One night seeing that the principal of a well known School of Oratory was bulletined to lecture at the Young Men's Union upon "The Philosophy of Expression" I went to hear him, more by way of routine than with any expectation of being enlightened or even interested, but his very first words surprised and delighted me. His tone was positive, his phrases epigrammatic, and I applauded heartily. "Here is a man of thought," I said.
At the close of the address I ventured to the platform and expressed to him my interest in what he had said. He was a large man with a broad and smiling face, framed in a brown beard. He appeared pleased with my compliments and asked if I were a resident of Boston. "No, I am a western man," I replied. "I am here to study and I was especially interested in your quotations from Darwin's book onExpression in Man and Animals."
His eyes expressed surprise and after a few minutes' conversation, he gave me his card saying, "Come and see me tomorrow morning at my office."
I went home pleasantly excited by this encounter. After months of unbroken solitude in the midst of throngs of strangers, this man's cordial invitation meant much to me.
On the following morning, at the hour set, I called at the door of his office on the top floor of No. 7 BeaconStreet, which was an old-fashioned one-story building without an elevator.
Brown asked me where I came from, what my plans were, and I replied with eager confidence. Then we grew harmoniously enthusiastic over Herbert Spencer and Darwin and Mantegazza and I talked a stream. My long silence found vent. Words poured from me in a torrent but he listened smilingly, his big head cocked on one side, waiting patiently for me to blow off steam. Later, when given a chance, he showed me the manuscript of a book upon which he was at work and together we discussed its main thesis. He asked me my opinion of this passage and that—and I replied, not as a pupil but as an equal, and the author seemed pleased at my candor.
Two hours passed swiftly in this way and as the interview was about to end he asked, "Where do you live?"
I told him and explained that I was trying to fit myself for teaching and that I was living as cheaply as possible. "I haven't any money for tuition," I confessed.
He mused a moment, then said, "If you wish to come into my school I shall be glad to have you do so. Never mind about tuition,—pay me when you can."
This generous offer sent me away filled with gratitude and an illogical hope. Not only had I gained a friend, I had found an intellectual comrade, one who was far more widely read, at least in science, than I. I went to my ten-cent lunch with a feeling that a door had unexpectedly opened and that it led into broader, sunnier fields of toil.
The school, which consisted of several plain offices and a large class-room, was attended by some seventy or eighty pupils, mostly girls from New England and Canada with a few from Indiana and Ohio. It was a simple little workshop but to me it was the mostimportant institution in Boston. It gave me welcome, and as I came into it on Monday morning at nine o'clock and was introduced to the pretty teacher of Delsarte, Miss Maida Craigen, whose smiling lips and big Irish-gray eyes made her beloved of all her pupils, I felt that my lonely life in Boston was ended.
The teachers met me with formal kindliness, finding in me only another crude lump to be moulded into form, and while I did not blame them for it, I instantly drew inside my shell and remained there—thus robbing myself of much that would have done me good. Some of the girls went out of their way to be nice to me, but I kept aloof, filled with a savage resentment of my poverty and my threadbare clothing.
Before the week was over, Professor Brown asked me to assist in reading the proof-sheets of his new book and this I did, going over it with him line by line. His deference to my judgment was a sincere compliment to my reading and warmed my heart like some elixir. It was my first authoritative appreciation and when at the end of the third session he said, "I shall consider your criticism more than equal to the sum of your tuition," I began to faintly forecast the time when my brain would make me self-supporting.
My days were now cheerful. My life had direction. For two hours each afternoon (when work in the school was over) I sat with Brown discussing the laws of dramatic art, and to make myself still more valuable in this work, I read every listed book or article upon expression, and translated several French authorities, transcribing them in longhand for his use.
In this work the weeks went by and spring approached. In a certain sense I felt that I was gaining an education which would be of value to me but I was not earning one cent of money, and my out-go was more than five dollarsper week, for I occasionally went to the theater, and I had also begun attendance at the Boston Symphony concerts in Music Hall.
By paying twenty-five cents students were allowed to fill the gallery and to stand on the ground floor, and Friday afternoons generally found me leaning against the wall listening to Brahms and Wagner. At such times I often thought of my mother, and my uncle David and wished that they too might hear these wondrous harmonies. I tried to imagine what the effect of this tumult of sound would be, as it beat in upon their inherited deeply musical brain-cells!
One by one I caught up the threads of certain other peculiar Boston interests, and by careful reading of theTranscriptwas enabled to vibrate in full harmony with the local hymn of gratitude. New York became a mere emporium, a town without a library, a city without a first class orchestra, the home of a few commercial painters and several journalistic poets! Chicago was a huge dirty town on the middle border. Washington a vulgar political camp—only Philadelphia was admitted to have the quality of a real city and her literary and artistic resources were pitiably slender and failing!
But all the time that I was feasting on these insubstantial glories, my meat was being cut down and my coat hung ever more loosely over my ribs. Pale and languid I longed for spring, for sunshine, with all the passion of a prisoner, and when at last the grass began to show green in the sheltered places on the Common and the sparrows began to utter their love notes, I went often of an afternoon to a bench in lee of a clump of trees and there sprawled out like a debilitated fox, basking in the tepid rays of a diminished sun.
For all his expressed admiration of my literary and scientific acumen, Brown did not see fit to invite me todinner, probably because of my rusty suit and frayed cuffs. I did not blame him. I was in truth a shabby figure, and the dark-brown beard which had come upon me added to the unhealthy pallor of my skin, so that Mrs. Brown, a rather smart and socially ambitious lady, must have regarded me as something of an anarchist, a person to avoid. She always smiled as we met, but her smile was defensive.
However, a blessed break in the monotony of my fare came during April when my friend Bashford invited me to visit him in Portland. I accepted his invitation with naïve precipitation and furbished up my wardrobe as best I could, feeling that even the wife of a clergyman might not welcome a visitor with fringed cuffs and celluloid collars.
This was my first sea voyage and I greatly enjoyed the trip—after I got there!
Mrs. Bashford received me kindly, but (I imagined) with a trace of official hospitality in her greeting. It was plain that she (like Mrs. Brown) considered me a "Charity Patient." Well, no matter, Bashford and I got on smoothly.
Their house was large and its grandeur was almost oppressive to me, but I spent nearly a week in it. As I was leaving, Bashford gave me a card to Dr. Cross, a former parishioner in Jamaica Plain, saying, "Call upon the Doctor as soon as you return. He'll be glad to hear of Dakota."
My little den in Boylston Place was almost intolerable to me now. Spring sunshine, real sunshine flooded the land and my heart was full of longing for the country. Therefore—though I dreaded meeting another stranger,—I decided to risk a dime and make the trip to Jamaica Plains, to call upon Dr. Cross.
