CHAPTER XXXIWHEN HOPE HOPPED HIGH
It is Anatole France, I think, who says somewhere that “robbery is to be condoned; the result of robbery respected.” Even so, listen to this story. We came into this hotel at elevenP. M.or thereabouts. Franklin, who is good at bargaining, or thinks he is, sallied up to the desk and asked for two rooms with bath, and an arrangement whereby our chauffeur could be entertained for less—the custom. There was a convention of some kind in town—traveling salesmen in certain lines, I believe—and all but one room in this hotel, according to the clerk, was taken. However, it was a large room—very, he said, with three beds and a good bath. Would we take that? If so, we could have it, without breakfast, of course, for three dollars.
“Done,” said Franklin, putting all three names on the registry.
It was a good room, large and clean, with porcelain bath of good size. We arose fairly early and breakfasted on the usual hotel breakfast. I made the painful mistake of being betrayed by the legend “pan fish and fried mush” from taking ham and eggs.
After our breakfast we came downstairs prepared to pay and depart, when, in a polite voice—oh, very suave—the day clerk, a different one from him of the night—announced to Franklin, who was at the window, “Seven-fifty, please.”
“How do you make that out?” inquired Franklin, taken aback.
“Three people in one room at three dollars a day each (two dollars each for the night)—six dollars. Breakfast, fifty cents each, extra—one-fifty. Total, seven-fifty.”
“But I thought you said this room was three for the night for three?”
“Oh, no—three dollars each per day. Two dollars each for the night. We always let it that way.”
“Oh, I see,” said Franklin, curiously. “You know what the night clerk said to me, do you?”
“I know the regular rate we charge for this room.”
For the fraction of a moment Franklin hesitated, then laid down a ten dollar bill.
“Why do you do that, Franklin?” I protested. “It isn’t fair. I wouldn’t. Let’s see the manager.”
“Oh, well,” he half whispered in weariness. “What can you do about it? They have you at their mercy.”
In the meantime, the clerk had slipped the bill in the drawer and handed back two-fifty in change.
“But, Franklin,” I exclaimed, “this is an outrage. This man doesn’t know anything about it, or if he does, he’s swindling. Why doesn’t he get the manager here if he’s on the level?”
This gentle clerk merely smiled at me. He had a comfortable, even cynical, grin on his face, which enraged me all the more.
“You know what you are?” I asked him asudden. “You’re a damned, third rate fakir and swindler! You know you’re lying when you say that room rents for three per person when three occupy it. That’s nine dollars a day for a room in an hotel that gets two or three dollars at the outside.”
He smiled, unperturbed, and then turned to wait on other people.
I raged and swore. I called him a few more names, but it never disturbed him the least. I demanded to see the mythical manager—but he remained mythical. Franklin, shocked, went off to get a cigar, and then helped Speed carry out the bags, porters being scarce. Meanwhile, I hung around hoping that glaring and offering to fight would produce some result. Not at all. Do you think I got back our three dollars, or that I ever saw the manager? Never. The car was ready. Franklin was waiting.He looked at me as much as to say, “Well, youdolove to fight, don’t you?” Finally I submitted to the inevitable, and, considerably crestfallen, clambered into the car, while Franklin uttered various soothing comments about the futility of attempting to cope with scoundrels en route. What was a dollar or two, more or less? But as we rode out of Sandusky I saw myself (1) beating the hotel clerk to death, (2) tearing the hotel down and throwing it into the lake, (3) killing the manager and all the clerks and help, (4) marching a triumphant army against the city at some future time, and razing it to the last stone.
“I would show them, by George! I would fix them!”
“Aren’t the clouds fine this morning?” observed Franklin, looking up at the sky, as we rolled out of the city. “See that fine patch of woods over there. Now that we’re getting near the Indiana line the scenery is beginning to improve a little, don’t you think?”
We were in a more fertile land, I thought—smoother, more prosperous. The houses looked a little better, more rural and homey.
“Yes, I think so,” I grumbled.
“And that’s the lake off there. Isn’t the wind fresh and fine?”
It was.
