CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURThe Old Homestead Suffers Disaster
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Old Homestead Suffers Disaster
The summer of 1912, so stormy in a political sense was singularly serene and happy for us. The old house had been received back into favor. It was beloved by us all but especially was it dear to my children. To Mary Isabel it possessed a value which it could not have to any of us, for it was her birth-place and she knew every stick and stone of it. To her it had all the glamor of a childhood home in summer time.
On Sunday, October 6, we began to plan our return to the city, and as we sat about our fire that night the big room never looked so warm, so homelike, so permanent. The deep fireplace was ablaze with light, and the walls packed with books and hung with pictures spoke of a realized ideal. On the tall settee (which I had built myself), lay a richly-colored balletta Navajo blanket, one that I had bought of a Flathead Indian in St. Ignatius. Others from Zuni and Ganado covered the floor. Over the piano "Apple Blossom Time," a wedding present from John Ennecking glowed like a jewel in the light of the quaint electric candles which had been set in the sockets of hammered brass sconces. In short, the place had the mellow charm of a completed home, and I said to Zulime "There isn't much more to do to it. It is rude and queer, a mixture of Paris, Boston, and the Wild West; but it belongs to us." It wasin truth a union of what we both represented, including our poverty, for it was all cheap and humble.
My father, white-haired, eighty-two years of age was living with us again, basking in the light of our fire and smiling at his grandchildren, who with lithe limbs and sweet young voices were singing and circling before him. I was glad to have him back in mother's room, and to him and to those who were to be his care-takers for the winter I gravely repeated, "I want everything kept just as it is. I want to feel that we can come back to it at any time and find every object in place, including the fire."
To which father replied, "I don't want to change it. It suits me."
The children, darting out of the music-room (which was the "dressing-room" of their stage), swung their Japanese lanterns, enacting once again their pretty little play, and then our guests rose two by two and went away. Zulime led the march to bed, the lights were turned out and the clear, crisp, odorous October night closed over our scene.
As I was about to leave the low-ceiled library, I took another look at it saying to myself, "It seems absurd to abandon this roomy, human habitation for a cramped little dwelling on a city lot." But with a sense of what the city offered by way of compensation, I climbed the old-fashioned, crooked, narrow stairway to my bed in the chamber over the music-room, content to say good-by for the winter....
It was dusky dawn when I awoke, with a sense of alarm, unable to tell what had awakened me. For several seconds I lay in confusion and vague suspense. Then a cry, a strange cry—a woman's scream—arose, followed by a rush of feet. Other cries, and the shrieks of children succeeded close, one upon the other.
My first thought was, "Constance has fallen." I sprang from my bed and was standing in the middle of the roomwhen I heard Zulime cross the floor beneath me, and a moment later she called up the stairway, "Hamlin,Fan has set the house on fire!"
My heart was gripped as if by an icy hand for I knew how inflammable the whole building was, and without stopping to put on coat or slippers, I ran swiftly down the stairs. As I entered the sitting-room so silent, so peaceful, so undisturbed, it seemed that my alarm was only a part of a dream till the sobbing of my daughters and my wife's voice at the telephone calling for help, convinced me of the frightful reality. I heard, too, the ominous crackling of flames in the kitchen.
Pushing open the swinging door I confronted a wall of smoke. One-half of the floor was already consumed, and along the linoleum a sharply-defined line of fire told that it rose from burning oil—and yet I could not quite believe it, even then. It was like a scene in a motion picture play.
My first thought was to check, to hold back the flames, till help came. The garden hose was lying out under a tree (I had put it there the day before) and with desperate haste I hurried to attach it to the water pipes. I saw father in the yard, but he uttered no word. We were each thinking the same thought—"The old homestead is doomed. Our life here is ended."
The hose was heavy and sanely perverse, and it seemed an age before I had the water turned on. Catching up the nozzle I approached the kitchen door. The thin stream had no effect, and the heat was so intense I could not face it. Throwing down the hose I reëntered the house.
The children, hysterical with fright, were just leaving by the east door and Zulime was upstairs. Opening the front door I stepped out upon the porch to call for help. The beauty of the morning, its stillness, its serenity, its odorous opulence, struck upon my senses with a kind ofironic benignancy, as if to say, "Why agonize over so small a thing?"
I shouted "Fire!" and my voice went ringing far up the street. I cried out again, a third time, a fourth, but no one answered, no one appeared, and behind me the crackling roar of the flames increased. In despair I turned back into the sitting-room.
It had been arranged between Zulime and myself that in case of fire (once the children were safe), she was to secure the silverware and her jewelry whilst I flew to collect my manuscripts.
