1
A STRANGE and perturbing girl!... He had not believed, he wished not to
believe, what she had told him—that one could be fool and dreamer and
yet make terms with Chicago.
But in the course of a few weeks it began to seem as if she were right.
Felix’s other letter of introduction was to Mr. Clive Bangs, editorial
writer on the Evening Chronicle. Very diffidently, after having made
futile inquires at other newspapers during the week, he went one
afternoon to present the letter.
Some one in the front office said, “Back there under the mezzanine—the
first office to the right.” He found a little built-in coop, and opened
the door. The space inside was crowded with desks and tables, the floor
littered with papers, the air filled with cigarette smoke. Through the
windows, facing on an alley overhung by tall buildings, no sunlight
came, and electric lamps on the desks pierced holes of light through the
twilight atmosphere. At one of the desks a plump man lounged, smoking a
cigarette. A long, lean man in shirt-sleeves was pounding a typewriter.
A surly-looking young man with a careless Windsor tie, and a lock of
hair that fell over one eye, sat at a third desk, reading a book.
The plump man looked up with a good-humoured smile, and Felix approached
him, saying, “Mr. Bangs?” The plump man waved a hand towards the
surly-looking youth. “That’s Mr. Bangs,” he said.
Mr. Bangs looked up, frowned at Felix, and said, “You want to see me?”
He jumped up, and indicated a chair vaguely. “Wait a minute,” he said,
and taking up a typewritten sheet from his desk went hurriedly out of
the office.
Felix looked at the chair. It was piled high with exchanges, so he
remained standing. The plump man continued to smoke dreamily. The long,
lean man thoughtfully wrote on. Felix waited. Mr. Bangs did not return.
It was, Felix felt uncomfortably, just what he had expected—it was silly
to have come here with that letter.
He glanced down at the desk, saw the book which Mr. Bangs had been
reading, noted the name on the cover, and picked it up with a sudden
interest. He looked at the title page, the date; and then turned the
leaves, tenderly, affectionately....
He had quite forgotten Mr. Bangs, and the nature of his errand.
Mr. Clive Bangs, having handed the typewritten sheet to the foreman of
the composing-room, walked back slowly. He knew very well who his
visitor was. Helen’s letter announcing his arrival was in his pocket.
“He is,” Helen had written him, “just as crazy as you are, Clive!” But
he distrusted Helen’s judgment.... It was one thing to welcome to
Chicago one more of the too few sophisticated spirits of the mid-west;
it was another to have on his hands some pale, gawky, helpless youth who
had been falsely encouraged by country librarians in the notion that he
could write! What seemed a prodigy out in Iowa might be merely one of
the army of unemployed and unemployable here in Chicago. Clive had tried
to help these prodigies before; and he knew that a painful addiction to
the style of Ruskin, combined with egotism and a total lack of ideas,
was no easy malady to cure. He rather flinched from the prospect of
taking Helen’s protégé in hand.... But, still—“_crazy as you are_”—Helen
might know what she was talking about.
Stopping in the doorway, Clive looked at his problem in person. He had
picked up that book—that H. G. Wells book.... Those were the days just
before “Tono-Bungay,” and the name of H. G. Wells was as yet cherished
by only a few enthusiasts. Besides, this was the least known of H. G.
Wells’ writings, and one who might have heard of Wells as a writer of
pseudo-scientific yarns would be puzzled by it. Clive stood for a moment
trying to gauge the quality of Felix Fay’s response to the volume in his
hand; then he went up to him.
Felix awoke to find Mr. Bangs standing beside him, and looking at him
quizzically.
“I see you’re looking at my latest Wells find,” said Mr. Bangs.
“The first English edition! Where did you pick it up?” Felix asked. “In
a second-hand store?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Bangs. “Forty cents! At Downer’s.”
Felix laid the book down reverently. “I wonder,” he said, “if they have
any other Wells’ things there. There’s one of his books I’ve never been
able to come across anywhere—‘The Island of Doctor Moreau.’ Do you know
it?”
