Part 4

The story as I recall it is this. Savage had a friend who set out for Ireland in the days before the cable; at midnight Savage awakened and saw his friend standing by his bedside. The friend stated that he was dead, but Savage was not to think that he had known the pangs of drowning; the steamer had been wrecked on the coast of Ireland, and the friend had been killed when a beam struck him on the left side of his head as he was trying to get off the ship. Savage wrote this out and had it signed by witnesses, and two or three weeks later came the news that the ship had been wrecked and the friend’s body found with the left side of his head crushed.

If such a case stood alone, it would of course be nothing. But in Edmund Gurney’s two volumes, _Phantasms of the Living_, are a thousand or so cases, carefully documented. There is another set of cases, collected by Dr. Walker Franklin Prince, of the Boston Society for Psychical Research in Bulletin XIV of that society. I no longer find these phenomena so difficult of belief, because my second wife and I demonstrated long-range telepathy in our personal lives. Later on, I shall be telling about our book, _Mental Radio_.

IV

In my class in college there was a Jewish boy by the name of Simon Stern, whom I came to know well because we lived in the same neighborhood and often went home together. Simon wrote a short story, and one day came to class in triumph, announcing that this story had been accepted by a monthly magazine published by a Hebrew orphans’ home. Straightway I was stirred to emulation. If Simon could write a story, why could not I? Such was the little acorn that grew into an oak, with so many branches that it threatens to become top-heavy.

I wrote a story about a pet bird. For years it had been my custom every summer to take young birds from the nest and raise them. They would know me as their only parent, and were charming pets. Now I put one of these birds into an adventure, making it serve to prove the innocence of a colored boy accused of arson. I mailed the story to the _Argosy_, one of the two Munsey publications in those early days, and the story was accepted, price twenty-five dollars. You can imagine that I was an insufferable youngster on the day that letter arrived; especially to my friend Simon Stern, who had not been paid for his story.

Our family fortunes happened to be at a low ebb just then, so I fell to digging in this new gold mine. I found several papers that bought children s stories at low prices; also, before long, I discovered another gold mine--writing jokes for the comic papers. At seventeen, jokes were my entire means of support. My mother and I spent that winter on West 23rd Street, near the river. My weekly budget was this: for a top-story hallroom in a lodginghouse, one dollar twenty-five; for two meals a day at an eating house, three dollars; and for a clean collar and other luxuries, twenty-five cents. It seems a slender allowance, but you must remember that I had infinite riches in the little room of the college library.

The quantity production of jokes is an odd industry, and for the aid of young aspirants I will tell how it is done. Jokes are made up hind end forward, so to speak; you don’t think of the joke, but of what it is to be about. There are tramp jokes, mother-in-law jokes, plumber jokes, Irishman jokes, and so on. You decide to write tramp jokes this morning; well, there are many things about tramps that are jokable; they do not like to work, they do not like to bathe, they do not like bulldogs, and so on. You decide to write about tramps not liking to bathe; very well, you think of all the words and phrases having to do with water, soaps, tubs, streams, rain, etc., and of puns or quirks by which these words can be applied to tramps.

I have a scrapbook in which my mother treasured many of the jokes for which I was paid one dollar apiece, and from this book, my biographer, Floyd Dell, selected one, in which a tramp calls attention to a sign, “Cleaning and Dyeing,” and says he always knew those two things went together. Out of this grew a joke more amusing than the one for which I was paid. My enterprising German publishers prepared a pamphlet about my books, to be sent to critics and reviewers in Germany, and they quoted this joke as a sample of my early humor. The Germans didn’t think it was very good. And no wonder. The phrase in translation appeared as “_Waescherei und Faeberei_,” which, alas, entirely destroys the double meaning of “Dyeing.” It makes me think of the Irishman on a railroad handcar who said that he had just been taking the superintendent for a ride, and had heard a fine conundrum. “What is the difference between a railroad spike and a thief in the baggage room? One grips the steel and the other steals the satchels.”

