Chapter VI: Book SIX: Wilson Avenue (2)

A red-haired young woman at the further end of the long table was the only one who appeared to take his arguments with any seriousness; at least he thought he saw approval in her eyes. The others, or so it seemed to him, were only politely amused at the intensity of his feelings on the subject. But when he had concluded his argument, the motherly-looking woman at the head of the table said, “Perhaps if Mr. Fay feels like that, he will be willing to undertake a class in English literature twice a week for us. Mr. Hays, who has had the class, is leaving town. You’ll have a chance, Mr. Fay, to try out your theories on twenty very interested young people—who I’m sure would be glad to learn to produce literature as well as to appreciate it. I think, myself, there’s something to your theory—though I don’t hold much by theories any more. I think a great deal depends on the enthusiasm with which they are carried out. I’m sure you will make an enthusiastic teacher—I only hope you won’t become too quickly discouraged. Do you think you’d like to try it?”

Gracious and even flattering as this offer was, yet the challenge in it rather staggered Felix. He had not expected to be called upon to prove the correctness of his theory in actual practice; he had never supposed that he would ever have the opportunity. Teaching was a province sacred to those who themselves had been elaborately taught—certainly not to be intruded upon by a youth who had never finished high school! Yet, if he believed in his own theory, he ought to be willing to put it to the test. He ought to take up this challenge. But did he dare risk a humiliating failure? And then his eyes met those of the red-haired girl down at the other end of the table; and he knew that she expected him to do it.

“Thank you for the chance,” he said. “I’ll be glad to.”

The talk swept on to other things, leaving him a little dazed. He had been quite casually accepted as one whose abilities might be of value; he had astonishingly become a part of this institution; and upon no false pretences—for in his argument he had candidly exposed the deficiencies of his formal schooling. These people were willing to try him out. And they went on talking as though nothing strange had occurred.... The loneliness and helplessness in which he had been submerged by his day of sight-seeing, ebbed away.

“Won’t you tell me something more about your idea? It’s very interesting to me, because I’m in charge of a group of children who are doing plays.”

The red-haired girl was speaking to him as they drifted out of the dining-room. She was a slender young person, of about twenty-five years, with an interestedly impersonal manner. She turned to a young man at her other side, an affected-looking young man, with a wide black ribbon depending from his nose-glasses, and said: “Paul, is your model set ready? Let us have a private view of it.”

“Charmed,” the young man replied, in a mincing accent. Felix disliked him at once.

“Paul,” the red-haired girl explained, turning back to Felix, “is our scenic genius. He makes the most wonderful little sets out of painted cardboard, and then we go and spoil them trying to carry them out in our theatre. He won’t even come and look at them when they’re finished—don’t you think that’s unkind?”

“Oh, please don’t say that, Miss Prentiss!” the young man protested, still in that tone which seemed to Felix unnatural and “prissy.” At the foot of the wide stairs he halted, and put a finger to his lips. “I don’t know _really_ whether I ought to show you the set—just yet. It’s not _quite_—”

“I’m sure it’s perfectly all right,” the girl said firmly, and proceeded up the stairs. To Felix she continued over her shoulder: “It’s a set for our ‘Prince and Pauper’. I’m mad to see what it’s like. Paul ought to do something quite stunning with it.”

“But I’ve only got one scene done, you know,” Paul objected. “And even that’s uncertain, you understand; the idea for the whole thing—” he waved his hands helplessly; Felix noted that they were graceful hands and beautifully manicured—“hasn’t quite _come_ yet!”

He paused again, doubtfully, but the girl ran relentlessly up the stairs. On the top floor she stopped in front of a door. “Now don’t make any excuses, Paul, but just let us in.”

Paul obediently opened the door, snapped on the lights, and they entered a room of which the walls were covered with tattered Persian rugs, the shelves sprinkled with curious bronze figures, and the floor, along one wall, lined with a row of books. In the centre of the room was a drawing-table, littered with scraps of gold and silver paper, coloured crayons, and tiny bottles of coloured inks. In the corner with a wire running down from the electric fixture in the ceiling, was a pot of glue. Felix walked over to the wall, glanced down at the row of books on the floor, and noted a set of the Yellow Book and an odd volume of the Savoy.

Paul had taken up a small model of a stage-set and was looking at it anxiously.

“Oh,” the girl cried, “let me see!”

He put it into her hands, sat down at the drawing-table, jumped up and turned on the current under his pot of glue, and sat down again, intent upon a pasteboard figure which he had taken from the tiny stage.

“Dear me, this is all wrong,” he said in distress, stripping the tinsel from the figure. “How could I?”

“Look,” the girl said to Felix, beckoning him with her head. “This is the palace scene. See—”

“Do take it over to your room to explain it,” Paul said petulantly. “You distract me.”

“Come,” said the girl, and they entered the room on the other side of the hall. But in a moment Paul had followed them anxiously. “I must tell you that the colours here are not right,” he said, hovering over the model, which the girl had set down on her table. “No blues—no blues at all! blues go in the next scene. Nothing but red and gold and black. And this arch will be different—more sombre. The throne higher—dwarfing the human figures. Very high—twenty inches, an inch to the foot, twenty feet high!”

“But Paul,” said the girl, “you know our proscenium-arch is only twelve feet high!”

