BOOK I
CHAPTER ONE
My First Winter in Chicago
"Well, Mother," I said as I took my seat at the breakfast table the
second day after our Thanksgiving dinner, "I must return to Chicago. I
have some lectures to deliver and besides I must get back to my
writing."
She made no objection to my announcement but her eyes lost something of
their happy light. "When will you come again?" she asked after a pause.
"Almost any minute," I replied assuringly. "You must remember that I'm
only a few hours away now. I can visit you often. I shall certainly come
up for Christmas. If you need me at any time send me word in the
afternoon and I'll be with you at breakfast."
That night at six o'clock I was in my city home, a lodging quite as
humble in character as my fortunes.
In a large chamber on the north side of a house on Elm Street and only
three doors from Lake Michigan, I had assembled my meager library and a
few pitiful mementoes of my life in Boston. My desk stood near a narrow
side window and as I mused I could look out upon the shoreless expanse
of blue-green water fading mistily into the north-east sky, and, at
night, when the wind was in the East the crushing thunder of the
breakers along the concrete wall formed a noble accompaniment to my
writing, filling me with vaguely ambitious literary plans. Exalted by
the sound of this mighty orchestra I felt entirely content with the
present and serenely confident of the future.
"This is where I belong," I said. "Here in the great Midland metropolis
with this room for my pivot, I shall continue my study of the plains and
the mountains."
I had burned no bridges between me and the Island of Manhattan, however!
Realizing all too well that I must still look to the East for most of my
income, I carefully retained my connections with Harper's, the
Century and other periodicals. Chicago, rich and powerful as it had
become, could not establish—or had not established—a paying magazine,
and its publishing firms were mostly experimental and not very
successful; although the Columbian Exposition which was just closing,
had left upon the city's clubs and societies (and especially on its
young men) an esthetic stimulation which bade fair to carry on to other
and more enduring enterprises.
Nevertheless in the belief that it was to become the second great
literary center of America I was resolved to throw myself into the task
of hurrying it forward on the road to new and more resplendent
achievement.
My first formal introduction to the literary and artistic circle in
which I was destined to work and war for many years, took place through
the medium of an address on Impressionism in Art which I delivered in
the library of Franklin Head, a banker whose home had become one of the
best-known intellectual meeting places on the North Side. This lecture,
considered very radical at the time, was the direct outcome of several
years of study and battle in Boston in support of the open-air school of
painting, a school which was astonishing the West with its defiant play
of reds and yellows, and the flame of its purple shadows. As a
missionary in the interest of the New Art, I rejoiced in this
opportunity to advance its inspiring heresies.
While uttering my shocking doctrines (entrenched behind a broad,
book-laden desk), my eyes were attracted to the face of a slender
black-bearded young man whose shining eyes and occasional smiling nod
indicated a joyous agreement with the main points of my harangue. I had
never seen him before, but I at once recognized in him a fellow
conspirator against "The Old Hat" forces of conservatism in painting.
At the close of my lecture he drew near and putting out his hand, said,
"My name is Taft—Lorado Taft. I am a sculptor, but now and again I talk
on painting. Impressionism is all very new here in the West, but like
yourself I am an advocate of it, I am doing my best to popularize a
knowledge of it, and I hope you will call upon me at my studio some
afternoon—any afternoon and discuss these isms with me."
Young Lorado Taft interested me, and I instantly accepted his invitation
to call, and in this way (notwithstanding a wide difference in training
and temperament), a friendship was established which has never been
strained even in the fiercest of our esthetic controversies. Many others
of the men and women I met that night became my co-workers in the
building of the "greater Chicago," which was even then coming into
being—the menace of the hyphenate American had no place in our
thoughts.
In less than a month I fell into a routine as regular, as peaceful, as
that in which I had moved in Boston. Each morning in my quiet sunny room
I wrote, with complete absorption, from seven o'clock until noon,
confidently composing poems, stories, essays, and dramas. I worked like
a painter with several themes in hand passing from one to the other as I
felt inclined. After luncheon I walked down town seeking exercise and
recreation. It soon became my habit to spend an hour or two in Taft's
studio (I fear to his serious detriment), and in this way I soon came to
know most of the "Bunnies" of "the Rabbit-Warren" as Henry B. Fuller
characterized this studio building—and it well deserved the name! Art
was young and timid in Cook County.
Among the women of this group Bessie Potter, who did lovely statuettes
of girls and children, was a notable figure. Edward Kemeys, Oliver
Dennett Grover, Charles Francis Browne, and Hermon MacNeill, all young
artists of high endowment, and marked personal charm became my valued
associates and friends. We were all equally poor and equally confident
of the future. Our doubts were few and transitory as cloud shadows, our
hopes had the wings of eagles.
As Chicago possessed few clubs of any kind and had no common place of
meeting for those who cultivated the fine arts, Taft's studio became,
naturally, our center of esthetic exchange. Painting and sculpture were
not greatly encouraged anywhere in the West, but Lorado and his brave
colleagues, hardy frontiersmen of art, laughed in the face of all
discouragement.
A group of us often lunched in what Taft called "the Beanery"—a noisy,
sloppy little restaurant on Van Buren Street, where our lofty
discussions of Grecian sculpture were punctuated by the crash of
waiter-proof crockery, or smothered with the howl of slid chairs.
However, no one greatly minded these barbarities. They were all a part
of the game. If any of us felt particularly flush we dined, at sixty
cents each, in the basement of a big department store a few doors
further west; and when now and then some good "lay brother" like
Melville Stone, or Franklin Head, invited us to a "royal gorge" at
Kinsley's or to a princely luncheon in the tower room of the Union
League, we went like minstrels to the baron's ball. None of us possessed
evening suits and some of us went so far as to denounce swallowtail
coats as "undemocratic." I was one of these.
This "artistic gang" also contained several writers who kept a little
apart from the journalistic circle of which Eugene Field and Opie Read
were the leaders, and though I passed freely from one of these groups to
the other I acknowledged myself more at ease with Henry Fuller and Taft
and Browne, and a little later I united with them in organizing a
society to fill our need of a common meeting place. This association we
called The Little Room, a name suggested by Madelaine Yale Wynne's
story of an intermittently vanishing chamber in an old New England
homestead.
For a year or two we met in Bessie Potter's studio, and on the theory
that our club, visible and hospitable on Friday afternoon, was
non-existent during all the other days of the week, we called it "the
Little Room." Later still we shifted to Ralph Clarkson's studio in the
Fine Arts Building—where it still flourishes.
The fact is, I was a poor club man. I did not smoke, and never used rum
except as a hair tonic—and beer and tobacco were rather distasteful to
me. I do not boast of this singularity, I merely state it. No doubt I
was considered a dull and profitless companion even in "the Little
Room," but in most of my sobrieties Taft and Browne upheld me, though
they both possessed the redeeming virtue of being amusing, which I, most
certainly, never achieved.
Taft was especially witty in his sly, sidewise comment, and often when
several of us were in hot debate, his sententious or humorous retorts
cut or stung in defence of some esthetic principle much more effectively
than most of my harangues. Sculpture, with him, was a religious faith,
and he defended it manfully and practiced it with skill and an industry
which was astounding.
Though a noble figure and universally admired, he had, like myself, two
very serious defects, he was addicted to frock coats and the habit of
lecturing! Although he did not go so far as to wear a plaid Windsor tie
with his "Prince Albert" coat (as I have been accused of doing), he
displayed something of the professor's zeal in his platform addresses. I
would demur against the plaid Windsor tie indictment if I dared to do
so, but a certain snapshot portrait taken by a South-side photographer
of that day (and still extant) forces me to painful confession—I had
such a tie, and I wore it with a frock coat. My social status is thus
clearly defined.
Taft's studio, which was on the top floor of the Athenæum Building on
Van Buren Street, had a section which he called "the morgue," for the
reason that it was littered with plaster duplicates of busts, arms, and
hands. This room, fitted up with shelf-like bunks, was filled nearly
every night with penniless young sculptors who camped in primitive
simplicity amid the grewsome discarded portraits of Cook County's most
illustrious citizens. Several of these roomers have since become artists
of wide renown, and I refrain from disclosing their names. No doubt they
will smile as they recall those nights amid their landlord's cast-off
handiwork.
Taft was an "easy mark" in those times, a shining hope to all the
indigent models, discouraged painters and other esthetic derelicts of
the Columbian Exposition. No artist suppliant ever knocked at his door
without getting a dollar, and some of them got twenty. For several years
Clarkson and I had him on our minds because of this gentle and yielding
disposition until at last we discovered that in one way or another, in
spite of a reckless prodigality, he prospered. The bread which he
cheerfully cast upon these unknown waters, almost always returned
(sometimes from another direction) in loaves at least as large as
biscuits. His fame steadily increased with his charity. I did not
understand the principle of his manner of life then, and I do not now.
By all the laws of my experience he should at this moment be in the
poorhouse, but he isn't—he is rich and honored and loved.
In sculpture he was, at this time a conservative, a worshiper of the
Greek, and it would seem that I became his counter-irritant, for my
demand for "A native art" kept him wholesomely stirred up. One by one as
the years passed he yielded esthetic positions which at first he most
stoutly held. He conceded that the Modern could not be entirely
expressed by the Ancient, that America might sometime grow to the
dignity of having an art of its own, and that in sculpture (as in
painting and architecture) new problems might arise. Even in his own
work (although he professed but one ideal, the Athenian) he came at last
to include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the
expression of the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell
parallel with his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face,
his best work remained somber, almost tragic in spirit.
Henry B. Fuller, who in The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani had shown
himself to be the finest literary craftsman in the West, became (a
little later) a leader in our group and a keen delight to us all. He was
at this time a small, brown-bearded man of thirty-five, whose quick
humor, keen insight and unfailing interest in all things literary made
him a caustic corrective of the bombast to which our local reviewers
were sadly liable. Although a merciless critic of Chicago, he was a
native of the city, and his comment on its life had to be confronted
with such equanimity as our self-elected social hierarchy could assume.
