Peter Whiffle/Chapter 5
Notwithstanding that Peter occupied an undue share of my waking thoughts for the next few days, perhaps a week went by before I found it convenient to seek him out again. One afternoon, I shook myself free from other entertainments and made my way in a taxi-auto to the apartment in the street near the Rue Blanche. The concierge, who was knitting at a little window adjacent to the door, informed me that to the best of her belief Monsieur Whiffle was athome. Venturing to operate the ascenseur alone, I was somewhat proud of my success in reaching the fourth floor without accident. Standing before Peter's door, I could hear the sound of a woman's voice, singing Manon's farewell to her little table:
Qui nous réunit si souvent!
Adieu, notre petite table,
Si grande pour nous cependant.
Si peu de place en se serrant.
The voice was a somewhat uncertain soprano with a too persistent larmoyante quality. When it ceased, I pressed the button and the door was opened by Peter, in violet and grey striped pyjamas and Japanese straw sandals with purple velvet straps across his toes.
Van Vechten! he cried. It's you! We've been home all day. Clara's been singing.
So the voice was Clara's. She sat, indeed, on the long piano bench—the piano was an acquisition since my last visit—, also slightly clad. She was wearing, to be exact, a crepe de chine night-dress. Her feet were bare and her hair was loose but, as the day was cool, she had thrown across her shoulders a black Manila shawl, embroidered with huge flowers of Chinese vermilion and magenta.
How are you, Mr. Van Vechten? she asked, extending her hand. I'll get some tea. Her manner, I noted, was more ingratiating than it had been the day we met at Martha's.
Nothing whatever was said about the situation, if there was a situation. For my part, I may say that I was entirely unaccustomed to walking into an apartment at five o'clock in the afternoon and discovering the host in pyjamas, conversing intimately with a lightly-clad lady, who, a week earlier, I had every reason to believe, had been only a casual acquaintance. The room, too, had been altered. The piano, a Pleyel baby grand, occupied a space near the window and George Moore was sitting on it, finding it an excellent point of vantage from which to scan the happenings in the outside world. Naturally his back was turned and he did not get up, taking his air of indifference from Peter and Clara or, perhaps, they had taken their air from him. The note-books had disappeared, although a pile of miscellaneous volumes, on top of which I spied Jean Lombard's l'Agonie, still occupied the corner. The table was covered with a cloth and the remains of a lunch, which had evidently consisted of veal kidneys, toast, and coffee. I detected the odour of Cœur de Jeannette and presently I descried a brûle-parfum, a tiny jade dragon, valiantly functioning. A pair of long white suède gloves and a black hat with a grey feather decorated the clock and candelabra on the mantelshelf, and a black and white check skirt, a pair of black silk stockings, and low patent-leather lady's shoes in trees were also to be seen, lying over a chair and on the floor.
Peter, however, attempted no explanations. Indeed, none was required, except perhaps for a catechumen. He began to talk immediately, in an easy conversational tone, evidently trying to cover my confusion. His manner reminded me that an intelligent Negro, who had written many books and met many people, had once told me that he was always obliged to spend at least ten minutes putting new white acquaintances at their ease, making them feel that it was unnecessary for them to put him at his ease. It is a curious fact that the man in an embarrassing situation is seldom as embarrassed as the man who breaks in upon it.
Peter asked many questions about what I had been doing, inquired about Richards, whom he avowed he liked—they had not, I afterwards recalled, exchanged more than three words—, and concluded with a sort of rhapsody on Clara's voice, which he pronounced magnificently suited to the new music.
Presently Clara herself came back into the room, bearing a tray with a pot of tea, toast and petits fours. She placed her burden on the piano bench while she quickly swept the débris from the table. Then she transferred the tea service to the unoccupied space and we drew up our chairs.
Where have you been? asked Clara. Martha says she hasn't seen you. Will you have one lump or two?
Two. You know, when one comes to Paris for the first time—
I took Van Vechten about a bit the other night, Peter broke in. I think I forgot to tell you. We've had so much to talk about. . . .
Clara interrupted the shadow of an anserine smile to nibble a pink cake. Her legs protruded at an odd angle and I caught myself looking at her thick ankles.
You're looking at my legs! she exclaimed. You mustn't do that! I have very ugly legs.
