Read Ebook: The Dead Men's Song Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its Author Young Ewing Allison by Hitchcock Champion Ingraham

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One of my earliest recollections of my friend and business associate for very many, very short and very happy years, is a conversation in the old Chicago Press Club rooms on South Clark Street, near Madison, in the early 90's, about three o'clock one morning, when the time for confidences arrives--if ever it does. What his especial business in Chicago was at that particular moment makes no particular difference. He might have been rehearsing "The Ogallallas," or mayhap he was on duty as Kentucky commissioner to the World's Fair. As a matter of mere fact he was there and we had spent an evening and part of a morning together and were bent on extending the session to daybreak. Sunrise on Madison Street always was a wonderful sight. The dingy buildings on that busy old thoroughfare, awakening to day-life, then appeared as newly painted in the mellow of the early morning.

My companion knew something was coming. Our chairs were close together--side by side--and we were looking each in the other's face. He had his hand back of his ear. "Allison," I said--and I suppose that after a night in his company I was so impregnated with his strong personality that I had my hand back of my ear too, and spoke in a low, slightly drawling nasal, like his--"Allison," I repeated, "don't you miss a great deal by being deaf?" Now, it is said with tender regret, but a deep and sincere regard for truth, that my friend makes a virtue of a slight deafness. He uses it to avoid arguments, assignments, conventions, parlor parties--and bores--and deftly evades a whole lot of "duty" conversations as well. Of course I know all this now, but in those days I thought his lack of complete hearing an infirmity calling for a sort of sympathy on my part. Anyway it was three o'clock in the morning, and...!

"Well," he replied, after a little pause, "I can't say that I do. You see, if anyone ever says anything worth repeating, he always tells me about it anyway." Such is the philosophical trend that makes Allison an original with a peculiar gift of expression both in the spoken and written word. He is literary to his finger tips, in the finest sense of the word, for pure love, his own enjoyment and the pleasure of his friends. There is an ambition for you! With all his genuine modesty by which the light of his genius is hid under even less than the Scriptural bushel, he has a deep and healthy and honorable respect for fame--not of the cheap and tawdry, lionizing kind, but fame in an everlasting appreciation of those who think with their own minds. Almost any pen portraiture could but skim the surface of a nature so gifted and with which daily association is so delightful--an association which is a constant fillip to the mind in fascinating witticisms, in deft characterizations of men and things, and in deep drafts on memory's storehouse for odd incidents and unexpected illuminations. A long silence from "Allison's corner" may precede a gleeful chortle, as he throws on my desk some delicious satirical skit with a "Well, I've got that out of my system, anyway!"

Allison has a method of prose writing all his own. If you could see him day in and out, you would soon recognize the symptoms. An idea strikes him; he becomes abstracted, reads a great deal, pull down books, fills pages of particularly ruled copy paper with figures from a big, round, black pencil until you might think he was calculating the expenditures of a Billion Dollar Congress. He is not a mathematician but, like Balzac, simply dotes on figures. Then comes the analytical stage and that he performs on foot, walking, head bent forward, upstairs, downstairs, outdoors, around the block, in again, through the clattering press room and up and down the hall. When the stride quickens and he strikes a straight line for his desk, his orderly mind has arranged and classified his subject down to the illuminating adjectives even and the whole is ready to be put on paper. Though his mind is orderly, his desk seldom is. He is the type of old-school editor who has everything handy in a profound confusion. He detests office system, just as he admires mental arrangement. I got a "rise" out of him only once when making a pretence of describing his very complex method of preserving correspondence, and then he flared: "It saved us a lot of trouble, didn't it?" The fact was patent, but the story is apropos. Allison was complaining to a friend of office routine.

Just the mere mention of his system brings up the delightful recollections of his desk-cleaning parties, Spring and Fall, events so momentous that they almost come under the classification of office holidays. The dust flies, torn papers fill the air and the waste-baskets, and odd memoranda come to light and must be discussed. While wielding the dust cloth Allison hums "Bing-Binger, the Baritone Singer," has the finest imaginable time and for several day wears an air of such conscious pride that every paper laid upon his desk is greeted with a terrible frown.

