IN RETROSPECT

Two years after this visit, in a serious attempt to set down what I

really did think of him, I arranged the following thoughts with which I

closed my sketch then and which I now append for what they may be worth.

They represented my best thought concerning him then:

"Thomas Culhane belongs to that class of society which the preachers and

the world's army of conventional merchants, lawyers, judges and

reputable citizens generally are presumably, if one may judge by the

moral and religious literature of the day, trying to reach and reform.

Yet here at his sanitarium are gathered representatives of those same

orders, the so-called better element. And here we see them suddenly

dominated, mind and soul, by this being whom they, theoretically at

least, look upon as a brand to be snatched from the burning.

"As the Church and society view Culhane, so they view all life outside

their own immediate circles. Culhane is in fact a conspicuous figure

among the semi-taboo. He has been referred to in many an argument and

platform and pulpit and in the press as a type of man whose influence is

supposed to be vitiating. Now a minister enters the sanitarium, broken

down by his habits of life, and this same Culhane is able to penetrate

him, to see that his dogmatic and dictatorial mental habits are the

cause of his ailment, and he has the moral courage to shock him, to drag

him by apparently brutal processes out of his rut. He reads the man

accurately, he knows him better than he knows himself, and he effects a

cure.

"This astonishing condition is certainly a new light for those seeking

to labor among men. Those who are successful gamblers, pugilists,

pickpockets, saloon-keepers, book-makers, jockeys and the like are so

by reason of their intelligence, their innate mental acumen and

perception. It is a fact that in the sporting world and among the

unconventional men-about-town you will often find as good if not better

judges of human nature than elsewhere. Contact with a rough and ready

and all-too-revealing world teaches them much. The world's customary

pretensions and delusions are in the main ripped away. They are bruised

by rough facts. Often the men gathered in some such café and whom

preachers and moralists are most ready to condemn have a clearer

perception of preachers, church organizations and reformers and their

relative importance in the multitudinous life of the world than the

preachers, church congregations and reformers have of those in the café

or the world outside to which they belong.

"This is why, in my humble judgment, the Church and those associated

with its aims make no more progress than they do. While they are

consciously eager to better the world, they are so wrapped up in

themselves and their theories, so hampered by their arbitrary and

limited conceptions of good and evil, that the great majority of men

move about them unseen, except in a far-away and superficial manner. Men

are not influenced at arm's length. It would be interesting to know if

some day a preacher or judge, who, offended by Mr. Culhane's profanity

and brutality, will be able to reach the gladiator and convert him to

his views as readily as the gladiator is able to rid him of his

ailment."

In justice to the preachers, moralists, et cetera, I should now like to

add that it is probably not any of the virtues or perfections

represented by a man like Culhane with which they are quarreling, but

the vices of many who are in no wise like him and do not stand for the

things he stands for. At the same time, the so-called "sports" might

well reply that it is not with any of the really admirable qualities of

the "unco guid" that they quarrel, but their too narrow interpretations

of virtue and duty and their groundless generalization as to types and

classes.

Be it so.

Here is meat for a thousand controversies.

_A True Patriarch_

In the streets of a certain moderate-sized county seat in Missouri not

many years ago might have been seen a true patriarch. Tall,

white-haired, stout in body and mind, he roamed among his neighbors,

dispensing sympathy and a curiously genial human interest through the

leisure of his day. One might have taken him to be Walt Whitman, of whom

he was the living counterpart; or, in the clear eye, high forehead and

thick, appealing white hair, have seen a marked similarity to Bryant as

he appeared in his later years. Already at this time he had seen man's

allotted term on earth, and yet he was still strong in the councils of

his people and rich in the accumulated interests of a lifetime.

At the particular time in question he was most interesting for the

eccentricities which years of stalwart independence had developed, but

these were lovable peculiarities and only severed from remarkable

actions by the compelling power of time and his increasing infirmities.

The loud, though pleasant, voice, and strong, often fiery, declamatory

manner, were remnants of the days when his fellow-citizens were wholly

swayed by the magnificence of his orations. Charmingly simple in manner,

he still represented with it that old courtesy which made every stranger

his guest. When moved by righteous indignation, there cropped out the

daring and domineering insistence of one who had always followed what he

considered to be the right, and who knew its power.

Even then, old as he was, if there were any topic worthy of discussion,

and his fellow-citizens were in danger of going wrong, he became an

haranguing prophet, as it were, a local Isaiah or Jeremiah. Every gate

heard him, for he stopped on his rounds in front of each, and calling

out the inhabitant poured forth such a volume of fact and argument as

tended to remove all doubt of what he, at least, considered right. All

of this he invariably accompanied by a magnificence of gesture worthy of

a great orator.

At such times his mind, apparently, was almost wholly engrossed with

these matters, and I have it from one of his daughters, who, besides

being his daughter, was a sincere admirer of his, that often he might

have been seen coming down his private lawn, and even the public streets

when there was no one near to hear him, shaking his head, gesticulating,

sometimes sweeping upward with his arms, as if addressing his

fellow-citizens in assemblage.

"He used to push his big hat well back upon his forehead," she said on

one occasion, "and often in winter, forgetful of the bitter cold, would

take off his overcoat and carry it on his arm. Occasionally he would

stop quite still, as if he were addressing a companion, and with

sweeping gestures illustrate some idea or other, although, of course,

there was no one present. Then, planting his big cane forcibly with each

step, as though still emphasizing his recently stated ideas, he would

come forward and enter the house."

The same suggestion of mental concentration might have been seen in

everything that he did, and I personally have seen him leading a pet

Jersey cow home for milking with the same dignity of bearing and

forcefulness of manner that characterized him when he stood before his

fellow-citizens at a public meeting addressing them on some important

topic. He never appeared to have a sense of difference from or

superiority over his fellowmen, but only the keenest sympathy with all

things human. Every man was his brother, every human being honest. A cow

or a horse was as much to be treated with sympathy and charity as a man

or a woman. If a purse was lost, forty-nine out of every fifty men would

return it without thought of reward, if you were to believe him.

In the little town where he had lived so many years, and where he

finally died, he knew every living creature from cattle upwards, and

could call each by name. The sick, the poor, the widows, the orphans,

the insane, and dependents of all kinds, were his especial care. Every

Sunday afternoon for years, it was his custom to go the rounds of the

indigent, frequently carrying a basket of his good wife's dinner. This

he distributed, along with consolation and advice. Occasionally he would

return home of a winter's day very much engrossed with the discovery of

some condition of distress hitherto unseen.

"Mother," he would say to his wife in that same oratorical manner

previously noted, as he entered the house, "I've found such a poor

family. They have moved into the old saloon below Solmson's. You know

how open that is." This was delivered in the most dramatic style after

he had indicated something important by throwing his overcoat on the bed

and standing his cane in the corner. "There's a man and several children

there. The mother is dead. They were on their way to Kansas, but it got

so cold they've had to stop here until the winter is broken. They're

without food; almost no clothing. Can't we find something for them?"

"On these occasions," said his daughter to me once, "he would, as he

nearly always did, talk to himself on the way, as if he were discussing

politics. But you could never tell what he was coming for."

Then with his own labor he would help his wife seek out the odds and

ends that could be spared, and so armed, would return, arguing by the

way as if an errand of mercy were the last thing he contemplated. Nearly

always the subject of these orations was some public wrong or error

which should receive, although in all likelihood it did not, immediate

attention.

Always of a reverent, although not exactly religious, turn of mind, he

took considerable interest in religious ministration, though he steadily

and persistently refused, in his later years, to go to church. He had

St. James's formula to quote in self-defense, which insists that "Pure

religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this, To visit the

fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted

from the world." Often, when pressed too close, he would deliver this

with kindly violence. One of the most touching anecdotes representative

of this was related to me by his daughter, who said:

"Mr. Kent, a poor man of our town, was sick for months previous to his

death, and my father used to go often, sometimes daily, to visit him. He

would spend perhaps a few minutes, perhaps an hour, with him, singing,

praying, and ministering to his spiritual wants. The pastor of the

church living so far away and coming only once a month, this duty

devolved upon some one, and my father did his share, and always felt

more than repaid for the time spent by the gratitude shown by the many

poor people he aided in this way.

"Mr. Kent's favorite song, for instance, was 'On Jordan's Stormy Banks

I Stand.' This he would have my father sing, and his clear voice could

often be heard in the latter's small house, and seemed to impart

strength to the sick man.

"Upon one occasion, I remember, Mr. Kent expressed a desire to hear a

certain song. My father was not very familiar with it but, anxious to

grant his request, came home and asked me if I would get a friend of

mine and go and sing the song for him.

"We entered the sick-room, he leading us by the hand, for we were

children at the time. Mr. Kent's face at once brightened, and father

said to him:

"'Mr. Kent, I told you this morning that I couldn't sing the song you

asked for, but these girls know it, and have come to sing it for you.'

"Then, waving his hand gently toward us, he said:

"'Sing, children.'

"We did so, and when we had finished he knelt and offered a prayer, not

for the poor man's recovery but that he might put his trust in the Lord

and meet death without fear. I have never been more deeply impressed nor

felt more confident in the presence of death, for the man died soon

after, soothed into perfect peace."

On another occasion he was sitting with some friends in front of the

courthouse in his town, talking and sunning himself, when a neighbor

came running up in great excitement, calling:

"Mr. White, Mr. White, come, right quick. Mrs. Sadler wants you."

