We talked of other writers. Peter drew my attention, for instance, to the work of Cunninghame Graham, that strange Scotch mystic who turned his back on civilization to write of the pampas, the arid plains of Africa, India, and Spain, only to find irony everywhere in every work of man. But, observed Peter, he could not hate civilization so intensely had he not lived in it. It is all very well to kick over the ladder after you have climbed it and set foot on the balcony. Like all lovers of the simple life, he is very complex. And we discussed James Branch Cabell, who, Peter told me, was originally a "romantic." He wrote of knights and ladyes and palfreys with sympathetic picturesqueness. Of late, however, continued Peter, he, too, seems to have turned over in bed. Romanticism still appears in his work but it is undermined by a biting and disturbing irony. He asks: Are any of the manifestations of modern civilization worthy of admiration? and like Graham, he seems to answer, No. It is possible that the public disregard for his earlier and simpler manner may have produced this metamorphosis. Many a man has become bitter with less reason. Then he spoke of the attributed influence of Maurice Hewlett and Anatole France on the work of Cabell. Bernard Shaw, said Peter, once lost all patience with those critics who insisted that he was a son of Ibsen and Nietzsche and asserted that it was their ignorance that prevented them from realizing the debt he owed to Samuel Butler. Cabell might, with justice, voice a similar complaint, for if he ever had a literary father it was Arthur Machen. In that author's The Chronicle of Clemendy, issued in 1888, may be discovered the same confusion of irony and romance that is to be traced in the work of Cabell. Moreover, like The Soul of Melicent, the book purports to be a translation from an old chronicle. I might further speak of the relationship between Hieroglyphics and Beyond Life, The Hill of Dreams and The Cream of the Jest, although in each case the treatment and the style are entirely dissimilar. Machen even preceded Cabell in his use of unfavourable reviews (Vide the advertising pages of Beyond Life) in his preface to the 1916 edition of The Great God Pan. Perhaps, added Peter, Cabell has also read Herman Melville's Mardi to some advantage. But he is no plagiarist; I am speaking from the point of view of literary genealogy. Peter, at my instigation, read a novel or two of Joseph Hergesheimer's. Linda Condon, he reported, is as evanescent as the spirit of God. Only those who have encountered Lady Beauty among the juniper trees in the early dawn will feel this book, and only those who feel will understand. For Hergesheimer has worked a miracle; he has brought marble to life, created a vibrant chastity. He has described ice in words of flame!
One night, quite accidentally, we saw the name of Clara Barnes on a poster in front of the Metropolitan Opera House. She was singing the rôle of the Priestess in Aida. We purchased two general admission tickets and slipped in to hear her. The Priestess, those who have heard Aida will remember, officiates in the temple scene of the first act but, like the impersonator of the Bird in Siegfried, she is invisible. Clara's voice sounded tired and worn, as indeed, it should sound after those long years of study.
We must go back to see her, Peter urged.
We found a changed and broken Clara. She was dressing alone, but on the third floor, and the odour of Cœur de Jeannette persisted. She burst into tears when she saw us.
I can't do it, she moaned. Why did you ever come? I can't do it. I can only sing with my music in front of me. I shall never be able to sing a part which appears and there are so few rôles in opera, which permit you to sing back of the scenery! I can't remember. Now she was wailing. As fast as I learn one part I forget another.
As we walked away on Fortieth Street, Peter began to relate an incident he had once read in Plutarch; There was a certain magpie, belonging to a barber at Rome, which could imitate any word he heard. One day, a company of passing soldiers blew their trumpets before the shop and for the next forty-eight hours the magpie was not only mute but also pensive and melancholy. It was generally believed that the sound of the trumpets had stunned the bird and deprived it of both voice and hearing. It appeared, however, that this was not the case for, says Plutarch, the bird had all the time been occupied in profound meditation, studying how to imitate the sound of the trumpets, and when at last master of the trick, he astonished his friends by a perfect imitation of the flourish on those instruments it had heard, observing with the greatest exactness all the repetitions, stops, and changes. This lesson, however, had apparently been learned at the cost of the whole of its intelligence, for it made it forget everything it had learned before.
