FELIX kept the little book in his desk, cultivated what he called the “Bab Ballad manner,” and waited, sceptically, to see how long his luck would last. In three weeks he was given a raise. But even this did not quite convince him.
It had been too easy—too astonishingly easy. It had come about, not because of any change in his character, not because he had ceased in some miraculous way to be a moon-calf, but precisely because he was just as much a moon-calf as ever. That was why he was compelled to suspect the authenticity of his good fortune.
“Stop worrying,” Clive told him one day at lunch. “What in the world are you afraid of?”
“That I’ll wake up,” said Felix.
“You’ll wake up, all right,” said Clive, “to discover that you’re being underpaid and overworked just like everybody else. You know, you go along looking as if you had had a telegram saying that your rich uncle in Australia had died and left you a million dollars, and you didn’t know whether to believe it or not. No one would guess to look at you that this remarkable good fortune of yours simply consists of eight or ten stiff hours a day for twenty-five dollars a week.”
This, to Felix, seemed an understatement of the merits of the situation. For one thing, he had become very much attached to Clive, whose odd, whimsical, theoretical conversation had a tang of its own; and this job on the Chronicle yielded him the opportunity to enjoy Clive’s company, though now on somewhat restricted terms.
Since Felix had become a reporter, taking his place as it were in the ranks of a lower caste, he had begun to feel that 53his visits to the editorial room were a kind of special privilege, which he endeavored to justify by an occasional piece of writing suited to the editorial page—some entertaining account of things seen in Chicago, the by-products of his work as a reporter. Or, more likely, things not seen at all, but pieced together out of his memory and hung on the slightest thread of contemporary incident.... Once he attended a meeting of “aurists,” and, with a reference to that meeting as a starting point, meandered through a column of odd and curious lore about ears: the ear as the organ of stability, by means of which we are enabled to stand upright—with the story of the little crustacean which puts sand in its ears, and upon whom some scientist played a mean trick, substituting iron filings for the sand-grains, and then applying a magnet overhead, with the result that the crustacean swam contentedly upside down!... In short, anything that happened to interest him!
He discovered that these writings gave him a special standing among his fellow-reporters. They had never ventured to aspire to the editorial page. Nor would Felix have ventured, except that he knew from loafing about the editorial room how welcome was an occasional column from the outside. He still felt himself to be an intruder into a superior realm, and he was grateful for those times, once or twice a week, when Clive stopped beside his desk and suggested that they lunch together.
He had wondered at first how it was that Clive Bangs, with a passion for ideas as intense as the one Felix had long been endeavoring to overcome within himself, should be a successful editorial writer on Chicago’s most conservative and respectable paper—and, for that matter, the valued committeeman of two or three eminently practical and sober reform organizations! Clive was not merely a moon-calf like himself; he was at the same time a quite sane and work-a-day young Chicagoan.
The thought of such an adjustment to the world fascinated and tantalized Felix. It held out for him the possibility of getting along successfully without going through any such 54violent psychic revolution as he had demanded of himself, Clive was inwardly an Anarchist, a Utopian, a theorist and dreamer of the wildest sort; and outwardly something quite other.
That outward quality was what Felix envied in Clive—that practical adaptability to the world, so far beyond anything that seemed possible for Felix himself to achieve. He would have given much for Clive’s ease of manner, his ability to meet ordinary people on their own ground—as for instance in discussing the Yale-Harvard game with a college boy and an instant later local politics with a “reform” alderman who stopped in turn by their table in the City Club. At such a moment Felix was struck dumb; he felt like a child in the presence of grown-up people. Clive seemed to him an infinitely superior being.
And yet this practical adaptability to human occasions was a trait upon which Clive himself seemed to set no value. His easy worldliness—as Felix thought it—was only one side of his character; and he preferred to indulge the other side—the side that was fantastically idealistic.
Perhaps it was because Felix had felt obliged to carry all his theories into practice, that some bounds had been set to his theorizing. No such bounds existed for Clive Bangs. The most extreme ideas that Felix had ever timidly cherished with regard to some free and happy society of the future, were commonplaces to Clive. His speculations roved boldly into Platonic, Nietzschean, and H. G. Wellsian spheres, and dwelt there as among solid realities.
They talked chiefly of love—of love in the future.
Sometimes Felix, too much allured and disturbed, had to protest that these were, after all, only dreams. One day at lunch Clive discoursed on freedom in love until Felix felt constrained to point out that human nature being what it is, jealousy—whether one liked it or not—was nevertheless a fact.
“Oh, yes,” Clive laughed. “I realize that the red-haired young woman at the settlement would find it difficult not to be jealous! In that sense, of course jealousy is a fact, 55and has to be taken into consideration. But we are free men at present, dealing with ideas, not with Jane and Sue—and as free men we are at liberty to inquire what kind of fact jealousy is. Witchcraft, too, was a fact—soberly attested by the greatest thinkers of the age. Anybody who didn’t believe in witchcraft was crazy, just like you and I. And jealousy is the same kind of fact—a socially-created fact. People are persuaded that it exists—that under certain circumstances it must exist. That’s all. How would I know when to be jealous, except that I am carefully taught what my rights of possession are and when they are infringed? It’s the old barbaric code, still handed down in talk and writing. And that’s why I am interested in the development of a new kind of talk and writing.”
