You were going to write to me first and you have not, and so I write to you, because I am thinking of you this evening, and that is the time to write, is it not? I have been thinking good things of you; it seems to me that your flavor has precipitated, and that I feel the form of you, as I never have this past short year. I find myself in consequence in an apologetic mood—and perhaps you will accept even that and not be repelled, since you have accepted so many moods of mine, and been dear about them, and filled me slowly—I am aware of it now—with a respect and an admiration and, yes, something deeper than these, of which my actions and my omissions were scarce able emissaries. You are away now, while I am in Chicago—silently away, since you have not even thought of me to write to me, and I find that I do not blame you at all: that I admire your taste and your silence, and that I shall look forward to whatever response this brings of your deigning with an eager gratefulness that surprises you no more than it does me. Tom chastened: Tom in full view at length of a loveliness that he sensed and went for, perhaps as one goes for the summit of a mountain: the moment one is upon the trail, all one’s energies are lost in climbing and fighting snags and underbrush and rocks, and the summit is beyond eye and soon out of thought: yet is it the less for it that the unblazed trail is dared? You are a very rare person: you have given me so much of myself that I shall be happy of you, even if I continue in this mood of being mad at myself that I did not give more. And yet what more could I have given? Would you take more, David? It is true that I have an excuse. You found me in the flush that was really the sign of a true decomposition, a deep giving away of my nerves that might have been ruin in one less trained to fighting. Or that might have been nothing in one less addicted to work. You see, work-to-success seemed necessary to me. When I do no work, my mind gets me into trouble: I am a geyser of wastestuffs: if I cannot empty myself into work, I am likely to empty some one else in a perverse replica of play. You have seen that, David. I worked while I should have been in some happy clime watching the skies and bathing and walking and smoking pipes of peace (if only pipes did not make me sick): I worked while the day’s task used more than the night brought of strength. I neared bankruptcy, but being an American that did not bother me—and I put on brighter colors for the approaching doom. In the crisis of eight years of this, you found me, David——: and what a dour childhood of preparation before it! Endless, endless. Working for Cornelia, working for myself—working toward nothing. For I am in it still. I shall try to put off the day of bankruptcy until I am fifty or more: then liquidate by dying. But you caught me in the first cold experience of being weak and sick and unable to spend prodigally and not feel anything but bulging coffers in the morning: in the first terrible condition of knowing I must work, though work was vile, and that no other work was present for my hands. That, does it explain my sudden horridnesses, my fevers, my cruelties to us both—your word? I am not cruel, Davie, I am full of love. Oh! why won’t you—you and a few blessed others whom I need the knowledge of in this fearful gorgeous world—why won’t you understand? Can you not see me going out into the streets of New York—yes, even here in Chicago—full of love for the dull men and the stricken women, ready to give myself to them all, if only they would take me—take me a moment——: full of love for the magic of their flesh and the mystery of their life and the splendor of their anguish? Oh! David, I love so much more than there is in the world willing. I am a sea of love cluttered in a basin. And when I am cried a little welcome, I mess everything up in my attempt to fit to a mortal measure. I have spoken to you—we have even quarreled—about little children. Don’t you see why? Why I was enraged at the idea of your speculating upon whether you wished a child or no? Identification. Suddenly, I am a child, and I do not care a damn about reason, I want only not to be left outside and unalive by my beloved. Often when I speak to a man or woman, Davie, something bleeds in my breast. And then I have headaches, and the wise doctor says: use ‘brakes’—do not give yourself so much—walk the streets indifferently. Easy, eh? Indifferently! When all of life floods all my senses like a corybantic passion: a perpetual sea of infinite elements each of which is attached to my nerves and to my heart. I cannot help loving people, so I hate them. For they are not what I would have them be: they are deaf and they do not love me. And children—whose lives go before me out of my hands and my sight like the horizon and the skies—is it a wonder my hands are stretched after them and that I suffer at my impotence? But, Davie, I am not cruel. I love—and I cannot reach what I love. My hard-headed lawyer friends quip me, calling mystic my wandering thoughts—the best of them. But I am filled with a sense of dimensions, flaring and parabolic, and the world their sense is comfortable in, is a strand of what I feel and see: and the magic that draws me to the world is the fact that it careers in an element outside myself. There, perhaps, imprisoned in the flesh of a woman is the thing I love—and I am outside—oh, fatally outside. If I open that flesh I am laughed at by blood and death. Life—life, I seek it. For I see it: and it is maddening to be alive.
This is a funny letter, is it not? But you must understand, and never again call cruel the man whose eyes are forever full of the vision of loving, and whose body is a prison, a terribly real prison—and who knows that the world is a bewildering texture of abyss and reality, of filth and flowers. I shall go hunting, killing myself through life, David, simply because I am hungry. Do not forget that. I know the falsehood of the game. Do not forget that either. My real self, my mocking sense of life, my outrageous need of love, of love, of love—that will go silent to the grave, when the gods have had their laugh of it. For truly I am a little like a toyboat that the gods have placed upon the waters, and blown upon, that scuds its pretty maddening moment, steerless, useless, against the inevitable stop on the pool’s other side.
Write to me.
Tom.
David’s day was pitched by it still higher. His moving through the life of the City had a lyric lilt. Its meanest shred came to expression in the tune he hummed. Until Mr. Barlow said:
“Is that the one song you know?”
David stopped. His energy was only for the moment without outlet. He jumped up, and used it to propel his body.
“I don’t feel a bit like working, this afternoon.”
“There you are, thinking of this as work! Can’t you get cured of that, David?”
The young man stopped at the desk of his Chief who had become his friend. He was pensive. He put one hand on the blotter and looked beyond the labyrinth of papers.