Again, there was his literary world which he was always dreaming about and slaving over, his art ambitions, into which I was now by degrees permitted to look. He was forging ahead in that realm, and since I was doing fairly well as a daily scribbler it might be that I would be able to perceive a little of all he was hoping to do. His great dream or scheme was to study the underworld life of St. Louis at first hand, those horrible, grisly, waterfront saloons and lowest tenderloin dives and brothels south of Market and east of Eighth where, listening to the patois of thieves and pimps and lechers and drug-fiends and murderers and outlaws generally, he was to extract from them, aside from their stories, some bizarre originality of phrase and scene that was to stand him in good stead in the composition of his tales. Just now, so he told me, he was content with making notes, jotting down scraps of conversation heard at bars, in sloppy urinals, cheap dance-halls, and I know not what. With a little more time and a little more of that slowly arriving sanity which comes to most of us eventually, I am inclined to think that he might have made something out of all this; he was so much in earnest, so patient; only, as I saw it, he was filled with an almost impossible idealism and romance which threw nearly everything out of proportion. He naturally inclined to the arabesque and the grotesque, but in no balanced way. His dreams were too wild, his mood at nearly all times too utterly romantic, his deductions far beyond what a sane contemplation of the facts warranted.
And relative to this period I could other tales unfold. He and Peter, long before I had arrived on the scene, had surrounded themselves with a company of wayfarers of their own: down-and-out English army officers and grafting younger sons of good families, a Frenchman or two, one of whom was a poet, several struggling artists who grafted on them, and a few weird and disreputable characters so degraded and nondescript that I could never make out just what their charm was. At least two of these had suitable rooms, where, in addition to Dick’s and mine, we were accustomed to meet. There were parties, Sunday and evening walks or trips, dinners. Poems, on occasion, were read, original, first-hand compositions; Dick’s stories, as Peter invariably insisted, were “inflicted,” the “growler” or “duck” (a tin bucket of good size) was “rushed” for beer, and cheese and crackers and hot crawfish, sold by old ambling negroes on the streets after midnight, were bought and consumed with gusto. Captain Simons, Captain Seller, Toussaint, Benèt—these are names of figures that are now so dim as to be mere wraiths, ranged about a smoky, dimly lighted room in some downtown rooming-house. Both Dick and Peter had reached that distinguished state where they were the center of attraction as well as supports and props to these others, and between them got up weird entertainments, knockabout Dutch comedian acts, which they took down to some wretched dance-hall and staged, each “doing a turn.” The glee over the memory of these things as they now narrated them to me!
Wood was so thin physically and so vigorous mentally that he was fascinating to look at. He had an idea that this bohemianism and his story work were of the utmost importance; and so they were if they had been but a prelude to something more serious, or if his dreams could only have been reduced to paper and print. There was something that lay in his eye, a ray. There was an aroma to his spirit which was delicious. As I get him now, he was a rather underdone Poe or de Maupassant or Manet, and assuredly a portion of the makings was certainly there. For at times the moods he could evoke in me were poignant, and he saw beauty and romance in many and strange ways and places. I have seen him enter a dirty, horrible saloon in one of St. Louis’s lowest dive regions with the air of a Prince Charming and there seat himself at some sloppy table, his patent leather low-quarters scraping the sanded or sawdusted floor, order beer and then, smiling genially upon all, begin to transcribe from memory whole sections of conversations he had heard somewhere, in the street perhaps, all the while racking his brain to recall the exact word and phrase. Unlike myself, he had a knack of making friends with these shabby levee and underworld characters, syphilitic, sodden, blue-nosed bums mostly, whom he picked up from Heaven knows where. And how he seemed to prize their vile language, their lies and their viler thoughts!
