Twelve Men

by Theodore Dreiser

  “Oh, I can cook. I just went around to the markets, and told the market-men what I wanted—heads of mackerel, and the part of the halibut that’s left after the rich man cuts off his steak—it’s the poorest part that he pays for, you know. And I went fishing myself two or three times—borrowed a big boat and got men to help me—oh, I’m a good fisherman, you know. And then I got the loan of an old covered brickyard that no one was using any more, a great big thing that I could close up and build fires in, and I put my kettle in there and rigged up tables out of borrowed boards, and got people to loan me plates and spoons and knives and forks and cups. I made fish chowder, and fish dinners, and really I set a very fine table, I did, that winter.”

  “For a cent-and-a-half a meal!”

  “Yes, sir, a cent-and-a-half a meal. Ask any one in New London. That’s all it cost me. The mayor said he was surprised at the way I did it.”

  “Well, but there wasn’t any particular personal service in the money they gave you?” I asked, catching him up on that point. “They didn’t personally serve—those who gave you the money?”

  “No, sir, they didn’t,” he replied dreamily, with unconscious simplicity. “But they gave through me, you see. That’s the way it was. I gave the personal service. Don’t you see? That’s the way.”

  “Yes, that’s the way,” I smiled, avoiding as far as possible a further discussion of this contradiction, so unconscious on his part, and in the drag of his thought he took up another idea.

  “I clothed ‘em that winter, too—went around and got barrels and boxes of old clothing. Some of them felt a little ashamed to put on the things, but I got over that, all right. I was wearing them myself, and I just told them, ‘Don’t feel badly, brother. I’m wearing them out of the same barrel with you—I’m wearing them out of the same barrel.’ Got my clothes entirely free for that winter.”

  “Can you always get all the aid you need for such enterprises?”

  “Usually, and then I can earn a good deal of money when I work steadily. I can get a hundred and fifty dollars for a little yacht, you know, every time I find time to make one; and I can make a good deal of money out of fishing. I went out fishing here on the Fourth of July and caught two hundred blackfish—four and five pounds, almost, every one of them.”

  “That ought to be profitable,” I said.

  “Well, it was,” he replied.

  “How much did you get for them?”

  “Oh, I didn’t sell them,” he said. “I never take money for my work that way. I gave them all away.”

  “What did you do?” I asked, laughing—“advertise for people to come for them?”

  “No. My wife took some, and my daughters, and I took the rest and we carried them around to people that we thought would like to have them.”

  “Well, that wasn’t so profitable, was it?” I commented amusedly.

  “Yes, they were fine fish,” he replied, not seeming to have heard me.

  We dropped the subject of personal service at this point, and I expressed the opinion that his service was only a temporary expedient. Times changed, and with them, people. They forgot. Perhaps those he aided were none the better for accepting his charity.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “But that don’t make any difference. You just have to keep on giving, that’s all, see? Not all of ‘em turn back. It helps a lot. Money is the only dangerous thing to give—but I never give money—not very often. I give myself, rather, as much as possible. I give food and clothing, too, but I try to show ‘em a new way—that’s not money, you know. So many people need a new way. They’re looking for it often, only they don’t seem to know how. But God, dear brother, however poor or mean they are—He knows. You’ve got to reach the heart, you know, and I let Him help me. You’ve got to make a man over in his soul, if you want to help him, and money won’t help you to do that, you know. No, it won’t.”

  He looked up at me in clear-eyed faith. It was remarkable.

  “Make them over?” I queried, still curious, for it was all like a romance, and rather fantastic to me. “What do you mean? How do you make them over?”

