"You know--if you should tell anyone, I might lose my position. I don't
care for myself--but be careful on her account. Goodnight."
He turned away before I could protest. His calling me back is the one
cloud on my memory of him. His secret was safe.
For the rest of the school year I gave my undivided attention to
baseball. The doctor was uniformly gruff to me. We did not have
another talk.
Two weeks before the school closed he disappeared. I knew that she had
died, he would not have deserted his post while her need lasted. On
Commencement Day, John, the apple-man, handed me a letter from him. I
tore it up carefully after reading it, as he asked--threw the fragments
out of the window of the train which was carrying me homeward. There
was much to help me to clear thinking in that letter, but the most
important part was advice about how to act towards the Father. "Don't
tell him your doubts now. It would only distress him. Wait till you're
grown up before you quarrel with him."
*II*
Nothing of moment happened in the weeks I spent in camp meeting that
summer. Luckily Mary was not there and Oliver, having finished the
Seminary, was passing some months in Europe. I bore in mind the
Doctor's advice, avoided all arguments and mechanically observed the
forms of that religious community. No one suspected my godlessness, but
I suspected everyone of hypocrisy. It was a barren time of deceit.
Even my correspondence with Margot gave me no pleasure. I could not
write to her about my doubts, but I wanted very much to talk them over
with her. While I could not put down on paper what was uppermost in my
heart, I found it very hard to fill letters with less important things.
Whenever I have been less than frank, I have always found it dolefully
unsatisfactory.
I imagine that most thoughtful boys of my generation were horribly
alone. It is getting more the custom nowadays for adults to be friends
with children. The Doctor at school was the only man in whom I had ever
confided. And in my loneliness I looked forward eagerly to long talks
with Margot. I supposed that love meant understanding.
The serious sickness of the Mother took us home before the summer was
ended. I had not been especially unhappy there during my childhood, but
now that I had seen other pleasanter homes, my own seemed cruelly
cheerless. Its gloom was intensified because the Mother was dying. I
had had no special love for her but the thing was made harder for me by
my lack of sympathy with their religious conventions. It was imperative
that they should not question God's will. The Mother did not want to
die. The Father was, I am sure, broken-hearted at the thought of losing
her. They kept up a brave attitude--to me it seemed a hollow
pretense--that God was being very good to them, that he was releasing
her from the bondage of life, calling her to joy unspeakable. However
much she was attached to things known--the Father, her absent son, the
graves of her other children, the homely things of the parsonage, the
few pieces of inherited silver, the familiar chairs--it was incumbent on
her to appear glad to go out into the unknown.
It was my first encounter with death. How strange it is that the
greatest of all commonplaces should always surprise us! What twist in
our brains is it, that makes us try so desperately to ignore death? The
doctors of philosophy juggle words over their _Erkenntnis
Theorie_--trying to discover the confines of human knowledge, trying to
decide for us what things are knowable and what we may not know--but
above all their prattle, the fact of death stands out as one thing we
all do know. Whether our temperaments incline us to reverence pure
reason or to accept empirical knowledge, we know, beyond cavil, that we
must surely die. Yet what an amazing amount of mental energy we expend
in trying to forget it. The result? We are all surprised and unnerved
when this commonplace occurs.
Christianity claims to have conquered death. For the elect, the Father
taught, it is a joyous awakening. The people of the church scrupulously
went through the forms which their creed imposed. Who can tell the
reality of their thoughts? There is some validity in the theory of
psychology which says that if you strike a man, you become angry; that
if you laugh, it makes you glad. I would not now deny that they got
some comfort from their attitude. But at the time, tossing about in my
stormy sea of doubts, it seemed to me that they were all afraid. Just
as well disciplined troops will wheel and mark time and ground arms, go
through all the familiar manoeuvres of the parade ground, while the
shells of the enemy sweep their ranks with cold fear, so it seemed to me
that these soldiers of Christ were performing rites for which they had
lost all heart in an effort to convince themselves that they were not
afraid.
A great tenderness and pity came to me for the Mother. As I have said
there had been little affection between us. All her love had gone out
to Oliver. Yet in those last days, when she was so helpless, it seemed
to comfort her if I sat by her bed-side and stroked her hand. Some
mystic sympathy sprang up between us and she felt no need of pretense
before me. I sat there and watched sorrow on her face, hopeless grief,
yes, and sometimes rebellion and fear. But with brave loyalty she hid
it all when the Father came into the room, dried her tears and talked of
the joy that was set before her.
There was also a sorrow of my own. Disillusionment had come to me from
Margot. Why I had expected that she would sympathize with and
understand my doubts, I do not know. It was a wild enough dream.
The first night at home I went to see her. The family crowded about
with many questions. Al was attending a southern military academy and
there were endless comparisons to be made between his school and mine.
