“I don’t recognize your face,” said Oliver, “but your manner is damn familiar.”
I was in Oliver’s studio one day when a strange knock came at the door—three long ones and two short raps. “S-h-h-h!” he said, and we both kept quiet. After a sufficient time had elapsed for the person to have departed, I asked him for an explanation. It seemed that —— was in the habit of calling and boring Oliver terribly, so he told him that in the future he intended opening the door only to his special friends, to whom he would give a private knock.
It needs some uncommon quirk for a man’s mind to work in this fashion. Instead of giving the private signal to his friends, he gave it to his one particular aversion, so that he could recognize it instantly and get rid of him quite neatly and without malice.
Another time, Oliver invited me to dine with him. We took a cab at the door of The Players. On the way to the restaurant he went through his pockets and found he hadn’t a cent. As I was broke myself, I decided we were in a pickle. Not so Oliver. We alighted at the door of a prominent café and Oliver approached the cabman:
“Say, dear fellow,” he began, and the driver, thinking he was going to be held up for the fare, was disposed to be cross. But this was too trifling a matter for Oliver to even mention.
“Say, dear fellow,” he continued, in his most confiding way, “I have invited my friend here to dine and I find I have forgotten my money. Could you—now I wonder if you could be a good chap and lend me ten dollars?”
To my astonishment, the man, taken completely unawares, pulled out a roll of bills and handed Oliver one of them.
One cannot be naïve by will power; the danger in consciously striving to be childlike is that one becomes childish, and that is a very different matter. I always think of Oliver Herford when I recall what Guy De Maupassant said upon being challenged to make a new Beatitude—
“Thrice blessed are the naïve, for they shall never see but God.”
One of the brightest and most witty men I knew in the old days was the actor, Maurice Barrymore, father of the present galaxy of stage folk of that name. A beautiful body—I was told that he had been the amateur champion middleweight of England—a face more Celtic than Saxon, Barry was the originator of bons mots that have gone all over the country. I do not remember much about his acting, but I remember his delightful companionship late at night (for he was a highly sensitive man who burned the candle at both ends), his brilliant conversation, his great intelligence and love of the fine things of life, his finesse, and his swiftness of thinking.