A story teller's story (2024)

A Story Teller’s Story

OTHER BOOKS BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON

The tale of an American writer’s journeythrough his own imaginative world andthrough the world of facts, with many ofhis experiences and impressions among otherwriters—told in many notes—in four books—andan Epilogue.

Sherwood Anderson

New YorkB. W. Huebsch, Inc.Mcmxxiv

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.

Portions of this book have been published in the AmericanMercury, Century and Phantasmus and to thesemagazines the author makes due acknowledgment.

CONTENTS.

A Story Teller’s Story

IN all the towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-Americanboyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knewit later in our great American industrial towns and cities.

My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist? Myfather, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keepinga small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he becameostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himselfa house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He calledhimself a “sign-writer.” The day of universal advertising had not yetcome and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but stillhe stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let goby the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butcher’s house (itwould have kept him busily at work for a month) in order to have a goat lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger thebaker.

There was your true pilgrimage abroad, out into the land. Fatherengaged a horse and a spring wagon and took the three older of his sonswith him. My older brother and the one next younger than myself were,from the first, adept at sign-writing, while both father and myselfwere helpless with a brush in our hands. And so I drove the horse and[Pg 4]father supervised the whole affair. He had a natural boyish love forthe supervision of affairs and the picking out of a particular fence ona particular road became to him as important a matter as the selectionof 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 herefused his consent the joy of the situation became intensified. Wedrove off up the road and turned into a wood and the farmer went backto his work of cultivating corn. We watched and waited, our boyishhearts beating madly. It was a summer day and in the small wood inwhich we were concealed we all sat on a fallen log in silence. Birdsflew overhead and a squirrel chattered. What a delicate tinge ofromance 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 opportunityto fret his little hour upon a greater stage, was intent on frettinghis 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,” hesaid, 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 Warand how he with a companion had crept for days and nights through anenemy country at the risk of their lives. “We were carrying messages,”he said, raising his eyebrows and throwing out his hands. By thegesture there was something implied. “Well, it was an affair of lifeor death. Why speak of the matter? My country needed me and I, and my[Pg 5]intrepid companion, had been selected because we were the bravest menin the army,” the raised eyebrows were saying.

And so with their paint pots and brushes in their hands my two brotherspresently crept out of the wood and ran crouching through cornfieldsand got into the dusty road. Quickly and with mad haste they dabbed thename of Alf Granger on the fence with the declaration that he baked thebest bread in the State of Ohio, and when they returned to us we allgot back into the spring wagon and drove back along the road past thesign. Father commanded me to stop the horse. “Look,” he said, frowningsavagely at my two brothers, “your N is wrong. You are beingcareless again with your Bs. Good gracious, will I never teachyou two how to handle a brush?”

If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clotheswere torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winterwe 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 iscalled poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, theartist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantlycomplaining because the public does not rush forward at once toproclaim him.

The boy who has no warm overcoat throws back his head and runs throughthe streets, past houses where smoke goes up into a clear cold sky,across vacant lots, through fields. The sky clouds and snows come andthe 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[Pg 6]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 thechildren—in some way outlaws in our native place and that thought wassoothing to a boy. It is a soothing thought in all my memories of myboyhood. Only recently one connected with my family said to me: “Youmust remember, now that you are an author, you have a respectable placein the world to maintain”; and for a moment my heart swelled with pridein the thought.

And then I went out of the presence of the cautious one to associatewith many other respectables and into my mind flashed thoughts ofthe sweetness I have seen shining in the eyes of others—of waiters,horsemen, thieves, gamblers, women, driven by poverty to the outerrim of society. Where were the respectables among those who had beenkindest and sweetest to me?

Whatever may be said in this matter, and I admit my feet have slippedmany times toward solid respectability we of our family were not toorespectable then.

For one thing father never paid his rent and so we were always livingin haunted houses. Never was such a family to take the haunts out ofa house. Old women riding white horses, dead men screaming, groans,cries—all were quieted when we came to live in a haunted house. Andhow often because of this talent—inherent in my family—we lived formonths scot-free in a fairly comfortable house, while at the sametime conferring a benefit on the property owner. It is a system—I[Pg 7]recommend it to poets with large families.

There were not enough bedclothes so three boys slept in one bed andthere was a window that, in summer, looked out upon fields, but inwinter had been painted by the hand of the frost king so that moonlightcame softly and dimly into the room. It was no doubt the fact thatthere 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 hadbeen a bound girl in a farmer’s family when she married father, theimprovident young dandy. There was Italian blood in her veins and herorigin was something of a mystery. Perhaps we never cared to solveit—wanted it to remain a mystery. It is so wonderfully comforting tothink of one’s mother as a dark, beautiful and somewhat mysteriouswoman. I later saw her mother—my own grandmother—but that is anotherstory.

She the dark evil old woman with the broad hips and the great breastsof a peasant and with the glowing hate shining out of her one eye wouldbe worth a book in herself. It was said she had shuffled off fourhusbands and when I knew her, although she was old, she looked notunwilling to tackle another. Some day perhaps I shall tell the tale ofthe old woman and the tramp who tried to rob the farm house when shewas staying alone; and of how she, after beating him into submissionwith her old fists, got drunk with him over a barrel of hard cider ina shed and of how the two went singing off together down the road—butnot now.

Our own mother had eyes that were like pools lying in deep shadows at[Pg 8]the edge of a wood but when she grew angry and fell into one of herdeep silences lights danced in the pools. When she spoke her words werefilled with strange wisdom (how sharply yet I remember certain commentsof hers—on life—on your neighbors!), but often she commanded all ofus by the strength of her silences.

She came into the bedroom where three boys lay on one bed, carrying inone hand a small kerosene lamp and in the other a dish in which waswarm 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 verystrange. He was one who could not fit himself into the social schemeand, until he was a grown man, he stayed about, living sometimes withone, 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 agreat distance. He was of the stuff of which poets are made. Whatinstinctive wisdom in him. All loved him but no one could help him inthe 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 greatplans for their lives, he lay beside them in silence—but sometimes hespoke and his words came always as from a far place. We were perhapsdiscussing 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 yousay. I know how they come. They come the same way you grow corn. Fatherplants seed in the earth and mother is the earth in which the seedgrows.”

[Pg 9]

I am thinking of my younger brother after he had grown a littleolder—I am thinking of him grown into a man and become habituallysilent like mother—I am thinking of him as he was just before hemysteriously disappeared out of our lives and never came back.

Now, however, he is in bed with the other brother and myself. An olderbrother, he who crept through the cornfields to paint the name of AlfGranger on the fence, had already gone from our lives. He had a talentfor drawing, and a drunken half-insane cutter of stones for graveyardshas taken him away from our town to another town where he is alreadysitting at a desk drawing designs for gravestones. A dove descends outof the sky and holds a leaf in its bill. There is an angel clinging toa rock in the midst of a storm at sea.

The three boys are in the bed in the room and there are not enoughbedclothes. Father’s overcoat, now too old to be worn, is thrown overthe foot of the bed and the three boys have been permitted to undressdownstairs, in the kitchen of the house, by the kitchen stove.

The oldest of the boys remaining at home (that is myself) must undressfirst and must arrange his clothes neatly on a kitchen chair. Motherdoes not scold about such a trifling matter. She stands silentlylooking and the boy does as he has been told. There is something ofmy 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[Pg 10]cultivate just that look, for myself!

And now the boy has undressed and must run in his white flannelnightgown barefooted through the cold house, past frosted windows, upa flight of stairs and, with a flying leap into the bed. The flannelnightgown has been worn almost threadbare by the older brother—nowgone out into the world—before it has come down to him who wears itnow.

He is the oldest of the brothers at home and must take the first plungeinto the icy bed, but soon the others come running. They are lying likelittle puppies in the bed but as they grow warmer the two older boysbegin to fight. There is a contest. The point is not to be compelled tolie on the outside where the covers may come off in the night. Blowsare struck and tense young bodies are intertwined. “It’s your turnto-night! No it’s yours! You’re a liar! Take that! Well then, takethat! I’ll show you!”

The youngest brother of the three brothers has already taken one of thetwo outside positions. It is his fate. He is not strong enough to fightwith 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 betweenthe other two goes on and on. They are of almost equal strength and thefight might possibly last for an hour.

But there is now the sound of the mother’s footsteps on the stairs andthat is the end of the struggle. Now—at this moment—the boy who hasthe coveted position may keep it. That is an understood thing.

The mother puts the kerosene lamp on a little table by the bed and[Pg 11]beside it the dish of warm, comforting melted fat. One by one six handsare 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 likeluminous pools.

The fat in the little cracked china dish is warm and soothing toburning itching hands. For an hour she has had the dish sitting at theback of the kitchen stove in the little frame house far out at the edgeof the town.

The strange, silent mother! She is making love to her sons, but thereare 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 acaress. 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 ownphysical life, even the two quarreling, fighting sons feel that nothingcan matter too much. If her husband, the father of the boys, is ano-account and cannot bring money home—the money that would feedand clothe her children in comfort—one feels it does not matter toomuch. If she herself, the proud quiet one, must humiliate herself,washing—for the sake of the few dimes it may bring in—the soiledclothes of her neighbors, one knows it does not matter too much.

And yet there is no Christian forbearance in her. She speaks sometimes[Pg 12]as she sits on the edge of the bed in the lamplight rubbing the warmfat into the cracked frost-bitten hands of her children and there isoften 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 theneighbor boy’s hands. We had been cramming ourselves with the contentsof a book, “The Last of the Mohicans,” and the neighbor boy, whosefather is the town shoemaker, had the hatchet given him as a Christmaspresent. He would not lend it, would not let it go out of his hands andso my brother, the determined one, has snatched it away.

The struggle took place in a little grove of trees half a mile from thehouse. “Le Renard Subtil,” cries my brother jerking the hatchet outof the neighbor boy’s hand. The neighbor boy did not want to be thevillain—“Le Renard Subtil.”

And so he went crying off toward his home, on the farther side of thefield. He lived in a yellow house just beyond our own and near the endof the street at the edge of the town.

My brother now had possession of the hatchet and paid no more attentionto 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 thanhe. I am Hawkeye the scout, “La Longue Carabine,” and as I stand by thefence la longue carabine is lying across the crook of my arm. Itis represented by a stick. “I could pick him off from here, shall I do[Pg 13]it?” I ask, speaking to my brother with whom I fight viciously everynight after we have got into bed but who, during the day, is my sworncomrade in arms.

Uncas—“Le Cerf Agile”—pays no attention to my words and I rest thestick over the fence, half determined to pick off the neighbor boy butat the last withholding my fire. “He is a little pig, never to let afellow 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 thesnow-covered field I feel very magnanimous—since at any moment I couldhave dropped him like a deer in flight. And then I see him go cryinginto his mother’s house. Uncas has, in fact, cuffed him a couple oftimes in the face. But was it not justified? “Dare a dirty Huron—asquaw 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 hasblabbed on us, and I tell Uncas the news but, with the impenetrablestoicism of a true savage, he pays no attention. He is as one sittingby 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, hestands some fifty feet from the largest of the trees in the grove andhurls the hatchet through the air.

What a determined fellow! I am of the paleface race myself and shallalways depend for my execution upon la longue carabine but Uncasis of another breed. Is there not painted on his breast a crawlingtortoise? In ink I have traced it there myself from a drawing he has[Pg 14]made.

During the short winter afternoon the hatchet will be thrown not oncebut 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 itmust enter the bark of the tree at just a particular spot.

The matter is of infinite importance. Has not Uncas, “The Last of theMohicans,” broad shoulders? He will later be a strong man. Now is thetime to acquire infinite skill.

He has measured carefully the spot on the body of the tree wherethe blade of the hatchet must enter with a soft chug, deep into theyielding bark. There is a tall warrior, a hated Huron, standing bythe tree and young Uncas has measured carefully so that he knows justwhere the top of the warrior’s head should come. An idea has come tohim. He will just scalp the unsuspecting warrior with the blade of thetomahawk; and has not he, Uncas, crept for many weary miles throughthe forest, going without food, eating snow for his drink? A skulkingHuron has dared creep into the hunting grounds of the Delawares and haslearned the winter abiding place of our tribe. Dare we let him go backto his squaw-loving people, bearing such knowledge? Uncas will show him!

He, Uncas, is absorbed in the problem before him and has not deigned tolook off across the fields to where the neighbor boy has gone cryingto his mother. “Le Renard Subtil” will be heard from again but for[Pg 15]the present is forgotten. The foot must be advanced just so. The armmust be drawn back just so. When one hurls the hatchet the body mustbe swung forward just so. An absolute silence must be maintained. Theskulking Huron who has dared come into our hunting grounds is unawareof the presence of the young Uncas. Is he, Uncas, not one whose feetleave no traces in the morning dew?

Deep within the breasts of my brother and myself there is a resentmentthat we were born out of our time. By what a narrow margin in thescroll of time have we missed the great adventure! Two, three, at themost a dozen generations earlier and we might so well have been born inthe virgin forest itself. On the very ground where we now stand Indianshave indeed stalked one another in the forest, and how often Uncas andmyself have discussed the matter. As for our father, we dismiss himhalf contemptuously. He is born to be a dandy of the cities and hasturned out to be a village house-painter, in the dwelling places ofthe paleface. The devil!—with luck he might have turned out to be anactor, or a writer or some such scum of earth but never could he havebeen a warrior. Why had not our mother, who might have been such asplendid Indian princess, the daughter of a great chief, why had shealso not been born a few generations earlier? She had just the silentstoicism needed for the wife of a great warrior. A deep injustice hadbeen done us, and something of the feeling of that injustice was in thestern face of Uncas as he crept each time to the line he had marked outin the snow and sent the hatchet hurtling through the air.

The two boys, filled with scorn of their parentage, on the father’s[Pg 16]side, are in a little grove of trees at the edge of an Ohio town. Inlater days the father—also born out of his place and time—will cometo mean more to them but now he has little except their contempt.Now Uncas is determined—absorbed—and I, who have so little of hispersistence, am impressed by his silent determination. It makes me alittle uncomfortable for, since he has snatched the hatchet out of theneighbor boy’s hand, saying, “Go on home, cry-baby,” no word has passedhis lips. There is but a small grunting sound when the hatchet ishurled and a scowl on his face when it misses the mark.

And “Le Renard Subtil” has gone home and blabbed to his mother, whoin 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 CerfAgile.” “We’ll catch hell,” he says, looking at the hatchet throwerwho has not so far unbent from the natural dignity of the Indian as toreply. He grunts and taking his place solemnly at the line poises hisbody. There is the quick abrupt swing forward of the body. What a shameUncas did not later become a professional baseball player. He mighthave made his mark in the world. The hatchet sings through the air.Well, it has struck sideways. The Huron is injured but not fatally, andUncas goes and sets him upright again. He has marked the place wherethe Huron warrior’s head should be by pressing a ball of snow into thewrinkled bark of the tree and has indicated the dog’s body by a deadbranch.

And so Hawkeye the scout—“La Longue Carabine”—has gone creeping off[Pg 17]among the trees to see if there are any more Hurons lurking about andhas come upon a great buck, pawing the snow and feeding on dry grassat the edge of a small creek. Up goes la longue carabine andthe buck pitches forward, dead, on the ice. Hawkeye runs forward andswiftly passes his hunting knife across the neck of the buck. It willnot do to build a fire now that there are Hurons lurking in the huntingground 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 cutsseveral great steaks from the carcass of the buck and makes his wayslowly and cautiously back to Uncas. As he approaches he three timesimitates the call of a catbird and an answering call comes from thelips of “Le Cerf Agile.”

“Aha! the night is coming on,” Uncas now says, having at last laid theHuron low. “Now that the dirty lover of squaws is dead we may build afire and feast. Cook the venison ere the night falls. When darkness hascome we must show no fire. Do not make much smoke—big fires for thepaleface, but little fires for us Indians.”

Uncas stands for a moment, gnawing the bone of the buck, and then of asudden becomes still and alert. “Aha! I thought so,” he says, and goesback 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 hewent off crying, across the field—fools that we were! While we havebeen in the forest he has crept into the very teepee of our people[Pg 18]and has stolen the princess, the mother of Uncas. And now “Le RenardSubtil,” with subtle daring, drags the stoical princess right acrossthe path of her warrior son. In one moment from a great height Hawkeyedraws the faithful Deer Killer to his shoulder and fires, and at thesame moment the tomahawk of Uncas sinks itself in the skull of theHuron 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 butUncas is filled with pride. As they go homeward in the gatheringdarkness and come to the house, where lives “Le Renard Subtil,” towhich he has gone crying but a few hours before, an idea comes tohim. Uncas creeps in the darkness, halfway between the house and thepicket fence in front and, balancing the hatchet in his hand, hurls itproudly. Well for the neighbor’s family that no one came to the door atthat moment for Uncas’ long afternoon of practicing has got results.The hatchet flies through the air and sinks itself fairly and deeplyinto the door panel as Uncas and Hawkeye run away home.

* * * * *

And now they are in the bed and the mother is rubbing the warm greaseinto their chapped hands. Her own hands are rough, but how gentle theyare! She is thinking of her sons, of the one already gone out into the[Pg 19]world and most of all at the moment of Uncas.

There is something direct brutal and fine in the nature of Uncas. Itis not quite an accident that in our games he is always the Indianwhile I am the despised white, the paleface. It is permitted me toheal my misfortune a little by being, not a storekeeper or a furtrader but that man nearest the Indian’s nature of all the palefaceswho ever lived on our continent, “La Longue Carabine”; but I cannot bean Indian and least of all an Indian of the tribe of the Delawares.I am not persistent patient and determined enough. As for Uncas, onemay coax and wheedle him along any road and I am always clinging tothat slight sense of leadership that my additional fifteen monthsof living gives me, by coaxing and wheedling, but one may not driveUncas. To attempt driving him is but to arouse a stubbornness andobstinacy 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 isin me something of the doglike, the squaw man, the paleface, the veryspirit of “Le Renard Subtil”—if the bitter truth must be told. Inall my after years I shall have to struggle against a tendency towardslickness and plausibility in myself. I am the tale-teller, the manwho sits by the fire waiting for listeners, the man whose life must beled into the world of his fancies, I am the one destined to follow thelittle, crooked words of men’s speech through the uncharted paths ofthe forests of fancy. What my father should have been I am to become.Through long years of the baffling uncertainty, that only such men asmyself can ever know, I am to creep with trembling steps forward in[Pg 20]a strange land, following the little words, striving to learn all theways of the ever-changing words, the smooth-lying little words, thehard, jagged, cutting words, the round, melodious, healing words. Allthe words I am in the end to come to know a little and to attempt touse for my purpose have, at the same time, the power in them both toheal and to destroy. How often am I to be made sick by words, how oftenam I to be healed by words, before I can come at all near to man’sestate!

And so as I lie in the bed putting out my chapped hands to the healingtouch of mother’s hands I do not look at her. Already I am often tooconscious of my own inner thoughts to look directly at people andnow, although I am not the one who has cuffed the neighbor boy andjerked the hatchet out of his hands, I am nevertheless busily at workborrowing the troubles of Uncas. I cannot let what is to be be, butmust push forward striving to change all by the power of words. I darenot thrust my words forward in the presence of mother, but they arebusily getting themselves said inside myself.

There is a consciousness of Uncas also within me. Another curse thatis to lie heavily on me all through my life has its grip on me. I amnot one to be satisfied to act for myself, think for myself, feel formyself but I must also attempt to think and feel for Uncas.

At the moment slick plausible excuses for what has happened during theafternoon are rising to my lips, struggling for expression. I am notsatisfied with being myself and letting things take their course, but[Pg 21]must be inside the very body of Uncas, striving to fill his stout youngbody with the questioning soul of myself.

As I write this I am remembering that my father, like myself, couldnever 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 Ifancy he never knew, but I remember that he once took it into his headto enact the rôle of the stern and unyielding parent to Uncas and whatcame of it.

The tragic little comedy took place in the woodshed back of one ofthe innumerable houses to which we were always moving when someabsurd landlord took it into his head that he should have some rentfor the house we occupied, and Uncas had just beaten with his fists aneighbor boy who had tried to run away with a baseball bat belongingto us. Uncas had retrieved the bat and had brought it proudly home,and father, who happened along the street at that moment, had got thenotion fixed in his mind that the bat belonged, not to us, but to theneighbor boy. Uncas tried to explain, but father, having taken up therôle of the just man, must needs play it out to the bitter end. Hedemanded that Uncas return the bat into the hands of the boy from whomhe had just ravaged it and Uncas, growing white and silent, ran homeand hid himself in the woodshed where father quickly found him out.

“I won’t,” declared Uncas; “the bat’s ours”; and then father—foolthat he was for ever allowing himself to get into such an undignifiedposition—began to beat him with a switch he had cut from a tree at[Pg 22]the front of the house. As the beating did no good and Uncas only tookit unmoved, father, as always happened with him, lost his head.

And so there was the boy, white with the sense of the injustice beingdone, and no doubt father also began to feel that he had put his footinto a trap. He grew furious and, picking up a large stick of wood froma 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 myselfon the ground where I could look through a crack and as long as I liveI 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 wassomething to be settled between her and Uncas, that picture danced likea crazy ghost in my fancy.

I trembled at the thought of what might happen, at the thought of whathad happened that day in the shed.

Father had stood—I shall never know how long—with the heavy stickupraised, 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 astrange unaccountable thing as a murder could happen. Thoughts did notform themselves definitely in my mind but after that moment I knew thatit is always the weak, frightened by their own weakness, who kill thestrong, and perhaps I also knew myself for one of the weak ones of the[Pg 23]world. At the moment, as father stood with the stick upraised, glaringat 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 stoodlooking at him and his eyes wavered, and then he threw the stick backupon the pile from which he had taken it and went silently away. Iremembered that he tramped off to Main Street and that, later in theevening when he came back to the house, he was drunk and went drunkento bed. The trick of drunkenness had saved him from the ordeal oflooking into the eyes of Uncas or of mother, as so often words havelater saved me from meeting fairly some absurd position into which Ihave 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 motherand 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 abig calf and I walloped him one. I wanted the hatchet and so I tookit—that’s what I did. I banged him one on the nose and jerked it outof his hand.”

Mother laughed—a queer unmirthful little laugh. It was the kind oflaugh that hurts. There was irony in it and that got to Uncas at once.[Pg 24]“It doesn’t take much of a fellow to snatch a hatchet out of the handsof a cry-baby,” she said.

That was all. She kept on rubbing his hands and now it was my eyes, andnot 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 theground peeking through the crack into the shed, that the first dimtraces of understanding of all such fellows as father and myself cameto me. I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when shehad taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys wereall again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried alittle, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there wasno one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possibleoccasions, was a way of crying too.

And I cried also, I suppose, because in Uncas and mother there was akind of directness and simplicity that father and all fellows, who likemyself are of the same breed with him, can never quite achieve.

A FAMILY of five boys and two girls—a mother who is to die, outwornand done for at thirty—

A father, whose blood and whose temperament I am to carry to the end ofmy days. How futile he was—in his physical life as a man in America inhis time—what dreams he must have had!

There was a dream he had of something magnificent—a lone rider on ahorse, dressed in shining armor and riding in a city before a vastmultitude of people—the beating of drums.... “The man—he comes!Hurra!” People who live their lives by facts can never understandsuch a fellow. “He comes! All hail!” What has he done? Well, nevermind—something grand, you may be sure of that. The dream that nevercan become a fact in life can become a fact in fancy. “There hegoes.... ‘Teddy the magnificent’!” One both laughs and cries over thememory of him.

The showman was there, in him—it flowered within him—and it is in metoo. When Carl Sandburg, the poet, long after said to me—speaking ofhis 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 pridein his voice when he said it. And then, later still, when I was writingmy 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[Pg 26]have some income to write at my leisure—and for a time I saw a gooddeal of that strange perverted band, I could understand them also. Theywere people like my own father, robbed of their inheritance. In an oddway they were my own people too.

John Emerson, a boyhood friend from my own village, had given me themovie 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 moneyand leisure. I went often to the movie studios and watched the men andthe women at work. Children, playing with dreams—dreams of an heroickind of desperado cowboy, doing good deeds at the business end of agun—dreams of an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid vice—Americandreams—Anglo-Saxon dreams. How they wanted to be the things they werealways playing, and how impossible it all was!

My father lived in a land and in a time when what one later begins tounderstand a little as the artist in man could not by any possibilitybe understood by his fellows. Dreams then were to be expressed inbuilding railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringingtelegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since fathercould not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. Thecommunity tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.

As for the movie people I saw, they worked in a strange land offragments of dreams. The parts they were to play were given them infragments. Everything was fragmentary and unfinished. A kind of[Pg 27]insanity reigned. A “set” having been made, at a certain cost indollars and cents, half a dozen little bits of the dream they were toenact were gone through—sometimes a dozen times—and the very piecethe actors were supposed to play they often did not know. A strangegreenish light fell down over them, and when they were not playing,they sat stupidly hour after hour arrayed in their motley, often pawingone another over listlessly with their hands and seeking outside thestudios—in drink, in dope, in futile love-making, in trying to carryon an absurd pretense to being ladies and gentlemen of parts—seekingin all these things to compensate themselves for being robbed of theirinheritance as artists—the right to pour their emotional energies intotheir work.

The result of all this perversion of workmanship and of emotionalenergy in the movie world seemed to me to reduce human beings to astate that most of all suggested to my mind angleworms squirming ina boy’s bait-can; and why any human being, under the conditions inwhich 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 mycomprehension.

But to return to my father. At least, there was little of the dulllistlessness 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, namedAldrich, who owned a broken-down horse and a spring wagon he went forthto strut his own little hour upon the boards.

It was winter and there was no work for father to be had in our[Pg 28]town and I presume Aldrich also had no work. I remember him asa quiet-looking middle-aged man with a red face. He also was ahouse-painter, during the summer months, and he and father had by somechance got hold of a secondhand magic-lantern outfit.

They were to show at country schoolhouses in the farming districts ofnorthern 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 bethrown 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 wouldbe a picture of Niagara Falls—taken in the winter—Niagara Fallsfrozen into a series of ice bridges and with small black figures of menrunning over the bridges.

These, you are to understand, however, would not be moving men. Theywould be frozen still and still—petrified men with legs upraised totake a step, and holding them there—to the end of time—forever.

Then there would be a picture of President McKinley and one of AbeLincoln and Grover Cleveland—one of an emigrant wagon going across theWestern plains to California, with Indians on ponies circling in themiddle distance—a picture of the driving of the last railroad spike,when the railroad builders coming from the West had met the railroadbuilders coming from the East—somewhere out on the plains. The spikewould be a golden one, as everyone in the audience would know, but inthe picture it would be black. Several men with silk hats on their[Pg 29]heads stood about while a workman drove the spike. The hammer wasupraised. It stayed there. In the background was an engine, and severalIndians wrapped in blankets and looking sad, as though to say: “Thiscooks our bacon.”

Most of the pictures would be in dead blacks and whites, but therewould be, at the very end, in colors, the old flag floating—that lastof all. It was as good for a hand then as it was later when GeorgeCohan got rich and became famous with it, and father and Aldrichevidently 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 inthe world would ever be understood at all if your mild quiet-lookingman did not have, buried away in him somewhere, the possibility ofbeing almost any known sort of a fool.

In the arrangement that had been made father was to be the actor—acomedian. 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 lastthe colored pictures, ending with the flag flying. The inference mightbe that the flag, at any rate, had survived the ordeal.

And a dream of a harvest of dimes too. As for expense—well, letus say, a dollar for the use of the country schoolhouse and enoughfirewood to heat it for the evening. A boy would build the fire for thechance to be admitted free; and the horse and the two men would be[Pg 30]fed at the bounty of some farmer. Father would have promised that—hewould have been very sure of being able to accomplish that—wouldhave depended upon his personal charm. I can fancy him explaining toAldrich, or rather not explaining. He would smile and throw out hishands in a peculiar way. “You leave that to me, just you leave that tome.”

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 uponit! He and his companion would have to stay in the one school districtfor two or three days. Arrangements would have to be made about gettingthe schoolhouse, and he and Aldrich would have to drive around theneighborhood 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 anIndian in his corner by the farmhouse stove; and he must have beensaying to himself constantly: “Now, how did I get into this? How did Iget into this?”

The farmer’s wife, the hired man and perhaps a grown daughter would be[Pg 31]there and there would be a maiden of uncertain age—the farm woman’ssister, who had never married and so just stayed about and worked forher board—and, in a corner, two or three towheaded boys who wouldpresently have to go off to bed.

All the others silent, but father talking and talking. An actor in thehouse! It was wonderful, like having Charlie Chaplin to dinner with younowadays!

Father was in his element now. This was pie for him. No hungry sonsabout, no sick wife, no grocery bills or rent to be paid. This thegolden 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 disregardfor the facts of life. In the picture I have of him—that is to say inmy fancy—in the picture I have of him during his pilgrimages of thatwinter I always see his partner in the affair, Aldrich, fast asleep ina chair.

But the farmer and his wife, and the wife’s sister—they are notasleep. 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 isTilly. 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 lookat his stock, to bed the stock down for the night, and father has gonewith him. Father runs about the stable holding the lantern. He boastsabout the horses and cattle in his father’s stables when he was a boy.[Pg 32]Whether that early home of his ever existed anywhere but in his fancyis 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 andthe towheaded children have gone regretfully to bed. There is somethingin the air of the room, a kind of suspense, a feeling that somethingis about to happen. Father has so carefully worked that up. He woulddo it by silences, by sudden breakings out into suppressed laughter,and then by quickly looking sad. I have seen him do the thing, oh, manytimes. “My dear people—you wait! There is something inside me that iswonderful, and if you will only be patient you will presently see orhear it come forth,” he seemed to be saying.

He is by the fire with his legs spread out and his hands are in histrousers pockets. He stares at the floor. He is smoking a cigar. Insome ways he always managed to keep himself supplied with the littlecomforts of life.

And he has so placed his chair that he can look at Tilly, who hasretired into her corner, without anyone else in the room seeing thelook. Now she is sitting in deep shadows, far away from the kerosenelamp with which the room is lighted and as she sits there, half lost inthe darkness, there is suddenly something—a haunting kind of beautyhangs over her.

She is a little excited by something father has managed in someindescribable way to do to the very air of the room. Tilly also wasonce 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,[Pg 33]she went to a country dance and a man, who dealt in horses, took afancy to her and carried her home after the dance in his buggy. Hewas a tall man with a heavy mustache and she—it was a moonlightnight in October—she grew sad and wistful. The horse dealer halfintended—well, he had been buying horses for a trucking companyat Toledo, Ohio, had secured all he wanted and was leaving theneighborhood on the next day—the thing he felt during that eveninglater quite went out of his mind.

As for father he is, at the moment perhaps thinking of mother, whenshe was young and lovely and was a bound girl in just such anotherfarmhouse, and surely he wanted something lovely for mother then ashe does for Tilly now. I have no doubt at all that father alwayswanted lovely things for people—to happen to people—and that he hadalso an absurd and never-dying faith in himself—that he was, in someinscrutable way, appointed to be the bearer of lovely things to obscurepeople.

However, there is something else in his mind also. Is he not the fellowwho, by his personal charm, is to earn for himself, Aldrich and thehorse, board, a bed, a welcome—without pay—until the show is pulledoff 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 thatone about his escape from the guards when he was a Union soldier in theCivil War and was being marched off to a Southern prison camp. He wouldno 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[Pg 34]escaped from prisons! Benvenuto Cellini or the Count of Monte Cristohad nothing on him.

Yes, the story he would now tell would be that once when it rained andthe Union prisoners, father among them—some forty men in all—werebeing 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 wetthe prisoners to the skin—the cold—the chattering teeth—the groansof weary men—the closeness of the dark forest on either hand—thesteady weary chug-chug of the feet of the prisoners in the mud—theline of guards at either side of the road, with the guns over theirshoulders—the curses of the Rebel guards when they stumbled in thedarkness.

What a night of weary anguish on the part of the prisoners! When theystopped to rest the guards went into a house and left the prisoners tostand outside in the rain, or lie on the bare ground, guarded by partof the company. If any died of exposure—well, there would be that manyless men to feed when they were got into the Southern prison camp.

And now, after many days and nights, marching thus, the souls of theprisoners were sick with weariness. A dreary desolated look would comeupon father’s face as he spoke of it.

They marched steadily along in the deep mud and the rain. How coldthe rain was! Now and then, in the darkness, a dog barked, far awaysomewhere. There was a break in the solid line of timber along the roadand the men marched across the crest of a low hill. There are lights[Pg 35]to be seen now, in distant farmhouses, far away across a valley—a fewlights 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 abroken branch from a near-by tree is blown against the side of thehouse. The farmer, a heavy, stolid-looking man, starts a little and hiswife shivers as with cold and Tilly is absorbed—she does not want tomiss a word of the tale.

And now father is describing the darkness of the valley below thehill and the lights seen, far off. Will any of the little company ofprisoners ever see their own homes again, their wives, their children,their sweethearts? The lights of the farmhouses in the valley are likestars 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 outof the centre of the road fire straight into the mass of them. Killthem 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 shallprevent his having been born in Georgia, although to-morrow night itmay be North Carolina or Kentucky. But to-night his birthplace shall beGeorgia. He is a man who lives by his fancy and to-night it shall suithis fancy and the drift of his tale to be a Georgian.

And so he, a prisoner of the Rebels, is being marched over the lowhill, with the lights from distant farmhouses shining like stars in[Pg 36]the darkness below, and suddenly a feeling comes to him, a feeling suchas 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 nolights and it is cold and dark. Everything you touch—feel with yourhands in the darkness—is strange and at the same time familiar. Youknow 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 hasgiven this particular tale a new turn since he told it last. “This issomething like.” Aldrich leans forward to listen.

And there is the woman Tilly, in the half darkness. See, she is quitelovely now, quite as she was on that evening when she rode with thehorse dealer in the buggy! Something has happened to soften the long,harsh lines of her face and she might be a princess sitting there nowin the half-light.

Father would have thought of that. It would be something worth whilenow to be a tale-teller to a princess. He stops talking to consider fora moment the possibilities of the notion, and then with a sigh gives itup.

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 aforest. The tale-teller is dressed in flashy clothes and with a crowdof courtiers, ladies in waiting—whatever hangers-on a princess has—issitting by an open fire. There are great, magnificent dogs lying abouttoo.

Father is considering whether or not it is worth trying sometime—thetelling of a tale of himself in just that rôle. An idea crosses his[Pg 37]mind. The princess has a lover who creeps one night into the castle andthe prince has become aware of his presence, is told of his presenceby a trusty varlet. Taking his sword in hand the prince creeps throughthe dark hallways to kill his rival, but father has warned the loversand they have fled. It afterward comes to the ears of the prince thatfather has protected the lovers and he—that is to say, father—iscompelled to flee for his life. He comes to America and lives the lifeof an exile, far from the splendor to which he has been accustomed.

Father is thinking whether it would be worth trying—the telling ofsuch a fable of his former existence, some evening at some farmhousewhere he and Aldrich are staying; and for a moment a sort of GeorgeBarr McCutcheon light comes into his eyes, but with a sigh he gives itup.

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 heresumes, casts another glance at Tilly. “Oh, Tilly, thou dear lovelyone,” he sighs inwardly.

The farmhouse is in the North and he has set himself forth as asoutherner 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 toschool, to a college in the North. In college he had a roommate, a dearfellow from the state of Illinois. The “roommate’s father was owner andeditor of the Chicago Tribune” he explains.

[Pg 38]

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 hewas there he, with his friend, went to hear the famous Lincoln-Douglasdebates. It was odd, but the facts were that the young fellow fromIllinois became enamored of the brilliant Douglas while he—well, totell the truth, his own heart was wrung by the simplicity and nobilityof the rail-splitter, Lincoln. “Never shall I forget the nobility ofthat countenance,” he says in speaking of it. He appears about to cryand does in fact take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his eyes.“Oh, the noble, the indescribable effect upon my boyhood heart of thestirring words of that man. There he stood like a mighty oak of theforest breasting the storms. ‘A nation cannot exist half slave and halffree. A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ he said, and hiswords thrilled me to the very marrow of my being.”

And then father would have described his homecoming after that terrificexperience. War was coming on and all the South was aflame.

One day at table in his southern home, with his brothers, his fatherand mother and his beautiful and innocent young sister sitting withhim, he dared to say something in defense of Lincoln.

What a storm was then raised! The father getting up from his placeat table pointed a trembling finger at his son. All eyes, exceptonly those of his younger sister, were turned on him in wrath anddisapproval. “Mention that hated name again in this house and I willshoot you like a dog, though you are my son,” his father said, and theson got up from the table and went away, filled with the sense of[Pg 39]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 thewords of the noble Lincoln.

And so he had ridden away from his southern home in the night and hadfinally 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, condemninghimself to be an outlaw in the hearts of those he had always loved—forthe sake of duty!

One can imagine Aldrich blinking a little and rubbing his handstogether. “Teddy is laying it on rather thick,” he no doubt says tohimself; but he must nevertheless have been filled with admiration.

However, let us, who are together revisiting the scene of my father’striumph on that evening in the farmhouse long ago, be not too much infear 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 virginTilly, sitting in the half darkness, and the kindliness of the shadowsthat had temporarily enhanced her failing beauty, may have had a gooddeal to do with father’s talent on that evening, I am sure nothing elseever 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 alwaysthe lovelier moments of her?

He had found her in a farmhouse when he was by way of being somethingof a young swell himself and she was a bound girl; and she was thenbeautiful—beautiful without the aid of shadows cast by a kerosene[Pg 40]lamp.

In reality she was the aristocrat of the two, as the beautifulone is always the aristocrat; and oh, how little beauty in womanis understood! The popular magazine covers and the moving-pictureactresses have raised the very devil with our American conception ofwomanly beauty.

But father had delicacy, of a sort, of that you may be quite sure; anddo you not suppose that Tilly, in the Ohio farmhouse, sensed somethingof his attitude toward what fragment of beauty was left in her, andthat she loved him for that attitude—as I am sure my own mother alsodid?

My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into thearms of the others, over the top of the wall.

And now the weary prisoners with their escort have come down off thehillside to a valley and are approaching a large old southern mansion,standing back from the road they have been traveling, and the officersin charge of the prisoners—there were two of them—command the guardsto turn in at a gate that leads to the house.

There is an open space before the house where the prisoners aregathered and the ground—covered with firm turf during most of theyear—has, under the continuous rains, become soft and yielding. Whereeach prisoner stands a puddle gathers about his feet.

The house is dark, but for a single light at the back, and one of theofficers begins shouting. A large pack of hunting dogs have come from ashed, hidden away in the darkness somewhere, and are gathered growling[Pg 41]and barking in a half circle about the prisoners.

One of the dogs rushes through the mass of prisoners and with a gladcry leaps upon father, and all the others follow so that guards arecompelled to drive the dogs off, kicking them and using the butts oftheir guns. Lights are lit inside the house. The people are astir.

You will understand what a moment this was for father. By one of thosestrange streaks of fate—which he is very careful to explain to hisaudience happen much more frequently in life than one imagines—he hadbeen led, as a prisoner on his way to a southern prison pen, right tothe door of his own father’s house.

What a moment indeed! Being a prisoner he has of course no idea howlong he will be kept there. Thank God, he has grown a thick, bushybeard since he left home.

As to his fate—if the prisoners are kept in the yard until daylightcomes—well, he knows his own mother.

His own father, old man though he is, has gone off to the war andall his brothers have gone; and his mother has come from a proud oldsouthern family, one of the oldest and proudest. Had she known he wasthere among the prisoners she would have seen him hanged without aprotest and would herself have lent a hand at pulling the rope.

* * * * *

Ah, what had not my father given for his country! Where will his equalbe found, even among the whole world’s heroes? In the eyes of his[Pg 42]own mother and father, in his brother’s eyes, in the eyes of all thebranches and ramifications of his southern family, in the eyes ofall—except only one unsophisticated and innocent girl—he had broughteverlasting disgrace on one of the proudest names of the South.

Indeed it was just because he, the son, had gone off to fight with thenorthern army that his father, a proud old man of sixty, had insistedon being taken into the southern army. “I have a strong old frame and Iinsist,” he had said. “I must make good the loss to my Southland for myown 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 couldface constant and terrible danger, and the seeds of an undying hatredagainst the son had been planted deep in the hearts of the whole family.

The dullest mind surely will comprehend now what a position father wasin when, in answer to the shouts of the officer, lights began to appearall through the house. Was it not a situation to wring tears from theheart of a man of stone! As for a woman’s heart—one can scarcely speakof the matter.

And in the house, before father’s eyes, there was one—a pureand innocent southern girl of rare beauty—a pearl of womanhoodin fact—rarest example of the famed spotless womanhood of theSouthland—his younger sister—the only woman child of the family.

You see, as father would so carefully have explained that evening inthe farmhouse, he did not care so much for his own life. That had[Pg 43]already been given to his country, he would have said proudly.

But, as you will understand quickly enough, had his presence among theprisoners been discovered, his proud mother—eager to wipe out the onlystain on the family escutcheon—would at once have insisted that hebe hanged to the doorpost of the very house in which he was born, herown hand pulling at the rope that was to jerk him up, into the arms ofdeath—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, seehow that younger sister—the love of his life at that time—see how shewould have suffered.

There she was, the pure and innocent girl, the one who understoodnothing, to be sure, of the import of his decision to stick to the oldflag and fight for the land of Washington and Lincoln, and who, in herinnocent way, just loved him. On that day at his father’s table, whenhe—so deeply affected by the Lincoln-Douglas debates—had dared saya word for the cause of the North, it had been her eyes and her eyesalone that had looked at him with love, when all the other eyes of hisfamily had looked at him with hatred and loathing.

And she would just be bursting into womanhood now. The aroma ofawakening womanhood would be lying over her as perfume over the openingrosebud.

Think of it! There she, the pure and innocent one, would have to standand see him hanged. A blight would be brought down upon her young life[Pg 44]and her head would, ever after that night, be bowed in lonely andsilent 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, thatnow covered her head like a cloud just kissed by the evening sun—thatvery golden hair might be turned as white as snow!

I can, in fancy, hear my father saying the words I have set down hereand coming very near to crying himself as he said them. At the momenthe would have believed without question the story he himself wastelling.

* * * * *

And now the front door to the old southern mansion is thrown openand there, in the doorway facing the prisoners in the rain, stands agigantic 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 andthe negro boy, as lads together, had fought, wrestled, hunted, fishedand lived together like two brothers. I will not go into that, however.Any professional southerner will tell you all about it, if you careto hear. It would have been the most trite part of father’s evening’seffort.)

Anyway, there the gigantic young negro stands in the doorway and he isholding in his hand a candle. Back of him stands my grandmother andback of her the young and innocent sister.

The figure of father’s mother is erect. She is old but she is yet talland strong. One of the officers explains to her that he and his menhave been on an all-night march, taking the crowd of Yankee prisonersto a prison camp, and asks for the hospitality of the house. Being a[Pg 45]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 ofour Southland,” he asks.

It is granted, of course. The proud woman beckons him and his brotherofficer into the house and herself steps out into the cold, drizzlingrain.

She has ordered the young negro to stand on the porch, holding thecandle aloof, and now, marching across the wet lawn, approaches theprisoners. The southern guards have stepped aside, bowing low beforesouthern 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 seesome of the unmannerly dogs of Yanks,” she says, leaning forward andstaring at them. She is very near her own son now but he has turned hisface away and is looking at the ground. Something however causes him toraise his head just as she, to express more fully her contempt, spitsat the men.

A little speck of her white spittle lands upon father’s thick, tawnybeard.

And now his mother has gone back into the house and it is again dark onthe lawn in front. The Rebel guards are relieved—two at a time—to goto the kitchen door, where they are given hot coffee and sandwiches.And once his young sister, she of the tender heart, tries to creep towhere the prisoners stand in the darkness. She is accompanied by an oldnegro woman and has planned to give food aid and comfort to the wearymen but is prevented. Her mother has missed her inside the house andcoming to the door calls to her. “I know your tender heart,” she says,[Pg 46]“but it shall not be. The teeth of no Yankee dog shall ever bite intofood raised on the land of your father. It shall not happen, at leastwhile your mother is alive to prevent.”

SO there was father, sitting comfortably in the warm farmhouse livingroom—he and Aldrich having been well fed at the table of a prosperousfarmer—and having before him what he most loved, an attentive andabsorbed audience. By this time the farmer’s wife would be deeplymoved by the fate of that son of the South that father had representedhimself as being; and as for Tilly—while, in the fanciful picturehe is making, he stands in the cold and wet outside the door of thatsouthern 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 actualflesh-and-blood family, the family he had left behind in an Ohiovillage when he set forth on his career as an actor?

It is not suffering too much. One need not waste too much sympathy onhis 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 leastwould be loath to trade him for a more provident shrewd and thoughtfulfather.

It must however have been a fairly hard winter, for mother at least andin connection with that winter and others that followed I have oftensince had an amusing thought. In later years, when my own name had a[Pg 48]little got up in the world as a teller of tales I was often accusedof having got my impulse, as a story-teller, from the Russians. Thestatement 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 publishedin the pages of the more reckless magazines, such as The LittleReview, the old Masses and later in The Seven Artsand The Dial, and when I was so often accused of being under theRussian influence, I began to read the Russians, to find out if thestatement, so often made concerning me and my work, could be true.

This I found, that in Russian novels the characters are always eatingcabbage soup and I have no doubt Russian writers eat it too.

This was a revelation to me. Many of the Russian tales are concernedwith the lives of peasants and a Boston critic once said I had broughtthe American peasant into literature; and it is likely that Russianwriters, like all the other writers who have ever lived and have notpandered to the popular demand for sentimental romances were fortunateif they could live as well as a peasant. “What the critics say is nodoubt true,” I told myself; for, like so many of the Russian writers, Iwas 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 andother townspeople were all either owners of land which they rented outto 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[Pg 49]would raise small fruits, corn, wheat, oats or potatoes, but that didparticularly well when planted to cabbages.

As a result the raising of cabbages became a sort of specialty withus in our country; and there are now, I believe, in my native place,some three or four prosperous factories, devoted to the making of whatbefore the war was called “sauerkraut.” Later, to help win the war, itwas called: “Liberty Cabbage.”

The specialization in the raising of cabbage began in our Ohio countryin my day, and in a good year some of the fields produced as high astwenty tons of cabbage an acre.

The cabbage fields grew larger and larger and, as we grew older, mybrothers and I went every spring and fell to work in the fields. Wecrawled across the fields, setting out cabbage plants in the spring,and in the fall went out to cut cabbages. The huge round hard headsof cabbage were cut from their stalks and pitched to a man who loadedthem upon a hay wagon; and on fall days I have often seen twenty orthirty wagons, each bearing its two or three tons of cabbages andwaiting its turn to get to the cars on the railroad siding. The waitingwagons filled our streets as tobacco-laden wagons fill the streets of aKentucky town in the fall, and in the stores and houses everyone for atime talked of nothing but cabbages. “What would the crop bring on themarkets at Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh, for some reason I havenever understood, had a passion for cabbages; and why Pittsburgh hasn’tproduced more so-called realistic writers, in the Russian manner, Icannot understand.

[Pg 50]

However, one may well leave that to the modern psychologists.

During the fall of that year, after father had set out on hisadventures as an actor, mother did something she had often done before.By a stroke of strategy she succeeded in getting a winter’s supply ofcabbages 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 thosewho lived on the farms near town, to make cabbages part of theircelebration of the occasion. Such lads, living as they did in thecountry, had the use of horses and buggies, and on Hallowe’en theyhitched up and drove off to town.

On the way they stopped at the cabbage fields and, finding in some ofthe fields many cabbages yet uncut, pulled them out by the roots andpiled them in the backs of their buggies.

The country lads, giggling with anticipated pleasure, drove into oneof the quieter residence streets of our town and, leaving the horsestanding in the road, one of them got out of the buggy and took oneof the cabbages in his hand. The cabbage had been pulled out of theground with the great stalklike root still clinging to it and the ladnow grasped this firmly. He crept toward one of the houses, preferablyone that was dark—an indication that the people of the house, havingspent a hard day at labor, had already gone to bed. Approaching thehouse cautiously, he swung the cabbage above his head, holding it bythe long stalk, and then he let it go. The thing was to just hurl the[Pg 51]cabbage full against the closed door of the house. It struck with athunderous sound and the supposition was that the people of the housewould be startled and fairly lifted out of their beds by the hollowbooming noise, produced when the head of cabbage landed against thedoor and, as a matter of fact, when a stout country boy had hurled thecabbage the sound produced was something quite tremendous.

The cabbage having been thrown the country boy ran quickly into theroad, 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 soonas the evening meal was finished the lights were put out and we waitedwhile mother stood just at the door, the knob in her hand. No doubt itmust have seemed strange to the boys of our town that one so gentle andquiet as mother could be so infuriated by the hurling of a cabbage atthe door of our house.

But there was the simple fact of the situation to tempt and darknesshad no sooner settled down upon our quiet street that one of the ladsappeared. It was worth while throwing cabbages at such a house. One waspursued, one was scolded, threats were hurled: “Don’t you dare comeback to this house! I’ll have the town marshal after you, that’s whatI’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[Pg 52]evening the game went on and on. The buggies were not driven to ourhouse, but were stopped at the head of the street, and town boys wenton pilgrimages to cabbage fields to get ammunition and join in thesiege. Mother stormed scolded and ran out into the darkness waving abroom while we children stayed indoors, enjoying the battle—and whenthe evening’s sport was at an end, we all fell to and gathered inthe spoils. As she returned from each sally from the fort mother hadbrought into the house the last cabbage thrown—if she could find it;and now, late in the evening when our provident tormentors were allgone, we children went forth with a lantern and got in the rest of ourcrop. Often as many as two or three hundred cabbages came our way andthese were all carefully gathered in. They had been pulled from theground, with all the heavy outer leaves still clinging to them, so thatthey were comparatively uninjured and, as there was also still attachedto 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, lyingclosely side by side, as I am told the dead are usually buried after asiege.

Perhaps indeed we were somewhat more careful with them than soldiersare with their dead after a battle. Were not the cabbages to be, forus, the givers of life? They were put into the trench carefully andtenderly with the heads downward and the stalks sticking up, mothersupervising, and about each head straw was carefully packed—windingsheets. One could get straw from a strawstack in a near-by field at[Pg 53]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 smallwhite beans from the grocery and salt pork from the butcher, and athick soup, of which we never tired, was concocted. The cabbages weresomething at our backs. They made us feel safe.

And there was also a sense of something achieved. In the land in whichwe lived one did not need to have a large income. There was food allabout, plenty of it, and we who lived so precariously in the land ofplenty had, by our “mother’s wit,” achieved this store of food withoutworking for it. A common sense of pride in our cleverness held ustogether.

One went out into our back yard on a winter’s night when there wassnow on the ground and looked abroad. Already we lads read books, andsnow-covered fields stretching away under the winter moon suggestedstrange, stirring thoughts—travelers beset by wolves on the RussianSteppes—emigrant trains lost in whirling snowstorms on the Westernsagebrush deserts of our own country, men in all sorts of strangeterrible places wandering, desperate and starving, under the wintermoon—and what of us? The place where the cabbages were buried made along white mound, directly across our back yard, and when one looked atit there was a sense of fullness and plenty in the land. One rememberedthat down under the snow, buried away in the straw, were those longrows of cabbages. Deer, buffaloes, wild horses and equally wildlong-horned cattle, far out on the Western plains, did not worry aboutfood because the ground was covered with snow. With their hoofs they[Pg 54]pawed the snow away, and found buried beneath the snow the sweet littleclusters of bunch grass, that again sent the warmth of life singingthrough their bodies.

It was a chance for the fancy to play, to kick up its heels and have agood 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 theground with the stalks straight up. They stuck up straight and stiff,like sentinels standing and, after looking, one went into the fortand slept quietly and peacefully. There the soldiers were—they werestanding firm and unyielding. Were there enemies prowling out therein the white darkness, the little wild dogs of want? One could laughat such thoughts. Were not the sentinels standing—quietly and firmlywaiting? One could go into the fort and sleep in peace, hugging thatthought.

To us at home, father was always, somewhat strangely, a part and atthe same time not a part of our lives. He flew in and out as a birdflies in and out of a bush, and I am quite sure that, all through theyears of our childhood, it never occurred to him to ask, when he setoff on one of his winter adventures, whether or not there was anythingto eat in our house. The fall came with its snows, and the littlecreeping fear of actual starvation for her brood, that must often havebeen in mother’s mind, followed by the spring, the warm rains, thepromise of plenty and his return. If he brought no money, he did bringsomething—a ham, some combs of honey, a jug of cider, or even perhapsa 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[Pg 55]I’m not a provider?”

There were tales to be told and he was the teller of tales. “It issufficient. Can man live by bread alone? There is food on the tablenow. Eat! Stuff yourselves! Spring has come and there are signs to bepainted. The night has passed and it is another day. I am a man offaith. I tell you a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without mynotice. I will make a tale of it—tell why and how it fell. The mostmarvelous 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 thefield, 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 moveout of one house and into another. The rent for the house in which wehad lived all during the winter had been long unpaid and mother hadno money. Father had just returned from one of his long adventures,but early in the day of the moving he disappeared again and, as wecould not afford a moving wagon, mother and we boys carted our poorbelongings to the new place on our backs.

As for father, he had managed to borrow a horse and a spring wagon froma neighbor and had set off again into the country. The house to whichwe were moving was far out at the edge of the town and next to it wasa field in which there was a great straw stack—a convenience, as whatwe called our “bed ticks,” on which we slept, had to be emptied of[Pg 56]the straw that had become fine and dustlike from long use, and thenrefilled with the new straw.

When all was done and we were quite settled in the new place, fatherdrove into the yard. He had noticed, he explained, a special kind ofstraw at a farmhouse some five miles away, at a place he had visitedduring his wanderings of the winter just past, and he had thought hewould give us all a treat by getting that particular kind of straw forour beds.

And so he had driven off at daybreak, and, while we packed ourfurniture to the new place, had dined with the farmer and his familyand had now returned. Although our beds had been made for the night thebed ticks must all be brought down again, the straw tumbled out and thespecial 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 asmother stood smiling—a little resentfully perhaps, but still smiling;“there, you kids, try sleeping on that. There is nothing on earth toogood for my kids.”