But they're very sympathetic! cried Peter. Don't you think they're sympathetic, Van Vechten?
I assured him that I did and we went on talking, a little constrainedly, I thought, about nothing in particular, until, at length, Peter asked Clara if she would sing again. Without waiting for a reply, he seated himself before the piano and began the prelude to Manon's air in the Cours la Reine scene and Clara, without rising, sang:
Aussi bien qu'une souveraine;
On s'incline, on baise mes mains,
Car par la beauté je suis reine!
Now her voice had lost the larmoyante quality, which evidently was a part of her bag of tricks for more emotional song, but it had acquired a hard brilliancy which was even more disagreeable to the ear. She had also, I remarked, no great regard for the pitch and little, if any, expressiveness, Nevertheless, Peter wheeled around, after an accompaniment which was even less sympathetic to me than Clara's legs, to exclaim:
Superb! I want her to study Isolde.
Peter doesn't understand, explained Clara, that you must begin with the lighter parts. If I sang Isolde now I would have no voice in five years. Isolde will come later. I can sing Isolde after I have lost my voice. My first reles will be Manon, Violetta, and Juliette. It's old stuff, perhaps, but it doesn't'injure the voice, and the voice is my first consideration. Now I wouldn't sing Salome if they offered me 500 francs a night.
Did you hear about Adelina Patti? asked Peter. She is a good Catholic. She went to a performance of Salome at the Châtelet and while Destinn was osculating the head of Jochanaan she dropped to her knees in her loge and began to pray!
I don't blame her, said Clara. It's rotten and immoral, Salome—not the play, I don't mean that, but the music, rotten, immoral music, ruinous to the voice. Patti was probably praying God for another Rossini. Strauss's music will steal ten years from Destinn's career.
Peter eyed her with adoration. After a few more remarks, I made my departure, both of them urging me to come again at any time. Peter had not said one word about his writing, I reflected, as I walked down the stairs, and he had been very exaggerated in his praise of Clara's meagre talents.
And I did not go back. I did not see Peter again that summer; I did not see him again, in fact, for nearly six years. My further adventures, which included a trip to London, to Munich, where I attended the Wagner and Mozart festivals, to Holland and Belgium, were sufficiently diverting but, as they have no bearing on Peter's history, I shall not relate them now. They will fall into their proper chapters in my autobiography, which Alfred A. Knopf will publish in two volumes in the fall of 1936.
Although I did not learn the facts I am about to catalogue until a much later date—some of them, indeed, not until after Peter's death—this seems as good a place as any to tell what I know of his early life. He was born June 5, 1885, in Toledo, Ohio. He never told his age to any one and I only discovered it after his death. If an inquiry were made concerning it, it was his custom to counter with another question: How old do you think I am? and then to add one year to the reply, thus insuring credence. So I have heard him give himself ages varying from eighteen to forty-five, but he was only thirty-four when he died in 1919.
His father was cashier in a bank, a straight, serious, plain sort of man, of the kind that is a prop to a small town, looked up to and respected, asked whether an election will have an effect on stock values, and whether it is better to illuminate one's house with gas or electricity. His mother was a small woman with a pleasant face and red hair which she parted in the centre. Kindliness she occasionally carried almost to the point of silliness. She was somewhat garrulous, too, but she was wellread, not at all ignorant, and at surprising moments gave evidence of possessing a small stock of common sense. I think Peter inherited a good deal of his quality from his mother, who was a Fotheringay of West Chester, Pennsylvania. I met her for the first time soon after her husband's death. She was wearing, in addition to a suitable mourning garment, five chains of Chinese beads and seemed moderately depressed.
Peter's resemblance to Buridan's donkey (it will be remembered that the poor beast wavered between the hay and the water until he starved to death) began with his very birth. He could not, indeed, decide whether he would be born or not. The family physician, by the aid of science and the knife, decided the matter for him. Soon thereafter he often hesitated between the milk-bottle and the breast. There was, doubtless, a certain element of restlessness and curiosity connected with this vacillation, a desire to miss nothing in life. It is possible that the root of this aggressive instinct might have been deracinated but Mrs. Whiffle, with a foresense of the decrees of the most modern motherhood, held no brief for suppressed desires. Baby Peter was always permitted to choose, at least nearly always, and so, as he grew older, his mania developed accordingly. A decision actually caused him physical pain, often made him definitely ill. He would pause interminably before two toys in a shop, or at any rate until his mother bought both of them for him. He could never decide whether to go in or go out, whether to play horse or to cut out pictures. His mother has told me that on one occasion she discovered this precocious child (at the age of twelve) in the library of a Toledo bibliophile (she was in the house as a luncheon guest) with the Sonnets of Pietro Aretino in one hand and Fanny Hill in the other. He could not make up his mind from which he would derive the most pleasure. In this instance, his maternal parent intervened and took both books away from him.
