ON the day of her arrival I arrayed myself in my best, armed myself with
flowers, candy and two tickets for the theater, and made my way out to
her aunt’s in one of the simpler home streets in the west end. I was so
fearful that my afternoon assignment should prove a barrier to my seeing
her that day that I went to her as early as ten-thirty, intending to
offer her the tickets and arrange to stop for her afterwards at the
theater; or, failing that, to see her for a little while in the evening
if my assignments permitted. I was so vain of my standing in her eyes,
so anxious to make a good impression, that I was ashamed to confess that
my reportorial duties made it difficult for me to see her at all. After
my free days in Chicago I wanted her to think that I was more than a
mere reporter, a sort of traveling correspondent and feature man, which
in a way I was, only my superiors were determined to keep me for some
reason in the ordinary reportorial class taking daily assignments as
usual. Instead of confessing my difficulties I made a great show of
freedom.
I found her in a small tree-shaded, cool-looking brick house, with a
brick sidewalk before it and a space of grass on one side. Never did
place seem more charming. I stared at it as one might at a shrine. Here
at last was the temporary home of my beloved, and she was within!
I knocked, and an attractive slip of a girl (her niece, as I learned)
answered. I was shown into a long, dustless, darkened parlor. After
giving me time to weigh the taste and affluence of her relatives
according to my standards, she arrived, the beloved, the beautiful. In
view of many later sadder things, it seems that here at least I might
attempt to do her full justice. She seemed exquisite to me then, a trim,
agreeable sylph of a girl, with a lovely oval face, stark red hair
braided and coiled after the fashion of a Greek head, a clear pink skin,
long, narrow, almond-shaped, gray-blue eyes, delicate, graceful hands, a
perfect figure, small well-formed feet. There was something of the wood
or water nymph about her, a seeking in her eyes, a breath of wild winds
in her hair, a scarlet glory to her mouth. And yet she was so obviously
a simple and inexperienced country girl, caught firm and fast in
American religious and puritanic traditions and with no hint in her mind
of all the wild, mad ways of the world. Sometimes I have grieved that
she ever met me, or that I so little understood myself as to have sought
her out.
I first saw her, after this long time, framed in a white doorway, and
she made a fascinating picture. Here, as in Chicago, she seemed shy,
innocent, questioning, as one who might fly at the first sound. I gazed
in admiration. Despite a certain something in her letters which had
indirectly assured me of her affection or her desire for mine, still she
held aloof, extending a cool hand and asking me to sit down, smiling
tenderly and graciously. I felt odd, out of place, and yet wonderfully
drawn to her, passionately interested. What followed by way of
conversation I cannot remember now—talk of the Fair, I suppose, some of
those we had known, her summer, mine. She took my roses and pinned some
of them on, placing the rest in a jar. There was a piano here, and after
a time she consented to play. In a moment, it seemed, it was
twelve-thirty, and I had to go.
I walked on air. It seemed to me that I had never seen any one more
beautiful—and I doubt now that I had. There was no reason to be applied
to the thing: it was plain infatuation, a burning, consuming desire for
her. If I had lost her then and there, or any time within a year
thereafter, I should have deemed it the most amazing affair of my life.
I returned to the office and took some assignment, which I cut short at
three-thirty in order to get back to the Grand Opera House to sit beside
her. The play was an Irish love drama, with Chauncey Olcott, the singing
comedian, in the title rôle. With her beside me I thought it perfect.
Love! Ah, love! When the performance was ended I was ready to weep over
the torturing beauty of life. Outside we found the matinée crowds, the
carriages, the sense of autumn gayety and show in the air. A nearby
ice-cream and candy store was crowded to suffocation. Young girls of the
better families hummed like bees. Because of my poverty and uncertain
station I felt depressed, at the same time pretending to a station which
I felt to be most unreal. The mixture of ambition and uncertainty,
pride, a gay coaxing in the air, added to the need to return to
conventional toil—how these tortured me! Nothing surprises me now more
than my driving emotions all through this period. I was as one
possessed.
We parted at a street-car—when I wanted a carriage! We met at her aunt’s
home at eight-thirty, because I saw an opportunity of deliberately
evading an assignment. In this simple parlor I dreamed the wildest, the
most fantastic dreams. She was the be-all and the end-all of my
existence. Now I must work for her, wait for her, succeed for her! Her
mediocre piano technique seemed perfect, her voice ideal! Never was such
beauty, such color. St. Louis took on a glamour which it had never
before possessed.... If only this love affair could have gone on to a
swift fruition it would have been perfect, blinding.