Elusive if not austere with strangers, Henry's laugh (a musical "ha ha")
was often heard among his friends. His face could be impassive not to
say repellent when approached by those in whom he took no interest, and
there were large numbers of his fellow citizens for whom the author of
Pensieri-Vani had only contempt. Strange to say, he became my most
intimate friend and confidant—antithetic pair!
Eugene Field, his direct opposite, and the most distinguished member of
"the journalistic gang," took very little interest in the doings of "the
Bunnies" and few of them knew him, but I often visited him in his home
on the North Side, and greatly enjoyed his solemn-faced humor. He was a
singular character, as improvident as Lorado but in a far different way.
I recall meeting him one day on the street wearing, as usual, a long,
gray plaid ulster with enormous pockets at the sides. Confronting me
with coldly solemn visage, he thrust his right hand into his pocket and
lifted a heavy brass candlestick to the light. "Look," he said. I
looked. Dropping this he dipped his left hand into the opposite pocket
and displayed another similar piece, then with a faint smile lifting the
corners of his wide, thin-lipped mouth, he gravely boomed, "Brother
Garland—you see before you—a man—who lately—had ten dollars."
Thereupon he went his way, leaving me to wonder whether his wife would
be equally amused with his latest purchase.
His library was filled with all kinds of curious objects—worthless junk
they seemed to me—clocks, snuffers, butterflies, and the like but he
also possessed many autographed books and photographs whose value I
granted. His cottage which was not large, swarmed with growing boys and
noisy dogs; and Mrs. Field, a sweet and patient soul, seemed sadly out
of key with her husband's habit of buying collections of rare moths,
door-knockers, and candle molds with money which should have gone to buy
chairs and carpets or trousers for the boys.
Eugene was one of the first "Colyumists" in the country, and to fill his
"Sharps and Flats" levied pitilessly upon his friends. From time to time
we all figured as subjects for his humorous paragraphs; but each new
victim understood and smiled. For example, in his column I read one
morning these words: "La Crosse, a small city in Wisconsin, famous for
the fact that all its trains back into town, and as the home of Hamlin
Garland."
He was one of the most popular of Western writers, and his home of a
Sunday was usually crowded with visitors, many of whom were actors. I
recall meeting Francis Wilson there—also E. S. Willard and Bram
Stoker—but I do not remember to have seen Fuller there, although,
later, Roswell, Eugene's brother, became Fuller's intimate friend.
George Ade, a thin, pale, bright-eyed young Hoosier, was a frequent
visitor at Field's. George had just begun to make a place for himself as
the author of a column in the News called "Stories of the Street and
of the Town"; and John T. McCutcheon, another Hoosier of the same lean
type was his illustrator. I believed in them both and took a kind of
elder brother interest in their work.
In the companionship of men like Field and Browne and Taft, I was happy.
My writing went well, and if I regretted Boston, I had the pleasant
sense of being so near West Salem that I could go to bed in a train at
ten at night, and breakfast with my mother in the morning, and just to
prove that this was true I ran up to the Homestead at Christmas time and
delivered my presents in person—keenly enjoying the smile of delight
with which my mother received them.
West Salem was like a scene on the stage that day—a setting for a rural
mid-winter drama. The men in their gayly-colored Mackinac jackets, the
sleighbells jingling pleasantly along the lanes, the cottage roofs laden
with snow, and the sidewalks, walled with drifts, were almost arctic in
their suggestion, and yet, my parents in the shelter of the friendly
hills, were at peace. The cold was not being driven against them by the
wind of the plain, and a plentiful supply of food and fuel made their
fireside comfortable and secure.
During this vacation I seized the opportunity to go a little farther and
spend a few days in the Pineries which I had never seen. Out of this
experience I gained some beautiful pictures of the snowy forest, and a
suggestion for a story or two. A few days later, on a commission from
McClure's, I was in Pittsburg writing an article on "Homestead and Its
Perilous Trades," and the clouds of smoke, the flaming chimneys, the
clang of steel, the roar of blast-furnaces and the thunder of monstrous
steel rollers made Wisconsin lumber camps idyllic. The serene white
peace of West Salem set Pittsburg apart as a sulphurous hell and my
description of it became a passionate indictment of an industrial system
which could so work and so house its men. The grimy hovels in which the
toilers lived made my own homestead a poem. More than ever convinced
that our social order was unjust and impermanent, I sent in my "story,"
in some doubt about its being accepted. It was printed with
illustrations by Orson Lowell and was widely quoted at the time.
Soon after this I made a trip to Memphis, thus gaining my first
impression of the South. Like most northern visitors, I was immediately
and intensely absorbed in the negroes. Their singing entranced me, and
my hosts, Mr. and Mrs. Judah, hired a trio of black minstrels to come in
and perform for me. Their songs so moved me, and I became so interested
in one old negro's curious chants that I fairly wore them out with
demands for their most characteristic spirituals. Some of the hymns were
of such sacred character that one of the men would not sing them. "I
ain't got no right to sing dem songs," he said.
In Atlanta I met Joel Chandler Harris, who had done so much to portray
the negro's inner kindliness, as well as his singularly poetic outlook.
Harris was one of the editors of the Atlanta Constitution, and there I
found him in a bare, prosaic office, a short, shy, red-haired man whom I
liked at once. Two nights later I was dining with James A. Herne and
William Dean Howells in New York City, and the day following I read some
of my verses for the Nineteenth Century Club. At the end of March I was
again at my desk in Chicago.
These sudden changes of scene, these dramatic meetings, so typical of my
life for many years, took away all sense of drudgery, all routine
weariness. Seldom remaining in any one place long enough to become bored
I had little chance to bore others. Literary clubs welcomed my readings
and lectures; and, being vigorous and of good digestion, I accepted
travel as a diversion as well as a business. As a student of American
life, I was resolved to know every phase of it.
Among my pleasant jobs I recall the putting into shape of a "Real
Conversation" with James Whitcomb Riley, the material for which had been
gained in a visit to Greenfield, Riley's native town, during August of
the previous year.
My first meeting with Riley had been in Boston at a time when I was a
penniless student and he the shining, highly-paid lecturer; and I still
suffered a feeling of wonder that a poet—any poet—could demand such
pay. I did not resent it—I only marveled at it—for in our conversation
he had made his philosophy plain.
"Tell of the things just like they was, they don't need no excuse," one
of his characters said. "Don't tech 'em up as the poets does till
they're all too fine fer use," and in his talk with me Riley quaintly
added, "Nature is good enough for God, it's good enough for me."
In this article which I wrote for McClure's, I made comment on the
essential mystery of the poet's art, a conjury which is able to
transmute a perfectly commonplace landscape into something fine and
mellow and sweet; for the region in which Riley spent his youth, and
from which he derived most of his later material, was to me a depressing
land, a country without a hill, a river or a lake; a commonplace
country, flat, unkempt and without a line of beauty, and yet from these
rude fields and simple gardens the singer had drawn the sweetest honey
of song, song with a tang in it, like the odor of ripe buckwheat and the
taste of frost-bit persimmons. It reinforced my resolution that the
mid-land was about to blossom into art.
In travel and in work such as this and in pleasant intercourse with the
painters, sculptors, and writers of Chicago my first winter in the
desolate, drab, and tumultuous city passed swiftly and on the whole
profitably, I no longer looked backward to Boston, but as the first warm
spring-winds began to blow, my thoughts turned towards my newly-acquired
homestead and the old mother who was awaiting me there.
Eager to start certain improvements which should tend to make the house
more nearly the kind of dwelling place I had promised myself it should
become, hungry for the soil, rejoicing in the thought of once more
planting and building, I took the train for the North with all my summer
ward-robe and most of my manuscripts, with no intention of reëntering
the city till October at the earliest.
CHAPTER TWO
I Return to the Saddle
To pass from the crowds, the smoke and the iron clangor of Chicago into
the clear April air of West Salem was a celestial change for me. For
many years the clock of my seasons had been stilled. The coming of the
birds, the budding of the leaves, the serial blossoming of spring had
not touched me, and as I walked up the street that exquisite morning, a
reminiscent ecstasy filled my heart. The laughter of the robins, the
shrill ki-ki-ki of the golden-wing woodpeckers, and the wistful whistle
of the lark, brought back my youth, my happiest youth, and when my
mother met me at the door it seemed that all my cares and all my years
of city life had fallen from me.
"Well, here I am!" I called, "ready for the spring's work."
With a silent laugh, as preface, she replied, "You'll get a-plenty. Your
father is all packed, impatient to leave for Ordway."
The old soldier, who came in from the barn a few moments later,
confirmed this. "I'm no truck farmer," he explained with humorous
contempt. "I turn this onion patch over to you. It's no place for me. In
two days I'll be broad-casting wheat on a thousand-acre farm. That's my
size"—a fact which I admitted.
As we sat at breakfast he went on to say that he found Wisconsin
woefully unprogressive. "These fellows back here are all stuck in the
mud. They've got to wake up to the reform movements. I'll be glad to
get back to Dakota where people are alive."
With the spirit of the seed-sower swelling within him he took the noon
train, handing over to me the management of the Homestead.
An hour later mother and I went out to inspect the garden and to plan
the seeding. The pie-plant leaves were unfolding and slender asparagus
spears were pointing from the mold. The smell of burning leaves brought
back to us both, with magic power, memories of the other springs and
other plantings on the plain. It was glorious, it was medicinal!
"This is the life!" I exultantly proclaimed. "Work is just what I need.
I shall set to it at once. Aren't you glad you are here in this lovely
valley and not out on the bleak Dakota plain?"
