It was during my stay at the Hotel Broztel that an incident occurred, small
in itself, but so characteristic of Mr. Saltus that it is included in order
to show his many-sidedness. As I have said before, Mr. Saltus and I when by
ourselves never chatted in rational English. From the early days of our
acquaintance, when for the first time he was brought in contact with pets,
he adopted as his own, and never relinquished, the baby language in which I
always addressed them, and it became ours. He not only delighted in using
it, but the vocabulary increased after he took it over. This is easily
accounted for when one realizes the muted days of his early life, so filled
with dread and discord, when he was afraid to play like other children,
afraid to say anything, and with no outlet in the way of pets, on which he
could expend his natural playfulness and lavish his love.
In writing of our various conversations, the language which we invariably
used when alone has been omitted, for the reason that it would be difficult
to understand, and that the deciphering of it would confuse and delay the
meaning. In my estimation it added to Mr. Saltus' charm and was a key to
the simplicity of his real nature, but to the public it would appear
trivial, if not absurd. One incident, however, is amusing.
Coming into my rooms one day, Mr. Saltus exclaimed:--
"What drivelling fools some men make of themselves! Here I have been for
ten minutes at the Manhattan, trying to get you on the telephone. The wires
were crossed, and I had to listen to drivel of the most nauseous kind
between a man and a woman. He, anyway, should be shot. A woman may be
forgiven for twaddle--but a man never."
"What did they say?" I asked.
"Oh--the man kept calling her honey-bunch, cutikins, and lollypop. It was
rot of the worst kind. Then she replied, calling him sugar plum and tootsy
wootsy and tiddley-winks. Lord, what fools some people make of themselves!"
He went out on some business after a while. Later in the day my telephone
rang. It was Mr. Saltus on the wire. Here is the conversation which
followed:--
"Miaw, Miaw, little Puss."
"Miaw."
"Little fur smoothed down and little taily waving in the air?" (I was
always supposed to be a Persian kitten.)
"Miaw."
"Wants to lap up keemy and nibbst fish at the Prince George for your
din-din?"
"Miaw!"
"Baby Totesikins love her Pasy and want din-din also? Lift her up to
answer."
(Toto lifted in my arms to the telephone, long practice having made her
adept.)
"Baby wants nice bickies?"
"Woof! Woof!"
"Loves, Pasy?"
"Woof." (Toto put down.)
"There, little Puffikins, Snippsy orders nice din for both. Says he good
old dog Tray. Says he satisfactory scoundrel."
Laughter.
"What are you laughing at?"
"At drivel of the most nauseous kind between a man and a woman. He at least
ought to be shot."
Laughter from the other end.
Never until that moment had Mr. Saltus realized what our conversation must
sound like to an outsider and an uninitiate. It brought us both up with a
jerk. Thereafter Mr. Saltus wrote "tolerance," and, underlining the word,
added it to a list he had made.
During the time Mr. Saltus had been alone in New York, one of his greatest
distractions and relaxations was taking his daughter Elsie, a debutante,
for tea or for luncheon. Tall, graceful, oriental in colouring like
himself, he not only admired her for her beauty but enjoyed her new and
refreshing angle on life. Chatting with her was both restful and
stimulating to him. In one sense she was a complete stranger to him, having
lived apart for so many years. In another, she was so close that everything
concerning her, no matter how slight, was of profound importance. As he had
no near relatives and saw nothing whatever of his many cousins, she
represented the only tie of blood in the world.
The circumstances were unfortunate. Living with a sister of her mother's,
who, obviously, could not be expected to welcome him with outstretched
arms, she met her father as a rule in restaurants. That was formal and less
conducive to intimacy than seeing a parent in moments of rest and
relaxation. Accepting this as the inevitable result of things, Mr. Saltus
looked forward to the time when in a home of her own he would feel free to
visit his daughter early, often and informally, and reach the bedrock of
her very charming self. This seemed about to be realized, when, soon after
her debut, she became engaged to one of the finest, most dependable and
altogether delightful of men,--J. Theus Munds,--and a date for the wedding
was set.
[Illustration: MRS. J. THEUS MUNDS
The Daughter of
EDGAR SALTUS
And Her Little Son]
Any idea of going to the wedding reception was beyond Mr. Saltus' wildest
dreams. Added to his abhorrence of crowds and festivities he was too ill
for such an affair. A look into the church was the most he was capable of.
Had father and daughter understood one another better, what followed need
never have happened. Invitations were sent to us--but for the church only.
