I HAD come to that period of a young man’s life where all is
uncertainty. In America there seemed at that time but one direction,
one channel, into which all such young fellows as myself could pour
their energies. All must give themselves wholeheartedly to material
and industrial progress. Could I do that? Was I fitted for such a
life? It was a kind of moral duty to try and then, as now, men at the
heads of the great industrial enterprises filled or had filled all the
newspapers and magazines with sermons on industry, thrift, virtue,
loyalty and patriotism, meaning I am afraid by the use of all these
high-sounding terms only devotion to the interests in which they had
money invested. But the terms were good terms, the words used were
magnificent words. And I was by my nature a word fellow, one who
could at most any time be hypnotized by high-sounding words. It was
confusing to me as it must be confusing to many young men now. During
the World War did we not see how even the very government went into the
advertising business, selling the war to the young men of the country
by the use of the same noble words advertising men used to forward the
sale of soap or automobile tires? To the young man a kind of worship
of some power outside himself is essential. One has strength and
enthusiasm and wants gods to worship. There were only these gods of
material success. Chivalry was gone. The Virgin had died. In America
there were no churches. What were called churches were merely clubs,
ruled over by the same forces that ruled over the factories and great
mercantile houses. Often the men I heard speaking in churches spoke
in the same words, used the same terms to define the meaning of life
that were used by the real-estate boomer, the politician, or the
enterprising business man talking to his employees of the necessity of
steadfastness and devotion to the interests of his firm.
The Virgin was dead and her son had taken as prophets such men as Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, the one with his little books in
which he set down and saved his acts and impulses, striving to make
them all serve definite ends as he saved his pennies and the other
preaching the intellectual doctrine of Self-reliance, Up and Onward.
The land was filled with gods but they were new gods and their images,
standing on every street of every town and city, were cast in iron and
steel. The factory had become America’s church and duplicates of it
stood everywhere, on almost every street of every city belching black
incense into the sky.
A passion for reading books had taken possession of me and I did not
work when I had any money at all but often for weeks spent my time
reading any book I could get my hands on. In every city there were
public libraries and I could get books without spending money.
The past took a strong hold on my imagination and I went eagerly down
through the ages, reading of the lives of the great men of antiquity;
of the Romans and their conquest of the world; of the early Christians
and their struggles before the great organizer Paul came to “put
Christianity across”; of the Cæsars, Charlemagnes and Napoleons,
marching and countermarching across Europe at the head of their troops;
of the cruel but powerful Peters and Ivans of Russia; of the great and
elegant dukes of Italy--the poisoners and schemers listening to the
words of their Machiavellis; of the magnificent painters and craftsmen
of the Middle Ages; of English and French kings; roundheads; Spanish
kings of the days of conquest and of gold ships bringing riches from
the Spanish Main; the Grand Inquisitor; the coming of Erasmus, the
cool scholarly questioner whose questions brought to the front Luther,
the conscientious barbarian--all, all spread out before me, the young
American coming into manhood, all in the books.
It was a feast. Could I digest it? I had saved a little money and knew
how to live very cheaply. After working for some weeks, and when I did
not spend money for drinking bouts to ease the confusion of my mind I
had a few dollars put aside and dollars meant leisure. That is perhaps
all dollars have ever meant to me.
Since I was always making the acquaintance of some fellow who lived
by gambling I went now and then into a gambling place and sometimes
had luck. I had five dollars when I went in at a certain door and came
out with a hundred dollars in my pocket. Oh, glorious day! On such an
amount I could live among books for weeks and so, renting a small room
on a poor street, I went every day to a public library and got a new
book. The book some man had spent years in composing was often waded
through in a day and then thrown aside. What a jumble of things in my
head! At times the life directly about me ceased to have any existence.
