1
THE family were apparently not at all surprised when, at the
supper-table, Felix announced his sudden decision.
“Well, I knew you’d be going one of these days,” his brother Ed
remarked.
That seemed strange to Felix, who had kept his Chicago intentions
carefully to himself all that year....
And his brother Jim, who was working again in spite of his lameness, was
quite converted from his supper-table querulousness by the announcement.
“When I was in Chicago—” he said, and told stories of the Chicago of ten
years ago, where he had tried briefly to gain a foothold. It remained in
his mind, it seemed, not as a failure, but as a glorious excursion....
Alice, Ed’s wife, was enchanted. Her cheeks glowed, and she asked
endless questions. It appeared that none of them had the slightest doubt
of Felix’s ultimate, and splendid, success. It really seemed as if they
envied him!
And all the while, Felix was thinking what an ironic spectacle he would
present if he returned home in a month or two. He clenched his fists
under the table-edge, and swore to himself that he would
never—never—make that confession of failure....
“You must write to your mother and tell her all about it, Felix,” said
Alice.
His mother and father were down on the farm in Illinois where Mrs. Fay
had lived as a little girl. She had never adjusted herself to town life;
nor had her husband. They were best content in the country, where she
could grow flowers in the front yard and he could fatten and butcher and
salt down a couple of hogs for the winter.... Their only grievance was
that their children found so little time to come and visit them. Ed
usually came once a year, in the slack season, and Jim when he needed a
rest; but Felix, it seemed, was always too busy....
“Why bother her about my going to Chicago?” Felix grumbled.
“Why, Felix!” Alice reproached him. She could never understand why it
was so hard for him to write to his mother.
“I don’t want her worrying about me,” Felix explained uncomfortably.
“She won’t worry about you,” Alice insisted. “She’ll be proud of you!”
Felix wondered if people always had to lie to themselves about their
prospects before they could do anything.... Perhaps he ought to lie to
himself; but he preferred to face the facts as they were. He would have
to embellish them a little, however, in writing to his mother....
When supper was cleared away, and Jim had gone out to sit on the front
steps, and Ed and Alice were in the front room playing one of the newest
records on the phonograph, Felix wrote briefly and shyly to his
mother—explaining that he was fairly certain to get something to do in
Chicago very quickly.... And then, by way of savouring in advance the
grim realities of his adventure, he wrote a long letter to Helen Raymond
in New York—a letter in which he made clear the wild recklessness of his
plans. He felt that the woman who had befriended him when she was the
librarian at Port Royal and he a queer boy who worked in a factory and
wrote poetry, would understand this newest folly of his.
But what a waste of time, writing letters, when he had only six days
left in which to prepare for going to Chicago!... He determined to use
those remaining days very carefully and sensibly.
He bought a street map the next morning, and went home to study it. But
it was hard to give it due attention at home. His sister-in-law was
mending and pressing his clothes, and collecting and inspecting his
shirts, and talking excitedly about his trip. “If you run short of
money, Felix, you just write to us for it. Ed and I will see that you
get it somehow.” Felix was fiercely resolved not to be a burden to them
after he went to Chicago, and these offers made him uncomfortable. Why
should Alice be so interested in this expedition of his anyway? She was
as concerned about it as though it were she herself who was going. She
wanted to know his plans; and when he did not seem to have any, she
persisted in trying to make them for him.
He was not going to get any opportunity to study that street map at
home. He decided that he would go and spend a few days at his friend Tom
Alden’s little place in the country, where he would find a more
congenial atmosphere.
2
Too congenial! Tom was the same perfect companion of an idle
hour—instinctively expert in gilding that idleness with delightful talk
until it ceased to seem mere idleness—the same old Tom that Felix had
loafed away long evenings with last summer, when they were supposed to
be writing novels. Tom was still desultorily working upon his novel; but
he put it aside to walk in the woods and talk with Felix about Chicago.
It was not, however, of the grim Chicago which loomed in Felix’s mind,
that Tom talked.
Tom, as Felix now realized, was a romantic soul. Chicago had been to him
a series of brilliant vacation-trips, a place of happy occasional
sanctuary from the dull realities of middle-class life in Port Royal: an
opportunity for brief, stimulating human contacts, not at all a place to
earn a living in.
