I had found him, on a Saturday evening, very drunk in a saloon in
Chicago. It was about nine o’clock and some time after I had fled from
Nora. I was nearly broke and thought I had better be thinking of doing
something that would bring me in a little money. What should I do?
The devil! It was apparent I would soon have to go to work again with
my hands. After some weeks of idleness my hands had become soft and
velvety to the touch and I liked them so. Now they were hands to hold
a pen or a paint brush. Why was I not a writer or a painter? Well, I
fancied one had to be a fellow of the schools before one dared approach
the arts. Often I went about cursing the fate that had not permitted
me to be born in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth with
its all-pervading smell of burning coal, oil and gasoline, and with
its noises and dirt. Mark Twain might declare the twentieth the most
glorious of all the centuries but it did not seem so to me. I thought
often of the fifteenth century in Italy when the great Borgia was just
coming into power, was at that time full of the subject. What glorious
children! Why could not I be a glorious child? Aha! the Lord Rodrigo de
Lancol y Borgia, Cardinal-Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina, Dean of the
Sacred College, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, etc., had
just been made Pope. Did I not myself have an Italian grandmother? What
a place and a time that might have been for me! It was the day of the
coronation of the new Pope and all Rome was excited. On the day before
four mules, laden with silver, had gone from Cardinal Rodrigo’s house
to the house of Cardinal Sforza-Visconti. It was the gentle privilege
of the Romans in those fine days to pillage the house of a cardinal
when he had been made pope. Was it not said, in the sacred laws, that
the vicar of Christ should give his substance to the poor? Fearing
he might not do it the poor went and took. Armed bands of desperate
fellows, with feathers in their hats, roamed the streets of the old
city at such times and a turn of the wheel of fortune might at any
moment make any one of them rich and powerful, a patron of the arts,
a rich and powerful grandee of Church or State. How I longed to be a
richly gowned, soft-handed cunning but scholarly grandee and patron of
the arts!
How much better times those than my own for such haphazard fellows
as myself, I thought, and cursed the twentieth century and the fate
that had thrown me into it. At that time in Chicago I knew a young Jew
named Ben Hecht, not yet a well-known writer, and sometimes he and I
went forth to do our cursing together. Outwardly he was a more adept
curser than myself but inwardly I felt I could outdo him and often we
had walked together, he cursing aloud our common fate and declaring
dramatically that life was for us an empty cup, a vessel turned upside
down, a golden goblet with cracks in the bowl, the largest crack being
the fact that we both unfortunately had our livings to make, and
I striving to cap his every curse with a more violent one. We went
together into a street and stood under the moon. Before us were many
huge ugly warehouses. “I hope they burn,” I said feebly, but he only
laughed at the weakness of my fancy. “I hope the builders die slowly of
a painful inflammation of the membranes of the bowels,” he said, while
I envied.
I had been walking alone on the streets of Chicago on that Saturday
evening when I found the younger Berners and had crossed the river to
the west side. I was gloomy and distraught and on a side street, off
West Madison Street and near the Chicago River, went into a small, dark
saloon. Several men sat at a small table at the back, among whom was
Alonzo Berners and there was a red-faced bartender leaning over the bar
and watching the group at the table. To all these I at the moment paid
no attention.
I was absorbed in the contemplation of my own difficult position in
life and was thinking only of myself. Sitting at a table I called for
a glass of brandy and when it was paid for realized that I had but two
dollars left in my pocket. I took the two dollars in my hand and looked
at them and putting them away continued looking at my empty hands. They
had, at the moment, as I have said, grown soft and velvety and I wanted
them to remain so. Wild dreams floated through my mind. Why had I not
more physical courage? It was all very well to talk with Ben Hecht of
the many advantages to be gained by being an Italian desperado of the
fifteenth century, but why had I not the courage to be a desperado of
the twentieth? Surely Rome or Naples or Florence, in the days of their
glory, never offered any better pickings than the Chicago of my own
day. In the older day a man slipped a slender knife delicately between
his victim’s neck and spine and made off with a few ducats at the risk
of his life but in Chicago men habitually got thousands of dollars by
robbery apparently without any risk at all. I looked at my own hands
and wondered. Could they hold a pistol steadily to the head of a timid
bank clerk or a mail-wagon driver? I decided they could not and was
ashamed of myself. Then I decided they might some day be induced to
hold a pen or a painter’s brush but reflected that the great patrons of
the arts were all long since dead and that my own brother, a painter,
had been compelled to make magazine covers for commercial “gents” in
order to get the slender amount necessary to educate himself in his
craft. “Huh!” I said to myself, not wanting I’m afraid, to work for any
commercial “gent” at all. Drinking my brandy I looked about the room
into which I had wandered.
It was a desperately dark little hole, lighted by two gaslights and
with two beer-stained tables in the semi-darkness at the rear. I looked
at the bartender, who had a large flat nose and bloodshot eyes and
decided it was just as well I had but two dollars. “I may be robbed
before I leave this hole,” I told myself and ordered another glass of
brandy, thinking I might as well drink up the little money I had rather
than have it taken from me.
And now the men at the other table in the room caught and held my
attention. With the exception of Alonzo Berners, whom the others had
picked up on the street, they were a hard-looking lot. One did not
think of them as desperate fellows. They were of the sort one saw
hanging about the places of Hinky Dink, Bathhouse John or of Conners,
the gray wolf, men famous in Chicago at that time, sullen fellows
without money, by no means desperate but hangers-on of the desperate,
fellows who robbed full of fright at their own temerity but the more
dangerous sometimes because of their fears.
I looked at them and at the man who had fallen into their clutches
and who was now spending his money upon them and at the same moment
they seemed to have become aware of my presence. Sullen eyes looked
at me sullenly. I was not of their world. Was I a fly cop? Their eyes
threatened. “If you are a fly cop or are in any way connected with the
man we have so fortunately picked up, a man quite apparently helplessly
drunk and having money, you had better be minding your business. As a
matter of fact it would be well for you to get out of here.”
I returned the stare directed at me and hesitated a moment. The sick
drunken man sitting among the others had a large roll of bills held in
his left hand that hung at his side, and his right elbow was on the
table.
What a look of suffering in his face! From time to time the others
ordered drinks brought from the bar and the sick man took a bill from
the roll and threw it on the table. When the change was brought by the
bartender one of his companions put it in his pocket. They were taking
turns, it was apparent, in robbing the man and as I looked an idea
came to me. Was it true that the bartender, a more out-and-out fellow
than the others, was disgusted at this slow and comparatively painless
method of committing robbery? Did I see in his eyes a kind of sympathy
for the man being robbed?
It was a ticklish moment for me. Having been thinking so
grandiloquently of Cæsar Borgia, Lorenzo the Magnificent and other
grand and courageous personages of my world of books, having just been
gazing at my own hands and wondering why they would not or could not do
some act of personal courage that would make me think better of myself,
having these thoughts, I of a sudden wanted to rescue the man with
the roll of bills but I did not want to make a fool of myself. I have
always wanted not to be a fool and have been a fool so often!
I had decided to perform a certain act and at the same time began
laughing at myself, not thinking I would be foolish enough to attempt
it. One of these conflicts between myself, as I live in my fancy,
and myself as I exist in fact, that have been going on in me since
I was a child had now started. It is the sort of thing that makes
autobiography, even of the half-playful sort I am now attempting,
so difficult to manage. One wants to treat oneself as a person of
more dignity and worth than one has the courage to attempt. Among
advertising men with whom I later associated we managed things better.
We took turns doing what we called “staging” each other. I was to
speak highly of Smith who in turn did the same of me. The trick
is not unknown to literary men, but it is difficult to manage in
autobiography. The self of the fancy persists in laughing at the self
of fact and does it sometimes at unfortunate moments. Also the fancy
is a great liar. How often later, when I became a man of business, I
did in fancy some shrewd or notable act that was never done in fact at
all, but that seemed so real that it was difficult not to believe in
it as a fact. I had been talking with a certain man and later thought
of a number of brilliant things I might have said. Then I met a friend
and told him of the conversation, putting the brilliant things in. The
story several times repeated became a part of the history of my life
and nothing would have later so amazed me as to have been compelled to
face the facts of the conversation and the figure I had cut in it.
Was the thing I now thought myself about to do in the saloon a fact or
was it but another of the fanciful acts, created in my own imagination,
I might and no doubt would later relate as a fact? Would it not be
better not to attempt to rescue the man in the room and later just to
say I had and in the end make myself believe I had?