The actuality of life became a kind of vapor, a thing outside of
myself. My body was a house in which I lived and there were many such
houses all about me but I did not live in them. Perhaps I was but
trying to make solid the walls of my own house, to roof it properly, to
cut windows, becoming accustomed to living in the house so that I could
have leisure to look out at the windows and into other houses. Of that
I do not know. To make such a claim for myself and my purpose seems
giving my life a more intelligent direction than I can convince myself
it has had.
I walked in and out of the little rooms in which I lived, often in what
was called the tough part of a city, hearing all about me the oaths of
drunken men, the crying of children, the weeping of some poor girl of
the streets who has just been beaten by her pimp, the quarreling of
laborers and their wives, walked hearing and seeing nothing, walked
gripping a book in my hand.
In fancy I was at the moment with the great Florentine Leonardo da
Vinci on a day when he sat on a little hill above his country house in
Italy studying the flight of birds or was making the mathematical and
geometrical calculations he so loved. Or I was sitting in a carriage
beside the scholar Erasmus as he drove across Europe going from the
court of one great duke or king to the court of another. The lives of
the dead men and women had become more real to me than the lives of
the living people about me.
How bad an American I had become, how utterly out of touch with the
spirit of my age! Sometimes for weeks I did not read a newspaper--a
fault in me that would have been considered almost in the light of a
crime had it been generally known to my fellows. A new railroad might
have been built, a new trust formed or some great national excitement
like the free silver affair--that did fall in at about that time--might
have shaken the whole country while I knew nothing about it.
There was indeed a kind of intimate acquaintance with an unknown
and unheralded kind of people I was unconsciously getting. In
Chicago, where I had now gone I for a time lived in a room in a huge
cheaply constructed building that had been erected about a little
court. The building was not old, had in fact been built but a few
years before--during the Chicago World’s Fair--but already it was a
half-tumbledown unsafe place with great sags in the floors in the
hallways and cracks in the walls. The building surrounded the little
brick-paved court and was divided into single rooms for bachelor
lodgers and into small two- and three-room apartments. Since it was
near the end of several street-car lines and a branch of the Chicago
elevated railroad it was occupied for the most part by street-car
conductors and motormen with their wives and children. Many of my
fellow-lodgers were young fellows having wives but no children and not
intending to have children if the accidents of life could be avoided.
They went off to work and came home from work at all sorts of odd hours.
I hadn’t very much money but did not mind. My room was small and cost
little and I lived on fruit and on stacks of wheatcakes that could be
had at ten cents the stack at a near-by workingmen’s eating place. When
I was broke I told myself I could always go again to some place where
laborers were wanted. I was young and my body was strong. “If I cannot
get work in the city I can get on a freight train at night and go away
to the country and work on a farm,” I thought. Sometimes I had qualms
of conscience because I had not already started on the great career as
an industrial magnate I had half-heartedly mapped out for myself but I
managed to put my sins of omission aside. There was plenty of time I
told myself and in any event I planned eventually to do the thing with
a grand rush.
In the meantime I lay for long hours on the little bed in my room
reading the last book I had got from the library or walked in a near-by
park under the trees. Time ceased to exist and the days became night
while the nights became days. Often I came back to my room at two in
the morning, washed my shirt, underwear and socks at a washbowl in a
corner, hung them out at my window facing the court to dry and lying
down naked on my bed read by a gaslight until daylight had come.
Marvelous days! Now I was marching with the conqueror Julius Cæsar over
the vast domains of the mighty Roman Empire. What a life and how proud
Julius and I were of his conquests and how often we spoke together
of the doings of Cicero, Pompey, Cato and the others in Rome. Indeed
Cæsar and I had become for the nonce the most intimate of friends
and often enough we discussed the unworthiness of some of the other
Romans, particularly of that Cicero. The man was no better than a dog,
a literary hack, when all was said and done, and such fellows are never
to be trusted. Often enough Cicero had talked with Cæsar and pretended
to be Cæsar’s friend but, as Julius often pointed out to me, such
fellows were wont to veer about with every wind that blew, “Writers
are the greatest cowards in the world and my own greatest weakness is
that I have a kind of hankering that way myself. Let a man but get
into power and he will always find such scribbling fellows willing and
anxious to sing his praises. They are the greatest cur dogs in the
world,” he declared vehemently.
