“Ever worked on a paper before?”
“No, sir.”
“How do you know you can write?”
“I don’t; but I think I could learn.”
“Learn? Learn? We haven’t time to teach anybody here! You better try one of the little papers—a trade paper, maybe, until you learn how—then come back,” and he walked off.
This gave me at least a definite idea as to how I might begin, but just the same it did not get me a position.
Meanwhile, looking here and there and not finding anything, I decided, since I had had experience as a collector and must live while I was making my way into journalism, to return to this work and see if I might not in the meantime get a place as a reporter.
Having been previously employed by an easy-payment instalment house, I now sought out another, the Corbin Company, in Lake Street, not very far from the office of the firm for which I had previously worked. From this firm, having been hard pressed for a winter overcoat the preceding fall, I had abstracted or held out twenty-five dollars, intending to restore it. But before I had been able to manage that a slack up in the work occurred, due to the fact that wandering street agents sold less in winter than in summer, and I was laid off and had to confess that I was short in my account.
The manager and owner, who had seemed to take a fancy to me, said nothing other than that I was making a mistake, taking the path that led to social hell. I do not recall that he even requested that the money be returned. But I was so nervous that I was convinced that some day, unless I returned the money, I should be arrested, and to avoid this I had written him a letter after leaving promising that I would pay up. He never even bothered to answer the letter, and I believe that if I had returned in the spring, paid the twenty-five dollars and asked for work he would have taken me on again. But I had no such thought in mind. I held myself disgraced forever and only wished to get clear of this sort of work. It was a vulture game at best, selling trash to the ignorant for twelve and fourteen times its value. Now that I was out of it I hated to return. I feared that the first thing my proposed employer would do would be to inquire of my previous employer, and that being informed of my stealing he would refuse to employ me.
With fear and trembling I inquired of the firm in Lake Street and was told that there was a place awaiting some one—“the right party.” The manager wanted to know if I could give a bond for three hundred dollars; they had just had one collector arrested for stealing sixty dollars. I told him I thought I could and decided to explain the proposition to my father and obtain his advice since I knew little about how a bond was secured. When I learned that the bonding company investigated one’s past, however, I was terrorized. My father, an honest, worthy and defiant German, on being told that a bond was required, scouted the idea with much vehemence. Why should any one want a bond from me? he demanded to know. Hadn’t I worked for Mr. M—— in the same line? Couldn’t they go there and find out? At thought of M—— I shook, and, rather than have an investigation, dropped the whole matter, deciding not to go near the place again.
But the manager, taken by my guileless look, I presume, called one evening at our house. He had taken a fancy to me, he said; I looked to be honest and industrious; he liked the neighborhood I lived in. He proposed that I should go to one of the local bonding companies and get a three hundred dollar bond for ten dollars a year, his company paying for the bond out of my first week’s salary, which was to be only twelve dollars to start with. This promised to involve explaining about M——, but I decided to go to the bonding company and refer only to two other men for whom I had worked and see what would happen. For the rest, I proposed to say that school and college life had filled my years before this. If trouble came over M—— I planned to run away.
But, to my astonishment and delight, my ruse worked admirably. The following Sunday afternoon my new manager called and asked me to report the following morning for work.
Oh, those singing days in the streets and parks and show-places of Chicago, those hours when in bright or thick lowery weather I tramped the highways and byways dreaming chaotic dreams. I had all my afternoons to myself after one or two o’clock. The speed with which I worked and could walk would soon get me over the list of my customers, and then I was free to go where I chose. Spring was coming. I was only nineteen. Life was all before me, and the feel of plenty of money in my pocket, even if it did not belong to me, was comforting. And then youth, youth—that lilt and song in one’s very blood! I felt as if I were walking on tinted clouds, among the highlands of the dawn.
How shall I do justice to this period, which for perfection of spirit, ease of soul, was the very best I had so far known? In the first place, because of months of exercise in the open air, my physical condition was good. I was certain to get somewhere in the newspaper world, or so I thought. The condition of our family was better than it had ever been in my time, for we four younger children were working steadily. Our home life, in spite of bickerings among several of my brothers and sisters, was still pleasing enough. Altogether we were prospering, and my father was looking forward to a day when all family debts would be paid and the soul of my mother, as well as his own when it passed over, could be freed from too prolonged torments in purgatory! For, as a Catholic, he believed that until all one’s full debts here on earth were paid one’s soul was held in durance on the other side.