“I can’t help that, my dear young woman,” the young man replied with hauteur. “I know well enough that you’ll ruin my beautiful scene. But in my mind—_Oh, pewter platter!_” His voice, uttering this preposterous exclamation, had become shrill, and he dashed to the door. “My glue-pot!” he cried, and disappeared.

The girl sat down and began to laugh. “Isn’t he funny?” she said.

“Funny?” Felix echoed dubiously.

“But he does make nice stage-pictures anyway,” she said.

Felix looked at the model. “But are these airs natural to him, or is he just putting them on to impress people? Where is he from?”

“Guess!”

Felix thought he saw a light. “London?”

The girl laughed again. “Arkansas,” she said.

“What!”

“Yes, just as he is now, from Arkansas—glasses, accent, Yellow Book and everything. I’ve a kind of notion why it is, if you’d like to hear it.”

“I would.”

“Then make yourself comfortable.” She motioned toward the couch, which with its pillows was the only suggestion of ease in her rather bare and workmanlike room; a writing-table, a typewriter on its stand, and a long shelf of books, gave it an air quite different from the room across the hall. She drew over a chair for herself in front of the couch.

“Don’t blame him,” she said. “We’re all a little like that—I mean, queer. I’m sure I seem quite as queer as that to my family down in Springfield. If you live in Arkansas, and want to make lovely stage-pictures, you _are_ a freak; or you become one trying to keep from being dull like everybody else. It’s inevitable.”

“You frighten me,” Felix said soberly. “Am I a freak? I suppose I am—but somehow I don’t like the idea.”

“Do you want to make a million dollars?”

“No, not at all.”

“Then of course you’re a freak.” She laughed cheerfully.

“And what does Chicago think of—of us?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s all right. Chicago is beginning to realize that it needs us. Chicago wants to be a metropolis. And all the stockyards in the world won’t make a metropolis. Enough of us, given a free-hand—can. And Chicago knows it. Just now we are at a premium here. We can be as crazy as we like!”

“I wonder?”

“You ought to have known the scenic genius who preceded Paul. Dick Bernitz, his name was. He was a wild one. Gloom—despair—and, as it turned out, drugs. He came from Nevada. He affected evening clothes—wanted to wear them all day long, in fact! Baudelaire was his god. We were too tame for him. He left us, and starved and froze somewhere in the slums—still in his evening clothes; and got pneumonia and died. And Dick was—just a nice boy who wanted to do beautiful pictures and poems. Nevada did that to him.”

“But—why blame Nevada?”

“His father was in real-estate. He wanted Dick to sell real-estate.”

“Well, and after all, why not? One must do something ordinary—to make a living.”

“Why didn’t _you_ do something ordinary? Why did you come to Chicago?”

Felix was silent.

“I’ve kind of got you bothered, haven’t I?” said the girl maliciously.

“You’ve given me something to think about.” He rose.

“But I haven’t asked you yet what I was going to. Will you do a play for us?”

“I can’t do plays!”

“Oh, yes, you can. You write poetry and stories and things, don’t you?”

“Do I give myself away as plainly as that?”

The girl laughed. “You ought to know that an institution like this is a gathering place for idealists of all sorts and kinds. I know the chief varieties, and you aren’t any of the sociological sorts, so you must be one of the artist kind. Besides, didn’t I hear you talk at dinner?”

Felix grinned shamefacedly. “I didn’t disguise myself very well,” he admitted. “But anyway—”

He walked impatiently across the little room. His mind was in a state of strange upheaval. All his ideas about Chicago and himself were being upset. He ought not to listen to this girl. He must not let her confuse his plans. In particular he must not become interested in writing. He had put all that aside for the present.

His lips twisted in an uneasy grimace. Why, at this moment, when his mind must be braced to meet the impact of realities, should he let himself be drugged with the opium of dreams?

Already, at her mere word, the old numbing desire had come in a new guise—a vague, feverish yearning toward the puppet-world of the stage: fascinating half-formed ideas for plays rose like bubbles in his mind.

It was a feeling like home-sickness.

He must not indulge it. Of course, it would be fun to write a play for this girl, and help invent scenery and costumes for it. But that was not what he had come to Chicago for. He must put aside all enthusiasms which had no relation to the world of work-a-day reality. The very fact that he was so much interested in the idea proved that it was wrong....

He saw now that it was foolish to have ever come to this place—this refuge for idealists and dreamers. The thought of hunting up a new lodging that night suggested itself; but of course it would be hard to find another place half so comfortable—and he must consider his very limited finances....

“Anyway,” he said, pausing in front of the girl, “I _won’t_ write you a play!”

“Oh, yes you will!” she said.

A knock, and the door burst open, and Paul rushed in with a new-made cardboard figure, dressed in gold tinsel. “At last!” he cried, holding it up. “This will be the key-note of the play!”

“Splendid!” cried the girl, glancing at it. “And now I’m going to take Mr. Fay down and show him our theatre.”

As they went out, Felix noted on her door a card which revealed that her first name was Rose-Ann. It seemed a singularly fitting name for her, somehow.

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V. The Struggle for Existence

1

A STRANGE and perturbing girl!... He had not believed, he wished not to believe, what she had told him—that one could be fool and dreamer and yet make terms with Chicago.

But in the course of a few weeks it began to seem as if she were right.

Felix’s other letter of introduction was to Mr. Clive Bangs, editorial writer on the Evening Chronicle. Very diffidently, after having made futile inquires at other newspapers during the week, he went one afternoon to present the letter.

