I remember that I sat in my room with tears streaming out of my own eyes. Oh, so delicately and well was the scene being handled! There was everything in just the way the man’s hands played with that knife. That told the whole story. The writer had not said too much about it. He had just, by a stroke of his pen, centred your attention there, upon the fingers of a hand fiddling with the handle of a knife at the edge of the table.
How easy to say too much! How easy to say too little! I remember that I half read through the scene and then put the book down and ran nervously up and down in my room. “He can’t do it! He can’t do it! No man can do a thing so beautifully restrained and sure!” Do you think, dear reader, I cared a hang about the social standing of the three men in that room, what kind of morals they had, their influence for good or evil on the characters of others, what they were up to? Indeed I did not. It is a long time at least since I have been such a child as that. A master had started to do a scene and I was in mortal terror lest he fail to draw his line sharp and true. I had never yet drawn my own line sharp and true, was not man enough to do so, was too timid, too weak vain and fearful.
But ah, that master, that man who had written the scene I was reading! Faith came back and I ran to pick up the book and read on and on. Oh, the delicate wonder of it, the joy of it! At the moment I could have crawled across the floor of my room and bathed with my happy tears the feet of the man who in another room long before had held his pen firmly, had spread upon a sheet of white paper, with such true and vital an economy of ink, the complete sense of his scene.
* * * * *
Utter obscurity, the joy of obscurity. Why had I not been content with it? In the nights alone in my room I had realized fully the danger of coming out of my obscurity and yet never did I write a tale, at all approaching good handling, but that I must need run down out of my room and go eagerly from one person to another asking praise. Time and again I said to myself: “You are an ignorant man. Every artist who goes to pieces and takes the joy of complete abandonment from his task, and the joy from his own life too, does so because he lets some outside impulse, want of fame, want of money, want of praise, come between him and his materials. The white surfaces before him become muddy and dirty, the scene before his mind’s eye fades or becomes dim and blurred.”
These things I had a thousand times said to myself and had made a dream of a life I was to live. I was to keep in obscurity, work in obscurity. When I had left the life of a manufacturer I would get, in Chicago or some other city, a clerkship or some other minor job that would just provide me with a living and would give me as much leisure as possible. Well, I would live somewhere in a cheap room on a street of laborers’ houses. Clothes would not matter to me. I would live wholly for something outside myself, for the white clean surfaces on which, if the gods were good, I might some day have the joy of writing at least one finely drawn and delicately wrought tale.
As I had walked away from my factory on a certain day these had been the thoughts in my mind and now, after two years and after a few of my tales had been printed and I had been a little praised I was going to New York for the obvious purpose of doing everything possible to make myself better known, to strut before the very people I was trying to understand so that I could write of them fully and truly. What a tangle!
It was a dramatic moment in my own life and if, on that particular evening as I walked alone in the streets of the Ohio town, I achieved a certain victory over myself, it was not to be a lasting one. The kind of workman I had wanted to be I could not be but I did not know it at the moment. It was not until long afterward I came to the conclusion that I, at least, could only give myself with complete abandonment to the surfaces and materials before me at rare moments, sandwiched in between long periods of failure. It was only at the rare moment I could give myself, my thoughts and emotions, to work and sometimes, at rarer moments, to the love of a friend or a woman.
I went from the railroad station along a street and onto a bridge where I stood leaning over and looking at the water below. How black the water in the dim light! From where I stood I could look along the river bottom to the factory district where my own factory had stood. The bridge led into a street that was in the fashionable residence district of the town and presently a fat gray-haired old man, accompanied by a friend, walked past. They were smoking expensive cigars and the fragrance hung heavy on the air so that I also wanted tobacco and lit a cigarette. The fat man had formerly been my banker and no doubt had he recognized me might have told me a tale of money lost through me, of promises unfulfilled. The deuce! I smiled at the thought of how glad I was he had not recognized me. Would he have been nasty about the matter or would he and I have laughed together over the thought of the foolish impulse in himself that had led him to conclude I was a man to be trusted and one likely to succeed in affairs—a good banker’s risk?
“Hello,” I said to myself, “I’d better get out of here.” Some of the men of the town I had succeeded in getting worked up to the point of investing in the wild business scheme I had formerly had in my head might at any moment pass along the bridge and recognize me. That might bring on an embarrassing moment. They might want their money back and I had no money to give. In fancy I began to see myself as a desperado revisiting the scene of some former crime. What had I done? Had I robbed a bank, held up a train, or killed someone? It might well be that at some time in the future I would want to write a tale of some desperate fellow’s having got into a tight hole. Now he had to pass, say in a park, the wife of a man he had murdered. I slunk away off the bridge, throwing my cigarette into the river and pulling my hat down over my eyes, becoming in fancy as I passed a man accompanied by a woman and a child the murderer my own fancy had created. When I had got to them my heart stopped beating and quite automatically I put my hand to my hip pocket as though there had been a pistol there. “Well, I was an enemy to society and if the worst came to the worst would sell my life as dearly as possible.”