*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74755 ***
_A Story Teller’s Story_
_OTHER BOOKS BY_
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON, _A novel_
MARCHING MEN, _A novel_
MID-AMERICAN CHANTS, _Chants_
WINESBURG, OHIO, _A book of tales_
POOR WHITE, _A novel_
THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG, _A book of tales_
MANY MARRIAGES, _A novel_
HORSES AND MEN, _A book of tales_
_A Story Teller’s Story_
The tale of an American writer’s journey
through his own imaginative world and
through the world of facts, with many of
his experiences and impressions among other
writers--told in many notes--in four books--and
an Epilogue.
_Sherwood Anderson_
_New York_ _B. W. Huebsch, Inc._ _Mcmxxiv_
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ,
who has been more than father to so many
puzzled, wistful children of the arts in this
big, noisy, growing and groping America, this
book is gratefully dedicated.
Portions of this book have been published in the _American
Mercury_, _Century_ and _Phantasmus_ and to these
magazines the author makes due acknowledgment.
CONTENTS.
BOOK ONE 3
BOOK TWO 131
BOOK THREE 287
BOOK FOUR 345
EPILOGUE 411
_A Story Teller’s Story_
A STORY-TELLER’S STORY
IN all the towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-American
boyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knew
it later in our great American industrial towns and cities.
My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist? My
father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping
a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became
ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself
a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called
himself a “sign-writer.” The day of universal advertising had not yet
come and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but still
he stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let go
by the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butcher’s house (it
would have kept him busily at work for a month) in order to have a go
at lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger the
baker.
There was your true pilgrimage abroad, out into the land. Father
engaged a horse and a spring wagon and took the three older of his sons
with him. My older brother and the one next younger than myself were,
from the first, adept at sign-writing, while both father and myself
were helpless with a brush in our hands. And so I drove the horse and
father supervised the whole affair. He had a natural boyish love for
the supervision of affairs and the picking out of a particular fence on
a particular road became to him as important a matter as the selection
of a site for a city, or the fortification that was to defend it.
And then the farmer who owned the fence had to be consulted and if he
refused his consent the joy of the situation became intensified. We
drove off up the road and turned into a wood and the farmer went back
to his work of cultivating corn. We watched and waited, our boyish
hearts beating madly. It was a summer day and in the small wood in
which we were concealed we all sat on a fallen log in silence. Birds
flew overhead and a squirrel chattered. What a delicate tinge of
romance spread over our commonplace enough business!
Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact.
It had fallen out that he, never having had the glorious opportunity
to fret his little hour upon a greater stage, was intent on fretting
his hour as best he could in a money-saving prosperous corn-shipping,
cabbage-raising Ohio village.
He magnified the danger of our situation. “He might have a shotgun,” he
said, pointing to where in the distance the farmer was again at work.
As we waited in the wood he sometimes told us a story of the Civil War
and how he with a companion had crept for days and nights through an
enemy country at the risk of their lives. “We were carrying messages,”
he said, raising his eyebrows and throwing out his hands. By the
gesture there was something implied. “Well, it was an affair of life
or death. Why speak of the matter? My country needed me and I, and my
intrepid companion, had been selected because we were the bravest men
in the army,” the raised eyebrows were saying.
And so with their paint pots and brushes in their hands my two brothers
presently crept out of the wood and ran crouching through cornfields
and got into the dusty road. Quickly and with mad haste they dabbed the
name of Alf Granger on the fence with the declaration that he baked the
best bread in the State of Ohio, and when they returned to us we all
got back into the spring wagon and drove back along the road past the
sign. Father commanded me to stop the horse. “Look,” he said, frowning
savagely at my two brothers, “your _N_ is wrong. You are being
careless again with your _Bs_. Good gracious, will I never teach
you two how to handle a brush?”
If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes
were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter
we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered.
Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is
called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the
artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly
complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to
proclaim him.
The boy who has no warm overcoat throws back his head and runs through
the streets, past houses where smoke goes up into a clear cold sky,
across vacant lots, through fields. The sky clouds and snows come and
the bare hands are cold and chapped. They are raw and red but at night,
before the boy sleeps, his mother will come with melted fat and rub it
over the raw places.
The warm fat is soothing. The touch of a mother’s fingers is soothing.
Well, you see, with us, we were all of us--mother father and the
children--in some way outlaws in our native place and that thought was
soothing to a boy. It is a soothing thought in all my memories of my
boyhood. Only recently one connected with my family said to me: “You
must remember, now that you are an author, you have a respectable place
in the world to maintain”; and for a moment my heart swelled with pride
in the thought.
And then I went out of the presence of the cautious one to associate
with many other respectables and into my mind flashed thoughts of
the sweetness I have seen shining in the eyes of others--of waiters,
horsemen, thieves, gamblers, women, driven by poverty to the outer
rim of society. Where were the respectables among those who had been
kindest and sweetest to me?
Whatever may be said in this matter, and I admit my feet have slipped
many times toward solid respectability we of our family were not too
respectable then.
For one thing father never paid his rent and so we were always living
in haunted houses. Never was such a family to take the haunts out of
a house. Old women riding white horses, dead men screaming, groans,
cries--all were quieted when we came to live in a haunted house. And
how often because of this talent--inherent in my family--we lived for
months scot-free in a fairly comfortable house, while at the same
time conferring a benefit on the property owner. It is a system--I
recommend it to poets with large families.
There were not enough bedclothes so three boys slept in one bed and
there was a window that, in summer, looked out upon fields, but in
winter had been painted by the hand of the frost king so that moonlight
came softly and dimly into the room. It was no doubt the fact that
there were three of us in one bed that drove away all fear of the
“haunts.”
Mother was tall and slender and had once been beautiful. She had
been a bound girl in a farmer’s family when she married father, the
improvident young dandy. There was Italian blood in her veins and her
origin was something of a mystery. Perhaps we never cared to solve
it--wanted it to remain a mystery. It is so wonderfully comforting to
think of one’s mother as a dark, beautiful and somewhat mysterious
woman. I later saw her mother--my own grandmother--but that is another
story.
She the dark evil old woman with the broad hips and the great breasts
of a peasant and with the glowing hate shining out of her one eye would
be worth a book in herself. It was said she had shuffled off four
husbands and when I knew her, although she was old, she looked not
unwilling to tackle another. Some day perhaps I shall tell the tale of
the old woman and the tramp who tried to rob the farm house when she
was staying alone; and of how she, after beating him into submission
with her old fists, got drunk with him over a barrel of hard cider in
a shed and of how the two went singing off together down the road--but
not now.
Our own mother had eyes that were like pools lying in deep shadows at
the edge of a wood but when she grew angry and fell into one of her
deep silences lights danced in the pools. When she spoke her words were
filled with strange wisdom (how sharply yet I remember certain comments
of hers--on life--on your neighbors!), but often she commanded all of
us by the strength of her silences.
She came into the bedroom where three boys lay on one bed, carrying in
one hand a small kerosene lamp and in the other a dish in which was
warm melted fat.
There were three boys in one bed, two of them almost of the same size.
The third was then a small silent fellow. Later his life was to be very
strange. He was one who could not fit himself into the social scheme
and, until he was a grown man, he stayed about, living sometimes with
one, sometimes with another of his brothers--always reading books,
dreaming, quarreling with no one.
He, the youngest of the three, looked out at life always as from a
great distance. He was of the stuff of which poets are made. What
instinctive wisdom in him. All loved him but no one could help him in
the difficult business of living his life and when on summer evenings,
as the three lay in the bed the two older boys fought or made great
plans for their lives, he lay beside them in silence--but sometimes he
spoke and his words came always as from a far place. We were perhaps
discussing the wonders of life. “Well,” he said, “it is so and so.
There will be no more babies, but the new babies do not come as you
say. I know how they come. They come the same way you grow corn. Father
plants seed in the earth and mother is the earth in which the seed
grows.”
I am thinking of my younger brother after he had grown a little
older--I am thinking of him grown into a man and become habitually
silent like mother--I am thinking of him as he was just before he
mysteriously disappeared out of our lives and never came back.
Now, however, he is in bed with the other brother and myself. An older
brother, he who crept through the cornfields to paint the name of Alf
Granger on the fence, had already gone from our lives. He had a talent
for drawing, and a drunken half-insane cutter of stones for graveyards
has taken him away from our town to another town where he is already
sitting at a desk drawing designs for gravestones. A dove descends out
of the sky and holds a leaf in its bill. There is an angel clinging to
a rock in the midst of a storm at sea.
Rock of ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.
The three boys are in the bed in the room and there are not enough
bedclothes. Father’s overcoat, now too old to be worn, is thrown over
the foot of the bed and the three boys have been permitted to undress
downstairs, in the kitchen of the house, by the kitchen stove.
The oldest of the boys remaining at home (that is myself) must undress
first and must arrange his clothes neatly on a kitchen chair. Mother
does not scold about such a trifling matter. She stands silently
looking and the boy does as he has been told. There is something of
my grandmother in a certain look that can come into her eyes. “Well,
you’d better,” it says. How unsuccessfully I have tried all my life to
cultivate just that look, for myself!
And now the boy has undressed and must run in his white flannel
nightgown barefooted through the cold house, past frosted windows, up
a flight of stairs and, with a flying leap into the bed. The flannel
nightgown has been worn almost threadbare by the older brother--now
gone out into the world--before it has come down to him who wears it
now.
He is the oldest of the brothers at home and must take the first plunge
into the icy bed, but soon the others come running. They are lying like
little puppies in the bed but as they grow warmer the two older boys
begin to fight. There is a contest. The point is not to be compelled to
lie on the outside where the covers may come off in the night. Blows
are struck and tense young bodies are intertwined. “It’s your turn
to-night! No it’s yours! You’re a liar! Take that! Well then, take
that! I’ll show you!”
The youngest brother of the three brothers has already taken one of the
two outside positions. It is his fate. He is not strong enough to fight
with either of the other two and perhaps he does not care for fighting.
He lies silently in the cold in the darkness while the fight between
the other two goes on and on. They are of almost equal strength and the
fight might possibly last for an hour.
But there is now the sound of the mother’s footsteps on the stairs and
that is the end of the struggle. Now--at this moment--the boy who has
the coveted position may keep it. That is an understood thing.
The mother puts the kerosene lamp on a little table by the bed and
beside it the dish of warm, comforting melted fat. One by one six hands
are thrust out to her.
There is a caress in her long toil-hardened fingers.
In the night and in the dim light of the lamp her dark eyes are like
luminous pools.
The fat in the little cracked china dish is warm and soothing to
burning itching hands. For an hour she has had the dish sitting at the
back of the kitchen stove in the little frame house far out at the edge
of the town.
The strange, silent mother! She is making love to her sons, but there
are no words for her love. There are no kisses, no caresses.
The rubbing of the warm fat into the cracked hands of her sons is a
caress. The light that now shines in her eyes is a caress.
* * * * *
The silent woman has left deep traces of herself in one of her sons.
He is the one now lying stilly in the bed with his two noisy brothers.
What has happened in the life of the mother? In herself, in her own
physical life, even the two quarreling, fighting sons feel that nothing
can matter too much. If her husband, the father of the boys, is a
no-account and cannot bring money home--the money that would feed
and clothe her children in comfort--one feels it does not matter too
much. If she herself, the proud quiet one, must humiliate herself,
washing--for the sake of the few dimes it may bring in--the soiled
clothes of her neighbors, one knows it does not matter too much.
And yet there is no Christian forbearance in her. She speaks sometimes
as she sits on the edge of the bed in the lamplight rubbing the warm
fat into the cracked frost-bitten hands of her children and there is
often a kind of smoldering fire in her words.
* * * * *
One of the boys in the bed has had a fight with the son of a neighbor.
He, the third son of the family, has taken a hatchet out of the
neighbor boy’s hands. We had been cramming ourselves with the contents
of a book, “The Last of the Mohicans,” and the neighbor boy, whose
father is the town shoemaker, had the hatchet given him as a Christmas
present. He would not lend it, would not let it go out of his hands and
so my brother, the determined one, has snatched it away.
The struggle took place in a little grove of trees half a mile from the
house. “Le Renard Subtil,” cries my brother jerking the hatchet out
of the neighbor boy’s hand. The neighbor boy did not want to be the
villain--“Le Renard Subtil.”
And so he went crying off toward his home, on the farther side of the
field. He lived in a yellow house just beyond our own and near the end
of the street at the edge of the town.
My brother now had possession of the hatchet and paid no more attention
to him but I went to stand by a fence to watch him go.
It is because I am a white man and understand the whites better than
he. I am Hawkeye the scout, “La Longue Carabine,” and as I stand by the
fence _la longue carabine_ is lying across the crook of my arm. It
is represented by a stick. “I could pick him off from here, shall I do
it?” I ask, speaking to my brother with whom I fight viciously every
night after we have got into bed but who, during the day, is my sworn
comrade in arms.
Uncas--“Le Cerf Agile”--pays no attention to my words and I rest the
stick over the fence, half determined to pick off the neighbor boy but
at the last withholding my fire. “He is a little pig, never to let a
fellow take his hatchet. Uncas was right to snatch it out of his hand.”
As I withhold my fire and the boy goes unscathed and crying across the
snow-covered field I feel very magnanimous--since at any moment I could
have dropped him like a deer in flight. And then I see him go crying
into his mother’s house. Uncas has, in fact, cuffed him a couple of
times in the face. But was it not justified? “Dare a dirty Huron--a
squaw man--dare such a one question the authority of a Delaware? Ugh!”
And now “Le Renard Subtil” has gone into his mother’s house and has
blabbed on us, and I tell Uncas the news but, with the impenetrable
stoicism of a true savage, he pays no attention. He is as one sitting
by the council fire. Are words to be wasted on a dog of a Huron?
And now “Le Cerf Agile” has an idea. Drawing a line in the snow, he
stands some fifty feet from the largest of the trees in the grove and
hurls the hatchet through the air.
What a determined fellow! I am of the paleface race myself and shall
always depend for my execution upon _la longue carabine_ but Uncas
is of another breed. Is there not painted on his breast a crawling
tortoise? In ink I have traced it there myself from a drawing he has
made.
During the short winter afternoon the hatchet will be thrown not once
but a hundred, perhaps two hundred, times. It whirls through the air.
The thing is to throw the hatchet so that, at the end of its flight,
the blade goes, just so, firmly into the soft bark of the tree. And it
must enter the bark of the tree at just a particular spot.
The matter is of infinite importance. Has not Uncas, “The Last of the
Mohicans,” broad shoulders? He will later be a strong man. Now is the
time to acquire infinite skill.
He has measured carefully the spot on the body of the tree where
the blade of the hatchet must enter with a soft chug, deep into the
yielding bark. There is a tall warrior, a hated Huron, standing by
the tree and young Uncas has measured carefully so that he knows just
where the top of the warrior’s head should come. An idea has come to
him. He will just scalp the unsuspecting warrior with the blade of the
tomahawk; and has not he, Uncas, crept for many weary miles through
the forest, going without food, eating snow for his drink? A skulking
Huron has dared creep into the hunting grounds of the Delawares and has
learned the winter abiding place of our tribe. Dare we let him go back
to his squaw-loving people, bearing such knowledge? Uncas will show him!
He, Uncas, is absorbed in the problem before him and has not deigned to
look off across the fields to where the neighbor boy has gone crying
to his mother. “Le Renard Subtil” will be heard from again but for
the present is forgotten. The foot must be advanced just so. The arm
must be drawn back just so. When one hurls the hatchet the body must
be swung forward just so. An absolute silence must be maintained. The
skulking Huron who has dared come into our hunting grounds is unaware
of the presence of the young Uncas. Is he, Uncas, not one whose feet
leave no traces in the morning dew?
Deep within the breasts of my brother and myself there is a resentment
that we were born out of our time. By what a narrow margin in the
scroll of time have we missed the great adventure! Two, three, at the
most a dozen generations earlier and we might so well have been born in
the virgin forest itself. On the very ground where we now stand Indians
have indeed stalked one another in the forest, and how often Uncas and
myself have discussed the matter. As for our father, we dismiss him
half contemptuously. He is born to be a dandy of the cities and has
turned out to be a village house-painter, in the dwelling places of
the paleface. The devil!--with luck he might have turned out to be an
actor, or a writer or some such scum of earth but never could he have
been a warrior. Why had not our mother, who might have been such a
splendid Indian princess, the daughter of a great chief, why had she
also not been born a few generations earlier? She had just the silent
stoicism needed for the wife of a great warrior. A deep injustice had
been done us, and something of the feeling of that injustice was in the
stern face of Uncas as he crept each time to the line he had marked out
in the snow and sent the hatchet hurtling through the air.
The two boys, filled with scorn of their parentage, on the father’s
side, are in a little grove of trees at the edge of an Ohio town. In
later days the father--also born out of his place and time--will come
to mean more to them but now he has little except their contempt.
Now Uncas is determined--absorbed--and I, who have so little of his
persistence, am impressed by his silent determination. It makes me a
little uncomfortable for, since he has snatched the hatchet out of the
neighbor boy’s hand, saying, “Go on home, cry-baby,” no word has passed
his lips. There is but a small grunting sound when the hatchet is
hurled and a scowl on his face when it misses the mark.
And “Le Renard Subtil” has gone home and blabbed to his mother, who
in turn has thrown a shawl over her head and has gone to our house,
no doubt to blab, in her turn, to our mother. “La Longue Carabine,”
being a paleface, is a little intent on disturbing the aim of “Le Cerf
Agile.” “We’ll catch hell,” he says, looking at the hatchet thrower
who has not so far unbent from the natural dignity of the Indian as to
reply. He grunts and taking his place solemnly at the line poises his
body. There is the quick abrupt swing forward of the body. What a shame
Uncas did not later become a professional baseball player. He might
have made his mark in the world. The hatchet sings through the air.
Well, it has struck sideways. The Huron is injured but not fatally, and
Uncas goes and sets him upright again. He has marked the place where
the Huron warrior’s head should be by pressing a ball of snow into the
wrinkled bark of the tree and has indicated the dog’s body by a dead
branch.
And so Hawkeye the scout--“La Longue Carabine”--has gone creeping off
among the trees to see if there are any more Hurons lurking about and
has come upon a great buck, pawing the snow and feeding on dry grass
at the edge of a small creek. Up goes _la longue carabine_ and
the buck pitches forward, dead, on the ice. Hawkeye runs forward and
swiftly passes his hunting knife across the neck of the buck. It will
not do to build a fire now that there are Hurons lurking in the hunting
ground of the Delawares so Uncas and he must feed upon raw meat. Well,
the hunter’s life for the hunter! What must be must be! Hawkeye cuts
several great steaks from the carcass of the buck and makes his way
slowly and cautiously back to Uncas. As he approaches he three times
imitates the call of a catbird and an answering call comes from the
lips of “Le Cerf Agile.”
“Aha! the night is coming on,” Uncas now says, having at last laid the
Huron low. “Now that the dirty lover of squaws is dead we may build a
fire and feast. Cook the venison ere the night falls. When darkness has
come we must show no fire. Do not make much smoke--big fires for the
paleface, but little fires for us Indians.”
Uncas stands for a moment, gnawing the bone of the buck, and then of a
sudden becomes still and alert. “Aha! I thought so,” he says, and goes
back again to where he has drawn the mark in the snow. “Go,” he says;
“see how many come.”
And now Hawkeye must creep through the thick forests, climb mountains,
leap canyons. Word has come that “Le Renard Subtil” but feigned when he
went off crying, across the field--fools that we were! While we have
been in the forest he has crept into the very teepee of our people
and has stolen the princess, the mother of Uncas. And now “Le Renard
Subtil,” with subtle daring, drags the stoical princess right across
the path of her warrior son. In one moment from a great height Hawkeye
draws the faithful Deer Killer to his shoulder and fires, and at the
same moment the tomahawk of Uncas sinks itself in the skull of the
Huron dog.
“‘Le Renard Subtil’ had drunk firewater and was reckless,” says Uncas,
as the two boys go homeward in the dusk.
* * * * *
The older of the two boys now homeward bound is somewhat afraid but
Uncas is filled with pride. As they go homeward in the gathering
darkness and come to the house, where lives “Le Renard Subtil,” to
which he has gone crying but a few hours before, an idea comes to
him. Uncas creeps in the darkness, halfway between the house and the
picket fence in front and, balancing the hatchet in his hand, hurls it
proudly. Well for the neighbor’s family that no one came to the door at
that moment for Uncas’ long afternoon of practicing has got results.
The hatchet flies through the air and sinks itself fairly and deeply
into the door panel as Uncas and Hawkeye run away home.
* * * * *
And now they are in the bed and the mother is rubbing the warm grease
into their chapped hands. Her own hands are rough, but how gentle they
are! She is thinking of her sons, of the one already gone out into the
world and most of all at the moment of Uncas.
There is something direct brutal and fine in the nature of Uncas. It
is not quite an accident that in our games he is always the Indian
while I am the despised white, the paleface. It is permitted me to
heal my misfortune a little by being, not a storekeeper or a fur
trader but that man nearest the Indian’s nature of all the palefaces
who ever lived on our continent, “La Longue Carabine”; but I cannot be
an Indian and least of all an Indian of the tribe of the Delawares.
I am not persistent patient and determined enough. As for Uncas, one
may coax and wheedle him along any road and I am always clinging to
that slight sense of leadership that my additional fifteen months
of living gives me, by coaxing and wheedling, but one may not drive
Uncas. To attempt driving him is but to arouse a stubbornness and
obstinacy that is limitless. Having told a lie to mother or father,
he will stick to the lie to the death while I--well, perhaps there is
in me something of the doglike, the squaw man, the paleface, the very
spirit of “Le Renard Subtil”--if the bitter truth must be told. In
all my after years I shall have to struggle against a tendency toward
slickness and plausibility in myself. I am the tale-teller, the man
who sits by the fire waiting for listeners, the man whose life must be
led into the world of his fancies, I am the one destined to follow the
little, crooked words of men’s speech through the uncharted paths of
the forests of fancy. What my father should have been I am to become.
Through long years of the baffling uncertainty, that only such men as
myself can ever know, I am to creep with trembling steps forward in
a strange land, following the little words, striving to learn all the
ways of the ever-changing words, the smooth-lying little words, the
hard, jagged, cutting words, the round, melodious, healing words. All
the words I am in the end to come to know a little and to attempt to
use for my purpose have, at the same time, the power in them both to
heal and to destroy. How often am I to be made sick by words, how often
am I to be healed by words, before I can come at all near to man’s
estate!
And so as I lie in the bed putting out my chapped hands to the healing
touch of mother’s hands I do not look at her. Already I am often too
conscious of my own inner thoughts to look directly at people and
now, although I am not the one who has cuffed the neighbor boy and
jerked the hatchet out of his hands, I am nevertheless busily at work
borrowing the troubles of Uncas. I cannot let what is to be be, but
must push forward striving to change all by the power of words. I dare
not thrust my words forward in the presence of mother, but they are
busily getting themselves said inside myself.
There is a consciousness of Uncas also within me. Another curse that
is to lie heavily on me all through my life has its grip on me. I am
not one to be satisfied to act for myself, think for myself, feel for
myself but I must also attempt to think and feel for Uncas.
At the moment slick plausible excuses for what has happened during the
afternoon are rising to my lips, struggling for expression. I am not
satisfied with being myself and letting things take their course, but
must be inside the very body of Uncas, striving to fill his stout young
body with the questioning soul of myself.
As I write this I am remembering that my father, like myself, could
never be singly himself but must always be a playing some rôle,
everlastingly strutting on the stage of life in some part not his own.
Was there a rôle of his own to be played? That I do not know and I
fancy he never knew, but I remember that he once took it into his head
to enact the rôle of the stern and unyielding parent to Uncas and what
came of it.
The tragic little comedy took place in the woodshed back of one of
the innumerable houses to which we were always moving when some
absurd landlord took it into his head that he should have some rent
for the house we occupied, and Uncas had just beaten with his fists a
neighbor boy who had tried to run away with a baseball bat belonging
to us. Uncas had retrieved the bat and had brought it proudly home,
and father, who happened along the street at that moment, had got the
notion fixed in his mind that the bat belonged, not to us, but to the
neighbor boy. Uncas tried to explain, but father, having taken up the
rôle of the just man, must needs play it out to the bitter end. He
demanded that Uncas return the bat into the hands of the boy from whom
he had just ravaged it and Uncas, growing white and silent, ran home
and hid himself in the woodshed where father quickly found him out.
“I won’t,” declared Uncas; “the bat’s ours”; and then father--fool
that he was for ever allowing himself to get into such an undignified
position--began to beat him with a switch he had cut from a tree at
the front of the house. As the beating did no good and Uncas only took
it unmoved, father, as always happened with him, lost his head.
And so there was the boy, white with the sense of the injustice being
done, and no doubt father also began to feel that he had put his foot
into a trap. He grew furious and, picking up a large stick of wood from
a woodpile in the shed, threatened to hit Uncas with it.
What a moment! I had run to the back of the shed and had thrown myself
on the ground where I could look through a crack and as long as I live
I shall never forget the next few moments--with the man and the boy,
both white, looking at each other; and, that night, in the bed later,
when mother was rubbing my chapped hands and when I knew there was
something to be settled between her and Uncas, that picture danced like
a crazy ghost in my fancy.
I trembled at the thought of what might happen, at the thought of what
had happened that day in the shed.
Father had stood--I shall never know how long--with the heavy stick
upraised, looking into the eyes of his son, and the son had stared,
with a fixed determined stare, back into the eyes of his father.
At the moment I had thought that--boy as I was--I understood how such a
strange unaccountable thing as a murder could happen. Thoughts did not
form themselves definitely in my mind but after that moment I knew that
it is always the weak, frightened by their own weakness, who kill the
strong, and perhaps I also knew myself for one of the weak ones of the
world. At the moment, as father stood with the stick upraised, glaring
at Uncas, my own sympathies (if my own fancy has not tricked me again)
were with father. My heart ached for him.
He was saved by mother. She came to the door of the shed and stood
looking at him and his eyes wavered, and then he threw the stick back
upon the pile from which he had taken it and went silently away. I
remembered that he tramped off to Main Street and that, later in the
evening when he came back to the house, he was drunk and went drunken
to bed. The trick of drunkenness had saved him from the ordeal of
looking into the eyes of Uncas or of mother, as so often words have
later saved me from meeting fairly some absurd position into which I
have got myself.
* * * * *
And so there was I now, in the bed and up to one of father’s tricks:
upstart that I was, dog of a Huron myself, I was trembling for mother
and for Uncas--two people very well able to take care of themselves.
Mother dropped my hand and took the outstretched hand of my brother.
“What happened?” she asked.
And Uncas told her, fairly and squarely. “He was a cry-baby and a
big calf and I walloped him one. I wanted the hatchet and so I took
it--that’s what I did. I banged him one on the nose and jerked it out
of his hand.”
Mother laughed--a queer unmirthful little laugh. It was the kind of
laugh that hurts. There was irony in it and that got to Uncas at once.
“It doesn’t take much of a fellow to snatch a hatchet out of the hands
of a cry-baby,” she said.
That was all. She kept on rubbing his hands and now it was my eyes, and
not the eyes of Uncas, that could look directly into our mother’s eyes.
Perhaps it was in that moment, and not in the moment when I lay on the
ground peeking through the crack into the shed, that the first dim
traces of understanding of all such fellows as father and myself came
to me. I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she
had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were
all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a
little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was
no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible
occasions, was a way of crying too.
And I cried also, I suppose, because in Uncas and mother there was a
kind of directness and simplicity that father and all fellows, who like
myself are of the same breed with him, can never quite achieve.
NOTE II
A FAMILY of five boys and two girls--a mother who is to die, outworn
and done for at thirty--
A father, whose blood and whose temperament I am to carry to the end of
my days. How futile he was--in his physical life as a man in America in
his time--what dreams he must have had!
There was a dream he had of something magnificent--a lone rider on a
horse, dressed in shining armor and riding in a city before a vast
multitude of people--the beating of drums.... “The man--he comes!
Hurra!” People who live their lives by facts can never understand
such a fellow. “He comes! All hail!” What has he done? Well, never
mind--something grand, you may be sure of that. The dream that never
can become a fact in life can become a fact in fancy. “There he
goes.... ‘Teddy the magnificent’!” One both laughs and cries over the
memory of him.
The showman was there, in him--it flowered within him--and it is in me
too. When Carl Sandburg, the poet, long after said to me--speaking of
his lecturing and reading his poetry aloud, to make a living--“I give
’em a good show,” I understood what he meant and I understood the pride
in his voice when he said it. And then, later still, when I was writing
my own novel, “Poor White”; and when my boyhood friend, John Emerson,
gave me a job--doing publicity for movie people, in order that I might
have some income to write at my leisure--and for a time I saw a good
deal of that strange perverted band, I could understand them also. They
were people like my own father, robbed of their inheritance. In an odd
way they were my own people too.
John Emerson, a boyhood friend from my own village, had given me the
movie job, knowing I would be no good at it. He was a successful man,
a moneymaker, and was always planning out schemes for giving me money
and leisure. I went often to the movie studios and watched the men and
the women at work. Children, playing with dreams--dreams of an heroic
kind of desperado cowboy, doing good deeds at the business end of a
gun--dreams of an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid vice--American
dreams--Anglo-Saxon dreams. How they wanted to be the things they were
always playing, and how impossible it all was!
My father lived in a land and in a time when what one later begins to
understand a little as the artist in man could not by any possibility
be understood by his fellows. Dreams then were to be expressed in
building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing
telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father
could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The
community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.
As for the movie people I saw, they worked in a strange land of
fragments of dreams. The parts they were to play were given them in
fragments. Everything was fragmentary and unfinished. A kind of
insanity reigned. A “set” having been made, at a certain cost in
dollars and cents, half a dozen little bits of the dream they were to
enact were gone through--sometimes a dozen times--and the very piece
the actors were supposed to play they often did not know. A strange
greenish light fell down over them, and when they were not playing,
they sat stupidly hour after hour arrayed in their motley, often pawing
one another over listlessly with their hands and seeking outside the
studios--in drink, in dope, in futile love-making, in trying to carry
on an absurd pretense to being ladies and gentlemen of parts--seeking
in all these things to compensate themselves for being robbed of their
inheritance as artists--the right to pour their emotional energies into
their work.
The result of all this perversion of workmanship and of emotional
energy in the movie world seemed to me to reduce human beings to a
state that most of all suggested to my mind angleworms squirming in
a boy’s bait-can; and why any human being, under the conditions in
which they must work and with the materials with which they must work,
should want to be a movie actor or a writer for the movies is beyond my
comprehension.
But to return to my father. At least, there was little of the dull
listlessness of the angleworm in him. He created his own, “dope,”
inside himself, most of the time.
Once he actually set up as a showman. With a man of our town, named
Aldrich, who owned a broken-down horse and a spring wagon he went forth
to strut his own little hour upon the boards.
It was winter and there was no work for father to be had in our
town and I presume Aldrich also had no work. I remember him as
a quiet-looking middle-aged man with a red face. He also was a
house-painter, during the summer months, and he and father had by some
chance got hold of a secondhand magic-lantern outfit.
They were to show at country schoolhouses in the farming districts of
northern Ohio. There was to be a sheet hung across the end of the room,
near the place where the teacher’s desk would sit, and on this would be
thrown certain pictures Aldrich had got hold of.
Those of you who have lived in the farming sections of mid-America,
in the days before the movies, will understand that show. There would
be a picture of Niagara Falls--taken in the winter--Niagara Falls
frozen into a series of ice bridges and with small black figures of men
running over the bridges.
These, you are to understand, however, would not be moving men. They
would be frozen still and still--petrified men with legs upraised to
take a step, and holding them there--to the end of time--forever.
Then there would be a picture of President McKinley and one of Abe
Lincoln and Grover Cleveland--one of an emigrant wagon going across the
Western plains to California, with Indians on ponies circling in the
middle distance--a picture of the driving of the last railroad spike,
when the railroad builders coming from the West had met the railroad
builders coming from the East--somewhere out on the plains. The spike
would be a golden one, as everyone in the audience would know, but in
the picture it would be black. Several men with silk hats on their
heads stood about while a workman drove the spike. The hammer was
upraised. It stayed there. In the background was an engine, and several
Indians wrapped in blankets and looking sad, as though to say: “This
cooks our bacon.”
Most of the pictures would be in dead blacks and whites, but there
would be, at the very end, in colors, the old flag floating--that last
of all. It was as good for a hand then as it was later when George
Cohan got rich and became famous with it, and father and Aldrich
evidently knew it would “go.”
The admission charge would be ten cents.
As I have said, Aldrich was a red-faced mild middle-aged appearing man.
What things will not such quiet-looking fellows sometimes do? No one in
the world would ever be understood at all if your mild quiet-looking
man did not have, buried away in him somewhere, the possibility of
being almost any known sort of a fool.
In the arrangement that had been made father was to be the actor--a
comedian. He was to sing certain songs.
First, a few pictures from the magic lantern; then a song by father,
with a little dance. Then more pictures and another song; and at last
the colored pictures, ending with the flag flying. The inference might
be that the flag, at any rate, had survived the ordeal.
And a dream of a harvest of dimes too. As for expense--well, let
us say, a dollar for the use of the country schoolhouse and enough
firewood to heat it for the evening. A boy would build the fire for the
chance to be admitted free; and the horse and the two men would be
fed at the bounty of some farmer. Father would have promised that--he
would have been very sure of being able to accomplish that--would
have depended upon his personal charm. I can fancy him explaining to
Aldrich, or rather not explaining. He would smile and throw out his
hands in a peculiar way. “You leave that to me, just you leave that to
me.”
And his hopes would not be unjustified either. What a boon for a quiet,
dull, farming family in the winter, to have such a one light down upon
it! He and his companion would have to stay in the one school district
for two or three days. Arrangements would have to be made about getting
the schoolhouse, and he and Aldrich would have to drive around the
neighborhood and distribute the play bills:
AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE
FRIDAY EVENING
MAJOR IRWIN ANDERSON
THE ACTOR
IN SONG AND DANCE
MARVELOUS MAGIC-LANTERN SHOW
A VISIT TO ALL THE WONDERS
OF THE WORLD
10 CENTS
And then the evenings in the farmhouses! Aldrich would sit like an
Indian in his corner by the farmhouse stove; and he must have been
saying to himself constantly: “Now, how did I get into this? How did I
get into this?”
The farmer’s wife, the hired man and perhaps a grown daughter would be
there and there would be a maiden of uncertain age--the farm woman’s
sister, who had never married and so just stayed about and worked for
her board--and, in a corner, two or three towheaded boys who would
presently have to go off to bed.
All the others silent, but father talking and talking. An actor in the
house! It was wonderful, like having Charlie Chaplin to dinner with you
nowadays!
Father was in his element now. This was pie for him. No hungry sons
about, no sick wife, no grocery bills or rent to be paid. This the
golden age--timeless; there was no past, no future--the quiet,
unsophisticated people in the room were putty to his hands.
Surely there was something magnificent in my father’s utter disregard
for the facts of life. In the picture I have of him--that is to say in
my fancy--in the picture I have of him during his pilgrimages of that
winter I always see his partner in the affair, Aldrich, fast asleep in
a chair.
But the farmer and his wife, and the wife’s sister--they are not
asleep. The unmarried woman in the house is, let us say, thirty-eight.
She is tall and gaunt and has several teeth missing and her name is
Tilly. It would be bound to be Tilly.
And when father has been in the house two hours he is calling her
“Tilly,” and the farmer he is addressing familiarly as “Ed.”
After the evening meal the farmer has had to go to his stable to look
at his stock, to bed the stock down for the night, and father has gone
with him. Father runs about the stable holding the lantern. He boasts
about the horses and cattle in his father’s stables when he was a boy.
Whether that early home of his ever existed anywhere but in his fancy
is doubtful.
What a fellow, wanting to be loved, was my father!
And now he is in the farmhouse sitting room and it is late evening and
the towheaded children have gone regretfully to bed. There is something
in the air of the room, a kind of suspense, a feeling that something
is about to happen. Father has so carefully worked that up. He would
do it by silences, by sudden breakings out into suppressed laughter,
and then by quickly looking sad. I have seen him do the thing, oh, many
times. “My dear people--you wait! There is something inside me that is
wonderful, and if you will only be patient you will presently see or
hear it come forth,” he seemed to be saying.
He is by the fire with his legs spread out and his hands are in his
trousers pockets. He stares at the floor. He is smoking a cigar. In
some ways he always managed to keep himself supplied with the little
comforts of life.
And he has so placed his chair that he can look at Tilly, who has
retired into her corner, without anyone else in the room seeing the
look. Now she is sitting in deep shadows, far away from the kerosene
lamp with which the room is lighted and as she sits there, half lost in
the darkness, there is suddenly something--a haunting kind of beauty
hangs over her.
She is a little excited by something father has managed in some
indescribable way to do to the very air of the room. Tilly also was
once young and must at some time have had her grand moment in life.
Her moment was not very prolonged. Once, when she was a young woman,
she went to a country dance and a man, who dealt in horses, took a
fancy to her and carried her home after the dance in his buggy. He
was a tall man with a heavy mustache and she--it was a moonlight
night in October--she grew sad and wistful. The horse dealer half
intended--well, he had been buying horses for a trucking company
at Toledo, Ohio, had secured all he wanted and was leaving the
neighborhood on the next day--the thing he felt during that evening
later quite went out of his mind.
As for father he is, at the moment perhaps thinking of mother, when
she was young and lovely and was a bound girl in just such another
farmhouse, and surely he wanted something lovely for mother then as
he does for Tilly now. I have no doubt at all that father always
wanted lovely things for people--to happen to people--and that he had
also an absurd and never-dying faith in himself--that he was, in some
inscrutable way, appointed to be the bearer of lovely things to obscure
people.
However, there is something else in his mind also. Is he not the fellow
who, by his personal charm, is to earn for himself, Aldrich and the
horse, board, a bed, a welcome--without pay--until the show is pulled
off at the schoolhouse? That is his business now and this is his hour.
In fancy I can hear the tale he would now begin telling. There was that
one about his escape from the guards when he was a Union soldier in the
Civil War and was being marched off to a Southern prison camp. He would
no doubt use that. It was a bull’s-eye story and always hit the mark!
Oh, how often and under what varying circumstances has not my father
escaped from prisons! Benvenuto Cellini or the Count of Monte Cristo
had nothing on him.
Yes, the story he would now tell would be that once when it rained and
the Union prisoners, father among them--some forty men in all--were
being marched off along a road in the deep mud--
That was indeed a night of adventure! It was a tale he loved telling,
and what realistic touches he could put into it: the rain that wet
the prisoners to the skin--the cold--the chattering teeth--the groans
of weary men--the closeness of the dark forest on either hand--the
steady weary chug-chug of the feet of the prisoners in the mud--the
line of guards at either side of the road, with the guns over their
shoulders--the curses of the Rebel guards when they stumbled in the
darkness.
What a night of weary anguish on the part of the prisoners! When they
stopped to rest the guards went into a house and left the prisoners to
stand outside in the rain, or lie on the bare ground, guarded by part
of the company. If any died of exposure--well, there would be that many
less men to feed when they were got into the Southern prison camp.
And now, after many days and nights, marching thus, the souls of the
prisoners were sick with weariness. A dreary desolated look would come
upon father’s face as he spoke of it.
They marched steadily along in the deep mud and the rain. How cold
the rain was! Now and then, in the darkness, a dog barked, far away
somewhere. There was a break in the solid line of timber along the road
and the men marched across the crest of a low hill. There are lights
to be seen now, in distant farmhouses, far away across a valley--a few
lights like stars shining.
The story-teller has got his audience leaning forward in their chairs.
Outside the farmhouse in which they sit a wind begins to blow and a
broken branch from a near-by tree is blown against the side of the
house. The farmer, a heavy, stolid-looking man, starts a little and his
wife shivers as with cold and Tilly is absorbed--she does not want to
miss a word of the tale.
And now father is describing the darkness of the valley below the
hill and the lights seen, far off. Will any of the little company of
prisoners ever see their own homes again, their wives, their children,
their sweethearts? The lights of the farmhouses in the valley are like
stars in the sky of a world turned upside down.
The Rebel commander of the guard has issued a warning and a command:
“It’s pretty dark here, and if any of the Yanks make a stir to move out
of the centre of the road fire straight into the mass of them. Kill
them like dogs.”
A feeling creeps over father. He is, you see, a southern man himself,
a man of the Georgia hills and plains. There is no law that shall
prevent his having been born in Georgia, although to-morrow night it
may be North Carolina or Kentucky. But to-night his birthplace shall be
Georgia. He is a man who lives by his fancy and to-night it shall suit
his fancy and the drift of his tale to be a Georgian.
And so he, a prisoner of the Rebels, is being marched over the low
hill, with the lights from distant farmhouses shining like stars in
the darkness below, and suddenly a feeling comes to him, a feeling such
as one sometimes has when one is alone in one’s own house at night.
You have had the feeling. You are alone in the house and there are no
lights and it is cold and dark. Everything you touch--feel with your
hands in the darkness--is strange and at the same time familiar. You
know how it is.
The farmer is nodding his head and his wife has her hands gripped,
lying in her lap. Even Aldrich is awake now. The devil! Father has
given this particular tale a new turn since he told it last. “This is
something like.” Aldrich leans forward to listen.
And there is the woman Tilly, in the half darkness. See, she is quite
lovely now, quite as she was on that evening when she rode with the
horse dealer in the buggy! Something has happened to soften the long,
harsh lines of her face and she might be a princess sitting there now
in the half-light.
Father would have thought of that. It would be something worth while
now to be a tale-teller to a princess. He stops talking to consider for
a moment the possibilities of the notion, and then with a sigh gives it
up.
It is a sweet notion but it won’t do. Tale-teller to a princess, eh!
Evenings in a castle and the prince has come in from hunting in a
forest. The tale-teller is dressed in flashy clothes and with a crowd
of courtiers, ladies in waiting--whatever hangers-on a princess has--is
sitting by an open fire. There are great, magnificent dogs lying about
too.
Father is considering whether or not it is worth trying sometime--the
telling of a tale of himself in just that rôle. An idea crosses his
mind. The princess has a lover who creeps one night into the castle and
the prince has become aware of his presence, is told of his presence
by a trusty varlet. Taking his sword in hand the prince creeps through
the dark hallways to kill his rival, but father has warned the lovers
and they have fled. It afterward comes to the ears of the prince that
father has protected the lovers and he--that is to say, father--is
compelled to flee for his life. He comes to America and lives the life
of an exile, far from the splendor to which he has been accustomed.
Father is thinking whether it would be worth trying--the telling of
such a fable of his former existence, some evening at some farmhouse
where he and Aldrich are staying; and for a moment a sort of George
Barr McCutcheon light comes into his eyes, but with a sigh he gives it
up.
It wouldn’t go over--not in a farmhouse in northern Ohio, he concludes.
He returns to the tale, that so evidently is going over; but, before he
resumes, casts another glance at Tilly. “Oh, Tilly, thou dear lovely
one,” he sighs inwardly.
The farmhouse is in the North and he has set himself forth as a
southerner enlisted in the northern army. An explanation is in order,
and he makes it, with a flourish.
Born a southerner, the son of a proud southern family, he was sent to
school, to a college in the North. In college he had a roommate, a dear
fellow from the state of Illinois. The “roommate’s father was owner and
editor of the _Chicago Tribune_” he explains.
And during one summer, a few years before the breaking out of the war,
he went on a visit to the home of his Illinois friend, and while he
was there he, with his friend, went to hear the famous Lincoln-Douglas
debates. It was odd, but the facts were that the young fellow from
Illinois became enamored of the brilliant Douglas while he--well, to
tell the truth, his own heart was wrung by the simplicity and nobility
of the rail-splitter, Lincoln. “Never shall I forget the nobility of
that countenance,” he says in speaking of it. He appears about to cry
and does in fact take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his eyes.
“Oh, the noble, the indescribable effect upon my boyhood heart of the
stirring words of that man. There he stood like a mighty oak of the
forest breasting the storms. ‘A nation cannot exist half slave and half
free. A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ he said, and his
words thrilled me to the very marrow of my being.”
And then father would have described his homecoming after that terrific
experience. War was coming on and all the South was aflame.
One day at table in his southern home, with his brothers, his father
and mother and his beautiful and innocent young sister sitting with
him, he dared to say something in defense of Lincoln.
What a storm was then raised! The father getting up from his place
at table pointed a trembling finger at his son. All eyes, except
only those of his younger sister, were turned on him in wrath and
disapproval. “Mention that hated name again in this house and I will
shoot you like a dog, though you are my son,” his father said, and the
son got up from the table and went away, filled with the sense of
filial duty that would not let a born southerner answer his own father,
but nevertheless determined to stick to the faith aroused in him by the
words of the noble Lincoln.
And so he had ridden away from his southern home in the night and had
finally joined the Union forces.
What a night--riding away from his father’s house in the darkness,
leaving his mother behind, leaving all tradition behind, condemning
himself to be an outlaw in the hearts of those he had always loved--for
the sake of duty!
One can imagine Aldrich blinking a little and rubbing his hands
together. “Teddy is laying it on rather thick,” he no doubt says to
himself; but he must nevertheless have been filled with admiration.
However, let us, who are together revisiting the scene of my father’s
triumph on that evening in the farmhouse long ago, be not too much in
fear for the heart of the woman Tilly. At any rate her physical self,
if not her heart, was safe.
Although there can be little doubt that the presence of the virgin
Tilly, sitting in the half darkness, and the kindliness of the shadows
that had temporarily enhanced her failing beauty, may have had a good
deal to do with father’s talent on that evening, I am sure nothing else
ever came of it. Father, in his own way, was devoted to mother.
And he had his own way of treasuring her. Did he not treasure always
the lovelier moments of her?
He had found her in a farmhouse when he was by way of being something
of a young swell himself and she was a bound girl; and she was then
beautiful--beautiful without the aid of shadows cast by a kerosene
lamp.
In reality she was the aristocrat of the two, as the beautiful
one is always the aristocrat; and oh, how little beauty in woman
is understood! The popular magazine covers and the moving-picture
actresses have raised the very devil with our American conception of
womanly beauty.
But father had delicacy, of a sort, of that you may be quite sure; and
do you not suppose that Tilly, in the Ohio farmhouse, sensed something
of his attitude toward what fragment of beauty was left in her, and
that she loved him for that attitude--as I am sure my own mother also
did?
My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the
arms of the others, over the top of the wall.
And now the weary prisoners with their escort have come down off the
hillside to a valley and are approaching a large old southern mansion,
standing back from the road they have been traveling, and the officers
in charge of the prisoners--there were two of them--command the guards
to turn in at a gate that leads to the house.
There is an open space before the house where the prisoners are
gathered and the ground--covered with firm turf during most of the
year--has, under the continuous rains, become soft and yielding. Where
each prisoner stands a puddle gathers about his feet.
The house is dark, but for a single light at the back, and one of the
officers begins shouting. A large pack of hunting dogs have come from a
shed, hidden away in the darkness somewhere, and are gathered growling
and barking in a half circle about the prisoners.
One of the dogs rushes through the mass of prisoners and with a glad
cry leaps upon father, and all the others follow so that guards are
compelled to drive the dogs off, kicking them and using the butts of
their guns. Lights are lit inside the house. The people are astir.
You will understand what a moment this was for father. By one of those
strange streaks of fate--which he is very careful to explain to his
audience happen much more frequently in life than one imagines--he had
been led, as a prisoner on his way to a southern prison pen, right to
the door of his own father’s house.
What a moment indeed! Being a prisoner he has of course no idea how
long he will be kept there. Thank God, he has grown a thick, bushy
beard since he left home.
As to his fate--if the prisoners are kept in the yard until daylight
comes--well, he knows his own mother.
His own father, old man though he is, has gone off to the war and
all his brothers have gone; and his mother has come from a proud old
southern family, one of the oldest and proudest. Had she known he was
there among the prisoners she would have seen him hanged without a
protest and would herself have lent a hand at pulling the rope.
* * * * *
Ah, what had not my father given for his country! Where will his equal
be found, even among the whole world’s heroes? In the eyes of his
own mother and father, in his brother’s eyes, in the eyes of all the
branches and ramifications of his southern family, in the eyes of
all--except only one unsophisticated and innocent girl--he had brought
everlasting disgrace on one of the proudest names of the South.
Indeed it was just because he, the son, had gone off to fight with the
northern army that his father, a proud old man of sixty, had insisted
on being taken into the southern army. “I have a strong old frame and I
insist,” he had said. “I must make good the loss to my Southland for my
own son, who has proven himself a dog and a renegade.”
And so the old man had marched off with a gun on his shoulder,
insisting on being taken as a common soldier and put where he could
face constant and terrible danger, and the seeds of an undying hatred
against the son had been planted deep in the hearts of the whole family.
The dullest mind surely will comprehend now what a position father was
in when, in answer to the shouts of the officer, lights began to appear
all through the house. Was it not a situation to wring tears from the
heart of a man of stone! As for a woman’s heart--one can scarcely speak
of the matter.
And in the house, before father’s eyes, there was one--a pure
and innocent southern girl of rare beauty--a pearl of womanhood
in fact--rarest example of the famed spotless womanhood of the
Southland--his younger sister--the only woman child of the family.
You see, as father would so carefully have explained that evening in
the farmhouse, he did not care so much for his own life. That had
already been given to his country, he would have said proudly.
But, as you will understand quickly enough, had his presence among the
prisoners been discovered, his proud mother--eager to wipe out the only
stain on the family escutcheon--would at once have insisted that he
be hanged to the doorpost of the very house in which he was born, her
own hand pulling at the rope that was to jerk him up, into the arms of
death--to make white again the family escutcheon, you understand.
Could a proud southern woman do less?
And in the event of such an outcome to the adventures of the night, see
how that younger sister--the love of his life at that time--see how she
would have suffered.
There she was, the pure and innocent girl, the one who understood
nothing, to be sure, of the import of his decision to stick to the old
flag and fight for the land of Washington and Lincoln, and who, in her
innocent way, just loved him. On that day at his father’s table, when
he--so deeply affected by the Lincoln-Douglas debates--had dared say
a word for the cause of the North, it had been her eyes and her eyes
alone that had looked at him with love, when all the other eyes of his
family had looked at him with hatred and loathing.
And she would just be bursting into womanhood now. The aroma of
awakening womanhood would be lying over her as perfume over the opening
rosebud.
Think of it! There she, the pure and innocent one, would have to stand
and see him hanged. A blight would be brought down upon her young life
and her head would, ever after that night, be bowed in lonely and
silent sorrow. That brave pure and just girl made old before her time.
Ah; well might it be that in one night the mass of golden locks, that
now covered her head like a cloud just kissed by the evening sun--that
very golden hair might be turned as white as snow!
I can, in fancy, hear my father saying the words I have set down here
and coming very near to crying himself as he said them. At the moment
he would have believed without question the story he himself was
telling.
* * * * *
And now the front door to the old southern mansion is thrown open
and there, in the doorway facing the prisoners in the rain, stands a
gigantic young negro--my father’s own body servant before he left home.
(Father stops the flow of his talk long enough to explain how he and
the negro boy, as lads together, had fought, wrestled, hunted, fished
and lived together like two brothers. I will not go into that, however.
Any professional southerner will tell you all about it, if you care
to hear. It would have been the most trite part of father’s evening’s
effort.)
Anyway, there the gigantic young negro stands in the doorway and he is
holding in his hand a candle. Back of him stands my grandmother and
back of her the young and innocent sister.
The figure of father’s mother is erect. She is old but she is yet tall
and strong. One of the officers explains to her that he and his men
have been on an all-night march, taking the crowd of Yankee prisoners
to a prison camp, and asks for the hospitality of the house. Being a
southerner himself he knows that southern hospitality can never fail,
even at midnight. “A bite to eat and a cup of hot coffee in the name of
our Southland,” he asks.
It is granted, of course. The proud woman beckons him and his brother
officer into the house and herself steps out into the cold, drizzling
rain.
She has ordered the young negro to stand on the porch, holding the
candle aloof, and now, marching across the wet lawn, approaches the
prisoners. The southern guards have stepped aside, bowing low before
southern womanhood, and she goes near the prisoners and looks at them,
as well as one may in the uncertain light. “I have a curiosity to see
some of the unmannerly dogs of Yanks,” she says, leaning forward and
staring at them. She is very near her own son now but he has turned his
face away and is looking at the ground. Something however causes him to
raise his head just as she, to express more fully her contempt, spits
at the men.
A little speck of her white spittle lands upon father’s thick, tawny
beard.
And now his mother has gone back into the house and it is again dark on
the lawn in front. The Rebel guards are relieved--two at a time--to go
to the kitchen door, where they are given hot coffee and sandwiches.
And once his young sister, she of the tender heart, tries to creep to
where the prisoners stand in the darkness. She is accompanied by an old
negro woman and has planned to give food aid and comfort to the weary
men but is prevented. Her mother has missed her inside the house and
coming to the door calls to her. “I know your tender heart,” she says,
“but it shall not be. The teeth of no Yankee dog shall ever bite into
food raised on the land of your father. It shall not happen, at least
while your mother is alive to prevent.”
NOTE III
SO there was father, sitting comfortably in the warm farmhouse living
room--he and Aldrich having been well fed at the table of a prosperous
farmer--and having before him what he most loved, an attentive and
absorbed audience. By this time the farmer’s wife would be deeply
moved by the fate of that son of the South that father had represented
himself as being; and as for Tilly--while, in the fanciful picture
he is making, he stands in the cold and wet outside the door of that
southern mansion, Heaven knows what is going on in poor Tilly’s heart.
It is however bleeding with sympathy, one may be sure of that.
So there is father and, in the meantime, what of his own actual
flesh-and-blood family, the family he had left behind in an Ohio
village when he set forth on his career as an actor?
It is not suffering too much. One need not waste too much sympathy on
his family. Although he was never what we called in our Ohio country,
“a good provider,” he had his points and as one of his sons I at least
would be loath to trade him for a more provident shrewd and thoughtful
father.
It must however have been a fairly hard winter, for mother at least and
in connection with that winter and others that followed I have often
since had an amusing thought. In later years, when my own name had a
little got up in the world as a teller of tales I was often accused
of having got my impulse, as a story-teller, from the Russians. The
statement is a plausible one. It is, in a way, based upon reason.
When I had grown to be a man, and when my stories began to be published
in the pages of the more reckless magazines, such as _The Little
Review_, the old _Masses_ and later in _The Seven Arts_
and _The Dial_, and when I was so often accused of being under the
Russian influence, I began to read the Russians, to find out if the
statement, so often made concerning me and my work, could be true.
This I found, that in Russian novels the characters are always eating
cabbage soup and I have no doubt Russian writers eat it too.
This was a revelation to me. Many of the Russian tales are concerned
with the lives of peasants and a Boston critic once said I had brought
the American peasant into literature; and it is likely that Russian
writers, like all the other writers who have ever lived and have not
pandered to the popular demand for sentimental romances were fortunate
if they could live as well as a peasant. “What the critics say is no
doubt true,” I told myself; for, like so many of the Russian writers, I
was raised largely on cabbage soup.
Let me explain.
The little Ohio farming community, where I lived as a lad had in it,
at that time, no factories, and the merchants artisans lawyers and
other townspeople were all either owners of land which they rented out
to tenant farmers, or they sold goods or their services to farmers.
The soil on the farms about the town was a light sandy loam that
would raise small fruits, corn, wheat, oats or potatoes, but that did
particularly well when planted to cabbages.
As a result the raising of cabbages became a sort of specialty with
us in our country; and there are now, I believe, in my native place,
some three or four prosperous factories, devoted to the making of what
before the war was called “sauerkraut.” Later, to help win the war, it
was called: “Liberty Cabbage.”
The specialization in the raising of cabbage began in our Ohio country
in my day, and in a good year some of the fields produced as high as
twenty tons of cabbage an acre.
The cabbage fields grew larger and larger and, as we grew older, my
brothers and I went every spring and fell to work in the fields. We
crawled across the fields, setting out cabbage plants in the spring,
and in the fall went out to cut cabbages. The huge round hard heads
of cabbage were cut from their stalks and pitched to a man who loaded
them upon a hay wagon; and on fall days I have often seen twenty or
thirty wagons, each bearing its two or three tons of cabbages and
waiting its turn to get to the cars on the railroad siding. The waiting
wagons filled our streets as tobacco-laden wagons fill the streets of a
Kentucky town in the fall, and in the stores and houses everyone for a
time talked of nothing but cabbages. “What would the crop bring on the
markets at Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh, for some reason I have
never understood, had a passion for cabbages; and why Pittsburgh hasn’t
produced more so-called realistic writers, in the Russian manner, I
cannot understand.
However, one may well leave that to the modern psychologists.
During the fall of that year, after father had set out on his
adventures as an actor, mother did something she had often done before.
By a stroke of strategy she succeeded in getting a winter’s supply of
cabbages for her family, without the expenditure of any monies.
The fall advanced, father had gone, and the annual village cut-up time,
called among us “Hallowe’en,” came on.
It was the custom among the lads of our town, particularly among those
who lived on the farms near town, to make cabbages part of their
celebration of the occasion. Such lads, living as they did in the
country, had the use of horses and buggies, and on Hallowe’en they
hitched up and drove off to town.
On the way they stopped at the cabbage fields and, finding in some of
the fields many cabbages yet uncut, pulled them out by the roots and
piled them in the backs of their buggies.
The country lads, giggling with anticipated pleasure, drove into one
of the quieter residence streets of our town and, leaving the horse
standing in the road, one of them got out of the buggy and took one
of the cabbages in his hand. The cabbage had been pulled out of the
ground with the great stalklike root still clinging to it and the lad
now grasped this firmly. He crept toward one of the houses, preferably
one that was dark--an indication that the people of the house, having
spent a hard day at labor, had already gone to bed. Approaching the
house cautiously, he swung the cabbage above his head, holding it by
the long stalk, and then he let it go. The thing was to just hurl the
cabbage full against the closed door of the house. It struck with a
thunderous sound and the supposition was that the people of the house
would be startled and fairly lifted out of their beds by the hollow
booming noise, produced when the head of cabbage landed against the
door and, as a matter of fact, when a stout country boy had hurled the
cabbage the sound produced was something quite tremendous.
The cabbage having been thrown the country boy ran quickly into the
road, leaped into his buggy and, striking his horse with the whip,
drove triumphantly away. He was not likely to return unless pursued,
and there it was that mother’s strategy came into play.
On the great night she made us all sit quietly in the house. As soon
as the evening meal was finished the lights were put out and we waited
while mother stood just at the door, the knob in her hand. No doubt it
must have seemed strange to the boys of our town that one so gentle and
quiet as mother could be so infuriated by the hurling of a cabbage at
the door of our house.
But there was the simple fact of the situation to tempt and darkness
had no sooner settled down upon our quiet street that one of the lads
appeared. It was worth while throwing cabbages at such a house. One was
pursued, one was scolded, threats were hurled: “Don’t you dare come
back to this house! I’ll have the town marshal after you, that’s what
I’ll do! If I get my hands on one of you I’ll give you a drubbing!”
There was something of the actor in mother also.
What a night for the lads! Here was something worth while and all
evening the game went on and on. The buggies were not driven to our
house, but were stopped at the head of the street, and town boys went
on pilgrimages to cabbage fields to get ammunition and join in the
siege. Mother stormed scolded and ran out into the darkness waving a
broom while we children stayed indoors, enjoying the battle--and when
the evening’s sport was at an end, we all fell to and gathered in
the spoils. As she returned from each sally from the fort mother had
brought into the house the last cabbage thrown--if she could find it;
and now, late in the evening when our provident tormentors were all
gone, we children went forth with a lantern and got in the rest of our
crop. Often as many as two or three hundred cabbages came our way and
these were all carefully gathered in. They had been pulled from the
ground, with all the heavy outer leaves still clinging to them, so that
they were comparatively uninjured and, as there was also still attached
to them the heavy stalklike root, they were in fine shape to be kept.
A long trench was dug in our back yard and the cabbages buried, lying
closely side by side, as I am told the dead are usually buried after a
siege.
Perhaps indeed we were somewhat more careful with them than soldiers
are with their dead after a battle. Were not the cabbages to be, for
us, the givers of life? They were put into the trench carefully and
tenderly with the heads downward and the stalks sticking up, mother
supervising, and about each head straw was carefully packed--winding
sheets. One could get straw from a strawstack in a near-by field at
night, any amount of it, and one did not pay or even bother to ask.
When winter came quickly, as it did after Hallowe’en, mother got small
white beans from the grocery and salt pork from the butcher, and a
thick soup, of which we never tired, was concocted. The cabbages were
something at our backs. They made us feel safe.
And there was also a sense of something achieved. In the land in which
we lived one did not need to have a large income. There was food all
about, plenty of it, and we who lived so precariously in the land of
plenty had, by our “mother’s wit,” achieved this store of food without
working for it. A common sense of pride in our cleverness held us
together.
One went out into our back yard on a winter’s night when there was
snow on the ground and looked abroad. Already we lads read books, and
snow-covered fields stretching away under the winter moon suggested
strange, stirring thoughts--travelers beset by wolves on the Russian
Steppes--emigrant trains lost in whirling snowstorms on the Western
sagebrush deserts of our own country, men in all sorts of strange
terrible places wandering, desperate and starving, under the winter
moon--and what of us? The place where the cabbages were buried made a
long white mound, directly across our back yard, and when one looked at
it there was a sense of fullness and plenty in the land. One remembered
that down under the snow, buried away in the straw, were those long
rows of cabbages. Deer, buffaloes, wild horses and equally wild
long-horned cattle, far out on the Western plains, did not worry about
food because the ground was covered with snow. With their hoofs they
pawed the snow away, and found buried beneath the snow the sweet little
clusters of bunch grass, that again sent the warmth of life singing
through their bodies.
It was a chance for the fancy to play, to kick up its heels and have a
good time. One could imagine the house in which one lived as a fort,
set far out on the Western frontier. The cabbages had been put into the
ground with the stalks straight up. They stuck up straight and stiff,
like sentinels standing and, after looking, one went into the fort
and slept quietly and peacefully. There the soldiers were--they were
standing firm and unyielding. Were there enemies prowling out there
in the white darkness, the little wild dogs of want? One could laugh
at such thoughts. Were not the sentinels standing--quietly and firmly
waiting? One could go into the fort and sleep in peace, hugging that
thought.
To us at home, father was always, somewhat strangely, a part and at
the same time not a part of our lives. He flew in and out as a bird
flies in and out of a bush, and I am quite sure that, all through the
years of our childhood, it never occurred to him to ask, when he set
off on one of his winter adventures, whether or not there was anything
to eat in our house. The fall came with its snows, and the little
creeping fear of actual starvation for her brood, that must often have
been in mother’s mind, followed by the spring, the warm rains, the
promise of plenty and his return. If he brought no money, he did bring
something--a ham, some combs of honey, a jug of cider, or even perhaps
a quarter of beef. There he was again and there was food on the table.
