The Holy Cross and Other Tales | Page 3

correspondence, and never afterwards broken.
Some years ago, however, I visited Chicago, to lecture, at the invitation of its famous social and literary "Twentieth Century Club." This was Eugene's opportunity, and I ought not to have been as dumfounded as I was, one day, when our evening papers copied from the "Chicago Record" a "very pleasant joke" at the expense of his town and myself! It was headed: "Chicago Excited! Tremendous Preparations for His Reception," and went on to give the order and route of a procession that was to be formed at the Chicago station and escort me to my quarters--stopping at Armour's packing-yards and the art-galleries on the way. It included the "Twentieth Century Club" in carriages, the "Browning Club" in busses, and the "Homer Club" in drays; ten millionnaire publishers, and as many pork-packers, in a chariot drawn by white horses, followed by not less than two hundred Chicago poets afoot! I have no doubt that Eugene thought I would enjoy this kind of advertisement as heartily as he did. If so, he lacked the gift of putting himself in the other man's place. But his sardonic face, a-grin like a school-boy's, was one with two others which shone upon me when I did reach Chicago, and my pride was not wounded sufficiently to prevent me from enjoying the restaurant luncheon to which he bore me off in triumph. I did promise to square accounts with him, in time, and this is how I fulfilled my word. The next year, at a meeting of a suburban "Society of Authors," a certain lady-journalist was chaffed as to her acquaintanceship with Field, and accused of addressing him as "Gene." At this she took umbrage, saying: "It's true we worked together on the same paper for five years, but he was always a perfect gentleman. I never called him 'Gene.'" This was reported by the press, and gave me the refrain for a skit entitled "Katharine and Eugenio:"
Five years she sate a-near him Within that type-strewn loft; She handed him the paste-pot, He passed the scissors oft; They dipped in the same inkstand That crowned their desk between, Yet--he never called her Katie, She never called him "Gene."
Though close--ah! close--the droplight That classic head revealed, She was to him Miss Katharine, He--naught but Mister Field; Decorum graced his upright brow And thinned his lips serene, And, though he wrote a poem each hour, Why should she call him "Gene?"
She gazed at his sporadic hair-- She knew his hymns by rote; They longed to dine together At Casey's table d'h?te; Alas, that Fortune's "hostages"-- But let us draw a screen! He dared not call her Katie; How could she call him "Gene?"
I signed my verses "By one of Gene's Victims"; they appeared in The Tribune, and soon were copied by papers in every part of the country. Other stanzas, with the same refrain, were added by the funny men of the southern and western press, and it was months before 'Gene' saw the last of them. The word "Eugenio," which was the name by which I always addressed him in our correspondence, left him in no doubt as to the initiator of the series, and so our "Merry War" ended, I think, with a fair quittance to either side.
Grieving, with so many others, over Yorick's premature death, it is a solace for me to remember how pleasant was our last interchange of written words. Not long ago, he was laid very low by pneumonia, but recovered, and before leaving his sickroom wrote me a sweetly serious letter--with here and there a sparkle in it--but in a tone sobered by illness, and full of yearning for a closer companionship with his friends. At the same time he sent me the first editions, long ago picked up, of all my earlier books, and begged me to write on their fly-leaves. This I did; with pains to gratify him as much as possible, and in one of the volumes wrote this little quatrain:
TO EUGENE FIELD
Death thought to claim you in this year of years, But Fancy cried--and raised her shield between-- "Still let men weep, and smile amid their tears; Take any two beside, but spare Eugene!"
In view of his near escape, the hyperbole, if such there was, might well be pardoned, and it touched Eugene so manifestly that--now that the eddy indeed has swept him away, and the Sabine Farm mourns for its new-world Horace--I cannot be too thankful that such was my last message to him.
Eugene Field was so mixed a compound that it will always be impossible quite to decide whether he was wont to judge critically of either his own conduct or his literary creations. As to the latter, he put the worst and the best side by side, and apparently