My own mind was in a ferment, thoughts scurrying across a background of
fancies as shadows play across the walls of a room when night comes on.
My friend sat in silence. He had got hold of Huysmann’s “Cathedral” and
was reading. Now and then he put the book down and sat for a long time
in silence looking at the gray lovely old building in that gray light.
It was one of the best moments of my own life. I felt free and glad.
Did the friend who was with me love me? It was sure I loved him. How
good his silent presence.
How good the presence of my own thoughts too! There was my friend,
the Cathedral, the presence of the little drama in the lives of the
three strange people who would presently come out of the church and
go away, the packed storehouse of my own fancy too. The end of the
story immediately before me I would never know but some day, when I was
alone, in Chicago perhaps, my fancy would take it up and play with it.
Too bad I was not a Turgenev or someone equally skillful. Were I such a
one I might make of what I had seen some such a tale as, say Turgenev’s
“Smoke.” There was just the material for a tale, a novel perhaps. One
might fancy the man a young American who had come to Paris to study
painting and before he came had engaged himself to an American girl
at home. He had learned French, had made progress with his work. Then
the American girl had set sail for Paris to join him and, at just that
moment, while she was at sea, he had fallen desperately in love with a
French woman. The deuce, the French woman was skillful with men and she
imagined the young American to be rich. With what uncertain thoughts
was the breast of the young American torn at that moment.
The three of them just suddenly came out of the church together and
walked away together in silence. That was all. All tales presented
themselves to the fancy in just that way. There was a suggestion, a
hint given. In a crowd of faces in a crowded street one face suddenly
jumped out. It had a tale to tell, was crying its tale to the streets
but at best one got only a fragment of it. Once, long after the time
of which I am now writing, I tried to paint in an American desert.
There was something about the light. My eyes were not accustomed to
it. There was a wide desert and beyond the desert hills floating away
into the distance. I could lie on my back on the sands of the desert
and watch the evening light fade away over the hills and such forms
come! I thought all I had ever felt could be expressed in one painting
of those hills but when later I took a brush into my hands I was only
dumb and stupid. What appeared on the canvas was dull and meaningless.
I walked about swearing at myself and then at the desert light and the
very hills that so short a time before had so filled me with peace and
happiness. I kept blaming the light. “Nothing stands still in this
light,” I said to myself.
As though anything ever stood still anywhere. It was the artist’s
business to make it stand still--well, just to fix the moment, in a
painting, in a tale, in a poem.
Sitting there with my friend, facing the cathedral, I remembered
something. On my desk, somewhere back in America, was a book in which I
had once written certain lines. Well, I had made a poem and had called
it, “One who would not grow old.” Now it came sharply back:
I have wished that the wind would stop blowing, that birds would stop
dead still in their flight, without falling into the sea, that waves
would stand ready to break upon shores without breaking, that all
time, all impulse, all movement, mood, hungers, everything would stop
and stand hushed and still for a moment.
It would be wonderful to be sitting on a log in a forest when it
happened.
When all was still and hushed, just as I have described, we would get
off the log and walk a little way.
The insects would all lie still on the ground or float, fixed and
silent in the air. An old frog, that lived under a stone and that had
opened his mouth to snap at a fly, would sit gaping.
There would be no movement, in New York, in Detroit, in Chicago down
by the stock exchange, in towns, in factories, on farms.
Out in Colorado, where a man was riding a horse furiously, striving to
catch a steer to be sent to Chicago and butchered--
He would stop, too, and the steer would stop.
You and I would walk a little way, in the forest, or on a prairie, or
on the streets of a town, and then we would stop. We would be the only
moving things in the world and then one of us would start a thought
rolling and rolling, down time, down space, down mind, down life too.
I am sure I would let you do it if later you would keep all of the
voices of your mind hushed while I did it in my turn. I would wait ten
lives while others did it for my turn.
* * * * *
That impulse gone long since as I sat that day before the cathedral
of Chartres! It was an impulse that had come time and again to every
artist but my own moments had come often enough. I had no cause to
quarrel with my own life.
Such moments as I had already had in it. “Life owes me nothing,” I kept
saying over and over to myself. It was true enough. For all one might
say about American life it had been good to me. On that afternoon I
thought that if I were suddenly to be confronted with death in the form
of the old man with a sickle in his hand, I would be compelled to say,
“Well, it’s your turn now, old fellow. I’ve had my chance. If I had
done little enough, it’s my fault, not yours.”
At any rate life in America had poured itself out richly enough. It was
doing that still. As I sat on the bench before Chartres on that gray
day I remembered such moments.
* * * * *
A hot afternoon at Saratoga. I had gone to the races with two men from
Kentucky, one a professional gambler and the other a business man who
could never succeed because he was always running off to the horse
races or some such place with such no-accounts as the little gambler
and myself. We were smoking big black cigars and all of us were clad
in rather garish clothes. All about us were men just like us but with
big diamonds on their fingers or in their neckties. On a stretch of
green lawn beneath trees a horse was being saddled. Such a beauty!
What a buzz of colorful words! The professional gambler, a small man
with crooked legs, had once been a jockey and later a trainer of race
horses. It was said he had done something crooked, had got himself into
disgrace with other horsemen but of that I knew little. At the sight of
such a horse as we were now watching as the saddle was put on something
strange happened to him. A soft light came into his eyes. The devil!
I had once or twice seen just such a light in the eyes of painters at
work, I had seen such a light in the eyes of Alfred Stieglitz in the
presence of a painting. Well, it was such a light as might have come
into the eyes of a Stark Young holding in his hands some piece of old
Italian craftsmanship.
