Part 19

Another poet, but in the Portuguese tongue, to the south, is Machado de Assis, of the celebrated poems which all Brazilians know: _Uma Creatura_, _Suave Mare Magno_, _No Alto_. The sonnet which he wrote to his wife is one of the noblest in the Portuguese tongue.

Machado de Assis was telling South America of Chinese poets, translating and publishing versions of them, an half century ago. We are just getting around to it. They have kept over us of the north, the æsthetic superiority of Mediterranean peoples among whom they originated.

We are forced to admit that the outlook of Germany is vast. It is not easy to comprehend how vast. In it, individual welfare has been sacrificed as ruthlessly as the Samurai Creed sacrificed it, centuries ago, in Japan. We call this _barbarism_. Germany has been cut latest of the European nations by the disease, _civilization_. As smallpox, other ills of flesh, are more fatal in a young, fresh race, not before visited by it, so young Germany fresh from the forests, the fens, felt the disease, _civilization_. For her it has been most deadly.

I recall the school on the plains. School is probably too important a word. It was a few bare rooms over a business block. No building for the purpose had been put up. From the windows we could look across the Main Street into upper rooms of other buildings. These rooms had been rented to houses of ill fame. Any time we could turn from our lessons and see the painted creatures lolling in the rooms, with their lovers. They were fat, greasy, disheveled, and clad in gay, cotton _Mother Hubbards_.

Beneath one of these houses there was a saloon. From the windows we could look over tops of screens that cut the too plain view from the sidewalk, and see Greasers, Indians, the stragglers of the plains, drinking, gambling. They quarreled frequently. Occasionally they fought with knives, with pistols. But the thrust of a knife that killed, in the lonely silence of the circling prairie was unimportant.

It was as if I saw it all far off through sheets of crystal. There was nothing I wanted. It represented the forces from which I longed to get away. As I walked about the streets of this settlement on the plains, drenched with sun and breeze-swept, I was conscious of an unknown world of art. I used to say to myself: I can not know the heights of life, wealth, power. I can not have things that do not depend upon myself. But, with my brain, I can know the heights of art. I can know all men have dreamed. I learned languages as other women learn to sew. For me they kept few difficulties. My foreign tutor, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, who knew many tongues, was introducing me to books of the Old World. He had a library of his own, of which he was good enough to give me use. His name was Arnold Jeannerett.

I was dazed at first, breathless, at this introduction to the sumptuous Palaces of Thought. Less and less I saw the world about me. It faded away with its crudity, harsh, noisy contrasts; discomforts; its persistent attempt to make life miserable for me. Nothing remained but a place of enchantment where there were no imperfections, and everything was as I wished.

I read Ariosto. I learned to know Petrarch, and the classics of Italy. I read the splendid prose of France; Bossuet, Fenelon, Chateaubriand, Rousseau. I read the lyric poets of Germany. Hidden upon my person somewhere, either in a pocket in my calico petticoat, or else within the lining of my hat, was some tiny book of the Old World.

But an unexpected complication arose. It made the women of the village angry. And in no slight degree. What right had I to amuse myself in ways not theirs? There was nothing left undone within their inventive range, which I soon learned to my sorrow was considerable, to make me understand their displeasure.

Sweeping past my eyes there was the picturesque panorama of the plains. Interesting things peculiar to isolation were happening.

Chief Joseph, with the warriors who murdered Custer, with their squaws and children, were being removed to a northern Reservation. They stopped in our village. Chief Joseph made a speech which one of the tribal interpreters put into English. The old chief described the massacre. He did it with relish. I sat in front of him, on a board upheld by two nail kegs. When he came to the horrors of it, over his dull eyes, which years had given singular expressionlessness, grey mists floated like spring across black winter. The memory was sweet.

The Main Street with its ugly, flat-topped buildings stretched from north to south. Through this artificial canal swept the wind, having come across desolate plains. Drifting through this street until midnight, moved a strangely assorted crowd, laughing, talking, drinking, quarreling. There were buck Indians in beaded moccasins, a striped calico about their loins, and tin bracelets upon thin, muscled arms. They walked with dignity. Sleek squaws, who toed in, toddled after them. Tin rings were in their ears. There were Mexicans with black, wide faces and white hats; Greasers, whom on-rushing civilization would soon annihilate; cowboys with fringed leggings and high heels, and gamblers with angular, prairie faces. There were soldiers from nearby forts and a few great-hearted pioneers who loved lonely places and who lived their adventures instead of writing them.

