“Methodist,” I replied ruefully.
“I knew it! But I’m not knocking her; I’m not saying that she isn’t pretty and virtuous, but I do say that she’s older than you, and narrow. Why, man, you don’t know your own mind yet. You don’t know where you’ll want to go or what you’ll want to do. In ten years from now you’ll be thirty-two, and she’ll be thirty-seven or more, believing and feeling things that will make you tired. You’ll never agree with her—or if you do, so much the worse for you. What she wants is a home and children and a steady provider, and what you really want is freedom to go and do as you please, only you don’t know it.
“Now I’ve watched you, Theodore, and I hear what people down here say about you, and I think you have something ahead of you if you don’t make a fool of yourself. But if you marry now—and a conventional and narrow woman at that, one older than you—you’re gone. She’ll cause you endless trouble. In three or four years you’ll have children, and you’ll get a worried, irritated point of view. Take my advice. Run with girls if you want to, but don’t marry. Now I’ve said my say, and you can do as you damned please.”
He smirked genially and condescendingly once more, and I felt very much impressed and put down. After all, I feared, in spite of my slushy mood, that what he said was true, that it would be best for me to devote myself solely to work and study and let women alone. But also I knew that I couldn’t.
The next time my beloved came to the city I decided to sound her on the likelihood of my changing, differing. We were walking along a leaf-strewn street, the red, brown, yellow and green leaves thick on the brick walk, of a gray November afternoon.
“And what would you do then?” I asked, referring to my fear of changing, not caring for her any longer.
She meditated for a while, kicking the leaves and staring at the ground without looking up. Finally she surveyed me with clear appealing blue-gray eyes.
“But you won’t,” she said. “Let’s not think of anything like that any more. We won’t, will we?”
Her tone was so tender and appealing that it moved me tremendously. She had this power over me, and retained it for years, of appealing to my deepest emotions. I felt so sorry for her—for life—even then. It was as if all that Maxwell had said was really true. She was different, older; she might never understand me. But this craving for her—what to do about that? All love, the fiercest passions, might cool and die out, but how did that help me then? In the long future before me should I not regret having given her up, never to have carried to fruition this delicious fever? I thought so.
For weeks thereafter my thoughts were colored by the truth of all John had said. She would never give herself to me without marriage, and here I was, lonely and financially unable to take her, and spiritually unable to justify my marriage to her even if I were. The tangle of life, its unfairness and indifference to the moods and longings of any individual, swept over me once more, weighing me down far beyond the power of expression. I felt like one condemned to carry a cross, and very unwilling and unhappy in doing it. The delirious painful meetings went on and on. I suffered untold tortures from my desires and my dreams. And they were destined never to be fulfilled.... Glorious fruit that hangs upon the vine too long, and then decays!
Another thing that happened at this time and made a great impression, tending more firmly than even Maxwell’s remarks to alter my point of view and make me feel that I must leave St. Louis and go on, was the arrival in the city of my brother Paul, who, as the star of a claptrap melodrama entitled “The Danger Signal,” now put in an appearance. He was one of my four brothers now out in the world making their own way and of them all by far the most successful. I had not seen him since my newspaper days in Chicago two years before. He was then in another play, “The Tin Soldier,” by the reigning farceur, Hoyt. His had not been the leading rôle at that time, but somehow his skill as a comedian had pushed him into that rôle. Previously he had leading parts in such middle-class plays as “A Midnight Bell,” “The Two Johns” and other things of that sort, as well as being an end man in several famous minstrel shows.
Now in this late November or early December, walking along South Sixth Street in the region of the old Havlin Theater, where all the standard melodramas of the time played, I was startled to see his face and name staring at me from a billboard. “Ah,” I thought, “my famous brother! Now these people will know whether our family amounts to anything or not! Wait’ll they hear he is my brother!”
His picture on the billboard recalled so many pleasant memories of him, his visits home, his kindness to and intense love for my mother, how in my tenth year he had talked of my being a writer (Heaven only knows why), and how once on one of his visits home, when I was fourteen, he had set me to the task of composing a humorous essay which he felt sure I could write! Willingly and singingly I essayed it, but when I chose the ancient topic of the mule and its tendency to kick his face fell, and he tried to show me in the gentlest way possible how hackneyed that was and to put me on the track of doing something original.... Now after all this time, and scarcely knowing whether or not he knew I was here, I was to see him once more, to make clear to him my worldly improvement. I do not say it to boast, but I honestly think there was more joy in the mere thought of seeing him again than there was in showing him off and getting a little personal credit because of his success.