He made a gesture. “There!” he seemed to be saying; “you see! Who says
I’m not a provider?”
There were tales to be told and he was the teller of tales. “It is
sufficient. Can man live by bread alone? There is food on the table
now. Eat! Stuff yourselves! Spring has come and there are signs to be
painted. The night has passed and it is another day. I am a man of
faith. I tell you a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without my
notice. I will make a tale of it--tell why and how it fell. The most
marvelous tale in the world might be made from the fall of a sparrow.
Is not the workman worthy of his hire? What about the lilies of the
field, eh? They toil not and neither do they spin--do they?”
And yet, was Solomon, in all his glory, arrayed like
one of these?
* * * * *
I remember a day in the early spring when we were compelled to move
out of one house and into another. The rent for the house in which we
had lived all during the winter had been long unpaid and mother had
no money. Father had just returned from one of his long adventures,
but early in the day of the moving he disappeared again and, as we
could not afford a moving wagon, mother and we boys carted our poor
belongings to the new place on our backs.
As for father, he had managed to borrow a horse and a spring wagon from
a neighbor and had set off again into the country. The house to which
we were moving was far out at the edge of the town and next to it was
a field in which there was a great straw stack--a convenience, as what
we called our “bed ticks,” on which we slept, had to be emptied of
the straw that had become fine and dustlike from long use, and then
refilled with the new straw.
When all was done and we were quite settled in the new place, father
drove into the yard. He had noticed, he explained, a special kind of
straw at a farmhouse some five miles away, at a place he had visited
during his wanderings of the winter just past, and he had thought he
would give us all a treat by getting that particular kind of straw for
our beds.
And so he had driven off at daybreak, and, while we packed our
furniture to the new place, had dined with the farmer and his family
and had now returned. Although our beds had been made for the night the
bed ticks must all be brought down again, the straw tumbled out and the
special straw put in. “There,” he said, with one of his grand gestures,
as we lads tramped wearily up the stairs with the refilled bags and as
mother stood smiling--a little resentfully perhaps, but still smiling;
“there, you kids, try sleeping on that. There is nothing on earth too
good for my kids.”
NOTE IV
LET us, however, return to father and the tale he is telling as he sits
in the farmhouse on the winter’s evening. I am too good a son of my
father to leave such a tale hanging forever thus, in the air.
As it turned out on that night, when it rained and when he in his young
manhood stood just outside the door of that southern mansion house of
his childhood, and when his mother, that proud woman of the Southland,
spat at him and his companions in misery, so that a white speck of her
spittle landed on his beard--where, as he said, it lay like a thing of
fire burning into his soul--on that night, I say, he did, by a stroke
of fortune, escape the fate that seemed to have him in its clutches.
Dawn was just beginning to break when the two Confederate officers came
out at the door of the house and marched their prisoners away.
“We went off into the gray dawn, up out of the valley and over the
hills, and then I turned to look back,” father explained. Gray and
weary and half dead with starvation, he turned to look. If he dropped
dead from starvation and weariness on his way to the prison pen, what
did it matter now? The light of his life had gone out. He was never
again to see any of his own people, that he knew.
But even as he looked he did see something. The company had stopped to
rest for a moment and stood where a sharp wind blew over them, just at
the crest of a hill. Down in the valley the dawn was just breaking and,
as father looked, he could see the gray of the old house and against
the gray of it, on the front veranda, just a fleck of white.
That would be his young and innocent sister, come out of the house, you
will understand, to look along the road taken by the prisoners, whose
evident misery had touched her young heart.
For father it would be, as he would so elaborately explain, a very high
spot in his life, perhaps the highest spot he was to reach in all his
weary march to the grave.
He stood there on the hillside, quite cold and miserable--in just that
utterly miserable and weary state when one is sometimes most alive--the
senses, that is to say, are most alive. At the moment he felt, as any
man must feel sometime in life, that an invisible cord does extend from
the innermost parts of himself to the innermost parts of some other
person. Love comes. For once in a lifetime a state of feeling becomes
as definite a thing as a stone wall touched with the hand.
And father had that feeling, at that moment on the hill; and that the
person for whom he had it was a woman and his own sister, made it even
more an assured thing. He might have expressed the feeling by saying
that, as by a miracle, the hill dropped away and he stood on dry level
ground in the very presence of his younger sister, so close to her in
fact that he might very easily have put out his hand and touched her.
So strong was the feeling that he lost for the moment all sense of
his presence among the prisoners, all sense of the cold hunger and
weariness of the hour and--exactly as the thing might be done, quite
ridiculously, by a second-rate actor in the movies--he did in fact step
out from among the ranks of prisoners and, with his hands extended
before him and his eyes shining, took several steps down the hillside,
only to be stopped by an oath from one of the guards.
In the farmhouse, as he told of that moment he would get out of his
chair and actually take several steps. He would at bottom be always a
good deal of an actor as well as a story-teller, as every story-teller
worth his salt inevitably is.
And then came the oath from the guard and an upraised gun, the heavy
butt of a gun, ready to swing down upon his head, and back he goes into
the ranks of prisoners. He mutters some excuse: “I just wanted to have
a look”--and is thus jerked down from the high place, to which his
imagination had suddenly lifted him, and back into the weariness of his
apparently hopeless journey. Gone, he thought at the moment, was the
sister he loved, his boyhood with its memories, all his past life, but
it wasn’t quite true.
Father did make an escape. How many escapes he, in fancy, made from
the hands of the enemy during that Civil War! He lived, you will
understand, in a rather dull farming community and loved at least some
air of probability hanging over his tales.
And so the Civil War became for him the canvas, the tubes of paint, the
brushes with which he painted his pictures. Perhaps one might better
say his own imagination was the brush and the Civil War his paint pot.
And he did have a fancy for escapes, as I myself have always had. My
own tales, told and untold, are full of escapes--by water in the dark
and in a leaky boat, escapes from situations, escapes from dullness,
from pretense, from the heavy-handed seriousness of the half artists.
What writer of tales does not dote upon escapes? They are the very
breath in our nostrils.
It is just possible that upon that occasion, father would have put it
to his audience, that the sight, or the imagined sight, of his sister
that morning had given him new hope. She was a virgin and there was
something catholic about father.
Very well, then, off he goes down the road with his head held high,
thinking of the possible schemes for escape and of his sister. He had
been given something, a new flair for life. A ray of new hope had come
into the black night of his situation. He walked more stoutly.
Stout Cortez--
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
It was just that stout way in which he now walked that gave him his
opportunity for escape--that time. All that day the other prisoners
went with hanging heads, tramping through the deep mud of the southern
roads in winter, but father walked with his head up.
Another night came and they were again in a forest, on a dark and
lonely road, with the guards walking at the side and sometimes quite
lost in the shadows cast by the trees--the prisoners a dark mass in the
very centre of the road.
Father stumbled over a stick, the heavy branch of a tree, quite
dead and broken off by the wind, and, stooping down, picked it up.
Something, perhaps just the impulse of a soldier, led him to sling the
stick lightly over his shoulder and carry it like a gun.
There he was, stepping proudly among those who were not proud--that
is to say, the other prisoners--and not having any plan in mind--just
thinking of his virginal sister back there, I dare say; and one of the
two officers of the guard spoke to him kindly.
“Don’t walk in there so close to the Yanks, in the deep mud, John,” the
officer said; “it’s better going out here. There is a path here at the
side. Get in here back of me.”
By his very pride, lifted up out of the ranks of the prisoners,
father’s mind acted quickly and with a muttered thanks he stepped to
the side of the road and became as one of the guards. The men came out
on the crest of another low hill and again, in the valley below, there
was the faint light of a farmhouse. “Halt!” one of the officers gave
command; and then--the younger of the two officers having been told by
his superior to send a man down into the valley to the farmhouse to see
if there was a chance for the guard and prisoners to rest for a few
hours and to get food--he sent father. The officer touched him on the
arm. “Go on you,” he said. “You go down and find out.”
So off father went, down a lane, holding the stick very correctly, like
a gun, until he was safely out of sight of the others, and then he
threw the stick away and ran.
The devil! He knew every inch of the ground on which he now stood. What
an opportunity for escape! One of his boyhood friends had lived in
the very house, toward which he was supposed to be going, and often,
in his young manhood and when he had come home for vacation from the
northern school, he had ridden and hunted along the very path his feet
now touched. Why, the very dogs and “niggers” on the place knew him as
they might have known their master.
And so, if he ran madly now, he ran knowing the ground under his feet.
Ah, he would be sure! When his escape was discovered dogs might be set
on his trail.
He plunged downward, getting clear of the trees, running across a
field--the soft mud clinging to his feet--and so skirted the house and
got to where there was a small creek down which he went for a mile
in the darkness, walking in the cold water that often came up to his
waist. That was to throw dogs off his trail, as any schoolboy should
know.
By making a great circle he got back into the road, by which he and the
other prisoners had been marched from his own father’s house. They had
come some twelve miles during the day and early evening, but the night
was still young and, after he had gone three or four miles, he knew a
short cut through the woods by which several miles could be cut off.
And so, you see, father went back again to his old home after all and
once again saw the sister he loved. The dawn was just breaking when he
arrived, but the dogs knew him and the negroes knew him. The very negro
who had held the light while his mother spat at the prisoners hid him
away in the loft of a barn and brought him food.
Not only food was brought, but also a suit of his own clothes that had
been left in the house.
And so he stayed hidden in the loft for three days, and then another
night came when it rained and was dark.
Then he crept out, with food for the needs of his journey, and knowing
that, when he had walked for a mile along the road that led back toward
the distant Union camp, a negro would be standing in a little grove
with a good horse saddled and bridled for him. The negro, in the late
afternoon, had gone off to a distant town, ostensibly for mail and was
to be bound to a tree where he would be discovered later by a party of
other negroes sent in search of him. Oh, all was arranged--everything
elaborately planned to ward off, from his helpers, the wrath of the
mother.
There was the night and the rain, and father, with a dark cloak now
about his shoulders, creeping from the stables and toward the house. By
the window of one of the rooms downstairs his young sister sat playing
an organ, and so he crept to the window and stood for a time looking.
Ah; there was moving-picture stuff for your soul! Why, oh why, did not
father live in another and later generation? In what affluence might
we not all have flourished! The old homestead, a fire burning in the
grate, the stern and relentless parent, and outside in the cold and wet
father, the outcast son, the disowned, the homeless one, about to ride
off into the night in the service of his country--never to return.
On the organ his sister would have been playing “The Last Link is
Broken,” and there stands father with the great tears rolling down his
cheeks.
Then to ride away into the night, to fight again for the flag he loved,
and that to him meant more than home, more than family--ah! more than
the love of the woman who was long afterward to come into his life, and
to console him somewhat for the fair sister he had lost.
For he did love her, quite completely. Is it not odd, when one
considers the matter, that the fair sister--who would have been my
aunt, and who never perhaps existed except in father’s fancy, but
concerning whom I have heard him tell so many touching tales--is it not
odd that I have never succeeded in inventing a satisfactory name for
her? Father never--if I remember correctly--gave her a name and I have
never succeeded in doing so.
How often have I tried and without success! Ophelia, Cornelia, Emily,
Violet, Eunice. You see the difficulty? It must have a quaint and
southern sound and must suggest--what must it not suggest?
But father’s tale must have its proper dénouement. One could trust the
tale-teller for that. Even had he lived in the days of the movies and
had the dénouement quite killed his story--for movie purposes, at least
in the northern towns, which would have been the best market--even in
the face of all of such difficulties which he fortunately did not have
to meet, one could be quite sure of the dénouement.
And he made it splashy. It was at the dreadful battle of Gettysburg,
late in the war and on the third of July too. The Confederates had such
a dreadful way of getting off on just the wrong foot on the very eve
of our national holiday. Vicksburg and Gettysburg for Fourth of July
celebrations. Surely it was, what, during the World War, would have
been called, “bad war psychology.”
There can be no doubt that father had been a soldier of some sort
during the Civil War and so, as was natural, he would give his tale a
soldier’s dénouement, sacrificing even the beloved and innocent younger
sister to his purpose (to be brought back to life--oh, many, many times
later, and made to serve in many future tales).
It was the second day of that great, that terrible battle of
Gettysburg, father had picked upon to serve as the setting for the end
of his yarn.
That was a moment! All over the North the people stood waiting; farmers
stopped working in the fields and drove into northern towns, waiting
for the click of the little telegraph instruments; country doctors let
the sick lie unattended and stood with all the others in the streets of
towns, where was no running in and out of stores. The whole North stood
waiting, listening. No time for talk now.
Ah! that Confederate General Lee--the neat quiet Sunday-school
superintendent among generals! One could never tell what he would do
next. Was it not all planned that the war should be fought out on
southern soil?--and here he had brought a great army of his finest
troops far into the North.
Everyone waited and listened. No doubt the South waited and listened
too.
No Lincoln and Douglas debates now. “A nation cannot exist half slave
and half free.”
Now there is the rattle of the box, and the dice that shall decide the
fate of a nation are being thrown. In an obscure farmhouse, far in the
North, long after the battle of those two terrible days was fought
and half forgotten, father also has got his hands on the dice box. He
is rattling words in it now. We poor tellers of tales have our moments
too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of
hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier
words into our battles. No uniforms for us, no riders springing away
into the gray smoke-mist of battle to carry out orders. We must sit in
lonely farmhouses or in cheap rooms in city lodging houses before our
typewriters; but if we do not look like generals, we at least feel like
that at moments anyway.
Father dropping his little rattling words into the hearts of the
farmer, the farmer’s wife, Tilly’s heart too. At Gettysburg a nation in
the death grapple. The innocent sister, fair virgin of the South, cast
in too.
Look at the eyes of that stoic Aldrich. They are shining now, eh? Ah!
he has been a soldier too. In his youth he also stood firmly amid shot
and shell, but ever after, poor dear, he had to be satisfied with mere
blank dumbness about it all. At the best he could but turn the crank of
a magic-lantern machine or join the G. A. R., and march with other men
through the streets of an Ohio town on Decoration days, when the real
question in the minds of all the onlookers was as to whether Clyde or
Tiffin, Ohio, would win the ball game to be played at Ame’s field that
afternoon.
A poor sort Aldrich, being able to do nothing but fight. On Decoration
days he marched dumbly through the dust to a graveyard and listened to
an address made by a candidate for Congress, who had made his money in
the wholesale poultry business. At best Aldrich could but speak in low
tones to another comrade, as the file of men marched along. “I was with
Grant at the Wilderness and before that at Shiloh. Where were you? Oh,
you were with Sherman, one of Sherman’s bummers, eh?”
That and no more for Aldrich--but for father, ah!
The second day at Gettysburg and Pickett’s men ready for their charge.
Was that not a moment? What men--those fellows of Pickett’s--the very
flower of the Southland--young bearded giants, tough like athletes,
trained to the minute.
It is growing late on that second day of the fight and Pickett’s men
are to decide it all. The sun will soon be going down behind the hills
of that low flat valley--the valley in which, but a few short days ago,
farmers were preparing to gather the grain crops. On the slope of one
of the hills a body of men lies waiting. It is the flower of the Union
army too. Father is among them, lying there.
They wait.
They are not trembling, but back of them in a thousand towns men
and women are both waiting and trembling. Freedom itself waits and
trembles--liberty is trembling--“You can’t fool all of the people all
of the time” is trembling like a broken reed. How many grand passages,
words, Decoration day addresses, messages to Congress, Fourth of July
addresses of the next two hundred years, not worth eight cents on the
dollar at the moment!
And now they come--Pickett’s men--down through the valley, in and out
of groves of trees and up the little slope. There is a place, known to
history as “the bloody angle.” There the men of the South rush straight
into a storm of iron. A hailstorm of iron swept also in among the men
of the North waiting for them.
That wild Rebel yell that broke from the lips of Pickett’s men is dying
now. The lips of Pickett’s men are turning white.
The voice of Meade has spoken and down through the valley go the Union
men in their turn--father among them.
It was then that a bullet in the leg dropped him in his tracks, and in
memory of that moment he stops the telling of his tale in the farmhouse
long enough to pull up his pants leg and show the scar of his wound.
Father was a true naturalist, liked to pin his tales down to earth, put
a spike of truth in them--at moments.
He pitched forward and fell and the men of his company rolled on to a
victory in which he could have no part. He had fallen in what was now,
suddenly, a little, quiet place among trees in an old orchard, and
there close beside him was a confederate boy, mortally wounded. The two
men roll uneasily in their pain and look directly into each other’s
eyes. It is a long, long look the two men give each other, for one of
them the last look into the eyes of a fellow before he goes on, over
the river.
The man lying there, and now dying, is just that young man who, as a
boy, was father’s best friend and comrade, the lad to whose place--some
twelve miles from his own father’s plantation--he used to ride for days
of sport. What rides they had taken together through the forests, a
pack of dogs at their heels, and what talks they then had!
You will understand that the young man now dying lived in that very
house, far back from the road, toward which father went that night when
he escaped the Rebel guard. He had marched off with the stick over his
shoulder, you will remember, and had then cut off across fields to his
own home where he was concealed by the negroes until the night of his
final escape.
And he had gone away from his own home on that dark night, dreaming of
a return, some time when the cruel war was over and the wounds it had
made were healed; but now he could never return. He was condemned to
remain alone, a wanderer always on the face of this earth.
For the lad now dying beside him on the field of Gettysburg was, in his
death hour, telling a fearful and tragic story.
Father’s family had been entirely wiped out. His father had been killed
in battle as had also his brothers.
And now, from the lips of his old comrade, he was to hear the most
fearful tale of all.
A party of northern foragers had come to the southern plantation house
on just such another dark, rainy night as the one on which he was
taken there as a prisoner. They marched as the confederate troops had
marched, along the driveway to the front of the house, and stood on the
lawn. A northern officer’s voice called as the southern officer had
called on that other night, and again the tall young negro came to the
door with a light, followed by that fiery woman of the Southland.
The negro held the light above his head so that, even in the darkness,
the blue coats of the hated northern troops could be seen.
The old southern woman came to stand at the edge of the porch. She
understood for what purpose the northern men had come, and she had
sworn that not a bite of food, raised on that plantation, should ever
pass the lips of a Yank.
Now she held a shotgun in her hand and, without a word or without any
sort of warning, raised it and fired into the mass of the men.
There was a cry of rage, and then many guns were raised to shoulders.
A sudden roar of the guns and a hundred leaden bullets cut through the
front of the house. It wiped out all of father’s family--except just
himself--and deprived his sons, too, of a proud southern ancestry; for,
just in the moment, before the shower of bullets came, father’s young
and innocent sister--realizing with that sure instinct that, everyone
understands, all women inevitably possess--realizing, I say, that death
was about to call her mother--the young girl had rushed panic-stricken
out of the door and had thrown her arms about her mother’s body,
just in time to meet death with her. And so all that was left of the
family--except just father--fell there in a heap. The captain of the
northern troops--a German brewer’s son from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cried
when later he looked down into the white silent face of the young girl,
and all his life afterward carried in his heart the remembrance of the
dead, pleading young eyes; but, as father so philosophically remarked,
what was done was done.
And with that fall there was father--a man left to wander forever
stricken and forlorn through life. Later he had, to be sure, married
and he had children whom he loved and treasured, but was that the same
thing? To the heart of a southerner, as every American understands,
ancestry means everything.
The purity of a southern woman is unlike any other purity ever known
to mankind. It is something special. The man who has been under the
influence of it can never afterward quite escape. Father didn’t expect
to. He declared always, after he had told the above story, that he did
not ever expect to be gay or happy again.
What he expected was that he would go on for the rest of his days
doing just what he was doing at the time. Well, he would try to bring
a little joy into the hearts of others--he would sing songs, dance a
little dance--he would join an old comrade in arms, one whose heart he
knew was as true as steel, and give a magic-lantern show. Others, for
an hour anyway, would be made to forget that element of sadness and
tragedy in life that he, of course, could never quite forget.
On that very night, lying half dead on the field of Gettysburg beside
the dead comrade of his youth, he had made up his mind to spend the
remaining days of his life bringing what sweetness and joy he could
into the lacerated hearts of a nation torn by civil strife. It had been
two o’clock in the morning before he was picked up by a squad of men
sent out to gather in the wounded, and already the news of the great
victory and the triumph of the cause of freedom was sweeping over the
northern land. And he had lain looking at the stars and had made his
resolution. Others might seek for the applause of the world, but, as
for himself, he would go into the dusty highways and byways of life
and bring to the lowly and forgotten the joy of a little fun at the
schoolhouse.
NOTE V
AS for the show father and Aldrich put on, that is another matter. One
may, without too much injustice, reserve judgment on the show. I myself
never saw one of their performances, but one of my brothers once did
and always, quietly and with commendable firmness, refused to speak of
it afterward.
Fancy will, however, serve. Aldrich would show his pictures of
McKinley, Grover Cleveland and the others, and then father would sing
and do one of his dances. There would be more pictures and another song
and dance and after that the picture of the flag, in colors. If the
night were fair forty or even fifty people, farmers, their wives, the
hired men and the children, would gather in the schoolhouse. The show
only cost ten cents. Too much injustice was not done them.
It is, however, rather a shame they did not let father tell stories
instead. Perhaps in all his life it never occurred to him they might
have been written. Poor father! As a public figure, he had to content
himself with the exercise of an art in which he was as bad, I fancy, as
any man who has ever lived.
And it is his singing and dancing that remains like a scar in my memory
of him. In the late fall, before Aldrich and he started out on their
adventure, father used to rehearse upstairs in our house.
The evening meal would have been out of the way and we children would
be sitting by the stove, about the table in the kitchen. Mother had
washed clothes during the day and now she was doing an ironing. Father
walked about, his hands clasped behind his back as though in deep
thought, and occasionally he raised his eyes to the ceiling, while his
lips moved silently.
Then he went out of the room and we heard him go upstairs into a
bedroom above. None of us, in the kitchen below, looked at each other.
We pretended to read books, to get our school lessons, or we looked at
the floor.
At that time the humor of America--of which we Americans were so
inordinately proud--expressed itself in the broader and less subtle
jokes of Mark Twain, Bill Nye and Petroleum V. Nasby, and there was a
book, commonly read by both children and grown-ups, and reputed to be
very funny, called, “Peck’s Bad Boy.” It told, if I remember correctly,
of the doings of a certain quite terrible youngster who put chewing gum
or molasses on the seats of chairs, threw pepper into people’s eyes,
stuck pins into schoolteachers, hung cats over clotheslines by their
tails, and did any number of other such charmingly expressive things.
This terrible child was, as I have said, reputed to be very funny
and the book recounting his doings must have sold tremendously. And
father, having read it, had written a ballad concerning just such
another youngster. This child also made life a hell for his fellows,
and his father was very proud of him. When the child had done something
unusually shocking the father tried, one gathered, to share in the
honor.
At any rate the refrain of father’s song was:
“You grow more like your dad every day.”
Evening after evening these words rang through our house. They made all
of us children shiver a little. Father sang them, danced a few halting
steps, and then sang them again.
In the kitchen, as I have already said, we others sat with our eyes
on the floor. One could not hear the words of the verses themselves,
but the spirit of the song was known to all of us. Am I right? Were
there--sometimes--tears in mother’s eyes as she bent over the ironing
board?
Of that, after all, I cannot be too sure. I can only be everlastingly
sure of the refrain:
“You grow more like your dad every day.”
* * * * *
And, however that may be, there is always one consoling thought. As
a showman, and on stormy nights, there must sometimes have been but
slight audiences at the schoolhouses and the takings for Aldrich and
father must have been thin. One fancies evenings when eighty cents
might cover all the receipts at the door.
One thinks of the eighty cents and shudders, and then a consoling
thought comes. Of one thing we may be quite sure--father and Aldrich
would not have gone hungry, and at night there must always have been
comfortable beds into which they could crawl. Father had promised
Aldrich he would see to the matter of bed and board.
And no doubt he did.
Even though the farmer and the farmer’s wife should have proved
hard-hearted one remembers the number of Tillies in the farmhouses of
Ohio. When everything else failed the Tillies would have taken care of
the troubadours. Of that one may be, I should say, very very sure.
NOTE VI
TO the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, from
the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections and,
no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two ends
continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air.
To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to give
yourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice.
There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moves with an ordered
purpose through ordered days, or at the least through ordered hours. In
the life of the fancy there is no such thing as good or bad. There are
no Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia do not come in
at the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the fancy. The Puritan,
the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the dry intellectuals, all
who desire to uplift, to remake life on some definite plan conceived
within the human brain die of a disease of the lungs. They would do
better to stay in the world of fact to spend their energy in catching
bootleggers, inventing new machines, helping humanity--as best they
can--in its no doubt laudable ambition to hurl bodies through the air
at the rate of five hundred miles an hour.
In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow movements
and with many graduations into the ugly and the beautiful. What is
alive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of the room in which we
live sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned with weariness? In the end
it must become the one thing or the other.
All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is beautiful
must bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic sadness and
suffering.
Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere smart-aleck,
without humbleness before the possibilities of life, one sure of
himself--and thus one may remain to the end, blind, deaf and dumb,
feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our intellectuals find this is the
more comfortable road to travel.
In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is ugly
in fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty!
* * * * *
In the world of fancy even the most base man’s actions sometimes take
on the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyes
of the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself by
being too sure.
Let us (in fancy) imagine for a moment an American lad walking alone at
evening in the streets of an American town.
American towns, and in particular American towns of the Middle West
of twenty years ago, were not built for beauty, they were not built
to be lived in permanently. A dreadful desire of escape, of physical
escape, must have got, like a disease, into our father’s brains. How
they pitched the towns and cities together! What an insanity! The lad
we have together invented, to walk at evening in the streets of such a
town, must of necessity be more beautiful than all the hurriedly built
towns and cities in which he may walk. True immaturity of the body and
the spirit is more beautiful than mere tired-out physical maturity: the
physical maturity of men and women that has no spiritual counterpart
within itself falls quickly into physical and ugly decay--like the
cheaply constructed frame houses of so many of our towns.
The lad of our fancy walks in the streets of a town hurriedly thrown
together, striving to dream his dreams, and must continue for a long
time to walk in the midst of such ugliness. The cheap, hurried, ugly
construction of America’s physical life still goes on and on. The idea
of permanent residence has not taken hold on us. Our imaginations are
not yet fired by love of our native soil.
The American boy of our mutual imaginative creation is walking in the
streets of an Ohio town, after the factories have begun coming and
the day of the hustlers is at hand, the houses of the town pushed up
quickly, people swarming into the town who have no notion of staying
there--a surprising number of them will stay, but they have, at first,
no intention of staying.
Before the boy’s day how slow the growth of the towns! There were the
people of an older generation, coming out slowly to the Middle West,
from New York state, from Pennsylvania, from New England--a great
many to my own Ohio country from New England. They had come drifting
in slowly, bringing traces of old customs, sayings, religions,
prejudices. The young farmers came first, glad of the rich free soil
and the friendlier climate--strong young males that were to come in
such numbers as to leave New England, with its small fields and its
thinner, stonier soil, a place of aging maiden ladies--that old-maid
civilization that was, nevertheless, to be the seat of our American
culture. An insane fear of the flesh, a touch of transcendentalism, a
reaching always up into the sky. In the ground underfoot there is only
fear, poverty, hardship. One must look upward, always upward.
What of the sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich flavor
on the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the skin of women, the play
of muscles through the bodies of men?
The cry of fear--“that way lies sin.”
In the new land, in that older time, too much maleness. Deep mud in the
streets of the little towns, built in the forest along rivers or on the
stage roads. Bearded, rough-handed men gathered about the saloons. Abe
Lincoln proving his manhood by lifting a barrel of whisky and drinking
from the bunghole. The ruffian of the frontier, father of the modern
gunman of our cities, proving his manhood by murder--Blinky Morgan of
Ohio, Jesse James of Missouri, Slade of the Overland Route to the gold
and silver camps of the Far West--these the heroes of that life.
A slow culture growing up, however--growing as culture must always
grow--through the hands of workmen.
In the small towns artisans coming in--the harness-maker, the
carriage-builder, the builder of wagons, the smith, the tailor, the
maker of shoes, the builders of houses and barns too.
As Slade and James were to be the fathers of the modern gunmen, so
these the fathers of the artists of the generations to come. In their
fingers the beginning of that love of surfaces, of the sensual love of
materials, without which no true civilization can ever be born.
And then, like a great flood over it all the coming of the factories,
the coming of modern industrialism.
Speed, hurried workmanship, cheap automobiles for cheap men, cheap
chairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroom
floors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, jazz,
the movies.
The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in the
midst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed. Something
vibrant in the air about us all.
The problem is to survive. If our youth is to get into his
consciousness that love of life--that with the male comes only through
the love of surfaces, sensually felt through the fingers--his problem
is to reach down through all the broken surface distractions of modern
life to that old love of craft out of which culture springs.
NOTE VII
THE end of the second year after mother’s death was at hand and our
family was at the point of falling to pieces. No more sitting by the
fire in the kitchen through the long fall and winter evenings with
mother at the ironing board. The kitchen of our house was cold and
cheerless. The spirit of the household had fled. It had gone down into
the ground with the body of the woman out of whose living body had come
five strong sons.
Mother had died swiftly, mysteriously, without warning. It was as
though she had got out of bed on a fall morning and had taken a long
look at her sons. “It’s about the time when they will have to push out
into the world. Any influence I may have on their lives has already
been exerted. There is no time to think of any other purpose in life
for myself, and anyway, I am too tired. Having lived out my life, now I
shall die.”
It was as though she had said something of the sort to herself, and
had then laid down her life as one might lay down a finished book. On
a rainy dismal day in the fall there she was, coming in at the kitchen
door from hanging a wash out on the line, temporarily strung up in
our woodshed, smiling quietly, making one of her quick soft ironic
observations, sweetening always the air of the room into which she
came with her presence.
On such a rainy morning in the fall she was like that, as she will live
always in the memory of her sons, and then, on another equally wet
dismal fall day two or three weeks later, she was dead.
What there had been of family life among us was going to pieces. It was
sure that father was not one to hold it together. No one could think of
him as destined to hold that or any other fort. That surely wasn’t his
line.
There was a period of waiting. The older son had already found his
place in life. He had already become what he was to remain to the
end, an American artist, a painter. The making of little designs for
the gravestones of village merchants was for him a passing phase.
Perhaps it was, at that time, the only form of expression one, having a
tendency toward the plastic arts, could find in our towns.
And so there was his destiny fixed--but what of us others? We did not
often speak openly of the matter among ourselves, but it was obvious
something had to be done and soon. In the few talks we had concerning
the matter in our broken household, while the one remaining daughter
(destined to die before her life could be really developed) was acting
as our temporary housekeeper, father held out strongly for the learning
of one of the trades. He talked of long years of apprenticeship to
some craft, and it was characteristic of him that as he talked he
became in fancy himself such a craftsman. One was trained slowly and
surely in one’s craft. Then one became a journeyman and went on his
travels, going from shop to shop, watching the master craftsmen. “It’s
something at your back,” father said, “something that can be depended
upon. It makes a man able to stand up as a man before his fellows.”
Did it? We boys listened and thought our own thoughts. As for
father--he had picked up a smattering knowledge of several crafts; and
how eloquently he, dear word fellow, could speak of them, sling the
jargon of the crafts! He had at various times been a harness-maker,
house-painter, sign-writer of a feeble sort, such an actor as I have
described, the tooter of a cornet in the village band.
In reality he was a tale-teller, but that was no craft among us. No
union had been formed among tale-tellers. The Authors’ League, the Pen
Women, the Poet’s Club, etc., had not yet been formed or, if there were
such organizations in existence, they at any rate did not reach down
into mid-American towns. At that time even the rumors of the vast sums
to be made by turning out clever plot stories for the popular magazines
or the movies had not been whispered about.
Other and more significant-seeming stories were floating however. A
new kind of hero, tarnished somewhat later, filled the popular eye. As
we boys went about in the main street of our town, citizens, feeling
a kindly interest in the motherless sons, continually stopped us.
Everyone was singing a new little song:
“Get on. Make money. Get to the top. A penny saved is a penny earned.
Money makes the mare go.”
“Save up your money, and save up your rocks.
And you’ll always have tobacco in the old tobacco box,”
sang Sil West, the smith, who was shoeing a horse in the alleyway back
of the stores on our main street.
The factories were calling. One went into a factory, did his work with
care and skill, became foreman, superintendent, part owner, married
the banker’s daughter, got rich and went off to Paris to sin the sins
neglected during so busy a youth and early manhood.
It sounded reasonable and possible. Learning a craft was slow business
and one was in a hurry. “Hurry” was the battle cry of the day.
And the time of the factories was just at hand. At that time they
were coming into Ohio, and into all the mid-American states in great
numbers, and no town was without hope of becoming an industrial centre.
The bicycle had come, followed by the automobile, and even the quiet
country roads were taking on the new spirit of speed.
Something was in the air. One breathed a new spirit into the lungs.
The paradise, later to be represented by the ford, the city apartment
building with tiled bathroom floors, subways, jazz, the movies--was it
not all just at hand? I myself and long afterward tried a little, in a
novel of mine called, “Poor White,” to give something of the feeling of
life in our towns at that time.
Oil and gas were spurting out of the ground in Ohio and the discovery
of oil and gas meant the coming of factories, it meant the New Age,
prosperity, growth going onward and upward. “Death to everything
old, slow and careful! Forward the Light Brigade! Theirs not to ask
the reason why! Theirs but to do or die”--the light brigade in our
particular town consisting of every merchant, doctor, workman, lawyer,
who had saved a few pennies that could be invested. In our ears rang
stories of the Lima Boom, the Gibsonburg boom, the Finley boom.
And was it not simple? One bored a hole deep down into the ground and
out came wealth--oil and gas, followed by the coming of the factories.
If we, in our town, did not quite “cut it,” did not “make the grade,”
could not become later another fragrant Akron or blissful Youngstown,
Ohio, it wasn’t because we didn’t try.
A hole was being bored at the edge of the town in a field near a grove
of hickory trees where we lads had formerly gone for nuts and squirrel
shooting on the fall days. In the field--a meadow--there had also been
a baseball diamond, and sometimes visiting circuses set up their tents
there; but now the hole had gone far down below the usually required
depth and nothing had happened. Rumors ran through the streets. The
well-drillers had come from over near Gibsonburg. Only a week or two
before a stranger had got off a train, had walked about through the
streets, and had then visited the place where the drilling was going
on. He had been seen to speak with the drillers. No doubt our drillers
were in “cahoots” with the Rockefellers, the Morgans, or some of
that crowd. Perhaps John D. himself had been pussyfooting about. One
couldn’t tell. Stranger things than that had happened. Were we to be
caught napping? It was decided to do what was called “shooting the
well.”
Surely here was something for a boy to take into account. Mysterious
whisperings among our elders on the streets in the evening; plot and
counterplot; dark doings among the capitalists--“stand back, villain,
unhand the fair figure of our hopes and dreams”--ah! an explosion at
the mysterious hour of dawn, far down in the bowels of Mother Earth.
Old Mother Earth to be given an emetic of a stirring sort. Forth would
flow wealth, factories, the very New Age itself.
One didn’t ask oneself how a participating interest in all these new
glories was to be achieved, and in the whole town no man was more
excited than father who had never owned a share of stock in anything.
He ceased speaking of the crafts and only shook his head in sorrow.
“I’d just like to be alive two hundred years from now,” he said. “Why,
I’ll tell you what; there’ll be a vast city right here--right on the
very spot on which I am now standing there’ll be, why there’ll be a
huge office building, like as not.”
So sure was he of all this that the wealth of the future became in
his fancy a thing of the present, even of the past. He felt himself
magnificently wealthy and, one day when he had been drinking and when,
because of what we thought his lack of dignity, we youngsters had
treated him to a rather thorough snubbing, he grew angry. Night came
and it rained. He went up into the garret of the house in which we then
lived and presently came down with a package of papers in his hand.
Were they old love letters, from the ladies he had known in his youth,
or unpaid grocery bills? It is a mystery that may never be solved.
He went into the little back yard of the house and, making a pile of
the papers, burned them solemnly. We boys crowded to the kitchen window
to watch. There was the little flare of the flame and above it, and
leaning over, father’s stern face--and then darkness.
Back he came into the house and before he went away, to spend the rest
of the evening whispering of the wealth of the future with other men
in the barrooms, he told us what had happened. “Do you know what those
papers were?” he asked sharply. “They were deeds to the whole business
section of the City of Cincinnati. I have been concealing from you
the fact that I had such papers, intending to leave them to you as an
inheritance but--”
“Well, you have not seen fit to treat me with respect and I have burned
them,” he declared, tramping out of the house.
* * * * *
Romance and mystery. There was the imagined figure of the shooter of
wells. The thing was done with nitro-glycerine. One put “nitro” and
“glycerine” together, one fancied, and there was this terrible result.
One did not know what “nitro” was, but had seen and felt “glycerine.”
“Ah! chemistry. You wait and you’ll see what will be done with
chemistry,” said father.
And so there was this mysterious stuff frozen into solid cakes and
carted through the night, along unfrequented roads, by the heroic
well-shooter.
Now, there was a man to suit a boy’s fancy, that well-shooter, a fellow
going nonchalantly along with the frozen cakes in the wagon behind him.
Is he worried? Not at all! He lights his pipe. He looks at the stars.
He sings a little ditty. “My bonny lies over the ocean. My bonny lies
over the sea. My bonny lies over the ocean--Oh, bring back my bonny to
meeeeeee.”
In the wagon back of him that stuff. A jar, a sudden jolt of the wagon,
the breaking of a wagon axle and then--
We boys whisper about it when we meet on the streets. One of the boys
holds up his thumb. “You see that thumbnail?” he asks. “Well, a little
bit of that stuff, no more than would cover that thumbnail, would blow
him and his wagon to smithereens.” The question asked was, how much
farther would, say a ton of the stuff, blow the outfit? Was there a
land as far beyond smithereens as the stars from earth, to which the
fellow might be sent, in the wink of an eye?
A glimpse of the infinite added to all the other excitement and mystery.
My first glimpse of the Industrial Age--with one of my brothers I got
out of bed one morning, before dawn, and crept away into the darkness
to lie in a grove of trees near the meadow and see the well shot.
Several other boys came. The father of one of our town boys, who had
stock in the gas-well company, had let slip the carefully hoarded
secret of the hour when the fearful thing was to happen.
And so, there we were, ten or twelve of us, lying concealed in the
wood. Dawn began to break. Birds and squirrels awoke in the trees over
our heads. On the road that came out from town buggies and surreys
appeared. The visitors tied their horses far away, by an old sawmill,
near the town’s edge, and came afoot to the field.
Now it was quite light and we could begin to recognize the men of
the party, solid respectable men, with money in the bank. There was
Penny Jacobs, who kept a little candy store; Seth McHugh, cashier of
the bank; Wilmott the lawyer, a dozen others. No doubt Em Harkness
was there. Of that I cannot be quite sure. He was a man of our town,
who ran a small general store and brother, I believe, to that other
Harkness who later became a man of vast wealth and a figure in the
Standard Oil Company. His money built the Harkness Memorial at
Yale, and if our town did not achieve the prominent position in the
Industrial Age of which we all at that moment dreamed, we had at least
among us the kin of royalty. We were not entirely left in the cold
outside world. A Harkness was a Harkness and we had a Harkness.
But to return to that significant moment in the field. As we lads
lay in the wood, well concealed from the eyes of our elders, we
were silent. Solemnity lay like a frost over our young souls. Even
the giggling and whispering that had gone on among us died now. The
well-shooter was there and he had turned out to be just an ordinary
looking teamster with whiskers, but that did not matter.
Greater and more significant things were astir. Even the birds stopped
singing and the squirrels chattered no more.
A long tube, containing no doubt the nitro-glycerine, had been lowered
into the hole in the ground and the honored guests of the occasion ran
quickly across the field and stood among the trees near our hiding
place.
They were dressed, these serious-minded citizens, as for a wedding or
a funeral. Even Penny Jacobs had put on what was called among us “a
boiled shirt.”
What an occasion! Now we were, all of us, as we stood or lay under the
trees--we were all one thing; and presently there would be a terrific
explosion, far down in the earth, below our bellies as we lay sprawled
in the wet grass--there would be this explosion, and then would we not
all, at that moment, become something else?
“Bang!” we would go into the New Age--that was the idea. In the
presence of our elders, who now stood in silence very near us, we lads
all felt a little ashamed of our ragged clothes and our unwashed faces.
Perhaps some of us had been to Sunday school and had heard the parable
of the virgins who did not keep their lamps trimmed and filled.
In shame we hid our faces before the glory of the vision before us.
There we were, sons of housepainters, carpenters, shoemakers, and the
like. Our fathers had worked with their hands. They had soiled their
clothes and their faces with common labor. Poor, benighted men! What
did they know of what Mark Twain called, “the glorious, rip-roaring
century, greatest of all the centuries?” A man could make a wagon that
would stand up, or shoe a horse, or build a house slowly and well, but
what was that?
Shucks! There would be this terrific rumble in the bowels of the earth,
and then the little cunning machines would come. Men would walk about
smoking twenty-five-cent cigars; they would put their thumbs in the
armholes of their vests and laugh at the past. Men would fly through
the air, dive under the sea, have breakfast in Cleveland, Ohio, and
lunch in London. A fellow couldn’t tell what would happen now.
Why, no one would work at all maybe--well, that is to say, not really
work. Some of our fathers had read a book called “Looking Backward” and
had talked about it in the homes and in the stores. Then we lads had
talked. Well, a fellow would maybe roll downtown from his country home
in the late morning and turn a few cranks or pull a few levers. Then
he would go and play, make love to some beautiful female or take an
afternoon’s ride over to Egypt to see the Pyramids, or visit the Holy
Land. A fellow had to get up an appetite for dinner, dang it all!
Anyway, that was that, and there we were. The well-shooter dropped
a heavy weight down the hole and cut out for the woods. When he was
halfway across the meadow the rumbling explosion occurred, down in the
earth.
And into the bright morning air shot a great fountain of mud and muddy
water. The derrick over the hole was covered with it, the grass in the
meadow was covered and much of it fell down like rain on us in the
wood. The front of Penny Jacobs’ boiled shirt was covered with it.
The mud fell on us lads, too, but that didn’t matter so much. None of
us had put on Sunday clothes. Our elders, who represented among us the
capitalistic class, went over and stood about the well for a time, and
then went sadly off up the road to unhitch their horses and drive back
to town.
When we lads emerged from the woods no one was left but the
well-shooter, and he was suspect, and grumpy as well, not having
breakfasted. Those of us whose fathers had no money invested were
inclined to take the whole matter as rather a delicious joke, but were
overruled. We stood about for a time, staring at the well-shooter, who
was engaged in gathering his paraphernalia together, and then we also
moved off toward town.
“I’ll bet that well-shooter’s a crook,” said one of my companions.
He had, I remember, a great deal of mud in his hair and on his face.
He kept complaining as we went along. “He could have stuck that
nitro-glycerine only halfway down, and then set it off, that’s what
he could have done.” The idea, later taken up enthusiastically by the
entire community, pleased us all. It was so apparent the well-shooter
was not the hero we had hoped. He didn’t look like a hero. “Well, my
dad says he knows him. He lives over by Monroeville and he gets drunk
and beats his wife, my dad says so,” another lad declared.
It was rather a good solution of our difficulty. If one can’t have a
hero, who wants just a teamster?
It was infinitely better to have a villainous well-shooter about whose
Machiavellian machinations one’s imagination could linger in happiness.
NOTE VIII
IT must have been about this time that my own imaginative life began
to take form. Having listened to the tales told by my father, I wanted
to begin inventing tales of my own. At that time and for long years
afterward, there was no notion of writing. Did I want an audience,
someone to hear me tell my tales? It is likely I did. There is
something of the actor in me.
When later I began to write I for a time told myself I would never
publish, and I remember that I went about thinking of myself as a kind
of heroic figure, a silent man creeping into little rooms, writing
marvelous tales, poems, novels--that would never be published.
Perhaps it never went quite that far. They would have to be published
sometime. My vanity demanded that. Very well--I had died and had been
buried in some obscure place. In my actual physical life I had been a
house-painter, a workman in a factory, an advertising writer--whatever
you please. I had passed unnoticed through the throng, you see. “I say,
John, who is that fellow over there?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen him about. He looks like a movie actor or
a gambler to me.”
You see, I dreamed of something like that--dead and buried away--and
then one day a man is snooping about in a garret in an old empty house.
He finds a pile of papers and begins looking them over, lazily, without
much interest. But look! “Hello here! Say, here is something!”
You get the notion. I’ll not go into it further. It might have been
a good card had I found within myself the courage to play it, but I
didn’t.
As to that first tale of mine and its invention. It grew out of
dissatisfaction with my father and a desire to invent another to take
his place. And professional jealousy may have had something to do with
it. He had been strutting about long enough. “Get out from under the
spotlight for a time, daddy. Give your son a chance to see what he can
do,” I perhaps really wanted to say.
It was fall and father had taken me with him to do a house-painting
job in the country. The year was growing old and bad rainy weather had
come. Perhaps we could not finish the painting job we were about to
begin, but, as father had explained to the farmer who had just built a
new house, we could at least put on a priming coat.
If the worst happened and we lost a good deal of time, waiting
about--“well,” said father winking at me, “you see, kid, we’ll eat.”
The farmer came for us in the early morning, driving in a spring wagon
into which was to be packed the ladders, pots and other materials of
our trade, and by the time we had got to his place the rain, that had
persisted for several days, began again. The carpenters were still at
work inside the house, so that nothing could be done there, and father
went off to the old cabin in which the farmer and his family were
living until the new house could be finished. He would spend the day
gossiping with the women folk or perhaps reading some book he had found
in the house. The farmer had a barrel of hard cider in his cellar. The
day promised to be not too depressing for father.
As for myself, I made the acquaintance of the farmer’s son, a lad my
own age, and we decided to go squirrel hunting in the near-by woods.
“You wait ’til father drives down into the new clearing. He’s going
to bring up some fence posts. Then we’ll take the gun and cut out. If
he gets onto us he’ll give me some job, make me wheel out manure, or
whitewash the henhouse, or something like that.”
We spent the morning and early afternoon tramping through muddy fields
to visit the wood lots on neighboring farms and came home too late for
the noon meal, but my new-found friend managed to get some sandwiches,
made of huge slices of bread and cold meat, and bring them to the barn.
We were tired and wet and had got no squirrels and so we crawled up
into the hay loft and burrowed down into the warm hay.
When we had finished eating our lunch and had got ourselves comfortably
warm my companion, a fat boy of perhaps sixteen, wanted to talk.
We talked as young males do, of hunting and what naturally good shots
we were but that we were not used to just the kind of gun we had been
handling. Then we spoke of riding horses and how nice it would have
been had we both been cowboys, and finally of the girls we had known.
What was a fellow to do? How was he to get close to some girl who
wasn’t too hoity-toity. The fat boy had a sister of about his own age
that I wanted to ask about but didn’t dare. What was she like? Was she
too hoity-toity?
We spoke vaguely of other girls we had been seated near at school,
or had met at boy-and-girl parties. “Did you ever kiss a girl? I
did once,” said the fat boy. “Kiss, eh? Is that all you’ve done?” I
answered, feeling the necessity of maintaining a kind of advantage, due
to my position as a town boy.
The hay into which we had burrowed deeply, so that just our heads were
in the outer air, was sweet to the nostrils and warm and we began to
grow sleepy. What was the use of talking of girls? They were silly
things and had in some queer way the power to unman a boy, to make a
fellow act and feel nervous and uneasy.
We lay in silence, thinking each his own thoughts, and presently the
fat boy closed his eyes and slept.
Father came upon the floor of the stable with his employer the farmer,
and the two men pulled boxes to the door looking out into the barnyard
and began to talk.
The farmer explained that he had come into our country from New
England, from Vermont, when he was a young man, and had gone into debt
for two hundred acres of land, when land could be had cheap. He had
worked and he had achieved. In time the farm had been paid for and
fifty additional acres bought. It had taken time, patience, and hard
labor. Much of the land had to be cleared. A man worked day and night,
that’s how he managed to get on.
And now he was building a new house. “Well,” he had said to his wife;
“Mary, you have been a good wife to me and I want you to have every
comfort.” The house was to have a bathroom and a bathtub. It would cost
money and maybe it would be all foolishness, but he wanted his wife
to have it. When a man was young he didn’t mind splashing about in a
washtub in a woodshed on Saturday evenings, but when he got a little
older and had, now and then, a touch of rheumatism, well, he thought
his wife deserved to have a bathtub in the house if she wanted it, no
matter what it cost.
Father agreed with his host. (It is perhaps as well to think of him
as our host and ourselves as guests since we stayed two weeks and
worked but two days.) He said that he had always felt just that way
himself. Women were the weaker sex and a man had to take that into
consideration. “You take a woman, now, that is like a horse and I don’t
like her,” said father. He spoke of mother as though she had been a
weak, gentle thing, entirely dependent upon the strength in himself in
getting through her life. “I married my wife up in your own state, up
in Vermont,” father said, indulging in one of his characteristic quick
imaginative flights.
And now that he had got a start I knew there was no telling where his
flight might end and I listened for a time, and then, turning away in
disgust, I began working my way downward into the hay. My mother, now
dead, was something I prized. He had just said she was born in Vermont
of an old decayed English gentle family. She wasn’t very strong but
would have children. They were born one after the other, but, thank
God! because of his own great natural strength his boys were strong.
“The one I have out here with me now was born in Kentucky,” he said.
“I took my wife down there on a visit to my own father’s place and he
was born during the visit. I thought his mother would die that time,
but she didn’t--I saved her. Night and day I stayed in her sick room,
nursing her.”
Now he had got himself launched and I knew the farmer would have
no more chance to do his own bragging. Father would invent another
decayed, gentle family in Kentucky to match the one he had just so
lightly brought into existence in the cold barren hills of Vermont.
But I was getting deeper and deeper down into the hay now and the
sounds of his voice grew faint, words could no longer be distinguished.
There was only a gentle murmuring sound, far off--like a summer breeze
just stirring the leaves of a forest; or, better yet, like the soft
murmur of some southern sea. Already, you see, I had begun reading
romances and knew, in fancy, just how the seas of the South murmured
and beat upon coral islands; and then how the fearful hurricane came
ramping along and swept the seas clear of ships. No one reads as a boy
reads. The boy gives himself utterly to the printed page and perhaps
the most blessed of all the tribe of the inkpots are those who write
what we used to call “dime novels”--blessed in their audience, I mean,
to be sure.
So there I was, sunk far down into a mythical Southland, my own
Southland, product of my own imaginings--not father’s. One could go
deep down into the hay and still breathe. All sounds became faint,
even the gentle sound of the snoring of the fat boy some ten feet away.
One closed the eyes and stepped off into a fragrant new world. Mother
was in that new world, but not father. I had left him out in the cold.
I considered the matter of births--my own birth in particular. The idea
of being born in Kentucky--the result of a union between two decaying,
gentle families--did not strike my fancy, not much.
The devil! Even then I felt myself a little the product of a new age
and a new land. Could I then have had all the thoughts I am now about
to attribute to myself! Probably not. But these notes make no pretense
of being a record of fact. That isn’t their object. They are merely
notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that
have floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likely
that I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring by
the ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essence
of things. That’s what I’m after.
And haven’t we Americans built enough railroads and factories, haven’t
we made our cities large and dirty and noisy enough, haven’t we been
giving ourselves to surface facts long enough? Let us away with the
fact of existence, for the moment at least. You, the reader, are to
imagine yourself sitting under a tree with me on a summer afternoon;
or, better yet, lying with me in the sweet-smelling hay in an Ohio
barn. We shall let our fancies loose, lie to ourselves if you please.
Let us not question each other too closely.
There is America, now. What is America? Whee! I say, now, don’t begin
with such a gigantic question as that.
Let’s think a little about what it isn’t. It isn’t English, for one
thing, and--isn’t it odd?--the notion persists that it is. If we are
ever to have a race of our own here--if the melting pot we are always
talking about ever really melts up the mass--how English, how German,
how Puritanic will it be? Not very much, I fancy. Too many Slavs,
Poles, Wops, Chinese, Negroes, Mexicans, Hindoos, Jews, whatnot, for
the old influences to hold in the end.
But is it not odd how that old notion persists? A few English came and
settled in that far-away frozen northeast corner--New England--and
their sons did the book-writing and the school-teaching. They did not
get themselves--physically--as breeders--very deeply into the new blood
of the land, but they made their notion of what we are and of what we
are to be stick pretty well.
In time, however, the basic cultural feeling of the land must change
too. Mind cannot persist without body. Blood will tell.
And in my own time I was to see the grip of the old New England, the
Puritanic culture, begin to loosen. The physical incoming of the Celts,
Latins, Slavs, men of the Far East, the blood of the dreaming nations
of the world gradually flowing thicker and thicker in the body of
the American, and the shrewd shop-keeping money-saving blood of the
northern men getting thinner and thinner.
But I run far, far ahead of myself. Did my own fancy, even then, as
a boy, lying in the hay in the barn, did it run ahead of my own day
and my own time? Of that I cannot say, but of one thing I am quite
certain--in all my life I have never for a moment subscribed to the
philosophy of life as set forth by the _Saturday Evening Post_,
the _Atlantic Monthly_, _Yale_, “Upward and Onward,” “The
White Man’s Burden,” etc.
There was always within me a notion of another aspect of life--at least
faintly felt--a life that dreamed a little of more colorful and gaudy
things--cruelty and tragedy creeping in the night, laughter, splashing
sunlight, the pomp and splendor of the old tyrants, the simple devotion
of old devotees.
Had I not seen and did I not then sharply remember that old grandmother
from the southeast of Europe, she with the one eye and the quick, dark
and dangerous temper! There were possibilities of cruelty in her. Once
she had tried to kill my sister with a butcher knife, and one could
think of her as killing with a laugh on her lips. Having known her one
could easily conceive of the possibility of a life in which cruelty had
its place too.
At that moment as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay and when the
fancy of my own flesh-and-blood father, down on the floor of the barn,
was giving me a birthright of decaying Germanic gentlefolk the dark old
woman who was my grandmother was more in my line.
And no doubt the warmth of the hay itself may have had something to do
with the setting and the mood of my first invented tale, as you will
perceive as you read of it. Cruelty, like breadfruit and pineapples, is
a product, I believe, of the South.
By the tale, told me by my parents, I had myself been born in a place
called Camden, Ohio, and in the articles touching on my birthplace that
have appeared in newspapers that town has always been named. It was one
of the towns through which father and mother had trekked when they were
first married.
Father must have had a little money at that time, as there is a
tradition of his having been a merchant, and of course there were not,
at that time, so many children. One could get up and out more easily.
Moving, perhaps at night, from town to town, to escape bill collectors,
was not so difficult. And then I fancy that, at first his own people,
from time to time, sent him money. However, I know little of his people
and only have the notion because I cannot conceive of his having earned
it or of his having made it by his shrewdness.
And so he was a merchant then, the grandest thing one could be in a
small Ohio town at that time. He kept shop in places known as Camden,
Morning Sun and Caledonia, Ohio. I believe he and President Harding
once played in the same brass band at Caledonia.
He was in the saddlery and harness business and you cannot fail to
catch the flavor of that. There would be a little shop on the town’s
main street with a leather horse collar hanging on a peg over the
sidewalk before the door. Inside there would be shiny new harness
hanging on the shop walls and, in the morning when the sun crept in,
the brass and nickel buckles would shine like jewels.
Young farmers coming in with great work harnesses on their shoulders
and throwing them with a great rattle and bang on the floor--the rich
pungent smell of leather--an old man, a workman, a harness-maker,
sitting on his horse and sewing a strap--on the floor by the stove a
wooden box filled with sawdust into which the workmen and the visiting
farmers, all of whom would chew tobacco, could spit--
Father prancing about--the young merchant then, with the young
merchant’s heavy silver watch and gold chain--a prospective Marshall
Field, a Wanamaker, a Julius Rosenwald, in his own fancy, perhaps.
“Hello, you, Ted. When you go’en a get that trace sewed up? These
new fangle factory harnesses ain’t worth a tinker’s dam. How’s wheat
looking out your way? No, the frost ain’t all out of the ground yet.
What do you think of elections, eh? D’you hear what that fellow
said--‘all Democrats ain’t horse thieves, but all horse thieves is
democrats’? Do you think Frank Means will make it for sheriff?”
That--in just that tone--and in a small frame house on a side street of
the town myself waiting to be born.
What is a birth? Has a man no rights of his own?
NOTE IX
SUCH a birth in an Ohio Village--the neighbor women coming in to
help--rather fat women in aprons.
They have had children of their own and are not too excited, but stand
about, waiting and indulging in gossip. “If the men had to have the
babies there would never be more than one child in a family. What
do men know about suffering? It’s the women who have to do all the
suffering in life, I always said--I said a woman feels everything
deeper than a man--don’t you think so? A woman has intuition, that’s
what it is.”
And then the doctor coming hurriedly, father having run for him. He
would be a large man with side whiskers and large red hands. Well; he
is a doctor of the new school, a modernist, like the child he is about
to help into the world. What he believes in, is fresh air. Wherever he
goes, and no matter what the disease he is treating, he always says
the same things. Modernists sometimes are like that. “Clean and fresh
air--that’s what I believe in. Throw open the doors and the windows.
Let’s have some fresh air in here.”
While the child is being born he tells his one joke. One might as well
be cheerful. Cheerfulness is a great healer, and what he believes in is
in making his patients smile in the midst of suffering. “Do you want
to know why I’m so strong on cleanliness?” he asks. “It’s because I’m a
damned sinner, I guess, and I don’t go to church, and I’ve heard that
cleanliness is next to Godliness. I’m trying to slip into Heaven on a
cake of soap--ha! that’s what I’m up to.”
A quick nervous laugh from the lips of father. He goes out of the
house to tell the story to a neighbor he has seen raking leaves in a
near-by yard. It is September now. He is a little unstrung. Under such
conditions a man feels faintly guilty. People conspire to give him
the feeling. It is as though all the women of the town were pointing
accusing fingers and as though all the men were laughing, “greasy-eyed
married men,” Bernard Shaw once called them. One will have to set up
the cigars to the men, darn ’em. As for the women--they are saying,
half jokingly, half in earnest: “There, you devil; see what you have
done--this is your doings.”
Father stands beside the fence telling the doctor’s joke to the
neighbor, who has heard it many times before but who, out of sympathy,
now laughs heartily. As though drawn toward each other by some
invisible cord they both sidle along the fence until they are standing
close together. It is a moment of masculine obscurity. Men must stand
shoulder to shoulder. The women have the centre of the stage--as father
would have said later, when he became an actor and loved to sling the
actor’s jargon, they were “hogging the footlights.”
Not quite succeeding however. This is the moment for me to come upon
the stage. The two men stand closely together, father fingering
nervously the heavy gold watch chain--he is soon to lose it with all
his other property in one of his frequent business failures--and from
the house comes a faint cry. To the two men standing there it sounds
not unlike the cry of a puppy inadvertently stepped on by a careless
master, and father jumps suddenly aside so that his neighbor laughs
again.
And that is myself--just being actually born into the world.
* * * * *
Which is one thing, but sometimes one’s fancy wants something else.
As I lay, deep buried in the hay in the barn on another fall day, and
as the resentment--born in me through having been made the son of
two decaying, gentle families--grew deeper and deeper, and also as
the grateful warmth of the departed summer--captured and held by the
hay--stole over my body, cold from the day of tramping in the wood in
a cold rain in pursuit of the squirrels--as the warmth took hold of my
body, the scene of my actual birth hour, just depicted, faded. I fled
from the field of fact and into the field of fancy.
Upon the sand on a desolated coast far down on the Gulf of Mexico an
athletic looking man of perhaps thirty lies looking out over the sea.
What cruel eyes he has, like the eyes of some cunning beast of prey.
He is perhaps thirty years of age, but one can see well enough, just by
looking at him casually, that he has retained all the youthful strength
and elasticity of his splendid body. He has a small black mustache and
black hair and his skin is burned to a deep brown. Even as he lies,
relaxed and listless, on the yellow sand a glow of life and of strength
seems to emanate from him.
As he lies thus one can tell, any schoolboy could tell, that he is
physically made to be the very ideal of American romance. He is a man
of action--young and strong--there can be little doubt he is a man
of daring. What might not be done with such a man! Throw him back
into the days of the early pioneers and he will turn you out another
Daniel Boone. He will creep through hundreds of miles of forests,
never disturbing a grass blade, and bring you back the fair daughter
of the English nobleman, traveling in this country, whose daughter
inadvertently went for an afternoon’s stroll in the wood and was
captured by a skulking Indian; or he will shoot you a squirrel in the
eye at five hundred yards with his faithful rifle, called, playfully,
“Old Betsy.” Move him up a little now. Let, say Bret Harte, have him.
There he is, fine and dandy. He is a gambler in a Western mining camp
now, wearing a silk shirt and a Stetson hat. He will lose you a whole
fortune without the bat of an eye, but his personal associates are a
bit rough. He is always being seen about with Black Peg, who runs a
house of prostitution, and with Silent Smith, the killer.
Until, well, until one day when a New England school-teacher comes
into the rough mining camp. One night she is set upon and is about to
be outraged by a drunken miner. Then he, the associate of Black Peg,
steps forward and shoots the miner. Ten minutes before, he was drunk
and lying in the gutter, so drunk in fact that flies had been using
his eyeballs as sliding places, but the danger to the school-teacher
had sobered him instantly. He is a gentleman now. He offers the
school-teacher his arm and they walk to her cabin discussing Emerson
and Longfellow, and then our central figure of romance leaves her at
her cabin door and goes to a lonely spot in the mountains. He sits down
to wait until winter and the deep snows come, in order that he may
freeze to death. He has realized that he loves the New England lady
and is, in the language of the Far West, as set forth in all the best
books, “not fitten for her.”
The truth is that father, that is to say, my fanciful father, might
well have been used by any one of a dozen of our American hero-makers.
He is in the goods. That is the idea. In the hands of a Jack London
he might have been another Sea Wolf or a musher trudging through
the deep snow of the frozen North, cornering some fair virgin in an
isolated cabin, only to let her off at the last moment out of respect
for her dead mother, who expected something quite different of her.
Then later he might have gone to Yale, and after that become a stock
broker, taking daring chances with railroad stocks, married a woman who
loved only the glare and shine of social life, chucked her, failed in
business, gone farming, and turned out a clean man after all, say in
the pages of the _Saturday Evening Post_. It could have been done.
Where my fanciful father was unfortunate, however, was in that he had
to live in the fancy of a boy in a hay barn--one who had as yet had
little or no experience with heroes.
