CHAPTER XXXIVA MIDDLE WESTERN CROWD
Though a city of seventyfive thousand, or thereabouts, Fort Wayne made scarcely any impression upon me. Now that I was back in Indiana and a few miles from my native heath, as it were, I expected, or perhaps I only half imagined, that I might gain impressions and sensations commensurate with my anticipations. But I didn’t. This was the city, or town, as it was then, to which my parents had originally traveled after their marriage in Dayton, Ohio, and where my father worked in a woolen mill as foreman, perhaps, before subsequently becoming its manager. It had always been a place of interest, if not happy memory, to my mother, who seemed to feel that she had been very happy here.
When our family, such as it was (greatly depleted by the departure of most of the children), came north to Warsaw, Fort Wayne, so much nearer than Chicago and a city of forty thousand, was the Mecca for the sporting youth of our town. To go to Fort Wayne! What a week end treat! For most of our youth who had sufficient means to travel so far, it was a city of great adventure. The fare was quite one dollar and seventyfive cents for the round trip, and only the bloods and sports, as we knew them, attempted it. I never had money enough to go, as much as I wanted to, nor yet the friends who were eager for my companionship.
But what tales did I not hear of restaurants, saloons, theatres, and other resorts of pleasure visited, and what veiled hints were not cast forth of secret pleasures indulged in—flirtations, if not more vigorous escapades. Life was such a phantasm of delight to me then. Nameless and formless pleasures danced constantly before myeyes. Principally, not quite entirely, they were connected with the beauty of girls, though money and privilege and future success were other forms. And there were a few youths and some girls in Warsaw, who to my inexperienced judgment, possessed nearly all that life had to offer!
At this late date, however, Fort Wayne, looking at it in the cold, practical light of a middle-aged automobile tourist, offered but few titillations, either reminiscent or otherwise. Here it was, to me, sacred ground, and here had these various things occurred, yet as I viewed it now it seemed a rather dull, middle West town, with scarcely anything save a brisk commerce to commend it. Abroad one finds many cities of the same size of great interest, historically and architecturally—but here! By night and day it seemed bright enough, and decidedly clean. All that I could think of as Franklin and I drifted about it on this first night was that it was a very humble copy of every other larger American city in all that it attempted—streets, cabarets, high buildings and so on. Every small city in America desires to be like Chicago or New York or both, to reproduce what is built and done in these places—the most obvious things, I mean.
After dining at a cabaret Hofbräu House and sleeping in a very comfortable room which admitted the clangor of endless street car bells, however, I awoke next morning with a sick stomach and a jaded interest in all material things, and I had neither eaten nor drunk much of anything the night before—truly, truly! We had sought out the principal resort and sat in it as a resource against greater boredom, nothing more. And now, being without appetite, I wandered forth to the nearest drug store to have put up the best remedy I know for a sick stomach—nux vomica and gentian, whatever that may be.
It was in this drug store that the one interesting thing in Fort Wayne occurred—at least to me. There were, as it was still early, a negro sweeping the place, and one clerk, a lean apothecary with roached and pointed hair, who was concealed in some rear room. He came forwardafter a time, took my prescription, and told me I would have to wait ten minutes. Later another man hobbled in, a creature who looked like the “before” picture of a country newspaper patent medicine advertisement. He was so gaunt and blue and sunken-seamed as to face that he rather frightened me, as if a corpse should walk into your room and begin to look around. His clothes were old and brown and looked as though they had been worn heaven knows what length of time. The clerk came out, and he asked for something the name of which I did not catch. Presently the clerk came back with his prescription and mine, and going to him and putting down a bottle and a box of pills, said of the former, holding it up, “Now this is for your blood. You understand, do you? You take this three times a day, every day until it is gone.” The sick man nodded like an automaton. “And these”—he now held up the pills—"are for your bowels. You take two o' these every night."
“This is for my blood and these are for my bowels,” said the man slowly.
The nostrums were wrapped up very neatly in grey paper, and tied with a pink string. The corpse extracted out of a worn leather book sixtyfive cents in small pieces, and put them down. Then he shuffled slowly out.