CHAPTER LII
As I look back upon my life now I realize clearly that of all the members of our family subsequent to my mother’s death, the only one who, without quite understanding me, still sympathized with my intellectual and artistic point of view—and that most helpfully and at times practically—was my brother Paul. Despite the fact that all my other brothers were much better able intellectually than he to appreciate the kind of thing I was tending toward mentally, his was the sympathy that buoyed me up. I do not think he understood, even in later years (long after I had written Sister Carrie, for instance), what I was driving at. His world was that of the popular song, the middle-class actor or comedian, the middle-class comedy, and such humorous esthetes of the writing world as Bill Nye, Petroleum V. Nasby, and the authors of the Spoopendyke Papers and Samantha at Saratoga. As far as I could make out—and I say this in no lofty, condescending spirit—he was full of simple middle-class romance, middle-class humor, middle-class tenderness, and middle-class grossness—all of which I am very free to say I admire. After all, we cannot all be artists, statesmen, generals, thieves or financiers. Some of us, the large majority, have to be just plain everyday middle-class, and a very comfortable state it is under any decent form of government.
But there is so very much more to be said of him, things which persistently lift him in my memory to a height far more appealing and important than hundreds of greater and surer fame. For my brother was a humorist of so tender and delicate a mold that to speak of him as a mere middle-class artist or middle-class thinker and composer, would be to do him a gross injustice and miss the entire significance and flavor of his being. His tenderness and sympathy, a very human appreciation of the weakness and errors as well as the toils and tribulations of most of us, was his most outstanding and engaging quality and gave him a very definite force and charm. Admitting that he had an intense, possibly an undue fondness for women (I have never been able to discover just where the dividing line is to be drawn in such matters), a frivolous, childish, horse-play sense of humor at times, still he had other qualities that were positively adorable. That sunny disposition, that vigorous, stout body and nimble mind, those smiling sweet blue eyes, that air of gayety and well-being that was with him nearly all the time, even at the most trying times! Life seemed to bubble in him. Hope sprang upward like a fountain. You felt in him a capacity to do (in his limited field), an ability to achieve, whether he was succeeding at the moment or not. Never having the least power to interpret anything in a high musical way, still he was always full of music of a tender, sometimes sad, sometimes gay kind, the ballad-maker of a nation. For myself, I was always fascinated by this skill of his, the lovable art that attempts to interpret sorrow and pleasure in terms of song, however humble. And on the stage, how, in a crude way, by mere smile and gesture, he could make an audience laugh! I have seen houses crowded to the ceiling with middle- or lower-class people, shop girls and boys, factory hands and the like, who tittered continuously at his every move. He seemed to radiate a kind of comforting sunshine and humor without a sharp edge or sting (satire was entirely beyond him), a kind of wilding asininity, your true clown in cap and bells, which caused even my morbid soul to chortle by the hour. Already he was a composer of a certain type of melodramatic and tearful yet land-sweeping songs (The Letter That Never Came, The Pardon Came Too Late, I Believe It for My Mother Told Me So, The Bowery). (Let those who wish to know him better read of him in Twelve Men: My Brother Paul.)
Well, this was my brother Paul, the same whom I have described as stout, gross, sensual, and all of these qualities went hand-in-hand. I have no time here for more than the briefest glimpse, the faintest echo. I should like to write a book about him—the wonderful, the tender! But now he was coming to St. Louis, and in my youthful, vainglorious way I was determined to show him what I was. He should be introduced to Peter, Dick and Rodenberger, my cronies. I would have a feast in my room after the theater in his honor. I would give another, a supper at Faust’s, then the leading restaurant of St. Louis, of a gay Bohemian character, and invite Wandell, Dunlap, my managing editor (I can never think of his name), Bassford, the dramatic editor, and Peter, Dick and Rodenberger. I proposed to bring my love to his theater some afternoon or evening and introduce him to her.
I hurried to the office of the Globe to find Dick and Peter and tell them my news and plans. They were very much for whatever it was I wanted to do, and eager to meet Paul of course. Also, within the next twenty-four hours I had written to Miss W——, and told Wandell, Bassford, the managing editor and nearly everybody else. I dropped in at Faust’s to get an estimate on the kind of dinner I thought he would like, having the head-waiter plan it for me, and then eagerly awaited his arrival.
