CHAPTER SEVENTEENSigns of Change
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Signs of Change
As a matter of record, and for the benefit of young readers who may be contemplating authorship, I here set down the fact that notwithstanding my increasing royalties, my gross income for 1901 was precisely $3,100. Out of this we saved five hundred dollars. Neither my wife nor I had any great hopes of the future. Neither of us felt justified in any unusual expenditures, and as for speculation—nothing could induce me to buy a share of stock—or even a bond (gilt-edged or otherwise), for I owned a prejudice, my father's prejudice, against all forms of intangible wealth. Evidences of wealth did not appeal to me. I wanted the real thing, I wanted the earth. Nothing but land gave me the needed sense of security.
In my most exalted moments I began to dream of using my income fromThe Captain of the Gray Horse Troopin the purchase of more Oklahoma land. In imagination I saw myself in a wide-rimmed hat and white linen suit sitting at ease on the porch of a broad-roofed house (built in the Mexican style with a patio) looking out over my thousand acres—I had decided to have just a thousand acres, it made such a mouth-filling announcement to one's friends.
I did not go so far as to think of a life without labor (I expected to work in the North till February, then rest and ride horse-back for three months in the South), but I did hope to relieve Zulime of some of her drudgery. Now that I think back to it, I am not at all sure that my wife rejoiced over my plan to go to Weatherford to purchaseanother farm. It is probable that I overcame her objections by telling her that I wanted more material for my book of Indian tales; anyhow I left her in Chicago almost as soon as we arrived there, and went again to Darlington and Colony to see Major Stouch and John Seger, and to make certain observations for President Roosevelt.
Seger, unskilled as he was with the pen, could talk with humor and pictorial quality, and some of his stories had so stimulated my imagination that I was eager to have more time with him among his wards. Without precisely following his narratives I had found myself able to reproduce the spirit of them in my own diction. His ability as a sign-talker was of especial service to me for, as he signed to his visitors, he muttered aloud, for my benefit, what he was expressing in gesture, and also what the red man signed in reply. In this way I got at the psychology of the Cheyenne to a degree which I could not possibly compass through an interpreter.
While looking for farms during the day, I drew from Seger night by night, the amazing story of his career among the Southern Cheyennes. It was a rough and disjointed narrative, but it was stirring and valuable as authentic record of the Southwest. "The Red Pioneer," "Lone Wolf's Old Guard," and many more of my tales of red people were secured on this trip. Several dealing with the Blackfeet and Northern Cheyennes, like "the Faith of His Fathers" and "White Weasel" I gained from Stouch. None of them are true in the sense of being precisely the way they were told, for I took very few notes. They are rather free transcripts of the incidents which chanced to follow my liking—but they reflect the spirit of the original narratives and are bound together by one underlying motive which is to show the Indian as a human being, a neighbor. "We have had plenty of the 'wily redskin' kind of thing," I said toStouch. "I am going to tell of the red man as you and Seger have known him, as a man of the polished stone age trying to adapt himself to steam and electricity."
It happened that plenteous rains had made Oklahoma very green and beautiful, and as I galloped about over the wide swells of the Caddo country, I was disposed to buy all the land that joined me. Imagining myself the lord of a thousand acres, I achieved a profound joy of living. It was good to glow in the sunlight, to face the sweet southern wind, and to feel once more beneath my knees the swelling muscles of a powerful horse. In a very vivid sense I relived the days when, as a lad of twelve, I rode with Burton and my sister Harriet along the prairie swells of the Cedar Valley some thirty years before. "Washitay," at such moments was not only the land of the past but the hope of the future.
My red neighbors interested me. The whole problem of their future was being worked out almost within sight of my door. Here the men of the Polished Stone Age and the men of gasoline engines and electrical telephones met and mingled in a daily adjustment which offered material of surpassing value to the novelist who could use it. Humor and pathos, tragic bitterness and religious exaltation were all within reach of my hand.
The spring nights which came to me there at Colony were of a quality quite new to me. The breeze, amiable and moist, was Southern, and the moonlight falling from the sky like a silent, all-enveloping cataract of silver, lay along the ground so mystically real that I could feel it with my hand. The air was at once tropic and Western, and this subtle blending of the North and the South, the strange and the familiar, appealed to me with such power that I wrote Zulime a statement of my belief that in becoming a part-owner in this land, I had assured for us both a happyand prosperous future. "I shall come here every spring," I declared, and in the glow of this enthusiasm, I purchased another farm of two hundred and forty acres and arranged with Seger for its management.
Alas, for my piece of mind! On my way homeward, at Reno, I encountered a simoon of most appalling power. An equatorial wind which pressed against the car and screamed at the window—a hot, unending pitiless blast withering the grain and tearing the heart out of young gardens—a storm which brought back to me the dreadful blizzard of dust which swept over our Iowa farm in the spring of '72. There was something grand as well as sorrowful in this unexpected display of desert ferocity.
My dream of a thousand-acre ranch shriveled with the plants. The prairie abandoning its youthful, buoyant air, took on a sinister and savage grandeur. To escape from the ashes of these ruined fields was now a passionate desire. The value of my land in Washitay fell almost to the vanishing point. Illinois became a green and pleasant pasture toward which I drove with gratitude and relief.
[I insert a line to say that this was only a mood. I went on with my purchase of lands till I had my thousand acres, but these acres were in scattered plots and the house with the patio and the porch was never built.]
At the Agency just before I left for the North I had hired some Cheyenne women to make for me a large council teepee which I had in mind to set up as my dwelling at Eagle's Nest Camp, where Zulime and I had agreed to spend the summer. Boyishly eager to reproduce as well as I could a Cheyenne house, I assembled all my blankets, parfleches, willow beds and other furnishings and raised my lodge on poles on the edge of the wood just inside the Camp's entrance.
It made a singularly appropriate addition to the reservation,to my thinking, at least, and I took inordinate pride in its ownership. Trim and white and graceful it stood against the forest wall, its crossed poles sprangling from its top with poetic suggestion of aboriginal life, and when, with elaborate ceremony, I laid the fuel for its first fire, calling upon our patron, Wallace Heckman, to touch a match to the tinder, I experienced a sense of satisfaction.
To my artist friends it was a "picturesque accessory"—to me it was a talisman of things passing. The smoke of the hickory faggots filling that conical roof-tree brought back to me a cloud of memories of the prairies of the Sioux, the lakes of the Chippewa, and the hills of the Cheyenne. Thin as were its walls, they shut out (for me) the commonplace present, helping me to reconstruct the world of Blackhawk and the Sitting Bull, and when I walked past it, especially at night, my mind took joy in its form, and a pleasant stir within my blood made manifest of its power.
Browne acknowledged its charm and painted a moonlight sketch of it, and Seton, who came by one day, helped me dedicate its firehole. In the light of its embers, he and I renewed our youth while smoking the beautiful Pipe of Meditation, which a young Cheyenne chief had given me in token of his friendship.
