BOOK TWO (continued 2)

How splendid! What have I done? The last thing I remember I was working at that place where so many kegs of nails had to be rolled down an incline. I was full of beer too. What happened after that? Did I save a besieged city, kill a dragon like Saint George, drive snakes out of the land like Saint Patrick, inaugurate a new and better social system, or what could I have done?

I am somewhere in a huge place. Perhaps I am standing in that great cathedral at Chartres, the cathedral that Judge Turner told me about when I was a lad and that I myself long afterward saw and that became for me as it has been for many other men and women the beauty shrine of my life. It may be that I am standing in that great place at midnight alone. It cannot be that there is any one with me for I feel very lonely. A feeling of being very small in the presence of something vast has taken possession of me. Can it be Chartres, the Virgin, the woman, God’s woman?

What am I talking about? I cannot be in the cathedral at Chartres or buried splendidly in a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a magnificent city. I am an American and if I am dead my spirit must now be in a large half-ruined and empty factory, a factory with cracks in the walls where the work of the builders was scamped, as nearly all building was scamped in my time.

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

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

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

Aha, you Stephenson, Franklin, Fulton, Bell, Edison—you heroes of my Industrial Age, you men who have been the gods of the men of my day—is your day over so soon? “In the end,” I am telling myself, “all of your triumphs come to the dull and meaningless absurdity, of say a clothespin factory. There have been sweeter men in old times, half forgotten now, who will be remembered after you are forgotten. The Virgin too, will be remembered after you are forgotten. Would it not be amusing if Chartres continued to stand after you are forgotten?”

Is it not absurd? Because I do not want to work in a warehouse and roll kegs, because I do not want to work in a factory anywhere I must needs go getting gaudy and magnificent and try to blow all factories away with a breath of my fancy. My fancy climbs up and up.

Democracy shall spread itself out thinner and thinner, it shall come to nothing but empty mouthings in the end. Everywhere, all over the earth, shall be the dreary commercial and material success of, say the later Byzantine Empire. In the West and after the great dukes, the kings and the popes, the commoners—who were not commoners after all but only stole the name—are having their day. The shrewd little money-getters with the cry “democracy” on their lips shall rule for a time and then the real commoners shall come—and that shall be the worst time of all. Oh, the futile little vanity of the workers who have forgotten the cunning of hands, who have long let machines take the place of the cunning of hands!

And the tired men of the arts. Oh, the cunning smart little men of the arts of New York and Chicago! Painters making advertising designs for soap, painters making portraits of bankers’ wives, story-tellers striving wearily to “make” the Saturday Evening Post or to be revolutionists in the arts. Artists everywhere striving for what?

Respectability perhaps—to call attention to themselves perhaps.

They will get—a Ford. On holidays they may go see the great automobile races on the speedway at Indianapolis Indiana. Not for them the flashing thoroughbreds or the sturdy trotters and pacers. Not for them freedom, laughter. For them machines.

Long ago that Judge Turner had corrupted my mind. He played me a hell of a trick. I have been going about trying to have thoughts. What a fool I have been! I have read many books of history, many stories of men’s lives. Why did I not go to college and get a safe education? I might have worked my way through and got my mind fixed in a comfortable mold. There is no excuse for me. I shall have to pay for my lack of a proper training.

In the next room to the one in which I am lying two men are talking.

FIRST VOICE. “He took straw, ground it, put it into some kind of rubber composition. The whole was mixed up together and subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. It came out a tough kind of composition that can be made to look like wood. It can be grained like wood. He will get rich. I tell you he is one of the great minds of the age.”

SECOND VOICE. “We shall have prohibition after a while and then you’ll see how it will turn out. You can’t down the American mind. Some fellow will make a drink, a synthetic drink. It won’t cost much to make. Perhaps it can be made out of crude oil like gasoline and then the Standard will take him up. He’ll get rich. We Americans can’t be put down, I’ll tell you that.”

FIRST VOICE. “There is a man in New York makes car wheels out of paper. It is ground, I suppose, and made into a kind of mush and then is subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. The wheels look like iron.”

SECOND VOICE. “Do you suppose he paints them black like iron?”

FIRST VOICE. “It’s a great age we live in. You can’t down machinery. I read a book by Mark Twain. He knocked theories cold, I’ll tell you what. He made out all life was just a great machine.”

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

Where am I? I am in a bed somewhere in a room in a workers’ rooming house. Two young mechanics live in the next room and now they are getting out of bed and are talking cheerfully. Once on cold nights monks awoke in cold cells in monasteries and muttered prayers to God. Now in a cold room two young mechanics proclaim their faith in new gods.

Words in a brain trying to come into consciousness out of heavy sleep. “Service! They make a point of service,” says one of the young men’s voices. My brain, a voice in my own brain, chattering: “The woman who had been taken in adultery came to wash with her hands the tired feet of the Christ. She wiped his feet with her long hair and poured precious ointment upon them.” A distorted thought born of the effort to awaken from a heavy dream: “Many men and women are going along a street. They all have long hair and bear vessels of precious ointment. They are going to wash the feet of a Rockefeller, of ‘Bet a million’ Gates, of a Henry Ford or the son of a Henry Ford, the gods of the new day.”

And now the dream again. Again the great empty place. I cannot breathe. There is a great black bell without a tongue, swinging silently in darkness. It swings and swings, making a great arch and I await silent and frightened. Now it stops and descends slowly. I am terrified. Can nothing stop the great descending iron bell? It stops and hangs for a moment and now it drops suddenly and I am a prisoner under the great iron bell.

NOTE IV

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

Nora’s lover does not come home although he writes whenever his ship comes to port. The ship carries ore from Duluth to Chicago and one may be quite sure he does not sleep much of the time in a clean berth nor smell in his nostrils the clean sea air, as I represented things to Nora when I wanted her to take better care of my room. Nora has tried. That idea of mine was a purely literary one but it has made Nora and myself friends.

She fancies the notion of having someone to care for, to do things for, and so do I. It is a literary triumph for me and I instinctively like literary triumphs. We are much together and as the time is a black one for me she makes life livable. Nora is a true modern, not fussy, not making a great brag and bluster about it as did so many of the “moderns” in the arts I was to see later in New York. In my day I was to see a time when if a man wrote ten honest paragraphs or painted three honest paintings he immediately set himself up as a persecuted saint and wept if Mr. Sumner of New York or the Watch and Ward Club of Boston did not descend upon him. Most “moderns” of the arts I was later to see regretted the day of the passing of the Inquisition. They did not hanker to be burned at the stake but would have loved having it done to them, as in the moving picture, with some sort of mechanical cold flame. As for Nora she wanted to know all I thought, all I felt. She was not afraid I would “ruin” her. She knew how to look out for herself.

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

There was no love-making for Nora’s mind was turned toward her sailorman and I was ill. My body was well and strong most of the time, but there was an illness within.

My mind dwelt too much of the time in darkness. I had already worked in a dozen factories and much of the time it had been with me as it was with Judge Turner when he was a boy in an Ohio town. Nature had compelled him to go into a vile shed on the walls of which were scrawled sentences that revolted his soul and the necessity of keeping my body going—a necessity I myself did not understand but that was there, in me—had compelled me, time and again, to go into the door of a factory as an employee.

I talked constantly to Nora of the thoughts in my mind. There was a kind of understanding between us. I did not try to come between her and her sailorman and I had the privilege of saying to her what I pleased.

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

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

I remembered the blows Harry had struck and that the black had struck and the blows I had seen Billy McCarthy strike. The black had a feint and a cross that confused Harry and that landed the black’s left every time full on Harry’s chin. Each time it landed Harry became a little more groggy but he could not avoid the blow. And I remembered how the black smiled each time as it landed. He had two rows of gold-covered teeth and his smile was like Jack Johnson’s golden smile.

I went along factory streets fancying myself the great black, possessing the knowledge of the black’s feint and cross and with the athlete of the warehouse standing before me.

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

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

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

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

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

NOTE V

IN the many factories where I have worked most men talked vilely to their fellows and long afterward I was to begin to understand that a little. It is the impotent man who is vile. His very impotence has made him vile and in the end I was to understand that when you take from man the cunning of the hand, the opportunity to constantly create new forms in materials, you make him impotent. His maleness slips imperceptibly from him and he can no longer give himself in love, either to work or to women. “Standardization! Standardization!” was to be the cry of my age and all standardization is necessarily a standardization in impotence. It is God’s law. Women who choose childlessness for themselves choose also impotence—perhaps to be the better companions for the men of a factory, a standardization age. To live is to create constantly new forms: with the body in living children; in new and more beautiful forms carved out of materials; in the creation of a world of the fancy; in scholarship; in clear and lucid thought; and those who do not live die and decay and from decay always a stench arises.

These the thoughts of a time long after the one of which I am now writing. One cannot think of the figure of a single man as being in himself to blame but as the man named Ford of Detroit has done more than any other man of my day to carry standardization to its logical end might he also not come to be looked upon as the great killer of his age? To make impotent is surely to kill. And there is talk of making him President. How fitting! Tamerlane, who specialized in the killing of men’s bodies but who tells in his autobiography how he was always desirous that all living men under him retain their manhood and self-respect, was the ruler of the world in his age. Tamerlane for the ancients. Ford for the moderns.

In our age why should we not all have houses alike, all men and women clad alike (I am afraid we shall have a bad time managing the women), all food alike, all the streets in all of our cities alike? Surely individuality is ruinous to an age of standardization. It should at once and without mercy be crushed out. Let us give all workers larger and larger salaries but let us crush out of them at once all flowering of individualities. It can be done. Let us arise in our might.

And let us put at our head the man who has done in his own affairs what we are all so universally agreed should everywhere be done, the man who has made standardization the fetish of his life.

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

Arise, men of my age! Under the banner of the new age we shall have a great machine moving slowly down a street and depositing cement houses to the right and left as it goes, like a diarrhœic elephant. All the young Edisons will enlist under the banner of a Ford. We shall have all the great minds of our age properly employed making car wheels out of waste newspapers and synthetic wines out of crude oils. I am told by intelligent men who were soldiers in the World War that in all the world before the war standardization had been carried to the highest pitch by the Germans but now the Germans have been defeated. May it not be that we Americans have all along been intended by God to be the nation that will carry highest the banner of the New Age?

NOTE VI

BUT I wander from my subject to leap into the future, to become a prophet, and I have no prophet’s beard. In reality I am thinking of a certain young man who once came rushing, full of vitality and health, into a mechanical age and of what happened to him and to the men among whom he worked.

There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Ford type of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futile outpouring of men’s lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was at work. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian. In old Rabelais there was the salt of infinite wit and I have no doubt the Rabelaisian flashes that came from our own Lincoln, Washington and the others had point and a flare to them.

But in the factories and in army camps!

Into my own consciousness, as I, a young man wishing vaguely to mature, walked in a factory street wishing childishly for a golden smile and a wicked left to cross over to the chin of some defender of the new age there was burned the memory of the last place in which I had worked before I had come to the warehouse to roll the kegs of nails.

It was a bicycle factory where I was employed as an assembler. With some ten or twelve other men I worked at a bench in a long room facing a row of windows. We assembled the parts that were brought to us by boys from other departments of the factory and put the bicycles together. There was such and such a screw to go into such and such a screw hole, such and such a nut to go on such and such a bolt. As always in the modern factory nothing ever varied and within a week any intelligent quick-handed man could have done the work with his eyes closed. One turned certain screws, tightened certain bolts, whirled a wheel, fastened on certain foot pedals and passed the work on to the next man. Outside the window I faced there was a railroad track lined on one side by factory walls and the other by what had started to be a stone quarry. The stone of this quarry had not, I presume, turned out to be satisfactory and the hole was being filled with rubbish carted from various parts of the city and all day carts arrived, dumped their loads—making each time a little cloud of dust—and over the dump wandered certain individuals, men and women who were looking among the rubbish for bits of treasure, bottles I fancy and bits of cloth and iron that could later be sold to junk men.

For three months I had worked at the place and listened to the talk of my companions and then I had fled. The men seemed everlastingly anxious to assert their manhood, to make it clear to their fellows that they were potent men able to do great deeds in the realms of the flesh and all day I stood beside a little stand-like bench, on which the frame of the bicycle was stuck upside down, tightening nuts and screws and listening to the men, the while I looked from their faces out the window to the factory walls and the rubbish heap. An unmarried man had been on the evening before to a certain house in a certain street and there had happened between himself and a woman what he now wished to talk about and to describe with infinite care in putting in all the details. What an undignified stallion he made of himself! He had his moment, was allowed his moment by the others and then another, a married man, took up the theme, also boastfully. There were days as I worked in that place when I became physically ill and other days when I cursed all the gods of my age that had made men—who in another age might have been farmers, shepherds or craftsmen—these futile fellows, ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they felt the age of impotency asserting itself in their bodies.

