Chapter XII: Book THREE: Note I (1)

“There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen. Other pleasures fail us, or wound us while they charm; but the pen we take up with rejoicing and lay down with satisfaction, for it has the power to advantage not only its lord and master, but many others as well, even though they be far away--sometimes, indeed, though they be not born for thousands of years to come. I believe I speak but the strict truth when I claim that as there is none among earthly delights more noble than literature, so there is none so lasting, none gentler, or more faithful; there is none which accompanies its possessor through the vicissitudes of life at so small cost of effort or anxiety.”

--Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio.

I ONCE knew a devout smoker who went to spend the winter in Havana and when he had got there and was unpacking his trunk he began to laugh, realizing suddenly that he had packed the trunk half full of boxes of cigars, and I have myself on more than one occasion when going from one city to another on some affair of business carried with me thousands of sheets of paper, fearing, I presume, that all the stationers in the new place had died. The fear of finding myself without paper, ink or pencils is a kind of disease with me and it is with a good deal of effort only that I restrain myself from stealing such articles whenever I am left unobserved in a store or in someone’s house. In houses where I live for some time I cache small stores of paper as a squirrel stores nuts and at one time in my life I had forcibly to be separated, by a considerate friend, from something like half a bushel of lead pencils I had for a long time carted about with me in a bag. There were enough pencils in the bag to have rewritten the history of mankind.

To the writer of prose, who loves his craft, there is nothing in the world so satisfying as being in the presence of great stacks of clean white sheets. The feeling is indescribably sweet and cannot be compared with any reaction to be got from sheets on which one has already scribbled. The written sheets are already covered with one’s faults and oh, it is seldom indeed these sentences, scrawled across these sheets, can compare with what was intended! One has been walking in a street and has been much alive. What stories the faces in the streets tell! How significant the faces of the houses! The walls of the houses are brushed away by the force of the imagination and one sees and feels all of the life within. What a universal giving away of secrets! Everything is felt, everything known. Physical life within one’s own body comes to an end of consciousness. The life outside oneself is all, everything.

Now for the pen or the pencil and paper and I shall make you feel this thing I now feel--ah, just that boy there and what is in his soul as he runs to look in at the window of the neighboring house in the early evening light; just what that woman is thinking as she sits on the porch of that other house holding the babe in her arms; just the dark, brooding thing in the soul of that laborer going homeward under those trees. He is getting old and was born an American. Why did he not rise in the world and become the owner or at least the superintendent of a factory and own an automobile?

Aha! You do not know, but I do. You wait now, I shall tell you. I have felt all, everything. In myself I have no existence. Now I exist only in these others.

I have run home to my room and have lighted a light. Words flow. What has happened? Bah! Such tame, unutterably dull stuff! There was something within me, truth, facility, the color and smell of things. Why, I might have done something here. Words are everything. I swear to you I have not lost my faith in words.

Do I not know? While I walked in the street there were such words came, in ordered array! I tell you what--words have color, smell; one may sometimes feel them with the fingers as one touches the cheek of a child.

There is no reason at all why I should not have been able, by the instrumentality of these little words, why I should not have been able to give you the very smell of the little street wherein I just walked, made you feel just the way the evening light fell over the faces of the houses and the people--the half moon through the branches of that old cherry tree that was all but dead but that had the one branch alive, the branch that touched the window where the boy stood with his foot up, lacing his shoe. And there was the dog sleeping in the dust of the road and making a little whining sound out of his dreams and the girl on a near-by street who was learning to ride a bicycle. She could not be seen but her two young brothers laughed loudly every time she fell to the pavement.

These the materials of the story-writer’s craft, these and the little words that must be made to run into sentences and paragraphs; now slow and haltingly, now quickly, swiftly, now singing like a woman’s voice in a dark house in a dark street at midnight, now viciously, threateningly, like wolves running in a winter forest of the North.

Oh! This unutterable rot spoken sometimes about writing. One is to consider the morals of the people who read, one is to please or amuse the people with these words and sentences. One lives in an age when there is much talk of service--to automobile owners, to riders on trains, to buyers of packages of food in stores. Is no one to do service to the little words, the words with which we make love, defend ourselves with lies after we have killed the friend who stole the woman we wanted--the words with which we bury our dead, comfort our friend, with which we are in the end to tell each other, if we may, all the secrets of our dreams and hopes?

I am servant to the words. Are you to tell me what words I shall put aside and not write? Are you to be the master of my mood, caught from yourself perhaps as you walked in the street and I saw you when you did not see me and when you were more sweet and true in all your bearing than you have ever been before, or when alas you were more vicious and cruel. Bah! The words I have put here on this paper!

But there are the clean sheets, the unwritten sheets. On them I shall write daringly, boldly and truly--to-morrow.

* * * * *

The writer has just come from the stationer’s, where he has got him a fresh supply of sheets. He had money with him and bought five thousand. Ah, the weight of them on the arm as he walked off along a street to his own house. Four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times he may destroy the sheet on which he has been writing and there, lying before him, will be again the fresh white surface.

Makers of paper, I exclude you from all the curses I have heaped upon manufacturers when I have walked in the street breathing coal dust and smoke. I have heard your industry kills fish in rivers. Let them be killed. Fishermen are, in any event, noisy lying brutes. Last night I dreamed I had been made Pope and that I had issued a bull, excommunicating all owners of factories, consigning them to burn everlastingly in hell, but ah, I left you out of my curses, you busy makers of paper. Those who made paper at a low price and in vast quantities somewhere up in the forests of Canada, I sainted. There was one man--I invented him--named Saint John P. Belger, who furnished paper to indigent writers of prose free of charge. For virtue I put him, in my dream, almost on a level with Saint Francis of Assisi.

And now the writer has got to his room and has stacked the bundles of paper on the desk where he sits to write. He goes to a window and throws it open and there is a man passing. Who is the man? The writer does not know but is tempted to throw a dish or a chair at his head, merely to show his contempt of the world. “Take that mankind! Go to Hades! Have I not five thousand sheets?”

It is without doubt a moment! In my boyhood I knew an old woodworker who on Sundays went to walk alone in a forest. Once I was lying on my back by a clump of bushes and saw his actions when he thought there was no one about.

What has mankind, in America, not missed because men do not know, or are forgetting, what the old workman knew? There was Sandro Botticelli who knew. He was in danger once of becoming married to a woman but at the critical moment he fled. All night he ran in the streets of Florence wrestling with himself and in the end won the victory. The woman was not to come between him and his surfaces, those cathedral walls, those dumb strips of canvas on which he was to paint--not all his dreams--what he could of his dreams. Nothing was to come between him and his materials.

The old woodworker in the forest approached a living tree and then walked away. He went close again and let his eye travel up along the tree’s trunk. Then, hesitatingly, lovingly he touched the tree with his fingers. That was all. It was enough.

It was the workman en rapport with his materials. Oh, there is a feeling in the breasts of men that will not die. Ages come and go, but always the feeling is alive, haltingly, in the breasts of the few. To the workman his materials are as the face of his God seen over the rim of the world. His materials are the promise of the coming of God to the workman.

Ford factories cannot kill the love of materials in the workmen and always and in the end the love of materials and tools in the workmen will kill the Fords. Standardization is a phase. It will pass. The tools and materials of the workmen cannot always remain cheap and foul. Some day the workmen will come back to their materials, out of the sterile land of standardization. If the machine is to survive it will come again under the dominance of the hands of workmen, as it already no doubt is doing, in a hundred, perhaps a thousand unknown places. The day of re-discovery of man by man may not be so far off as we fancy. Has there not been, in our own time, a slackening of the impulse toward purely material ends? Has not the cry for success and material growth become already a bore to the average American?

These the thoughts of a man. To the boy lying in the silent place on the Sunday afternoon long ago and seeing the old workman touching so tenderly the tree that he dreamed might some day become the materials of his craft no such thoughts.

What happened? Just a tightening of the cords of the boy’s body. There was an inclination to be at the same time sad and full of joy. A door had been jerked open by the hand of the workman but the boy could not see within the house. He was, I remember, known as something of a “nut” in our town--a silent old chap--and once he went away to work in a city factory but later came back to his own little shop. He was a wagon-maker and the making of wagons by individual workmen lasted out his time. But he had no young workman to whom he taught the love of his trade. That died with him.

Not quite, perhaps. The picture of the old workman and just the way his fingers touched the trunk of a tree on a certain Sunday afternoon and of how, as he walked away along a path, he kept stopping to turn back and take another look at his materials, stayed in a boy’s mind through long years of being smart, of trying mightily to be shrewd and capable in a world where materials did not matter, in the company of workmen vulgarized by the fact that the old workman’s love of materials was unknown to them.

* * * * *

The writer with his sheets in a room. Will he accomplish his purpose? It is sure he will not. And that too is a part of the joy of his fate. Do not pity the workman, you who have succeeded in life. He wants no pity. Before him always there is the unsolved problem, the clean white unwritten sheets, and the workman also knows his moments of surrender, of happiness. There will always be the moments when he is lost in wonder before the possibilities of the materials before him.

As for myself I had been, at the time in my life of which I am now writing, a man of business for many years, had been buying and selling, but had all the time been secretly scribbling in my room at night.

During the day I for years wrote advertisements--of soaps, of plows, house paints, incubators for the hatching of chickens.

Was there something hatching in me? With all my scribbling had I something to say? Were there tales I had picked up I might in the end tell truly and well? I had seen and known men and women, going from their homes to their work, going from their work to their homes, had worked with them in offices and shops. On all sides the untold tales looked out at me like living things.

I had bought and sold but had no real interest in buying and selling. All day I wrote advertisements and perhaps the advertisements helped sell So-and-so many dollars’ worth of goods. As I walked homeward through streets, across bridges, I could not remember what I had been writing about.

At times too there was a sharp sense of uncleanliness. In my room the white sheets looked up at me. I remembered the workman seen in the forest in the presence of the tree when I was a boy. “I will launch out upon new adventures,” I said to myself.

NOTE II

ON an evening of the late summer I got off a train at a growing Ohio industrial town where I had once lived. I was rapidly becoming a middle-aged man. Two years before I had left the place in disgrace. There I had tried to be a manufacturer, a moneymaker, and had failed, and I had been trying and failing ever since. In the town some thousands of dollars had been lost for others. An effort to conform to the standard dreams of the men of my times had failed and in the midst of my disgrace and generally hopeless outlook, as regards making a living, I had been filled with joy at coming to the end of it all. One morning I had left the place afoot, leaving my poor little factory, like an illegitimate child, on another man’s doorstep. I had left, merely taking what money was in my pocket, some eight or ten dollars.

What a moment that leaving had been! To one of the European artists I afterward came to know the situation would have been unbelievably grotesque. Such a man could not have believed in my earnestness about it all and would have thought my feelings of the moment a worked-up thing. I can in fancy hear one of the Frenchmen, Italians or Russians I later knew laughing at me. “Well, but why get so worked up? A factory is a factory, is it not? Why may not one break it like an empty bottle? You have lost some money for others? See the light on that field over there. These others, for whom you lost money, were they compelled to beg in the streets, were their children torn by wolves? What is it you Americans get so excited about when a little money is lost?”

A European artist may not understand but an American will understand. The devil! It is not a question of money. No men are so careless and free with money as the Americans. There is another matter involved.

It strikes rather deeply at the roots of our beings. Childish as it all may have seemed to an older and more sophisticated world, we Americans, from the beginning, have been up to something, or we have wanted to think we were up to something. We came here, or our fathers or grandfathers came here, from a hundred diverse places--and you may be sure it was not the artists who came. Artists do not want to cut down trees, root stumps out of the ground, build towns and railroads. The artist wants to sit with a strip of canvas before him, face an open space on a wall, carve a bit of wood, make combinations of words and sentences, as I am doing now--and try to express to others some thought or feeling of his own. He wants to dream of color, to lay hold of form, free the sensual in himself, live more fully and freely in his contact with the materials before him than he can possibly live in life. He seeks a kind of controlled ecstasy and is a man with a passion, a “nut,” as we love to say in America. And very often, when he is not in actual contact with his materials, he is a much more vain and disagreeable ass than any man, not an artist, could possibly be. As a living man he is almost always a pest. It is only when dead he begins to have value.

The simple truth is that in a European country the artist is more freely accepted than he is among us, and only because he has been longer about. They know how harmless he really is--or rather do not know how subtly dangerous he can be--and accept him only as one might accept a hybrid cross between a dog and a cat that went growling mewing barking and spitting about the house. One might want to kill the first of such strange beasts one sees but after one has seen a dozen and has realized that, like the mule, they cannot breed their own kind one laughs and lets them live, paying no more attention to them than modern France for example pays to its artists.

But in America things are somewhat different. Here something went wrong in the beginning. We pretended to so much and were going to do such great things here. This vast land was to be a refuge for all the outlawed brave foolish folk of the world. The declaration of the rights of man was to have a new hearing in a new place. The devil! We did get ourselves into a bad hole. We were going to be superhuman and it turned out we were sons of men who were not such devilish fellows after all. You cannot blame us that we are somewhat reluctant about finding out the very human things concerning ourselves. One does so hate to come down off the perch.