Some one in the front office said, “Back there under the mezzanine—the first office to the right.” He found a little built-in coop, and opened the door. The space inside was crowded with desks and tables, the floor littered with papers, the air filled with cigarette smoke. Through the windows, facing on an alley overhung by tall buildings, no sunlight came, and electric lamps on the desks pierced holes of light through the twilight atmosphere. At one of the desks a plump man lounged, smoking a cigarette. A long, lean man in shirt-sleeves was pounding a typewriter. A surly-looking young man with a careless Windsor tie, and a lock of hair that fell over one eye, sat at a third desk, reading a book.

The plump man looked up with a good-humoured smile, and Felix approached him, saying, “Mr. Bangs?” The plump man waved a hand towards the surly-looking youth. “That’s Mr. Bangs,” he said.

Mr. Bangs looked up, frowned at Felix, and said, “You want to see me?” He jumped up, and indicated a chair vaguely. “Wait a minute,” he said, and taking up a typewritten sheet from his desk went hurriedly out of the office.

Felix looked at the chair. It was piled high with exchanges, so he remained standing. The plump man continued to smoke dreamily. The long, lean man thoughtfully wrote on. Felix waited. Mr. Bangs did not return.

It was, Felix felt uncomfortably, just what he had expected—it was silly to have come here with that letter.

He glanced down at the desk, saw the book which Mr. Bangs had been reading, noted the name on the cover, and picked it up with a sudden interest. He looked at the title page, the date; and then turned the leaves, tenderly, affectionately....

He had quite forgotten Mr. Bangs, and the nature of his errand.

Mr. Clive Bangs, having handed the typewritten sheet to the foreman of the composing-room, walked back slowly. He knew very well who his visitor was. Helen’s letter announcing his arrival was in his pocket. “He is,” Helen had written him, “just as crazy as you are, Clive!” But he distrusted Helen’s judgment.... It was one thing to welcome to Chicago one more of the too few sophisticated spirits of the mid-west; it was another to have on his hands some pale, gawky, helpless youth who had been falsely encouraged by country librarians in the notion that he could write! What seemed a prodigy out in Iowa might be merely one of the army of unemployed and unemployable here in Chicago. Clive had tried to help these prodigies before; and he knew that a painful addiction to the style of Ruskin, combined with egotism and a total lack of ideas, was no easy malady to cure. He rather flinched from the prospect of taking Helen’s protégé in hand.... But, still—“_crazy as you are_”—Helen might know what she was talking about.

Stopping in the doorway, Clive looked at his problem in person. He had picked up that book—that H. G. Wells book.... Those were the days just before “Tono-Bungay,” and the name of H. G. Wells was as yet cherished by only a few enthusiasts. Besides, this was the least known of H. G. Wells’ writings, and one who might have heard of Wells as a writer of pseudo-scientific yarns would be puzzled by it. Clive stood for a moment trying to gauge the quality of Felix Fay’s response to the volume in his hand; then he went up to him.

Felix awoke to find Mr. Bangs standing beside him, and looking at him quizzically.

“I see you’re looking at my latest Wells find,” said Mr. Bangs.

“The first English edition! Where did you pick it up?” Felix asked. “In a second-hand store?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Bangs. “Forty cents! At Downer’s.”

Felix laid the book down reverently. “I wonder,” he said, “if they have any other Wells’ things there. There’s one of his books I’ve never been able to come across anywhere—‘The Island of Doctor Moreau.’ Do you know it?”

“I have the only copy I’ve ever seen in Chicago,” said Clive Bangs. “I’ll lend it to you.”

“I wish you would,” Felix said gratefully. “I found ‘The Time Machine’ in an old junk-shop in Port Royal last summer, and that made ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’ the only thing of Wells’ I hadn’t read—I suppose you know ‘Kipps’? And ‘Love and Mr. Lewisham’?”

Mr. Bangs nodded. “This book,” he said, indicating the volume on the desk, “isn’t so well known as it might be.” He took a cigarette and passed Felix the box with an unconscious gesture.

Clive Bangs had ceased to judge this young man. He had accepted him. After all, how many people were there in Chicago who had read “First and Last Things”? So it was, once upon a time, when two men met who had both read an obscure book of poems about Wine and Death by one Edward Fitzgerald.

Felix lighted his cigarette from Clive Bangs’ match. “I brought my copy to Chicago with me,” he said. “It’s the only book I did bring.”

Clive Bangs looked at his watch and picked up his hat. Suddenly Felix remembered, and put his hand, embarrassedly, in his pocket for his letter of introduction.

Clive Bangs laughed. “Never mind!” he said. “I know who you are. Come on, let’s have a drink.”

A few minutes later they were sitting in a barroom called “The Tavern,” ordering ale with bitters, which Clive Bangs recommended as the specialty of the place.

“So you are Helen’s wild young man from Iowa!” said Clive. “I wish Helen were here, and we three would get drunk together.”

Felix was startled at the idea of Helen, the beautiful and condescending goddess of the library-shrine of his youth, getting drunk....

Clive laughed. “Oh,” he said, “I mean on ideas. Though for my part, after a hard day’s work, it takes a little alcohol to put the practical part of my mind asleep and set free my imagination. My mind is disposed in layers. After the first drink I cease to be interested in politics and social reform. After the second I forget the girl about whom I happen to be worrying at the time. And with the third drink, I enter the realm of pure theory.”

