CHAPTER LVIIIFRENCH LICK
After passing through Jasper and Dubois Counties, where we had seen more good automobiles, good roads and brisk life than we had since the very best sections of northern Indiana and Ohio, our luck in roads left off. Around the courthouse square at Jasper we had seen machines of the best make, and parties of well to do people driving; but on our road to Kellerville and Norton and French Lick we passed nothing but rumbling wagons and some few, not very good, cars.
And now the landscape changed rapidly. I had always heard that Brown County, east of Monroe (the seat of our state university), was the roughest and most picturesque in the state, containing a hill, the highest in Indiana, of over five hundred feet! As a student I had walked there with a geologizing party, but if my memory served me correctly, it did not compare in picturesqueness with the region through which we were now making our way. Heights and depths are variable matters anyway, and the impression of something stupendous or amazingly precipitous which one can get from a region of comparatively low altitude depends on the arrangement of its miniature gorges and crevasses. Here in Orange County I had an impression of great hills and deep ravines and steep inclines which quite equalled anything we had seen. It suggested the vicinity of Stroudsburg in Pennsylvania, and as we sped along there were sudden drops down which we ground at breakneck speed, which quite took my breath away. It was a true and beautiful mountain country, becabined, lonely, for the most part bridgeless—and such roads! We bumped and jounced and floundered along. Now and again we were at thevery bottom of a ravine, with lovely misty hills rising sheer above us. Again, we were on some seeming mountain side, the valleys falling sharply away from the road and showing some rocky rivulet at the bottom. More than once we shot the machine through a tumbling, sparkling, moonlit stream.
At the bottom of one ravine I saw a light, and we being very uncertain of our way, I climbed out at the gate and went up under some vines and bushes to knock at the door. Inside, since it was open, I beheld a quite metropolitan interior—craftsman furniture, a wall of well-built shelves loaded with books, a table strewn with magazines and papers, and the room lighted by a silk shaded lamp. When I knocked a short, stocky, legal looking youth of most precise manners and attire and a large pair of horn glasses on his nose, arose from a small secretary and came over.
“French Lick?” I inquired.
“About eighteen miles,” he replied. “You are on the right road.”
I felt quite reduced. I had expected to find a picturesque, ambling, drawling mountaineer.
Between bounces and jounces and “holding back” against declivities to which Bert seemed amazingly indifferent, I sat and dreamed over those moonlit hills. What a possession for a state like Indiana, I thought—a small, quaint, wonderful Alpine region within its very center. As time went on and population increased, I thought, this would afford pleasure and recreation to thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who knows, who could not afford to go farther. Plainly it had already evinced its charm to the world, for were we not on the very outskirts of two of the most remarkable curative spring resorts in America, if not in the world? Who had not heard of French Lick—West Baden? And yet when I went to school at the state university, these places had not been heard of locally, let alone nationally.
I recall a long, lanky student from this very county who was studying law at “our college,” who told me ofFrench Lick, and that “a lot of people around there thought the waters were good for rheumatism.” I expected, somehow, as we rode along, to see some evidence in the way of improved mountain conditions—better houses, more of them, possibly—now that we were in the vicinity of such a prosperous resort, but not a sign was there. Ten o’clock came and then eleven. We were told that we were within nine miles, seven miles, four miles, two miles—still no houses to speak of, and only the poorest type of cabin. At one mile there was still no sign. Then suddenly, at the bend of a road, came summer cottages of the customary resort type, a street of them. Bright lamps appeared. A great wall of cream colored brick, ablaze with lights, arose at the bottom of the ravine into which we were descending. I was sure this was the principal hotel. Then as we approached gardens and grounds most extensive and formal in character appeared, and in their depths, to the left, through a faint pearly haze, appeared a much larger and much more imposing structure. This wasThehotel. The other was an annex for servants!
All the gaudy luxury of a Lausanne or Biarritz resort was here in evidence. A railroad spur adjoining a private hotel station contained three or four private cars, idling here while their owners rested. A darkened Pullman train was evidently awaiting some particular hour to depart. At the foot of a long iron and glass awning, protecting a yellow marble staircase of exceedingly florate design, a liveried flunky stood waiting to open automobile doors. As we sped up he greeted us. Various black porters pounced on our bags like vultures. We were escorted through a marble lobby such as Arabian romances once dreamed of as rare, and to an altar like desk, where a high priest of American profit deigned to permit us to register. We were assigned rooms (separate quarters for our chauffeur) at six dollars the day, and subsequently ushered down two miles of hall on the fifth or sixth floor to our very plain, very white, but tastefully furnishedrooms, where we were permitted to pay the various slaves who had attended us.
