Chapter III

I really doubt very much whether anybody ever enjoyed food more than Kilmer. The slender youth had become a decidedly stocky young man, who ate mammoth meals with prodigious satisfaction. He delighted upon sitting down to breakfast to maintain, with almost savage earnestness (such was the amusing effect), that the most fitting dish for that meal was steak. As a matter of fact, however, his habit was to miss his breakfast altogether through haste to catch his train, except for a cup of coffee and a piece of buttered toast which, when he missed the ’bus, he ate, a mouthful every dozen or so leaps, on his way down the hill (almost a mountain) to the station. Sundays, however, with the whole day at home, he apparently regarded among other things as a sort of barbecue. Looking over the morning table it was his custom to inquire with the air of a man making a fairly satisfactory beginning, what was scheduled for dinner.

Kilmer never ate any lunch, as the ordinary world understands the word--about the first hour of the afternoon he went (when his means had become such that he could afford it) to a sort of Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner every day. How proceeding directly to his office he did any work afterward, was always considerable of a mystery to me. And lunching alone he doubtless regarded as a misanthropic perversion. His luncheons and his frequent dinners in town alone represented what many would regard as a rather arduous social life, which however arduous, however, never failed to include the weekly luncheon with his mother, Mrs. Kilburn-Kilmer. As an epilogue, so to say, to his meal it was his wont to have, speaking his order slowly so as to suck the full flavour of the idea, “a large black cigar.”

One time being in the city with his family for a period after the birth of one of his children, he gave a series of Sunday morning breakfasts at a fashionable restaurant (it was a pleasant crotchet with him that he was “a fashionable young man”), entertainments which were distinguished by, first, the fact the guests so abundantly represented the world of journalism that they filled a good portion of the room, and, secondly, by the circumstance of their lingering at the board until mid-day diners began to arrive.

How a poet could _not_ be a glorious eater, it was one of Kilmer’s whims to say, he could not see; for the poet was happier than other men by reason of his acuter senses, and as his eyes delighted in the beauty of the world, so should his palate thrill with pleasure in the taste of the earth’s bounteous yield for the sustenance of men. The romance, too, of the things we eat he felt lustily.

Rich spices from the Orient,
And fruit that knew Italian skies.

He had another, and a decidedly quaint, notion of food. He firmly believed that hearty eating was an adequate physical compensation for loss of sleep. He was fond of declaring his faith in this fantastic idea by means of a story of some “ancient receptive child” (friend of his) who managed to bring up a family of seven (or so) children by ill-paid hack-work occupying most of the day and night--a noble success due entirely to noble meals.

* * * * *

This man has home and child and wife
And battle set for every day.
This man has God and love and life;
These stand, all else shall pass away.

And “this man’s” days were long, long days: Kilmer’s home, a place of boundless week-end hospitality and almost equally boundless domesticity (guests being obliged to exercise much agility in clambering about toys with which the stairs were laden), was also year after year a place of almost unbelievable literary industry. The trying idiosyncrasies of the artistic temperament were about as discernible in Kilmer as kleptomania. He was, as you may say, social and domestic in his habits of writing to an amazing degree. Night after night he would radiantly walk up and down the floor singing a lullaby to one of his children whom he carried screaming in his arms while he dictated between vociferous sounds to his secretary or wife--his wife frequently driven by the drowsiness of two in the morning to take short naps with her head upon the typewriter while the literally tireless journalist filled and lighted his pipe.

This, however, was an atmosphere of cloistral seclusion compared with Kilmer’s office at the _New York Times_. Here, where he regularly got through each week enough hard work to hold down three or four fairly capable young men, he maintained a sort of salon for a ludicrous variety of picturesque characters with nothing in particular to do and no place else to go, ranging from types of patrician leisure to stray dogs of the literary world visibly out of a job.

The latter class, indeed, apparently regarded him as a kind of a clearing house for employment. A singularly convincing commentary on the radiating humanity of this brilliant young man was one rather grotesque feature of his mail. In addition to a constant and copious stream of requests from persons but slightly known, or quite unknown to him, for advice as to how to succeed in letters, and for his personal imprimatur on their enclosed manuscripts, he was apparently constantly in receipt of innumerable epistolary stories of extraordinary distress, suffered (generally) by elderly characters defeated in the lists of literature. Though there was in Kilmer’s robust nature a decided distaste, somewhat analogous to the innate aversion of the clean in spirit to moral obliquity, for what he termed “ineffectual people,” there was too an amusing strain of paternal feeling toward most of those of all ages with whom he was in contact. And this feeling he did not neglect, whenever the occasion arose, to translate into practical effect.

He had a comical manner of terming his elders “young” So-and-So. I was six years his senior, which at the period of life at which we met represented a considerable difference in experience. And yet, throughout our association, in spiritual force he was the oak, I the clinging vine. And I know of cases where this was quite as much so when the other man was something like fifteen years the elder. One such instance, ludicrous in its contrast between the two men, was confessed to me with deep feeling just the other day.

“So-long” or “good-bye” was seldom Kilmer’s parting word. It was rather a word he continually used which will be thought of as peculiarly his as long as his memory endures, the closing word of “Rouge Bouquet.” The last time I saw him at his home, then at Larchmont Manor, New York, my companion (in marriage) and I upon leaving almost missed our car, which started a block or so from the Kilmer house. As the three of us dashed after it, Kilmer stopped this car by what seemed to me something like sheer force of his willing it to stop. Then, as he dropped away from the race, there came from him high and clear out of the night (and always shall I hear it ring) his benediction: “Farewell! Children.” Yes, it is even so; as the spirit is measured and the frailties of the soul are numbered, how many who knew this wondrous boy were his “children”!

The wisdom of the maxim “A busy man is never too busy to do one thing more” was indisputable in the spectacle of Kilmer. Though this was not, so far as I recollect, a maxim he employed, he had one of his own something like it, which admirably summed up his practical philosophy. When confronted by some financial dilemma, he was fond of declaring: “The demand creates the supply. A sound economic principle.” He seemed to crave serious responsibilities and insistent obligations as some men crave liquor; and he grew more rosy as these increased.

Thank God for the mighty tide of fears
Against me always hurled!
Thank God for the bitter and ceaseless strife,
And the sting of His chastening rod!

There was nothing incongruous to Kilmer about the incongruity expressed in a communication written in 1916 to the Reverend Edward F. Garesché, S. J.; a letter which began by saying, “I am sorry that your letter of October 11 has been so long unanswered, but this has been the busiest month of my life”; which then told of his looping the loop of the country in lecture engagements; proceeded to discuss a matter which had made a strong appeal to his heart, the founding of an Academy of Catholic Letters to be called the Marian Institute; and concluded with the remark, “I will gladly take on the work of acting secretary until the members make their own selection.”