It was with an unpleasant shock of surprise that I found Joe liked the harbor.
When I took him home for Christmas he spent half his time down there on the docks. He explored the whole region for miles around, in a week he spoke in familiar terms of slips and bays and rivers that to me were still nothing but names. Moreover, he liked my father. And my father, opening up by degrees, showed an unmistakable relish for Joe.
They had long talks in the study at night, where I could hear them arguing about the decline of our shipping, the growth of our trusts and railroads, graft and high finance and strikes, the swift piling up of our troubles at home—and about the great chance we were losing abroad, the blind weak part we were playing in this eager ocean world where every nation that was alive was rushing in to get a place. As their voices rose loud and excited, even my young sister Sue, who was just out of high school now and doing some groping about of her own, would go into the study to listen at times. But I kept out. For already I was tired again of all these harbor problems, I wanted to get at life through Art! And I felt besides that if I entered into long talks with my father, sooner or later he would be sure to bring up the dreaded question of my going into his business. And this I was firmly resolved not to do. For my dislike of all his work, his deepening worries, his dogged absorption in his tiresome hobby of ships, was even sharper than before.
"That dad of yours," Joe told me, "is a mighty interesting old boy. He has had a big life with a big idea."
"Has he?" said I. "Then he's lost it."
"He hasn't! That's just the trouble. He thinks he's a comer when he's a goer—he can't see his idea is out of date. It's a pity," he added sadly. "When a man can spend his days and nights hating the trusts and the railroads as he does, it's a pity he's so darned old in his views of what ought to be done about it. Your father believes that if only we'd get a strong navy and a large mercantile marine——"
"Oh, cut it, J. K.," I said pettishly. "I tell you I don't care what he believes! The next thing you'll be telling me is that I ought to take a job in his warehouse!"
"You might do worse," said Joe.
"What?" I demanded indignantly.
"That's just what I said. If you'd go on a paper and learn to write like a regular man I'd be tickled to death. But if all you want to be in life is a young Guy de Maupassant and turn out little gems for the girls, then I say you'd be a lot better off if you went into your father's warehouse and began telling Wall Street to get off the roof!"
"Thank you," I said stiffly.
From that talk Joe and I began drifting apart. I never brought him home again, I saw less of him at college. And at the end of the college year he went to New York, where he found a job on a paper.
And so all through my senior year I was left undisturbed to "queer" myself in my own sweet way, which was to slave for hours over Guy de Maupassant and other foreign authors, write stories and sketches by the score, and with two other "Ishmaelites" plan for a year's work in Paris. The French prof was delighted and spurred us on with glowing accounts of life in "the Quarter." One of us wanted to be a painter. No place for that like Paris! Another an architect—Paris! Myself a writer—Paris! For what could American writers to-day, with their sentimental little yarns covering with a laugh or a tear all the big deep facts of life, show to compare to the unflinching powerful work of the best writers over in France? In Paris they were training men to write of life as it really is! How that prof did drum it in. Better still, how he talked it up to my mother—the last time she came to college.
I soon found she was on my side. If only she could bring father around.
I still remember vividly that exciting night in June when the three of us, back there at home, sat on the terrace and fought it out. I remember the beauty of the night, I mean of the night up there in the garden under the stars, my mother's garden and her stars, and of the hideous showing put up by my father's harbor below.
Of course he opposed my going abroad. His old indifference to me had vanished, I saw he regarded me now as worth while, grown up, a business asset worth fighting for. And my father fought. He spoke abruptly, passionately of the great chance on the docks down there. I remember being surprised at his talk, at the bigness and the intensity of this hunger of his for ships. But of what he said I remembered nothing, I did not hear, for I was eyeing my mother.
I saw she was watching him pityingly. Why? What argument had she still to use? I waited in increasing suspense.
"So that's all there is to it," I heard him end. "You might as well get it right out of your head. You're not going over to Europe to fool away any more of your time. You're going to buckle down right here."
"Billy, leave us alone," said my mother.
What in the name of all the miracles did she do to him that night—my mother so frail (she had grown so of late), my father so strong? The next day she told me he had consented.
I saw little of him in the next two weeks. He left me alone with her every evening. But when I watched him he looked changed—beaten and broken, older. In spite of myself I pitied him now, and a confused uneasiness, almost remorse, came over me at the way I had opposed him. "What's come over Dad?" I wondered. Once I saw him look at my mother, and his look was frightened, crushed. What was it she had told him?
Those evenings I read "Pendennis" aloud for the third time to my mother. It had been our favorite book, and I took anxious pains to show her how I loved it still. But once chancing to look quickly up, I caught my mother watching me with a hungriness and an utter despair such as I'd never seen before. It struck me cold, I looked away—and suddenly I realized what a selfish little beast I was, beside this woman who loved me so and whom I was now leaving. My throat contracted sharply. But when I looked back the look was gone, and in its place was a quiet smile.
"Oh, my boy, you must do fine work," she said. "I want it so much more than anything else in my whole life. In my whole life," she repeated. I came over to her chair, bent over her and kissed her hard.
"I'm sorry I'm going! I'm sorry!" I whispered. "But mammy! It's only for a year!"
Why did that make her cling to me so? If only she had told me.
But what young egotists we sons are. It was only a few days later that with my two college chums, from the deck of an ocean liner, I said good-by to the harbor.
"Thank God I'm through with you at last."
I was in Paris for two years.
In those first weeks of deep delight I called it, "The Beautiful City of Grays." For this town was certainly mellowed down. No jar of an ugly present here, no loud disturbing harbor. But on the other hand, no dullness of a fossilized past. What college had been supposed to do this city did, it took the past and made it alive, richly, thrillingly alive, and wove it in with the present. In the first Sorbonne lectures, even with my meager French, I felt this at once, I wanted to feel it. These profs were brilliant, sparkling, gay. They talked as though Rousseau and Voltaire, Hugo, Balzac and Flaubert, Maupassant and all the rest were still vital dazzling news to the world, because these men were still molding the world. And from here exploring out over the town, I was smilingly greeted everywhere by such affable gracious old places, that seemed to say:
"We've been written about for a thousand years, and now you also wish to write. How charming of you. Please sit down. Garçon, un bock."