Mother's face sobered. "Yes, I like it here—it seems more like home
than any other place—and yet I miss the prairie and my Ordway friends."
As I went about the village I came to a partial understanding of her
feeling. The small dark shops, the uneven sidewalks, the rickety wooden
awnings were closely in character with the easy-going citizens who moved
leisurely and contentedly about their small affairs. It came to me (with
a sense of amusement) that these coatless shopkeepers who dealt out
sugar and kerosene while wearing their derby hats on the backs of their
heads, were not only my neighbors, but members of the Board of
Education. Though still primitive to my city eyes, they no longer
appeared remote. Something in their names and voices touched me nearly.
They were American. Their militant social democracy was at once comical
and corrective.
O, the peace, the sweetness of those days! To be awakened by the valiant
challenge of early-rising roosters; to hear the chuckle of dawn-light
worm-hunting robins brought a return of boy-hood's exultation. Not only
did my muscles harden to the spade and the hoe, my soul rejoiced in a
new and delightful sense of establishment. I had returned to
citizenship. I was a proprietor. The clock of the seasons had resumed
its beat.
Hiring a gardener, I bought a hand-book on Horticulture and announced my
intent to make those four fat acres feed my little flock. I was now a
land enthusiast. My feet laid hold upon the earth. I almost took root!
With what secret satisfaction I planned to widen the front porch and
build a two-story bay-window on the north end of the sitting room—an
enterprise of such audacity that I kept it strictly to myself! It meant
the extravagant outlay of nearly two hundred dollars—but above and
beyond that, it involved cutting a hole in the wall and cluttering up
the yard; therefore I thought it best to keep my plot hidden from my
mother till mid-summer gave more leisure to us all.
My notebook of that spring is crowded with descriptions, almost lyrical,
of the glory of sunsets and the beauty of bird-song and budding
trees—even the loud-voiced, cheerful democracy of the village was
grateful to me.
"Yesterday I was deep in the tumult of Chicago," runs the entry,
"to-day, I am hoeing in my sun-lit garden, hearing the mourning-dove coo
and the cat-birds cry. Last night as the sun went down the hill-tops to
the west became vividly purple with a subtle illusive deep-crimson glow
beneath, while the sky above their tops, a saffron dome rose almost to
the zenith. These mystical things are here joined: The trill of
black-birds near at hand, the cackle of barn-yard fowls, the sound of
hammers, a plowman talking to his team, the pungent smoke of burning
leaves, the cool, sweet, spring wind and the glowing down-pouring
sunshine—all marvelous and satisfying to me and mine. This is home!"
On the twelfth of April, however, a most dramatic reversal to winter
took place. "The day remained beautifully springlike till about two
o'clock when a gray haze came rushing downward from the north-west. Big
black clouds developed with portentous rapidity. Thunder arose, and an
icy wind, furious and swift as a tornado roared among the trees. The
rain, chilled almost into hail, drummed on the shingles. The birds fell
silent, the hens scurried to shelter. In ten minutes the cutting blast
died out. A dead calm succeeded. Then out burst the sun, flooding the
land with laughter! The black-birds resumed their piping, the fowls
ventured forth, and the whole valley again lay beaming and blossoming
under a perfect sky."
The following night I was in the city watching a noble performance of
"Tristan and Isolde!"
I took enormous satisfaction in the fact that I could plant peas in my
garden till noon and hear a concert in Chicago on the same day. The
arrangement seemed ideal.
On May 9th I was again at home, "the first whippoorwill sang
to-night—trees are in full leaf," I note.
In a big square room in the eastern end of the house, I set up a
handmade walnut desk which I had found in LaCrosse, and on this I began
to write in the inspiration of morning sun-shine and bird-song. For four
hours I bent above my pen, and each afternoon I sturdily flourished
spade and hoe, while mother hobbled about with cane in hand to see that
I did it right. "You need watching," she laughingly said.
With a cook and a housemaid, a man to work the garden, and a horse to
plow out my corn and potatoes, I began to wear the composed dignity of
an earl. I pruned trees, shifted flower beds and established berry
patches with the large-handed authority of a southern planter. It was
comical, it was delightful!
To eat home-cooked meals after years of dreadful restaurants gave me
especial satisfaction, but alas! there was a flaw in my lute. We had to
eat in our living room; and when I said "Mother, one of these days I'm
going to move the kitchen to the south and build a real sure-enough
dining room in between," she turned upon me with startled gaze.
"You'd better think a long time about that," she warningly replied.
"We're perfectly comfortable the way we are."
"Comfortable? Yes, but we must begin to think of being luxurious.
There's nothing too good for you, mother."
Early in July my brother Franklin joined me in the garden work, and then
my mother's cup of contentment fairly overflowed its brim. So far as we
knew she had no care, no regret. Day by day she sat in an easy chair
under the trees, watching us as we played ball on the lawn, or cut weeds
in the garden; and each time we looked at her, we both acknowledged a
profound sense of satisfaction, of relief. Never again would she burn in
the suns of the arid plains, or cower before the winds of a desolate
winter. She was secure. "You need never work again," I assured her. "You
can get up when you please and go to bed when you please. Your only job
is to sit in the shade and boss the rest of us," and to this she
answered only with a silent, characteristic chuckle of delight.
"The Junior," as I called my brother, enjoyed the homestead quite as
much as I. Together we painted the porch, picked berries, hoed potatoes,
and trimmed trees. Everything we did, everything we saw, recovered for
us some part of our distant boyhood. The noble lines of the hills to the
west, the weeds of the road-side, the dusty weather-beaten,
covered-bridges, the workmen in the fields, the voices of our neighbors,
the gossip of the village—all these sights and sounds awakened
deep-laid, associated tender memories. The cadence of every song, the
quality of every resounding jest made us at home, once and for all. Our
twenty-five-year stay on the level lands of Iowa and Dakota seemed only
an unsuccessful family exploration—our life in the city merely a
business, winter adventure.
To visit among the farmers—to help at haying or harvesting, brought
back minute touches of the olden, wondrous prairie world. We went
swimming in the river just as we used to do when lads, rejoicing in the
caress of the wind, the sting of the cool water, and on such expeditions
we often thought of Burton and others of our play-mates faraway, and of
Uncle David, in his California exile. "I wish he, too, could enjoy this
sweet and tranquil world," I said, and in this desire my brother joined.
We wore the rudest and simplest clothing, and hoed (when we hoed) with
furious strokes; but as the sun grew hot we usually fled to the shade of
the great maples which filled the back yard, and there, at ease,
recounted the fierce toil of the Iowa harvest fields, recalling the
names of the men who shared it with us,—and so, while all around us
green things valorously expanded, and ripening apples turned to scarlet
and gold in their coverts of green, we burrowed deep in the soil like
the badger which is the symbol of our native state.
After so many years of bleak and treeless farm-lands, it seemed that our
mother could not get enough of the luxuriant foliage, the bloom and the
odorous sweetness of this lovely valley. Hour by hour, day by day, she
sat on the porch, or out under the trees, watching the cloud shadows
slide across the hills, hearing the whistle of the orioles and the love
songs of the cat-bird, happy in the realization that both her sons
were, at last, within the sound of her voice. She had but one
unsatisfied desire (a desire which she shyly reiterated), and that was
her longing for a daughter, but neither Frank nor I, at the moment, had
any well-defined hope of being able to fulfill that demand.
My life had not been one to bring about intimate relationships with
women. I had been too poor and too busy in Boston to form any
connections other than just good friendships, and even now, my means
would not permit a definite thought of marriage. "Where can I keep a
wife? My two little rooms in Chicago are all the urban home I can
afford, and to bring a daughter of the city to live in West Salem would
be dangerous." Nevertheless, I promised mother that on my return to
Chicago, I would look around and see what I could find.
For three months—that is to say during May, June and July, I remained
concerned with potato bugs, currant worms, purslane and other important
garden concerns, but in August I started on a tour which had
far-reaching effects.
Though still at work upon Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, I was beginning to
meditate on themes connected with Colorado, and as the heat of July
intensified in the low country, I fell to dreaming of the swift mountain
streams whose bright waters I had seen in a previous trip, and so
despite all my protestations, I found myself in Colorado Springs one
August day, a guest of Louis Ehrich, a New Yorker and fellow reformer,
in exile for his health. It was at his table that I met Professor
Fernow, chief of the National Bureau of Forestry, who was in the west on
a tour of the Federal Forests, and full of enthusiasm for his science.
His talk interested me enormously. I forecast, dimly, something of the
elemental change which scientific control was about to bring into the
mountain west, and when (sensing my genuine interest) he said "Why not
accompany me on my round?" I accepted instantly, and my good friends,
the Ehrichs out-fitted me for the enterprise.
We left next day for Glenwood Springs, at which point Fernow hired
horses and a guide who knew the streams and camps of the White River
Plateau, and early on the second morning we set out on a trail which, in
a literary sense, carried me a long way and into a new world. From the
plain I ascended to the peaks. From the barbed-wire lanes of Iowa and
Kansas I entered the thread-like paths of the cliffs, and (most
important of all) I returned to the saddle. I became once more the
horseman in a region of horsemen.
For the first time in nearly twenty years I swung to the saddle, and by
that act recovered a power and a joy which only verse could express. I
found myself among men of such endurance and hardihood that I was
ashamed to complain of my aching bones and overstrained muscles—men to
whom dark nights, precipitous trails, noxious insects, mud and storms
were all "a part of the game."
In those few days I absorbed the essential outlines of a new world. My
note-book of the time is proof of it—and "The Prairie in the Sky,"
which was the title of the article I wrote for Harper's Weekly, is
further evidence of it. How beautiful it all was! As I look back upon it
I see green parks lit with larkspur and painter's brush. I taste the
marvelous freshness of the air. The ptarmigan scuttles away among the
rocks, the marmot whistles, the conies utter their slender wistful
cries.