But at last Margot and I got free of them and off by ourselves in an
arbor. She seemed older than I, the maturity which had come to her in
these two years startled me. But I blurted out my troubles without
preface.
"Margot," I said, "Do you believe everything in the Bible?"
I suppose she was expecting some word of love. Two years before, when I
had left her, I had kissed her. And now----
"Of course," she said, in surprise.
If she had doubted one jot or tittle of it, I might have been content.
Her unthinking acceptation of it all angered me.
"I don't," I growled.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean what I say. I don't believe in the Bible."
I remember so well how she looked--there in the arbor, where she had led
me--her eyes wide with surprise and fear. I thought she looked stupid.
"I don't believe in God," I went on.
I expected her to take this announcement quietly. But two years before I
had never heard of men who doubted the existence of God, except, of
course, the benighted heathen. Margot's hair is almost white now, but I
suppose that in all her life, I am the only person she has heard
question the teachings of the church.
Now I realize the extent of my folly in expecting that she would
understand. The two years I had been away had changed everything for
me, even the meaning of the words I used. I had been out in a wider
world than hers, had begun to meet the minds of men who thought. In
that little mountain village, a second rate, rather mushy-brained rector
had been her intellectual guide. It was insane for me to think she
would sympathize with me. And yet, because I loved her, I did. I was
only eighteen.
How the fright grew in her eyes as I went on declaiming my unbeliefs!
"It's wicked--what you are saying."
"It's true. Is truth wicked?"
"I won't listen to you any more."
She got up. Suddenly I realized that I was losing her.
"Margot," I pleaded, "you mustn't go. We're going to get married. I've
got to tell you what I think."
"I'll never marry a man who doesn't believe in God."
We were both very heroic. There was no older, wiser person there to
laugh at us. So we stood and glared at each other. She waited some
minutes for me to recant. I could not. Then two tears started down her
cheeks. I wanted desperately to say something, but there were tears in
my eyes also and no words would come. She turned and walked away. I
could not believe it. I do not know how long I waited for her to come
back. At last I went home.
Sullen, bitter days followed. I suppose she hoped, as I did, that some
way would be found to restore peace. But neither of us knew how.
If I might have my way, I would first of all arrange life so that boys
should escape such crises. Sooner or later, I suppose, every human
being comes to a point where to compromise means utter damnation. But if
I could remould this "sorry scheme of things," I would see that this
portentous moment did not come till maturity. A Frenchman has said that
after thirty we all become cynics. It is a vicious saying, but holds a
tiny grain of truth. As we get older we become indifferent, cynical, in
regard to phrases. The tragedy of youth is that it rarely sees beyond
words. And of all futilities, it seems to me that quarrels over the
terms with which we strive to express our mysticism--our religion, if
you will--are the most futile. At eighteen I let a tangle of words
crash into, smash, my love. Youth is cruel--above all to itself.
The mother's funeral seemed to me strangely unreal. It was hard to find
the expected tears, and the black mourning clothes were abhorrent. I
felt that I was imprisoned in some foul dungeon and was stifling for
lack of air.
Release came with time for me to start to College. There was a lump in
my throat as I climbed into the buckboard, beside the negro boy who was
to drive me down to the county seat for the midnight train. The Father
reached up and shook my hand and hoped that the Lord would have me in
His keeping and then we turned out through the gate into the main
street. I saw the Father standing alone in the doorway and I knew he was
praying for me. I felt that I would never come back. I was sorry for
the Father in the big empty house, but I had no personal regret, except
Margot. The memory of the former leave-taking, how with her I had found
the first realization of love, the first vague sensing of the mystic
forces of life, came back to me sharply. All through the two years she
had been a constant point in my thinking. I had not mooned about her
sentimentally, more often than not, in the rush of work or play, I had
not thought of her at all. But the vision of her had always been there,
back in the holy of holies of my brain, a thing which was not to change
nor fade.
The Episcopal Church was lit up, as we drove by I could hear some
laughter. I knew they were decorating it for a wedding. Margot would
be there, for she was one of the bride's maids. As soon as we were out
of the village I told the negro boy I had forgotten something and
jumping out, I walked back into the woods and circled round to the side
of the church. I put a board up under a window and looked in. There
were other people there, but I saw only Margot. She was sitting apart
from the laughter, weaving a wreath of ground-pine for the lectern. Her
face was very sad. Of course she knew I was going away, everyone knows
such things in a little village. But she held her head high. If I had
called her out onto the steps, she would have asked me once more to
recant. I knew it was irrevocable. The fates had made us too proud.
I slipped down from my perch and made my way back to the buckboard.
There was a wild west wind blowing, it howled and shrieked through the
pines and I caught some of its fierce exultation. The summer had been
bitter beyond words. The full life before me called, the life without
need of hypocrisy.