We are now losing our former feeling of inherent virtue, are permitting ourselves occasionally to laugh at ourselves for our pretensions, but there was a time here when we were sincerely in earnest about all this American business, “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We actually meant it and no one will ever understand present-day America or Americans who does not concede that we meant it and that while we were building all of our big ugly hurriedly--thrown together towns, creating our great industrial system, growing always more huge and prosperous, we were as much in earnest about what we thought we were up to as were the French of the thirteenth century when they built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God.

They built the cathedral of Chartres to the glory of God and we really intended building here a land to the glory of Man, and thought we were doing it too. That was our intention and the affair only blew up in the process, or got perverted, because Man, even the brave and the free Man, is somewhat a less worthy object of glorification than God. This we might have found out long ago but that we did not know each other. We came from too many different places to know each other well, had been promised too much, wanted too much. We were afraid to know each other.

Oh, how Americans have wanted heroes, wanted brave simple fine men! And how sincerely and deeply we Americans have been afraid to understand and love one another, fearing to find ourselves at the end no more brave heroic and fine than the people of almost any other part of the world.

I however digress. What I am trying to do is to give the processes of my own mind at two distinct moments of my own life. First, the moment when after many years of effort to conform to an unstated and but dimly understood American dream by making myself a successful man in the material world I threw all overboard and then at another moment when, having come back to the same spot where I passed through the first moment, I attempted to confront myself with myself with a somewhat changed point of view.

As for the first of these moments, it was melodramatic and even silly enough. The struggle centred itself at the last within the walls of a particular moment and within the walls of a particular room.

I sat in the room with a woman who was my secretary. For several years I had been sitting there, dictating to her regarding the goods I had made in my factory and that I was attempting to sell. The attempt to sell the goods had become a sort of madness in me. There were certain thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of men living in towns or on farms in many states of my country who might possibly buy the goods I had made rather than the goods made in another factory by another man. How I had wheedled! How I had schemed! In some years I gave myself quite fully to the matter in hand and the dollars trickled in. Well, I was about to become rich. It was a possibility. After a good day or week, when many dollars had come, I went to walk and when I had got into a quiet place where I was unobserved I threw back my shoulders and strutted. During the year I had made for myself so many dollars. Next year I would make so many more, and the next year so many more. But my thoughts of the matter did not express themselves in the dollars. It never does to the American man. Who calls the American a dollar-lover is foolish. My factory was of a certain size--it was really a poor haphazardly enough run place--but after a time I would build a great factory and after that a greater and greater. Like a true American, I thought in size.

My fancy played with the matter of factories as a child would play with a toy. There would be a great factory with walls going up and up and a little open place for a lawn at the front, shower baths for the workers with perhaps a fountain playing on a lawn, and up before the door of this place I would drive in a large automobile.

Oh, how I would be respected by all, how I would be looked up to by all! I walked in a little dark street, throwing back my shoulders. How grand and glorious I felt!

The houses along the street in which I walked were small and ugly and dirty-faced children played in the yards. I wondered. Having walked, dreaming my dream for a long time I returned to the neighborhood of my factory and opening my office went in to sit at my desk smoking a cigarette. The night watchman came in. He was an old man who had once been a school-teacher but, as he said, his eyes had gone back on him.

When I had walked alone I had been able to make myself feel somewhat as I fancied a prince might have felt but when anyone came near me something exploded inside. I was a deflated balloon. Well, in fancy, I had a thousand workmen under me. They were children and I was their father and would look out for them. Perhaps I would build them model houses to live in, a town of model houses built about my great factory, eh? The workmen would be my children and I would look out for my children. “Land of the free--home of the brave.”

But I was back in my factory now and the night watchman sat smoking with me. Sometimes we talked far into the night. The devil! He was a fellow like myself, having the same problems as myself. How could I be his father? The thought was absurd. Once, when he was a younger man, he had dreamed of being a scholar but his eyes had gone back on him. What had he wanted to do? He spoke of it for a time. He had wanted to be a scholar and I had myself spent those earlier years eagerly reading books. “I would really like to have been a learned monk, one of those fellows such as appeared in the Middle Ages, one of the fellows who went off and lived by himself and gave himself up wholly to learning, one who believed in learning, who spent his life humbly seeking new truths--but I got married and my wife had kids, and then, you see, my eyes went back on me.” He spoke of the matter philosophically. One did not let oneself get too much excited. After a time one got over any feeling of bitterness. The night watchman had a boy, a lad of fifteen, who also loved books. “He is pretty lucky, can get all the books he wants at the public library. In the afternoon after school is out and before I come down here to my job he reads aloud to me.”