Sunday morning came, and I called at the theater at about eleven, and found him on the stage of this old theater entirely surrounded by trunks and scenery. There was with him at the moment a very petite actress, the female star of the company, who, as I later learned, was one of his passing flames. He was stout as ever, and dressed in the most engaging Broadway fashion: a suit of good cloth and smart cut, a fur coat, a high hat and a gold-headed cane—in short, all the earmarks of prosperity and comfort. What a wonderful thing he and this stage world, even this world of claptrap melodrama, seemed to me at the time. I felt on the instant somehow as though I were better established in the world than I thought, to be thus connected with one who traveled all over the country. The whole world seemed to come closer because of him.
“Hello!” he called, plainly astonished. “Where’d you come from?” and then seeing that I was better dressed and poised mentally than he had ever known me, he looked me over in an odd, slightly doubting way, as a stranger might, and then introduced me to his friend. Seeing him apparently pleased by my arrival and eager to talk with me, she quickly excused herself, saying she had to go on to her hotel; then he fell to asking me questions as to how I came to be here, how I was getting along. I am sure he was slightly puzzled and possibly disturbed by my sharp change from a shy, retiring boy to one who examined him with the chill and weighing eye of the newspaper man. To me, all of a sudden, he was not merely one whom I had to like because he was my brother or one who knew more about life than I—rather less, I now thought, quickly gathering his intellectual import, but because of his character solely. I might like or dislike that as I chose. He reminded me now a great deal of my mother, and I could not help recalling how loving and generous he had always been with her. Instantly he appealed to me as the simple, home-loving mother-boy that he was. It brought him so close to me that I was definitely and tenderly drawn to him. I could feel how fine and generous he really was. Even then although I doubt very much whether he liked me at first, finding me so brash and self-sufficient, still, so simple and communistic were the laws by which his charming mind worked, he at once accepted me as a part of the family and so of himself, a brother, one of mother’s boys. How often have I heard him say in regard to some immediate relative concerning whom an acrimonious debate might be going forward, “After all, he’s your brother, isn’t he?” or “She’s your sister,” as though mere consanguinity should dissolve all dissatisfactions and rages! Isn’t there something humanly sweet about that, in the face of all the cold, decisive conclusions of this world?
CHAPTER LIII
Well, such was my brother Paul and now he was here. Never before was he so much my dear brother as now. So generally admirable was he that I should have liked him quite as much had he been no relative. After a few moments of explanation as to my present state I offered to share my room with him for the period of his stay, but he declined. Then I offered to take him to lunch, but he was too hurried or engaged. He agreed to come to my room after the show, however, and offered me a box for myself and my new friends. So much faith did I have in the good sense of Peter, Dick and Rodenberger, their certainty of appreciating the charm of a man like Paul, that I brought them to the theater this same night, although I knew the show itself must be a mess. There was a scenic engine in this show, with a heroine lying across the rails! My dear brother was a comic switchman or engineer in this act, evoking roars of low-brow laughter by his antics and jokes.
I shall never forget how my three friends took all this. Now that he was actually here they were good enough to take him into their affectionate consideration on my account, almost as though he belonged to them. He was “Dreiser’s brother Paul,” even “Dear old Paul” afterwards. Because working conditions favored us that night we all three descended on the Havlin together, sitting in the box while the show was in progress but spending all the intermissions in Paul’s dressingroom or on the back of the stage. Having overcome his first surprise and possibly dislike of my brash newspaper manner, he was now all smiles and plainly delighted with my friends, Rodenberger and Peter, especially the latter, appealing to him as characters not unlike himself, individuals whom he could understand. And in later years, when I was in New York, he was always asking after them and singing their praises. Dick also came in for a share of his warm affection, but in a slower way. He thought Dick amusing but queer, like a strange animal of some kind. On subsequent tours which took him to St. Louis he was always in touch with these three. Above all things, the waggish grotesqueries of McCord’s mind moved him immensely. Peter’s incisive personality and daring unconventionality seemed to fascinate Paul. “Wonderful boy, that,” he used to say to me, almost as though he were confiding a deep secret. “You’ll hear from him yet, mark my word. You can’t lose a kid like that.” And time proved quite plainly that he was right.
