Did you ever have a notion of this kind—there is an orange, or say an apple, lying on a table before you. You put out your hand to take it. Perhaps you eat it, make it a part of your physical life. Have you touched? Have you eaten? That’s what I wonder about.
The whole subject is only important to me because I want the apple. What subtle flavors are concealed in it—how does it taste, smell, feel? Heavens, man, the way the apple feels in the hand is something—isn’t it?
For a long time I thought only of eating the apple. Then later its fragrance became something of importance too. The fragrance stole out through my room, through a window and into the streets. It made itself a part of all the smells of the streets. The devil!—in Chicago or Pittsburgh, Youngstown or Cleveland it would have had a rough time.
That doesn’t matter.
The point is that after the form of the apple began to take my eye I often found myself unable to touch at all. My hands went toward the object of my desire and then came back.
There I sat, in the room with the apple before me, and hours passed. I had pushed myself off into a world where nothing has any existence. Had I done that, or had I merely stepped, for the moment, out of the world of darkness into the light?
It may be that my eyes are blind and that I cannot see.
It may be I am deaf.
My hands are nervous and tremble. How much do they tremble? Now, alas, I am absorbed in looking at my own hands.
With these nervous and uncertain hands may I really feel for the form of things concealed in the darkness?
Theodore Dreiser is old—he is very, very old. I do not know how many years he has lived, perhaps forty, perhaps fifty, but he is very old. Something grey and bleak and hurtful, that has been in the world perhaps forever, is personified in him.
When Dreiser is gone men shall write books, many of them, and in the books they shall write there will be so many of the qualities Dreiser lacks. The new, the younger men shall have a sense of humor, and everyone knows Dreiser has no sense of humor. More than that, American prose writers shall have grace, lightness of touch, a dream of beauty breaking through the husks of life.
O, those who follow him shall have many things that Dreiser does not have. That is a part of the wonder and beauty of Theodore Dreiser, the things that others shall have, because of him.
Long ago, when he was editor of the Delineator, Dreiser went one day, with a woman friend, to visit an orphan asylum. The woman once told me the story of that afternoon in the big, ugly grey building, with Dreiser, looking heavy and lumpy and old, sitting on a platform, folding and refolding his pocket-handkerchief and watching the children—all in their little uniforms, trooping in.
“The tears ran down his cheeks and he shook his head,” the woman said, and that is a real picture of Theodore Dreiser. He is old in spirit and he does not know what to do with life, so he tells about it as he sees it, simply and honestly. The tears run down his cheeks and he folds and refolds the pocket-handkerchief and shakes his head.
Heavy, heavy, the feet of Theodore. How easy to pick some of his books to pieces, to laugh at him for so much of his heavy prose.
The feet of Theodore are making a path, the heavy brutal feet. They are tramping through the wilderness of lies, making a path. Presently the path will be a street, with great arches overhead and delicately carved spires piercing the sky. Along the street will run children, shouting, “Look at me. See what I and my fellows of the new day have done”—forgetting the heavy feet of Dreiser.
The fellows of the ink-pots, the prose writers in America who follow Dreiser, will have much to do that he has never done. Their road is long but, because of him, those who follow will never have to face the road through the wilderness of Puritan denial, the road that Dreiser faced alone.
| Page | |
| ix | Foreword |
| xi | Dreiser |
| 3 | I’m a Fool |
| 21 | The Triumph of a Modern |
| 31 | “Unused” |
| 139 | A Chicago Hamlet |
| 185 | The Man Who Became a Woman |
| 231 | Milk Bottles |
| 245 | The Sad Horn Blowers |
| 287 | The Man’s Story |
| 315 | An Ohio Pagan |
IT was a hard jolt for me, one of the most bitterest I ever had to face. And it all came about through my own foolishness, too. Even yet sometimes, when I think of it, I want to cry or swear or kick myself. Perhaps, even now, after all this time, there will be a kind of satisfaction in making myself look cheap by telling of it.
It began at three o’clock one October afternoon as I sat in the grand stand at the fall trotting and pacing meet at Sandusky, Ohio.
To tell the truth, I felt a little foolish that I should be sitting in the grand stand at all. During the summer before I had left my home town with Harry Whitehead and, with a nigger named Burt, had taken a job as swipe with one of the two horses Harry was campaigning through the fall race meets that year. Mother cried and my sister Mildred, who wanted to get a job as a school teacher in our town that fall, stormed and scolded about the house all during the week before I left. They both thought it something disgraceful that one of our family should take a place as a swipe with race horses. I’ve an idea Mildred thought my taking the place would stand in the way of her getting the job she’d been working so long for.
But after all I had to work, and there was no other work to be got. A big lumbering fellow of nineteen couldn’t just hang around the house and I had got too big to mow people’s lawns and sell newspapers. Little chaps who could get next to people’s sympathies by their sizes were always getting jobs away from me. There was one fellow who kept saying to everyone who wanted a lawn mowed or a cistern cleaned, that he was saving money to work his way through college, and I used to lay awake nights thinking up ways to injure him without being found out. I kept thinking of wagons running over him and bricks falling on his head as he walked along the street. But never mind him.