He explained that the woman in question was dying, and, being afraid she

would strangle in her last moments, had asked the bystanders to run for

him, her old acquaintance, in the efficacy of whose prayers she had

great faith. The old patriarch was without a coat at the time, but,

unmindful of that, hastened after.

"Mr. White," exclaimed the sick woman excitedly upon seeing him, "I want

you to pray that I won't strangle. I'm not afraid to die, but I don't

want to die that way. I want you to offer a prayer for me that I may be

saved from that. I'm so afraid."

Seeing by the woman's manner that she was very much overwrought, he

used all his art to soothe her.

"Have no fear, Mrs. Sadler, now," he exclaimed solemnly. "You won't

strangle. I will ask the Lord for you, and this evil will not come upon

you. You need not have any fear."

"Kneel down, you," he commanded, turning upon the assembled neighbors

and relatives who had followed or had been there before him, while he

pushed back his white hair from his forehead. "Let us now pray that this

good woman here be allowed to pass away in peace." And even with the

rustle of kneeling that accompanied his words he lifted up his coatless

arms and began to pray.

Through his magnificent phraseology, no doubt, as well as his profound

faith, he succeeded in inducing a feeling of peace and quiet in all his

hearers, the sick woman included, who, listening, sank into a restful

stupor, from which all agony of mind had apparently disappeared. Then

when the physical atmosphere of the room had been thus reorganized, he

ceased and retired to the yard in front of the house, where on a bench

under a shade tree he seated himself to wipe his moist brow and recover

his composure. In a few moments a slight commotion in the sick-room

denoted that the end had come. Several neighbors came out, and one said,

"Well, it is all over, Mr. White. She is dead."

"Yes," he replied with great assurance. "She didn't strangle, did she?"

"No," said the other, "the Lord granted her request."

"I knew He would," he replied in his customary loud and confident tone.

"Prayer is always answered."

Then, after viewing the dead woman and making additional comments, he

was off, as placid as though nothing had occurred.

I happened to hear of this some time after, and one day, while sitting

with him on his front porch, said, "Mr. White, do you really believe

that the Lord directly answered your prayer in that instance?"

"Answered!" he almost shouted defiantly and yet with a kind of human

tenderness that one could never mistake. "Of course He answered! Why

wouldn't He--a faithful old servant like that? To be sure, He answered."

"Might it not have been merely the change of atmosphere which your

voice and strength introduced? The quality of your own thoughts goes for

something in such matters. Mind acts on mind."

"Certainly," he said, in a manner as agreeable as if it had always been

a doctrine with him. "I know that. But, after all, what is _that_--my

mind, your mind, the sound of voices? It's all the Lord anyhow, whatever

you think."

How could one gainsay such a religionist as that?

The poor, the blind, the insane, and sufferers of all sorts, as I have

said before, were always objects of his keenest sympathies. Evidence of

it flashed out at the most unexpected moments--loud, rough exclamations,

which, however, always contained a note so tender and suggestive as to

defy translation. Thus, while we were sitting on his front porch one day

and hotly discussing politics to while away a dull afternoon, there came

down the street, past his home, a queer, ragged, half-demented

individual, who gazed about in an aimless sort of way, peering queerly

over fences, looking idly down the road, staring strangely overhead into

the blue. It was apparent, in a moment, that the man was crazy, some

demented creature, harmless enough, however, to be allowed abroad and so

save the county the expense of caring for him. The old man broke a

sentence short in order to point and shake his head emotionally.

"Look at that," he said to me, with a pathetic sweep of the arm, "now

just look at that! There's a poor, demented soul, with no one to look

after him. His brother is a hard-working saddler. His sister is dead. No

money to speak of, any of them." He paused a moment, and then added, "I

don't know what we're to do in such cases. The state and the county

don't always do their duty. Most people here are too poor to help, there

are so many to be taken care of. It seems almost at times as if you

can't do anything but leave them to the mercy of God, and yet you can't

do that either, quite," and he once more shook his head sadly.

I was for denouncing the county, but he explained very charitably that

it was already very heavily taxed by such cases. He did not seem to know

exactly what should be done at the time, but he was very sorry, very,

and for the time being the warm argument in which he had been indulging

was completely forgotten. Now he lapsed into silence and all

communication was suspended, while he rocked silently in his great chair

and thought.

One day in passing the local poor-farm (and this is of my own

knowledge), he came upon a man beating a poor idiot with a whip. The

latter was incapable of reasoning and therefore of understanding why it

was that he was being beaten. The two were beside a wood-pile and the

demented one was crying. In a moment the old patriarch had jumped out of

his conveyance, leaped over the fence, and confronted the amazed

attendant with an uplifted arm.

"Not another lick!" he fairly shouted. "What do you mean by striking an

idiot?"

"Why," explained the attendant, "I want him to carry in the wood, and he

won't do it."

"It is not his place to bring in the wood. He isn't put here for that,

and in the next place he can't understand what you mean. He's put here

to be taken care of. Don't you dare strike him again. I'll see about

this, and you."

Knowing his interrupter well, his position and power in the community,

the man endeavored to explain that some work must be done by the

inmates, and that this one was refractory. The only way he had of making

him understand was by whipping him.

"Not another word," the old man blustered, overawing the county

hireling. "You've done a wrong, and you know it. I'll see to this," and

off he bustled to the county courthouse, leaving the transgressor so

badly frightened that whips thereafter were carefully concealed, in this

institution at least. The court, which was held in his home town, was

not in session at the time, and only the clerk was present when he came

tramping down the aisle and stood before the latter with his right hand

uplifted in the position of one about to make oath.

"Swear me," he called solemnly, and without further explanation, as the

latter stared at him. "I want you to take this testimony under oath."

The clerk knew well enough the remarkable characteristics of his guest,

whose actions were only too often inexplicable from the ground point of

policy and convention. Without ado, after swearing him, he got out ink

and paper, and the patriarch began.

"I saw," he said, "in the yard of the county farm of this county, not

over an hour ago, a poor helpless idiot, too weak-minded to understand

what was required of him, and put in that institution by the people of

this county to be cared for, being beaten with a cowhide by Mark

Sheffels, who is an attendant there, because the idiot did not

understand enough to carry in wood, which the people have hired Mark

Sheffels to carry in. Think of it," he added, quite forgetting the

nature of his testimony and that he was now speaking for dictation and

not for an audience to hear, and going off into a most scorching and

brilliant arraignment of the entire system in which such brutality could

occur, "a poor helpless idiot, unable to frame in his own disordered

mind a single clear sentence, being beaten by a sensible, healthy brute

too lazy and trifling to perform the duties for which he was hired and

which he personally is supposed to perform."

There was more to the effect, for instance, that the American people and

the people of this county should be ashamed to think that such crimes

should be permitted and go unpunished, and that this was a fair sample.

The clerk, realizing the importance of Mr. White in the community, and

the likelihood of his following up his charges very vigorously, quietly

followed his address in a very deferential way, jotting down such

salient features as he had time to write. When he was through, however,

he ventured to lift his voice in protest.

"You know, Mr. White," he said, "Sheffels is a member of our party, and

was appointed by us. Of course, now, it's too bad that this thing should

have happened, and he ought to be dropped, but if you are going to make

a public matter of it in this way it may hurt us in the election next

month."

The old patriarch threw back his head and gazed at him in the most

blazing way, almost without comprehension, apparently, of so petty a

view.

"What!" he exclaimed. "What's that got to do with it? Do you want the

Democratic Party to starve the poor and beat the insane?"

The opposition was rather flattened by the reply, and left the old

gentleman to storm out. For once, at least, in this particular instance,

anyhow, he had purified the political atmosphere, as if by lightning,

and within the month following the offending attendant was dropped.

Politics, however, had long known his influence in a similar way. There

was a time when he was the chief political figure in the county, and

possessed the gift of oratory, apparently, beyond that of any of his

fellow-citizens. Men came miles to hear him, and he took occasion to

voice his views on every important issue. It was his custom in those

days, for instance, when he had anything of special importance to say,

to have printed at his own expense a few placards announcing his coming,

which he would then carry to the town selected for his address and

personally nail up. When the hour came, a crowd, as I am told, was never

wanting. Citizens and farmers of both parties for miles about usually

came to hear him.

Personally I never knew how towering his figure had been in the past, or

how truly he had been admired, until one day I drifted in upon a lone

bachelor who occupied a hut some fifteen miles from the patriarch's home

and who was rather noted in the community at the time that I was there

for his love of seclusion and indifference to current events. He had not

visited the nearest neighboring village in something like five years,

and had not been to the moderate-sized county seat in ten. Naturally he

treasured memories of his younger days and more varied activity.

"I don't know," he said to me one day, in discussing modern statesmen

and political fame in general, "but getting up in politics is a queer

game. I can't understand it. Men that you'd think ought to get up don't

seem to. It doesn't seem to be real greatness that helps 'em along."

"What makes you say that?" I asked.

"Well, there used to be a man over here at Danville that I always

thought would get up, and yet he didn't. He was the finest orator I ever

heard."

"Who was he?" I asked.

"Arch White," he said quietly. "He was really a great man. He was a good

man. Why, many's the time I've driven fifteen miles to hear him. I used

to like to go into Danville just for that reason. He used to be around

there, and sometimes he'd talk a little. He could stir a fellow up."

"Oratory alone won't make a statesman," I ventured, more to draw him out

than to object.

"Oh, I know," he answered, "but White was a good man. The

plainest-spoken fellow I ever heard. He seemed to be able to tell us

just what was the matter with us, or at least I thought so. He always

seemed a wonderful speaker to me. I've seen as many as two thousand

people up at High Hill hollerin' over what he was saying until you could

hear them for miles."

"Why didn't he get up, then, do you suppose?" I now asked on my part.

"I dunno," he answered. "Guess he was too honest, maybe. It's sometimes

that way in politics, you know. He was a mighty determined man, and one

that would talk out in convention, whatever happened. Whenever they got

to twisting things too much and doing what wasn't just honest, I suppose

he'd kick out. Anyhow, he didn't get up, and I've always wondered at

it."

In Danville one might hear other stories wholly bearing out this latter

opinion, and always interesting--delightful, really. Thus, a long,

enduring political quarrel was once generated by an incident of no great

importance, save that it revealed an odd streak in the old patriarch's

character and his interpretation of charity and duty.

A certain young man, well known to the people of this county and to the

patriarch, came to Danville one day and either drank up or gambled away

a certain sum of money intrusted to him by his aunt for disposition in

an entirely different manner. When the day was all over, however, he was

not too drunk to realize that he was in a rather serious predicament,

and so, riding out of town, traveled a little way and then tearing his

clothes and marking his skin, returned, complaining that he had been set

upon by the wayside, beaten, and finally robbed. His clothes were in a

fine state of dilapidation after his efforts, and even his body bore

marks which amply seconded his protestation. In the slush and rain of

the dark village street he was finally picked up by the county treasurer

seemingly in a wretched state, and the latter, knowing the generosity

of White and the fact that his door was always open to those in

distress, took the young man by the arm and led him to the patriarch's

door, where he personally applied for him. The old patriarch, holding a

lamp over his head, finally appeared and peered outward into the

darkness.

"Yes," he exclaimed, as he always did, eyeing the victim; "what is it

you want of me?"

"Mr. White," said the treasurer, "it's me. I've got young Squiers here,

who needs your sympathy and aid tonight. He's been beaten and robbed out

here on the road while he was on his way to his mother's home."

"Who?" inquired the patriarch, stepping out on the porch and eyeing the

newcomer, the while he held the lamp down so as to get a good look.

"Billy Squiers!" he exclaimed when he saw who it was. "Mr. Morton, I'll

not take this man into my house. I know him. He's a drunkard and a liar.

No man has robbed him. This is all a pretense, and I want you to take

him away from here. Put him in the hotel. I'll pay his expenses for the

night, but he can't come into my home," and he retired, closing the door

after him.

The treasurer fell back amazed at this onslaught, but recovered

sufficiently to knock at the door once more and declare to his friend

that he deemed him no Christian in taking such a stand and that true

religion commanded otherwise, even though he suspected the worst. The

man was injured and penniless. He even went so far as to quote the

parable of the good Samaritan who passed down by way of Jericho and

rescued him who had fallen among thieves. The argument had long

continued into the night and rain before the old patriarch finally waved

them both away.

"Don't you quote Scripture to me," he finally shouted defiantly, still

holding the light and flourishing it in an oratorical sweep. "I know my

Bible. There's nothing in it requiring me to shield liars and drunkards,

not a bit of it," and once more he went in and closed the door.

Nevertheless the youth was housed and fed at his expense and no charge

of any kind made against him, although many believed, as did Mr. White,

that he was guilty of theft, whereas others of the opposing political

camp believed not. However, considerable opposition, based on old Mr.

White's lack of humanity in this instance, was generated by this

argument, and for years he was taunted with it although he always

maintained that he was justified and that the Lord did not require any

such service of him.

The crowning quality of nearly all of his mercies, as one may easily

see, was their humor. Even he was not unaware, in retrospect, of the

figure he made at times, and would smilingly tell, under provocation, of

his peculiar attitude on one occasion or another. Partially from

himself, from those who saw it, and the judge presiding in the case, was

the following characteristic anecdote gathered.

In the same community with him at one time lived a certain man by the

name of Moore, who in his day had been an expert tobacco picker, but who

later had come by an injury to his hand and so turned cobbler, and a

rather helpless, although not hopeless, one at that. Mr. White had known

this man from boyhood up, and had been a witness at various times to the

many changes in his fortunes, from the time, for instance, when he had

earned as much as several dollars a day--good pay in that region--to the

hour when he took a cobbler's kit upon his back and began to eke out a

bare livelihood for his old age by traveling about the countryside

mending shoes. At the time under consideration, this ex-tobacco picker

had degenerated into so humble a thing as Uncle Bobby Moore, a poor,

half-remembered cobbler, whose earlier state but few knew, and who at

this time had only a few charitably inclined friends, with some of whom

he spent the more pleasant portion of the year from spring to fall.

Thus, it was his custom to begin his annual pilgrimage with a visit of

ten days to Mr. White, where he would sit and cobble shoes for all the

members of the household. From here he would go to another acquaintance

some ten miles farther on, where he could enjoy the early fruit which

was then ripening in delicious quantity. Then he would visit a friendly

farmer whose home was upon the Missouri River still farther away, where

he did his annual fishing, and so on by slow degrees, until at last he

would reach a neighborhood rich in cider presses, where he would wind up

the fall, and so end his travel for the winter, beginning his peculiar

round once more the following spring at the home of Mr. White.

Naturally the old patriarch knew him and liked him passing well.

As he grew older, however, Uncle Bobby reached the place where even by

this method and his best efforts he could scarcely make enough to

sustain him in comfort during the winter season, which was one of nearly

six months, free as his food and lodging occasionally were. He was too

feeble. Not desiring to put himself upon any friend for more than a

short visit, he finally applied to the patriarch.

"I come to you, Mr. White," he said, "because I don't think I can do for

myself any longer in the winter season. My hand hurts a good deal and I

get tired so easily. I want to know if you'd won't help me to get into

the county farm during the winter months, anyhow. In summer I can still

look out for myself, I think."

In short, he made it clear that in summer he preferred to be out so that

he might visit his friends and still enjoy his declining years.

The old patriarch was visibly moved by this appeal, and seizing him by

the arm and leading off toward the courthouse where the judge governing

such cases was then sitting he exclaimed, "Come right down here, Uncle

Bobby. I'll see what can be done about this. Your old age shouldn't be

troubled in this fashion--not after all the efforts you have made to

maintain yourself," and bursting in on the court a few moments later,

where a trial was holding at the time, he deliberately led his charge

down the aisle, disturbing the court proceedings by so doing, and

calling as he came:

"Your Honor, I want you to hear this case especially. It's a very

important and a very sad case, indeed."

Agape, the spectators paused to listen. The judge, an old and

appreciative friend of his, turned a solemn eye upon this latest

evidence of eccentricity.

"What is it, Mr. White?" he inquired.

"Your Honor," returned the latter in his most earnest and oratorical

manner, "this man here, as you may or may not know, is an old and

honorable citizen of this county. He has been here nearly all the days

of his life, and every day of that time he has earned an honest living.

These people here," he said, gazing about upon the interested

spectators, "can witness whether or not he was one of the best tobacco

pickers this county ever saw. Mayhew," he interrupted himself to call to

a spectator on one of the benches, "you know whether Uncle Bobby always

earned an honest living. Speak up. Tell the Court, did he?"

"Yes, Mr. White," said Mayhew quickly, "he did."

"Morrison," he called, turning in another direction, where an aged

farmer sat, "what do you know of this man?"

Mr. Morrison was about to reply, when the Court interfered.

"The Court knows, Mr. White, that he is an honest man. Now what would

you have it do?"

"Well, your Honor," resumed the speaker, indifferently following his own

oratorical bent, the while the company surveyed him, amused and smiling,

"this man has always earned an honest living until he injured his hand

here in some way a number of years ago, and since then it has been

difficult for him to make his way and he has been cobbling for a living.

However, he is getting so old now that he can't even earn much at that,

except in the spring and summer, and so I brought him here to have him

assigned a place in the county infirmary. I want you to make out an

order admitting him to that institution, so that I can take it and go

with him and see that he is comfortably placed."

"All right, Mr. White," replied the judge, surveying the two figures in

mid-aisle, "I so order."

"But, your Honor," he went on, "there's an exception I want made in this

case. Mr. Moore has a few friends that he likes to visit in the summer,

and who like to have him visit them. I want him to have the privilege of

coming out in the summer to see these people and to see me."

"All right, Mr. White," said the judge, "he shall have that privilege.

Now, what else?"

Satisfied in these particulars, the aged citizen led his charge away,

and then went with him to the infirmary, where he presented the order of

the Court and then left him.

Things went very well with his humble client for a certain time, and

Uncle Bobby was thought to be well disposed of, when one day he came to

his friend again. It appeared that only recently he had been changed

about in his quarters at the infirmary and put into a room with a

slightly demented individual, whose nocturnal wanderings greatly

disturbed his very necessary sleep.

"I want to know if you won't have them put me by myself, Mr. White," he

concluded. "I need my sleep. But they say they can't do it without an

order."