That trail led me back to the hunter's cabin, to the miner's shack on
whose rough-hewn walls the fire-light flickered in a kind of silent
music. It set me once again in the atmosphere of daring and filled me
with the spirit of pioneer adventure.
In a physical sense I ended my exploration ten days later, but in
imagination I continued to ride "The High Country." I had entered a
fresh scene—discovered a new enthusiasm.
By this I do not mean to imply that I at once set about the composition
of a Wild West novel, but for those who may be interested in the
literary side of this chronicle, I will admit that this splendid trip
into high Colorado, marks the beginning of my career as a fictionist of
the Mountain West.
Thereafter neither the coulee country nor the prairie served exclusively
as material for my books. From the plains, which were becoming each year
more crowded, more prosaic, I fled in imagination as in fact to the
looming silver-and-purple summits of the Continental Divide, while in my
mind an ambition to embody, as no one at that time had done, the spirit
and the purpose of the Rocky Mountain trailer was vaguely forming in my
mind. To my home in Wisconsin I carried back a fragment of rock, whose
gray mass, beautifully touched with gold and amber and orange-colored
lichens formed a part of the narrow causeway which divides the White
River from the Bear. It was a talisman of the land whose rushing waters,
majestic forests and exquisite Alpine meadows I desired to hold in
memory, and with this stone on my desk I wrote. It aided me in recalling
the scenes and the characters I had so keenly admired.
* * * * * *
In calling upon Lorado one afternoon soon after my return to Chicago I
was surprised and a little disconcerted to find two strange young ladies
making themselves very much at home in his studio. In greeting me he
remarked in a mood of sly mischief, "You will not approve of these
girls—they are on their way to Paris to study sculpture, but I want
you to know them. They are Janet Scudder and my sister Zulime."
Up to this time, notwithstanding our growing friendship, I was not aware
that he had a sister, but I greeted Miss Taft with something like
fraternal interest. She was a handsome rather pale girl with fine,
serious gray-blue eyes, and a composed and graceful manner. Her profile
was particularly good and as she was not greatly interested in looking
at me I had an excellent chance to study her.
Lorado explained "My sister has been in Kansas visiting mother and
father and is now on her way to New York to take a steamer for
France.... She intends to remain abroad for two years," he added.
Knowing that I was at that moment in the midst of writing a series of
essays on The National Spirit in American Art, he expected this to
draw my fire—and it did. "Why go abroad," I demanded bluntly. "Why not
stay right here and study modeling with your brother? Paris is no place
for an American artist."
With an amused glance at her friend, Miss Scudder, Miss Taft replied in
a tone of tolerant contempt for my ignorance, "One doesn't get very far
in art without Paris."
Somewhat nettled by her calm inflection and her supercilious glance I
hotly retorted, "Nonsense! You can acquire all the technic you require,
right here in Chicago. If you are in earnest, and are really in search
of instruction you can certainly get it in Boston or New York. Stay in
your own country whatever you do. This sending students at their most
impressionable age to the Old World to absorb Old World conventions and
prejudices is all wrong. It makes of them something which is neither
American nor European. Suppose France did that? No nation has an art
worth speaking of unless it has a national spirit."
Of course this is only a brief report of my harangue which might just
as well have remained unspoken, so far as Miss Taft was concerned, and
when her brother came to her aid I retired worsted. The two pilgrims
went their way leaving me to hammer Lorado at my leisure.
I wish I could truthfully say that this brief meeting with Zulime Taft
filled me with a deep desire to see her again but I cannot do so. On the
contrary, my recollection is that I considered her a coldly-haughty
young person running away from her native land, not to study art but to
have a pleasant time in Paris—while she (no doubt) regarded me as a
rude, forth-putting anarch—which I was. At this point our acquaintance
and our controversy rested.
As the months and years passed I heard of her only through some
incidental remark of her brother. Having no slightest premonition of the
part she was to play in my after life, I made no inquiries concerning
her. She, however, followed me—as I afterward learned, by means of my
essays and stories in the magazines but remained quite uninterested (so
far as I know) in the personality of their author.
CHAPTER THREE
In the Footsteps of General Grant
Among the new esthetic and literary enterprises which the Exposition had
brought to Chicago was the high-spirited publishing firm of Stone and
Kimball, which started out valiantly in the spring of '94. The head of
the house, a youth just out of Harvard, was Herbert Stone, son of my
friend Melville Stone, manager of the Associated Press. Kimball was
Herbert's classmate.
Almost before he had opened his office, Herbert came to me to get a
manuscript. "Eugene Field has given us one," he urged, "and we want one
from you. We are starting a real publishing house in Chicago and we need
your support."
There was no resisting such an appeal. Having cast in my lot with
Chicago, it was inevitable that I should ally myself with its newest
literary enterprise, a business which expressed something of my faith in
the west. Not only did I turn over to Stone the rights to Main Traveled
Roads, together with a volume of verse—I promised him a book of
essays—and a novel.
These aspiring young collegians were joined in '95 by another Harvard
man, a tall, dark, smooth-faced youth named Harrison Rhodes, and when,
of an afternoon these three missionaries of culture each in a long frock
coat, tightly buttoned, with cane, gloves and shining silk hats, paced
side by side down the Lake Shore Drive they had the effect of an
esthetic invasion, but their crowning audacity was a printed circular
which announced that tea would be served in their office in the Caxton
Building on Saturday afternoons! Finally as if to convince the city of
their utter madness, this intrepid trio adventured the founding of a
literary magazine to be called The Chap Book! Culture on the Middle
Border had at last begun to hum!
Despite the smiles of elderly scoffers, the larger number of my esthetic
associates felt deeply grateful to these devoted literary pioneers,
whose taste, enterprise and humor were all sorely needed "in our midst."
If not precisely cosmopolitan they were at least in touch with London.
Early in '94 they brought out a lovely edition of Main Traveled Roads
and a new book called Prairie Songs. Neither of these volumes
sold—the firm had no special facilities for selling books, but their
print and binding delighted me, and in the autumn of the same year I
gladly let them publish a collection of essays called Crumbling Idols,
a small screed which aroused an astonishing tumult of comment, mostly
antagonistic. Walter Page, editor of the Forum, in which one of the
key-note chapters appeared, told me that over a thousand editorials were
written upon my main thesis.
In truth the attention which this iconoclastic declaration of faith
received at the hands of critics was out of all proportion to its size.
Its explosive power was amazing. As I read it over now, with the clamor
of "Cubism," "Imagism" and "Futurism" in my ears, it seems a harmless
and on the whole rather reasonable plea for National Spirit and the
freedom of youth, but in those days all of my books had mysterious power
for arousing opposition, and most reviews of my work were so savage that
I made a point of not reading them for the reason that they either
embittered me, or were so lacking in discrimination as to have no value.
In spite of all appearances to the contrary, I hated contention,
therefore I left consideration of these assaults entirely to my
publishers. (I learned afterwards that Miss Taft was greatly interested
in Crumbling Idols. Perhaps she assumed that I was writing at her.)
Meanwhile in Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, the manuscript of which I had
carried about with me on many of my lecturing trips, I was attempting to
embody something of Chicago life, a task which I found rather difficult.
After nine years of life in Boston, the city by the lake seemed
depressingly drab and bleak, and my only hope lay in representing it not
as I saw it, but as it appeared to my Wisconsin heroine who came to it
from Madison and who perceived in it the mystery and the beauty which I
had lost. To Rose, fresh from the farm, it was a great capital, and the
lake a majestic sea. As in A Spoil of Office, I had tried to maintain
the point of view of a countryman, so now I attempted to embody in Rose
of Dutcher's Coolly, a picture of Chicago as an ambitious young girl
from the Wisconsin farm would see it.
In my story Rose Dutcher made her way from Bluff Siding to the State
University, and from Madison to a fellowship in the artistic and
literary Chicago, of which I was a part. Her progress was intended to be
typical. I said, "I will depict the life of a girl who has ambitious
desires, and works toward her goal as blindly and as determinedly as a
boy." It was a new thesis so far as Western girls were concerned, and I
worked long and carefully on the problem, carrying the manuscript back
and forth with me for two years.
As spring came on, I again put "Rose" in my trunk and hastened back to
West Salem in order to build the two-story bay-window which I had
minutely planned, which was, indeed, almost as important as my
story and much more exciting. To begin the foundation of that
extension was like setting in motion the siege of a city! It was
extravagant—reckless—nevertheless assisted by a neighbor who was
clever at any kind of building, I set to work in boyish, illogical
enthusiasm.
Mother watched us tear out and rebuild with uneasy glance but when the
windows were in and a new carpet with an entire "parlor suite" to match,
arrived from the city, her alarm became vocal. "You mustn't spend your
money for things like these. We can't afford such luxuries."
"Don't you worry about my money," I replied, "There's more where I found
this. There's nothing too good for you, mother."
How sweet and sane and peaceful and afar off those blessed days seem to
me as I muse over this page. At the village shops sirloin steak was ten
cents a pound, chickens fifty cents a pair and as for eggs—I couldn't
give ours away, at least in the early summer,—and all about us were
gardens laden with fruit and vegetables, more than we could eat or sell
or feed to the pigs. Wars were all in the past and life a simple matter
of working out one's own individual problems. Never again shall I feel
that confidence in the future, that joy in the present. I had no
doubts—none that I can recall.
My brother came again in June and joyfully aided me in my esthetic
pioneering. We amazed the town by seeding down a potato patch and laying
out a tennis court thereon, the first play-ground of its kind in
Hamilton township, and often as we played of an afternoon, farmers on
their way to market with loads of grain or hogs, paused to watch our
game and make audible comment on our folly. We also bought a lawn-mower,
the second in the town, and shaved our front yard. We took down the old
picket fence in front of the house and we planted trees and flowers,
until at last some of the elderly folk disgustedly exclaimed, "What
won't them Garland boys do next!"
