There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and
character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who
produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be
named with ‘Two Years Before the Mast.’ Ralph Keeler wrote the ‘Vagabond
Adventures’ which he had lived. I have it on my heart to name him in the
presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection
for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is
worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it
only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I
imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is
made up of. I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that
fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought
himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from
his editor. He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at
last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange
career in much better terms than it can be given again. He had been, as
he claimed, “a cruel uncle’s ward” in his early orphan-hood, and while
yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart’s
desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels. But it
was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat, and
meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a
Spanish picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and even a
danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so
little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating
Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and
enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri.
They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal
more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took
to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to
California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the
manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine. I
reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler’s faith
in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail
instantly and decisively. He had come to Cambridge to see it through the
press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief
absences. Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he
accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its
correspondent.
“Don’t go, Keeler,” I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his
intention. “They’ll garrote you down there.”
“Well,” he said, with the air of being pleasantly interested by the
coincidence, as he stood on my study hearth with his feet wide apart in a
fashion he had, and gayly flirted his hand in the air, “that’s what
Aldrich says, and he’s agreed to write my biography, on condition that I
make a last dying speech when they bring me out on the plaza to do it,
‘If I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of
‘Marjorie Daw and Other People,’ I should not now be in this place.’”
He went, and he did not come back. He was not indeed garroted as his
friends had promised, but he was probably assassinated on the steamer by
which he sailed from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was
never heard of again.
I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men
commonly do. If I am to meet somewhere else the friends who are no
longer here, I should like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some
chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by no means kept
itself unspotted, but which in all its consciousness of error, cheerfully
trusted that “the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us.” The faith
worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply or humbly affirmed,
and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere. He had
nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself
wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some
things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of
self-respect. He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any
discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheerful compliance.
“Why do you use bias for opinion?” I demanded, in going over a proof with
him. “Oh, because I’m such an ass--such a bi-ass.”
He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his
listener’s shoulder: “Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it.
It’s the only one you’ve got, or ever will have.” This light and joyous
creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, and I need not say
that I never met him in any of the great Cambridge houses. I am not sure
that he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was framed
rather for men’s liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to
whether his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his
manner. Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious mind
towards the society which ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to
be greatly vexed by it. He lived on in the house of a suave old actor,
who oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless
Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston
restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you
were of his acquaintance. On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the
post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming
for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe
salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning
stroll. The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do
not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better
element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing
less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel
was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately
worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it.
I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments
of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He
was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost
womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were
blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled
nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished.