CHAPTER XLIIIN THE CHAUTAUQUA BELT
The centre of Indiana is a region of calm and simplicity, untroubled to a large extent, as I have often felt, by the stormy emotions and distresses which so often affect other parts of America and the world. It is a region of smooth and fertile soil, small, but comfortable homes, large grey or red barns, the American type of windmill, the American silo, the American motor car—a happy land of churches, Sunday schools, public schools and a general faith in God and humanity as laid down by the Presbyterian or the Baptist or the Methodist Church and by the ten commandments, which is at once reassuring and yet disturbing.
This day as we traveled through Wabash, Peru (the winter home of Hagenbeck’s and Wallace’s combined shows, b’gosh!), Kokomo, where the world very nearly came to an end for Speed and where James Whitcomb Riley once worked in a printer’s shop (I understood he had no love for my work)—and so on through Westfield, an old Quaker settlement, and to Carmel (where Franklin lives), and really to Indianapolis, for Carmel is little more than a suburb of the former,—I was more and more struck with the facts as I have outlined them here. Certain parts of the world are always in turmoil. Across the rasping grasses of Siberia or the dry sands of Egypt blow winds cold or hot, which make of the people restless, wandering tribes. To peaceful Holland and Belgium, the lowlands of Germany, the plains of France and Italy, and indeed all the region of the ancient world, come periodic storms of ambition or hate, which make of those old soils burying grounds not only of individual souls but of races. Here in America we have alreadyhad proof that certain sections of our land are destined apparently to tempestuous lives—the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards, Texas, Colorado, Kentucky, various parts of the South and the West and the Northwest, where conditions appear to engender the mood dynamic. From Chicago, or Colorado, or San Francisco one may expect a giant labor war or social upheaval of any kind; from Boston or Pennsylvania or New Mexico new religious movements may come—and have; New York, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Nebraska and Illinois can and have contributed vast political upheavals. This is even true of Ohio, its next door neighbor.
But Indiana lies in between all this—simple, unpretentious, not indifferent but quiescent,—a happy land of farms and simple industries which can scarcely be said to have worked any harm to any man.
Its largest cities have grown in an unobtrusive and almost unheralded way. Its largest contributions to American life so far have been a mildly soporific love literature of sorts, and an uncertain political vote. Anyone could look at these towns—all that we saw—and be sure that the natives were of an orderly, saving, genial and religious turn. I never saw neater small towns anywhere, nor more imposing churches and public buildings, nor fewer saloons, nor cleaner streets, nor better roads. A happy land, truly, where the local papers give large and serious attention to the most innocuous of social doings and the farmers take good care that all their land is under cultivation and well looked after.
As we were passing through Wabash, for instance—or was it Peru?—we came upon a very neat and pleasing church and churchyard, the front lawn of which an old man of a very energetic and respectable appearance—quite your “first citizen” type—was mowing with a lawnmower.
“Why should a man of that character be doing that work this weekday, do you suppose?” I inquired of Franklin.
“To get to heaven, of course. Can’t you see? Heavenis a literal, material thing to him. It’s like this church building and its grass. The closer he can identify himself with that here the nearer he will come to walking into his heaven there. I’ve noticed at home that the more prosperous and well to do farmers are usually the leaders in the church. They apply the same rules of getting on in religion that they do to their business. It is all a phase of the instinct of a man to provide for himself and his family. I tell you, these people expect to find more or less a duplication of what they have here—with all the ills and pinches taken out and all the refinements of their fancy, such as it is, added.”
I felt as I thought of that old man that this was true. He reminded me of my father, to whom to do the most menial work about a Catholic church was an honor—such as carrying in wood, building a fire, and the like. You were nearer God and the angels for doing it. Actually you were just outside the pearly gates. And if one could only die in a church—presto!—the gates would open and there you would be inside.
Truly, this day of riding south after my depressing afternoon in Warsaw was one of the most pleasant of any that had come to me. Now that I had recovered from my mood of the night before—a chemic and psychic disturbance which quite did for me—I was in a very cheerful frame of mind. Long before either Franklin or Speed had risen this morning—they had spent the evening looking around the town—I was up, had a cold bath, and had written various letters and visited the post office and studied the town in general.
