As for Nora, I might very well have gone to my door and called to
her--she was at work somewhere on the floor below and would have
gladly come running to offer her woman’s sympathy to my hurt physical
self--but it was not my hurt physical self that I thought wanted
attention. As far as that is concerned I was then, as I have been all
my life, not so much concerned with the matter of physical discomfort
or pain. Always it has been true of me that a framed water lily on a
wall or a walk in a factory street can hurt me worse than a blow on the
jaw and long afterward when I became a scribbler of tales I was able
to take advantage of this peculiarity of my nature to do my work under
conditions that would have disheartened a more physically sensitive
man. As I was destined to live most of my life and do most of my work
in factory towns and in little, ill-smelling, hideously-furnished
rooms, freezing cold in winter and hot and cheerless in summer, it
turned out to be a good and convenient trait in me and in the end I
had so trained myself to forget my surroundings that I could sit for
hours lost in my own thoughts and dreams, or scribbling oftentimes
meaningless sentences in a cold room in a factory street, on a log
beside some country road, in a railroad station or in the lobby of some
large hotel, filled with the hurrying hustling figures of business men,
totally unconscious of my surroundings, until my mood had worn itself
out and I had sunk into one of the moods of depression common, I think,
to all such fellows as myself. Never was such an almighty scribbler as
I later became and am even now. Ink, paper and pencils are cheap in
our day and I have taken full advantage of that fact and have during
some years written hundreds of thousands of words which have afterward
been thrown away. Many have told me, in print or by word of mouth, that
all should have been thrown away and they may be right, but I am one
who loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight
of a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with words
always gladdens me. The result of the scribbling, the tale of perfect
balance, all the elements of the tale understood, an infinite number of
minute adjustments perfectly made, the power of self-criticism fully at
work, the shifting surface of word values and color in full play, form
and the rhythmic flow of thought and mood marching forward with the
sentences--these are things of a dream, of a far dim day toward which
one goes knowing one can never arrive but infinitely glad to be on
the road. It is the story I dare say of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and
the sloughs and sink holes on the road are many but the tale of that
journey is known to other men than scribblers.
The consolation of ink and paper came, however, long after the time
with which I am now concerned, and what a consolation it is! How much
easier it is to sit in a room before a desk and with paper before one
to describe a fight between oneself as hero of some tale and five or
six burly ruffians than with the fists to dispose of one baseball
player on the platform of a warehouse.
In the tale one can do any such job as it should be done and in the
doing give satisfaction both to oneself and the possible reader, for
the reader will always share in the emotions of the hero and gloat with
him over his victories. In the tale, as you will understand, all is
in order. The feint and the cross, the powerful left to the jaw, the
golden smile, the shifting movements of the shoulders that confuse and
disconcert the opponent, all work like well-oiled machines. One defeats
not one baseball player or ruffian of the city streets but a dozen if
the need arises. Oh, what glorious times I have had, sitting in little
rooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood have
run from the wounds of the villains, foolish enough to oppose me on the
field of honor; what fair women I have loved and how they have loved
me and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, open-hearted and fine I
have been! I remember how I sat in the back room of a small bootlegging
establishment at Mobile, Alabama, one afternoon, long after the time
with which I am now concerned and while three drunken sailors discussed
the divinity of Christ at a near-by table wrote the story of little,
tired-out and crazed Joe Wainsworth’s killing of Jim Gibson in the
harness shop at Bidwell Ohio, that afterward was used in the novel
“Poor White”; and of how at a railroad station at Detroit I sat writing
the tale of Elsie Leander’s westward journey, in “The Triumph of the
Egg,” and missed my own train--these remain as rich and fine spots in a
precarious existence.
But at the time of which I am speaking the consolation of ink and paper
was a thing of the future and my bunged-up eyes and hurt spirits were
facts.
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
I lay on my back on my bed, trying to get up courage to face facts.
As for the throbbing of the hurt places, the pain was a kind of
satisfaction to me at the moment.
There was the warehouse where I had been more or less a spiritual bully
but where I would now have to eat crow. Well, I need not go back. The
day before had been payday and I would, by never going near the place
again, lose little money and save myself the humiliation of facing the
teamsters. And when it came to the scratch, I thought, there was the
city I was in, the state, the very United States of America itself--I
could if I chose desert them all. I was young, had been well trained
in poverty, had no family ties, no social position to uphold, I was
unmarried and as yet childless.