“I have the only copy I’ve ever seen in Chicago,” said Clive Bangs.
“I’ll lend it to you.”
“I wish you would,” Felix said gratefully. “I found ‘The Time Machine’
in an old junk-shop in Port Royal last summer, and that made ‘The Island
of Doctor Moreau’ the only thing of Wells’ I hadn’t read—I suppose you
know ‘Kipps’? And ‘Love and Mr. Lewisham’?”
Mr. Bangs nodded. “This book,” he said, indicating the volume on the
desk, “isn’t so well known as it might be.” He took a cigarette and
passed Felix the box with an unconscious gesture.
Clive Bangs had ceased to judge this young man. He had accepted him.
After all, how many people were there in Chicago who had read “First and
Last Things”? So it was, once upon a time, when two men met who had both
read an obscure book of poems about Wine and Death by one Edward
Fitzgerald.
Felix lighted his cigarette from Clive Bangs’ match. “I brought my copy
to Chicago with me,” he said. “It’s the only book I did bring.”
Clive Bangs looked at his watch and picked up his hat. Suddenly Felix
remembered, and put his hand, embarrassedly, in his pocket for his
letter of introduction.
Clive Bangs laughed. “Never mind!” he said. “I know who you are. Come
on, let’s have a drink.”
A few minutes later they were sitting in a barroom called “The Tavern,”
ordering ale with bitters, which Clive Bangs recommended as the
specialty of the place.
“So you are Helen’s wild young man from Iowa!” said Clive. “I wish Helen
were here, and we three would get drunk together.”
Felix was startled at the idea of Helen, the beautiful and condescending
goddess of the library-shrine of his youth, getting drunk....
Clive laughed. “Oh,” he said, “I mean on ideas. Though for my part,
after a hard day’s work, it takes a little alcohol to put the practical
part of my mind asleep and set free my imagination. My mind is disposed
in layers. After the first drink I cease to be interested in politics
and social reform. After the second I forget the girl about whom I
happen to be worrying at the time. And with the third drink, I enter the
realm of pure theory.”
The tall glasses of ale were set before them.
“Here’s to Utopia!” said Clive.
2
It was only when Felix had warmly parted from his new friend, and agreed
to come over the next noon for lunch and a visit to Downer’s, that he
realized—with some chagrin—that he had failed to say anything to Mr.
Clive Bangs about getting a job as a reporter on the Evening Chronicle.
In fact, he had fallen very neatly into the trap prepared for him by his
own fatal temperament. He had given himself away at the very start. And
Bangs, who appeared to indulge some theoretical and visionary traits as
a relaxation to the sober work of helping get out a great daily
newspaper, had enjoyed his moon-calfishness: but to what end?
Going back to his room at Community House, Felix gravely and
dispassionately considered the question of what impression he had made.
“On the one hand,” he said to himself, “it is doubtless true that Mr.
Bangs must enjoy coming across another person who shares his own
literary tastes. But, on the other hand, these tastes are in the nature
of an avocation for him, and my possession of them proves nothing
whatever as to my fitness for a newspaper job. Suppose he had happened
to be enthusiastic about Japanese prints; suppose he had just bought a
Kiyonaga, and I had looked at it and praised it; he would have been
pleased to find some one who knew the difference between a Kiyonaga and
a Kunisada—but would he have thought that a reason for helping me to get
a newspaper job? I’m afraid not.”
Felix was pleased with the coolness of his reasoning under circumstances
where another person might have built up vain hopes. And in any event,
Clive Bangs was a friend; and friendship had a value of its own. He
would not embarrass Clive Bangs with any requests for help; he would
take what their friendship had to give, and be glad of it.
Accordingly, it was without any ulterior motive that he went to lunch
with Bangs next day. Again they talked literature and ideas; they
explored Downer’s together, and Felix picked up a second volume to
complete his Muses’ Library edition of the poems of John Donne: and they
strolled back to the office of the Chronicle, where Felix became
acquainted with the other editorial writers.