And so I had become in fancy the friend of Cæsar and all day I marched
beside him and at evening went with him and his men into their camp.
The days and weeks passed. I sat by the window looking into the little
brick-paved court and there were many other windows. As it was summer
they were all open. Evening came, after a day of walking in dreams, and
I had come into my room and taking off my coat had thrown myself down
on my bed. When darkness came I did not light a light but lay quietly
listening.
I had stepped now out of the past and into the present and all about me
were the voices of living people. The men and women in the rooms along
the court did not laugh or sing often and indeed in the many times,
during my life, I have lived, as I did then, lying like a little worm
in the middle of the apple of modern life, I have never found that
American men and women, except only the Negroes, laugh or sing much in
their homes or at their work.
It was evening and a street-car conductor had come home to his wife.
They were silent in each other’s presence for a time, then they began
to quarrel. Sometimes they fought and after that they made love. The
love-making of the couples along the court aroused my own passions and
I had bad dreams at night.
What a strange thing love-making had become among modern factory
hands, street-car conductors and all such fellows! Almost always it
was preceded by a quarrel, often blows were struck, there were tears,
repentance and then embraces. Did the tired nerves of the men and women
need the stimulation of the fights and quarrels?
A red-faced man who stumbled as he walked along the hallways to his
small apartment had secured a small flat stick which he kept behind a
door. His wife was young and fat. When he had come home from work and
had in silence eaten his evening meal he sat by the window facing the
court and read a newspaper while his wife washed the dishes. Suddenly,
when the dishes were washed, he jumped to his feet and ran to get the
stick. “Don’t, John, don’t,” his wife pleaded half-heartedly, as he
began to pursue her about the narrow room. Chairs were knocked over
and tables upset. He kept hitting her with the flat stick upon the
nether cheeks and she kept laughing and protesting. Sometimes he struck
her too hard and she grew angry and, turning upon him, scratched his
face with her finger nails. Then he swore and wrestled with her. Their
period of more intense love-making had now come and silence reigned
over the little home for the rest of the night.
I lay on my bed in the darkness and closed my eyes. Once more I was
in the camp of Cæsar and we were in Gaul. The great captain had been
writing at a small table near the door of his tent but now a man had
come to speak with him. I lay in silence upon a kind of thick warm
cloth spread on the ground beside the tent.
The man who talked with Cæsar was a bridge-builder and had come to
speak with him regarding the building of a bridge that the legions
might cross a river beside which they now lay encamped. A certain
number of men would be needed with boats and others were at daylight to
go hew great timbers in a near-by forest and roll them into the stream.
How very quiet and peaceful it was where I lay! Cæsar’s tent was
pitched on a hillside. In person he was like ... there was an Italian
fruit dealer who had a small store on a street near the park where I
went every day to sit, a tall gaunt man who had lost one eye and whose
black hair was turning gray. The fruit dealer had evidently lost his
eye in a fight as there was a long scar on his cheek. It was this man I
had metamorphosed into a Cæsar.
Below, at the foot of the hill on which the tent stood and on the banks
of a river the legions were camped. They had built fires and some of
the men were bathing in the river but when they came out they dressed
quickly because of little biting flies that swarmed about their heads.
I was glad Cæsar’s tent was pitched on a hill where there was a little
breeze and there were no biting flies or insects. Below, the fires in
the valley glowed and cast yellow and red lights over the tawny bodies
and faces of the soldiers.
The man who had come to Cæsar was a craftsman and had a maimed hand.
Two of the fingers of his left hand had been cut sharply off as by a
blow with an ax. He went away into the darkness and Cæsar went within
his tent.
I lay on my bed in the room in the building in Chicago not daring to
open my eyes. Had I been asleep? Now there was no quarreling in the
other places along the court but there were still lights at some of
the windows. The workers had not yet all come home. Two women were
talking together across the space between their windows. Street-car
conductors and motormen, who had been all day working their cars
slowly through crowded streets, propitiating quarrelsome passengers,
cursing and being cursed at by teamsters and crossing policemen, were
now asleep. Of what were they dreaming? They had come from the car
barns, had read a newspaper, telling perhaps of a fight between English
troops and the natives of Thibet, had read also a speech by the German
emperor demanding a place in the sun for Germany, had noted who had
beaten the Chicago White Sox or who had been beaten by them. Then they
had quarreled with their wives, blows had been struck, there had been
love-making and then sleep.
I arose and went to walk in the silent streets and twice during that
summer I was stopped by holdup men who took a few dollars from me. The
World’s Fair had been followed by a time of industrial depression. How
many miles I have walked in the streets of American cities at night! In
Chicago and the other industrial cities long streets of houses--how
many houses almost universally ugly and cheaply constructed, like
the building in which I then lived! I passed through sections where
all the people were Negroes and heard laughter in the houses. Then
came the sections entirely inhabited by Jews, by Greeks, Armenians,
Italians, Germans, or Poles. How many elements not yet combined in the
cities! The American writers, whose books I read, went on assuming
that the typical American was a transplanted Englishman, an Englishman
who had served his term in the stony purgatory of New England and had
then escaped out into the happy land, this Heaven, the Middle West.
Here they were all to grow rich and live forever, a happy blissful
existence. Was not all the world supposed to be watching the great
democratic experiment in government and human happiness they were to
conduct so bravely?
I wandered on into factory districts, long silent streets of grim black
walls. Had men but escaped out of the prisons of the Old World into
the more horrid prisons of the New? Dread took hold of me as on a dark
street I was approached by a man who put a gun to my face. He wanted
money and I tried to be facetious with him, telling him I hadn’t enough
money to buy drinks for the two of us but would match him pennies for
what I had but he only growled at me and taking my few pieces of silver
hurried away. Perhaps he did not even understand my words. America,
once a place that prided itself on its sense of humor, was now, since
the coming of the factories, a place where the very robbers were all
too serious about life.
Periods of lust kept coming and going. In the building where I lived
there was a woman, very young yet, a high-school graduate from an
Illinois town who had married a young man of the place. They had come
to live in Chicago, to make their way in the great world, and as he
could get no other work he had taken a place as street-car conductor.
Oh, it was but a temporary arrangement. He was one who intended, as for
that matter I did myself, to rise in the world.
The man I never saw but all afternoon the woman sat by a window in one
of the two rooms of her apartment or went for short walks in the park.
We began presently to smile shyly at each other but did not speak, both
being embarrassed. Like myself she read books and that was a kind of
bond between us. I got into the habit of sitting by my window with my
book in my hand while she sat by her window also holding a book.
And here was a new confusion. The pages of the books no longer lived.
The woman, sitting there, but a few feet away from me, across the
little court, I did not want. Of that I was quite sure. She was another
man’s wife. What thoughts had she in her head, what feelings had she?
Her face was round and fair and she had blue eyes. What did she want?
Children perhaps, I thought. She wanted to have a house like all the
other houses lived in by the people of her home town who had made
money and who held positions of some importance in the town’s life.
One day she sat on a bench in the park and I, walking past, saw the
title of the book she read. It was a popular novel of the day but I
have forgotten its name and the name of its author. Even at that time,
although I knew little enough, I did know that such books had always
been written, would always be written, books that sold by the hundreds
of thousands and were often proclaimed as great works of art and that
after a year or two were utterly forgotten. In them was no sense of
strangeness, no wonder about life. They lacked the touch of life. “Dead
books for men and women who dare not live,” I thought contemptuously.