The tall glasses of ale were set before them.

“Here’s to Utopia!” said Clive.

2

It was only when Felix had warmly parted from his new friend, and agreed to come over the next noon for lunch and a visit to Downer’s, that he realized—with some chagrin—that he had failed to say anything to Mr. Clive Bangs about getting a job as a reporter on the Evening Chronicle.

In fact, he had fallen very neatly into the trap prepared for him by his own fatal temperament. He had given himself away at the very start. And Bangs, who appeared to indulge some theoretical and visionary traits as a relaxation to the sober work of helping get out a great daily newspaper, had enjoyed his moon-calfishness: but to what end?

Going back to his room at Community House, Felix gravely and dispassionately considered the question of what impression he had made. “On the one hand,” he said to himself, “it is doubtless true that Mr. Bangs must enjoy coming across another person who shares his own literary tastes. But, on the other hand, these tastes are in the nature of an avocation for him, and my possession of them proves nothing whatever as to my fitness for a newspaper job. Suppose he had happened to be enthusiastic about Japanese prints; suppose he had just bought a Kiyonaga, and I had looked at it and praised it; he would have been pleased to find some one who knew the difference between a Kiyonaga and a Kunisada—but would he have thought that a reason for helping me to get a newspaper job? I’m afraid not.”

Felix was pleased with the coolness of his reasoning under circumstances where another person might have built up vain hopes. And in any event, Clive Bangs was a friend; and friendship had a value of its own. He would not embarrass Clive Bangs with any requests for help; he would take what their friendship had to give, and be glad of it.

Accordingly, it was without any ulterior motive that he went to lunch with Bangs next day. Again they talked literature and ideas; they explored Downer’s together, and Felix picked up a second volume to complete his Muses’ Library edition of the poems of John Donne: and they strolled back to the office of the Chronicle, where Felix became acquainted with the other editorial writers.

The long, lean man was a New Englander named Hosmer Flint; he corresponded very much to Felix’s idea of what the editorial writer of a great daily newspaper should be, for he had a mind incredibly stored with statistics of all kinds. The other was the chief editorial writer—a man of fifty, plump and dimpled, with a childlike charm of manner which made it natural for every one to call him “Willie”—his other name being Smith.

Willie Smith genially expressed to Felix the hope that there might be something for him on the Chronicle, and when the managing editor happened in he introduced Felix to him casually as a young man who was looking for a newspaper job; but Felix understood that this was simply Willie’s good nature, and refused to take the possibility seriously. He found his new acquaintances agreeable to talk to, however, and fell into the habit of dropping into the editorial office in the slack part of the afternoon, for a half-hour’s talk. Having no economic reason for pretending to be anything but himself in their presence, he talked about the things that really interested him—socialism and anarchism and life and art.

He permitted himself these idle pleasures only after hours dutifully spent in annoying the editors of five or six other papers with a brisk and efficient presentation of his usefulness. He had to appear so preternaturally capable and alert on these occasions that it was a relief to be able to throw off the disguise and loaf and invite his soul in the editorial room of the Evening Chronicle. It was, as he sometimes reproachfully told himself, a concession to his inborn weakness, and just so much time lost from his task of getting a newspaper job.

3

But one could not look for a job all the time. It was with only slight compunction that he fell into the custom of spending his evenings in the company of Rose-Ann—sometimes talking in her room, sometimes in Paul’s watching him invent his beautiful and fantastic toy-scenery, and again in the tiny Community Theatre, helping them make costumes and build stage-sets.

It was, it seemed, to the fascination of the tiny theater itself, as much as to Rose-Ann’s persuasions, that he presently succumbed, and found himself writing a little play for a group of children—a play about the further adventures of the Pied Piper and the boys and girls who followed him into the mountain.... He felt rather like one of those children himself, lured by some irresistible music away from the daylit world of ambition into the hollow hill of fantasy.... Rose-Ann approved the play enthusiastically, and the children of her group, assigning the parts among themselves, began spontaneously to learn it by heart.

Meantime, rehearsals of a sort were going on for the “Prince and Pauper.” Rose-Ann had her own way of teaching. She became, it seemed, herself a child, and was accepted by the others as such; they quarreled and made up with her, kissed her and made faces at her and petted her, exactly as if she were one of themselves; and Felix, watching these scenes, wished that he, too, had that capacity for childlikeness, so that he could join in the fun on such terms of innocent intimacy. But he felt dreadfully grown-up and awkward, and Rose-Ann, on her knees amid her playmates, laughing and talking and acting one part or another with the utter abandon of childhood’s “pretending”—she was the youngest of them all; indeed, she seemed more than anything else a delightful doll—a marvellous talking and laughing doll of gold and ivory.

Mrs. Perkins—big, fat, comfortable Mrs. Perkins, still young-looking though reputed to be a grandmother, who lived in the neighborhood and came to the theater to sew costumes for them, and whom everybody, without any disrespect, called “Perk”—beckoned him over one day to her corner as he stood admiring Rose-Ann with her children, and whispered to him:

“You just feel like putting her in your pocket and carrying her off, don’t you?”

Felix grinned at her. “How do _you_ know?” he whispered back. Yes, she was a wonderful little toy-girl, less and more than human, that one wanted to hold and touch and play with, and take home to keep! But how did she, old Granny Perk, know how a young man felt about it!

