BOOK IV (continued 2)

I remember that as the little old gambler and I stood near the horse I spoke to him of a painting I had once seen in New York, that painting of Albert Ryder’s of the ghostly white horse running beneath a mysteriously encircled moon on an old race track at night.

The gambler and I talked of the painting. “I know,” he said, “I like to hang around race tracks at night myself.”

That was all he said and we stood watching the horse. In a few minutes now that tense trembling body would be at ease, fallen into the ease of its long, swinging stride, out there on the track.

The gambler and I went away to stand by a fence. Were men less fortunate than horses? Did men also seek but to express themselves beautifully as in a few minutes now the horse would do? The gambler’s body trembled as did my own. When the horse ran (he broke the record for the mile, that day) he and I did not speak to each other. We had together seen something we together loved. Was it enough? “At least,” I told myself, “we men have a kind of consciousness that perhaps the horses haven’t. We have this consciousness of one another. That is what love is, perhaps.”

There was a child, a young boy of fourteen walking beside his mother in a park at Cleveland, Ohio. I sat on a bench there and saw him go by and after that one moment of his passing never saw him again but I’ll never forget while I live. The moment was like the moment of the running of the horse. Could it be that it was the boy’s most beautiful moment? Well, I had seen it. Why was I not made to be a painter? The boy’s head was thrown a little back, he had black curly hair and carried his hat in his hand. In just that moment of his passing the bench on which I sat his young body was all alive, all of the senses fully alive. Whose son was he? Such a living thing as that, to be thrown into the life of Cleveland, Ohio or of Paris or Venice either for that matter.

I am always having those moments of checking up like a miser closing the shutters of his house at night to count his gold before he goes to bed and although there are many notes on which I might close this book on my own imaginative life in America, it seems to me good enough to close it just there as I sat that day before Chartres Cathedral beside a man I had come to love and in the presence of that cathedral that had made me more deeply happy than any other work of art I had ever seen.

My friend kept pretending to read his book but from time to time I saw how his eyes followed the old tower of the church and the gladness that came into him too.

We would both soon be going back to America to our separate places there. We wanted to go, wanted to take our chances of getting what we could out of our own lives in our own places. We did not want to spend our lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europe from which we were separated by a wide ocean. Americans with cultural impulses had done too much of that sort of thing in the past. The game was worn out and even a ladies’ literary society in an Iowa city was coming to know that a European artist of the present day was not necessarily of importance just because he was a European.

The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that. In Europe they knew it better than they did in America.

It was for me a morning of such thoughts, such memories—just there before Chartres with my friend.

Once, in one of my novels, “Poor White,” I made my hero at the very end of the book go on a trip alone. He was feeling the futility of his own life pretty fully, as I myself have so often done, and so after his business was attended to be went to walk on a beach. That was in the town of Sandusky, in the state of Ohio, my own state.

He gathered up a little handful of shining stones like a child, and later carried them about with him. They were a comfort to him. Life, his own efforts at life, had seemed so futile and ineffectual but the little stones were something glistening and clear. To the child man, the American who was hero of my book and, I thought, to myself and to many other American men I had seen, they were something a little permanent. They were beautiful and strange at the moment and would be still beautiful and strange after a week, a month, a year.

I had ended my novel on that note and a good many of my friends had told me they did not know what I was talking about. Was it because, to most Americans, the desire for something, for even little colored stones to hold in the hand now and then to glisten and shine outside the muddle of life, was it because to most Americans that desire had not become as yet conscious?

Perhaps it had not but that was not my story. At least in me it had become conscious, if not as yet well directed or very intelligent. It had made me a restless man all my life, had set me wandering from place to place, had driven me from the towns to the cities and from one city to another.

In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I did it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly. I had found out that trying to do my job was fun and that doing it well and finely was a task for the most part beyond me.

Often enough I sat thinking of my wasted years, making excuses for myself, but in my happier moments and when I was not at work on my job I was happiest when I was in the mood into which I had fallen on the day when I sat before the cathedral—that is to say, when I sat rolling over and over the little colored stones I had managed to gather up. The man with the two women had just dropped another into my hands. How full my hands were! How many flashes of beauty had come to me out of American life.

It was up to me to carve the stones, to make them more beautiful if I could but often enough my hands trembled. I wasn’t young any more, but I had sought teachers and had found a few. One of them was with me at that moment sitting on the bench before the cathedral and pretending to read a book about it. He grew tired of the pretense and taking out a package of cigarettes offered me one, but then found he hadn’t any match. To such confirmed smokers as my friend and myself the French notion of making a government monopoly of matches is a pest. It is like so much that is European nowadays. It is like the penuriousness of an old age of which at least there is none in America. “The devil!” said my friend. “Let’s go for a walk.”

We did walk, down through the lovely old town, the town made lovely not by the men who live there now but by men of another age, long since fast asleep. If we were neither of us so young in years any more, there was a way in which we were both young enough. We were young with that America of which we both at that moment felt ourselves very much a part, and of which, for many other reasons aside from the French monopoly in matches, we were glad in our hearts to be a part.

EPILOGUE