Chapter VI: Book TWO: Note I (1)

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.”