“Oh, I know!” and Perk smiled her comfortable smile. “I was a girl myself once. Little Miss Rosy-Posy knows just how nice she looks to you, and don’t you doubt it!”

Yes, perhaps Rose-Ann did like to be looked at and enjoyed by some one who was not a child. She seemed to be teasing him with her presence—to be saying, “Don’t _you_ want to come and play with me, too?”

He had tried to tell Clive about Rose-Ann, but his first words, “a girl over at Community House,” had apparently evoked in Clive’s mind the picture of a misguided spinster of forty whose repressed maternal instincts were finding satisfaction in the running of other people’s lives—a creature against whom he proceeded to warn Felix in humorous terms. “She will manage you, Felix,” he said, “—for your own good. Now it’s all right to be managed by a woman, so long as it is for her benefit. You can at least complain about it. But when you’re managed for your own good, you are helpless.”

Felix objected to this notion of Rose-Ann, but Clive asked her age. And Felix said he didn’t know, but that she was a little older than himself.

“A little older than you. I thought so,” said Clive. “Beware!” There was no use talking to Clive about girls, anyway; it was a subject upon which he was frequently bitter and always absurd. Felix had told Rose-Ann a little about him, and she had said, “He’s been hurt by some girl.” Doubtless that was true. And Felix felt a certain satisfaction in the inward comparison of this creature of Clive’s distorted fancy with the real and delightful Rose-Ann—whom even as Clive talked he could see in memory, with himself standing by and caressing with his gaze every swift movement of that delicate and supple doll-body of hers.

“You’re all wrong,” he said to Clive. “She’s a pagan.”

“Yes,” said Clive scornfully, “one of those settlement-house pagans.”

Felix only laughed.

All this, however, was not getting a job. By desperate economies, as his money dwindled, he was managing to hold out. But he could not hold out forever. Clive had asked him one day if he needed money, and he had answered evasively. There was no use starting that sort of thing.

He had to get a job.

But it looked as though he were not going to get a job. There seemed to be no use trying to impress city editors with his efficiency. There had been a vacancy on a morning paper, and another young man—with, so far as Felix could tell, no better qualifications than his own—had been selected. That discouraged him. Doubtless these city editors could see through his pretences....

4

And then one afternoon when he dropped in at the Chronicle office, Clive asked him if he was ready to go to work Monday morning: he had been taken on as a reporter.... He would get, Clive told him, twenty dollars a week to start with. Clive told him this in a pleased but casual way, as though it were something long arranged between Felix and himself which had just been ratified by the higher powers. So Clive had been working for him all along!

“Go and tell Harris you’ll be on deck,” said Clive. Harris was the city editor. “And better speak to the Old Man, too.” The Old Man was the managing editor, Mr. Devoe. Felix had never supposed for a moment that these personages had him under consideration.

He presented himself before both of them, not knowing what to say. Apparently it was not necessary to say anything. Both of them were busy—too busy, Felix hoped, for them to notice how dazed he was.

“All right, Fay, you’ll be here Monday morning at eight o’clock,” said the city editor.

“I suppose Mr. Bangs told you that we’re going to start you off at twenty dollars?” said Mr. Devoe. “We can do a little better later, perhaps. It’s up to you.” Mr. Devoe looked at him severely—or kindly, Felix was not sure which—over his glasses, and turned back to his desk.

“Yes, sir,” said Felix.

Willie Smith patted him on the back. “Glad you’ve got it,” he said.

“Take it easy,” Clive told him. “A newspaper job in Chicago is just like a newspaper job anywhere else.”

Well! So at last, somehow, the devil only knew how, he had gained a foothold in Chicago.

He discussed the event with Rose-Ann that evening. She laughed at his surprise. “How do you suppose people get jobs?” she demanded. “You were going at it in precisely the right way. I knew from what you told me they were going to take you.”

Felix had already begun to worry about the future. “I don’t know where any place is,” he said. “I must dig up my street-map.”

“Oh, throw that street-map away,” said Rose-Ann. “I’ll give you a guide to Chicago that’s much more useful.” She went to her shelf and took down a little book. “Here!”

It was the “Bab Ballads.” Felix looked puzzled.

“If you can write a play that will please children, you can write to please the people of Chicago. They’re children, too,” she said.

Felix slipped the book in his pocket and went to his room and his street-map. She had too much confidence in him. Only he himself knew what a fool he was. He had got this job under false pretences.

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VI. A Guide to Chicago

1

AND yet it seemed that Rose-Ann knew him better than he knew himself.

On Monday morning the city editor gruffly assigned him a desk. He hated to sit there idle, and he had thrown away his morning paper. Finding that he still had Rose-Ann’s little book in his pocket, he took it out and read in that. Presently the city editor called his name. He rose, putting the book back into his pocket. His first test had come.

“Go over to the Annex and see if you can get something about the Taft-Roosevelt situation from—” and he named a distinguished political personage.

“Where?” Felix asked.

“At the Annex.”

(But what in the world was the Annex? From the tone in which its name had been uttered by the city editor, Felix was aware that it was some place that he ought to know all about. Some place that anybody who had ever dreamed of being a reporter on a Chicago paper would of _course_ know all about! But what was it? The Annex to what?... By a violent mental effort he came to the conclusion that it must be a hotel; probably one of Chicago’s most famous hotels! and here he had been in Chicago a month, and didn’t know where it was. Idiot!)

