CHAPTER XVIII

I found a room the next morning in Pine Street, only a few doors from this hotel and a block from my new office. It was a hall bedroom, one of a long series which I was to occupy, dirty and grimy. I recall it still with a sickening sense of its ugliness; and yet its cheapness and griminess did not then trouble me so much. Did I not have the inestimable boon of youth and ambition, which make most material details unimportant? Some drab of a woman rented it to me, and outside were those red, yellow, blue, green and orange street-cars clanging and roaring and wheezing by all night long. Inside were four narrow gray walls, a small wooden bed, none too clean sheets and pillow-cases, a yellow washstand. I brought over my bag, arranged the few things I thought need not be kept under lock and key, and returned to the streets. I need not bother about the office until twelve-thirty, when the assignments were handed out—or “the book,” as Hartung reverently called it, was laid out for our inspection.

And now, spread before me for my survey and entertainment was the great city of St. Louis, and life itself as it was manifesting itself to me through this city. This was the most important and interesting thing to me, not my new position. Work? Well, that was important enough, considering the difficulty I had had in securing it. What was more, I was always driven by the haunting fear of losing this or any other position I had ever had, of not being able to find another (a left-over fear, perhaps, due to the impression that poverty had made on me in my extreme youth). Just the same, the city came first in my imagination and desires, and I now began to examine it with care, its principal streets, shops, hotels, its residence district. What a pleasure to walk about, to stare, to dream of better days and great things to come.

Just at this time St. Louis seemed to be upon the verge of change and improvement. An old section of mansions bordering on the business center was rapidly giving way to a rabble of small stores and cheap factories. Already several new buildings of the Chicago style of skyscraper were either contemplated or in process of construction. There was a new club, the Mercantile, the largest in the city, composed entirely of merchants in the downtown section, which had just been opened and about which the papers were making a great stir. There was a new depot contracted for, one of the finest in all the country, so I was told, which was to house all the roads entering the city. A new city hall was being talked of, an enormous thing-to-be. Out in the west end, where progress seemed the most vital, were new streets and truly magnificent residence “places,” parked and guarded areas these, in which were ranged many residences of the ultra-rich. The first time I saw one of these places I was staggered by its exclusive air and the beauty and even grandeur of some of the great houses in it—newly manufactured exclusiveness. Here were great gray or white or brownstone affairs, bright, almost gaudy, with great verandas, astonishing doorways, flights of stone steps, heavily and richly draped windows, immense carriage-houses, parked and flowered lawns.

By degrees I came to know the trade and poor sections of the city. Here were long throbbing wholesale streets, crowded with successful companies; along the waterfront was a mill area backed up by wretched tenements, as poor and grimy and dingy as any I have ever seen; elsewhere were long streets of middle-class families, all alike, all with white stone doorsteps or windowsills and tiny front yards.

The atmosphere of the Globe-Democrat after a time came to have a peculiar appeal for me because it was dominated so completely by the robust personality of McCullagh. He was so natural, unaffected, rugged. As time passed he steadily grew in my estimation and by degrees, as I read his paper, his powerful, brilliant editorials, and saw how systematically and forcefully he managed all things in connection with himself and his men, the very air of St. Louis became redolent of him. He was a real force, a great man. So famous was he already that men came to St. Louis from the Southwest and elsewhere just to see him and his office. I often think of him in that small office, sitting waist-deep among his papers, his heavy head sunk on his pouter-like chest, his feet incased in white socks and low slipper-like shoes, his whole air one of complete mental and physical absorption in his work. A few years later he committed suicide, out of sheer weariness, I assume, tired of an inane world. Yet it was not until long after, when I was much better able to judge him and his achievements, that I understood what a really big thing he had done: built up a journal of national and even international significance in a region which, one would have supposed, could never have supported anything more than a mediocre panderer to trade interests. As Hazard had proudly informed me, the annual bill for telegraph news alone was $400,000: a sum which, in the light of subsequent journalistic achievements in America, may seem insignificant but which at that time meant a great deal. He seemed to have a desire to make the paper not only good (as that word is used in connection with newspapers) but great, and from my own memory and impression I can testify that it was both. It had catholicity and solidity in editorials and news. The whole of Europe, as well as America, was combed and reflected in order that his readers might be entertained and retained, and each day one could read news of curious as well as of scientific interest from all over the world. Its editorials were in the main wise and jovial, often beautifully written by McCullagh himself. Of assumed Republican tendencies, it was much more a party leader than follower, both in national and in State affairs. The rawest of raw youths, I barely sensed this at the time, and yet I felt something of the wonder and beauty of it all. I knew him to be a great man because I could feel it. There was something of dignity and force about all that was connected with him. Later it became a fact of some importance to me that I had been called to a paper of so much true worth, by a man so wise, so truly able.