But all the formalities, traditions, beliefs, of a conventional and
puritanic region were in the way. Love, as it is in most places, and
despite its consuming blaze, was a slow process. There must be many such
visits, I knew, before I could even place an arm about her. I was to be
permitted to take her to church, to concerts, the theater, a restaurant
occasionally, but nothing more.
The next morning I went to church with her; the next afternoon
unavoidable work kept me from her, but that night I shirked and stayed
with her until eleven. The next morning, since she had to catch an early
train for Florissant, I slept late, but during the next two weeks (she
could not come oftener, having to spend one Sunday with her “folks,” as
she referred to them) I poured forth my amazement and delight on reams
of thin paper. I wonder now where they are. Once there was a trunk full.
Perhaps the most interesting effect of this sudden fierce passion was
the heightened color it lent to everything. Never before had I realized
quite so clearly the charm of life as life, its wondrous singing, its
intense appeal. I remember witnessing a hanging about this time,
standing beside the murderer when the trap was sprung, and being
horrified, sickened to death, yet when I returned to the office and
there was a letter from her—the world was perfect once more, no evil or
pain in it! I followed up the horrors of a political catastrophe, in
which a city treasurer shot himself to escape the law—but a letter from
her, and the world was beautiful. A negro in an outlying county
assaulted a girl, and I arrived in time to see him lynched, but walking
in the wood afterward, away from the swinging body, I thought of her—and
life contained not a single ill. Such is infatuation. If I had been
alive before, now I was more than alive. I tingled all over with longing
and aspiration—to be an editor, a publisher, a playwright—I know not
what. The simple homes I had dreamed over before as representing all
that was charming and soothing and shielding were now twice as
attractive. Love, all its possibilities, paraded before my eyes, a
gorgeous, fantastic procession. Love! Love! The charm of a home in which
it would find its most appropriate setting! The brooding tenderness of
it! Its healing force against the blows of ordinary life! To be married,
to have your beloved with you, to have a charming home to which to
return of an evening, or at any hour, sick or well! I was young, in good
health and spirits. In a few years I should be neither so young nor so
vital. Age would descend, cold, gray, thin, passionless. This glorious,
glorious period of love, desire, would be gone, and then what? Ah, and
then what! If I did not achieve now and soon all that I desired in the
way of tenderness, fortune, beauty—now when I was young and could enjoy
it—my chance would once and for all be over. I should be helpless. Youth
would come no more! Love would come no more! But now—now—life was
sounding, singing, urging, teasing; but also it was running away fast,
and what was I doing about it? What could I do?
The five months which followed were a period of just such color and
mood, the richest period of rank romanticism I have ever endured. At
times I could laugh, at others sigh, over the incidents of this period,
for there is as little happiness in love as there is out of it, at least
in my case. If I had only known myself I might have seen, and that
plainly, that it was not any of the charming conventional things which
this girl represented but her charming physical self that I craved. The
world, as I see it now, has trussed itself up too helplessly with too
many strings of convention, religion, dogma. It has accepted too many
rules, all calculated for the guidance of individuals in connection with
the propagation and rearing of children, the conquest and development of
this planet. This is all very well for those who are interested in that,
but what of those who are not? Is it everybody’s business to get married
and accept all the dictates of conventional society—that is, bear and
rear children according to a given social or religious theory? Cannot
the world have too much of mere breeding? Are two billion wage slaves,
for instance, more advantageous than one billion, or one billion more
than five hundred million? Or is an unconquered planet less interesting
than a conquered one? Isn’t the mere _contact of love_, if it produces
ideas, experiences, tragedies even, as important as raising a few
hundred thousand coal miners, railroad hands or heroes destined to be
eventually ground or shot in some contest with autocratic or
capitalistic classes? And, furthermore, I am inclined to suspect that
the monogamous standard to which the world has been tethered much too
harshly for a thousand years or more now is entirely wrong. I do not
believe that it is Nature’s only or ultimate way of continuing or
preserving itself. Nor am I inclined to accept the belief that it
produces the highest type of citizen. The ancient world knew little of
strict monogamy, and some countries today are still without it. Even in
our religious or moralistic day we are beginning to see less and less of
its strict enforcement. (Fifty thousand divorces in one State in one
year is but a straw.) It is a product, I suspect, of intellectual
lethargy or dullness, a mental incapacity for individuality. What we
have achieved is a vast ruthless machine for the propagation of people
far beyond the world’s need, even its capacity to support decently. In
special cases, where the strong find themselves, we see more of secret
polygamy and polyandry than is suspected by the dull and the ignorant.
