“I like the country, but it’s a hard place to make a living, isn’t it?” I finally said.
“Yes,” he assented gloomily. “I’ve never been able to get anything out of it—but I haven’t done very well in the city either.”
I sensed the mood of an easily defeated man.
“I’m so used to the noise and bustle of the streets that these fields seem lonely,” I said.
“Yes, but you might get over that in time, don’t you think?”
Never, I thought, but did not say so; instead I said: “That’s a beautiful sky, isn’t it?” and he looked blankly to where a touch of purple was creeping into the background of red and gold.
We reached the house at dusk. Going through the gate I said: “I don’t see how I can go into this with you, Mich. There isn’t enough in it.”
“Well, don’t worry about it any more tonight. I’d rather the girl wouldn’t know. We’ll talk it over in the morning.”
CHAPTER LVI
Disheartening as this village and country life might seem as a permanent field of endeavor, it was pleasing enough as a spectacle or as the scene of a vacation. Although it was late February when I came and there was snow on the ground, a warm wind came in a day or two and drove most of it away. A full moon rose every night in the east and there was a sense of approaching Spring. Before the charming old farmhouse flowed the wonderful little Maumee River, dimpling over stones and spreading out wide, as though it wished to appear much more than it was. There is madness in moonlight, and there is madness in that chemical compound which is youth. Here in this simple farming region, once free of the thought that by any chance I might be compelled to remain here, I felt strangely renewed and free as a bird, though at the same time there was an undercurrent of sadness, not only for myself but for life itself, the lapse and decay of things, the impossibility of tasting or knowing more than a fraction of the glories and pleasures that are everywhere outspread. Although I had not had a vacation in years, I was eager to be at work. The greatness of life, its possibilities, the astounding dreams of supremacy which might come true, were calling to me. I wanted to be on, to find what life had in store for me; and yet I wanted to stay here for a while.
Mich’s father, as well as his mother and wife, interested me intensely, for they were simple, industrious, believing. They were good Baptists or Methodists or Presbyterians. The grizzled little old farmer who had built up this place or inherited a part and added the rest, was exactly like all the other farmers I have ever known: genial, kindly, fairly tolerant, curious as to the wonders of the world without, full of a great faith in America and its destiny, sure that it is the greatest country in the world, and that there has never been one other like it. That first night at supper, and the next morning at breakfast, and all my other days here, the old man questioned me as to life, its ways, my beliefs or theories, and I am positive that he was delighted to have me there, for it was winter and he had little to do besides read his paper.
The newspaper of largest circulation in this region was the Blade of Toledo, which he read assiduously. The mother and daughter-in-law did most of the work. The mother was forever busy cooking breakfast or dinner, cleaning the rooms, milking, making butter and cheese, gathering eggs from a nearby hennery. Her large cellar was stocked with jellies, preserved fruit, apples, potatoes and other vegetables. There was an ample store of bacon, salt pork and beef. I found that no fresh meat other than chicken was served, but the meals were delightful and plentiful, delicious biscuits and jelly, fresh butter, eggs, ham, bacon, salt pork or cured beef, and the rarely absent fried chicken, as well as some rabbits which Mich shot. During my stay he did nothing but idle about the barn, practicing on a cornet which he said had saved his lungs at a time when he was threatened with consumption. But his playing! I wonder the cure did not prove fatal. I noted the intense interest of Mich’s father in what the discovery of gas in this region would do for it. He was almost certain that all small towns hereabout would now become prosperous manufacturing centers. There would be work for all. Wages would go up. Many people would soon come here and become rich. This of course never came true at all. The flow of natural gas soon gave out and the oil strikes were not even rivals of some nearby fields.