And I sat down. Scenes from the books of my great idols rose around every corner, or if they didn't I made them rise. There was pride in the process. To go to the Place de la République, take a seat before some cheap, jolly café, squint out at the Place with an artist's eye, reconstruct the Bastille, the Great Revolution, dream back of that to Rousseau and Voltaire and the way they shook the world by their writings—and then wake up and find that I had been at it for three mortal hours! What a chap I was for dreams. I must be quite a genius. There were hours with Hugo in Notre Dame in one of its most shadowy corners; with Zola on top of a 'bus at night as it lumbered up into the Belleville slums; with Balzac in an old garden I found; with Guy de Maupassant everywhere, in the gay hum and lights of those endless cafés, from bridges at sunset over the Seine, or far up the long rich dusk of the Champs Élysées, lights twinkling out, and his women laughing, chattering by.
Nothing left in this rich old world but the harbor? Nothing beautiful, fine or great for an eager, hungry, happy young man? I could laugh! I knew now that the harbor had lied! For into this radiant city not only the past but the whole present of the earth appeared to me to be pouring in. Painters, sculptors, writers and builders were here from all nations, with even some Hindus and Japs thrown in, young, bringing all their dreams and ambitions, their gaiety, their vigor and zest.
"Young men are lucky. They will see great things."
Voltaire had said that about thirty years before the French Revolution. It had been true then, true ever since, it was true to-day and here—though our great things I felt very sure were not to come in violence—the world had gone beyond all that. No, these immense surprises that were lurking just before us, these astounding miracles that were to rise before our eyes, would come in the unfolding of the powers in men's minds, working free and ranging wide, with a deep resistless onward rush—in the stirring times of peace!
And we were not only to see great things but we were all to do them! That was the very keynote of the place. Here a fellow could certainly write if only he had it in him. Impatiently I slaved at my French. Five hours sleep was plenty.
In the small apartment we had taken just on the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, on the nights when we were working at home, one of us at his easel, another at his drafting board, myself at my desk, we would knock off at about eleven o'clock and come down for beer and a long smoke in front of the café below. A homely little place it was, with two rows of small iron tables in front, and at one of these we would seat ourselves. Behind us in the window was a long glass tank of gold fish, into which from time to time a huge cat would reach an omnivorous paw. Often from within the café we would hear Russian folk songs played on balalaikas by a group of Russian students there. And between the songs a low hubbub rose, in French and many other tongues, for here were French and Germans, English and Bohemians, Russians and Italians, all gathered here while they were young.
How serene the old city seemed those nights. The street outside was quiet. The motor 'bus, that pest of Paris, had not yet appeared. Only an occasional cab would come tinkling on its way. Our street was absurdly short. At one end was a gay cluster of lights from the crowded cafés of the "Boul' Mich'," at the other were the low lighted arches at the back of the Odéon, from which when the play was over fluffy feminine figures would emerge from the stage entrance; we would hear their low musical voices as they came merrily by us in cabs. Other figures would pass. Across the street before us rose the trees and the lofty iron fence of the Gardens, with a rich gloom of shrubs behind, and against this background figures in groups and alone and in couples would come strolling by with their happiness or hurrying eagerly toward it. Or to what else were they hurrying? From what were they coming so slowly away?
These strangers in this setting thrilled me. Comedy, tragedy, character, plot—there seemed nothing in life but the writing of tales—watching, listening, dreaming, finding, then becoming deeply excited, feeling them grow inside of you, planning them out and writing them off, then working them over and over and over, little by little building them up. What a rich absorbing life for a fellow, and for me it still lay all ahead. I had used but twenty-two years of my life, there were fifty left to write in, and what couldn't you write in fifty years!
Often, sitting here at night, I would get an idea and begin to work, and I would keep on until at last the enormous old woman who kept the café—we called her "The Blessed Damozel"—would come lumbering out and good humoredly growl,
"Couches-toi donc. Une heure vient de sonner."
There came a brief interruption. Into our street's procession one evening, over its round cobblestones on a bicycle that wearily wobbled, there came a lean dusty figure with something distinctly familiar in the stoop of the big shoulders.
"Hello, boys," said a deep gruff voice.
"J. K.!"
It was. Joe Kramer arriving in Paris at midnight on a punctured tire, and cursing the cobblestone pavements over which he had hunted us out.
A hot supper, a bottle of wine, a genial beam on all three of us, and Joe told his story. After leaving college, from New York he had gone to Kansas City, and by the "livest paper" there he had been sent abroad with a bike to do a series of "Sunday specials." He had come over steerage and written an exposé of his passage. He had two weeks for Paris and then was off to Berlin and Vienna.
"I'm just breaking ground this time, boys," he said. "I want to get the hang of the countries and a start in their infernal languages."
The next day he began to break ground in our city. Early the next morning I found Joe propped up in bed scowling into Le Matin as he tried to butt his way through the language into the news events of the day. What I tried to tell him of the Paris I had found made no appeal whatever.
"All right, Kid," he said indulgently. "If I had a dozen lifetimes I might be a poet. But I haven't, so I'll just be a reporter."
And he and his bike plunged into the town. He found its "newspaper row" that day and a Frenchman to whom he had a letter. With this man Joe went to the Bourse and that night to the Chamber of Deputies. He got "Sunday specials" out of them both, and then went on to the Bourse de Travail. And in the few spare moments he had, Joe told us of the things he had seen. Rumors of war and high finance, trade unions, strikes and sabotage burst on my startled artist's ears. It made me think of the harbor! This was not my Paris!
"It is," said J. K. stoutly. "There's no place like a newspaper office to put you right next to the heart of a town."
He would not hear to our seeing him off. I remember him that last night after supper strapping his bag onto his bike and starting off down our quiet old street on his way to the station.
"To-morrow," he said, "I'll stop off in Leipsic. I want to have a look at the college that stirred my young grandfather up for life. I've got his diary with me."
Again, in spite of the gruffness, I felt that wistful quality in him. J. K. was hunting for something too.
But what a relief to see him go, to forget his loud disturbing Paris and again drink deep of mine, the city of great writers.
"I'll never really know them," I thought, "until I can not only talk but think and feel in their language."
So I drudged for hours a day in my room. I inflicted my French on my chums at meals, on defenseless drivers of 'buses who could not rise and go away, and on the Blessed Damozel, who said:
"Va donc, cherches-toi une fille. C'est la seule manière d'apprendre le Français."
I was vaguely thrilled by this idea, the more because so far in my life I had had no experience of the kind. On the streets, in cabs, and in cafés I began watching women with different eyes, more eagerly selecting eyes that picked out of the throng the one her of the moment so that for me she was quite alone. She was alone for a thousand reasons, different ones in every case. She was of many ages, rich and poor, now gorgeous and now simply dressed, now a ravishing creature that took your breath and again just funny and very French with a saucy way of wearing her clothes. Her fascinations were always new. I watched her twinkling earrings, her trick of using her lips when she smiled, her hands, her silk clad ankles, her swelling young bust, the small coquettish hat she wore, her shoulders, their expressive shrugs, her quick vivacious movements—and I watched her eyes. Her eyes would meet mine now and then, often with only a challenging smile but again in an intimate dazzling way that gave me a deep swift shock of delight and left me confused and excited.
"In a little while," I thought. I decided to wait till I knew more French. "She'll be strange enough, God knows," I thought half apprehensively, "even when I can talk her language." And with a feeling almost of relief I would plunge back into my work and forget her. For me she was only an incident in this teeming radiant life.
I must learn French! I strained my ears at lectures, at plays from the top gallery, I hired a tutor to hurry it on. Years later in New York I met a Russian revolutionist come to raise money for his cause. "Three weeks have I been in this country," he said in utter exasperation. "And not yet do I speak fluently the English!" That was how I felt about French. What a delight to begin to feel easy, to catch the fine shadings, the music and color of words and of phrases. How much more pliant and smooth and brilliant than English. How remote from the harbor.
I could study my models now, not only their construction but their small character touches as well. De Maupassant was still first for me. So simple and sure, with so few strokes but each stroke counting to the full, one suggestive sentence making you imagine the rest, everything else in the world shut out, your mind gripped suddenly and held, focussed on this man and this woman who a moment before had been nothing to you but were now more real than life itself. Especially this woman, what an absorbing creature he made her—and the big human ideas he injected into these petites histoires.
I wrote short stories by the score. Each one had a perfectly huge idea but each seemed worse than the one before. I took to myself the advice of Flaubert, and from a table before a café I would watch the people around me and jot down the minutest details, I filled whole pages with my strokes. But which to choose to make this person or this scene like no other in the world? There came the rub. How had De Maupassant done it? The answer came to me one night:
"Not only by watching people. He talked to 'em, lived with 'em, knew their lives!"
The very thing my music teacher had said about Beethoven. How uneasy I had been then, how absurdly young and priggish then in the gingerly way I had gone at the harbor. Thank heaven there was no harbor here. I could enter this life with a wholehearted zest.
I began with one of my roommates. He was to be an architect. A hard-working little chap, his days were filled with sharp suspense. The Beaux Arts entrance examinations were close ahead. If he did not pass, he told me, his parents in Ohio were too poor to give him another chance.
"If I have to go back to Ohio now," he said in that soft reflective voice of his, "I'll put up cowsheds—later on, barns—and maybe when I'm fifty, a moving picture theater. If I stay here and go back a Beaux Arts man, I can go to New York or Chicago and get right into the center of the big things being done."
With a wet towel bound around his head he used to sit at his work half the night. I watched the lines tighten about his thin lips and between his gray eyes, grew to know the long weariness in them over some problem, the sudden grim joy when the problem worked out. One day he came home early.
"Queer," he said simply. "I can see one side of your face, one side of your body, one leg and one arm. But the other side don't seem to be there." I looked up at him a moment.
"Let's go out for a walk," I suggested. We went for a stroll in the Gardens. And here I was surprised and just a bit ashamed to find that while I had a real sympathy for him I had just as real curiosity. For here was a living illustration of the horror of going blind. I could see his jaws set like a vise, I could hear his low voice talking steadily on as though to keep from thinking. What was he thinking? What was he feeling? We talked of the most commonplace things. But moment by moment, through his voice and his grip on my arm, those sudden waves now of sickening fear, now of keen suspense, now of angry groping around for a foothold, seemed pouring from him right into me, became part of me—while the other part of me stood off and listened.
"By God, this is life!" said one part of me. "No, it isn't; it's hell," growled the other part. "This thing has got to be settled!"
I took him to an oculist, and there I had another close view, this time of intense relief.
"Blind? Why, no, you're not going blind," said the oculist kindly. "All you need is"—I heard nothing more. I had never had any idea before of how swift and deep relief could be. On the street outside I heard it not only in his unsteady laugh but in my own as well. We celebrated long that night, and very late he took me to his favorite place down on the lower quay of the river, where with the lights and the sounds of the city far off it felt like some old dungeon. But just over our heads hung the heavy black arch of a stone bridge, and looking up through this arch as a frame we could see close above a gray, luminous mass rising and rising in great sweeping lines till it filled half the sky—silent, tremendous, Notre Dame. From down here the old edifice seemed alive. And though my friend talked little here, I felt him again coming into me. And this time it was his religion that came, his curious passion for building.