Without doubt we "started something" in the sleepy village. Others
following our example went so far as to take down their own fences and
to buy lawn-mowers. That we were planning waterworks and a bath-room
remained a secret—this was too revolutionary to be spoken of for the
present. We were forced to make progress slowly.
Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, published during this year, was attacked
quite as savagely as Main Traveled Roads had been, and this criticism
saddened and depressed me. With a foolish notion that the Middle West
should take a moderate degree of pride in me, I resented this
condemnation. "Am I not making in my small way the same sort of
historical record of the west that Whittier and Holmes secured for New
England?" I asked my friends. "Am I not worthy of an occasional friendly
word, a message of encouragement?"
Of course I should have risen superior to these local misjudgments, and
in fact I did keep to my work although only a faint voice here and there
was raised in my defence. Even after Rose had been introduced to
London by William Stead, and Henry James and Israel Zangwill and James
Barrie had all written in praise of her, the editors of the western
papers still maintained a consistently militant attitude. Perhaps I
should have taken comfort from the fact that they considered me worth
assaulting, but that kind of comfort is rather bleak at its best,
especially when the sales of your book are so small as to be
confirmatory of the critic.
Without doubt this persistent antagonism, this almost universal
depreciation of my stories of the plains had something to do with
intensifying the joy with which I returned to the mountain world and
its heroic types, at any rate I spent July and August of that year in
Colorado and New Mexico, making many observations, which turned out to
have incalculable value to me in later days. From a roundup in the
Current Creek country I sauntered down through Salida, Ouray, Telluride,
Durango and the Ute Reservation, a circuit which filled my mind with
noble suggestions for stories and poems, a tour which profoundly
influenced my life as well as my writing.
The little morocco-covered notebook in which I set down some of my
impressions is before me as I write. It still vibrates with the ecstasy
of that enthusiasm. Sentences like these are frequent. "From the dry hot
plains, across the blazing purple of the mesa's edge, I look away to
where the white clouds soar in majesty above the serrate crest of
Uncomphagre. Oh, the splendor and mystery of those cloud-hid regions!...
A coyote, brown and dry and hot as any tuft of desert grass drifts
by.... Into the coolness and sweetness and cloud-glory of this marvelous
land.... Gorgeous shadows are in motion on White House Peak.... Along
the trail as though walking a taut wire, a caravan of burros streams,
driven by a wide-hatted graceful horseman.... Twelve thousand feet! I am
brother to the eagles now! The matchless streams, the vivid
orange-colored meadows. The deep surf-like roar of the firs, the wailing
sigh of the wind in the grass—a passionate longing wind." Such are my
jottings.
In these pages I can now detect the beginnings of a dozen of my stories,
a score of my poems. No other of my trips was ever so inspirational.
Not content with the wonders of Colorado I drifted down to Santa Fé and
Isleta, with Charles Francis Browne and Hermon MacNeill, and got finally
to Holbrook, where we outfitted and rode away across the desert, bound
for the Snake Dance at Walpi. It would seem that we had decided to
share all there was of romance in the South West. They were as insatiate
as I.
For a week we lived on the mesa at Walpi in the house of Heli. Aided by
Dr. Fewkes of Washington, we saw most of the phases of the snake
ceremonies. The doctor and his own men were camped at the foot of the
mesa, making a special study of the Hopi and their history. Remote,
incredibly remote it all seemed even at that time, and some of that
charm I put into an account of it which Harper's published—one of the
earliest popular accounts of the Snake Dance.
One night as I was standing on the edge of the cliff looking out over
the sand to the west, I saw a train of pack horses moving toward Walpi
like a jointed, canvas-colored worm. It was the outfit of another party
of "tourists" coming to the dance, and half an hour later a tall, lean,
brown and smiling man of middle life rode up the eastern trail at the
head of his train.
Greeting me pleasantly he asked, "Has the ceremony begun?"
"The snakes are in process of being gathered," I replied, "but you are
in time for the most interesting part of the festival."
In response to a question he explained, "I've been studying the
Cliff-Dwellings of the Mesa Verde. My name is Pruden. I am from New
York."
It was evident that "The Doctor" (as his guides called him) was not only
a man of wide experience on the trail, but a scientist as well, and I
found him most congenial.
We spent the evening together, and together we witnessed the mysterious
snake dance which the natives of Walpi give every other year—a ceremony
so incredibly primitive that it carried me back into the stone age, and
three days later (leaving Browne and MacNeill to paint and sculpture the
Hopi) we went to Zuni and Acoma and at last to the Grand Cañon of the
Colorado, a trip which laid upon my mind a thousand glorious impressions
of the desert and its life. It was so beautiful, so marvelous that sand
and flies and hunger and thirst were forgotten.
Aside from its esthetic delight, this summer turned out to be the most
profitable season of my whole career. It marks a complete 'bout face in
my march. Coming just after Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, it dates the
close of my prairie tales and the beginning of a long series of mountain
stories. Cripple Creek and the Current Creek country suggested The
Eagle's Heart, Witches' Gold, Money Magic, and a dozen shorter
romances. In truth every page of my work thereafter was colored by the
experiences of this glorious savage splendid summer.
The reasons are easy to define. All my emotional relationships with the
"High Country" were pleasant, my sense of responsibility was less keen,
hence the notes of resentment, of opposition to unjust social conditions
which had made my other books an offense to my readers were almost
entirely absent in my studies of the mountaineers. My pity was less
challenged in their case. Lonely as their lives were, it was not a
sordid loneliness. The cattle rancher was at least not a drudge.
Careless, slovenly and wasteful as I knew him to be, he was not mean. He
had something of the Centaur in his bearing. Marvelous horsemanship
dignified his lean figure and lent a notable grace to his gestures. His
speech was picturesque and his observations covered a wide area.
Self-reliant, fearless, instant of action in emergency, his character
appealed to me with ever-increasing power.
I will not say that I consciously and deliberately cut myself off from
my prairie material, the desertion came about naturally. Swiftly,
inevitably, the unplowed valleys, the waterless foothills and the high
peaks, inspired me, filled me with desire to embody them in some form of
prose, of verse.
Laden with a myriad impressions of Indians, mountaineers and miners, I
returned to my home as a bee to its hive, and there, during October, in
my quiet chamber worked fast and fervently to transform my rough notes
into fiction. Making no attempt to depict the West as some one else had
seen it, or might thereafter see it, I wrote of it precisely as it
appeared to me, verifying every experience, for, although I had not
lingered long in any one place—a few weeks at most—I had observed
closely and my impressions were clearly and deeply graved.
In fear of losing that freshness of delight, that emotion which gave me
inspiration, I had made copious notes while in the field and although I
seldom referred to them after I reached my desk, the very act of putting
them down had helped to organize and fix them in my mind.
All of September and October was spent at the Homestead. Each morning I
worked at my writing, and in the afternoon I drove my mother about the
country or wrought some improvement to the place.
In the midst of these new literary enthusiasms I received a message
which had a most disturbing effect on my plans. It was a letter from Sam
McClure whose new little magazine was beginning to show astonishing
vitality. "I want you to write for me a life of Ulysses Grant. I want it
to follow Ida Tarbell's Lincoln which is now nearing an end. Come to
New York and talk it over."
This request arrested me in my fictional progress. I was tempted to
accept this commission, not merely because of the editor's generous
terms of payment but for the deeper reason that Grant was a word of
epic significance in my mind. From the time when I was three years of
age, this great name had rung in my ears like the sound of a mellow
bell. I knew I could write Grant's story—but—I hesitated.
"It is a mighty theme," I replied, "and yet I am not sure that I ought
to give so much of my time at this, the most creative period of my life.
It may change the whole current of my imagination."
My father, whose attitude toward the great Commander held much of
hero-worship and who had influenced my childish thinking, influenced me
now, but aside from his instruction I had come to consider Grant's
career more marvelous than that of any other American both by reason of
its wide arc of experience and its violent dramatic contrasts. It lent
itself to epic treatment. With a feeling that if I could put this deeply
significant and distinctively American story into a readable volume, I
should be adding something to American literature as well as to my own
life, I consented. Dropping my fictional plans for the time I became the
historian.
In order to make the biography a study from first-hand material I
planned a series of inspirational trips which filled in a large part of
'96. Beginning at Georgetown, Ohio, where I found several of Grant's
boyhood playmates, I visited Ripley, where he went to school, and then
at the Academy at West Point I spent several days examining the records.
In addition, I went to each of the barracks at which young Grant had
been stationed. Sacketts Harbor, Detroit and St. Louis yielded their
traditions. A month in Mexico enabled me to trace out on foot not only
the battle grounds of Monterey, but that of Vera Cruz, Puebla and Molina
del Rey. No spot on which Grant had lived long enough to leave a
definite impression was neglected. In this work I had the support of
William Dean Howells who insisted on my doing the book bravely.
In pursuit of material concerning Grant's later life I interviewed
scores of his old neighbors in Springfield and Galena, and in pursuit of
his classmates, men like Buckner and Longstreet and Wright and Franklin,
I took long journeys. In short I spared no pains to give my material a
first-hand quality, and in doing this I traveled nearly thirty thousand
miles, making many interesting acquaintances, in more than half the
states of the Union.
During all these activities, however, the old Wisconsin farmhouse
remained my pivot. In my intervals of rest I returned to my study and
made notes of the vividly contrasting scenes through which I had passed.
Orizaba and Jalapa, Perote with its snowy mountains rising above hot,
cactus-covered plains, and Mexico City became almost dream-like by
contrast with the placid beauty of Neshonoc. Some of my experiences,
like "the Passion Play at Coyocan," for example, took on a medieval
quality, so incredibly remote was its scene,—and yet, despite all this
travel, notwithstanding my study of cities and soldiers and battle maps,
I could not forget to lay out my garden. I kept my mother supplied with
all the necessaries and a few of the luxuries of life.