I got the place with Harry and I liked Burt fine. We got along splendid together. He was a big nigger with a lazy sprawling body and soft, kind eyes, and when it came to a fight he could hit like Jack Johnson. He had Bucephalus, a big black pacing stallion that could do 2.09 or 2.10, if he had to, and I had a little gelding named Doctor Fritz that never lost a race all fall when Harry wanted him to win.
We set out from home late in July in a box car with the two horses and after that, until late November, we kept moving along to the race meets and the fairs. It was a peachy time for me, I’ll say that. Sometimes now I think that boys who are raised regular in houses, and never have a fine nigger like Burt for best friend, and go to high schools and college, and never steal anything, or get drunk a little, or learn to swear from fellows who know how, or come walking up in front of a grand stand in their shirt sleeves and with dirty horsey pants on when the races are going on and the grand stand is full of people all dressed up—What’s the use of talking about it? Such fellows don’t know nothing at all. They’ve never had no opportunity.
But I did. Burt taught me how to rub down a horse and put the bandages on after a race and steam a horse out and a lot of valuable things for any man to know. He could wrap a bandage on a horse’s leg so smooth that if it had been the same color you would think it was his skin, and I guess he’d have been a big driver, too, and got to the top like Murphy and Walter Cox and the others if he hadn’t been black.
Gee whizz, it was fun. You got to a county seat town, maybe say on a Saturday or Sunday, and the fair began the next Tuesday and lasted until Friday afternoon. Doctor Fritz would be, say in the 2.25 trot on Tuesday afternoon and on Thursday afternoon Bucephalus would knock ’em cold in the “free-for-all” pace. It left you a lot of time to hang around and listen to horse talk, and see Burt knock some yap cold that got too gay, and you’d find out about horses and men and pick up a lot of stuff you could use all the rest of your life, if you had some sense and salted down what you heard and felt and saw.
And then at the end of the week when the race meet was over, and Harry had run home to tend up to his livery stable business, you and Burt hitched the two horses to carts and drove slow and steady across country, to the place for the next meeting, so as to not over-heat the horses, etc., etc., you know.
Gee whizz, Gosh amighty, the nice hickorynut and beechnut and oaks and other kinds of trees along the roads, all brown and red, and the good smells, and Burt singing a song that was called Deep River, and the country girls at the windows of houses and everything. You can stick your colleges up your nose for all me. I guess I know where I got my education.
Why, one of those little burgs of towns you come to on the way, say now on a Saturday afternoon, and Burt says, “let’s lay up here.” And you did.
And you took the horses to a livery stable and fed them, and you got your good clothes out of a box and put them on.
And the town was full of farmers gaping, because they could see you were race horse people, and the kids maybe never see a nigger before and was afraid and run away when the two of us walked down their main street.
And that was before prohibition and all that foolishness, and so you went into a saloon, the two of you, and all the yaps come and stood around, and there was always someone pretended he was horsey and knew things and spoke up and began asking questions, and all you did was to lie and lie all you could about what horses you had, and I said I owned them, and then some fellow said “will you have a drink of whiskey” and Burt knocked his eye out the way he could say, off-hand like, “Oh well, all right, I’m agreeable to a little nip. I’ll split a quart with you.” Gee whizz.
But that isn’t what I want to tell my story about. We got home late in November and I promised mother I’d quit the race horses for good. There’s a lot of things you’ve got to promise a mother because she don’t know any better.
And so, there not being any work in our town any more than when I left there to go to the races, I went off to Sandusky and got a pretty good place taking care of horses for a man who owned a teaming and delivery and storage and coal and real-estate business there. It was a pretty good place with good eats, and a day off each week, and sleeping on a cot in a big barn, and mostly just shovelling in hay and oats to a lot of big good-enough skates of horses, that couldn’t have trotted a race with a toad. I wasn’t dissatisfied and I could send money home.
And then, as I started to tell you, the fall races come to Sandusky and I got the day off and I went. I left the job at noon and had on my good clothes and my new brown derby hat, I’d just bought the Saturday before, and a stand-up collar.
First of all I went down-town and walked about with the dudes. I’ve always thought to myself, “put up a good front” and so I did it. I had forty dollars in my pocket and so I went into the West House, a big hotel, and walked up to the cigar stand. “Give me three twenty-five cent cigars,” I said. There was a lot of horsemen and strangers and dressed-up people from other towns standing around in the lobby and in the bar, and I mingled amongst them. In the bar there was a fellow with a cane and a Windsor tie on, that it made me sick to look at him. I like a man to be a man and dress up, but not to go put on that kind of airs. So I pushed him aside, kind of rough, and had me a drink of whiskey. And then he looked at me, as though he thought maybe he’d get gay, but he changed his mind and didn’t say anything. And then I had another drink of whiskey, just to show him something, and went out and had a hack out to the races, all to myself, and when I got there I bought myself the best seat I could get up in the grand stand, but didn’t go in for any of these boxes. That’s putting on too many airs.
And so there I was, sitting up in the grand stand as gay as you please and looking down on the swipes coming out with their horses, and with their dirty horsey pants on and the horse blankets swung over their shoulders, same as I had been doing all the year before. I liked one thing about the same as the other, sitting up there and feeling grand and being down there and looking up at the yaps and feeling grander and more important, too. One thing’s about as good as another, if you take it just right. I’ve often said that.
Well, right in front of me, in the grand stand that day, there was a fellow with a couple of girls and they was about my age. The young fellow was a nice guy all right. He was the kind maybe that goes to college and then comes to be a lawyer or maybe a newspaper editor or something like that, but he wasn’t stuck on himself. There are some of that kind are all right and he was one of the ones.
He had his sister with him and another girl and the sister looked around over his shoulder, accidental at first, not intending to start anything—she wasn’t that kind—and her eyes and mine happened to meet.
You know how it is. Gee, she was a peach! She had on a soft dress, kind of a blue stuff and it looked carelessly made, but was well sewed and made and everything. I knew that much. I blushed when she looked right at me and so did she. She was the nicest girl I’ve ever seen in my life. She wasn’t stuck on herself and she could talk proper grammar without being like a school teacher or something like that. What I mean is, she was O. K. I think maybe her father was well-to-do, but not rich to make her chesty because she was his daughter, as some are. Maybe he owned a drug store or a drygoods store in their home town, or something like that. She never told me and I never asked.
My own people are all O. K. too, when you come to that. My grandfather was Welsh and over in the old country, in Wales he was—But never mind that.
The first heat of the first race come off and the young fellow setting there with the two girls left them and went down to make a bet. I knew what he was up to, but he didn’t talk big and noisy and let everyone around know he was a sport, as some do. He wasn’t that kind. Well, he come back and I heard him tell the two girls what horse he’d bet on, and when the heat was trotted they all half got to their feet and acted in the excited, sweaty way people do when they’ve got money down on a race, and the horse they bet on is up there pretty close at the end, and they think maybe he’ll come on with a rush, but he never does because he hasn’t got the old juice in him, come right down to it.
And then, pretty soon, the horses came out for the 2.18 pace and there was a horse in it I knew. He was a horse Bob French had in his string but Bob didn’t own him. He was a horse owned by a Mr. Mathers down at Marietta, Ohio.
This Mr. Mathers had a lot of money and owned some coal mines or something, and he had a swell place out in the country, and he was stuck on race horses, but was a Presbyterian or something, and I think more than likely his wife was one, too, maybe a stiffer one than himself. So he never raced his horses hisself, and the story round the Ohio race tracks was that when one of his horses got ready to go to the races he turned him over to Bob French and pretended to his wife he was sold.
So Bob had the horses and he did pretty much as he pleased and you can’t blame Bob, at least, I never did. Sometimes he was out to win and sometimes he wasn’t. I never cared much about that when I was swiping a horse. What I did want to know was that my horse had the speed and could go out in front, if you wanted him to.
And, as I’m telling you, there was Bob in this race with one of Mr. Mathers’ horses, was named “About Ben Ahem” or something like that, and was fast as a streak. He was a gelding and had a mark of 2.21, but could step in .08 or .09.
Because when Burt and I were out, as I’ve told you, the year before, there was a nigger, Burt knew, worked for Mr. Mathers and we went out there one day when we didn’t have no race on at the Marietta Fair and our boss Harry was gone home.
And so everyone was gone to the fair but just this one nigger and he took us all through Mr. Mathers’ swell house and he and Burt tapped a bottle of wine Mr. Mathers had hid in his bedroom, back in a closet, without his wife knowing, and he showed us this Ahem horse. Burt was always stuck on being a driver but didn’t have much chance to get to the top, being a nigger, and he and the other nigger gulped that whole bottle of wine and Burt got a little lit up.
So the nigger let Burt take this About Ben Ahem and step him a mile in a track Mr. Mathers had all to himself, right there on the farm. And Mr. Mathers had one child, a daughter, kinda sick and not very good looking, and she came home and we had to hustle and get About Ben Ahem stuck back in the barn.
I’m only telling you to get everything straight. At Sandusky, that afternoon I was at the fair, this young fellow with the two girls was fussed, being with the girls and losing his bet. You know how a fellow is that way. One of them was his girl and the other his sister. I had figured that out.
“Gee whizz,” I says to myself, “I’m going to give him the dope.”
He was mighty nice when I touched him on the shoulder. He and the girls were nice to me right from the start and clear to the end. I’m not blaming them.
And so he leaned back and I give him the dope on About Ben Ahem. “Don’t bet a cent on this first heat because he’ll go like an oxen hitched to a plow, but when the first heat is over go right down and lay on your pile.” That’s what I told him.
