I took Van Vechten about a bit the other night, Peter broke in. I think
I forgot to tell you. We've had so much to talk about....
Clara interrupted the shadow of an anserine smile to nibble a pink
cake. Her legs protruded at an odd angle and I caught myself looking at
her thick ankles.
You're looking at my legs! she exclaimed. You mustn't do that! I have
very ugly legs.
But they're very sympathetic! cried Peter. Don't you think they're
sympathetic, Van Vechten?
I assured him that I did and we went on talking, a little
constrainedly, I thought, about nothing in particular, until, at
length, Peter asked Clara if she would sing again. Without waiting for
a reply, he seated himself before the piano and began the prelude to
Manon's air in the Cours la Reine scene and Clara, without rising, sang:
Je marche sur tous les chemins
Aussi bien qu'une souveraine;
On s'incline, on baise mes mains,
Car par la beauté je suis reine!
Now her voice had lost the larmoyante quality, which evidently was a
part of her bag of tricks for more emotional song, but it had acquired
a hard brilliancy which was even more disagreeable to the ear. She
had also, I remarked, no great regard for the pitch and little, if
any, expressiveness. Nevertheless, Peter wheeled around, after an
accompaniment which was even less sympathetic to me than Clara's legs,
to exclaim:
Superb! I want her to study Isolde.
Peter doesn't understand, explained Clara, that you must begin with
the lighter parts. If I sang Isolde now I would have no voice in five
years. Isolde will come later. I can sing Isolde after I have lost my
voice. My first rôles will be Manon, Violetta, and Juliette. It's old
stuff, perhaps, but it doesn't injure the voice, and the voice is my
first consideration. Now I wouldn't sing Salome if they offered me 500
francs a night.
Did you hear about Adelina Patti? asked Peter. She is a good Catholic.
She went to a performance of Salome at the Châtelet and while Destinn
was osculating the head of Jochanaan she dropped to her knees in her
loge and began to pray!
I don't blame her, said Clara. It's rotten and immoral, Salome--not the
play, I don't mean that, but the music, rotten, immoral music, ruinous
to the voice. Patti was probably praying God for another Rossini.
Strauss's music will steal ten years from Destinn's career.
Peter eyed her with adoration. After a few more remarks, I made my
departure, both of them urging me to come again at any time. Peter had
not said one word about his writing, I reflected, as I walked down
the stairs, and he had been very exaggerated in his praise of Clara's
meagre talents.
And I did not go back. I did not see Peter again that summer; I did not
see him again, in fact, for nearly six years. My further adventures,
which included a trip to London, to Munich, where I attended the
Wagner and Mozart festivals, to Holland and Belgium, were sufficiently
diverting but, as they have no bearing on Peter's history, I shall
not relate them now. They will fall into their proper chapters in my
autobiography, which Alfred A. Knopf will publish in two volumes in the
fall of 1936.
Although I did not learn the facts I am about to catalogue until a much
later date--some of them, indeed, not until after Peter's death--this
seems as good a place as any to tell what I know of his early life.
He was born June 5, 1885, in Toledo, Ohio. He never told his age to
any one and I only discovered it after his death. If an inquiry were
made concerning it, it was his custom to counter with another question:
How old do you think I am? and then to add one year to the reply, thus
insuring credence. So I have heard him give himself ages varying from
eighteen to forty-five, but he was only thirty-four when he died in
1919.
His father was cashier in a bank, a straight, serious, plain sort of
man, of the kind that is a prop to a small town, looked up to and
respected, asked whether an election will have an effect on stock
values, and whether it is better to illuminate one's house with gas
or electricity. His mother was a small woman with a pleasant face and
red hair which she parted in the centre. Kindliness she occasionally
carried almost to the point of silliness. She was somewhat garrulous,
too, but she was well-read, not at all ignorant, and at surprising
moments gave evidence of possessing a small stock of common sense. I
think Peter inherited a good deal of his quality from his mother, who
was a Fotheringay of West Chester, Pennsylvania. I met her for the
first time soon after her husband's death. She was wearing, in addition
to a suitable mourning garment, five chains of Chinese beads and seemed
moderately depressed.
Peter's resemblance to Buridan's donkey (it will be remembered that the
poor beast wavered between the hay and the water until he starved to
death) began with his very birth. He could not, indeed, decide whether
he would be born or not. The family physician, by the aid of science
and the knife, decided the matter for him. Soon thereafter he often
hesitated between the milk-bottle and the breast. There was, doubtless,
a certain element of restlessness and curiosity connected with this
vacillation, a desire to miss nothing in life. It is possible that the
root of this aggressive instinct might have been deracinated but Mrs.
