The Passing Bells (13 page)

“Write out of your own personal experiences of life.”

Theodore Dreiser had told him that—and all the other members of the Pen and Quill Club at the university. That had been during the fall term, 1912, and Dreiser had been the guest speaker. The big slow-speaking gloomy-faced man had told of the difficulties he had faced in the publication of
Sister Carrie
and
Jennie Gerhardt
, and had spoken to them about the need for truth in writing—honesty and realism. They had spoken afterward in German, their common heritage as German-Americans creating an instant bond, although their childhoods and upbringing had been poles apart. It had been Dreiser who had advised him to work on a newspaper so as to see life as it truly was—the raw, hard, often ugly side of the human condition—and it had been Dreiser who had told him to write down his thoughts and observations every day and to keep them for reference later. He had followed the suggestion, keeping a free-flowing sketchbook written in Pitman shorthand.

He took a notebook and a fountain pen from the case and then placed the case across his legs to serve as a desk. Opening the shorthand notebook to the first page, he began to write.

Friday night, June 12, 1914

Observations and Reflections. Here I sit, feeling like every one's country cousin come to stay with rich relatives. The country mouse and the city mouse fable. A paradox there as I come from Chicago—which is about as big a town as you can find—and the cousins come from Abingdon, Surrey, which is about as hick a place as you'll find anywhere. But, oh, Lord, do they ooze sophistication! Debonair. What an overworked word that was during my last year in school. Any guy who smoked Murads was debonair—or wore a wristwatch, or took a girl up to the Loop in a taxicab. Well, we never really understood the meaning of that word. If the fellows in the frat house want to know what debonair means, they should watch Captain Fenton Wood-Lacy for about ten minutes and then crawl off somewhere and write UNCOUTH across their foreheads.

I feel depressed—by my clothes. I caught my uncle— No, I shall clarify my thoughts on that subject first. The Earl of Stanmore is not my uncle. He is the man my aunt married. An uncle should have at least some common ground to share with his nephew. Uncle Paul and I have little in common, but we can at least get into a roaring argument on the subject of Cubs versus White Sox. Returning to the matter of clothing. I could see the earl glancing with definite disapproval at my dinner jacket at least five times during the course of the evening. This was true also of my cousin Charles and Captain Wood-Lacy. Roger Wood-Lacy does not appear to share the others' fixation about clothes. He looked a bit rumpled himself, but then he appears to go out of his way to “play the poet.” Have not read any of his verses, but, judging by the number of Greek and Latin phrases he drops like pearls, I imagine he is not a budding Carl Sandburg or Vachel Lindsay.

House is magnificent. A mixture of architectural types: Tudor, Queen Anne, Georgian, and Victorian. But there is a unifying cohesion to the style, the entire façade having been rebuilt, or reconstructed, by the Wood-Lacys' father, a prominent architect now dead. Charles told me something about the house's history. The Normans built a priory here in the twelfth century, and it was written into the Doomsday Book as pryory, with a “y” instead of an “i.” The structure was torn down in the fourteenth century, and the Duke of Abingdon built a manor house here and retained the name, poor spelling and all. The dukes of Abingdon, a family named de Guise, died out during the War of the Roses, and the property was bought by the first of the Grevilles during the reign of Henry VII. The Grevilles had been firm backers of the Tudor cause and were given knighthoods and land, but the first earl was not created until 1660 at the restoration of the monarchy, the Grevilles having weathered the political turmoils of the struggle between king and parliament. The first earl had been a Greville who had hitched his star to the king and had gone into exile with the future Charles II. They are a landowning family that has always been blessed with sons. Country gentry. One earl had fought with the Duke of Marlborough and lost an arm at the battle of Blenheim, but, from what I can gather, soldiering has never been a family tradition as it is in some great English families.

