Edgar Saltus: The Man Part 23

3.--Mowgy must have her own way entirely and in all things. It makes her ill to be contended with. Besides, her way is usually the best in the end. Save trouble and take it first.

4.--Mowgy can never be questioned. The slightest interrogation irritates her beyond expression. Let her alone. She is too frank for comfort. She will tell you everything sooner or later, and you will wish she hadn't.

5.--Mowgy never remembers anything you ask her to do, unless it is vital or concerns animals. Don't expect it. On the plane where she lives, trifles do not exist. She forgets her own requirements. How can she remember yours?

6.--Mowgy is no housekeeper. Her intentions, not the results, are excellent. If she remembers to order meals be thankful. If she doesn't, be thankful that she is as she is. Keep accounts at the nearest restaurants and shut up.

7.--Mowgy is truthful. Don't ask her a question unless you want the unvarnished truth. It is better to take it varnished.

8.--Mowgy never picks up anything. Absent-mindedness only. Look carefully under chairs and tables before leaving a place. Gold bags, money, jewelry or important papers may be on the floor. She will drop you if you are not on the alert to avoid it.

9.--Mowgy does not live on this plane. Understand that clearly. She cannot be made to conform to the image and likeness of others. Don't try. You would not like her if you could make her over. Let well enough alone.

10.--The foregoing are Mowgy's limitations from the normal viewpoint. You must be abnormal or this will not apply to you. If she takes you it will be to make you over. The process is crucifying but curative. You will wonder how you ever managed to live without her. She has a world of her own, and it is the best world I know of to live in. If you have a chance to get there, make a fight for it. She is the only one of her kind on earth. My blessing, E. S.

Such a doc.u.ment! Though written in jest, there was an undercurrent of seriousness about it. One could not read it unmoved. From that paper alone a psychologist could rebuild Edgar Saltus as he was. To me it is the most characteristic bit of writing he left behind him.

CHAPTER XVIII

The ma.n.u.script of "The Ghost Girl" finished, one might have supposed Mr.

Saltus would take a rest, particularly as his heart became worse so rapidly that nitroglycerin was necessary most of the time. Carl Van Vechten had written of him so charmingly in The Merry-Go-Round, and with so much insight, that Mr. Saltus was encouraged to keep on working, as it was the only way in which he could lose himself for the time.

Sending the ma.n.u.script of "The Ghost Girl" to a typist at Columbia, he suffered another periodical cleaning of his "kennel" and started in on the outline of another novel. That also was an enlarged and amplified rendering of an earlier book, torn to pieces and baked en ca.s.serole with an occult sauce, to its enormous and entire benefit. He was not reminded of the fact that the central situation had been used before. He was borrowing from himself, to be sure, and it was quite permissible, but in other circ.u.mstances I would have urged him to let his original creation stand. As it was I was glad to see him begin it as soon as "The Ghost Girl" was off his hands, realizing that he must have mental food and constant distraction.

The lease on our apartment bothered Mr. Saltus. During the years "things"

had become relative to both of us. They had not only lost all value but they had become transformed into fetters. To get rid of the enc.u.mbrance of "things," and be free to pack a suitcase and go at will, was an intriguing idea to him. In discussing it, and the process of elimination necessary to reach the desired results, we agreed to get rid of all but two articles,--the carved olive-wood table at which he had written most of his books, and the arm-chair in which our little Toto had died. Mr. Saltus did not live to see it, but "things"--all the things we wanted to get rid of and forget,--are scattered now to the winds in every direction,--all but the table and the chair.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARIE SALTUS

Sitting at the Table on which her Husband wrote his Books, burning Incense before a Siamese Buddha and meditating on a Stanza from the Bhagavad Gita.

From a Painting by Hope Bryson, 1925.]

That chair, were it endowed with speech, could tell volumes. The same insight which expressed itself throughout so understandingly in regard to my devotion to Toto did so again, and in so touching a way, that it is the most vivid and enduring memory I have of Mr. Saltus.