With this thought in my mind, and believing that I had but a few minutes in which to work, I ran up the stairs to my study and began gathering such of my manuscripts as had no duplicates. As I thought of the hundreds of letters from my literary friends, of the many family records, of the innumerable notes, pictures, keepsakes, souvenirs and mementoes which had been assembling there for a quarter of a century, I became confused, indecisive. It was so hard to choose. At last I caught up a sheaf of unpublished stories which filled one drawer, and beating off the screen of the north window threw the manuscripts out upon the grass.
A neighbor's wife, quick to understand the meaning of my anxiety about these sheets, ran to her home across the way and bringing a valise, began to stuff them into it. Having cleared my desk of its most valuable papers I hurried to my dressing-room to secure shoes and trousers; but by this time the hall was full of the most nauseating smoke. The fire having swept entirely through the library, was burning the front porch. My escape by way of the stairway was cut off. Blinded and gasping I gave up the search for clothes and turned back into my study.
I was not in the least scared; on the contrary, I was filledwith a kind of fatalistic rage. In imagination I saw the old house, with all that it meant to me, in ruins. I saw the great elms and maples scorched, dead, the tall black locust burned to a ship's mast. As I peered from the window, a neighbor called earnestly, "You'd better get off there; the whole house is going."
From the window I could see the villagers rapidly assembling, and not knowing how far advanced the flames might be I yielded to the advice of my friend, and swinging myself from the window dropped to the ground.
My next care was for the children. I could hear them crying frantically for "papa!" and I hurried to where they stood cowering in the door of the barn. "O, papa, put it out. I don't want it to burn.Put it out!" moaned Mary Isabel with passionate intensity.
Her faith in her father had an infinite pathos at the moment. She loved the house. It was a part of her very brain and blood. To have it burn was a kind of outrage. Little Connie, five years old, with chattering teeth, joined her pleading cry, "Can'tyou put it out, papa?" she asked piteously.
"No," I answered sadly. "Papa can not put it out. Nobody can. You must say good-by to our dear old home."
Wrapping a quilt about her I started across the road toward my neighbor's porch. The yard was full of my fellow-citizens, and young men were heroically dragging out smoking furniture from the lower floor, while over in the Sander's yard piles of books, bedding and furniture were accumulating. It was all curiously familiar and typical.
In the full belief that the homestead would soon be a heap of charcoal, we took the children back into our friend's dining-room. "Pull down the curtain," entreated Zulime, "we don't want to see the old place go."
Helpless for lack of street clothing, with my children onmy knees, I sat in silence, noting the flickering glare of the light on the walls, and hearing the shouts of the firemen and the sound of their axes.
Huldah, our neighbor's daughter, entered. "They're checking it!" she exclaimed. "It is under control."
This seemed incredible, but it was confirmed by George Dudley, who came in bringing my shoes and a suit of my clothing.
When at last I was fully clothed and could go out into the street I was amazed to find a part of the house standing. Most of the east wing seemed quite untouched, except of smoke and water. The west wing and front porch were in black disarray, but the roof held its place and the trees seemed scarcely scorched. A few firemen, among them the village plumber, the young banker, and a dentist, were on guard, watchfully intent that the flames should not break out again. The sun was rising gloriously over the hills. The fire, my fire, was over.
No doubt this event appeared most trivial to the travelers in a passing train. From the car windows it was only a column of smoke in the edge of a small village. Our disaster offered, indeed, only a mild sensation to the occupants of an early automobile party, but to my father, to Zulime and to the children, it was a desolate and appalling ruin. They had grown to love this old house foolishly, illogically, for it was neither beautiful nor historic, nor spacious. It was only a commonplace frame cottage, inwrought with memories and associations, but it was home—all we had.
The yard was piled with furniture, half-burned, soaked and malodorous, but none of my manuscripts were in sight. I had expected to find them scattered like feathers across the garden or trampled into the muddy sward. In reply to my question my friend Dudley replied, "They're allsafe. I had the boys carry them down in blankets. You'll find them in the barn."
As I moved about silently, studying the ruins, the kindliest of my neighbors said, "You'll have to entirely rebuild." And to this a carpenter, a skilled and honest workman, agreed. "The cheapest thing to do is to tear it all down and start from the foundation."
Slowly, minutely, I studied the ruin. Surely here was gruesome change! Black, ill-smelling, smoking debris lay where our pretty dining-room had been. The library with all my best books (many of them autographed) was equally desolate, heaped with steaming, charred masses of tables, chairs, rugs and fallen plaster. I thought of it as it had been the night before, with the soft lights of the candles falling upon my children dancing with swinging lanterns. I recalled Ennecking's radiant spring painting, and Steele's "Bloom of the Grape," which glowed above the mantle, and my heart almost failed me—"Is this the end of my life in Wisconsin?"
