BOOK FOUR 345

EPILOGUE 411

_A Story Teller’s Story_

A STORY-TELLER’S STORY

IN all the towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-American boyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knew it later in our great American industrial towns and cities.

My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist? My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a “sign-writer.” The day of universal advertising had not yet come and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but still he stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let go by the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butcher’s house (it would have kept him busily at work for a month) in order to have a go at lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger the baker.

There was your true pilgrimage abroad, out into the land. Father engaged a horse and a spring wagon and took the three older of his sons with him. My older brother and the one next younger than myself were, from the first, adept at sign-writing, while both father and myself were helpless with a brush in our hands. And so I drove the horse and father supervised the whole affair. He had a natural boyish love for the supervision of affairs and the picking out of a particular fence on a particular road became to him as important a matter as the selection of a site for a city, or the fortification that was to defend it.

And then the farmer who owned the fence had to be consulted and if he refused his consent the joy of the situation became intensified. We drove off up the road and turned into a wood and the farmer went back to his work of cultivating corn. We watched and waited, our boyish hearts beating madly. It was a summer day and in the small wood in which we were concealed we all sat on a fallen log in silence. Birds flew overhead and a squirrel chattered. What a delicate tinge of romance spread over our commonplace enough business!

Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact. It had fallen out that he, never having had the glorious opportunity to fret his little hour upon a greater stage, was intent on fretting his hour as best he could in a money-saving prosperous corn-shipping, cabbage-raising Ohio village.

He magnified the danger of our situation. “He might have a shotgun,” he said, pointing to where in the distance the farmer was again at work. As we waited in the wood he sometimes told us a story of the Civil War and how he with a companion had crept for days and nights through an enemy country at the risk of their lives. “We were carrying messages,” he said, raising his eyebrows and throwing out his hands. By the gesture there was something implied. “Well, it was an affair of life or death. Why speak of the matter? My country needed me and I, and my intrepid companion, had been selected because we were the bravest men in the army,” the raised eyebrows were saying.

And so with their paint pots and brushes in their hands my two brothers presently crept out of the wood and ran crouching through cornfields and got into the dusty road. Quickly and with mad haste they dabbed the name of Alf Granger on the fence with the declaration that he baked the best bread in the State of Ohio, and when they returned to us we all got back into the spring wagon and drove back along the road past the sign. Father commanded me to stop the horse. “Look,” he said, frowning savagely at my two brothers, “your _N_ is wrong. You are being careless again with your _Bs_. Good gracious, will I never teach you two how to handle a brush?”

If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.

The boy who has no warm overcoat throws back his head and runs through the streets, past houses where smoke goes up into a clear cold sky, across vacant lots, through fields. The sky clouds and snows come and the bare hands are cold and chapped. They are raw and red but at night, before the boy sleeps, his mother will come with melted fat and rub it over the raw places.

The warm fat is soothing. The touch of a mother’s fingers is soothing. Well, you see, with us, we were all of us--mother father and the children--in some way outlaws in our native place and that thought was soothing to a boy. It is a soothing thought in all my memories of my boyhood. Only recently one connected with my family said to me: “You must remember, now that you are an author, you have a respectable place in the world to maintain”; and for a moment my heart swelled with pride in the thought.

And then I went out of the presence of the cautious one to associate with many other respectables and into my mind flashed thoughts of the sweetness I have seen shining in the eyes of others--of waiters, horsemen, thieves, gamblers, women, driven by poverty to the outer rim of society. Where were the respectables among those who had been kindest and sweetest to me?

Whatever may be said in this matter, and I admit my feet have slipped many times toward solid respectability we of our family were not too respectable then.

For one thing father never paid his rent and so we were always living in haunted houses. Never was such a family to take the haunts out of a house. Old women riding white horses, dead men screaming, groans, cries--all were quieted when we came to live in a haunted house. And how often because of this talent--inherent in my family--we lived for months scot-free in a fairly comfortable house, while at the same time conferring a benefit on the property owner. It is a system--I recommend it to poets with large families.

There were not enough bedclothes so three boys slept in one bed and there was a window that, in summer, looked out upon fields, but in winter had been painted by the hand of the frost king so that moonlight came softly and dimly into the room. It was no doubt the fact that there were three of us in one bed that drove away all fear of the “haunts.”

Mother was tall and slender and had once been beautiful. She had been a bound girl in a farmer’s family when she married father, the improvident young dandy. There was Italian blood in her veins and her origin was something of a mystery. Perhaps we never cared to solve it--wanted it to remain a mystery. It is so wonderfully comforting to think of one’s mother as a dark, beautiful and somewhat mysterious woman. I later saw her mother--my own grandmother--but that is another story.

She the dark evil old woman with the broad hips and the great breasts of a peasant and with the glowing hate shining out of her one eye would be worth a book in herself. It was said she had shuffled off four husbands and when I knew her, although she was old, she looked not unwilling to tackle another. Some day perhaps I shall tell the tale of the old woman and the tramp who tried to rob the farm house when she was staying alone; and of how she, after beating him into submission with her old fists, got drunk with him over a barrel of hard cider in a shed and of how the two went singing off together down the road--but not now.

Our own mother had eyes that were like pools lying in deep shadows at the edge of a wood but when she grew angry and fell into one of her deep silences lights danced in the pools. When she spoke her words were filled with strange wisdom (how sharply yet I remember certain comments of hers--on life--on your neighbors!), but often she commanded all of us by the strength of her silences.

She came into the bedroom where three boys lay on one bed, carrying in one hand a small kerosene lamp and in the other a dish in which was warm melted fat.

There were three boys in one bed, two of them almost of the same size. The third was then a small silent fellow. Later his life was to be very strange. He was one who could not fit himself into the social scheme and, until he was a grown man, he stayed about, living sometimes with one, sometimes with another of his brothers--always reading books, dreaming, quarreling with no one.

He, the youngest of the three, looked out at life always as from a great distance. He was of the stuff of which poets are made. What instinctive wisdom in him. All loved him but no one could help him in the difficult business of living his life and when on summer evenings, as the three lay in the bed the two older boys fought or made great plans for their lives, he lay beside them in silence--but sometimes he spoke and his words came always as from a far place. We were perhaps discussing the wonders of life. “Well,” he said, “it is so and so. There will be no more babies, but the new babies do not come as you say. I know how they come. They come the same way you grow corn. Father plants seed in the earth and mother is the earth in which the seed grows.”

I am thinking of my younger brother after he had grown a little older--I am thinking of him grown into a man and become habitually silent like mother--I am thinking of him as he was just before he mysteriously disappeared out of our lives and never came back.

Now, however, he is in bed with the other brother and myself. An older brother, he who crept through the cornfields to paint the name of Alf Granger on the fence, had already gone from our lives. He had a talent for drawing, and a drunken half-insane cutter of stones for graveyards has taken him away from our town to another town where he is already sitting at a desk drawing designs for gravestones. A dove descends out of the sky and holds a leaf in its bill. There is an angel clinging to a rock in the midst of a storm at sea.

Rock of ages, cleft for me, Let me hide myself in Thee.

The three boys are in the bed in the room and there are not enough bedclothes. Father’s overcoat, now too old to be worn, is thrown over the foot of the bed and the three boys have been permitted to undress downstairs, in the kitchen of the house, by the kitchen stove.

The oldest of the boys remaining at home (that is myself) must undress first and must arrange his clothes neatly on a kitchen chair. Mother does not scold about such a trifling matter. She stands silently looking and the boy does as he has been told. There is something of my grandmother in a certain look that can come into her eyes. “Well, you’d better,” it says. How unsuccessfully I have tried all my life to cultivate just that look, for myself!

And now the boy has undressed and must run in his white flannel nightgown barefooted through the cold house, past frosted windows, up a flight of stairs and, with a flying leap into the bed. The flannel nightgown has been worn almost threadbare by the older brother--now gone out into the world--before it has come down to him who wears it now.

He is the oldest of the brothers at home and must take the first plunge into the icy bed, but soon the others come running. They are lying like little puppies in the bed but as they grow warmer the two older boys begin to fight. There is a contest. The point is not to be compelled to lie on the outside where the covers may come off in the night. Blows are struck and tense young bodies are intertwined. “It’s your turn to-night! No it’s yours! You’re a liar! Take that! Well then, take that! I’ll show you!”

The youngest brother of the three brothers has already taken one of the two outside positions. It is his fate. He is not strong enough to fight with either of the other two and perhaps he does not care for fighting. He lies silently in the cold in the darkness while the fight between the other two goes on and on. They are of almost equal strength and the fight might possibly last for an hour.

But there is now the sound of the mother’s footsteps on the stairs and that is the end of the struggle. Now--at this moment--the boy who has the coveted position may keep it. That is an understood thing.

The mother puts the kerosene lamp on a little table by the bed and beside it the dish of warm, comforting melted fat. One by one six hands are thrust out to her.

There is a caress in her long toil-hardened fingers.

In the night and in the dim light of the lamp her dark eyes are like luminous pools.

The fat in the little cracked china dish is warm and soothing to burning itching hands. For an hour she has had the dish sitting at the back of the kitchen stove in the little frame house far out at the edge of the town.

The strange, silent mother! She is making love to her sons, but there are no words for her love. There are no kisses, no caresses.

The rubbing of the warm fat into the cracked hands of her sons is a caress. The light that now shines in her eyes is a caress.

* * * * *

The silent woman has left deep traces of herself in one of her sons. He is the one now lying stilly in the bed with his two noisy brothers. What has happened in the life of the mother? In herself, in her own physical life, even the two quarreling, fighting sons feel that nothing can matter too much. If her husband, the father of the boys, is a no-account and cannot bring money home--the money that would feed and clothe her children in comfort--one feels it does not matter too much. If she herself, the proud quiet one, must humiliate herself, washing--for the sake of the few dimes it may bring in--the soiled clothes of her neighbors, one knows it does not matter too much.

And yet there is no Christian forbearance in her. She speaks sometimes as she sits on the edge of the bed in the lamplight rubbing the warm fat into the cracked frost-bitten hands of her children and there is often a kind of smoldering fire in her words.

* * * * *

One of the boys in the bed has had a fight with the son of a neighbor. He, the third son of the family, has taken a hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hands. We had been cramming ourselves with the contents of a book, “The Last of the Mohicans,” and the neighbor boy, whose father is the town shoemaker, had the hatchet given him as a Christmas present. He would not lend it, would not let it go out of his hands and so my brother, the determined one, has snatched it away.

The struggle took place in a little grove of trees half a mile from the house. “Le Renard Subtil,” cries my brother jerking the hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hand. The neighbor boy did not want to be the villain--“Le Renard Subtil.”

And so he went crying off toward his home, on the farther side of the field. He lived in a yellow house just beyond our own and near the end of the street at the edge of the town.

My brother now had possession of the hatchet and paid no more attention to him but I went to stand by a fence to watch him go.

It is because I am a white man and understand the whites better than he. I am Hawkeye the scout, “La Longue Carabine,” and as I stand by the fence _la longue carabine_ is lying across the crook of my arm. It is represented by a stick. “I could pick him off from here, shall I do it?” I ask, speaking to my brother with whom I fight viciously every night after we have got into bed but who, during the day, is my sworn comrade in arms.

Uncas--“Le Cerf Agile”--pays no attention to my words and I rest the stick over the fence, half determined to pick off the neighbor boy but at the last withholding my fire. “He is a little pig, never to let a fellow take his hatchet. Uncas was right to snatch it out of his hand.”

As I withhold my fire and the boy goes unscathed and crying across the snow-covered field I feel very magnanimous--since at any moment I could have dropped him like a deer in flight. And then I see him go crying into his mother’s house. Uncas has, in fact, cuffed him a couple of times in the face. But was it not justified? “Dare a dirty Huron--a squaw man--dare such a one question the authority of a Delaware? Ugh!”

And now “Le Renard Subtil” has gone into his mother’s house and has blabbed on us, and I tell Uncas the news but, with the impenetrable stoicism of a true savage, he pays no attention. He is as one sitting by the council fire. Are words to be wasted on a dog of a Huron?

And now “Le Cerf Agile” has an idea. Drawing a line in the snow, he stands some fifty feet from the largest of the trees in the grove and hurls the hatchet through the air.

What a determined fellow! I am of the paleface race myself and shall always depend for my execution upon _la longue carabine_ but Uncas is of another breed. Is there not painted on his breast a crawling tortoise? In ink I have traced it there myself from a drawing he has made.

During the short winter afternoon the hatchet will be thrown not once but a hundred, perhaps two hundred, times. It whirls through the air. The thing is to throw the hatchet so that, at the end of its flight, the blade goes, just so, firmly into the soft bark of the tree. And it must enter the bark of the tree at just a particular spot.

The matter is of infinite importance. Has not Uncas, “The Last of the Mohicans,” broad shoulders? He will later be a strong man. Now is the time to acquire infinite skill.

He has measured carefully the spot on the body of the tree where the blade of the hatchet must enter with a soft chug, deep into the yielding bark. There is a tall warrior, a hated Huron, standing by the tree and young Uncas has measured carefully so that he knows just where the top of the warrior’s head should come. An idea has come to him. He will just scalp the unsuspecting warrior with the blade of the tomahawk; and has not he, Uncas, crept for many weary miles through the forest, going without food, eating snow for his drink? A skulking Huron has dared creep into the hunting grounds of the Delawares and has learned the winter abiding place of our tribe. Dare we let him go back to his squaw-loving people, bearing such knowledge? Uncas will show him!

He, Uncas, is absorbed in the problem before him and has not deigned to look off across the fields to where the neighbor boy has gone crying to his mother. “Le Renard Subtil” will be heard from again but for the present is forgotten. The foot must be advanced just so. The arm must be drawn back just so. When one hurls the hatchet the body must be swung forward just so. An absolute silence must be maintained. The skulking Huron who has dared come into our hunting grounds is unaware of the presence of the young Uncas. Is he, Uncas, not one whose feet leave no traces in the morning dew?

Deep within the breasts of my brother and myself there is a resentment that we were born out of our time. By what a narrow margin in the scroll of time have we missed the great adventure! Two, three, at the most a dozen generations earlier and we might so well have been born in the virgin forest itself. On the very ground where we now stand Indians have indeed stalked one another in the forest, and how often Uncas and myself have discussed the matter. As for our father, we dismiss him half contemptuously. He is born to be a dandy of the cities and has turned out to be a village house-painter, in the dwelling places of the paleface. The devil!--with luck he might have turned out to be an actor, or a writer or some such scum of earth but never could he have been a warrior. Why had not our mother, who might have been such a splendid Indian princess, the daughter of a great chief, why had she also not been born a few generations earlier? She had just the silent stoicism needed for the wife of a great warrior. A deep injustice had been done us, and something of the feeling of that injustice was in the stern face of Uncas as he crept each time to the line he had marked out in the snow and sent the hatchet hurtling through the air.

The two boys, filled with scorn of their parentage, on the father’s side, are in a little grove of trees at the edge of an Ohio town. In later days the father--also born out of his place and time--will come to mean more to them but now he has little except their contempt. Now Uncas is determined--absorbed--and I, who have so little of his persistence, am impressed by his silent determination. It makes me a little uncomfortable for, since he has snatched the hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hand, saying, “Go on home, cry-baby,” no word has passed his lips. There is but a small grunting sound when the hatchet is hurled and a scowl on his face when it misses the mark.

And “Le Renard Subtil” has gone home and blabbed to his mother, who in turn has thrown a shawl over her head and has gone to our house, no doubt to blab, in her turn, to our mother. “La Longue Carabine,” being a paleface, is a little intent on disturbing the aim of “Le Cerf Agile.” “We’ll catch hell,” he says, looking at the hatchet thrower who has not so far unbent from the natural dignity of the Indian as to reply. He grunts and taking his place solemnly at the line poises his body. There is the quick abrupt swing forward of the body. What a shame Uncas did not later become a professional baseball player. He might have made his mark in the world. The hatchet sings through the air. Well, it has struck sideways. The Huron is injured but not fatally, and Uncas goes and sets him upright again. He has marked the place where the Huron warrior’s head should be by pressing a ball of snow into the wrinkled bark of the tree and has indicated the dog’s body by a dead branch.

And so Hawkeye the scout--“La Longue Carabine”--has gone creeping off among the trees to see if there are any more Hurons lurking about and has come upon a great buck, pawing the snow and feeding on dry grass at the edge of a small creek. Up goes _la longue carabine_ and the buck pitches forward, dead, on the ice. Hawkeye runs forward and swiftly passes his hunting knife across the neck of the buck. It will not do to build a fire now that there are Hurons lurking in the hunting ground of the Delawares so Uncas and he must feed upon raw meat. Well, the hunter’s life for the hunter! What must be must be! Hawkeye cuts several great steaks from the carcass of the buck and makes his way slowly and cautiously back to Uncas. As he approaches he three times imitates the call of a catbird and an answering call comes from the lips of “Le Cerf Agile.”

“Aha! the night is coming on,” Uncas now says, having at last laid the Huron low. “Now that the dirty lover of squaws is dead we may build a fire and feast. Cook the venison ere the night falls. When darkness has come we must show no fire. Do not make much smoke--big fires for the paleface, but little fires for us Indians.”

Uncas stands for a moment, gnawing the bone of the buck, and then of a sudden becomes still and alert. “Aha! I thought so,” he says, and goes back again to where he has drawn the mark in the snow. “Go,” he says; “see how many come.”

And now Hawkeye must creep through the thick forests, climb mountains, leap canyons. Word has come that “Le Renard Subtil” but feigned when he went off crying, across the field--fools that we were! While we have been in the forest he has crept into the very teepee of our people and has stolen the princess, the mother of Uncas. And now “Le Renard Subtil,” with subtle daring, drags the stoical princess right across the path of her warrior son. In one moment from a great height Hawkeye draws the faithful Deer Killer to his shoulder and fires, and at the same moment the tomahawk of Uncas sinks itself in the skull of the Huron dog.

“‘Le Renard Subtil’ had drunk firewater and was reckless,” says Uncas, as the two boys go homeward in the dusk.

