The younger years of being a business schemer, trying to grow rich—I have said little enough of those years in my book. However the book is long enough, perhaps far too long.
Had I ever really wanted to be rich? Perhaps I had only wanted to live, in my craft, in the practice of my craft. It was certain I had not, for many years of my life, known what I wanted. After years of striving to get money, to get power, to be successful, I had found in the end well-nigh perfect contentment in looking and listening, in sitting lost in some little corner, writing, trying to write all down. “A little worm in the fair apple of progress,” I had called myself laughing—the American laugh.
Now, for a few years, I had been looking abroad. I think it was Joseph Conrad who said that a writer only began to live after he began to write. It pleased me to think I was, after all, but ten years old.
Plenty of time ahead for such a one. Time to look about, plenty of time to look about.
Well, I had been looking about. I an American middle-westerner, ten years old, had been looking at old London, at strong arrogant young New York, at old France too.
It was apparent that although in France, in the eleventh twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there had been many men alive who had cared greatly for the work of their hands, present-day Frenchmen obviously did not. The cathedral before me was faced on one side by ugly sheds, such as some railroad company might have put up on the shores of a lake facing a city of mid-America. I had taken a second leap from New York to Paris, had been brought there by a friend who now sat on the bench beside me. The man was a friend dear to my heart. We had been sitting for days on just that bench, wandering about the cathedral. Visitors came and went, mostly Americans, middle-western Americans like myself no doubt. Some of them looked at the cathedral without stopping the motors of theirs cars. They were in a hurry, had got the hurry habit. One day a little drama played itself out in the open space before the cathedral door. An American came with two women, one French the other American, his wife or his sweetheart. He was flirting with the French woman and the American woman was pretending she did not see. My friend and I watched the drama flit back and forth for two or three hours. There before us was a woman losing her man, and she did not want to admit it to herself. Once when they had all three gone inside the cathedral, the American woman came out and stood for a moment by the massively beautiful door, the old eleventh-century door facing us. She did not see us and went to lean against the door itself, crying softly. Then she wiped her eyes and went inside again to join the others. They were all presumably getting culture there, in the presence of the work of the old workmen. The stooped figures of old Frenchwomen with shawls about their shoulders kept hurrying across the open space, going into the cathedral to worship. My friend and I were also worshiping at the cathedral, had been doing that for days.
Life went on then, ever in the same tragic comic sweet way. In the presence of the beautiful old church one was only more aware, all art could do no more than that—make people, like my friend and myself, more aware. An American girl put her face against the beautiful door of Chartres Cathedral and wept for her lost lover. What had been in the hearts of the workmen who once leaned over the same door carving it? They were fellows who had imaginations that flamed up. “Always wood for carvers to carve, always little flashing things to stir the souls of painters, always the tangle of human lives for the tale-tellers to mull over, dream over,” I told myself. I remembered what an excited young man had once said to me in Chicago. We had stood together in Lake Street, that most noisy and terrible of all Chicago’s downtown streets. “There are as many tales to be found here as in any street of any city in the world,” he had said a little defiantly. Then he looked at me and smiled. “But they will be different tales than would be found in any street of any of the old world cities,” he added.
I wondered.
My own mind was in a ferment, thoughts scurrying across a background of fancies as shadows play across the walls of a room when night comes on. My friend sat in silence. He had got hold of Huysmann’s “Cathedral” and was reading. Now and then he put the book down and sat for a long time in silence looking at the gray lovely old building in that gray light. It was one of the best moments of my own life. I felt free and glad. Did the friend who was with me love me? It was sure I loved him. How good his silent presence.
How good the presence of my own thoughts too! There was my friend, the Cathedral, the presence of the little drama in the lives of the three strange people who would presently come out of the church and go away, the packed storehouse of my own fancy too. The end of the story immediately before me I would never know but some day, when I was alone, in Chicago perhaps, my fancy would take it up and play with it. Too bad I was not a Turgenev or someone equally skillful. Were I such a one I might make of what I had seen some such a tale as, say Turgenev’s “Smoke.” There was just the material for a tale, a novel perhaps. One might fancy the man a young American who had come to Paris to study painting and before he came had engaged himself to an American girl at home. He had learned French, had made progress with his work. Then the American girl had set sail for Paris to join him and, at just that moment, while she was at sea, he had fallen desperately in love with a French woman. The deuce, the French woman was skillful with men and she imagined the young American to be rich. With what uncertain thoughts was the breast of the young American torn at that moment.