It happened that I was scheduled to give a series of lectures at the University of Chicago onThe Outdoor Literature of America, and with a delightful feeling of propriety in the fact I set to work to write these addresses in my canvas lodge, surrounded by all its primitive furnishings. It made an admirable study, but at night as I lay on my willow couch, I found the moonlight so intense and the converging lines of the lodge poles so suggestive of other folk and other times that slumber was fitful. The wistful ghosts of Blackhawk and his kind seemed all about me. Not till the moon set or the shadows of the forestcovered me, was I able to compose myself to sleep.
For several weeks I wrote at ease upon my theme and then, into the carefree atmosphere of my Lodge of Dreams came the melancholy news that William McClintock, my giant uncle, had been stricken by the same mysterious malady which had broken my mother's heart, and that he was lying motionless on his bed in the narrow space of his chamber. The "stroke" (so my aunt wrote) had come upon him (as upon my mother) without the slightest warning, and with no discoverable cause.
On my return to the Homestead I went at once to see him. He was sitting in my mother's wheeled chair, quite helpless, yet cheerful and confident of ultimate recovery. He had always been a man of dignity, and singularly abstemious of habit, and these qualities were strongly accentuated by his sudden helplessness. He was very gentle, very patient, and the sight of him lying there made speaking very difficult for me.
When the doctor would permit, he loved to lie in his chair on the porch of his little cottage where he could look out upon the hills, his eyes reflecting his beloved landscape like those of a dreaming cage-weary lion. Inarticulate, like my mother, he was nevertheless the poet, and never failed to respond—at least with a meaning glance—to any imaginative word in my discourse.
How much he had meant to me in all the days of my boyhood! As the master of the threshing machine forty years agone, he had filled my childish heart with worship. As the swift-footed deer trailer, the patient bee-hunter, the silent lover of the forest, he had held my regard and though he had never quite risen to the high place which my Uncle David occupied in my boyhood's worship, he had always been to me a picturesque and kindly figure. Year by year I had watched his giant form stoop, and his black beard waxthin and white, and now, here he sat almost at the end of his trail, unable to move, yet expressing a kind of elemental bravery, a philosophic patience which moved me as no words of lamentation could have done.
Strange malady! He who had never met his match in stark strength could not now by the exercise of all his will, lift that limp arm from his side and as I sat beside him I recalled my last sad meeting with Major Powell, the man who first guided a canoe through the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, and in my mind arose a conception of what these two men, each in his kind represented in the story of American pioneering. One the far-famed explorer, the other the unknown rifleman behind the plow. With William McClintock—with my father, with Major Powell, a whole world, a splendid and heroic world was passing never to return, and when I took my uncle's hand in parting I was almost certain that I should never see him again.
Once he was king of forest men.To him a snow-capped mountain rangeWas but a line, a place of mark,A view-point on the trail. ThenHe had no dread of dark,No fear of change.Now an uprolled rug upon the floorAppalls his feet. His withered armShakes at the menace of a door,And every wind-waft does him harm.God! 'Tis a piteous thing to seeThis ranger of the hills confinedTo the small compass of his roomLike a chained eagle on a tree,Lax-winged and gray and blind.Only in dreams he sees the bloomOn far hills where the red deer run.Only in memory guides the light canoeOr stalks the bear with dog and polished gun.In him behold the story of the West,The chronicle of rifleman behind the plow,Typing the life of those who knewNo barrier but the sunset in their quest.On his bent head and grizzled hairIs set the crown of those who shewNew cunning to the wolf, new courage to the bear.
Another evidence of melancholy change came to me in the failing powers of Ladrone, my mountain horse, who had come through the winter very badly. I found him standing in the pasture, weak and inactive, taking no interest in the rich grasses under his feet. In the belief that exercise would do him good, I saddled him and started to ride about the square, but soon drew rein. He had not the strength to carry me!
Sadly dismounting I led him back to the stable. It was evident that he would never again career with me across the hills. Bowed and dejected he resumed his place in the paddock. Standing thus, with hanging head, he appeared to be dreaming of the days when as a part of the round-up, in the far Northwest, he had carried his master over the range and through the herd with joyous zeal. Each time I looked at him I felt a twinge of pain.
Everything I could do for him was done, every remedial measure was tried, but he grew steadily worse, and at last, I called a neighbor to my aid and said, "Oliver, my horse is very sick. I fear his days are numbered. Study him, do what you can for him, and if you find he cannot be cured, put him away. Don't tell me when it is done or how it is done—I don't want to know. You understand?"
He understood, and one morning, a few days later, as Ilooked in the pasture for the gray pony, he was nowhere to be seen. In the dust of the driveway, I detected the marks of his small feet. The toes of his shoes pointed toward the gate, and there were no returning foot-prints. He had gone away on the long trail which leads to the River of Darkness and The Wide Lands Beyond It.
His bridle and saddle were hanging in the barn (they are still there), silent memorials of the explorations in which he and I had played a resolute part.
Something grips me by the throat as I remember his eyes,
"Brown, clear and calm, with color down deep,Where his brave, proud soul seemed to lie."
I recall the first days we spent together, beautiful days in the Frazer Valley, when jubilant cranes bugled from the skies, and humming birds moved in myriads along the river's banks—memories of those desperate days in the Skeena forests, amid dank and poisonous plants—of marches on the tundra along the high Stickeen Divide—all these come back. I see him crowding close to my fire, thin and weak.
I relive once more that bitter night on the wharf in Glenora when (chilled by the cold wind), he first began to cough. I am thinking of his journey on the boat with me to Wrangell; of the day when I left him there (the only horse on the coast); of my return; of our long trip to Seattle; of his trust in me as he faced the strange monsters of the city; of his long dark ride to St. Paul; of the joyous day when I opened his prison door and finding him safe and well, rode him forth to the admiration of my uncles at the county fair. A vast section of my life faded with the passing of that small gray horse. "Lost my Ladrone, gone the wild living. I dream, but my dreaming is vain."
My sense of uneasiness was deepened by another warning,a third sign of decay. One morning my father while apparently in his usual health, suddenly grew dizzy and fell and as I bent above him he gazed up at me with an expression which I had never before seen in his face, a humble, helpless, appealing look. It seemed that he was going as William had gone.
Happily I was mistaken. His indomitable soul reasserted itself. He refused to surrender. He rallied. "I'm all right," he said at last, a grim line coming back into his mouth. "It's passing off. I can move," and lifting his arm he opened and shut his hand in proof of it. "I'm better than a dozen dead men yet."
He was distinctly stronger next day, and when, looking from my window I saw him going about his work in the garden, bareheaded as was his habit, resolute and unsubdued, I was reassured, but never again did he move with the same vigor as before. For the first time he acknowledged his age.
During all these melancholy experiences so significant of the dying border, I had the comfort of my undaunted wife whose happy spirit refused to be clouded by what she recognized as merely the natural decay of the preceding generation. Her mind was set on the future, our future. She refused to yield her youthful right to happiness, and under the influence of her serene philosophy I went back to my writing, or at least to the serious consideration of another mountain theme, which was taking shape in my brain.
With a mere love-story I had never been content. For me a sociological background was necessary in order to make fiction worth while, and I was minded to base my next novel on a study of the "war" which had just taken place, at Cripple Creek, between the Free Miner, the Union Miner and the Operator or Capitalist.