* * * * *

The older of the two boys now homeward bound is somewhat afraid but Uncas is filled with pride. As they go homeward in the gathering darkness and come to the house, where lives “Le Renard Subtil,” to which he has gone crying but a few hours before, an idea comes to him. Uncas creeps in the darkness, halfway between the house and the picket fence in front and, balancing the hatchet in his hand, hurls it proudly. Well for the neighbor’s family that no one came to the door at that moment for Uncas’ long afternoon of practicing has got results. The hatchet flies through the air and sinks itself fairly and deeply into the door panel as Uncas and Hawkeye run away home.

* * * * *

And now they are in the bed and the mother is rubbing the warm grease into their chapped hands. Her own hands are rough, but how gentle they are! She is thinking of her sons, of the one already gone out into the world and most of all at the moment of Uncas.

There is something direct brutal and fine in the nature of Uncas. It is not quite an accident that in our games he is always the Indian while I am the despised white, the paleface. It is permitted me to heal my misfortune a little by being, not a storekeeper or a fur trader but that man nearest the Indian’s nature of all the palefaces who ever lived on our continent, “La Longue Carabine”; but I cannot be an Indian and least of all an Indian of the tribe of the Delawares. I am not persistent patient and determined enough. As for Uncas, one may coax and wheedle him along any road and I am always clinging to that slight sense of leadership that my additional fifteen months of living gives me, by coaxing and wheedling, but one may not drive Uncas. To attempt driving him is but to arouse a stubbornness and obstinacy that is limitless. Having told a lie to mother or father, he will stick to the lie to the death while I--well, perhaps there is in me something of the doglike, the squaw man, the paleface, the very spirit of “Le Renard Subtil”--if the bitter truth must be told. In all my after years I shall have to struggle against a tendency toward slickness and plausibility in myself. I am the tale-teller, the man who sits by the fire waiting for listeners, the man whose life must be led into the world of his fancies, I am the one destined to follow the little, crooked words of men’s speech through the uncharted paths of the forests of fancy. What my father should have been I am to become. Through long years of the baffling uncertainty, that only such men as myself can ever know, I am to creep with trembling steps forward in a strange land, following the little words, striving to learn all the ways of the ever-changing words, the smooth-lying little words, the hard, jagged, cutting words, the round, melodious, healing words. All the words I am in the end to come to know a little and to attempt to use for my purpose have, at the same time, the power in them both to heal and to destroy. How often am I to be made sick by words, how often am I to be healed by words, before I can come at all near to man’s estate!

And so as I lie in the bed putting out my chapped hands to the healing touch of mother’s hands I do not look at her. Already I am often too conscious of my own inner thoughts to look directly at people and now, although I am not the one who has cuffed the neighbor boy and jerked the hatchet out of his hands, I am nevertheless busily at work borrowing the troubles of Uncas. I cannot let what is to be be, but must push forward striving to change all by the power of words. I dare not thrust my words forward in the presence of mother, but they are busily getting themselves said inside myself.

There is a consciousness of Uncas also within me. Another curse that is to lie heavily on me all through my life has its grip on me. I am not one to be satisfied to act for myself, think for myself, feel for myself but I must also attempt to think and feel for Uncas.

At the moment slick plausible excuses for what has happened during the afternoon are rising to my lips, struggling for expression. I am not satisfied with being myself and letting things take their course, but must be inside the very body of Uncas, striving to fill his stout young body with the questioning soul of myself.

As I write this I am remembering that my father, like myself, could never be singly himself but must always be a playing some rôle, everlastingly strutting on the stage of life in some part not his own. Was there a rôle of his own to be played? That I do not know and I fancy he never knew, but I remember that he once took it into his head to enact the rôle of the stern and unyielding parent to Uncas and what came of it.

The tragic little comedy took place in the woodshed back of one of the innumerable houses to which we were always moving when some absurd landlord took it into his head that he should have some rent for the house we occupied, and Uncas had just beaten with his fists a neighbor boy who had tried to run away with a baseball bat belonging to us. Uncas had retrieved the bat and had brought it proudly home, and father, who happened along the street at that moment, had got the notion fixed in his mind that the bat belonged, not to us, but to the neighbor boy. Uncas tried to explain, but father, having taken up the rôle of the just man, must needs play it out to the bitter end. He demanded that Uncas return the bat into the hands of the boy from whom he had just ravaged it and Uncas, growing white and silent, ran home and hid himself in the woodshed where father quickly found him out.

“I won’t,” declared Uncas; “the bat’s ours”; and then father--fool that he was for ever allowing himself to get into such an undignified position--began to beat him with a switch he had cut from a tree at the front of the house. As the beating did no good and Uncas only took it unmoved, father, as always happened with him, lost his head.

And so there was the boy, white with the sense of the injustice being done, and no doubt father also began to feel that he had put his foot into a trap. He grew furious and, picking up a large stick of wood from a woodpile in the shed, threatened to hit Uncas with it.

What a moment! I had run to the back of the shed and had thrown myself on the ground where I could look through a crack and as long as I live I shall never forget the next few moments--with the man and the boy, both white, looking at each other; and, that night, in the bed later, when mother was rubbing my chapped hands and when I knew there was something to be settled between her and Uncas, that picture danced like a crazy ghost in my fancy.

I trembled at the thought of what might happen, at the thought of what had happened that day in the shed.

Father had stood--I shall never know how long--with the heavy stick upraised, looking into the eyes of his son, and the son had stared, with a fixed determined stare, back into the eyes of his father.

At the moment I had thought that--boy as I was--I understood how such a strange unaccountable thing as a murder could happen. Thoughts did not form themselves definitely in my mind but after that moment I knew that it is always the weak, frightened by their own weakness, who kill the strong, and perhaps I also knew myself for one of the weak ones of the world. At the moment, as father stood with the stick upraised, glaring at Uncas, my own sympathies (if my own fancy has not tricked me again) were with father. My heart ached for him.

He was saved by mother. She came to the door of the shed and stood looking at him and his eyes wavered, and then he threw the stick back upon the pile from which he had taken it and went silently away. I remembered that he tramped off to Main Street and that, later in the evening when he came back to the house, he was drunk and went drunken to bed. The trick of drunkenness had saved him from the ordeal of looking into the eyes of Uncas or of mother, as so often words have later saved me from meeting fairly some absurd position into which I have got myself.

* * * * *

And so there was I now, in the bed and up to one of father’s tricks: upstart that I was, dog of a Huron myself, I was trembling for mother and for Uncas--two people very well able to take care of themselves.

Mother dropped my hand and took the outstretched hand of my brother.

“What happened?” she asked.

And Uncas told her, fairly and squarely. “He was a cry-baby and a big calf and I walloped him one. I wanted the hatchet and so I took it--that’s what I did. I banged him one on the nose and jerked it out of his hand.”

Mother laughed--a queer unmirthful little laugh. It was the kind of laugh that hurts. There was irony in it and that got to Uncas at once. “It doesn’t take much of a fellow to snatch a hatchet out of the hands of a cry-baby,” she said.

That was all. She kept on rubbing his hands and now it was my eyes, and not the eyes of Uncas, that could look directly into our mother’s eyes.

Perhaps it was in that moment, and not in the moment when I lay on the ground peeking through the crack into the shed, that the first dim traces of understanding of all such fellows as father and myself came to me. I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible occasions, was a way of crying too.

And I cried also, I suppose, because in Uncas and mother there was a kind of directness and simplicity that father and all fellows, who like myself are of the same breed with him, can never quite achieve.

NOTE II

A FAMILY of five boys and two girls--a mother who is to die, outworn and done for at thirty--

A father, whose blood and whose temperament I am to carry to the end of my days. How futile he was--in his physical life as a man in America in his time--what dreams he must have had!

There was a dream he had of something magnificent--a lone rider on a horse, dressed in shining armor and riding in a city before a vast multitude of people--the beating of drums.... “The man--he comes! Hurra!” People who live their lives by facts can never understand such a fellow. “He comes! All hail!” What has he done? Well, never mind--something grand, you may be sure of that. The dream that never can become a fact in life can become a fact in fancy. “There he goes.... ‘Teddy the magnificent’!” One both laughs and cries over the memory of him.

The showman was there, in him--it flowered within him--and it is in me too. When Carl Sandburg, the poet, long after said to me--speaking of his lecturing and reading his poetry aloud, to make a living--“I give ’em a good show,” I understood what he meant and I understood the pride in his voice when he said it. And then, later still, when I was writing my own novel, “Poor White”; and when my boyhood friend, John Emerson, gave me a job--doing publicity for movie people, in order that I might have some income to write at my leisure--and for a time I saw a good deal of that strange perverted band, I could understand them also. They were people like my own father, robbed of their inheritance. In an odd way they were my own people too.

John Emerson, a boyhood friend from my own village, had given me the movie job, knowing I would be no good at it. He was a successful man, a moneymaker, and was always planning out schemes for giving me money and leisure. I went often to the movie studios and watched the men and the women at work. Children, playing with dreams--dreams of an heroic kind of desperado cowboy, doing good deeds at the business end of a gun--dreams of an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid vice--American dreams--Anglo-Saxon dreams. How they wanted to be the things they were always playing, and how impossible it all was!

My father lived in a land and in a time when what one later begins to understand a little as the artist in man could not by any possibility be understood by his fellows. Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.

As for the movie people I saw, they worked in a strange land of fragments of dreams. The parts they were to play were given them in fragments. Everything was fragmentary and unfinished. A kind of insanity reigned. A “set” having been made, at a certain cost in dollars and cents, half a dozen little bits of the dream they were to enact were gone through--sometimes a dozen times--and the very piece the actors were supposed to play they often did not know. A strange greenish light fell down over them, and when they were not playing, they sat stupidly hour after hour arrayed in their motley, often pawing one another over listlessly with their hands and seeking outside the studios--in drink, in dope, in futile love-making, in trying to carry on an absurd pretense to being ladies and gentlemen of parts--seeking in all these things to compensate themselves for being robbed of their inheritance as artists--the right to pour their emotional energies into their work.

The result of all this perversion of workmanship and of emotional energy in the movie world seemed to me to reduce human beings to a state that most of all suggested to my mind angleworms squirming in a boy’s bait-can; and why any human being, under the conditions in which they must work and with the materials with which they must work, should want to be a movie actor or a writer for the movies is beyond my comprehension.

But to return to my father. At least, there was little of the dull listlessness of the angleworm in him. He created his own, “dope,” inside himself, most of the time.

Once he actually set up as a showman. With a man of our town, named Aldrich, who owned a broken-down horse and a spring wagon he went forth to strut his own little hour upon the boards.

It was winter and there was no work for father to be had in our town and I presume Aldrich also had no work. I remember him as a quiet-looking middle-aged man with a red face. He also was a house-painter, during the summer months, and he and father had by some chance got hold of a secondhand magic-lantern outfit.

They were to show at country schoolhouses in the farming districts of northern Ohio. There was to be a sheet hung across the end of the room, near the place where the teacher’s desk would sit, and on this would be thrown certain pictures Aldrich had got hold of.

Those of you who have lived in the farming sections of mid-America, in the days before the movies, will understand that show. There would be a picture of Niagara Falls--taken in the winter--Niagara Falls frozen into a series of ice bridges and with small black figures of men running over the bridges.

These, you are to understand, however, would not be moving men. They would be frozen still and still--petrified men with legs upraised to take a step, and holding them there--to the end of time--forever.

Then there would be a picture of President McKinley and one of Abe Lincoln and Grover Cleveland--one of an emigrant wagon going across the Western plains to California, with Indians on ponies circling in the middle distance--a picture of the driving of the last railroad spike, when the railroad builders coming from the West had met the railroad builders coming from the East--somewhere out on the plains. The spike would be a golden one, as everyone in the audience would know, but in the picture it would be black. Several men with silk hats on their heads stood about while a workman drove the spike. The hammer was upraised. It stayed there. In the background was an engine, and several Indians wrapped in blankets and looking sad, as though to say: “This cooks our bacon.”

Most of the pictures would be in dead blacks and whites, but there would be, at the very end, in colors, the old flag floating--that last of all. It was as good for a hand then as it was later when George Cohan got rich and became famous with it, and father and Aldrich evidently knew it would “go.”

The admission charge would be ten cents.

As I have said, Aldrich was a red-faced mild middle-aged appearing man. What things will not such quiet-looking fellows sometimes do? No one in the world would ever be understood at all if your mild quiet-looking man did not have, buried away in him somewhere, the possibility of being almost any known sort of a fool.

In the arrangement that had been made father was to be the actor--a comedian. He was to sing certain songs.

First, a few pictures from the magic lantern; then a song by father, with a little dance. Then more pictures and another song; and at last the colored pictures, ending with the flag flying. The inference might be that the flag, at any rate, had survived the ordeal.

And a dream of a harvest of dimes too. As for expense--well, let us say, a dollar for the use of the country schoolhouse and enough firewood to heat it for the evening. A boy would build the fire for the chance to be admitted free; and the horse and the two men would be fed at the bounty of some farmer. Father would have promised that--he would have been very sure of being able to accomplish that--would have depended upon his personal charm. I can fancy him explaining to Aldrich, or rather not explaining. He would smile and throw out his hands in a peculiar way. “You leave that to me, just you leave that to me.”

And his hopes would not be unjustified either. What a boon for a quiet, dull, farming family in the winter, to have such a one light down upon it! He and his companion would have to stay in the one school district for two or three days. Arrangements would have to be made about getting the schoolhouse, and he and Aldrich would have to drive around the neighborhood and distribute the play bills:

AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE FRIDAY EVENING MAJOR IRWIN ANDERSON THE ACTOR IN SONG AND DANCE MARVELOUS MAGIC-LANTERN SHOW A VISIT TO ALL THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD 10 CENTS

And then the evenings in the farmhouses! Aldrich would sit like an Indian in his corner by the farmhouse stove; and he must have been saying to himself constantly: “Now, how did I get into this? How did I get into this?”

The farmer’s wife, the hired man and perhaps a grown daughter would be there and there would be a maiden of uncertain age--the farm woman’s sister, who had never married and so just stayed about and worked for her board--and, in a corner, two or three towheaded boys who would presently have to go off to bed.

All the others silent, but father talking and talking. An actor in the house! It was wonderful, like having Charlie Chaplin to dinner with you nowadays!

Father was in his element now. This was pie for him. No hungry sons about, no sick wife, no grocery bills or rent to be paid. This the golden age--timeless; there was no past, no future--the quiet, unsophisticated people in the room were putty to his hands.

Surely there was something magnificent in my father’s utter disregard for the facts of life. In the picture I have of him--that is to say in my fancy--in the picture I have of him during his pilgrimages of that winter I always see his partner in the affair, Aldrich, fast asleep in a chair.

But the farmer and his wife, and the wife’s sister--they are not asleep. The unmarried woman in the house is, let us say, thirty-eight. She is tall and gaunt and has several teeth missing and her name is Tilly. It would be bound to be Tilly.

And when father has been in the house two hours he is calling her “Tilly,” and the farmer he is addressing familiarly as “Ed.”

After the evening meal the farmer has had to go to his stable to look at his stock, to bed the stock down for the night, and father has gone with him. Father runs about the stable holding the lantern. He boasts about the horses and cattle in his father’s stables when he was a boy. Whether that early home of his ever existed anywhere but in his fancy is doubtful.

What a fellow, wanting to be loved, was my father!

And now he is in the farmhouse sitting room and it is late evening and the towheaded children have gone regretfully to bed. There is something in the air of the room, a kind of suspense, a feeling that something is about to happen. Father has so carefully worked that up. He would do it by silences, by sudden breakings out into suppressed laughter, and then by quickly looking sad. I have seen him do the thing, oh, many times. “My dear people--you wait! There is something inside me that is wonderful, and if you will only be patient you will presently see or hear it come forth,” he seemed to be saying.

He is by the fire with his legs spread out and his hands are in his trousers pockets. He stares at the floor. He is smoking a cigar. In some ways he always managed to keep himself supplied with the little comforts of life.

And he has so placed his chair that he can look at Tilly, who has retired into her corner, without anyone else in the room seeing the look. Now she is sitting in deep shadows, far away from the kerosene lamp with which the room is lighted and as she sits there, half lost in the darkness, there is suddenly something--a haunting kind of beauty hangs over her.

She is a little excited by something father has managed in some indescribable way to do to the very air of the room. Tilly also was once young and must at some time have had her grand moment in life. Her moment was not very prolonged. Once, when she was a young woman, she went to a country dance and a man, who dealt in horses, took a fancy to her and carried her home after the dance in his buggy. He was a tall man with a heavy mustache and she--it was a moonlight night in October--she grew sad and wistful. The horse dealer half intended--well, he had been buying horses for a trucking company at Toledo, Ohio, had secured all he wanted and was leaving the neighborhood on the next day--the thing he felt during that evening later quite went out of his mind.

As for father he is, at the moment perhaps thinking of mother, when she was young and lovely and was a bound girl in just such another farmhouse, and surely he wanted something lovely for mother then as he does for Tilly now. I have no doubt at all that father always wanted lovely things for people--to happen to people--and that he had also an absurd and never-dying faith in himself--that he was, in some inscrutable way, appointed to be the bearer of lovely things to obscure people.

However, there is something else in his mind also. Is he not the fellow who, by his personal charm, is to earn for himself, Aldrich and the horse, board, a bed, a welcome--without pay--until the show is pulled off at the schoolhouse? That is his business now and this is his hour.

In fancy I can hear the tale he would now begin telling. There was that one about his escape from the guards when he was a Union soldier in the Civil War and was being marched off to a Southern prison camp. He would no doubt use that. It was a bull’s-eye story and always hit the mark! Oh, how often and under what varying circumstances has not my father escaped from prisons! Benvenuto Cellini or the Count of Monte Cristo had nothing on him.

Yes, the story he would now tell would be that once when it rained and the Union prisoners, father among them--some forty men in all--were being marched off along a road in the deep mud--

That was indeed a night of adventure! It was a tale he loved telling, and what realistic touches he could put into it: the rain that wet the prisoners to the skin--the cold--the chattering teeth--the groans of weary men--the closeness of the dark forest on either hand--the steady weary chug-chug of the feet of the prisoners in the mud--the line of guards at either side of the road, with the guns over their shoulders--the curses of the Rebel guards when they stumbled in the darkness.

