Chapter XI
I left the hospital before Peter. My injuries, indeed, were of so slight a nature that I was confined only a few days, while his were so serious that the physicians despaired of his life, and he was forced to keep to his bed for several months. Following my early discharge, I made daily visits of inquiry to the hospital but it was not until June, 1914, that I was assured that he would recover. With this good news, came a certain sense of relief, and I made plans for another voyage to Europe. The incidents of that voyage—I was in Paris at the beginning of the war—are of sufficient interest so that I may recount them in another place, but they bear no relationship to the present narrative.
Subsequent to his recovery, I have learned since from the physician who attended him during his protracted illness, Peter returned to Toledo with his mother. It is probable that he made further literary experiments. It has even occurred to me that the pivot of his being, the explanation for his whole course of action may have escaped me. Although, from the hour of our first meeting, my interest in and my affection for Peter were deep, assuredly I never imagined that I should be writing down the history of his life. For the greater part of the term of our friendship, indeed, I was a writer only in a very modest sense. I was not on the lookout for the kind of "copy" his affairs and ideas offered, for at this period I was a reporter of music and the drama. Even later, when I began to set down my thoughts in what is euphemistically called a more permanent form, the notion of using Peter as a subject never presented itself to me, and if he had asked me to do so during his lifetime, urging me to put aside a pile of unfinished work in his behalf, the request would have astounded me. I made, therefore, no special effort to ferret out his secrets. When it was convenient for both of us we met and, largely by accident, I was a silent witness of three of his literary experiments. How many others he may have made, I do not know. It is possible that at some time or other he may have been inspired by the religious school, the Tolstoy theory of art, or he may have followed the sensuous lead of Gozzoli and Debussy, artists whose work intrigued him enormously, or in another æsthetic avatar, he may have believed that true art is degrading or coldly classic. There is even the possibility, by no means remote, that he may have fallen under the influence of the small-town and psychoanalytic schools. Except in a general way, however, in a conversation which I shall record at the end of this chapter, he never mentioned further experiments. It is possible that others may have evidence bearing on this point. Martha Baker might make a good witness, but she died in 1911. Mrs. Whiffle knew nothing of any importance whatever about her son. Since his death I have interrogated her in vain. She was, indeed, very much astonished at the little I told her and she will read this book, I think, with real amazement. The report of Clara Barnes, too, was negligible. Edith Dale has supplied me with a few facts which I have inserted where they chronologically belong. Most of my other friends, Phillip Moeller, Alfred Knopf, Edna Kenton, Pitts Sanborn, Avery Hopwood, Freddo Sides, Joseph Hergesheimer, even my wife, Fania Marinoff, never met Peter. Louis Sherwin walked up Fifth Avenue with us one day, but Peter was unusually silent and after he had left us at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street, Louis was not sufficiently curious to ask any questions concerning him. I doubt if Louis could even recall the incident today. I have inserted advertisements in the Paris, New York, and Toledo newspapers, begging any one with pertinent facts or letters in his possession to communicate with me, but as yet I have received no replies. I have never seen a photograph of my friend and his mother informs me that she doubts if he ever sat for one.
The record, therefore, of Peter's literary life, at the conclusion of this chapter, will be as complete as I can make it. I have tried to set down the truth as I saw it, leaving out nothing that I remember, even at the danger of becoming unnecessarily garrulous and rambling. I have written down all I know because, after all, I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted, and some one else, with the facts before him, may be better able to reconstruct the picture of this strange life.
Our next meeting occurred in January, 1919, and his first remark was, Thank God, you're not shot up! From that time, until the day of his death, nearly a year later, Peter never mentioned the war to me again, although I saw him frequently enough, nor did he speak of his writing, save once, on an occasion which shall be reported in its proper place.
