CHAPTER XXXVIWARSAW IN 1884-6
And right here I began to ponder on the mystery of association and contact, the chemistry and physics of transference by which a sky or a scene becomes a delicious presence in the human brain or the human blood, carried around for years in that mystic condition described as “a memory” and later transferred, perhaps, or not, by conversation, paint, music, or the written word, to the brains of others, there to be carried around again and possibly extended in ever widening and yet fading circles in accordance with that curious, so-called law (is it a law?) of the transmutation of energy. That sounds so fine, that law of transmutation, and yet it makes such short work of that other fine palaver about the immortality of the soul. How many impressions have you transferred in this way? How much of you has gone from you in this way and died? A thin and pathetic end, I say, if all go on, being thinned and transmuted as they go.
Warsaw was an idyllic town for a youth of my temperament and age to have been brought to just at that time. It was so young, vigorous and hopeful. I recall with never-ending delight the intense sense of beauty its surrounding landscape gave me, its three lakes, the Tippecanoe River, which drained two of them, the fine woods and roads and bathing places which lay in various directions. People were always coming to Warsaw to shoot ducks in the marshes about, or to fish or summer on the lakes. Its streets were graced with many trees—they were still here in various places as we rode about today, and not so much larger, as I could see, than when I was here years before. The courthouse, new in my day,standing in an open square and built of white Indiana limestone, was as imposing as ever, and, as we came upon it now turning a corner, it seemed a really handsome building, one of the few in towns of this size which I had seen which I could honestly say I liked. The principal streets, Centre, Buffalo and South, were better built, if anything, than in my time, and actually wider than I had recalled them as being. They were imbued with a spirit not different to that which I had felt while living here. Only on the northwest corner of Centre and Buffalo Streets (the principal street corner opposite this courthouse) where once had stood a bookstore, and next to that a small restaurant with an oyster counter, and next to that a billiard and pool room, the three constituting in themselves the principal meeting or loafing place for the idle young of all ages, the clever workers, school boys, clerks and what not of the entire town, and I presume county—all this was entirely done away with, and in its place was a stiff, indifferent, exclusive looking bank building of three stories in height, which gave no least suggestion of an opportunity for such life as we had known to exist here.
Where do the boys meet now, I asked myself, and what boys? I should like to see. Why, this was the very center and axis of all youthful joy and life in my day. There is a kind of freemasonry of generations which binds together the youths of one season, plus those of a season or two elder, and a season or two younger. At this corner, and in these places, to say nothing of the village post office, Peter’s Shoe Repairing and Shine Parlor, and Moon’s and Thompson’s grocery stores, we of ages ranging from fourteen to seventeen and eighteen—never beyond nineteen or twenty—knew only those who fell within these masonic periods. To be of years not much less nor more than these was thesine qua nonof happy companionship. To have a little money, to be in the high or common school (upper grades), to have a little gaiety, wit, and intelligence, to be able to think andtalk of girls in a clever, flirtatious (albeit secretly nervous manner), were almost as seriously essential.
A fellow by the name of Pierre (we always called him Peary) Morris ran this bookstore, which was the most popular meeting place of all. Here, beginning with the earliest days after our arrival, I recognized a sympathetic atmosphere, though I was somewhat too young to share in it. My mother (my father was still working in Terre Haute) placed us in what was known as the West Ward School. It adjoined an old but very comfortable house we had rented; the school yard and our yard touched. Here we dwelt for one year and part of another, then moved directly across the street, south, into an old brick house known as the Thralls Mansion, one of the first—as I understood it, actuallythefirst—brick house to be built in the county years and years before. Here, in these two houses, we spent all the time that I was in Warsaw. From the frame or “old Grant house,” I sallied each day to my studies of the seventh grade in the school next door. From the Thralls house I accompanied my sister Tillie each day to the high school, in the heart of the town, not far from this court house, where I completed my work in the eighth grade and first year high. I have (in spite of the fact that I have been myself all these years) but a very poor conception of the type of youth I was, and yet I love him dearly. For one thing, I know that he was a dreamer. For another, somewhat cowardly, but still adventurous and willing, on most occasions, to take a reasonable chance. For a third, he was definitely enthusiastic about girls or beauty in the female form, and what was more, about beauty in all forms, natural and otherwise. What clouds meant to him! What morning and evening skies! What the murmur of the wind, the beauty of small sails on our lakes, birds a-wing, the color and flaunt and rhythm of things!
Walking, playing, dreaming, studying, I had finally come to feel myself an integral part of the group of youths, if not girls, who centered about this bookstoreand this corner. Judson Morris, or Jud Morris, as we called him, a hunchback, and the son of the proprietor, was a fairly sympathetic and interesting friend. Frank Yaisley, the brother of Dora, and two years older; George Reed, since elevated to a circuit judgeship somewhere in the West; “Mick” or Will McConnell, who died a few years later of lockjaw contracted by accidentally running a rusty nail into his foot; Harry Croxton, subsequently a mining engineer who died in Mexico and was buried there, and John and George Sharp, sons of the local flour mill owner and grandnephews of my mother; Rutger Miller, Orren Skiff, and various others were all of this group. There were still others of an older group who belonged to the best families and somehow seemed to exchange courtesies here and, in addition, members of a younger group than ourselves, who were to succeed us, as freshman class succeeds freshman class at college.
My joy in this small world and these small groups of youths, and what the future held in store for us, was very great. As I figured it out, the whole duty of men was to grow, get strong, eat, drink, sleep, get married, have children and found a family, and so fulfill the Biblical injunction to “multiply and replenish the earth.” Even at this late date I was dull to such things as fame, lives of artistic achievement, the canniness and subtlety of wealth, and all such things, although I knew from hearing everyone talk that one must and did get rich eventually if one amounted to anything at all. A perfect, worldly wise dogma, but not truer, really, than any other dogma.
