(_Eastlake, disregarding her comments, continues._)
Dear lady, did you ever read some stately bit of prose, which caught in
its glamour of splendid words the vital, throbbing world of affairs and
passions, some crystallization of a rich experience, and then by chance
turn to the "newsy" column of an American newspaper? (Forsooth, these
must be literary letters!) Well, that tells the sensations of going
from Europe to Wabash. I had caught the sound of the greater harmony,
or struggle, and I must accept the squeak of the melodeon. I did not
think highly of myself; had started too far back in the race, and I
knew that laborious years of intense zeal would place me only third
class, or even lower, in any pursuit of the arts. Perhaps if I had felt
that I could have made a good third class, I should have fought it out
in Europe. There are some things man cannot accomplish, however, our
optimistic national creed to the contrary. And there would have been
something low in disappointing my father for such ignoble results, such
imperfect satisfaction.
So to Wabash I went. I resolved to adapt myself to the billiards and
whiskey of the Commercial Club, and to the desk in the inner office
behind the glass partitions. And I like to think that I satisfied my
father those two years in the mills. After a time I achieved a lazy
content. At first I tried to deceive myself; to think that the newsy
column of Wabash was as significant as the grand page of London or
Paris. That simple yarn didn't satisfy me many months.
Then my father died. I hung on at the mills for a time, until the
strikes and the general depression gave me valid reasons for
withdrawing. To skip details, I sold out my interests, and with my
little capital came to Chicago. My income, still dependent in some part
upon those Wabash mills, trembles back and forth in unstable
equilibrium.
Chicago was too much like Wabash just then. I went to Florence to join
a man, half German Jew, half American, wholly cosmopolite, whom I had
known in Paris. His life was very thin: it consisted wholly of
interests--a tenuous sort of existence. I can thank him for two things:
that I did not remain forever in Italy, trying to say something new,
and that I began a definite task. I should send you my book (now that
it is out and people are talking about it), but it would bore you, and
you would feel that you must chatter about it. It is a good piece of
journeyman work. I gathered enough notes for another volume, and then I
grew restless. Business called me home for a few months, so I came back
to Chicago. Of all places! you say. Yes, to Chicago, to see this brutal
whirlpool as it spins and spins. It has fascinated me, I admit, and I
stay on--to live up among the chimneys, hanging out over the cornice of
a twelve-story building; to soak myself in the steam and smoke of the
prairie and in the noises of a city's commerce.
Am I content? Yes, when I am writing to you; or when the pile of
manuscripts at my side grows painfully page by page; or when, peering
out of the fort-like embrasure, I can see the sun drenched in smoke and
mist and the "sky-scrapers" gleam like the walls of a Colorado canon. I
have enough to buy me existence, and at thirty I still find peepholes
into hopes.
Are these enough facts for you? Shall I send you an inventory of my
room, of my days, of my mental furniture? Some long afternoon I will
spirit you up here in that little steel cage, and you shall peer out of
my window, tapping your restless feet, while you sniff at the squalor
below. You will move softly about, questioning the watercolors, the
bits of bric-à-brac, the dusty manuscripts, the dull red hangings, not
quite understanding the fox in his hole. You will gratefully catch the
sounds from the mound below our feet, and when you say good-by and drop
swiftly down those long stories you will gasp a little sigh of relief.
You will pull down your veil and drive off to an afternoon tea, feeling
that things as they are are very nice, and that a little Chicago mud is
worth all the clay of the studios. And I? I shall take the roses out of
the vase and throw them away. I shall say, "Enough!" But somehow you
will have left a suggestion of love about the place. I shall fancy that
I still hear your voice, which will be so far away dealing out
banalities. I shall treasure the words you let wander heedlessly out of
the window. I shall open my book and write, "To-day she
came--_beatissima hora_."