For twenty years this little village had been the place of my family altar, not because it was remarkable in any way, but because since 1850 it had been the habitat of my mother's people and because it was filled with my father's pioneer friends. "Is it worth while to rebuild?" I asked myself. For the time I lost direction. I had no plan.
The sight of my white-haired father wandering about the yard, dazed, bewildered, his eyes filled with a look of despair at last decided me. Realizing that this was his true home; that no other roof could have the same appeal, and he could not be transplanted, I resolved to cover his head; to make it possible for him to live out his few remaining years under this roof with his granddaughters. "For his sake and the children's sake," I announced to Zulime, "I shall begin at once to clear away and restore. Before thewinter comes you shall all be back in the old House. Perhaps we can eat our Thanksgiving dinner in the restored dining-room."
Whether she fully shared my desire to rebuild or whether she believed in my ability to carry out my plan so quickly I can not say. In such matters she was not decisive—she rested on my stubborn will.
The day came on—glorious, odorous, golden—but we saw little of its beauty. Engaged in digging the family silver out of the embers, and collecting my scattered books and papers I had no time to look at the sky. Occasionally, as I looked up from my work I saw my little daughters playing with childish intentness among the fallen leaves in my neighbor's yard, and in mistaken confidence I remarked what a blessing it is that childhood can so easily forget disaster.
I did not realize then, nor till many months after, how profound the shock had been to them. For years after the event they started at every unusual sound and woke at night screaming of fire.
All that day and all the days of the week which followed they played with the same singular insect-like absorption and at last I began to get some notion of their horror. They refused to enter the yard. "I don't want to see it," Mary Isabel wailed. Then she asked, "Will it ever be home for us again?"
"Yes," I answered with final determination. "I'll put it back just as it was before the fire came. It shall be nicer than ever when I am done."
Before night I had engaged a crew of men to clear away. Thereafter I lived like a man in a tunnel. I saw almost nothing of the opulent, golden sunshine, nothing of the exquisite foliage, nothing of the far hills, purple with Indian summer haze. Busily sorting my burned books orspreading out my treasured rugs, I toiled as long as light lasted. There were a few pleasant surprises. From one charred frame the face of Frank Norris, miraculously fresh and handsome and smiling, looked out through smoked and broken glass. In one corner of the sideboard (decorated by Thompson-Seton), a part of the silver bearing my mother's initials lay quite unharmed, though all of the pieces on the top were melted into a flat mass of bullion. Autographed books from Howells, Riley, Gilbert Parker, Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, fell to pieces in my hand, or showed so deep a stain of smoke as to make their rebinding impossible. My best Navajo rug, a fine example of the ancient weaving, was a frail cinder on the back of the charred settee, and a Hopi ceremonial dress which hung upon the wall was a blackened shred.
All these things had small money value, and to many men, would have represented no interest whatsoever, but to me they were precious. They were a part of my life. To burn them was to char a section of my brain. Pitiful possessions! Worthless rags! And yet they were the best I could show after thirty years of labor with the pen!
My father's condition troubled me most. To have him rendered homeless at eighty-two with winter coming on seemed to me an intolerable cruelty, and so with a driving haste I set to work with my own hands to clear away and restore. Wielding the wrecking bar and the spade each day, I toiled like a hired man—even after the carpenters were gone at night I scraped paint and shoveled rubbish.
Let no one pity me! A curious pleasure came with all this, for it seemed to advance the reconstruction with double swiftness.
At the end of the week I sent my wife and the children back to their city home, and thereafter I had but one interest, one diversion—to plan and execute my rebuilding.To close the walls, to make the rooms secure against wind and rain was imperative.
The insurance inspector came pleasantly to the rescue, and with a small balance in the bank I hired roofers, plumbers, carpenters, masons, till the street resounded with their clamor. In a week I had the rooms cleared, the doors and windows closed, and my father living in one corner of the house, whilst I camped down in my study. Water-soaked, ill-smelling, but inhabitable, the old house again possessed a light and a hearth.
"The children and their grandsire shall eat Thanksgiving dinner in the rebuilt dining-room," was my secret sentimental resolution. "To do that will turn a wail into a song—a disaster into a poem."