But what a change was here, not so much materially as spiritually! Have you ever picked up an empty beetle shell at the end of the summer—that pale, transparent thing which once held a live and flying thing? Did it not bring with it a sense of transmutation and lapse—the passing of all good things? Here was this attractive small town, as brisk and gay as any other, no doubt, but to me now how empty! Here in these streets, in the two houses in which we had lived, in this corner bookstore and itsadjacent restaurant, in the West Ward and Central High Schools, in the local Catholic Church where mass was said only once a month, and in the post office, swimming holes, and on the lakes which surrounded us like gems, had been spent the three happiest years of my boyhood.
Only the year before we came here I had been taken out of a Catholic school at Evansville, Indiana. The public school was to me like a paradise after the stern religiosity of this other school. Education began to mean something to me. I wanted to read and to know. There was a lovely simplicity about the whole public school world which had nothing binding or driving about it. The children were urged, coaxed, pleaded with—not driven. Force was a last resort, and rarely indulged in. Can’t you see how it was that I soon fell half in love with my first teacher, a big, soft, pink-cheeked, buxom blonde, and with our home and our life here?
But I was concerned now only with this corner book store and how it looked today. Coming out from New York, I kept thinking how it would look and how the square would look and whether there would be any of the old atmosphere about the schools or the lakes, or our two houses, or the houses of my friends, or the Catholic Church or anything. I wanted to see our ex-homes and the schools and all these things. Turning into the square after passing the first two houses mentioned, I looked at this corner, and here was this new bank building and nothing more. It looked cold and remote. A through car of a state-wide trolley system, which ran all the way from Michigan City and Gary on Lake Michigan to Indianapolis, Evansville, Terre Haute, and other places in the extreme south, stood over the way. There had been no street car of any kind here in my day. The court house was the same, the store in which Nueweiler’s clothing store used to be (and because of Frank Nueweiler, an elderly figure in “our crowd,” one of our rendezvous) was now a bookstore, the successor, really, to the one I was looking for. Thepost office had been moved to a new store building erected by the government. (I think in every town we passed we had found a new post office erected by the government.) The Harry Oram wagon works was in exactly the same position at the northwest corner of the square, only larger. There was no trace of Epstein’s Wool, Hide and Tallow Exchange, which had stood on another corner directly across the way from the bookstore. A new building had replaced that. All Epstein’s children had gone to Chicago, so a neighboring hardware clerk told me, and Epstein himself had died fifteen years before.
But what of the Yaisleys? What of the Yaisleys? I kept asking myself that. Where had they gone? To satisfy myself as to that, before going any farther, I went into this new bookstore in Nueweiler’s old clothing emporium, and asked the man who waited on me while I selected postcards.
“What became of the Nueweilers who used to run this place as a clothing store?” I asked as a feeler, before going into the more delicate matter of the Yaisleys.
“Nueweiler?” he replied, with an air of slight surprise. “Why, he has the dry goods store at the next corner—Yaisley’s old place.”
“Well, and what has become of Yaisley, then?”
“Oh, he died all of twenty years ago. You must be quite a stranger about here.”
“I am,” I volunteered. “I used to live here, but I haven’t been here now for nearly thirty years, and that’s why I’m anxious to know. I used to know Frank and Will and Dora Yaisley, and even her elder sister, Bertha, by sight, at least.”
“Oh, yes, Will Yaisley. There was an interesting case for you,” he observed reminiscently. “I remember him, though I don’t remember the others so well. I only came here in 1905, and he was back here then. Why, he had been out West by then and had come back here broke. His father was dead then, and the rest of thefamily scattered. He was so down and out that he hung around the saloons, doing odd jobs of cleaning and that sort of thing—and at other times laid cement sidewalks.”
“How old was he at that time, do you think?” I inquired.
“Oh, about forty, I should say.”
This unhappy end of Will Yaisley was all the more startling when I contrasted it with what I had known of him (1884-1886). Then he was a youth of twenty or twentyone or two, clerking in his father’s store, which was the largest in town, and living in this fine house which was now a K. of P. Club. He was brisk and stocky and red-headed—his sister Dora had glints of red in her hair—and, like the rest of this family, was vain and supercilious.
Aphrodite had many devotees in this simple Christian village. The soil of the town, its lakes and groves, seemed to generate a kind of madness in us all. I recall that during the short time I was there, there was scandal after scandal, and seemingly innocent sex attractions, which sprang up between boys and girls whom I knew, ended disastrously after I had departed. One of the boys already referred to was found, after he was dead, to have left a pretty, oversexed school girl, whom I also knew, enceinte. The son of one of the richest land owners and a brother of a very pretty school girl who sat near me in first year high, was found, the year after I left, to have seduced a lovely tall girl with fair hair and blue eyes, who lived only two blocks from us. The story went round (it was retailed to me in Chicago) that she got down on her knees to him (how should anyone have seen her do that?) and on his refusing to marry her, committed suicide by swallowing poison. Her death by suicide, and the fact that he had been courting her, were true enough. I personally know of three other girls, all beauties, and all feverish with desire (how keen is the natural urge to sex!) who were easily persuaded, no doubt, and had to be sent away so that the scandal ofhaving a child at home, without having a husband to vouch for it, might be hushed up.
Poor, dogma-bound humanity! How painfully we weave our way through the mysteries, once desire has trapped us!