I was a free man, I told myself, sitting on the bed and staring about
the room through swollen eyelids. Was I free? Did any man ever achieve
freedom? I had my own life before me. Why did I not, by some grand
effort, begin to live a life?
I lay on the bed with the wet towel thrown aside thinking, trying to
make plans. A faint suspicion of something permanently wrong with me
had begun to creep into my consciousness. Was I, alas, a fellow born
out of his place and time? I was in a world where only men of action
seemed to thrive. Already I had noted that fact. One wanted a definite
thing to go after, money, fame, a position of power in the big world,
and having something definite of the sort in mind one shut one’s eyes
and pitched in with all the force of one’s physical and mental self.
I squirmed about trying to force myself to face myself. My body was
strong enough for all practical purposes, when not scarred and bruised
by the blows of an angry ball player, and I was not such a bad-looking
fellow. I was not lazy and on the whole rather liked hard physical
labor. Need I be what I at the moment seemed to myself to be, a useless
and foolish dreamer, a child in a world filled with what I thought to
be grown-up men? Why should I myself not also grow up, take the plow by
the handle, plow vast fields, become rich or famous? Perhaps I could
become a man of power and rule or influence many other men’s lives.
There is a trick the fancy has. Start it in any direction and it goes
prancing off at a great rate and that trick my own fancy now did.
Although my body ached as a result of my recent plunge into the field
of action I, in fancy, plunged in again and began thinking of myself as
holding the handle of a plow and plowing the fields of life, turning
great furrows, planting perhaps the seeds of new ideas. Oho, for the
smell of new-turned earth, the sight of the sower casting his seed!
I was off again. On that day Nora had done the work in my room early
but now she was sweeping and dusting on the floor below and I could
hear her moving about.
Why should I not first of all conquer Nora? That, I at that moment
thought, was surely the beginning of manhood, to conquer some woman,
and why not Nora as well as another? It would be something of an
undertaking that was sure. Nora was not beautiful nor perhaps too
subtle in her outlook on life but then was I myself subtle? She was
direct and simple and had, I thought, a direct and simple mind and
after I had conquered her, had bent her to my own will, what might we
not do together? There was to be sure the sailor with whom she was to
live and to whom she was promised but I brushed him aside. “I can cook
his goose in some way,” I thought to myself, much as I had thought I
could easily dispose of the ball player by my feints and crosses.
We might, I thought, following up the fancy I had just had, begin by
being tillers of the soil. We could go West somewhere and take up land.
Already I had read many tales of the West and had a fancy for casting
in my fortunes with the West. “Out where the smile lasts a little
longer, out where the handclasp is a little stronger,” etc. “Oho, for
the land where men are men and gals are gals!” I thought my fancy
running away like a wild horse broken out of its stall. I saw myself
owning vast farms somewhere in the Far West and saw, I am afraid, Nora
doing most of the plowing, planting and the harvesting of crops, the
while I rode grandly over the estate on a black stallion, receiving the
homage of serfs.
But what would I do with my odd moments? I had tried talking to Nora of
the things that interested me most, the play of light over a factory
chimney, seen amid smoke as darkness came on, odd expressions caught
from the lips of passing men and women, the play of the fancy over the
imagined lives of men and women too. Had Nora understood or cared?
Could I go on always talking and talking in the face of the fact that I
knew she was not much interested?
With a rush of resolution I threw my doubts aside. Oh, to be one who
made two blades of grass where but one had grown before! With Nora
at my side I would in some field become great and powerful. I was at
the moment but a bunged-up fellow lying on the bed in a cheap rooming
house but what did that matter? All about me was the great American
world rushing on and on to new mechanical and material triumphs. Teddy
Roosevelt and the strenuous life had not yet come but he was implicit
in the American mood. Imperialism had already come. It was time, I told
myself, to be up and doing.
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores;
Before him only shoreless seas.
The good mate said, “Now must we pray,
For lo, the very stars are gone.
Brave Admr’l speak.” “What shall I say?”
“Why say: ‘Sail on, sail on and on.’”