Riley’s intimate friendships with other writers were comparatively few, due largely to his home-keeping habit, but there were some for whom, without ever seeing much of them, he had a liking that approached affection. Mark Twain was one of these; Mr. Howells and Joel Chandler Harris were others. He saw Longfellow on the occasion of his first visit to Boston. Riley had sent him several of his poems, which Longfellow had acknowledged in an encouraging letter; but it was not the way of Riley to knock at any strange door, and General “Dan” Macaulay, once mayor of Indianapolis, a confident believer in the young Hoosier’s future, took charge of the pilgrimage. Longfellow had been ill, but he appeared unexpectedly just as a servant was turning the visitors away. He was wholly kind and gracious, and “shook hands five times,” Riley said, when they parted. The slightest details of that call—it was shortly before Longfellow’s death—were ineffaceably written in Riley’s memory—even the lavender trousers which, he insisted, Longfellow wore!
Save for the years of lyceum work and the last three winters of his life spent happily in Florida, Riley’s absences from home were remarkably infrequent. He derived no pleasure from the hurried travelling made necessary by his long tours as a reader; he was without the knack of amusing himself in strange places, and the social exactions of such journeys he found very irksome. Even in his active years, before paralysis crippled him, his range of activities was most circumscribed. The Lockerbie Street in which he lived so comfortably, tucked away though it is from the noisier currents of traffic, lies, nevertheless, within sound of the court-house bell, and he followed for years a strict routine which he varied rarely and only with the greatest apprehension as to the possible consequences.
It was a mark of our highest consideration and esteem to produce Riley at entertainments given in honor of distinguished visitors, but this was never effected without considerable plotting. (I have heard that in Atlanta “Uncle Remus” was even a greater problem to his fellow citizens!) Riley’s innate modesty, always to be reckoned with, was likely to smother his companionableness in the presence of ultra-literary personages. His respect for scholarship, for literary sophistication, made him reluctant to meet those who, he imagined, breathed a divine ether to which he was unacclimated. At a small dinner in honor of Henry James he maintained a strict silence until one of the other guests, in an effort to “draw out” the novelist, spoke of Thomas Hardy and the felicity of his titles, mentioning Under the Greenwood Tree and A Pair of Blue Eyes. Riley, for the first time addressing the table, remarked quietly of the second of these, “It’s an odd thing about eyes, that they usually come in sets!”—a comment which did not, as I remember, strike Mr. James as being funny.
Riley always seemed a little bewildered by his success, and it was far from his nature to trade upon it. He was at pains to escape from any company where he found himself the centre of attraction. He resented being “shown off” (to use his own phrase) like “a white mouse with pink eyes.” He cited as proof that he was never intended for a social career the unhappy frustration of his attempt to escort his first sweetheart to a party. Dressed with the greatest care, he knocked at the beloved’s door. Her father eyed him critically and demanded: “What you want, Jimmy?”
“Come to take Bessie to the party.”
“Humph! Bessie ain’t goin’ to no party; Bessie’s got the measles!”
V
In so far as Riley was a critic of life and conduct, humor was his readiest means of expression. Whimsical turns of speech colored his familiar talk, and he could so utter a single word—always with quiet inadvertence—as to create a roar of laughter. Apart from the commoner type of anecdotal humor, he was most amusing in his pursuit of fancies of the Stocktonesque order. I imagine that he and John Holmes of Old Cambridge would have understood each other perfectly; all the Holmes stories I ever heard—particularly the one about Methuselah and the shoe-laces, preserved by Colonel Higginson—are very similar to yarns invented by Riley.
To catch his eye in a company or at a public gathering was always dangerous, for if he was bored or some tedious matter was forward, he would seek relief by appealing to a friend with a slight lifting of the brows, or a telepathic reference to some similar situation in the past. As he walked the streets with a companion his comments upon people and trifling incidents of street traffic were often in his best humorous vein. With his intimates he had a fashion of taking up without prelude subjects that had been dropped weeks before. He was greatly given to assuming characters and assigning parts to his friends in the little comedies he was always creating. For years his favorite rôle was that of a rural preacher of a type that had doubtless aroused his animosity in youth. He built up a real impression of this character—a cadaverous person of Gargantuan appetite, clad in a long black alpaca coat, who arrived at farmhouses at meal-times and depleted the larder, while the children of the household, awaiting the second table in trepidation, gloomily viewed the havoc through the windows. One or another of us would be Brother Hotchkiss, or Brother Brookwarble, and we were expected to respond in his own key of bromidic pietism. This device, continually elaborated, was not wholly foolishness on his part, but an expression of his deep-seated contempt for cant and hypocrisy, which he regarded as the most grievous of sins.
When he described some “character” he had known, it was with an amount of minute detail that made the person stand forth as a veritable being. Questions from the listener would be welcomed, as evidence of sympathy with the recital and interest in the individual under discussion. As I journeyed homeward with him once from Philadelphia, he began limning for two companions a young lawyer he had known years before at Greenfield. He carried this far into the night, and at the breakfast table was ready with other anecdotes of this extraordinary individual. When the train reached Indianapolis the sketch, vivid and amusing, seemed susceptible of indefinite expansion.