Well, I never saw a fellow treat any one sweller. There was a fat man sitting beside the little girl, that had looked at me twice by this time, and I at her, and both blushing, and what did he do but have the nerve to turn and ask the fat man to get up and change places with me so I could set with his crowd.
Gee whizz, craps amighty. There I was. What a chump I was to go and get gay up there in the West House bar, and just because that dude was standing there with a cane and that kind of a necktie on, to go and get all balled-up and drink that whiskey, just to show off.
Of course she would know, me setting right beside her and letting her smell of my breath. I could have kicked myself right down out of that grand stand and all around that race track and made a faster record than most of the skates of horses they had there that year.
Because that girl wasn’t any mutt of a girl. What wouldn’t I have give right then for a stick of chewing gum to chew, or a lozenger, or some liquorice, or most anything. I was glad I had those twenty-five cent cigars in my pocket and right away I give that fellow one and lit one myself. Then that fat man got up and we changed places and there I was, plunked right down beside her.
They introduced themselves and the fellow’s best girl, he had with him, was named Miss Elinor Woodbury, and her father was a manufacturer of barrels from a place called Tiffin, Ohio. And the fellow himself was named Wilbur Wessen and his sister was Miss Lucy Wessen.
I suppose it was their having such swell names got me off my trolley. A fellow, just because he has been a swipe with a race horse, and works taking care of horses for a man in the teaming, delivery, and storage business, isn’t any better or worse than any one else. I’ve often thought that, and said it too.
But you know how a fellow is. There’s something in that kind of nice clothes, and the kind of nice eyes she had, and the way she had looked at me, awhile before, over her brother’s shoulder, and me looking back at her, and both of us blushing.
I couldn’t show her up for a boob, could I?
I made a fool of myself, that’s what I did. I said my name was Walter Mathers from Marietta, Ohio, and then I told all three of them the smashingest lie you ever heard. What I said was that my father owned the horse About Ben Ahem and that he had let him out to this Bob French for racing purposes, because our family was proud and had never gone into racing that way, in our own name, I mean. Then I had got started and they were all leaning over and listening, and Miss Lucy Wessen’s eyes were shining, and I went the whole hog.
I told about our place down at Marietta, and about the big stables and the grand brick house we had on a hill, up above the Ohio River, but I knew enough not to do it in no bragging way. What I did was to start things and then let them drag the rest out of me. I acted just as reluctant to tell as I could. Our family hasn’t got any barrel factory, and, since I’ve known us, we’ve always been pretty poor, but not asking anything of any one at that, and my grandfather, over in Wales—but never mind that.
We set there talking like we had known each other for years and years, and I went and told them that my father had been expecting maybe this Bob French wasn’t on the square, and had sent me up to Sandusky on the sly to find out what I could.
And I bluffed it through I had found out all about the 2.18 pace, in which About Ben Ahem was to start.
I said he would lose the first heat by pacing like a lame cow and then he would come back and skin ’em alive after that. And to back up what I said I took thirty dollars out of my pocket and handed it to Mr. Wilbur Wessen and asked him, would he mind, after the first heat, to go down and place it on About Ben Ahem for whatever odds he could get. What I said was that I didn’t want Bob French to see me and none of the swipes.
Sure enough the first heat come off and About Ben Ahem went off his stride, up the back stretch, and looked like a wooden horse or a sick one, and come in to be last. Then this Wilbur Wessen went down to the betting place under the grand stand and there I was with the two girls, and when that Miss Woodbury was looking the other way once, Lucy Wessen kinda, with her shoulder you know, kinda touched me. Not just tucking down, I don’t mean. You know how a woman can do. They get close, but not getting gay either. You know what they do. Gee whizz.
And then they give me a jolt. What they had done, when I didn’t know, was to get together, and they had decided Wilbur Wessen would bet fifty dollars, and the two girls had gone and put in ten dollars each, of their own money, too. I was sick then, but I was sicker later.
About the gelding, About Ben Ahem, and their winning their money, I wasn’t worried a lot about that. It come out O.K. Ahem stepped the next three heats like a bushel of spoiled eggs going to market before they could be found out, and Wilbur Wessen had got nine to two for the money. There was something else eating at me.
Because Wilbur come back, after he had bet the money, and after that he spent most of his time talking to that Miss Woodbury, and Lucy Wessen and I was left alone together like on a desert island. Gee, if I’d only been on the square or if there had been any way of getting myself on the square. There ain’t any Walter Mathers, like I said to her and them, and there hasn’t ever been one, but if there was, I bet I’d go to Marietta, Ohio, and shoot him tomorrow.
There I was, big boob that I am. Pretty soon the race was over, and Wilbur had gone down and collected our money, and we had a hack down-town, and he stood us a swell supper at the West House, and a bottle of champagne beside.