And there was McCord, bless his enthusiastic, materialistic heart, who seemed to take fire from this joint companionship and was determined to do something, he scarcely knew what—draw, paint, write, collect—anything. His mind was so wrought up by the rich pattern which life was weaving before his eyes that he could scarcely sleep at nights. He was for prowling about with us these winter and spring days, looking at the dark city after work hours, or investigating these wretched dives with Dick and myself. Or, the three of us would take a banjo, a mandolin and a flute (McCord could perform on the flute and Dick on the mandolin) and go to Forrest Park or one of the minor parks on the south side, and there proceed to make the night hideous with our carolings until some solid policeman, assuming that the public had rights, would interfere and bid us depart. Our invariable retort on all such occasions was that we were newspaper men and artists and as such entitled to courtesies from the police, which the thick-soled minion of the law would occasionally admit. Sometimes we would go to Dick’s room or mine and chatter and sing until dawn, when, somewhat subdued, we would seek out some German saloon-keeper whom either Peter or Wood knew, rouse him out of his slumbers and demand that he come down and supply us with ham and eggs and beer.
My stage critical work having vivified my desire to write a play or comic opera on the order of Wang or The Isle of Champagne, two of the reigning successes of that day, or the pleasing Robin Hood of de Koven, I set about this task as best I might, scribbling scenes, bits of humor, phases of character. In this idea I was aided and abetted not only by Wood and McCord, both of whom by now seemed to think I might do something, but by the fact that the atmosphere of the Globe office, as well as of St. Louis itself, was, for me at least, inspirational and creative. I liked the world in which I now found myself. There were about me and in the city so many who seemed destined to do great things—Wood, McCord, Hazard, a man by the name of Bennett who was engaged in sociologic propaganda of one kind and another, William Marion Reedy, already editing the Mirror, Albert Johnson, a most brilliant reporter who had, preceding my coming, resigned from the Globe and gone over to the Chronicle, Alfred Robyn, composer of Answer and Marizanillo, one of whose operas was even then being given a local tryout. I have mentioned the wonderful W. C. Brann who preceded me in writing “Heard in the Corridors” and who later stirred America with the Iconoclast.
All this, plus the fact that Augustus Thomas had come from here, a reporter on the Post-Dispatch, and that I was now seeing one of his plays, In Missouri, moved me to the point where I finally thought out what I considered a fairly humorous plot for a comic opera, which was to be called Jeremiah I. It was based on the idea of transporting, by reason of his striking accidentally a mythical Aztec stone on his farm, an old Indiana farmer of a most cantankerous and inquisitive disposition from the era in which he then was back into that of the Aztecs of Mexico, where, owing to a religious invocation then being indulged in with a view to discovering a new ruler, he was assumed to be the answer. Beginning as a cowardly refugee in fear for his life, he was slowly changed into an amazing despot, having at one time as many as three hundred ex-advisers or Aztec secretaries of state in one pen awaiting poisoning. He was to be dissuaded from carrying out this plan by his desire for a certain Aztec maiden, who was to avoid him until he repented of his crimes. She eventually persuaded him to change the form of government from that of a despotism to that of a republic, with himself as candidate for President.
There was nothing much to it. Its only humor lay in the thought or sight of a cranky, curious, critical farmer super-imposed upon ancient architecture and forms of worship. Having once thought it out, however, and being pleased with it, I worked at it feverishly nights when I was not on assignments, and in a week or less had a rough outline of it, lyrics and all. I told McCord and Wood about it. And so great was their youthful encouragement that at once I saw this as the way out of my difficulties, the path to that great future I desired. I would become the author of comic opera books. Already I saw myself in New York, rich, famous.
But at that time I could not possibly write without constant encouragement, and having roughed out the opera I now burned for assistance in developing it in detail. At last I went to Peter and told him of my difficulty, my inability to go ahead. He seemed to relish the whole idea hugely, so much so that he made the thing seem far more plausible and easy for me to do and urged me to go ahead, not to faint or get cold feet. Enamored of costumes and gorgeous settings, he even went so far as to first suggest and then later work out in water color, suggestions for costumes and color schemes which I thought wonderful. I was lifted to the seventh heaven. To think that I had worked out something which he considered interesting!
