“Good evening, Mr. McCullagh,” I said politely as he neared me.
“How d’ do?” he returned gutturally but with such an air of sociability as I had never noticed in him before. “How d’ do? Well, you’re still about, I see. You’re on the Republic, I believe?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I was so pleased and flattered to think that he should trouble to talk to me at all or to indicate that he knew where I was that I could scarcely contain myself. I wanted to thank him, to apologize, to tell him how wonderful he was to me and what a fool I was in my own estimation, but I couldn’t. My tongue was thick.
“You like it over there?”
“Yes, sir. Fairly well, sir.” I was as humble in his presence as a jackie is before an officer. He seemed always so forceful and commanding.
“That little matter of those theaters,” he began after a pause, turning and walking back to his chair, I following, “—Um! um! I don’t think you understand quite how I felt about that. I was sorry to see you go. Um! um!” and he cleared his throat. “It was an unfortunate mistake all around. I want you to know that I did not blame you so much. Um! You might have been relieved of other work. I don’t want to take you away from any other paper, but—um!—I want you to know that if you are ever free and want to come back you can. There is no prejudice in my mind against you.”
I don’t know of anything that ever moved me more. It was wonderful, thrilling. I could have cried from sheer delight. He, my chief, saying this to me! And after all those wretched hours! What a fool I was, I now thought, not to have gone to him personally then and asked his consideration. However, as I saw it, it was too late. Why change now and go back? But I was so excited that I could scarcely speak, and probably would not have known what to say if I had tried. I stood there, and finally blurted out:
“I’m very sorry, Mr. McCullagh. I didn’t mean to do what I did. It was a mistake. I had that extra assignment and—”
“O-oh, that’s all right—that’s all right,” he insisted gruffly and as if he wished to be done with it once and for all. “No harm done. I didn’t mind that so much. But you needn’t have left—that’s what I wish you to understand. You could have stayed if you had wanted to.”
As I viewed it afterward, my best opportunity for a secure position in St. Louis was here. If I had only known it, or, knowing, had been quick to take advantage of it, I might have profited greatly. Mr. McCullagh’s mood was plainly warm toward me; he probably looked upon me as a foolish and excitable but fairly capable boy whom it would have been his pleasure to assist in the world. He had brought me from Chicago; perhaps he wished me to remain under his eye.... Plainly, a word, and I could have returned, I am sure of it, perhaps never to leave. As it was, however, I was so nervous and excited that I took no advantage of it. Possibly he noticed my embarrassment and was pleased. At any rate, as I mumbled my thanks and gratitude for all he had done for me, saying that if I were doing things over I should try to do differently, he interrupted me with:
“Just a moment. It may be that you have some young friend whom you want to help to a position here in St. Louis. If you have, send him to me. I’ll do anything I can for him. I’m always glad to do anything I can for young men.”
I smiled and flushed and thanked him, but for the life of me I could think of nothing else to say. It was so strange, so tremendous, that this man should want to do anything for me after all the ridiculous things I had done under him that I could only hurry away, out of his sight. Once in the shielding darkness outside I felt better but sad. It seemed as if I had made a mistake, as if I should have asked him to take me back.
“Why, he as much as offered to!” I said to myself. “I can go back there any time I wish, or he’ll give me a place for some one else—think of it! Then he doesn’t consider me a fool, as I thought he did!”
For days thereafter I went about my work trying to decide whether I should resign from the Republic and return to him, only now I seemed so very important here, to myself at least, that it did not seem wise. Wasn’t I getting along? Would returning to work under Mitchell be an advantage? I decided not. Also, that I had no real excuse for leaving the Republic at present; so I did nothing, waiting to be absolutely sure what I wanted to do. There was a feeling growing in me at this time that I really did not want to stay in St. Louis at all, that perhaps it would be better for me if I should move on elsewhere. McEnnis, as I recalled, had cautioned me to that effect. Another newspaper man writing me from Chicago and asking for a place (a friend of Dunlap’s, by the way), I recommended him and he was put to work on the Globe-Democrat. And so my reputation for influence in local newspaper affairs grew.