The thing I loved best was the clouds that rose high above the levels. They painted pictures. They satisfied my longing to get away.

I loved them when they were white, glittering mountains looking down upon some fairy land.

I used to ride out upon the levels, stop my horse, observe them, feeling happily upon face and arms, the warm, rollicking wind of the south, from unknown spaces where perhaps flowers grew. One longed sometimes here for the lonely comfort of long rains.

Then I would turn my horse and ride home through the twilight, when the little stars first began to prick the day. I like to think of it all again. And the moons of my youth, which poised so superbly above the plains.

I said nothing ever came again. I was wrong. The Strip Opening came.

THE STRIP OPENING

BY

EARL UNDERWOOD

Then the little place resembled any cow-town at time of the county fair or the reunion of the Veterans of the Civil War, except that the crowd did not have a carnival spirit. The crowd was made up of cattle-men driven from their former pasture land, old adventurers still looking for a fortune, wanderers of all kinds, professional gamblers who resembled human buzzards, homeless stragglers from everywhere. There were old men with weather beaten faces from the Klondike, from the gold fields of Arizona, and old Mexico. There were poor, honest, but unsuccessful farmers from other states looking for new homes and considering this a kind of Promised Land for inability of all kinds. They came in _boomer wagons_. They came from every point of the compass. There were some successful Middle West farmers who had just sold their own land for a large price and brought their family here, hoping to get a new start for their sons. The crowd slept in _boomer wagons_; they slept on the ground; they slept on cots along the streets; they slept on the floors of empty buildings. Seventy-five thousand people were poured into a little village that had barely accommodations for ten thousand.

It was hot. Everyone suffered. The ground was sun-baked until it cracked open in wide fissures. There had been no rain for four months. Daily the south wind blew until the atmosphere kept the hue of a twilight that did not change. The corn was burned and sere. The leaves withered; all the vegetation was colorless and dry. The intense heat was unchanging. The day was followed by a night without dew. The continued milling of horses, wagons, people on foot, ground up the dirt until it became an impalpable powder that penetrated everywhere, even the sides of the houses. And through all this dry, parching heat there was an agonizing lack of water. There were poor families here who had waited, in wagons, for years for the gift of this free land. There were legitimate people who really wanted homes and were willing to work for them. There was a large class too of shiftless, chronic boomers from the entire West, whose lives had been spent in looking for something for nothing. There were chronic wanderers seeking sensation. After this Strip Opening was over, they would sadly turn away, hoping for similar, fresh excitement somewhere else.

It was a prohibition country, but saloons and gambling houses and houses of prostitution were open day and night. Everyone went armed. A man who did not have a gun upon his hip was something to remark about.

The scarcity of water increased from day to day. Horses, dogs, and mules went about sadly with their swollen tongues hanging out. The entire prairie was parched like another Sahara. Over it bent a sky that was just as blue, just as cloudless, just as brazen and wind beaten.

Along with the gamblers came the prostitutes, the Three Card Monte men, from the deserts of Arizona, from the deserts of New Mexico, from Arkansas, and Texas. The prostitutes were not segregated nor isolated. They occupied the second story, front, of the business houses along the one Main Street. Among them were two Cherokee Indian girls, sisters; Violet and May. May was built like the Venus. She was her little sister in the flesh, as far as beauty went. She had thin, fine lined features, coal black hair that reached her ankles, and a complexion the color of a cape-jessamine. The only marks of the Indian were her silence and suppleness; and the grace of her body. Both had been convent bred. After these years of forced and disagreeable restraint in the convent, they turned to the easiest way, or else some law of atavism asserted itself, and swept upon them the insistent instincts of their Indian past.