And then there is no doubt he, from the first, had certain weaknesses.
He wasn’t always kind to old women and children and, as you will see
in the sequel, he wasn’t to be trusted with a virgin. He just wouldn’t
behave himself, and when it comes to this matter of virgins, perhaps
the least said about any man’s attitude toward them--except, to be
sure, in novels and in the movies--the better. As Mr. Howells once
pointed out, “it is better to present to the readers only the brighter
and more pleasant aspects of our common lives.”
However, let us return to the man lying on the sand. There he is, you
see, and it was sure he had been all his life, at any rate, a man of
action. The Civil War had just come to an end a few years before and
during the war he had been rather busily engaged. He had gone into
the war as a spy for the Federal government and when he had got into
the South had managed to engage himself as a spy for the Confederate
side also. This had permitted him to move rather freely back and forth
and to do well carrying contraband goods. When he had no special
information to give to one or the other of his employers he could
invent information--during a war that is always easy. He was, as I have
said, a man of action. He aimed to get results, as they say in the
advertising profession.
The war at an end, he had gone into the South, having several projects
in mind and, at the time we meet him first, he was waiting on the
lonely coast to sight a ship that was to bring some business associates
of his. In a bayou, near the mouth of the river, some ten miles away,
there was a ship, manned by his own men, awaiting his return. He was
engaged in the business of smuggling firearms to various revolutionary
parties in South American republics and was now only waiting for the
coming of a man who was to hand over to him certain monies.
And so the day passed and the evening came and at last an hour before
darkness settled down over the lonely sand dunes a ship appeared. My
mythical father arose and, fastening a cloth to the end of a stick,
waved it back and forth over his head. The ship drew near and two boats
were lowered. Some ten or twelve men were coming ashore and with them
a woman. When they had got into the boats the ship did not wait but
immediately steamed away.
The man on the beach began gathering a great pile of sticks and bits of
driftwood, preparative to building a fire, and now and then he turned
his head to look toward the approaching boats. That there was a woman
among his visitors bothered him. Women were always interfering with
business. Why had they wanted to bring a woman? “To the deuce with
women!” he growled, making his way through the deep sand with a great
pile of sticks in his arms.
Then the boat had landed and there was the old Harry to pay. A
revolutionary party in one of the South American republics had gone
to pieces and nearly all its members had been arrested and were to be
executed. There was no money to pay for the firearms that were to have
been shipped, and the little band of men, now standing on the lonely
beach and facing the smugglers, had barely escaped with their lives.
They had rowed out to sea in two boats and had been picked up by a
steamer, and one among them had in his possession money enough to bribe
the steamer captain to bring them to this spot, where they were to
have landed, just at this time, under quite different circumstances.
Different circumstances indeed!
The lady of the party--well, she was something special--the daughter of
one of the wealthiest sugar planters of her native land, she had given
her young soul to the cause of the revolution and when the smash came
had been compelled to fly with the others. Her own father disowned her
in a moment of cowardice and the death sentence was out against her.
What else could she do but flee?
If they had brought nothing else, they had brought food ashore from the
ship, and the party might as well eat, since they would, in any event,
have to spend the night on the beach. In the morning, it was the hope
expressed by the leader of the party, that the firearms smuggler would
guide them inland. They had friends in America but had they landed
at a regular port of entry it might well have turned out that their
own government would have asked the American government to send them
home--to face the consequences of their folly.
With a grim smile on his cruel lips my fanciful father had heard them
out in silence and now began building a fire. Night came and he moved
softly about. A strange and new impulse had come into his hard and
cruel heart. He had fallen instantly in love with the young female
leader of revolution from the foreign land and was trying to figure out
how he could get away from the others and have a talk with her.
At last when food had been prepared and eaten, he spoke, agreeing to
perform all that had been asked of him, but declaring that the young
woman could not be compelled to spend the night in such a place.
Speaking in the Spanish language--with which he was marvelously
conversant--he commanded the others to stay by the fire while he took
the young woman inland to where, some two miles away, he declared he
had some horses concealed in the stable of an oyster thief, a friend of
his who lived up the bay.
The others consenting, he and the young woman set off. She was very
beautiful and, as they had all been seated about the fire, she had kept
her eyes almost constantly upon the American.
He was of the type of which American heroes are made, you see, and she
had, in her young girlhood, read American novels. In American novels,
as in American plays--as everyone knows--a man can, just as well as
not, be a horse thief, a desperado, a child-kidnapper, a gentleman
burglar, or a well-poisoner for years and years, and then, in an
instant, become the sweetest and most amiable fellow possible, and with
perfect manners too. It is one of the most interesting things about us
Americans. No doubt it came to us from the English. It seems to be an
Anglo-Saxon trait and a very lovely one too. All anyone need do is to
mention in the presence of any one of us at any time the word “mother,”
or leave one of us alone in the darkness in a forest in a lonely cabin
on a mountain at night with a virgin.
With some of us--that is to say, with those of us who have gone into
politics--the same results can sometimes be had by speaking of the
simple and humble laboring man, but it is the virgin that gets us every
shot. In bringing out all the best in us she is a hundred per cent.
efficient.
In the presence of a virgin something like a dawn among mountains
creeps over the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon and a gentle light comes into
his eyes. If he has a dress suit anywhere about he goes and puts it on.
Also he gets himself a shave and a hair cut, and you would be surprised
to see how everything clears up after that.
* * * * *
I, however, digress. In my enthusiasm for my fellows I jerk myself too
violently out of my boyhood. No boy could so wholeheartedly appreciate
or understand our national traits.
The story I had set myself down to tell was that of my own birth into
the world of fancy--as opposed to the rather too realistic birth
already depicted--and that, as I have explained, took place in Camden,
Ohio.
Very well, then, a year has passed and I am being born a second time,
as it were, but this second birth is quite different from the one in
the Ohio town. There is more punch to it. Reading of it will lift you,
who have been patient enough to follow me so far, out of your common
everyday humdrum existences.
And if you have read Freud you will find it of additional interest
that, in my fanciful birth, I have retained the very form and substance
of my earthly mother while getting an entirely new father, whom I set
up--making anything but a hero of him--only to sling mud at him. I am
giving myself away to the initiated, that is certain.
But be that as it may, however, there is mother lying in bed in a
lonely cabin on another long sandy beach, also on the Gulf of Mexico.
(In my fanciful life I have always had a hunger for the warm South.)
Mother has been honorably married to my fanciful father on that very
evening when she went with him from among her fellow-countrymen,
sitting by the fire on that other beach, and after just such a
metamorphosis of his character as she had come to expect through having
read American novels and through having seen two or three American
plays produced in the capital of her native land.
After having secured the horses from the stable of the oyster thief
they had ridden off together and had come at last into a deep forest of
magnolia trees in blossom. A southern moon came up into the sky and so
soft was the night, so gentle the breezes from the now distant sea, and
so sweet the hum of insect life under their horses’ feet, that mother
found herself speaking of her lost home and of her mother.
To my fanciful father the combination--the deep forest, the scent of
the magnolia blossoms and the word “mother”--together with the fact
that he was alone in a dark place with a virgin, an innocent one, these
things were all irresistible to him. The metamorphosis spoken of above
took place, and he proposes marriage and on the spot proposed to live a
better life.
And so they rode together out of the forest and were married, but, in
his case, the metamorphosis did not hold.
Within a few months he had gone back to his old life, leaving mother
alone in a strange land until the time should come when I, having been
born, could take up the task of being her protector and guardian.
And now I am being born. It is late in the afternoon of a still hot
day and I, having just been ushered into the world by the aid of a
fisherman’s wife, who also does duty as a midwife in that isolated
place and who has now left to return again late at night--I, having
been so born, am lying on the bed beside mother and thinking my first
thoughts. In my own fancy I was, from the very first, a remarkable
child and did not cry out as most newly born infants do, but lay buried
in deep thought. In the little hut it is stifling hot, and flies and
other winged insects of the warm South are buzzing in the air. Strange
insects of gigantic size crawl over the walls and, from far-away
somewhere, there comes the murmur of the sea. Mother is lying beside
me, weak and wan.
We lie there for a long time and, young as I am, I realize that she is
tired and discouraged about life. “Why has not life in America turned
out as it always did in the novels and plays?” she is asking herself;
but I, having at that time still retained all my young courage and
freshness of outlook, am not discouraged.
There is a sound outside the cabin, the swishing sound of heavy feet
dragged through the hot dry sands, and the low moaning sound of a woman
crying.
Again a steamer, from foreign parts, has visited that lonely coast
and again a boat has been lowered. In the boat is my fanciful father
accompanied by four of his evil henchmen and accompanied also by
another woman. She is young and fair, another virgin; but now, alas,
father has become hardened on that subject!
The strange woman is terribly afraid but is at the same time in love
with her captor (owing to the strange natures of women, this, you
will understand, is entirely possible), and father has had the cruel
impulse to bring the two women together. Perhaps he wants to see them
suffer the pangs of jealousy.
But he will get no such pangs from mother. With her son beside her she
lies silently waiting.
For what? That is the question that, try as he would, the son could not
answer.
And so the two lie there in silence on the poor bed in the hut while
that strange monster of a man drags another woman across the yellow
sands and in at the door of the hut. What has happened is that he has
gone back to his old wicked life and, with his comrade, has joined
another revolutionary party in another South American republic, and
this time the revolution has been successful and he and his partners
have helped sack a South American city.
At the forefront of the invaders was my fanciful father and--whatever
else may be said of him it can never be said that he lacked in
courage--it was from him, in fact, that I got my own courage.
Into the invaded city he had rushed at the head of his men and, when
the city was being sacked, he demanded riches for his men but took none
for himself. For his own portion of the loot he had taken the virginal
daughter of the leader of the Federal forces and it was this woman he
was now dragging in at the door of our hut.
She was very beautiful and perhaps, had I been older, I should not have
blamed father, but at that time the love of right was very strong in me.
When father saw that I had already been born he staggered back for a
step and leaned against the wall of the cabin, still however clinging
to the hand of his new-found woman. “I had hoped to arrive before or
at the very hour of birth, I had counted on that,” he muttered, cursing
under his breath.
For a moment he stood looking at mother and myself and both of us
looked calmly at him.
“Birth--the birth hour--is the test of womanhood,” he said, taking
hold of the shoulder of his new woman and shaking her violently, as
though to fix her attention. “I wanted you to see how the women of my
own race meet bravely all such trying situations; for, as you must
know, by the customs of my country, the woman who marries an American
becomes instantly an American, with all the American virtues. It is our
climate, I dare say, and it happens to people very quickly.
“At any rate there it is. The woman you see before you I really love,
but she has become Anglo-Saxon, through having married me, and is
therefore above me, as far above me as the stars.
“I cannot live with her. She is too good, too brave,” said my fanciful
father, staggering through the door and dragging his woman after him.
Outside the door I heard him still talking loudly to his new woman as
they went away. “Our Anglo-Saxon women are the most wonderful creatures
in the world,” I heard him saying. “In a few years now they will run
the world.”
* * * * *
It was growing dark in the hayloft in the barn in the state of Ohio.
Did I, as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay, really imagine the
absurd scene depicted above? Although I was very young I had already
read many novels and stories.
In any event the whole silly affair has remained in my fancy for years.
When I was a lad I played with such fanciful scenes as other boys play
with brightly colored marbles. From the beginning there has been, as
opposed to my actual life, these grotesque fancies. Later, to be sure,
I did acquire more or less skill in bringing them more and more closely
into the world of the actual. They were but the raw materials with
which the story-writer must work as the worker in woods works with
trees cut in a forest.
As for the fancies themselves, they have always seemed to me like trees
that have grown without having been planted. Later, after the period
in my own life of which I am now writing, I worked for many years as
a laborer in many places, and gradually as I stood all day beside a
lathe in some factory, or later went about among business men trying
to sell some article, in which I was myself not interested, I began to
look at other men and to wonder what absurd fancies went on in secret
within them. There was that curiosity and there was something else. I
had perhaps, as I have no doubt all people have, a great desire to be
loved and a little respected. My own fancies rule me. Even to-day I
cannot go into a movie theatre and see there some such national hero
as, say, Bill Hart, without wishing myself such another. In the theatre
I sit looking at the people and see how they are all absorbed in the
affairs of the man on the stage. Now he springs lightly off a horse and
goes toward the door of a lonely cabin. We, in the theatre, know that
within the cabin are some ten desperate men all heavily armed with guns
and with them, bound to a chair, is a fair woman, another virgin got
off the reservation, as it were. Bill stops at the door of the cabin
and takes a careful look at his guns, and we, in the audience, know
well enough that in a few minutes now he will go inside and just shoot
all of those ten fellows in there to death, fairly make sieves of them,
and that he will get wounded himself but not seriously--just enough to
need the help of the virgin in getting out of the cabin and onto his
horse--so he can ride to her father’s ranch house and go to bed and get
well after a while, in time for the wedding.
All these things we know, but we love our Bill and can hardly wait
until the shooting begins. As for myself I never see such a performance
but that I later go out of the theatre and, when I get off into a quiet
street alone, I become just such another. Looking about to see that I
am unobserved, I jerk two imaginary guns out of my hip pockets and draw
a quick bead on some near-by tree. “Dog,” I cry, “unhand her!” All my
early reading of American literature comes into my mind and I try to
do a thing that is always being spoken of in the books. I try to make
my eyes narrow to pin points. Bill Hart can do it wonderfully in the
pictures and why not I? As I sat in the movie house it was evident
that Bill Hart was being loved by all the men women and children
sitting about and I also want to be loved--to be a little dreaded and
feared, too, perhaps. “Ah! there goes Sherwood Anderson! Treat him with
respect. He is a bad man when he is aroused. But treat him kindly and
he will be as gentle with you as any cooing dove.”
* * * * *
As a boy lying buried in the hay I presume I had some such notion as
that, and later as a man standing by a lathe in some factory some such
notion must have still been in my mind. I wanted then to be something
heroic in the eyes of my own mother, now dead, and at the same time
wanted to be something heroic in my own eyes too.
One could not do the thing in actual life, so one did it in a new world
created within one’s fancy.
And what a world that fanciful one--how grotesque, how strange, how
teeming with strange life! Could one ever bring order into that world?
In my own actual work as a tale-teller I have been able to organize and
tell but a few of the fancies that have come to me. There is a world
into which no one but myself has ever entered and I would like to take
you there; but how often when I go, filled with confidence, to the very
door leading into that strange world, I find it locked! Now, in the
morning, I myself cannot enter the land into which all last night, as I
lay awake in my bed, I went alone at will.
There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell
you. I should like to take you with me through the gate into the land,
let you wander there with me. There are people there with whom I should
like you to talk. There is the old woman accompanied by the gigantic
dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day, the stout man with the
gray eyes and with the pack on his back, who stands talking to the
beautiful woman as she sits in her carriage, the little dark woman with
the boyish husband who lives in a small frame house by a dusty road far
out, in the country.
These and many other figures, all having a life of their own, all
playing forever in the field of my fancy. The fanciful shadowy life
striving to take on flesh, to live as you and I live, to come out of
the shadowy world of the fancy into the actuality of accomplished art.
When I had grown to be a man, and had begun to try a little to organize
this inner life, I wondered often if a woman, being pregnant, and
walking about through the streets, past factory doors, in the “loop
district” of Chicago, let us say, if such a woman being conscious of
something alive within--that is, at the moment a part of herself, flesh
of her flesh, and that will presently come out of herself to live its
own life, in a world her eyes now see passing before her--if such a
woman does not have dreadful moments of fear.
To the tale-teller, you must understand, the telling of the tale is
the cutting of the natal cord. When the tale is told it exists outside
oneself and often it is more living than the living man from whom it
came. The imagined figure may well live on and on in the fanciful life
of others after the man from whose lips it came, or whose fingers
guided the pen that wrote the tale, long after he is forgotten, and
I have myself had some curious experiences of this sort. A public
speaker, in speaking of my Winesburg tales, praised me as a writer
but spoke slightingly of the figures that lived in the tales. “They
weren’t worth telling about,” he said; and I remember that I sat at the
back of the room, filled with people, hearing him speak, and remember
sharply also just the sense of horror that crept over me at the moment.
“It is a lie. He has missed the point,” I cried to myself. Could the
man not understand that he was doing a quite unpermissible thing? As
well go into the bedroom of a woman during her lying-in and say to
her: “You are no doubt a very nice woman, but the child to which you
have just given birth is a little monster and will be hanged.” Surely
any man can understand that, to such a one, it might be permitted to
speak at any length regarding her own failings as a woman, but--if the
child live--surely this other thing must not be done. “It must not be
condemned for the failings of the mother,” I thought, shivering with
fright. As I sat listening certain figures, Wing Biddlebaum, Hugh
McVey, Elizabeth Willard, Kate Swift, Jesse Bentley, marched across the
field of my fancy. They had lived within me, and I had given a kind
of life to them. They had lived, for a passing moment anyway, in the
consciousness of others beside myself. Surely I myself might well be
blamed--condemned--for not having the strength or skill in myself to
give them a more vital and a truer life--but that they should be called
people not fit to be written about filled me with horror.
However, I again find myself plunging forward into a more advanced
and sophisticated point of view than could have been held by the boy,
beginning to remake his own life more to his own liking by plunging
into a fanciful life. I shall be blamed. Those of my critics who
declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the
meandering formlessness of these notes.
It does not matter. My point is that, in the boy, as later in the man
into whom the boy is to grow, there are two beings, each distinct, each
having its own life and each of importance to the man himself.
The boy who lives in the world of fact is to help his father put a
priming coat on a new house built by a prosperous Ohio farmer. In my
day we used a dirty yellow ochre for the purpose. The color satisfied
no sensual part of myself. How I hated it! It was used because it was
cheap and later was to be covered up, buried away out of sight. Ugly
colors, buried away out of sight, have a way of remaining always in
sight in the consciousness of the painter who has spread them.
* * * * *
In the hayloft the fat boy was awake now. Darkness was coming fast and
he must bestir himself, must if possible escape the wrath of his father
for the day wasted in entertaining me. He crawled up out of his own
hole and, reaching down, put a fat hand on my shoulder and shook me. He
had a plan for his own escape which he whispered to me as my head came
up into sight in the dim evening light in the loft.
He was an only son and his mother was fond of him--she would even lie
for him. Now he would creep away unseen to the house and frankly tell
his mother he has been fooling about with me all day long. She would
scold a little but, after a time, when his father came into the house
for supper and when in harsh tones he asked what the boy had been
doing, the gentle little lie would come. “It won’t really be a lie,”
the fat boy declared stoutly, defending the virtue of his mother. “Do
you expect me to do all the housework and the churning as well?” the
farm woman would ask her husband sharply. She, it seemed, was a person
of understanding and did not expect a boy to do a man’s work all the
time. “You’d think dad never was a kid,” he whispered to me. “He works
all the time and he wants me to work all the time too. I wouldn’t
never have no fun if it wasn’t for ma. Gee, I only wish I had a dad
like your’n. He’s just like a kid himself, isn’t he now?”
In the gathering darkness the farm boy and I crept down a ladder to the
floor of the barn and he ran away to the farmhouse, his feet making no
sound in the soft mud of the farmyard. The rain persisted and the night
would be cold. In another part of the barn the farmer was doing his
evening chores, assisted by father--always the accommodating one--who
held the lantern and ran to get ears of corn to throw into the horses’
feed-boxes. I could hear his voice, calling cheerfully. Already he knew
all the farm horses by name and spoke of them familiarly. “How many
ears for old Frank? Does Topsy get five ears too?”
Outside the barn, as I stood under the eaves, there was still a faint
streak of light in the western sky, and the new house we were to give
the priming coat, built close down to the road, could still be seen.
Little strings of water fell from the roof above and made a tiny
stream at my feet. The new house had two full stories and an attic.
How magnificent to be a man, to be rich and to be able to build such a
house! When the fat boy grew into manhood he would inherit the house
and many broad acres. He also would be rich and would have a great
house, with bathrooms and perhaps electric lights. The automobile had
come. No doubt he would have one. How magnificent a house, a farm, an
automobile--a beautiful wife to lie with him at night! I had been to
Sunday school and had heard the stories of the magnificent men of old,
Jacob and David and that young man Absalom, who had everything in the
world to look forward to but who nevertheless did unspeakable things.
And now the voices of the men inside the barn seemed far away. The
new house was in some queer way a menace to me. I wondered why. The
older house, the one the young New Englander had builded when he
had first come into the new land, stood far away from the road. One
went, from the barns, along a path to the right. The path lay beside
an apple orchard, and at the orchard’s end there was a bridge over a
small stream. Then one crossed the bridge and started climbing the
hill against the side of which the house had been built. It had been
built of logs, very solidly, on a small terrace, and as the farmer had
begun to prosper wings had been added. Back of the house stood forest
trees, some the same trees that had been there when the first room of
the cabin was built. The young farmer, with some of his neighbors,
had felled the trees for his house on the very ground on which it now
stood, and then during the long winter he had felled many other trees
in the flat plain below, where his farming land was to lie, and, on a
certain day, there had no doubt been a log-rolling, with other young
farmers and their women coming from far and near. A whole forest of
magnificent trees had been rolled into a great pile and burned--there
had been feastings, tests of physical strength among the young men, a
few unmarried fellows about, looking shyly at the unmarried girls, game
on the table, talk in the evening of the possibilities of a war with
the slaveholding farmers of the South.
All these things the older house had seen as it crouched on the side
of the hill, and now it seemed to have crept away out of sight in
the darkness, hidden itself among the trees still left standing on
the hill; but even as I stood looking lights began to appear at its
windows. The old house seemed smiling and calling to me. Now, myself
and my brothers had no home--the house in which we at that time lived
was not a home--for us there could be no home now that mother was not
there. We but stayed temporarily in a house, with a few sticks of
furniture--waiting--for what?
The older people of our native town had gone out of themselves, warmly,
toward us. How many times had I been stopped on the street by some
solid citizen of our town, a carpenter, Vet Howard, a wheelwright,
Val Voght, a white bearded old merchant, Thad Hurd. In the eyes of
these older people, as they talked to me, there was something, a light
shining as the lights now shone from the farmhouse among the trees.
They knew father--loved him, too, in a way--but well they knew he was
not one to plan for his sons, help his sons in making their own plans.
Was there something wistful in their eyes as they stood talking to the
boy on the village street? I remember the old merchant spoke of God,
but the carpenter and the wheelwright spoke of something else--of the
new times coming. “Things are on the march,” they said, “and the new
generation will do great things. We older fellows belong to something
that is passing. We had our trades and worked at them, but you young
fellows have to think of something else. It is going to be a time when
money will count big, so save your money, boy. You have energy. I’ve
watched you. Now you are a little wild after the girls and going to
dances. I saw you going down toward the cemetery with that little
Truscan girl last Wednesday evening. Better cut that all out. Work.
Save money. Get into the manufacturing business if you can. The thing
now is to get rich, be in the swim. That’s the ticket.”
The older fellows had said these words to me, somewhat wistfully, as
the old house, hidden now in the darkness, seemed to look at me. Was it
because the men who said the words were themselves not quite convinced?
Did the old American farmhouse among the trees know the end of its life
was at hand and was it also calling wistfully to me?
One remains doubtful and, as I now sit writing, I am most doubtful of
all the veracity of this impression I am trying to give of myself as a
boy standing in the darkness in the shelter of the barn’s eaves.
Did I really want to be the son of some prosperous farmer with the
prospect ahead of some day owning land of my own and having a big new
house and an automobile? Or did my eyes but turn hungrily toward the
older house because it represented to my lonely heart the presence of a
mother--who would even go to the length of lying for a fellow?
I was sure I wanted something I did not have, could never (having my
father’s blood in me) achieve.
Old houses in which long lives have been lived, in which men and women
have lived, suffered and endured together--a people, my own people,
come to a day when entire lives are lived in one place, a people who
have come to love the streets of old towns, the mellow color of the
stone walls of old houses.
Did I want these things, even then? Being an American in a new land
and facing a new time, did I want even what Europe must have meant
in the hearts of many of the older men who had talked to the boy on
the streets of an Ohio town? Was there something in me that, at the
moment, went wandering back through the blood of my ancestors, through
the blood of the ancestors of the men about me--to England, to Italy,
Sweden, Russia, France, Germany--older places, older towns, older
impulses?
The new house, the farmer was having built, stood clear of the
forest and directly faced the dirt road that led into town. It had
instinctively run out to meet the coming automobile and the interurban
car--and how blatantly it announced itself! “You see I am new, I cost
money. I am big. I am bold,” it seemed to be saying.
And looking at it I crouched for a moment against the wall of the barn,
instinctively afraid.
Was it because the new house was, for all its size, cheaply constructed
and at bottom ugly? Could I have known that even as a boy? To make such
a declaration would, I am sure, be giving myself an early critical
instinct too much developed. It would be making something of a little
monster of the boy crouching there in the darkness by the barn.
All I can say is that I remember how the boy who, on that evening long
ago, went slowly away from the barn through the mud of the barnyard,
turned his back on the new house, and stopped for a moment on the
bridge leading to the old house, sad and frightened. Before him lay a
life of adventures (imagined if not actually experienced), but at the
moment he went not toward the future but toward the past. In the older
house there was, to be sure, a meal to be had without labor--in this
case a meal prepared at the hands of a kindly faced woman--and there
was also a warm bed into which the boy could crawl to indulge all night
long undisturbed in his dreams; but there was something else. A sense
of security? It may be, after all, just the sense of security, or
assurance of warmth, food, and leisure--most of all leisure--the boy
wanted on that evening, that, for some reason I cannot explain, marked
the end of boyhood for him.
BOOK TWO
NOTE I
I WAS rolling kegs of nails out of a great sheet-iron warehouse and
onto a long platform, from where they were to be carted by trucks,
down a short street, out to a wharf and aboard a ship. The kegs were
heavy but they were not large, and as they were rolled down a slight
incline to the platform the rolling could be done with the foot. Like
practically all modern workmen my body had plenty to do but my mind was
idle. There was no planning of the work, no scheming to make the day’s
work fit the plan. The truckmen, four heavy and good-natured Swedes,
loaded the trucks, and that also required no skill. The kegs were so
heavy that a few of them only could be put on a truck at one time and
the trucks did not have to be loaded skillfully.
As for the nails themselves, they came pouring out of machines
somewhere back in the factory at the edge of which the warehouse stood.
The warehouse had two platforms, one at which cars were loaded and our
own for the loading of trucks, and I could hear voices on the other
platform--an oath, a broken laugh--but never did I see the men employed
there.
On our side we had a little life of our own. My single fellow-workman,
who all day long ran in and out of the warehouse with me, was a short,
stocky young man who on Saturday afternoons played baseball and, in
the winter, hockey. He continually boasted of his prowess in games and
when the warehouse foreman was not about--he seldom appeared on our
platform--the athlete stopped work to tell one of the teamsters a story.
The stories all concerned one impulse in life, and as I had grown
unspeakably weary of hearing them and indeed doubted the man’s potency,
he was so insistent about it, I did not stop working but rolled
kegs busily. The teamster laughed heavily. “There was a fat woman,
hanging out clothes, on a line. Two stray dogs came along,” etc. The
story-teller himself laughed as he told his tale and sometimes glared
at me because I did not stop to listen. “You ain’t afraid of your job,
are you?” he asked, but I did not answer. The horses hitched to the
trucks were quiet beasts with broad flanks, and as he talked, telling
his tales, they switched their tails slowly back and forth, driving
flies away. Then they turned their heads to look at me, running out
of the warehouse and down the incline behind one of the flying kegs.
“Don’t be in a hurry. You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” they also
seemed to be saying.
My legs and arms, my body had enough to do but my mind was idle. During
the year before I had been with race horses, going with them about Ohio
to the fairs and race meetings, and then I had given up that life,
although I loved it well, because I wanted something from men I did not
think I could find at the tracks. The life of the sporting fraternity
had color and the horses themselves, beautiful temperamental things,
fascinated me, but I hungered for something of my own. At the tracks
one received a succession of thrills and was kept on the alert but the
emotions aroused were all vicarious.
“No Wonder,” a gray pacer, was on the track for his morning workout and
I, being unoccupied at the moment, leaned over a wooden fence to watch.
He had been jogged slowly around the track and now his driver was about
to do what we called “setting him down.” His flanks flattened and he
seemed to spring into his stride, and what a stride it was! He fairly
flew over the ground and the boy by the fence, half asleep but a moment
before, was now all attention. He leaned far over the fence to watch
and wait. Now the gray was making the upper turn and soon he would be
headed directly down the home stretch. By leaning far forward the boy
could see just the play of the muscles over the powerful breast. Oh,
the flying legs, the distended nostrils, the sobbing whistle of the
wind in and out of the great lungs!
But all vicarious after all, all something outside myself. I rubbed the
legs of the horses and later walked them slowly for miles, cooling them
out after a race or after a workout. Plenty of time to think. Could I,
in time, become a Geers, a Snapper Garrison, a Bradley, a Walter Cox, a
Murphy? Something whispered to me that I could not. There was required
of a successful horseman something I did not have. Either the trotting
or the running tracks required a calm, a seemingly indifferent exterior
I could not achieve. A track negro with whom I worked had spoken
discouraging words. “You’re too excitable, too flighty,” he said. “A
horse, that wanted to, would know how to bluff you. You ain’t made to
get all they is outen a horse.”
Restlessness had taken hold of me and I had left the tracks to go visit
certain cities.
The work, I found, did not tire me and after the longest and hardest
day I went to my room, bathed, took off my sweaty clothes and was a new
man, quite refreshed and ready for adventure.
At the warehouse a kind of understanding between myself and the
Swedish teamsters, had already been achieved. When they returned with
the empty trucks along the short street between our warehouse and
the wharf they stopped at a saloon to have filled the tin pails for
beer they carried on the trucks, and the athlete and myself had also
provided ourselves with pails which they had filled for us. Aha! the
athlete might boast of his prowess on the baseball field or at playing
hockey in the winter, but I could outdrink him and in the eyes of the
teamsters that made me the better man. How foolish the athlete! Had he
declined to have anything to do with drink all might have been well
with him, but as the ability to “carry your liquor” was an accepted
standard among us he foolishly accepted it. On hot days and in the
late afternoon the pails were sent frequently to the saloon and the
athlete became worried. “Ah, let’s cut it out,” he said to me coaxingly
and the teamsters laughed. “Why, Eddie, we haven’t had any at all
yet,” they said; but he insisted, was compelled to insist. Already he
staggered a little as he rolled the kegs out of the warehouse and now
it was my turn to loiter with the teamsters while he worked. No more
story-telling now. “I have a kind of headache to-day,” he said, while
the teamsters and I drank six, eight, sometimes ten or twelve of the
generous portions of strong beer, flauntingly. As the beer was paid
for from a fund collected from all, we were drinking, in part at least,
at the athlete’s expense. I drank and drank, enjoying the discomfiture
of my fellow-worker, and something happened inside my head. My legs
remained steady and I could roll the kegs more rapidly and accurately
than ever--they became like corks and I fairly whirled them along the
warehouse floor and down the incline and to the trucks--but at the same
time all reality became strangely colored and overlaid with unreality
inside myself. Beyond the roadway, in which the trucks stood, there was
a vacant lot and this now became the centre of my attention. The vacant
lot was in reality filled with rubbish, rusty tin cans, piles of dirt,
broken wagon wheels and wornout household utensils, and among all this
foul stuff dirty-faced children played and screamed; but now all this
unsightliness was wiped off the surface of my vision. I talked to the
teamsters and together we laughed at Eddie who kept scolding and saying
apologetically that the beer we had been drinking was rotten stuff and
gave him a headache, while all the time the most marvelous things took
place in the vacant lot before my eyes.
First of all an army of soldiers appeared and marched back and forth
directed by a man on a magnificent horse. He was many years older but
at the same time looked strangely like myself and wore a long, flowing
purple mantle. And also he had a golden helmet on his head while his
soldiers, who obeyed his slightest wish, were also richly dressed.
First there came a file of men dressed in light green and with bright
yellow plumes flying from their helmets, and these were followed by
others dressed in blue, in flaming red and in uniforms combining all
these colors.
The men marched for what seemed a long time in the vacant lot while
I dreamed of becoming a great general, a world conqueror perhaps,
but continued meanwhile sending the kegs whirling down the incline.
Eddie and I had a race to see who could roll kegs most accurately and
rapidly--an hour before he could have beaten me easily, but now I
could roll six to his five and land them just so, standing upright on
the platform below--while at the same time there was this other life,
outside myself, going on before my eyes.
I raised my eyes and looked at the vacant lot and the soldiers went
through quick and accurate manœuvres. Then they marched away along a
near-by street and the place became a great canvas over which colors
played. The surface was brown, a soft velvety glowing brown, now other
colors appeared, reds, golden yellows, deep purples. The colors stole
swiftly out across the open place and designs were formed. I will be a
great painter, I decided; but now the vacant lot had become a carpet on
which walked beautiful men and women. They smiled at me, beckoned to
me, and then they paid me no more attention and became absorbed in each
other. “Very well; if you prefer to roll kegs, go your own way,” they
seemed to be saying, and when they laughed there was something derisive
in their laughter.
Was I a little insane? Had I been born a little insane? I rolled the
kegs of nails, drank innumerable pails of beer, the sweat rolled
from my body and soaked my clothes and presently quitting time came
and I returned along a street with hundreds of other workers--all
smelling equally vile--to a rooming house where I lived with many other
laborers, Hungarians, Swedes, a few Irish, several Italians and, oddly
enough, one English Jew.
The house was run by a worried-looking woman of forty who had one
daughter, a young woman of nineteen, who had taken a kind of fancy to
me. Her father, a laborer like myself, had deserted her mother when the
child was but four or five years old and had never been seen again. As
for the daughter, she had a strong body, clear blue eyes, thick lips
and a large nose, and like myself she had Italian blood in her veins,
her father having been an Italian.
Toward her mother she was loyal, staying in the house and doing the
work of a chambermaid for very little pay when she might have made a
great deal more money at something else; but her loyalty was tempered
by a sturdy kind of independence that nothing could shake. During the
spring, before I came to live at the house, she had become engaged to
marry a young sailor, an engineer’s assistant on a lake boat, but,
although later I spoke to her of the danger, she did not let the fact
of her engagement to another interfere with her relationship with me.
Our own relationship is a little hard to explain. When I came from the
warehouse and climbed the stairs to my room I found her there at work,
making my bed, which had been allowed to air all day, or changing the
sheets. The sheets were changed almost daily and her mother constantly
scolded about the matter. “If he wants clean sheets every day let him
pay for them,” the mother said, but the daughter paid no attention,
and indeed I was no doubt responsible for more than one quarrel between
mother and daughter. Among laboring people a girl engaged is taboo and
the other men in the house thought I was doing an unfair thing to her
absent lover. Whether or not he knew what was going on I never found
out.
What was going on? I came into the house, climbed the stairs and
found her at work in my room. At the foot of the stairs I had met her
mother, who had scowled at me, and now the other workers, trooping in,
attempted to tease. She kept on working and did not look at me and I
went to stand by a window that looked down into the street. “Which one
is she going to marry?--that’s what I want to know,” one of the workers
on the floor below called to another. She looked up at me and something
I saw in her eyes made me bold. “Don’t mind them,” I said. “What makes
you think I do?” she replied. I was glad none of the men who worked at
our warehouse roomed at the house. “They would be shouting, laughing
and going on about it all day,” I thought.
The young woman--her name was Nora--talked to me in whispers as she did
the work in the room, or she listened and I talked. The minutes passed
and we stayed on together, looking at each other, whispering, laughing
at each other. In the house all, including the mother, were convinced I
was working to bring about Nora’s ruin and the mother wanted to order
me out of the house but did not dare. Once as I stood in the hallway
outside my door late at night I had overheard the two women talking in
the kitchen of the house. “If you mention the matter again I shall
walk out of the house and never come back.”
Occasionally in the evening Nora and I walked along the street, past
the warehouse where I was employed, and out upon the docks, where we
sat together looking into the darkness and once--but I will not tell
you what happened upon that occasion.
First of all I will tell you of how the relationship of Nora and myself
began. It may be that the bond between us was brought into existence by
the beer I drank at the warehouse in the late afternoons. One evening,
when I had first come to the house, I came home, after drinking
heavily, and it was then Nora and I had our first intimate conversation.
I had come into the house and climbed the three flights of stairs to my
room, thinking of the vacant lot covered with the soft glowing carpet
and of the beautiful men and women walking thereon, and when I got to
my room it seemed unspeakably shabby. No doubt I was drunk. In any
event there was Nora at work and it was my opportunity. For what? I did
not quite know, but there was something I knew I wanted from Nora and
the beer drinking had made me bold. I had a sudden conviction that my
boldness would overawe her.
And there was something else too. Although I was but a young man I
had already worked in factories in several cities and had lived in
too many shabby rooms in shabby houses in factory streets. The outer
surface of my life was too violently uncouth, too persistently uncouth.
Well enough for Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and others to sing of
the strength and fineness of laboring men, making heroes of them,
but already the democratic dream had faded and laborers were not my
heroes. I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me
and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness.
The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all
struck me as men who had no sense of life at all. They were so likely
to be dry intellectual sterile men. Already I had begun asking myself
the questions I have been asking myself ever since. “Does no man love
another man? Why does not some man arise who wants the man working
next to him to work in the midst of order? Can a man and a woman love
each other when they live in an ugly house in an ugly street? Why do
working men and women so often seem perversely unclean and disorderly
in their houses? Why do not factory owners realize that, although they
build large, well-lighted factories, they will accomplish nothing until
they realize the need of order and cleanliness in thinking and feeling
also?” I had come into the midst of men with a clean strong body, my
mother had been one who would have fought to the death for order and
cleanliness about her and her sons. Was it not apparent that something
had already happened to the democracy on which Whitman had counted
so much? (I had not heard of Whitman then. My thoughts were my own.
Perhaps I had better be more simple in speaking of them.)
I had come out of a messy workplace along a messy street to a messy
room and did not like it and within me was the beer that made me bold.
And there were the visions I had seen in the vacant lot. It may be
that I thought then that all my fellows lived as I did, having quite
conscious and separate inner and outer lives going on in the same
body that they were trying to bring into accord. As for myself I saw
visions, had from boyhood been seeing visions. Moments of extreme
exaltation were followed by times of terrible depression. Were all
people really like that? The visions were sometimes stronger than the
reality of life about me. Might it not be that they were the reality,
that they existed rather than myself--that is to say, rather than my
physical self and the physical fact of the men and women among whom I
then worked and lived, rather than the physical fact of the ugly rooms
in ugly houses in ugly streets?
Was there a consciousness of something wrong, a consciousness we all
had and were ashamed of?
There was the vacant lot in which an hour before I had seen the
marching soldiers and the beautifully gowned men and women walking
about. Why might that not exist as really as the half-drunken
teamsters, myself, the irritated athlete and the piles of unsightly
rubbish?
Perhaps it did exist in all of us. Perhaps the others saw what I saw.
At that time I had a great deal of faith in a belief of my own that
there existed a kind of secret and well-nigh universal conspiracy to
insist on ugliness. “It’s just a kind of boyish trick we’re up to,
myself and the others,” I sometimes told myself, and there were times
when I became almost convinced that if I just went suddenly up behind
any man or any woman and said “boo” he or she would come out of it and
I would come out of it, and we would march off arm in arm laughing at
ourselves and everyone else and having really quite a wonderful time.
I had decided to try to say “boo” to Nora, I fancy. There I was in the
room with her (I had been in the house about three days and had only
seen her and heard her name spoken once before, when she was sweeping
out the hallway by my door), and now she was throwing the covers back
over the soiled sheets on my bed and there was dust on the window panes
and streaks along the wall paper, while the floor of the room had been
given but two or three careless whisks with a broom. Nora was making
the bed and back of her head, as she leaned over to do the job, there
was a picture on the wall, a picture of five or six water lilies lying
on a table. There was a streak of dust down across the white face of
the lilies and at that moment a cloud of dust, stirred up by the heavy
trucks now going homeward along the street, floated just outside the
window.
“Well, Miss Nora,” I suddenly said after I had been standing in
the room for a moment, silently and boldly staring at her. I began
advancing toward her and no doubt my eyes were shining with enthusiasm.
I dare say I was pretty drunk but I am sure I walked steadily. “Well,”
I cried in a loud voice, “what are you up to there?”
She turned to stare at me and I went on, still speaking rapidly, with a
kind of hurried nervous stuttering manner brought on by the liquor and
a fear that if I stopped speaking I should not be able to start again.
“I refer to the bed,” I said, going up close to her and pointing at it.
“You see, don’t you, that the sheets you are putting on the bed are
soiled?” I pounded on my own chest, much in the manner of the primitive
hero in Mr. Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape”; and no doubt had I
at that time seen the play I might at that moment have begun saying in
hoarse, throaty tones: “I belong. I belong.”
I did not say anything of the sort because I am not primitive and had
not then seen the play, nor did I whine or complain because of the
soiled sheets on the bed. I talked, I am afraid, rather like a Napoleon
or a Tamerlane to poor Nora who was already appalled by my sudden
descent upon her.
Pounding on my chest and descending upon her I made a speech something
in the following manner: “My dear Nora, you are a woman and no doubt
a virgin, but you may not always be one. Have hopes. Some day a man
will come along who will admire your person and will ask your hand in
marriage.” I looked at her somewhat critically. “You will not refuse
him,” I declared, with the air of a soothsayer delivering himself of a
prophecy. “You will accept the marriage state, Nora, partly because you
are bored, partly because you will look upon the opportunity as a means
of escape from your present way of life, and partly because you will
find within yourself an instinct telling you that any kind of marriage
will bring you something you want.”
“But we will not discuss you. We will discuss myself,” I declared. I
continued pounding myself on the chest and so great was my momentary
enthusiasm that later my breast was somewhat sore. “Nora, woman,” I
said, “look at me! You cannot see my body and I dare say if I did not
have on these soiled clothes your maidenly modesty would compel you to
run out of this room. But do not run. I do not intend to take off my
clothes.”
“Very well, we will not speak any more of my body,” I said in a loud
voice, wishing to reassure her since I could see she was becoming a
little alarmed. No doubt she thought me insane. She had grown slightly
pale and had stepped away from me so that her back was against the
wall and the soiled water lilies were just above her head. “I am not
speaking of my own body in relation to your body, do not get that
entirely feminine notion into your head,” I explained. “I am speaking
of my body in relation to yonder soiled sheets.”
And now I pointed toward the bed and stopped pounding my own chest
which was becoming sore. Stepping quite close to her, so close in
fact that my face was within a few inches of her own, I put one hand
against the wall and tried to quiet my own loud, blustering tones, and
to assume a tone of great ease, or rather, of nonchalance. I took a
cigarette from my pocket and succeeded in lighting it without burning
my fingers, a feat requiring a good deal of concentration under the
circumstances. The truth is, that I had bethought myself that in a
moment more Nora would either hit me with the broom, that stood close
at her hand, or would run out of the room thinking me insane.
As I had a notion I wanted to put over to her while I could and while
my beer-born courage lasted I now tried to be more at my ease. A
little smile began to play about the corners of my mouth and I thought
of myself at the moment as a diplomat--not an American or an English
diplomat, let me say, but an Italian diplomat of, we will suppose, the
sixteenth century.
In as light and bantering a tone as I could assume under the
circumstances--my task was the more difficult because a workman,
hearing my speech from a neighboring room, had come along the hallway
and was now standing at the door with a look of astonishment on his
face--assuming, I say, a light bantering tone, I now rapidly explained
to Nora the notion that had been in my head when I interrupted her
bed-making. She had been about to reach for the broom and with it
to drive me from the room, but now the words streaming from my lips
caught and held her attention. With a fluency in words that never
comes to me when I am writing and that only comes to my lips when I
am slightly under the influence of strong drink I explained myself.
To the astonished young woman I compared the bed she had been making
to a suit of clothes I might be about to put on my body after I had
bathed the aforesaid body. Talking rapidly and enunciating my words
very distinctly so she should lose nothing of my discourse (and I
might here explain to you, my readers, that in ordinary conversation
I am rather given to the slovenly dragging of words so common to the
people of the Middle West. We, you must know, do not say “feah,” as a
New Englander might, nor “fear,” as an Italian-American might, that is
to say, pronouncing distinctly the “r,” but “feehr”), going on very
clearly and distinctly I told Nora she was not to judge me by the smell
that came from my clothes, that under my clothes lived a body I was
about to wash clean as soon as she had finished her work in the room
and had gone away. Leaving both her and the workman outside the door
standing and staring at me I walked to the window and threw it up. “The
cloud of dust you see floating up from the street below,” I explained,
“does not represent all the elements of the atmosphere even in an
American industrial city.” I then tried, as best I could, to explain to
my limited audience that air, normally, might be a clean thing to be
cleanly breathed into the lungs and that a man like myself, although
he might wear dirty, soiled clothes in order to earn money to keep his
body alive might also at the same time have a certain feeling of pride
and joy in his body and want clean sheets to put it between when he
laid it down to sleep at night.
To Nora, standing there and staring at me, half in wonder, half in
anger, I tried to explain a little my habit of having visions and
sketched for her, as rapidly and briefly as I could, the marvelous
sights I had in fancy seen in the vacant lot near the warehouse in
the late afternoon, and also I preached her a kind of sermon, not, I
assure you, with the object of changing her own character but rather to
carry out the plan that had formed in my rather befuddled brain, a plan
for bullying her--that is to say of bending her to my own purpose if
possible.
Being by nature a rather shrewd man, however, I did not put the case to
her directly but pursuing the method common to preachers who always try
to conceal their own wants under the mask of the common good, so that a
man who is apparently always trying to get others into Heaven is really
only afraid he will not manage to get there himself, pursuing valiantly
this method, I pointed to the soiled water lilies above Nora’s head.
An inspiration seized me. At that time, you must remember, I did know
that Nora was engaged to be married to an engineer’s assistant on a
lake steamer. I chanced at that moment to see the picture of the water
lilies and thought of the little quiet back waters of Sandusky Bay
where as a boy I had sometimes gone fishing with a certain charming
old country doctor who for a time had employed me, ostensibly as a
stable boy but really as a companion on long country drives. The old
doctor had been a talkative soul and loved to speculate on life and its
purposes and we often went fishing on summer afternoons and evenings,
not so much for the purpose of catching fish as to give the doctor the
opportunity to sit in a boat on the bank of some stream and pour wisdom
into my willing young ears.
And so there I was, in the presence of Nora and that wondering workman,
standing with one arm raised and pointing at the cheap chromo on the
wall and being as much the actor as I could. Even though my brain
was somewhat befuddled I was watching Nora, waiting and hoping that
something I might say would really arrest her attention, and now I
thought, as I have said, of quiet sweet back waters of bays and rivers,
of suns going down in clean evening skies, of my own white bare feet
dangling in warm pellucid waters.
To Nora I said the following words, quite without definite thought, as
they came flowing from my lips: “I do not know you, young woman, and
have never until this moment thought of you and your life but I’ll tell
you this: the time will come when you will marry a man who now sails on
the seas. Even at this moment he is standing on the deck of a boat and
thinking of you, and the air about him is not like this air you and I
for our sins are compelled to breathe.”
“Ah ha!” I cried, seeing by a look in Nora’s eyes that my chance shot
had hit home and shrewdly following up the advantage that gave me. “Ah
ha!” I cried; “let us think and speak of the life of a sailor. He is in
the presence of the clean sea. God has made clean the scene upon which
his eyes rest. At night he lies down in a clean bunk. Nothing about him
is as it is about us. There is no foul air, no dirty streaks on wall
paper, no unclean sheets, no unclean beds.”
“Your young sailor lies in bed at night and his body is clean, as I
dare say also is his mind. He thinks of his sweetheart on shore and of
necessity, do you see, all about him is so clean, he must think of her
as one who in her soul is clean.”
And now to my readers I must stop a moment to explain that I speak at
length in this way of my conversation with Nora, my triumph with her,
as I may I think legitimately call it, because it was a purely literary
feat and I am writing, as you know, of the life of a literary man. I
had never, when all this occurred, been at sea nor had I ever been
aboard a ship, but I had, to be sure, read books and stories regarding
ships and the conduct of sailors aboard ships, and in my boyhood I had
known a man who was once mate on a river boat on the Mississippi River.
He to be sure had spoken more often of the gaudiness rather than the
cleanliness of the boats on which he had worked but, as I have said, I
was being as literary as I could.
And realizing now that I had by good fortune stumbled upon the right
note I went on elaborating the romantic side of the life of the sailor
aboard ship, touching upon the hopes and dreams of such a man and
pointing out to Nora that it was a great mistake on her part not to
have one room in the great house of so many rooms, upon the care of
which she could pour some of the natural housewifely qualities with
which her nature was, I was certain, so richly endowed.
I saw, you understand, that I had her but was careful not to press
my advantage too far. And then, too, I had begun to like her, as
all literary men like inordinately those who take seriously their
outpourings.
And so I now quickly drove a bargain with Nora. Like herself, I
explained, I was lonely and wanting companionship. Strange thoughts
and fancies came to me that I would like to tell to another. “We will
have a friendship,” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “In the evenings we
will walk about together. I will tell you of the strange notions that
come into my head and of the marvelous adventures that sometimes occur
to me in the life of my fancy. I will do that and you--well, you see,
you will take extra good care of my room. You will lavish upon it some
of the affection natural to your nature, thinking as you do so, not of
me but of your sailor man at sea, and of the time to come when you may
make a clean warm nest for him ashore.”
“Poor man,” I said, “you must remember that he is buffeted often by
storms, often his life is in danger and often too he is in strange
ports where but for his constancy to the thoughts of you, he might get
into almost any kind of a muddle with some other woman.”
I had succeeded, you see, by a purely literary trick, in getting myself
into Nora’s consciousness as in some way connected with her absent
lover.
“But I must not press the matter too far,” I thought, and, stepping
back, stood smiling at her as genially as I could.
And then another thought came. “There will be a kind of wrath in her
soul at this moment and I must direct it quickly toward someone other
than myself.” The workman who, attracted by my loud words at the
beginning of my discourse, had come along the hallway and who now stood
at the door of my room looking in, did not speak English very well and
I was sure had not understood much of my long speech.
Going to the open window I now said, over my shoulder: “I am silly
saying all these things to you, Nora, but I have been lonesome and to
tell the truth I am a little drunk. Forgive me. You know yourself that
the other men in this house are stupid fellows and do not care at all
in what shape their rooms are kept. They work like dogs and sleep like
dogs and do not have thoughts and dreams as you do and as I and your
sailor man do.”
“There is that man listening to our little conversation, there now, by
the door,” I said straightening up and pointing; but my speech got no
further. As I had conjectured within myself, Nora had for some minutes
been anxious to hit someone with the broom that stood close at hand and
she now, suddenly and quite unreasonably, decided to hit the workman.
Grabbing the broom in her hand she flew at him screaming with wrath.
“Can’t we have a little talk, my friend and I, without your sticking in
your nose?” she cried, and the workman fled down the hallway with Nora
at his heels, striking vigorously at him with the broom.
NOTE II
ONE who like myself could not, because of circumstances, spend the
years of his youth in the schools must of necessity turn to books and
to the men and women directly about him; upon these he must depend for
his knowledge of life and to these I had turned. What a life the people
of the books led! They were for the most part such respectable people,
with problems I did not have at all or they were such keen and brainy
villains as I could never hope to become. Being a Nero a Jesse James or
a Napoleon I often thought would suit me first rate but I could not see
how I was going to make it. In the first place I never could shoot very
well, I hadn’t the courage to kill people I did not like and to steal
on any grand scale involved the risk of prison--or at least I then
thought it did. I later found that only petty thieves were in danger
but at that time, long before I myself became a schemer in business,
I knew only petty thieves. At the race tracks some of my friends were
always being marched off to prison or I heard of some man I had known
being nabbed and taken away and prisons frightened me. I remembered
vividly a night of my boyhood and myself going through an alleyway
and past our town jail and the white face of a man staring out at me
from behind iron bars. “Hey kid, get me an iron bar or a hammer and
pass it up here to me and I’ll give you a quarter,” he said in harsh
throaty tones but I was frightened at the sight of his white drawn
face in the moonlight and at the thoughts of the grim silent place in
which he stood. A murderer, a crazed farmer who had killed his wife and
hired man with an ax, had once been lodged in the jail and I had got
the notion into my head that all men who passed into its doors were
terrible and dangerous. I ran quickly away and got out of the alleyway
into a lighted street and always afterward I remembered that moment,
the stars in the sky, the moonlight shining on the faces of buildings,
the quick sharp laughter of a girl somewhere in the darkness on the
porch of a house, the sound of a horse’s hoofs in a roadway, all the
sweet sounds of free men and women walking about. I wanted to spend my
life walking about and looking at things, listening to words, to the
sound of winds blowing through trees, smelling life sweet and alive,
not put away somewhere in a dark ill-smelling place. Once later when I
was working at Columbus, Ohio, I went with a fellow--he had a sickening
kind of curiosity about such places and kept urging and urging--to the
state prison on visiting day. It was at the hour when the prisoners
take exercise and many of them were in a large open place between high
walls, on which guards with guns walked up and down. I looked once and
then closed my eyes and during the rest of our pilgrimage through the
place I carefully avoided looking into the prisoners’ faces or into
the cells before which we stopped but looked down instead at the stone
floors until we were again outside in the sunlight.
As I have said the books were mostly about respectable people with
moral problems, with family fortunes that must be saved or built up,
daughters safely married, hints at a possible loss of virtue on the
part of some woman and the terrible consequences that were to follow.
In the books the women who grew familiar with men, to whom they were
not married, were always having children and thus giving themselves
away to all and I did not know any such women. The kind of women among
whom life at that time threw me were much wiser and pretty much seemed
to have children or not as they chose and I presume I thought the other
kind must be a rather foolish sort and not worth bothering or thinking
about.
And then there was the grand life in the big world, the life of the
courts, the field, camp and palace, and in the America of Newport,
Boston and New York. It was all a life far away from me but it seemed
to occupy the attention of most of the novelists. As for myself I did
not think at that time that I would ever see much of such life and I am
afraid it did not much tempt me.
However, I read greedily everything that came into my hands. Laura
Jean Libbey, Walter Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Fielding,
Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Balzac, the Bible, Stephen Crane, dime
novels, Cooper, Stevenson, our own Mark Twain and Howells and later
Whitman. The books--any books--have always fed my dreams and I am one
who has always lived by his dreams and even to-day I can often get as
much fun and satisfaction out of a dull book as out of a so-called
brilliant or witty one. The books like life itself are only useful to
me in as much as they feed my own dreams or give me a background upon
which I can construct new dreams.
Books I have always had access to and I am sure there is no other
country in the world where people in general are so sentimentally
romantic on the subject of books and education. Not that we read the
books or really care about education. Not we. What we do is to own
books and go to colleges and I have known more than one young man
without money work his way patiently through college without paying
much attention to what the colleges are presumed to teach. The fact
of having got through college and of having managed to get a degree
satisfies us and so the owning of books has become in most American
families a kind of moral necessity. We own the books, put them on the
shelves and go to the movies and the books, not being read and sitting
dumbly there on the shelves in the houses, fairly jump at anyone who
cares for them. It was so also in my own youth. Wherever I went someone
was always bringing me books or urging me to come to some house and
help myself and having got into most houses I could have helped myself,
if books were not offered, simply by re-arranging the shelves so there
was no gaping hole left. I did it sometimes but not often.
As for the owners, they were interested, absorbed in the great
industrial future just ahead for all Americans. We were all to have
college degrees, ride in automobiles, come by some kind of marvelous
mechanical process into a new, more cultured and better age, “Clear the
track! Come on! Get in the swim!” was the cry and later I was to take
up the cry myself and become one of the most valiant of the hustlers
but for a time--for several years--I stayed in the backwaters of life
and looked about.
My companions for the time being were flash men, the sharpshooters and
touts at the race tracks. How many such fellows as Sit-still Murphy,
Flatnose Humphrey of Frisco, Horsey Hollister and others of that stripe
I knew at that time! And there were also gamblers, a politician or two
and most of all a strange kind of sensitive and footloose man or woman,
unfitted for the life of a hustler, not shrewd, usually lovable and
perplexed, feeling themselves out of touch with the mood of the times
and often spending life getting drunk, wandering about and loving to
talk away long hours on bridges in cities, on country roads and in the
back rooms of little saloons, which for all the evil they are presumed
to have brought upon us I thank my gods existed during my youth. How
often have I said to myself: “What kind of a world will this be when
we are all moral and good people, when there are no more rascals to be
found among us and no places left where rascals may congregate to speak
lovingly of their rascalities?”
Of the rascals I met at that time there was one of a far different sort
than the others who did much to educate me in the ways of the world.
I found him in a town of northern Ohio to which I had drifted and in
which I had got a job in a stable run by a man named Nate Lovett, who
owned several race horses and who also kept a livery barn. Nate had a
stallion, a fast trotter named “Will you Please” and got most of his
income by taking him about to neighboring towns to serve mares but he
had also some ten or twelve half-wornout old driving horses that were
let to the young men of the town when they wanted to take some girl to
a dance or for a drive in the country. These I took care of, working
all day and sleeping on a cot in what we called the office but having
my evenings free. A gigantic and goodhearted Negro took care of the
racing horses and stayed in the office from eight until eleven in the
evening. “Go on child. I ain’t got no folks in this town and I don’t
want none here neither,” he said.
Lovett, a man of the English jockey type, had lost one eye in a fight
but was a quiet enough fellow, never losing his temper except when
someone spoke favorably of the Irish or of the Catholic religion. He
had a fixed notion that the Pope at Rome had made up his mind to get
control of America and had filled the land with crafty spies and agents
who worked tirelessly night and day to accomplish his ends and when
he spoke of the Irish Catholics he lowered his voice, put his hand
over his mouth, winked, scowled and acted in general like one creeping
stealthily through some mountainous country, infested with desperadoes,
and in which every tree and stone might conceal a deadly enemy.
At the stable during the long quiet winter afternoons there was little
to do so we all gathered in the office, a room some fifteen by twenty
with a large stove in the centre. There certain citizens of the town
came daily to visit us.
In the room there would be at one time Bert the Negro; Lovett, sitting
on a stool and tapping the floor with a driver’s whip; myself, taking
in everything and sometimes with my nose in a book; Tom Moseby, who
had been a gambler on a Mississippi River boat in his young days and
who always wore a large dirty white collar with a black stock; Silas
Hunt, a lawyer who had no practice nor seemed to want any and who was
said to be writing a book on the subject of constitutional law, a
book that no one ever saw; a fat German, who was a follower of Karl
Marx and who owned a large farm near the town, but who, for all his
anti-capitalistic beliefs, was said to cheat ruthlessly all who had
any sort of dealings with him; Billy West, who owned two race horses
himself and whose wife ran the town millinery store and who was himself
something of a dandy and, last of all, Judge Turner.
The judge was a short fat neatly-dressed man with a bald head, a
white Vandyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks and
extraordinarily small hands and feet. In his younger days he had a
cousin, at one time a quite powerful political figure in Ohio, and
after the Civil War the judge, an unsuccessful young lawyer, had
managed through the cousin to get himself sent South on some sort of
financial mission, to settle, I believe, certain claims covering cotton
corn and other stores requisitioned or destroyed by the conquering
Union armies.
It had been the great opportunity of the judge’s life and he had taken
shrewd advantage of it, had come near being shot in two or three
southern cities but had kept his head and had, it was whispered about,
well feathered his own and the cousin’s nest. After it was all over
and the cousin had fallen from power he had come back to his native
place--after three or four years spent in Europe, lying low in fear of
a threatened investigation of his operations--and had bought a large
brick house with a lawn and trees and had imported a Negro man-servant
from the South. He spent his time reading books and listening during
the afternoon to the talk of the men of our little circle, flattering
women rather grossly, drinking a good deal of raw whisky and delivering
himself of rather shrewd observations on life and the men he had known
and seen.
The judge had never married and indeed cared nothing for women although
he fancied himself in the rôle of a gallant who could do with women as
he pleased, a notion constantly fed by the reactions to his advances of
the women with whom his life in the town threw him into contact--the
wife of the grocer from whom he bought the supplies for his home, a
fat girl with red cheeks who clerked in the dry-goods store, Billy
West’s wife, and several others. To all these women he was elaborately
courteous, bowing before them, making pretty speeches and when no one
was watching even boldly caressing them with his little fat hands. In
the grocery he even pressed the hand of the merchant’s wife while her
lord was engaged, with his back turned, in getting a package down off a
shelf, and even sometimes pinched her hips, laughing softly while she
shook her head and scowled at him, but to me, for whom he had taken a
fancy born of my predilection for books, he spoke of women always with
contempt.
“My dislike of them is however but a peculiarity of my own nature and
I would not have it influence you in the least,” he explained. “The
French, among whom I once lived and whose language I speak, make an art
of this matter of love-making between men and women and I admire the
French exceedingly. They are a wise and shrewd people and not much
given to the talking of tommyrot I assure you.”
The judge had, early in our acquaintance, invited me to his house
where I later spent many of my evenings during that spring, drinking
his whisky, listening to his talk and smoking cigarettes with him. It
was the judge in fact who taught me to smoke cigarettes, a habit much
looked down upon in American towns at that time, being taken as an
indication of weakness and effeminacy. The judge was, however, able to
carry off his own devotion to the habit because he had been in Europe,
spoke several languages and most of all because he was reported to
be educated. In the saloons of the town, when men congregated before
the bar in the evening, the subject of cigarette smoking was often
discussed. “If I ever caught a son of mine smoking one of those coffin
nails I’d knock his fool head off,” said a drayman. “I agree with you
for all except maybe Judge Turner now,” said his companion. “For him
it’s all right. He sets a bad example maybe, but looket! Ain’t he been
to college and to Paris and London and all them places? Lord, I only
wish I had his education, that’s all I wish.”
* * * * *
I am in the judge’s house and it is dark and stormy outside. I have
dined with the Negro Bert at six in the kitchen of Nate Lovett’s house
and now, although it is but shortly past seven, the judge has also
dined and is ready for an evening of talk. There is a large stove of
the sort known as a baseburner in the room and the walls are lined with
books. We sit by a small table and there is a decanter of whisky upon
it. Although I am but eighteen the judge does not hesitate to invite me
to help myself to the whisky. “Drink all you want. If you are the kind
of a fool who makes a pig of himself you might as well find it out.”
The judge talks as we drink and his talk is something new to my ears.
These are not the words or thoughts of the towns, the city factories or
the sports of the race tracks. All of the judge’s talk is a laughing,
half-cynical, half-earnest kind of confession. Were the things the
judge told me of himself true? They were no doubt as true as these
confessions of myself and my own relations to life I am setting down
here. What I mean is that he was at least trying to inject into them
the essence of truth.
