The man who talked with Cæsar was a bridge-builder and had come to speak with him regarding the building of a bridge that the legions might cross a river beside which they now lay encamped. A certain number of men would be needed with boats and others were at daylight to go hew great timbers in a near-by forest and roll them into the stream.
How very quiet and peaceful it was where I lay! Cæsar’s tent was pitched on a hillside. In person he was like ... there was an Italian fruit dealer who had a small store on a street near the park where I went every day to sit, a tall gaunt man who had lost one eye and whose black hair was turning gray. The fruit dealer had evidently lost his eye in a fight as there was a long scar on his cheek. It was this man I had metamorphosed into a Cæsar.
Below, at the foot of the hill on which the tent stood and on the banks of a river the legions were camped. They had built fires and some of the men were bathing in the river but when they came out they dressed quickly because of little biting flies that swarmed about their heads. I was glad Cæsar’s tent was pitched on a hill where there was a little breeze and there were no biting flies or insects. Below, the fires in the valley glowed and cast yellow and red lights over the tawny bodies and faces of the soldiers.
The man who had come to Cæsar was a craftsman and had a maimed hand. Two of the fingers of his left hand had been cut sharply off as by a blow with an ax. He went away into the darkness and Cæsar went within his tent.
I lay on my bed in the room in the building in Chicago not daring to open my eyes. Had I been asleep? Now there was no quarreling in the other places along the court but there were still lights at some of the windows. The workers had not yet all come home. Two women were talking together across the space between their windows. Street-car conductors and motormen, who had been all day working their cars slowly through crowded streets, propitiating quarrelsome passengers, cursing and being cursed at by teamsters and crossing policemen, were now asleep. Of what were they dreaming? They had come from the car barns, had read a newspaper, telling perhaps of a fight between English troops and the natives of Thibet, had read also a speech by the German emperor demanding a place in the sun for Germany, had noted who had beaten the Chicago White Sox or who had been beaten by them. Then they had quarreled with their wives, blows had been struck, there had been love-making and then sleep.
I arose and went to walk in the silent streets and twice during that summer I was stopped by holdup men who took a few dollars from me. The World’s Fair had been followed by a time of industrial depression. How many miles I have walked in the streets of American cities at night! In Chicago and the other industrial cities long streets of houses—how many houses almost universally ugly and cheaply constructed, like the building in which I then lived! I passed through sections where all the people were Negroes and heard laughter in the houses. Then came the sections entirely inhabited by Jews, by Greeks, Armenians, Italians, Germans, or Poles. How many elements not yet combined in the cities! The American writers, whose books I read, went on assuming that the typical American was a transplanted Englishman, an Englishman who had served his term in the stony purgatory of New England and had then escaped out into the happy land, this Heaven, the Middle West. Here they were all to grow rich and live forever, a happy blissful existence. Was not all the world supposed to be watching the great democratic experiment in government and human happiness they were to conduct so bravely?
I wandered on into factory districts, long silent streets of grim black walls. Had men but escaped out of the prisons of the Old World into the more horrid prisons of the New? Dread took hold of me as on a dark street I was approached by a man who put a gun to my face. He wanted money and I tried to be facetious with him, telling him I hadn’t enough money to buy drinks for the two of us but would match him pennies for what I had but he only growled at me and taking my few pieces of silver hurried away. Perhaps he did not even understand my words. America, once a place that prided itself on its sense of humor, was now, since the coming of the factories, a place where the very robbers were all too serious about life.
Periods of lust kept coming and going. In the building where I lived there was a woman, very young yet, a high-school graduate from an Illinois town who had married a young man of the place. They had come to live in Chicago, to make their way in the great world, and as he could get no other work he had taken a place as street-car conductor. Oh, it was but a temporary arrangement. He was one who intended, as for that matter I did myself, to rise in the world.
The man I never saw but all afternoon the woman sat by a window in one of the two rooms of her apartment or went for short walks in the park. We began presently to smile shyly at each other but did not speak, both being embarrassed. Like myself she read books and that was a kind of bond between us. I got into the habit of sitting by my window with my book in my hand while she sat by her window also holding a book.
And here was a new confusion. The pages of the books no longer lived. The woman, sitting there, but a few feet away from me, across the little court, I did not want. Of that I was quite sure. She was another man’s wife. What thoughts had she in her head, what feelings had she? Her face was round and fair and she had blue eyes. What did she want? Children perhaps, I thought. She wanted to have a house like all the other houses lived in by the people of her home town who had made money and who held positions of some importance in the town’s life. One day she sat on a bench in the park and I, walking past, saw the title of the book she read. It was a popular novel of the day but I have forgotten its name and the name of its author. Even at that time, although I knew little enough, I did know that such books had always been written, would always be written, books that sold by the hundreds of thousands and were often proclaimed as great works of art and that after a year or two were utterly forgotten. In them was no sense of strangeness, no wonder about life. They lacked the touch of life. “Dead books for men and women who dare not live,” I thought contemptuously. There was a kind of pretense of solving some problem of life but the problem was so childishly stated that later a childish solution seemed quite natural and right. A young man came to an American city from a country town and, although at bottom he was true and fine, the city for a time diverted him from his noble aims. He committed some near crime that made both himself and the girl he really loved suffer terribly, but she stood firmly by him and at the last, and with her help, he pulled himself up again, by the bootstraps as it were, and became a rich manufacturer who was kind to his employees.