The attacks of heart irregularity increasing, it became necessary for me to feel his pulse at intervals and give him the tablets of nitroglycerin. As soon as he felt one coming on he struggled through the hall into my room, to sink into that arm-chair and put his hand out.

"Quick,--quick,--_Mowgy_. _Feel_ my pulse," he said, many and many a time.

"I think I'm sinking. Shall I take my medsy?" as he always called his medicine.

It was a serious responsibility for a novice. Night or day, whenever he felt an attack coming on, he went over the same route, and sank into the same chair. It seemed such a waste of effort, when with a word he could have called me to him. When I suggested as much he smiled, but continued the slow and painful journey through the hall to my room. Upon one occasion the effort to get there was such, that his hands were like ice and his lips blue when he reached me. Sinking into the chair he looked at me, but the hand he extended was not for me to feel his pulse, but to take in mine.

There was no need for words to tell me that he thought he was dying, having used, as he believed, his last ounce of strength to reach his goal. With the touch of his hand came the consciousness, clear as clairvoyance, that it was his intention to die in that particular chair--if he could; and the significance of it brought the tears to my eyes. He was determined that the poignant memories of Toto, a.s.sociated with the chair, should be so interwoven with his own, that her chair as well as her ashes should become indissolubly a part of himself. No touching act of his whole life so stretched out and reached the inner recesses of my being as that one. It wiped out a mult.i.tude of lesser things as the sun obliterates candle light.

With unerring intuition, he knew how this would penetrate more and more with the years, till it would become indelibly stamped on my heart.

This, and one other incident, small in itself yet colossal in its significance, and showing the sweet and sympathetic side of his nature, stand in relief against his subsidiary weaknesses. Shortly before his death, my father had, at Mr. Saltus' request, given him a small canvas, a daub of daisies painted by me at the age of seven, and, crude as it was, retained by an unusually devoted parent. Mr. Saltus was particularly attached to it, and it hung in the room beside his bed. Over and over I begged him to let me destroy the hideous thing, but he was up in arms at the suggestion, replying every time:--

"After a while you can, for no one but Snipps shall have those daisies.

When I die I want you to put them in my hands and have them cremated with me."

The day before his pa.s.sing he referred to it again, exacting a promise that I would do so,--and it was carried out. Though the subject of death was constantly on his tongue, and he outlined the details he wanted carried out for his funeral, it was more in the way of precaution than anything else, that being a marked characteristic of his.

Sitting in the arm-chair by the window in my bed-room the month before his pa.s.sing, he looked out into the splendid immensity of the June sky and chatted freely and happily about the Great Adventure.

"What a lot I must make good next life!" he exclaimed again and again. "I did not realize the verities for so long. The light came late, but I cannot lose it now, and I will build better next time."

His tortured body had become a prison to him.

"I'm tired of these old clothes," he told me over and over again. "I want a new deal, to begin as a little boy once more. But in the interval of freedom on the other side, I want to roam at will through the Halls of Learning, to feed my soul with the food of the mental plane." That was his prayer.

The cynic, the satirist, the jester with life, as the world believed him to be,--false faces all--dissolved, and the real ego emerged, to play hide-and-seek no longer. The timidity, the humility, to conceal which he had a.s.sumed so much that he was not, spoke now:--

"Don't let a curious public come here to gaze at me after I am out of my body. Let me be forgotten. I have done nothing worth while. It will be my mistakes by which I will be remembered, if at all. Since I began to take myself seriously in hand, I have lived in semi-obscurity. Let me go in the same way. Don't put our address in the newspapers for a curious crowd to come here. Have a simple Theosophical service over my old clothes,--and for G.o.d's sake no black anywhere,--on yourself or about the place."

a.s.sured by me that I would do so, he went on:--

"You have suffered so much that you are numb and immune. Let the sunshine in and let the canary sing. Help my departing spirit by your poise and power. Keep everyone away, and bury my ashes with your own hands."