The suggestion for this theme had come to me duringa call on some friends in New York City, where I had been amused and somewhat embarrassed, by the ecstatic and outspoken admiration of a boy of fourteen, who was (as his mother put it) "quite crazy over miners, Indians and cowboys. His dream is to go West and illustrate your books," she had said to me.
This lad's enthusiasm for the West and his ambition to be an illustrator of western stories had started me on a tale in which a fine but rather spoiled New York girl was to be carried to Colorado by the enthusiasm of her youthful brother, and there plunged (against her will) into the warfare of mountaineers and miners, a turbulence which her beloved brother would insist on sharing. Such a girl might conceivably find herself in the storm center of a contest such as that which had taken place on Bull Hill in the late nineties.
I called this studyHesper, or the Cowboy Patrolfor the reason that in "the Cripple Creek War," cattlemen had acted as outposts for the union miners, and in this fact I perceived something picturesque and new and telling, something which would give me just the imaginative impulse I required.
Some of my friendly critics were still occasionally writing to me to ask, "Why don't you give us moreMain Traveled Roadsstories," and it was not easy to make plain to them that I had moved away from that mood, and that my life and farm life had both greatly altered in thirty years. To repeat the tone of that book would have been false not only to my art, but to the country as well.
Furthermore, I had done that work. I had put together inMain Traveled Roadsand its companion volumes a group of thirty short stories (written between 1887 and 1891), in which I had expressed all I had to say on that especial phase of western life. To attempt to recover the spirit ofmy youth would not only have been a failure but a bore—even to those who were urging me to the task. It was my business to keep moving—to accompany my characters as they migrated into the happier, more hopeful West. Like them I was "Campin' through, podner, just a campin' through."
As inThe Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, I had dealt with the three-cornered fight of the cattlemen, the Indian, and the soldier, so now, in 1902, I returned to the mountain West, to picture another conflict, equally stirring and possessing a still finer setting and back-ground. InHesperI was concerned with a war, in which most of the action had taken place among the clouds, on the hilltops nearly two miles above sea-level. There was something grandly pictorial in this drama; but, after writing a few chapters of it, I felt the need of revisiting the scene.
Zulime again accompanied me and as our train slid down the familiar road leading to Colorado Springs and we could see the lightning flashing among the high summits on which I had laid the scenes of my story, Zulime glowed with joy and I took on a renewed sense of power. For an hour I felt equal to my task, to be historian of the free miner seemed to me a worthy office.
The Ehrichs were again our hosts and they (as well as Russell Wray, the Editor of theGazette) took the keenest interest in my design. From Wray and his friends I began at once to derive an understanding of the part which "Little London" (as the miners called the Springs) had taken in the war. I relied on a visit to Bull Hill and Victor to furnish the Sky-town or "Red-neck" point of view.
Wray was especially valuable to me, for he had taken part in the famous expedition of the "Yaller Legs" and his experiences as a reporter and his sense of humor had enabled him to report both sides of the controversy. Hehad many friends in the camp, to whom he gave me letters.
The character which interested me most, in all the warring factions, was the free miner, the prospector, the man of the trail. Him I clearly understood. He had been companion in most of my trips into the wild. He was blood brother to my father, and cousin to my heroic uncles. He represented the finest phases of pioneering. "Matt Kelley," "Rob Raymond" and "Jack Munroe," I knew and loved, and their presence in this labor war redeemed it from the sordid, uninspired struggle which such contests usually turn out to be. In my design these three characters filled heroic place.
Zulime (with no literary problems to distract her) had another easeful, idyllic summer. The Ehrichs, the Wrays and the Palmers welcomed her as an old friend, and in their companionship she rode and camped and dined in easeful leisure, but I was on the move. I visited a ranch on the plains of Eastern Colorado, joined a round-up in the Sierra Blanca country, explored the gambling-houses and mines of Cripple Creek and Victor, and spent two weeks reëxploring the White River Plateau, this time with Walter Wykoff, of Princeton. For a week or two, Wykoff, Miss Ehrich and Zulime and I camped high on the shoulder of Pike's Peak. Vast and splendid scenes of storm and sun were printed on my mind, and, while the actual writing of my novel halted, I felt certain that I was doing just the right thing. I felt sure of finishing it in the proper spirit of enthusiasm.
The trip not only enabled me to finishHesper—it suggested several of the stories which went intoThey of the High Trailsand gave me the plan ofThe Forester's Daughter. I returned to West Salem, brown as an Indian and bursting with energy, and for several weeks toiled with desperate haste to put my impressions, imaginings in form.
Each morning of those peaceful days I took to mother'sroom, on the sunward side of the old Homestead, and there wrought into final shape the materials I had gathered. I had only to shut my eyes to see again the clouds circling the walls of Shavano. In imagination I rode once more with Matt Kelley up Bull Hill, or, sitting opposite the chief of the Miners' Union, reënjoyed his graphic account of the coming of the Federal troops. The bawling roar of the round-up on the meadow came back to fill my eyes with pictures of the Sierra Blanca foothills. In truth I had no need of notes. I was embarrassed with material. I threw my note-books into a drawer and forgot them.
Letters from my publishers informed me thatThe Captain of the Gray Horse Troopwas marching on, but that they hoped I was at work on something to follow it. To this I replied:
"Yes, I am in the midst of a story which I hope will be as good asThe Captain, but don't hurry me!"
Whilst I, busied with my fiction, kept to my study, Zulime was ecstatically rearranging furniture. During our absence in Colorado, father had moved to another house, relinquishing all claim on the Homestead, and for the first time in our lives my wife and I were authentic householders in full possession of every room. We had a door-bell, and our clock was our own. Our meal-times conformed to our will, and not to another's. We went to bed when we pleased, and rose when we got ready.
Zulime's joy of ownership was almost comical. Leading me from room to room she repeated, "This isourhouse. Don't you like our house? Isn't it fun to have it all to ourselves?"
Her rapture instructed me. I perceived that the old Homestead had not yet served its purpose. So far as my father was concerned it was a story told, a drama almost ended, but as the undivided home of my young wife itdeveloped new meaning. Another soul was coming into being; another tenant was about to take its place beneath our roof. Small feet would soon be dancing through those silent rooms, careless of the men and women whose gray heads and gaunt limbs had been carried out over their thresholds to a final resting-place beneath the sod.
A new interest, a new phase of life, was coming to Zulime, and to me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEENThe Old Pioneer Takes the Back Trail
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Old Pioneer Takes the Back Trail
In the midst of this period of hard work onHesper, news of the death of Frank Norris came to me. Frank Norris the most valiant, the happiest, the handsomest of all my fellow craftsmen. Nothing more shocking, more insensate than the destruction of this glorious young fictionist had come to my literary circle, for he was aglow with a husband's happiness, gay with the pride of paternity, and in the full spring-tide of his powers. His going left us all poorer and took from American literature one of its strongest young writers.
The papers at once wired me for tributes, and these I gave, gladly, and later when one of the magazines paid me for an article, I used the money in the purchase of a tall clock to serve as a memorial. This time-piece stands in the hall of my city home and every time I pass it I am reminded of the fine free spirit of Frank Norris. In my small corner of the world he remains a vital memory.