In a little while he was telling me of some Quakers who inhabited a Quaker community just north of his home town, and how one of them said to another once, in a fit of anger:
“Wilbur, thee knows I can lick thee, the best day thee ever lived.”
The idea of two Quakers fighting cheered me. I felt much better.
But now tell me—don’t you think I ought to destroy Sandusky anyhow, as a warning?
After we left Sandusky I began to feel at home again, for somehow this territory southwest was more like Indiana than any we had seen—smooth and placid andfertile—it was a homelike land. We scudded through a place called Clyde, hung madly with hundreds of little blue and white triangular banners announcing that a Chautauqua was to be held here within a few days—one of those simple, country life Chautauquas which do so much, apparently, to enliven this mid-western world. And then we came to a place called Fremont, which had once had the honor of being the home and death place (if not birthplace) of the Hon. Rutherford B. Hayes, once President of the United States by accident—the man who stole the office from Samuel J. Tilden, who was elected. A queer honor—but dishonor is as good as honor any day for ensuring one a place in the memory of posterity.
And after that we drove through places called Woodside and Pemberton and Portage—you know the size—only in these towns, by now, I was seeing exact duplicates of men I had known in my earliest days. Thus at Woodside where we asked our way to Pemberton and Bowling Green, Ohio, the man who leaned against our car was an exact duplicate of a man I had known in Sullivan, over thirty years before, who used to drive a delivery wagon, and the gentleman he was driving (a local merchant of some import, I took it) was exactly like old Leonard B. Welles, who used to run one of the four or five successful grocery stores in Warsaw. He had a short, pointed, and yet full beard, with steely blue eyes and a straight, thin-lipped mouth—but not an unkindly expression about them. I began to think of the days when I used to wait for old Mr. Welles to serve me.
Later we came to a river called Portage, yellow and placid and flowing between winding banks that separated fields of hay from fields of grain; and then we began to draw near to a territory with which I had been exceedingly familiar twenty years before—so much so that it remains as fresh as though it had been yesterday.
You must know, because I propose to tell you, that in the fair city of St. Louis, at the age of twentytwo, I was fairly prosperous as a working newspaper man’s prosperity goes, and in a position to get or make or even keepa place not only for myself but for various others—such friends, for instance, as I chose to aid. I do not record this boastfully. I was a harum scarum youth, who was fairly well liked by his elders, but with no least faculty, apparently, of taking care of his own interests. From Chicago one of those fine days blew a young newspaper man whom I had known and liked up there. He was not a very good newspaper man, humdrum and good natured, but a veritable satellite of mine. He wanted me to get him a place and I did. Then he wanted counsel as to whether he should get married, and I aided and abetted him in that. Then he lost his job through his inability to imagine something properly one night, and I had to get him another one. Then he began to dream of running a country paper with me as a fellow aspirer to rural honors and emoluments, and if you will believe me, so rackbrained was I, and so restless and uncertain as to my proper future, that I listened to him with willing ears. Yes, I had some vague, impossible idea of being first State Assemblyman Dreiser of some rural region, and then, perchance, State Senator Dreiser, and then Congressman Dreiser, or Governor Dreiser, if you please, and all at once, owing to my amazing facility andsavoir faire, and my clear understanding of the rights, privileges, duties and emoluments of private citizens, and of public officers, and because of my deep and abiding interest in the welfare of the nation—President Dreiser—the distinguished son of the state of Indiana, or Ohio, or Michigan, or wherever I happened to bestow myself.
I had only one hundred and fifty dollars all told in the world at the time—but somehow money didn’t seem so very important. Perhaps that was why I listened to him. Anyhow, he hailed from this northern section of Ohio. His father lived just outside of the village of Grand Rapids (Ohio, not Michigan), and between there and a town called Bowling Green, which we were now approaching, lay the region which we were to improve with our efforts and presence.
