Theodore Dreiser

“ After our long, dreary drive in the rain the sun was now shining through sultry clouds and it was pleasant to see the welter of thriving foundries and shops, smoky and black, which seemed to sing of prosperity; the long, smooth red brick pavement of the street by which we entered, so very kempt and sanitary; the gay public square, one of the most pleasing small parks I have ever seen, crowded with long distance trolley cars and motors—the former bearing the names of towns as much as a hundred and a hundred and fifty miles away. ”

“ And now beyond Elmira for a distance of one hundred and twenty miles or more, all the way into Warsaw, we had one of the most delightful days of any—a perfectly heavenly day, the weather so fine, the sky so blue, and not a tinge of anything save harvesting weather anywhere. As we rolled along the sound of the reaper was heard in the land—great mechanical combinations of engines and threshers and grain separators and straw stack builders—a great flume or trough reaching high in the air and carrying out the grainless straw and chaff, blowing it on a single mound. ”

“ See the utter brutality with which every great dream is filched from the mind, all the delicate, tendril-like responsiveness of youth is taken away, your friends and pleasures and aspirations slain. I looked about me, and beginning to recognize familiar soil, such as a long stretch of white road ending in an old ice house, a railroad track out which I had walked, felt a sudden, overpowering, almost sickening depression at the lapse of time and all that had gone with it. ”

“ I know how the Hudson joins the ocean at New York, the Missouri the Mississippi at St. Louis, the Moselle the Rhine, at Coblenz, the New and Big Kanawha in the picturesque mountains of West Virginia, and the Alleghany the Monongahela to make the Ohio in Pittsburg—but this sweep of the Ohio, coming up from the South and turning immediately south again in a mighty elbow which pushes at the low hill on which the city stands, is tremendous. You know this is a mighty river, bearing the muddy waters of half a continent, by merely looking at it. It speaks for itself. ”

“ But men are men! And the women—many married and unmarried ones—don’t want them to be otherwise. Life is a dizzy, glittering game of trapping and fishing and evading, and slaying and pursuing, despite all the religious and socalled moral details by which we surround it. Nature itself has an intense love of the chase. It loves snares, pitfalls, gins, traps, masks and mummeries, and even murder and death—yes, very much murder and death. It loves nothing so much as to build up a papier-mâché wall of convention, and then slip round or crash through it. ”

“ Every garden suggests a tryst of lovers. A river, if you follow one, glimmers and whimpers. The stars glow and sing. They bend down like lambent eyes. All nature improvises a harmony—a splendid harmony—one of her rarest symphonies indeed.
And tonight as we sped out of Owego and I rested in the deep cushions of the car it seemed as if some such perfect symphony was being interpreted. Somewhere out of the great mystery of the unknowable was coming this rare and lovely something. What is God, I asked, that he should build such scenes as this? His forces of chemistry! His powers of physics! ”

“ EVANSVILLE But I cannot possibly hope to convey the delicious sting life had in it for me at this time as a spectacle, a dream, something in which to bathe and be enfolded, as only youth and love know life. Not Evansville alone but life itself was beautiful—the sky, the trees, the sun, the visible scene. People hurrying to and fro or idling in the shade, the sound of church bells, of whistles, a wide stretch of common. ”

“ As I stood looking at this I had once more that sinking sensation I experienced in Warsaw and Terre Haute. Life moves so insensibly out from under you. It slips away like a slow moving tide. You look and the box or straw that once was at your doorstep is far down stream—or rather you are the box, the straw. Your native castle is miles removed. I went in and knocked at the door while Franklin, without, sketched and photographed to suit himself. ”

“ Times have changed a little since then and yet here were the same types—the red-cheeked, wide-eyed boy in the new brown suit and twentyfive cent hat looking at people as if all the world and its every gesture were a surprise, and the women walking about streets impossible, one must say, from a social and intellectual point of view, trying to look as if they had something to do and some place to go. ”

