But the one thing that struck me as of greatest import in those days was Euclid Avenue with its large houses and lawns which are now so close to the business heart, and its rich men, John D. Rockefeller and Mark Hanna and Henry M. Flagler and Tom Johnson. Rockefeller had just given millions and millions to revivify the almost defunct University of Chicago, then a small Baptist College, to say nothing of being hailed (newly then) as the richest man in America. All of these people were living here in Euclid Avenue, and I looked up their houses and all the other places of interest, envying the rich and wishing that I was famous or a member of a wealthy family, and that I might meet some one of the beautiful girls I imagined I saw here and have her fall in love with me.
Tra, la! Tra, la! There’s nothing like being a passionate, romantic dunce if you want to taste this wine of wizardry which is life. I was and I did....
CHAPTER XXIX
THE FLAT LANDS OF OHIO
But now Cleveland by no means moved me as it once had. Not that there was anything wrong with Cleveland. The change was in me, no doubt—a septicæmia which makes things look different in middle life. We breakfasted at a rather attractive looking restaurant which graced a very lively outlying corner, where a most stately and perfect featured young woman cashier claimed our almost undivided attention. (Hail, Eros!) And then we sped on to the Hollenden, an hotel which I recalled as being the best in my day, to consult the Cleveland Automobile Club as to the condition of the roads west.
Sitting before this hotel in our car, under a grey sky and with the wind whipping about rather chilly for an August morning, I was reminded of other days spent in this same hotel, not as a guest but as a youthful chair warmer between such hours as I was not working on the Cleveland Plain Dealer or walking the streets of the city, or sleeping in the very dull room I had engaged in a very dingy and smoky looking old house. Why didn’t I get a better place? Well, my uncertainty as to whether I should long remain in Cleveland was very great. This house was convenient to the business heart, the rooms were clean, and from the several windows on the second floor I could see a wide sweep of the lake, with its white caps and gulls and ships, and closer at hand the imposing buildings of the city. It was a great spectacle, and I was somewhat of a recluse and fonder of spectacles than I was of people.
But the Hollenden, which was then the principal hotel of the city and centre of all the extravagant transient life of the time, appealed to me as a convenient method of obtaining comfort of sorts without any expense. Newspaper men have a habit of making themselves at home almost anywhere. Their kaleidoscopic contact with the rough facts of life, and their commercial compulsion to go, do, see, under all circumstances and at all hours, soon robs them of that nervous fear or awe which possesses less sophisticated souls. When you are sent in the morning to attend a wedding or a fire, at noon to interview a celebrity or describe a trial, and at night to report an explosion, a political meeting or a murder, you soon lose all that sense of unwelcomed intrusion which restrains the average citizen. Celebrities become mere people. Gorgeous functions melt into commonplace affairs, no better than any other function that has been or will be again; an hotel like this is little more than a mere lounging place to the itinerant scribe, to the comforts of which as a representative of the press he is entitled.
If not awe or mystery, then certainly nervous anticipation attaches to the movements and personality of nearly all reporters. At least it does in my case. To this day, though I have been one in my time, I stand in fear of them. I never know what to expect, what scarifying question they are going to hurtle at me, or what cold, examining eyes are going to strip me to the bone—eyes that represent brains so shrewd and merciless that one wonders why they do not startle the world long before they usually do.
In those days this hotel was the most luxurious in Cleveland, and here, between hours, because it was cold and I was lonely, I came to sit and stare out at all the passing throng, vigorous and active enough to entertain anyone. It was a brisk life that Cleveland presented, and young. The great question with me always was, how did people come to be, in the first place? What were the underlying laws of our being? How did it come that human beings could separate themselves from cosmic solidarity and navigate alone? Why did we all have much the same tastes, appetites, desires? Why should two billion people on earth have two feet, two eyes, two hands? The fact that Darwin had already set forward his facts as to evolution did not clear things up for me at all. I wanted to know who started the thing evolving, and why. And so I loved to sit about in places like this where I could see people and think about it.
Incidentally I wanted to think about government and the growth of cities and the value and charm of different professions, and whether my own somewhat enforced profession (since I had no cunning, apparently, for anything else) was to be of any value to me. I was just at the age when the enjoyment of my life and strength seemed the most important thing in the world. I wanted to live, to have money, to be somebody, to meet and enjoy the companionship of interesting and well placed people, to seem to be better than I was. While I by no means condemned those above or beneath, nor ignored the claims of any individual or element to fair and courteous treatment, still, materialist that I was, I wanted to share on equal terms with the best, in all the more and most exclusive doings and beings. The fact that the world (in part) was busy about feasts and pleasures, that there were drawingrooms lighted for receptions, diningrooms for dinner, ballrooms for dancing, and that I was nowhere included, was an aching thorn. I used to stroll about where theatres were just receiving their influx of evening patrons or where some function of note was being held, and stare with avid eyes at the preparations. I felt lone and lorn. A rather weak and profitless tendency, say you? Quite so; I admit it. It interests me now quite as much as it possibly could you. I am now writing of myself not as I am, but as I was.
We gained the information that the best road to Fort Wayne was not via the lake shore, as we wished, but through a town called Elyria and Vermilion, and so on through various Ohio towns to the Indiana line. I did not favor that at all. I argued that we should go by the lake anyhow, but somehow we started for Elyria—or “Delirious,” as we called it.