BOOK TWO

NOTE I

I WAS rolling kegs of nails out of a great sheet-iron warehouse and onto a long platform, from where they were to be carted by trucks, down a short street, out to a wharf and aboard a ship. The kegs were heavy but they were not large, and as they were rolled down a slight incline to the platform the rolling could be done with the foot. Like practically all modern workmen my body had plenty to do but my mind was idle. There was no planning of the work, no scheming to make the day’s work fit the plan. The truckmen, four heavy and good-natured Swedes, loaded the trucks, and that also required no skill. The kegs were so heavy that a few of them only could be put on a truck at one time and the trucks did not have to be loaded skillfully.

As for the nails themselves, they came pouring out of machines somewhere back in the factory at the edge of which the warehouse stood.

The warehouse had two platforms, one at which cars were loaded and our own for the loading of trucks, and I could hear voices on the other platform--an oath, a broken laugh--but never did I see the men employed there.

On our side we had a little life of our own. My single fellow-workman, who all day long ran in and out of the warehouse with me, was a short, stocky young man who on Saturday afternoons played baseball and, in the winter, hockey. He continually boasted of his prowess in games and when the warehouse foreman was not about--he seldom appeared on our platform--the athlete stopped work to tell one of the teamsters a story.

The stories all concerned one impulse in life, and as I had grown unspeakably weary of hearing them and indeed doubted the man’s potency, he was so insistent about it, I did not stop working but rolled kegs busily. The teamster laughed heavily. “There was a fat woman, hanging out clothes, on a line. Two stray dogs came along,” etc. The story-teller himself laughed as he told his tale and sometimes glared at me because I did not stop to listen. “You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” he asked, but I did not answer. The horses hitched to the trucks were quiet beasts with broad flanks, and as he talked, telling his tales, they switched their tails slowly back and forth, driving flies away. Then they turned their heads to look at me, running out of the warehouse and down the incline behind one of the flying kegs. “Don’t be in a hurry. You ain’t afraid of your job, are you?” they also seemed to be saying.

My legs and arms, my body had enough to do but my mind was idle. During the year before I had been with race horses, going with them about Ohio to the fairs and race meetings, and then I had given up that life, although I loved it well, because I wanted something from men I did not think I could find at the tracks. The life of the sporting fraternity had color and the horses themselves, beautiful temperamental things, fascinated me, but I hungered for something of my own. At the tracks one received a succession of thrills and was kept on the alert but the emotions aroused were all vicarious.

“No Wonder,” a gray pacer, was on the track for his morning workout and I, being unoccupied at the moment, leaned over a wooden fence to watch. He had been jogged slowly around the track and now his driver was about to do what we called “setting him down.” His flanks flattened and he seemed to spring into his stride, and what a stride it was! He fairly flew over the ground and the boy by the fence, half asleep but a moment before, was now all attention. He leaned far over the fence to watch and wait. Now the gray was making the upper turn and soon he would be headed directly down the home stretch. By leaning far forward the boy could see just the play of the muscles over the powerful breast. Oh, the flying legs, the distended nostrils, the sobbing whistle of the wind in and out of the great lungs!

But all vicarious after all, all something outside myself. I rubbed the legs of the horses and later walked them slowly for miles, cooling them out after a race or after a workout. Plenty of time to think. Could I, in time, become a Geers, a Snapper Garrison, a Bradley, a Walter Cox, a Murphy? Something whispered to me that I could not. There was required of a successful horseman something I did not have. Either the trotting or the running tracks required a calm, a seemingly indifferent exterior I could not achieve. A track negro with whom I worked had spoken discouraging words. “You’re too excitable, too flighty,” he said. “A horse, that wanted to, would know how to bluff you. You ain’t made to get all they is outen a horse.”

Restlessness had taken hold of me and I had left the tracks to go visit certain cities.

The work, I found, did not tire me and after the longest and hardest day I went to my room, bathed, took off my sweaty clothes and was a new man, quite refreshed and ready for adventure.

At the warehouse a kind of understanding between myself and the Swedish teamsters, had already been achieved. When they returned with the empty trucks along the short street between our warehouse and the wharf they stopped at a saloon to have filled the tin pails for beer they carried on the trucks, and the athlete and myself had also provided ourselves with pails which they had filled for us. Aha! the athlete might boast of his prowess on the baseball field or at playing hockey in the winter, but I could outdrink him and in the eyes of the teamsters that made me the better man. How foolish the athlete! Had he declined to have anything to do with drink all might have been well with him, but as the ability to “carry your liquor” was an accepted standard among us he foolishly accepted it. On hot days and in the late afternoon the pails were sent frequently to the saloon and the athlete became worried. “Ah, let’s cut it out,” he said to me coaxingly and the teamsters laughed. “Why, Eddie, we haven’t had any at all yet,” they said; but he insisted, was compelled to insist. Already he staggered a little as he rolled the kegs out of the warehouse and now it was my turn to loiter with the teamsters while he worked. No more story-telling now. “I have a kind of headache to-day,” he said, while the teamsters and I drank six, eight, sometimes ten or twelve of the generous portions of strong beer, flauntingly. As the beer was paid for from a fund collected from all, we were drinking, in part at least, at the athlete’s expense. I drank and drank, enjoying the discomfiture of my fellow-worker, and something happened inside my head. My legs remained steady and I could roll the kegs more rapidly and accurately than ever--they became like corks and I fairly whirled them along the warehouse floor and down the incline and to the trucks--but at the same time all reality became strangely colored and overlaid with unreality inside myself. Beyond the roadway, in which the trucks stood, there was a vacant lot and this now became the centre of my attention. The vacant lot was in reality filled with rubbish, rusty tin cans, piles of dirt, broken wagon wheels and wornout household utensils, and among all this foul stuff dirty-faced children played and screamed; but now all this unsightliness was wiped off the surface of my vision. I talked to the teamsters and together we laughed at Eddie who kept scolding and saying apologetically that the beer we had been drinking was rotten stuff and gave him a headache, while all the time the most marvelous things took place in the vacant lot before my eyes.

First of all an army of soldiers appeared and marched back and forth directed by a man on a magnificent horse. He was many years older but at the same time looked strangely like myself and wore a long, flowing purple mantle. And also he had a golden helmet on his head while his soldiers, who obeyed his slightest wish, were also richly dressed. First there came a file of men dressed in light green and with bright yellow plumes flying from their helmets, and these were followed by others dressed in blue, in flaming red and in uniforms combining all these colors.

The men marched for what seemed a long time in the vacant lot while I dreamed of becoming a great general, a world conqueror perhaps, but continued meanwhile sending the kegs whirling down the incline. Eddie and I had a race to see who could roll kegs most accurately and rapidly--an hour before he could have beaten me easily, but now I could roll six to his five and land them just so, standing upright on the platform below--while at the same time there was this other life, outside myself, going on before my eyes.

I raised my eyes and looked at the vacant lot and the soldiers went through quick and accurate manœuvres. Then they marched away along a near-by street and the place became a great canvas over which colors played. The surface was brown, a soft velvety glowing brown, now other colors appeared, reds, golden yellows, deep purples. The colors stole swiftly out across the open place and designs were formed. I will be a great painter, I decided; but now the vacant lot had become a carpet on which walked beautiful men and women. They smiled at me, beckoned to me, and then they paid me no more attention and became absorbed in each other. “Very well; if you prefer to roll kegs, go your own way,” they seemed to be saying, and when they laughed there was something derisive in their laughter.

Was I a little insane? Had I been born a little insane? I rolled the kegs of nails, drank innumerable pails of beer, the sweat rolled from my body and soaked my clothes and presently quitting time came and I returned along a street with hundreds of other workers--all smelling equally vile--to a rooming house where I lived with many other laborers, Hungarians, Swedes, a few Irish, several Italians and, oddly enough, one English Jew.

The house was run by a worried-looking woman of forty who had one daughter, a young woman of nineteen, who had taken a kind of fancy to me. Her father, a laborer like myself, had deserted her mother when the child was but four or five years old and had never been seen again. As for the daughter, she had a strong body, clear blue eyes, thick lips and a large nose, and like myself she had Italian blood in her veins, her father having been an Italian.

Toward her mother she was loyal, staying in the house and doing the work of a chambermaid for very little pay when she might have made a great deal more money at something else; but her loyalty was tempered by a sturdy kind of independence that nothing could shake. During the spring, before I came to live at the house, she had become engaged to marry a young sailor, an engineer’s assistant on a lake boat, but, although later I spoke to her of the danger, she did not let the fact of her engagement to another interfere with her relationship with me.

Our own relationship is a little hard to explain. When I came from the warehouse and climbed the stairs to my room I found her there at work, making my bed, which had been allowed to air all day, or changing the sheets. The sheets were changed almost daily and her mother constantly scolded about the matter. “If he wants clean sheets every day let him pay for them,” the mother said, but the daughter paid no attention, and indeed I was no doubt responsible for more than one quarrel between mother and daughter. Among laboring people a girl engaged is taboo and the other men in the house thought I was doing an unfair thing to her absent lover. Whether or not he knew what was going on I never found out.

What was going on? I came into the house, climbed the stairs and found her at work in my room. At the foot of the stairs I had met her mother, who had scowled at me, and now the other workers, trooping in, attempted to tease. She kept on working and did not look at me and I went to stand by a window that looked down into the street. “Which one is she going to marry?--that’s what I want to know,” one of the workers on the floor below called to another. She looked up at me and something I saw in her eyes made me bold. “Don’t mind them,” I said. “What makes you think I do?” she replied. I was glad none of the men who worked at our warehouse roomed at the house. “They would be shouting, laughing and going on about it all day,” I thought.

The young woman--her name was Nora--talked to me in whispers as she did the work in the room, or she listened and I talked. The minutes passed and we stayed on together, looking at each other, whispering, laughing at each other. In the house all, including the mother, were convinced I was working to bring about Nora’s ruin and the mother wanted to order me out of the house but did not dare. Once as I stood in the hallway outside my door late at night I had overheard the two women talking in the kitchen of the house. “If you mention the matter again I shall walk out of the house and never come back.”

Occasionally in the evening Nora and I walked along the street, past the warehouse where I was employed, and out upon the docks, where we sat together looking into the darkness and once--but I will not tell you what happened upon that occasion.

First of all I will tell you of how the relationship of Nora and myself began. It may be that the bond between us was brought into existence by the beer I drank at the warehouse in the late afternoons. One evening, when I had first come to the house, I came home, after drinking heavily, and it was then Nora and I had our first intimate conversation.

I had come into the house and climbed the three flights of stairs to my room, thinking of the vacant lot covered with the soft glowing carpet and of the beautiful men and women walking thereon, and when I got to my room it seemed unspeakably shabby. No doubt I was drunk. In any event there was Nora at work and it was my opportunity. For what? I did not quite know, but there was something I knew I wanted from Nora and the beer drinking had made me bold. I had a sudden conviction that my boldness would overawe her.

And there was something else too. Although I was but a young man I had already worked in factories in several cities and had lived in too many shabby rooms in shabby houses in factory streets. The outer surface of my life was too violently uncouth, too persistently uncouth. Well enough for Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and others to sing of the strength and fineness of laboring men, making heroes of them, but already the democratic dream had faded and laborers were not my heroes. I was born fussy, liked cleanness and orderliness about me and had already been thrown too much into the midst of shiftlessness. The socialists and communists I had seen and heard talk nearly all struck me as men who had no sense of life at all. They were so likely to be dry intellectual sterile men. Already I had begun asking myself the questions I have been asking myself ever since. “Does no man love another man? Why does not some man arise who wants the man working next to him to work in the midst of order? Can a man and a woman love each other when they live in an ugly house in an ugly street? Why do working men and women so often seem perversely unclean and disorderly in their houses? Why do not factory owners realize that, although they build large, well-lighted factories, they will accomplish nothing until they realize the need of order and cleanliness in thinking and feeling also?” I had come into the midst of men with a clean strong body, my mother had been one who would have fought to the death for order and cleanliness about her and her sons. Was it not apparent that something had already happened to the democracy on which Whitman had counted so much? (I had not heard of Whitman then. My thoughts were my own. Perhaps I had better be more simple in speaking of them.)

I had come out of a messy workplace along a messy street to a messy room and did not like it and within me was the beer that made me bold.

And there were the visions I had seen in the vacant lot. It may be that I thought then that all my fellows lived as I did, having quite conscious and separate inner and outer lives going on in the same body that they were trying to bring into accord. As for myself I saw visions, had from boyhood been seeing visions. Moments of extreme exaltation were followed by times of terrible depression. Were all people really like that? The visions were sometimes stronger than the reality of life about me. Might it not be that they were the reality, that they existed rather than myself--that is to say, rather than my physical self and the physical fact of the men and women among whom I then worked and lived, rather than the physical fact of the ugly rooms in ugly houses in ugly streets?

Was there a consciousness of something wrong, a consciousness we all had and were ashamed of?

There was the vacant lot in which an hour before I had seen the marching soldiers and the beautifully gowned men and women walking about. Why might that not exist as really as the half-drunken teamsters, myself, the irritated athlete and the piles of unsightly rubbish?

Perhaps it did exist in all of us. Perhaps the others saw what I saw. At that time I had a great deal of faith in a belief of my own that there existed a kind of secret and well-nigh universal conspiracy to insist on ugliness. “It’s just a kind of boyish trick we’re up to, myself and the others,” I sometimes told myself, and there were times when I became almost convinced that if I just went suddenly up behind any man or any woman and said “boo” he or she would come out of it and I would come out of it, and we would march off arm in arm laughing at ourselves and everyone else and having really quite a wonderful time.

I had decided to try to say “boo” to Nora, I fancy. There I was in the room with her (I had been in the house about three days and had only seen her and heard her name spoken once before, when she was sweeping out the hallway by my door), and now she was throwing the covers back over the soiled sheets on my bed and there was dust on the window panes and streaks along the wall paper, while the floor of the room had been given but two or three careless whisks with a broom. Nora was making the bed and back of her head, as she leaned over to do the job, there was a picture on the wall, a picture of five or six water lilies lying on a table. There was a streak of dust down across the white face of the lilies and at that moment a cloud of dust, stirred up by the heavy trucks now going homeward along the street, floated just outside the window.

“Well, Miss Nora,” I suddenly said after I had been standing in the room for a moment, silently and boldly staring at her. I began advancing toward her and no doubt my eyes were shining with enthusiasm. I dare say I was pretty drunk but I am sure I walked steadily. “Well,” I cried in a loud voice, “what are you up to there?”

She turned to stare at me and I went on, still speaking rapidly, with a kind of hurried nervous stuttering manner brought on by the liquor and a fear that if I stopped speaking I should not be able to start again. “I refer to the bed,” I said, going up close to her and pointing at it. “You see, don’t you, that the sheets you are putting on the bed are soiled?” I pounded on my own chest, much in the manner of the primitive hero in Mr. Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Hairy Ape”; and no doubt had I at that time seen the play I might at that moment have begun saying in hoarse, throaty tones: “I belong. I belong.”

I did not say anything of the sort because I am not primitive and had not then seen the play, nor did I whine or complain because of the soiled sheets on the bed. I talked, I am afraid, rather like a Napoleon or a Tamerlane to poor Nora who was already appalled by my sudden descent upon her.

Pounding on my chest and descending upon her I made a speech something in the following manner: “My dear Nora, you are a woman and no doubt a virgin, but you may not always be one. Have hopes. Some day a man will come along who will admire your person and will ask your hand in marriage.” I looked at her somewhat critically. “You will not refuse him,” I declared, with the air of a soothsayer delivering himself of a prophecy. “You will accept the marriage state, Nora, partly because you are bored, partly because you will look upon the opportunity as a means of escape from your present way of life, and partly because you will find within yourself an instinct telling you that any kind of marriage will bring you something you want.”

“But we will not discuss you. We will discuss myself,” I declared. I continued pounding myself on the chest and so great was my momentary enthusiasm that later my breast was somewhat sore. “Nora, woman,” I said, “look at me! You cannot see my body and I dare say if I did not have on these soiled clothes your maidenly modesty would compel you to run out of this room. But do not run. I do not intend to take off my clothes.”

“Very well, we will not speak any more of my body,” I said in a loud voice, wishing to reassure her since I could see she was becoming a little alarmed. No doubt she thought me insane. She had grown slightly pale and had stepped away from me so that her back was against the wall and the soiled water lilies were just above her head. “I am not speaking of my own body in relation to your body, do not get that entirely feminine notion into your head,” I explained. “I am speaking of my body in relation to yonder soiled sheets.”

And now I pointed toward the bed and stopped pounding my own chest which was becoming sore. Stepping quite close to her, so close in fact that my face was within a few inches of her own, I put one hand against the wall and tried to quiet my own loud, blustering tones, and to assume a tone of great ease, or rather, of nonchalance. I took a cigarette from my pocket and succeeded in lighting it without burning my fingers, a feat requiring a good deal of concentration under the circumstances. The truth is, that I had bethought myself that in a moment more Nora would either hit me with the broom, that stood close at her hand, or would run out of the room thinking me insane.

As I had a notion I wanted to put over to her while I could and while my beer-born courage lasted I now tried to be more at my ease. A little smile began to play about the corners of my mouth and I thought of myself at the moment as a diplomat--not an American or an English diplomat, let me say, but an Italian diplomat of, we will suppose, the sixteenth century.

In as light and bantering a tone as I could assume under the circumstances--my task was the more difficult because a workman, hearing my speech from a neighboring room, had come along the hallway and was now standing at the door with a look of astonishment on his face--assuming, I say, a light bantering tone, I now rapidly explained to Nora the notion that had been in my head when I interrupted her bed-making. She had been about to reach for the broom and with it to drive me from the room, but now the words streaming from my lips caught and held her attention. With a fluency in words that never comes to me when I am writing and that only comes to my lips when I am slightly under the influence of strong drink I explained myself. To the astonished young woman I compared the bed she had been making to a suit of clothes I might be about to put on my body after I had bathed the aforesaid body. Talking rapidly and enunciating my words very distinctly so she should lose nothing of my discourse (and I might here explain to you, my readers, that in ordinary conversation I am rather given to the slovenly dragging of words so common to the people of the Middle West. We, you must know, do not say “feah,” as a New Englander might, nor “fear,” as an Italian-American might, that is to say, pronouncing distinctly the “r,” but “feehr”), going on very clearly and distinctly I told Nora she was not to judge me by the smell that came from my clothes, that under my clothes lived a body I was about to wash clean as soon as she had finished her work in the room and had gone away. Leaving both her and the workman outside the door standing and staring at me I walked to the window and threw it up. “The cloud of dust you see floating up from the street below,” I explained, “does not represent all the elements of the atmosphere even in an American industrial city.” I then tried, as best I could, to explain to my limited audience that air, normally, might be a clean thing to be cleanly breathed into the lungs and that a man like myself, although he might wear dirty, soiled clothes in order to earn money to keep his body alive might also at the same time have a certain feeling of pride and joy in his body and want clean sheets to put it between when he laid it down to sleep at night.

To Nora, standing there and staring at me, half in wonder, half in anger, I tried to explain a little my habit of having visions and sketched for her, as rapidly and briefly as I could, the marvelous sights I had in fancy seen in the vacant lot near the warehouse in the late afternoon, and also I preached her a kind of sermon, not, I assure you, with the object of changing her own character but rather to carry out the plan that had formed in my rather befuddled brain, a plan for bullying her--that is to say of bending her to my own purpose if possible.

Being by nature a rather shrewd man, however, I did not put the case to her directly but pursuing the method common to preachers who always try to conceal their own wants under the mask of the common good, so that a man who is apparently always trying to get others into Heaven is really only afraid he will not manage to get there himself, pursuing valiantly this method, I pointed to the soiled water lilies above Nora’s head. An inspiration seized me. At that time, you must remember, I did know that Nora was engaged to be married to an engineer’s assistant on a lake steamer. I chanced at that moment to see the picture of the water lilies and thought of the little quiet back waters of Sandusky Bay where as a boy I had sometimes gone fishing with a certain charming old country doctor who for a time had employed me, ostensibly as a stable boy but really as a companion on long country drives. The old doctor had been a talkative soul and loved to speculate on life and its purposes and we often went fishing on summer afternoons and evenings, not so much for the purpose of catching fish as to give the doctor the opportunity to sit in a boat on the bank of some stream and pour wisdom into my willing young ears.

And so there I was, in the presence of Nora and that wondering workman, standing with one arm raised and pointing at the cheap chromo on the wall and being as much the actor as I could. Even though my brain was somewhat befuddled I was watching Nora, waiting and hoping that something I might say would really arrest her attention, and now I thought, as I have said, of quiet sweet back waters of bays and rivers, of suns going down in clean evening skies, of my own white bare feet dangling in warm pellucid waters.

To Nora I said the following words, quite without definite thought, as they came flowing from my lips: “I do not know you, young woman, and have never until this moment thought of you and your life but I’ll tell you this: the time will come when you will marry a man who now sails on the seas. Even at this moment he is standing on the deck of a boat and thinking of you, and the air about him is not like this air you and I for our sins are compelled to breathe.”

“Ah ha!” I cried, seeing by a look in Nora’s eyes that my chance shot had hit home and shrewdly following up the advantage that gave me. “Ah ha!” I cried; “let us think and speak of the life of a sailor. He is in the presence of the clean sea. God has made clean the scene upon which his eyes rest. At night he lies down in a clean bunk. Nothing about him is as it is about us. There is no foul air, no dirty streaks on wall paper, no unclean sheets, no unclean beds.”

“Your young sailor lies in bed at night and his body is clean, as I dare say also is his mind. He thinks of his sweetheart on shore and of necessity, do you see, all about him is so clean, he must think of her as one who in her soul is clean.”

And now to my readers I must stop a moment to explain that I speak at length in this way of my conversation with Nora, my triumph with her, as I may I think legitimately call it, because it was a purely literary feat and I am writing, as you know, of the life of a literary man. I had never, when all this occurred, been at sea nor had I ever been aboard a ship, but I had, to be sure, read books and stories regarding ships and the conduct of sailors aboard ships, and in my boyhood I had known a man who was once mate on a river boat on the Mississippi River. He to be sure had spoken more often of the gaudiness rather than the cleanliness of the boats on which he had worked but, as I have said, I was being as literary as I could.