“George,” I said to the robustious soul who carried my bag, “how many rooms has this hotel?”
“Eight hundred, suh, Ah believe.”
“And how many miles is it from here to the diningroom?”
“We don’t serve no meals aftah nine o’clock, suh, but Ah expects if you wanted a lil' sumfin sent up to yo room, de chef would see you done got it.”
“No, George, I’m afraid of these chefs. I think I’ll go out instead. Isn’t there a restaurant around here somewhere?”
“Nothin' as you-all’d like to patronize, suh, no suh. Dey is one restaurant. It keeps open most all night. It’s right outside de grounds here. I think you might get a lil' sumfin dayah. Dey has a kinda pie countah.”
“That’s it, George,” I replied. “That’s me. A plain, humble pie counter. And now good night to you, George.”
“Good night, suh.”
And he went out grinning.
French LickFRENCH LICKThe Hotel and Fresh Water Spring
FRENCH LICKThe Hotel and Fresh Water Spring
FRENCH LICKThe Hotel and Fresh Water Spring
I may seem to be exaggerating, but I say it in all seriousness. These enormous American watering place hotels, with their armies of servants, heavy, serious-faced guests, solemn state diningrooms, miles of halls and the like, more or less frighten me. They are so enormous. Their guests are so stiff, starchy, captain-of-industry-like. And they are so often (not always) accompanied by such pursy, fussy, heavily bejeweled or besilked and velveted females, whose very presence seems to exude a kind of opposition to or contempt for simple things, which puts me on tenter hooks. I don’t seem quite to belong. I may have the necessary money to pay for all and sundry services such as great hostelries provide—for a period anyhow—but even so, I still feel small. I look about me furtively and suspect every man I see of being at least a millionaire. I feel as though I were entirely surrounded by judges, merchant princes, eminent doctors, lawyers,priests, senators and presidents, and that if I dare say a word, some one might cry—"That man! Who is he, anyhow? Put him out." And so, as I say, I “kinda-sorta” slip along and never make any more noise or fuss or show than I have to. If a head waiter doesn’t put me in exactly the place I would like to be, or the room clerk doesn’t give me just the room I would like, I always say, “Ah, well, I’m just a writer, and perhaps I’d better not say anything. They might put me out. Bishops and doctors and lawyers ought to have all the center tables or window seats, and so——” It’s really uncomfortable to be so humble—just nothing at all.
But notwithstanding this rather tragic state, my room was a good one, and the windows, once opened to the moonlight, commanded a fine view of the grounds, with the walks, spring pavilions and artificial grottoes and flower beds all picked out clearly by the pale, ethereal light. The restaurant over the way was all that George said it was and more—very bad. The whole town seemed to be comprised of this one great hotel and an enormous annex for servants and chauffeurs, and then a few tatter-demalion resorts and the town cottages. The springs in the grounds were four or five in number, all handsomely hooded with Moorish pavilions. In each case these latter were floored with colored marbles, and you went down steps into them, carrying your own glass and drinking all of the peculiar tasting fluid you could endure. Resident physicians prescribe treatments or methods, for a price. The very wealthy visitors or patients often bring their own physicians, who resent, no doubt, all local medical advice. The victims, or lovers of leisure, idle about these far-flung grounds, enjoying the walks, the smooth grass, the views, the golf links and the tennis courts. The hours for meals are the principal hours—and dinner from seven to nine is an event—a dress affair. The grand parade to the diningroom seems to begin at six fortyfive or six fifty. At that time you can sit in the long hall leadingto that very essential chamber and see the personages go by.
For this occasion, at breakfast the next morning and luncheon, which here is a kind of an affair of state, Franklin and I did well enough. We were given tables with a pleasant view, walked over the grounds, drank at all the springs, bought picture postcards, and after idling and getting thoroughly refreshed, decided to be on our way. West Baden, as it proved, was directly on our route out of town, not more than three quarters of a mile off; and to this we repaired, also, merely to see.
If anything, it was more assuming in its appearance than French Lick. The principal hotel, an enormous one of cream brick and white stone, with a low, flat, red oval dome, Byzantine or Moroccan in spirit, was almost of the size and the general appearance of the Trocadero in Paris. As in the case of the hotel at French Lick, the grounds were very extensive and gardened to within an inch of their life. Pagodas and smart kiosks indicated the springs. A great wide circular driveway admitted to the entrance of the principal hotel. Banked and parked with stone, there was a stream here which ran through the principal grounds, and there were other hotels by no means humble in their appearance.