I drank of the whisky sparingly, not so much through fear of being
convicted of piggishness by getting drunk as from a desire to hear all
the judge might have to say.
At the barn when he came there to loaf with the others during the
winter afternoons the judge usually remained silent and managed
always to achieve an effect of wisdom by the good-natured but cynical
expression of his face and eyes. He sat with his fat white hands folded
over his round neatly-waistcoated paunch and looked about with the
cold little eyes that were so amazingly like the eyes of a bird. My
employer, Nate Lovett, was upon his everlasting theme. “Now you just
look at it. I wish the people would begin to do some thinking in this
country. Why, there were six Catholics elected to this last Congress
and people just sit still and say there’s no harm in a Catholic.” The
horseman was a regular subscriber to a weekly paper that attributed
all the ills of society to the growth in America of the Catholic faith
and read it eagerly--it was the only thing he did read--that his own
pet prejudice be properly fed and nourished, and no doubt there was
published somewhere a paper that carried on an equally earnest campaign
against the Protestants. My employer went to no church but the notion
of six Catholics in the national Congress alarmed him. The horseman
declared that the Catholics would in a short time come into absolute
power in America and drew a black enough picture of the future when
all of the things he so feared had come to pass. The wheels of the
factories would stop turning, streets of towns would be unlighted, men
and women would be burned at the stake, there would be no schools, no
books accessible to the general public, we would have a tyrant king
instead of a Congress and no man who did not bow his knee to the Pope
in Rome would be safe in his bed at night. The horseman declared he
had once read a book showing just the condition of affairs when the
Catholics were in power--that is to say in the Middle Ages. Pointing
the butt of his driving whip at Judge Turner he pleaded, and never in
vain, for a more learned and scholarly substantiation of his theory.
“Ain’t I right now, Judge?” he asked pleadingly. “Mind you, I ain’t
setting myself up before a man who knows more than I do and has read
all the books and been everywhere, even in Rome itself, but I’ll tell
you something. That king, that Englishman, of the name of Henry the
Eighth, who first told the Pope at Rome to go back to his Dago town and
mind his own business was some man now, wasn’t he, eh?”
And now Nate had got himself warmed up and lit into his theme. “They
say he was too free with women, that King Henry. Well, what if he
was?” he cried. “I knew a man once, Jake Freer it was, from over
near Muncie Indiana, who could get more out of a bum horse in a hard
race than any man you ever set your eyes on and he was the darndest
woman-chaser in ten states. Why, he couldn’t get near a skirt, old or
young, without prancing around like a two-year-old stud and he was
forty-five if he was a day but put him in a hard race and then you’d
see the stuff come out in him. He’d be laying back in second or third
place, let us say. Well, they gets to the upper turn and he knows he
ain’t got the speed to outstep ’em. What does he do? Does he give up?
Not he. He lets on to go crazy and begins to swear and rip around. Such
language! Lord a’mighty, how he could swear! It was wonderful to hear
him. He tells them other stiffs of drivers, laying in there ahead of
him, that he’s going to kill ’em or punch their eyes out and the first
you know he slides his old skate of a horse out in front and once in
front he stays there. They don’t dast to try to pass him. He scares his
own horse too I suppose but anyway he sure scares them other drivers.
Down he sails to the wire looking back over his shoulder making threats
and switching his long whip around. He was a big fine-looking man that
had had his cheek laid open with a razor in a fight with a nigger and
was an ugly looking man to see. “I’m going to whip hell outen you,” he
keeps saying over his shoulder, just loud enough so the judges can’t
hear him up in the stand. But them other drivers can hear him all right.
“And then what does he do? As soon as the heat is finished he hurries
up to the stand, to the judges’ stand you see, pretending to be mad
as a wildcat and he claims the other drivers put it up between them to
foul him. That’s what he does, and he talks so hard and so earnest that
he half makes the judges believe it and he gets away with maybe hitting
one of the other horses in the face with his whip at the upper turn and
throwing him off his stride or something like that.
“Now, Judge, I ask you, wasn’t he all right, if he was a woman-chaser?
And that Henry the Eighth was just like him. He told the Pope to go
hang himself and I’m an Englishman and once I told two Catholic stiffs
the same thing. They banged out this here eye of mine but you bet I
gave ’em what for, and that’s just what Henry did to the Pope, now
ain’t it?”
At the livery barn the judge had smilingly agreed with Nate Lovett that
Henry the Eighth was one of the great and noble kings of the world
and had expressed unbounded admiration for Jake Freer, adding that,
as far as his own reading and traveling had carried him, he had never
been able to find that the Catholics when they were in absolute power
all over the world had ever done anything for racing or to improve the
trotting or pacing-horse breeds. “All they did,” he remarked, quietly
“except perhaps Francesco Gonzago, Marquis of Mantua, who did rather
go in for good horses, was to build a lot of cathedrals like Chartres,
Saint Mark’s at Venice, Westminster Abbey, Mont St. Michel and others
and to inspire the loveliest and truest art in the world. But,” he said
smilingly, “what good does all that do for a man like you Nate, or for
anyone here in this town? You didn’t know Francesco, who had a knack
for fast horses, and forty cathedrals would never get you another mare
for ‘Will you Please’ or help either you or Jake Freer to win one race,
and there is at present little doubt in my own mind that the future of
America lies largely with just such men as you and Jake.”
At his own house as we sat together in the evenings, the judge paid
me the rare compliment, always deeply appreciated by a young man, of
assuming I was on the same intellectual level with himself. He smoked
cigarettes and drank surprising quantities of whisky, holding each
glass for a moment between his eyes and the light and making a queer
clicking sound with his thin dry lips as he sat looking at it.
The man talked on whatever subject came into his mind and I remember an
evening when he got on the subject of women and his own attitude toward
them and the queer feeling of sadness that crept over me as he talked.
Much of what he had to say I did not at that time understand but I
sensed the tragedy of the man’s figure as he drew for me a picture of
his life.
His father had been a Presbyterian minister and a widower in the town
to which the son came later to lead his own solitary life and the judge
said that in his youth he remembered his father chiefly as a silent
figure given to long solitary walks in fields and on country roads. “He
loved my mother I fancy,” the judge said. “Perhaps he was one of those
rare men who can really love.”
The boy had grown up, himself rather drawn away from the life of the
town, and had been sent later to a college in the East, and during
his first year in college his father died. There was a suspicion of
suicide, although little was said about it, the man having taken
an overdose of some sort of medicine given him by one of the town
physicians.
It was then that the politician cousin appeared and after the funeral
he talked to the younger man, telling him that a few days before his
death the father had come to him and talked of the son, securing from
the politician a promise that in case of his own sudden death, the lad
would be looked after and given a fair chance in life. “Your father
killed himself,” said the cousin, a rather downright fellow who was
fifteen years older than the young man he addressed. “He was in love
with your mother and was also a man who believed in a future life. What
he did was to spend years in prayer. He was always praying, day and
night as he walked around, and in the end he convinced himself that his
untiring devotion had won him so high a place in God’s esteem he would
be forgiven for doing away with his own life and would be admitted into
Heaven to live throughout eternity with the woman he loved.”
After his father’s funeral young Turner had gone back to the eastern
college and there the tragedy that had been long awaiting him suddenly
pounced.
During his boyhood, he explained, he had been rather a solitary,
spending his time in reading books and in playing on a piano that
had belonged to his mother and that his father, who was also devoted
to music, had taught him to play. “The boys of the town,” he said,
in speaking of that portion of his life, “were not of my sort and I
could not understand them. At school the larger boys often beat me
and they encouraged the younger boys in treating me with contempt. I
could not play baseball or football, physical pain of any sort made me
ill, I would begin crying when anyone spoke harshly to me, and then I
developed a kind of viciousness in myself too. Being unable to beat
the other boys with my fists and having even at that early age read a
great many books, particularly books of history, with which my father’s
library were filled, I spent my days and nights dreaming of all sorts
of sly deviltry.”
“For one thing,” the judge went on, laughing and rubbing his hands
together, “I thought a great deal of poisoning some of the boys at the
school. At the recess time we were all gathered in a large yard given
over to the boys as a playground. There was the yard without any grass
and at one side, by a high board fence, a long wooden shed into which
we went to perform certain necessary functions of the body. The board
fence separated our play place from one given over to the recreation of
the girls.”
“The walls of our own shed and our side of the fence itself were
covered with crude drawings and scrawled sentences expressing the
sensual dreams of crude and adolescent youth and these were allowed
by the authorities to remain. The place filled me with unspeakable
revulsion as did also much of the talk of the boys and I shall remember
always something that happened to me there. A great loutish boy is
standing at the door of our shed into which I am at that moment forced
by nature to go and is gazing at the sky over the high board fence
that separates us from the playground of the girls. His eyes are
heavy with stupid sensuality. From beyond the fence comes the shrill
laughter of the little girls. Suddenly, as I am about to pass--a small
creature I was then with delicate hands and at that time I believe with
small delicate features--suddenly and quite without apparent cause he
raises a large heavy hand and strikes me full in the face, so that the
blood runs in a stream from my nose, and then, without a word to me,
shrinking in terror against the fence on which the horrible pictures
and words are scrawled and mingling my blood with tears, he goes calmly
away. He is quite cheerful in fact, as though some deep want of his
nature had suddenly been satisfied.
“I had been reading a history of Italy; a most flamboyant book it was,
filled with the doings of vicious and crafty men--I now suppose they
must have been, vicious and crafty but then how I delighted in them! My
father’s being a minister had I presume turned my mind to the Church
and how I wished he had been a great and powerful cardinal or a pope of
the fifteenth century instead of what he was! I had dreamed of him as a
Cosmo de Medici and myself as that Duke Francisco who succeeded Cosmo.
“What a grand time in which to live I thought that must have been and
how I loved the book in my father’s library that described the life of
those days. In the book were such sentences! Some of them I remember
even to this day and in my bed at night, even yet sometimes, I lie
laughing with delight at the thought of the fanfaronading march of the
words across the pages of that book. ‘Italian vitality had subsided
into the repose of the tomb. The winged arrow of death entered his
heart. The hour of vengeance had struck.’
“I will read you something from the book itself,” said the judge,
pouring himself another glass of whisky, holding it for a moment
between his eyes and the light and then, after drinking, going to a
shelf from which he took a book in a red cover. After turning the pages
for a few minutes and having lighted himself a fresh cigarette he read:
“‘The emperor Charles the Fifth placed Cosmo de Medici on the ducal
chair of Florence and Pope Pius Fifth granted him the title of grand
duke of Tuscany. He was a cruel and perfidious tyrant.’”
“‘Cosmo was succeeded by Francisco, a duke who governed through the
instrumentality of the poisoned cup and the dagger, and who lapped
blood with the greed of a bloodhound. He married Bianca Cabello,
the daughter of a nobleman of Venice. She was the wife of a young
Florentine. Francisco saw her, and, inflamed by her marvelous beauty,
invited her and her husband to his palace, and assassinated her
husband. His own wife died at just that time, probably by poison, and
the grand duke married Bianca. His brother, the Cardinal Ferdinando,
displeased with the union, presented them each with a goblet of
poisoned wine, and they sank into the grave together.’”
“Aha!” cried Judge Turner, looking over the top of the book at me and
laughing gleefully. “There you are, you see. That was myself in my
boyhood, that young Francisco. In my fancy I succeeded, when there
was no one about, when I was walking alone along the sidewalks of
this very town or when I had got into my bed at night, I succeeded
I say in making the great metamorphosis. In the books in my father’s
library were many pictures of the streets of old Italian and Spanish
cities. There was one I sharply remember. Two young bloods, with cloaks
over their shoulders and with swords swinging at their sides, are
approaching each other along a street. Two or three monks, a man seated
on the back of a donkey going along a narrow roadway, a great stone
bridge in the far distance, a bridge spanning perhaps a deep dark gulf
between high mountain peaks, peaks faintly seen amid clouds and in the
foreground, near the two young men and dominating the whole scene, a
great cathedral done in the glorious Gothic style that I myself later,
in my real flesh and blood life, so loved and bowed down before at
Chartres in France.”
“And there was I, in fancy you understand, one of the two young men
walking in that glorious street and not frightened little Arthur
Turner, son of a sad and discouraged Presbyterian minister in an Ohio
town. There was the metempsychosis. I was Francisco before he had
succeeded Cosmo and had become himself the great and charmingly wicked
duke sitting in his ducal chair, and long before he became enamored
of the lovely Bianca. Every day I went into my own little room in my
father’s house and got out a sword of wood I had fashioned from a lath
and buckled it on. I had got one of my father’s coats from a closet and
this, serving me as a cloak, I imagined it of the finest Florentine
stuff, a cloak of such stuff as would become the shoulders of one who
belonged to the great Medici family and who was to sit in the proud
ducal chair of Florence. Up and down the room I went and below my
father, the sad long-faced man, had become in my fancy the great Cosmo
himself. We were in our ducal palace and cardinals in their red cloaks,
princes, captains of armies, ambassadors and other princely personages
were waiting at the door for a word with the great Cosmo.
“Welladay! My own time would come. For the present I was concerning
myself with the study of poisons. On a little table in my room I had
a collection of various small receptacles, an old saltcellar with a
broken top, two small teacups, an empty baking-powder can and other
small vessels, found in the street or stolen from our kitchen, and
into these I had put salt, flour, pepper, ginger and other spices
taken also by stealth from the kitchen. I mixed and remixed, making
various colored powders which I folded into small packets or dampened
and rolled into little balls which I concealed about my person, and
then went forth into the street, to visit in fancy other palaces or to
poison, or run through with my sword, people who were enemies of our
house. What beautifully wicked men and women all about me and with what
suavity we greeted each other! How deeply we loved and served--to the
very death--our friends and how quietly crafty and urbane we were with
our enemies! Oh, I loved then the word urbane. What a glorious word, I
thought. At that time, as the young Francisco, I was determined that if
my craftiness could raise me to the great office of pope I would take
for myself the name Urbane, adding the ‘e’ to a name already taken by
some of them.
“These were my dreams, and then, well I was compelled to go to the town
school and sit sometimes in that horrible shed facing the crude and
terrible scrawlings on the walls and to become also the victim of the
crude outbreaks of my companions.
“Until one day in the spring. I had gone for a walk with my father in
the late afternoon after school was dismissed and we were botanizing,
as my father was fond of doing, both for his own edification and also
I suppose in order to further his son’s education. In a meadow at the
edge of a strip of woodland into which we were passing I found a white
mushroom with which I ran to father. ‘Throw it away,’ he cried. ‘It is
an Amanita Phalloides, the Destroying Angel. A bit of it no larger than
a mustard seed would destroy your life.’
“We returned to our own house and sat down for the evening meal with
the words ‘Amanita Phalloides’ ringing in my ears and with the round
bell-like shape of the Amanita Phalloides dancing before my eyes. It
was white, of a strange glowing whiteness, suggesting I thought not
the death of some common man of low degree but that of a prince or a
great duke. It was so Francisco and Bianca must have looked, I thought,
when in the words of the flamboyant writer of the book in my father’s
library, they ‘sank into the grave together.’ There must have been just
that very white metallic pallor on their cheeks. What a picture of that
sinking I had in my fancy. It was not just a grave, a mere dirty hole
scooped out of the ground, as graves were wont to be in our Ohio town.
No indeed! An opening had been made in the earth it is true but this
had been entirely rimmed with flowers and was filled with a liquid, a
soft purple perfumed liquid. And so into the grave went the bodies of
myself as Francisco and of my lovely paramour, Bianca. The weight of
our golden robes made us sink slowly into the soft purple flood and as
we sank from sight music from the lips of all the fair children of the
aristocracy of Florence was wafted far over fair fields, while back of
the massed children in white stood also--upon a kind of green eminence
at the foot of a majestic mountain--all the great lords, dukes,
cardinals and other dignitaries of our imperial city.
“It was so that, as the grown-up Francisco, I was to die but I was yet
alive and there was the Amanita Phalloides--later when I grew older
I laughed to myself and told myself it should have been a Phallus
Impudicus--there it was lying on the grass in the meadow at the edge
of the wood. I had placed it carefully there at the command of my
father and had, oh very carefully, marked the spot. One went along the
main road leading out of town, to the south, to a certain bridge and
across a meadow by a cowpath, climbed a fence, walked a certain number
of steps along a rail fence beside a young wheat field, where elders
grew, crossed another meadow and came to the edge of the wood. There
was a stump near which grew a bush and even as I sat with father at our
evening meal and as our housekeeper, a fat silent old woman with false
teeth that rattled sometimes as she talked, even as she served the
evening meal I was repeating to myself a certain formula I had made on
our homeward journey. One hundred and nineteen steps along the cowpath
in the meadow, ninety-three steps along the fence in the shadow of the
elders, two hundred and six steps across the second meadow to the stump
and my prize.
“I had determined to get the Amanita Phalloides on that very night
after my father and our housekeeper had gone to sleep and although
I was terribly frightened at the prospect of the tramp along lonely
country roads and across fields, that I imagined were at night infested
by strange and ferocious beasts lying in wait ready to destroy, I did
not think of giving up for that reason.
“And so in fact in the middle of that very night, when all in our house
and in the town were asleep, I went. Buckling on my wooden sword and
creeping silently downstairs I let myself out at the kitchen door,
having first supplied myself with matches and two or three bits of
candle from a kitchen shelf.
“Oh, how I suffered on that journey and how determined I was! When I
had got out from among the silent terrifying houses and had come nearly
to the place where I was to turn off the highroad two men on horseback
passed and I hid myself, lying on my belly, white and silent, in a
ditch at the side of the road. ‘They are desperadoes going forth to
kill,’ I told myself.
“And then they were gone and I could no longer hear the tramp of their
horses and there was the trip to be made across the fields, recounting
the steps as I had counted them during the homeward journey that
afternoon with my father. During the walk homeward that afternoon both
father and myself were muttering to ourselves, he praying no doubt that
when he had taken his own life God would admit him into Heaven and into
the company of the woman he loved and I counting steadily ‘eighty-six,
eighty-seven, eighty-eight,’ counting steadily the steps that would
lead me again to the Amanita Phalloides, to the Destroying Angel, with
which I dreamed I might take many lives.
“I got my prize by the aid of the matches and the bits of candle and
after a good deal of nervous fumbling about, creeping on my hands and
knees in the wet grass,” said the old judge laughing in his peculiarly
bitter and at the same time half-jolly way. “I got it and ran all the
way home, imagining every bush and every deep shadow on the road and in
the fields might contain man or beast lying in wait ready to destroy
me. Then later I managed without the old housekeeper knowing to dry
it on a small shelf at the back of our kitchen stove and after it was
thoroughly dried I powdered it and putting the horrible powder I had
concocted into papers, carried them off with me to school.”
“Many of the boys of our school lived at a distance and carried their
luncheons and I fancied myself going nonchalantly into the hallway
where the luncheon pails were left standing in a row and sprinkling
the powders over their contents. As for the boys who went home at the
noon hour--well, you see I had read in one of the books in my father’s
library of a certain elegant lady of Pisa who once cut a peach, handing
half of it to a gallant she wished to destroy and herself eating the
other quite harmless half. I thought I might work out some such scheme,
using an apple instead of a peach and working some of the poison under
the skin of one side with a pin point.”
The judge had been laughing, I thought in a somewhat nervous manner,
as he told me the above tale of his youth. “To be sure I never really
intended to poison anyone,” he said. “Well now, did I or did I not?
I really can’t say. I had achieved however, through the accidental
discovery of the qualities of the Amanita Phalloides, a certain new
attitude toward myself. As I went about with the little poison packets
in my pockets I felt suddenly a new kind of respect for myself. I
felt power in myself and something quite new to the other boys must
have crept at about this time into the expression of my eyes. I was
no longer frightened and did not shrink away or begin crying when one
of the bullies of the school approached me at the recess time now
and--could it be true?--I felt they were suddenly afraid of me. The
thought filled me with a queer sort of joy and I walked boldly about
the school yard, not strutting but at the same time shrinking from no
one. There was at that time a report current among the boys--I do not
know where it came from but it was believed and I did not deny it--that
I carried a loaded pistol about in my pocket.”
The judge--and by the way his title was a quite spurious one given him
by his fellow-townsmen late in his life because he had been a lawyer,
because he had money, had been in the government service and had been
to Europe--the judge now told me of his experience as a young man in
college. Now that I come to think of it he no doubt did not tell me
at one time all the things I am here setting down. During that winter
and spring I spent a great many evenings in his company and he talked
continuously of himself, of his cheating the men of the South to get
money for himself and cousin, of his wanderings in Europe, of the men
he had met at home and abroad and of what he had concluded concerning
men’s lives, their motives and impulses and what he thought it would be
best for me to do to make my own life as happy as possible.
He had returned at the end of his own life to live out his days alone
in his native place because, as he said, one had in the end to accept
his own time, place and people, whatever they might be, and that one
gained nothing by wandering about the earth among strangers. During his
middle years he had thought he would live out his life in some European
town or city, in Chartres where, while he lived there for some months,
he was all tender with love and regard for the men of a bygone age who
had built the lovely cathedral at that place; at Oxford where he had
spent some months wandering filled with joy among the old colleges
and under the great trees that line the river Thames; in London where
he got to have a great respect for the half-stupid but as he said
wholly dignified self-respect of the young Englishmen he saw walking
in the Strand or along Piccadilly; or in some more colorful town of
the south like Madrid or Florence. The French and Paris he declared
he could not understand, although he wanted very much to understand
and be understood by them, as he felt they were in a way more like
himself than any of the others of the Europeans he had seen. “I learned
to speak their language quite fluently,” he said, “but they never
really took me into their lives. The men I met, painters, writers and
fellows of that sort, went about with me, borrowed my money and tried
continually to sell me inferior paintings but I always realized they
were laughing up their sleeves, and just what about I couldn’t make out
or perhaps I shouldn’t have cared.”
In the end the judge had come home to his Ohio town and had settled
down to his books, his whisky and his companionship with such men
as Nate Lovett, Billy West, and the others. “We are what we are, we
Americans,” he said, “and we had better stick to our knitting. Anyway,”
he added, “people are nice here as far as I have been able to observe
and although they are filled with stupid prejudices and are fools, the
common people, workers and the like, such as the men of this town,
wherever you find them, are about the nicest folk one ever finds.”
* * * * *
As for the judge’s experience as a young college man and the sort of
tragedy that then came and that no doubt set the tone of his after
life, it was stupid enough. With his mind filled with the thoughts
taken from the books in his father’s library and after a boyhood of
such loneliness and brooding as I have here described he went to
college filled with high hopes but was there doomed to live as lonely
an existence as he had lived in his home town. The young men of the
college, given for the most part to the cultivation of athletic sports
and to going about to parties and dances with the girls of a near-by
city, did not take to young Turner and he did not take to them.
And then during his second year something happened. There was a young
man in one of the upper classes, an athlete of note but at the same
time an earnest student, toward whom the Ohio boy’s fancy now turned.
It was an entirely sentimental affair, as the man afterward explained
and might have done him no harm had he been content never to give it
any kind of expression.
He did however near the end of his second year try to give it
expression. For weeks he had been going about, much like a young girl
in love, thinking constantly of the athlete, of his splendid rugged
figure, fine eyes and quick active mind and of how wonderful it would
be if he could have an intimate friendship with such a fellow. He
dreamed of walks the two might take together in the evenings under the
elms that grew on the campus. “I thought he would take my arm or I
would take his and we would walk and talk,” Judge Turner said, and I
remember that as he spoke he got out of his chair and walked about the
room and that his small white hands played nervously over the front of
his coat. He seemed not to want to face me as he told the more vital
part of his tale but going behind my chair walked up and down the room
at my back, and I remember how, although I was then but a boy, I knew
he suffered and wanted to put his arms about me as he talked but did
not dare. My own heart was filled with sadness so that unknown perhaps
to him tears came in my eyes and what part of his tragedy and his words
I did not understand I am sure I did dimly sense the meaning of.
He had, it happened, gone about for months thinking of the older fellow
of his college as one much like himself but blessed with a stronger
body, greater ability to make his way in the world and no doubt also
wanting to give something of himself, or something beautiful outside
himself that would represent some spirit of himself, to another man.
Once young Turner went to a near-by city and spent a whole afternoon
going from shop to shop trying to find some bit of jewelry, a painting
or something of the sort he himself thought lovely and that would be
within the limits of his own slender means that he might in secret
send to the man he so admired.
“For women I did not care,” the judge said huskily. “To tell the truth
I was afraid of women. In a relationship made with a woman one, I
thought, risked too much. It might be quite altogether perfect or it
might be just nothing at all. To tell the truth I did not then have
and never have had enough assurance of fineness in myself to make it
possible for me to approach a woman with the object of becoming her
lover and I was not then and never have been a strong lustful man and I
had, even at that time, put all thought of anything very definite ever
happening between myself and a woman utterly aside.”
“I had put the thought aside, and had taken up this other, you see.
Between myself and the young athlete I had created in fancy a relation
that would never attempt to come to any sort of physical expression. We
would live, I dreamed, each his own life, each gathering what beauty
might be possible from the great outer world and bringing it as a prize
to the other. There would be this man I loved and of whom I asked
nothing and toward whom my whole impulse would be forever just to give
and give to the very top of my bent.
“You understand how it was, or rather of course you do not understand
now but some day it may be you will,” said the voice coming from the
thin lips of the small fat man walking up and down the room behind me
in the house in Ohio. “I did a foolish thing,” said the voice. “One day
I wrote a note to the man telling something of the dream that had been
in my mind and as I had nothing else to send I went to a florist’s and
sent him a great bunch of beautiful roses.”
“I got no answer to the note but later he showed it about and all
during the rest of my days at the school--and out of a kind of
blind determination I stayed on there until I graduated and had got
my degree, my expenses after my father’s death being paid by my
cousin--during all the rest of my days at the school I was looked upon
generally as a--perhaps you do not even know the meaning of the word--I
was looked upon as a pervert.
“There was another and more vulgar word, a word I had seen on the walls
of the shed and on the board fence when I was a schoolboy that was
also shouted at me. Like my father before me I, in my trouble, took to
walking in the streets and in lonely places at night. The word would
be shouted at me from the darkness or from the steps of a house as I
stumbled along in the darkness and I had not then, as I had when I was
a lad, the satisfaction of thinking of myself as another Francisco, as
one who could resort to poison powders to assert his own supremacy and
to reëstablish himself with himself.
“I was simply determined I would finish my days in college and would
not follow my father’s footsteps in taking my own life--having then and
always having had a queer sort of respect, do you see, for life as it
manifested itself in my own body--that I would finish my days in that
place and that I would then, at the first opportunity, get hold of
enough money to make myself respected among the men with whom and in
whose company I would in all likelihood have to live out my days.
“I conceived, do you see, of money-making as the only sure method to
win respect from the men of the modern world and as for you, my lad,
if you have sensibilities as I suppose you have or I should not have
taken the trouble to invite you to my house--as for you, my lad, if an
opportunity comes to you, as it did to me when my cousin got me sent
South, you had better take advantage of it,” said the judge, coming
from behind my chair and standing before me to pour himself another
glass of the whisky which he drank this time I noticed without the
customary little ceremony of holding it for a moment between his eyes
and the light.
I thought, or I may fancy I then thought, that the judge’s bright
birdlike eyes were clouded and looked tired as he said these last
words and that his hands as he poured the whisky trembled a little but
perhaps the notion but springs from my more mature fancy playing over a
dramatic moment in life.
And at any rate he came to loaf away the next afternoon at the stable
and was as he always had been, sitting in silence, listening to
the talk that went round and folding his fat little hands over his
neatly-waistcoated paunch. And when he spoke he, as always, concealed
under so thick a coat of good-natured toleration what sarcasm may have
lurked in his words that he won and seemed always to hold the respect
of all of his hearers.
NOTE III
DEFINITION
“_A really high-class horse is one that is consistent, game,
intelligent, gentle, obedient, courageous, and at all times willing
and able to go any route with weight up and maintain a high rate
of speed and overcome all ordinary difficulties under adverse
conditions._
“_Remember that horses are not machines._”
--_Trainer and Cloeker’s Handicap (strictly private)._
A NARROW beam of yellow light against the satin surface of purplish
gray wood, wood become soft of texture, touched with these delicate
shades of color. The light from above falls straight down the face
of a great heavy beam of the wood. Or is it marble rather than wood,
marble touched also by the delicate hand of time? I am perhaps dead and
in my grave. No, it cannot be a grave. Would it not be wonderful if I
had died and been buried in a marble sepulchre, say on the summit of a
high hill above a city in which live many beautiful men and women? It
is a grand notion and I entertain it for a time. What have I done to
be buried so splendidly? Well, never mind that. I have always been one
who wanted a great deal of love, admiration and respect from others
without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it. I am buried
magnificently in a marble sepulchre cut into the side of a large hill,
near the top. On a certain day my body was brought hither with great
pomp. Music played, women and children wept and strong men bowed their
heads. Now on feast days young men and women come up the hillside to
look through a small glass opening left in the side of my burial place.
It must be through the opening the yellow light comes. The young men
who come up the hillside are wishing they could be like me, and the
young and beautiful women are all wishing I were still alive and that I
might be their lover.
How splendid! What have I done? The last thing I remember I was working
at that place where so many kegs of nails had to be rolled down an
incline. I was full of beer too. What happened after that? Did I save a
besieged city, kill a dragon like Saint George, drive snakes out of the
land like Saint Patrick, inaugurate a new and better social system, or
what could I have done?
I am somewhere in a huge place. Perhaps I am standing in that great
cathedral at Chartres, the cathedral that Judge Turner told me about
when I was a lad and that I myself long afterward saw and that became
for me as it has been for many other men and women the beauty shrine of
my life. It may be that I am standing in that great place at midnight
alone. It cannot be that there is any one with me for I feel very
lonely. A feeling of being very small in the presence of something vast
has taken possession of me. Can it be Chartres, the Virgin, the woman,
God’s woman?
What am I talking about? I cannot be in the cathedral at Chartres
or buried splendidly in a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a
magnificent city. I am an American and if I am dead my spirit must now
be in a large half-ruined and empty factory, a factory with cracks in
the walls where the work of the builders was scamped, as nearly all
building was scamped in my time.
It cannot be I am in the presence of the Virgin. Americans do not
believe in either Virgins or Venuses. Americans believe in themselves.
There is no need of gods now but if the need arises Americans will
manufacture many millions of them, all alike. They will label them
“Keep smiling” or “Safety first” and go on their way, and as for the
woman, the Virgin, she is the enemy of our race. Her purpose is not our
purpose. Away with her!
The beam of wood I see is just a beam of wood. It was cut in a forest
and brought to the factory to support a wall that had begun to give
way. No one touched it with careless hurried hands and so it aged as
you see, quite beautifully--as trees themselves age. All about me are
broken wheels. In the factory the great steam-driven wheels are forever
still now.
Broken dreams, ends of thoughts, a stifled feeling within my chest.
Aha, you Stephenson, Franklin, Fulton, Bell, Edison--you heroes of
my Industrial Age, you men who have been the gods of the men of my
day--is your day over so soon? “In the end,” I am telling myself, “all
of your triumphs come to the dull and meaningless absurdity, of say
a clothespin factory. There have been sweeter men in old times, half
forgotten now, who will be remembered after you are forgotten. The
Virgin too, will be remembered after you are forgotten. Would it not
be amusing if Chartres continued to stand after you are forgotten?”
Is it not absurd? Because I do not want to work in a warehouse and roll
kegs, because I do not want to work in a factory anywhere I must needs
go getting gaudy and magnificent and try to blow all factories away
with a breath of my fancy. My fancy climbs up and up.
Democracy shall spread itself out thinner and thinner, it shall come to
nothing but empty mouthings in the end. Everywhere, all over the earth,
shall be the dreary commercial and material success of, say the later
Byzantine Empire. In the West and after the great dukes, the kings and
the popes, the commoners--who were not commoners after all but only
stole the name--are having their day. The shrewd little money-getters
with the cry “democracy” on their lips shall rule for a time and then
the real commoners shall come--and that shall be the worst time of
all. Oh, the futile little vanity of the workers who have forgotten
the cunning of hands, who have long let machines take the place of the
cunning of hands!
And the tired men of the arts. Oh, the cunning smart little men of
the arts of New York and Chicago! Painters making advertising designs
for soap, painters making portraits of bankers’ wives, story-tellers
striving wearily to “make” the _Saturday Evening Post_ or to be
revolutionists in the arts. Artists everywhere striving for what?
Respectability perhaps--to call attention to themselves perhaps.
They will get--a Ford. On holidays they may go see the great automobile
races on the speedway at Indianapolis Indiana. Not for them the
flashing thoroughbreds or the sturdy trotters and pacers. Not for them
freedom, laughter. For them machines.
Long ago that Judge Turner had corrupted my mind. He played me a hell
of a trick. I have been going about trying to have thoughts. What a
fool I have been! I have read many books of history, many stories of
men’s lives. Why did I not go to college and get a safe education? I
might have worked my way through and got my mind fixed in a comfortable
mold. There is no excuse for me. I shall have to pay for my lack of a
proper training.
In the next room to the one in which I am lying two men are talking.
FIRST VOICE. “He took straw, ground it, put it into some kind
of rubber composition. The whole was mixed up together and subjected to
an immense hydraulic pressure. It came out a tough kind of composition
that can be made to look like wood. It can be grained like wood. He
will get rich. I tell you he is one of the great minds of the age.”
SECOND VOICE. “We shall have prohibition after a while and
then you’ll see how it will turn out. You can’t down the American mind.
Some fellow will make a drink, a synthetic drink. It won’t cost much to
make. Perhaps it can be made out of crude oil like gasoline and then
the Standard will take him up. He’ll get rich. We Americans can’t be
put down, I’ll tell you that.”
FIRST VOICE. “There is a man in New York makes car wheels out
of paper. It is ground, I suppose, and made into a kind of mush and
then is subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. The wheels look
like iron.”
SECOND VOICE. “Do you suppose he paints them black like iron?”
FIRST VOICE. “It’s a great age we live in. You can’t down
machinery. I read a book by Mark Twain. He knocked theories cold, I’ll
tell you what. He made out all life was just a great machine.”
* * * * *
Where am I? Am I dreaming or am I awake? It seems to me that I am
somewhere in a great empty place. I shall have one of my terrible fits
of depression if I am not careful now. Sometimes I walk gayly along the
streets and talk to men and women gayly but there are other times when
I am so depressed that all the muscles of my body ache. I am like one
on whose back a great beast sits. Now it seems to me I am in a huge
empty place. Has the roof of a factory in which I was at work at night
fallen in? There is a long shaft of yellow light falling down a beam of
wood or marble.
Thoughts flitting, an effort to awaken out of dreams, voices heard,
voices talking somewhere in the distance, the figures of men and women
I have known flashing in and out of darkness. There is a tiny faint
voice speaking: “The money-makers will grow weary and disgusted with
their own money-making and labor shall have lost all faith, all sense
of the cunning of the hand. The factory hands shall rule. What a mess
it will be!”
* * * * *
Where am I? I am in a bed somewhere in a room in a workers’ rooming
house. Two young mechanics live in the next room and now they are
getting out of bed and are talking cheerfully. Once on cold nights
monks awoke in cold cells in monasteries and muttered prayers to God.
Now in a cold room two young mechanics proclaim their faith in new gods.
Words in a brain trying to come into consciousness out of heavy sleep.
“Service! They make a point of service,” says one of the young men’s
voices. My brain, a voice in my own brain, chattering: “The woman
who had been taken in adultery came to wash with her hands the tired
feet of the Christ. She wiped his feet with her long hair and poured
precious ointment upon them.” A distorted thought born of the effort
to awaken from a heavy dream: “Many men and women are going along a
street. They all have long hair and bear vessels of precious ointment.
They are going to wash the feet of a Rockefeller, of ‘Bet a million’
Gates, of a Henry Ford or the son of a Henry Ford, the gods of the new
day.”
And now the dream again. Again the great empty place. I cannot breathe.
There is a great black bell without a tongue, swinging silently in
darkness. It swings and swings, making a great arch and I await silent
and frightened. Now it stops and descends slowly. I am terrified. Can
nothing stop the great descending iron bell? It stops and hangs for a
moment and now it drops suddenly and I am a prisoner under the great
iron bell.
NOTE IV
WITH a frantic effort I am awake, I am in my laborers’ rooming house
and Nora, who is my friend, has been trying to clean the wall paper in
my room. She takes bits of bread dough and rubs the walls. The paper
on the walls was originally yellow but time and coal soot have made it
almost black. Light is struggling in through a window, wiped clean by
Nora but yesterday, but already nearly black again. The morning sun is
playing on the wall.
Nora’s lover does not come home although he writes whenever his ship
comes to port. The ship carries ore from Duluth to Chicago and one may
be quite sure he does not sleep much of the time in a clean berth nor
smell in his nostrils the clean sea air, as I represented things to
Nora when I wanted her to take better care of my room. Nora has tried.
That idea of mine was a purely literary one but it has made Nora and
myself friends.
She fancies the notion of having someone to care for, to do things for,
and so do I. It is a literary triumph for me and I instinctively like
literary triumphs. We are much together and as the time is a black
one for me she makes life livable. Nora is a true modern, not fussy,
not making a great brag and bluster about it as did so many of the
“moderns” in the arts I was to see later in New York. In my day I was
to see a time when if a man wrote ten honest paragraphs or painted
three honest paintings he immediately set himself up as a persecuted
saint and wept if Mr. Sumner of New York or the Watch and Ward Club of
Boston did not descend upon him. Most “moderns” of the arts I was later
to see regretted the day of the passing of the Inquisition. They did
not hanker to be burned at the stake but would have loved having it
done to them, as in the moving picture, with some sort of mechanical
cold flame. As for Nora she wanted to know all I thought, all I felt.
She was not afraid I would “ruin” her. She knew how to look out for
herself.
In the evenings we went out to walk together, sometimes going to the
docks and sitting together while the moon came up over the waters of
the lake and sometimes going to what was called the better part of town
to walk under trees in a park or along a residence street.
There was no love-making for Nora’s mind was turned toward her
sailorman and I was ill. My body was well and strong most of the time,
but there was an illness within.
My mind dwelt too much of the time in darkness. I had already worked
in a dozen factories and much of the time it had been with me as
it was with Judge Turner when he was a boy in an Ohio town. Nature
had compelled him to go into a vile shed on the walls of which were
scrawled sentences that revolted his soul and the necessity of keeping
my body going--a necessity I myself did not understand but that was
there, in me--had compelled me, time and again, to go into the door of
a factory as an employee.
I talked constantly to Nora of the thoughts in my mind. There was a
kind of understanding between us. I did not try to come between her
and her sailorman and I had the privilege of saying to her what I
pleased.
What a mixed-up affair! I was always pretending to Nora that I loved
men and was a great mixer with men while at the same time I was
dreaming of having a fight with my fists with the athlete at the
warehouse.
In the late afternoon I went along a street homeward bound, filled with
beer and imagining a scene. In my wanderings I had known personally two
fighters, Bill McCarthy, a lightweight, and Harry Walters, a heavy.
Once I was second for Harry Walters in a fight with a Negro in a barn
near Toledo, Ohio. Sports came out from the city to the barn near a
river and when Harry began to lose I was shrewd enough to spread the
alarm that the police were coming so that everyone fled and Harry was
saved a beating at the hands of the black.
I remembered the blows Harry had struck and that the black had struck
and the blows I had seen Billy McCarthy strike. The black had a feint
and a cross that confused Harry and that landed the black’s left every
time full on Harry’s chin. Each time it landed Harry became a little
more groggy but he could not avoid the blow. And I remembered how the
black smiled each time as it landed. He had two rows of gold-covered
teeth and his smile was like Jack Johnson’s golden smile.
I went along factory streets fancying myself the great black,
possessing the knowledge of the black’s feint and cross and with the
athlete of the warehouse standing before me.
Aha! There is a slight rocking movement of the body, just so. The head
moves slowly and rhythmically like the head of a snake when it is about
to strike. Oh, for a long row of yellow gold-crowned teeth to glisten
in the mouth when one smiles the golden smile in factory streets, in
factories themselves or, most of all, when in a fight, when about to
knock an athlete who works with one on a certain platform, “for a
goal,” as we used to say among us fighters--an athlete on a platform
and with three or four large heavy Swede teamsters standing looking on
and smiling also their own slow smiles.
Patience now! One gets the body and the head moving just so, in
opposite directions, with opposing rhythm--a sort of counterpoint, as
it were--and then the golden smile comes and, quickly, shiftily, the
feint with the right for the belly followed with lightning quickness by
the left, crossed to the chin.
Oh, for a powerful left! “I would give freely and willingly all the
chances I possess of being buried with great pomp in a marble sepulchre
on a hillside above a magnificent city for a powerful left,” I think
each evening as I go home from work.
And all the time pretending to Nora and myself that I am one who loves
mankind! Love indeed! Nora who wished to make happy the one man she
understood and with whom she was to live was the lover, not I.
For me the athlete, poor innocent one, has become a symbol.
NOTE V
IN the many factories where I have worked most men talked vilely to
their fellows and long afterward I was to begin to understand that a
little. It is the impotent man who is vile. His very impotence has made
him vile and in the end I was to understand that when you take from man
the cunning of the hand, the opportunity to constantly create new forms
in materials, you make him impotent. His maleness slips imperceptibly
from him and he can no longer give himself in love, either to work
or to women. “Standardization! Standardization!” was to be the cry
of my age and all standardization is necessarily a standardization
in impotence. It is God’s law. Women who choose childlessness for
themselves choose also impotence--perhaps to be the better companions
for the men of a factory, a standardization age. To live is to create
constantly new forms: with the body in living children; in new and more
beautiful forms carved out of materials; in the creation of a world of
the fancy; in scholarship; in clear and lucid thought; and those who do
not live die and decay and from decay always a stench arises.
These the thoughts of a time long after the one of which I am now
writing. One cannot think of the figure of a single man as being in
himself to blame but as the man named Ford of Detroit has done more
than any other man of my day to carry standardization to its logical
end might he also not come to be looked upon as the great killer of
his age? To make impotent is surely to kill. And there is talk of
making him President. How fitting! Tamerlane, who specialized in the
killing of men’s bodies but who tells in his autobiography how he was
always desirous that all living men under him retain their manhood and
self-respect, was the ruler of the world in his age. Tamerlane for the
ancients. Ford for the moderns.
In our age why should we not all have houses alike, all men and women
clad alike (I am afraid we shall have a bad time managing the women),
all food alike, all the streets in all of our cities alike? Surely
individuality is ruinous to an age of standardization. It should at
once and without mercy be crushed out. Let us give all workers larger
and larger salaries but let us crush out of them at once all flowering
of individualities. It can be done. Let us arise in our might.
And let us put at our head the man who has done in his own affairs what
we are all so universally agreed should everywhere be done, the man who
has made standardization the fetish of his life.
Books may be standardized--they are already almost that; painting may
be standardized--it has often been done, and the standardization of
poetry will be easy. Already I know a man who is working on a machine
for the production of poetry. One feeds into it the letters of the
alphabet and out comes poetry and one may pull various levers for the
production of poems either of the _vers libre_ sort or poetry in
the classic style.
Arise, men of my age! Under the banner of the new age we shall have a
great machine moving slowly down a street and depositing cement houses
to the right and left as it goes, like a diarrhœic elephant. All the
young Edisons will enlist under the banner of a Ford. We shall have
all the great minds of our age properly employed making car wheels out
of waste newspapers and synthetic wines out of crude oils. I am told
by intelligent men who were soldiers in the World War that in all the
world before the war standardization had been carried to the highest
pitch by the Germans but now the Germans have been defeated. May it
not be that we Americans have all along been intended by God to be the
nation that will carry highest the banner of the New Age?
NOTE VI
BUT I wander from my subject to leap into the future, to become a
prophet, and I have no prophet’s beard. In reality I am thinking of a
certain young man who once came rushing, full of vitality and health,
into a mechanical age and of what happened to him and to the men among
whom he worked.
There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Ford
type of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futile
outpouring of men’s lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was at
work. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian. In old Rabelais
there was the salt of infinite wit and I have no doubt the Rabelaisian
flashes that came from our own Lincoln, Washington and the others had
point and a flare to them.
But in the factories and in army camps!
Into my own consciousness, as I, a young man wishing vaguely to mature,
walked in a factory street wishing childishly for a golden smile and a
wicked left to cross over to the chin of some defender of the new age
there was burned the memory of the last place in which I had worked
before I had come to the warehouse to roll the kegs of nails.
It was a bicycle factory where I was employed as an assembler. With
some ten or twelve other men I worked at a bench in a long room facing
a row of windows. We assembled the parts that were brought to us
by boys from other departments of the factory and put the bicycles
together. There was such and such a screw to go into such and such
a screw hole, such and such a nut to go on such and such a bolt. As
always in the modern factory nothing ever varied and within a week any
intelligent quick-handed man could have done the work with his eyes
closed. One turned certain screws, tightened certain bolts, whirled a
wheel, fastened on certain foot pedals and passed the work on to the
next man. Outside the window I faced there was a railroad track lined
on one side by factory walls and the other by what had started to be a
stone quarry. The stone of this quarry had not, I presume, turned out
to be satisfactory and the hole was being filled with rubbish carted
from various parts of the city and all day carts arrived, dumped their
loads--making each time a little cloud of dust--and over the dump
wandered certain individuals, men and women who were looking among the
rubbish for bits of treasure, bottles I fancy and bits of cloth and
iron that could later be sold to junk men.
For three months I had worked at the place and listened to the talk
of my companions and then I had fled. The men seemed everlastingly
anxious to assert their manhood, to make it clear to their fellows
that they were potent men able to do great deeds in the realms of the
flesh and all day I stood beside a little stand-like bench, on which
the frame of the bicycle was stuck upside down, tightening nuts and
screws and listening to the men, the while I looked from their faces
out the window to the factory walls and the rubbish heap. An unmarried
man had been on the evening before to a certain house in a certain
street and there had happened between himself and a woman what he now
wished to talk about and to describe with infinite care in putting in
all the details. What an undignified stallion he made of himself! He
had his moment, was allowed his moment by the others and then another,
a married man, took up the theme, also boastfully. There were days as I
worked in that place when I became physically ill and other days when
I cursed all the gods of my age that had made men--who in another age
might have been farmers, shepherds or craftsmen--these futile fellows,
ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they felt the
age of impotency asserting itself in their bodies.
In the bicycle factory I had repeatedly told the other men that I was
subject to sick headaches and I used to go often to a window, throw
it open and lean out, closing my eyes and trying to create in fancy a
world in which men lived under bright skies, drank wine, loved women
and with their hands created something of lasting value and beauty and
seeing me thus, white and with trembling hands, the men dropped the
talk that so sickened me. Like kind children they came and did my work
or, after the noon hour, brought me little packages of remedies they
had bought at the drug store or had carried to me from their homes.
I had worked the sick headache racket to the limit and then, feeling it
had become wornout, had quit my job and had gone to the place where I
worked with the young athlete I now wanted to beat with my fists.
And on a certain day I tried. I had now convinced myself that the
feint, the cross and the golden smile were all in good working
condition and that no man, least of all the young athlete who could
not stand up to his drink, could stand up against me.
For weeks I had been as nasty as I could be to my fellow-workman. There
was a trick I had learned. I gave one of the kegs I was rolling down
the incline just a little sudden turn with my foot so that it struck
him on the legs as he came into the house through a door. I hit him on
the shins and when he howled with pain expressed the greatest regret
and then as soon as I could, without arousing too much suspicion, I did
it again.
We ceased speaking and only glared at each other. Even the dull-witted
teamsters knew there was a fight brewing. I waited and watched, making
my lips do the nearest thing possible to a golden smile, and at night
in my room and even sometimes when I was walking with Nora and had come
into a quiet dark street I practiced the feint and the cross. “What in
Heaven’s name are you doing?” Nora asked, but I did not tell her but
talked instead of my dreams, of brave men in rich clothes walking with
lovely women in a strange land I was always trying to create in a world
of my fancy and that was always being knocked galley-west by the facts
of my life. Regarding the queer sudden little movements I was always
making with my shoulders and hands I tried to be very mysterious and
once I remember, when we had been sitting on a bench in a little park,
I left her and went behind a bush. She thought I had gone there out of
a natural necessity but it was not true. I had remembered how Harry
Walters and Billy McCarthy, when they were preparing for a fight, did
a good deal of what is called shadow boxing. One imagines an opponent
before oneself and advances and recedes, feints and crosses, whirls
suddenly around and gives ground before a rushing opponent only to come
back at him with terrific straight rights and lefts, just as his attack
has exhausted itself.
I wanted, I fancy, to have Nora grow tired of waiting for me and to
come look around the bush and to discover my secret--that I was not as
she thought, a rather foolish but smart-talking fellow inclined to be
something of a cloud man. Ah, I thought, as I danced about on a bit of
grass back of the bush, she will come to peek and see me here in my
true light. She will take me for some famous fighter, a young Corbett
or that famous middleweight of the day called “The Nonpareil.” What I
hoped was that she would come to some such conclusion without asking
questions and would go back to the bench to wait for my coming filled
with a new wonder. A famous young prizefighter traveling incognito, not
wanting public applause, a young Henry Adams of Boston with the punch
of a Bob Fitzsimmons, a Ralph Waldo Emerson with the physical assurance
of a railway brakeman--what painter, literary man or scholar has not
had moments of indulging in some such dream? A burly landlord has
been crude enough to demand instant pay for the room in which one is
living, or some taxi driver, who has all but run one down at a corner,
jerked out of his seat and given a thorough beating in the face of an
entire street. “Did you see him pummel that fellow? And he such a pale
intellectual looking chap, too! You can never tell how far a dog can
jump by the length of his tail.” Etc., etc.
Men lost in admiration going off along a street talking of one’s
physical prowess. Oneself flecking the dust off one’s hands and
lighting a cigarette, while one looks with calm indifference at a
red-faced taxi driver lying pale and quite defeated and hopeless in a
gutter.
It was something of that sort of admiration I wanted from Nora but I
did not get it. Once when I was walking in a street with her and had
just gone through with my exercises she looked at me with scorn in her
eyes. “You’re a nice fellow but you’re bughouse all right,” she said
and that was all I ever succeeded in getting out of her.
But I got something else at the warehouse.
The fight came off on a Wednesday at about three in the afternoon and
the athlete and myself had two teamsters as witnesses to the affair.
All day I had been bedeviling him--being just as downright ugly and
nasty as I could, clipping him on the shins with several flying kegs,
making my apologies as insolently as possible and when he started
telling one of his endless nasty tales to the teamsters starting a loud
conversation on some other subject just as he was about to come to the
nub of his story. The teamsters felt the fight brewing and wanted to
encourage it. They purposely listened to me and did not hear the nub.
He thought, I dare say, that I would never be foolish enough to fight
him and I must have taken his scorn of me for timidity for I suddenly
grew very bold. He was coming in at the door of the house just as I was
on my way out behind one of the kegs and I suddenly stopped it, looked
him squarely in the eyes and then, with an attempt at the golden smile
on my lips, sent the keg flying directly at him.
He leaped over the keg and came toward me in silence and I prepared to
bring my technique into play. Really I had, at the moment, a great deal
of confidence in myself and began at once rocking my head, making queer
little shifting movements with my feet and trying to establish a kind
of cross rhythm in my shoulders and head that would, I felt, confuse
him.
He looked at me lost in astonishment and I decided to lead. Had I been
content to hit him in the belly with my right, putting all my strength
back of the blow and then had I begun kicking, biting and pummeling
furiously, I might have come out all right. He was so astonished--no
doubt, like Nora, he thought me quite bughouse--that the right would
surely have landed, but that, you see, was not the technique of the
situation.
The thing was to feint for the belly and then “pull one’s punch” as it
were, and immediately afterwards whip over the powerful left to the
jaw. But my left was not powerful and anyway it did not land.
He knocked me down and when I got up and started my gymnastics again he
knocked me down a second time and a third and a fourth. He knocked me
down perhaps a dozen times and the two teamsters came to the door to
watch and all the time there was the most foolish look on his face and
on their faces. It was a look a bulldog attacked by a hen might have
assumed--no doubt by my bullyragging I had convinced them, as I had
myself, I could fight--but presently both my eyes were so swollen and
my nose and mouth so bruised and cut that I could not see and so I got
to my feet and walked away, going out of the warehouse in the midst of
an intense silence on the part of all three of the spectators.
And so along a street I went to my room, followed by two or three
curious children who perhaps thought I had been hit by a freight train
and succeeded in also getting my door bolted against any sudden descent
of Nora. My eyes were very evidently going to be badly discolored, my
nose bled and my lips were badly cut, and so, after bathing my face in
cold water, I put a wet towel over it and went and threw myself on the
bed.
It was one of those moments that come, I presume, into every man’s
life. I was lying on my bed in my room, in the condition already
described, the door was bolted, Nora was not directly about and I was
out from under the eyes of my fellowmen.
I tried to think as one will at such moments.
As for Nora, I might very well have gone to my door and called to
her--she was at work somewhere on the floor below and would have
gladly come running to offer her woman’s sympathy to my hurt physical
self--but it was not my hurt physical self that I thought wanted
attention. As far as that is concerned I was then, as I have been all
my life, not so much concerned with the matter of physical discomfort
or pain. Always it has been true of me that a framed water lily on a
wall or a walk in a factory street can hurt me worse than a blow on the
jaw and long afterward when I became a scribbler of tales I was able
to take advantage of this peculiarity of my nature to do my work under
conditions that would have disheartened a more physically sensitive
man. As I was destined to live most of my life and do most of my work
in factory towns and in little, ill-smelling, hideously-furnished
rooms, freezing cold in winter and hot and cheerless in summer, it
turned out to be a good and convenient trait in me and in the end I
had so trained myself to forget my surroundings that I could sit for
hours lost in my own thoughts and dreams, or scribbling oftentimes
meaningless sentences in a cold room in a factory street, on a log
beside some country road, in a railroad station or in the lobby of some
large hotel, filled with the hurrying hustling figures of business men,
totally unconscious of my surroundings, until my mood had worn itself
out and I had sunk into one of the moods of depression common, I think,
to all such fellows as myself. Never was such an almighty scribbler as
I later became and am even now. Ink, paper and pencils are cheap in
our day and I have taken full advantage of that fact and have during
some years written hundreds of thousands of words which have afterward
been thrown away. Many have told me, in print or by word of mouth, that
all should have been thrown away and they may be right, but I am one
who loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight
of a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with words
always gladdens me. The result of the scribbling, the tale of perfect
balance, all the elements of the tale understood, an infinite number of
minute adjustments perfectly made, the power of self-criticism fully at
work, the shifting surface of word values and color in full play, form
and the rhythmic flow of thought and mood marching forward with the
sentences--these are things of a dream, of a far dim day toward which
one goes knowing one can never arrive but infinitely glad to be on
the road. It is the story I dare say of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and
the sloughs and sink holes on the road are many but the tale of that
journey is known to other men than scribblers.
The consolation of ink and paper came, however, long after the time
with which I am now concerned, and what a consolation it is! How much
easier it is to sit in a room before a desk and with paper before one
to describe a fight between oneself as hero of some tale and five or
six burly ruffians than with the fists to dispose of one baseball
player on the platform of a warehouse.
In the tale one can do any such job as it should be done and in the
doing give satisfaction both to oneself and the possible reader, for
the reader will always share in the emotions of the hero and gloat with
him over his victories. In the tale, as you will understand, all is
in order. The feint and the cross, the powerful left to the jaw, the
golden smile, the shifting movements of the shoulders that confuse and
disconcert the opponent, all work like well-oiled machines. One defeats
not one baseball player or ruffian of the city streets but a dozen if
the need arises. Oh, what glorious times I have had, sitting in little
rooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood have
run from the wounds of the villains, foolish enough to oppose me on the
field of honor; what fair women I have loved and how they have loved
me and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, open-hearted and fine I
have been! I remember how I sat in the back room of a small bootlegging
establishment at Mobile, Alabama, one afternoon, long after the time
with which I am now concerned and while three drunken sailors discussed
the divinity of Christ at a near-by table wrote the story of little,
tired-out and crazed Joe Wainsworth’s killing of Jim Gibson in the
harness shop at Bidwell Ohio, that afterward was used in the novel
“Poor White”; and of how at a railroad station at Detroit I sat writing
the tale of Elsie Leander’s westward journey, in “The Triumph of the
Egg,” and missed my own train--these remain as rich and fine spots in a
precarious existence.
But at the time of which I am speaking the consolation of ink and paper
was a thing of the future and my bunged-up eyes and hurt spirits were
facts.
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
I lay on my back on my bed, trying to get up courage to face facts.
As for the throbbing of the hurt places, the pain was a kind of
satisfaction to me at the moment.
There was the warehouse where I had been more or less a spiritual bully
but where I would now have to eat crow. Well, I need not go back. The
day before had been payday and I would, by never going near the place
again, lose little money and save myself the humiliation of facing the
teamsters. And when it came to the scratch, I thought, there was the
city I was in, the state, the very United States of America itself--I
could if I chose desert them all. I was young, had been well trained
in poverty, had no family ties, no social position to uphold, I was
unmarried and as yet childless.
I was a free man, I told myself, sitting on the bed and staring about
the room through swollen eyelids. Was I free? Did any man ever achieve
freedom? I had my own life before me. Why did I not, by some grand
effort, begin to live a life?
I lay on the bed with the wet towel thrown aside thinking, trying to
make plans. A faint suspicion of something permanently wrong with me
had begun to creep into my consciousness. Was I, alas, a fellow born
out of his place and time? I was in a world where only men of action
seemed to thrive. Already I had noted that fact. One wanted a definite
thing to go after, money, fame, a position of power in the big world,
and having something definite of the sort in mind one shut one’s eyes
and pitched in with all the force of one’s physical and mental self.
I squirmed about trying to force myself to face myself. My body was
strong enough for all practical purposes, when not scarred and bruised
by the blows of an angry ball player, and I was not such a bad-looking
fellow. I was not lazy and on the whole rather liked hard physical
labor. Need I be what I at the moment seemed to myself to be, a useless
and foolish dreamer, a child in a world filled with what I thought to
be grown-up men? Why should I myself not also grow up, take the plow by
the handle, plow vast fields, become rich or famous? Perhaps I could
become a man of power and rule or influence many other men’s lives.
There is a trick the fancy has. Start it in any direction and it goes
prancing off at a great rate and that trick my own fancy now did.
Although my body ached as a result of my recent plunge into the field
of action I, in fancy, plunged in again and began thinking of myself as
holding the handle of a plow and plowing the fields of life, turning
great furrows, planting perhaps the seeds of new ideas. Oho, for the
smell of new-turned earth, the sight of the sower casting his seed!
I was off again. On that day Nora had done the work in my room early
but now she was sweeping and dusting on the floor below and I could
hear her moving about.
Why should I not first of all conquer Nora? That, I at that moment
thought, was surely the beginning of manhood, to conquer some woman,
and why not Nora as well as another? It would be something of an
undertaking that was sure. Nora was not beautiful nor perhaps too
subtle in her outlook on life but then was I myself subtle? She was
direct and simple and had, I thought, a direct and simple mind and
after I had conquered her, had bent her to my own will, what might we
not do together? There was to be sure the sailor with whom she was to
live and to whom she was promised but I brushed him aside. “I can cook
his goose in some way,” I thought to myself, much as I had thought I
could easily dispose of the ball player by my feints and crosses.
We might, I thought, following up the fancy I had just had, begin by
being tillers of the soil. We could go West somewhere and take up land.
Already I had read many tales of the West and had a fancy for casting
in my fortunes with the West. “Out where the smile lasts a little
longer, out where the handclasp is a little stronger,” etc. “Oho, for
the land where men are men and gals are gals!” I thought my fancy
running away like a wild horse broken out of its stall. I saw myself
owning vast farms somewhere in the Far West and saw, I am afraid, Nora
doing most of the plowing, planting and the harvesting of crops, the
while I rode grandly over the estate on a black stallion, receiving the
homage of serfs.
But what would I do with my odd moments? I had tried talking to Nora of
the things that interested me most, the play of light over a factory
chimney, seen amid smoke as darkness came on, odd expressions caught
from the lips of passing men and women, the play of the fancy over the
imagined lives of men and women too. Had Nora understood or cared?
Could I go on always talking and talking in the face of the fact that I
knew she was not much interested?
With a rush of resolution I threw my doubts aside. Oh, to be one who
made two blades of grass where but one had grown before! With Nora
at my side I would in some field become great and powerful. I was at
the moment but a bunged-up fellow lying on the bed in a cheap rooming
house but what did that matter? All about me was the great American
world rushing on and on to new mechanical and material triumphs. Teddy
Roosevelt and the strenuous life had not yet come but he was implicit
in the American mood. Imperialism had already come. It was time, I told
myself, to be up and doing.
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores;
Before him only shoreless seas.
The good mate said, “Now must we pray,
For lo, the very stars are gone.
Brave Admr’l speak.” “What shall I say?”
“Why say: ‘Sail on, sail on and on.’”
NOTE VII
JUMPING off the bed I instantly began to try to prepare myself for new
adventures. As I had been lying on the bed thinking the thoughts above
set down and working myself up to new heights of fancied grandeur some
time had passed. Perhaps I had slept and awakened. At any rate it was
now dark in the room and I lighted a lamp. By its light and after I had
bathed my face for some time it did not look so swollen although both
eyes had turned a deep purple.
Undaunted I dressed in my best Sunday clothes and prepared to set out.
I had engaged to walk with Nora on that evening and it was our custom
on such occasions for me to pass quietly out of the house, tapping on
the door of her room on the floor below and waiting for her on the
front steps.
To tell the truth I had already got well going the new dramatization of
myself as a man of action but was not sure of myself in the new rôle to
want to face any of the workmen in the house. Nora I thought I could
handle.
As I stood in the room dressed in my best clothes I counted my money
and then decided I would not be a Western ranchman after all but a man
of commerce, an empire builder perhaps. I had in my possession some
ninety-eight dollars which seemed to me at the moment sufficient for a
start in almost any undertaking. It would support me for a few weeks
while I looked about and then I would pitch in somewhere and become an
empire builder. It would take time but what was time to me? I had an
abundance of time. “I’ll do it,” I told myself resolutely.
Why not? Was I not a man of imagination? Was I not young and did I not
have a strong body?