“Yes, sir,” said Felix to the city editor, and went out and asked the policeman on the nearest corner.... It was horribly obvious to him, at that moment, that he was too ignorant of plain everyday reality ever to hold this job.

2

He came back, having failed to get the interview.... He had been given half an hour by a delightful old gentleman at the Annex; half an hour in which to try to get some kind of quotable political comment on a situation in which everybody was interested, from a man who, if any one, knew what the situation really was. And every question had been turned aside so cleverly, so smoothly, so genially, that under other circumstances it would have been a pleasure to see it done. The old gentleman had been the soul of courtesy; he seemed to enjoy talking to his young questioner; doubtless because it was so easy to put him off the track.

At first Felix’s questions had been straightforward; and the evasiveness of the replies had disconcerted him. He framed his questions more shrewdly; but the old gentleman answered them with the same bland courtesy and to precisely the same effect. Felix kept on for a while, doggedly. And then gradually he realized—what, he told himself scornfully, he should have known from the very start, that he had been sent out on a futile quest. If there had been the slightest chance of getting anything out of this old gentleman, the best reporter on the staff would have been sent—not the newest and greenest cub.

He was angry—at himself, for having tried so naïvely to do the impossible; at the city editor, for not giving him a real assignment; at the tradition of “news,” which, having attached a fictitious importance to the subject of politics, was wasting his time and the old gentleman’s in this solemnly idiotic fashion.

“Is there anything else I could tell you about?” the old gentleman asked blandly.

“You have been very kind—” said Felix.

“Oh, not at all,” said the old gentleman. “Nothing pleases me more than to give information to a young seeker after truth.”

“There _is_ one thing I would like to know,” said Felix. “Who struck Billy Patterson?”

This insulting question—insulting precisely because it was silly, because it threw the whole earnest interview suddenly into the key of farce—did not for an instant shake the old gentleman’s aplomb. He appeared to reflect gravely, with finger-tips delicately joined and head cocked on one side, in his characteristic gesture. He smiled faintly, and spoke.

“You have trenched,” he said, “upon an important public issue, and one not lightly to be discussed—a question of deep interest to hundreds of thousands of our fellow-countrymen. In fact, I have seldom been in any gathering of true Americans, when this question has not been raised. _Who struck Billy Patterson?_ Again and again have I heard men ask each other that question. And how seldom, if ever, has the reply been satisfactory! No, I say frankly to you, the reply has not been satisfactory. And so the question remains—like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down. Careless and unthinking statesmen may try to lead the people astray with talk of minor issues, such as the tariff, imperialism, and the conservation of natural resources, but the heart of the American people remains true. When the shouting and the tumult dies, and the senators go back to Washington, common men look at each other and ask, _Who struck Billy Patterson?_ It is a question that searches to the very vitals of our polity. We boast of our unexampled freedom, our magnificent opportunities; and rightly so. But justice, even-handed and sure, is the true foundation of a lasting prosperity. We know this, and we are humble before the Muse of History. Be it said in our behalf that others have not had to prod at our sleeping consciences. It is not because of outside criticism that we trouble ourselves over this matter. The Frenchman and the Turk do not point the finger of scorn at us; and even our brothers across the sea, speaking our own language, are probably ignorant of William Patterson’s very name. But we do not forget. And whatever happens, so long as this question remains unanswered, I venture to predict that no other issue will usurp its place; and on the heart of the last American will be written the solemn words: _Who struck Billy Patterson?_ Is there anything else?”

So the old gentleman could play that game, too!

“Well,” said Felix, “I _was_ going to ask you if—if you thought McPhairson Conglocketty Angus McClan got a square deal, but—”

The old gentleman shook his head, still smiling.

“I really don’t think it would be proper,” he said, “for me to discuss the internal affairs of the British Empire.”

“And Noah’s Ark,” said Felix. “If you could express an opinion—”

“It might be construed as a reflection upon the naval policy of the new administration.”

“And as to what became of little Charley Ross?”

“That,” said the old gentleman, “is something the national committee would prefer to remain, for the present, a secret.”

Felix was beaten.

“Thank you,” he said, and went away.

“Got anything?” the city editor asked, when Felix came up to his desk to report.

“Not a thing.” Felix said.

The city editor grunted, reached out for a typewritten sheet on the hook, and seemed to dismiss the matter from his mind.

Felix went back to his desk and sat there idly. He took out Rose-Ann’s little book from his pocket, and read in it. And then suddenly he put a sheet of paper in his machine and commenced to write.

Confound it, if what Rose-Ann said about the people of Chicago was so, they would enjoy the true story of that interview. It _was_ funny. Funny just because it was silly. But it was so preposterously the opposite of what he had been sent to find out—it seemed a deliberate mockery of the traditional and legitimate curiosity of the public. If he ventured to show it to the city editor, it would probably be his last assignment.

Recklessly, he wrote it.

The city editor strolled to the water-tank, and back, wiping his lips. He saw Felix writing, came over, put a hand on his shoulder, and asked, “What are you writing?”

Well, he was lost. There was no backing out now. He handed over the first sheets.

“Thought you didn’t get anything,” the city editor remarked.

“I—didn’t,” said Felix.

“Where’s the rest of it?”

Felix wrote the last sentence, and surrendered the page.