Musical? Of course. His is the poetic mind, the imaginative, with an intensely practical, analytical perception--uncanny at times. He is perfectly "crazy" about operas, reads everything that comes to his hand--particularly novels--and is an inveterate patron of picture shows. "Under no strain trying to hear 'em talk," he confidences. While such occasions really are very rare, once in an age he becomes depressed--a peculiar fact in one so temperamental. After the fifth call within a month to act as pall-bearer at a funeral, he was in the depths. A friend was trying to cheer him.

"Isn't it too bad, Mr. Allison," the friend suggested, "that we can't all be like the lilies in the field, neither toiling nor spinning, but shedding perfume everywhere?"

"That lily business is all right," was Allison's retort, "but if I were a flower it would be just my luck to be a tube-rose and be picked for a funeral!"

If I could have one grand wish it would be that everybody could know him as I do: the man; the book-worm; the toastmaster; the public speaker; the writer; the sentimentalist; the friend. Absolutely natural and approachable at all times with never the remotest hint of theatricalism, , he is yet so many sided and complex that, without this self-same naturalness, often would be misunderstood. That he never cultivated an exclusiveness or built about himself barriers of idiosyncrasy is a distinct credit to his common sense. He's chock-full of that!

Let us see just how versatile Young Allison is. Years ago--twenty-six to be exact--he took the dry old subject of insurance and week in and out made it sparkle with such wit and brilliancy that every-day editorials became literary gems which laymen read with keenest enjoyment. Insurance writing might be said to be his vocation--a sort of daily-bread affair, well executed, because one should not quarrel with his sustenance--with librettos for operas, and poems and essays as an avocation. Fate must have doomed his operas in the very beginning, for despite some delicious productions, captivating in words and spirit, and set to slashing music, they go unsung because a a malign Jinx pursued.

While Allison is an omnivorous reader of novels and every other form of book, which he carries to and from his home in a favorite brown-leather handbag of diminutive size, he never had an ambition to create novels, though to his everlasting credit wrote two for a particular purpose which he accomplished by injecting the right tone or "color" into tales depicting the inner life on daily newspapers. We of the old Press Club used to grow choleric as we would read stories about alleged newspaper men, but a serene satisfaction fell upon us when Allison's reflections appeared. They were "right!" And while "resting" from the more or less arduous and routine and yet interest-holding duties of newspaper-man, Allison's relaxation and refreshment come in studies of human nature in all its mystifying aspects, whether in war or in peace; or in the sports--prize-fighting and baseball; or in the sciences; in politics; in the streets or in the home. Or they come from pleasure in the creation of essays on books--novels; of lectures; of formal and serious addresses; of tactful and witty toasts.

From my viewpoint Allison appears in public speaking to best advantage at banquets, either when responding to some toast, or as toastmaster. On such occasions he very quickly finds the temper of his listeners and without haste or oratorical effect, for he never orates, and almost without gesture, he "gets 'em" and "keeps 'em." Knowing how little he hears at public functions his performances at the head of the table, when acting as toastmaster, to me are only a shade removed from the marvelous. Either he has an uncanny second-sight, or that vaunted deafness is all a big pretense, for I have heard him "pull stuff" on a preceding speaker so pat that no one else could be made to believe what I knew was the truth: that--he--had--not--heard--a--single--word--uttered!

Perchance as a character note, should be added here a line or two about a work undertaken in behalf of a friend on a few hours notice for which he received a reward only in thanks. This friend had contracted to write certain memoirs but was incapacitated by illness and hung out the distress signal. Allison responded, shut himself up for a month, and produced a smooth and well balanced work of five hundred and fifty pages. Once I sent him a check to cover the cost of one of his books but he declared the check a "tempting bauble" and returned it framed. But I got a copy just the same inscribed "With the compliments of the Author" which I prized just as much as if I had paid for it with a clearing house certificate.