My jokes became an obsession. While other youths were thinking about “dates,” I was pondering jokes about Scotchmen, Irishmen, Negroes, Jews. I would take my mother to church, and make up jokes on the phrases in the prayer book and hymnbook. I kept my little notebook before me at meals, while walking, while dressing, and in classes if the professor was a bore. I wrote out my jokes on slips of paper, with a number in the corner, and sent them in batches of ten to the different editors; when the pack came back with one missing, I had earned a dollar. I had a bookkeeping system, showing where each batch had been sent; jokes number 321 to 330 had been sent to _Life_, _Judge_, and _Puck_, and were now at the _Evening Journal_.

I began taking jokes to artists who did illustrating. They would pay for ideas--if you could catch them right after they had collected the money. It was a New York bohemia entirely unknown to fame. Dissolute and harum-scarum but good-natured young fellows, they were, inhabiting crudely furnished “studios” in the neighborhood of East 14th Street. I will give one glimpse of this artist utopia: I entered a room with a platform in the center and saw a tall lanky Irishman standing on it, bare-armed and bare-legged, a sheet wrapped around him, and an umbrella in his hand, the ferule held to his mouth. “What is this?” I asked, and the young artist replied, “I am doing a set of illustrations of the Bible. This is Joshua with the trumpet blowing down the walls of Jericho.”

V

The editor of _Argosy_ who accepted my first story was Matthew White, Jr., a genial little gentleman, who had been the great Munsey’s associate from the earliest days, when that future master of magazine merchandising and chain grocery stores had sat in a one-room office in his shirt sleeves and kept his own accounts. White invited me to call on him, and I went, and we had a delightful chat; at any rate, I found it so. Finally the editor asked me if I would not like to see the “plant,” whereupon he led me through two or three rooms full of bookkeepers and office girls stamping envelopes, and then paused casually at the elevator and rang the bell. So I learned that an author is not so great a novelty to an editor as an editor is to an author. The device of “showing the plant” is one which I have employed many times with callers who fail to realize that I am more of a novelty to them than they are to me.

I wrote other stories for the _Argosy_, and also odds and ends for _Munsey’s_. They had a department called “Fads,” and I racked my imagination for new ones that could be humorously written up; each one would be a meal ticket for a week. In the summer--1895, I think it was--my mother and I went to a hotel up in a village called Pawlet, Vermont, and Matthew White, a bachelor, came to join us for his vacation. My experience at that hotel requires considerable courage to tell.

My father was drinking, and we were stranded. Rather than be dependent upon our relatives, I had answered an advertisement for a hotel clerk, and there I was, the newly arrived employee of this moderately decent country establishment. I was supposed to do part-time work to earn the board of my mother and myself, and the very first night of my arrival, I discovered that one of the duties of the so-called clerk was to carry up pitchers of ice water to the guests. I refused the duty, and the outcome of the clash of wills was that the proprietor did it instead. I can see in my mind’s eye this stoop-shouldered, elderly man, with a long brown beard turning gray; he was kindhearted, and doubtless saw the kind of decayed gentlefolk he had got on his hands. He was sorry for my mother, and did not turn us away.

I performed such duties as were consistent with my notion of my own dignity, but they were not many. Among them was copying out the dinner menus every day; that brought me into clash with the cooks of the establishment--they were husband and wife, and had a notion of their importance fully equal to my own. I would sometimes fail to copy all the fancy French phrases whereby they sought to glorify their performances. Ever since then, I lose my appetite when I hear of “prime ribs of beef au jus.”

I remember that among the guests was the painter, J. G. Brown, famous for depicting newsboys and village types. I took long walks with him and learned his notion of art, which was that one must paint only beautiful and cheerful things, never anything ugly or depressing. His children were not so democratic as their father and refused to overlook my status as an employee. His oldest daughter was named Mabel, and all the young people called her that. I, quite innocently, did the same--until she turned upon me in a fury and informed me that she was “Miss Brown.”