It was a halcyon morning, partly grey with a faint tint of pink in the East, when I first looked out, and such an array of house martins on five telegraph or telephone wires over the way as I had not seen in a long time. Birds are odd creatures. Their gregariousness without speech always fascinates me. These, ranged as they were on the different wires, looked exactly like the notes of a complicated and difficult fugue—so much so that I said to a passing citizen who seemed to show an interest: “Now,if you had a piano or an organ just how would you play that?”
He looked up at the wires which a wave of my hand indicated, then at me. He was a man of over forty, who looked as though he might be a traveling salesman or hotelkeeper.
“They do look like notes, don’t they?” he agreed.
We both smiled, and then he added: “Now you make me wonder.” And so we parted.
Towns of this size, particularly in the Middle West—and I can scarcely say why—have an intense literary and artistic interest for me. Whether it is because of a certain comic grandioseness which accompanies some of their characters or an ultra seriousness entirely out of proportion to the seeming import of events here—or whether one senses a flow of secret and subconscious desires hindered or trammeled perhaps by cluttering or suffocating beliefs or weaknesses, or a lightness and simplicity of character due to the soil and the air—I do not know; but it is so. In this region I am always stirred or appealed to by something which I cannot quite explain. The air seems lighter, the soil more grateful; a sense of something delicately and gracefully romantic is abroad.
Like children they are, these people, so often concerned with little things which do not matter at all—neighborhood opinions, neighborhood desires, neighborhood failures and contempts which a little more mind could solve or dissolve so readily. Whenever I see a town of this size in Indiana I think of our family and its relation to one or many like it. My mother and sisters and brothers suffered so much from conventional local notions. They made such a pathetic struggle to rid themselves of trammeling, minor local beliefs.
And did they succeed?
Not quite. Who does? Small life surrounds one like a sea. We swim in it, whether we will or no. In high halls somewhere are tremendous councils of gods and supermen, but they will not admit us. Zeus and Apollo will not suffer the feeble judgments of humble man. Andso here we sit and slave and are weary—insects with an appointed task.
North Manchester, like all the small Indiana towns, appealed to me on the very grounds I have outlined. As I went up the street this early morning with my letters I encountered an old man, evidently a citizen of importance—present or past—being led down by his daughter (I took her to be). The latter was a thin, anæmic person who looked endless devotion—a pathetic, yearning solicitude for this man. He was blind, and yet quite an impressive figure, large, protuberant as to stomach, a broad, well-modeled face somewhat like that of the late Henry Ward Beecher, long, snow white hair, a silk hat, a swinging cutaway coat of broadcloth, a pleated soft-bosomed shirt ornamented with a black string tie, and an ivory-headed cane. Under his arm were papers and books. His sightless eyes were fixed on nothing—straight ahead. To me he looked like a lawyer or judge or congressman or politician—a local big-wig of some kind yet stricken in this most pathetic of all ways. The girl who was with him was so intent on his welfare. She was his eyes, his ears, his voice, really. It was wonderful—the resignation and self-effacement of her expression. It was quite moving.
“Who is that man?” I asked of a grocer clerk putting out a barrel of potatoes.
“That? Oh, that’s Judge Shellenberger—or he was judge. He’s a lawyer now for the Monon (a railroad that runs through here). He used to be judge of the circuit court.”
I watched them down the street, and as they turned into a block of buildings where I suppose was his office, my mind was busy conjuring up the background which enmeshed them. Life is so full of great tales—every life in its way a masterpiece if seen in its entirety and against the vast background of life itself. Poor, fluttering, summer loving man! The bones of him make the chalk cliffs of time.
To the curb in front of another grocery store as Iwas coming back to the hotel drew up a small, rickety buggy—so dilapidated and antique, scarcely worthy or safe to be hauled about rough country roads any longer. In it were “my Grandfather Squeers”—jackknife legs and all—and his wife, a most spare and crotchety female, in a very plain black dress, so inexpensive, a grey linseywoolsey shawl and a grey poke bonnet. She looked sosetand fixed and yet humanly interesting in her way. I felt sorry for the two of them at once, as I always do for age and that limited array of thoughts which has produced only a hard, toilsome life. (We laugh at ignorance or dullness or condemn them so loudly, but sometimes they are combined with such earnestness and effort that one would rather cry.) “My Grandfather Squeers” was plainly a little rheumatic and crotchety, too. He reminded me of that Mr. Gridley who was occupying my old room in Warsaw, only he was much older and not quite so intelligent. He was having a hard time getting down between the wheels and straightening out some parcels under the seat, the while Aunt Sally stared on straight ahead and the horse looked back at them—a not overfed bay mare which seemed very much concerned in their affairs and what they were going to do next.
