CHAPTER XVICHEMUNG
Next morning I was aroused at dawn, it seemed to me, by a pounding on a nearby door.
“Get up, you drunken hound!” called a voice which was unmistakably that of the young man who had rented us the room. “That’s right, snore, after you stay up all night,” he added; and he beat the door vehemently again.
I wanted to get up and protest against his inconsiderateness of the slumber of others and would have, I think, only I was interested to discover who the “drunken hound” might be and why this youth should be so abrupt with him. After all, I reflected, we were in a very poor hotel, the boy doing the knocking was a mere farm hand translated to the country hotel business, and anyhow we should soon be out of here. It was all life and color and if I didn’t like it I needn’t have stayed here the night before. Franklin would have gone on. But who was the “drunken hound”? The sound had ceased almost as abruptly as it had begun. The boy had gone downstairs. After awhile the light grew stronger and Franklin seemed to stir. I rose and pulled the shutters to, but could not sleep any more. The world outside looked so inviting. There were trees and great fields of grass and a few white houses scattered here and there and a heavy dew. I at once thought how delightful it would be to get up and ride on again.
“This is a typical middle west country hotel, even if it is in New York,” said Franklin, sitting up and running his hand through his tousled hair. “That fellow he’s calling a ‘drunken hound’ must be his father. I heard him tell Speed last night that his father slept in there.”
Presently we threw open the shutters and made what use we could of the bowl and pitcher and the two small towels provided.
“How did you ever come to be an artist, Franklin?” I inquired idly, as I watched him stare out at the surrounding fields, while he sat putting on his shoes. “You told me once that you were a farm hand until you were nearly twentyfive.”
“Nearly twentysix,” he corrected. “Oh, I always wanted to draw and did, a little, only I didn’t know anything about it. Finally I took a course in a correspondence school.”
“Get out,” I replied incredulously.
“Yes, I did,” he went on. “They sent me instructions how to lay in with pen and ink various sorts of line technique on sheets of paper that were ruled off in squares—long lines, short lines, stipple, ‘crosspatch’ and that sort of thing. They made some other suggestions that had some value: what kind of ink and pens and paper to buy. I used to try to draw with ordinary writing ink and pens.”
“But a correspondence school——” I protested.
“I know,” he said. “It seems ridiculous. It’s true, just the same. I didn’t know where else to go and besides I didn’t have the money. There was a school in Indianapolis but they wanted too much—I tried it awhile but the instructor knew very little. The correspondence school wanted only six dollars for fifteen lessons, and they took it in part payments.”
He smiled reminiscently.
“Well, how did you come to get started, finally?”
“Oh, I worked most of my method out for myself. Art is a matter of feeling, anyhow. The drawing in squares gave me an idea which made me abandon the squares. I used to write poetry too, of sorts—or tried to—and one day I wrote a poem and decided to illustrate it and take it down to one of the Indianapolis newspapers, because I had seen others in there somewhat like it—I mean illustrated in pen and ink. It was a poem aboutOctober, or something. My father thought I was wasting my time. He wanted me to tend the farm. But I took the poem down and they bought it right away—gave me six dollars for it.”
“And then what?” I asked, deeply interested.
“Well, that rather astonished my father—as much, if not more, than it did me. He never imagined there was any money in that sort of thing—and unless you were going to make money——” He waved his hand deprecatively.
“I know,” I agreed. “And then what?”
“Well, they bought another and my father began to think there was something in it—in art, you know, if you want to call it that, in Indiana, at that time!”—he paused. “Still I can’t tell you how much feeling I put in those things, either,—the trees, the birds flying, the shocked corn. I used to stop when I was plowing or reaping and stand and look at the sky and the trees and the clouds and wish I could paint them or do something. The big cities seemed so far off. But it’s Indiana that seems wonderful to me now.”
“And to me,” I said. “Like a mother. Because we were brought up there, I suppose.”
Sitting on the edge of this wretched hotel bed, Franklin smiled vaguely, his fine hand moving through his glistening white hair.
“And then?”
“Well, one day the editor in Indianapolis said I ought to send some of my drawing down to New York, or go down—that I would get along. He thought I ought to study art.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I saved enough drawing for theIndianapolis Newsand writing poetry and pitching hay and plowing wheat to go that autumn to Chicago; I spent three months in the Art Institute. Being in those days a good Sunday School boy, a publisher of religious literature, socalled, bought some work of me and at Christmas time I sold a half page to the old ChicagoRecord. The followingfall I went to New York. I found a little room and sold sketches, and then I got on a paper—theNews. You remember.”
“Certainly. Was that your first place?”
“The very first.”
“And I thought you had been in New York years and years.”
I can see Franklin even yet, standing before his drawingboard in the newspaper office, making horrible Sunday “layouts.” He was so gentle, good looking and altogether attractive.
“Yes, and then what?”
“Well, after my year’s contract which started with theNewshad expired, I tried freelancing. This didn’t go very well; so I determined not to spend all my savings visiting art editors. I boarded a boat one day and went to Europe. Four months later, I returned to New York and rented a studio. After I had paid my first month’s rent I was broke. At the magazines I would say that I had just returned from abroad, so that I got plenty of work, but I owned neither easel nor chair. After a few days the janitor, if you please, came to me and said that he and his wife had been talking about me and thought perhaps I needed some money and that they had eighty dollars upstairs which I could have right away if I wanted to use it. It sounds wild, but it’s true. They said I could take it and pay it back whenever I got ready, in six months or a year or two years.”
My estimate of poor old human nature was rapidly rising.
“Did you take it?”
“Yes, a part of it. I had to, in a way; but I paid it back in a little while. I often think of those people.”