* * * * *

Men and women, many men and many women! There were men and women working in my factory, men and women walking in streets with me, many men and women scattered far and wide over the country to whom I wanted to sell my goods. I sent men, salesmen, to see them--I wrote letters; how many thousands of letters, all to the same purpose! “Will you buy my goods?” And again, “Will you buy my goods?”

What were the other men thinking about? What was I myself thinking about? Suppose it were possible to know something of the men and women, to know something of oneself, too. The devil! These were not thoughts that would help me to sell my goods to all the others. What were all the others like? What was I myself like? Did I want a large factory with a little lawn and a fountain in front and with a model town built about it?

Days of endlessly writing letters to men, nights of walking in strange quiet streets. What had happened to me? “I shall go get drunk,” I said to myself and I did go and get drunk. Taking a train to a near-by city I drank until a kind of joy came to me and with some man I had found and who had joined in my carousal I walked in streets, shouting at other men, singing songs, going sometimes into strange houses to laugh with people, to talk with people I found there.

Here was something I liked and something the others liked too. When I had come to people in strange houses, half drunk, released, they were not afraid of me. “Well, he wants to talk,” they seemed to be saying to themselves. “That’s fine!” There was something broken down between us, a wall broken down. We talked of outlandish things for Anglo-Saxon trained people to speak of, of love between men and women, of what children’s coming meant. Food was brought forth. Often in a single evening of this sort I got more from people than I could get from weeks of ordinary intercourse. The people were a little excited by the strangeness of two unknown men in their houses. With my companion I went boldly to the door and knocked. Laughter. “Hello, the house!” It might be the house of a laborer or that of a well-to-do merchant. I had hold of my new-found friend’s arm and explained our presence as well as I could. “We are a little drunk and we are travelers. We just want to sit and visit with you a while.”

There was a kind of terror in people’s eyes, and a kind of gladness too. An old workman showed us a relic he had brought home with him from the Civil War while his wife ran into a bedroom and changed her dress. Then a child awoke in a near-by room and began to cry and was permitted to come in in her nightgown and lie in my arms or in the arms of the new-found friend who had got drunk with me. The talk swept over strange intimate subjects. What were men up to? What were women up to? There was a kind of deep taking of breath, as though we had all been holding something back from one another and had suddenly decided to let go. Once or twice we stayed all night in the house to which we had gone.

And then back to the writing of letters--to sell my goods. In the city to which I had gone to carouse I had seen many women of the streets, standing at corners, looking furtively about. My thoughts got fixed upon prostitution. Was I a prostitute? Was I prostituting my life?

What thoughts in the mind! There was a note due and payable at the bank. “Now here, you man, attend to your affairs. You have induced others to put money into your enterprises. If you are to build a great enterprise here you must be up and at it.”

How often in after years I have laughed at myself for the thoughts and emotions of that time. There is a thought I have had that is very delicious. It is this, and I dare say it will be an unwelcome thought to many, “I am the American man. I think there is no doubt of it. I am just the mixture, the cold, moral man of the North into whose body has come the warm pagan blood of the South. I love and am afraid to love. Behold in me the American man striving to become an artist, to become conscious of himself, filled with wonder concerning himself and others, trying to have a good time and not fake a good time, I am not English Italian Jew German Frenchman Russian. What am I? I am tremendously serious about it all but at the same time I laugh constantly at myself for my own seriousness. Like all real American men of our day I wander constantly from place to place striving to put down roots into the American soil and not quite doing it. If you say the real American man is not yet born, you lie. I am the type of the fellow.”

This is somewhat of a joke on me but it is a greater joke on the reader. As respectable and conventional a man as Calvin Coolidge has me in him--and I have him in myself? Do not doubt it. I have him in me and Eugene Debs in me and the crazy political idealists of the Western States and Mr. Gary of the Steel Trust and the whole crew. I accept them all as part of myself. Would to God they would thus accept me!

* * * * *

And being this thing I have tried to describe I return now to myself sitting between the walls of a certain room and between the walls of a certain moment too. Just why was that moment so pregnant? I will never quite know.