  “Oh, in their attitude, that’s how. You’ve got to change a man and bring him out of self-seeking if you really want to make him good. Most men are so tangled up in their own errors and bad ways, and so worried over their seekings, that unless you can set them to giving it’s no use. They’re always seeking, and they don’t know what they want half the time. Money isn’t the thing. Why, half of them wouldn’t understand how to use it if they had it. Their minds are not bright enough. Their perceptions are not clear enough. All you can do is to make them content with themselves. And that, giving to others will do. I never saw the man or the woman yet who couldn’t be happy if you could make them feel the need of living for others, of doing something for somebody besides themselves. It’s a fact. Selfish people are never happy.”

  He rubbed his hands as if he saw the solution of the world’s difficulties very clearly, and I said to him:

  “Well, now, you’ve got a man out of the mire, and ‘saved,’ as you call it, and then what? What comes next?”

  “Well, then he’s saved,” he replied. “Happiness comes next—content.”

  “I know. But must he go to church, or conform to certain rules?”

  “No, no, no!” he replied sweetly. “Nothing to do except to be good to others. ‘True religion and undefiled before our God and Father is this,’” he quoted, “‘to visit the widow and the orphan in their affliction and to keep unspotted from the world. Charity is kind,’ you know. ‘Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, seeketh not its own.’”

  “Well,” I said, rather aimlessly, I will admit, for this high faith staggered me. (How high! How high!) “And then what?”

  “Well, then the world would come about. It would be so much better. All the misery is in the lack of sympathy one with another. When we get that straightened out we can work in peace. There are lots of things to do, you know.”

  Yes, I thought, looking down on the mills and the driving force of self-interest—on greed, lust, love of pleasure, all their fantastic and yet moving dreams.

  “I’m an ignorant man myself, and I don’t know all,” he went on, “and I’d like to study. My, but I’d like to look into all things, but I can’t do it now. We can’t stop until this thing is straightened out. Some time, maybe,” and he looked peacefully away.

  “By the way,” I said, “whatever became of the man to whom you gave your rubber boots over on Fisher’s Island?”

  His face lit up as if it were the most natural thing that I should know about it.

  “Say,” he exclaimed, in the most pleased and confidential way, as if we were talking about a mutual friend, “I saw him not long ago. And, do you know, he’s a good man now—really, he is. Sober and hard-working. And, say, would you believe it, he told me that I was the cause of it—just that miserable old pair of rubber boots—what do you think of that?”

  I shook his hand at parting, and as we stood looking at each other in the shadow of the evening I asked him:

  “Are you afraid to die?”

  “Say, brother, but I’m not,” he returned. “It hasn’t any terror for me at all. I’m just as willing. My, but I’m willing.”

  He smiled and gripped me heartily again, and, as I was starting to go, said:

  “If I die tonight, it’ll be all right. He’ll use me just as long as He needs me. That I know. Good-by.”

  “Good-by,” I called back.

  He hung by his fence, looking down upon the city. As I turned the next corner I saw him awakening from his reflection and waddling stolidly back into the house.

  My Brother Paul

  I like best to think of him as he was at the height of his all-too-brief reputation and success, when, as the author and composer of various American popular successes (“On the Banks of the Wabash,” “Just Tell Them That You Saw Me,” and various others), as a third owner of one of the most su
ccessful popular music publishing houses in the city and as an actor and playwright of some small repute, he was wont to spin like a moth in the white light of Broadway. By reason of a little luck and some talent he had come so far, done so much for himself. In his day he had been by turn a novitiate in a Western seminary which trained aspirants for the Catholic priesthood; a singer and entertainer with a perambulating cure-all oil troupe or wagon (“Hamlin’s Wizard Oil”) traveling throughout Ohio, Indiana and Illinois; both end- and middle-man with one, two or three different minstrel companies of repute; the editor or originator and author of a “funny column” in a Western small city paper; the author of the songs mentioned and a hundred others; a black-face monologue artist; a white-face ditto, at Tony Pastor’s, Miner’s and Niblo’s of the old days; a comic lead; co-star and star in such melodramas and farces as “The Danger Signal,” “The Two Johns,” “A Tin Soldier,” “The Midnight Bell,” “A Green Goods Man” (a farce which he himself wrote, by the way), and others. The man had a genius for the kind of gayety, poetry and romance which may, and no doubt must be, looked upon as exceedingly middle-class but which nonetheless had as much charm as anything in this world can well have. He had at this time absolutely no cares or financial worries of any kind, and this plus his health, self-amusing disposition and talent for entertaining, made him a most fascinating figure to contemplate.

