The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, February 18, 1906, Page 7

THE SAN FRANCISCO SUNDAY CALL. v B HERE is something in- expressibly sad and touching in the death of young Cameron Owens, the boy who turned on the gasand lay down to die, al and as & strang the Occidental Hotel just & while ago because, forsooth, he bad not achieved lit- er fame at the age of 22 years. Because his melan- choly, hisdesperate de- spondency, the poign- of his disappointments, are not un- th; because this boy’s story «repeated day after e ambitious boys ave hitched their wagon ke poor Cameron Ow: f hopes and ideals. There em soaring and dream- and in constant danger ing cruelly bumped into conscious- the cobbles of realit: The plain, practical people who write e newspapers and magazines for a ng—whose names appear with perhaps resome frequency upon the printed page, ° public, alas, is a fickle public, end with comferting regularity on the pay roll—are always recelving letters and manuscripts and confidences from them, and are being importuned in their busiest moments for advice by them. So are the clever, petted people who act ®r sing or play the piano or the violin or osllo or compose the operas and ora- torion, who model the beautiful statues ant paint the wonderful pictures that we hear about. There are so many of them, palpitating between hope and fear, now confident, now limp with the falling of courage, like fledglings futtering on the edge of thelr negt They should de very gently dealt with, these aspiring boys and girls, for youth so buoyant, so tremendously, unbound- y hopeful, so extravagant i you will, and yet so tender and unguarded, so eas- ily abashed and cast into the depths. It is to the credit of a busy, self- seeking world that they are usually gently deait with. Thelr poems and plays and stories aré returned to them with the kindest of refusals—printed ers of refusal, to be sure, but so verly printed to Imitate typewrit- g that the kindly fraud is discovered nly in the third or fourth or fifth letter, when the shock is not so great. Even the great artists in various branches of art are kind enough to re- ceive their visits and answer their let- and to be very graciously encour- aging or discouraging as the case my uire. How could they be otherwise? Even wayfarers who have traveled cnly a little way along the road to the goal of "their ambition soften with &ym- for they know how much their hopes mean to them. fresh only the other school boy eame to sensitive boy I to fine, clean man- wuscript of a story art in his Inside I real a it ¢ when a higl —a studious, ched growing hood—with the man have 1 give him my professional opinion of 1t? It was a matter of tremendous im- port to him. Would I? know as you know opinion he hoped for, but confirmation of his own opinion, for if he hadn't thought it was good he would never have read a word of it to any one. He read it with a catch in his voice, a tremulous anxiety for the darling of his mind, that would have made me lie with my last breath and say it was good if it hadn’t been. Without shame or penitence I con- fess it But it wi good and surprisingly good at that and 1 was so glad that It was—because of that catch in his voige—that I could have cried with Joy. It isn’t so much the things in life that matter as what they mean to us; and I for one wouldn't cast a little child’s rag dolly in the fire just be- cause it is a rag dollL 1 have among my friends a cheer- ful, common sensible man—no non- sense about him, no slushy sentiment \d foolishness, you may be sure— whose company is sometimes pleasant, except on the first of the month, when seems to radiate on odious and un- sonable prosperity with his glib about new houses and automo- showing an offensively complacent gard of the significance of the Of course I would, and I that it was not date. He is just the practical sort of man who would bring your Snow Image to the house, set it by the fire and reduce it to’ a puddle to prove your folly to.you. When the staring headlines tcld the story of poor Cameron Owens' rash deed he said, 1lke the practical man that he is: “Pooh! Pooh! Disappointed ambi- tion! ‘Wanted fame! No one ever killed himself on_that account, let me tell you. Why the boy had a good position and a good home. He was getting along. There was something else—some REAL cause. Just take my word for it that there was.” But there wasn't—inconceivable as that may be to my friend, the practical b boy could have stood better or had & oleaner record with his employ- ers than this poor boy. And In the story that his mother tells—a story of boyish life so