It came with a rush, the feeling that I must quit buying and selling, the overwhelming feeling of uncleanliness. I was in my whole nature a tale-teller. My father had been one and his not knowing had destroyed him. The tale-teller cannot bother with buying and selling. To do so will destroy him. No class of men I have ever known are so dull and cheerless as the writers of glad sentimental romances, the painters of glad pretty pictures. The corrupt unspeakable thing that had happened to tale-telling in America was all concerned with this matter of buying and selling. The horse cannot sing like a canary bird nor the canary bird pull a plow like a horse and either of them attempting it becomes something ridiculous.

NOTE III

THERE was a door leading out from my office to the street. How many steps to the door? I counted them, “five, six, seven.” “Suppose,” I asked myself, “I could take those five, six, seven steps to the door, pass out at the door, go along that railroad track out there, disappear into the far horizon beyond. Where was I to go? In the town where my factory was located I had still the reputation of being a bright young business man. In my first years there I had been filled with shrewd vast schemes. I had been admired, looked up to. Since that time I had gone down and down as a bright young man but no one yet knew how far I had gone. I was still respected in the town, my word was still good at the bank. I was a respectable man.”

Did I want to do something not respectable, not decent? I am trying to give you the history of a moment and as a tale-teller I have come to think that the true history of life is but a history of moments. It is only at rare moments we live. I wanted to walk out at a door and go away into the distance. The American is still a wanderer, a migrating bird not yet ready to build a nest. All our cities are built temporarily as are the houses in which we live. We are on the way--toward what? There have been other times in the history of the world when many strange peoples came together in a new strange land. To assume that we have made an America, even materially, seems to me now but telling ourselves fairy tales in the night. We have not even made it materially yet and the American man has only gone in for money-making on a large scale to quiet his own restlessness, as the monk of old days was given the Regula of Augustine to quiet him and still the lusts in himself. For the monk, kept occupied with the saying of prayers and the doing of many little sacred offices, there was no time for the lusts of the world to enter in and for the American to be perpetually busy with his affairs, with his automobiles, with his movies, there is no time for unquiet thoughts.

On that day in the office at my factory I looked at myself and laughed. The whole struggle I am trying to describe and that I am confident will be closer to the understanding of most Americans than anything else I have ever written was accompanied by a kind of mocking laughter at myself and my own seriousness about it all.

Very well, then, I wanted to go out of the door and never come back. How many Americans want to go--but where do they want to go? I wanted to accept for myself all the little restless thoughts of which myself and the others had been so afraid and you, who are Americans, will understand the necessity of my continually laughing at myself and at all things dear to me. I must laugh at the thing I love the more intensely because of my love. Any American will understand that.

It was a trying moment for me. There was the woman, my secretary, now looking at me. What did she represent? What did she not represent? Would I dare be honest with her? It was quite apparent to me I would not. I had got to my feet and we stood looking at each other. “It is now or never,” I said to myself, and I remember that I kept smiling. I had stopped dictating to her in the midst of a sentence. “The goods about which you have inquired are the best of their kind made in the--”

I stood and she sat and we were looking at each other intently. “What’s the matter?” she asked. She was an intelligent woman, more intelligent I am sure than myself, just because she was a woman and good, while I have never been good, do not know how to be good. Could I explain all to her? The words of a fancied explanation marched through my mind: “My dear young woman, it is all very silly but I have decided to no longer concern myself with this buying and selling. It may be all right for others but for me it is poison. There is this factory. You may have it if it please you. It is of little value I dare say. Perhaps it is money ahead and then again it may well be it is money behind. I am uncertain about it all and now I am going away. Now, at this moment, with the letter I have been dictating, with the very sentence you have been writing left unfinished, I am going out that door and never come back. What am I going to do? Well now, that I don’t know. I am going to wander about. I am going to sit with people, listen to words, tell tales of people, what they are thinking, what they are feeling. The devil! It may even be I am going forth in search of myself.”

The woman was looking into my eyes the while I looked into hers. Perhaps I had grown a little pale and now she grew pale. “You’re sick,” she said and her words gave me an idea. There was wanted a justification of myself, not to myself but to the others. A crafty thought came. Was the thought crafty or was I, at the moment, a little insane, a “nut,” as every American so loves to say of every man who does something a little out of the groove.