LET us, however, return to father and the tale he is telling as he sitsin the farmhouse on the winter’s evening. I am too good a son of myfather 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 youngmanhood stood just outside the door of that southern mansion house ofhis 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 herspittle landed on his beard—where, as he said, it lay like a thing offire burning into his soul—on that night, I say, he did, by a strokeof fortune, escape the fate that seemed to have him in its clutches.

Dawn was just beginning to break when the two Confederate officers cameout 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 thehills, and then I turned to look back,” father explained. Gray andweary and half dead with starvation, he turned to look. If he droppeddead from starvation and weariness on his way to the prison pen, whatdid it matter now? The light of his life had gone out. He was neveragain to see any of his own people, that he knew.

But even as he looked he did see something. The company had stopped to[Pg 58]rest for a moment and stood where a sharp wind blew over them, just atthe 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 againstthe 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, youwill understand, to look along the road taken by the prisoners, whoseevident misery had touched her young heart.

For father it would be, as he would so elaborately explain, a very highspot in his life, perhaps the highest spot he was to reach in all hisweary march to the grave.

He stood there on the hillside, quite cold and miserable—in just thatutterly miserable and weary state when one is sometimes most alive—thesenses, that is to say, are most alive. At the moment he felt, as anyman must feel sometime in life, that an invisible cord does extend fromthe innermost parts of himself to the innermost parts of some otherperson. Love comes. For once in a lifetime a state of feeling becomesas definite a thing as a stone wall touched with the hand.

And father had that feeling, at that moment on the hill; and that theperson for whom he had it was a woman and his own sister, made it evenmore an assured thing. He might have expressed the feeling by sayingthat, as by a miracle, the hill dropped away and he stood on dry levelground in the very presence of his younger sister, so close to her infact 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[Pg 59]his presence among the prisoners, all sense of the cold hunger andweariness of the hour and—exactly as the thing might be done, quiteridiculously, by a second-rate actor in the movies—he did in fact stepout from among the ranks of prisoners and, with his hands extendedbefore 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 hischair and actually take several steps. He would at bottom be always agood deal of an actor as well as a story-teller, as every story-tellerworth his salt inevitably is.

And then came the oath from the guard and an upraised gun, the heavybutt of a gun, ready to swing down upon his head, and back he goes intothe ranks of prisoners. He mutters some excuse: “I just wanted to havea look”—and is thus jerked down from the high place, to which hisimagination had suddenly lifted him, and back into the weariness of hisapparently hopeless journey. Gone, he thought at the moment, was thesister he loved, his boyhood with its memories, all his past life, butit wasn’t quite true.

Father did make an escape. How many escapes he, in fancy, made fromthe hands of the enemy during that Civil War! He lived, you willunderstand, in a rather dull farming community and loved at least someair of probability hanging over his tales.

And so the Civil War became for him the canvas, the tubes of paint, thebrushes with which he painted his pictures. Perhaps one might bettersay his own imagination was the brush and the Civil War his paint pot.[Pg 60]And he did have a fancy for escapes, as I myself have always had. Myown tales, told and untold, are full of escapes—by water in the darkand 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 verybreath in our nostrils.

It is just possible that upon that occasion, father would have put itto his audience, that the sight, or the imagined sight, of his sisterthat morning had given him new hope. She was a virgin and there wassomething 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 hadbeen given something, a new flair for life. A ray of new hope had comeinto the black night of his situation. He walked more stoutly.

It was just that stout way in which he now walked that gave him hisopportunity for escape—that time. All that day the other prisonerswent with hanging heads, tramping through the deep mud of the southernroads in winter, but father walked with his head up.

Another night came and they were again in a forest, on a dark andlonely road, with the guards walking at the side and sometimes quitelost in the shadows cast by the trees—the prisoners a dark mass in thevery centre of the road.

Father stumbled over a stick, the heavy branch of a tree, quite[Pg 61]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 thestick lightly over his shoulder and carry it like a gun.

There he was, stepping proudly among those who were not proud—thatis to say, the other prisoners—and not having any plan in mind—justthinking of his virginal sister back there, I dare say; and one of thetwo officers of the guard spoke to him kindly.

“Don’t walk in there so close to the Yanks, in the deep mud, John,” theofficer said; “it’s better going out here. There is a path here at theside. 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 tothe side of the road and became as one of the guards. The men came outon the crest of another low hill and again, in the valley below, therewas the faint light of a farmhouse. “Halt!” one of the officers gavecommand; and then—the younger of the two officers having been told byhis superior to send a man down into the valley to the farmhouse to seeif there was a chance for the guard and prisoners to rest for a fewhours and to get food—he sent father. The officer touched him on thearm. “Go on you,” he said. “You go down and find out.”

So off father went, down a lane, holding the stick very correctly, likea gun, until he was safely out of sight of the others, and then hethrew the stick away and ran.

The devil! He knew every inch of the ground on which he now stood. Whatan opportunity for escape! One of his boyhood friends had lived in[Pg 62]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 thenorthern school, he had ridden and hunted along the very path his feetnow touched. Why, the very dogs and “niggers” on the place knew him asthey 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 seton his trail.

He plunged downward, getting clear of the trees, running across afield—the soft mud clinging to his feet—and so skirted the house andgot to where there was a small creek down which he went for a milein the darkness, walking in the cold water that often came up to hiswaist. That was to throw dogs off his trail, as any schoolboy shouldknow.

By making a great circle he got back into the road, by which he and theother prisoners had been marched from his own father’s house. They hadcome some twelve miles during the day and early evening, but the nightwas still young and, after he had gone three or four miles, he knew ashort 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 andonce again saw the sister he loved. The dawn was just breaking when hearrived, but the dogs knew him and the negroes knew him. The very negrowho had held the light while his mother spat at the prisoners hid himaway in the loft of a barn and brought him food.

[Pg 63]

Not only food was brought, but also a suit of his own clothes that hadbeen left in the house.

And so he stayed hidden in the loft for three days, and then anothernight came when it rained and was dark.

Then he crept out, with food for the needs of his journey, and knowingthat, when he had walked for a mile along the road that led back towardthe distant Union camp, a negro would be standing in a little grovewith a good horse saddled and bridled for him. The negro, in the lateafternoon, had gone off to a distant town, ostensibly for mail and wasto be bound to a tree where he would be discovered later by a party ofother negroes sent in search of him. Oh, all was arranged—everythingelaborately planned to ward off, from his helpers, the wrath of themother.

There was the night and the rain, and father, with a dark cloak nowabout his shoulders, creeping from the stables and toward the house. Bythe window of one of the rooms downstairs his young sister sat playingan 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 notfather live in another and later generation? In what affluence mightwe not all have flourished! The old homestead, a fire burning in thegrate, the stern and relentless parent, and outside in the cold and wetfather, the outcast son, the disowned, the homeless one, about to rideoff into the night in the service of his country—never to return.

On the organ his sister would have been playing “The Last Link isBroken,” and there stands father with the great tears rolling down hischeeks.

[Pg 64]

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 thanthe love of the woman who was long afterward to come into his life, andto console him somewhat for the fair sister he had lost.

For he did love her, quite completely. Is it not odd, when oneconsiders the matter, that the fair sister—who would have been myaunt, and who never perhaps existed except in father’s fancy, butconcerning whom I have heard him tell so many touching tales—is it notodd that I have never succeeded in inventing a satisfactory name forher? Father never—if I remember correctly—gave her a name and I havenever 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 andsouthern sound and must suggest—what must it not suggest?

But father’s tale must have its proper dénouement. One could trust thetale-teller for that. Even had he lived in the days of the movies andhad the dénouement quite killed his story—for movie purposes, at leastin the northern towns, which would have been the best market—even inthe face of all of such difficulties which he fortunately did not haveto 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 sucha dreadful way of getting off on just the wrong foot on the very eveof our national holiday. Vicksburg and Gettysburg for Fourth of Julycelebrations. Surely it was, what, during the World War, would have[Pg 65]been called, “bad war psychology.”

There can be no doubt that father had been a soldier of some sortduring the Civil War and so, as was natural, he would give his tale asoldier’s dénouement, sacrificing even the beloved and innocent youngersister to his purpose (to be brought back to life—oh, many, many timeslater, and made to serve in many future tales).

It was the second day of that great, that terrible battle ofGettysburg, father had picked upon to serve as the setting for the endof his yarn.

That was a moment! All over the North the people stood waiting; farmersstopped working in the fields and drove into northern towns, waitingfor the click of the little telegraph instruments; country doctors letthe sick lie unattended and stood with all the others in the streets oftowns, where was no running in and out of stores. The whole North stoodwaiting, listening. No time for talk now.

Ah! that Confederate General Lee—the neat quiet Sunday-schoolsuperintendent among generals! One could never tell what he would donext. Was it not all planned that the war should be fought out onsouthern soil?—and here he had brought a great army of his finesttroops far into the North.

Everyone waited and listened. No doubt the South waited and listenedtoo.

No Lincoln and Douglas debates now. “A nation cannot exist half slaveand half free.”

Now there is the rattle of the box, and the dice that shall decide thefate of a nation are being thrown. In an obscure farmhouse, far in theNorth, long after the battle of those two terrible days was fought[Pg 66]and half forgotten, father also has got his hands on the dice box. Heis rattling words in it now. We poor tellers of tales have our momentstoo, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops ofhills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldierwords into our battles. No uniforms for us, no riders springing awayinto the gray smoke-mist of battle to carry out orders. We must sit inlonely farmhouses or in cheap rooms in city lodging houses before ourtypewriters; but if we do not look like generals, we at least feel likethat at moments anyway.

Father dropping his little rattling words into the hearts of thefarmer, the farmer’s wife, Tilly’s heart too. At Gettysburg a nation inthe death grapple. The innocent sister, fair virgin of the South, castin 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 shotand shell, but ever after, poor dear, he had to be satisfied with mereblank dumbness about it all. At the best he could but turn the crank ofa magic-lantern machine or join the G. A. R., and march with other menthrough the streets of an Ohio town on Decoration days, when the realquestion in the minds of all the onlookers was as to whether Clyde orTiffin, Ohio, would win the ball game to be played at Ame’s field thatafternoon.

A poor sort Aldrich, being able to do nothing but fight. On Decorationdays he marched dumbly through the dust to a graveyard and listened toan address made by a candidate for Congress, who had made his money in[Pg 67]the wholesale poultry business. At best Aldrich could but speak in lowtones to another comrade, as the file of men marched along. “I was withGrant 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 veryflower 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 menare to decide it all. The sun will soon be going down behind the hillsof 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 oneof the hills a body of men lies waiting. It is the flower of the Unionarmy too. Father is among them, lying there.

They wait.

They are not trembling, but back of them in a thousand towns menand women are both waiting and trembling. Freedom itself waits andtrembles—liberty is trembling—“You can’t fool all of the people allof the time” is trembling like a broken reed. How many grand passages,words, Decoration day addresses, messages to Congress, Fourth of Julyaddresses of the next two hundred years, not worth eight cents on thedollar at the moment!

And now they come—Pickett’s men—down through the valley, in and outof groves of trees and up the little slope. There is a place, known to[Pg 68]history as “the bloody angle.” There the men of the South rush straightinto a storm of iron. A hailstorm of iron swept also in among the menof the North waiting for them.

That wild Rebel yell that broke from the lips of Pickett’s men is dyingnow. The lips of Pickett’s men are turning white.

The voice of Meade has spoken and down through the valley go the Unionmen in their turn—father among them.

It was then that a bullet in the leg dropped him in his tracks, and inmemory of that moment he stops the telling of his tale in the farmhouselong 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, puta spike of truth in them—at moments.

He pitched forward and fell and the men of his company rolled on to avictory 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, andthere close beside him was a confederate boy, mortally wounded. The twomen roll uneasily in their pain and look directly into each other’seyes. It is a long, long look the two men give each other, for one ofthem the last look into the eyes of a fellow before he goes on, overthe river.

The man lying there, and now dying, is just that young man who, as aboy, was father’s best friend and comrade, the lad to whose place—sometwelve miles from his own father’s plantation—he used to ride for daysof sport. What rides they had taken together through the forests, a[Pg 69]pack of dogs at their heels, and what talks they then had!

You will understand that the young man now dying lived in that veryhouse, far back from the road, toward which father went that night whenhe escaped the Rebel guard. He had marched off with the stick over hisshoulder, you will remember, and had then cut off across fields to hisown home where he was concealed by the negroes until the night of hisfinal escape.

And he had gone away from his own home on that dark night, dreaming ofa return, some time when the cruel war was over and the wounds it hadmade were healed; but now he could never return. He was condemned toremain alone, a wanderer always on the face of this earth.

For the lad now dying beside him on the field of Gettysburg was, in hisdeath hour, telling a fearful and tragic story.

Father’s family had been entirely wiped out. His father had been killedin battle as had also his brothers.

And now, from the lips of his old comrade, he was to hear the mostfearful tale of all.

A party of northern foragers had come to the southern plantation houseon just such another dark, rainy night as the one on which he wastaken there as a prisoner. They marched as the confederate troops hadmarched, along the driveway to the front of the house, and stood on thelawn. A northern officer’s voice called as the southern officer hadcalled on that other night, and again the tall young negro came to thedoor with a light, followed by that fiery woman of the Southland.

[Pg 70]

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. Sheunderstood for what purpose the northern men had come, and she hadsworn that not a bite of food, raised on that plantation, should everpass the lips of a Yank.

Now she held a shotgun in her hand and, without a word or without anysort 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 thefront of the house. It wiped out all of father’s family—except justhimself—and deprived his sons, too, of a proud southern ancestry; for,just in the moment, before the shower of bullets came, father’s youngand innocent sister—realizing with that sure instinct that, everyoneunderstands, all women inevitably possess—realizing, I say, that deathwas about to call her mother—the young girl had rushed panic-strickenout 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 thefamily—except just father—fell there in a heap. The captain of thenorthern troops—a German brewer’s son from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, criedwhen 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 thedead, 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[Pg 71]stricken and forlorn through life. Later he had, to be sure, marriedand he had children whom he loved and treasured, but was that the samething? 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 knownto mankind. It is something special. The man who has been under theinfluence of it can never afterward quite escape. Father didn’t expectto. He declared always, after he had told the above story, that he didnot ever expect to be gay or happy again.

What he expected was that he would go on for the rest of his daysdoing just what he was doing at the time. Well, he would try to bringa little joy into the hearts of others—he would sing songs, dance alittle dance—he would join an old comrade in arms, one whose heart heknew was as true as steel, and give a magic-lantern show. Others, foran hour anyway, would be made to forget that element of sadness andtragedy in life that he, of course, could never quite forget.

On that very night, lying half dead on the field of Gettysburg besidethe dead comrade of his youth, he had made up his mind to spend theremaining days of his life bringing what sweetness and joy he couldinto the lacerated hearts of a nation torn by civil strife. It had beentwo o’clock in the morning before he was picked up by a squad of mensent out to gather in the wounded, and already the news of the greatvictory and the triumph of the cause of freedom was sweeping over thenorthern land. And he had lain looking at the stars and had made hisresolution. Others might seek for the applause of the world, but, as[Pg 72]for himself, he would go into the dusty highways and byways of lifeand bring to the lowly and forgotten the joy of a little fun at theschoolhouse.

AS for the show father and Aldrich put on, that is another matter. Onemay, without too much injustice, reserve judgment on the show. I myselfnever saw one of their performances, but one of my brothers once didand always, quietly and with commendable firmness, refused to speak ofit afterward.

Fancy will, however, serve. Aldrich would show his pictures ofMcKinley, Grover Cleveland and the others, and then father would singand do one of his dances. There would be more pictures and another songand dance and after that the picture of the flag, in colors. If thenight were fair forty or even fifty people, farmers, their wives, thehired men and the children, would gather in the schoolhouse. The showonly cost ten cents. Too much injustice was not done them.

It is, however, rather a shame they did not let father tell storiesinstead. Perhaps in all his life it never occurred to him they mighthave been written. Poor father! As a public figure, he had to contenthimself with the exercise of an art in which he was as bad, I fancy, asany man who has ever lived.

And it is his singing and dancing that remains like a scar in my memoryof him. In the late fall, before Aldrich and he started out on theiradventure, father used to rehearse upstairs in our house.

The evening meal would have been out of the way and we children would[Pg 74]be sitting by the stove, about the table in the kitchen. Mother hadwashed clothes during the day and now she was doing an ironing. Fatherwalked about, his hands clasped behind his back as though in deepthought, and occasionally he raised his eyes to the ceiling, while hislips moved silently.

Then he went out of the room and we heard him go upstairs into abedroom 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 atthe floor.

At that time the humor of America—of which we Americans were soinordinately proud—expressed itself in the broader and less subtlejokes of Mark Twain, Bill Nye and Petroleum V. Nasby, and there was abook, commonly read by both children and grown-ups, and reputed to bevery funny, called, “Peck’s Bad Boy.” It told, if I remember correctly,of the doings of a certain quite terrible youngster who put chewing gumor molasses on the seats of chairs, threw pepper into people’s eyes,stuck pins into schoolteachers, hung cats over clotheslines by theirtails, and did any number of other such charmingly expressive things.

This terrible child was, as I have said, reputed to be very funnyand the book recounting his doings must have sold tremendously. Andfather, having read it, had written a ballad concerning just suchanother youngster. This child also made life a hell for his fellows,and his father was very proud of him. When the child had done somethingunusually shocking the father tried, one gathered, to share in the[Pg 75]honor.

At any rate the refrain of father’s song was:

Evening after evening these words rang through our house. They made allof us children shiver a little. Father sang them, danced a few haltingsteps, and then sang them again.

In the kitchen, as I have already said, we others sat with our eyeson 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? Werethere—sometimes—tears in mother’s eyes as she bent over the ironingboard?

Of that, after all, I cannot be too sure. I can only be everlastinglysure of the refrain:

“You grow more like your dad every day.”

* * * * *

And, however that may be, there is always one consoling thought. Asa showman, and on stormy nights, there must sometimes have been butslight audiences at the schoolhouses and the takings for Aldrich andfather must have been thin. One fancies evenings when eighty centsmight cover all the receipts at the door.

One thinks of the eighty cents and shudders, and then a consolingthought comes. Of one thing we may be quite sure—father and Aldrichwould not have gone hungry, and at night there must always have beencomfortable beds into which they could crawl. Father had promised[Pg 76]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 provedhard-hearted one remembers the number of Tillies in the farmhouses ofOhio. When everything else failed the Tillies would have taken care ofthe troubadours. Of that one may be, I should say, very very sure.

TO the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, fromthe first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections and,no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two endscontinue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air.

To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to giveyourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice.

There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moves with an orderedpurpose through ordered days, or at the least through ordered hours. Inthe life of the fancy there is no such thing as good or bad. There areno Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia do not come inat the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the fancy. The Puritan,the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the dry intellectuals, allwho desire to uplift, to remake life on some definite plan conceivedwithin the human brain die of a disease of the lungs. They would dobetter to stay in the world of fact to spend their energy in catchingbootleggers, inventing new machines, helping humanity—as best theycan—in its no doubt laudable ambition to hurl bodies through the airat the rate of five hundred miles an hour.

In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow movementsand with many graduations into the ugly and the beautiful. What is[Pg 78]alive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of the room in which welive sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned with weariness? In the endit must become the one thing or the other.

All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is beautifulmust bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic sadness andsuffering.

Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere smart-aleck,without humbleness before the possibilities of life, one sure ofhimself—and thus one may remain to the end, blind, deaf and dumb,feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our intellectuals find this is themore comfortable road to travel.

In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is uglyin fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty!

* * * * *

In the world of fancy even the most base man’s actions sometimes takeon the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyesof the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself bybeing too sure.

Let us (in fancy) imagine for a moment an American lad walking alone atevening in the streets of an American town.

American towns, and in particular American towns of the Middle Westof twenty years ago, were not built for beauty, they were not builtto be lived in permanently. A dreadful desire of escape, of physicalescape, must have got, like a disease, into our father’s brains. Howthey pitched the towns and cities together! What an insanity! The ladwe have together invented, to walk at evening in the streets of such a[Pg 79]town, must of necessity be more beautiful than all the hurriedly builttowns and cities in which he may walk. True immaturity of the body andthe spirit is more beautiful than mere tired-out physical maturity: thephysical maturity of men and women that has no spiritual counterpartwithin itself falls quickly into physical and ugly decay—like thecheaply constructed frame houses of so many of our towns.

The lad of our fancy walks in the streets of a town hurriedly throwntogether, striving to dream his dreams, and must continue for a longtime to walk in the midst of such ugliness. The cheap, hurried, uglyconstruction of America’s physical life still goes on and on. The ideaof permanent residence has not taken hold on us. Our imaginations arenot yet fired by love of our native soil.

The American boy of our mutual imaginative creation is walking in thestreets of an Ohio town, after the factories have begun coming andthe day of the hustlers is at hand, the houses of the town pushed upquickly, people swarming into the town who have no notion of stayingthere—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 thepeople of an older generation, coming out slowly to the Middle West,from New York state, from Pennsylvania, from New England—a greatmany to my own Ohio country from New England. They had come driftingin slowly, bringing traces of old customs, sayings, religions,[Pg 80]prejudices. The young farmers came first, glad of the rich free soiland the friendlier climate—strong young males that were to come insuch numbers as to leave New England, with its small fields and itsthinner, stonier soil, a place of aging maiden ladies—that old-maidcivilization that was, nevertheless, to be the seat of our Americanculture. An insane fear of the flesh, a touch of transcendentalism, areaching always up into the sky. In the ground underfoot there is onlyfear, poverty, hardship. One must look upward, always upward.

What of the sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich flavoron the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the skin of women, the playof 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 thestreets of the little towns, built in the forest along rivers or on thestage roads. Bearded, rough-handed men gathered about the saloons. AbeLincoln proving his manhood by lifting a barrel of whisky and drinkingfrom the bunghole. The ruffian of the frontier, father of the moderngunman of our cities, proving his manhood by murder—Blinky Morgan ofOhio, Jesse James of Missouri, Slade of the Overland Route to the goldand silver camps of the Far West—these the heroes of that life.

A slow culture growing up, however—growing as culture must alwaysgrow—through the hands of workmen.

In the small towns artisans coming in—the harness-maker, thecarriage-builder, the builder of wagons, the smith, the tailor, the[Pg 81]maker of shoes, the builders of houses and barns too.

As Slade and James were to be the fathers of the modern gunmen, sothese the fathers of the artists of the generations to come. In theirfingers the beginning of that love of surfaces, of the sensual love ofmaterials, 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, cheapchairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroomfloors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, jazz,the movies.

The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in themidst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed. Somethingvibrant in the air about us all.

The problem is to survive. If our youth is to get into hisconsciousness that love of life—that with the male comes only throughthe love of surfaces, sensually felt through the fingers—his problemis to reach down through all the broken surface distractions of modernlife to that old love of craft out of which culture springs.

THE end of the second year after mother’s death was at hand and ourfamily was at the point of falling to pieces. No more sitting by thefire in the kitchen through the long fall and winter evenings withmother at the ironing board. The kitchen of our house was cold andcheerless. The spirit of the household had fled. It had gone down intothe ground with the body of the woman out of whose living body had comefive strong sons.

Mother had died swiftly, mysteriously, without warning. It was asthough she had got out of bed on a fall morning and had taken a longlook at her sons. “It’s about the time when they will have to push outinto the world. Any influence I may have on their lives has alreadybeen exerted. There is no time to think of any other purpose in lifefor myself, and anyway, I am too tired. Having lived out my life, now Ishall die.”

It was as though she had said something of the sort to herself, andhad then laid down her life as one might lay down a finished book. Ona rainy dismal day in the fall there she was, coming in at the kitchendoor from hanging a wash out on the line, temporarily strung up inour woodshed, smiling quietly, making one of her quick soft ironicobservations, sweetening always the air of the room into which she[Pg 83]came with her presence.

On such a rainy morning in the fall she was like that, as she will livealways in the memory of her sons, and then, on another equally wetdismal fall day two or three weeks later, she was dead.

What there had been of family life among us was going to pieces. It wassure that father was not one to hold it together. No one could think ofhim as destined to hold that or any other fort. That surely wasn’t hisline.

There was a period of waiting. The older son had already found hisplace in life. He had already become what he was to remain to theend, an American artist, a painter. The making of little designs forthe gravestones of village merchants was for him a passing phase.Perhaps it was, at that time, the only form of expression one, having atendency toward the plastic arts, could find in our towns.

And so there was his destiny fixed—but what of us others? We did notoften speak openly of the matter among ourselves, but it was obvioussomething had to be done and soon. In the few talks we had concerningthe matter in our broken household, while the one remaining daughter(destined to die before her life could be really developed) was actingas our temporary housekeeper, father held out strongly for the learningof one of the trades. He talked of long years of apprenticeship tosome craft, and it was characteristic of him that as he talked hebecame in fancy himself such a craftsman. One was trained slowly andsurely in one’s craft. Then one became a journeyman and went on histravels, going from shop to shop, watching the master craftsmen. “It’s[Pg 84]something at your back,” father said, “something that can be dependedupon. 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 forfather—he had picked up a smattering knowledge of several crafts; andhow eloquently he, dear word fellow, could speak of them, sling thejargon 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 havedescribed, the tooter of a cornet in the village band.

In reality he was a tale-teller, but that was no craft among us. Nounion had been formed among tale-tellers. The Authors’ League, the PenWomen, the Poet’s Club, etc., had not yet been formed or, if there weresuch organizations in existence, they at any rate did not reach downinto mid-American towns. At that time even the rumors of the vast sumsto be made by turning out clever plot stories for the popular magazinesor the movies had not been whispered about.

Other and more significant-seeming stories were floating however. Anew kind of hero, tarnished somewhat later, filled the popular eye. Aswe boys went about in the main street of our town, citizens, feelinga 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.”

[Pg 85]

sang Sil West, the smith, who was shoeing a horse in the alleyway backof the stores on our main street.

The factories were calling. One went into a factory, did his work withcare and skill, became foreman, superintendent, part owner, marriedthe banker’s daughter, got rich and went off to Paris to sin the sinsneglected during so busy a youth and early manhood.

It sounded reasonable and possible. Learning a craft was slow businessand 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 theywere coming into Ohio, and into all the mid-American states in greatnumbers, and no town was without hope of becoming an industrial centre.The bicycle had come, followed by the automobile, and even the quietcountry 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 apartmentbuilding with tiled bathroom floors, subways, jazz, the movies—was itnot all just at hand? I myself and long afterward tried a little, in anovel of mine called, “Poor White,” to give something of the feeling oflife in our towns at that time.

Oil and gas were spurting out of the ground in Ohio and the discoveryof oil and gas meant the coming of factories, it meant the New Age,prosperity, growth going onward and upward. “Death to everythingold, slow and careful! Forward the Light Brigade! Theirs not to askthe reason why! Theirs but to do or die”—the light brigade in ourparticular town consisting of every merchant, doctor, workman, lawyer,[Pg 86]who had saved a few pennies that could be invested. In our ears rangstories of the Lima Boom, the Gibsonburg boom, the Finley boom.

And was it not simple? One bored a hole deep down into the ground andout 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 groveof hickory trees where we lads had formerly gone for nuts and squirrelshooting on the fall days. In the field—a meadow—there had also beena baseball diamond, and sometimes visiting circuses set up their tentsthere; but now the hole had gone far down below the usually requireddepth and nothing had happened. Rumors ran through the streets. Thewell-drillers had come from over near Gibsonburg. Only a week or twobefore a stranger had got off a train, had walked about through thestreets, and had then visited the place where the drilling was goingon. He had been seen to speak with the drillers. No doubt our drillerswere in “cahoots” with the Rockefellers, the Morgans, or some ofthat crowd. Perhaps John D. himself had been pussyfooting about. Onecouldn’t tell. Stranger things than that had happened. Were we to becaught napping? It was decided to do what was called “shooting thewell.”

Surely here was something for a boy to take into account. Mysteriouswhisperings among our elders on the streets in the evening; plot andcounterplot; dark doings among the capitalists—“stand back, villain,[Pg 87]unhand the fair figure of our hopes and dreams”—ah! an explosion atthe 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 wouldflow wealth, factories, the very New Age itself.

One didn’t ask oneself how a participating interest in all these newglories was to be achieved, and in the whole town no man was moreexcited 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 thevery spot on which I am now standing there’ll be, why there’ll be ahuge office building, like as not.”

So sure was he of all this that the wealth of the future became inhis fancy a thing of the present, even of the past. He felt himselfmagnificently wealthy and, one day when he had been drinking and when,because of what we thought his lack of dignity, we youngsters hadtreated him to a rather thorough snubbing, he grew angry. Night cameand it rained. He went up into the garret of the house in which we thenlived 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 ofthe papers, burned them solemnly. We boys crowded to the kitchen windowto watch. There was the little flare of the flame and above it, and[Pg 88]leaning over, father’s stern face—and then darkness.

Back he came into the house and before he went away, to spend the restof the evening whispering of the wealth of the future with other menin the barrooms, he told us what had happened. “Do you know what thosepapers were?” he asked sharply. “They were deeds to the whole businesssection of the City of Cincinnati. I have been concealing from youthe fact that I had such papers, intending to leave them to you as aninheritance but—”

“Well, you have not seen fit to treat me with respect and I have burnedthem,” he declared, tramping out of the house.

* * * * *

Romance and mystery. There was the imagined figure of the shooter ofwells. 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 withchemistry,” said father.

And so there was this mysterious stuff frozen into solid cakes andcarted through the night, along unfrequented roads, by the heroicwell-shooter.

Now, there was a man to suit a boy’s fancy, that well-shooter, a fellowgoing 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 liesover the sea. My bonny lies over the ocean—Oh, bring back my bonny to[Pg 89]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 boysholds up his thumb. “You see that thumbnail?” he asks. “Well, a littlebit of that stuff, no more than would cover that thumbnail, would blowhim and his wagon to smithereens.” The question asked was, how muchfarther would, say a ton of the stuff, blow the outfit? Was there aland as far beyond smithereens as the stars from earth, to which thefellow 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 gotout of bed one morning, before dawn, and crept away into the darknessto 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 hadstock in the gas-well company, had let slip the carefully hoardedsecret of the hour when the fearful thing was to happen.

And so, there we were, ten or twelve of us, lying concealed in thewood. Dawn began to break. Birds and squirrels awoke in the trees overour heads. On the road that came out from town buggies and surreysappeared. 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 ofthe party, solid respectable men, with money in the bank. There was[Pg 90]Penny Jacobs, who kept a little candy store; Seth McHugh, cashier ofthe bank; Wilmott the lawyer, a dozen others. No doubt Em Harknesswas 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 otherHarkness who later became a man of vast wealth and a figure in theStandard Oil Company. His money built the Harkness Memorial atYale, and if our town did not achieve the prominent position in theIndustrial Age of which we all at that moment dreamed, we had at leastamong us the kin of royalty. We were not entirely left in the coldoutside world. A Harkness was a Harkness and we had a Harkness.

But to return to that significant moment in the field. As we ladslay in the wood, well concealed from the eyes of our elders, wewere silent. Solemnity lay like a frost over our young souls. Eventhe giggling and whispering that had gone on among us died now. Thewell-shooter was there and he had turned out to be just an ordinarylooking teamster with whiskers, but that did not matter.

Greater and more significant things were astir. Even the birds stoppedsinging and the squirrels chattered no more.

A long tube, containing no doubt the nitro-glycerine, had been loweredinto the hole in the ground and the honored guests of the occasion ranquickly across the field and stood among the trees near our hidingplace.

They were dressed, these serious-minded citizens, as for a wedding ora funeral. Even Penny Jacobs had put on what was called among us “aboiled shirt.”

What an occasion! Now we were, all of us, as we stood or lay under the[Pg 91]trees—we were all one thing; and presently there would be a terrificexplosion, far down in the earth, below our bellies as we lay sprawledin the wet grass—there would be this explosion, and then would we notall, at that moment, become something else?

“Bang!” we would go into the New Age—that was the idea. In thepresence of our elders, who now stood in silence very near us, we ladsall 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 parableof 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 thelike. Our fathers had worked with their hands. They had soiled theirclothes and their faces with common labor. Poor, benighted men! Whatdid they know of what Mark Twain called, “the glorious, rip-roaringcentury, greatest of all the centuries?” A man could make a wagon thatwould stand up, or shoe a horse, or build a house slowly and well, butwhat 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 aboutsmoking twenty-five-cent cigars; they would put their thumbs in thearmholes of their vests and laugh at the past. Men would fly throughthe air, dive under the sea, have breakfast in Cleveland, Ohio, andlunch 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[Pg 92]work. Some of our fathers had read a book called “Looking Backward” andhad talked about it in the homes and in the stores. Then we lads hadtalked. Well, a fellow would maybe roll downtown from his country homein the late morning and turn a few cranks or pull a few levers. Thenhe would go and play, make love to some beautiful female or take anafternoon’s ride over to Egypt to see the Pyramids, or visit the HolyLand. A fellow had to get up an appetite for dinner, dang it all!

Anyway, that was that, and there we were. The well-shooter droppeda heavy weight down the hole and cut out for the woods. When he washalfway across the meadow the rumbling explosion occurred, down in theearth.

And into the bright morning air shot a great fountain of mud and muddywater. The derrick over the hole was covered with it, the grass in themeadow was covered and much of it fell down like rain on us in thewood. 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 ofus had put on Sunday clothes. Our elders, who represented among us thecapitalistic class, went over and stood about the well for a time, andthen went sadly off up the road to unhitch their horses and drive backto town.

When we lads emerged from the woods no one was left but thewell-shooter, and he was suspect, and grumpy as well, not havingbreakfasted. Those of us whose fathers had no money invested wereinclined to take the whole matter as rather a delicious joke, but wereoverruled. We stood about for a time, staring at the well-shooter, who[Pg 93]was engaged in gathering his paraphernalia together, and then we alsomoved 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 thatnitro-glycerine only halfway down, and then set it off, that’s whathe could have done.” The idea, later taken up enthusiastically by theentire community, pleased us all. It was so apparent the well-shooterwas not the hero we had hoped. He didn’t look like a hero. “Well, mydad says he knows him. He lives over by Monroeville and he gets drunkand beats his wife, my dad says so,” another lad declared.

It was rather a good solution of our difficulty. If one can’t have ahero, who wants just a teamster?

It was infinitely better to have a villainous well-shooter about whoseMachiavellian machinations one’s imagination could linger in happiness.

IT must have been about this time that my own imaginative life beganto take form. Having listened to the tales told by my father, I wantedto begin inventing tales of my own. At that time and for long yearsafterward, there was no notion of writing. Did I want an audience,someone to hear me tell my tales? It is likely I did. There issomething of the actor in me.

When later I began to write I for a time told myself I would neverpublish, and I remember that I went about thinking of myself as a kindof heroic figure, a silent man creeping into little rooms, writingmarvelous tales, poems, novels—that would never be published.

Perhaps it never went quite that far. They would have to be publishedsometime. My vanity demanded that. Very well—I had died and had beenburied in some obscure place. In my actual physical life I had been ahouse-painter, a workman in a factory, an advertising writer—whateveryou 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 ora gambler to me.”

You see, I dreamed of something like that—dead and buried away—and[Pg 95]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, withoutmuch interest. But look! “Hello here! Say, here is something!”

You get the notion. I’ll not go into it further. It might have beena good card had I found within myself the courage to play it, but Ididn’t.

As to that first tale of mine and its invention. It grew out ofdissatisfaction with my father and a desire to invent another to takehis place. And professional jealousy may have had something to do withit. He had been strutting about long enough. “Get out from under thespotlight for a time, daddy. Give your son a chance to see what he cando,” I perhaps really wanted to say.

It was fall and father had taken me with him to do a house-paintingjob in the country. The year was growing old and bad rainy weather hadcome. Perhaps we could not finish the painting job we were about tobegin, but, as father had explained to the farmer who had just built anew house, we could at least put on a priming coat.

If the worst happened and we lost a good deal of time, waitingabout—“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 wagoninto which was to be packed the ladders, pots and other materials ofour trade, and by the time we had got to his place the rain, that hadpersisted for several days, began again. The carpenters were still atwork inside the house, so that nothing could be done there, and fatherwent off to the old cabin in which the farmer and his family were[Pg 96]living until the new house could be finished. He would spend the daygossiping with the women folk or perhaps reading some book he had foundin the house. The farmer had a barrel of hard cider in his cellar. Theday promised to be not too depressing for father.

As for myself, I made the acquaintance of the farmer’s son, a lad myown 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 goingto bring up some fence posts. Then we’ll take the gun and cut out. Ifhe gets onto us he’ll give me some job, make me wheel out manure, orwhitewash the henhouse, or something like that.”

We spent the morning and early afternoon tramping through muddy fieldsto visit the wood lots on neighboring farms and came home too late forthe 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 upinto the hay loft and burrowed down into the warm hay.

When we had finished eating our lunch and had got ourselves comfortablywarm my companion, a fat boy of perhaps sixteen, wanted to talk.

We talked as young males do, of hunting and what naturally good shotswe were but that we were not used to just the kind of gun we had beenhandling. Then we spoke of riding horses and how nice it would havebeen 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[Pg 97]wasn’t too hoity-toity. The fat boy had a sister of about his own agethat I wanted to ask about but didn’t dare. What was she like? Was shetoo 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? Idid once,” said the fat boy. “Kiss, eh? Is that all you’ve done?” Ianswered, feeling the necessity of maintaining a kind of advantage, dueto my position as a town boy.

The hay into which we had burrowed deeply, so that just our heads werein the outer air, was sweet to the nostrils and warm and we began togrow sleepy. What was the use of talking of girls? They were sillythings and had in some queer way the power to unman a boy, to make afellow act and feel nervous and uneasy.

We lay in silence, thinking each his own thoughts, and presently thefat 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 barnyardand began to talk.

The farmer explained that he had come into our country from NewEngland, from Vermont, when he was a young man, and had gone into debtfor two hundred acres of land, when land could be had cheap. He hadworked and he had achieved. In time the farm had been paid for andfifty additional acres bought. It had taken time, patience, and hardlabor. Much of the land had to be cleared. A man worked day and night,[Pg 98]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 everycomfort.” The house was to have a bathroom and a bathtub. It would costmoney and maybe it would be all foolishness, but he wanted his wifeto have it. When a man was young he didn’t mind splashing about in awashtub in a woodshed on Saturday evenings, but when he got a littleolder and had, now and then, a touch of rheumatism, well, he thoughthis wife deserved to have a bathtub in the house if she wanted it, nomatter what it cost.

Father agreed with his host. (It is perhaps as well to think of himas our host and ourselves as guests since we stayed two weeks andworked but two days.) He said that he had always felt just that wayhimself. Women were the weaker sex and a man had to take that intoconsideration. “You take a woman, now, that is like a horse and I don’tlike her,” said father. He spoke of mother as though she had been aweak, gentle thing, entirely dependent upon the strength in himself ingetting through her life. “I married my wife up in your own state, upin Vermont,” father said, indulging in one of his characteristic quickimaginative flights.

And now that he had got a start I knew there was no telling where hisflight might end and I listened for a time, and then, turning away indisgust, I began working my way downward into the hay. My mother, nowdead, was something I prized. He had just said she was born in Vermontof an old decayed English gentle family. She wasn’t very strong but[Pg 99]would have children. They were born one after the other, but, thankGod! 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 hewas 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 haveno more chance to do his own bragging. Father would invent anotherdecayed, gentle family in Kentucky to match the one he had just solightly brought into existence in the cold barren hills of Vermont.

But I was getting deeper and deeper down into the hay now and thesounds of his voice grew faint, words could no longer be distinguished.There was only a gentle murmuring sound, far off—like a summer breezejust stirring the leaves of a forest; or, better yet, like the softmurmur of some southern sea. Already, you see, I had begun readingromances and knew, in fancy, just how the seas of the South murmuredand beat upon coral islands; and then how the fearful hurricane cameramping along and swept the seas clear of ships. No one reads as a boyreads. The boy gives himself utterly to the printed page and perhapsthe most blessed of all the tribe of the inkpots are those who writewhat 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 ownSouthland, product of my own imaginings—not father’s. One could godeep down into the hay and still breathe. All sounds became faint,[Pg 100]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. Motherwas 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 ideaof 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 ageand a new land. Could I then have had all the thoughts I am now aboutto attribute to myself! Probably not. But these notes make no pretenseof being a record of fact. That isn’t their object. They are merelynotes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas thathave floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likelythat I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring bythe ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essenceof things. That’s what I’m after.

And haven’t we Americans built enough railroads and factories, haven’twe made our cities large and dirty and noisy enough, haven’t we beengiving ourselves to surface facts long enough? Let us away with thefact of existence, for the moment at least. You, the reader, are toimagine yourself sitting under a tree with me on a summer afternoon;or, better yet, lying with me in the sweet-smelling hay in an Ohiobarn. We shall let our fancies loose, lie to ourselves if you please.Let us not question each other too closely.

[Pg 101]

There is America, now. What is America? Whee! I say, now, don’t beginwith such a gigantic question as that.

Let’s think a little about what it isn’t. It isn’t English, for onething, and—isn’t it odd?—the notion persists that it is. If we areever to have a race of our own here—if the melting pot we are alwaystalking 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, forthe old influences to hold in the end.

But is it not odd how that old notion persists? A few English came andsettled in that far-away frozen northeast corner—New England—andtheir sons did the book-writing and the school-teaching. They did notget themselves—physically—as breeders—very deeply into the new bloodof the land, but they made their notion of what we are and of what weare to be stick pretty well.

In time, however, the basic cultural feeling of the land must changetoo. Mind cannot persist without body. Blood will tell.

And in my own time I was to see the grip of the old New England, thePuritanic culture, begin to loosen. The physical incoming of the Celts,Latins, Slavs, men of the Far East, the blood of the dreaming nationsof the world gradually flowing thicker and thicker in the body ofthe American, and the shrewd shop-keeping money-saving blood of thenorthern men getting thinner and thinner.

But I run far, far ahead of myself. Did my own fancy, even then, asa boy, lying in the hay in the barn, did it run ahead of my own day[Pg 102]and my own time? Of that I cannot say, but of one thing I am quitecertain—in all my life I have never for a moment subscribed to thephilosophy of life as set forth by the Saturday Evening Post,the Atlantic Monthly, Yale, “Upward and Onward,” “TheWhite Man’s Burden,” etc.

There was always within me a notion of another aspect of life—at leastfaintly felt—a life that dreamed a little of more colorful and gaudythings—cruelty and tragedy creeping in the night, laughter, splashingsunlight, the pomp and splendor of the old tyrants, the simple devotionof old devotees.

Had I not seen and did I not then sharply remember that old grandmotherfrom the southeast of Europe, she with the one eye and the quick, darkand dangerous temper! There were possibilities of cruelty in her. Onceshe had tried to kill my sister with a butcher knife, and one couldthink of her as killing with a laugh on her lips. Having known her onecould easily conceive of the possibility of a life in which cruelty hadits place too.

At that moment as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay and when thefancy 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 oldwoman who was my grandmother was more in my line.

And no doubt the warmth of the hay itself may have had something to dowith the setting and the mood of my first invented tale, as you willperceive as you read of it. Cruelty, like breadfruit and pineapples, isa product, I believe, of the South.

[Pg 103]

By the tale, told me by my parents, I had myself been born in a placecalled Camden, Ohio, and in the articles touching on my birthplace thathave appeared in newspapers that town has always been named. It was oneof the towns through which father and mother had trekked when they werefirst married.

Father must have had a little money at that time, as there is atradition 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 peopleand only have the notion because I cannot conceive of his having earnedit or of his having made it by his shrewdness.

And so he was a merchant then, the grandest thing one could be in asmall Ohio town at that time. He kept shop in places known as Camden,Morning Sun and Caledonia, Ohio. I believe he and President Hardingonce played in the same brass band at Caledonia.

He was in the saddlery and harness business and you cannot fail tocatch the flavor of that. There would be a little shop on the town’smain street with a leather horse collar hanging on a peg over thesidewalk before the door. Inside there would be shiny new harnesshanging 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 shouldersand throwing them with a great rattle and bang on the floor—the rich[Pg 104]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 awooden box filled with sawdust into which the workmen and the visitingfarmers, all of whom would chew tobacco, could spit—

Father prancing about—the young merchant then, with the youngmerchant’s heavy silver watch and gold chain—a prospective MarshallField, a Wanamaker, a Julius Rosenwald, in his own fancy, perhaps.

“Hello, you, Ted. When you go’en a get that trace sewed up? Thesenew fangle factory harnesses ain’t worth a tinker’s dam. How’s wheatlooking 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 fellowsaid—‘all Democrats ain’t horse thieves, but all horse thieves isdemocrats’? 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 ofthe town myself waiting to be born.

What is a birth? Has a man no rights of his own?

SUCH a birth in an Ohio Village—the neighbor women coming in tohelp—rather fat women in aprons.

They have had children of their own and are not too excited, but standabout, waiting and indulging in gossip. “If the men had to have thebabies there would never be more than one child in a family. Whatdo men know about suffering? It’s the women who have to do all thesuffering in life, I always said—I said a woman feels everythingdeeper than a man—don’t you think so? A woman has intuition, that’swhat it is.”

And then the doctor coming hurriedly, father having run for him. Hewould be a large man with side whiskers and large red hands. Well; heis a doctor of the new school, a modernist, like the child he is aboutto help into the world. What he believes in, is fresh air. Wherever hegoes, and no matter what the disease he is treating, he always saysthe same things. Modernists sometimes are like that. “Clean and freshair—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 wellbe cheerful. Cheerfulness is a great healer, and what he believes in isin making his patients smile in the midst of suffering. “Do you want[Pg 106]to know why I’m so strong on cleanliness?” he asks. “It’s because I’m adamned sinner, I guess, and I don’t go to church, and I’ve heard thatcleanliness is next to Godliness. I’m trying to slip into Heaven on acake of soap—ha! that’s what I’m up to.”

A quick nervous laugh from the lips of father. He goes out of thehouse to tell the story to a neighbor he has seen raking leaves in anear-by yard. It is September now. He is a little unstrung. Under suchconditions a man feels faintly guilty. People conspire to give himthe feeling. It is as though all the women of the town were pointingaccusing fingers and as though all the men were laughing, “greasy-eyedmarried men,” Bernard Shaw once called them. One will have to set upthe cigars to the men, darn ’em. As for the women—they are saying,half jokingly, half in earnest: “There, you devil; see what you havedone—this is your doings.”

Father stands beside the fence telling the doctor’s joke to theneighbor, who has heard it many times before but who, out of sympathy,now laughs heartily. As though drawn toward each other by someinvisible cord they both sidle along the fence until they are standingclose together. It is a moment of masculine obscurity. Men must standshoulder to shoulder. The women have the centre of the stage—as fatherwould have said later, when he became an actor and loved to sling theactor’s jargon, they were “hogging the footlights.”

Not quite succeeding however. This is the moment for me to come uponthe stage. The two men stand closely together, father fingeringnervously the heavy gold watch chain—he is soon to lose it with allhis other property in one of his frequent business failures—and from[Pg 107]the house comes a faint cry. To the two men standing there it soundsnot unlike the cry of a puppy inadvertently stepped on by a carelessmaster, and father jumps suddenly aside so that his neighbor laughsagain.

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, andas the resentment—born in me through having been made the son oftwo decaying, gentle families—grew deeper and deeper, and also asthe grateful warmth of the departed summer—captured and held by thehay—stole over my body, cold from the day of tramping in the wood ina cold rain in pursuit of the squirrels—as the warmth took hold of mybody, the scene of my actual birth hour, just depicted, faded. I fledfrom the field of fact and into the field of fancy.

Upon the sand on a desolated coast far down on the Gulf of Mexico anathletic 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 bylooking at him casually, that he has retained all the youthful strengthand elasticity of his splendid body. He has a small black mustache andblack hair and his skin is burned to a deep brown. Even as he lies,[Pg 108]relaxed and listless, on the yellow sand a glow of life and of strengthseems to emanate from him.

As he lies thus one can tell, any schoolboy could tell, that he isphysically made to be the very ideal of American romance. He is a manof action—young and strong—there can be little doubt he is a manof daring. What might not be done with such a man! Throw him backinto the days of the early pioneers and he will turn you out anotherDaniel Boone. He will creep through hundreds of miles of forests,never disturbing a grass blade, and bring you back the fair daughterof the English nobleman, traveling in this country, whose daughterinadvertently went for an afternoon’s stroll in the wood and wascaptured by a skulking Indian; or he will shoot you a squirrel in theeye 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 campnow, wearing a silk shirt and a Stetson hat. He will lose you a wholefortune without the bat of an eye, but his personal associates are abit rough. He is always being seen about with Black Peg, who runs ahouse of prostitution, and with Silent Smith, the killer.

Until, well, until one day when a New England school-teacher comesinto the rough mining camp. One night she is set upon and is about tobe outraged by a drunken miner. Then he, the associate of Black Peg,steps forward and shoots the miner. Ten minutes before, he was drunkand lying in the gutter, so drunk in fact that flies had been usinghis eyeballs as sliding places, but the danger to the school-teacher[Pg 109]had sobered him instantly. He is a gentleman now. He offers theschool-teacher his arm and they walk to her cabin discussing Emersonand Longfellow, and then our central figure of romance leaves her ather cabin door and goes to a lonely spot in the mountains. He sits downto wait until winter and the deep snows come, in order that he mayfreeze to death. He has realized that he loves the New England ladyand is, in the language of the Far West, as set forth in all the bestbooks, “not fitten for her.”

The truth is that father, that is to say, my fanciful father, mightwell 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 Londonhe might have been another Sea Wolf or a musher trudging throughthe deep snow of the frozen North, cornering some fair virgin in anisolated cabin, only to let her off at the last moment out of respectfor her dead mother, who expected something quite different of her.Then later he might have gone to Yale, and after that become a stockbroker, taking daring chances with railroad stocks, married a woman wholoved only the glare and shine of social life, chucked her, failed inbusiness, gone farming, and turned out a clean man after all, say inthe pages of the Saturday Evening Post. It could have been done.

Where my fanciful father was unfortunate, however, was in that he hadto live in the fancy of a boy in a hay barn—one who had as yet hadlittle or no experience with heroes.

And then there is no doubt he, from the first, had certain weaknesses.[Pg 110]He wasn’t always kind to old women and children and, as you will seein the sequel, he wasn’t to be trusted with a virgin. He just wouldn’tbehave himself, and when it comes to this matter of virgins, perhapsthe least said about any man’s attitude toward them—except, to besure, in novels and in the movies—the better. As Mr. Howells oncepointed out, “it is better to present to the readers only the brighterand more pleasant aspects of our common lives.”

However, let us return to the man lying on the sand. There he is, yousee, and it was sure he had been all his life, at any rate, a man ofaction. The Civil War had just come to an end a few years before andduring the war he had been rather busily engaged. He had gone intothe war as a spy for the Federal government and when he had got intothe South had managed to engage himself as a spy for the Confederateside also. This had permitted him to move rather freely back and forthand to do well carrying contraband goods. When he had no specialinformation to give to one or the other of his employers he couldinvent information—during a war that is always easy. He was, as I havesaid, a man of action. He aimed to get results, as they say in theadvertising profession.

The war at an end, he had gone into the South, having several projectsin mind and, at the time we meet him first, he was waiting on thelonely coast to sight a ship that was to bring some business associatesof 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 wasengaged in the business of smuggling firearms to various revolutionaryparties in South American republics and was now only waiting for the[Pg 111]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 beforedarkness settled down over the lonely sand dunes a ship appeared. Mymythical 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 boatswere lowered. Some ten or twelve men were coming ashore and with thema woman. When they had got into the boats the ship did not wait butimmediately steamed away.

The man on the beach began gathering a great pile of sticks and bits ofdriftwood, preparative to building a fire, and now and then he turnedhis head to look toward the approaching boats. That there was a womanamong his visitors bothered him. Women were always interfering withbusiness. Why had they wanted to bring a woman? “To the deuce withwomen!” he growled, making his way through the deep sand with a greatpile of sticks in his arms.

Then the boat had landed and there was the old Harry to pay. Arevolutionary party in one of the South American republics had goneto pieces and nearly all its members had been arrested and were to beexecuted. There was no money to pay for the firearms that were to havebeen shipped, and the little band of men, now standing on the lonelybeach 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 asteamer, and one among them had in his possession money enough to bribethe steamer captain to bring them to this spot, where they were to[Pg 112]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 ofone of the wealthiest sugar planters of her native land, she had givenher young soul to the cause of the revolution and when the smash camehad been compelled to fly with the others. Her own father disowned herin 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 theship, 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 hopeexpressed by the leader of the party, that the firearms smuggler wouldguide them inland. They had friends in America but had they landedat a regular port of entry it might well have turned out that theirown government would have asked the American government to send themhome—to face the consequences of their folly.

With a grim smile on his cruel lips my fanciful father had heard themout in silence and now began building a fire. Night came and he movedsoftly about. A strange and new impulse had come into his hard andcruel heart. He had fallen instantly in love with the young femaleleader of revolution from the foreign land and was trying to figure outhow 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 toperform all that had been asked of him, but declaring that the youngwoman could not be compelled to spend the night in such a place.[Pg 113]Speaking in the Spanish language—with which he was marvelouslyconversant—he commanded the others to stay by the fire while he tookthe young woman inland to where, some two miles away, he declared hehad some horses concealed in the stable of an oyster thief, a friend ofhis who lived up the bay.

The others consenting, he and the young woman set off. She was verybeautiful and, as they had all been seated about the fire, she had kepther eyes almost constantly upon the American.

He was of the type of which American heroes are made, you see, and shehad, in her young girlhood, read American novels. In American novels,as in American plays—as everyone knows—a man can, just as well asnot, be a horse thief, a desperado, a child-kidnapper, a gentlemanburglar, or a well-poisoner for years and years, and then, in aninstant, become the sweetest and most amiable fellow possible, and withperfect manners too. It is one of the most interesting things about usAmericans. No doubt it came to us from the English. It seems to be anAnglo-Saxon trait and a very lovely one too. All anyone need do is tomention 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 cabinon a mountain at night with a virgin.

