1
the family were apparently not at all surprised when, at the supper-table, felix announced his sudden decision.
“well, i knew you’d be going one of these days,” his brother ed remarked.
that seemed strange to felix, who had kept his chicago intentions carefully to himself all that year....
and his brother jim, who was working again in spite of his lameness, was quite converted from his supper-table querulousness by the announcement. “when i was in chicago—” he said, and told stories of the chicago of ten years ago, where he had tried briefly to gain a foothold. it remained in his mind, it seemed, not as a failure, but as a glorious excursion....
alice, ed’s wife, was enchanted. her cheeks glowed, and she asked endless questions. it appeared that none of them had the slightest doubt of felix’s ultimate, and splendid, success. it really seemed as if they envied him!
and all the while, felix was thinking what an ironic spectacle he would present if he returned home in a month or two. he clenched his fists under the table-edge, and swore to himself that he would never—never—make that confession of failure....
“you must write to your mother and tell her all about it, felix,” said alice.
his mother and father were down on the farm in illinois where mrs. fay had lived as a little girl. she had never adjusted herself to town life; nor had her husband. they were best content in the country, where she could grow flowers in the front yard and he could fatten and butcher and salt down a couple of hogs for the winter.... their 10only grievance was that their children found so little time to come and visit them. ed usually came once a year, in the slack season, and jim when he needed a rest; but felix, it seemed, was always too busy....
“why bother her about my going to chicago?” felix grumbled.
“why, felix!” alice reproached him. she could never understand why it was so hard for him to write to his mother.
“i don’t want her worrying about me,” felix explained uncomfortably.
“she won’t worry about you,” alice insisted. “she’ll be proud of you!”
felix wondered if people always had to lie to themselves about their prospects before they could do anything.... perhaps he ought to lie to himself; but he preferred to face the facts as they were. he would have to embellish them a little, however, in writing to his mother....
when supper was cleared away, and jim had gone out to sit on the front steps, and ed and alice were in the front room playing one of the newest records on the phonograph, felix wrote briefly and shyly to his mother—explaining that he was fairly certain to get something to do in chicago very quickly.... and then, by way of savouring in advance the grim realities of his adventure, he wrote a long letter to helen raymond in new york—a letter in which he made clear the wild recklessness of his plans. he felt that the woman who had befriended him when she was the librarian at port royal and he a queer boy who worked in a factory and wrote poetry, would understand this newest folly of his.
but what a waste of time, writing letters, when he had only six days left in which to prepare for going to chicago!... he determined to use those remaining days very carefully and sensibly.
he bought a street map the next morning, and went home to study it. but it was hard to give it due attention at home. his sister-in-law was mending and pressing his 11clothes, and collecting and inspecting his shirts, and talking excitedly about his trip. “if you run short of money, felix, you just write to us for it. ed and i will see that you get it somehow.” felix was fiercely resolved not to be a burden to them after he went to chicago, and these offers made him uncomfortable. why should alice be so interested in this expedition of his anyway? she was as concerned about it as though it were she herself who was going. she wanted to know his plans; and when he did not seem to have any, she persisted in trying to make them for him.
he was not going to get any opportunity to study that street map at home. he decided that he would go and spend a few days at his friend tom alden’s little place in the country, where he would find a more congenial atmosphere.
2
too congenial! tom was the same perfect companion of an idle hour—instinctively expert in gilding that idleness with delightful talk until it ceased to seem mere idleness—the same old tom that felix had loafed away long evenings with last summer, when they were supposed to be writing novels. tom was still desultorily working upon his novel; but he put it aside to walk in the woods and talk with felix about chicago. it was not, however, of the grim chicago which loomed in felix’s mind, that tom talked.
tom, as felix now realized, was a romantic soul. chicago had been to him a series of brilliant vacation-trips, a place of happy occasional sanctuary from the dull realities of middle-class life in port royal: an opportunity for brief, stimulating human contacts, not at all a place to earn a living in.
lying in the cool grass beside the creek where he and felix had spent so many illusioned hours a summer ago, he talked with dreamy enthusiasm of genial drunken poets and philosophers and friends met at the pen club—and of their girl companions, charming and sophisticated, whose loves were frank and light-hearted.