“What ails him, do you suppose?” I asked of the dapper, beau-like clerk.
“Oh, chronic anæmia. He can’t live long.”
“Will that medicine do him any good, do you think?”
“Not a bit. He can’t live.He’sHe’sall worn out. But he goes to some doctor around here and gets a prescription and we have to fill it. If we didn’t, someone else would.”
He smiled on me most genially.
What a shame to take his money, I thought. He looks as though food or decent clothes would be better for him, but what might one say? I recalled how when I was young and chronically ailing, how eagerly I clung to the thought of life, and would I not now if I were in his place? Here was I with a prescription of my own in myhand which I scarcely touched afterwards. But how near to his grave that man really was. And how futile and silly that advice about his blood sounded!
Without any special interest in Fort Wayne to delay us, and without any desire to see or do anything in particular, we made finally that memorable start for Warsaw toward which I had been looking ever since I stepped into the car in New York. Now in an hour or two or three, at the best, I would be seeing our old home, or one of them, at least, and gazing at the things which of all things identified with my youth appealed to me most. Here I had had my first taste of the public school as opposed to the Catholic or parochial school, and a delightful change it was. Warsaw was so beautiful, or seemed to me so at the time, a love of a place, with a river or small stream and several lakes and all the atmosphere of a prosperous and yet homey and home-loving resort. My mother and father and sisters and brothers were so interesting to me in those days. As in the poem of Davidson’s,
“The sounding cities, rich and warmSmouldered and glittered in the plain.”
I was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. The sun and the air and some responsive chemistry which I do not understand were making my blood into wine. Would I now be dreadfully disappointed?
Our way lay through a country more or less familiar as to its character, though I had never actually been through it except on a train. All about were small towns and lakes which I had heard of but never visited. Now it was my privilege to see them if I chose, and I felt very much elated over it all. I was interested, amused, curiosity stirred.
With the old settlers at Columbia City, IndianWITH THE OLD SETTLERS AT COLUMBIA CITY, INDIANA
WITH THE OLD SETTLERS AT COLUMBIA CITY, INDIANA
WITH THE OLD SETTLERS AT COLUMBIA CITY, INDIANA
But it was not until we reached Columbia City, only twenty miles from Warsaw, that my imagination was keenly aroused. Columbia City, small as it was, say fifteen or eighteen hundred at that time, and not much larger now, was another spot to which our small-town life-seekinggadabouts were wont to run on a Saturday night—for what purpose I scarcely know, since I never had sufficient means to accompany them. At that time, in that vigorously imaginative period, I conjured up all sorts of sybaritic delights, as being the end and aim of these expeditions, since the youths who comprised them were so keen in regard to all matters of sex. They seemed to be able to think of nothing else, and talked girls, girls, girls from morning to night, or made sly references to these jaunts which thereby became all the more exciting to me. Warsaw at that time was peculiarly favored with a bevy of attractive girls who kept all our youths on thequi viveas to love and their favor. With an imagination that probably far outran my years, I built up a fancy as to Columbia City which far exceeded its import, of course. To me it was a kind of Cairo of the Egyptians, with two horned Hathor in the skies, and what breaths of palms and dulcet quavers of strings and drums I know not.
These youths, who were quite smart and possessed of considerable pocket money, much more than I ever had or could get, would not have me as a companion. I was a betwixt and between soul at that time, not entirely debarred from certain phases of association and companionship with youths somewhat older than myself, and yet never included in these more private and intimate adventures to which they were constantly referring. They kept me on tenter hooks, as did the ravishing charms of so many girls about us, without my ever being satisfied. Besides, from this very town had come a girl to our Warsaw High School whom I used to contemplate with adoring eyes, she was so rounded and pink and gay. But that was all it ever came to, just that—I contemplated her from afar. I never had the courage to go near her. In the presence of most girls, especially the attractive ones, I was dumb, frozen by a nameless fear.
So this place, now we reached it, had interest to this extent, that I wanted to see what it was like although I really knew—courthouse, courthouse square, surrounding stores, and then a few streets with simple homes andchurches. Exactly. It was like all the others, only somewhat poorer—not so good as Napoleon, Ohio, or even Hicksville.