All very foolish, you say. No doubt, but it interested me and I was of an age when very few things interested me vitally. With clothing black as soot, with hands brown with stain and skinned and swollen and feverish, I kept to my job without regard to Sundays or the ordinary hours of labor. I was not seeking sympathy,—I was renewing my youth. I was both artist and workman. My muscles hardened, my palms broadened, my appetite became prodigious. I lost all fear of indigestion and ate anything which my friend Dudley was good enough to provide. I even drank coffee at every opportunity, and went so far as to eat doughnuts and pancakes at breakfast! To be deliciously hungry as of old was heartening.
The weather continued merciful. Each day the sun rose red and genial, and at noon the warm haze of Indian summer trailed along the hills—though I had little time in which to enjoy it. Each sunset marked a new stanza in my poem, a completed phrase, a recovered figure. "Our small affairs have shut out the light of the sun," I said to father, "the political situation has lost all interest for me."
Bare, clean and sweet, the library and music-room at last were ready for furniture. All these must be replaced. A hurried trip to the city, three days of determined shopping with Zulime, and a stream of new goods (necessary to refurnish), began to set toward the threshold. The draymen plied busily between the station and the gate.
By November first my father and I were camping in the library and cooking our own food in the dining-room. We rose each day before dawn and ate our bacon and coffee while yet the stars twinkled in the west, and both of us were reminded of the frosty mornings on our Iowa farm, when we used to eat by candle-light in order to husk corn by starlight. My hands felt as they used to feel when, worn by the rasping husks, they burned with fever. Heavy as hams, they refused to hold a pen, and my mind refused to compose even letters—but the pen was not needed. "My poem is composed of wood and steel," I remarked to Dudley.
At last the yard was cleared of its charred rubbish, the porch restored to its old foundation, and the new metal roof, broad-spreading and hospitable, gleamed like snow in dusk and dawn, and from the uncurtained windows our relighted lamps called to the world that the Garland household was about to reassemble and the author permitted himself to straighten up. Changing to my city garments I took the train for Chicago, promising to bring the children with me when our Thanksgiving turkey was fatted for the fire.
My daughters listened eagerly to my tale of the new house, but expressed a fear of sleeping in it. This fear I determined to expel.
On the Saturday before Thanksgiving I rejoined my workmen, finding the house in a worse state of disarray than when I had last seen it. The floors were littered with dust and shavings, and in the dining-room my father, deeply discouraged, was gloomily cooking his breakfast onan oil stove set in the middle of the floor. "It'll take another month to finish the job," he said.
"Oh, no it won't," I replied. "It won't take a week."
Fortunately the stain on the floor was dry and with the aid of two good men I finished the woodwork and beat the rugs. In a couple of days the lower house was livable.
On Wednesday at five o'clock I went to the train, leaving the electric lights all ablaze and the fire snapping in the chimney. It looked amazingly comfortable, restored, settled, and I was confident the children would respond to its cheer.
"Is it all made new?" they asked wistfully.
"Wait and see!" I confidently replied.
The night was cold and dark but as they neared the old house its windows winked a cheery welcome. "Why, it looks just as it used to!" exclaimed Mary Isabel.
"There are lights in our room!" exclaimed Constance.
"Run ahead, and knock," I urged.
She hung back. "I'm afraid," she said.
"So am I," echoed Connie.
The new metal roof gleaming like frost interested them as they entered the gate.
"Why, the porch is all here!" shouted Constance.
"But the screens are off," commented Mary Isabel.
"Knock!" I commanded.
Reaching up to the shining old brass knocker she banged it sharply.
The house awoke! White-haired old father came to the door and, first of all, the children sprang to his arms.
Then as they looked around they shouted with joy. "Why, it's just as it was—only nicer," was their verdict.
While Zulime looked keenly and smilingly around, Connie ran from settee to bookcase. "Everything is here—our books, the fireplace."
"Isn't it wonderful!" Mary Isabel exclaimed.
After greeting father Zulime surveyed the result of my six weeks' toil with critical but approving eyes. "I like it. It's much better than I expected. Itiswonderful. But we must have new curtains for the windows," she added, with the housewife's attention to details.
The children danced through the brilliantly lighted rooms, but declined to go into the dining-room or to open the door to the kitchen which they remembered only as a mass of black embers and steaming ashes. I did not urge them to do so. On the contrary, I gathered them round me on the restored hearth and talked of the Thanksgiving dinner of the morrow.
As the hour for bedtime came Connie's eyes grew big and dark, and every small unusual sound startled her. Daddy's presence at last reassured them both and they went to sleep and, with only one or two restless intervals, slumbered till daylight.
Two of our neighbors—two capable women, came in next morning to help, and in a few hours the windows were curtained, the linen laid out and the turkey in the oven. Under Zulime's hands the rooms bloomed into homeliness. The kitchen things fell into orderly array. Pictures took their places on the walls, little knick-knacks which had been brought from the city were set on the mantels and bookcases, and when our guests arrived they each and all exclaimed, "No one would ever know you'dhada fire!"
