Chapter X: Book TWO: Note I (5)

I had found him, on a Saturday evening, very drunk in a saloon in Chicago. It was about nine o’clock and some time after I had fled from Nora. I was nearly broke and thought I had better be thinking of doing something that would bring me in a little money. What should I do? The devil! It was apparent I would soon have to go to work again with my hands. After some weeks of idleness my hands had become soft and velvety to the touch and I liked them so. Now they were hands to hold a pen or a paint brush. Why was I not a writer or a painter? Well, I fancied one had to be a fellow of the schools before one dared approach the arts. Often I went about cursing the fate that had not permitted me to be born in the fifteenth century instead of the twentieth with its all-pervading smell of burning coal, oil and gasoline, and with its noises and dirt. Mark Twain might declare the twentieth the most glorious of all the centuries but it did not seem so to me. I thought often of the fifteenth century in Italy when the great Borgia was just coming into power, was at that time full of the subject. What glorious children! Why could not I be a glorious child? Aha! the Lord Rodrigo de Lancol y Borgia, Cardinal-Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina, Dean of the Sacred College, Vice-Chancellor of the Holy Roman Church, etc., had just been made Pope. Did I not myself have an Italian grandmother? What a place and a time that might have been for me! It was the day of the coronation of the new Pope and all Rome was excited. On the day before four mules, laden with silver, had gone from Cardinal Rodrigo’s house to the house of Cardinal Sforza-Visconti. It was the gentle privilege of the Romans in those fine days to pillage the house of a cardinal when he had been made pope. Was it not said, in the sacred laws, that the vicar of Christ should give his substance to the poor? Fearing he might not do it the poor went and took. Armed bands of desperate fellows, with feathers in their hats, roamed the streets of the old city at such times and a turn of the wheel of fortune might at any moment make any one of them rich and powerful, a patron of the arts, a rich and powerful grandee of Church or State. How I longed to be a richly gowned, soft-handed cunning but scholarly grandee and patron of the arts!

How much better times those than my own for such haphazard fellows as myself, I thought, and cursed the twentieth century and the fate that had thrown me into it. At that time in Chicago I knew a young Jew named Ben Hecht, not yet a well-known writer, and sometimes he and I went forth to do our cursing together. Outwardly he was a more adept curser than myself but inwardly I felt I could outdo him and often we had walked together, he cursing aloud our common fate and declaring dramatically that life was for us an empty cup, a vessel turned upside down, a golden goblet with cracks in the bowl, the largest crack being the fact that we both unfortunately had our livings to make, and I striving to cap his every curse with a more violent one. We went together into a street and stood under the moon. Before us were many huge ugly warehouses. “I hope they burn,” I said feebly, but he only laughed at the weakness of my fancy. “I hope the builders die slowly of a painful inflammation of the membranes of the bowels,” he said, while I envied.

I had been walking alone on the streets of Chicago on that Saturday evening when I found the younger Berners and had crossed the river to the west side. I was gloomy and distraught and on a side street, off West Madison Street and near the Chicago River, went into a small, dark saloon. Several men sat at a small table at the back, among whom was Alonzo Berners and there was a red-faced bartender leaning over the bar and watching the group at the table. To all these I at the moment paid no attention.

I was absorbed in the contemplation of my own difficult position in life and was thinking only of myself. Sitting at a table I called for a glass of brandy and when it was paid for realized that I had but two dollars left in my pocket. I took the two dollars in my hand and looked at them and putting them away continued looking at my empty hands. They had, at the moment, as I have said, grown soft and velvety and I wanted them to remain so. Wild dreams floated through my mind. Why had I not more physical courage? It was all very well to talk with Ben Hecht of the many advantages to be gained by being an Italian desperado of the fifteenth century, but why had I not the courage to be a desperado of the twentieth? Surely Rome or Naples or Florence, in the days of their glory, never offered any better pickings than the Chicago of my own day. In the older day a man slipped a slender knife delicately between his victim’s neck and spine and made off with a few ducats at the risk of his life but in Chicago men habitually got thousands of dollars by robbery apparently without any risk at all. I looked at my own hands and wondered. Could they hold a pistol steadily to the head of a timid bank clerk or a mail-wagon driver? I decided they could not and was ashamed of myself. Then I decided they might some day be induced to hold a pen or a painter’s brush but reflected that the great patrons of the arts were all long since dead and that my own brother, a painter, had been compelled to make magazine covers for commercial “gents” in order to get the slender amount necessary to educate himself in his craft. “Huh!” I said to myself, not wanting I’m afraid, to work for any commercial “gent” at all. Drinking my brandy I looked about the room into which I had wandered.