It was specifically as this “new kind of talk and writing” that Clive discussed modern literature. He repudiated any preoccupation with literature as an art. It was to him a kind of social dynamics. It had been used to build up through the ages a vast system of “taboos”—and now it was being used to break them down again. In this work of social iconoclasm the chiefs were H. G. Wells, Shaw and Galsworthy—with Meredith as a breathless and stammering forerunner and Hardy as a blind prophet....
“Do you suppose the public knows what they are really up to?” Felix asked doubtfully.
“No. And it would hang them if it did. But fiction cuts deeper than any kind of argument. And it’s doing its work. Wait ten years.... The new younger generation won’t be like us, Felix—content to orate about these matters at luncheon. They will despise us, Felix! They will say we did nothing but talk.”
“Quite right, too,” said Felix.
“They will have heard our talk—talk—talk, and they will be sick of it. They will be all for action. And you and I, Felix, who will then be respectably married, you to your settlement Egeria and I to God knows whom, will be shocked at the younger generation. We will remember how prayerfully we planned to be unconventional, in what a mood of 56far-seeing social righteousness we went about breaking the commandments, and how, after all, we stopped on the way to discuss the matter more thoroughly, and ended by never doing anything at all—and we will be disgusted by the light-minded frivolity of those youngsters. Even our novels—instead of corrupting the youth of the land as we hope!—will probably be regarded by them as hopelessly old-fashioned. If we ever actually write them....”
When he had reached that point in the discussion, Clive would become silent and sullen. “If I only had the energy to write!” he would complain bitterly.
He had been brooding over a novel for four years, and had not yet written a word of it.... They had long talks about that unwritten novel which was to corrupt the younger generation.
2
At Community House, Felix was having difficulties with his class. Not that they were lacking in enthusiasm; on the contrary, their enthusiasm carried him in directions where he had no intention of going. At the outset, he had conceived English composition to be a simple matter. Perhaps it might have been for children; but these young people of eighteen were already convinced of its difficulties, and haggled over semicolons. They wanted to know the “rules” by the observance of which one became a good writer!
Felix presently gave up prose as too hard to teach, and started in upon verse, with greater success. Yet when it came to explaining why love and rove are technically correct rhymes, and young and son no rhymes at all, he was nonplussed. Very soon the class had hit upon a mode which was neither verse nor prose—a kind of free verse. It was quite other than Felix had any wish to encourage anybody to write. He doubted if the writing of free verse would ever enable them to appreciate the Ode to a Nightingale. But he was helpless in the situation, and could only let them go ahead.
His conception of verse was precisely that it was not free; 57he had thought that the pains and pleasures of rhyme and metre would give them a creative understanding of English poetry. This free verse of theirs seemed to him utterly unrelated to the tradition into which he sought to give them an insight. It was very free verse indeed—it mixed its metaphors recklessly, it soared into realms of vague emotion. And when its meaning was at all clear, it carried the burden of a hopeless reproach against circumstance, and a plaintive yearning for it knew not what. Felix fiercely disliked this plaintive hopelessness, and preached scornfully at his class. They seemed to be impressed; but they continued as before.
“I can’t believe you really feel like that,” he said to a merry-faced young Jewess who had just read aloud a poem full of world-sorrow.
She looked offended. “But I do!” she cried. “If you only knew!” and she put her hand expressively to her bosom.
“My God!” he said. “What a broken-hearted crowd!”
There was a quick burst of laughter, and then a girl spoke up. “But Mr. Fay, do you not think we feel?”
“I know you feel unhappy. But don’t you ever feel anything else? Don’t you ever have a good time? Or don’t you think good times are worth writing about?”
“Did Keats and Shelley write about their good times?” asked an ironical youth.
“Yes,” said Felix defiantly. “They wrote about lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon, and skylarks, and things like that; and they loved them to begin with—that was why they wrote about them. Don’t you love anything—anything that is right on hand to be loved—babies, or pet kittens, or pretty clothes, or pretty girls? Are you always pining for something you haven’t got?”
“Always!” two or three of them responded impressively in chorus.
“The desire of the moth for the star,” the ironical young man contributed.
“See here,” said Felix. “Shelley was a young aristocrat 58with an income, living luxuriously in Italy, and he could afford to be unhappy.” They laughed, but Felix went on earnestly. “He could afford to be devoted to something afar from the sphere of his sorrow, because his sorrow consisted of the fact that after eloping with two girls, he couldn’t elope with a third and have a perfectly clear conscience. Added to the fact that he knew, if he did, he would be tired of her in a few weeks anyway. He had tried it before, and he knew. That was what Shelley’s sorrow was all about, and if any one here present is in the same situation, I grant that he is entitled to feel that the desire for happiness is the desire of the moth for the star. But for ordinary mortals like ourselves, happiness is no such impossible thing. It is not the desire of the moth for the star, but—” he hesitated, and the ironical youth broke in with:
“The desire of the moth for the candle-flame!”