“Now, don’t you forget about them seed onions,” came a definite caution from the figure on the seat.
“No, I won’t,” he replied.
“And ast about the potatoes.”
“Yes.”
He cricketed his way into the store and presently came out with a small bag followed by a boy carrying a large bag—of potatoes, I assumed.
“I guess we can put them right in front—eh, mother?” he called.
“Yes, I suppose so,” she assented, rather sharply, I thought, but not angrily.
The while the boy roughly bestowed the bag between them he went back for something, then came out and readjusted the potatoes properly.
“He didn’t have any red tape,” he called loudly, as though it was a matter of considerable importance.
“Well, all right,” she said. “Come on and get in.”
With much straining of his thin, stiff legs he got up and as he did so I noticed that his coat and trousers were home-made—cut, oh! most amazingly—and out of some old, faded wine colored cloth to begin with, probably worn years before by someone else. It made me think of all the old people I had known in my time, scrimping along on little or nothing, and of the thousands and thousands perhaps in every land for whom life is so hard, so meagre! If an artist takes a special case in hand and depicts it, one weeps, but no scheme has been devised to relieve the intense pressure on the many; and we forget so easily. I most of all. If I were a god, I have often said to myself, I would try to leaven the whole thing a little more evenly—but would I? Perhaps if I were a god I would see a reason for things as they are—a strangeness, a beauty, a requital not present to these mortal eyes.
These streets of North Manchester were hung with those same triangular banners—red, white, blue, green, pink, orange—which we had seen in the East and which announced the imminence of a local Chautauqua. I do not know much about that organization, but it certainly knows how to advertise in country towns. In the store windows were quite striking pictures of Stromboli, the celebrated band leader, a chrysanthemum haired, thin bodied Italian in a braided white suit, who had been photographed crouching, as though he were about to spring, and with one thin hand raised high in the air holding a bâton. His appearance was that of one who was saying: “One more crash now and I have won all.” And adjoining him in every window was the picture of Madame Adelina Scherzo, the celebrated soprano prima donna “straight from the Metropolitan Opera House, New York,” who was shown photographed with manager and friends on the observation platform of her privatecar. Madame Scherzo was in black velvet, with bare arms, shoulders and throat, an entrancing sight. She was rather pretty too, and a line under the picture made it clear that she was costing the management "$800.00 a day," a charge which interested me, considering the size of the town and county and the probable audiences which could be got out to see anything.
“How large is the hall where the Chautauqua entertainments are held?” I asked of the local bookstore man where I was buying some picturecards.
“It isn’t a hall; it’s a tent,” he replied. “They bring their own tent.”
“Well, how many will it seat or hold?”
“Oh, about fifteen hundred people.”
“And how many can they count on at any given performance?”
“Oh, about a thousand.”
“Not more than that?” I queried.
“A thousand is a good crowd for a fair night,” he persisted.
“And how much can they average per head?” I continued.
“Oh, not more than twentyfive cents. The seats run fifteen, twentyfive, thirtyfive and fifty cents.”
“Then say they average forty cents,” I said to myself. “That would mean that they took in four hundred dollars at a single performance—or if there are two a day, between seven and eight hundred dollars a day. And this one singer costs them eight hundred.”
I saw the horns and hoofs of the ubiquitous press agent.
“Do you think that Madame Scherzo gets the sum they say she does?” I asked of this same bookstore man, wondering whether he was taken in by their announcement. He looked fairly intelligent.
“Yes, indeed! She comes from the Metropolitan Opera House. I don’t suppose she’d come out here for any less than that.”
I wondered whether he intended this as a reflection onIndiana or a compliment to North Manchester. It was a little dubious.
“Well, that’s a good deal for a tent that only seats fifteen hundred,” I replied.
