I believe that in the ordinary course of life Ewart and Lindsay could hardly have met for mutual benefit. I was the human link; assuring Ewart of Lindsay's genius, assuring Lindsay of Ewart's promise. The reserved, almost inarticulate, young Guards' officer brought forth in due time his Way of Revelation and Lindsay hailed it with delight and advised his New Mexican friends that the author of it was coming.
The idea of America, and especially of the South, certainly fired Wilfrid Ewart's imagination. He longed to go to New Orleans—that city for which in a way he had been bound when later he was so tragically killed. The idea of my journey to the Spanish Main also caused him to crave to share in its adventures. I remember our last dinner together in 1921—it was one night between Christmas and New Years. Wilfrid Ewart raised his glass solemnly and pronounced a toast: "To 1922, and may we both stand together on that Peak where in one view Pacific and Atlantic meet!" I had been talking to him of Darien and then of Mt. Zempoaltepec in Mexico whence at one moment you may see both oceans.
I smiled, we talked, and in my heart I doubted he would come, but he did. Alas now for the train of circumstances! He came, and he is lost.
I was waiting in the harbor and he was in the city. It is so perhaps still. I was answering once more those endless questions: "Are you in favor of subverting existing government by force?" "Only in such a case as that of Colombia in 1902," I reply. That will not be taken as an answer. "Am I a polygamist?" "Ever been deported?"—
The questioning is interrupted by the discovery of an abduction case—hours pass. It was nearly eight when I got free.
As I walked out of the dock gate in white coat, riding breeches, and knapsack on my shoulders an impatient cabman cried out—"Now the caballeros are coming." But I hastened to a street car and then to Forty-second Street and the Hotel Commodore, that Temple of the Calf, in which my poet had chosen to stay. And he knew where Ewart was staying. So we were joined again, the three of us, as we had been in London two years before.
Vachel, at that time engrossed by classic Art and modern American politics, was an enigma to Ewart. The American's enthusiasms were bewildering to the Englishman just fresh from our "no-enthusiasm-for-anything-that-matters" atmosphere of England. One thing, however, both admired, and that was Broadway at night all lit up from the color reflections on the road-crowds to the stars in the sky. But they admired it in different ways. Ewart admitted the grandness of America but never felt its greatness. For New York he obtained an admiration which had not learned its bounds. He knew it as the greatest piece of human magnificence he had seen. Central Park was his favorite haunt, and many an afternoon he walked there and watched, in the evening, the fade-out in the dusk, and then the lighting, the starring, the flaming, the rising of the brightness, and then at last the fast-pouring floods of electric illumination.
Life for me in a giddy New York week changed incredibly from the languor of the tropics to the ardor of the North. It was meetings at luncheon, meetings at dinner, theater every night, business letters, telephone messages in consecutive half dozens, rolling about in "overheads" and "undergrounds" and cabs. I knew I should be glad to get away.
Halfway through my time I had to leave the Commodore Hotel, that Temple of the Calf, as I have called it. It had been requisitioned for the Bankers' Conference. The poet had been installed longer than I had—they could not turn him out. But me they could. I went across to the quieter, old-fashioned "Murray Hill" to be still near to my two friends. It was a great sight at the Hotel Commodore next day, when the bankers had arrived—from every State in the Union, and every banker wearing a crimson silken tag which told the name of his bank and his little town. Thousands of little bankers, scores of big ones, swarmed in and out of the vast hall of the hotel. And they all walked with becoming gravity and aplomb. It was the greatest conference of the century. On the table was the question of Europe's unpaid debts; the bankers felt, and indeed they had been told by their leaders, that upon them depended the solvency of the Old World.
One afternoon whilst we paced the stone hall and talked, the orchestra began to play the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers" and this set the thirty or forty canaries who perch in their gilded cages above the foyer palms all a-singing. Such a joyous hubbub then ensued in that great hall, of golden birds and bankers' tongues and tinkling brass. Somewhere afar a bank president was orating ponderously. But added to that a man with a megaphone upon the mezzanine balustrade described a baseball game in the "World Series." The architecture of the place, with its color and lighting effects, the frame of our gilded society, was superb; the human attendance behind marble bars were busy, bowed, attentive, all that man could wish. Every banker in America seemed to be pulling his weight, every facial expression was at par. There was a sense of the coffers behind them and the business and power they represented. So the afternoon band kept playing its elaborately orchestrated tune, child's tune, from the Chauve Souris—not exactly the "Parade of the Wooden Soldiers," sometimes grander and yet delightful, titillating, perhaps the Parade of the Little Golden Bankers instead.