This ride was a further revelation of the beauty of NewEngland. For half an hour the little horse-car ran along winding lanes under great overarching elm trees, past apple-orchards in bursting bloom. On every hand luscious lawns spread, filled with crocuses and dandelions just beginning to spangle the green. The effect upon me was somewhat like that which would be produced in the mind of a convict who should suddenly find his prison doors opening into a June meadow. Standing with the driver on the front platform, I drank deep of the flower-scented air. I had never seen anything more beautiful.
Dr. Cross, a sweet and gentle man of about sixty years of age (not unlike in manner and habit Professor Bush, my principal at the Cedar Valley Seminary) received his seedy visitor with a kindly smile. I liked him and trusted him at once. He was tall and very thin, with dark eyes and a long gray beard. His face was absolutely without suspicion or guile. It was impossible to conceive of his doing an unkind or hasty act, and he afterward said that I had the pallor of a man who had been living in a cellar. "I was genuinely alarmed about you," he said.
His small frame house was simple, but it stood in the midst of a clump of pear trees, and when I broke out in lyrical praise of the beauty of the grass and glory of the flowers, the doctor smiled and became even more distinctly friendly. It appeared that through Mr. Bashford he had purchased a farm in Dakota, and the fact that I knew all about it and all about wheat farming gave me distinction.
He introduced me to his wife, a wholesome hearty soul who invited me to dinner. I stayed. It was my first chance at a real meal since my visit to Portland, and I left the house with a full stomach, as well as a full heart, feeling that the world was not quite so unfriendly afterall. "Come again on Sunday," the doctor almost commanded. "We shall expect you."
My money had now retired to the lower corner of my left-hand pocket and it was evident that unless I called upon my father for help I must go back to the West; and much as I loved to talk of the broad fields and pleasant streams of Dakota, I dreaded the approach of the hour when I must leave Boston, which was coming to mean more and more to me every day.
In a blind vague way I felt that to leave Boston was to leave all hope of a literary career and yet I saw no way of earning money in the city. In the stress of my need I thought of an old friend, a carpenter in Greenfield. "I'm sure he will give me a job," I said.
With this in mind I went into Professor Brown's office one morning and I said, "Well, Professor, I must leave you."
"What's that? What's the matter?" queried the principal shrilly.
"My money's gone. I've got to get out and earn more," I answered sadly.
He eyed me gravely. "What are you going to do?" he inquired.
"I am going back to shingling," I said with tragic accent.
"Shingling!" the old man exclaimed, and then began to laugh, his big paunch shaking up and down with the force of his mirth. "Shingling!" he shouted finally. "Canyoushingle?"
"You bet I can," I replied with comical access of pride, "but I don't like to. That is to say I don't like to give up my work here in Boston just when I am beginning to feel at home."
Brown continued to chuckle. To hear that a man who knew Mantegazza and Darwin and Whitman andBrowning could eventhinkof shingling, was highly humorous, but as he studied my forlorn face he sensed the despairing quiver in my voice and his kind heart softened. He ceased to smile. "Oh, you mustn't do that," he said earnestly. "You mustn't surrender now. We'll fix up some way for you to earn your keep. Can't you borrow a little?"
"Yes, I could get a few dollars from home, but I don't feel justified in doing so,—times are hard out there and besides I see no way of repaying a loan."
He pondered a moment, "Well, now I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll make you our Instructor in Literature for the summer term and I'll put your Booth lecture on the programme. That will give you a start, and perhaps something else will develop for the autumn."
This noble offer so emboldened me that I sent west for twenty-five dollars to pay my board, and to have my suit dyed.—It was the very same suit I had bought of the Clark Street tailor, and the aniline purple had turned pink along the seams—or if not pink it was some other color equally noticeable in the raiment of a lecturer, and not to be endured. I also purchased a new pair of shoes and a necktie of the Windsor pattern. This cravat and my long Prince Albert frock, while not strictly in fashion, made me feel at least presentable.
Another piece of good fortune came to me soon after. Dr. Cross again invited me to dine and after dinner as we were driving together along one of the country lanes, the good doctor said, "Mrs. Cross is going up into New Hampshire for the summer and I shall be alone in the house. Why don't you come and stay with me? You need the open air, and I need company."
This generous offer nearly shipwrecked my dignity. Several moments passed before I could control my voice to thank him. At last I said, "That's very kind of you,Doctor. I'll come if you will let me pay at least the cost of my board."
The Doctor understood this feeling and asked, "How much are you paying now?"
With slight evasion I replied, "Well, I try to keep within five dollars a week."
He smiled. "I don't see how you do it, but I can give you an attic room and you can pay me at your convenience."
This noble invitation translated me from my dark, cold, cramped den (with its night-guard of redoubtable cockroaches) into the light and air of a comfortable suburban home. It took me back to the sky and the birds and the grass—and Irish Mary, the cook, put red blood into my veins. In my sabbath walks along the beautiful country roads, I heard again the song of the cat-bird and the trill of the bobolink. For the first time in months I slept in freedom from hunger, in security of the morrow. Oh, good Hiram Cross, your golden crown should be studded with jewels, for your life was filled with kindnesses like this!
Meanwhile, in preparation for the summer term I gladly helped stamp and mail Brown's circulars. The lecture "Edwin Booth as Iago" I carefully re-wrote—for Brown had placed it on his printed programme and had also announced me as "Instructor in Literature." I took care to send this circular to all my friends and relatives in the west.
Decidedly that summer of Taine in a Dakota cabin was bearing fruit, and yet just in proportion as Brown came to believe in my ability so did he proceed to "hector" me. He never failed to ask of a morning, "Well, when are you going back to shingling?"
The Summer School opened in July. It was well attended, and the membership being made up of teachersof English and Oratory from several states was very impressive to me. Professors of elocution and of literature from well-known colleges and universities gave dignity and distinction to every session.
My class was very small and paid me very little but it brought me to know Mrs. Payne, a studious, kindly woman (a resident of Hyde Park), who for some reason which will forever remain obscure, considered me not merely a youth of promise, but a lecturer of value. Having heard from Brown how sadly I needed money—perhaps she even detected poverty in my dyed coat, she not only invited me to deliver an immediate course of lectures at her house in Hyde Park but proceeded to force tickets upon all her friends.
The importance of this engagement will appear when the reader is informed that I was owing the Doctor for a month's board, and saw no way of paying it, and that my one suit was distressingly threadbare. There are other and more interesting ways of getting famous but alas! I rose only by inches and incredible effort. My reader must be patient with me.
My subjects were ambitious enough, "The Art of Edwin Booth," was ready for delivery, but "Victor Hugo and his Prose Masterpieces," was only partly composed and "The Modern German Novel" and "The American Novel" were in notes merely, therefore with puckered brow and sturdy pen I set to work in my little attic room, and there I toiled day and night to put on paper the notions I had acquired concerning these grandiose subjects.