And I was with that girl and she wasn’t saying much, and I wasn’t saying much either. One thing I know. She wasn’t stuck on me because of the lie about my father being rich and all that. There’s a way you know.... Craps amighty. There’s a kind of girl, you see just once in your life, and if you don’t get busy and make hay, then you’re gone for good and all, and might as well go jump off a bridge. They give you a look from inside of them somewhere, and it ain’t no vamping, and what it means is—you want that girl to be your wife, and you want nice things around her like flowers and swell clothes, and you want her to have the kids you’re going to have, and you want good music played and no rag time. Gee whizz.
There’s a place over near Sandusky, across a kind of bay, and it’s called Cedar Point. And after we had supper we went over to it in a launch, all by ourselves. Wilbur and Miss Lucy and that Miss Woodbury had to catch a ten o’clock train back to Tiffin, Ohio, because, when you’re out with girls like that you can’t get careless and miss any trains and stay out all night, like you can with some kinds of Janes.
And Wilbur blowed himself to the launch and it cost him fifteen cold plunks, but I wouldn’t never have knew if I hadn’t listened. He wasn’t no tin horn kind of a sport.
Over at the Cedar Point place, we didn’t stay around where there was a gang of common kind of cattle at all.
There was big dance halls and dining places for yaps, and there was a beach you could walk along and get where it was dark, and we went there.
She didn’t talk hardly at all and neither did I, and I was thinking how glad I was my mother was all right, and always made us kids learn to eat with a fork at table, and not swill soup, and not be noisy and rough like a gang you see around a race track that way.
Then Wilbur and his girl went away up the beach and Lucy and I sat down in a dark place, where there was some roots of old trees, the water had washed up, and after that the time, till we had to go back in the launch and they had to catch their trains, wasn’t nothing at all. It went like winking your eye.
Here’s how it was. The place we were setting in was dark, like I said, and there was the roots from that old stump sticking up like arms, and there was a watery smell, and the night was like—as if you could put your hand out and feel it—so warm and soft and dark and sweet like an orange.
I most cried and I most swore and I most jumped up and danced, I was so mad and happy and sad.
When Wilbur come back from being alone with his girl, and she saw him coming, Lucy she says, “we got to go to the train now,” and she was most crying too, but she never knew nothing I knew, and she couldn’t be so all busted up. And then, before Wilbur and Miss Woodbury got up to where we was, she put her face up and kissed me quick and put her head up against me and she was all quivering and—Gee whizz.
Sometimes I hope I have cancer and die. I guess you know what I mean. We went in the launch across the bay to the train like that, and it was dark, too. She whispered and said it was like she and I could get out of the boat and walk on the water, and it sounded foolish, but I knew what she meant.
And then quick we were right at the depot, and there was a big gang of yaps, the kind that goes to the fairs, and crowded and milling around like cattle, and how could I tell her? “It won’t be long because you’ll write and I’ll write to you.” That’s all she said.
I got a chance like a hay barn afire. A swell chance I got.
And maybe she would write me, down at Marietta that way, and the letter would come back, and stamped on the front of it by the U.S.A. “there ain’t any such guy,” or something like that, whatever they stamp on a letter that way.
And me trying to pass myself off for a bigbug and a swell—to her, as decent a little body as God ever made. Craps amighty—a swell chance I got!
And then the train come in, and she got on it, and Wilbur Wessen he come and shook hands with me, and that Miss Woodbury was nice too and bowed to me, and I at her, and the train went and I busted out and cried like a kid.
Gee, I could have run after that train and made Dan Patch look like a freight train after a wreck but, socks amighty, what was the use? Did you ever see such a fool?
I’ll bet you what—if I had an arm broke right now or a train had run over my foot—I wouldn’t go to no doctor at all. I’d go set down and let her hurt and hurt—that’s what I’d do.
I’ll bet you what—if I hadn’t a drunk that booze I’d a never been such a boob as to go tell such a lie—that couldn’t never be made straight to a lady like her.
I wish I had that fellow right here that had on a Windsor tie and carried a cane. I’d smash him for fair. Gosh darn his eyes. He’s a big fool—that’s what he is.
And if I’m not another you just go find me one and I’ll quit working and be a bum and give him my job. I don’t care nothing for working, and earning money, and saving it for no such boob as myself.
INASMUCH as I have put to myself the task of trying to tell you a curious story in which I am myself concerned—in a strictly secondary way you must of course understand—I will begin by giving you some notion of myself.
Very well then, I am a man of thirty-two, rather small in size, with sandy hair. I wear glasses. Until two years ago I lived in Chicago, where I had a position as clerk in an office that afforded me a good enough living. I have never married, being somewhat afraid of women—in the flesh, in a way of speaking. In fancy and in my imagination I have always been very bold but in the flesh women have always frightened me horribly. They have a way of smiling quietly as though to say——. But we will not go into that now.
Since boyhood I have had an ambition to be a painter, not, I will confess, because of a desire to produce some great masterpiece of the arts, but simply and solely because I have always thought the life painters lead would appeal to me.
