CHAPTER XXXVWARSAW AT LAST!
Getting to Warsaw was a matter of an hour or so at most from here. I think my principal sensation on entering Indiana and getting thus far was one of disappointment that nothing had happened, and worse, nothing could happen. From here on it was even worse. It is all very well to dream of revisiting your native soil and finding at least traces, if no more, of your early world, but I tell you it is a dismal and painful business. Life is a shifting and changing thing. Not only your own thoughts and moods, but those of all others who endure, undergo a mighty alteration. Houses and landscapes and people go by and return no more. The very land itself changes. All that is left of what you were, or of what was, in your own brain, is a dwindling and spindling thing.
Not many miles out from Warsaw, we passed through the town of Pierceton, where lived two girls I barely knew at school, and here we picked up a typical Hoosier, who, because we asked the road of the principal storekeeper, volunteered to ride along and show us. “I’m going for a couple of miles in that direction. If you don’t mind I’ll get in and show you.”
Franklin welcomed him. I objected to the shrewd type, a cross between a country politician and a sales agent, who manages his errands in this way, but I said nothing. He made himself comfortable alongside Speed and talked to him principally the small change of country life.
As we sped along I began to feel an ugly resentment toward all life and change, and the driving, destroying urge of things. The remorselessness of time, how bitterly, irritatingly clear it stood out here! We talk aboutthe hardness and cruelty of men! Contrast their sharpest, most brutal connivings with the slow, indifferent sapping of strength and hope and joy which nature practices upon each and every one of us. See the utter brutality with which every great dream is filched from the mind, all the delicate, tendril-like responsiveness of youth is taken away, your friends and pleasures and aspirations slain. I looked about me, and beginning to recognize familiar soil, such as a long stretch of white road ending in an old ice house, a railroad track out which I had walked, felt a sudden, overpowering, almost sickening depression at the lapse of time and all that had gone with it. Thirty years, nearly, had passed and with them all the people and all the atmosphere that surrounded them, or nearly so, and all my old intimacies and loves and romantic feelings. A dead world like this is such a compound—a stained-glass window at its best; a bone yard at its worst.
Approaching Warsaw after thirty years, my mind was busy gathering up a thousand threads long since fallen and even rotting in the grass of time. Here was the place, I said to myself, where we, the depleted portion of our family that constituted “we” at the time, came to stabilize our troubled fortunes and (it was my mother’s idea) to give the three youngest children, of whom I was one, an opportunity to get a sensible American free school education. Hitherto our family (to introduce a little private history) had been more or less under the domination of my dogmatic father, who was a Catholic and a bigot. I never knew a narrower, more hidebound religionist, nor one more tender and loving in his narrow way. He was a crank, a tenth rate Saint Simon or Francis of Assisi, and yet a charming person if it had been possible to get his mind off the subject of religion for more than three seconds at a time. He worked, ate, played, slept and dreamed religion. With no other thought than the sanctity and glory and joy of the Catholic Church, he was constantly attempting to drive a decidedly recalcitrant family into a similar point of view.
In the main (there were ten of us living) we wouldnone of it. The majority, by some trick of chemistry which produces unheard of reactions in the strangest manner (though he and, to a much less extent, my mother, were religiously minded) were caught fast by the material, unreligious aspect of things. They were, one and all, mastered by the pagan life stream which flows fresh and clean under all our religions and all our views, moralistic and otherwise. It will have none of the petty, narrowing traps and gins wherewith the mistaken processes of the so-called minds of some would seek to enslave it. Life will not be boxed in boxes. It will not be wrapped and tied up with strings and set aside on a shelf to await a particular religious or moral use. As yet we do not understand life, we do not know what it is, what the laws are that govern it. At best we see ourselves hobbling along, responding to this dream and that lust and unable to compel ourselves to gainsay the fires and appetites and desires of our bodies and minds. Some of these, in some of us, strangely enough (and purely accidentally, of that I am convinced) conform to the current needs or beliefs of a given society; and if we should be so fortunate as to find ourselves in that society, we are by reason of these ideals, favorites, statesmen, children of fortune, poets of the race. On the other hand, others of us who do not and cannot conform (who are left-over phases of ancient streams, perhaps, or portentous striæ of new forces coming into play) are looked upon as horrific, and to be stabilized, or standardized, and brought into the normal systole-diastole of things. Those of us endowed with these things in mind and blood are truly terrible to the mass—pariahs, failures, shams, disgraces. Yet life is no better than its worst elements, no worse than its best. Its perfections are changing temporalities, illusions of perfection that will be something very different tomorrow. Again I say, we do not know what life is—not nearly enough to set forth a fixed code of any kind, religious or otherwise. But we do know that it sings and stings, that it has perfections, entrancements, shames—each according to his blood flux and its chemical character.Life is rich, gorgeous, an opium eater’s dream of something paradisiacal—but it is never the thin thing that thin blood and a weak, ill nourished, poorly responding brain would make it, and that is where the majority of our religions, morals, rules and safeguards come from. From thin, petered out blood, and poor, nervous, noncommanding weak brains.
