Edgar Saltus: The Man Part 12

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?

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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 circ.u.mstances 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 mult.i.tude 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 const.i.tuted 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.

Strangely enough he was extremely happy in doing these things. Although the Hotel del Coronado was only a five minutes' walk from the bungalow it offered no attraction to him. Barring a daily dip in the ocean and the occasional necessity for going over to San Diego, he could not be persuaded to leave the grounds.

Winter wore away, and with the approach of spring the invalid emerged from the shadow of death; and old dog Tray remained at his post. Among Mr.

Saltus' most marked characteristics were two fears,--that of losing his luggage and getting some contagious disease. In neither case could any amount of reasoning touch him. The luggage complex put him to no end of inconvenience at times. When trunks could not be taken in a taxi, he frequently insisted upon driving with the express-man to the railway station. Then fear put out tentacles. Would the luggage be put on the train? If it was, would it be carried past its destination? Every railroad journey found him wandering like an earthbound spirit between his seat and the luggage van. It was a form of obsession. Many a time he would greet me in the morning with the announcement:--

"I had a terrible nightmare last night. What do you suppose it was?"

"That you had lost your trunks," was the first and usually the correct reply.

"Yes, I had lost them. They dematerialized and I was wandering through the train and express vans till I went mad. Then I awoke. It was awful."

Toward the end of his life, when Theosophy had done its work for him, and he realized that all possessions are anchors and enc.u.mbrances, this fear became modified,--but he never quite overcame it. It was the same with disease, or rather contagion. Having a horror of all forms of illness, he had the subconscious idea that if there was anything to be caught he would be in for it.

When in his last days he was so desperately ill with gastritis, he looked upon it as karma striking him in the face for shrinking as he had from others. Myself excepted, he rushed from people who were ill as from an earthquake.

This particular spring an epidemic of bubonic plague broke out in San Francisco. It was supposed to have been carried there by rats from China.

As cats eat rats they also came under the ban of suspicion. The newspapers dripped with it. Mr. Saltus read them with horror. Ships from San Francisco might dock at San Diego. He had more nightmares. Behind him as he sought his lost luggage an army of rodents followed. There was no talking him out of it. The plague with all its attendant complications was hovering above us.

Coronado has a large winter colony as well as permanent residents,--eastern people who come in for the season and take houses. Their departure often means a number of homeless and discarded cats. Mr. Saltus was shocked by the cruelty of this. One of the vagrants with particularly long whiskers and a piteous miaw I had nicknamed "Jean Valjean." Where he slept was his own secret, but where he ate was usually out of my hand. When not referring to him by his name, Mr. Saltus called him "the table boarder," and he concerned himself not a little over Jean's well being.

Rumours of the bubonic plague changed that in an instant, and Jean became overnight the dangerous carrier of the most deadly germs, unfit for the society of humans and to be driven from the door. It was too ridiculous for argument. To have yielded an inch to Mr. Saltus in such a thing would have forfeited my mental ascendency forever, an exceedingly bad thing for him in every way. Had he been yielded to less during his formative years it would have been a blessing both to himself and to others, and would have made possible a little yielding to him in later life. As it was, it was hazardous to give in, even if he had a certain amount of right on his side.

When he had none, it was suicidal.

Laughing at his fears, ridiculing the idea of poor Jean carrying the plague, and a.s.suring him that demons and devils were particularly immune, I refused to accept his hallucination about the cat. He was told to attend to his work and his writing, and not interfere with the running of the house.

Diplomacy was one of Mr. Saltus' strong points. He appeared to agree with me. Coming around the corner of the piazza the following afternoon however, when supposed to be on the sands, I was in time to see him with the hose in his hand, the nozzle turned so as to send a straight and powerful stream of water. This he was playing on Jean, who, terrified at such unlooked-for hostility in place of his usual plate of food, let out piteous howls and fled up a eucalyptus tree.

h.e.l.l has no fury like a woman defied. Dropping the hose when he saw me Mr.

Saltus turned,--but he had no chance to escape or explain. Seizing the nozzle I let him have it full in the face, and as he ran I followed, soaking him through and through till he got out of range. It was a tense moment. Swearing and raging, he shook himself and fled to his attic room.

When he emerged, an hour later, it was with suitcases in his hand.

"After treatment like this I am going to the Hotel del Coronado, and I will send for my trunks. Never in my life have I been subjected to such an indignity. Here I am,--growing grey in your service and less than a stray cat in your eyes."

"Good-bye and good luck," I answered. "If having led two unfortunate women a devil's dance hasn't taught you anything you are hopeless. Had one of them played a hose on you ages ago, I would not have been obliged to now.

Don't come back for your trunks. I will send them."

That took him off his feet entirely. He had in mind a scene in which, after repentance and apologies on my part, he would graciously consent to forgive me. Incidentally it would mean the banishment of Jean. Dismissed in that way, there was nothing for him to do but go. With a suitcase in either hand he started for the hotel. Years later he told me that he had put his suitcases on the sand, and sitting down on one of them, had taken stock of himself. For the good part of two hours he sat there, till the sun dropping behind Point Loma, and the chill which followed, reminded him of the pa.s.sing of time. A man can do a great deal of thinking in two hours.