The long, lean man was a New Englander named Hosmer Flint; he
corresponded very much to Felix’s idea of what the editorial writer of a
great daily newspaper should be, for he had a mind incredibly stored
with statistics of all kinds. The other was the chief editorial writer—a
man of fifty, plump and dimpled, with a childlike charm of manner which
made it natural for every one to call him “Willie”—his other name being
Smith.
Willie Smith genially expressed to Felix the hope that there might be
something for him on the Chronicle, and when the managing editor
happened in he introduced Felix to him casually as a young man who was
looking for a newspaper job; but Felix understood that this was simply
Willie’s good nature, and refused to take the possibility seriously. He
found his new acquaintances agreeable to talk to, however, and fell into
the habit of dropping into the editorial office in the slack part of the
afternoon, for a half-hour’s talk. Having no economic reason for
pretending to be anything but himself in their presence, he talked about
the things that really interested him—socialism and anarchism and life
and art.
He permitted himself these idle pleasures only after hours dutifully
spent in annoying the editors of five or six other papers with a brisk
and efficient presentation of his usefulness. He had to appear so
preternaturally capable and alert on these occasions that it was a
relief to be able to throw off the disguise and loaf and invite his soul
in the editorial room of the Evening Chronicle. It was, as he sometimes
reproachfully told himself, a concession to his inborn weakness, and
just so much time lost from his task of getting a newspaper job.
3
But one could not look for a job all the time. It was with only slight
compunction that he fell into the custom of spending his evenings in the
company of Rose-Ann—sometimes talking in her room, sometimes in Paul’s
watching him invent his beautiful and fantastic toy-scenery, and again
in the tiny Community Theatre, helping them make costumes and build
stage-sets.
It was, it seemed, to the fascination of the tiny theater itself, as
much as to Rose-Ann’s persuasions, that he presently succumbed, and
found himself writing a little play for a group of children—a play about
the further adventures of the Pied Piper and the boys and girls who
followed him into the mountain.... He felt rather like one of those
children himself, lured by some irresistible music away from the daylit
world of ambition into the hollow hill of fantasy.... Rose-Ann approved
the play enthusiastically, and the children of her group, assigning the
parts among themselves, began spontaneously to learn it by heart.
Meantime, rehearsals of a sort were going on for the “Prince and
Pauper.” Rose-Ann had her own way of teaching. She became, it seemed,
herself a child, and was accepted by the others as such; they quarreled
and made up with her, kissed her and made faces at her and petted her,
exactly as if she were one of themselves; and Felix, watching these
scenes, wished that he, too, had that capacity for childlikeness, so
that he could join in the fun on such terms of innocent intimacy. But he
felt dreadfully grown-up and awkward, and Rose-Ann, on her knees amid
her playmates, laughing and talking and acting one part or another with
the utter abandon of childhood’s “pretending”—she was the youngest of
them all; indeed, she seemed more than anything else a delightful doll—a
marvellous talking and laughing doll of gold and ivory.
Mrs. Perkins—big, fat, comfortable Mrs. Perkins, still young-looking
though reputed to be a grandmother, who lived in the neighborhood and
came to the theater to sew costumes for them, and whom everybody,
without any disrespect, called “Perk”—beckoned him over one day to her
corner as he stood admiring Rose-Ann with her children, and whispered to
him:
“You just feel like putting her in your pocket and carrying her off,
don’t you?”
Felix grinned at her. “How do _you_ know?” he whispered back. Yes, she
was a wonderful little toy-girl, less and more than human, that one
wanted to hold and touch and play with, and take home to keep! But how
did she, old Granny Perk, know how a young man felt about it!
“Oh, I know!” and Perk smiled her comfortable smile. “I was a girl
myself once. Little Miss Rosy-Posy knows just how nice she looks to you,
and don’t you doubt it!”
Yes, perhaps Rose-Ann did like to be looked at and enjoyed by some one
who was not a child. She seemed to be teasing him with her presence—to
be saying, “Don’t _you_ want to come and play with me, too?”