Yet my status as a college student apparently kept me in the amateur class, for I was on the tennis team that played matches with other hotels in the neighborhood. I remember a trip we made, in which I received a lesson in table manners as practiced in this remote land of the Yankees. It was the custom to serve vegetables in little bird bathtubs, which were ranged in a semicircle about each plate, five or six of them. The guests finished eating, and I also finished; all the other plates were cleared away, but mine remained untouched, and I did not know why. The waitress was standing behind me, and I remarked gently, “I am through”--the very precise language that my mother had taught me to use; never “I am done,” but always, “I am through.” But this waitress taught me something new. Said she, in a voice of icy scorn: “_Stack your dishes!_”

VI

The venerable faculty of the College of the City of New York, who had charge of my intellectual life for five years, were nearly all of them Tammany appointees, and therefore Catholics. It was the first time I had ever met Catholics, and I found them kindly, but set in dogma, and as much given to propaganda as I myself was destined to become.

For example, there was “Herby.” Several hours a week for several years I had “Herby,” the eminent Professor Charles George Herbermann, editor of the _Catholic Encyclopedia_ and leading light of the Jesuits. He was a stout, irascible old gentleman with a bushy reddish beard. “Mr. Sinclair,” he would roar, “it is so because I _say_ it is so!” But that did not go with me at all; I would say, “But, Professor, how _can_ it be so?” We would have a wrangle, pleasing to other members of the class, who had not prepared their lessons and were afraid of being called upon. (We learned quickly to know each professor’s hobbies, and whenever we were not prepared to recite, we would start a discussion.)

“Herby” taught me Latin, “Tizzy” taught me Greek, and Professor George Hardy taught me English. He was a little round man of the Catholic faith, and his way of promoting the faith was to set a class that was sixty per cent Jewish to learning Catholic sentimentality disguised as poetry. I remember we had to recite Dobson’s “The Missal,” and avenged ourselves by learning it to the tune of a popular music-hall ditty of the hour, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” Hardy was a good teacher, except when the Pope came in. He told us that Milton was a dangerous disturber of the peace of Europe, and that it was a libel to say that Chaucer was a Wycliffite. What a Wycliffite was nobody ever mentioned.

Our professor of history had no dogma, so I was permitted to learn English and European history according to the facts. I was interested, but could not see why it was necessary for me to learn the names of so many kings and dukes and generals, and the dates when they had slaughtered so many human beings. In the effort to keep them in my mind until examination day, I evolved a memory system, and once it tripped me in a comical way. “Who was Lord Cobden?” inquired the professor; and my memory system replied: “He passed the corncob laws.”

But the prize laugh of my history class had to do with a lively witted youngster by the name of Fred Schwed, who afterward became a curb broker. Fred never prepared anything and never paid attention, but trusted to his gift of the gab. He was suddenly called upon to explain the origin of the title, Prince of Wales. Said the grave Professor Johnston: “Mr. Schwed, how did it happen that an English prince, the son of an English king, was born on Welsh soil?” Fred, called suddenly out of a daydream or perhaps a game of crap shooting, gazed with a wild look and stammered: “Why--er--why, you see, Professor--his mother was there.”

VII

Also, I remember vividly Professor Hunt, who taught us freehand drawing, mechanical drawing, and perspective. A lean gentleman with a black mustache and a fierce tongue, he suffered agonies from bores. You may believe that in our class we had many; and foreigners struggling with English were also a trial to him. I recall a dumb Russian by the name of Vilkomirsson; he would gaze long and yearningly, and at last blurt out some question that would cause the class to titter. In perspective it is customary to indicate certain points by their initials; the only one I recall now is “V.P.,” which means “vanishing point.” The poor foreigner could never get these abbreviations straight, and he would take a seat right in front of the professor in the hope of being able to ask help without disturbing the rest of the class. “Professor, I don’t understand what you mean when you say that the V.P. is six inches away.” “Mr. Vilkomirsson,” demanded the exasperated teacher, “if I were to tell you that the D.F. is six feet away, what would you understand me to mean?”