12felix walked up and down impatiently. a year ago he too had dreamed of tom’s chicago—
“midnights of revel
and noondays of song!”
but he knew better now. he could imagine the pen club, with its boon-companionship of whiskey and mutual praise. these, he told himself, were the consolations of failure. he might, he reflected grimly, have to fall back on these things at forty. but in the meantime he would try to learn to face reality.
and those light chicago loves—he suspected that the romantic temperament had thrown a glamour over these also. he was not going to chicago for pen club friendship nor the solace of complaisant femininity.... while tom alden reminisced of glorious nights of talk and drink and kisses, felix was brooding over a scene inside his mind which he called chicago—a scene in which the insane clamour of the wheat-pit was mingled with stockyards brutality and filth. this was what he must deal with....
“what’s on your mind?” tom asked.
“nothing. except—i came here to study my street map, and i haven’t looked inside it.”
“never mind your street map just now,” tom said. “we’re going to the station to meet gloria and madge.”
madge was a cousin of tom’s, and gloria her especial—and beautiful—friend. they were just back from a trip abroad, and tom had asked them out to dinner to hear what they had to tell.
“you mustn’t be prejudiced against gloria because of her eyelashes,” tom urged. “she has rather a mind, i think.”
so felix, reluctantly, went along to the station.
tom jested at his reluctance. “why, are you afraid of becoming entangled in gloria’s celebrated eyelashes?”
“no, i’m not afraid of that,” felix said.
tom laughed and put his hand on felix’s shoulder.
“think, they bring us news of the great world: london! paris! doesn’t that stir you?”
13“no,” felix retorted, “for i don’t believe it. they bring back what they took with them.”
“wait and see! i hear rumours that gloria has become fearfully cosmopolitan.”
when gloria and madge stepped from the train, it was evident, even to so careless an observer as felix, that they had been at least outwardly transformed. every woman in port royal was wearing the wide-flaring “merry widow” hat; and these girls wore small close-fitting hats—gloria’s being a jaunty little flower-confection, and madge’s a tiny straw turban set off by a perky feather.
“dear old tom,” said gloria, embracing him affectionately. “too busy to come to town to see old friends, so old friends have to come see him. busy writing great novel?”
“more or less,” tom answered, and they started back up the road. “how’s europe?”
“we tore ourselves from the arms of doting relatives to come and tell you—when one’s been all over the world, what’s a few miles more? ... even when it means getting one’s new paris shoes all dusty! have you noticed them, tom?” she paused on one toe and looked down sidewise admiringly at her foot.
“i noticed a generally exotic effect,” tom admitted.
“tan suede!” gloria explained. “and then, our blouses. something quite new. and—but mustn’t talk to great philosopher about such frivolous things. must talk about art and socialism. there are lots of socialists over there, in france and germany—and even in england!”
“so you found that out,” tom observed. “now i suppose you regard socialism as quite respectable.”
“oh, most respectable. but just as hard to understand as ever! though i was able, when i talked to some of them at the countess of berwick’s tea, to appear quite intelligent on the subject, on account of having listened to you. i used ‘proletarian’ and ‘proletariat’ without once getting them mixed.”
“the countess of berwick! our little gloria flew high, didn’t she?”
14“oh, all sorts of people go to the countess of berwick’s teas. you’ve only to be reputed ‘interesting,’ and you get invited everywhere. and how do you suppose i got into the ‘interesting’ class? not by my gifts of intellect, tommy. but—you know, they expect americans to behave queerly. they’re disappointed if we don’t. there was an american poet over there, a tame professor poet, and they were disappointed because he didn’t come to dinner in boots and spurs and a red shirt or something. so i bethought myself—and got invited. you know my baby-talk? i brought it out and polished it up for the occasion. you should have heard me! baby-talking to england’s brightest and best. and they fell for it. they consider it oh, so american! i nearly set a fashion in london, tommy. me, having been brought up in miss pettit’s most exclusive school, and taught to act like a lady, and then making a hit in london with bad manners. the baby-talk wasn’t all. daughter of american plough magnate puts feet on table and tells naughty stories—that sort of thing. they like it.”