But there was something that was much better than anything we had encountered yet—an Old Settler’s Day, no less—which had filled the streets with people and wagons and the public square with tents, for resting rooms, had spread table cloths out on the public lawn for eating, while a merry-go-round whirled in the middle of one street, and various tents and stands on several sides of the square were crowded with eatables and drinkables of sorts. I believe they have dubbed these small aisles of tents a “Broadway,” in the middle West. Of course, there were popcorn, candy, hot “weenies,” as sausages are known hereabouts, and lemonade. I never saw a more typically rural crowd, nor one that seemed to get more satisfaction out of its modest pleasures.
But the very old farmers and their wives, the old settlers and settleresses and their children and their grandchildren, and their great grandchildren! Life takes on at once comic and yet poetic and pathetic phases the moment you view a crowd of this kind in the detached way that we were doing it. Here were men and women so old and worn and bent and crumpled by the ageing processes of life that they looked like the yellow leaves of the autumn. Compared with the fresh young people who were to be seen spinning about on the merry-go-round, or walking the streets in twos and threes, they were infinitely worn. Such coats and trousers, actually cut and sewn at home! And such hats and whiskers and canes and shoes! I called Franklin’s attention to two stocky, pinky rustics wearing Charlie Chaplin hats and carrying Charlie Chaplin canes, and then to group after group of men and women so astonishing that they seemed figures out of some gnome or troll world, figures so distorted as to seem only fit fancies for a dream. We sat down by one so weird that he seemed the creation of a genius bent on depicting age. I tried to strike up a conversation, but he would not. He did not seem to hear. I began towhisper to Franklin concerning the difference between a figure like this and those aspirations which we held in our youth concerning “getting on.” Life seems to mock itself with these walking commentaries on ambition. Of what good are the fruits of earthly triumph anyhow?
Nearly all of the older ones, to add to their picturesqueness, wore bits of gold lettered cloth which stated clearly that they were old settlers. They stalked or hobbled or stood about talking in a mechanical manner. They rasped and cackled—"grandthers," “gaffers,” “Polichinelles,” “Pantaloons.” I had to smile, and yet if the least breath of the blood mood of sixteen were to return, one would cry.
And then came the younger generations! I wish those who are so sure that democracy is a great success and never to be upset by the cunning and self-interestedness of wily and unscrupulous men, would make a face to face study of these people. I am in favor of the dream of democracy, on whatever basis it can be worked out. It is an ideal. But how, I should like to ask, is a proletariat such as this, and poorer specimens yet, as we all know, to hold its own against the keen, resourceful oligarchs at the top? Certainly ever since I have been in the world, I have seen nothing but Americans who were so sure that the people were fit to rule, and did rule, and that nothing but the widest interests of all the people were ever really sought by our statesmen and leaders in various fields. The people are all right and to be trusted. They are capable of understanding their public and private affairs in such a manner as to bring the greatest happiness to the greatest number—but are they? I was taught this in the adjacent schools of Warsaw, quite as I was taught that the Christian ideal was right and true, and that it really prevailed in life, and that those who did not agree with it were thieves and scoundrels. Actually, I went into life from this very region believing largely in all this, only to find by degrees that this theory had no relationship to the facts. Life was persistently demonstrating to me that self-interest and only self-interestruled—that strength dominated weakness, that large ideas superseded and ruled small ones, and so on and so forth,ad infinitum. It was interesting and even astonishing to find that we were not only being dominated mentally by a theory that had no relationship to life whatsoever, but that large, forceful brains were even then plotting the downfall of the republic. Big minds were ruling little ones, big thoughts superseding little ones. The will to power was in all individuals above the grade of amœba, and even there. All of us were mouthing one set of ideas and acting according to a set of instincts entirely opposed to our so called ideas. I, for one, was always charging individuals with failing to live up to the Christian idea and its derived moral code, whereas no detail of the latter affected my own conduct in the least.