The only inharmonious note at this time was my intense loneliness. In Chicago, in spite of the gradual breaking up of our home and the disintegration of the family, I had managed to build up that spiritual or imaginative support which comes to all of us from familiarity with material objects. I had known Chicago, its newspaper world, its various sections, its places of amusement, some dozen or two of newspaper men. Here I knew no one at all.

And back in Chicago there had been Alice and N—— and K——, whereas here whom had I? Alice was a living pain for years, for in my erratic way I was really fond of her. I am of that peculiar disposition, which will not let memories of old ties and old pleasures die easily. I suffer for things which might not give another a single ache or pain. Alice came very close to me, and now she was gone. Without any reasonable complaint, save that I was slightly weary, did not care for her as much as I had, and that my mind was full of the world outside and my future, I had left her. It had not been more than four weeks since I had visited her in her little parlor in Chicago, sipping of those delights which only youth and ecstatic imagination can conjure; now I was three hundred miles away from her kisses and the warmth of her hands. At the same time there was this devil or angel of ambition which quite in spite of myself was sweeping me onward. I fancied some vast Napoleonic ending for myself, which of course was moonshine. I could not have gone back to Chicago then if I had wished; it was not spiritually possible. Something within kept saying “On—on!” Besides, it would have done no good. The reaction would have been more irritating than the pain it satisfied. As it was, I could only walk about the city in this chilling November weather and speculate about myself and Alice and N—— and K—— and my own future. What an odd beginning, I often thought to myself. Scandalous, perhaps, in one so young: three girls in as many years, two of them deeply and seriously wounded by me.

“I shall write to her,” I thought. “I will ask her to come down here. I can’t stand this. She is too lovely and precious to me. It is cruel to leave her so.”

There is this to be said for me in regard to my not writing to her: I was uncertain as to the financial practicability of it. In Chicago I had been telling her of my excellent position, boasting that I was making more than I really was. So long as I was there and not married the pretense could easily be sustained. Here, three hundred miles away, where she would and could not come unless I was prepared to support her, it was a different matter. To ask her now meant a financial burden which I did not feel able, or at least willing, to assume. No doubt I could have starved her on twenty dollars a week; had I been desperately swayed by love I would have done so. I could even have had her, had I so chosen, on conditions which did not involve marriage; but I could not bring myself to do this. I did not think it quite fair. I felt that she would have a just claim to my continuing the relation with her.... And outside was the wide world. I told myself that I would marry her if I had money. If she had not been of a soft yielding type she could easily have entrapped me, but she had not chosen to do so. Anyhow, here I was, and here I stayed, meditating on the tragedy of it all.

By this time of course it is quite obvious that I was not an ethically correct and moral youth, but a sentimental boy of considerable range of feeling who, facing the confusing evidences of life, was not prepared to accept anything as final. I did not know then whether I believed that the morality and right conduct preached by the teachers of the world were important or not. The religious and social aphorisms of the day had been impressed upon me, but they did not stick. Something whispered to me that apart from theory there was another way which the world took and which had little in common with the strait and narrow path of the doctrinaires. Not all men swindle in little things, or lie or cheat, but how few fail to compromise in big ones. Perhaps I would not have deliberately lied about anything, at least not in important matters, and I would not now under ordinary circumstances after the one experience in Chicago have stolen. Beyond this I could not have said how I would have acted under given circumstances. Women were not included in my moral speculations as among those who were to receive strict justice—not pretty women. In that, perhaps, I was right: they did not always wish it. I was anxious to meet with many of them, as many as I might, and I would have conducted myself as joyously as their own consciences would permit. That I was to be in any way punished for this, or that the world would severely censure me for it, I did not yet believe. Other boys did it; they were constantly talking about it. The world—the world of youth at least—seemed to be concerned with libertinage. Why should not I be?