Part 4

"That's just it, and that's just why I like it," he replied, never looking at me but proceeding with his weaving in the most industrious fashion. "You have just one outstanding fault, Dreiser. You don't know how to make anything out of the little things of life. You want to remember that this is an art, not a job. I'm discovering whether I can make a Turkish carpet or not, and it gives me pleasure. If I can get so much as one good spot of color worked out, one small portion of the design, I'll be satisfied. I'll know then that I can do it, the whole thing, don't you see? Some of these things have been the work of a lifetime of one man. You call that a small thing? I don't. The pleasure is in doing it, proving that you can, not in the rug itself." He clacked and tied, congratulating himself vastly. In due course of time three or four inches were finished, a soft and yet firm silky fabric, and he was in great glee over it, showing it to all and insisting that in time (how long? I often wondered) he would complete it and would then own a splendid carpet.

It was at this time that he built about him in Newark a structure of friendships and interests which, it seemed to me, promised to be for life. He interested himself intensely in the paper with which he was connected and although he was only the cartoonist, still it was not long before various departments and elements in connection with it seemed to reflect his presence and to be alive with his own good will and enthusiasm. Publisher, editor, art director, managing editor and business manager, were all in friendly contact with him. He took out life insurance for the benefit of the wife and children he was later to have! With the manager of the engraving department he was working out problems in connection with copperplate engraving and printing; with the official photographer, art photography; with the art director, some scheme for enlarging the local museum in some way. With his enduring love of the fantastic and ridiculous it was not long before he had successfully planned and executed a hoax of the most ridiculous character, a piece of idle drollery almost too foolish to think of, and yet which eventually succeeded in exciting the natives of at least four States and was telegraphed to and talked about in a Sunday feature way, by newspapers all over the country, and finally involved Peter as an actor and stage manager of the most vivid type imaginable. And yet it was all done really to amuse himself, to see if he could do it, as he often told me.

This particular hoax related to that silly old bugaboo of our boyhood days, the escaped and wandering wild man, ferocious, blood-loving, terrible. I knew nothing of it until Peter, one Sunday afternoon when we were off for a walk a year or two after he had arrived in Newark, suddenly announced apropos of nothing at all, "Dreiser, I've just hit upon a great idea which I am working out with some of the boys down on our paper. It's a dusty old fake, but it will do as well as any other, better than if it were a really decent idea. I'm inventing a wild man. You know how crazy the average dub is over anything strange, different,'terrible.' Barnum was right, you know. There's one born every minute. Well, I'm just getting this thing up now. It's as good as the sacred white elephant or the blood-sweating hippopotamus. And what's more, I'm going to stage it right here in little old Newark--and they'll all fall for it, and don't you think they won't," and he chuckled most ecstatically.

"For heaven's sake, what's coming now?" I sighed.

"Oh, very well. But I have it all worked out just the same. We're beginning to run the preliminary telegrams every three or four days--one from Ramblersville, South Jersey, let us say, another from Hohokus, twenty-five miles farther on, four or five days later. By degrees as spring comes on I'll bring him north--right up here into Essex County--a genuine wild man, see, something fierce and terrible. We're giving him long hair like a bison, red eyes, fangs, big hands and feet. He's entirely naked--or will be when he gets here. He's eight feet tall. He kills and eats horses, dogs, cattle, pigs, chickens. He frightens men and women and children. I'm having him bound across lonely roads, look in windows at night, stampede cattle and drive tramps and peddlers out of the country. But say, wait and see. As summer comes on we'll make a regular headliner of it. We'll give it pages on Sunday. We'll get the rubes to looking for him in posses, offer rewards. Maybe some one will actually capture and bring in some poor lunatic, a real wild man. You can do anything if you just stir up the natives enough."

I laughed. "You're crazy," I said. "What a low comedian you really are, Peter!"

Well, the weeks passed, and to mark progress he occasionally sent me clippings of telegrams, cut not from his pages, if you please, but from such austere journals as the _Sun_ and _World_ of New York, the _North American_ of Philadelphia, the _Courant_ of Hartford, recording the antics of his imaginary thing of the woods. Longish articles actually began to appear here and there, in Eastern papers especially, describing the exploits of this very elusive and moving demon. He had been seen in a dozen fairly widely distributed places within the month, but always coming northward. In one place he had killed three cows at once, in another two, and eaten portions of them raw! Old Mrs. Gorswitch of Dutchers Run, Pennsylvania, returning from a visit to her daughter-in-law, Annie A. Gorswitch, and ambling along a lonely road in Osgoroola County, was suddenly descended upon by a most horrific figure, half man, half beast, very tall and with long hair and red, all but bloody eyes who, looking at her with avid glance, made as if to seize her, but a wagon approaching along the road from another direction, he had desisted and fled, leaving old Mrs. Gorswitch in a faint upon the ground. Barns and haystacks had been fired here and there, lonely widows in distant cotes been made to abandon their homes through fear.... I marveled at the assiduity and patience of the man.

