We fell into a correspondence which swiftly took on a regular form and resulted, on my part, in a most extended correspondence, letters so long that they surprised even myself. I found myself in the grip of a letter-writing fever such as hitherto had never possessed me, writing long, personal, intimate accounts of my own affairs, my work, my dreams, what not, as well as what I thought of her, of the beauty of life as I had seen it with her in Chicago, my theories and imaginings in regard to everything. As I see it now, this was perhaps my first and easiest attempt at literary expression, the form being negligible and yet sufficient to encompass and embody without difficulty all the surging and seething emotions and ideas which had hitherto been locked up in me, bubbling and steaming to the explosion point. Indeed the newspaper forms to which I was daily compelled to confine myself offered no outlet, and in addition, in Miss W—— I had found a seemingly sympathetic and understanding soul, one which required and inspired all the best that was in me. I was now, as I told myself, on the verge of something wonderful, a new life. I must work, save, advance myself and better my condition generally, so as to be worthy of her.... At the very same time I was still able to see beauty in other women and the cloying delights of those who would never be able to be as good as she! They might be good enough for me but far beneath her whose eyes were “too pure to behold evil.”
In the latter part of September she came to St. Louis and gave me my first delighted sight of her since we had left Chicago. At this time I was at the topmost toss of my adventures in St. Louis. I was, as I now assumed, somebody. By now also I had found a new room in the very heart of the city, on Broadway near the Southern, and was leading a bachelor existence under truly metropolitan circumstances. This room was on the third floor rear of a building which looked out over some nondescript music hall whose glass roof was just below and from whence nightly, and frequently in the afternoon, issued all sorts of garish music hall clatter, including music and singing and voices in monologue or dialogue. One block south were the Southern Hotel, Faust’s Restaurant, and the Olympic Theater. In the block north were the courthouse and Dick’s old room, which by now he had abandoned, having in spite of all his fine dreams of a resplendent heiress married a girl whom together we had met in the church some months before—a circus-rider! Thereafter he had removed to a prosaic flat on the south side, an institution which seemed to me but a crude and rather pathetic attempt at worthless domesticity.
I should like to report here that something over a year later this first marriage of his terminated in the death of his wife. Later—some two or three years—he indulged in a second most prosaic and inartistic romance—wedding finally, on this occasion, the daughter of a carpenter. And her name—Sopheronisby Boanerga Watkins. And a year or two after this she was burned to death by an exploding oil stove. And this was the man who was bent on capturing an heiress.
In my new room therefore, because it was more of a center, I had already managed to set up a kind of garret salon, which was patronized by Dick and Peter, Rodenberger, Dunlap, Brady and a number of other acquaintances. No sooner was I settled here than Michaelson, whose affairs I had straightened out by getting him a place on the Republic, put in an appearance, and also John Maxwell, who because of untoward conditions in Chicago had come to St. Louis to better his fortunes. But more of that later.
In spite of all these friends and labors and attempts at aiding others, it was my affair with Miss W—— which now completely engrossed me. So seriously had I taken this new adventure to heart that I was scarcely able to eat or sleep. Once I knew definitely that she was inclined to like me, as her letters proved, and the exact day of her arrival had been fixed, I walked on air. I had not been able to save much money since I had been on the Republic (possibly a hundred dollars all told, and that since my brothers had left), but of that I took forty or fifty and bought a new fall suit of a most pronounced if not startling pattern, the coat being extra long and of no known relation to any current style (an idea of my own), to say nothing of such extras as patent leather shoes, ties, collars, a new pearl-gray hat—all purchased in view of this expected visit for her especial delectation! Although I had little money for what I considered the essentials of courtship—theater boxes, dinners and suppers at the best restaurants, flowers, candy—still I hoped to make an impression. Why shouldn’t I? Being a newspaper man and an ex-dramatic editor, to say nothing of my rather close friendship with the present Republic critic, I could easily obtain theater tickets, although the exigencies of my work often prevented, as I discovered afterward, my accompanying her for more than an hour at a time.
