AS one looks back on youth so much of it appears ridiculous and
maundering and without an essential impulse or direction, and yet as I
look at life itself I am not sure but that indirection or unimportant
idlings are a part of life’s method. We often think we are doing some
vastly important thing, whereas in reality we are merely marking time.
At other times, when we appear to be marking time we are growing or
achieving at a great rate; and so it may have been with me. Instead of
pushing on to New York, I chose to return to St. Louis and grasp one
more hour of exquisite romance, drink one more cup of love. And whether
it profited me save as pleasure is profit I cannot tell. Only, may not
pleasure be the ultimate profit?
This trip to St. Louis was for me a most pivotal and deranging thing,
probably a great mistake. At that time, of course, I could not see that.
Instead, I was completely lost in the grip of a passion that
subsequently proved detrimental or devastating. The reality which I was
seeking to establish was a temporary contact only. Any really beautiful
girl or any idyllic scene could have done for me all the things that
this particular girl and scene could do, only thus far I had chanced to
meet no other who could displace her. And in a way I knew this then,
only I realized also that one beautiful specimen was as good a key to
the lock of earthly delights as another.... Only there were so many
locks or chambers to which one key would fit, and how sad, in youth at
least, not to have all the locks, or at least a giant illusion as to
one!
* * * * *
This return began with a long hot trip in July to St. Louis, and then a
quick change in the Union Station there at evening which brought me by
midnight to the small town in the backwoods of Missouri, near which she
lived. It was hot. I recall the wide hot fields and small wooden towns
of Southern Ohio and Indiana and this Missouri landscape in the
night—the frogs, the katydids, the summer stars. I ached and yearned,
not so much over her as over youth and love and the evanescence of all
material fires. The spirit of youth cried and sang at the same time.
The little cottages with their single yellow light shining in the fields
through which this dusty train ran! The perfumed winds!
At last the train stopped and left me standing at midnight on a wooden
platform with no one to greet me. The train was late. A liveryman who
was supposed to look after me did not. At a lone window sat the
telegraph operator, station-master, baggage-agent all in one, a green
shield shading his eyes. Otherwise the station was bare and silent save
for the katydids in some weeds near at hand and some chirping
tree-toads. The agent told me that a hotel was a part of this station,
run by this railroad. Upstairs, over the baggage and other rooms, were a
few large barn-like sleeping chambers, carpetless, dusty, cindery, the
windows curtainless and broken in places, and save for some all but
slatless shutters unshielded from the world and the night. I placed a
chair against my door, my purse under my pillow, my bag near at hand.
During the night several long freights thundered by, their headlights
lighting the room; yet, lying on a mattress of straw and listening to
the frogs and katydids outside, I slept just the same. The next morning
I tied a handkerchief over my eyes and slept some more, arising about
ten to continue my journey.
The home to which I was going was part of an old decayed village, once a
point on a trail or stage-coach route, once the prospective capital of
the State, but now nothing. A courthouse and some quaint tree-shaded
homes were all but lost or islanded in a sea of corn. I rode out a long,
hot, dusty road and finally up a long tree-shaded lane to its very end,
where I passed through a gate and at the far end came upon a worn,
faded, rain-rotted house facing a row of trees in a wide lawn. I felt
that never before had I been so impressed with a region and a home. It
was all so simple. The house, though old and decayed, was exquisite. The
old French windows—copied from where and by whom?—reaching to the grass;
the long graceful rooms, the cool hall, the veranda before it, so very
Southern in quality, the flowers about every window and door! I found a
home in which lived a poverty-stricken and yet spiritually impressive
patriarch, a mother who might serve as an American tradition so simple
and gracious was she, sisters and brothers who were reared in an
atmosphere which somehow induced a gracious, sympathetic idealism and
consideration. Poor as they were, they were the best of the families
here. The father had been an office-holder and one of the district
leaders in his day, and one of his sons still held an office. A
son-in-law was the district master of this entire congressional
district, which included seven counties, and could almost make or break
a congressman. All but three daughters were married, and I was engaged
to one of the remaining ones. Another, too beautiful and too hoyden to
think of any one in particular, was teaching school, or playing at it. A
farm of forty acres to the south of the house was tilled by the father
and two sons.
Elsewhere I have indicated this atmosphere, but here I like to touch on
it again. We Americans have home traditions or ideals, created as much
by song and romance as anything else: _My Old Kentucky Home_, _Suwanee
River_. Despite any willing on my part, this home seemed to fulfill the
spirit of those songs. There was something so sadly romantic about it.