Satisfied at having at least seen these twin resorts, I was content to make short work of the rest of the journey. At Paoli (what a rural sounding midwestern name), the county seat of this poor and rather backwoods county, we found a courthouse so small and countrified that we could not resist the desire to pause and observe it—it was so nondescript—a cross between a Greek temple and a country school. The Greek temple was surmounted by a small, somewhat German looking belfry. About it, on all sides, ran the old time hitching rail for wagons, an unpretentious note which indicated the nonarrival of the automobile. To it were fastened a collection of nondescript wagons, buggies, and buckboards, intermingled with three or four small automobiles. I got out and walked through it only to see the county treasurer, or someone inhis office, sawing away on a fiddle. The music was not exactly entrancing, but jolly. Outside stood a rather gaunt and malarial looking farmer in the poorest of crinkly jeans, threadbare and worn at the elbows. “Tell me,” I said. “I see on the map here a place called Lost River. Is there a river here and does it disappear underground?”
“That’s just what it does, mister,” he replied most courteously, “but thar ain’t nothin' to see. The water just sorta peters out as it goes along. You can’t see nothin' but just dry stones. I don’t know exactly where it does come up again. Out here Orangeville way, I think. There are a lot of underground caves around here.”
We went on, but on discovering a splendid stretch of road and speeding on it, we forgot all about Lost River.
Throughout this and the next county north, the roads seemed to attain a maximum of perfection, possibly due to the amazing quarries at Bedford, beyond. We traveled so fast that we ran down a hen and left it fluttering in the road, a sight which gave me the creeps and started a new train of speculation. I predicted then, to myself privately, that having run down one thing we would run down another before the trip was over, for, as I said before, this is the sort of thing that is always happening to me—what Nietzsche would call my typical experience. If I should stop at one pretentious hotel like the Kittatinny, on a trip like this, I would be sure to stop at another, like French Lick, before I was through, or if I lost a valuable ring on Monday, I would be sure to lose a valuable pin on Thursday or thereabouts. Life goes on in pairs for me. My one fear in connection with this chicken incident was that the loss might prove something much more valuable than a chicken, and the thought of death by accident, to others than myself, always terrifies me.
Through the region that suggested the beauty and sweep of western New York, we now sped into Bedford City, a city that seemed to have devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to churches. I never saw so manylarge and even quite remarkable churches in so small a town. It only had twelve thousand population, yet the churches looked as though they might minister to thirty thousand.
Just at the edge of this town, north, we came to quarries, the extent and impressiveness of which seemed to me a matter of the greatest import. Carrara, in Italy, is really nothing compared with this. There some of the pure white stone is mined—cut from tunnels in the sides of the hills. Here the quarries are all open to the sky and reaching for miles, apparently, on every hand. Our road lay along a high ridge which divided two immense fields of stone, and sitting in our car we could see derricks and hear electrically driven stone drills on every hand for miles. There were sheer walls of stone, thirty, forty, and as it seemed to me, even fifty feet high, cut true to plummet, and which revealed veins of unquarried stone suggesting almost untold wealth. At the bottom of these walls were pools of dull green water, the color of a smoky emerald, and looking like a precious stone. In the distance, on every hand, were hills of discarded stone, or at least stone for which there was no present use. I fancy they were veined or broken or slightly defective blocks which are of no great value now, but which a more frugal generation may discover how to use. In every direction were car tracks, spurs, with flat cars loaded or waiting to be loaded with these handsome blocks. As we went north from here, following a line of railroad that led to Bloomington, Indiana, the ways seemed to be lined with freight trains hauling this stone. We must have passed a dozen such in our rapid run to Bloomington.
In approaching this town my mind was busy with another group of reminiscences. As I thought back over them now, it seemed to me that I must have been a most unsatisfactory youth to contemplate at this time, one who lacked nearly all of the firm, self-directive qualities which most youths of my age at that time were supposed to have. I was eighteen then, and all romance and moonshine.I had come down from Chicago after these several years at Warsaw and two in Chicago, in which I had been trying to connect commercially with life, and as I may say now, I feel myself to have been a rather poor specimen. I had no money other than about three hundred dollars loaned to me, or rather forced upon me, by an ex-teacher of mine (one who had conducted the recitation room in the high school at Warsaw) who, finding me working for a large wholesale hardware company in Chicago, insisted that I should leave and come here to be educated.
