Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/314

Rh transferred from the Times. Both taught me much. From one, singing amid his dirt in an attic, I learned about a world that, hiding behind ephemeral appearances, lies deathlessly serene and unalterably lovely; from the other, about a world which far from deathless and certainly less serene, flaunts its rewards upon a more obviously remunerative scale. Of both poet and financier, at any rate, I kept vivid, grateful, pleasant memories.

Between the unsavoury world I had lived in so long and the new one I had now entered, the Old Man of Visions, himself at home in all and every kind of world, always seemed a bridge. His personality spread imaginatively, as it were, over all grades and through all strata of humanity. In my slow upward climb he seemed to hand me on, and in return for his unfailing guidance it was possible to make his own conditions a trifle more comfortable: possible, but not easy, because there was no help he needed and did not positively scorn. He watched my welfare with unfailing interest, but nothing would induce him to buy a new hat, a new frock-coat, an umbrella or a pair of gloves. "Our memories, at any given moment," says Bergson, "form a solid whole, a pyramid, so to speak, whose point is inserted precisely into our present action." On that "point" old Louis still drives through my mind and wields an influence to-day....

The happier period with James Speyer was, of course, an episode, like my other experiences. It was wonderful to draw a good salary regularly for pleasant work; to have long holidays in the Adirondacks, or moose-shooting in the woods north of the Canadian Pacific Railway; wonderful, too, when my employer went to Europe for three months, to know myself in charge of such big interests, with a power of attorney to sign all cheques. But the usual restlessness was soon on me again, desire for a change stirred in my blood. The Spanish-American War, I remember, made me think of joining Roosevelt's Rough Riders, a scheme both Speyer and Louis strongly disapproved, and that an attack of typhoid fever rendered impossible in any case. Rh