The manuscript of "The Ghost Girl" finished, one might have supposed Mr.
Saltus would take a rest, particularly as his heart became worse so rapidly
that nitroglycerin was necessary most of the time. Carl Van Vechten had
written of him so charmingly in The Merry-Go-Round, and with so much
insight, that Mr. Saltus was encouraged to keep on working, as it was the
only way in which he could lose himself for the time.
Sending the manuscript of "The Ghost Girl" to a typist at Columbia, he
suffered another periodical cleaning of his "kennel" and started in on the
outline of another novel. That also was an enlarged and amplified rendering
of an earlier book, torn to pieces and baked en casserole with an occult
sauce, to its enormous and entire benefit. He was not reminded of the fact
that the central situation had been used before. He was borrowing from
himself, to be sure, and it was quite permissible, but in other
circumstances I would have urged him to let his original creation stand. As
it was I was glad to see him begin it as soon as "The Ghost Girl" was off
his hands, realizing that he must have mental food and constant
distraction.
The lease on our apartment bothered Mr. Saltus. During the years "things"
had become relative to both of us. They had not only lost all value but
they had become transformed into fetters. To get rid of the encumbrance of
"things," and be free to pack a suitcase and go at will, was an intriguing
idea to him. In discussing it, and the process of elimination necessary to
reach the desired results, we agreed to get rid of all but two
articles,--the carved olive-wood table at which he had written most of his
books, and the arm-chair in which our little Toto had died. Mr. Saltus did
not live to see it, but "things"--all the things we wanted to get rid of
and forget,--are scattered now to the winds in every direction,--all but
the table and the chair.
[Illustration: MARIE SALTUS
Sitting at the Table on which her Husband wrote his Books, burning Incense
before a Siamese Buddha and meditating on a Stanza from the Bhagavad Gita.
From a Painting by Hope Bryson, 1925.]
That chair, were it endowed with speech, could tell volumes. The same
insight which expressed itself throughout so understandingly in regard to
my devotion to Toto did so again, and in so touching a way, that it is the
most vivid and enduring memory I have of Mr. Saltus.
The attacks of heart irregularity increasing, it became necessary for me to
feel his pulse at intervals and give him the tablets of nitroglycerin. As
soon as he felt one coming on he struggled through the hall into my room,
to sink into that arm-chair and put his hand out.
"Quick,--quick,--_Mowgy_. _Feel_ my pulse," he said, many and many a time.
"I think I'm sinking. Shall I take my medsy?" as he always called his
medicine.
It was a serious responsibility for a novice. Night or day, whenever he
felt an attack coming on, he went over the same route, and sank into the
same chair. It seemed such a waste of effort, when with a word he could
have called me to him. When I suggested as much he smiled, but continued
the slow and painful journey through the hall to my room. Upon one occasion
the effort to get there was such, that his hands were like ice and his lips
blue when he reached me. Sinking into the chair he looked at me, but the
hand he extended was not for me to feel his pulse, but to take in mine.
There was no need for words to tell me that he thought he was dying, having
used, as he believed, his last ounce of strength to reach his goal. With
the touch of his hand came the consciousness, clear as clairvoyance, that
it was his intention to die in that particular chair--if he could; and the
significance of it brought the tears to my eyes. He was determined that the
poignant memories of Toto, associated with the chair, should be so
interwoven with his own, that her chair as well as her ashes should become
indissolubly a part of himself. No touching act of his whole life so
stretched out and reached the inner recesses of my being as that one. It
wiped out a multitude of lesser things as the sun obliterates candle light.
With unerring intuition, he knew how this would penetrate more and more
with the years, till it would become indelibly stamped on my heart.
This, and one other incident, small in itself yet colossal in its
significance, and showing the sweet and sympathetic side of his nature,
stand in relief against his subsidiary weaknesses. Shortly before his
death, my father had, at Mr. Saltus' request, given him a small canvas, a
daub of daisies painted by me at the age of seven, and, crude as it was,
retained by an unusually devoted parent. Mr. Saltus was particularly
attached to it, and it hung in the room beside his bed. Over and over I
begged him to let me destroy the hideous thing, but he was up in arms at
the suggestion, replying every time:--
"After a while you can, for no one but Snipps shall have those daisies.