When at last I was on the train, and felt the jar as it started, I
walked forward into the smoking car. As a symbol of my new liberty, as
reverently as if it had been a sacrament to the Goddess of Reason, I lit
a cigarette. The tears were very close to my eyes as I sat there and
smoked. But the pride of martyrdom held them back. Was I not giving up
even Margot for the Cause of Truth?
*III*
The College was set on a hill top, overlooking a broad fair valley.
There was none of the rugged grandeur of our Tennessee Mountains, it was
a softer landscape than my home country offered. But the greatest
difference lay in the close packed, well tilled fields. Here and there
were patches of woods, but no forest. It was an agricultural country.
If I should set out to construct a heaven, I would build it on the lines
of that old campus. Whenever nowadays I am utterly tired and long for
rest, the vision comes to me of those ivy grown buildings and the rows
of scrawny poplars. It is my symbol for light-hearted joy and
contentment. The doleful shadow of my home did not reach so far, and I
was more carefree there than I have ever been elsewhere.
I joined heartily in the student life, played a fair game of football
and excelled in the new game of tennis. There is a period at the end of
adolescence when if ever, you feel an exuberance of animal well-being,
when it is a pride to be able to lift a heavier weight than your
neighbor, when it is a joy to feel your muscles ache with fatigue, when
your whole being is opening up to a new sensation for which you know no
name. I remember glorious tramps in the deep winter snow, as I look back
on them I know that the thrilling zest, which then seemed to me
intimately connected with the muscles of my thighs and back, was the
dawning realization of the sheer beauty of the world. I spent this
period at college. I suppose that is why I love the place.
From the first only one subject of study interested me. It was not on
the freshman year's curriculum. By some twist of fate "Anglo-Saxon"
appealed to me vividly. I suppose it was an outgrowth from my boyish
fondness for Malory's "Morte d'Arthur." In the library I found many
books in the crabbed Old English of the earliest chronicles. They still
seem to me the most fascinating which have ever been written. I
deciphered some of them with ease. Before I could get the meat out of
the others I had to master a grammar of Anglo-Saxon. All my spare
moments were spent among the shelves. My classroom work was poorly
done. But among the books I came into close contact with Professor
Meer, the librarian and head of the English Literature Department. His
specialty was Chaucer, but my interest ran back to an even earlier date.
He was my second adult friend and many an evening I spent in his home.
But our talk was always of literature rather than of life, of the very
early days, when there were no traditions nor conventions and each
writer was also a discoverer.
A phase of life which had never before troubled me began to occupy
considerable of my thought. My attention was drawn to the women
question by the talk of the football men. There were two very distinct
groups among the athletes; the Y.M.C.A. men and the others. It was
inevitable that I should feel hostile to the former. They used the
phrases, spoke the language of the Camp Meeting. With great pain and
travail I had fought my way free from all that. Many of them were
perhaps estimable fellows, I do not know. I did not get well acquainted
with any of them. But I was surprised to find myself often ill at ease
with the others. Their talk was full of vague hints which I seldom
understood. They had come to college very much more sophisticated than
I. In the quest for manly wisdom, I read a book on sex-matters, which I
found in my fraternity house.
It taught me very little. I have seen dozens of such books since and I
cannot understand the spirit in which they are written. In the effort
to be clean spirited and scientific the authors have fallen over
backwards and have told their readers almost nothing at all. It was
like a book which described the mechanism of a printing press without
one word about its use or place in life. A printing press is a very
lifeless thing unless one has some comprehension that not so much in
itself but in its vast utility it is the most wonderful thing which man
has made. The book which fell into my hands, described in detail, in
cold blooded and rather revolting phraseology, the physiology of sex,
but it gave no hint of its psychologic or social significance, it did
not even remotely suggest that sooner or later everyone who read it
would have to deal with sex as a problem of personal ethics. It was a
poor manual for one just entering manhood.
I had never been told anything about sex. I judged from the witticisms
of the gymnasium that the others had discussed these matters a great
deal in their preparatory schools. And with the added knowledge of
later years, I am persuaded that my school had been unusually clean
spirited. I never heard the boys talking of such things, and if any of
them were getting into bad habits, they did it privately.
These college men boasted. Of course I hid my ignorance with shame. As
the football season wore on the talk became more explicit. Some of the
team, after the Thanksgiving Day game, with our rival college, which
ended the season, were "going into town to raise hell." The Y.M.C.A.
men expected to "come right home." A week or so before the last game,
Bainbridge, our captain and a senior, showed some of us a letter which a
girl in town had written him. The other fellows who saw the letter
thought it hilariously funny. To me it seemed strange and curious. A
woman, who could have written it was something entirely foreign to my
experience.