We stopped talking about his career then and went down to look in the diningroom and after our car. The place was so unsatisfactory and it was still so early we decided not to remain for breakfast.
As I was sitting on the porch, Franklin having gone off to rout out Speed, an automobile approached containinga man and three women and bearing a plumcolored pennant labeled “Lansing, Michigan.” Pennants seem to be a habit with cars coming from the west. These tourists halted, and I was morally certain that they did so because of my presence here. They thought others were breakfasting. With much fluttering of their motoring regalia, the women stepped out and shook themselves while their escort departed to make inquiries. Presently he returned and with him our young host, who in the clear morning light seemed much more a farmer than ever—a plow hand. Something about his crude, untutored strength and energy appealed to me. I thought of his drunken father and how he might be trying to make the best of this place, against lack of experience and with a ne’er do well parent on his hands. Now he fixed me with a steady eye.
“You people goin' to have breakfast?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, pleasantly.
“You ain’t?”
“No.”
“Well,” he went on, turning to the newcomers, “then ’youpeople can have breakfast.”
So, I thought, these people will have to eat the very poor breakfast that is being prepared for us. It will serve them right—the vulgar, showy creatures. As we were departing, however, Franklin explained that there was an extra charge which he had not troubled to dispute, for something which we had apparently not had. I explained that it was for the meal we had not eaten.
Once more, then, we drove off along more of those delightful country roads which in the early morning sun, with the fields glistening with dew, and laborers making their way to work, and morning birds on the wing, were too lovely. The air, after our stuffy room, was so refreshing, ’Ibegan to sing. Little white houses hugged distant green hillsides, their windows shining like burnished gold. Green branches hung over and almost brushed our faces. The sky, the shade, the dew was heavenly. I thought of Franklin and his father and ofhim in his father’s fields at dawn, looking at the trees—those fog wrapped trees of dawn—and wishing he was an artist.
Meanwhile, my mind was busy with the sharp contrast this whole progress was presenting to my tour of Europe, even the poorest and most deserted regions I visited. In England, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, there was so much to see—so much that was memorable or quaint or strange or artistic—but here; well, here there were just towns like this one and Binghamton and Scranton and Wilkes-Barré, places the best for which you could say was that they were brisk and vivid and building something which in the future will no doubt seem very beautiful,—I’m sure of it.
And yet I kept saying to myself that notwithstanding all this, all I could sum up against America even, it was actually better than Europe. And why? Well, because of a certain indefinable something—either of hope or courage or youth or vigor or illusion, what you will; but the average American, or the average European transplanted to America, is a better or at least a more dynamic person than the average European at home, even the Frenchman. He has more grit, verve, humor, or a lackadaisical slapdash method which is at once efficient, self-sustaining, comforting. His soul, in spite of all the chains wherewith the ruling giants are seeking to fetter him, is free. As yet, regardless of what is or may be, he does not appear to realize that he is not free or that he is in any way oppressed. There are no ruling classes, to him. He sings, whistles, jests, laughs boisterously; matches everybody for cigars, beers, meals; chews tobacco, spits freely, smokes, swears, rolls to and fro, cocks his hat on one side of his head, and altogether by and large is a regular “hell of a feller.” He doesn’t know anything about history, or very little, and doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t know anything about art,—but, my God, who with the eternal hills and all nature for a background cannot live without representative art? His food isn’t extraordinarily good, though plentiful, hisclothes are made by Stein-Bloch, or Hart, Schaffner & Marx, and altogether he is a noisy, blatant, contented mess—but oh, the gay, selfsufficient soul of him! no moans! no tears! Into the teeth of destiny he marches, whistling “Yankee Doodle” or “Turkey in the Straw.” In the parlance of his own streets, “Can you beat him?”
Nevertheless my sympathies kept reverting to the young innkeeper and I finally got out a map to see if I could discover the name of the very small town or crossroads where this hotel was situated. It proved to be Chemung.
Instantly I recalled the story of a gubernatorial aspirant of twenty years before who had come from this very place or county in New York. Previously a district attorney or lieutenant governor, he had one day been nominated for the governorship, on the reigning ticket. His chances were splendid. There was scarcely a cloud in the sky. He was believed to be brilliant, promising, a presidential possibility of the future. An important meeting was called in New York, I believe, at Madison Square Garden very likely, to ratify and celebrate his nomination. All the élite politically who customarily grace such events were present. The Garden was filled. But, alas, at the sound of the applause called forth by his opening burst of oratory, he paused and took off his coat—quite as he would at an upstate rally, here in Chemung. The audience gasped. The sophisticated leaders of the city groaned. What! Take off your coat at a political address in Madison Square Garden? A candidate for governorship of the state of New York? It completely destroyed him. He was never heard of more. I, a mere stripling at the time, brooded long over this sudden turn of fortune as exemplifying a need to discriminate between audiences and classes. It put a cool, jesuitical thought in my mind that I did not soon forget. “Never remove your coat in the wrong place,” was a maxim that dwelt with me for some time. And here we were in Chemung, the place to which this man subsequently retired, to meditate, no doubt, over thecostly follies and errors we sometimes commit without the ability or the knowledge to guard against them.
An hour and a half later we were having breakfast at Elmira, a place much like Binghamton, in the customary “Rathskeller-Grill-Café de Berlin.” This one was all embossed with gold paper and Teutonic hunting scenes, and contained the usual heavy mission tables, to say nothing of a leftover smell of cigarettes burned the night before. There were negro waiters too, and another group of motorists having a most elaborate breakfast and much talk of routes and cars and distant cities. Here it was necessary for us to decide the course of our future progress, so we shortly set off in search of the local automobile club.