Those who saw him during the earlier part of the evening, at the club, never could be made to see the tragic side of the whole affair. Upon them he apparently made an ineffaceable impression and from what we others heard, it must have been a performance in the genuine grand manner. It was, in a way, the glorious apex of his unreal career among us. People who did not see him there were always very pitiless about the way he acted, pity not being reserved, I suppose, for the unpardonable failure of something as great as the Pan Jandrum. But I have seen no one who did see him there who could tell of any part of it without putting it on a lofty epic scale--even the saturnine barber whose pride in his control of the imagination was like a perpetual flower in his buttonhole. The quantity he had to drink was grown, by the time it reached my ears, to an heroic figure. The picture was of him seated in his shirt sleeves alone at a small table, immersed in bottles. The smoke-filled grill room was thronged with young men and dignitaries tip-toe on tables and chairs and chairs on tables in order to hear him and see his stupendous gestures. Nobody could ever remember anything, he said, but it was so impressive as to need but a day for it to acquire a legendary character. I know for a fact that one of the twelve old women of the village who lived a whole block away sent to find the cause of the noise, and that old Mr. Galhoolie roared with the best until it was too much for him and he was sick--in the English sense--all down his patriarchal white beard. I have found myself wishing I had been there, as I wish I had been at Camelot or at one of the receptions given the Greek of many devices on his wanderings. But I do not wish I had been up on the hill that night, though that was the dramatic part of the show. It came after he was known to have escaped from the club alone, after a lengthy disappearance. Up there, they had naturally supposed that he failed to fill his place on account of some trivial domestic tragedy, or the advent of friends; or that something had at last got into his solid old liver which during so many years of good living had been besieged in vain. But when they heard he was coming up there in all his magnificence they were horrified. A morbid curiosity chained them there, but they awaited him in silent, breathless apprehension, imagining him drawing slowly toward them like an evil fate over the snowy intervening mile of road. Their reticence was curious, and explained only by the unbelievableness of the Great Pan Jandrum’s being uncontrolled--hilarious, crude, outlandish--they didn’t know what. And they appreciated the occasion at once. It was no ordinary man about to be foolish, disheartening as that would be under the circumstances, but they realized that it would touch each one of us inasmuch as we had put a certain rare type of faith in what he was.