“And suppose that it is!” said Felix. “What is life anyway, except a burning of ourselves up in action? Only I don’t see why you prefer such tragic figures of speech. Why not—”
The ironical youth interrupted again: “The desire of the caterpillar for the cabbage-leaf!”
“I give you up!” said Felix.
But he learned from Rose-Ann that his class was considered by the residents a real success. And fat old Mrs. Perk, one evening at the tiny theatre, said to him: “I hear you’re making poets out of the boys and girls. They say you’re a grand teacher!”
It was very odd: it seemed to make no difference that they could not take what he wanted to give them, or that he did not want to give them what they were getting; the class was a success anyway!
“Who was telling you?” he asked.
“That David Arenstein,” she told him. “The one that always used to be talking about committing suicide.” David was the ironical youth who had quoted Shelley at him. “But he’s far from committing suicide now—” and she 59smiled her comfortable smile. “He’s going to be married. Oh, yes, he comes and tells me all his troubles.”
Felix laughed. “I hope he doesn’t hold me to blame!”
She shook her head. “Well, you’ll be getting married yourself, pretty soon, I suppose?”
He did not venture to challenge her as to whom. But he said, “What in the world makes you think that?”
“Oh,” she said, “young folks do, sooner or later, I’ve noticed.”
3
It was nonsense, of course. He was in no position to think about such things, at all. And as for Rose-Ann, he had in the course of weeks become as it were acclimated to her loveliness, so that it no longer tormented him as at first. He was secretly proud of his imperturbability. And if Rose-Ann’s companionship had lately grown more disturbing than ever, it was for a very different reason. It was because of her flattering and at the same time annoying expectations of him as an artist—a poet—a creator. He attempted to deny any pretensions of this sort; he tried to evade any discussion of art at all. But they had formed the habit of going to the theater together, and he found it impossible to resist talking with her about how plays should be written.
“Why don’t you write a really-and-truly play?” she asked, one night on their way back to the Community House.
He attempted to turn the question aside. “Hawkins is writing one, according to office gossip,” he said. Hawkins was the young dramatic critic of the Chronicle.
“Well, if Hawkins can write a play—!” she said.
“All right,” he assented cheerfully, “I’ll wait and see if Hawkins can!”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You know what I think, Felix?”
“I never have any idea what you’re going to think. What is it this time?”
60“I think you’ve had your feelings hurt, somehow, back where you came from. In regard to writing. Something has made you afraid to show what you can do.”
There was something quaintly maternal in her manner which almost took the sting out of that word afraid. But Felix hardened. “Well, why don’t you write a play?” he countered.
“Don’t be brutal, Felix. You know—and I know—that I’m not up to it. I can do little things. I can’t do a big thing. And you can.”
“It’s nice of you to be so sure, Rose-Ann. But I’m not. Or rather, I’m pretty sure I can’t. So there.”
“Why do you say that? It’s not true, and you know it.”
He wished Rose-Ann had not become so serious. They were walking home through one of the first winter snows. A little while ago she had thrown a fluffy snowball at him, and threatened to wash his face, reproaching him for not being enough of a child. This was even more embarrassing. He had an absurd fear that she would commence to talk to him about his soul.... This was coming dangerously near to it. He scuffed up the soft snow with his feet, while she looked sidewise at him waiting for a reply.
“Rose-Ann, you make me uncomfortable,” he said at last. “This business of having some one ‘believe’ in you isn’t what it’s cracked up to be in the romances. It—it’s a damned nuisance. I’d be perfectly happy if you didn’t come to me with your preposterous demands. I’m not the young genius in ‘The Divine Fire.’ I’m a reporter on a Chicago newspaper. Of course I want to write a play. Every young reporter wants to, I suppose. And of course, since you insist upon it, I think I could. But what of that? Every young reporter thinks the same thing.”
“Why this pretence of modesty, Felix? You’re scared, that’s all.”
“Scared of what?” he demanded angrily.
She answered slowly, as though she had just discovered the reason. “Of letting people know your real ambitions.”
61“Of making a silly fool of myself,” he muttered.
“But where’s the harm?” she continued. “Suppose they did know? Suppose everybody knew all your secret dreams? Would that be so terrible? Do you think everybody is watching you, ready to laugh at you? You’re afraid of being laughed at, that’s the trouble.... Well, I know your secret, Felix, and I don’t laugh.”
He shrugged his shoulders. It was intolerable that she should think she knew his secret. “What if I do want to write plays? I want to write novels, and poems, and lots of other things. And if I had nothing else to do, perhaps I’d try my hand at them all. But my main concern now is to make a living.”
“Still worried about your job? Not really?”
“Yes, really. How do I know how long this fool stunt of mine is going to please the Chronicle? I haven’t done a single piece of straight reporting since I’ve been on the paper. And I know no more of the real Chicago—”
“Felix, you are absurd!”