Otherwise, aside from various slight illnesses, his childhood was singularly devoid of incident. Because he hummed bits of tune while at play, his mother decided that he must be musical and sent him to an instructor of the piano. The first six months were drudgery for Peter but as soon as he began to read music easily the skies cleared for him. He never became a great player but he played easily and well, much better than I imagined after hearing his rather bombastic accompaniments to Clara's singing. Of books he was an omnivorous reader. He read every volume—some of them two or three times—in the family library, which included, of course, the works of Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and Sir Walter Scott, Emerson's Essays, Bulwer-Lytton, Owen Meredith's Lucile, that long narrative poem called Nothing to Wear, Artemus Ward's Panorama, Washington Irving, Longfellow, Whittier, Thoreau, Lowell, and Hawthorne, and among the moderns, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, F. Hopkinson Smith, F. Marion Crawford, Richard Harding Davis, George W. Cable, Frank Stockton, H. C. Bunner, and Thomas Nelson Page. Peter once told me that his favourite books when he was fourteen or fifteen years old were Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and H. B. Fuller's The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani. The latter made a remarkable impression on him, when he first discovered it at the age of fifteen, not that he fully appreciated its ironic raillery but it seemed to point out the pleasure to be apprehended from pleasant places. He named a cat of the period, a regal yellow short-haired tom, after the Prorege of Arcopia. The house library exhausted, the public library offered further opportunities for browsing and it was there that he made the acquaintance of Gautier, in translation, of course. He also found it possible to procure—though not at the public library—and he devoured with avidity—he has asserted that they had an extraordinary effect in awakening his imagination—Nick Carter, Bertha M. Clay, and Golden Days. For a period of four or five years, in spite of all protests, although he had never heard of the vegetarians, he subsisted entirely on a diet of cookies soaked in hot milk. He had a curious inherent dislike for spinach and it was characteristic of his father that he ordered the dish to appear on the table every day until the boy tasted a morsel. In after life, Peter could never even look at a dish of spinach. He cared nothing at all for outdoor sports. Games of any kind, card or osculatory, he considered nuisances. At a party, while the other children were engaged in the pleasing pastime of post office, he was usually to be found in a corner, reading some book. The companionship of boys and girls of his own age meant very little to him. He liked to talk to older people and found special pleasure in the company of the Reverend Horatio Wallace, a clergyman of the Dutch Reformed Church, who had visited New York. This reverend doctor was violently opposed to art museums, novels, and symphony orchestras, but he talked about them and he was the only person Peter knew in Toledo who did. He railed against the sins of New York and the vices of Paris but, also, he described them.
In the matter of a university education, his mother took a high hand, precluding all discussion and indecision by sending him willy-nilly to Williams. Her brother had been a Williams man and she prayed that Peter might like to be one too. The experiment was not unsuccessful. The charm in Peter's nature began to expand at college and he even made a few friends, the names of most of which he could no longer remember, when he spoke to me of his college days some years afterwards. He realized that the reason he had made so few in Toledo was that the people of Toledo were not his kind of people. They lived in a world which did not exist for him. They lived in the world of Toledo while he lived in the world of books. At college, he began to take an interest in personalities; he began to take an interest in life itself. He studied French—it was the only course he thoroughly enjoyed—and he began to read Gautier in the original. Then, at the instigation of a particularly intelligent professor, he passed on to Barbey d'Aurevilly, to Huysmans, to Laforgue, and to Mallarmé.
His holidays were always a torture for the boy. Should he accept one of several invitations to visit his lad friends or should he go home? One Easter vacation, Monkey Rollins had asked him to visit him in Providence while Teddy Quartermouse had bidden him to enjoy himself in New York. Peter pondered. He liked Monkey's sisters but a week in Providence meant, he knew, dancing, bridge, and golf, all of which he hated. Teddy was not as companionable as Monkey and he had no sisters, but in New York both indoor and outdoor sports could be avoided. Peter helplessly examined both sides of the shield until Monkey settled the question—by coming after him, helping him pack, and carrying him triumphantly to the railway station.