Whiffle, with a foresense of the decrees of the most modern motherhood,
held no brief for suppressed desires. Baby Peter was always permitted
to choose, at least nearly always, and so, as he grew older, his mania
developed accordingly. A decision actually caused him physical pain,
often made him definitely ill. He would pause interminably before two
toys in a shop, or at any rate until his mother bought both of them
for him. He could never decide whether to go in or go out, whether to
play horse or to cut out pictures. His mother has told me that on one
occasion she discovered this precocious child (at the age of twelve) in
the library of a Toledo bibliophile (she was in the house as a luncheon
guest) with the Sonnets of Pietro Aretino in one hand and Fanny Hill
in the other. He could not make up his mind from which he would derive
the most pleasure. In this instance, his maternal parent intervened and
took both books away from him.
Otherwise, aside from various slight illnesses, his childhood was
singularly devoid of incident. Because he hummed bits of tune while
at play, his mother decided that he must be musical and sent him to
an instructor of the piano. The first six months were drudgery for
Peter but as soon as he began to read music easily the skies cleared
for him. He never became a great player but he played easily and
well, much better than I imagined after hearing his rather bombastic
accompaniments to Clara's singing. Of books he was an omnivorous
reader. He read every volume--some of them two or three times--in
the family library, which included, of course, the works of Dickens,
Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and Sir Walter Scott,
Emerson's Essays, Bulwer-Lytton, Owen Meredith's Lucile, that long
narrative poem called Nothing to Wear, Artemus Ward's Panorama,
Washington Irving, Longfellow, Whittier, Thoreau, Lowell, and
Hawthorne, and among the moderns, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells,
F. Hopkinson Smith, F. Marion Crawford, Richard Harding Davis, George
W. Cable, Frank Stockton, H.C. Bunner, and Thomas Nelson Page. Peter
once told me that his favourite books when he was fourteen or fifteen
years old were Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and H.B. Fuller's The
Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani. The latter made a remarkable impression
on him, when he first discovered it at the age of fifteen, not that
he fully appreciated its ironic raillery but it seemed to point out
the pleasure to be apprehended from pleasant places. He named a cat
of the period, a regal yellow short-haired tom, after the Prorege
of Arcopia. The house library exhausted, the public library offered
further opportunities for browsing and it was there that he made the
acquaintance of Gautier, in translation, of course. He also found
it possible to procure--though not at the public library--and he
devoured with avidity--he has asserted that they had an extraordinary
effect in awakening his imagination--Nick Carter, Bertha M. Clay,
and Golden Days. For a period of four or five years, in spite of all
protests, although he had never heard of the vegetarians, he subsisted
entirely on a diet of cookies soaked in hot milk. He had a curious
inherent dislike for spinach and it was characteristic of his father
that he ordered the dish to appear on the table every day until the
boy tasted a morsel. In after life, Peter could never even look at a
dish of spinach. He cared nothing at all for outdoor sports. Games of
any kind, card or osculatory, he considered nuisances. At a party,
while the other children were engaged in the pleasing pastime of post
office, he was usually to be found in a corner, reading some book. The
companionship of boys and girls of his own age meant very little to
him. He liked to talk to older people and found special pleasure in
the company of the Reverend Horatio Wallace, a clergyman of the Dutch
Reformed Church, who had visited New York. This reverend doctor was
violently opposed to art museums, novels, and symphony orchestras, but
he talked about them and he was the only person Peter knew in Toledo
who did. He railed against the sins of New York and the vices of Paris
but, also, he described them.
In the matter of a university education, his mother took a high hand,
precluding all discussion and indecision by sending him willy-nilly
to Williams. Her brother had been a Williams man and she prayed that
Peter might like to be one too. The experiment was not unsuccessful.
The charm in Peter's nature began to expand at college and he even made
a few friends, the names of most of which he could no longer remember,
when he spoke to me of his college days some years afterwards. He
realized that the reason he had made so few in Toledo was that the
people of Toledo were not his kind of people. They lived in a world
which did not exist for him. They lived in the world of Toledo while he
lived in the world of books. At college, he began to take an interest
in personalities; he began to take an interest in life itself. He
studied French--it was the only course he thoroughly enjoyed--and he
began to read Gautier in the original. Then, at the instigation of a
particularly intelligent professor, he passed on to Barbey d'Aurevilly,
to Huysmans, to Laforgue, and to Mallarmé.
His holidays were always a torture for the boy. Should he accept one
of several invitations to visit his lad friends or should he go home?
One Easter vacation, Monkey Rollins had asked him to visit him in
Providence while Teddy Quartermouse had bidden him to enjoy himself
in New York. Peter pondered. He liked Monkey's sisters but a week in
Providence meant, he knew, dancing, bridge, and golf, all of which he
hated. Teddy was not as companionable as Monkey and he had no sisters,
but in New York both indoor and outdoor sports could be avoided. Peter
helplessly examined both sides of the shield until Monkey settled
the question by coming after him, helping him pack, and carrying him
triumphantly to the railway station.
No sooner, however, had he arrived in Providence than he knew that it
would be impossible for him to remain there. He did not find Monkey's
mother very agreeable, rather she was too agreeable. The vegetables
were cooked in milk--the Rollins family had previously lived in
Missouri. This, of course, was not to be borne. Worst of all, there
was a parrot, a great, shrieking, feathered beast, with koprolagniac
tastes. Nevertheless, he exerted himself at dinner, giving a lengthy
and apocryphal description to Mrs. Rollins of his performance of a
concerto for kettle-drum with the college band, and doubtless made a
distinctly favourable impression on the entire family. Even the parrot
volunteered: Hurrah for you, kid, you're some guy! as the procession
trooped into the library, which one of the girls referred to as "the
carnegie," for coffee. While Caruso negotiated Celeste Aida on the
phonograph, Peter, after whispering an appropriate excuse to Monkey,
contrived to slip upstairs. He looked about on the landing in the
upper hallway for a telephone but, naturally, it wasn't there. Then
he reconnoitred and discovered that by climbing out over the porch
and making a ten foot jump he would land very neatly in a bed of
crocuses. This he did and, scrambling to his feet, made straight for
an apothecary's coloured lights, which he saw in the distance. The
sequel is simple. In fifteen minutes, by way of the kitchen, he was
back in the library; in thirty minutes, he had the family in roars of
laughter; in forty-five minutes, Papa Rollins began to yawn and guessed
it was bed-time; Mama Rollins called in the maid to cover the parrot
and arrange the fire. Monkey said he thought he would play a game of
something or other with Peter. The girls giggled. In exactly an hour,
there was a ring at the door and the maid reappeared in the library,
with a yellow envelope addressed to Peter. He hastily tore it open,
trying to look portentous. Everybody else did look portentous. Peter
handed the telegram to Monkey, who read it aloud: Your mother would
like to shake your hand before she takes the ether tomorrow morning.
The message was dated from New York and the signature was that of
a famous surgeon. Mrs. Rollins was the first to break a moment of
appalling silence: There's a train in fifteen minutes. It's the last.
Quick, Monkey, the motor! Peter cried, Send my things to the Manhattan,
as he jerked on his coat. He caught the train and some hours later he
and Teddy Quartermouse might have been observed amusing themselves with
highballs and a couple of girls at Rector's.
In time, college days passed. Peter confessed to me that the last two
years were an awful strain but he stuck them out, chiefly because he
could not think of anything else he wanted to do. His real mental agony
began with his release. He dreaded life and most of all he dreaded
work. His father, although well-to-do, had a sharply defined notion
that a boy who would not work never amounted to anything. His peculiar
nature sometimes asserted itself in ludicrous and fantastically
exaggerated demonstrations of this theory. Once, for example, during
a summer vacation spent in the country, he insisted that Peter skin
a pig. You have an opportunity to learn now and you never can tell
when you may have to skin another pig. When the time comes you will be
prepared. His father, Peter returned from college discovered, was in no
mood to tolerate vacillation or dawdling. But Peter seemed to feel no
urge of any kind. I not only did not want to do anything, he explained,
there was nothing that I wanted to do. Here his father, with whom the
boy had never been particularly sympathetic (motive of the Œdipus
complex by the flutes in the orchestra), asserted his authority and
put him in the bank. Peter loathed the bank. He hated his work, cutting
open envelopes early in the morning, sorting out bills for collection,
and then, on his bicycle, making the collections. In the afternoon, an
endless task at the adding machine seemed Dantesque and, at night, the
sealing of envelopes was even more tiresome than opening them in the
morning. There was, however, one mitigating circumstance in connection
with the last job of the day, the pleasure afforded by the rich odour
of the hot sealing-wax. His pay was $9 a week; he has told me that
probably he was not worth it! Fortunately he lived at home and was not
asked to pay board. He bought books with the $9 and "silly things."
When I asked him what he meant by silly things, he replied: O! Rookwood
pottery, and alligators, and tulip bulbs: I don't remember, things like
that! One day, he promised his father that he would give up smoking if
that one would present him with a gold cigarette-case!
There came a morning when he could not make up his mind to get up. His
mother called him several times in vain. He arrived at the bank half
an hour late and was reprimanded. His father spoke about his tardiness
at lunch. At this period he was inclined to be sulky. He started off
on his bicycle in the afternoon but he did not go to the bank. He rode
along by the river, stopping at a low saloon in the outlying districts,
where the workmen of some factory were wont to congregate in the
evening, and drank a great many glasses of beer. Cheered somewhat
thereby, the thought of facing his father no longer exasperated him.
The big scene took place before dinner. Had it not been for the beer,
he would have been obliged to act his part on an empty stomach.
Are you no good at all? Thus his father's baritone aria began. Are
you worthless? I'm not going to support you. Suppose you had to pay
your own board. I can't keep a son of mine in the bank because he is a
son of mine unless he does some work. Certainly not. How long are you
going to dawdle? What are you going to do? Et cetera, et cetera, with
a magnificent cadenza and a high E to top off with. Sustained by the
beer, Peter reported to me that he rather enjoyed the tune. He said
nothing. Dinner was eaten in complete silence and then the paternal
parent went to bed, a discouraged and broken man. He seemed senescent,
although he was not yet fifty. After dinner, Peter's mother spoke to
him more gently but she also was full of warning and gloomy foreboding:
What is it you want to do, my son?... I don't know. I'm not sure that
I want to do anything.... But you must do _something_. You wouldn't be
manly if you didn't do something. It is manly to work. A day will come
when my son will want to marry and then he will need money to support
his dear wife. Etc. Etc. Peter reported to me that he seemed to have
heard this music before. He had not yet read The Way of All Flesh; I
doubt if it were published at this time, but Ernest Pontifex would have
been a sympathetic figure to him. Peter knew the meaning of the word
cliché, although the sound and the spelling of it were yet strange to
him.
When he got to his room certain words his mother had spoken rang in
his ears. Why, he asked himself, should men support women? Art is the
only attraction in life and women never do good work in art. They are
useless in the world aside from their functions of sex and propagation.
Why should they not work so that the males could be free to think and
dream? Then it occurred to him that he would be furious if any woman
supported his father; that could not be borne, to have his father at
home all day while his mother was away at work!
Nevertheless, he went to sleep quite happy, he has assured me, and
slept soundly through the night, although he dreamed of a pair of
alligators, one of which was pulling at his head and the other at
his feet, while a man with an ax rained blows on his stomach. In the
morning his affairs seemed to be in a desperate state. He could not
bear the idea of getting up and going to the bank and yet there was
nothing else he wanted to do. Of one thing only he was sure: he did not
want to support himself. He did not, so far as he was able to make
out, want to do anything! He wanted his family to stop bothering him.
Was no provision made in this world for such as he?
Certainly, no provision was made for him in Toledo, Ohio. The word
temperament was still undiscovered there. His negative kind of desire
was alien to American sympathy. Of so much, he was aware. Adding
machines and collections awaited him. He went to the bank where the
paying teller again reprimanded him. So did one of the clerks. So did
one of the directors, a friend of his father. He staggered through
another day, which he helped along a little by returning at noon with
all his notes uncollected. Nobody wants to pay today, he explained....
But it's your business to make them pay.... There was cold ham, cold
slaw, and rice pudding for lunch. His mother had been crying. His
father was stern.
During the rice pudding, he made a resolution, which he kept. From that
day on he worked as he had never worked before. Everybody in the bank
was astonished. His father was delighted. His mother said, I told you
so. I know my son.... He stopped buying books and silly things and,
when he had saved enough money, he took a train to New York without
bidding the bank officials or his family good-bye. Once there, his
resolution again failed him. He had no desires, or if he had, one
counteracted another. His money was almost gone and he was forced to
seek for work but everywhere he went he was refused. He lived at a
Mills Hotel. He retained a strange fondness for his mother and began to
write her, asking her to address him care of general delivery.
At last he secured a position at a soda fountain in a drug-store. He
worked there about a week. One night the place got on his nerves to
such an extent that he wanted to break the glasses and squirt fizz at
every customer. To amuse himself, therefore, he contrived to inject a
good dose of castor oil or cantharides into every drink he served. The
proprietor of the shop was snoopy, Peter told me, and after watching
me out of the corner of his eye for some time, he gave me a good kick,
which landed me in the middle of the street. He tossed six dollars,
the remainder of my wages, after me. It may appear strange to you but
I have never been happier in my life than I was that night with six
dollars in my possession and the satisfactory knowledge that I would
never see that store again.
During the next three weeks, Peter did not find any work. I doubt if
he tried to find any. He often slept in Madison Square or Bryant Park
with a couple of newspapers over him and a couple under him. He lived
on the most meagre rations, some of which he collected in bread lines.
He even begged at the kitchen doors of the large hotels and asked for
money on the street. He has told me, however, that he was neither
discouraged nor unhappy. He felt the most curious sense of uplift, as
if he were suffering martyrdom, as, indeed, he was. Life seemed to have
left him out of its accounting, to have made no arrangements for his
nature. He had no desire to work, in fact his repugnance for work was
his strongest feeling, and yet, it seemed, he could procure no money
without working. He was willing, however, to go without the things he
wanted, really to suffer, rather than work. I just did not want to do
anything, he has said. It was a fixed idea. It was my greatest joy
to talk about the social unrest, the rights of the poor, the wicked
capitalist, and the ideas of Karl Marx with the man in the street, the
real man in the street, the man who never went anywhere else. During
this period, he continued to write his mother what she afterwards
described as "bright, clever letters." I have seen a few of them, full
of the most astounding energy and enthusiasm, and a vague philosophy of
quietism. She wrote back, gently chiding him, letters of resignation
but still letters of advice, breathing the hope that he might grow into
a respected citizen of Toledo, Ohio. She did not understand Peter but
she loved him and would have gone to New York to see him, had not a
restraining hand burked her. Mr. Whiffle was determined to hold no more
traffic with his son. He refused, indeed, to allow Peter's name to be
mentioned in his presence. Toledo talked with intensity behind his back
but Mr. Whiffle did not know that. Hard as he tried not to show it, he
was disappointed: it was impossible for him to reconcile his idea of a
son with the actuality. Mrs. Whiffle's first mild suggestion that she
might visit Peter was received with a terrible hurricane of resentment.
She did not mention the subject again. She would have gone anyway if
Peter had asked her to come but he never did.
Through an Italian, whom he met one day in Bryant Park, Peter next
secured a position as a member of the claque at the Opera. Every
night, with instructions when to applaud, he received either a seat
in the dress circle or a general admission ticket. There was also a
small salary attached to the office. He did not care about the salary
but he enjoyed going to the Opera which he had never before attended.
He heard Manon Lescaut, La Damnation de Faust, Tristan, Lohengrin,
Tosca, Roméo et Juliette, and Fedora. But his favourite nights were the
nights when Olive Fremstad sang. He heard her as Venus in Tannhäuser,
as Selika in L'Africaine, as Carmen, and he heard her in that unique
performance of Salome on January 22, 1907. One night he became so
interested in watching her that he forgot to applaud the singer who had
paid the claque. His delinquency was reported by one of his colleagues
and the next evening, when he went to the bar on Seventh Avenue where
the claque gathered to receive its orders, he was informed that his
services would no longer be required.
After another three weeks of vagrancy, he found another job, again
through a park acquaintance. He has told me that it was the only work
he ever enjoyed. He became a "professor" in a house of pretty ladies.
His duty was to play the piano. Play us another tune, professor, the
customers would say, as they ordered beer at a dollar a bottle, and
Peter would play a tune. Occasionally one of the customers would ask
him to take a drink and he would order a sloe gin fizz, which Alonzo,
the sick-looking waiter, a consumptive with a wife and five children
to support, would bring in a sticky glass, which he deposited with his
long dirty fingers on the ledge of the piano. Occasionally some man,
waiting for a girl, was left alone with him, and would talk with him
about the suspender business or the base-ball game, subjects which
perhaps might not have interested him elsewhere but which glowed with
an enthralling fire in that incongruous environment. The men preferred
tunes like Lucia, the current Hippodrome success from Neptune's
Daughter, or songs from The Red Mill, in which Montgomery and Stone
were appearing at the Knickerbocker, or I don't care. This last was
always demanded when a certain girl, who imitated Eva Tanguay, was in
the room. But the women, when they were alone in the house, just before
dinner in the late afternoon, or on a dull evening, always asked him to
play Hearts and Flowers, Massenet's Elégie, or the garden scene from
Faust, and then they would drink whisky and cry and tell him lies about
their innocent girlhood. There was even some literary conversation.
One of the girls read Georges Ohnet and another admired the work of
Harris Merton Lyon and talked about it. Peter found it very easy to
remain pure.
He received two dollars a night from the house, and, occasionally,
tips. Out of this he managed to rent a hall bedroom on West
Thirty-ninth Street and to pay for his lunches. The Madame provided him
with his dinner. Breakfast he never ate. He passed his mornings in bed
and his afternoons in the park, usually with a book.
A French girl named Blanche, whom he liked particularly, died one
night. She was taken to a funeral chapel the next morning. The other
girls went about the house snivelling and most of them sent flowers
to the chapel. Blanche's coffin was well banked with carnations and
tube-roses. The Madame sent a magnificent standing floral-piece,
a cross of white roses and, on a ribbon, the inscription, May our
darling rest in peace. Blanche wore a white lace dress and looked very
beautiful and very innocent as she lay dead, Peter thought. Her mother
came from a distant city and there was a priest. The two days preceding
Blanche's burial, the girls passed in tears and prayers and sentimental
remarks about how good she was. At night they worked as usual and
Peter played the piano. It was very much like the Maison Tellier, he
reflected.
With Peter, change was automatic and axiomatic, but he might have
remained in the house a very long time, as he has assured me that he
was perfectly contented, but for one of those accidents that never
happen in realistic novels but which constantly happen in life. Mrs.
Whiffle's brother, the graduate of Williams, erstwhile mentioned, a
quaint person, who lived at Rochester, was a rich bachelor. He was also
a collector, not of anything special, just a collector. He collected
old andirons and doorknobs and knockers. He also collected postmarks
and homespun coverlets and obsolete musical instruments. Occasionally
he even collected books and in this respect his taste was unique. He
collected first editions of Ouida, J.T. Trowbridge, Horatio Alger, Jr.,
G.A. Henty, and Oliver Optic. He had complete sets of first editions of
all these authors and, unlike most book collectors, he read them with a
great deal of pleasure. He especially enjoyed Cudjo's Cave, a novel he
had devoured so many times that he had found it necessary to have the
volume rebound, thus subtracting from its value if it ever comes up at
an auction sale.
This uncle had always been prejudiced against Peter's father and, of
late years, this prejudice had swollen into a first-rate aversion.
Visits were never exchanged. He considered himself an amateur of parts
and Peter's father, a sordid business grub. Mrs. Whiffle, however,
whose whole nature was conciliatory, continued to write long letters to
her brother. Recently she had turned to him for sympathy and had found
a well of it. Mr. Fotheringay was ready to sympathize with anybody who
had fled from old man Whiffle's tyranny. For the first time he began
to take an interest in the boy whom he had never seen. His imagination
fed on his sister's letters until it seemed to him that this boy was
the only living being he had ever loved. Peter had been working among
the daughters of joy about two months when Mr. Fotheringay died. When
his will, made only a few weeks before his death, was read, it was
discovered that he had left his collections to Williams College with
the proviso that they be suitably housed, kept intact, and called the
John Alden Fotheringay Collection. Williams College, I believe, was
unable to meet the terms of the bequest and, as a result, through a
contingent clause, they were sold. Not long ago, I ran across one of
the books in Alfred F. Goldsmith's shop on Lexington Avenue in New
York. It was a copy of J.T. Trowbridge's The Satin-Wood Box and it was
easily identified by Mr. Fotheringay's bookplate, which represented an
old man counting his gold, with the motto, In hoc signo vinces. After
this department of the estate had been provided for in the will, a very
considerable sum of money, well invested, remained. This was left to
Peter without proviso.
As he never expected letters from any one except his mother, he seldom
visited the post office and this particular communication from Mr.
Fotheringay's lawyers, forwarded by Mrs. Whiffle, lay in a general
delivery box for nearly a week before he called. He answered by
telegraph and the next morning he received a substantial check at his
hall bedroom address. The first thing he bought, he has told me, was
a book, an extra-illustrated copy of Mademoiselle de Maupin, from
Brentano's in Union Square. Then he went to a tailor and was measured
for clothes. Next he visited Brooks Brothers, on Twenty-second Street
and Broadway, and purchased a ready-made suit, a hat, shoes and
stockings, shirts, and neckties. He took a bath, shaved, had his hair
cut, and, dressed in his new finery, embarked for the Knickerbocker
in a taxi. He walked into the bar under Maxfield Parrish's King Cole
and ordered a Martini cocktail. Then he ate a dinner, consisting of
terrapin, roast canvas-back, an alligator pear, and a quart or two of
Pontet Canet. It was during the course of this dinner that it occurred
to him, for the first time in his life, that he would become an author.
Four days later he sailed for Paris.
_Chapter VI_
There is a considerable period in the life of George Borrow for which
his biographers have been absolutely unable to account. To this day
where Borrow spent those lost years is either unknown or untold. There
is a similar period in the life of Peter Whiffle, the period including
the years 1907-1913. In the summer of the former year I left him at
Paris in the arms of Clara Barnes, so to speak, and I did not see him
again until February, 1913. Subsequently, when I knew him better, I
inquired about these phantom years but I never elicited a satisfactory
reply. He answered me, to be sure, but his answer consisted of two
words, I lived.
Our next meeting took place in New York, where I was a musical reporter
on the New York Times, the assistant to Mr. Richard Aldrich. One
night, having dropped Fania Marinoff at the theatre where she was
playing, I walked south-east until I came to the Bowery. I strolled
down that decaying thoroughfare, which has lost much of its ancient
glory--even the thugs and the belles of Avenue A have deserted it--to
Canal Street, where the Manhattan Bridge invites the East Side to
adventure through its splendid portal, but the East Side ignores the
invitation and stays at home. It is the upper West Side that accepts
the invitation and regiments of motor-cars from Riverside Drive, in
continuous procession, pass over the bridge. For a time I stood and
watched the ugly black scarabs with their acetylene eyes crawl up the
approach and disappear through the great arch and then, walking a
few steps, I stopped before the Thalia Theatre, as I have stopped so
many times, to admire the noble façade with its flight of steps and
its tall columns, for this is one of my dream theatres. Often have I
sat in the first row of the dress circle, which is really a circle,
leaning over the balustrade, gazing into the pit a few feet below, and
imagining the horseshoe as it might appear were it again frequented by
the fashion of the town. This is a theatre, in which, and before which,
it has often amused me to fancy myself a man of wealth, when my first
diversion would be a complete renovation--without any reconstruction
or vandalism--of this playhouse, and the production of some play by
Shakespeare, for to me, no other theatre in New York, unless it be
the Academy of Music, lends itself so readily to a production of
Shakespeare as the Thalia. As I write these lines, I recall that
the old New York theatres are fast disappearing: Wallack's is gone;
Daly's is no more; even Weber and Fields's has been demolished. Cannot
something be done to save the Thalia, which is much older than any
of these? Cannot this proud auditorium be reconsecrated to the best
in the drama? On this night I paused for a moment, musing before the
portal, somewhat after this manner--for I have always found that
_things_ rather than people awaken any latent sentiment and sympathy in
my heart--and then again I passed on.
Soon I came to a tiny Chinese shop, although I was still several blocks
above Chinatown. The window was stacked with curious crisp waffles or
wafers in the shape of lotus flowers, for the religious and sexual
symbolism of the Chinese extends even to their culinary functions, and
a Chinaman, just inside, was dexterously transferring the rice batter
to the irons, which were placed over the fire, turned a few moments,
and a wafer removed and sprinkled with dry rice powder, as Richelieu,
lacking a blotter, sprinkled pounce on his wet signature. But the shop
was not consecrated solely to the manufacture of waffles; there were
tea-sets and puppy-cats, all the paraphernalia of a Chinese shop in New
York--on the shelves and tables. It was the waffles, and the peanut
cakes, however, which tempted me to enter.
Once inside, I became aware of the presence of a Chinese woman at the
back of the shop, holding in her arms an exquisite Chinese baby, for
all Chinese babies, with their flat porcelain faces, their straight
black hair, and their ivory hands, are exquisite. This baby, in
green-blue trousers fashioned of some soft silk brocade, a pink jacket
of the same material, and a head-dress prankt with ribbons into which
ornaments of scarlet worsted and blue-bird feathers were twisted, was
smiling silently and gracefully waving her tiny ivory hands towards the
face of an outcast of the streets who stood beside her mother. I caught
the rough workman's suit, the soiled, torn boots, the filthy cap, and
the unkempt hair in my glance, which reverted to the baby. Then, as I
approached the odd group, and spoke to the mother, the derelict turned.
Carl! he ejaculated, for, of course, it was Peter.
I was too much astonished to speak at all, as I stared at this ragged
figure without a collar or a tie, with several days growth of beard on
his usually glabrous cheeks, and dirty finger-nails. I had only wit
enough left to shake his hand. At this time I knew nothing of his early
life, nothing of the fortune he had inherited, and the man in front
of me, save for something curiously inconsistent in the expression of
the face, was a tramp. Certainly the face was puzzling: it positively
exuded happiness. Perhaps, I thought, it was because he was glad to see
me. I was glad to see him, even in this guise.
Carl, he repeated, dear old Carl! How silly of me not to remember that
you would be in New York. He caught my glance. Somewhat of a change,
eh? No more ruffles and frills. That life, and everything connected
with it, is finished. Luckily, you've caught me near home. Come with
me; there's liquor there.
So we walked out. I had not yet spoken a word. I was choking with an
emotion I usually reserve for old theatres, but Peter did not appear to
be aware of it. He chattered on gaily.
Have you been to Paris recently? Where have you been? What have you
been doing? Are you writing? Isn't New York lovely? Don't you think
Chinese babies are the kind to have, if you are going to become a
father at all? Wasn't that an adorable one? He waited for no answers.
Look at the lights on the bridge. I live in the shadow of the span.
I think I live somewhere near the old Five Points that used to turn
up in all the old melodramas; you know, The Streets of New York. It's
a wonderful neighbourhood. Everybody, absolutely _everybody_, is
interesting. There's nobody you can't talk to, and very few that can't
talk. They all have something to say. They are all either disappointed
and discouraged or hopeful. They all have emotions and they are not
afraid to show them. They all talk about the REVOLUTION. It may come
this winter. No, I don't mean the Russian revolution. Nobody expects
a revolution in Russia. Nobody down here is interested in Russia; the
Russian Jews especially are not. They have forgotten Russia. I mean
the American REVOLUTION. The Second American REVOLUTION, I suppose
it will be called. Labour against Capital. The Workman against the
Leisure Class. The Proletariat against the Idler. Did you ever hear of
Piet Vlag? Do you read The Masses? I go to meetings, union meetings,
Socialist meetings, I.W.W. meetings, Syndicalist meetings, Anarchist
meetings. I egg them on. It may come this winter, I tell you! There
will be barricades on Fifth Avenue. Vanderbilt and Rockefeller will
be besieged in their houses with the windows shuttered and the doors
barred and the butler standing guard with a machine-gun at some gazebo
or turret. It will be a real siege, lasting, perhaps, months. How long
will the food hold out? In the end, they'll have to eat the canary and
the Pekinese, and, no, not the cat, I hope. The cat will be clever and
escape, go over to the enemy where he can get his meals. But boots,
boot soup! Just like the siege of Paris; each robber baron locked up in
his stronghold. Sometimes, the housemaid will desert; sometimes, the
cook. The millionaires will be obliged to make their own beds and cook
their own dogs and, at last, to man their own machine-guns!
