JUMPING off the bed I instantly began to try to prepare myself for new
adventures. As I had been lying on the bed thinking the thoughts above
set down and working myself up to new heights of fancied grandeur some
time had passed. Perhaps I had slept and awakened. At any rate it was
now dark in the room and I lighted a lamp. By its light and after I had
bathed my face for some time it did not look so swollen although both
eyes had turned a deep purple.
Undaunted I dressed in my best Sunday clothes and prepared to set out.
I had engaged to walk with Nora on that evening and it was our custom
on such occasions for me to pass quietly out of the house, tapping on
the door of her room on the floor below and waiting for her on the
front steps.
To tell the truth I had already got well going the new dramatization of
myself as a man of action but was not sure of myself in the new rôle to
want to face any of the workmen in the house. Nora I thought I could
handle.
As I stood in the room dressed in my best clothes I counted my money
and then decided I would not be a Western ranchman after all but a man
of commerce, an empire builder perhaps. I had in my possession some
ninety-eight dollars which seemed to me at the moment sufficient for a
start in almost any undertaking. It would support me for a few weeks
while I looked about and then I would pitch in somewhere and become an
empire builder. It would take time but what was time to me? I had an
abundance of time. “I’ll do it,” I told myself resolutely.
Why not? Was I not a man of imagination? Was I not young and did I not
have a strong body?
As I washed the dried blood off my face, put on my Sunday suit and
adjusted my tie I in fancy swept the field of commercial adventure
with my somewhat damaged eyes. There were the great cities of Chicago
and New York I had not yet seen, although I had read much about
them and about men who had grown from poverty to riches and power
in them. Like all young Americans I had read innumerable tales of
men who had begun with nothing and had become great leaders, owners
of railroads, governors of states, foreign ambassadors, generals of
armies, presidents of great modern republics. Abraham Lincoln walking
miles through a storm after a hard day’s work to borrow his first book,
Jay Gould the young Wall Street clerk, setting up a great dynasty of
wealth, Daniel Drew the cattle dealer becoming a millionaire, Garfield
the canal-boat boy and Vanderbilt the ferryman become President and
millionaire, Grant the failure, hauling hides from his father’s
tannery at Galena, Illinois, to St. Louis--and, it was said, getting
so well piped sometimes on the homeward journey that he fell off the
wagon--he also became great, the winner of a mighty war, President of
his country, a noted traveler, receiving the homage of kings. “And I
can carry my liquor better than he could, by all reports,” I said to
myself.
Were these men any better than myself? At the moment and in spite of
the gloom of an hour before, I thought not, and as for my having but
ninety-eight dollars, what did that matter? As a matter of fact one
gathered from having read American history that there was a sort of
advantage to be gained from starting with nothing. One had something to
talk and brag about in one’s old age, and when one became a candidate
for President one furnished one’s campaign managers with materials for
campaign slogans.
And now I was dressed and had tiptoed out of the house, tapped on
Nora’s door and was waiting for her outside. I had decided that when
she came out I would not make an appeal for her woman’s sympathy by
telling of what had actually happened to me. “I do not want woman’s
sympathy,” I thought proudly. What I wanted was woman’s respect. I
wanted to conquer them, to have them at my feet, to stand before them
the conquering male.
When Nora came and when we had walked to where there was a street light
and she had seen my damaged countenance I began at once to brag and to
reconstruct the fight at the warehouse more to my own fancy. Not one
but four men had attacked me and I had valiantly stood my ground. An
inspiration came. I had got into the fight, I told Nora, because of a
woman. A young woman, a working girl like Nora herself had passed the
platform and the men at work there with me had begun making remarks
that were not very nice. What was I to do? I was one who could never
stand quietly by and hear an innocent woman, particularly one who had
to work for her living and had perhaps no men of her own to stand up
for her, hear such a woman subjected to insult. I had, I told Nora, at
once pitched into the four men and there had been a terrible fight.
As I described the fancied affair to Nora the feint and the cross on
which I had so depended had worked wonderfully. I had received many
hard blows, it was true, and Nora could see by looking at my face how
I had suffered, but I had given better than I had received. Like a
tornado I had swept up and down the warehouse platform making feints
with my right and whipping my powerful left to the jaws of my opponents
until at last they were all laid out like dead men before me. And then
I had come home, a little fearful that I might have killed one or two
of the men but not waiting to see. “I did not care,” I said. “If my
opponents have suffered a terrible beating at my hands and if one or
two of them die of their injuries it was their own fault. They should
have known better than to have insulted a woman in my presence.”
