The opportunity soon came, for apparently he was as much interested in me as I in him. He came over after I had submitted my second bit of copy and announced that it was entirely satisfactory. A man from the composing-room entered and commented on the fact that James Whitcomb Riley and Eugene Field were billed to lecture in the city soon. I remarked that I had once seen Field in the office of the News in Chicago, which brought out the fact that my city editor had once worked in Chicago, had been a member of the Whitechapel Club, knew Field, Finley Peter Dunne, Brand Whitlock, Ben King and others. At mention of the magic name of Ben King, author of “If I Should Die Tonight” and “Jane Jones,” the atmosphere of Chicago of the time of the Whitechapel Club and Eugene Field and Ben King returned. At once we fell into a varied and gay exchange of intimacies.
It resulted in an enduring and yet stormy and disillusioning friendship. If he had been a girl I would have married him, of course. It would have been inevitable. We were intellectual affinities. Our dreams were practically identical, though we approached them from different angles. He was the sentimentalist in thought, though the realist in action; I was the realist in thought and the sentimentalist in action. He took me out to lunch, and we stayed nearly three hours. He took me to dinner, and to do so was compelled to call up his wife and say he had to stay in town. He had dreams of becoming a poet and novelist, I of becoming a playwright. Before the second day had gone he had shown me a book of fairy-tales and some poems. I became enamored of him, the victim of a delightful illusion.
Because he liked me he wanted me to stay on. There was no immediate place, he said, but one might open at any time. Having very little money, I could not see my way to that, but I did try to get a place on the rival paper. That failing, he suggested that although I wander on toward Cleveland and Buffalo I stand ready to come back if he telegraphed for me. Meanwhile we reveled in that wonderful possession, intellectual affection. I thought him wonderful, perfect, great; he thought—well, I have heard him tell in after years what he thought. Even now at times he fixes me with hungry, welcoming eyes.
CHAPTER LVII
Whether I should go East or West suddenly became a question with me. I had the feeling that I might do better in Detroit or some point west of Chicago, only the nearness of such cities as Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and those farther east deterred me; the cost of reaching them was small, and all the while I should be moving toward my brother in New York. And so, after making inquiry at the office of the Bee for a possible opening and finding none, and learning from several newspaper men that Detroit was not considered a live journalistic town, I decided to travel eastward, and bought a ticket to Cleveland.
Riding in sight of the tumbling waves of Lake Erie, I was taken back in thought to my days in Chicago and all those who had already dropped out of my life forever. What a queer, haphazard, disconnected thing this living was! Where should I be tomorrow, what doing—the next year—the year after that? Should I ever have any money, any standing, any friends? So I tortured myself. Arriving in Cleveland at the close of a smoky gray afternoon, I left my bag at the station and sought a room, then walked out to see what I should see. I knew no one. Not a friend anywhere within five hundred miles. My sole resource my little skill as a newspaper worker. Buying the afternoon and morning papers, I examined them with care, copying down their editorial room addresses, then betook me to a small beanery for food.
The next morning I was up early, determined to see as much as I could, to visit the offices of the afternoon papers before noon, then to look in upon the city editors of the two or three morning papers. The latter proved not very friendly and there appeared to be no opening anywhere. But I determined to remain here for a few days studying the city as a city and visiting the same editors each day or as often as they would endure me. If nothing came of it within a week, and no telegram came from my friend H—— in Toledo calling me back, I proposed to move on; to which city I had not as yet made up my mind.
The thing that interested me most about Cleveland then was that it was so raw, dark, dirty, smoky, and yet possessed of one thing: force, raucous, clattering, semi-intelligent force. America was then so new industrially, in the furnace stage of its existence. Everything was in the making: fortunes, art, social and commercial life. The most impressive things were its rich men, their homes, factories, clubs, office buildings and institutions of commerce and pleasure generally; and this was as true of Cleveland as of any other city in America.
Indeed the thing which held my attention, after I had been in Cleveland a day or two and had established myself in a somber room in a somber neighborhood once occupied by the very rich, were those great and new residences in Euclid Avenue, with wide lawns and iron or stone statues of stags and dogs and deer, which were occupied by such rich men as John D. Rockefeller, Tom Johnson, and Henry M. Flagler. Rockefeller only a year or two before had given millions to revivify the almost defunct University of Chicago, then a small Baptist college, and was accordingly being hailed as one of the richest men of America. He and his satellites and confreres were already casting a luster over Cleveland. They were all living here in Euclid Avenue, and I was interested to look up their homes, envying them their wealth of course and wishing that I were famous or a member of a wealthy family, and that I might some day meet one of the beautiful girls I thought must be here and have her fall in love with and make me rich. Physically or artistically or materially, there was nothing to see but business: a few large hotels, like those of every American city, and these few great houses. Add a few theaters and commonplace churches. All American cities and all the inhabitants were busy with but one thing: commerce. They ate, drank and slept trade. In my wanderings I found a huge steel works and a world of low, smoky, pathetic little hovels about it. Although I was not as yet given to reasoning about the profound delusion of equality under democracy, this evidence of the little brain toiling for the big one struck me with great force and produced a good deal of speculative thought later on.