In the bicycle factory I had repeatedly told the other men that I was subject to sick headaches and I used to go often to a window, throw it open and lean out, closing my eyes and trying to create in fancy a world in which men lived under bright skies, drank wine, loved women and with their hands created something of lasting value and beauty and seeing me thus, white and with trembling hands, the men dropped the talk that so sickened me. Like kind children they came and did my work or, after the noon hour, brought me little packages of remedies they had bought at the drug store or had carried to me from their homes.

I had worked the sick headache racket to the limit and then, feeling it had become wornout, had quit my job and had gone to the place where I worked with the young athlete I now wanted to beat with my fists.

And on a certain day I tried. I had now convinced myself that the feint, the cross and the golden smile were all in good working condition and that no man, least of all the young athlete who could not stand up to his drink, could stand up against me.

For weeks I had been as nasty as I could be to my fellow-workman. There was a trick I had learned. I gave one of the kegs I was rolling down the incline just a little sudden turn with my foot so that it struck him on the legs as he came into the house through a door. I hit him on the shins and when he howled with pain expressed the greatest regret and then as soon as I could, without arousing too much suspicion, I did it again.

We ceased speaking and only glared at each other. Even the dull-witted teamsters knew there was a fight brewing. I waited and watched, making my lips do the nearest thing possible to a golden smile, and at night in my room and even sometimes when I was walking with Nora and had come into a quiet dark street I practiced the feint and the cross. “What in Heaven’s name are you doing?” Nora asked, but I did not tell her but talked instead of my dreams, of brave men in rich clothes walking with lovely women in a strange land I was always trying to create in a world of my fancy and that was always being knocked galley-west by the facts of my life. Regarding the queer sudden little movements I was always making with my shoulders and hands I tried to be very mysterious and once I remember, when we had been sitting on a bench in a little park, I left her and went behind a bush. She thought I had gone there out of a natural necessity but it was not true. I had remembered how Harry Walters and Billy McCarthy, when they were preparing for a fight, did a good deal of what is called shadow boxing. One imagines an opponent before oneself and advances and recedes, feints and crosses, whirls suddenly around and gives ground before a rushing opponent only to come back at him with terrific straight rights and lefts, just as his attack has exhausted itself.

I wanted, I fancy, to have Nora grow tired of waiting for me and to come look around the bush and to discover my secret—that I was not as she thought, a rather foolish but smart-talking fellow inclined to be something of a cloud man. Ah, I thought, as I danced about on a bit of grass back of the bush, she will come to peek and see me here in my true light. She will take me for some famous fighter, a young Corbett or that famous middleweight of the day called “The Nonpareil.” What I hoped was that she would come to some such conclusion without asking questions and would go back to the bench to wait for my coming filled with a new wonder. A famous young prizefighter traveling incognito, not wanting public applause, a young Henry Adams of Boston with the punch of a Bob Fitzsimmons, a Ralph Waldo Emerson with the physical assurance of a railway brakeman—what painter, literary man or scholar has not had moments of indulging in some such dream? A burly landlord has been crude enough to demand instant pay for the room in which one is living, or some taxi driver, who has all but run one down at a corner, jerked out of his seat and given a thorough beating in the face of an entire street. “Did you see him pummel that fellow? And he such a pale intellectual looking chap, too! You can never tell how far a dog can jump by the length of his tail.” Etc., etc.

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

It was something of that sort of admiration I wanted from Nora but I did not get it. Once when I was walking in a street with her and had just gone through with my exercises she looked at me with scorn in her eyes. “You’re a nice fellow but you’re bughouse all right,” she said and that was all I ever succeeded in getting out of her.

But I got something else at the warehouse.

The fight came off on a Wednesday at about three in the afternoon and the athlete and myself had two teamsters as witnesses to the affair.

All day I had been bedeviling him—being just as downright ugly and nasty as I could, clipping him on the shins with several flying kegs, making my apologies as insolently as possible and when he started telling one of his endless nasty tales to the teamsters starting a loud conversation on some other subject just as he was about to come to the nub of his story. The teamsters felt the fight brewing and wanted to encourage it. They purposely listened to me and did not hear the nub.

He thought, I dare say, that I would never be foolish enough to fight him and I must have taken his scorn of me for timidity for I suddenly grew very bold. He was coming in at the door of the house just as I was on my way out behind one of the kegs and I suddenly stopped it, looked him squarely in the eyes and then, with an attempt at the golden smile on my lips, sent the keg flying directly at him.

He leaped over the keg and came toward me in silence and I prepared to bring my technique into play. Really I had, at the moment, a great deal of confidence in myself and began at once rocking my head, making queer little shifting movements with my feet and trying to establish a kind of cross rhythm in my shoulders and head that would, I felt, confuse him.

He looked at me lost in astonishment and I decided to lead. Had I been content to hit him in the belly with my right, putting all my strength back of the blow and then had I begun kicking, biting and pummeling furiously, I might have come out all right. He was so astonished—no doubt, like Nora, he thought me quite bughouse—that the right would surely have landed, but that, you see, was not the technique of the situation.

The thing was to feint for the belly and then “pull one’s punch” as it were, and immediately afterwards whip over the powerful left to the jaw. But my left was not powerful and anyway it did not land.

He knocked me down and when I got up and started my gymnastics again he knocked me down a second time and a third and a fourth. He knocked me down perhaps a dozen times and the two teamsters came to the door to watch and all the time there was the most foolish look on his face and on their faces. It was a look a bulldog attacked by a hen might have assumed—no doubt by my bullyragging I had convinced them, as I had myself, I could fight—but presently both my eyes were so swollen and my nose and mouth so bruised and cut that I could not see and so I got to my feet and walked away, going out of the warehouse in the midst of an intense silence on the part of all three of the spectators.

And so along a street I went to my room, followed by two or three curious children who perhaps thought I had been hit by a freight train and succeeded in also getting my door bolted against any sudden descent of Nora. My eyes were very evidently going to be badly discolored, my nose bled and my lips were badly cut, and so, after bathing my face in cold water, I put a wet towel over it and went and threw myself on the bed.

It was one of those moments that come, I presume, into every man’s life. I was lying on my bed in my room, in the condition already described, the door was bolted, Nora was not directly about and I was out from under the eyes of my fellowmen.

I tried to think as one will at such moments.