The earl is a political conservative, but not rabidly so. He had some good things to say about the prime minister, Mr. Asquith, but his bête noire is Loyd George, a Welshman who used to be a solicitor—lawyer. Lloyd George is chancellor of the exchequer, and the earl blames the man for the rise in taxes and for pressuring the prime minister into taking an inflexible stand on the question of home rule for Ireland. The Irish question did not come up at dinner—no politics are discussed until the ladies have left the room—but it was woven into the general conversation when port and cigars were passed around after the women had left. I say woven, because politics takes a decided back seat to talk about the coming hunting season and horse riding in all of its phases—point to point, jumping, dressage. I was asked if I rode and I said yes. Not a total lie because I have been on a horse a few times, not enjoying the experience any more than the poor animal beneath me.

Hanna has three children. William—named after my father—is sixteen and will be home from Eton for the summer holidays any day now. Charles is my age. He seems like a nice enough sort of guy but vaguely indecisive about things. I have no idea what he wants to do in life, but I gather that that isn't terribly important to him or to his parents. Young men of his class—he will inherit the title one day—are not expected to do anything except ride a horse and look after the lands and the tenantry. A friend of Charles from Cambridge, the son of a lord somebody or other, had shocked his friends by “going into trade.” He had taken a job with a company that makes automobile engines. I gathered by the way they talked about him that he had committed some kind of sin against the peerage. Peers, or the sons of peers, may serve on the board of directors of business concerns, but they don't get involved in the day-to-day grind of making or selling the product. This class structure is arcane, but I shall fathom it out in time. A million and one taboos. Alexandra is eighteen and just about the prettiest girl I've ever seen in my life. Honey blonde. Blue eyes. Angelic face. Not too much behind it, I'm afraid. The kind of girl who has no room in her head for anything but boys, clothes, parties, and sugar-whipped dreams of perpetual happiness.

Aunt Hanna. She took me aside after dinner and we walked for a quarter-hour on the terrace. She talked about my father—her beloved Willie—and how much I reminded her of him. Perhaps we were alike when she last saw him. He left home at twenty. She would have been seventeen. She never saw him after that time. In other words, her image of him is vastly different from my own. She referred to him, in rather schoolgirlish French, as
le beau bohème
, as though his act of leaving home and finally being disinherited had been romantic. She should have come to Paris and seen him in his final days, drugged with absinthe, our apartment filled with mad paintings that would never sell. God forgive me, but his death was a blessing. Aunt Hanna feels a certain sense of guilt for not having come to Paris after Father died. She was ill at the time, she says. Perhaps she was, or perhaps she couldn't face seeing her beloved Willie in the awful light of truth. Anyway, she let Uncle Paul pick up the pieces, which is just as well in retrospect. I can't imagine the Earl of Stanmore being overjoyed at taking into his ancestral home the Catholic daughter of a Paris shopkeeper and her eight-year-old son. In all fairness, Aunt Jessie wasn't that overjoyed either—nor Uncle Paul. But he bought Mother the house on Roscoe Street and paid all the bills and gave her a generous allowance and— But why are my thoughts roaming so far afield tonight?

His eyes began to blur, and he capped the pen and closed the notebook. He had a pair of glasses in the case, but he was tired of writing. His heart wasn't in it. Thinking about the house on Roscoe, only five blocks from the home of the ever-glorious Cubs, the palace of Frank Chance, the domain of Frank Schulte, triggered too many memories. They flooded in upon him and he shut them out. The novel that Dreiser had advised him to write was in
that
Chicago, not the Chicago of stockyard workers and striking trolley motormen. If he was serious about becoming a novelist, he must attempt to weave the tangled threads of his childhood into a cohesive pattern. The plight of Chicago's working poor was not his element. Neither, of course, was Europe.

He turned off the lamp and sat in the darkness, watching the window curtains float gently in the night wind. The silence was almost unnerving. He wasn't used to it. A big-city boy, born in Paris, raised to manhood in Chicago. He missed the muted thunder of traffic, the distant rumble of trains. He felt a pang of homesickness for Pastor's saloon on Clark Street: the sawdust and the shots of rye with beer chasers; the pool and the poker games; the lean, hard-boiled talk of newspapersmen.

