Club life in Colorado Springs is highly developed. The El Paso Club is not merely a good club for such a small city, but would be a very good club anywhere. One has only to penetrate as far as the cigar stand to discover that—for a club may always be known by the cigars it keeps. So, too, with the Cheyenne Mountain Country Club at Broadmoor, a suburb of the Springs. It isn't one of those small-town country clubs, in which, after ringing vainly for the waiter, you go out to the kitchen and find him for yourself, in his shirtsleeves and minus a collar. Nor, when he puts in his appearance, is he wearing a spotted alpaca coat that doesn't fit. Without being in the least pretentious, it is a real country club, run for men and women who know what a real club is.
When you sit at luncheon at the large round table in the men's café you may find yourself between a famous polo-player from Meadowbrook, and a bronzed young ranch-owner, who will tell you that cattle rustling still goes on in his section of the country. The latter you will take for a perfect product of the West, a "gentleman cowboy," from a novel. But presently you will learn that he is a member of that almost equally fictitious thing, an "old New York family," that he has been in the West but a year or two, and that he was in "Tark's class" at Princeton. So on around the table. One man has just arrived from Paris; another from Honolulu, or the Philippines, or China or Japan. And when, as we were sitting there, a man came in whom I had met in Rome ten years before, I said to myself: This is not life. It is the beginning of a short story by some disciple of Mrs. Wharton: A group of cosmopolitans seated around a table in a club. Casual mention of Bombay, Buda-Pesth and Singapore. Presently some man will flick his cigarette ash and say, "By the way, De Courcey, what ever became of the queer little chap we used to see at the officer's mess in Simla?" Whereupon De Courcey, late of the Lancers, and second son of Lord Thusandso, will light a fresh Corona and recount, according to the accepted formula, the story of The Queer Little Chap.
I could even imagine the illustrations for the story. They would be by Wenzell, and would show us there, in the club, like a group of sleek Greek statues, clothed in full afternoon regalia of the most unbelievable smoothness—looking, in short, not at all like ourselves, or anybody else.
However, the story of The Queer Little Chap was not told. That is the trouble with trying to live short stories. You can get them started, sometimes, but they never work out. If the setting is all right, the story somehow will not "break," whereas, on the other hand, when the surroundings are absolutely wrong, when the wrong people are present, when the conditions are utterly impossible, your short story will break violently and without warning, and will very likely cover you with spots. The trouble is that life, in its more fragmentary departments, lacks what we call "form" and "composition." There is something amateurish about it. Nine editors out of ten would reject a short story written by the Hand of Fate, on this ground, and would probably advise Fate to go and take a course in short-story-writing at some university. No; Fate has not the short story gift. She writes novels—rather long and rambling, most of them, like those of De Morgan or Romaine Rolland. But even her novels are not popular. People say they are too long. They can't be bothered reading novels which consume a whole lifetime. Besides, Fate seldom supplies a happy ending, and that's what people want, now-a-days. So, though Fate's novels are given away, they have no vogue.
Having somehow digressed from clubs to authorship I may perhaps be pardoned for wandering still further from my trail here to mention Andy Adams.
A long time ago, ex-Governor Hunt expressed lack of faith in the future of Colorado Springs because, at that time, there was not much water to be found there, and further because the town had "too many writers of original poetry." So far as I could judge, from a brief visit, things have changed. There is plenty of water, and I did not meet a single poet. However, I did meet an author, and he is a real one. Andy Adams' card proclaims him author, but more than this, his books do, also. Himself a former cowboy, he writes cowboy stories which prove that cowboy stories need not be as false, and as maudlinly romantic as most cowboy stories manage to be. You don't have to know the plains to know that Mr. Adams' tales are true, any more than you have to know anatomy to understand that a man can't stand without a backbone. Truth is the backbone of Mr. Adams' writings, and the body of them has that rare kind of beauty which may, perhaps, be likened to the body of some cowboy—some perfect physical specimen from Mr. Adams' own pages.
I have not read all his books, and the only reason why I have not is that I have not yet had time. But so far as I have read I have not found one false note in them. I have not come upon a "lone horseman" riding through the gulch at eventide. I have not encountered the daughter of an eastern millionaire who has ridden out to see the sunset. Nor have I stumbled on a romantic meeting or a theatrical rescue.
So far as I know, Mr. Adams' book "The Log of a Cowboy," is preëminently the classic of the plains. One of its greatest qualities is that of ceaseless movement. Three thousand head of cattle are driven through those chapters, from the Mexican frontier to the Canada border, and those cattle travel with a flow as irresistible as the unrelenting flow of De Quincey's Tartar tribe.
The author is one of those absolutely basic things, a natural story teller, and the fine simplicity of his writing springs not from education ("All the schooling I ever had I picked up at a cross-roads country school house"), not from an academic knowledge of "literature," but from primary qualities in his own nature, and the strong, ingenuous outlook of his own two eyes.
Mr. Henry Russell Wray tells of a request from eastern publishers for a brief sketch of Adams' life. He asked Adams to write about two hundred words about himself, as though dealing with another being. The next day he received this: