Chapter III: Book FOUR: 345 (3)

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.