No sooner, however, had he arrived in Providence than he knew that it would be impossible for him to remain there. He did not find Monkey's mother very agreeable, rather she was too agreeable. The vegetables were cooked in milk—the Rollins family had previously lived in Missouri. This, of course, was not to be borne. Worst of all, there was a parrot, a great, shrieking, feathered beast, with koprolagniac tastes. Nevertheless, he exerted himself at dinner, giving a lengthy and apocryphal description to Mrs. Rollins of his performance of a concerto for kettle-drum with the college band, and doubtless made a distinctly favourable impression on the entire family. Even the parrot volunteered: Hurrah for you, kid, you're some guy! as the procession trooped into the library, which one of the girls referred to as "the carnegie," for coffee. While Caruso negotiated Celeste Aida on the phonograph, Peter, after whispering an appropriate excuse to Monkey, contrived to slip upstairs. He looked about on the landing in the upper hallway for a telephone but, naturally, it wasn't there. Then he reconnoitred and discovered that by climbing out over the porch and making a ten foot jump he would land very neatly in a bed of crocuses. This he did and, scrambling to his feet, made straight for an apothecary's coloured lights, which he saw in the distance. The sequel is simple. In fifteen minutes, by way of the kitchen, he was back in the library; in thirty minutes, he had the family in roars of laughter; in forty-five minutes, Papa Rollins began to yawn and guessed it was bed-time; Mama Rollins called in the maid to cover the parrot and arrange the fire. 'Monkey said he thought he would play a game of something or other with Peter. The girls giggled. In exactly an hour, there was a ring at the door and the maid reappeared in the library, with a yellow envelope addressed to Peter. He hastily tore it open, trying to look portentous. Everybody else did look portentous. Peter handed the telegram to Monkey, who read it aloud: Your mother would like to shake your hand before she takes the ether tomorrow morning. The message was dated from New York and the signature was that of a famous surgeon. Mrs. Rollins was the first to break a moment of appalling silence: There's a train in fifteen minutes. It's the last. Quick, Monkey, the motor! Peter cried, Send my things to the Manhattan, as he jerked on his coat. He caught the train and some hours later he and Teddy Quartermouse might have been observed amusing themselves with highballs and a couple of girls at Rector's.
In time, college days passed. Peter confessed to me that the last two years were an awful strain but he stuck them out, chiefly because he could not think of anything else he wanted to do. His real mental agony began with his release. He dreaded life and most of all he dreaded work. His father, although well-to-do, had a sharply defined notion that a boy who would not work never amounted to anything. His peculiar nature sometimes asserted itself in ludicrous and fantastically exaggerated demonstrations of this theory. Once, for example, during a summer vacation spent in the country, he insisted that Peter skin a pig. You have an opportunity to learn now and you never can tell when you may have to skin another pig. When the time comes you will be prepared. His father, Peter returned from college discovered, was in no mood to tolerate vacillation or dawdling. But Peter seemed to feel no urge of any kind. I not only did not want to 'do anything, he explained, there was nothing that I wanted to do. Here his father, with whom the boy had never been particularly sympathetic (motive of the Œdipus complex by the flutes in the orchestra), asserted his authority and put him in the bank. Peter loathed the bank. He hated his work, cutting open envelopes early in the morning, sorting out bills for collection, and then, on his bicycle, making the collections. In the afternoon, an endless task at the adding machine seemed Dantesque and, at night, the sealing of envelopes was even more tiresome than opening them in the morning. There was, however, one mitigating circumstance in connection with the last job of the day, the pleasure afforded by the rich odour of the hot sealing-wax. His pay was $9 a week; he has told me that probably he was not worth it! Fortunately he lived at home and was not asked to pay board. He bought books with the $9 and "silly things." When I asked him what he meant by silly things, he replied: O! Rookwood pottery, and alligators, and tulip bulbs: I don't remember, things like that! One day, he promised his father that he would give up smoking if that one would present him with a gold cigarette-case!
