"Just that. You take the reader from protoplasm to paradise,—you lead him through labyrinths, mazes and mysteries, and leave him just where you started. If you cannot give the reader a ladder give him a straw,—but give him something."
We are all tenacious with the children of our brain, Edgar Saltus especially so, but in this instance he took the criticism willingly. That last chapter he re-wrote four times, amplifying the idea of the continuity of life and the possibility of reincarnation, which he referred to as the "supreme Alhambra of dream." What he offered then was not his belief, but a theory and a suggestion. The last chapter curiously enough was the part of the book receiving the highest praise from the critics, who with one accord said that he had struck a new and exalted note. A few years later he was wringing his hands because he could not re-write "Lords of the Ghostland" in the light of what he then knew. Over and over again he lamented this fact.
"If I had not been so pig-headed,—so dense. Having the chance to turn out a masterpiece,—a thing that would have lived,—I passed it by. I saw only in a restricted circle, when had I but looked up, a limitless horizon of wonder and wisdom stretched before me."
CHAPTER IX
In the spring of 1907, the death of my father left me a nervous and physical wreck. Though never close friends, and knowing quite well of his disapproval, Mr. Saltus admired his splendid intellect and broad vision.
There are those who make tragedies out of trifles, and others to whom most events however important mean nothing at all. To the latter, when touched by an overwhelming grief, the world and everything in it become as shadows on glass.
Because of his sensitiveness and his super-susceptibility to suffering, Mr. Saltus was sympathetic to a degree. He had begun to see the beauty of service, and during that time he devoted himself to my family in every way that he knew how.
The autumn found me in California again, a nervous wreck, and so ill with acute gastritis, that death seemed but hiding around the corner. With an elderly friend of the family I always addressed as Aunt, and whose interests made it necessary for her to live in California for a time, we went from place to place, settling for the winter in a bungalow at Coronado Beach. If one must die, why not peacefully and pleasantly in the sunshine?