Once more the old patriarch led his charge before the Court, then

sitting, as it happened, and breaking in upon the general proceedings as

before, began:

"Your Honor, this man here, Mr. Moore, whom I brought before you some

time ago, has been comfortably housed by your order, and he's deeply

grateful for it, as he will tell you, and as I can, but he's an old man,

your Honor, and, above all things, needs his rest. Now, of late they've

been quartering him with a poor, demented sufferer down there who walks

a good deal in his sleep, and it wears upon him. I've come here with him

to ask you to allow him to have a room by himself, where he will be

alone and rest undisturbed."

"Very well, Mr. White," said the Court, "it shall be as you request."

Without replying, the old gentleman turned and led the supplicant away.

Everything went peacefully now for a number of years, until finally

Uncle Bobby, having grown so feeble with age that he feared he was soon

to die, came to his friend and asked him to promise him one thing.

"What is it?" asked the latter.

By way of replying, the supplicant described an old oak tree which grew

in the yard of the Baptist Church some miles from Danville, and said:

"I want you to promise that when I am dead, wherever I happen to be at

the time, that you will see that I am buried under that tree." He gave

no particular reason save that he had always liked the tree and the view

it commanded, but made his request a very secret matter and begged to be

assured that Mr. White would come and get his body and carry it to the

old oak.

The latter, always a respecter of the peculiarities and crotchets of his

friends, promised. After a few years went by, suddenly one day he

learned that Uncle Bobby was not only dead but buried, a thing which

astonished him greatly. No one locally being supposed to know that he

was to have had any special form of burial, the old patriarch at once

recalled his promise.

"Where is his body?" he asked.

"Why, they buried it under the old white oak over at Mt. Horeb Church,"

was the answer.

"What!" he exclaimed, too astonished to think of anything save his lost

privilege of mercy, "who told them to bury him there?"

"Why, _he_ did," said the friend. "It was his last wish, I believe."

"The confounded villain," he shouted, amusingly enough. "He led me to

believe that I was the only one he told. I alone was to have looked

after his burial, and now look at him--going and having himself buried

without a word. The scoundrel! Would you believe that an old friend like

Uncle Bobby would do anything like that? However," he added after a

time, "I think I know how it was. He got so old and feeble here of late

that he must have lost his mind--otherwise he would never have done

anything like that to me."

And with this he was satisfied to rest and let bygones be bygones.

_De Maupassant, Junior_

He dawned on me in the spring of 1906, a stocky, sturdy, penetrative

temperament of not more than twenty-four or -five years of age, steady of

eye, rather aloof and yet pervasive and bristling; a devouring type.

Without saying much, and seeming to take anything I had to say with a

grain of salt, he managed to impress himself on me at once. Frankly, I

liked him very much, although I could see at a glance that he was not so

very much impressed with me. I was an older man than he by, say, ten

years, an editor of an unimportant magazine, newly brought in (which he

did not know) to turn it into something better. In order to earn a few

dollars he had undertaken to prepare for the previous editor a most

ridiculous article, some silly thing about newspaper writing as a career

for women. It had been ordered or encouraged, and I felt that it was but

just that it should be paid for.

"Why do you waste your time on a thing like that?" I inquired, smiling

and trying to criticize and yet encourage him at one and the same time,

for I had been annoyed by many similar assignments given out by the old

management which could not now be used. "You look to me to have too much

force and sense for that. Why not undertake something worth your time?"

"My time, hell!" he bristled, like a fighting sledge-dog, of which by

the way he reminded me. "You show me a magazine in this town that would

buy anything that I thought worthy of my time! You're like all the rest

of them: you talk big, but you really don't want anything very

important. You want little things probably, written to a theory or down

to 'our policy.' I know. Give me the stuff. You don't have to take it.

It was ordered, but I'll throw it in the waste basket."

"Not so fast! Not so fast!" I replied, admiring his courage and moved by

his contempt of the editorial and book publishing conditions in America.

He was so young and raw and savage in his way, quite animal, and yet how

interesting! There was something as fresh and clean about him as a newly

plowed field or the virgin prairies. He typified for me all the young

unsophisticated strength of my country, but with more "punch" than it

usually manifests, in matters intellectual at least. "Now, don't get

excited, and don't snarl," I cooed. "I know what you say is true. They

don't really want much of what you have to offer. I don't. Working for

some one else, as most of us do, for the dear circulation department,

it's not possible for us to get very far above crowd needs and tastes.

I've been in your position exactly. I am now. Where do you come from?"

He told me--Missouri--and some very few years before from its state

university.

"And what is it you want to do?"

"What's that to you?" he replied irritatingly, with an ingrowing and

obvious self-conviction of superiority and withdrawing as though he

highly resented my question as condescending and intrusive. "You

probably wouldn't understand if I told you. Just now I want to write

enough magazine stuff to make a living, that's all."

"Dear, dear!" I said, laughing at the slap. "What a bravo we are!

Really, you're interesting. But suppose now you and I get down to brass

tacks. You want to do something interesting, if you can, and get paid

for it. I rather like you, and anyhow you look to me as though you might

do the things I want, or some of them. Now, you want to do the least

silly thing you can--something better than this. I want the least silly

stuff I can get away with in this magazine--genuine color out of the

life of New York, if such a thing can be published in an ordinary

magazine. Roughly, here's the kind of thing I want," and I outlined to

him the probable policy of the magazine under my direction. I had taken

an anæmic "white-light" monthly known as _The Broadway_ (!) and was

attempting to recast it into a national or international metropolitan

picture. He thawed slightly.

"Well, maybe with that sort of idea behind it, it might come to

something. I don't know. It's _possible_ that you may be the one to do

it." He emphasized the "possible." "At any rate, it's worth trying.

Judging by the snide editors and publications in this town, no one in

America wants anything decent." His lip curled. "I have ambitions of my

own, but I don't expect to work them out through the magazines of this

town; maybe not of this country. I didn't know that any change was

under way here."

"Well, it is," I said. "Still, you can't expect much from this either,

remember. After all, it seeks to be a popular magazine. We'll see how

far we can go with really interesting material. And now if you know of

any others like yourself, bring them in here. I need them. I'll pay you

for that article, only I'll include it in a better price I'll give you

for something else later, see?"

I smiled and he smiled. His was a warmth which was infectious when he

chose to yield, but it was always a repressed warmth, cynical, a bit

hard; heat chained to a purpose, I thought. He went away and I saw him

no more until about a week later when he brought me his first attempt to

give me what I wanted.

In the meantime I was busy organizing a staff which should if possible,

I decided after seeing him, include him. I could probably use him as a

salaried "special" writer, provided he could be trained to write

"specials." He looked so intelligent and ambitious that he promised

much. Besides, the little article which he had left when he came again,

while not well organized or arranged as to its ideas or best points, was

exceedingly well written from the point of mere expression.

And the next thing I had given him to attempt was even better. It was,

if I recall correctly, a stirring picture of the East Side, intended to

appeal to readers elsewhere than in the city, but while in the matter of

color and definiteness of expression as well as choice of words it was

exceptional, it was lacking in, quite as the first one had been, the

arrangement of its best points. This I explained to him, and also made

it clear to him that I could show him how if he would let me. He seemed

willing enough, quite anxious, although always with an air of reserve,

as if he were accommodating himself to me in this much but no more. He

grasped the idea of order swiftly, and in a little while, having worked

at a table in an outer room, brought me the rearranged material, almost

if not quite satisfactory. During a number of weeks and months

thereafter, working on one "special" and another in this way with me, he

seemed finally to grasp the theory I had, or at least to develop a

method of his own which was quite as satisfactory to me, and I was very

much pleased. A little later I employed him at a regular salary.

It was pathetic, as I look at it now, the things we were trying to do

and the conditions under which we were trying to do them--the raw

commercial force and theory which underlay the whole thing, the

necessity of explaining and fighting for so much that one should not, as

I saw it then, have to argue over at all. We were in new rooms, in a new

building, filled with lumber not yet placed and awaiting the completion

of partitions which, as some one remarked, "would divide us up." Our

publisher and owner was a small, energetic, vibrant and colorful soul,

all egotism and middle-class conviction as to the need of "push,"

ambition, "closeness to life," "punch," and what not else, American to

the core, and descending on us, or me rather, hourly as it were,

demanding the "hows" and the "whyfors" of the dream which the little

group I was swiftly gathering about me was seeking to make real.

It was essential to me, therefore, that something different should be

done, some new fresh note concerning metropolitan life and action be

struck; the old, slow and somewhat grandiose methods of reporting and

describing things dispensed with, at least in this instance, and here

was a youth who seemed able to help me do it. He was so vigorous, so

avid of life, so anxious to picture the very atmosphere which this

magazine was now seeking to portray. I felt stronger, better for having

him around. The growth of the city, the character and atmosphere of a

given neighborhood, the facts concerning some great social fortune,

event, condition, crime interested him intensely; on the other hand he

was so very easy to teach, quick to sense what was wanted and the order

in which it must be presented. A few brief technical explanations from

me, and he had the art of writing a "special" at his fingertips, and

thereafter gave me no real difficulty.