Physically he is of medium height, rather slight in form and, when walking, stoops a bit with head forward and a trifle to one side. In conversing he has a captivating trick of looking up while his head is bent and keeping his blue eyes nailed to yours pretty much all the time. Around eyes and mouth is ever lurking a wrinkling smile and its break--the laugh--is hearty and contagious with a timbre of peculiar huskiness. His face is a trifle thin through the cheeks, which accentuates a breadth of head, now crowning with silvery--and let me whisper this--slowly thinning hair. Stubby white mustaches for facial adornment, and cloth of varying brown shades to encompass the physical man, complete the picture.

Such is Young Ewing Allison as I see him.

Young Allison is a Kentuckian and proud of it with a pride that does not restrain him from seeing the peculiarities and frailties as well as the admirable traits of his fellow natives and skillfully putting them on paper to his own vast delight--and theirs too. What he gives, he is willing to take with Cromwell-like philosophy: "Paint me warts and all!" To speak of Allison in any sense whatever must be in the character of newspaper man, since to this work his whole life has been devoted. And if I may speak with well intentioned frankness: He's a damn good editor, too! However little our lay friends may understand this message, aside from its emphasis, I rest secure in the thought that to the brotherhood it opens a wide vista of qualifications to which reams might be devoted without doing full justice to the subject. Today he might not be the ideal city editor, or night editor, or managing editor of our great modern miracle-machines called newspapers, but I have yet to meet the man who can more quickly absorb, analyze, sum-up and deliver an editorial opinion, so deliciously phrased and so nicely gauged. He who can do this is the embodiment of all staff editors!

Fifteen years or more ago, long before we dreamed of being associated in business, Allison wrote me with the frankness that has characterized our friendship from the first, just how he came to enter newspaper work. Where he was concerned I was always "wanting to know" and he seemed ever willing to tell--me. The letter was as usual written in lead pencil on soft, spongy, ruled copy paper and that portion having reference to the subject named is given verbatim:

You see I lost two years going to school--from seven to nine years old. I was put out of all the private schools for incorrigible "inattention"--then it was discovered that I had been partially deaf and not guilty--but my schooling ended there and I was turned loose on my father's library to get an education by main force--got it by reading everything--had read Rousseau's "Confessions" at 14--and books replaced folks as companions. Wanted to get nearer to books and so hired myself to the country printer and newspaper at 13--great disappointment to the family, my mother having dreams of my becoming a preacher--. I had meantime begun and finished as much as a page apiece of many stories and books, several epic poems--but one day the Old Man went home to dinner and left me only a scrap of "reprint" to set during his hour and a half of absence. It was six or eight lines nonpareil about the Russian gentleman who started to drive from his country home to the city one evening in his sleigh with his 4 children. Wolves attacked them and one by one he threw the children to the pack, hoping each time thus to save the others. When he had thrown the last his sleigh came to the city gate with him sitting in it a raving maniac. That yarn had been going the rounds of print since 1746. The Old Man was an absent-minded old child, and I knew it, so I turned my fancy loose and enlarged the paragraph to a full galley of long primer, composing the awful details as I set the type and made it a thriller. The Old Man never "held copy" reading proof, so he passed it all right and I saw myself an author in print for the first time. The smell of printer's ink has never since been out of my hair.

As a newspaper man Allison prided himself on never having involved any of his papers in a libel suit, though he was usually the man who wrote the "danger-stuff." He had complaints, yes; libel suits, no. Dick Ryan, known in prehistoric newspaper circles in Louisville as "Cold Steel," because his mild blue eyes hardened and glinted when his copy was cut--the typical police court reporter who could be depended upon for a sobbing "blonde-girl story" when news was off--always said that when a party came in to complain of the hardship of an article, Allison talked to him so benevolently that the complainant always went away in tears, reflecting on how much worse it might have been if Allison hadn't softened the article that seemed so raw. "Damned if I don't believe he cries with 'em, too!" said Ryan. "If I had that sympathetic stop in my own voice I know I'd cry during ordinary conversations, just listening to myself."