And realizing now that I had by good fortune stumbled upon the right note I went on elaborating the romantic side of the life of the sailor aboard ship, touching upon the hopes and dreams of such a man and pointing out to Nora that it was a great mistake on her part not to have one room in the great house of so many rooms, upon the care of which she could pour some of the natural housewifely qualities with which her nature was, I was certain, so richly endowed.

I saw, you understand, that I had her but was careful not to press my advantage too far. And then, too, I had begun to like her, as all literary men like inordinately those who take seriously their outpourings.

And so I now quickly drove a bargain with Nora. Like herself, I explained, I was lonely and wanting companionship. Strange thoughts and fancies came to me that I would like to tell to another. “We will have a friendship,” I exclaimed enthusiastically. “In the evenings we will walk about together. I will tell you of the strange notions that come into my head and of the marvelous adventures that sometimes occur to me in the life of my fancy. I will do that and you--well, you see, you will take extra good care of my room. You will lavish upon it some of the affection natural to your nature, thinking as you do so, not of me but of your sailor man at sea, and of the time to come when you may make a clean warm nest for him ashore.”

“Poor man,” I said, “you must remember that he is buffeted often by storms, often his life is in danger and often too he is in strange ports where but for his constancy to the thoughts of you, he might get into almost any kind of a muddle with some other woman.”

I had succeeded, you see, by a purely literary trick, in getting myself into Nora’s consciousness as in some way connected with her absent lover.

“But I must not press the matter too far,” I thought, and, stepping back, stood smiling at her as genially as I could.

And then another thought came. “There will be a kind of wrath in her soul at this moment and I must direct it quickly toward someone other than myself.” The workman who, attracted by my loud words at the beginning of my discourse, had come along the hallway and who now stood at the door of my room looking in, did not speak English very well and I was sure had not understood much of my long speech.

Going to the open window I now said, over my shoulder: “I am silly saying all these things to you, Nora, but I have been lonesome and to tell the truth I am a little drunk. Forgive me. You know yourself that the other men in this house are stupid fellows and do not care at all in what shape their rooms are kept. They work like dogs and sleep like dogs and do not have thoughts and dreams as you do and as I and your sailor man do.”

“There is that man listening to our little conversation, there now, by the door,” I said straightening up and pointing; but my speech got no further. As I had conjectured within myself, Nora had for some minutes been anxious to hit someone with the broom that stood close at hand and she now, suddenly and quite unreasonably, decided to hit the workman. Grabbing the broom in her hand she flew at him screaming with wrath. “Can’t we have a little talk, my friend and I, without your sticking in your nose?” she cried, and the workman fled down the hallway with Nora at his heels, striking vigorously at him with the broom.

NOTE II

ONE who like myself could not, because of circumstances, spend the years of his youth in the schools must of necessity turn to books and to the men and women directly about him; upon these he must depend for his knowledge of life and to these I had turned. What a life the people of the books led! They were for the most part such respectable people, with problems I did not have at all or they were such keen and brainy villains as I could never hope to become. Being a Nero a Jesse James or a Napoleon I often thought would suit me first rate but I could not see how I was going to make it. In the first place I never could shoot very well, I hadn’t the courage to kill people I did not like and to steal on any grand scale involved the risk of prison--or at least I then thought it did. I later found that only petty thieves were in danger but at that time, long before I myself became a schemer in business, I knew only petty thieves. At the race tracks some of my friends were always being marched off to prison or I heard of some man I had known being nabbed and taken away and prisons frightened me. I remembered vividly a night of my boyhood and myself going through an alleyway and past our town jail and the white face of a man staring out at me from behind iron bars. “Hey kid, get me an iron bar or a hammer and pass it up here to me and I’ll give you a quarter,” he said in harsh throaty tones but I was frightened at the sight of his white drawn face in the moonlight and at the thoughts of the grim silent place in which he stood. A murderer, a crazed farmer who had killed his wife and hired man with an ax, had once been lodged in the jail and I had got the notion into my head that all men who passed into its doors were terrible and dangerous. I ran quickly away and got out of the alleyway into a lighted street and always afterward I remembered that moment, the stars in the sky, the moonlight shining on the faces of buildings, the quick sharp laughter of a girl somewhere in the darkness on the porch of a house, the sound of a horse’s hoofs in a roadway, all the sweet sounds of free men and women walking about. I wanted to spend my life walking about and looking at things, listening to words, to the sound of winds blowing through trees, smelling life sweet and alive, not put away somewhere in a dark ill-smelling place. Once later when I was working at Columbus, Ohio, I went with a fellow--he had a sickening kind of curiosity about such places and kept urging and urging--to the state prison on visiting day. It was at the hour when the prisoners take exercise and many of them were in a large open place between high walls, on which guards with guns walked up and down. I looked once and then closed my eyes and during the rest of our pilgrimage through the place I carefully avoided looking into the prisoners’ faces or into the cells before which we stopped but looked down instead at the stone floors until we were again outside in the sunlight.

As I have said the books were mostly about respectable people with moral problems, with family fortunes that must be saved or built up, daughters safely married, hints at a possible loss of virtue on the part of some woman and the terrible consequences that were to follow. In the books the women who grew familiar with men, to whom they were not married, were always having children and thus giving themselves away to all and I did not know any such women. The kind of women among whom life at that time threw me were much wiser and pretty much seemed to have children or not as they chose and I presume I thought the other kind must be a rather foolish sort and not worth bothering or thinking about.

And then there was the grand life in the big world, the life of the courts, the field, camp and palace, and in the America of Newport, Boston and New York. It was all a life far away from me but it seemed to occupy the attention of most of the novelists. As for myself I did not think at that time that I would ever see much of such life and I am afraid it did not much tempt me.

However, I read greedily everything that came into my hands. Laura Jean Libbey, Walter Scott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Fielding, Shakespeare, Jules Verne, Balzac, the Bible, Stephen Crane, dime novels, Cooper, Stevenson, our own Mark Twain and Howells and later Whitman. The books--any books--have always fed my dreams and I am one who has always lived by his dreams and even to-day I can often get as much fun and satisfaction out of a dull book as out of a so-called brilliant or witty one. The books like life itself are only useful to me in as much as they feed my own dreams or give me a background upon which I can construct new dreams.

Books I have always had access to and I am sure there is no other country in the world where people in general are so sentimentally romantic on the subject of books and education. Not that we read the books or really care about education. Not we. What we do is to own books and go to colleges and I have known more than one young man without money work his way patiently through college without paying much attention to what the colleges are presumed to teach. The fact of having got through college and of having managed to get a degree satisfies us and so the owning of books has become in most American families a kind of moral necessity. We own the books, put them on the shelves and go to the movies and the books, not being read and sitting dumbly there on the shelves in the houses, fairly jump at anyone who cares for them. It was so also in my own youth. Wherever I went someone was always bringing me books or urging me to come to some house and help myself and having got into most houses I could have helped myself, if books were not offered, simply by re-arranging the shelves so there was no gaping hole left. I did it sometimes but not often.

As for the owners, they were interested, absorbed in the great industrial future just ahead for all Americans. We were all to have college degrees, ride in automobiles, come by some kind of marvelous mechanical process into a new, more cultured and better age, “Clear the track! Come on! Get in the swim!” was the cry and later I was to take up the cry myself and become one of the most valiant of the hustlers but for a time--for several years--I stayed in the backwaters of life and looked about.

My companions for the time being were flash men, the sharpshooters and touts at the race tracks. How many such fellows as Sit-still Murphy, Flatnose Humphrey of Frisco, Horsey Hollister and others of that stripe I knew at that time! And there were also gamblers, a politician or two and most of all a strange kind of sensitive and footloose man or woman, unfitted for the life of a hustler, not shrewd, usually lovable and perplexed, feeling themselves out of touch with the mood of the times and often spending life getting drunk, wandering about and loving to talk away long hours on bridges in cities, on country roads and in the back rooms of little saloons, which for all the evil they are presumed to have brought upon us I thank my gods existed during my youth. How often have I said to myself: “What kind of a world will this be when we are all moral and good people, when there are no more rascals to be found among us and no places left where rascals may congregate to speak lovingly of their rascalities?”

Of the rascals I met at that time there was one of a far different sort than the others who did much to educate me in the ways of the world. I found him in a town of northern Ohio to which I had drifted and in which I had got a job in a stable run by a man named Nate Lovett, who owned several race horses and who also kept a livery barn. Nate had a stallion, a fast trotter named “Will you Please” and got most of his income by taking him about to neighboring towns to serve mares but he had also some ten or twelve half-wornout old driving horses that were let to the young men of the town when they wanted to take some girl to a dance or for a drive in the country. These I took care of, working all day and sleeping on a cot in what we called the office but having my evenings free. A gigantic and goodhearted Negro took care of the racing horses and stayed in the office from eight until eleven in the evening. “Go on child. I ain’t got no folks in this town and I don’t want none here neither,” he said.

Lovett, a man of the English jockey type, had lost one eye in a fight but was a quiet enough fellow, never losing his temper except when someone spoke favorably of the Irish or of the Catholic religion. He had a fixed notion that the Pope at Rome had made up his mind to get control of America and had filled the land with crafty spies and agents who worked tirelessly night and day to accomplish his ends and when he spoke of the Irish Catholics he lowered his voice, put his hand over his mouth, winked, scowled and acted in general like one creeping stealthily through some mountainous country, infested with desperadoes, and in which every tree and stone might conceal a deadly enemy.

At the stable during the long quiet winter afternoons there was little to do so we all gathered in the office, a room some fifteen by twenty with a large stove in the centre. There certain citizens of the town came daily to visit us.

In the room there would be at one time Bert the Negro; Lovett, sitting on a stool and tapping the floor with a driver’s whip; myself, taking in everything and sometimes with my nose in a book; Tom Moseby, who had been a gambler on a Mississippi River boat in his young days and who always wore a large dirty white collar with a black stock; Silas Hunt, a lawyer who had no practice nor seemed to want any and who was said to be writing a book on the subject of constitutional law, a book that no one ever saw; a fat German, who was a follower of Karl Marx and who owned a large farm near the town, but who, for all his anti-capitalistic beliefs, was said to cheat ruthlessly all who had any sort of dealings with him; Billy West, who owned two race horses himself and whose wife ran the town millinery store and who was himself something of a dandy and, last of all, Judge Turner.

The judge was a short fat neatly-dressed man with a bald head, a white Vandyke beard, cold blue eyes, soft round white cheeks and extraordinarily small hands and feet. In his younger days he had a cousin, at one time a quite powerful political figure in Ohio, and after the Civil War the judge, an unsuccessful young lawyer, had managed through the cousin to get himself sent South on some sort of financial mission, to settle, I believe, certain claims covering cotton corn and other stores requisitioned or destroyed by the conquering Union armies.

It had been the great opportunity of the judge’s life and he had taken shrewd advantage of it, had come near being shot in two or three southern cities but had kept his head and had, it was whispered about, well feathered his own and the cousin’s nest. After it was all over and the cousin had fallen from power he had come back to his native place--after three or four years spent in Europe, lying low in fear of a threatened investigation of his operations--and had bought a large brick house with a lawn and trees and had imported a Negro man-servant from the South. He spent his time reading books and listening during the afternoon to the talk of the men of our little circle, flattering women rather grossly, drinking a good deal of raw whisky and delivering himself of rather shrewd observations on life and the men he had known and seen.

The judge had never married and indeed cared nothing for women although he fancied himself in the rôle of a gallant who could do with women as he pleased, a notion constantly fed by the reactions to his advances of the women with whom his life in the town threw him into contact--the wife of the grocer from whom he bought the supplies for his home, a fat girl with red cheeks who clerked in the dry-goods store, Billy West’s wife, and several others. To all these women he was elaborately courteous, bowing before them, making pretty speeches and when no one was watching even boldly caressing them with his little fat hands. In the grocery he even pressed the hand of the merchant’s wife while her lord was engaged, with his back turned, in getting a package down off a shelf, and even sometimes pinched her hips, laughing softly while she shook her head and scowled at him, but to me, for whom he had taken a fancy born of my predilection for books, he spoke of women always with contempt.

“My dislike of them is however but a peculiarity of my own nature and I would not have it influence you in the least,” he explained. “The French, among whom I once lived and whose language I speak, make an art of this matter of love-making between men and women and I admire the French exceedingly. They are a wise and shrewd people and not much given to the talking of tommyrot I assure you.”

The judge had, early in our acquaintance, invited me to his house where I later spent many of my evenings during that spring, drinking his whisky, listening to his talk and smoking cigarettes with him. It was the judge in fact who taught me to smoke cigarettes, a habit much looked down upon in American towns at that time, being taken as an indication of weakness and effeminacy. The judge was, however, able to carry off his own devotion to the habit because he had been in Europe, spoke several languages and most of all because he was reported to be educated. In the saloons of the town, when men congregated before the bar in the evening, the subject of cigarette smoking was often discussed. “If I ever caught a son of mine smoking one of those coffin nails I’d knock his fool head off,” said a drayman. “I agree with you for all except maybe Judge Turner now,” said his companion. “For him it’s all right. He sets a bad example maybe, but looket! Ain’t he been to college and to Paris and London and all them places? Lord, I only wish I had his education, that’s all I wish.”

* * * * *

I am in the judge’s house and it is dark and stormy outside. I have dined with the Negro Bert at six in the kitchen of Nate Lovett’s house and now, although it is but shortly past seven, the judge has also dined and is ready for an evening of talk. There is a large stove of the sort known as a baseburner in the room and the walls are lined with books. We sit by a small table and there is a decanter of whisky upon it. Although I am but eighteen the judge does not hesitate to invite me to help myself to the whisky. “Drink all you want. If you are the kind of a fool who makes a pig of himself you might as well find it out.”

The judge talks as we drink and his talk is something new to my ears. These are not the words or thoughts of the towns, the city factories or the sports of the race tracks. All of the judge’s talk is a laughing, half-cynical, half-earnest kind of confession. Were the things the judge told me of himself true? They were no doubt as true as these confessions of myself and my own relations to life I am setting down here. What I mean is that he was at least trying to inject into them the essence of truth.

I drank of the whisky sparingly, not so much through fear of being convicted of piggishness by getting drunk as from a desire to hear all the judge might have to say.

At the barn when he came there to loaf with the others during the winter afternoons the judge usually remained silent and managed always to achieve an effect of wisdom by the good-natured but cynical expression of his face and eyes. He sat with his fat white hands folded over his round neatly-waistcoated paunch and looked about with the cold little eyes that were so amazingly like the eyes of a bird. My employer, Nate Lovett, was upon his everlasting theme. “Now you just look at it. I wish the people would begin to do some thinking in this country. Why, there were six Catholics elected to this last Congress and people just sit still and say there’s no harm in a Catholic.” The horseman was a regular subscriber to a weekly paper that attributed all the ills of society to the growth in America of the Catholic faith and read it eagerly--it was the only thing he did read--that his own pet prejudice be properly fed and nourished, and no doubt there was published somewhere a paper that carried on an equally earnest campaign against the Protestants. My employer went to no church but the notion of six Catholics in the national Congress alarmed him. The horseman declared that the Catholics would in a short time come into absolute power in America and drew a black enough picture of the future when all of the things he so feared had come to pass. The wheels of the factories would stop turning, streets of towns would be unlighted, men and women would be burned at the stake, there would be no schools, no books accessible to the general public, we would have a tyrant king instead of a Congress and no man who did not bow his knee to the Pope in Rome would be safe in his bed at night. The horseman declared he had once read a book showing just the condition of affairs when the Catholics were in power--that is to say in the Middle Ages. Pointing the butt of his driving whip at Judge Turner he pleaded, and never in vain, for a more learned and scholarly substantiation of his theory. “Ain’t I right now, Judge?” he asked pleadingly. “Mind you, I ain’t setting myself up before a man who knows more than I do and has read all the books and been everywhere, even in Rome itself, but I’ll tell you something. That king, that Englishman, of the name of Henry the Eighth, who first told the Pope at Rome to go back to his Dago town and mind his own business was some man now, wasn’t he, eh?”

And now Nate had got himself warmed up and lit into his theme. “They say he was too free with women, that King Henry. Well, what if he was?” he cried. “I knew a man once, Jake Freer it was, from over near Muncie Indiana, who could get more out of a bum horse in a hard race than any man you ever set your eyes on and he was the darndest woman-chaser in ten states. Why, he couldn’t get near a skirt, old or young, without prancing around like a two-year-old stud and he was forty-five if he was a day but put him in a hard race and then you’d see the stuff come out in him. He’d be laying back in second or third place, let us say. Well, they gets to the upper turn and he knows he ain’t got the speed to outstep ’em. What does he do? Does he give up? Not he. He lets on to go crazy and begins to swear and rip around. Such language! Lord a’mighty, how he could swear! It was wonderful to hear him. He tells them other stiffs of drivers, laying in there ahead of him, that he’s going to kill ’em or punch their eyes out and the first you know he slides his old skate of a horse out in front and once in front he stays there. They don’t dast to try to pass him. He scares his own horse too I suppose but anyway he sure scares them other drivers. Down he sails to the wire looking back over his shoulder making threats and switching his long whip around. He was a big fine-looking man that had had his cheek laid open with a razor in a fight with a nigger and was an ugly looking man to see. “I’m going to whip hell outen you,” he keeps saying over his shoulder, just loud enough so the judges can’t hear him up in the stand. But them other drivers can hear him all right.

“And then what does he do? As soon as the heat is finished he hurries up to the stand, to the judges’ stand you see, pretending to be mad as a wildcat and he claims the other drivers put it up between them to foul him. That’s what he does, and he talks so hard and so earnest that he half makes the judges believe it and he gets away with maybe hitting one of the other horses in the face with his whip at the upper turn and throwing him off his stride or something like that.

“Now, Judge, I ask you, wasn’t he all right, if he was a woman-chaser? And that Henry the Eighth was just like him. He told the Pope to go hang himself and I’m an Englishman and once I told two Catholic stiffs the same thing. They banged out this here eye of mine but you bet I gave ’em what for, and that’s just what Henry did to the Pope, now ain’t it?”

At the livery barn the judge had smilingly agreed with Nate Lovett that Henry the Eighth was one of the great and noble kings of the world and had expressed unbounded admiration for Jake Freer, adding that, as far as his own reading and traveling had carried him, he had never been able to find that the Catholics when they were in absolute power all over the world had ever done anything for racing or to improve the trotting or pacing-horse breeds. “All they did,” he remarked, quietly “except perhaps Francesco Gonzago, Marquis of Mantua, who did rather go in for good horses, was to build a lot of cathedrals like Chartres, Saint Mark’s at Venice, Westminster Abbey, Mont St. Michel and others and to inspire the loveliest and truest art in the world. But,” he said smilingly, “what good does all that do for a man like you Nate, or for anyone here in this town? You didn’t know Francesco, who had a knack for fast horses, and forty cathedrals would never get you another mare for ‘Will you Please’ or help either you or Jake Freer to win one race, and there is at present little doubt in my own mind that the future of America lies largely with just such men as you and Jake.”

At his own house as we sat together in the evenings, the judge paid me the rare compliment, always deeply appreciated by a young man, of assuming I was on the same intellectual level with himself. He smoked cigarettes and drank surprising quantities of whisky, holding each glass for a moment between his eyes and the light and making a queer clicking sound with his thin dry lips as he sat looking at it.

The man talked on whatever subject came into his mind and I remember an evening when he got on the subject of women and his own attitude toward them and the queer feeling of sadness that crept over me as he talked. Much of what he had to say I did not at that time understand but I sensed the tragedy of the man’s figure as he drew for me a picture of his life.

His father had been a Presbyterian minister and a widower in the town to which the son came later to lead his own solitary life and the judge said that in his youth he remembered his father chiefly as a silent figure given to long solitary walks in fields and on country roads. “He loved my mother I fancy,” the judge said. “Perhaps he was one of those rare men who can really love.”

The boy had grown up, himself rather drawn away from the life of the town, and had been sent later to a college in the East, and during his first year in college his father died. There was a suspicion of suicide, although little was said about it, the man having taken an overdose of some sort of medicine given him by one of the town physicians.

It was then that the politician cousin appeared and after the funeral he talked to the younger man, telling him that a few days before his death the father had come to him and talked of the son, securing from the politician a promise that in case of his own sudden death, the lad would be looked after and given a fair chance in life. “Your father killed himself,” said the cousin, a rather downright fellow who was fifteen years older than the young man he addressed. “He was in love with your mother and was also a man who believed in a future life. What he did was to spend years in prayer. He was always praying, day and night as he walked around, and in the end he convinced himself that his untiring devotion had won him so high a place in God’s esteem he would be forgiven for doing away with his own life and would be admitted into Heaven to live throughout eternity with the woman he loved.”

After his father’s funeral young Turner had gone back to the eastern college and there the tragedy that had been long awaiting him suddenly pounced.

During his boyhood, he explained, he had been rather a solitary, spending his time in reading books and in playing on a piano that had belonged to his mother and that his father, who was also devoted to music, had taught him to play. “The boys of the town,” he said, in speaking of that portion of his life, “were not of my sort and I could not understand them. At school the larger boys often beat me and they encouraged the younger boys in treating me with contempt. I could not play baseball or football, physical pain of any sort made me ill, I would begin crying when anyone spoke harshly to me, and then I developed a kind of viciousness in myself too. Being unable to beat the other boys with my fists and having even at that early age read a great many books, particularly books of history, with which my father’s library were filled, I spent my days and nights dreaming of all sorts of sly deviltry.”

“For one thing,” the judge went on, laughing and rubbing his hands together, “I thought a great deal of poisoning some of the boys at the school. At the recess time we were all gathered in a large yard given over to the boys as a playground. There was the yard without any grass and at one side, by a high board fence, a long wooden shed into which we went to perform certain necessary functions of the body. The board fence separated our play place from one given over to the recreation of the girls.”