But what was more interesting to me than his success in grasping my

theory of "special" writing was his own character, as it was revealed to

me from day to day in intimate working contact with him under these

conditions. Here, as I soon learned, and was glad to learn, was no

namby-pamby scribbler of the old happy-ending, pretty-nothing school of

literary composition. On the contrary he sounded, for the first time in

my dealings with literary aspirants of every kind, that sure, sane,

penetrating, non-sentimental note so common to the best writers of the

Continent, a note entirely free from mush, bravado and cant. He had a

style as clear as water, as simple as rain; color, romance, humor; and

if a little too much of vanity and self-importance, still one could

forgive him for they were rather well-based. Already used to dealing

with literary and artistic aspirants of different kinds in connection

with the publications of which I had been a part, this one appealed to

me as being the best of them all and a very refreshing change.

One day, only a few weeks after I had met him, seeing that I was alert

for fiction, poetry and short essays or prose phantasies, all

illustrative of the spirit of New York, he brought me a little poem

entitled "Neuvain," which interested me greatly. It was so brief and

forceful and yet so delicate, a double triolet of the old French order,

but with the modernity and flavor of the streets outside, the conduit

cars, hand-organs and dancing children of the pavements. The title

seemed affected, seeing that the English word "Spring" would have done

as well, but it was typical of his mood at the time, his literary

adorations. He was in leash to the French school of which de Maupassant

was the outstanding luminary, only I did not know it at the time.

"Charming," I exclaimed quite enthusiastically. "I like this. Let me see

anything else you have. Do you write short stories?"

For answer he merely stared at me for a little while in the most

examining and arrogant and contemptuous way, as much as to say, "Let me

see if you are really worth my time and trouble in this matter," or

"This sad specimen of alleged mentality is just beginning to suspect

that I might write a short story." Seeing that I merely smiled most

genially in return, he finally deigned to say, "Sure, I write short

stories. What do you think I'm in the writing game for?"

"But you might be interested in novels only or plays, or poetry."

"No," he returned after a pause and with that same air of unrelieved

condescension, "the short story is what I want to specialize in."

"Well," I said to myself, "here is a young cub who certainly has talent,

is crowded with it, and yet owing to the kind of thing he is starting

out to do and the fact that life will give him slaps and to spare before

he is many years older, he needs to be encouraged. I was like that

myself not so long ago. And besides, if I do not encourage this type of

work financially (which is the best way of all), who will?"

About a week later I was given another and still more gratifying

surprise, for one day, in his usual condescending manner, he brought to

me two short pieces of fiction and laid them most gingerly on my desk

with scarcely a word--"Here was something I might read if I chose," I

believe. The reading of these two stories gave me as much of a start as

though I had discovered a fully developed genius. They were so truly new

or different in their point of view, so very clear, incisive, brief,

with so much point in them (_The Second Motive_; _The Right Man_). For

by then having been struggling with the short-story problem in other

magazine offices before this, I had become not a little pessimistic as

to the trend of American short fiction, as well as long--the

impossibility of finding any, even supposing it publishable once we had

it. My own experience with "Sister Carrie" as well as the fierce

opposition or chilling indifference which, as I saw, overtook all those

who attempted anything even partially serious in America, was enough to

make me believe that the world took anything even slightly approximating

the truth as one of the rankest and most criminal offenses possible. One

dared not "talk out loud," one dared not report life as it was, as one

lived it. And one of the primary warnings I had received from the

president of this very organization--a most eager and ambitious and

distressing example of that American pseudo-morality which combines a

pirate-like acquisitiveness with an inward and absolute conviction of

righteousness--was that while he wanted something new in fiction,

something more virile and life-like than that "mush," as he

characterized it, to be found in the current magazines, still (1), it

must have a strong appeal for the general reader (!); and (2), be very

compelling in fact and _clean_, as the dear general reader would of

course understand that word--a solid little pair of millstones which

would unquestionably end in macerating everything vital out of any good

story.

Still I did not despair; something might be done. And though I sighed, I

hoped to be able to make my superior stretch a point in favor of the

exceptional thing, or, as the slang phrase went, "slip a few over on

him," but that of course meant nothing or something, as you choose. My

dream was really to find one or many like this youth, or a pungent kind

of realism that would be true and yet within such limits as would make

it usable. Imagine, then, my satisfaction in finding these two things,

tales that I could not only admire genuinely but that I could publish,

things that ought to have an interest for all who knew even a little

about life. True, they were ironic, cruel, but still with humor and

color, so deftly and cleanly told that they were smile-provoking. I

called him and said as much, or nearly so--a mistake, as I sometimes

think now, for art should be long--and bought them forthwith, hoping,

almost against hope, to find many more such like them.

By this time, by the way, and as I should have said before, I had still

further enlarged my staff by one art director of the most flamboyant and

erratic character, a genius of sorts, volatile, restless, emotional,

colorful, a veritable Verlaine-Baudelaire-Rops soul, who, not content to

arrange and decorate the magazine each month, must needs wish to write,

paint, compose verse and music and stage plays, as well as move in an

upper social world, _entrée_ to which was his by birth. Again, there was

by now an Irish-Catholic makeup editor, a graduate of some distinguished

sectarian school, who was more interested in St. Jerome and his

_Vulgate_, as an embodiment of classic Latin, than he was in getting out

the magazine. Still he had the advantage of being interesting--"and I

learned about Horace from him." Again, there was a most interesting and

youthful and pretty, if severe, example of the Wellesley-Mt.

Holyoke-Bryn Mawr school of literary art and criticism, a most

engagingly interesting intellectual maiden, who functioned as assistant

editor and reader in an adjoining room, along with the art-director, the

makeup editor and an office boy. This very valuable and in some

respects remarkable young woman, who while holding me in proper

contempt, I fear, for my rather loose and unliterary ways, was still, as

I had suspected before employing her, as keen for something new and

vital in fiction and every other phase of the scriptic art as any one

well could be. She was ever for culling, sorting, eliminating--repression

carried to the N-th power. At first L---- cordially hated her, calling

her a "simp," a "bluff," a "la-de-da," and what not. In addition to

these there was a constantly swelling band of writers, artists, poets,

critics, dreamers of reforms social, and I know not what else, who,

holding the hope of achieving their ends or aims through some really

forceful magazine, were by now beginning to make our place a center. It

fairly swarmed for a time with aspirants; an amusing, vivid, strident

world.

As for L----, all this being new to him, he was as interested,

fascinated even, as any one well might be. He responded to it almost

gayly at times, wondering whether something wonderful, international,

enduring might not be made to come of it. He rapidly developed into one

of the most pertinacious and even disconcerting youths I have ever met.

At times he seemed to have a positive genius for saying and doing

irritable and disagreeable things, not only to me but to others. Never

having heard of me before he met me here, he was convinced, I think,

that I was a mere nothing, with some slight possibilities as an editor

maybe, certainly with none as a writer or as one who could even suggest

anything to writers. I had helped him, but that was as it should be. As

for my art-director, he was at first a fool, later a genius; ditto my

makeup man.

As for Miss E----, the Wellesley-Bryn Mawr-Mt. Holyoke assistant, who

from the first had agreed with me that here indeed was a writer of

promise, a genius really, he, as I have said, at first despised her.

Later, by dint of exulting in his force, sincerity of purpose, his keen

insight and all but braggart strength, she managed, probably on account

of her looks and physical graces, to install herself in his confidence

and to convince him that she was not only an honest admirer of his skill

but one who had taste and judgment of no mean caliber. Thereafter he

was about as agreeable as a semi-caged wild animal would be about any

office.

But above all he was affronted by M----, the publisher of the paper,

concerning whom he could find no words equal to his contemptuous

thoughts of him. The publisher, as L---- made quite bold to say to me,

was little more than a "dodging, rat-like financial ferret," a

"financial stool-pigeon for some trust or other," a "shrewd, material

little shopkeeper." This because M---- was accustomed to enter and force

a conversation here and there, anxious of course to gather the full

import of all these various energies and enthusiasms. One of the things

which L---- most resented in him at the time was his air of supreme

material well-being, his obvious attempt and wish not to convey it, his

carefully-cut clothes, his car, his numerous assistants and secretaries

following him here and there from various other organizations with which

he was connected.

M----'s idea, as he always said, was to spend and to live, only it

wasn't. He merely induced others so to do. One of his customs (and it

must have impressed L---- very much, innocent newcomer that he was) was

to have one or another of his hirelings announce his passing from one

"important" meeting to another, within or without his own building,

telephone messages being "thrown in" on his line or barred out, wherever

he happened to be at the moment and when, presumably, he was deep in one

of those literary conferences or confidences with one employee or

another or with a group, for which he rapidly developed a passion.

Another of his vanities was to have his automobile announced and he be

almost forced into it by impetuous secretaries, who, because of orders

previously given, insisted that he must be made to keep certain

important engagements. Or he would send for one of his hirelings,

wherever he chanced to be--club, restaurant, his home--midnight if

necessary, to confer with him on some subject of great moment, and the

hireling was supposed to call a taxi and come post haste in order that

he might not be kept waiting.

"God!" L---- once remarked in my presence. "To think that a thinking

being has to be beholden to a thing like that for his weekly income!

Somebody ought to tap him with a feather-duster and kill him!"