What a night of weary anguish on the part of the prisoners! When they stopped to rest the guards went into a house and left the prisoners to stand outside in the rain, or lie on the bare ground, guarded by part of the company. If any died of exposure--well, there would be that many less men to feed when they were got into the Southern prison camp.

And now, after many days and nights, marching thus, the souls of the prisoners were sick with weariness. A dreary desolated look would come upon father’s face as he spoke of it.

They marched steadily along in the deep mud and the rain. How cold the rain was! Now and then, in the darkness, a dog barked, far away somewhere. There was a break in the solid line of timber along the road and the men marched across the crest of a low hill. There are lights to be seen now, in distant farmhouses, far away across a valley--a few lights like stars shining.

The story-teller has got his audience leaning forward in their chairs. Outside the farmhouse in which they sit a wind begins to blow and a broken branch from a near-by tree is blown against the side of the house. The farmer, a heavy, stolid-looking man, starts a little and his wife shivers as with cold and Tilly is absorbed--she does not want to miss a word of the tale.

And now father is describing the darkness of the valley below the hill and the lights seen, far off. Will any of the little company of prisoners ever see their own homes again, their wives, their children, their sweethearts? The lights of the farmhouses in the valley are like stars in the sky of a world turned upside down.

The Rebel commander of the guard has issued a warning and a command: “It’s pretty dark here, and if any of the Yanks make a stir to move out of the centre of the road fire straight into the mass of them. Kill them like dogs.”

A feeling creeps over father. He is, you see, a southern man himself, a man of the Georgia hills and plains. There is no law that shall prevent his having been born in Georgia, although to-morrow night it may be North Carolina or Kentucky. But to-night his birthplace shall be Georgia. He is a man who lives by his fancy and to-night it shall suit his fancy and the drift of his tale to be a Georgian.

And so he, a prisoner of the Rebels, is being marched over the low hill, with the lights from distant farmhouses shining like stars in the darkness below, and suddenly a feeling comes to him, a feeling such as one sometimes has when one is alone in one’s own house at night. You have had the feeling. You are alone in the house and there are no lights and it is cold and dark. Everything you touch--feel with your hands in the darkness--is strange and at the same time familiar. You know how it is.

The farmer is nodding his head and his wife has her hands gripped, lying in her lap. Even Aldrich is awake now. The devil! Father has given this particular tale a new turn since he told it last. “This is something like.” Aldrich leans forward to listen.

And there is the woman Tilly, in the half darkness. See, she is quite lovely now, quite as she was on that evening when she rode with the horse dealer in the buggy! Something has happened to soften the long, harsh lines of her face and she might be a princess sitting there now in the half-light.

Father would have thought of that. It would be something worth while now to be a tale-teller to a princess. He stops talking to consider for a moment the possibilities of the notion, and then with a sigh gives it up.

It is a sweet notion but it won’t do. Tale-teller to a princess, eh! Evenings in a castle and the prince has come in from hunting in a forest. The tale-teller is dressed in flashy clothes and with a crowd of courtiers, ladies in waiting--whatever hangers-on a princess has--is sitting by an open fire. There are great, magnificent dogs lying about too.

Father is considering whether or not it is worth trying sometime--the telling of a tale of himself in just that rôle. An idea crosses his mind. The princess has a lover who creeps one night into the castle and the prince has become aware of his presence, is told of his presence by a trusty varlet. Taking his sword in hand the prince creeps through the dark hallways to kill his rival, but father has warned the lovers and they have fled. It afterward comes to the ears of the prince that father has protected the lovers and he--that is to say, father--is compelled to flee for his life. He comes to America and lives the life of an exile, far from the splendor to which he has been accustomed.

Father is thinking whether it would be worth trying--the telling of such a fable of his former existence, some evening at some farmhouse where he and Aldrich are staying; and for a moment a sort of George Barr McCutcheon light comes into his eyes, but with a sigh he gives it up.

It wouldn’t go over--not in a farmhouse in northern Ohio, he concludes.

He returns to the tale, that so evidently is going over; but, before he resumes, casts another glance at Tilly. “Oh, Tilly, thou dear lovely one,” he sighs inwardly.

The farmhouse is in the North and he has set himself forth as a southerner enlisted in the northern army. An explanation is in order, and he makes it, with a flourish.

Born a southerner, the son of a proud southern family, he was sent to school, to a college in the North. In college he had a roommate, a dear fellow from the state of Illinois. The “roommate’s father was owner and editor of the _Chicago Tribune_” he explains.

And during one summer, a few years before the breaking out of the war, he went on a visit to the home of his Illinois friend, and while he was there he, with his friend, went to hear the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. It was odd, but the facts were that the young fellow from Illinois became enamored of the brilliant Douglas while he--well, to tell the truth, his own heart was wrung by the simplicity and nobility of the rail-splitter, Lincoln. “Never shall I forget the nobility of that countenance,” he says in speaking of it. He appears about to cry and does in fact take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his eyes. “Oh, the noble, the indescribable effect upon my boyhood heart of the stirring words of that man. There he stood like a mighty oak of the forest breasting the storms. ‘A nation cannot exist half slave and half free. A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ he said, and his words thrilled me to the very marrow of my being.”

And then father would have described his homecoming after that terrific experience. War was coming on and all the South was aflame.

One day at table in his southern home, with his brothers, his father and mother and his beautiful and innocent young sister sitting with him, he dared to say something in defense of Lincoln.

What a storm was then raised! The father getting up from his place at table pointed a trembling finger at his son. All eyes, except only those of his younger sister, were turned on him in wrath and disapproval. “Mention that hated name again in this house and I will shoot you like a dog, though you are my son,” his father said, and the son got up from the table and went away, filled with the sense of filial duty that would not let a born southerner answer his own father, but nevertheless determined to stick to the faith aroused in him by the words of the noble Lincoln.

And so he had ridden away from his southern home in the night and had finally joined the Union forces.

What a night--riding away from his father’s house in the darkness, leaving his mother behind, leaving all tradition behind, condemning himself to be an outlaw in the hearts of those he had always loved--for the sake of duty!

One can imagine Aldrich blinking a little and rubbing his hands together. “Teddy is laying it on rather thick,” he no doubt says to himself; but he must nevertheless have been filled with admiration.

However, let us, who are together revisiting the scene of my father’s triumph on that evening in the farmhouse long ago, be not too much in fear for the heart of the woman Tilly. At any rate her physical self, if not her heart, was safe.

Although there can be little doubt that the presence of the virgin Tilly, sitting in the half darkness, and the kindliness of the shadows that had temporarily enhanced her failing beauty, may have had a good deal to do with father’s talent on that evening, I am sure nothing else ever came of it. Father, in his own way, was devoted to mother.

And he had his own way of treasuring her. Did he not treasure always the lovelier moments of her?

He had found her in a farmhouse when he was by way of being something of a young swell himself and she was a bound girl; and she was then beautiful--beautiful without the aid of shadows cast by a kerosene lamp.

In reality she was the aristocrat of the two, as the beautiful one is always the aristocrat; and oh, how little beauty in woman is understood! The popular magazine covers and the moving-picture actresses have raised the very devil with our American conception of womanly beauty.

But father had delicacy, of a sort, of that you may be quite sure; and do you not suppose that Tilly, in the Ohio farmhouse, sensed something of his attitude toward what fragment of beauty was left in her, and that she loved him for that attitude--as I am sure my own mother also did?

My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of the others, over the top of the wall.

And now the weary prisoners with their escort have come down off the hillside to a valley and are approaching a large old southern mansion, standing back from the road they have been traveling, and the officers in charge of the prisoners--there were two of them--command the guards to turn in at a gate that leads to the house.

There is an open space before the house where the prisoners are gathered and the ground--covered with firm turf during most of the year--has, under the continuous rains, become soft and yielding. Where each prisoner stands a puddle gathers about his feet.

The house is dark, but for a single light at the back, and one of the officers begins shouting. A large pack of hunting dogs have come from a shed, hidden away in the darkness somewhere, and are gathered growling and barking in a half circle about the prisoners.

One of the dogs rushes through the mass of prisoners and with a glad cry leaps upon father, and all the others follow so that guards are compelled to drive the dogs off, kicking them and using the butts of their guns. Lights are lit inside the house. The people are astir.

You will understand what a moment this was for father. By one of those strange streaks of fate--which he is very careful to explain to his audience happen much more frequently in life than one imagines--he had been led, as a prisoner on his way to a southern prison pen, right to the door of his own father’s house.

What a moment indeed! Being a prisoner he has of course no idea how long he will be kept there. Thank God, he has grown a thick, bushy beard since he left home.

As to his fate--if the prisoners are kept in the yard until daylight comes--well, he knows his own mother.

His own father, old man though he is, has gone off to the war and all his brothers have gone; and his mother has come from a proud old southern family, one of the oldest and proudest. Had she known he was there among the prisoners she would have seen him hanged without a protest and would herself have lent a hand at pulling the rope.

* * * * *

Ah, what had not my father given for his country! Where will his equal be found, even among the whole world’s heroes? In the eyes of his own mother and father, in his brother’s eyes, in the eyes of all the branches and ramifications of his southern family, in the eyes of all--except only one unsophisticated and innocent girl--he had brought everlasting disgrace on one of the proudest names of the South.

Indeed it was just because he, the son, had gone off to fight with the northern army that his father, a proud old man of sixty, had insisted on being taken into the southern army. “I have a strong old frame and I insist,” he had said. “I must make good the loss to my Southland for my own son, who has proven himself a dog and a renegade.”

And so the old man had marched off with a gun on his shoulder, insisting on being taken as a common soldier and put where he could face constant and terrible danger, and the seeds of an undying hatred against the son had been planted deep in the hearts of the whole family.

The dullest mind surely will comprehend now what a position father was in when, in answer to the shouts of the officer, lights began to appear all through the house. Was it not a situation to wring tears from the heart of a man of stone! As for a woman’s heart--one can scarcely speak of the matter.

And in the house, before father’s eyes, there was one--a pure and innocent southern girl of rare beauty--a pearl of womanhood in fact--rarest example of the famed spotless womanhood of the Southland--his younger sister--the only woman child of the family.

You see, as father would so carefully have explained that evening in the farmhouse, he did not care so much for his own life. That had already been given to his country, he would have said proudly.

But, as you will understand quickly enough, had his presence among the prisoners been discovered, his proud mother--eager to wipe out the only stain on the family escutcheon--would at once have insisted that he be hanged to the doorpost of the very house in which he was born, her own hand pulling at the rope that was to jerk him up, into the arms of death--to make white again the family escutcheon, you understand.

Could a proud southern woman do less?

And in the event of such an outcome to the adventures of the night, see how that younger sister--the love of his life at that time--see how she would have suffered.

There she was, the pure and innocent girl, the one who understood nothing, to be sure, of the import of his decision to stick to the old flag and fight for the land of Washington and Lincoln, and who, in her innocent way, just loved him. On that day at his father’s table, when he--so deeply affected by the Lincoln-Douglas debates--had dared say a word for the cause of the North, it had been her eyes and her eyes alone that had looked at him with love, when all the other eyes of his family had looked at him with hatred and loathing.

And she would just be bursting into womanhood now. The aroma of awakening womanhood would be lying over her as perfume over the opening rosebud.

Think of it! There she, the pure and innocent one, would have to stand and see him hanged. A blight would be brought down upon her young life and her head would, ever after that night, be bowed in lonely and silent sorrow. That brave pure and just girl made old before her time. Ah; well might it be that in one night the mass of golden locks, that now covered her head like a cloud just kissed by the evening sun--that very golden hair might be turned as white as snow!

I can, in fancy, hear my father saying the words I have set down here and coming very near to crying himself as he said them. At the moment he would have believed without question the story he himself was telling.

* * * * *

And now the front door to the old southern mansion is thrown open and there, in the doorway facing the prisoners in the rain, stands a gigantic young negro--my father’s own body servant before he left home. (Father stops the flow of his talk long enough to explain how he and the negro boy, as lads together, had fought, wrestled, hunted, fished and lived together like two brothers. I will not go into that, however. Any professional southerner will tell you all about it, if you care to hear. It would have been the most trite part of father’s evening’s effort.)

Anyway, there the gigantic young negro stands in the doorway and he is holding in his hand a candle. Back of him stands my grandmother and back of her the young and innocent sister.

The figure of father’s mother is erect. She is old but she is yet tall and strong. One of the officers explains to her that he and his men have been on an all-night march, taking the crowd of Yankee prisoners to a prison camp, and asks for the hospitality of the house. Being a southerner himself he knows that southern hospitality can never fail, even at midnight. “A bite to eat and a cup of hot coffee in the name of our Southland,” he asks.

It is granted, of course. The proud woman beckons him and his brother officer into the house and herself steps out into the cold, drizzling rain.

She has ordered the young negro to stand on the porch, holding the candle aloof, and now, marching across the wet lawn, approaches the prisoners. The southern guards have stepped aside, bowing low before southern womanhood, and she goes near the prisoners and looks at them, as well as one may in the uncertain light. “I have a curiosity to see some of the unmannerly dogs of Yanks,” she says, leaning forward and staring at them. She is very near her own son now but he has turned his face away and is looking at the ground. Something however causes him to raise his head just as she, to express more fully her contempt, spits at the men.

A little speck of her white spittle lands upon father’s thick, tawny beard.

And now his mother has gone back into the house and it is again dark on the lawn in front. The Rebel guards are relieved--two at a time--to go to the kitchen door, where they are given hot coffee and sandwiches. And once his young sister, she of the tender heart, tries to creep to where the prisoners stand in the darkness. She is accompanied by an old negro woman and has planned to give food aid and comfort to the weary men but is prevented. Her mother has missed her inside the house and coming to the door calls to her. “I know your tender heart,” she says, “but it shall not be. The teeth of no Yankee dog shall ever bite into food raised on the land of your father. It shall not happen, at least while your mother is alive to prevent.”

NOTE III

SO there was father, sitting comfortably in the warm farmhouse living room--he and Aldrich having been well fed at the table of a prosperous farmer--and having before him what he most loved, an attentive and absorbed audience. By this time the farmer’s wife would be deeply moved by the fate of that son of the South that father had represented himself as being; and as for Tilly--while, in the fanciful picture he is making, he stands in the cold and wet outside the door of that southern mansion, Heaven knows what is going on in poor Tilly’s heart. It is however bleeding with sympathy, one may be sure of that.

So there is father and, in the meantime, what of his own actual flesh-and-blood family, the family he had left behind in an Ohio village when he set forth on his career as an actor?

It is not suffering too much. One need not waste too much sympathy on his family. Although he was never what we called in our Ohio country, “a good provider,” he had his points and as one of his sons I at least would be loath to trade him for a more provident shrewd and thoughtful father.

It must however have been a fairly hard winter, for mother at least and in connection with that winter and others that followed I have often since had an amusing thought. In later years, when my own name had a little got up in the world as a teller of tales I was often accused of having got my impulse, as a story-teller, from the Russians. The statement is a plausible one. It is, in a way, based upon reason.

When I had grown to be a man, and when my stories began to be published in the pages of the more reckless magazines, such as _The Little Review_, the old _Masses_ and later in _The Seven Arts_ and _The Dial_, and when I was so often accused of being under the Russian influence, I began to read the Russians, to find out if the statement, so often made concerning me and my work, could be true.

This I found, that in Russian novels the characters are always eating cabbage soup and I have no doubt Russian writers eat it too.

This was a revelation to me. Many of the Russian tales are concerned with the lives of peasants and a Boston critic once said I had brought the American peasant into literature; and it is likely that Russian writers, like all the other writers who have ever lived and have not pandered to the popular demand for sentimental romances were fortunate if they could live as well as a peasant. “What the critics say is no doubt true,” I told myself; for, like so many of the Russian writers, I was raised largely on cabbage soup.

Let me explain.

The little Ohio farming community, where I lived as a lad had in it, at that time, no factories, and the merchants artisans lawyers and other townspeople were all either owners of land which they rented out to tenant farmers, or they sold goods or their services to farmers. The soil on the farms about the town was a light sandy loam that would raise small fruits, corn, wheat, oats or potatoes, but that did particularly well when planted to cabbages.

As a result the raising of cabbages became a sort of specialty with us in our country; and there are now, I believe, in my native place, some three or four prosperous factories, devoted to the making of what before the war was called “sauerkraut.” Later, to help win the war, it was called: “Liberty Cabbage.”

The specialization in the raising of cabbage began in our Ohio country in my day, and in a good year some of the fields produced as high as twenty tons of cabbage an acre.

The cabbage fields grew larger and larger and, as we grew older, my brothers and I went every spring and fell to work in the fields. We crawled across the fields, setting out cabbage plants in the spring, and in the fall went out to cut cabbages. The huge round hard heads of cabbage were cut from their stalks and pitched to a man who loaded them upon a hay wagon; and on fall days I have often seen twenty or thirty wagons, each bearing its two or three tons of cabbages and waiting its turn to get to the cars on the railroad siding. The waiting wagons filled our streets as tobacco-laden wagons fill the streets of a Kentucky town in the fall, and in the stores and houses everyone for a time talked of nothing but cabbages. “What would the crop bring on the markets at Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh, for some reason I have never understood, had a passion for cabbages; and why Pittsburgh hasn’t produced more so-called realistic writers, in the Russian manner, I cannot understand.

However, one may well leave that to the modern psychologists.

During the fall of that year, after father had set out on his adventures as an actor, mother did something she had often done before. By a stroke of strategy she succeeded in getting a winter’s supply of cabbages for her family, without the expenditure of any monies.

The fall advanced, father had gone, and the annual village cut-up time, called among us “Hallowe’en,” came on.

It was the custom among the lads of our town, particularly among those who lived on the farms near town, to make cabbages part of their celebration of the occasion. Such lads, living as they did in the country, had the use of horses and buggies, and on Hallowe’en they hitched up and drove off to town.

On the way they stopped at the cabbage fields and, finding in some of the fields many cabbages yet uncut, pulled them out by the roots and piled them in the backs of their buggies.