I have always liked the notion (let’s be honest if we can) of going about, wearing a hat, tipped a little to the side of my head, sporting a moustache, carrying a cane and speaking in an off-hand way of such things as form, rhythm, the effects of light and masses, surfaces, etc., etc. During my life I have read a good many books concerning painters and their work, their friendships and their loves and when I was in Chicago and poor and was compelled to live in a small room alone, I assure you I carried off many a dull weary evening by imagining myself a painter of wide renown in the world.
It was afternoon and having finished my day’s work I went strolling off to the studio of another painter. He was still at work and there were two models in the room, women in the nude sitting about. One of them smiled at me, I thought a little wistfully, but pshaw, I am too blasé for anything of that sort.
I go across the room to my friend’s canvas and stand looking at it.
Now he is looking at me, a little anxiously. I am the greater man, you understand. That is frankly and freely acknowledged. Whatever else may be said against my friend he never claimed to be my equal. In fact it is generally understood, wherever I go, that I am the greater man.
“Well?” says my friend. You see he is fairly hanging on my words, as the saying goes; in short, he is waiting for me to speak with the air of one about to be hanged.
Why? The devil! Why does he put everything up to me? One gets tired carrying such responsibility upon one’s shoulders. A painter should be the judge of his own work and not embarrass his fellow painters by asking questions. That is my method.
Very well then. If I speak sharply you have only yourself to blame. “The yellow you have been using is a little muddy. The arm of this woman is not felt. In painting one should feel the arm of a woman. What I advise is that you change your palette. You have scattered too much. Pull it together. A painting should stick together as a wet snow ball thrown by a boy clings to a wall.”
When I had reached the age of thirty, that is to say two years ago, I received from my aunt, the sister of my father to be exact, a small fortune I had long been dreaming I might possibly inherit.
My aunt I had never seen, but I had always been saying to myself, “I must go see my aunt. The old lady will be sore at me and when she dies will not leave me a cent.”
And then, lucky fellow that I am, I did go to see her just before she died.
Filled with determination to put the thing through I set out from Chicago, and it is not my fault that I did not spend the day with her. Even although my aunt is (as I am not fool enough not to know that you know) a woman I would have spent the day with her but that it was impossible.
She lived at Madison, Wisconsin, and I went there on Saturday morning. The house was locked and the windows boarded up. Fortunately, at just that moment, a mail carrier came along and, upon my telling him that I was my aunt’s nephew, gave me her address. He also gave me some news concerning her.
For years she had been a sufferer from hay-fever and every summer had to have a change of climate.
That was an opportunity for me. I went at once to a hotel and wrote her a letter telling of my visit and expressing, to the utmost of my ability, my sorrow in not having found her at home. “I have been a long time doing this job but now that I am at it I fancy I shall do it rather well,” I said to myself.
A sort of feeling came into my hand, as it were. I can’t just say what it was but as soon as I sat down I knew very well I should be eloquent. For the moment I was positively a poet.
In the first place, and as one should in writing a letter to a lady, I spoke of the sky. “The sky is full of mottled clouds,” I said. Then, and I frankly admit in a brutally casual way, I spoke of myself as one practically prostrated with grief. To tell the truth I did not just know what I was doing. I had got the fever for writing words, you see. They fairly flowed out of my pen.
I had come, I said, on a long and weary journey to the home of my only female relative, and here I threw into the letter some reference to the fact that I was an orphan. “Imagine,” I wrote, “the sorrow and desolation in my heart at finding the house unoccupied and the windows boarded up.”
It was there, sitting in the hotel at Madison, Wisconsin, with the pen in my hand, that I made my fortune. Something bold and heroic came into my mood and, without a moment’s hesitation, I mentioned in my letter what should never be mentioned to a woman, unless she be an elderly woman of one’s own family, and then only by a physician perhaps—I spoke of my aunt’s breasts, using the plural.
I had hoped, I said, to lay my tired head on her breasts. To tell the truth I had become drunken with words and now, how glad I am that I did. Mr. George Moore, Clive Bell, Paul Rosenfeld, and others of the most skillful writers of our English speech, have written a great deal about painters and, as I have already explained, there was not a book or magazine article in English and concerning painters, their lives and works, procurable in Chicago, I had not read.
What I am now striving to convey to you is something of my own pride in my literary effort in the hotel at Madison, Wisconsin, and surely, if I was, at that moment an artist, no other artist has ever had such quick and wholehearted recognition.
Having spoken of putting my tired head on my aunt’s breasts (poor woman, she died, never having seen me) I went on to give the general impression—which by the way was quite honest and correct—of a somewhat boyish figure, rather puzzled, wandering in a confused way through life. The imaginary but correct enough figure of myself, born at the moment in my imagination, had made its way through dismal swamps of gloom, over the rough hills of adversity and through the dry deserts of loneliness, toward the one spot in all this world where it had hoped to find rest and peace—that is to say upon the bosom of its aunt. However, as I have already explained, being a thorough modern and full of the modern boldness, I did not use the word bosom, as an old-fashioned writer might have done. I used the word breasts. When I had finished writing tears were in my eyes.