Lying in the cool grass beside the creek where he and Felix had spent so
many illusioned hours a summer ago, he talked with dreamy enthusiasm of
genial drunken poets and philosophers and friends met at the Pen
Club—and of their girl companions, charming and sophisticated, whose
loves were frank and light-hearted.
Felix walked up and down impatiently. A year ago he too had dreamed of
Tom’s Chicago—
“_Midnights of revel
And noondays of song!_”
But he knew better now. He could imagine the Pen Club, with its
boon-companionship of whiskey and mutual praise. These, he told himself,
were the consolations of failure. He might, he reflected grimly, have to
fall back on these things at forty. But in the meantime he would try to
learn to face reality.
And those light Chicago loves—he suspected that the romantic temperament
had thrown a glamour over these also. He was not going to Chicago for
Pen Club friendship nor the solace of complaisant femininity.... While
Tom Alden reminisced of glorious nights of talk and drink and kisses,
Felix was brooding over a scene inside his mind which he called
Chicago—a scene in which the insane clamour of the wheat-pit was mingled
with stockyards brutality and filth. This was what he must deal with....
“What’s on your mind?” Tom asked.
“Nothing. Except—I came here to study my street map, and I haven’t
looked inside it.”
“Never mind your street map just now,” Tom said. “We’re going to the
station to meet Gloria and Madge.”
Madge was a cousin of Tom’s, and Gloria her especial—and
beautiful—friend. They were just back from a trip abroad, and Tom had
asked them out to dinner to hear what they had to tell.
“You mustn’t be prejudiced against Gloria because of her eyelashes,” Tom
urged. “She has rather a mind, I think.”
So Felix, reluctantly, went along to the station.
Tom jested at his reluctance. “Why, are you afraid of becoming entangled
in Gloria’s celebrated eyelashes?”
“No, I’m not afraid of that,” Felix said.
Tom laughed and put his hand on Felix’s shoulder.
“Think, they bring us news of the great world: London! Paris! Doesn’t
that stir you?”
“No,” Felix retorted, “for I don’t believe it. They bring back what they
took with them.”
“Wait and see! I hear rumours that Gloria has become fearfully
cosmopolitan.”
When Gloria and Madge stepped from the train, it was evident, even to so
careless an observer as Felix, that they had been at least outwardly
transformed. Every woman in Port Royal was wearing the wide-flaring
“Merry Widow” hat; and these girls wore small close-fitting
hats—Gloria’s being a jaunty little flower-confection, and Madge’s a
tiny straw turban set off by a perky feather.
“Dear old Tom,” said Gloria, embracing him affectionately. “Too busy to
come to town to see old friends, so old friends have to come see him.
Busy writing great novel?”
“More or less,” Tom answered, and they started back up the road. “How’s
Europe?”
“We tore ourselves from the arms of doting relatives to come and tell
you—When one’s been all over the world, what’s a few miles more? ...
even when it means getting one’s new Paris shoes all dusty! Have you
noticed them, Tom?” She paused on one toe and looked down sidewise
admiringly at her foot.
“I noticed a generally exotic effect,” Tom admitted.
“Tan suede!” Gloria explained. “And then, our blouses. Something quite
new. And—but mustn’t talk to great philosopher about such frivolous
things. Must talk about art and socialism. There are lots of socialists
over there, in France and Germany—and even in England!”
“So you found that out,” Tom observed. “Now I suppose you regard
socialism as quite respectable.”
“Oh, most respectable. But just as hard to understand as ever! Though I
was able, when I talked to some of them at the Countess of Berwick’s
tea, to appear quite intelligent on the subject, on account of having
listened to you. I used ‘proletarian’ and ‘proletariat’ without once
getting them mixed.”
“The Countess of Berwick! Our little Gloria flew high, didn’t she?”
“Oh, all sorts of people go to the Countess of Berwick’s teas. You’ve
only to be reputed ‘interesting,’ and you get invited everywhere. And
how do you suppose I got into the ‘interesting’ class? Not by my gifts
of intellect, Tommy. But—you know, they expect Americans to behave
queerly. They’re disappointed if we don’t. There was an American poet
over there, a tame professor poet, and they were disappointed because he
didn’t come to dinner in boots and spurs and a red shirt or something.
