IV
TO INTRODUCE PAUL INGRAM
Exactly why it should be I who sit down to write of the loves and errors of Paul Ingram, his descent into hell and resurrection therefrom, is a thing that is not quite clear to me now, but which will not become clearer the more I try to justify it. It is certainly not because I was at one crisis of his life the instrument to save him, since I know how very careless Fate can be in the choice of her instruments. I am not his oldest friend, nor should I care to say—his dearest. We have done a good deal of work together—shared a good deal of opprobrium. I still bear upon my forehead the mark made by a stone that was meant for a better man, on the wild night when the Home Defence League roughs broke up our meeting at Silvertown. Yet, and notwithstanding, I am by no means sure, should the inevitable happen in my own lifetime, whether, of all the disciples who pass from the oration at the graveside to the whispers over the funeral baked meats, mine will be the pen chosen to write the life—mine the fingers authorized to untie the letters—of Paul Ingram, novelist, dreamer, and reformer.
A good deal of what I have written I was witness to myself; a good deal more I learnt from Ingram during what, with so many cleaner and pleasanter ways of leaving the world, we all hope will be his last illness of the kind; and a not considerable part has been told me by his wife, for whom it is notorious that I entertain an affection as hopeless as it is happily engrossing. Even so, when all is admitted, each part assigned to its proper source of inspiration, I am aware a good deal will remain unaccounted for. This I have no alternative but to leave to the sagacity of my readers. Even to their discretion—a little.
To begin with myself, only that I may get myself the sooner out of the way. My earlier years I have regarded from different points of view at different periods of my life. It is only comparatively lately that I have attained the true point of view and come to see that all the early portion should be regarded as a joke. For what legend can ask to be taken seriously whose sole remaining evidence is a small white towel, of the sort technically known, I believe, as "huckaback," lying folded now in a drawer of the desk at which I am writing. Two simple motions of the extensor and flexor muscles of one arm, and the proof of former greatness might lie beneath my eyes. But I will not make them. I know too well what would happen next. My fingers would not rest until the smooth bleached folds were shaken loose, nor my eyes until, written in indelible ink that successive launderings have only made blacker, the following legend appeared before them:
"J. B. Prentice.Between-Maid—No. 8."
You see, when a man has fallen, suddenly, from a great height, he is not expected to record his impressions as the third, the second, the first floor windows flashed successively past his startled eyes. He wakes up, if he wakes at all, in a nice, cosy atmosphere of iodoform, neatly and securely packed in antiseptic dressing, with a fluffy, frilly angel at his side, who has been waiting for those tired, tired eyes to open, and who puts her finger to her lips, the moment they do, for fear her voice shan't reach the muffled ears, and says—you know what she says—
"Lie still! You're not to talk nor to agitate yourself."
So I don't propose to agitate myself, and though I've only just begun to talk, it shall be of something better worth while. Farewell, then, for the last time, great showy mansion among the Chislehurst hills, with your orchard and shrubberies, flower gardens and pergolas, your pineries and fineries, your two great cedars, inlaid in the pale enamel of the sky, and shaven lawns, across which and toward the pink-striped marquee a butler hurries with an armful of white napery and flashing silver. And to you, dear little fellow-worker—Polly or Molly or Betsy, as the case may be—who once wiped your honest, grimy phiz on No. 8, a quite especial grip of the hand, wherever you be to-day. Your reproach long since kissed away, I hope; suckling some good fellow's children; cooking some good fellow's meals. Life is so hard on the between-maid.
When I awoke it was in a Pimlico bed-sitting-room, writing literally for dear life, and for life that is growing dearer each year. I have a fatal facility for descriptive writing, and my speciality is the psychology of crowds. As old Winstanley of thePanoplywould say when assigning me to anything I was to write up from the non-technical point of view, Aeroplane Meet, Palace Cup-tie, Royal Progress or what not: "Off with you, my boy! Column and a half, and a little more 'tripe' than last time. Turn 'em all loose, 'the hoarse cheer,' 'the lump in the throat,' and the 'mist over the eyes.' Don't be afraid! People have time for a little sentiment on Sundays."
I think they have. And I think I'm a witness to the price they are prepared to pay for it. Once a year, too, I write a novel whose circulation, for some occult reason, always stops short at eighteen hundred. Often when I'm reporting a football match, or anything like that, I try to count eighteen hundred, roughly, and imagine how my people would look all bunched together. A good many readers, but—what a gate!