The streets looked like a scene from a comic opera. Red blanketed Indians mixed freely with the whites, and Mexicans, wearing a fortune in a silver hat band that glittered like a coiled snake around their pointed-crowned, broad-brimmed, white hats. Notwithstanding the fact that the Indian is a stoic and seldom gets excited himself, he gravitates toward a crowd like a fly toward a bowl of sugar, instinctively rebelling against the accumulated loneliness of the past. He does not take any part to be sure, nor does he join in the fun and the noise, but he has his own, ancient, silent, devious ways of pleasure. He did not know of course, the silent watchful Indian, that he was helping to celebrate his own funeral. All these tens of thousands of white men congregated here, were at a given signal, going to leap over the line of the Indian Territory and cut up, into the checker-board squares of little farms, the old, happy hunting ground of his ancestors.

The line-up was on the southern Kansas line. For weeks, for months, they had been getting ready for this race; Texans on their long winded cow-ponies, Kentuckians on their thoroughbreds, Illinois farmers on their fat, overfed, pot-bellied horses, and Missouri farmers driving wagons with mules. It was just like getting ready for a world Marathon, which had fifty thousand entries, and no rules and no judges. They trained hundreds of horses here for weeks; for endurance, for speed, for that first great leap forward. Some had picked out the land they wanted in advance and had a definite objective. The rich paid fabulous sums for horses; tall, gaunt, clean limbed Kentucky racers, or Virginia thoroughbreds, thin and nimble bodied. There were fat mule teams that could not make twenty miles in a day. But everyone was eager for a little square of that rich land.

On the morning of the big day, this entire mass moved to the State Line which was only four miles away, where each one tried for first place. From then until noon it surpassed Pandemonium itself or any congregation of the lost in Purgatory. For a hundred miles this great crowd was held back only by a little group of cavalry-men spread out at intervals that were too great. High noon was the opening hour. It was announced by a cannon. The announcement was passed down the line by the echoing firing of troopers.

By noon the red, sun-baked plain was veiled with a blue haze of heat. There was almost no vegetation. The great drought had killed it. There was no grass, no weeds, no trees that were green, because of months of wind and rainlessness. Nowhere was there a sign of water. All the little _cricks_ were dry. Clouds of sand kicked up by the wind curled derisively over all the former trickling water courses. The thirst was terrible. It all but made men mad.

When at length the signal came, when the cannon roared, instantly that long, black, wavering line became alive, leaped forward like a long supple serpent, then separated into individual units that spread out across the plain. Men on thoroughbreds who knew horses, and even the riders of the humble cow-ponies, husbanded their strength wisely and held their horses down to the long swinging lope of the prairies, which the trained cow-pony can keep up all day. Less experienced riders, senseless with haste and greed, many with expensive horses which they had bought for the occasion, lashed into top speed at the outset, and before two miles were covered they were down and out. Prairie schooners, thousands of them, broke like a huge covey of awkward quail, set out at speed over the levels, and then dropped back to their old lumbering gait. Some had strong horses that pulled vigorously, some, horses that were weary and old and harnessed with ropes. There were even teams of oxen in this long, mad race. One man went in on a thousand dollar Kentucky thoroughbred, and when he reached the land he had picked out, he found a _sooner_ calmly ploughing with his oxen. It occurred to no one that land just over the line was as good as land twenty miles ahead. It was a woman on foot who realized this. When the cannon boomed and the long black line dashed away, she took one step forward, and stuck down in the ground a stake on which she had whittled her name. She sat down on the ground under a large black cotton umbrella and drank her bottled lemonade, while the rest rushed away in the heat, for a claim or a town lot. Cities were built in six hours.

Then came night in these cities of a few hours. What had been bare, red ground at noon, was at night well ordered cities of tents. The next day they elected a mayor and municipal officers and formed a government. In a week there were hundreds of lumber buildings. The second week they had electric lights. And the second day they had a daily paper.