For myself, life was at the topmost toss. I was like some bird poised on a high twig, teetering and fluttering and ready for flight. Again, I was like those flying hawks and buzzards that ride so gracefully on still wings above a summer landscape, seeing all the wonders of the world below. Again, I was like a song that sings itself, the spirit of happy music that by some freak of creation is able to rejoice in its own harmonies and rhythms. Joy was ever before me, the sense of some great adventure lurking just around the corner.
How I loved the tonic note of even the grinding wheels of the trucks and cars, the clang and clatter of cable and electric lines, the surge of vehicles in every street! The palls of heavy manufacturing smoke that hung low over the city like impending hurricanes; the storms of wintry snow or sleety rain; the glow of yellow lights in little shops at evening, mile after mile, where people were stirring and bustling over potatoes, flour, cabbages—all these things were the substance of songs, paintings, poems. I liked the sections where the women of the town were still, at noon, sleeping off the debauches of the preceding night, or at night were preparing for the gaudy make-believes of their midnight day. I liked those sections crowded with great black factories, stock-yards, steel works, Pullman yards, where in the midst of Plutonian stress and clang men mixed or forged or joined or prepared those delicacies, pleasures and perfections for which the world buys and sells itself. Life was at its best here, its promise the most glittering. I liked those raw neighborhoods where in small, unpainted, tumbledown shanties set in grassless, can-strewn yards drunken and lecherous slatterns and brawlers were to be found mooning about in a hell of their own. And, for contrast, I liked those areas of great mansions set upon the great streets of the city in spacious lawns, where liveried servants stood by doors and carriages turned in at spacious gates and under heavy porte-cochères.
I think I grasped Chicago in its larger material if not in its more complicated mental aspects. Its bad was so deliciously bad, its good so very good, keen and succulent, reckless, inconsequential, pretentious, hopeful, eager, new. People cursed or raved or snarled—the more fortunate among them, but they were never heavy or dull or asleep. In some neighborhoods the rancidity of dirt, or the stark icy bleakness of poverty, fairly shouted, but they were never still, decaying pools of misery. On wide bleak stretches of prairie swept by whipping winds one could find men who were tanning dog or cat hides but their wives were buying yellow plush albums or red silk-shaded lamps or blue and green rugs on time, as I could personally testify. Churches with gaudy altars and services rose out of mucky masses of shanties and gas-tanks; saloons with glistening bars of colored glass and mirrors stood as the centers and clubs of drear, bleak masses of huts. There were vice districts and wealth districts hung with every enticing luxury that the wit of a commonplace or conventional mind could suggest. Such was Chicago.
In the vice districts I had been paid for shabby rugs and lamps, all shamelessly overpriced, by plump naked girls striding from bed to dresser to get a purse, and then offered certain favors for a dollar, or its equivalent—a credit on the contract slip. In the more exclusive neighborhoods I was sent around to a side entrance by comfortably dressed women who were too proud or too sly to have their neighbors know that they were buying on time. Black negresses leered at me from behind shuttered windows at noon; plump wives drew me into risqué situations on sight; death-bereaved weepers mourned over their late lost in my presence—and postponed paying me. But I liked the life. I was crazy about it. Chicago was like a great orchestra in a tumult of noble harmonies. I was like a guest at a feast, eating and drinking in a delirium of ecstasy.