In after years I was appalled at the audacity of that schedule, and I think I had the grace to be scared at the time, but I swung into it recklessly. Tickets had been taken by some of the best known men among the teachers, and I was assured by Mrs. Payne that we would have the most distinguished audience that ever gracedHyde Park. "Among your listeners will be the literary editors of several Boston papers, two celebrated painters, and several well-known professors of oratory," she said, and like Lieutenant Napoleon called upon to demonstrate his powers, I graved with large and ruthless fist, and approached my opening date with palpitating but determined heart.
It was a tense moment for me as (while awaiting my introduction) I looked into the faces of the men and women seated in that crowded parlor. Just before the dais, shading his eyes with his hand, was a small man with a pale face and brown beard. This was Charles E. Hurd, literary editor of theTranscript. Near him sat Theodore Weld, as venerable in appearance as Socrates (with long white hair and rosy cheeks), well known as one of the anti-slavery guard, a close friend of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison. Beside him was Professor Raymond of Princeton, the author of several books, while Churchill of Andover and half a dozen other representatives of great colleges loomed behind him. I faced them all with a gambler's composure but behind my mask I was jellied with fear.
However, when I rose to speak, the tremor passed out of my limbs, the blood came back to my brain, and I began without stammering. This first paper, fortunately for us all, dealt with Edwin Booth, whom I revered. To my mind he not only expressed the highest reach of dramatic art in his day, he was the best living interpreter of Shakespeare, and no doubt it was the sincerity of my utterance which held my hearers, for they all listened intently while I analyzed the character ofIago, and disclosed what seemed to me to be the sources of the great tragedian's power, and when I finished they applauded with unmistakable approval, and Mrs. Payne glowed with a sense of proprietorship in her protégé who had seizedthe opportunity and made it his. I was absurd but triumphant.
Many of the guests (kindly of spirit) came up to shake hands and congratulate me. Mr. Hurd gave me a close grip and said, "Come up to theTranscriptoffice and see me." John J. Enneking, a big, awkward red-bearded painter, elbowed up and in his queer German way spoke in approval. Churchill, Raymond, both said, "You'll do," and Brown finally came along with a mocking smile on his big face, eyed me with an air of quizzical comradeship, nudged me slyly with his elbow as he went by, and said, "Going back to shingling, are you?"
On the homeward drive, Dr. Cross said very solemnly, "You have no need to fear the future."
It was a very small event in the history of Hyde Park, but it was a veritable bridge of Lodi for me. I never afterward felt lonely or disheartened in Boston. I had been tested both as teacher and orator and I must be pardoned for a sudden growth of boyish self-confidence.
The three lectures which followed were not so successful as the first, but my audience remained. Indeed I think it would have increased night by night had the room permitted it, and Mrs. Payne was still perfectly sure that her protégé had in him all the elements of success, but I fear Prof. Church expressed the sad truth when he said in writing, "Your man Garland is a diamond in the rough!" Of course I must have appeared very seedy and uncouth to these people and I am filled with wonder at their kindness to me. My accent was western. My coat sleeves shone at the elbows, my trousers bagged at the knees. Considering the anarch I must have been, I marvel at their toleration. No western audience could have been more hospitable, more cordial.
The ninety dollars which I gained from this series oflectures was, let me say, the less important part of my victory, and yet it was wondrous opportune. They enabled me to cancel my indebtedness to the Doctor, and still have a little something to keep me going until my classes began in October, and as my landlord did not actually evict me, I stayed on shamelessly, fattening visibly on the puddings and roasts which Mrs. Cross provided and dear old Mary cooked with joy. She was the true artist. She loved to see her work appreciated.
My class in English literature that term numbered twenty and the money which this brought carried me through till the mid-winter vacation, and permitted another glorious season of Booth and the Symphony Orchestra. In the month of January I organized a class in American Literature, and so at last became self-supporting in the city of Boston! No one who has not been through it can realize the greatness of this victory.
I permitted myself a few improvements in hose and linen. I bought a leather hand-bag with a shoulder strap, and every day joined the stream of clerks and students crossing the Common. I began to feel a proprietary interest in the Hub. My sleeping room (also my study), continued to be in the attic (a true attic with a sloping roof and one window) but the window faced the south, and in it I did all my reading and writing. It was hot on sunny days and dark on cloudy days, but it was a refuge.
As a citizen with a known habitation I was permitted to carry away books from the library, and each morning from eight until half-past twelve I sat at my desk writing, tearing away at some lecture, or historical essay, and once in a while I composed a few lines of verse. Five afternoons in each week I went to my classes and to the library, returning at six o'clock to my dinner and to my reading. This was my routine, and I was happy in it.My letters to my people in the west were confident, more confident than I ofttimes felt.
During my second summer Burton Babcock, who had decided to study for the Unitarian ministry, came east with intent to enter the Divinity School at Harvard. He was the same old Burton, painfully shy, thoughtful, quaintly abrupt in manner, and together we visited the authorities at Cambridge and presented his case as best we could.
For some reason not clear to either of us, the school refused to aid and after a week's stay with me Burton, a little disheartened but not resentful, went to Meadville, Pennsylvania. Boston seemed very wonderful to him and I enjoyed his visit keenly. We talked inevitably of old friends and old days in the manner of middle-aged men, and he told me that John Gammons had entered the Methodist ministry and was stationed in Decorah, that Charles, my former partner in Dakota, had returned to the old home very ill with some obscure disease. Mitchell Morrison was a watch-maker and jeweler in Winona and Lee Moss had gone to Superior. The scattering process had begun. The diverging wind-currents of destiny had already parted our little group and every year would see its members farther apart. How remote it all seems to me now,—like something experienced on another planet!
Each month saw me more and more the Bostonian by adoption. My teaching paid my board, leaving me free to study and to write. I never did any hack-work for the newspapers. Hawthorne's influence over me was still powerful, and in my first attempts at writing fiction I kept to the essay form and sought for a certain distinction in tone. In poetry, however, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Walt Whitman were more to my way of thinking than either Poe or Emerson. In brief I was sadly"mixed." Perhaps the enforced confinement of my city life gave all poems of the open air, of the prairies, their great and growing power over me for I had resolved to remain in Boston until such time as I could return to the West in the guise of a conqueror. Just what I was about to conquer and in what way I was to secure eminence was not very clear to me, but I was resolved none the less, and had no immediate intention of returning.
In the summer of 1886 Brown held another Summer School and again I taught a class. Autumn brought a larger success. Mrs. Lee started a Browning Class in Chelsea, and another loyal pupil organized a Shakespeare class in Waltham. I enjoyed my trips to these classes very much and one of the first stories I ever wrote was suggested by some characters I saw in an old grocery store in Waltham. As I recall my method of teaching, it consisted chiefly of readings. My critical comment could not have been profound.
I was earning now twelve dollars per week, part of this went for railway fare, but I still had a margin of profit. True I still wore reversible cuffs and carried my laundry bundles in order to secure the discount, but I dressed in better style and looked a little less like a starving Russian artist, and I was becoming an author!