Our freehand drawing was done in a large studio with plaster casts all around the room. We took a drawing board and fastened a sheet of paper to it, and with a piece of charcoal proceeded to make the best possible representation of one of the casts; Professor Hunt in the meantime roamed about the room like a tiger at large, taking a swipe with his sharp claws at this or that helpless victim. That our efforts at “free” art were not uniformly successful you may judge from verses that I contributed to our college paper portraying the agony of mind of a subfreshman who, forgetting what he was drawing, took his partly completed work from the rack and wandered up and down in front of a row of plaster casts, exclaiming: “Good gracious, is it Juno, or King Henry of Navarre?”

I contributed a number of verses and jokes to this college paper and to a class annual that we got up. I have some of them still in my head, and will set down the sad story of “an imaginative poet” who

Came to C.C.N.Y. Dreaming of nature’s beauty And the glories of the sky. He learned that stars are hydrogen, The comets made of gas; That Jupiter and Venus In elliptic orbits pass. He learned that the painted rainbow, God’s promise, as poets feign, Is transverse oscillations Turning somersaults in rain.

And so on to the sorrowful climax:

His poetry now is ruined, His metaphors, of course; He’s trying to square the circle And to find the five-toed horse.

I will relate one other incident of these early days, in which you may see how the child is father to the man. The crowding in our ramshackle old school building had become a scandal, and an effort was under way to persuade the legislature to vote funds for new buildings uptown. No easy matter to persuade politicians to take an interest in anything so remote as higher education! We students were asked to circulate petitions, to be signed by voters; and I, in an excess of loyalty to my alma mater, gave my afternoons and Saturdays to the task for a month or two, and went the rounds of department stores and business houses. Not many of the persons invited to sign had ever heard of the matter, but it cost them nothing, and they were willing to take the word of a nice jolly lad that a free college was a good thing. I brought in some six or eight hundred signatures, and got my name in the college paper for my zeal. You see here the future socialist, distributing leaflets and making soapbox speeches--to the same ill-informed and indifferent crowd.

VIII

Simon Stern and I went into partnership and wrote a novel of many adventures about which I don’t remember a thing. Together we visited the office of Street and Smith, publishers of “thrillers” for boys, and met one of the editors, who was amused to hear two boys in short trousers announce themselves as joint authors of a novel. He read it, and did not accept it, but held out hopes and suggested that we write another novel, according to his needs. We agreed to do so and went away, and to the consternation of the editor came back in a week with the novel complete. I have since learned that you must never do that. Make the editor think you are taking a lot of time because that is one of his tests of excellence--despite the examples of Dumas and Balzac and Dickens and Dostoevski and other masters.

I am not sure what became of that story. All I remember is that during the ensuing summer I was working at a full-length novel of adventure, which I am ashamed to realize bore a striking resemblance to _Treasure Island_. The difference was that it happened on land, having to do with an effort to find buried gold hidden by some returning forty-niners before they were killed by Indians. _The Prairie Pirates_ was the title, and I don’t know if the manuscript survives; but I recall having read it at some later date and being impressed by my idea of “sex appeal” at the age of seventeen. The hero had accompanied the beautiful heroine all the way from California and rescued her many times from Indian marauders and treacherous half-breeds. At the end he told her blushingly that he loved her, and then, having obtained permission, “he placed upon her forehead a holy kiss.”

I was working on that novel in some country boardinghouse in New Jersey, and I mounted my bicycle with a bundle of manuscript strapped upon it, and rode to New York and up the Hudson into the Adirondack mountains, to a farmhouse on Brant Lake. At this retreat I enjoyed the companionship of a girl who was later to be my wife; her mother and my mother had become intimate friends, and we summered together several times for that reason. She was a year and a half younger than I, and we gazed at each other across a chasm of misunderstanding. She was a quiet, undeveloped, and unhappy girl, while I was a self-confident and aggressive youth, completely wrapped up in my own affairs. To neither of us did fate give the slightest hint of the trick it meant to play upon us four years later.

