I
This story was told to me once by a very able newspaper cartoonist,
and since it makes rather clear the powerfully repressive and often
transforming force of convention, I set it down as something in the
nature of an American social document. As he told it, it went something
like this:
At one time I was a staff artist on the principal paper of one of the
mid-Western cities, a city on a river. It was, and remains to this
hour, a typical American city. No change. It had a population then of
between four and five hundred thousand. It had its clubs and churches
and its conventional goings-on. It was an excellent and prosperous
manufacturing city; nothing more.
On the staff with me at this time was a reporter whom I had known
a little, but never intimately. I don’t know whether I ought to
bother to describe him or not—physically, I mean. His physique is
unimportant to this story. But I think it would be interesting and
even important to take him apart mentally and look at him, if one
could—sort out the various components of his intellectual machinery,
and so find out exactly how his intellectual processes proceeded.
However, I can’t do that; I have not the skill. Barring certain
very superficial characteristics which I will mention, he was then
and remains now a psychological mystery to me. He was what I would
describe as superficially clever, a good writer of a good, practical,
matter-of-fact story. He appeared to be well liked by those who were
above him officially, and he could write Sunday feature stories of
a sort, no one of which, as I saw it, ever contained a moving touch
of color or a breath of real poetry. Some humor he had. He was
efficient. He had a nose for news. He dressed quite well and he was not
ill-looking—tall, thin, wiry, almost leathery. He had a quick, facile
smile, a genial wordflow for all who knew him. He was the kind of man
who was on practical and friendly terms with many men connected with
the commercial organizations and clubs about town, and from whom he
extracted news bits from time to time. By the directing chiefs of the
paper he was considered useful.
Well, this man and I were occasionally sent out on the same assignment,
he to write the story, I to make sketches—usually some Sunday
feature story. Occasionally we would talk about whatever was before
us—newspaper work, politics, the particular story in hand—but never
enthusiastically or warmly about anything. He lacked what I thought
was the artistic and poetic point of view. And yet, as I say, we were
friendly enough. I took him about as any newspaperman takes another
newspaperman of the same staff who is in good standing.
Along in the spring or summer of the second year that I was on the
paper the Sunday editor, to whom I was beholden in part for my salary,
called me into his room and said that he had decided that Wallace
Steele and myself were to do a feature story about the “love-boats”
which plied Saturday and Sunday afternoons and every evening up and
down the river for a distance of thirty-five miles or more. This
distance, weather permitting, gave an opportunity to six or seven
hundred couples on hot nights to escape the dry, sweltering heat of the
city—and it was hot there in the summer—and to enjoy the breezes and
dance, sometimes by the light of Chinese lanterns, sometimes by the
light of the full moon. It was delightful. Many, many thousands took
advantage of the opportunity in season.
It was delicious to me, then in the prime of youth and ambition, to sit
on the hurricane or “spoon” deck, as our Sunday editor called it, and
study not only the hundreds of boys and girls, but also the older men
and women, who came principally to make love, though secondarily to
enjoy the river and the air, to brood over the picturesque groupings of
the trees, bushes, distant cabins and bluffs which rose steeply from
the river, to watch the great cloud of smoke that trailed back over us,
to see the two halves of the immense steel walking beam chuff-chuffing
up and down, and to listen to the drive of the water-wheel behind. This
was in the days before the automobile, and any such pleasant means of
getting away from the city was valued much more than it is now.
But to return to this Sunday editor and his orders. I was to make
sketches of spooning couples, or at least of two or three small
distinctive groups with a touch of romance in them. Steele was to
tell how the love-making went on. This, being an innocent method of
amusement, relief from the humdrum of such a world as this was looked
upon with suspicion if not actual disfavor by the wiseacres of the
paper, as well as by the conservatives of the city. True conservatives
would not so indulge themselves. The real object of the Sunday editor
was to get something into his paper that would have a little kick to
it. We were, without exaggerating the matter in any way, to shock the
conservatives by a little picture of life and love, which, however
innocent, was none the less taboo in that city. The story was to
suggest, as I understand it, loose living, low ideals and the like.
These outings did not have the lockstep of business or religion in them.