THE COURIER.
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When I Knew
Stephen Crane.
By VILLA SIBERT CATHER, in the Library.
MMMMIMII Ill IIMIIMI IMUMIIIMM
It WBf, I think, in the spring of '94,
that a slender, narrow chested fellow in
a shabby grey suit, with a soft felt hat
pulled low over his eyes, sauntered into
the office of the managing editor of the
Nebraeka State Journal and introduced
himself as Stephen Crane. He stated
that he was going to Mexico to do some
work for the Bacheller syndicate and
get rid of his cough, and that he would
be stopping in Lincoln a few days.
Later he explained that he was out of
money and would be compelled to wait
ho til he got a check from the East be
fore he went further. 1 was a junior at
the Nebraska state university at the
time, and was doing some work for the
State Journal in my leisure time, and 1
happened to be in the managingditor'e
room when Mr. Crane introduced him
self. I was just off the range; I knew a
little Greek and something about cattle
and a good horse when I saw one, and
beyond horses and cattle I considered
nothing of vital importance except good
stories and the people who wrote them.
This was the first man of letters I had
ever met in the flesh, and when the
young man announced who be was, I
dropped into a chair behind the editor's
desk where 1 could stare at him with,
out being too much in evidence.
Only a youthful enthusiasm and a
large propeneity for hero worship could
have found anything impressive in the
young man who stood before the man
aging editor's desk. He was thin to
emaciation, his face was gaunt and un
shaven, a thin dark moustache straggled
on his upper lip, his black hair grows
low" oh his forehead- and was shaggy
and unkempt. His grey clothes were
much the worse for wear and fitted him
so badly it seemed unlikely he had ever
been measured for them. He wore a
flannel shirt and a slovenly apology for
a necktie, and his shoes were dusty and
worn gray about the toes and vere
badly run over at the heel. I had seen
many a tramp printer come up the
Joarsal stairs to hunt a job, but never
one who presented such a disreputable
appearance as this story-maker man.
He wore gloves, which seemed rather a
contradiction to the general sloveliness
of bis attire, but when he took them off
to search his pockets for his credentials,
I aoticed that bis bands were singularly
fine; long, white and delicately shaped,
with thin, nervous fingers. I have seen
pictures of Aubrey Beardaley's hands
that recalled Crane's very vividly.
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No. I, board of Trade,
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At that time Crane was but twenty
four, and almost" an -unknown man.
Hamlin Garland had seen some of his
work and believed in him, and intro
duced him to Mr. Howells, who recom
mended bim to the Bacheller Syndicate.
"The Red Badge of Courage" had been
published in the State Journal that
winter along with a lot of other syndi
cate matter, and the grammatical con
struction of the story was so faulty that
the managing editor had several UmeB
called on me to edit the copy. In this
way I had read it very carefully, and
through the careless sentence-structure
I saw the wonder of that remarkable
performauce. But the grammar cer
tainly sb bad. I remember one of the
reporters who had corrected the phrase
"it don't' for the tenth time remarked
savagely, "It 1 couldn't write better
English than this, I'd quit.'
Crane spent several days in the town,
living from hand to mouth aud waiting
for bis money. I think he borrowed a
amall amount from the managing edi
tor. He lounged about the office most
of the time, and I frequently encounter
ed him going in and out of the cheap
restaurants on Tenth street. When he
was at the office he talked a good deal
in a wandering, absent minded fashion,
and his conversation was uniformly
frivolous. If he could not evade .a seri
ous question by a jjke, he bolted. I cut
my classes to lie in wait for him, confi
dent that in tome unwary moment I
could trap him into seriouB conversation,
that if one burned incense long enough
and ardently enough, the oracle would
not be dumb. I.was Maupassant mad.
at the time, a' malady particularly un
attractive in a junior, and I made a
frantic effort to get an expression of
opinion from him on"Ie Bonheur."
"Oh, you're Moping, are you?" he re
marked with a sarcastic grin, and went
on reading a little volume of Poe that
he carried in his pocket. At another
time I cornered him in the Funny Man's
room and succeeded in getting a little
out of him. We were taught literature
by an exceedingly analytical method at
the university, and we probably dis
torted the method, and 1 waB trying to
find the least common multiple of Ham
let and the greatest common devisor of
Macbeth, and I began asking him
whether stories were constructed by
cabalistic formulae. At length he
sighed wearily and shook his drooping
shoulders, remarking:
"Where did you get all that rot?
Yarns aren't done by mathematics.
You can't do it by rule any more than
you can dance by rule. You have to
have the itch of the thing in your fing
ers, and it you haven't well, you're
damned lucky, and you'll live long and
prosper, that's all." And with that he
yawned and went down the hall.
Crane was moody most of the time,
his health was bad and he seemed pro
foundly discouraged. Even his jokes
were exceedingly drastic. He went
about with the tense, preoccupied, self
centered air of a man who is brooding
over some impending disaster, and I con
jectured vainly as to what it might be.
Though he was seemingly entirely idle
during the few days I knew him, his
manner indicated that he was in the
throes of work that told terribly on his
nerves. His eyes I remember as the
finest I have ever seen, large, dark and
full of luster and changing lights, but
with a 'profound melancholy always
lurking deep in them. They were eyes
that seemed to be burning themselves
out.
As he sat at the desk with his shoul
ders drooping forward, his head low, and
his long white fingers drumming on the
sheets of copy paper, he was as nervous
as a race horse fretting to be on the
track. Always, as he came and went
about the halls, be seemed like a man
preparing tor a sudden departure. Now
that be ia dead it occurs to me that all
his life was a preparation for sudden
depart uro. I remember once when he
was writing a letter he stopped and
asked me about the spelling of a word,
saying carelessly, "I haven't time to
learn to spell."