When we came together for the first time, after the long interval—he had just returned to New York from Florida—I was surprised at and even shocked by the purely physical change, which, to be sure, had a psychical significance, for his face had grown more spiritual. He had always been slender, but now he was thin, almost emaciated. To describe his appearance a little later, I might use the word haggard. His coat, which once fitted his figure snugly, rather hung from his shoulders. There were white patches in the blue-black of his hair, deep circles under his eyes, and hollows in his cheeks. But his eyes, themselves, seemed to shine with a new light, seemed to see something which I could not even imagine. He had rid himself of many excrescences and externalities, the purely adscititious qualities, charming though they might be, which masked his personality. He had, indeed, discovered himself, although I never knew how clearly until our last conversation. Peter, without appearing to be particularly aware of it, had become a mystic. His emancipation had come through suffering. He was quieter, less restless, less excitable, still enthusiastic, but with more balance, more—I do not wish to be misunderstood—irony. He had found life very satisfying and very hard, very sweet, with something of a bitter after-taste. He seemed almost holy to me, reminding me at times of those ascetic monks who crawl two thousand miles on their bellies to worship at some shrine, or of those Hindu fakirs who lie in one tortured position for years, their bodies slowly consuming, while their souls gain fire. That he was ill, very ill, I surmised at once, although, like everything else I have noted here, this was an impression. He made no admissions, never spoke of his malady; indeed, for Peter, he talked astonishingly little about himself. He was pathetic and at the same time an object for admiration.
Afterwards, I learned from his mother that he suffered from an incurable disease, the disease that killed him late in 1919. But he never spoke of this to me and he never complained, unless his occasional confession that he was tired might be construed as a complaint.
We had fine times together, of a new kind. The tables, in a sense, were turned. I had become the writer, however humble, and his ambition had not been realized. His sympathy with my work, with what I was trying to do, which he saw almost immediately, saw, indeed, in the beginning, more clearly than I saw it myself, was complete. He was never weary of talking about it, at any rate he never showed me that he was weary, and naturally this drew us very closely together, for an author is fondest of those men who talk the most about his work. But this is not the place to publish his opinions of me, although some of them were so curious and far-seeing—they were not all flattering by any means—that I shall undoubtedly recur to them in my autobiography. Fortunately for me, his sympathy grew as my work progressed, and it seemed amazing to me later, looking over the book after a period of years, that he had found anything pleasant to report of Music After the Great War. He had, indeed, seen something in it, and when I recalled what he had said it was impossible to feel that he had overstated the case in the interests of friendship. He had seen the germ, the root of what was to come; he had seen a suggestion of a style, undeveloped ideas, which he felt would later be developed, as indeed, to a limited extent, they were. His plea, to put it concisely, had been for a more personal expression. He was always asking me, after this or that remark or anecdote in conversation, why I did not write it, just as I had said it or told it, and it was a great pleasure for him to perceive in The Merry-Go-Round and In the Garret (of which he read the proofs just before his death) some signs of growth in this direction.
You are becoming freer, he would say. You are loosening your tongue; your heart is beating faster. In time you may liberate those subconscious ideas which are entangled in your very being. It is only your conscious self that prevents you from becoming a really interesting writer. Let that once be as free as the air and the other will be free too. You must walk boldly and proudly and without fear. You must search the heart; the mind is negligible in literature as in all other forms of art. Try to write just as you feel and you will discover that your feeling is greater than your knowledge of it. The words that appear on the paper will at first seem strange to you, almost like hermetic symbols, and it is possible that in the course of time you will be able to say so much that you yourself will not understand what you are writing. Do not be afraid of that. Let the current flow freely when you feel that it is the true current that is flowing.
That is the lesson, he continued, that the creative or critical artist can learn from the interpreter, the lesson of the uses of personality. The great interpreters, Rachel, Ristori, Mrs. Siddons, Duse, Bernhardt, Réjane, Ysaye, Paderewski, and Mary Garden are all big, vibrant personalities, that the deeper thing, call it God, call it IT, flows through and permeates. You may not believe this now, but I know it is true, and you will know it yourself some day. And if you cannot release your personality, what you write, though it be engraved in letters an inch deep on stones weighing many tons, will lie like snow in the street to be melted away by the first rain.