1
FELIX kept the little book in his desk, cultivated what he called the
“Bab Ballad manner,” and waited, sceptically, to see how long his luck
would last. In three weeks he was given a raise. But even this did not
quite convince him.
It had been too easy—too astonishingly easy. It had come about, not
because of any change in his character, not because he had ceased in
some miraculous way to be a moon-calf, but precisely because he was just
as much a moon-calf as ever. That was why he was compelled to suspect
the authenticity of his good fortune.
“Stop worrying,” Clive told him one day at lunch. “What in the world are
you afraid of?”
“That I’ll wake up,” said Felix.
“You’ll wake up, all right,” said Clive, “to discover that you’re being
underpaid and overworked just like everybody else. You know, you go
along looking as if you had had a telegram saying that your rich uncle
in Australia had died and left you a million dollars, and you didn’t
know whether to believe it or not. No one would guess to look at you
that this remarkable good fortune of yours simply consists of eight or
ten stiff hours a day for twenty-five dollars a week.”
This, to Felix, seemed an understatement of the merits of the situation.
For one thing, he had become very much attached to Clive, whose odd,
whimsical, theoretical conversation had a tang of its own; and this job
on the Chronicle yielded him the opportunity to enjoy Clive’s company,
though now on somewhat restricted terms.
Since Felix had become a reporter, taking his place as it were in the
ranks of a lower caste, he had begun to feel that his visits to the
editorial room were a kind of special privilege, which he endeavored to
justify by an occasional piece of writing suited to the editorial
page—some entertaining account of things seen in Chicago, the
by-products of his work as a reporter. Or, more likely, things not seen
at all, but pieced together out of his memory and hung on the slightest
thread of contemporary incident.... Once he attended a meeting of
“aurists,” and, with a reference to that meeting as a starting point,
meandered through a column of odd and curious lore about ears: the ear
as the organ of stability, by means of which we are enabled to stand
upright—with the story of the little crustacean which puts sand in its
ears, and upon whom some scientist played a mean trick, substituting
iron filings for the sand-grains, and then applying a magnet overhead,
with the result that the crustacean swam contentedly upside down!... In
short, anything that happened to interest him!
He discovered that these writings gave him a special standing among his
fellow-reporters. They had never ventured to aspire to the editorial
page. Nor would Felix have ventured, except that he knew from loafing
about the editorial room how welcome was an occasional column from the
outside. He still felt himself to be an intruder into a superior realm,
and he was grateful for those times, once or twice a week, when Clive
stopped beside his desk and suggested that they lunch together.
He had wondered at first how it was that Clive Bangs, with a passion for
ideas as intense as the one Felix had long been endeavoring to overcome
within himself, should be a successful editorial writer on Chicago’s
most conservative and respectable paper—and, for that matter, the valued
committeeman of two or three eminently practical and sober reform
organizations! Clive was not merely a moon-calf like himself; he was at
the same time a quite sane and work-a-day young Chicagoan.
The thought of such an adjustment to the world fascinated and tantalized
Felix. It held out for him the possibility of getting along successfully
without going through any such violent psychic revolution as he had
demanded of himself, Clive was inwardly an Anarchist, a Utopian, a
theorist and dreamer of the wildest sort; and outwardly something quite
other.
That outward quality was what Felix envied in Clive—that practical
adaptability to the world, so far beyond anything that seemed possible
for Felix himself to achieve. He would have given much for Clive’s ease
of manner, his ability to meet ordinary people on their own ground—as
for instance in discussing the Yale-Harvard game with a college boy and
an instant later local politics with a “reform” alderman who stopped in
turn by their table in the City Club. At such a moment Felix was struck
dumb; he felt like a child in the presence of grown-up people. Clive
seemed to him an infinitely superior being.
And yet this practical adaptability to human occasions was a trait upon
which Clive himself seemed to set no value. His easy worldliness—as
Felix thought it—was only one side of his character; and he preferred to
indulge the other side—the side that was fantastically idealistic.