Of all the pranks America has played upon us, I count not the least its having sent us an Ingram as a recruit to the cause of reform. The name is familiar over there, but it is quoted, I fancy, rather as a peg upon which would-be subverters of established anarchy hang their arguments than as authority for democratic ideals. Colonel Ingram, of Omaha, president of the Mid-West Chilling and Transportation Syndicate, is of the family; so is the Hon. Randolph Ingram, the great "Corporation Judge" of the Supreme Court. Jared Ingram, of Milburn, author of that contribution to Christian Unity, "A Rod for the Back of Dumb Devills," was one ancestor, and Elmer Ingram, the soldier-lawyer who helped to bait Arnold to his treason and damnation, was another. These names are not the fruit of any research on my part: I cull them from a little book which I saw at Ingram's rooms quite early in our acquaintance, and which, with a smile at my curiosity, he was good enough to lend me. It was one of those boastful little pamphlets "for private circulation," which are multiplying across the Atlantic, as a caste which has secured an undue share of material welfare becomes conscious of its origins and uneasy amid the obliterations of the democratic spirit. Of those we love, however, even the generations are dear to us, and I insist on recalling, with vicarious pride, that "Hump. Ingraham and Damaris his wyffe," who landed at South Bay from the brigSteadfastin Worcester year, and rode off, saddle and pillion, through forest paths to the clearing where their home was to be raised, were of good and gentle English stock, from Ministerley in Derbyshire. Sweet little Damaris (one almost loves her for her name) wilted and died within the year, but the task of increasing and multiplying, and getting hold of the land, was taken up by a sterner and, let us hope, stronger, Deborah, eight months later, and thence the seed has spread, through a riot of Bestgifts, Resolveds, Susannahs and Hepzibahs, broad of breast and hip, strong of limb, stout and undismayed of heart. Westward—always westward. Across Ohio and Indiana, striking its roots north and south in farm and factory, store and workshop; halting here for twenty, there for thirty, years, but always, as a new generation grows to manhood, up and away again. Over the plains in crawling wagons, too impatient to await the harnessing of the iron horse—the riveting of the strangling fetters of steel: through the lawless and auriferous canyons of Colorado and Nevada: blown along on the mad wind of the 'forties and 'fifties, until, amid the grapes and roses of the Pacific slope and upon the pearly Californian beach, a wind, warm and wasted and very old from across the great still ocean, whispered them, "Thus far!"
Paul was the last Ingram that will ever be born in the old homestead. His father he never saw; his sister died as a girl, and his mother, struck down by some obscure woman's disease, moved, within his memory, only from her bed to her chair, and from her chair to her bed again. He says he was a lazy, loafing, dreamy boy, with very little interest in anything beyond his meals; but the beautiful words in which he has enshrined that early home for us are proof how busily his brain must have been employed in those seemingly idle hours, and how keenly the spiritual significance of all that he saw came home to him from the first. Probably in the mere work of the house there was not enough to occupy strong, bony hands, such as his. Successive mortgages had nibbled the property away piecemeal, sparing only the house and yard; and even for that the last mortgage was running a race with death. He went to free school, but seems to have had few companions of his age. The village was depopulated; the house-doors opened only on old faces. He used sometimes to sit alone through a whole summer afternoon, he has told me, swinging on the garden gate and whittling wood. From the fence an old beaten track led away, through a marsh where a few ducks quacked and waddled still, up the shoulder of a little hill, and away around one of those woods of second growth that have sprung up all over the old pilgrim clearings—right into the heart of the setting sun. Often, he assures me, on looking up quickly from his whittling, he has seen an arm and hand beckoning him westward, from the edge of the trees. Set aside the stubborn mysticism that could conceive such a vision, and can still maintain its actuality—is not the picture a sufficiently haunting one? Within, the mother, waiting for death; outside, the lad, straining to be gone. And the old wattled kitchen chimney, smoking thinly, and the red glory through the sapling wood, and the drowsy quack of the ducks!
After Mrs. Ingram's death the mortgage foreclosed upon the farm and its contents with the precision and completeness of a highly organized machine. It is proof how forced a growth the modern cult of the family in America is, that it never seems to have occurred to son or mother to appeal to any of the prosperous breed whom the old house had sent forth. The land had long been earmarked for the great weighing-scale factory that has since galvanized Milburn into strenuous life, and made it a sort of industrial model, which commissions and deputations from Europe are taken to see, presumably, says Ingram, as a warning to what devilish lengths efficiency can be carried. The old homestead was torn down to make a site for the boiler-house. Nothing is left of it now except one rafter, in the lavishly endowed Museum, with what is presumably an Indian arrow-head still embedded in the wood.
I am bound to add that my indignation upon the subject never roused Paul to a corresponding heat. To his mind, already set upon first causes, no doubt it seemed very natural, a mere incident in the exploitation that dubs itself progress. He ate his last meal in the despoiled kitchen, warmed his coffee over a few sticks on the hearth that had burned away ten forests, and set off, by the path up the hill and round the corner of the wood, to wherever the arm might be beckoning him.