We visited many out-of-the-way places together, Peter and I, the Negro dance-halls near 135th Street, and the Italian and the Yiddish Theatres. Peter once remarked that he enjoyed plays more in a foreign language with which he was unfamiliar. What he could imagine of plot and dialogue far transcended the actuality. We often dined at a comfortable Italian restaurant on Spring Street, on the walls of which birds fluttered through frescoed arbours, trailing with fruits and flowers, and where the spaghetti was too good to be eaten without prayer. In an uptown café, we had a strange adventure with a Frenchwoman, La Tigresse, which I have related elsewhere.[4] Peter refused, in these last months, to go to concerts, especially in Carnegie Hall, the atmosphere of which, he said, made it impossible to listen to music. The bare walls, the bright lights, the sweating conductors, and the silly, gaping crowd oppressed his spirit. He envied Ludwig of Bavaria who could listen to music in a darkened hall in which he was the only auditor. Conditions were more favourable in the moving picture theatres. The bands, perhaps, did not play so well but the auditoriums were more subtly lighted, so that the figures of the audience did not intrude.
Peter was more of a recluse than ever. It had been impossible to persuade him to meet anybody since the Edith Dale days (Edith herself was now living in New Mexico and, owing to a slight misunderstanding, I had not seen or heard from her in five years). He was even sensitive and morbid on the subject. He made me promise, as a matter of fact, after the Louis Sherwin episode, that in case we encountered any of my friends in a restaurant or at a theatre, I would not introduce him. There was, I assured myself, a good reason for this. In these last days, Peter faded out in a crowd. He lost a good deal of his personality even in the presence of a third person. I begged him to go with me to Florine Stettheimer's studio to see her pictures, which I was sure would please him, but he refused. He liked to stroll around with me in odd places and he read and played the piano a good deal, but he seemed to have few other interests. He was absolutely ignorant of such matters as politics and government. He never voted and I have heard him refer to the president, and not in jest, as Abraham Wilson. Sports did not amuse him either, but occasionally we went together to see the wrestlers at Madison Square Garden, especially when Stanislaus Zbyszko was announced to appear.
He never went to Europe again although, shortly before he died, he talked of a voyage to Spain. He visited his mother at Toledo several times and he had planned a trip to Florida, the climate of which he found particularly soothing to his malady, in January, 1920. Occasionally he just disappeared, returning again, somewhat mysteriously, without any explanation, without, indeed, any admission that he had been away. I knew him too well to ask questions and, to say truth, there was something very sweet about these little mystifications. Privacy was so dear a privilege to him that even with his nearest friends, of which, assuredly, I was one, perhaps the nearest in this last year, it was essential to his happiness that he should maintain a certain restraint, a certain reserve, I had almost said, a certain mystery, but, curiously, there was nothing theatrical about Peter, even in his most theatrical performances. Just as by the fineness of his taste, Rembrandt softened the hideousness of a lurid subject in his Anatomy Lesson, so the exquisite charm of Peter's personality overcame any possible repugnance to anything he might choose to do.
During this last year in New York, he lived in an old house on Beekman Place, that splendid row, just two blocks long, of mellow brown-stone dwellings, with flights of steps, which back upon the East River at Fiftieth Street. We often sat on the balcony, looking over towards the span of the Queensboro Bridge, Blackwell's Island, with its turreted and battlemented castles so like the Mysteries of Udolpho, watching the gulls sweep over the surface of the water, the smoke wreathe from the factory chimneys, and the craft on the river, with cargoes "of Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, fire-wood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays," of the city, but seemingly away from it, with our backs to it, literally, indeed, while life ebbed by. And, at my side, too, I saw it slowly ebbing.