CHAPTER XLOLD HAUNTS AND OLD DREAMS
But the school next door gave me the cruellest shock of all. I went into it because, it being mid August, the preliminary autumn repairs were under way and the place was open. Workingmen were scattered about—carpenters, painters, glaziers. I had no idea how sound my memory was for these old scenes until I stepped inside the door and saw the closets where we used to hang our hats and coats onournails and walked up the stairs to the seventh grade room, which is the one in which I had been placed on our arrival in Warsaw.
Here it was, just as I had left it, apparently—the same walls, the same benches, the same teacher’s table. But how small the benches had grown, scarcely large enough for me to squeeze into now, even though I allowed for a tight fit! The ceiling and walls seemed not nearly so high or so far as they had once seemed. At that very table sat Mae Calvert, our teacher—dead now, so someone told me later—a blooming girl of nineteen or twenty who at that time seemed one of the most entrancing creatures in all the world. She had such fine blue eyes, such light brown hair, such a rounded, healthy, vigorous body. And she had been so fond of me. Once, sitting at my little desk (it was the fifth from the front in the second aisle, counting from the west side of the room), she paused and put her hand on my head and cheek, pinching my neck and ear, and I colored the while I thrilled with pleasure. You see, hitherto, I had been trained in a Catholic school, what little I had been, and the process had proved most depressing—black garbed, straight laced nuns. But here in this warm, friendly room, with girls who were attractive and boys who were for thelarger part genial and companionable, and with a teacher who took an interest in me, I felt as though I were in a kind of school paradise, the Nirvana of the compulsorily trained.
Another time (it was in reading class) she asked me to read a paragraph and when I had and paused, she said: “I can’t tell you how beautifully you read, Theodore. It is so natural; you make everything so real.” I blushed again, for I felt for the moment by some odd transposition that she was making fun of me. When I looked up into her face and saw her eyes—the way in which she looked at me—I understood. She was actually fond of me.
At later times and in various ways during this year she drew me out of an intense dreamy shyness by watching over me, expending an affection which I scarcely knew how to take. She would occasionally keep me after school to help me with my grammar—a profound mystery, no least rudiment of which I ever mastered—and when she gradually discovered that I knew absolutely nothing concerning it, she merely looked at me and pinched my cheek.
“Well, don’t you worry; you can get along without grammar for a while yet. You’ll understand it later on.”
She passed me in all my examinations, regardless I presume, though I have reason to believe that I was highly intelligent in respect to some things. At the end of the year, when we were clearing up our papers and I was getting ready to leave, she put her arms about me and kissed me goodbye. I remember the day, the warm, spring sunlit afternoon, the beauty and the haunting sense of the waning of things that possessed me at the time. I went home, to think and wonder about her.
I saw her a year or so later, a much stouter person, married and with a baby, and I remember being very shocked. She didn’t seem the same, but she remembered me and smiled on me. For my part, not having seen her for so long a time, I felt very strange and bashful-almostas though I were in the presence of one I had never known.
But the feeling which I had here today passed over this last unheeded. It concerned only the particular days in which I was here, the days of a new birth and freedom from horrific Spartan restraint, plus the overawing weight of the lapse of time. Never before I think, certainly not since my mother’s death, was I so impressed by the lapse of time, the diaphanous nothingness of things. I was here thirtytwo years before and all that I saw then had body and substance—a glaring material state. Here was some of the same material, the same sunlight, a few of the same people, perhaps, but time had filched away nearly all our characteristics. That boy—was his spiritual substance inside of me still unchanged, merely overlaid by experience like the heart of a palm? I could not even answer that to myself. The soul within me could not say. And at least foursevenths of my allotted three score years and ten had gone.
Down the street from this school about five doors was another house which was very familiar. I went up the narrow brick walk and knocked. A tall, lean, sallow creature of no particular figure but with piercing black eyes and long, thin hands came to the door. Her hair, once jet black, was thinly streaked with grey. She must have been all of thirtyfive or forty when I knew her as a boy. That made her sixtyfive or seventy now; yet I could see no particular change, so vigorous and energetic was she.
“Well, Ed,” she exclaimed, “or is it Theodore? Well, of all things! Come right in here. I’m glad to see you. Land o' goodness! And Nate will be pleased to death. Nate! Nate!” she called into an adjoining room. “Come in here. If here isn’t Theodore—or is it Ed?” (“It’s Theodore,” I interjected quickly.) “You know it’s been so long since I’ve seen you two I can scarcely tell you apart. But I remember both as well as if it were yesterday. And it’s been—let me see—how long has it been? Nearly thirty years now, hasn’t it? Well, of all things!I do declare! And you’re getting stout, too. And you’ve grown to be over six feet, at least. Well, I do declare! To think of your walking in on me like this. Just you sit right down here and make yourself comfortable. Well, of all things!”
By now I must have been smiling like a Cheshire cat.
