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.