Edgar Saltus: The Man

by Marie Saltus

November brought Mr. Saltus to the Coronado Hotel. He had been mapping out a plot for "Daughters of the Rich." San Diego and Coronado enchanted him.

"My next novel shall open here," he exclaimed.

So it did. The opening chapter of "The Monster" introduces the reader to the Hotel del Coronado and the bay.

The bungalow occupied by us was none too large for two women and a maid. It had however a large attic room. Mr. Saltus gave it one look, and, in his own words, "miawed at the door and begged." It looked the background for a scribbler, with odd nooks and corners to hide manuscripts and curious old tables to write on. Once seen, nothing would do but he must have it. He declared that a djinn who lived there specialized in helping old scoundrels to scribble. I added that a horrible hourla lived there as well and that he made a practice of changing men into horned toads. (Horned toads are plentiful in Coronado.)

All this made him very insistent. California had always appealed to Mr. Saltus. It offered a special inducement then, for under the laws of the State a divorce could be secured for abandonment. He thought that a man not worth changing for a hat was not worth keeping at all, and after a year's residence he could take the initiative in the matter,—hat or no hat. An attorney was consulted and retained. California was to be his home for a year at least.

In the circumstances Mr. Saltus was very anxious to settle down. He had wandered so much, and he was tired of it. A few trunks in an apartment hotel cannot be called a home. His popularity as a novelist had waned. Public opinion was against him, not only because of the publicity incidental to so many divorce suits, but because there had grown up and around him the belief that he was a free-thinker and lover, irritable and erratic,—a man who had few friends and a multitude of enemies.

However little he let all this affect him on the surface, Mr. Saltus was too acutely sensitive not to feel it, and it cut deep. Like a wounded animal seeking shelter, his one desire was to get as far away as he could from a world which, knowing but little of his real self, criticised and condemned him. To come in contact only with the things of nature and of beauty,—to live in the sunshine far from the haunts of men and the sordid struggle of a great city, was to him the ideal.

In view of all this, and after much cajoling on his part, and his constant reiteration that for three females,—one old, one ill and one negligible,—a handy man about the house was a necessity, he was accepted. The prospect of Mr. Saltus being handy with anything but a pen or a knife and fork was remote. None the less, the attic shortly became his habitat, the djinn and the hourla his familiar spirits, and the plot of "The Monster" began fermenting in his mind.

It was a new world to the man accustomed for years to the limelight of publicity, and the diversions of a metropolis, to live for months on a narrow strip of sand, ministering to the wants of an elderly widow and an invalid, who at best could walk only a short three minutes to the sands at the ocean front, and spent most of her time resting in a hammock.

It must be said of him however that he came to the scratch with flying colours. Unaccustomed as he had been in his youth to look upon anything other than "Will it please me or will it not?" he began to put in practice one of life's most difficult lessons,—unselfishness. In his desire to serve another and quite unconscious of the result, he began to build up some of the qualities in which he had been deficient so long. Having constituted himself a handy man and old dog Tray, in a place where servants are scarce as rubies, he kept burning and replenished the fire in the living-room. He also, in spite of the hours spent in using his eyes to write, would read aloud to the invalid whenever he was requested.