There was little doubt I could do the thing more gaudily in fancy. The
place in which I sat was in a part of the city little frequented at
night. Near it were only vacant lots and rows of dark and now empty
factory buildings. It was unlikely there were any policemen in the
neighborhood and in case of need and if a policeman did appear what
sort of fellow was he likely to be--a fellow really appointed to the
district to knock aside such interfering fools as myself? As for the
men seated at the table, if they were cowards it was unlikely the
bartender was one.
I kept smiling to myself, at my own thoughts, at my trick of always
threshing my acts out in advance and in the end doing nothing except to
create later the fiction of an act performed. “My book reading and my
conversations with such fellows as Judge Turner are making a bigger
fool of me than I need be,” I told myself, still looking at the empty
hands lying on the table before me. What really empty things they
were, those same hands of mine. They had never grasped anything, never
fulfilled any purpose for me. So many fingers, so many pads of flesh
in the palms, so many little muscles to grasp things, to lay hold of
some situation, to drive a knife into an enemy, to lift a friend, to
make love to a woman, hands to become servants of the brain and to
make their owner something other than a meaningless thing of words and
fancies drifting through life with millions of other meaningless men.
I really thought at that time I had a brain. It is an illusion that I
believe almost everyone has.
In disgust of myself my eyes stopped looking at my empty hands
and looked instead about the room. What seemed to me a stream of
deliciously romantic notions now came. There was no doubt the man
sitting with the crew from the city’s underworld was very ill. One
might have said he was about to die. A chalky pallor had spread over
his face and except for his eyes everything about his face and figure
expressed utter weariness. It was so people looked when they were about
to die, when they were through with life, done for, glad to throw life
aside.
The face and figure of the man were like that but the eyes were not.
They were alive and only seemed curious and puzzled. As they looked
at me from out the pale face I had the curious illusion of a voice
speaking, speaking as though out of a coffin or a cavern.
Now the man’s eyes were looking from my eyes to the eyes of the
bartender. Was there something commanding in them? Had the sick man,
in his helpless position, the power to command the two men in the room
who might conceivably be of use to him? The man had been drunk for
several days, and now he was not drinking but the poison from the vile
stuff he had taken had permeated his system. The same eyes had looked
at the men among whom he sat and his brain had come to a decision
concerning them. Men’s eyes could be impersonal sometimes. The other
men at the table were of no value, had been thrown aside as useless.
One fancied a thin sick body going on for days, eyes not looking about,
eyes alive in a corner of the head of a man waiting for a moment of
sanity.
And now they command. The sick man was not afraid, as in his place I
would have been. There was no fear in the eyes that now looked at me
so steadily. It might be the man did not mind the fact that he was
about to be robbed and perhaps his body had known so much pain that the
additional pain of a beating would not too much matter.
As for myself I was thinking beyond my own depths, thinking of certain
things as possible in another that could never have been possible in
myself. I was a coward trying to think the thoughts of a brave man.
From the very moment when I first became aware of the actuality of the
man Alonzo Berners I began doing something I had never done before, I
began to live in another, suffer in another, love another perhaps.
If the man’s eyes were issuing a command what did he want? I grew
resentful. What right had he to command me? Did he think me a fool?
Unconsciously I had begun to resist a command. “I won’t. You got
yourself into this pickle, now get yourself out.”
What a plague to have an imagination! It seemed to me a kind of
wordless conversation, something after the following manner, now began
between myself, the bartender and the man at the table.
From the bloodshot eyes of the bartender leaning over his bar words
were now coming. I leaned forward to listen.
“Ah! Bah! I do not like this affair. You have fallen into the hands
of these cheap thugs and from the looks of you I should say you are
a rather decent sort. To me, situated as I am in life, that would
not make any difference if the men robbing you were fellows I could
respect. If any one of a dozen men I know chose to hit you over the
head and throw your body into the river I would not lift a hand to
prevent it. As the matter stands I think I will. I do not fancy these
dogs you are with eating so fat a calf. As for myself you are not fair
game. Poor chap, you are sick. I cannot leave my job here but the
fellow over there at the table will take you away. Speak to him. He
will do as you wish.”
What a chattering of unheard voices my imagination had created in the
room!
Words from the living eyes of the sick man.
“It does not matter about being robbed. If these men beat or kill me it
does not matter. The point is I am tired now.” The eyes smiled.
And now the man at the table was looking directly at me and his words,
created, you understand in my fancy, were directed at me. “Well, come
on lad. Lift me up in your arms and carry me home. It is only because
you are young and inexperienced you are afraid.”