Judge "Bill" Smith, one of the greatest of Kentucky lawyers on constitutional points, or rather Judge William Smith of the Jefferson Circuit Court--because he has passed over now, taking his kindly and childlike, yet keen and resourceful personality out of life's war for good and all--Judge Smith told me the story of that case one night after we had discussed down to the water-marks in the paper, his treasured copy of Burns. And at my very urgent solicitation he transcribed the salient features, not in all the intimate details of the spoken words, but with deep poetic feeling and rare conception of their human aspects. He wrote:

There are three poets in Burns. One is the poet you read; the second is the poet some mellow old Scot, with an edge on his tongue, recites to you; the third and most wonderful is the Burns that somebody with even a thin shred of a high voice sings to you. Burns is translated to the fourth power by singing him--without accompaniment--just the whinnying of a tenor or soprano voice, vibrant with feeling and pathos, at the right time of the evening, or in some penumbrous atmosphere of seclusion where memory can work its miracles.

I was defending Allison in that libel case and we started off on the 200-mile trip together. We had the smoker of the Pullman all to ourselves, and after I had recited some furlongs of Burns to him, he began to sing "Jockey's Ta'en the Parting Kiss" in a sort of thin and whimpering quaver of a tenor that cut through the noise of the train like a violin note through silence. I thought I knew the poem, but it seemed to me I had never dreamed what was in it, with the wail of a Highland woman pouring plaintive melody through the flood gates of her heart. And he knew every one of them and sang them all with the tailing of the bag-pipes in the sound.

I wasn't going down to practice law, but to practice patience and politics. I had been on that circuit for years and knew the court and the bar very well. So I said to Allison "Don't you sing one of those songs again until I give the sign." And the first thing I did was to bring him into touch with the circuit judge, who had the room adjoining mine at the hotel. He was a Burns lover, too; and besides as I had brought whiskey and as the town was prohibition, there was really nowhere else for the judge to spend his evenings. Soon we were capping back and forth, the judge and I, with Burns.

"Allison, if you wrote like you sing Burns, maybe you wouldn't be here--but it's well worth the trouble!"

I knew then there was no more politics to practice--just law enough to be found to let the court stand firm when the time came.

The next night it was in the judge's room. Half a dozen old followers of the circuit were there on the judge's tip. "You bring your whiskey," he said to me, privately, "or there'll be none." And I brought it. And between Burns and the bottle and the long low silences of good country-bred men listening back through the soft cadences of memory, the case was won that night. I think it was Jock's song that did it. You never hear it sung by concert singers; because it has no theatricalism in it. It's just the wailing of the faith of the country lass in her lover:

'When the shades of evenin' creep O'er the day's fair, gladsome e'e Sound and safely may he sleep, Sweetly blithe his waukenin' be. He will think on her he loves, Fondly he'll repeat her name, For, where'er he distant roves, Jockey's heart is still at hame.'

If you listen right close you'll hear the hiss of the kettle behind it, and you can see the glow of the firelight and smell the sap of green wood in the smoke.

Well, there were continuances; of course. It is never constitutional to throw a case of politics out of court too soon. We made that four hundred-mile round trip four times and, every time, Burns sat at night where Blackstone ruled by day. Never one word of the case from judge to accused, just continuances. But on the last night--the case was to be pressed next day--the judge said to Allison at the door, as he went off to bed:

But the case was dismissed; we were serenaded at the hotel and held a reception. Driving away in a buggy over the fourteen miles to the railway station, Allison said: "There never was a prettier summer-time jail anywhere in the world than this one. I've been down to see it. It has vines growing over the low, white-washed walls, there's apple trees in the yard and the jailer has a curly headed little girl of six who would bring 'em to you and could slip 'em through the barred window by standing on the split bottom chair where her father sleeps in the shade after dinner. It's a beautiful picture--but it hasn't got a single damned modern convenience for winter and a six months' term would have landed me there till January!"

