Twelve Men | Page 6

and disreputable Tenderloin characters generally.
(Of such was the beginning of the Chinese restaurant in America.) He
would introduce us to a few of his Celestial friends, whose
acquaintance apparently he had been most assiduously cultivating for
some time past and with whom he was now on the best of terms. He
had, as Peter pointed out to me, the happy knack of persuading himself
that there was something vastly mysterious and superior about the
whole Chinese race, that there was some Chinese organization known
as the Six Companions, which, so far as I could make out from him,
was ruling very nearly (and secretly, of course) the entire habitable
globe. For one thing it had some governing connection with great
constructive ventures of one kind and another in all parts of the world,
supplying, as he said, thousands of Chinese laborers to any one who
desired them, anywhere, and although they were employed by others,
ruling them with a rod of iron, cutting their throats when they failed to
perform their bounden duties and burying them head down in a basket
of rice, then transferring their remains quietly to China in coffins made
in China and brought for that purpose to the country in which they were.
The Chinese who had worked for the builders of the Union Pacific had
been supplied by this company, as I understood from Dick. In regard to
all this Peter used to analyze and dispose of Dick's self-generated
romance with the greatest gusto, laughing the while and yet pretending
to accept it all.

But there was one phase of all this which interested Peter immensely.
Were there on sale in St. Louis any bits of jade, silks, needlework,
porcelains, basketry or figurines of true Chinese origin? He was far
more interested in this than in the social and economic sides of the lives
of the Chinese, and was constantly urging Dick to take him here, there
and everywhere in order that he might see for himself what of these
amazing wonders were locally extant, leading Dick in the process a
merry chase and a dog's life. Dick was compelled to persuade nearly all
of his boasted friends to produce all they had to show. Once, I recall, a
collection of rare Chinese porcelains being shown at the local museum
of art, there was nothing for it but that Dick must get one or more of his
Oriental friends to interpret this, that and the other symbol in
connection with this, that and the other vase--things which put him to
no end of trouble and which led to nothing, for among all the local
Chinese there was not one who knew anything about it, although they,
Dick included, were not honest enough to admit it.
"You know, Dreiser," Peter said to me one day with the most delicious
gleam of semi-malicious, semi-tender humor, "I am really doing all this
just to torture Dick. He doesn't know a damned thing about it and
neither do these Chinese, but it's fun to haul 'em out there and make 'em
sweat. The museum sells an illustrated monograph covering all this,
you know, with pictures of the genuinely historic pieces and
explanations of the various symbols in so far as they are known, but
Dick doesn't know that, and he's lying awake nights trying to find out
what they're all about. I like to see his expression and that of those
chinks when they examine those things." He subsided with a low
chuckle all the more disturbing because it was so obviously the product
of well-grounded knowledge.
Another phase of this same humor related to the grand artistic, social
and other forms of life to which Dick was hoping to ascend via
marriage and which led him, because of a kind of anticipatory
eagerness, into all sorts of exaggerations of dress, manners, speech,
style in writing or drawing, and I know not what else. He had, as I have
said, a "studio" in Broadway, an ordinary large, square upper chamber
of an old residence turned commercial but which Dick had decorated in

the most, to him, recherché or different manner possible. In Dick's
gilding imagination it was packed with the rarest and most carefully
selected things, odd bits of furniture, objects of art, pictures,
books--things which the ordinary antique shop provides in plenty but
which to Dick, having been reared in Bloomington, Illinois, were of the
utmost artistic import. He had vaulting ambitions and pretensions,
literary and otherwise, having by now composed various rondeaus,
triolets, quatrains, sonnets, in addition to a number of short stories over
which he had literally slaved and which, being rejected by many editors,
were kept lying idly and inconsequentially and seemingly
inconspicuously about his place--the more to astonish the poor
unsophisticated "outsider." Besides it gave