One day in June or July following, being in Newark and asking Peter quite idly about his wild man, he replied, "Oh, it's great, great! Couldn't be better! He'll soon be here now. We've got the whole thing arranged now for next Sunday or Saturday--depends on which day I can get off. We're going to photograph him. Wanto come over?"

"What rot!" I said. "Who's going to pose? Where?"

"Well," he chuckled, "come along and see. You'll find out fast enough. We've got an actual wild man. I got him. I'll have him out here in the woods. If you don't believe it, come over. You wouldn't believe me when I said I could get the natives worked up. Well, they are. Look at these," and he produced clippings from rival papers. The wild man was actually being seen in Essex County, not twenty-five miles from Newark. He had ravaged the property of people in five different States. It was assumed that he was a lunatic turned savage, or that he had escaped from a circus or trading-ship wrecked on the Jersey coast (suggestions made by Peter himself). His depredations, all told, had by now run into thousands, speaking financially. Staid residents were excited. Rewards for his capture were being offered in different places. Posses of irate citizens were, and would continue to be, after him, armed to the teeth, until he was captured. Quite remarkable developments might be expected at any time ... I stared. It seemed too ridiculous, and it was, and back of it all was smirking, chuckling Peter, the center and fountain of it!

"You dog!" I protested. "You clown!" He merely grinned.

Not to miss so interesting a dénouement as the actual capture of this prodigy of the wilds, I was up early and off the following Sunday to Newark, where in Peter's apartment in due time I found him, his rooms in a turmoil, he himself busy stuffing things into a bag, outside an automobile waiting and within it the staff photographer as well as several others, all grinning, and all of whom, as he informed me, were to assist in the great work of tracking, ambushing and, if possible, photographing the dread peril.

"Yes, well, who's going to be him?" I insisted.

"Never mind! Never mind! Don't be so inquisitive," chortled Peter. "A wild man has his rights and privileges, as well as any other. Remember, I caution all of you to be respectful in his presence. He's very sensitive, and he doesn't like newspapermen anyhow. He'll be photographed, and he'll be wild. That's all you need to know."

In due time we arrived at as comfortable an abode for a wild man as well might be. It was near the old Essex and Morris Canal, not far from Boonton. A charming clump of brush and rock was selected, and here a snapshot of a posse hunting, men peering cautiously from behind trees in groups and looking as though they were most eager to discover something, was made. Then Peter, slipping away--I suddenly saw him ambling toward us, hair upstanding, body smeared with black muck, daubs of white about the eyes, little tufts of wool about wrists and ankles and loins--as good a figure of a wild man as one might wish, only not eight feet tall.

"Peter!" I said. "How ridiculous! You loon!"

"Have a care how you address me," he replied with solemn dignity. "A wild man is a wild man. Our punctilio is not to be trifled with. I am of the oldest, the most famous line of wild men extant. Touch me not." He strode the grass with the air of a popular movie star, while he discussed with the art director and photographer the most terrifying and convincing attitudes of a wild man seen by accident and unconscious of his pursuers.

"But you're not eight feet tall!" I interjected at one point.

"A small matter. A small matter," he replied airily. "I will be in the picture. Nothing easier. We wild men, you know--"

Some of the views were excellent, most striking. He leered most terribly from arras of leaves or indicated fright or cunning. The man was a good actor. For years I retained and may still have somewhere a full set of the pictures as well as the double-page spread which followed the next week.

Well, the thing was appropriately discussed, as it should have been, but the wild man got away, as was feared. He went into the nearby canal and washed away all his terror, or rather he vanished into the dim recesses of Peter's memory. He was only heard of a few times more in the papers, his supposed body being found in some town in northeast Pennsylvania--or in the small item that was "telegraphed" from there. As for Peter, he emerged from the canal, or from its banks, a cleaner if not a better man. He was grinning, combing his hair, adjusting his tie.

"What a scamp!" I insisted lovingly. "What an incorrigible trickster!"

