at the head of the page.
After this not very profitable occupation I turned my attention to tutoring, fitting a boy for West Point, and another for the Yale Scientific School. The former was the son of an ignorant Irishman and had got a limited amount of information at the Jesuit school. I taught him geography, history of the country and states, of which he knew nothing, and I made him learn the Declaration of Independence and simple mathematics. He went in with flying colors.
I found that my business career did not interfere in any way with my social life in Cincinnati. I was still anxious to be an artist and was painting in my bedroom every night. The city was, even at that time, beginning to be an art center for the Middle West. Nicholas Longworth, grandfather of the husband of Miss Alice Roosevelt, had shown a particular aptitude for making money and a better one for spending it the right way. As a young man he had climbed the hills of the town and, looking from them across the water, decided it would be impossible for the city to extend in but one way. Accordingly, he put his savings into land, always keeping one lap ahead of the spread of population. Caring for beautiful things, he began to encourage the fine arts, and it was at his home that I saw my very first collection of oil paintings. Concord was the home of the steel engraving, and the copies of oils that my father had brought back with him from Europe and hung up in the Old Manse swore at everything else in the house. The Longworth collection was mostly German pictures—by Koeck-Koeck, Meyer von Bremen, and two by Lessing of the life of Huss, the martyr, which were evidently worthless, but so aroused my decorative instinct that I remembered them for years after.
Wandering up the main street of Cincinnati one evening, I saw a name plate on a doorway—one I had never heard—and after it the magic word “Artist.” I was thrilled. There was actually some one in this town living and having his being and spending his time painting. I used to pass back and forth before this sign, which was at the bottom of a stairway, like a dentist’s or a photographer’s; and finally, one evening just at dusk, I got the courage to go up. Knocking timidly on the door, I was greeted with loud roars of “Come in.” The dingy room was a holy of holies to me—I had never seen an artist’s studio before. In the far corner was a man in a khaki apron, using the blackest of soft soap to wash what were, in my eyes, enormous brushes. Heretofore, my own experiments in oil painting had been made with the usual small brushes and a tin box used by maiden ladies. The bigness and boldness of this establishment took my breath away.
When I got the courage to look about I saw that, besides this big Norse viking with the tumbled hair, there was a sculptor in the corner, modeling—think of the daring!—a figure in the nude! I must have presented a ridiculous figure, for there was a laugh behind my back, and, turning, I saw a woman almost naked, sitting on a stool! They asked me why I had wanted to come in, and I told them I tried to paint, but that I had never seen a studio before. I looked with wonder at the big canvases on the wall, and even then realized that here was a sense of color altogether different from that of the German artists, and that the capacity for brushwork was a marvel—for this painter was none other than Frank Duveneck, who had just returned from Munich.
When I went up to West Walnut Hills and told them that I had found a real artist in Cincinnati, I was laughed at in a very pitying way; but later on, when this same Duveneck gave a showing of his work in Boston and was hailed as the “new American Velásquez,” I felt a great satisfaction, although I was no longer in Cincinnati and could not enjoy my triumph.
After an experience as a casket maker’s assistant, where I was expected to board with him and sleep in the manufactory, and eventually—great stress was laid on this—become a partner in the business, I decided to accept an offer my cousins had made me to go farther west and become a clerk in a department store they had started in San Francisco. I had previously received a proposition to become a salesman of cheap jewelry, for, so this man told me, my line of talk would be a sure-fire success for making sales to “servant girls at the back door.”
My ticket as far as Chicago was given me by Chap Dwight, who was connected with railways, and for the rest of the way I paid for a first-class fare and no Pullman—in those days it was possible to sit up in the smoker. This I did as far as Cheyenne, where my troubles began. I was told that the train would stop for an hour, so I alighted to take a look about the town and get some dinner. The only thing that aroused my interest was a sign marked “Simmons” over a doorway with steps leading down to it and quite evidently a dive. There were two baize doors above which shone bright lights, with reams of smoke rising above the heads of men. I went down and started to push open the door, but just at that moment loud voices were raised inside and something whizzed by my head. I looked up, and, not six inches from my outstretched hand was a clean bullethole through the door. I never opened it.
Trying not to hurry, I made my way back to my train and started to get aboard, searching in every pocket for my ticket. It was gone. I begged clemency from the conductor and tried to make him remember that I had got on at Chicago, but I had no berth, and there were too many deadbeats trying to get to California in those days for him to have any pity whatsoever for me. In desperation, I spoke to the baggageman. He advised me to go as far as my money would take me and then telegraph home for more. Anything was better than being left at midnight in this city of careless bullets. Out to Rawlins, Wyoming, was as far as my pocketbook would take me, and I would have two dollars and fifty cents left for a bed and telegram.
Imagine a town eight thousand feet above the sea, freezing cold, again the middle of the night. How I got off the train and over to the hotel, where shown the only light, I do not know. I do know, however, that I put a chair under the handle of the door, candle and matches and my pistol beside the bed, before I went to sleep. Daylight showed no improvement, but only took away the air of dark mystery and bared to the eye a bleakness indescribable. To have been told that there was no telegraph office would not have surprised me a bit, but to learn that it was “not a money order station” was almost worse. Sitting on a stone in front of the hotel, I tried to think out my problem. The temperature was twenty or thirty below zero, nothing grew in the ground, and all the ice and snow was blown away by the terrible winds as soon as it fell. That morning two men had been found frozen stiff within a hundred yards of the hotel. They had not seen the light, which was on the other side of the house, and had simply lain down and decided to stop. To see the dead bodies of these men who had given in a hundred yards from safety was one of the greatest lessons I ever learned—NEVER STOP!