He got off the bed and placed his attaché case on a table, then stood in front of the open windows. A long way from home, but maybe this was the perspective he needed. Europe was the past, changeless, drowsy, and content with its old glories, fiercely proud of its ancient traditions. Nothing stood still in Chicago. The city was bursting outward and upward. Even the old house on Roscoe was gone to make way for the new apartment houses being built on the North Side. Looking out on the ordered patterns of the garden, he could see the little house much more clearly than he could have in the Windy City. He had debated with himself about coming to Europe, blowing the bulk of his savings, putting his job in jeopardy (for there was no guarantee that Harrington Comstock Briggs would take him back after being away for six weeks—the hard-nosed little editor's idea of a vacation for his staff was three days in Waukegan), but he was here and by God he'd make the most of it. He'd let himself drift to Europe's stately music and then go back to the New World's ragtime clear-eyed and refreshed.

“I wrote
Jennie Gerhardt
out of love and pain . . . facing my ghosts,” Dreiser had said. It was what he must do. He would scrap
City of the Big Shoulders
and begin another novel, one rooted in his own heritage. He would take his time, plan the book carefully, write it with honesty. The saga of the Rilkes, which was the saga of America over the past half-century—money, power, success and failure. Uncle Paul would be fictionalized in the book, as well as his father, mother, and even Aunt Hanna and the Grevilles. The awesome scope of it stunned him for a moment. Was he up to the challenge? Well, he thought, turning away from the window and getting into bed, he had six weeks in the tranquillity of Europe to think about it, to make notes and plan the outline. He felt both awed and excited and wondered whether he would be able to fall asleep, but the moment he closed his eyes that question was no longer in doubt.

5

Captain Fenton Wood-Lacy walked across a stubbled field with a light fowling piece under his right arm, the gun uncocked and, for that matter, unloaded. He had brought a game bag, which dangled from his left shoulder, but no shells.

“I might try and bag some of those jackdaws,” he had told Lord Stanmore after their early morning ride. It was the type of shooting that the earl felt was beneath his dignity as one of the premier grouse hunters in the British Isles, but he did not discourage other men from killing the grain-scavenging birds.

“Try and get a pigeon or two while you're at it.”

“I'll try,” the captain had said.

He was now within sight of the crows. They were in the same spot as the morning before, wheeling and cawing above the chimney stacks of Burgate House. He wondered if the raucous noise disturbed Lydia's sleep. He walked on slowly, and it was nearly nine o'clock when he reached the edge of the formal gardens that were spread out on both sides of the house like pruned wings. A gate to the east gardens was open, and he sauntered through, leaving the gun and the game bag on a carved stone seat. He followed a path that meandered through groves of yew and willow to the terrace that encircled the house in a broad stone ring. A maid washing an upstairs window waved at him and he waved back. The servants at Burgate House reflected their master. They were all Londoners, as cheery and cheeky as sparrows.

As he approached the tall bow windows of the morning room, he could see Lydia inside, just as he had hoped, seated at a table, having her morning coffee. She was wearing a pale yellow peignoir and her hair hung loosely to her shoulders. He tapped gently on the glass, and she looked up, first with a frown, then with a bemused smile. He waited patiently until she got up from the table and opened a side window.

“Good morning,” he said.

“What on earth are you doing here? Don't they serve breakfast at the Grevilles?”

“They do, but the company can't compare to this place. May I come in?”

“Through the front door or through the window?”

“Which would you prefer?”

She stepped back. “The window, by all means. But take care Harker doesn't mistake you for a burglar and put buckshot in your backside.”

“I'll take the chance.” The casement window was narrow, but he managed to squeeze through after stepping up on a ledge. “
Voilà!”
he cried, stumbling into the room. “Amazing the skills one learns in the Guards.”

She returned to her coffee, and he could tell that she was not overjoyed to see him. She would be polite, of course. Lydia was always polite, even when she was on the verge of being her most shrewish.

“Well, now,” he said, straddling a chair and folding his arms along the back of it. “I just happened to be passing by—”

“Please, Fenton, don't be any more ridiculous than you are already. Want some coffee?”