The lad was only fourteen when he left home, but tall and strong for his years. He tramped to Philadelphia, "jumped" the freight by night as it pulled out of the clattering, flaring yard, was shunted into a siding at Scranton, forgotten, and found there three days later starving and all but mad. From Scranton he beat his way to St. Louis; washed dishes and set up pins in a skittle alley; tired soon of the smoke and blood-warm water of the old French city; fed cattle in the stockyards of Kansas, wrestled a drunken brakeman for his life on the roof of the rocking, bumping cars halfway down the Missouri canyon, and wrestled him so well that the man begged a job for him at the journey's end. He was jacking wagons in the Union Pacific workshops at Rawlins when the White River expedition came through, and joined the force as teamster at a dollar a day. He smelt powder for the first time, lay trapped for ten days in the stinkingcorralat Snake River, when the water failed and the relief went wide, and "Bummer Jim" and "Flies Above," having thoughtfully strewn the carcasses of three hundred slaughtered horses to windward, serenaded the poisoned pale-faces nightly with copious obscenity, the burden of which was "come and be killed." After the relief and disbandment of the force, he stayed on in the Rockies and grew to manhood amid the silent aromatic barrenness of itsmesasandarroyos. Settlers were dribbling into the old Indian reservation. He was in turn horse-jingler, range-rider, prospector, stage-driver; built fences, freighted logs, dug ditches; spotted the banks of Bear Creek and Milk Creek, with his campfires and tomato tins, and was happy, until something, indefinable as the scent that steals down wind to the hunted stag, told him that the civilization from which he had fled was hard upon his heels again. He left Colorado the year before the railroad came through, and turned his face east again.
I know I am telling the story of Ingram's early life very baldly and badly. You see, there is so little romance in it; just the instinctive repulsion that one so often notices in the history of the world's reformers toward the thing they are to do battle with in the end. As Paul used to tell it himself, leaning forward over the fire in my stuffy little sitting-room, his strong, lean hands clasped round the bowl of his pipe and the smoke drifting lazily about his moustache and beard, it was only from an occasional gleam of the deep-set eye or quiver of the thin nostril, as he talked, that one could gather how deeply every lesson of force and fraud had sunk into his soul, to bear its fruit later in unalterable resolve. I never saw him really moved from his stoicism but once. We had been walking home together from dinner through the West End streets and had been unwilling witnesses of a sordid detail of their policing. A woman, crying and screaming, was being led away, not roughly, I think, but very determinedly, by two men in blue. Her hair had come loose, and one great curl hung to her waist. Her fur stole had tumbled in the roadway, and some careless Samaritan had thrown it over her shoulders, besmearing the velvet coat with mud. We were very silent during the rest of the walk, and when we got to my rooms Ingram unbosomed himself.
It was when he was working his way back east in the shiftless and circuitous fashion that had become habitual to him. He got off the train at a small city, the seat of a state university. He wouldn't tell me the name, but I imagine it was somewhere in the Southwest. It was eight o'clock on a fall morning, the hour at which the stores are opening and the saloons being swept out. As he left the depot, his grip in his hand, on a hunt for breakfast and work, he became aware of some unusual excitement. Men were leaving their houses, collarless and in shirt-sleeves—calling to one another and running down the street. At the end, where it joined the main business avenue, a crowd had gathered—old men, young men, even children, and a few women. "And what do you think they were watching? Well, sir, there in God's blessed morning light, three women in silk dresses, with satin shoes, and bare heads and shoulders, were sweeping the filthy street with brooms and shovels and pitching the mud into a zinc handcart. Think of it, Prentice! Every one of them somebody's daughter—some mother's little girl. They were all good-lookers; but one, who might be my own child to-night, had a face like an angel—fallen if you like—with a slender neck such as the artist men we've been talking to to-night rave about, that's got those cute little blue shadows where it joins the shoulders. She was the one that had the spade. A man in the crowd told me what it all meant. They were sporting girls from a joint that had been pulled three times in the last month. The magistrates had got tired, and, instead of fining them, had worked in a state law two hundred years old that treats such women as tramps and vagrants and sets 'em to scavenging. 'And I guess,' my man adds, 'that's where they b'long all right.' He was a patriarchal old billy-goat, Prentice, with a nice long Pharisee beard, and, I'll bet, a sin for every hair. While he was pitching me his simple lay, my little girl looks up, and, either seeing I was a stranger or because mine was the only face there wasn't contempt in—or worse—gave a sort of heart-breaking smile; and just as I was trying not to see it, a lad behind me, with his hat over his eyes and a cigar sticking out of his cheek, calls out:
"'Get on to Mamie, fellows, with the mud-scoop!'