He had tried to tell Clive about Rose-Ann, but his first words, “a girl
over at Community House,” had apparently evoked in Clive’s mind the
picture of a misguided spinster of forty whose repressed maternal
instincts were finding satisfaction in the running of other people’s
lives—a creature against whom he proceeded to warn Felix in humorous
terms. “She will manage you, Felix,” he said, “—for your own good. Now
it’s all right to be managed by a woman, so long as it is for her
benefit. You can at least complain about it. But when you’re managed for
your own good, you are helpless.”
Felix objected to this notion of Rose-Ann, but Clive asked her age. And
Felix said he didn’t know, but that she was a little older than himself.
“A little older than you. I thought so,” said Clive. “Beware!” There was
no use talking to Clive about girls, anyway; it was a subject upon which
he was frequently bitter and always absurd. Felix had told Rose-Ann a
little about him, and she had said, “He’s been hurt by some girl.”
Doubtless that was true. And Felix felt a certain satisfaction in the
inward comparison of this creature of Clive’s distorted fancy with the
real and delightful Rose-Ann—whom even as Clive talked he could see in
memory, with himself standing by and caressing with his gaze every swift
movement of that delicate and supple doll-body of hers.
“You’re all wrong,” he said to Clive. “She’s a pagan.”
“Yes,” said Clive scornfully, “one of those settlement-house pagans.”
Felix only laughed.
All this, however, was not getting a job. By desperate economies, as his
money dwindled, he was managing to hold out. But he could not hold out
forever. Clive had asked him one day if he needed money, and he had
answered evasively. There was no use starting that sort of thing.
He had to get a job.
But it looked as though he were not going to get a job. There seemed to
be no use trying to impress city editors with his efficiency. There had
been a vacancy on a morning paper, and another young man—with, so far as
Felix could tell, no better qualifications than his own—had been
selected. That discouraged him. Doubtless these city editors could see
through his pretences....
4
And then one afternoon when he dropped in at the Chronicle office, Clive
asked him if he was ready to go to work Monday morning: he had been
taken on as a reporter.... He would get, Clive told him, twenty dollars
a week to start with. Clive told him this in a pleased but casual way,
as though it were something long arranged between Felix and himself
which had just been ratified by the higher powers. So Clive had been
working for him all along!
“Go and tell Harris you’ll be on deck,” said Clive. Harris was the city
editor. “And better speak to the Old Man, too.” The Old Man was the
managing editor, Mr. Devoe. Felix had never supposed for a moment that
these personages had him under consideration.
He presented himself before both of them, not knowing what to say.
Apparently it was not necessary to say anything. Both of them were
busy—too busy, Felix hoped, for them to notice how dazed he was.
“All right, Fay, you’ll be here Monday morning at eight o’clock,” said
the city editor.
“I suppose Mr. Bangs told you that we’re going to start you off at
twenty dollars?” said Mr. Devoe. “We can do a little better later,
perhaps. It’s up to you.” Mr. Devoe looked at him severely—or kindly,
Felix was not sure which—over his glasses, and turned back to his desk.
“Yes, sir,” said Felix.
Willie Smith patted him on the back. “Glad you’ve got it,” he said.
“Take it easy,” Clive told him. “A newspaper job in Chicago is just like
a newspaper job anywhere else.”
Well! So at last, somehow, the devil only knew how, he had gained a
foothold in Chicago.
He discussed the event with Rose-Ann that evening. She laughed at his
surprise. “How do you suppose people get jobs?” she demanded. “You were
going at it in precisely the right way. I knew from what you told me
they were going to take you.”
Felix had already begun to worry about the future. “I don’t know where
any place is,” he said. “I must dig up my street-map.”
“Oh, throw that street-map away,” said Rose-Ann. “I’ll give you a guide
to Chicago that’s much more useful.” She went to her shelf and took down
a little book. “Here!”
It was the “Bab Ballads.” Felix looked puzzled.
“If you can write a play that will please children, you can write to
please the people of Chicago. They’re children, too,” she said.
Felix slipped the book in his pocket and went to his room and his
street-map. She had too much confidence in him. Only he himself knew
what a fool he was. He had got this job under false pretences.
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