Perhaps it was because Felix had felt obliged to carry all his theories
into practice, that some bounds had been set to his theorizing. No such
bounds existed for Clive Bangs. The most extreme ideas that Felix had
ever timidly cherished with regard to some free and happy society of the
future, were commonplaces to Clive. His speculations roved boldly into
Platonic, Nietzschean, and H. G. Wellsian spheres, and dwelt there as
among solid realities.
They talked chiefly of love—of love in the future.
Sometimes Felix, too much allured and disturbed, had to protest that
these were, after all, only dreams. One day at lunch Clive discoursed on
freedom in love until Felix felt constrained to point out that human
nature being what it is, jealousy—whether one liked it or not—was
nevertheless a fact.
“Oh, yes,” Clive laughed. “I realize that the red-haired young woman at
the settlement would find it difficult not to be jealous! In that sense,
of course jealousy is a fact, and has to be taken into consideration.
But we are free men at present, dealing with ideas, not with Jane and
Sue—and as free men we are at liberty to inquire what kind of fact
jealousy is. Witchcraft, too, was a fact—soberly attested by the
greatest thinkers of the age. Anybody who didn’t believe in witchcraft
was crazy, just like you and I. And jealousy is the same kind of fact—a
socially-created fact. People are persuaded that it exists—that under
certain circumstances it must exist. That’s all. How would I know when
to be jealous, except that I am carefully taught what my rights of
possession are and when they are infringed? It’s the old barbaric code,
still handed down in talk and writing. And that’s why I am interested in
the development of a new kind of talk and writing.”
It was specifically as this “new kind of talk and writing” that Clive
discussed modern literature. He repudiated any preoccupation with
literature as an art. It was to him a kind of social dynamics. It had
been used to build up through the ages a vast system of “taboos”—and now
it was being used to break them down again. In this work of social
iconoclasm the chiefs were H. G. Wells, Shaw and Galsworthy—with
Meredith as a breathless and stammering forerunner and Hardy as a blind
prophet....
“Do you suppose the public knows what they are really up to?” Felix
asked doubtfully.
“No. And it would hang them if it did. But fiction cuts deeper than any
kind of argument. And it’s doing its work. Wait ten years.... The new
younger generation won’t be like us, Felix—content to orate about these
matters at luncheon. They will despise us, Felix! They will say we did
nothing but talk.”
“Quite right, too,” said Felix.
“They will have heard our talk—talk—talk, and they will be sick of it.
They will be all for action. And you and I, Felix, who will then be
respectably married, you to your settlement Egeria and I to God knows
whom, will be shocked at the younger generation. We will remember how
prayerfully we planned to be unconventional, in what a mood of
far-seeing social righteousness we went about breaking the commandments,
and how, after all, we stopped on the way to discuss the matter more
thoroughly, and ended by never doing anything at all—and we will be
disgusted by the light-minded frivolity of those youngsters. Even our
novels—instead of corrupting the youth of the land as we hope!—will
probably be regarded by them as hopelessly old-fashioned. If we ever
actually write them....”
When he had reached that point in the discussion, Clive would become
silent and sullen. “If I only had the energy to write!” he would
complain bitterly.
He had been brooding over a novel for four years, and had not yet
written a word of it.... They had long talks about that unwritten novel
which was to corrupt the younger generation.
2
At Community House, Felix was having difficulties with his class. Not
that they were lacking in enthusiasm; on the contrary, their enthusiasm
carried him in directions where he had no intention of going. At the
outset, he had conceived English composition to be a simple matter.
Perhaps it might have been for children; but these young people of
eighteen were already convinced of its difficulties, and haggled over
semicolons. They wanted to know the “rules” by the observance of which
one became a good writer!