That fall I was invited to visit my clergyman friend, William Moir, in his brother’s camp at Saranac Lake. I got on my bicycle at four o’clock one morning and set out upon a mighty feat--something that was the goal in life of all cycling enthusiasts in those far off eighteen-nineties. “Have you done a century?” we would ask one another, and it was like flying across the Atlantic later on. All day I pedaled, through sand and dust and heat. I remember ten miles or so up the Schroon River--no doubt it is a paved boulevard now, but in 1896 it was a ribbon of deep sand, and I had to plod for two or three hours. I remember coming down through a pass into Keene Valley--on a “corduroy road” made of logs, over which I bumped madly. In those days you used your foot on the front tire for a brake, and the sole of my shoe became so hot that I had to dip it into the mountain stream. I remember the climb out of Keene Valley, eight miles or so, pushing the wheel uphill; there was Cascade Lake at sunset, a beautiful spot, and I heard Tennyson’s bugles blowing--

The long light shakes across the lakes And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

I came into the home of my friend at half past ten at night, and was disappointed of my hopes because the total had been only ninety-six miles. I had not yet “done a century.” I took the same ride back a couple of weeks later, and was so bent upon achievement that it was all my mother could do to dissuade me from taking an extra night ride from the farmhouse to the village and back so as to complete the hundred miles. From this you may see that I was soundly built at that age and looking for something to cut my teeth upon. If it should ever happen that a “researcher” wants something to practice on, he may consult the files of the New York _Evening Post_ for the autumn of 1896 and find a column article describing the ride. I am not sure it was signed, but I remember that Mr. Moir, job-maker extraordinary, had given me a letter to the city editor of the _Evening Post_, and I had become a reporter for a week. I gave it up because the staff was too crowded, and all there was for this bright kid just out of knickerbockers was a few obituary notices, an inch or two each.

It was the _Post_ I read in the afternoon, and the _Sun_ in the morning, and in my social ideas I was the haughtiest little snob that ever looked down upon mankind from the lofty turrets of an imitation-Gothic college. I can recollect as if it were yesterday my poor father--he was showing some signs of evolving into a radical, having been reading editorials by Brisbane in the _Evening Journal_, a sort of steam calliope with which Willie Hearst had just broken loose on Park Row. Oh, the lofty scorn with which I spurned my father! I would literally put my fingers into my ears in order that my soul might not be sullied by the offensive sounds of the Hearst calliope. I do not think my father ever succeeded in making me hear a word of Brisbane’s assaults upon the great and noble-minded McKinley, then engaged in having the presidency purchased for him by Mark Hanna.

IX

My poor father was no longer in position to qualify as an educator of youth. Every year he was gripped more tightly in the claws of his demon. He would disappear for days, and it would be my task to go and seek him in the barrooms that he frequented. I would find him, and there would be a moral battle. I would argue and plead and threaten; he would weep, or try to assert his authority--though I cannot recall that he ever even pretended to be angry with me. I would lead him up the street, and every corner saloon would be a new contest. “I must have just one more drink, son. I can’t go home without one more. If you only knew what I am suffering!” I would get him to bed and hide his trousers so that he could not escape, and mother would make cups of strong black coffee, or perhaps a drink of warm water and mustard.

Later on, things grew worse yet. My father was no longer to be found in his old haunts; he was ashamed to have his friends see him and would wander away. Then I had to seek him in the dives on the Bowery--the Highway of Lost Men, as I called it in _Love’s Pilgrimage_. I would walk for hours, peering into scores of places, and at last I would find him, sunk into a chair or sleeping with his arms on a beer-soaked table. Once I found him literally in the gutter--no uncommon sight in those days.