A GRAY morning and myself, no longer young, sitting on a bench before
the little open space that faces the cathedral of Chartres. Thoughts
flitting across a background of years. Had I finally accepted myself,
in part at least, as a tale-teller, had I come that far on the road
toward manhood?
It was sure I had been traveling, wandering from place to place, trying
to look and listen. At that moment I was very far away from that land,
the background of my tales, the Middle West of America. I was perhaps
even farther away spiritually than physically. In my day men covered
huge physical distances in a short time. As I sat there nearly all
the reality of me was still living in the Middle West of America, in
mining towns, factory towns, in sweet stretches of Ohio and Illinois
countryside, in great smoke-hung cities, in the midst of that strange,
still-forming muddle of peoples that is America.
I had drawn myself out of that for the time, had been in New York among
the other writer folk, among the painters, among the talkers too. That
after the years of active participation in life, in modern American
life, cheating some, lying a good deal, scheming, being hurt by others,
hurting others.
The younger years of being a business schemer, trying to grow rich--I
have said little enough of those years in my book. However the book is
long enough, perhaps far too long.
Had I ever really wanted to be rich? Perhaps I had only wanted to live,
in my craft, in the practice of my craft. It was certain I had not, for
many years of my life, known what I wanted. After years of striving
to get money, to get power, to be successful, I had found in the end
well-nigh perfect contentment in looking and listening, in sitting lost
in some little corner, writing, trying to write all down. “A little
worm in the fair apple of progress,” I had called myself laughing--the
American laugh.
Now, for a few years, I had been looking abroad. I think it was Joseph
Conrad who said that a writer only began to live after he began to
write. It pleased me to think I was, after all, but ten years old.
Plenty of time ahead for such a one. Time to look about, plenty of time
to look about.
Well, I had been looking about. I an American middle-westerner, ten
years old, had been looking at old London, at strong arrogant young New
York, at old France too.
It was apparent that although in France, in the eleventh twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, there had been many men alive who had cared
greatly for the work of their hands, present-day Frenchmen obviously
did not. The cathedral before me was faced on one side by ugly sheds,
such as some railroad company might have put up on the shores of a lake
facing a city of mid-America. I had taken a second leap from New York
to Paris, had been brought there by a friend who now sat on the bench
beside me. The man was a friend dear to my heart. We had been sitting
for days on just that bench, wandering about the cathedral. Visitors
came and went, mostly Americans, middle-western Americans like myself
no doubt. Some of them looked at the cathedral without stopping the
motors of theirs cars. They were in a hurry, had got the hurry habit.
One day a little drama played itself out in the open space before the
cathedral door. An American came with two women, one French the other
American, his wife or his sweetheart. He was flirting with the French
woman and the American woman was pretending she did not see. My friend
and I watched the drama flit back and forth for two or three hours.
There before us was a woman losing her man, and she did not want to
admit it to herself. Once when they had all three gone inside the
cathedral, the American woman came out and stood for a moment by the
massively beautiful door, the old eleventh-century door facing us. She
did not see us and went to lean against the door itself, crying softly.
Then she wiped her eyes and went inside again to join the others. They
were all presumably getting culture there, in the presence of the work
of the old workmen. The stooped figures of old Frenchwomen with shawls
about their shoulders kept hurrying across the open space, going into
the cathedral to worship. My friend and I were also worshiping at the
cathedral, had been doing that for days.
Life went on then, ever in the same tragic comic sweet way. In the
presence of the beautiful old church one was only more aware, all art
could do no more than that--make people, like my friend and myself,
more aware. An American girl put her face against the beautiful door
of Chartres Cathedral and wept for her lost lover. What had been in the
hearts of the workmen who once leaned over the same door carving it?
They were fellows who had imaginations that flamed up. “Always wood
for carvers to carve, always little flashing things to stir the souls
of painters, always the tangle of human lives for the tale-tellers to
mull over, dream over,” I told myself. I remembered what an excited
young man had once said to me in Chicago. We had stood together in Lake
Street, that most noisy and terrible of all Chicago’s downtown streets.
“There are as many tales to be found here as in any street of any city
in the world,” he had said a little defiantly. Then he looked at me and
smiled. “But they will be different tales than would be found in any
street of any of the old world cities,” he added.