So I bethought myself—and got invited. You know my baby-talk? I brought
it out and polished it up for the occasion. You should have heard me!
Baby-talking to England’s brightest and best. And they fell for it. They
consider it oh, so American! I nearly set a fashion in London, Tommy.
Me, having been brought up in Miss Pettit’s most exclusive school, and
taught to act like a lady, and then making a hit in London with bad
manners. The baby-talk wasn’t all. Daughter of American Plough Magnate
Puts Feet on Table and Tells Naughty Stories—that sort of thing. They
like it.”
“You mustn’t believe her, Tom,” Madge interrupted. “She didn’t do any
such thing.”
“Tom understands me,” Gloria laughed. “Exaggeration for effect. Just
like in a novel. If you put my London visit in a novel, Tom, you’d have
me putting my feet on the table, wouldn’t you?”
“But my imagination,” said Tom, “would balk at the picture of you
telling naughty stories.”
“Oh, but Tom, I’ve been to Paris since you used to know me, and I’ve
become very, very wicked. Don’t contradict me, Madge. I’ve got to
persuade Tom that I got some benefit out of my year abroad. Yes, Tom,
you’ve no idea how broad-minded Paris has made me. Why, if somebody
should mention a man’s ‘mistress’ to me now, I wouldn’t shudder and turn
pale. I would probably say, ‘Dear me, has he only one?’ That’s what
Paris has made of me. I’m brazen, Tom—brazen.”
They reached the house, and there they chattered on till dinner, and
through dinner, and after dinner in Tom’s living room—Felix playing a
silent part, and inwardly contemptuous of Gloria’s assumed
sophistication. Gloria made a few attempts to draw him into the
conversation, but these being resisted, she devoted herself to Tom.
Growing confidential, she told him the newest fashions in French
lingerie—Madge protesting only slightly, for after all, wasn’t Tom her
cousin? and Felix didn’t count. “They’re still wearing muslin over
here,” said Gloria, “while we, Tom dear, come from Paris intimately
attired in georgette and chiffon—if you know what that means. All the
difference in the world, I can assure you! One’s Puritanism goes when
one puts on chiffon next to one’s skin. And think, Tom, I never dreamed,
all my poor wasted life in Iowa, that nightgowns could be anything but
white muslin. Well, you should see the lovely nighties that Madge and I
brought home. You’d never guess the colour.... Lavender! Why, the social
circles of Port Royal are rocking with it! A blow, Tom, at the very
foundations of middle-class morality. Lavender nighties!”
“I do think,” Tom said, “that what people wear makes a difference in
their attitude toward life.”
“Oh, I can feel the difference already. My Presbyterian conscience
shrivelled up and perished at the touch of that pagan garment. My whole
attitude toward life has changed.”
Felix shrugged his shoulders by way of expressing his unbelief in the
paganism of lavender nightgowns.
“What are they writing in Paris now?” Tom asked.
“Well, Tom, I admit I was surprised at first. I never dreamed that even
the French could be so—French. But I got used to it. I like it now. Even
Madge likes it. She makes me translate the wickedest passages for her.”
“I don’t any such thing,” Madge objected.
“What is there so wicked in those passages?” asked Felix, speaking for
almost the first time.
Gloria considered him for a moment before replying. “Nothing really
wicked at all,” she said. “Wicked only according to our stupid
Anglo-Saxon notions. Simply frank, that’s all.”
“I wonder,” said Felix, “if they are really more frank than English
novels—the best of them. Defoe and Fielding were rather frank, you
know.”
Gloria shrugged her pretty shoulders. “If there was anything like that
in Defoe and Fielding, it escaped my innocent young mind when I read
them.” She turned again to Tom. “They omit nothing—Nothing!”
“You excite my curiosity,” Tom said sceptically. “Please describe more
specifically the Nothing which they omit.”
Gloria laughed, and sketched lightly and brightly the plot of one of the
most outrageous new French novels—extreme, she admitted, even for
France. “Every other chapter,” she said, “is one which the boldest
English novelist would leave to your imagination. In this story, here it
is, with, I assure you, a wealth of detail.”
“A wealth of words, rather, I suspect,” said Tom. “The same words that
have done duty in the same French novels for a generation:
_volupté_—_exquise_—_baiser_—_baiser_.... The same old thing, so far as
I gather from your description, Gloria. That kind of eloquent rhetoric
isn’t frankness,—at least not the kind of literary frankness that Felix
and I are interested in.”