In my note book of that time I find these lines: "I have a feeling of
swift change in art and literature here in America. This latest trip to
New York has shocked and saddened me. To watch the struggle, to feel the
bitterness and intolerance of the various groups—to find one clique of
artists set against another, to know that most of those who come here
will fail and die—is appalling. The City is filled with strugglers,
students of art, ambitious poets, journalists, novelists, writers of all
kinds—I meet them at the clubs—some of them will be the large figures
of 1900, most of them will have fallen under the wheel—This bitter war
of Realists and Romanticists will be the jest of those who come after
us, and they in their turn will be full of battle ardor with other cries
and other banners. How is it possible to make much account of the cries
and banners of to-day when I know they will be forgotten of all but the
students of literary history?"
My contract with McClure's called for an advance of fifty dollars a
week (more money than I had ever hoped to earn) and with this in
prospect I purchased a new set of dinner china and a piano, which filled
my mother's heart with delight. As I thought of her living long weeks in
the old homestead with only my invalid aunt for company my conscience
troubled me, and as it was necessary for me to go to Washington to
complete my history, I attempted to mitigate her loneliness by buying a
talking machine, through which I was able send her messages and songs.
She considered these wax cylinders a poor substitute for my actual
voice, but she got some entertainment from them by setting the machine
going for the amazement of her callers.
November saw me settled in Washington, hard at work on my history, but
all the time my mind was working, almost unconsciously, on my new
fictional problems, "After all, I am a novelist," I wrote to Fuller, and
I found time even in the midst of my historical study to compose an
occasional short story of Colorado or Mexico.
Magazine editors were entirely hospitable to me now, for my tales of the
Indian and the miner had created a friendlier spirit among their
readers. My later themes were, happily, quite outside the controversial
belt. Concerned less with the hopeless drudgery, and more with the epic
side of western life, I found myself almost popular. My critics, once
off their guard, were able to praise, cautiously it is true, but to
praise. Some of them assured me with paternal gravity that I might, by
following their suggestions become a happy and moderately successful
writer, and this prosperity, you may be sure, was reflected to some
degree in the dining room of the old Homestead.
My father, though glad of the shelter of the Wisconsin hills in winter,
was too vigorous,—far too vigorous—to be confined to the limits of a
four-acre garden patch, and when I urged him to join me in buying one of
the fine level farms in our valley he agreed, but added "I must sell my
Dakota land first."
With this I was forced to be content. Though sixty years old he still
steered the six-horse header in harvest time, tireless and unsubdued.
Times were improving slowly, very slowly in Dakota but opportunities for
selling his land were still remote. He was not willing to make the
necessary sacrifices. "I will not give it away," he grimly declared.
My return to the Homestead during the winter holidays brought many
unforgettable experiences. Memories of those winter mornings come back
to me—sunrises with steel-blue shadows lying along the drifts, whilst
every weed, every shrub, feathered with frost, is lit with subtlest fire
and the hills rise out of the mist, domes of brilliant-blue and burning
silver. Splashes of red-gold fill all the fields, and small birds,
flying amid the rimy foliage, shake sparkles of fire from their careless
wings.
It was the antithesis of Indian summer, and yet it had something of the
same dream-like quality. Its beauty was more poignant. The rounded tops
of the red-oaks seemed to float in the sparkling air in which millions
of sun-lit frost flakes glittered. All forms and lines were softened by
this falling veil, and the world so adorned, so transfigured, filled
the heart with a keen regret, a sense of pity that such a world should
pass.
At such times I was glad of my new home, and my mother found in me only
the confident and hopeful son. My doubts of the future, my
discouragements of the present I carefully concealed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Red Men and Buffalo
Although my Ulysses Grant, His Life and Character absorbed most of my
time and the larger part of my energy during two years, I continued to
dream (in my hours of leisure), of the "High Country" whose splendors of
cloud and peak, combined with the broad-cast doings of the cattleman and
miner, had aroused my enthusiasm. The heroic types, both white and red,
which the trail has fashioned to its needs continued to allure me, and
when in June, '97, my brother, on his vacation, met me again at West
Salem, I outlined a tour which should begin with a study of the Sioux at
Standing Rock and end with Seattle and the Pacific Ocean. "I must know
the North-west," I said to him.
In order to report properly to any army post, I had in my pocket a
letter from General Miles which commended me to all agents and officers,
and with this as passport I was in the middle of getting my equipment in
order when Ernest Thompson Seton and his wife surprised me by dropping
off the train one morning late in the month. They too, were on their way
to the Rockies, and in radiant holiday humor.
My first meeting with Seton had been in New York at a luncheon given for
James Barrie only a few months before, but we had formed one of those
instantaneous friendships which spring from the possession of many
identical interests. His skill as an illustrator and his knowledge of
wild animals had gained my admiration but I now learned that he knew
certain phases of the West better than I, for though of English birth he
had lived in Manitoba for several years. We were of the same age also,
and this was another bond of sympathy.
He asked me to accompany him on his tour of the Yellowstone but as I had
already arranged for a study of the Sioux, and as his own plans were
equally definite, we reluctantly gave up all idea of camping together,
but agreed to meet in New York City in October to compare notes.
The following week, on the first day of July, my brother and I were in
Bismark, North Dakota, on our way to the Standing Rock Reservation to
witness the "White Men's Big Sunday," as the red people were accustomed
to call the Fourth of July.
It chanced to be a cool, sweet, jocund morning, and as we drove away, in
an open buggy, over the treeless prairie swells toward the agency some
sixty miles to the south, I experienced a sense of elation, a joy of
life, a thrill of expectancy, which promised well for fiction. I knew
the signs.
There was little settlement of any kind for twenty miles, but after we
crossed the Cannonball River we entered upon the unviolated, primeval
sod of the red hunter. Conical lodges were grouped along the streams.
Horsemen with floating feathers and beaded buck-skin shirts over-took us
riding like scouts, and when on the second morning we topped the final
hill and saw the agency out-spread below us on the river bank, with
hundreds of canvas tepees set in a wide circle behind it, our
satisfaction was complete. Thousands of Sioux, men, women, and children
could be seen moving about the teepees, while platoons of mounted
warriors swept like scouting war parties across the plain. I
congratulated myself on having reached this famous agency while yet its
festival held something tribal and primitive.
After reporting to the Commander at Fort Yates, and calling upon the
Agent in his office, we took lodgings at a little half-breed boarding
house near the store, and ate our dinner at a table where full-bloods,
half-bloods and squaw men were the other guests.
Every waking hour thereafter we spent in observation of the people. With
an interpreter to aid me I conversed with the head men and inquired into
their history. The sign-talkers, sitting in the shade of a lodge or
wagon-top, depicting with silent grace the stirring tales of their
youth, were absorbingly interesting. I spent hours watching the play of
their expressive hands.
The nonchalant cow-boys riding about the camp, the somber squaw-men
(attended by their blanketed wives and groups of wistful half-breed
children), and the ragged old medicine men all in their several ways
made up a marvelous scene, rich with survivals of pioneer life.
The Gall and the Sitting Bull were both dead, but Rain-in-the-Face (made
famous by Longfellow) was alive, very much alive, though a cripple. We
met him several times riding at ease (his crutch tied to his saddle), a
genial, handsome, dark-complexioned man of middle age, with whom it was
hard to associate the acts of ferocity with which he was charged.
My letter of introduction from General Miles not only made me welcome at
the Fort, it authorized me to examine the early records of the Agency,
and these I carefully read in search of material concerning the Sitting
Bull.
In those dingy, brief, bald lines of record, I discovered official
evidence of this chief's supremacy long before the Custer battle. As
early as 1870 he was set down as one of the "irreconcilables," and in
1874 the Sioux most dreaded by the whites was "Sitting Bull's Band." To
Sitting Bull all couriers were sent, and the brief official accounts of
their meetings with him were highly dramatic and sometimes humorous.
He was a red man, and proud of it. He believed in remaining as he was
created. "The great spirit made me red, and red I am satisfied to
remain," he declared. "All my people ask is to be let alone, to hunt the
buffalo, and to live the life of our fathers"—and in this he had the
sympathy of many white men even of his day.
(In the final count this chieftain, for the reason that he kept the red
man's point of view, will outlive the opportunists who truckled to the
white man's power. He will stand as a typical Sioux.)
Our days at the Agency passed so swiftly, so pleasantly that we would
have lingered on indefinitely had not the report of an "outbreak" among
the northern Cheyennes aroused a more intense interest. In the hope of
seeing something of this uprising I insisted on hurriedly returning to
Bismark, where we took the earliest possible train for Custer City,
Montana.
At that strange little cow-town my brother hired a man to drive us to
Fort Custer, some forty or fifty miles to the south, a ride which
carried us deep into a wild and beautiful land, a country almost
untouched of man, and when, toward sun-set, we came in sight of the high
bluff which stands at the confluence of the Big Horn and the Little Big
Horn rivers, the fort, the ferry, the stream were a picture by Catlin or
a glorious illustration in a romance of the Border. It was easy to
imagine ourselves back in the stirring days of Sitting Bull and Roman
Nose.
The commander of the Garrison, Colonel Anderson, a fine soldierly
figure, welcomed us courteously and turned us over to Lieutenant Aherne,
a hospitable young Irishman who invited us to spend the night in his
quarters. It happened most opportunely that he was serving as Inspector
of the meat issue at the Crow Agency, and on the following day we
accompanied him on his detail, a deeply instructive experience, for, at
night we attended a ceremonial social dance given by the Crows in honor
of Chief Two Moon, a visiting Cheyenne.
