“Yes,” I said, smiling and thinking of my need of experience and cash. “Just how many days' work would you guarantee me, if any?”
“Well, four. I could guarantee you that many.”
He looked at me in a mock serious and yet approving way. I could see that he was attracted to me—fate only knows why. Something about me (as he told me later) affected him vigorously. He could not, he admitted, get me out of his mind. He was slightly ashamed of offering me so wretched a task, and yet urged by the necessity of making a showing in the face of crisis. He, too, was comparatively new to his task.
I will not go into this story further than to say that it resulted in an enduring and yet stormy and disillusioning friendship. If he had been a girl he would have married me, of course. It would have been inevitable, even though he was already married, as he was. That other marriage would have been broken up. We were intellectual affinities, as it were. Our dreams were practically identical, approaching them though we were, at different angles. He was more the sentimentalist in thought, though the realist in action; I the realist in thought, and sentimentalist in action. He kept looking at me and that same morning, when having ridden about over all the short lines unharmed and made up a dramatic story, and when, in addition, for a “Romance Column” which the paper ran, I had written one or two brief descriptions of farm life about Toledo, he came over to tell me that he was impressed. My descriptions were beautiful, he said.
We went out to lunch, and stayed nearly three hours. He took me out to dinner. Though he was newly married and his delightful young wife was awaiting him in their home a few miles out of the city, duty compelled him to stay in town. Damon had met Pythias—Gawayne, Ivaine. We talked and talked and talked. He had worked in Chicago; so had I. He had known various newspaper geniuses there—so had I. He had dreams of becoming a poet and novelist—I of becoming a playwright. Before the second day had gone, a book of fairytales and some poems he had completed and was publishing locally had been shown me. Under the action of our joint chemistries I was magically impressed. I became enamoured of him—the victim of a delightful illusion—one of the most perfect I have ever entertained.
Because he was so fond of me, so strikingly adoring, he wanted me to stay on. There was no immediate place, and he could not make one for me at once, but would I not wait until an opening might come? Or better yet—would I not wander on toward Cleveland and Buffalo, working at what I chose, and then, if a place opened, come back? He would telegraph me (as he subsequently did at Pittsburg). Meanwhile we reveled in that wonderful possession—intellectual affection—a passionate intellectual rapprochement, in youth. I thought he was beautiful, great, perfect. 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.
Alas, alas, for the dreams and the perfections which never stay!
CHAPTER XXXII
THE FRONTIER OF INDIANA
To me, therefore, this region was holy Ganges—Mecca, Medina—the blessed isles of the West. In approaching Bowling Green, Ohio, I was saying to myself how strange it will be to see H—— again, should he chance to be there! What an interesting talk I will have with him! And after Bowling Green how interesting to pass through Grand Rapids, even though there was not a soul whom I would wish to greet again! Toledo was too far north to bother about.
When we entered Bowling Green, however, by a smooth macadam road under a blazing sun, it was really not interesting at all; indeed it was most disappointing. The houses were small and low and everything was still, and after one sees town after town for eight hundred or a thousand miles, all more or less alike, one town must be different and possessed of some intrinsic merit not previously encountered to attract attention.