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from Baxter's Procrustes (1904)
The club had always appreciated the value of uncut copies, but this financial indorsement en- hanced their desirability immensely. This rise in the Essay on Pipes was not without a sympathetic effect upon all the club publications. The Emerson essay rose from three dollars to seventeen, and the Thoreau, being by an author less widely read, and by his own confession commercially unsuccessful, brought a somewhat higher figure. The prices, thus inflated, were not permitted to come down appreciably. Since every member of the club possessed one or more of these valuable editions, they were all manifestly interested in keeping up the price. The publication, however, which brought the highest prices, and, but for the sober second thought, might have wrecked the whole system, was Baxter’s Procrustes.
Baxter was, perhaps, the most scholarly member of the club. A graduate of Harvard, he had traveled extensively, had read widely, and while not so enthusiastic a collector as some of us, possessed as fine a private library as any man of his age in the city. He was about thirty-five when he joined the club, and apparently some bitter experience—some disappointment in love or ambition—had left its mark upon his character. With light, curly hair, fair complexion, and gray eyes, one would have expected Baxter to be genial of temper, with a tendency toward wordiness of speech. But though he had oc- casional flashes of humor, his ordinary demeanor was charac- terized by a mild cynicism, which, with his gloomy pessimistic
philosophy, so foreign to the temperament that should ac- company his physical type, could only be accounted for upon the hypothesis of some secret sorrow such as I have sug- gested. What it might be no one knew. He had means and so- cial position, and was an uncommonly handsome man. The fact that he remained unmarried at thirty-five furnished some support for the theory of a disappointment in love, though this the several intimates of Baxter who belonged to the club were not able to verify.
It had occurred to me, in a vague way, that perhaps Baxter might be an unsuccessful author. That he was a poet we knew very well, and typewritten copies of his verses had occasionally circulated among us. But Baxter had always expressed such a profound contempt for modern literature, had always spoken in terms of such unmeasured pity for the slaves of the pen, who were dependent upon the whim of an undiscriminating public for recognition and a livelihood, that no one of us had ever suspected him of aspirations toward publication, until, as I have said, it occurred to me one day that Baxter’s attitude with regard to publication might be viewed in the light of ef- fect as well as of cause,—that his scorn of publicity might as easily arise from failure to achieve it, as his never having pub- lished might be due to his preconceived disdain of the vulgar popularity which one must share with the pugilist or balloon- ist of the hour.
