CHAPTER LVI

Disheartening as this village and country life might seem as a permanent field of endeavor, it was pleasing enough as a spectacle or as the scene of a vacation. Although it was late February when I came and there was snow on the ground, a warm wind came in a day or two and drove most of it away. A full moon rose every night in the east and there was a sense of approaching Spring. Before the charming old farmhouse flowed the wonderful little Maumee River, dimpling over stones and spreading out wide, as though it wished to appear much more than it was. There is madness in moonlight, and there is madness in that chemical compound which is youth. Here in this simple farming region, once free of the thought that by any chance I might be compelled to remain here, I felt strangely renewed and free as a bird, though at the same time there was an undercurrent of sadness, not only for myself but for life itself, the lapse and decay of things, the impossibility of tasting or knowing more than a fraction of the glories and pleasures that are everywhere outspread. Although I had not had a vacation in years, I was eager to be at work. The greatness of life, its possibilities, the astounding dreams of supremacy which might come true, were calling to me. I wanted to be on, to find what life had in store for me; and yet I wanted to stay here for a while.

Mich’s father, as well as his mother and wife, interested me intensely, for they were simple, industrious, believing. They were good Baptists or Methodists or Presbyterians. The grizzled little old farmer who had built up this place or inherited a part and added the rest, was exactly like all the other farmers I have ever known: genial, kindly, fairly tolerant, curious as to the wonders of the world without, full of a great faith in America and its destiny, sure that it is the greatest country in the world, and that there has never been one other like it. That first night at supper, and the next morning at breakfast, and all my other days here, the old man questioned me as to life, its ways, my beliefs or theories, and I am positive that he was delighted to have me there, for it was winter and he had little to do besides read his paper.

The newspaper of largest circulation in this region was the Blade of Toledo, which he read assiduously. The mother and daughter-in-law did most of the work. The mother was forever busy cooking breakfast or dinner, cleaning the rooms, milking, making butter and cheese, gathering eggs from a nearby hennery. Her large cellar was stocked with jellies, preserved fruit, apples, potatoes and other vegetables. There was an ample store of bacon, salt pork and beef. I found that no fresh meat other than chicken was served, but the meals were delightful and plentiful, delicious biscuits and jelly, fresh butter, eggs, ham, bacon, salt pork or cured beef, and the rarely absent fried chicken, as well as some rabbits which Mich shot. During my stay he did nothing but idle about the barn, practicing on a cornet which he said had saved his lungs at a time when he was threatened with consumption. But his playing! I wonder the cure did not prove fatal. I noted the intense interest of Mich’s father in what the discovery of gas in this region would do for it. He was almost certain that all small towns hereabout would now become prosperous manufacturing centers. There would be work for all. Wages would go up. Many people would soon come here and become rich. This of course never came true at all. The flow of natural gas soon gave out and the oil strikes were not even rivals of some nearby fields.

All this talk was alien to my thoughts. I could not fix my interest on trade and what it held in store for anybody. I knew it must be so and that America was destined to grow materially, but somehow the thing did not interest me. My thoughts leaped to the artistic spectacle such material prosperity might subsequently present, not to the purely material phase of the prosperity itself. Indeed I could never think of the work being done in any factory or institution without passing from that work to the lives behind it, the crowds of commonplace workers, the great streets which they filled, the bare homes, and the separate and distinct dramas of their individual lives. I was tremendously interested by the rise of various captains of industry then already bestriding America, their opportunities and pleasures, the ease and skill with which they organized “trusts” and combinations, their manipulations of the great railroads, oil and coal fields, their control of the telegraph and the telephone, their sharp and watchful domination of American politics; but only as drama. Grover Cleveland was President, and his every deed was paining the Republicans quite as much as it was gratifying the Democrats, but I could already see that the lot of the underdog varied little with the much-heralded changes of administration—and it was the underdog that always interested me more than the upper one, his needs, his woes, his simplicities. Here, as elsewhere, I could see by talking to Mich and his father, men became vastly excited, paraded and all but wept over the results of one election or another, city, State or national, but when all was said and done and America had been “saved,” or the Constitution “defended” or “wrecked,” the condition of the average man, myself included, was about as it had been before.

The few days I spent here represented an interlude between an old and a new life. I have always felt that in leaving St. Louis I put my youth behind me; that which followed was both sobering and broadening. But on this farm, beside this charming river, I paused for a few days and took stock of my life thus far, and it certainly seemed pointless and unpromising. I thought constantly and desperately of my future, the uncertainty of it, and yet all the while my eye was fixed not upon any really practical solution for me but rather upon the pleasures and luxuries of life as enjoyed by others, the fine houses, the fine clothes, the privilege of traveling, of sharing in the amusements of the rich and the clever. Here I was, at the foot of the ladder, with not the least skill for making money, compelled to make my way upward as best I might, and yet thinking in terms of millions always. However much I might earn in journalism, I had sense enough to know that it would yield me little or nothing. After some thought, I decided that I would move on to some other city, where I would get into the newspaper business for a while and then see what I should see.

Indeed I never saw Mich but once again.

But Toledo. This was my first free and unaided flight into the unknown. I found here a city far more agreeable than St. Louis, which, being much greater in size, had districts which were positively appalling for their poverty and vice; whereas here was a city of not quite 100,000, as clean and fresh as any city could be. I recall being struck with clean asphalt pavements, a canal or waterway in which many lake vessels were riding, and houses and stores, frame for the most part, which seemed clean if not quite new. The first papers I bought, the Blade and the Bee, were full of the usual American small city bluster together with columns and columns about American politics and business.

