Edgar Saltus: The Man Part 20

"Miaw, Miaw, little Puss."

"Miaw."

"Little fur smoothed down and little taily waving in the air?" (I was always supposed to be a Persian kitten.)

"Miaw."

"Wants to lap up keemy and nibbst fish at the Prince George for your din-din?"

"Miaw!"

"Baby Totesikins love her Pasy and want din-din also? Lift her up to answer."

(Toto lifted in my arms to the telephone, long practice having made her adept.)

"Baby wants nice bickies?"

"Woof! Woof!"

"Loves, Pasy?"

"Woof." (Toto put down.)

"There, little Puffikins, Snippsy orders nice din for both. Says he good old dog Tray. Says he satisfactory scoundrel."

Laughter.

"What are you laughing at?"

"At drivel of the most nauseous kind between a man and a woman. He at least ought to be shot."

Laughter from the other end.

Never until that moment had Mr. Saltus realized what our conversation must sound like to an outsider and an uninitiate. It brought us both up with a jerk. Thereafter Mr. Saltus wrote "tolerance," and, underlining the word, added it to a list he had made.

During the time Mr. Saltus had been alone in New York, one of his greatest distractions and relaxations was taking his daughter Elsie, a debutante, for tea or for luncheon. Tall, graceful, oriental in colouring like himself, he not only admired her for her beauty but enjoyed her new and refreshing angle on life. Chatting with her was both restful and stimulating to him. In one sense she was a complete stranger to him, having lived apart for so many years. In another, she was so close that everything concerning her, no matter how slight, was of profound importance. As he had no near relatives and saw nothing whatever of his many cousins, she represented the only tie of blood in the world.

The circ.u.mstances were unfortunate. Living with a sister of her mother's, who, obviously, could not be expected to welcome him with outstretched arms, she met her father as a rule in restaurants. That was formal and less conducive to intimacy than seeing a parent in moments of rest and relaxation. Accepting this as the inevitable result of things, Mr. Saltus looked forward to the time when in a home of her own he would feel free to visit his daughter early, often and informally, and reach the bedrock of her very charming self. This seemed about to be realized, when, soon after her debut, she became engaged to one of the finest, most dependable and altogether delightful of men,--J. Theus Munds,--and a date for the wedding was set.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MRS. J. THEUS MUNDS

The Daughter of

EDGAR SALTUS

And Her Little Son]

Any idea of going to the wedding reception was beyond Mr. Saltus' wildest dreams. Added to his abhorrence of crowds and festivities he was too ill for such an affair. A look into the church was the most he was capable of.

Had father and daughter understood one another better, what followed need never have happened. Invitations were sent to us--but for the church only.

Cards to the reception were omitted. A whip lash across his face would have hurt Mr. Saltus less. It bowled him over. Nothing would have induced him to go in any event, but the knowledge that he, her father, was purposely omitted was a knife in the back. Appreciating why his presence would have been not only unwelcome but an embarra.s.sment, he expected others to have understood that he would have looked upon the invitation as an act of courtesy only.

Vainly I tried to put it before him as I saw it, explaining and extenuating the omission. It failed to have the desired effect. Mr. Saltus took it that I, too, was turning against him. It was a hopeless muddle. Had his daughter been older at the time, and more experienced, and had she known him better, it could have been avoided so easily. Had she gone to him explaining the situation, he would not only have urged her to omit him but entered sympathetically into her viewpoint. The invitations were not sent out by her, and she could not, without directly offending her aunt, have given one over her head. Acting as many another has when in doubt, she did nothing and was silent, believing that in the years to come it would be explained and made right between them. Mr. Saltus never overlooked it. Not until he lay in his coffin and that closed forever, did she come under the same roof with him again.

The following winter Mr. Saltus just escaped pneumonia, and was weakened by its effects, so we decided to try housekeeping again. It was a brave venture. He wanted his meals when he wanted them. A set time for anything irritated him beyond endurance. Handicapped by a wife who frequently forgot that the ordering depended upon herself, and who was lost in abstract s.p.a.ce when she should have found her way to the grocers or even to the telephone in time, it was beginning under difficulties.

Having a fancy for the atmosphere of Columbia University, which was his Alma Mater, we took an apartment in The Arizona, 508 West 114th Street, directly opposite the oval. It savoured of the country out there, adding the convenience of being between Riverside Drive and Morningside Park, where, his increasing lameness permitting, Mr. Saltus was able to go and rest. With the realization of his age and infirmities his desire to get away from the world increased by leaps and bounds, for not only did he wish to avoid people, but he even disliked to have them know where he lived.

Long accustomed to being taken for my father, that did not trouble him.

But walking painfully with a stick, and stopping at intervals to take peppermint for the acute indigestion, which attacked him when in motion, humiliated him intensely. The sympathy in the faces of those who pa.s.sed him, a sympathy sometimes expressed in words, was more agonizing even than the pain. In order to keep his home a secret retreat, where, like a wounded animal, he could hide in silence, he continued giving the Manhattan Club as his address.

