A Book About Myself

by Theodore Dreiser

In the meantime we were entering St. Louis and the station. By then, somehow, he had not only convinced the sheriff and the other officers, but the prisoner. They liked him and were willing to do what he said. I could even see the rural love of show and parade gleaming in the eyes of the sheriff and the two detectives. Plainly, the office of the Globe was the great place in their estimation for such an exhibition. At the same time, between looking at me and the prisoner and the officers, he had knitted a fine mental net from which I seemed unable to escape. Even as I rose with these others to leave the train I cried: “No, I won’t come in on this! It’s all right if you want to bring him down to the Republic, or you can take him to the Four Courts, but I’m not going to let you get away with this. You hear now, don’t you?” But then it was too late.

Once outside, Galvin laid hold of my arm in an amazingly genial fashion and hung on it. In spite of me, he seemed to be master of the situation and to realize it. Once more he began to plead, and getting in front of me he seemed to do his best to keep my optical attention. From that point on and from that day to this, I have never been able to explain to myself what did happen. All at once, and much more clearly than before, I seemed to see that his plan in regard to the Globe was the best. It would save time, and besides, he kept repeating in an almost sing-song way that we would go first to the Globe and then to the Republic. “You come up with me to the Globe, and then I’ll go down with you to the Republic,” he kept saying. “We’ll just let Wood or McCord take one picture, and then we’ll all go down to your place—see?”

Although I didn’t see I went. For the time, nothing seemed important. If he had stayed by me I think he could have prevented my writing any story at all. As it was he was so eager to achieve this splendid triumph of introducing the celebrated bandit into the editorial rooms of the Globe first and there having him photographed and introduced to my old chief, that he hailed a carriage, and, the six of us crowding into it, we were bustled off in a trice to the door of the Globe, where, once I reached it, and seeing him and the detectives and the bandit hurrying across the sidewalk, I suddenly awoke to the asininity of it all.

“Wait!” I called. “Say, hold on! Cut this! I won’t do it! I don’t agree to this!” but it was too late. In a trice the prisoner and the rest of them were up the two or three low steps of the main entrance and into the hall, and I was left outside to meditate on the insanity of the thing I had done.

“Great God!” I suddenly exclaimed to myself. “What have I let that fellow do to me? I’ve been hypnotized, that’s what it is! I’ve allowed him to take a prisoner whom I had in my own hands at one time into the office of our great rival to be photographed! He’s put it all over me on this job—and I had him beaten! I had him where I could have shoved him off the train—and now I let him do this to me, and tomorrow there’ll be a long editorial in the Globe telling how this fellow was brought there first and photographed, and his picture to prove it!” I swore and groaned for blocks as I walked towards the Republic, wondering what I should do.

Distinct as was my failure, it was so easy, even when practically admitting the whole truth, to make it seem as though the police had deliberately worked against the Republic. I did not even have to do that but merely recited my protests, without admitting or insisting upon hypnotism, which Wandell would not have believed anyhow. On the instant he burst into a great rage against the police department, seeing apparently no fault in anything I had done, and vowing vengeance. They were always doing this; they did it to the Republic when he was on the Globe. Wait—he would get even with them yet! Rushing a photographer to the jail, he had various pictures made, all of which appeared with my story, but to no purpose. The Globe had us beaten. Although I had slaved over the text, given it the finest turns I could, still there on the front page of the Globe was a large picture of the bandit, seated in the sanctum sanctorum of the great G-D, a portion of the figure, although not the head, of its great chief standing in the background, and over it all, in extra large type, the caption:

“LONE TRAIN ROBBER VISITS OFFICE OF GLOBE

TO PAY HIS RESPECTS”

and underneath in italics a full account of how he had willingly and gladly come there.

I suffered tortures, not only for days but for weeks and months, absolute tortures. Whenever I thought of Galvin I wanted to kill him. To think, I said to myself, that I had thought of the two trains and then run across the meadow and paid the agent for stopping the train, which permitted Galvin to see the burglar at all, and then to be done in this way! And, what was worse, he was so gayly and cynically conscious of having done me. When we met on the street one day, his lip curled with the old undying hatred and contempt.