Afterward, he had come up front and asked the lecturer if he could make a place for him at Eos ... that he was out of a job ... starving ... a poor German scholar ... formerly, in better days, a man of much wealth and travel....
He had spent his last nickel for admission to Spalton's lecture. Spalton brought him back to the Eos Artwork Studios.
There he found that the queer, gentle, old man was as helpless as a child ... all he could be trusted to do was to write addresses on letters ... which he was set at, not too exactingly....
I never saw so happy a man as Pfeiler was that winter.
He was a Buddhist, not by pose, but by sincere conviction. He thought, also, that the Koran was a greater book than the Bible ... and more miraculous ... "one man, Mohammed, who left a work of greater beauty than the combined efforts of the several hundred who gave us that hodge-podge, the Bible."
Pfeiler had been left a fortune by his father, a wealthy German merchant ... so, like Sir Richard Burton, he had made off to the Near East ... where he had lived among the Turks for ten years ... till, what with his buying rare manuscripts and Oriental and Turkish art, he had suddenly run upon the rocks of bankruptcy ... and had returned from the Levantine a ruined, helpless scholar, who had never been taught to be anything else but a man of culture and leisure....
By steerage he made his way to America ... to Chicago ... all his works of art, his priceless manuscripts sold ... the money gone like water through the assiduities of false friends and sycophants....
On the bum in Chicago ... a hotel clerk, discharged as incompetent--he had forgotten to insist that a man and woman register always as man and wife ... "because it was such hypocrisy" ... finally a dishwasher, who lived in a hall bed-room ... no friends because of his abstractedness, his immersion in oriental scholarship ... his only place of refuge, his dwelling place, when not washing dishes for a mere existence, the Public Library....
"Old Pfeiler" drank coffee by the quart, as drunkards drink whiskey. He had a nervous affliction which caused him to shake his head continually, as if in impatience ... or as a dog shakes his head to dislodge something that has crept into his ear....