  My first recollection of him is of myself as a boy often and he a man of twenty-five (my oldest brother). He had come back to the town in which we were then living solely to find his mother and help her. Six or seven years before he had left without any explanation as to where he was going, tired of or irritated by the routine of a home which for any genuine opportunity it offered him might as well never have existed. It was run dominantly by my father in the interest of religious and moral theories, with which this boy had little sympathy. He was probably not understood by any one save my mother, who understood or at least sympathized with us all. Placed in a school which was to turn him out a priest, he had decamped, and now seven years later was here in this small town, with fur coat and silk hat, a smart cane—a gentleman of the theatrical profession. He had joined a minstrel show somewhere and had become an “end-man.” He had suspected that we were not as fortunate in this world’s goods as might be and so had returned. His really great heart had called him.

  But the thing which haunts me, and which was typical of him then as throughout life, was the spirit which he then possessed and conveyed. It was one of an agile geniality, unmarred by thought of a serious character but warm and genuinely tender and with a taste for simple beauty which was most impressive. He was already the author of a cheap songbook, ”The Paul Dresser Songster“ (“All the Songs Sung in the Show”), and some copies of this he had with him, one of which he gave me. But we having no musical instrument of any kind, he taught me some of the melodies “by ear.” The home in which by force of poverty we were compelled to live was most unprepossessing and inconvenient, and the result of his coming could but be our request for, or at least the obvious need of, assistance. Still he was as much an enthusiastic part of it as though he belonged to it. He was happy in it, and the cause of his happiness was my mother, of whom he was intensely fond. I recall how he hung about her in the kitchen or wherever she happened to be, how enthusiastically he related all his plans for the future, his amusing difficulties in the past. He was very grand and youthfully self-important, or so we all thought, and still he patted her on the shoulder or put his arm about her and kissed her. Until she died years later she was truly his uppermost thought, crying with her at times over her troubles and his. He contributed regularly to her support and sent home all his cast-off clothing to be made over for the younger ones. (Bless her tired hands!)

  As I look back now on my life, I realize quite clearly that of all the members of my family, subsequent to my mother’s death, the only one who truly understood me, or, better yet, sympathized with my intellectual and artistic point of view, was, strange as it may seem, this same Paul, my dearest brother. Not that he was in any way fitted intellectually or otherwise to enjoy high forms of art and learning and so guide me, or that he understood, even in later years (long after I had written “Sister Carrie,” for instance), what it was that I was attempting to do; he never did. His world was that of the popular song, the middle-class actor or comedian, the middle-class comedy, and such humorous aesthetes of the writing world as Bill Nye, Petroleum V. Nasby, the authors of the Spoopendyke Papers, and “Samantha at Saratoga.” As far as I could make out—and I say this in no lofty, condescending spirit, by any means—he was entirely full of simple, middle-class romance, middle-class humor, middle-class tenderness and middle-class grossness, all of which I am very free to say early disarmed and won me completely and kept me so much his debtor that I should hesitate to try to acknowledge or explain all that he did for or meant to me.