As I washed the dried blood off my face, put on my Sunday suit and
adjusted my tie I in fancy swept the field of commercial adventure
with my somewhat damaged eyes. There were the great cities of Chicago
and New York I had not yet seen, although I had read much about
them and about men who had grown from poverty to riches and power
in them. Like all young Americans I had read innumerable tales of
men who had begun with nothing and had become great leaders, owners
of railroads, governors of states, foreign ambassadors, generals of
armies, presidents of great modern republics. Abraham Lincoln walking
miles through a storm after a hard day’s work to borrow his first book,
Jay Gould the young Wall Street clerk, setting up a great dynasty of
wealth, Daniel Drew the cattle dealer becoming a millionaire, Garfield
the canal-boat boy and Vanderbilt the ferryman become President and
millionaire, Grant the failure, hauling hides from his father’s
tannery at Galena, Illinois, to St. Louis--and, it was said, getting
so well piped sometimes on the homeward journey that he fell off the
wagon--he also became great, the winner of a mighty war, President of
his country, a noted traveler, receiving the homage of kings. “And I
can carry my liquor better than he could, by all reports,” I said to
myself.
Were these men any better than myself? At the moment and in spite of
the gloom of an hour before, I thought not, and as for my having but
ninety-eight dollars, what did that matter? As a matter of fact one
gathered from having read American history that there was a sort of
advantage to be gained from starting with nothing. One had something to
talk and brag about in one’s old age, and when one became a candidate
for President one furnished one’s campaign managers with materials for
campaign slogans.
And now I was dressed and had tiptoed out of the house, tapped on
Nora’s door and was waiting for her outside. I had decided that when
she came out I would not make an appeal for her woman’s sympathy by
telling of what had actually happened to me. “I do not want woman’s
sympathy,” I thought proudly. What I wanted was woman’s respect. I
wanted to conquer them, to have them at my feet, to stand before them
the conquering male.
When Nora came and when we had walked to where there was a street light
and she had seen my damaged countenance I began at once to brag and to
reconstruct the fight at the warehouse more to my own fancy. Not one
but four men had attacked me and I had valiantly stood my ground. An
inspiration came. I had got into the fight, I told Nora, because of a
woman. A young woman, a working girl like Nora herself had passed the
platform and the men at work there with me had begun making remarks
that were not very nice. What was I to do? I was one who could never
stand quietly by and hear an innocent woman, particularly one who had
to work for her living and had perhaps no men of her own to stand up
for her, hear such a woman subjected to insult. I had, I told Nora, at
once pitched into the four men and there had been a terrible fight.
As I described the fancied affair to Nora the feint and the cross on
which I had so depended had worked wonderfully. I had received many
hard blows, it was true, and Nora could see by looking at my face how
I had suffered, but I had given better than I had received. Like a
tornado I had swept up and down the warehouse platform making feints
with my right and whipping my powerful left to the jaws of my opponents
until at last they were all laid out like dead men before me. And then
I had come home, a little fearful that I might have killed one or two
of the men but not waiting to see. “I did not care,” I said. “If my
opponents have suffered a terrible beating at my hands and if one or
two of them die of their injuries it was their own fault. They should
have known better than to have insulted a woman in my presence.”
I had told Nora my story and we had walked in silence until we had come
to a street lamp when she suddenly stopped and, taking my left hand,
turned it up to the light. As I had not succeeded in the actual fight
in striking a blow with it, the hand was unmarked by a bruise. “Huh!”
said Nora and we went on in silence.
The silence, which was one of the hardest I have ever had to bear,
continued until we had finished our walk--which on that evening did not
last very long,--and had got back to the house.
On the steps in front we stopped and Nora stood for a time looking at
me. It was a look I did not much fancy, but what was I to do? Two or
three times during our walk I had tried to begin talking a little and
had attempted to patch up the structure of my yarn so that it would
not be quite so full of holes and leaky but could think of no way to
explain the unbruised surface and uninjured knuckles of my left, so I
had taken refuge in a kind of sullen silence.
I had even begun to feel a little injured and angry and was asking
myself what right Nora had to question my story--was feeling, to tell
the truth, much as I was later to feel when some editor or critic
rejected, as not sound, one of my written tales--that is to say,
resentful and intolerant of the editor or critic and inclined to call
him a fool and to attribute to him all kinds of secret and degrading
motives. I was feeling much in this mood, I say, when we had got back
to the steps and were standing in the darkness in front.
And then Nora suddenly put her strong arm about my neck and pulled my
head down upon her shoulder and I began to cry like a child.
That in an odd way made me more resentful than ever. It faced me with
a problem I have all my life been trying to face and have never quite
succeeded. One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder,
finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class
than the average man. It is a fact perhaps but a fact that I have
always thought we men should deny with all the strength of our more
powerful wills. We men should conquer women. We should not stand in the
darkness with our heads on their shoulders, blubbering as I was doing
at that moment.
However, I continued crying and being ashamed of myself and Nora did
not press her advantage. When, now and then, I lifted my face from her
shoulder and looked at her face, dimly seen in the darkness, it seemed
to me just kindly and filled with sympathy for my position.
I felt, I presume, most of all the story-teller’s shame at the failure
of his yarn and there was something else too. There was a suspicion
that Nora, the woman who had been for weeks listening to my talk
and whom I had somewhat looked down upon as not being my equal, had
suddenly become my superior. I had prided myself on my mind and on the
superiority of my imaginative flights. Could it be that this woman,
this maker of beds in a cheap laborers’ rooming house, had a better
mind than my own?
The thought was unbearable and so, as soon as I could conveniently
manage it, I got my head off Nora’s shoulder and made my escape.
In my room I sat again on the edge of the bed and I had again bolted
the door. The notion of using Nora to plant and sow fields for me
while I rode about on a magnificent black stallion was now quite gone
and I had to construct another and at once. That I realized. I had to
construct a new dramatization of myself and leave Nora out of it. I was
not ready for the Noras. Perhaps I would never be ready for them. Few
American men I have ever known have ever shown any signs of being ready
for the Noras of the world or of being able really to understand or
face them.
My mind turned again to the field of business and affairs. I had
already known a good many men and, while such fellows as the baseball
player at the warehouse had the better of me because I had been fool
enough to let the struggle between us get on a physical plane, I had
not met many men who had caused me to tremble because of any special
spiritual or intellectual strength in themselves.
To be sure the world of affairs was one of which I knew nothing and
yet I thought I might tackle it. “It cannot be worse than the world
of labor,” I thought as I sat in the darkness, trying not to think of
Nora--thoughts of whom I was convinced might weaken the resolution
I had taken and might even cause me to begin blubbering again--and
keeping my mind fixed on the laborers I had known, even as the laborers
who lived in the house with me tramped heavily, one by one, up the
stairs and went off to their rooms and to sleep.
“I will become a man of action, in the mood of the American of my day.
I will build railroads, conquer empires, become rich and powerful. Why
should I not do something of the sort as well as all the other men who
have done it so brilliantly? America is the land of opportunity. I must
keep that thought ever in my mind,” I told myself as I tiptoed out of
the house at two o’clock in the morning, having left a note of good-by
to Nora and the amount of my room rent in an envelope on my bed. I was
being very careful not to make any noise as I went along the hallway
and past Nora’s door. “I had better not wake up the woman,” I was wise
enough to say to myself as I went away, hugging my new impulse in life.
NOTE VIII
I HAD come to that period of a young man’s life where all is
uncertainty. In America there seemed at that time but one direction,
one channel, into which all such young fellows as myself could pour
their energies. All must give themselves wholeheartedly to material
and industrial progress. Could I do that? Was I fitted for such a
life? It was a kind of moral duty to try and then, as now, men at the
heads of the great industrial enterprises filled or had filled all the
newspapers and magazines with sermons on industry, thrift, virtue,
loyalty and patriotism, meaning I am afraid by the use of all these
high-sounding terms only devotion to the interests in which they had
money invested. But the terms were good terms, the words used were
magnificent words. And I was by my nature a word fellow, one who
could at most any time be hypnotized by high-sounding words. It was
confusing to me as it must be confusing to many young men now. During
the World War did we not see how even the very government went into the
advertising business, selling the war to the young men of the country
by the use of the same noble words advertising men used to forward the
sale of soap or automobile tires? To the young man a kind of worship
of some power outside himself is essential. One has strength and
enthusiasm and wants gods to worship. There were only these gods of
material success. Chivalry was gone. The Virgin had died. In America
there were no churches. What were called churches were merely clubs,
ruled over by the same forces that ruled over the factories and great
mercantile houses. Often the men I heard speaking in churches spoke
in the same words, used the same terms to define the meaning of life
that were used by the real-estate boomer, the politician, or the
enterprising business man talking to his employees of the necessity of
steadfastness and devotion to the interests of his firm.
The Virgin was dead and her son had taken as prophets such men as Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, the one with his little books in
which he set down and saved his acts and impulses, striving to make
them all serve definite ends as he saved his pennies and the other
preaching the intellectual doctrine of Self-reliance, Up and Onward.
The land was filled with gods but they were new gods and their images,
standing on every street of every town and city, were cast in iron and
steel. The factory had become America’s church and duplicates of it
stood everywhere, on almost every street of every city belching black
incense into the sky.
A passion for reading books had taken possession of me and I did not
work when I had any money at all but often for weeks spent my time
reading any book I could get my hands on. In every city there were
public libraries and I could get books without spending money.
The past took a strong hold on my imagination and I went eagerly down
through the ages, reading of the lives of the great men of antiquity;
of the Romans and their conquest of the world; of the early Christians
and their struggles before the great organizer Paul came to “put
Christianity across”; of the Cæsars, Charlemagnes and Napoleons,
marching and countermarching across Europe at the head of their troops;
of the cruel but powerful Peters and Ivans of Russia; of the great and
elegant dukes of Italy--the poisoners and schemers listening to the
words of their Machiavellis; of the magnificent painters and craftsmen
of the Middle Ages; of English and French kings; roundheads; Spanish
kings of the days of conquest and of gold ships bringing riches from
the Spanish Main; the Grand Inquisitor; the coming of Erasmus, the
cool scholarly questioner whose questions brought to the front Luther,
the conscientious barbarian--all, all spread out before me, the young
American coming into manhood, all in the books.
It was a feast. Could I digest it? I had saved a little money and knew
how to live very cheaply. After working for some weeks, and when I did
not spend money for drinking bouts to ease the confusion of my mind I
had a few dollars put aside and dollars meant leisure. That is perhaps
all dollars have ever meant to me.
Since I was always making the acquaintance of some fellow who lived
by gambling I went now and then into a gambling place and sometimes
had luck. I had five dollars when I went in at a certain door and came
out with a hundred dollars in my pocket. Oh, glorious day! On such an
amount I could live among books for weeks and so, renting a small room
on a poor street, I went every day to a public library and got a new
book. The book some man had spent years in composing was often waded
through in a day and then thrown aside. What a jumble of things in my
head! At times the life directly about me ceased to have any existence.
The actuality of life became a kind of vapor, a thing outside of
myself. My body was a house in which I lived and there were many such
houses all about me but I did not live in them. Perhaps I was but
trying to make solid the walls of my own house, to roof it properly, to
cut windows, becoming accustomed to living in the house so that I could
have leisure to look out at the windows and into other houses. Of that
I do not know. To make such a claim for myself and my purpose seems
giving my life a more intelligent direction than I can convince myself
it has had.
I walked in and out of the little rooms in which I lived, often in what
was called the tough part of a city, hearing all about me the oaths of
drunken men, the crying of children, the weeping of some poor girl of
the streets who has just been beaten by her pimp, the quarreling of
laborers and their wives, walked hearing and seeing nothing, walked
gripping a book in my hand.
In fancy I was at the moment with the great Florentine Leonardo da
Vinci on a day when he sat on a little hill above his country house in
Italy studying the flight of birds or was making the mathematical and
geometrical calculations he so loved. Or I was sitting in a carriage
beside the scholar Erasmus as he drove across Europe going from the
court of one great duke or king to the court of another. The lives of
the dead men and women had become more real to me than the lives of
the living people about me.
How bad an American I had become, how utterly out of touch with the
spirit of my age! Sometimes for weeks I did not read a newspaper--a
fault in me that would have been considered almost in the light of a
crime had it been generally known to my fellows. A new railroad might
have been built, a new trust formed or some great national excitement
like the free silver affair--that did fall in at about that time--might
have shaken the whole country while I knew nothing about it.
There was indeed a kind of intimate acquaintance with an unknown
and unheralded kind of people I was unconsciously getting. In
Chicago, where I had now gone I for a time lived in a room in a huge
cheaply constructed building that had been erected about a little
court. The building was not old, had in fact been built but a few
years before--during the Chicago World’s Fair--but already it was a
half-tumbledown unsafe place with great sags in the floors in the
hallways and cracks in the walls. The building surrounded the little
brick-paved court and was divided into single rooms for bachelor
lodgers and into small two- and three-room apartments. Since it was
near the end of several street-car lines and a branch of the Chicago
elevated railroad it was occupied for the most part by street-car
conductors and motormen with their wives and children. Many of my
fellow-lodgers were young fellows having wives but no children and not
intending to have children if the accidents of life could be avoided.
They went off to work and came home from work at all sorts of odd hours.
I hadn’t very much money but did not mind. My room was small and cost
little and I lived on fruit and on stacks of wheatcakes that could be
had at ten cents the stack at a near-by workingmen’s eating place. When
I was broke I told myself I could always go again to some place where
laborers were wanted. I was young and my body was strong. “If I cannot
get work in the city I can get on a freight train at night and go away
to the country and work on a farm,” I thought. Sometimes I had qualms
of conscience because I had not already started on the great career as
an industrial magnate I had half-heartedly mapped out for myself but I
managed to put my sins of omission aside. There was plenty of time I
told myself and in any event I planned eventually to do the thing with
a grand rush.
In the meantime I lay for long hours on the little bed in my room
reading the last book I had got from the library or walked in a near-by
park under the trees. Time ceased to exist and the days became night
while the nights became days. Often I came back to my room at two in
the morning, washed my shirt, underwear and socks at a washbowl in a
corner, hung them out at my window facing the court to dry and lying
down naked on my bed read by a gaslight until daylight had come.
Marvelous days! Now I was marching with the conqueror Julius Cæsar over
the vast domains of the mighty Roman Empire. What a life and how proud
Julius and I were of his conquests and how often we spoke together
of the doings of Cicero, Pompey, Cato and the others in Rome. Indeed
Cæsar and I had become for the nonce the most intimate of friends
and often enough we discussed the unworthiness of some of the other
Romans, particularly of that Cicero. The man was no better than a dog,
a literary hack, when all was said and done, and such fellows are never
to be trusted. Often enough Cicero had talked with Cæsar and pretended
to be Cæsar’s friend but, as Julius often pointed out to me, such
fellows were wont to veer about with every wind that blew, “Writers
are the greatest cowards in the world and my own greatest weakness is
that I have a kind of hankering that way myself. Let a man but get
into power and he will always find such scribbling fellows willing and
anxious to sing his praises. They are the greatest cur dogs in the
world,” he declared vehemently.
And so I had become in fancy the friend of Cæsar and all day I marched
beside him and at evening went with him and his men into their camp.
The days and weeks passed. I sat by the window looking into the little
brick-paved court and there were many other windows. As it was summer
they were all open. Evening came, after a day of walking in dreams, and
I had come into my room and taking off my coat had thrown myself down
on my bed. When darkness came I did not light a light but lay quietly
listening.
I had stepped now out of the past and into the present and all about me
were the voices of living people. The men and women in the rooms along
the court did not laugh or sing often and indeed in the many times,
during my life, I have lived, as I did then, lying like a little worm
in the middle of the apple of modern life, I have never found that
American men and women, except only the Negroes, laugh or sing much in
their homes or at their work.
It was evening and a street-car conductor had come home to his wife.
They were silent in each other’s presence for a time, then they began
to quarrel. Sometimes they fought and after that they made love. The
love-making of the couples along the court aroused my own passions and
I had bad dreams at night.
What a strange thing love-making had become among modern factory
hands, street-car conductors and all such fellows! Almost always it
was preceded by a quarrel, often blows were struck, there were tears,
repentance and then embraces. Did the tired nerves of the men and women
need the stimulation of the fights and quarrels?
A red-faced man who stumbled as he walked along the hallways to his
small apartment had secured a small flat stick which he kept behind a
door. His wife was young and fat. When he had come home from work and
had in silence eaten his evening meal he sat by the window facing the
court and read a newspaper while his wife washed the dishes. Suddenly,
when the dishes were washed, he jumped to his feet and ran to get the
stick. “Don’t, John, don’t,” his wife pleaded half-heartedly, as he
began to pursue her about the narrow room. Chairs were knocked over
and tables upset. He kept hitting her with the flat stick upon the
nether cheeks and she kept laughing and protesting. Sometimes he struck
her too hard and she grew angry and, turning upon him, scratched his
face with her finger nails. Then he swore and wrestled with her. Their
period of more intense love-making had now come and silence reigned
over the little home for the rest of the night.
I lay on my bed in the darkness and closed my eyes. Once more I was
in the camp of Cæsar and we were in Gaul. The great captain had been
writing at a small table near the door of his tent but now a man had
come to speak with him. I lay in silence upon a kind of thick warm
cloth spread on the ground beside the tent.
The man who talked with Cæsar was a bridge-builder and had come to
speak with him regarding the building of a bridge that the legions
might cross a river beside which they now lay encamped. A certain
number of men would be needed with boats and others were at daylight to
go hew great timbers in a near-by forest and roll them into the stream.
How very quiet and peaceful it was where I lay! Cæsar’s tent was
pitched on a hillside. In person he was like ... there was an Italian
fruit dealer who had a small store on a street near the park where I
went every day to sit, a tall gaunt man who had lost one eye and whose
black hair was turning gray. The fruit dealer had evidently lost his
eye in a fight as there was a long scar on his cheek. It was this man I
had metamorphosed into a Cæsar.
Below, at the foot of the hill on which the tent stood and on the banks
of a river the legions were camped. They had built fires and some of
the men were bathing in the river but when they came out they dressed
quickly because of little biting flies that swarmed about their heads.
I was glad Cæsar’s tent was pitched on a hill where there was a little
breeze and there were no biting flies or insects. Below, the fires in
the valley glowed and cast yellow and red lights over the tawny bodies
and faces of the soldiers.
The man who had come to Cæsar was a craftsman and had a maimed hand.
Two of the fingers of his left hand had been cut sharply off as by a
blow with an ax. He went away into the darkness and Cæsar went within
his tent.
I lay on my bed in the room in the building in Chicago not daring to
open my eyes. Had I been asleep? Now there was no quarreling in the
other places along the court but there were still lights at some of
the windows. The workers had not yet all come home. Two women were
talking together across the space between their windows. Street-car
conductors and motormen, who had been all day working their cars
slowly through crowded streets, propitiating quarrelsome passengers,
cursing and being cursed at by teamsters and crossing policemen, were
now asleep. Of what were they dreaming? They had come from the car
barns, had read a newspaper, telling perhaps of a fight between English
troops and the natives of Thibet, had read also a speech by the German
emperor demanding a place in the sun for Germany, had noted who had
beaten the Chicago White Sox or who had been beaten by them. Then they
had quarreled with their wives, blows had been struck, there had been
love-making and then sleep.
I arose and went to walk in the silent streets and twice during that
summer I was stopped by holdup men who took a few dollars from me. The
World’s Fair had been followed by a time of industrial depression. How
many miles I have walked in the streets of American cities at night! In
Chicago and the other industrial cities long streets of houses--how
many houses almost universally ugly and cheaply constructed, like
the building in which I then lived! I passed through sections where
all the people were Negroes and heard laughter in the houses. Then
came the sections entirely inhabited by Jews, by Greeks, Armenians,
Italians, Germans, or Poles. How many elements not yet combined in the
cities! The American writers, whose books I read, went on assuming
that the typical American was a transplanted Englishman, an Englishman
who had served his term in the stony purgatory of New England and had
then escaped out into the happy land, this Heaven, the Middle West.
Here they were all to grow rich and live forever, a happy blissful
existence. Was not all the world supposed to be watching the great
democratic experiment in government and human happiness they were to
conduct so bravely?
I wandered on into factory districts, long silent streets of grim black
walls. Had men but escaped out of the prisons of the Old World into
the more horrid prisons of the New? Dread took hold of me as on a dark
street I was approached by a man who put a gun to my face. He wanted
money and I tried to be facetious with him, telling him I hadn’t enough
money to buy drinks for the two of us but would match him pennies for
what I had but he only growled at me and taking my few pieces of silver
hurried away. Perhaps he did not even understand my words. America,
once a place that prided itself on its sense of humor, was now, since
the coming of the factories, a place where the very robbers were all
too serious about life.
Periods of lust kept coming and going. In the building where I lived
there was a woman, very young yet, a high-school graduate from an
Illinois town who had married a young man of the place. They had come
to live in Chicago, to make their way in the great world, and as he
could get no other work he had taken a place as street-car conductor.
Oh, it was but a temporary arrangement. He was one who intended, as for
that matter I did myself, to rise in the world.
The man I never saw but all afternoon the woman sat by a window in one
of the two rooms of her apartment or went for short walks in the park.
We began presently to smile shyly at each other but did not speak, both
being embarrassed. Like myself she read books and that was a kind of
bond between us. I got into the habit of sitting by my window with my
book in my hand while she sat by her window also holding a book.
And here was a new confusion. The pages of the books no longer lived.
The woman, sitting there, but a few feet away from me, across the
little court, I did not want. Of that I was quite sure. She was another
man’s wife. What thoughts had she in her head, what feelings had she?
Her face was round and fair and she had blue eyes. What did she want?
Children perhaps, I thought. She wanted to have a house like all the
other houses lived in by the people of her home town who had made
money and who held positions of some importance in the town’s life.
One day she sat on a bench in the park and I, walking past, saw the
title of the book she read. It was a popular novel of the day but I
have forgotten its name and the name of its author. Even at that time,
although I knew little enough, I did know that such books had always
been written, would always be written, books that sold by the hundreds
of thousands and were often proclaimed as great works of art and that
after a year or two were utterly forgotten. In them was no sense of
strangeness, no wonder about life. They lacked the touch of life. “Dead
books for men and women who dare not live,” I thought contemptuously.
There was a kind of pretense of solving some problem of life but the
problem was so childishly stated that later a childish solution seemed
quite natural and right. A young man came to an American city from a
country town and, although at bottom he was true and fine, the city for
a time diverted him from his noble aims. He committed some near crime
that made both himself and the girl he really loved suffer terribly,
but she stood firmly by him and at the last, and with her help, he
pulled himself up again, by the bootstraps as it were, and became a
rich manufacturer who was kind to his employees.
The book she read expressed perhaps the high-school girl’s dream, the
dream she had when she married and came to Chicago. Was her dream the
same now? I had already, as far as I reacted to the life about me at
all, started upon another road, was becoming, a little, the eternal
questioner of myself and others. Not for me the standardized little
pellets of opinion, the little neatly wrapped packages of sentiment
the magazine writers had learned to do up, I told myself. In modern
factories food was packed in convenient standard-sized packages and I
half suspected that behind the high-sounding labels the food was often
enough sawdust or something of the sort. It was apparent publishers
also had learned to do up neat packages containing sawdust and put
bright-colored labels on them.
Oh, glorious contempt! Seeing the book the woman was reading, knowing
she was the wife of another and that never by any chance could we come
close to each other, give to each other anything of value, I enjoyed my
contempt for an hour and then it faded. I sat as before by my window
and held an open book but could not follow the thoughts and ideas of
the writer of the book. I sat by my window and she with her book sat by
her window.
Was something about to happen that neither of us wanted, of which we
were both afraid, that would be without value to either of us?
One evening when I met her in the hallway of the building I stopped
before her and we stood thus for a minute facing each other. We both
blushed, both felt guilty, and then I tried to say something to her but
did not succeed. I stammered out a few words about the weather, saying
how hot it was, and hurried away but a week later, when we again met in
the same place it was dark and we kissed.
We began then to walk in silence together in the park in the early
evenings and sometimes we sat together on a park bench. How careful we
were not to be seen by others who lived in our building. Her husband
left the house at three in the afternoon and did not return until
midnight and when he came home he was tired and discouraged. He scolded
at his wife. “He is always scolding,” she said. Well, one wanted to
save money, get into business for oneself. And now he had a wife to
support and the wages of street-car conductors were not large. The
young man who wanted to rise in the world had begun to resent his wife
and she felt it vaguely, uneasily. She also was filled with resentment.
Did she want revenge? She had no words to express what she felt and I
had no way of understanding. Was I not also confused, wanting something
very much, that at the same time I did not want? I sat in my room
until darkness came holding the book I now could not read and when the
darkness had come threw it with a loud bang on a table. The sound had
become a signal to her and when I went into the park she came to join
me. One evening when we had kissed in the darkness of the park I went
home ahead of her but did not close the door of my room. I stood in
the darkness by the door waiting. She had to pass along the hallway to
reach her own place and I put out my hand and drew her inside.
“I’m afraid,” she kept saying, “I don’t want to. I’m afraid.” What a
queer silent frightened love-making it was--no love-making at all. She
was afraid and I was afraid, not of her husband but of myself. Later
she went away crying silently along the hallway and after that she and
I did not sit at our two windows or walk in the park and I returned to
my books. Once, on a night two or three weeks later as I lay in my own
bedroom, I heard the husband and wife talking together. Something had
happened that had pleased and excited her. She had been able to offer
something she thought would help her husband and was urging him to give
up being a street-car conductor and to go back to the town from which
they had come. Her father owned a store there, I gathered, and had
objected to her marriage but she had secretly written, perhaps been
very humble, and had persuaded her father to take the younger man into
partnership in his business. “Don’t be proud now, Jim. I’m not proud
any more. Something has happened to me Jim. I’m not proud any more,” I
heard her saying as I lay in my own room in the darkness, and I leave
the reader to judge whether, under the circumstances, I could be proud.
But perhaps after all the woman and I have done something for each
other, I thought.
NOTE IX
ON a certain Sunday morning of that summer I found myself sitting in
a little garden under apple trees back of a red brick house that had
green window blinds and that stood on the side of a hill near the edge
of an Illinois town of some five or six thousand people. Sitting by
a small table near me was a dark slender man with pale cheeks, a man
I had never seen until late on the evening before and who I had half
thought would die but a few hours earlier. Now, although the morning
was warm, he had a blanket wrapped around him and his thin hands, lying
on the table, trembled. Together we were drinking our morning coffee,
containing a touch of brandy. A robin hopped on the grass near by and
the sunlight falling through the branches of the trees made yellow
patches at our feet.
I sat in silence filled with wonder at the strangeness of the
circumstances that had brought me to the spot and of my own mood. The
garden in which we sat had a gravel path running down through the
centre and on one side vegetables grew, with narrow beds of flowers
about the vegetable plots. Along the further side against a fence were
tall berry bushes and on our side there was grass under the trees and
near by a tall hedge of elders. Looking toward the foot of the garden
one got a view of a river valley dotted with farmhouses and beyond the
elders there was a road that led along a hillside down into town.
The town itself was old, for that Illinois country, and had already had
two lives. First, it had been a river town on the banks of a stream
that led down into the Mississippi, and now it was a merchandising
centre. Later perhaps it would become a factory town. The river life
had died, when the railroads came but there still were some remnants
of the older place, one or two streets of small log stores and houses
standing on a bluff above the river and now used as residences by
farm laborers. The old town, left thus off by itself half forgotten
by the new town, was picturesque. In the company of my strange new
acquaintance and once with his father, an old man who had lived in the
river town in the days of its prosperity, I later spent several hours
among the old houses. Dogs and pigs wandered through the deep dust of
the principal street facing the river or slept in the shade of the
old buildings and the old man told me that even in its better days
it was a quite terrible place. In the winter, in the early days, the
roads were hub deep to the wagons with mud, the houses were small and
near each house was an outhouse that smelled horribly in summer and
invited millions of flies. Pigs, cows and horses were kept in little
sheds near the houses and often diseases, encouraged by the utter lack
of sanitation, swept through the town and sometimes carried off whole
families.
The older of the two men, named Jim Berners, was a merchant, owning
with his son a large store on the principal street of the newer town
and had been brought to the Illinois town when he was a child. His
father, an Englishman, had come to America as a young man and for
several years had been a merchant in the city of Philadelphia. Having
married there and wanting to establish himself as the head of a landed
family in the new country he had come to Illinois when land could be
had at a low price and had bought five hundred acres of river bottom
land.
With his young wife and his three children he lived in the river town
and had cleared and got ready for planting most of his land when
misfortune came down upon him. In the crude little towns of that day
doctors were for the most part half educated, the houses were stuffy
and full of drafts in winter and epidemics of smallpox, followed by
scarlet fever, diphtheria and typhus came and could not be checked.
Within two years the merchant’s rather delicate wife died and her death
was followed by his own and by the death of two of his three children.
There was only the babe left alive and he had been put in charge of an
old judge with whom the father had formed a friendship.
The young Berners had grown into manhood in the household of the judge,
whose great boast it was that he was a personal friend of Abraham
Lincoln. He told me he had never been ill a day in his life. Upon
reaching manhood he sold three hundred acres of his land and like his
father became a merchant.
Father and son still owned the Berners merchandising establishment
although they seemed to give it little attention.
What a place it was! Some ten years before I made his acquaintance
the younger Berners, named Alonzo, had gone to Chicago where he had
got quite hopelessly drunk. During his whole life the man had been a
sufferer from some obscure nervous disease and was never without pain.
The sprees he sometimes went on were but a kind of desperate attempt
to free himself for a short time from the presence of pain. After the
drunken time he was dreadfully ill and seemed about to die and then
there came a time of weakness and a kind of physical peace. The tense
nerves of his slender body relaxed, he slept at night and spent the
days talking with a few friends, reading books or riding about town in
a buggy.
On the sprees, of ten years before, sprees indulged in twice a year at
regular intervals outside his own town, when he had stolen away without
warning to his father or to an older sister of the household, young
Alonzo had been picked up in the city of Chicago by an English deep-sea
sailor. The sailor had been working for a time on a lake steamer but
had tired of the place and had left his ship at Chicago and had also
gone on a drunk. He rescued Alonzo Berners from the men into whose
hands he had fallen and brought him home and later became attached to
the Berners establishment, staying in the Illinois town at first as
clerk in the store and later as the store’s manager. He was a heavily
built man of fifty-five when I saw him and had a white scar, evidently
from an old knife wound, on his brown cheek and a peculiar waddling
gait. As he hustled about the store one thought of a fat duck trying to
make its way rapidly along on land.
In the Berners establishment were sold hardware, agricultural
implements, house and barn paints, jack-knives and a thousand other
things and there was also a harness shop in the main building facing
the town’s principal street. Back of the main building there was an
alleyway and across the alleyway half a dozen large frame buildings in
which were kept hides bought from the farmers, coal, lumber, bins of
corn, wheat and oats in bags and hay in bales.
The whole establishment, an infinitely busy place, was run by the
sailor who could neither read or write but who was helped by a
stern-looking woman bookkeeper. The sailor was shrewd wise and jolly
and had always some tale of life on the deep sea to tell to his farmer
customers. He was the most popular man in town and there was another
feature that added tremendously to the popularity of the store. In the
spring, just before planting time, and in the fall after the crops were
harvested, the Berners gave a great feast in one of the sheds. The hay
corn and lumber were taken out and long wooden tables erected, while
invitations were sent far and wide to the town and country people.
Women of the town and country wives came to help prepare the feast, the
old sailor waddled about shouting, pigs, turkeys, calves and lambs were
killed, bushels of potatoes baked, pies and cakes, baked in advance by
the women, were brought and there was a feast lasting sometimes all
afternoon and far into the night. Alonzo Berners had provided many
barrels of beer and the sailor and his pals among the farmers got half
drunk and sang songs and made speeches while the professional men of
the town, the lawyers, judges and doctors, all came and made speeches.
What a storm of talk! Even the preachers and the rival merchants were
there and a prayer was said as each new group sat down to the feast,
the ministers shaking their heads over the beer drinking but falling to
with a will at the food. The two annual affairs must often have cost
the Berners a good part of the profits made during the year but they
did not mind. “It doesn’t matter,” said the elder Berners. “I’m old and
nearly ready to die, it isn’t likely Alonzo will live very long and as
for Hallie,” meaning the daughter, “I have already given her one of my
two farms. The Berners are going to peter out anyway and why should
they care about leaving money behind them?”
The elder Berners, a man of seventy, rarely went into town but spent
most of his days in his little garden and during my own visit at the
house he came every day to sit with me, smoking his pipe and talking
until he fell asleep in his chair. When he had been a younger man and
before his wife died he had owned several trotting horses of which he
loved to talk. One of the horses, named “Peter Point,” had been the
pride and joy of his life and he spoke of the horse as of a beloved son.
Oh, what a great magnificent beast the stallion Peter Point had been
and how he could trot! Sometimes when he spoke of him the old man
jumped to his feet and climbing on the chair seat touched the limb
of an apple tree with his fingers. “Looket here now. He was taller
than that. Yes, siree! He was taller than that when he threw up his
head,” he declared, jumping down from the chair and hopping about like
an excited boy and walking up and down before me rubbing his hands
together. He told me a long tale of a trip he had once taken with his
stallion and two trotting mares as far east as Pennsylvania and of how
Peter Point won every race in which he started, always the trotting
free-for-all, and spoke fervently of the moment when he came out with
the others and paraded before the grandstand before the first heat of a
race. Jim Berners, then young and strong, sat in the sulky and what a
moment it was for him. The memory of it filled him with excitement. “My
father used to talk of the English aristocracy to his friend the judge,
with whom I was left when all my family died, and the judge told me
tales of what he had to say. Sometimes on days like that, when we came
out for the first heat and were scoring down for the start or going
slowly back for another try after a false start, I used to think of his
words. There was me, sitting in the sulky, and there was the man, old
Charlie Whaley, who took care of Peter Point, standing over near the
grandstand with a blanket over his shoulder. Charlie winked and nodded
at me and I winked at him. How swelled up with pride I was. I usually
had two or three hundred dollars bet on Peter’s chances and he never
once went back on me. I thought we were pretty aristocratic ourselves,
Peter and me.”
“Well, and so there we were jogging slowly up to the starting place and
the people in the grandstand were shouting and down in the betting ring
there was a hubbub and I used to look at the people and think about
them and about myself and the horse too. ‘Lordy,’ I used to say to
myself, ‘what a lot we do think of ourselves and what God-awful things
we are, we humans, come right down to it.’ I was raised in the old
Judge Willard’s house, right here in this town, you know, and in the
old days a lot of what we called our big men used to come to talk their
affairs over with the judge. Abe Lincoln used to come and once the
editor of the _Chicago Tribune_ and young Logan who afterward got
to be governor, and a lot of others, congressmen, and other such truck.
They came and planned and schemed and then they used to make speeches
up in front of the town hall that was down by the river in the old town
but that later burned to the ground. They talked and talked, and I used
to listen.
“And such talk! ‘All men are created free and equal,’ ‘Nature’s
noblemen,’ ‘Noble pioneers’ and all that kind of stuff about men just
like me. Lordy, what a lot of big sounding words I had listened to
when I was a kid. It used to make me sick to think of it sometimes
later, when I was sitting up there behind Peter and to think that I had
sometimes believed such bunk myself, I who had seen and known a lot of
them same pioneers pretty intimately and should have known better than
to listen.
“As I say, I used to think about it and a lot of other foolishness I’d
heard, when I was up behind Peter, and he with his head up so high and
looking--say, he could walk past one of them grandstands and past all
of them people like God Almighty himself might have walked! What I mean
is, not giving the people or the other horses in the race or the other
drivers or the judges up in the stand or me or anyone anything but
his darned contempt. It was lovely to see. Sometimes when he’d see a
mare he’d throw up his head and snort and sometimes there was a little
quiet noise he made just as though he was saying to us ‘You worms, you
worms,’ to all of us, all of the people in the world including myself.
“Why, hell, no one ever knew how fast that Peter could trot. He got
sick and died before he ever got to the grand circuit where horses of
his own class usually raced,” the old man declared proudly. Jim Berners
had taken his horses over into Ohio and with Peter had won a race at a
place called Fostoria and then that night the horse was taken violently
ill and lying down in his stall quietly died.
His owner had been in at the death and after the stallion was dead
had walked about the dark race course the rest of the night and had
decided to give up racing. “I took a turn about the track,” he said,
“and stood a long time at the head of the stretch thinking of the times
I had made the turn up there, with Peter leading all the other horses,
and not half extending himself at that, and of how proud I had been so
many times, sitting behind him and pretending to myself I was doing the
job. I wasn’t doing a darned thing but sitting still and riding home in
front. It was only after Peter died I ever told myself the truth.”
“I stood up at the head of the stretch, as I said, and the moon came
out and Peter was dead now and I decided to go home. And I had some
thoughts that night about most human beings, including myself, that I
haven’t ever forgot. I thought a lot of us were swine and the rest a
kind of half-baked lot, put us against a horse like Peter had been.
‘And so,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll quit racing and go home and try to
keep my mouth shut a good deal of the time.’ And I haven’t been too
much stuck on myself or anyone else ever since.”
NOTE X
BERNERS, the merchant and horseman, had for a good many years been
disappointed and hurt by the thought that his family was not to carry
on after his death but in his old age had grown cheerful about the
matter. “We aren’t so much. It doesn’t matter. I dare say the sun will
come up mornings and the moon at night when there are no more Berners
in Illinois, or anywhere else, for that matter.” As a child the boy
Alonzo was always sickly. “We’ve always been thinking he’d die, about
twice every year, but you see he hasn’t quite done it yet,” the old man
said softly.
Hallie, the daughter of the house, was five years older than her
brother and was devoted to him. After seeing them together one
understood that she could never have married. It was just a thing
that couldn’t have happened. One thought of her as saying to herself:
“Marriage is too intimate. I am not made for intimate relations.” The
idea of Hallie Berners held in a man’s arms was for some obscure reason
monstrous and yet how affectionate she was! There was a sense in which
her brother and father were babes in her charge, babes never touched by
her hands or her lips but constantly caressed by her thoughts. She was
a tall rather stern-looking woman with graying hair, large strong hands
and quiet gray eyes and she was very shy. Her shyness expressed itself
in severity and when she was much touched she grew silent and almost
haughty in her bearing. It was as though she were saying to herself:
“Look out now! If you are not careful you will let something precious
escape you.”
The son Alonzo was a man of thirty-five with a little black mustache,
thin features, small delicate hands and thick, black hair. As a young
man he had gone away to an eastern college but a desperate illness had
compelled him to come home almost at once and he had not again tried
getting out from under his sister’s care, only leaving the family roof
when he crept away for the brief periods of drunkenness that gave him a
temporary means of escape out of his house of pain. He stayed at home
and on fair days sometimes rode about town and the surrounding country
behind an old black horse that belonged to the family or sat in the
garden under the apple trees talking with friends who came to see him.
In a large room in the house where he stayed on dull or cold days there
were a couch, a fireplace and many books on shelves built into the
walls.
How many people came up along the hillside road to sit and talk with
Alonzo Berners! Were they sorry for him? At first I thought they were
and then I saw they came to receive rather than to give. It was Alonzo
who did the giving to all. What did he give? Among those I saw at the
house was a local judge, son of that judge with whom his father had
lived when he was a boy, a man named Marvin Manno, who lived in Chicago
but who often came to the town and spent two or three days for the sake
of talking with the invalid and who paid him a visit during my time
there, two or three doctors who came, not in a professional way but
for something unprofessional they wanted, a cripple of the town who
made his living by taking people’s photographs, a man who bought and
sold horses, and a tall silent boy who wore glasses and who had large
protruding teeth so that he looked something like a horse when on rare
occasions he smiled.
Life in the Berners household--in reality presided over by the sick
man, in a queer way absolutely controlled by him--was a revelation to
me. Like that Judge Turner I had known a few years before, and for
that matter like myself too, the man had read a great many books and
was still constantly reading--he spent more than half his time with a
book in his hands and told me once that but for books he thought he
should have gone mad from the gnawing pains that were always eating at
him--but in the single fact that we were all readers the similarity
between Judge Turner, Alonzo and myself ceased.
In this new man whose path I had unexpectedly crossed was a quiet kind
of sanity unknown in any other I had seen. He was a giver. What did he
give? The question amazed and startled me. He was loved by all who knew
him and during the week I spent in his house, seeing him with other
men and riding with him about town and out into the country, I was
startled by the feeling of love and well-being that came into the eyes
of people when he appeared among them. My own mind, always given to
asking questions, unable to take anything for granted, raced like the
stallion Peter Point carrying old Jim Berners to one of his victories.
Was there a kind of power in pain to remake a man? My own conception of
life was profoundly disturbed. The man before me had spent his entire
life sitting in the dark house of pain. He sat there now looking out
through the windows and into other houses that were alive and cheerful
with health. Why had he health and sanity within himself while, almost
without exception, the others including myself had not?
As I looked at him and at the men who came to visit him a kind of
wonder grew within me. The man Marvin Manno, a slender man, rather
elegantly clad and with gold-rimmed glasses on his large nose, was
talking. He was connected, in an official capacity, with some large
commercial establishment of the city, an establishment that sold goods
to the Berners store, but he did not come to the town on business.
Why had he come? He spoke continually of his own schemes and hopes
and balanced oddly back and forth between devotion to the business
interests he served and a kind of penchant he had for writing poetry.
An odd effect was produced. The man was sincerely devoted to two
interests in life that could not by any chance be combined and as one
listened to his talk one became more and more puzzled. Only Alonzo
Berners was not puzzled. He entered into the man’s thoughts, understood
him, gave him what he apparently wanted, sympathetic understanding
without sentimentality. We sat in the garden back of the Berners house,
the man Manno talked, a doctor came and spoke of his patients, and in
particular of an old woman lying in a cabin down by the river, who for
two years had been on the point of death but who could not die. Then
the judge spoke of his father and of political affairs in the state,
the elder Berners boasted of the speed of the stallion Peter Point and
the boy with the large teeth smiled shyly but remained silent.
Then when evening came and they had all gone away I looked at Alonzo
Berners and wondered. In all the talk no mention was ever made of
himself or his own affairs. Even the pain always present in his body
had been forgotten by the others. Any mention of his suffering would
have seemed out of place.
My own mind was groping about in a new medium for the expression
of a life. I was very young then, had not yet come to the age of
citizenship, but for a long time I had been building within myself my
own consciousness of men. Well, they were a kind of thing, selfish and
self-centred, and they were right in being so. One played the game, won
if he could and tried not to be a bellyacher if he lost. In me was a
kind of contempt for men including myself that Alonzo Berners did not
have. Where had I got my contempt and how had he escaped getting it?
Was he right and I wrong or was he a sentimentalist? My mind had run
into a thicket of new ideas and I could not find my way out. “Tread
softly,” I said to myself.
I sat aside, near the boy with the teeth, looking at my new
acquaintance and trying to straighten all these things out in my mind.
Hundreds of men, famous and infamous, I had met in the books I had
read, went as in a procession across the field of my fancy. How many
books I had read and how many stories of the lives of men, so-called
great men and rascals, lovely women with gold and jewels in their
hands, great killers of men, lawgivers, daring breakers of the law,
devout men, starving in deserts for the glory of God; what men and
women, what vast resounding names!
Was there something in the books I had missed? A vagrant thought
came. Across the pages of some of the books there had wandered a
different kind of man or woman. The writers of books had little to
say about such people. There was little enough to be said. In the
stories told of the great they appeared always as minor characters.
The great strutted. The others walked softly. Clement VII had sent
an ambassador to Charles of Spain. What the ambassador, one of the
mysterious quiet fellows, said to Charles “Emperor of the Romans and
Lord of the whole world” (_Romanorum Imperator semper augustus, mundi
totius Dominus, universus dominis, Universis Principibus et Populis
semper verendus_) one did not know, but a peculiar thing happened.
The ambassador served faithfully both Charles and the Pope, endeared
himself to the two mortal enemies. They were both happier with him
about. A thousand conflicting interests swirled about him but he kept
himself quite clear. Could it have been that such a one loved men, as
men, and that men loved him? There was so little for the writers of
books to say of such fellows. They had not sought exalted office and
seemed content to play the minor rôle in life. What were they up to?
Was there a power greater than obvious power, a power not having in it
the disease of obvious power?
I looked about me and wondered. Before me, sitting among men in an
Illinois village, was a pale man with delicate hands who, two or three
times a year, became hopelessly drunk and who then had to be brought
back helpless to his home, as I had brought him a few days before. Men
gathered about and talked of their own affairs and he sat for the most
part in silence, saying only now and then a few words, always in their
interests. His mind seemed always to follow the minds of the others.
Did he have no life of his own?
I began to resent the man but as I sat with him the cynicism of Judge
Turner I had so much admired lost some of its force in me and the elder
Berners, condemning men as less worthy of life than race horses became
a half-amusing figure. I was mystified and amazed. Did most men and
women remain children and was Alonzo Berners grown up? Was it grown up
to come to the realization that oneself did not matter, that nothing
mattered but a kind of consciousness of the wonder of life outside
oneself?
I sat under the apple trees smiling to myself and wondering why I
smiled. Was there possible such a thing as goodness in men, a goodness
that was not stuffy and hateful? Like most young men I had a contempt
of goodness. Had I been making a mistake? The man before me now did
not, like Judge Turner, say wise and witty things that remained fixed
in the mind and that could afterward be passed off in conversations as
one’s own. Later in New York and in other American cities I was to see
a good many men of a sort not unlike Judge Turner but few like Alonzo
Berners. The smart fellows of the American Intelligentsia sat about
in restaurants in New York and wrote articles for the political and
semi-literary weeklies. A smart saying they had heard at dinner or at
lunch the day before was passed off as their own in the next article
they wrote. The usual plan was to write of politics or politicians or
to slaughter some second-rate artist--in short, to pick out easy game
and kill it with their straw shafts and they gained great reputations
by pointing out the asininity of men everyone already knew for asses.
For a great many years I was filled with admiration of such fellows
and vaguely dreamed of becoming such another myself. I wanted then, as
a young man, I think, to sit with Alonzo Berners and his friends and
suddenly say something to upset them all. Alonzo’s life of physical
suffering was forgotten by me as by the others but unlike them there
was in me a kind of unpleasant dislike of him, a dislike he saw and
understood but let pass as being boyish vanity. The smart-seeming
things I thought of to say sounded flat enough when I said them over
to myself and I remained silent. Occasionally Alonzo turned to me and
smiled. I had done him a kindness, had risked something for him, and I
was his guest. Perhaps he thought me not mature enough to understand
him and his kind of men. Would I ever become mature?
NOTE XI
DID I in reality also love the man?
I had found him, on a Saturday evening, very drunk in a saloon in
Chicago. It was about nine o’clock and some time after I had fled from
Nora. I was nearly broke and thought I had better be thinking of doing
something that would bring me in a little money. What should I do?
The devil! It was apparent I would soon have to go to work again with
my hands. After some weeks of idleness my hands had become soft and
velvety to the touch and I liked them so. Now they were hands to hold
a pen or a paint brush. Why was I not a writer or a painter? Well, I
fancied one had to be a fellow of the schools before one dared approach
the arts. Often I went about cursing the fate that had not permitted
me to be born in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth with
its all-pervading smell of burning coal, oil and gasoline, and with
its noises and dirt. Mark Twain might declare the twentieth the most
glorious of all the centuries but it did not seem so to me. I thought
often of the fifteenth century in Italy when the great Borgia was just
coming into power, was at that time full of the subject. What glorious
children! Why could not I be a glorious child? Aha! the Lord Rodrigo de
Lancol y Borgia, Cardinal-Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina, Dean of the
Sacred College, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, etc., had
just been made Pope. Did I not myself have an Italian grandmother? What
a place and a time that might have been for me! It was the day of the
coronation of the new Pope and all Rome was excited. On the day before
four mules, laden with silver, had gone from Cardinal Rodrigo’s house
to the house of Cardinal Sforza-Visconti. It was the gentle privilege
of the Romans in those fine days to pillage the house of a cardinal
when he had been made pope. Was it not said, in the sacred laws, that
the vicar of Christ should give his substance to the poor? Fearing
he might not do it the poor went and took. Armed bands of desperate
fellows, with feathers in their hats, roamed the streets of the old
city at such times and a turn of the wheel of fortune might at any
moment make any one of them rich and powerful, a patron of the arts,
a rich and powerful grandee of Church or State. How I longed to be a
richly gowned, soft-handed cunning but scholarly grandee and patron of
the arts!
How much better times those than my own for such haphazard fellows
as myself, I thought, and cursed the twentieth century and the fate
that had thrown me into it. At that time in Chicago I knew a young Jew
named Ben Hecht, not yet a well-known writer, and sometimes he and I
went forth to do our cursing together. Outwardly he was a more adept
curser than myself but inwardly I felt I could outdo him and often we
had walked together, he cursing aloud our common fate and declaring
dramatically that life was for us an empty cup, a vessel turned upside
down, a golden goblet with cracks in the bowl, the largest crack being
the fact that we both unfortunately had our livings to make, and
I striving to cap his every curse with a more violent one. We went
together into a street and stood under the moon. Before us were many
huge ugly warehouses. “I hope they burn,” I said feebly, but he only
laughed at the weakness of my fancy. “I hope the builders die slowly of
a painful inflammation of the membranes of the bowels,” he said, while
I envied.
I had been walking alone on the streets of Chicago on that Saturday
evening when I found the younger Berners and had crossed the river to
the west side. I was gloomy and distraught and on a side street, off
West Madison Street and near the Chicago River, went into a small, dark
saloon. Several men sat at a small table at the back, among whom was
Alonzo Berners and there was a red-faced bartender leaning over the bar
and watching the group at the table. To all these I at the moment paid
no attention.
I was absorbed in the contemplation of my own difficult position in
life and was thinking only of myself. Sitting at a table I called for
a glass of brandy and when it was paid for realized that I had but two
dollars left in my pocket. I took the two dollars in my hand and looked
at them and putting them away continued looking at my empty hands. They
had, at the moment, as I have said, grown soft and velvety and I wanted
them to remain so. Wild dreams floated through my mind. Why had I not
more physical courage? It was all very well to talk with Ben Hecht of
the many advantages to be gained by being an Italian desperado of the
fifteenth century, but why had I not the courage to be a desperado of
the twentieth? Surely Rome or Naples or Florence, in the days of their
glory, never offered any better pickings than the Chicago of my own
day. In the older day a man slipped a slender knife delicately between
his victim’s neck and spine and made off with a few ducats at the risk
of his life but in Chicago men habitually got thousands of dollars by
robbery apparently without any risk at all. I looked at my own hands
and wondered. Could they hold a pistol steadily to the head of a timid
bank clerk or a mail-wagon driver? I decided they could not and was
ashamed of myself. Then I decided they might some day be induced to
hold a pen or a painter’s brush but reflected that the great patrons of
the arts were all long since dead and that my own brother, a painter,
had been compelled to make magazine covers for commercial “gents” in
order to get the slender amount necessary to educate himself in his
craft. “Huh!” I said to myself, not wanting I’m afraid, to work for any
commercial “gent” at all. Drinking my brandy I looked about the room
into which I had wandered.
It was a desperately dark little hole, lighted by two gaslights and
with two beer-stained tables in the semi-darkness at the rear. I looked
at the bartender, who had a large flat nose and bloodshot eyes and
decided it was just as well I had but two dollars. “I may be robbed
before I leave this hole,” I told myself and ordered another glass of
brandy, thinking I might as well drink up the little money I had rather
than have it taken from me.
And now the men at the other table in the room caught and held my
attention. With the exception of Alonzo Berners, whom the others had
picked up on the street, they were a hard-looking lot. One did not
think of them as desperate fellows. They were of the sort one saw
hanging about the places of Hinky Dink, Bathhouse John or of Conners,
the gray wolf, men famous in Chicago at that time, sullen fellows
without money, by no means desperate but hangers-on of the desperate,
fellows who robbed full of fright at their own temerity but the more
dangerous sometimes because of their fears.
I looked at them and at the man who had fallen into their clutches
and who was now spending his money upon them and at the same moment
they seemed to have become aware of my presence. Sullen eyes looked
at me sullenly. I was not of their world. Was I a fly cop? Their eyes
threatened. “If you are a fly cop or are in any way connected with the
man we have so fortunately picked up, a man quite apparently helplessly
drunk and having money, you had better be minding your business. As a
matter of fact it would be well for you to get out of here.”
I returned the stare directed at me and hesitated a moment. The sick
drunken man sitting among the others had a large roll of bills held in
his left hand that hung at his side, and his right elbow was on the
table.
What a look of suffering in his face! From time to time the others
ordered drinks brought from the bar and the sick man took a bill from
the roll and threw it on the table. When the change was brought by the
bartender one of his companions put it in his pocket. They were taking
turns, it was apparent, in robbing the man and as I looked an idea
came to me. Was it true that the bartender, a more out-and-out fellow
than the others, was disgusted at this slow and comparatively painless
method of committing robbery? Did I see in his eyes a kind of sympathy
for the man being robbed?
It was a ticklish moment for me. Having been thinking so
grandiloquently of Cæsar Borgia, Lorenzo the Magnificent and other
grand and courageous personages of my world of books, having just been
gazing at my own hands and wondering why they would not or could not do
some act of personal courage that would make me think better of myself,
having these thoughts, I of a sudden wanted to rescue the man with
the roll of bills but I did not want to make a fool of myself. I have
always wanted not to be a fool and have been a fool so often!
I had decided to perform a certain act and at the same time began
laughing at myself, not thinking I would be foolish enough to attempt
it. One of these conflicts between myself, as I live in my fancy,
and myself as I exist in fact, that have been going on in me since
I was a child had now started. It is the sort of thing that makes
autobiography, even of the half-playful sort I am now attempting,
so difficult to manage. One wants to treat oneself as a person of
more dignity and worth than one has the courage to attempt. Among
advertising men with whom I later associated we managed things better.
We took turns doing what we called “staging” each other. I was to
speak highly of Smith who in turn did the same of me. The trick
is not unknown to literary men, but it is difficult to manage in
autobiography. The self of the fancy persists in laughing at the self
of fact and does it sometimes at unfortunate moments. Also the fancy
is a great liar. How often later, when I became a man of business, I
did in fancy some shrewd or notable act that was never done in fact at
all, but that seemed so real that it was difficult not to believe in
it as a fact. I had been talking with a certain man and later thought
of a number of brilliant things I might have said. Then I met a friend
and told him of the conversation, putting the brilliant things in. The
story several times repeated became a part of the history of my life
and nothing would have later so amazed me as to have been compelled to
face the facts of the conversation and the figure I had cut in it.
Was the thing I now thought myself about to do in the saloon a fact or
was it but another of the fanciful acts, created in my own imagination,
I might and no doubt would later relate as a fact? Would it not be
better not to attempt to rescue the man in the room and later just to
say I had and in the end make myself believe I had?
There was little doubt I could do the thing more gaudily in fancy. The
place in which I sat was in a part of the city little frequented at
night. Near it were only vacant lots and rows of dark and now empty
factory buildings. It was unlikely there were any policemen in the
neighborhood and in case of need and if a policeman did appear what
sort of fellow was he likely to be--a fellow really appointed to the
district to knock aside such interfering fools as myself? As for the
men seated at the table, if they were cowards it was unlikely the
bartender was one.
I kept smiling to myself, at my own thoughts, at my trick of always
threshing my acts out in advance and in the end doing nothing except to
create later the fiction of an act performed. “My book reading and my
conversations with such fellows as Judge Turner are making a bigger
fool of me than I need be,” I told myself, still looking at the empty
hands lying on the table before me. What really empty things they
were, those same hands of mine. They had never grasped anything, never
fulfilled any purpose for me. So many fingers, so many pads of flesh
in the palms, so many little muscles to grasp things, to lay hold of
some situation, to drive a knife into an enemy, to lift a friend, to
make love to a woman, hands to become servants of the brain and to
make their owner something other than a meaningless thing of words and
fancies drifting through life with millions of other meaningless men.
I really thought at that time I had a brain. It is an illusion that I
believe almost everyone has.
In disgust of myself my eyes stopped looking at my empty hands
and looked instead about the room. What seemed to me a stream of
deliciously romantic notions now came. There was no doubt the man
sitting with the crew from the city’s underworld was very ill. One
might have said he was about to die. A chalky pallor had spread over
his face and except for his eyes everything about his face and figure
expressed utter weariness. It was so people looked when they were about
to die, when they were through with life, done for, glad to throw life
aside.
The face and figure of the man were like that but the eyes were not.
They were alive and only seemed curious and puzzled. As they looked
at me from out the pale face I had the curious illusion of a voice
speaking, speaking as though out of a coffin or a cavern.
Now the man’s eyes were looking from my eyes to the eyes of the
bartender. Was there something commanding in them? Had the sick man,
in his helpless position, the power to command the two men in the room
who might conceivably be of use to him? The man had been drunk for
several days, and now he was not drinking but the poison from the vile
stuff he had taken had permeated his system. The same eyes had looked
at the men among whom he sat and his brain had come to a decision
concerning them. Men’s eyes could be impersonal sometimes. The other
men at the table were of no value, had been thrown aside as useless.
One fancied a thin sick body going on for days, eyes not looking about,
eyes alive in a corner of the head of a man waiting for a moment of
sanity.
And now they command. The sick man was not afraid, as in his place I
would have been. There was no fear in the eyes that now looked at me
so steadily. It might be the man did not mind the fact that he was
about to be robbed and perhaps his body had known so much pain that the
additional pain of a beating would not too much matter.
As for myself I was thinking beyond my own depths, thinking of certain
things as possible in another that could never have been possible in
myself. I was a coward trying to think the thoughts of a brave man.
From the very moment when I first became aware of the actuality of the
man Alonzo Berners I began doing something I had never done before, I
began to live in another, suffer in another, love another perhaps.
If the man’s eyes were issuing a command what did he want? I grew
resentful. What right had he to command me? Did he think me a fool?
Unconsciously I had begun to resist a command. “I won’t. You got
yourself into this pickle, now get yourself out.”
What a plague to have an imagination! It seemed to me a kind of
wordless conversation, something after the following manner, now began
between myself, the bartender and the man at the table.
From the bloodshot eyes of the bartender leaning over his bar words
were now coming. I leaned forward to listen.
“Ah! Bah! I do not like this affair. You have fallen into the hands
of these cheap thugs and from the looks of you I should say you are
a rather decent sort. To me, situated as I am in life, that would
not make any difference if the men robbing you were fellows I could
respect. If any one of a dozen men I know chose to hit you over the
head and throw your body into the river I would not lift a hand to
prevent it. As the matter stands I think I will. I do not fancy these
dogs you are with eating so fat a calf. As for myself you are not fair
game. Poor chap, you are sick. I cannot leave my job here but the
fellow over there at the table will take you away. Speak to him. He
will do as you wish.”
What a chattering of unheard voices my imagination had created in the
room!
Words from the living eyes of the sick man.
“It does not matter about being robbed. If these men beat or kill me it
does not matter. The point is I am tired now.” The eyes smiled.
And now the man at the table was looking directly at me and his words,
created, you understand in my fancy, were directed at me. “Well, come
on lad. Lift me up in your arms and carry me home. It is only because
you are young and inexperienced you are afraid.”
NOTE XII
“AFRAID?” It was only because I was so thoroughly afraid I now arose
from my seat and went toward the sick man. As for the imagined voices I
did not believe in them. Did I not know the tricks of my own fancy and
did the man think I was going to be fool enough to risk my hide for a
stranger? It is true, had I been a man of physical courage, I might,
without too great risk, have gone over to the table and snatched the
roll of bills out of the sick man’s hands. When it came right down to
it I could at the moment use such a roll of bills very handily. Had I
been a man of courage I might have gone blustering and swaggering to
the table and bluffed everyone in the place but being, as I knew I was,
a coward did the man sitting there think I was going to risk my hide
for him?
I moved slowly toward the table, all the time laughing at myself and
telling myself I was not going to do what I was at the same time
obviously doing and the bartender coming from behind the bar with a
hammer in his hand fell in behind me. I could see the hammer from a
corner of my eye. Well, he was going to hit me with it. In a moment
more my head would be crushed and, as would be quite plain to any man
of sense, I would only be getting what I deserved. What a confounded
fool! I was terribly frightened and at the same time there was a smile
on my lips. My appearance at the moment must have been disconcerting to
the men at the table.
They were apparently as great fools as myself. As I approached, the
sick man, perhaps to free himself from the others, threw the roll of
bills carelessly on the table and one of his companions put a large
hairy hand over it. Was he also afraid? All of the men were looking
intently at me and at the bartender behind me. Were they but waiting to
see my head crushed? One of them got rather hesitatingly to his feet
and doubling his fist raised it as though to strike me in the face--I
had now got within a foot of the sick man--but the blow did not descend.
Reaching down I put my arms about the sick man’s shoulder and half
raised him to his feet, the foolish smile still on my face but as I
saw he could not stand I prepared to take him in my arms. That would
make me quite helpless but I was helpless enough as it was. What did it
matter? “If I am going to be slugged I might as well be slugged doing
something,” I thought.
I lifted the man as gently as I could, placing the slender body over my
shoulder and waiting for the blows that were to descend upon me but at
that very moment the hand of the bartender reached over and snatching
the roll of bills from under the hand on the table put it in my pocket.
All was done in silence and in silence, with Alonzo Berners slung over
my shoulder, I walked to the door and to West Madison Street where
there were lights and people passing up and down. At the corner I put
him down and looking back saw the bartender standing at the door of his
establishment watching. Was he laughing? I fancied he was. And one
might also fancy he was keeping the others bluffed in the room until
I had got safely away. I stood at the corner beside the sick man, who
leaned helplessly against my legs, and waited for a cab that would take
me to a railroad station. Already I had taken letters from his pocket
and knew where he lived. He seemed unable to speak. “He will probably
die on the way and then I’ll be in a hell of a mess,” I kept saying to
myself after I had got with him into the day coach of a train.
NOTE XIII
MY adventure with Alonzo Berners came to an end after I had been at his
house for a week and during the week nothing I can set down as notable
happened at all and later I was told he was dead, that he had again got
drunk in the city of Chicago and had fallen or had been knocked off a
bridge into the Chicago River where he drowned. There was the house on
the hillside and the garden. During my visit to the house the elder
Berners worked in the garden or sat with me boasting of the horse Peter
Point and found in me a sympathetic audience. I have always understood
horses better than men. It’s easier.
I sat in the garden listening to the talk of the men who came to see
Alonzo Berners, rode with him once in his buggy or went into town
to walk by myself or to listen to some tale told by the sailor who
managed the store. The sister, who on the night of my arrival had
treated me coldly--no doubt strange characters had come to the Berners
house on the same mission that had brought me and also no doubt she
was in terrible fear when Alonzo was away on one of his helpless
debauches--the sister later treated me with the silent kindliness
characteristic of her.
Nothing happened at all during my visit and Alonzo Berners did not
during the whole time say a notable thing that I could later remember
and that I can now quote to explain my feeling for him.
Nothing happened but that I was puzzled as I had never been before.
There was something in the very walls of the Berners house that excited
and when I had gone to bed at night I did not sleep. Notions came.