There came a morning when he could not make up his mind to get up. His mother called him several times in vain. He arrived at the bank half an hour late and was reprimanded. His father spoke about his tardiness at lunch. At this period he was inclined to be sulky. He started off on his bicycle in the afternoon but he did not go to the bank. He rode along by the river, stopping at a low saloon in the outlying districts, where the workmen of some factory were wont to congregate in the evening, and drank a great many glasses of beer. Cheered somewhat thereby, the thought of facing his father no longer exasperated him. The big scene took place before dinner. Had it not been for the beer, he would have been obliged to act his part on an empty stomach.
Are you no good at all? Thus his father's baritone aria began. Are you worthless? I'm not going to support you. Suppose you had to pay your own board. I can't keep a son of mine in the bank because he is a son of mine unless he does some work. Certainly not. How long are you going to dawdle? What are you going to do? Et cetera, et cetera, with a magnificent cadenza and a high E to top off with. Sustained by the beer, Peter reported to me that he rather enjoyed the tune. He said nothing. Dinner was eaten in complete silence and then the paternal parent went to bed, a discouraged and broken man. He seemed senescent, although he was not yet fifty. After dinner, Peter's mother spoke to him more gently but she also was full of warning and gloomy foreboding: What is it you want to do, my son? . . . I don't know. I'm not sure that I want to do anything. . . . But you must do something. You wouldn't be manly if you didn't do something. It is manly to work. A day will come when my son will want to marry and then he will need money to support his dear wife. Etc. Etc. Peter reported to me that he seemed to have heard this music before. He had not yet read The Way of All Flesh; I doubt if it were published at this time, but Ernest Pontifex would have been a sympathetic figure to him. Peter knew the meaning of the word cliché, although the sound and the spelling of it were yet strange to him.
When he got to his room certain words his mother had spoken rang in his ears. Why, he asked himself, should men support women? Art is the only attraction in life and women never do good work in art. They are useless in the world aside from their functions of sex and propagation. Why should they not work so that the males could be free to think and dream? Then it occurred to him that he would be furious if any woman supported his father; that could not be borne, to have his father at home all day while his mother was away at work!
Nevertheless, he went to sleep quite happy, he has assured me, and slept soundly through the night, although he dreamed of a pair of alligators, one of which was pulling at his head and the other at his feet, while a man with an ax rained blows on his stomach. In the morning his affairs seemed to be in a desperate state. He could not bear the idea of getting up and going to the bank and yet there was nothing else he wanted to do. Of one thing only he was sure: he did not want to support himself. He did not, so far as he was able to make out, want to do anything! He wanted his family to stop bothering him. Was no provision made in this world for such as he?
Certainly, no provision was made for him in Toledo, Ohio. The word temperament was still undiscovered there. His negative kind of desire was alien to American sympathy. Of so much, he was aware. Adding machines and collections awaited him. He went to the bank where the paying teller again reprimanded him. So did one of the clerks. So did one of the directors, a friend of his father. He staggered through another day, which he helped along a little by returning at noon with all his notes uncollected. Nobody wants to pay today, he explained. . . . But it's your business to make them pay. . . . There was cold ham, cold slaw, and rice pudding for lunch. His mother had been crying. His father was stern.
During the rice pudding, he made a resolution, which he kept. From that day on he worked as he had never worked before. Everybody in the bank was astonished. His father was delighted. His mother said, I told you so. I know my son. . . . He stopped buying books and silly things and, when he had saved enough money, he took a train to New York without bidding the bank officials or his family good-bye. Once there, his resolution again failed him. He had no desires, or if he had, one counteracted another. His money was almost gone and he was forced to seek for work but everywhere he went he was refused. He lived at a Mills Hotel. He retained a strange fondness for his mother and began to write her, asking her to address him care of general delivery.
At last he secured a position at a soda fountain in a drug-store. He worked there about a week. One night the place got on his nerves to such an extent that he wanted to break the glasses and squirt fizz at every customer. To amuse himself, therefore, he contrived to inject a good dose of castor oil or cantharides into every drink he served. The proprietor of the shop was snoopy, Peter told me, and after watching me out of the corner of his eye for some time, he gave me a good kick, which landed me in the middle of the street. He tossed six dollars, the remainder of my wages, after me. It may appear strange to you but I have never been happier in my life than I was that night with six dollars in my possession and the satisfactory knowledge that I would never see that store again.
