XI
I saw Chicago first through a late May rain—a mad, blowing, windy rain. The skies were overcast and gray. There was a pall like smoke over everything, and through the downpour, looking not fresh and clean from the descending streams, but dingy and sullen, as if unwillingly cleansed, the gigantic buildings shot up forbiddingly into the sky.
Such masses of humanity! I was one of a sweeping torrent of many, many atoms. People hurried this way and that way and every way. I rubbed my eyes, for the colossal city and this rushing, crushing mob, that pushed and elbowed, bewildered and amazed me.
I did not know what to do when I stepped off the train and into the great station. For a time I wandered aimlessly about the room, jostled and pushed by a tremendous crowd of people, who seemed to be pouring in from arriving trains. It must have been about eight in the morning.
All the seats in the waiting-room were taken, and after a while I sat down on my suitcase, and tried to plan out just what I should do.
I had a hundred dollars, a fabulous sum, it seemed to me. With it I presumed I could live wherever I chose, and in comparative luxury. But that hundred dollars was not mine, and I had a passionate determination to spend no more of it than I should actually need. I wanted to return it intact to the man who had given it to me.
As I had lain in my berth on the train I had vowed that he should not hear from me till I wrote to return his money. "Dirty money," he had called it, but to me anything that was his was beautiful. I planned the sort of letter I should write when I inclosed this money. By that time I should have secured a remarkable position. My stories and my poems would be bought by discerning editors, and I—ah me! the extravagant dreams of the youthful writer! What is there he is not going to accomplish in the world? What heights he will scale! But, then, what comfort, what sublime compensation for all the miserable realities of life, there is in being capable of such dreams! That alone is a divine gift of the gods, it seems to me.
But now I was no longer dreaming impossible dreams in my berth. I was sitting in that crowded Chicago railway station, and I was confronted with the problem of what to do and where to go.
It would of course be necessary for me to get a room the first thing; but I did not know just where I should look for that. I thought of going out into the street and looking for "furnished-room" signs, and then I thought of asking a policeman. I was debating the matter rather stupidly, I'm afraid, for the crowds distracted me, when a woman came up and spoke to me.
She had a plain, kind face and wore glasses. A large red badge, with gilt letters on it, was pinned on her breast.