Later that evening, at Peter’s suggestion I outlined portions of it to Wood. He also seemed to believe that it was good. He insisted that there must be an evening at his room or mine when I would read it all to them. Accordingly a week later I read it in Dick’s room, to much partial applause of course. What else could they do? Peter even went so far as to suggest that he would love to act the part of Jeremiah I, and forthwith began to give us imitations of the prospective king’s mannerisms and characteristics. Whatever the merit of the manuscript itself, certainly we imagined Peter’s characterizations to be funny. Later he brought me as many as fifty designs of costumes and scenes in color, which appealed to me as having novelty as well as beauty. He had evidently worked for weeks, nights after hours and mornings before coming to the office and on Sundays. By this I was so thrilled that I could scarcely believe my eyes. To think that I had written the book of a real comic opera that should be deemed worthy of this, and that it was within the range of possibility that it would some day be produced!
I began to feel myself a personage, although at bottom I mistrusted the reality of it all. Fate could not be that kind, not so swift. I should never get it produced ... and yet, like the man in the Arabian fable who kicked over his tray of glassware, dreaming great dreams, I was tending toward the same thing. There was always in me the saving grace of doubt or self-mistrust. I was never quite sure that I should be able to do all that at times I was inclined to hope I might, and so was usually inclined to go about my work as nervously and as enthusiastically as ever, hoping that I might have some of the good fortune of which I dreamed, but never seriously depending on it.
Perhaps it would have been better for me had I.
CHAPTER XXXII
While I rejoiced in the thought that I might now, and so easily, become a successful comic opera librettist, and a poet besides, still I found myself for the most part in a very gloomy frame of mind. One of the things that grieved me intensely, as I have said, was the sight of bitter poverty and failure, and the fact that I personally was not one of those solid commercial figures of which St. Louis was full at this time. They filled the great hotels, the clubs, the mansions, the social positions of importance. They were free, as I foolishly thought, to indulge in all those luxuries and pleasures which, as I so sadly saw, the poor were not privileged to enjoy, myself included. Just about that time there was something about a commercial institution—its exterior simplicity and bareness, the thrash of its inward life, its suggestion of energy, force, compulsion and need—which invariably held me spellbound. Despite my literary and artistic ambitions, I still continued to think it essential, to me, and to all men for that matter if they were to have any force and dignity in this world, that each and every one should be in control of something of this kind, something commercially and financially successful. And what was I—a pale sprout of a newspaper man, possibly an editor or author in the future, but what more?
At times this state of mind tended to make me irritable and even savage instead of sad. I thought that my very generous benefactor, the great McCullagh, ought to see what an important man I was and give me at once the dramatic editorship free and clear of any other work, or at least combine it with something better than mere reporting. I ought to be allowed to do editorials or special work. Again, my mind, although largely freed of Catholic and religious dogma generally and the belief in the workability of the Christian ideals as laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, was still swashing around among the idealistic maxims of Christ and the religionists and moralists generally, contrasting them hourly, as it were, with the selfish materialism of the day as I saw it. Look at the strong men at the top, I was constantly saying to myself, so comfortable, so indifferent, so cruelly dull. How I liked to flail them with maxims excerpted from Christ! Those large districts south of the business heart, along the river and elsewhere, which nightly or weekly Wood, McCord and myself were investigating and which were crowded with the unfit, the unsuccessful, the unhappy—how they haunted me and how I attempted (in my mind, of course) to indict society and comfort them with the poetic if helpless words of the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor,” etc. Betimes, interviewing one important citizen and another, I gained the impression that they truly despised any one who was poor, that they did not give him or his fate a second thought; and betimes I was right—other times wrong. But having been reared on maxims relative to Christian duty I thought they should devote their all to the poor. This failure on their part seemed terrible to me, for having been taught to believe in the Sermon on the Mount I thought they—not myself, for instance—were the ones to make it work out. Mr. McCullagh had begun sending me out of town on various news stories, which was in itself the equivalent of a traveling correspondentship and might readily have led to my being officially recognized as such if I had remained there long enough. Trials of murder cases in St. Joseph and Hannibal, threatened floods in lower Illinois, and train robberies (common occurrences in this region, either between St. Louis and Kansas City, or St. Louis and Louisville) made it necessary for me to make arrangements with Hazard or Wood to carry on my dramatic work while I went about these tasks; a necessity which I partly relished and partly disliked, being uncertain as to which was the more important task to me.