With some of us—that is to say, with those of us who have gone intopolitics—the same results can sometimes be had by speaking of thesimple and humble laboring man, but it is the virgin that gets us everyshot. In bringing out all the best in us she is a hundred per cent.efficient.

[Pg 114]

In the presence of a virgin something like a dawn among mountainscreeps over the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon and a gentle light comes intohis 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 surprisedto see how everything clears up after that.

* * * * *

I, however, digress. In my enthusiasm for my fellows I jerk myself tooviolently out of my boyhood. No boy could so wholeheartedly appreciateor understand our national traits.

The story I had set myself down to tell was that of my own birth intothe world of fancy—as opposed to the rather too realistic birthalready 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 inthe 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 commoneveryday humdrum existences.

And if you have read Freud you will find it of additional interestthat, in my fanciful birth, I have retained the very form and substanceof my earthly mother while getting an entirely new father, whom I setup—making anything but a hero of him—only to sling mud at him. I amgiving myself away to the initiated, that is certain.

But be that as it may, however, there is mother lying in bed in alonely 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.)[Pg 115]Mother has been honorably married to my fanciful father on that veryevening when she went with him from among her fellow-countrymen,sitting by the fire on that other beach, and after just such ametamorphosis of his character as she had come to expect through havingread American novels and through having seen two or three Americanplays produced in the capital of her native land.

After having secured the horses from the stable of the oyster thiefthey had ridden off together and had come at last into a deep forest ofmagnolia trees in blossom. A southern moon came up into the sky and sosoft was the night, so gentle the breezes from the now distant sea, andso sweet the hum of insect life under their horses’ feet, that motherfound herself speaking of her lost home and of her mother.

To my fanciful father the combination—the deep forest, the scent ofthe magnolia blossoms and the word “mother”—together with the factthat he was alone in a dark place with a virgin, an innocent one, thesethings were all irresistible to him. The metamorphosis spoken of abovetook place, and he proposes marriage and on the spot proposed to live abetter life.

And so they rode together out of the forest and were married, but, inhis case, the metamorphosis did not hold.

Within a few months he had gone back to his old life, leaving motheralone in a strange land until the time should come when I, having beenborn, 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[Pg 116]day and I, having just been ushered into the world by the aid of afisherman’s wife, who also does duty as a midwife in that isolatedplace and who has now left to return again late at night—I, havingbeen so born, am lying on the bed beside mother and thinking my firstthoughts. In my own fancy I was, from the very first, a remarkablechild and did not cry out as most newly born infants do, but lay buriedin deep thought. In the little hut it is stifling hot, and flies andother winged insects of the warm South are buzzing in the air. Strangeinsects of gigantic size crawl over the walls and, from far-awaysomewhere, there comes the murmur of the sea. Mother is lying besideme, weak and wan.

We lie there for a long time and, young as I am, I realize that she istired and discouraged about life. “Why has not life in America turnedout 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 andfreshness of outlook, am not discouraged.

There is a sound outside the cabin, the swishing sound of heavy feetdragged through the hot dry sands, and the low moaning sound of a womancrying.

Again a steamer, from foreign parts, has visited that lonely coastand again a boat has been lowered. In the boat is my fanciful fatheraccompanied by four of his evil henchmen and accompanied also byanother 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 lovewith her captor (owing to the strange natures of women, this, youwill understand, is entirely possible), and father has had the cruelimpulse to bring the two women together. Perhaps he wants to see them[Pg 117]suffer the pangs of jealousy.

But he will get no such pangs from mother. With her son beside her shelies silently waiting.

For what? That is the question that, try as he would, the son could notanswer.

And so the two lie there in silence on the poor bed in the hut whilethat strange monster of a man drags another woman across the yellowsands and in at the door of the hut. What has happened is that he hasgone back to his old wicked life and, with his comrade, has joinedanother revolutionary party in another South American republic, andthis time the revolution has been successful and he and his partnershave helped sack a South American city.

At the forefront of the invaders was my fanciful father and—whateverelse may be said of him it can never be said that he lacked incourage—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, whenthe city was being sacked, he demanded riches for his men but took nonefor himself. For his own portion of the loot he had taken the virginaldaughter of the leader of the Federal forces and it was this woman hewas now dragging in at the door of our hut.

She was very beautiful and perhaps, had I been older, I should not haveblamed 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 astep and leaned against the wall of the cabin, still however clingingto the hand of his new-found woman. “I had hoped to arrive before or[Pg 118]at the very hour of birth, I had counted on that,” he muttered, cursingunder his breath.

For a moment he stood looking at mother and myself and both of uslooked calmly at him.

“Birth—the birth hour—is the test of womanhood,” he said, takinghold of the shoulder of his new woman and shaking her violently, asthough to fix her attention. “I wanted you to see how the women of myown race meet bravely all such trying situations; for, as you mustknow, by the customs of my country, the woman who marries an Americanbecomes instantly an American, with all the American virtues. It is ourclimate, 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 istherefore above me, as far above me as the stars.

“I cannot live with her. She is too good, too brave,” said my fancifulfather, staggering through the door and dragging his woman after him.Outside the door I heard him still talking loudly to his new woman asthey went away. “Our Anglo-Saxon women are the most wonderful creaturesin the world,” I heard him saying. “In a few years now they will runthe 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 theabsurd scene depicted above? Although I was very young I had alreadyread many novels and stories.

[Pg 119]

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 playwith brightly colored marbles. From the beginning there has been, asopposed to my actual life, these grotesque fancies. Later, to be sure,I did acquire more or less skill in bringing them more and more closelyinto the world of the actual. They were but the raw materials withwhich the story-writer must work as the worker in woods works withtrees cut in a forest.

As for the fancies themselves, they have always seemed to me like treesthat have grown without having been planted. Later, after the periodin my own life of which I am now writing, I worked for many years asa laborer in many places, and gradually as I stood all day beside alathe in some factory, or later went about among business men tryingto sell some article, in which I was myself not interested, I began tolook at other men and to wonder what absurd fancies went on in secretwithin them. There was that curiosity and there was something else. Ihad perhaps, as I have no doubt all people have, a great desire to beloved and a little respected. My own fancies rule me. Even to-day Icannot go into a movie theatre and see there some such national heroas, say, Bill Hart, without wishing myself such another. In the theatreI sit looking at the people and see how they are all absorbed in theaffairs of the man on the stage. Now he springs lightly off a horse andgoes toward the door of a lonely cabin. We, in the theatre, know thatwithin the cabin are some ten desperate men all heavily armed with gunsand with them, bound to a chair, is a fair woman, another virgin gotoff the reservation, as it were. Bill stops at the door of the cabin[Pg 120]and takes a careful look at his guns, and we, in the audience, knowwell enough that in a few minutes now he will go inside and just shootall 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 toneed the help of the virgin in getting out of the cabin and onto hishorse—so he can ride to her father’s ranch house and go to bed and getwell after a while, in time for the wedding.

All these things we know, but we love our Bill and can hardly waituntil the shooting begins. As for myself I never see such a performancebut that I later go out of the theatre and, when I get off into a quietstreet alone, I become just such another. Looking about to see that Iam unobserved, I jerk two imaginary guns out of my hip pockets and drawa quick bead on some near-by tree. “Dog,” I cry, “unhand her!” All myearly reading of American literature comes into my mind and I try todo a thing that is always being spoken of in the books. I try to makemy eyes narrow to pin points. Bill Hart can do it wonderfully in thepictures and why not I? As I sat in the movie house it was evidentthat Bill Hart was being loved by all the men women and childrensitting about and I also want to be loved—to be a little dreaded andfeared, too, perhaps. “Ah! there goes Sherwood Anderson! Treat him withrespect. He is a bad man when he is aroused. But treat him kindly andhe 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[Pg 121]that, and later as a man standing by a lathe in some factory some suchnotion must have still been in my mind. I wanted then to be somethingheroic in the eyes of my own mother, now dead, and at the same timewanted 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 worldcreated within one’s fancy.

And what a world that fanciful one—how grotesque, how strange, howteeming 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 andtell but a few of the fancies that have come to me. There is a worldinto which no one but myself has ever entered and I would like to takeyou there; but how often when I go, filled with confidence, to the verydoor leading into that strange world, I find it locked! Now, in themorning, I myself cannot enter the land into which all last night, as Ilay awake in my bed, I went alone at will.

There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tellyou. 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 shouldlike you to talk. There is the old woman accompanied by the giganticdogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day, the stout man with thegray eyes and with the pack on his back, who stands talking to thebeautiful woman as she sits in her carriage, the little dark woman withthe boyish husband who lives in a small frame house by a dusty road farout, in the country.

These and many other figures, all having a life of their own, all[Pg 122]playing forever in the field of my fancy. The fanciful shadowy lifestriving to take on flesh, to live as you and I live, to come out ofthe 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 organizethis inner life, I wondered often if a woman, being pregnant, andwalking about through the streets, past factory doors, in the “loopdistrict” of Chicago, let us say, if such a woman being conscious ofsomething alive within—that is, at the moment a part of herself, fleshof her flesh, and that will presently come out of herself to live itsown life, in a world her eyes now see passing before her—if such awoman does not have dreadful moments of fear.

To the tale-teller, you must understand, the telling of the tale isthe cutting of the natal cord. When the tale is told it exists outsideoneself and often it is more living than the living man from whom itcame. The imagined figure may well live on and on in the fanciful lifeof others after the man from whose lips it came, or whose fingersguided the pen that wrote the tale, long after he is forgotten, andI have myself had some curious experiences of this sort. A publicspeaker, in speaking of my Winesburg tales, praised me as a writerbut spoke slightingly of the figures that lived in the tales. “Theyweren’t worth telling about,” he said; and I remember that I sat at theback of the room, filled with people, hearing him speak, and remembersharply 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 theman not understand that he was doing a quite unpermissible thing? As[Pg 123]well go into the bedroom of a woman during her lying-in and say toher: “You are no doubt a very nice woman, but the child to which youhave just given birth is a little monster and will be hanged.” Surelyany man can understand that, to such a one, it might be permitted tospeak at any length regarding her own failings as a woman, but—if thechild live—surely this other thing must not be done. “It must not becondemned for the failings of the mother,” I thought, shivering withfright. As I sat listening certain figures, Wing Biddlebaum, HughMcVey, Elizabeth Willard, Kate Swift, Jesse Bentley, marched across thefield of my fancy. They had lived within me, and I had given a kindof life to them. They had lived, for a passing moment anyway, in theconsciousness of others beside myself. Surely I myself might well beblamed—condemned—for not having the strength or skill in myself togive them a more vital and a truer life—but that they should be calledpeople not fit to be written about filled me with horror.

However, I again find myself plunging forward into a more advancedand sophisticated point of view than could have been held by the boy,beginning to remake his own life more to his own liking by plunginginto a fanciful life. I shall be blamed. Those of my critics whodeclare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over themeandering formlessness of these notes.

It does not matter. My point is that, in the boy, as later in the maninto whom the boy is to grow, there are two beings, each distinct, eachhaving 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[Pg 124]priming coat on a new house built by a prosperous Ohio farmer. In myday we used a dirty yellow ochre for the purpose. The color satisfiedno sensual part of myself. How I hated it! It was used because it wascheap and later was to be covered up, buried away out of sight. Uglycolors, buried away out of sight, have a way of remaining always insight in the consciousness of the painter who has spread them.

* * * * *

In the hayloft the fat boy was awake now. Darkness was coming fast andhe must bestir himself, must if possible escape the wrath of his fatherfor the day wasted in entertaining me. He crawled up out of his ownhole and, reaching down, put a fat hand on my shoulder and shook me. Hehad a plan for his own escape which he whispered to me as my head cameup 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 liefor him. Now he would creep away unseen to the house and frankly tellhis mother he has been fooling about with me all day long. She wouldscold a little but, after a time, when his father came into the housefor supper and when in harsh tones he asked what the boy had beendoing, the gentle little lie would come. “It won’t really be a lie,”the fat boy declared stoutly, defending the virtue of his mother. “Doyou expect me to do all the housework and the churning as well?” thefarm woman would ask her husband sharply. She, it seemed, was a personof understanding and did not expect a boy to do a man’s work all thetime. “You’d think dad never was a kid,” he whispered to me. “He worksall the time and he wants me to work all the time too. I wouldn’t[Pg 125]never have no fun if it wasn’t for ma. Gee, I only wish I had a dadlike 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 thefloor of the barn and he ran away to the farmhouse, his feet making nosound in the soft mud of the farmyard. The rain persisted and the nightwould be cold. In another part of the barn the farmer was doing hisevening chores, assisted by father—always the accommodating one—whoheld 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 knewall the farm horses by name and spoke of them familiarly. “How manyears for old Frank? Does Topsy get five ears too?”

Outside the barn, as I stood under the eaves, there was still a faintstreak of light in the western sky, and the new house we were to givethe priming coat, built close down to the road, could still be seen.Little strings of water fell from the roof above and made a tinystream 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 ahouse! When the fat boy grew into manhood he would inherit the houseand many broad acres. He also would be rich and would have a greathouse, with bathrooms and perhaps electric lights. The automobile hadcome. No doubt he would have one. How magnificent a house, a farm, anautomobile—a beautiful wife to lie with him at night! I had been toSunday 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[Pg 126]world to look forward to but who nevertheless did unspeakable things.

And now the voices of the men inside the barn seemed far away. Thenew house was in some queer way a menace to me. I wondered why. Theolder house, the one the young New Englander had builded when hehad first come into the new land, stood far away from the road. Onewent, from the barns, along a path to the right. The path lay besidean apple orchard, and at the orchard’s end there was a bridge over asmall stream. Then one crossed the bridge and started climbing thehill against the side of which the house had been built. It had beenbuilt of logs, very solidly, on a small terrace, and as the farmer hadbegun to prosper wings had been added. Back of the house stood foresttrees, some the same trees that had been there when the first room ofthe 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 nowstood, and then during the long winter he had felled many other treesin the flat plain below, where his farming land was to lie, and, on acertain day, there had no doubt been a log-rolling, with other youngfarmers and their women coming from far and near. A whole forest ofmagnificent trees had been rolled into a great pile and burned—therehad been feastings, tests of physical strength among the young men, afew unmarried fellows about, looking shyly at the unmarried girls, gameon the table, talk in the evening of the possibilities of a war withthe slaveholding farmers of the South.

All these things the older house had seen as it crouched on the sideof the hill, and now it seemed to have crept away out of sight in[Pg 127]the darkness, hidden itself among the trees still left standing onthe hill; but even as I stood looking lights began to appear at itswindows. The old house seemed smiling and calling to me. Now, myselfand my brothers had no home—the house in which we at that time livedwas not a home—for us there could be no home now that mother was notthere. We but stayed temporarily in a house, with a few sticks offurniture—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 somesolid citizen of our town, a carpenter, Vet Howard, a wheelwright,Val Voght, a white bearded old merchant, Thad Hurd. In the eyes ofthese older people, as they talked to me, there was something, a lightshining 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 wasnot 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 theboy on the village street? I remember the old merchant spoke of God,but the carpenter and the wheelwright spoke of something else—of thenew times coming. “Things are on the march,” they said, “and the newgeneration will do great things. We older fellows belong to somethingthat is passing. We had our trades and worked at them, but you youngfellows have to think of something else. It is going to be a time whenmoney will count big, so save your money, boy. You have energy. I’vewatched you. Now you are a little wild after the girls and going todances. I saw you going down toward the cemetery with that little[Pg 128]Truscan girl last Wednesday evening. Better cut that all out. Work.Save money. Get into the manufacturing business if you can. The thingnow is to get rich, be in the swim. That’s the ticket.”

The older fellows had said these words to me, somewhat wistfully, asthe old house, hidden now in the darkness, seemed to look at me. Was itbecause the men who said the words were themselves not quite convinced?Did the old American farmhouse among the trees know the end of its lifewas at hand and was it also calling wistfully to me?

One remains doubtful and, as I now sit writing, I am most doubtful ofall the veracity of this impression I am trying to give of myself as aboy 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 theprospect ahead of some day owning land of my own and having a big newhouse and an automobile? Or did my eyes but turn hungrily toward theolder house because it represented to my lonely heart the presence of amother—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 myfather’s blood in me) achieve.

Old houses in which long lives have been lived, in which men and womenhave lived, suffered and endured together—a people, my own people,come to a day when entire lives are lived in one place, a people whohave come to love the streets of old towns, the mellow color of thestone walls of old houses.

Did I want these things, even then? Being an American in a new landand facing a new time, did I want even what Europe must have meant[Pg 129]in the hearts of many of the older men who had talked to the boy onthe streets of an Ohio town? Was there something in me that, at themoment, went wandering back through the blood of my ancestors, throughthe blood of the ancestors of the men about me—to England, to Italy,Sweden, Russia, France, Germany—older places, older towns, olderimpulses?

The new house, the farmer was having built, stood clear of theforest and directly faced the dirt road that led into town. It hadinstinctively run out to meet the coming automobile and the interurbancar—and how blatantly it announced itself! “You see I am new, I costmoney. 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 constructedand at bottom ugly? Could I have known that even as a boy? To make sucha declaration would, I am sure, be giving myself an early criticalinstinct too much developed. It would be making something of a littlemonster 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 longago, 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 thebridge leading to the old house, sad and frightened. Before him lay alife of adventures (imagined if not actually experienced), but at themoment he went not toward the future but toward the past. In the olderhouse there was, to be sure, a meal to be had without labor—in this[Pg 130]case a meal prepared at the hands of a kindly faced woman—and therewas also a warm bed into which the boy could crawl to indulge all nightlong undisturbed in his dreams; but there was something else. A senseof security? It may be, after all, just the sense of security, orassurance of warmth, food, and leisure—most of all leisure—the boywanted on that evening, that, for some reason I cannot explain, markedthe end of boyhood for him.

I WAS rolling kegs of nails out of a great sheet-iron warehouse andonto 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 wereheavy but they were not large, and as they were rolled down a slightincline to the platform the rolling could be done with the foot. Likepractically all modern workmen my body had plenty to do but my mind wasidle. There was no planning of the work, no scheming to make the day’swork fit the plan. The truckmen, four heavy and good-natured Swedes,loaded the trucks, and that also required no skill. The kegs were soheavy that a few of them only could be put on a truck at one time andthe trucks did not have to be loaded skillfully.

As for the nails themselves, they came pouring out of machinessomewhere back in the factory at the edge of which the warehouse stood.

The warehouse had two platforms, one at which cars were loaded and ourown for the loading of trucks, and I could hear voices on the otherplatform—an oath, a broken laugh—but never did I see the men employedthere.

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[Pg 134]the winter, hockey. He continually boasted of his prowess in games andwhen the warehouse foreman was not about—he seldom appeared on ourplatform—the athlete stopped work to tell one of the teamsters a story.

The stories all concerned one impulse in life, and as I had grownunspeakably weary of hearing them and indeed doubted the man’s potency,he was so insistent about it, I did not stop working but rolledkegs busily. The teamster laughed heavily. “There was a fat woman,hanging out clothes, on a line. Two stray dogs came along,” etc. Thestory-teller himself laughed as he told his tale and sometimes glaredat 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 thetrucks were quiet beasts with broad flanks, and as he talked, tellinghis tales, they switched their tails slowly back and forth, drivingflies away. Then they turned their heads to look at me, running outof 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 alsoseemed to be saying.

My legs and arms, my body had enough to do but my mind was idle. Duringthe year before I had been with race horses, going with them about Ohioto 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 notthink I could find at the tracks. The life of the sporting fraternityhad color and the horses themselves, beautiful temperamental things,fascinated me, but I hungered for something of my own. At the tracksone received a succession of thrills and was kept on the alert but the[Pg 135]emotions aroused were all vicarious.

“No Wonder,” a gray pacer, was on the track for his morning workout andI, 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 aboutto do what we called “setting him down.” His flanks flattened and heseemed to spring into his stride, and what a stride it was! He fairlyflew over the ground and the boy by the fence, half asleep but a momentbefore, was now all attention. He leaned far over the fence to watchand wait. Now the gray was making the upper turn and soon he would beheaded directly down the home stretch. By leaning far forward the boycould see just the play of the muscles over the powerful breast. Oh,the flying legs, the distended nostrils, the sobbing whistle of thewind in and out of the great lungs!

But all vicarious after all, all something outside myself. I rubbed thelegs of the horses and later walked them slowly for miles, cooling themout 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, aMurphy? Something whispered to me that I could not. There was requiredof a successful horseman something I did not have. Either the trottingor the running tracks required a calm, a seemingly indifferent exteriorI could not achieve. A track negro with whom I worked had spokendiscouraging words. “You’re too excitable, too flighty,” he said. “Ahorse, that wanted to, would know how to bluff you. You ain’t made toget all they is outen a horse.”

[Pg 136]

Restlessness had taken hold of me and I had left the tracks to go visitcertain cities.

The work, I found, did not tire me and after the longest and hardestday I went to my room, bathed, took off my sweaty clothes and was a newman, quite refreshed and ready for adventure.

At the warehouse a kind of understanding between myself and theSwedish teamsters, had already been achieved. When they returned withthe empty trucks along the short street between our warehouse andthe wharf they stopped at a saloon to have filled the tin pails forbeer they carried on the trucks, and the athlete and myself had alsoprovided ourselves with pails which they had filled for us. Aha! theathlete might boast of his prowess on the baseball field or at playinghockey in the winter, but I could outdrink him and in the eyes of theteamsters that made me the better man. How foolish the athlete! Had hedeclined to have anything to do with drink all might have been wellwith him, but as the ability to “carry your liquor” was an acceptedstandard among us he foolishly accepted it. On hot days and in thelate afternoon the pails were sent frequently to the saloon and theathlete became worried. “Ah, let’s cut it out,” he said to me coaxinglyand the teamsters laughed. “Why, Eddie, we haven’t had any at allyet,” they said; but he insisted, was compelled to insist. Already hestaggered a little as he rolled the kegs out of the warehouse and nowit was my turn to loiter with the teamsters while he worked. No morestory-telling now. “I have a kind of headache to-day,” he said, whilethe teamsters and I drank six, eight, sometimes ten or twelve of thegenerous portions of strong beer, flauntingly. As the beer was paid[Pg 137]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 discomfitureof my fellow-worker, and something happened inside my head. My legsremained steady and I could roll the kegs more rapidly and accuratelythan ever—they became like corks and I fairly whirled them along thewarehouse floor and down the incline and to the trucks—but at the sametime all reality became strangely colored and overlaid with unrealityinside myself. Beyond the roadway, in which the trucks stood, there wasa vacant lot and this now became the centre of my attention. The vacantlot was in reality filled with rubbish, rusty tin cans, piles of dirt,broken wagon wheels and wornout household utensils, and among all thisfoul stuff dirty-faced children played and screamed; but now all thisunsightliness was wiped off the surface of my vision. I talked to theteamsters and together we laughed at Eddie who kept scolding and sayingapologetically that the beer we had been drinking was rotten stuff andgave him a headache, while all the time the most marvelous things tookplace in the vacant lot before my eyes.

First of all an army of soldiers appeared and marched back and forthdirected by a man on a magnificent horse. He was many years older butat the same time looked strangely like myself and wore a long, flowingpurple mantle. And also he had a golden helmet on his head while hissoldiers, who obeyed his slightest wish, were also richly dressed.First there came a file of men dressed in light green and with brightyellow plumes flying from their helmets, and these were followed by[Pg 138]others dressed in blue, in flaming red and in uniforms combining allthese colors.

The men marched for what seemed a long time in the vacant lot whileI 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 andrapidly—an hour before he could have beaten me easily, but now Icould roll six to his five and land them just so, standing upright onthe 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 wentthrough quick and accurate manœuvres. Then they marched away along anear-by street and the place became a great canvas over which colorsplayed. The surface was brown, a soft velvety glowing brown, now othercolors appeared, reds, golden yellows, deep purples. The colors stoleswiftly out across the open place and designs were formed. I will be agreat painter, I decided; but now the vacant lot had become a carpet onwhich walked beautiful men and women. They smiled at me, beckoned tome, and then they paid me no more attention and became absorbed in eachother. “Very well; if you prefer to roll kegs, go your own way,” theyseemed to be saying, and when they laughed there was something derisivein their laughter.

Was I a little insane? Had I been born a little insane? I rolled thekegs of nails, drank innumerable pails of beer, the sweat rolledfrom my body and soaked my clothes and presently quitting time came[Pg 139]and I returned along a street with hundreds of other workers—allsmelling equally vile—to a rooming house where I lived with many otherlaborers, Hungarians, Swedes, a few Irish, several Italians and, oddlyenough, one English Jew.

The house was run by a worried-looking woman of forty who had onedaughter, a young woman of nineteen, who had taken a kind of fancy tome. Her father, a laborer like myself, had deserted her mother when thechild was but four or five years old and had never been seen again. Asfor the daughter, she had a strong body, clear blue eyes, thick lipsand 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 thework of a chambermaid for very little pay when she might have made agreat deal more money at something else; but her loyalty was temperedby a sturdy kind of independence that nothing could shake. During thespring, before I came to live at the house, she had become engaged tomarry 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 factof her engagement to another interfere with her relationship with me.

Our own relationship is a little hard to explain. When I came from thewarehouse 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 thesheets. The sheets were changed almost daily and her mother constantlyscolded about the matter. “If he wants clean sheets every day let himpay for them,” the mother said, but the daughter paid no attention,[Pg 140]and indeed I was no doubt responsible for more than one quarrel betweenmother and daughter. Among laboring people a girl engaged is taboo andthe other men in the house thought I was doing an unfair thing to herabsent lover. Whether or not he knew what was going on I never foundout.

What was going on? I came into the house, climbed the stairs andfound her at work in my room. At the foot of the stairs I had met hermother, 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 Iwent to stand by a window that looked down into the street. “Which oneis she going to marry?—that’s what I want to know,” one of the workerson the floor below called to another. She looked up at me and somethingI saw in her eyes made me bold. “Don’t mind them,” I said. “What makesyou think I do?” she replied. I was glad none of the men who worked atour warehouse roomed at the house. “They would be shouting, laughingand going on about it all day,” I thought.

The young woman—her name was Nora—talked to me in whispers as she didthe work in the room, or she listened and I talked. The minutes passedand we stayed on together, looking at each other, whispering, laughingat each other. In the house all, including the mother, were convinced Iwas working to bring about Nora’s ruin and the mother wanted to orderme out of the house but did not dare. Once as I stood in the hallwayoutside my door late at night I had overheard the two women talking inthe kitchen of the house. “If you mention the matter again I shall[Pg 141]walk out of the house and never come back.”

Occasionally in the evening Nora and I walked along the street, pastthe warehouse where I was employed, and out upon the docks, where wesat together looking into the darkness and once—but I will not tellyou what happened upon that occasion.

First of all I will tell you of how the relationship of Nora and myselfbegan. It may be that the bond between us was brought into existence bythe beer I drank at the warehouse in the late afternoons. One evening,when I had first come to the house, I came home, after drinkingheavily, 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 myroom, thinking of the vacant lot covered with the soft glowing carpetand of the beautiful men and women walking thereon, and when I got tomy room it seemed unspeakably shabby. No doubt I was drunk. In anyevent there was Nora at work and it was my opportunity. For what? I didnot quite know, but there was something I knew I wanted from Nora andthe beer drinking had made me bold. I had a sudden conviction that myboldness would overawe her.

And there was something else too. Although I was but a young man Ihad already worked in factories in several cities and had lived intoo many shabby rooms in shabby houses in factory streets. The outersurface of my life was too violently uncouth, too persistently uncouth.Well enough for Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and others to sing ofthe strength and fineness of laboring men, making heroes of them,but already the democratic dream had faded and laborers were not my[Pg 142]heroes. I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about meand had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness.The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly allstruck me as men who had no sense of life at all. They were so likelyto be dry intellectual sterile men. Already I had begun asking myselfthe questions I have been asking myself ever since. “Does no man loveanother man? Why does not some man arise who wants the man workingnext to him to work in the midst of order? Can a man and a woman loveeach other when they live in an ugly house in an ugly street? Why doworking men and women so often seem perversely unclean and disorderlyin their houses? Why do not factory owners realize that, although theybuild large, well-lighted factories, they will accomplish nothing untilthey realize the need of order and cleanliness in thinking and feelingalso?” I had come into the midst of men with a clean strong body, mymother had been one who would have fought to the death for order andcleanliness about her and her sons. Was it not apparent that somethinghad already happened to the democracy on which Whitman had countedso 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 messyroom 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 bethat I thought then that all my fellows lived as I did, having quite[Pg 143]conscious and separate inner and outer lives going on in the samebody that they were trying to bring into accord. As for myself I sawvisions, had from boyhood been seeing visions. Moments of extremeexaltation were followed by times of terrible depression. Were allpeople really like that? The visions were sometimes stronger than thereality 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 myphysical self and the physical fact of the men and women among whom Ithen worked and lived, rather than the physical fact of the ugly roomsin ugly houses in ugly streets?

Was there a consciousness of something wrong, a consciousness we allhad and were ashamed of?

There was the vacant lot in which an hour before I had seen themarching soldiers and the beautifully gowned men and women walkingabout. Why might that not exist as really as the half-drunkenteamsters, myself, the irritated athlete and the piles of unsightlyrubbish?

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 thatthere existed a kind of secret and well-nigh universal conspiracy toinsist 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 timeswhen I became almost convinced that if I just went suddenly up behindany man or any woman and said “boo” he or she would come out of it andI would come out of it, and we would march off arm in arm laughing atourselves and everyone else and having really quite a wonderful time.

[Pg 144]

I had decided to try to say “boo” to Nora, I fancy. There I was in theroom with her (I had been in the house about three days and had onlyseen her and heard her name spoken once before, when she was sweepingout the hallway by my door), and now she was throwing the covers backover the soiled sheets on my bed and there was dust on the window panesand streaks along the wall paper, while the floor of the room had beengiven but two or three careless whisks with a broom. Nora was makingthe bed and back of her head, as she leaned over to do the job, therewas a picture on the wall, a picture of five or six water lilies lyingon a table. There was a streak of dust down across the white face ofthe lilies and at that moment a cloud of dust, stirred up by the heavytrucks now going homeward along the street, floated just outside thewindow.

“Well, Miss Nora,” I suddenly said after I had been standing inthe room for a moment, silently and boldly staring at her. I beganadvancing 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 akind of hurried nervous stuttering manner brought on by the liquor anda 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 aresoiled?” I pounded on my own chest, much in the manner of the primitivehero in Mr. Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape”; and no doubt had I[Pg 145]at that time seen the play I might at that moment have begun saying inhoarse, throaty tones: “I belong. I belong.”

I did not say anything of the sort because I am not primitive and hadnot then seen the play, nor did I whine or complain because of thesoiled sheets on the bed. I talked, I am afraid, rather like a Napoleonor a Tamerlane to poor Nora who was already appalled by my suddendescent upon her.

Pounding on my chest and descending upon her I made a speech somethingin the following manner: “My dear Nora, you are a woman and no doubta virgin, but you may not always be one. Have hopes. Some day a manwill come along who will admire your person and will ask your hand inmarriage.” I looked at her somewhat critically. “You will not refusehim,” I declared, with the air of a soothsayer delivering himself of aprophecy. “You will accept the marriage state, Nora, partly because youare bored, partly because you will look upon the opportunity as a meansof escape from your present way of life, and partly because you willfind within yourself an instinct telling you that any kind of marriagewill bring you something you want.”

“But we will not discuss you. We will discuss myself,” I declared. Icontinued pounding myself on the chest and so great was my momentaryenthusiasm that later my breast was somewhat sore. “Nora, woman,” Isaid, “look at me! You cannot see my body and I dare say if I did nothave on these soiled clothes your maidenly modesty would compel you torun out of this room. But do not run. I do not intend to take off myclothes.”

[Pg 146]

“Very well, we will not speak any more of my body,” I said in a loudvoice, wishing to reassure her since I could see she was becoming alittle alarmed. No doubt she thought me insane. She had grown slightlypale and had stepped away from me so that her back was against thewall and the soiled water lilies were just above her head. “I am notspeaking of my own body in relation to your body, do not get thatentirely feminine notion into your head,” I explained. “I am speakingof my body in relation to yonder soiled sheets.”

And now I pointed toward the bed and stopped pounding my own chestwhich was becoming sore. Stepping quite close to her, so close infact that my face was within a few inches of her own, I put one handagainst the wall and tried to quiet my own loud, blustering tones, andto assume a tone of great ease, or rather, of nonchalance. I took acigarette from my pocket and succeeded in lighting it without burningmy fingers, a feat requiring a good deal of concentration under thecircumstances. The truth is, that I had bethought myself that in amoment more Nora would either hit me with the broom, that stood closeat 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 whilemy beer-born courage lasted I now tried to be more at my ease. Alittle smile began to play about the corners of my mouth and I thoughtof myself at the moment as a diplomat—not an American or an Englishdiplomat, let me say, but an Italian diplomat of, we will suppose, thesixteenth century.

In as light and bantering a tone as I could assume under the[Pg 147]circumstances—my task was the more difficult because a workman,hearing my speech from a neighboring room, had come along the hallwayand was now standing at the door with a look of astonishment on hisface—assuming, I say, a light bantering tone, I now rapidly explainedto Nora the notion that had been in my head when I interrupted herbed-making. She had been about to reach for the broom and with itto drive me from the room, but now the words streaming from my lipscaught and held her attention. With a fluency in words that nevercomes to me when I am writing and that only comes to my lips when Iam slightly under the influence of strong drink I explained myself.To the astonished young woman I compared the bed she had been makingto a suit of clothes I might be about to put on my body after I hadbathed the aforesaid body. Talking rapidly and enunciating my wordsvery distinctly so she should lose nothing of my discourse (and Imight here explain to you, my readers, that in ordinary conversationI am rather given to the slovenly dragging of words so common to thepeople of the Middle West. We, you must know, do not say “feah,” as aNew Englander might, nor “fear,” as an Italian-American might, that isto say, pronouncing distinctly the “r,” but “feehr”), going on veryclearly and distinctly I told Nora she was not to judge me by the smellthat came from my clothes, that under my clothes lived a body I wasabout to wash clean as soon as she had finished her work in the roomand had gone away. Leaving both her and the workman outside the doorstanding and staring at me I walked to the window and threw it up. “Thecloud of dust you see floating up from the street below,” I explained,[Pg 148]“does not represent all the elements of the atmosphere even in anAmerican industrial city.” I then tried, as best I could, to explain tomy limited audience that air, normally, might be a clean thing to becleanly breathed into the lungs and that a man like myself, althoughhe might wear dirty, soiled clothes in order to earn money to keep hisbody alive might also at the same time have a certain feeling of prideand joy in his body and want clean sheets to put it between when helaid it down to sleep at night.

To Nora, standing there and staring at me, half in wonder, half inanger, I tried to explain a little my habit of having visions andsketched for her, as rapidly and briefly as I could, the marveloussights I had in fancy seen in the vacant lot near the warehouse inthe late afternoon, and also I preached her a kind of sermon, not, Iassure you, with the object of changing her own character but rather tocarry out the plan that had formed in my rather befuddled brain, a planfor bullying her—that is to say of bending her to my own purpose ifpossible.

Being by nature a rather shrewd man, however, I did not put the case toher directly but pursuing the method common to preachers who always tryto conceal their own wants under the mask of the common good, so that aman who is apparently always trying to get others into Heaven is reallyonly afraid he will not manage to get there himself, pursuing valiantlythis method, I pointed to the soiled water lilies above Nora’s head.An inspiration seized me. At that time, you must remember, I did knowthat Nora was engaged to be married to an engineer’s assistant on a[Pg 149]lake steamer. I chanced at that moment to see the picture of the waterlilies and thought of the little quiet back waters of Sandusky Baywhere as a boy I had sometimes gone fishing with a certain charmingold country doctor who for a time had employed me, ostensibly as astable boy but really as a companion on long country drives. The olddoctor had been a talkative soul and loved to speculate on life and itspurposes and we often went fishing on summer afternoons and evenings,not so much for the purpose of catching fish as to give the doctor theopportunity to sit in a boat on the bank of some stream and pour wisdominto 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 thewall and being as much the actor as I could. Even though my brainwas somewhat befuddled I was watching Nora, waiting and hoping thatsomething I might say would really arrest her attention, and now Ithought, 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 feetdangling in warm pellucid waters.

To Nora I said the following words, quite without definite thought, asthey came flowing from my lips: “I do not know you, young woman, andhave never until this moment thought of you and your life but I’ll tellyou this: the time will come when you will marry a man who now sails onthe seas. Even at this moment he is standing on the deck of a boat andthinking of you, and the air about him is not like this air you and Ifor our sins are compelled to breathe.”

[Pg 150]

“Ah ha!” I cried, seeing by a look in Nora’s eyes that my chance shothad hit home and shrewdly following up the advantage that gave me. “Ahha!” I cried; “let us think and speak of the life of a sailor. He is inthe presence of the clean sea. God has made clean the scene upon whichhis eyes rest. At night he lies down in a clean bunk. Nothing about himis as it is about us. There is no foul air, no dirty streaks on wallpaper, no unclean sheets, no unclean beds.”

“Your young sailor lies in bed at night and his body is clean, as Idare say also is his mind. He thinks of his sweetheart on shore and ofnecessity, do you see, all about him is so clean, he must think of heras one who in her soul is clean.”

And now to my readers I must stop a moment to explain that I speak atlength 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 literaryfeat and I am writing, as you know, of the life of a literary man. Ihad never, when all this occurred, been at sea nor had I ever beenaboard a ship, but I had, to be sure, read books and stories regardingships and the conduct of sailors aboard ships, and in my boyhood I hadknown 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 thecleanliness of the boats on which he had worked but, as I have said, Iwas being as literary as I could.

And realizing now that I had by good fortune stumbled upon the rightnote I went on elaborating the romantic side of the life of the sailoraboard ship, touching upon the hopes and dreams of such a man and[Pg 151]pointing out to Nora that it was a great mistake on her part not tohave one room in the great house of so many rooms, upon the care ofwhich she could pour some of the natural housewifely qualities withwhich her nature was, I was certain, so richly endowed.

I saw, you understand, that I had her but was careful not to pressmy advantage too far. And then, too, I had begun to like her, asall literary men like inordinately those who take seriously theiroutpourings.

And so I now quickly drove a bargain with Nora. Like herself, Iexplained, I was lonely and wanting companionship. Strange thoughtsand fancies came to me that I would like to tell to another. “We willhave a friendship,” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “In the evenings wewill walk about together. I will tell you of the strange notions thatcome into my head and of the marvelous adventures that sometimes occurto 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 someof the affection natural to your nature, thinking as you do so, not ofme but of your sailor man at sea, and of the time to come when you maymake a clean warm nest for him ashore.”

“Poor man,” I said, “you must remember that he is buffeted often bystorms, often his life is in danger and often too he is in strangeports where but for his constancy to the thoughts of you, he might getinto almost any kind of a muddle with some other woman.”

I had succeeded, you see, by a purely literary trick, in getting myselfinto Nora’s consciousness as in some way connected with her absentlover.

“But I must not press the matter too far,” I thought, and, stepping[Pg 152]back, stood smiling at her as genially as I could.

And then another thought came. “There will be a kind of wrath in hersoul at this moment and I must direct it quickly toward someone otherthan myself.” The workman who, attracted by my loud words at thebeginning of my discourse, had come along the hallway and who now stoodat the door of my room looking in, did not speak English very well andI was sure had not understood much of my long speech.

Going to the open window I now said, over my shoulder: “I am sillysaying all these things to you, Nora, but I have been lonesome and totell the truth I am a little drunk. Forgive me. You know yourself thatthe other men in this house are stupid fellows and do not care at allin what shape their rooms are kept. They work like dogs and sleep likedogs and do not have thoughts and dreams as you do and as I and yoursailor man do.”

“There is that man listening to our little conversation, there now, bythe door,” I said straightening up and pointing; but my speech got nofurther. As I had conjectured within myself, Nora had for some minutesbeen anxious to hit someone with the broom that stood close at hand andshe 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 inyour nose?” she cried, and the workman fled down the hallway with Noraat his heels, striking vigorously at him with the broom.

ONE who like myself could not, because of circumstances, spend theyears of his youth in the schools must of necessity turn to books andto the men and women directly about him; upon these he must depend forhis knowledge of life and to these I had turned. What a life the peopleof 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 brainyvillains as I could never hope to become. Being a Nero a Jesse James ora Napoleon I often thought would suit me first rate but I could not seehow I was going to make it. In the first place I never could shoot verywell, I hadn’t the courage to kill people I did not like and to stealon any grand scale involved the risk of prison—or at least I thenthought it did. I later found that only petty thieves were in dangerbut 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 werealways being marched off to prison or I heard of some man I had knownbeing nabbed and taken away and prisons frightened me. I rememberedvividly a night of my boyhood and myself going through an alleywayand past our town jail and the white face of a man staring out at mefrom behind iron bars. “Hey kid, get me an iron bar or a hammer and[Pg 154]pass it up here to me and I’ll give you a quarter,” he said in harshthroaty tones but I was frightened at the sight of his white drawnface in the moonlight and at the thoughts of the grim silent place inwhich he stood. A murderer, a crazed farmer who had killed his wife andhired man with an ax, had once been lodged in the jail and I had gotthe notion into my head that all men who passed into its doors wereterrible and dangerous. I ran quickly away and got out of the alleywayinto 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 theporch of a house, the sound of a horse’s hoofs in a roadway, all thesweet sounds of free men and women walking about. I wanted to spend mylife walking about and looking at things, listening to words, to thesound of winds blowing through trees, smelling life sweet and alive,not put away somewhere in a dark ill-smelling place. Once later when Iwas working at Columbus, Ohio, I went with a fellow—he had a sickeningkind of curiosity about such places and kept urging and urging—to thestate prison on visiting day. It was at the hour when the prisonerstake exercise and many of them were in a large open place between highwalls, on which guards with guns walked up and down. I looked once andthen closed my eyes and during the rest of our pilgrimage through theplace I carefully avoided looking into the prisoners’ faces or intothe cells before which we stopped but looked down instead at the stonefloors until we were again outside in the sunlight.

[Pg 155]

As I have said the books were mostly about respectable people withmoral problems, with family fortunes that must be saved or built up,daughters safely married, hints at a possible loss of virtue on thepart of some woman and the terrible consequences that were to follow.In the books the women who grew familiar with men, to whom they werenot married, were always having children and thus giving themselvesaway to all and I did not know any such women. The kind of women amongwhom life at that time threw me were much wiser and pretty much seemedto have children or not as they chose and I presume I thought the otherkind must be a rather foolish sort and not worth bothering or thinkingabout.

And then there was the grand life in the big world, the life of thecourts, 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 seemedto occupy the attention of most of the novelists. As for myself I didnot think at that time that I would ever see much of such life and I amafraid it did not much tempt me.

However, I read greedily everything that came into my hands. LauraJean Libbey, Walter Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Fielding,Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Balzac, the Bible, Stephen Crane, dimenovels, Cooper, Stevenson, our own Mark Twain and Howells and laterWhitman. The books—any books—have always fed my dreams and I am onewho has always lived by his dreams and even to-day I can often get asmuch fun and satisfaction out of a dull book as out of a so-calledbrilliant or witty one. The books like life itself are only useful tome in as much as they feed my own dreams or give me a background upon[Pg 156]which I can construct new dreams.

Books I have always had access to and I am sure there is no othercountry in the world where people in general are so sentimentallyromantic on the subject of books and education. Not that we read thebooks or really care about education. Not we. What we do is to ownbooks and go to colleges and I have known more than one young manwithout money work his way patiently through college without payingmuch attention to what the colleges are presumed to teach. The factof having got through college and of having managed to get a degreesatisfies us and so the owning of books has become in most Americanfamilies a kind of moral necessity. We own the books, put them on theshelves and go to the movies and the books, not being read and sittingdumbly there on the shelves in the houses, fairly jump at anyone whocares for them. It was so also in my own youth. Wherever I went someonewas always bringing me books or urging me to come to some house andhelp myself and having got into most houses I could have helped myself,if books were not offered, simply by re-arranging the shelves so therewas no gaping hole left. I did it sometimes but not often.

As for the owners, they were interested, absorbed in the greatindustrial future just ahead for all Americans. We were all to havecollege degrees, ride in automobiles, come by some kind of marvelousmechanical process into a new, more cultured and better age, “Clear thetrack! Come on! Get in the swim!” was the cry and later I was to takeup the cry myself and become one of the most valiant of the hustlers[Pg 157]but for a time—for several years—I stayed in the backwaters of lifeand looked about.

My companions for the time being were flash men, the sharpshooters andtouts at the race tracks. How many such fellows as Sit-still Murphy,Flatnose Humphrey of Frisco, Horsey Hollister and others of that stripeI knew at that time! And there were also gamblers, a politician or twoand most of all a strange kind of sensitive and footloose man or woman,unfitted for the life of a hustler, not shrewd, usually lovable andperplexed, feeling themselves out of touch with the mood of the timesand often spending life getting drunk, wandering about and loving totalk away long hours on bridges in cities, on country roads and in theback rooms of little saloons, which for all the evil they are presumedto have brought upon us I thank my gods existed during my youth. Howoften have I said to myself: “What kind of a world will this be whenwe are all moral and good people, when there are no more rascals to befound among us and no places left where rascals may congregate to speaklovingly of their rascalities?”

Of the rascals I met at that time there was one of a far different sortthan 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 inwhich I had got a job in a stable run by a man named Nate Lovett, whoowned several race horses and who also kept a livery barn. Nate had astallion, a fast trotter named “Will you Please” and got most of hisincome by taking him about to neighboring towns to serve mares but hehad also some ten or twelve half-wornout old driving horses that werelet to the young men of the town when they wanted to take some girl to[Pg 158]a dance or for a drive in the country. These I took care of, workingall day and sleeping on a cot in what we called the office but havingmy evenings free. A gigantic and goodhearted Negro took care of theracing horses and stayed in the office from eight until eleven in theevening. “Go on child. I ain’t got no folks in this town and I don’twant none here neither,” he said.

Lovett, a man of the English jockey type, had lost one eye in a fightbut was a quiet enough fellow, never losing his temper except whensomeone spoke favorably of the Irish or of the Catholic religion. Hehad a fixed notion that the Pope at Rome had made up his mind to getcontrol of America and had filled the land with crafty spies and agentswho worked tirelessly night and day to accomplish his ends and whenhe spoke of the Irish Catholics he lowered his voice, put his handover his mouth, winked, scowled and acted in general like one creepingstealthily 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 littleto do so we all gathered in the office, a room some fifteen by twentywith a large stove in the centre. There certain citizens of the towncame daily to visit us.

In the room there would be at one time Bert the Negro; Lovett, sittingon a stool and tapping the floor with a driver’s whip; myself, takingin everything and sometimes with my nose in a book; Tom Moseby, whohad been a gambler on a Mississippi River boat in his young days and[Pg 159]who always wore a large dirty white collar with a black stock; SilasHunt, a lawyer who had no practice nor seemed to want any and who wassaid to be writing a book on the subject of constitutional law, abook that no one ever saw; a fat German, who was a follower of KarlMarx and who owned a large farm near the town, but who, for all hisanti-capitalistic beliefs, was said to cheat ruthlessly all who hadany sort of dealings with him; Billy West, who owned two race horseshimself and whose wife ran the town millinery store and who was himselfsomething of a dandy and, last of all, Judge Turner.

The judge was a short fat neatly-dressed man with a bald head, awhite Vandyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks andextraordinarily small hands and feet. In his younger days he had acousin, at one time a quite powerful political figure in Ohio, andafter the Civil War the judge, an unsuccessful young lawyer, hadmanaged through the cousin to get himself sent South on some sort offinancial mission, to settle, I believe, certain claims covering cottoncorn and other stores requisitioned or destroyed by the conqueringUnion armies.

It had been the great opportunity of the judge’s life and he had takenshrewd advantage of it, had come near being shot in two or threesouthern 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 overand the cousin had fallen from power he had come back to his nativeplace—after three or four years spent in Europe, lying low in fear ofa threatened investigation of his operations—and had bought a largebrick house with a lawn and trees and had imported a Negro man-servant[Pg 160]from the South. He spent his time reading books and listening duringthe afternoon to the talk of the men of our little circle, flatteringwomen rather grossly, drinking a good deal of raw whisky and deliveringhimself of rather shrewd observations on life and the men he had knownand seen.

The judge had never married and indeed cared nothing for women althoughhe fancied himself in the rôle of a gallant who could do with women ashe pleased, a notion constantly fed by the reactions to his advances ofthe women with whom his life in the town threw him into contact—thewife of the grocer from whom he bought the supplies for his home, afat girl with red cheeks who clerked in the dry-goods store, BillyWest’s wife, and several others. To all these women he was elaboratelycourteous, bowing before them, making pretty speeches and when no onewas watching even boldly caressing them with his little fat hands. Inthe grocery he even pressed the hand of the merchant’s wife while herlord was engaged, with his back turned, in getting a package down off ashelf, and even sometimes pinched her hips, laughing softly while sheshook her head and scowled at him, but to me, for whom he had taken afancy born of my predilection for books, he spoke of women always withcontempt.

“My dislike of them is however but a peculiarity of my own nature andI would not have it influence you in the least,” he explained. “TheFrench, among whom I once lived and whose language I speak, make an artof this matter of love-making between men and women and I admire theFrench exceedingly. They are a wise and shrewd people and not much[Pg 161]given to the talking of tommyrot I assure you.”

The judge had, early in our acquaintance, invited me to his housewhere I later spent many of my evenings during that spring, drinkinghis whisky, listening to his talk and smoking cigarettes with him. Itwas the judge in fact who taught me to smoke cigarettes, a habit muchlooked down upon in American towns at that time, being taken as anindication of weakness and effeminacy. The judge was, however, able tocarry off his own devotion to the habit because he had been in Europe,spoke several languages and most of all because he was reported tobe educated. In the saloons of the town, when men congregated beforethe bar in the evening, the subject of cigarette smoking was oftendiscussed. “If I ever caught a son of mine smoking one of those coffinnails I’d knock his fool head off,” said a drayman. “I agree with youfor all except maybe Judge Turner now,” said his companion. “For himit’s all right. He sets a bad example maybe, but looket! Ain’t he beento college and to Paris and London and all them places? Lord, I onlywish I had his education, that’s all I wish.”

* * * * *

I am in the judge’s house and it is dark and stormy outside. I havedined with the Negro Bert at six in the kitchen of Nate Lovett’s houseand now, although it is but shortly past seven, the judge has alsodined and is ready for an evening of talk. There is a large stove ofthe sort known as a baseburner in the room and the walls are lined withbooks. We sit by a small table and there is a decanter of whisky uponit. Although I am but eighteen the judge does not hesitate to invite meto help myself to the whisky. “Drink all you want. If you are the kind[Pg 162]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 orthe sports of the race tracks. All of the judge’s talk is a laughing,half-cynical, half-earnest kind of confession. Were the things thejudge told me of himself true? They were no doubt as true as theseconfessions of myself and my own relations to life I am setting downhere. What I mean is that he was at least trying to inject into themthe essence of truth.

I drank of the whisky sparingly, not so much through fear of beingconvicted of piggishness by getting drunk as from a desire to hear allthe judge might have to say.

At the barn when he came there to loaf with the others during thewinter afternoons the judge usually remained silent and managedalways to achieve an effect of wisdom by the good-natured but cynicalexpression of his face and eyes. He sat with his fat white hands foldedover his round neatly-waistcoated paunch and looked about with thecold little eyes that were so amazingly like the eyes of a bird. Myemployer, Nate Lovett, was upon his everlasting theme. “Now you justlook at it. I wish the people would begin to do some thinking in thiscountry. Why, there were six Catholics elected to this last Congressand people just sit still and say there’s no harm in a Catholic.” Thehorseman was a regular subscriber to a weekly paper that attributedall the ills of society to the growth in America of the Catholic faithand read it eagerly—it was the only thing he did read—that his own[Pg 163]pet prejudice be properly fed and nourished, and no doubt there waspublished somewhere a paper that carried on an equally earnest campaignagainst the Protestants. My employer went to no church but the notionof six Catholics in the national Congress alarmed him. The horsemandeclared that the Catholics would in a short time come into absolutepower in America and drew a black enough picture of the future whenall of the things he so feared had come to pass. The wheels of thefactories would stop turning, streets of towns would be unlighted, menand women would be burned at the stake, there would be no schools, nobooks accessible to the general public, we would have a tyrant kinginstead of a Congress and no man who did not bow his knee to the Popein Rome would be safe in his bed at night. The horseman declared hehad once read a book showing just the condition of affairs when theCatholics were in power—that is to say in the Middle Ages. Pointingthe butt of his driving whip at Judge Turner he pleaded, and never invain, for a more learned and scholarly substantiation of his theory.“Ain’t I right now, Judge?” he asked pleadingly. “Mind you, I ain’tsetting myself up before a man who knows more than I do and has readall the books and been everywhere, even in Rome itself, but I’ll tellyou something. That king, that Englishman, of the name of Henry theEighth, who first told the Pope at Rome to go back to his Dago town andmind his own business was some man now, wasn’t he, eh?”

And now Nate had got himself warmed up and lit into his theme. “Theysay he was too free with women, that King Henry. Well, what if he[Pg 164]was?” he cried. “I knew a man once, Jake Freer it was, from overnear Muncie Indiana, who could get more out of a bum horse in a hardrace than any man you ever set your eyes on and he was the darndestwoman-chaser in ten states. Why, he couldn’t get near a skirt, old oryoung, without prancing around like a two-year-old stud and he wasforty-five if he was a day but put him in a hard race and then you’dsee the stuff come out in him. He’d be laying back in second or thirdplace, let us say. Well, they gets to the upper turn and he knows heain’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. Suchlanguage! Lord a’mighty, how he could swear! It was wonderful to hearhim. He tells them other stiffs of drivers, laying in there ahead ofhim, that he’s going to kill ’em or punch their eyes out and the firstyou know he slides his old skate of a horse out in front and once infront he stays there. They don’t dast to try to pass him. He scares hisown horse too I suppose but anyway he sure scares them other drivers.Down he sails to the wire looking back over his shoulder making threatsand switching his long whip around. He was a big fine-looking man thathad had his cheek laid open with a razor in a fight with a nigger andwas an ugly looking man to see. “I’m going to whip hell outen you,” hekeeps saying over his shoulder, just loud enough so the judges can’thear 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 hurriesup to the stand, to the judges’ stand you see, pretending to be mad[Pg 165]as a wildcat and he claims the other drivers put it up between them tofoul him. That’s what he does, and he talks so hard and so earnest thathe half makes the judges believe it and he gets away with maybe hittingone of the other horses in the face with his whip at the upper turn andthrowing 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 gohang himself and I’m an Englishman and once I told two Catholic stiffsthe same thing. They banged out this here eye of mine but you bet Igave ’em what for, and that’s just what Henry did to the Pope, nowain’t it?”

