Twelve Men | Page 4

great force, to whom I owe some of the most ecstatic
intellectual hours of my life, hours in which life seemed to bloom forth
into new aspects, glowed as with the radiance of a gorgeous tropic day.
Peter was one such. About my own age at this time, he was blessed
with a natural understanding which was simply Godlike. Although, like
myself, he was raised a Catholic and still pretending in a boisterous,
Rabelaisian way to have some reverence for that faith, he was
amusingly sympathetic to everything good, bad, indifferent--"in case
there might be something in it; you never can tell." Still he hadn't the
least interest in conforming to the tenets of the church and laughed at
its pretensions, preferring his own theories to any other. Apparently
nothing amused him so much as the thought of confession and
communion, of being shrived by some stout, healthy priest as worldly
as himself, and preferably Irish, like himself. At the same time he had a
hearty admiration for the Germans, all their ways, conservatisms, their
breweries, food and such things, and finally wound up by marrying a
German girl.
As far as I could make out, Peter had no faith in anything except Nature
itself, and very little in that except in those aspects of beauty and
accident and reward and terrors with which it is filled and for which he

had an awe if not a reverence and in every manifestation of which he
took the greatest delight. Life was a delicious, brilliant mystery to him,
horrible in some respects, beautiful in others; a great adventure. Unlike
myself at the time, he had not the slightest trace of any lingering
Puritanism, and wished to live in a lush, vigorous, healthy, free, at
times almost barbaric, way. The negroes, the ancient Romans, the
Egyptians, tales of the Orient and the grotesque Dark Ages, our own
vile slums and evil quarters--how he reveled in these! He was for nights
of wandering, endless investigation, reading, singing, dancing, playing!
Apropos of this I should like to relate here that one of his seemingly
gross but really innocent diversions was occasionally visiting a certain
black house of prostitution, of which there were many in St. Louis.
Here while he played a flute and some one else a tambourine or small
drum, he would have two or three of the inmates dance in some weird
savage way that took one instanter to the wilds of Central Africa. There
was, so far as I know, no payment of any kind made in connection with
this. He was a friend, in some crude, artistic or barbaric way. He
satisfied, I am positive, some love of color, sound and the dance in
these queer revels.
Nor do I know how he achieved these friendships, such as they were. I
was never with him when he did. But aside from the satiation they
afforded his taste for the strange and picturesque, I am sure they
reflected no gross or sensual appetite. But I wish to attest in passing
that the mere witnessing of these free scenes had a tonic as well as
toxic effect on me. As I view myself now, I was a poor, spindling,
prying fish, anxious to know life, and yet because of my very narrow
training very fearsome of it, of what it might do to me, what dreadful
contagion of thought or deed it might open me to! Peter was not so. To
him all, positively all, life was good. It was a fascinating spectacle, to
be studied or observed and rejoiced in as a spectacle. When I look back
now on the shabby, poorly-lighted, low-ceiled room to which he led me
"for fun," the absolutely black or brown girls with their white teeth and
shiny eyes, the unexplainable, unintelligible love of rhythm and the
dance displayed, the beating of a drum, the sinuous, winding motions
of the body, I am grateful to him. He released my mind, broadened my

view, lengthened my perspective. For as I sat with him, watching him
beat his drum or play his flute, noted the gayety, his love of color and
effect, and feeling myself low, a criminal, disgraced, the while I was
staring with all my sight and enjoying it intensely, I realized that I was
dealing with a man who was "bigger" than I was in many respects,
saner, really more wholesome. I was a moral coward, and he was not
losing his life and desires through fear--which the majority of us do. He
was strong, vital, unafraid, and he made me so.
But, lest I seem to make him low or impossible to those who
instinctively cannot accept life beyond the range of their own little
routine world, let me hasten to his other aspects. He was