Twelve Men | Page 2

something which man could not understand, of which very
likely he was a mere tool. Peter was as much thrilled and entendered by
the brawling strumpet in the street or the bagnio as by the virgin with
her starry crown. The rich were rich and the poor poor, but all were in
the grip of imperial forces whose ruthless purposes or lack of them
made all men ridiculous, pathetic or magnificent, as you choose. He
pitied ignorance and necessity, and despised vanity and cruelty for
cruelty's sake, and the miserly hoarding of anything. He was liberal,
material, sensual and yet spiritual; and although he never had more than
a little money, out of the richness and fullness of his own temperament
he seemed able to generate a kind of atmosphere and texture in his
daily life which was rich and warm, splendid really in thought (the true
reality) if not in fact, and most grateful to all. Yet also, as I have said,
always he wished to seem the clown, the scapegrace, the wanton and
the loon even, mouthing idle impossibilities at times and declaring his
profoundest faith in the most fantastic things.
Do I seem to rave? I am dealing with a most significant person.
In so far as I knew he was born into a mid-Western family of Irish
extraction whose habitat was southwest Missouri. In the town in which

he was reared there was not even a railroad until he was fairly well
grown--a fact which amused but never impressed him very much.
Apropos of this he once told me of a yokel who, never having seen a
railroad, entered the station with his wife and children long before train
time, bought his ticket and waited a while, looking out of the various
windows, then finally returned to the ticket-seller and asked, "When
does this thing start?" He meant the station building itself. At the time
Peter had entered upon art work he had scarcely prosecuted his studies
beyond, if so far as, the conventional high or grammar school, and yet
he was most amazingly informed and but little interested in what any
school or college had to offer. His father, curiously enough, was an
educated Irish-American, a lawyer by profession, and a Catholic. His
mother was an American Catholic, rather strict and narrow. His
brothers and sisters, of whom there were four, were, as I learned later,
astonishingly virile and interesting Americans of a rather wild,
unsettled type. They were all, in so far as I could judge from chance
meetings, agnostic, tense, quick-moving--so vital that they weighed on
one a little, as very intense temperaments are apt to do. One of the
brothers, K----, who seemed to seek me out ever so often for Peter's
sake, was so intense, nervous, rapid-talking, rapid-living, that he
frightened me a little. He loved noisy, garish places. He liked to play
the piano, stay up very late; he was a high liver, a "good dresser," as the
denizens of the Tenderloin would say, an excellent example of the
flashy, clever promoter. He was always representing a new company,
introducing something--a table or laxative water, a shaving soap, a
chewing gum, a safety razor, a bicycle, an automobile tire or the
machine itself. He was here, there, everywhere--in Waukesha,
Wisconsin; San Francisco; New York; New Orleans. "My, my! This is
certainly interesting!" he would exclaim, with an air which would have
done credit to a comedian and extending both hands. "Peter's pet friend,
Dreiser! Well, well, well! Let's have a drink. Let's have something to
eat. I'm only in town for a day. Maybe you'd like to go to a show--or hit
the high places? Would you? Well, well, well! Let's make a night of it!
What do you say?" and he would fix me with a glistening, nervous and
what was intended no doubt to be a reassuring eye, but which unsettled
me as thoroughly as the imminence of an earthquake. But I was talking
of Peter.

The day I first saw him he was bent over a drawing-board illustrating a
snake story for one of the Sunday issues of the Globe-Democrat, which
apparently delighted in regaling its readers with most astounding
concoctions of this kind, and the snake he was drawing was most
disturbingly vital and reptilian, beady-eyed, with distended jaws,
extended tongue, most fatefully coiled.
"My," I commented in passing, for I was in to see him about another
matter, "what a glorious snake!"
"Yes, you can't make 'em too snaky for the snake-editor up front," he
returned, rising and dusting tobacco from his lap and shirtfront, for he
was in his shirt-sleeves. Then he expectorated not in but to one side of
a handsome polished brass cuspidor which contained not the least
evidence of use, the rubber mat