At one o'clock the cooks, the children and Zulime all agreed that the fowl was ready for the carver and so we all assembled in the new and larger dining-room. No formal Thanksgiving was spoken, but vaguely forming in my mind was a poem which should express our joy and gratitude. My brother's seat was empty and so were those of other loved ones, but we did not dwell upon these sadthings. I was living, working and planning now for the vivid souls of my daughters whose glowing cheeks and laughing eyes repaid me for all my toil. For them I had rebuilt this house—for them and their grandsire—whose trail was almost at its end. How happy he was in their presence! They, too, were happy because they were young, the sun was shining and their home was magically restored.
The happiest time of all was at night, when the evening shadows closed round the friendly walls, and the trees sighed in the chill wind—for beside the fire we gathered, the Garlands and McClintocks, in the good old fashion, while our neighbors came in to congratulate and rejoice. All the black terror of the dismantled house, all the toil and worry of the months which lay between, were forgotten as the children, without a care, sang and danced in the light of our new and broadened hearth.
That night as my daughters, "dressed up" as princesses, danced like fairies in the light of our restored and broadened hearth, I forgot all the toil, all the disheartenment which the burning of the house had brought upon me. To them the re-built homestead was only another evidence of their Daddy's magic power. His lamp was not less potent than Aladdin's.That night as my daughters, "dressed up" as princesses, danced like fairies in the light of our restored and broadened hearth, I forgot all the toil, all the disheartenment which the burning of the house had brought upon me. To them the re-built homestead was only another evidence of their Daddy's magic power. His lamp was not less potent than Aladdin's.
That night as my daughters, "dressed up" as princesses, danced like fairies in the light of our restored and broadened hearth, I forgot all the toil, all the disheartenment which the burning of the house had brought upon me. To them the re-built homestead was only another evidence of their Daddy's magic power. His lamp was not less potent than Aladdin's.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVEDarkness Just Before the Dawn
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Darkness Just Before the Dawn
In going back over the records of the years 1912 and 1913, I can see that my life was lacking in "drive." It is true I wrote two fairly successful novels which were well spoken of by my reviewers and in addition I continued to conduct the Cliff Dwellers' Club and to act as one of the Vice Presidents of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, but I was very far from a feeling of satisfaction with my position. My life seemed dwindling into futility. I was in physical pain much of the time and tortured by a fear of the future.
Naturally and inevitably the burden of my increasing discontent, worse health, fell with sad reiteration upon my wife, who was not only called upon to endure poverty, but to bear with a sick and disheartened husband. The bravery of her smile served to increase my sense of unworthiness. Her very sweetness, her cheerful acceptance of never-ending household drudgery, was an accusation.
She no longer touched brush or clay, although I strongly urged her to sketch or model the children. She had no time, even if she had retained the will, to continue her work as an artist. With a faculty for entertaining handsomely and largely, with hosts of friends who would have clustered about her with loyal admiration, she remained the mistress of a narrow home and one more or less incompetent housemaid. All these considerations added to my sense ofweakness and made the particular manuscript upon which I was spending most of my time, a piece of selfish folly.
For ten years I had been working, from time to time, on an autobiographical manuscript which I had called by various names, but which had finally solidified intoA Son of the Middle Border. Even in my days of deepest discouragement I turned most of my energy to its revision. In the belief that it was my final story and with small hope of its finding favor in any form, I toiled away, year after year, finding in the aroused memories of my youthful world a respite from the dull grind of my present.
My duties as head of the Cliff Dwellers and as Secretary of The Theater Society tended to keep me in Chicago. My lecture engagements became fewer and I dropped out or Eastern Club life, retaining only long distance connection with the world of Arts and Letters. In losing touch with my fellows something vital had gone out of me.
In spite of all my former protestations, the city began to take on the color of Henry Fuller's pessimism. My youthful faith in Chicago's future as a great literary center had faded into middle-aged doubt. One by one its writers were slipping away to Manhattan. The Midland seemed farther away from publishers than ever, "The current is all against us," declared Fuller.
As a man of fifty-two I found myself more and more discordant with my surroundings. With sadness I conceded that not in my time would any marked change for the better take place. "Such as Chicago now is, so it will remain during my life," I admitted to Fuller.
"Yes, if it doesn't get worse," was his sad reply.
I would have put my Woodlawn house on sale in 1912 had it not been for my father's instant protest. "Don't take Zulime and the children so far away," he pleaded. "If you move to New York I shall never see any of you again.Stay where you are. Wait till I am 'mustered out'—it won't be long now."
