Queer People

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 44, 14 May 1927, Page 14

Queer People

SOME STARTLING ACQUAINTANCES In twenty years of travel in many lands, one naturally met a number of queer people; some who were queer in themselves, like an unknown woman who asked me to call and see her in New York; a bed-ridden old lady who thought she was Mme. Montessori; others who were queer by virtue of their position or the lives they led. I once hired a man to take me in a boat from the Panama Canal to Nombre de Dios. I found he was over sixty years old and his little open launch was his home. He had been a gold-seeker and hoper for gold all his life, and yet was so poor he depended for literature on the chance print on dirty bits of paper he picked up on the quayside. He was queer in his life. We visited a little island you could throw a stone across, and on it was a sort of Woolworth store kept by a Lancashire man. He lived by intercepting Indian canoes and trading baubles for bananas. He had a coloured wife and I don’t know how many children. I think he was queer by virtue of his position (writes Stephen Graham in an English weekly). The Other Tolstoy One of the queerest people I ever met was at Astapavo Station in Russia. It was at Astapavo that the . great Tolstoy was taken out of a train dying. He breathed his last there, and out of honour to him the station was being kept as it was that night. In the dim candle-light I entered the station waiting-room, coming from the Moscow train, and suddenly I saw Tolstoy—yes, unmistakably. I was thrilled and chilled by the sight of the old man. But, after all, it was not a psychic experience. This other Tolstoy was the proprietor of the buffet, who, having a resemblance to Tolstoy, had cultivated it, wore the same type of Russian blouse and the same beard, and frowned the world-sorrow of Tolstoy’s frown. I met once in Jerusalem a beggar pilgrim who had made the journey from Russia to the Holy Land twenty times in his life. There was something glorious about Abram, but 1 think he belongs to this gallery of queer folk. Such an odour of sanctity attached to Abram that the peas-ant-women pilgrims in Jerusalem regarded him as a sort of saint and used to seek his blessing. The old man used to fill his mouth with holy water and spurt it out into their eyes. Yes, queer! A Baptist’s Exile At Milledgeville in Georgia I once met an old Baptist minister, an Englishman, who could not get back home. He had been given a home in the infirmary, but, hearing of an Englishman in town, came down to my hotel to visit me. He had been out of England since the days of Queen Victoria, and his talk was all of Mr. Gladstone and Home Rule and of Lord Shaftesbury in his carriage with beautiful horses prancing along Piccadilly. General In Prison When I was doing my rounds as prison visitor in London I once opened a cell door and saw a brigadier-general sitting on a truckle bed. He told me proudly that he had fought in all his country’s wars since 1883. Now, owing to an extravagant wife, he had been getting money by false pretences to pay her bills and become mewed up in Pentoville. Strange, I thought! Very near him in prison was a boy burglar who lived for Ruskin and was killing time by memorising the “Stones of Venice.”

Among the queerest people I met in New York last autumn was Harry Thaw, liberated from the asylum, still fabulously rich, but clearly affected by his life among the insane. I saw him twice at a certain night-club, where he remained all night, going home at dawn, but never gay with the rest of the crowd —always sinister. Another queer companion was a Red Indian I met outside a “flop-house,” who wanted to sell his coat to get more drink. There seemed something garish and untoward about a Red Indian from a reservation wandering on the streets of the great American metropolis.

I also saw in New York one of the most repulsive-looking hoboes I have met, followed him into a Chinese den, and was given heroin in my tea. That is the risk of being inquisitive about queer people. But, of course, one does not need to stray from home to meet queer people. They come to my door in Soho; they write to me regularly. This Christmas a pallid and worn, bedraggled woman rang my bell. “Can you grant me a few minutes’ conversation?” she inquired. “What about?” I asked. “My name is well known to you,'' she replied. “In fact, it is quite well known.” “But tell me,” I urged. “She drew herself up with dignity and answered with a frown: “My name is Mary Stuart.” A World of Queer People However, as I go over my adventures, I realise that I have met many more queer men than queer women. Perhaps we are more queer. Most

women who write are, I think, a little queer. Amy Lowell, smoking cigars and swearing like a trooper, was certainly queer. But, then, all we writers, male and female, are on the queer side; and I have no doubt many a person whom I have met and thought queer has gone away from my presence saying: “My word, that’s a queer fellow; goes on wandering about the world from country to country. Why doesn’t he stay in one place? What possesses him that he takes so much hardship by choice?” He is quite right. He and I are queer. We are all queer.