"Dreiser, Dreiser," he chortled, "there's nothing like it. You should not scoff. I am a public benefactor. I am really a creator. I have created a being as distinct as any that ever lived. He is in many minds--mine, yours. You know that you believe in him really. There he was peeking out from between those bushes only fifteen minutes ago. And he has made, and will make, thousands of people happy, thrill them, give them a new interest. If Stevenson can create a Jekyll and Hyde, why can't I create a wild man? I have. We have his picture to prove it. What more do you wish?"

I acquiesced. All told, it was a delightful bit of foolery and art, and Peter was what he was first and foremost, an artist in the grotesque and the ridiculous.

For some time thereafter peace seemed to reign in his mind, only now it was that the marriage and home and children idea began to grow. From much of the foregoing it may have been assumed that Peter was out of sympathy with the ordinary routine of life, despised the commonplace, the purely practical. As a matter of fact it was just the other way about. I never knew a man so radical in some of his viewpoints, so versatile and yet so wholly, intentionally and cravingly, immersed in the usual as Peter. He was all for creating, developing, brightening life along simple rather than outré lines, in so far as he himself was concerned. Nearly all of his arts and pleasures were decorative and homey. A good grocer, a good barber, a good saloon-keeper, a good tailor, a shoe maker, was just as interesting in his way to Peter as any one or anything else, if not a little more so. He respected their lines, their arts, their professions, and above all, where they had it, their industry, sobriety and desire for fair dealing. He believed that millions of men, especially those about him were doing the best they could under the very severe conditions which life offered. He objected to the idle, the too dull the swindlers and thieves as well as the officiously puritanic or dogmatic. He resented, for himself at least, solemn pomp and show. Little houses, little gardens, little porches, simple cleanly neighborhoods with their air of routine, industry, convention and order, fascinated him as apparently nothing else could. He insisted that they were enough. A man did not need a great house unless he was a public character with official duties.

"Dreiser," he would say in Philadelphia and Newark, if not before, "it's in just such a neighborhood as this that some day I'm going to live. I'm going to have my little _frau_, my seven children, my chickens, dog, cat, canary, best German style, my garden, my birdbox, my pipe; and Sundays, by God, I'll march 'em all off to church, wife and seven kids, as regular as clockwork, shined shoes, pigtails and all, and I'll lead the procession."

"Yes, yes," I said. "You talk."

"Well, wait and see. Nothing in this world means so much to me as the good old orderly home stuff. One ought to live and die in a family. It's the right way. I'm cutting up now, sowing my wild oats, but that's nothing. I'm just getting ready to eventually settle down and live, just as I tell you, and be an ideal orderly citizen. It's the only way. It's the way nature intends us to do. All this early kid stuff is passing, a sorting-out process. We get over it. Every fellow does, or ought to be able to, if he's worth anything, find some one woman that he can live with and stick by her. That makes the world that you and I like to live in, and you know it. There's a psychic call in all of us to it, I think. It's the genius of our civilization, to marry one woman and settle down. And when I do, no more of this all-night stuff with this, that and the other lady. I'll be a model husband and father, sure as you're standing there. Don't you think I won't. Smile if you want to--it's so. I'll have my garden. I'll be friendly with my neighbors. You can come over then and help us put the kids to bed."

"Oh, Lord! This is a new bug now! We'll have the vine-covered cot idea for a while, anyhow."

"Oh, all right. Scoff if you want to. You'll see."

Time went by. He was doing all the things I have indicated, living in a kind of whirl of life. At the same time, from time to time, he would come back to this thought. Once, it is true, I thought it was all over with the little yellow-haired girl in Philadelphia. He talked of her occasionally, but less and less. Out on the golf links near Passaic he met another girl, one of a group that flourished there. I met her. She was not unpleasing, a bit sensuous, rather attractive in dress and manners, not very well informed, but gay, clever, up-to-date; such a girl as would pass among other women as fairly satisfactory.

For a time Peter seemed greatly attracted to her. She danced, played a little, was fair at golf and tennis, and she was, or pretended to be, intensely interested in him. He confessed at last that he believed he was in love with her.

"So it's all day with Philadelphia, is it?" I asked.

"It's a shame," he replied, "but I'm afraid so. I'm having a hell of a time with myself, my alleged conscience, I tell you."

I heard little more about it. He had a fad for collecting rings at this time, a whole casket full, like a Hindu prince, and he told me once he was giving her her choice of them.

