One day, on Commonwealth Avenue, as Louis was strolling, he saw a large man of dignified bearing, with beard, top hat, frock coat, come out of a nearby building, enter his carriage and signal the coachman to drive on. The dignity was unmistakable, all men of station in Boston were dignified; sometimes insistently so, but Louis wished to know who and what was behind the dignity. So he asked one of the workmen, who said:
“Why he’s the archeetec of this building.”
“Yes? and what is an archeetec, the owner?”
“Naw; he’s the man what drawed the plans for this building.”
“What! What’s that you say: drawed the plans for this building?”
“Sure. He lays out the rooms on paper, then makes a picture of the front, and we do the work under our own boss, but the archeetec’s the boss of everybody.”
Louis was amazed. So this was the way: The workmen stood behind their boss, their boss stood behind the archeetec—but the building stood in front of them all. He asked the man if there had been an “archeetec” for the Masonic Temple, and the man said: “Sure, there’s an archeetec for every building.” Louis was incredulous, but if it were true it was glorious news. How great, how wonderful a man must have been the “archeetec” of his beloved temple! So he asked the man how the architect made the outside of the temple and the man said: “Why, he made it out of his head; and he had books besides.” The “books besides” repelled Louis: anybody could do that; but the “made it out of his head” fascinated him.
How could a man make so beautiful a building out of his head? What a great man he must be; what a wonderful man. Then and there Louis made up his mind to become an architect and make beautiful buildings “out of his head.” He confined this resolve to the man. But the man said:
“I don’t know about that. You got to know a lot first. You got to have an education. Of course us mechanics has our books too. That’s the way we lay out stairs, rails and things like that. But you got to have more brains, more experience, more education and more books, especially more books, to be an archeetec. Can yer father keep yer at school long enough?”
“Yes; he says he’ll keep me at school until I’m twenty-one if I wish.”
“Well, that being so, yer may stand a chance of coming out ahead, but I honestly don’t think yer have the right kind of brains. That faraway look in yer eyes makes me think yer won’t be practical, and y’ got to be practical. I’m a foreman and that’s as far as I’ll get, and I’ve done work under a good many archeetecs; and some of them that’s practical ain’t much else. And some of them that’s fairly practical has so much education from books that they gets awful fussy, and are hard to get on with.” The latter part of this monologue interested Louis rather faintly, for he’d made up his mind. He thanked the foreman who said in parting: “Well, I dunno—mebbe.”
Shortly before his father left Boston for Chicago, Louis confided to him his heart’s desire. The father seemed pleased, greatly pleased, that his son’s ambition was centering on something definite. He “allowed,” as they used to say in New England, that Architecture was a great art, the mother of all the arts, and its practice a noble profession, adding a word or two about Michelangelo. Then he offered a counter proposal that made Louis gasp. It was none other than this: That Louis was fond of the farm and the open, that he had shown himself a natural farmer with ready mastery of detail of common farming. Why not go further. After proper preparation he would send Louis to an agricultural college, he said, and thus Louis would be equipped as a scientific farmer. Louis was dazzled. The word scientific was electrical. Before him arose the woods, the fields, the cattle, the crops, the great grand open world as a narcotic phantom of delight. The father was eloquent concerning blooded stock, plant cross-fertilization, the chemistry of soils and fertilizers, underdrainage, and so forth; Louis wavered. He sat long in silence, on his father’s knee, lost to the world. Then he said: “No: I have made up my mind.”
And thus it was agreed that Louis should remain in Boston to complete his General Education; after that to a Technical School; and, some day—Abroad.
During the years preceding his decision, Louis, in practice, was essentially scatterbrained. His many and varied activities and preoccupations, physical, mental, emotional, his keen power of observation, his insatiable hunger for knowledge at first hand, his temperamental responses to externals, his fleeting mystic trances, his utterly childlike flashes of intuition, his welcoming of new worlds, opening upon him one after another, his perception that they must grow larger and larger, his imagination, unknown to him as such; all these things, impenetrable to him in their vast significance within the gigantic and diverse world of men and things and thoughts and acts, a world as yet sealed tight to him; all these things seemed to exist within him formless, aimless, a disconnected miscellany rich in impulse but devoid of order, of form, of intention.
Yet this was not precisely the fact. It was an ostensible fact, objectively, a non-fact, subjectively; for a presiding order, a primal impulse, was governing and shaping him through his own marvel at manifestations of power, his constant wonder at what men could do; at men’s power to do what they willed to do; and deeper than this moved a power he had heard in the Song of Spring, and which awakened within the glory of the sunrise.
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