All through October I wrote on my novel, but as the dark days of autumn came on, I began as usual to dwell upon my interests in the city and not even Zulime's companionship could keep me from a feeling of restlessness. I longed for literary comradeship. Theoretically my native village was an ideal place in which to write, actually it sapped me and after a few weeks depressed me. With no literary "atmosphere," damnable word, I looked away to New York for stimulus. I did not go so far as one of my friends whodeclined to have anything to do with his relatives simply because he did not like them, but I clearly recognized that my friends in the city meant more to me than any of my Wisconsin neighbors and it became more and more evident that to make and keep an arbitrary residence in a region which did not in itself stimulate or satisfy me, was a mistake. There was nothing to do in West Salem but write.
Above all other considerations, however, I had a feeling, perhaps it was a mistaken one,—that my powers grew in proportion as I went Eastward. In West Salem I was merely an amateur gardener, living a life which approached the vegetable,—so far as external action went. In Chicago I was a perversity, a man of mis-directed energy. In New York I was, at least respected as a writer.
In short New York allured me as London allures the writers of England, and as Paris attracts the artists of Europe. It was my literary capital. Theoretically I belonged to Wisconsin, as Hardy belonged to Wessex or Barrie to Scotland, actually my happiest home was adjacent to Madison Square. Only as I neared the publishing centers did I feel the slightest confidence in the future. This increased sense of importance may have been based upon an illusion but it was a very real emotion nevertheless.
Why should I not feel this? From my village home, from digging potatoes and doing carpenter work, I went (almost directly) to a luncheon at the White House, and the following night I attended a dinner given to Mark Twain on his sixty-seventh birthday with William Dean Howells, Thomas B. Reed, Wayne McVeagh, Brander Matthews, H. H. Rogers, George Harvey, Pierpont Morgan, Hamilton Wright Mabie and a dozen others who were leaders in their chosen work, as my table mates. Perhaps I was not deserving of these honors—I'm not urging that point—I am merely stating the facts which made my home in West Salem seem remote and lonely to me. Acknowledging myselfa weak mortal I could not entirely forego the honors which the East seemed willing to bestow, and as father was in good health with a household of his own, I felt free to spend the entire winter in New York. For the first time in many years, I felt relieved of anxiety for those left behind.
New York was in the worst of its subway upheaval when we landed there, but having secured a small furnished apartment in a new but obscure hotel on Forty-seventh street, Zulime and I settled down for the winter. Our tiny three-room suite (a lovely nest for a woman) was not in the least like a home for an old trailer and corn-husker like myself. Its gas log and gimcrack mantel, its "Mission" furniture and its "new art" rugs were all of hopeless artificiality, but our sitting-room (on the quiet side of the building) received the sun, and there on the lid of a small desk I took up and carried forward the story ofHesperwhich my publishers had asked me to prepare for the spring trade.
Before we had time to unpack, a note came from President Roosevelt asking me to return to Washington to confer on a phase of the Indian service with which I was familiar, and I went at once—glad to be of any service—especially an unofficial service.
It was always a pleasure as well as an honor to meet Roosevelt. He was our first literary president. His esthetic interests were not only keen, but discriminating. He knew what each of us had published, and valued each of us for the particular contributions we were making to American literature. Each of us gave him something—in my case it was a knowledge of the West. Notwithstanding the multiple duties of his office, he put aside a part of each day for reading and when he read, he concentrated upon his page with such intensity that he remembered all that was important in the writing.
He knew the masters in the other arts also. If he had aproblem in architecture or medaling or painting to decide, he went to Mead or St. Gaudens, or Blashfield. Under his administration the White House had resumed its fine colonial character. At his direction Mead and McKim had restored it to the noble simplicity of Madison's time. They had cleared out the business offices and removed the absurd mixture of political machinery and household furniture which had accumulated under the rule of his predecessors, most of whom (coming from small inland towns) knew nothing of any art but government, and in some cases not too much of that. On this particular visit I recall the fact that repairs were going on, for the President invited me to take luncheon with his family, and we ate in a small room on the front of the house for the reason that the dining-room was in process of being restored and the howl of the floor polisher was resounding through the hall.
It may interest the reader to know that while my wife and I occasionally lunched or dined with "the choice ones of the earth," we prudently practiced "light housekeeping" between our splendid feasts. Like a brown-bearded Santa Claus I often ran the gauntlet of the elevator boy with pockets bulging bottles of milk, hunks of cheese, hot muffins, and pats of butter, and frequently, when the weather was bad, or when some one had neglected to invite us out, we supped in our room.
Once when I entered laden in this fashion I was sharply taken aback by the presence of several belated callers, very grand ladies, and only the most skilful manœuvering enabled me to slide into the closet and out of my overcoat without betraying my cargo. My predicament highly amused Zulime, while at the same time she inwardly trembled for fear of a smash. I mention this incident in order to reveal the reverse side of our splendid social progress. We were in no danger of becoming "spoiled" with feasting, so long as we kept to our Latin Quarter methods of lunching.
We had many notable dinners that winter, but our long anticipated visit to Mark Twain's house in Riverdale stands out above them all. We reached the house about seven o'clock, by way of an ancient hack which met us at the depot and carried us up the hill, into the yard of an old-fashioned mansion sheltered by great trees.
Mark came running lightly down the broad stairs to meet us in the hall, seemingly in excellent health, although his spirits were not at all as boyish as his step. "I'm glad to see you," he said cordially, "but you'll find the house a hospital. The girls have both been miserable and Mrs. Clemens, I'm sorry to say, is still too ill to see you. I bring her greetings to you and her apology."
Thereupon he related with invincible humor and vivid phraseology, the elaborate scheme of deception to which they had been forced during Jean's illness. Mrs. Clemens was very weak, so low that the slightest excitement—so the doctor warned us—might prove fatal; hence we were obliged to pretend that Jean was well but busy doing this or doing that, in order that her mother might not suspect the truth of the situation.
"I was protected by the doctor's orders, which forbade me from spending more than two minutes in Mrs. Clemens' room, but Clara, who was allowed to nurse her mother, was forced to enter upon a season of unveracity which taxed her imagination to the uttermost. She had to pretend that Jean was away on a visit, or that she was in town shopping or away at a dinner. Together we invented all kinds of social engagements for her and that involved the description of new gowns and a list of the guests of each entertainment. Oh, it was dreadful. Fortunately Clara had a good reputation with her mother, and was able to carry conviction, whereas I had a very hard time. I kept getting into shoal water."
He was very funny—I can only report the substance ofhis tale—and yet there was a tone in his voice which enabled me to understand the tragic situation. Mrs. Clemens' illness was hopeless.
All through the dinner he talked on in the same enthralling fashion, picturesque, humorous, tragic. He dealt with June bugs, alcohol, Christian Science, the Philippine outrage and a dozen other apparently unrelated subjects. He imitated a horse-fly. He swore. He quoted poetry. We laughed till our sides ached—and yet, all the while, beneath it all, he had in mind (as we had in mind)—that sweetly-patient invalid waiting upstairs for his good-night caress.