“The walls of our own shed and our side of the fence itself were covered with crude drawings and scrawled sentences expressing the sensual dreams of crude and adolescent youth and these were allowed by the authorities to remain. The place filled me with unspeakable revulsion as did also much of the talk of the boys and I shall remember always something that happened to me there. A great loutish boy is standing at the door of our shed into which I am at that moment forced by nature to go and is gazing at the sky over the high board fence that separates us from the playground of the girls. His eyes are heavy with stupid sensuality. From beyond the fence comes the shrill laughter of the little girls. Suddenly, as I am about to pass--a small creature I was then with delicate hands and at that time I believe with small delicate features--suddenly and quite without apparent cause he raises a large heavy hand and strikes me full in the face, so that the blood runs in a stream from my nose, and then, without a word to me, shrinking in terror against the fence on which the horrible pictures and words are scrawled and mingling my blood with tears, he goes calmly away. He is quite cheerful in fact, as though some deep want of his nature had suddenly been satisfied.

“I had been reading a history of Italy; a most flamboyant book it was, filled with the doings of vicious and crafty men--I now suppose they must have been, vicious and crafty but then how I delighted in them! My father’s being a minister had I presume turned my mind to the Church and how I wished he had been a great and powerful cardinal or a pope of the fifteenth century instead of what he was! I had dreamed of him as a Cosmo de Medici and myself as that Duke Francisco who succeeded Cosmo.

“What a grand time in which to live I thought that must have been and how I loved the book in my father’s library that described the life of those days. In the book were such sentences! Some of them I remember even to this day and in my bed at night, even yet sometimes, I lie laughing with delight at the thought of the fanfaronading march of the words across the pages of that book. ‘Italian vitality had subsided into the repose of the tomb. The winged arrow of death entered his heart. The hour of vengeance had struck.’

“I will read you something from the book itself,” said the judge, pouring himself another glass of whisky, holding it for a moment between his eyes and the light and then, after drinking, going to a shelf from which he took a book in a red cover. After turning the pages for a few minutes and having lighted himself a fresh cigarette he read: “‘The emperor Charles the Fifth placed Cosmo de Medici on the ducal chair of Florence and Pope Pius Fifth granted him the title of grand duke of Tuscany. He was a cruel and perfidious tyrant.’”

“‘Cosmo was succeeded by Francisco, a duke who governed through the instrumentality of the poisoned cup and the dagger, and who lapped blood with the greed of a bloodhound. He married Bianca Cabello, the daughter of a nobleman of Venice. She was the wife of a young Florentine. Francisco saw her, and, inflamed by her marvelous beauty, invited her and her husband to his palace, and assassinated her husband. His own wife died at just that time, probably by poison, and the grand duke married Bianca. His brother, the Cardinal Ferdinando, displeased with the union, presented them each with a goblet of poisoned wine, and they sank into the grave together.’”

“Aha!” cried Judge Turner, looking over the top of the book at me and laughing gleefully. “There you are, you see. That was myself in my boyhood, that young Francisco. In my fancy I succeeded, when there was no one about, when I was walking alone along the sidewalks of this very town or when I had got into my bed at night, I succeeded I say in making the great metamorphosis. In the books in my father’s library were many pictures of the streets of old Italian and Spanish cities. There was one I sharply remember. Two young bloods, with cloaks over their shoulders and with swords swinging at their sides, are approaching each other along a street. Two or three monks, a man seated on the back of a donkey going along a narrow roadway, a great stone bridge in the far distance, a bridge spanning perhaps a deep dark gulf between high mountain peaks, peaks faintly seen amid clouds and in the foreground, near the two young men and dominating the whole scene, a great cathedral done in the glorious Gothic style that I myself later, in my real flesh and blood life, so loved and bowed down before at Chartres in France.”

“And there was I, in fancy you understand, one of the two young men walking in that glorious street and not frightened little Arthur Turner, son of a sad and discouraged Presbyterian minister in an Ohio town. There was the metempsychosis. I was Francisco before he had succeeded Cosmo and had become himself the great and charmingly wicked duke sitting in his ducal chair, and long before he became enamored of the lovely Bianca. Every day I went into my own little room in my father’s house and got out a sword of wood I had fashioned from a lath and buckled it on. I had got one of my father’s coats from a closet and this, serving me as a cloak, I imagined it of the finest Florentine stuff, a cloak of such stuff as would become the shoulders of one who belonged to the great Medici family and who was to sit in the proud ducal chair of Florence. Up and down the room I went and below my father, the sad long-faced man, had become in my fancy the great Cosmo himself. We were in our ducal palace and cardinals in their red cloaks, princes, captains of armies, ambassadors and other princely personages were waiting at the door for a word with the great Cosmo.

“Welladay! My own time would come. For the present I was concerning myself with the study of poisons. On a little table in my room I had a collection of various small receptacles, an old saltcellar with a broken top, two small teacups, an empty baking-powder can and other small vessels, found in the street or stolen from our kitchen, and into these I had put salt, flour, pepper, ginger and other spices taken also by stealth from the kitchen. I mixed and remixed, making various colored powders which I folded into small packets or dampened and rolled into little balls which I concealed about my person, and then went forth into the street, to visit in fancy other palaces or to poison, or run through with my sword, people who were enemies of our house. What beautifully wicked men and women all about me and with what suavity we greeted each other! How deeply we loved and served--to the very death--our friends and how quietly crafty and urbane we were with our enemies! Oh, I loved then the word urbane. What a glorious word, I thought. At that time, as the young Francisco, I was determined that if my craftiness could raise me to the great office of pope I would take for myself the name Urbane, adding the ‘e’ to a name already taken by some of them.

“These were my dreams, and then, well I was compelled to go to the town school and sit sometimes in that horrible shed facing the crude and terrible scrawlings on the walls and to become also the victim of the crude outbreaks of my companions.

“Until one day in the spring. I had gone for a walk with my father in the late afternoon after school was dismissed and we were botanizing, as my father was fond of doing, both for his own edification and also I suppose in order to further his son’s education. In a meadow at the edge of a strip of woodland into which we were passing I found a white mushroom with which I ran to father. ‘Throw it away,’ he cried. ‘It is an Amanita Phalloides, the Destroying Angel. A bit of it no larger than a mustard seed would destroy your life.’

“We returned to our own house and sat down for the evening meal with the words ‘Amanita Phalloides’ ringing in my ears and with the round bell-like shape of the Amanita Phalloides dancing before my eyes. It was white, of a strange glowing whiteness, suggesting I thought not the death of some common man of low degree but that of a prince or a great duke. It was so Francisco and Bianca must have looked, I thought, when in the words of the flamboyant writer of the book in my father’s library, they ‘sank into the grave together.’ There must have been just that very white metallic pallor on their cheeks. What a picture of that sinking I had in my fancy. It was not just a grave, a mere dirty hole scooped out of the ground, as graves were wont to be in our Ohio town. No indeed! An opening had been made in the earth it is true but this had been entirely rimmed with flowers and was filled with a liquid, a soft purple perfumed liquid. And so into the grave went the bodies of myself as Francisco and of my lovely paramour, Bianca. The weight of our golden robes made us sink slowly into the soft purple flood and as we sank from sight music from the lips of all the fair children of the aristocracy of Florence was wafted far over fair fields, while back of the massed children in white stood also--upon a kind of green eminence at the foot of a majestic mountain--all the great lords, dukes, cardinals and other dignitaries of our imperial city.

“It was so that, as the grown-up Francisco, I was to die but I was yet alive and there was the Amanita Phalloides--later when I grew older I laughed to myself and told myself it should have been a Phallus Impudicus--there it was lying on the grass in the meadow at the edge of the wood. I had placed it carefully there at the command of my father and had, oh very carefully, marked the spot. One went along the main road leading out of town, to the south, to a certain bridge and across a meadow by a cowpath, climbed a fence, walked a certain number of steps along a rail fence beside a young wheat field, where elders grew, crossed another meadow and came to the edge of the wood. There was a stump near which grew a bush and even as I sat with father at our evening meal and as our housekeeper, a fat silent old woman with false teeth that rattled sometimes as she talked, even as she served the evening meal I was repeating to myself a certain formula I had made on our homeward journey. One hundred and nineteen steps along the cowpath in the meadow, ninety-three steps along the fence in the shadow of the elders, two hundred and six steps across the second meadow to the stump and my prize.

“I had determined to get the Amanita Phalloides on that very night after my father and our housekeeper had gone to sleep and although I was terribly frightened at the prospect of the tramp along lonely country roads and across fields, that I imagined were at night infested by strange and ferocious beasts lying in wait ready to destroy, I did not think of giving up for that reason.

“And so in fact in the middle of that very night, when all in our house and in the town were asleep, I went. Buckling on my wooden sword and creeping silently downstairs I let myself out at the kitchen door, having first supplied myself with matches and two or three bits of candle from a kitchen shelf.

“Oh, how I suffered on that journey and how determined I was! When I had got out from among the silent terrifying houses and had come nearly to the place where I was to turn off the highroad two men on horseback passed and I hid myself, lying on my belly, white and silent, in a ditch at the side of the road. ‘They are desperadoes going forth to kill,’ I told myself.

“And then they were gone and I could no longer hear the tramp of their horses and there was the trip to be made across the fields, recounting the steps as I had counted them during the homeward journey that afternoon with my father. During the walk homeward that afternoon both father and myself were muttering to ourselves, he praying no doubt that when he had taken his own life God would admit him into Heaven and into the company of the woman he loved and I counting steadily ‘eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight,’ counting steadily the steps that would lead me again to the Amanita Phalloides, to the Destroying Angel, with which I dreamed I might take many lives.

“I got my prize by the aid of the matches and the bits of candle and after a good deal of nervous fumbling about, creeping on my hands and knees in the wet grass,” said the old judge laughing in his peculiarly bitter and at the same time half-jolly way. “I got it and ran all the way home, imagining every bush and every deep shadow on the road and in the fields might contain man or beast lying in wait ready to destroy me. Then later I managed without the old housekeeper knowing to dry it on a small shelf at the back of our kitchen stove and after it was thoroughly dried I powdered it and putting the horrible powder I had concocted into papers, carried them off with me to school.”

“Many of the boys of our school lived at a distance and carried their luncheons and I fancied myself going nonchalantly into the hallway where the luncheon pails were left standing in a row and sprinkling the powders over their contents. As for the boys who went home at the noon hour--well, you see I had read in one of the books in my father’s library of a certain elegant lady of Pisa who once cut a peach, handing half of it to a gallant she wished to destroy and herself eating the other quite harmless half. I thought I might work out some such scheme, using an apple instead of a peach and working some of the poison under the skin of one side with a pin point.”

The judge had been laughing, I thought in a somewhat nervous manner, as he told me the above tale of his youth. “To be sure I never really intended to poison anyone,” he said. “Well now, did I or did I not? I really can’t say. I had achieved however, through the accidental discovery of the qualities of the Amanita Phalloides, a certain new attitude toward myself. As I went about with the little poison packets in my pockets I felt suddenly a new kind of respect for myself. I felt power in myself and something quite new to the other boys must have crept at about this time into the expression of my eyes. I was no longer frightened and did not shrink away or begin crying when one of the bullies of the school approached me at the recess time now and--could it be true?--I felt they were suddenly afraid of me. The thought filled me with a queer sort of joy and I walked boldly about the school yard, not strutting but at the same time shrinking from no one. There was at that time a report current among the boys--I do not know where it came from but it was believed and I did not deny it--that I carried a loaded pistol about in my pocket.”

The judge--and by the way his title was a quite spurious one given him by his fellow-townsmen late in his life because he had been a lawyer, because he had money, had been in the government service and had been to Europe--the judge now told me of his experience as a young man in college. Now that I come to think of it he no doubt did not tell me at one time all the things I am here setting down. During that winter and spring I spent a great many evenings in his company and he talked continuously of himself, of his cheating the men of the South to get money for himself and cousin, of his wanderings in Europe, of the men he had met at home and abroad and of what he had concluded concerning men’s lives, their motives and impulses and what he thought it would be best for me to do to make my own life as happy as possible.

He had returned at the end of his own life to live out his days alone in his native place because, as he said, one had in the end to accept his own time, place and people, whatever they might be, and that one gained nothing by wandering about the earth among strangers. During his middle years he had thought he would live out his life in some European town or city, in Chartres where, while he lived there for some months, he was all tender with love and regard for the men of a bygone age who had built the lovely cathedral at that place; at Oxford where he had spent some months wandering filled with joy among the old colleges and under the great trees that line the river Thames; in London where he got to have a great respect for the half-stupid but as he said wholly dignified self-respect of the young Englishmen he saw walking in the Strand or along Piccadilly; or in some more colorful town of the south like Madrid or Florence. The French and Paris he declared he could not understand, although he wanted very much to understand and be understood by them, as he felt they were in a way more like himself than any of the others of the Europeans he had seen. “I learned to speak their language quite fluently,” he said, “but they never really took me into their lives. The men I met, painters, writers and fellows of that sort, went about with me, borrowed my money and tried continually to sell me inferior paintings but I always realized they were laughing up their sleeves, and just what about I couldn’t make out or perhaps I shouldn’t have cared.”

In the end the judge had come home to his Ohio town and had settled down to his books, his whisky and his companionship with such men as Nate Lovett, Billy West, and the others. “We are what we are, we Americans,” he said, “and we had better stick to our knitting. Anyway,” he added, “people are nice here as far as I have been able to observe and although they are filled with stupid prejudices and are fools, the common people, workers and the like, such as the men of this town, wherever you find them, are about the nicest folk one ever finds.”

* * * * *

As for the judge’s experience as a young college man and the sort of tragedy that then came and that no doubt set the tone of his after life, it was stupid enough. With his mind filled with the thoughts taken from the books in his father’s library and after a boyhood of such loneliness and brooding as I have here described he went to college filled with high hopes but was there doomed to live as lonely an existence as he had lived in his home town. The young men of the college, given for the most part to the cultivation of athletic sports and to going about to parties and dances with the girls of a near-by city, did not take to young Turner and he did not take to them.

And then during his second year something happened. There was a young man in one of the upper classes, an athlete of note but at the same time an earnest student, toward whom the Ohio boy’s fancy now turned. It was an entirely sentimental affair, as the man afterward explained and might have done him no harm had he been content never to give it any kind of expression.

He did however near the end of his second year try to give it expression. For weeks he had been going about, much like a young girl in love, thinking constantly of the athlete, of his splendid rugged figure, fine eyes and quick active mind and of how wonderful it would be if he could have an intimate friendship with such a fellow. He dreamed of walks the two might take together in the evenings under the elms that grew on the campus. “I thought he would take my arm or I would take his and we would walk and talk,” Judge Turner said, and I remember that as he spoke he got out of his chair and walked about the room and that his small white hands played nervously over the front of his coat. He seemed not to want to face me as he told the more vital part of his tale but going behind my chair walked up and down the room at my back, and I remember how, although I was then but a boy, I knew he suffered and wanted to put his arms about me as he talked but did not dare. My own heart was filled with sadness so that unknown perhaps to him tears came in my eyes and what part of his tragedy and his words I did not understand I am sure I did dimly sense the meaning of.

He had, it happened, gone about for months thinking of the older fellow of his college as one much like himself but blessed with a stronger body, greater ability to make his way in the world and no doubt also wanting to give something of himself, or something beautiful outside himself that would represent some spirit of himself, to another man. Once young Turner went to a near-by city and spent a whole afternoon going from shop to shop trying to find some bit of jewelry, a painting or something of the sort he himself thought lovely and that would be within the limits of his own slender means that he might in secret send to the man he so admired.

“For women I did not care,” the judge said huskily. “To tell the truth I was afraid of women. In a relationship made with a woman one, I thought, risked too much. It might be quite altogether perfect or it might be just nothing at all. To tell the truth I did not then have and never have had enough assurance of fineness in myself to make it possible for me to approach a woman with the object of becoming her lover and I was not then and never have been a strong lustful man and I had, even at that time, put all thought of anything very definite ever happening between myself and a woman utterly aside.”

“I had put the thought aside, and had taken up this other, you see. Between myself and the young athlete I had created in fancy a relation that would never attempt to come to any sort of physical expression. We would live, I dreamed, each his own life, each gathering what beauty might be possible from the great outer world and bringing it as a prize to the other. There would be this man I loved and of whom I asked nothing and toward whom my whole impulse would be forever just to give and give to the very top of my bent.

“You understand how it was, or rather of course you do not understand now but some day it may be you will,” said the voice coming from the thin lips of the small fat man walking up and down the room behind me in the house in Ohio. “I did a foolish thing,” said the voice. “One day I wrote a note to the man telling something of the dream that had been in my mind and as I had nothing else to send I went to a florist’s and sent him a great bunch of beautiful roses.”

“I got no answer to the note but later he showed it about and all during the rest of my days at the school--and out of a kind of blind determination I stayed on there until I graduated and had got my degree, my expenses after my father’s death being paid by my cousin--during all the rest of my days at the school I was looked upon generally as a--perhaps you do not even know the meaning of the word--I was looked upon as a pervert.

“There was another and more vulgar word, a word I had seen on the walls of the shed and on the board fence when I was a schoolboy that was also shouted at me. Like my father before me I, in my trouble, took to walking in the streets and in lonely places at night. The word would be shouted at me from the darkness or from the steps of a house as I stumbled along in the darkness and I had not then, as I had when I was a lad, the satisfaction of thinking of myself as another Francisco, as one who could resort to poison powders to assert his own supremacy and to reëstablish himself with himself.

“I was simply determined I would finish my days in college and would not follow my father’s footsteps in taking my own life--having then and always having had a queer sort of respect, do you see, for life as it manifested itself in my own body--that I would finish my days in that place and that I would then, at the first opportunity, get hold of enough money to make myself respected among the men with whom and in whose company I would in all likelihood have to live out my days.

“I conceived, do you see, of money-making as the only sure method to win respect from the men of the modern world and as for you, my lad, if you have sensibilities as I suppose you have or I should not have taken the trouble to invite you to my house--as for you, my lad, if an opportunity comes to you, as it did to me when my cousin got me sent South, you had better take advantage of it,” said the judge, coming from behind my chair and standing before me to pour himself another glass of the whisky which he drank this time I noticed without the customary little ceremony of holding it for a moment between his eyes and the light.

I thought, or I may fancy I then thought, that the judge’s bright birdlike eyes were clouded and looked tired as he said these last words and that his hands as he poured the whisky trembled a little but perhaps the notion but springs from my more mature fancy playing over a dramatic moment in life.

And at any rate he came to loaf away the next afternoon at the stable and was as he always had been, sitting in silence, listening to the talk that went round and folding his fat little hands over his neatly-waistcoated paunch. And when he spoke he, as always, concealed under so thick a coat of good-natured toleration what sarcasm may have lurked in his words that he won and seemed always to hold the respect of all of his hearers.

NOTE III

DEFINITION

“_A really high-class horse is one that is consistent, game, intelligent, gentle, obedient, courageous, and at all times willing and able to go any route with weight up and maintain a high rate of speed and overcome all ordinary difficulties under adverse conditions._

“_Remember that horses are not machines._”

--_Trainer and Cloeker’s Handicap (strictly private)._

A NARROW beam of yellow light against the satin surface of purplish gray wood, wood become soft of texture, touched with these delicate shades of color. The light from above falls straight down the face of a great heavy beam of the wood. Or is it marble rather than wood, marble touched also by the delicate hand of time? I am perhaps dead and in my grave. No, it cannot be a grave. Would it not be wonderful if I had died and been buried in a marble sepulchre, say on the summit of a high hill above a city in which live many beautiful men and women? It is a grand notion and I entertain it for a time. What have I done to be buried so splendidly? Well, never mind that. I have always been one who wanted a great deal of love, admiration and respect from others without having to go to all the trouble of deserving it. I am buried magnificently in a marble sepulchre cut into the side of a large hill, near the top. On a certain day my body was brought hither with great pomp. Music played, women and children wept and strong men bowed their heads. Now on feast days young men and women come up the hillside to look through a small glass opening left in the side of my burial place. It must be through the opening the yellow light comes. The young men who come up the hillside are wishing they could be like me, and the young and beautiful women are all wishing I were still alive and that I might be their lover.

How splendid! What have I done? The last thing I remember I was working at that place where so many kegs of nails had to be rolled down an incline. I was full of beer too. What happened after that? Did I save a besieged city, kill a dragon like Saint George, drive snakes out of the land like Saint Patrick, inaugurate a new and better social system, or what could I have done?

I am somewhere in a huge place. Perhaps I am standing in that great cathedral at Chartres, the cathedral that Judge Turner told me about when I was a lad and that I myself long afterward saw and that became for me as it has been for many other men and women the beauty shrine of my life. It may be that I am standing in that great place at midnight alone. It cannot be that there is any one with me for I feel very lonely. A feeling of being very small in the presence of something vast has taken possession of me. Can it be Chartres, the Virgin, the woman, God’s woman?

What am I talking about? I cannot be in the cathedral at Chartres or buried splendidly in a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a magnificent city. I am an American and if I am dead my spirit must now be in a large half-ruined and empty factory, a factory with cracks in the walls where the work of the builders was scamped, as nearly all building was scamped in my time.

It cannot be I am in the presence of the Virgin. Americans do not believe in either Virgins or Venuses. Americans believe in themselves. There is no need of gods now but if the need arises Americans will manufacture many millions of them, all alike. They will label them “Keep smiling” or “Safety first” and go on their way, and as for the woman, the Virgin, she is the enemy of our race. Her purpose is not our purpose. Away with her!

The beam of wood I see is just a beam of wood. It was cut in a forest and brought to the factory to support a wall that had begun to give way. No one touched it with careless hurried hands and so it aged as you see, quite beautifully--as trees themselves age. All about me are broken wheels. In the factory the great steam-driven wheels are forever still now.

Broken dreams, ends of thoughts, a stifled feeling within my chest.

Aha, you Stephenson, Franklin, Fulton, Bell, Edison--you heroes of my Industrial Age, you men who have been the gods of the men of my day--is your day over so soon? “In the end,” I am telling myself, “all of your triumphs come to the dull and meaningless absurdity, of say a clothespin factory. There have been sweeter men in old times, half forgotten now, who will be remembered after you are forgotten. The Virgin too, will be remembered after you are forgotten. Would it not be amusing if Chartres continued to stand after you are forgotten?”

Is it not absurd? Because I do not want to work in a warehouse and roll kegs, because I do not want to work in a factory anywhere I must needs go getting gaudy and magnificent and try to blow all factories away with a breath of my fancy. My fancy climbs up and up.

