A Book About Myself

by Theodore Dreiser

She arose to leave me. “I want to get some of my things before the porter puts them away,” she explained.

I stepped out of her way. She tripped up the aisle and I looked after her, fascinated. Of a sudden she seemed quite the most interesting of all those here, simple, pretty, vigorous and with a kind of tact and grace that was impressive. Also I felt an intense something about her that was concealed by an air of supreme innocence and maidenly reserve. I went out to the smokingroom, where I sat alone looking out of the window.

“What a delightful girl,” I thought, with a feeling of intense satisfaction. “And I have the certainty of seeing her again in the morning!”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

The next morning I was awake early, stirred by the thoughts of Chicago, the Fair, Miss W—— (my favorite), as well as the group of attractive creatures who now formed a sort of background for her. One of the characteristics of my very youthful temperament at that time was the power to invest every place I had ever left with a romance and strangeness such as might have attached to something abandoned, say, a thousand or two years before and which I was now revisiting for the first time to find it nearly all done over. So it was now in my attitude toward Chicago. I had been away for only eight or nine months, and still I expected—what did I not expect?—the whole skyline and landscape to be done over, or all that I had known done away with. Going into Chicago I studied every street and crossing and house and car. How sad to think I had ever had to leave it, to leave Alice, my home, my father, all my relatives and old friends! Where was E——, A——, T——, my father? At thought of the latter I was deeply moved, for had I not left him about a year before and without very much ceremony at the time I had chosen to follow the fortunes of my sister C——? Now that I looked back on it all from the vantage point of a year’s work I was much chastened and began to think how snippy and unkind I had been. Poor, tottering, broken soul, I thought. I could see him then as he really was, a warm, generous and yet bigoted and ignorant soul, led captive in his childhood to a brainless theory and having no power within himself to break that chain, and now wandering distrait and forlorn amid a storm of difficulties: age, the death of his wife, the flight of his children, doubt as to their salvation, poverty, a declining health.

I can see him now, a thin grasshopper of a man, brooding wearily with those black-brown Teutonic eyes of his, as sad as failure itself. What thoughts! What moods! He was very much like one of those old men whom Rembrandt has portrayed, wrinkled, sallow, leathery. My father’s peculiarly German hair and beard were always carefully combed and brushed, the hair back over his forehead like Nietzsche’s, the beard resting reddishly on his chest. His clothes were always loose and ill-fitting, being bought for durability, not style, or made over from abandoned clothes of some one—my brother Paul or my sister M——’s husband. He always wore an old and very carefully preserved black derby hat, very wide of brim and out of style, which he pulled low over his deep-set weary eyes. I always wondered where and when he had bought it. On this trip I offered to buy him a new one, but he preferred to use the money for a mass for the repose of my good mother’s soul! Under his arm or in one of his capacious pockets was always a Catholic prayerbook from which he read prayers as familiar to him as his own hands, yet from the mumbling repetition of which he extracted some comfort, as does the Hindu from meditating upon space or time. In health he was always fluttering to one or another of a score of favorite Catholic churches, each as commonplace as the other, and there, before some trashy plaster image of some saint or virgin as dead or helpless as his own past, making supplication for what?—peace in death, the reconversion and right conduct of his children, the salvation of his own and my mother’s soul? Debts were his great misery, as I had always known. If one died and left unpaid an old bill of some kind one had to stay in purgatory so much longer!

Riding into Chicago this morning I speculated as to the thinness of his hands as I had known them, the tremulousness of his inquiries, the appeal in his sad resigned eyes, whence all power to compel or convince had long since gone. In the vast cosmic flight of force, flowing from what heart we know not but in which as little corks our suns and planets float, it is possible that there may be some care, an equation, a balancing of the scales of suffering and pleasure. I hope so. If not I know not the reason for tears or those emotions with which so many of us salve the memory of seemingly immedicable ills. If immedicable, why cry?

I sought Miss W——, who was up before me and sitting beside her section window. I was about to go and talk with her when my attention was claimed by other girls. This bevy could not very well afford to see the attention of the only man on board so easily monopolized. There were so many pretty faces among them that I wavered. I talked idly among them, interested to see what overtures and how much of an impression I might make. My natural love of womankind made them all inviting.

When the train drew into Chicago we were met by a tally-ho, which the obliging Mr. Dean had been kind enough to announce to each and every one of us as the train stopped. The idea of riding to the World’s Fair in such a thing and with this somewhat conspicuous party of school-teachers went very much against the grain. Being very conscious of my personal dignity in the presence of others and knowing the American and middle-West attitude toward all these new and persistently derided toys and pleasures of the effete East and England, I was inclined to look upon this one as out of place in Chicago. Besides, a canvas strip on the coach advertising the nature of this expedition infuriated me and seemed spiritually involved with the character of Mr. Dean. That bounder had done this, I was sure. I wondered whether the sophisticated and well-groomed superintendent of schools would lend himself to any such thing when plainly it was to be written up in the Republic, but since he did not seem to mind it I was mollified; in fact, he took it all with a charming gayety and grace which eventually succeeded in putting my own silly provincialism and pride to rout. He sat up in front with me and the driver discussing philosophy, education, the Fair, a dozen things, during which I made a great pretense at wise deductions and a wider reading than I had ever had.

Once clear of the depot and turning into Adams Street, we were off behind six good horses through as interesting a business section as one might wish to see, its high buildings (the earliest and most numerous in America) and its mass of congested traffic making a brisk summer morning scene. I was reëngaged by Michigan Avenue, that splendid boulevard with its brief vista of the lake, which was whipped to cotton-tops this bright morning by a fresh wind, and then the long residence-lined avenue to the south with its wealth of new and pretentious homes, its smart paving and lighting, its crush of pleasure traffic hurrying townward or to the Fair. Within an hour we were assigned rooms in a comfortable hotel near the Fair grounds, one of those hastily and yet fairly well constructed buildings which later were changed into flats or apartments. One wall of this hotel, as I now discovered, the side on which my room was, faced a portion of the Fair grounds, and from my windows I could see some of its classic façades, porticoes, roofs, domes, lagoons. All at once and out of nothing in this dingy city of six or seven hundred thousand which but a few years before had been a wilderness of wet grass and mud flats, and by this lake which but a hundred years before was a lone silent waste, had now been reared this vast and harmonious collection of perfectly constructed and snowy buildings, containing in their delightful interiors the artistic, mechanical and scientific achievements of the world. Greece, Italy, India, Egypt, Japan, Germany, South America, the West and East Indies, the Arctics—all represented! I have often thought since how those pessimists who up to that time had imagined that nothing of any artistic or scientific import could possibly be brought to fruition in America, especially in the middle West, must have opened their eyes as I did mine at the sight of this realized dream of beauty, this splendid picture of the world’s own hope for itself. I have long marveled at it and do now as I recall it, its splendid Court of Honor, with its monumental stateliness and simple grandeur; the peristyle with its amazing grace of columns and sculptured figures; the great central arch with its triumphal quadriga; the dome of the Administration Building with its daring nudes; the splendid groupings on the Agricultural Building, as well as those on the Manufacturers’ and Women’s buildings. It was not as if many minds had labored toward this great end, or as if the great raw city which did not quite understand itself as yet had endeavored to make a great show, but rather as though some brooding spirit of beauty, inherent possibly in some directing over-soul, had waved a magic wand quite as might have Prospero in The Tempest or Queen Mab in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and lo, this fairyland.