CHAPTER XIXTHE REV. J. CADDEN McMICKENS
The last twelve miles of the run into Portageville had seemed if anything the most perfect of all. Before we reached Canaseraga we traversed a number of miles of dirt road—"one of the finest dirt roads anywhere," a local enthusiast described it,—and it was excellent, very much above the average. After Canaseraga it continued for twelve miles, right into Portageville and the Falls, and even on to Warsaw and East Aurora, some forty miles farther, as we found out later. Following it we skirted a hillside with a fine valley below it, and few, if any, houses to evidence the thriving farm life which the fields seemed to suggest. Evening gnats were whirling everywhere. Breaths of cool air were beginning to emanate from the grove of woods which we occasionally passed. The long rays of the sun slanted so heavily that they came under my visor and found my eyes. A fine vigorous type of farm boy swinging along with an axe over his shoulder, and beads of perspiration on his brow, informed us that we were on the right road. I envied him his pink cheeks and his lithe body and his clear blue eyes.
But the Falls, when we found them, were not quite all that I expected. Three Falls—an upper, a lower and a middle—were all included in a park called “Letchworth,” but it did not seem to me that much parking had been accomplished. A great house near them at the spot where a railroad crosses on a high trestle, deceived us into thinking that we had found a delightful hotel for the night; but no, it was an institution of some kind. Deep down in a valley below the Falls we found Portageville, a small, crossroads place that looked for all theworld like one of those cowboy towns one sees so persistently displayed in the moving pictures. There were two or three frame hotels of drab or green shades, facing a large open square, and a collection of small white frame houses, with a host of rather primitive looking Americans sitting outside the hotels in rocking or arm chairs, the men in their shirt sleeves. Franklin, who is precise in his apparel, was rather irritated, I think. He was not expecting anything quite so crude. We inquired as to rooms and meals and found that we could have both, only the evening meal should be eaten very soon, if we wanted any. The hour for it was from six to seven, with no à la carte service.
The individual who volunteered this information was a little, short, stout man in belted trousers and shirt sleeves who stood beside the car as it lay alongside the hotel platform, picking his teeth with a toothpick. He was so blandly unconscious of the fact that the process might be a little annoying that he was amusing. I got the feeling that things would not be so comfortable here as they might be, and so I was glad when Franklin suggested that we seek a more perfect view of the Falls, which someone had said was to be obtained from below the Falls. It would take only ten or fifteen minutes, so the proprietor suggested,—straight up the road we were on—so we went on seeking it. We did not return.
In the first place, we could not find the view indicated, and in the second place, we encountered a man who wanted to ride and who told such a queer story of being robbed of his bicycle while assisting another man to repair his machine, that we began to suspect he was a little crazy or that he had some scheme in mind of robbing us,—just which we could not determine. But in parleying with him and baffling him by suggesting we were going back into the village instead of the way he thought we were going, we lost so much time that it was night, and we did not think we would get a decent meal if we did return. So we questioned another stranger as to the route to Warsaw,found that it was only twenty miles, and struck out for it.
Over a road that was singularly smooth for a dirt one, and through land as flat as Illinois, a tableland on the top of a ridge,—which proved the last we were to see—we raced Warsaw-ward. It was strangely like my school days home, or I romanticised myself into the belief that it was. It was the same size as Warsaw, Indiana, when I left it—thirtyfive hundred—and its principal east and west street, as I discovered the next morning, was named Buffalo, as at home. It differed in one respect greatly, and that was that it had no courthouse square, and no lakes immediately adjoining it; but otherwise its general atmosphere was quite the same. It had a river, or small stream about the size of the Tippecanoe. The similarity is not so startling when one considers how many towns of thirtyfive hundred are county seats in the middle west, and how limited their opportunities for difference are. Assemble four or five hundred frame and brick houses of slightly varying size and architecture and roominess, surround them with trees and pleasing grass plots, provide the town a main street and one cross street of stores, place one or two red brick school houses at varying points in them, add one white sandstone courthouse in a public square, and a railroad station, and four or five or six red brick churches, and there you have them all. Give one town a lake, another a stream, another a mill pond—it makes little difference.
And actually, as we dashed along toward Warsaw under a starry sky, with a warm, summery wind blowing, a wind so warm that it felt suspiciously like rain, I allowed myself to sink into the most commemorative state. When you forget the now and go back a number of years and change yourself into a boy and view old scenes and see old faces, what an unbelievably strange and inexplicable thing life becomes! We attempt solutions of this thing, but to me it is the most vacuous of all employments. I rather prefer to take it as a strange, unbelievable, impossible orchestral blending of sounds and scenes and moodsand odors and sensations, which have no real meaning and yet which, tinkling and kaleidoscopic as they are, are important for that reason. I never ride this way at night, or when I am tired by day or night, but that life becomes this uncanny blur of nothingness.