My entrance into print came about through my good friend, Mr. Hurd, the book reviewer of theTranscript. For him I began to write an occasional critical article or poem just to try my hand. One of my regular "beats" was up the three long flights of stairs which led to Hurd's little den above Washington Street, for there I felt myself a little more of the literary man, a little nearer the current of American fiction.
Let me repeat my appreciation of the fact that I met with the quickest response and the most generous aid among the people of Boston. There was nothing coldor critical in their treatment of me. My success, admittedly, came from some sympathy in them rather than from any real deserving on my part. I cannot understand at this distance why those charming people should have consented to receive from me, opinions concerning anything whatsoever,—least of all notions of literature,—but they did, and they seemed delighted at "discovering" me. Perhaps they were surprised at finding so much intelligence in a man from the plains.
It was well that I was earning my own living at last, for things were not going especially well at home. A couple of dry seasons had made a great change in the fortunes of my people. Frank, with his usual careless good nature as clerk in the store had given credit to almost every comer, and as the hard times came on, many of those indebted failed to pay, and father was forced to give up his business and go back to the farm which he understood and could manage without the aid of an accountant.
"The Junior" as I called my brother, being footloose and discontented, wrote to say that he was planning to go farther west—to Montana, I think it was. His letter threw me into dismay. I acknowledged once again that my education had in a sense been bought at his expense. I recalled the many weeks when the little chap had plowed in my stead whilst I was enjoying the inspiration of Osage. It gave me distress to think of him separating himself from the family as David had done, and yet my own position was too insecure to warrant me promising much in his aid. Nevertheless, realizing that mother would suffer less if she knew her two sons were together, I wrote, saying, "If you have definitely decided on leaving home, don't go west. Come to Boston, and I will see if I cannot get you something to do."
It ended in his coming to Boston, and my mother wasprofoundly relieved. Father gave no sign either of pleasure or regret. He set to work once more increasing his acreage, vigorous and unsubdued.
Frank's coming added to my burden of responsibility and care, but increased my pleasure in the city, for I now had someone to show it to. He secured a position as an accountant in a railway office and though we seldom met during the week, on Sundays we roamed the parks, or took excursions down the bay, and in a short time he too became an enthusiastic Bostonian with no thought of returning to Dakota. Little Jessie was now the sole stay and comfort of our mother.
As I look back now upon the busy, happy days of 1885 and 1886, I can grasp only a few salient experiences.... A terrific storm is on the sea. We are at Nantasket to study it. The enormous waves are charging in from the illimitable sky like an army of horses, only to fall and waste themselves in wrath upon the sand. I feel the stinging blast against my face.... I am riding on a train over the marshes on my way to my class in Chelsea. I look across the level bay and behold a soaring banner of sunshot mist, spun by a passing engine, rising, floating, vanishing in the air.... I am sitting in an old grocery shop in Waltham listening to the quaint aphorism of a group of loafers around the stove.... I am lecturing before a summer school in Pepperel, New Hampshire.... I am at the theater, I hear Salvini thunderously clamoring on the stage. I see Modjeska's beautiful hands. I thrill to Sarah Bernhardt's velvet somber voice....
It is summer, Frank and I are walking the lovely lanes of Milton under gigantic elms, or lying on the grass of the park in West Roxbury, watching the wild birds come and go, hearing the sound of the scythestone in the meadow. Day by day, week by week, Boston, NewEngland, comes to fuse that part of me which is eastern. I grow at last into thinking myself a fixture. Boston is the center of music, of art, of literature. My only wish now is to earn money enough to visit my people in the West.
And yet, notwithstanding all this, neither of us ever really became a Bostonian. We never got beyond a feeling for the beauty, the picturesqueness and the charm of our surroundings. The East caused me to cry out in admiration, but it did not inspire me to write. It did not appeal to me as my material. It was rather as a story already told, a song already sung.
When I walked a lane, or saw the sloping roof of a house set against a hillside I thought of Whittier or Hawthorne and was silent. The sea reminded me of Celia Thaxter or Lucy Larcom. The marshes brought up theWayside Innof Longfellow; all, all was of the past. New England, rich with its memories of great men and noble women, had no direct inspiration for me, a son of the West. It did not lay hold upon my creative imagination, neither did it inspire me to sing of its glory. I remained immutably of the Middle Border and strange to say, my desire to celebrate the West was growing.
Each season dropped a thickening veil of mist between me and the scenes of my youth, adding a poetic glamour to every rememberable form and fact. Each spring when the smell of fresh, uncovered earth returned to fret my nostrils I thought of the wide fields of Iowa, of the level plains of Dakota, and a desire to hear once more the prairie chicken calling from the ridges filled my heart. In the autumn when the wind swept through the bare branches of the elm, I thought of the lonely days of plowing on the prairie, and the poetry and significance of those wild gray days came over me with such power that I instinctively seized my pen to write of them.
One day, a man shoveling coal in the alley below my window reminded me of that peculiar ringingscrapewhich the farm shovel used to make when (on the Iowa farm) at dusk I scooped my load of corn from the wagon box to the crib, and straightway I fell a-dreaming, and from dreaming I came to composition, and so it happened that my first writing of any significance was an article depicting an Iowa corn-husking scene.
It was not merely a picture of the life my brother and I had lived,—it was an attempt to set forth a typical scene of the Middle Border. "The Farm Life of New England has been fully celebrated by means of innumerable stories and poems," I began, "its husking bees, its dances, its winter scenes are all on record; is it not time that we of the west should depict our own distinctive life? The middle border has its poetry, its beauty, if we can only see it."
To emphasize these differences I called this first article "The Western Corn Husking," and put into it the grim report of the man who had "been there," an insistence on the painful as well as the pleasant truth, a quality which was discovered afterwards to be characteristic of my work. The bitter truth was strongly developed in this first article.
Up to this time I had composed nothing except several more or less high-falutin' essays, a few poems and one or two stories somewhat in imitation of Hawthorne, but in this my first real shot at the delineation of prairie life, I had no models. Perhaps this clear field helped me to be true. It was not fiction, as I had no intention at that time of becoming a fictionist, but it was fact, for it included the mud and cold of the landscape as well as its bloom and charm.
I sent "The Corn Husking" to theNew American Magazine, and almost by return mail the editor, WilliamWyckoff, wrote an inspiring letter to the effect that the life I had described was familiar to him, and that it had never been treated in this way. "I shall be very glad to read anything you have written or may write, and I suggest that you follow up this article by others of the same nature."
It was just the encouragement I needed. I fell to work at once upon other articles, taking up the seasons one by one. Wyckoff accepted them gladly, but paid for them slowly and meagerly—but I did not blame him for that. His magazine was even then struggling for life.
