"I'm tired of these old clothes," he told me over and over again. "I want a new deal, to begin as a little boy once more. But in the interval of freedom on the other side, I want to roam at will through the Halls of Learning, to feed my soul with the food of the mental plane." That was his prayer.
The cynic, the satirist, the jester with life, as the world believed him to be,—false faces all—dissolved, and the real ego emerged, to play hide-and-seek no longer. The timidity, the humility, to conceal which he had assumed so much that he was not, spoke now:—
"Don't let a curious public come here to gaze at me after I am out of my body. Let me be forgotten. I have done nothing worth while. It will be my mistakes by which I will be remembered, if at all. Since I began to take myself seriously in hand, I have lived in semi-obscurity. Let me go in the same way. Don't put our address in the newspapers for a curious crowd to come here. Have a simple Theosophical service over my old clothes,—and for God's sake no black anywhere,—on yourself or about the place."
Assured by me that I would do so, he went on:—
"You have suffered so much that you are numb and immune. Let the sunshine in and let the canary sing. Help my departing spirit by your poise and power. Keep everyone away, and bury my ashes with your own hands."
Though talking of his transition almost constantly, Mr. Saltus was very much like the woman who, being asked if she believed in ghosts, said, "No, but I'm dreadfully afraid of them." Every hour or two he would refer to what we would do when he regained his health. Rosy pictures of a rose garden in California were painted, and delightful dreams of sitting under a banyan tree at Mrs. Besant's feet took shape from the smoke of his cigarettes.
Meanwhile the manuscript of Mr. Saltus' last novel, "The Golden Flood," was sketched in the rough up to the middle of chapter twelve. The words did not drop from his pen as they had once done. Weariness and effort crept in. Though work to him was still a song, death was the refrain. Midsummer came. Mr. Saltus, too ill by far to be taken into the country, seemed nevertheless a little better.
He took a fancy for sitting on the roof of our apartment house. Taking up camp chairs and pillows I arranged to make it comfortable for him, and he sat there for hours, reading or chatting with me.
Toward the middle of July unusually hot weather made this lofty sitting room doubly acceptable to him, for our apartment, being on the top of the house, was painfully hot all night, though electric fans were kept running at high speed in his bed-room and study. In these circumstances the cool air of the roof offered freshness and relief.
Evening after evening we sat there looking down upon the city below, where multiple electric lights and illuminated signs fought for supremacy, and above to where the stars pierced the softness of evening. The height, the silence, and the stars particularly, took us back more than twenty years to the turret of the old Narragansett Casino, from which we had first looked at them together, and we returned there many times in our chats.