The mob will be barricaded, too, behind barriers hastily thrown up
in the street, formed of old moving-vans, Rolls-Royces and Steinway
grands, covered with Gobelin tapestries and Lilihan, Mosul, Sarouk,
and Khorassan rugs, the spoils of the denuded houses. With a red
handkerchief bound around my brow, I will wave a red flag and shriek on
the top of such a barricade. My face will be streaked with blood. We
will all yell and if we don't sing the Ça Ira and the Carmagnole, we
will at least sing Alexander's Ragtime Band and My Wife's Gone to the
Country.
Eventually, Fifth Avenue will fall and the Astors and the Goulds will
be brought before the Tribunal of the People, and if you know any
better spot for a guillotine than the very square in which we stood
just now, in that vast open space before the Manhattan Bridge, over
which they all drive off for Long Island, I wish you'd tell me. There
are those who would like to see the killing done in Washington or
Madison Square, or the Plaza or Columbus Circle, which, of course, has
a sentimental interest for the Italians, but think of the joy it would
give the East Side mothers, suckling their babies, and the pushcart
vendors, and all the others who never find time to go up town to have
the show right here. Right here it shall be, if I have my way, and just
now I have a good deal of influence.
We had stopped before one of those charming old brick houses with
marble steps and ancient hand-wrought iron railings which still remain
on East Broadway to remind us of the day when stately landaus drove
up to deposit crinolined ladies before their portals. We ascended the
steps and Peter opened the door with his key. The hallway was dark
but Peter struck matches to light us up the stairs and we only ceased
climbing when we reached the top landing. He unlocked another door
which opened on a spacious chamber, a lovely old room with a chaste
marble fire-place in the Dorian mode, and faded wall-paper of rose and
grey, depicting Victorian Greek females, taller than the damsels drawn
by Du Maurier and C.D. Gibson, languishing in the shadows of broken
columns and weeping willow trees. Upon this paper were fastened with
pins a number of covers from radical periodicals, native and foreign,
some in vivid colours, the cover of The Masses for March, 1912, Charles
A. Winter's Enlightenment versus Violence, the handsome head of a
workman, his right hand bearing a torch, printed in green, several
cartoons by Art Young, usually depicting the rich man as an octopus
or hog, and posters announcing meetings of various radical groups.
Gigantic letters, cut from sheets of newspaper, formed the legend,
I.W.W., over the door.
The room was almost devoid of furniture. There was an iron bed, with
tossed bed-clothing, a table on which lay a few books, including, I
noted, one by Karl Marx, another by English Walling, Frank Harris's
The Bomb, together with a number of copies of Piet Vlag's new journal,
The Masses, and Jack Marinoff's Yiddish comic weekly, The Big Stick.
There was also a pail on the table, such a pail as that in which a
workman carries his mid-day meal. There were exactly two chairs and a
wardrobe of polished oak in the best Grand Rapids manner stood in one
corner. All this was sufficiently bewildering but I must confess that
the appearance of the lovely head of a Persian cat, issuing from under
the bed-covers, made me doubt my reason. I recognized George Moore.
Presently I made out another puss, sitting beside a basket full of
kittens in the corner near the wardrobe.
I must introduce you, explained Peter, to the mother of George Moore's
progeny. This is George Sand.
By this time I was a fit subject for the asylum. Even the Persian cats
did not set me right. Happy or not, the man was evidently poor.
I suppose I would insult you if I offered you a job, I stuttered at
last.
A job! Carl, don't you know that I simply will not work?
Well, and I found this even more difficult than my first proposal, I
hope you won't misunderstand.... I haven't much ... but you must permit
me to give you some money.
Money! What for?
Why, for you....
Comprehending at last, Peter threw back his head and began to laugh.
But I don't need money.... I never had so little use for it. Do you
realize what it costs me to live here? About $15 a week. That includes
every item, even fresh beef for my cats, I was about to tell you,
if you had given me time--you always interrupt--that I simply don't
know what to do with my money. Stocks have gone up. The labourers in
the factories at Little Falls are working overtime to make me more
prosperous. Indeed, one of the reasons I was so glad to see you was
that I thought, perhaps, you could help me to spend some money.
The line about the interruptions, I should explain, was simply a
fabrication of Peter's. If I have set our conversations down as
monologues on his part, that is just how they occurred. Aside from
Philip Moeller and Arnold Daly, I have never known any one to talk
so much, and my rôle with Peter, as with them, was that of listener.
To continue, I should have known enough, even so early in our
acquaintance, not to be astonished by anything he might do, but if
there had been a mirror in the room, which there was not, I fancy I
might have looked into the most exasperatingly astonished face I had
ever seen up to that time. I managed, however, to laugh. Peter laughed,
too, and sat down. George Moore leaped to his knee and George Sand to
his shoulder, rubbing her magnificent orange brush across his face.
And how about your book? I asked.
It's coming ... coming fast.
Are you still collecting notes?
Notes?... O! you are remembering what I was doing in Paris. _That_
was only an experiment.... I was on the wrong track.... I threw them
all away! I couldn't do anything with _that_.... I'm done with such
nonsense.