It was a desperately dark little hole, lighted by two gaslights and with two beer-stained tables in the semi-darkness at the rear. I looked at the bartender, who had a large flat nose and bloodshot eyes and decided it was just as well I had but two dollars. “I may be robbed before I leave this hole,” I told myself and ordered another glass of brandy, thinking I might as well drink up the little money I had rather than have it taken from me.

And now the men at the other table in the room caught and held my attention. With the exception of Alonzo Berners, whom the others had picked up on the street, they were a hard-looking lot. One did not think of them as desperate fellows. They were of the sort one saw hanging about the places of Hinky Dink, Bathhouse John or of Conners, the gray wolf, men famous in Chicago at that time, sullen fellows without money, by no means desperate but hangers-on of the desperate, fellows who robbed full of fright at their own temerity but the more dangerous sometimes because of their fears.

I looked at them and at the man who had fallen into their clutches and who was now spending his money upon them and at the same moment they seemed to have become aware of my presence. Sullen eyes looked at me sullenly. I was not of their world. Was I a fly cop? Their eyes threatened. “If you are a fly cop or are in any way connected with the man we have so fortunately picked up, a man quite apparently helplessly drunk and having money, you had better be minding your business. As a matter of fact it would be well for you to get out of here.”

I returned the stare directed at me and hesitated a moment. The sick drunken man sitting among the others had a large roll of bills held in his left hand that hung at his side, and his right elbow was on the table.

What a look of suffering in his face! From time to time the others ordered drinks brought from the bar and the sick man took a bill from the roll and threw it on the table. When the change was brought by the bartender one of his companions put it in his pocket. They were taking turns, it was apparent, in robbing the man and as I looked an idea came to me. Was it true that the bartender, a more out-and-out fellow than the others, was disgusted at this slow and comparatively painless method of committing robbery? Did I see in his eyes a kind of sympathy for the man being robbed?

It was a ticklish moment for me. Having been thinking so grandiloquently of Cæsar Borgia, Lorenzo the Magnificent and other grand and courageous personages of my world of books, having just been gazing at my own hands and wondering why they would not or could not do some act of personal courage that would make me think better of myself, having these thoughts, I of a sudden wanted to rescue the man with the roll of bills but I did not want to make a fool of myself. I have always wanted not to be a fool and have been a fool so often!

I had decided to perform a certain act and at the same time began laughing at myself, not thinking I would be foolish enough to attempt it. One of these conflicts between myself, as I live in my fancy, and myself as I exist in fact, that have been going on in me since I was a child had now started. It is the sort of thing that makes autobiography, even of the half-playful sort I am now attempting, so difficult to manage. One wants to treat oneself as a person of more dignity and worth than one has the courage to attempt. Among advertising men with whom I later associated we managed things better. We took turns doing what we called “staging” each other. I was to speak highly of Smith who in turn did the same of me. The trick is not unknown to literary men, but it is difficult to manage in autobiography. The self of the fancy persists in laughing at the self of fact and does it sometimes at unfortunate moments. Also the fancy is a great liar. How often later, when I became a man of business, I did in fancy some shrewd or notable act that was never done in fact at all, but that seemed so real that it was difficult not to believe in it as a fact. I had been talking with a certain man and later thought of a number of brilliant things I might have said. Then I met a friend and told him of the conversation, putting the brilliant things in. The story several times repeated became a part of the history of my life and nothing would have later so amazed me as to have been compelled to face the facts of the conversation and the figure I had cut in it.

Was the thing I now thought myself about to do in the saloon a fact or was it but another of the fanciful acts, created in my own imagination, I might and no doubt would later relate as a fact? Would it not be better not to attempt to rescue the man in the room and later just to say I had and in the end make myself believe I had?

There was little doubt I could do the thing more gaudily in fancy. The place in which I sat was in a part of the city little frequented at night. Near it were only vacant lots and rows of dark and now empty factory buildings. It was unlikely there were any policemen in the neighborhood and in case of need and if a policeman did appear what sort of fellow was he likely to be--a fellow really appointed to the district to knock aside such interfering fools as myself? As for the men seated at the table, if they were cowards it was unlikely the bartender was one.