Cards to the reception were omitted. A whip lash across his face would have
hurt Mr. Saltus less. It bowled him over. Nothing would have induced him to
go in any event, but the knowledge that he, her father, was purposely
omitted was a knife in the back. Appreciating why his presence would have
been not only unwelcome but an embarrassment, he expected others to have
understood that he would have looked upon the invitation as an act of
courtesy only.
Vainly I tried to put it before him as I saw it, explaining and extenuating
the omission. It failed to have the desired effect. Mr. Saltus took it that
I, too, was turning against him. It was a hopeless muddle. Had his daughter
been older at the time, and more experienced, and had she known him better,
it could have been avoided so easily. Had she gone to him explaining the
situation, he would not only have urged her to omit him but entered
sympathetically into her viewpoint. The invitations were not sent out by
her, and she could not, without directly offending her aunt, have given one
over her head. Acting as many another has when in doubt, she did nothing
and was silent, believing that in the years to come it would be explained
and made right between them. Mr. Saltus never overlooked it. Not until he
lay in his coffin and that closed forever, did she come under the same roof
with him again.
The following winter Mr. Saltus just escaped pneumonia, and was weakened by
its effects, so we decided to try housekeeping again. It was a brave
venture. He wanted his meals when he wanted them. A set time for anything
irritated him beyond endurance. Handicapped by a wife who frequently forgot
that the ordering depended upon herself, and who was lost in abstract space
when she should have found her way to the grocers or even to the telephone
in time, it was beginning under difficulties.
Having a fancy for the atmosphere of Columbia University, which was his
Alma Mater, we took an apartment in The Arizona, 508 West 114th Street,
directly opposite the oval. It savoured of the country out there, adding
the convenience of being between Riverside Drive and Morningside Park,
where, his increasing lameness permitting, Mr. Saltus was able to go and
rest. With the realization of his age and infirmities his desire to get
away from the world increased by leaps and bounds, for not only did he wish
to avoid people, but he even disliked to have them know where he lived.
Long accustomed to being taken for my father, that did not trouble him.
But walking painfully with a stick, and stopping at intervals to take
peppermint for the acute indigestion, which attacked him when in motion,
humiliated him intensely. The sympathy in the faces of those who passed
him, a sympathy sometimes expressed in words, was more agonizing even than
the pain. In order to keep his home a secret retreat, where, like a wounded
animal, he could hide in silence, he continued giving the Manhattan Club as
his address.
While formerly Mr. Saltus had enjoyed having me take a walk with him, he
now avoided it. Toto only was permitted to accompany him.
"My God," he would exclaim when questioned, "I may be a cripple, but I am
not blind. I can see what people are thinking--'That poor girl tied to an
old derelict!'"
Ridiculous as this was, Mr. Saltus could not be persuaded out of it. For
the same reason he refused to get into a street car with me. To sit, and
let me stand beside him, as might happen if the car were crowded, was a
chance he did not mean to take.
Specialists diagnosed his trouble as Reynous disease, an affliction most
unusual in this part of the world,--of slow growth, but leading inevitably
to a wheeled chair. The prospect appalled him. My father had been confined
to one for many years, and Mr. Saltus knew what it meant.
"Karma has taken my legs from under me," he exclaimed again and again.
I invented cases of cure for him, but in my absence one day he consulted a
physician, who had not been coached in the matter, and he told him the
truth. The blow was terrific. Realizing that he must keep his mind occupied
or go under, he started to write "The Paliser Case." The plot was not new.
It was "The Perfume of Eros" in a new frock. He was not writing so much to
create as to fight the constant pain in his legs. His condition was an
embarrassing one to his pride. When the pain attacked him, he had to sit
down there and then, or fall down. To be compelled to rest on copings,
doorsteps or curbstones, as the case might be, was tragic, and yet it was
more tragic to remain a prisoner in the house. My mother gave him a small
camp chair, and this upon occasions he took with him in case of
emergencies.
One specialist after another was called, for between the indigestion and
his legs, he was in perpetual torture. Rebellious at first, at what seemed
a tragic and trivial end to his eventful life, Mr. Saltus brought his
philosophy into concrete use, realizing that the lesson of patience was
what he needed most, and was now in a position to acquire. With the
acceptance of his afflictions as karma, and adjusting his mind to the idea
of the wheeled chair, it lost its power to hurt him. Removing from my
bureau a card I had stuck in the glass, he put it in his. It was a
quotation from the Gita, which read:--"Taking as equal pleasure and pain,
gain or loss, victory or defeat, thou shalt not incur sin." From that hour
he complained no longer, although complications and sorrow piled on in
rapid succession.