“Forgive me, Tom!” said Gloria, with mock humility. “My mistake! Here I
have been going across the ocean in search of sensation, and all the
while the real shock was waiting for me right here at home. In your
novel you have doubtless outdone the puny efforts of these mere
foreigners. What do they know about frankness? I abase myself, and
repent in dust and ashes!”
“I really do think,” said Tom, “that you imagine the truth can be told
only in French.”
“I suppose I was guilty of that foolish error. But I pine for
enlightenment. Give me the truth—the Truth!—in my own native tongue!”
Tom shook his head. “I didn’t say I had tried to tell it.”
“Oh, don’t disappoint me that way, Tom. Surely you are not going to let
these Frenchmen put it over on you! Don’t say that!”
“Well,” Tom said gravely, “Felix has a chapter in his novel here—I found
the manuscript in my desk and was just reading it again the other
day—that I think goes a little beyond anything I have ever seen in any
French novel.”
Gloria turned to Felix and stared. “Well!” she cried. “America is saved!
Will you read it to us, Mr. Fay?”
“No,” he said.
“Oh, why not!”
“Don’t want to.”
“I think you show a lack of confidence in us, Mr. Fay. Here we put
ourselves in your hand. We open our hearts to you. We conceal nothing.
And you sit there with a masterpiece of literary frankness up your
sleeve, and refuse to read it. I don’t think it’s fair.”
Felix was silent. He really wanted to read that chapter. He was proud of
it. But he must not become interested in novel-writing again. It would
distract his mind too much from the Chicago adventure. That unfinished
novel ought to remain in that drawer in Tom’s desk until he had made
good in Chicago.
“I don’t believe it’s so frank, after all,” said Gloria, returning to
the attack. “That’s why you’re afraid to read it. You’re afraid of
disappointing our expectations.”
Felix looked at her defiantly.
“All right, I will,” he said.
“Oh, this is worth coming back for.”
He rose and went to Tom’s room. He returned, a little doubtfully, with
the manuscript. “I want to say first of all that there is nothing
intentionally shocking about this chapter. It simply aims to tell how
people really behave under circumstances usually glossed over with
romantic phrases.”
At any rate, Gloria would understand; so why should he hesitate?
He began to read. From the first page, he was aware of a transformation
in the atmosphere of the occasion. Gloria, who had been leaning forward
with dramatic eagerness, became rigid in her attitude, and her humorous
smile seemed to have become tensely frozen in its place. Madge had
picked up a magazine, opened it to a picture, and continued to look at
the picture while listening alertly, with an air of being at a key-hole.
Tom continued gravely smoking his pipe, apparently oblivious of any
constraint upon the others. After a little, Gloria carefully relaxed her
attitude, and leaned back, looking above Felix’s head, with an impassive
face and arms straight at her sides. Felix defiantly read on.
He knew there was nothing really shocking about the chapter—at least, to
an enlightened and adult mind such as Gloria’s. It did not occur to him
that in its local colour and middle-western psychology, there was
something—not present in the most highly flavoured French romance—to
disturb the pretences and awake the painful and ashamed memories of a
middle-western mind: something sufficiently near to the unromantic truth
of Gloria’s own secret life, perhaps, to evoke in her an hysterical
disgust.... He only knew that the situation was becoming uncomfortable,
and that he was sorry he had ever got into it.
He finished the chapter. There ensued a painful silence.
“Very remarkable writing indeed, Mr. Fay,” was all the comment the young
woman back from abroad had to offer. Evidently what was delightfully
daring in Paris was something else in Port Royal on the Mississippi....
Felix, not knowing quite what to think, went to put his manuscript away.
Surely Gloria could not have been really shocked!... When he returned,
they were all talking with animation about something else.... Presently
it was time for the girls to leave. “I hear you’re going to Chicago
soon,” Gloria said sweetly to Felix. “_Bon voyage!_”
“I have made a fool of myself again,” Felix said to himself bitterly.
3
The next day, and the next, Felix and Tom talked again about Chicago;
but not in the realistic vein Felix would have preferred. Tonight he
must go back to town; he had already stayed too long—he was falling into
his old habit of day-dreaming about the future.... That chapter had set
him off. Gloria had been—well, startled and impressed, to say the least.