During the next three weeks, Peter did not find any work. I doubt if he tried to find any. He often slept in Madison Square or Bryant Park with a couple of newspapers over him and a couple under him. He lived on the most meagre rations, some of which he collected in bread lines. He even begged at the kitchen doors of the large hotels and asked for money on the street. He has told me, however, that he was neither discouraged nor unhappy. He felt the most curious sense of uplift, as if he were suffering martyrdom, as, indeed, he was. Life seemed to have left him out of its accounting, to have made no arrangements for his nature. He had no desire to work, in fact his repugnance for work was his strongest feeling, and yet, it seemed, he could procure no money without working. He was willing, however, to go without the things he wanted, really to suffer, rather than work. I just did not want to do anything, he has said. It was a fixed idea. It was my greatest joy to talk about the social unrest, the rights of the poor, the wicked capitalist, and the ideas of Karl 'Marx with the man in the street, the real man in the street, the man who never went anywhere else. During this period, he continued to write his mother what she afterwards described as bright, clever letters. I have seen a few of them, full of the most astounding energy and enthusiasm, and a vague philosophy of quietism. She wrote back, gently chiding him, letters of resignation but still letters of advice, breathing the hope that he might grow into a respected citizen of Toledo, Ohio. She did not understand Peter but she loved him and would have gone to New York to see him, had not a restraining hand burked her. Mr. Whiffle was determined to hold no more traffic with his son. He refused, indeed, to allow Peter's name to be mentioned in his presence. Toledo talked with intensity behind his back but Mr. Whiffle did not know that. Hard as he tried not to show it, he was disappointed: it was impossible for him to reconcile his idea of a son with the actuality. Mrs. Whiffle's first mild suggestion that she might visit Peter was received with a terrible hurricane of resentment. She did not mention the subject again. She would have gone anyway if Peter had asked her to come but he never did.
Through an Italian, whom he met one day in Bryant Park, Peter next secured a position as a member of the claque at the Opera. Every night, with instructions when to applaud, he received either a seat in the dress circle or a general admission ticket. There was also a small salary attached to the office. He did not care about the salary but he enjoyed going to the Opera which he had never before attended. He heard Manon Lescaut, La Damnation de Faust, Tristan, Lohengrin, Tosca, Roméo et Juliette, and Fedora. But his favourite nights were the nights when Olive Fremstad sang. He heard her as Venus in Tannhauser, as Selika in l'Africaine, as Carmen, and he heard her in that unique performance of Salome on January 22, 1907. One night he became so interested in watching her that he forgot to applaud the singer who had paid the claque. His delinquency was reported by one of his colleagues and the next evening, when he went to the bar on Seventh Avenue where the claque gathered to receive its orders, he was informed that his services would no longer be required.
After another three weeks of vagrancy, he found another job, again through a park acquaintance. He has told me that it was the only work he ever enjoyed. He became a "professor" in a house of pretty ladies. His duty was to play the piano. Play us another tune, professor, the customers would say, as they ordered beer at a dollar a bottle, and Peter would play a tune. Occasionally one of the customers would ask him to take a drink and he would order a sloe gin fizz, which Alonzo, the sick-looking waiter, a consumptive with a wife and five children to support, would bring in a sticky glass, which he deposited with his long dirty fingers on the ledge of the piano. Occasionally some man, waiting for a girl, was left alone with him, and would talk with him about the suspender business or the base-ball game, subjects which perhaps might not have interested him elsewhere but which glowed with an enthralling fire in that incongruous environment. The men preferred tunes like Lucia, the current Hippodrome success from Neptune's Daughter, or songs from The Red Mill, in which Montgomery and Stone were appearing at the Knickerbocker, or I don't care. This last was always demanded when a certain girl, who imitated Eva Tanguay, was in the room. But the women, when they were alone in the house, just before dinner in the late afternoon, or on a dull evening, always asked him to play Hearts and Flowers, Massenet's Elégie, or the garden scene from Faust, and then they would drink whisky and cry and tell him lies about their innocent girlhood. There was even some literary conversation. One of the girls read Georges Ohnet and another admired the work of Harris Merton Lyon and talked about it. Peter found it very easy to remain pure.