At the livery barn the judge had smilingly agreed with Nate Lovett thatHenry the Eighth was one of the great and noble kings of the worldand had expressed unbounded admiration for Jake Freer, adding that,as far as his own reading and traveling had carried him, he had neverbeen able to find that the Catholics when they were in absolute powerall over the world had ever done anything for racing or to improve thetrotting or pacing-horse breeds. “All they did,” he remarked, quietly“except perhaps Francesco Gonzago, Marquis of Mantua, who did rathergo in for good horses, was to build a lot of cathedrals like Chartres,Saint Mark’s at Venice, Westminster Abbey, Mont St. Michel and othersand to inspire the loveliest and truest art in the world. But,” he saidsmilingly, “what good does all that do for a man like you Nate, or foranyone here in this town? You didn’t know Francesco, who had a knack[Pg 166]for fast horses, and forty cathedrals would never get you another marefor ‘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 ofAmerica lies largely with just such men as you and Jake.”

At his own house as we sat together in the evenings, the judge paidme the rare compliment, always deeply appreciated by a young man, ofassuming I was on the same intellectual level with himself. He smokedcigarettes and drank surprising quantities of whisky, holding eachglass for a moment between his eyes and the light and making a queerclicking 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 anevening when he got on the subject of women and his own attitude towardthem 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 Isensed the tragedy of the man’s figure as he drew for me a picture ofhis life.

His father had been a Presbyterian minister and a widower in the townto which the son came later to lead his own solitary life and the judgesaid that in his youth he remembered his father chiefly as a silentfigure given to long solitary walks in fields and on country roads. “Heloved my mother I fancy,” the judge said. “Perhaps he was one of thoserare men who can really love.”

The boy had grown up, himself rather drawn away from the life of thetown, and had been sent later to a college in the East, and during[Pg 167]his first year in college his father died. There was a suspicion ofsuicide, although little was said about it, the man having takenan overdose of some sort of medicine given him by one of the townphysicians.

It was then that the politician cousin appeared and after the funeralhe talked to the younger man, telling him that a few days before hisdeath the father had come to him and talked of the son, securing fromthe politician a promise that in case of his own sudden death, the ladwould be looked after and given a fair chance in life. “Your fatherkilled himself,” said the cousin, a rather downright fellow who wasfifteen years older than the young man he addressed. “He was in lovewith your mother and was also a man who believed in a future life. Whathe did was to spend years in prayer. He was always praying, day andnight as he walked around, and in the end he convinced himself that hisuntiring devotion had won him so high a place in God’s esteem he wouldbe forgiven for doing away with his own life and would be admitted intoHeaven to live throughout eternity with the woman he loved.”

After his father’s funeral young Turner had gone back to the easterncollege and there the tragedy that had been long awaiting him suddenlypounced.

During his boyhood, he explained, he had been rather a solitary,spending his time in reading books and in playing on a piano thathad belonged to his mother and that his father, who was also devotedto 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 Icould not understand them. At school the larger boys often beat me[Pg 168]and they encouraged the younger boys in treating me with contempt. Icould not play baseball or football, physical pain of any sort made meill, I would begin crying when anyone spoke harshly to me, and then Ideveloped a kind of viciousness in myself too. Being unable to beatthe other boys with my fists and having even at that early age read agreat many books, particularly books of history, with which my father’slibrary were filled, I spent my days and nights dreaming of all sortsof sly deviltry.”

“For one thing,” the judge went on, laughing and rubbing his handstogether, “I thought a great deal of poisoning some of the boys at theschool. At the recess time we were all gathered in a large yard givenover to the boys as a playground. There was the yard without any grassand at one side, by a high board fence, a long wooden shed into whichwe went to perform certain necessary functions of the body. The boardfence separated our play place from one given over to the recreation ofthe girls.”

“The walls of our own shed and our side of the fence itself werecovered with crude drawings and scrawled sentences expressing thesensual dreams of crude and adolescent youth and these were allowedby the authorities to remain. The place filled me with unspeakablerevulsion as did also much of the talk of the boys and I shall rememberalways something that happened to me there. A great loutish boy isstanding at the door of our shed into which I am at that moment forcedby nature to go and is gazing at the sky over the high board fencethat separates us from the playground of the girls. His eyes are[Pg 169]heavy with stupid sensuality. From beyond the fence comes the shrilllaughter of the little girls. Suddenly, as I am about to pass—a smallcreature I was then with delicate hands and at that time I believe withsmall delicate features—suddenly and quite without apparent cause heraises a large heavy hand and strikes me full in the face, so that theblood runs in a stream from my nose, and then, without a word to me,shrinking in terror against the fence on which the horrible picturesand words are scrawled and mingling my blood with tears, he goes calmlyaway. He is quite cheerful in fact, as though some deep want of hisnature 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 theymust have been, vicious and crafty but then how I delighted in them! Myfather’s being a minister had I presume turned my mind to the Churchand how I wished he had been a great and powerful cardinal or a pope ofthe fifteenth century instead of what he was! I had dreamed of him as aCosmo 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 andhow I loved the book in my father’s library that described the life ofthose days. In the book were such sentences! Some of them I remembereven to this day and in my bed at night, even yet sometimes, I lielaughing with delight at the thought of the fanfaronading march of thewords across the pages of that book. ‘Italian vitality had subsided[Pg 170]into the repose of the tomb. The winged arrow of death entered hisheart. 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 momentbetween his eyes and the light and then, after drinking, going to ashelf from which he took a book in a red cover. After turning the pagesfor a few minutes and having lighted himself a fresh cigarette he read:“‘The emperor Charles the Fifth placed Cosmo de Medici on the ducalchair of Florence and Pope Pius Fifth granted him the title of grandduke of Tuscany. He was a cruel and perfidious tyrant.’”

“‘Cosmo was succeeded by Francisco, a duke who governed through theinstrumentality of the poisoned cup and the dagger, and who lappedblood with the greed of a bloodhound. He married Bianca Cabello,the daughter of a nobleman of Venice. She was the wife of a youngFlorentine. Francisco saw her, and, inflamed by her marvelous beauty,invited her and her husband to his palace, and assassinated herhusband. His own wife died at just that time, probably by poison, andthe grand duke married Bianca. His brother, the Cardinal Ferdinando,displeased with the union, presented them each with a goblet ofpoisoned wine, and they sank into the grave together.’”

“Aha!” cried Judge Turner, looking over the top of the book at me andlaughing gleefully. “There you are, you see. That was myself in myboyhood, that young Francisco. In my fancy I succeeded, when therewas no one about, when I was walking alone along the sidewalks ofthis very town or when I had got into my bed at night, I succeeded[Pg 171]I say in making the great metamorphosis. In the books in my father’slibrary were many pictures of the streets of old Italian and Spanishcities. There was one I sharply remember. Two young bloods, with cloaksover their shoulders and with swords swinging at their sides, areapproaching each other along a street. Two or three monks, a man seatedon the back of a donkey going along a narrow roadway, a great stonebridge in the far distance, a bridge spanning perhaps a deep dark gulfbetween high mountain peaks, peaks faintly seen amid clouds and in theforeground, near the two young men and dominating the whole scene, agreat cathedral done in the glorious Gothic style that I myself later,in my real flesh and blood life, so loved and bowed down before atChartres in France.”

“And there was I, in fancy you understand, one of the two young menwalking in that glorious street and not frightened little ArthurTurner, son of a sad and discouraged Presbyterian minister in an Ohiotown. There was the metempsychosis. I was Francisco before he hadsucceeded Cosmo and had become himself the great and charmingly wickedduke sitting in his ducal chair, and long before he became enamoredof the lovely Bianca. Every day I went into my own little room in myfather’s house and got out a sword of wood I had fashioned from a lathand buckled it on. I had got one of my father’s coats from a closet andthis, serving me as a cloak, I imagined it of the finest Florentinestuff, a cloak of such stuff as would become the shoulders of one whobelonged to the great Medici family and who was to sit in the proudducal chair of Florence. Up and down the room I went and below my[Pg 172]father, the sad long-faced man, had become in my fancy the great Cosmohimself. We were in our ducal palace and cardinals in their red cloaks,princes, captains of armies, ambassadors and other princely personageswere waiting at the door for a word with the great Cosmo.

“Welladay! My own time would come. For the present I was concerningmyself with the study of poisons. On a little table in my room I hada collection of various small receptacles, an old saltcellar with abroken top, two small teacups, an empty baking-powder can and othersmall vessels, found in the street or stolen from our kitchen, andinto these I had put salt, flour, pepper, ginger and other spicestaken also by stealth from the kitchen. I mixed and remixed, makingvarious colored powders which I folded into small packets or dampenedand rolled into little balls which I concealed about my person, andthen went forth into the street, to visit in fancy other palaces or topoison, or run through with my sword, people who were enemies of ourhouse. What beautifully wicked men and women all about me and with whatsuavity we greeted each other! How deeply we loved and served—to thevery death—our friends and how quietly crafty and urbane we were withour enemies! Oh, I loved then the word urbane. What a glorious word, Ithought. At that time, as the young Francisco, I was determined that ifmy craftiness could raise me to the great office of pope I would takefor myself the name Urbane, adding the ‘e’ to a name already taken bysome of them.

“These were my dreams, and then, well I was compelled to go to the townschool and sit sometimes in that horrible shed facing the crude and[Pg 173]terrible scrawlings on the walls and to become also the victim of thecrude outbreaks of my companions.

“Until one day in the spring. I had gone for a walk with my father inthe late afternoon after school was dismissed and we were botanizing,as my father was fond of doing, both for his own edification and alsoI suppose in order to further his son’s education. In a meadow at theedge of a strip of woodland into which we were passing I found a whitemushroom with which I ran to father. ‘Throw it away,’ he cried. ‘It isan Amanita Phalloides, the Destroying Angel. A bit of it no larger thana mustard seed would destroy your life.’

“We returned to our own house and sat down for the evening meal withthe words ‘Amanita Phalloides’ ringing in my ears and with the roundbell-like shape of the Amanita Phalloides dancing before my eyes. Itwas white, of a strange glowing whiteness, suggesting I thought notthe death of some common man of low degree but that of a prince or agreat 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’slibrary, they ‘sank into the grave together.’ There must have been justthat very white metallic pallor on their cheeks. What a picture of thatsinking I had in my fancy. It was not just a grave, a mere dirty holescooped 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 thishad been entirely rimmed with flowers and was filled with a liquid, asoft purple perfumed liquid. And so into the grave went the bodies ofmyself as Francisco and of my lovely paramour, Bianca. The weight of[Pg 174]our golden robes made us sink slowly into the soft purple flood and aswe sank from sight music from the lips of all the fair children of thearistocracy of Florence was wafted far over fair fields, while back ofthe massed children in white stood also—upon a kind of green eminenceat 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 yetalive and there was the Amanita Phalloides—later when I grew olderI laughed to myself and told myself it should have been a PhallusImpudicus—there it was lying on the grass in the meadow at the edgeof the wood. I had placed it carefully there at the command of myfather and had, oh very carefully, marked the spot. One went along themain road leading out of town, to the south, to a certain bridge andacross a meadow by a cowpath, climbed a fence, walked a certain numberof steps along a rail fence beside a young wheat field, where eldersgrew, crossed another meadow and came to the edge of the wood. Therewas a stump near which grew a bush and even as I sat with father at ourevening meal and as our housekeeper, a fat silent old woman with falseteeth that rattled sometimes as she talked, even as she served theevening meal I was repeating to myself a certain formula I had made onour homeward journey. One hundred and nineteen steps along the cowpathin the meadow, ninety-three steps along the fence in the shadow of theelders, two hundred and six steps across the second meadow to the stumpand my prize.

[Pg 175]

“I had determined to get the Amanita Phalloides on that very nightafter my father and our housekeeper had gone to sleep and althoughI was terribly frightened at the prospect of the tramp along lonelycountry roads and across fields, that I imagined were at night infestedby strange and ferocious beasts lying in wait ready to destroy, I didnot think of giving up for that reason.

“And so in fact in the middle of that very night, when all in our houseand in the town were asleep, I went. Buckling on my wooden sword andcreeping silently downstairs I let myself out at the kitchen door,having first supplied myself with matches and two or three bits ofcandle from a kitchen shelf.

“Oh, how I suffered on that journey and how determined I was! When Ihad got out from among the silent terrifying houses and had come nearlyto the place where I was to turn off the highroad two men on horsebackpassed and I hid myself, lying on my belly, white and silent, in aditch at the side of the road. ‘They are desperadoes going forth tokill,’ I told myself.

“And then they were gone and I could no longer hear the tramp of theirhorses and there was the trip to be made across the fields, recountingthe steps as I had counted them during the homeward journey thatafternoon with my father. During the walk homeward that afternoon bothfather and myself were muttering to ourselves, he praying no doubt thatwhen he had taken his own life God would admit him into Heaven and intothe company of the woman he loved and I counting steadily ‘eighty-six,eighty-seven, eighty-eight,’ counting steadily the steps that wouldlead me again to the Amanita Phalloides, to the Destroying Angel, with[Pg 176]which I dreamed I might take many lives.

“I got my prize by the aid of the matches and the bits of candle andafter a good deal of nervous fumbling about, creeping on my hands andknees in the wet grass,” said the old judge laughing in his peculiarlybitter and at the same time half-jolly way. “I got it and ran all theway home, imagining every bush and every deep shadow on the road and inthe fields might contain man or beast lying in wait ready to destroyme. Then later I managed without the old housekeeper knowing to dryit on a small shelf at the back of our kitchen stove and after it wasthoroughly dried I powdered it and putting the horrible powder I hadconcocted into papers, carried them off with me to school.”

“Many of the boys of our school lived at a distance and carried theirluncheons and I fancied myself going nonchalantly into the hallwaywhere the luncheon pails were left standing in a row and sprinklingthe powders over their contents. As for the boys who went home at thenoon hour—well, you see I had read in one of the books in my father’slibrary of a certain elegant lady of Pisa who once cut a peach, handinghalf of it to a gallant she wished to destroy and herself eating theother 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 underthe 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 reallyintended to poison anyone,” he said. “Well now, did I or did I not?[Pg 177]I really can’t say. I had achieved however, through the accidentaldiscovery of the qualities of the Amanita Phalloides, a certain newattitude toward myself. As I went about with the little poison packetsin my pockets I felt suddenly a new kind of respect for myself. Ifelt power in myself and something quite new to the other boys musthave crept at about this time into the expression of my eyes. I wasno longer frightened and did not shrink away or begin crying when oneof the bullies of the school approached me at the recess time nowand—could it be true?—I felt they were suddenly afraid of me. Thethought filled me with a queer sort of joy and I walked boldly aboutthe school yard, not strutting but at the same time shrinking from noone. There was at that time a report current among the boys—I do notknow where it came from but it was believed and I did not deny it—thatI carried a loaded pistol about in my pocket.”

The judge—and by the way his title was a quite spurious one given himby 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 beento Europe—the judge now told me of his experience as a young man incollege. Now that I come to think of it he no doubt did not tell meat one time all the things I am here setting down. During that winterand spring I spent a great many evenings in his company and he talkedcontinuously of himself, of his cheating the men of the South to getmoney for himself and cousin, of his wanderings in Europe, of the menhe had met at home and abroad and of what he had concluded concerningmen’s lives, their motives and impulses and what he thought it would bebest for me to do to make my own life as happy as possible.

[Pg 178]

He had returned at the end of his own life to live out his days alonein his native place because, as he said, one had in the end to accepthis own time, place and people, whatever they might be, and that onegained nothing by wandering about the earth among strangers. During hismiddle years he had thought he would live out his life in some Europeantown 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 whohad built the lovely cathedral at that place; at Oxford where he hadspent some months wandering filled with joy among the old collegesand under the great trees that line the river Thames; in London wherehe got to have a great respect for the half-stupid but as he saidwholly dignified self-respect of the young Englishmen he saw walkingin the Strand or along Piccadilly; or in some more colorful town ofthe south like Madrid or Florence. The French and Paris he declaredhe could not understand, although he wanted very much to understandand be understood by them, as he felt they were in a way more likehimself than any of the others of the Europeans he had seen. “I learnedto speak their language quite fluently,” he said, “but they neverreally took me into their lives. The men I met, painters, writers andfellows of that sort, went about with me, borrowed my money and triedcontinually to sell me inferior paintings but I always realized theywere laughing up their sleeves, and just what about I couldn’t make outor perhaps I shouldn’t have cared.”

In the end the judge had come home to his Ohio town and had settleddown to his books, his whisky and his companionship with such men[Pg 179]as Nate Lovett, Billy West, and the others. “We are what we are, weAmericans,” 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 observeand although they are filled with stupid prejudices and are fools, thecommon 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 oftragedy that then came and that no doubt set the tone of his afterlife, it was stupid enough. With his mind filled with the thoughtstaken from the books in his father’s library and after a boyhood ofsuch loneliness and brooding as I have here described he went tocollege filled with high hopes but was there doomed to live as lonelyan existence as he had lived in his home town. The young men of thecollege, given for the most part to the cultivation of athletic sportsand to going about to parties and dances with the girls of a near-bycity, did not take to young Turner and he did not take to them.

And then during his second year something happened. There was a youngman in one of the upper classes, an athlete of note but at the sametime an earnest student, toward whom the Ohio boy’s fancy now turned.It was an entirely sentimental affair, as the man afterward explainedand might have done him no harm had he been content never to give itany kind of expression.

He did however near the end of his second year try to give itexpression. For weeks he had been going about, much like a young girl[Pg 180]in love, thinking constantly of the athlete, of his splendid ruggedfigure, fine eyes and quick active mind and of how wonderful it wouldbe if he could have an intimate friendship with such a fellow. Hedreamed of walks the two might take together in the evenings under theelms that grew on the campus. “I thought he would take my arm or Iwould take his and we would walk and talk,” Judge Turner said, and Iremember that as he spoke he got out of his chair and walked about theroom and that his small white hands played nervously over the front ofhis coat. He seemed not to want to face me as he told the more vitalpart of his tale but going behind my chair walked up and down the roomat my back, and I remember how, although I was then but a boy, I knewhe suffered and wanted to put his arms about me as he talked but didnot dare. My own heart was filled with sadness so that unknown perhapsto him tears came in my eyes and what part of his tragedy and his wordsI 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 fellowof his college as one much like himself but blessed with a strongerbody, greater ability to make his way in the world and no doubt alsowanting to give something of himself, or something beautiful outsidehimself that would represent some spirit of himself, to another man.Once young Turner went to a near-by city and spent a whole afternoongoing from shop to shop trying to find some bit of jewelry, a paintingor something of the sort he himself thought lovely and that would bewithin the limits of his own slender means that he might in secret[Pg 181]send to the man he so admired.

“For women I did not care,” the judge said huskily. “To tell the truthI was afraid of women. In a relationship made with a woman one, Ithought, risked too much. It might be quite altogether perfect or itmight be just nothing at all. To tell the truth I did not then haveand never have had enough assurance of fineness in myself to make itpossible for me to approach a woman with the object of becoming herlover and I was not then and never have been a strong lustful man and Ihad, even at that time, put all thought of anything very definite everhappening 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 relationthat would never attempt to come to any sort of physical expression. Wewould live, I dreamed, each his own life, each gathering what beautymight be possible from the great outer world and bringing it as a prizeto the other. There would be this man I loved and of whom I askednothing and toward whom my whole impulse would be forever just to giveand give to the very top of my bent.

“You understand how it was, or rather of course you do not understandnow but some day it may be you will,” said the voice coming from thethin lips of the small fat man walking up and down the room behind mein the house in Ohio. “I did a foolish thing,” said the voice. “One dayI wrote a note to the man telling something of the dream that had beenin my mind and as I had nothing else to send I went to a florist’s and[Pg 182]sent him a great bunch of beautiful roses.”

“I got no answer to the note but later he showed it about and allduring the rest of my days at the school—and out of a kind ofblind determination I stayed on there until I graduated and had gotmy degree, my expenses after my father’s death being paid by mycousin—during all the rest of my days at the school I was looked upongenerally as a—perhaps you do not even know the meaning of the word—Iwas looked upon as a pervert.

“There was another and more vulgar word, a word I had seen on the wallsof the shed and on the board fence when I was a schoolboy that wasalso shouted at me. Like my father before me I, in my trouble, took towalking in the streets and in lonely places at night. The word wouldbe shouted at me from the darkness or from the steps of a house as Istumbled along in the darkness and I had not then, as I had when I wasa lad, the satisfaction of thinking of myself as another Francisco, asone who could resort to poison powders to assert his own supremacy andto reëstablish himself with himself.

“I was simply determined I would finish my days in college and wouldnot follow my father’s footsteps in taking my own life—having then andalways having had a queer sort of respect, do you see, for life as itmanifested itself in my own body—that I would finish my days in thatplace and that I would then, at the first opportunity, get hold ofenough money to make myself respected among the men with whom and inwhose company I would in all likelihood have to live out my days.

[Pg 183]

“I conceived, do you see, of money-making as the only sure method towin 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 havetaken the trouble to invite you to my house—as for you, my lad, if anopportunity comes to you, as it did to me when my cousin got me sentSouth, you had better take advantage of it,” said the judge, comingfrom behind my chair and standing before me to pour himself anotherglass of the whisky which he drank this time I noticed without thecustomary little ceremony of holding it for a moment between his eyesand the light.

I thought, or I may fancy I then thought, that the judge’s brightbirdlike eyes were clouded and looked tired as he said these lastwords and that his hands as he poured the whisky trembled a little butperhaps the notion but springs from my more mature fancy playing over adramatic moment in life.

And at any rate he came to loaf away the next afternoon at the stableand was as he always had been, sitting in silence, listening tothe talk that went round and folding his fat little hands over hisneatly-waistcoated paunch. And when he spoke he, as always, concealedunder so thick a coat of good-natured toleration what sarcasm may havelurked in his words that he won and seemed always to hold the respectof all of his hearers.

DEFINITION

A NARROW beam of yellow light against the satin surface of purplishgray wood, wood become soft of texture, touched with these delicateshades of color. The light from above falls straight down the faceof 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 andin my grave. No, it cannot be a grave. Would it not be wonderful if Ihad died and been buried in a marble sepulchre, say on the summit of ahigh hill above a city in which live many beautiful men and women? Itis a grand notion and I entertain it for a time. What have I done tobe buried so splendidly? Well, never mind that. I have always been onewho wanted a great deal of love, admiration and respect from otherswithout having to go to all the trouble of deserving it. I am buriedmagnificently in a marble sepulchre cut into the side of a large hill,[Pg 185]near the top. On a certain day my body was brought hither with greatpomp. Music played, women and children wept and strong men bowed theirheads. Now on feast days young men and women come up the hillside tolook 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 menwho come up the hillside are wishing they could be like me, and theyoung and beautiful women are all wishing I were still alive and that Imight be their lover.

How splendid! What have I done? The last thing I remember I was workingat that place where so many kegs of nails had to be rolled down anincline. I was full of beer too. What happened after that? Did I save abesieged city, kill a dragon like Saint George, drive snakes out of theland like Saint Patrick, inaugurate a new and better social system, orwhat could I have done?

I am somewhere in a huge place. Perhaps I am standing in that greatcathedral at Chartres, the cathedral that Judge Turner told me aboutwhen I was a lad and that I myself long afterward saw and that becamefor me as it has been for many other men and women the beauty shrine ofmy life. It may be that I am standing in that great place at midnightalone. It cannot be that there is any one with me for I feel verylonely. A feeling of being very small in the presence of something vasthas 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 Chartresor buried splendidly in a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a[Pg 186]magnificent city. I am an American and if I am dead my spirit must nowbe in a large half-ruined and empty factory, a factory with cracks inthe walls where the work of the builders was scamped, as nearly allbuilding was scamped in my time.

It cannot be I am in the presence of the Virgin. Americans do notbelieve in either Virgins or Venuses. Americans believe in themselves.There is no need of gods now but if the need arises Americans willmanufacture many millions of them, all alike. They will label them“Keep smiling” or “Safety first” and go on their way, and as for thewoman, the Virgin, she is the enemy of our race. Her purpose is not ourpurpose. Away with her!

The beam of wood I see is just a beam of wood. It was cut in a forestand brought to the factory to support a wall that had begun to giveway. No one touched it with careless hurried hands and so it aged asyou see, quite beautifully—as trees themselves age. All about me arebroken wheels. In the factory the great steam-driven wheels are foreverstill now.

Broken dreams, ends of thoughts, a stifled feeling within my chest.

Aha, you Stephenson, Franklin, Fulton, Bell, Edison—you heroes ofmy Industrial Age, you men who have been the gods of the men of myday—is your day over so soon? “In the end,” I am telling myself, “allof your triumphs come to the dull and meaningless absurdity, of saya clothespin factory. There have been sweeter men in old times, halfforgotten now, who will be remembered after you are forgotten. TheVirgin too, will be remembered after you are forgotten. Would it not[Pg 187]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 rollkegs, because I do not want to work in a factory anywhere I must needsgo getting gaudy and magnificent and try to blow all factories awaywith a breath of my fancy. My fancy climbs up and up.

Democracy shall spread itself out thinner and thinner, it shall come tonothing but empty mouthings in the end. Everywhere, all over the earth,shall be the dreary commercial and material success of, say the laterByzantine Empire. In the West and after the great dukes, the kings andthe popes, the commoners—who were not commoners after all but onlystole the name—are having their day. The shrewd little money-getterswith the cry “democracy” on their lips shall rule for a time and thenthe real commoners shall come—and that shall be the worst time ofall. Oh, the futile little vanity of the workers who have forgottenthe cunning of hands, who have long let machines take the place of thecunning of hands!

And the tired men of the arts. Oh, the cunning smart little men ofthe arts of New York and Chicago! Painters making advertising designsfor soap, painters making portraits of bankers’ wives, story-tellersstriving wearily to “make” the Saturday Evening Post or to berevolutionists 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 automobileraces on the speedway at Indianapolis Indiana. Not for them the[Pg 188]flashing thoroughbreds or the sturdy trotters and pacers. Not for themfreedom, laughter. For them machines.

Long ago that Judge Turner had corrupted my mind. He played me a hellof a trick. I have been going about trying to have thoughts. What afool I have been! I have read many books of history, many stories ofmen’s lives. Why did I not go to college and get a safe education? Imight have worked my way through and got my mind fixed in a comfortablemold. There is no excuse for me. I shall have to pay for my lack of aproper 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 hydraulicpressure. It came out a tough kind of composition that can be made tolook like wood. It can be grained like wood. He will get rich. I tellyou 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 itwill turn out. You can’t down the American mind. Some fellow will makea drink, a synthetic drink. It won’t cost much to make. Perhaps it canbe made out of crude oil like gasoline and then the Standard will takehim up. He’ll get rich. We Americans can’t be put down, I’ll tell youthat.”

FIRST VOICE.“There is a man in New York makes car wheels out of paper. Itis ground, I suppose, and made into a kind of mush and then issubjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. The wheels look [Pg 189] 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 bookby Mark Twain. He knocked theories cold, I’ll tell you what. He madeout all life was just a great machine.”

* * * * *

Where am I? Am I dreaming or am I awake? It seems to me that I amsomewhere in a great empty place. I shall have one of my terrible fitsof depression if I am not careful now. Sometimes I walk gayly along thestreets and talk to men and women gayly but there are other times whenI am so depressed that all the muscles of my body ache. I am like oneon whose back a great beast sits. Now it seems to me I am in a hugeempty place. Has the roof of a factory in which I was at work at nightfallen in? There is a long shaft of yellow light falling down a beam ofwood or marble.

Thoughts flitting, an effort to awaken out of dreams, voices heard,voices talking somewhere in the distance, the figures of men and womenI have known flashing in and out of darkness. There is a tiny faintvoice speaking: “The money-makers will grow weary and disgusted withtheir own money-making and labor shall have lost all faith, all senseof the cunning of the hand. The factory hands shall rule. What a messit will be!”

[Pg 190]

* * * * *

Where am I? I am in a bed somewhere in a room in a workers’ roominghouse. Two young mechanics live in the next room and now they aregetting out of bed and are talking cheerfully. Once on cold nightsmonks 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’svoices. My brain, a voice in my own brain, chattering: “The womanwho had been taken in adultery came to wash with her hands the tiredfeet of the Christ. She wiped his feet with her long hair and pouredprecious ointment upon them.” A distorted thought born of the effortto awaken from a heavy dream: “Many men and women are going along astreet. 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 newday.”

And now the dream again. Again the great empty place. I cannot breathe.There is a great black bell without a tongue, swinging silently indarkness. It swings and swings, making a great arch and I await silentand frightened. Now it stops and descends slowly. I am terrified. Cannothing stop the great descending iron bell? It stops and hangs for amoment and now it drops suddenly and I am a prisoner under the greatiron bell.

WITH a frantic effort I am awake, I am in my laborers’ rooming houseand Nora, who is my friend, has been trying to clean the wall paper inmy room. She takes bits of bread dough and rubs the walls. The paperon the walls was originally yellow but time and coal soot have made italmost black. Light is struggling in through a window, wiped clean byNora but yesterday, but already nearly black again. The morning sun isplaying on the wall.

Nora’s lover does not come home although he writes whenever his shipcomes to port. The ship carries ore from Duluth to Chicago and one maybe quite sure he does not sleep much of the time in a clean berth norsmell in his nostrils the clean sea air, as I represented things toNora 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 andmyself 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 likeliterary triumphs. We are much together and as the time is a blackone 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 wasto see a time when if a man wrote ten honest paragraphs or painted[Pg 192]three honest paintings he immediately set himself up as a persecutedsaint and wept if Mr. Sumner of New York or the Watch and Ward Club ofBoston did not descend upon him. Most “moderns” of the arts I was laterto see regretted the day of the passing of the Inquisition. They didnot hanker to be burned at the stake but would have loved having itdone to them, as in the moving picture, with some sort of mechanicalcold 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 forherself.

In the evenings we went out to walk together, sometimes going to thedocks and sitting together while the moon came up over the waters ofthe lake and sometimes going to what was called the better part of townto walk under trees in a park or along a residence street.

There was no love-making for Nora’s mind was turned toward hersailorman 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 workedin a dozen factories and much of the time it had been with me asit was with Judge Turner when he was a boy in an Ohio town. Naturehad compelled him to go into a vile shed on the walls of which werescrawled sentences that revolted his soul and the necessity of keepingmy body going—a necessity I myself did not understand but that wasthere, in me—had compelled me, time and again, to go into the door ofa factory as an employee.

I talked constantly to Nora of the thoughts in my mind. There was akind of understanding between us. I did not try to come between her[Pg 193]and her sailorman and I had the privilege of saying to her what Ipleased.

What a mixed-up affair! I was always pretending to Nora that I lovedmen and was a great mixer with men while at the same time I wasdreaming of having a fight with my fists with the athlete at thewarehouse.

In the late afternoon I went along a street homeward bound, filled withbeer and imagining a scene. In my wanderings I had known personally twofighters, Bill McCarthy, a lightweight, and Harry Walters, a heavy.Once I was second for Harry Walters in a fight with a Negro in a barnnear Toledo, Ohio. Sports came out from the city to the barn near ariver and when Harry began to lose I was shrewd enough to spread thealarm that the police were coming so that everyone fled and Harry wassaved a beating at the hands of the black.

I remembered the blows Harry had struck and that the black had struckand the blows I had seen Billy McCarthy strike. The black had a feintand a cross that confused Harry and that landed the black’s left everytime full on Harry’s chin. Each time it landed Harry became a littlemore groggy but he could not avoid the blow. And I remembered how theblack smiled each time as it landed. He had two rows of gold-coveredteeth 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 theathlete of the warehouse standing before me.

Aha! There is a slight rocking movement of the body, just so. The head[Pg 194]moves slowly and rhythmically like the head of a snake when it is aboutto strike. Oh, for a long row of yellow gold-crowned teeth to glistenin the mouth when one smiles the golden smile in factory streets, infactories themselves or, most of all, when in a fight, when about toknock an athlete who works with one on a certain platform, “for agoal,” as we used to say among us fighters—an athlete on a platformand with three or four large heavy Swede teamsters standing looking onand smiling also their own slow smiles.

Patience now! One gets the body and the head moving just so, inopposite directions, with opposing rhythm—a sort of counterpoint, asit were—and then the golden smile comes and, quickly, shiftily, thefeint with the right for the belly followed with lightning quickness bythe left, crossed to the chin.

Oh, for a powerful left! “I would give freely and willingly all thechances I possess of being buried with great pomp in a marble sepulchreon a hillside above a magnificent city for a powerful left,” I thinkeach evening as I go home from work.

And all the time pretending to Nora and myself that I am one who lovesmankind! Love indeed! Nora who wished to make happy the one man sheunderstood and with whom she was to live was the lover, not I.

For me the athlete, poor innocent one, has become a symbol.

IN the many factories where I have worked most men talked vilely totheir fellows and long afterward I was to begin to understand that alittle. It is the impotent man who is vile. His very impotence has madehim vile and in the end I was to understand that when you take from manthe cunning of the hand, the opportunity to constantly create new formsin materials, you make him impotent. His maleness slips imperceptiblyfrom him and he can no longer give himself in love, either to workor to women. “Standardization! Standardization!” was to be the cryof my age and all standardization is necessarily a standardizationin impotence. It is God’s law. Women who choose childlessness forthemselves choose also impotence—perhaps to be the better companionsfor the men of a factory, a standardization age. To live is to createconstantly new forms: with the body in living children; in new and morebeautiful forms carved out of materials; in the creation of a world ofthe fancy; in scholarship; in clear and lucid thought; and those who donot 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 nowwriting. One cannot think of the figure of a single man as being inhimself to blame but as the man named Ford of Detroit has done more[Pg 196]than any other man of my day to carry standardization to its logicalend might he also not come to be looked upon as the great killer ofhis age? To make impotent is surely to kill. And there is talk ofmaking him President. How fitting! Tamerlane, who specialized in thekilling of men’s bodies but who tells in his autobiography how he wasalways desirous that all living men under him retain their manhood andself-respect, was the ruler of the world in his age. Tamerlane for theancients. Ford for the moderns.

In our age why should we not all have houses alike, all men and womenclad 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? Surelyindividuality is ruinous to an age of standardization. It should atonce and without mercy be crushed out. Let us give all workers largerand larger salaries but let us crush out of them at once all floweringof 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 whatwe are all so universally agreed should everywhere be done, the man whohas made standardization the fetish of his life.

Books may be standardized—they are already almost that; painting maybe standardized—it has often been done, and the standardization ofpoetry will be easy. Already I know a man who is working on a machinefor the production of poetry. One feeds into it the letters of thealphabet and out comes poetry and one may pull various levers for theproduction of poems either of the vers libre sort or poetry inthe classic style.

Arise, men of my age! Under the banner of the new age we shall have a[Pg 197]great machine moving slowly down a street and depositing cement housesto the right and left as it goes, like a diarrhœic elephant. All theyoung Edisons will enlist under the banner of a Ford. We shall haveall the great minds of our age properly employed making car wheels outof waste newspapers and synthetic wines out of crude oils. I am toldby intelligent men who were soldiers in the World War that in all theworld before the war standardization had been carried to the highestpitch by the Germans but now the Germans have been defeated. May itnot be that we Americans have all along been intended by God to be thenation that will carry highest the banner of the New Age?

BUT I wander from my subject to leap into the future, to become aprophet, and I have no prophet’s beard. In reality I am thinking of acertain 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 amongwhom he worked.

There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Fordtype of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futileoutpouring of men’s lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was atwork. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian. In old Rabelaisthere was the salt of infinite wit and I have no doubt the Rabelaisianflashes that came from our own Lincoln, Washington and the others hadpoint 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 awicked left to cross over to the chin of some defender of the new agethere was burned the memory of the last place in which I had workedbefore I had come to the warehouse to roll the kegs of nails.

It was a bicycle factory where I was employed as an assembler. Withsome ten or twelve other men I worked at a bench in a long room facinga row of windows. We assembled the parts that were brought to us[Pg 199]by boys from other departments of the factory and put the bicyclestogether. There was such and such a screw to go into such and sucha screw hole, such and such a nut to go on such and such a bolt. Asalways in the modern factory nothing ever varied and within a week anyintelligent quick-handed man could have done the work with his eyesclosed. One turned certain screws, tightened certain bolts, whirled awheel, fastened on certain foot pedals and passed the work on to thenext man. Outside the window I faced there was a railroad track linedon one side by factory walls and the other by what had started to be astone quarry. The stone of this quarry had not, I presume, turned outto be satisfactory and the hole was being filled with rubbish cartedfrom various parts of the city and all day carts arrived, dumped theirloads—making each time a little cloud of dust—and over the dumpwandered certain individuals, men and women who were looking among therubbish for bits of treasure, bottles I fancy and bits of cloth andiron that could later be sold to junk men.

For three months I had worked at the place and listened to the talkof my companions and then I had fled. The men seemed everlastinglyanxious to assert their manhood, to make it clear to their fellowsthat they were potent men able to do great deeds in the realms of theflesh and all day I stood beside a little stand-like bench, on whichthe frame of the bicycle was stuck upside down, tightening nuts andscrews and listening to the men, the while I looked from their facesout the window to the factory walls and the rubbish heap. An unmarriedman had been on the evening before to a certain house in a certain[Pg 200]street and there had happened between himself and a woman what he nowwished to talk about and to describe with infinite care in putting inall the details. What an undignified stallion he made of himself! Hehad 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 Iworked in that place when I became physically ill and other days whenI cursed all the gods of my age that had made men—who in another agemight have been farmers, shepherds or craftsmen—these futile fellows,ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they felt theage of impotency asserting itself in their bodies.

In the bicycle factory I had repeatedly told the other men that I wassubject to sick headaches and I used to go often to a window, throwit open and lean out, closing my eyes and trying to create in fancy aworld in which men lived under bright skies, drank wine, loved womenand with their hands created something of lasting value and beauty andseeing me thus, white and with trembling hands, the men dropped thetalk that so sickened me. Like kind children they came and did my workor, after the noon hour, brought me little packages of remedies theyhad 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 ithad become wornout, had quit my job and had gone to the place where Iworked 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 thefeint, the cross and the golden smile were all in good workingcondition and that no man, least of all the young athlete who could[Pg 201]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. Therewas a trick I had learned. I gave one of the kegs I was rolling downthe incline just a little sudden turn with my foot so that it struckhim on the legs as he came into the house through a door. I hit him onthe shins and when he howled with pain expressed the greatest regretand then as soon as I could, without arousing too much suspicion, I didit again.

We ceased speaking and only glared at each other. Even the dull-wittedteamsters knew there was a fight brewing. I waited and watched, makingmy lips do the nearest thing possible to a golden smile, and at nightin my room and even sometimes when I was walking with Nora and had comeinto a quiet dark street I practiced the feint and the cross. “What inHeaven’s name are you doing?” Nora asked, but I did not tell her buttalked instead of my dreams, of brave men in rich clothes walking withlovely women in a strange land I was always trying to create in a worldof my fancy and that was always being knocked galley-west by the factsof my life. Regarding the queer sudden little movements I was alwaysmaking with my shoulders and hands I tried to be very mysterious andonce 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 ofa natural necessity but it was not true. I had remembered how HarryWalters and Billy McCarthy, when they were preparing for a fight, dida good deal of what is called shadow boxing. One imagines an opponentbefore oneself and advances and recedes, feints and crosses, whirls[Pg 202]suddenly around and gives ground before a rushing opponent only to comeback at him with terrific straight rights and lefts, just as his attackhas exhausted itself.

I wanted, I fancy, to have Nora grow tired of waiting for me and tocome look around the bush and to discover my secret—that I was not asshe thought, a rather foolish but smart-talking fellow inclined to besomething of a cloud man. Ah, I thought, as I danced about on a bit ofgrass back of the bush, she will come to peek and see me here in mytrue light. She will take me for some famous fighter, a young Corbettor that famous middleweight of the day called “The Nonpareil.” What Ihoped was that she would come to some such conclusion without askingquestions and would go back to the bench to wait for my coming filledwith a new wonder. A famous young prizefighter traveling incognito, notwanting public applause, a young Henry Adams of Boston with the punchof a Bob Fitzsimmons, a Ralph Waldo Emerson with the physical assuranceof a railway brakeman—what painter, literary man or scholar has nothad moments of indulging in some such dream? A burly landlord hasbeen crude enough to demand instant pay for the room in which one isliving, 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 anentire street. “Did you see him pummel that fellow? And he such a paleintellectual looking chap, too! You can never tell how far a dog canjump by the length of his tail.” Etc., etc.

Men lost in admiration going off along a street talking of one’s[Pg 203]physical prowess. Oneself flecking the dust off one’s hands andlighting a cigarette, while one looks with calm indifference at ared-faced taxi driver lying pale and quite defeated and hopeless in agutter.

It was something of that sort of admiration I wanted from Nora but Idid not get it. Once when I was walking in a street with her and hadjust gone through with my exercises she looked at me with scorn in hereyes. “You’re a nice fellow but you’re bughouse all right,” she saidand 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 andthe athlete and myself had two teamsters as witnesses to the affair.

All day I had been bedeviling him—being just as downright ugly andnasty as I could, clipping him on the shins with several flying kegs,making my apologies as insolently as possible and when he startedtelling one of his endless nasty tales to the teamsters starting a loudconversation on some other subject just as he was about to come to thenub of his story. The teamsters felt the fight brewing and wanted toencourage 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 fighthim and I must have taken his scorn of me for timidity for I suddenlygrew very bold. He was coming in at the door of the house just as I wason my way out behind one of the kegs and I suddenly stopped it, lookedhim squarely in the eyes and then, with an attempt at the golden smileon my lips, sent the keg flying directly at him.

[Pg 204]

He leaped over the keg and came toward me in silence and I prepared tobring my technique into play. Really I had, at the moment, a great dealof confidence in myself and began at once rocking my head, making queerlittle shifting movements with my feet and trying to establish a kindof cross rhythm in my shoulders and head that would, I felt, confusehim.

He looked at me lost in astonishment and I decided to lead. Had I beencontent to hit him in the belly with my right, putting all my strengthback of the blow and then had I begun kicking, biting and pummelingfuriously, I might have come out all right. He was so astonished—nodoubt, like Nora, he thought me quite bughouse—that the right wouldsurely have landed, but that, you see, was not the technique of thesituation.

The thing was to feint for the belly and then “pull one’s punch” as itwere, and immediately afterwards whip over the powerful left to thejaw. 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 heknocked me down a second time and a third and a fourth. He knocked medown perhaps a dozen times and the two teamsters came to the door towatch and all the time there was the most foolish look on his face andon their faces. It was a look a bulldog attacked by a hen might haveassumed—no doubt by my bullyragging I had convinced them, as I hadmyself, I could fight—but presently both my eyes were so swollen andmy nose and mouth so bruised and cut that I could not see and so I gotto my feet and walked away, going out of the warehouse in the midst ofan intense silence on the part of all three of the spectators.

[Pg 205]

And so along a street I went to my room, followed by two or threecurious children who perhaps thought I had been hit by a freight trainand succeeded in also getting my door bolted against any sudden descentof Nora. My eyes were very evidently going to be badly discolored, mynose bled and my lips were badly cut, and so, after bathing my face incold water, I put a wet towel over it and went and threw myself on thebed.

It was one of those moments that come, I presume, into every man’slife. I was lying on my bed in my room, in the condition alreadydescribed, the door was bolted, Nora was not directly about and I wasout 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 toher—she was at work somewhere on the floor below and would havegladly come running to offer her woman’s sympathy to my hurt physicalself—but it was not my hurt physical self that I thought wantedattention. As far as that is concerned I was then, as I have been allmy life, not so much concerned with the matter of physical discomfortor pain. Always it has been true of me that a framed water lily on awall or a walk in a factory street can hurt me worse than a blow on thejaw and long afterward when I became a scribbler of tales I was ableto take advantage of this peculiarity of my nature to do my work underconditions that would have disheartened a more physically sensitiveman. As I was destined to live most of my life and do most of my workin factory towns and in little, ill-smelling, hideously-furnishedrooms, freezing cold in winter and hot and cheerless in summer, it[Pg 206]turned out to be a good and convenient trait in me and in the end Ihad so trained myself to forget my surroundings that I could sit forhours lost in my own thoughts and dreams, or scribbling oftentimesmeaningless sentences in a cold room in a factory street, on a logbeside some country road, in a railroad station or in the lobby of somelarge hotel, filled with the hurrying hustling figures of business men,totally unconscious of my surroundings, until my mood had worn itselfout 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 asI later became and am even now. Ink, paper and pencils are cheap inour day and I have taken full advantage of that fact and have duringsome years written hundreds of thousands of words which have afterwardbeen thrown away. Many have told me, in print or by word of mouth, thatall should have been thrown away and they may be right, but I am onewho loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sightof a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with wordsalways gladdens me. The result of the scribbling, the tale of perfectbalance, all the elements of the tale understood, an infinite number ofminute adjustments perfectly made, the power of self-criticism fully atwork, the shifting surface of word values and color in full play, formand the rhythmic flow of thought and mood marching forward with thesentences—these are things of a dream, of a far dim day toward whichone goes knowing one can never arrive but infinitely glad to be onthe road. It is the story I dare say of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” andthe sloughs and sink holes on the road are many but the tale of that[Pg 207]journey is known to other men than scribblers.

The consolation of ink and paper came, however, long after the timewith which I am now concerned, and what a consolation it is! How mucheasier it is to sit in a room before a desk and with paper before oneto describe a fight between oneself as hero of some tale and five orsix burly ruffians than with the fists to dispose of one baseballplayer on the platform of a warehouse.

In the tale one can do any such job as it should be done and in thedoing give satisfaction both to oneself and the possible reader, forthe reader will always share in the emotions of the hero and gloat withhim over his victories. In the tale, as you will understand, all isin order. The feint and the cross, the powerful left to the jaw, thegolden smile, the shifting movements of the shoulders that confuse anddisconcert the opponent, all work like well-oiled machines. One defeatsnot one baseball player or ruffian of the city streets but a dozen ifthe need arises. Oh, what glorious times I have had, sitting in littlerooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood haverun from the wounds of the villains, foolish enough to oppose me on thefield of honor; what fair women I have loved and how they have lovedme and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, open-hearted and fine Ihave been! I remember how I sat in the back room of a small bootleggingestablishment at Mobile, Alabama, one afternoon, long after the timewith which I am now concerned and while three drunken sailors discussedthe 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[Pg 208]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 writingthe tale of Elsie Leander’s westward journey, in “The Triumph of theEgg,” and missed my own train—these remain as rich and fine spots in aprecarious existence.

But at the time of which I am speaking the consolation of ink and paperwas a thing of the future and my bunged-up eyes and hurt spirits werefacts.

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 ofsatisfaction to me at the moment.

There was the warehouse where I had been more or less a spiritual bullybut where I would now have to eat crow. Well, I need not go back. Theday before had been payday and I would, by never going near the placeagain, lose little money and save myself the humiliation of facing theteamsters. And when it came to the scratch, I thought, there was thecity I was in, the state, the very United States of America itself—Icould if I chose desert them all. I was young, had been well trainedin poverty, had no family ties, no social position to uphold, I wasunmarried and as yet childless.

I was a free man, I told myself, sitting on the bed and staring aboutthe room through swollen eyelids. Was I free? Did any man ever achievefreedom? I had my own life before me. Why did I not, by some grand[Pg 209]effort, begin to live a life?

I lay on the bed with the wet towel thrown aside thinking, trying tomake plans. A faint suspicion of something permanently wrong with mehad begun to creep into my consciousness. Was I, alas, a fellow bornout of his place and time? I was in a world where only men of actionseemed to thrive. Already I had noted that fact. One wanted a definitething 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 eyesand 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 wasstrong enough for all practical purposes, when not scarred and bruisedby the blows of an angry ball player, and I was not such a bad-lookingfellow. I was not lazy and on the whole rather liked hard physicallabor. Need I be what I at the moment seemed to myself to be, a uselessand foolish dreamer, a child in a world filled with what I thought tobe grown-up men? Why should I myself not also grow up, take the plow bythe handle, plow vast fields, become rich or famous? Perhaps I couldbecome 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 goesprancing 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 fieldof action I, in fancy, plunged in again and began thinking of myself asholding the handle of a plow and plowing the fields of life, turning[Pg 210]great furrows, planting perhaps the seeds of new ideas. Oho, for thesmell 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 earlybut now she was sweeping and dusting on the floor below and I couldhear her moving about.

Why should I not first of all conquer Nora? That, I at that momentthought, was surely the beginning of manhood, to conquer some woman,and why not Nora as well as another? It would be something of anundertaking that was sure. Nora was not beautiful nor perhaps toosubtle in her outlook on life but then was I myself subtle? She wasdirect and simple and had, I thought, a direct and simple mind andafter I had conquered her, had bent her to my own will, what might wenot do together? There was to be sure the sailor with whom she was tolive and to whom she was promised but I brushed him aside. “I can cookhis goose in some way,” I thought to myself, much as I had thought Icould easily dispose of the ball player by my feints and crosses.

We might, I thought, following up the fancy I had just had, begin bybeing 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 castingin my fortunes with the West. “Out where the smile lasts a littlelonger, out where the handclasp is a little stronger,” etc. “Oho, forthe land where men are men and gals are gals!” I thought my fancyrunning away like a wild horse broken out of its stall. I saw myselfowning vast farms somewhere in the Far West and saw, I am afraid, Nora[Pg 211]doing most of the plowing, planting and the harvesting of crops, thewhile I rode grandly over the estate on a black stallion, receiving thehomage of serfs.

But what would I do with my odd moments? I had tried talking to Nora ofthe things that interested me most, the play of light over a factorychimney, seen amid smoke as darkness came on, odd expressions caughtfrom the lips of passing men and women, the play of the fancy over theimagined 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 Iknew she was not much interested?

With a rush of resolution I threw my doubts aside. Oh, to be one whomade two blades of grass where but one had grown before! With Noraat my side I would in some field become great and powerful. I was atthe moment but a bunged-up fellow lying on the bed in a cheap roominghouse but what did that matter? All about me was the great Americanworld rushing on and on to new mechanical and material triumphs. TeddyRoosevelt and the strenuous life had not yet come but he was implicitin the American mood. Imperialism had already come. It was time, I toldmyself, to be up and doing.

JUMPING off the bed I instantly began to try to prepare myself for newadventures. As I had been lying on the bed thinking the thoughts aboveset down and working myself up to new heights of fancied grandeur sometime had passed. Perhaps I had slept and awakened. At any rate it wasnow dark in the room and I lighted a lamp. By its light and after I hadbathed my face for some time it did not look so swollen although botheyes 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 customon such occasions for me to pass quietly out of the house, tapping onthe door of her room on the floor below and waiting for her on thefront steps.

To tell the truth I had already got well going the new dramatization ofmyself as a man of action but was not sure of myself in the new rôle towant to face any of the workmen in the house. Nora I thought I couldhandle.

As I stood in the room dressed in my best clothes I counted my moneyand then decided I would not be a Western ranchman after all but a manof commerce, an empire builder perhaps. I had in my possession someninety-eight dollars which seemed to me at the moment sufficient for astart in almost any undertaking. It would support me for a few weeks[Pg 213]while I looked about and then I would pitch in somewhere and become anempire builder. It would take time but what was time to me? I had anabundance 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 nothave a strong body?

As I washed the dried blood off my face, put on my Sunday suit andadjusted my tie I in fancy swept the field of commercial adventurewith my somewhat damaged eyes. There were the great cities of Chicagoand New York I had not yet seen, although I had read much aboutthem and about men who had grown from poverty to riches and powerin them. Like all young Americans I had read innumerable tales ofmen who had begun with nothing and had become great leaders, ownersof railroads, governors of states, foreign ambassadors, generals ofarmies, presidents of great modern republics. Abraham Lincoln walkingmiles 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 ofwealth, Daniel Drew the cattle dealer becoming a millionaire, Garfieldthe canal-boat boy and Vanderbilt the ferryman become President andmillionaire, Grant the failure, hauling hides from his father’stannery at Galena, Illinois, to St. Louis—and, it was said, gettingso well piped sometimes on the homeward journey that he fell off thewagon—he also became great, the winner of a mighty war, President ofhis country, a noted traveler, receiving the homage of kings. “And Ican carry my liquor better than he could, by all reports,” I said tomyself.

[Pg 214]

Were these men any better than myself? At the moment and in spite ofthe gloom of an hour before, I thought not, and as for my having butninety-eight dollars, what did that matter? As a matter of fact onegathered from having read American history that there was a sort ofadvantage to be gained from starting with nothing. One had something totalk and brag about in one’s old age, and when one became a candidatefor President one furnished one’s campaign managers with materials forcampaign slogans.

And now I was dressed and had tiptoed out of the house, tapped onNora’s door and was waiting for her outside. I had decided that whenshe came out I would not make an appeal for her woman’s sympathy bytelling of what had actually happened to me. “I do not want woman’ssympathy,” I thought proudly. What I wanted was woman’s respect. Iwanted to conquer them, to have them at my feet, to stand before themthe conquering male.