And in the meantime still other things had been happening to me which seemed to complicate my life here and make me almost a fixture in St. Louis. For one thing, worrying over the well-being of my two brothers, E—— and A——, who were still in Chicago, and wishing to do something to improve their condition, I thought that St. Louis would be as good a place for them as any in which to try their fortunes anew. Both had seemed rather unhappy in Chicago and since I was getting along here I felt that it would be only decent in me to give them a helping hand if I could. The blood-tie was rather strong in me then. I have always had a weakness for members of our family regardless of their deserts or mine or what I thought they had done to me. I had a comfortable floor with ample room for them if I chose to invite them, and I thought that my advice and aid and enthusiasm might help them to do better. There was in me then, and has remained (though in a fading form, I am sorry to say), a sort of home-longing (the German Heimweh, no doubt) which made me look back on everything in connection with our troubled lives with a sadness, an ache, a desire to remedy or repair if possible some of the ills and pains that had beset us all. We had not always been unhappy together; what family ever has been? We had quarreled over trivial things, but there had been many happy hours. And now we were separated, and these two brothers were not doing as well as I.
I say it in faint extenuation of all the many hard unkind things I have done in my time, that at the thought of the possible misery some of my brothers and sisters might be enduring, the lacks from which they might be hopelessly suffering, my throat often tightened and my heart ached. Life bears so hard on us all, on many so terribly. What, E—— or A—— longing for something and not being able to afford it! It hurt me far more than any lack of my own ever could. It never occurred to me that they might be wishing to help me; it was always I, hard up or otherwise, wishing that I might do something for them. And this longing in the face of no complaint on their part and no means on mine to translate it into anything much better than wishes and dreams made it all the more painful at times.
My plan was to bring them here and give them a little leisure to look about for some way to better themselves, and then—well, then I should not need to worry about them so much. With this in mind I wrote first to E—— and then A——, and the former, younger and more restless and always more attracted to me than any of the others, soon came on; while A—— required a little more time to think. However, in the course of time he too appeared, and then we three were installed in my rooms, the harboring of my brothers costing me five additional dollars. Here we kept bachelor’s hall, gay enough while it lasted but more or less clouded over all the while by their need of finding work.
I had forgotten, or did not know, or the fact did not make a sufficiently sharp impression on me, that this was a panic year (1893) and that there were hundreds of thousands of men out of work, the country over. Indeed, trade was at a standstill, or nearly so. When I first went on the Republic, if I had only stopped to remember, many factories were closing down or slowing up, discharging men or issuing scrip of their own wherewith to pay them until times should be better, and some shops and stores were failing entirely. It had been my first experience of a panic and should have made a deep impression on me had I been of a practical turn, for one of my earliest assignments had been to visit some of the owners of factories and stores and shops and ask the cause of their decline and whether better times were in sight. Occasionally even then I read long editorials in the Republic or the Globe on the subject, yet I could take no interest in them. They were too heavy, as I thought. Yet I can remember the gloom hanging over streets and shops and how solemnly some of the manufacturers spoke of the crisis and the hard times yet in store. There were to be hard times for a year or more.
I recall one old man at this time, very prosy and stiff and conventional, “one of our best business men,” who had had a large iron factory on the south side for fifty years and who now in his old age had to shut down for good. Being sent out to interview him, I found him after a long search in one of the silent wings of his empty foundry, walking about alone examining some machinery which also was still. I asked him what the trouble was and if he would resume work soon again.
“Just say that I’m done,” he replied. “This panic has finished me. I could go on later, I suppose, but I’m too old to begin all over again. I haven’t any money now, and that’s all there is to it.”
I left him meditating over some tool he was trying to adjust.
In the face of this imagine my gayly inviting my two brothers to this difficult scene and then expecting them to get along in some way, persuading them to throw up whatever places or positions they had in Chicago! Yet in so doing I satisfied an emotional or psychic longing to have them near me and to do something for them, and beyond that I did not think.