I had grown pale and it may be I was ill but nevertheless I was laughing--the American laugh. Had I suddenly become a little insane? What a comfort that thought would be, not to myself but to the others. My leaving the place I was then in would tear up roots that had gone down a little into the ground. The ground I did not think would support the tree that was myself and that I thought wanted to grow.

My mind dwelt on the matter of roots and I looked at my feet. The whole question with which I was at the moment concerned became a matter of feet. I had two feet that could take me out of the life I was then in and that, to do so, would need but take three or four steps to a door. When I had reached the door and had stepped out of my little factory office everything would be quite simplified, I was sure. I had to lift myself out. Others would have to tackle the job of getting me back, once I had stepped over that threshold.

Whether at the moment I merely became shrewd and crafty or whether I really became temporarily insane I shall never quite know. What I did was to step very close to the woman and looking directly into her eyes I laughed gayly. Others besides herself would, I knew, hear the words I was now speaking. I looked at my feet. “I have been wading in a long river and my feet are wet,” I said.

Again I laughed as I walked lightly toward the door and out of a long and tangled phase of my life, out of the door of buying and selling, out of the door of affairs.

“They want me to be a ‘nut,’ will love to think of me as a ‘nut,’ and why not? It may just be that’s what I am,” I thought gayly and at the same time turned and said a final confusing sentence to the woman who now stared at me in speechless amazement. “My feet are cold wet and heavy from long wading in a river. Now I shall go walk on dry land,” I said, and as I passed out at the door a delicious thought came. “Oh, you little tricky words, you are my brothers. It is you, not myself, have lifted me over this threshold. It is you who have dared give me a hand. For the rest of my life I will be a servant to you,” I whispered to myself as I went along a spur of railroad track, over a bridge, out of a town and out of that phase of my life.

NOTE IV

ON the evening when I returned to the town my mood was quite another one. I was on my way from Chicago to the city of New York. Why had I wanted to stop? The impulse had come suddenly, as I stood at the railroad ticket window in Chicago.

It rained when I got off the train and the night promised to be dark but half an hour later the rain ceased and the stars came out. At the station I escaped notice. Already in the town I and my struggles had been forgotten. At the moment when I had so dramatically walked away from my factory there had been some little local newspaper furore--“Well-known business man mysteriously disappears. Not known to have had any troubles,” etc. I went into a baggage check room and left my bag and then to a ticket window where I bought a ticket to New York on a later train. Both the check room boy and the ticket-seller were strangers to me. It was evident the town had grown, suddenly and furiously, as industrial towns do grow. Had it become a centre for the manufacture of automobiles shoes rubber tires or chewing gum? I did not know. In the station waiting room ten or twelve people stood or sat about and several taxi drivers were shouting at the door.

I walked away in the drizzling rain and stood on a bridge until the night cleared. Now it was plain to me that I had wanted to spend an evening alone with myself in the midst of the shadows of a former life. Since I had left the town much had happened. All during the last years of my life as a manufacturer and later as a Chicago advertising man I had secretly been writing tales and now they were beginning to be published. In some places they had been praised, in others blamed. I had loved the praise. It had made me feel very much as I had felt as a manufacturer when I had made a little money and had begun to dream of building a great factory and being father to workmen--that is to say, rather grand and noble. When my tales displeased people and when some critic wrote condemning me and calling me a dull or an unclean man I got furiously angry but always tried quickly to conceal my anger. I was really so angry that I did not want, on any account, to let the other fellow know how angry and hurt I was. Often the critic seemed merely to want to hurt. I had had a moment of exaltation, of joy in thinking I had penetrated a little into the life story of some man or woman. The person about whom I had been writing had been swept by some passion, of the flesh or spirit and I had been swept along with him. At such times I, as an individual, had no existence. Sometimes I had been seated writing all night at my desk and could not have told whether I had been there two hours or ten. Then the morning light streamed in at my window and my hands trembled so that I could no longer hold the pen. What a sweet clean feeling! During those hours there had been no life of my own at all. I had lived but in the characters I was trying to bring to life in my story and in the early morning light I felt as one shriven of all grossness, of all vanity, of all cheapness in himself. The process of writing had been for me purifying and fine. It had been curative and later I was filled with unholy wrath when someone said that, during that period of work, I had been unclean or vile.