As for Nora, I might very well have gone to my door and called to her—she was at work somewhere on the floor below and would have gladly come running to offer her woman’s sympathy to my hurt physical self—but it was not my hurt physical self that I thought wanted attention. As far as that is concerned I was then, as I have been all my life, not so much concerned with the matter of physical discomfort or pain. Always it has been true of me that a framed water lily on a wall or a walk in a factory street can hurt me worse than a blow on the jaw and long afterward when I became a scribbler of tales I was able to take advantage of this peculiarity of my nature to do my work under conditions that would have disheartened a more physically sensitive man. As I was destined to live most of my life and do most of my work in factory towns and in little, ill-smelling, hideously-furnished rooms, freezing cold in winter and hot and cheerless in summer, it turned out to be a good and convenient trait in me and in the end I had so trained myself to forget my surroundings that I could sit for hours lost in my own thoughts and dreams, or scribbling oftentimes meaningless sentences in a cold room in a factory street, on a log beside some country road, in a railroad station or in the lobby of some large hotel, filled with the hurrying hustling figures of business men, totally unconscious of my surroundings, until my mood had worn itself out and I had sunk into one of the moods of depression common, I think, to all such fellows as myself. Never was such an almighty scribbler as I later became and am even now. Ink, paper and pencils are cheap in our day and I have taken full advantage of that fact and have during some years written hundreds of thousands of words which have afterward been thrown away. Many have told me, in print or by word of mouth, that all should have been thrown away and they may be right, but I am one who loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with words always gladdens me. The result of the scribbling, the tale of perfect balance, all the elements of the tale understood, an infinite number of minute adjustments perfectly made, the power of self-criticism fully at work, the shifting surface of word values and color in full play, form and the rhythmic flow of thought and mood marching forward with the sentences—these are things of a dream, of a far dim day toward which one goes knowing one can never arrive but infinitely glad to be on the road. It is the story I dare say of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the sloughs and sink holes on the road are many but the tale of that journey is known to other men than scribblers.

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

In the tale one can do any such job as it should be done and in the doing give satisfaction both to oneself and the possible reader, for the reader will always share in the emotions of the hero and gloat with him over his victories. In the tale, as you will understand, all is in order. The feint and the cross, the powerful left to the jaw, the golden smile, the shifting movements of the shoulders that confuse and disconcert the opponent, all work like well-oiled machines. One defeats not one baseball player or ruffian of the city streets but a dozen if the need arises. Oh, what glorious times I have had, sitting in little rooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood have run from the wounds of the villains, foolish enough to oppose me on the field of honor; what fair women I have loved and how they have loved me and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, open-hearted and fine I have been! I remember how I sat in the back room of a small bootlegging establishment at Mobile, Alabama, one afternoon, long after the time with which I am now concerned and while three drunken sailors discussed the divinity of Christ at a near-by table wrote the story of little, tired-out and crazed Joe Wainsworth’s killing of Jim Gibson in the harness shop at Bidwell Ohio, that afterward was used in the novel “Poor White”; and of how at a railroad station at Detroit I sat writing the tale of Elsie Leander’s westward journey, in “The Triumph of the Egg,” and missed my own train—these remain as rich and fine spots in a precarious existence.

But at the time of which I am speaking the consolation of ink and paper was a thing of the future and my bunged-up eyes and hurt spirits were facts.

I lay on my back on my bed, trying to get up courage to face facts. As for the throbbing of the hurt places, the pain was a kind of satisfaction to me at the moment.

There was the warehouse where I had been more or less a spiritual bully but where I would now have to eat crow. Well, I need not go back. The day before had been payday and I would, by never going near the place again, lose little money and save myself the humiliation of facing the teamsters. And when it came to the scratch, I thought, there was the city I was in, the state, the very United States of America itself—I could if I chose desert them all. I was young, had been well trained in poverty, had no family ties, no social position to uphold, I was unmarried and as yet childless.

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

I lay on the bed with the wet towel thrown aside thinking, trying to make plans. A faint suspicion of something permanently wrong with me had begun to creep into my consciousness. Was I, alas, a fellow born out of his place and time? I was in a world where only men of action seemed to thrive. Already I had noted that fact. One wanted a definite thing to go after, money, fame, a position of power in the big world, and having something definite of the sort in mind one shut one’s eyes and pitched in with all the force of one’s physical and mental self. I squirmed about trying to force myself to face myself. My body was strong enough for all practical purposes, when not scarred and bruised by the blows of an angry ball player, and I was not such a bad-looking fellow. I was not lazy and on the whole rather liked hard physical labor. Need I be what I at the moment seemed to myself to be, a useless and foolish dreamer, a child in a world filled with what I thought to be grown-up men? Why should I myself not also grow up, take the plow by the handle, plow vast fields, become rich or famous? Perhaps I could become a man of power and rule or influence many other men’s lives.

There is a trick the fancy has. Start it in any direction and it goes prancing off at a great rate and that trick my own fancy now did.

Although my body ached as a result of my recent plunge into the field of action I, in fancy, plunged in again and began thinking of myself as holding the handle of a plow and plowing the fields of life, turning great furrows, planting perhaps the seeds of new ideas. Oho, for the smell of new-turned earth, the sight of the sower casting his seed!

I was off again. On that day Nora had done the work in my room early but now she was sweeping and dusting on the floor below and I could hear her moving about.

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

We might, I thought, following up the fancy I had just had, begin by being tillers of the soil. We could go West somewhere and take up land. Already I had read many tales of the West and had a fancy for casting in my fortunes with the West. “Out where the smile lasts a little longer, out where the handclasp is a little stronger,” etc. “Oho, for the land where men are men and gals are gals!” I thought my fancy running away like a wild horse broken out of its stall. I saw myself owning vast farms somewhere in the Far West and saw, I am afraid, Nora doing most of the plowing, planting and the harvesting of crops, the while I rode grandly over the estate on a black stallion, receiving the homage of serfs.

But what would I do with my odd moments? I had tried talking to Nora of the things that interested me most, the play of light over a factory chimney, seen amid smoke as darkness came on, odd expressions caught from the lips of passing men and women, the play of the fancy over the imagined lives of men and women too. Had Nora understood or cared? Could I go on always talking and talking in the face of the fact that I knew she was not much interested?

With a rush of resolution I threw my doubts aside. Oh, to be one who made two blades of grass where but one had grown before! With Nora at my side I would in some field become great and powerful. I was at the moment but a bunged-up fellow lying on the bed in a cheap rooming house but what did that matter? All about me was the great American world rushing on and on to new mechanical and material triumphs. Teddy Roosevelt and the strenuous life had not yet come but he was implicit in the American mood. Imperialism had already come. It was time, I told myself, to be up and doing.