When at last we went home he could see my whole body, and I felt as though I had seen his whole soul.
Then I carefully wrote this down on paper. I put in every touch that I could remember. I rewrote it to make it big, and I made it so big I spoiled it all. I tore this up and began again. For about two weeks I wrote nothing else. But at last I tore up everything. After all, he was a friend of mine.
"But where's the harm," I argued, "so long as I always tear it up? This is real stuff. I'll get somewhere this way if I keep on."
And I did keep on. Shamelessly I wormed my way into friends by the dozen. I found it such an absorbing pursuit I could hardly wait to finish up one before I went on to another. There were such a bewildering lot of them, now that I had pried open my eyes. Would-be painters, sculptors, poets, dramatists, novelists, rich and poor, tragic ones and comic ones, with the meanest pettiest jealousies, the most bumptious self-conceits, the blindest worship of masters, the most profound humility, ambition so savage it made men inhuman. Many were starving themselves to death.
There was a little Hungarian Jew, an ardent follower of Matisse.
"Technique?" he cried. "It is nothing! To grip your soul in your two hands and press it on your canvas—that is art, that is Matisse!"
He took me night after night through old buildings up in Montparnasse, immense and dismal rookeries crowded with Poles, Bohemians and God knows what other races, all feverish post-impressionists. Often we would find three together close around one candle, scowling and squinting at their easels, gaunt, silent, eager. Matisse—Matisse!
"Most of them," said my guide, "are just mad. They cannot paint. All think they are going to do great things, but all they are going to do is to die."
It was through this little Hungarian that I made my first study of female life.
Why delay any longer? I had been in Paris over six months, and I had qualms almost of guilt at the thought of this chastity of mine. At first I said, "Art is a jealous mistress." And this did splendidly for a time. But then a stout German youth came along and laid it down as an absolute law that no writer could do a woman right until he had lived with a dozen. Hence that scented little cat with whom he had lived for the past year. She was the first of the dozen, eh? Damn the fellow, how much was there in it? De Maupassant certainly hadn't held off. In fact there were few of my idols who had. Why not be brave and take the plunge? It need not be such a terrific plunge; no doubt if I went at it right I could find a safe, easy kind of a her, friendly and confiding, a thoroughly good fellow with none of these wild ups and downs. The less temperament the better; she must have a good quiet head on her shoulders; no doubt we would need it. And she must not be too young. Let her have had affairs enough to know that ours was only one more and would probably be as brief as the rest—the briefer the better.
So tamely I pictured my first love. And the gay old city of Paris smiled, and in that bantering way of hers she brought to me in a café one night a perfect young tigress of a girl, a lithe, dusky beauty with smouldering eyes, and said:
"Without doubt this one is better for you. Regard what loveliness, what fire! Oh, my son, why not be brave?"
I was not brave, I barely spoke, and my friend the little Hungarian Jew who had brought her to my table was forced to do the talking. For she, too, was silent. But how different was her silence from the quiet I had pictured. Presently, however, I became a little easier, and by degrees we began to talk. She told me she was a painter. An Armenian by birth, she had run away from home at eighteen, and here for two years in Julien's she had tried to paint till she felt she'd go mad. She talked in abrupt, eager sentences, breaking off to watch people around us. How her big eyes fastened upon them. "To watch faces until you are sure—and then paint! There is nothing else in the world!" she said. And I found this reassuring.
After that I saw her many nights. And from time to time breaking that silence of hers, she became so fiercely confiding, not only about her painting, but about what she called her innermost soul, that soon I could look my De Maupassant square in the face, man to man, for I was learning a lot about women. As yet we were friends and nothing more, but I could feel both of us changing fast. "In a little while," I thought.
But alas. One night she took me up to her room and showed me her paintings. They were bad. They were fearfully bad, and my face must have shown the impression they made.
"You consider them frightful!" she exclaimed. I stoutly denied it, but things only went from bad to worse. Here was that temperament I had dreaded. Now she was clutching both my arms.
"Mon dieu! Why not say it? Why cannot you say it?"
"No," I replied. "You have done some extremely powerful work!" Anything to quiet her nerves. "Especially this one—look—over here!" And I pointed to one of her pictures.
"I will show you how I shall look at it!" she cried in a perfect frenzy of tears. She snatched up a knife that lay on her table, a very old, curved, Armenian knife, and went at the painting and slashed it to shreds, and then scattered the shreds all over the room.
And watching this little festival, I thought to myself excitedly,
"I know enough about this girl!"
My retreat was so precipitate as to appear almost a flight.
"Yes," I said to myself, outside, "De Maupassant knew women. And he went insane at forty-five."
And so my next case was a chap from Detroit, whose aim, he told me, was no less than to make himself "by the sheer force of my will a perfect, all-round, modern man."
It was over his case that I lost what was left of my sense of honor. For I not only wrote him down, I kept what I had written. "Ten years from now," I said in excuse, "I won't believe him unless he's on paper." But having kept this, I began keeping others, until my locked drawer was filled with the dreams and ambitions and even the loves of my confiding, innocent friends. At last I was a writer.
What a relief when my mother wrote that my father had consented to a second year abroad for me. In my gratitude I even grew just a trifle homesick.
"Hadn't I better come home for the summer?" I wrote her.
"No," she replied, "we cannot afford it. I want you to keep right on with your work. I feel so sure you are working hard and will do things I shall be proud of."