There was no resisting this appeal. With a profound sense of what Zulime and the children meant to him, I gave up all thought of going East and settled back into my groove. "We will remain where we are so long as father lives," I declared to my friends.
My wife, who had perceived with alarm my growing discontent with Chicago, was greatly relieved by this decision. To her the thought of migration even to the North Side was disturbing, for it would break her close connection with the circle whose center was in her brother's studio. I am not seeking to excuse my recreancy to The Middle West; I am merely stating it as a phase of literary history, for my case is undoubtedly typical of many other writers who turned their faces eastward.
The plain truth is I had reached an age where I no longer cared to pioneer even in a literary sense. Desirous of the acceptances proper to a writer with gray hair and a string of creditable books, I wished to go where honor waited. I craved a place as a man of letters. That my powers were deteriorating in the well-worn rut of my life in Woodlawn I knew too well, and my need of contact with my fellow craftsmen in the East sharpened. The support and inspiration which come naturally to authors in contact with their kind were being denied me. Age was bringing me no "harvest home." In short, at the very time when I should have been most honored, most recompensed, in my work, I found myself living meanly in a mean street and going about like a man of mean concerns, having little influence on my art or among my fellows.
That Chicago was still on the border in a literary sense was sharply emphasized when the National Institute of Arts and Letters decided (after much debate), to hold its Annual Meeting for 1913 in the midland metropolis. "Itis a long way out to Chicago," its Secretary wrote, "and I don't know how many members we can assemble, but I think we shall be able to bring twenty-five at least. You have been appointed chairman of the Committee of Arrangements, with full powers to go ahead."
The honor and responsibility of this appointment spurred me to action. I decided to accept and make the meeting a literary milestone in western history. My first thought was to make the Cliff Dwellers' Club the host of the occasion, but on further consideration, I reckoned that the City's welcome would have greater weight if all its literary and artistic forces could be in some way combined. To bring this about I directed letters to the heads of seventeen clubs and educational organizations, asking them to meet with me and form a joint Reception Committee.
This they did, and in a most harmonious session elected Hobart Chatfield-Taylor chairman. To this Committee I then said, "If we are to have any considerable number of our distinguished eastern authors and artists at this dinner we must make it very easy for them to travel. We should have a special train for them or at least special sleeping cars so that they can come as if in a moving club."
In this plan I had instant support. The sturdy group of men who had been so ready to aid me in building up the Cliff Dwellers (men like Hutchinson, Logan, Glessner, Ryerson, Aldis, and Heckmen), all took vital interest in the arrangements for the reception and dinner. The necessary funds were immediately subscribed, and my report to the Institute Council created a fine feeling of enthusiasm in the ranks of both organizations. The success of the meeting was assured. Some of the oldest members wrote, "It is a long way out there but we are coming."
The press of the city responded generously and some of its editors perceived and stated the historical significanceof this pilgrimage of poets, artists, and historians to "the sparsely settled Border of Esthetic Culture." A trainload of men who painted, sculptured and composed, men who were entirely concerned with the critical or esthetic side of life, an academy of arts and letters rolling westward, was a new and wondrous phase of national exploration. The invasion was also capable of comic interpretation and a few graceless wags did allude to it as "a missionary expedition to Darkest Illinois."
To Fuller, to Chatfield-Taylor and to me, this joke was not altogether pleasant. We knew all too well the feeling of some of the writers who were coming. Several of them were seeing "the West" for the first time in their lives, others had not been in Chicago since the World's Fair in '93. All were conscious of the effort involved in reaching the arid and unknown frontier.
The entire Middle West had only ten resident members of the Institute although a large proportion of its membership was drawn from the Southern and Central Western States, "All trails lead to New York and there are no returning footsteps," commented Fuller. "Once a writer or painter or illustrator pulls his stakes and sets out for Manhattan, Chicago sees him no more."
All this was disheartening to those of us who, twenty years before, had visioned Chicago as a shining center of American art, but we went forward with our preparations, hoping that a fairly representative delegation could be induced to come.
Some thirty-five arrived safely, and the Dinner of Welcome in Sculpture Hall not only set a milestone in the progress of the city, but was in itself a beautiful and distinctive event.
The whole panorama of western settlement and its city building unrolled before me, as Charles L. Hutchinson,President of the Art Institute, rose in his place, and in the name of the most aspiring of Chicago's men and women, welcomed the members of the American Academy and the National Institute as representatives of American Art and American Literature. Once again and for the moment our city became a capital in something like the character of Boston a generation before. This conception was illusory, of course, but we permitted ourselves the illusion and accepted the praise which our visitors showered upon us with a belief that we had gained, at last, a recognized place in the Nation's esthetic history.