“He said this?” asked the city editor, pausing for a moment. Felix nodded. “Just like the old bird, too,” the city editor muttered, and went on reading. He read to the end, and then read the first page again, and then smiled amiably. “And you didn’t know you had a story!” he said.

“Well,” said Felix, still incredulous. “I didn’t think—”

“You’re sure you’ve got it right?” the city editor asked, rubbing his chin.

“Every word,” said Felix, earnest in behalf of his veracity.

“H’m,” said the city editor. “With a little fixing up, I think we’ve got a nice little story here.” He carried it into the managing editor’s room.

And to Felix’s great astonishment the story, with a few changes, was printed on the first page, under a solemnly ironic heading.... They were laughing about it in the editorial room when he ventured in that afternoon to see Clive. “So you had a story and didn’t know it!” Willie said delightedly.

“Never mind,” Clive told him, “you’ve made a hit with Harris by letting him discover the story for himself.” Clive really seemed to think he had played a kind of trick on Harris. “The regular cub trick,” said Clive.

Felix showed the story to Rose-Ann that night.

She was pleased, but not surprised. “It’s exactly the sort of thing I expected you to do,” she said.

He was tempted to tell Rose-Ann the truth about it; but he decided not to. Let her keep on believing in him—while she could!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

VII. Work and Play

1

FELIX kept the little book in his desk, cultivated what he called the “Bab Ballad manner,” and waited, sceptically, to see how long his luck would last. In three weeks he was given a raise. But even this did not quite convince him.

It had been too easy—too astonishingly easy. It had come about, not because of any change in his character, not because he had ceased in some miraculous way to be a moon-calf, but precisely because he was just as much a moon-calf as ever. That was why he was compelled to suspect the authenticity of his good fortune.

“Stop worrying,” Clive told him one day at lunch. “What in the world are you afraid of?”

“That I’ll wake up,” said Felix.

“You’ll wake up, all right,” said Clive, “to discover that you’re being underpaid and overworked just like everybody else. You know, you go along looking as if you had had a telegram saying that your rich uncle in Australia had died and left you a million dollars, and you didn’t know whether to believe it or not. No one would guess to look at you that this remarkable good fortune of yours simply consists of eight or ten stiff hours a day for twenty-five dollars a week.”

This, to Felix, seemed an understatement of the merits of the situation. For one thing, he had become very much attached to Clive, whose odd, whimsical, theoretical conversation had a tang of its own; and this job on the Chronicle yielded him the opportunity to enjoy Clive’s company, though now on somewhat restricted terms.

Since Felix had become a reporter, taking his place as it were in the ranks of a lower caste, he had begun to feel that his visits to the editorial room were a kind of special privilege, which he endeavored to justify by an occasional piece of writing suited to the editorial page—some entertaining account of things seen in Chicago, the by-products of his work as a reporter. Or, more likely, things not seen at all, but pieced together out of his memory and hung on the slightest thread of contemporary incident.... Once he attended a meeting of “aurists,” and, with a reference to that meeting as a starting point, meandered through a column of odd and curious lore about ears: the ear as the organ of stability, by means of which we are enabled to stand upright—with the story of the little crustacean which puts sand in its ears, and upon whom some scientist played a mean trick, substituting iron filings for the sand-grains, and then applying a magnet overhead, with the result that the crustacean swam contentedly upside down!... In short, anything that happened to interest him!

He discovered that these writings gave him a special standing among his fellow-reporters. They had never ventured to aspire to the editorial page. Nor would Felix have ventured, except that he knew from loafing about the editorial room how welcome was an occasional column from the outside. He still felt himself to be an intruder into a superior realm, and he was grateful for those times, once or twice a week, when Clive stopped beside his desk and suggested that they lunch together.

He had wondered at first how it was that Clive Bangs, with a passion for ideas as intense as the one Felix had long been endeavoring to overcome within himself, should be a successful editorial writer on Chicago’s most conservative and respectable paper—and, for that matter, the valued committeeman of two or three eminently practical and sober reform organizations! Clive was not merely a moon-calf like himself; he was at the same time a quite sane and work-a-day young Chicagoan.

The thought of such an adjustment to the world fascinated and tantalized Felix. It held out for him the possibility of getting along successfully without going through any such violent psychic revolution as he had demanded of himself, Clive was inwardly an Anarchist, a Utopian, a theorist and dreamer of the wildest sort; and outwardly something quite other.

That outward quality was what Felix envied in Clive—that practical adaptability to the world, so far beyond anything that seemed possible for Felix himself to achieve. He would have given much for Clive’s ease of manner, his ability to meet ordinary people on their own ground—as for instance in discussing the Yale-Harvard game with a college boy and an instant later local politics with a “reform” alderman who stopped in turn by their table in the City Club. At such a moment Felix was struck dumb; he felt like a child in the presence of grown-up people. Clive seemed to him an infinitely superior being.

And yet this practical adaptability to human occasions was a trait upon which Clive himself seemed to set no value. His easy worldliness—as Felix thought it—was only one side of his character; and he preferred to indulge the other side—the side that was fantastically idealistic.

Perhaps it was because Felix had felt obliged to carry all his theories into practice, that some bounds had been set to his theorizing. No such bounds existed for Clive Bangs. The most extreme ideas that Felix had ever timidly cherished with regard to some free and happy society of the future, were commonplaces to Clive. His speculations roved boldly into Platonic, Nietzschean, and H. G. Wellsian spheres, and dwelt there as among solid realities.

