PRICELESS PRESENT

...When Christmas came and with it the welcome arrival of Freda, Oscar's charming wife, and his little girl Susan, and we had distributed the presents, gorged the turkey, and my wife and Freda had taken the children skating, Oscar and I sat together before the fire and talked for an hour or so about "battles long ago," and battles to come...

...He told them about Tom Paine and Gov...

...Oscar had arrived a month before Christmas and for that happy time I banged out his copy on the typewriter, while Oscar in an adjoining room, grunted and groaned and sweated away on his revisions...

...But then I realized this would get me snarled up with the bees and the flowers, so, I just told them to run along and play, all writers made funny noises...

...I was in bed, when Oscar blew into town, recuperating from a heart attack, and feeling about as low as I have ever felt in my life, which is some sort of a record for all-time lowness...

...The sounds which emanated from Oscar's room would lead an outsider to figure that they came from the racked victim of some medieval Inquisitor...

...Because they were priceless...

...They had Congressman Thomas over to offset Oscar...

...He had written in long-hand and in that well-nigh indescribable handwriting of his, with all the "s'es" old style German, and the "m's" and "n's" most difficult to distinguish, the story of a life as rich and rewarding in its peculiar way as any that I know about in our latter-day America...

...Sustained effort" indeed...

...As is the story of how Oscar before he had been in town a week fished up three kindred lovers of good music and spent many happy evenings playing a second-hand flute whicn he had bought in a Bowery pawn-shop on one of his rare trips to New York, where I think he always felt that he was "a stranger and afraid in a world he never made...

...For though we were both opposed to it, as were the majority of Americans who knew what it would mean, we felt in our hearts that our entrance into the war could not be long delayed...

...But as is the case with thousands of readers of the old American Guardian who now take The Progressive knowing that Oscar Ameringer would heartily approve this magazine and its fighting policy, some of Oscar's presents remain...

...It was a memorable night when Thomas spoke...

...Then it was Oscar gave me his presents...

...The high-school teeners had organized a Fireside Forum which met in the study of Peter Apelian, the great-hearted, liberal minister in our town, who had come to this country, as Oscar had come, as an immigrant, and who knew a good American when he saw one...

...It was useless to try to explain to them how revising, and, in particular, cutting out anything you had written was equivalent to having and then murdering your little baby...

...Who am I," he asked haughtily, "to tamper with a masterpiece...

...Some of the older people, who had been poisoned by the anti-Americanism of the Dies Committee of which the Honorable J. Parnell Thomas, the Congressman from our district, was a most vociferous and obnoxious member, were alarmed about the presence of this man in our midst, speaking with a heavy German accent, and talking about such dangerous things as labor unions and the true meaning of democracy, and all that "Red" stuff...

...They were part of his love for all suffering, bewildered, silently despairing people in all the nations of the world, in Germany and Italy and Japan too, sweating it out in the grip of unseen, monstrous powers, which soon would have our people as well in their toils...

...Why does he do that...

...When he had finished holding up the bogey of a Red Revolution, Oscar arose, beaming at him over his gold-rimmed spectacles and with "large, divine and comfortable words, beyond my tongue to tell thee," slayed him before our delighted eyes...

...Wilde drew himself up...

...He gave my failing spirit faith in our cause and its eventual victory, dark as were these days for all manifestations of human decency...

...Those publishers (Henry Holt) are yelling for this book here and we got to get it all prettied up so they can print it quick...

...Well then, dearie," said Oscar, "we have a little job to do here...

...Altgeld, and others of his idols, and about his old friend Gene Debs, and about the salt of the American earth, the coal diggers and steel workers and garment makers, among whom his crowded life had been spent and to whose richer lives he had made such a mighty contribution...

...In short, he gave me of himself and his unweakening soul...

...He saw one in Ameringer, and very soon Oscar was telling a fine bunch of the sons and daughters of a predominately middle-class group of commuters, things about their native land which they never could have found in their history books...

...Coming back from school to stop outside Oscar's room, they would tramp, grinning, into mine saying, "Oscar makes funny noises when he writes books, doesn't he, Daddy...

...They were nothing that could be bought in any store in Radburn or New York...

...THEN he dug out of his bag that great yellow mass of pencilled manuscript and my heart skipped a few beats for sheer happiness that I could have some part, no matter how humble, in the writing of a great life story...

...But the sight of my comrade, boss, and beloved friend, coming into the room, with those sparkling eyes, lighted with intelligence, wisdom and human mirth, and with a sadness too, such as men of the Lincoln type show in their eyes—well, that did me more good than all the digitalis shots, and the fussing of doctors and nurses had done in a weary month's time...

...JUST as the kids did with their toys, I broke these Christmas presents of Oscar's, left them abandoned in corners of my memory, threw them away with heedless gestures...

...And though I had been strictly forbidden to take on any jobs which would require sustained effort, I took on this particular editing job* and it was no mean one either, with the avidity with which a starving man goes for his first meal...

...To be sure, Americans who loved their country fought off this entrance for nearly a year, but it was as we all knew a losing fight...

...I could have told them, of course, what another and quite different Oscar—Oscar Wilde—said when his editors asked him to revise his manuscript...

...But that is another story...

...He gave me of his wealth of sympathy for all underdogs, of his wisdom won on the wind-swept picket lines of his youth, in labor union halls, in the struggling vanguard of the movement...

...OF course, like every other youngster in town, my brats fell instantly and uproariously in love with the chuckling, square-cut, bespectacled man with the pipe, who talked to them gravely at times, as one human being to another, and again would have them cackling with glee at some secret joke which they shared in common...

...It was that fateful year in which Oscar Ameringer came to stay with us for awhile in the little town of Radburn, N. J. Oscar had with him the manuscript of his autobiography which was to be published under the title of // You Don't Weaken, a title suggested one night at my house by Max Eastman...

...If he were here, good God if he were only here, Oscar would be wishing you all a merry Christmas, as I do now...

...Oscar always made these gruesome noises when he wrote, and after awhile Mickey and Ann, my small children, who were at first petrified by them, learned to take them in their stride...

...The job of preparing that precious manuscript for the publishers, ordinarily monotonous hack work, was sheer joy...

...The immortality in which we can all believe is the deathlessness of a great life, nobly lived...