Looking at the country now, and remembering it as itwas then, I could see little, if any, change. Oh, yes—one. At that time it was dotted on every hand with tall skeleton derricks for driving oil wells. The farming world was crazy about oil wells, believing them to be the open sesame to a world of luxury and every blessed thing which they happened to desire. And every man who owned so much as a foot of land was sinking an oil well on it. The spectacle which I beheld when I first ventured into this region was one to stir the soul of avarice, if not of oil. As far as the eye could see, the still wintry fields were dotted with these gaunt structures standing up naked and cold—a more or less unsatisfactory sight. I remember asking myself rather ruefully why it was that I couldn’t own an oil well and be happy. Now when I entered this region again all these derricks had disappeared, giving place to small dummy engines, or some automatic arrangement lying close to the ground, and controlled from afar, by which the oil pumping was done. These engines were very dirty, but fortunately inconspicuous. And apparently nearly all the wells which I had seen being dug in 1893 had proved successful. In every field was at least one of these pumping devices, and sometimes two and three, all in active working order. They looked odd in fields of corn and wheat. But where were the palaces of great beauty which the farmers of 1893 expected if they struck oil? I saw none; merely many fairly comfortable, and I trust happy, homes.
But to return to my venture into this region. The most disturbing thing about it, as I look back on it now, is that it shows me how nebulous and impractical I was at that time. Clearly I had had a sharp desire to be rich and famous, without any understanding of how to achieve these terms of comfort. On the other hand, I had the true spirit of adventure, else I would never have dropped so comfortable a berth as I had, where I was well liked, to come up here where I knew nothing of what the future held in store. Great dreams invariably shoot past the possibilities of life.
Those cold, snowy, silent streets, those small bleakhomes, shut in from the February or March cold, with all the force of their country life centered around the parlor stove! H——, my fellow adventurer, had preceded me, occupying with his wife a comfortable portion of his father’s home, and it was he who met me at the train. He could live here comfortably and indefinitely, and think nothing of it. He was home. After a single day’s investigation, I now saw that there was nothing to his proposition as far as I or Grand Rapids was concerned—not a thing. The paper which he had outlined to me as having a working circulation of sixteen hundred and advertising to the value of a thousand or more had really nothing at all. The county, which had only perhaps 10,000 population, had already more papers than it could support. The last editor had decamped, leaving a novice who worked for the leading druggist, owner of the printing press and other materials of construction, to potter about, endeavoring to explain what was useless to explain. And I had thrown up a good position to pursue a chimera.
But in spite of this, H—— wished to see all the leading citizens to discover what encouragement they would offer to two aspiring souls like ourselves! I can see them yet—one a tall, bony man of a ministerial cast of countenance. He was the druggist, and by the same token one of several doctors living here. There was a short, fat, fussy man, who ran the principal feed and livery stable. He had advertised occasionally in other days. Then there were the local banker and four or five others, all of them meager, unimportant intellects.
They looked us over as if we were adventurers from Mars. They weren’t sure whether they needed a newspaper here or not. I agree now that they did not. They talked about small advertisements which they might or might not run, but which they were certain had never paid when they did—advertisements which they had placed as a favor to the former editor or editors. In addition, they wanted assurances as to how the paper would be run and whether we were good, moral boys andwhether we would work hard for the interests of the town and against certain unsatisfactory elements. It was amazing. Oh, yes, the paper had to be Republican in politics.
“No, no, no,” I finally said to H——, in a spirit of dissatisfaction and at the end of a long, cold, windy day. We had walked out the country road toward his house and I had stopped to stare at an array of crows occupying a bleak woodpatch, and at the red sun, smiling over a floor of white. “There’s nothing in this. It would set me crazy. It’s a wild goose chase. Is there anything else around here, or shall I skip out tonight?”
He wanted me to stay and visit Bowling Green, a town near at hand. (This was the one we were now approaching.) There was another newspaper there for sale on easy terms. I agreed after some coaxing, and, having lingered three days to secure suitable roads—the distance was twentyfive miles—we drove over. That was the time I saw the gas wells. It was a better place than Grand Rapids, but the price of the paper, when we reached there, was much more than we could pay. I think we figured, between us, that we could put down two hundred dollars and the owners wanted five hundred, with the balance on mortgage and a total selling price of eight thousand. So that dream went glimmering. In the meanwhile, I browsed about studying country life, admiring the Maumee River at Grand Rapids (H——'s home faced it from a beautiful rise). Then one fine spring day the sun rose on fields from which the snow had suddenly melted, and I felt that I must be off. I went, as I have said, to Toledo first. Here I encountered the youth to whom I have frequently referred and with whom I was destined to lead a curious career.