“you mustn’t believe her, tom,” madge interrupted. “she didn’t do any such thing.”
“tom understands me,” gloria laughed. “exaggeration for effect. just like in a novel. if you put my london visit in a novel, tom, you’d have me putting my feet on the table, wouldn’t you?”
“but my imagination,” said tom, “would balk at the picture of you telling naughty stories.”
“oh, but tom, i’ve been to paris since you used to know me, and i’ve become very, very wicked. don’t contradict me, madge. i’ve got to persuade tom that i got some benefit out of my year abroad. yes, tom, you’ve no idea how broad-minded paris has made me. why, if somebody should mention a man’s ‘mistress’ to me now, i wouldn’t shudder and turn pale. i would probably say, ‘dear me, has he only one?’ that’s what paris has made of me. i’m brazen, tom—brazen.”
they reached the house, and there they chattered on till dinner, and through dinner, and after dinner in tom’s living 15room—felix playing a silent part, and inwardly contemptuous of gloria’s assumed sophistication. gloria made a few attempts to draw him into the conversation, but these being resisted, she devoted herself to tom. growing confidential, she told him the newest fashions in french lingerie—madge protesting only slightly, for after all, wasn’t tom her cousin? and felix didn’t count. “they’re still wearing muslin over here,” said gloria, “while we, tom dear, come from paris intimately attired in georgette and chiffon—if you know what that means. all the difference in the world, i can assure you! one’s puritanism goes when one puts on chiffon next to one’s skin. and think, tom, i never dreamed, all my poor wasted life in iowa, that nightgowns could be anything but white muslin. well, you should see the lovely nighties that madge and i brought home. you’d never guess the colour.... lavender! why, the social circles of port royal are rocking with it! a blow, tom, at the very foundations of middle-class morality. lavender nighties!”
“i do think,” tom said, “that what people wear makes a difference in their attitude toward life.”
“oh, i can feel the difference already. my presbyterian conscience shrivelled up and perished at the touch of that pagan garment. my whole attitude toward life has changed.”
felix shrugged his shoulders by way of expressing his unbelief in the paganism of lavender nightgowns.
“what are they writing in paris now?” tom asked.
“well, tom, i admit i was surprised at first. i never dreamed that even the french could be so—french. but i got used to it. i like it now. even madge likes it. she makes me translate the wickedest passages for her.”
“i don’t any such thing,” madge objected.
“what is there so wicked in those passages?” asked felix, speaking for almost the first time.
gloria considered him for a moment before replying. “nothing really wicked at all,” she said. “wicked only according to our stupid anglo-saxon notions. simply frank, that’s all.”
16“i wonder,” said felix, “if they are really more frank than english novels—the best of them. defoe and fielding were rather frank, you know.”
gloria shrugged her pretty shoulders. “if there was anything like that in defoe and fielding, it escaped my innocent young mind when i read them.” she turned again to tom. “they omit nothing—nothing!”
“you excite my curiosity,” tom said sceptically. “please describe more specifically the nothing which they omit.”
gloria laughed, and sketched lightly and brightly the plot of one of the most outrageous new french novels—extreme, she admitted, even for france. “every other chapter,” she said, “is one which the boldest english novelist would leave to your imagination. in this story, here it is, with, i assure you, a wealth of detail.”
“a wealth of words, rather, i suspect,” said tom. “the same words that have done duty in the same french novels for a generation: volupté—exquise—baiser—baiser.... the same old thing, so far as i gather from your description, gloria. that kind of eloquent rhetoric isn’t frankness,—at least not the kind of literary frankness that felix and i are interested in.”