I was not only working, but living, feeling, listening hard, under the stimulus day and night of the tense, rich life around me. About this time I made a friend of a gaunt, bearded Russian chap, whose dream for years had been, like mine, to become a writer of fiction. His god had been Turgenief. And a year ago, leaving his home, a little town near Moscow, with forty roubles in his purse he had set out on foot with a pack on his back to tramp the long and winding road that stretched away two thousand miles to the distant city of Paris, the place where his idol had lived and studied and written for so many years. Through this young Russian pilgrim I came to know the books of some of his countrymen, and through him I caught glimpses down into the vast, mysterious soul of that people in the North.
Through other chaps I met those days, other deep, tremendous vistas opened up as backgrounds for these Paris friends of mine. Half the night, in that café endeared to so many youths of all nations under its name of "The Dirty Spoon," I heard talk about all things under the sun, talk that was a merry war of words, ideas and points of view as wide apart as that of a Jap and a German. For every land upon the earth had sent its army of ideas, and they all charged together here, and the walls of the Dirty Spoon resounded with the battle—with roars of laughter and applause. For we were of free, tolerant minds. We were gay, young dogs of war who had left our tails behind us—our tails of prejudice, distrust—and our emancipated souls had only scorn for hatreds born of race or creed. Like J. K., we had rid ourselves of all creeds past and present—but J. K. had always been free with a scowl, his feet set grimly on the ground—we here were free with a verve and a dash that took us careering up into the stars to laugh at the very heavens.
There was breadth in our very manner of speech. For here were we from all over the earth, all speaking one tongue, the language in which half the things that had moved the world had been said by men before us. And what sparkling things there were still to be said, what dazzling things we would see and do, in this prodigious onward march of the armies of peace, out of all dark ages into a glad new world for men, where our great smiling goddess of all the arts would reign supreme, where we would dream mighty visions of life and all these visions would come true.
So we saw the world those days in the radiant city on the Seine.
And meanwhile far up in the North, the Russian Czar, having started with loud ostentation the movement for a world-wide peace, was swiftly completing his preparations to strike with his armies at Japan. And the other nations of Europe, jealous and suspicious of each other's every secret plan—they, too, were making ready for what the future years might bring.
"Young men are lucky. They will see great things."
And these young men have seen great things. But they have not been lucky.
It was about a year after this that again Joe Kramer broke in on my dreams.
He arrived early on a raw, wet morning in the following winter. His all-night ride from Cherbourg had left him disheveled, unshaven and hungry.
"Well, boys," he asked when our greetings were over, "what do you think of the news?"
"What news?"
Joe gave us a grim, fatherly smile.
"Say. Do I have to come all the way from Chicago to tell you what's happening down the street? Well, you young beauty boosters, there's a panic on the Bourse this week that's got your fair city flat on her back. And the cause of the said panic is that France is in deep on Russian bonds, which are now worth about a cent to the dollar. Because the Russian people—already dead sick of the war with Japan—have risen in a howling mob against their government. See?"
"I did hear of that," said the painter among us. "A Polish chap in the studio said something about it yesterday."
"Now, did he?" said the ironical Joe. "Just kind of murmured it, I suppose, while bending reverently over his art." He rose. "Well, boys, I'm sorry for you, but I've only got a day in this town, I'm off for Russia on the night train. Bill, I wish you'd help me here. I've got an awful lot to do and my French is still a little weak."
It was not at all weak, it was strong and loud. I can hear it still, Joe Kramer's French, and it is a fitting memory of that devastating day.
The day began so splendidly, so big with promise of great ideas. I grew quite excited about it. Here was Joe on his way to a real revolution. Sent out by his Chicago paper, he was going to Russia to see a whole people fight to be free—a struggle prophesied long ago by Turgenief, Tolstoy and other big Russians whose work I admired. And now it was actually coming off—and Joe, the lucky devil, was going to be right on hand! From some mysterious source in New York he had secured a letter to a Russian revolutionist leader who for many years had been an exile here in Paris. Joe was anxious to see him at once.
"All right," I said eagerly. "Give me his address."
"Hold on," J. K. retorted. "It's not so easy as all that. I want to get into Russia. This man's house in Paris is watched day and night by the Russian secret police, and nobody who's seen with him has a chance of crossing the frontier. We've got to go slow."
"What'll we do?"
"I want you to steer me first to a Frenchman. He's an anarchist. Here's his address."
The anarchist was a bit disappointing. A mild little man, we found him in an attic room receiving a vigorous scolding from the huge blonde with whom he lived. But after reading Joe's letter, he, too, took on a mysterious air. He came with us in our cab, and off we went over Paris until I thought we should never end. Again and again the cab would stop and our guide would darkly disappear. But from one of these trips he returned triumphant.
"I have found his wife," he announced. "But she says she must have a look at you first." The cab rattled off, and the next stop was in front of a public library.
"Now," said our guide, "go in and sit down at a table and pretend you are reading."
We went in and did as he said. Soon a middle-aged woman in black sat down at the other side of the table. She stared at us gloomily a moment; then with a yawn she opened a book and calmly started making notes. Presently, scowling over her work, she began muttering to herself.
"You must not look up," I heard in French. "A Russian spy sits over there. You wish to see my husband. Come to-night at nine o'clock to the second floor of the Café Voltaire. He will be at the top of the stairs. Good-by." And she yawned again over her writing.
"Now, this," I thought, "is a revolution!" I thoroughly approved of this. The Café Voltaire was an excellent choice, an almost perfect mise-en-scène. It had long been one of my favorite haunts. A tall white wooden building, so toned down, so tumbled down, so heavy laden with memories of poets, dramatists, pamphleteers and fiery young orators, who had sat here and conspired and schemed and exhorted over human rights. It had well lived up to its glorious name. What great ideas had started from here! Here French history had been made!