Though talking of his transition almost constantly, Mr. Saltus was very much like the woman who, being asked if she believed in ghosts, said, "No, but I'm dreadfully afraid of them." Every hour or two he would refer to what we would do when he regained his health. Rosy pictures of a rose garden in California were painted, and delightful dreams of sitting under a banyan tree at Mrs. Besant's feet took shape from the smoke of his cigarettes.

Meanwhile the ma.n.u.script of Mr. Saltus' last novel, "The Golden Flood," was sketched in the rough up to the middle of chapter twelve. The words did not drop from his pen as they had once done. Weariness and effort crept in.

Though work to him was still a song, death was the refrain. Midsummer came.

Mr. Saltus, too ill by far to be taken into the country, seemed nevertheless a little better.

He took a fancy for sitting on the roof of our apartment house. Taking up camp chairs and pillows I arranged to make it comfortable for him, and he sat there for hours, reading or chatting with me.

Toward the middle of July unusually hot weather made this lofty sitting room doubly acceptable to him, for our apartment, being on the top of the house, was painfully hot all night, though electric fans were kept running at high speed in his bed-room and study. In these circ.u.mstances the cool air of the roof offered freshness and relief.

Evening after evening we sat there looking down upon the city below, where multiple electric lights and illuminated signs fought for supremacy, and above to where the stars pierced the softness of evening. The height, the silence, and the stars particularly, took us back more than twenty years to the turret of the old Narragansett Casino, from which we had first looked at them together, and we returned there many times in our chats.

"How much we have had to learn since those days," Mr. Saltus remarked the last time we sat there. "It's taken bludgeoning blows, but, after all, we have absorbed something, don't you think?" He sighed.

"Yes," I said. "Our personalities thought they wanted so many things, but our egos knew we wanted only to grow, and so gave us the chance."

The mysteries and beauties of Infinity seemed to fall from the stars like blessings. Sometimes we sat there till midnight chatting over the splendors of s.p.a.ce, cause and cosmos, kalpas of time, and creations yet to be cradled. However far we wandered in dimensional s.p.a.ce, greater and vaster became the vistas beyond.

It is possible that these intimate talks on the abstract gave Mr. Saltus the interior poise to greet the liberating angel who even then was knocking at our door.

The end came suddenly and unexpectedly, and from a cause long supposed to be dormant. It began with a severe chill. Anything can begin that way, and I was not alarmed. Neither was the physician, who, in the absence of Dr.

Darlington, was called in. Other chills, however, of greater intensity, followed in rapid succession. They were frightful, each one seeming as if it would be the last. Septic poisoning, super-induced by an internal abscess, developed into acute Bright's disease. Unable at any time to stand intense pain, he found this agony. Opiates were given, but owing to his absorption being so slow they failed to make it endurable. A hospital was the place to have taken Mr. Saltus, and St. Luke's was at the corner of our street. He could have been moved without much distress and I could have been near him. Though he fought to his utmost against crying out under his pain, at the suggestion of a hospital he shrieked:--

"I won't go to St. Luke's, and if you bring a nurse in my room I will kill her. When Toto died and you were almost out of your mind, I kept you beside me and nursed you. You cannot force me to go."

Much as it would have added to his comfort, and necessary as it was in his case to have specific care, the idea of a hospital had to be abandoned. It was hysteria, but in his condition he had to be humored. Had I brought in a nurse against his will, he, she, or both, would have been found dashed to pieces on the pavement outside; and our apartment being on the top floor, the risk was too great.

Mr. Saltus was not an easy man to take care of, for from no other hand than mine would he take food or medicine, nor would he let me leave his side for a moment. The responsibility of turning into a nurse one with such limited knowledge was not the best thing for him, but it was impossible to do otherwise. To keep his chart, give his medicine and hypodermics, and try to make him believe that he was getting better every moment, was difficult.