Democracy shall spread itself out thinner and thinner, it shall come to nothing but empty mouthings in the end. Everywhere, all over the earth, shall be the dreary commercial and material success of, say the later Byzantine Empire. In the West and after the great dukes, the kings and the popes, the commoners--who were not commoners after all but only stole the name--are having their day. The shrewd little money-getters with the cry “democracy” on their lips shall rule for a time and then the real commoners shall come--and that shall be the worst time of all. Oh, the futile little vanity of the workers who have forgotten the cunning of hands, who have long let machines take the place of the cunning of hands!

And the tired men of the arts. Oh, the cunning smart little men of the arts of New York and Chicago! Painters making advertising designs for soap, painters making portraits of bankers’ wives, story-tellers striving wearily to “make” the _Saturday Evening Post_ or to be revolutionists in the arts. Artists everywhere striving for what?

Respectability perhaps--to call attention to themselves perhaps.

They will get--a Ford. On holidays they may go see the great automobile races on the speedway at Indianapolis Indiana. Not for them the flashing thoroughbreds or the sturdy trotters and pacers. Not for them freedom, laughter. For them machines.

Long ago that Judge Turner had corrupted my mind. He played me a hell of a trick. I have been going about trying to have thoughts. What a fool I have been! I have read many books of history, many stories of men’s lives. Why did I not go to college and get a safe education? I might have worked my way through and got my mind fixed in a comfortable mold. There is no excuse for me. I shall have to pay for my lack of a proper training.

In the next room to the one in which I am lying two men are talking.

FIRST VOICE. “He took straw, ground it, put it into some kind of rubber composition. The whole was mixed up together and subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. It came out a tough kind of composition that can be made to look like wood. It can be grained like wood. He will get rich. I tell you he is one of the great minds of the age.”

SECOND VOICE. “We shall have prohibition after a while and then you’ll see how it will turn out. You can’t down the American mind. Some fellow will make a drink, a synthetic drink. It won’t cost much to make. Perhaps it can be made out of crude oil like gasoline and then the Standard will take him up. He’ll get rich. We Americans can’t be put down, I’ll tell you that.”

FIRST VOICE. “There is a man in New York makes car wheels out of paper. It is ground, I suppose, and made into a kind of mush and then is subjected to an immense hydraulic pressure. The wheels look like iron.”

SECOND VOICE. “Do you suppose he paints them black like iron?”

FIRST VOICE. “It’s a great age we live in. You can’t down machinery. I read a book by Mark Twain. He knocked theories cold, I’ll tell you what. He made out all life was just a great machine.”

* * * * *

Where am I? Am I dreaming or am I awake? It seems to me that I am somewhere in a great empty place. I shall have one of my terrible fits of depression if I am not careful now. Sometimes I walk gayly along the streets and talk to men and women gayly but there are other times when I am so depressed that all the muscles of my body ache. I am like one on whose back a great beast sits. Now it seems to me I am in a huge empty place. Has the roof of a factory in which I was at work at night fallen in? There is a long shaft of yellow light falling down a beam of wood or marble.

Thoughts flitting, an effort to awaken out of dreams, voices heard, voices talking somewhere in the distance, the figures of men and women I have known flashing in and out of darkness. There is a tiny faint voice speaking: “The money-makers will grow weary and disgusted with their own money-making and labor shall have lost all faith, all sense of the cunning of the hand. The factory hands shall rule. What a mess it will be!”

* * * * *

Where am I? I am in a bed somewhere in a room in a workers’ rooming house. Two young mechanics live in the next room and now they are getting out of bed and are talking cheerfully. Once on cold nights monks awoke in cold cells in monasteries and muttered prayers to God. Now in a cold room two young mechanics proclaim their faith in new gods.

Words in a brain trying to come into consciousness out of heavy sleep. “Service! They make a point of service,” says one of the young men’s voices. My brain, a voice in my own brain, chattering: “The woman who had been taken in adultery came to wash with her hands the tired feet of the Christ. She wiped his feet with her long hair and poured precious ointment upon them.” A distorted thought born of the effort to awaken from a heavy dream: “Many men and women are going along a street. They all have long hair and bear vessels of precious ointment. They are going to wash the feet of a Rockefeller, of ‘Bet a million’ Gates, of a Henry Ford or the son of a Henry Ford, the gods of the new day.”

And now the dream again. Again the great empty place. I cannot breathe. There is a great black bell without a tongue, swinging silently in darkness. It swings and swings, making a great arch and I await silent and frightened. Now it stops and descends slowly. I am terrified. Can nothing stop the great descending iron bell? It stops and hangs for a moment and now it drops suddenly and I am a prisoner under the great iron bell.

NOTE IV

WITH a frantic effort I am awake, I am in my laborers’ rooming house and Nora, who is my friend, has been trying to clean the wall paper in my room. She takes bits of bread dough and rubs the walls. The paper on the walls was originally yellow but time and coal soot have made it almost black. Light is struggling in through a window, wiped clean by Nora but yesterday, but already nearly black again. The morning sun is playing on the wall.

Nora’s lover does not come home although he writes whenever his ship comes to port. The ship carries ore from Duluth to Chicago and one may be quite sure he does not sleep much of the time in a clean berth nor smell in his nostrils the clean sea air, as I represented things to Nora when I wanted her to take better care of my room. Nora has tried. That idea of mine was a purely literary one but it has made Nora and myself friends.

She fancies the notion of having someone to care for, to do things for, and so do I. It is a literary triumph for me and I instinctively like literary triumphs. We are much together and as the time is a black one for me she makes life livable. Nora is a true modern, not fussy, not making a great brag and bluster about it as did so many of the “moderns” in the arts I was to see later in New York. In my day I was to see a time when if a man wrote ten honest paragraphs or painted three honest paintings he immediately set himself up as a persecuted saint and wept if Mr. Sumner of New York or the Watch and Ward Club of Boston did not descend upon him. Most “moderns” of the arts I was later to see regretted the day of the passing of the Inquisition. They did not hanker to be burned at the stake but would have loved having it done to them, as in the moving picture, with some sort of mechanical cold flame. As for Nora she wanted to know all I thought, all I felt. She was not afraid I would “ruin” her. She knew how to look out for herself.

In the evenings we went out to walk together, sometimes going to the docks and sitting together while the moon came up over the waters of the lake and sometimes going to what was called the better part of town to walk under trees in a park or along a residence street.

There was no love-making for Nora’s mind was turned toward her sailorman and I was ill. My body was well and strong most of the time, but there was an illness within.

My mind dwelt too much of the time in darkness. I had already worked in a dozen factories and much of the time it had been with me as it was with Judge Turner when he was a boy in an Ohio town. Nature had compelled him to go into a vile shed on the walls of which were scrawled sentences that revolted his soul and the necessity of keeping my body going--a necessity I myself did not understand but that was there, in me--had compelled me, time and again, to go into the door of a factory as an employee.

I talked constantly to Nora of the thoughts in my mind. There was a kind of understanding between us. I did not try to come between her and her sailorman and I had the privilege of saying to her what I pleased.

What a mixed-up affair! I was always pretending to Nora that I loved men and was a great mixer with men while at the same time I was dreaming of having a fight with my fists with the athlete at the warehouse.

In the late afternoon I went along a street homeward bound, filled with beer and imagining a scene. In my wanderings I had known personally two fighters, Bill McCarthy, a lightweight, and Harry Walters, a heavy. Once I was second for Harry Walters in a fight with a Negro in a barn near Toledo, Ohio. Sports came out from the city to the barn near a river and when Harry began to lose I was shrewd enough to spread the alarm that the police were coming so that everyone fled and Harry was saved a beating at the hands of the black.

I remembered the blows Harry had struck and that the black had struck and the blows I had seen Billy McCarthy strike. The black had a feint and a cross that confused Harry and that landed the black’s left every time full on Harry’s chin. Each time it landed Harry became a little more groggy but he could not avoid the blow. And I remembered how the black smiled each time as it landed. He had two rows of gold-covered teeth and his smile was like Jack Johnson’s golden smile.

I went along factory streets fancying myself the great black, possessing the knowledge of the black’s feint and cross and with the athlete of the warehouse standing before me.

Aha! There is a slight rocking movement of the body, just so. The head moves slowly and rhythmically like the head of a snake when it is about to strike. Oh, for a long row of yellow gold-crowned teeth to glisten in the mouth when one smiles the golden smile in factory streets, in factories themselves or, most of all, when in a fight, when about to knock an athlete who works with one on a certain platform, “for a goal,” as we used to say among us fighters--an athlete on a platform and with three or four large heavy Swede teamsters standing looking on and smiling also their own slow smiles.

Patience now! One gets the body and the head moving just so, in opposite directions, with opposing rhythm--a sort of counterpoint, as it were--and then the golden smile comes and, quickly, shiftily, the feint with the right for the belly followed with lightning quickness by the left, crossed to the chin.

Oh, for a powerful left! “I would give freely and willingly all the chances I possess of being buried with great pomp in a marble sepulchre on a hillside above a magnificent city for a powerful left,” I think each evening as I go home from work.

And all the time pretending to Nora and myself that I am one who loves mankind! Love indeed! Nora who wished to make happy the one man she understood and with whom she was to live was the lover, not I.

For me the athlete, poor innocent one, has become a symbol.

NOTE V

IN the many factories where I have worked most men talked vilely to their fellows and long afterward I was to begin to understand that a little. It is the impotent man who is vile. His very impotence has made him vile and in the end I was to understand that when you take from man the cunning of the hand, the opportunity to constantly create new forms in materials, you make him impotent. His maleness slips imperceptibly from him and he can no longer give himself in love, either to work or to women. “Standardization! Standardization!” was to be the cry of my age and all standardization is necessarily a standardization in impotence. It is God’s law. Women who choose childlessness for themselves choose also impotence--perhaps to be the better companions for the men of a factory, a standardization age. To live is to create constantly new forms: with the body in living children; in new and more beautiful forms carved out of materials; in the creation of a world of the fancy; in scholarship; in clear and lucid thought; and those who do not live die and decay and from decay always a stench arises.

These the thoughts of a time long after the one of which I am now writing. One cannot think of the figure of a single man as being in himself to blame but as the man named Ford of Detroit has done more than any other man of my day to carry standardization to its logical end might he also not come to be looked upon as the great killer of his age? To make impotent is surely to kill. And there is talk of making him President. How fitting! Tamerlane, who specialized in the killing of men’s bodies but who tells in his autobiography how he was always desirous that all living men under him retain their manhood and self-respect, was the ruler of the world in his age. Tamerlane for the ancients. Ford for the moderns.

In our age why should we not all have houses alike, all men and women clad alike (I am afraid we shall have a bad time managing the women), all food alike, all the streets in all of our cities alike? Surely individuality is ruinous to an age of standardization. It should at once and without mercy be crushed out. Let us give all workers larger and larger salaries but let us crush out of them at once all flowering of individualities. It can be done. Let us arise in our might.

And let us put at our head the man who has done in his own affairs what we are all so universally agreed should everywhere be done, the man who has made standardization the fetish of his life.

Books may be standardized--they are already almost that; painting may be standardized--it has often been done, and the standardization of poetry will be easy. Already I know a man who is working on a machine for the production of poetry. One feeds into it the letters of the alphabet and out comes poetry and one may pull various levers for the production of poems either of the _vers libre_ sort or poetry in the classic style.

Arise, men of my age! Under the banner of the new age we shall have a great machine moving slowly down a street and depositing cement houses to the right and left as it goes, like a diarrhœic elephant. All the young Edisons will enlist under the banner of a Ford. We shall have all the great minds of our age properly employed making car wheels out of waste newspapers and synthetic wines out of crude oils. I am told by intelligent men who were soldiers in the World War that in all the world before the war standardization had been carried to the highest pitch by the Germans but now the Germans have been defeated. May it not be that we Americans have all along been intended by God to be the nation that will carry highest the banner of the New Age?

NOTE VI

BUT I wander from my subject to leap into the future, to become a prophet, and I have no prophet’s beard. In reality I am thinking of a certain young man who once came rushing, full of vitality and health, into a mechanical age and of what happened to him and to the men among whom he worked.

There was in the factories where I worked and where the efficient Ford type of man was just beginning his dull reign this strange and futile outpouring of men’s lives in vileness through their lips. Ennui was at work. The talk of the men about me was not Rabelaisian. In old Rabelais there was the salt of infinite wit and I have no doubt the Rabelaisian flashes that came from our own Lincoln, Washington and the others had point and a flare to them.

But in the factories and in army camps!

Into my own consciousness, as I, a young man wishing vaguely to mature, walked in a factory street wishing childishly for a golden smile and a wicked left to cross over to the chin of some defender of the new age there was burned the memory of the last place in which I had worked before I had come to the warehouse to roll the kegs of nails.

It was a bicycle factory where I was employed as an assembler. With some ten or twelve other men I worked at a bench in a long room facing a row of windows. We assembled the parts that were brought to us by boys from other departments of the factory and put the bicycles together. There was such and such a screw to go into such and such a screw hole, such and such a nut to go on such and such a bolt. As always in the modern factory nothing ever varied and within a week any intelligent quick-handed man could have done the work with his eyes closed. One turned certain screws, tightened certain bolts, whirled a wheel, fastened on certain foot pedals and passed the work on to the next man. Outside the window I faced there was a railroad track lined on one side by factory walls and the other by what had started to be a stone quarry. The stone of this quarry had not, I presume, turned out to be satisfactory and the hole was being filled with rubbish carted from various parts of the city and all day carts arrived, dumped their loads--making each time a little cloud of dust--and over the dump wandered certain individuals, men and women who were looking among the rubbish for bits of treasure, bottles I fancy and bits of cloth and iron that could later be sold to junk men.

For three months I had worked at the place and listened to the talk of my companions and then I had fled. The men seemed everlastingly anxious to assert their manhood, to make it clear to their fellows that they were potent men able to do great deeds in the realms of the flesh and all day I stood beside a little stand-like bench, on which the frame of the bicycle was stuck upside down, tightening nuts and screws and listening to the men, the while I looked from their faces out the window to the factory walls and the rubbish heap. An unmarried man had been on the evening before to a certain house in a certain street and there had happened between himself and a woman what he now wished to talk about and to describe with infinite care in putting in all the details. What an undignified stallion he made of himself! He had his moment, was allowed his moment by the others and then another, a married man, took up the theme, also boastfully. There were days as I worked in that place when I became physically ill and other days when I cursed all the gods of my age that had made men--who in another age might have been farmers, shepherds or craftsmen--these futile fellows, ever more and more loudly proclaiming their potency as they felt the age of impotency asserting itself in their bodies.

In the bicycle factory I had repeatedly told the other men that I was subject to sick headaches and I used to go often to a window, throw it open and lean out, closing my eyes and trying to create in fancy a world in which men lived under bright skies, drank wine, loved women and with their hands created something of lasting value and beauty and seeing me thus, white and with trembling hands, the men dropped the talk that so sickened me. Like kind children they came and did my work or, after the noon hour, brought me little packages of remedies they had bought at the drug store or had carried to me from their homes.

I had worked the sick headache racket to the limit and then, feeling it had become wornout, had quit my job and had gone to the place where I worked with the young athlete I now wanted to beat with my fists.

And on a certain day I tried. I had now convinced myself that the feint, the cross and the golden smile were all in good working condition and that no man, least of all the young athlete who could not stand up to his drink, could stand up against me.

For weeks I had been as nasty as I could be to my fellow-workman. There was a trick I had learned. I gave one of the kegs I was rolling down the incline just a little sudden turn with my foot so that it struck him on the legs as he came into the house through a door. I hit him on the shins and when he howled with pain expressed the greatest regret and then as soon as I could, without arousing too much suspicion, I did it again.

We ceased speaking and only glared at each other. Even the dull-witted teamsters knew there was a fight brewing. I waited and watched, making my lips do the nearest thing possible to a golden smile, and at night in my room and even sometimes when I was walking with Nora and had come into a quiet dark street I practiced the feint and the cross. “What in Heaven’s name are you doing?” Nora asked, but I did not tell her but talked instead of my dreams, of brave men in rich clothes walking with lovely women in a strange land I was always trying to create in a world of my fancy and that was always being knocked galley-west by the facts of my life. Regarding the queer sudden little movements I was always making with my shoulders and hands I tried to be very mysterious and once I remember, when we had been sitting on a bench in a little park, I left her and went behind a bush. She thought I had gone there out of a natural necessity but it was not true. I had remembered how Harry Walters and Billy McCarthy, when they were preparing for a fight, did a good deal of what is called shadow boxing. One imagines an opponent before oneself and advances and recedes, feints and crosses, whirls suddenly around and gives ground before a rushing opponent only to come back at him with terrific straight rights and lefts, just as his attack has exhausted itself.

I wanted, I fancy, to have Nora grow tired of waiting for me and to come look around the bush and to discover my secret--that I was not as she thought, a rather foolish but smart-talking fellow inclined to be something of a cloud man. Ah, I thought, as I danced about on a bit of grass back of the bush, she will come to peek and see me here in my true light. She will take me for some famous fighter, a young Corbett or that famous middleweight of the day called “The Nonpareil.” What I hoped was that she would come to some such conclusion without asking questions and would go back to the bench to wait for my coming filled with a new wonder. A famous young prizefighter traveling incognito, not wanting public applause, a young Henry Adams of Boston with the punch of a Bob Fitzsimmons, a Ralph Waldo Emerson with the physical assurance of a railway brakeman--what painter, literary man or scholar has not had moments of indulging in some such dream? A burly landlord has been crude enough to demand instant pay for the room in which one is living, or some taxi driver, who has all but run one down at a corner, jerked out of his seat and given a thorough beating in the face of an entire street. “Did you see him pummel that fellow? And he such a pale intellectual looking chap, too! You can never tell how far a dog can jump by the length of his tail.” Etc., etc.

Men lost in admiration going off along a street talking of one’s physical prowess. Oneself flecking the dust off one’s hands and lighting a cigarette, while one looks with calm indifference at a red-faced taxi driver lying pale and quite defeated and hopeless in a gutter.

It was something of that sort of admiration I wanted from Nora but I did not get it. Once when I was walking in a street with her and had just gone through with my exercises she looked at me with scorn in her eyes. “You’re a nice fellow but you’re bughouse all right,” she said and that was all I ever succeeded in getting out of her.

But I got something else at the warehouse.

The fight came off on a Wednesday at about three in the afternoon and the athlete and myself had two teamsters as witnesses to the affair.

All day I had been bedeviling him--being just as downright ugly and nasty as I could, clipping him on the shins with several flying kegs, making my apologies as insolently as possible and when he started telling one of his endless nasty tales to the teamsters starting a loud conversation on some other subject just as he was about to come to the nub of his story. The teamsters felt the fight brewing and wanted to encourage it. They purposely listened to me and did not hear the nub.

He thought, I dare say, that I would never be foolish enough to fight him and I must have taken his scorn of me for timidity for I suddenly grew very bold. He was coming in at the door of the house just as I was on my way out behind one of the kegs and I suddenly stopped it, looked him squarely in the eyes and then, with an attempt at the golden smile on my lips, sent the keg flying directly at him.

He leaped over the keg and came toward me in silence and I prepared to bring my technique into play. Really I had, at the moment, a great deal of confidence in myself and began at once rocking my head, making queer little shifting movements with my feet and trying to establish a kind of cross rhythm in my shoulders and head that would, I felt, confuse him.

He looked at me lost in astonishment and I decided to lead. Had I been content to hit him in the belly with my right, putting all my strength back of the blow and then had I begun kicking, biting and pummeling furiously, I might have come out all right. He was so astonished--no doubt, like Nora, he thought me quite bughouse--that the right would surely have landed, but that, you see, was not the technique of the situation.

The thing was to feint for the belly and then “pull one’s punch” as it were, and immediately afterwards whip over the powerful left to the jaw. But my left was not powerful and anyway it did not land.

He knocked me down and when I got up and started my gymnastics again he knocked me down a second time and a third and a fourth. He knocked me down perhaps a dozen times and the two teamsters came to the door to watch and all the time there was the most foolish look on his face and on their faces. It was a look a bulldog attacked by a hen might have assumed--no doubt by my bullyragging I had convinced them, as I had myself, I could fight--but presently both my eyes were so swollen and my nose and mouth so bruised and cut that I could not see and so I got to my feet and walked away, going out of the warehouse in the midst of an intense silence on the part of all three of the spectators.

And so along a street I went to my room, followed by two or three curious children who perhaps thought I had been hit by a freight train and succeeded in also getting my door bolted against any sudden descent of Nora. My eyes were very evidently going to be badly discolored, my nose bled and my lips were badly cut, and so, after bathing my face in cold water, I put a wet towel over it and went and threw myself on the bed.

It was one of those moments that come, I presume, into every man’s life. I was lying on my bed in my room, in the condition already described, the door was bolted, Nora was not directly about and I was out from under the eyes of my fellowmen.

I tried to think as one will at such moments.

As for Nora, I might very well have gone to my door and called to her--she was at work somewhere on the floor below and would have gladly come running to offer her woman’s sympathy to my hurt physical self--but it was not my hurt physical self that I thought wanted attention. As far as that is concerned I was then, as I have been all my life, not so much concerned with the matter of physical discomfort or pain. Always it has been true of me that a framed water lily on a wall or a walk in a factory street can hurt me worse than a blow on the jaw and long afterward when I became a scribbler of tales I was able to take advantage of this peculiarity of my nature to do my work under conditions that would have disheartened a more physically sensitive man. As I was destined to live most of my life and do most of my work in factory towns and in little, ill-smelling, hideously-furnished rooms, freezing cold in winter and hot and cheerless in summer, it turned out to be a good and convenient trait in me and in the end I had so trained myself to forget my surroundings that I could sit for hours lost in my own thoughts and dreams, or scribbling oftentimes meaningless sentences in a cold room in a factory street, on a log beside some country road, in a railroad station or in the lobby of some large hotel, filled with the hurrying hustling figures of business men, totally unconscious of my surroundings, until my mood had worn itself out and I had sunk into one of the moods of depression common, I think, to all such fellows as myself. Never was such an almighty scribbler as I later became and am even now. Ink, paper and pencils are cheap in our day and I have taken full advantage of that fact and have during some years written hundreds of thousands of words which have afterward been thrown away. Many have told me, in print or by word of mouth, that all should have been thrown away and they may be right, but I am one who loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with words always gladdens me. The result of the scribbling, the tale of perfect balance, all the elements of the tale understood, an infinite number of minute adjustments perfectly made, the power of self-criticism fully at work, the shifting surface of word values and color in full play, form and the rhythmic flow of thought and mood marching forward with the sentences--these are things of a dream, of a far dim day toward which one goes knowing one can never arrive but infinitely glad to be on the road. It is the story I dare say of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the sloughs and sink holes on the road are many but the tale of that journey is known to other men than scribblers.