Thanksgiving night--we had won the game--all of us, but the Y.M.C.A.
men, went into town for a dinner and celebration. I happened to be the
only man from my fraternity on the football team, and, when the dinner
broke up, I found myself alone. My head was swimming a bit and I
remember walking down the main street, trying to recall whether or not I
had decided to launch out on this woman adventure. I was sure I had not
expected to be left to my own resources. I was making my way towards
the station to catch a train back to college, when I fell in with some
of the fellows. They annexed me at once. Down the street we went,
roaring out the Battle Cry of Freedom. They had an objective but every
barroom we passed distracted their attention. It was the first time I
had ever approached the frontier of sobriety--that night I went far over
the line. Out of the muddle of it all, I remember being persuaded to
climb some dark stairs and being suddenly sobered by the sight of a
roomful of women. I may have been so befuddled that I am doing them an
injustice, but no women ever seemed to me so nauseatingly ugly. Despite
the protest of my friends, I bolted.
It is not a pleasant experience to relate, but it kept me from what
might easily have been worse. I had missed the last train. Not wanting
to spend the night in a hotel, nor to meet my fellows on the morning
train, I walked the ten miles out to college. Somehow the sight of
those abhorrent women had driven all the fumes of alcohol from my brain.
In the cold, crisp night, under the low hanging lights of heaven, I felt
myself more clear minded than usual. As sharply as the stars shone
overhead, I realized that I had no business with such debauch. It was
not that I took any resolution, only I understood beyond question that
such things had no attraction to me.
It is something I do not understand. The Father had taught me that many
things were sinful. But I do not think there was anything in my
training to lead me to feel that drunkenness and debauch were any worse
than card-playing. Yet I learned to play poker with a light heart. It
was the same with theatre going and dancing. He had very much oftener
warned me against these things than against drunkenness. The best
explanation I can find, although it does not entirely satisfy me, is
that vulgar debauch shocked some aesthetic, rather than moral instinct.
It was not the thought of sin which had driven me to run away from those
women, but their appalling ugliness.
Towards the end of the spring term, the long-delayed quarrel with the
Father came to a head. I forget the exact cause of the smash-up,
perhaps it was smoking. I am sure it commenced over some such lesser
thing. But once the breach was open there was no chance of patching it
up. In the half dozen letters which passed between us, I professed my
heresies with voluminous underlinings. I had only one idea, to finish
forever with pretense and hypocrisy.
I was foolish--and cruel. I did not appreciate the Father's love for
me, nor realize his limitations. He was sure he was right. His whole
intellectual system was based on an abiding faith. From the viewpoint
of the new Pragmatic philosophy, he had tested his "truth" by a long
life and had found it good. Perhaps in his earlier days he had
encountered skepticism, but since early manhood, since he had taken up
his pastorate, all his association had been with people who were
mentally his inferiors. He was more than a "parson," he was the
wise-man, not only of our little village, but of the country side. All
through the mountains his word carried conclusive weight. Inevitably he
had become cock-sure and dogmatic. It was humanly impossible for him to
argue with a youth like me.
In my narrow, bitter youth, I could not see this. I might have granted
his sincerity, if he had granted mine. But for him to assume that I
loved vice because I doubted certain dogma, looked to me like cant. But
the men he knew, who were not "professing Christians," were drunkards or
worse. He really believed that Robert Ingersoll was a man of
unspeakable depravity. He could not conceive of a man leading an upright
life without the aid of Christ. Peace between us was impossible. His
ultimatum was an effort to starve me into repentance. "My income," he
wrote, "comes from believers who contribute their mites for the carrying
on of the work of Christ. It would be a sin to allow you to squander it
on riotous living."
So my college course came to an end.
*IV*
In one regard the fairies who attended my christening were marvelously
kind to me. They gave me the gift of friends. It is the thing above
all others which makes me reverent, makes me wish for a god to thank.
There is no equity in the matter. I am convinced that it is what the
Father would have called "an act of grace." Always, in every crisis,
whenever the need has arisen, a friend has stepped beside me to help me
through.
So it was when the Father cut off my allowance. Utterly ignorant of the
life outside, I was not so frightened by my sudden pennilessness as I
should have been, as I would be to-day. Work was found for me. My
friend, Prof. Meers discovered that he needed an assistant to help him
on a bibliography which he was preparing. He offered me a modest
salary--enough to live comfortably. So I stayed on in the college town,
living in the fraternity house.
The library work interested me more than my study had done. Even the
routine detail of it was not bad and I had much time to spend on the Old
English which fascinated me. I was not ambitious and would have been
content to spend my life in that peaceful, pleasant town. But Prof.
Meers had other plans for me. Back of my indolent interest in old
books, he was optimistic enough to see a promise of great scholarship.
