AS April advanced I left the Corbin Company, determined to improve my
condition. I was tired of collecting—the same districts, the same
excuses, innocences, subterfuges. By degrees I had come to feel a great
contempt for the average mind. So many people were so low, so shifty, so
dirty, so nondescript. They were food for dreams; little more. Owing to
my experience with the manager of the Lovell Company in the matter of
taking what did not belong to me I had become very cautious, and this
meant that I should be compelled to live from week to week on my
miserable twelve dollars.
In addition, home life had become a horrible burden. The house was badly
kept and the meals were wretched. Being of a quarrelsome, fault-finding
disposition and not having M—— or T—— to fight with, C—— now turned her
attentions to E—— and myself. We did not do this and that; the burden of
the work was left to her. By degrees I grew into a kind of servant.
Being told one April Friday of some needs that I must supply, and having
decided that I could not endure either this abode or my present work, I
took my fate in my hands and the next day resigned my job, having in my
possession sixty-five dollars. I was now determined, come what might,
never to take another job except one of reporting unless I was actually
driven to it by starvation, and in this mood I came home and announced
that I had lost my position and that this “home” would therefore have to
be given up. And how glad I was! Now I should be rid of this dull flat,
which was so colorless and burdensome. As I see it now, my sister
sensibly enough from her point of view, perhaps, was figuring that E——
and I, as dutiful brothers, should support her while she spent all her
money on clothes. I came to dislike her almost as much as I did M——, and
told her gladly this same day that we could not live here any longer. In
consequence the furniture company was notified to come and get the
furniture. Our lease of the place being only from month to month, it was
easy enough to depart at once. E—— and I were to share a room at the de
G——s for a dollar and a half a week each, such meals as I ate there to
be paid for at the rate of twenty-five cents each.
Then and there, as I have since noted with a kind of fatalistic
curiosity, the last phase of my rather troublesome youth began. Up to
and even including this last move to Taylor Street I had been intimately
identified, in spirit at least, with our family and its concentrated
home life. During my mother’s life, of course, I had felt that wherever
she was was home; after her death it was the house in which she had
lived that held me, quite as much as it was my father and those of us
who remained together to keep up in some manner the family spirit. When
the spell of this began to lessen, owing to bitter recrimination and the
continuous development of individuality in all of us, this new branch
home established by three of us seemed something of the old place and
spiritually allied to it; but when it fell, and the old home broke up at
about the same time, I felt completely adrift.
What was I to do with myself now? I asked. Where go? Here I was, soon
(in three months) to be twenty-one years old, and yet without trade or
profession, a sort of nondescript dreamer without the power to earn a
decent living and yet with all the tastes and proclivities of one
destined to an independent fortune. My eyes were constantly fixed on
people in positions far above my own. Those who interested me most were
bankers, millionaires, artists, executives, leaders, the real rulers of
the world. Just at this time the nation was being thrown into its
quadrennial ferment, the presidential election. The newspapers were
publishing reams upon reams of information and comment. David B. Hill,
then governor of New York, Grover Cleveland of New York, Thomas B.
Hendricks of Indiana, and others were being widely and favorably
discussed by the Democratic party, whose convention was to be held here
in Chicago the coming June. Among the Republicans, Benjamin Harrison of
Indiana, James G. Blaine of Maine, Thomas B. Allison of Iowa, and others
were much to the fore.
If by my devotion to minor matters I have indicated that I was not
interested in public affairs I have given an inadequate account of
myself. It is true that life at close range fascinated me, but the
general progress of Europe and America and Asia and Africa was by no
means beyond my intellectual inquiry. By now I was a reader of Emerson,
Carlyle, Macaulay, Froude, John Stuart Mill and others. The existence of
Nietzsche in Germany, Darwin, Spencer, Wallace and Tyndall in England,
and what they stood for, was in part at least within the range of my
intuition, if not my exact knowledge. In America, Washington, Jefferson,
Jackson, Lincoln, the history of the Civil War and the subsequent drift
of the nation to monopoly and so to oligarchy, were all within my
understanding and private philosophizing.
And now this national ferment in regard to political preferment and
advancement, the swelling tides of wealth and population in Chicago, the
upward soaring of names and fames, stirred me like whips and goads. I
wanted to get up—oh, how eagerly! I wanted to shake off the garments of
the commonplace in which I seemed swathed and step forth into the public
arena, where I should be seen and understood for what I was. “No common
man am I,” I was constantly saying to myself, and I would no longer be
held down to this shabby world of collecting in which I found myself.
The newspapers—the newspapers—somehow, by their intimacy with everything
that was going on in the world, seemed to be the swiftest approach to
all this of which I was dreaming. It seemed to me as if I understood
already all the processes by which they were made. Reporting, I said to
myself, must certainly be easy. Something happened—one car ran into
another; a man was shot; a fire broke out; the reporter ran to the
scene, observed or inquired the details, got the names and addresses of
those immediately concerned, and then described it all. To reassure
myself on this point I went about looking for accidents on my own
account, or imagining them, and then wrote out what I saw or imagined.
To me the result, compared with what I found in the daily papers, was
quite satisfactory. Some paper must give me a place.
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