Before telling of them, another incident should be given in its proper
sequence. In giving some of Mr. Saltus' clothes to a tailor for pressing, a
letter fell out of one of the pockets. It was a note from his Los Angeles
friend Miss S----, of whom he had told me that he had lost all trace. Sent
from abroad, it was directed to the Manhattan Club. It was not the simple
note or the friendship which angered me at the moment, but his stupid and
needless denials regarding it. Although I knew, better than anyone else
could have done, how impossible it was for him to face momentary
unpleasantness, this was too much. I went to him and said,
"Well, Snipps, you are a clever prevaricator, but in this you have been a
plain ass. A spineless jellyfish must give place to it. Judas and Ananias
combined could take lessons from you with profit. Here you are ready to
cross the river Styx and take the remnants of a misspent life into
Avitchi." (The lower astral plane. Its lessons and condition were a subject
which tormented Mr. Saltus more than a little. Darkness always appalled
him, and he dreaded detention there.)
It was a cruel thrust on my part, said on the impulse of the moment. Mr.
Saltus went white to the lips.
"That you can say such a thing over nothing!" he gasped. "I could not risk
the reminders of Dorothy S----, which you would have treated me to had I
told you."
His usual comeback about the "subordinate entity" and the "submerged It,"
failed him then. The lower astral plane with all its horrors, then
uppermost in his mind, was recalled by my chance remark. He went off into
hysterics, of so serious a nature that it ended by his going to bed.
Complicating his other disabilities was heart trouble, and he was taking
nitroglycerine at the time. There was nothing to do but put a sponge over
the incident and make light of it.
This I did, so convincingly that a few days later he began to call:--
"Little Anny feels ill," or "Little Anny wants to come in and sit down
beside you,"--"Anny" being his abbreviation for Ananias.
It is a pity that Mr. Saltus was never frank with me over this friendship.
Knowing my faults and limitations as no one else could, he knew also that
smallness was not one of them, and that bigness and fineness on his part
always engendered in me the desire to meet it in kind.
Had he but told me how greatly Miss S----had ministered to his comfort
during my absence in England, when he was ill and alone,--how she had
overseen his mending, and, studying the needs of a dyspeptic, had prepared
meals for him in her little apartment many a time, I would have been
sympathetic.
Miss S---- came into Mr. Saltus' life shortly after his illness in Los
Angeles, to which I have referred, and at the moment when he was turning
from the material to the spiritual. The understanding of occultism, which
came to him in a blinding flash, was such that he could think and talk of
little else. Miss S----, whose unusual personality and fluid mind rendered
her susceptible to new impacts, was very much interested in what he told
her along these lines. As she has put it to me since Mr. Saltus' death, "He
came into my life like a Buddha, bringing enlightenment."
With thirty-five years' difference in their ages, and meeting him only when
he was past middle life, she saw in him a great teacher--and he saw in her
a rarely sensitive soul full of possibilities.
These potentialities were developed after Miss S---- went to New York, and
soon placed her in a position of importance and responsibility.
She could not see in Mr. Saltus, as I did, a being who step by step had
mounted a ladder of light on the rungs of his dead selves. She saw only
the finished product, for the process of refinement, by which his greater
qualities had been separated from the lesser, covered a long period of
years.
Some of those who read this biography will say that Mr. Saltus may have
been glad to escape at times from a home where animals were given so much
attention. This remark has in fact been made to me by those who can judge
only from the surface of things. The fabric of this criticism is, however,
less substantial than moonlight. During the latter years of Mr. Saltus'
life much of Miss S----'s time was spent abroad. When Mr. Saltus saw her,
as he did frequently during her intermissions in New York, he but left his
home environment to go into a similar one. High-strung, nervous and
temperamental, Miss S---- had the animal complex as strongly as I. Her
apartment was never without one or two pets whose comfort, well being and
happiness were her constant pre-occupation. Had he found these conditions
under his own roof unpleasant, he would not have gone out of his way to
duplicate them elsewhere.
Not long after Mr. Saltus' death, Miss S----and myself visited the
Bide-a-Wee Home for Animals, of which I was a director. On our return home
we noticed a poor lost cat trying to cross the street through densely
congested traffic. With one accord we stood still, holding our breath, our
hands clenched in agony, till the cat reached the further side in safety.
Our reactions were not only immediate, but identical.
I make no attempt to go into the whys and wherefores of it all, nor do I
offer an explanation. The facts are as I have stated. An elucidation of
them is work for a psychiatrist.