I kept smiling to myself, at my own thoughts, at my trick of always threshing my acts out in advance and in the end doing nothing except to create later the fiction of an act performed. “My book reading and my conversations with such fellows as Judge Turner are making a bigger fool of me than I need be,” I told myself, still looking at the empty hands lying on the table before me. What really empty things they were, those same hands of mine. They had never grasped anything, never fulfilled any purpose for me. So many fingers, so many pads of flesh in the palms, so many little muscles to grasp things, to lay hold of some situation, to drive a knife into an enemy, to lift a friend, to make love to a woman, hands to become servants of the brain and to make their owner something other than a meaningless thing of words and fancies drifting through life with millions of other meaningless men. I really thought at that time I had a brain. It is an illusion that I believe almost everyone has.

In disgust of myself my eyes stopped looking at my empty hands and looked instead about the room. What seemed to me a stream of deliciously romantic notions now came. There was no doubt the man sitting with the crew from the city’s underworld was very ill. One might have said he was about to die. A chalky pallor had spread over his face and except for his eyes everything about his face and figure expressed utter weariness. It was so people looked when they were about to die, when they were through with life, done for, glad to throw life aside.

The face and figure of the man were like that but the eyes were not. They were alive and only seemed curious and puzzled. As they looked at me from out the pale face I had the curious illusion of a voice speaking, speaking as though out of a coffin or a cavern.

Now the man’s eyes were looking from my eyes to the eyes of the bartender. Was there something commanding in them? Had the sick man, in his helpless position, the power to command the two men in the room who might conceivably be of use to him? The man had been drunk for several days, and now he was not drinking but the poison from the vile stuff he had taken had permeated his system. The same eyes had looked at the men among whom he sat and his brain had come to a decision concerning them. Men’s eyes could be impersonal sometimes. The other men at the table were of no value, had been thrown aside as useless. One fancied a thin sick body going on for days, eyes not looking about, eyes alive in a corner of the head of a man waiting for a moment of sanity.

And now they command. The sick man was not afraid, as in his place I would have been. There was no fear in the eyes that now looked at me so steadily. It might be the man did not mind the fact that he was about to be robbed and perhaps his body had known so much pain that the additional pain of a beating would not too much matter.

As for myself I was thinking beyond my own depths, thinking of certain things as possible in another that could never have been possible in myself. I was a coward trying to think the thoughts of a brave man. From the very moment when I first became aware of the actuality of the man Alonzo Berners I began doing something I had never done before, I began to live in another, suffer in another, love another perhaps.

If the man’s eyes were issuing a command what did he want? I grew resentful. What right had he to command me? Did he think me a fool? Unconsciously I had begun to resist a command. “I won’t. You got yourself into this pickle, now get yourself out.”

What a plague to have an imagination! It seemed to me a kind of wordless conversation, something after the following manner, now began between myself, the bartender and the man at the table.

From the bloodshot eyes of the bartender leaning over his bar words were now coming. I leaned forward to listen.

“Ah! Bah! I do not like this affair. You have fallen into the hands of these cheap thugs and from the looks of you I should say you are a rather decent sort. To me, situated as I am in life, that would not make any difference if the men robbing you were fellows I could respect. If any one of a dozen men I know chose to hit you over the head and throw your body into the river I would not lift a hand to prevent it. As the matter stands I think I will. I do not fancy these dogs you are with eating so fat a calf. As for myself you are not fair game. Poor chap, you are sick. I cannot leave my job here but the fellow over there at the table will take you away. Speak to him. He will do as you wish.”

What a chattering of unheard voices my imagination had created in the room!

Words from the living eyes of the sick man.

“It does not matter about being robbed. If these men beat or kill me it does not matter. The point is I am tired now.” The eyes smiled.

And now the man at the table was looking directly at me and his words, created, you understand in my fancy, were directed at me. “Well, come on lad. Lift me up in your arms and carry me home. It is only because you are young and inexperienced you are afraid.”

NOTE XII

“AFRAID?” It was only because I was so thoroughly afraid I now arose from my seat and went toward the sick man. As for the imagined voices I did not believe in them. Did I not know the tricks of my own fancy and did the man think I was going to be fool enough to risk my hide for a stranger? It is true, had I been a man of physical courage, I might, without too great risk, have gone over to the table and snatched the roll of bills out of the sick man’s hands. When it came right down to it I could at the moment use such a roll of bills very handily. Had I been a man of courage I might have gone blustering and swaggering to the table and bluffed everyone in the place but being, as I knew I was, a coward did the man sitting there think I was going to risk my hide for him?

I moved slowly toward the table, all the time laughing at myself and telling myself I was not going to do what I was at the same time obviously doing and the bartender coming from behind the bar with a hammer in his hand fell in behind me. I could see the hammer from a corner of my eye. Well, he was going to hit me with it. In a moment more my head would be crushed and, as would be quite plain to any man of sense, I would only be getting what I deserved. What a confounded fool! I was terribly frightened and at the same time there was a smile on my lips. My appearance at the moment must have been disconcerting to the men at the table.