When Nora came and when we had walked to where there was a street lightand she had seen my damaged countenance I began at once to brag and toreconstruct the fight at the warehouse more to my own fancy. Not onebut four men had attacked me and I had valiantly stood my ground. Aninspiration came. I had got into the fight, I told Nora, because of awoman. A young woman, a working girl like Nora herself had passed theplatform and the men at work there with me had begun making remarksthat were not very nice. What was I to do? I was one who could neverstand quietly by and hear an innocent woman, particularly one who hadto work for her living and had perhaps no men of her own to stand upfor her, hear such a woman subjected to insult. I had, I told Nora, at[Pg 215]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 onwhich I had so depended had worked wonderfully. I had received manyhard blows, it was true, and Nora could see by looking at my face howI had suffered, but I had given better than I had received. Like atornado I had swept up and down the warehouse platform making feintswith my right and whipping my powerful left to the jaws of my opponentsuntil at last they were all laid out like dead men before me. And thenI had come home, a little fearful that I might have killed one or twoof the men but not waiting to see. “I did not care,” I said. “If myopponents have suffered a terrible beating at my hands and if one ortwo of them die of their injuries it was their own fault. They shouldhave 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 cometo 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 fightin 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 notlast very long,—and had got back to the house.

On the steps in front we stopped and Nora stood for a time looking atme. It was a look I did not much fancy, but what was I to do? Two orthree times during our walk I had tried to begin talking a little and[Pg 216]had attempted to patch up the structure of my yarn so that it wouldnot be quite so full of holes and leaky but could think of no way toexplain the unbruised surface and uninjured knuckles of my left, so Ihad taken refuge in a kind of sullen silence.

I had even begun to feel a little injured and angry and was askingmyself what right Nora had to question my story—was feeling, to tellthe truth, much as I was later to feel when some editor or criticrejected, as not sound, one of my written tales—that is to say,resentful and intolerant of the editor or critic and inclined to callhim a fool and to attribute to him all kinds of secret and degradingmotives. I was feeling much in this mood, I say, when we had got backto the steps and were standing in the darkness in front.

And then Nora suddenly put her strong arm about my neck and pulled myhead 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 witha problem I have all my life been trying to face and have never quitesucceeded. 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 classthan the average man. It is a fact perhaps but a fact that I havealways thought we men should deny with all the strength of our morepowerful wills. We men should conquer women. We should not stand in thedarkness with our heads on their shoulders, blubbering as I was doingat that moment.

However, I continued crying and being ashamed of myself and Nora didnot press her advantage. When, now and then, I lifted my face from her[Pg 217]shoulder and looked at her face, dimly seen in the darkness, it seemedto me just kindly and filled with sympathy for my position.

I felt, I presume, most of all the story-teller’s shame at the failureof his yarn and there was something else too. There was a suspicionthat Nora, the woman who had been for weeks listening to my talkand whom I had somewhat looked down upon as not being my equal, hadsuddenly become my superior. I had prided myself on my mind and on thesuperiority of my imaginative flights. Could it be that this woman,this maker of beds in a cheap laborers’ rooming house, had a bettermind than my own?

The thought was unbearable and so, as soon as I could convenientlymanage 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 boltedthe door. The notion of using Nora to plant and sow fields for mewhile I rode about on a magnificent black stallion was now quite goneand I had to construct another and at once. That I realized. I had toconstruct a new dramatization of myself and leave Nora out of it. I wasnot ready for the Noras. Perhaps I would never be ready for them. FewAmerican men I have ever known have ever shown any signs of being readyfor the Noras of the world or of being able really to understand orface them.

My mind turned again to the field of business and affairs. I hadalready known a good many men and, while such fellows as the baseballplayer at the warehouse had the better of me because I had been foolenough to let the struggle between us get on a physical plane, I had[Pg 218]not met many men who had caused me to tremble because of any specialspiritual or intellectual strength in themselves.

To be sure the world of affairs was one of which I knew nothing andyet I thought I might tackle it. “It cannot be worse than the worldof labor,” I thought as I sat in the darkness, trying not to think ofNora—thoughts of whom I was convinced might weaken the resolutionI had taken and might even cause me to begin blubbering again—andkeeping my mind fixed on the laborers I had known, even as the laborerswho lived in the house with me tramped heavily, one by one, up thestairs 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. Whyshould I not do something of the sort as well as all the other men whohave done it so brilliantly? America is the land of opportunity. I mustkeep that thought ever in my mind,” I told myself as I tiptoed out ofthe house at two o’clock in the morning, having left a note of good-byto Nora and the amount of my room rent in an envelope on my bed. I wasbeing very careful not to make any noise as I went along the hallwayand past Nora’s door. “I had better not wake up the woman,” I was wiseenough to say to myself as I went away, hugging my new impulse in life.

I HAD come to that period of a young man’s life where all isuncertainty. In America there seemed at that time but one direction,one channel, into which all such young fellows as myself could pourtheir energies. All must give themselves wholeheartedly to materialand industrial progress. Could I do that? Was I fitted for such alife? It was a kind of moral duty to try and then, as now, men at theheads of the great industrial enterprises filled or had filled all thenewspapers and magazines with sermons on industry, thrift, virtue,loyalty and patriotism, meaning I am afraid by the use of all thesehigh-sounding terms only devotion to the interests in which they hadmoney invested. But the terms were good terms, the words used weremagnificent words. And I was by my nature a word fellow, one whocould at most any time be hypnotized by high-sounding words. It wasconfusing to me as it must be confusing to many young men now. Duringthe World War did we not see how even the very government went into theadvertising business, selling the war to the young men of the countryby the use of the same noble words advertising men used to forward thesale of soap or automobile tires? To the young man a kind of worshipof some power outside himself is essential. One has strength andenthusiasm and wants gods to worship. There were only these gods of[Pg 220]material success. Chivalry was gone. The Virgin had died. In Americathere were no churches. What were called churches were merely clubs,ruled over by the same forces that ruled over the factories and greatmercantile houses. Often the men I heard speaking in churches spokein the same words, used the same terms to define the meaning of lifethat were used by the real-estate boomer, the politician, or theenterprising business man talking to his employees of the necessity ofsteadfastness and devotion to the interests of his firm.

The Virgin was dead and her son had taken as prophets such men as RalphWaldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, the one with his little books inwhich he set down and saved his acts and impulses, striving to makethem all serve definite ends as he saved his pennies and the otherpreaching 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 andsteel. The factory had become America’s church and duplicates of itstood everywhere, on almost every street of every city belching blackincense into the sky.

A passion for reading books had taken possession of me and I did notwork when I had any money at all but often for weeks spent my timereading any book I could get my hands on. In every city there werepublic libraries and I could get books without spending money.

The past took a strong hold on my imagination and I went eagerly downthrough the ages, reading of the lives of the great men of antiquity;[Pg 221]of the Romans and their conquest of the world; of the early Christiansand their struggles before the great organizer Paul came to “putChristianity 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 andelegant dukes of Italy—the poisoners and schemers listening to thewords of their Machiavellis; of the magnificent painters and craftsmenof the Middle Ages; of English and French kings; roundheads; Spanishkings of the days of conquest and of gold ships bringing riches fromthe Spanish Main; the Grand Inquisitor; the coming of Erasmus, thecool scholarly questioner whose questions brought to the front Luther,the conscientious barbarian—all, all spread out before me, the youngAmerican coming into manhood, all in the books.

It was a feast. Could I digest it? I had saved a little money and knewhow to live very cheaply. After working for some weeks, and when I didnot spend money for drinking bouts to ease the confusion of my mind Ihad a few dollars put aside and dollars meant leisure. That is perhapsall dollars have ever meant to me.

Since I was always making the acquaintance of some fellow who livedby gambling I went now and then into a gambling place and sometimeshad luck. I had five dollars when I went in at a certain door and cameout with a hundred dollars in my pocket. Oh, glorious day! On such anamount I could live among books for weeks and so, renting a small roomon a poor street, I went every day to a public library and got a new[Pg 222]book. The book some man had spent years in composing was often wadedthrough in a day and then thrown aside. What a jumble of things in myhead! At times the life directly about me ceased to have any existence.The actuality of life became a kind of vapor, a thing outside ofmyself. My body was a house in which I lived and there were many suchhouses all about me but I did not live in them. Perhaps I was buttrying to make solid the walls of my own house, to roof it properly, tocut windows, becoming accustomed to living in the house so that I couldhave leisure to look out at the windows and into other houses. Of thatI do not know. To make such a claim for myself and my purpose seemsgiving my life a more intelligent direction than I can convince myselfit has had.

I walked in and out of the little rooms in which I lived, often in whatwas called the tough part of a city, hearing all about me the oaths ofdrunken men, the crying of children, the weeping of some poor girl ofthe streets who has just been beaten by her pimp, the quarreling oflaborers and their wives, walked hearing and seeing nothing, walkedgripping a book in my hand.

In fancy I was at the moment with the great Florentine Leonardo daVinci on a day when he sat on a little hill above his country house inItaly studying the flight of birds or was making the mathematical andgeometrical calculations he so loved. Or I was sitting in a carriagebeside the scholar Erasmus as he drove across Europe going from thecourt of one great duke or king to the court of another. The lives ofthe dead men and women had become more real to me than the lives of[Pg 223]the living people about me.

How bad an American I had become, how utterly out of touch with thespirit of my age! Sometimes for weeks I did not read a newspaper—afault in me that would have been considered almost in the light of acrime had it been generally known to my fellows. A new railroad mighthave been built, a new trust formed or some great national excitementlike the free silver affair—that did fall in at about that time—mighthave shaken the whole country while I knew nothing about it.

There was indeed a kind of intimate acquaintance with an unknownand unheralded kind of people I was unconsciously getting. InChicago, where I had now gone I for a time lived in a room in a hugecheaply constructed building that had been erected about a littlecourt. The building was not old, had in fact been built but a fewyears before—during the Chicago World’s Fair—but already it was ahalf-tumbledown unsafe place with great sags in the floors in thehallways and cracks in the walls. The building surrounded the littlebrick-paved court and was divided into single rooms for bachelorlodgers and into small two- and three-room apartments. Since it wasnear the end of several street-car lines and a branch of the Chicagoelevated railroad it was occupied for the most part by street-carconductors and motormen with their wives and children. Many of myfellow-lodgers were young fellows having wives but no children and notintending 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[Pg 224]little and I lived on fruit and on stacks of wheatcakes that could behad at ten cents the stack at a near-by workingmen’s eating place. WhenI was broke I told myself I could always go again to some place wherelaborers were wanted. I was young and my body was strong. “If I cannotget work in the city I can get on a freight train at night and go awayto the country and work on a farm,” I thought. Sometimes I had qualmsof conscience because I had not already started on the great career asan industrial magnate I had half-heartedly mapped out for myself but Imanaged to put my sins of omission aside. There was plenty of time Itold myself and in any event I planned eventually to do the thing witha grand rush.

In the meantime I lay for long hours on the little bed in my roomreading the last book I had got from the library or walked in a near-bypark under the trees. Time ceased to exist and the days became nightwhile the nights became days. Often I came back to my room at two inthe morning, washed my shirt, underwear and socks at a washbowl in acorner, hung them out at my window facing the court to dry and lyingdown naked on my bed read by a gaslight until daylight had come.

Marvelous days! Now I was marching with the conqueror Julius Cæsar overthe vast domains of the mighty Roman Empire. What a life and how proudJulius and I were of his conquests and how often we spoke togetherof the doings of Cicero, Pompey, Cato and the others in Rome. IndeedCæsar and I had become for the nonce the most intimate of friendsand often enough we discussed the unworthiness of some of the other[Pg 225]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 neverto be trusted. Often enough Cicero had talked with Cæsar and pretendedto be Cæsar’s friend but, as Julius often pointed out to me, suchfellows were wont to veer about with every wind that blew, “Writersare the greatest cowards in the world and my own greatest weakness isthat I have a kind of hankering that way myself. Let a man but getinto power and he will always find such scribbling fellows willing andanxious to sing his praises. They are the greatest cur dogs in theworld,” he declared vehemently.

And so I had become in fancy the friend of Cæsar and all day I marchedbeside 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 littlebrick-paved court and there were many other windows. As it was summerthey were all open. Evening came, after a day of walking in dreams, andI had come into my room and taking off my coat had thrown myself downon my bed. When darkness came I did not light a light but lay quietlylistening.

I had stepped now out of the past and into the present and all about mewere the voices of living people. The men and women in the rooms alongthe 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 wormin the middle of the apple of modern life, I have never found that[Pg 226]American men and women, except only the Negroes, laugh or sing much intheir 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 beganto quarrel. Sometimes they fought and after that they made love. Thelove-making of the couples along the court aroused my own passions andI had bad dreams at night.

What a strange thing love-making had become among modern factoryhands, street-car conductors and all such fellows! Almost always itwas preceded by a quarrel, often blows were struck, there were tears,repentance and then embraces. Did the tired nerves of the men and womenneed the stimulation of the fights and quarrels?

A red-faced man who stumbled as he walked along the hallways to hissmall apartment had secured a small flat stick which he kept behind adoor. His wife was young and fat. When he had come home from work andhad in silence eaten his evening meal he sat by the window facing thecourt 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 thestick. “Don’t, John, don’t,” his wife pleaded half-heartedly, as hebegan to pursue her about the narrow room. Chairs were knocked overand tables upset. He kept hitting her with the flat stick upon thenether cheeks and she kept laughing and protesting. Sometimes he struckher too hard and she grew angry and, turning upon him, scratched hisface with her finger nails. Then he swore and wrestled with her. Theirperiod of more intense love-making had now come and silence reigned[Pg 227]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 wasin the camp of Cæsar and we were in Gaul. The great captain had beenwriting at a small table near the door of his tent but now a man hadcome to speak with him. I lay in silence upon a kind of thick warmcloth spread on the ground beside the tent.

The man who talked with Cæsar was a bridge-builder and had come tospeak with him regarding the building of a bridge that the legionsmight cross a river beside which they now lay encamped. A certainnumber of men would be needed with boats and others were at daylight togo 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 waspitched on a hillside. In person he was like ... there was an Italianfruit dealer who had a small store on a street near the park where Iwent every day to sit, a tall gaunt man who had lost one eye and whoseblack hair was turning gray. The fruit dealer had evidently lost hiseye in a fight as there was a long scar on his cheek. It was this man Ihad metamorphosed into a Cæsar.

Below, at the foot of the hill on which the tent stood and on the banksof a river the legions were camped. They had built fires and some ofthe men were bathing in the river but when they came out they dressedquickly 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 littlebreeze and there were no biting flies or insects. Below, the fires inthe valley glowed and cast yellow and red lights over the tawny bodies[Pg 228]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 ablow with an ax. He went away into the darkness and Cæsar went withinhis tent.

I lay on my bed in the room in the building in Chicago not daring toopen my eyes. Had I been asleep? Now there was no quarreling in theother places along the court but there were still lights at some ofthe windows. The workers had not yet all come home. Two women weretalking together across the space between their windows. Street-carconductors and motormen, who had been all day working their carsslowly through crowded streets, propitiating quarrelsome passengers,cursing and being cursed at by teamsters and crossing policemen, werenow asleep. Of what were they dreaming? They had come from the carbarns, had read a newspaper, telling perhaps of a fight between Englishtroops and the natives of Thibet, had read also a speech by the Germanemperor demanding a place in the sun for Germany, had noted who hadbeaten the Chicago White Sox or who had been beaten by them. Then theyhad quarreled with their wives, blows had been struck, there had beenlove-making and then sleep.

I arose and went to walk in the silent streets and twice during thatsummer I was stopped by holdup men who took a few dollars from me. TheWorld’s Fair had been followed by a time of industrial depression. Howmany miles I have walked in the streets of American cities at night! InChicago and the other industrial cities long streets of houses—how[Pg 229]many houses almost universally ugly and cheaply constructed, likethe building in which I then lived! I passed through sections whereall the people were Negroes and heard laughter in the houses. Thencame the sections entirely inhabited by Jews, by Greeks, Armenians,Italians, Germans, or Poles. How many elements not yet combined in thecities! The American writers, whose books I read, went on assumingthat the typical American was a transplanted Englishman, an Englishmanwho had served his term in the stony purgatory of New England and hadthen escaped out into the happy land, this Heaven, the Middle West.Here they were all to grow rich and live forever, a happy blissfulexistence. Was not all the world supposed to be watching the greatdemocratic experiment in government and human happiness they were toconduct so bravely?

I wandered on into factory districts, long silent streets of grim blackwalls. Had men but escaped out of the prisons of the Old World intothe more horrid prisons of the New? Dread took hold of me as on a darkstreet I was approached by a man who put a gun to my face. He wantedmoney and I tried to be facetious with him, telling him I hadn’t enoughmoney to buy drinks for the two of us but would match him pennies forwhat I had but he only growled at me and taking my few pieces of silverhurried away. Perhaps he did not even understand my words. America,once a place that prided itself on its sense of humor, was now, sincethe coming of the factories, a place where the very robbers were alltoo serious about life.

Periods of lust kept coming and going. In the building where I lived[Pg 230]there was a woman, very young yet, a high-school graduate from anIllinois town who had married a young man of the place. They had cometo live in Chicago, to make their way in the great world, and as hecould 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 forthat matter I did myself, to rise in the world.

The man I never saw but all afternoon the woman sat by a window in oneof 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, bothbeing embarrassed. Like myself she read books and that was a kind ofbond between us. I got into the habit of sitting by my window with mybook 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 thelittle court, I did not want. Of that I was quite sure. She was anotherman’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 theother houses lived in by the people of her home town who had mademoney 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 thetitle of the book she read. It was a popular novel of the day but Ihave 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[Pg 231]been written, would always be written, books that sold by the hundredsof thousands and were often proclaimed as great works of art and thatafter a year or two were utterly forgotten. In them was no sense ofstrangeness, no wonder about life. They lacked the touch of life. “Deadbooks for men and women who dare not live,” I thought contemptuously.There was a kind of pretense of solving some problem of life but theproblem was so childishly stated that later a childish solution seemedquite natural and right. A young man came to an American city from acountry town and, although at bottom he was true and fine, the city fora time diverted him from his noble aims. He committed some near crimethat 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, hepulled himself up again, by the bootstraps as it were, and became arich manufacturer who was kind to his employees.

The book she read expressed perhaps the high-school girl’s dream, thedream she had when she married and came to Chicago. Was her dream thesame now? I had already, as far as I reacted to the life about me atall, started upon another road, was becoming, a little, the eternalquestioner of myself and others. Not for me the standardized littlepellets of opinion, the little neatly wrapped packages of sentimentthe magazine writers had learned to do up, I told myself. In modernfactories food was packed in convenient standard-sized packages and Ihalf suspected that behind the high-sounding labels the food was oftenenough sawdust or something of the sort. It was apparent publishers[Pg 232]also had learned to do up neat packages containing sawdust and putbright-colored labels on them.

Oh, glorious contempt! Seeing the book the woman was reading, knowingshe was the wife of another and that never by any chance could we comeclose to each other, give to each other anything of value, I enjoyed mycontempt for an hour and then it faded. I sat as before by my windowand held an open book but could not follow the thoughts and ideas ofthe writer of the book. I sat by my window and she with her book sat byher window.

Was something about to happen that neither of us wanted, of which wewere both afraid, that would be without value to either of us?

One evening when I met her in the hallway of the building I stoppedbefore her and we stood thus for a minute facing each other. We bothblushed, both felt guilty, and then I tried to say something to her butdid not succeed. I stammered out a few words about the weather, sayinghow hot it was, and hurried away but a week later, when we again met inthe same place it was dark and we kissed.

We began then to walk in silence together in the park in the earlyevenings and sometimes we sat together on a park bench. How careful wewere not to be seen by others who lived in our building. Her husbandleft the house at three in the afternoon and did not return untilmidnight and when he came home he was tired and discouraged. He scoldedat his wife. “He is always scolding,” she said. Well, one wanted tosave money, get into business for oneself. And now he had a wife tosupport and the wages of street-car conductors were not large. The[Pg 233]young man who wanted to rise in the world had begun to resent his wifeand 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 Ihad no way of understanding. Was I not also confused, wanting somethingvery much, that at the same time I did not want? I sat in my roomuntil darkness came holding the book I now could not read and when thedarkness had come threw it with a loud bang on a table. The sound hadbecome a signal to her and when I went into the park she came to joinme. One evening when we had kissed in the darkness of the park I wenthome ahead of her but did not close the door of my room. I stood inthe darkness by the door waiting. She had to pass along the hallway toreach 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 aqueer silent frightened love-making it was—no love-making at all. Shewas afraid and I was afraid, not of her husband but of myself. Latershe went away crying silently along the hallway and after that she andI did not sit at our two windows or walk in the park and I returned tomy books. Once, on a night two or three weeks later as I lay in my ownbedroom, I heard the husband and wife talking together. Something hadhappened that had pleased and excited her. She had been able to offersomething she thought would help her husband and was urging him to giveup being a street-car conductor and to go back to the town from whichthey had come. Her father owned a store there, I gathered, and hadobjected to her marriage but she had secretly written, perhaps been[Pg 234]very humble, and had persuaded her father to take the younger man intopartnership in his business. “Don’t be proud now, Jim. I’m not proudany more. Something has happened to me Jim. I’m not proud any more,” Iheard her saying as I lay in my own room in the darkness, and I leavethe reader to judge whether, under the circumstances, I could be proud.But perhaps after all the woman and I have done something for eachother, I thought.

ON a certain Sunday morning of that summer I found myself sitting ina little garden under apple trees back of a red brick house that hadgreen window blinds and that stood on the side of a hill near the edgeof an Illinois town of some five or six thousand people. Sitting bya small table near me was a dark slender man with pale cheeks, a manI had never seen until late on the evening before and who I had halfthought would die but a few hours earlier. Now, although the morningwas warm, he had a blanket wrapped around him and his thin hands, lyingon the table, trembled. Together we were drinking our morning coffee,containing a touch of brandy. A robin hopped on the grass near by andthe sunlight falling through the branches of the trees made yellowpatches at our feet.

I sat in silence filled with wonder at the strangeness of thecircumstances that had brought me to the spot and of my own mood. Thegarden in which we sat had a gravel path running down through thecentre and on one side vegetables grew, with narrow beds of flowersabout the vegetable plots. Along the further side against a fence weretall berry bushes and on our side there was grass under the trees andnear by a tall hedge of elders. Looking toward the foot of the gardenone got a view of a river valley dotted with farmhouses and beyond the[Pg 236]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 hadtwo lives. First, it had been a river town on the banks of a streamthat led down into the Mississippi, and now it was a merchandisingcentre. Later perhaps it would become a factory town. The river lifehad died, when the railroads came but there still were some remnantsof the older place, one or two streets of small log stores and housesstanding on a bluff above the river and now used as residences byfarm laborers. The old town, left thus off by itself half forgottenby the new town, was picturesque. In the company of my strange newacquaintance and once with his father, an old man who had lived in theriver town in the days of its prosperity, I later spent several hoursamong the old houses. Dogs and pigs wandered through the deep dust ofthe principal street facing the river or slept in the shade of theold buildings and the old man told me that even in its better daysit was a quite terrible place. In the winter, in the early days, theroads were hub deep to the wagons with mud, the houses were small andnear each house was an outhouse that smelled horribly in summer andinvited millions of flies. Pigs, cows and horses were kept in littlesheds near the houses and often diseases, encouraged by the utter lackof sanitation, swept through the town and sometimes carried off wholefamilies.

The older of the two men, named Jim Berners, was a merchant, owningwith his son a large store on the principal street of the newer townand had been brought to the Illinois town when he was a child. His[Pg 237]father, an Englishman, had come to America as a young man and forseveral years had been a merchant in the city of Philadelphia. Havingmarried there and wanting to establish himself as the head of a landedfamily in the new country he had come to Illinois when land could behad at a low price and had bought five hundred acres of river bottomland.

With his young wife and his three children he lived in the river townand had cleared and got ready for planting most of his land whenmisfortune came down upon him. In the crude little towns of that daydoctors were for the most part half educated, the houses were stuffyand full of drafts in winter and epidemics of smallpox, followed byscarlet fever, diphtheria and typhus came and could not be checked.Within two years the merchant’s rather delicate wife died and her deathwas 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 anold 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 AbrahamLincoln. He told me he had never been ill a day in his life. Uponreaching manhood he sold three hundred acres of his land and like hisfather became a merchant.

Father and son still owned the Berners merchandising establishmentalthough they seemed to give it little attention.

What a place it was! Some ten years before I made his acquaintancethe younger Berners, named Alonzo, had gone to Chicago where he hadgot quite hopelessly drunk. During his whole life the man had been a[Pg 238]sufferer from some obscure nervous disease and was never without pain.The sprees he sometimes went on were but a kind of desperate attemptto free himself for a short time from the presence of pain. After thedrunken time he was dreadfully ill and seemed about to die and thenthere came a time of weakness and a kind of physical peace. The tensenerves of his slender body relaxed, he slept at night and spent thedays talking with a few friends, reading books or riding about town ina buggy.

On the sprees, of ten years before, sprees indulged in twice a year atregular intervals outside his own town, when he had stolen away withoutwarning to his father or to an older sister of the household, youngAlonzo had been picked up in the city of Chicago by an English deep-seasailor. The sailor had been working for a time on a lake steamer buthad tired of the place and had left his ship at Chicago and had alsogone on a drunk. He rescued Alonzo Berners from the men into whosehands he had fallen and brought him home and later became attached tothe Berners establishment, staying in the Illinois town at first asclerk in the store and later as the store’s manager. He was a heavilybuilt man of fifty-five when I saw him and had a white scar, evidentlyfrom an old knife wound, on his brown cheek and a peculiar waddlinggait. As he hustled about the store one thought of a fat duck trying tomake its way rapidly along on land.

In the Berners establishment were sold hardware, agriculturalimplements, house and barn paints, jack-knives and a thousand otherthings and there was also a harness shop in the main building facingthe town’s principal street. Back of the main building there was an[Pg 239]alleyway and across the alleyway half a dozen large frame buildings inwhich were kept hides bought from the farmers, coal, lumber, bins ofcorn, wheat and oats in bags and hay in bales.

The whole establishment, an infinitely busy place, was run by thesailor who could neither read or write but who was helped by astern-looking woman bookkeeper. The sailor was shrewd wise and jollyand had always some tale of life on the deep sea to tell to his farmercustomers. He was the most popular man in town and there was anotherfeature that added tremendously to the popularity of the store. In thespring, just before planting time, and in the fall after the crops wereharvested, the Berners gave a great feast in one of the sheds. The haycorn and lumber were taken out and long wooden tables erected, whileinvitations were sent far and wide to the town and country people.Women of the town and country wives came to help prepare the feast, theold sailor waddled about shouting, pigs, turkeys, calves and lambs werekilled, bushels of potatoes baked, pies and cakes, baked in advance bythe women, were brought and there was a feast lasting sometimes allafternoon and far into the night. Alonzo Berners had provided manybarrels of beer and the sailor and his pals among the farmers got halfdrunk and sang songs and made speeches while the professional men ofthe town, the lawyers, judges and doctors, all came and made speeches.What a storm of talk! Even the preachers and the rival merchants werethere 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 towith a will at the food. The two annual affairs must often have cost[Pg 240]the Berners a good part of the profits made during the year but theydid not mind. “It doesn’t matter,” said the elder Berners. “I’m old andnearly ready to die, it isn’t likely Alonzo will live very long and asfor Hallie,” meaning the daughter, “I have already given her one of mytwo farms. The Berners are going to peter out anyway and why shouldthey care about leaving money behind them?”

The elder Berners, a man of seventy, rarely went into town but spentmost of his days in his little garden and during my own visit at thehouse he came every day to sit with me, smoking his pipe and talkinguntil he fell asleep in his chair. When he had been a younger man andbefore his wife died he had owned several trotting horses of which heloved to talk. One of the horses, named “Peter Point,” had been thepride 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 beenand how he could trot! Sometimes when he spoke of him the old manjumped to his feet and climbing on the chair seat touched the limbof an apple tree with his fingers. “Looket here now. He was tallerthan that. Yes, siree! He was taller than that when he threw up hishead,” he declared, jumping down from the chair and hopping about likean excited boy and walking up and down before me rubbing his handstogether. He told me a long tale of a trip he had once taken with hisstallion and two trotting mares as far east as Pennsylvania and of howPeter Point won every race in which he started, always the trottingfree-for-all, and spoke fervently of the moment when he came out with[Pg 241]the others and paraded before the grandstand before the first heat of arace. Jim Berners, then young and strong, sat in the sulky and what amoment it was for him. The memory of it filled him with excitement. “Myfather 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 metales of what he had to say. Sometimes on days like that, when we cameout for the first heat and were scoring down for the start or goingslowly back for another try after a false start, I used to think of hiswords. There was me, sitting in the sulky, and there was the man, oldCharlie Whaley, who took care of Peter Point, standing over near thegrandstand with a blanket over his shoulder. Charlie winked and noddedat me and I winked at him. How swelled up with pride I was. I usuallyhad two or three hundred dollars bet on Peter’s chances and he neveronce 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 andthe people in the grandstand were shouting and down in the betting ringthere was a hubbub and I used to look at the people and think aboutthem and about myself and the horse too. ‘Lordy,’ I used to say tomyself, ‘what a lot we do think of ourselves and what God-awful thingswe are, we humans, come right down to it.’ I was raised in the oldJudge Willard’s house, right here in this town, you know, and in theold days a lot of what we called our big men used to come to talk theiraffairs over with the judge. Abe Lincoln used to come and once theeditor of the Chicago Tribune and young Logan who afterward got[Pg 242]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 speechesup in front of the town hall that was down by the river in the old townbut that later burned to the ground. They talked and talked, and I usedto listen.

“And such talk! ‘All men are created free and equal,’ ‘Nature’snoblemen,’ ‘Noble pioneers’ and all that kind of stuff about men justlike me. Lordy, what a lot of big sounding words I had listened towhen I was a kid. It used to make me sick to think of it sometimeslater, when I was sitting up there behind Peter and to think that I hadsometimes believed such bunk myself, I who had seen and known a lot ofthem same pioneers pretty intimately and should have known better thanto listen.

“As I say, I used to think about it and a lot of other foolishness I’dheard, when I was up behind Peter, and he with his head up so high andlooking—say, he could walk past one of them grandstands and past allof them people like God Almighty himself might have walked! What I meanis, not giving the people or the other horses in the race or the otherdrivers or the judges up in the stand or me or anyone anything buthis darned contempt. It was lovely to see. Sometimes when he’d see amare he’d throw up his head and snort and sometimes there was a littlequiet noise he made just as though he was saying to us ‘You worms, youworms,’ 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 gotsick and died before he ever got to the grand circuit where horses of[Pg 243]his own class usually raced,” the old man declared proudly. Jim Bernershad taken his horses over into Ohio and with Peter had won a race at aplace called Fostoria and then that night the horse was taken violentlyill and lying down in his stall quietly died.

His owner had been in at the death and after the stallion was deadhad walked about the dark race course the rest of the night and haddecided 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 timesI 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 somany times, sitting behind him and pretending to myself I was doing thejob. I wasn’t doing a darned thing but sitting still and riding home infront. 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 cameout and Peter was dead now and I decided to go home. And I had somethoughts that night about most human beings, including myself, that Ihaven’t ever forgot. I thought a lot of us were swine and the rest akind 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 tokeep my mouth shut a good deal of the time.’ And I haven’t been toomuch stuck on myself or anyone else ever since.”

BERNERS, the merchant and horseman, had for a good many years beendisappointed and hurt by the thought that his family was not to carryon after his death but in his old age had grown cheerful about thematter. “We aren’t so much. It doesn’t matter. I dare say the sun willcome up mornings and the moon at night when there are no more Bernersin Illinois, or anywhere else, for that matter.” As a child the boyAlonzo was always sickly. “We’ve always been thinking he’d die, abouttwice every year, but you see he hasn’t quite done it yet,” the old mansaid softly.

Hallie, the daughter of the house, was five years older than herbrother and was devoted to him. After seeing them together oneunderstood that she could never have married. It was just a thingthat couldn’t have happened. One thought of her as saying to herself:“Marriage is too intimate. I am not made for intimate relations.” Theidea of Hallie Berners held in a man’s arms was for some obscure reasonmonstrous and yet how affectionate she was! There was a sense in whichher brother and father were babes in her charge, babes never touched byher hands or her lips but constantly caressed by her thoughts. She wasa tall rather stern-looking woman with graying hair, large strong handsand quiet gray eyes and she was very shy. Her shyness expressed itself[Pg 245]in severity and when she was much touched she grew silent and almosthaughty in her bearing. It was as though she were saying to herself:“Look out now! If you are not careful you will let something preciousescape 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 youngman he had gone away to an eastern college but a desperate illness hadcompelled him to come home almost at once and he had not again triedgetting out from under his sister’s care, only leaving the family roofwhen he crept away for the brief periods of drunkenness that gave him atemporary means of escape out of his house of pain. He stayed at homeand on fair days sometimes rode about town and the surrounding countrybehind an old black horse that belonged to the family or sat in thegarden 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 therewere a couch, a fireplace and many books on shelves built into thewalls.

How many people came up along the hillside road to sit and talk withAlonzo Berners! Were they sorry for him? At first I thought they wereand then I saw they came to receive rather than to give. It was Alonzowho did the giving to all. What did he give? Among those I saw at thehouse was a local judge, son of that judge with whom his father hadlived when he was a boy, a man named Marvin Manno, who lived in Chicagobut who often came to the town and spent two or three days for the sakeof talking with the invalid and who paid him a visit during my time[Pg 246]there, two or three doctors who came, not in a professional way butfor something unprofessional they wanted, a cripple of the town whomade his living by taking people’s photographs, a man who bought andsold horses, and a tall silent boy who wore glasses and who had largeprotruding teeth so that he looked something like a horse when on rareoccasions he smiled.

Life in the Berners household—in reality presided over by the sickman, in a queer way absolutely controlled by him—was a revelation tome. Like that Judge Turner I had known a few years before, and forthat matter like myself too, the man had read a great many books andwas still constantly reading—he spent more than half his time with abook in his hands and told me once that but for books he thought heshould have gone mad from the gnawing pains that were always eating athim—but in the single fact that we were all readers the similaritybetween Judge Turner, Alonzo and myself ceased.

In this new man whose path I had unexpectedly crossed was a quiet kindof sanity unknown in any other I had seen. He was a giver. What did hegive? The question amazed and startled me. He was loved by all who knewhim and during the week I spent in his house, seeing him with othermen and riding with him about town and out into the country, I wasstartled by the feeling of love and well-being that came into the eyesof people when he appeared among them. My own mind, always given toasking questions, unable to take anything for granted, raced like thestallion Peter Point carrying old Jim Berners to one of his victories.[Pg 247]Was there a kind of power in pain to remake a man? My own conception oflife was profoundly disturbed. The man before me had spent his entirelife sitting in the dark house of pain. He sat there now looking outthrough the windows and into other houses that were alive and cheerfulwith health. Why had he health and sanity within himself while, almostwithout exception, the others including myself had not?

As I looked at him and at the men who came to visit him a kind ofwonder grew within me. The man Marvin Manno, a slender man, ratherelegantly clad and with gold-rimmed glasses on his large nose, wastalking. He was connected, in an official capacity, with some largecommercial establishment of the city, an establishment that sold goodsto 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 hopesand balanced oddly back and forth between devotion to the businessinterests he served and a kind of penchant he had for writing poetry.An odd effect was produced. The man was sincerely devoted to twointerests in life that could not by any chance be combined and as onelistened to his talk one became more and more puzzled. Only AlonzoBerners was not puzzled. He entered into the man’s thoughts, understoodhim, gave him what he apparently wanted, sympathetic understandingwithout sentimentality. We sat in the garden back of the Berners house,the man Manno talked, a doctor came and spoke of his patients, and inparticular of an old woman lying in a cabin down by the river, who fortwo years had been on the point of death but who could not die. Then[Pg 248]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 andthe boy with the large teeth smiled shyly but remained silent.

Then when evening came and they had all gone away I looked at AlonzoBerners and wondered. In all the talk no mention was ever made ofhimself or his own affairs. Even the pain always present in his bodyhad been forgotten by the others. Any mention of his suffering wouldhave seemed out of place.

My own mind was groping about in a new medium for the expressionof a life. I was very young then, had not yet come to the age ofcitizenship, but for a long time I had been building within myself myown consciousness of men. Well, they were a kind of thing, selfish andself-centred, and they were right in being so. One played the game, wonif he could and tried not to be a bellyacher if he lost. In me was akind of contempt for men including myself that Alonzo Berners did nothave. 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 runinto a thicket of new ideas and I could not find my way out. “Treadsoftly,” I said to myself.

I sat aside, near the boy with the teeth, looking at my newacquaintance and trying to straighten all these things out in my mind.Hundreds of men, famous and infamous, I had met in the books I hadread, went as in a procession across the field of my fancy. How manybooks I had read and how many stories of the lives of men, so-calledgreat men and rascals, lovely women with gold and jewels in theirhands, great killers of men, lawgivers, daring breakers of the law,[Pg 249]devout men, starving in deserts for the glory of God; what men andwomen, what vast resounding names!

Was there something in the books I had missed? A vagrant thoughtcame. Across the pages of some of the books there had wandered adifferent kind of man or woman. The writers of books had little tosay about such people. There was little enough to be said. In thestories told of the great they appeared always as minor characters.The great strutted. The others walked softly. Clement VII had sentan ambassador to Charles of Spain. What the ambassador, one of themysterious quiet fellows, said to Charles “Emperor of the Romans andLord of the whole world” (Romanorum Imperator semper augustus, munditotius Dominus, universus dominis, Universis Principibus et Populissemper verendus) one did not know, but a peculiar thing happened.The ambassador served faithfully both Charles and the Pope, endearedhimself to the two mortal enemies. They were both happier with himabout. A thousand conflicting interests swirled about him but he kepthimself quite clear. Could it have been that such a one loved men, asmen, and that men loved him? There was so little for the writers ofbooks to say of such fellows. They had not sought exalted office andseemed 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 itthe disease of obvious power?

I looked about me and wondered. Before me, sitting among men in anIllinois village, was a pale man with delicate hands who, two or threetimes a year, became hopelessly drunk and who then had to be brought[Pg 250]back helpless to his home, as I had brought him a few days before. Mengathered about and talked of their own affairs and he sat for the mostpart in silence, saying only now and then a few words, always in theirinterests. 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 JudgeTurner I had so much admired lost some of its force in me and the elderBerners, condemning men as less worthy of life than race horses becamea half-amusing figure. I was mystified and amazed. Did most men andwomen remain children and was Alonzo Berners grown up? Was it grown upto come to the realization that oneself did not matter, that nothingmattered but a kind of consciousness of the wonder of life outsideoneself?

I sat under the apple trees smiling to myself and wondering why Ismiled. Was there possible such a thing as goodness in men, a goodnessthat was not stuffy and hateful? Like most young men I had a contemptof goodness. Had I been making a mistake? The man before me now didnot, like Judge Turner, say wise and witty things that remained fixedin the mind and that could afterward be passed off in conversations asone’s own. Later in New York and in other American cities I was to seea good many men of a sort not unlike Judge Turner but few like AlonzoBerners. The smart fellows of the American Intelligentsia sat aboutin restaurants in New York and wrote articles for the political andsemi-literary weeklies. A smart saying they had heard at dinner or atlunch the day before was passed off as their own in the next article[Pg 251]they wrote. The usual plan was to write of politics or politicians orto slaughter some second-rate artist—in short, to pick out easy gameand kill it with their straw shafts and they gained great reputationsby pointing out the asininity of men everyone already knew for asses.For a great many years I was filled with admiration of such fellowsand vaguely dreamed of becoming such another myself. I wanted then, asa young man, I think, to sit with Alonzo Berners and his friends andsuddenly say something to upset them all. Alonzo’s life of physicalsuffering was forgotten by me as by the others but unlike them therewas in me a kind of unpleasant dislike of him, a dislike he saw andunderstood but let pass as being boyish vanity. The smart-seemingthings I thought of to say sounded flat enough when I said them overto myself and I remained silent. Occasionally Alonzo turned to me andsmiled. I had done him a kindness, had risked something for him, and Iwas his guest. Perhaps he thought me not mature enough to understandhim and his kind of men. Would I ever become mature?

DID I in reality also love the man?

I had found him, on a Saturday evening, very drunk in a saloon inChicago. It was about nine o’clock and some time after I had fled fromNora. I was nearly broke and thought I had better be thinking of doingsomething 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 withmy hands. After some weeks of idleness my hands had become soft andvelvety to the touch and I liked them so. Now they were hands to holda pen or a paint brush. Why was I not a writer or a painter? Well, Ifancied one had to be a fellow of the schools before one dared approachthe arts. Often I went about cursing the fate that had not permittedme to be born in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth withits all-pervading smell of burning coal, oil and gasoline, and withits noises and dirt. Mark Twain might declare the twentieth the mostglorious of all the centuries but it did not seem so to me. I thoughtoften of the fifteenth century in Italy when the great Borgia was justcoming into power, was at that time full of the subject. What gloriouschildren! Why could not I be a glorious child? Aha! the Lord Rodrigo deLancol y Borgia, Cardinal-Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina, Dean of theSacred College, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, etc., had[Pg 253]just been made Pope. Did I not myself have an Italian grandmother? Whata place and a time that might have been for me! It was the day of thecoronation of the new Pope and all Rome was excited. On the day beforefour mules, laden with silver, had gone from Cardinal Rodrigo’s houseto the house of Cardinal Sforza-Visconti. It was the gentle privilegeof the Romans in those fine days to pillage the house of a cardinalwhen he had been made pope. Was it not said, in the sacred laws, thatthe vicar of Christ should give his substance to the poor? Fearinghe might not do it the poor went and took. Armed bands of desperatefellows, with feathers in their hats, roamed the streets of the oldcity at such times and a turn of the wheel of fortune might at anymoment 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 arichly gowned, soft-handed cunning but scholarly grandee and patron ofthe arts!

How much better times those than my own for such haphazard fellowsas myself, I thought, and cursed the twentieth century and the fatethat had thrown me into it. At that time in Chicago I knew a young Jewnamed Ben Hecht, not yet a well-known writer, and sometimes he and Iwent forth to do our cursing together. Outwardly he was a more adeptcurser than myself but inwardly I felt I could outdo him and often wehad walked together, he cursing aloud our common fate and declaringdramatically that life was for us an empty cup, a vessel turned upsidedown, a golden goblet with cracks in the bowl, the largest crack beingthe fact that we both unfortunately had our livings to make, and[Pg 254]I striving to cap his every curse with a more violent one. We wenttogether into a street and stood under the moon. Before us were manyhuge ugly warehouses. “I hope they burn,” I said feebly, but he onlylaughed at the weakness of my fancy. “I hope the builders die slowly ofa painful inflammation of the membranes of the bowels,” he said, whileI envied.

I had been walking alone on the streets of Chicago on that Saturdayevening when I found the younger Berners and had crossed the river tothe west side. I was gloomy and distraught and on a side street, offWest Madison Street and near the Chicago River, went into a small, darksaloon. Several men sat at a small table at the back, among whom wasAlonzo Berners and there was a red-faced bartender leaning over the barand watching the group at the table. To all these I at the moment paidno attention.

I was absorbed in the contemplation of my own difficult position inlife and was thinking only of myself. Sitting at a table I called fora glass of brandy and when it was paid for realized that I had but twodollars left in my pocket. I took the two dollars in my hand and lookedat them and putting them away continued looking at my empty hands. Theyhad, at the moment, as I have said, grown soft and velvety and I wantedthem to remain so. Wild dreams floated through my mind. Why had I notmore physical courage? It was all very well to talk with Ben Hecht ofthe many advantages to be gained by being an Italian desperado of thefifteenth century, but why had I not the courage to be a desperado ofthe twentieth? Surely Rome or Naples or Florence, in the days of their[Pg 255]glory, never offered any better pickings than the Chicago of my ownday. In the older day a man slipped a slender knife delicately betweenhis victim’s neck and spine and made off with a few ducats at the riskof his life but in Chicago men habitually got thousands of dollars byrobbery apparently without any risk at all. I looked at my own handsand wondered. Could they hold a pistol steadily to the head of a timidbank clerk or a mail-wagon driver? I decided they could not and wasashamed of myself. Then I decided they might some day be induced tohold a pen or a painter’s brush but reflected that the great patrons ofthe arts were all long since dead and that my own brother, a painter,had been compelled to make magazine covers for commercial “gents” inorder to get the slender amount necessary to educate himself in hiscraft. “Huh!” I said to myself, not wanting I’m afraid, to work for anycommercial “gent” at all. Drinking my brandy I looked about the roominto which I had wandered.

It was a desperately dark little hole, lighted by two gaslights andwith two beer-stained tables in the semi-darkness at the rear. I lookedat the bartender, who had a large flat nose and bloodshot eyes anddecided it was just as well I had but two dollars. “I may be robbedbefore I leave this hole,” I told myself and ordered another glass ofbrandy, thinking I might as well drink up the little money I had ratherthan have it taken from me.

And now the men at the other table in the room caught and held myattention. With the exception of Alonzo Berners, whom the others hadpicked up on the street, they were a hard-looking lot. One did not[Pg 256]think of them as desperate fellows. They were of the sort one sawhanging about the places of Hinky Dink, Bathhouse John or of Conners,the gray wolf, men famous in Chicago at that time, sullen fellowswithout money, by no means desperate but hangers-on of the desperate,fellows who robbed full of fright at their own temerity but the moredangerous sometimes because of their fears.

I looked at them and at the man who had fallen into their clutchesand who was now spending his money upon them and at the same momentthey seemed to have become aware of my presence. Sullen eyes lookedat me sullenly. I was not of their world. Was I a fly cop? Their eyesthreatened. “If you are a fly cop or are in any way connected with theman we have so fortunately picked up, a man quite apparently helplesslydrunk and having money, you had better be minding your business. As amatter 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 sickdrunken man sitting among the others had a large roll of bills held inhis left hand that hung at his side, and his right elbow was on thetable.

What a look of suffering in his face! From time to time the othersordered drinks brought from the bar and the sick man took a bill fromthe roll and threw it on the table. When the change was brought by thebartender one of his companions put it in his pocket. They were takingturns, it was apparent, in robbing the man and as I looked an ideacame to me. Was it true that the bartender, a more out-and-out fellowthan the others, was disgusted at this slow and comparatively painlessmethod of committing robbery? Did I see in his eyes a kind of sympathy[Pg 257]for the man being robbed?

It was a ticklish moment for me. Having been thinking sograndiloquently of Cæsar Borgia, Lorenzo the Magnificent and othergrand and courageous personages of my world of books, having just beengazing at my own hands and wondering why they would not or could not dosome act of personal courage that would make me think better of myself,having these thoughts, I of a sudden wanted to rescue the man withthe roll of bills but I did not want to make a fool of myself. I havealways 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 beganlaughing at myself, not thinking I would be foolish enough to attemptit. 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 sinceI was a child had now started. It is the sort of thing that makesautobiography, even of the half-playful sort I am now attempting,so difficult to manage. One wants to treat oneself as a person ofmore dignity and worth than one has the courage to attempt. Amongadvertising men with whom I later associated we managed things better.We took turns doing what we called “staging” each other. I was tospeak highly of Smith who in turn did the same of me. The trickis not unknown to literary men, but it is difficult to manage inautobiography. The self of the fancy persists in laughing at the selfof fact and does it sometimes at unfortunate moments. Also the fancyis a great liar. How often later, when I became a man of business, Idid in fancy some shrewd or notable act that was never done in fact at[Pg 258]all, but that seemed so real that it was difficult not to believe init as a fact. I had been talking with a certain man and later thoughtof a number of brilliant things I might have said. Then I met a friendand told him of the conversation, putting the brilliant things in. Thestory several times repeated became a part of the history of my lifeand nothing would have later so amazed me as to have been compelled toface 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 orwas 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 bebetter not to attempt to rescue the man in the room and later just tosay I had and in the end make myself believe I had?

There was little doubt I could do the thing more gaudily in fancy. Theplace in which I sat was in a part of the city little frequented atnight. Near it were only vacant lots and rows of dark and now emptyfactory buildings. It was unlikely there were any policemen in theneighborhood and in case of need and if a policeman did appear whatsort of fellow was he likely to be—a fellow really appointed to thedistrict to knock aside such interfering fools as myself? As for themen seated at the table, if they were cowards it was unlikely thebartender was one.

I kept smiling to myself, at my own thoughts, at my trick of alwaysthreshing my acts out in advance and in the end doing nothing except tocreate later the fiction of an act performed. “My book reading and myconversations with such fellows as Judge Turner are making a bigger[Pg 259]fool of me than I need be,” I told myself, still looking at the emptyhands lying on the table before me. What really empty things theywere, those same hands of mine. They had never grasped anything, neverfulfilled any purpose for me. So many fingers, so many pads of fleshin the palms, so many little muscles to grasp things, to lay hold ofsome situation, to drive a knife into an enemy, to lift a friend, tomake love to a woman, hands to become servants of the brain and tomake their owner something other than a meaningless thing of words andfancies drifting through life with millions of other meaningless men.I really thought at that time I had a brain. It is an illusion that Ibelieve almost everyone has.

In disgust of myself my eyes stopped looking at my empty handsand looked instead about the room. What seemed to me a stream ofdeliciously romantic notions now came. There was no doubt the mansitting with the crew from the city’s underworld was very ill. Onemight have said he was about to die. A chalky pallor had spread overhis face and except for his eyes everything about his face and figureexpressed utter weariness. It was so people looked when they were aboutto die, when they were through with life, done for, glad to throw lifeaside.

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 lookedat me from out the pale face I had the curious illusion of a voicespeaking, speaking as though out of a coffin or a cavern.

Now the man’s eyes were looking from my eyes to the eyes of thebartender. Was there something commanding in them? Had the sick man,[Pg 260]in his helpless position, the power to command the two men in the roomwho might conceivably be of use to him? The man had been drunk forseveral days, and now he was not drinking but the poison from the vilestuff he had taken had permeated his system. The same eyes had lookedat the men among whom he sat and his brain had come to a decisionconcerning them. Men’s eyes could be impersonal sometimes. The othermen 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 ofsanity.

And now they command. The sick man was not afraid, as in his place Iwould have been. There was no fear in the eyes that now looked at meso steadily. It might be the man did not mind the fact that he wasabout to be robbed and perhaps his body had known so much pain that theadditional pain of a beating would not too much matter.

As for myself I was thinking beyond my own depths, thinking of certainthings as possible in another that could never have been possible inmyself. 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 theman Alonzo Berners I began doing something I had never done before, Ibegan to live in another, suffer in another, love another perhaps.

If the man’s eyes were issuing a command what did he want? I grewresentful. 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[Pg 261]yourself into this pickle, now get yourself out.”

What a plague to have an imagination! It seemed to me a kind ofwordless conversation, something after the following manner, now beganbetween myself, the bartender and the man at the table.

From the bloodshot eyes of the bartender leaning over his bar wordswere now coming. I leaned forward to listen.

“Ah! Bah! I do not like this affair. You have fallen into the handsof these cheap thugs and from the looks of you I should say you area rather decent sort. To me, situated as I am in life, that wouldnot make any difference if the men robbing you were fellows I couldrespect. If any one of a dozen men I know chose to hit you over thehead and throw your body into the river I would not lift a hand toprevent it. As the matter stands I think I will. I do not fancy thesedogs you are with eating so fat a calf. As for myself you are not fairgame. Poor chap, you are sick. I cannot leave my job here but thefellow over there at the table will take you away. Speak to him. Hewill do as you wish.”

What a chattering of unheard voices my imagination had created in theroom!

Words from the living eyes of the sick man.

“It does not matter about being robbed. If these men beat or kill me itdoes 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[Pg 262]on lad. Lift me up in your arms and carry me home. It is only becauseyou are young and inexperienced you are afraid.”

“AFRAID?” It was only because I was so thoroughly afraid I now arosefrom my seat and went toward the sick man. As for the imagined voices Idid not believe in them. Did I not know the tricks of my own fancy anddid the man think I was going to be fool enough to risk my hide for astranger? 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 theroll of bills out of the sick man’s hands. When it came right down toit I could at the moment use such a roll of bills very handily. Had Ibeen a man of courage I might have gone blustering and swaggering tothe 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 hidefor him?

I moved slowly toward the table, all the time laughing at myself andtelling myself I was not going to do what I was at the same timeobviously doing and the bartender coming from behind the bar with ahammer in his hand fell in behind me. I could see the hammer from acorner of my eye. Well, he was going to hit me with it. In a momentmore my head would be crushed and, as would be quite plain to any manof sense, I would only be getting what I deserved. What a confoundedfool! I was terribly frightened and at the same time there was a smile[Pg 264]on my lips. My appearance at the moment must have been disconcerting tothe men at the table.

They were apparently as great fools as myself. As I approached, thesick man, perhaps to free himself from the others, threw the roll ofbills carelessly on the table and one of his companions put a largehairy hand over it. Was he also afraid? All of the men were lookingintently at me and at the bartender behind me. Were they but waiting tosee my head crushed? One of them got rather hesitatingly to his feetand doubling his fist raised it as though to strike me in the face—Ihad 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 halfraised him to his feet, the foolish smile still on my face but as Isaw he could not stand I prepared to take him in my arms. That wouldmake me quite helpless but I was helpless enough as it was. What did itmatter? “If I am going to be slugged I might as well be slugged doingsomething,” I thought.

I lifted the man as gently as I could, placing the slender body over myshoulder and waiting for the blows that were to descend upon me but atthat very moment the hand of the bartender reached over and snatchingthe 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 overmy shoulder, I walked to the door and to West Madison Street wherethere were lights and people passing up and down. At the corner I puthim down and looking back saw the bartender standing at the door of hisestablishment watching. Was he laughing? I fancied he was. And one[Pg 265]might also fancy he was keeping the others bluffed in the room untilI had got safely away. I stood at the corner beside the sick man, wholeaned helplessly against my legs, and waited for a cab that would takeme to a railroad station. Already I had taken letters from his pocketand knew where he lived. He seemed unable to speak. “He will probablydie on the way and then I’ll be in a hell of a mess,” I kept saying tomyself after I had got with him into the day coach of a train.

MY adventure with Alonzo Berners came to an end after I had been at hishouse for a week and during the week nothing I can set down as notablehappened at all and later I was told he was dead, that he had again gotdrunk in the city of Chicago and had fallen or had been knocked off abridge into the Chicago River where he drowned. There was the house onthe hillside and the garden. During my visit to the house the elderBerners worked in the garden or sat with me boasting of the horse PeterPoint and found in me a sympathetic audience. I have always understoodhorses better than men. It’s easier.

I sat in the garden listening to the talk of the men who came to seeAlonzo Berners, rode with him once in his buggy or went into townto walk by myself or to listen to some tale told by the sailor whomanaged the store. The sister, who on the night of my arrival hadtreated me coldly—no doubt strange characters had come to the Bernershouse on the same mission that had brought me and also no doubt shewas in terrible fear when Alonzo was away on one of his helplessdebauches—the sister later treated me with the silent kindlinesscharacteristic of her.

Nothing happened at all during my visit and Alonzo Berners did notduring the whole time say a notable thing that I could later remember[Pg 267]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 excitedand 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 thenyoung and had quite made up my mind about men and life. Men and womenwere divided into two classes containing a few shrewd wise people andmany fools. I was trying very hard to place myself among the wiseand shrewd ones. The Berners family I could not place in either ofthese classifications and in particular Alonzo Berners puzzled anddisconcerted me.

Was there a force in life of which I knew nothing at all and was thisforce exemplified in the person of the man I had picked up in a Chicagosaloon?

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 othersand for no reason I could understand but wanted to understand. Hisvery living in the house had done something to it, to the very wall ofthe house, so that anyone coming into the place, sleeping between thewalls, was affected. Could it be that the man Alonzo Berners simplyloved the people about him and the places in which they lived andhad that love become a force in itself affecting the very air peoplebreathed? Sometimes in the afternoons when there was no one about Iwent through the rooms of the house looking curiously about. There wasa chair here and a table there. On the table lay a book. Was there alsoin the house a kind of fragrance? Why did the sunlight fall with such[Pg 268]a pronounced golden glory on the faded carpet on the floor of AlonzoBerners’ room?

Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting tobelieve in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power ofintellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and inothers.

Was I afraid also of people who had the power of loving, of givingthemselves? Was I afraid of the power of unasking love in myself and inothers?

That I should be afraid of anything in the realm of the spirit, thatthere 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 anydoubt at all that Alonzo Berners knew of it. He said nothing and whenI went away he had nothing to say. I spent the days of that week inhis presence, saw the men who came to visit him and whom I thought Iunderstood well enough and then at night went to my bed and did notsleep. I was like one tortured by a desire for conversion to somethinglike the love of God, by a desire to love and be loved and sometimes inthe night I lay in my bed like a very lovelorn maiden and sometimes Igrew angry and walked up and down in the moonlight in my room swearingand shaking my fist at the shadows that flitted across the walls in themoonlight.

It was two o’clock of the morning of one of the last nights I spentin the house and I let myself out at the kitchen door and went for awalk, going down along the hillside to the town and through the newer[Pg 269]town to the older place by the river. The moon was shining and all washushed and silent. What a quiet night! “I will give myself over tothese new impulses,” I thought, and so went along thinking thoughtsthat had never before come into my head.

Could it be that force, all power was disease, that man on his wayup from savagery and having discovered the mind and its uses hadgone a little off his head in using his new toy? I had always beendrawn toward horses dogs and other animals and among people had caredmost for simple folk who made no pretense of having an intellect,workmen who in spite of the handicaps put in their way by modernlife still loved the materials in which they worked, who loved theplay of hands over materials, who followed instinctively a forceoutside themselves—they felt to be greater and more worthy thanthemselves—women who gave themselves to physical experiences withgrave and fine abandon, all people in fact who lived for somethingoutside themselves, for materials in which they worked, for peopleother than themselves, things over which they made no claim ofownership.

Was I, who thought of myself as a young man having no morality nowface to face with a new morality? In the fifteenth century man haddiscovered man. Had man later been lost to man? Was Alonzo Bernerssimply one who loved his fellows and was he by that token stronger inhis weakness, more notable in his obscure Illinois village life thanall these great and powerful ones I had been following with my own mindacross the pages of history?

There was no doubt I was in a magnificent mood and that I enjoyed itand when I got to the old town I went and stood by a small brick[Pg 270]building that had once been a residence but was now a cowshed. In anear-by house a child cried and a man and a woman awoke from sleep andtalked for a time in low hushed voices. Two dogs came and discovered mewhere I stood in the silence. As I remained unmoved they did not knowwhat to make of their discovery. At first they barked and then theywagged their tails, and then, as I continued to ignore them, they wentaway looking offended. “You are not treating us fairly,” they seemed tobe saying.

“And they are something like myself,” I thought, looking at the dustyroad on which the soft moonlight was falling and smiling at nothingness.

I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming a ridiculous desire toabase myself before something not human and so stepping into themoonlit road I knelt in the dust. Having no God, the gods havingbeen taken from me by the life about me, as a personal God has beentaken from all modern men by a force within that man himself does notunderstand but that is called the intellect, I kept smiling at thefigure I cut in my own eyes as I knelt in the road and as I had smiledat the figure I had cut in the Chicago saloon when I went with such anoutward show of indifference to the rescue of Alonzo Berners.

There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myselfthat I had the power to believe in a God, and so I merely knelt in thedust in the silence and no words came to my lips.

Did I worship merely the dust under my knees? There was the coincidenceas 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[Pg 271]feeling come down from old tellers of tales took possession of me.My fancy played with the figure of myself in the ridiculous positioninto which I had got and I thought of the wise men of old times whowere reputed to have come to worship at the feet of another cryingbabe in an obscure place. How grand! The wise men of an older time hadfollowed a star to a cowshed. Was I becoming wise? Smiling at myselfand with also a kind of contempt of myself and my own sentimentality Ihalf decided I would try to devote myself to something, give my life apurpose. “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 laughingfinger of scorn at myself. I laughed at myself but all the time keptthinking of the occasional flashes of laughter that came from the drawnlips of Alonzo Berners. Why was his laughter freer and more filled withjoy than my own?

WAR, leisure and the South!

The leisure was not too much cut across by the hours spent in drillsand manœuvres and the other duties of a soldier. Here was a lifein which everything was physical, the mind on a vacation and theimagination having leisure to play while the body worked. One’sindividuality became lost and one became part of something whollyphysical, vast, strong, capable of being fine and heroic, capable ofbeing brutal and cruel.

One’s body was a house in which had lived two, three, perhaps tenor twelve personalities. The fancy became the head of the house andswept the body away into some absurd adventure or the mind took chargeand laid down laws. These then were in turn driven out of the houseby physical desire, by the lustful self. Dumb nights of walking citystreets, wanting women, wanting to touch with the hands lovely things.

All gone now, that kind of imaginings, for the time anyway. In thedistance, beckoning, the women of the southern island, the dark Cuban[Pg 273]women. Would they like us when we came, we American lads, in our brownclothes? 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 ourfathers had fought a great battle. Everywhere camps among the trees andthe ground worn hard as bricks by the constant tramping of feet. Inthe morning one awoke with five other men in a tent. There was morningroll call standing shoulder to shoulder. “Corporal Smith!” “Here!”“Corporal Anderson!” “Here!” Then breakfast out of flat tin dishes andthe falling into line for hours of drill.

Out from under the trees into a wide field we went, the southern sunpouring down on us and presently the back tired, the legs tired. Onesank into a half-dead state. This did not signify battles, killingother men. The men with whom one marched were comrades, feeling thesame weariness, obeying the same commands, being molded with oneselfinto something apart from oneself. We were being hardened, whipped intoshape. For what? Well, never mind. Take what is before you! You havecome out from under the shadow of the factory, the sun shines. The tallboys marching with you were raised in the same town with yourself. Nowthey are all silent, marching, marching. Times of adventure ahead. Youand they will see strange people, hear strange tongues spoken.

The Spaniards, eh! You know of them from books? Stout Cortez, silentupon his peak in Darien. Dark cruel eyes, dark swaggering men—inone’s fancy. In the fancy picture ships coming suddenly up out of the[Pg 274]western seas, bearing gold, bearing dark, adventurous men.

Is one going to fight such men, with one’s comrades, some thousandsof such men? Tall boys from an Ohio town, baseball players, clerks instores, Eddie Sanger over there who got Nell Brinker into trouble andwas made to marry her at the point of a shotgun; Tom Means, who wasonce sent to the state reform farm; Harry Bacon, who got religion whenthe evangelist came to preach in the Methodist Church but got over itafterward—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 longhours with all these men. Here is something your mind has always beengroping about trying to understand, the physical relation of man toman, of man to woman, of woman to woman. The mind is ugly when theflesh does not come in too. The flesh is ugly when the mind is putout of the house that is the body. Is the flesh ugly now? No, this issomething special. This is something felt.

Suppose a man spend certain months, not thinking consciously, lettinghimself be swept along by other men, with other men, feeling theweariness of a thousand other men’s legs in his own legs, desiringwith others, fearing with the others, being brave sometimes with theothers. By such an experience can one gain knowledge of the others andof oneself too?

Comrades loved! Never mind now the thoughts of the hour of killing. Onegets little enough. Take what is offered. And the killing may not come.Let the Roosevelts and others of that sort, the men of action, talkand think now of the hour of action, of the drawn sword, the pointed[Pg 275]gun, victory, defeat, glory, bloody fields. You are not a general or astatesman. Take the thing before you, the physical marching fact of anarmy of which you are a part.

There is just the possibility that you are yourself a disease and thatyou may be cured here. This tremendous physical experience may cureyou of the disease of yourself. Can one lose oneself utterly, becomeas nothing, become but a part of something, the state, the army? Thearmy is something physical and actual while the state is nothing. Thestate exists but in men’s minds and imaginations and you have let yourown imagination rule in your house too long. Let this young body ofyours, so straight, so fair, so strong, let it have full possession ofthe house now. The imagination may play now over fields, over mountaintops if it please. “We are coming, Father Abraham, a hundred thousandstrong!” You have forced your fancy to grovel in factory dust toolong. Let it go now. You are nothing, so many little pounds of fleshand bone, a small unit in a vast thing that is marching, marching—thearmy. Blossoms on apple trees, sap in the branches of trees, a singlehead of wheat in a vast wheat field, eh?

All day long the march goes on and dust gathers in little circles aboutthe eyes of weary men. A thin sharp voice is heard, an impersonalvoice. It is speaking, not to you, not to one man only, but to athousand men. “Fours right into line.”

“Fours right into line!” You have so wanted that, have so hungered forit. Has not your whole life been filled with a vague indefinite desireto wheel into some vast line with all the others you have known andseen? It is enough! The legs respond. Tears sometimes gather in the[Pg 276]eyes at the thought of being able, without question, to do some onething with thousands of others, with comrades.

I HAD enlisted for a soldier shortly after my visit to Alonzo Bernersand because I was broke and could see no other way to avoid going backinto a factory. The voices crying out for war with Spain, for thefreeing of Cuba, I had heard not at all but there had been a voicewithin myself that was plain and clear enough and I did not believethere was danger of many battles being fought. The glory of Spain, readabout in the books, was dead. We had old Spain at a disadvantage, poorold woman. The situation was unique. America, the young and swaggeringgiant of the West had been fortunate. She had not been compelled toface, on the field of battle, the giant of the Old World in the daysof her Old World strength. Now the young western giant was going toassert himself and it would be like taking pennies from a child, likerobbing an old gypsy woman in a vacant lot at night after a fair. Thenewspapers might call into service Stephen Crane, Richard HardingDavis, all the writers of battle tales trying to work up the illusionof a great war about to be fought, but no one believed, no one wasafraid. In the camps the soldiers laughed. Songs were being sung. Tothe soldiers the Spaniards were something like performers in a circusto which the American boys had been invited. It was said they had bellson their hats, wore swords and played guitars under the windows of[Pg 278]ladies’ bedrooms at night.

America wanted heroes and I thought I would enjoy being a hero and soI did not enlist for a soldier in Chicago, where I was unknown and myrushing to my country’s aid might have passed unnoticed, but sent offa wire to the captain of militia of my home town in Ohio and got ona train to go there. Alonzo Berners had pressed upon me a loan of ahundred dollars but I did not want to spend any of it for railroad fareso beat my way homeward on a freight train and even the hoboes withwhom I sat in an empty freight car treated me with respect as though Iwere already the hero of a hundred hard-fought battles. At a stationtwenty 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 Ihad given up a lucrative position in the city to answer my country’scall, they would want a Cincinnatus dropping his plow handles, andwhy should I not give them the best imitation I could manage? What Iachieved 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 hada 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 entiretown turned out and cheered. Girls ran out of houses to kiss us andold veterans of the Civil War—they had known that of battles we wouldnever know—stood with tears in their eyes.

To the young factory hand of the cities—that was myself, as I nowremember myself at that moment—it was grand and glorious. There hasalways been a kind of shrewdness and foxiness in me and I could not[Pg 279]convince myself that Spain, clinging to its old traditions, old guns,old ships, could offer much resistance to the strong young nation nowabout to attack and I could not get over the feeling that I was goingoff 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 Ishould object.

And then the camp at the edge of a southern city under forest trees,the physical hardening process that I instinctively liked. I havealways enjoyed with a kind of intoxicating gusto any physical use ofmy body out in the sun and wind. In the army it brought me untroubledsleep at night, physical delight in my own body, the drunkenness ofphysical well-being and often in my tent at night, after a long dayof drilling and when the others slept, I rolled quietly out under thetent flap and lay on my back on the ground, looking at the stars seenthrough the branches of trees. About me many thousands of men weresleeping 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 myown 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 fellowas myself? I had read somewhere that he had had an inclination to bea scribbler. I fancied the army, of which I was a part, hemmed in onall sides by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards. No one could thinkwhat to do and so I (Corporal Anderson) was sent for. The Americans[Pg 280]were in the same position the French revolutionists had been in whenyoung Napoleon appeared and with “a whiff of grapeshot” took thedestinies of a nation in his hands. Oh, I had read my Carlyle and knewsomething also of Machiavelli and his Prince. Aha! In fancy also Icould be a great and cruel conqueror. The American army was surroundedby untold thousands of fierce Spaniards but in the American army wasmyself. This was my hour. I sat up on the ground outside the tentwhere my comrades were sleeping and in the darkness gave quick andaccurate 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 onemade? It would create a diversion, give my marvelous mind time towork. And now it was done and I began to fling bunches of troops hereand there. My courier sprang upon a swift horse and rode away in thedarkness. In his tent the Spanish commander was feasting—and hereI, being a true Anglo-Saxon, must needs make out that the imaginarySpaniard was something of a monster. He was half drunk in his tent andwas surrounded by concubines. Ah! he is sure to have concubines aboutand is proud and sure of victory but little does he know of me, thesleepless one. Grand phrases, grand ideas, flocking like birds! Now theSpanish commander has shown his true nature. A young boy comes to bringhim wine and trips, spilling a little of the wine on the commander’suniform. He arises and unsheathing his sword plunges it into the littleboy’s breast. All are aghast. The Spaniards all stand aghast, and atthat very moment I, like an avenging angel, and followed by thousands[Pg 281]of pure clean-living Americans (Anglo-Saxon Americans, let it beunderstood), I swoop down upon him.

* * * * *

At the time of which I am writing America had not learned as it didduring the World War that in order to stamp out brutal militarism it isbest to adopt brutal militarism, teach it to our sons, do everythingpossible to brutalize our own people. During the World War I am toldboys and young men in the training camps were made to attack withthe bayonet dummy figures of men and were even told to grunt as theyplunged the bayonet into the figure. Everything possible was done tobrutalize the imaginations of the young men, but in our war—“my war” Ifind myself calling it at times—we had not yet carried our educationthat far. There was as yet a childish belief in democracy. Men evensupposed that the purpose of democracy was to raise free men who couldthink for themselves, act for themselves in an emergency. The modernidea of the standardization of men had not taken hold and was eventhought to be inimical to the very notion of democracy. And we had notlearned yet, as we did later, that when an army is to be organized youmust split your men up, so that no man knows his fellows, that you mustnot have officers coming from the same towns as their soldiers, thateverything must be made as machine-like and impersonal as possible.

And so there we were, just boys from an Ohio country town with officersfrom the same town in a wood in the South being made into soldiers andI am much afraid not taking the whole affair too seriously. We wereheroes and we accepted the fact. It was enough. In the southern cities[Pg 282]ladies invited us to dine at their houses on our days off in town. Thecaptain of our company had been a janitor of a public building back inOhio, the first lieutenant was a celery raiser on a small farm near ourtown and the second lieutenant had been a knife grinder in a cutleryfactory.

* * * * *

In the camp I marched with the others for several hours each day and inthe evening went with some other young soldier for a walk in the woodor in the streets of a southern city. There was a kind of drunkennessof comradeship. So many men so like oneself, doing the same thingwith oneself. As for the officers—well, it was to be admitted thatin military affairs they knew more than ourselves but there theirsuperiority ended. It would be just as well for none of them to attemptto put on too much side when we were not drilling or were not on actualmilitary duty. The war would soon be over and after a time we would allbe going back home. An officer might conceivably “get away” with somesort of injustice for the moment—but a year from now, when we were allat home again.... Did the fool want to take the chance of four or fivehuskies giving him a beating some night in an alleyway?

The constant marching and manœuvring was a kind of music in the legsand bodies of men. No man is a single thing, physical or mental. Themarching went on and on. The physical ruled. There was a vast slowrhythm, out of the bodies of many thousands of men, always going on andon. It got into one’s body. There was a kind of physical drunkennessproduced. He who weakened was laughed at by his comrades and the[Pg 283]weakness went away or he disappeared. One was afloat on a vast sea ofmen. There was a kind of music on the surface of the sea. The music wasa 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 wasan officer? What was a man? An officer was but one out of whose throatcame a voice.

The army moved across a great open field. One’s body was tired buthappy with an odd new kind of happiness. The mind did not torture thebody, asking questions. The body was moved by a power outside itselfand as for the fancy, it played freely, far, freely and widely, overoceans, over mountain tops too.

And now the voice and the words, caught up and repeated by othervoices, harsh voices, tired voices, thin high pitched voices.

* * * * *

Three young men having run the guard line, together are walking alonga dark road toward a southern city. In the city and later when theyhave stood on street corners and walked through the section of thecity where only Negroes live—being Ohio boys and fascinated by thestrangeness of the notion of a race thus set aside—they go into asaloon where they sit drinking beer. They discuss their officers, theposition of the officer in relation to his men. “I think it’s all[Pg 284]right,” says a doctor’s son. “Ed and Dug are all right. They have tolive 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, thathas to be kept up, only I should think it would be kind of tough onthem. I should think they might get to feeling they were somethingspecial and get themselves into a mess.”

And now Ed, the raiser of celery, comes into the saloon. He is savingall he can of his officer’s pay hoping to buy a few additional acres ofland when he gets back home and he doesn’t much like spending money. Hesees the three sitting there and wants to join them but hesitates. Thenhe calls to me and he and I go off together along a street and intoanother saloon.

The celery raiser is a devout Catholic and he and I get into adiscussion. I have some money and am buying the beer and so it goes onfor a long time. I speak of the feeling I have when I have marched fora long time in rhythm with many other men and Ed nods his head. “It’sthe same way I feel about the Church,” he says. “That’s just the way weCatholics get to feeling about the Church.”

At the camp Ed, being an officer, can walk boldly in but I, being buta corporal and having gone off to town without leave, must creep alongthe guard line to where a fellow from my own town is stationed. “Whogoes 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 inthe darkness to my tent.

And now I am in the tent, awake beside five sleeping men and I am[Pg 285]filled with drinks and thinking of war. What a strange idea that menshould need a war to throw many of them for a time into a commonmood. Is there unison only in hatred? I do not believe it but theidea fascinates me. Men form a democracy but in the end must throwthe democracy aside in order to make the army that shall protect andpreserve democracy. The guard and myself creeping past him to my tentare as soldiers a little absurd. Is all feeling of comradeship, ofbrotherhood between many men, a little absurd?

I ONCE knew a devout smoker who went to spend the winter in Havana andwhen 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 ofcigars, and I have myself on more than one occasion when going from onecity to another on some affair of business carried with me thousandsof sheets of paper, fearing, I presume, that all the stationers inthe new place had died. The fear of finding myself without paper, inkor pencils is a kind of disease with me and it is with a good deal ofeffort only that I restrain myself from stealing such articles wheneverI am left unobserved in a store or in someone’s house. In houses where[Pg 290]I live for some time I cache small stores of paper as a squirrel storesnuts and at one time in my life I had forcibly to be separated, by aconsiderate friend, from something like half a bushel of lead pencilsI had for a long time carted about with me in a bag. There were enoughpencils in the bag to have rewritten the history of mankind.

To the writer of prose, who loves his craft, there is nothing in theworld so satisfying as being in the presence of great stacks of cleanwhite sheets. The feeling is indescribably sweet and cannot be comparedwith any reaction to be got from sheets on which one has alreadyscribbled. The written sheets are already covered with one’s faults andoh, it is seldom indeed these sentences, scrawled across these sheets,can compare with what was intended! One has been walking in a streetand has been much alive. What stories the faces in the streets tell!How significant the faces of the houses! The walls of the houses arebrushed away by the force of the imagination and one sees and feels allof the life within. What a universal giving away of secrets! Everythingis felt, everything known. Physical life within one’s own body comes toan 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 thisthing I now feel—ah, just that boy there and what is in his soul ashe runs to look in at the window of the neighboring house in the earlyevening light; just what that woman is thinking as she sits on theporch of that other house holding the babe in her arms; just the dark,brooding thing in the soul of that laborer going homeward under thosetrees. He is getting old and was born an American. Why did he not rise[Pg 291]in the world and become the owner or at least the superintendent of afactory and own an automobile?

Aha! You do not know, but I do. You wait now, I shall tell you. I havefelt all, everything. In myself I have no existence. Now I exist onlyin 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 wassomething within me, truth, facility, the color and smell of things.Why, I might have done something here. Words are everything. I swear toyou 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 maysometimes feel them with the fingers as one touches the cheek of achild.

There is no reason at all why I should not have been able, by theinstrumentality of these little words, why I should not have been ableto 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 thehouses and the people—the half moon through the branches of that oldcherry 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 footup, lacing his shoe. And there was the dog sleeping in the dust of theroad and making a little whining sound out of his dreams and the girlon a near-by street who was learning to ride a bicycle. She could not[Pg 292]be seen but her two young brothers laughed loudly every time she fellto the pavement.

These the materials of the story-writer’s craft, these and the littlewords that must be made to run into sentences and paragraphs; nowslow and haltingly, now quickly, swiftly, now singing like a woman’svoice 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 toconsider the morals of the people who read, one is to please or amusethe people with these words and sentences. One lives in an age whenthere is much talk of service—to automobile owners, to riders ontrains, to buyers of packages of food in stores. Is no one to doservice to the little words, the words with which we make love, defendourselves with lies after we have killed the friend who stole the womanwe 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 thesecrets of our dreams and hopes?

I am servant to the words. Are you to tell me what words I shall putaside and not write? Are you to be the master of my mood, caught fromyourself perhaps as you walked in the street and I saw you when you didnot see me and when you were more sweet and true in all your bearingthan you have ever been before, or when alas you were more vicious andcruel. Bah! The words I have put here on this paper!

But there are the clean sheets, the unwritten sheets. On them I shall[Pg 293]write daringly, boldly and truly—to-morrow.

* * * * *

The writer has just come from the stationer’s, where he has got him afresh 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 tohis own house. Four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times he maydestroy the sheet on which he has been writing and there, lying beforehim, will be again the fresh white surface.

Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heapedupon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coaldust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers. Letthem be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy lying brutes.Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I had issued abull, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning them toburn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my curses, youbusy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low price and in vastquantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada, I sainted. There wasone man—I invented him—named Saint John P. Belger, who furnishedpaper to indigent writers of prose free of charge. For virtue I puthim, 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 bundlesof paper on the desk where he sits to write. He goes to a window andthrows it open and there is a man passing. Who is the man? The writer[Pg 294]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 toHades! Have I not five thousand sheets?”

It is without doubt a moment! In my boyhood I knew an old woodworkerwho on Sundays went to walk alone in a forest. Once I was lying on myback by a clump of bushes and saw his actions when he thought there wasno one about.

What has mankind, in America, not missed because men do not know, orare forgetting, what the old workman knew? There was Sandro Botticelliwho knew. He was in danger once of becoming married to a woman butat the critical moment he fled. All night he ran in the streets ofFlorence wrestling with himself and in the end won the victory. Thewoman was not to come between him and his surfaces, those cathedralwalls, those dumb strips of canvas on which he was to paint—not allhis dreams—what he could of his dreams. Nothing was to come betweenhim and his materials.

The old woodworker in the forest approached a living tree and thenwalked away. He went close again and let his eye travel up along thetree’s trunk. Then, hesitatingly, lovingly he touched the tree with hisfingers. That was all. It was enough.

It was the workman en rapport with his materials. Oh, there is afeeling in the breasts of men that will not die. Ages come and go, butalways the feeling is alive, haltingly, in the breasts of the few. Tothe workman his materials are as the face of his God seen over the rimof the world. His materials are the promise of the coming of God to[Pg 295]the workman.

Ford factories cannot kill the love of materials in the workmen andalways and in the end the love of materials and tools in the workmenwill kill the Fords. Standardization is a phase. It will pass. Thetools and materials of the workmen cannot always remain cheap and foul.Some day the workmen will come back to their materials, out of thesterile land of standardization. If the machine is to survive it willcome again under the dominance of the hands of workmen, as it alreadyno doubt is doing, in a hundred, perhaps a thousand unknown places. Theday 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 towardpurely material ends? Has not the cry for success and material growthbecome already a bore to the average American?

These the thoughts of a man. To the boy lying in the silent place onthe Sunday afternoon long ago and seeing the old workman touching sotenderly the tree that he dreamed might some day become the materialsof his craft no such thoughts.

What happened? Just a tightening of the cords of the boy’s body. Therewas an inclination to be at the same time sad and full of joy. A doorhad been jerked open by the hand of the workman but the boy could notsee 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 ina city factory but later came back to his own little shop. He was awagon-maker and the making of wagons by individual workmen lasted out[Pg 296]his time. But he had no young workman to whom he taught the love of histrade. That died with him.

Not quite, perhaps. The picture of the old workman and just the way hisfingers touched the trunk of a tree on a certain Sunday afternoon andof how, as he walked away along a path, he kept stopping to turn backand take another look at his materials, stayed in a boy’s mind throughlong years of being smart, of trying mightily to be shrewd and capablein a world where materials did not matter, in the company of workmenvulgarized by the fact that the old workman’s love of materials wasunknown 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 nopity. Before him always there is the unsolved problem, the clean whiteunwritten sheets, and the workman also knows his moments of surrender,of happiness. There will always be the moments when he is lost inwonder before the possibilities of the materials before him.

As for myself I had been, at the time in my life of which I am nowwriting, 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 Isomething to say? Were there tales I had picked up I might in the end[Pg 297]tell truly and well? I had seen and known men and women, going fromtheir homes to their work, going from their work to their homes, hadworked with them in offices and shops. On all sides the untold taleslooked 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 helpedsell So-and-so many dollars’ worth of goods. As I walked homewardthrough streets, across bridges, I could not remember what I had beenwriting about.

At times too there was a sharp sense of uncleanliness. In my room thewhite sheets looked up at me. I remembered the workman seen in theforest in the presence of the tree when I was a boy. “I will launch outupon new adventures,” I said to myself.

ON an evening of the late summer I got off a train at a growing Ohioindustrial town where I had once lived. I was rapidly becoming amiddle-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 somethousands of dollars had been lost for others. An effort to conformto the standard dreams of the men of my times had failed and in themidst of my disgrace and generally hopeless outlook, as regards makinga 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 artistsI afterward came to know the situation would have been unbelievablygrotesque. Such a man could not have believed in my earnestness aboutit all and would have thought my feelings of the moment a worked-upthing. I can in fancy hear one of the Frenchmen, Italians or Russians Ilater knew laughing at me. “Well, but why get so worked up? A factoryis a factory, is it not? Why may not one break it like an empty[Pg 299]bottle? You have lost some money for others? See the light on thatfield over there. These others, for whom you lost money, were theycompelled to beg in the streets, were their children torn by wolves?What is it you Americans get so excited about when a little money islost?”

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 andfree with money as the Americans. There is another matter involved.

It strikes rather deeply at the roots of our beings. Childish as itall may have seemed to an older and more sophisticated world, weAmericans, from the beginning, have been up to something, or we havewanted to think we were up to something. We came here, or our fathersor grandfathers came here, from a hundred diverse places—and you maybe sure it was not the artists who came. Artists do not want to cutdown trees, root stumps out of the ground, build towns and railroads.The artist wants to sit with a strip of canvas before him, face anopen space on a wall, carve a bit of wood, make combinations of wordsand sentences, as I am doing now—and try to express to others somethought or feeling of his own. He wants to dream of color, to lay holdof form, free the sensual in himself, live more fully and freely inhis contact with the materials before him than he can possibly livein life. He seeks a kind of controlled ecstasy and is a man with apassion, a “nut,” as we love to say in America. And very often, when heis not in actual contact with his materials, he is a much more vain anddisagreeable ass than any man, not an artist, could possibly be. As a[Pg 300]living man he is almost always a pest. It is only when dead he beginsto have value.

The simple truth is that in a European country the artist is morefreely accepted than he is among us, and only because he has beenlonger about. They know how harmless he really is—or rather do notknow how subtly dangerous he can be—and accept him only as one mightaccept a hybrid cross between a dog and a cat that went growling mewingbarking and spitting about the house. One might want to kill the firstof such strange beasts one sees but after one has seen a dozen and hasrealized that, like the mule, they cannot breed their own kind onelaughs and lets them live, paying no more attention to them than modernFrance for example pays to its artists.

But in America things are somewhat different. Here something wentwrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to dosuch great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all theoutlawed brave foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rightsof man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil! We did getourselves into a bad hole. We were going to be superhuman and it turnedout we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all.You cannot blame us that we are somewhat reluctant about finding outthe very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to comedown off the perch.

We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permittingourselves occasionally to laugh at ourselves for our pretensions, butthere was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this[Pg 301]American business, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Weactually meant it and no one will ever understand present-day Americaor Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while wewere building all of our big ugly hurriedly—thrown together towns,creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge andprosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we wereup to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built thecathedral of Chartres to the glory of God.

They built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God and we reallyintended building here a land to the glory of Man, and thought we weredoing it too. That was our intention and the affair only blew up in theprocess, or got perverted, because Man, even the brave and the freeMan, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God. Thiswe 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, hadbeen promised too much, wanted too much. We were afraid to know eachother.

Oh, how Americans have wanted heroes, wanted brave simple fine men! Andhow sincerely and deeply we Americans have been afraid to understandand love one another, fearing to find ourselves at the end no morebrave heroic and fine than the people of almost any other part of theworld.

I however digress. What I am trying to do is to give the processesof my own mind at two distinct moments of my own life. First, themoment when after many years of effort to conform to an unstated and[Pg 302]but dimly understood American dream by making myself a successfulman in the material world I threw all overboard and then at anothermoment when, having come back to the same spot where I passed throughthe first moment, I attempted to confront myself with myself with asomewhat changed point of view.

As for the first of these moments, it was melodramatic and even sillyenough. The struggle centred itself at the last within the walls of aparticular moment and within the walls of a particular room.

I sat in the room with a woman who was my secretary. For several yearsI had been sitting there, dictating to her regarding the goods I hadmade in my factory and that I was attempting to sell. The attempt tosell the goods had become a sort of madness in me. There were certainthousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of men living in towns oron farms in many states of my country who might possibly buy the goodsI had made rather than the goods made in another factory by anotherman. How I had wheedled! How I had schemed! In some years I gave myselfquite 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 orweek, when many dollars had come, I went to walk and when I had gotinto a quiet place where I was unobserved I threw back my shoulders andstrutted. During the year I had made for myself so many dollars. Nextyear I would make so many more, and the next year so many more. But mythoughts of the matter did not express themselves in the dollars. It[Pg 303]never does to the American man. Who calls the American a dollar-loveris foolish. My factory was of a certain size—it was really a poorhaphazardly enough run place—but after a time I would build a greatfactory and after that a greater and greater. Like a true American, Ithought in size.

My fancy played with the matter of factories as a child would play witha toy. There would be a great factory with walls going up and up and alittle open place for a lawn at the front, shower baths for the workerswith perhaps a fountain playing on a lawn, and up before the door ofthis place I would drive in a large automobile.

Oh, how I would be respected by all, how I would be looked up to byall! I walked in a little dark street, throwing back my shoulders. Howgrand and glorious I felt!

The houses along the street in which I walked were small and ugly anddirty-faced children played in the yards. I wondered. Having walked,dreaming my dream for a long time I returned to the neighborhood ofmy factory and opening my office went in to sit at my desk smoking acigarette. The night watchman came in. He was an old man who had oncebeen 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 somewhatas I fancied a prince might have felt but when anyone came near mesomething exploded inside. I was a deflated balloon. Well, in fancy,I had a thousand workmen under me. They were children and I was theirfather and would look out for them. Perhaps I would build them model[Pg 304]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 mychildren. “Land of the free—home of the brave.”

But I was back in my factory now and the night watchman sat smokingwith me. Sometimes we talked far into the night. The devil! He was afellow like myself, having the same problems as myself. How could I behis 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 tobe a scholar and I had myself spent those earlier years eagerly readingbooks. “I would really like to have been a learned monk, one of thosefellows such as appeared in the Middle Ages, one of the fellows whowent off and lived by himself and gave himself up wholly to learning,one who believed in learning, who spent his life humbly seeking newtruths—but I got married and my wife had kids, and then, you see, myeyes went back on me.” He spoke of the matter philosophically. One didnot let oneself get too much excited. After a time one got over anyfeeling 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 hewants at the public library. In the afternoon after school is out andbefore I come down here to my job he reads aloud to me.”

* * * * *

Men and women, many men and many women! There were men and womenworking in my factory, men and women walking in streets with me, many[Pg 305]men and women scattered far and wide over the country to whom I wantedto 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 buymy goods?” And again, “Will you buy my goods?”

What were the other men thinking about? What was I myself thinkingabout? Suppose it were possible to know something of the men and women,to know something of oneself, too. The devil! These were not thoughtsthat would help me to sell my goods to all the others. What were allthe others like? What was I myself like? Did I want a large factorywith a little lawn and a fountain in front and with a model town builtabout it?

Days of endlessly writing letters to men, nights of walking in strangequiet streets. What had happened to me? “I shall go get drunk,” I saidto myself and I did go and get drunk. Taking a train to a near-by cityI drank until a kind of joy came to me and with some man I had foundand who had joined in my carousal I walked in streets, shouting atother men, singing songs, going sometimes into strange houses to laughwith people, to talk with people I found there.

Here was something I liked and something the others liked too. When Ihad come to people in strange houses, half drunk, released, they werenot afraid of me. “Well, he wants to talk,” they seemed to be sayingto themselves. “That’s fine!” There was something broken down betweenus, a wall broken down. We talked of outlandish things for Anglo-Saxon[Pg 306]trained people to speak of, of love between men and women, of whatchildren’s coming meant. Food was brought forth. Often in a singleevening of this sort I got more from people than I could get fromweeks of ordinary intercourse. The people were a little excited by thestrangeness of two unknown men in their houses. With my companion Iwent boldly to the door and knocked. Laughter. “Hello, the house!” Itmight be the house of a laborer or that of a well-to-do merchant. I hadhold of my new-found friend’s arm and explained our presence as well asI could. “We are a little drunk and we are travelers. We just want tosit and visit with you a while.”

There was a kind of terror in people’s eyes, and a kind of gladnesstoo. An old workman showed us a relic he had brought home with him fromthe 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 permittedto come in in her nightgown and lie in my arms or in the arms of thenew-found friend who had got drunk with me. The talk swept over strangeintimate subjects. What were men up to? What were women up to? Therewas a kind of deep taking of breath, as though we had all been holdingsomething 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 cityto which I had gone to carouse I had seen many women of the streets,standing at corners, looking furtively about. My thoughts got fixed[Pg 307]upon prostitution. Was I a prostitute? Was I prostituting my life?

What thoughts in the mind! There was a note due and payable at thebank. “Now here, you man, attend to your affairs. You have inducedothers to put money into your enterprises. If you are to build a greatenterprise here you must be up and at it.”

How often in after years I have laughed at myself for the thoughtsand emotions of that time. There is a thought I have had that is verydelicious. It is this, and I dare say it will be an unwelcome thoughtto many, “I am the American man. I think there is no doubt of it. I amjust the mixture, the cold, moral man of the North into whose body hascome 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 becomeconscious of himself, filled with wonder concerning himself and others,trying to have a good time and not fake a good time, I am not EnglishItalian Jew German Frenchman Russian. What am I? I am tremendouslyserious about it all but at the same time I laugh constantly at myselffor my own seriousness. Like all real American men of our day I wanderconstantly from place to place striving to put down roots into theAmerican soil and not quite doing it. If you say the real American manis 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 thereader. As respectable and conventional a man as Calvin Coolidge has mein him—and I have him in myself? Do not doubt it. I have him in me[Pg 308]and Eugene Debs in me and the crazy political idealists of the WesternStates and Mr. Gary of the Steel Trust and the whole crew. I acceptthem 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 myselfsitting between the walls of a certain room and between the walls of acertain moment too. Just why was that moment so pregnant? I will neverquite 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 atale-teller. My father had been one and his not knowing had destroyedhim. The tale-teller cannot bother with buying and selling. To do sowill destroy him. No class of men I have ever known are so dull andcheerless as the writers of glad sentimental romances, the painters ofglad pretty pictures. The corrupt unspeakable thing that had happenedto tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter of buyingand selling. The horse cannot sing like a canary bird nor the canarybird pull a plow like a horse and either of them attempting it becomessomething ridiculous.

THERE was a door leading out from my office to the street. How manysteps to the door? I counted them, “five, six, seven.” “Suppose,” Iasked myself, “I could take those five, six, seven steps to the door,pass out at the door, go along that railroad track out there, disappearinto the far horizon beyond. Where was I to go? In the town where myfactory was located I had still the reputation of being a bright youngbusiness man. In my first years there I had been filled with shrewdvast schemes. I had been admired, looked up to. Since that time I hadgone down and down as a bright young man but no one yet knew how far Ihad gone. I was still respected in the town, my word was still good atthe bank. I was a respectable man.”

Did I want to do something not respectable, not decent? I am tryingto give you the history of a moment and as a tale-teller I have cometo 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 doorand go away into the distance. The American is still a wanderer, amigrating bird not yet ready to build a nest. All our cities arebuilt temporarily as are the houses in which we live. We are on theway—toward what? There have been other times in the history of theworld when many strange peoples came together in a new strange land.[Pg 310]To assume that we have made an America, even materially, seems tome now but telling ourselves fairy tales in the night. We have noteven made it materially yet and the American man has only gone in formoney-making on a large scale to quiet his own restlessness, as themonk of old days was given the Regula of Augustine to quiet him andstill the lusts in himself. For the monk, kept occupied with the sayingof prayers and the doing of many little sacred offices, there was notime for the lusts of the world to enter in and for the American tobe perpetually busy with his affairs, with his automobiles, with hismovies, 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 willbe closer to the understanding of most Americans than anything elseI have ever written was accompanied by a kind of mocking laughter atmyself 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 wantedto accept for myself all the little restless thoughts of which myselfand the others had been so afraid and you, who are Americans, willunderstand the necessity of my continually laughing at myself andat all things dear to me. I must laugh at the thing I love the moreintensely because of my love. Any American will understand that.

It was a trying moment for me. There was the woman, my secretary, nowlooking at me. What did she represent? What did she not represent?[Pg 311]Would I dare be honest with her? It was quite apparent to me I wouldnot. I had got to my feet and we stood looking at each other. “It isnow 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 goodsabout 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’sthe matter?” she asked. She was an intelligent woman, more intelligentI am sure than myself, just because she was a woman and good, while Ihave never been good, do not know how to be good. Could I explain allto her? The words of a fancied explanation marched through my mind: “Mydear young woman, it is all very silly but I have decided to no longerconcern myself with this buying and selling. It may be all right forothers but for me it is poison. There is this factory. You may haveit if it please you. It is of little value I dare say. Perhaps it ismoney ahead and then again it may well be it is money behind. I amuncertain 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 havebeen writing left unfinished, I am going out that door and never comeback. What am I going to do? Well now, that I don’t know. I am goingto wander about. I am going to sit with people, listen to words, telltales of people, what they are thinking, what they are feeling. Thedevil! 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[Pg 312]sick,” she said and her words gave me an idea. There was wanted ajustification of myself, not to myself but to the others. A craftythought came. Was the thought crafty or was I, at the moment, a littleinsane, a “nut,” as every American so loves to say of every man whodoes something a little out of the groove.

I had grown pale and it may be I was ill but nevertheless I waslaughing—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 gonedown a little into the ground. The ground I did not think would supportthe 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 wholequestion with which I was at the moment concerned became a matter offeet. I had two feet that could take me out of the life I was then inand 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 factoryoffice everything would be quite simplified, I was sure. I had to liftmyself 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 Ireally became temporarily insane I shall never quite know. What I didwas to step very close to the woman and looking directly into her eyesI laughed gayly. Others besides herself would, I knew, hear the words Iwas now speaking. I looked at my feet. “I have been wading in a long[Pg 313]river and my feet are wet,” I said.

Again I laughed as I walked lightly toward the door and out of a longand 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,’ andwhy not? It may just be that’s what I am,” I thought gayly and at thesame time turned and said a final confusing sentence to the woman whonow stared at me in speechless amazement. “My feet are cold wet andheavy from long wading in a river. Now I shall go walk on dry land,” Isaid, 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 ahand. For the rest of my life I will be a servant to you,” I whisperedto myself as I went along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, outof a town and out of that phase of my life.

ON the evening when I returned to the town my mood was quite anotherone. I was on my way from Chicago to the city of New York. Why hadI wanted to stop? The impulse had come suddenly, as I stood at therailroad ticket window in Chicago.

It rained when I got off the train and the night promised to be darkbut half an hour later the rain ceased and the stars came out. Atthe station I escaped notice. Already in the town I and my struggleshad been forgotten. At the moment when I had so dramatically walkedaway from my factory there had been some little local newspaperfurore—“Well-known business man mysteriously disappears. Not knownto have had any troubles,” etc. I went into a baggage check room andleft my bag and then to a ticket window where I bought a ticket to NewYork on a later train. Both the check room boy and the ticket-sellerwere strangers to me. It was evident the town had grown, suddenly andfuriously, as industrial towns do grow. Had it become a centre for themanufacture of automobiles shoes rubber tires or chewing gum? I did notknow. In the station waiting room ten or twelve people stood or satabout and several taxi drivers were shouting at the door.

I walked away in the drizzling rain and stood on a bridge until thenight cleared. Now it was plain to me that I had wanted to spend an[Pg 315]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 yearsof my life as a manufacturer and later as a Chicago advertising manI had secretly been writing tales and now they were beginning to bepublished. In some places they had been praised, in others blamed. Ihad loved the praise. It had made me feel very much as I had felt as amanufacturer when I had made a little money and had begun to dream ofbuilding a great factory and being father to workmen—that is to say,rather grand and noble. When my tales displeased people and when somecritic wrote condemning me and calling me a dull or an unclean man Igot furiously angry but always tried quickly to conceal my anger. Iwas really so angry that I did not want, on any account, to let theother fellow know how angry and hurt I was. Often the critic seemedmerely to want to hurt. I had had a moment of exaltation, of joy inthinking I had penetrated a little into the life story of some man orwoman. The person about whom I had been writing had been swept by somepassion, of the flesh or spirit and I had been swept along with him. Atsuch times I, as an individual, had no existence. Sometimes I had beenseated writing all night at my desk and could not have told whether Ihad been there two hours or ten. Then the morning light streamed in atmy 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 lifeof my own at all. I had lived but in the characters I was trying tobring to life in my story and in the early morning light I felt as one[Pg 316]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 beencurative and later I was filled with unholy wrath when someone saidthat, during that period of work, I had been unclean or vile.

And most of all I was furiously angry when someone said that the peopleof whom I wrote, being only such people as I myself had known, wereof a lower, more immoral, less healthy order of beings. They were notrespectable, were queer and did unaccountable things. I had myself beena respectable man and at one time in my life all of my friends had beenrespectable men and women and had I not known what was underneath thecoats of many such, what they were too? I was furious for the men andwomen about whom I had written and furious for myself too but actually,on the outside, in the face of scurrilous criticism, had always assumeda sort of heavy bucolic genial manner, something in the manner of acertain type of benevolent old gentleman I had always detested. “Theymay be right,” I said aloud generously when inside myself I thought thecritics often enough only dogs and fools.

I was thinking of myself and my critics as I walked that evening in therain and I presume that what I had wanted in coming back thus to theOhio 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 abasis, of that I was sure. When I had been doing my writing, unknownand unseen, there was a sort of freedom. One worked, more or less insecret, as one might indulge in some forbidden vice. There were the[Pg 317]bankers and others who had put money into my enterprises. They hadexpected I would be giving myself wholly to the matter in hand andI 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 thatwas to read. In the evening one came home to one’s house and goingupstairs closed the door to a room. There was before one the desk andpaper.

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 forgottento bring home five pounds of sugar from the store and now she was angryabout it. There came one of those strangely vital little domesticflare-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 turnlooking unnecessarily angry about the small matter of the sugar.

They were in their garden unconscious of me and I was unconscious ofa dinner being put on a table downstairs in my house, unconscious ofany need of food I would ever feel again, unconscious of the regime ofmy own household, of the affairs of my factory. A man and a woman ina garden had become the centre of a universe about which it seemed tome I might think and feel in joy and wonder forever. People had outermotives that seemed to control their lives. Under certain circumstancesthey said certain words. Stealthily I went to lock the door of my room.A domestic regime would be upset by my determination, the affairsof a certain factory might be ruined by my inattention but what didall that, at the moment, matter to me? I became cruelly impersonal[Pg 318]and could not avoid becoming so. Had a god been in my way or intenton disturbing me just then I would have at least tried to brush himaside. “You Jove, sit in that chair over there and keep your mouthshut! You Minerva, get down that stairway, go into the front room of myhouse and sit in a rocking-chair with your hands folded until I haveattended to the business before me! At the moment I am concerned witha man standing in a potato patch with a can of potato bugs held in hishand and with a certain perplexed baffled look in his eyes and in theeyes of the wife in a gingham apron who is unnecessarily angry about atrifling matter of sugar not brought home from a store. You must seethat I am a swimmer and have stripped myself of the clothes which aremy ordinary life. You, my dear Minerva, should not stay in the presenceof a naked man. People will say things about you. Get down the stairwayat 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 swimthere? Will I be able to keep my head above water? That is a matter forgreater 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 rememberan evening alone in my room. I was not always writing. Sometimes Iread the work of other men. There was a scene being depicted by an oldmaster of prose. Three men were in a little room talking. What wasattempted was that there should be actual words said while the reader[Pg 319]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 whileat the same time there was murder in his heart. The three had beeneating and now the man who wanted to kill was fingering the handle of aknife.

I remember that I sat in my room with tears streaming out of my owneyes. Oh, so delicately and well was the scene being handled! There waseverything in just the way the man’s hands played with that knife. Thattold the whole story. The writer had not said too much about it. He hadjust, by a stroke of his pen, centred your attention there, upon thefingers of a hand fiddling with the handle of a knife at the edge ofthe table.

How easy to say too much! How easy to say too little! I remember thatI half read through the scene and then put the book down and rannervously up and down in my room. “He can’t do it! He can’t do it! Noman 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 menin that room, what kind of morals they had, their influence for good orevil on the characters of others, what they were up to? Indeed I didnot. 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 hefail to draw his line sharp and true. I had never yet drawn my own linesharp and true, was not man enough to do so, was too timid, too weakvain 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,[Pg 320]the delicate wonder of it, the joy of it! At the moment I could havecrawled across the floor of my room and bathed with my happy tearsthe feet of the man who in another room long before had held his penfirmly, had spread upon a sheet of white paper, with such true andvital an economy of ink, the complete sense of his scene.

* * * * *

Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why had I not been content withit? In the nights alone in my room I had realized fully the danger ofcoming out of my obscurity and yet never did I write a tale, at allapproaching good handling, but that I must need run down out of my roomand go eagerly from one person to another asking praise. Time and againI said to myself: “You are an ignorant man. Every artist who goes topieces and takes the joy of complete abandonment from his task, andthe joy from his own life too, does so because he lets some outsideimpulse, want of fame, want of money, want of praise, come betweenhim and his materials. The white surfaces before him become muddyand dirty, the scene before his mind’s eye fades or becomes dim andblurred.”

These things I had a thousand times said to myself and had made a dreamof 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 orsome other city, a clerkship or some other minor job that would justprovide 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[Pg 321]something outside myself, for the white clean surfaces on which, if thegods were good, I might some day have the joy of writing at least onefinely drawn and delicately wrought tale.

As I had walked away from my factory on a certain day these had beenthe thoughts in my mind and now, after two years and after a few of mytales had been printed and I had been a little praised I was going toNew York for the obvious purpose of doing everything possible to makemyself better known, to strut before the very people I was trying tounderstand 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 particularevening as I walked alone in the streets of the Ohio town, I achieved acertain victory over myself, it was not to be a lasting one. The kindof workman I had wanted to be I could not be but I did not know it atthe moment. It was not until long afterward I came to the conclusionthat I, at least, could only give myself with complete abandonment tothe surfaces and materials before me at rare moments, sandwiched inbetween long periods of failure. It was only at the rare moment I couldgive myself, my thoughts and emotions, to work and sometimes, at rarermoments, to the love of a friend or a woman.

I went from the railroad station along a street and onto a bridge whereI stood leaning over and looking at the water below. How black thewater in the dim light! From where I stood I could look along the riverbottom to the factory district where my own factory had stood. Thebridge led into a street that was in the fashionable residence districtof the town and presently a fat gray-haired old man, accompanied by[Pg 322]a friend, walked past. They were smoking expensive cigars and thefragrance hung heavy on the air so that I also wanted tobacco and lita cigarette. The fat man had formerly been my banker and no doubt hadhe recognized me might have told me a tale of money lost through me, ofpromises unfulfilled. The deuce! I smiled at the thought of how gladI was he had not recognized me. Would he have been nasty about thematter or would he and I have laughed together over the thought of thefoolish impulse in himself that had led him to conclude I was a man tobe 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 themen of the town I had succeeded in getting worked up to the point ofinvesting in the wild business scheme I had formerly had in my headmight at any moment pass along the bridge and recognize me. That mightbring on an embarrassing moment. They might want their money back andI had no money to give. In fancy I began to see myself as a desperadorevisiting the scene of some former crime. What had I done? Had Irobbed a bank, held up a train, or killed someone? It might well bethat at some time in the future I would want to write a tale of somedesperate 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 thebridge, throwing my cigarette into the river and pulling my hat downover my eyes, becoming in fancy as I passed a man accompanied by awoman and a child the murderer my own fancy had created. When I had[Pg 323]got to them my heart stopped beating and quite automatically I put myhand to my hip pocket as though there had been a pistol there. “Well, Iwas an enemy to society and if the worst came to the worst would sellmy life as dearly as possible.”

More absurdity in myself, endless absurdities. My own childishnesssometimes amused me. Would it amuse others? Were others like myself,hopelessly childish? Many men and women seemed, in outward appearanceat least, to comport themselves in life with a certain dignity. Allhistory was filled with the stories of men who had managed to getthrough 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 acollege professor or a judge. He rode about through the streets of acity in an automobile, was called a great man. How did that affect himinside, 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 tallserious-looking man with whiskers saying it. “He writes novels andtales. He is a great man.”

And now as there was no one else to say the words set down above I saidthem myself and at first I liked the sound of them and then a desire tolaugh took possession of me and I not only wanted to laugh at myselfbut I wanted everyone in America to laugh with me, at myself and atthemselves too.

Oh, glorious moment! No more great men again ever, no more bad men orgood men, everyone on to everyone else. Was there a sense of something,I at that moment felt, in all American people everywhere? In the[Pg 324]old days we Americans had been proud of what we thought of as ourdistinctive American humor but lately our humor had pretty much settleditself down into the universal dullness of the newspaper funny strip. Areally great humorist like Mr. Ring Lardner had come to that. Would itnot be a joke on us all if we were all, already, and in reality, prettyfar beyond any outward expression of ourselves we were getting?

And now I was stumbling about in the dark streets of an Ohiomanufacturing town poking sharp sticks into the tender flesh of myselfand others. There was no one to refute any smart thing I thought andso I had a good time. Like everyone else I would so love to go throughlife criticizing everyone else and withholding from others any right tocriticize me. Oh, the joy of being a king a pope or an emperor!

“Suppose,” I now thought, “everyone in America really hungers for amore direct and subtle expression of our common lives than we have everyet 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 itwould explain the common boredom with life and with work characteristicof so many so-called successful men I had met. Whether he was asuccessful railroad-builder or a successful writer of magazine shortstories, the brighter man always seemed bored. Also it would explainbeautifully our American fear of the highbrow. Suppose the brighter menwere really having a good time—on the sly as it were—well, laughingup their sleeves. And suppose some fellow were to come along who was[Pg 325]really on to the entire emptiness of the whole success theory of life,the whole absurd business of building bigger and bigger towns, biggerand bigger factories, bigger and bigger houses, but had decided not tobe a reformer and scold about it. I fancied such a one going blandlyabout and really laughing, not fake laughing as in the newspaper funnystrips, made by poor driven slaves who think they must be rich or sillyto get fun out of life, getting the old American laugh back again, thelaugh that came from far down inside, an American Falstaff kind of alaugh.

Well, now I had got myself into deep water. I had fancied intoexistence a man I had not nerve or brains enough to be myself and onenever likes that. The figure my fancy had made annoyed me as I am surehe would everyone else.

I had gone in the darkness down along a spur of a railroad track towhere my factory had formerly stood and there it was, much as I hadleft it except that my name had been taken off the front. There was awall of the building that looked up toward the railroad station andthere I had once put a big sign on which was my name in letters threefeet 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 buildingbut strangers would think I did.

And now my name was gone and another man’s name, in letters as largeas I had once used, was in its place. I went near the building tryingto spell out the new name in the darkness, hating the name withinstinctive jealousy, and a man came out at a door of the factory andwalked toward me. Oh Lord, it was the former school-teacher, the man[Pg 326]who had once been my night watchman and who was now evidently nightwatchman for my successor. Would he recognize me, lurking about theplace of my former grandeur?