Felix presently gave up prose as too hard to teach, and started in upon
verse, with greater success. Yet when it came to explaining why _love_
and _rove_ are technically correct rhymes, and _young_ and _son_ no
rhymes at all, he was nonplussed. Very soon the class had hit upon a
mode which was neither verse nor prose—a kind of free verse. It was
quite other than Felix had any wish to encourage anybody to write. He
doubted if the writing of free verse would ever enable them to
appreciate the Ode to a Nightingale. But he was helpless in the
situation, and could only let them go ahead.
His conception of verse was precisely that it was not free; he had
thought that the pains and pleasures of rhyme and metre would give them
a creative understanding of English poetry. This free verse of theirs
seemed to him utterly unrelated to the tradition into which he sought to
give them an insight. It was very free verse indeed—it mixed its
metaphors recklessly, it soared into realms of vague emotion. And when
its meaning was at all clear, it carried the burden of a hopeless
reproach against circumstance, and a plaintive yearning for it knew not
what. Felix fiercely disliked this plaintive hopelessness, and preached
scornfully at his class. They seemed to be impressed; but they continued
as before.
“I can’t believe you really feel like that,” he said to a merry-faced
young Jewess who had just read aloud a poem full of world-sorrow.
She looked offended. “But I do!” she cried. “If you only knew!” and she
put her hand expressively to her bosom.
“My God!” he said. “What a broken-hearted crowd!”
There was a quick burst of laughter, and then a girl spoke up. “But Mr.
Fay, do you not think we _feel_?”
“I know you feel unhappy. But don’t you ever feel anything else? Don’t
you ever have a good time? Or don’t you think good times are worth
writing about?”
“Did Keats and Shelley write about their good times?” asked an ironical
youth.
“Yes,” said Felix defiantly. “They wrote about lucent syrops tinct with
cinnamon, and skylarks, and things like that; and they loved them to
begin with—that was why they wrote about them. Don’t you love
anything—anything that is right on hand to be loved—babies, or pet
kittens, or pretty clothes, or pretty girls? Are you always pining for
something you haven’t got?”
“Always!” two or three of them responded impressively in chorus.
“_The desire of the moth for the star_,” the ironical young man
contributed.
“See here,” said Felix. “Shelley was a young aristocrat with an income,
living luxuriously in Italy, and he could afford to be unhappy.” They
laughed, but Felix went on earnestly. “He could afford to be devoted to
something afar from the sphere of his sorrow, because his sorrow
consisted of the fact that after eloping with two girls, he couldn’t
elope with a third and have a perfectly clear conscience. Added to the
fact that he knew, if he did, he would be tired of her in a few weeks
anyway. He had tried it before, and he knew. That was what Shelley’s
sorrow was all about, and if any one here present is in the same
situation, I grant that he is entitled to feel that the desire for
happiness is the desire of the moth for the star. But for ordinary
mortals like ourselves, happiness is no such impossible thing. It is not
the desire of the moth for the star, but—” he hesitated, and the
ironical youth broke in with:
“The desire of the moth for the candle-flame!”
“And suppose that it is!” said Felix. “What is life anyway, except a
burning of ourselves up in action? Only I don’t see why you prefer such
tragic figures of speech. Why not—”
The ironical youth interrupted again: “The desire of the caterpillar for
the cabbage-leaf!”
“I give you up!” said Felix.
But he learned from Rose-Ann that his class was considered by the
residents a real success. And fat old Mrs. Perk, one evening at the tiny
theatre, said to him: “I hear you’re making poets out of the boys and
girls. They say you’re a grand teacher!”
It was very odd: it seemed to make no difference that they could not
take what he wanted to give them, or that he did not want to give them
what they were getting; the class was a success anyway!
“Who was telling you?” he asked.
“That David Arenstein,” she told him. “The one that always used to be
talking about committing suicide.” David was the ironical youth who had
quoted Shelley at him. “But he’s far from committing suicide now—” and
she smiled her comfortable smile. “He’s going to be married. Oh, yes, he
comes and tells me all his troubles.”
Felix laughed. “I hope he doesn’t hold me to blame!”