They were apparently as great fools as myself. As I approached, the sick man, perhaps to free himself from the others, threw the roll of bills carelessly on the table and one of his companions put a large hairy hand over it. Was he also afraid? All of the men were looking intently at me and at the bartender behind me. Were they but waiting to see my head crushed? One of them got rather hesitatingly to his feet and doubling his fist raised it as though to strike me in the face--I had now got within a foot of the sick man--but the blow did not descend.

Reaching down I put my arms about the sick man’s shoulder and half raised him to his feet, the foolish smile still on my face but as I saw he could not stand I prepared to take him in my arms. That would make me quite helpless but I was helpless enough as it was. What did it matter? “If I am going to be slugged I might as well be slugged doing something,” I thought.

I lifted the man as gently as I could, placing the slender body over my shoulder and waiting for the blows that were to descend upon me but at that very moment the hand of the bartender reached over and snatching the roll of bills from under the hand on the table put it in my pocket.

All was done in silence and in silence, with Alonzo Berners slung over my shoulder, I walked to the door and to West Madison Street where there were lights and people passing up and down. At the corner I put him down and looking back saw the bartender standing at the door of his establishment watching. Was he laughing? I fancied he was. And one might also fancy he was keeping the others bluffed in the room until I had got safely away. I stood at the corner beside the sick man, who leaned helplessly against my legs, and waited for a cab that would take me to a railroad station. Already I had taken letters from his pocket and knew where he lived. He seemed unable to speak. “He will probably die on the way and then I’ll be in a hell of a mess,” I kept saying to myself after I had got with him into the day coach of a train.

NOTE XIII

MY adventure with Alonzo Berners came to an end after I had been at his house for a week and during the week nothing I can set down as notable happened at all and later I was told he was dead, that he had again got drunk in the city of Chicago and had fallen or had been knocked off a bridge into the Chicago River where he drowned. There was the house on the hillside and the garden. During my visit to the house the elder Berners worked in the garden or sat with me boasting of the horse Peter Point and found in me a sympathetic audience. I have always understood horses better than men. It’s easier.

I sat in the garden listening to the talk of the men who came to see Alonzo Berners, rode with him once in his buggy or went into town to walk by myself or to listen to some tale told by the sailor who managed the store. The sister, who on the night of my arrival had treated me coldly--no doubt strange characters had come to the Berners house on the same mission that had brought me and also no doubt she was in terrible fear when Alonzo was away on one of his helpless debauches--the sister later treated me with the silent kindliness characteristic of her.

Nothing happened at all during my visit and Alonzo Berners did not during the whole time say a notable thing that I could later remember and that I can now quote to explain my feeling for him.

Nothing happened but that I was puzzled as I had never been before. There was something in the very walls of the Berners house that excited and when I had gone to bed at night I did not sleep. Notions came. Odd exciting fancies kept me awake. As I have explained I was then young and had quite made up my mind about men and life. Men and women were divided into two classes containing a few shrewd wise people and many fools. I was trying very hard to place myself among the wise and shrewd ones. The Berners family I could not place in either of these classifications and in particular Alonzo Berners puzzled and disconcerted me.

Was there a force in life of which I knew nothing at all and was this force exemplified in the person of the man I had picked up in a Chicago saloon?

At night as I lay in my bed new ideas, new impulses, came flocking. There was a man in the house with me, a man fairly worshiped by others and for no reason I could understand but wanted to understand. His very living in the house had done something to it, to the very wall of the house, so that anyone coming into the place, sleeping between the walls, was affected. Could it be that the man Alonzo Berners simply loved the people about him and the places in which they lived and had that love become a force in itself affecting the very air people breathed? Sometimes in the afternoons when there was no one about I went through the rooms of the house looking curiously about. There was a chair here and a table there. On the table lay a book. Was there also in the house a kind of fragrance? Why did the sunlight fall with such a pronounced golden glory on the faded carpet on the floor of Alonzo Berners’ room?

Questions invaded my mind and I was young and skeptical, wanting to believe in the power of the mind, wanting to believe in the power of intellectual force, terribly afraid of sentimentality in myself and in others.

Was I afraid also of people who had the power of loving, of giving themselves? Was I afraid of the power of unasking love in myself and in others?

That I should be afraid of anything in the realm of the spirit, that there should perhaps be a force in the world I did not understand, could not understand, irritated me profoundly.