As a bitter agnostic as well as a tender humorist Mark Twain loomed larger in my horizon after that night. The warmly human side of him was revealed to me as never before, and thereafter I knew him and I felt that he knew me. That remote glance from beneath those shaggy eyebrows no longer deceived me. He was a tender and loyal husband. Later when I came to read the marvelous story of his life as related by Albert Bigelow Paine, I found a part of my intuitions recorded as facts. He was an elemental western American—with many of the faults and all of the excellencies of the border.
Meanwhile I was at work. In my diary of this date I find these words, "This is living! The sunlight floods our tiny sitting-room whose windows look out on a blue-and-white mountainous 'scape of city roofs. We have dined and the steam is singing in our gilded radiator. The noise and bustle of the city is far away.—I foresee that I shall be able to do a great deal of work on my novel."
In that last sentence I was reckoning without the effect of my wife's popularity. Invitations to luncheons, dinners, and theater parties began to pile up, and I could not ask Zulime to deny herself these pleasures, although I tried to keep my forenoons sacred to my pen. I returned to the manuscript ofHesperand succeeded in writing at least athousand words each day; on fortunate mornings I was able to turn off a full chapter.
It was a gay and satisfying season. We met all our old friends and made many new ones, finding ourselves more and more at home in the city. We rode to grand receptions in the street cars—as usual—and while we ate our luncheons at inexpensive cafés, we often dined with our more prosperous fellow-craftsmen. In spite of many interruptions I managed to complete my novel. By the first of MarchHesperwas ready for the printer and I turned it over to Duneka.
On Zulime's birthday as I was putting the last chapter in final shape, I received a letter from father which said, "I am coming East. Meet me in Washington on the 21st." To this request there was but one answer: "I'll be there."
It was the first time that the old pioneer had taken "the back trail" since leaving Boston, nearly fifty years before, and I rejoiced in his decision. The thought of leading him into the halls of Congress and pointing out for him the orators whose doings had been so long his chief concern, was pleasureable to me. From my earliest childhood I had heard him comment on the weekly record of Congressional debates. He loved oratory. He was a hero-worshiper. With him the Capitol meant Lincoln and Grant and Blaine and Sherman. It was not a city, it was a shrine.
When he stepped from the train in Washington the following week, I was there to meet him, and for several days I led him from splendor to splendor. With me he saw Mount Vernon, the White House, Congress, the library, and his patriotism intensified as the glories of his country's capital unrolled before his eyes. He said little, only looked, and when he had harvested as much of Washington as he could carry I took him to Philadelphia, in order that he might breathe the air of Continental Hall and gaze upon its sacred Liberty Bell. His patriotism had few reservations.All these relics were of high solemnity to him.
At last as a climax we approached New York, whose glittering bays, innumerable ships and monstrous buildings awed him and saddened him. It was a picture at once incredible and familiar, resembling illustrations he had seen in the magazines, only mightier more magnificent than he had imagined any of it to be. It overwhelmed him, wearied him, disheartened him, and so it came about that the quiet dinners he took with me at my club were his most enduring pleasures, for there he rested, there he saw me at home. He acquired an understanding of my endurance of the vast and terrible town.
Up to this time the story of my doings in the East had been to him like those of characters in highly-colored romance. He had believed me (in a sense) when, in West Salem, I had spoken of meetings with Roosevelt and Howells and other famous men, and yet, till now, he had never been able to realize the fact that Ibelongedin New York, and that men of large affairs were actually my friends. He comprehended now (in some degree) my good fortune, and it gratified him while it daunted him. He understood why I could not live in West Salem.
If he was proud to acknowledge me as a son, I, on my part, was proud to acknowledge him as my father, for as he sat with me in the dining-room of the club or walked about the Library to examine the relics and portraits of Booth (for whom he had a passionate admiration) he was altogether admirable.
At the end of our third day, I suggested Boston. To this he replied, "No, I've had enough," and there was a tired droop in his voice. "I'm ready to go home. I'm all tired out with 'seeing things,' and besides it's time to be getting back to my garden."
To urge him to remain longer would have been a mistake. Boston would have disturbed and bewildered him.Not only would he have failed to find the city of his youth, he would have been saddened by the changes. His loss of power to remember troubled me. He retained but few of his impressions of Washington, and with sorrow I acknowledged that it no longer mattered whether he saw Boston or not. He had waited too long for his great excursion. He was old and timid and longing for rest.
As he went to his train (surfeited with strange glories, crowds and exhibitions) he repeated that his dinners with me at the club remained his keenest pleasures. In tasting a few of my comforts he understood why I loved the great city. He saw me also in an established position, and this he considered a gain. His faith in my future was now complete.
***
For years he had talked of this expedition, planned for it, calculated upon its expense, and now it was accomplished. He went back to his garden with a sense of pride, of satisfaction which he would share with his cronies as they met in Johnson's Drug Store or Anderson's Meat Market. What he said of me I do not know, but I fear he reported me as living in unimaginable luxury and consorting on terms of equality with the great ones of New York.
CHAPTER NINETEENNew Life in the Old House
CHAPTER NINETEEN
New Life in the Old House
Meanwhile, Chicago rushing toward its two million mark, had not, alas! lived up to its literary promise of '94. In music, in painting, in sculpture and architecture it was no longer negligible, but each year its authors appeared more and more like a group of esthetic pioneers heroically maintaining themselves in the midst of an increasing tumult of material upbuilding.
One by one its hopeful young publishing houses had failed, and one by one its aspiring periodicals had withered in the keen wind of Eastern competition.The Dialalone held on, pathetically solitary, one might almost say alien and solitary.
Against all this misfortune even my besotted optimism could not prevail. My pioneering spirit, subdued by years of penury and rough usage, yielded more and more to the honor and the intellectual companionship which the East offered. To Fuller I privately remarked: "As soon as I can afford it I intend to establish a home in New York."
"I'd go further," he replied. "I would live in Italy if I could."
It was a very significant fact that Chicago contained in 1903 but a handful of writers, while St. Louis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit and Kansas City had fewer yet. "What is the reason for this literary sterility?" I asked of my companions. "Why should not these powerful cities produce authors? Boston, when she had less than three hundredthousands citizens had Lowell, Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes."
The answer was (and still is), "Because there are few supporters of workers in the fine arts. Western men do not think in terms of art. There are no literary periodicals in these cities to invite (and pay for) the work of the author and the illustrator, and there is moreover a tendency on the part of our builders to give the eastern sculptor, painter or architect the jobs which might be done by local men. Until Chicago has at least one magazine founded like a university, and publishing houses like Scribners and Macmillans our authors and artists must go to New York." Of course none of these answers succeeded in clearing up the mystery, but they were helpful.
Some of the writers in the Little Room were outspokenly envious of my ability to spend half my winters in the East, but Lorado Taft stoutly declared that the West inspired him, satisfied him. "Chicago suits me," he asserted, "and besides I can't afford to run away from my job. You should be the last man to admit defeat,youwho have been preaching local color and local patriotism all your days."
In truth Taft was one of the few who could afford to remain in Chicago for its public supported him handsomely, but those of us who wrote had no organizations to help sustain our self-esteem. Nevertheless I permitted him to imagine my pessimism to be only a mood which, in some degree it was, for I had many noble friends in the city who invited me to dinner even if they did not read my books.
The claims of Chicago upon me had been strengthened by the presence of Professor Taft who had given up his home in Kansas and was now settled not far from his son and near the University. He had brought all his books and other treasures with intent to spend the remaining years of his life in the neighborhood of his illustrious son and his twodaughters, a fact which I could not overlook in any plans for changing my own residence.
Don Carlos Taft was a singular and powerful figure, as I have already indicated, a stoic, of Oriental serenity, one who could smile in the midst of excruciating pain. With his eyes against a blank wall he was able to endlessly amuse himself by calling up the deep-laid concepts of his earlier years of study. Though affected with some obscure spinal disorder which made every movement a punishment, he concealed his suffering, no matter how intense it might be, and always answered, "Fine, fine!" when any of us asked "How are you to-day?"
He lived in Woodlawn as he had lived in Kansas, like a man in a diving bell. His capacious brain filled with "knowledges" of the days when Gladstone was king and Darwin an outlaw, had little room for the scientific theories of Bergson and his like. He remained the old-fashioned New England theologian converted to militant agnosticism.
Although at this time over seventy years of age his mind was notably clear, orderly and active, and his talk (usually a carefully constructed monologue) was stately, formal and precise. He used no slang, and retained scarcely a word of his boyhood's vernacular. The only emotional expression he permitted himself was a chuckle of glee over an intellectual misstatement or a historical bungle. Novels, theaters, music possessed no interest for him.
He had read, I believe, one or two of my books but never alluded to them, although he manifested a growing respect for my ability to earn money, and especially delighted in my faculty for living within my means. He watched the slow growth of my income with approving eyes. To him as to my father, earning money was a struggle, saving it a virtue, and wasting it a crime.
In almost every other characteristic he was my father'sdirect antithesis—my father, whose faith approximated that of a Sioux warrior. "I take things as they come," was one of his sayings. He was not concerned with the theories of Evolution, the Pragmatic Philosophy or any other formal system of learning or ethics. With him the present was filled with duties, the remote past or the distant future was of indifferent concern. To deal justly and to leave the world a little better than he found it, was his creed.
The one point of contact between these widely divergent pioneers was their love of Zulime, for my father was almost as fond of her as Don Carlos himself, and distinctly more expressive of his love—for Father Taft held affection to be something not quite decorous when openly declared. He never offered a caress or spoke an affectionate word so far as I know.
There was something pathetic in his situation in these days. Full of learning and eager to share it with youth he could find no one willing to listen to him—not even his children. In the midst of a vast city he was sadly solitary. None of his children appeared interested in his allusions to Hammurabi or Charlemagne, on the contrary, monologues of any kind were taboo in the artistic circles where Lorado reigned. We was too busy, we were all too busy with our small plans and daily struggles, to take any interest in Locke or Gibbon or Hume, therefore the ageing philosopher sat forlornly among his faded, musty books, dreaming his days away on some abstruse ethical problem, or carving with his patient knife some quaintly ornate piece of furniture, while my own father (at the opposite pole of life) weeded his garden, read the daily paper or played cinch with the men at the village drugstore.
Nevertheless, with full knowledge of these fundamental divergencies in the lives of our sires, I urged Zulime to invite Professor Taft to spend a few weeks in West Salem. "He and father will disagree, but the one is a philosopheraccustomed to pioneer types and the other a man of reason and I am willing to risk their coming together if you are."
Don Carlos seemed pleased by this invitation and promised to come "one of these days."
Our return to Wisconsin in April was a return to winter. On looking from our car windows at dawn, we found the ground white with snow, and flakes of frost driving through the budding branches of the trees. Every bird was mute, as if with horror and the tender amber-and-green leaves of the maples shone through the rime with a singular and pathetic beauty.
Happily this was only a cold wave. Toward noon the sun came out, the icy cover sank into the earth and the robins began to sing again as if to reassure themselves as well as us.
We came back to the Homestead now with a full sense of our proprietorship. It was entirely ours and it was waiting for us. Father was at the gate, it is true, but he was there this time merely as care-taker, as supervisor of the garden—our garden.
His greeting of Zulime had a deeper note of tenderness than he had ever used hitherto, for he was aware of our hope, and shared our joyous expectancy. "I'm glad you've come," he said simply. "I hate to see the house standing here cold and empty. It don't seem natural or right."
His first act was to lead us out to the garden where orderly beds of springing vegetables testified to his care. "I didn't do anything about the flowers," he confessed rather shamefacedly. "I'm no good at that kind of work."
As the days went by I discovered that father's heart clung to the old place. He loved to spend his days upon it. He was comfortable in his own little cottage, but it seemed too small and too "slick" for him. He liked our trees and lawn and barn, and I was glad to have him continue his supervision of them. They gave him somethingto think about, something to do. The curse of the "tired farmers" of the village was their enforced idleness. There was almost nothing for them to exercise upon.
He spent most of each day tinkering around the barn, overseeing the garden or resting on the back porch where mother used to sit and look out on the valley. On Sunday he came in to supper, and afterward called for "The Sweet Story of Old" and "The Palace of the King." He listened in silence, a blur in his dreaming eyes, for the past returned on the wings of these songs.
Nobly considerate in his attitude toward Zulime he seemed to understand, perfectly, her almost childish joy in the possession of a nest of her own. He never came to a meal without invitation, though he was seldom without the invitation, for Zulime was fond of him and had only one point of contention with him: "I wish you wouldn't wear your working clothes about the street," she said—and artfully added, "You are so handsome when you are in your Sunday suit, I wish you would wear it all the time."
He smiled with pleasure, but replied: "I'd look fine hoeing potatoes in my Sunday suit, wouldn't I!" Nevertheless he was mindful of her request and always came to dinner in, at worst, his second best.
Each day the gardens about us took on charm. The plum and cherry trees flung out banners of bloom and later the apple trees flowered in pink-and-white radiance. Wonder-working sap seemed to spout into the air through every minute branch. Showers of rain alternated with vivid sunshine, and through the air, heavy with perfume, the mourning dove sang with sad insistence as if to remind us of the impermanency of May's ineffable loveliness. Butterflies suddenly appeared in the grass, and the bees toiled like harvesters, so eager, so busy that they tumbled over one another in their haste. Nature was at her sweetest andloveliest, and in the midst of it walked my young wife, in quiet anticipation of motherhood.
Commonplace to others our rude homestead grew in beauty and significance to us. Day by day we sat on our front porch, and watched the clouds of blossoms thicken. If we walked in our garden we felt the creative loam throbbing beneath our feet. Each bird seemed as proud of the place as we. Each insect was in a transport of activity.