All this talk was alien to my thoughts. I could not fix my interest on trade and what it held in store for anybody. I knew it must be so and that America was destined to grow materially, but somehow the thing did not interest me. My thoughts leaped to the artistic spectacle such material prosperity might subsequently present, not to the purely material phase of the prosperity itself. Indeed I could never think of the work being done in any factory or institution without passing from that work to the lives behind it, the crowds of commonplace workers, the great streets which they filled, the bare homes, and the separate and distinct dramas of their individual lives. I was tremendously interested by the rise of various captains of industry then already bestriding America, their opportunities and pleasures, the ease and skill with which they organized “trusts” and combinations, their manipulations of the great railroads, oil and coal fields, their control of the telegraph and the telephone, their sharp and watchful domination of American politics; but only as drama. Grover Cleveland was President, and his every deed was paining the Republicans quite as much as it was gratifying the Democrats, but I could already see that the lot of the underdog varied little with the much-heralded changes of administration—and it was the underdog that always interested me more than the upper one, his needs, his woes, his simplicities. Here, as elsewhere, I could see by talking to Mich and his father, men became vastly excited, paraded and all but wept over the results of one election or another, city, State or national, but when all was said and done and America had been “saved,” or the Constitution “defended” or “wrecked,” the condition of the average man, myself included, was about as it had been before.
The few days I spent here represented an interlude between an old and a new life. I have always felt that in leaving St. Louis I put my youth behind me; that which followed was both sobering and broadening. But on this farm, beside this charming river, I paused for a few days and took stock of my life thus far, and it certainly seemed pointless and unpromising. I thought constantly and desperately of my future, the uncertainty of it, and yet all the while my eye was fixed not upon any really practical solution for me but rather upon the pleasures and luxuries of life as enjoyed by others, the fine houses, the fine clothes, the privilege of traveling, of sharing in the amusements of the rich and the clever. Here I was, at the foot of the ladder, with not the least skill for making money, compelled to make my way upward as best I might, and yet thinking in terms of millions always. However much I might earn in journalism, I had sense enough to know that it would yield me little or nothing. After some thought, I decided that I would move on to some other city, where I would get into the newspaper business for a while and then see what I should see.
Indeed I never saw Mich but once again.
But Toledo. This was my first free and unaided flight into the unknown. I found here a city far more agreeable than St. Louis, which, being much greater in size, had districts which were positively appalling for their poverty and vice; whereas here was a city of not quite 100,000, as clean and fresh as any city could be. I recall being struck with clean asphalt pavements, a canal or waterway in which many lake vessels were riding, and houses and stores, frame for the most part, which seemed clean if not quite new. The first papers I bought, the Blade and the Bee, were full of the usual American small city bluster together with columns and columns about American politics and business.
Before seeking work I decided to investigate the town. I was intensely interested in America and its cities, and wondered, in spite of my interest in New York, which I would select for my permanent resting-place. When was I to have a home of my own? Would it be as pleasing as one of these many which here and elsewhere I saw in quiet rows shaded by trees, many of them with spacious lawns and suggestive of that security and comfort so dear to the mollusc-like human heart? For, after security, nothing seems to be so important or so desirable to the human organism as rest, or at least ease. The one thing that the life force seems to desire to escape is work, or at any rate strife. One would think that man had been invented against his will by some malign power and was being harried along ways and to tasks against which his soul revolted and to which his strength was not equal.
As I walked about the streets of this city my soul panted for the seeming comfort and luxury of them. The well-kept lawns, the shuttered and laced windows! The wonder of evening fires in winter! The open, cool and shadowy doors in summer! Swings and hammocks on lawns and porches! The luxury of the book and rocker! Somehow in the stress of my disturbed youth I had missed most of this.
After a day of looking about the city I applied to the city editor of the leading morning paper, and encountered one of the intellectual experiences of my life. At the city editorial desk in a small and not too comfortable room sat a small cherubic individual, with a complexion of milk and cream, light brown hair and a serene blue eye, who looked me over quizzically, as much as to say: “Look what the latest breeze has wafted in.” His attitude was neither antagonistic nor welcoming. He was so assured that I half-detected on sight the speculative thinker and dreamer. Yet in the rôle of city editor in a mid-West manufacturing town one must have an air if not the substance of commercial understanding and ability, and so my young city editor seemed to breathe a determination to be very executive and forceful.
