ON the evening when I returned to the town my mood was quite another one. I was on my way from Chicago to the city of New York. Why had I wanted to stop? The impulse had come suddenly, as I stood at the railroad ticket window in Chicago.
It rained when I got off the train and the night promised to be dark but half an hour later the rain ceased and the stars came out. At the station I escaped notice. Already in the town I and my struggles had been forgotten. At the moment when I had so dramatically walked away from my factory there had been some little local newspaper furore—“Well-known business man mysteriously disappears. Not known to have had any troubles,” etc. I went into a baggage check room and left my bag and then to a ticket window where I bought a ticket to New York on a later train. Both the check room boy and the ticket-seller were strangers to me. It was evident the town had grown, suddenly and furiously, as industrial towns do grow. Had it become a centre for the manufacture of automobiles shoes rubber tires or chewing gum? I did not know. In the station waiting room ten or twelve people stood or sat about and several taxi drivers were shouting at the door.
I walked away in the drizzling rain and stood on a bridge until the night cleared. Now it was plain to me that I had wanted to spend an evening alone with myself in the midst of the shadows of a former life. Since I had left the town much had happened. All during the last years of my life as a manufacturer and later as a Chicago advertising man I had secretly been writing tales and now they were beginning to be published. In some places they had been praised, in others blamed. I had loved the praise. It had made me feel very much as I had felt as a manufacturer when I had made a little money and had begun to dream of building a great factory and being father to workmen—that is to say, rather grand and noble. When my tales displeased people and when some critic wrote condemning me and calling me a dull or an unclean man I got furiously angry but always tried quickly to conceal my anger. I was really so angry that I did not want, on any account, to let the other fellow know how angry and hurt I was. Often the critic seemed merely to want to hurt. I had had a moment of exaltation, of joy in thinking I had penetrated a little into the life story of some man or woman. The person about whom I had been writing had been swept by some passion, of the flesh or spirit and I had been swept along with him. At such times I, as an individual, had no existence. Sometimes I had been seated writing all night at my desk and could not have told whether I had been there two hours or ten. Then the morning light streamed in at my window and my hands trembled so that I could no longer hold the pen. What a sweet clean feeling! During those hours there had been no life of my own at all. I had lived but in the characters I was trying to bring to life in my story and in the early morning light I felt as one shriven of all grossness, of all vanity, of all cheapness in himself. The process of writing had been for me purifying and fine. It had been curative and later I was filled with unholy wrath when someone said that, during that period of work, I had been unclean or vile.
And most of all I was furiously angry when someone said that the people of whom I wrote, being only such people as I myself had known, were of a lower, more immoral, less healthy order of beings. They were not respectable, were queer and did unaccountable things. I had myself been a respectable man and at one time in my life all of my friends had been respectable men and women and had I not known what was underneath the coats of many such, what they were too? I was furious for the men and women about whom I had written and furious for myself too but actually, on the outside, in the face of scurrilous criticism, had always assumed a sort of heavy bucolic genial manner, something in the manner of a certain type of benevolent old gentleman I had always detested. “They may be right,” I said aloud generously when inside myself I thought the critics often enough only dogs and fools.
I was thinking of myself and my critics as I walked that evening in the rain and I presume that what I had wanted in coming back thus to the Ohio town was to try to arrive at some sort of basis for self-criticism.
It was going to be a somewhat difficult undertaking, finding such a basis, of that I was sure. When I had been doing my writing, unknown and unseen, there was a sort of freedom. One worked, more or less in secret, as one might indulge in some forbidden vice. There were the bankers and others who had put money into my enterprises. They had expected I would be giving myself wholly to the matter in hand and I had been cheating and did not want them to know. One wrote tales, played with them. One did not think of publication, of a public that was to read. In the evening one came home to one’s house and going upstairs closed the door to a room. There was before one the desk and paper.
In a neighboring garden a man was picking potato bugs off potato vines. His wife came to the kitchen door and began to scold. He had forgotten to bring home five pounds of sugar from the store and now she was angry about it. There came one of those strangely vital little domestic flare-ups, the man with a tin can in which were the captured bugs, looking ridiculous as he stood listening to his wife, and she in turn looking unnecessarily angry about the small matter of the sugar.
They were in their garden unconscious of me and I was unconscious of a dinner being put on a table downstairs in my house, unconscious of any need of food I would ever feel again, unconscious of the regime of my own household, of the affairs of my factory. A man and a woman in a garden had become the centre of a universe about which it seemed to me I might think and feel in joy and wonder forever. People had outer motives that seemed to control their lives. Under certain circumstances they said certain words. Stealthily I went to lock the door of my room. A domestic regime would be upset by my determination, the affairs of a certain factory might be ruined by my inattention but what did all that, at the moment, matter to me? I became cruelly impersonal and could not avoid becoming so. Had a god been in my way or intent on disturbing me just then I would have at least tried to brush him aside. “You Jove, sit in that chair over there and keep your mouth shut! You Minerva, get down that stairway, go into the front room of my house and sit in a rocking-chair with your hands folded until I have attended to the business before me! At the moment I am concerned with a man standing in a potato patch with a can of potato bugs held in his hand and with a certain perplexed baffled look in his eyes and in the eyes of the wife in a gingham apron who is unnecessarily angry about a trifling matter of sugar not brought home from a store. You must see that I am a swimmer and have stripped myself of the clothes which are my ordinary life. You, my dear Minerva, should not stay in the presence of a naked man. People will say things about you. Get down the stairway at once. I am a swimmer and am about to leap off into the sea of lives, into the sea of present-day American lives. Will I be able to swim there? Will I be able to keep my head above water? That is a matter for greater gods than yourself to decide. Get out of here!”
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Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why could not one cling to that? Why the later vanity that made one want to be proclaimed? I remember an evening alone in my room. I was not always writing. Sometimes I read the work of other men. There was a scene being depicted by an old master of prose. Three men were in a little room talking. What was attempted was that there should be actual words said while the reader should be given the sense of things felt for which there were no words. One of the men kept talking in the most affable and genial manner while at the same time there was murder in his heart. The three had been eating and now the man who wanted to kill was fingering the handle of a knife.