But the manner in which L---- developed in this atmosphere! It was

interesting. At first, before the magazine became so significant or

well-organized, it was a great pleasure for me to associate with him

outside office hours, and a curious and vivid companion he made. He was

so intensely avid of life, so intolerant of the old, of anything

different to that which he personally desired or saw, that at times it

was most difficult to say anything at all for fear of meeting a rebuff

or at least a caustic objection. As I was very pleased to note, he had a

passion for seeing, as all youth should have when it first comes to the

great city--the great bridges, the new tunnels just then being completed

or dug, the harbor and bay, Coney Island, the two new and great railway

terminals, then under construction. Most, though, he reveled in

different and even depressing neighborhoods--Eighth Avenue, for

instance, about which he later wrote a story, and a very good one ("A

Quiet Duet"); Hell's Kitchen, that neighborhood that lies (or did), on

the West Side of Manhattan, between Eighth and Tenth Avenues,

Thirty-sixth and Forty-first Streets; Little Italy, the region below

Delancey and north of Worth Street on the East Side; Chinatown;

Washington Street (Syria in America); the Greeks in Twenty-seventh and

-eighth Streets, West Side. All these and many more phases of New York's

multiplex life took his full and restless attention. Once he said to me

quite excitedly, walking up Eighth Avenue at two in the morning--I was

showing him some rear tenement slums in the summertime--"God, how I hate

to go to bed in this town! I'm afraid something will happen while I'm

asleep and I won't see it!" That was exactly how he felt all the time, I

am sure.

And in those days he was most simple, a very Spartan of a boy. He hadn't

the least taste for drink, lived in a small hall-bedroom

somewhere--Eighth Avenue, I believe--and took his meals in those shabby

little quick-lunch rooms where the characters were more important to him

than the food. (My hat--my hat is in my hand!) Intellectually he was so

stern and ambitious that I all but stood in awe of and reverence before

him. Here, I said to myself, is one who will really do; let him be as

savage as he pleases. In America he probably needs to be.

And during this short time, what scraps of his early life he revealed!

By degrees I picked up bits of his early deprivations and difficulties,

if such they might be called. He had been a newspaper reporter, or had

tried to be, in Kansas City, had worked in the college restaurant and

laundry of the middle-West State university from which he had graduated,

to help pay his way. Afterward he had assisted the janitor of some great

skyscraper somewhere--Kansas City, I believe--and, what was most

pleasing to me, he in nowise emphasized these as youthful difficulties

or made any comment as to their being "hard." Neither did he try to

boastingly minimize them as nothing at all--another wretched pose. From

him I learned that throughout his youth he had been carried here and

there by the iron woman who was his mother and whom he seemed to adore

in some grim contentious way, smothering his comments as though he

disliked to say anything at all, and yet describing her at times as

coarse and vulgar, but a mother to him "all right," someone who had made

marked sacrifices for him.

She had once "run" a restaurant in a Western mining camp, had then or

later carried him as a puling baby under her shawl or cloak across the

Mojave Desert, on foot a part of the way. Apparently he did not know who

his father was, and he was not very much concerned to know whether she

did or not. His father had died, he said, when he was a baby. Later his

mother, then a cook in some railroad hotel in Texas, had sent him to

school there. Later still she had been a "bawler out," if you know what

that means, an employee of a loan shark and used by him to compel

delinquent, albeit petty and pathetic, creditors to pay their dues or

then and there, before all their fellow-workers, be screamed at for

their delinquency about the shop in which they worked! Later she became

a private detective! an insurance agent--God knows what--a kind of rough

man-woman, as she turned out to be, but all the while clinging to this

boy, her pet, no doubt her dream of perfection. She had by turns sent

him to common and high school and to college, remitting him such sums of

money as she might to pay his way. Later still (at that very time in

fact) she was seeking to come to New York to keep house for him, only

he would not have that, perhaps sensing the need of greater freedom. But

he wrote her regularly, as he confessed to me, and in later years I

believe sent her a part of his earnings, which were to be saved by her

for him against a rainy day. Among his posthumous writings later I found

a very lovely story ("His Mother"), describing her and himself in

unsparing and yet loving terms, a compound of the tender and the brutal

in his own soul.

The thing that always made me hope for the best was that at that time he

was not at all concerned with the petty little _moralic_ and economic

definitions and distinctions which were floating about his American

world in one form and another. Indeed he seemed to be entirely free of

and even alien to them. What he had heard about the indwelling and

abiding perfections of the human soul had gone, and rightly so, in one

ear and out the other. He respected the virtues, but he knew of and

reckoned with die antipathetic vices which gave them their reason for

being. To him the thief was almost as important as the saint, the reason

for the saint's being. And, better still, he had not the least interest

in American politics or society--a wonderful sign. The American dream of

"getting ahead" financially and socially was not part of him--another

mark royal. All life was fascinating, acceptable, to be interpreted if

one had the skill; it was a great distinction to have the skill--worth

endless pains to acquire it.

But how unwilling would the average American of his day have been,

stuffed as he was and still is with book and picture drivel about

artists and art, to accept L---- as anything more than a raw, callow

yokel, presuming to assail the outer portals of the temple with his

muddy feet! A romping, stamping, irritable soul, with more the air of a

young railroad brakeman or "hand," than an artist, and with so much

coarse language at times and such brutality of thought as to bar him

completely, one might say, from having anything to do with great

fiction, great artistic conceptions, or the temple of art. What, sit

with the mighty!--that coarse youth, with darkish-brown hair parted at

one side and combed over one ear, in the manner of a grandiose barber;

with those thick-soled and none too shapely brown shoes, that none too

well-made store suit of clothes, that little round brown hat, more

often a cap, pulled rather savagely and vulgarly, even insultingly, over

one eye; that coarse frieze overcoat, still worn on cold spring days,

its "corners" back and front turned up by the damp and from being

indifferently sat on; that brash corn-cob pipe and bag of cheap tobacco,

extracted and lit at odd moments; what, that youth with the aggressive,

irritating vibrant manner--almost the young tough with a chip on his

shoulder looking for one to even so much as indicate that he is not all

he should be! Positively, there was something brutal and yet cosmic (not

comic) about him, his intellectual and art pretensions considered. At

times his waspishness and bravado palled even on me. He was too

aggressive, too forceful, too intolerant, I said. He should be softer.

At other times I felt that he needed to be all that and more to "get

by," as he would have said. I wanted to modify him a little--and yet I

didn't--and I remained drawn to him in spite of many irritating little

circumstances, all but infuriating at times, and actually calculated, it

seemed, with a kind of savage skill to reduce what he conceived to be my

lofty superiority. At times I thought he ought to be killed--like a

father meditating on an unruly son--but the mood soon passed and his

literary ability made amends for everything.

In so far as the magazine was concerned, once it began to grow and

attract attention he was for me its most important asset; not that he

did so much directly as that he provided a definite standard toward

which we all had to work. Not incuriously, he was swiftly recognized for

what he was by all who came in touch with the magazine. In the first

place, interested in his progress, I had seen to it that he was properly

introduced wherever that was possible and of benefit to him, and later

on, by sheer force of his mental capacity and integrity, his dreams and

his critical skill, he managed to center about him an entire band of

seeking young writers, artists, poets, playwrights, aspiring musicians;

an amusing and as interesting a group as I have ever seen. Their points

of rendezvous appeared to be those same shabby quick-lunches in back

streets or even on the principal thoroughfares about Times Square, or

they met in each other's rooms or my office at night after I had gone,

giving me as an excuse that they had work to do. And during all this

time the air fairly hummed with rumors of new singers, dancers, plays,

stories being begun or under way, articles and essays contemplated;

avid, if none too well financed frolics or bohemian midnight suppers

here and there. Money was by no means plentiful, and in consequence

there was endless borrowing and "paying up" among them. Among the most

enthusiastic members of this circle, as I had begun to note, and finally

rather nervously, were my art-director, a valiant knight in Bohemia if

ever there was one, and she of Bryn Mawr-Wellesley standards. My makeup

editor, as well as various contributors who had since become more or

less closely identified with the magazine, were also following him up

all the time.

If not directly profitable it was enlivening, and I was fairly well

convinced by now that from the point of view of being "aware," "in touch

with," "in sympathy with" many of the principal tendencies and

undercurrents which make for a magazine's success and precedence, this

group was as valuable to me as any might well be. It constituted a

"kitchen cabinet" of sorts and brought hundreds of interesting ideas to

the surface, and from all directions. Now it would be a new and hitherto

unheard-of tenor who was to be brought from abroad and introduced with

great noise to repute-loving Americans; a new sculptor or painter who

had never been heard of in America; a great actor, perhaps, or poet or

writer. I listened to any quantity of gossip in regard to new movements

that were ready to burst upon the world, in sculpture, painting, the

scriptic art. About the whole group there was much that was exceedingly

warm, youthful, full of dreams. They were intensely informative and full

of hope, and I used to look at them and wonder which one, if any, was

destined to have his dreams realized.

Of L---- however I never had the least doubt. He began, it is true, to

adopt rather more liberal tendencies, to wish always to be part and

parcel of this gayety, this rushing here and there; and he drank at

times--due principally, as I thought, to my wildling art-director, who

had no sense or reserve in matters material or artistic and who was all

for a bacchanalian career, cost what it might. On more than one occasion

I heard L---- declaring roundly, apropos of some group scheme of

pilgrimage, "No, no! I will not. I am going _home_ now!" He had a story

he wanted to work on, an article to finish. At the same time he would

often agree that if by a certain time, when he was through, they were

still at a certain place, or a second or third, he would look them up.

Never, apparently, did his work suffer in the least.