Into the radiant white of the cherry blossoms, impetuous green shoots (new generations) appeared as if in feverish haste, unwilling to await the passing of the flowers. The hills to the south were soaring bubbles of exquisite green vapor dashed with amber and pink and red. Each morning the shade of the maple trees deepened, and on the lawn the dandelions opened, sowing with pieces of gold the velvet of the sward. The songs of the robin, the catbird and the thrush became more confident, more prolix until, at last, the drab and angular little village was transfigured into celestial beauty by the heavenly light and melody of completed spring.
In a certain sense here was the wealth I had been struggling to secure. Here were—seemingly—all the elements of man's content, a broad roof, a generous garden, spreading trees, blossoming shrubs, a familiar horizon line, a lovely wife—and the promise of a child!
Truly, I should have been happy, and in my sour, big-fisted way I was happy. I tried, honestly, to grasp and hold the ecstasy which these days offered. I who had lived for twelve years on railway trains, in camp, on horse-back or in wretched little city hotels, was now a portly householder, a pampered husband and a prospective parent. And yet—such is my perverse temperament—I could not overlook the fact that this tranquil village like thousands of others scattered over the West, was but a half-way house, a pleasanthospital into which many of the crippled, worn-out and white-haired farmers and their wives had come to rest for a little while on their way to the grave.
As I walked the shaded street, perceiving these veterans of the hoe and plow, digging feebly in the earth of their small gardens, or sitting a-dream on the narrow porches of their tiny cottages my joy was embittered. Age, age was everywhere. Here in the midst of the flowering trees the men of the Middle Border were withering into dust.
In the city one does not come into anything like this close relationship with a dying generation. The tragedy is obscured. Here Zulime and I, young and strong, were living in the midst of an almost universal senility and decay. There was no escape from these grim facts.
Looked at from a distance there was comfort in the thought of these pioneers, released from the grind of their farm routine, dozing at ease beneath the maple trees, but closely studied they became sorrowful. I knew too much about them. Several of them had been my father's companions in those glorious days in fifty-five. Yonder white-haired invalid, sitting in the sun silently watching his bees, had been a famous pilot on the river, and that bushy-haired giant, halting by on a stick, was the wreck of a mighty hunter. The wives of these men equally worn, equally rheumatic and even more querulous, had been the rosy, laughing, dancing companions of Isabel McClintock in the days when Richard Garland came a-courting. All, all were camping in lonely cottages while their sons and daughters, in distant cities or far-off mountain valleys, adventuring in their turn, were taking up the discipline and the duties of a new border, a new world.
As a novelist I could not fail to observe these melancholy features of a life which on its surface seemed idyllic. In New York, in Chicago I was concerned mainly with happy, busy people of my own age or younger,—here I was broughtinto close contact daily—almost hourly—with the passing of my father's generation and, also, I was made aware of the coming in of an alien, uninspiring race. The farms of the Dudleys, the McKinleys, the Coburns were being taken by the Smeckpeffers, the Heffelfingers, and the Bergmans! Already the pages of the village newspaper were peppered with such names, and a powerful Congregation was building a German church on the site of the old-time Methodist meeting house of my boyhood. My strain was dying out—a new and to my mind less admirable America was coming on.
As June deepened my father (who realized something of the changes going on) proposed a trip to the town in Iowa near which we had lived for twelve years, and to this I consented, feeling that this visit could not safely be postponed another year.
He had never been back to our prairie farm in Mitchell County since leaving it, over twenty years before, and now (with money and leisure) he was eager to go, and as my old Seminary associates had asked me to speak at their Commencement, we rode away one lovely June day up along the Mississippi to Winona, thence by way of a winding coulee, to the level lands, and so across to Mitchell County, our old home. The railroad, which was new to us, ran across Dry Run prairie within half a mile of our school-house, but so flat and monotonous did the whole country now appear, we could not distinguish any familiar landmarks. The "hills" along the creek were barely noticeable from the car, and all the farm-steads were hidden by groves of trees. We passed our former home without recognizing it!
Osage, we soon discovered, was almost as much of an asylum for the aged as West Salem. It, too, was filled with worn-out farmers, men with whom my father had subdued the sod in the early days. Osmond Button, William Frazer,Oliver Cole, David Babcock were all living "in town" on narrow village lots, "taking it easy" as they called it, but they were by no means as contented as they seemed to the casual onlooker. Freed from the hard daily demands of the farm, many of them acknowledged a sense of uselessness, a fear of decay.
As fast as they learned of our presence, scores of loyal friends swarmed about us expressing a sincere regard for my father, and a kind of wondering respect for me. Some of them clung to my father's hand as though in hope of recovering through him some gleam of the beauty, some part of the magic of the brave days gone—days when the land was new and they were young. "You must come home with me," each man insisted, "the women folks all want to see you."
Twenty years had wrought great changes in the men as well as in the county, and my father was bewildered and saddened by the tale. One by one he called the names of those who had been his one-time friends and neighbors. Some were dead, others had moved away—only one or two remained where he had left them, and it was in the hope of seeing these men and at the same time to visit the farm and school-house on Dry Run, and the church at Burr Oak, that I hired a carriage and drove my father out along the well-remembered lane to the north and east—I say "well-remembered" although the growth of the trees and the presence of new buildings made its appeal mixed and unsatisfactory to us both.
We found our house almost hid in the trees which we had planted on the bare prairie thirty years before. As we stood in the yard I spoke of the silver wedding which took place there. The yard was attractive but the house (infested by the family of a poor renter) was repulsive. The upstairs chamber in which I had slept for so many yearspresented a filthy clutter of chicken feathers, cast-off furniture and musty clothing. Our stay was short.
Strangers were in all of the other houses along the way—we found but two of our former neighbors at home, and the farther we drove the more melancholy we both became.
One of the places which I wished especially to revisit was the school-house at Burr Oak, the room which had been our social center in the early eighties. In it we had listened to church service in summer, and there in winter our Grange Suppers and Friday Lyceums had been held. It was there, too, that I had worshiped at the shrine of Hattie's girlish beauty, when as a shock-haired lad I forgot, for a day, the loneliness of my prairie home.
Alas! the tall oaks which in those days had given dignity and charm to the yard had all been cut down, and the building, once glorified by the waving shadows of the leaves, now stood bare as a bone beside the road. An alien lived where Betty once reigned, and the white cottage from which Agnes was wont to issue in her exquisite Sunday frock, was untenanted and falling into decay.
How lovely those girls had seemed to me as I watched them approach, walking so daintily the path beside the fence! What rich, alluring color flamed in Bettie's cheek, what fire flashed in Aggie's dark and roguish eyes!
To a stranger, Burr Oak—my Burr Oak—even in Seventy-two was only a pleasant meeting place of prairie lanes on the margin of a forest, but to me it had been a temple of magic. I had but to shut my eyes to desolating changes, turning my vision inward, in order to see myself (a stocky awkward boy in a Sunday suit with a torturing collar) standing on the porch waiting to see those white-clad maidens pass into the vestibule.
