But one thing and another interfered.  I went South.  One day six months later, after I had returned, he called up once more, saying he wished to see me.  Of course I asked him down and he came and spoke of his health.  Some doctor, an old college pal of his, was assuring him that he had Bright’s disease and that he might die at any time.  He wanted to know, in case anything happened to him, would I look after his many mss., most of which, the most serious efforts at least, had never been published.  I agreed.  Then he went away and I never saw him again.  A year later I was one day informed that he had died three days before of kidney trouble.  He had been West to see a moving-picture director; on his way East he had been taken ill and had stopped off with friends somewhere to be treated, or operated upon.  A few weeks later he had returned to New York, but refusing to rest and believing that he could not die, so soon, had kept out of doors and in the city, until suddenly he did collapse.  Or, rather, he met his favorite doctor, an intellectual savage like himself, who with some weird desire to appear forceful, definite, unsentimental perhaps—­a mental condition L——­ most fancied—­had told him to go home and to bed, for he would be dead in forty-eight hours!—­a fine bit of assurance which perhaps as much as anything else assisted L——­ to die.  At any rate and in spite of the ministrations of his wife, who wished to defy the doctor and who in her hope for herself and her children as well as him strove to contend against this gloom, he did so go to bed and did die.  On the last day, realizing no doubt how utterly indifferent his life had been, how his main aspirations or great dreams had been in the main nullified by passions, necessities, crass chance (how well he was fitted to understand that!) he broke down and cried for hours.  Then he died.

A friend who had known much of this last period, said to me rather satirically, “He was dealing with death in the shape of a medic.  Have you ever seen him?” The doctor, he meant.  “He looks like an advertisement for an undertaker.  I do believe he was trying to discover whether he could kill somebody by the power of suggestion, and he met L——­ in the nick of time.  You know how really sensitive he was.  Well, that medic killed him, the same as you would kill a bird with a bullet.  He said ‘You’re already dead,’ and he was.”

And—­oh yes—­M——­, his former patron.  At the time of L——­’s sickness and death he was still owing him $1100 for services rendered during the last days of that unfortunate magazine.  He had never been called upon to pay his debts, for he had sunk through one easy trapdoor of bankruptcy only to rise out of another, smiling and with the means to continue.  Yes, he was rich again, rated A No. 1, the president of a great corporation, and with L——­’s $1100 still unpaid and now not legally “collectible.”  His bank balance, established by a friend at the time, was exactly one hundred thousand.