“You’re a St. Louis newspaper man, eh?” he said, eyeing me casually. “Never worked in a town of this size, though? Well, the conditions are very different. We pay much attention to small items—make a good deal out of nothing,” and he smiled. “But there isn’t a thing I can see now, nothing beyond a three- or four-day job which you wouldn’t want, I’m sure.”
“How do you know I wouldn’t?”
“Well, I’ll tell you about it. There’s a street-car strike on and I could use a man who had nerve enough to ride around on the cars the company is attempting to run and report how things are. But I’ll tell you frankly: it’s dangerous. You may be shot or hit with a brick.”
CHAPTER LVII
Whether I should go East or West suddenly became a question with me. I had the feeling that I might do better in Detroit or some point west of Chicago, only the nearness of such cities as Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and those farther east deterred me; the cost of reaching them was small, and all the while I should be moving toward my brother in New York. And so, after making inquiry at the office of the Bee for a possible opening and finding none, and learning from several newspaper men that Detroit was not considered a live journalistic town, I decided to travel eastward, and bought a ticket to Cleveland.
Riding in sight of the tumbling waves of Lake Erie, I was taken back in thought to my days in Chicago and all those who had already dropped out of my life forever. What a queer, haphazard, disconnected thing this living was! Where should I be tomorrow, what doing—the next year—the year after that? Should I ever have any money, any standing, any friends? So I tortured myself. Arriving in Cleveland at the close of a smoky gray afternoon, I left my bag at the station and sought a room, then walked out to see what I should see. I knew no one. Not a friend anywhere within five hundred miles. My sole resource my little skill as a newspaper worker. Buying the afternoon and morning papers, I examined them with care, copying down their editorial room addresses, then betook me to a small beanery for food.
The next morning I was up early, determined to see as much as I could, to visit the offices of the afternoon papers before noon, then to look in upon the city editors of the two or three morning papers. The latter proved not very friendly and there appeared to be no opening anywhere. But I determined to remain here for a few days studying the city as a city and visiting the same editors each day or as often as they would endure me. If nothing came of it within a week, and no telegram came from my friend H—— in Toledo calling me back, I proposed to move on; to which city I had not as yet made up my mind.
The thing that interested me most about Cleveland then was that it was so raw, dark, dirty, smoky, and yet possessed of one thing: force, raucous, clattering, semi-intelligent force. America was then so new industrially, in the furnace stage of its existence. Everything was in the making: fortunes, art, social and commercial life. The most impressive things were its rich men, their homes, factories, clubs, office buildings and institutions of commerce and pleasure generally; and this was as true of Cleveland as of any other city in America.
Indeed the thing which held my attention, after I had been in Cleveland a day or two and had established myself in a somber room in a somber neighborhood once occupied by the very rich, were those great and new residences in Euclid Avenue, with wide lawns and iron or stone statues of stags and dogs and deer, which were occupied by such rich men as John D. Rockefeller, Tom Johnson, and Henry M. Flagler. Rockefeller only a year or two before had given millions to revivify the almost defunct University of Chicago, then a small Baptist college, and was accordingly being hailed as one of the richest men of America. He and his satellites and confreres were already casting a luster over Cleveland. They were all living here in Euclid Avenue, and I was interested to look up their homes, envying them their wealth of course and wishing that I were famous or a member of a wealthy family, and that I might some day meet one of the beautiful girls I thought must be here and have her fall in love with and make me rich. Physically or artistically or materially, there was nothing to see but business: a few large hotels, like those of every American city, and these few great houses. Add a few theaters and commonplace churches. All American cities and all the inhabitants were busy with but one thing: commerce. They ate, drank and slept trade. In my wanderings I found a huge steel works and a world of low, smoky, pathetic little hovels about it. Although I was not as yet given to reasoning about the profound delusion of equality under democracy, this evidence of the little brain toiling for the big one struck me with great force and produced a good deal of speculative thought later on.