The consolation of ink and paper came, however, long after the time with which I am now concerned, and what a consolation it is! How much easier it is to sit in a room before a desk and with paper before one to describe a fight between oneself as hero of some tale and five or six burly ruffians than with the fists to dispose of one baseball player on the platform of a warehouse.

In the tale one can do any such job as it should be done and in the doing give satisfaction both to oneself and the possible reader, for the reader will always share in the emotions of the hero and gloat with him over his victories. In the tale, as you will understand, all is in order. The feint and the cross, the powerful left to the jaw, the golden smile, the shifting movements of the shoulders that confuse and disconcert the opponent, all work like well-oiled machines. One defeats not one baseball player or ruffian of the city streets but a dozen if the need arises. Oh, what glorious times I have had, sitting in little rooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood have run from the wounds of the villains, foolish enough to oppose me on the field of honor; what fair women I have loved and how they have loved me and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, open-hearted and fine I have been! I remember how I sat in the back room of a small bootlegging establishment at Mobile, Alabama, one afternoon, long after the time with which I am now concerned and while three drunken sailors discussed the divinity of Christ at a near-by table wrote the story of little, tired-out and crazed Joe Wainsworth’s killing of Jim Gibson in the harness shop at Bidwell Ohio, that afterward was used in the novel “Poor White”; and of how at a railroad station at Detroit I sat writing the tale of Elsie Leander’s westward journey, in “The Triumph of the Egg,” and missed my own train--these remain as rich and fine spots in a precarious existence.

But at the time of which I am speaking the consolation of ink and paper was a thing of the future and my bunged-up eyes and hurt spirits were facts.

Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

I lay on my back on my bed, trying to get up courage to face facts. As for the throbbing of the hurt places, the pain was a kind of satisfaction to me at the moment.

There was the warehouse where I had been more or less a spiritual bully but where I would now have to eat crow. Well, I need not go back. The day before had been payday and I would, by never going near the place again, lose little money and save myself the humiliation of facing the teamsters. And when it came to the scratch, I thought, there was the city I was in, the state, the very United States of America itself--I could if I chose desert them all. I was young, had been well trained in poverty, had no family ties, no social position to uphold, I was unmarried and as yet childless.

I was a free man, I told myself, sitting on the bed and staring about the room through swollen eyelids. Was I free? Did any man ever achieve freedom? I had my own life before me. Why did I not, by some grand effort, begin to live a life?

I lay on the bed with the wet towel thrown aside thinking, trying to make plans. A faint suspicion of something permanently wrong with me had begun to creep into my consciousness. Was I, alas, a fellow born out of his place and time? I was in a world where only men of action seemed to thrive. Already I had noted that fact. One wanted a definite thing to go after, money, fame, a position of power in the big world, and having something definite of the sort in mind one shut one’s eyes and pitched in with all the force of one’s physical and mental self. I squirmed about trying to force myself to face myself. My body was strong enough for all practical purposes, when not scarred and bruised by the blows of an angry ball player, and I was not such a bad-looking fellow. I was not lazy and on the whole rather liked hard physical labor. Need I be what I at the moment seemed to myself to be, a useless and foolish dreamer, a child in a world filled with what I thought to be grown-up men? Why should I myself not also grow up, take the plow by the handle, plow vast fields, become rich or famous? Perhaps I could become a man of power and rule or influence many other men’s lives.

There is a trick the fancy has. Start it in any direction and it goes prancing off at a great rate and that trick my own fancy now did.

Although my body ached as a result of my recent plunge into the field of action I, in fancy, plunged in again and began thinking of myself as holding the handle of a plow and plowing the fields of life, turning great furrows, planting perhaps the seeds of new ideas. Oho, for the smell of new-turned earth, the sight of the sower casting his seed!

I was off again. On that day Nora had done the work in my room early but now she was sweeping and dusting on the floor below and I could hear her moving about.

Why should I not first of all conquer Nora? That, I at that moment thought, was surely the beginning of manhood, to conquer some woman, and why not Nora as well as another? It would be something of an undertaking that was sure. Nora was not beautiful nor perhaps too subtle in her outlook on life but then was I myself subtle? She was direct and simple and had, I thought, a direct and simple mind and after I had conquered her, had bent her to my own will, what might we not do together? There was to be sure the sailor with whom she was to live and to whom she was promised but I brushed him aside. “I can cook his goose in some way,” I thought to myself, much as I had thought I could easily dispose of the ball player by my feints and crosses.

We might, I thought, following up the fancy I had just had, begin by being tillers of the soil. We could go West somewhere and take up land. Already I had read many tales of the West and had a fancy for casting in my fortunes with the West. “Out where the smile lasts a little longer, out where the handclasp is a little stronger,” etc. “Oho, for the land where men are men and gals are gals!” I thought my fancy running away like a wild horse broken out of its stall. I saw myself owning vast farms somewhere in the Far West and saw, I am afraid, Nora doing most of the plowing, planting and the harvesting of crops, the while I rode grandly over the estate on a black stallion, receiving the homage of serfs.

But what would I do with my odd moments? I had tried talking to Nora of the things that interested me most, the play of light over a factory chimney, seen amid smoke as darkness came on, odd expressions caught from the lips of passing men and women, the play of the fancy over the imagined lives of men and women too. Had Nora understood or cared? Could I go on always talking and talking in the face of the fact that I knew she was not much interested?

With a rush of resolution I threw my doubts aside. Oh, to be one who made two blades of grass where but one had grown before! With Nora at my side I would in some field become great and powerful. I was at the moment but a bunged-up fellow lying on the bed in a cheap rooming house but what did that matter? All about me was the great American world rushing on and on to new mechanical and material triumphs. Teddy Roosevelt and the strenuous life had not yet come but he was implicit in the American mood. Imperialism had already come. It was time, I told myself, to be up and doing.

Behind him lay the gray Azores, Behind the Gates of Hercules; Before him not the ghost of shores; Before him only shoreless seas. The good mate said, “Now must we pray, For lo, the very stars are gone. Brave Admr’l speak.” “What shall I say?” “Why say: ‘Sail on, sail on and on.’”

NOTE VII

JUMPING off the bed I instantly began to try to prepare myself for new adventures. As I had been lying on the bed thinking the thoughts above set down and working myself up to new heights of fancied grandeur some time had passed. Perhaps I had slept and awakened. At any rate it was now dark in the room and I lighted a lamp. By its light and after I had bathed my face for some time it did not look so swollen although both eyes had turned a deep purple.

Undaunted I dressed in my best Sunday clothes and prepared to set out. I had engaged to walk with Nora on that evening and it was our custom on such occasions for me to pass quietly out of the house, tapping on the door of her room on the floor below and waiting for her on the front steps.

To tell the truth I had already got well going the new dramatization of myself as a man of action but was not sure of myself in the new rôle to want to face any of the workmen in the house. Nora I thought I could handle.

As I stood in the room dressed in my best clothes I counted my money and then decided I would not be a Western ranchman after all but a man of commerce, an empire builder perhaps. I had in my possession some ninety-eight dollars which seemed to me at the moment sufficient for a start in almost any undertaking. It would support me for a few weeks while I looked about and then I would pitch in somewhere and become an empire builder. It would take time but what was time to me? I had an abundance of time. “I’ll do it,” I told myself resolutely.

Why not? Was I not a man of imagination? Was I not young and did I not have a strong body?

As I washed the dried blood off my face, put on my Sunday suit and adjusted my tie I in fancy swept the field of commercial adventure with my somewhat damaged eyes. There were the great cities of Chicago and New York I had not yet seen, although I had read much about them and about men who had grown from poverty to riches and power in them. Like all young Americans I had read innumerable tales of men who had begun with nothing and had become great leaders, owners of railroads, governors of states, foreign ambassadors, generals of armies, presidents of great modern republics. Abraham Lincoln walking miles through a storm after a hard day’s work to borrow his first book, Jay Gould the young Wall Street clerk, setting up a great dynasty of wealth, Daniel Drew the cattle dealer becoming a millionaire, Garfield the canal-boat boy and Vanderbilt the ferryman become President and millionaire, Grant the failure, hauling hides from his father’s tannery at Galena, Illinois, to St. Louis--and, it was said, getting so well piped sometimes on the homeward journey that he fell off the wagon--he also became great, the winner of a mighty war, President of his country, a noted traveler, receiving the homage of kings. “And I can carry my liquor better than he could, by all reports,” I said to myself.

Were these men any better than myself? At the moment and in spite of the gloom of an hour before, I thought not, and as for my having but ninety-eight dollars, what did that matter? As a matter of fact one gathered from having read American history that there was a sort of advantage to be gained from starting with nothing. One had something to talk and brag about in one’s old age, and when one became a candidate for President one furnished one’s campaign managers with materials for campaign slogans.

And now I was dressed and had tiptoed out of the house, tapped on Nora’s door and was waiting for her outside. I had decided that when she came out I would not make an appeal for her woman’s sympathy by telling of what had actually happened to me. “I do not want woman’s sympathy,” I thought proudly. What I wanted was woman’s respect. I wanted to conquer them, to have them at my feet, to stand before them the conquering male.

When Nora came and when we had walked to where there was a street light and she had seen my damaged countenance I began at once to brag and to reconstruct the fight at the warehouse more to my own fancy. Not one but four men had attacked me and I had valiantly stood my ground. An inspiration came. I had got into the fight, I told Nora, because of a woman. A young woman, a working girl like Nora herself had passed the platform and the men at work there with me had begun making remarks that were not very nice. What was I to do? I was one who could never stand quietly by and hear an innocent woman, particularly one who had to work for her living and had perhaps no men of her own to stand up for her, hear such a woman subjected to insult. I had, I told Nora, at once pitched into the four men and there had been a terrible fight.

As I described the fancied affair to Nora the feint and the cross on which I had so depended had worked wonderfully. I had received many hard blows, it was true, and Nora could see by looking at my face how I had suffered, but I had given better than I had received. Like a tornado I had swept up and down the warehouse platform making feints with my right and whipping my powerful left to the jaws of my opponents until at last they were all laid out like dead men before me. And then I had come home, a little fearful that I might have killed one or two of the men but not waiting to see. “I did not care,” I said. “If my opponents have suffered a terrible beating at my hands and if one or two of them die of their injuries it was their own fault. They should have known better than to have insulted a woman in my presence.”

I had told Nora my story and we had walked in silence until we had come to a street lamp when she suddenly stopped and, taking my left hand, turned it up to the light. As I had not succeeded in the actual fight in striking a blow with it, the hand was unmarked by a bruise. “Huh!” said Nora and we went on in silence.

The silence, which was one of the hardest I have ever had to bear, continued until we had finished our walk--which on that evening did not last very long,--and had got back to the house.

On the steps in front we stopped and Nora stood for a time looking at me. It was a look I did not much fancy, but what was I to do? Two or three times during our walk I had tried to begin talking a little and had attempted to patch up the structure of my yarn so that it would not be quite so full of holes and leaky but could think of no way to explain the unbruised surface and uninjured knuckles of my left, so I had taken refuge in a kind of sullen silence.

I had even begun to feel a little injured and angry and was asking myself what right Nora had to question my story--was feeling, to tell the truth, much as I was later to feel when some editor or critic rejected, as not sound, one of my written tales--that is to say, resentful and intolerant of the editor or critic and inclined to call him a fool and to attribute to him all kinds of secret and degrading motives. I was feeling much in this mood, I say, when we had got back to the steps and were standing in the darkness in front.

And then Nora suddenly put her strong arm about my neck and pulled my head down upon her shoulder and I began to cry like a child.

That in an odd way made me more resentful than ever. It faced me with a problem I have all my life been trying to face and have never quite succeeded. One does so hate to admit that the average woman is kinder, finer, more quick of sympathy and on the whole so much more first class than the average man. It is a fact perhaps but a fact that I have always thought we men should deny with all the strength of our more powerful wills. We men should conquer women. We should not stand in the darkness with our heads on their shoulders, blubbering as I was doing at that moment.

However, I continued crying and being ashamed of myself and Nora did not press her advantage. When, now and then, I lifted my face from her shoulder and looked at her face, dimly seen in the darkness, it seemed to me just kindly and filled with sympathy for my position.

I felt, I presume, most of all the story-teller’s shame at the failure of his yarn and there was something else too. There was a suspicion that Nora, the woman who had been for weeks listening to my talk and whom I had somewhat looked down upon as not being my equal, had suddenly become my superior. I had prided myself on my mind and on the superiority of my imaginative flights. Could it be that this woman, this maker of beds in a cheap laborers’ rooming house, had a better mind than my own?

The thought was unbearable and so, as soon as I could conveniently manage it, I got my head off Nora’s shoulder and made my escape.

In my room I sat again on the edge of the bed and I had again bolted the door. The notion of using Nora to plant and sow fields for me while I rode about on a magnificent black stallion was now quite gone and I had to construct another and at once. That I realized. I had to construct a new dramatization of myself and leave Nora out of it. I was not ready for the Noras. Perhaps I would never be ready for them. Few American men I have ever known have ever shown any signs of being ready for the Noras of the world or of being able really to understand or face them.

My mind turned again to the field of business and affairs. I had already known a good many men and, while such fellows as the baseball player at the warehouse had the better of me because I had been fool enough to let the struggle between us get on a physical plane, I had not met many men who had caused me to tremble because of any special spiritual or intellectual strength in themselves.

To be sure the world of affairs was one of which I knew nothing and yet I thought I might tackle it. “It cannot be worse than the world of labor,” I thought as I sat in the darkness, trying not to think of Nora--thoughts of whom I was convinced might weaken the resolution I had taken and might even cause me to begin blubbering again--and keeping my mind fixed on the laborers I had known, even as the laborers who lived in the house with me tramped heavily, one by one, up the stairs and went off to their rooms and to sleep.

“I will become a man of action, in the mood of the American of my day. I will build railroads, conquer empires, become rich and powerful. Why should I not do something of the sort as well as all the other men who have done it so brilliantly? America is the land of opportunity. I must keep that thought ever in my mind,” I told myself as I tiptoed out of the house at two o’clock in the morning, having left a note of good-by to Nora and the amount of my room rent in an envelope on my bed. I was being very careful not to make any noise as I went along the hallway and past Nora’s door. “I had better not wake up the woman,” I was wise enough to say to myself as I went away, hugging my new impulse in life.

NOTE VIII

I HAD come to that period of a young man’s life where all is uncertainty. In America there seemed at that time but one direction, one channel, into which all such young fellows as myself could pour their energies. All must give themselves wholeheartedly to material and industrial progress. Could I do that? Was I fitted for such a life? It was a kind of moral duty to try and then, as now, men at the heads of the great industrial enterprises filled or had filled all the newspapers and magazines with sermons on industry, thrift, virtue, loyalty and patriotism, meaning I am afraid by the use of all these high-sounding terms only devotion to the interests in which they had money invested. But the terms were good terms, the words used were magnificent words. And I was by my nature a word fellow, one who could at most any time be hypnotized by high-sounding words. It was confusing to me as it must be confusing to many young men now. During the World War did we not see how even the very government went into the advertising business, selling the war to the young men of the country by the use of the same noble words advertising men used to forward the sale of soap or automobile tires? To the young man a kind of worship of some power outside himself is essential. One has strength and enthusiasm and wants gods to worship. There were only these gods of material success. Chivalry was gone. The Virgin had died. In America there were no churches. What were called churches were merely clubs, ruled over by the same forces that ruled over the factories and great mercantile houses. Often the men I heard speaking in churches spoke in the same words, used the same terms to define the meaning of life that were used by the real-estate boomer, the politician, or the enterprising business man talking to his employees of the necessity of steadfastness and devotion to the interests of his firm.

The Virgin was dead and her son had taken as prophets such men as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Benjamin Franklin, the one with his little books in which he set down and saved his acts and impulses, striving to make them all serve definite ends as he saved his pennies and the other preaching the intellectual doctrine of Self-reliance, Up and Onward. The land was filled with gods but they were new gods and their images, standing on every street of every town and city, were cast in iron and steel. The factory had become America’s church and duplicates of it stood everywhere, on almost every street of every city belching black incense into the sky.

A passion for reading books had taken possession of me and I did not work when I had any money at all but often for weeks spent my time reading any book I could get my hands on. In every city there were public libraries and I could get books without spending money.

The past took a strong hold on my imagination and I went eagerly down through the ages, reading of the lives of the great men of antiquity; of the Romans and their conquest of the world; of the early Christians and their struggles before the great organizer Paul came to “put Christianity across”; of the Cæsars, Charlemagnes and Napoleons, marching and countermarching across Europe at the head of their troops; of the cruel but powerful Peters and Ivans of Russia; of the great and elegant dukes of Italy--the poisoners and schemers listening to the words of their Machiavellis; of the magnificent painters and craftsmen of the Middle Ages; of English and French kings; roundheads; Spanish kings of the days of conquest and of gold ships bringing riches from the Spanish Main; the Grand Inquisitor; the coming of Erasmus, the cool scholarly questioner whose questions brought to the front Luther, the conscientious barbarian--all, all spread out before me, the young American coming into manhood, all in the books.

It was a feast. Could I digest it? I had saved a little money and knew how to live very cheaply. After working for some weeks, and when I did not spend money for drinking bouts to ease the confusion of my mind I had a few dollars put aside and dollars meant leisure. That is perhaps all dollars have ever meant to me.

Since I was always making the acquaintance of some fellow who lived by gambling I went now and then into a gambling place and sometimes had luck. I had five dollars when I went in at a certain door and came out with a hundred dollars in my pocket. Oh, glorious day! On such an amount I could live among books for weeks and so, renting a small room on a poor street, I went every day to a public library and got a new book. The book some man had spent years in composing was often waded through in a day and then thrown aside. What a jumble of things in my head! At times the life directly about me ceased to have any existence. The actuality of life became a kind of vapor, a thing outside of myself. My body was a house in which I lived and there were many such houses all about me but I did not live in them. Perhaps I was but trying to make solid the walls of my own house, to roof it properly, to cut windows, becoming accustomed to living in the house so that I could have leisure to look out at the windows and into other houses. Of that I do not know. To make such a claim for myself and my purpose seems giving my life a more intelligent direction than I can convince myself it has had.

I walked in and out of the little rooms in which I lived, often in what was called the tough part of a city, hearing all about me the oaths of drunken men, the crying of children, the weeping of some poor girl of the streets who has just been beaten by her pimp, the quarreling of laborers and their wives, walked hearing and seeing nothing, walked gripping a book in my hand.

In fancy I was at the moment with the great Florentine Leonardo da Vinci on a day when he sat on a little hill above his country house in Italy studying the flight of birds or was making the mathematical and geometrical calculations he so loved. Or I was sitting in a carriage beside the scholar Erasmus as he drove across Europe going from the court of one great duke or king to the court of another. The lives of the dead men and women had become more real to me than the lives of the living people about me.

How bad an American I had become, how utterly out of touch with the spirit of my age! Sometimes for weeks I did not read a newspaper--a fault in me that would have been considered almost in the light of a crime had it been generally known to my fellows. A new railroad might have been built, a new trust formed or some great national excitement like the free silver affair--that did fall in at about that time--might have shaken the whole country while I knew nothing about it.

There was indeed a kind of intimate acquaintance with an unknown and unheralded kind of people I was unconsciously getting. In Chicago, where I had now gone I for a time lived in a room in a huge cheaply constructed building that had been erected about a little court. The building was not old, had in fact been built but a few years before--during the Chicago World’s Fair--but already it was a half-tumbledown unsafe place with great sags in the floors in the hallways and cracks in the walls. The building surrounded the little brick-paved court and was divided into single rooms for bachelor lodgers and into small two- and three-room apartments. Since it was near the end of several street-car lines and a branch of the Chicago elevated railroad it was occupied for the most part by street-car conductors and motormen with their wives and children. Many of my fellow-lodgers were young fellows having wives but no children and not intending to have children if the accidents of life could be avoided. They went off to work and came home from work at all sorts of odd hours.

I hadn’t very much money but did not mind. My room was small and cost little and I lived on fruit and on stacks of wheatcakes that could be had at ten cents the stack at a near-by workingmen’s eating place. When I was broke I told myself I could always go again to some place where laborers were wanted. I was young and my body was strong. “If I cannot get work in the city I can get on a freight train at night and go away to the country and work on a farm,” I thought. Sometimes I had qualms of conscience because I had not already started on the great career as an industrial magnate I had half-heartedly mapped out for myself but I managed to put my sins of omission aside. There was plenty of time I told myself and in any event I planned eventually to do the thing with a grand rush.

In the meantime I lay for long hours on the little bed in my room reading the last book I had got from the library or walked in a near-by park under the trees. Time ceased to exist and the days became night while the nights became days. Often I came back to my room at two in the morning, washed my shirt, underwear and socks at a washbowl in a corner, hung them out at my window facing the court to dry and lying down naked on my bed read by a gaslight until daylight had come.

Marvelous days! Now I was marching with the conqueror Julius Cæsar over the vast domains of the mighty Roman Empire. What a life and how proud Julius and I were of his conquests and how often we spoke together of the doings of Cicero, Pompey, Cato and the others in Rome. Indeed Cæsar and I had become for the nonce the most intimate of friends and often enough we discussed the unworthiness of some of the other Romans, particularly of that Cicero. The man was no better than a dog, a literary hack, when all was said and done, and such fellows are never to be trusted. Often enough Cicero had talked with Cæsar and pretended to be Cæsar’s friend but, as Julius often pointed out to me, such fellows were wont to veer about with every wind that blew, “Writers are the greatest cowards in the world and my own greatest weakness is that I have a kind of hankering that way myself. Let a man but get into power and he will always find such scribbling fellows willing and anxious to sing his praises. They are the greatest cur dogs in the world,” he declared vehemently.