During the weeks of preparation for this event I had been happy and content, but a few days later, after the clubs had fallen back to their normal humdrum level I acknowledged with a sense of hopeless weariness that our huge city had a long way to go before it could equal the small Boston of Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, and Howells. My desire to rejoin my fellows in New York was intensified. "As there is only one London for England so there is only one New York for America."
All through the autumn of 1913 I ground away at my story of the Middle Border, conscious of the fact that—in a commercial sense—I was wasting my time, for several of my editorial friends had assured me of that fact—but each morning as I climbed to my study I forgot my drab surroundings. Closing the door of the bitter present and turning my back on the stormy future I relived my audacious youth and dreamed of the brave days of old.
Thanksgiving Day in West Salem was misty, dark and still, but the children—bless their shining faces—regarded it as just the right kind of weather for our festival. They were up early and running of errands for their mother who was chief cook. Our only guests were three lonely old women, and it gave me a pang of pity for the children whowere forced thus to tolerate a group of gray-heads to whom life was a closing, mournful dirge. Happily, my daughters had the flame of invincible youth in their blood and danced and sang as if the world were new and wholly beautiful, which it was, to them.
Dear little daughters! They didn't know that Daddy was worried about his future and theirs, and no sooner were we back in our Chicago home than they began to look away toward Christmas. "Poppie!"—Mary Isabel would repeat—"only three weeks till—you know what! Remember!"
I remembered. Once again their stockings were stuffed to the hem, and their tree, a marvel of light, touched the ceiling with its pliant tip on which sparkled a golden star. To them I was still a wonder-worker. For a week I put aside my dark musings and rejoiced with them in their fairy world.
Now it chanced that the University Club of Pittsburg had booked me for a lecture early in January and in taking account of this, I planned to invade Manhattan once again, in a desperate attempt to dispose of my rewrittenSon of the Middle Border, and to offer, also, one or two short stories which I had lately put into clean copy. Humbly, sadly, unwillingly I left my home that cold, bleak, dirty day, staggering under the weight of my valises, for I was not in good health and my mood was irresolute.
Change was in my world and change of an ominous kind was in my brain. Subjects which once interested me had lost their savor, and several tales in which I had put my best effort had failed to meet my own approval and had been thrown aside. No mechanic, no clerk, would have envied me as I boarded a filthy street car on my way to the Englewood station. That I had reached a fork in my trail was all too evident. The things for which I had laboredall my days were as ashes in my hand. I walked with a stoop and the bag containing my manuscript dragged at my shoulder like a fifty-pound weight as I painfully climbed the steps leading to the waiting-room of the grimy, noisy, train station. I was a million miles from being a "distinguished man of letters" at that moment, and with a sense of my poverty and declining health, took a seat in the crowded day coach and rode all day in gloomy silence. At noon I dined on a sandwich. Dollars looked as large as dinner plates that day. "Your only way to earn money is to save it," I accused myself.
At the University Club in Pittsburg I recovered slightly. The lecture having been announced to take place in the dining-room could not be staged till nine o'clock—a fact which worried me for I had arranged to take the night train for the East—and this alarm, this fear of losing my train led me to begin by address while my audience was assembling, and my hurried utterance led to weariness on the part of my hearers. My performance was a failure, and to complete my disheartenment I reached the station about five minutes after the last eastern train had pulled out.
Dismayed by this mishap, I took a seat in a corner and darkly ruminated. "What shall I do now? Shall I go back to Chicago? Or shall I go on?"
Decision was in reality taken out of my hands by the baggageman who said in response to inquiry, "I put your trunk on the 8:40 train. It is well on its way to New York."
Accepting this as a mandate to go on, I returned to my room in the University Club and went to bed, but not to sleep. For hours I tossed and turned in self-questioning, self-accusing fury.
"What a fool you have been to waste years of labor ona book which nobody wants and which has put you—temporarily at least—out of conceit with fiction. Why go on? Why spend more time and money on a vain attempt to dispose of this manuscript?"
Falling asleep at last, I regained a part of my courage, and at breakfast a faint glow of hope crept into my thinking. At nine o'clock I took the day train and in silence rode for nearly twelve hours, retracing the thirty years which lay between my first view of Manhattan and this my hundredth reëntrance. With no thrill of excitement I crossed the ferry and having registered at a small hotel on Thirty-fourth Street, went to bed at nine o'clock completely worn out with my journey.
