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.