It must have been about this time that I sold toHarper's Weeklya long poem of the prairie, for which I was paid the enormous sum of twenty-five dollars. With this, the first money I ever had received for magazine writing, I hastened to purchase some silk for my mother, and theMemoirs of General Grantfor my father, with intent to suitably record and celebrate my entrance into literature. For the first time in her life, my mother was able to wear a silk dress, and she wrote, soon after, a proud and grateful letter saying things which blurred my eyes and put a lump into my throat. If only I could have laid the silk in her lap, and caught the light of her happy smile!
At twenty-seven years of age, and after having been six years absent from Osage, the little town in which I went to school, I found myself able to revisit it. My earnings were still humiliatingly less than those of a hod-carrier, but by shameless economy I had saved a little over one hundred dollars and with this as a travelling fund, I set forth at the close of school, on a vacation tour which was planned to include the old home in the Coulee, the Iowa farm, and my father's house in Dakota. I took passage in a first class coach this time, but was still a long way from buying a berth in a sleeping car.
To find myself actually on the train and speeding westward was deeply and pleasurably exciting, but I did not realize how keen my hunger for familiar things had grown, till the next day when I reached the level lands of Indiana. Every field of wheat, every broad hat, every honest treatment of the letter "r" gave me assurance that I was approaching my native place. The reapers at work in the fields filled my mind with visions of the past. The very weeds at the roadside had a magical appeal and yet, eager as I was to reach old friends, I found in Chicago a new friend whose sympathy was so stimulating, so helpful that I delayed my journey for two days in order that I might profit by his critical comment.
This meeting came about in a literary way. Some months earlier, in May, to be exact, Hurd of theTranscripthad placed in my hands a novel calledZuryand my review of it had drawn from its author, a western man, a letter of thanks and a cordial invitation to visit him as I passed through Chicago, on my way to my old home. This I had gladly accepted, and now with keen interest, I was on my way to his home.
Joseph Kirkland was at this time nearly sixty years of age, a small, alert, dark-eyed man, a lawyer, who lived in what seemed to me at the time, plutocratic grandeur, but in spite of all this, and notwithstanding the difference in our ages, I liked him and we formed an immediate friendship. "Mrs. Kirkland and my daughters are in Michigan for the summer," he explained, "and I am camping in my study." I was rather glad of this arrangement for, having the house entirely to ourselves, we could discuss realism, Howells and the land-question with full vigor and all night if we felt like it.
Kirkland had read some of my western sketches and in the midst of his praise of them suddenly asked, "Why don't you write fiction?"
To this I replied, "I can't manage the dialogue."
"Nonsense!" said he. "You're lazy, that's all. You use the narrative form because it's easier. Buckle to it—you can write stories as well as I can—but you must sweat!"
This so surprised me that I was unable to make any denial of his charge. The fact is he was right. To compose a page of conversation, wherein each actor uses his own accent and speaks from his own point of view, was not easy. I had dodged the hard spots.
The older man's bluntness and humor, and his almost wistful appreciation of my youth and capacity for being moved, troubled me, absorbed my mind even during our talk. Some of his words stuck like burrs, because they seemed so absurd. "When your name is known all overthe West," he said in parting, "remember what I say. You can go far if you'll only work. I began too late. I can't emotionalize present day western life—you can, but you must bend to your desk like a man. You must grind!"
I didn't feel in the least like a successful fictionist and being a household word seemed very remote,—but I went away resolved to "grind" if grinding would do any good.
Once out of the city, I absorbed "atmosphere" like a sponge. It was with me no longer (as in New England) a question of warmed-over themes and appropriated characters. Whittier, Hawthorne, Holmes, had no connection with the rude life of these prairies. Each weedy field, each wire fence, the flat stretches of grass, the leaning Lombardy trees,—everything was significant rather than beautiful, familiar rather than picturesque.
Something deep and resonant vibrated within my brain as I looked out upon this monotonous commonplace landscape. I realized for the first time that the east had surfeited me with picturesqueness. It appeared that I had been living for six years amidst painted, neatly arranged pasteboard scenery. Now suddenly I dropped to the level of nature unadorned, down to the ugly unkempt lanes I knew so well, back to the pungent realities of the streamless plain.
Furthermore I acknowledged a certain responsibility for the conditions of the settlers. I felt related to them, an intolerant part of them. Once fairly out among the fields of northern Illinois everything became so homely, uttered itself so piercingly to me that nothing less than song could express my sense of joy, of power. This was my country—these my people.
It was the third of July, a beautiful day with a radiant sky, darkened now and again with sudden showers.Great clouds, trailing veils of rain, enveloped the engine as it roared straight into the west,—for an instant all was dark, then forth we burst into the brilliant sunshine careening over the green ridges as if drawn by runaway dragons with breath of flame.
It was sundown when I crossed the Mississippi river (at Dubuque) and the scene which I looked out upon will forever remain a splendid page in my memory. The coaches lay under the western bluffs, but away to the south the valley ran, walled with royal purple, and directly across the flood, a beach of sand flamed under the sunset light as if it were a bed of pure untarnished gold. Behind this an island rose, covered with noble trees which suggested all the romance of the immemorial river. The redman's canoe, the explorer's batteau, the hunter's lodge, the emigrant's cabin, all stood related to that inspiring vista. For the first time in my life I longed to put this noble stream into verse.
All that day I had studied the land, musing upon its distinctive qualities, and while I acknowledged the natural beauty of it, I revolted from the gracelessness of its human habitations. The lonely boxlike farm-houses on the ridges suddenly appeared to me like the dens of wild animals. The lack of color, of charm in the lives of the people anguished me. I wondered why I had never before perceived the futility of woman's life on a farm.
I asked myself, "Why have these stern facts never been put into our literature as they have been used in Russia and in England? Why has this land no story-tellers like those who have made Massachusetts and New Hampshire illustrious?"
These and many other speculations buzzed in my brain. Each moment was a revelation of new uglinesses as well as of remembered beauties.
At four o'clock of a wet morning I arrived at CharlesCity, from which I was to take "the spur" for Osage. Stiffened and depressed by my night's ride, I stepped out upon the platform and watched the train as it passed on, leaving me, with two or three other silent and sleepy passengers, to wait until seven o'clock in the morning for the "accommodation train." I was still busy with my problem, but the salient angles of my interpretation were economic rather than literary.
Walking to and fro upon the platform, I continued to ponder my situation. In a few hours I would be among my old friends and companions, to measure and be measured. Six years before I had left them to seek my fortune in the eastern world. I had promised little,—fortunately—and I was returning, without the pot of gold and with only a tinge of glory.
Exteriorly I had nothing but a crop of sturdy whiskers to show for my years of exile but mentally I was much enriched. Twenty years of development lay between my thought at the moment and those of my simpler days. My study of Spencer, Whitman and other of the great leaders of the world, my years of absorbed reading in the library, my days of loneliness and hunger in the city had swept me into a far bleak land of philosophic doubt where even the most daring of my classmates would hesitate to follow me.