And it was about this time that I began to gather the true source and

import of his literary predisposition. He was literally obsessed, as I

now discovered, with Continental and more especially the French

conception of art in writing. He had studied the works as well as the

temperaments and experiences (more especially the latter, I fear) of

such writers as de Maupassant, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Balzac, de Musset,

Sand, Daudet, Dumas junior, and Zola, as well as a number of the more

recent writers: Hervieu, Bourget, Louys and their contemporaries. Most

of all, though, he was impressed, and deeply, by the life and art of de

Maupassant, his method of approach, his unbiased outlook on life, his

freedom from moral and religious and even sentimental predisposition. In

the beginning of his literary career I really believe he slaved to

imitate him exactly, although he could not very well escape the American

temperament and rearing by which he was hopelessly conditioned. A

certain Western critic and editor, to whom he had first addressed his

hopes and scribblings before coming to me, writing me after L----'s

death in reference to a period antedating that in which I had known him,

observed, "He was crazy about the _fin de siècle_ stuff that then held

the boards and from which (I hope the recording angel will put it to my

credit) I steered him clear." I think so; but he was still very much

interested in it. He admired Aubrey Beardsley, the poster artists of

France, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rops, the Yellow Book, even Oscar Wilde,

although his was a far more substantial and plebeian and even radical

point of view.

Unfortunately for L----, I have always thought, there now thrust himself

forward the publisher and owner of the magazine, who from previously

having been content to see that the mercantile affairs of the magazine

were in good order, had decided that since it was attracting attention

he should be allowed to share in its literary and artistic prestige,

should indeed be closely identified with it and recognized as its true

source and inspiration--a thing which in no fashion had been

contemplated by me when I went there. From having agreed very distinctly

with me that no such interference would at any time be indulged in, he

now came forward with a plan for an advisory council which was to

consist of himself and the very members of the staff which I had

created.

I could not object and it did not disturb me so much personally. For

some time I had been sensing that the thing was for me no end in itself,

but an incident. This same I felt to be true for L----, who had been

taking more and more interest in the magazine's technical composition.

At the same time I saw no immediate way of arranging my affairs and

departing, which left me, for a very little while, more or less of a

spectator. During this time I had the dissatisfaction of noting the

growth of an influence with L---- which could, as I saw, prove only

harmful. M---- was no suitable guide for him. He was a brilliant but

superficial and very material type who was convinced that in the having

and holding of many things material--houses, lands, corporation stocks,

a place in the clubs and circles of those who were materially

prosperous--was really to achieve all that was significant in the now or

the hereafter. Knowing comparatively nothing of either art or letters,

or that subtle thing which makes for personality and atmosphere in a

magazine or in writing (and especially the latter), that grateful

something which attracts and detains one, he was nevertheless convinced

that he did. And what was more, he was determined not only to make

friends with and hold all those whom I might have attracted, providing

they could prove useful to him, but also a number of a much more

successful group in these fields, those who had already achieved repute

in a more commonplace and popular way and were therefore presumably

possessed of a following and with the power to exact a high return for

their product, and for the magazine, regardless of intrinsic merit. His

constant talk was of money, its power to attract and buy, the

significance of all things material. He now wanted the magazine to be

representative of this glowing element, and at the same time,

paradoxical as it might seem, the best that might be in literary and

artistic thought.

Naturally the thing was impossible, but he had a facile and specious

method of arguing, a most gay and in some respects magnetic personality,

far from stodgy or gross, which for a time attracted many to him. Very

briskly then indeed he proceeded to make friends with all those with

whom I had surrounded myself, to enter into long and even private

discussions with them as to the proper conduct of the magazine, to hint

quite broadly at a glorious future in which all, each one particularly

to whom he talked, was to share. Curiously, this new and (as I would

have thought) inimical personality of M---- seemed to appeal to L----

very much.

I do not claim that the result was fatal. It may even, or at least

might, have had value, combined with an older or slightly more balanced

temperament. But it seemed to me that it offered too quickly what should

have come, if at all, as the result of much effort. For in regard to the

very things L---- should have most guarded against--show and the shallow

pleasures of social and night and material life in New York--M---- was

most specious. I never knew a more intriguing and fascinating man in

this respect nor one who cared less for those he used to obtain his

unimportant ends. He had positive genius for making the gaudy and the

unworthy seem worthy and even perfect. During his earlier days there,

L---- had more than once "cursed him out" (in his absence, of course),

to use his own expressive phrase, for his middle-West trade views, as he

described them, his shabby social and material ideals, and yet, as I

could plainly see, even at that time the virus of his theories was

working. For it must be remembered that L---- was very new to New York,

very young, and never having had much of anything he was no doubt

slightly envious of the man's material facility, the sense of

all-sufficiency, exclusiveness and even a kind of petty trade grandeur

with which he tried to surround himself.

Well, that might not have proved fatal either, only L---- needed some one

to keep him true to himself, his individual capabilities, to constantly

caution and if possible sober him to his very severe taste, and as it

was he was all but surrounded by acolytes and servitors.

A little later, having left M----'s and assumed another editorial

position, and being compelled to follow the various current magazines

more or less professionally, I was disturbed to note that there began to

appear in various publications--especially M----'s, which was

flourishing greatly for the moment--stories which while exhibiting much

of the deftness and repression as well as an avidity for the true color

of things, still showed what I had at first feared they might: a decided

compromise. That curse of all American fiction, the necessarily happy

ending, had been impressed on him--by whom? To my sincere

dissatisfaction, he began writing stories, some at least, which

concerned (1), a young woman who successfully abandoned art dreams for

advertising; (2), a middle-aged charmer, female, who attempted

_libertinage_ and was defeated, American style; (3), a Christmas picture

with sweetness and light reigning on every hand (Dickens at his

sentimentalest could have done no worse); (4), a Broadway press agent

who, attempting to bring patronage to a great hotel via chic vice,

accidentally and unintentionally mates an all-too-good young society man

turned hotel manager to a grand heiress. And so on and so on, not ad

infinitum but for a period at least--the ten years in which he managed

to live and work.

And, what was more, during this new period I heard and occasionally saw

discouraging things in connection with him from time to time. True to

his great promise, for I sincerely think M---- had a genuine fondness

for his young protégé, as much of a fondness as he could well have for

anything, he guaranteed him perhaps as much as three thousand a year;

sent him to Stockholm at the age of twenty-four or -five to meet and

greet the famous false pole discoverer, Doctor Cook; allowed him to go

to Paris in connection with various articles; to Rome; sent him into the

middle and far West; to Broadway for dramatic and social studies. Well

and good, only he wanted always in what was done for him the "uplift"

note, the happy ending--or at least one not vulgar or low--whereas my

idea in connection with L----, gifted as he was, was that he should

confine himself to fiction as an art and without any regard to theories

or types of ending, believing, as I did, that he would definitely

establish himself in that way in the long run. I had no objection of

course to experiences of various kinds, his taking up with any line of

work which might seem at the moment far removed from realistic writing,

providing always that the star of his ideal was in sight. Whenever he

wrote, be it early or late, it must be in the clear, incisive,

uncompromising vein of these first stories and with that passion for

revelation which characterized him at first, that same unbiased and

unfettered non-moral viewpoint.

But after meeting with and working for M---- under this new arrangement

and being apparently fascinated for the moment by his personality, he

seemed to me to gradually lose sight of his ideal, to be actually taken

in by the plausible arguments which the latter could spin with the ease

that a spider spins gossamer. In that respect I insist that M---- was a

bad influence. Under his tutelage L---- gradually became, for instance,

an habitué of a well-known and pseudo-bohemian chop-house, a most

mawkish and naïvely imitative affair, intended frankly to be a copy or

even the original, forsooth, of an old English inn, done, in so far as

its woodwork was concerned, in smoked or dark-stained oak to represent

an old English interior, its walls covered with long-stemmed pipes and

pictures of English hunting and drinking scenes, its black-stained but

unvarnished tables littered with riding, driving and country-life

society papers, to give it that air of _sans ceremonie_ with an upper

world of which its habitués probably possessed no least inkling but most

eagerly craved. Here, along with a goodly group of his latter-day

friends, far different from those by whom he had first been

surrounded--a pretentious society poet of no great merit but

considerable self-emphasis, a Wall Street broker, posing as a club man,

_raconteur_, "first-nighter" and what not, and several young and

ambitious playwrights, all seeking the heaven of a Broadway success--he

began to pose as one of the intimates of the great city, its bosom child

as it were, the cynosure and favorite of its most glittering

precincts--a most M-----like proceeding. His clothes by now, for I saw

him on occasion, had taken on a more lustrous if less convincing aspect

than those he had worn when I first knew him. The small round hat or

rakish cap, typical of his Western dreams, had now given way to a most

pretentious square-topped derby, beloved, I believe, of undertakers and

a certain severe type of banker as well as some clergymen, only it was a

light brown. His suit and waistcoat were of a bright English tweed,

reddish-brown or herring-bone gray by turns, his shoes box-toed

perfections of the button type. He carried a heavy cane, often a bright

leather manuscript case, and seemed intensely absorbed in the great and

dramatic business of living and writing. "One must," so I read him at

this time, "take the pleasures as well as the labors of this world with

the utmost severity." Here, with a grand manner, he patronized the

manager and the waiters, sent word to his friend the cook, who probably

did not know him at all, that his chop or steak was to be done just so.

