CHAPTER XXXVIITHE OLD HOUSE
Dora Yaisley and her sister, insofar as I could learn this day, had fared no better than some of the others. Indeed, life had slipped along for all and made my generation, or many of the figures in it, at least, seem like the decaying leaves that one finds under the new green shoots and foliage of a later spring. Dora had married a lawyer from some other town, so my gossip believed, but later, talking to another old resident and one who remembered me, I was told that she had run away and turned up married—to leave again and live in another place. As for another beauty of my day, it was said that she had been seen in hotels in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne with some man not her husband. The book man with whom I first talked volunteered this information.
“But she’s working now right here in Warsaw,” he volunteered a little later. “If you know her, you might go to see her. I’m sure she’d be glad to see you. She hasn’t any relative around now.”
“You don’t say!” I exclaimed, astonished. “Is she as good looking as ever?”
“No,” he replied with a faint wryness of expression, “she’s not beautiful any more. She must be over forty. But she’s a very nice woman. I see her around here occasionally. She goes regularly to my church.”
After browsing here so long with this man, Franklin having gone to seek something else, I returned to the car and requested that we proceed out Centre Street to the second house in which we had lived—the Thralls Mansion—that having been the most important and the more picturesque of the two. On nearing it I was again surprised and indeed given a sharp, psychic wrench whichendured for hours and subsequently gave me a splitting headache. It was not gone, oh, no, not the formal walls, but everything else was. Formerly, in my day, there had been a large grove of pines here, with interludes, in one of which flourished five chestnut trees, yielding us all the chestnuts we could use; in another a group of orchard trees, apples, pears, peaches, cherries. The house itself stood on a slope which led down to a pond of considerable size, on which of a moonlight night, when our parents would not permit us to go farther, we were wont to skate. On the other side of this pond, to the southeast of it, was a saw and furniture mill, and about it, on at least two sides, were scattered dozens upon dozens of oak, walnut and other varieties of logs, stored here pending their use in the mill. Jumping logs was a favorite sport of all us school boys from all parts of the town—getting poles and leaping from pile to pile like flying squirrels. It was a regular Saturday morning and week day evening performance, until our mother’s or sister’s or brother’s warning voices could be heard calling us hence. From my bedroom window on the second floor, I could contemplate this pond and field, hear the pleasant droning of the saw and planes of the mill, and see the face of the town clock in the court house tower, lighted at night, and hear the voice of its bell tolling the hours regularly day and night.
This house found and has retained a place in my affections which has never been disturbed by any other—and I have lived in many. It was so simple—two stories on the north side, three on the south, where the hill declined sharply, and containing eleven rooms and two cellar rooms, most convenient to our kitchen and dining-room.
It was, as I have said, a very old house. Even when we took it age had marred it considerably. We had to replace certain window sashes and panes and fix the chimney and patch the roof in several places where it leaked. The stairs creaked. Being almost entirely surrounded by pines which sighed and whispered continually,it was supposed to be damp but it was not. In grey or rainy weather the aspect of the whole place was solemn, historic. In snowy or stormy weather, it took on a kind of patriarchal significance. When the wind was high these thick, tall trees swirled and danced in a wild ecstasy. When the snow was heavy they bent low with their majestic plumes of white. Underneath them was a floor of soft brown pine needles as soft and brown as a rug. We could gather basket upon basket of resiny cones with which to start our morning fires. In spring and summer these trees were full of birds, the grackle of blackbird particularly, for these seemed to preempt the place early in March and were inclined to fight others for possession. Nevertheless, robins, bluebirds, wrens and other of the less aggressive feathers built their nests here. I could always tell when spring was certainly at hand by the noise made by a tree full of newly arrived blackbirds on some chill March morning. Though snow might still be about, they were strutting about on the bits of lawn we were able to maintain between groups of pines, or hopping on the branches of trees, rasping out their odd speech.
But now, as we rolled out my familiar street, I noted that the sawmill was no longer. The furniture factory had been converted into an electrical supply works. Furthermore, the pond at the foot of our house was filled up, not a trace of it remaining, and all saw logs, of course, long since cleaned away. Worse and worse, the pine grove had disappeared completely. In the front or west part of our premises now stood two new houses of a commonplace character, with considerable lawn space about them, but not a tree. And there had been so many fine ones! Furthermore, the ground about the house proper was stripped bare, save for one lone crab apple tree which stood near our north side door. It was still vigorous, and the ground under it was littered with bright red-yellow crabs which were being allowed to decay. From the front door, which once looked out upon a long cobble and brick walk, which ran between doublerows of pine trees to our very distant gate (all gone now) protruded a sign which read, “Saws Filed.” A path ran from this door southward over the very pond on which we used to skate! Near at hand was the “old Grant house” in which we had lived before we moved into this one, and it was still there, only it had been moved over closer to the school and another house crowded in beside it, on what was once our somewhat spacious lawn. The old school lawn, which once led down to the street that passed its gate, was gone, and instead this street came up to the school door, meeting the one which had formerly passed our house and ended at a stile, giving on to the school lawn. The school yard trees were gone, and facing the new street made of the old school lawn were houses. Only our old Thralls house remained standing as it was, on the right hand side.