“But you don’t want to forget that they play to two audiences a day,” he returned solemnly, as though he had solved it all.
I thought it unkind to argue with him. Why shouldn’t North Manchester have a celebrated prima donna costing eight hundred dollars a day? Think how the knowledge of that would add to the natives' enjoyment of her music!
“You’re right,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that.” And out I went.
While we were trifling about getting ready to start, a singular combination of circumstances produced an odd case of repetition or duplication of a set of facts which had occurred the year before, which impressed me greatly, the more so as it corresponded exactly with a number of similar instances in my own life.
I might preface my remarks by saying that throughout my life experiences and scenes have to a certain extent tended to duplicate or repeat themselves. Nietzsche remarks somewhere that we all have our typical experiences. It is not a particularly brilliant deduction, considering the marked predilections of certain temperaments. But when we connect up the fact with chemical or physical law, as we are likely some day to do, it becomes highly significant. Personally, I am one who believes that as yet we have not scratched the surface of underlying fact and law. I once believed, for instance, that nature was a blind, stumbling force or combination of forces which knew not what or whither. I drew that conclusion largely from the fumbling nonintelligence (relatively speaking) of men and all sentient creatures. Of late years I have inclined to think just the reverse, i. e., that nature is merely dark to us because of her tremendous subtlety and our own very limited powers of comprehension; also that in commonwith many other minor forces and forms of intelligence—insects and trees, for example—we are merely tools or implements—slaves, to be exact—and that collectively we are used as any other tool or implement would be used by us.
Thus there is a certain species of ant, the Dorylii, which is plainly a scavenger so far as the surface of the earth is concerned, appearing at the precise moment when a dead body is becoming offensive and burying and devouring it. This may be said to be equally true of buzzards, jackals, carrion crows, creatures which a Darwinian naturalist would explain as the result of an unintentional pressure—and natural selection. On the other hand, current biology tends to indicate that all is foreshadowed, prearranged; that indications of what will be are given ages before it is permitted to appear. Ontogenetic Orthogenesis it is called, I believe. The creative forces have an amazing way of working. They may use strange means—races of men and insects, of no particular value to them—to accomplish certain results. Thus man might well be a tool intended to release certain forces in the soil—coal, iron, stone, copper, gold—and all his social organization and social striving merely the physico-legal aspects or expression of the processes by which all things are done. Multiple unit forces must work in some harmonious way, and all these harmonious processes would therefore need to be provided for. They may be the chemical and physical laws by which we are governed. How otherwise can one explain the fact that although there is apparently sufficient wisdom in the universe to sustain immense sidereal systems in order and to generate all the complex organisms which we see and can examine at our leisure, yet man remains blind and dumb as to the processes by which he comes and goes? He has examined a little. He has prepared a lexicon of laws whose workings he has detected. Beyond these must be additional laws, or so he suspects, but what are they? In the meantime, instead of nature permitting him to go on (once he has his mind prepared for thoughtalong these lines), it strikes him down and puts new, ignorant youth in his place—new, ignorant generations of youths.
Actually (I sincerely believe this) it is not intended that man should ever be permitted to know anything. The temperaments of the powers to whom we pray are not magnanimous. Man is a slave, a tool. The fable of Prometheus and the divine fire has more of fact than of poetry in it. At every turn of man’s affairs he is arbitrarily and ruthlessly and mockingly confused. New generations of the dull and thick are put forth. False prophets arise. Religionists, warriors, dreamers without the slightest conception of the import of that which they seek or do, arise, slay, burn, confuse. Man stands confounded for a time, a slave to illusion, toiling with forces and by aid of forces which he does not understand, and effecting results the ultimate use of which he cannot possibly grasp. We burn gas! For ourselves alone? We generate electricity! For ourselves alone? We mine coal, iron, lead, etc.—release it into space eventually. For ourselves alone? Who knows, really? By reason of the flaming, generative chemistry of our bodies we are compelled to go on. Why?
At the critical moment when man becomes too inquisitive he may be once more chained to the rock, Prometheus-like, and the eagles of ignorance and duty set at his vitals. Why the astounding bludgeoning of each other by the nations of Europe? Cosmically—permanently—what can they gain?