As the week advanced my irritation grew and I have never had any doubt at all that Alonzo Berners knew of it. He said nothing and when I went away he had nothing to say. I spent the days of that week in his presence, saw the men who came to visit him and whom I thought I understood well enough and then at night went to my bed and did not sleep. I was like one tortured by a desire for conversion to something like the love of God, by a desire to love and be loved and sometimes in the night I lay in my bed like a very lovelorn maiden and sometimes I grew angry and walked up and down in the moonlight in my room swearing and shaking my fist at the shadows that flitted across the walls in the moonlight.

It was two o’clock of the morning of one of the last nights I spent in the house and I let myself out at the kitchen door and went for a walk, going down along the hillside to the town and through the newer town to the older place by the river. The moon was shining and all was hushed and silent. What a quiet night! “I will give myself over to these new impulses,” I thought, and so went along thinking thoughts that had never before come into my head.

Could it be that force, all power was disease, that man on his way up from savagery and having discovered the mind and its uses had gone a little off his head in using his new toy? I had always been drawn toward horses dogs and other animals and among people had cared most for simple folk who made no pretense of having an intellect, workmen who in spite of the handicaps put in their way by modern life still loved the materials in which they worked, who loved the play of hands over materials, who followed instinctively a force outside themselves--they felt to be greater and more worthy than themselves--women who gave themselves to physical experiences with grave and fine abandon, all people in fact who lived for something outside themselves, for materials in which they worked, for people other than themselves, things over which they made no claim of ownership.

Was I, who thought of myself as a young man having no morality now face to face with a new morality? In the fifteenth century man had discovered man. Had man later been lost to man? Was Alonzo Berners simply one who loved his fellows and was he by that token stronger in his weakness, more notable in his obscure Illinois village life than all these great and powerful ones I had been following with my own mind across the pages of history?

There was no doubt I was in a magnificent mood and that I enjoyed it and when I got to the old town I went and stood by a small brick building that had once been a residence but was now a cowshed. In a near-by house a child cried and a man and a woman awoke from sleep and talked for a time in low hushed voices. Two dogs came and discovered me where I stood in the silence. As I remained unmoved they did not know what to make of their discovery. At first they barked and then they wagged their tails, and then, as I continued to ignore them, they went away looking offended. “You are not treating us fairly,” they seemed to be saying.

“And they are something like myself,” I thought, looking at the dusty road on which the soft moonlight was falling and smiling at nothingness.

I had suddenly an odd, and to my own seeming a ridiculous desire to abase myself before something not human and so stepping into the moonlit road I knelt in the dust. Having no God, the gods having been taken from me by the life about me, as a personal God has been taken from all modern men by a force within that man himself does not understand but that is called the intellect, I kept smiling at the figure I cut in my own eyes as I knelt in the road and as I had smiled at the figure I had cut in the Chicago saloon when I went with such an outward show of indifference to the rescue of Alonzo Berners.

There was no God in the sky, no God in myself, no conviction in myself that I had the power to believe in a God, and so I merely knelt in the dust in the silence and no words came to my lips.

Did I worship merely the dust under my knees? There was the coincidence as there is always the coincidence. The symbol flashed into my mind. A child cried again in a near-by house and I presume some traditional feeling come down from old tellers of tales took possession of me. My fancy played with the figure of myself in the ridiculous position into which I had got and I thought of the wise men of old times who were reputed to have come to worship at the feet of another crying babe in an obscure place. How grand! The wise men of an older time had followed a star to a cowshed. Was I becoming wise? Smiling at myself and with also a kind of contempt of myself and my own sentimentality I half decided I would try to devote myself to something, give my life a purpose. “Why not to another effort at the re-discovery of man by man?” I thought rather grandly, getting up and beating the dust off my knees, the while I continued the trick I had learned of pointing the laughing finger of scorn at myself. I laughed at myself but all the time kept thinking of the occasional flashes of laughter that came from the drawn lips of Alonzo Berners. Why was his laughter freer and more filled with joy than my own?

NOTE XIV

WAR, leisure and the South!

The leisure was not too much cut across by the hours spent in drills and manœuvres and the other duties of a soldier. Here was a life in which everything was physical, the mind on a vacation and the imagination having leisure to play while the body worked. One’s individuality became lost and one became part of something wholly physical, vast, strong, capable of being fine and heroic, capable of being brutal and cruel.

One’s body was a house in which had lived two, three, perhaps ten or twelve personalities. The fancy became the head of the house and swept the body away into some absurd adventure or the mind took charge and laid down laws. These then were in turn driven out of the house by physical desire, by the lustful self. Dumb nights of walking city streets, wanting women, wanting to touch with the hands lovely things.