Two Moon, a handsome broad-shouldered man of fifty, met us at the door
of the Dance Lodge, welcomed us with courtly grace, and gave us seats
beside him on the honor side of the circle. It appeared that he was
master of ceremonies, and under his direction the dancing proceeded with
such dramatic grace and skill that we needed very little help to
understand its action.
In groups of eight, in perfect order, the young men rose from their
seats, advanced to the center of the circle, and there reënacted by
means of signs, attitudes and groupings, various notable personal or
tribal achievements of the past. With stealthy, silent stride this one
delineated the exploit of some ancestral chief, who had darted forth
alone on a solitary scouting expedition. Others depicted the enemy,
representing his detection and his capture. A third band arose, and
trailing the hero spy, swiftly, silently, discovered the captors,
attacked and defeated them and with triumphant shouts released the
captive and brought him to camp—all in perfect unison with the singers
at the drum whose varying rhythm set the pace for each especial episode,
almost as precisely as a Chinese orchestra augments or diminishes the
action on the stage.
To me this was a thrilling glimpse into prehistoric America, for these
young men, stripped of their tainted white-man rags, were wholly
admirable, painted lithe-limbed warriors, rejoicing once again in the
light of their ancestral moons. On every face was a look like that of a
captive leopard, dreaming of far-seen, familiar sands. The present was
forgot, the past was momentarily restored. At midnight we went away but
the strangely-moving beat of that barbaric drum was still throbbing in
my ears as I fell asleep.
* * * * * *
Early the following morning, eager to reach the scene of the Cheyenne
outbreak we hired saddle horses and rode away directly across the Custer
battle field on our way toward Lame Deer, where we were told the troops
were still in camp to protect the agency.
What a ride that was! Our trail led us beyond the plow and the wagon
wheel, far into the midst of hills where herds of cattle were feeding as
the bison had fed for countless ages. Every valley had its story, for
here the last battles of the Cheyennes had taken place. I had overtaken
the passing world of the red nomad.
We stopped that night at a ranch about half way across the range, and in
its cabin I listened while the cattlemen expressed their hatred of the
Cheyenne. The violence of their antagonism, their shameless greed for
the red man's land revealed to me once and for all the fomenting spirit
of each of the Indian Wars which had accompanied the exterminating,
century-long march of our invading race. In a single sentence these men
expressed the ruthless creed of the land-seeker. "We intend to wipe
these red sons-of-dogs from the face of the earth." Here was displayed
shamelessly the seamy side of western settlement.
At about ten o'clock next morning we topped the scantily-timbered ridge
which walls in the Lame Deer Agency, and looked down upon the tents of
the troops. A company of cavalry drilling on the open field to the north
gave evidence of active service, and as I studied the mingled huts and
tepees of the village, I realized that I had arrived in time to witness
some part of the latest staging of the red man's final stand.
Reporting at once to the agent, Major George Stouch, I found him to be a
veteran officer of the regular army "On Special Duty," a middle-aged,
pleasant-faced man of unassuming dignity whose crooked wrist (caused by
a bullet in the Civil War) gave him a touch of awkwardness; but his eyes
were keen, and his voice clear and decisive.
"The plans of the cattlemen have been momentarily checked," he said,
"but they are still bitter, and a single pistol-shot may bring renewed
trouble. The Cheyennes, as you know, are warriors."
He introduced me to Captain Cooper, in command of the troopers, and to
Captain Reed, Commander of the Infantry, who invited us to join his
mess, an invitation which we gladly accepted.
Cooper was a soldier of wide experience, a veteran of the Civil War, and
an Indian fighter of distinction. But his Lieutenant, a handsome young
West Pointer named Livermore, interested me still more keenly, for he
was a student of the sign language and had been at one time in command
of an experimental troop of red "rookies." Like Major Stouch he was a
broad-minded friend of all primitive peoples, and his experiences and
stories were of the greatest value to me.
With the aid of Major Stouch I won the confidence of White Bull, Two
Moon, Porcupine, American Horse and other of the principal Cheyennes,
and one of the Agency policemen, a fine fellow called Wolf Voice, became
my interpreter. Though half-Cheyenne and half-Assiniboin, he spoke
English well, and manifested a marked sense of humor. He had served one
summer as guide to Frederick Remington, and had some capital stories
concerning him. "Remington fat man—too heavy on pony. Him 'fraid
Injuns sure catch him," he said with a chuckle. "Him all-time carry
box—take pictures. Him no warrior."
For two weeks I absorbed "material" at every pore, careless of other
duties, thinking only of this world, avid for the truth, yet selecting
my facts as every artist must, until, at last, measurably content I
announced my intention to return to the railway. "We have tickets to
Seattle," I said to Stouch, "and we must make use of them."
"I'm sorry to have you go," he replied, "but if you must go I'll send
Wolf Voice with you as far as Custer."
We had no real need of a guide but I was glad to have Wolf Voice riding
with me, for I had grown to like him and welcomed any opportunity for
conversing with him. He was one of the few full-bloods who could speak
English well enough to enjoy a joke.
As we were passing his little cabin, just at the edge of the Agency, he
said, "Wait, I get you somesing."
In a few moments he returned, carrying a long eagle feather in his hand.
This he handed to me, saying, "My little boy—him dead. Him carry in
dance dis fedder. You my friend. You take him."
Major Stouch had told me of this boy, a handsome little fellow of only
five years of age, who used to join most soberly and cunningly with the
men in their ceremonial dances; and so when Wolf Voice said, "I give you
dis fedder—you my friend. You Indian's friend," I was deeply moved.
"Wolf Voice, I shall keep this as a sign, a sign that we are friends."
He pointed toward a woman crouching over a fire in the corral, "You see
him—my wife? Him cry—all time cry since him son die. Him no sleep in
house. Sleep all time in tepee. Me no sleep in house. Spirit come, cry,
woo-oo-oo in chimney. My boy spirit come,—cry—me 'fraid! My heart
very sore."
The bronze face of the big man was quivering with emotion as he spoke,
and not knowing what to say to comfort him I pretended to haste. "Let us
go. You can tell me about it while we ride."
As we set forth he recovered his smile, for he was naturally of a
cheerful disposition, and in our long, leisurely journey I obtained many
curious glimpses into his psychology—the psychology of the red man. He
led us to certain shrines or "medicine" rocks and his remarks concerning
the offerings of cartridges, calico, tobacco and food which we found
deposited beside a twisted piece of lava on the side of a low hill were
most revealing.
"Wolf Voice, do you believe the dead come back to get these presents," I
asked.
"No," he soberly replied. "Spirit no eat tobacco, spirit eat spirit of
tobacco."
His reply was essentially Oriental in its philosophy. It was the
essence of the offering, the invisible part which was taken by the
invisible dead.
Many other of his remarks were almost equally revelatory. "White soldier
heap fool," he said. "Stand up in rows to be shot at. Injun fight
running—in bush—behind trees."
We stopped again at The Half-Way Ranch, and the manner in which the
cattlemen treated Wolf Voice angered me. He was much more admirable than
they, and yet they would not allow him to sleep in the house.
He rode all the way back to Fort Custer with us and when we parted I
said, "Wolf Voice, I hope we meet again," and I meant it. His spirit is
in all that I have since written of the red men. He, Two Moon, American
Horse, and Porcupine were of incalculable value to me in composing The
Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, which was based upon this little war.
From Billings we went almost directly to the Flat Head Reservation. We
had heard that a herd of buffalo was to be seen in its native pastures
just west of Flat Head Lake and as I put more value on seeing that herd
than upon any other "sight" in the state of Montana, we made it our next
objective.
Outfitting at Jocko we rode across the divide to the St. Ignacio
Mission. Less wild than the Cheyenne reservation the Flat Head country
was much more beautiful, and we were entirely happy in our camp beside
the rushing stream which came down from the Jocko Lakes.
"Yes, there is such a herd," the trader said. "It is owned by Michel
Pablo and consists of about two hundred, old and young. They can be
reached by riding straight north for some twenty miles and then turning
to the west. You will have to hunt them, however; they are not in a
corral. They are feeding just as they used to do. They come and go as
they happen to feel the need of food or water."
With these stimulating directions we set forth one morning to "hunt a
herd of buffalo," excited as a couple of boys, eager as hunters yet with
only the desire to see the wild kine.
After we left the road and turned westward our way led athwart low hills
and snake-like ravines and along deep-worn cattle paths leading to water
holes. All was magnificently primeval. No mark of plow or spade, no
planted stake or post assailed our eyes. We were deep in the land of the
bison at last.
Finally, as we topped a long, low swell, my brother shouted, "Buffalo!"
and looking where he pointed, I detected through the heated haze of the
midday plain, certain vague, unfamiliar forms which hinted at the
prehistoric past. They were not cows or horses, that was evident. Here
and there purple-black bodies loomed, while close beside them other
smaller objects gave off a singular and striking contrast. There was no
mistaking the character of these animals. They were bison.
To ride down upon them thus, in the silence and heat of that uninhabited
valley, was to realize in every detail, a phase of the old-time life of
the plains. We moved in silence. The grass-hoppers springing with
clapping buzz before our horses' feet gave out the only sound. No other
living thing uttered voice. Nothing moved save our ponies and those
distant monstrous kine whose presence filled us with the same emotion
which had burned in the hearts of our pioneer ancestors.
As we drew nearer, clouds of dust arose like lazy smoke from smoldering
fires, curtains which concealed some mighty bull tossing the powdery
earth with giant hoof. The cows seeing our approach, began to shift and
change. The bulls did not hurry, on the contrary, they fell to the rear
and grimly halted our advance. Towers of alkali dust, hot and white,
lingering smoke-like in the air shielded us like a screen, and
so—slowly riding—we drew near enough to perceive the calves and hear
the mutter of the cows as they reënacted for us the life of the vanished
millions of their kind.