But alas! Into this hallowed spot that night, at nine o'clock on his way to his train, came Joe in a yellow mackintosh with a brand-new suitcase in his hand—and showed me history in the making. It was made in a small, stuffy room upstairs. On the one side J. K. with a million American readers behind him, on the other this revolutionist whose name that week had been in newspapers all over the world. So far, so good. But look at him, look at this history maker. Tall, sallow and dyspeptic, a professor of economics. Romance, liberty, history, thrill? Not at all. They talked of factories, wages, strikes, of railroads, peasants' taxes, of plows and wheat and corn and hay! They got quite excited over hay.
And all this had to come through their defenseless interpreter—me. My head ached, one foot fell asleep. The Social Democratic Party, the Social Revolutionist Party, the Constitutional Democrats, in and out of my head they trooped. If this be revolution, then God save the king! Crushed to earth, as we left at last, my head still buzzing with economics, I looked dismally back on my poor café, on liberty, justice and human rights. There was something as bad as the harbor in Joe; he was always spoiling everything.
"Why don't you take Carlyle's French Revolution along?" I suggested forlornly. "You might read it on the train."
"Because, you poor kid, he's way out of date."
It took me days to get into my work.
About two months later, back he came. From one of our front windows he looked down into the old Gardens, into all the loveliness the April twilight was bringing there, and,
"Where can I get a typewriter?" he asked. "I've got such an awful lot of stuff that I want to dictate it right off the bat."
This was literature in the making. For hours in Joe's room that week I sat and heard him make it. In one corner lay a heap of dirty shirts and collars, in another a stack of papers and books. An English stenographer sat at the window, J. K. strode up and down and talked. It was real enough, this narrative. Facts and figures, he had them down cold, to back up with a crushing force the points he was making against the Czar. Poverty, tyranny, bloody oppression, wholesale slaughter of a people in a half-mad monarch's war—Joe pounded them in with sledgehammer blows. He not only made you sure they were true, he made you sure that these things must be stopped and that you as a decent American certainly wanted to help with your money. And as for the revolution itself, he left no doubt in your mind about that. It was there all right, Joe had seen people give up their lives, he had seen men and women clubbed and shot down, he had been so near he had seen the blood. (But he made human blood so darned commonplace, curse him!) And in Petersburg for two long nights he had gone about a city in darkness, every street light put out by the strikers, the streets filled with surging black masses of figures. Yes, Joe had certainly seen big things.
Then what was the matter with me, I thought, that all this did not thrill me? "Young men are lucky. They will see great things." All right, here was one of my great things, a whole nation rising to throw off its chains, to show the world that wars must cease—and to me it didn't seem great at all, it seemed only big, and there was a world of difference. Big? It was enormous, not only what Joe had seen up there, but what he was doing right here in this room. He was talking to a million people, damn him, and doubtless this was just the kind of writing that would appeal to them. Thousands of his commonplace readers would send their dollars to Russia, where dyspeptic professors of economics would use the money to hire halls, into which millions of commonplace Russians would crowd to hear about strikes, wages, taxes and hay! And then some more commonplace blood would be shed, the dyspeptic professors would be put in office—and this was a modern revolution!
Was everything modern only big? Must I always have that feeling the harbor used to give me?
"No!" I decided angrily. The fault didn't lie in me nor in Russia, but in J. K. and the way he was writing. As I followed that blunt narrative of his journey through cities and factory towns, into deep forests, across snowy plains and through little hamlets half buried in snow and filled with the starving families of the men who had gone to the war, I tried to picture it all to myself—not as he described it, confound him, but with all the beauty which must have been there. Ye Gods of the Road, what a journey! What tremendous canvases teeming with life, such strange, dramatic significant life! What a chance for a writer!
One night on a train whose fifth-class cars, cattle cars and nothing more, were packed with wounded men from the front, out of one of those traveling hells Joe had pulled a peasant boy half drunk, and by the display of a bottle of vodka had enticed him into his own compartment in a second-class car ahead. The boy's right arm was a loathsome sight, festering from a neglected wound. Amputation was plainly a matter of days. But it was not to forget that grim event that the boy had jumped off at each little station to spend his few kopecks on vodka. No, he was stolidly getting drunk because, as he confided to Joe, at dawn he would come to his home town and there he knew he was going to tell twenty-six wives that their men had been killed. He laboriously counted them off on his fingers—each wife and each husband by their long, homely Russian names. Then he burst into half-drunken sobs and pounded the window ledge with his fist. It was the fist of his right arm, and the kid gave a queer, sharp scream of pain.
If Voltaire had been there he would have come back and described that peasant boy he'd seen in a way that would have gripped men's souls and sent a great shudder over the world at war and what it meant to mankind—while Joe was simply slapping it down like some hustling, keen reporter.
"Look here, Joe; you make me sick!" I exploded at last. "You ought to stick right here for months and work on this wonderful stuff you've got till there's nothing left you can possibly do!"
"Be an artist, eh, a poet, a great writer." He gave me one of those fatherly smiles. "I've got some things to say to you, Kid. I don't like the life you're leading."
"Don't you? Why don't you?" I rejoined. And so began a fight that lasted as long as he was in Paris.
Nothing that I had been doing here made any appeal whatever to Joe. I showed him my sketch of Notre Dame from under that old bridge at night.
"Yes," he said, "this is fine writing, awful fine. But it has about as much meaning to me as a woman's left ear. What's the use of sitting down under a bridge and looking up at an ancient church and trying to feel like a two-spot? For God's sake, Bill, get it out of your system, quit getting reverent over the past. You're sitting here at the feet of the Masters, fellahs who were all right in their day, but are now every one of 'em out of date. And you're so infernally busy copying their technique and style and trying to learn just how to write, that you're getting nothing to write about. Why can't you go to life for your stuff?"
"Go to life?" I said indignantly. "I've done nothing else for over a year!"
"Show me."
"Here!"
He read more of my sketches.