Nate, or Nathaniel, one-time carpenter and builder (and still such, for all I know), strolled in. It was late in the afternoon, and he was lounging about in a white cotton shirt and grey trousers, his suspenders down about his hips, a pipe in his mouth and an evening paper in his hand.
“Well, Dorse,” he called, “where do you come from?”
I told him.
“Think of that, now,” exclaimed Mrs. McConnell, “and a car! And you came all the way through from New York? Well, lots of them do that now. Charlie Biggers went through from here to Pennsylvania in a Ford not long ago.”
She cackled stridently. I was fascinated by her vigor in age.
“Nate here,” she went on, “says he thinks we ought to get a machine one of these days, but lawsie! I don’t know whether I could learn to run it, and I’m certainhecouldn’t.” Her keen birdlike eyes devoured me, and she smiled. “And so you’re a writer? Well, what do you write? Novels?”
“Well, some people condescend to call them that,” I answered. “I’d hesitate to tell you what some others call them.”
“It’s funny I never heard of any of ’em. What’s the names of some of ’em?”
I enlightened her.
“Well, now, that’s strange. I never heard of a one of them—I must get two or three and see how you write.”
“That’s good of you,” I chuckled, in the best of spirits.
“Bertie Wilkerson—you remember Bertie, don’t you?—he was the son of the justice of the peace here—well, he’s on one of the Cleveland papers now, writing in someway. There’s a woman over here in Wabash (I knew the name of the novelist coming now) has made a big reputation for herself with her books. They have whole stacks of ’em here in the stores, I see. I read one of ’em. They tell me she’s worth four or five hundred thousand dollars by now. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?” She gave me her name.
“Yes,” I replied very humbly, “I have.”
“Well, I don’t suppose you make that much, anyhow, do you?” she queried.
“No,” I replied. “I’m very sorry, I don’t.”
I could see by the stress she laid on the four or five hundred thousand dollars and the stacks of books in the local store that my type of authorship would never appeal to her.
Be that as it may, we found other things equally interesting to both to talk about. The town had changed. She began to tell when and in what manner and why the old pond had been filled in; why the leading banker, whose wide verandahed house had been a subject of wonder and envy to me, had moved it off the old property and built an even more splendiferous home. Children and grand-children had come to live with him. I could see the old house in its new position on the other side of the pond—a poor affair compared to what I thought it was. Why do our memories lie so? Could anyone or anything be a greater liar than the average memory?
When I came out of there after a time and returned to the car Franklin was still patiently sketching, making good use of his time, whereas Speed was sitting with his feet on a part of his engine equipment cleaning a chain. They were partly surrounded now: (1) by old Mr. Gridley, he of my former room, who was retailing the story of his son’s death; (2) by a short, dusty, rotund, rather oily-haired man who announced that he was the owner of the property which had formerly sheltered me, and who by virtue of having cut down all the trees and built the two abominable houses in front seemed to think thathe was entitled to my friendship and admiration—anon sequiturwhich irritated me greatly; (3) by a small boy from somewhere in the vicinity who stood with his legs very far apart, his hands in his pockets, and merely stared and listened while Mr. Gridley related the moving details of his son’s death and the futility of the campaign at the Dardanelles. The owner of the houses in front kept trying to interject bits of his personal history as carpenter, builder, land speculator, and the like. It was most entertaining.
“I was just saying to your friend here,” said the latter, who had never met me until this moment, “that if you’re in town long enough you must come and take dinner with me. We’re just plain people, but we can give you plenty to eat. Anyone who lived here as long ago as you did——”
I felt no least desire to dine with him, largely because he had cut down all the fine trees and built such trashy houses.
He chattered on in an impossible fashion. I could see he was greatly impressed by our possession of this car. And to have come all the way from New York! I wanted to annihilate him for having destroyed the trees—the wretch!
But I felt that we ought to be getting on. Here it was after five and I still had various things to see—the old Central High School, where so long ago I finished my eighth grade common and my first year German and algebra; the lakes, Centre and Pike, where with many others I had been accustomed to row, swim, skate, fish, and camp; the old swimming hole out in the Tippecanoe (three miles out, I thought, at least); our old Catholic Church, where I regularly went to confession and communion; the woods where I had once found a dead peddler, lying face down, self-finished, at the foot of a great oak; and so on and so forth—endless places, indeed. Besides, there were various people I wanted to see, people who, like the wiry Mrs. McConnell, could tell me much—perhaps.
Alas for intentions and opportunities! I suppose I might have spent days browsing and communing, but now that I was here and actually seeing things, I did not feel inclined to do it. What was there really to see, I asked myself, aside from the mere exterior or surface of things? In one more hour I could examine exteriorly or in perspective all of these things—the lakes, the school, the swimming hole, the church—they were all near at hand—unless I wanted to linger here for weeks. Did I really want to stay longer than this dusk?