The country lads, giggling with anticipated pleasure, drove into one of the quieter residence streets of our town and, leaving the horse standing in the road, one of them got out of the buggy and took one of the cabbages in his hand. The cabbage had been pulled out of the ground with the great stalklike root still clinging to it and the lad now grasped this firmly. He crept toward one of the houses, preferably one that was dark--an indication that the people of the house, having spent a hard day at labor, had already gone to bed. Approaching the house cautiously, he swung the cabbage above his head, holding it by the long stalk, and then he let it go. The thing was to just hurl the cabbage full against the closed door of the house. It struck with a thunderous sound and the supposition was that the people of the house would be startled and fairly lifted out of their beds by the hollow booming noise, produced when the head of cabbage landed against the door and, as a matter of fact, when a stout country boy had hurled the cabbage the sound produced was something quite tremendous.

The cabbage having been thrown the country boy ran quickly into the road, leaped into his buggy and, striking his horse with the whip, drove triumphantly away. He was not likely to return unless pursued, and there it was that mother’s strategy came into play.

On the great night she made us all sit quietly in the house. As soon as the evening meal was finished the lights were put out and we waited while mother stood just at the door, the knob in her hand. No doubt it must have seemed strange to the boys of our town that one so gentle and quiet as mother could be so infuriated by the hurling of a cabbage at the door of our house.

But there was the simple fact of the situation to tempt and darkness had no sooner settled down upon our quiet street that one of the lads appeared. It was worth while throwing cabbages at such a house. One was pursued, one was scolded, threats were hurled: “Don’t you dare come back to this house! I’ll have the town marshal after you, that’s what I’ll do! If I get my hands on one of you I’ll give you a drubbing!” There was something of the actor in mother also.

What a night for the lads! Here was something worth while and all evening the game went on and on. The buggies were not driven to our house, but were stopped at the head of the street, and town boys went on pilgrimages to cabbage fields to get ammunition and join in the siege. Mother stormed scolded and ran out into the darkness waving a broom while we children stayed indoors, enjoying the battle--and when the evening’s sport was at an end, we all fell to and gathered in the spoils. As she returned from each sally from the fort mother had brought into the house the last cabbage thrown--if she could find it; and now, late in the evening when our provident tormentors were all gone, we children went forth with a lantern and got in the rest of our crop. Often as many as two or three hundred cabbages came our way and these were all carefully gathered in. They had been pulled from the ground, with all the heavy outer leaves still clinging to them, so that they were comparatively uninjured and, as there was also still attached to them the heavy stalklike root, they were in fine shape to be kept. A long trench was dug in our back yard and the cabbages buried, lying closely side by side, as I am told the dead are usually buried after a siege.

Perhaps indeed we were somewhat more careful with them than soldiers are with their dead after a battle. Were not the cabbages to be, for us, the givers of life? They were put into the trench carefully and tenderly with the heads downward and the stalks sticking up, mother supervising, and about each head straw was carefully packed--winding sheets. One could get straw from a strawstack in a near-by field at night, any amount of it, and one did not pay or even bother to ask.

When winter came quickly, as it did after Hallowe’en, mother got small white beans from the grocery and salt pork from the butcher, and a thick soup, of which we never tired, was concocted. The cabbages were something at our backs. They made us feel safe.

And there was also a sense of something achieved. In the land in which we lived one did not need to have a large income. There was food all about, plenty of it, and we who lived so precariously in the land of plenty had, by our “mother’s wit,” achieved this store of food without working for it. A common sense of pride in our cleverness held us together.

One went out into our back yard on a winter’s night when there was snow on the ground and looked abroad. Already we lads read books, and snow-covered fields stretching away under the winter moon suggested strange, stirring thoughts--travelers beset by wolves on the Russian Steppes--emigrant trains lost in whirling snowstorms on the Western sagebrush deserts of our own country, men in all sorts of strange terrible places wandering, desperate and starving, under the winter moon--and what of us? The place where the cabbages were buried made a long white mound, directly across our back yard, and when one looked at it there was a sense of fullness and plenty in the land. One remembered that down under the snow, buried away in the straw, were those long rows of cabbages. Deer, buffaloes, wild horses and equally wild long-horned cattle, far out on the Western plains, did not worry about food because the ground was covered with snow. With their hoofs they pawed the snow away, and found buried beneath the snow the sweet little clusters of bunch grass, that again sent the warmth of life singing through their bodies.

It was a chance for the fancy to play, to kick up its heels and have a good time. One could imagine the house in which one lived as a fort, set far out on the Western frontier. The cabbages had been put into the ground with the stalks straight up. They stuck up straight and stiff, like sentinels standing and, after looking, one went into the fort and slept quietly and peacefully. There the soldiers were--they were standing firm and unyielding. Were there enemies prowling out there in the white darkness, the little wild dogs of want? One could laugh at such thoughts. Were not the sentinels standing--quietly and firmly waiting? One could go into the fort and sleep in peace, hugging that thought.

To us at home, father was always, somewhat strangely, a part and at the same time not a part of our lives. He flew in and out as a bird flies in and out of a bush, and I am quite sure that, all through the years of our childhood, it never occurred to him to ask, when he set off on one of his winter adventures, whether or not there was anything to eat in our house. The fall came with its snows, and the little creeping fear of actual starvation for her brood, that must often have been in mother’s mind, followed by the spring, the warm rains, the promise of plenty and his return. If he brought no money, he did bring something--a ham, some combs of honey, a jug of cider, or even perhaps a quarter of beef. There he was again and there was food on the table. He made a gesture. “There!” he seemed to be saying; “you see! Who says I’m not a provider?”

There were tales to be told and he was the teller of tales. “It is sufficient. Can man live by bread alone? There is food on the table now. Eat! Stuff yourselves! Spring has come and there are signs to be painted. The night has passed and it is another day. I am a man of faith. I tell you a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without my notice. I will make a tale of it--tell why and how it fell. The most marvelous tale in the world might be made from the fall of a sparrow. Is not the workman worthy of his hire? What about the lilies of the field, eh? They toil not and neither do they spin--do they?”

And yet, was Solomon, in all his glory, arrayed like one of these?

* * * * *

I remember a day in the early spring when we were compelled to move out of one house and into another. The rent for the house in which we had lived all during the winter had been long unpaid and mother had no money. Father had just returned from one of his long adventures, but early in the day of the moving he disappeared again and, as we could not afford a moving wagon, mother and we boys carted our poor belongings to the new place on our backs.

As for father, he had managed to borrow a horse and a spring wagon from a neighbor and had set off again into the country. The house to which we were moving was far out at the edge of the town and next to it was a field in which there was a great straw stack--a convenience, as what we called our “bed ticks,” on which we slept, had to be emptied of the straw that had become fine and dustlike from long use, and then refilled with the new straw.

When all was done and we were quite settled in the new place, father drove into the yard. He had noticed, he explained, a special kind of straw at a farmhouse some five miles away, at a place he had visited during his wanderings of the winter just past, and he had thought he would give us all a treat by getting that particular kind of straw for our beds.

And so he had driven off at daybreak, and, while we packed our furniture to the new place, had dined with the farmer and his family and had now returned. Although our beds had been made for the night the bed ticks must all be brought down again, the straw tumbled out and the special straw put in. “There,” he said, with one of his grand gestures, as we lads tramped wearily up the stairs with the refilled bags and as mother stood smiling--a little resentfully perhaps, but still smiling; “there, you kids, try sleeping on that. There is nothing on earth too good for my kids.”

NOTE IV

LET us, however, return to father and the tale he is telling as he sits in the farmhouse on the winter’s evening. I am too good a son of my father to leave such a tale hanging forever thus, in the air.

As it turned out on that night, when it rained and when he in his young manhood stood just outside the door of that southern mansion house of his childhood, and when his mother, that proud woman of the Southland, spat at him and his companions in misery, so that a white speck of her spittle landed on his beard--where, as he said, it lay like a thing of fire burning into his soul--on that night, I say, he did, by a stroke of fortune, escape the fate that seemed to have him in its clutches.

Dawn was just beginning to break when the two Confederate officers came out at the door of the house and marched their prisoners away.

“We went off into the gray dawn, up out of the valley and over the hills, and then I turned to look back,” father explained. Gray and weary and half dead with starvation, he turned to look. If he dropped dead from starvation and weariness on his way to the prison pen, what did it matter now? The light of his life had gone out. He was never again to see any of his own people, that he knew.

But even as he looked he did see something. The company had stopped to rest for a moment and stood where a sharp wind blew over them, just at the crest of a hill. Down in the valley the dawn was just breaking and, as father looked, he could see the gray of the old house and against the gray of it, on the front veranda, just a fleck of white.

That would be his young and innocent sister, come out of the house, you will understand, to look along the road taken by the prisoners, whose evident misery had touched her young heart.

For father it would be, as he would so elaborately explain, a very high spot in his life, perhaps the highest spot he was to reach in all his weary march to the grave.

He stood there on the hillside, quite cold and miserable--in just that utterly miserable and weary state when one is sometimes most alive--the senses, that is to say, are most alive. At the moment he felt, as any man must feel sometime in life, that an invisible cord does extend from the innermost parts of himself to the innermost parts of some other person. Love comes. For once in a lifetime a state of feeling becomes as definite a thing as a stone wall touched with the hand.

And father had that feeling, at that moment on the hill; and that the person for whom he had it was a woman and his own sister, made it even more an assured thing. He might have expressed the feeling by saying that, as by a miracle, the hill dropped away and he stood on dry level ground in the very presence of his younger sister, so close to her in fact that he might very easily have put out his hand and touched her. So strong was the feeling that he lost for the moment all sense of his presence among the prisoners, all sense of the cold hunger and weariness of the hour and--exactly as the thing might be done, quite ridiculously, by a second-rate actor in the movies--he did in fact step out from among the ranks of prisoners and, with his hands extended before him and his eyes shining, took several steps down the hillside, only to be stopped by an oath from one of the guards.

In the farmhouse, as he told of that moment he would get out of his chair and actually take several steps. He would at bottom be always a good deal of an actor as well as a story-teller, as every story-teller worth his salt inevitably is.

And then came the oath from the guard and an upraised gun, the heavy butt of a gun, ready to swing down upon his head, and back he goes into the ranks of prisoners. He mutters some excuse: “I just wanted to have a look”--and is thus jerked down from the high place, to which his imagination had suddenly lifted him, and back into the weariness of his apparently hopeless journey. Gone, he thought at the moment, was the sister he loved, his boyhood with its memories, all his past life, but it wasn’t quite true.

Father did make an escape. How many escapes he, in fancy, made from the hands of the enemy during that Civil War! He lived, you will understand, in a rather dull farming community and loved at least some air of probability hanging over his tales.

And so the Civil War became for him the canvas, the tubes of paint, the brushes with which he painted his pictures. Perhaps one might better say his own imagination was the brush and the Civil War his paint pot. And he did have a fancy for escapes, as I myself have always had. My own tales, told and untold, are full of escapes--by water in the dark and in a leaky boat, escapes from situations, escapes from dullness, from pretense, from the heavy-handed seriousness of the half artists. What writer of tales does not dote upon escapes? They are the very breath in our nostrils.

It is just possible that upon that occasion, father would have put it to his audience, that the sight, or the imagined sight, of his sister that morning had given him new hope. She was a virgin and there was something catholic about father.

Very well, then, off he goes down the road with his head held high, thinking of the possible schemes for escape and of his sister. He had been given something, a new flair for life. A ray of new hope had come into the black night of his situation. He walked more stoutly.

Stout Cortez-- Silent upon a peak in Darien.

It was just that stout way in which he now walked that gave him his opportunity for escape--that time. All that day the other prisoners went with hanging heads, tramping through the deep mud of the southern roads in winter, but father walked with his head up.

Another night came and they were again in a forest, on a dark and lonely road, with the guards walking at the side and sometimes quite lost in the shadows cast by the trees--the prisoners a dark mass in the very centre of the road.

Father stumbled over a stick, the heavy branch of a tree, quite dead and broken off by the wind, and, stooping down, picked it up. Something, perhaps just the impulse of a soldier, led him to sling the stick lightly over his shoulder and carry it like a gun.

There he was, stepping proudly among those who were not proud--that is to say, the other prisoners--and not having any plan in mind--just thinking of his virginal sister back there, I dare say; and one of the two officers of the guard spoke to him kindly.

“Don’t walk in there so close to the Yanks, in the deep mud, John,” the officer said; “it’s better going out here. There is a path here at the side. Get in here back of me.”

By his very pride, lifted up out of the ranks of the prisoners, father’s mind acted quickly and with a muttered thanks he stepped to the side of the road and became as one of the guards. The men came out on the crest of another low hill and again, in the valley below, there was the faint light of a farmhouse. “Halt!” one of the officers gave command; and then--the younger of the two officers having been told by his superior to send a man down into the valley to the farmhouse to see if there was a chance for the guard and prisoners to rest for a few hours and to get food--he sent father. The officer touched him on the arm. “Go on you,” he said. “You go down and find out.”

So off father went, down a lane, holding the stick very correctly, like a gun, until he was safely out of sight of the others, and then he threw the stick away and ran.

The devil! He knew every inch of the ground on which he now stood. What an opportunity for escape! One of his boyhood friends had lived in the very house, toward which he was supposed to be going, and often, in his young manhood and when he had come home for vacation from the northern school, he had ridden and hunted along the very path his feet now touched. Why, the very dogs and “niggers” on the place knew him as they might have known their master.

And so, if he ran madly now, he ran knowing the ground under his feet. Ah, he would be sure! When his escape was discovered dogs might be set on his trail.

He plunged downward, getting clear of the trees, running across a field--the soft mud clinging to his feet--and so skirted the house and got to where there was a small creek down which he went for a mile in the darkness, walking in the cold water that often came up to his waist. That was to throw dogs off his trail, as any schoolboy should know.

By making a great circle he got back into the road, by which he and the other prisoners had been marched from his own father’s house. They had come some twelve miles during the day and early evening, but the night was still young and, after he had gone three or four miles, he knew a short cut through the woods by which several miles could be cut off.

And so, you see, father went back again to his old home after all and once again saw the sister he loved. The dawn was just breaking when he arrived, but the dogs knew him and the negroes knew him. The very negro who had held the light while his mother spat at the prisoners hid him away in the loft of a barn and brought him food.

Not only food was brought, but also a suit of his own clothes that had been left in the house.

And so he stayed hidden in the loft for three days, and then another night came when it rained and was dark.

Then he crept out, with food for the needs of his journey, and knowing that, when he had walked for a mile along the road that led back toward the distant Union camp, a negro would be standing in a little grove with a good horse saddled and bridled for him. The negro, in the late afternoon, had gone off to a distant town, ostensibly for mail and was to be bound to a tree where he would be discovered later by a party of other negroes sent in search of him. Oh, all was arranged--everything elaborately planned to ward off, from his helpers, the wrath of the mother.

There was the night and the rain, and father, with a dark cloak now about his shoulders, creeping from the stables and toward the house. By the window of one of the rooms downstairs his young sister sat playing an organ, and so he crept to the window and stood for a time looking. Ah; there was moving-picture stuff for your soul! Why, oh why, did not father live in another and later generation? In what affluence might we not all have flourished! The old homestead, a fire burning in the grate, the stern and relentless parent, and outside in the cold and wet father, the outcast son, the disowned, the homeless one, about to ride off into the night in the service of his country--never to return.

On the organ his sister would have been playing “The Last Link is Broken,” and there stands father with the great tears rolling down his cheeks.

Then to ride away into the night, to fight again for the flag he loved, and that to him meant more than home, more than family--ah! more than the love of the woman who was long afterward to come into his life, and to console him somewhat for the fair sister he had lost.

For he did love her, quite completely. Is it not odd, when one considers the matter, that the fair sister--who would have been my aunt, and who never perhaps existed except in father’s fancy, but concerning whom I have heard him tell so many touching tales--is it not odd that I have never succeeded in inventing a satisfactory name for her? Father never--if I remember correctly--gave her a name and I have never succeeded in doing so.

How often have I tried and without success! Ophelia, Cornelia, Emily, Violet, Eunice. You see the difficulty? It must have a quaint and southern sound and must suggest--what must it not suggest?

But father’s tale must have its proper dénouement. One could trust the tale-teller for that. Even had he lived in the days of the movies and had the dénouement quite killed his story--for movie purposes, at least in the northern towns, which would have been the best market--even in the face of all of such difficulties which he fortunately did not have to meet, one could be quite sure of the dénouement.

And he made it splashy. It was at the dreadful battle of Gettysburg, late in the war and on the third of July too. The Confederates had such a dreadful way of getting off on just the wrong foot on the very eve of our national holiday. Vicksburg and Gettysburg for Fourth of July celebrations. Surely it was, what, during the World War, would have been called, “bad war psychology.”

There can be no doubt that father had been a soldier of some sort during the Civil War and so, as was natural, he would give his tale a soldier’s dénouement, sacrificing even the beloved and innocent younger sister to his purpose (to be brought back to life--oh, many, many times later, and made to serve in many future tales).

It was the second day of that great, that terrible battle of Gettysburg, father had picked upon to serve as the setting for the end of his yarn.

That was a moment! All over the North the people stood waiting; farmers stopped working in the fields and drove into northern towns, waiting for the click of the little telegraph instruments; country doctors let the sick lie unattended and stood with all the others in the streets of towns, where was no running in and out of stores. The whole North stood waiting, listening. No time for talk now.

Ah! that Confederate General Lee--the neat quiet Sunday-school superintendent among generals! One could never tell what he would do next. Was it not all planned that the war should be fought out on southern soil?--and here he had brought a great army of his finest troops far into the North.

Everyone waited and listened. No doubt the South waited and listened too.

No Lincoln and Douglas debates now. “A nation cannot exist half slave and half free.”

Now there is the rattle of the box, and the dice that shall decide the fate of a nation are being thrown. In an obscure farmhouse, far in the North, long after the battle of those two terrible days was fought and half forgotten, father also has got his hands on the dice box. He is rattling words in it now. We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles. No uniforms for us, no riders springing away into the gray smoke-mist of battle to carry out orders. We must sit in lonely farmhouses or in cheap rooms in city lodging houses before our typewriters; but if we do not look like generals, we at least feel like that at moments anyway.

Father dropping his little rattling words into the hearts of the farmer, the farmer’s wife, Tilly’s heart too. At Gettysburg a nation in the death grapple. The innocent sister, fair virgin of the South, cast in too.