Life is greater than anything we know.
It is stronger.
It is wilder.
It is more horrible.
It is more beautiful.
We need not stop and think we have found a solution. We have not even found a beginning. We do not know. And my patriotic father wanted us all to believe in the Catholic church and the infallibility of the Pope and confession and communion!
Great Pan of the Greeks, and you, Isis of the Egyptians, save me! These moderns are all insane!
But I was talking of the effect of the approach of Warsaw upon me. And I want to get back to my mother, for she was the center of all my experiences here. Such a woman! Truly, when I think of my mother I feel that I had best keep silent. I certainly had one of the most perfect mothers ever a man had. Warsaw, in fact, really means my mother to me, for here I first came to partially understand her, to view her as a woman and to know how remarkable she was. An open, uneducated, wondering, dreamy mind, none of the customary, conscious principles with which so many conventional souls are afflicted. A happy, hopeful, animal mother, with a desire to live, and not much constructive ability wherewith to make real her dreams. A pagan mother taken over into the Catholic Church at marriage, because she loved a Catholic and would follow her love anywhere. A great poet mother, because she loved fables and fairies and half believed in them, and once saw the Virgin Mary standing in our garden (this was at Sullivan), blue robes,crown and all, and was sure it was she! She loved the trees and the flowers and the clouds and the sound of the wind, and was wont to cry over tales of poverty almost as readily as over poverty itself, and to laugh over the mannikin fol de rols of all too responsive souls. A great hearted mother—loving, tender, charitable, who loved the ne’er do well a little better than those staid favorites of society who keep all laws. Her own children frequently complained of her errors and tempers (what mortal ever failed so to do?) and forgot their own beams to be annoyed by her motes. But at that they loved her, each and every one, and could not stay away from her very long at a time, so potent and alive she was.
I always say I know how great some souls can be because I know how splendid that of my mother was. Hail, you! wherever you are!
In drawing near to Warsaw, I felt some of this as of a thousand other things which had been at that time and now were no more.
We came in past the new outlying section of Winona, a region of summer homes, boat houses and casinos scattered about a lake which in my day was entirely surrounded by woods, green and still, and thence along a street which I found out later was an extension of the very street on which we had originally lived, only now very much lengthened to provide a road out to Winona. Lined on either side by the most modern of cottages, these new style verandaed, summer resorty things hung with swings and couch hammocks which one sees at all the modern American watering places, it was too new and smart to suit me exactly and carried with it no suggestion of anything that I had been familiar with. A little farther on, though, it merged into something that I did know. There were houses that looked as though they might have endured all of forty years and been the same ones I had known as the houses of some of my youthful companions. I tried to find the home of Loretta Brown, for instance, who was killed a few years later in a wreck inthe West, and of Bertha Stillmayer, who used to hold my youthful fancy, at a distance. I could not find them. There was a church, also, at one corner, which I was almost sure I knew, and then suddenly, as we neared another corner, I recognized two residences. One was that of the principal lumber dealer of our town, a man who with his son and daughter and a few other families constituted the elite, and next to it, the home of the former owner of the principal dry goods store; very fine houses both of them, and suggesting by their architecture and the arrangement of their grounds all that at one time I thought was perfect—the topmost rung of taste and respectability!
In my day these were very close to the business heart, but so was everything in Warsaw then. In the first and better one, rather that of the wealthier of the two men, for they were both very much alike in their physical details, was, of all things, an automobile show room—an interesting establishment of its kind, made possible, no doubt, by the presence of the prosperous summer resort we had just passed. On the porch of this house and its once exclusive walk were exhibition tires and posters of the latest automobiles. In the other house, more precious to me still because of various memories, was the present home of the local Knights of Pythias, an organization I surely need not describe. In front of it hung a long, perpendicular glass sign or box, which could be lighted from within by incandescent globes. The lettering was merely “K. of P.”
In years and years I cannot recall anything giving me a sharper wrench. I was so surprised, although I was fully prepared not to be—not that I cared, really, whether these houses had changed or not—I didn’t. But in one of them, the present home of the K. of P., had lived in my time the Yaisley family, and this family was endeared to me, partly by its wealth (qualify this by the inexperience of youth and our personal poverty) and partly by the presence of Dora Yaisley, the youngest daughter, who was a girl of about my own age, possibly younger, andwho, to me, was so beautiful that I used to dream about her all the time. As a matter of fact, from my fourteenth to my sixteenth year, from the first time I saw her until a long time after I had seen her no more, she was the one girl whose perfection I was sure of. Perhaps she would not be called beautiful by many. No doubt, if I could see her today, she would not appeal to me at all. But then——