In fact it took me years and years to get one thing straight in my poor brain, and that was this: that aside from the economic or practical possibility of translating one’s dreams into reality, the less one broods over them the better. Here I was now, earning the very inadequate stipend of eighteen dollars—or it may have been twenty or twenty-two, for I have a dim recollection of having been given at least one raise in pay—yet with no more practical sense than to undertake a burden which I could not possibly sustain. For despite my good intentions I had no surplus wherewith to sustain my brothers, assuming that their efforts proved even temporarily unavailing. All this dream of doing something for them was based on good will and a totally inadequate income. In consequence it could not but fail, as it did, seeing that St. Louis was far less commercially active than Chicago. It was not growing much and there was an older and much more European theory of apprenticeship and continuity in place and type of work than prevailed at that time in the windy city. Work was really very hard to get, especially in manufacturing and commercial lines, and in consequence my two brothers, after only a week or two of pleasuring, which was all I could afford, were compelled to hunt here and there, early and late, without finding anything to do. True, I tried to help them in one way and another with advice as to institutions, lines of work and the like, but to no end.
But before and after they came, how enthusiastically and no doubt falsely I painted the city of St. Louis, its large size, opportunities, beauties, etc., and once they were here I put myself to the task of showing them its charms; but to no avail. We went about together to restaurants, parks, theaters, outlying places. As long as it was new and they felt that there was some hope of finding work they were gay enough and interested and we spent a number of delightful hours together. But as time wore on and fading summer days proved that their dreams and mine were hopeless and they could do no better here than in Chicago if as well, their moods changed, as did mine. The burden of expense was considerable. While paying gayly enough for food and rent, and even laundry, for the three, I began to wonder whether I should be able to endure the strain much longer. Love them as I might in their absence, and happy as I was with them, still it was not possible for me to keep up this pace. I was depriving myself of bare necessities, and I think they saw it. I said nothing, of that I am positive, but after a month or six weeks of trial and failure they themselves saw the point and became unhappy over it. Our morning and evening hours, whenever I could see them in the evening, became less and less gay. Finally A——, with his usual eye for the sensible, announced that he was tired of searching here and was about to return to Chicago. He did not like St. Louis anyhow; it was a “hell of a place,” a third-rate city. He was going back where he could get work. And E——, perhaps recalling past joys of which I knew nothing, said he was going also. And so once more I was alone.
Yet even this rough experience had no marked effect on me. It taught me little if anything in regard to the economic struggle. I know now that these two must have had a hard time replacing themselves in Chicago at that time, but the meaning of it did not get to me then. As for E——, some years later I persuaded him to join me in New York, where I managed to keep him by me that time until he became self-supporting.
CHAPTER XLVIII
Because Miss W—— lived some distance from the city and would remain there until her school season opened, I neglected to write to her; but once September had come and the day of her return was near I began to think of her and soon was as keenly interested as ever. Her simplicity and charm came back to me with great force, and I one day sat down and wrote her a brief letter recalling our Chicago days and asking her how long it would be before she would be returning to St. Louis. I was rather nervous now lest she should not answer.
In due time, however, a note came in which she told me that she expected to be at Florissant, about twenty or twenty-five miles out of St. Louis, by September fifteenth, when her school work would begin, and that she would be in St. Louis shortly afterward to visit an aunt and hoped to see me. There was something about the letter so simple, direct and yet artful that it touched me deeply. As I have said, I really knew nothing of the conditions which surrounded her, and yet from the time I received this letter I sensed something that appealed to me: a rurality and simplicity plus a certain artful daintiness—the power, I suppose, to pose under my glance and yet evade—which held me as in a vise. Beside her, all others seemed harder, holder, or of coarser fiber.
It does not matter now but as I look back on it there seems to have been more of pure, exalted or frenetic romance in this thing (at first, and even a year or so afterward), than in any mating experience of which I have any recollection, with the possible exception of Alice. Unlike most of my other affairs, this (in the beginning at least) seemed more a matter of pure romance or poetry, a desire to see and be near her. Indeed I could only think of her as a part of some idyllic country scene, of walking or riding with her along some leafy country lane, of rowing a little boat on a stream, of sitting with her under trees in a hammock, of watching her play tennis, of being with her where grass, flowers, trees and a blue sky were. In that idyllic world of the Fair she had seemed well-placed. This must be a perfect love, I thought. Here was your truly sweet, pure girl who inspired a man with a nobler passion than mere lust. I began to picture myself with her in a home somewhere, possibly here in St. Louis, of going with her to church even, for I fancied she was of a strict religious bent, of pushing a baby carriage—indeed, of leading a thoroughly domestic life, and being happy in it!