Looking at this crowd of people here in the streets of Columbia City, I was more affected by their futility and pathos—life’s futility and pathos for the mass—than by anything else so far. What could these people do, even by banding together, to control the giants at the top? Here they were, entertained like babies by the most pathetic toys—a badge, a little conversation, a little face-to-face contemplation of other futilitarians as badly placed as themselves. The merry-go-round was spinning and grinding out a wheezy tune. I saw young girls sitting sidewise of wooden horses, lions and the like, their dresses (because of the short skirt craze) drawn to the knee, or nearly so. Imagine the storm which would have ensued in my day had any girl dared to display more than an ankle! (Custom! Custom!) About it were small boys and big boys and big girls, for the most part too poor to indulge in its circular madness very often, who were contenting themselves with contemplating the ecstasy of others.
“Franklin,” I said, “you were raised out in this region about the time I was. How would such a spectacle as that have been received in our day?” (I was referring tothe exhibition of legs, and I was very pleased with it as such, not quarreling with it at all.)
“Oh, shocking,” he replied, smiling reminiscently, “it just wouldn’t have occurred.”
“And how do you explain its possibility now? These people are just as religious, aren’t they?”
“Nearly so—but fashion, fashion, the mass love of imitation. If the mass want to do it and can find an excuse or permission in the eyes of others, or even if they don’t want to do it, but their superiors do, they will suffer it. I haven’t the slightest doubt but that there is many a girl sitting on a wooden horse in there who would rather not have her skirt pulled up to her knees, but since others do it she does it. She wants to be ‘in the swim.’ And she’d rather be unhappy or a little ashamed than not be in the swim. Nothing hurts like being out of style, you know, especially out in the country these days—not even the twinges of a Puritan conscience.”
“Franklin,” I said, “I’ll tell you. You were raised on a farm and know farmer boys at sight. Pick me out a farmer’s boy here and now, who hasn’t money enough to ride in this thing, and I’ll give him a dime. We’ll see how he takes it.”
Franklin smiled and looked around carefully. The thing interested him so much that he finally circled the merry-go-round and lighted on one youth whose short pants and ungainly shoes and cheap but clean little dotted shirt and small fifteen or twentyfive cent hat and pink cheeks, as well as his open mouth and rapt attention, indicated that here was a wonder with which he was thoroughly unfamiliar. I waited to see if he would step aboard at the next stop of the car, or the next, but no, he was merely an onlooker. At the next start of the car or platform I watched his eager eyes follow those who got on. It was pathetic, and when the merry-go-round started again he gazed aloft at the whirling thing in an ecstasy of delight. As it was slowing down for the second or third time, preparatory to taking on a new load, I reached over his shoulder and quite unheeded, at first,put a quarter before his eyes. For a moment he stopped quite dazed and looked at it, then at me, then at the quarter, then at me.
“Go on! Ride!” I commanded. “Get on!” The carousel was almost still.
Suddenly, with a mixture of reverence, awe, and a world of surprise in his eyes, he seemed to comprehend what I meant. He looked at his shabby father who had been standing near him all this while, but finding him interested in other things, clambered aboard. I watched him take his place beside a horse, not on it. I watched it start with almost as much pleasure as came to him, I think. Then as the speed increased, I turned to urge Franklin to photograph two old men, who were near. They were so wonderful. We were still at that when the machine stopped, only I did not notice. I was watching the two old men. All at once I saw this boy making his way through the crowd. He had his hand out before him, and as he reached me he opened it and there were the four nickels change.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I didn’t mean you to give them back. Run quick! Ride again! Get on before it starts again.”
I can see those round, surprised blue eyes with the uncertain light of vague comprehension and happiness in them. He could scarcely make it out.
“Run quick,” I said. “Ride four times, or do anything you please.”
His eyes seemed to get rounder and bigger for a second, then his hand wavered, and the hungry fingers shut tight on the money. He ran.
“How’s that for getting a thousand dollars' worth of fun for a nickel, Franklin?” I inquired.
“Right-o,” he replied. “We ought to be ashamed to take it.”
And it was literally true, so subtle are the ways by which one can come by what does not belong to him, even though partially paid for.