The first census showed people from every state in the Union and from far away Australia. There were petty aristocrats from Europe. There was an Hungarian nobleman whose name it is not best to give, because there is just one chance in a thousand that it might have been his own name. Too bad, for it was an imposing name, made up of a title, five given names and a double-deck family name. He resembled a captain of cuirassiers. He was a hero of romance in real life; tall, spare, dark; pointed mustache, snappy black eyes, and a very distinguished manner; the cosmopolitan manner. He was an accomplished linguist, who had disembarked at every great port of the world. He knew Shanghai, Frisco, Rio, and the Straits Settlements. He came as a respectable adventurer, because being an adventurer was a profession here. He probably had no definite aim. Because however, collectively, among such a crowd of people there must be money it was an opportunity for him. And if they had money, his wits were keen enough to get some of it, because that was his objective in life. He lived lightly and easily upon the money which other people worked to earn. He waited patiently and happily until they earned it. And then he took it away from them. He used to relate to circles of open-mouthed listeners, under the round white moon of those first warm nights, when the dewless air was glittering and clear, how once he had circled the world with a prince of the blood royal. The prince had incurred his father’s displeasure so his father had decreed to punish him by temporary banishment. By way of banishment he chartered a yacht for a number of years, gave the boy a fortune in spending money, and sent him away to look the world over.

Here, for a living, this Hungarian nobleman did the people. And he did them successfully. To the German settlers he was a German; to the Hungarian a Hungarian; to the French a Frenchman. To the townspeople in general he was an international lawyer who had never seen the inside of a law book in his life. He sold legal advice for cash. His knowledge of all trickery was profound and worthy of respect. When business in a legal line was dull, he sold clothing to measure. In addition, he dealt in real estate. He was a broker of everything who never failed to leave the person he dealt with broke. He was royal in one thing, in the generous way he knew how to spend other people’s money. Even in this isolated place he contrived to look like a fashion plate. He had a large and elegantly selected wardrobe. He never knew where the next meal was coming from, but he always got a meal.

The superannuated politician from other states, who had worn out the patience of all his constituents at home, was here. There were Georgia colonels, Kentucky captains, with goatees or huge mustaches, and narrow, down hanging, black, string ties. There were judges, generals, old and _passés_, a conglomeration of ambition and proud failure, looking hopefully for another chance from Fate. To dispute with any one of them that his town would not have a hundred thousand inhabitants in a year meant gun play.

Food was from the usual western lunch counter. Here every one swung himself to a tall stool and ate. Food was reduced largely to beefsteak, canned tomatoes, wet, soggy bread, and black creamless coffee.

Night, in the towns, with the electric lights beating down upon dry sand, was hard and cruel and white. The business streets were one frame shack after another, each shack with an enormous front built up high to make it look imposing. One town’s most popular and crowded corner, was Reece Brothers’ Gambling House. Here roulette, faro, craps, stud poker, kept the restless crowd busy throughout the night. Of the Reece Brothers, Bill was what you would call the typical gambler, an ideal movie gambler of today. Grey-eyed, thin-lipped, with a mouth like a steel trap, at the ends of which there dangled a long, pointed, limp, corn-silk, yellow mustache. He wore a poetic Lord Byron collar, a flowing tie, a hugely plaided suit, and the largest and most expensive sombrero in town. This was a dry country because it was still under government control; an Indian country. Notwithstanding this fact, however, enormous amounts of liquor were sold openly over a regular bar.

Sam Reece was of a deeply religious bent. When Sunday morning came, after his night shift at the faro table, as lookout, he put on his long, black Prince Albert, tall, silk-plush hat ten years out of date, worn black kid gloves with fancy stitching along the back, and looking like an undertaker at a dry convention, he took his stately way to church. The church was an oblong tent. It was unbearably hot in summer, and in winter of course there was no heat in it. Sam had various aspirations in life. His greatest aspiration was to sing solos in the choir. It was his one genuine pleasure.

With night fall, the lonely little towns began to get busy. By eight o’clock the unpaved dusty streets were packed with a crowd of men and women milling back and forth, back and forth, from one gambling house to another. Many of these people back home were not gamblers, but church deacons, conservative business men, farmers, whom the loneliness forced to seek excitement or companionship. Any one from a corn doctor to an anarchist, could have a crowd of applauding listeners about him, if he mounted the empty sugar barrel which stood upon the Public Acre, and stood up to make a speech.

Nearly always the wind blew. It blew throughout the night, throughout the day. The air was so dry it was something glittering, sweeping continually past. The arc lights swinging wildly in the boisterous wind, cast strange and grotesque shadows upon the unpainted shacks, and the people who were moving about. The church and the gambling houses and that long, black, restless ribbon which was the incoming Santa Fé train, were the only civilizing forces that welded men together, and helped drive away distance, homesickness, and loneliness.