“forgive me, tom!” said gloria, with mock humility. “my mistake! here i have been going across the ocean in search of sensation, and all the while the real shock was waiting for me right here at home. in your novel you have doubtless outdone the puny efforts of these mere foreigners. what do they know about frankness? i abase myself, and repent in dust and ashes!”
“i really do think,” said tom, “that you imagine the truth can be told only in french.”
“i suppose i was guilty of that foolish error. but i pine for enlightenment. give me the truth—the truth!—in my own native tongue!”
tom shook his head. “i didn’t say i had tried to tell it.”
“oh, don’t disappoint me that way, tom. surely you are not going to let these frenchmen put it over on you! don’t say that!”
17“well,” tom said gravely, “felix has a chapter in his novel here—i found the manuscript in my desk and was just reading it again the other day—that i think goes a little beyond anything i have ever seen in any french novel.”
gloria turned to felix and stared. “well!” she cried. “america is saved! will you read it to us, mr. fay?”
“no,” he said.
“oh, why not!”
“don’t want to.”
“i think you show a lack of confidence in us, mr. fay. here we put ourselves in your hand. we open our hearts to you. we conceal nothing. and you sit there with a masterpiece of literary frankness up your sleeve, and refuse to read it. i don’t think it’s fair.”
felix was silent. he really wanted to read that chapter. he was proud of it. but he must not become interested in novel-writing again. it would distract his mind too much from the chicago adventure. that unfinished novel ought to remain in that drawer in tom’s desk until he had made good in chicago.
“i don’t believe it’s so frank, after all,” said gloria, returning to the attack. “that’s why you’re afraid to read it. you’re afraid of disappointing our expectations.”
felix looked at her defiantly.
“all right, i will,” he said.
“oh, this is worth coming back for.”
he rose and went to tom’s room. he returned, a little doubtfully, with the manuscript. “i want to say first of all that there is nothing intentionally shocking about this chapter. it simply aims to tell how people really behave under circumstances usually glossed over with romantic phrases.”
at any rate, gloria would understand; so why should he hesitate?
he began to read. from the first page, he was aware of a transformation in the atmosphere of the occasion. gloria, who had been leaning forward with dramatic eagerness, became rigid in her attitude, and her humorous smile seemed to 18have become tensely frozen in its place. madge had picked up a magazine, opened it to a picture, and continued to look at the picture while listening alertly, with an air of being at a key-hole. tom continued gravely smoking his pipe, apparently oblivious of any constraint upon the others. after a little, gloria carefully relaxed her attitude, and leaned back, looking above felix’s head, with an impassive face and arms straight at her sides. felix defiantly read on.
he knew there was nothing really shocking about the chapter—at least, to an enlightened and adult mind such as gloria’s. it did not occur to him that in its local colour and middle-western psychology, there was something—not present in the most highly flavoured french romance—to disturb the pretences and awake the painful and ashamed memories of a middle-western mind: something sufficiently near to the unromantic truth of gloria’s own secret life, perhaps, to evoke in her an hysterical disgust.... he only knew that the situation was becoming uncomfortable, and that he was sorry he had ever got into it.
he finished the chapter. there ensued a painful silence.
“very remarkable writing indeed, mr. fay,” was all the comment the young woman back from abroad had to offer. evidently what was delightfully daring in paris was something else in port royal on the mississippi....
felix, not knowing quite what to think, went to put his manuscript away. surely gloria could not have been really shocked!... when he returned, they were all talking with animation about something else.... presently it was time for the girls to leave. “i hear you’re going to chicago soon,” gloria said sweetly to felix. “bon voyage!”
“i have made a fool of myself again,” felix said to himself bitterly.