These friends of his, or at least one of them (the poet) he met every

day at five for an all-essential game of chess, after which an evening

paper was read and the chop ordered. Ale--not beer--in a pewter mug was

_comme il faut_, the only thing for a gentleman of letters, worthy of

the name, to drink.

I am sorry to write so, for after all youth must have its fling. Still,

I had expected better of L----, and I was a little disappointed to see

that earlier dream of simplicity and privation giving way to an

absolutely worthless show. Besides, twenty or thirty such stories as

"The Right Man," "Sweet Dreams," "The Man With the Broken Fingers," "The

Second Motive," would outweigh a thousand of the things he was getting

published and the profits of which permitted him these airs.

Again, during the early days of his success with M----, he had

married--a young nurse who had previously been a clerk in a store, a

serious, earnest and from one point of view helpful person, seeing that

she could keep his domestic affairs in order and bear him children,

which she did, but she had no understanding of, or flair for, the type

of thing he was called upon to do. She had no instinct for literature or

the arts, and aside from her domestic capacities little skill or taste

for "socializing." And, naturally, he was neglecting her. His head was

probably surging with great ideas of art and hence a social supremacy

which might well carry him anywhere. He had bought a farm some distance

from New York, where in a community supposedly inhabited by successful

and superior men of letters he posed as a farmer at times, mowing and

cocking hay as became a Western plow-boy; and also, as the mood moved

him, and as became a great and secluded writer, working in a den

entirely surrounded by books in fine leather bindings (!) and being

visited by those odd satellites of the scriptic art who see in genius of

this type the _summum bonum_ of life. It was the thing to do at that

time, for a writer to own a farm and work it. Horace had. One individual

in particular, a man of genuine literary and critical ability and great

taste in the matter of all the arts but with no least interest in or

tolerance for the simplicities of effort, came here occasionally, as I

heard, to help him pile hay, and this in a silk shirt and a monocle; a

second--and a most fascinating intellectual _flaneur_, who, however, had

no vision or the gift of dreams--came to eat, drink, talk of many things

to be done, to steal a few ideas, borrow a little money perhaps or

consume a little morphine, and depart; a third came to spout of his

success in connection with plays, or his proposed successes; a fourth to

paint a picture, urged on by L----; a fifth to compose rural verse; a

sixth, a broker or race-track tout or city bar-tender (for color, this

last), to marvel that one of L----'s sense, or any one indeed, should

live in the country at all. There were drinking bouts, absolute

drunkenness, in which, according to the Johnsonian tradition and that of

Messieurs Rabelais and Molière, the weary intellect and one's guiding

genius were immersed in a comforting Lethe of rye.

Such things cost money, however. In addition, my young friend, due to a

desire no doubt to share in the material splendors of his age (a

doctrine M---- was ever fond of spouting--and as a duty, if you please),

had saddled himself, for a time at least, with an apartment in an

exclusive square on the East Side, the rent of which was a severe drain.

Before this there had been, and after it were still, others, obligations

too much for him to bear financially, all in the main taken for show,

that he might be considered a literary success. Now and again (so I was

told by several of his intimates), confronted by a sudden exhaustion of

his bank balance, he would leave some excellent apartment house or

neighborhood, where for a few months he had been living in grand style,

extracting his furniture as best he might, or leaving it and various

debts beside, and would take refuge in some shabby tenement, or rear

rooms even, and where, touched by remorse or encouraged by the great

literary and art traditions (Balzac, Baudelaire, Johnson, Goldsmith,

Verlaine) he would toil unendingly at definite money-yielding

manuscripts, the results of which carried to some well-paying

_successful magazine_ would yield him sufficient to return to the white

lights--often even to take a better apartment than that which last had

been his. By now, however, one of the two children he eventually left

behind him had been born. His domestic cares were multiplying, the

marriage idea dull. Still he did not hesitate to continue those dinners

given to his friends, the above-mentioned group or its spiritual kin,

either in his apartment or in a bohemian restaurant of great show in New

York. In short, he was a fairly successful short-story writer and critic

in whom still persisted a feeling that he would yet triumph in the

adjacent if somewhat more difficult field of popular fiction.

It was during this period, if I may interpolate an incident, that I was

waiting one night in a Broadway theater lobby for a friend to appear,

when who should arrive on the scene but L----, most outlandishly dressed

in what I took to be a _reductio ad absurdum_ of his first pose, as I

now half-feared it to be: that of the uncouth and rugged young American,

disclaiming style in dress at least, and content to be a clod in looks

so long as he was a Shelley in brains. His suit was of that coarse

ill-fitting character described as Store, and shelf-worn; his shoes all

but dusty brogans, his headgear a long-visored yellowish-and-brown

cross-barred cap. He had on a short, badly-cut frieze overcoat, his

hands stuck defiantly in his trousers pockets, forcing its lapels wide

open. And he appeared to be partially if not entirely drunk, and very

insolent. I had the idea that the drunkenness and the dress were a pose,

or else that he had been in some neighborhood in search of copy which

required such an outfit. Charitably let us accept the last. He was

accompanied by two satellic souls who were doing their best to restrain

him.

"Come, now! Don't make a scene. We'll see the show all right!"

"Sure we'll see the show!" he returned contentiously. "Where's the

manager?"

A smug mannikin whose uniform was a dress suit, the business manager

himself, eyed him in no friendly spirit from a nearby corner.

"This is Mr. L----," one of the satellites now approached and explained

to the manager. "He's connected with M----'s Magazine. He does short

stories and dramatics occasionally."

The manager bowed. After all, M----'s Magazine had come to have some

significance on Broadway. It was as well to be civil. Courtesy was

extended for three, and they went in.

As for myself, I resented the mood and the change. It was in no way my

affair--his life was his own--and still I resented it. I did not believe

that he was as bad as he seemed. He had too much genuine sense. It was

just boyish swagger and show, and still it was time that he was getting

over that and settling down. I really hoped that time would modify all

this.

One thing that made me hope for the best was that very shortly after

this M----'s Magazine blew completely up, leaving him without that

semi-financial protection which I felt was doing him so much harm. The

next favorable sign that I observed was that a small volume of short

stories, some sixteen in number, and containing the cream of his work up

to that time, was brought to a publishing house with which I was

financially identified at the time, and although no word was said to me

(I really think he took great care not to see me), still it was left and

on my advice eventually published (it sold, I believe, a little under

five hundred copies). But the thing that cheered me was that it

contained not one story which could be looked upon as a compromise with

his first views. And better, it had been brought to the concern with

which I was connected--intentionally, I am sure. I was glad to have had

a hand in its publication. "At least," I said, "he has not lost sight of

his first ideal. He may go on now."

And thereafter, in one magazine and another, excellent enough to have

but a small circulation, I saw something of his which had genuine merit.

A Western critical journal began to publish a series of essays by him,

for which I am sure he received nothing at all. Again, three or four

years later, a second volume of stories, almost if not quite as good as

his first, was issued by this same Western paper. He was trying to do

serious work; but he still sought and apparently craved those grand

scenes on the farm or in some New York restaurant or an expensive

apartment, and when he could no longer afford it. He still wrote

happy-ending, or compromise, stories for any such magazine as would

receive him, and was apparently building up a reasonably secure market

for them. In the meantime the moving-picture scenario market had

developed, and he wrote for it. His eyes were also turning toward the

stage, as one completed manuscript and several "starts" turned over to

me after his death proved. One day some one who knew him and me quite

well assured me that L----, having sent out many excellent stories only

to have them returned, had one day cried and then raged, cursing America

for its attitude toward serious letters--an excellent sign, I thought,

good medicine for one who must eventually forsake his hope of material

grandeur and find himself. "In time, in time," I said, "he will eat

through the husks of these other things, the 'M---- complex,' and do

something splendid. He can't help it. But this fantastic dream of

grandeur, of being a popular success, will have to be lived down."

For a time now I heard but little more save once that he was connected

with a moving-picture concern, suggesting plots and making some money.

Then I saw a second series of essays in the same Western critical

paper--that of the editor who had published his book--and some of them

were excellent, very searching and sincere. I felt that he was moving

along the right line, although they earned him nothing. Then one week,

very much to my surprise, there was a very glowing and extended

commentary on myself, concerning which for the time being I decided to

make no comment; and a little later, perhaps three weeks, a telephone

call. Did I recall him? (!) Could he come and see me? (!) I invited him

to dinner, and he came, carrying, of all things--and for him, the

ex-railroad boy--a great armful of red roses. This touched me.

"What's the idea?" I inquired jovially, laughing at him.

He blushed like a girl, a little irritably too, I thought, for he found

me (as perhaps he had hoped not to) examining and critical, and he may

have felt that I was laughing at him, which I wasn't. "I wished to give

them to you, and I brought 'em. Why shouldn't I?"

"You know you should bring them if you want me to have them, and I'm

only too glad to get them, anyway. Don't think I'm criticizing."

He smiled and began at once on the "old days," as he now called them, a

sad commentary on our drifting days. Indeed he seemed able to talk of

little else or fast enough or with too much enthusiasm. He went over

many things and people--M----; K----, the wonderful art-director, now

insane and a wreck; the group of which he and I had once been a part;

his youthful and unsophisticated viewpoint at the time. "You know," he

confessed quite frankly finally, "my mother always told me then and

afterwards that I made a mistake in leaving you. You were the better

influence for me. She was right. I know it now. Still, a life's a life,

and we have to work through it and ourselves somehow."