I can only repeat that I was psychically wrenched, although I was saying to myself that I felt no least interest in the visible scene. I had lived here, true, but what of it? There was this of it, that somewhere down in myself, far below my surface emotions and my frothy reasoning faculties, something was hurting. It was not I, exactly. It was like something else that had once been me and was still in me, somewhere, another person or soul that was grieving, but was now overlayed or shut away like a ghost in a sealed room. I feltitthe while I bustled about examining this and that detail.
First I went up to the old house and walked about it trying to replace each detail as it was, and as I did so, restoring to my mind scene after scene and mood after mood of my younger days. What becomes of old scenes and old moods in cosmic substance? Here had been the pump, and here it was still, thank heaven, unchanged. Here, under a wide-armed fir which once stood here, Ed, Al, Tillie and I had once taken turns stirring a huge iron pot full of apple butter which was boiling over pine twigs and cones, and also gathered cones to keep it going. Here, also, to the right of the front door as youfaced west, was my favorite lounging place, a hammock strung between two trees, where of a summer day, or when the weather was favorable at any time, I used to lie and read, looking up between times through the branches of the trees to the sky overhead and wondering over and rejoicing in the beauty of life. We were poor in the main, and, worse yet, because of certain early errors of some of the children (how many have I committed since!) and the foolish imaginings of my parents, my father in particular, we considered ourselves socially discredited. We hadn’t done so well as some people. We weren’t rich. Some of us hadn’t been good!! But in books and nature, even at this age, I managed to find solace for all our fancied shortcomings, or nearly all, and though I grieved to think that we had so little of what seemed to give others so much pleasure, and the right to strut and stare, I also fancied that life must and probably did hold something better for me than was indicated here.
After I had made the rounds once, Franklin sitting in the offing in his car and sketching the house, I knocked at the front door and received no answer. Finally I went inside and knocked at the first inside door, which originally gave into our parlor. The place looked really very tatterdemalion, like an isolated Eleventh Avenue, New York, tenement. No one answered, but finally from what was formerly my sister Theresa’s room, on the second floor, a stocky and somewhat frowsy woman of plainly Slavic origin put her head over the balustrade of the handsome old carved walnut staircase, and called, “Well?”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, “but once, a number of years ago, our family used to live in this house, and I have come back to look it over. Can you tell me who occupies it now?”
“Well, no one family has it now,” she replied pleasantly on hearing of my mission. “There are four families in it, two on this floor up here, one on that floor (indicating) and one in the basement. The people on the first floor rent that front room to a boarder.”
“A tenement!” I exclaimed to myself.
“Well, there doesn’t appear to be anyone at home here,” I said to her. “Do you mind if I look at your rooms? The room at the end of the hall there was once my sleeping room.”
“Oh, not at all. Certainly. Certainly. Come right up.”
I mounted the stairs, now creakier than ever, and entered a room which in our day seemed comparatively well furnished. It was memorable to me because of a serious siege of illness which my sister, Theresa, had undergone there, and because of several nights in which I had tried to sit up and keep watch. Once from this room, at two in the morning, I had issued forth to find our family physician, an old, grey-bearded man, who, once I had knocked him up, came down to his door, lamp in hand, a long white nightgown protecting his stocky figure, his whiskers spreading like a sheaf of wheat, and demanded to know what I meant by disturbing him.
“But, doctor,” I said timorously, “she’s very sick. She has a high fever. She asked me to beg you to come right away.”
“A high fever! Shucks! Wasn’t I just there at four? Here I am, an old man, needing my sleep, and I never get a decent night’s rest. It’s always the way. As though I didn’t know. Suppose she has a little fever. It won’t hurt her.”
“But will you come, doctor?” I pleaded, knowing full well that he would, although he had begun irritably to close the door.
“Yes, I’ll come. Of course I’ll come, though I know it isn’t a bit necessary. You run on back. I’ll be there.”
I hurried away through the dark, a little fearful of the silent streets, and presently he came, fussing and fuming at the inconsiderateness of some people.
I always think of old Dr. Woolley as being one of the nicest, kindest old doctors that ever was.
But now this room, instead of being a happy combinationof bed room and study, was a kitchen, dining room and living room combined. There were prints and pots and pans hung on the walls, and no carpet, and a big iron cook stove and a plain deal table and various chairs and boxes, all very humble and old. But the place was clean, I was glad to see, and the warm, August sun was streaming through the west windows, a cheering sight. I missed the sheltering pine boughs outside, and was just thinking “how different” and asking myself “what is time, anyhow” when there came up the stairs a Slavic workingman of small but vigorous build. He had on grey jean trousers and a blue shirt, and carried a bucket and a shovel.
“The gentleman once lived in this house. He’s come back to see it,” explained his wife courteously.
“Well, I suppose it’s changed, eh?” he replied.
“Oh, very much,” I sighed. “I used to sleep in this end bedroom as a boy.”
“Well, you’ll find another boy sleeping there if you look,” he said, opening the door, and as he did so I saw a small, chubby, curly-haired boy of four or five snoozing on his pillow, his face turned away from the golden sun which poured into the room. The beauty of it touched me deeply. It brought back the lapse of time with a crash.
How nature dashes its generations of new childhood against the beaches of this old, old world, I thought. Our little day in the sun is so short. Our tenure of the things of earth so brief. And we fight over land and buildings and position. To my host and hostess I said, “beautiful,” and then that whimpering thing in the sealed room began to cry and I hurried down the stairs.