The shade of the great trees moved across the lawn in stately and
lengthening curves. A stream at the foot of the slope leading down from
the west side of the house dimpled and whimpered in the sun. Birds sang,
and there were golden bees about the flowers and wasps under the eaves
of the house. Hammocks of barrel—staves, and others of better texture,
were strung between the trees. In a nearby barn of quaint design were
several good horses, and there were cows in the field adjoining. Ducks
and geese solemnly padded to and fro between the house and the stream.
The air was redolent of corn, wheat, clover, timothy, flowers.
To me it seemed that all the spirit of rural America, its idealism, its
dreams, the passion of a Brown, the courage and patience and sadness of
a Lincoln, the dreams and courage of a Lee or a Jackson, were all here.
The very soil smacked of American idealism and faith, a fixedness in
sentimental and purely imaginative American tradition, in which I, alas!
could not share. I was enraptured. Out of its charms and sentiments I
might have composed an elegy or an epic, but I could not believe that it
was more than a frail flower of romance. I had seen Pittsburgh.... I had
seen Lithuanians and Hungarians in their “courts” and hovels. I had seen
the girls of that city walking the streets at night. This profound faith
in God, in goodness, in virtue and duty that I saw here in no wise
squared with the craft, the cruelty, the brutality and the envy that I
saw everywhere else. These parents were gracious and God-fearing, but to
me they seemed asleep. They did not know life—could not. These boys and
girls, as I soon found, respected love and marriage and duty and other
things which the idealistic American still clings to.
Outside was all this other life that I had seen of which apparently
these people knew nothing. They were as if suspended in dreams, lotus
eaters, and my beloved was lost in this same romance. I was thinking of
her beauty, her wealth of hair, the color of her cheeks, the beauty of
her figure, of what she might be to me. She might have been thinking of
the same thing, possibly more indirectly, but also she was thinking of
the dignity and duty and sanctity of marriage. For her, marriage and one
love were for life. For myself, whether I admitted it or not, love was a
thing much less stable. Indeed I was not thinking of marriage at all,
but rather whether I could be happy here and now, and how much I could
extract out of love. Or perhaps, to be just to myself, I was as much a
victim of passion and romance as she was, only to the two of us it did
not mean the same thing. Unconsciously I identified her with the beauty
of all I saw, and at the same time felt that it was all so different
from anything I knew or believed that I wondered how she would fit in
with the kind of life toward which I was moving. How overcome this
rigidity in duty and truth?
Both of us being inflamed, it was the most difficult thing for me to
look upon her and not crave her physically, and, as she later admitted,
she felt the same yearning toward me. At the time, however, she was all
but horrified at a thought which ran counter to all the principles
impressed upon her since early youth. There was thus set up between us
in this delightful atmosphere a conflict between tradition and desire.
The hot faint breezes about the house and in the trees seemed to whisper
of secret and forbidden contact. The perfumes of the thickly grown beds
of flowers, the languorous sultry heat of the afternoon and night, the
ripening and blooming fields beyond, the drowsy, still, starry nights
with their hum of insects and croak of frogs and the purrs and whimpers
and barks of animals, seemed to call for but one thing. There was about
her an intense delight in living. No doubt she longed as much to be
seized as I to seize her, and yet there was a moral elusiveness which
added even more to the chase. I wished to take her then and not wait,
but the prejudices of a most careful rearing frightened and deterred
her. And yet I shall always feel that the impulse was better than the
forces which confuted and subsequently defeated it. For then was the
time to unite, not years later when, however much the economic and
social and religious conditions which are supposed to surround and
safeguard such unions had been fulfilled, my zest for her, and no doubt
hers in part for me, had worn away.
Love should act in its heat, not when its bank account is heavy. The
chemic formula which works to reproduce the species, and the most vital
examples at that, is not concerned with the petty local and social
restraints which govern all this. Life if it wants anything wants
children, and healthy ones, and the weighing and binding rules which
govern their coming and training may easily become too restrictive.
Nature’s way is correct, her impulses sound. The delight of possessing
my fiancée then would have repaid her for her fears. and me for
ruthlessness if I had taken her. A clearer and a better grasp of life
would have been hers and mine. The coward sips little of life, the
strong man drinks deep. Old prejudices must always fall, and life must
always change. It is the law.
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