THERE was a door leading out from my office to the street. How many
steps to the door? I counted them, “five, six, seven.” “Suppose,” I
asked myself, “I could take those five, six, seven steps to the door,
pass out at the door, go along that railroad track out there, disappear
into the far horizon beyond. Where was I to go? In the town where my
factory was located I had still the reputation of being a bright young
business man. In my first years there I had been filled with shrewd
vast schemes. I had been admired, looked up to. Since that time I had
gone down and down as a bright young man but no one yet knew how far I
had gone. I was still respected in the town, my word was still good at
the bank. I was a respectable man.”
Did I want to do something not respectable, not decent? I am trying
to give you the history of a moment and as a tale-teller I have come
to think that the true history of life is but a history of moments.
It is only at rare moments we live. I wanted to walk out at a door
and go away into the distance. The American is still a wanderer, a
migrating bird not yet ready to build a nest. All our cities are
built temporarily as are the houses in which we live. We are on the
way--toward what? There have been other times in the history of the
world when many strange peoples came together in a new strange land.
To assume that we have made an America, even materially, seems to
me now but telling ourselves fairy tales in the night. We have not
even made it materially yet and the American man has only gone in for
money-making on a large scale to quiet his own restlessness, as the
monk of old days was given the Regula of Augustine to quiet him and
still the lusts in himself. For the monk, kept occupied with the saying
of prayers and the doing of many little sacred offices, there was no
time for the lusts of the world to enter in and for the American to
be perpetually busy with his affairs, with his automobiles, with his
movies, there is no time for unquiet thoughts.
On that day in the office at my factory I looked at myself and laughed.
The whole struggle I am trying to describe and that I am confident will
be closer to the understanding of most Americans than anything else
I have ever written was accompanied by a kind of mocking laughter at
myself and my own seriousness about it all.
Very well, then, I wanted to go out of the door and never come back.
How many Americans want to go--but where do they want to go? I wanted
to accept for myself all the little restless thoughts of which myself
and the others had been so afraid and you, who are Americans, will
understand the necessity of my continually laughing at myself and
at all things dear to me. I must laugh at the thing I love the more
intensely because of my love. Any American will understand that.
It was a trying moment for me. There was the woman, my secretary, now
looking at me. What did she represent? What did she not represent?
Would I dare be honest with her? It was quite apparent to me I would
not. I had got to my feet and we stood looking at each other. “It is
now or never,” I said to myself, and I remember that I kept smiling.
I had stopped dictating to her in the midst of a sentence. “The goods
about which you have inquired are the best of their kind made in the--”
I stood and she sat and we were looking at each other intently. “What’s
the matter?” she asked. She was an intelligent woman, more intelligent
I am sure than myself, just because she was a woman and good, while I
have never been good, do not know how to be good. Could I explain all
to her? The words of a fancied explanation marched through my mind: “My
dear young woman, it is all very silly but I have decided to no longer
concern myself with this buying and selling. It may be all right for
others but for me it is poison. There is this factory. You may have
it if it please you. It is of little value I dare say. Perhaps it is
money ahead and then again it may well be it is money behind. I am
uncertain about it all and now I am going away. Now, at this moment,
with the letter I have been dictating, with the very sentence you have
been writing left unfinished, I am going out that door and never come
back. What am I going to do? Well now, that I don’t know. I am going
to wander about. I am going to sit with people, listen to words, tell
tales of people, what they are thinking, what they are feeling. The
devil! It may even be I am going forth in search of myself.”
The woman was looking into my eyes the while I looked into hers.
Perhaps I had grown a little pale and now she grew pale. “You’re
sick,” she said and her words gave me an idea. There was wanted a
justification of myself, not to myself but to the others. A crafty
thought came. Was the thought crafty or was I, at the moment, a little
insane, a “nut,” as every American so loves to say of every man who
does something a little out of the groove.
I had grown pale and it may be I was ill but nevertheless I was
laughing--the American laugh. Had I suddenly become a little insane?
What a comfort that thought would be, not to myself but to the others.
My leaving the place I was then in would tear up roots that had gone
down a little into the ground. The ground I did not think would support
the tree that was myself and that I thought wanted to grow.
My mind dwelt on the matter of roots and I looked at my feet. The whole
question with which I was at the moment concerned became a matter of
feet. I had two feet that could take me out of the life I was then in
and that, to do so, would need but take three or four steps to a door.
When I had reached the door and had stepped out of my little factory
office everything would be quite simplified, I was sure. I had to lift
myself out. Others would have to tackle the job of getting me back,
once I had stepped over that threshold.
Whether at the moment I merely became shrewd and crafty or whether I
really became temporarily insane I shall never quite know. What I did
was to step very close to the woman and looking directly into her eyes
I laughed gayly. Others besides herself would, I knew, hear the words I
was now speaking. I looked at my feet. “I have been wading in a long
river and my feet are wet,” I said.
Again I laughed as I walked lightly toward the door and out of a long
and tangled phase of my life, out of the door of buying and selling,
out of the door of affairs.
“They want me to be a ‘nut,’ will love to think of me as a ‘nut,’ and
why not? It may just be that’s what I am,” I thought gayly and at the
same time turned and said a final confusing sentence to the woman who
now stared at me in speechless amazement. “My feet are cold wet and
heavy from long wading in a river. Now I shall go walk on dry land,” I
said, and as I passed out at the door a delicious thought came. “Oh,
you little tricky words, you are my brothers. It is you, not myself,
have lifted me over this threshold. It is you who have dared give me a
hand. For the rest of my life I will be a servant to you,” I whispered
to myself as I went along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out
of a town and out of that phase of my life.