As for Nora, I might very well have gone to my door and called to her—she was at work somewhere on the floor below and would have gladly come running to offer her woman’s sympathy to my hurt physical self—but it was not my hurt physical self that I thought wanted attention. As far as that is concerned I was then, as I have been all my life, not so much concerned with the matter of physical discomfort or pain. Always it has been true of me that a framed water lily on a wall or a walk in a factory street can hurt me worse than a blow on the jaw and long afterward when I became a scribbler of tales I was able to take advantage of this peculiarity of my nature to do my work under conditions that would have disheartened a more physically sensitive man. As I was destined to live most of my life and do most of my work in factory towns and in little, ill-smelling, hideously-furnished rooms, freezing cold in winter and hot and cheerless in summer, it turned out to be a good and convenient trait in me and in the end I had so trained myself to forget my surroundings that I could sit for hours lost in my own thoughts and dreams, or scribbling oftentimes meaningless sentences in a cold room in a factory street, on a log beside some country road, in a railroad station or in the lobby of some large hotel, filled with the hurrying hustling figures of business men, totally unconscious of my surroundings, until my mood had worn itself out and I had sunk into one of the moods of depression common, I think, to all such fellows as myself. Never was such an almighty scribbler as I later became and am even now. Ink, paper and pencils are cheap in our day and I have taken full advantage of that fact and have during some years written hundreds of thousands of words which have afterward been thrown away. Many have told me, in print or by word of mouth, that all should have been thrown away and they may be right, but I am one who loves, like a drunkard his drink, the smell of ink, and the sight of a great pile of white sheets that may be scrawled over with words always gladdens me. The result of the scribbling, the tale of perfect balance, all the elements of the tale understood, an infinite number of minute adjustments perfectly made, the power of self-criticism fully at work, the shifting surface of word values and color in full play, form and the rhythmic flow of thought and mood marching forward with the sentences—these are things of a dream, of a far dim day toward which one goes knowing one can never arrive but infinitely glad to be on the road. It is the story I dare say of the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and the sloughs and sink holes on the road are many but the tale of that journey is known to other men than scribblers.
The consolation of ink and paper came, however, long after the time with which I am now concerned, and what a consolation it is! How much easier it is to sit in a room before a desk and with paper before one to describe a fight between oneself as hero of some tale and five or six burly ruffians than with the fists to dispose of one baseball player on the platform of a warehouse.
In the tale one can do any such job as it should be done and in the doing give satisfaction both to oneself and the possible reader, for the reader will always share in the emotions of the hero and gloat with him over his victories. In the tale, as you will understand, all is in order. The feint and the cross, the powerful left to the jaw, the golden smile, the shifting movements of the shoulders that confuse and disconcert the opponent, all work like well-oiled machines. One defeats not one baseball player or ruffian of the city streets but a dozen if the need arises. Oh, what glorious times I have had, sitting in little rooms with great piles of paper before me; what buckets of blood have run from the wounds of the villains, foolish enough to oppose me on the field of honor; what fair women I have loved and how they have loved me and on the whole how generous, chivalrous, open-hearted and fine I have been! I remember how I sat in the back room of a small bootlegging establishment at Mobile, Alabama, one afternoon, long after the time with which I am now concerned and while three drunken sailors discussed the divinity of Christ at a near-by table wrote the story of little, tired-out and crazed Joe Wainsworth’s killing of Jim Gibson in the harness shop at Bidwell Ohio, that afterward was used in the novel “Poor White”; and of how at a railroad station at Detroit I sat writing the tale of Elsie Leander’s westward journey, in “The Triumph of the Egg,” and missed my own train—these remain as rich and fine spots in a precarious existence.
But at the time of which I am speaking the consolation of ink and paper was a thing of the future and my bunged-up eyes and hurt spirits were facts.
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
I lay on my back on my bed, trying to get up courage to face facts. As for the throbbing of the hurt places, the pain was a kind of satisfaction to me at the moment.
There was the warehouse where I had been more or less a spiritual bully but where I would now have to eat crow. Well, I need not go back. The day before had been payday and I would, by never going near the place again, lose little money and save myself the humiliation of facing the teamsters. And when it came to the scratch, I thought, there was the city I was in, the state, the very United States of America itself—I could if I chose desert them all. I was young, had been well trained in poverty, had no family ties, no social position to uphold, I was unmarried and as yet childless.
I was a free man, I told myself, sitting on the bed and staring about the room through swollen eyelids. Was I free? Did any man ever achieve freedom? I had my own life before me. Why did I not, by some grand effort, begin to live a life?
I lay on the bed with the wet towel thrown aside thinking, trying to make plans. A faint suspicion of something permanently wrong with me had begun to creep into my consciousness. Was I, alas, a fellow born out of his place and time? I was in a world where only men of action seemed to thrive. Already I had noted that fact. One wanted a definite thing to go after, money, fame, a position of power in the big world, and having something definite of the sort in mind one shut one’s eyes and pitched in with all the force of one’s physical and mental self. I squirmed about trying to force myself to face myself. My body was strong enough for all practical purposes, when not scarred and bruised by the blows of an angry ball player, and I was not such a bad-looking fellow. I was not lazy and on the whole rather liked hard physical labor. Need I be what I at the moment seemed to myself to be, a useless and foolish dreamer, a child in a world filled with what I thought to be grown-up men? Why should I myself not also grow up, take the plow by the handle, plow vast fields, become rich or famous? Perhaps I could become a man of power and rule or influence many other men’s lives.