A violent perception of the mysterious, the irrevocable march of human life swept over me and I shivered before a sudden realization of the ceaseless change and shift of western life and landscape. How few of those I knew were there to greet me! Walter and Charles were dead, Maud and Lena were both married, and Burton was preaching somewhere in the West.
Six short years had made many changes in the little town and it was in thinking upon these changes that I reached a full realization of the fact that I was no longera "promising boy" of the prairie but a man, with a notion of human life and duty and responsibility which was neither cheerful nor resigned. I was returning as from deep valleys, from the most alien climate.
Looking at the sky above me, feeling the rush of the earth beneath my feet I saw how much I had dared and how little, how pitifully little I had won. Over me the ragged rainclouds swept, obscuring the stars and in their movement and in the feeling of the dawn lay something illimitable and prophetic. Such moments do not come to men often—but to me for an hour, life was painfully purposeless. "What does it all mean?" I asked myself.
At last the train came, and as it rattled away to the north and I drew closer to the scenes of my boyhood, my memory quickened. The Cedar rippling over its limestone ledges, the gray old mill and the pond where I used to swim, the farm-houses with their weedy lawns, all seemed not only familiar but friendly, and when at last I reached the station (the same grimy little den from which I had started forth six years before), I rose from my seat with the air of a world-traveller and descended upon the warped and splintered platform, among my one time friends and neighbors, with quickened pulse and seeking eye.
It was the fourth of July and a crowd was at the station, but though I recognized half the faces, not one of them lightened at sight of me. The 'bus driver, the ragged old dray-man (scandalously profane), the common loafers shuffling about, chewing and spitting, seemed absolutely unchanged. One or two elderly citizens eyed me closely as I slung my little Boston valise with a long strap over my shoulder and started up the billowing board sidewalk toward the center of the town, but I gave out no word of recognition. Indeed I took a boyish pride in the disguising effect of my beard.
How small and flat and leisurely the village seemed. The buildings which had once been so imposing in my eyes were now of very moderate elevation indeed, and the opera house was almost indistinguishable from the two-story structures which flanked it; but the trees had increased in dignity, and some of the lawns were lovely.
With eyes singling out each familiar object I loitered along the walk. There stood the grimy wagon shop from which a hammer was ringing cheerily, like the chirp of a cricket,—just as aforetime. Orrin Blakey stood at the door of his lumber yard surveying me with curious eyes but I passed him in silence. I wished to spend an hour or two in going about in guise of a stranger. There was something instructive as well as deliciously exciting in thus seeing old acquaintances as from behind a mask. They were at once familiar and mysterious—mysterious with my new question, "Is this life worth living?"
The Merchants' Hotel which once appeared so luxurious (within the reach only of great lecturers like Joseph Cook and Wendell Phillips) had declined to a shabby frame tavern, but entering the dining room I selected a seat near an open window, from which I could look out upon the streets and survey the throng of thickening sightseers as they moved up and down before me like the figures in a vitascope.
I was waited upon by a slatternly girl and the breakfast she brought to me was so bad (after Mary's cooking) that I could only make a pretense of eating it, but I kept my seat, absorbed by the forms coming and going, almost within the reach of my hand. Among the first to pace slowly by was Lawyer Ricker, stately, solemn and bibulous as ever, his red beard flowing over a vest unbuttoned in the manner of the old-fashioned southern gentleman, his spotless linen and neat tie showing that his careful, faithful wife was still on guard.
Him I remembered for his astounding ability to recite poetry by the hour and also because of a florid speech which I once heard him make in the court room. For six mortal hours he spoke on a case involving the stealing of a horse-blanket worth about four dollars and a half. In the course of his argument he ranged with leisurely self-absorption, from ancient Egypt and the sacred Crocodile down through the dark ages, touching at Athens and Mount Olympus, reviewing Rome and the court of Charlemagne, winding up at four P. M. with an impassioned appeal to the jury to remember the power of environment upon his client. I could not remember how the suit came out, but I did recall the look of stupefaction which rested on the face of the accused as he found himself likened to Gurth the swine-herd and a peasant of Carcassone.
Ricker seemed quite unchanged save for the few gray hairs which had come into his beard and, as he stood in conversation with one of the merchants of the town, his nasal voice, his formal speech and the grandiloquent gesture of his right hand brought back to me all the stories I had heard of his drinking and of his wife's heroic rescuing expeditions to neighboring saloons. A strange, unsatisfactory end to a man of great natural ability.
Following him came a young girl leading a child of ten. I knew them at once. Ella McKee had been of the size of the little one, her sister, when I went away, and nothing gave me a keener realization of the years which had passed than the flowering of the child I had known into this charming maiden of eighteen. Her resemblance to her sister Flora was too marked to be mistaken, and the little one by her side had the same flashing eyes and radiant smile with which both of her grown up sisters were endowed. Their beauty fairly glorified the dingy street as they walked past my window.
Then an old farmer, bent and worn of frame, halted before me to talk with a merchant. This was David Babcock, Burton's father, one of our old time neighbors, a little more bent, a little thinner, a little grayer—that was all, and as I listened to his words I asked, "What purpose does a man serve by toiling like that for sixty years with no increase of leisure, with no growth in mental grace?"
There was a wistful note in his voice which went straight to my heart. He said: "No, our wheat crop ain't a-going to amount to much this year. Of course we don't try to raise much grain—it's mostly stock, but I thought I'd try wheat again. I wisht we could get back to the good old days of wheat raising—it w'ant so confining as stock-raisin'." His good days were also in the past!
As I walked the street I met several neighbors from Dry Run as well as acquaintances from the Grove. Nearly all, even the young men, looked worn and weather-beaten and some appeared both silent and sad. Laughter was curiously infrequent and I wondered whether in my days on the farm they had all been as rude of dress, as misshapen of form and as wistful of voice as they now seemed to me to be. "Have times changed? Has a spirit of unrest and complaining developed in the American farmer?"
I perceived the town from the triple viewpoint of a former resident, a man from the city, and a reformer, and every minutest detail of dress, tone and gesture revealed new meaning to me. Fancher and Gammons were feebler certainly, and a little more querulous with age, and their faded beards and rough hands gave pathetic evidence of the hard wear of wind and toil. At the moment nothing glozed the essential tragic futility of their existence.
Then down the street came "The Ragamuffins," the little Fourth of July procession, which in the old days had seemed so funny, so exciting to me. I laughed no more. It filled me with bitterness to think that such a makeshift spectacle could amuse anyone. "How dull and eventless life must be to enable such a pitiful travesty to attract and hold the attention of girls like Ella and Flora," I thought as I saw them standing with their little sister to watch "the parade."
From the window of a law office, Emma and Matilda Leete were leaning and I decided to make myself known to them. Emma, who had been one of my high admirations, had developed into a handsome and interesting woman with very little of the village in her dress or expression, and when I stepped up to her and asked, "Do you know me?" her calm gray eyes and smiling lips denoted humor. "Of course I know you—in spite of the beard. Come in and sit with us and tell all of us about yourself."
As we talked, I found that they, at least, had kept in touch with the thought of the east, and Ella understood in some degree the dark mood which I voiced. She, too, occasionally doubted whether the life they were all living was worth while. "We make the best of it," she said, "but none of us are living up to our dreams."
Her musical voice, thoughtful eyes and quick intelligence, re-asserted their charm, and I spent an hour or more in her company talking of old friends. It was not necessary to talk down to her. She was essentially urban in tone while other of the girls who had once impressed me with their beauty had taken on the airs of village matrons and did not interest me. If they retained aspirations they concealed the fact. Their husbands and children entirely occupied their minds.
Returning to the street, I introduced myself to UncleBilly Fraser and Osmund Button and other Sun Prairie neighbors and when it became known that "Dick Garland's boy" was in town, many friends gathered about to shake my hand and inquire concerning "Belle" and "Dick."
The hard, crooked fingers, which they laid in my palm completed the sorrowful impression which their faces had made upon me. A twinge of pain went through my heart as I looked into their dim eyes and studied their heavy knuckles. I thought of the hand of Edwin Booth, of the flower-like palm of Helena Modjeska, of the subtle touch of Inness, and I said, "Is it not time that the human hand ceased to be primarily a bludgeon for hammering a bare living out of the earth? Nature all bountiful, undiscriminating, would, under justice, make such toil unnecessary." My heart burned with indignation. With William Morris and Henry George I exclaimed, "Nature is not to blame. Man's laws are to blame,"—but of this I said nothing at the time—at least not to men like Babcock and Fraser.
Next day I rode forth among the farms of Dry Run, retracing familiar lanes, standing under the spreading branches of the maple trees I had planted fifteen years before. I entered the low stone cabin wherein Neighbor Button had lived for twenty years (always intending sometime to build a house and make a granary of this), and at the table with the family and the hired men, I ate again of Ann's "riz" biscuit and sweet melon pickles. It was not a pleasant meal, on the contrary it was depressing to me. The days of the border were over, and yet Arvilla his wife was ill and aging, still living in pioneer discomfort toiling like a slave.
At neighbor Gardner's home, I watched his bent complaining old wife housekeeping from dawn to dark, literally dying on her feet. William Knapp's home wassomewhat improved but the men still came to the table in their shirt sleeves smelling of sweat and stinking of the stable, just as they used to do, and Mrs. Knapp grown more gouty, more unwieldy than ever (she spent twelve or fourteen hours each day on her swollen and aching feet), moved with a waddling motion because, as she explained, "I can't limp—I'm just as lame in one laig as I am in t'other. But 'tain't no use to complain, I've just so much work to do and I might as well go ahead and do it."
I slept that night in her "best room," yes, at last, after thirty years of pioneer life, she had a guest chamber and a new "bedroom soot." With open pride and joy she led Belle Garland's boy in to view this precious acquisition, pointing out the soap and towels, and carefully removing the counterpane! I understood her pride, for my mother had not yet acquired anything so luxurious as this. She was still on the border!
Next day, I called upon Andrew Ainsley and while the women cooked in a red-hot kitchen, Andy stubbed about the barnyard in his bare feet, showing me his hogs and horses. Notwithstanding his town-visitor and the fact that it was Sunday, he came to dinner in a dirty, sweaty, collarless shirt, and I, sitting at his oil-cloth covered table, slipped back, deeper, ever deeper among the stern realities of the life from which I had emerged. I recalled that while my father had never allowed his sons or the hired men to come to the table unwashed or uncombed, we usually ate while clothed in our sweaty garments, glad to get food into our mouths in any decent fashion, while the smell of the horse and the cow mingled with the savor of the soup. There is no escape even on a modern "model farm" from the odor of the barn.
Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle and half-hidden despair. Agnes hadmarried and moved away to Dakota, and Bess had taken upon her girlish shoulders the burdens of wifehood and motherhood almost before her girlhood had reached its first period of bloom. In addition to the work of being cook and scrub-woman, she was now a mother and nurse. As I looked around upon her worn chairs, faded rag carpets, and sagging sofas,—the bare walls of her pitiful little house seemed a prison. I thought of her as she was in the days of her radiant girlhood and my throat filled with rebellious pain.
All the gilding of farm life melted away. The hard and bitter realities came back upon me in a flood. Nature was as beautiful as ever. The soaring sky was filled with shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink's fairy bells rose from the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous grass and waving grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset could conceal the poverty of these people, on the contrary they brought out, with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical daily routine of these lives.
I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw lovely girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of the women I had known had withered into querulous and complaining spinsterhood, and I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of the farm. "Of such pain and futility are the lives of the average man and woman of both city and country composed," I acknowledged to myself with savage candor, "Why lie about it?"
Some of my playmates opened their acrid hearts to me. My presence stimulated their discontent. I was one of them, one who having escaped had returned as from some far-off glorious land of achievement. My improved dress, my changed manner of speech, everythingI said, roused in them a kind of rebellious rage and gave them unwonted power of expression. Their mood was no doubt transitory, but it was as real as my own.
Men who were growing bent in digging into the soil spoke to me of their desire to see something of the great eastern world before they died. Women whose eyes were faded and dim with tears, listened to me with almost breathless interest whilst I told them of the great cities I had seen, of wonderful buildings, of theaters, of the music of the sea. Young girls expressed to me their longing for a life which was better worth while, and lads, eager for adventure and excitement, confided to me their secret intention to leave the farm at the earliest moment. "I don't intend to wear out my life drudging on this old place," said Wesley Fancher with a bitter oath.
In those few days, I perceived life without its glamor. I no longer looked upon these toiling women with the thoughtless eyes of youth. I saw no humor in the bent forms and graying hair of the men. I began to understand that my own mother had trod a similar slavish round with never a full day of leisure, with scarcely an hour of escape from the tugging hands of children, and the need of mending and washing clothes. I recalled her as she passed from the churn to the stove, from the stove to the bedchamber, and from the bedchamber back to the kitchen, day after day, year after year, rising at daylight or before, and going to her bed only after the evening dishes were washed and the stockings and clothing mended for the night.
The essential tragedy and hopelessness of most human life under the conditions into which our society was swiftly hardening embittered me, called for expression, but even then I did not know that I had found my theme.I had no intention at the moment of putting it into fiction.
The reader may interrupt at this point to declare that all life, even the life of the city is futile, if you look at it in that way, and I reply by saying that I still have moments when I look at it that way. What is it all about, anyhow, this life of ours? Certainly to be forever weary and worried, to be endlessly soiled with thankless labor and to grow old before one's time soured and disappointed, is not the whole destiny of man!
Some of these things I said to Emma and Matilda but their optimism was too ingrained to yield to my gray mood. "We can't afford to grant too much," said Emma. "We are in it, you see."
