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I never pretended to be a friend to him; I was merely one to whom he resorted when all the rest cast him out. He never found me wanting, but he got few letters from me, and none that were flattering.
gpt
I used to love Matas are Hearn's pitiful words. It is with sorrow and pain that we note the sudden cessation in 1887 of the letters to Krehbiel. This noble friend had drawn from Hearn a beautiful world of play and enduring memories, and one may be more than sure that it was not Krehbiel who should be blamed. Baker had been his most helpful and best friend, and yet for a fancied wrong Hearn wrote him a letter filled with insult and ruffianism which a gentleman could not answer, hardly forgive, and never forget. Did Hearn know anybody of character in the West Indies? To the greatest of American editors, the one who
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him and introduced him to a national and international audience, who treated him with a sweet and gracious benignity, even after a shamelessness that is indescribable--to this good man there is not a published letter, although many, and many more, must exist. One day while at my house, Hearn rushed to his room, seized the man's picture on the wall, tore it in a hundred pieces, and danced and spat upon it in a furious rage. In subsequent letters to me he explained his hatred--how he broke his engagements, how he borrowed money from his loathed and insulted friend, how he got credit through him from his tailor, etc. Gently the abused one bore it all and without the least remonstrance, writing me,
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Hearn has utterly cast me off; I was loath to part with him. Professor Chamberlain and others kindly explain the curious morbid psychology which Hearn had exhibited towards them. To the last, love and trust breathed from Hearn's letters to me, and yet I learn that to others long afterward he wrote of me with bitterness and malevolent injustice. And yet he had written me after I saw him for the last time, in this way:
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Please don't write me at all, or expect me to write, for some months. I do not need any money. I have a good deal on my mind, and am apt, in consequence, to do very stupid or very unkind things in an unlucky moment. And then he wrote:
gpt
No, dear Gooley, I will never be indifferent to you! Never think that; I understand better than you suppose. If I am silent at intervals, never doubt me, dear teacher and brother; and you will find everything come right.