"But damn it, Bill, these people aren't alive. They're only a bunch of artist kids as reverent over the past as yourself, they have about as much connection with anything live and vital to-day as so many mediæval monks. You fellahs think you're free of creeds. You're the creediest kids I ever saw, your religion is style, technique and form. For God's sake lose it and use your own eyes, forget you're an artist and be a reporter, come out in the world and have a try. You'll find so much stuff you won't need any plots, you'll simply report events as they happen. And you won't have any time for technique, the next event will be tuning up before you've got to the end of the last. With a big daily paper behind him a good reporter can follow the front page around the world. Russia's on the front page now. All right, you can go to Russia. By June it may be Hindustan, or Pittsburgh, Turkey or China. Believe me, Bill, the nations of this planet are working themselves into a state where they're ready to do things you never dreamed of. I'm not talking of kings and governments, I'm talking of the people themselves, the people in such excited crowds that nobody knows who's who or what's next.
"I saw my first crowd in Petersburg the very day I got off the train. They filled a street from wall to wall and as far as you could see. They weren't saying a word or singing a song, and there wasn't even a drum to keep time. But they moved along with their wives and kids as though they'd left home, job and church, and were looking for something else so hard they didn't care for bullets. I saw 'em shot down like so many sheep. But bullets won't stop what I saw in their eyes. God knows I don't want a religion. I'm no socialist nor anarchist. But if there's one thing I want to hang on to it's my belief in the common crowd. They've had a raw deal since the world began. They can have the whole earth whenever they want it. And they're beginning to want it hard!
"Forget your own name and jump into the crowd, write and don't stop to remember you're writing! The place you need is the U. S. A.—and the work you need is a job on a paper!"
"Are you through?" I snapped.
"I am!"
"All right," said I. "I'm going to stay just where I am! I'm not going to be yanked by you all over the earth, to write news articles on the run! I'm going to stick in one place—right here—and take my time and learn my job. I don't want to write news, I want to write books. I'd rather write one good novel than all the headline stuff in the world. It's books that make the headlines."
"Books?" Joe's look was funny.
"Sure they do. Take Russia. What started this whole revolution! Books. It didn't start with your common crowds—they were all eating fried onions. It started with a few writers of novels!"
"Who left their little mahogany desks," said Joe, "got into peasant clothes and went to live with the peasants!"
"Oh no they didn't. Only a few. Turgenief didn't. Tchernichefsky didn't. Dostoiefsky——"
"Say. Are they Russians? I never heard their names up there."
I looked at J. K. thoughtfully.
"No," I said. "You wouldn't. As yet they're not quite crowdy enough. But they are Russians and their ideas made most of the first revolutionists. The whole revolution was started by books."
"It wasn't," snapped Joe. "It was taxes. Their taxes were doubled because of the war, and——"
"Oh, damn your war taxes, and damn your plows and your corn and hay! You've got a hay mind, that's the trouble with you! You've got so you think that hay and bread and pork and beans are all men live and die for! They don't, Mister Reporter, they die for ideals—freedom, democracy, human rights—which are in 'em so deep that when a big writer sees 'em there and brings 'em out and holds 'em up and says, 'Here! This is you, this is what you want, this is what you believe in!'—your crowd says, 'Sure! Why didn't we see it long ago?' And then they do things that go into headlines! But to be able to write like that a man can't go chasing all over the earth, he's got to quit sneering at art and technique, he's got to learn how to make characters real and build plots that make readers sit up all night to see what becomes of the people he's made! If believing that is a creed, then I'm creedy! I'm willing to throw over everything else, but I'll hang on to this one thing all my life—the fact that big art means working like hell!"
"Gee," said J. K. "What an artist."
These fights of ours left me weak and sore, as though I'd been back on the terrace at home, listening to my father talk and looking at his harbor.
When Joe left me in peace at last, just for the sake of the rest and change I turned my attention to music, or, rather, to a musical friend, a young Bohemian composer who lived wholly in a world of his own. I explored this musical world of his, by his side in dark top galleries, in the Café Rouge on concert nights, in his room at his piano. How deliciously far away from hay was this chap's feeling for Mozart. With him I could feel sure of myself, of the way I was living for my art, of what my mother way back at the start had called the "fine things" in humanity.
I remember the night we heard "Bohème" from the gallery of the Opéra Comique. I remember the talk we had late that night, and my walk by the edge of the Gardens home—and the letter and the cable that I found waiting on my desk. The letter was from my father and told me that my mother was dying. The cable told me she was dead.
I remember learning that letter by heart on that long ocean voyage home. This was no sudden illness, I learned, my mother had known of it while I was home, known that she had it and that it was fatal. That was the news she had told my father alone that night on the terrace! That was why she had been so eager to get me away to Paris; that was why she had kept me abroad!
"She did not want you to see how she looked," my father wrote. "She wanted you to remember her always as she was when you saw her last."
I remembered her now. What a young beast I had been to forget her, to drop her so utterly out of my thoughts in that selfish happy Paris life, when it was she who had sent me there, when it was she who had set me free for a time from the harbor which was now dragging me back, when it was she from the very start who had fostered this passion for "all that is fine." I remembered her now—remembered and remembered—until her dear image filled me.
My father's letter went on to tell how she had fought for her life. Three operations, all three of them failures, but still she had held bravely on in hopes of some new discovery which science might make and so bring her a cure. A thought suddenly gripped me and struck me cold. It had all depended on science, on men working calmly and coldly along in laboratories all over the world, while my mother had held to her thread of life and hoped that these laboratory gods would hurry, hurry while yet there was time! How many thousands like her every day, every hour all over the world were watching those gods with that awful suspense. For they were the only gods that were left, and a comfortless set of gods they were! They were like J. K., they had hay minds! They were businesslike, relentless, cold, they belonged to the world of the harbor! My mother's kind god was a myth and a joke, with no power here one way or the other. I felt that now, I had thought it before, only thought it, with that gay freedom of thought we had aired back there in Paris. But I knew now that deep underneath I had believed all along in this god of hers, as I had in my beautiful goddess of art and in all the things that were fine. It had taken this news from the harbor to bring him tottering, crashing down. For no god like hers would have let her die! And I felt fear now, the fear of Death, whom I'd never really noticed before and who now seemed to say to me,
"She is nothing—has gone nowhere—she is only dead!"