Why should something want to produce two billion people all alike,—ears, eyes, noses, hands, unless for mere sensory purposes,—to sensitize fully and voluptuously something that is delicious? Why billions of trees, flowers, insects, animals, all seeking to feel, unless feeling without socalled reason is the point? Why reason, anyway? And to what end? Supposing, for instance, that one could reason through to the socalled solution, actually found it, and then had to live with that bit of exact knowledge and no more forever and ever and ever! Give me, instead, sound and fury, signifying nothing. Give me the song sung by an idiot, dancing down the wind. Give me this gay, sad, mad seeking and never finding about which we are all so feverishly employed. It is so perfect, this inexplicable mystery.
And it was with some such thoughts as these that I was employed, sitting back in the car and spinning along over these roads this night. I was only half awake and half in a dreamland of my own creating. The houses that we passed with open doors, lamp on table, people reading, girls playing at pianos, people sitting in doorsteps, were in the world of twentyfive or thirty years before, and I was entering the Warsaw of my school days. There was no real difference. “What ideas have we today that we did not have then?” I was dreamily asking myself. “How do people differ? Are the houses any better, or the clothes? Or the people in their bodies and minds? Or are their emotions any richer or keener or sweeter?” Euripides wrote the Medea in 440 B. C. Shakespeare wrote “Macbeth” in 1605 A. D. “The Song of Songs”—how old is that? Or the Iliad? The general feeling is that we are getting on, but I should like to know what we can get on to, actually. And beyond the delight of sensory response, what is there to get onto? Mechanicalizing the world does not,cannot, it seems to me, add to the individual’s capacity for sensory response. Life has always been vastly varied. How, by inventing things, can we make it more so? As a matter of fact, life, not man, is supplying its own inventions and changes, adding some, discarding others. To what end? Today we have the automobile. Three thousand years ago we had the chariot. Today we fight with forty-centimeter guns and destructive gases. Three thousand years ago we fought with catapults and burning pitch and oil. Man uses all the forces he can conceive, and he seems to be able to conceive of greater and greater forces, but he does not understand them, and his individual share in the race’s sensory response to them is apparently no greater than ever. We are capable of feeling so much and no more. Has any writer, for instance, felt more poignantly or more sweetly than those whose moods and woes are now the Iliad? And when Medea speaks, can anyone say it is ancient and therefore less than we can feel today? We know that this is not true.
I may seem to grow dim in my researches, but I can conceive of no least suggestion of real change in the sensory capacity of life. As it was in the beginning, so it appears that it is now—and shall I say, ever shall be? I will not venture that. I am not all-wise and I do not know.
When we entered Warsaw I had just such thoughts in my mind, and a feeling that I would like very much to have something to eat. Since it was early Saturday evening, the streets were crowded with country vehicles, many automobiles, and a larger percentage of tumble-down buggies and wagons than I had so far seen elsewhere. Why? The oldest, poorest, most ratty and rickety looking auto I had seen in I don’t know when was labeled “For Hire.”
“Gee whiz!” exclaimed Speed when he caught sight of it. And I added, “Who would want to ride in that, anyhow?”
Yet, since it was there, it would seem as if somebody might want to do so.
However, at the north end of the principal street, and close to a small park, we discovered one of the most comfortable little hotels imaginable. All the rooms were done in bright, cheerful colors, and seemed to be properly cared for. There were baths and an abundance of hot water and towels, and electric lights and electric call bells,—rather novel features for a country hotel of this size. The lobby was as smart and brisk as most hotels of a much more expensive character. We “spruced up” considerably at the sight of it. Franklin proceeded with his toilet in a most ambitious manner, whereupon I changed to a better suit. I felt quite as though I were dressing for an adventure of some kind, though I did not think there was the slightest likelihood of our finding one in a town of this size, nor was I eager for the prospect. A half dozen years before—perhaps earlier—I would have been most anxious to get into conversation with some girl and play the gallant as best I could, or roam the dark in search of adventure, but tonight I was interested in no such thing, even if I might have.
Surely I must be getting along in years, I said to myself, to be thus indifferent to these early enthusiasms. Twenty years before, if anyone had told me that I could go forth into a brisk Saturday evening crowd such as was filling this one street, and, seeing the young girls and boys and women and men going about, feel no least thrill of possible encounters, I would have said that life, under such circumstances, would not be worth living. Yet here I was, and here we were, and this was exactly what I was doing and life seemed fairly attractive.