I started walking away along the tracks singing the words of an oldditty my father had been fond of singing in his liquor when I was aboy and that had at that moment popped into my head, and at the sametime staggering about as though I were drunk. It was my purpose tomake the night watchman think me a drunken workman homeward bound andI succeeded. As I went away from him, staggering along the track,singing and not answering when he demanded to know who I was and whatI was doing there, he grew angry, ran quickly up behind and kicked atme. Fortunately he missed and fortunately I remembered that his eyeshad gone back on him long since. He now grabbed at me but I eluded hisgrasp, singing my ditty as I half ran, half staggered away:

I HAD become a writer, a word fellow. That was my craft. Flinging asidethe fake devotion that must always be characteristic of all such jobsas the advertising writing I had been doing for several years I hadaccepted my passion for scribbling as one accepts the fact that thecentral interest of one’s whole being lies in carving stone, spreadingpaint 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 craftsintensified, followed with religious fervor and determination by menwho love them and deep down within him perhaps every man wants morethan anything else to be a good craftsman. Surely nothing in the modernworld has been more destructive than the idea that man can live withoutthe joy of hands and mind combined in craftsmanship, that men can liveby the accumulation of monies, by trickery. In the crafts only one mayexercise all one’s functions. The body comes in, the mind comes in, allthe sensual faculties become alive. When one writes one deals with athousand influences that motivate his own and other lives. There is,first of all, the respect for what has gone before, for the work of theolder craftsmen. One who has written as much as I have written—and forevery word printed there are hundreds I have scrawled experimentallythat will never be printed—has also read much and often with great[Pg 328]joy.

In Russia England France Germany a writer sat writing. Oh, how well hedid his job, and how close I feel to him as I read! What a sharp sensehe 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 ofnote in all countries that have their roots deep down in the life aboutthem. The sentences are like windows looking into houses. Something issuddenly torn aside, all lies, all trickery about life gone for themoment. It is what one wants, what one seeks constantly in one’s owncraftsmanship, and how seldom it comes. The little faky tricks arealways so ready to help over the hard places and when one has used themthere is the little flush of triumph followed by—bah! followed alwaysby the sick awakening.

One need not go too far afield to find sentences and paragraphs thatstir deeply. No doubt they were in the Indian language before whitemen came and the first whites on our shores brought the sense of them.There was that Fredis, sister of that Norseman Eric, who had cometo America long before Columbus came and had built him a house inVinland. The sister was a strong-willed woman who bullied her husbandand was avaricious for wealth. Came sailing to Greenland the brothers,Helgi and Finnbogi, with a strong ship, and she induces them to goadventuring 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 thirtybut unknown to them she conceals an extra five in her own vessel so[Pg 329]that in the far land, where are no white men and white men’s laws areunknown, she shall have the upper hand. They get to Vinland and shewill 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 clearnesssome old writer tells of what happened. Well, the brothers had thelarger and better ship and she wanted that too.

One morning early Fredis arose from her bed and dressed herself, butdid not put on her shoes and stockings. A heavy dew had fallen, andshe took her husband’s cloak, and wrapped it about her, and thenwalked to the brothers’ house and up to the door, which had been onlypartly closed by one of the men, who had gone out but a short timebefore. She pushed the door open and stood silently in the doorway fora time. Finnbogi, who was lying on the innermost side of the room,awoke. “What dost thou wish here, Fredis?” She answers: “I wish theeto 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 Iam ill content with the breach that has come between us, for methinksthere has been no cause for it.” “It is even as thou sayest,” saysshe, “and so it seems to me; but my errand to thee is that I wish toexchange 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 homeand Finnbogi to his bed. She climbed up into the bed and awakenedThorvard (her husband) with her cold feet; and he asked her why shewas so cold and wet. She answered with great passion. “I have been[Pg 330]to the brothers’,” says she, “to try to buy their ship, for I wish tohave a larger vessel; but they received my overtures so ill that theystruck me and handled me very roughly; that time thou, poor wretch,will neither avenge my shame nor thy own; and I find, perforce, thatI am no longer in Greenland. Moreover I shall part from thee unlessthou makest vengeance for this.” And now he could stand her taunts nolonger, and ordered the men to rise at once and take their weapons;and they then proceeded directly to the house of the brothers, andentered it while the folk were asleep, and seized and bound them, andled each one out when he was bound; and, as they came out, Frediscaused each to be slain.

Since I had been a boy it had been such passages as the one above thathad 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 morningin the far western world and had sensed the rest. For such a one therewould perhaps have been no thought of interference. One can think ofhim, the unknown writer of the memorable passage above, as even helpingin the dreadful slaying there in the field at the edge of the wood andnear the sea, not because he wanted to but because he would have beenafraid. He would have done that and later perhaps have gone off aloneinto the woods and cried a little and prayed a little, as I can imaginemyself doing after such an affair. The woman Fredis, after she had gotwhat she wanted, swore all her men to secrecy. “I will devise the meansof your death if there is any word of this when we have returned toGreenland,” she said, and after she had gone home with the two vesselsloaded and had made up her own lie to tell her brother Eric of what hadhappened to the brothers and their men in the far place, she made all[Pg 331]of her own men handsome presents.

But there was that scribbler. He would put it down. Fear might havemade him take part in the murder but no fear could now keep his handfrom the pen. Do I not know the wretch? Have I not got his own blood inme? He would have walked about for days, re-living all of that dreadfulmorning scene in Vinland and then when he was one day walking he wouldhave thought of something. Well, he would have thought suddenly ofjust that bit about Fredis crawling back into her husband’s bed, afterthe talk with Finnbogi, and how her cold wet feet awoke the man. Hewould have been alone in the wood, back there in Greenland, when thatbit came to him, but at once he hurried to his own house. Perhaps hiswife was getting dinner and wanted him to go to the store but he wouldhave brushed her aside, and sitting down with ink and paper—perhapsin 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 willget yourself into trouble,” said his wife, and he knew what she saidwas 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. “Isay now, Leif, that bit, where Fredis gets into the bed and with hercold 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, youknow.” “Oh, the deuce now! Never mind that. But I say now, you’ll haveto admit it, I did rather put a spike into my scene. I nailed it down,now didn’t I, Leify old chap?”

WELL, there was my father, there was myself. If people did not wanttheir 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 whowent off to Vinland with Fredis told—and for just the reasons thatmade 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 thatilluminating touch the Norse story-teller had found when he thought upthe bit about Fredis—that about her getting into bed and touching theback of her sleeping husband with the cold feet. The foxy devil! Do Inot know what happened after that? First he thought of the two in thewarm bed—the determined woman and the startled weak man—with a littlejump of delight and then he went back over his story and put that inabout her having got up in the first place without putting on shoes andstockings and the cold wet dew on the grass and the log against thewall of the house on which they sat. Now he had got going just rightand he knew he had got going just right. What a splendid feeling! Itwas like a dance. How neatly everything fitted in! Words came—ah—justthe right words.

How many times, in these modern days when I have seen how[Pg 333]story-tellers and painters have got themselves so often all balled-upwith the question of style I have wondered whether the story-tellersamong the old Norse and those most marvelous story-tellers of the olderTestaments, whether they also did not have their periods of escapingout into words because they had grown weary of seeking after the heartof their stories.

I dare say they stole when they could without being detected as I haveso often done. Well, there was the heart of the tale itself. That hadfirst to be got at and then one had to find the words wherewith toclothe 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 hasa long race to run but who is feverishly forcing the pace. How manytimes I have sat writing, hoping I had got at the heart of the tale Iwas trying to put down on the paper when inside myself I knew I hadnot. I have tried to bluff myself. Often I have gone to others, hopingthey would say words that would quiet the voices within. “You have notgot it and you know you have not got it. Tear all up. Well, then, bea fool and go on trying to bluff yourself. Perhaps you can get somecritic to say you have got what you know well enough you have not got,the very heart, the very music of your tale.”

IN Chicago I had ruined my chances of becoming a successful man ofaffairs because I could not take affairs seriously but that had notbothered me. Often enough, to be sure, I dodged the fact that, afterhaving started on the scent of some tale I turned aside because I couldnot follow the scent and consoled myself by saying that the need ofmoney had been the cause of my defeat or that the need of leisure hadupset me but it was always a lie.

I was an advertising man in Chicago and sat in a room with some halfa dozen others. We had met to discuss some matter of grave importanceto say a maker of plows or automobile tires. The matter was really ofno importance to me. The man had come to Chicago with three or fourothers and we were to discuss methods of increasing his sales. So manythousands of tires made, so many thousands of plows. There were othermakers of tires, other makers of plows too. Could we be more persuasivethan they, more bold and daring in statement, more foxy and cleverperhaps?

We sat in a room to talk it over and near me sat a large man witha beard. Someone had told me that he was the treasurer of the plowcompany but that had meant little. Now, as he sat there smoking acigarette and gazing out at a window I saw, just when his head was[Pg 335]slightly turned, that he had a long scar on his cheek, that he hadgrown the beard to conceal the scar. The talk went on but I satfascinated. “We must develop the trade in the southwest, that’s what wemust do,” said a voice from some far-distant place. Pictures had begunto form in my fancy. Beside the voices in the room, other voices weremaking themselves heard. Old memories had begun to stir.

There was something, a story within me that had been there a long timebut had never been told and that the scar under the beard had broughtto life. What an unfortunate time for the story to begin assertingitself at just that moment. Now I was to think of the promotion of thesale 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 someman was talking. He had been to Texas and knew things I would laterhave to know when I wrote advertisements for the plow company. I triedto appear attentive. There was a trick I had cultivated for just suchoccasions. I leaned a little forward and put my head in my hands, asthough lost in deep thought. Some of the men in the room had heard thatI wrote stories and had therefore concluded that I had a good brain.Americans have always a kind of tenderness for such cheats as I wasbeing at the moment. Now they gave me credit for thinking deeply on thesubject of plows, which was what I wanted. One of my employers—he waspresident of our company and his name was Barton—tried to cover up myobvious inattention. Already he had decided I would have to write theplow company’s advertisements but later he would tell me of all that[Pg 336]had been said in the room. He would take me into his office and scoldme gently, like a mother speaking to a badly behaved child. “Of courseyou didn’t hear a blamed word they said but here is the gist of it. Ihad 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 theglasses was speaking of agricultural conditions in Texas I was afraidthat at any moment you might begin to whistle or sing.”

Voices inside the room and voices inside myself too. Was somethingcoming a bit clear at last?

Now my fancy had taken me quite out of the room where the others talkedof plows. One night, years before, when I was a young laborer and wasbeating my way westward on a freight train, a brakeman had succeededin throwing me off the train in an Indiana town. I had remembered theplace long afterward because of my embarrassment—walking about amongpeople 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 townto a country road I found a creek and bathed. Then I went back to townto 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 bya street light near a church on a side street a girl smiled at me. Halfundecided as to whether or not I had better try to follow and pick upan 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[Pg 337]seen the condition of my clothes she would in any event have nothing todo with me.

As is natural to man, under such circumstances, I told myself I did notwant her anyway and went off down another street.

I came to a bridge and stood for a time looking down into the waterand then went on across the bridge along a road and into a field wherelong grass grew. It was a summer night and I was sleepy but after I hadslept, perhaps for several hours, I was awakened by something going onin the field and within a few feet of me.

The field was small and two houses stood facing it, the one near whereI lay in a fence corner and the other a few hundred yards away. WhenI had come into the field lights were lighted in both houses but nowthey were both dark and before me—some ten paces away—three men werestruggling silently while near them stood a woman who held her handsover her face and who sobbed, not loudly but with a kind of low wailingcry. There was something, dimly seen, something white, lying on theground near the woman and suddenly by a kind of flash of intuitionI understood what had happened. The white thing on the ground was awoman’s garment.

The three men were struggling desperately and even in the dim light itwas evident that two of them were trying to overcome the third. He wasthe woman’s lover and lived in the house at the end of the path thatcrossed the field and the two others were her brothers. They had goneinto the town for the evening and had come home late and as they werewalking silently across the grass in the field they had stumbled upon[Pg 338]the love-makers and in a flash there was the impulse to kill theirsister’s lover. Perhaps they felt the honor of their house had beendestroyed.

And now one of them had got a knife out of his pocket and had slashedat the lover, laying his cheek open, and they might have killed the manas the woman and I watched trembling but at that moment he got away andran 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 feetof each other—and for a long time she did not move. “After all I amnot a man of action. I am a recorder of things, a teller of tales.” Itwas 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, therewas 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 darerisk trying to open a door. He ran back across the field, dodging hereand there, and passing near us crossed the bridge into the road thatled to town. The woman in the field began calling, evidently to her twobrothers, but they paid no attention. “John. Fred!” she called betweenher sobs. “Stop! Stop!”

And now again all was silent in the field and I could hear the rapidsteps of the three running men in the dusty road in the distance.

Then lights appeared in both the houses facing the field and the womanwent into the house near me, still sobbing bitterly, and presentlythere were voices to be heard. Then the woman—now fully clad—came[Pg 339]out and went across the field to the second house and presently cameback with another woman. Their skirts almost brushed my face as theypassed me.

The three sat on the steps of the house on my side of the field, allcrying, and above the sound of their crying I could still hear, faroff, the sound of running feet. The lover had got into the town, whichwas but half a mile away, and was evidently dodging through streets.Was the town aroused? Now and then shouts came from the distance. I hadno 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, myselflying trembling in the grass and the three women on the steps of thehouse near me, and all three crying softly. Time passed. What hadhappened? What would happen? In fancy I saw the running man caught andperhaps killed in some dark little side street of an Indiana farmingtown into which I had been thrown by the accident that a railroadbrakeman had seen me standing on the bumpers between two cars of histrain and had ordered me off. “Well, get off or give me a dollar,” hehad said, and I had not wanted to give him a dollar. I had only hadthree dollars in my pocket. Why should I give one to him? “There willbe other freight trains,” I had said to myself, “and perhaps I shallsee something of interest here in this town.”

Interest indeed! Now I lay in the grass trembling with fear. In fancyI had become the lover of the younger of the three women sitting onthe steps of the house and my sweetheart’s brothers with open knivesin their hands were pursuing me in a dark street. I felt the knivesslashing my body and knew that what I felt the three women also felt.[Pg 340]Every few minutes the younger of the three cried out. It was as thougha 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 thesilence. Feet, not running but walking steadily, were heard on thebridge that led into the road that passed the field and four menappeared. 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 beenan explanation. The three had gone together to a doctor, the cut cheekhad been patched, they had got a marriage license and a preacher andwere now coming home for a marriage.

The marriage took place at once, there before me on the steps of thehouse, and after the marriage, and after some sort of heavy joke onthe part of the preacher, a joke at which no one laughed, the loverwith his sweetheart, accompanied by the third woman, the one from thehouse across the field and who was evidently the lover’s mother, wentoff across the field. Presently the field where I lay was all dark andsilent again.

* * * * *

And that had been the scene playing itself out in my fancy as I satin the advertising office in Chicago, pretending to listen to theman who spoke of agricultural conditions in Texas and looking at theman with the scar on his cheek, the scar that had been partly hiddenfrom the sight of others by growing the beard. I remembered that theplow company, now wanting to sell its plows in greater numbers in thesouthwest, was located in an Indiana town. How fine it would be if I[Pg 341]could speak to the man of the beard and ask him if by any chance hewas the lover of the field. In fancy I saw all the men in the roomsuddenly talking with the greatest intimacy. Experiences in life wereexchanged, everyone laughed. There had been something in the air ofthe room. The men who had come to us were from a small city in Indianawhile we all lived in the great city. They were somewhat suspicious ofus while we were compelled to try to allay their suspicions. After theconference there would be a dinner, perhaps at some club, and afterwarddrinks—but there would still be suspicion. I fancied a scene in whichno man suspected another. What tales might then be told! How much wemight find out of each other!

And now in fancy the bearded man and I were walking and talkingtogether and I was telling him of the scene in the field and of what Ihad seen and he had told me of what I had not seen. He told me of howduring the running he had become exhausted and had stopped in a darklittle alleyway behind stores in the town and of how the brothers hadfound him there. One of them came toward him threateningly but he beganto talk and an explanation followed. Then they had gone to arouse adoctor and a small official who gave them the marriage license.

“Do you know,” he said, “neither her mother nor my own knew just whathad happened and didn’t dare ask. Her mother never asked her and mymother never asked me. We went along later as though nothing hadhappened 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 notcome to our house without being invited and we did not go freely to[Pg 342]their house as we always had done before the brothers saw us togetherin the field that night.”

“It was all a little strange and as soon as I could I grew the beard tohide the scar on my face that I thought embarrassed all the others.

“As for Molly and myself—well, you see it was somewhat strange tofind ourselves suddenly man and wife but she has been a good wife tome. After the ceremony that night on the porch of the house and afterthe preacher went away we all stood for a little time together, sayingnothing, then my mother started for our house across the field and Itook my wife’s arm and followed. When we got to our house I took myMolly into my bedroom and we sat on the edge of the bed. There was awindow that looked over across the field to the house where she hadalways lived and after a while the lights went out over there. My ownmother 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 havebeen rejoicing in both houses and I think there is no doubt we wouldinevitably have married. Anyway, my mother did things about the houseshe had already done once that night, opened the door to let out thecat that was already out, tried to wind the clock that was alreadywound. 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’tknow for how long. Then she did something. The doctor in town had sewedup the wound in my cheek and had covered the place with a soft cloth[Pg 343]held in place by pieces of tape. What she did was to reach up and touchthe end of the wound, timidly, with the tips of her fingers. She did itseveral 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 onthe bed and took each other’s hands. We didn’t undress. What we did wasto lie there, all night, just as I have described, with our clothes onand holding fast to each other’s hands.”

I WALKED about the city of New York looking at people. I was not tooyoung any more and could not make myself over to fit a new city. Nodoubt certain characteristics of my own nature had become fixed. Iwas a man of the mid-western towns who had gone from his town to themid-western cities and there had gone through the adventures common tosuch fellows as myself. Was there some salt in me? To the end of mylife I would talk with the half slovenly drawl of the middle-westerner,would walk like such a middle-westerner, have the air of somethingbetween a laborer, a man of business, a gambler, a race horse owner, anactor. If I was, as I then fully intended, to spend the rest of my lifetrying to tell such tales as I could think and feel my way through, Iwould have to tell the tales of my own people. Would I gain new powerand insight for the telling by having come East, by consorting withother story-tellers? Would I understand better my own people and whathad 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 cityand the men of the city and what they were thinking and feeling. Therewere certain men I wanted to see, who had written things I thought hadgiven me new lights on my own people, the subjects of my tales.

[Pg 348]

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, JamesOppenheim and others had just started a magazine, The Seven Arts(that after its death was to be replaced by The Dial, publishedby a quite different group), and the magazine had not only offered topublish some of my things but its editors had asked me to come to seethem.

I wanted to go and was at the same time a little afraid. At that timethere was a good deal of talk abroad as to a new artistic awakening inAmerica. Mr. Waldo Frank’s “Our America” must have been in preparationat just about that time and it could not have been much later that Mr.William Allen White wrote in The New Republic, an article theimport of which was that “The King is dead! Long live the King!” Ifthere were new kings in the land, I wanted to see and consort with themif I could.

As for The Seven Arts magazine, there had been rumors of itscoming birth, even in Chicago. Miss Edna Kenton had come from New Yorkto Chicago at about that time and a meeting was held. There was a largeparty in a large house and upstairs somewhere the new day was underdiscussion. We, downstairs, did not just know what was being discussedbut there was a kind of tingling sensation in the air. Little groupsof us gathered in the rooms below. “What’s up?” It is to be rememberedthis was in Chicago and we were all young and no doubt naïve. “Whatthey whispering about upstairs?” “Don’t you know?” Not to know was,[Pg 349]we all felt, a kind of cultural blight. I had run from one group toanother trying to find out and at just that moment a young doctor,who in his spare moments wrote poetry, came into the house and wenthurriedly upstairs. A rather ribald fellow among the guests—Ben Hechtperhaps—who like the rest of us was angry that he had not been letinto the secret, made an announcement. “I know what it is. Someone’shaving a baby,” he said.

What about the men of New York, the writers whose work I admired, thepainters whose work I admired? I had always wanted to be a paintermyself, was always having sensations and seeing forms that couldperhaps have been expressed in paint and in no other way but thematerials of the painter’s craft seemed to me to lie far outside my wayof life. One had to know drawing, to know what green did to yellow andyellow to brown. When one talked to painters they spoke of things thatlay far outside one’s pathway. There had been one painter I had knownquite well. He had lived in a room near my own in Chicago and paintedlandscapes. Rather he painted one landscape over and over. There was anold 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 deepshadows that had gathered behind the house. Then there were some trees,the tops of which could be but faintly seen on the horizon. The lastrays of the sun had splashed the sky with red. Often in the evening thepainter, a large man with red hair, came into my room and spoke to me.[Pg 350]He also had been touched with the new day and had read Paul Gauguin’snotebook and a work by Mr. Clive Bell. “The new fellows have nothing onme,” he declared and taking me into his room he showed me half a dozenof his canvases and how that in one the tops of the trees could just beseen above the roof of the house and in another that there were reallyno 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 theeffect of light on color, of form and its significance, of thenew cubistic and post-impressionistic movements, the import andsignificance of which he declared scornfully he had measured and forthe most part discarded, that I became frightened and did not for yearsafterwards try to paint. Once in Chicago I went into a store, intendingto buy some colors with which to play at idle moments in my room but acertain air of the clerk had frightened me. My own father, when he wasalive, had often received from manufacturers certain cards on whichthe house-painter’s colors were shown and the trade name of each colorprinted below and I had thought I might find such a card lying on acounter in the art store but saw none and was ashamed to ask. Perhaps Iwanted the clerk to think me a painter who knew his craft. How gliblythe red-haired man had reeled off the names of colors. I was like onewho has wandered into a church where people are kneeling in prayer. Ibegan walking on tiptoes. “I only wanted to buy a pencil eraser,” Isaid.

[Pg 351]

And so now there I was in the city of New York and there were certainmen in the city to whom I would have liked to go, to talk with them ofmy craft, but when I thought of doing so I was afraid.

My own position was something like this: there were in my head certaintales I knew but could not yet tell and certain others I had told butfelt I had told badly or haltingly. Was there a certain formula onecould learn that might help one out of the difficulty? There was asense in which I thought of myself as an ignorant man. The tales I hadalready put down on paper had been as a sort of growth in me. There wasThe Little Review, run by two Chicago women who had preceded meto 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 andmyself had in common a fondness for rather striking clothes and forstrutting a bit upon the stage of life that drew us closely togetherbut being at bottom fellow Chicagoans we were bound not to take eachother too seriously—at least not under the rose.

Did I want, above everything else, to be taken seriously? No doubt Idid. That may have been the notion I had in coming to the city. And Isuppose I wanted also to find superior craftsmen at whose feet I couldsit. I already had my own notions concerning American story-tellers ingeneral.

* * * * *

I was walking in the street or sitting in a train and overheard aremark dropped from the lips of some man or woman. Out of a thousandsuch remarks, heard almost every day, one stayed in my head. I could[Pg 352]not shake it out. And then people constantly told me tales and in thetelling of them there was a sentence used that intoxicated. “I waslying on my back on the porch and the street lamp shone on my mother’sface. What was the use? I could not say to her what was in my mind. Shewould not have understood. There was a man lived next door who keptgoing past the house and smiling at me. I got it into my head that heknew all that I could not tell mother.”

A few such sentences in the midst of a conversation overheard ordropped into a tale someone told. These were the seeds of stories. Howcould one make them grow?

In telling tales of themselves people constantly spoiled the talein telling. They had some notion of how a story should be told gotfrom reading. Little lies crept in. They had done something mean andtried to justify some action that for the tale’s sake did not needjustification.

There was a notion that ran through all story-telling in America, thatstories must be built about a plot and that absurd Anglo-Saxon notionthat they must point a moral, uplift the people, make better citizens,etc. The magazines were filled with these plot stories and most of theplays on our stage were plot plays. “The Poison Plot,” I called itin conversation with my friends as the plot notion did seem to me topoison 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 beconstructed and editors were inordinately fond of them. One got[Pg 353]“an idea for a story.” What was meant was that a new trick had beenthought out. Nearly all the adventure stories and the well-knownAmerican western stories were so constructed. A man went into theredwood forests or into the deserts and took up land. He has been arather mean, second-rate chap in civilization but in the new place agreat change comes over him. Well, the writer had got him out wherethere 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 changedhim completely. The writer could make a regular angel of him, have himrescue downtrodden women, catch horse thieves, exhibit any kind ofbravery required to keep the reader excited and happy.

A word of good sense dropped in anywhere would have blown the wholething to pieces but there was no danger. In all such writing allconsideration for human beings was thrown aside. No one lived in suchtales. Let such a writer begin to think of human beings, care a littlefor 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 sameman 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 ifgoing there could so transform anyone. At least I know I should wasteno time in getting there.

In the construction of these stories there was endless variation but inall of them human beings, the lives of human beings, were altogetherdisregarded. An Alabama Negro was given the shrewdness of a ConnecticutYankee, a trick that made some writer temporarily famous and brought[Pg 354]him wealth. Having made his Negro think like a Yankee, having made himpractice all the smart cute tricks of the Yankee, there was nothing tostop the writer producing a thousand tales with the hybrid Negro as thehero of them all. Only the giving out of the patience of the editors orof 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 attemptedthe writer’s craft had, at the beginning, some real interest in thepeople about him but this was quickly lost. The imaginative life of theromancer must be lived entirely in a queer pasteboard world.

It was a peculiarity of the writer’s craft that one must of necessitygive oneself to the people about whom one wrote, must in a quitespecial way believe in the existence of these people, and a peculiarchildlike credulousness must result to the writer who so completelyseparated himself from actual life. Having acquired sudden fame andwealth such a writer woke up some morning to find himself irrevocablydead. The actuality of life could not reach him. On all sides of himpeople suffered, were touched with moments of nameless joy, loved anddied, and the manufacturer of society detectives, desert heroes anddaring adventures by sea and land could no longer see life at all.With unseeing eyes, deaf ears and benumbed senses he must walk throughlife—a movie hero, a stage star or a rich and successful manufacturerof romances—no longer a human being at all. One had no notion ofgiving oneself to that kind of death in life but to find out what one[Pg 355]did not want to do was but half the battle.

After all the tales themselves came quickly. In certain moods onebecame 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 clothethem—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 situationis difficult enough. Even the very sweetness of our people in theirattitude toward our writers is destructive. You have seen how I myselfwas allowed to play like a reckless child among advertising men,constantly forgiven for my impudence, often paid an absurd figurefor writing an unimportant advertisement—that any one of forty men,not authors, would have gladly written with more care at half myprice—simply because I was an author.

Well, I had published certain tales over my own name and my fate wassealed. That the tales were not liked by many of the critics didnot matter too much. To be sure, my books did not sell, but I wasdiscussed in the newspapers and literary magazines and my picture wasoccasionally printed and finally a very second-rate English writer ofromances, very popular in our country, spoke well of me and Mr. FrankHarris spoke ill of me.

Ye gods, I was lost and must flee. The very grocer at the corner, withwhom I was wont to sit on the steps by the back door of the store onsummer evenings while he talked of his life as a young sailor on a[Pg 356]lake steamer looked at me with new eyes. He began speaking like a verymovie hero. His tales, that had been so naturally and humanly told,became grotesques of tales. The fellow had some idea I might make himthe hero of some improbable romance of our inland seas, one alwaysholding the helm in some desperate storm or jumping overboard torescue some broker’s daughter, and tried heroically to supply me withmaterials. He had in his youth read some novel of the seas and now hebegan to lie valiantly, telling me all the desperate escapades of whichhe had heard or read as having happened to himself. Shades of Defoe andMelville, such a sea and such a sailor’s life as he manufactured! Iremembered almost with tears in my eyes the little homely real storieshe had formerly been in the habit of telling of himself, and lefthim never to return. I was even vicious enough to rob him, for hisdefection, 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 thatI had, at just that time, done a deed affecting my personal life thathad lost me the respect of some of my acquaintances. One of them saw mypicture, printed I think in the Literary Digest, and immediatelyafterward wrote me a letter. “You are a great artist and may doanything you please. I forgive you everything,” he wrote and as I readthe letter my heart went sick within me. “At any rate why do theywant to dehumanize us?” I asked myself. Violently then I cursed theromancers. They were in reality at the bottom of it all. Not satisfiedwith the cowboys the sailors and the detectives they had descended[Pg 357]upon their brothers of the pen and the brush. A poet was a certain kindof 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 besure I had myself known some American poets and had found them in theireveryday life much like all the other people I knew except that theywere a trifle more sensitive to life and its beauties and, before theybecame widely known as poets, sometimes wrote beautiful bits describingtheir inner reaction to some flash of beauty that had come to them.They were that before they became widely known as poets and then laterthey were usually goners.

That was how it was with the poet. The painter usually starved in agarret and went about his small room pale and emaciated, with a palettestuck on his thumb, and then one day a lovely lady came along thestreet, saw how that he was a genius and married him. I’ll say this forus scribblers and the actors. We got off better. We usually, in theromances, sat on a park bench with the tramps and had a dirty newspaperblown to us by a cold wind. On the front page of the newspaper was alarge picture of ourselves and an announcement that fame had come. Thenwe went and bought the tramps a breakfast with our last dollar beforewe went to live in a great house with servants. We scribblers and theactors got off the least shamefully in the romances but then, it is tobe remembered, fellows of our own craft got up these yarns that had sostuck in the public mind and that they had for that reason perhaps alittle pity for us.

All of this however concerned the materials for tales. One had to doone’s own winnowing in any event. I was in New York and was after[Pg 358]something other than stories. Would I find what I wanted? I wassomewhat afraid of the writers, particularly of the ones whose work Imost 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 thevictim of the same romancers I have just been cursing.) There werecertain men I thought had written of America and American writing withan understanding that had been a help to me. I was what I was, a roughand tumble participant in life. As yet there had been little time forstudy, for quiet thought.

As for these other men, the fellows of the East, what of them? Ifancied 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 greatdifficulty about telling the tale after the scent has been picked up.The tales that continually came to me in the way indicated above couldof course not become tales until I had clothed them. Having, from aconversation overheard or in some other way, got the tone of a tale, Iwas like a woman who has just become impregnated. Something was growinginside me. At night when I lay in my bed I could feel the heels of thetale kicking against the walls of my body. Often as I lay thus everyword of the tale came to me quite clearly but when I got out of bed towrite it down the words would not come.

I had constantly to seek in roads new to me. Other men had felt what Ihad felt, had seen what I had seen—how had they met the difficulties[Pg 359]I faced? My father when he told his tales walked up and down the roombefore his audience. He pushed out little experimental sentencesand watched his audience narrowly. There was a dull-eyed old farmersitting 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. Whenthe experimental sentence he had tried did not get anywhere he triedanother and kept trying. Beside words he had—to help the telling ofhis tales—the advantage of being able to act out those parts for whichhe could find no words. He could frown, shake his fists, smile, let alook of pain or annoyance drift over his face.

These were his advantages that I had to give up if I was to write mytales rather than tell them and how often I had cursed my fate.

How significant words had become to me! At about this time an Americanwoman 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 separatedfrom sense—in the ordinary meaning of the word sense—an approach Iwas sure the poets must often be compelled to make. Was it an approachthat would help me? I decided to try it.

A year or two before the time of which I am now writing an Americanpainter, Mr. Felix Russman, had taken me one day into his workshop toshow me his colors. He laid them out on a table before me and then hiswife called him out of the room and he stayed for half an hour. Ithad been one of the most exciting moments of my life. I shifted the[Pg 360]little pans of color about, laid one color against another. I walkedaway and came near. Suddenly there had flashed into my consciousness,for perhaps the first time in my life, the secret inner world of thepainters. Before that time I had wondered often enough why certainpaintings, done by the old masters, and hung in our Chicago ArtInstitute, had so strange an effect upon me. Now I thought I knew. Thetrue painter revealed all of himself in every stroke of his brush.Titian made one feel so utterly the splendor of himself; from FraAngelico and Sandro Botticelli there came such a deep human tendernessthat on some days it fairly brought tears to the eyes; in a mostdreadful way and in spite of all his skill Bouguereau gave away his owninner nastiness while Leonardo made one feel all of the grandeur ofhis mind just as Balzac had made his readers feel the universality andwonder of his mind.

Very well then, the words used by the tale-teller were as the colorsused by the painter. Form was another matter. It grew out of thematerials of the tale and the teller’s reaction to them. It was thetale trying to take form that kicked about inside the tale-teller atnight when he wanted to sleep.

And words were something else. Words were the surfaces, the clothesof the tale. I thought I had begun to get something a little clearernow. I had smiled to myself a little at the sudden realization of howlittle native American words had been used by American story-writers.When most American writers wanted to be very American they went in forslang. Surely we American scribblers had paid long and hard for theEnglish blood in our veins. The English had got their books into our[Pg 361]schools, their ideas of correct forms of expression were firmly fixedin our minds. Words as commonly used in our writing were in reality anarmy that marched in a certain array and the generals in command of thearmy were still English. One saw the words as marching, always justso—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 abarroom in Chicago or to a group of laborers by a factory door inIndiana one instinctively disbanded the army. There were moments thenfor what have always been called by our correct writers “unprintablewords.” One got now and then a certain effect by a bit of profanity.One dropped instinctively into the vocabulary of the men about, wascompelled to do so to get the full effect sought for the tale. Was thetale he was telling not just the tale of a man named Smoky Pete andhow he caught his foot in the trap set for himself?—or perhaps onewas giving them the Mama Geigans story. The devil. What had the wordsof such a tale to do with Thackeray or Fielding? Did the men to whomone told the tale not know a dozen Smoky Petes and Mama Geigans? Hadone ventured into the classic English models for tale-telling at thatmoment there would have been a roar. “What the devil! Don’t you gohigh-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 withsympathy. Perhaps one wanted to throw an altogether new light on a talethe audience already knew.

Would the common words of our daily speech in shops and offices do[Pg 362]the trick? Surely the Americans among whom one sat talking had felteverything the Greeks had felt, everything the English felt? Deathscame to them, the tricks of fate assailed their lives. I was certainnone of them lived felt or talked as the average American novelmade them live feel and talk and as for the plot short stories ofthe magazines—those bastard children of De Maupassant, Poe and O.Henry—it was certain there were no plot short stories ever lived inany life I had known anything about.

Did it come to this, that Americans worked, made love, settled newwestern 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 butabout which I did not laugh. It excited me as one might grow excited ingoing into a new and wonderful country where everything is strange—asort of Lewis and Clark expedition for me. Here were words laid beforeme 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 hadcome into my hands I spent days going about with a tablet of paper inmy pocket and making new and strange combinations of words. The resultwas I thought a new familiarity with the words of my own vocabulary. Ibecame a little conscious where before I had been unconscious. Perhapsit was then I really fell in love with words, wanted to give each wordI 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[Pg 363]York hoping to see and know, fellows of the schools, men who knew theirEurope, knew the history of the arts, who knew a thousand things Icould not know, it had never occurred to me that in the end I wouldfind them as frankly puzzled as myself. When I found that out there wasa new adjustment to make. It was then only the trick men, the men whoworked from the little patent formula they had learned, the critics whocould never get English literature out of their heads, who thought theywere sure of their grounds? That knowledge was a relief when I found itout but I was a long long time finding it out. It takes a long time tofind out one’s own limitations and perhaps a longer time to find outthe limitations of one’s critics.

* * * * *

Was there really something new in the air of America? I remember thatat about this time someone told me that I was myself something new andhow thankful I was to hear it. “Very well,” I said to myself, “if thereare certain men launching a new ship from the harbor of New York and ifthey are willing to take me aboard I’ll sure go.” I was just as willingto be a modern as anything else, was glad to be. It was very sure I wasnot going to be a successful author and well enough I knew that, notbeing successful, there would be a great deal of consolation to me inbeing at least a modern.

What I at the moment felt toward all the more deeply cultured men whoseacquaintanceship I sought and still in a sense feel toward them wassomething like what a young mechanic might feel when his boss comesinto the shop accompanied by his daughter. The young mechanic is[Pg 364]standing at his lathe and there is grease on his face and hands. Theboss’s daughter has never been shown over the shop before and is alittle excited by the presence of so many strange men and as she andher father approach the lathe where the young workman stands he doesnot know whether to appear surly and uncommunicative or bold and a bitimpudent. (In his place I, being an American, should probably havewinked at the girl and been terribly embarrassed and ashamed later.)

There he stands fumbling about with his fingers and pretending to lookout of the window and—the devil!—now the boss has stopped behind hislathe and is attempting to explain something to the daughter, “This isa sprocket post, is it not?” he says to the workman, who is compelledto turn around. “Yes, sir,” he mutters, in embarrassment but his eyes,in just that fraction of a second, have taken a sweeping glance at thedaughter.

And now she is gone and the workman is asking himself questions. “IfI was a swell now I suppose maybe I’d be invited to their house.” Heimagines himself in a dress suit going up a long driveway to the frontof a grand house. He is swinging a cane and there on the front steps isthe boss’s daughter waiting to receive him. What will he talk to herabout? 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 ifhe had really tried. There is a woman lives in his rooming house who isunfaithful to her husband. He knows who with. She is going to have achild but the chances are it is not her husband’s child. Often he has[Pg 365]asked himself how she will feel on the night when the child is born andwhen 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 daughterwhose voice was so soft and whose skin looked so delicate that day whenshe came into the shop with her father? “Dare I ask her what she thinksthe unfaithful wife will be thinking and feeling when the child isborn?”

Young workmen have a kind of fear of the thing called culture. Mostmiddle-westerners think of it—in spite of their protestations to thecontrary—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 theirsons by sending them to Yale or Harvard and as there are a good manybankers and manufacturers Yale and Harvard are inclined to be crowded.Mark Twain thought he would find it in Boston—a whole generation ofAmericans thought that.

To the young workman culture is somewhat like a new suit of clothesthat does not fit too well. It binds under the arms when one first putsit on.

WHEN I lived in Chicago and had first begun to write stories anAmerican critic who had seen some of my work had been very kind aboutsecuring the publication of the stories but once, when he was annoyedwith me for writing a story he did not like, he wrote me a scoldingletter. “You are, after all, nothing but an advertising writer whowould like to be something else and can’t make it,” he said and after Ihad got to New York and had walked about a little looking at the tallarrogant buildings and at the smart alert-looking people in the streetsI thought I had better, for the time at least, stay away from thepeople whose work and whose minds I admired. “They might find out howreally little I know,” I said to myself shrewdly.

I was however not too lonely, having plenty of people at whom I couldlook, to whom I could listen. My brother, who lived in New York, tookme to the Salmagundi Club where I saw any number of successful paintersand my boyhood friend Mr. John Emerson took me to the Players and Lambsand also, with other men and women I knew, I penetrated into the lifeof Greenwich Village.

How many strings to grasp! How many things I wanted of the city thatwas, I had no doubt, the artistic and intellectual capital of thecountry! The city’s wealth did not impress me too much, as I had been[Pg 367]in other wealthy places. One could make money as fast in Chicago as inNew York, although it could probably not be spent with quite as muchstyle. What I wanted most was the men who would help me solve certainproblems connected with the craft to which I was devoted. Could I findsuch fellows? Would they do it?

The bitter truth was that of the actors I saw and heard talk noneseemed much interested in the craft of the actor and of the paintersthe same lack of interest in what seemed to me so essential wasapparent, and surely we scribblers were no better. The successful menof the arts talked of the market and little else. Writers even wentinto bookstores to see what kind of books were selling well in orderto know what kind of books to write, actors talked of salaries paidand of getting some part that would bring them into prominence and thepainters followed the same bent.

Were the successful practitioners of the arts much less decent fellowsthan the laborers and business men of the Middle West among whom mylife had been spent? I was forced to ask myself that question too.

I SAT in a restaurant in New York thinking of my friends George andMarco in Chicago. We had been lads together and I remembered an eveningof our young manhood when we all went out to walk together. We hadstopped at a bridge and stood leaning over and I remembered that Marcohad 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 whenI’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 makemoney. Later all of us had made money and then when youth was gonewe had all tried something else. Marco wrote poetry and George and Iwrote stories. None of us knew much of our crafts but we had struggledtogether with them and in the evenings had sat about talking. What wehad all wanted was the leisure money might bring. We had all wanted togo to New York and live among men who knew more of the crafts we weretrying to practice than we felt we would ever know.

And now I had come to New York and was sitting I in a restaurant wherethe more successful of the practitioners of the arts congregated. Whatdid I want? I wanted to hear men of my own craft, who loved the craft,[Pg 369]speak of it. I remembered how as a boy in mid-western towns before thefactories came in so thick the carpenters, wheelwrights, harness-makersand other craftsmen often gathered about to speak of their work and howI loved to be among them at such times. The factories had brushed suchfellows aside. Had the same thing happened in the more delicate crafts?Were the great publishing houses of the city and the magazines butfactories and were the writers and picture makers who worked for thembut factory hands now?

If that had happened I thought I understood the men among whom I hadnow come. The older craftsmen had thought little on the subject ofwages and had never talked on the subject when they gathered in groupsin the evenings but the factory hands among whom I later worked hadtalked of little else. They had talked of how much money might bemade and had boasted interminably of their potency in sex. Were thepractitioners of the more delicate crafts becoming like them?

In the New York restaurant was a room filled with people, all in someway practitioners of the arts. Near me at a table sat three men andtwo women. They were talking in rather loud tones and seemed consciousthat everything they said was of importance. One had a queer sense oftheir separateness from each other. Why, when one of them spoke, did henot look at his fellows? Instead he glanced about the room, as thoughsaying to himself, “Is anyone looking at me?”

And now one of these men arose and walked across the room. There wassomething strange about his walk. I was puzzled and then the truth[Pg 370]came to me. All the men and women in the room were obviously aware ofwhat 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 anothertable did not want really to speak to him. He wanted to walk acrossthe room for the same reason that I am told, nowadays, it is almostimpossible to do anything with actors as they all want to get into onespot on the stage—upstage where the light is the clearest.

What a ghastly separation from life! I sat in the New York restaurantfully aware that what was true of the men and women about me was truealso of myself. The people in the restaurant, the actors, painters andwriters, had made themselves what the public thought it wanted from itsartists, and had been well paid for doing so. What I felt in New York Imight have felt with even more terrible certainty in Hollywood.

I fled from the restaurant and at a street corner stopped and laughedat myself. I remembered that at the moment I had on a pair of socks anda neck-scarf, either of which might have been seen for a mile. “At anyrate you’re not such a blushing violet yourself,” I said, grinning withmyself at myself.

IT was time surely for me to review myself. I wanted to know just whatI was doing in New York, what I was up to—if I could find out. I hadtime 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 peopleor go to see paintings, evenings of my own. No advertisements to write,for a time anyway. “Crescent Soap Lightens the Day’s Work. TangletoesCatches the Flies,” etc. For a man living as I lived a few hundreddollars would go far. For the American there are always plenty ofbooks to be had without cost and one may see what the more successfulpainters are doing by simply walking in at the door of a museum or agallery. The work of the more unsuccessful ones worth seeing AlfredStieglitz will show you or tell you about. Cigarettes do not cost verymuch and there are happy hours to be spent sitting by the window ofa room in a side street hearing what people have to say as they walkpast. 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 frommorning till night. I wondered if she was planning to write a novel andwas thinking about the characters, dreaming of them, making up scenesand situations in which they were to play a part.

[Pg 372]

If my life in the past had been split into two parts it need be thatno longer. I have taken a resolution. In the future I would write nomore advertisements. If I became broke I would become a beggar and sitwith a beggar bowl in Fifth Avenue. Even the police are sentimentalenough not to kick an author out. I would not sit swearing at the bookpublishers, the magazine editors or the public, that I was not rich.I had not tried to accommodate myself to them—why should they botherabout me? I sat dreaming of what might be the takings of an authorwith a beggar bowl in his lap sitting in front of the Public Libraryon Fifth Avenue. The press of people would prevent the literarilyinclined ladies from stopping to discuss books or to tell the authorthat his philosophy of life was all wrong. Also they could not accusehim of personal immorality. A beggar could not be immoral. He was atonce above and below immorality. And the takings! There would be muchgood silver and I loved silver. If I should become blind my fortunewould be made at last. A blind author sitting begging before the PublicLibrary in the city of New York! Who dare say there was not gloriousopportunity left in our country?

Had I less courage than my father? Perhaps I had. He also might havethought of so noble a plan but in my place he might also have put itinto execution at once. Ladies often came to the Public Library to meettheir lovers. Quarrels started there. One would learn much of life bysitting as I have suggested. No man or woman would hesitate to speakboldly before a beggar. The stones would be cold but perhaps one couldhave a cushion.

WHEN I went on my pilgrimage to New York I was not a young man anymore. The gray had begun to show in my hair. On the very day aftermy arrival I chanced to pick up a novel of Turgenev’s, “A House ofGentlefolk,” and saw how that he had made his hero Levretsky an oldman, through with life, at forty-five.

Pretty rough on an American who had not dared think of trying to dowhat he wanted until he was approaching that age. No American daredthink of doing anything he enjoyed until youth was gone. Youth mustbe given to money making among us and leisure was a sin. A short timeafter the period of which I am now writing I was given the Dialprize for literature, the intent of which was that it was to be givento encourage some young man just starting out on the hard road ofliterary effort. It had been offered to me and I wanted it but thoughtseriously 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 citythinking!

I had a penchant for taking my own life rather seriously. Americans ingeneral pretended their own lives did not matter. They were continuallytalking of devoting their lives to business, to some reform, to their[Pg 374]children, to the public. I had been called a modern and perhaps onlydeserved the title inasmuch as I was a born questioner. I did nottake such words people were always saying too seriously. Often enoughI used to lie on my bed in my room and on moonlight nights I lit acigarette and spent some time looking at myself. I lifted up my legs,one after the other, and rejoiced at the thought that they might yettake me into many strange places. Then I lifted my arms and lookedlong and earnestly at my hands. Why had they not served me better? Whywould they not serve me better? It was easy enough to put a pen intothe fingers. I myself was perfectly willing to be a great author. Whywould not the pen slide more easily and gracefully over the paper? Whatsentences I wanted to write, what paragraphs, what pages! If readingMiss Stein had given me a new sense of my own limited vocabulary, hadmade me feel words as more living things, if seeing the work of many ofthe modern painters had given me a new feeling for form and color, whywould my own hands not become better servants to me?

On some nights, as I lay thus, the noise of the great city to whichI had come growing fainter as the night wore on, I had many strangethoughts, brought into my head by reading the works of such men asMr. Van Wyck Brooks or by talking with such men as my friends AlfredStieglitz and Paul Rosenfeld. My own hands had not served me verywell. Nothing they had done with words had satisfied me. There was notfinesse enough in my fingers. All sorts of thoughts and emotions cameto me that would not creep down my arms and out through my fingers[Pg 375]upon the paper. How much was I to blame for that? How much could fairlybe blamed to the civilization in which I had lived? I presume I wantedvery much to blame something other than myself if I could.

The thoughts that came were something like this: “Suppose,” I suggestedto myself, “that the giving of itself by an entire generation tomechanical things were really making all men impotent. There was apassion for size among almost all the men I had known. Almost everyman I had known had wanted a bigger house, a bigger factory, a fasterautomobile than his fellows. I had myself run an automobile and doingso had given me a strange sense of vicarious power, mingled with a kindof shame too. I pressed my foot upon a little button on the floor ofthe car and it shot forward. There was a feeling that did not reallybelong to me, that I had in some way stolen. I was rushing along a roador 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 wasin reality so ineffectual in myself? Did so many of my fellow writerswant great sales for their books because, feeling as I did then theineffectually of their own hands to do good work, they wanted to beconvinced from the outside? Was the desire all modern peoples had fora greater navy, a greater army, taller public buildings, but a signof growing impotence? Was there a growing race of people in the worldwho had no use for their hands and were the hands paying them back bybecoming ineffectual? Was the Modern after all but the man who hadbegun faintly to realize what I was then realizing and were all his[Pg 376]efforts but at bottom the attempt to get his hands back on the endsof his arms? ‘It may be that all the men of our age can at best butact as fertilizer,’ Paul Rosenfeld had said to me. Was what I was thenthinking in reality what he had meant?”

I am trying to give as closely as I can a transcript of some of myown thoughts as I lay on my bed in a rooming house in the city of NewYork and after I had walked about and had talked a little with some ofthe men I admired. I was thinking of old workers in the time of thecrafts and of the new workers I had personally known in the time ofthe factories. I was thinking of myself and my own ineffectualness.Perhaps I was but trying to make excuses for myself. Most artistsspend a large part of their time doing that. In the factories so manyof the workers spent so large a part of their time boasting of theirsexual effectiveness. Was that because they felt themselves every yeargrowing more and more ineffectual as men? Were modern women going moreand more toward man’s life and man’s attitude toward life becausethey were becoming all the time less and less able to be women? Fortwo or three hundred years the western peoples had been in the gripof a thing called Puritanism. Mr. Brooks and Mr. Waldo Frank, in twobooks published at about that time, had declared that industrialismwas a natural outgrowth of Puritanism, that having renounced life forthemselves the Puritans were determined to kill life in others.

I had definite reasons for asking myself many of the questions thatcame to me as I lay in my bed at night. I had already published severalstories and, for some reason I had not clearly understood, many people[Pg 377]in reading my stories had been made angry by them. Many abusive lettershad been written me. I had been called a pervert, a thoroughly nastyman.

Was I that? I thought if I was I had better find out. My own handslooked all right to me as I lay on my bed looking at them in themoonlight. Were they unclean hands? There had been a few times, forbrief periods only, when they had seemed to me to serve my purpose.I had felt something deeply, been quite impersonally absorbed insomething in the life about me and my hands had of a sudden come tolife. They had arranged words on paper I thought very skillfully. Howclean I had felt during just those moments! It was the feeling I hadalways been seeking. At last, in a crippled way to be sure but after afashion, my whole being had become a quite impersonal thing, expressingitself on paper through written words. The life about me seemed to havebecome my life. I sang as I worked, as in my boyhood I had often seenold 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 uncleanby men and women who had never known me, could have had no personalreasons for thinking me unclean. Was I unclean? Were the hands that,for such brief periods of my life, had really served me, had they beenunclean at such moments of service?

Other thoughts came. Even my friend Paul Rosenfeld had called me “thePhallic Chekhov.” Had I a sex obsession? Was I a goner?

Another American, Mr. Henry Adams, had evidently been as puzzled as[Pg 378]I was at that moment although I am sure he would never have been soundignified as to have written, as I am doing here, of himself as lyingon a bed in a New York rooming house and putting his own hands up intothe moonlight to stare at them.

However he had been equally puzzled. “Singularly enough,” he had saidin his book, “The Education of Henry Adams,” “singularly enough, notone of Adams’ many schools of education has ever drawn his attentionto the opening lines of Lucretius, though they were perhaps the finestin all Latin literature, where the poet invoked Venus exactly as Danteinvoked the Virgin:”

‘Quae, quoniam rerum naturam Sola gubernas.’

“The Venus of Epicurean philosophy survived in the Virgin of theSchools.”

“All this was to American thought as though it had never existed. Thetrue American knew something of the facts, but nothing of the feelings;he read the letter, but he never felt the law. Before this historicchasm, a mind like that of Adams felt itself helpless; he turnedfrom the Virgin to the dynamo as though he were a Branly coherer. Onone side, at the Louvre and at Chartres, as he knew by the record ofwork actually done and still before his eyes, was the highest energyever known to men, the creator of four-fifths of his noblest art,[Pg 379]exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all thesteam engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy wasunknown to the American mind. An American Virgin would never darecommand; an American Venus would never dare exist.”

IF Mr. Adams had not spent his time as I was doing, lying on a bedand looking at his own hands, he had at least spent his time lookingabout. “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venuswould never dare exist,” he had said and it was an accusation that anAmerican 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 hadneither love nor reverence. Never a boy or man I had known at allintimately but that had both in him. We had simply been cheated. OurVirgins and Venuses had to be worshiped under the bush. What nights Ihad spent mooning about with middle-western boys, with hungry girlstoo. Were we but trying to refute the older men of New England whohad got such a grip on our American intellectual life, the Emersons,Hawthornes and Longfellows? It was perhaps true to say of theintellectual sons of these men that a Virgin would never dare command,that a Venus would never dare exist. I knew little of New England menin 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,[Pg 381]having written some thousands of rather senseless advertisements,having rubbed affectionately the legs of a few race horses, havingtried blunderingly to love a few women and having written a few novelsthat 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? Becausemy own hands had for the most part served me so badly could I let themlie beside me in idleness?

I did not dare make such a surrender, nor did I dare dodge the issuewith myself by going off into that phase of New York life I had alreadycome to dislike, that phase of life which allows a man to employ hishands merely in writing smart and self-satisfying words regarding thefailures of other men. In reality I was not trying to look at othermen’s lives just then and as for other men’s work—it meant somethingto me when it taught me something. I was a middle-westerner who hadcome East to school if I could find the school.

I wanted back the hands that had been taken from me if I could get themback. Mr. Stark Young had talked to me one day of what thinking mightbe and his words kept ringing in my ears. Such words as he had said tome always excited like music or painting. He was a man who had been aprofessor in colleges and knew what was conventionally called thinkingand he had said that thinking meant nothing at all unless it was donewith the whole body—not merely with the head. I remember that onenight I got out of bed and went to my window. I had a room far overon Twenty-second Street, near the Hudson River, and often, late at[Pg 382]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 nowgoing back to the ships to sail away over the world. One of them, avery drunken sailor who had to stop every few steps and lean against abuilding, sang in a hoarse throaty voice:

I looked at my own hands lying on the window sill in the moonlight andI dare say had anyone seen me at that moment he might have decided Ihad gone quite insane. I talked to my own hands, made them promises,pleaded with them, “I shall cover you with golden rings. You shall bebathed in perfumes.”

Perhaps there was an effort to be made I had not the courage orstrength to make. When it came to tale-telling there were certain talesthat fairly told themselves, but there were others, more fascinating,that needed a great deal of understanding, of myself first and then ofothers.