Suddenly he announced that it was "all off" and that he was going to marry the maid of Philadelphia. He had thrown the solitaire engagement ring he had given her down a sewer! At first he would confess nothing as to the reason or the details, but being so close to me it eventually came out. Apparently, to the others as to myself, he had talked much of his simple home plans, his future children--the good citizen idea. He had talked it to his new love also, and she had sympathized and agreed. Yet one day, after he had endowed her with the engagement ring, some one, a member of the golf club, came and revealed a tale. The girl was not "straight." She had been, mayhap was even then, "intimate" with other men--one anyhow. She was in love with Peter well enough, as she insisted afterward, and willing to undertake the life he suggested, but she had not broken with the old atmosphere completely, or if she had it was still not believed that she had. There were those who could not only charge, but prove. A compromising note of some kind sent to some one was involved, turned over to Peter.

"Dreiser," he growled as he related the case to me, "it serves me right. I ought to know better. I know the kind of woman I need. This one has handed me a damned good wallop, and I deserve it. I might have guessed that she wasn't suited to me. She was really too free--a life-lover more than a wife. That home stuff! She was just stringing me because she liked me. She isn't really my sort, not simple enough."

"But you loved her, I thought?"

"I did, or thought I did. Still, I used to wonder too. There were many ways about her that troubled me. You think I'm kidding about this home and family idea, but I'm not. It suits me, however flat it looks to you. I want to do that, live that way, go through the normal routine experience, and I'm going to do it."

"But how did you break it off with her so swiftly?" I asked curiously.

"Well, when I heard this I went direct to her and put it up to her. If you'll believe me she never even denied it. Said it was all true, but that she was in love with me all right, and would change and be all that I wanted her to be."

"Well, that's fair enough," I said, "if she loves you. You're no saint yourself, you know. If you'd encourage her, maybe she'd make good."

"Well, maybe, but I don't think so really," he returned, shaking his head. "She likes me, but not enough, I'm afraid. She wouldn't run straight, now that she's had this other. She'd mean to maybe, but she wouldn't. I feel it about her. And anyhow I don't want to take any chances. I like her--I'm crazy about her really, but I'm through. I'm going to marry little Dutchy if she'll have me, and cut out this old-line stuff. You'll have to stand up with me when I do."

In three months more the new arrangement was consummated and little Dutchy--or Zuleika, as he subsequently named her--was duly brought to Newark and installed, at first in a charming apartment in a conventionally respectable and cleanly neighborhood, later in a small house with a "yard," lawn front and back, in one of the homiest of home neighborhoods in Newark. It was positively entertaining to observe Peter not only attempting to assume but assuming the rôle of the conventional husband, and exactly nine months after he had been married, to the hour, a father in this humble and yet, in so far as his

## particular home was concerned, comfortable world. I have no space here

for more than the barest outline. I have already indicated his views, most emphatically expressed and forecasted. He fulfilled them all to the letter, up to the day of his death. In so far as I could make out, he made about as satisfactory a husband and father and citizen as I have ever seen. He did it deliberately, in cold reason, and yet with a warmth and flare which puzzled me all the more since it _was_ based on reason and forethought. I misdoubted. I was not quite willing to believe that it would work out, and yet if ever a home was delightful, with a charming and genuinely "happy" atmosphere, it was Peter's.

"Here she is," he observed the day he married her, "me _frau_--Zuleika. Isn't she a peach? Ever see any nicer hair than that? And these here, now, pink cheeks? What? Look at 'em! And her little Dutchy nose! Isn't it cute? Oh, Dutchy! And right here in me vest pocket is the golden band wherewith I am to be chained to the floor, the domestic hearth. And right there on her finger is my badge of prospective serfdom." Then, in a loud aside to me, "In six months I'll be beating her. Come now, Zuleika. We have to go through with this. You have to swear to be my slave."

And so they were married.

And in the home afterward he was as busy and helpful and noisy as any man about the house could ever hope to be. He was always fussing about after hours "putting up" something or arranging his collections or helping Zuleika wash and dry the dishes, or showing her how to cook something if she didn't know how. He was running to the store or bringing home things from the downtown market. Months before the first child was born he was declaring most shamelessly, "In a few months now, Dreiser, Zuleika and I are going to have our first calf. The bones roll for a boy, but you never can tell. I'm offering up prayers and oblations--both of us are. I make Zuleika pray every night. And say, when it comes, no spoiling-the-kid stuff. No bawling or rocking it to sleep nights permitted. Here's one kid that's going to be raised right. I've worked out all the rules. No trashy baby-foods. Good old specially brewed Culmbacher for the mother, and the kid afterwards if it wants it. This is one family in which law and order are going to prevail--good old 'dichtig, wichtig' law and order."