The letter I wrote on that day covered some seven sheets of hotel paper—finely written to the margins—and cost four cents to mail.
“Shall I mail it or shall I not?” I said to myself as I came out of the hotel office and stood before a mail box. The letter was balanced between my finger and thumb.
The forefinger of my left hand—I was holding the letter in my right hand—touched my nose, mouth, forehead, eyes, chin, neck, shoulder, arm, hand and then tapped the letter itself. No doubt I fully intended, from the first, to drop it. I had been doing the work of an artist. Well, artists are always talking of destroying their own work but few do it, and those who do are perhaps the real heroes of life.
And so down into the mail box it went with a thud and my fortune was made. The letter was received by my aunt, who was lying abed of an illness that was to destroy her—she had, it seems, other things beside hay-fever the matter with her—and she altered her will in my favor. She had intended leaving her money, a tidy sum yielding an income of five thousand a year, to a fund to be established for the study of methods for the cure of hay-fever—that is to say, really you see, to her fellow sufferers—but instead left it to me. My aunt could not find her spectacles and a nurse—may the gods bring her bright days and a good husband—read the letter aloud. Both women were deeply touched and my aunt wept. I am only telling you the facts, you understand, but I would like to suggest that this whole incident might well be taken as proof of the power of modern art. From the first I have been a firm believer in the moderns. I am one who, as an art critic might word it, has been right down through the movements. At first I was an impressionist and later a cubist, a post-impressionist, and even a vorticist. Time after time, in my imaginary life, as a painter, I have been quite swept off my feet. For example I remember Picasso’s blue period ... but we’ll not go into that.
What I am trying to say is that, having this faith in modernity, if one may use the word thus, I did find within myself a peculiar boldness as I sat in the hotel writing room at Madison, Wisconsin. I used the word breasts (in the plural, you understand) and everyone will admit that it is a bold and modern word to use in a letter to an aunt one has never seen. It brought my aunt and me into one family. Her modesty never could have admitted anything else.
And then, my aunt was really touched. Afterward I talked to the nurse and made her a rather handsome present for her part in the affair. When the letter had been read my aunt felt overwhelmingly drawn to me. She turned her face to the wall and her shoulders shook. Do not think that I am not also touched as I write this. “Poor lad,” my aunt said to the nurse, “I will make things easier for him. Send for the lawyer.”
“UNUSED,” that was one of the words the Doctor used that day in speaking of her. He, the doctor, was an extraordinarily large and immaculately clean man, by whom I was at that time employed. I swept out his office, mowed the lawn before his residence, took care of the two horses in his stable and did odd jobs about the yard and kitchen—such as bringing in firewood, putting water in a tub in the sun behind a grape arbor for the doctor’s bath and even sometimes, during his bath, scrubbing for him those parts of his broad back he himself could not reach.
The doctor had a passion in life with which he early infected me. He loved fishing and as he knew all of the good places in the river, several miles west of town, and in Sandusky Bay, some nineteen or twenty miles to the north, we often went off for long delightful days together.
It was late in the afternoon of such a fishing day in the late June, when the doctor and I were together in a boat on the bay, that a farmer came running to the shore, waving his arms and calling to the doctor. Little May Edgley’s body had been found floating near a river’s mouth half a mile away, and, as she had been dead for several days, as the doctor had just had a good bite, and as there was nothing he could do anyway, it was all nonsense, his being called. I remembered how he growled and grumbled. He did not then know what had happened but the fish were just beginning to bite splendidly, I had just landed a fine bass and the good evening’s fishing was all ahead of us. Well, you know how it is—a doctor is always at everyone’s beck and call.
“Dang it all! That’s the way it always goes! Here we are—as good a fishing evening as we’ll find this summer—wind just right and the sky clouding over—and will you look at my dang luck? A doctor in the neighborhood and that farmer knows it and so, just to accommodate me, he goes and stubs his toe, like as not, or his boy falls out of a barn loft, or his old woman gets the toothache. Like as not it’s one of his women folks. I know ’em! His wife’s got an unmarried sister living with her. Dang sentimental old maid! She’s got a nervous complaint—gets all worked up and thinks she’s going to die. Die nothing! I know that kind. Lots of ’em like to have a doctor fooling around. Let a doctor come near, so they can get him alone in a room, and they’ll spend hours talking about themselves—if he’ll let ’em.”
The doctor was reeling in his line, grumbling and complaining as he did so and then, suddenly, with the characteristic cheerfulness that I had seen carry him with a smile on his lips through whole days and nights of work and night driving over rough frozen earth roads in the winter, he picked up the oars and rowed vigorously ashore. When I offered to take the oars he shook his head. “No kid, it’s good for the figure,” he said, looking down at his huge paunch. He smiled. “I got to keep my figure. If I don’t I’ll be losing some of my practice among the unmarried women.”