When I die I want you to put them in my hands and have them cremated with
me."
The day before his passing he referred to it again, exacting a promise that
I would do so,--and it was carried out. Though the subject of death was
constantly on his tongue, and he outlined the details he wanted carried out
for his funeral, it was more in the way of precaution than anything else,
that being a marked characteristic of his.
Sitting in the arm-chair by the window in my bed-room the month before his
passing, he looked out into the splendid immensity of the June sky and
chatted freely and happily about the Great Adventure.
"What a lot I must make good next life!" he exclaimed again and again. "I
did not realize the verities for so long. The light came late, but I cannot
lose it now, and I will build better next time."
His tortured body had become a prison to him.
"I'm tired of these old clothes," he told me over and over again. "I want
a new deal, to begin as a little boy once more. But in the interval of
freedom on the other side, I want to roam at will through the Halls of
Learning, to feed my soul with the food of the mental plane." That was his
prayer.
The cynic, the satirist, the jester with life, as the world believed him to
be,--false faces all--dissolved, and the real ego emerged, to play
hide-and-seek no longer. The timidity, the humility, to conceal which he
had assumed so much that he was not, spoke now:--
"Don't let a curious public come here to gaze at me after I am out of my
body. Let me be forgotten. I have done nothing worth while. It will be my
mistakes by which I will be remembered, if at all. Since I began to take
myself seriously in hand, I have lived in semi-obscurity. Let me go in the
same way. Don't put our address in the newspapers for a curious crowd to
come here. Have a simple Theosophical service over my old clothes,--and
for God's sake no black anywhere,--on yourself or about the place."
Assured by me that I would do so, he went on:--
"You have suffered so much that you are numb and immune. Let the sunshine
in and let the canary sing. Help my departing spirit by your poise and
power. Keep everyone away, and bury my ashes with your own hands."
Though talking of his transition almost constantly, Mr. Saltus was very
much like the woman who, being asked if she believed in ghosts, said, "No,
but I'm dreadfully afraid of them." Every hour or two he would refer to
what we would do when he regained his health. Rosy pictures of a rose
garden in California were painted, and delightful dreams of sitting under a
banyan tree at Mrs. Besant's feet took shape from the smoke of his
cigarettes.
Meanwhile the manuscript of Mr. Saltus' last novel, "The Golden Flood," was
sketched in the rough up to the middle of chapter twelve. The words did
not drop from his pen as they had once done. Weariness and effort crept in.
Though work to him was still a song, death was the refrain. Midsummer came.
Mr. Saltus, too ill by far to be taken into the country, seemed
nevertheless a little better.
He took a fancy for sitting on the roof of our apartment house. Taking up
camp chairs and pillows I arranged to make it comfortable for him, and he
sat there for hours, reading or chatting with me.
Toward the middle of July unusually hot weather made this lofty sitting
room doubly acceptable to him, for our apartment, being on the top of the
house, was painfully hot all night, though electric fans were kept running
at high speed in his bed-room and study. In these circumstances the cool
air of the roof offered freshness and relief.
Evening after evening we sat there looking down upon the city below, where
multiple electric lights and illuminated signs fought for supremacy, and
above to where the stars pierced the softness of evening. The height, the
silence, and the stars particularly, took us back more than twenty years to
the turret of the old Narragansett Casino, from which we had first looked
at them together, and we returned there many times in our chats.
"How much we have had to learn since those days," Mr. Saltus remarked the
last time we sat there. "It's taken bludgeoning blows, but, after all, we
have absorbed something, don't you think?" He sighed.
"Yes," I said. "Our personalities thought they wanted so many things, but
our egos knew we wanted only to grow, and so gave us the chance."
The mysteries and beauties of Infinity seemed to fall from the stars like
blessings. Sometimes we sat there till midnight chatting over the splendors
of space, cause and cosmos, kalpas of time, and creations yet to be
cradled. However far we wandered in dimensional space, greater and vaster
became the vistas beyond.