He was better as a critic of literature than as a judge of men. He
continually made plans for me. I paid scant attention to them until
almost a year had passed and we were beginning to see the end of the
work he could offer me. I began to speculate with more interest about
what I would do next.
Without telling me about it, Prof. Meers wrote to the head of a New York
Library, whom he knew and secured a position for me. When he received
the news he came to me with a more definite plan than I would ever have
been able to work out for myself. He knew that a certain publishing
house wanted to bring out a text book edition of "Ralph Roister
Doister." He had given them my name and I was to prepare the manuscript
during my free hours. This he told me would not bring me much money,
but some reputation and would make it easier for him to find other
openings for me, where I could develop my taste for Old English. I
caught some of his enthusiasm and set out for my new work with high
hopes.
Of my first weeks in the city there is little memory left except of a
disheartening search for a place to live. After much tramping about I
took a forlorn hall bedroom in a not over peaceful family. The quest
for an eating place was equally unsatisfactory.
In the library I was put to uninteresting work in the Juvenile
Department. But there, handling books in words of one syllable, I found
a new and disturbing outlook on life. There was more jealousy than
friendship among my fellow employees. The chances of advancement were
few, the competition keen--and new to me. I did not understand the
hostility, which underlies the struggle for a living. Once I remember I
found a carefully compiled sheet of figures, which I had prepared for my
monthly report, torn to bits in my waste paper basket. Another time
some advice, which I afterwards discovered to have been intentionally
misleading, sent me off on a wild goose chase, wasted half a day and
brought me a reprimand from the chief. Such things were
incomprehensible to me at first. It took some time to realize that the
people about me were afraid of me, afraid that I might win favor and be
advanced over their heads. I resented their attitude, but gradually, by
a word dropped here and there, I learned how a dollar a week more or
less was a very vital matter to most of them. One girl in my department
had a mother to support and was trying desperately to keep a brother in
school. There was a man whose wife was sick, the doctor's and
druggist's bills were a constant terror to him. Very likely if I had
been in their place, I would have done the little, mean things they did.
Life began to wear a new aspect of sombreness to me. I could not hope
for advancement without trampling on someone.
By temperament I was utterly unfitted for this struggle. My desire for
life was so weak that such shameful, petty hostilities seemed an
exorbitant price to pay for it. I would much rather not have been born
than struggle in this manner to live. I began to look about eagerly for
some other employment. But I could find none which did not bear the
same taint.
However it was there in that library that I encountered Norman Benson.
He was near ten years older than I, tall and loose jointed. His face,
very heavily lined, reminded me of our Tennessee mountaineers. But the
resemblance went no farther. He was a city product, bred in luxury and
wealth. He was variously described by the people of the library as "a
saint," "a freak," "a philanthropist," "a crank." The chief called him
"a bore." He was the idol of the small boys who ran errands for us and
put the books back on the shelves. He gave them fat Egyptian cigarettes
out of his silver case, to their immense delight and to the immense
horror of Miss Dilly, who had the boys in charge.
His hobby, as he soon explained to me, was "a circulating library that
really circulates." He had a strange language, a background of Harvard
English, a foreground of picturesque slang--all illumined by flashes of
weird profanity. Of course I cannot recall his words, but his manner of
speaking I shall never forget.
"They call this a circulating library," he would shout. "Hell! It
never moves an inch. It's stationary! Instead of going out around the
town, it sits here and waits for people to come. And the people don't
come. Not on your life! Only a few have the nerve to face out all this
imposing architecture and red-tape. If there is anything to discourage
readers, they don't do it because they've been too stupid to think of
it. If a stranger comes in and asks for a book they treat him like a
crook. Ask him impertinent questions about his father's occupation.
Won't let him take a book unless he can get some tax-payer to promise to
pay for it if he steals it! What in thunder has that got to do with it?
Someone wants to read. They ought to send up an Hosanna! They ought to
go out like postmen, and leave a book at each door every morning.
Circulating? Rot!"
He had given his time and money for a year or two to bring about this
reform. At first he had met with cold indifference. But he stuck to
his point. He had put up his money as guarantees for any books which
might be lost. He had persuaded half a dozen or more school teachers to
distribute books among their scholars and the parents, paying them out
of his own pocket for the extra work. He had established branches in
several mission churches and in one or two saloons.
"That corpse of a librarian," he explained to me, "had the fool idea
that his job was to preserve books--to pickle them! I've been trying to
show him that every book he has on his shelves gathering dust, is money
wasted, that his job is to keep them moving. The city's books ought to
be in the homes of the tax-payers--not locked up in a library. The very
idea horrified him at first. He was afraid the books would get dirty.