Meanwhile, from the tiptop of the highest of trees poor Jean sent out frantic appeals for help and rescue. However easy it is for cats to climb trees, getting down is different. They have been known to starve to death in one. When dishes of dainties and fish failed to dislodge him more than a limb or two lower, we realized that it was impossible for him to get down, and the maid announced that the sun was setting and the rapidly vanishing twilight called for speed. The highest kind of an extension ladder was borrowed and opened to its utmost capacity. It barely reached the limb below the one to which the frightened cat clung. The slender ladder, swaying somewhat more than was comfortable as one ascended, the tall tree and the dark combined, were not tempting. Several small boys started up very bravely but came down less so. Not one of them got half-way to the top, although I kept raising the price for valour till it reached five dollars, and the terrified Jean increased his appeals for help. There seemed to be no alternative. Putting on my riding breeches I was starting up the ladder when a voice as pitiful as Jean's cracked the silence.

"My G.o.d, Mowgy, come off that ladder!"

Mr. Saltus pushed me aside and started up. He had never been on a ladder before. With his teeth set and three women doing their best to steady it, he finally got to the top, and by stretching his arm to the utmost caught Jean by the tail, and dropped him--not, as he intended, into my arms, but on the top of my head.

The episode was closed. The cat was saved, and by the following morning the bubonic scare _transformed_ itself into a comedy. Descending from the djinn and the hourla of the attic, Mr. Saltus greeted me with the following limerick:--

On the sands where a blonde girl was stopping To the rescue of Jean she came hopping, Waved the hose in the air-- And said "I don't care, If I do get my Snippsikins sopping."

"There," he said, "is an example of an anapaest. If a sprinkling can produce this, next time I will turn out an entire poem. There's nothing like water, and plenty of it, to make genius grow. Give Jean a saucer of cream. No skimmed milk for this." Mr. Saltus laughed and resumed, "You are the first feminine thing to face me and put me to rout--My hat's off to you."

I laughed at this, it seemed so ridiculous.

"Let me tell you a story," he went on. "There was before your day a prize-fighter,--a powerful fellow,--six feet of brawn. He could knock anyone into a c.o.c.ked hat in the first round. Even his friends were rather afraid of him. One day a delegation of them went to his house to suggest a new fight. His wife was opposed to this. She wanted him to accompany her on a vacation. It was she who met the friends at the door, and told them definitely that her husband was going to take a rest and would not consider their offers. They turned away, but one of the party,--a Peeping Tom sort of a chap, crept back, and looked in through a crack in the shutters. What he saw was a revelation. The prize-fighter was emerging from under the bed.

The frail sc.r.a.p of a wife was standing in the center of the room, with one slender finger upraised. Shaking this she said, 'Stay where you are till they are a safe distance off. I'll kill you if you come out before.'"

This story, whether he made it up or not, amused Mr. Saltus enormously, and when thereafter, entering into the spirit of it, I would put up a finger, it never failed to make him laugh like a boy. The playfulness which had been inhibited so long had full fling now, and he adored to have me pretend I was going to chastise him for something, declaring, as he afterward put in his copy, "When a woman ceases to quarrel with a man she ceases to love him." With his almost uncanny intuition he got the motive underlying every act.

It was during this spring that the framework on which Mr. Saltus afterward built "The Gardens of Aphrodite" grew. Much of it was written when sitting in the rose garden under a palm tree, the offending Jean purring at his feet. Notes on which he constructed "Oscar Wilde,--An Idler's Impression,"

were gathered together as well, and reminiscences used in "Parna.s.sians Personally Encountered" were jotted down and put into shape to use.

There was something soothing and yet stimulating in the song of the surf on the sands, reaching him as it did through the branches of acacia trees. In "the enchanted garden," as he called the small green handkerchief-like patch of gra.s.s, Mr. Saltus evolved, co-ordinated and put in shape the material from which he drew largely ever after.

A few weeks later he was en route for New York, to break up such home as he had there and return to the coast with his things, having decided to make California his home indefinitely. A ranch in the middle part of the State welcomed me. It was a heavenly spot,--no neighbors within miles, and plenty of animals and flowers for company.

From that ranch came two little creatures,--one particularly, destined to have a larger place and a greater influence in Mr. Saltus' life than most of the humans he encountered. Taken from their respective mothers at an age when their eyes were just open, so young that they had to learn to lap by nibbling my fingers dipped in milk, Fifi the kitten and Toto the shepherd dog puppy were annexed from a neighbor, and given to one ready to shield them with her life.

In the late summer these little ones with Auntie and myself were settled again. This time it was in a large house in Los Angeles with a delightful garden, situated in what was then the extreme upper limit of the city.

Beyond it were vacant fields. Hollywood was in the distance. It was taken with a view to giving Mr. Saltus a bed-room with study adjoining in a wing of the house, off by itself, and shortly after we moved in, he joined us.

Mr. Saltus was not an easy, if an interesting man to keep house with.

Ringing of the telephone sent him almost into hysterics. Trades people and servants talking under his windows incited him to murder.