With the Procession

by Henry Blake Fuller

Jane retraced her steps to kiss her. She had not kissed her own mother for ten years.

VI

Within a month after Truesdale Marshall's return home the understanding between himself and his father might fairly have been classified among the facts accomplished; and it was brought about, too, by those indefinite courses, those impalpable procedures through which, in actual life, so many understandings are really arrived at. Truesdale, therefore, never received word that his father "wished to see him in the library"—as in the story-books. Nor did the two ever draw their chairs together in the middle of the stage close to the footlights, and have it out—as at the theatre. When Truesdale spoke at all he spoke casually—with more or less of implication or insinuation—to his mother or his sisters. When he spoke not at all, he acted—and his actions spoke as loudly and effectually as actions are held commonly to do. His father, therefore, learned presently, and with enough distinctness to serve all purposes, that the filial back was no more ready now than ever before to submit to harness; that rules and regulations were sure to be resented; that dates and duties were fretful affairs at best; that engagements and responsibilities were far too irksome to be endured; and, above all, that anything like "hours" would be most emphatically beyond the pale of a moment's consideration. Truesdale professed to regard himself as having returned once more to the life of the frontier; and being thus placed, what could he be but a pioneer? Very well; he would be a pioneer—the pioneer of a leisure class.

He made, however, one concession to his father: he consented to a reduction in his allowance.

He had led himself to believe that now, at last, in the town of his birth the career of a man of leisure was completely practicable. During his long absence from home his family had sent him at intervals copies of the local newspapers—sheets whose utterances were triumphantly optimistic, even beyond their triumphant and optimistic wont. Furthermore, his courses over the Continent had brought him into contact with many travellers more lately from home than himself, whose strange and topping tales—carried, indeed, in a direction the reverse of that taken by most such reports—had told him much of contemporaneous achievement behind them, and had filled him with a half-belief that no expectations founded on such a base could be exorbitant. A great light had arisen; the city, notably a metropolis for many years already, had opened out into a cosmopolis; the poet had at last arrived, and the earth was now tolerable for the foot of man.

He visited on the South shore the great white shell from which the spirit had taken its formal leave but a week before, and he acknowledged the potency of the poet's spell. "It is good," he assented; "better than I could have thought—better than anybody over there could be made to believe. I might have tried to get home a fortnight sooner, perhaps."

He met half-way the universal expectation that the spirit of the White City was but just transferred to the body of the great Black City close at hand, over which it was to hover as an enlightenment—through which it might permeate as an informing force.

"Good!" he thought; "there's no place where it's needed more or where it might do more good." The great town, in fact, sprawled and coiled about him like a hideous monster—a piteous, floundering monster, too. It almost called for tears. Nowhere a more tireless activity, nowhere a more profuse expenditure, nowhere a more determined striving after the ornate, nowhere a more undaunted endeavor towards the monumental expression of success, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque, grewsome, appalling. "So little taste," sighed Truesdale; "so little training, so little education, so total an absence of any collective sense of the fit and the proper! Who could believe, here, that there are cities elsewhere which fashioned themselves rightly almost by intuition—which took shape and reached harmony by an unreasoned instinct, as you might say?"

But let that pass; he must take the town as he found it. Between his own transplanted artistic interests on the one hand and his association with the great throng of artists that the Aufklärung had doubtless brought and held, he should do well enough. He figured mornings given over to music and painting—his own; and afternoons of studio-rounds, when fellow-artists would turn him their unfinished canvasses to the light, or would pull away the clinging sheets from their shapes of dampened clay; and evenings when the room would thicken with smoke and tall glasses would make rings on the shining tops of tables, while a dozen agile wits had their own way with Monet and Bourget and Verlaine. For the rest, concerts, spectacles, bals; if need be, receptions; or, if pushed to it, five-o'clock tea—with the chance that one other man might be present. Thus the winter. As for the summer: "No canoeing, of course, on the Lahn and the Moselle; I must fall back upon the historic Illinois, with its immemorial towns and villages and crumbling cathedrals, and the long line of ancient and picturesque châteaux between Ottawa and Peoria. No more villeggiatura at Frascati or Fiesole; I shall have to flee from the summer heats to the wild ravines and gorges of DuPage County—and raise turnips and cabbages there with the rest of them."

Putting aside for the present all thought of the coming summer, Truesdale set himself to the formation of a circle. He had gone away as a boy and had come back as a young man. He had grown beyond his old acquaintances, he thought, and apart from them—of which last there could be no doubt on either side; and it struck him that the easiest and simplest thing to do would be to drop them all and to start afresh. To drop everybody and to start afresh was something he was completely habituated to. He did it through the year at intervals of from three to six months; during the busy summer season among the Swiss pensions he had done it once every fortnight, or oftener. His nature was full of adaptability, receptivity, fluidity; he made friends everywhere he went, and snatched up acquaintances at every corner.