Then, glancing down at his attire, he
added with an absent-minded smile, "I
haven't time to dress either; it takes an
awful slice out of a fellow's life."
He said ho was,poor, and he certainly
looked it, but four years later when he
was in Cuba, drawing the largest salary"
ever paid a newspaper correspondent,
he clung to the same untidy-manner of
dress, and his ragged overalls and but
tonless shirt were eyesores to the im
maculate Mr. Davis, in his spotless
linen and neat khaki uniform, with hk
Gibson chin always freshly shaven.
When I first heard of his serious illness,
his old throat trouble aggravated into
consumption by bis reckless exposure in
Cuba, I recalled a passage from Maeter
linck's essay, ''The Pre-Destined," on
those doomed to early death: "As child
ren, life seems nearer to them than to
other children. They appear to know
nothing, snd yet there is in their eyes
so profound a certainty that we feel
they must know all. In all haste, but
wisely and with minute care do they
prepare themselves to live, and thi.very
haste is a sign upon which mothers can
scarce bring themselves to look." I re
membered, too, the young man's mel
ancholy and tenseness, his burning eyes
and his way ef slurring over the lees im
portant things, as one whose time is
short. fr . T., . -t
I have 'heard other people say how
difficult it was to induce Crane to talk
seriously about bis work, and I suspect
that he was particularly averse to tiis
cuseioDB with literary men of wider edu
cation and better equipment than him
self, yet he seemed to feel that this fuller
culture was not for him. Perhaps the
unreasoning instinct which lies deep, in
the rootB et our lives, and which guides
us all, told him that he had not time to
acquire it.
Men will sometimes reveal themselves
to children, or to people whom they
think never to see again, more com
pletely than they ever do to their con
freres. From the wise we hold back
alike our follies and our risdom. and
for the recipients of our deeper confi
dences we seldom select our equals.
The soul has no message for the friends
with whom we dine every week. It is
silenced by custom and convention, and
we play only in the shallows. It selects
its listeners willfully, and seemingly de
lights to waata its best upon the chance
wayfarer who meets us in the highway
at a fated hour. There are . moments,
too, when the tido runs high or very
low, when self-revelation is necessary to
every man, if it be only to his valet or
his gardener, At such a moment I was
with Mr. Crane.
The hoped for revelation came unex
pectedly enough. It was on the last
night he was in Lincoln. I had come
back from the theater and' was in the
Journal office writing a notice of the
play. It was eleven o'clock when Crane
oame in. He had expected his money to
arrive on the night mail and it had not
done so, aud he was out of sorts and
deeply despondent. He sat down on the
ledge of the open window that faced on
the street, and when I had finished my
notice I went over and took a chair be
side him. Quite without invitation on
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my part, Crane began to talk, begv-..,,
curse his trade from the first throb of
creative desire, in a boy, to the finished
work of the master. The night was op
preseively warm; one of those dry winds
that are the curse of that country was
blowing up from Kansas. The white,
western moonlight threw sharp, blue
shadows below us. The streets were
silent at that hour, and we could hear
the gurgle of the fountain in Post-Office
square across the street, and the twang
of banjos from the lower veranda of the
Hotel Lincoln, where the colored wait
ers were serenading the guests. The
drop lights in the office were doll under
their green shades, and the telegraph
sounder clicked faintly in the next room.
In all his long tirade, Crane never
raised his voice; he spoke slowly and
monotonously and even calmly, but I
have never known so bitter a heart in
any man as he revealed to me that
night. It was an arraignment of the
wages of lifo, an invocation to the min
isters of hate.
'Incidentally he told me the Bum he
had received for "The Bed Badge of
Courage,'' which I think was something
'Mm ainety dollars, and he repeated
some lines from "The Black Eiders,"
which was then in preparation. He
gave me to understand that he had a
'double literary life; writing in the first
place the matter ttiat pleased himself,
and doing it very slowly; in the second
place, any sort of stuff that would sell.
And he remarked that his poor wsb just
as bad as it could possibly be. He real
ized, he said, that his limitations were
absolutely impassable. "What I can't
do, I can't do at all, and I can't acquire
it. I only hold one trump."
'He had no settled plans at all. He
was going to Mexico wholly uncertain
of being able to do any successful work
there, and he seemed to feel very inse
cure about the financial end of his ven
ture. The thing that most interested
me was what he said about bis slow
method' of, composition. He declared
that there was little money in story
writing at best, and practically none in
it for him, because of the time it took
him to work up his detail. Other men,
he said, could sit down and write up an
experience, while the physical effect of
it, so to speak, was still upon them, and
yesterday's impressions' made today's
"copy." But when he csme in from
the streets to write up what he had seen
there, his faculties were benumbed, and
he sat twirling his .pencil and hunting
for words like a schoolboy.
I mentioned "The Red Badge of Cour
age," which was written in nine days,
and he replied that, though the writing
took very little time, he had been un
consciously working the detail of the
story.out through' the most of his boy
hood. His ancestry had been soldiers,
and he had been imagining war stories
ever since he was out of knickerbockers,
and in writing his first war story he had
simply gone over his imaginary cam
paigns and selected his favorite imagin
ary experiences. He declared that his
imagination was hide-bound; it was
there, but it pulled hard. After he got
a notion for a Btory, months passed be
fore he could get any sort of personal
contact with it, or feel any potency to
handle it. "The detail of a thing has to
filter through my blood, and then it
comes out like a native product, but it
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