Odd exciting fancies kept me awake. As I have explained I was then
young and had quite made up my mind about men and life. Men and women
were divided into two classes containing a few shrewd wise people and
many fools. I was trying very hard to place myself among the wise
and shrewd ones. The Berners family I could not place in either of
these classifications and in particular Alonzo Berners puzzled and
disconcerted me.
Was there a force in life of which I knew nothing at all and was this
force exemplified in the person of the man I had picked up in a Chicago
saloon?
At night as I lay in my bed new ideas, new impulses, came flocking.
There was a man in the house with me, a man fairly worshiped by others
and for no reason I could understand but wanted to understand. His
very living in the house had done something to it, to the very wall of
the house, so that anyone coming into the place, sleeping between the
walls, was affected. Could it be that the man Alonzo Berners simply
loved the people about him and the places in which they lived and
had that love become a force in itself affecting the very air people
breathed? Sometimes in the afternoons when there was no one about I
went through the rooms of the house looking curiously about. There was
a chair here and a table there. On the table lay a book. Was there also
in the house a kind of fragrance? Why did the sunlight fall with such
a pronounced golden glory on the faded carpet on the floor of Alonzo
Berners’ room?
Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to
believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of
intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and in
others.
Was I afraid also of people who had the power of loving, of giving
themselves? Was I afraid of the power of unasking love in myself and in
others?
That I should be afraid of anything in the realm of the spirit, that
there should perhaps be a force in the world I did not understand,
could not understand, irritated me profoundly.
As the week advanced my irritation grew and I have never had any
doubt at all that Alonzo Berners knew of it. He said nothing and when
I went away he had nothing to say. I spent the days of that week in
his presence, saw the men who came to visit him and whom I thought I
understood well enough and then at night went to my bed and did not
sleep. I was like one tortured by a desire for conversion to something
like the love of God, by a desire to love and be loved and sometimes in
the night I lay in my bed like a very lovelorn maiden and sometimes I
grew angry and walked up and down in the moonlight in my room swearing
and shaking my fist at the shadows that flitted across the walls in the
moonlight.
It was two o’clock of the morning of one of the last nights I spent
in the house and I let myself out at the kitchen door and went for a
walk, going down along the hillside to the town and through the newer
town to the older place by the river. The moon was shining and all was
hushed and silent. What a quiet night! “I will give myself over to
these new impulses,” I thought, and so went along thinking thoughts
that had never before come into my head.
Could it be that force, all power was disease, that man on his way
up from savagery and having discovered the mind and its uses had
gone a little off his head in using his new toy? I had always been
drawn toward horses dogs and other animals and among people had cared
most for simple folk who made no pretense of having an intellect,
workmen who in spite of the handicaps put in their way by modern
life still loved the materials in which they worked, who loved the
play of hands over materials, who followed instinctively a force
outside themselves--they felt to be greater and more worthy than
themselves--women who gave themselves to physical experiences with
grave and fine abandon, all people in fact who lived for something
outside themselves, for materials in which they worked, for people
other than themselves, things over which they made no claim of
ownership.
Was I, who thought of myself as a young man having no morality now
face to face with a new morality? In the fifteenth century man had
discovered man. Had man later been lost to man? Was Alonzo Berners
simply one who loved his fellows and was he by that token stronger in
his weakness, more notable in his obscure Illinois village life than
all these great and powerful ones I had been following with my own mind
across the pages of history?
There was no doubt I was in a magnificent mood and that I enjoyed it
and when I got to the old town I went and stood by a small brick
building that had once been a residence but was now a cowshed. In a
near-by house a child cried and a man and a woman awoke from sleep and
talked for a time in low hushed voices. Two dogs came and discovered me
where I stood in the silence. As I remained unmoved they did not know
what to make of their discovery. At first they barked and then they
wagged their tails, and then, as I continued to ignore them, they went
away looking offended. “You are not treating us fairly,” they seemed to
be saying.
“And they are something like myself,” I thought, looking at the dusty
road on which the soft moonlight was falling and smiling at nothingness.
I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming a ridiculous desire to
abase myself before something not human and so stepping into the
moonlit road I knelt in the dust. Having no God, the gods having
been taken from me by the life about me, as a personal God has been
taken from all modern men by a force within that man himself does not
understand but that is called the intellect, I kept smiling at the
figure I cut in my own eyes as I knelt in the road and as I had smiled
at the figure I had cut in the Chicago saloon when I went with such an
outward show of indifference to the rescue of Alonzo Berners.
There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myself
that I had the power to believe in a God, and so I merely knelt in the
dust in the silence and no words came to my lips.
Did I worship merely the dust under my knees? There was the coincidence
as there is always the coincidence. The symbol flashed into my mind.
A child cried again in a near-by house and I presume some traditional
feeling come down from old tellers of tales took possession of me.
My fancy played with the figure of myself in the ridiculous position
into which I had got and I thought of the wise men of old times who
were reputed to have come to worship at the feet of another crying
babe in an obscure place. How grand! The wise men of an older time had
followed a star to a cowshed. Was I becoming wise? Smiling at myself
and with also a kind of contempt of myself and my own sentimentality I
half decided I would try to devote myself to something, give my life a
purpose. “Why not to another effort at the re-discovery of man by man?”
I thought rather grandly, getting up and beating the dust off my knees,
the while I continued the trick I had learned of pointing the laughing
finger of scorn at myself. I laughed at myself but all the time kept
thinking of the occasional flashes of laughter that came from the drawn
lips of Alonzo Berners. Why was his laughter freer and more filled with
joy than my own?
NOTE XIV
WAR, leisure and the South!
The leisure was not too much cut across by the hours spent in drills
and manœuvres and the other duties of a soldier. Here was a life
in which everything was physical, the mind on a vacation and the
imagination having leisure to play while the body worked. One’s
individuality became lost and one became part of something wholly
physical, vast, strong, capable of being fine and heroic, capable of
being brutal and cruel.
One’s body was a house in which had lived two, three, perhaps ten
or twelve personalities. The fancy became the head of the house and
swept the body away into some absurd adventure or the mind took charge
and laid down laws. These then were in turn driven out of the house
by physical desire, by the lustful self. Dumb nights of walking city
streets, wanting women, wanting to touch with the hands lovely things.
“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it and I want the heart
to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too.--What’s become of
all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?
All gone now, that kind of imaginings, for the time anyway. In the
distance, beckoning, the women of the southern island, the dark Cuban
women. Would they like us when we came, we American lads, in our brown
clothes? Would they take us as lovers, we the land’s deliverers?
Long days of marching. We were in a forest of the South where once our
fathers had fought a great battle. Everywhere camps among the trees and
the ground worn hard as bricks by the constant tramping of feet. In
the morning one awoke with five other men in a tent. There was morning
roll call standing shoulder to shoulder. “Corporal Smith!” “Here!”
“Corporal Anderson!” “Here!” Then breakfast out of flat tin dishes and
the falling into line for hours of drill.
Out from under the trees into a wide field we went, the southern sun
pouring down on us and presently the back tired, the legs tired. One
sank into a half-dead state. This did not signify battles, killing
other men. The men with whom one marched were comrades, feeling the
same weariness, obeying the same commands, being molded with oneself
into something apart from oneself. We were being hardened, whipped into
shape. For what? Well, never mind. Take what is before you! You have
come out from under the shadow of the factory, the sun shines. The tall
boys marching with you were raised in the same town with yourself. Now
they are all silent, marching, marching. Times of adventure ahead. You
and they will see strange people, hear strange tongues spoken.
The Spaniards, eh! You know of them from books? Stout Cortez, silent
upon his peak in Darien. Dark cruel eyes, dark swaggering men--in
one’s fancy. In the fancy picture ships coming suddenly up out of the
western seas, bearing gold, bearing dark, adventurous men.
Is one going to fight such men, with one’s comrades, some thousands
of such men? Tall boys from an Ohio town, baseball players, clerks in
stores, Eddie Sanger over there who got Nell Brinker into trouble and
was made to marry her at the point of a shotgun; Tom Means, who was
once sent to the state reform farm; Harry Bacon, who got religion when
the evangelist came to preach in the Methodist Church but got over it
afterward--are these men to become killers, to try to kill Spaniards,
who will try to kill them?
Now, never mind! There is before you now but the marching for long
hours with all these men. Here is something your mind has always been
groping about trying to understand, the physical relation of man to
man, of man to woman, of woman to woman. The mind is ugly when the
flesh does not come in too. The flesh is ugly when the mind is put
out of the house that is the body. Is the flesh ugly now? No, this is
something special. This is something felt.
Suppose a man spend certain months, not thinking consciously, letting
himself be swept along by other men, with other men, feeling the
weariness of a thousand other men’s legs in his own legs, desiring
with others, fearing with the others, being brave sometimes with the
others. By such an experience can one gain knowledge of the others and
of oneself too?
Comrades loved! Never mind now the thoughts of the hour of killing. One
gets little enough. Take what is offered. And the killing may not come.
Let the Roosevelts and others of that sort, the men of action, talk
and think now of the hour of action, of the drawn sword, the pointed
gun, victory, defeat, glory, bloody fields. You are not a general or a
statesman. Take the thing before you, the physical marching fact of an
army of which you are a part.
There is just the possibility that you are yourself a disease and that
you may be cured here. This tremendous physical experience may cure
you of the disease of yourself. Can one lose oneself utterly, become
as nothing, become but a part of something, the state, the army? The
army is something physical and actual while the state is nothing. The
state exists but in men’s minds and imaginations and you have let your
own imagination rule in your house too long. Let this young body of
yours, so straight, so fair, so strong, let it have full possession of
the house now. The imagination may play now over fields, over mountain
tops if it please. “We are coming, Father Abraham, a hundred thousand
strong!” You have forced your fancy to grovel in factory dust too
long. Let it go now. You are nothing, so many little pounds of flesh
and bone, a small unit in a vast thing that is marching, marching--the
army. Blossoms on apple trees, sap in the branches of trees, a single
head of wheat in a vast wheat field, eh?
All day long the march goes on and dust gathers in little circles about
the eyes of weary men. A thin sharp voice is heard, an impersonal
voice. It is speaking, not to you, not to one man only, but to a
thousand men. “Fours right into line.”
“Fours right into line!” You have so wanted that, have so hungered for
it. Has not your whole life been filled with a vague indefinite desire
to wheel into some vast line with all the others you have known and
seen? It is enough! The legs respond. Tears sometimes gather in the
eyes at the thought of being able, without question, to do some one
thing with thousands of others, with comrades.
NOTE XV
I HAD enlisted for a soldier shortly after my visit to Alonzo Berners
and because I was broke and could see no other way to avoid going back
into a factory. The voices crying out for war with Spain, for the
freeing of Cuba, I had heard not at all but there had been a voice
within myself that was plain and clear enough and I did not believe
there was danger of many battles being fought. The glory of Spain, read
about in the books, was dead. We had old Spain at a disadvantage, poor
old woman. The situation was unique. America, the young and swaggering
giant of the West had been fortunate. She had not been compelled to
face, on the field of battle, the giant of the Old World in the days
of her Old World strength. Now the young western giant was going to
assert himself and it would be like taking pennies from a child, like
robbing an old gypsy woman in a vacant lot at night after a fair. The
newspapers might call into service Stephen Crane, Richard Harding
Davis, all the writers of battle tales trying to work up the illusion
of a great war about to be fought, but no one believed, no one was
afraid. In the camps the soldiers laughed. Songs were being sung. To
the soldiers the Spaniards were something like performers in a circus
to which the American boys had been invited. It was said they had bells
on their hats, wore swords and played guitars under the windows of
ladies’ bedrooms at night.
America wanted heroes and I thought I would enjoy being a hero and so
I did not enlist for a soldier in Chicago, where I was unknown and my
rushing to my country’s aid might have passed unnoticed, but sent off
a wire to the captain of militia of my home town in Ohio and got on
a train to go there. Alonzo Berners had pressed upon me a loan of a
hundred dollars but I did not want to spend any of it for railroad fare
so beat my way homeward on a freight train and even the hoboes with
whom I sat in an empty freight car treated me with respect as though I
were already the hero of a hundred hard-fought battles. At a station
twenty miles from home I bought a new suit of clothes, a new hat,
neckties and even a walking stick. My home town would want to think I
had given up a lucrative position in the city to answer my country’s
call, they would want a Cincinnatus dropping his plow handles, and
why should I not give them the best imitation I could manage? What I
achieved was something between a bank clerk and an actor out of work.
I was received with acclaim. Never before that time or since have I had
a personal triumph and I liked it. When, with the others of my company,
I marched away to the railroad station to entrain for war the entire
town turned out and cheered. Girls ran out of houses to kiss us and
old veterans of the Civil War--they had known that of battles we would
never know--stood with tears in their eyes.
To the young factory hand of the cities--that was myself, as I now
remember myself at that moment--it was grand and glorious. There has
always been a kind of shrewdness and foxiness in me and I could not
convince myself that Spain, clinging to its old traditions, old guns,
old ships, could offer much resistance to the strong young nation now
about to attack and I could not get over the feeling that I was going
off with many others on a kind of glorious national picnic. Very well,
if I was to be given credit for being a hero I could not see why I
should object.
And then the camp at the edge of a southern city under forest trees,
the physical hardening process that I instinctively liked. I have
always enjoyed with a kind of intoxicating gusto any physical use of
my body out in the sun and wind. In the army it brought me untroubled
sleep at night, physical delight in my own body, the drunkenness of
physical well-being and often in my tent at night, after a long day
of drilling and when the others slept, I rolled quietly out under the
tent flap and lay on my back on the ground, looking at the stars seen
through the branches of trees. About me many thousands of men were
sleeping and along a guard line, somewhere over there in the darkness,
guards were walking up and down. Was it a kind of vast child’s play?
The guards were pretending the army was in danger, why should not my
own imagination play for a time?
How strong my body felt! I stretched and threw my arms above my head.
For a time my fancy played with the notion of becoming a great general.
Why might not Napoleon in his boyhood have been just such a fellow
as myself? I had read somewhere that he had had an inclination to be
a scribbler. I fancied the army, of which I was a part, hemmed in on
all sides by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards. No one could think
what to do and so I (Corporal Anderson) was sent for. The Americans
were in the same position the French revolutionists had been in when
young Napoleon appeared and with “a whiff of grapeshot” took the
destinies of a nation in his hands. Oh, I had read my Carlyle and knew
something also of Machiavelli and his Prince. Aha! In fancy also I
could be a great and cruel conqueror. The American army was surrounded
by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards but in the American army was
myself. This was my hour. I sat up on the ground outside the tent
where my comrades were sleeping and in the darkness gave quick and
accurate orders. Certain ones of my soldiers were to make a sortie.
I did not quite know what a sortie was but anyway why not have one
made? It would create a diversion, give my marvelous mind time to
work. And now it was done and I began to fling bunches of troops here
and there. My courier sprang upon a swift horse and rode away in the
darkness. In his tent the Spanish commander was feasting--and here
I, being a true Anglo-Saxon, must needs make out that the imaginary
Spaniard was something of a monster. He was half drunk in his tent and
was surrounded by concubines. Ah! he is sure to have concubines about
and is proud and sure of victory but little does he know of me, the
sleepless one. Grand phrases, grand ideas, flocking like birds! Now the
Spanish commander has shown his true nature. A young boy comes to bring
him wine and trips, spilling a little of the wine on the commander’s
uniform. He arises and unsheathing his sword plunges it into the little
boy’s breast. All are aghast. The Spaniards all stand aghast, and at
that very moment I, like an avenging angel, and followed by thousands
of pure clean-living Americans (Anglo-Saxon Americans, let it be
understood), I swoop down upon him.
* * * * *
At the time of which I am writing America had not learned as it did
during the World War that in order to stamp out brutal militarism it is
best to adopt brutal militarism, teach it to our sons, do everything
possible to brutalize our own people. During the World War I am told
boys and young men in the training camps were made to attack with
the bayonet dummy figures of men and were even told to grunt as they
plunged the bayonet into the figure. Everything possible was done to
brutalize the imaginations of the young men, but in our war--“my war” I
find myself calling it at times--we had not yet carried our education
that far. There was as yet a childish belief in democracy. Men even
supposed that the purpose of democracy was to raise free men who could
think for themselves, act for themselves in an emergency. The modern
idea of the standardization of men had not taken hold and was even
thought to be inimical to the very notion of democracy. And we had not
learned yet, as we did later, that when an army is to be organized you
must split your men up, so that no man knows his fellows, that you must
not have officers coming from the same towns as their soldiers, that
everything must be made as machine-like and impersonal as possible.
And so there we were, just boys from an Ohio country town with officers
from the same town in a wood in the South being made into soldiers and
I am much afraid not taking the whole affair too seriously. We were
heroes and we accepted the fact. It was enough. In the southern cities
ladies invited us to dine at their houses on our days off in town. The
captain of our company had been a janitor of a public building back in
Ohio, the first lieutenant was a celery raiser on a small farm near our
town and the second lieutenant had been a knife grinder in a cutlery
factory.
* * * * *
In the camp I marched with the others for several hours each day and in
the evening went with some other young soldier for a walk in the wood
or in the streets of a southern city. There was a kind of drunkenness
of comradeship. So many men so like oneself, doing the same thing
with oneself. As for the officers--well, it was to be admitted that
in military affairs they knew more than ourselves but there their
superiority ended. It would be just as well for none of them to attempt
to put on too much side when we were not drilling or were not on actual
military duty. The war would soon be over and after a time we would all
be going back home. An officer might conceivably “get away” with some
sort of injustice for the moment--but a year from now, when we were all
at home again.... Did the fool want to take the chance of four or five
huskies giving him a beating some night in an alleyway?
The constant marching and manœuvring was a kind of music in the legs
and bodies of men. No man is a single thing, physical or mental. The
marching went on and on. The physical ruled. There was a vast slow
rhythm, out of the bodies of many thousands of men, always going on and
on. It got into one’s body. There was a kind of physical drunkenness
produced. He who weakened was laughed at by his comrades and the
weakness went away or he disappeared. One was afloat on a vast sea of
men. There was a kind of music on the surface of the sea. The music was
a part of oneself. One was oneself a part of the music. One’s body,
moving in rhythm with all these other bodies, made the music. What was
an officer? What was a man? An officer was but one out of whose throat
came a voice.
The army moved across a great open field. One’s body was tired but
happy with an odd new kind of happiness. The mind did not torture the
body, asking questions. The body was moved by a power outside itself
and as for the fancy, it played freely, far, freely and widely, over
oceans, over mountain tops too.
Beyond him not the ghost of shores,
Beyond him only shoreless seas.
And now the voice and the words, caught up and repeated by other
voices, harsh voices, tired voices, thin high pitched voices.
Fours right into line--
Fours right into line.
* * * * *
Three young men having run the guard line, together are walking along
a dark road toward a southern city. In the city and later when they
have stood on street corners and walked through the section of the
city where only Negroes live--being Ohio boys and fascinated by the
strangeness of the notion of a race thus set aside--they go into a
saloon where they sit drinking beer. They discuss their officers, the
position of the officer in relation to his men. “I think it’s all
right,” says a doctor’s son. “Ed and Dug are all right. They have to
live off by themselves and act as though they were something special,
kind of grand and wise and gaudy. It’s a kind of bluff, I guess, that
has to be kept up, only I should think it would be kind of tough on
them. I should think they might get to feeling they were something
special and get themselves into a mess.”
And now Ed, the raiser of celery, comes into the saloon. He is saving
all he can of his officer’s pay hoping to buy a few additional acres of
land when he gets back home and he doesn’t much like spending money. He
sees the three sitting there and wants to join them but hesitates. Then
he calls to me and he and I go off together along a street and into
another saloon.
The celery raiser is a devout Catholic and he and I get into a
discussion. I have some money and am buying the beer and so it goes on
for a long time. I speak of the feeling I have when I have marched for
a long time in rhythm with many other men and Ed nods his head. “It’s
the same way I feel about the Church,” he says. “That’s just the way we
Catholics get to feeling about the Church.”
At the camp Ed, being an officer, can walk boldly in but I, being but
a corporal and having gone off to town without leave, must creep along
the guard line to where a fellow from my own town is stationed. “Who
goes there?” he demands sternly; and “Ah, cut it Will, you big boob.
Don’t make such a racket,” I answer as I go past him and creep away in
the darkness to my tent.
And now I am in the tent, awake beside five sleeping men and I am
filled with drinks and thinking of war. What a strange idea that men
should need a war to throw many of them for a time into a common
mood. Is there unison only in hatred? I do not believe it but the
idea fascinates me. Men form a democracy but in the end must throw
the democracy aside in order to make the army that shall protect and
preserve democracy. The guard and myself creeping past him to my tent
are as soldiers a little absurd. Is all feeling of comradeship, of
brotherhood between many men, a little absurd?
BOOK THREE
NOTE I
“There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other
pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take
up with rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power
to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well,
even though they be far away--sometimes, indeed, though they be not
born for thousands of years to come. I believe I speak but the strict
truth when I claim that as there is none among earthly delights more
noble than literature, so there is none so lasting, none gentler, or
more faithful; there is none which accompanies its possessor through
the vicissitudes of life at so small cost of effort or anxiety.”
--Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio.
I ONCE knew a devout smoker who went to spend the winter in Havana and
when he had got there and was unpacking his trunk he began to laugh,
realizing suddenly that he had packed the trunk half full of boxes of
cigars, and I have myself on more than one occasion when going from one
city to another on some affair of business carried with me thousands
of sheets of paper, fearing, I presume, that all the stationers in
the new place had died. The fear of finding myself without paper, ink
or pencils is a kind of disease with me and it is with a good deal of
effort only that I restrain myself from stealing such articles whenever
I am left unobserved in a store or in someone’s house. In houses where
I live for some time I cache small stores of paper as a squirrel stores
nuts and at one time in my life I had forcibly to be separated, by a
considerate friend, from something like half a bushel of lead pencils
I had for a long time carted about with me in a bag. There were enough
pencils in the bag to have rewritten the history of mankind.
To the writer of prose, who loves his craft, there is nothing in the
world so satisfying as being in the presence of great stacks of clean
white sheets. The feeling is indescribably sweet and cannot be compared
with any reaction to be got from sheets on which one has already
scribbled. The written sheets are already covered with one’s faults and
oh, it is seldom indeed these sentences, scrawled across these sheets,
can compare with what was intended! One has been walking in a street
and has been much alive. What stories the faces in the streets tell!
How significant the faces of the houses! The walls of the houses are
brushed away by the force of the imagination and one sees and feels all
of the life within. What a universal giving away of secrets! Everything
is felt, everything known. Physical life within one’s own body comes to
an end of consciousness. The life outside oneself is all, everything.
Now for the pen or the pencil and paper and I shall make you feel this
thing I now feel--ah, just that boy there and what is in his soul as
he runs to look in at the window of the neighboring house in the early
evening light; just what that woman is thinking as she sits on the
porch of that other house holding the babe in her arms; just the dark,
brooding thing in the soul of that laborer going homeward under those
trees. He is getting old and was born an American. Why did he not rise
in the world and become the owner or at least the superintendent of a
factory and own an automobile?
Aha! You do not know, but I do. You wait now, I shall tell you. I have
felt all, everything. In myself I have no existence. Now I exist only
in these others.
I have run home to my room and have lighted a light. Words flow.
What has happened? Bah! Such tame, unutterably dull stuff! There was
something within me, truth, facility, the color and smell of things.
Why, I might have done something here. Words are everything. I swear to
you I have not lost my faith in words.
Do I not know? While I walked in the street there were such words came,
in ordered array! I tell you what--words have color, smell; one may
sometimes feel them with the fingers as one touches the cheek of a
child.
There is no reason at all why I should not have been able, by the
instrumentality of these little words, why I should not have been able
to give you the very smell of the little street wherein I just walked,
made you feel just the way the evening light fell over the faces of the
houses and the people--the half moon through the branches of that old
cherry tree that was all but dead but that had the one branch alive,
the branch that touched the window where the boy stood with his foot
up, lacing his shoe. And there was the dog sleeping in the dust of the
road and making a little whining sound out of his dreams and the girl
on a near-by street who was learning to ride a bicycle. She could not
be seen but her two young brothers laughed loudly every time she fell
to the pavement.
These the materials of the story-writer’s craft, these and the little
words that must be made to run into sentences and paragraphs; now
slow and haltingly, now quickly, swiftly, now singing like a woman’s
voice in a dark house in a dark street at midnight, now viciously,
threateningly, like wolves running in a winter forest of the North.
Oh! This unutterable rot spoken sometimes about writing. One is to
consider the morals of the people who read, one is to please or amuse
the people with these words and sentences. One lives in an age when
there is much talk of service--to automobile owners, to riders on
trains, to buyers of packages of food in stores. Is no one to do
service to the little words, the words with which we make love, defend
ourselves with lies after we have killed the friend who stole the woman
we wanted--the words with which we bury our dead, comfort our friend,
with which we are in the end to tell each other, if we may, all the
secrets of our dreams and hopes?
I am servant to the words. Are you to tell me what words I shall put
aside and not write? Are you to be the master of my mood, caught from
yourself perhaps as you walked in the street and I saw you when you did
not see me and when you were more sweet and true in all your bearing
than you have ever been before, or when alas you were more vicious and
cruel. Bah! The words I have put here on this paper!
But there are the clean sheets, the unwritten sheets. On them I shall
write daringly, boldly and truly--to-morrow.
* * * * *
The writer has just come from the stationer’s, where he has got him a
fresh supply of sheets. He had money with him and bought five thousand.
Ah, the weight of them on the arm as he walked off along a street to
his own house. Four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times he may
destroy the sheet on which he has been writing and there, lying before
him, will be again the fresh white surface.
Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heaped
upon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coal
dust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers. Let
them be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy lying brutes.
Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I had issued a
bull, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning them to
burn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my curses, you
busy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low price and in vast
quantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada, I sainted. There was
one man--I invented him--named Saint John P. Belger, who furnished
paper to indigent writers of prose free of charge. For virtue I put
him, in my dream, almost on a level with Saint Francis of Assisi.
And now the writer has got to his room and has stacked the bundles
of paper on the desk where he sits to write. He goes to a window and
throws it open and there is a man passing. Who is the man? The writer
does not know but is tempted to throw a dish or a chair at his head,
merely to show his contempt of the world. “Take that mankind! Go to
Hades! Have I not five thousand sheets?”
It is without doubt a moment! In my boyhood I knew an old woodworker
who on Sundays went to walk alone in a forest. Once I was lying on my
back by a clump of bushes and saw his actions when he thought there was
no one about.
What has mankind, in America, not missed because men do not know, or
are forgetting, what the old workman knew? There was Sandro Botticelli
who knew. He was in danger once of becoming married to a woman but
at the critical moment he fled. All night he ran in the streets of
Florence wrestling with himself and in the end won the victory. The
woman was not to come between him and his surfaces, those cathedral
walls, those dumb strips of canvas on which he was to paint--not all
his dreams--what he could of his dreams. Nothing was to come between
him and his materials.
The old woodworker in the forest approached a living tree and then
walked away. He went close again and let his eye travel up along the
tree’s trunk. Then, hesitatingly, lovingly he touched the tree with his
fingers. That was all. It was enough.
It was the workman en rapport with his materials. Oh, there is a
feeling in the breasts of men that will not die. Ages come and go, but
always the feeling is alive, haltingly, in the breasts of the few. To
the workman his materials are as the face of his God seen over the rim
of the world. His materials are the promise of the coming of God to
the workman.
Ford factories cannot kill the love of materials in the workmen and
always and in the end the love of materials and tools in the workmen
will kill the Fords. Standardization is a phase. It will pass. The
tools and materials of the workmen cannot always remain cheap and foul.
Some day the workmen will come back to their materials, out of the
sterile land of standardization. If the machine is to survive it will
come again under the dominance of the hands of workmen, as it already
no doubt is doing, in a hundred, perhaps a thousand unknown places. The
day of re-discovery of man by man may not be so far off as we fancy.
Has there not been, in our own time, a slackening of the impulse toward
purely material ends? Has not the cry for success and material growth
become already a bore to the average American?
These the thoughts of a man. To the boy lying in the silent place on
the Sunday afternoon long ago and seeing the old workman touching so
tenderly the tree that he dreamed might some day become the materials
of his craft no such thoughts.
What happened? Just a tightening of the cords of the boy’s body. There
was an inclination to be at the same time sad and full of joy. A door
had been jerked open by the hand of the workman but the boy could not
see within the house. He was, I remember, known as something of a
“nut” in our town--a silent old chap--and once he went away to work in
a city factory but later came back to his own little shop. He was a
wagon-maker and the making of wagons by individual workmen lasted out
his time. But he had no young workman to whom he taught the love of his
trade. That died with him.
Not quite, perhaps. The picture of the old workman and just the way his
fingers touched the trunk of a tree on a certain Sunday afternoon and
of how, as he walked away along a path, he kept stopping to turn back
and take another look at his materials, stayed in a boy’s mind through
long years of being smart, of trying mightily to be shrewd and capable
in a world where materials did not matter, in the company of workmen
vulgarized by the fact that the old workman’s love of materials was
unknown to them.
* * * * *
The writer with his sheets in a room. Will he accomplish his purpose?
It is sure he will not. And that too is a part of the joy of his fate.
Do not pity the workman, you who have succeeded in life. He wants no
pity. Before him always there is the unsolved problem, the clean white
unwritten sheets, and the workman also knows his moments of surrender,
of happiness. There will always be the moments when he is lost in
wonder before the possibilities of the materials before him.
As for myself I had been, at the time in my life of which I am now
writing, a man of business for many years, had been buying and selling,
but had all the time been secretly scribbling in my room at night.
During the day I for years wrote advertisements--of soaps, of plows,
house paints, incubators for the hatching of chickens.
Was there something hatching in me? With all my scribbling had I
something to say? Were there tales I had picked up I might in the end
tell truly and well? I had seen and known men and women, going from
their homes to their work, going from their work to their homes, had
worked with them in offices and shops. On all sides the untold tales
looked out at me like living things.
I had bought and sold but had no real interest in buying and selling.
All day I wrote advertisements and perhaps the advertisements helped
sell So-and-so many dollars’ worth of goods. As I walked homeward
through streets, across bridges, I could not remember what I had been
writing about.
At times too there was a sharp sense of uncleanliness. In my room the
white sheets looked up at me. I remembered the workman seen in the
forest in the presence of the tree when I was a boy. “I will launch out
upon new adventures,” I said to myself.
NOTE II
ON an evening of the late summer I got off a train at a growing Ohio
industrial town where I had once lived. I was rapidly becoming a
middle-aged man. Two years before I had left the place in disgrace.
There I had tried to be a manufacturer, a moneymaker, and had failed,
and I had been trying and failing ever since. In the town some
thousands of dollars had been lost for others. An effort to conform
to the standard dreams of the men of my times had failed and in the
midst of my disgrace and generally hopeless outlook, as regards making
a living, I had been filled with joy at coming to the end of it all.
One morning I had left the place afoot, leaving my poor little factory,
like an illegitimate child, on another man’s doorstep. I had left,
merely taking what money was in my pocket, some eight or ten dollars.
What a moment that leaving had been! To one of the European artists
I afterward came to know the situation would have been unbelievably
grotesque. Such a man could not have believed in my earnestness about
it all and would have thought my feelings of the moment a worked-up
thing. I can in fancy hear one of the Frenchmen, Italians or Russians I
later knew laughing at me. “Well, but why get so worked up? A factory
is a factory, is it not? Why may not one break it like an empty
bottle? You have lost some money for others? See the light on that
field over there. These others, for whom you lost money, were they
compelled to beg in the streets, were their children torn by wolves?
What is it you Americans get so excited about when a little money is
lost?”
A European artist may not understand but an American will understand.
The devil! It is not a question of money. No men are so careless and
free with money as the Americans. There is another matter involved.
It strikes rather deeply at the roots of our beings. Childish as it
all may have seemed to an older and more sophisticated world, we
Americans, from the beginning, have been up to something, or we have
wanted to think we were up to something. We came here, or our fathers
or grandfathers came here, from a hundred diverse places--and you may
be sure it was not the artists who came. Artists do not want to cut
down trees, root stumps out of the ground, build towns and railroads.
The artist wants to sit with a strip of canvas before him, face an
open space on a wall, carve a bit of wood, make combinations of words
and sentences, as I am doing now--and try to express to others some
thought or feeling of his own. He wants to dream of color, to lay hold
of form, free the sensual in himself, live more fully and freely in
his contact with the materials before him than he can possibly live
in life. He seeks a kind of controlled ecstasy and is a man with a
passion, a “nut,” as we love to say in America. And very often, when he
is not in actual contact with his materials, he is a much more vain and
disagreeable ass than any man, not an artist, could possibly be. As a
living man he is almost always a pest. It is only when dead he begins
to have value.
The simple truth is that in a European country the artist is more
freely accepted than he is among us, and only because he has been
longer about. They know how harmless he really is--or rather do not
know how subtly dangerous he can be--and accept him only as one might
accept a hybrid cross between a dog and a cat that went growling mewing
barking and spitting about the house. One might want to kill the first
of such strange beasts one sees but after one has seen a dozen and has
realized that, like the mule, they cannot breed their own kind one
laughs and lets them live, paying no more attention to them than modern
France for example pays to its artists.
But in America things are somewhat different. Here something went
wrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to do
such great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all the
outlawed brave foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rights
of man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil! We did get
ourselves into a bad hole. We were going to be superhuman and it turned
out we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all.
You cannot blame us that we are somewhat reluctant about finding out
the very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to come
down off the perch.
We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permitting
ourselves occasionally to laugh at ourselves for our pretensions, but
there was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this
American business, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We
actually meant it and no one will ever understand present-day America
or Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while we
were building all of our big ugly hurriedly--thrown together towns,
creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and
prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were
up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the
cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God.
They built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God and we really
intended building here a land to the glory of Man, and thought we were
doing it too. That was our intention and the affair only blew up in the
process, or got perverted, because Man, even the brave and the free
Man, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God. This
we might have found out long ago but that we did not know each other.
We came from too many different places to know each other well, had
been promised too much, wanted too much. We were afraid to know each
other.
Oh, how Americans have wanted heroes, wanted brave simple fine men! And
how sincerely and deeply we Americans have been afraid to understand
and love one another, fearing to find ourselves at the end no more
brave heroic and fine than the people of almost any other part of the
world.
I however digress. What I am trying to do is to give the processes
of my own mind at two distinct moments of my own life. First, the
moment when after many years of effort to conform to an unstated and
but dimly understood American dream by making myself a successful
man in the material world I threw all overboard and then at another
moment when, having come back to the same spot where I passed through
the first moment, I attempted to confront myself with myself with a
somewhat changed point of view.
As for the first of these moments, it was melodramatic and even silly
enough. The struggle centred itself at the last within the walls of a
particular moment and within the walls of a particular room.
I sat in the room with a woman who was my secretary. For several years
I had been sitting there, dictating to her regarding the goods I had
made in my factory and that I was attempting to sell. The attempt to
sell the goods had become a sort of madness in me. There were certain
thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of men living in towns or
on farms in many states of my country who might possibly buy the goods
I had made rather than the goods made in another factory by another
man. How I had wheedled! How I had schemed! In some years I gave myself
quite fully to the matter in hand and the dollars trickled in. Well,
I was about to become rich. It was a possibility. After a good day or
week, when many dollars had come, I went to walk and when I had got
into a quiet place where I was unobserved I threw back my shoulders and
strutted. During the year I had made for myself so many dollars. Next
year I would make so many more, and the next year so many more. But my
thoughts of the matter did not express themselves in the dollars. It
never does to the American man. Who calls the American a dollar-lover
is foolish. My factory was of a certain size--it was really a poor
haphazardly enough run place--but after a time I would build a great
factory and after that a greater and greater. Like a true American, I
thought in size.
My fancy played with the matter of factories as a child would play with
a toy. There would be a great factory with walls going up and up and a
little open place for a lawn at the front, shower baths for the workers
with perhaps a fountain playing on a lawn, and up before the door of
this place I would drive in a large automobile.
Oh, how I would be respected by all, how I would be looked up to by
all! I walked in a little dark street, throwing back my shoulders. How
grand and glorious I felt!
The houses along the street in which I walked were small and ugly and
dirty-faced children played in the yards. I wondered. Having walked,
dreaming my dream for a long time I returned to the neighborhood of
my factory and opening my office went in to sit at my desk smoking a
cigarette. The night watchman came in. He was an old man who had once
been a school-teacher but, as he said, his eyes had gone back on him.
When I had walked alone I had been able to make myself feel somewhat
as I fancied a prince might have felt but when anyone came near me
something exploded inside. I was a deflated balloon. Well, in fancy,
I had a thousand workmen under me. They were children and I was their
father and would look out for them. Perhaps I would build them model
houses to live in, a town of model houses built about my great factory,
eh? The workmen would be my children and I would look out for my
children. “Land of the free--home of the brave.”
But I was back in my factory now and the night watchman sat smoking
with me. Sometimes we talked far into the night. The devil! He was a
fellow like myself, having the same problems as myself. How could I be
his father? The thought was absurd. Once, when he was a younger man,
he had dreamed of being a scholar but his eyes had gone back on him.
What had he wanted to do? He spoke of it for a time. He had wanted to
be a scholar and I had myself spent those earlier years eagerly reading
books. “I would really like to have been a learned monk, one of those
fellows such as appeared in the Middle Ages, one of the fellows who
went off and lived by himself and gave himself up wholly to learning,
one who believed in learning, who spent his life humbly seeking new
truths--but I got married and my wife had kids, and then, you see, my
eyes went back on me.” He spoke of the matter philosophically. One did
not let oneself get too much excited. After a time one got over any
feeling of bitterness. The night watchman had a boy, a lad of fifteen,
who also loved books. “He is pretty lucky, can get all the books he
wants at the public library. In the afternoon after school is out and
before I come down here to my job he reads aloud to me.”
* * * * *
Men and women, many men and many women! There were men and women
working in my factory, men and women walking in streets with me, many
men and women scattered far and wide over the country to whom I wanted
to sell my goods. I sent men, salesmen, to see them--I wrote letters;
how many thousands of letters, all to the same purpose! “Will you buy
my goods?” And again, “Will you buy my goods?”
What were the other men thinking about? What was I myself thinking
about? Suppose it were possible to know something of the men and women,
to know something of oneself, too. The devil! These were not thoughts
that would help me to sell my goods to all the others. What were all
the others like? What was I myself like? Did I want a large factory
with a little lawn and a fountain in front and with a model town built
about it?
Days of endlessly writing letters to men, nights of walking in strange
quiet streets. What had happened to me? “I shall go get drunk,” I said
to myself and I did go and get drunk. Taking a train to a near-by city
I drank until a kind of joy came to me and with some man I had found
and who had joined in my carousal I walked in streets, shouting at
other men, singing songs, going sometimes into strange houses to laugh
with people, to talk with people I found there.
Here was something I liked and something the others liked too. When I
had come to people in strange houses, half drunk, released, they were
not afraid of me. “Well, he wants to talk,” they seemed to be saying
to themselves. “That’s fine!” There was something broken down between
us, a wall broken down. We talked of outlandish things for Anglo-Saxon
trained people to speak of, of love between men and women, of what
children’s coming meant. Food was brought forth. Often in a single
evening of this sort I got more from people than I could get from
weeks of ordinary intercourse. The people were a little excited by the
strangeness of two unknown men in their houses. With my companion I
went boldly to the door and knocked. Laughter. “Hello, the house!” It
might be the house of a laborer or that of a well-to-do merchant. I had
hold of my new-found friend’s arm and explained our presence as well as
I could. “We are a little drunk and we are travelers. We just want to
sit and visit with you a while.”
There was a kind of terror in people’s eyes, and a kind of gladness
too. An old workman showed us a relic he had brought home with him from
the Civil War while his wife ran into a bedroom and changed her dress.
Then a child awoke in a near-by room and began to cry and was permitted
to come in in her nightgown and lie in my arms or in the arms of the
new-found friend who had got drunk with me. The talk swept over strange
intimate subjects. What were men up to? What were women up to? There
was a kind of deep taking of breath, as though we had all been holding
something back from one another and had suddenly decided to let go.
Once or twice we stayed all night in the house to which we had gone.
And then back to the writing of letters--to sell my goods. In the city
to which I had gone to carouse I had seen many women of the streets,
standing at corners, looking furtively about. My thoughts got fixed
upon prostitution. Was I a prostitute? Was I prostituting my life?
What thoughts in the mind! There was a note due and payable at the
bank. “Now here, you man, attend to your affairs. You have induced
others to put money into your enterprises. If you are to build a great
enterprise here you must be up and at it.”
How often in after years I have laughed at myself for the thoughts
and emotions of that time. There is a thought I have had that is very
delicious. It is this, and I dare say it will be an unwelcome thought
to many, “I am the American man. I think there is no doubt of it. I am
just the mixture, the cold, moral man of the North into whose body has
come the warm pagan blood of the South. I love and am afraid to love.
Behold in me the American man striving to become an artist, to become
conscious of himself, filled with wonder concerning himself and others,
trying to have a good time and not fake a good time, I am not English
Italian Jew German Frenchman Russian. What am I? I am tremendously
serious about it all but at the same time I laugh constantly at myself
for my own seriousness. Like all real American men of our day I wander
constantly from place to place striving to put down roots into the
American soil and not quite doing it. If you say the real American man
is not yet born, you lie. I am the type of the fellow.”
This is somewhat of a joke on me but it is a greater joke on the
reader. As respectable and conventional a man as Calvin Coolidge has me
in him--and I have him in myself? Do not doubt it. I have him in me
and Eugene Debs in me and the crazy political idealists of the Western
States and Mr. Gary of the Steel Trust and the whole crew. I accept
them all as part of myself. Would to God they would thus accept me!
* * * * *
And being this thing I have tried to describe I return now to myself
sitting between the walls of a certain room and between the walls of a
certain moment too. Just why was that moment so pregnant? I will never
quite know.
It came with a rush, the feeling that I must quit buying and selling,
the overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness. I was in my whole nature a
tale-teller. My father had been one and his not knowing had destroyed
him. The tale-teller cannot bother with buying and selling. To do so
will destroy him. No class of men I have ever known are so dull and
cheerless as the writers of glad sentimental romances, the painters of
glad pretty pictures. The corrupt unspeakable thing that had happened
to tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter of buying
and selling. The horse cannot sing like a canary bird nor the canary
bird pull a plow like a horse and either of them attempting it becomes
something ridiculous.
NOTE III
THERE was a door leading out from my office to the street. How many
steps to the door? I counted them, “five, six, seven.” “Suppose,” I
asked myself, “I could take those five, six, seven steps to the door,
pass out at the door, go along that railroad track out there, disappear
into the far horizon beyond. Where was I to go? In the town where my
factory was located I had still the reputation of being a bright young
business man. In my first years there I had been filled with shrewd
vast schemes. I had been admired, looked up to. Since that time I had
gone down and down as a bright young man but no one yet knew how far I
had gone. I was still respected in the town, my word was still good at
the bank. I was a respectable man.”
Did I want to do something not respectable, not decent? I am trying
to give you the history of a moment and as a tale-teller I have come
to think that the true history of life is but a history of moments.
It is only at rare moments we live. I wanted to walk out at a door
and go away into the distance. The American is still a wanderer, a
migrating bird not yet ready to build a nest. All our cities are
built temporarily as are the houses in which we live. We are on the
way--toward what? There have been other times in the history of the
world when many strange peoples came together in a new strange land.
To assume that we have made an America, even materially, seems to
me now but telling ourselves fairy tales in the night. We have not
even made it materially yet and the American man has only gone in for
money-making on a large scale to quiet his own restlessness, as the
monk of old days was given the Regula of Augustine to quiet him and
still the lusts in himself. For the monk, kept occupied with the saying
of prayers and the doing of many little sacred offices, there was no
time for the lusts of the world to enter in and for the American to
be perpetually busy with his affairs, with his automobiles, with his
movies, there is no time for unquiet thoughts.
On that day in the office at my factory I looked at myself and laughed.
The whole struggle I am trying to describe and that I am confident will
be closer to the understanding of most Americans than anything else
I have ever written was accompanied by a kind of mocking laughter at
myself and my own seriousness about it all.
Very well, then, I wanted to go out of the door and never come back.
How many Americans want to go--but where do they want to go? I wanted
to accept for myself all the little restless thoughts of which myself
and the others had been so afraid and you, who are Americans, will
understand the necessity of my continually laughing at myself and
at all things dear to me. I must laugh at the thing I love the more
intensely because of my love. Any American will understand that.
It was a trying moment for me. There was the woman, my secretary, now
looking at me. What did she represent? What did she not represent?
Would I dare be honest with her? It was quite apparent to me I would
not. I had got to my feet and we stood looking at each other. “It is
now or never,” I said to myself, and I remember that I kept smiling.
I had stopped dictating to her in the midst of a sentence. “The goods
about which you have inquired are the best of their kind made in the--”
I stood and she sat and we were looking at each other intently. “What’s
the matter?” she asked. She was an intelligent woman, more intelligent
I am sure than myself, just because she was a woman and good, while I
have never been good, do not know how to be good. Could I explain all
to her? The words of a fancied explanation marched through my mind: “My
dear young woman, it is all very silly but I have decided to no longer
concern myself with this buying and selling. It may be all right for
others but for me it is poison. There is this factory. You may have
it if it please you. It is of little value I dare say. Perhaps it is
money ahead and then again it may well be it is money behind. I am
uncertain about it all and now I am going away. Now, at this moment,
with the letter I have been dictating, with the very sentence you have
been writing left unfinished, I am going out that door and never come
back. What am I going to do? Well now, that I don’t know. I am going
to wander about. I am going to sit with people, listen to words, tell
tales of people, what they are thinking, what they are feeling. The
devil! It may even be I am going forth in search of myself.”
The woman was looking into my eyes the while I looked into hers.
Perhaps I had grown a little pale and now she grew pale. “You’re
sick,” she said and her words gave me an idea. There was wanted a
justification of myself, not to myself but to the others. A crafty
thought came. Was the thought crafty or was I, at the moment, a little
insane, a “nut,” as every American so loves to say of every man who
does something a little out of the groove.
I had grown pale and it may be I was ill but nevertheless I was
laughing--the American laugh. Had I suddenly become a little insane?
What a comfort that thought would be, not to myself but to the others.
My leaving the place I was then in would tear up roots that had gone
down a little into the ground. The ground I did not think would support
the tree that was myself and that I thought wanted to grow.
My mind dwelt on the matter of roots and I looked at my feet. The whole
question with which I was at the moment concerned became a matter of
feet. I had two feet that could take me out of the life I was then in
and that, to do so, would need but take three or four steps to a door.
When I had reached the door and had stepped out of my little factory
office everything would be quite simplified, I was sure. I had to lift
myself out. Others would have to tackle the job of getting me back,
once I had stepped over that threshold.
Whether at the moment I merely became shrewd and crafty or whether I
really became temporarily insane I shall never quite know. What I did
was to step very close to the woman and looking directly into her eyes
I laughed gayly. Others besides herself would, I knew, hear the words I
was now speaking. I looked at my feet. “I have been wading in a long
river and my feet are wet,” I said.
Again I laughed as I walked lightly toward the door and out of a long
and tangled phase of my life, out of the door of buying and selling,
out of the door of affairs.
“They want me to be a ‘nut,’ will love to think of me as a ‘nut,’ and
why not? It may just be that’s what I am,” I thought gayly and at the
same time turned and said a final confusing sentence to the woman who
now stared at me in speechless amazement. “My feet are cold wet and
heavy from long wading in a river. Now I shall go walk on dry land,” I
said, and as I passed out at the door a delicious thought came. “Oh,
you little tricky words, you are my brothers. It is you, not myself,
have lifted me over this threshold. It is you who have dared give me a
hand. For the rest of my life I will be a servant to you,” I whispered
to myself as I went along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out
of a town and out of that phase of my life.
NOTE IV
ON the evening when I returned to the town my mood was quite another
one. I was on my way from Chicago to the city of New York. Why had
I wanted to stop? The impulse had come suddenly, as I stood at the
railroad ticket window in Chicago.
It rained when I got off the train and the night promised to be dark
but half an hour later the rain ceased and the stars came out. At
the station I escaped notice. Already in the town I and my struggles
had been forgotten. At the moment when I had so dramatically walked
away from my factory there had been some little local newspaper
furore--“Well-known business man mysteriously disappears. Not known
to have had any troubles,” etc. I went into a baggage check room and
left my bag and then to a ticket window where I bought a ticket to New
York on a later train. Both the check room boy and the ticket-seller
were strangers to me. It was evident the town had grown, suddenly and
furiously, as industrial towns do grow. Had it become a centre for the
manufacture of automobiles shoes rubber tires or chewing gum? I did not
know. In the station waiting room ten or twelve people stood or sat
about and several taxi drivers were shouting at the door.
I walked away in the drizzling rain and stood on a bridge until the
night cleared. Now it was plain to me that I had wanted to spend an
evening alone with myself in the midst of the shadows of a former life.
Since I had left the town much had happened. All during the last years
of my life as a manufacturer and later as a Chicago advertising man
I had secretly been writing tales and now they were beginning to be
published. In some places they had been praised, in others blamed. I
had loved the praise. It had made me feel very much as I had felt as a
manufacturer when I had made a little money and had begun to dream of
building a great factory and being father to workmen--that is to say,
rather grand and noble. When my tales displeased people and when some
critic wrote condemning me and calling me a dull or an unclean man I
got furiously angry but always tried quickly to conceal my anger. I
was really so angry that I did not want, on any account, to let the
other fellow know how angry and hurt I was. Often the critic seemed
merely to want to hurt. I had had a moment of exaltation, of joy in
thinking I had penetrated a little into the life story of some man or
woman. The person about whom I had been writing had been swept by some
passion, of the flesh or spirit and I had been swept along with him. At
such times I, as an individual, had no existence. Sometimes I had been
seated writing all night at my desk and could not have told whether I
had been there two hours or ten. Then the morning light streamed in at
my window and my hands trembled so that I could no longer hold the pen.
What a sweet clean feeling! During those hours there had been no life
of my own at all. I had lived but in the characters I was trying to
bring to life in my story and in the early morning light I felt as one
shriven of all grossness, of all vanity, of all cheapness in himself.
The process of writing had been for me purifying and fine. It had been
curative and later I was filled with unholy wrath when someone said
that, during that period of work, I had been unclean or vile.
And most of all I was furiously angry when someone said that the people
of whom I wrote, being only such people as I myself had known, were
of a lower, more immoral, less healthy order of beings. They were not
respectable, were queer and did unaccountable things. I had myself been
a respectable man and at one time in my life all of my friends had been
respectable men and women and had I not known what was underneath the
coats of many such, what they were too? I was furious for the men and
women about whom I had written and furious for myself too but actually,
on the outside, in the face of scurrilous criticism, had always assumed
a sort of heavy bucolic genial manner, something in the manner of a
certain type of benevolent old gentleman I had always detested. “They
may be right,” I said aloud generously when inside myself I thought the
critics often enough only dogs and fools.
I was thinking of myself and my critics as I walked that evening in the
rain and I presume that what I had wanted in coming back thus to the
Ohio town was to try to arrive at some sort of basis for self-criticism.
It was going to be a somewhat difficult undertaking, finding such a
basis, of that I was sure. When I had been doing my writing, unknown
and unseen, there was a sort of freedom. One worked, more or less in
secret, as one might indulge in some forbidden vice. There were the
bankers and others who had put money into my enterprises. They had
expected I would be giving myself wholly to the matter in hand and
I had been cheating and did not want them to know. One wrote tales,
played with them. One did not think of publication, of a public that
was to read. In the evening one came home to one’s house and going
upstairs closed the door to a room. There was before one the desk and
paper.
In a neighboring garden a man was picking potato bugs off potato vines.
His wife came to the kitchen door and began to scold. He had forgotten
to bring home five pounds of sugar from the store and now she was angry
about it. There came one of those strangely vital little domestic
flare-ups, the man with a tin can in which were the captured bugs,
looking ridiculous as he stood listening to his wife, and she in turn
looking unnecessarily angry about the small matter of the sugar.
They were in their garden unconscious of me and I was unconscious of
a dinner being put on a table downstairs in my house, unconscious of
any need of food I would ever feel again, unconscious of the regime of
my own household, of the affairs of my factory. A man and a woman in
a garden had become the centre of a universe about which it seemed to
me I might think and feel in joy and wonder forever. People had outer
motives that seemed to control their lives. Under certain circumstances
they said certain words. Stealthily I went to lock the door of my room.
A domestic regime would be upset by my determination, the affairs
of a certain factory might be ruined by my inattention but what did
all that, at the moment, matter to me? I became cruelly impersonal
and could not avoid becoming so. Had a god been in my way or intent
on disturbing me just then I would have at least tried to brush him
aside. “You Jove, sit in that chair over there and keep your mouth
shut! You Minerva, get down that stairway, go into the front room of my
house and sit in a rocking-chair with your hands folded until I have
attended to the business before me! At the moment I am concerned with
a man standing in a potato patch with a can of potato bugs held in his
hand and with a certain perplexed baffled look in his eyes and in the
eyes of the wife in a gingham apron who is unnecessarily angry about a
trifling matter of sugar not brought home from a store. You must see
that I am a swimmer and have stripped myself of the clothes which are
my ordinary life. You, my dear Minerva, should not stay in the presence
of a naked man. People will say things about you. Get down the stairway
at once. I am a swimmer and am about to leap off into the sea of lives,
into the sea of present-day American lives. Will I be able to swim
there? Will I be able to keep my head above water? That is a matter for
greater gods than yourself to decide. Get out of here!”
* * * * *
Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why could not one cling to that?
Why the later vanity that made one want to be proclaimed? I remember
an evening alone in my room. I was not always writing. Sometimes I
read the work of other men. There was a scene being depicted by an old
master of prose. Three men were in a little room talking. What was
attempted was that there should be actual words said while the reader
should be given the sense of things felt for which there were no words.
One of the men kept talking in the most affable and genial manner while
at the same time there was murder in his heart. The three had been
eating and now the man who wanted to kill was fingering the handle of a
knife.
I remember that I sat in my room with tears streaming out of my own
eyes. Oh, so delicately and well was the scene being handled! There was
everything in just the way the man’s hands played with that knife. That
told the whole story. The writer had not said too much about it. He had
just, by a stroke of his pen, centred your attention there, upon the
fingers of a hand fiddling with the handle of a knife at the edge of
the table.
How easy to say too much! How easy to say too little! I remember that
I half read through the scene and then put the book down and ran
nervously up and down in my room. “He can’t do it! He can’t do it! No
man can do a thing so beautifully restrained and sure!” Do you think,
dear reader, I cared a hang about the social standing of the three men
in that room, what kind of morals they had, their influence for good or
evil on the characters of others, what they were up to? Indeed I did
not. It is a long time at least since I have been such a child as that.
A master had started to do a scene and I was in mortal terror lest he
fail to draw his line sharp and true. I had never yet drawn my own line
sharp and true, was not man enough to do so, was too timid, too weak
vain and fearful.
But ah, that master, that man who had written the scene I was reading!
Faith came back and I ran to pick up the book and read on and on. Oh,
the delicate wonder of it, the joy of it! At the moment I could have
crawled across the floor of my room and bathed with my happy tears
the feet of the man who in another room long before had held his pen
firmly, had spread upon a sheet of white paper, with such true and
vital an economy of ink, the complete sense of his scene.
* * * * *
Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why had I not been content with
it? In the nights alone in my room I had realized fully the danger of
coming out of my obscurity and yet never did I write a tale, at all
approaching good handling, but that I must need run down out of my room
and go eagerly from one person to another asking praise. Time and again
I said to myself: “You are an ignorant man. Every artist who goes to
pieces and takes the joy of complete abandonment from his task, and
the joy from his own life too, does so because he lets some outside
impulse, want of fame, want of money, want of praise, come between
him and his materials. The white surfaces before him become muddy
and dirty, the scene before his mind’s eye fades or becomes dim and
blurred.”
These things I had a thousand times said to myself and had made a dream
of a life I was to live. I was to keep in obscurity, work in obscurity.
When I had left the life of a manufacturer I would get, in Chicago or
some other city, a clerkship or some other minor job that would just
provide me with a living and would give me as much leisure as possible.
Well, I would live somewhere in a cheap room on a street of laborers’
houses. Clothes would not matter to me. I would live wholly for
something outside myself, for the white clean surfaces on which, if the
gods were good, I might some day have the joy of writing at least one
finely drawn and delicately wrought tale.
As I had walked away from my factory on a certain day these had been
the thoughts in my mind and now, after two years and after a few of my
tales had been printed and I had been a little praised I was going to
New York for the obvious purpose of doing everything possible to make
myself better known, to strut before the very people I was trying to
understand so that I could write of them fully and truly. What a tangle!
It was a dramatic moment in my own life and if, on that particular
evening as I walked alone in the streets of the Ohio town, I achieved a
certain victory over myself, it was not to be a lasting one. The kind
of workman I had wanted to be I could not be but I did not know it at
the moment. It was not until long afterward I came to the conclusion
that I, at least, could only give myself with complete abandonment to
the surfaces and materials before me at rare moments, sandwiched in
between long periods of failure. It was only at the rare moment I could
give myself, my thoughts and emotions, to work and sometimes, at rarer
moments, to the love of a friend or a woman.
I went from the railroad station along a street and onto a bridge where
I stood leaning over and looking at the water below. How black the
water in the dim light! From where I stood I could look along the river
bottom to the factory district where my own factory had stood. The
bridge led into a street that was in the fashionable residence district
of the town and presently a fat gray-haired old man, accompanied by
a friend, walked past. They were smoking expensive cigars and the
fragrance hung heavy on the air so that I also wanted tobacco and lit
a cigarette. The fat man had formerly been my banker and no doubt had
he recognized me might have told me a tale of money lost through me, of
promises unfulfilled. The deuce! I smiled at the thought of how glad
I was he had not recognized me. Would he have been nasty about the
matter or would he and I have laughed together over the thought of the
foolish impulse in himself that had led him to conclude I was a man to
be trusted and one likely to succeed in affairs--a good banker’s risk?
“Hello,” I said to myself, “I’d better get out of here.” Some of the
men of the town I had succeeded in getting worked up to the point of
investing in the wild business scheme I had formerly had in my head
might at any moment pass along the bridge and recognize me. That might
bring on an embarrassing moment. They might want their money back and
I had no money to give. In fancy I began to see myself as a desperado
revisiting the scene of some former crime. What had I done? Had I
robbed a bank, held up a train, or killed someone? It might well be
that at some time in the future I would want to write a tale of some
desperate fellow’s having got into a tight hole. Now he had to pass,
say in a park, the wife of a man he had murdered. I slunk away off the
bridge, throwing my cigarette into the river and pulling my hat down
over my eyes, becoming in fancy as I passed a man accompanied by a
woman and a child the murderer my own fancy had created. When I had
got to them my heart stopped beating and quite automatically I put my
hand to my hip pocket as though there had been a pistol there. “Well, I
was an enemy to society and if the worst came to the worst would sell
my life as dearly as possible.”
More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishness
sometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself,
hopelessly childish? Many men and women seemed, in outward appearance
at least, to comport themselves in life with a certain dignity. All
history was filled with the stories of men who had managed to get
through life with at least an outward dignity. Was all history a lie?
There was a man who owned a bank or an automobile factory or who was a
college professor or a judge. He rode about through the streets of a
city in an automobile, was called a great man. How did that affect him
inside, how did it make him feel? I began now wondering about myself.
Suppose someone were suddenly to call me a great man. I imagined a tall
serious-looking man with whiskers saying it. “He writes novels and
tales. He is a great man.”
And now as there was no one else to say the words set down above I said
them myself and at first I liked the sound of them and then a desire to
laugh took possession of me and I not only wanted to laugh at myself
but I wanted everyone in America to laugh with me, at myself and at
themselves too.
Oh, glorious moment! No more great men again ever, no more bad men or
good men, everyone on to everyone else. Was there a sense of something,
I at that moment felt, in all American people everywhere? In the
old days we Americans had been proud of what we thought of as our
distinctive American humor but lately our humor had pretty much settled
itself down into the universal dullness of the newspaper funny strip. A
really great humorist like Mr. Ring Lardner had come to that. Would it
not be a joke on us all if we were all, already, and in reality, pretty
far beyond any outward expression of ourselves we were getting?
And now I was stumbling about in the dark streets of an Ohio
manufacturing town poking sharp sticks into the tender flesh of myself
and others. There was no one to refute any smart thing I thought and
so I had a good time. Like everyone else I would so love to go through
life criticizing everyone else and withholding from others any right to
criticize me. Oh, the joy of being a king a pope or an emperor!
“Suppose,” I now thought, “everyone in America really hungers for a
more direct and subtle expression of our common lives than we have ever
yet had and that we are all only terribly afraid we won’t get it.”
The notion seemed good. It would explain so much. For one thing it
would explain the common boredom with life and with work characteristic
of so many so-called successful men I had met. Whether he was a
successful railroad-builder or a successful writer of magazine short
stories, the brighter man always seemed bored. Also it would explain
beautifully our American fear of the highbrow. Suppose the brighter men
were really having a good time--on the sly as it were--well, laughing
up their sleeves. And suppose some fellow were to come along who was
really on to the entire emptiness of the whole success theory of life,
the whole absurd business of building bigger and bigger towns, bigger
and bigger factories, bigger and bigger houses, but had decided not to
be a reformer and scold about it. I fancied such a one going blandly
about and really laughing, not fake laughing as in the newspaper funny
strips, made by poor driven slaves who think they must be rich or silly
to get fun out of life, getting the old American laugh back again, the
laugh that came from far down inside, an American Falstaff kind of a
laugh.
Well, now I had got myself into deep water. I had fancied into
existence a man I had not nerve or brains enough to be myself and one
never likes that. The figure my fancy had made annoyed me as I am sure
he would everyone else.
I had gone in the darkness down along a spur of a railroad track to
where my factory had formerly stood and there it was, much as I had
left it except that my name had been taken off the front. There was a
wall of the building that looked up toward the railroad station and
there I had once put a big sign on which was my name in letters three
feet high. How proud I had been when the sign was first put up. “Oh,
glorious day! I a manufacturer!” To be sure I did not own the building
but strangers would think I did.
And now my name was gone and another man’s name, in letters as large
as I had once used, was in its place. I went near the building trying
to spell out the new name in the darkness, hating the name with
instinctive jealousy, and a man came out at a door of the factory and
walked toward me. Oh Lord, it was the former school-teacher, the man
who had once been my night watchman and who was now evidently night
watchman for my successor. Would he recognize me, lurking about the
place of my former grandeur?