I shall always believe this to be the most graceful, sympathetic and poetic relation involving a legal case I ever heard and never will cease to give thanks that my always strong and constantly growing admiration for Allison led me to insist upon its transcription.

"Well," Allison ruminated, with that ever present twinkle in his eye, "my experience was very interesting. I found I had friends; and discovered traces of a family unknown to history claiming direct kinship with President Thomas Jefferson!"

During his insurance newspaper work Allison was once called upon to give a public endorsement to a friend and very kindly expressed conviction that had his management continued "all the interest of the company would have been secured." When later on he was forced to criticise extraordinary acts of this whilom friend, the endorsement was called up against him in a broadside affidavit, which he promptly reviewed in the most deliciously sarcastic editorial concluding:

And we do not hesitate to declare anew that "we believe if he had been continued as president, all the interests of the company would have been secured." It was certainly not his fault that he did not secure more. Everything cannot be done in eleven months. But in the language of the far-Western tombstone it can be justly said, "He done what he could."

JUST BROWSING AROUND

One who has never read around the clock in a virtual debauch of novel reading cannot appreciate Allison's "Delicious Vice;" no more can he Field's "Dibdin's Ghost" who has not smuggled home under his coat some cherished volume at the expense of his belly--and possibly someone else's too! "The Delicious Vice!" What a tart morsel to roll on one's tongue in anticipation and to speculate over before scanning the pages to discover that the vice is not "hitting the pipe" or "snuffing happy dust" but is as Allison paints it with whimsical but affectionate words, "pipe dreams and fond adventures of an habitual novel-reader among some great books and their people." These are the all too skimpy pages through which its author rhapsodizes on the noble profession, makes a keen distinction between novel readers and "women, nibblers and amateurs," brings up reminiscences of "early crimes and joys" and discourses learnedly, discerningly and entertainingly upon "good honest scoundrelism and villains." Every page is the best and when the last has passed under your eye, you again begin square at the beginning and read it all over. You are here only to have the appetite spiced by one single gem quoted from the first novel for the boy to read which of course is "Robinson Crusoe:"

... There are other symptoms of the born novel-reader to be observed in him. If he reads at night he is careful so to place his chair that the light will fall on the page from a direction that will ultimately ruin the eyes--but it does not interfere with the light. He humps himself over the open volume and begins to display that unerring curvilinearity of the spine that compels his mother to study braces and to fear that he will develop consumption. Yet you can study the world's health records and never find a line to prove that any man with "occupation or profession--novel-reading" is recorded as dying of consumption. The humped-over attitude promotes compression of the lungs, telescoping of the diaphragm, atrophy of the abdominal abracadabra and other things ; but--it--never--hurts--the--boy!

To a novel-reading boy the position is one of instinct like that of a bicycle racer. His eyes are strained, his nerves and muscles at tension--everything ready for excitement--and the book, lying open, leaves his hands perfectly free to drum on the sides of the chair, slap his legs and knees, fumble in his pockets or even scratch his head, as emotion and interest demand. Does anybody deny that the highest proof of special genius is the possession of the instinct to adapt itself to the matter in hand? Nothing more need be said.

Now, if you will observe carefully such a boy when he comes to a certain point in "Robinson Crusoe" you may recognize the stroke of fate in his destiny. If he's the right sort, he will read gayly along; he drums, he slaps himself, he beats his breast, he scratches his head. Suddenly there will come the shock. He is reading rapidly and gloriously. He finds his knife in his pocket, as usual, and puts it back; the top-string is there; he drums the devil's tattoo, he wets his finger and smears the margin of the page as he whirls it over and then--he finds--

"The--Print--of--a--Man's--Naked--Foot--on--the--Shore!!!"