NOTE VII

JUMPING off the bed I instantly began to try to prepare myself for new adventures. As I had been lying on the bed thinking the thoughts above set down and working myself up to new heights of fancied grandeur some time had passed. Perhaps I had slept and awakened. At any rate it was now dark in the room and I lighted a lamp. By its light and after I had bathed my face for some time it did not look so swollen although both eyes had turned a deep purple.

Undaunted I dressed in my best Sunday clothes and prepared to set out. I had engaged to walk with Nora on that evening and it was our custom on such occasions for me to pass quietly out of the house, tapping on the door of her room on the floor below and waiting for her on the front steps.

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

As I stood in the room dressed in my best clothes I counted my money and then decided I would not be a Western ranchman after all but a man of commerce, an empire builder perhaps. I had in my possession some ninety-eight dollars which seemed to me at the moment sufficient for a start in almost any undertaking. It would support me for a few weeks while I looked about and then I would pitch in somewhere and become an empire builder. It would take time but what was time to me? I had an abundance of time. “I’ll do it,” I told myself resolutely.

Why not? Was I not a man of imagination? Was I not young and did I not have a strong body?

As I washed the dried blood off my face, put on my Sunday suit and adjusted my tie I in fancy swept the field of commercial adventure with my somewhat damaged eyes. There were the great cities of Chicago and New York I had not yet seen, although I had read much about them and about men who had grown from poverty to riches and power in them. Like all young Americans I had read innumerable tales of men who had begun with nothing and had become great leaders, owners of railroads, governors of states, foreign ambassadors, generals of armies, presidents of great modern republics. Abraham Lincoln walking miles through a storm after a hard day’s work to borrow his first book, Jay Gould the young Wall Street clerk, setting up a great dynasty of wealth, Daniel Drew the cattle dealer becoming a millionaire, Garfield the canal-boat boy and Vanderbilt the ferryman become President and millionaire, Grant the failure, hauling hides from his father’s tannery at Galena, Illinois, to St. Louis—and, it was said, getting so well piped sometimes on the homeward journey that he fell off the wagon—he also became great, the winner of a mighty war, President of his country, a noted traveler, receiving the homage of kings. “And I can carry my liquor better than he could, by all reports,” I said to myself.

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

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

When Nora came and when we had walked to where there was a street light and she had seen my damaged countenance I began at once to brag and to reconstruct the fight at the warehouse more to my own fancy. Not one but four men had attacked me and I had valiantly stood my ground. An inspiration came. I had got into the fight, I told Nora, because of a woman. A young woman, a working girl like Nora herself had passed the platform and the men at work there with me had begun making remarks that were not very nice. What was I to do? I was one who could never stand quietly by and hear an innocent woman, particularly one who had to work for her living and had perhaps no men of her own to stand up for her, hear such a woman subjected to insult. I had, I told Nora, at once pitched into the four men and there had been a terrible fight.

As I described the fancied affair to Nora the feint and the cross on which I had so depended had worked wonderfully. I had received many hard blows, it was true, and Nora could see by looking at my face how I had suffered, but I had given better than I had received. Like a tornado I had swept up and down the warehouse platform making feints with my right and whipping my powerful left to the jaws of my opponents until at last they were all laid out like dead men before me. And then I had come home, a little fearful that I might have killed one or two of the men but not waiting to see. “I did not care,” I said. “If my opponents have suffered a terrible beating at my hands and if one or two of them die of their injuries it was their own fault. They should have known better than to have insulted a woman in my presence.”

I had told Nora my story and we had walked in silence until we had come to a street lamp when she suddenly stopped and, taking my left hand, turned it up to the light. As I had not succeeded in the actual fight in striking a blow with it, the hand was unmarked by a bruise. “Huh!” said Nora and we went on in silence.

The silence, which was one of the hardest I have ever had to bear, continued until we had finished our walk—which on that evening did not last very long,—and had got back to the house.

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

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

And then Nora suddenly put her strong arm about my neck and pulled my head down upon her shoulder and I began to cry like a child.

That in an odd way made me more resentful than ever. It faced me with a problem I have all my life been trying to face and have never quite succeeded. One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man. It is a fact perhaps but a fact that I have always thought we men should deny with all the strength of our more powerful wills. We men should conquer women. We should not stand in the darkness with our heads on their shoulders, blubbering as I was doing at that moment.

However, I continued crying and being ashamed of myself and Nora did not press her advantage. When, now and then, I lifted my face from her shoulder and looked at her face, dimly seen in the darkness, it seemed to me just kindly and filled with sympathy for my position.

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

The thought was unbearable and so, as soon as I could conveniently manage it, I got my head off Nora’s shoulder and made my escape.

In my room I sat again on the edge of the bed and I had again bolted the door. The notion of using Nora to plant and sow fields for me while I rode about on a magnificent black stallion was now quite gone and I had to construct another and at once. That I realized. I had to construct a new dramatization of myself and leave Nora out of it. I was not ready for the Noras. Perhaps I would never be ready for them. Few American men I have ever known have ever shown any signs of being ready for the Noras of the world or of being able really to understand or face them.

My mind turned again to the field of business and affairs. I had already known a good many men and, while such fellows as the baseball player at the warehouse had the better of me because I had been fool enough to let the struggle between us get on a physical plane, I had not met many men who had caused me to tremble because of any special spiritual or intellectual strength in themselves.

To be sure the world of affairs was one of which I knew nothing and yet I thought I might tackle it. “It cannot be worse than the world of labor,” I thought as I sat in the darkness, trying not to think of Nora—thoughts of whom I was convinced might weaken the resolution I had taken and might even cause me to begin blubbering again—and keeping my mind fixed on the laborers I had known, even as the laborers who lived in the house with me tramped heavily, one by one, up the stairs and went off to their rooms and to sleep.

“I will become a man of action, in the mood of the American of my day. I will build railroads, conquer empires, become rich and powerful. Why should I not do something of the sort as well as all the other men who have done it so brilliantly? America is the land of opportunity. I must keep that thought ever in my mind,” I told myself as I tiptoed out of the house at two o’clock in the morning, having left a note of good-by to Nora and the amount of my room rent in an envelope on my bed. I was being very careful not to make any noise as I went along the hallway and past Nora’s door. “I had better not wake up the woman,” I was wise enough to say to myself as I went away, hugging my new impulse in life.

NOTE VIII

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

The Virgin was dead and her son had taken as prophets such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, the one with his little books in which he set down and saved his acts and impulses, striving to make them all serve definite ends as he saved his pennies and the other preaching the intellectual doctrine of Self-reliance, Up and Onward. The land was filled with gods but they were new gods and their images, standing on every street of every town and city, were cast in iron and steel. The factory had become America’s church and duplicates of it stood everywhere, on almost every street of every city belching black incense into the sky.

A passion for reading books had taken possession of me and I did not work when I had any money at all but often for weeks spent my time reading any book I could get my hands on. In every city there were public libraries and I could get books without spending money.

The past took a strong hold on my imagination and I went eagerly down through the ages, reading of the lives of the great men of antiquity; of the Romans and their conquest of the world; of the early Christians and their struggles before the great organizer Paul came to “put Christianity across”; of the Cæsars, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, marching and countermarching across Europe at the head of their troops; of the cruel but powerful Peters and Ivans of Russia; of the great and elegant dukes of Italy—the poisoners and schemers listening to the words of their Machiavellis; of the magnificent painters and craftsmen of the Middle Ages; of English and French kings; roundheads; Spanish kings of the days of conquest and of gold ships bringing riches from the Spanish Main; the Grand Inquisitor; the coming of Erasmus, the cool scholarly questioner whose questions brought to the front Luther, the conscientious barbarian—all, all spread out before me, the young American coming into manhood, all in the books.

It was a feast. Could I digest it? I had saved a little money and knew how to live very cheaply. After working for some weeks, and when I did not spend money for drinking bouts to ease the confusion of my mind I had a few dollars put aside and dollars meant leisure. That is perhaps all dollars have ever meant to me.

Since I was always making the acquaintance of some fellow who lived by gambling I went now and then into a gambling place and sometimes had luck. I had five dollars when I went in at a certain door and came out with a hundred dollars in my pocket. Oh, glorious day! On such an amount I could live among books for weeks and so, renting a small room on a poor street, I went every day to a public library and got a new book. The book some man had spent years in composing was often waded through in a day and then thrown aside. What a jumble of things in my head! At times the life directly about me ceased to have any existence. The actuality of life became a kind of vapor, a thing outside of myself. My body was a house in which I lived and there were many such houses all about me but I did not live in them. Perhaps I was but trying to make solid the walls of my own house, to roof it properly, to cut windows, becoming accustomed to living in the house so that I could have leisure to look out at the windows and into other houses. Of that I do not know. To make such a claim for myself and my purpose seems giving my life a more intelligent direction than I can convince myself it has had.

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

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

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

There was indeed a kind of intimate acquaintance with an unknown and unheralded kind of people I was unconsciously getting. In Chicago, where I had now gone I for a time lived in a room in a huge cheaply constructed building that had been erected about a little court. The building was not old, had in fact been built but a few years before—during the Chicago World’s Fair—but already it was a half-tumbledown unsafe place with great sags in the floors in the hallways and cracks in the walls. The building surrounded the little brick-paved court and was divided into single rooms for bachelor lodgers and into small two- and three-room apartments. Since it was near the end of several street-car lines and a branch of the Chicago elevated railroad it was occupied for the most part by street-car conductors and motormen with their wives and children. Many of my fellow-lodgers were young fellows having wives but no children and not intending to have children if the accidents of life could be avoided. They went off to work and came home from work at all sorts of odd hours.

I hadn’t very much money but did not mind. My room was small and cost little and I lived on fruit and on stacks of wheatcakes that could be had at ten cents the stack at a near-by workingmen’s eating place. When I was broke I told myself I could always go again to some place where laborers were wanted. I was young and my body was strong. “If I cannot get work in the city I can get on a freight train at night and go away to the country and work on a farm,” I thought. Sometimes I had qualms of conscience because I had not already started on the great career as an industrial magnate I had half-heartedly mapped out for myself but I managed to put my sins of omission aside. There was plenty of time I told myself and in any event I planned eventually to do the thing with a grand rush.

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

Marvelous days! Now I was marching with the conqueror Julius Cæsar over the vast domains of the mighty Roman Empire. What a life and how proud Julius and I were of his conquests and how often we spoke together of the doings of Cicero, Pompey, Cato and the others in Rome. Indeed Cæsar and I had become for the nonce the most intimate of friends and often enough we discussed the unworthiness of some of the other Romans, particularly of that Cicero. The man was no better than a dog, a literary hack, when all was said and done, and such fellows are never to be trusted. Often enough Cicero had talked with Cæsar and pretended to be Cæsar’s friend but, as Julius often pointed out to me, such fellows were wont to veer about with every wind that blew, “Writers are the greatest cowards in the world and my own greatest weakness is that I have a kind of hankering that way myself. Let a man but get into power and he will always find such scribbling fellows willing and anxious to sing his praises. They are the greatest cur dogs in the world,” he declared vehemently.

And so I had become in fancy the friend of Cæsar and all day I marched beside him and at evening went with him and his men into their camp.

The days and weeks passed. I sat by the window looking into the little brick-paved court and there were many other windows. As it was summer they were all open. Evening came, after a day of walking in dreams, and I had come into my room and taking off my coat had thrown myself down on my bed. When darkness came I did not light a light but lay quietly listening.

I had stepped now out of the past and into the present and all about me were the voices of living people. The men and women in the rooms along the court did not laugh or sing often and indeed in the many times, during my life, I have lived, as I did then, lying like a little worm in the middle of the apple of modern life, I have never found that American men and women, except only the Negroes, laugh or sing much in their homes or at their work.

It was evening and a street-car conductor had come home to his wife. They were silent in each other’s presence for a time, then they began to quarrel. Sometimes they fought and after that they made love. The love-making of the couples along the court aroused my own passions and I had bad dreams at night.

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

A red-faced man who stumbled as he walked along the hallways to his small apartment had secured a small flat stick which he kept behind a door. His wife was young and fat. When he had come home from work and had in silence eaten his evening meal he sat by the window facing the court and read a newspaper while his wife washed the dishes. Suddenly, when the dishes were washed, he jumped to his feet and ran to get the stick. “Don’t, John, don’t,” his wife pleaded half-heartedly, as he began to pursue her about the narrow room. Chairs were knocked over and tables upset. He kept hitting her with the flat stick upon the nether cheeks and she kept laughing and protesting. Sometimes he struck her too hard and she grew angry and, turning upon him, scratched his face with her finger nails. Then he swore and wrestled with her. Their period of more intense love-making had now come and silence reigned over the little home for the rest of the night.

I lay on my bed in the darkness and closed my eyes. Once more I was in the camp of Cæsar and we were in Gaul. The great captain had been writing at a small table near the door of his tent but now a man had come to speak with him. I lay in silence upon a kind of thick warm cloth spread on the ground beside the tent.