Out in the buzzing country street we did nothing but stroll about, buy picture postcards, write on and address them, buy some camera films, get our shoes shined, and finally go for our dinner to a commonplace country restaurant. I was interested in the zealous, cadaverous, overambitious young man who was the proprietor, and a young, plump blonde girl acting as waitress, who mighthave been his wife or only a hired girl. Her eyes looked swollen and as though she had been crying recently. And he was in a crotchety, non-palliative mood, taking our orders in a superior, contemptuous manner, and making us feel as though we were of small import.
“What ails mine host, do you suppose?” I asked of Franklin.
“Oh, he thinks that we think we’re something, I suppose, and he’s going to prove to us that we’re not. You know how country people are.”
I watched him thereafter, and I actually think Franklin’s interpretation was correct.
As we ambled about afterwards, Speed told us the harrowing story of the descent of the Rev. J. Cadden McMickens on the fair city of Kokomo, Indiana, some few years before, when he was working there as a test man for one of the great automobile companies. After a reasonable period of religious excitement and exhortation, in which the Rev. J. Cadden conducted a series of meetings in a public hall hired for the occasion and urged people to reform and repent of their sins, he suddenly announced that on a given day the end of the world would certainly take place and that all those not reformed or “saved” by that date would be damned. On the night before the fatal morning on which the earth was to be consumed by fire or water, or both, Speed suddenly awoke to the fact that he was not “saved” and that he could not get a train out of Kokomo to Carmel, Indiana, where his mother lived. To him at that time the world was surely coming to an end. Fire, brimstone, water, smoke, were already in the air. As he related this story to us I got the impression that his knees knocked under him. In consequence of the thought of never being able to see his dear mother any more, or his sister or brothers, he nearly succumbed of heart failure. Afterwards, finding that the earth was not destroyed and that he was as safe and sound as ever, he was seized by a great rage against the aforesaid Rev. J. Cadden McMickens, and went to seek him out in order that he might give him “a damnedgood licking,” as he expressed it, but the Rev. J. Cadden, having seen his immense prophecy come to nothing, had already fled.
“But, Speed,” I protested, “how comes it that you, a sensible young fellow, capable of being a test man for a great automobile factory like that of the H—— Company, could be taken in by such fol de rol? Didn’t you know that the earth was not likely to be consumed all of a sudden by fire or water? Didn’t you ever study geology or astronomy or anything like that?”
“No, I never,” he replied, with the only true and perfect Hoosier response to such a query. “I never had a chance to go to school much. I had to go to work when I was twelve.”
“Yes, I know, Speed,” I replied sympathetically, “but you read the newspapers right along, don’t you? They rather show that such things are not likely to happen—in a general way they do.”
“Yes, I know,” he replied, “but I was just a kid then. That doggone skunk! I’d just like to have a picture of him, I would, frightening me like that.”
“But, Speed,” I said, “surely you didn’t believe that the earth was going to be swallowed by fire that next morning after you were so frightened?”
“Yes, I did, too,” he replied. “He was just agettin' out papers and handbills with great big type, and hollerin' there on the corner. It was enough to scare anybody. Why wouldn’t I? Just the same, I wasn’t the only one. There were hundreds—mostly everybody in Kokomo. I went over to see an old lady I knew, and she said she didn’t know if it would happen or not—she wasn’t sure.”
“You poor kid,” I mumbled.
“Well, what did you do, Speed, when you found you couldn’t get out of town?” inquired Franklin. “Why didn’t you walk out?”
“Yes, walk out,” replied Speed resentfully. “I have a picture of myself walking out, and Carmel forty milesaway or more. I wanted to be with my mother when the earth burned up.”
“And you couldn’t make it by morning,” I commented.
“No, I couldn’t,” he replied.
“Well, then, what did you do?” persisted Franklin.
“Well, I went to see this old lady where I boarded once, and I just stayed with her. We sat and waited together.”
At this point I was troubled between a desire to laugh and to weep. This poor youth! And the wild-eyed J. Cadden McMickens! And Kokomo! And the hundreds who believed! Can’t you see Speed and the old lady—the young boy and the woman who didn’t know and couldn’t be sure, and Kokomo, and the Rev. J. Cadden McMic——
I feel as if I would like to get hold of the Rev. J. Cadden even at this late date and shake him up a bit. I won’t say kick him, but——