And so I had become in fancy the friend of Cæsar and all day I marched beside him and at evening went with him and his men into their camp.

The days and weeks passed. I sat by the window looking into the little brick-paved court and there were many other windows. As it was summer they were all open. Evening came, after a day of walking in dreams, and I had come into my room and taking off my coat had thrown myself down on my bed. When darkness came I did not light a light but lay quietly listening.

I had stepped now out of the past and into the present and all about me were the voices of living people. The men and women in the rooms along the court did not laugh or sing often and indeed in the many times, during my life, I have lived, as I did then, lying like a little worm in the middle of the apple of modern life, I have never found that American men and women, except only the Negroes, laugh or sing much in their homes or at their work.

It was evening and a street-car conductor had come home to his wife. They were silent in each other’s presence for a time, then they began to quarrel. Sometimes they fought and after that they made love. The love-making of the couples along the court aroused my own passions and I had bad dreams at night.

What a strange thing love-making had become among modern factory hands, street-car conductors and all such fellows! Almost always it was preceded by a quarrel, often blows were struck, there were tears, repentance and then embraces. Did the tired nerves of the men and women need the stimulation of the fights and quarrels?

A red-faced man who stumbled as he walked along the hallways to his small apartment had secured a small flat stick which he kept behind a door. His wife was young and fat. When he had come home from work and had in silence eaten his evening meal he sat by the window facing the court and read a newspaper while his wife washed the dishes. Suddenly, when the dishes were washed, he jumped to his feet and ran to get the stick. “Don’t, John, don’t,” his wife pleaded half-heartedly, as he began to pursue her about the narrow room. Chairs were knocked over and tables upset. He kept hitting her with the flat stick upon the nether cheeks and she kept laughing and protesting. Sometimes he struck her too hard and she grew angry and, turning upon him, scratched his face with her finger nails. Then he swore and wrestled with her. Their period of more intense love-making had now come and silence reigned over the little home for the rest of the night.

I lay on my bed in the darkness and closed my eyes. Once more I was in the camp of Cæsar and we were in Gaul. The great captain had been writing at a small table near the door of his tent but now a man had come to speak with him. I lay in silence upon a kind of thick warm cloth spread on the ground beside the tent.

The man who talked with Cæsar was a bridge-builder and had come to speak with him regarding the building of a bridge that the legions might cross a river beside which they now lay encamped. A certain number of men would be needed with boats and others were at daylight to go hew great timbers in a near-by forest and roll them into the stream.

How very quiet and peaceful it was where I lay! Cæsar’s tent was pitched on a hillside. In person he was like ... there was an Italian fruit dealer who had a small store on a street near the park where I went every day to sit, a tall gaunt man who had lost one eye and whose black hair was turning gray. The fruit dealer had evidently lost his eye in a fight as there was a long scar on his cheek. It was this man I had metamorphosed into a Cæsar.

Below, at the foot of the hill on which the tent stood and on the banks of a river the legions were camped. They had built fires and some of the men were bathing in the river but when they came out they dressed quickly because of little biting flies that swarmed about their heads. I was glad Cæsar’s tent was pitched on a hill where there was a little breeze and there were no biting flies or insects. Below, the fires in the valley glowed and cast yellow and red lights over the tawny bodies and faces of the soldiers.

The man who had come to Cæsar was a craftsman and had a maimed hand. Two of the fingers of his left hand had been cut sharply off as by a blow with an ax. He went away into the darkness and Cæsar went within his tent.

I lay on my bed in the room in the building in Chicago not daring to open my eyes. Had I been asleep? Now there was no quarreling in the other places along the court but there were still lights at some of the windows. The workers had not yet all come home. Two women were talking together across the space between their windows. Street-car conductors and motormen, who had been all day working their cars slowly through crowded streets, propitiating quarrelsome passengers, cursing and being cursed at by teamsters and crossing policemen, were now asleep. Of what were they dreaming? They had come from the car barns, had read a newspaper, telling perhaps of a fight between English troops and the natives of Thibet, had read also a speech by the German emperor demanding a place in the sun for Germany, had noted who had beaten the Chicago White Sox or who had been beaten by them. Then they had quarreled with their wives, blows had been struck, there had been love-making and then sleep.

I arose and went to walk in the silent streets and twice during that summer I was stopped by holdup men who took a few dollars from me. The World’s Fair had been followed by a time of industrial depression. How many miles I have walked in the streets of American cities at night! In Chicago and the other industrial cities long streets of houses--how many houses almost universally ugly and cheaply constructed, like the building in which I then lived! I passed through sections where all the people were Negroes and heard laughter in the houses. Then came the sections entirely inhabited by Jews, by Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Germans, or Poles. How many elements not yet combined in the cities! The American writers, whose books I read, went on assuming that the typical American was a transplanted Englishman, an Englishman who had served his term in the stony purgatory of New England and had then escaped out into the happy land, this Heaven, the Middle West. Here they were all to grow rich and live forever, a happy blissful existence. Was not all the world supposed to be watching the great democratic experiment in government and human happiness they were to conduct so bravely?

I wandered on into factory districts, long silent streets of grim black walls. Had men but escaped out of the prisons of the Old World into the more horrid prisons of the New? Dread took hold of me as on a dark street I was approached by a man who put a gun to my face. He wanted money and I tried to be facetious with him, telling him I hadn’t enough money to buy drinks for the two of us but would match him pennies for what I had but he only growled at me and taking my few pieces of silver hurried away. Perhaps he did not even understand my words. America, once a place that prided itself on its sense of humor, was now, since the coming of the factories, a place where the very robbers were all too serious about life.

Periods of lust kept coming and going. In the building where I lived there was a woman, very young yet, a high-school graduate from an Illinois town who had married a young man of the place. They had come to live in Chicago, to make their way in the great world, and as he could get no other work he had taken a place as street-car conductor. Oh, it was but a temporary arrangement. He was one who intended, as for that matter I did myself, to rise in the world.

The man I never saw but all afternoon the woman sat by a window in one of the two rooms of her apartment or went for short walks in the park. We began presently to smile shyly at each other but did not speak, both being embarrassed. Like myself she read books and that was a kind of bond between us. I got into the habit of sitting by my window with my book in my hand while she sat by her window also holding a book.

And here was a new confusion. The pages of the books no longer lived. The woman, sitting there, but a few feet away from me, across the little court, I did not want. Of that I was quite sure. She was another man’s wife. What thoughts had she in her head, what feelings had she? Her face was round and fair and she had blue eyes. What did she want? Children perhaps, I thought. She wanted to have a house like all the other houses lived in by the people of her home town who had made money and who held positions of some importance in the town’s life. One day she sat on a bench in the park and I, walking past, saw the title of the book she read. It was a popular novel of the day but I have forgotten its name and the name of its author. Even at that time, although I knew little enough, I did know that such books had always been written, would always be written, books that sold by the hundreds of thousands and were often proclaimed as great works of art and that after a year or two were utterly forgotten. In them was no sense of strangeness, no wonder about life. They lacked the touch of life. “Dead books for men and women who dare not live,” I thought contemptuously. There was a kind of pretense of solving some problem of life but the problem was so childishly stated that later a childish solution seemed quite natural and right. A young man came to an American city from a country town and, although at bottom he was true and fine, the city for a time diverted him from his noble aims. He committed some near crime that made both himself and the girl he really loved suffer terribly, but she stood firmly by him and at the last, and with her help, he pulled himself up again, by the bootstraps as it were, and became a rich manufacturer who was kind to his employees.

The book she read expressed perhaps the high-school girl’s dream, the dream she had when she married and came to Chicago. Was her dream the same now? I had already, as far as I reacted to the life about me at all, started upon another road, was becoming, a little, the eternal questioner of myself and others. Not for me the standardized little pellets of opinion, the little neatly wrapped packages of sentiment the magazine writers had learned to do up, I told myself. In modern factories food was packed in convenient standard-sized packages and I half suspected that behind the high-sounding labels the food was often enough sawdust or something of the sort. It was apparent publishers also had learned to do up neat packages containing sawdust and put bright-colored labels on them.

Oh, glorious contempt! Seeing the book the woman was reading, knowing she was the wife of another and that never by any chance could we come close to each other, give to each other anything of value, I enjoyed my contempt for an hour and then it faded. I sat as before by my window and held an open book but could not follow the thoughts and ideas of the writer of the book. I sat by my window and she with her book sat by her window.

Was something about to happen that neither of us wanted, of which we were both afraid, that would be without value to either of us?

One evening when I met her in the hallway of the building I stopped before her and we stood thus for a minute facing each other. We both blushed, both felt guilty, and then I tried to say something to her but did not succeed. I stammered out a few words about the weather, saying how hot it was, and hurried away but a week later, when we again met in the same place it was dark and we kissed.

We began then to walk in silence together in the park in the early evenings and sometimes we sat together on a park bench. How careful we were not to be seen by others who lived in our building. Her husband left the house at three in the afternoon and did not return until midnight and when he came home he was tired and discouraged. He scolded at his wife. “He is always scolding,” she said. Well, one wanted to save money, get into business for oneself. And now he had a wife to support and the wages of street-car conductors were not large. The young man who wanted to rise in the world had begun to resent his wife and she felt it vaguely, uneasily. She also was filled with resentment. Did she want revenge? She had no words to express what she felt and I had no way of understanding. Was I not also confused, wanting something very much, that at the same time I did not want? I sat in my room until darkness came holding the book I now could not read and when the darkness had come threw it with a loud bang on a table. The sound had become a signal to her and when I went into the park she came to join me. One evening when we had kissed in the darkness of the park I went home ahead of her but did not close the door of my room. I stood in the darkness by the door waiting. She had to pass along the hallway to reach her own place and I put out my hand and drew her inside.

“I’m afraid,” she kept saying, “I don’t want to. I’m afraid.” What a queer silent frightened love-making it was--no love-making at all. She was afraid and I was afraid, not of her husband but of myself. Later she went away crying silently along the hallway and after that she and I did not sit at our two windows or walk in the park and I returned to my books. Once, on a night two or three weeks later as I lay in my own bedroom, I heard the husband and wife talking together. Something had happened that had pleased and excited her. She had been able to offer something she thought would help her husband and was urging him to give up being a street-car conductor and to go back to the town from which they had come. Her father owned a store there, I gathered, and had objected to her marriage but she had secretly written, perhaps been very humble, and had persuaded her father to take the younger man into partnership in his business. “Don’t be proud now, Jim. I’m not proud any more. Something has happened to me Jim. I’m not proud any more,” I heard her saying as I lay in my own room in the darkness, and I leave the reader to judge whether, under the circumstances, I could be proud. But perhaps after all the woman and I have done something for each other, I thought.

NOTE IX

ON a certain Sunday morning of that summer I found myself sitting in a little garden under apple trees back of a red brick house that had green window blinds and that stood on the side of a hill near the edge of an Illinois town of some five or six thousand people. Sitting by a small table near me was a dark slender man with pale cheeks, a man I had never seen until late on the evening before and who I had half thought would die but a few hours earlier. Now, although the morning was warm, he had a blanket wrapped around him and his thin hands, lying on the table, trembled. Together we were drinking our morning coffee, containing a touch of brandy. A robin hopped on the grass near by and the sunlight falling through the branches of the trees made yellow patches at our feet.

I sat in silence filled with wonder at the strangeness of the circumstances that had brought me to the spot and of my own mood. The garden in which we sat had a gravel path running down through the centre and on one side vegetables grew, with narrow beds of flowers about the vegetable plots. Along the further side against a fence were tall berry bushes and on our side there was grass under the trees and near by a tall hedge of elders. Looking toward the foot of the garden one got a view of a river valley dotted with farmhouses and beyond the elders there was a road that led along a hillside down into town.

The town itself was old, for that Illinois country, and had already had two lives. First, it had been a river town on the banks of a stream that led down into the Mississippi, and now it was a merchandising centre. Later perhaps it would become a factory town. The river life had died, when the railroads came but there still were some remnants of the older place, one or two streets of small log stores and houses standing on a bluff above the river and now used as residences by farm laborers. The old town, left thus off by itself half forgotten by the new town, was picturesque. In the company of my strange new acquaintance and once with his father, an old man who had lived in the river town in the days of its prosperity, I later spent several hours among the old houses. Dogs and pigs wandered through the deep dust of the principal street facing the river or slept in the shade of the old buildings and the old man told me that even in its better days it was a quite terrible place. In the winter, in the early days, the roads were hub deep to the wagons with mud, the houses were small and near each house was an outhouse that smelled horribly in summer and invited millions of flies. Pigs, cows and horses were kept in little sheds near the houses and often diseases, encouraged by the utter lack of sanitation, swept through the town and sometimes carried off whole families.

The older of the two men, named Jim Berners, was a merchant, owning with his son a large store on the principal street of the newer town and had been brought to the Illinois town when he was a child. His father, an Englishman, had come to America as a young man and for several years had been a merchant in the city of Philadelphia. Having married there and wanting to establish himself as the head of a landed family in the new country he had come to Illinois when land could be had at a low price and had bought five hundred acres of river bottom land.

With his young wife and his three children he lived in the river town and had cleared and got ready for planting most of his land when misfortune came down upon him. In the crude little towns of that day doctors were for the most part half educated, the houses were stuffy and full of drafts in winter and epidemics of smallpox, followed by scarlet fever, diphtheria and typhus came and could not be checked. Within two years the merchant’s rather delicate wife died and her death was followed by his own and by the death of two of his three children. There was only the babe left alive and he had been put in charge of an old judge with whom the father had formed a friendship.

The young Berners had grown into manhood in the household of the judge, whose great boast it was that he was a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. He told me he had never been ill a day in his life. Upon reaching manhood he sold three hundred acres of his land and like his father became a merchant.

Father and son still owned the Berners merchandising establishment although they seemed to give it little attention.

What a place it was! Some ten years before I made his acquaintance the younger Berners, named Alonzo, had gone to Chicago where he had got quite hopelessly drunk. During his whole life the man had been a sufferer from some obscure nervous disease and was never without pain. The sprees he sometimes went on were but a kind of desperate attempt to free himself for a short time from the presence of pain. After the drunken time he was dreadfully ill and seemed about to die and then there came a time of weakness and a kind of physical peace. The tense nerves of his slender body relaxed, he slept at night and spent the days talking with a few friends, reading books or riding about town in a buggy.

On the sprees, of ten years before, sprees indulged in twice a year at regular intervals outside his own town, when he had stolen away without warning to his father or to an older sister of the household, young Alonzo had been picked up in the city of Chicago by an English deep-sea sailor. The sailor had been working for a time on a lake steamer but had tired of the place and had left his ship at Chicago and had also gone on a drunk. He rescued Alonzo Berners from the men into whose hands he had fallen and brought him home and later became attached to the Berners establishment, staying in the Illinois town at first as clerk in the store and later as the store’s manager. He was a heavily built man of fifty-five when I saw him and had a white scar, evidently from an old knife wound, on his brown cheek and a peculiar waddling gait. As he hustled about the store one thought of a fat duck trying to make its way rapidly along on land.

In the Berners establishment were sold hardware, agricultural implements, house and barn paints, jack-knives and a thousand other things and there was also a harness shop in the main building facing the town’s principal street. Back of the main building there was an alleyway and across the alleyway half a dozen large frame buildings in which were kept hides bought from the farmers, coal, lumber, bins of corn, wheat and oats in bags and hay in bales.

The whole establishment, an infinitely busy place, was run by the sailor who could neither read or write but who was helped by a stern-looking woman bookkeeper. The sailor was shrewd wise and jolly and had always some tale of life on the deep sea to tell to his farmer customers. He was the most popular man in town and there was another feature that added tremendously to the popularity of the store. In the spring, just before planting time, and in the fall after the crops were harvested, the Berners gave a great feast in one of the sheds. The hay corn and lumber were taken out and long wooden tables erected, while invitations were sent far and wide to the town and country people. Women of the town and country wives came to help prepare the feast, the old sailor waddled about shouting, pigs, turkeys, calves and lambs were killed, bushels of potatoes baked, pies and cakes, baked in advance by the women, were brought and there was a feast lasting sometimes all afternoon and far into the night. Alonzo Berners had provided many barrels of beer and the sailor and his pals among the farmers got half drunk and sang songs and made speeches while the professional men of the town, the lawyers, judges and doctors, all came and made speeches. What a storm of talk! Even the preachers and the rival merchants were there and a prayer was said as each new group sat down to the feast, the ministers shaking their heads over the beer drinking but falling to with a will at the food. The two annual affairs must often have cost the Berners a good part of the profits made during the year but they did not mind. “It doesn’t matter,” said the elder Berners. “I’m old and nearly ready to die, it isn’t likely Alonzo will live very long and as for Hallie,” meaning the daughter, “I have already given her one of my two farms. The Berners are going to peter out anyway and why should they care about leaving money behind them?”

The elder Berners, a man of seventy, rarely went into town but spent most of his days in his little garden and during my own visit at the house he came every day to sit with me, smoking his pipe and talking until he fell asleep in his chair. When he had been a younger man and before his wife died he had owned several trotting horses of which he loved to talk. One of the horses, named “Peter Point,” had been the pride and joy of his life and he spoke of the horse as of a beloved son.

Oh, what a great magnificent beast the stallion Peter Point had been and how he could trot! Sometimes when he spoke of him the old man jumped to his feet and climbing on the chair seat touched the limb of an apple tree with his fingers. “Looket here now. He was taller than that. Yes, siree! He was taller than that when he threw up his head,” he declared, jumping down from the chair and hopping about like an excited boy and walking up and down before me rubbing his hands together. He told me a long tale of a trip he had once taken with his stallion and two trotting mares as far east as Pennsylvania and of how Peter Point won every race in which he started, always the trotting free-for-all, and spoke fervently of the moment when he came out with the others and paraded before the grandstand before the first heat of a race. Jim Berners, then young and strong, sat in the sulky and what a moment it was for him. The memory of it filled him with excitement. “My father used to talk of the English aristocracy to his friend the judge, with whom I was left when all my family died, and the judge told me tales of what he had to say. Sometimes on days like that, when we came out for the first heat and were scoring down for the start or going slowly back for another try after a false start, I used to think of his words. There was me, sitting in the sulky, and there was the man, old Charlie Whaley, who took care of Peter Point, standing over near the grandstand with a blanket over his shoulder. Charlie winked and nodded at me and I winked at him. How swelled up with pride I was. I usually had two or three hundred dollars bet on Peter’s chances and he never once went back on me. I thought we were pretty aristocratic ourselves, Peter and me.”

“Well, and so there we were jogging slowly up to the starting place and the people in the grandstand were shouting and down in the betting ring there was a hubbub and I used to look at the people and think about them and about myself and the horse too. ‘Lordy,’ I used to say to myself, ‘what a lot we do think of ourselves and what God-awful things we are, we humans, come right down to it.’ I was raised in the old Judge Willard’s house, right here in this town, you know, and in the old days a lot of what we called our big men used to come to talk their affairs over with the judge. Abe Lincoln used to come and once the editor of the _Chicago Tribune_ and young Logan who afterward got to be governor, and a lot of others, congressmen, and other such truck. They came and planned and schemed and then they used to make speeches up in front of the town hall that was down by the river in the old town but that later burned to the ground. They talked and talked, and I used to listen.

“And such talk! ‘All men are created free and equal,’ ‘Nature’s noblemen,’ ‘Noble pioneers’ and all that kind of stuff about men just like me. Lordy, what a lot of big sounding words I had listened to when I was a kid. It used to make me sick to think of it sometimes later, when I was sitting up there behind Peter and to think that I had sometimes believed such bunk myself, I who had seen and known a lot of them same pioneers pretty intimately and should have known better than to listen.

“As I say, I used to think about it and a lot of other foolishness I’d heard, when I was up behind Peter, and he with his head up so high and looking--say, he could walk past one of them grandstands and past all of them people like God Almighty himself might have walked! What I mean is, not giving the people or the other horses in the race or the other drivers or the judges up in the stand or me or anyone anything but his darned contempt. It was lovely to see. Sometimes when he’d see a mare he’d throw up his head and snort and sometimes there was a little quiet noise he made just as though he was saying to us ‘You worms, you worms,’ to all of us, all of the people in the world including myself.

“Why, hell, no one ever knew how fast that Peter could trot. He got sick and died before he ever got to the grand circuit where horses of his own class usually raced,” the old man declared proudly. Jim Berners had taken his horses over into Ohio and with Peter had won a race at a place called Fostoria and then that night the horse was taken violently ill and lying down in his stall quietly died.

His owner had been in at the death and after the stallion was dead had walked about the dark race course the rest of the night and had decided to give up racing. “I took a turn about the track,” he said, “and stood a long time at the head of the stretch thinking of the times I had made the turn up there, with Peter leading all the other horses, and not half extending himself at that, and of how proud I had been so many times, sitting behind him and pretending to myself I was doing the job. I wasn’t doing a darned thing but sitting still and riding home in front. It was only after Peter died I ever told myself the truth.”

“I stood up at the head of the stretch, as I said, and the moon came out and Peter was dead now and I decided to go home. And I had some thoughts that night about most human beings, including myself, that I haven’t ever forgot. I thought a lot of us were swine and the rest a kind of half-baked lot, put us against a horse like Peter had been. ‘And so,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll quit racing and go home and try to keep my mouth shut a good deal of the time.’ And I haven’t been too much stuck on myself or anyone else ever since.”

NOTE X

BERNERS, the merchant and horseman, had for a good many years been disappointed and hurt by the thought that his family was not to carry on after his death but in his old age had grown cheerful about the matter. “We aren’t so much. It doesn’t matter. I dare say the sun will come up mornings and the moon at night when there are no more Berners in Illinois, or anywhere else, for that matter.” As a child the boy Alonzo was always sickly. “We’ve always been thinking he’d die, about twice every year, but you see he hasn’t quite done it yet,” the old man said softly.