“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it and I want the heart
to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too.--What’s become of
all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?

All gone now, that kind of imaginings, for the time anyway. In the distance, beckoning, the women of the southern island, the dark Cuban women. Would they like us when we came, we American lads, in our brown clothes? Would they take us as lovers, we the land’s deliverers?

Long days of marching. We were in a forest of the South where once our fathers had fought a great battle. Everywhere camps among the trees and the ground worn hard as bricks by the constant tramping of feet. In the morning one awoke with five other men in a tent. There was morning roll call standing shoulder to shoulder. “Corporal Smith!” “Here!” “Corporal Anderson!” “Here!” Then breakfast out of flat tin dishes and the falling into line for hours of drill.

Out from under the trees into a wide field we went, the southern sun pouring down on us and presently the back tired, the legs tired. One sank into a half-dead state. This did not signify battles, killing other men. The men with whom one marched were comrades, feeling the same weariness, obeying the same commands, being molded with oneself into something apart from oneself. We were being hardened, whipped into shape. For what? Well, never mind. Take what is before you! You have come out from under the shadow of the factory, the sun shines. The tall boys marching with you were raised in the same town with yourself. Now they are all silent, marching, marching. Times of adventure ahead. You and they will see strange people, hear strange tongues spoken.

The Spaniards, eh! You know of them from books? Stout Cortez, silent upon his peak in Darien. Dark cruel eyes, dark swaggering men--in one’s fancy. In the fancy picture ships coming suddenly up out of the western seas, bearing gold, bearing dark, adventurous men.

Is one going to fight such men, with one’s comrades, some thousands of such men? Tall boys from an Ohio town, baseball players, clerks in stores, Eddie Sanger over there who got Nell Brinker into trouble and was made to marry her at the point of a shotgun; Tom Means, who was once sent to the state reform farm; Harry Bacon, who got religion when the evangelist came to preach in the Methodist Church but got over it afterward--are these men to become killers, to try to kill Spaniards, who will try to kill them?

Now, never mind! There is before you now but the marching for long hours with all these men. Here is something your mind has always been groping about trying to understand, the physical relation of man to man, of man to woman, of woman to woman. The mind is ugly when the flesh does not come in too. The flesh is ugly when the mind is put out of the house that is the body. Is the flesh ugly now? No, this is something special. This is something felt.

Suppose a man spend certain months, not thinking consciously, letting himself be swept along by other men, with other men, feeling the weariness of a thousand other men’s legs in his own legs, desiring with others, fearing with the others, being brave sometimes with the others. By such an experience can one gain knowledge of the others and of oneself too?

Comrades loved! Never mind now the thoughts of the hour of killing. One gets little enough. Take what is offered. And the killing may not come. Let the Roosevelts and others of that sort, the men of action, talk and think now of the hour of action, of the drawn sword, the pointed gun, victory, defeat, glory, bloody fields. You are not a general or a statesman. Take the thing before you, the physical marching fact of an army of which you are a part.

There is just the possibility that you are yourself a disease and that you may be cured here. This tremendous physical experience may cure you of the disease of yourself. Can one lose oneself utterly, become as nothing, become but a part of something, the state, the army? The army is something physical and actual while the state is nothing. The state exists but in men’s minds and imaginations and you have let your own imagination rule in your house too long. Let this young body of yours, so straight, so fair, so strong, let it have full possession of the house now. The imagination may play now over fields, over mountain tops if it please. “We are coming, Father Abraham, a hundred thousand strong!” You have forced your fancy to grovel in factory dust too long. Let it go now. You are nothing, so many little pounds of flesh and bone, a small unit in a vast thing that is marching, marching--the army. Blossoms on apple trees, sap in the branches of trees, a single head of wheat in a vast wheat field, eh?

All day long the march goes on and dust gathers in little circles about the eyes of weary men. A thin sharp voice is heard, an impersonal voice. It is speaking, not to you, not to one man only, but to a thousand men. “Fours right into line.”

“Fours right into line!” You have so wanted that, have so hungered for it. Has not your whole life been filled with a vague indefinite desire to wheel into some vast line with all the others you have known and seen? It is enough! The legs respond. Tears sometimes gather in the eyes at the thought of being able, without question, to do some one thing with thousands of others, with comrades.

NOTE XV

I HAD enlisted for a soldier shortly after my visit to Alonzo Berners and because I was broke and could see no other way to avoid going back into a factory. The voices crying out for war with Spain, for the freeing of Cuba, I had heard not at all but there had been a voice within myself that was plain and clear enough and I did not believe there was danger of many battles being fought. The glory of Spain, read about in the books, was dead. We had old Spain at a disadvantage, poor old woman. The situation was unique. America, the young and swaggering giant of the West had been fortunate. She had not been compelled to face, on the field of battle, the giant of the Old World in the days of her Old World strength. Now the young western giant was going to assert himself and it would be like taking pennies from a child, like robbing an old gypsy woman in a vacant lot at night after a fair. The newspapers might call into service Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, all the writers of battle tales trying to work up the illusion of a great war about to be fought, but no one believed, no one was afraid. In the camps the soldiers laughed. Songs were being sung. To the soldiers the Spaniards were something like performers in a circus to which the American boys had been invited. It was said they had bells on their hats, wore swords and played guitars under the windows of ladies’ bedrooms at night.

America wanted heroes and I thought I would enjoy being a hero and so I did not enlist for a soldier in Chicago, where I was unknown and my rushing to my country’s aid might have passed unnoticed, but sent off a wire to the captain of militia of my home town in Ohio and got on a train to go there. Alonzo Berners had pressed upon me a loan of a hundred dollars but I did not want to spend any of it for railroad fare so beat my way homeward on a freight train and even the hoboes with whom I sat in an empty freight car treated me with respect as though I were already the hero of a hundred hard-fought battles. At a station twenty miles from home I bought a new suit of clothes, a new hat, neckties and even a walking stick. My home town would want to think I had given up a lucrative position in the city to answer my country’s call, they would want a Cincinnatus dropping his plow handles, and why should I not give them the best imitation I could manage? What I achieved was something between a bank clerk and an actor out of work.

I was received with acclaim. Never before that time or since have I had a personal triumph and I liked it. When, with the others of my company, I marched away to the railroad station to entrain for war the entire town turned out and cheered. Girls ran out of houses to kiss us and old veterans of the Civil War--they had known that of battles we would never know--stood with tears in their eyes.

To the young factory hand of the cities--that was myself, as I now remember myself at that moment--it was grand and glorious. There has always been a kind of shrewdness and foxiness in me and I could not convince myself that Spain, clinging to its old traditions, old guns, old ships, could offer much resistance to the strong young nation now about to attack and I could not get over the feeling that I was going off with many others on a kind of glorious national picnic. Very well, if I was to be given credit for being a hero I could not see why I should object.

And then the camp at the edge of a southern city under forest trees, the physical hardening process that I instinctively liked. I have always enjoyed with a kind of intoxicating gusto any physical use of my body out in the sun and wind. In the army it brought me untroubled sleep at night, physical delight in my own body, the drunkenness of physical well-being and often in my tent at night, after a long day of drilling and when the others slept, I rolled quietly out under the tent flap and lay on my back on the ground, looking at the stars seen through the branches of trees. About me many thousands of men were sleeping and along a guard line, somewhere over there in the darkness, guards were walking up and down. Was it a kind of vast child’s play? The guards were pretending the army was in danger, why should not my own imagination play for a time?

How strong my body felt! I stretched and threw my arms above my head. For a time my fancy played with the notion of becoming a great general. Why might not Napoleon in his boyhood have been just such a fellow as myself? I had read somewhere that he had had an inclination to be a scribbler. I fancied the army, of which I was a part, hemmed in on all sides by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards. No one could think what to do and so I (Corporal Anderson) was sent for. The Americans were in the same position the French revolutionists had been in when young Napoleon appeared and with “a whiff of grapeshot” took the destinies of a nation in his hands. Oh, I had read my Carlyle and knew something also of Machiavelli and his Prince. Aha! In fancy also I could be a great and cruel conqueror. The American army was surrounded by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards but in the American army was myself. This was my hour. I sat up on the ground outside the tent where my comrades were sleeping and in the darkness gave quick and accurate orders. Certain ones of my soldiers were to make a sortie. I did not quite know what a sortie was but anyway why not have one made? It would create a diversion, give my marvelous mind time to work. And now it was done and I began to fling bunches of troops here and there. My courier sprang upon a swift horse and rode away in the darkness. In his tent the Spanish commander was feasting--and here I, being a true Anglo-Saxon, must needs make out that the imaginary Spaniard was something of a monster. He was half drunk in his tent and was surrounded by concubines. Ah! he is sure to have concubines about and is proud and sure of victory but little does he know of me, the sleepless one. Grand phrases, grand ideas, flocking like birds! Now the Spanish commander has shown his true nature. A young boy comes to bring him wine and trips, spilling a little of the wine on the commander’s uniform. He arises and unsheathing his sword plunges it into the little boy’s breast. All are aghast. The Spaniards all stand aghast, and at that very moment I, like an avenging angel, and followed by thousands of pure clean-living Americans (Anglo-Saxon Americans, let it be understood), I swoop down upon him.