He received two dollars a night from the house, and, occasionally, tips. Out of this he managed to rent a hall bedroom on West Thirty-ninth Street and to pay for his lunches. The Madame provided him with his dinner. Breakfast he never ate. He passed his mornings in bed and his afternoons in the park, usually with a book.
A French girl named Blanche, whom he liked particularly, died one night. She was taken to a funeral chapel the next morning. The other girls went about the house snivelling and most of them sent flowers to the chapel. Blanche's coffin was well banked with carnations and tube-roses. The Madame sent a magnificent standing floral-piece, a cross of white roses and, on a ribbon, the inscription, May our darling rest in peace. Blanche wore a white lace dress and looked very beautiful and very innocent as she lay dead, Peter thought. Her mother came from a distant city and there was a priest. The two days preceding Blanche's burial, the girls passed in tears and prayers and sentimental remarks about how good she was. At night they worked as usual and Peter played the piano. It was very much like the Maison Tellier, he reflected.
With Peter, change was automatic and axiomatic, but he might have remained in the house a very long time, as he has assured me that he was perfectly contented, but for one of those accidents that never happen in realistic novels but which constantly happen in life. Mrs. Whiffle's brother, the graduate of Williams, erstwhile mentioned, a quaint person, who lived at Rochester, was a rich bachelor. He was also a collector, not of anything special, just a collector. He collected old andirons and doorknobs and knockers. He also collected postmarks and homespun coverlets and obsolete musical instruments. Occasionally he even collected books and in this respect his taste was unique. He collected first editions of Ouida, J. T. Trowbridge, Horatio Alger, Jr., G. A. Henty, and Oliver Optic. He had complete sets of first editions of all these authors and, unlike most book collectors, he read them with a great deal of pleasure. He especially enjoyed Cudgo's Cave, a novel he had devoured so many times that he had found it necessary to have the volume rebound, thus subtracting from its value if it ever comes up at an auction sale.
This uncle had always been prejudiced against Peter's father and, of late years, this prejudice had swollen into a first-rate aversion. Visits were never exchanged. He considered himself an amateur of parts and Peter's father, a sordid business grub. Mrs. Whiffle, however, whose whole nature was conciliatory, continued to write long letters to her brother. Recently she had turned to him for sympathy and had found a well of it. Mr. Fotheringay was ready to sympathize with anybody who had fled from old man Whiffle's tyranny. For the first time he began to take an interest in the boy whom he had never seen. His imagination fed on his sister's letters until it seemed to him that this boy was the only living being he had ever loved. Peter had been working among the daughters of joy about two months when Mr. Fotheringay died. When his will, made only a few weeks before his death, was read, it was discovered that he had left his collections to Williams College with the proviso that they be suitably housed, kept intact, and called the John Alden Fotheringay Collection. Williams College, I believe, was unable to meet the terms of the bequest and, as a result, through a contingent clause, they were sold. Not long ago, I ran across one of the books in Alfred F. Goldsmith's shop on Lexington Avenue in New York. It was a copy of J. T. Trowbridge's The Satin-Wood Box and it was easily identified by Mr. Fotheringay's bookplate, which represented an old man counting his gold, with the motto, In hoc signo vinces. After this department of the estate had been provided for in the will, a very considerable sum of money, well invested, remained. This was left to Peter without proviso.
As he never expected letters from any one except his mother, he seldom visited the post office and this particular communication from Mr. Fotheringay's lawyers, forwarded by Mrs. Whiffle, lay in a general delivery box for nearly a week before he called. He answered by telegraph and the next morning he received a substantial check at his hall bedroom address. The first thing he bought, he has told me, was a book, an extra-illustrated copy of Mademoiselle de Maupin, from Brentano's in Union Square. Then he went to a tailor and was measured for clothes. Next he visited Brooks Brothers, on Twenty-second Street and Broadway, and purchased a ready-made suit, a hat, shoes and stockings, shirts, and neckties. He took a bath, shaved, had his hair cut, and, dressed in his new finery, embarked for the Knickerbocker in a taxi. He walked into the bar under Maxfield Parrish's King Cole and ordered a Martini cocktail. Then he ate a dinner, consisting of terrapin, roast canvasback, an alligator pear, and a quart or two of Pontet Canet. It was during the course of this dinner that it occurred to him, for the first time in his life, that he would become an author. Four days later he sailed for Paris.