She shook her head. “Well, you’ll be getting married yourself, pretty
soon, I suppose?”
He did not venture to challenge her as to whom. But he said, “What in
the world makes you think that?”
“Oh,” she said, “young folks do, sooner or later, I’ve noticed.”
3
It was nonsense, of course. He was in no position to think about such
things, at all. And as for Rose-Ann, he had in the course of weeks
become as it were acclimated to her loveliness, so that it no longer
tormented him as at first. He was secretly proud of his
imperturbability. And if Rose-Ann’s companionship had lately grown more
disturbing than ever, it was for a very different reason. It was because
of her flattering and at the same time annoying expectations of him as
an artist—a poet—a creator. He attempted to deny any pretensions of this
sort; he tried to evade any discussion of art at all. But they had
formed the habit of going to the theater together, and he found it
impossible to resist talking with her about how plays should be written.
“Why don’t you write a really-and-truly play?” she asked, one night on
their way back to the Community House.
He attempted to turn the question aside. “Hawkins is writing one,
according to office gossip,” he said. Hawkins was the young dramatic
critic of the Chronicle.
“Well, if Hawkins can write a play—!” she said.
“All right,” he assented cheerfully, “I’ll wait and see if Hawkins can!”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You know what I think, Felix?”
“I never have any idea what you’re going to think. What is it this
time?”
“I think you’ve had your feelings hurt, somehow, back where you came
from. In regard to writing. Something has made you afraid to show what
you can do.”
There was something quaintly maternal in her manner which almost took
the sting out of that word _afraid_. But Felix hardened. “Well, why
don’t _you_ write a play?” he countered.
“Don’t be brutal, Felix. You know—and I know—that I’m not up to it. I
can do little things. I can’t do a big thing. And you can.”
“It’s nice of you to be so sure, Rose-Ann. But I’m not. Or rather, I’m
pretty sure I _can’t_. So there.”
“Why do you say that? It’s not true, and you know it.”
He wished Rose-Ann had not become so serious. They were walking home
through one of the first winter snows. A little while ago she had thrown
a fluffy snowball at him, and threatened to wash his face, reproaching
him for not being enough of a child. This was even more embarrassing. He
had an absurd fear that she would commence to talk to him about his
soul.... This was coming dangerously near to it. He scuffed up the soft
snow with his feet, while she looked sidewise at him waiting for a
reply.
“Rose-Ann, you make me uncomfortable,” he said at last. “This business
of having some one ‘believe’ in you isn’t what it’s cracked up to be in
the romances. It—it’s a damned nuisance. I’d be perfectly happy if you
didn’t come to me with your preposterous demands. I’m not the young
genius in ‘The Divine Fire.’ I’m a reporter on a Chicago newspaper. Of
course I want to write a play. Every young reporter wants to, I suppose.
And of course, since you insist upon it, I think I could. But what of
that? Every young reporter thinks the same thing.”
“Why this pretence of modesty, Felix? You’re scared, that’s all.”
“Scared of what?” he demanded angrily.
She answered slowly, as though she had just discovered the reason. “Of
letting people know your real ambitions.”
“Of making a silly fool of myself,” he muttered.
“But where’s the harm?” she continued. “Suppose they did know? Suppose
everybody knew all your secret dreams? Would that be so terrible? Do you
think everybody is watching you, ready to laugh at you? You’re afraid of
being laughed at, that’s the trouble.... Well, I know your secret,
Felix, and I don’t laugh.”
He shrugged his shoulders. It was intolerable that she should think she
knew his secret. “What if I do want to write plays? I want to write
novels, and poems, and lots of other things. And if I had nothing else
to do, perhaps I’d try my hand at them all. But my main concern now is
to make a living.”
“Still worried about your job? Not really?”
“Yes, really. How do I know how long this fool stunt of mine is going to
please the Chronicle? I haven’t done a single piece of straight
reporting since I’ve been on the paper. And I know no more of the real
Chicago—”
“Felix, you _are_ absurd!”
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