Peter Whiffle

by Carl Van Vechten

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.