more months it was everywhere, in the papers, on the stage, on the street-organs, played by orchestras, bands, whistled and sung in the streets. One day on Broadway near the Marlborough I met my brother, gold-headed cane, silk shirt, a smart summer suit, a gay straw hat.
“Ah,” I said, rather sarcastically, for I still felt peeved that he had shown so little interest in my affairs at the time I was leaving. “On the banks, I see.”
“On the banks,” he replied cordially. “You turned the trick for me, Thee, that time. What are you doing now? Why don’t you ever come and see me? I’m still your brother, you know. A part of that is really yours.”
“Cut that!” I replied most savagely. “I couldn’t write a song like that in a million years. You know I couldn’t. The words are nothing.”
“Oh, all right. It’s true, though, you know. Where do you keep yourself? Why don’t you come and see me? Why be down on me? I live here, you know.” He looked up at the then brisk and successful hotel.
“Well, maybe I will some time,” I said distantly, but with no particular desire to mend matters, and we parted.
There was, however, several years later, a sequel to all this and one so characteristic of him that it has always remained in my mind as one of the really beautiful things of life, and I might as well tell it here and now. About five years later I had become so disappointed in connection with my work and the unfriendly pressure of life that I had suffered what subsequently appeared to have been a purely psychic breakdown or relapse, not physical, but one which left me in no mood or condition to go on with my work, or any work indeed in any form. Hope had disappeared in a sad haze. I could apparently succeed in nothing, do nothing mentally that was worth while. At the same time I had all but retired from the world, living on less and less until finally I had descended into those depths where I was in the grip of actual want, with no place to which my pride would let me turn. I had always been too vain and self-centered. Apparently there was but one door, and I was very close to it. To match my purse I had retired to a still sorrier neighborhood in B----, one of the poorest. I desired most of all to be let alone, to be to myself. Still I could not be, for occasionally I met people, and certain prospects and necessities drove me to various publishing houses. One day as I was walking in some street near Broadway (not on it) in New York, I ran into my brother quite by accident, he as prosperous and comfortable as ever. I think I resented him more than ever. He was of course astonished, shocked, as I could plainly see, by my appearance and desire not to be seen. He demanded to know where I was living, wanted me to come then and there and stay with him, wanted me to tell him what the trouble was—all of which I rather stubbornly refused to do and finally got away—not however without giving him my address, though with the caution that I wanted nothing.
The next morning he was there bright and early in a cab. He was the most vehement, the most tender, the most disturbed creature I have ever seen. He was like a distrait mother with a sick child more than anything else.
“For God’s sake,” he commented when he saw me, “living in a place like this—and at this number, too!” (130 it was, and he was superstitious as to the thirteen.) “I knew there’d be a damned thirteen in it!” he ejaculated. “And me over in New York! Jesus Christ! And you sick and run down this way! I might have known. It’s just like you. I haven’t heard a thing about you in I don’t know when. Well, I’m not going back without you, that’s all. You’ve got to come with me now, see? Get your clothes, that’s all. The cabby’ll take your trunk. I know just the place for you, and you’re going there tomorrow or next day or next week, but you’re coming with me now. My God, I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself, and me feeling the way I do about you!” His eyes all but brimmed.
I was so morose and despondent that, grateful as I felt, I could scarcely take his mood at its value. I resented it, resented myself, my state, life.
“I can’t,” I said finally, or so I thought. “I won’t. I don’t need your help. You don’t owe me anything. You’ve done enough already.”
“Owe, hell!” he retorted. “Who’s talking about ‘owe’? And you my brother—my own flesh and blood! Why, Thee, for that matter, I owe you half of ‘On the Banks,’ and you know it. You can’t go on living like this. You’re sick and discouraged. You can’t fool me. Why, Thee, you’re a big man. You’ve just got to come out of this! Damn it—don’t you see—don’t make me”—and he took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes. “You can’t help yourself now, but you can later, don’t you see? Come on. Get your things. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t. You’ve got to come, that’s all. I won’t go without you,” and he began looking about for my bag and trunk.
I still protested weakly, but in vain. His affection was so overwhelming and tender that it made me weak. I allowed him to help me get my things together. Then he paid the bill, a small one, and on the way to the hotel insisted on forcing a roll of bills on me, all that he had with him. I was compelled at once, that same day or the next, to indulge in a suit, hat, shoes, underwear, all that I needed. A bedroom adjoining his suite at the hotel was taken, and for two days I lived there, later accompanying him in his car to a famous sanitarium in Westchester, one in charge of an old friend of his, a well-known ex-wrestler whose fame for this sort of work was great. Here I was booked for six weeks, all expenses paid, until I should “be on my feet again,” as he expressed it. Then he left, only to visit and revisit me until I returned to the city, fairly well restored in nerves if not in health.
But could one ever forget the mingled sadness and fervor of his original appeal, the actual distress written in his face, the unlimited generosity of his mood and deed as well as his unmerited self-denunciation? One pictures such tenderness and concern as existing between parents and children, but rarely between brothers. Here he was evincing the same thing, as soft as love itself, and he a man of years and some affairs and I an irritable, distrait and peevish soul.
Take note, ye men of satire and spleen. All men are not selfish or hard.
The final phase of course related to his untimely end. He was not quite fifty-five when he died, and with a slightly more rugged quality of mind he might have lasted to seventy. It was due really to the failure of his firm (internal dissensions and rivalries, in no way due to him, however, as I have been told) and what he foolishly deemed to be the end of his financial and social glory. His was one of those simple, confiding, non-hardy dispositions, warm and colorful but intensely sensitive, easily and even fatally chilled by the icy blasts of human difficulty, however slight. You have no doubt seen some animals, cats, dogs, birds, of an especially affectionate nature, which when translated to a strange or unfriendly climate soon droop and die. They have no spiritual resources wherewith to contemplate what they do not understand or know. Now his friends would leave him. Now that bright world of which he had been a part would know him no more. It was pathetic, really. He emanated a kind of fear. Depression and even despair seemed to hang about him like a cloak. He could not shake it off. And yet, literally, in his case there was nothing to fear, if he had only known.
And yet two years before he did die, I knew he would. Fantastic as it may seem, to be shut out from that bright world of which he deemed himself an essential figure was all but unendurable. He had no ready money now—not the same amount anyhow. He could not greet his old-time friends so gayly, entertain so freely. Meeting him on Broadway shortly after the failure and asking after his affairs, he talked of going into business for himself as a publisher, but I realized that he could not. He had neither the ability nor the talent for that, nor the heart. He was not a business man but a song-writer and actor, had never been anything but that. He tried in this new situation to write songs, but he could not. They were too morbid. What he needed was some one to buoy him up, a manager, a strong confidant of some kind, some one who would have taken his affairs in hand and shown him what to do. As it