And most of all I was furiously angry when someone said that the people of whom I wrote, being only such people as I myself had known, were of a lower, more immoral, less healthy order of beings. They were not respectable, were queer and did unaccountable things. I had myself been a respectable man and at one time in my life all of my friends had been respectable men and women and had I not known what was underneath the coats of many such, what they were too? I was furious for the men and women about whom I had written and furious for myself too but actually, on the outside, in the face of scurrilous criticism, had always assumed a sort of heavy bucolic genial manner, something in the manner of a certain type of benevolent old gentleman I had always detested. “They may be right,” I said aloud generously when inside myself I thought the critics often enough only dogs and fools.

I was thinking of myself and my critics as I walked that evening in the rain and I presume that what I had wanted in coming back thus to the Ohio town was to try to arrive at some sort of basis for self-criticism.

It was going to be a somewhat difficult undertaking, finding such a basis, of that I was sure. When I had been doing my writing, unknown and unseen, there was a sort of freedom. One worked, more or less in secret, as one might indulge in some forbidden vice. There were the bankers and others who had put money into my enterprises. They had expected I would be giving myself wholly to the matter in hand and I had been cheating and did not want them to know. One wrote tales, played with them. One did not think of publication, of a public that was to read. In the evening one came home to one’s house and going upstairs closed the door to a room. There was before one the desk and paper.

In a neighboring garden a man was picking potato bugs off potato vines. His wife came to the kitchen door and began to scold. He had forgotten to bring home five pounds of sugar from the store and now she was angry about it. There came one of those strangely vital little domestic flare-ups, the man with a tin can in which were the captured bugs, looking ridiculous as he stood listening to his wife, and she in turn looking unnecessarily angry about the small matter of the sugar.

They were in their garden unconscious of me and I was unconscious of a dinner being put on a table downstairs in my house, unconscious of any need of food I would ever feel again, unconscious of the regime of my own household, of the affairs of my factory. A man and a woman in a garden had become the centre of a universe about which it seemed to me I might think and feel in joy and wonder forever. People had outer motives that seemed to control their lives. Under certain circumstances they said certain words. Stealthily I went to lock the door of my room. A domestic regime would be upset by my determination, the affairs of a certain factory might be ruined by my inattention but what did all that, at the moment, matter to me? I became cruelly impersonal and could not avoid becoming so. Had a god been in my way or intent on disturbing me just then I would have at least tried to brush him aside. “You Jove, sit in that chair over there and keep your mouth shut! You Minerva, get down that stairway, go into the front room of my house and sit in a rocking-chair with your hands folded until I have attended to the business before me! At the moment I am concerned with a man standing in a potato patch with a can of potato bugs held in his hand and with a certain perplexed baffled look in his eyes and in the eyes of the wife in a gingham apron who is unnecessarily angry about a trifling matter of sugar not brought home from a store. You must see that I am a swimmer and have stripped myself of the clothes which are my ordinary life. You, my dear Minerva, should not stay in the presence of a naked man. People will say things about you. Get down the stairway at once. I am a swimmer and am about to leap off into the sea of lives, into the sea of present-day American lives. Will I be able to swim there? Will I be able to keep my head above water? That is a matter for greater gods than yourself to decide. Get out of here!”

* * * * *

Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why could not one cling to that? Why the later vanity that made one want to be proclaimed? I remember an evening alone in my room. I was not always writing. Sometimes I read the work of other men. There was a scene being depicted by an old master of prose. Three men were in a little room talking. What was attempted was that there should be actual words said while the reader should be given the sense of things felt for which there were no words. One of the men kept talking in the most affable and genial manner while at the same time there was murder in his heart. The three had been eating and now the man who wanted to kill was fingering the handle of a knife.

I remember that I sat in my room with tears streaming out of my own eyes. Oh, so delicately and well was the scene being handled! There was everything in just the way the man’s hands played with that knife. That told the whole story. The writer had not said too much about it. He had just, by a stroke of his pen, centred your attention there, upon the fingers of a hand fiddling with the handle of a knife at the edge of the table.

How easy to say too much! How easy to say too little! I remember that I half read through the scene and then put the book down and ran nervously up and down in my room. “He can’t do it! He can’t do it! No man can do a thing so beautifully restrained and sure!” Do you think, dear reader, I cared a hang about the social standing of the three men in that room, what kind of morals they had, their influence for good or evil on the characters of others, what they were up to? Indeed I did not. It is a long time at least since I have been such a child as that. A master had started to do a scene and I was in mortal terror lest he fail to draw his line sharp and true. I had never yet drawn my own line sharp and true, was not man enough to do so, was too timid, too weak vain and fearful.