simple that it is pathetic—there is no way- wardness, no folly, none of the miser- gble madcap ventures that bring boys even In their boyhood to the end of the thoroughfure, nothing but the most earnest, painstaking devotion to high ideals. Poor, sorrow-stricken little mother! She Is asking herself every hour of the day if anywhere in her mother love and mother care and anxiety there was & flaw that would put upon her the re- sponsibllity of her boy's desperate deed. And in this she is doing only what ev- ery loving mother in her place would do. I sat with her in the pretty, cozy, tasteful room that was “Cameron’s den” and read over with her the few manugeripts so carefully and elabor- ately prepared for the editorial eye, that he left unburned, manuscripts that show the boy's bright, observant miad and sympathetic nature, that carry even in their amateurish crudeness and inadequacy of experience a real prom- ise, an unmistakable evidence o ca- pacity. How high his aim was you can read between the lines of ambitious passages which he had levingly and laborigus.: polished, trying: the effect of one ‘word and then another with the instinct uf the true craftsman. We read these, the sad little mother and I, and we turned the pages of his books in which he had marked pas- sages, and every one that he marked, every marginal note that he made, points to the summit of his hopes as straight as does the needle to the pole. Through _all his books—from his well thumbed Shakespeare with the little penciled criss-cross of admiration 1Ifting up passages on ambition,: on evement, on work well done, down the tiny volume of Robert Beverly ale— it is plainly to be seen that he s on the hunt for help to make him- elf a writer, for suggestion, encour- >ment and consolation. Let me give you one of his favorite passages from Hale. in which he heard, perhaps, kind calling to kind: The pedant scorns blithe songs With tender words, And cares for naught but harmonizing chords; The genius feels the warm ter seek his eye Decause he hears a mother's lullaby. To strengthen his own fainting spirit he thumbed the pages for the self- encouragement and self-accusations of writers who were so happy as to have their writings printed; who had won the blissful triumph of having a book published “to occupy an inch of space upon a dusty shelf.” Where he found such thoughts he d them, and among them I feund Oh_shame! I give up my high endeavor? all 1 pretend my store of strength is gone? I claim peace and Joy and bliss forever e my rest while God goes toiling on? I think that you wili think with me that the mind that responds to and finds expression for itself in the lines that I have cuoted is not a common nor an ignoble mind. “Cameron loved his books,” his mother. tel me as she takes them from me i s them down gently, with that strange, futile tenderness with which we handle the belongings of dead. “Sometimes I thought he cared too much for them, that he was too absorbed in them, more than was good for him. He was always a good student from the time he was first sent to school I have an un- broken succession of honor certificates fro his very first term up to his have,” she sa d-eved little mo ! Of coursc she has; not only the honor certi cates that the little boy in knicker- bockers brought home so proudly, but in the same drawer with them the first little shoes he wore, the first little tooth he lost, the curl from his baby head—all th little. treasures _that are more to the mother heart than the most splendid jewels in royal caskets. The meanest thief is not 86 mean that he would rob her of her treas- ures. “Cameron’s one ambition, his only desire in life it seemed, was to be a writer. He always wanted to do his work well at Vanderslice's, he al- ways wanted to be on time, because that was his duty; but when he was through with his work he would write long and late into the night, and then he would tear up what he wrote and say that he wasn’t satisfied with it. He would wish that he could write like this writer and like that, that he ad- mired, and he’'d be impatient and say that he never could, that he didn’t have it in_him. “Whether he sent his stories away and they came back I don’t know for a certamty. I think he did, for he was always writing until recently. “I noticed before—before, he ‘did this—that he was burning a good many papers. He would bring them into the kitchen and put them in the stove, and I told him to be careful and not burn anything he might want again.” With his mother one may only guess ‘that the boy was going through that Slough of Despond that ninety-nine out of every hundred