Look at the eyes of that stoic Aldrich. They are shining now, eh? Ah! he has been a soldier too. In his youth he also stood firmly amid shot and shell, but ever after, poor dear, he had to be satisfied with mere blank dumbness about it all. At the best he could but turn the crank of a magic-lantern machine or join the G. A. R., and march with other men through the streets of an Ohio town on Decoration days, when the real question in the minds of all the onlookers was as to whether Clyde or Tiffin, Ohio, would win the ball game to be played at Ame’s field that afternoon.

A poor sort Aldrich, being able to do nothing but fight. On Decoration days he marched dumbly through the dust to a graveyard and listened to an address made by a candidate for Congress, who had made his money in the wholesale poultry business. At best Aldrich could but speak in low tones to another comrade, as the file of men marched along. “I was with Grant at the Wilderness and before that at Shiloh. Where were you? Oh, you were with Sherman, one of Sherman’s bummers, eh?”

That and no more for Aldrich--but for father, ah!

The second day at Gettysburg and Pickett’s men ready for their charge. Was that not a moment? What men--those fellows of Pickett’s--the very flower of the Southland--young bearded giants, tough like athletes, trained to the minute.

It is growing late on that second day of the fight and Pickett’s men are to decide it all. The sun will soon be going down behind the hills of that low flat valley--the valley in which, but a few short days ago, farmers were preparing to gather the grain crops. On the slope of one of the hills a body of men lies waiting. It is the flower of the Union army too. Father is among them, lying there.

They wait.

They are not trembling, but back of them in a thousand towns men and women are both waiting and trembling. Freedom itself waits and trembles--liberty is trembling--“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time” is trembling like a broken reed. How many grand passages, words, Decoration day addresses, messages to Congress, Fourth of July addresses of the next two hundred years, not worth eight cents on the dollar at the moment!

And now they come--Pickett’s men--down through the valley, in and out of groves of trees and up the little slope. There is a place, known to history as “the bloody angle.” There the men of the South rush straight into a storm of iron. A hailstorm of iron swept also in among the men of the North waiting for them.

That wild Rebel yell that broke from the lips of Pickett’s men is dying now. The lips of Pickett’s men are turning white.

The voice of Meade has spoken and down through the valley go the Union men in their turn--father among them.

It was then that a bullet in the leg dropped him in his tracks, and in memory of that moment he stops the telling of his tale in the farmhouse long enough to pull up his pants leg and show the scar of his wound. Father was a true naturalist, liked to pin his tales down to earth, put a spike of truth in them--at moments.

He pitched forward and fell and the men of his company rolled on to a victory in which he could have no part. He had fallen in what was now, suddenly, a little, quiet place among trees in an old orchard, and there close beside him was a confederate boy, mortally wounded. The two men roll uneasily in their pain and look directly into each other’s eyes. It is a long, long look the two men give each other, for one of them the last look into the eyes of a fellow before he goes on, over the river.

The man lying there, and now dying, is just that young man who, as a boy, was father’s best friend and comrade, the lad to whose place--some twelve miles from his own father’s plantation--he used to ride for days of sport. What rides they had taken together through the forests, a pack of dogs at their heels, and what talks they then had!

You will understand that the young man now dying lived in that very house, far back from the road, toward which father went that night when he escaped the Rebel guard. He had marched off with the stick over his shoulder, you will remember, and had then cut off across fields to his own home where he was concealed by the negroes until the night of his final escape.

And he had gone away from his own home on that dark night, dreaming of a return, some time when the cruel war was over and the wounds it had made were healed; but now he could never return. He was condemned to remain alone, a wanderer always on the face of this earth.

For the lad now dying beside him on the field of Gettysburg was, in his death hour, telling a fearful and tragic story.

Father’s family had been entirely wiped out. His father had been killed in battle as had also his brothers.

And now, from the lips of his old comrade, he was to hear the most fearful tale of all.

A party of northern foragers had come to the southern plantation house on just such another dark, rainy night as the one on which he was taken there as a prisoner. They marched as the confederate troops had marched, along the driveway to the front of the house, and stood on the lawn. A northern officer’s voice called as the southern officer had called on that other night, and again the tall young negro came to the door with a light, followed by that fiery woman of the Southland.

The negro held the light above his head so that, even in the darkness, the blue coats of the hated northern troops could be seen.

The old southern woman came to stand at the edge of the porch. She understood for what purpose the northern men had come, and she had sworn that not a bite of food, raised on that plantation, should ever pass the lips of a Yank.

Now she held a shotgun in her hand and, without a word or without any sort of warning, raised it and fired into the mass of the men.

There was a cry of rage, and then many guns were raised to shoulders. A sudden roar of the guns and a hundred leaden bullets cut through the front of the house. It wiped out all of father’s family--except just himself--and deprived his sons, too, of a proud southern ancestry; for, just in the moment, before the shower of bullets came, father’s young and innocent sister--realizing with that sure instinct that, everyone understands, all women inevitably possess--realizing, I say, that death was about to call her mother--the young girl had rushed panic-stricken out of the door and had thrown her arms about her mother’s body, just in time to meet death with her. And so all that was left of the family--except just father--fell there in a heap. The captain of the northern troops--a German brewer’s son from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cried when later he looked down into the white silent face of the young girl, and all his life afterward carried in his heart the remembrance of the dead, pleading young eyes; but, as father so philosophically remarked, what was done was done.

And with that fall there was father--a man left to wander forever stricken and forlorn through life. Later he had, to be sure, married and he had children whom he loved and treasured, but was that the same thing? To the heart of a southerner, as every American understands, ancestry means everything.

The purity of a southern woman is unlike any other purity ever known to mankind. It is something special. The man who has been under the influence of it can never afterward quite escape. Father didn’t expect to. He declared always, after he had told the above story, that he did not ever expect to be gay or happy again.

What he expected was that he would go on for the rest of his days doing just what he was doing at the time. Well, he would try to bring a little joy into the hearts of others--he would sing songs, dance a little dance--he would join an old comrade in arms, one whose heart he knew was as true as steel, and give a magic-lantern show. Others, for an hour anyway, would be made to forget that element of sadness and tragedy in life that he, of course, could never quite forget.

On that very night, lying half dead on the field of Gettysburg beside the dead comrade of his youth, he had made up his mind to spend the remaining days of his life bringing what sweetness and joy he could into the lacerated hearts of a nation torn by civil strife. It had been two o’clock in the morning before he was picked up by a squad of men sent out to gather in the wounded, and already the news of the great victory and the triumph of the cause of freedom was sweeping over the northern land. And he had lain looking at the stars and had made his resolution. Others might seek for the applause of the world, but, as for himself, he would go into the dusty highways and byways of life and bring to the lowly and forgotten the joy of a little fun at the schoolhouse.

NOTE V

AS for the show father and Aldrich put on, that is another matter. One may, without too much injustice, reserve judgment on the show. I myself never saw one of their performances, but one of my brothers once did and always, quietly and with commendable firmness, refused to speak of it afterward.

Fancy will, however, serve. Aldrich would show his pictures of McKinley, Grover Cleveland and the others, and then father would sing and do one of his dances. There would be more pictures and another song and dance and after that the picture of the flag, in colors. If the night were fair forty or even fifty people, farmers, their wives, the hired men and the children, would gather in the schoolhouse. The show only cost ten cents. Too much injustice was not done them.

It is, however, rather a shame they did not let father tell stories instead. Perhaps in all his life it never occurred to him they might have been written. Poor father! As a public figure, he had to content himself with the exercise of an art in which he was as bad, I fancy, as any man who has ever lived.

And it is his singing and dancing that remains like a scar in my memory of him. In the late fall, before Aldrich and he started out on their adventure, father used to rehearse upstairs in our house.

The evening meal would have been out of the way and we children would be sitting by the stove, about the table in the kitchen. Mother had washed clothes during the day and now she was doing an ironing. Father walked about, his hands clasped behind his back as though in deep thought, and occasionally he raised his eyes to the ceiling, while his lips moved silently.

Then he went out of the room and we heard him go upstairs into a bedroom above. None of us, in the kitchen below, looked at each other. We pretended to read books, to get our school lessons, or we looked at the floor.

At that time the humor of America--of which we Americans were so inordinately proud--expressed itself in the broader and less subtle jokes of Mark Twain, Bill Nye and Petroleum V. Nasby, and there was a book, commonly read by both children and grown-ups, and reputed to be very funny, called, “Peck’s Bad Boy.” It told, if I remember correctly, of the doings of a certain quite terrible youngster who put chewing gum or molasses on the seats of chairs, threw pepper into people’s eyes, stuck pins into schoolteachers, hung cats over clotheslines by their tails, and did any number of other such charmingly expressive things.

This terrible child was, as I have said, reputed to be very funny and the book recounting his doings must have sold tremendously. And father, having read it, had written a ballad concerning just such another youngster. This child also made life a hell for his fellows, and his father was very proud of him. When the child had done something unusually shocking the father tried, one gathered, to share in the honor.

At any rate the refrain of father’s song was:

“You grow more like your dad every day.”

Evening after evening these words rang through our house. They made all of us children shiver a little. Father sang them, danced a few halting steps, and then sang them again.

In the kitchen, as I have already said, we others sat with our eyes on the floor. One could not hear the words of the verses themselves, but the spirit of the song was known to all of us. Am I right? Were there--sometimes--tears in mother’s eyes as she bent over the ironing board?

Of that, after all, I cannot be too sure. I can only be everlastingly sure of the refrain:

“You grow more like your dad every day.”

* * * * *

And, however that may be, there is always one consoling thought. As a showman, and on stormy nights, there must sometimes have been but slight audiences at the schoolhouses and the takings for Aldrich and father must have been thin. One fancies evenings when eighty cents might cover all the receipts at the door.

One thinks of the eighty cents and shudders, and then a consoling thought comes. Of one thing we may be quite sure--father and Aldrich would not have gone hungry, and at night there must always have been comfortable beds into which they could crawl. Father had promised Aldrich he would see to the matter of bed and board.

And no doubt he did.

Even though the farmer and the farmer’s wife should have proved hard-hearted one remembers the number of Tillies in the farmhouses of Ohio. When everything else failed the Tillies would have taken care of the troubadours. Of that one may be, I should say, very very sure.

NOTE VI

TO the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, from the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections and, no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two ends continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air.

To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to give yourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice.

There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moves with an ordered purpose through ordered days, or at the least through ordered hours. In the life of the fancy there is no such thing as good or bad. There are no Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia do not come in at the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the fancy. The Puritan, the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the dry intellectuals, all who desire to uplift, to remake life on some definite plan conceived within the human brain die of a disease of the lungs. They would do better to stay in the world of fact to spend their energy in catching bootleggers, inventing new machines, helping humanity--as best they can--in its no doubt laudable ambition to hurl bodies through the air at the rate of five hundred miles an hour.

In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow movements and with many graduations into the ugly and the beautiful. What is alive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of the room in which we live sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned with weariness? In the end it must become the one thing or the other.

All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is beautiful must bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic sadness and suffering.

Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere smart-aleck, without humbleness before the possibilities of life, one sure of himself--and thus one may remain to the end, blind, deaf and dumb, feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our intellectuals find this is the more comfortable road to travel.

In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is ugly in fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty!

* * * * *

In the world of fancy even the most base man’s actions sometimes take on the forms of beauty. Dim pathways do sometimes open before the eyes of the man who has not killed the possibilities of beauty in himself by being too sure.

Let us (in fancy) imagine for a moment an American lad walking alone at evening in the streets of an American town.

American towns, and in particular American towns of the Middle West of twenty years ago, were not built for beauty, they were not built to be lived in permanently. A dreadful desire of escape, of physical escape, must have got, like a disease, into our father’s brains. How they pitched the towns and cities together! What an insanity! The lad we have together invented, to walk at evening in the streets of such a town, must of necessity be more beautiful than all the hurriedly built towns and cities in which he may walk. True immaturity of the body and the spirit is more beautiful than mere tired-out physical maturity: the physical maturity of men and women that has no spiritual counterpart within itself falls quickly into physical and ugly decay--like the cheaply constructed frame houses of so many of our towns.

The lad of our fancy walks in the streets of a town hurriedly thrown together, striving to dream his dreams, and must continue for a long time to walk in the midst of such ugliness. The cheap, hurried, ugly construction of America’s physical life still goes on and on. The idea of permanent residence has not taken hold on us. Our imaginations are not yet fired by love of our native soil.

The American boy of our mutual imaginative creation is walking in the streets of an Ohio town, after the factories have begun coming and the day of the hustlers is at hand, the houses of the town pushed up quickly, people swarming into the town who have no notion of staying there--a surprising number of them will stay, but they have, at first, no intention of staying.

Before the boy’s day how slow the growth of the towns! There were the people of an older generation, coming out slowly to the Middle West, from New York state, from Pennsylvania, from New England--a great many to my own Ohio country from New England. They had come drifting in slowly, bringing traces of old customs, sayings, religions, prejudices. The young farmers came first, glad of the rich free soil and the friendlier climate--strong young males that were to come in such numbers as to leave New England, with its small fields and its thinner, stonier soil, a place of aging maiden ladies--that old-maid civilization that was, nevertheless, to be the seat of our American culture. An insane fear of the flesh, a touch of transcendentalism, a reaching always up into the sky. In the ground underfoot there is only fear, poverty, hardship. One must look upward, always upward.

What of the sensual love of life, of surfaces, words with a rich flavor on the tongue, colors, the soft texture of the skin of women, the play of muscles through the bodies of men?

The cry of fear--“that way lies sin.”

In the new land, in that older time, too much maleness. Deep mud in the streets of the little towns, built in the forest along rivers or on the stage roads. Bearded, rough-handed men gathered about the saloons. Abe Lincoln proving his manhood by lifting a barrel of whisky and drinking from the bunghole. The ruffian of the frontier, father of the modern gunman of our cities, proving his manhood by murder--Blinky Morgan of Ohio, Jesse James of Missouri, Slade of the Overland Route to the gold and silver camps of the Far West--these the heroes of that life.

A slow culture growing up, however--growing as culture must always grow--through the hands of workmen.

In the small towns artisans coming in--the harness-maker, the carriage-builder, the builder of wagons, the smith, the tailor, the maker of shoes, the builders of houses and barns too.

As Slade and James were to be the fathers of the modern gunmen, so these the fathers of the artists of the generations to come. In their fingers the beginning of that love of surfaces, of the sensual love of materials, without which no true civilization can ever be born.

And then, like a great flood over it all the coming of the factories, the coming of modern industrialism.

Speed, hurried workmanship, cheap automobiles for cheap men, cheap chairs in cheap houses, city apartment houses with shining bathroom floors, the Ford, the Twentieth Century Limited, the World War, jazz, the movies.

The modern American youth is going forth to walk at evening in the midst of these. New and more terrible nerve tension, speed. Something vibrant in the air about us all.

The problem is to survive. If our youth is to get into his consciousness that love of life--that with the male comes only through the love of surfaces, sensually felt through the fingers--his problem is to reach down through all the broken surface distractions of modern life to that old love of craft out of which culture springs.

NOTE VII

THE end of the second year after mother’s death was at hand and our family was at the point of falling to pieces. No more sitting by the fire in the kitchen through the long fall and winter evenings with mother at the ironing board. The kitchen of our house was cold and cheerless. The spirit of the household had fled. It had gone down into the ground with the body of the woman out of whose living body had come five strong sons.

Mother had died swiftly, mysteriously, without warning. It was as though she had got out of bed on a fall morning and had taken a long look at her sons. “It’s about the time when they will have to push out into the world. Any influence I may have on their lives has already been exerted. There is no time to think of any other purpose in life for myself, and anyway, I am too tired. Having lived out my life, now I shall die.”

It was as though she had said something of the sort to herself, and had then laid down her life as one might lay down a finished book. On a rainy dismal day in the fall there she was, coming in at the kitchen door from hanging a wash out on the line, temporarily strung up in our woodshed, smiling quietly, making one of her quick soft ironic observations, sweetening always the air of the room into which she came with her presence.

On such a rainy morning in the fall she was like that, as she will live always in the memory of her sons, and then, on another equally wet dismal fall day two or three weeks later, she was dead.

What there had been of family life among us was going to pieces. It was sure that father was not one to hold it together. No one could think of him as destined to hold that or any other fort. That surely wasn’t his line.

There was a period of waiting. The older son had already found his place in life. He had already become what he was to remain to the end, an American artist, a painter. The making of little designs for the gravestones of village merchants was for him a passing phase. Perhaps it was, at that time, the only form of expression one, having a tendency toward the plastic arts, could find in our towns.

And so there was his destiny fixed--but what of us others? We did not often speak openly of the matter among ourselves, but it was obvious something had to be done and soon. In the few talks we had concerning the matter in our broken household, while the one remaining daughter (destined to die before her life could be really developed) was acting as our temporary housekeeper, father held out strongly for the learning of one of the trades. He talked of long years of apprenticeship to some craft, and it was characteristic of him that as he talked he became in fancy himself such a craftsman. One was trained slowly and surely in one’s craft. Then one became a journeyman and went on his travels, going from shop to shop, watching the master craftsmen. “It’s something at your back,” father said, “something that can be depended upon. It makes a man able to stand up as a man before his fellows.”

Did it? We boys listened and thought our own thoughts. As for father--he had picked up a smattering knowledge of several crafts; and how eloquently he, dear word fellow, could speak of them, sling the jargon of the crafts! He had at various times been a harness-maker, house-painter, sign-writer of a feeble sort, such an actor as I have described, the tooter of a cornet in the village band.

In reality he was a tale-teller, but that was no craft among us. No union had been formed among tale-tellers. The Authors’ League, the Pen Women, the Poet’s Club, etc., had not yet been formed or, if there were such organizations in existence, they at any rate did not reach down into mid-American towns. At that time even the rumors of the vast sums to be made by turning out clever plot stories for the popular magazines or the movies had not been whispered about.

Other and more significant-seeming stories were floating however. A new kind of hero, tarnished somewhat later, filled the popular eye. As we boys went about in the main street of our town, citizens, feeling a kindly interest in the motherless sons, continually stopped us. Everyone was singing a new little song:

“Get on. Make money. Get to the top. A penny saved is a penny earned. Money makes the mare go.”

