An American Tragedy I. Теодор Драйзер

or victorious, he had been conscious of the fact that the work his parents did was not satisfactory to others – shabby, trivial. And always he was thinking of what he would do, once he reached the place where he could get away.

      For Clyde’s parents had proved impractical in the matter of the future of their children. They did not understand the importance or the essential necessity for some form of practical or professional training for each and every one of their young ones. Instead, being wrapped up in the notion of evangelizing the world, they had neglected to keep their children in school in any one place. They had moved here and there, sometimes in the very midst of an advantageous school season, because of a larger and better religious field in which to work. And there were times, when, the work proving highly unprofitable and Asa being unable to make much money at the two things he most understood – gardening and canvassing for one invention or another – they were quite without sufficient food or decent clothes, and the children could not go to school. In the face of such situations as these, whatever the children might think, Asa and his wife remained as optimistic as ever, or they insisted to themselves that they were, and had unwavering faith in the Lord and His intention to provide.

      The combination home and mission which this family occupied was dreary enough in most of its phases to discourage the average youth or girl of any spirit. It consisted in its entirety of one long store floor in an old and decidedly colorless and inartistic wooden building which was situated in that part of Kansas City which lies north of Independence Boulevard and west of Troost Avenue, the exact street or place being called Bickel, a very short thoroughfare opening off Missouri Avenue, a somewhat more lengthy but no less nondescript highway. And the entire neighborhood in which it stood was very faintly and yet not agreeably redolent of a commercial life which had long since moved farther south, if not west. It was some five blocks from the spot on which twice a week the open air meetings of these religious enthusiasts and proselytizers were held.

      And it was the ground floor of this building, looking out into Bickel Street at the front and some dreary back yards of equally dreary frame houses, which was divided at the front into a hall forty by twenty-five feet in size, in which had been placed some sixty collapsible wood chairs, a lectern, a map of Palestine or the Holy Land, and for wall decorations some twenty-five printed but unframed mottoes which read in part:

      “WINE IS A MOCKER, STRONG DRINK IS RAGING AND WHOSOEVER IS DECEIVED THEREBY IS NOT WISE.”

      “TAKE HOLD OF SHIELD AND BUCKLER, AND STAND UP FOR MINE HELP.” PSALMS 35:2.

      “AND YE, MY FLOCK, THE FLOCK OF MY PASTURE, are men, AND I AM YOUR GOD, SAITH THE LORD GOD.” EZEKIEL 34:31.

      “O GOD, THOU KNOWEST MY FOOLISHNESS, AND MY SINS ARE NOT HID FROM THEE.” PSALMS 69:5.

      “IF YE HAVE FAITH AS A GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED, YE SHALL SAY UNTO THIS MOUNTAIN, REMOVE HENCE TO YONDER PLACE; AND IT SHALL MOVE; AND NOTHING SHALL BE IMPOSSIBLE TO YOU.” MATTHEW 17:20.

      “FOR THE DAY OF THE LORD IS NEAR.” OBADIAH 15.

      “FOR THERE SHALL BE NO REWARD TO THE EVIL MAN.” PROVERBS 24:20.

      “LOOK, THEN, NOT UPON THE WINE WHEN IT IS RED: IT BITETH LIKE A SERPENT, AND STINGETH LIKE AN ADDER.” PROVERBS 23:31,32.

      These mighty adjurations were as silver and gold plates set in a wall of dross.

      The rear forty feet of this very commonplace floor was intricately and yet neatly divided into three small bedrooms, a living room which overlooked the backyard and wooden fences of yards no better than those at the back; also, a combination kitchen and dining room exactly ten feet square, and a store room for mission tracts, hymnals, boxes, trunks and whatever else of non-immediate use, but of assumed value, which the family owned. This particular small room lay immediately to the rear of the mission hall itself, and into it before or after speaking or at such times as a conference seemed important, both Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths were wont to retire – also at times to meditate or pray.

      How often had Clyde and his sisters and younger brother seen his mother or father, or both, in conference with some derelict or semi-repentant soul who had come for advice or aid, most usually for aid. And here at times, when his mother’s and father’s financial difficulties were greatest, they were to be found thinking, or as Asa Griffiths was wont helplessly to say at times, “praying their way out,” a rather ineffectual way, as Clyde began to think later.

      And the whole neighborhood was so dreary and run-down that he hated the thought of living in it, let alone being part of a work that required constant appeals for aid, as well as constant prayer and thanksgiving to sustain it.

      Mrs. Elvira Griffiths before she had married Asa had been nothing but an ignorant farm girl, brought up without much thought of religion of any kind. But having fallen in love with him, she had become inoculated with the virus of Evangelism and proselytizing which dominated him, and had followed him gladly and enthusiastically in all of his ventures and through all of his vagaries. Being rather flattered by the knowledge that she could speak and sing, her ability to sway and persuade and control people with the “word of God,” as she saw it, she had become more or less pleased with herself on this account and so persuaded to continue.

      Occasionally a small band of people followed the preachers to their mission, or learning of its existence through their street work, appeared there later – those odd and mentally disturbed or distrait souls who are to be found in every place. And it had been Clyde’s compulsory duty throughout the years when he could not act for himself to be in attendance at these various meetings. And always he had been more irritated than favorably influenced by the types of men and women who came here – mostly men – down-and-out laborers, loafers, drunkards, wastrels, the botched and helpless who seemed to drift in, because they had no other place to go. And they were always testifying as to how God or Christ or Divine Grace had rescued them from this or that predicament – never how they had rescued any one else. And always his father and mother were saying “Amen” and “Glory to God,” and singing hymns and afterward taking up a collection for the legitimate expenses of the hall – collections which, as he surmised, were little enough – barely enough to keep the various missions they had conducted in existence.

      The one thing that really interested him in connection with his parents was the existence somewhere in the east – in a small city called Lycurgus, near Utica he understood – of an uncle, a brother of his father’s, who was plainly different from all this. That uncle – Samuel Griffiths by name – was rich. In one way and another, from casual remarks dropped by his parents, Clyde had heard references to certain things this particular uncle might do for a person, if he but would; references to the fact that he was a shrewd, hard business man; that he had a great house and a large factory in Lycurgus for the manufacture of collars and shirts, which employed not less than three hundred people; that he had a son who must be about Clyde’s age, and several daughters, two at least, all of whom must be, as Clyde imagined, living in luxury in Lycurgus. News of all this had apparently been brought west in some way by people who knew Asa and his father and brother. As Clyde pictured this uncle, he must be a kind of Croesus, living in ease and luxury there in the east, while here in the west – Kansas City – he and his parents and his brother and sisters were living in the same wretched and hum-drum, hand-to-mouth state that had always characterized their lives.

      But for this – apart from anything he might do for himself, as he early began to see – there was no remedy. For at fifteen, and even a little earlier, Clyde began to understand that his education, as well as his sisters’ and brother’s, had been sadly neglected. And it would be rather hard for him to overcome this handicap, seeing that other boys and girls with more money and better homes were being trained for special kinds of work. How was one to get a start under such circumstances? Already when, at the age of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen, he began looking in the papers, which, being too worldly, had never been admitted to his home, he found that mostly skilled help was wanted, or boys to learn trades in which at the moment he was not very much interested. For true to the standard of the American youth, or the general American attitude toward life, he felt himself above the type of labor which was purely manual. What! Run a machine, lay bricks, learn to be a carpenter, or a plasterer, or plumber, when boys no better than himself were clerks and druggists’ assistants and bookkeepers and assistants