“ When you are sent in the morning to attend a wedding or a fire, at noon to interview a celebrity or describe a trial, and at night to report an explosion, a political meeting or a murder, you soon lose all that sense of unwelcomed intrusion which restrains the average citizen. Celebrities become mere people. Gorgeous functions melt into commonplace affairs, no better than any other function that has been or will be again; an hotel like this is little more than a mere lounging place to the itinerant scribe, to the comforts of which as a representative of the press he is entitled. ”

“ THE FERRY AT DECKER Is it an illusion of romance, merely, or is it true that, in spite of the fact that the French, governmentally speaking, have been out of old Vincennes—the very region of it—for over a hundred and fifty years, and that nearly all we know of the town of twenty thousand has come into existence in the last fifty years, there still exists in it, hovers over it, the atmosphere of old France? ”

“ Think of a long, smooth red brick road stretching out before you mile after mile, the blue waters of Lake Erie to your right, with its waves, ships and gulls; a flat, Holland-like farming land to your left, with occasional small white towns, factory centers, and then field upon field of hay, corn, cabbages, wheat, potatoes—mile after mile and mile after mile.
Ohio is too flat. It hasn’t the rural innocence and unsophistication which Indiana seems still to retain, nor yet the characteristics of a thoroughgoing manufacturing world. ”

“ In this warm, sensuous wind that was blowing here, it seemed as though nature must be about some fruitful labor. Sometimes a night achieves a quality of this sort, something so human and sympathetic that it is like a seeking hand. I sat back in the car meditating on all I had seen, how soon now we would be in Indianapolis and Carmel,—and then this trip would be over. ”

“ They were log cabin necessities decked out in all the gimcrackery of the Petit Trianon. They weren’t log-cabin necessities any more, and they certainly bore no close relationship to the perfection of a Heppelwhite or a Sheraton, or the convincing charms of the great periods. They were just a combination of country and city, as their inventor understood them, without having the real merit of either, and to me they seemed to groan of their unhappy union. It was as if a man had taken all the worst and best in American life and fastened them together without really fusing them. ”

“ I never imagined that there were so many processes through which all parts of a machine have to be put to perfect them, or that literally thousands of men do some one little thing to every machine turned out. We stood and gazed at men who were polishing the lacquered sides of automobile bodies with their thumbs, dipping them in oil and so rubbing down certain rough places; or at others hovering over automobile motors attached in rows to gasoline tanks and being driven at an enormous rate of speed for days at a time without ever stopping, to test their durability and speed capacity. ”

“ I wouldn’t devote a line to those amazingly commercial towns and cities of America which are so numerous if the very commercial life of the average American weren’t so interesting to me. If anyone should ask me “What’s in Binghamton?” I should confess to a sense of confusion, as if he were expecting me to refer to something artistic or connected in any way with the world of high thought. But then, what’s in Leeds or Sheffield or Nottingham, or in Stettin or Hamburg or Bremen? Nothing save people, and people are always interesting, when you get enough of them. ”

“ Or is it better that people should live well always, rather than that their haunts should be lighted by the fires of tragedy? Did Rome really need to be sacked? Did Troy need to fall?
Franklin seemed to consider that peace and human comfort were of more import than great tragic records, and I thought of this, but to no purpose. One can never solve the riddle, really. It twists and turns, heaves and changes color, like a cauldron that glows and bubbles but is never still.
And then we settled ourselves once more for the last run of thirtyfive miles to Indianapolis. ”

“ And actually, as we dashed along toward Warsaw under a starry sky, with a warm, summery wind blowing, a wind so warm that it felt suspiciously like rain, I allowed myself to sink into the most commemorative state. When you forget the now and go back a number of years and change yourself into a boy and view old scenes and see old faces, what an unbelievably strange and inexplicable thing life becomes! ”