The man who talked with Cæsar was a bridge-builder and had come to speak with him regarding the building of a bridge that the legions might cross a river beside which they now lay encamped. A certain number of men would be needed with boats and others were at daylight to go hew great timbers in a near-by forest and roll them into the stream.

How very quiet and peaceful it was where I lay! Cæsar’s tent was pitched on a hillside. In person he was like ... there was an Italian fruit dealer who had a small store on a street near the park where I went every day to sit, a tall gaunt man who had lost one eye and whose black hair was turning gray. The fruit dealer had evidently lost his eye in a fight as there was a long scar on his cheek. It was this man I had metamorphosed into a Cæsar.

Below, at the foot of the hill on which the tent stood and on the banks of a river the legions were camped. They had built fires and some of the men were bathing in the river but when they came out they dressed quickly because of little biting flies that swarmed about their heads. I was glad Cæsar’s tent was pitched on a hill where there was a little breeze and there were no biting flies or insects. Below, the fires in the valley glowed and cast yellow and red lights over the tawny bodies and faces of the soldiers.

The man who had come to Cæsar was a craftsman and had a maimed hand. Two of the fingers of his left hand had been cut sharply off as by a blow with an ax. He went away into the darkness and Cæsar went within his tent.

I lay on my bed in the room in the building in Chicago not daring to open my eyes. Had I been asleep? Now there was no quarreling in the other places along the court but there were still lights at some of the windows. The workers had not yet all come home. Two women were talking together across the space between their windows. Street-car conductors and motormen, who had been all day working their cars slowly through crowded streets, propitiating quarrelsome passengers, cursing and being cursed at by teamsters and crossing policemen, were now asleep. Of what were they dreaming? They had come from the car barns, had read a newspaper, telling perhaps of a fight between English troops and the natives of Thibet, had read also a speech by the German emperor demanding a place in the sun for Germany, had noted who had beaten the Chicago White Sox or who had been beaten by them. Then they had quarreled with their wives, blows had been struck, there had been love-making and then sleep.

I arose and went to walk in the silent streets and twice during that summer I was stopped by holdup men who took a few dollars from me. The World’s Fair had been followed by a time of industrial depression. How many miles I have walked in the streets of American cities at night! In Chicago and the other industrial cities long streets of houses—how many houses almost universally ugly and cheaply constructed, like the building in which I then lived! I passed through sections where all the people were Negroes and heard laughter in the houses. Then came the sections entirely inhabited by Jews, by Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Germans, or Poles. How many elements not yet combined in the cities! The American writers, whose books I read, went on assuming that the typical American was a transplanted Englishman, an Englishman who had served his term in the stony purgatory of New England and had then escaped out into the happy land, this Heaven, the Middle West. Here they were all to grow rich and live forever, a happy blissful existence. Was not all the world supposed to be watching the great democratic experiment in government and human happiness they were to conduct so bravely?

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

Periods of lust kept coming and going. In the building where I lived there was a woman, very young yet, a high-school graduate from an Illinois town who had married a young man of the place. They had come to live in Chicago, to make their way in the great world, and as he could get no other work he had taken a place as street-car conductor. Oh, it was but a temporary arrangement. He was one who intended, as for that matter I did myself, to rise in the world.

The man I never saw but all afternoon the woman sat by a window in one of the two rooms of her apartment or went for short walks in the park. We began presently to smile shyly at each other but did not speak, both being embarrassed. Like myself she read books and that was a kind of bond between us. I got into the habit of sitting by my window with my book in my hand while she sat by her window also holding a book.

And here was a new confusion. The pages of the books no longer lived. The woman, sitting there, but a few feet away from me, across the little court, I did not want. Of that I was quite sure. She was another man’s wife. What thoughts had she in her head, what feelings had she? Her face was round and fair and she had blue eyes. What did she want? Children perhaps, I thought. She wanted to have a house like all the other houses lived in by the people of her home town who had made money and who held positions of some importance in the town’s life. One day she sat on a bench in the park and I, walking past, saw the title of the book she read. It was a popular novel of the day but I have forgotten its name and the name of its author. Even at that time, although I knew little enough, I did know that such books had always been written, would always be written, books that sold by the hundreds of thousands and were often proclaimed as great works of art and that after a year or two were utterly forgotten. In them was no sense of strangeness, no wonder about life. They lacked the touch of life. “Dead books for men and women who dare not live,” I thought contemptuously. There was a kind of pretense of solving some problem of life but the problem was so childishly stated that later a childish solution seemed quite natural and right. A young man came to an American city from a country town and, although at bottom he was true and fine, the city for a time diverted him from his noble aims. He committed some near crime that made both himself and the girl he really loved suffer terribly, but she stood firmly by him and at the last, and with her help, he pulled himself up again, by the bootstraps as it were, and became a rich manufacturer who was kind to his employees.

The book she read expressed perhaps the high-school girl’s dream, the dream she had when she married and came to Chicago. Was her dream the same now? I had already, as far as I reacted to the life about me at all, started upon another road, was becoming, a little, the eternal questioner of myself and others. Not for me the standardized little pellets of opinion, the little neatly wrapped packages of sentiment the magazine writers had learned to do up, I told myself. In modern factories food was packed in convenient standard-sized packages and I half suspected that behind the high-sounding labels the food was often enough sawdust or something of the sort. It was apparent publishers also had learned to do up neat packages containing sawdust and put bright-colored labels on them.

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

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

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

We began then to walk in silence together in the park in the early evenings and sometimes we sat together on a park bench. How careful we were not to be seen by others who lived in our building. Her husband left the house at three in the afternoon and did not return until midnight and when he came home he was tired and discouraged. He scolded at his wife. “He is always scolding,” she said. Well, one wanted to save money, get into business for oneself. And now he had a wife to support and the wages of street-car conductors were not large. The young man who wanted to rise in the world had begun to resent his wife and she felt it vaguely, uneasily. She also was filled with resentment. Did she want revenge? She had no words to express what she felt and I had no way of understanding. Was I not also confused, wanting something very much, that at the same time I did not want? I sat in my room until darkness came holding the book I now could not read and when the darkness had come threw it with a loud bang on a table. The sound had become a signal to her and when I went into the park she came to join me. One evening when we had kissed in the darkness of the park I went home ahead of her but did not close the door of my room. I stood in the darkness by the door waiting. She had to pass along the hallway to reach her own place and I put out my hand and drew her inside.