* * * * *

At the time of which I am writing America had not learned as it did during the World War that in order to stamp out brutal militarism it is best to adopt brutal militarism, teach it to our sons, do everything possible to brutalize our own people. During the World War I am told boys and young men in the training camps were made to attack with the bayonet dummy figures of men and were even told to grunt as they plunged the bayonet into the figure. Everything possible was done to brutalize the imaginations of the young men, but in our war--“my war” I find myself calling it at times--we had not yet carried our education that far. There was as yet a childish belief in democracy. Men even supposed that the purpose of democracy was to raise free men who could think for themselves, act for themselves in an emergency. The modern idea of the standardization of men had not taken hold and was even thought to be inimical to the very notion of democracy. And we had not learned yet, as we did later, that when an army is to be organized you must split your men up, so that no man knows his fellows, that you must not have officers coming from the same towns as their soldiers, that everything must be made as machine-like and impersonal as possible.

And so there we were, just boys from an Ohio country town with officers from the same town in a wood in the South being made into soldiers and I am much afraid not taking the whole affair too seriously. We were heroes and we accepted the fact. It was enough. In the southern cities ladies invited us to dine at their houses on our days off in town. The captain of our company had been a janitor of a public building back in Ohio, the first lieutenant was a celery raiser on a small farm near our town and the second lieutenant had been a knife grinder in a cutlery factory.

* * * * *

In the camp I marched with the others for several hours each day and in the evening went with some other young soldier for a walk in the wood or in the streets of a southern city. There was a kind of drunkenness of comradeship. So many men so like oneself, doing the same thing with oneself. As for the officers--well, it was to be admitted that in military affairs they knew more than ourselves but there their superiority ended. It would be just as well for none of them to attempt to put on too much side when we were not drilling or were not on actual military duty. The war would soon be over and after a time we would all be going back home. An officer might conceivably “get away” with some sort of injustice for the moment--but a year from now, when we were all at home again.... Did the fool want to take the chance of four or five huskies giving him a beating some night in an alleyway?

The constant marching and manœuvring was a kind of music in the legs and bodies of men. No man is a single thing, physical or mental. The marching went on and on. The physical ruled. There was a vast slow rhythm, out of the bodies of many thousands of men, always going on and on. It got into one’s body. There was a kind of physical drunkenness produced. He who weakened was laughed at by his comrades and the weakness went away or he disappeared. One was afloat on a vast sea of men. There was a kind of music on the surface of the sea. The music was a part of oneself. One was oneself a part of the music. One’s body, moving in rhythm with all these other bodies, made the music. What was an officer? What was a man? An officer was but one out of whose throat came a voice.

The army moved across a great open field. One’s body was tired but happy with an odd new kind of happiness. The mind did not torture the body, asking questions. The body was moved by a power outside itself and as for the fancy, it played freely, far, freely and widely, over oceans, over mountain tops too.

Beyond him not the ghost of shores,
Beyond him only shoreless seas.

And now the voice and the words, caught up and repeated by other voices, harsh voices, tired voices, thin high pitched voices.

Fours right into line--
Fours right into line.

* * * * *

Three young men having run the guard line, together are walking along a dark road toward a southern city. In the city and later when they have stood on street corners and walked through the section of the city where only Negroes live--being Ohio boys and fascinated by the strangeness of the notion of a race thus set aside--they go into a saloon where they sit drinking beer. They discuss their officers, the position of the officer in relation to his men. “I think it’s all right,” says a doctor’s son. “Ed and Dug are all right. They have to live off by themselves and act as though they were something special, kind of grand and wise and gaudy. It’s a kind of bluff, I guess, that has to be kept up, only I should think it would be kind of tough on them. I should think they might get to feeling they were something special and get themselves into a mess.”

And now Ed, the raiser of celery, comes into the saloon. He is saving all he can of his officer’s pay hoping to buy a few additional acres of land when he gets back home and he doesn’t much like spending money. He sees the three sitting there and wants to join them but hesitates. Then he calls to me and he and I go off together along a street and into another saloon.

The celery raiser is a devout Catholic and he and I get into a discussion. I have some money and am buying the beer and so it goes on for a long time. I speak of the feeling I have when I have marched for a long time in rhythm with many other men and Ed nods his head. “It’s the same way I feel about the Church,” he says. “That’s just the way we Catholics get to feeling about the Church.”