Economic opportunity, plus love or attraction, arranges all this, all
the churches, laws, disasters to the contrary notwithstanding. Love or
desire, where economic conditions permit, will and does find a way.
Here I was dreaming of all the excellencies of which the
conventionalists prate in connection with home, peace, stability and the
like, anxious to put my neck under that yoke, when in reality what I
really wanted, and the only thing that my peculiarly erratic and
individual disposition would permit, was mental and personal freedom. I
did not really want any such conventional girl at all, and if I had
clearly understood what it all meant I might have been only too glad to
give her up. What I wanted was the joy of possessing her without any of
the hindrances or binding chains of convention and monogamy, but she
would none of it. This unsatisfied desire, added to a huge world-sorrow
over life itself, the richness and promise of the visible scene, the
sting and urge of its beauty, the briefness of our days, the uncertainty
of our hopes, the smallness of our capacity to achieve or consume where
so much is, produced an intense ache and urge which endured until I left
St. Louis. I was so staggered by the promise and the possibilities of
life, at the same time growing more and more doubtful of my capacity to
achieve anything, that I was falling into a profound sadness. Yet I was
only twenty-two, and between these thoughts would come intense waves of
do and dare: I was to be all that I fancied, achieve all that I dreamed.
As a contrast to all these thoughts, fancies, and depressions, I
indulged in a heavy military coat of the most disturbing length, a
wide-brimmed Stetson hat, Southern style, gloves, a cane, soft pleated
shirts—a most _outré_ equipment for all occasions including those on
which I could call upon her or take her to a theater or restaurant. I
remember one Saturday morning, when I was on my way to see my lady love
and had stopped at the Olympic to secure two seats, meeting a dapper,
rather flashy newspaper man. I had on the military coat, and the hat, a
pair of bright yellow gloves, narrow-toed patent leather shoes, a ring,
a pin, a suit brighter than his own, a cane, and I was carrying a
bouquet of roses. I was about to take a street-car out to her place, not
being prosperous enough to hire a carriage.
“Well, for sake, old man, what’s up?” he called, seizing me by the arm.
“You’re not getting married, are you?”
“Aw, cut the comedy!” I replied, or words to that effect. “Can’t a
fellow put on any decent clothes in this town without exciting the
natives? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he replied apologetically. “You look swell. You got
on more dog than ever I see a newspaper man around here pull. You must
be getting along! How are things at the _Republic_, anyhow?”
We now conversed more affably. He touched the coat gingerly and with
interest, felt of the quality of the cloth, looked me up and down,
seemingly with admiration—more likely with amazement—shook his head
approvingly and said: “Some class, I must say. You’re right there,
sport, with the raiment,” and walked off.
It was in this style that I prosecuted my quest. For my ordinary day’s
labor I wore other clothes, but sometimes, when stealing a march on my
city editor Saturday afternoons or Sundays or evenings, I had to perform
a lightning change act in order to get into my finery, pay my visit, and
still get back to the office between eleven and twelve, or before
six-thirty, in my ordinary clothes. Sometimes I changed as many as three
times in one afternoon or evening. My room being near here facilitated
this. A little later, when I was more experienced, I aided myself to
this speed by wearing all but the coat and hat, an array in which I
never presumed to enter the office. Even my ultra impressive suit and my
shoes, shirts and ties attracted attention.
“Gee whiz, Mr. Dreiser!” my pet office boy at the _Republic_ once
remarked to me as I entered in this array, “you certainly look as though
you ought to own the paper! The boss don’t look like you.”
Wandell, Williams, the sporting editor, the religious editor, the
dramatic editor, all eyed me with evident curiosity. “You certainly are
laying it on thick these days,” Williams genially remarked, beaming on
me with his one eye.
As for my lady love—well, I reached the place where I could hold her
hand, put my arms about her, kiss her, but never could I induce her to
sit upon my lap. That was reserved for a much later date.
------------------------------------------------------------------------