Elsewhere I have indicated this atmosphere, but here I like to touch on it again. We Americans have home traditions or ideals, created as much by song and romance as anything else: My Old Kentucky Home, Suwanee River. Despite any willing on my part, this home seemed to fulfill the spirit of those songs. There was something so sadly romantic about it. The shade of the great trees moved across the lawn in stately and lengthening curves. A stream at the foot of the slope leading down from the west side of the house dimpled and whimpered in the sun. Birds sang, and there were golden bees about the flowers and wasps under the eaves of the house. Hammocks of barrel—staves, and others of better texture, were strung between the trees. In a nearby barn of quaint design were several good horses, and there were cows in the field adjoining. Ducks and geese solemnly padded to and fro between the house and the stream. The air was redolent of corn, wheat, clover, timothy, flowers.
To me it seemed that all the spirit of rural America, its idealism, its dreams, the passion of a Brown, the courage and patience and sadness of a Lincoln, the dreams and courage of a Lee or a Jackson, were all here. The very soil smacked of American idealism and faith, a fixedness in sentimental and purely imaginative American tradition, in which I, alas! could not share. I was enraptured. Out of its charms and sentiments I might have composed an elegy or an epic, but I could not believe that it was more than a frail flower of romance. I had seen Pittsburgh.... I had seen Lithuanians and Hungarians in their “courts” and hovels. I had seen the girls of that city walking the streets at night. This profound faith in God, in goodness, in virtue and duty that I saw here in no wise squared with the craft, the cruelty, the brutality and the envy that I saw everywhere else. These parents were gracious and God-fearing, but to me they seemed asleep. They did not know life—could not. These boys and girls, as I soon found, respected love and marriage and duty and other things which the idealistic American still clings to.
Outside was all this other life that I had seen of which apparently these people knew nothing. They were as if suspended in dreams, lotus eaters, and my beloved was lost in this same romance. I was thinking of her beauty, her wealth of hair, the color of her cheeks, the beauty of her figure, of what she might be to me. She might have been thinking of the same thing, possibly more indirectly, but also she was thinking of the dignity and duty and sanctity of marriage. For her, marriage and one love were for life. For myself, whether I admitted it or not, love was a thing much less stable. Indeed I was not thinking of marriage at all, but rather whether I could be happy here and now, and how much I could extract out of love. Or perhaps, to be just to myself, I was as much a victim of passion and romance as she was, only to the two of us it did not mean the same thing. Unconsciously I identified her with the beauty of all I saw, and at the same time felt that it was all so different from anything I knew or believed that I wondered how she would fit in with the kind of life toward which I was moving. How overcome this rigidity in duty and truth?
Both of us being inflamed, it was the most difficult thing for me to look upon her and not crave her physically, and, as she later admitted, she felt the same yearning toward me. At the time, however, she was all but horrified at a thought which ran counter to all the principles impressed upon her since early youth. There was thus set up between us in this delightful atmosphere a conflict between tradition and desire. The hot faint breezes about the house and in the trees seemed to whisper of secret and forbidden contact. The perfumes of the thickly grown beds of flowers, the languorous sultry heat of the afternoon and night, the ripening and blooming fields beyond, the drowsy, still, starry nights with their hum of insects and croak of frogs and the purrs and whimpers and barks of animals, seemed to call for but one thing. There was about her an intense delight in living. No doubt she longed as much to be seized as I to seize her, and yet there was a moral elusiveness which added even more to the chase. I wished to take her then and not wait, but the prejudices of a most careful rearing frightened and deterred her. And yet I shall always feel that the impulse was better than the forces which confuted and subsequently defeated it. For then was the time to unite, not years later when, however much the economic and social and religious conditions which are supposed to surround and safeguard such unions had been fulfilled, my zest for her, and no doubt hers in part for me, had worn away.
Love should act in its heat, not when its bank account is heavy. The chemic formula which works to reproduce the species, and the most vital examples at that, is not concerned with the petty local and social restraints which govern all this. Life if it wants anything wants children, and healthy ones, and the weighing and binding rules which govern their coming and training may easily become too restrictive. Nature’s way is correct, her impulses sound. The delight of possessing my fiancée then would have repaid her for her fears. and me for ruthlessness if I had taken her. A clearer and a better grasp of life would have been hers and mine. The coward sips little of life, the strong man drinks deep. Old prejudices must always fall, and life must always change. It is the law.
CHAPTER LXVI
And so this romance ended for me. At the time, of course, I did not know it; on leaving her I was under the impression that I was more than ever attached to her. In the face of this postponement, life took on a grayer and more disappointing aspect. To be forced to wait when at that moment, if ever, was the time!
And yet I told myself that better days were surely in store. I would return East and in some way place myself so that soon we might be reunited. It was a figment of hope. By the time I was finally capable of maintaining her economically, my earlier mood had changed. That hour which we had known, or might have known, had gone forever. I had seen more of life, more of other women, and although even then she was by no means unattractive the original yearning had vanished. She was now but one of many, and there were those who were younger and more sophisticated, even more attractive.
And yet, before I left her, what days! The sunshine! The lounging under the trees! The drowsy summer heat! The wishing for what might not be! Having decided that her wish was genuine and my impulse to comply with it wise, I stood by it, wishing that it might be otherwise. I consoled myself thinly with the thought that the future must bring us together, and then left, journeying first to St. Louis and later to New York. For while I was here that letter from my brother which urged me once more to come to New York was forwarded to me. Just before leaving Pittsburgh I had sent him a collection of those silly “features” I had been writing, and he also was impressed. I must come to New York. Some metropolitan paper was the place for me and my material. Anyhow, I would enjoy visiting there in the summer time more than later. I wired him that I would arrive at a certain time, and then set out for St. Louis and a visit among my old newspaper friends there.