It is possible that these intimate talks on the abstract gave Mr. Saltus
the interior poise to greet the liberating angel who even then was knocking
at our door.
The end came suddenly and unexpectedly, and from a cause long supposed to
be dormant. It began with a severe chill. Anything can begin that way, and
I was not alarmed. Neither was the physician, who, in the absence of Dr.
Darlington, was called in. Other chills, however, of greater intensity,
followed in rapid succession. They were frightful, each one seeming as if
it would be the last. Septic poisoning, super-induced by an internal
abscess, developed into acute Bright's disease. Unable at any time to stand
intense pain, he found this agony. Opiates were given, but owing to his
absorption being so slow they failed to make it endurable. A hospital was
the place to have taken Mr. Saltus, and St. Luke's was at the corner of our
street. He could have been moved without much distress and I could have
been near him. Though he fought to his utmost against crying out under his
pain, at the suggestion of a hospital he shrieked:--
"I won't go to St. Luke's, and if you bring a nurse in my room I will kill
her. When Toto died and you were almost out of your mind, I kept you beside
me and nursed you. You cannot force me to go."
Much as it would have added to his comfort, and necessary as it was in his
case to have specific care, the idea of a hospital had to be abandoned. It
was hysteria, but in his condition he had to be humored. Had I brought in a
nurse against his will, he, she, or both, would have been found dashed to
pieces on the pavement outside; and our apartment being on the top floor,
the risk was too great.
Mr. Saltus was not an easy man to take care of, for from no other hand than
mine would he take food or medicine, nor would he let me leave his side for
a moment. The responsibility of turning into a nurse one with such limited
knowledge was not the best thing for him, but it was impossible to do
otherwise. To keep his chart, give his medicine and hypodermics, and try to
make him believe that he was getting better every moment, was difficult.
Though Mr. Saltus spoke of death as if he were playing hide-and-seek with
it, it was offset by his lament:--
"Poor child, poor child! I am killing you, but I cannot help it, for you
are the only one I can let touch me. When Snippsy gets well he will be so
good that you will not like him. I'm paying a frightful karma. The Masters
of Wisdom must be hastening my evolution."
Though he spoke of recovery, it was only while I sat beside him. Upon an
occasion when, anxious to be sure of an important prescription being filled
accurately, I suggested going to the chemist's at the corner and leaving
him with my mother, with whom Mr. Saltus was perfectly at home, he screamed
so loudly that people in a neighboring apartment rushed in to offer
assistance.
"Don't leave me! Don't leave me! I might die while you are away," he called
out.
His illness lasted but eight days. On July 30th at three in the afternoon I
saw death in his face, although neither the physician nor my mother
expected it so soon. To keep him cheered and comforted was all that could
be done. His horror of disagreeable things was such that, although he asked
me many times a day if I thought he might die, I persistently told him that
he was getting better.
It was my desire to send for Mr. Saltus' daughter, that she might see him
again before the end, but fearing his reaction I did not.
At nine that night he was a little easier. The morphine was then for the
first time able to deaden his agony.
"For God's sake lie down on the sofa and rest," he urged, looking at my
haggard face.
Long accustomed to insomnia, I was able, as one can under great excitement,
to go without sleep and almost without food for a week, but it was
beginning to tell, and my hands and lips quivered.
"Do lie down. You look as if you were going to die, poor child," he urged
again.
Shaking my head, for speech was beyond me, I sat still. The clock, set in
the middle of bottles, pills and restoratives which had to be given at
intervals during the night, ticked on.
"What of the morphine?" Mr. Saltus asked. "I am easier now; but for the
morning? Have you enough?"
Again I smiled and nodded. That he could speak of a morrow was tragic.
The end came at three a. m., July 31st, while it was still dark, and was
quite painless. Conscious until the last, it is doubtful if until then Mr.
Saltus realized that he was passing out of the body. Efforts to give him
nitroglycerin were futile.
Grasping the tiny Rosicrucian cross he always wore about his neck, which
symbolized all that he aspired to, he put his other hand in mine.
"Mowgy!" He could say no more. It was his last word, as, casting off the
fetters of the flesh, he passed onward into the larger life, where "even
the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea."