Part 22 (1/2)
”You know you should bring theet the”
He san at once on the ”old days,” as he now called the days Indeed he seeh or with too s 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 toldyou You were the better influence for ht I know it now Still, a life's a life, and we have to work through it and ourselves soreed heartily
He told me of his wife, children, farm, his health and his difficulties
It appeared that he wasvery well His great bane was the popularIt was true, I said, and atme to come to his place in the country atand another interfered I went South One day six months later, after I had returned, he called up oncehe wished to see me Of course I asked him down and he cae pal of his, was assuring hiht die at any ti happened to him, would I look after his many mss, most of which, the reed Then he went away and I never saw hiain A year later I was one day informed that he had died three days before of kidney trouble
He had been West to see a -picture director; on his way East he had been taken ill and had stopped off with friends somewhere to be treated, or operated upon A feeeks later he had returned to New York, but refusing to rest and believing that he could not die, so soon, had kept out of doors and in the city, until suddenly he did collapse
Or, rather, he e like himself, ith some weird desire to appear forceful, definite, unsentimental perhaps--a o hoht hours!--a fine bit of assurance which perhaps aselse assisted L---- to die At any rate and in spite of the ministrations of his wife, ished to defy the doctor and who in her hope for herself and her children as well as hio to bed and did die On the last day, realizing no doubt how utterly indifferent his life had been, how his reat dreams had been in the main nullified by passions, necessities, crass chance (hoell he was fitted to understand that!) he broke down and cried for hours Then he died
A friend who had known much of this last period, said towith death in the shape of a medic Have you ever seen him?” The doctor, he meant ”He looks like an advertise to discover whether he could kill soestion, and he met L---- in the nick of time You kno really sensitive he was Well, that medic killed him, the same as you would kill a bird with a bullet
He said 'You're already dead,' and he was”
And--oh yes--M----, his former patron At the ti hi the last days of that unfortunate azine He had never been called upon to pay his debts, for he had sunk through one easy trapdoor of bankruptcy only to rise out of another, s and with the ain, rated A No 1, the president of a great corporation, and with L----'s 1100 still unpaid and now not legally ”collectible” His bank balance, established by a friend at the time, was exactly one hundred thousand
But Mrs L----, anxious to find so cold, and knowing of no one else to whom to turn, had written to him There was no food in the house, no medicine, no way to feed the children at the moment That ht--
A letter in ansas not long in arriving, and aM----y document it was M---- had been stunned by the dreadful news, stunned
Could it really be? Could it? His young brilliant friend? Impossible! At the dread, pathetic news he had cried--yes he had--cried--and cried--and cried--and then he had even cried sorim
As for him, his own affairs were never in so wretched a condition It was unfortunate Debts there were on every hand They haunted him, robbed him of his sleep He himself scarcely knehich way to turn
They stood in serried ranks, his debts A slight push on the part of any one, and he would be crushed--crushed--go down in ruin And so, as much as he was torn, and as , nothing He was agonized, beaten to earth, but still-- Then, having signed it, there was a PS or an NB This stated that in looking over his affairs he had just discovered that by stinting hiether twenty-five dollars, and this he was enclosing Would that God had designed that he should be better placed at this sad hour!
However that may be, I at once sent for the mss and they came, a jumbled mass in two suitcases and a portfolio; and a third suitcase, so I was infor all of a hundred mss, mostly stories, had been lost somewhere! There had been much financial trouble of late and more than one enforced move Mrs L---- had been compelled--but I will not tell all Suffice it to say that he had such an end as his own realistic pen ht have satirically craved
The mss, finally sorted, tabulated and read, yielded two small volumes of excellent tales, all unpublished, the publishedall but uniformly worthless There was also the attempt at a popular comedy, previously mentioned, a sad affair, and a volu volume of verse, in case a publisher could ever be found for the sense of fored them as best I could and finally--
But they are still unpublished
PS As for the suht be said that although he was not a great psychologist, still, owing to a certain pretentiousness of assertion at tily suppose he was Neither had he, as yet, any fixed theories of art or definite style of his own, i as he was now de Maupassant, now O Henry, now Poe; but also itone, original and forceful and water-clear in expression and naturalness At times he veered to a rather showy technique, at others to a cold and even harsh simplicity
Yet always in the nance when necessary Like his idol, de Maupassant, he had no reat or disturbing i ideas He saw A to be painted as all masters see life and paint it Gifted with a true vein of satire, he had not, at the time of his death, quite mastered its possibilities
He still retained prejudice of one type or another, which he perement of his colors At the sas which in America, as elsewhere, ordinarily assail an aainst naturalness and sincerity in matters of the intellect and the facts of life, and the consequent difficulty of any one so gifted in obtaining funds at any tiht have done much better sooner He was certain to come into his own eventually had he lived His very accurate and sensitive powers of observation, his literary taste, his energy and pride in his work, were destined to carry him there It could not have been otherwise Ten yearsby the rate at which he worked, his annual product and that which he did leave, one ht say that in the pantheon of American letters it is certain that he would have proved a durable if not one of its great figures, and he ht well have been that As it stands, it is not inized, if for no e Feudists_
In a certain Connecticut fishi+ng-town so, a shi+pyard and so there existed the several shops and stores which catered to the wants of those who labored in those lines, there dwelt a grocerye, whose life and ly point the moral and social successes and failures of the rural e, with the vanities and desires of the average man's life behind rather than before his of Parson Thirdly, which graced the hu upper lip, a mouth like the sickleface and a ive hiiously seek to depict Add to this that he was middle-sized, clerically spare in forht very readily give the i a minister His clothes, however, were old, his trousers torn but neatly haed Everything about hiht have been inclined on first sight to consider him crusty and morose
Even more remarkable than himself, however, was his store I have seenbecause of their neatness; I never saw one before that struck me as more remarkable for its disorder In the first place it was filled neck-deep with barrels and boxes in the utreasy, provision-lined alleys led off into dingy sections which the eye could not penetrate Old signs hung about, advertising things which had long since ceased to sell and were forgotten by the public There were pictures in once gilt but now time-blackened frarocers offered one commodity and another, all now almost obliterated by fly-specks Shelves were ible Cobwebs hung thickly from corners and pillars There were oil, lard, and a dust-laden scum of some sort on three of the nus and on many exteriors of once salable articles Pork, lard, molasses, and nails were packed in different corners of the place in barrels