3
the next day, and the next, felix and tom talked again about chicago; but not in the realistic vein felix would have preferred. tonight he must go back to town; he had already stayed too long—he was falling into his old habit 19of day-dreaming about the future.... that chapter had set him off. gloria had been—well, startled and impressed, to say the least. that chapter was good. perhaps he was destined to help bring back to english fiction its lost candour, the candour of the elizabethans and defoe and fielding.
but no, he must not think about such things now. he would have no time for writing, for a long while, in chicago. he would be too much immersed in the struggle for existence. if he were to write novels, he ought to stay in port royal. yes, he might take the civil service examination and get a quiet job in the post-office that would give him time to think and dream and write....
he sprang up. he knew quite well what this meant. cowardice! if he got into the post-office, he would stay there forever.... he started abruptly toward the house, leaving tom in the midst of an anecdote of old chicago days.
he had left the map on tom’s desk. his novel was in that same desk. if he started reading that novel again, he might decide to stay in port royal and finish it. he wondered whether the map or the novel would claim him when he sat down at that desk. five minutes at that desk might decide his whole future for him....
he went into tom’s room, went over to the desk—and from a letter lying open beside the pen-tray there flashed up to him his own name, felix fay ... with a fringe of words about it.
those words startled him, and he bent over the letter to make sure that they were really there; he read them, and turned to see the signature—it was that of madge alden; and then he sat down in tom’s chair and read slowly that paragraph of three sentences.
“is that nasty young man felix fay really a friend of yours? i think he’d better leave port royal quick. the story of that horrible chapter is all over town and—well, if you knew the things gloria is saying about him!”
so gloria had betrayed him to port royal.
20
4
he sank back in his chair, amazed at his sensations. he had never thought any written words could affect him like that. he had never cared what people thought....
it was absurd. he felt as though a cannon-ball had gone through his abdomen. he sat there, weak, stunned, gasping for breath—with a mind curiously detached, floating somewhere above that stunned body, wondering.... it was curious that anything in the world could hurt so much.
then, in a rush, all his energy seemed to come back, flooding and filling his body—as if to provide him the strength with which to return blow for blow. and that superfluity of strength was worse than the weakness had been—for there was no one, nothing to fight. words out of the air had hurt him, and he could not fight back.
the emotion which flooded him ebbed at last, leaving him in a curious mood of utter coldness. the thought came into his mind: “nothing that ever happens to me can hurt me after this—nothing.”
he opened the drawer. he wanted to see that unfinished novel. he wanted to know what it was really like. he felt capable of judging it calmly.
he turned the pages here and there, reading at random, now with affection and now with contempt, making up his mind.... he suddenly realized that he was feeling ashamed of it all. he did not realize that this new humiliation, at the hands of a girl, had awakened painful memories of the love-affair which he had celebrated in this novel, and which had ended so differently in real life from the way it was to end in this book; he only knew that he was ashamed.
the style, he said to himself, was bad—very bad.
he forced himself to read again the chapter which had caused all the trouble. it made him smile painfully. why, this bald and painstaking frankness of his was not courageous, it was merely comic!... he turned the pages again. this stuff was not a novel.
he had been an idler, a dreamer, a fool....
and suddenly he remembered something—a scene from 21a long time ago: it was in school, and the principal was looking over a boy’s shoulder at a piece of paper upon which, day-dreaming of his future, the boy had written: “felix fay, the great novelist....”
he heard the principal telling that boy to write those words on the blackboard, to show the class what he had been doing instead of attending to his lessons. he saw the boy, pale and trembling, rise and face a hundred curious, staring eyes....
felix had not recalled that scene for years; it had hurt too much. but now it was no longer painful. he saw the scene for the first time impersonally; and he felt that the principal had been right....
gazing down at the manuscript in his hand, he pronounced sentence upon it in the words in which the principal had once condemned that boy. “this is what is known as egotism,” he whispered.
he rose, stuffed the pages into tom’s fireplace and set fire to them with a match. then, while the record of all his futile dreaming went up in smoky flame, he turned back to the desk, sat down, and bent over the microscopic squares and confused lettering of the street-map of chicago.