  Imagine, if you can, a man weighing all of three hundred pounds, not more than five feet ten-and-one-half inches in height and yet of so lithesome a build that he gave not the least sense of either undue weight or lethargy. His temperament, always ebullient and radiant, presented him as a clever, eager, cheerful, emotional and always highly illusioned person with so collie-like a warmth that one found him compelling interest and even admiration. Easily cast down at times by the most trivial matters, at others, and for the most part, he was so spirited and bubbly and emotional and sentimental that your fiercest or most gloomy intellectual rages or moods could scarcely withstand his smile. This tenderness or sympathy of his, a very human appreciation of the weaknesses and errors as well as the toils and tribulations of most of us, was by far his outstanding and most engaging quality, and gave him a very definite force and charm. Admitting, as I freely do, that he was very sensuous (gross, some people might have called him), that he had an intense, possibly an undue fondness for women, a frivolous, childish, horse-playish sense of humor at times, still he had other qualities which were absolutely adorable. Life seemed positively to spring up fountain-like in him. One felt in him a capacity to do (in his possibly limited field); an ability to achieve, whether he was doing so at the moment or not, and a supreme willingness to share and radiate his success—qualities exceedingly rare, I believe. Some people are so successful, and yet you know their success is purely selfish—exclusive, not inclusive; they never permit you to share in their lives. Not so my good brother. He was generous to the point of self-destruction, and that is literally true. He was the mark if not the prey of all those who desired much or little for nothing, those who previously might not have rendered him a service of any kind. He was all life and color, and thousands (I use the word with care) noted and commented on it.

  When I first came to New York he was easily the foremost popular song-writer of the day and was the cause of my coming, so soon at least, having established himself in the publishing field and being so comfortably settled as to offer me a kind of anchorage in so troubled a commercial sea. I was very much afraid of New York, but with him here it seemed not so bad. The firm of which he was a part had a floor or two in an old residence turned office building, as so many are in New York, in Twentieth Street very close to Broadway, and here, during the summer months (1894-7) when the various theatrical road-companies, one of which he was always a part, had returned for the closed season, he was to be found aiding his concern in the reception and care of possible applicants for songs and attracting by his personality such virtuosi of the vaudeville and comedy stage as were likely to make the instrumental publications of his firm a success.

  I may as well say here that he had no more business skill than a fly. At the same time, he was in no wise sycophantic where either wealth, power or fame was concerned. He considered himself a personage of sorts, and was. The minister, the moralist, the religionist, the narrow, dogmatic and self-centered in any field were likely to be the butt of his humor, and he could imitate so many phases of character so cleverly that he was the life of any idle pleasure-seeking
party anywhere. To this day I recall his characterization of an old Irish washerwoman arguing; a stout, truculent German laying down the law; lean, gloomy, out-at-elbows actors of the Hamlet or classic school complaining of their fate; the stingy skinflint haggling over a dollar, and always with a skill for titillating the risibilities which is vivid to me even to this day. Other butts of his humor were the actor, the Irish day-laborer, the negro and the Hebrew. And how he could imitate them! It is useless to try to indicate such things in writing, the facial expression, the intonation, the gestures; these are not things of words. Perhaps I can best indicate the direction of his mind, if not his manner, by the following:

  One night as we were on our way to a theater there stood on a nearby corner in the cold a blind man singing and at the same time holding out a little tin cup into which the coins of the charitably inclined were supposed to be dropped. At once my brother noticed him, for he had an eye for this sort of thing, the pathos of poverty as opposed to so gay a scene, the street with its hurrying theater crowds. At the same time, so inherently mischievous was his nature that although his sympathy for the suffering or the ill-used of fate was overwhelming, he could not resist combining his intended charity with a touch of the ridiculous.

  “Got any pennies?” he demanded.

  “Three or four.”

  Going over to an outdoor candystand he exchanged a quarter for pennies, then came back and waited until the singer, who had ceased singing, should begin a new melody. A custom of the singer’s, since the song was of no import save as a means of attracting attention to him, was to interpolate a “Thank you” after each coin dropped in his cup and between the words of the song, regardless. It was this little idiosyncrasy which evidently had attracted my brother’s attention, although it had not mine. Standing quite close, his pennies in his hand, he waited until the singer had resumed, then began dropping pennies, waiting each time for the “Thank you,” which caused the song to go about as follows: