Twelve Men | Page 9

aren't coming, I guess. I'll have to be going on."
He smiled weakly and made off, Peter half following and urging him to
come back. Then, since he would not, we stood there on the exact spot
of the rendezvous gazing smirkily after him. Then we went into the
park a few paces and sat on a bench in full view, talking--or Peter
was--most volubly. He was really choking with laughter. A little later,
at seven-thirty, we went cackling into the park, only to return in five
minutes as though we had changed our minds and were coming
out--and saw Dick bustling off at our approach. It was sad really. There
was an element of the tragic in it. But not to Peter. He was all laughter,
all but apoplectic gayety. "Oh, by George!" he choked. "This is too
much! Oh, ho! This is great! his poor heiress! And he came back! Har!
Har! Har!"
"Peter, you dog," I said, "aren't you ashamed of yourself, to rub it in
this way?"
"Not a bit, not a bit!" he insisted most enthusiastically. "Do him good.
Why shouldn't he suffer? He'll get over it. He's always bluffing about
his heiresses. Now he's lost a real one. Har! Har! Har!" and he fairly
choked, and for days and weeks and months he laughed, but he never
told. He merely chortled at his desk, and if any one asked him what he
was laughing about, even Dick, he would reply, "Oh, something--a joke
I played on a fellow once."
If Dick ever guessed he never indicated as much. But that lost romance!
That faded dream!
Not so long after this, the following winter, I left St. Louis and did not
see Peter for several years, during which time I drifted through various
cities to New York. We kept up a more or less desultory
correspondence which resulted eventually in his contributing to a paper
of which I had charge in New York, and later, in part at least I am sure,
in his coming there. I noticed one thing, that although Peter had no

fixed idea as to what he wished to be--being able to draw, write,
engrave, carve and what not--he was in no way troubled about it. "I
don't see just what it is that I am to do best," he said to me once. "It
may be that I will wind up as a painter or writer or collector--I can't tell
yet. I want to study, and meantime I'm making a living--that's all I want
now. I want to live, and I am living, in my way."
Some men are masters of cities, or perhaps better, of all the elements
which enter into the making of them, and Peter was one. I think
sometimes that he was born a writer of great force and charm, only as
yet he had not found himself. I have known many writers, many
geniuses even, but not one his superior in intellect and romantic
response to life. He was a poet, thinker, artist, philosopher and master
of prose, as a posthumous volume ("Wolf, the Autobiography of a Cave
Dweller") amply proves, but he was not ready then to fully express
himself, and it troubled him not at all. He loved life's every facet, was
gay and helpful to himself and others, and yet always with an eye for
the undercurrent of human misery, error and tragedy as well as comedy.
Immediately upon coming to New York he began to examine and grasp
it in a large way, its museums, public buildings, geography, politics,
but after a very little while decided suddenly that he did not belong
there and without a by-your-leave, although once more we had fallen
into each other's ways, he departed without a word, and I did not hear
from him for months. Temporarily at least he felt that he had to obtain
more experience in a lesser field, and lost no time in so doing. The next
I knew he was connected, at a comfortable salary, with the then
dominant paper of Philadelphia.
It was after he had established himself very firmly in Philadelphia that
we two finally began to understand each other fully, to sympathize
really with each other's point of view as opposed to the more or less
gay and casual nature of our earlier friendship. Also here perhaps, more
than before, we felt the binding influence of having worked together in
the West. It was here that I first noticed the ease with which he took
hold of a city, the many-sidedness of his peculiar character which led
him to reflect so many angles of it, which a less varied temperament
would never have touched upon. For, first of all, wherever he happened

to be, he was intensely interested in the