Before seeking work I decided to investigate the town. I was intensely interested in America and its cities, and wondered, in spite of my interest in New York, which I would select for my permanent resting-place. When was I to have a home of my own? Would it be as pleasing as one of these many which here and elsewhere I saw in quiet rows shaded by trees, many of them with spacious lawns and suggestive of that security and comfort so dear to the mollusc-like human heart? For, after security, nothing seems to be so important or so desirable to the human organism as rest, or at least ease. The one thing that the life force seems to desire to escape is work, or at any rate strife. One would think that man had been invented against his will by some malign power and was being harried along ways and to tasks against which his soul revolted and to which his strength was not equal.

As I walked about the streets of this city my soul panted for the seeming comfort and luxury of them. The well-kept lawns, the shuttered and laced windows! The wonder of evening fires in winter! The open, cool and shadowy doors in summer! Swings and hammocks on lawns and porches! The luxury of the book and rocker! Somehow in the stress of my disturbed youth I had missed most of this.

After a day of looking about the city I applied to the city editor of the leading morning paper, and encountered one of the intellectual experiences of my life. At the city editorial desk in a small and not too comfortable room sat a small cherubic individual, with a complexion of milk and cream, light brown hair and a serene blue eye, who looked me over quizzically, as much as to say: “Look what the latest breeze has wafted in.” His attitude was neither antagonistic nor welcoming. He was so assured that I half-detected on sight the speculative thinker and dreamer. Yet in the rôle of city editor in a mid-West manufacturing town one must have an air if not the substance of commercial understanding and ability, and so my young city editor seemed to breathe a determination to be very executive and forceful.

“You’re a St. Louis newspaper man, eh?” he said, eyeing me casually. “Never worked in a town of this size, though? Well, the conditions are very different. We pay much attention to small items—make a good deal out of nothing,” and he smiled. “But there isn’t a thing I can see now, nothing beyond a three- or four-day job which you wouldn’t want, I’m sure.”

“How do you know I wouldn’t?”

“Well, I’ll tell you about it. There’s a street-car strike on and I could use a man who had nerve enough to ride around on the cars the company is attempting to run and report how things are. But I’ll tell you frankly: it’s dangerous. You may be shot or hit with a brick.”

I indicated my willingness to undertake this and he looked at me in a mock serious and yet approving way. He took me on and I went about the city on one car-line and another, studying the strange streets, expecting and fearing every moment that a brick might be shied at me through the window or that a gang of irate workingmen would board the car and beat me up. But nothing happened, not a single threatening workman anywhere; I so reported and was told to write it up and make as much of the “story” as possible. Without knowing anything of the merits of the case, my sympathies were all with the workingmen. I had seen enough of strikes, and of poverty, and of the quarrels between the money-lords and the poor, to be all on one side. As was the custom in all newspaper offices with which I ever had anything to do, where labor and capital were concerned I was told to be neutral and not antagonize either side. I wrote my “story” and it was published in the first edition. Then, at the order of this same youth, I visited some charity bazaar, where all the important paintings owned in the city were being exhibited, and wrote an account which was headed, “As in Old Toledo,” with all the silly chaff about “gallants and ladies gay,” after which I spread my feet under a desk, being interested to talk more with the smiling if indifferent youth who had employed me.

The opportunity soon came, for apparently he was as much interested in me as I in him. He came over after I had submitted my second bit of copy and announced that it was entirely satisfactory. A man from the composing-room entered and commented on the fact that James Whitcomb Riley and Eugene Field were billed to lecture in the city soon. I remarked that I had once seen Field in the office of the News in Chicago, which brought out the fact that my city editor had once worked in Chicago, had been a member of the Whitechapel Club, knew Field, Finley Peter Dunne, Brand Whitlock, Ben King and others. At mention of the magic name of Ben King, author of “If I Should Die Tonight” and “Jane Jones,” the atmosphere of Chicago of the time of the Whitechapel Club and Eugene Field and Ben King returned. At once we fell into a varied and gay exchange of intimacies.

It resulted in an enduring and yet stormy and disillusioning friendship. If he had been a girl I would have married him, of course. It would have been inevitable. We were intellectual affinities. Our dreams were practically identical, though we approached them from different angles. He was the sentimentalist in thought, though the realist in action; I was the realist in thought and the sentimentalist in action. He took me out to lunch, and we stayed nearly three hours. He took me to dinner, and to do so was compelled to call up his wife and say he had to stay in town. He had dreams of becoming a poet and novelist, I of becoming a playwright. Before the second day had gone he had shown me a book of fairy-tales and some poems. I became enamored of him, the victim of a delightful illusion.

Because he liked me he wanted me to stay on. There was no immediate place, he said, but one might open at any time. Having very little money, I could not see my way to that, but I did try to get a place on the rival paper. That failing, he suggested that although I wander on toward Cleveland and Buffalo I stand ready to come back if he telegraphed for me. Meanwhile we reveled in that wonderful possession, intellectual affection. I thought him wonderful, perfect, great; he thought—well, I have heard him tell in after years what he thought. Even now at times he fixes me with hungry, welcoming eyes.