Franklin was eager to get on. When first he invited me he had planned no such extended tour as this, and these were not his sacred scenes. It was all very well—but——
Nevertheless, we did cruise (as Speed was wont to express it), first to Centre Lake, where many a moonlight when the ice was as thick as a beam and as smooth as glass Ed, Tillie and I, along with a half hundred town boys and girls, had skated to our hearts' content or fished through the ice. My, how wonderful it was! To see them cutting ice on the lake with horses and fishing through holes only large enough to permit the extraction of a small sized fish when one bit. To my astonishment the waters of the lake had receded or diminished fully a fifth of its original circumference, and all the houses and boathouses which formerly stood close to its edge were now fully two hundred feet inland. In addition, all the smartness and superiority which once invested this section were now gone—the region of the summer conferences at Winona having superseded this. Houses I was sure I would be able to recall, should they chance to be here—those of Maud Rutter, Augusta Nueweiler (she of the fir tree kiss), Ada Sanguiat, were not discernible at all. I knew they were here unchanged, but I could not find them.
We went out past an old bridge to the northeast of the town (scarcely a half mile out) and found to my astonishment that the stream it once spanned—the Tippecanoe, if you please—and that once drained Centre andPike Lakes, was now no more. There was only a new stone culvert here, not the old iron and plank wagon bridge of my day—and no water underneath it at all, only a seepy muck, overgrown with marsh grass!! The whole river, a clear sandy-bottomed stream, was now gone—due to the recession of the lake, I suppose. The swimming hole that I fancied must be all of two or three miles out was not more than one, and it had disappeared, of course, with the rest. There was not even a sign of the footpath that led across the fields to it. All was changed. The wild rice fields that once stood about here for what seemed miles to me, and overrun in the summertime (July, August, and September, in particular) with thousands upon thousands of blackbirds and crows, were now well plowed cornland! I could not see more than the vaguest outlines of the region I had known, and I could not recapture, save in the vaguest way, any of the boyish moods that held me at the time. In my heart was a clear stream and a sandy bottom and a troop of half-forgotten boys, and birds, and blue skies, and men fishing by this bridge where was now this culvert—Ed and I among them occasionally—and here was nothing at all—a changed world.
“Oh, it’s all gone!” I cried to Franklin. “Why, an iron wagon bridge used to hang here. This was a beautiful fishing pool. A path went across here. Let’s go back.”
We went up to the old Central High School, looking exactly as it did in my day, only now a ward instead of a high school—a new high having been built since I left—and here I tried to recapture some of the emotions I have always had in my dreams of it and have still. I saw troops of boys and girls coming out of it at noon and at four in the afternoon—I and my sister Tillie among them. I saw Dora Yaisley and Myrtle Taylor (of the pale flower face and violet eyes), and Jess Beasley and Sadie and Dolly Varnum—what a company! And there were George and John Sharp—always more or less companionable with me, and “Jud” Morris and Frank Yaisleyand Al Besseler and a score of others—interesting souls all and now scattered to the four corners of the earth.
But sitting in the car—suddenly I saw myself in my seat upstairs looking out the north window which was nearest me, and dreaming of the future. From where I sat in those days I could see up a long, clean alley, with people crossing at its different street intersections for blocks away. I could see far off to where the station was and the flour mill and where the trains came in. I could hear their whistles—distant and beckoning—feeling the tug and pull of my future life to come out and away. I could see clouds and trees and little houses and birds over the court house tower, and then I wanted to get out and fly too—to walk up and down the great earth and be happy.
I tell you, in those days, wonderful, amazing moods were generated in the blood of me. I felt and saw things which have never come true—glories, moods, gayeties, perfections. There was a lilt in my heart and my soul. I wanted, oh! I wanted all that Nature can breed in her wealth of stars and universes—and I found—what have I found——?
The frame of any man is an infinitesimal shell. The soul of him so small, a pale lamp which he carries in his hands! The passions of which we boast or from whose imagined horrors we flee are such little things—rush lights—scarcely able to glimmer in so great a dark. People rage at men and women for their passions! At best, granting a Hero, a Caligula, an Alexander, a Napoleon—what small, greedy insects indeed they were. They blazed and bestrode the earth. They fought, conquered, reveled. Against the vast illimitable substance and force of things, what pale flames they really were, after all; so trivial, so unimportant. As well seek out the captains and generals and emperors of ants. In the vast something or nothing of life they are as much worth recording personally. I have eaten and drunken, and thirsted after all, but shouldthe curtain descend now, how little have I had! How little could any man ever have!
Oh, great, scheming, dreaming Prince of Life—what is that you are after? What blood moods in your soul is it that we, your atoms, hurry to fulfill? Do you love? Do you hate? By billions sweating, blazing, do we fulfill some quaint desire of yours? Drop you the curtain then on me. I do not care—I am very tired. Drop it and let me dream no more the endless wonders and delights that never, never, can be.