The afternoon following my arrival I flew uptown to see Esther. She waved to me and smiled as I approached—she had been waiting on the “stoop.” As she shook my hand in her somewhat masculine fashion, she took me in with a glance, and the first thing she said was: “What a genteel person you have become! You have changed astonishingly.” “Do you think so?” I asked her. “I am afraid I haven’t. At least they do not think so in Missouri.” Then she told me that she had got only ten points, but that she was expecting three more in the fall. She was almost resigned to wait another year before entering college. That would enable her to make her total requirements, save up a little more money, and get her breath. “A woman is not a man, you know,” she added. “I am beginning to feel the effects of it all. I am really exhausted. Geometry has nearly finished me. And mother has added her share. She is no longer young, and this winter she was ill. I have worried and I have had to send money. But let us not talk about my troubles. You are full of things to tell me, I know.”
Yes, I had lots I wanted to say, but I did not know where to begin; and the one thing that was uppermost in my mind I was afraid to utter lest she should misunderstand and feel injured and reproach me. I did not want her to reproach me on first meeting. I wanted to give myself time as well as her. And so we fell into one of those customary long silences, and for a while I felt at home again, and reflected that perhaps I had been hasty in letting the first poignant reactions mislead me. Toward evening Esther remarked that it was fortunate I had got to town the day before. If I had no other plans, she would take me to a meeting at Clinton Hall where Michailoff was to speak on “The Coming Storm in America.” It would be exciting, she said, and enlightening. Michailoff had just come out of prison. He was full of new impressions of America and “the system” generally, and one could rely on him to tear things open.
Of course we went, and the assemblage was noisy and quarrelsome and intolerant, and the hall was stuffy and smelly, and the speaker was honest and fiery and ill-informed. He thundered passionately, and as if he were detailing a personal grievance against American individualism and the benighted Americans who allowed a medieval religion and an oppressive capitalistic system to mulct and exploit them, and referred to a recent article in the Zukunft where the writer had weakly admitted the need of being fair even to Christianity, and insisted that to be fair to an enemy of humanity was to be a traitor to humanity. I listened to it all with an alien ear. Soon I caught myself defending the enemy out there. What did these folk know of Americans, anyhow? Michailoff was, after all, to radicalism what Higgins and Moore were to Christianity. His idea of being liberal was to tolerate anarchism if you were a socialist and communism if you were an individualist. And, as we left the hall, I told Esther what I had hesitated to tell her earlier in the evening.
“Save yourself, my dear friend. Run as fast as you can. You will find a bigger and freer world than this. Promise me that you will follow me to the West this fall. You will thank me for it. Those big, genuine people out in Missouri are the salt of the earth. Whatever they may think about the problem of universal brotherhood, they have already solved it for their next-door neighbors. There is no need of the social revolution in Missouri; they have a generous slice of the kingdom of heaven.”
Maybe I was exaggerating, but that was how I felt. From this distance and from these surroundings Missouri and the new world she meant to me was enchanting and heroic. The loneliness I had endured, the snubbing, the ridicule, the inner struggles—all the dreariness and the sadness of my life in exile—had faded out of the picture, and what remained was only an idealized vision of the clean manhood, the large human dignity, the wholesome, bracing atmosphere of it, which contrasted so strikingly with the things around me.
No, there was no sense in deceiving myself, the East Side had somehow ceased to be my world. I had thought a few days ago that I was going home. I had yelled to Harvey from the train, as it was pulling out of the station at Columbia, “I am going home, old man!” But I had merely come to another strange land. In the fall I would return to that other exile. I was, indeed, a man without a country.
During that entire summer, while I opened gates on an Elevated train in Brooklyn, I tussled with my problem. It was quite apparent to me from the first what its solution must be. I knew that now there was no going back for me; that my only hope lay in continuing in the direction I had taken, however painful it may be to my loved ones and to myself. But for a long time I could not admit it to myself. A host of voices and sights and memories had awakened within me that clutched me to my people and to my past.
As long as I remained in New York I kept up the tragic farce of making Sunday calls on brother Harry and pretending that all was as before, that America and education had changed nothing, that I was still one of them. I had taken a room in a remote quarter of Brooklyn, where there were few immigrants, under the pretense that it was nearer to the railway barns. But I was deceiving no one but myself. Most of my relatives, who had received me so heartily when I arrived, seemed to be avoiding Harry’s house on Sundays, and on those rare occasions when I ran into one of them he seemed frigid and ill at ease. Once Paul said to me: “You are very funny. It looks as if you were ashamed of the family. You aren’t really, are you? You know they said you would be when you went away. There is a lot of foolish talk about it. Everybody speaks of Harry and me as the doctor’s brothers. Can’t you warm up?”
I poured out my heart in a letter to Harvey. If a year ago I had been told that I would be laying my sorrows and my disappointments in my own kindred before any one out there, I would have laughed at the idea. But that barbarian in Missouri was the only human being, strangely enough, in whom I could now confide with any hope of being understood. I tried to convey to him some idea of the agonizing moral experience I was going through. I told him that I was aching to get back to Columbia (how apt the name was!), to take up again where I had left off the process of my transformation, and to get through with it as soon as might be.
And in the fall I went back—this time a week before college opened—and was met by Harvey at the station, just as those rural-looking boys had been met by their friends the year before. When I reached the campus, I was surprised to see how many people knew me. Scores of them came up and slapped me on the back and shook hands in their hearty, boisterous fashion, and hoped that I had had a jolly summer. I was asked to join boarding-clubs, to become a member in debating societies, to come and see this fellow or that in his room. It took me off my feet, this sudden geniality of my fellows toward me. I had not been aware how, throughout the previous year, the barriers between us had been gradually and steadily breaking down. It came upon me all at once. I felt my heart going out to my new friends. I had become one of them. I was not a man without a country. I was an American.