Hallie, the daughter of the house, was five years older than her brother and was devoted to him. After seeing them together one understood that she could never have married. It was just a thing that couldn’t have happened. One thought of her as saying to herself: “Marriage is too intimate. I am not made for intimate relations.” The idea of Hallie Berners held in a man’s arms was for some obscure reason monstrous and yet how affectionate she was! There was a sense in which her brother and father were babes in her charge, babes never touched by her hands or her lips but constantly caressed by her thoughts. She was a tall rather stern-looking woman with graying hair, large strong hands and quiet gray eyes and she was very shy. Her shyness expressed itself in severity and when she was much touched she grew silent and almost haughty in her bearing. It was as though she were saying to herself: “Look out now! If you are not careful you will let something precious escape you.”

The son Alonzo was a man of thirty-five with a little black mustache, thin features, small delicate hands and thick, black hair. As a young man he had gone away to an eastern college but a desperate illness had compelled him to come home almost at once and he had not again tried getting out from under his sister’s care, only leaving the family roof when he crept away for the brief periods of drunkenness that gave him a temporary means of escape out of his house of pain. He stayed at home and on fair days sometimes rode about town and the surrounding country behind an old black horse that belonged to the family or sat in the garden under the apple trees talking with friends who came to see him. In a large room in the house where he stayed on dull or cold days there were a couch, a fireplace and many books on shelves built into the walls.

How many people came up along the hillside road to sit and talk with Alonzo Berners! Were they sorry for him? At first I thought they were and then I saw they came to receive rather than to give. It was Alonzo who did the giving to all. What did he give? Among those I saw at the house was a local judge, son of that judge with whom his father had lived when he was a boy, a man named Marvin Manno, who lived in Chicago but who often came to the town and spent two or three days for the sake of talking with the invalid and who paid him a visit during my time there, two or three doctors who came, not in a professional way but for something unprofessional they wanted, a cripple of the town who made his living by taking people’s photographs, a man who bought and sold horses, and a tall silent boy who wore glasses and who had large protruding teeth so that he looked something like a horse when on rare occasions he smiled.

Life in the Berners household--in reality presided over by the sick man, in a queer way absolutely controlled by him--was a revelation to me. Like that Judge Turner I had known a few years before, and for that matter like myself too, the man had read a great many books and was still constantly reading--he spent more than half his time with a book in his hands and told me once that but for books he thought he should have gone mad from the gnawing pains that were always eating at him--but in the single fact that we were all readers the similarity between Judge Turner, Alonzo and myself ceased.

In this new man whose path I had unexpectedly crossed was a quiet kind of sanity unknown in any other I had seen. He was a giver. What did he give? The question amazed and startled me. He was loved by all who knew him and during the week I spent in his house, seeing him with other men and riding with him about town and out into the country, I was startled by the feeling of love and well-being that came into the eyes of people when he appeared among them. My own mind, always given to asking questions, unable to take anything for granted, raced like the stallion Peter Point carrying old Jim Berners to one of his victories. Was there a kind of power in pain to remake a man? My own conception of life was profoundly disturbed. The man before me had spent his entire life sitting in the dark house of pain. He sat there now looking out through the windows and into other houses that were alive and cheerful with health. Why had he health and sanity within himself while, almost without exception, the others including myself had not?

As I looked at him and at the men who came to visit him a kind of wonder grew within me. The man Marvin Manno, a slender man, rather elegantly clad and with gold-rimmed glasses on his large nose, was talking. He was connected, in an official capacity, with some large commercial establishment of the city, an establishment that sold goods to the Berners store, but he did not come to the town on business. Why had he come? He spoke continually of his own schemes and hopes and balanced oddly back and forth between devotion to the business interests he served and a kind of penchant he had for writing poetry. An odd effect was produced. The man was sincerely devoted to two interests in life that could not by any chance be combined and as one listened to his talk one became more and more puzzled. Only Alonzo Berners was not puzzled. He entered into the man’s thoughts, understood him, gave him what he apparently wanted, sympathetic understanding without sentimentality. We sat in the garden back of the Berners house, the man Manno talked, a doctor came and spoke of his patients, and in particular of an old woman lying in a cabin down by the river, who for two years had been on the point of death but who could not die. Then the judge spoke of his father and of political affairs in the state, the elder Berners boasted of the speed of the stallion Peter Point and the boy with the large teeth smiled shyly but remained silent.

Then when evening came and they had all gone away I looked at Alonzo Berners and wondered. In all the talk no mention was ever made of himself or his own affairs. Even the pain always present in his body had been forgotten by the others. Any mention of his suffering would have seemed out of place.

My own mind was groping about in a new medium for the expression of a life. I was very young then, had not yet come to the age of citizenship, but for a long time I had been building within myself my own consciousness of men. Well, they were a kind of thing, selfish and self-centred, and they were right in being so. One played the game, won if he could and tried not to be a bellyacher if he lost. In me was a kind of contempt for men including myself that Alonzo Berners did not have. Where had I got my contempt and how had he escaped getting it? Was he right and I wrong or was he a sentimentalist? My mind had run into a thicket of new ideas and I could not find my way out. “Tread softly,” I said to myself.

I sat aside, near the boy with the teeth, looking at my new acquaintance and trying to straighten all these things out in my mind. Hundreds of men, famous and infamous, I had met in the books I had read, went as in a procession across the field of my fancy. How many books I had read and how many stories of the lives of men, so-called great men and rascals, lovely women with gold and jewels in their hands, great killers of men, lawgivers, daring breakers of the law, devout men, starving in deserts for the glory of God; what men and women, what vast resounding names!

Was there something in the books I had missed? A vagrant thought came. Across the pages of some of the books there had wandered a different kind of man or woman. The writers of books had little to say about such people. There was little enough to be said. In the stories told of the great they appeared always as minor characters. The great strutted. The others walked softly. Clement VII had sent an ambassador to Charles of Spain. What the ambassador, one of the mysterious quiet fellows, said to Charles “Emperor of the Romans and Lord of the whole world” (_Romanorum Imperator semper augustus, mundi totius Dominus, universus dominis, Universis Principibus et Populis semper verendus_) one did not know, but a peculiar thing happened. The ambassador served faithfully both Charles and the Pope, endeared himself to the two mortal enemies. They were both happier with him about. A thousand conflicting interests swirled about him but he kept himself quite clear. Could it have been that such a one loved men, as men, and that men loved him? There was so little for the writers of books to say of such fellows. They had not sought exalted office and seemed content to play the minor rôle in life. What were they up to? Was there a power greater than obvious power, a power not having in it the disease of obvious power?

I looked about me and wondered. Before me, sitting among men in an Illinois village, was a pale man with delicate hands who, two or three times a year, became hopelessly drunk and who then had to be brought back helpless to his home, as I had brought him a few days before. Men gathered about and talked of their own affairs and he sat for the most part in silence, saying only now and then a few words, always in their interests. His mind seemed always to follow the minds of the others. Did he have no life of his own?

I began to resent the man but as I sat with him the cynicism of Judge Turner I had so much admired lost some of its force in me and the elder Berners, condemning men as less worthy of life than race horses became a half-amusing figure. I was mystified and amazed. Did most men and women remain children and was Alonzo Berners grown up? Was it grown up to come to the realization that oneself did not matter, that nothing mattered but a kind of consciousness of the wonder of life outside oneself?

I sat under the apple trees smiling to myself and wondering why I smiled. Was there possible such a thing as goodness in men, a goodness that was not stuffy and hateful? Like most young men I had a contempt of goodness. Had I been making a mistake? The man before me now did not, like Judge Turner, say wise and witty things that remained fixed in the mind and that could afterward be passed off in conversations as one’s own. Later in New York and in other American cities I was to see a good many men of a sort not unlike Judge Turner but few like Alonzo Berners. The smart fellows of the American Intelligentsia sat about in restaurants in New York and wrote articles for the political and semi-literary weeklies. A smart saying they had heard at dinner or at lunch the day before was passed off as their own in the next article they wrote. The usual plan was to write of politics or politicians or to slaughter some second-rate artist--in short, to pick out easy game and kill it with their straw shafts and they gained great reputations by pointing out the asininity of men everyone already knew for asses. For a great many years I was filled with admiration of such fellows and vaguely dreamed of becoming such another myself. I wanted then, as a young man, I think, to sit with Alonzo Berners and his friends and suddenly say something to upset them all. Alonzo’s life of physical suffering was forgotten by me as by the others but unlike them there was in me a kind of unpleasant dislike of him, a dislike he saw and understood but let pass as being boyish vanity. The smart-seeming things I thought of to say sounded flat enough when I said them over to myself and I remained silent. Occasionally Alonzo turned to me and smiled. I had done him a kindness, had risked something for him, and I was his guest. Perhaps he thought me not mature enough to understand him and his kind of men. Would I ever become mature?

NOTE XI

DID I in reality also love the man?

I had found him, on a Saturday evening, very drunk in a saloon in Chicago. It was about nine o’clock and some time after I had fled from Nora. I was nearly broke and thought I had better be thinking of doing something that would bring me in a little money. What should I do? The devil! It was apparent I would soon have to go to work again with my hands. After some weeks of idleness my hands had become soft and velvety to the touch and I liked them so. Now they were hands to hold a pen or a paint brush. Why was I not a writer or a painter? Well, I fancied one had to be a fellow of the schools before one dared approach the arts. Often I went about cursing the fate that had not permitted me to be born in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth with its all-pervading smell of burning coal, oil and gasoline, and with its noises and dirt. Mark Twain might declare the twentieth the most glorious of all the centuries but it did not seem so to me. I thought often of the fifteenth century in Italy when the great Borgia was just coming into power, was at that time full of the subject. What glorious children! Why could not I be a glorious child? Aha! the Lord Rodrigo de Lancol y Borgia, Cardinal-Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina, Dean of the Sacred College, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, etc., had just been made Pope. Did I not myself have an Italian grandmother? What a place and a time that might have been for me! It was the day of the coronation of the new Pope and all Rome was excited. On the day before four mules, laden with silver, had gone from Cardinal Rodrigo’s house to the house of Cardinal Sforza-Visconti. It was the gentle privilege of the Romans in those fine days to pillage the house of a cardinal when he had been made pope. Was it not said, in the sacred laws, that the vicar of Christ should give his substance to the poor? Fearing he might not do it the poor went and took. Armed bands of desperate fellows, with feathers in their hats, roamed the streets of the old city at such times and a turn of the wheel of fortune might at any moment make any one of them rich and powerful, a patron of the arts, a rich and powerful grandee of Church or State. How I longed to be a richly gowned, soft-handed cunning but scholarly grandee and patron of the arts!

How much better times those than my own for such haphazard fellows as myself, I thought, and cursed the twentieth century and the fate that had thrown me into it. At that time in Chicago I knew a young Jew named Ben Hecht, not yet a well-known writer, and sometimes he and I went forth to do our cursing together. Outwardly he was a more adept curser than myself but inwardly I felt I could outdo him and often we had walked together, he cursing aloud our common fate and declaring dramatically that life was for us an empty cup, a vessel turned upside down, a golden goblet with cracks in the bowl, the largest crack being the fact that we both unfortunately had our livings to make, and I striving to cap his every curse with a more violent one. We went together into a street and stood under the moon. Before us were many huge ugly warehouses. “I hope they burn,” I said feebly, but he only laughed at the weakness of my fancy. “I hope the builders die slowly of a painful inflammation of the membranes of the bowels,” he said, while I envied.

I had been walking alone on the streets of Chicago on that Saturday evening when I found the younger Berners and had crossed the river to the west side. I was gloomy and distraught and on a side street, off West Madison Street and near the Chicago River, went into a small, dark saloon. Several men sat at a small table at the back, among whom was Alonzo Berners and there was a red-faced bartender leaning over the bar and watching the group at the table. To all these I at the moment paid no attention.

I was absorbed in the contemplation of my own difficult position in life and was thinking only of myself. Sitting at a table I called for a glass of brandy and when it was paid for realized that I had but two dollars left in my pocket. I took the two dollars in my hand and looked at them and putting them away continued looking at my empty hands. They had, at the moment, as I have said, grown soft and velvety and I wanted them to remain so. Wild dreams floated through my mind. Why had I not more physical courage? It was all very well to talk with Ben Hecht of the many advantages to be gained by being an Italian desperado of the fifteenth century, but why had I not the courage to be a desperado of the twentieth? Surely Rome or Naples or Florence, in the days of their glory, never offered any better pickings than the Chicago of my own day. In the older day a man slipped a slender knife delicately between his victim’s neck and spine and made off with a few ducats at the risk of his life but in Chicago men habitually got thousands of dollars by robbery apparently without any risk at all. I looked at my own hands and wondered. Could they hold a pistol steadily to the head of a timid bank clerk or a mail-wagon driver? I decided they could not and was ashamed of myself. Then I decided they might some day be induced to hold a pen or a painter’s brush but reflected that the great patrons of the arts were all long since dead and that my own brother, a painter, had been compelled to make magazine covers for commercial “gents” in order to get the slender amount necessary to educate himself in his craft. “Huh!” I said to myself, not wanting I’m afraid, to work for any commercial “gent” at all. Drinking my brandy I looked about the room into which I had wandered.

It was a desperately dark little hole, lighted by two gaslights and with two beer-stained tables in the semi-darkness at the rear. I looked at the bartender, who had a large flat nose and bloodshot eyes and decided it was just as well I had but two dollars. “I may be robbed before I leave this hole,” I told myself and ordered another glass of brandy, thinking I might as well drink up the little money I had rather than have it taken from me.

And now the men at the other table in the room caught and held my attention. With the exception of Alonzo Berners, whom the others had picked up on the street, they were a hard-looking lot. One did not think of them as desperate fellows. They were of the sort one saw hanging about the places of Hinky Dink, Bathhouse John or of Conners, the gray wolf, men famous in Chicago at that time, sullen fellows without money, by no means desperate but hangers-on of the desperate, fellows who robbed full of fright at their own temerity but the more dangerous sometimes because of their fears.

I looked at them and at the man who had fallen into their clutches and who was now spending his money upon them and at the same moment they seemed to have become aware of my presence. Sullen eyes looked at me sullenly. I was not of their world. Was I a fly cop? Their eyes threatened. “If you are a fly cop or are in any way connected with the man we have so fortunately picked up, a man quite apparently helplessly drunk and having money, you had better be minding your business. As a matter of fact it would be well for you to get out of here.”

I returned the stare directed at me and hesitated a moment. The sick drunken man sitting among the others had a large roll of bills held in his left hand that hung at his side, and his right elbow was on the table.

What a look of suffering in his face! From time to time the others ordered drinks brought from the bar and the sick man took a bill from the roll and threw it on the table. When the change was brought by the bartender one of his companions put it in his pocket. They were taking turns, it was apparent, in robbing the man and as I looked an idea came to me. Was it true that the bartender, a more out-and-out fellow than the others, was disgusted at this slow and comparatively painless method of committing robbery? Did I see in his eyes a kind of sympathy for the man being robbed?

It was a ticklish moment for me. Having been thinking so grandiloquently of Cæsar Borgia, Lorenzo the Magnificent and other grand and courageous personages of my world of books, having just been gazing at my own hands and wondering why they would not or could not do some act of personal courage that would make me think better of myself, having these thoughts, I of a sudden wanted to rescue the man with the roll of bills but I did not want to make a fool of myself. I have always wanted not to be a fool and have been a fool so often!

I had decided to perform a certain act and at the same time began laughing at myself, not thinking I would be foolish enough to attempt it. One of these conflicts between myself, as I live in my fancy, and myself as I exist in fact, that have been going on in me since I was a child had now started. It is the sort of thing that makes autobiography, even of the half-playful sort I am now attempting, so difficult to manage. One wants to treat oneself as a person of more dignity and worth than one has the courage to attempt. Among advertising men with whom I later associated we managed things better. We took turns doing what we called “staging” each other. I was to speak highly of Smith who in turn did the same of me. The trick is not unknown to literary men, but it is difficult to manage in autobiography. The self of the fancy persists in laughing at the self of fact and does it sometimes at unfortunate moments. Also the fancy is a great liar. How often later, when I became a man of business, I did in fancy some shrewd or notable act that was never done in fact at all, but that seemed so real that it was difficult not to believe in it as a fact. I had been talking with a certain man and later thought of a number of brilliant things I might have said. Then I met a friend and told him of the conversation, putting the brilliant things in. The story several times repeated became a part of the history of my life and nothing would have later so amazed me as to have been compelled to face the facts of the conversation and the figure I had cut in it.

Was the thing I now thought myself about to do in the saloon a fact or was it but another of the fanciful acts, created in my own imagination, I might and no doubt would later relate as a fact? Would it not be better not to attempt to rescue the man in the room and later just to say I had and in the end make myself believe I had?

There was little doubt I could do the thing more gaudily in fancy. The place in which I sat was in a part of the city little frequented at night. Near it were only vacant lots and rows of dark and now empty factory buildings. It was unlikely there were any policemen in the neighborhood and in case of need and if a policeman did appear what sort of fellow was he likely to be--a fellow really appointed to the district to knock aside such interfering fools as myself? As for the men seated at the table, if they were cowards it was unlikely the bartender was one.

I kept smiling to myself, at my own thoughts, at my trick of always threshing my acts out in advance and in the end doing nothing except to create later the fiction of an act performed. “My book reading and my conversations with such fellows as Judge Turner are making a bigger fool of me than I need be,” I told myself, still looking at the empty hands lying on the table before me. What really empty things they were, those same hands of mine. They had never grasped anything, never fulfilled any purpose for me. So many fingers, so many pads of flesh in the palms, so many little muscles to grasp things, to lay hold of some situation, to drive a knife into an enemy, to lift a friend, to make love to a woman, hands to become servants of the brain and to make their owner something other than a meaningless thing of words and fancies drifting through life with millions of other meaningless men. I really thought at that time I had a brain. It is an illusion that I believe almost everyone has.

In disgust of myself my eyes stopped looking at my empty hands and looked instead about the room. What seemed to me a stream of deliciously romantic notions now came. There was no doubt the man sitting with the crew from the city’s underworld was very ill. One might have said he was about to die. A chalky pallor had spread over his face and except for his eyes everything about his face and figure expressed utter weariness. It was so people looked when they were about to die, when they were through with life, done for, glad to throw life aside.

The face and figure of the man were like that but the eyes were not. They were alive and only seemed curious and puzzled. As they looked at me from out the pale face I had the curious illusion of a voice speaking, speaking as though out of a coffin or a cavern.

Now the man’s eyes were looking from my eyes to the eyes of the bartender. Was there something commanding in them? Had the sick man, in his helpless position, the power to command the two men in the room who might conceivably be of use to him? The man had been drunk for several days, and now he was not drinking but the poison from the vile stuff he had taken had permeated his system. The same eyes had looked at the men among whom he sat and his brain had come to a decision concerning them. Men’s eyes could be impersonal sometimes. The other men at the table were of no value, had been thrown aside as useless. One fancied a thin sick body going on for days, eyes not looking about, eyes alive in a corner of the head of a man waiting for a moment of sanity.

And now they command. The sick man was not afraid, as in his place I would have been. There was no fear in the eyes that now looked at me so steadily. It might be the man did not mind the fact that he was about to be robbed and perhaps his body had known so much pain that the additional pain of a beating would not too much matter.

As for myself I was thinking beyond my own depths, thinking of certain things as possible in another that could never have been possible in myself. I was a coward trying to think the thoughts of a brave man. From the very moment when I first became aware of the actuality of the man Alonzo Berners I began doing something I had never done before, I began to live in another, suffer in another, love another perhaps.

If the man’s eyes were issuing a command what did he want? I grew resentful. What right had he to command me? Did he think me a fool? Unconsciously I had begun to resist a command. “I won’t. You got yourself into this pickle, now get yourself out.”

What a plague to have an imagination! It seemed to me a kind of wordless conversation, something after the following manner, now began between myself, the bartender and the man at the table.

From the bloodshot eyes of the bartender leaning over his bar words were now coming. I leaned forward to listen.

“Ah! Bah! I do not like this affair. You have fallen into the hands of these cheap thugs and from the looks of you I should say you are a rather decent sort. To me, situated as I am in life, that would not make any difference if the men robbing you were fellows I could respect. If any one of a dozen men I know chose to hit you over the head and throw your body into the river I would not lift a hand to prevent it. As the matter stands I think I will. I do not fancy these dogs you are with eating so fat a calf. As for myself you are not fair game. Poor chap, you are sick. I cannot leave my job here but the fellow over there at the table will take you away. Speak to him. He will do as you wish.”

What a chattering of unheard voices my imagination had created in the room!

Words from the living eyes of the sick man.

“It does not matter about being robbed. If these men beat or kill me it does not matter. The point is I am tired now.” The eyes smiled.

And now the man at the table was looking directly at me and his words, created, you understand in my fancy, were directed at me. “Well, come on lad. Lift me up in your arms and carry me home. It is only because you are young and inexperienced you are afraid.”

NOTE XII

“AFRAID?” It was only because I was so thoroughly afraid I now arose from my seat and went toward the sick man. As for the imagined voices I did not believe in them. Did I not know the tricks of my own fancy and did the man think I was going to be fool enough to risk my hide for a stranger? It is true, had I been a man of physical courage, I might, without too great risk, have gone over to the table and snatched the roll of bills out of the sick man’s hands. When it came right down to it I could at the moment use such a roll of bills very handily. Had I been a man of courage I might have gone blustering and swaggering to the table and bluffed everyone in the place but being, as I knew I was, a coward did the man sitting there think I was going to risk my hide for him?

I moved slowly toward the table, all the time laughing at myself and telling myself I was not going to do what I was at the same time obviously doing and the bartender coming from behind the bar with a hammer in his hand fell in behind me. I could see the hammer from a corner of my eye. Well, he was going to hit me with it. In a moment more my head would be crushed and, as would be quite plain to any man of sense, I would only be getting what I deserved. What a confounded fool! I was terribly frightened and at the same time there was a smile on my lips. My appearance at the moment must have been disconcerting to the men at the table.

They were apparently as great fools as myself. As I approached, the sick man, perhaps to free himself from the others, threw the roll of bills carelessly on the table and one of his companions put a large hairy hand over it. Was he also afraid? All of the men were looking intently at me and at the bartender behind me. Were they but waiting to see my head crushed? One of them got rather hesitatingly to his feet and doubling his fist raised it as though to strike me in the face--I had now got within a foot of the sick man--but the blow did not descend.