And fiercely in a bewildered way I rebelled against this emptiness. I rebelled against this world of hay that was so abruptly dragging me back to a sense of its almighty grip on my life. When my ship came up the Bay, the world looked harsh and gray to me, though there was a bright and sunny glare on the muddy waves of the harbor.
My mother had been buried several days before I reached home.
I found Sue waiting on the dock, and I saw with a little shock of surprise that my young sister was grown up. I had never noticed her much before. Sue and I had never got on from the start. She had been my father's chum and I had been my mother's. I had always felt her mocking smile toward me and all my solemn thoughts. And after that small catastrophe which I had had with Eleanore, I had more than ever avoided Sue and her girl friends. Then I had gone to college, and each time that I came home she had seemed to me all arms and legs, fool secrets and fool giggles—a most uninteresting kid. I remember being distinctly surprised when I brought Joe home for Christmas to find that he thought her quite a girl. But now she was all different. She had grown tall and graceful, lithe, and in her suit of mourning she looked so much older, her face thin and worn, subdued and softened by all she'd been through. For the weight of all those weary weeks had been upon her shoulders. There was something pitiful about her. I came up and kissed her awkwardly, then found myself suddenly holding her close. She clung to me and trembled a little. I found it hard to speak.
"I wish I'd been here, too," I said gruffly.
"I wish you had, Billy—it's been a long time."
All at once Sue and I had become close friends.
We had a long talk, at home that day, and she told me how our parents had drawn together in the last years, of how my poor mother had wanted my father close by her side and of how he had responded, neglecting his business and spending his last dollar on doctors, consultations and trips to sanitariums, anything to keep up her strength. He had even read "Pendennis" aloud. How changed he must have been to do that. I knew why she had wanted to hear it again. It had been our favorite book. I remembered how I had read it to her just before I went abroad, and how I had caught her watching me with that hungry despairing look in her eyes. What a young brute I had been to go!... For a time Sue's voice seemed far away. Then I heard her telling how over that story of a young author my mother had talked to my father of me.
"He's going to try to know you, Billy, and help you," said Sue. "He promised her that before she died. And I hope you're going to help him, too. He needs you very badly. You never understood father, you know. I don't believe you have any idea of what he has gone through in his business."
"What do you mean? Have things gone wrong?"
"I don't understand it very well. He hardly ever speaks of it. I think he'd better tell you himself."
That evening in his library, from my seat by the table, I furtively watched my father's face. He sat in a huge chair against the wall, with a smaller chair in front for his feet, his vest unbuttoned, his short heavy body settled low as he grimly kept his eyes on his book. The strong overhead light which shone on his face showed me the deeper lines, all the wrinkles, the broad loose pouch of skin on the throat, the gray color, the pain, the weakness and the age in his motionless eyes. What was going on in there? Sometimes it would seem an hour before he turned another page. All afternoon he had been at her grave.
He had given her no happy life. Was it of that he was thinking? I felt ashamed to be wondering, for he seemed so weak and old in his grief. Two years ago his hair had been gray, but he had still looked strong and hale. I could hardly feel now that he was the same man. I felt drawn to him now, I wished he would put down his book and talk and tell me everything about her.
But what an embarrassing job it is to get acquainted with one's father. When Sue had left us after dinner, there had been a few brief remarks and then this long tense silence. I, too, pretended to be reading.
"Your mother thought a lot of you, boy." He spoke at last so abruptly that I looked up at him with a start, and saw him watching me anxiously.
"Yes, sir." I looked quickly down, and our eyes did not meet again after that.
"It was her pluck that kept you in Paris—while she was dying."
I choked:
"I know."
"You don't know—not how she wanted you back—you'll never know. I wanted to write you to come home."
"I wish you had!"
"She wouldn't hear of it!"
"I see." Another silence. Why couldn't I think of something to say?
"She kept every letter you wrote her. They're up there in her bureau drawer. She was always reading 'em—over and over. She thought a lot of your writing, boy—of what you would do when—when she was dead." The last came out almost fiercely. I waited a moment, got hold of myself.
"Yes, sir," I brought out at last.
"I hope you'll make it all worth while."
"I will. I'll try. I'll do my best." I did not look up, for I could still feel his anxious eyes upon my face.
"Do you want to go back to Paris?"
"No, sir! I want to stay right here!" What was the matter with my fool voice?
"Have you got any plans for your writing here? How are you going about it to start?"
"Well, sir, to begin with—I've got some stuff I did abroad."
"Stories?"
"Not exactly——"
"Poems?" My father's look was tragic.
"No."
And I tried to explain what I had been doing. But my attempts to tell him of my work in Paris were as forced and as pathetic as his efforts to attend. More and more halting grew our talk, and it ended in a silence that seemed to have no end. Then I went to the fireplace, knocked the ashes out of my pipe, refilled it and relit it. When I returned he was reading his book, and with deep relief I took up mine. That much of it was over.
But again I found myself watching him. What was in my father's mind? Why this anxious almost humble tone? It made me wince, it made me ashamed. I sat there all evening pretending to read and feeling that he was doing the same.
"Good night, dad—I think I'll go to bed." Even this little came clumsily. I had never called him "dad" before.
"Good night, my boy. See you at breakfast."
"Yes, sir."
I glanced back as I turned down the hall and saw him staring after me.