“Save up your money, and save up your rocks. And you’ll always have tobacco in the old tobacco box,”

sang Sil West, the smith, who was shoeing a horse in the alleyway back of the stores on our main street.

The factories were calling. One went into a factory, did his work with care and skill, became foreman, superintendent, part owner, married the banker’s daughter, got rich and went off to Paris to sin the sins neglected during so busy a youth and early manhood.

It sounded reasonable and possible. Learning a craft was slow business and one was in a hurry. “Hurry” was the battle cry of the day.

And the time of the factories was just at hand. At that time they were coming into Ohio, and into all the mid-American states in great numbers, and no town was without hope of becoming an industrial centre. The bicycle had come, followed by the automobile, and even the quiet country roads were taking on the new spirit of speed.

Something was in the air. One breathed a new spirit into the lungs. The paradise, later to be represented by the ford, the city apartment building with tiled bathroom floors, subways, jazz, the movies--was it not all just at hand? I myself and long afterward tried a little, in a novel of mine called, “Poor White,” to give something of the feeling of life in our towns at that time.

Oil and gas were spurting out of the ground in Ohio and the discovery of oil and gas meant the coming of factories, it meant the New Age, prosperity, growth going onward and upward. “Death to everything old, slow and careful! Forward the Light Brigade! Theirs not to ask the reason why! Theirs but to do or die”--the light brigade in our particular town consisting of every merchant, doctor, workman, lawyer, who had saved a few pennies that could be invested. In our ears rang stories of the Lima Boom, the Gibsonburg boom, the Finley boom.

And was it not simple? One bored a hole deep down into the ground and out came wealth--oil and gas, followed by the coming of the factories. If we, in our town, did not quite “cut it,” did not “make the grade,” could not become later another fragrant Akron or blissful Youngstown, Ohio, it wasn’t because we didn’t try.

A hole was being bored at the edge of the town in a field near a grove of hickory trees where we lads had formerly gone for nuts and squirrel shooting on the fall days. In the field--a meadow--there had also been a baseball diamond, and sometimes visiting circuses set up their tents there; but now the hole had gone far down below the usually required depth and nothing had happened. Rumors ran through the streets. The well-drillers had come from over near Gibsonburg. Only a week or two before a stranger had got off a train, had walked about through the streets, and had then visited the place where the drilling was going on. He had been seen to speak with the drillers. No doubt our drillers were in “cahoots” with the Rockefellers, the Morgans, or some of that crowd. Perhaps John D. himself had been pussyfooting about. One couldn’t tell. Stranger things than that had happened. Were we to be caught napping? It was decided to do what was called “shooting the well.”

Surely here was something for a boy to take into account. Mysterious whisperings among our elders on the streets in the evening; plot and counterplot; dark doings among the capitalists--“stand back, villain, unhand the fair figure of our hopes and dreams”--ah! an explosion at the mysterious hour of dawn, far down in the bowels of Mother Earth. Old Mother Earth to be given an emetic of a stirring sort. Forth would flow wealth, factories, the very New Age itself.

One didn’t ask oneself how a participating interest in all these new glories was to be achieved, and in the whole town no man was more excited than father who had never owned a share of stock in anything. He ceased speaking of the crafts and only shook his head in sorrow. “I’d just like to be alive two hundred years from now,” he said. “Why, I’ll tell you what; there’ll be a vast city right here--right on the very spot on which I am now standing there’ll be, why there’ll be a huge office building, like as not.”

So sure was he of all this that the wealth of the future became in his fancy a thing of the present, even of the past. He felt himself magnificently wealthy and, one day when he had been drinking and when, because of what we thought his lack of dignity, we youngsters had treated him to a rather thorough snubbing, he grew angry. Night came and it rained. He went up into the garret of the house in which we then lived and presently came down with a package of papers in his hand. Were they old love letters, from the ladies he had known in his youth, or unpaid grocery bills? It is a mystery that may never be solved.

He went into the little back yard of the house and, making a pile of the papers, burned them solemnly. We boys crowded to the kitchen window to watch. There was the little flare of the flame and above it, and leaning over, father’s stern face--and then darkness.

Back he came into the house and before he went away, to spend the rest of the evening whispering of the wealth of the future with other men in the barrooms, he told us what had happened. “Do you know what those papers were?” he asked sharply. “They were deeds to the whole business section of the City of Cincinnati. I have been concealing from you the fact that I had such papers, intending to leave them to you as an inheritance but--”

“Well, you have not seen fit to treat me with respect and I have burned them,” he declared, tramping out of the house.

* * * * *

Romance and mystery. There was the imagined figure of the shooter of wells. The thing was done with nitro-glycerine. One put “nitro” and “glycerine” together, one fancied, and there was this terrible result. One did not know what “nitro” was, but had seen and felt “glycerine.” “Ah! chemistry. You wait and you’ll see what will be done with chemistry,” said father.

And so there was this mysterious stuff frozen into solid cakes and carted through the night, along unfrequented roads, by the heroic well-shooter.

Now, there was a man to suit a boy’s fancy, that well-shooter, a fellow going nonchalantly along with the frozen cakes in the wagon behind him. Is he worried? Not at all! He lights his pipe. He looks at the stars. He sings a little ditty. “My bonny lies over the ocean. My bonny lies over the sea. My bonny lies over the ocean--Oh, bring back my bonny to meeeeeee.”

In the wagon back of him that stuff. A jar, a sudden jolt of the wagon, the breaking of a wagon axle and then--

We boys whisper about it when we meet on the streets. One of the boys holds up his thumb. “You see that thumbnail?” he asks. “Well, a little bit of that stuff, no more than would cover that thumbnail, would blow him and his wagon to smithereens.” The question asked was, how much farther would, say a ton of the stuff, blow the outfit? Was there a land as far beyond smithereens as the stars from earth, to which the fellow might be sent, in the wink of an eye?

A glimpse of the infinite added to all the other excitement and mystery.

My first glimpse of the Industrial Age--with one of my brothers I got out of bed one morning, before dawn, and crept away into the darkness to lie in a grove of trees near the meadow and see the well shot. Several other boys came. The father of one of our town boys, who had stock in the gas-well company, had let slip the carefully hoarded secret of the hour when the fearful thing was to happen.

And so, there we were, ten or twelve of us, lying concealed in the wood. Dawn began to break. Birds and squirrels awoke in the trees over our heads. On the road that came out from town buggies and surreys appeared. The visitors tied their horses far away, by an old sawmill, near the town’s edge, and came afoot to the field.

Now it was quite light and we could begin to recognize the men of the party, solid respectable men, with money in the bank. There was Penny Jacobs, who kept a little candy store; Seth McHugh, cashier of the bank; Wilmott the lawyer, a dozen others. No doubt Em Harkness was there. Of that I cannot be quite sure. He was a man of our town, who ran a small general store and brother, I believe, to that other Harkness who later became a man of vast wealth and a figure in the Standard Oil Company. His money built the Harkness Memorial at Yale, and if our town did not achieve the prominent position in the Industrial Age of which we all at that moment dreamed, we had at least among us the kin of royalty. We were not entirely left in the cold outside world. A Harkness was a Harkness and we had a Harkness.

But to return to that significant moment in the field. As we lads lay in the wood, well concealed from the eyes of our elders, we were silent. Solemnity lay like a frost over our young souls. Even the giggling and whispering that had gone on among us died now. The well-shooter was there and he had turned out to be just an ordinary looking teamster with whiskers, but that did not matter.

Greater and more significant things were astir. Even the birds stopped singing and the squirrels chattered no more.

A long tube, containing no doubt the nitro-glycerine, had been lowered into the hole in the ground and the honored guests of the occasion ran quickly across the field and stood among the trees near our hiding place.

They were dressed, these serious-minded citizens, as for a wedding or a funeral. Even Penny Jacobs had put on what was called among us “a boiled shirt.”

What an occasion! Now we were, all of us, as we stood or lay under the trees--we were all one thing; and presently there would be a terrific explosion, far down in the earth, below our bellies as we lay sprawled in the wet grass--there would be this explosion, and then would we not all, at that moment, become something else?

“Bang!” we would go into the New Age--that was the idea. In the presence of our elders, who now stood in silence very near us, we lads all felt a little ashamed of our ragged clothes and our unwashed faces. Perhaps some of us had been to Sunday school and had heard the parable of the virgins who did not keep their lamps trimmed and filled.

In shame we hid our faces before the glory of the vision before us. There we were, sons of housepainters, carpenters, shoemakers, and the like. Our fathers had worked with their hands. They had soiled their clothes and their faces with common labor. Poor, benighted men! What did they know of what Mark Twain called, “the glorious, rip-roaring century, greatest of all the centuries?” A man could make a wagon that would stand up, or shoe a horse, or build a house slowly and well, but what was that?

Shucks! There would be this terrific rumble in the bowels of the earth, and then the little cunning machines would come. Men would walk about smoking twenty-five-cent cigars; they would put their thumbs in the armholes of their vests and laugh at the past. Men would fly through the air, dive under the sea, have breakfast in Cleveland, Ohio, and lunch in London. A fellow couldn’t tell what would happen now.

Why, no one would work at all maybe--well, that is to say, not really work. Some of our fathers had read a book called “Looking Backward” and had talked about it in the homes and in the stores. Then we lads had talked. Well, a fellow would maybe roll downtown from his country home in the late morning and turn a few cranks or pull a few levers. Then he would go and play, make love to some beautiful female or take an afternoon’s ride over to Egypt to see the Pyramids, or visit the Holy Land. A fellow had to get up an appetite for dinner, dang it all!

Anyway, that was that, and there we were. The well-shooter dropped a heavy weight down the hole and cut out for the woods. When he was halfway across the meadow the rumbling explosion occurred, down in the earth.

And into the bright morning air shot a great fountain of mud and muddy water. The derrick over the hole was covered with it, the grass in the meadow was covered and much of it fell down like rain on us in the wood. The front of Penny Jacobs’ boiled shirt was covered with it.

The mud fell on us lads, too, but that didn’t matter so much. None of us had put on Sunday clothes. Our elders, who represented among us the capitalistic class, went over and stood about the well for a time, and then went sadly off up the road to unhitch their horses and drive back to town.

When we lads emerged from the woods no one was left but the well-shooter, and he was suspect, and grumpy as well, not having breakfasted. Those of us whose fathers had no money invested were inclined to take the whole matter as rather a delicious joke, but were overruled. We stood about for a time, staring at the well-shooter, who was engaged in gathering his paraphernalia together, and then we also moved off toward town.

“I’ll bet that well-shooter’s a crook,” said one of my companions. He had, I remember, a great deal of mud in his hair and on his face. He kept complaining as we went along. “He could have stuck that nitro-glycerine only halfway down, and then set it off, that’s what he could have done.” The idea, later taken up enthusiastically by the entire community, pleased us all. It was so apparent the well-shooter was not the hero we had hoped. He didn’t look like a hero. “Well, my dad says he knows him. He lives over by Monroeville and he gets drunk and beats his wife, my dad says so,” another lad declared.

It was rather a good solution of our difficulty. If one can’t have a hero, who wants just a teamster?

It was infinitely better to have a villainous well-shooter about whose Machiavellian machinations one’s imagination could linger in happiness.

NOTE VIII

IT must have been about this time that my own imaginative life began to take form. Having listened to the tales told by my father, I wanted to begin inventing tales of my own. At that time and for long years afterward, there was no notion of writing. Did I want an audience, someone to hear me tell my tales? It is likely I did. There is something of the actor in me.

When later I began to write I for a time told myself I would never publish, and I remember that I went about thinking of myself as a kind of heroic figure, a silent man creeping into little rooms, writing marvelous tales, poems, novels--that would never be published.

Perhaps it never went quite that far. They would have to be published sometime. My vanity demanded that. Very well--I had died and had been buried in some obscure place. In my actual physical life I had been a house-painter, a workman in a factory, an advertising writer--whatever you please. I had passed unnoticed through the throng, you see. “I say, John, who is that fellow over there?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve seen him about. He looks like a movie actor or a gambler to me.”

You see, I dreamed of something like that--dead and buried away--and then one day a man is snooping about in a garret in an old empty house. He finds a pile of papers and begins looking them over, lazily, without much interest. But look! “Hello here! Say, here is something!”

You get the notion. I’ll not go into it further. It might have been a good card had I found within myself the courage to play it, but I didn’t.

As to that first tale of mine and its invention. It grew out of dissatisfaction with my father and a desire to invent another to take his place. And professional jealousy may have had something to do with it. He had been strutting about long enough. “Get out from under the spotlight for a time, daddy. Give your son a chance to see what he can do,” I perhaps really wanted to say.

It was fall and father had taken me with him to do a house-painting job in the country. The year was growing old and bad rainy weather had come. Perhaps we could not finish the painting job we were about to begin, but, as father had explained to the farmer who had just built a new house, we could at least put on a priming coat.

If the worst happened and we lost a good deal of time, waiting about--“well,” said father winking at me, “you see, kid, we’ll eat.”

The farmer came for us in the early morning, driving in a spring wagon into which was to be packed the ladders, pots and other materials of our trade, and by the time we had got to his place the rain, that had persisted for several days, began again. The carpenters were still at work inside the house, so that nothing could be done there, and father went off to the old cabin in which the farmer and his family were living until the new house could be finished. He would spend the day gossiping with the women folk or perhaps reading some book he had found in the house. The farmer had a barrel of hard cider in his cellar. The day promised to be not too depressing for father.

As for myself, I made the acquaintance of the farmer’s son, a lad my own age, and we decided to go squirrel hunting in the near-by woods. “You wait ’til father drives down into the new clearing. He’s going to bring up some fence posts. Then we’ll take the gun and cut out. If he gets onto us he’ll give me some job, make me wheel out manure, or whitewash the henhouse, or something like that.”

We spent the morning and early afternoon tramping through muddy fields to visit the wood lots on neighboring farms and came home too late for the noon meal, but my new-found friend managed to get some sandwiches, made of huge slices of bread and cold meat, and bring them to the barn.

We were tired and wet and had got no squirrels and so we crawled up into the hay loft and burrowed down into the warm hay.

When we had finished eating our lunch and had got ourselves comfortably warm my companion, a fat boy of perhaps sixteen, wanted to talk.

We talked as young males do, of hunting and what naturally good shots we were but that we were not used to just the kind of gun we had been handling. Then we spoke of riding horses and how nice it would have been had we both been cowboys, and finally of the girls we had known. What was a fellow to do? How was he to get close to some girl who wasn’t too hoity-toity. The fat boy had a sister of about his own age that I wanted to ask about but didn’t dare. What was she like? Was she too hoity-toity?

We spoke vaguely of other girls we had been seated near at school, or had met at boy-and-girl parties. “Did you ever kiss a girl? I did once,” said the fat boy. “Kiss, eh? Is that all you’ve done?” I answered, feeling the necessity of maintaining a kind of advantage, due to my position as a town boy.

The hay into which we had burrowed deeply, so that just our heads were in the outer air, was sweet to the nostrils and warm and we began to grow sleepy. What was the use of talking of girls? They were silly things and had in some queer way the power to unman a boy, to make a fellow act and feel nervous and uneasy.

We lay in silence, thinking each his own thoughts, and presently the fat boy closed his eyes and slept.

Father came upon the floor of the stable with his employer the farmer, and the two men pulled boxes to the door looking out into the barnyard and began to talk.

The farmer explained that he had come into our country from New England, from Vermont, when he was a young man, and had gone into debt for two hundred acres of land, when land could be had cheap. He had worked and he had achieved. In time the farm had been paid for and fifty additional acres bought. It had taken time, patience, and hard labor. Much of the land had to be cleared. A man worked day and night, that’s how he managed to get on.

And now he was building a new house. “Well,” he had said to his wife; “Mary, you have been a good wife to me and I want you to have every comfort.” The house was to have a bathroom and a bathtub. It would cost money and maybe it would be all foolishness, but he wanted his wife to have it. When a man was young he didn’t mind splashing about in a washtub in a woodshed on Saturday evenings, but when he got a little older and had, now and then, a touch of rheumatism, well, he thought his wife deserved to have a bathtub in the house if she wanted it, no matter what it cost.

Father agreed with his host. (It is perhaps as well to think of him as our host and ourselves as guests since we stayed two weeks and worked but two days.) He said that he had always felt just that way himself. Women were the weaker sex and a man had to take that into consideration. “You take a woman, now, that is like a horse and I don’t like her,” said father. He spoke of mother as though she had been a weak, gentle thing, entirely dependent upon the strength in himself in getting through her life. “I married my wife up in your own state, up in Vermont,” father said, indulging in one of his characteristic quick imaginative flights.

And now that he had got a start I knew there was no telling where his flight might end and I listened for a time, and then, turning away in disgust, I began working my way downward into the hay. My mother, now dead, was something I prized. He had just said she was born in Vermont of an old decayed English gentle family. She wasn’t very strong but would have children. They were born one after the other, but, thank God! because of his own great natural strength his boys were strong.

“The one I have out here with me now was born in Kentucky,” he said. “I took my wife down there on a visit to my own father’s place and he was born during the visit. I thought his mother would die that time, but she didn’t--I saved her. Night and day I stayed in her sick room, nursing her.”

Now he had got himself launched and I knew the farmer would have no more chance to do his own bragging. Father would invent another decayed, gentle family in Kentucky to match the one he had just so lightly brought into existence in the cold barren hills of Vermont.

But I was getting deeper and deeper down into the hay now and the sounds of his voice grew faint, words could no longer be distinguished. There was only a gentle murmuring sound, far off--like a summer breeze just stirring the leaves of a forest; or, better yet, like the soft murmur of some southern sea. Already, you see, I had begun reading romances and knew, in fancy, just how the seas of the South murmured and beat upon coral islands; and then how the fearful hurricane came ramping along and swept the seas clear of ships. No one reads as a boy reads. The boy gives himself utterly to the printed page and perhaps the most blessed of all the tribe of the inkpots are those who write what we used to call “dime novels”--blessed in their audience, I mean, to be sure.

So there I was, sunk far down into a mythical Southland, my own Southland, product of my own imaginings--not father’s. One could go deep down into the hay and still breathe. All sounds became faint, even the gentle sound of the snoring of the fat boy some ten feet away. One closed the eyes and stepped off into a fragrant new world. Mother was in that new world, but not father. I had left him out in the cold.