But now that I am upon the subject, perhaps I might as well include the story of my journey into Toledo, where was a principal paper called theBladewith which I wished to connect myself, if possible. The place only had a hundred thousand at the time, and I did not think it worth the remaining years of my life, but I thought it might be good for a little while—say six months. AlthoughI was considered (I am merely quoting others) an exceptional newspaper man, I did not know what I wanted to be. Already the newspaper profession was boring me. It seemed a hopeless, unremunerative, more or less degrading form of work, and yet I could think of nothing else to do. Apparently I had no other talent.
I shall never forget the first morning I went into Toledo. The train followed the bank of a canal and ran between that canal and the Maumee River. The snow which had troubled us so much a day or two before had gone off, and it was as bright and encouraging as one might wish. I was particularly elated by the natural aspects of this region, for the Maumee River, beginning at Fort Wayne, Indiana, and flowing northeastward, makes a peculiarly attractive scenic diversion. It is a beautiful stream, with gently sloping banks on either hand, and in places rapids and even slight falls. At Grand Rapids and farther along it broadened out into something essentially romantic to look upon, and Toledo itself, when I reached it, was so clean and new and industrious—without all the depressing areas of factory and tenement life which lowers the charm of some cities. It seemed to me as I looked at it this Spring morning as if life must be better here than in cities older, or at least greater—cities like St. Louis and Chicago, where so much of the oppressive struggle for existence had already manifested itself. And yet I knew I liked those cities better. Be that as it may, it was a happy prospect which I contemplated, and I sought out the office of theBladewith the air of one who is certain of his powers and not likely to be daunted by mere outward circumstances.
I have always felt of life that it is more fortuitous than anything else. People strive so mightily to do things—to arrange life according to some scheme of their own—but little, if anything, comes of it in most cases. Children are taught by their parents that they must be this, that, or the other to get along—economical, industrious, sober, truthful and the like—and what comes of it? Unless they are peculiarly talented and able to uselife in a direct and forceful way—unless they have qualities or charms which draw life to them, or compel life to come, willy-nilly, they are used and then discarded. A profound schooling in manners, morals and every other virtue and pleasantry will not make up for lack of looks in a girl. Honesty, sobriety, industry, and even other solemn virtues, will not raise a lad to a seat of dignity. Life is above these petty rules, however essential they may be to the strong in ruling the weak, or to a state or nation in the task of keeping itself in order. We succeed or fail not by the socalled virtues or their absence, but by something more or less than these things. All good things are gifts—beauty, strength, grace, magnetism, swiftness and subtlety of mind, the urge or compulsion to do. Taking thought will not bring them to anyone. Effort never avails save by grace or luck or something else. The illusion of the self made is one of the greatest of all.
Here in Toledo I came upon one of the happiest illustrations of this. In the office of theBladein the city editorial room, sat a young man as city editor who was destined to take a definite and inspiriting part in my life. He was small, very much smaller than myself, plump, rosy cheeked, with a complexion of milk and cream, soft light brown hair, a clear, observing blue eye. Without effort you could detect the speculative thinker and dreamer. In the rôle of city editor of a western manufacturing town paper, one must have the air, if not the substance, of commercial understanding and ability (executive control and all that), and so in this instance, my young city editor seemed to breathe a determination to be very executive and forceful.
“You’re a St. Louis newspaper man, eh?” he said, estimating me casually and in a glance. “Never worked in a town of this size though? Well, the conditions are very different. We pay much more attention to small items—make a good deal out of nothing,” he smiled. “But there isn’t a thing that I can see anyhow. Nothing much beyond a three or four day job, which you wouldn’twant, I’m sure. As a matter of fact, there’s a street car strike on—you may have noticed it—and I could use a man who would have nerve enough to ride round on the cars which the company is attempting to run and report how things are. But I’ll tell you frankly, it’s dangerous. You may be shot or hit with a brick.”
“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 intheir 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!