That chapter _was_ good. Perhaps he was destined to help bring back to
English fiction its lost candour, the candour of the Elizabethans and
Defoe and Fielding.
But no, he must not think about such things now. He would have no time
for writing, for a long while, in Chicago. He would be too much immersed
in the struggle for existence. If he were to write novels, he ought to
stay in Port Royal. Yes, he might take the civil service examination and
get a quiet job in the post-office that would give him time to think and
dream and write....
He sprang up. He knew quite well what this meant. Cowardice! If he got
into the post-office, he would stay there forever.... He started
abruptly toward the house, leaving Tom in the midst of an anecdote of
old Chicago days.
He had left the map on Tom’s desk. His novel was in that same desk. If
he started reading that novel again, he might decide to stay in Port
Royal and finish it. He wondered whether the map or the novel would
claim him when he sat down at that desk. Five minutes at that desk might
decide his whole future for him....
He went into Tom’s room, went over to the desk—and from a letter lying
open beside the pen-tray there flashed up to him his own name, _Felix
Fay_ ... with a fringe of words about it.
Those words startled him, and he bent over the letter to make sure that
they were really there; he read them, and turned to see the signature—it
was that of Madge Alden; and then he sat down in Tom’s chair and read
slowly that paragraph of three sentences.
“_Is that nasty young man Felix Fay really a friend of yours? I
think he’d better leave Port Royal quick. The story of that
horrible chapter is all over town and—well, if you knew the
things Gloria is saying about him!_”
So Gloria had betrayed him to Port Royal.
4
He sank back in his chair, amazed at his sensations. He had never
thought any written words could affect him like that. He had never cared
what people thought....
It was absurd. He felt as though a cannon-ball had gone through his
abdomen. He sat there, weak, stunned, gasping for breath—with a mind
curiously detached, floating somewhere above that stunned body,
wondering.... It was curious that anything in the world could hurt so
much.
Then, in a rush, all his energy seemed to come back, flooding and
filling his body—as if to provide him the strength with which to return
blow for blow. And that superfluity of strength was worse than the
weakness had been—for there was no one, nothing to fight. Words out of
the air had hurt him, and he could not fight back.
The emotion which flooded him ebbed at last, leaving him in a curious
mood of utter coldness. The thought came into his mind: “Nothing that
ever happens to me can hurt me after this—nothing.”
He opened the drawer. He wanted to see that unfinished novel. He wanted
to know what it was really like. He felt capable of judging it calmly.
He turned the pages here and there, reading at random, now with
affection and now with contempt, making up his mind.... He suddenly
realized that he was feeling ashamed of it all. He did not realize that
this new humiliation, at the hands of a girl, had awakened painful
memories of the love-affair which he had celebrated in this novel, and
which had ended so differently in real life from the way it was to end
in this book; he only knew that he was ashamed.
The style, he said to himself, was bad—very bad.
He forced himself to read again the chapter which had caused all the
trouble. It made him smile painfully. Why, this bald and painstaking
frankness of his was not courageous, it was merely comic!... He turned
the pages again. This stuff was not a novel.
He had been an idler, a dreamer, a fool....
And suddenly he remembered something—a scene from a long time ago: it
was in school, and the principal was looking over a boy’s shoulder at a
piece of paper upon which, day-dreaming of his future, the boy had
written: “_Felix Fay, the great novelist_....”
He heard the principal telling that boy to write those words on the
blackboard, to show the class what he had been doing instead of
attending to his lessons. He saw the boy, pale and trembling, rise and
face a hundred curious, staring eyes....
Felix had not recalled that scene for years; it had hurt too much. But
now it was no longer painful. He saw the scene for the first time
impersonally; and he felt that the principal had been right....
Gazing down at the manuscript in his hand, he pronounced sentence upon
it in the words in which the principal had once condemned that boy.
“This is what is known as egotism,” he whispered.
He rose, stuffed the pages into Tom’s fireplace and set fire to them
with a match. Then, while the record of all his futile dreaming went up
in smoky flame, he turned back to the desk, sat down, and bent over the
microscopic squares and confused lettering of the street-map of Chicago.
------------------------------------------------------------------------