As for the business ashore—there was May Edgley, of our town, drowned in that out of the way place, and her body had been in the water several days. It had been found among some willows that grew near the mouth of a deep creek that emptied into the bay, had lodged in among the roots of the willows, and when we got ashore the farmer, his son and the hired man, had got it out and had laid it on some boards near a barn that faced the bay.
That was my own first sight of death and I shall not forget the moment when I followed the doctor in among the little group of silent people standing about and saw the dead, discolored and bloated body of the woman lying there.
The doctor was used to that sort of thing, but to me it was all new and terrifying. I remember that I looked once and then ran away. Dashing into the barn I went to lean against the feedbox of a stall, where an old farm-horse was eating hay. The warm day outside had suddenly seemed cold and chill but in the barn it was warm again. Oh, what a lovely thing to a boy is a barn, with the rich warm comforting smell of the cured hay and the animal life, lying like a soft bed over it all. At the doctor’s house, while I lived and worked there, the doctor’s wife used to put on my bed, on winter nights, a kind of soft warm bed cover called a “comfortable.” That’s what it was like to me that day in the barn when we had just found May Edgley’s body.
As for the body—well, May Edgley had been a small woman with small firm hands and in one of her hands, tightly gripped, when they had found her, was a woman’s hat—a great broad-brimmed gaudy thing it must have been, and there had been a huge ostrich feather sticking out of the top, such an ostrich feather as you see sometimes sticking out of the hat of a kind of big flashy woman at the horse races or at second-rate summer resorts near cities.
It stayed in my mind, that bedraggled ostrich feather, little May Edgley’s hand had gripped so determinedly when death came, and as I stood shivering in the barn I could see it again, as I had so often seen it perched on the head of big bold Lil Edgley, May Edgley’s sister, as she went, half-defiantly always, through the streets of our town, Bidwell, Ohio.
And then as I stood shivering with boyish dread of death in that old barn, the farm-horse put his head through an opening at the front of the stall and rubbed his soft warm nose against my cheek. The farmer, on whose place we were, must have been one who was kind to his animals. The old horse rubbed his nose up and down my cheek. “You are a long ways from death, my lad, and when the time comes for you you won’t shiver so much. I am old and I know. Death is a kind comforting thing to those who are through with their lives.”
Something of that sort the old farm-horse seemed to be saying and at any rate he quieted me, took the fear and the chill all out of me.
It was when the doctor and I were driving home together that evening in the dusk, and after all arrangements for sending May Edgley’s body back to town and to her people had been made, that he spoke of her and used the word I am now using as the title for her story. The doctor said a great many things that evening that I cannot now remember and I only remember how the night came softly on and how the grey road faded out of sight, and then how the moon came out and the road that had been grey became silvery white, with patches of inky blackness where the shadows of trees fell across it. The doctor was one sane enough not to talk down to a boy. How often he spoke intimately to me of his impressions of men and events! There were many things in the fat old doctor’s mind of which his patients knew nothing, but of which his stable boy knew.
The doctor’s old bay horse went steadily along, doing his work as cheerfully as the doctor did his and the doctor smoked a cigar. He spoke of the dead woman, May Edgley, and of what a bright girl she had been.
As for her story—he did not tell it completely. I was myself much alive that evening—that is to say the imaginative side of myself was much alive—and the doctor was as a sower, sowing seed in a fertile soil. He was as one who goes through a wide long field, newly plowed by the hand of Death, the plowman, and as he went along he flung wide the seeds of May Edgley’s story, wide, far over the land, over the rich fertile land of a boy’s awakening imagination.
THERE were three boys and as many girls in the Edgley family of Bidwell, Ohio, and of the girls Lillian and Kate were known in a dozen towns along the railroad that ran between Cleveland and Toledo. The fame of Lillian, the eldest, went far. On the streets of the neighboring towns of Clyde, Norwalk, Fremont, Tiffin, and even in Toledo and Cleveland, she was well known. On summer evenings she went up and down our main street wearing a huge hat with a white ostrich feather that fell down almost to her shoulder. She, like her sister Kate, who never succeeded in attaining to a position of prominence in the town’s life, was a blonde with cold staring blue eyes. On almost any Friday evening she might have been seen setting forth on some adventure, from which she did not return until the following Monday or Tuesday. It was evident the adventures were profitable, as the Edgley family were working folk and it is certain her brothers did not purchase for her the endless number of new dresses in which she arrayed herself.
It was a Friday evening in the summer and Lillian appeared on the upper main street of Bidwell. Two dozen men and boys loafed by the station platform, awaiting the arrival of the New York Central train, eastward bound. They stared at Lillian who stared back at them. In the west, from which direction the train was presently to come, the sun went down over young corn fields. A dusky golden splendor lit the skies and the loafers were awed into silence, hushed, both by the beauty of the evening and by the challenge in Lillian’s eyes.
Then the train arrived and the spell of silence was broken. The conductor and brakeman jumped to the station platform and waved their hands at Lillian and the engineer put his head out of the cab.