I had told Nora my story and we had walked in silence until we had come
to a street lamp when she suddenly stopped and, taking my left hand,
turned it up to the light. As I had not succeeded in the actual fight
in striking a blow with it, the hand was unmarked by a bruise. “Huh!”
said Nora and we went on in silence.
The silence, which was one of the hardest I have ever had to bear,
continued until we had finished our walk--which on that evening did not
last very long,--and had got back to the house.
On the steps in front we stopped and Nora stood for a time looking at
me. It was a look I did not much fancy, but what was I to do? Two or
three times during our walk I had tried to begin talking a little and
had attempted to patch up the structure of my yarn so that it would
not be quite so full of holes and leaky but could think of no way to
explain the unbruised surface and uninjured knuckles of my left, so I
had taken refuge in a kind of sullen silence.
I had even begun to feel a little injured and angry and was asking
myself what right Nora had to question my story--was feeling, to tell
the truth, much as I was later to feel when some editor or critic
rejected, as not sound, one of my written tales--that is to say,
resentful and intolerant of the editor or critic and inclined to call
him a fool and to attribute to him all kinds of secret and degrading
motives. I was feeling much in this mood, I say, when we had got back
to the steps and were standing in the darkness in front.
And then Nora suddenly put her strong arm about my neck and pulled my
head down upon her shoulder and I began to cry like a child.
That in an odd way made me more resentful than ever. It faced me with
a problem I have all my life been trying to face and have never quite
succeeded. One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder,
finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class
than the average man. It is a fact perhaps but a fact that I have
always thought we men should deny with all the strength of our more
powerful wills. We men should conquer women. We should not stand in the
darkness with our heads on their shoulders, blubbering as I was doing
at that moment.
However, I continued crying and being ashamed of myself and Nora did
not press her advantage. When, now and then, I lifted my face from her
shoulder and looked at her face, dimly seen in the darkness, it seemed
to me just kindly and filled with sympathy for my position.
I felt, I presume, most of all the story-teller’s shame at the failure
of his yarn and there was something else too. There was a suspicion
that Nora, the woman who had been for weeks listening to my talk
and whom I had somewhat looked down upon as not being my equal, had
suddenly become my superior. I had prided myself on my mind and on the
superiority of my imaginative flights. Could it be that this woman,
this maker of beds in a cheap laborers’ rooming house, had a better
mind than my own?
The thought was unbearable and so, as soon as I could conveniently
manage it, I got my head off Nora’s shoulder and made my escape.
In my room I sat again on the edge of the bed and I had again bolted
the door. The notion of using Nora to plant and sow fields for me
while I rode about on a magnificent black stallion was now quite gone
and I had to construct another and at once. That I realized. I had to
construct a new dramatization of myself and leave Nora out of it. I was
not ready for the Noras. Perhaps I would never be ready for them. Few
American men I have ever known have ever shown any signs of being ready
for the Noras of the world or of being able really to understand or
face them.
My mind turned again to the field of business and affairs. I had
already known a good many men and, while such fellows as the baseball
player at the warehouse had the better of me because I had been fool
enough to let the struggle between us get on a physical plane, I had
not met many men who had caused me to tremble because of any special
spiritual or intellectual strength in themselves.
To be sure the world of affairs was one of which I knew nothing and
yet I thought I might tackle it. “It cannot be worse than the world
of labor,” I thought as I sat in the darkness, trying not to think of
Nora--thoughts of whom I was convinced might weaken the resolution
I had taken and might even cause me to begin blubbering again--and
keeping my mind fixed on the laborers I had known, even as the laborers
who lived in the house with me tramped heavily, one by one, up the
stairs and went off to their rooms and to sleep.
“I will become a man of action, in the mood of the American of my day.
I will build railroads, conquer empires, become rich and powerful. Why
should I not do something of the sort as well as all the other men who
have done it so brilliantly? America is the land of opportunity. I must
keep that thought ever in my mind,” I told myself as I tiptoed out of
the house at two o’clock in the morning, having left a note of good-by
to Nora and the amount of my room rent in an envelope on my bed. I was
being very careful not to make any noise as I went along the hallway
and past Nora’s door. “I had better not wake up the woman,” I was wise
enough to say to myself as I went away, hugging my new impulse in life.