Oh, Crackey! At this tremendous moment the novel-reader, who has genius, drums no more. His hands have seized the upper edges of the muslin lids, he presses the lower edges against his stomach, his back takes an added intensity of hump, his eyes bulge, his heart thumps--he is landed--landed!

Terror, surprise, sympathy, hope, skepticism, doubt--come all ye trooping emotions to threaten and console; but an end has come to fairy stories and wonder tales--Master Studious is in the awful presence of Human Nature.

For many years I have believed that that Print--of--a--Man's--Naked--Foot was set in Italic type in all editions of "Robinson Crusoe." But a patient search of many editions has convinced me that I must have been mistaken.

The passage comes sneaking along in the midst of a paragraph in common Roman letters and by the living jingo, you discover it just as Mr. Crusoe discovered the footprint itself!

I wish I might tell the reason why no scoundrel was ever a novel reader; that I might browse for the benefit of those who have never been translated into ecstacies over "good old honest scoundrelism and villains" or describe my friend's first blinding and unselfish tears that watered the grave of Helen Mar, but these are among the delicious experiences of the "Vice" itself, so sacred that other hands, no matter how loving, may not be laid upon them.

Allison has a very happy faculty of hitting upon titles for essays and addresses that stir the imagination and whet the appetite. Probably the best example is "The Delicious Vice" to which reference has just been made. This title was more or less an evolution from an address delivered before the Western Writers Association "On the Vice of Novel Reading" that started a discussion lasting through one whole day. Allison is a warm champion of The Novel as an institution, and as well an avowed and confirmed reader of novels, which he declares are poetry in essence, lacking only the form and rhyme but having measure, the accent and the figures of the whole range of poetry. He says that in all literature--

The great muse of History ranks first in dignity, power and usefulness; but who will say that at her court the Prime Minister is not the Novel which by its lightness, grace and address has popularized history all over the world?

At that time the word "microbe" and the theory of its significance was in the full swell of popular use. Allison took it to illustrate the essence of spiritual intellectuality struggling against the swarming bacteria of animalism that made up the rest of the human body controlled by the brain. He pointed out that the difference between types of brains was two ounces of grayish pulp, almost wholly absent in the unthinking herd of men. But it enlarged in gradually lessening groups of men to the intellectual few that dominate thought, thus:

The microbe that might have become glorious ounces of brain has been content at first to become merely a little wart of pulp, which finds expression in skill and quickness and more of coveted leisure. There is the next higher terrace and another and another, until finally it becomes a pyramid, ever more fragile and symmetrical, the apex of which is a delicate spire, where the purest intellects are elevated to an ever increasing height in ever decreasing numbers, until in the dizzy altitude above the groveling base below they are wrapped little by little in the cold solitude of incarnate genius burning like suns with their own essence. It is so far up that the eyes deceive and men dispute who it is that stands at the top, but, whoever he may be, he has carried by the force of strength, determination and patient will, the whole swarm of his evil bacteria with him. They swarm through every terrace below, increasing in force as the pyramid enlarges downward. It is the pyramidal bulk of human nature with its finest brain, true to anatomic principles, at the top. That radiance at the summit is the delight and the aspiration of all below.

"Some of the fellows we knew in the C. S. A. have had queer luck in the shuffle, Kilgore. You remember Knowles of Georgia? I found him keeping bar in Sacramento. Young of North Carolina, who led that charge at Fredericksburg, is running a restaurant in Colorado; and Thomas, of Tennessee--by the Lord Harry, he killed himself with drink working in a mine in Arizona--had the jim-jams seven times they say and thought his head was a rabbit's nest. Last time I saw you riled, Kilgore, was that night in the trenches at Fredericksburg when Nelson hid your tobacco bag. You wanted to fight him, by the Lord Harry, there and then, but he wouldn't do it--because he said he would rather kill Yankees than gentlemen. And you both agreed to take your chances next day on a fool trial which would fight the Yankees best!"

Century, October, 1889.

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