"Well, Prentice," (Paul breathes hard) "I hit him, clean and sweet, on the cheekbone, just under his damned leering swine's eye. It was very irregular: I suppose I should have given him a chance, but, by God! I couldn't wait. I've had to fight all my life, in warm blood and cold blood, but I've never hit a man as hard as that before or since. He went down like a skittle, and I thought I'd killed him; but the boy was full of gall and devil, and knew a lot besides. He fought me five minutes good before they carried him into a drug store. And how those canting woman-drivers came round! They wanted me to drink, wanted to carry my grip—asked me to name the job. But I went and sat in their depot, without breakfast and with a face like a boil, for four hours until the next train pulled out. I shook their mud off my feet pretty smart. I'd have thrown away the shoes if I'd had another pair. But I couldn't shake off what I'd seen.
"No, no, Prentice," he went on, stubbornly, as I, with my cockney worldly wisdom, tried to argue him out of what I thought an unhealthy view of a vexed question; "No, sir: you can split men up into sheep and goats, bad cases and hard cases; but women stand or fall together. Everything you do to one you do to the rest. On every woman's face—good or bad, white or black—I've seen since, down to that woman to-night, I've seen the shadow of the same wrong."
He was twenty-five years old when the desire of seeing Europe took hold on him. He had no money, and, though he was strong and handy, there was nothing he could do that any other strong man could not do as well. He had his health, however, and staked that. Wages were high in one department of the smelter at Leadville, for reasons that forced themselves on the bluntest intelligence after a few months. He worked there for a year, laying money by and fighting with the nausea that grew upon him week by week. At the end of the twelve months, reeling, half-blind, and with his teeth loose in their gums, but with more money in his pockets than he had ever owned before, he turned his face to the healing desert. An old miner turned ranchman found him at sunset lying under a rock, his face pressed to the earth, and quivering, like a landed trout, in the full grip of the deadly lead-sickness. He laid him across his pony, took him to his mud-roofed hovel close by, kept him for six months in his own blankets, gave him all the milk of his one cow, drove him to the railroad as soon as he was able to travel, and—bade him God-speed with a torrent of invective that struck even Leadville dumb. Ingram had committed the capital error of offering him pay for his hospitality, an error over which I believe he broods to-day.
By the time he was fit to work again his savings were gone. He was twenty-six, and Europe as far off as ever. This time, having damaged his health, he staked his reason, and for two years herded sheep on the Wyoming plains. Herding sheep seems at first cry a simple, pastoral task, with Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Biblical Associations. I must take Paul's word for it, then, that some special danger either to body or soul attends it, and that few men retire from it with a competence except to go into a madhouse or found a new religion. In either case, he says, they will have seen "Hell on the plains." The day before Ingram left for the sheep country he bought for a few dollars the entire stock of a misguided Englishman who was trying to sell second-hand books in Cheyenne City, loaded them into his grub-wagon and read them, slowly, one by one, in the exact order or disorder in which they were packed, and with a cold fear at his heart as the second year drew to a close, that his shepherding would outlast them. It seems absurd, but, as far as I can gather, this has been Ingram's sole literary education.
Either the wages of loneliness, or, I fancy, something else of which he has not told me, must have given Paul his heart's desire, for, two years afterward, at the recruiting office in the Rue St. Dominique, which has been many a good man's alternative to Seine water or the cold muzzle-end, he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion.
Whatever his reasons for this step (and I never was told them), I think the five years that Paul spent under the iron discipline of the Legion cured what, with all due allowance made for the strange ways by which men find themselves, was becoming an incurable unrest. Among the sad middle-aged soldiers who were his comrades, many of whom had come a longer and a stranger way than he, to find a hard bed and a bloody grave at the end, something, I believe, which he had roamed the world a-seeking and which had evaded him till now, was found at last. Out of that uneasy human cauldron, into which the deserter casts his broken oath, and therouéhis disillusionment, and the unloved his loneliness, and the branded their shame, and to which, as long as it or its like shall endure, from time to time the artist will turn for inspiration, the brave man for opportunity, the coward, perhaps, for the stimulus which his own quailing heart denies him, and the saint for relief of temptation, and the hungry for bread, a vision, I believe, did arise for this lonely, unlettered American which the others missed, a knowledge was gained that all the schools and universities of the world could not have taught him: the vision and the knowledge of the human heart.
He was thirty-four years old when he left the Legion—a little gaunt and worn. He had given the world twenty years' hard service, and had a worsted stripe on one arm for his earnings.