“I’m afraid,” she kept saying, “I don’t want to. I’m afraid.” What a queer silent frightened love-making it was—no love-making at all. She was afraid and I was afraid, not of her husband but of myself. Later she went away crying silently along the hallway and after that she and I did not sit at our two windows or walk in the park and I returned to my books. Once, on a night two or three weeks later as I lay in my own bedroom, I heard the husband and wife talking together. Something had happened that had pleased and excited her. She had been able to offer something she thought would help her husband and was urging him to give up being a street-car conductor and to go back to the town from which they had come. Her father owned a store there, I gathered, and had objected to her marriage but she had secretly written, perhaps been very humble, and had persuaded her father to take the younger man into partnership in his business. “Don’t be proud now, Jim. I’m not proud any more. Something has happened to me Jim. I’m not proud any more,” I heard her saying as I lay in my own room in the darkness, and I leave the reader to judge whether, under the circumstances, I could be proud. But perhaps after all the woman and I have done something for each other, I thought.

NOTE IX

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

I sat in silence filled with wonder at the strangeness of the circumstances that had brought me to the spot and of my own mood. The garden in which we sat had a gravel path running down through the centre and on one side vegetables grew, with narrow beds of flowers about the vegetable plots. Along the further side against a fence were tall berry bushes and on our side there was grass under the trees and near by a tall hedge of elders. Looking toward the foot of the garden one got a view of a river valley dotted with farmhouses and beyond the elders there was a road that led along a hillside down into town.

The town itself was old, for that Illinois country, and had already had two lives. First, it had been a river town on the banks of a stream that led down into the Mississippi, and now it was a merchandising centre. Later perhaps it would become a factory town. The river life had died, when the railroads came but there still were some remnants of the older place, one or two streets of small log stores and houses standing on a bluff above the river and now used as residences by farm laborers. The old town, left thus off by itself half forgotten by the new town, was picturesque. In the company of my strange new acquaintance and once with his father, an old man who had lived in the river town in the days of its prosperity, I later spent several hours among the old houses. Dogs and pigs wandered through the deep dust of the principal street facing the river or slept in the shade of the old buildings and the old man told me that even in its better days it was a quite terrible place. In the winter, in the early days, the roads were hub deep to the wagons with mud, the houses were small and near each house was an outhouse that smelled horribly in summer and invited millions of flies. Pigs, cows and horses were kept in little sheds near the houses and often diseases, encouraged by the utter lack of sanitation, swept through the town and sometimes carried off whole families.

The older of the two men, named Jim Berners, was a merchant, owning with his son a large store on the principal street of the newer town and had been brought to the Illinois town when he was a child. His father, an Englishman, had come to America as a young man and for several years had been a merchant in the city of Philadelphia. Having married there and wanting to establish himself as the head of a landed family in the new country he had come to Illinois when land could be had at a low price and had bought five hundred acres of river bottom land.

With his young wife and his three children he lived in the river town and had cleared and got ready for planting most of his land when misfortune came down upon him. In the crude little towns of that day doctors were for the most part half educated, the houses were stuffy and full of drafts in winter and epidemics of smallpox, followed by scarlet fever, diphtheria and typhus came and could not be checked. Within two years the merchant’s rather delicate wife died and her death was followed by his own and by the death of two of his three children. There was only the babe left alive and he had been put in charge of an old judge with whom the father had formed a friendship.

The young Berners had grown into manhood in the household of the judge, whose great boast it was that he was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. He told me he had never been ill a day in his life. Upon reaching manhood he sold three hundred acres of his land and like his father became a merchant.

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

What a place it was! Some ten years before I made his acquaintance the younger Berners, named Alonzo, had gone to Chicago where he had got quite hopelessly drunk. During his whole life the man had been a sufferer from some obscure nervous disease and was never without pain. The sprees he sometimes went on were but a kind of desperate attempt to free himself for a short time from the presence of pain. After the drunken time he was dreadfully ill and seemed about to die and then there came a time of weakness and a kind of physical peace. The tense nerves of his slender body relaxed, he slept at night and spent the days talking with a few friends, reading books or riding about town in a buggy.

On the sprees, of ten years before, sprees indulged in twice a year at regular intervals outside his own town, when he had stolen away without warning to his father or to an older sister of the household, young Alonzo had been picked up in the city of Chicago by an English deep-sea sailor. The sailor had been working for a time on a lake steamer but had tired of the place and had left his ship at Chicago and had also gone on a drunk. He rescued Alonzo Berners from the men into whose hands he had fallen and brought him home and later became attached to the Berners establishment, staying in the Illinois town at first as clerk in the store and later as the store’s manager. He was a heavily built man of fifty-five when I saw him and had a white scar, evidently from an old knife wound, on his brown cheek and a peculiar waddling gait. As he hustled about the store one thought of a fat duck trying to make its way rapidly along on land.

In the Berners establishment were sold hardware, agricultural implements, house and barn paints, jack-knives and a thousand other things and there was also a harness shop in the main building facing the town’s principal street. Back of the main building there was an alleyway and across the alleyway half a dozen large frame buildings in which were kept hides bought from the farmers, coal, lumber, bins of corn, wheat and oats in bags and hay in bales.

The whole establishment, an infinitely busy place, was run by the sailor who could neither read or write but who was helped by a stern-looking woman bookkeeper. The sailor was shrewd wise and jolly and had always some tale of life on the deep sea to tell to his farmer customers. He was the most popular man in town and there was another feature that added tremendously to the popularity of the store. In the spring, just before planting time, and in the fall after the crops were harvested, the Berners gave a great feast in one of the sheds. The hay corn and lumber were taken out and long wooden tables erected, while invitations were sent far and wide to the town and country people. Women of the town and country wives came to help prepare the feast, the old sailor waddled about shouting, pigs, turkeys, calves and lambs were killed, bushels of potatoes baked, pies and cakes, baked in advance by the women, were brought and there was a feast lasting sometimes all afternoon and far into the night. Alonzo Berners had provided many barrels of beer and the sailor and his pals among the farmers got half drunk and sang songs and made speeches while the professional men of the town, the lawyers, judges and doctors, all came and made speeches. What a storm of talk! Even the preachers and the rival merchants were there and a prayer was said as each new group sat down to the feast, the ministers shaking their heads over the beer drinking but falling to with a will at the food. The two annual affairs must often have cost the Berners a good part of the profits made during the year but they did not mind. “It doesn’t matter,” said the elder Berners. “I’m old and nearly ready to die, it isn’t likely Alonzo will live very long and as for Hallie,” meaning the daughter, “I have already given her one of my two farms. The Berners are going to peter out anyway and why should they care about leaving money behind them?”