I started walking away along the tracks singing the words of an old
ditty my father had been fond of singing in his liquor when I was a
boy and that had at that moment popped into my head, and at the same
time staggering about as though I were drunk. It was my purpose to
make the night watchman think me a drunken workman homeward bound and
I succeeded. As I went away from him, staggering along the track,
singing and not answering when he demanded to know who I was and what
I was doing there, he grew angry, ran quickly up behind and kicked at
me. Fortunately he missed and fortunately I remembered that his eyes
had gone back on him long since. He now grabbed at me but I eluded his
grasp, singing my ditty as I half ran, half staggered away:
“’Twas a summer’s day and the sea was rippled
By the softest, gentlest breeze,
When a ship set sail with her cargo laden
For a land beyond the seas.
Did she never come back? No, she never came back,
And her fate is yet unlearned.
Though for years and years sad hearts have been waiting
Yet the ship she never returned.”
NOTE V
I HAD become a writer, a word fellow. That was my craft. Flinging aside
the fake devotion that must always be characteristic of all such jobs
as the advertising writing I had been doing for several years I had
accepted my passion for scribbling as one accepts the fact that the
central interest of one’s whole being lies in carving stone, spreading
paint upon canvas, digging in the earth for gold, working the soil,
working in wood or in iron. The arts are after all but the old crafts
intensified, followed with religious fervor and determination by men
who love them and deep down within him perhaps every man wants more
than anything else to be a good craftsman. Surely nothing in the modern
world has been more destructive than the idea that man can live without
the joy of hands and mind combined in craftsmanship, that men can live
by the accumulation of monies, by trickery. In the crafts only one may
exercise all one’s functions. The body comes in, the mind comes in, all
the sensual faculties become alive. When one writes one deals with a
thousand influences that motivate his own and other lives. There is,
first of all, the respect for what has gone before, for the work of the
older craftsmen. One who has written as much as I have written--and for
every word printed there are hundreds I have scrawled experimentally
that will never be printed--has also read much and often with great
joy.
In Russia England France Germany a writer sat writing. Oh, how well he
did his job, and how close I feel to him as I read! What a sharp sense
he gives of the life about him! With him one enters into that life,
feels the hidden passions of peoples, their little household traits,
their loves and hates. There are sentences written by all writers of
note in all countries that have their roots deep down in the life about
them. The sentences are like windows looking into houses. Something is
suddenly torn aside, all lies, all trickery about life gone for the
moment. It is what one wants, what one seeks constantly in one’s own
craftsmanship, and how seldom it comes. The little faky tricks are
always so ready to help over the hard places and when one has used them
there is the little flush of triumph followed by--bah! followed always
by the sick awakening.
One need not go too far afield to find sentences and paragraphs that
stir deeply. No doubt they were in the Indian language before white
men came and the first whites on our shores brought the sense of them.
There was that Fredis, sister of that Norseman Eric, who had come
to America long before Columbus came and had built him a house in
Vinland. The sister was a strong-willed woman who bullied her husband
and was avaricious for wealth. Came sailing to Greenland the brothers,
Helgi and Finnbogi, with a strong ship, and she induces them to go
adventuring with her to Vinland but at the very beginning tricks them.
She in her ship is to have thirty men and they are to have thirty
but unknown to them she conceals an extra five in her own vessel so
that in the far land, where are no white men and white men’s laws are
unknown, she shall have the upper hand. They get to Vinland and she
will not let them stay in the house, built there by her brother Eric,
and they go patiently away and build a hut of their own.
Still she schemes. See now with what truth, what fidelity and clearness
some old writer tells of what happened. Well, the brothers had the
larger and better ship and she wanted that too.
One morning early Fredis arose from her bed and dressed herself, but
did not put on her shoes and stockings. A heavy dew had fallen, and
she took her husband’s cloak, and wrapped it about her, and then
walked to the brothers’ house and up to the door, which had been only
partly closed by one of the men, who had gone out but a short time
before. She pushed the door open and stood silently in the doorway for
a time. Finnbogi, who was lying on the innermost side of the room,
awoke. “What dost thou wish here, Fredis?” She answers: “I wish thee
to rise and go out with me, for I would speak with thee.” He did so;
and they walked to a tree, which lay close by the wall of the house,
and seated themselves upon it. “How art thou pleased here?” says she.
He answers “I am well pleased with the fruitfulness of the land, but I
am ill content with the breach that has come between us, for methinks
there has been no cause for it.” “It is even as thou sayest,” says
she, “and so it seems to me; but my errand to thee is that I wish to
exchange ships with you brothers, for ye have a larger ship than I,
and I wish to depart from here.” “To this I must accede,” says he,
“if it is thy pleasure.” Therewith they parted, and she returned home
and Finnbogi to his bed. She climbed up into the bed and awakened
Thorvard (her husband) with her cold feet; and he asked her why she
was so cold and wet. She answered with great passion. “I have been
to the brothers’,” says she, “to try to buy their ship, for I wish to
have a larger vessel; but they received my overtures so ill that they
struck me and handled me very roughly; that time thou, poor wretch,
will neither avenge my shame nor thy own; and I find, perforce, that
I am no longer in Greenland. Moreover I shall part from thee unless
thou makest vengeance for this.” And now he could stand her taunts no
longer, and ordered the men to rise at once and take their weapons;
and they then proceeded directly to the house of the brothers, and
entered it while the folk were asleep, and seized and bound them, and
led each one out when he was bound; and, as they came out, Fredis
caused each to be slain.
Since I had been a boy it had been such passages as the one above that
had moved me most strangely. There was a man, perhaps one of Fredis’
men, who had seen a part of what had happened on that dreadful morning
in the far western world and had sensed the rest. For such a one there
would perhaps have been no thought of interference. One can think of
him, the unknown writer of the memorable passage above, as even helping
in the dreadful slaying there in the field at the edge of the wood and
near the sea, not because he wanted to but because he would have been
afraid. He would have done that and later perhaps have gone off alone
into the woods and cried a little and prayed a little, as I can imagine
myself doing after such an affair. The woman Fredis, after she had got
what she wanted, swore all her men to secrecy. “I will devise the means
of your death if there is any word of this when we have returned to
Greenland,” she said, and after she had gone home with the two vessels
loaded and had made up her own lie to tell her brother Eric of what had
happened to the brothers and their men in the far place, she made all
of her own men handsome presents.
But there was that scribbler. He would put it down. Fear might have
made him take part in the murder but no fear could now keep his hand
from the pen. Do I not know the wretch? Have I not got his own blood in
me? He would have walked about for days, re-living all of that dreadful
morning scene in Vinland and then when he was one day walking he would
have thought of something. Well, he would have thought suddenly of
just that bit about Fredis crawling back into her husband’s bed, after
the talk with Finnbogi, and how her cold wet feet awoke the man. He
would have been alone in the wood, back there in Greenland, when that
bit came to him, but at once he hurried to his own house. Perhaps his
wife was getting dinner and wanted him to go to the store but he would
have brushed her aside, and sitting down with ink and paper--perhaps
in her angry presence--he wrote all out, just as it is put down above.
Not only did he write, but he read his piece to others. “You will
get yourself into trouble,” said his wife, and he knew what she said
was true but that could not stop him. Do I not know the soul of him?
He would have gone about boasting a little, strutting a little. “I
say now, Leif, that bit, where Fredis gets into the bed and with her
cold feet awakens Thorvard--not bad, eh? I rather nailed her there,
now didn’t I old man?” “But you yourself helped to do the murder, you
know.” “Oh, the deuce now! Never mind that. But I say now, you’ll have
to admit it, I did rather put a spike into my scene. I nailed it down,
now didn’t I, Leify old chap?”
NOTE VI
WELL, there was my father, there was myself. If people did not want
their stories told, it would be better for them to keep away from me.
I would tell if I could get at the heart of it--as the fellow who
went off to Vinland with Fredis told--and for just the reasons that
made him tell. And like that fellow, after he returned to Greenland,
I would have to walk alone in the woods or in city streets thinking,
trying to think, trying to get all in accord, seeking always just that
illuminating touch the Norse story-teller had found when he thought up
the bit about Fredis--that about her getting into bed and touching the
back of her sleeping husband with the cold feet. The foxy devil! Do I
not know what happened after that? First he thought of the two in the
warm bed--the determined woman and the startled weak man--with a little
jump of delight and then he went back over his story and put that in
about her having got up in the first place without putting on shoes and
stockings and the cold wet dew on the grass and the log against the
wall of the house on which they sat. Now he had got going just right
and he knew he had got going just right. What a splendid feeling! It
was like a dance. How neatly everything fitted in! Words came--ah--just
the right words.
How many times, in these modern days when I have seen how
story-tellers and painters have got themselves so often all balled-up
with the question of style I have wondered whether the story-tellers
among the old Norse and those most marvelous story-tellers of the older
Testaments, whether they also did not have their periods of escaping
out into words because they had grown weary of seeking after the heart
of their stories.
I dare say they stole when they could without being detected as I have
so often done. Well, there was the heart of the tale itself. That had
first to be got at and then one had to find the words wherewith to
clothe it. One got a bit feverish at times and used feverish words,
made his telling too turgid or too wordy. One was like a runner who has
a long race to run but who is feverishly forcing the pace. How many
times I have sat writing, hoping I had got at the heart of the tale I
was trying to put down on the paper when inside myself I knew I had
not. I have tried to bluff myself. Often I have gone to others, hoping
they would say words that would quiet the voices within. “You have not
got it and you know you have not got it. Tear all up. Well, then, be
a fool and go on trying to bluff yourself. Perhaps you can get some
critic to say you have got what you know well enough you have not got,
the very heart, the very music of your tale.”
NOTE VII
IN Chicago I had ruined my chances of becoming a successful man of
affairs because I could not take affairs seriously but that had not
bothered me. Often enough, to be sure, I dodged the fact that, after
having started on the scent of some tale I turned aside because I could
not follow the scent and consoled myself by saying that the need of
money had been the cause of my defeat or that the need of leisure had
upset me but it was always a lie.
I was an advertising man in Chicago and sat in a room with some half
a dozen others. We had met to discuss some matter of grave importance
to say a maker of plows or automobile tires. The matter was really of
no importance to me. The man had come to Chicago with three or four
others and we were to discuss methods of increasing his sales. So many
thousands of tires made, so many thousands of plows. There were other
makers of tires, other makers of plows too. Could we be more persuasive
than they, more bold and daring in statement, more foxy and clever
perhaps?
We sat in a room to talk it over and near me sat a large man with
a beard. Someone had told me that he was the treasurer of the plow
company but that had meant little. Now, as he sat there smoking a
cigarette and gazing out at a window I saw, just when his head was
slightly turned, that he had a long scar on his cheek, that he had
grown the beard to conceal the scar. The talk went on but I sat
fascinated. “We must develop the trade in the southwest, that’s what we
must do,” said a voice from some far-distant place. Pictures had begun
to form in my fancy. Beside the voices in the room, other voices were
making themselves heard. Old memories had begun to stir.
There was something, a story within me that had been there a long time
but had never been told and that the scar under the beard had brought
to life. What an unfortunate time for the story to begin asserting
itself at just that moment. Now I was to think of the promotion of the
sale of plows in the newly opened State of Oklahoma and in Texas.
I sat with some six or eight men by a large table in a room and some
man was talking. He had been to Texas and knew things I would later
have to know when I wrote advertisements for the plow company. I tried
to appear attentive. There was a trick I had cultivated for just such
occasions. I leaned a little forward and put my head in my hands, as
though lost in deep thought. Some of the men in the room had heard that
I wrote stories and had therefore concluded that I had a good brain.
Americans have always a kind of tenderness for such cheats as I was
being at the moment. Now they gave me credit for thinking deeply on the
subject of plows, which was what I wanted. One of my employers--he was
president of our company and his name was Barton--tried to cover up my
obvious inattention. Already he had decided I would have to write the
plow company’s advertisements but later he would tell me of all that
had been said in the room. He would take me into his office and scold
me gently, like a mother speaking to a badly behaved child. “Of course
you didn’t hear a blamed word they said but here is the gist of it. I
had to tell that big man with a beard that you were a genius. My God,
what lies do I not tell on your account? When the little man with the
glasses was speaking of agricultural conditions in Texas I was afraid
that at any moment you might begin to whistle or sing.”
Voices inside the room and voices inside myself too. Was something
coming a bit clear at last?
Now my fancy had taken me quite out of the room where the others talked
of plows. One night, years before, when I was a young laborer and was
beating my way westward on a freight train, a brakeman had succeeded
in throwing me off the train in an Indiana town. I had remembered the
place long afterward because of my embarrassment--walking about among
people in my dirty torn clothes and with my dirty hands and face.
However, I had a little money and after I had walked through the town
to a country road I found a creek and bathed. Then I went back to town
to a restaurant and bought food.
It was a Saturday evening and the streets were filled with people.
After it grew dark my torn clothes were not so much in evidence and by
a street light near a church on a side street a girl smiled at me. Half
undecided as to whether or not I had better try to follow and pick up
an acquaintance, I stood for some moments by a tree staring after her.
Then I bethought me that when she had seen me more closely and had
seen the condition of my clothes she would in any event have nothing to
do with me.
As is natural to man, under such circumstances, I told myself I did not
want her anyway and went off down another street.
I came to a bridge and stood for a time looking down into the water
and then went on across the bridge along a road and into a field where
long grass grew. It was a summer night and I was sleepy but after I had
slept, perhaps for several hours, I was awakened by something going on
in the field and within a few feet of me.
The field was small and two houses stood facing it, the one near where
I lay in a fence corner and the other a few hundred yards away. When
I had come into the field lights were lighted in both houses but now
they were both dark and before me--some ten paces away--three men were
struggling silently while near them stood a woman who held her hands
over her face and who sobbed, not loudly but with a kind of low wailing
cry. There was something, dimly seen, something white, lying on the
ground near the woman and suddenly by a kind of flash of intuition
I understood what had happened. The white thing on the ground was a
woman’s garment.
The three men were struggling desperately and even in the dim light it
was evident that two of them were trying to overcome the third. He was
the woman’s lover and lived in the house at the end of the path that
crossed the field and the two others were her brothers. They had gone
into the town for the evening and had come home late and as they were
walking silently across the grass in the field they had stumbled upon
the love-makers and in a flash there was the impulse to kill their
sister’s lover. Perhaps they felt the honor of their house had been
destroyed.
And now one of them had got a knife out of his pocket and had slashed
at the lover, laying his cheek open, and they might have killed the man
as the woman and I watched trembling but at that moment he got away and
ran across the field toward his own house followed by the others.
I was left alone in the field with the woman--we were within a few feet
of each other--and for a long time she did not move. “After all I am
not a man of action. I am a recorder of things, a teller of tales.” It
was somewhat thus I excused myself for not coming to the lover’s aid,
as I lay perfectly still in the fence corner, looking and listening.
The woman continued to sob and now, from across the dark field, there
was a shout. The lover had not succeeded in getting into his own house,
was really but a step ahead of his pursuers, and perhaps did not dare
risk trying to open a door. He ran back across the field, dodging here
and there, and passing near us crossed the bridge into the road that
led to town. The woman in the field began calling, evidently to her two
brothers, but they paid no attention. “John. Fred!” she called between
her sobs. “Stop! Stop!”
And now again all was silent in the field and I could hear the rapid
steps of the three running men in the dusty road in the distance.
Then lights appeared in both the houses facing the field and the woman
went into the house near me, still sobbing bitterly, and presently
there were voices to be heard. Then the woman--now fully clad--came
out and went across the field to the second house and presently came
back with another woman. Their skirts almost brushed my face as they
passed me.
The three sat on the steps of the house on my side of the field, all
crying, and above the sound of their crying I could still hear, far
off, the sound of running feet. The lover had got into the town, which
was but half a mile away, and was evidently dodging through streets.
Was the town aroused? Now and then shouts came from the distance. I had
no watch and did not know how long I had slept in the field.
Now all became silent again and there were just the four people, myself
lying trembling in the grass and the three women on the steps of the
house near me, and all three crying softly. Time passed. What had
happened? What would happen? In fancy I saw the running man caught and
perhaps killed in some dark little side street of an Indiana farming
town into which I had been thrown by the accident that a railroad
brakeman had seen me standing on the bumpers between two cars of his
train and had ordered me off. “Well, get off or give me a dollar,” he
had said, and I had not wanted to give him a dollar. I had only had
three dollars in my pocket. Why should I give one to him? “There will
be other freight trains,” I had said to myself, “and perhaps I shall
see something of interest here in this town.”
Interest indeed! Now I lay in the grass trembling with fear. In fancy
I had become the lover of the younger of the three women sitting on
the steps of the house and my sweetheart’s brothers with open knives
in their hands were pursuing me in a dark street. I felt the knives
slashing my body and knew that what I felt the three women also felt.
Every few minutes the younger of the three cried out. It was as though
a knife had gone into her body. All four of us trembled with fear.
And then, as we waited and shook with dread, there was a stir in the
silence. Feet, not running but walking steadily, were heard on the
bridge that led into the road that passed the field and four men
appeared. Somewhere in the town, in the dark night streets of the town,
the two brothers had caught the lover but it was evident there had been
an explanation. The three had gone together to a doctor, the cut cheek
had been patched, they had got a marriage license and a preacher and
were now coming home for a marriage.
The marriage took place at once, there before me on the steps of the
house, and after the marriage, and after some sort of heavy joke on
the part of the preacher, a joke at which no one laughed, the lover
with his sweetheart, accompanied by the third woman, the one from the
house across the field and who was evidently the lover’s mother, went
off across the field. Presently the field where I lay was all dark and
silent again.
* * * * *
And that had been the scene playing itself out in my fancy as I sat
in the advertising office in Chicago, pretending to listen to the
man who spoke of agricultural conditions in Texas and looking at the
man with the scar on his cheek, the scar that had been partly hidden
from the sight of others by growing the beard. I remembered that the
plow company, now wanting to sell its plows in greater numbers in the
southwest, was located in an Indiana town. How fine it would be if I
could speak to the man of the beard and ask him if by any chance he
was the lover of the field. In fancy I saw all the men in the room
suddenly talking with the greatest intimacy. Experiences in life were
exchanged, everyone laughed. There had been something in the air of
the room. The men who had come to us were from a small city in Indiana
while we all lived in the great city. They were somewhat suspicious of
us while we were compelled to try to allay their suspicions. After the
conference there would be a dinner, perhaps at some club, and afterward
drinks--but there would still be suspicion. I fancied a scene in which
no man suspected another. What tales might then be told! How much we
might find out of each other!
And now in fancy the bearded man and I were walking and talking
together and I was telling him of the scene in the field and of what I
had seen and he had told me of what I had not seen. He told me of how
during the running he had become exhausted and had stopped in a dark
little alleyway behind stores in the town and of how the brothers had
found him there. One of them came toward him threateningly but he began
to talk and an explanation followed. Then they had gone to arouse a
doctor and a small official who gave them the marriage license.
“Do you know,” he said, “neither her mother nor my own knew just what
had happened and didn’t dare ask. Her mother never asked her and my
mother never asked me. We went along later as though nothing had
happened at all except that with all of us, her brothers and myself,
and even our two mothers, there was a kind of formality. They did not
come to our house without being invited and we did not go freely to
their house as we always had done before the brothers saw us together
in the field that night.”
“It was all a little strange and as soon as I could I grew the beard to
hide the scar on my face that I thought embarrassed all the others.
“As for Molly and myself--well, you see it was somewhat strange to
find ourselves suddenly man and wife but she has been a good wife to
me. After the ceremony that night on the porch of the house and after
the preacher went away we all stood for a little time together, saying
nothing, then my mother started for our house across the field and I
took my wife’s arm and followed. When we got to our house I took my
Molly into my bedroom and we sat on the edge of the bed. There was a
window that looked over across the field to the house where she had
always lived and after a while the lights went out over there. My own
mother kept moving about in our house and, although she made no noise,
I knew she was crying. Was she crying because she was glad or sad?
Had Molly and I married in the regular way I suppose there would have
been rejoicing in both houses and I think there is no doubt we would
inevitably have married. Anyway, my mother did things about the house
she had already done once that night, opened the door to let out the
cat that was already out, tried to wind the clock that was already
wound. Then she went off upstairs and our house was dark and silent too.
“We just sat like that, on the edge of the bed, Molly and me, I don’t
know for how long. Then she did something. The doctor in town had sewed
up the wound in my cheek and had covered the place with a soft cloth
held in place by pieces of tape. What she did was to reach up and touch
the end of the wound, timidly, with the tips of her fingers. She did it
several times, and each time a soft little moan came from her lips.
“She did that, as I say six or eight times and then we both lay down on
the bed and took each other’s hands. We didn’t undress. What we did was
to lie there, all night, just as I have described, with our clothes on
and holding fast to each other’s hands.”
BOOK IV
NOTE I
I WALKED about the city of New York looking at people. I was not too
young any more and could not make myself over to fit a new city. No
doubt certain characteristics of my own nature had become fixed. I
was a man of the mid-western towns who had gone from his town to the
mid-western cities and there had gone through the adventures common to
such fellows as myself. Was there some salt in me? To the end of my
life I would talk with the half slovenly drawl of the middle-westerner,
would walk like such a middle-westerner, have the air of something
between a laborer, a man of business, a gambler, a race horse owner, an
actor. If I was, as I then fully intended, to spend the rest of my life
trying to tell such tales as I could think and feel my way through, I
would have to tell the tales of my own people. Would I gain new power
and insight for the telling by having come East, by consorting with
other story-tellers? Would I understand better my own people and what
had made the tragedies, the comedies and the wonders of their lives?
I was in New York as a guest, as an onlooker, wondering about the city
and the men of the city and what they were thinking and feeling. There
were certain men I wanted to see, who had written things I thought had
given me new lights on my own people, the subjects of my tales.
I dare say there was a good deal of a certain half-rural timidity in me.
There was Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, whose book “America’s Coming-of-Age,”
had moved me deeply. He with Mr. Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, James
Oppenheim and others had just started a magazine, _The Seven Arts_
(that after its death was to be replaced by _The Dial_, published
by a quite different group), and the magazine had not only offered to
publish some of my things but its editors had asked me to come to see
them.
I wanted to go and was at the same time a little afraid. At that time
there was a good deal of talk abroad as to a new artistic awakening in
America. Mr. Waldo Frank’s “Our America” must have been in preparation
at just about that time and it could not have been much later that Mr.
William Allen White wrote in _The New Republic_, an article the
import of which was that “The King is dead! Long live the King!” If
there were new kings in the land, I wanted to see and consort with them
if I could.
As for _The Seven Arts_ magazine, there had been rumors of its
coming birth, even in Chicago. Miss Edna Kenton had come from New York
to Chicago at about that time and a meeting was held. There was a large
party in a large house and upstairs somewhere the new day was under
discussion. We, downstairs, did not just know what was being discussed
but there was a kind of tingling sensation in the air. Little groups
of us gathered in the rooms below. “What’s up?” It is to be remembered
this was in Chicago and we were all young and no doubt naïve. “What
they whispering about upstairs?” “Don’t you know?” Not to know was,
we all felt, a kind of cultural blight. I had run from one group to
another trying to find out and at just that moment a young doctor,
who in his spare moments wrote poetry, came into the house and went
hurriedly upstairs. A rather ribald fellow among the guests--Ben Hecht
perhaps--who like the rest of us was angry that he had not been let
into the secret, made an announcement. “I know what it is. Someone’s
having a baby,” he said.
What about the men of New York, the writers whose work I admired, the
painters whose work I admired? I had always wanted to be a painter
myself, was always having sensations and seeing forms that could
perhaps have been expressed in paint and in no other way but the
materials of the painter’s craft seemed to me to lie far outside my way
of life. One had to know drawing, to know what green did to yellow and
yellow to brown. When one talked to painters they spoke of things that
lay far outside one’s pathway. There had been one painter I had known
quite well. He had lived in a room near my own in Chicago and painted
landscapes. Rather he painted one landscape over and over. There was an
old stone building that looked like pictures one had seen of peasants’
cottages. It was evening and two cows were coming home along a road,
to a barn one fancied, but the barn could not be seen for the deep
shadows that had gathered behind the house. Then there were some trees,
the tops of which could be but faintly seen on the horizon. The last
rays of the sun had splashed the sky with red. Often in the evening the
painter, a large man with red hair, came into my room and spoke to me.
He also had been touched with the new day and had read Paul Gauguin’s
notebook and a work by Mr. Clive Bell. “The new fellows have nothing on
me,” he declared and taking me into his room he showed me half a dozen
of his canvases and how that in one the tops of the trees could just be
seen above the roof of the house and in another that there were really
no trees at all. “What you think is trees is only clouds,” he declared,
“and what you think is the sun going down is really the moon coming up.”
Returning with me to my room he had talked so long and well of the
effect of light on color, of form and its significance, of the
new cubistic and post-impressionistic movements, the import and
significance of which he declared scornfully he had measured and for
the most part discarded, that I became frightened and did not for years
afterwards try to paint. Once in Chicago I went into a store, intending
to buy some colors with which to play at idle moments in my room but a
certain air of the clerk had frightened me. My own father, when he was
alive, had often received from manufacturers certain cards on which
the house-painter’s colors were shown and the trade name of each color
printed below and I had thought I might find such a card lying on a
counter in the art store but saw none and was ashamed to ask. Perhaps I
wanted the clerk to think me a painter who knew his craft. How glibly
the red-haired man had reeled off the names of colors. I was like one
who has wandered into a church where people are kneeling in prayer. I
began walking on tiptoes. “I only wanted to buy a pencil eraser,” I
said.
And so now there I was in the city of New York and there were certain
men in the city to whom I would have liked to go, to talk with them of
my craft, but when I thought of doing so I was afraid.
My own position was something like this: there were in my head certain
tales I knew but could not yet tell and certain others I had told but
felt I had told badly or haltingly. Was there a certain formula one
could learn that might help one out of the difficulty? There was a
sense in which I thought of myself as an ignorant man. The tales I had
already put down on paper had been as a sort of growth in me. There was
_The Little Review_, run by two Chicago women who had preceded me
to New York. They had published tales of mine and might publish more.
When I went to see them we had much fun together and Miss Anderson and
myself had in common a fondness for rather striking clothes and for
strutting a bit upon the stage of life that drew us closely together
but being at bottom fellow Chicagoans we were bound not to take each
other too seriously--at least not under the rose.
Did I want, above everything else, to be taken seriously? No doubt I
did. That may have been the notion I had in coming to the city. And I
suppose I wanted also to find superior craftsmen at whose feet I could
sit. I already had my own notions concerning American story-tellers in
general.
* * * * *
I was walking in the street or sitting in a train and overheard a
remark dropped from the lips of some man or woman. Out of a thousand
such remarks, heard almost every day, one stayed in my head. I could
not shake it out. And then people constantly told me tales and in the
telling of them there was a sentence used that intoxicated. “I was
lying on my back on the porch and the street lamp shone on my mother’s
face. What was the use? I could not say to her what was in my mind. She
would not have understood. There was a man lived next door who kept
going past the house and smiling at me. I got it into my head that he
knew all that I could not tell mother.”
A few such sentences in the midst of a conversation overheard or
dropped into a tale someone told. These were the seeds of stories. How
could one make them grow?
In telling tales of themselves people constantly spoiled the tale
in telling. They had some notion of how a story should be told got
from reading. Little lies crept in. They had done something mean and
tried to justify some action that for the tale’s sake did not need
justification.
There was a notion that ran through all story-telling in America, that
stories must be built about a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notion
that they must point a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens,
etc. The magazines were filled with these plot stories and most of the
plays on our stage were plot plays. “The Poison Plot,” I called it
in conversation with my friends as the plot notion did seem to me to
poison all story-telling. What was wanted I thought was form, not plot,
an altogether more elusive and difficult thing to come at.
The plots were frameworks about which the stories were to be
constructed and editors were inordinately fond of them. One got
“an idea for a story.” What was meant was that a new trick had been
thought out. Nearly all the adventure stories and the well-known
American western stories were so constructed. A man went into the
redwood forests or into the deserts and took up land. He has been a
rather mean, second-rate chap in civilization but in the new place a
great change comes over him. Well, the writer had got him out where
there was no one looking and could do as he pleased with the fellow.
Never mind what he had been. The forests or the deserts had changed
him completely. The writer could make a regular angel of him, have him
rescue downtrodden women, catch horse thieves, exhibit any kind of
bravery required to keep the reader excited and happy.
A word of good sense dropped in anywhere would have blown the whole
thing to pieces but there was no danger. In all such writing all
consideration for human beings was thrown aside. No one lived in such
tales. Let such a writer begin to think of human beings, care a little
for human beings, and his pasteboard world would melt before his eyes.
The man in the desert or in the redwood forests was of course the same
man he had been before he went there. He had the same problems to face.
God knows we would all flee to the forests or the deserts at once if
going there could so transform anyone. At least I know I should waste
no time in getting there.
In the construction of these stories there was endless variation but in
all of them human beings, the lives of human beings, were altogether
disregarded. An Alabama Negro was given the shrewdness of a Connecticut
Yankee, a trick that made some writer temporarily famous and brought
him wealth. Having made his Negro think like a Yankee, having made him
practice all the smart cute tricks of the Yankee, there was nothing to
stop the writer producing a thousand tales with the hybrid Negro as the
hero of them all. Only the giving out of the patience of the editors or
of the public could stop him, and both seemed inexhaustible.
As to what the writer himself suffered under these circumstances,
that was a different matter. One supposed that any man who attempted
the writer’s craft had, at the beginning, some real interest in the
people about him but this was quickly lost. The imaginative life of the
romancer must be lived entirely in a queer pasteboard world.
It was a peculiarity of the writer’s craft that one must of necessity
give oneself to the people about whom one wrote, must in a quite
special way believe in the existence of these people, and a peculiar
childlike credulousness must result to the writer who so completely
separated himself from actual life. Having acquired sudden fame and
wealth such a writer woke up some morning to find himself irrevocably
dead. The actuality of life could not reach him. On all sides of him
people suffered, were touched with moments of nameless joy, loved and
died, and the manufacturer of society detectives, desert heroes and
daring adventures by sea and land could no longer see life at all.
With unseeing eyes, deaf ears and benumbed senses he must walk through
life--a movie hero, a stage star or a rich and successful manufacturer
of romances--no longer a human being at all. One had no notion of
giving oneself to that kind of death in life but to find out what one
did not want to do was but half the battle.
After all the tales themselves came quickly. In certain moods one
became impregnated with the seeds of a hundred new tales in one day.
The telling of the tales, to get them into form, to clothe them,
find just the words and the arrangement of words that would clothe
them--that was a quite different matter. I wanted to find, if I could,
the men who would help me toward the solution of that problem.
For even an unknown and unsuccessful scribbler in America the situation
is difficult enough. Even the very sweetness of our people in their
attitude toward our writers is destructive. You have seen how I myself
was allowed to play like a reckless child among advertising men,
constantly forgiven for my impudence, often paid an absurd figure
for writing an unimportant advertisement--that any one of forty men,
not authors, would have gladly written with more care at half my
price--simply because I was an author.
Well, I had published certain tales over my own name and my fate was
sealed. That the tales were not liked by many of the critics did
not matter too much. To be sure, my books did not sell, but I was
discussed in the newspapers and literary magazines and my picture was
occasionally printed and finally a very second-rate English writer of
romances, very popular in our country, spoke well of me and Mr. Frank
Harris spoke ill of me.
Ye gods, I was lost and must flee. The very grocer at the corner, with
whom I was wont to sit on the steps by the back door of the store on
summer evenings while he talked of his life as a young sailor on a
lake steamer looked at me with new eyes. He began speaking like a very
movie hero. His tales, that had been so naturally and humanly told,
became grotesques of tales. The fellow had some idea I might make him
the hero of some improbable romance of our inland seas, one always
holding the helm in some desperate storm or jumping overboard to
rescue some broker’s daughter, and tried heroically to supply me with
materials. He had in his youth read some novel of the seas and now he
began to lie valiantly, telling me all the desperate escapades of which
he had heard or read as having happened to himself. Shades of Defoe and
Melville, such a sea and such a sailor’s life as he manufactured! I
remembered almost with tears in my eyes the little homely real stories
he had formerly been in the habit of telling of himself, and left
him never to return. I was even vicious enough to rob him, for his
defection, of my grocery trade.
How utterly all my life had been changed by a little public attention!
Even some of my friends went the road of the grocer. I remember that
I had, at just that time, done a deed affecting my personal life that
had lost me the respect of some of my acquaintances. One of them saw my
picture, printed I think in the _Literary Digest_, and immediately
afterward wrote me a letter. “You are a great artist and may do
anything you please. I forgive you everything,” he wrote and as I read
the letter my heart went sick within me. “At any rate why do they
want to dehumanize us?” I asked myself. Violently then I cursed the
romancers. They were in reality at the bottom of it all. Not satisfied
with the cowboys the sailors and the detectives they had descended
upon their brothers of the pen and the brush. A poet was a certain kind
of man with long hair and no food who went about muttering to himself.
There was no escape for him. That he was and his fate was fixed. To be
sure I had myself known some American poets and had found them in their
everyday life much like all the other people I knew except that they
were a trifle more sensitive to life and its beauties and, before they
became widely known as poets, sometimes wrote beautiful bits describing
their inner reaction to some flash of beauty that had come to them.
They were that before they became widely known as poets and then later
they were usually goners.
That was how it was with the poet. The painter usually starved in a
garret and went about his small room pale and emaciated, with a palette
stuck on his thumb, and then one day a lovely lady came along the
street, saw how that he was a genius and married him. I’ll say this for
us scribblers and the actors. We got off better. We usually, in the
romances, sat on a park bench with the tramps and had a dirty newspaper
blown to us by a cold wind. On the front page of the newspaper was a
large picture of ourselves and an announcement that fame had come. Then
we went and bought the tramps a breakfast with our last dollar before
we went to live in a great house with servants. We scribblers and the
actors got off the least shamefully in the romances but then, it is to
be remembered, fellows of our own craft got up these yarns that had so
stuck in the public mind and that they had for that reason perhaps a
little pity for us.
All of this however concerned the materials for tales. One had to do
one’s own winnowing in any event. I was in New York and was after
something other than stories. Would I find what I wanted? I was
somewhat afraid of the writers, particularly of the ones whose work I
most admired because I thought they must be a special kind of being,
quite different from the men I had known. (No doubt I was myself the
victim of the same romancers I have just been cursing.) There were
certain men I thought had written of America and American writing with
an understanding that had been a help to me. I was what I was, a rough
and tumble participant in life. As yet there had been little time for
study, for quiet thought.
As for these other men, the fellows of the East, what of them? I
fancied in them an erudition the contemplation of which made me afraid.
Now I understood how Mark Twain felt when he went up to Boston. Did he,
like myself, want something without knowing just what he wanted?
For such men as myself you must understand there is always a great
difficulty about telling the tale after the scent has been picked up.
The tales that continually came to me in the way indicated above could
of course not become tales until I had clothed them. Having, from a
conversation overheard or in some other way, got the tone of a tale, I
was like a woman who has just become impregnated. Something was growing
inside me. At night when I lay in my bed I could feel the heels of the
tale kicking against the walls of my body. Often as I lay thus every
word of the tale came to me quite clearly but when I got out of bed to
write it down the words would not come.
I had constantly to seek in roads new to me. Other men had felt what I
had felt, had seen what I had seen--how had they met the difficulties
I faced? My father when he told his tales walked up and down the room
before his audience. He pushed out little experimental sentences
and watched his audience narrowly. There was a dull-eyed old farmer
sitting in a corner of the room. Father had his eyes on the fellow.
“I’ll get him,” he said to himself. He watched the farmer’s eyes. When
the experimental sentence he had tried did not get anywhere he tried
another and kept trying. Beside words he had--to help the telling of
his tales--the advantage of being able to act out those parts for which
he could find no words. He could frown, shake his fists, smile, let a
look of pain or annoyance drift over his face.
These were his advantages that I had to give up if I was to write my
tales rather than tell them and how often I had cursed my fate.
How significant words had become to me! At about this time an American
woman living in Paris, Miss Gertrude Stein, had published a book called
“Tender Buttons” and it had come into my hands. How it had excited me!
Here was something purely experimental and dealing in words separated
from sense--in the ordinary meaning of the word sense--an approach I
was sure the poets must often be compelled to make. Was it an approach
that would help me? I decided to try it.
A year or two before the time of which I am now writing an American
painter, Mr. Felix Russman, had taken me one day into his workshop to
show me his colors. He laid them out on a table before me and then his
wife called him out of the room and he stayed for half an hour. It
had been one of the most exciting moments of my life. I shifted the
little pans of color about, laid one color against another. I walked
away and came near. Suddenly there had flashed into my consciousness,
for perhaps the first time in my life, the secret inner world of the
painters. Before that time I had wondered often enough why certain
paintings, done by the old masters, and hung in our Chicago Art
Institute, had so strange an effect upon me. Now I thought I knew. The
true painter revealed all of himself in every stroke of his brush.
Titian made one feel so utterly the splendor of himself; from Fra
Angelico and Sandro Botticelli there came such a deep human tenderness
that on some days it fairly brought tears to the eyes; in a most
dreadful way and in spite of all his skill Bouguereau gave away his own
inner nastiness while Leonardo made one feel all of the grandeur of
his mind just as Balzac had made his readers feel the universality and
wonder of his mind.
Very well then, the words used by the tale-teller were as the colors
used by the painter. Form was another matter. It grew out of the
materials of the tale and the teller’s reaction to them. It was the
tale trying to take form that kicked about inside the tale-teller at
night when he wanted to sleep.
And words were something else. Words were the surfaces, the clothes
of the tale. I thought I had begun to get something a little clearer
now. I had smiled to myself a little at the sudden realization of how
little native American words had been used by American story-writers.
When most American writers wanted to be very American they went in for
slang. Surely we American scribblers had paid long and hard for the
English blood in our veins. The English had got their books into our
schools, their ideas of correct forms of expression were firmly fixed
in our minds. Words as commonly used in our writing were in reality an
army that marched in a certain array and the generals in command of the
army were still English. One saw the words as marching, always just
so--in books--and came to think of them so--in books.
But when one told a tale to a group of advertising men sitting in a
barroom in Chicago or to a group of laborers by a factory door in
Indiana one instinctively disbanded the army. There were moments then
for what have always been called by our correct writers “unprintable
words.” One got now and then a certain effect by a bit of profanity.
One dropped instinctively into the vocabulary of the men about, was
compelled to do so to get the full effect sought for the tale. Was the
tale he was telling not just the tale of a man named Smoky Pete and
how he caught his foot in the trap set for himself?--or perhaps one
was giving them the Mama Geigans story. The devil. What had the words
of such a tale to do with Thackeray or Fielding? Did the men to whom
one told the tale not know a dozen Smoky Petes and Mama Geigans? Had
one ventured into the classic English models for tale-telling at that
moment there would have been a roar. “What the devil! Don’t you go
high-toning us!”
And it was sure one did not always seek a laugh from his audience.
Sometimes one wanted to move the audience, make them squirm with
sympathy. Perhaps one wanted to throw an altogether new light on a tale
the audience already knew.
Would the common words of our daily speech in shops and offices do
the trick? Surely the Americans among whom one sat talking had felt
everything the Greeks had felt, everything the English felt? Deaths
came to them, the tricks of fate assailed their lives. I was certain
none of them lived felt or talked as the average American novel
made them live feel and talk and as for the plot short stories of
the magazines--those bastard children of De Maupassant, Poe and O.
Henry--it was certain there were no plot short stories ever lived in
any life I had known anything about.
Did it come to this, that Americans worked, made love, settled new
western states, arranged their personal affairs, drove their fords,
using one language while they read books, wanted perhaps to read books,
in quite another language?
I had come to Gertrude Stein’s book about which everyone laughed but
about which I did not laugh. It excited me as one might grow excited in
going into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange--a
sort of Lewis and Clark expedition for me. Here were words laid before
me as the painter had laid the color pans on the table in my presence.
My mind did a kind of jerking flop and after Miss Stein’s book had
come into my hands I spent days going about with a tablet of paper in
my pocket and making new and strange combinations of words. The result
was I thought a new familiarity with the words of my own vocabulary. I
became a little conscious where before I had been unconscious. Perhaps
it was then I really fell in love with words, wanted to give each word
I used every chance to show itself at its best.
It had then not occurred to me that the men I had really come to New
York hoping to see and know, fellows of the schools, men who knew their
Europe, knew the history of the arts, who knew a thousand things I
could not know, it had never occurred to me that in the end I would
find them as frankly puzzled as myself. When I found that out there was
a new adjustment to make. It was then only the trick men, the men who
worked from the little patent formula they had learned, the critics who
could never get English literature out of their heads, who thought they
were sure of their grounds? That knowledge was a relief when I found it
out but I was a long long time finding it out. It takes a long time to
find out one’s own limitations and perhaps a longer time to find out
the limitations of one’s critics.
* * * * *
Was there really something new in the air of America? I remember that
at about this time someone told me that I was myself something new and
how thankful I was to hear it. “Very well,” I said to myself, “if there
are certain men launching a new ship from the harbor of New York and if
they are willing to take me aboard I’ll sure go.” I was just as willing
to be a modern as anything else, was glad to be. It was very sure I was
not going to be a successful author and well enough I knew that, not
being successful, there would be a great deal of consolation to me in
being at least a modern.
What I at the moment felt toward all the more deeply cultured men whose
acquaintanceship I sought and still in a sense feel toward them was
something like what a young mechanic might feel when his boss comes
into the shop accompanied by his daughter. The young mechanic is
standing at his lathe and there is grease on his face and hands. The
boss’s daughter has never been shown over the shop before and is a
little excited by the presence of so many strange men and as she and
her father approach the lathe where the young workman stands he does
not know whether to appear surly and uncommunicative or bold and a bit
impudent. (In his place I, being an American, should probably have
winked at the girl and been terribly embarrassed and ashamed later.)
There he stands fumbling about with his fingers and pretending to look
out of the window and--the devil!--now the boss has stopped behind his
lathe and is attempting to explain something to the daughter, “This is
a sprocket post, is it not?” he says to the workman, who is compelled
to turn around. “Yes, sir,” he mutters, in embarrassment but his eyes,
in just that fraction of a second, have taken a sweeping glance at the
daughter.
And now she is gone and the workman is asking himself questions. “If
I was a swell now I suppose maybe I’d be invited to their house.” He
imagines himself in a dress suit going up a long driveway to the front
of a grand house. He is swinging a cane and there on the front steps is
the boss’s daughter waiting to receive him. What will he talk to her
about? Dare a man speak in such company of the only things he knows?
What does he know?
He knows that Jack Johnson could probably have whipped Jess Willard if
he had really tried. There is a woman lives in his rooming house who is
unfaithful to her husband. He knows who with. She is going to have a
child but the chances are it is not her husband’s child. Often he has
asked himself how she will feel on the night when the child is born and
when her husband is so excited and proud.
After all, the young workman knows a good many things of his own sort,
but of how many of them can he, dare he, speak with the boss’s daughter
whose voice was so soft and whose skin looked so delicate that day when
she came into the shop with her father? “Dare I ask her what she thinks
the unfaithful wife will be thinking and feeling when the child is
born?”
Young workmen have a kind of fear of the thing called culture. Most
middle-westerners think of it--in spite of their protestations to the
contrary--as in some vague way to be breathed in the air of New York.
New Yorkers seem to think of it as to be found in London or Paris.
Bankers and manufacturers of the Middle-West hope to get it for their
sons by sending them to Yale or Harvard and as there are a good many
bankers and manufacturers Yale and Harvard are inclined to be crowded.
Mark Twain thought he would find it in Boston--a whole generation of
Americans thought that.
To the young workman culture is somewhat like a new suit of clothes
that does not fit too well. It binds under the arms when one first puts
it on.
NOTE II
WHEN I lived in Chicago and had first begun to write stories an
American critic who had seen some of my work had been very kind about
securing the publication of the stories but once, when he was annoyed
with me for writing a story he did not like, he wrote me a scolding
letter. “You are, after all, nothing but an advertising writer who
would like to be something else and can’t make it,” he said and after I
had got to New York and had walked about a little looking at the tall
arrogant buildings and at the smart alert-looking people in the streets
I thought I had better, for the time at least, stay away from the
people whose work and whose minds I admired. “They might find out how
really little I know,” I said to myself shrewdly.
I was however not too lonely, having plenty of people at whom I could
look, to whom I could listen. My brother, who lived in New York, took
me to the Salmagundi Club where I saw any number of successful painters
and my boyhood friend Mr. John Emerson took me to the Players and Lambs
and also, with other men and women I knew, I penetrated into the life
of Greenwich Village.
How many strings to grasp! How many things I wanted of the city that
was, I had no doubt, the artistic and intellectual capital of the
country! The city’s wealth did not impress me too much, as I had been
in other wealthy places. One could make money as fast in Chicago as in
New York, although it could probably not be spent with quite as much
style. What I wanted most was the men who would help me solve certain
problems connected with the craft to which I was devoted. Could I find
such fellows? Would they do it?
The bitter truth was that of the actors I saw and heard talk none
seemed much interested in the craft of the actor and of the painters
the same lack of interest in what seemed to me so essential was
apparent, and surely we scribblers were no better. The successful men
of the arts talked of the market and little else. Writers even went
into bookstores to see what kind of books were selling well in order
to know what kind of books to write, actors talked of salaries paid
and of getting some part that would bring them into prominence and the
painters followed the same bent.
Were the successful practitioners of the arts much less decent fellows
than the laborers and business men of the Middle West among whom my
life had been spent? I was forced to ask myself that question too.
NOTE III
I SAT in a restaurant in New York thinking of my friends George and
Marco in Chicago. We had been lads together and I remembered an evening
of our young manhood when we all went out to walk together. We had
stopped at a bridge and stood leaning over and I remembered that Marco
had said something, expressive at the moment of what we had all felt.
“The time’ll come, I’ll bet you what you please the time’ll come when
I’ll be making my hundred and twenty-five every month,” he had said.
Well, Marco’s remark had expressed something more than a desire to make
money. Later all of us had made money and then when youth was gone
we had all tried something else. Marco wrote poetry and George and I
wrote stories. None of us knew much of our crafts but we had struggled
together with them and in the evenings had sat about talking. What we
had all wanted was the leisure money might bring. We had all wanted to
go to New York and live among men who knew more of the crafts we were
trying to practice than we felt we would ever know.
And now I had come to New York and was sitting I in a restaurant where
the more successful of the practitioners of the arts congregated. What
did I want? I wanted to hear men of my own craft, who loved the craft,
speak of it. I remembered how as a boy in mid-western towns before the
factories came in so thick the carpenters, wheelwrights, harness-makers
and other craftsmen often gathered about to speak of their work and how
I loved to be among them at such times. The factories had brushed such
fellows aside. Had the same thing happened in the more delicate crafts?
Were the great publishing houses of the city and the magazines but
factories and were the writers and picture makers who worked for them
but factory hands now?
If that had happened I thought I understood the men among whom I had
now come. The older craftsmen had thought little on the subject of
wages and had never talked on the subject when they gathered in groups
in the evenings but the factory hands among whom I later worked had
talked of little else. They had talked of how much money might be
made and had boasted interminably of their potency in sex. Were the
practitioners of the more delicate crafts becoming like them?
In the New York restaurant was a room filled with people, all in some
way practitioners of the arts. Near me at a table sat three men and
two women. They were talking in rather loud tones and seemed conscious
that everything they said was of importance. One had a queer sense of
their separateness from each other. Why, when one of them spoke, did he
not look at his fellows? Instead he glanced about the room, as though
saying to himself, “Is anyone looking at me?”
And now one of these men arose and walked across the room. There was
something strange about his walk. I was puzzled and then the truth
came to me. All the men and women in the room were obviously aware of
what they thought of as their own importance. No man spoke naturally,
walked naturally.
The man who had got up from the table to go speak to someone at another
table did not want really to speak to him. He wanted to walk across
the room for the same reason that I am told, nowadays, it is almost
impossible to do anything with actors as they all want to get into one
spot on the stage--upstage where the light is the clearest.
What a ghastly separation from life! I sat in the New York restaurant
fully aware that what was true of the men and women about me was true
also of myself. The people in the restaurant, the actors, painters and
writers, had made themselves what the public thought it wanted from its
artists, and had been well paid for doing so. What I felt in New York I
might have felt with even more terrible certainty in Hollywood.
I fled from the restaurant and at a street corner stopped and laughed
at myself. I remembered that at the moment I had on a pair of socks and
a neck-scarf, either of which might have been seen for a mile. “At any
rate you’re not such a blushing violet yourself,” I said, grinning with
myself at myself.
NOTE IV
IT was time surely for me to review myself. I wanted to know just what
I was doing in New York, what I was up to--if I could find out. I had
time now to ask myself a lot of questions and I enjoyed doing so.
Mornings to walk about, afternoons to go to the parks, sit with people
or go to see paintings, evenings of my own. No advertisements to write,
for a time anyway. “Crescent Soap Lightens the Day’s Work. Tangletoes
Catches the Flies,” etc. For a man living as I lived a few hundred
dollars would go far. For the American there are always plenty of
books to be had without cost and one may see what the more successful
painters are doing by simply walking in at the door of a museum or a
gallery. The work of the more unsuccessful ones worth seeing Alfred
Stieglitz will show you or tell you about. Cigarettes do not cost very
much and there are happy hours to be spent sitting by the window of
a room in a side street hearing what people have to say as they walk
past. All the women of my street spent the time at the same thing.
There was a fat old woman across the way who never left the window from
morning till night. I wondered if she was planning to write a novel and
was thinking about the characters, dreaming of them, making up scenes
and situations in which they were to play a part.
If my life in the past had been split into two parts it need be that
no longer. I have taken a resolution. In the future I would write no
more advertisements. If I became broke I would become a beggar and sit
with a beggar bowl in Fifth Avenue. Even the police are sentimental
enough not to kick an author out. I would not sit swearing at the book
publishers, the magazine editors or the public, that I was not rich.
I had not tried to accommodate myself to them--why should they bother
about me? I sat dreaming of what might be the takings of an author
with a beggar bowl in his lap sitting in front of the Public Library
on Fifth Avenue. The press of people would prevent the literarily
inclined ladies from stopping to discuss books or to tell the author
that his philosophy of life was all wrong. Also they could not accuse
him of personal immorality. A beggar could not be immoral. He was at
once above and below immorality. And the takings! There would be much
good silver and I loved silver. If I should become blind my fortune
would be made at last. A blind author sitting begging before the Public
Library in the city of New York! Who dare say there was not glorious
opportunity left in our country?
Had I less courage than my father? Perhaps I had. He also might have
thought of so noble a plan but in my place he might also have put it
into execution at once. Ladies often came to the Public Library to meet
their lovers. Quarrels started there. One would learn much of life by
sitting as I have suggested. No man or woman would hesitate to speak
boldly before a beggar. The stones would be cold but perhaps one could
have a cushion.
NOTE V
WHEN I went on my pilgrimage to New York I was not a young man any
more. The gray had begun to show in my hair. On the very day after
my arrival I chanced to pick up a novel of Turgenev’s, “A House of
Gentlefolk,” and saw how that he had made his hero Levretsky an old
man, through with life, at forty-five.
Pretty rough on an American who had not dared think of trying to do
what he wanted until he was approaching that age. No American dared
think of doing anything he enjoyed until youth was gone. Youth must
be given to money making among us and leisure was a sin. A short time
after the period of which I am now writing I was given the _Dial_
prize for literature, the intent of which was that it was to be given
to encourage some young man just starting out on the hard road of
literary effort. It had been offered to me and I wanted it but thought
seriously of investing in hair dye before going to call on the editors.
So little work of any account done! Mornings coming, noons, nights!
Many nights of lying awake in my bed in some rooming house in the city
thinking!
I had a penchant for taking my own life rather seriously. Americans in
general pretended their own lives did not matter. They were continually
talking of devoting their lives to business, to some reform, to their
children, to the public. I had been called a modern and perhaps only
deserved the title inasmuch as I was a born questioner. I did not
take such words people were always saying too seriously. Often enough
I used to lie on my bed in my room and on moonlight nights I lit a
cigarette and spent some time looking at myself. I lifted up my legs,
one after the other, and rejoiced at the thought that they might yet
take me into many strange places. Then I lifted my arms and looked
long and earnestly at my hands. Why had they not served me better? Why
would they not serve me better? It was easy enough to put a pen into
the fingers. I myself was perfectly willing to be a great author. Why
would not the pen slide more easily and gracefully over the paper? What
sentences I wanted to write, what paragraphs, what pages! If reading
Miss Stein had given me a new sense of my own limited vocabulary, had
made me feel words as more living things, if seeing the work of many of
the modern painters had given me a new feeling for form and color, why
would my own hands not become better servants to me?
On some nights, as I lay thus, the noise of the great city to which
I had come growing fainter as the night wore on, I had many strange
thoughts, brought into my head by reading the works of such men as
Mr. Van Wyck Brooks or by talking with such men as my friends Alfred
Stieglitz and Paul Rosenfeld. My own hands had not served me very
well. Nothing they had done with words had satisfied me. There was not
finesse enough in my fingers. All sorts of thoughts and emotions came
to me that would not creep down my arms and out through my fingers
upon the paper. How much was I to blame for that? How much could fairly
be blamed to the civilization in which I had lived? I presume I wanted
very much to blame something other than myself if I could.
The thoughts that came were something like this: “Suppose,” I suggested
to myself, “that the giving of itself by an entire generation to
mechanical things were really making all men impotent. There was a
passion for size among almost all the men I had known. Almost every
man I had known had wanted a bigger house, a bigger factory, a faster
automobile than his fellows. I had myself run an automobile and doing
so had given me a strange sense of vicarious power, mingled with a kind
of shame too. I pressed my foot upon a little button on the floor of
the car and it shot forward. There was a feeling that did not really
belong to me, that I had in some way stolen. I was rushing along a road
or through a street and carrying five or six other people with me and,
in spite of myself, felt rather grand doing it. Was that because I was
in reality so ineffectual in myself? Did so many of my fellow writers
want great sales for their books because, feeling as I did then the
ineffectually of their own hands to do good work, they wanted to be
convinced from the outside? Was the desire all modern peoples had for
a greater navy, a greater army, taller public buildings, but a sign
of growing impotence? Was there a growing race of people in the world
who had no use for their hands and were the hands paying them back by
becoming ineffectual? Was the Modern after all but the man who had
begun faintly to realize what I was then realizing and were all his
efforts but at bottom the attempt to get his hands back on the ends
of his arms? ‘It may be that all the men of our age can at best but
act as fertilizer,’ Paul Rosenfeld had said to me. Was what I was then
thinking in reality what he had meant?”
I am trying to give as closely as I can a transcript of some of my
own thoughts as I lay on my bed in a rooming house in the city of New
York and after I had walked about and had talked a little with some of
the men I admired. I was thinking of old workers in the time of the
crafts and of the new workers I had personally known in the time of
the factories. I was thinking of myself and my own ineffectualness.
Perhaps I was but trying to make excuses for myself. Most artists
spend a large part of their time doing that. In the factories so many
of the workers spent so large a part of their time boasting of their
sexual effectiveness. Was that because they felt themselves every year
growing more and more ineffectual as men? Were modern women going more
and more toward man’s life and man’s attitude toward life because
they were becoming all the time less and less able to be women? For
two or three hundred years the western peoples had been in the grip
of a thing called Puritanism. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Waldo Frank, in two
books published at about that time, had declared that industrialism
was a natural outgrowth of Puritanism, that having renounced life for
themselves the Puritans were determined to kill life in others.
I had definite reasons for asking myself many of the questions that
came to me as I lay in my bed at night. I had already published several
stories and, for some reason I had not clearly understood, many people
in reading my stories had been made angry by them. Many abusive letters
had been written me. I had been called a pervert, a thoroughly nasty
man.
Was I that? I thought if I was I had better find out. My own hands
looked all right to me as I lay on my bed looking at them in the
moonlight. Were they unclean hands? There had been a few times, for
brief periods only, when they had seemed to me to serve my purpose.
I had felt something deeply, been quite impersonally absorbed in
something in the life about me and my hands had of a sudden come to
life. They had arranged words on paper I thought very skillfully. How
clean I had felt during just those moments! It was the feeling I had
always been seeking. At last, in a crippled way to be sure but after a
fashion, my whole being had become a quite impersonal thing, expressing
itself on paper through written words. The life about me seemed to have
become my life. I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often seen
old craftsmen sing and as I had never heard men sing in the factories.
And for what I had written at such times I had been called unclean
by men and women who had never known me, could have had no personal
reasons for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that,
for such brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they been
unclean at such moments of service?
Other thoughts came. Even my friend Paul Rosenfeld had called me “the
Phallic Chekhov.” Had I a sex obsession? Was I a goner?
Another American, Mr. Henry Adams, had evidently been as puzzled as
I was at that moment although I am sure he would never have been so
undignified as to have written, as I am doing here, of himself as lying
on a bed in a New York rooming house and putting his own hands up into
the moonlight to stare at them.
However he had been equally puzzled. “Singularly enough,” he had said
in his book, “The Education of Henry Adams,” “singularly enough, not
one of Adams’ many schools of education has ever drawn his attention
to the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finest
in all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Dante
invoked the Virgin:”
‘Quae, quoniam rerum naturam Sola gubernas.’
“The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of the
Schools.”
‘Donna, sei tanto grande, e tanta vali,
Che qual vuol grazia, e a te non ricorre,
Sua Disianza vuol volar senz’ ali.’
“All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. The
true American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings;
he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historic
chasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turned
from the Virgin to the dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. On
one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record of
work actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energy
ever known to men, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art,
exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the
steam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was
unknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never dare
command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”
NOTE VI
IF Mr. Adams had not spent his time as I was doing, lying on a bed
and looking at his own hands, he had at least spent his time looking
about. “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus
would never dare exist,” he had said and it was an accusation that an
American could neither love nor worship.
At any rate I was a man of the Middle West. I was not a New Englander.
For my own people, as I had known them, it was absurd to say they had
neither love nor reverence. Never a boy or man I had known at all
intimately but that had both in him. We had simply been cheated. Our
Virgins and Venuses had to be worshiped under the bush. What nights I
had spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girls
too. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England who
had got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons,
Hawthornes and Longfellows? It was perhaps true to say of the
intellectual sons of these men that a Virgin would never dare command,
that a Venus would never dare exist. I knew little of New England men
in the flesh but it was not necessarily true of us, out in my country.
Of that I was pretty sure.
As for my own hands I continued looking at them. Questions kept coming.
I was myself no longer young. Having made a few bicycles in factories,
having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements,
having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, having
tried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novels
that did not satisfy me or anyone else, having done these few things,
could I begin now to think of myself as tired out and done for? Because
my own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let them
lie beside me in idleness?
I did not dare make such a surrender, nor did I dare dodge the issue
with myself by going off into that phase of New York life I had already
come to dislike, that phase of life which allows a man to employ his
hands merely in writing smart and self-satisfying words regarding the
failures of other men. In reality I was not trying to look at other
men’s lives just then and as for other men’s work--it meant something
to me when it taught me something. I was a middle-westerner who had
come East to school if I could find the school.
I wanted back the hands that had been taken from me if I could get them
back. Mr. Stark Young had talked to me one day of what thinking might
be and his words kept ringing in my ears. Such words as he had said to
me always excited like music or painting. He was a man who had been a
professor in colleges and knew what was conventionally called thinking
and he had said that thinking meant nothing at all unless it was done
with the whole body--not merely with the head. I remember that one
night I got out of bed and went to my window. I had a room far over
on Twenty-second Street, near the Hudson River, and often, late at
night, sailors from the ships lying in the river came along my street.
They had been drinking, seeing the girls, having a time, and were now
going back to the ships to sail away over the world. One of them, a
very drunken sailor who had to stop every few steps and lean against a
building, sang in a hoarse throaty voice:
“Lady Lou. Lady Lou.
I love you.
Lady Lou.”
I looked at my own hands lying on the window sill in the moonlight and
I dare say had anyone seen me at that moment he might have decided I
had gone quite insane. I talked to my own hands, made them promises,
pleaded with them, “I shall cover you with golden rings. You shall be
bathed in perfumes.”
Perhaps there was an effort to be made I had not the courage or
strength to make. When it came to tale-telling there were certain tales
that fairly told themselves, but there were others, more fascinating,
that needed a great deal of understanding, of myself first and then of
others.
NOTE VII
AND so there I was, an American rapidly approaching middle life,
sitting in my room over in west Twenty-second Street at night after
a day spent listening to the talk of the new men and trying with all
my might to be one of the new men myself. Below me in the street the
common life of people went on but I tried to put it away from me for
the time, was having too good a time thinking of myself to think much
of ordinary people. It is a mood that has appeared and reappeared in
me at various times and I am trying to clear it out of my system by
writing this book. When I have done that I hope to shut up on the
subject for keeps. In my book I have had something to say of my father,
emphasizing the showman side of his nature. I have perhaps lied now
and then regarding the facts of his life but have not lied about the
essence of it.
He was a man who loved a parade, bands playing in streets and himself
in a gaudy uniform somewhere up near the head of the procession and I
have myself had a pretty hard time not making a parade out of my own
life.
Some time after the period of which I am now writing, my friend Mr.
Paul Rosenfeld was with me in London stopping at the same hotel and one
day I got away from him and when he wasn’t watching wandered into a
gents’ furnishing store. When he came into the hotel later I took him
to my room and displayed before him the things I had bought. He almost
wept but there was little he could do. “Don’t,” he said. “Come out of
the room. Promise me you won’t wear these things until you get out
again to Chicago.”
I was in New York and was the son of my father. The New Movement in the
Arts was under way. If it was going to be a parade I wanted, ached, to
be in it. Was I but trying to put myself over to the literary world as
formerly I had been employed to put over automobile tires to the public?
It was a question I was compelled to keep asking myself as it had
something to do with the ineffectualness of my own hands lying before
me on the window sill. I kept thinking of middle-western men like
Dreiser, Masters, Sandburg and the others. There was something sincere
and fine about them. Perhaps they had not worried, as I seemed to be
doing, about the whole question of whether they belonged to the New
Movement or not. I thought of them as somewhere out in the Middle West
quietly at work, trying to understand the life about them, trying to
express it in their work as best they could. How many other men were
there in towns and cities of that great middle-western empire--my
own land--younger men coming along. I had been unable to make my own
beginning until most of the stronger years of my own life had passed.
Perhaps I could not have begun at all but for them and perhaps, because
of them, other men could now begin ten years younger than myself.
“The eastern men, among whom I had now come, were perhaps right in
demanding something more than courage from American artists,” I began
telling myself. It was apparent there were two steps necessary and it
might well be that we middle-western men had taken but one step. One
had first of all to face one’s materials, accept fully the life about,
quit running off in fancy to India, to England, to the South Seas. We
Americans had to begin to stay, in spirit at least, at home. We had to
accept our materials, face our materials.