CHAPTER XLIX
On the day of her arrival I arrayed myself in my best, armed myself with flowers, candy and two tickets for the theater, and made my way out to her aunt’s in one of the simpler home streets in the west end. I was so fearful that my afternoon assignment should prove a barrier to my seeing her that day that I went to her as early as ten-thirty, intending to offer her the tickets and arrange to stop for her afterwards at the theater; or, failing that, to see her for a little while in the evening if my assignments permitted. I was so vain of my standing in her eyes, so anxious to make a good impression, that I was ashamed to confess that my reportorial duties made it difficult for me to see her at all. After my free days in Chicago I wanted her to think that I was more than a mere reporter, a sort of traveling correspondent and feature man, which in a way I was, only my superiors were determined to keep me for some reason in the ordinary reportorial class taking daily assignments as usual. Instead of confessing my difficulties I made a great show of freedom.
I found her in a small tree-shaded, cool-looking brick house, with a brick sidewalk before it and a space of grass on one side. Never did place seem more charming. I stared at it as one might at a shrine. Here at last was the temporary home of my beloved, and she was within!
I knocked, and an attractive slip of a girl (her niece, as I learned) answered. I was shown into a long, dustless, darkened parlor. After giving me time to weigh the taste and affluence of her relatives according to my standards, she arrived, the beloved, the beautiful. In view of many later sadder things, it seems that here at least I might attempt to do her full justice. She seemed exquisite to me then, a trim, agreeable sylph of a girl, with a lovely oval face, stark red hair braided and coiled after the fashion of a Greek head, a clear pink skin, long, narrow, almond-shaped, gray-blue eyes, delicate, graceful hands, a perfect figure, small well-formed feet. There was something of the wood or water nymph about her, a seeking in her eyes, a breath of wild winds in her hair, a scarlet glory to her mouth. And yet she was so obviously a simple and inexperienced country girl, caught firm and fast in American religious and puritanic traditions and with no hint in her mind of all the wild, mad ways of the world. Sometimes I have grieved that she ever met me, or that I so little understood myself as to have sought her out.
I first saw her, after this long time, framed in a white doorway, and she made a fascinating picture. Here, as in Chicago, she seemed shy, innocent, questioning, as one who might fly at the first sound. I gazed in admiration. Despite a certain something in her letters which had indirectly assured me of her affection or her desire for mine, still she held aloof, extending a cool hand and asking me to sit down, smiling tenderly and graciously. I felt odd, out of place, and yet wonderfully drawn to her, passionately interested. What followed by way of conversation I cannot remember now—talk of the Fair, I suppose, some of those we had known, her summer, mine. She took my roses and pinned some of them on, placing the rest in a jar. There was a piano here, and after a time she consented to play. In a moment, it seemed, it was twelve-thirty, and I had to go.
I walked on air. It seemed to me that I had never seen any one more beautiful—and I doubt now that I had. There was no reason to be applied to the thing: it was plain infatuation, a burning, consuming desire for her. If I had lost her then and there, or any time within a year thereafter, I should have deemed it the most amazing affair of my life.
I returned to the office and took some assignment, which I cut short at three-thirty in order to get back to the Grand Opera House to sit beside her. The play was an Irish love drama, with Chauncey Olcott, the singing comedian, in the title rôle. With her beside me I thought it perfect. Love! Ah, love! When the performance was ended I was ready to weep over the torturing beauty of life. Outside we found the matinée crowds, the carriages, the sense of autumn gayety and show in the air. A nearby ice-cream and candy store was crowded to suffocation. Young girls of the better families hummed like bees. Because of my poverty and uncertain station I felt depressed, at the same time pretending to a station which I felt to be most unreal. The mixture of ambition and uncertainty, pride, a gay coaxing in the air, added to the need to return to conventional toil—how these tortured me! Nothing surprises me now more than my driving emotions all through this period. I was as one possessed.
We parted at a street-car—when I wanted a carriage! We met at her aunt’s home at eight-thirty, because I saw an opportunity of deliberately evading an assignment. In this simple parlor I dreamed the wildest, the most fantastic dreams. She was the be-all and the end-all of my existence. Now I must work for her, wait for her, succeed for her! Her mediocre piano technique seemed perfect, her voice ideal! Never was such beauty, such color. St. Louis took on a glamour which it had never before possessed.... If only this love affair could have gone on to a swift fruition it would have been perfect, blinding.
But all the formalities, traditions, beliefs, of a conventional and puritanic region were in the way. Love, as it is in most places, and despite its consuming blaze, was a slow process. There must be many such visits, I knew, before I could even place an arm about her. I was to be permitted to take her to church, to concerts, the theater, a restaurant occasionally, but nothing more.