I considered the matter of births--my own birth in particular. The idea of being born in Kentucky--the result of a union between two decaying, gentle families--did not strike my fancy, not much.

The devil! Even then I felt myself a little the product of a new age and a new land. Could I then have had all the thoughts I am now about to attribute to myself! Probably not. But these notes make no pretense of being a record of fact. That isn’t their object. They are merely notes of impressions, a record of vagrant thoughts, hopes, ideas that have floated through the mind of one present-day American. It is likely that I have not, and will not, put into them one truth, measuring by the ordinary standards of truth. It is my aim to be true to the essence of things. That’s what I’m after.

And haven’t we Americans built enough railroads and factories, haven’t we made our cities large and dirty and noisy enough, haven’t we been giving ourselves to surface facts long enough? Let us away with the fact of existence, for the moment at least. You, the reader, are to imagine yourself sitting under a tree with me on a summer afternoon; or, better yet, lying with me in the sweet-smelling hay in an Ohio barn. We shall let our fancies loose, lie to ourselves if you please. Let us not question each other too closely.

There is America, now. What is America? Whee! I say, now, don’t begin with such a gigantic question as that.

Let’s think a little about what it isn’t. It isn’t English, for one thing, and--isn’t it odd?--the notion persists that it is. If we are ever to have a race of our own here--if the melting pot we are always talking about ever really melts up the mass--how English, how German, how Puritanic will it be? Not very much, I fancy. Too many Slavs, Poles, Wops, Chinese, Negroes, Mexicans, Hindoos, Jews, whatnot, for the old influences to hold in the end.

But is it not odd how that old notion persists? A few English came and settled in that far-away frozen northeast corner--New England--and their sons did the book-writing and the school-teaching. They did not get themselves--physically--as breeders--very deeply into the new blood of the land, but they made their notion of what we are and of what we are to be stick pretty well.

In time, however, the basic cultural feeling of the land must change too. Mind cannot persist without body. Blood will tell.

And in my own time I was to see the grip of the old New England, the Puritanic culture, begin to loosen. The physical incoming of the Celts, Latins, Slavs, men of the Far East, the blood of the dreaming nations of the world gradually flowing thicker and thicker in the body of the American, and the shrewd shop-keeping money-saving blood of the northern men getting thinner and thinner.

But I run far, far ahead of myself. Did my own fancy, even then, as a boy, lying in the hay in the barn, did it run ahead of my own day and my own time? Of that I cannot say, but of one thing I am quite certain--in all my life I have never for a moment subscribed to the philosophy of life as set forth by the _Saturday Evening Post_, the _Atlantic Monthly_, _Yale_, “Upward and Onward,” “The White Man’s Burden,” etc.

There was always within me a notion of another aspect of life--at least faintly felt--a life that dreamed a little of more colorful and gaudy things--cruelty and tragedy creeping in the night, laughter, splashing sunlight, the pomp and splendor of the old tyrants, the simple devotion of old devotees.

Had I not seen and did I not then sharply remember that old grandmother from the southeast of Europe, she with the one eye and the quick, dark and dangerous temper! There were possibilities of cruelty in her. Once she had tried to kill my sister with a butcher knife, and one could think of her as killing with a laugh on her lips. Having known her one could easily conceive of the possibility of a life in which cruelty had its place too.

At that moment as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay and when the fancy of my own flesh-and-blood father, down on the floor of the barn, was giving me a birthright of decaying Germanic gentlefolk the dark old woman who was my grandmother was more in my line.

And no doubt the warmth of the hay itself may have had something to do with the setting and the mood of my first invented tale, as you will perceive as you read of it. Cruelty, like breadfruit and pineapples, is a product, I believe, of the South.

By the tale, told me by my parents, I had myself been born in a place called Camden, Ohio, and in the articles touching on my birthplace that have appeared in newspapers that town has always been named. It was one of the towns through which father and mother had trekked when they were first married.

Father must have had a little money at that time, as there is a tradition of his having been a merchant, and of course there were not, at that time, so many children. One could get up and out more easily. Moving, perhaps at night, from town to town, to escape bill collectors, was not so difficult. And then I fancy that, at first his own people, from time to time, sent him money. However, I know little of his people and only have the notion because I cannot conceive of his having earned it or of his having made it by his shrewdness.

And so he was a merchant then, the grandest thing one could be in a small Ohio town at that time. He kept shop in places known as Camden, Morning Sun and Caledonia, Ohio. I believe he and President Harding once played in the same brass band at Caledonia.

He was in the saddlery and harness business and you cannot fail to catch the flavor of that. There would be a little shop on the town’s main street with a leather horse collar hanging on a peg over the sidewalk before the door. Inside there would be shiny new harness hanging on the shop walls and, in the morning when the sun crept in, the brass and nickel buckles would shine like jewels.

Young farmers coming in with great work harnesses on their shoulders and throwing them with a great rattle and bang on the floor--the rich pungent smell of leather--an old man, a workman, a harness-maker, sitting on his horse and sewing a strap--on the floor by the stove a wooden box filled with sawdust into which the workmen and the visiting farmers, all of whom would chew tobacco, could spit--

Father prancing about--the young merchant then, with the young merchant’s heavy silver watch and gold chain--a prospective Marshall Field, a Wanamaker, a Julius Rosenwald, in his own fancy, perhaps.

“Hello, you, Ted. When you go’en a get that trace sewed up? These new fangle factory harnesses ain’t worth a tinker’s dam. How’s wheat looking out your way? No, the frost ain’t all out of the ground yet. What do you think of elections, eh? D’you hear what that fellow said--‘all Democrats ain’t horse thieves, but all horse thieves is democrats’? Do you think Frank Means will make it for sheriff?”

That--in just that tone--and in a small frame house on a side street of the town myself waiting to be born.

What is a birth? Has a man no rights of his own?

NOTE IX

SUCH a birth in an Ohio Village--the neighbor women coming in to help--rather fat women in aprons.

They have had children of their own and are not too excited, but stand about, waiting and indulging in gossip. “If the men had to have the babies there would never be more than one child in a family. What do men know about suffering? It’s the women who have to do all the suffering in life, I always said--I said a woman feels everything deeper than a man--don’t you think so? A woman has intuition, that’s what it is.”

And then the doctor coming hurriedly, father having run for him. He would be a large man with side whiskers and large red hands. Well; he is a doctor of the new school, a modernist, like the child he is about to help into the world. What he believes in, is fresh air. Wherever he goes, and no matter what the disease he is treating, he always says the same things. Modernists sometimes are like that. “Clean and fresh air--that’s what I believe in. Throw open the doors and the windows. Let’s have some fresh air in here.”

While the child is being born he tells his one joke. One might as well be cheerful. Cheerfulness is a great healer, and what he believes in is in making his patients smile in the midst of suffering. “Do you want to know why I’m so strong on cleanliness?” he asks. “It’s because I’m a damned sinner, I guess, and I don’t go to church, and I’ve heard that cleanliness is next to Godliness. I’m trying to slip into Heaven on a cake of soap--ha! that’s what I’m up to.”

A quick nervous laugh from the lips of father. He goes out of the house to tell the story to a neighbor he has seen raking leaves in a near-by yard. It is September now. He is a little unstrung. Under such conditions a man feels faintly guilty. People conspire to give him the feeling. It is as though all the women of the town were pointing accusing fingers and as though all the men were laughing, “greasy-eyed married men,” Bernard Shaw once called them. One will have to set up the cigars to the men, darn ’em. As for the women--they are saying, half jokingly, half in earnest: “There, you devil; see what you have done--this is your doings.”

Father stands beside the fence telling the doctor’s joke to the neighbor, who has heard it many times before but who, out of sympathy, now laughs heartily. As though drawn toward each other by some invisible cord they both sidle along the fence until they are standing close together. It is a moment of masculine obscurity. Men must stand shoulder to shoulder. The women have the centre of the stage--as father would have said later, when he became an actor and loved to sling the actor’s jargon, they were “hogging the footlights.”

Not quite succeeding however. This is the moment for me to come upon the stage. The two men stand closely together, father fingering nervously the heavy gold watch chain--he is soon to lose it with all his other property in one of his frequent business failures--and from the house comes a faint cry. To the two men standing there it sounds not unlike the cry of a puppy inadvertently stepped on by a careless master, and father jumps suddenly aside so that his neighbor laughs again.

And that is myself--just being actually born into the world.

* * * * *

Which is one thing, but sometimes one’s fancy wants something else. As I lay, deep buried in the hay in the barn on another fall day, and as the resentment--born in me through having been made the son of two decaying, gentle families--grew deeper and deeper, and also as the grateful warmth of the departed summer--captured and held by the hay--stole over my body, cold from the day of tramping in the wood in a cold rain in pursuit of the squirrels--as the warmth took hold of my body, the scene of my actual birth hour, just depicted, faded. I fled from the field of fact and into the field of fancy.

Upon the sand on a desolated coast far down on the Gulf of Mexico an athletic looking man of perhaps thirty lies looking out over the sea. What cruel eyes he has, like the eyes of some cunning beast of prey.

He is perhaps thirty years of age, but one can see well enough, just by looking at him casually, that he has retained all the youthful strength and elasticity of his splendid body. He has a small black mustache and black hair and his skin is burned to a deep brown. Even as he lies, relaxed and listless, on the yellow sand a glow of life and of strength seems to emanate from him.

As he lies thus one can tell, any schoolboy could tell, that he is physically made to be the very ideal of American romance. He is a man of action--young and strong--there can be little doubt he is a man of daring. What might not be done with such a man! Throw him back into the days of the early pioneers and he will turn you out another Daniel Boone. He will creep through hundreds of miles of forests, never disturbing a grass blade, and bring you back the fair daughter of the English nobleman, traveling in this country, whose daughter inadvertently went for an afternoon’s stroll in the wood and was captured by a skulking Indian; or he will shoot you a squirrel in the eye at five hundred yards with his faithful rifle, called, playfully, “Old Betsy.” Move him up a little now. Let, say Bret Harte, have him. There he is, fine and dandy. He is a gambler in a Western mining camp now, wearing a silk shirt and a Stetson hat. He will lose you a whole fortune without the bat of an eye, but his personal associates are a bit rough. He is always being seen about with Black Peg, who runs a house of prostitution, and with Silent Smith, the killer.

Until, well, until one day when a New England school-teacher comes into the rough mining camp. One night she is set upon and is about to be outraged by a drunken miner. Then he, the associate of Black Peg, steps forward and shoots the miner. Ten minutes before, he was drunk and lying in the gutter, so drunk in fact that flies had been using his eyeballs as sliding places, but the danger to the school-teacher had sobered him instantly. He is a gentleman now. He offers the school-teacher his arm and they walk to her cabin discussing Emerson and Longfellow, and then our central figure of romance leaves her at her cabin door and goes to a lonely spot in the mountains. He sits down to wait until winter and the deep snows come, in order that he may freeze to death. He has realized that he loves the New England lady and is, in the language of the Far West, as set forth in all the best books, “not fitten for her.”

The truth is that father, that is to say, my fanciful father, might well have been used by any one of a dozen of our American hero-makers. He is in the goods. That is the idea. In the hands of a Jack London he might have been another Sea Wolf or a musher trudging through the deep snow of the frozen North, cornering some fair virgin in an isolated cabin, only to let her off at the last moment out of respect for her dead mother, who expected something quite different of her. Then later he might have gone to Yale, and after that become a stock broker, taking daring chances with railroad stocks, married a woman who loved only the glare and shine of social life, chucked her, failed in business, gone farming, and turned out a clean man after all, say in the pages of the _Saturday Evening Post_. It could have been done.

Where my fanciful father was unfortunate, however, was in that he had to live in the fancy of a boy in a hay barn--one who had as yet had little or no experience with heroes.

And then there is no doubt he, from the first, had certain weaknesses. He wasn’t always kind to old women and children and, as you will see in the sequel, he wasn’t to be trusted with a virgin. He just wouldn’t behave himself, and when it comes to this matter of virgins, perhaps the least said about any man’s attitude toward them--except, to be sure, in novels and in the movies--the better. As Mr. Howells once pointed out, “it is better to present to the readers only the brighter and more pleasant aspects of our common lives.”

However, let us return to the man lying on the sand. There he is, you see, and it was sure he had been all his life, at any rate, a man of action. The Civil War had just come to an end a few years before and during the war he had been rather busily engaged. He had gone into the war as a spy for the Federal government and when he had got into the South had managed to engage himself as a spy for the Confederate side also. This had permitted him to move rather freely back and forth and to do well carrying contraband goods. When he had no special information to give to one or the other of his employers he could invent information--during a war that is always easy. He was, as I have said, a man of action. He aimed to get results, as they say in the advertising profession.

The war at an end, he had gone into the South, having several projects in mind and, at the time we meet him first, he was waiting on the lonely coast to sight a ship that was to bring some business associates of his. In a bayou, near the mouth of the river, some ten miles away, there was a ship, manned by his own men, awaiting his return. He was engaged in the business of smuggling firearms to various revolutionary parties in South American republics and was now only waiting for the coming of a man who was to hand over to him certain monies.

And so the day passed and the evening came and at last an hour before darkness settled down over the lonely sand dunes a ship appeared. My mythical father arose and, fastening a cloth to the end of a stick, waved it back and forth over his head. The ship drew near and two boats were lowered. Some ten or twelve men were coming ashore and with them a woman. When they had got into the boats the ship did not wait but immediately steamed away.

The man on the beach began gathering a great pile of sticks and bits of driftwood, preparative to building a fire, and now and then he turned his head to look toward the approaching boats. That there was a woman among his visitors bothered him. Women were always interfering with business. Why had they wanted to bring a woman? “To the deuce with women!” he growled, making his way through the deep sand with a great pile of sticks in his arms.

Then the boat had landed and there was the old Harry to pay. A revolutionary party in one of the South American republics had gone to pieces and nearly all its members had been arrested and were to be executed. There was no money to pay for the firearms that were to have been shipped, and the little band of men, now standing on the lonely beach and facing the smugglers, had barely escaped with their lives. They had rowed out to sea in two boats and had been picked up by a steamer, and one among them had in his possession money enough to bribe the steamer captain to bring them to this spot, where they were to have landed, just at this time, under quite different circumstances.

Different circumstances indeed!

The lady of the party--well, she was something special--the daughter of one of the wealthiest sugar planters of her native land, she had given her young soul to the cause of the revolution and when the smash came had been compelled to fly with the others. Her own father disowned her in a moment of cowardice and the death sentence was out against her. What else could she do but flee?

If they had brought nothing else, they had brought food ashore from the ship, and the party might as well eat, since they would, in any event, have to spend the night on the beach. In the morning, it was the hope expressed by the leader of the party, that the firearms smuggler would guide them inland. They had friends in America but had they landed at a regular port of entry it might well have turned out that their own government would have asked the American government to send them home--to face the consequences of their folly.

With a grim smile on his cruel lips my fanciful father had heard them out in silence and now began building a fire. Night came and he moved softly about. A strange and new impulse had come into his hard and cruel heart. He had fallen instantly in love with the young female leader of revolution from the foreign land and was trying to figure out how he could get away from the others and have a talk with her.

At last when food had been prepared and eaten, he spoke, agreeing to perform all that had been asked of him, but declaring that the young woman could not be compelled to spend the night in such a place. Speaking in the Spanish language--with which he was marvelously conversant--he commanded the others to stay by the fire while he took the young woman inland to where, some two miles away, he declared he had some horses concealed in the stable of an oyster thief, a friend of his who lived up the bay.

The others consenting, he and the young woman set off. She was very beautiful and, as they had all been seated about the fire, she had kept her eyes almost constantly upon the American.

He was of the type of which American heroes are made, you see, and she had, in her young girlhood, read American novels. In American novels, as in American plays--as everyone knows--a man can, just as well as not, be a horse thief, a desperado, a child-kidnapper, a gentleman burglar, or a well-poisoner for years and years, and then, in an instant, become the sweetest and most amiable fellow possible, and with perfect manners too. It is one of the most interesting things about us Americans. No doubt it came to us from the English. It seems to be an Anglo-Saxon trait and a very lovely one too. All anyone need do is to mention in the presence of any one of us at any time the word “mother,” or leave one of us alone in the darkness in a forest in a lonely cabin on a mountain at night with a virgin.

With some of us--that is to say, with those of us who have gone into politics--the same results can sometimes be had by speaking of the simple and humble laboring man, but it is the virgin that gets us every shot. In bringing out all the best in us she is a hundred per cent. efficient.

In the presence of a virgin something like a dawn among mountains creeps over the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon and a gentle light comes into his eyes. If he has a dress suit anywhere about he goes and puts it on. Also he gets himself a shave and a hair cut, and you would be surprised to see how everything clears up after that.

* * * * *

I, however, digress. In my enthusiasm for my fellows I jerk myself too violently out of my boyhood. No boy could so wholeheartedly appreciate or understand our national traits.

The story I had set myself down to tell was that of my own birth into the world of fancy--as opposed to the rather too realistic birth already depicted--and that, as I have explained, took place in Camden, Ohio.

Very well, then, a year has passed and I am being born a second time, as it were, but this second birth is quite different from the one in the Ohio town. There is more punch to it. Reading of it will lift you, who have been patient enough to follow me so far, out of your common everyday humdrum existences.

And if you have read Freud you will find it of additional interest that, in my fanciful birth, I have retained the very form and substance of my earthly mother while getting an entirely new father, whom I set up--making anything but a hero of him--only to sling mud at him. I am giving myself away to the initiated, that is certain.

But be that as it may, however, there is mother lying in bed in a lonely cabin on another long sandy beach, also on the Gulf of Mexico. (In my fanciful life I have always had a hunger for the warm South.) Mother has been honorably married to my fanciful father on that very evening when she went with him from among her fellow-countrymen, sitting by the fire on that other beach, and after just such a metamorphosis of his character as she had come to expect through having read American novels and through having seen two or three American plays produced in the capital of her native land.

After having secured the horses from the stable of the oyster thief they had ridden off together and had come at last into a deep forest of magnolia trees in blossom. A southern moon came up into the sky and so soft was the night, so gentle the breezes from the now distant sea, and so sweet the hum of insect life under their horses’ feet, that mother found herself speaking of her lost home and of her mother.

