Tramping on Life Part 99

"I'm calling you from the stockyards," and I told him what I was doing....

"Come on up to my house, and forget your five carloads of calves ...

they can weather through the last jump, to New York, alone ... what does it matter?... they're going to be butchered in a few days."

Looking about this way and that, to make sure I was unseen, I took my grip in my hand, hopped aboard a street car outside the stockyards, and abandoned my calves to their destiny.

Meunier welcomed me. He invited me to stay at his house for several weeks. His pretty, young wife, smiling whimsically, showed me to a room she had already set in dainty order for me.

Meunier had gone to his office....

Nichi Swartzman, the tall j.a.panese genius, showed up, and Bella Meunier, Nichi, and I ate breakfast together.

Swartzman was, and is, a magnificent talker ... a torch of inspiration burned brightly in his brain, with continual conversational fire.

But he must have his drink. Several of them. Which Laston's wife poured for him abundantly.

After breakfast I sprawled on the floor ... I always sprawl on floors instead of sitting in chairs....

Swartzman and Bella Meunier and I talked and talked and talked ... of Poe ... of Baudelaire, of Balzac....

Then Nichi launched forth on a long disquisition on j.a.panese and Chinese art, and Mrs. Meunier and I gladly remained silent during the whole morning, enchanted by the vistas of beauty which Swartzman's words opened for us.

"Why," I thought, "must such a man lack audiences? If civilisation were in its right mind, he would hold a chair in some great university, and lecture daily to hundreds ... this man is _alive_. His fire wakes kindred fire ... why must we leave the business of teaching to the corpse-minded, the dead-hearted? like so many of our professors and teachers!"

I found out afterward that Nichi Swartzman was utterly irresponsible as he was brilliant.

Laston Meunier dug up poor old Fritz Von Hammer, the former Eos pianist--whose breath was still as fetid as ever ... who still insisted on seizing you by the coat lapel and talking right into your nose--dug him up from the moving picture house, where he played.

Von Hammer wept over the piano, as he found himself free again to play as he wished....

The party was in my honour. There were present about a dozen guests, picked from Buffalo's bohemia. They sat about on the floor on cus.h.i.+ons.

Swartzman recited Poe's Black Cat, with gestures and facial contortions that were terrifying. His huge, yellow, angular j.a.panese face grimacing near the ceiling ... he was six foot six, if anything....

His recitation was done so well that, when he had finished, we sat, for a moment, in frightened silence, like children. Then we stormed him with applause.

"Now play the Danse Macabre," cried Nichi, to Von Hammer....

"I can't do it without a violin accompaniment."

"Try it for me ... and I shall dance the Dance of Death for you."

Von Hammer said he would do his best ... after much persuasion and a few more drinks....

And Nichi Swartzman danced....

We saw, though we did not know it, the origin of modern futurist dancing there. Nichi danced with his street clothes on ... wearing his hat, in ghoulish rakishness, tipped down over his eyes ... inter-wreathing his cane with his long, skeletal, twisting legs and arms ... his eyes gleaming cat-like through merest slits....

At three o'clock in the morning we were all drunk. Before we parted we joined in singing shakily but enthusiastically _Down in Bohemia Land_.

Meunier, fulfilling his promise to me, paid my fare to New York. I soon walked into the office of the _National Magazine_.

Clara Martin was there, and Allsworth Lephil, the managing editor, and his a.s.sistant Galusha Siddon.

As I sat in the office, they gave me a sort of impromptu reception.

Ray Sanford strolled in, as fresh-complexioned as an Englishman. He was, they said, preparing a series of articles on the negro problem. And I met a little, bustling, sharp-eyed man, with much of the feminine about him,--his face lifted as if on an intuitive intellectual scent....

Carruthers Heflin ... he wore a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, like a stage-doctor. He was busy with a series of articles to be ent.i.tled, _Babylons of To-day_ ... exposing the corruption of our modern American cities.

I spoke to them of my projected trip to Europe.

"I think you're foolish to run off to Europe just at this time in your life. Now is the time you should establish yourself here. Besides, Jarvis Mackworth has written us that you're writing a book while Derek, the Chicago millionaire, stakes you."

"Yes, that's true. But couldn't I write it in Europe as well as here?"

"You'd find too many distractions."

"Where would you go first?" asked Clara Martin.

"Paris!"

"That would be absolutely fatal for a young man of your disposition. You need to sit quiet and write for a few years ... you've been over the map too much already."

"Baxter has just been in here ... he's writing us a sensational novel exposing society. He spoke to me about you," Lephil remarked,--"said he wished we'd put a tag on you and s.h.i.+p you down to his Eden colony."

There was a pause. Miss Martin thoughtfully tapped her forehead with a pencil.

"I don't think it would be good for Johnnie to go down to Eden and put up with Penton," she interjected, "they're too much alike."

"Ally Merton is in New York," Galusha Siddon informed me. "He's working on the _Express_. He wants you to run down and see him."

Merton had come to New York the year before, to work on the _Express_.

Mackworth had gotten him the job. Ally was as meticulously dressed as ever. His eyes swept me from head to foot, with an instinctive glance of appraisal, as he shook hands.

"Come on up on the roof. The paper wants a photo of you ... to go with a story I'm writing about you."

I rather resented all my friends' way of talking to me, as if I were a child to be discussed, ordered about, and disposed of. But I humoured them by playing up to their patronising spirit ... even playing horse with them continually on the sly, and having lots of fun that they didn't suspect.