They talked chiefly of love—of love in the future.

Sometimes Felix, too much allured and disturbed, had to protest that these were, after all, only dreams. One day at lunch Clive discoursed on freedom in love until Felix felt constrained to point out that human nature being what it is, jealousy—whether one liked it or not—was nevertheless a fact.

“Oh, yes,” Clive laughed. “I realize that the red-haired young woman at the settlement would find it difficult not to be jealous! In that sense, of course jealousy is a fact, and has to be taken into consideration. But we are free men at present, dealing with ideas, not with Jane and Sue—and as free men we are at liberty to inquire what kind of fact jealousy is. Witchcraft, too, was a fact—soberly attested by the greatest thinkers of the age. Anybody who didn’t believe in witchcraft was crazy, just like you and I. And jealousy is the same kind of fact—a socially-created fact. People are persuaded that it exists—that under certain circumstances it must exist. That’s all. How would I know when to be jealous, except that I am carefully taught what my rights of possession are and when they are infringed? It’s the old barbaric code, still handed down in talk and writing. And that’s why I am interested in the development of a new kind of talk and writing.”

It was specifically as this “new kind of talk and writing” that Clive discussed modern literature. He repudiated any preoccupation with literature as an art. It was to him a kind of social dynamics. It had been used to build up through the ages a vast system of “taboos”—and now it was being used to break them down again. In this work of social iconoclasm the chiefs were H. G. Wells, Shaw and Galsworthy—with Meredith as a breathless and stammering forerunner and Hardy as a blind prophet....

“Do you suppose the public knows what they are really up to?” Felix asked doubtfully.

“No. And it would hang them if it did. But fiction cuts deeper than any kind of argument. And it’s doing its work. Wait ten years.... The new younger generation won’t be like us, Felix—content to orate about these matters at luncheon. They will despise us, Felix! They will say we did nothing but talk.”

“Quite right, too,” said Felix.

“They will have heard our talk—talk—talk, and they will be sick of it. They will be all for action. And you and I, Felix, who will then be respectably married, you to your settlement Egeria and I to God knows whom, will be shocked at the younger generation. We will remember how prayerfully we planned to be unconventional, in what a mood of far-seeing social righteousness we went about breaking the commandments, and how, after all, we stopped on the way to discuss the matter more thoroughly, and ended by never doing anything at all—and we will be disgusted by the light-minded frivolity of those youngsters. Even our novels—instead of corrupting the youth of the land as we hope!—will probably be regarded by them as hopelessly old-fashioned. If we ever actually write them....”

When he had reached that point in the discussion, Clive would become silent and sullen. “If I only had the energy to write!” he would complain bitterly.

He had been brooding over a novel for four years, and had not yet written a word of it.... They had long talks about that unwritten novel which was to corrupt the younger generation.

2

At Community House, Felix was having difficulties with his class. Not that they were lacking in enthusiasm; on the contrary, their enthusiasm carried him in directions where he had no intention of going. At the outset, he had conceived English composition to be a simple matter. Perhaps it might have been for children; but these young people of eighteen were already convinced of its difficulties, and haggled over semicolons. They wanted to know the “rules” by the observance of which one became a good writer!

Felix presently gave up prose as too hard to teach, and started in upon verse, with greater success. Yet when it came to explaining why _love_ and _rove_ are technically correct rhymes, and _young_ and _son_ no rhymes at all, he was nonplussed. Very soon the class had hit upon a mode which was neither verse nor prose—a kind of free verse. It was quite other than Felix had any wish to encourage anybody to write. He doubted if the writing of free verse would ever enable them to appreciate the Ode to a Nightingale. But he was helpless in the situation, and could only let them go ahead.

His conception of verse was precisely that it was not free; he had thought that the pains and pleasures of rhyme and metre would give them a creative understanding of English poetry. This free verse of theirs seemed to him utterly unrelated to the tradition into which he sought to give them an insight. It was very free verse indeed—it mixed its metaphors recklessly, it soared into realms of vague emotion. And when its meaning was at all clear, it carried the burden of a hopeless reproach against circumstance, and a plaintive yearning for it knew not what. Felix fiercely disliked this plaintive hopelessness, and preached scornfully at his class. They seemed to be impressed; but they continued as before.

“I can’t believe you really feel like that,” he said to a merry-faced young Jewess who had just read aloud a poem full of world-sorrow.

She looked offended. “But I do!” she cried. “If you only knew!” and she put her hand expressively to her bosom.

“My God!” he said. “What a broken-hearted crowd!”

There was a quick burst of laughter, and then a girl spoke up. “But Mr. Fay, do you not think we _feel_?”

“I know you feel unhappy. But don’t you ever feel anything else? Don’t you ever have a good time? Or don’t you think good times are worth writing about?”

“Did Keats and Shelley write about their good times?” asked an ironical youth.

“Yes,” said Felix defiantly. “They wrote about lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon, and skylarks, and things like that; and they loved them to begin with—that was why they wrote about them. Don’t you love anything—anything that is right on hand to be loved—babies, or pet kittens, or pretty clothes, or pretty girls? Are you always pining for something you haven’t got?”

“Always!” two or three of them responded impressively in chorus.

“_The desire of the moth for the star_,” the ironical young man contributed.