To my fanciful father the combination--the deep forest, the scent of the magnolia blossoms and the word “mother”--together with the fact that he was alone in a dark place with a virgin, an innocent one, these things were all irresistible to him. The metamorphosis spoken of above took place, and he proposes marriage and on the spot proposed to live a better life.

And so they rode together out of the forest and were married, but, in his case, the metamorphosis did not hold.

Within a few months he had gone back to his old life, leaving mother alone in a strange land until the time should come when I, having been born, could take up the task of being her protector and guardian.

And now I am being born. It is late in the afternoon of a still hot day and I, having just been ushered into the world by the aid of a fisherman’s wife, who also does duty as a midwife in that isolated place and who has now left to return again late at night--I, having been so born, am lying on the bed beside mother and thinking my first thoughts. In my own fancy I was, from the very first, a remarkable child and did not cry out as most newly born infants do, but lay buried in deep thought. In the little hut it is stifling hot, and flies and other winged insects of the warm South are buzzing in the air. Strange insects of gigantic size crawl over the walls and, from far-away somewhere, there comes the murmur of the sea. Mother is lying beside me, weak and wan.

We lie there for a long time and, young as I am, I realize that she is tired and discouraged about life. “Why has not life in America turned out as it always did in the novels and plays?” she is asking herself; but I, having at that time still retained all my young courage and freshness of outlook, am not discouraged.

There is a sound outside the cabin, the swishing sound of heavy feet dragged through the hot dry sands, and the low moaning sound of a woman crying.

Again a steamer, from foreign parts, has visited that lonely coast and again a boat has been lowered. In the boat is my fanciful father accompanied by four of his evil henchmen and accompanied also by another woman. She is young and fair, another virgin; but now, alas, father has become hardened on that subject!

The strange woman is terribly afraid but is at the same time in love with her captor (owing to the strange natures of women, this, you will understand, is entirely possible), and father has had the cruel impulse to bring the two women together. Perhaps he wants to see them suffer the pangs of jealousy.

But he will get no such pangs from mother. With her son beside her she lies silently waiting.

For what? That is the question that, try as he would, the son could not answer.

And so the two lie there in silence on the poor bed in the hut while that strange monster of a man drags another woman across the yellow sands and in at the door of the hut. What has happened is that he has gone back to his old wicked life and, with his comrade, has joined another revolutionary party in another South American republic, and this time the revolution has been successful and he and his partners have helped sack a South American city.

At the forefront of the invaders was my fanciful father and--whatever else may be said of him it can never be said that he lacked in courage--it was from him, in fact, that I got my own courage.

Into the invaded city he had rushed at the head of his men and, when the city was being sacked, he demanded riches for his men but took none for himself. For his own portion of the loot he had taken the virginal daughter of the leader of the Federal forces and it was this woman he was now dragging in at the door of our hut.

She was very beautiful and perhaps, had I been older, I should not have blamed father, but at that time the love of right was very strong in me.

When father saw that I had already been born he staggered back for a step and leaned against the wall of the cabin, still however clinging to the hand of his new-found woman. “I had hoped to arrive before or at the very hour of birth, I had counted on that,” he muttered, cursing under his breath.

For a moment he stood looking at mother and myself and both of us looked calmly at him.

“Birth--the birth hour--is the test of womanhood,” he said, taking hold of the shoulder of his new woman and shaking her violently, as though to fix her attention. “I wanted you to see how the women of my own race meet bravely all such trying situations; for, as you must know, by the customs of my country, the woman who marries an American becomes instantly an American, with all the American virtues. It is our climate, I dare say, and it happens to people very quickly.

“At any rate there it is. The woman you see before you I really love, but she has become Anglo-Saxon, through having married me, and is therefore above me, as far above me as the stars.

“I cannot live with her. She is too good, too brave,” said my fanciful father, staggering through the door and dragging his woman after him. Outside the door I heard him still talking loudly to his new woman as they went away. “Our Anglo-Saxon women are the most wonderful creatures in the world,” I heard him saying. “In a few years now they will run the world.”

* * * * *

It was growing dark in the hayloft in the barn in the state of Ohio. Did I, as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay, really imagine the absurd scene depicted above? Although I was very young I had already read many novels and stories.

In any event the whole silly affair has remained in my fancy for years. When I was a lad I played with such fanciful scenes as other boys play with brightly colored marbles. From the beginning there has been, as opposed to my actual life, these grotesque fancies. Later, to be sure, I did acquire more or less skill in bringing them more and more closely into the world of the actual. They were but the raw materials with which the story-writer must work as the worker in woods works with trees cut in a forest.

As for the fancies themselves, they have always seemed to me like trees that have grown without having been planted. Later, after the period in my own life of which I am now writing, I worked for many years as a laborer in many places, and gradually as I stood all day beside a lathe in some factory, or later went about among business men trying to sell some article, in which I was myself not interested, I began to look at other men and to wonder what absurd fancies went on in secret within them. There was that curiosity and there was something else. I had perhaps, as I have no doubt all people have, a great desire to be loved and a little respected. My own fancies rule me. Even to-day I cannot go into a movie theatre and see there some such national hero as, say, Bill Hart, without wishing myself such another. In the theatre I sit looking at the people and see how they are all absorbed in the affairs of the man on the stage. Now he springs lightly off a horse and goes toward the door of a lonely cabin. We, in the theatre, know that within the cabin are some ten desperate men all heavily armed with guns and with them, bound to a chair, is a fair woman, another virgin got off the reservation, as it were. Bill stops at the door of the cabin and takes a careful look at his guns, and we, in the audience, know well enough that in a few minutes now he will go inside and just shoot all of those ten fellows in there to death, fairly make sieves of them, and that he will get wounded himself but not seriously--just enough to need the help of the virgin in getting out of the cabin and onto his horse--so he can ride to her father’s ranch house and go to bed and get well after a while, in time for the wedding.

All these things we know, but we love our Bill and can hardly wait until the shooting begins. As for myself I never see such a performance but that I later go out of the theatre and, when I get off into a quiet street alone, I become just such another. Looking about to see that I am unobserved, I jerk two imaginary guns out of my hip pockets and draw a quick bead on some near-by tree. “Dog,” I cry, “unhand her!” All my early reading of American literature comes into my mind and I try to do a thing that is always being spoken of in the books. I try to make my eyes narrow to pin points. Bill Hart can do it wonderfully in the pictures and why not I? As I sat in the movie house it was evident that Bill Hart was being loved by all the men women and children sitting about and I also want to be loved--to be a little dreaded and feared, too, perhaps. “Ah! there goes Sherwood Anderson! Treat him with respect. He is a bad man when he is aroused. But treat him kindly and he will be as gentle with you as any cooing dove.”

* * * * *

As a boy lying buried in the hay I presume I had some such notion as that, and later as a man standing by a lathe in some factory some such notion must have still been in my mind. I wanted then to be something heroic in the eyes of my own mother, now dead, and at the same time wanted to be something heroic in my own eyes too.

One could not do the thing in actual life, so one did it in a new world created within one’s fancy.

And what a world that fanciful one--how grotesque, how strange, how teeming with strange life! Could one ever bring order into that world? In my own actual work as a tale-teller I have been able to organize and tell but a few of the fancies that have come to me. There is a world into which no one but myself has ever entered and I would like to take you there; but how often when I go, filled with confidence, to the very door leading into that strange world, I find it locked! Now, in the morning, I myself cannot enter the land into which all last night, as I lay awake in my bed, I went alone at will.

There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell you. I should like to take you with me through the gate into the land, let you wander there with me. There are people there with whom I should like you to talk. There is the old woman accompanied by the gigantic dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day, the stout man with the gray eyes and with the pack on his back, who stands talking to the beautiful woman as she sits in her carriage, the little dark woman with the boyish husband who lives in a small frame house by a dusty road far out, in the country.

These and many other figures, all having a life of their own, all playing forever in the field of my fancy. The fanciful shadowy life striving to take on flesh, to live as you and I live, to come out of the shadowy world of the fancy into the actuality of accomplished art.

When I had grown to be a man, and had begun to try a little to organize this inner life, I wondered often if a woman, being pregnant, and walking about through the streets, past factory doors, in the “loop district” of Chicago, let us say, if such a woman being conscious of something alive within--that is, at the moment a part of herself, flesh of her flesh, and that will presently come out of herself to live its own life, in a world her eyes now see passing before her--if such a woman does not have dreadful moments of fear.

To the tale-teller, you must understand, the telling of the tale is the cutting of the natal cord. When the tale is told it exists outside oneself and often it is more living than the living man from whom it came. The imagined figure may well live on and on in the fanciful life of others after the man from whose lips it came, or whose fingers guided the pen that wrote the tale, long after he is forgotten, and I have myself had some curious experiences of this sort. A public speaker, in speaking of my Winesburg tales, praised me as a writer but spoke slightingly of the figures that lived in the tales. “They weren’t worth telling about,” he said; and I remember that I sat at the back of the room, filled with people, hearing him speak, and remember sharply also just the sense of horror that crept over me at the moment. “It is a lie. He has missed the point,” I cried to myself. Could the man not understand that he was doing a quite unpermissible thing? As well go into the bedroom of a woman during her lying-in and say to her: “You are no doubt a very nice woman, but the child to which you have just given birth is a little monster and will be hanged.” Surely any man can understand that, to such a one, it might be permitted to speak at any length regarding her own failings as a woman, but--if the child live--surely this other thing must not be done. “It must not be condemned for the failings of the mother,” I thought, shivering with fright. As I sat listening certain figures, Wing Biddlebaum, Hugh McVey, Elizabeth Willard, Kate Swift, Jesse Bentley, marched across the field of my fancy. They had lived within me, and I had given a kind of life to them. They had lived, for a passing moment anyway, in the consciousness of others beside myself. Surely I myself might well be blamed--condemned--for not having the strength or skill in myself to give them a more vital and a truer life--but that they should be called people not fit to be written about filled me with horror.

However, I again find myself plunging forward into a more advanced and sophisticated point of view than could have been held by the boy, beginning to remake his own life more to his own liking by plunging into a fanciful life. I shall be blamed. Those of my critics who declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the meandering formlessness of these notes.

It does not matter. My point is that, in the boy, as later in the man into whom the boy is to grow, there are two beings, each distinct, each having its own life and each of importance to the man himself.

The boy who lives in the world of fact is to help his father put a priming coat on a new house built by a prosperous Ohio farmer. In my day we used a dirty yellow ochre for the purpose. The color satisfied no sensual part of myself. How I hated it! It was used because it was cheap and later was to be covered up, buried away out of sight. Ugly colors, buried away out of sight, have a way of remaining always in sight in the consciousness of the painter who has spread them.

* * * * *

In the hayloft the fat boy was awake now. Darkness was coming fast and he must bestir himself, must if possible escape the wrath of his father for the day wasted in entertaining me. He crawled up out of his own hole and, reaching down, put a fat hand on my shoulder and shook me. He had a plan for his own escape which he whispered to me as my head came up into sight in the dim evening light in the loft.

He was an only son and his mother was fond of him--she would even lie for him. Now he would creep away unseen to the house and frankly tell his mother he has been fooling about with me all day long. She would scold a little but, after a time, when his father came into the house for supper and when in harsh tones he asked what the boy had been doing, the gentle little lie would come. “It won’t really be a lie,” the fat boy declared stoutly, defending the virtue of his mother. “Do you expect me to do all the housework and the churning as well?” the farm woman would ask her husband sharply. She, it seemed, was a person of understanding and did not expect a boy to do a man’s work all the time. “You’d think dad never was a kid,” he whispered to me. “He works all the time and he wants me to work all the time too. I wouldn’t never have no fun if it wasn’t for ma. Gee, I only wish I had a dad like your’n. He’s just like a kid himself, isn’t he now?”

In the gathering darkness the farm boy and I crept down a ladder to the floor of the barn and he ran away to the farmhouse, his feet making no sound in the soft mud of the farmyard. The rain persisted and the night would be cold. In another part of the barn the farmer was doing his evening chores, assisted by father--always the accommodating one--who held the lantern and ran to get ears of corn to throw into the horses’ feed-boxes. I could hear his voice, calling cheerfully. Already he knew all the farm horses by name and spoke of them familiarly. “How many ears for old Frank? Does Topsy get five ears too?”

Outside the barn, as I stood under the eaves, there was still a faint streak of light in the western sky, and the new house we were to give the priming coat, built close down to the road, could still be seen. Little strings of water fell from the roof above and made a tiny stream at my feet. The new house had two full stories and an attic. How magnificent to be a man, to be rich and to be able to build such a house! When the fat boy grew into manhood he would inherit the house and many broad acres. He also would be rich and would have a great house, with bathrooms and perhaps electric lights. The automobile had come. No doubt he would have one. How magnificent a house, a farm, an automobile--a beautiful wife to lie with him at night! I had been to Sunday school and had heard the stories of the magnificent men of old, Jacob and David and that young man Absalom, who had everything in the world to look forward to but who nevertheless did unspeakable things.

And now the voices of the men inside the barn seemed far away. The new house was in some queer way a menace to me. I wondered why. The older house, the one the young New Englander had builded when he had first come into the new land, stood far away from the road. One went, from the barns, along a path to the right. The path lay beside an apple orchard, and at the orchard’s end there was a bridge over a small stream. Then one crossed the bridge and started climbing the hill against the side of which the house had been built. It had been built of logs, very solidly, on a small terrace, and as the farmer had begun to prosper wings had been added. Back of the house stood forest trees, some the same trees that had been there when the first room of the cabin was built. The young farmer, with some of his neighbors, had felled the trees for his house on the very ground on which it now stood, and then during the long winter he had felled many other trees in the flat plain below, where his farming land was to lie, and, on a certain day, there had no doubt been a log-rolling, with other young farmers and their women coming from far and near. A whole forest of magnificent trees had been rolled into a great pile and burned--there had been feastings, tests of physical strength among the young men, a few unmarried fellows about, looking shyly at the unmarried girls, game on the table, talk in the evening of the possibilities of a war with the slaveholding farmers of the South.

All these things the older house had seen as it crouched on the side of the hill, and now it seemed to have crept away out of sight in the darkness, hidden itself among the trees still left standing on the hill; but even as I stood looking lights began to appear at its windows. The old house seemed smiling and calling to me. Now, myself and my brothers had no home--the house in which we at that time lived was not a home--for us there could be no home now that mother was not there. We but stayed temporarily in a house, with a few sticks of furniture--waiting--for what?

The older people of our native town had gone out of themselves, warmly, toward us. How many times had I been stopped on the street by some solid citizen of our town, a carpenter, Vet Howard, a wheelwright, Val Voght, a white bearded old merchant, Thad Hurd. In the eyes of these older people, as they talked to me, there was something, a light shining as the lights now shone from the farmhouse among the trees. They knew father--loved him, too, in a way--but well they knew he was not one to plan for his sons, help his sons in making their own plans. Was there something wistful in their eyes as they stood talking to the boy on the village street? I remember the old merchant spoke of God, but the carpenter and the wheelwright spoke of something else--of the new times coming. “Things are on the march,” they said, “and the new generation will do great things. We older fellows belong to something that is passing. We had our trades and worked at them, but you young fellows have to think of something else. It is going to be a time when money will count big, so save your money, boy. You have energy. I’ve watched you. Now you are a little wild after the girls and going to dances. I saw you going down toward the cemetery with that little Truscan girl last Wednesday evening. Better cut that all out. Work. Save money. Get into the manufacturing business if you can. The thing now is to get rich, be in the swim. That’s the ticket.”

The older fellows had said these words to me, somewhat wistfully, as the old house, hidden now in the darkness, seemed to look at me. Was it because the men who said the words were themselves not quite convinced? Did the old American farmhouse among the trees know the end of its life was at hand and was it also calling wistfully to me?

One remains doubtful and, as I now sit writing, I am most doubtful of all the veracity of this impression I am trying to give of myself as a boy standing in the darkness in the shelter of the barn’s eaves.

Did I really want to be the son of some prosperous farmer with the prospect ahead of some day owning land of my own and having a big new house and an automobile? Or did my eyes but turn hungrily toward the older house because it represented to my lonely heart the presence of a mother--who would even go to the length of lying for a fellow?

I was sure I wanted something I did not have, could never (having my father’s blood in me) achieve.

Old houses in which long lives have been lived, in which men and women have lived, suffered and endured together--a people, my own people, come to a day when entire lives are lived in one place, a people who have come to love the streets of old towns, the mellow color of the stone walls of old houses.

Did I want these things, even then? Being an American in a new land and facing a new time, did I want even what Europe must have meant in the hearts of many of the older men who had talked to the boy on the streets of an Ohio town? Was there something in me that, at the moment, went wandering back through the blood of my ancestors, through the blood of the ancestors of the men about me--to England, to Italy, Sweden, Russia, France, Germany--older places, older towns, older impulses?

The new house, the farmer was having built, stood clear of the forest and directly faced the dirt road that led into town. It had instinctively run out to meet the coming automobile and the interurban car--and how blatantly it announced itself! “You see I am new, I cost money. I am big. I am bold,” it seemed to be saying.

And looking at it I crouched for a moment against the wall of the barn, instinctively afraid.

Was it because the new house was, for all its size, cheaply constructed and at bottom ugly? Could I have known that even as a boy? To make such a declaration would, I am sure, be giving myself an early critical instinct too much developed. It would be making something of a little monster of the boy crouching there in the darkness by the barn.

All I can say is that I remember how the boy who, on that evening long ago, went slowly away from the barn through the mud of the barnyard, turned his back on the new house, and stopped for a moment on the bridge leading to the old house, sad and frightened. Before him lay a life of adventures (imagined if not actually experienced), but at the moment he went not toward the future but toward the past. In the older house there was, to be sure, a meal to be had without labor--in this case a meal prepared at the hands of a kindly faced woman--and there was also a warm bed into which the boy could crawl to indulge all night long undisturbed in his dreams; but there was something else. A sense of security? It may be, after all, just the sense of security, or assurance of warmth, food, and leisure--most of all leisure--the boy wanted on that evening, that, for some reason I cannot explain, marked the end of boyhood for him.