While formerly Mr. Saltus had enjoyed having me take a walk with him, he now avoided it. Toto only was permitted to accompany him.

"My G.o.d," he would exclaim when questioned, "I may be a cripple, but I am not blind. I can see what people are thinking--'That poor girl tied to an old derelict!'"

Ridiculous as this was, Mr. Saltus could not be persuaded out of it. For the same reason he refused to get into a street car with me. To sit, and let me stand beside him, as might happen if the car were crowded, was a chance he did not mean to take.

Specialists diagnosed his trouble as Reynous disease, an affliction most unusual in this part of the world,--of slow growth, but leading inevitably to a wheeled chair. The prospect appalled him. My father had been confined to one for many years, and Mr. Saltus knew what it meant.

"Karma has taken my legs from under me," he exclaimed again and again.

I invented cases of cure for him, but in my absence one day he consulted a physician, who had not been coached in the matter, and he told him the truth. The blow was terrific. Realizing that he must keep his mind occupied or go under, he started to write "The Paliser Case." The plot was not new.

It was "The Perfume of Eros" in a new frock. He was not writing so much to create as to fight the constant pain in his legs. His condition was an embarra.s.sing one to his pride. When the pain attacked him, he had to sit down there and then, or fall down. To be compelled to rest on copings, doorsteps or curbstones, as the case might be, was tragic, and yet it was more tragic to remain a prisoner in the house. My mother gave him a small camp chair, and this upon occasions he took with him in case of emergencies.

One specialist after another was called, for between the indigestion and his legs, he was in perpetual torture. Rebellious at first, at what seemed a tragic and trivial end to his eventful life, Mr. Saltus brought his philosophy into concrete use, realizing that the lesson of patience was what he needed most, and was now in a position to acquire. With the acceptance of his afflictions as karma, and adjusting his mind to the idea of the wheeled chair, it lost its power to hurt him. Removing from my bureau a card I had stuck in the gla.s.s, he put it in his. It was a quotation from the Gita, which read:--"Taking as equal pleasure and pain, gain or loss, victory or defeat, thou shalt not incur sin." From that hour he complained no longer, although complications and sorrow piled on in rapid succession.

Before telling of them, another incident should be given in its proper sequence. In giving some of Mr. Saltus' clothes to a tailor for pressing, a letter fell out of one of the pockets. It was a note from his Los Angeles friend Miss S----, of whom he had told me that he had lost all trace. Sent from abroad, it was directed to the Manhattan Club. It was not the simple note or the friendship which angered me at the moment, but his stupid and needless denials regarding it. Although I knew, better than anyone else could have done, how impossible it was for him to face momentary unpleasantness, this was too much. I went to him and said,

"Well, Snipps, you are a clever prevaricator, but in this you have been a plain a.s.s. A spineless jellyfish must give place to it. Judas and Ananias combined could take lessons from you with profit. Here you are ready to cross the river Styx and take the remnants of a misspent life into Avitchi." (The lower astral plane. Its lessons and condition were a subject which tormented Mr. Saltus more than a little. Darkness always appalled him, and he dreaded detention there.)

It was a cruel thrust on my part, said on the impulse of the moment. Mr.

Saltus went white to the lips.

"That you can say such a thing over nothing!" he gasped. "I could not risk the reminders of Dorothy S----, which you would have treated me to had I told you."

His usual comeback about the "subordinate ent.i.ty" and the "submerged It,"

failed him then. The lower astral plane with all its horrors, then uppermost in his mind, was recalled by my chance remark. He went off into hysterics, of so serious a nature that it ended by his going to bed.

Complicating his other disabilities was heart trouble, and he was taking nitroglycerine at the time. There was nothing to do but put a sponge over the incident and make light of it.

This I did, so convincingly that a few days later he began to call:--

"Little Anny feels ill," or "Little Anny wants to come in and sit down beside you,"--"Anny" being his abbreviation for Ananias.

It is a pity that Mr. Saltus was never frank with me over this friendship.

Knowing my faults and limitations as no one else could, he knew also that smallness was not one of them, and that bigness and fineness on his part always engendered in me the desire to meet it in kind.

Had he but told me how greatly Miss S----had ministered to his comfort during my absence in England, when he was ill and alone,--how she had overseen his mending, and, studying the needs of a dyspeptic, had prepared meals for him in her little apartment many a time, I would have been sympathetic.

Miss S---- came into Mr. Saltus' life shortly after his illness in Los Angeles, to which I have referred, and at the moment when he was turning from the material to the spiritual. The understanding of occultism, which came to him in a blinding flash, was such that he could think and talk of little else. Miss S----, whose unusual personality and fluid mind rendered her susceptible to new impacts, was very much interested in what he told her along these lines. As she has put it to me since Mr. Saltus' death, "He came into my life like a Buddha, bringing enlightenment."