I remember that as the little old gambler and I stood near the horse I
spoke to him of a painting I had once seen in New York, that painting
of Albert Ryder’s of the ghostly white horse running beneath a
mysteriously encircled moon on an old race track at night.
The gambler and I talked of the painting. “I know,” he said, “I like to
hang around race tracks at night myself.”
That was all he said and we stood watching the horse. In a few minutes
now that tense trembling body would be at ease, fallen into the ease of
its long, swinging stride, out there on the track.
The gambler and I went away to stand by a fence. Were men less
fortunate than horses? Did men also seek but to express themselves
beautifully as in a few minutes now the horse would do? The gambler’s
body trembled as did my own. When the horse ran (he broke the record
for the mile, that day) he and I did not speak to each other. We had
together seen something we together loved. Was it enough? “At least,”
I told myself, “we men have a kind of consciousness that perhaps the
horses haven’t. We have this consciousness of one another. That is what
love is, perhaps.”
There was a child, a young boy of fourteen walking beside his mother in
a park at Cleveland, Ohio. I sat on a bench there and saw him go by and
after that one moment of his passing never saw him again but I’ll never
forget while I live. The moment was like the moment of the running of
the horse. Could it be that it was the boy’s most beautiful moment?
Well, I had seen it. Why was I not made to be a painter? The boy’s head
was thrown a little back, he had black curly hair and carried his hat
in his hand. In just that moment of his passing the bench on which I
sat his young body was all alive, all of the senses fully alive. Whose
son was he? Such a living thing as that, to be thrown into the life of
Cleveland, Ohio or of Paris or Venice either for that matter.
I am always having those moments of checking up like a miser closing
the shutters of his house at night to count his gold before he goes to
bed and although there are many notes on which I might close this book
on my own imaginative life in America, it seems to me good enough to
close it just there as I sat that day before Chartres Cathedral beside
a man I had come to love and in the presence of that cathedral that had
made me more deeply happy than any other work of art I had ever seen.
My friend kept pretending to read his book but from time to time I saw
how his eyes followed the old tower of the church and the gladness that
came into him too.
We would both soon be going back to America to our separate places
there. We wanted to go, wanted to take our chances of getting what we
could out of our own lives in our own places. We did not want to spend
our lives living in the past, dreaming over the dead past of a Europe
from which we were separated by a wide ocean. Americans with cultural
impulses had done too much of that sort of thing in the past. The
game was worn out and even a ladies’ literary society in an Iowa city
was coming to know that a European artist of the present day was not
necessarily of importance just because he was a European.
The future of the western world lay with America. Everyone knew that.
In Europe they knew it better than they did in America.
It was for me a morning of such thoughts, such memories--just there
before Chartres with my friend.
Once, in one of my novels, “Poor White,” I made my hero at the very end
of the book go on a trip alone. He was feeling the futility of his own
life pretty fully, as I myself have so often done, and so after his
business was attended to be went to walk on a beach. That was in the
town of Sandusky, in the state of Ohio, my own state.
He gathered up a little handful of shining stones like a child, and
later carried them about with him. They were a comfort to him. Life,
his own efforts at life, had seemed so futile and ineffectual but the
little stones were something glistening and clear. To the child man,
the American who was hero of my book and, I thought, to myself and
to many other American men I had seen, they were something a little
permanent. They were beautiful and strange at the moment and would be
still beautiful and strange after a week, a month, a year.
I had ended my novel on that note and a good many of my friends had
told me they did not know what I was talking about. Was it because,
to most Americans, the desire for something, for even little colored
stones to hold in the hand now and then to glisten and shine outside
the muddle of life, was it because to most Americans that desire had
not become as yet conscious?
Perhaps it had not but that was not my story. At least in me it had
become conscious, if not as yet well directed or very intelligent. It
had made me a restless man all my life, had set me wandering from place
to place, had driven me from the towns to the cities and from one city
to another.
In the end I had become a teller of tales. I liked my job. Sometimes I
did it fairly well and sometimes I blundered horribly. I had found out
that trying to do my job was fun and that doing it well and finely was
a task for the most part beyond me.
Often enough I sat thinking of my wasted years, making excuses for
myself, but in my happier moments and when I was not at work on my job
I was happiest when I was in the mood into which I had fallen on the
day when I sat before the cathedral--that is to say, when I sat rolling
over and over the little colored stones I had managed to gather up.
The man with the two women had just dropped another into my hands. How
full my hands were! How many flashes of beauty had come to me out of
American life.
It was up to me to carve the stones, to make them more beautiful if I
could but often enough my hands trembled. I wasn’t young any more, but
I had sought teachers and had found a few. One of them was with me at
that moment sitting on the bench before the cathedral and pretending
to read a book about it. He grew tired of the pretense and taking out
a package of cigarettes offered me one, but then found he hadn’t any
match. To such confirmed smokers as my friend and myself the French
notion of making a government monopoly of matches is a pest. It is like
so much that is European nowadays. It is like the penuriousness of an
old age of which at least there is none in America. “The devil!” said
my friend. “Let’s go for a walk.”
We did walk, down through the lovely old town, the town made lovely not
by the men who live there now but by men of another age, long since
fast asleep. If we were neither of us so young in years any more,
there was a way in which we were both young enough. We were young with
that America of which we both at that moment felt ourselves very much
a part, and of which, for many other reasons aside from the French
monopoly in matches, we were glad in our hearts to be a part.