“ In those days this hotel was the most luxurious in Cleveland, and here, between hours, because it was cold and I was lonely, I came to sit and stare out at all the passing throng, vigorous and active enough to entertain anyone. It was a brisk life that Cleveland presented, and young. The great question with me always was, how did people come to be, in the first place? What were the underlying laws of our being? How did it come that human beings could separate themselves from cosmic solidarity and navigate alone? Why did we all have much the same tastes, appetites, desires? ”

“ And then late in the afternoon, after hours of this wonder world, we trudge home, along the warm, dusty, yellow country road; the evening sun is red in the West, our feet buried in the dust. Not a wagon, not a sound, save that of wood doves, bluejays, the spiritual, soulful, lyric thrush. On a long, limp twig with a 435fork at the end is strung our fish, so small and stiff now—so large, glistening, brilliant, when we caught them. On every hand are field fragrances, the distant low of cows and the grunts of pigs. I hear the voice of a farmer—"Poo-gy! ”

“ It is as good as the successful and happy feel it to be—as bad as the miserable think it is bad—only it is neither. It is something so large and strange and above our understanding that it can scarcely sense the pain or joy of one single individual—only the pains or joys of masses.
It recognizes only a mass delight or a mass sorrow. Can you share, or understand, the pains or delights of any one single atom in your body? You cannot. Why may there not be an oversoul that bears the same relationship to you that you bear to the individual atoms or ions of your physical cosmos? ”

“ On my long, meditative ride back to New York, I had time to think over the details of my trip and the nature of our land and the things I had seen and what I really thought of them. I concluded that my native state and my country are as yet children, politically and socially—a child state and a child country. They have all the health, wealth, strength, enthusiasm for life that is necessary, but their problems are all before them. We are indeed a free people, in part, bound only by our illusions, but we are a heavily though sweetly illusioned people nevertheless. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the sky will be soaring buzzards, surely. Over a field of green will stand a tall, gnarled dead tree trunk, its gauntness concealed by a cape of wild ivy. On its topmost level will sit a brown hawk or a grey headed eagle calculating on methods of capture. Across the street, up the road a little way, will be the brown home of “crazy old Bowles,” who used to come to our well for water singing and sometimes executing a weird step, or gazing vacantly and insanely at the sky. He was an ex-army man, shot in the head at Lookout Mountain and now a little daffy. ”

“ America can be the rawest, most awkward and inept land at times. You look at some of its scenes and people on occasions, and you wonder why the calves don’t eat them. They are so verdant. And yet right in the midst of a thought like this you will be touched by a sense of youth and beauty and freedom and strength and happiness in a vigorous, garish way which will disarm you completely and make you want to become a part of it all, for a time anyhow. ”

“ A MINSTREL BROTHER But we didn’t reach Evansville, for all our declaration and pretence of our need. A delightful run along a delightful road, overhung with trees (and now that we were out of the valley between the two rivers, cut between high banks of tree shaded earth) , brought us to Princeton, a town so bright and clean looking that we were persuaded, almost against our wishes, to pass the night here. Some towns have just so much personality. They speak to you of pleasant homes and pleasant people—a genial atmosphere. ”

“ As life expresses itself, so it should be, I fancy. All my sympathies go out to such young people, 122for I recall with what earnestness as a boy I used to do this same thing—how I wished and longed and how my body tingled at the thoughts of love and the promise of life to come.
Once on the road again, I hummed and meditated until suddenly I found myself dreaming. I wasn’t on the high road between Binghamton and Elmira at all but in some happy land that hadn’t anything to do with motoring—a land of youth and affection. ”

“ Long before either Franklin or Speed had risen this morning—they had spent the evening looking around the town—I was up, had a cold bath, and had written various letters and visited the post office and studied the town in general.
It was a halcyon morning, partly grey with a faint tint of pink in the East, when I first looked out, and such an array of house martins on five telegraph or telephone wires over the way as I had not seen in a long time. Birds are odd creatures. Their gregariousness without speech always fascinates me. ”