Chapter I: Book FOUR: 345 (1)

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--