There was a kind of pretense of solving some problem of life but the
problem was so childishly stated that later a childish solution seemed
quite natural and right. A young man came to an American city from a
country town and, although at bottom he was true and fine, the city for
a time diverted him from his noble aims. He committed some near crime
that made both himself and the girl he really loved suffer terribly,
but she stood firmly by him and at the last, and with her help, he
pulled himself up again, by the bootstraps as it were, and became a
rich manufacturer who was kind to his employees.
The book she read expressed perhaps the high-school girl’s dream, the
dream she had when she married and came to Chicago. Was her dream the
same now? I had already, as far as I reacted to the life about me at
all, started upon another road, was becoming, a little, the eternal
questioner of myself and others. Not for me the standardized little
pellets of opinion, the little neatly wrapped packages of sentiment
the magazine writers had learned to do up, I told myself. In modern
factories food was packed in convenient standard-sized packages and I
half suspected that behind the high-sounding labels the food was often
enough sawdust or something of the sort. It was apparent publishers
also had learned to do up neat packages containing sawdust and put
bright-colored labels on them.
Oh, glorious contempt! Seeing the book the woman was reading, knowing
she was the wife of another and that never by any chance could we come
close to each other, give to each other anything of value, I enjoyed my
contempt for an hour and then it faded. I sat as before by my window
and held an open book but could not follow the thoughts and ideas of
the writer of the book. I sat by my window and she with her book sat by
her window.
Was something about to happen that neither of us wanted, of which we
were both afraid, that would be without value to either of us?
One evening when I met her in the hallway of the building I stopped
before her and we stood thus for a minute facing each other. We both
blushed, both felt guilty, and then I tried to say something to her but
did not succeed. I stammered out a few words about the weather, saying
how hot it was, and hurried away but a week later, when we again met in
the same place it was dark and we kissed.
We began then to walk in silence together in the park in the early
evenings and sometimes we sat together on a park bench. How careful we
were not to be seen by others who lived in our building. Her husband
left the house at three in the afternoon and did not return until
midnight and when he came home he was tired and discouraged. He scolded
at his wife. “He is always scolding,” she said. Well, one wanted to
save money, get into business for oneself. And now he had a wife to
support and the wages of street-car conductors were not large. The
young man who wanted to rise in the world had begun to resent his wife
and she felt it vaguely, uneasily. She also was filled with resentment.
Did she want revenge? She had no words to express what she felt and I
had no way of understanding. Was I not also confused, wanting something
very much, that at the same time I did not want? I sat in my room
until darkness came holding the book I now could not read and when the
darkness had come threw it with a loud bang on a table. The sound had
become a signal to her and when I went into the park she came to join
me. One evening when we had kissed in the darkness of the park I went
home ahead of her but did not close the door of my room. I stood in
the darkness by the door waiting. She had to pass along the hallway to
reach her own place and I put out my hand and drew her inside.
“I’m afraid,” she kept saying, “I don’t want to. I’m afraid.” What a
queer silent frightened love-making it was--no love-making at all. She
was afraid and I was afraid, not of her husband but of myself. Later
she went away crying silently along the hallway and after that she and
I did not sit at our two windows or walk in the park and I returned to
my books. Once, on a night two or three weeks later as I lay in my own
bedroom, I heard the husband and wife talking together. Something had
happened that had pleased and excited her. She had been able to offer
something she thought would help her husband and was urging him to give
up being a street-car conductor and to go back to the town from which
they had come. Her father owned a store there, I gathered, and had
objected to her marriage but she had secretly written, perhaps been
very humble, and had persuaded her father to take the younger man into
partnership in his business. “Don’t be proud now, Jim. I’m not proud
any more. Something has happened to me Jim. I’m not proud any more,” I
heard her saying as I lay in my own room in the darkness, and I leave
the reader to judge whether, under the circumstances, I could be proud.
But perhaps after all the woman and I have done something for each
other, I thought.