These strangers in this setting thrilled me. Comedy, tragedy, character, plot--there seemed nothing in life but the writing of tales--watching, listening, dreaming, finding, then becoming deeply excited, feeling them grow inside of you, planning them out and writing them off, then working them over and over and over, little by little building them up. What a rich absorbing life for a fellow, and for me it still lay all ahead. I had used but twenty-two years of my life, there were fifty left to write in, and what couldn't you write in fifty years!
Often, sitting here at night, I would get an idea and begin to work, and I would keep on until at last the enormous old woman who kept the café--we called her "The Blessed Damozel"--would come lumbering out and good humoredly growl,
"Couches-toi donc. Une heure vient de sonner."
There came a brief interruption. Into our street's procession one evening, over its round cobblestones on a bicycle that wearily wobbled, there came a lean dusty figure with something distinctly familiar in the stoop of the big shoulders.
It was. Joe Kramer arriving in Paris at midnight on a punctured tire, and cursing the cobblestone pavements over which he had hunted us out.
A hot supper, a bottle of wine, a genial beam on all three of us, and Joe told his story. After leaving college, from New York he had gone to Kansas City, and by the "livest paper" there he had been sent abroad with a bike to do a series of "Sunday specials." He had come over steerage and written an exposé of his passage. He had two weeks for Paris and then was off to Berlin and Vienna.
"I'm just breaking ground this time, boys," he said. "I want to get the hang of the countries and a start in their infernal languages."
The next day he began to break ground in our city. Early the next morning I found Joe propped up in bed scowling into _Le Matin_ as he tried to butt his way through the language into the news events of the day. What I tried to tell him of the Paris I had found made no appeal whatever.
"All right, Kid," he said indulgently. "If I had a dozen lifetimes I might be a poet. But I haven't, so I'll just be a reporter."
And he and his bike plunged into the town. He found its "newspaper row" that day and a Frenchman to whom he had a letter. With this man Joe went to the Bourse and that night to the Chamber of Deputies. He got "Sunday specials" out of them both, and then went on to the Bourse de Travail. And in the few spare moments he had, Joe told us of the things he had seen. Rumors of war and high finance, trade unions, strikes and sabotage burst on my startled artist's ears. It made me think of the harbor! _This_ was not my Paris!