A long night's sleep and a pot of delicious coffee for breakfast put so much sunshine into my world that I set out for Franklin Square with a gambler's countenance, resolute to conceal my dismay from my friends and especially from my publisher. There was something in the very air of Broadway which generated confidence.
Harpers' editors were genial, respectful, but by no means enthusiastic concerning my autobiographic manuscript, although I assured Duneka that I had vastly improved it since he had read it a year before.
"That may be," he granted, "but it is not fiction and nothing serializes but fiction. We'll be glad to schedule it as a book, but I don't see any place for it in our magazine." And then—more to get rid of me than for any other reason, he added, "You might seeCollier's. Mark Sullivan is the editor up there now; it might be that he could use something of yours."
Duneka's indifference even more than his shunting my precious manuscript into the street brought back my cloud of doubt, for it indicated a loss of faith in me. To him I was a squeezed lemon. Nevertheless I took his hint.Sullivan, I knew and liked, and while I had small hope of interesting him inThe Middle Border, I did think he might buy one or two of my short stories.
TheCollier'splant humming with speed, prosperous and commercial, was not reassuring to me, but I kept on through the maze until I reached Sullivan's handsome room, where I was given an easy chair and told to wait, "the editor will see you in a few minutes."
Alert, kindly, cordial, Mark greeted me and taking a seat, fixed his keen blue, kindly eyes upon me. "I'm glad to see you," he said, and I believed he meant it. He went on, "This is the psychological moment for us both. I am looking for American material and I want something of yours. What have you to show me?"
Thus encouraged I told him ofA Son of the Middle Border.
He was interested. "Where is the manuscript? Is it complete?"
"It is. I have it with me at the hotel."
"Send it down to me," he said quickly, "I'll read it and give you a verdict at once."
In an illogical glow of hope I hastened to fetch the manuscript, and in less than two hours it was in his hands.
I speak of my hope as "illogical" for if the literary monthly of my own publishers could not find a place for it, how could I reasonably expect a hustling, bustling popular weekly likeCollier'sto use it?
Nevertheless something in Sullivan's voice and manner restored my confidence, and when I called on the editor of theCenturyI was able to assume the tone of successful authorship. The closer I got to my market the more assured I became. I counted for something in New York. My thirty years of effort were remembered in my favor.
On Tuesday Sullivan, who had been called to the West,wired me from Chicago thatA Son of the Middle Borderwould make an admirable serial and that his assistants would take the matter up with me. "I predict a great success for it."
That night I sent a message to my wife in which I exultantly said, "Rejoice! I've soldThe Middle BordertoCollier's Weekly. Our troubles are over for a year at least."
Two days laterCollier'stook a short story at four hundred dollars and theCenturygave me three hundred for an article on James A. Herne, and when I boarded the train for Chicago the following week I was not only four thousand dollars better off than when I came—I had regained my faith in the future. My task was clearly outlined. For the seventh time I set to work revisingA Son of the Middle Border, preparing it for serial publication.
My father, who knew that I had been writing upon this story for years, stared at me in silent amazement when I told him of its sale. That the editor of a great periodical should be interested in a record of the migrations and failures of the McClintocks and Garlands was incredible. Nevertheless he was eager to see it in print—and when in March the first installment appeared, he read it with absorbed attention and mixed emotions. "Aren't you a little hard on me?" he asked with a light in his eyes which was half-humorous, half-resentful.
"I don't think so, Father," I replied. "You must admit you were a stern disciplinarian in those days."
"Well maybe I was—but I didn't realize it."
My first understanding of the depths this serial sounded came to me in the letters which were written to the editor by those who could not find words in which to express their longing for the bright world gone—the world when they were young and glad. "You have written my life," eachone said—and by this they meant that the facts of my family history, and my own emotional experiences were so nearly theirs that my lines awoke an almost intolerable regret in their hearts—an ache which is in my own heart to-day—the world-old hunger of the gray-haired man dwelling upon the hope and illusions of youth.
These responses which indicated a wider and more lasting effect than I had hoped to produce, led me to plan for the publication of the book close on the heels of the concluding installment of the serial but in this I was disappointed. The Mexican war suddenly thrust new and tremendously exciting news articles into the magazine, separating and delaying the printing of my story. Had it not been for the loyalty of Mark Sullivan it would have been completely side-tracked, but he would not have it so; on the contrary he began to talk with me about printing six more installments, and this necessarily put off the question of finding a publisher for the book.
Nevertheless I returned to my desk in the expectation that the Mexican excitement was only a flurry and that the magazine would be able to complete the publication of the manuscript within the year. My harvest was not destroyed; it was only delayed.