The next morning I went to church with her; the next afternoon unavoidable work kept me from her, but that night I shirked and stayed with her until eleven. The next morning, since she had to catch an early train for Florissant, I slept late, but during the next two weeks (she could not come oftener, having to spend one Sunday with her “folks,” as she referred to them) I poured forth my amazement and delight on reams of thin paper. I wonder now where they are. Once there was a trunk full.
Perhaps the most interesting effect of this sudden fierce passion was the heightened color it lent to everything. Never before had I realized quite so clearly the charm of life as life, its wondrous singing, its intense appeal. I remember witnessing a hanging about this time, standing beside the murderer when the trap was sprung, and being horrified, sickened to death, yet when I returned to the office and there was a letter from her—the world was perfect once more, no evil or pain in it! I followed up the horrors of a political catastrophe, in which a city treasurer shot himself to escape the law—but a letter from her, and the world was beautiful. A negro in an outlying county assaulted a girl, and I arrived in time to see him lynched, but walking in the wood afterward, away from the swinging body, I thought of her—and life contained not a single ill. Such is infatuation. If I had been alive before, now I was more than alive. I tingled all over with longing and aspiration—to be an editor, a publisher, a playwright—I know not what. The simple homes I had dreamed over before as representing all that was charming and soothing and shielding were now twice as attractive. Love, all its possibilities, paraded before my eyes, a gorgeous, fantastic procession. Love! Love! The charm of a home in which it would find its most appropriate setting! The brooding tenderness of it! Its healing force against the blows of ordinary life! To be married, to have your beloved with you, to have a charming home to which to return of an evening, or at any hour, sick or well! I was young, in good health and spirits. In a few years I should be neither so young nor so vital. Age would descend, cold, gray, thin, passionless. This glorious, glorious period of love, desire, would be gone, and then what? Ah, and then what! If I did not achieve now and soon all that I desired in the way of tenderness, fortune, beauty—now when I was young and could enjoy it—my chance would once and for all be over. I should be helpless. Youth would come no more! Love would come no more! But now—now—life was sounding, singing, urging, teasing; but also it was running away fast, and what was I doing about it? What could I do?
The five months which followed were a period of just such color and mood, the richest period of rank romanticism I have ever endured. At times I could laugh, at others sigh, over the incidents of this period, for there is as little happiness in love as there is out of it, at least in my case. If I had only known myself I might have seen, and that plainly, that it was not any of the charming conventional things which this girl represented but her charming physical self that I craved. The world, as I see it now, has trussed itself up too helplessly with too many strings of convention, religion, dogma. It has accepted too many rules, all calculated for the guidance of individuals in connection with the propagation and rearing of children, the conquest and development of this planet. This is all very well for those who are interested in that, but what of those who are not? Is it everybody’s business to get married and accept all the dictates of conventional society—that is, bear and rear children according to a given social or religious theory? Cannot the world have too much of mere breeding? Are two billion wage slaves, for instance, more advantageous than one billion, or one billion more than five hundred million? Or is an unconquered planet less interesting than a conquered one? Isn’t the mere contact of love, if it produces ideas, experiences, tragedies even, as important as raising a few hundred thousand coal miners, railroad hands or heroes destined to be eventually ground or shot in some contest with autocratic or capitalistic classes? And, furthermore, I am inclined to suspect that the monogamous standard to which the world has been tethered much too harshly for a thousand years or more now is entirely wrong. I do not believe that it is Nature’s only or ultimate way of continuing or preserving itself. Nor am I inclined to accept the belief that it produces the highest type of citizen. The ancient world knew little of strict monogamy, and some countries today are still without it. Even in our religious or moralistic day we are beginning to see less and less of its strict enforcement. (Fifty thousand divorces in one State in one year is but a straw.) It is a product, I suspect, of intellectual lethargy or dullness, a mental incapacity for individuality. What we have achieved is a vast ruthless machine for the propagation of people far beyond the world’s need, even its capacity to support decently. In special cases, where the strong find themselves, we see more of secret polygamy and polyandry than is suspected by the dull and the ignorant. Economic opportunity, plus love or attraction, arranges all this, all the churches, laws, disasters to the contrary notwithstanding. Love or desire, where economic conditions permit, will and does find a way.