Good Lord! What's the best end that can come to a book, I'd like to
know? It ought to fall to pieces from much reading. For a book to be
eaten by worms is a sin. I've been hammering at him, until he's
beginning to see the light. He don't cry any more if a book has to be
rebound."
Indeed, the "hammering" process had been effective. That year the chief
read a paper at the National Congress on "Library Extension." Of course
he took all the credit; boasted how the idea had come from his library
and so forth. But Benson cared not at all for that. His plan had been
accepted and he was content.
He interested me immensely. Why did a man with a large income spend his
time, rushing about trying to make people read books they did not care
enough for to come after? I could get no answer from him. He would
switch away from the question into a panegyric on reading. It was a
frequent expression of his that "reading is an invention of the last
half century."
"Of course," he would qualify, "the aristocracy has enjoyed reading much
longer. But the people? They've just learned how. The democratization
of books is the most momentous social event in the history of the world.
Think of it! More people read an editorial in the newspaper within
twenty-four hours than could possibly have read Shakespeare during his
entire life. There are dozens of single books which have had a larger
edition than all the imprints of Elizabethan literature put together.
Don't you see the immensity of it? It means that people all over the
world will be able to think of the same thing at the same time. It
means a social mind. Plato lived in his little corner of the world and
his teachings lived by word of mouth and manuscripts. Only a few people
could read them, fewer still could afford to buy them. 'Uncle Tom's
Cabin' swept across the country in a couple of years. Think how long it
took Christianity to spread--a couple of hundred miles a century. And
then think of the theory of evolution! It has captured the world in
less than a generation! That's what books mean. We're just entering the
epoch of human knowledge as compared to the old learning of individuals.
It's gigantic! Wonderful!"
Benson, like many another, took a liking to me. I was lonely enough in
that library. And finding no sympathy elsewhere, I improved every
opportunity to talk with him.
One evening he asked me to come home with him to dinner. I accepted
gladly, being more than tired of my pallid little room, and the sloppy
restaurant where I ate. An evening with this rich young man, seemed
attractive indeed. To my surprise he led the way to a downtown Bowery
car. I did not know the city well and I thought perhaps this dismal
street led to some fairer quarter. But the further we went the grimmer
became the neighborhood. It was my first visit to the slums.
We got off at Stanton Street. It is so familiar to me now--with its
dingy unloveliness, the squalor of its tenements, its crowding humanity,
and the wonder that people can laugh in such a place--that it is hard to
recall how it looked that first time. I think the thing which impressed
me most was the multitude of children. Clearest of all I remember
stepping over a filthy baby. It lay flat on its back, sucking an apple
core and stared up at me with a strange disinterestedness. It did not
seem to be afraid I would step on it. I wanted to stop and set the
youngster to one side, out of the way. But I felt that I would look
foolish. I did not know where to take hold of it. And Benson strode on
down the street without noticing it.
A couple of blocks further, we came to a dwelling house with flower
boxes in the windows. A brass-plate on the door bore the inscription,
"The Children's House." So I was introduced to the Social Settlement.
They were novelties in those days.
A tumult of youngsters swarmed about us as we entered. A sweet faced
young woman was trying to drive them out, explaining with good natured
vexation that they had over-stayed their time and would not go. They
clambered all over Benson, but somehow he was more successful than the
young woman in persuading them to go home. Her name, when Benson
introduced me, gave me a start. It recalled a fantastic newspaper story
of a millionaire's daughter who had left her diamonds and yachts to live
among the poor. I had supposed her some sallow-faced, nun-like
creature. I found her to be vibrantly alive, not at all a recluse.
The Settlement consisted of a front and rear tenement. The court
between had been turned into a pleasant garden. With the hollyhocks
along the walls and the brilliant beds of geraniums it was a strangely
beautiful place for that crowded district. The men's quarters were in
the back building. Benson had two rooms on the top floor, a small
monastic bedroom and a larger study. It surprised me more than the
courtyard. It was startling to find the atmosphere of a college
dormitory in the center of the slums. The books, the fencing foils, the
sofa-pillows in the window-seat--after my months in a furnished
room--made me homesick for my fraternity house.
Downstairs in the cheery dining room, I met the staff of "Residents."
The Rev. James Dawn, an Englishman, was the Head Worker. He was a
graduate of Oxford and had been associated with Arthur Toynbee in the
first London Settlement. His wife, also English, sat at the foot of the
table. Benson introduced me rapidly to the others. "Miss
Blake--District Nurse," "Miss Thompson--Kindergartner," "Long,
Instructor in Sociology in the University," "Dr. Platt--of the Health
Department." I did not begin to get the labels straight.
It was a very much better dinner than I could get in any restaurant,
better than the food I had had at College and school. But the thing
which impressed me most was the whizz of sharp, intellectual--often
witty--conversation. The discussion centered on one of the innumerable
municipal problems. I was ashamed of my inability to contribute to it.