Leaving the village of Osage, with my mind still in a tumult of revolt, I took the train for the Northwest, eager to see my mother and my little sister, yet beginning to dread the changes which I must surely find in them. Not only were my senses exceedingly alert and impressionable, my eyes saw nothing but the loneliness and the lack of beauty in the landscape, and the farther west I went, the lonelier became the boxlike habitations of the plain. Here were the lands over which we had hurried in 1881, lured by the "Government Land" of the farther west. Here, now, a kind of pioneering behind the lines was going on. The free lands were gone and so, at last, the price demanded by these speculators must be paid.
This wasteful method of pioneering, this desolate business of lonely settlement took on a new and tragic significance as I studied it. Instructed by my new philosophy I now perceived that these plowmen, these wives and daughters had been pushed out into these lonely ugly shacks by the force of landlordism behind. These plodding Swedes and Danes, these thrifty Germans, these hairy Russians had all fled from the feudalism of theirnative lands and were here because they had no share in the soil from which they sprung, and because in the settled communities of the eastern states, the speculative demand for land had hindered them from acquiring even a leasing right to the surface of the earth.
I clearly perceived that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives!
And yet all this did not prevent me from acknowledging the beauty of the earth. On the contrary, social injustice intensified nature's prodigality. I said, "Yes, the landscape is beautiful, but how much of its beauty penetrates to the heart of the men who are in the midst of it and battling with it? How much of consolation does the worn and weary renter find in the beauty of cloud and tree or in the splendor of the sunset?—Grace of flower does not feed or clothe the body, and when the toiler is both badly clothed and badly fed, bird-song and leaf-shine cannot bring content." Like Millet, I asked, "Why should all of a man's waking hours be spent in an effort to feed and clothe his family? Is there not something wrong in our social scheme when the unremitting toiler remains poor?"
With such thoughts filling my mind, I passed through this belt of recent settlement and came at last into the valley of the James. One by one the familiar flimsy little wooden towns were left behind (strung like beads upon a string), and at last the elevator at Ordway appeared on the edge of the horizon, a minute, wavering projection against the sky-line, and half an hour later we entered the village, a sparse collection of weather-beaten wooden houses, without shade of trees or grass of lawns, a desolate, drab little town.
Father met me at the train, grayer of beard and hair, but looking hale and cheerful, and his voice, his peculiar expressions swept away all my city experience. In aninstant I was back precisely where I had been when I left the farm. He was Captain, I was a corporal in the rear ranks.
And yet he was distinctly less harsh, less keen. He had mellowed. He had gained in sentiment, in philosophy, that was evident, and as we rode away toward the farm we fell into intimate, almost tender talk.
I was glad to note that he had lost nothing either in dignity or manliness in my eyes. His speech though sometimes ungrammatical was vigorous and precise and his stories gave evidence of his native constructive skill. "Your mother is crazy to see you," he said, "but I have only this one-seated buggy, and she couldn't come down to meet you."
When nearly a mile away I saw her standing outside the door of the house waiting for us, so eager that she could not remain seated, and as I sprang from the carriage she came hurrying out to meet me, uttering a curious little murmuring sound which touched me to the heart.
The changes in her shocked me, filled me with a sense of guilt. Hesitation was in her speech. Her voice once so glowing and so jocund, was tremulous, and her brown hair, once so abundant, was thin and gray. I realized at once that in the three years of my absence she had topped the high altitude of her life and was now descending swiftly toward defenseless age, and in bitter sadness I entered the house to meet my sister Jessie who was almost a stranger to me.
She had remained small and was quaintly stooped in neck and shoulders but retained something of her childish charm. To her I was quite alien, in no sense a brother. She was very reticent, but it did not take me long to discover that in her quiet fashion she commanded the camp. For all his military bluster, the old soldierwas entirely subject to her. She was never wilful concerning anything really important, but she assumed all the rights of an individual and being the only child left in the family, went about her affairs without remark or question, serene, sweet but determined.
The furniture and pictures of the house were quite as humble as I had remembered them to be, but mother wore with pride the silk dress I had sent to her and was so happy to have me at home that she sat in silent content, while I told her of my life in Boston (boasting of my success of course, I had to do that to justify myself), and explaining that I must return, in time to resume my teaching in September.
Harvest was just beginning, and I said, "Father, if you'll pay me full wages, I'll take a hand."
This pleased him greatly, but he asked, "Do you think you can stand it?"
"I can try," I responded. Next day I laid off my city clothes and took my place as of old on the stack.
On the broad acres of the arid plains the header and not the binder was then in use for cutting the wheat, and as stacker I had to take care of the grain brought to me by the three header boxes.
It was very hard work that first day. It seemed that I could not last out the afternoon, but I did, and when at night I went to the house for supper, I could hardly sit at the table with the men, so weary were my bones. I sought my bed early and rose next day so sore that movement was torture. This wore away at last and on the third day I had no difficulty in keeping up my end of the whiffletree.
The part of labor that I hated was the dirt. Night after night as I came in covered with dust, too tired to bathe, almost too weary to change my shirt, I declared against any further harvesting. However, I generallymanaged to slosh myself with cold water from the well, and so went to my bed with a measure of self-respect, but even the "spare room" was hot and small, and the conditions of my mother's life saddened me. It was so hot and drear for her!
Every detail of the daily life of the farm now assumed literary significance in my mind. The quick callousing of my hands, the swelling of my muscles, the sweating of my scalp, all the unpleasant results of severe physical labor I noted down, but with no intention of exalting toil into a wholesome and regenerative thing as Tolstoi, an aristocrat, had attempted to do. Labor when so prolonged and severe as at this time my toil had to be, is warfare. I was not working as a visitor but as a hired hand, and doing my full day's work and more.
At the end of the week I wrote to my friend Kirkland, enclosing some of my detailed notes and his reply set me thinking. "You're the first actual farmer in American fiction,—now tell the truth about it," he wrote.
Thereafter I studied the glory of the sky and the splendor of the wheat with a deepening sense of the generosity of nature and monstrous injustice of social creeds. In the few moments of leisure which came to me as I lay in the shade of a grain-rick, I pencilled rough outlines of poems. My mind was in a condition of tantalizing productivity and I felt vaguely that I ought to be writing books instead of pitching grain. Conceptions for stories began to rise from the subconscious deeps of my thought like bubbles, noiseless and swift—and still I did not realize that I had entered upon a new career.
At night or on Sunday I continued my conferences with father and mother. Together we went over the past, talking of old neighbors and from one of these conversations came the theme of my first story. It was a very simple tale (told by my mother) of an old woman,who made a trip back to her York state home after an absence in the West of nearly thirty years. I was able to remember some of the details of her experience and when my mother had finished speaking I said to her, "That is too good to lose. I'm going to write it out." Then to amuse her, I added, "Why, that's worth seventy-five dollars to me. I'll go halves with you."