I RETURN TO AMERICA
In the early spring of 1898 I made up my mind once and for all that it was high time for me to leave Europe and get back to my own country if I ever intended to get to work with young men in my profession, or in any other activity in which I might be able to hold my own.
Europe had not palled on me—far from it! To have lingered on in Berlin, in Rome or in Venice would have pleased me at that time, had I possessed the necessary means to linger, wander and observe. Had I had financial independence and no sense of responsibility, I might have been in Europe to-day as a resident.
In 1898 our country went to war with Spain. How the rumors of war affected other young Americans studying, traveling, or on business in Europe at that time, I do not know. In me the rumors of war created an uncontrollable desire to return to my native land. Perhaps I thought I could go to war in her defense. It is impossible for me now to analyze, as I should like to do, my determination in 1898 to get away from Europe, university studies and all that the life abroad had meant to me, just as quickly as possible. My mother was aghast at this resolution on my part. She said to me: "If you were going to China, Kamtchatka, Tibet or almost any other place but America, I could easily think it a very natural thing to do. But America! I feel as if I should lose all touch with you."
I suppose that my mother was fearful that on returning to America I would also return to all the unpleasantness, devilishness and lawlessness which I had pretty successfully run away from when I shipped as a coal-passer in Hoboken in 1889, on the poor old steamship Elbe. Furthermore, I think it not unlikely that my mother herself had lived so long in Europe, and had been able to keep such close track of me there, that she had a notion that we were always to live in Europe, and that there I must somehow win or lose. Then, again, there is no doubt that it disappointed my mother very much that I would not continue in the university and take my degree.
But something impelled me on my course, and in the spring of 1898 I said good-by to the university, to Berlin, to Germany and to all Europe as places in which I desired to cast my lot.
As a mere visitor, I have been back in Europe on several occasions since 1898, but I have never regretted my stubborn decision in that year to return to my country and make it my abiding place.
In retrospect, it occurs to me, first of all, that the general experience in Europe, on account of its prolongation, lost for me that personal touch with young men of my own age who were making their way ahead in America, and which accounts for so much in getting into the swim of things, making those friends that avail so much in business or in the professions—in a word, in growing in your own community with your own people. I stayed too long in Europe for my own good.
In 1898, in spite of the mysterious and uncontrollable desire to get back to America, I was for months after my arrival in New York the most Europe-homesick person imaginable. Whom did I find that knew me? Only a few friends settled there who had been at my mother's home in Berlin, or that I had met during my travels. I did not know one of them in any business capacity here, and not one of them had been acquainted with me in any of my American homes. I had got acquainted with them in Europe, "on the march," so to speak.
I think it unfortunate that a boy or young man should linger so long in lands far removed from his own, when, in the end, he usually must try to amount to something.
It is again that question of camping, which I referred to in an earlier part of my story, which is preëminently noticeable in all such American colony life abroad as I have observed. The colonies are for the most part nothing but camps, the colonists being only too obviously mere birds of passage.
I do not believe it is a good thing for a young man, whose life is afterwards to be taken up again in his native land, to spend so much time out of it as I did. I lost touch with my home generation; I spent the most formative years of my life in countries where, as it proved, I was not to live and make my way; I got into lackadaisical ways of looking at things, and I fell to thinking that living in bachelor quarters on five hundred dollars a year would be an enviable achievement.
Yet Europe, and particularly Germany, also did me a certain good for which I must always be grateful. I have already hinted at some of the benefits which I think I appreciated at the time of their bestowal, and have learned never to forget. I must certainly thank Europe for a quieting effect on my fiery unwillingness to see inexorable truths as they must be seen sooner or later. I must also thank Europe for some most delightful friends and acquaintances. But where are they now? The great majority are scattered no doubt all over the world, only a few remaining in my own country for me to enjoy. This is the pathos of the whole business as I have been through it.