AND so there I was, an American rapidly approaching middle life,sitting in my room over in west Twenty-second Street at night aftera day spent listening to the talk of the new men and trying with allmy might to be one of the new men myself. Below me in the street thecommon life of people went on but I tried to put it away from me forthe time, was having too good a time thinking of myself to think muchof ordinary people. It is a mood that has appeared and reappeared inme at various times and I am trying to clear it out of my system bywriting this book. When I have done that I hope to shut up on thesubject 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 nowand then regarding the facts of his life but have not lied about theessence of it.

He was a man who loved a parade, bands playing in streets and himselfin a gaudy uniform somewhere up near the head of the procession and Ihave myself had a pretty hard time not making a parade out of my ownlife.

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 oneday I got away from him and when he wasn’t watching wandered into a[Pg 384]gents’ furnishing store. When he came into the hotel later I took himto my room and displayed before him the things I had bought. He almostwept but there was little he could do. “Don’t,” he said. “Come out ofthe room. Promise me you won’t wear these things until you get outagain to Chicago.”

I was in New York and was the son of my father. The New Movement in theArts was under way. If it was going to be a parade I wanted, ached, tobe in it. Was I but trying to put myself over to the literary world asformerly 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 hadsomething to do with the ineffectualness of my own hands lying beforeme on the window sill. I kept thinking of middle-western men likeDreiser, Masters, Sandburg and the others. There was something sincereand fine about them. Perhaps they had not worried, as I seemed to bedoing, about the whole question of whether they belonged to the NewMovement or not. I thought of them as somewhere out in the Middle Westquietly at work, trying to understand the life about them, trying toexpress it in their work as best they could. How many other men werethere in towns and cities of that great middle-western empire—myown land—younger men coming along. I had been unable to make my ownbeginning 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, becauseof them, other men could now begin ten years younger than myself.

[Pg 385]

“The eastern men, among whom I had now come, were perhaps right indemanding something more than courage from American artists,” I begantelling myself. It was apparent there were two steps necessary and itmight well be that we middle-western men had taken but one step. Onehad 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. WeAmericans had to begin to stay, in spirit at least, at home. We had toaccept our materials, face our materials.

There was one thing, but there was something else too. We had to beginto face the possibilities of the surfaces of our pages.

Ah, here was something very difficult and delicate indeed! Was I rightafter all in sitting in the darkness of my room and looking at my ownhands, pleading with my own hands? Had I really come to New York—notto find out and digest abstract thoughts about American life but tofind there the men who would direct me more truly to the training of myown hands for my task?

In the days of the old crafts men became apprenticed craftsmen atfifteen. Had the men of the new day to live nearly three times thatlong before they found out they need go looking for the masters?

I WAS living in a rooming house in a side street in New York and hadspent more years of my life than I cared to think about in just suchplaces. When I first began writing I used to read a great deal, inGeorge Moore and others, of writers, painters, poets and the likesitting in cafés. That however happened in Paris, not in New York orChicago. Everyone has read about it. You know how they do. In theevening one by one they come in at the door of the café. On the arm ofthe painter there may chance to be a beautiful grisette. The writersare less fortunate with the ladies and are glad to sit in silencelistening to the talk. And how brilliant the talk! Such things aresaid! There is always an old wit, someone in the manner of Whistleror 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 somethingof 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 aboutgovernment, “All government should be done away with. It’s nonsense.”Bang! The Jimmy Whistler or the Degas of the café has shot him right[Pg 387]between the eyes. There was a sense in which Miss Jane Heap of TheLittle Review supplied the need of such a one in New York, but sheand Miss Margaret Anderson could not cover the whole field. That wasimpossible.

And, in any event, neither New York nor Chicago has any cafés. When Ifirst went to New York drinking was still publicly going on but onestood up at a bar with the foot on a rail and shot the drink intooneself. There might be a moment of conversation with the bartender.“What chance you think the Giants got?” etc. Nothing specially helpfulin that and anyway what one secretly hoped was that the White Sox ofChicago would win.

Everyone lived in rooms, except those who had rich parents and mostyoung American artists gathered in the city, ate at cafeterias. InChicago, before I left, they had begun taking the chairs out of therestaurants and one fancied that, in a few years, all Chicagoans wouldeat as they drank, standing. It would save time.

We more solemn and serious American scribblers, painters, etc., for themost part lived in rooms and I have myself a memory of rooms in whichI have lived, that is like a desert trail. I can no longer recall allof them. In a sense they haunt my whole life. At a little distance theybecome gray, little gray holes into which I have crept.

And we Americans have enough of the blood of the northern races inus that we must have our holes into which to creep, to contemplateourselves, to say our prayers. In Paris, during a summer when Iloitered there, I found myself able to sit all afternoon in a café,[Pg 388]watching the people pass up and down a little street. At another caféacross a small square a young student made love to a girl. He kepttouching her body with his hands and laughing and occasionally hekissed her. That happened and carts passed. One side of my mind madelittle delightful mental notes. The French teamsters did not makegeldings of their horses. Magnificent stallions passed drawing dustcarts. Why did Americans unman stallions while the French did not? Theteamster walked in the road with his hat cocked to the side of hishead and a bit of color in the hat. The stallion threw back his headand trumpeted. The teamster made some sort of sarcastic comment to thestudent with the girl, who answered in kind but did not quit kissingher. There was a small church on the west side of the square and oldwomen were going in and coming out. All these things happened and Iwas alive to them all and still I sat in a café writing a tale of lifein my own Ohio towns. How natural it seemed, in Paris, to lead one’ssecret inner life quite openly in the streets and how unnatural thesame sort of thing would have seemed in an American city.

In Chicago alone there had been enough rooms, in which I myself hadlived, 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 muchwere 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 thestreet there was no place to sit unless one went into a movie or wentto eat expensive and unnecessary food in a crowded restaurant. In the[Pg 389]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, Ifancy, to a Frenchman or an Italian.

ONE goes from Chicago to New York on a modern train very quicklybut in the short time while the train is tearing along, while onesleeps and awakens once, one cuts the distance between oneself andEurope immeasurably. To the American, and in spite of the laterdisillusionment brought by the World War Europe remained the old homeof 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 mindwith the click of the car wheels. To the man of the American West howmuch the East means. How deeply buried the great European craftsmenhad been in the soil out of which they had come. How intimately theyhad known their own peoples and with what infinite delicacy andunderstanding they had spoken out of them. As one sat in the train onefound oneself bitterly condemning many of our own older craftsmen forselling 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 littlecheap acclaim.

Moments of wrath and then a smile too. “My boy, my boy, keep your shirton!”

[Pg 391]

In the next seat a Detroit man talking loudly. “Advertising pays. Whatyou got to do is put it across in a hurry.”

Only yesterday there was myself too, talking so, pounding tables inoffices, 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 yettell 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 theMiddle or Far West will never quite understand. Near my own room in thecity, lying in the Hudson River, were vessels that to-morrow would setsail for Europe, other vessels that had arrived from Europe but theday before. As I lay on my cot in my room at night I could hear thesteamboats crying in the river. At night when there was a fog they werelike cows lost in a forest, somewhere out in the Middle West, lost andbawling for the warm barns.

One went down to walk in the street facing the river. People werearriving on boats, departing on boats. They took the whole mattercalmly, as one living in Chicago would entrain for Indianapolis. Outin my own country, when I was a boy, going to Europe meant somethingtremendous, like going to war for example. It was of infinitely moreimportance than, let us say, getting married. One got married or evenwent to war without writing a book about it but no man went to Europefrom Ohio at least, without later writing a book about his travels.[Pg 392]Men and women of the Middle West became famous by way of Europeantrips. Such and such a one had been to Europe three times. He wasconsulted upon all occasions, was allowed to sit on the platform atpolitical meetings, might even claim the privilege of carrying a cane.Even the men of the barrooms were impressed. The bartender settled aquarrel between two men by referring the matter to Ed Swarts, who hadbeen 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 notquite daring? At least there was not in me the naïve faith in Europe myfather must have had. I found myself able to go into the presence ofmen who had spent years in Europe without trembling, visibly at least,but something pulled. It was so difficult to understand life and theimpulses of life here. There was so much phrase-making to cover up thereality of feelings, of hungers. Would one learn something by going tothe 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 inspirit and in fact, who had digested what Europe had to give Americaand who would pass it on to me. I was middle-western enough to think ita bit presumptuous of me to strike out as a man of letters, set myselfup 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 mentalking and talking. There was, at just that time, a distinct effortto awaken in New York something like the group life among artists[Pg 393]and intellectuals for which Paris had long been famous. There wasthe extreme radical political and intellectual group, gathered aboutThe Masses; the Little Review with its sledgehammerpronouncements and a kind of flaunting joy of life, of which the otherswere both scornful and afraid; The Seven Arts group, inclinedto make itself small and exclusive; the liberals, always apparentlytrembling on the edge of a real feeling for the crafts and never quitemaking it, that gathered about The New Republic and TheNation, and besides these Mencken and Nathan, knights errant atlarge, with pistols always loaded, ready at any moment to shoot anyoneif 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 lieon my cot. I began checking off names. As for myself I had no seriousintention of becoming a New Yorker. I was a middle-westerner bornand bred. All the rest of my days I might drift here and there aboutAmerica but at heart I would be, to the New Yorker, a man from beyondthe 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 VanWyck Brooks, the man who never wrote a line that did not give me joy,but his mind seemed altogether occupied with what had happened toTwain, Howells, Whitman, Poe and the New Englanders, men for the mostpart dead before I was born. I was sorry they had the rotten luck tobe born in a new land but could not stay permanently sorry. I had to[Pg 394]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 bean artist in America. The theme absorbs all his time and energy. He haslittle 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 andPadraic Colum, Julius Friend, Ferdinand Schevill, Stark Young when Icame to him later, Lawrence Gilman, Gilbert Seldes, Jane Heap, GertrudeStein. Not all of them New Yorkers, but none of them, except Miss Heapand Ferdinand Schevill middle-westerners like myself.

There were in New York and Chicago no end of people who were willingto talk to me, listen to my talk, cry out for any good thing Idid, condemn with quick intelligence what I did that was cheap orsecond-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 ofgratitude I owe to men like Paul Rosenfeld, Stark Young, AlfredStieglitz, Waldo Frank and others, men who have willingly taken longhours 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, inrelation to other writers who were coming out of the Middle West andwho would come. It was rather odd how many of them had Jewish bloodin their veins. I did not believe I was too much prejudiced becausethe people I have named liked certain work of my own. Often enough[Pg 395]they did not like it and I had opportunity to realize their reactionsto other men’s work, had seen how Stieglitz had labored for Marin,Hartley, O’Keefe, Dove and others, how Waldo Frank had given Sandburgthe intelligent appreciation he must have so wanted, had watched withglowing pleasure the subtle workings of the minds of men like Rosenfeldand Young.

I tried to feel and think my way into the matter because it had Ithought some relation to my own problem which as you will remember wasto 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 despisedcultural foster child of Europe, with unpleasant questions always beingasked about its parentage, to an America that had begun to be consciousof itself as a living home-making folk, to an America that had at lastgiven up the notion that anything worth while could ever be got bybeing in a hurry, by being dollar rich, by being merely big and able tolick some smaller nation with one hand tied behind its broad nationalback.

As for the men of Jewish blood, so many of whom I found quick and eagerto meet me half way, my heart went out to them in gratitude. They werewanting love and understanding, had in their natures many impulsesthat were destructive. Was there a sense of being outlaws? They didnot want their own secret sense of separateness from the life aboutthem commented upon but it existed. They themselves kept it alive and Ithought they were not unwise in doing so. I watched them eagerly. Did[Pg 396]they have, in their very race feeling, the bit of ground under theirfeet it was so hard for an Ohio man to get in Cleveland Cincinnati orChicago or New York? The man of Jewish blood, in an American city,could at any rate feel no more separateness from the life about himthan the advertising writer in a Chicago advertising agency who hadwithin him a love of the craft of words. The Jewish race had madeitself felt in the arts for ages and even our later middle-westernanti-Jewish crusader Henry Ford had no doubt as a child been taught toread the Bible written by old Jewish word-fellows.

As far as I myself could understand, the feeling of separatenessfrom the life about was common to all Americans. It explained theeverlasting get-together movements always going on among business menand as for race prejudices, they also were common. There was the Southwith its concern about the Negroes, the Far West and its orientals, thewhole country a little later with its sudden hatred of the Germans andin the Middle West all sorts of little cross-currents of race hatredsas the factory hands came into the towns from all over Europe. NoAmerican ever met another American without drawing a little back. Therewas a question in the soul. “What are your people? Where did they comefrom?” “What kind of blood flows in your veins?”

Could it not very well be that the men of Jewish blood who had giventhemselves to the crafts in America could look at life a bit moreimpersonally, go out more quickly and warmly to individuals, throw upout of the body of the race more individuals who could give themselves[Pg 397]wholeheartedly to the cultural life because of the very fact of a racehistory behind them?

One had always to remember that we Americans were in the process oftrying to make a race. The Jews had been a part of the life of almostevery race that had come to us and were for perhaps that very reason ina better position than the rest of us to help make our own race.

A GRAY morning and myself, no longer young, sitting on a bench beforethe little open space that faces the cathedral of Chartres. Thoughtsflitting 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 roadtoward manhood?

It was sure I had been traveling, wandering from place to place, tryingto 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 perhapseven farther away spiritually than physically. In my day men coveredhuge physical distances in a short time. As I sat there nearly allthe reality of me was still living in the Middle West of America, inmining towns, factory towns, in sweet stretches of Ohio and Illinoiscountryside, 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 amongthe other writer folk, among the painters, among the talkers too. Thatafter the years of active participation in life, in modern Americanlife, 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—Ihave said little enough of those years in my book. However the book is[Pg 399]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, formany years of my life, known what I wanted. After years of strivingto get money, to get power, to be successful, I had found in the endwell-nigh perfect contentment in looking and listening, in sitting lostin some little corner, writing, trying to write all down. “A littleworm in the fair apple of progress,” I had called myself laughing—theAmerican laugh.

Now, for a few years, I had been looking abroad. I think it was JosephConrad who said that a writer only began to live after he began towrite. 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 timeto look about.

Well, I had been looking about. I an American middle-westerner, tenyears old, had been looking at old London, at strong arrogant young NewYork, at old France too.

It was apparent that although in France, in the eleventh twelfth andthirteenth centuries, there had been many men alive who had caredgreatly for the work of their hands, present-day Frenchmen obviouslydid 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 lakefacing a city of mid-America. I had taken a second leap from New Yorkto Paris, had been brought there by a friend who now sat on the benchbeside me. The man was a friend dear to my heart. We had been sitting[Pg 400]for days on just that bench, wandering about the cathedral. Visitorscame and went, mostly Americans, middle-western Americans like myselfno doubt. Some of them looked at the cathedral without stopping themotors 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 thecathedral door. An American came with two women, one French the otherAmerican, his wife or his sweetheart. He was flirting with the Frenchwoman and the American woman was pretending she did not see. My friendand 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 toadmit it to herself. Once when they had all three gone inside thecathedral, the American woman came out and stood for a moment by themassively beautiful door, the old eleventh-century door facing us. Shedid 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. Theywere all presumably getting culture there, in the presence of the workof the old workmen. The stooped figures of old Frenchwomen with shawlsabout their shoulders kept hurrying across the open space, going intothe cathedral to worship. My friend and I were also worshiping at thecathedral, had been doing that for days.

Life went on then, ever in the same tragic comic sweet way. In thepresence of the beautiful old church one was only more aware, all artcould do no more than that—make people, like my friend and myself,more aware. An American girl put her face against the beautiful door[Pg 401]of Chartres Cathedral and wept for her lost lover. What had been in thehearts of the workmen who once leaned over the same door carving it?They were fellows who had imaginations that flamed up. “Always woodfor carvers to carve, always little flashing things to stir the soulsof painters, always the tangle of human lives for the tale-tellers tomull over, dream over,” I told myself. I remembered what an excitedyoung man had once said to me in Chicago. We had stood together in LakeStreet, 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 cityin the world,” he had said a little defiantly. Then he looked at me andsmiled. “But they will be different tales than would be found in anystreet of any of the old world cities,” he added.

I wondered.

My own mind was in a ferment, thoughts scurrying across a background offancies 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” andwas reading. Now and then he put the book down and sat for a long timein 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. Howgood 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 thethree strange people who would presently come out of the church and[Pg 402]go away, the packed storehouse of my own fancy too. The end of thestory immediately before me I would never know but some day, when I wasalone, 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 aone 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. Onemight fancy the man a young American who had come to Paris to studypainting and before he came had engaged himself to an American girlat home. He had learned French, had made progress with his work. Thenthe American girl had set sail for Paris to join him and, at just thatmoment, while she was at sea, he had fallen desperately in love with aFrench woman. The deuce, the French woman was skillful with men and sheimagined the young American to be rich. With what uncertain thoughtswas the breast of the young American torn at that moment.

The three of them just suddenly came out of the church together andwalked away together in silence. That was all. All tales presentedthemselves to the fancy in just that way. There was a suggestion, ahint given. In a crowd of faces in a crowded street one face suddenlyjumped out. It had a tale to tell, was crying its tale to the streetsbut at best one got only a fragment of it. Once, long after the timeof which I am now writing, I tried to paint in an American desert.There was something about the light. My eyes were not accustomed toit. There was a wide desert and beyond the desert hills floating awayinto the distance. I could lie on my back on the sands of the desert[Pg 403]and watch the evening light fade away over the hills and such formscome! I thought all I had ever felt could be expressed in one paintingof those hills but when later I took a brush into my hands I was onlydumb and stupid. What appeared on the canvas was dull and meaningless.I walked about swearing at myself and then at the desert light and thevery hills that so short a time before had so filled me with peace andhappiness. I kept blaming the light. “Nothing stands still in thislight,” I said to myself.

As though anything ever stood still anywhere. It was the artist’sbusiness to make it stand still—well, just to fix the moment, in apainting, in a tale, in a poem.

Sitting there with my friend, facing the cathedral, I rememberedsomething. On my desk, somewhere back in America, was a book in which Ihad once written certain lines. Well, I had made a poem and had calledit, “One who would not grow old.” Now it came sharply back:

* * * * *

That impulse gone long since as I sat that day before the cathedralof Chartres! It was an impulse that had come time and again to everyartist but my own moments had come often enough. I had no cause toquarrel with my own life.

Such moments as I had already had in it. “Life owes me nothing,” I keptsaying over and over to myself. It was true enough. For all one mightsay about American life it had been good to me. On that afternoon Ithought that if I were suddenly to be confronted with death in the formof 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 haddone little enough, it’s my fault, not yours.”

At any rate life in America had poured itself out richly enough. It wasdoing that still. As I sat on the bench before Chartres on that gray[Pg 405]day I remembered such moments.

* * * * *

A hot afternoon at Saratoga. I had gone to the races with two men fromKentucky, one a professional gambler and the other a business man whocould never succeed because he was always running off to the horseraces or some such place with such no-accounts as the little gamblerand myself. We were smoking big black cigars and all of us were cladin rather garish clothes. All about us were men just like us but withbig diamonds on their fingers or in their neckties. On a stretch ofgreen lawn beneath trees a horse was being saddled. Such a beauty!What a buzz of colorful words! The professional gambler, a small manwith crooked legs, had once been a jockey and later a trainer of racehorses. It was said he had done something crooked, had got himself intodisgrace with other horsemen but of that I knew little. At the sight ofsuch a horse as we were now watching as the saddle was put on somethingstrange 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 atwork, I had seen such a light in the eyes of Alfred Stieglitz in thepresence of a painting. Well, it was such a light as might have comeinto the eyes of a Stark Young holding in his hands some piece of oldItalian craftsmanship.

I remember that as the little old gambler and I stood near the horse Ispoke to him of a painting I had once seen in New York, that paintingof Albert Ryder’s of the ghostly white horse running beneath a[Pg 406]mysteriously encircled moon on an old race track at night.

The gambler and I talked of the painting. “I know,” he said, “I like tohang around race tracks at night myself.”

That was all he said and we stood watching the horse. In a few minutesnow that tense trembling body would be at ease, fallen into the ease ofits long, swinging stride, out there on the track.

The gambler and I went away to stand by a fence. Were men lessfortunate than horses? Did men also seek but to express themselvesbeautifully as in a few minutes now the horse would do? The gambler’sbody trembled as did my own. When the horse ran (he broke the recordfor the mile, that day) he and I did not speak to each other. We hadtogether seen something we together loved. Was it enough? “At least,”I told myself, “we men have a kind of consciousness that perhaps thehorses haven’t. We have this consciousness of one another. That is whatlove is, perhaps.”

There was a child, a young boy of fourteen walking beside his mother ina park at Cleveland, Ohio. I sat on a bench there and saw him go by andafter that one moment of his passing never saw him again but I’ll neverforget while I live. The moment was like the moment of the running ofthe 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 headwas thrown a little back, he had black curly hair and carried his hatin his hand. In just that moment of his passing the bench on which I[Pg 407]sat his young body was all alive, all of the senses fully alive. Whoseson was he? Such a living thing as that, to be thrown into the life ofCleveland, Ohio or of Paris or Venice either for that matter.

I am always having those moments of checking up like a miser closingthe shutters of his house at night to count his gold before he goes tobed and although there are many notes on which I might close this bookon my own imaginative life in America, it seems to me good enough toclose it just there as I sat that day before Chartres Cathedral besidea man I had come to love and in the presence of that cathedral that hadmade 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 sawhow his eyes followed the old tower of the church and the gladness thatcame into him too.

We would both soon be going back to America to our separate placesthere. We wanted to go, wanted to take our chances of getting what wecould out of our own lives in our own places. We did not want to spendour lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europefrom which we were separated by a wide ocean. Americans with culturalimpulses had done too much of that sort of thing in the past. Thegame was worn out and even a ladies’ literary society in an Iowa citywas coming to know that a European artist of the present day was notnecessarily of importance just because he was a European.

The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that.[Pg 408]In Europe they knew it better than they did in America.

It was for me a morning of such thoughts, such memories—just therebefore Chartres with my friend.

Once, in one of my novels, “Poor White,” I made my hero at the very endof the book go on a trip alone. He was feeling the futility of his ownlife pretty fully, as I myself have so often done, and so after hisbusiness was attended to be went to walk on a beach. That was in thetown of Sandusky, in the state of Ohio, my own state.

He gathered up a little handful of shining stones like a child, andlater carried them about with him. They were a comfort to him. Life,his own efforts at life, had seemed so futile and ineffectual but thelittle stones were something glistening and clear. To the child man,the American who was hero of my book and, I thought, to myself andto many other American men I had seen, they were something a littlepermanent. They were beautiful and strange at the moment and would bestill 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 hadtold me they did not know what I was talking about. Was it because,to most Americans, the desire for something, for even little coloredstones to hold in the hand now and then to glisten and shine outsidethe muddle of life, was it because to most Americans that desire hadnot become as yet conscious?

Perhaps it had not but that was not my story. At least in me it hadbecome conscious, if not as yet well directed or very intelligent. It[Pg 409]had made me a restless man all my life, had set me wandering from placeto place, had driven me from the towns to the cities and from one cityto another.

In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes Idid it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly. I had found outthat trying to do my job was fun and that doing it well and finely wasa task for the most part beyond me.

Often enough I sat thinking of my wasted years, making excuses formyself, but in my happier moments and when I was not at work on my jobI was happiest when I was in the mood into which I had fallen on theday when I sat before the cathedral—that is to say, when I sat rollingover 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. Howfull my hands were! How many flashes of beauty had come to me out ofAmerican life.

It was up to me to carve the stones, to make them more beautiful if Icould but often enough my hands trembled. I wasn’t young any more, butI had sought teachers and had found a few. One of them was with me atthat moment sitting on the bench before the cathedral and pretendingto read a book about it. He grew tired of the pretense and taking outa package of cigarettes offered me one, but then found he hadn’t anymatch. To such confirmed smokers as my friend and myself the Frenchnotion of making a government monopoly of matches is a pest. It is likeso much that is European nowadays. It is like the penuriousness of an[Pg 410]old age of which at least there is none in America. “The devil!” saidmy friend. “Let’s go for a walk.”

We did walk, down through the lovely old town, the town made lovely notby the men who live there now but by men of another age, long sincefast 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 withthat America of which we both at that moment felt ourselves very mucha part, and of which, for many other reasons aside from the Frenchmonopoly in matches, we were glad in our hearts to be a part.

IT seems but yesterday although a year has passed since that afternoonwhen Edward and I sat talking in a restaurant. I was staying at asmall hotel in a side street in the city of New York. It had been anuncertain day with us, such days as come in any relationship. One askssomething of a friend and finds him empty-handed or something is askedand a vacant look comes into one’s own eyes. Two men, or a man andwoman, were but yesterday very close and now they are far apart.

Edward came to lunch with me and we went to a restaurant in theneighborhood. It was of the cheap hurried highly-sanitary sort, shinyand white. After eating we sat on and on, looking at each other, tryingto say to each other something for which we could find no words. In aday or two I would be going away to the South. Each of us felt the needof something from the other, an expression of regard perhaps. We wereboth engaged in the practice of the same craft—story-tellers both ofus. And what fumblers! Each man fumbling often and often in materialsnot well enough understood—that is to say in the lives and the dramain 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 inthe afternoon we were the only people in the restaurant. Then a thirdman came in and sat as far away from us as possible. For some time[Pg 414]the women waiters in the place had been looking at Edward and myselfsomewhat belligerently. It may have been they were employed only forthe noon rush and now wanted to go home. A somewhat large woman withher 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 butrecently been let out. I do not mean to suggest that he came to Edwardand myself and told his story. Indeed he was afraid of us and when hesaw us loitering there went to sit as far away as possible. He watchedus furtively with frightened eyes. Then he ordered some food and aftereating hurriedly went away leaving the flavor of himself behind. Hehad been trying to get a job but on all sides had been defeated by hisown timidity. Now like ourselves he wanted some place to rest, to sitwith 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 wastired and discouraged and had thought he would go into the restaurant,eat slowly, gather himself together. Perhaps Edward and myself—andthe waitress with her arms crossed who wanted to get our tip and cutout to some movie show—perhaps all of us had chilled the heart of theman from prison. “Well, things are so and so. One’s own heart has beenchilled. You are going away to the South, eh? Well, good-by; I must begetting along.”

II

I was walking in the streets of the city that evening of November.[Pg 415]There was snow on the roofs of buildings, but it had all been scrapedoff the roadways. There is a thing happens to American men. It ispitiful. One walks along, going slowly along in the streets, and whenone looks sharply at one’s fellows something dreadful comes into themind. There is a thing happens to the backs of the necks of Americanmen. There is this sense of something drying, getting old withouthaving ripened. The skin does something. One becomes conscious of theback of one’s own neck and is worried. “Might not all our lives ripenlike fruit—drop at the end, full-skinned and rich with color, from thetree of life, eh?” When one is in the country one looks at a tree. “Cana tree be a dead dried-up thing while it is still young? Can a tree bea neurotic?” one asks.

I had worked myself into a state of mind, as so often happens withme, and so I went out of the streets, out of the presence of all theAmerican people hurrying along; the warmly dressed, unnecessarilyweary, hurrying, hustling, half-frightened city people.

In my room I sat reading a book of the tales of Balzac. Then I had gotup to prepare for dinner when there came a knock at the door and inanswer to my call a man entered.

He was a fellow of perhaps forty-five, a short strongly-builtbroad-shouldered man with graying hair. There was in his face somethingof the rugged simplicity of a European peasant. One felt he might livea long time, do hard work and keep to the end the vigor of that body ofhis.

For some time I had been expecting the man to come to see me and wascurious concerning him. He was an American writer like Edward and[Pg 416]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 asoul, eh?

And now there the man stood, with his queer old boyish face. He stoodin the doorway, smiling anxiously. “Were you going out? Will I bedisturbing you?” I had been standing before a glass adjusting a necktie.

“Come on in,” I said, perhaps a little pompously. Before sensitivepeople I am likely to become a bit bovine. I do not wag my tail likea dog. What I do is to moo like a cow. “Come into the warm stalland 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 ... youwill understand.... “It’s always fair weather, when good fellows gettogether” ... 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 ofquiet dignity that I often envy in others.

I stood with my hands fingering my tie and looked at the man in thedoorway. I had thrown the book I had been reading on a small tableby the bed. “The devil!—he is one of our everlastingly distraughtAmericans. He is too much like myself.” I was tired and wanted to talkof my craft to some man who was sure of himself. Queer disconnectedideas are always popping into one’s mind. Perhaps they are not sodisconnected. At that moment—as I stood looking at the man in thedoorway—the figure of another man came sharply to my mind. The man wasa carpenter who for a time lived next door to my father’s house when[Pg 417]I was a boy in an Ohio town. He was a workman of the old sort, one whowould build a house out of timber just as it is cut into boards by asawmill. He could make the door frames and the window frames, knew howto cut cunningly all the various joints necessary to building a housetightly in a wet cold country.

And on Summer evenings the carpenter used to come sometimes and standby the door of our house and talk with mother as she was doing anironing. He had a flair for mother, I fancy, and was always comingwhen father was not at home but he never came into the house. He stoodat the door speaking of his work. He always talked of his work. If hehad a flair for mother and she had one for him it was kept hidden awaybut one fancied that, when we children were not about, mother spoke tohim 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 thehotel in the city of New York was just a kind of quiet assurance in hisfigure remembered from boyhood. The old workman had spoken to motherof young workmen in his employ. “They aren’t learning their tradeproperly,” he said. “Everything is cut in the factories now and theyoung fellows get no chance. They can stand looking at a tree and theydo not know what can be done with it ... while I ... well, I hope itdon’t sound like bragging too much ... I know my trade.”

III

You see what a confusion! Something was happening to me that is always[Pg 418]happening. Try as much as I may I cannot become a man of culture. At mydoor stood a man waiting to be admitted and there stood I—thinking ofa carpenter in a town of my boyhood. I was making the man at the doorfeel 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 everymoment more distraught. His fingers played with his hat nervously.

And then he broke the silence by plunging into an apology. “I’ve beenvery anxious to see you. There are things I have been wanting to askyou about. There is something important to me perhaps you can tell me.Well, you see, I thought—sometime when you are not very busy, whenyou are unoccupied.... I dare say you are a very busy man. To tell thetruth now I did not hope to find you unoccupied when I came in thus, atthis hour. You may be going out to dine. You are fixing your tie. It’sa nice tie.... I like it. What I thought was that I could perhaps be sofortunate as to make an appointment with you. Oh, I know well enoughyou must be a busy man.”

The deuce! I did not like all this fussiness. I wanted to shout at theman 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 standingthere in that way. He was nervous and distraught and already he hadmade me nervous and distraught.

“Do come in. Sit there on the edge of the bed. It’s the mostcomfortable place. You see I have but one chair,” I said, making amotion with my hand. As a matter of fact there were other chairs in theroom but they were covered with clothing. I had taken off one suit and[Pg 419]put on another.

We began at once to talk, or rather he talked, sitting on the edge ofthe bed and facing me. How nervous he was! His fingers twitched.

“Well now, I really did not expect I would find you unoccupied when Icame in here at this hour. I am living, for the time being in this veryhotel—on the floor below. What I thought was that I would try to makean 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 manseen that afternoon in the restaurant came into my mind—the furtivefellow who had been a thief, had been sent to prison and who, after hewas freed, did not know what to do with himself.

What I mean is that my mind again did a thing it is always doing. Itleaped away from the man sitting before me, confused him with thefigures of other men. After I had left Edward I had walked aboutthinking my own thoughts. Shall I be able to explain what happenedat that moment? In one instant I was thinking of the man now sittingbefore me and who had wanted to pay me this visit, of the ex-thiefseen in the restaurant, of myself and my friend Edward, and of the oldworkman who used to come and stand at the kitchen door to talk withmother 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 manwalking about. What a man wants is to be able to justify himself tohimself. What I as a man want is to be able, some time in my life, to[Pg 420]do something well—to do some piece of work finely just for the sake ofdoing it—to know the feel of a thing growing into a life of its ownunder my fingers, eh?”

IV

What I am trying to convey to you, the reader, is a sense of the manin the bedroom, and myself looking at each other and thinking each hisown thoughts and that these thoughts were a compound of our own andother people’s thoughts too. In the restaurant Edward and myself, whilewanting to do so very much, had yet been unable to come close to eachother. The man from prison, wanting us also, had been frightened byour presence and now here was this new man, a writer like myself andEdward, trying to thrust himself into the circle of my consciousness.

We continued looking at each other. The man was a popular Americanshort story writer. He wrote each year ten, twelve, fifteen magazinestories which sold for from five hundred to fifteen hundred dollarseach.

Was he tired of writing his stories? What did he want of me? I beganto grow more and more belligerent in my attitude toward him. It is,with me, a common effect of feeling my own limitations. When I feelinadequate I look about at once for someone with whom I may becomeirritated.

The book I had been reading a half hour before, the book of “The Talesof Balzac,” lay on a table near where the man sat and his fingers nowreached out and took hold of it. It was bound in soft brown leather.[Pg 421]One who loves me and who knew of my love for the book had taken it frommy room in a house in Chicago and had carried it off to an old workmanwho 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 thebook. One got the notion that the fingers wanted to begin tearing pagesfrom the book.

I had been trying to reassure him. “Do stay, I have nothing to do,” Ihad said and he smiled at my words as a child might smile. “I am suchan egotist,” he explained. “You see, I want to talk of myself. I writestories, you see, but they aren’t any good. Really they aren’t any goodat 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’swhat 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 marriedand now I have a daughter in college. She goes to Vassar. Her name isElsie. Things are fixed with me. I live on a certain scale—that’s whatI mean—that’s what’s the trouble with me.”

It was apparent the man had something of importance to himself hewanted 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 identitywe will call him Arthur Hobson—although that is not his name.)Although he was born in America he is of Italian descent and there isin his nature, no doubt, something of the Italian spirit of violence,strangely mingled, as it so often is in the Latins, with gentleness[Pg 422]and subtlety.

However, he was like myself in one thing. He was an American and wastrying to understand himself—not as an Italian but as an American.

And so there was this Hobson—born in America of an Italian father—afather who had changed his name after coming to America and hadprospered here. He, the father, had come to America to make money andhad 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 playerand to have, during his college days, the joy of seeing his name andpicture in the newspapers. As it turned out however, he could notbecome one of the great players and to the end of his college careerremained what is called a substitute—getting into but one or twocomparatively unimportant games to win his college letter.

He did not have it in him to be a great football player and so, ina 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 Italiandescent and who also remained through most of his college career asubstitute on a football team—but in the story the man did have, justat the end of his days in college, an opportunity of which he tookbrilliant advantage.

There was this Hobson in his room writing on an afternoon of the lateFall. It was the birth of a Story-teller. He moved restlessly about theroom, sat a long time writing and then got up and moved about again.

[Pg 423]

In the story he wrote that day in his room long ago he did what hecould not do in the flesh. The hero of his story was a rather smallsquare-shouldered man like himself and there was an important game on,the most important of the year. All the other players were Anglo-Saxonsand they could not win the game. They held their opponents even butcould make no progress toward scoring.

And now came the last ten minutes of play and the team began to weakena little and that heartened the other side. “Hold ’em! ... hold ’em!... hold ’em!” shouted the crowd. At last, at the very last, the youngItalian boy was given his chance. “Let the Wop go in! We are going tolose anyway. Let the Wop go in!”

Who has not read such stories? There are infinite variations of thetheme. There he was, the little dark-skinned Italian-American and whoever thought he could do anything special! Such games as football arefor the nations of the North. “Well, it will have to be done. One ofthe halfbacks has injured himself. Go in there, you Wop!”

So in he goes and the story football game, the most important one ofthe year for his school, is won. It is almost lost but he saves theday. Aha, the other side has the ball and fumbles, just as they arenearing the goal line. Forward springs the little alert dark figure.Now he has the ball and has darted away. He stumbles and almost fallsbut ... see ... he has made a little twisting movement with his body[Pg 424]just as that big fellow, the fullback of the opposing team, is aboutto pounce upon him. “See him run!” When he stumbles something happensto his leg. His ankle is sprained but still he runs like a streak. Nowevery step brings pain but he runs on and on. The game is won for theold 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 hisfirst story, had left his hero with a slight limp that went with himall through life and had justified it by the notion that the limp wasin some way a badge of honor, a kind of proof of his thorough-goingAmericanism.

Anyway, he wrote the story and sent it to one of our American magazinesand it was paid for and published. He did, after all, achieve akind of distinction during his days in college. In an Americancollege a football star is something but an author is something,too. “Look, there goes Hobson. He’s an author! He had a story in theNational 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 thefraternities are after the fellow.”

And so there was Hobson and his father was proud of him and his collegewas proud of him and his future was assured. He wrote another footballstory and another and another. Things began to come his way and bythe time he left college he was engaged to be married to one of themost popular girls of his class. She wasn’t very enthusiastic abouthis 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[Pg 425]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 collegesand Hobson could go to football games all Fall and get new ideas forstories without traveling too far.

The Italian-American has become what he is, an American artist. He hasa daughter in college now and owns an automobile. He is a success. Hewrites football stories.

V

He sat in my room in the hotel in New York, fingering the book he hadpicked 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 wasin 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 thebars of a prison. “Before he leaves this room my treasured book will bedestroyed,” a corner of my brain was whispering to me.

He wanted to talk about writing. That was his purpose. As with Edwardand myself, there was now something between Hobson and myself thatwanted saying. We were both story-tellers, fumbling about in materialswe too often did not understand.

“You see now,” he urged upon me, leaning forward and now actuallytearing a page of my book, “You see now, I write of youth ... youthout 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[Pg 426]spoken to me saying that my stories are always clean and healthy andthe 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 cleanhealthy stuff.’”

He had grown too nervous to sit still and getting up began to walk backand forth in the narrow space before the bed, still clinging to mybook. He tried to give me a picture of his life.

He lived he said, during most of the year, in a Connecticut village bythe 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 toget hold of the subject from a new angle and so, in the Fall, one wentto many games and took notes. Little things happened on the field thatcould be built up and elaborated. Above all, one must get punch intothe stories. There must be a little unexpected turn of events. “Youunderstand. You are a writer yourself.”

My visitor’s mind slipped off into a new channel and he told me thestory of his life in the New England town during the long months of theSpring, Summer and early Fall when, as I understood the matter, he didno writing.

Well, he played golf, he went to swim in the sea, he ran hisautomobile. In the New England town he owned a large white frame housewhere he lived with his wife, with his daughter when she was at homefrom school, and with two or three servants. He told me of his lifethere, of his working through the Summer months in a garden, of hisgoing sometimes in the afternoons for long walks about the town andout along the country roads. He grew quieter and putting my book back[Pg 427]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 agood many years. There are people there I would like to know better. Iwould like really to know them, I mean. Men and women go along the roadpast my place. There is a man of about my own age whose wife has lefthim. He lives alone in a little house and cooks his own food. Sometimeshe also goes for a walk and comes past my place and we are supposed tobe friends. Something of the kind is in the wind. He stops sometimesby my garden and stands looking over and we talk but do not say muchto each other. The devil, that’s the way it goes you see—there he isby the fence and there am I with a hoe in my hand. I walk to where hestands and also lean on the fence. We speak of the vegetables growingin my garden. Would you believe it we never speak of anything but thevegetables or the flowers perhaps? It’s a fact. There he stands. Did Itell you his wife has left him? He wants to speak of that—I’m sure ofit. To tell the truth when he set out from his own house he was quitedetermined to come up to my place and tell me all about everything, howhe feels, why his wife has left him and all about it. The man who wentaway 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 manhimself 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’tdo it, you see. All he does is to stand by my fence and speak of[Pg 428]growing vegetables. ‘Your lettuce is doing very well. The weeds do growlike the deuce, don’t they though? That’s a nice bed of flowers youhave over there near the house.’”

The writer of the football stories threw up his hands in disgust. Itwas evident he also felt something I had often felt. One learns towrite 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. BillHart, the two-gun man of the movies, who goes creeping through forests,riding pell-mell down hillsides, shooting his guns bang-bang, would bearrested 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? Notat all. Eagerly they go to see him. Cowboys from distant towns rideto where they may see his pictures. For the cowboy also the past hasbecome a flaming thing. Forgotten are the long dull days of followingfoolish cows across an empty desert place. Aha, the cowboy also wantsto believe. Do you not suppose Bill Hart also wants to believe?

The deuce of it all is that, wanting to believe the lie, one shutsout the truth, too. The man by the fence, looking at the New Englandgarden, 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 hadrun away with his friend. I was thinking of him and of something else[Pg 429]at the same time. I wanted to save my Balzac if I could. Already thefootball-story man had torn a page of the book. Were he to get excitedagain he might tear out more pages. When he had first come into my roomI had been discourteous, standing and staring at him, and now I did notwant to speak of the book, to warn him. I wanted to pick it up casuallywhen he wasn’t looking. “I’ll walk across the room with it and put itout of his reach,” I thought but just as I was about to put out my handhe put out his hand and took it again.

And now as he fingered the book nervously his mind jumped off in a newdirection. He told me that during the Summer before he had got hold ofa book of verses by an American poet, Carl Sandburg.

“There’s a fellow,” he cried, waving my Balzac about. “He feels commonthings as I would like to be able to feel them and sometimes as I workin my garden I think of him. As I walk about in my town or go swimmingor fishing in the Summer afternoons I think of him.” He quoted:

“Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, Icannot 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 fromplace to place. Now he had forgotten the man who on Summer days came tolean over his fence and was speaking of other people of his New Englandtown.

On Summer mornings he sometimes went to loiter about on the main[Pg 430]street of the town of his adoption, and there were things always goingon that caught his fancy, as flies are caught in molasses.

Life bestirred itself in the bright sunlight in the streets. Firstthere was a surface life and then another and more subtle life goingon below the surface and the football-story writer felt both verykeenly—he was one made to feel all life keenly—but all the time hekept trying to think only of the outside of things. That would bebetter for him, he thought. A story writer who had written footballstories for ten or fifteen years might very well get himself into a badway by letting his fancy play too much over the life immediately abouthim. It was just possible—well you see it might turn out that he wouldcome in the end to hate a football game more than anything else in theworld—he might come to hate a football game as that furtive fellowI 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 madehim 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. Itwas, let us say, a bright early Fall morning and the sun was shiningand the air filled with the tang of the sea. Why did he find it sodifficult to speak with anyone regarding the half-formed thoughts andfeelings inside himself? He had always found it difficult to speak ofsuch things, he explained, and that was the reason he had come to seeme. I was a fellow writer and no doubt I also was often caught in thesame trap. “I thought I would speak to you about it. I thought maybe[Pg 431]you and I could talk it over,” he said.

He went, on such a morning as I have described, into the town’s mainstreet and for a time stood about before the postoffice. Then he wentto 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 andfingering my Balzac, “you see there is a small fish stand right nearthe shoe-shining stand and across the street there is a grocery wherethey set baskets of fruit out on the sidewalk. There are baskets ofapples, baskets of peaches, baskets of pears, a bunch of yellow bananashanging up. The fellow who runs the grocery is a Greek and the man whoshines 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 wassomething sensual in the touch of his fingers as he tried to describesomething to me, a sense he had got of an inner life growing up betweenthe men of such oddly assorted nationalities selling their merchandiseon the streets of a New England town.

Before coming to that he spoke at length of the fish lying amid crackedice in a little box-like stand the fish merchant had built. One mighthave fancied my visitor also dreamed of some day becoming a fishmerchant. The fish, he explained, were brought in from the sea in theevening by fishermen and the fish merchant came at daybreak to arrangehis stock and all morning whenever he sold a fish he re-arranged the[Pg 432]stock, bringing more fish from a deep box at the back of his littlecoop. Sometimes he stood back of his sales counter but when there wereno customers about he came out and walked up and down the sidewalk andlooked with pride at the fish lying amid the pieces of cracked ice.

The Italian shoe-shiner and the Greek grocer stood on the sidewalklaughing at their neighbor. He was never satisfied with the displaymade by his wares but was always at work changing it, trying to improveit.

On the shoe-shining stand sat the writer of football stories and whenanother customer did not come to take his place at once he lingered amoment. There was a soft smile on his lips.

Sometimes when the story writer was there, sitting quietly on theshoe-shining stand, something happened at the fish-stand of which hetried to tell me. The fat old Yankee fish merchant did something—heallowed himself to be humiliated in a way that made the Greek and theItalian furious—although they never said anything about the matter.

“It is like this,” the story writer began, smiling shyly at me. “Yousee now—well, you see the fish merchant has a daughter. She is hisdaughter but the American, the Yank, does not have a daughter in thesame way as a Greek or an Italian. I am an American myself but I haveenough 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—‘dothis or that,’ and this or that is done. There may be grumbling behindthe door. All right, let it pass! There is no grumbling in his[Pg 433]presence. I’m talking now of the lower classes, the peasants. That’sthe kind of blood I have in my veins. Oh, I admit there is a kind ofbrutality 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 andfor the woman in the house there is work too. She has her kids to lookafter. And the father—he works hard all day, he makes the living forall, he buys the food and clothes.

“Does he want to come home and hear talk of the rights of women andchildren, all that sort of bosh? Does he want to find an American or anEnglish feminist perhaps, enshrined in his house?”

“Ha!” The story writer jumped off the bed and began again walkingrestlessly back and forth.

“The devil!” he cried. “I am neither the one thing nor the other. And Ialso am bullied by my wife—not openly but in secret. It is all done inthe name of keeping up appearances. Oh, it is all done very quietly andgently. I should have been an artist but I have become, you see, a manof business. It is my business to write football stories, eh! Among mypeople, the Italians, there have been artists. If they have money—verywell and if they have no money—very well. Let us suppose one of themliving poorly, eating his crust of bread. Aha! With his hands he doeswhat 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 hemakes what he feels. He goes about laughing, puts his hat on the sideof his head. Does he worry about running an automobile? ‘Go to thedevil,’ he says. Does he lie awake nights thinking of how to maintaina large house and a daughter in college? The devil! Is there talk of[Pg 434]keeping up appearances for the sake of the woman? For an artist, yousee,—well, what he has to say to his fellows is in his work. If he isan Italian his woman is a woman or out she goes. My Italians know howto be men.”

“Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, Icannot 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 wassomething feverish in his eyes. Again he smiled softly but his fingerscontinued to play nervously with the pages of my book and now he toreseveral of the pages. Again he spoke of the three men of his NewEngland 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 fishscales and the backs are white like the bellies of fish.”

“And the Italian shoe-shiner is a fat man too. He has a mustache. Whenhe is shining my shoes sometimes—well, sometimes he looks up from hisjob and laughs and then he calls the fat Yankee fish-seller—what doyou think—a mermaid.”

In the life of the Yankee there was something that exasperated myvisitor as it did the Greek grocer and the Italian who shined shoes[Pg 435]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 takethe book from his hand (he was quite unconscious of the damage he wasdoing) but each time as I reached out I lost courage. The name Balzacwas stamped in gold on the back and the name seemed to be grinning atme.

My visitor grinned at me too, in an excited nervous way. The sellerof fish, the old fat man with the fish scales on his hands, had adaughter who was ashamed of her father and of his occupation in life.The daughter, an only child lived during most of the year in Bostonwhere she was a student at the Boston Conservatory of Music. She wasambitious to become a pianist and had begun to take on the airs of alady—had a little mincing step and a little mincing voice and woremincing clothes too, my visitor said.

And in the Summer, like the writer’s daughter, she came home to live inher father’s house and, like the writer himself, sometimes went to walkabout.

To the New England town during the Summer months there came a greatmany city people—from Boston and New York—and the pianist did notwant them to know she was the daughter of the seller of fish. Sometimesshe came to her father’s booth to get money from him or to speak withhim concerning some affair of the family and it was understood betweenthem that—when there were city visitors about—the father would notrecognize his daughter as being in any way connected with himself. Whenthey stood talking together and when one of the city visitors camealong the street the daughter became a customer intent upon buying[Pg 436]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 theItalian shoe-shiner were both furious and took the humiliation of theirfellow merchant as in some way a reflection on themselves, an assaultupon their own dignity, and the story writer having his shoes shinedfelt the same way. All three men scowled and avoided looking at eachother. The shoe-shiner rubbed furiously at the writer’s shoes and theGreek merchant began swearing at a boy employed in his store.

As for the fish merchant, he played his part to perfection. Picking upone of the fish he held it before his daughter’s eyes. “It’s perfectlyfresh and a beauty, Madam,” he said. He avoided looking at his fellowmerchants and did not speak to them for a long time after his daughterhad gone.

But when she had gone and the life that went on between the three menwas 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 littlebooth and walked up and down arranging and re-arranging his stock andwhen 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 tounderstand. You see, it’s like this—” his eyes seemed to say, “—weAmericans can’t live for ourselves. We must live and work for ourwives, our sons and our daughters. We can’t all of us get up in theworld so we must give them their chance.” It was something of the sorthe always seemed to be wanting to say.

[Pg 437]

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 theball.

But life in the streets of the New England village wasn’t like that. Noshort stories with clever endings—as in the magazines—happened in thestreets of the town at all. Life went on and on and little illuminatinghuman things happened. There was drama in the street and in the livesof the people in the street but it sprang directly out of the stuff oflife itself. Could one understand that?

The young Italian tried but something got in his way. The fact thathe was a successful writer of magazine short stories got in his way.The large white house near the sea, the automobile and the daughter atVassar—all these things had got in his way.

One had to keep to the point and after a time it had happened that theman could not write his stories in the town. In the Fall he went tomany football games, took notes, thought out plots, and then went offto 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 furiouslyhour after hour and then went to walk in the city streets. One had tokeep giving things a new twist—to get new ideas constantly. The deuce,it was like having to write advertisements. One continually advertiseda kind of life that did not exist.

In the city streets, as one walked restlessly about, the actualityof life became as a ghost that haunted the house of one’s fancy. Achild was crying in a stairway, a fat old woman with great breasts wasleaning out at a window, a man came running along a street, dodged[Pg 438]into an alleyway, crawled over a high board fence, crept through apassageway between two apartment buildings and then continued runningand running in another street.

Such things happened and the man walking and trying to think only offootball games stood listening. In the distance he could hear thesounds of the running feet. They sounded quite sharply for a longmoment and then were lost in the din of the street cars and motortrucks. Where was the running man going and what had he done? The oldHarry! Now the sound of the running feet would go on and on foreverin the imaginative life of the writer and at night in the room in thehotel in the city, the room to which he had come to write footballstories, he would awaken out of sleep to hear the sound of runningfeet. There Was terror and drama in the sound. The running man had awhite face. There was a look of terror on his face and for a moment akind 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 plotsfor football stories. The fat Yankee fish-seller in the New Englandtown had surrendered his manhood in the presence of other men forthe sake of a daughter who wished to pass herself off as a lady andthe New England town where he lived was full of people doing strangeunaccountable things. The writer was himself always doing strangeunaccountable things.

“What’s the matter with me?” he asked sharply, walking up and downbefore me in the room in the New York hotel and tearing the pages of[Pg 439]my book. “Well, you see,” he explained, “when I wrote my first footballstory it was fun. I was a boy wanting to be a football hero and as Icould not become one in fact I became one in fancy. It was a boy’sfancy but now I’m a man and want to grow up. Something inside me wantsto grow up.”

“They won’t let me,” he cried, holding his hands out before him. He haddropped my book on the floor. “Look,” he said earnestly, “my hands arethe hands of a middle-aged man and the skin on the back of my neck iswrinkled like an old man’s. Must my hands go on forever, painting thefancies of children?”

VIII

The writer of football stories had gone out of my room. He is anAmerican artist. No doubt he is at this moment sitting somewhere in ahotel room, writing football stories. As I now sit writing of him myown mind is filled with fragmentary glimpses of life caught and heldfrom our talk. The little fragments caught in the field of my fancy arelike flies caught in molasses—they cannot escape. They will not goout of the house of my fancy and I am wondering, as no doubt you, thereader, will be wondering, what became of the daughter of the seller offish who wanted to be a lady. Did she become a famous pianist or didshe in the end run away with a man from New York City who was spendinghis vacation in the New England town only to find, after she got tothe city with him, that he already had a wife? I am wondering abouther—about the man whose wife ran away with his friend and about therunning man in the city streets. He stays in my fancy the most sharply[Pg 440]of all. What happened to him? He had evidently committed a crime. Didhe 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 isjust such a day as the one on which he came to see me. It is eveningnow and he came in the evening. In fancy again I see him, going abouton Spring, Summer and early Fall days, on the streets of his NewEngland town. Being an author he is somewhat timid and hesitates aboutspeaking with people he meets. Well, he is lonely. By this time hisdaughter has no doubt graduated from Vassar. Perhaps she is married toa writer of stories. It may be that she has married a writer of cowboystories 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 offootball games is writing another. In fancy I can hear the click of histypewriting machine. He is fighting, it seems, to maintain a certainposition in life, a house by the sea, an automobile and he blames thatfact 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 timethere is another fight going on. On that day in the hotel in the cityof New York he told me, with tears in his eyes, that he wanted to growup, to let his fanciful life keep pace with his physical life butthat the magazine editors would not let him. He blamed the editorsof magazines—he blamed his wife and daughter—as I remember our[Pg 441]conversation, he did not blame himself.

Perhaps he did not dare let his fanciful life mature to keep pace withhis physical life. He lives in America, where as yet to mature in one’sfanciful life is thought of as something like a crime.

In any event there he is, haunting my fancy. As the man running in thestreets will always stay in his fancy, disturbing him when he wants tobe thinking out new plots for football stories, so he will always stayin my fancy—unless, well unless I can unload him into the fancifullives of you readers.

As the matter stands I see him now as I saw him on that Winter eveninglong ago. He is standing at the door of my room with the strained lookin his eyes and is bewailing the fact that after our talk he will haveto 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 thedoor of my room closes and he is gone. I hear his footsteps in thehallway.

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 thehotel and then through my mind go the words of the poet Sandburg he hasquoted to me:

“Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, Icannot 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 myeyes to the floor where my destroyed Balzac is lying. The soft brown[Pg 442]leather back is uninjured and now again, in fancy, the name of theauthor is staring at me. The name is stamped on the back of the book inletters of gold.

From the floor of my room the name Balzac is grinning ironically upinto my own American face.