writers, actors, artists have to flounder through, on their way to success, and the way seemed long and very dark to him. ““He was always very sensitive—too sen- sitive for. his own happiness, I am afraid,” the little mother tells me to ex- ULD HOPE FAILATTWENTY-TiW( ¥ RBY HELEN DARE , 4 ., . cuse him, to ward off all blame or harsh criticism. * “He was slight and small, a delicate boy, and he was sensitive about his size, He was just about my height, and knowing how sensitive he was, I used to be careful when we went out to- gether at night to always keep just about half a step behind when we walked under g street lamp, just enough to throw his shagow a little longer than mine. Then 1 would call his attention to it and “You see, Cameron, you're not so VEBRY small. You're taller than I am; just look for yourself. [ “He never said anything about it, but I'm afraid te saw through me, he knew what 1 did and why I did it.” Tnnocent, loving deception. How sweet and beautiful a place the world Is when there is love like that in it What self-centered son or daughter would willingly wound a heart so tender? Surely not her own gentle boy, wild and hopeless as his melancholy was, if he had known—or remembered. I wonder how many boys and girls who think the world is cruel to them have the impulse to do what poor Cameron Owens did, an impulse half formed and quickly smothered, to be laughed at later from the serene poise of maturity. More, I fancy, than any gathering of statistics will ever show, for youth, high- strung and untried, takes its sorrows poignantly. The Snanish have a proverb about pa- ticnce, more -patience and yet more patience, and this is what one who would do must learn. I think it I were of an introspective and despondent mind instead of so cheer- fully busy that I never have time to turn back to correct yesterday's mistakes I would cure myself by searching out the troubles other people have lived through, obstacles they have overcome. I would think of Flaubert whittling and sandpapering Salaambo for twenty- five vears—a quarter of a century, my dears of tender years—until at last it dazzled the world a perfect gem. 1 would thinkK of our own dear Robert Louis Stevenson in sickness and poverty still writing on the beautiful thoughts that made all the world love him. I would dwell on his friendship with Simoneau, the old tamale man of Monterey, who kept him from being hungry for a little while—Simonéau, poor, humble and old, but so true a friend that no money can buy from him the letters Robert Louis so faithfully remembered to write to him from all parts of the world. I would think of Balzac, in his dirty nighteap and dressing gown and garret, writing in a frenzy for endless, unbeliev- able hours and hoping fiercely that fame and love and riches will come to him while he still has the youth to enjoy them. 1 would think of Frances Hodgson Bur- nett, an ambitious little girl in Tennessee, going out in a sunbonnet to pick black- berries to get the money to buy paper to write her first stories om and postage stamps to send them to editors—and more postage stamps to send them again when they came back. Mrs. Burnett told me between tears and a smile, “There were snakes in the berry patches; and, oh, how I feared snakes! I would think of one of the bravest spirits I ever knew, a newspaper writer here who was-dil and.dwarfed and pain- fully deformed finto a grotesque, twisted little mannikin, who had to fight his way on the same terms—no favors given nor odds asked—with the big, strong, hearty men in his calling. And he did it, too, and got pretty well to the top, and ‘wa: the mainstay of a family and the cheeri- est grig in the office at that It is always safe to believe—what the poor lad who gave up forgot—that even the longest lane has @ turning. Those who have their doubts about that always remind me of a spirited, willful young horse I used to ride. In the Pre- sidio he particularly disliked going through the wood ‘that borders the golf ground. Ordinarily he was the best of company, sharing my moods like a twin, but from beginning to end of the gloomy wood he would sulk and behave his un- prettiest. When we came out into the open on a high point where the full pano- rama of the bay broke upon us he would come to glad life all over, prick up his ears, make a little bound and gallop away like a boy let out of school. Many of us are not uniike my whim- sical steed. We sulk in discontent along the dull and tedious ways, yet if we per- severe, plodding on step by step over the hummock and hollow, we may reach at last the open space where the prospect is wide and beautiful. ?