“You may never learn anything directly there, Theodore,” she counseled, “but something will come to you indirectly. You will see what education means, what its aim is, and that will be worth a great deal. Just go one year, at least, and then you can decide for yourself what you want to do after that.”
She was an old maid, with a set of false upper teeth, and a heavenly, irradiating smile. She had led a very hard life herself, and did not wish me to. She was possessed of a wondrously delicate perception of romance, and was of so good a heart that I can scarcely ever think of her without a tendency to rhapsodize. She was not beautiful, and yet she was not unattractive either. Four years later, having eventually married, she died in child-birth. At this time, for some reason not clear to myself, she yearned over me in a tender, delicate, motherly way. I have never forgotten the look in her eyes when she found me in the wholesale hardware house (they called me down to the office and I came in my overalls), nor how she said, smiling a delicate, whimsical, emotional smile:
“Theodore, work of this kind isn’t meant for you, really. It will injure your spirit. I want you to let me help you go to school again.”
I cannot go into the romance of this—it is too long a story. I forget, really, whether I protested much or not. My lungs and stomach were troubling me greatly and I was coughing and agonizing with dyspepsia nearly all thewhile. After some conferences and arrangements made with my mother, I came—and for an entire college year dreamed and wondered.
I know now for a fact that I never learned, all the time I was there, quite what it was all about. I heard much talk of -ologies and -tries and -isms without quite grasping the fundamental fact that they were really dealing with plain, ordinary, everyday life—the forces about us. Somehow I had the vague uncertain notion that they did not concern ordinary life at all. I remember one brisk youth telling me that in addition to law, which he was studying, he was taking up politics, taxation, economics, and the like, as aids. I wondered of what possible use those things could be to him, and how much superior his mind must be to mine, since he could grasp them and I, no doubt, could not.
Again, the professors there were such a wondrous company to me, quite marvelous. They were such an outré company, your heavy-domed, owl-like wiseacres, who see in books and the storing up of human knowledge in books the sum and substance of life’s significance. As I look back on them now I marvel at my awe of them then, and at that time I was not very much awestricken either—rather nonplussed.
Suffice it to say that the one thing that I really wanted to see in connection with this college was a ground floor parlor I had occupied in an old, rusty, vine-covered house, which stood in the center of a pleasing village lawn and had for a neighbor a small, one-story frame, where dwelt a hoyden of a girl who made it her business to bait me the first semester I was there. This room I had occupied with a law student by the name of William or Bill Wadhams, center rush and almost guiding spirit of the whole college football team, and afterwards county treasurer of and state senator from an adjacent Indiana county. He was a romping, stamping, vigorous, black-haired, white-faced pagan, who cursed and drank a little and played cards and flirted with the girls. He could be so mild and so engaging that when I first saw him I liked himimmensely, and what was much more curious he seemed to take a fancy to me. We made an agreement as to expenditures and occupying the same room. It did not seem in the least odd to me, at that time, that he should occupy the same bed with me. I had always been sleeping with one or the other of my brothers. It was more odd that, although he at once surrounded himself with the crême-de-la-crême of the college football world, who made of our humble chamber a conference and card room, I got along well enough with them all to endure it, and even made friends out of some of them. They were charming—so robust and boisterous and contentious and yet genial.
Through his personality or my own—I can never quite make out which—I was drawn into a veritable maelstrom of college life. I had no least idea what I wanted to study, but because I had been deficient in certain things in high school, I took up those,—first-year Latin, geometry, English literature, history and Old English. How I ever got along I do not know. I think I failed in most things because I never mastered grammar or mathematics. However, I staggered on, worrying considerably and feeling that my life, and indeed my character, was a failure. Between whiles, I found time and the mood for associating with and enjoying all sorts of odd personalities—youth of the most diverse temperaments and ambitions, who seemed to find in me something which they liked,—a Michigan law student, an Indiana minister’s son, a boy who was soon to be heir to a large fortune and so on and so on. I was actually popular with some, after a fashion, and if I had known how to make use of my abilities in this line—had I really craved friendship and connections—I might have built up some enduring relationships which would have stood me in good stead, commercially and socially, later. As it was, my year ended, I left college, dropping all but half a dozen youths from my list of even occasional correspondents, and finally losing track of all of them, finding in different scenes and interests all that I seemed to require in the way of mental and social diversion.