Reaching down I put my arms about the sick man’s shoulder and half raised him to his feet, the foolish smile still on my face but as I saw he could not stand I prepared to take him in my arms. That would make me quite helpless but I was helpless enough as it was. What did it matter? “If I am going to be slugged I might as well be slugged doing something,” I thought.

I lifted the man as gently as I could, placing the slender body over my shoulder and waiting for the blows that were to descend upon me but at that very moment the hand of the bartender reached over and snatching the roll of bills from under the hand on the table put it in my pocket.

All was done in silence and in silence, with Alonzo Berners slung over my shoulder, I walked to the door and to West Madison Street where there were lights and people passing up and down. At the corner I put him down and looking back saw the bartender standing at the door of his establishment watching. Was he laughing? I fancied he was. And one might also fancy he was keeping the others bluffed in the room until I had got safely away. I stood at the corner beside the sick man, who leaned helplessly against my legs, and waited for a cab that would take me to a railroad station. Already I had taken letters from his pocket and knew where he lived. He seemed unable to speak. “He will probably die on the way and then I’ll be in a hell of a mess,” I kept saying to myself after I had got with him into the day coach of a train.

NOTE XIII

MY adventure with Alonzo Berners came to an end after I had been at his house for a week and during the week nothing I can set down as notable happened at all and later I was told he was dead, that he had again got drunk in the city of Chicago and had fallen or had been knocked off a bridge into the Chicago River where he drowned. There was the house on the hillside and the garden. During my visit to the house the elder Berners worked in the garden or sat with me boasting of the horse Peter Point and found in me a sympathetic audience. I have always understood horses better than men. It’s easier.

I sat in the garden listening to the talk of the men who came to see Alonzo Berners, rode with him once in his buggy or went into town to walk by myself or to listen to some tale told by the sailor who managed the store. The sister, who on the night of my arrival had treated me coldly--no doubt strange characters had come to the Berners house on the same mission that had brought me and also no doubt she was in terrible fear when Alonzo was away on one of his helpless debauches--the sister later treated me with the silent kindliness characteristic of her.

Nothing happened at all during my visit and Alonzo Berners did not during the whole time say a notable thing that I could later remember and that I can now quote to explain my feeling for him.

Nothing happened but that I was puzzled as I had never been before. There was something in the very walls of the Berners house that excited and when I had gone to bed at night I did not sleep. Notions came. Odd exciting fancies kept me awake. As I have explained I was then young and had quite made up my mind about men and life. Men and women were divided into two classes containing a few shrewd wise people and many fools. I was trying very hard to place myself among the wise and shrewd ones. The Berners family I could not place in either of these classifications and in particular Alonzo Berners puzzled and disconcerted me.

Was there a force in life of which I knew nothing at all and was this force exemplified in the person of the man I had picked up in a Chicago saloon?

At night as I lay in my bed new ideas, new impulses, came flocking. There was a man in the house with me, a man fairly worshiped by others and for no reason I could understand but wanted to understand. His very living in the house had done something to it, to the very wall of the house, so that anyone coming into the place, sleeping between the walls, was affected. Could it be that the man Alonzo Berners simply loved the people about him and the places in which they lived and had that love become a force in itself affecting the very air people breathed? Sometimes in the afternoons when there was no one about I went through the rooms of the house looking curiously about. There was a chair here and a table there. On the table lay a book. Was there also in the house a kind of fragrance? Why did the sunlight fall with such a pronounced golden glory on the faded carpet on the floor of Alonzo Berners’ room?

Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and in others.

Was I afraid also of people who had the power of loving, of giving themselves? Was I afraid of the power of unasking love in myself and in others?

That I should be afraid of anything in the realm of the spirit, that there should perhaps be a force in the world I did not understand, could not understand, irritated me profoundly.

As the week advanced my irritation grew and I have never had any doubt at all that Alonzo Berners knew of it. He said nothing and when I went away he had nothing to say. I spent the days of that week in his presence, saw the men who came to visit him and whom I thought I understood well enough and then at night went to my bed and did not sleep. I was like one tortured by a desire for conversion to something like the love of God, by a desire to love and be loved and sometimes in the night I lay in my bed like a very lovelorn maiden and sometimes I grew angry and walked up and down in the moonlight in my room swearing and shaking my fist at the shadows that flitted across the walls in the moonlight.

It was two o’clock of the morning of one of the last nights I spent in the house and I let myself out at the kitchen door and went for a walk, going down along the hillside to the town and through the newer town to the older place by the river. The moon was shining and all was hushed and silent. What a quiet night! “I will give myself over to these new impulses,” I thought, and so went along thinking thoughts that had never before come into my head.

Could it be that force, all power was disease, that man on his way up from savagery and having discovered the mind and its uses had gone a little off his head in using his new toy? I had always been drawn toward horses dogs and other animals and among people had cared most for simple folk who made no pretense of having an intellect, workmen who in spite of the handicaps put in their way by modern life still loved the materials in which they worked, who loved the play of hands over materials, who followed instinctively a force outside themselves--they felt to be greater and more worthy than themselves--women who gave themselves to physical experiences with grave and fine abandon, all people in fact who lived for something outside themselves, for materials in which they worked, for people other than themselves, things over which they made no claim of ownership.

Was I, who thought of myself as a young man having no morality now face to face with a new morality? In the fifteenth century man had discovered man. Had man later been lost to man? Was Alonzo Berners simply one who loved his fellows and was he by that token stronger in his weakness, more notable in his obscure Illinois village life than all these great and powerful ones I had been following with my own mind across the pages of history?

There was no doubt I was in a magnificent mood and that I enjoyed it and when I got to the old town I went and stood by a small brick building that had once been a residence but was now a cowshed. In a near-by house a child cried and a man and a woman awoke from sleep and talked for a time in low hushed voices. Two dogs came and discovered me where I stood in the silence. As I remained unmoved they did not know what to make of their discovery. At first they barked and then they wagged their tails, and then, as I continued to ignore them, they went away looking offended. “You are not treating us fairly,” they seemed to be saying.

“And they are something like myself,” I thought, looking at the dusty road on which the soft moonlight was falling and smiling at nothingness.

I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming a ridiculous desire to abase myself before something not human and so stepping into the moonlit road I knelt in the dust. Having no God, the gods having been taken from me by the life about me, as a personal God has been taken from all modern men by a force within that man himself does not understand but that is called the intellect, I kept smiling at the figure I cut in my own eyes as I knelt in the road and as I had smiled at the figure I had cut in the Chicago saloon when I went with such an outward show of indifference to the rescue of Alonzo Berners.

There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myself that I had the power to believe in a God, and so I merely knelt in the dust in the silence and no words came to my lips.

Did I worship merely the dust under my knees? There was the coincidence as there is always the coincidence. The symbol flashed into my mind. A child cried again in a near-by house and I presume some traditional feeling come down from old tellers of tales took possession of me. My fancy played with the figure of myself in the ridiculous position into which I had got and I thought of the wise men of old times who were reputed to have come to worship at the feet of another crying babe in an obscure place. How grand! The wise men of an older time had followed a star to a cowshed. Was I becoming wise? Smiling at myself and with also a kind of contempt of myself and my own sentimentality I half decided I would try to devote myself to something, give my life a purpose. “Why not to another effort at the re-discovery of man by man?” I thought rather grandly, getting up and beating the dust off my knees, the while I continued the trick I had learned of pointing the laughing finger of scorn at myself. I laughed at myself but all the time kept thinking of the occasional flashes of laughter that came from the drawn lips of Alonzo Berners. Why was his laughter freer and more filled with joy than my own?

NOTE XIV

WAR, leisure and the South!

The leisure was not too much cut across by the hours spent in drills and manœuvres and the other duties of a soldier. Here was a life in which everything was physical, the mind on a vacation and the imagination having leisure to play while the body worked. One’s individuality became lost and one became part of something wholly physical, vast, strong, capable of being fine and heroic, capable of being brutal and cruel.

One’s body was a house in which had lived two, three, perhaps ten or twelve personalities. The fancy became the head of the house and swept the body away into some absurd adventure or the mind took charge and laid down laws. These then were in turn driven out of the house by physical desire, by the lustful self. Dumb nights of walking city streets, wanting women, wanting to touch with the hands lovely things.

“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it and I want the heart to scold. Dear dead women, with such hair, too.--What’s become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms?

All gone now, that kind of imaginings, for the time anyway. In the distance, beckoning, the women of the southern island, the dark Cuban women. Would they like us when we came, we American lads, in our brown clothes? Would they take us as lovers, we the land’s deliverers?

Long days of marching. We were in a forest of the South where once our fathers had fought a great battle. Everywhere camps among the trees and the ground worn hard as bricks by the constant tramping of feet. In the morning one awoke with five other men in a tent. There was morning roll call standing shoulder to shoulder. “Corporal Smith!” “Here!” “Corporal Anderson!” “Here!” Then breakfast out of flat tin dishes and the falling into line for hours of drill.

Out from under the trees into a wide field we went, the southern sun pouring down on us and presently the back tired, the legs tired. One sank into a half-dead state. This did not signify battles, killing other men. The men with whom one marched were comrades, feeling the same weariness, obeying the same commands, being molded with oneself into something apart from oneself. We were being hardened, whipped into shape. For what? Well, never mind. Take what is before you! You have come out from under the shadow of the factory, the sun shines. The tall boys marching with you were raised in the same town with yourself. Now they are all silent, marching, marching. Times of adventure ahead. You and they will see strange people, hear strange tongues spoken.

The Spaniards, eh! You know of them from books? Stout Cortez, silent upon his peak in Darien. Dark cruel eyes, dark swaggering men--in one’s fancy. In the fancy picture ships coming suddenly up out of the western seas, bearing gold, bearing dark, adventurous men.

Is one going to fight such men, with one’s comrades, some thousands of such men? Tall boys from an Ohio town, baseball players, clerks in stores, Eddie Sanger over there who got Nell Brinker into trouble and was made to marry her at the point of a shotgun; Tom Means, who was once sent to the state reform farm; Harry Bacon, who got religion when the evangelist came to preach in the Methodist Church but got over it afterward--are these men to become killers, to try to kill Spaniards, who will try to kill them?

Now, never mind! There is before you now but the marching for long hours with all these men. Here is something your mind has always been groping about trying to understand, the physical relation of man to man, of man to woman, of woman to woman. The mind is ugly when the flesh does not come in too. The flesh is ugly when the mind is put out of the house that is the body. Is the flesh ugly now? No, this is something special. This is something felt.

Suppose a man spend certain months, not thinking consciously, letting himself be swept along by other men, with other men, feeling the weariness of a thousand other men’s legs in his own legs, desiring with others, fearing with the others, being brave sometimes with the others. By such an experience can one gain knowledge of the others and of oneself too?

Comrades loved! Never mind now the thoughts of the hour of killing. One gets little enough. Take what is offered. And the killing may not come. Let the Roosevelts and others of that sort, the men of action, talk and think now of the hour of action, of the drawn sword, the pointed gun, victory, defeat, glory, bloody fields. You are not a general or a statesman. Take the thing before you, the physical marching fact of an army of which you are a part.

There is just the possibility that you are yourself a disease and that you may be cured here. This tremendous physical experience may cure you of the disease of yourself. Can one lose oneself utterly, become as nothing, become but a part of something, the state, the army? The army is something physical and actual while the state is nothing. The state exists but in men’s minds and imaginations and you have let your own imagination rule in your house too long. Let this young body of yours, so straight, so fair, so strong, let it have full possession of the house now. The imagination may play now over fields, over mountain tops if it please. “We are coming, Father Abraham, a hundred thousand strong!” You have forced your fancy to grovel in factory dust too long. Let it go now. You are nothing, so many little pounds of flesh and bone, a small unit in a vast thing that is marching, marching--the army. Blossoms on apple trees, sap in the branches of trees, a single head of wheat in a vast wheat field, eh?

All day long the march goes on and dust gathers in little circles about the eyes of weary men. A thin sharp voice is heard, an impersonal voice. It is speaking, not to you, not to one man only, but to a thousand men. “Fours right into line.”

“Fours right into line!” You have so wanted that, have so hungered for it. Has not your whole life been filled with a vague indefinite desire to wheel into some vast line with all the others you have known and seen? It is enough! The legs respond. Tears sometimes gather in the eyes at the thought of being able, without question, to do some one thing with thousands of others, with comrades.

NOTE XV

I HAD enlisted for a soldier shortly after my visit to Alonzo Berners and because I was broke and could see no other way to avoid going back into a factory. The voices crying out for war with Spain, for the freeing of Cuba, I had heard not at all but there had been a voice within myself that was plain and clear enough and I did not believe there was danger of many battles being fought. The glory of Spain, read about in the books, was dead. We had old Spain at a disadvantage, poor old woman. The situation was unique. America, the young and swaggering giant of the West had been fortunate. She had not been compelled to face, on the field of battle, the giant of the Old World in the days of her Old World strength. Now the young western giant was going to assert himself and it would be like taking pennies from a child, like robbing an old gypsy woman in a vacant lot at night after a fair. The newspapers might call into service Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, all the writers of battle tales trying to work up the illusion of a great war about to be fought, but no one believed, no one was afraid. In the camps the soldiers laughed. Songs were being sung. To the soldiers the Spaniards were something like performers in a circus to which the American boys had been invited. It was said they had bells on their hats, wore swords and played guitars under the windows of ladies’ bedrooms at night.

America wanted heroes and I thought I would enjoy being a hero and so I did not enlist for a soldier in Chicago, where I was unknown and my rushing to my country’s aid might have passed unnoticed, but sent off a wire to the captain of militia of my home town in Ohio and got on a train to go there. Alonzo Berners had pressed upon me a loan of a hundred dollars but I did not want to spend any of it for railroad fare so beat my way homeward on a freight train and even the hoboes with whom I sat in an empty freight car treated me with respect as though I were already the hero of a hundred hard-fought battles. At a station twenty miles from home I bought a new suit of clothes, a new hat, neckties and even a walking stick. My home town would want to think I had given up a lucrative position in the city to answer my country’s call, they would want a Cincinnatus dropping his plow handles, and why should I not give them the best imitation I could manage? What I achieved was something between a bank clerk and an actor out of work.

I was received with acclaim. Never before that time or since have I had a personal triumph and I liked it. When, with the others of my company, I marched away to the railroad station to entrain for war the entire town turned out and cheered. Girls ran out of houses to kiss us and old veterans of the Civil War--they had known that of battles we would never know--stood with tears in their eyes.

To the young factory hand of the cities--that was myself, as I now remember myself at that moment--it was grand and glorious. There has always been a kind of shrewdness and foxiness in me and I could not convince myself that Spain, clinging to its old traditions, old guns, old ships, could offer much resistance to the strong young nation now about to attack and I could not get over the feeling that I was going off with many others on a kind of glorious national picnic. Very well, if I was to be given credit for being a hero I could not see why I should object.

And then the camp at the edge of a southern city under forest trees, the physical hardening process that I instinctively liked. I have always enjoyed with a kind of intoxicating gusto any physical use of my body out in the sun and wind. In the army it brought me untroubled sleep at night, physical delight in my own body, the drunkenness of physical well-being and often in my tent at night, after a long day of drilling and when the others slept, I rolled quietly out under the tent flap and lay on my back on the ground, looking at the stars seen through the branches of trees. About me many thousands of men were sleeping and along a guard line, somewhere over there in the darkness, guards were walking up and down. Was it a kind of vast child’s play? The guards were pretending the army was in danger, why should not my own imagination play for a time?

How strong my body felt! I stretched and threw my arms above my head. For a time my fancy played with the notion of becoming a great general. Why might not Napoleon in his boyhood have been just such a fellow as myself? I had read somewhere that he had had an inclination to be a scribbler. I fancied the army, of which I was a part, hemmed in on all sides by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards. No one could think what to do and so I (Corporal Anderson) was sent for. The Americans were in the same position the French revolutionists had been in when young Napoleon appeared and with “a whiff of grapeshot” took the destinies of a nation in his hands. Oh, I had read my Carlyle and knew something also of Machiavelli and his Prince. Aha! In fancy also I could be a great and cruel conqueror. The American army was surrounded by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards but in the American army was myself. This was my hour. I sat up on the ground outside the tent where my comrades were sleeping and in the darkness gave quick and accurate orders. Certain ones of my soldiers were to make a sortie. I did not quite know what a sortie was but anyway why not have one made? It would create a diversion, give my marvelous mind time to work. And now it was done and I began to fling bunches of troops here and there. My courier sprang upon a swift horse and rode away in the darkness. In his tent the Spanish commander was feasting--and here I, being a true Anglo-Saxon, must needs make out that the imaginary Spaniard was something of a monster. He was half drunk in his tent and was surrounded by concubines. Ah! he is sure to have concubines about and is proud and sure of victory but little does he know of me, the sleepless one. Grand phrases, grand ideas, flocking like birds! Now the Spanish commander has shown his true nature. A young boy comes to bring him wine and trips, spilling a little of the wine on the commander’s uniform. He arises and unsheathing his sword plunges it into the little boy’s breast. All are aghast. The Spaniards all stand aghast, and at that very moment I, like an avenging angel, and followed by thousands of pure clean-living Americans (Anglo-Saxon Americans, let it be understood), I swoop down upon him.

* * * * *

At the time of which I am writing America had not learned as it did during the World War that in order to stamp out brutal militarism it is best to adopt brutal militarism, teach it to our sons, do everything possible to brutalize our own people. During the World War I am told boys and young men in the training camps were made to attack with the bayonet dummy figures of men and were even told to grunt as they plunged the bayonet into the figure. Everything possible was done to brutalize the imaginations of the young men, but in our war--“my war” I find myself calling it at times--we had not yet carried our education that far. There was as yet a childish belief in democracy. Men even supposed that the purpose of democracy was to raise free men who could think for themselves, act for themselves in an emergency. The modern idea of the standardization of men had not taken hold and was even thought to be inimical to the very notion of democracy. And we had not learned yet, as we did later, that when an army is to be organized you must split your men up, so that no man knows his fellows, that you must not have officers coming from the same towns as their soldiers, that everything must be made as machine-like and impersonal as possible.

And so there we were, just boys from an Ohio country town with officers from the same town in a wood in the South being made into soldiers and I am much afraid not taking the whole affair too seriously. We were heroes and we accepted the fact. It was enough. In the southern cities ladies invited us to dine at their houses on our days off in town. The captain of our company had been a janitor of a public building back in Ohio, the first lieutenant was a celery raiser on a small farm near our town and the second lieutenant had been a knife grinder in a cutlery factory.

* * * * *

In the camp I marched with the others for several hours each day and in the evening went with some other young soldier for a walk in the wood or in the streets of a southern city. There was a kind of drunkenness of comradeship. So many men so like oneself, doing the same thing with oneself. As for the officers--well, it was to be admitted that in military affairs they knew more than ourselves but there their superiority ended. It would be just as well for none of them to attempt to put on too much side when we were not drilling or were not on actual military duty. The war would soon be over and after a time we would all be going back home. An officer might conceivably “get away” with some sort of injustice for the moment--but a year from now, when we were all at home again.... Did the fool want to take the chance of four or five huskies giving him a beating some night in an alleyway?

The constant marching and manœuvring was a kind of music in the legs and bodies of men. No man is a single thing, physical or mental. The marching went on and on. The physical ruled. There was a vast slow rhythm, out of the bodies of many thousands of men, always going on and on. It got into one’s body. There was a kind of physical drunkenness produced. He who weakened was laughed at by his comrades and the weakness went away or he disappeared. One was afloat on a vast sea of men. There was a kind of music on the surface of the sea. The music was a part of oneself. One was oneself a part of the music. One’s body, moving in rhythm with all these other bodies, made the music. What was an officer? What was a man? An officer was but one out of whose throat came a voice.

The army moved across a great open field. One’s body was tired but happy with an odd new kind of happiness. The mind did not torture the body, asking questions. The body was moved by a power outside itself and as for the fancy, it played freely, far, freely and widely, over oceans, over mountain tops too.

Beyond him not the ghost of shores, Beyond him only shoreless seas.

And now the voice and the words, caught up and repeated by other voices, harsh voices, tired voices, thin high pitched voices.

Fours right into line-- Fours right into line.

* * * * *

Three young men having run the guard line, together are walking along a dark road toward a southern city. In the city and later when they have stood on street corners and walked through the section of the city where only Negroes live--being Ohio boys and fascinated by the strangeness of the notion of a race thus set aside--they go into a saloon where they sit drinking beer. They discuss their officers, the position of the officer in relation to his men. “I think it’s all right,” says a doctor’s son. “Ed and Dug are all right. They have to live off by themselves and act as though they were something special, kind of grand and wise and gaudy. It’s a kind of bluff, I guess, that has to be kept up, only I should think it would be kind of tough on them. I should think they might get to feeling they were something special and get themselves into a mess.”

And now Ed, the raiser of celery, comes into the saloon. He is saving all he can of his officer’s pay hoping to buy a few additional acres of land when he gets back home and he doesn’t much like spending money. He sees the three sitting there and wants to join them but hesitates. Then he calls to me and he and I go off together along a street and into another saloon.

The celery raiser is a devout Catholic and he and I get into a discussion. I have some money and am buying the beer and so it goes on for a long time. I speak of the feeling I have when I have marched for a long time in rhythm with many other men and Ed nods his head. “It’s the same way I feel about the Church,” he says. “That’s just the way we Catholics get to feeling about the Church.”

At the camp Ed, being an officer, can walk boldly in but I, being but a corporal and having gone off to town without leave, must creep along the guard line to where a fellow from my own town is stationed. “Who goes there?” he demands sternly; and “Ah, cut it Will, you big boob. Don’t make such a racket,” I answer as I go past him and creep away in the darkness to my tent.

And now I am in the tent, awake beside five sleeping men and I am filled with drinks and thinking of war. What a strange idea that men should need a war to throw many of them for a time into a common mood. Is there unison only in hatred? I do not believe it but the idea fascinates me. Men form a democracy but in the end must throw the democracy aside in order to make the army that shall protect and preserve democracy. The guard and myself creeping past him to my tent are as soldiers a little absurd. Is all feeling of comradeship, of brotherhood between many men, a little absurd?