CHAPTER IV
But if I was wrought up by the varying aspects of the city, I was equally wrought up by the delights of love, which came for the first time fully with the arrival of Alice. Was I in love with her? No, as I understand myself now. I doubt that I have ever been in love with any one, or with anything save life as a whole. Twice or thrice I have developed stirring passions but always there was a voice or thought within which seemed to say over and over, like a bell at sea: “What does it matter? Beauty is eternal.... Beauty will come again!” But this thing, life, this picture of effort, this colorful panorama of hope and joy and despair—that did matter! Beauty, like a tinkling bell, the tintings of the dawn, the whispering of gentle winds and waters in summer days and Arcadian places, was in everything and everywhere. Indeed the appeal of this local life was its relationship to eternal perfect beauty. That it should go! That never again, after a few years, might I see it more! That love should pass! That youth should pass! That in due time I should stand old and grizzled, contemplating with age-filmed eyes joys and wonders whose sting and color I could no longer feel or even remember—out on it for a damned tragedy and a mirthless joke!
Alice proved to be in love with me. She lived in a two-flat frame house in what was then the far middle-south section of the city, a region about Fifty-first and Halsted streets. Her foster-father was a railroad watchman, and had saved up a few thousand dollars by years of toil. This little apartment represented his expenditures plus her taste, such as it was: a simple little place, with red plush curtains shielding a pair of folding-doors which separated two large rooms front and back. There were lace curtains and white shades at the windows, a piano (a most soothing luxury for me to contemplate), and then store furniture: a red velvet settee, a red plush rocker, several other new badly designed chairs.
Quaint little soul! How cheery and dreamful and pulsating with life she was when I met her! Her suitor, as I afterwards came to know, was a phlegmatic man of thirty-five, who had found in her all that he desired and was eager to marry her, as he eventually did. He was wont to call regularly on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, taking her occasionally to a theater or to dinner downtown. When I arrived on the scene I must have disrupted all this, for after a time, because I manifested some opposition, leaving her no choice indeed, Wednesdays and Sundays became my evenings, and any others that I chose. Regardless of my numerous and no doubt asinine defects, she was in love with me and willing to accept me on my own terms.
Yes, Alice saw something she wanted and thought she could hold. She wanted to unite with me for this little span of existence, to go with me hand in hand into the ultimate nothingness. I think she was a poet in her way, but voiceless. When I called the first night she sat primly for a little while on one of her red chairs near the window, while I occupied a rocker. I had hung up my coat and hat with a flourish and had stood about for a while examining everything, with the purpose of estimating it and her. It all seemed cozy and pleasing enough and, curiously, I felt more at ease on this my first visit than I ever did at my Scotch maid’s home. There her thrifty, cautious, religious though genial and well-meaning mother, her irritable blind uncle and her more attractive young sister disturbed and tended to alienate me. Here, for weeks and weeks, I never saw Alice’s foster-parents. When finally I was introduced to them, they grated on me not at all. This first night she played a little on her piano, then on her banjo, and because she seemed especially charming to me I went over and stood behind her chair, deciding to take her face in my hands and kiss her. Perhaps a touch of remorse and in consequence a bit of indecision now swayed her, for she got up before I could do it. On the instant my assurance became less and yet my mood hardened, for I thought she was trifling with me. After the previous Sunday it seemed to me that she could do no less than permit me to embrace her. I was deciding that the evening was about to be a failure, when she came up behind me and said: “Don’t you think it’s rather nice across there, between those houses?”
Over the way a gap between peaked-roofed houses revealed a long stretch of prairie, now covered with snow, gas lamps flickering in orderly rows, an occasional frame house glowing in the distance.
“Yes,” I admitted moodily.
“This is a funny neighborhood,” she ventured. “People are always moving in and out in that row of houses over there.”
“Are they?” I said, not very much interested now that I felt myself defeated. There was a silence and then she laid one hand on my arm.
“You’re not mad at me, Dorse?” she asked, using a name which my sister had given me.
The sound of it on her lips, soft and pleading, moved me.
“Oh, no,” I replied loftily. “Why should I be?”
“I was thinking that maybe I oughtn’t to be doing this. There’s been some one else up to now, you know.”
“Yes.”
“I guess I don’t care for him any more or I wouldn’t be doing what I am.”
“I thought you cared for me. Why did you invite me down here?”
“Oh, Dorse, I do,” she said, placing both her hands on my folded arms and looking up into my face with a kind of tenseness. “I know it isn’t right but I can’t help it. You have such nice hair and eyes, and you’re so tall. Do you care for me at all?”