There was one thing, but there was something else too. We had to begin
to face the possibilities of the surfaces of our pages.
Ah, here was something very difficult and delicate indeed! Was I right
after all in sitting in the darkness of my room and looking at my own
hands, pleading with my own hands? Had I really come to New York--not
to find out and digest abstract thoughts about American life but to
find there the men who would direct me more truly to the training of my
own hands for my task?
In the days of the old crafts men became apprenticed craftsmen at
fifteen. Had the men of the new day to live nearly three times that
long before they found out they need go looking for the masters?
NOTE VIII
I WAS living in a rooming house in a side street in New York and had
spent more years of my life than I cared to think about in just such
places. When I first began writing I used to read a great deal, in
George Moore and others, of writers, painters, poets and the like
sitting in cafés. That however happened in Paris, not in New York or
Chicago. Everyone has read about it. You know how they do. In the
evening one by one they come in at the door of the café. On the arm of
the painter there may chance to be a beautiful grisette. The writers
are less fortunate with the ladies and are glad to sit in silence
listening to the talk. And how brilliant the talk! Such things are
said! There is always an old wit, someone in the manner of Whistler
or Degas. The old dog sits at a table keeping everything in order.
I remember that two or three men I knew in New York tried something
of the sort but did not quite pull it off. Let someone get a little
“hifalutin’”--some scribbler, let us say. Suppose he sighs and says
“The beautiful must remain the unattainable,” or something like that.
Or let some other scribbler go off on a long solemn pronouncement about
government, “All government should be done away with. It’s nonsense.”
Bang! The Jimmy Whistler or the Degas of the café has shot him right
between the eyes. There was a sense in which Miss Jane Heap of _The
Little Review_ supplied the need of such a one in New York, but she
and Miss Margaret Anderson could not cover the whole field. That was
impossible.
And, in any event, neither New York nor Chicago has any cafés. When I
first went to New York drinking was still publicly going on but one
stood up at a bar with the foot on a rail and shot the drink into
oneself. There might be a moment of conversation with the bartender.
“What chance you think the Giants got?” etc. Nothing specially helpful
in that and anyway what one secretly hoped was that the White Sox of
Chicago would win.
Everyone lived in rooms, except those who had rich parents and most
young American artists gathered in the city, ate at cafeterias. In
Chicago, before I left, they had begun taking the chairs out of the
restaurants and one fancied that, in a few years, all Chicagoans would
eat as they drank, standing. It would save time.
We more solemn and serious American scribblers, painters, etc., for the
most part lived in rooms and I have myself a memory of rooms in which
I have lived, that is like a desert trail. I can no longer recall all
of them. In a sense they haunt my whole life. At a little distance they
become gray, little gray holes into which I have crept.
And we Americans have enough of the blood of the northern races in
us that we must have our holes into which to creep, to contemplate
ourselves, to say our prayers. In Paris, during a summer when I
loitered there, I found myself able to sit all afternoon in a café,
watching the people pass up and down a little street. At another café
across a small square a young student made love to a girl. He kept
touching her body with his hands and laughing and occasionally he
kissed her. That happened and carts passed. One side of my mind made
little delightful mental notes. The French teamsters did not make
geldings of their horses. Magnificent stallions passed drawing dust
carts. Why did Americans unman stallions while the French did not? The
teamster walked in the road with his hat cocked to the side of his
head and a bit of color in the hat. The stallion threw back his head
and trumpeted. The teamster made some sort of sarcastic comment to the
student with the girl, who answered in kind but did not quit kissing
her. There was a small church on the west side of the square and old
women were going in and coming out. All these things happened and I
was alive to them all and still I sat in a café writing a tale of life
in my own Ohio towns. How natural it seemed, in Paris, to lead one’s
secret inner life quite openly in the streets and how unnatural the
same sort of thing would have seemed in an American city.
In Chicago alone there had been enough rooms, in which I myself had
lived, had hidden myself away, to have made a long street of houses.
How much had my own outlook on life been made by the rooms? How much
were the lives of all Americans made by the places in which they lived?
When Americans grew tired of their houses--or rooms--and went into the
street there was no place to sit unless one went into a movie or went
to eat expensive and unnecessary food in a crowded restaurant. In the
movies signs were put up: “Best place in town to kill time.”
Time then was a thing to be killed. It would seem an odd notion, I
fancy, to a Frenchman or an Italian.
NOTE IX
ONE goes from Chicago to New York on a modern train very quickly
but in the short time while the train is tearing along, while one
sleeps and awakens once, one cuts the distance between oneself and
Europe immeasurably. To the American, and in spite of the later
disillusionment brought by the World War Europe remained the old home
of the crafts. Even as the train goes eastward in one’s own country,
there is an inner ferment of excitement. Turgenev, Gogol, Fielding,
Cervantes, De Foe, Balzac--what mighty names marched through the mind
with the click of the car wheels. To the man of the American West how
much the East means. How deeply buried the great European craftsmen
had been in the soil out of which they had come. How intimately they
had known their own peoples and with what infinite delicacy and
understanding they had spoken out of them. As one sat in the train one
found oneself bitterly condemning many of our own older craftsmen for
selling out their inheritances, for selling out the younger men, too.
Why were they not more consciously aware of what they, as craftsmen,
were at? What had they got--a few automobiles, suburban homes, a little
cheap acclaim.
Moments of wrath and then a smile too. “My boy, my boy, keep your shirt
on!”
In the next seat a Detroit man talking loudly. “Advertising pays. What
you got to do is put it across in a hurry.”
Only yesterday there was myself too, talking so, pounding tables in
offices, crying the gospel of size, of hustle.
“Keep your shirt on! Listen! You are starting rather late to do much.
Perhaps if you are patient, if you listen work and learn you shall yet
tell delicately a few tales.”
As one approaches the Atlantic Coast there is a feeling comes that one,
not born, not having lived, through youth and young manhood in the
Middle or Far West will never quite understand. Near my own room in the
city, lying in the Hudson River, were vessels that to-morrow would set
sail for Europe, other vessels that had arrived from Europe but the
day before. As I lay on my cot in my room at night I could hear the
steamboats crying in the river. At night when there was a fog they were
like cows lost in a forest, somewhere out in the Middle West, lost and
bawling for the warm barns.
One went down to walk in the street facing the river. People were
arriving on boats, departing on boats. They took the whole matter
calmly, as one living in Chicago would entrain for Indianapolis. Out
in my own country, when I was a boy, going to Europe meant something
tremendous, like going to war for example. It was of infinitely more
importance than, let us say, getting married. One got married or even
went to war without writing a book about it but no man went to Europe
from Ohio at least, without later writing a book about his travels.
Men and women of the Middle West became famous by way of European
trips. Such and such a one had been to Europe three times. He was
consulted upon all occasions, was allowed to sit on the platform at
political meetings, might even claim the privilege of carrying a cane.
Even the men of the barrooms were impressed. The bartender settled a
quarrel between two men by referring the matter to Ed Swarts, who had
been home to Germany twice. “Well, he’s traveled. He has an education.
He knows what he’s talking about,” the bartender said.
Had I myself come to New York, half wanting to go on to Europe and not
quite daring? At least there was not in me the naïve faith in Europe my
father must have had. I found myself able to go into the presence of
men who had spent years in Europe without trembling, visibly at least,
but something pulled. It was so difficult to understand life and the
impulses of life here. There was so much phrase-making to cover up the
reality of feelings, of hungers. Would one learn something by going to
the sources of all this vast river of mixed bloods, mixed traditions,
mixed passions and impulses?
Perhaps I thought that in New York I should find men, Americans in
spirit and in fact, who had digested what Europe had to give America
and who would pass it on to me. I was middle-western enough to think it
a bit presumptuous of me to strike out as a man of letters, set myself
up as a man of letters. I wanted to, but didn’t quite dare.
However I took a long breath and plunged. All about me were men
talking and talking. There was, at just that time, a distinct effort
to awaken in New York something like the group life among artists
and intellectuals for which Paris had long been famous. There was
the extreme radical political and intellectual group, gathered about
_The Masses_; the _Little Review_ with its sledgehammer
pronouncements and a kind of flaunting joy of life, of which the others
were both scornful and afraid; _The Seven Arts_ group, inclined
to make itself small and exclusive; the liberals, always apparently
trembling on the edge of a real feeling for the crafts and never quite
making it, that gathered about _The New Republic_ and _The
Nation_, and besides these Mencken and Nathan, knights errant at
large, with pistols always loaded, ready at any moment to shoot anyone
if the shooting would make a bit of stir in the town.
Among these men I walked and after walking went back to my room to lie
on my cot. I began checking off names. As for myself I had no serious
intention of becoming a New Yorker. I was a middle-westerner born
and bred. All the rest of my days I might drift here and there about
America but at heart I would be, to the New Yorker, a man from beyond
the mountains, an Ohio man to the end.
I was a middle-westerner trying to pick up cultural scraps in New York,
trying to go to school there.
I made little lists of names on the walls of my mind. There was Van
Wyck Brooks, the man who never wrote a line that did not give me joy,
but his mind seemed altogether occupied with what had happened to
Twain, Howells, Whitman, Poe and the New Englanders, men for the most
part dead before I was born. I was sorry they had the rotten luck to
be born in a new land but could not stay permanently sorry. I had to
live myself in the moment, in America as it was, as it was becoming.
Often I thought of Brooks. “He has a theme. It is that a man cannot be
an artist in America. The theme absorbs all his time and energy. He has
little or no time to give to such fellows as myself and our problems.”
I did not put Brooks aside. He put me aside.
There were however others. Alfred Stieglitz, Waldo Frank, Henry Canby,
Paul Rosenfeld, Leo Ornstein, Ben Huebsch, Alfred Kreymborg, Mary and
Padraic Colum, Julius Friend, Ferdinand Schevill, Stark Young when I
came to him later, Lawrence Gilman, Gilbert Seldes, Jane Heap, Gertrude
Stein. Not all of them New Yorkers, but none of them, except Miss Heap
and Ferdinand Schevill middle-westerners like myself.
There were in New York and Chicago no end of people who were willing
to talk to me, listen to my talk, cry out for any good thing I
did, condemn with quick intelligence what I did that was cheap or
second-rate. Not one among them but had thought further than myself,
that could tell me a hundred things I did not know. What a debt of
gratitude I owe to men like Paul Rosenfeld, Stark Young, Alfred
Stieglitz, Waldo Frank and others, men who have willingly taken long
hours out of their busy lives to walk and talk with me of my craft.
I used to lie in my room thinking of them, in relation to myself, in
relation to other writers who were coming out of the Middle West and
who would come. It was rather odd how many of them had Jewish blood
in their veins. I did not believe I was too much prejudiced because
the people I have named liked certain work of my own. Often enough
they did not like it and I had opportunity to realize their reactions
to other men’s work, had seen how Stieglitz had labored for Marin,
Hartley, O’Keefe, Dove and others, how Waldo Frank had given Sandburg
the intelligent appreciation he must have so wanted, had watched with
glowing pleasure the subtle workings of the minds of men like Rosenfeld
and Young.
I tried to feel and think my way into the matter because it had I
thought some relation to my own problem which as you will remember was
to try to find footing for myself, a basis of self-criticism.
I wanted, as all men do, to belong.
To what? To an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised
cultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always being
asked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be conscious
of itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at last
given up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got by
being in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able to
lick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad national
back.
As for the men of Jewish blood, so many of whom I found quick and eager
to meet me half way, my heart went out to them in gratitude. They were
wanting love and understanding, had in their natures many impulses
that were destructive. Was there a sense of being outlaws? They did
not want their own secret sense of separateness from the life about
them commented upon but it existed. They themselves kept it alive and I
thought they were not unwise in doing so. I watched them eagerly. Did
they have, in their very race feeling, the bit of ground under their
feet it was so hard for an Ohio man to get in Cleveland Cincinnati or
Chicago or New York? The man of Jewish blood, in an American city,
could at any rate feel no more separateness from the life about him
than the advertising writer in a Chicago advertising agency who had
within him a love of the craft of words. The Jewish race had made
itself felt in the arts for ages and even our later middle-western
anti-Jewish crusader Henry Ford had no doubt as a child been taught to
read the Bible written by old Jewish word-fellows.
As far as I myself could understand, the feeling of separateness
from the life about was common to all Americans. It explained the
everlasting get-together movements always going on among business men
and as for race prejudices, they also were common. There was the South
with its concern about the Negroes, the Far West and its orientals, the
whole country a little later with its sudden hatred of the Germans and
in the Middle West all sorts of little cross-currents of race hatreds
as the factory hands came into the towns from all over Europe. No
American ever met another American without drawing a little back. There
was a question in the soul. “What are your people? Where did they come
from?” “What kind of blood flows in your veins?”
Could it not very well be that the men of Jewish blood who had given
themselves to the crafts in America could look at life a bit more
impersonally, go out more quickly and warmly to individuals, throw up
out of the body of the race more individuals who could give themselves
wholeheartedly to the cultural life because of the very fact of a race
history behind them?
One had always to remember that we Americans were in the process of
trying to make a race. The Jews had been a part of the life of almost
every race that had come to us and were for perhaps that very reason in
a better position than the rest of us to help make our own race.
NOTE X
A GRAY morning and myself, no longer young, sitting on a bench before
the little open space that faces the cathedral of Chartres. Thoughts
flitting across a background of years. Had I finally accepted myself,
in part at least, as a tale-teller, had I come that far on the road
toward manhood?
It was sure I had been traveling, wandering from place to place, trying
to look and listen. At that moment I was very far away from that land,
the background of my tales, the Middle West of America. I was perhaps
even farther away spiritually than physically. In my day men covered
huge physical distances in a short time. As I sat there nearly all
the reality of me was still living in the Middle West of America, in
mining towns, factory towns, in sweet stretches of Ohio and Illinois
countryside, in great smoke-hung cities, in the midst of that strange,
still-forming muddle of peoples that is America.
I had drawn myself out of that for the time, had been in New York among
the other writer folk, among the painters, among the talkers too. That
after the years of active participation in life, in modern American
life, cheating some, lying a good deal, scheming, being hurt by others,
hurting others.
The younger years of being a business schemer, trying to grow rich--I
have said little enough of those years in my book. However the book is
long enough, perhaps far too long.
Had I ever really wanted to be rich? Perhaps I had only wanted to live,
in my craft, in the practice of my craft. It was certain I had not, for
many years of my life, known what I wanted. After years of striving
to get money, to get power, to be successful, I had found in the end
well-nigh perfect contentment in looking and listening, in sitting lost
in some little corner, writing, trying to write all down. “A little
worm in the fair apple of progress,” I had called myself laughing--the
American laugh.
Now, for a few years, I had been looking abroad. I think it was Joseph
Conrad who said that a writer only began to live after he began to
write. It pleased me to think I was, after all, but ten years old.
Plenty of time ahead for such a one. Time to look about, plenty of time
to look about.
Well, I had been looking about. I an American middle-westerner, ten
years old, had been looking at old London, at strong arrogant young New
York, at old France too.
It was apparent that although in France, in the eleventh twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, there had been many men alive who had cared
greatly for the work of their hands, present-day Frenchmen obviously
did not. The cathedral before me was faced on one side by ugly sheds,
such as some railroad company might have put up on the shores of a lake
facing a city of mid-America. I had taken a second leap from New York
to Paris, had been brought there by a friend who now sat on the bench
beside me. The man was a friend dear to my heart. We had been sitting
for days on just that bench, wandering about the cathedral. Visitors
came and went, mostly Americans, middle-western Americans like myself
no doubt. Some of them looked at the cathedral without stopping the
motors of theirs cars. They were in a hurry, had got the hurry habit.
One day a little drama played itself out in the open space before the
cathedral door. An American came with two women, one French the other
American, his wife or his sweetheart. He was flirting with the French
woman and the American woman was pretending she did not see. My friend
and I watched the drama flit back and forth for two or three hours.
There before us was a woman losing her man, and she did not want to
admit it to herself. Once when they had all three gone inside the
cathedral, the American woman came out and stood for a moment by the
massively beautiful door, the old eleventh-century door facing us. She
did not see us and went to lean against the door itself, crying softly.
Then she wiped her eyes and went inside again to join the others. They
were all presumably getting culture there, in the presence of the work
of the old workmen. The stooped figures of old Frenchwomen with shawls
about their shoulders kept hurrying across the open space, going into
the cathedral to worship. My friend and I were also worshiping at the
cathedral, had been doing that for days.
Life went on then, ever in the same tragic comic sweet way. In the
presence of the beautiful old church one was only more aware, all art
could do no more than that--make people, like my friend and myself,
more aware. An American girl put her face against the beautiful door
of Chartres Cathedral and wept for her lost lover. What had been in the
hearts of the workmen who once leaned over the same door carving it?
They were fellows who had imaginations that flamed up. “Always wood
for carvers to carve, always little flashing things to stir the souls
of painters, always the tangle of human lives for the tale-tellers to
mull over, dream over,” I told myself. I remembered what an excited
young man had once said to me in Chicago. We had stood together in Lake
Street, that most noisy and terrible of all Chicago’s downtown streets.
“There are as many tales to be found here as in any street of any city
in the world,” he had said a little defiantly. Then he looked at me and
smiled. “But they will be different tales than would be found in any
street of any of the old world cities,” he added.
I wondered.
My own mind was in a ferment, thoughts scurrying across a background of
fancies as shadows play across the walls of a room when night comes on.
My friend sat in silence. He had got hold of Huysmann’s “Cathedral” and
was reading. Now and then he put the book down and sat for a long time
in silence looking at the gray lovely old building in that gray light.
It was one of the best moments of my own life. I felt free and glad.
Did the friend who was with me love me? It was sure I loved him. How
good his silent presence.
How good the presence of my own thoughts too! There was my friend,
the Cathedral, the presence of the little drama in the lives of the
three strange people who would presently come out of the church and
go away, the packed storehouse of my own fancy too. The end of the
story immediately before me I would never know but some day, when I was
alone, in Chicago perhaps, my fancy would take it up and play with it.
Too bad I was not a Turgenev or someone equally skillful. Were I such a
one I might make of what I had seen some such a tale as, say Turgenev’s
“Smoke.” There was just the material for a tale, a novel perhaps. One
might fancy the man a young American who had come to Paris to study
painting and before he came had engaged himself to an American girl
at home. He had learned French, had made progress with his work. Then
the American girl had set sail for Paris to join him and, at just that
moment, while she was at sea, he had fallen desperately in love with a
French woman. The deuce, the French woman was skillful with men and she
imagined the young American to be rich. With what uncertain thoughts
was the breast of the young American torn at that moment.
The three of them just suddenly came out of the church together and
walked away together in silence. That was all. All tales presented
themselves to the fancy in just that way. There was a suggestion, a
hint given. In a crowd of faces in a crowded street one face suddenly
jumped out. It had a tale to tell, was crying its tale to the streets
but at best one got only a fragment of it. Once, long after the time
of which I am now writing, I tried to paint in an American desert.
There was something about the light. My eyes were not accustomed to
it. There was a wide desert and beyond the desert hills floating away
into the distance. I could lie on my back on the sands of the desert
and watch the evening light fade away over the hills and such forms
come! I thought all I had ever felt could be expressed in one painting
of those hills but when later I took a brush into my hands I was only
dumb and stupid. What appeared on the canvas was dull and meaningless.
I walked about swearing at myself and then at the desert light and the
very hills that so short a time before had so filled me with peace and
happiness. I kept blaming the light. “Nothing stands still in this
light,” I said to myself.
As though anything ever stood still anywhere. It was the artist’s
business to make it stand still--well, just to fix the moment, in a
painting, in a tale, in a poem.
Sitting there with my friend, facing the cathedral, I remembered
something. On my desk, somewhere back in America, was a book in which I
had once written certain lines. Well, I had made a poem and had called
it, “One who would not grow old.” Now it came sharply back:
I have wished that the wind would stop blowing, that birds would stop
dead still in their flight, without falling into the sea, that waves
would stand ready to break upon shores without breaking, that all
time, all impulse, all movement, mood, hungers, everything would stop
and stand hushed and still for a moment.
It would be wonderful to be sitting on a log in a forest when it
happened.
When all was still and hushed, just as I have described, we would get
off the log and walk a little way.
The insects would all lie still on the ground or float, fixed and
silent in the air. An old frog, that lived under a stone and that had
opened his mouth to snap at a fly, would sit gaping.
There would be no movement, in New York, in Detroit, in Chicago down
by the stock exchange, in towns, in factories, on farms.
Out in Colorado, where a man was riding a horse furiously, striving to
catch a steer to be sent to Chicago and butchered--
He would stop, too, and the steer would stop.
You and I would walk a little way, in the forest, or on a prairie, or
on the streets of a town, and then we would stop. We would be the only
moving things in the world and then one of us would start a thought
rolling and rolling, down time, down space, down mind, down life too.
I am sure I would let you do it if later you would keep all of the
voices of your mind hushed while I did it in my turn. I would wait ten
lives while others did it for my turn.
* * * * *
That impulse gone long since as I sat that day before the cathedral
of Chartres! It was an impulse that had come time and again to every
artist but my own moments had come often enough. I had no cause to
quarrel with my own life.
Such moments as I had already had in it. “Life owes me nothing,” I kept
saying over and over to myself. It was true enough. For all one might
say about American life it had been good to me. On that afternoon I
thought that if I were suddenly to be confronted with death in the form
of the old man with a sickle in his hand, I would be compelled to say,
“Well, it’s your turn now, old fellow. I’ve had my chance. If I had
done little enough, it’s my fault, not yours.”
At any rate life in America had poured itself out richly enough. It was
doing that still. As I sat on the bench before Chartres on that gray
day I remembered such moments.
* * * * *
A hot afternoon at Saratoga. I had gone to the races with two men from
Kentucky, one a professional gambler and the other a business man who
could never succeed because he was always running off to the horse
races or some such place with such no-accounts as the little gambler
and myself. We were smoking big black cigars and all of us were clad
in rather garish clothes. All about us were men just like us but with
big diamonds on their fingers or in their neckties. On a stretch of
green lawn beneath trees a horse was being saddled. Such a beauty!
What a buzz of colorful words! The professional gambler, a small man
with crooked legs, had once been a jockey and later a trainer of race
horses. It was said he had done something crooked, had got himself into
disgrace with other horsemen but of that I knew little. At the sight of
such a horse as we were now watching as the saddle was put on something
strange happened to him. A soft light came into his eyes. The devil!
I had once or twice seen just such a light in the eyes of painters at
work, I had seen such a light in the eyes of Alfred Stieglitz in the
presence of a painting. Well, it was such a light as might have come
into the eyes of a Stark Young holding in his hands some piece of old
Italian craftsmanship.
I remember that as the little old gambler and I stood near the horse I
spoke to him of a painting I had once seen in New York, that painting
of Albert Ryder’s of the ghostly white horse running beneath a
mysteriously encircled moon on an old race track at night.
The gambler and I talked of the painting. “I know,” he said, “I like to
hang around race tracks at night myself.”
That was all he said and we stood watching the horse. In a few minutes
now that tense trembling body would be at ease, fallen into the ease of
its long, swinging stride, out there on the track.
The gambler and I went away to stand by a fence. Were men less
fortunate than horses? Did men also seek but to express themselves
beautifully as in a few minutes now the horse would do? The gambler’s
body trembled as did my own. When the horse ran (he broke the record
for the mile, that day) he and I did not speak to each other. We had
together seen something we together loved. Was it enough? “At least,”
I told myself, “we men have a kind of consciousness that perhaps the
horses haven’t. We have this consciousness of one another. That is what
love is, perhaps.”
There was a child, a young boy of fourteen walking beside his mother in
a park at Cleveland, Ohio. I sat on a bench there and saw him go by and
after that one moment of his passing never saw him again but I’ll never
forget while I live. The moment was like the moment of the running of
the horse. Could it be that it was the boy’s most beautiful moment?
Well, I had seen it. Why was I not made to be a painter? The boy’s head
was thrown a little back, he had black curly hair and carried his hat
in his hand. In just that moment of his passing the bench on which I
sat his young body was all alive, all of the senses fully alive. Whose
son was he? Such a living thing as that, to be thrown into the life of
Cleveland, Ohio or of Paris or Venice either for that matter.
I am always having those moments of checking up like a miser closing
the shutters of his house at night to count his gold before he goes to
bed and although there are many notes on which I might close this book
on my own imaginative life in America, it seems to me good enough to
close it just there as I sat that day before Chartres Cathedral beside
a man I had come to love and in the presence of that cathedral that had
made me more deeply happy than any other work of art I had ever seen.
My friend kept pretending to read his book but from time to time I saw
how his eyes followed the old tower of the church and the gladness that
came into him too.
We would both soon be going back to America to our separate places
there. We wanted to go, wanted to take our chances of getting what we
could out of our own lives in our own places. We did not want to spend
our lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europe
from which we were separated by a wide ocean. Americans with cultural
impulses had done too much of that sort of thing in the past. The
game was worn out and even a ladies’ literary society in an Iowa city
was coming to know that a European artist of the present day was not
necessarily of importance just because he was a European.
The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that.
In Europe they knew it better than they did in America.
It was for me a morning of such thoughts, such memories--just there
before Chartres with my friend.
Once, in one of my novels, “Poor White,” I made my hero at the very end
of the book go on a trip alone. He was feeling the futility of his own
life pretty fully, as I myself have so often done, and so after his
business was attended to be went to walk on a beach. That was in the
town of Sandusky, in the state of Ohio, my own state.
He gathered up a little handful of shining stones like a child, and
later carried them about with him. They were a comfort to him. Life,
his own efforts at life, had seemed so futile and ineffectual but the
little stones were something glistening and clear. To the child man,
the American who was hero of my book and, I thought, to myself and
to many other American men I had seen, they were something a little
permanent. They were beautiful and strange at the moment and would be
still beautiful and strange after a week, a month, a year.
I had ended my novel on that note and a good many of my friends had
told me they did not know what I was talking about. Was it because,
to most Americans, the desire for something, for even little colored
stones to hold in the hand now and then to glisten and shine outside
the muddle of life, was it because to most Americans that desire had
not become as yet conscious?
Perhaps it had not but that was not my story. At least in me it had
become conscious, if not as yet well directed or very intelligent. It
had made me a restless man all my life, had set me wandering from place
to place, had driven me from the towns to the cities and from one city
to another.
In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I
did it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly. I had found out
that trying to do my job was fun and that doing it well and finely was
a task for the most part beyond me.
Often enough I sat thinking of my wasted years, making excuses for
myself, but in my happier moments and when I was not at work on my job
I was happiest when I was in the mood into which I had fallen on the
day when I sat before the cathedral--that is to say, when I sat rolling
over and over the little colored stones I had managed to gather up.
The man with the two women had just dropped another into my hands. How
full my hands were! How many flashes of beauty had come to me out of
American life.
It was up to me to carve the stones, to make them more beautiful if I
could but often enough my hands trembled. I wasn’t young any more, but
I had sought teachers and had found a few. One of them was with me at
that moment sitting on the bench before the cathedral and pretending
to read a book about it. He grew tired of the pretense and taking out
a package of cigarettes offered me one, but then found he hadn’t any
match. To such confirmed smokers as my friend and myself the French
notion of making a government monopoly of matches is a pest. It is like
so much that is European nowadays. It is like the penuriousness of an
old age of which at least there is none in America. “The devil!” said
my friend. “Let’s go for a walk.”
We did walk, down through the lovely old town, the town made lovely not
by the men who live there now but by men of another age, long since
fast asleep. If we were neither of us so young in years any more,
there was a way in which we were both young enough. We were young with
that America of which we both at that moment felt ourselves very much
a part, and of which, for many other reasons aside from the French
monopoly in matches, we were glad in our hearts to be a part.
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
IT seems but yesterday although a year has passed since that afternoon
when Edward and I sat talking in a restaurant. I was staying at a
small hotel in a side street in the city of New York. It had been an
uncertain day with us, such days as come in any relationship. One asks
something of a friend and finds him empty-handed or something is asked
and a vacant look comes into one’s own eyes. Two men, or a man and
woman, were but yesterday very close and now they are far apart.
Edward came to lunch with me and we went to a restaurant in the
neighborhood. It was of the cheap hurried highly-sanitary sort, shiny
and white. After eating we sat on and on, looking at each other, trying
to say to each other something for which we could find no words. In a
day or two I would be going away to the South. Each of us felt the need
of something from the other, an expression of regard perhaps. We were
both engaged in the practice of the same craft--story-tellers both of
us. And what fumblers! Each man fumbling often and often in materials
not well enough understood--that is to say in the lives and the drama
in the lives of the people about whom the tales were told.
We sat looking at each other and as it was now nearly three o’clock in
the afternoon we were the only people in the restaurant. Then a third
man came in and sat as far away from us as possible. For some time
the women waiters in the place had been looking at Edward and myself
somewhat belligerently. It may have been they were employed only for
the noon rush and now wanted to go home. A somewhat large woman with
her arms crossed stood glaring at us.
As for the third man in the place, the fellow who had just come in,
he had been in prison for some crime he had committed and had but
recently been let out. I do not mean to suggest that he came to Edward
and myself and told his story. Indeed he was afraid of us and when he
saw us loitering there went to sit as far away as possible. He watched
us furtively with frightened eyes. Then he ordered some food and after
eating hurriedly went away leaving the flavor of himself behind. He
had been trying to get a job but on all sides had been defeated by his
own timidity. Now like ourselves he wanted some place to rest, to sit
with a friend, to talk, and by an odd chance I, and Edward as well,
knew the fellow’s thoughts while he was in the room. The devil!--he was
tired and discouraged and had thought he would go into the restaurant,
eat slowly, gather himself together. Perhaps Edward and myself--and
the waitress with her arms crossed who wanted to get our tip and cut
out to some movie show--perhaps all of us had chilled the heart of the
man from prison. “Well, things are so and so. One’s own heart has been
chilled. You are going away to the South, eh? Well, good-by; I must be
getting along.”
II
I was walking in the streets of the city that evening of November.
There was snow on the roofs of buildings, but it had all been scraped
off the roadways. There is a thing happens to American men. It is
pitiful. One walks along, going slowly along in the streets, and when
one looks sharply at one’s fellows something dreadful comes into the
mind. There is a thing happens to the backs of the necks of American
men. There is this sense of something drying, getting old without
having ripened. The skin does something. One becomes conscious of the
back of one’s own neck and is worried. “Might not all our lives ripen
like fruit--drop at the end, full-skinned and rich with color, from the
tree of life, eh?” When one is in the country one looks at a tree. “Can
a tree be a dead dried-up thing while it is still young? Can a tree be
a neurotic?” one asks.
I had worked myself into a state of mind, as so often happens with
me, and so I went out of the streets, out of the presence of all the
American people hurrying along; the warmly dressed, unnecessarily
weary, hurrying, hustling, half-frightened city people.
In my room I sat reading a book of the tales of Balzac. Then I had got
up to prepare for dinner when there came a knock at the door and in
answer to my call a man entered.
He was a fellow of perhaps forty-five, a short strongly-built
broad-shouldered man with graying hair. There was in his face something
of the rugged simplicity of a European peasant. One felt he might live
a long time, do hard work and keep to the end the vigor of that body of
his.
For some time I had been expecting the man to come to see me and was
curious concerning him. He was an American writer like Edward and
myself and two or three weeks before he had gone to Edward pleading....
Well, he had wanted to see and talk with me. Another fellow with a
soul, eh?
And now there the man stood, with his queer old boyish face. He stood
in the doorway, smiling anxiously. “Were you going out? Will I be
disturbing you?” I had been standing before a glass adjusting a necktie.
“Come on in,” I said, perhaps a little pompously. Before sensitive
people I am likely to become a bit bovine. I do not wag my tail like
a dog. What I do is to moo like a cow. “Come into the warm stall
and eat hay with me,” I seem to myself to be saying at such times.
I would really like to be a jolly friendly sort of a cuss ... you
will understand.... “It’s always fair weather, when good fellows get
together” ... that is the sort of thing I mean.
That is what I want and I can’t achieve it, nor can I achieve a kind of
quiet dignity that I often envy in others.
I stood with my hands fingering my tie and looked at the man in the
doorway. I had thrown the book I had been reading on a small table
by the bed. “The devil!--he is one of our everlastingly distraught
Americans. He is too much like myself.” I was tired and wanted to talk
of my craft to some man who was sure of himself. Queer disconnected
ideas are always popping into one’s mind. Perhaps they are not so
disconnected. At that moment--as I stood looking at the man in the
doorway--the figure of another man came sharply to my mind. The man was
a carpenter who for a time lived next door to my father’s house when
I was a boy in an Ohio town. He was a workman of the old sort, one who
would build a house out of timber just as it is cut into boards by a
sawmill. He could make the door frames and the window frames, knew how
to cut cunningly all the various joints necessary to building a house
tightly in a wet cold country.
And on Summer evenings the carpenter used to come sometimes and stand
by the door of our house and talk with mother as she was doing an
ironing. He had a flair for mother, I fancy, and was always coming
when father was not at home but he never came into the house. He stood
at the door speaking of his work. He always talked of his work. If he
had a flair for mother and she had one for him it was kept hidden away
but one fancied that, when we children were not about, mother spoke to
him of us. Our own father was not one with whom one spoke of children.
Children existed but vaguely for him.
As for the carpenter, what I remembered of him on the evening in the
hotel in the city of New York was just a kind of quiet assurance in his
figure remembered from boyhood. The old workman had spoken to mother
of young workmen in his employ. “They aren’t learning their trade
properly,” he said. “Everything is cut in the factories now and the
young fellows get no chance. They can stand looking at a tree and they
do not know what can be done with it ... while I ... well, I hope it
don’t sound like bragging too much ... I know my trade.”
III
You see what a confusion! Something was happening to me that is always
happening. Try as much as I may I cannot become a man of culture. At my
door stood a man waiting to be admitted and there stood I--thinking of
a carpenter in a town of my boyhood. I was making the man at the door
feel embarrassed by my silent scrutiny of him and that I did not want.
He was in a nervous distraught condition and I was making him every
moment more distraught. His fingers played with his hat nervously.
And then he broke the silence by plunging into an apology. “I’ve been
very anxious to see you. There are things I have been wanting to ask
you about. There is something important to me perhaps you can tell me.
Well, you see, I thought--sometime when you are not very busy, when
you are unoccupied.... I dare say you are a very busy man. To tell the
truth now I did not hope to find you unoccupied when I came in thus, at
this hour. You may be going out to dine. You are fixing your tie. It’s
a nice tie.... I like it. What I thought was that I could perhaps be so
fortunate as to make an appointment with you. Oh, I know well enough
you must be a busy man.”
The deuce! I did not like all this fussiness. I wanted to shout at the
man standing at my door and say ... “to the devil with you!” You see,
I wanted to be more rude than I had already been--leaving him standing
there in that way. He was nervous and distraught and already he had
made me nervous and distraught.
“Do come in. Sit there on the edge of the bed. It’s the most
comfortable place. You see I have but one chair,” I said, making a
motion with my hand. As a matter of fact there were other chairs in the
room but they were covered with clothing. I had taken off one suit and
put on another.
We began at once to talk, or rather he talked, sitting on the edge of
the bed and facing me. How nervous he was! His fingers twitched.
“Well now, I really did not expect I would find you unoccupied when I
came in here at this hour. I am living, for the time being in this very
hotel--on the floor below. What I thought was that I would try to make
an appointment with you. ‘We’ll have a talk’--that’s what I thought.”
I stood looking at him and then, like a flash, the figure of the man
seen that afternoon in the restaurant came into my mind--the furtive
fellow who had been a thief, had been sent to prison and who, after he
was freed, did not know what to do with himself.
What I mean is that my mind again did a thing it is always doing. It
leaped away from the man sitting before me, confused him with the
figures of other men. After I had left Edward I had walked about
thinking my own thoughts. Shall I be able to explain what happened
at that moment? In one instant I was thinking of the man now sitting
before me and who had wanted to pay me this visit, of the ex-thief
seen in the restaurant, of myself and my friend Edward, and of the old
workman who used to come and stand at the kitchen door to talk with
mother when I was a boy.
Thoughts went through my mind like voices talking.
“Something within a man is betrayed. There is but the shell of a man
walking about. What a man wants is to be able to justify himself to
himself. What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to
do something well--to do some piece of work finely just for the sake of
doing it--to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its own
under my fingers, eh?”
IV
What I am trying to convey to you, the reader, is a sense of the man
in the bedroom, and myself looking at each other and thinking each his
own thoughts and that these thoughts were a compound of our own and
other people’s thoughts too. In the restaurant Edward and myself, while
wanting to do so very much, had yet been unable to come close to each
other. The man from prison, wanting us also, had been frightened by
our presence and now here was this new man, a writer like myself and
Edward, trying to thrust himself into the circle of my consciousness.
We continued looking at each other. The man was a popular American
short story writer. He wrote each year ten, twelve, fifteen magazine
stories which sold for from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars
each.
Was he tired of writing his stories? What did he want of me? I began
to grow more and more belligerent in my attitude toward him. It is,
with me, a common effect of feeling my own limitations. When I feel
inadequate I look about at once for someone with whom I may become
irritated.
The book I had been reading a half hour before, the book of “The Tales
of Balzac,” lay on a table near where the man sat and his fingers now
reached out and took hold of it. It was bound in soft brown leather.
One who loves me and who knew of my love for the book had taken it from
my room in a house in Chicago and had carried it off to an old workman
who had put it in this new suit of soft brown leather.
The fingers of the man on the bed were playing with the pages of the
book. One got the notion that the fingers wanted to begin tearing pages
from the book.
I had been trying to reassure him. “Do stay, I have nothing to do,” I
had said and he smiled at my words as a child might smile. “I am such
an egotist,” he explained. “You see, I want to talk of myself. I write
stories, you see, but they aren’t any good. Really they aren’t any good
at all but they do bring me in money. I’m in a tight hole, I tell you.
I own an automobile and I live on a certain scale that is fixed--that’s
what I mean--that’s what’s the trouble with me. I am no longer young,
as you’ll see if you look at my hair. It’s getting gray. I’m married
and now I have a daughter in college. She goes to Vassar. Her name is
Elsie. Things are fixed with me. I live on a certain scale--that’s what
I mean--that’s what’s the trouble with me.”
It was apparent the man had something of importance to himself he
wanted to say and that he did not know how to begin.
I tried to help. My friend Edward had told me a little of his story.
(For the sake of convenience and really to better conceal his identity
we will call him Arthur Hobson--although that is not his name.)
Although he was born in America he is of Italian descent and there is
in his nature, no doubt, something of the Italian spirit of violence,
strangely mingled, as it so often is in the Latins, with gentleness
and subtlety.
However, he was like myself in one thing. He was an American and was
trying to understand himself--not as an Italian but as an American.
And so there was this Hobson--born in America of an Italian father--a
father who had changed his name after coming to America and had
prospered here. He, the father, had come to America to make money and
had been successful. Then he had sent his son to an American college,
wanting to make a real American of him.
The son had been ambitious to become a well-known football player
and to have, during his college days, the joy of seeing his name and
picture in the newspapers. As it turned out however, he could not
become one of the great players and to the end of his college career
remained what is called a substitute--getting into but one or two
comparatively unimportant games to win his college letter.
He did not have it in him to be a great football player and so, in
a world created in his fancy, he did what he could not do in life.
He wrote a story concerning a man who, like himself, was of Italian
descent and who also remained through most of his college career a
substitute on a football team--but in the story the man did have, just
at the end of his days in college, an opportunity of which he took
brilliant advantage.
There was this Hobson in his room writing on an afternoon of the late
Fall. It was the birth of a Story-teller. He moved restlessly about the
room, sat a long time writing and then got up and moved about again.
In the story he wrote that day in his room long ago he did what he
could not do in the flesh. The hero of his story was a rather small
square-shouldered man like himself and there was an important game on,
the most important of the year. All the other players were Anglo-Saxons
and they could not win the game. They held their opponents even but
could make no progress toward scoring.
And now came the last ten minutes of play and the team began to weaken
a little and that heartened the other side. “Hold ’em! ... hold ’em!
... hold ’em!” shouted the crowd. At last, at the very last, the young
Italian boy was given his chance. “Let the Wop go in! We are going to
lose anyway. Let the Wop go in!”
Who has not read such stories? There are infinite variations of the
theme. There he was, the little dark-skinned Italian-American and who
ever thought he could do anything special! Such games as football are
for the nations of the North. “Well, it will have to be done. One of
the halfbacks has injured himself. Go in there, you Wop!”
So in he goes and the story football game, the most important one of
the year for his school, is won. It is almost lost but he saves the
day. Aha, the other side has the ball and fumbles, just as they are
nearing the goal line. Forward springs the little alert dark figure.
Now he has the ball and has darted away. He stumbles and almost falls
but ... see ... he has made a little twisting movement with his body
just as that big fellow, the fullback of the opposing team, is about
to pounce upon him. “See him run!” When he stumbles something happens
to his leg. His ankle is sprained but still he runs like a streak. Now
every step brings pain but he runs on and on. The game is won for the
old school. “The little Wop did it! Hurrah! Hurrah!”
The devil and all! These Italian fellows have a cruel streak in them,
even in their dreams. The young Italian-American writer, writing his
first story, had left his hero with a slight limp that went with him
all through life and had justified it by the notion that the limp was
in some way a badge of honor, a kind of proof of his thorough-going
Americanism.
Anyway, he wrote the story and sent it to one of our American magazines
and it was paid for and published. He did, after all, achieve a
kind of distinction during his days in college. In an American
college a football star is something but an author is something,
too. “Look, there goes Hobson. He’s an author! He had a story in the
_National Whiz_ and got three hundred and fifty dollars for it.
A smart fellow, I tell you! He’ll make his way in the world. All the
fraternities are after the fellow.”
And so there was Hobson and his father was proud of him and his college
was proud of him and his future was assured. He wrote another football
story and another and another. Things began to come his way and by
the time he left college he was engaged to be married to one of the
most popular girls of his class. She wasn’t very enthusiastic about
his people but one did not need to live in the same city with them.
An author can live where he pleases. The young couple came from the
Middle-West and went to live in New England, in a town facing the sea.
It was a good place for him. In New England there are many colleges
and Hobson could go to football games all Fall and get new ideas for
stories without traveling too far.
The Italian-American has become what he is, an American artist. He has
a daughter in college now and owns an automobile. He is a success. He
writes football stories.
V
He sat in my room in the hotel in New York, fingering the book he had
picked up from the table. The deuce! Did he want to tear the leaves?
The fellow who came into the restaurant where Edward and I sat was
in my mind perhaps--that is to say, the man who had been in prison.
I kept thinking of the story writer as a man trying to tear away the
bars of a prison. “Before he leaves this room my treasured book will be
destroyed,” a corner of my brain was whispering to me.
He wanted to talk about writing. That was his purpose. As with Edward
and myself, there was now something between Hobson and myself that
wanted saying. We were both story-tellers, fumbling about in materials
we too often did not understand.
“You see now,” he urged upon me, leaning forward and now actually
tearing a page of my book, “You see now, I write of youth ... youth
out in the sun and wind, eh? I am supposed to represent young America,
healthy young America. You wouldn’t believe how many times people have
spoken to me saying that my stories are always clean and healthy and
the editors of magazines are always saying it too. ‘Keep on the track,’
they say. ‘Don’t fly off the handle! We want lots of just such clean
healthy stuff.’”
He had grown too nervous to sit still and getting up began to walk back
and forth in the narrow space before the bed, still clinging to my
book. He tried to give me a picture of his life.
He lived he said, during most of the year, in a Connecticut village by
the sea and for a large part of the year did not try to write at all.
The writing of football stories was a special thing. One had always to
get hold of the subject from a new angle and so, in the Fall, one went
to many games and took notes. Little things happened on the field that
could be built up and elaborated. Above all, one must get punch into
the stories. There must be a little unexpected turn of events. “You
understand. You are a writer yourself.”
My visitor’s mind slipped off into a new channel and he told me the
story of his life in the New England town during the long months of the
Spring, Summer and early Fall when, as I understood the matter, he did
no writing.
Well, he played golf, he went to swim in the sea, he ran his
automobile. In the New England town he owned a large white frame house
where he lived with his wife, with his daughter when she was at home
from school, and with two or three servants. He told me of his life
there, of his working through the Summer months in a garden, of his
going sometimes in the afternoons for long walks about the town and
out along the country roads. He grew quieter and putting my book back
on the table sat down again on the edge of the bed.
“It’s odd,” he said. “You see, I have lived in that one town now for a
good many years. There are people there I would like to know better. I
would like really to know them, I mean. Men and women go along the road
past my place. There is a man of about my own age whose wife has left
him. He lives alone in a little house and cooks his own food. Sometimes
he also goes for a walk and comes past my place and we are supposed to
be friends. Something of the kind is in the wind. He stops sometimes
by my garden and stands looking over and we talk but do not say much
to each other. The devil, that’s the way it goes you see--there he is
by the fence and there am I with a hoe in my hand. I walk to where he
stands and also lean on the fence. We speak of the vegetables growing
in my garden. Would you believe it we never speak of anything but the
vegetables or the flowers perhaps? It’s a fact. There he stands. Did I
tell you his wife has left him? He wants to speak of that--I’m sure of
it. To tell the truth when he set out from his own house he was quite
determined to come up to my place and tell me all about everything, how
he feels, why his wife has left him and all about it. The man who went
away with his wife was his best friend. It’s quite a story, you see.
Everyone in our town knows about it but they do not know how the man
himself feels as he sits up there in his house all alone.”
“That’s what he has made up his mind to talk to me about but he can’t
do it, you see. All he does is to stand by my fence and speak of
growing vegetables. ‘Your lettuce is doing very well. The weeds do grow
like the deuce, don’t they though? That’s a nice bed of flowers you
have over there near the house.’”
The writer of the football stories threw up his hands in disgust. It
was evident he also felt something I had often felt. One learns to
write a little and then comes this temptation to do tricks with words.
The people who should catch us at our tricks are of no avail. Bill
Hart, the two-gun man of the movies, who goes creeping through forests,
riding pell-mell down hillsides, shooting his guns bang-bang, would be
arrested and put out of the way if he did that at Billings, Montana,
but do you suppose the people of Billings laugh at his pranks? Not
at all. Eagerly they go to see him. Cowboys from distant towns ride
to where they may see his pictures. For the cowboy also the past has
become a flaming thing. Forgotten are the long dull days of following
foolish cows across an empty desert place. Aha, the cowboy also wants
to believe. Do you not suppose Bill Hart also wants to believe?
The deuce of it all is that, wanting to believe the lie, one shuts
out the truth, too. The man by the fence, looking at the New England
garden, could not become brother to the writer of football stories.
“_They tell themselves so many little lies, my beloved._”
VI
I was sliding across the room now, thinking of the man whose wife had
run away with his friend. I was thinking of him and of something else
at the same time. I wanted to save my Balzac if I could. Already the
football-story man had torn a page of the book. Were he to get excited
again he might tear out more pages. When he had first come into my room
I had been discourteous, standing and staring at him, and now I did not
want to speak of the book, to warn him. I wanted to pick it up casually
when he wasn’t looking. “I’ll walk across the room with it and put it
out of his reach,” I thought but just as I was about to put out my hand
he put out his hand and took it again.
And now as he fingered the book nervously his mind jumped off in a new
direction. He told me that during the Summer before he had got hold of
a book of verses by an American poet, Carl Sandburg.
“There’s a fellow,” he cried, waving my Balzac about. “He feels common
things as I would like to be able to feel them and sometimes as I work
in my garden I think of him. As I walk about in my town or go swimming
or fishing in the Summer afternoons I think of him.” He quoted:
“_Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I
cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet._”
It was pretty evident the man’s mind was jerking about, flying from
place to place. Now he had forgotten the man who on Summer days came to
lean over his fence and was speaking of other people of his New England
town.
On Summer mornings he sometimes went to loiter about on the main
street of the town of his adoption, and there were things always going
on that caught his fancy, as flies are caught in molasses.
Life bestirred itself in the bright sunlight in the streets. First
there was a surface life and then another and more subtle life going
on below the surface and the football-story writer felt both very
keenly--he was one made to feel all life keenly--but all the time he
kept trying to think only of the outside of things. That would be
better for him, he thought. A story writer who had written football
stories for ten or fifteen years might very well get himself into a bad
way by letting his fancy play too much over the life immediately about
him. It was just possible--well you see it might turn out that he would
come in the end to hate a football game more than anything else in the
world--he might come to hate a football game as that furtive fellow
I had seen in the restaurant that afternoon no doubt hated a prison.
There were his wife and child and his automobile to be thought about.
He did not drive the automobile much himself--in fact driving it made
him nervous--but his wife and the daughter from Vassar loved driving it.
And so there he was in the town--on the main street of the town. It
was, let us say, a bright early Fall morning and the sun was shining
and the air filled with the tang of the sea. Why did he find it so
difficult to speak with anyone regarding the half-formed thoughts and
feelings inside himself? He had always found it difficult to speak of
such things, he explained, and that was the reason he had come to see
me. I was a fellow writer and no doubt I also was often caught in the
same trap. “I thought I would speak to you about it. I thought maybe
you and I could talk it over,” he said.
He went, on such a morning as I have described, into the town’s main
street and for a time stood about before the postoffice. Then he went
to stand before the door of a cigar store.
A favorite trick of his was to get his shoes shined.
“You see,” he exclaimed, eagerly leaning forward on the bed and
fingering my Balzac, “you see there is a small fish stand right near
the shoe-shining stand and across the street there is a grocery where
they set baskets of fruit out on the sidewalk. There are baskets of
apples, baskets of peaches, baskets of pears, a bunch of yellow bananas
hanging up. The fellow who runs the grocery is a Greek and the man who
shines my shoes is an Italian. Lord, he’s a Wop like myself.
“As for the man who sells fish, he’s a Yank.
“How nice the fish look in the morning sun!”
The story-teller’s hand caressed the back of my book and there was
something sensual in the touch of his fingers as he tried to describe
something to me, a sense he had got of an inner life growing up between
the men of such oddly assorted nationalities selling their merchandise
on the streets of a New England town.
Before coming to that he spoke at length of the fish lying amid cracked
ice in a little box-like stand the fish merchant had built. One might
have fancied my visitor also dreamed of some day becoming a fish
merchant. The fish, he explained, were brought in from the sea in the
evening by fishermen and the fish merchant came at daybreak to arrange
his stock and all morning whenever he sold a fish he re-arranged the
stock, bringing more fish from a deep box at the back of his little
coop. Sometimes he stood back of his sales counter but when there were
no customers about he came out and walked up and down the sidewalk and
looked with pride at the fish lying amid the pieces of cracked ice.
The Italian shoe-shiner and the Greek grocer stood on the sidewalk
laughing at their neighbor. He was never satisfied with the display
made by his wares but was always at work changing it, trying to improve
it.
On the shoe-shining stand sat the writer of football stories and when
another customer did not come to take his place at once he lingered a
moment. There was a soft smile on his lips.
Sometimes when the story writer was there, sitting quietly on the
shoe-shining stand, something happened at the fish-stand of which he
tried to tell me. The fat old Yankee fish merchant did something--he
allowed himself to be humiliated in a way that made the Greek and the
Italian furious--although they never said anything about the matter.
“It is like this,” the story writer began, smiling shyly at me. “You
see now--well, you see the fish merchant has a daughter. She is his
daughter but the American, the Yank, does not have a daughter in the
same way as a Greek or an Italian. I am an American myself but I have
enough memory of life in my father’s house to know that.”
“In the house of an Italian or a Greek the father is king. He says--‘do
this or that,’ and this or that is done. There may be grumbling behind
the door. All right, let it pass! There is no grumbling in his
presence. I’m talking now of the lower classes, the peasants. That’s
the kind of blood I have in my veins. Oh, I admit there is a kind of
brutality in it all but there is kindness and good sense in it, too.
Well, the father goes out of his house to his work in the morning and
for the woman in the house there is work too. She has her kids to look
after. And the father--he works hard all day, he makes the living for
all, he buys the food and clothes.
“Does he want to come home and hear talk of the rights of women and
children, all that sort of bosh? Does he want to find an American or an
English feminist perhaps, enshrined in his house?”
“Ha!” The story writer jumped off the bed and began again walking
restlessly back and forth.
“The devil!” he cried. “I am neither the one thing nor the other. And I
also am bullied by my wife--not openly but in secret. It is all done in
the name of keeping up appearances. Oh, it is all done very quietly and
gently. I should have been an artist but I have become, you see, a man
of business. It is my business to write football stories, eh! Among my
people, the Italians, there have been artists. If they have money--very
well and if they have no money--very well. Let us suppose one of them
living poorly, eating his crust of bread. Aha! With his hands he does
what he pleases. With his hands he works in stone--he works in colors,
eh! Within himself he feels certain things and then with his hands he
makes what he feels. He goes about laughing, puts his hat on the side
of his head. Does he worry about running an automobile? ‘Go to the
devil,’ he says. Does he lie awake nights thinking of how to maintain
a large house and a daughter in college? The devil! Is there talk of
keeping up appearances for the sake of the woman? For an artist, you
see,--well, what he has to say to his fellows is in his work. If he is
an Italian his woman is a woman or out she goes. My Italians know how
to be men.”
“_Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I
cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet._”
VII
The story writer again sat down on the edge of the bed. There was
something feverish in his eyes. Again he smiled softly but his fingers
continued to play nervously with the pages of my book and now he tore
several of the pages. Again he spoke of the three men of his New
England town.
The fish-seller, it seemed, was not like the Yank of the comic papers.
He was fat and in the comic papers a Yank is long and thin.
“He is short and fat,” my visitor said, “and he smokes a corncob pipe.
What hands he has! His hands are like fish. They are covered with fish
scales and the backs are white like the bellies of fish.”
“And the Italian shoe-shiner is a fat man too. He has a mustache. When
he is shining my shoes sometimes--well, sometimes he looks up from his
job and laughs and then he calls the fat Yankee fish-seller--what do
you think--a mermaid.”
In the life of the Yankee there was something that exasperated my
visitor as it did the Greek grocer and the Italian who shined shoes
and as he told the story my treasured book, still held in his hand,
suffered more and more. I kept going toward him, intending to take
the book from his hand (he was quite unconscious of the damage he was
doing) but each time as I reached out I lost courage. The name Balzac
was stamped in gold on the back and the name seemed to be grinning at
me.
My visitor grinned at me too, in an excited nervous way. The seller
of fish, the old fat man with the fish scales on his hands, had a
daughter who was ashamed of her father and of his occupation in life.
The daughter, an only child lived during most of the year in Boston
where she was a student at the Boston Conservatory of Music. She was
ambitious to become a pianist and had begun to take on the airs of a
lady--had a little mincing step and a little mincing voice and wore
mincing clothes too, my visitor said.
And in the Summer, like the writer’s daughter, she came home to live in
her father’s house and, like the writer himself, sometimes went to walk
about.
To the New England town during the Summer months there came a great
many city people--from Boston and New York--and the pianist did not
want them to know she was the daughter of the seller of fish. Sometimes
she came to her father’s booth to get money from him or to speak with
him concerning some affair of the family and it was understood between
them that--when there were city visitors about--the father would not
recognize his daughter as being in any way connected with himself. When
they stood talking together and when one of the city visitors came
along the street the daughter became a customer intent upon buying
fish. “Are your fish fresh?” she asked, assuming a casual lady-like air.
The Greek, standing at the door of his store across the street and the
Italian shoe-shiner were both furious and took the humiliation of their
fellow merchant as in some way a reflection on themselves, an assault
upon their own dignity, and the story writer having his shoes shined
felt the same way. All three men scowled and avoided looking at each
other. The shoe-shiner rubbed furiously at the writer’s shoes and the
Greek merchant began swearing at a boy employed in his store.
As for the fish merchant, he played his part to perfection. Picking up
one of the fish he held it before his daughter’s eyes. “It’s perfectly
fresh and a beauty, Madam,” he said. He avoided looking at his fellow
merchants and did not speak to them for a long time after his daughter
had gone.
But when she had gone and the life that went on between the three men
was resumed the fish merchant courted his neighbors. “Don’t blame me.
It’s got to be done,” he seemed to be saying. He came out of his little
booth and walked up and down arranging and re-arranging his stock and
when he glanced at the others there was a pleading look in his eyes.
“Well, you don’t understand. You haven’t been in America long enough to
understand. You see, it’s like this--” his eyes seemed to say, “--we
Americans can’t live for ourselves. We must live and work for our
wives, our sons and our daughters. We can’t all of us get up in the
world so we must give them their chance.” It was something of the sort
he always seemed to be wanting to say.
It was a story. When one wrote football stories one thought out a plot,
as a football coach thought out a new formation that would advance the
ball.
But life in the streets of the New England village wasn’t like that. No
short stories with clever endings--as in the magazines--happened in the
streets of the town at all. Life went on and on and little illuminating
human things happened. There was drama in the street and in the lives
of the people in the street but it sprang directly out of the stuff of
life itself. Could one understand that?
The young Italian tried but something got in his way. The fact that
he was a successful writer of magazine short stories got in his way.
The large white house near the sea, the automobile and the daughter at
Vassar--all these things had got in his way.
One had to keep to the point and after a time it had happened that the
man could not write his stories in the town. In the Fall he went to
many football games, took notes, thought out plots, and then went off
to the city, where he rented a room in a small hotel in a side street.
In the room he sat all day writing football stories. He wrote furiously
hour after hour and then went to walk in the city streets. One had to
keep giving things a new twist--to get new ideas constantly. The deuce,
it was like having to write advertisements. One continually advertised
a kind of life that did not exist.
In the city streets, as one walked restlessly about, the actuality
of life became as a ghost that haunted the house of one’s fancy. A
child was crying in a stairway, a fat old woman with great breasts was
leaning out at a window, a man came running along a street, dodged
into an alleyway, crawled over a high board fence, crept through a
passageway between two apartment buildings and then continued running
and running in another street.
Such things happened and the man walking and trying to think only of
football games stood listening. In the distance he could hear the
sounds of the running feet. They sounded quite sharply for a long
moment and then were lost in the din of the street cars and motor
trucks. Where was the running man going and what had he done? The old
Harry! Now the sound of the running feet would go on and on forever
in the imaginative life of the writer and at night in the room in the
hotel in the city, the room to which he had come to write football
stories, he would awaken out of sleep to hear the sound of running
feet. There Was terror and drama in the sound. The running man had a
white face. There was a look of terror on his face and for a moment a
kind of terror would creep over the body of the writer lying in his bed.
That feeling would come and with it would come vague floating dreams,
thoughts, impulses--that had nothing to do with the formation of plots
for football stories. The fat Yankee fish-seller in the New England
town had surrendered his manhood in the presence of other men for
the sake of a daughter who wished to pass herself off as a lady and
the New England town where he lived was full of people doing strange
unaccountable things. The writer was himself always doing strange
unaccountable things.
“What’s the matter with me?” he asked sharply, walking up and down
before me in the room in the New York hotel and tearing the pages of
my book. “Well, you see,” he explained, “when I wrote my first football
story it was fun. I was a boy wanting to be a football hero and as I
could not become one in fact I became one in fancy. It was a boy’s
fancy but now I’m a man and want to grow up. Something inside me wants
to grow up.”
“They won’t let me,” he cried, holding his hands out before him. He had
dropped my book on the floor. “Look,” he said earnestly, “my hands are
the hands of a middle-aged man and the skin on the back of my neck is
wrinkled like an old man’s. Must my hands go on forever, painting the
fancies of children?”
VIII
The writer of football stories had gone out of my room. He is an
American artist. No doubt he is at this moment sitting somewhere in a
hotel room, writing football stories. As I now sit writing of him my
own mind is filled with fragmentary glimpses of life caught and held
from our talk. The little fragments caught in the field of my fancy are
like flies caught in molasses--they cannot escape. They will not go
out of the house of my fancy and I am wondering, as no doubt you, the
reader, will be wondering, what became of the daughter of the seller of
fish who wanted to be a lady. Did she become a famous pianist or did
she in the end run away with a man from New York City who was spending
his vacation in the New England town only to find, after she got to
the city with him, that he already had a wife? I am wondering about
her--about the man whose wife ran away with his friend and about the
running man in the city streets. He stays in my fancy the most sharply
of all. What happened to him? He had evidently committed a crime. Did
he escape or did he, after he had got out into the adjoining street,
run into the arms of a waiting policeman?
Like the writer of football stories, my own fancy is haunted. To-day is
just such a day as the one on which he came to see me. It is evening
now and he came in the evening. In fancy again I see him, going about
on Spring, Summer and early Fall days, on the streets of his New
England town. Being an author he is somewhat timid and hesitates about
speaking with people he meets. Well, he is lonely. By this time his
daughter has no doubt graduated from Vassar. Perhaps she is married to
a writer of stories. It may be that she has married a writer of cowboy
stories who lives in the New England town and works in a garden.
Perhaps at this very moment the man who has written so many stories of
football games is writing another. In fancy I can hear the click of his
typewriting machine. He is fighting, it seems, to maintain a certain
position in life, a house by the sea, an automobile and he blames that
fact on his wife, and on his daughter who wanted to go to Vassar.
He is fighting to maintain his position in life and at the same time
there is another fight going on. On that day in the hotel in the city
of New York he told me, with tears in his eyes, that he wanted to grow
up, to let his fanciful life keep pace with his physical life but
that the magazine editors would not let him. He blamed the editors
of magazines--he blamed his wife and daughter--as I remember our
conversation, he did not blame himself.
Perhaps he did not dare let his fanciful life mature to keep pace with
his physical life. He lives in America, where as yet to mature in one’s
fanciful life is thought of as something like a crime.
In any event there he is, haunting my fancy. As the man running in the
streets will always stay in his fancy, disturbing him when he wants to
be thinking out new plots for football stories, so he will always stay
in my fancy--unless, well unless I can unload him into the fanciful
lives of you readers.
As the matter stands I see him now as I saw him on that Winter evening
long ago. He is standing at the door of my room with the strained look
in his eyes and is bewailing the fact that after our talk he will have
to go back to his own room and begin writing another football story.
He speaks of that as one might speak of going to prison and then the
door of my room closes and he is gone. I hear his footsteps in the
hallway.
My own hands are trembling a little. “Perhaps his fate is also my own,”
I am telling myself. I hear his human footsteps in the hallway of the
hotel and then through my mind go the words of the poet Sandburg he has
quoted to me:
“_Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I
cannot bring you now. It is too early and I am not footloose yet._”
The words of the American poet rattle in my head and then I turn my
eyes to the floor where my destroyed Balzac is lying. The soft brown
leather back is uninjured and now again, in fancy, the name of the
author is staring at me. The name is stamped on the back of the book in
letters of gold.
From the floor of my room the name Balzac is grinning ironically up
into my own American face.
=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74755 ***