Too shy in those days to meet their eyes, too worshipful to ever hope for word or smile, I remained their silentadorer. Here and now I set down the tribute which I could not then express:
O maids to whom I never spoke, to whomMy dreaming ran in lonely field,Because of you I saw the bloomOf Maytime more abundantly revealed.From you each bud new magic caught.When you were near, my skiesWere brighter, for your beauty broughtA poet's rapture to my eyes.Men tell me you are bent and gray,And worn with toil and pain;And so I pray the Wheel of ChanceMay never set us face to face again.Better that I should think of youAs you then were, strong and sweet,Walking your joyous sunlit wayBetween the wheat and roses of the lane—Pass on, O weary women of today—Remain forever 'mid the roses and the wheat,O girls with laughing lips and dancing feet!
That ride and the people I met closed a gate for me. I accomplished a painful relinquishment. That noon-day sun divided my past from my present as with the stroke of a flaming sword. Up to this moment I had retained, in formless fashion, a belief that I could some time and somehow reach out and regain, at least in part, the substance of the life I had once lived here in this scene. Now I confessed that not only was my youth gone but that the friends and the place of my youth had vanished. My heart, wrung with a measureless regret filled my throat with pain, and as I looked in my father's face I perceived that he, too, was feeling the force of Time's inexorable decree.
We started homeward in silence, speaking only now and then when some object made itself recognizable to us.
"I shall never ride this lane again," I said as we were nearing the town. "It has been a sad experience. The world of my boyhood—the world we both knew—is utterly gone. It exists only in your memory and mine. I want to get away—back to Zulime and the present."
"I'm ready to go," replied my father. "I thought I'd enjoy visiting the old place and seeing old neighbors, but I haven't. It's all too melancholy. I'm ready to go back to the LaCrosse Valley and stay there what little time I've got left to me."
That night, at the Seminary, I met the Alumni and spoke to them on some subject connected with the early history of the school, and in doing so I obtained once again a perception of the barrier which had risen between my classmates and myself. They were not only serious, they were piteously solemn. No one laughed, no one took a light and airy view of life. Once or twice I tried to jest or ventured a humorous remark, but these attempts to lighten the gloom were met with chilling silence. No one whispered or smiled or turned aside. It was like a prayer meeting in the face of famine.
Part of this was due no doubt to their habit of listening to sermons, but some of it arose I am sure from a feeling of poignant regret similar to that which burdened my own heart. As usual in such reunions the absent ones were named and the faces of the dead recalled. In all our songs the rustling of withered leaves could be heard. All felt the pitiless march of time and I respected them for their perception of life's essential enigma.
After the "Services" were finished, several of the women came up to me and introduced themselves. One handsome gray-haired woman said: "I am Rosa Clinton," and it shocked me to be unable to find in her the girl I once knew. Another matron whom I recognized at once, retained something inescapably girlish in both face and voice. It hurtme to detect in her withered lips the quaint twist which had once been so charming to me—but then she undoubtedly discovered in me equally distressing reminders of decay.
Not all my philosophy could prevent me from falling into profound melancholy. I went back to my hotel thinking of these men and women as they were when, as a youth of twenty, I trod with them the worn plank walks beneath the magical murmuring maple trees. The bitter facts of their lives gave rise to question. What was it all about? What was the value of their efforts or my own? Has the life of man any more significance than that of an insect?
Just before leaving for the train next day we called on Osmond Button, who clung to my father with piteous intensity. "Stay another day," he pleaded, but father would not listen to any postponement.
This old neighbor went to the train with us, knowing full well that he and my father would never meet again.
Thus it happened—curiously, yet most naturally—that the last man we saw as we left Osage was our first neighbor on Dry Run prairie in the autumn of Seventy-one.
From this melancholy review of the bent forms of ancient friends and neighbors, dreaming of the past, I returned to my wife, who was concerned entirely with the future. What had she to do with elderly folk? Life to her was sweet and promiseful. Intently toiling over the adornment of tiny caps, socks and gowns, joyful as a girl of seven making dresses for a doll, she insisted on displaying to me all of that lilliputian wardrobe. A dozen times each day she called on me to admire this or that garment, and I was greatly relieved to find that the growing wonder of the experience through which she was about to pass, prevented her from giving way to fear of it. Over me, at times, an icy shadow fell. Suppose—suppose——!
One night she dreamed that a babe had come to us, andthat the nurse had carelessly allowed it to chill and die, but I had no such disturbing premonitions. Contrary to the statements of sentimental novelists and poets I almost never dreamed of my wife. I more often dreamed of Howells or Roosevelt or some of my editorial friends, indeed I often had highly technical literary dreams wherein I prepared manuscripts for the press or composed speeches or poems, and sometimes my mother or Jessie came back to me—but Zulime had never up to this time entered my sleep.
One afternoon during this period of waiting and just after I had finished the writing ofHesperwe joined our good friends the Eastons on an excursion up the Mississippi on their house-boat, a glorious outing which I mention because it was the farthest removed from my boyhood life on Dry Run prairie whose scenes had just been vividly brought to mind.
Here was the flawless poetry of recreation, the perfection of travel. To sit in a reclining chair on the screened-in forward deck of a beautiful boat, what time it was being propelled by some invisible silent machinery, up a shining river, reflecting wooded bluffs, was like taking flight on the magic carpet of my boyhood's story book. The purple head-lands projecting majestically into the still flood took on once more the poetry and the mystery of the prehistoric. One by one those royal pyramids ordered and adorned themselves for our inspection while the narrow valleys opening their gates, displayed all their tranquil pastoral charm.
Our meals, delicately cooked and perfectly served, appeared as if by conjury, on a table in the dining-room amidships, and as we ate we watched the glory deepen on the clouds, while the waters, soundless as oil, rolled past our open doors. It was all a passage to the Land of the Lotos to me. How had I, whose youth had been so full of penury and toil, earned a share in such leisure, such luxury?Was it right for me to give myself up to the enjoyment of it? For Zulime's sake I rejoiced in it, knowing that her days were long with waiting and suspense.
Without knowing much of the bitter anguish of the ordeal, I held maternity to be (as the great poets had taught me to hold it) a noble heroism. "If mankind is worth continuing on this earth," I had written, "then the mother is entitled to the highest honor, the tenderest care. Science should do its best to lessen her pain, to make her birth-bed honorable."
In spite of my wife's brave smile I sensed in her a subconscious dread of what was coming, and this anxiety I shared so fully that I ceased to write and gave all my time to her. Together we walked the garden or drove about the country in the low-hung, easy-riding old surrey, tracing the wooded ways we loved the best, or climbing to where a wide view of the valley offered. I understood her laughing stoicism much better now, and it no longer deceived me. She made light of her own fears in order that I might not worry. The fact that she was past her first youth was my torment, for I had read that the danger increased with every year beyond twenty-five and the thought that we might never ride these lanes again came into my mind and would not be exorcised. At such moments as I could snatch I worked on a series of lectures which I was scheduled to deliver at the University of Chicago—lectures on Edwin Booth which brought back my Boston days.
At last the dreaded day came!—I shall not dwell upon the long hours of the mother's pain, or on the sleepless anxiety of my household, for I have no desire to relive them. I would rather make statement of my relief and gratitude when after many, many hours of suffering, Edward Evans of LaCrosse, a scientific, deft and powerful surgeon, came to the mother's rescue. He was a master—the man who knew!