It was to me a wonderfully attractive group of people. They enjoyed all
which seemed most desirable in college life and added to this was a
strange magnetic earnestness, I did not understand. I saw them relaxed.
But even in their after-dinner conversation, over their coffee cups and
cigarettes, there was an undercurrent of seriousness which hinted at
some vital contact with an unknown reality. I was like an Eskimo
looking at a watch, I could not comprehend what made the hands go round.
I could see their actions, but not the stimuli from which they reacted.
I knew nothing of misery.
That evening set my mind in a whirl. It was an utterly new world I had
seen. I had never thought of the slums except as a distressful place to
live. Stanton Street was revolting. I did not want to see it again.
And yet I could not shake myself free from the thought of it--of it and
of the strange group I had met in the Children's House. There seemed to
be something fateful about it, something I must look at without
flinching and try to understand.
On the other hand some self-defensive instinct made me try to forget it.
The distaste for the struggle for life which had come to me from
experiencing the petty jealousies of the library was turned into a dumb,
vague fear by the sight of the slum. I turned to "Ralph Roister
Doister"--on which I had made only listless progress--with a new ardor.
The only escape which I could see from perplexing problems of life lay
in a career of scholarship.
The Old English which had formerly been an amusement for me, now seemed
a means of salvation. When Benson next suggested that I spend the
evening with him, I excused myself on the ground of work.
But very often as I sat at my table, burning the midnight oil over that
century old farce, the vision of that baby of Stanton Street, sucking
the piece of garbage, came between me and my page. And I felt some
shame in trying to drive him away. It was as though a challenging
gauntlet had been thrown at my feet which I must needs pick up and face
out the fight, or commit some gross surrender. I tried to escape the
issue, with books.
*BOOK III*
*I*
Not long after this visit to the slums, when I had been in the city a
little more than a year, I received a new offer of employment, through
the kindness of Professor Meer. The work was to catalogue, and edit a
descriptive bibliography of a large collection of early English
manuscripts and pamphlets. A rich manufacturer of tin cans had bought
them and intended to give them to some college library.
It offered just the escape I was looking for. I wrote at once, in high
spirits, to accept it. However some cold water was thrown on my glee by
Norman Benson. He was my one friend in the library and I hastened to
tell him the good news. But when he read the letter he was far from
enthusiastic.
"Are you going to accept it?" he asked coldly.
"Of course," I replied, surprised at his tone. "I hardly hoped for such
luck, at least not for many years. It's a great chance."
"This really interests me," he said, laying down the books he was
carrying and sitting on my desk. "What earthly good," he went on, "do
you think it's going to do anyone to have you diddle about with these
old parchments?"
"Why. It----" I began glibly enough, but I was not prepared for the
question. And, realizing suddenly that I had not considered this aspect
of the case, I left my response unfinished.
"I haven't a bit of the scholastic temperament," he said, after having
waited long enough to let me try to find an answer. "It's just one of
the many things I don't understand. I wouldn't deny that any bit of
scholarship, however 'dry-as-dust,' may be of some use. I don't doubt
that a good case of this kind could be made for the study of medieval
literature. I don't say it's _absolutely_ useless. But _relatively_ it
seems--well--uninteresting to me. It's in the same class as astronomy.
You could study the stars till you were black in the face and you
wouldn't find anything wrong with them, and if you did you couldn't make
it right. Astronomy has been of some practical use to us, at least it
helps us regulate our watches. But how in the devil do you expect to
wring any usefulness out of Anglo-Saxon? Don't you want to be useful?"
His scorn for my specialty ruffled my temper.
"What would you suggest for me to do? Social-Settlement-ology?" I
replied with elaborate irony.
But if he caught the note of anger in my retort, he was too busy with
his own ideas to pay any attention to it. He got off the table and
paced up and down like a caged beast, as he always did when he was
wrestling with a problem. In a moment he came back and sat down.
"You don't answer my question," he said sharply. "You can stand on your
dignity and say I have no right to ask it. But that's rot! I'm serious
and I give you the credit of thinking you are. Now you propose to turn
your back on the world and go into a sort of monastery. This job is
just a beginning. You're making your choice between men and books,
between human thought that is alive and the kind that's been preserved
like mummies. Why? I ask. What is there in these old books which can
compare in interest to the life about us. Truth is not only stranger
than fiction, it is more dramatic, more comic, more tragic, more
beautiful. Even Shelley never wrote a lyric like some you can see with
your own eyes, perhaps feel. I like to know what makes people do things.
I'd like to know what makes you accept this offer. I assume that you
want to be useful to your day and generation. What utility do you hope
to serve in tabulating these old books, which nobody but a few savants
will ever read?"
