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.