I was entirely unprepared to answer his question. And I felt myself sink
in his estimation. Why was I reaching out for the life of a bookworm
with such eagerness? I understand now. I was a coward. I was still
sore from the wounds of my childish endeavor to comprehend God. I was
afraid of life. I was afraid of the little child sucking the apple core
on Stanton Street. The life about me, of which Benson spoke so
enthusiastically, seemed to me threatening. It evidently laid an
obligation of warfare on the people who entered it actively. I wanted
peace. Books seemed to me a sort of city of refuge.
My new employer, Mr. Perry, the tin-can man, was a strange type. He had
grown up in a fruit preserving industry and at thirty-odd he had
invented a method of crimping the tops onto cans, without the use of
solder. Good luck had given him an honest business partner and the
patent had made a fortune for both of them. When the first instalment of
royalties had come in, Perry had stopped stirring the kettle of
raspberry preserves and had not done a stroke of work since. At forty he
had built a "mansion" in the city and had gone in for politics. He
bought his way to a seat in the State Senate, only to find that it bored
him to extinction. After several other fads had proved uninteresting,
he had set his heart on a LL.D. A friend had advised him to donate a
valuable collection of books to some college.
He had sent a large check to a London dealer and this heterogeneous mass
had been the result. As his interest in the matter had been only
momentary he was decidedly penurious about it after the first outlay.
That, I suppose, is why I, instead of a recognized authority, was chosen
for the work. He had no idea what the catalogue should be like, and his
one instruction to me, was to make it "something scholarly."
There was in his monstrous mansion an apartment originally designed for
the children's tutor. But there had never been any children. These
quarters were given to me. There was a private entrance, a bedroom,
bath and study, where my meals were served, and there was a stairway
down to the library.
In the three years I worked for him I did not see him ten times. His
wife was dead, he lived away a good deal and, to my great satisfaction,
he never invited me to his bachelor parties--the reverberations of which
sometimes shook me out of sleep. Once every six months or so he would
bring an expert to look over my work. As they found no fault and he
could not understand it, he was convinced that it was scholarly.
It was a period of great content for me. The rut into which I fell was
deep indeed. I saw no one. Almost my only contact with others was by
mail. And my letters all related to my specialty. Eight full hours I
worked in the library. The architect had not expected Mr. Perry to do
much reading and, the windows being few, the room was gloomy. I had
often to use artificial light. At five I went for an hour's walk in the
park. At least this was my theory. But the least inclemency was an
excuse to take some manuscript up to my room, to my shaded lamp and open
fire. The daily eight hours on the catalogue was only a beginning. As
soon as I had finished my edition of "Ralph Roister-Doister," I began a
monograph on Anglo-Saxon Roots. My ambition was to win a fellowship in
an English University. By the time my catalogue was finished, I would
have enough money put by for a year or more of study in Oxford. My life
was mapped out.
*II*
The darkness came unexpectedly.
Sometimes my eyes had been tired, but I had not taken it seriously. One
afternoon, as I laid out a sheet of paper on the desk, the page was
suddenly obscured by a dancing spider-web--a dizzying contortion of
black and white--growing denser and denser. I clapped my hands over my
eyes and felt so sudden a relief I was afraid to take them away again.
I got up slowly and felt my way with my foot to an easy chair. How long
I sat there, my hands pressed hard against my eyes, I do not know. I
had read somewhere of a man going blind with just such symptoms. It was
fear unspeakable, fear that made me laugh. When one feels that the gods
are witty it is a bad sign.
I was suddenly calm. It was accepted. I thought for a few minutes, my
eyes still shut, and then felt my way to the telephone.
"Central," I said, and I remember that my voice was calm and
commonplace. "Will you give me the Eye and Ear Hospital? I can't look
up the number. I'm blind."
"Sure," came back the answer. "It must be hard to be blind."
A clutch came to my throat. It comes to me now as I write about it,
comes every time I hear people complaining that modern industry has
robbed our life of all humanity, has turned us into mechanisms. Such
talk makes me think of the sudden sympathy which came to me out of the
machine. Whenever I am utterly blue and discouraged, I go into a
telephone booth.
"Hello, Central," I say, "tell me something cheerful. I'm down on my
luck."
It has never failed. Always some joking sympathy has come out of the
machine and helped me to get right again.
When the doctor came, he looked a minute at my desk, at the whole
eye-straining mass of faded print and notes. He snapped on the electric
light.
"I suppose you work a lot in this fiendish glare?"
"I need a strong light," I said.
He grunted in disgust.
"This will hurt," he said, as he made me sit down near the electric
light, "but you've got to bear it."
He fixed a little mirror on his forehead and flashed the cruel ray into
my eye. Back somewhere in the brain it focussed and burned. The sweat
broke out all over me.
"Now the other eye."