Here lay a calf beside its dam. Yonder a solitary ancient and shaggy
bull stood apart, sullen and brooding. Nearer a colossal chieftain,
glossy, black, and weighing two thousand pounds moved from group to
group, restless and combative, wrinkling his ridiculously small nose,
and uttering a deep, menacing, muttering roar. His rivals, though they
slunk away, gave utterance to similar sinister snarls, as if voicing
bitter resentment. They did not bellow, they growled, low down in
their cavernous throats, like angry lions. Nothing that I had ever heard
or read of buffaloes had given me the quality of this majestic clamor.
Occasionally one of them, tortured by flies, dropped to earth, and
rolled and tore the sod, till a dome of dust arose and hid him. Out of
this gray curtain he suddenly reappeared, dark and savage, like a dun
rock emerging from mist. One furious giant, moving with curling upraised
tail, challenged to universal combat, whilst all his rivals gave way,
reluctant, resentful, yet afraid. The rumps of some of the veterans were
as bare of hair as the loins of lions, but their enormous shoulders
bulked into deformity by reason of a dense mane. They moved like
elephants—clumsy, enormous, distorted, yet with astonishing celerity.
It was worth a long journey to stand thus and watch that small band of
bison, representatives of a race whose myriads once covered all America,
for though less than two hundred in number, they were feeding and
warring precisely as their ancestors had fed and warred for a million
years. Small wonder that the red men believe the white invader must have
used some evil medicine, some magic power in sweeping these majestic
creatures from the earth. Once they covered the hills like a robe of
brown, now only a few small bands are left to perpetuate the habits and
the customs of the past.
As we watched, they fed, fought, rose up and lay down in calm disdain of
our presence. It was as if, unobserved, and yet close beside them, we
were studying the denizens of a small corner of aboriginal America,
America in pre-Columbian times. Reluctantly, slowly we turned and rode
away, back to our tent, back to the railway and the present day.
* * * * * *
On our return to Missoula we found the town aflame with a report that a
steamer had just landed at Seattle, bringing from Alaska nearly three
million dollars in gold-dust, and that the miners who owned the treasure
had said, "We dug it from the valley of the Yukon, at a point called
the Klondike. A thousand miles from anywhere. The Yukon is four
thousand miles long, and flows north, so that the lower half freezes
solid early in the fall, and to cross overland from Skagway—the way we
came out—means weeks of travel. It is the greatest gold camp in the
world but no one can go in now. Everybody must wait till next June."
It was well that this warning was plainly uttered, for the adventurous
spirits of Montana instantly took fire. Nothing else was talked of by
the men on the street and in the trains. Even my brother said, "I wish I
could go."
"But you can't," I argued. "It is time you started for New York. Herne
will drop you if you don't turn up for rehearsal in September."
Reluctantly agreeing to this, he turned his face toward the East whilst
I kept on toward Seattle, to visit my classmate Burton Babcock, who was
living in a village on Puget Sound.
The coast towns were humming with mining news and mining plans. The word
"Klondike" blazed out on banners, on shop windows and on brick walls.
Alert and thrifty merchants at once began to advertise Klondike shoes,
Klondike coats, Klondike camp goods. Hundreds of Klondike exploring
companies were being organized. In imagination each shop-keeper saw the
gold seekers of the world in line of march, their faces set toward
Seattle and the Sound. Every sign indicated a boom.
This swift leaping to grasp an opportunity was characteristically
American, and I would have gladly taken part in the play, but alas! my
Grant history was still unfinished, and I had already overstayed my
vacation limit. I should have returned at once, but my friend Babcock
was expecting me to visit him, and this I did.
Anacortes (once a port of vast pretentions), was, at this time, a
boom-town in decay, and Burton whom I had not seen for ten years,
seemed equally forlorn. After trying his hand at several professions, he
had finally drifted to this place, and was living alone in a rude cabin,
camping like a woodsman. Being without special training in any trade, he
had fallen into competition with the lowest kind of unskilled labor.
Like my Uncle David, another unsuccessful explorer, he had grown old
before his time, and for a few minutes I could detect in him nothing of
the lithe youth I had known at school on the Iowa prairie twenty years
before. Shaggy of beard, wrinkled and bent he seemed already an old man.
By severest toil in the mills and in the forest he had become the owner
of two small houses on a ragged street—these and a timber claim on the
Skagit River formed his entire fortune.
Though careless of dress and hard of hand, his speech remained that of
the thinker, and much of his reading was still along high, philosophical
lines. He had been a singular youth, and he had developed into a still
more singular man. With an instinctive love of the forest, he had become
a daring and experienced mountaineer. As he described to me his solitary
trips over the high Cascades I was reminded of John Muir, for he, too,
often spent weeks in the high peaks above his claim with only such
outfit as he could carry on his back.
"What do you do it for?" I asked. "Are you gold-hunting?"
With a soft chuckle he answered, "Oh, no; I do it just for the fun of
it. I love to move around up there, alone, above timber line. It's
beautiful up there."
Naturally, I recalled the scenes of our boyhood. I spoke of the Burr Oak
Lyceums, of our life at the Osage Seminary, and of the boys and girls we
had loved, but he was not disposed, at the moment, to dwell on them or
on the past. His heart (I soon discovered) was aflame with desire to
join the rush of gold-seekers. "I wish you would grubstake me," he
timidly suggested. "I'd like to try my hand at digging gold in the
Klondike."
"It's too late in the season," I replied. "Wait till spring. Wait till I
finish my history of Grant and I'll go in with you."
With this arrangement (which on my part was more than half a jest) I
left him and started homeward by way of Lake MacDonald, the Blackfoot
Reservation and Fort Benton, my mind teeming with subjects for poems,
short stories and novels. My vacation was over. Aspiring vaguely to
qualify as the fictionist of this region, I was eager to be at work.
Here was my next and larger field. As my neighbors in Iowa and Dakota
were moving on into these more splendid spaces, so now I resolved to
follow them and be their chronicler.
This trip completed my conversion. I resolved to preempt a place in the
history of the great Northwest which was at once a wilderness and a
cosmopolis, for in it I found men and women from many lands, drawn to
the mountains in search of health, or recreation, or gold. I perceived
that almost any character I could imagine could be verified in this
amazing mixture. I began to sketch novels which would have been false in
Wisconsin or Iowa. With a sense of elation, of freedom, I decided to
swing out into the wider air of Colorado and Montana.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Telegraph Trail
The writing of the last half of my Grant biography demanded a careful
study of war records, therefore in the autumn of '97 I took lodgings in
Washington, and settled to the task of reading my way through the
intricacies of the Grant Administrations. Until this work was completed
I could not make another trip to the Northwest.
The new Congressional Library now became my grandiose work-shop. All
through the winter from nine till twelve in the morning and from two
till six in the afternoon, I sat at a big table in a special room,
turning the pages of musty books and yellowed newspapers, or dictating
to a stenographer the story of the Reconstruction Period as it unfolded
under my eyes. I was for the time entirely the historian, with little
time to dream of the fictive material with which my memory was filled.
I find this significant note in my diary. "My Grant life is now so
nearly complete that I feel free to begin a work which I have long
meditated. I began to dictate, to-day, the story of my life as boy and
man in the West. In view of my approaching perilous trip into the North
I want to leave a fairly accurate chronicle of what I saw and what I did
on the Middle Border. The truth is, with all my trailing about in the
Rocky Mountains I have never been in a satisfying wilderness. It is
impossible, even in Wyoming, to get fifty miles from settlement. I long
to undertake a journey which demands hardihood, and so, after careful
investigation, I have decided to go into the Yukon Valley by pack train
over the British Columbian Mountains, a route which offers a fine and
characteristic New World adventure."
To prepare myself for this expedition I ran up to Ottawa in February to
study maps and to talk with Canadian officials concerning the various
trails which were being surveyed and blazed. "No one knows much about
that country," said Dawson with a smile.
I returned to Washington quite determined on going to Teslin Lake over a
path which followed an abandoned telegraph survey from Quesnelle on the
Fraser River to the Stickeen, a distance estimated at about eight
hundred miles, and I quote these lines as indicating my mind at the
time:
|
The way is long and cold and lone—
But I go!
It leads where pines forever moan
Their weight of snow—
But I go!
There are voices in the wind which call
There are shapes which beckon to the plain
I must journey where the peaks are tall,
And lonely herons clamor in the rain.
|
One of my most valued friends in Washington at this time was young
Theodore Roosevelt, who had resigned his position as Police Commissioner
in New York City to become Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His life on
a Dakota ranch had not only filled him with a love for western trails
and sympathy with western men, but had created in him a special interest
in western writers. No doubt it was this regard for the historians of
the West which led him to invite me to his house; for during the winter
I occasionally lunched or dined with him. He also gave me the run of his
office, and there I sometimes saw him in action, steering the department
toward efficiency.
Though nominally Assistant Secretary he was in fact the Head of the
Navy, boldly pushing plans to increase its fighting power. This I know,
for one day as I sat in his office I heard him giving orders for gun
practice and discussing the higher armament of certain ships. I remember
his words as he showed me a sheet on which was indicated the relative
strength of the world's navies. "We must raise all our guns to a higher
power," he said with characteristic emphasis.
John Hay, Senator Lodge, Major Powell and Edward Eggleston were among my
most distinguished hosts during this winter and I have many pleasant
memories of these highly distinctive personalities. Major Powell
appealed to me with especial power by reason of his heroic past. He had
been an engineer under Grant at Vicksburg and was very helpful to me in
stating the methods of the siege, but his experiences after the war were
still more romantic. Though a small man and with but one arm, he had
nevertheless led a fleet of canoes through the Grand Cañon of the
Colorado—the first successful attempt at navigating that savage and
sullen river, and his laconic account of it enormously impressed me. He
was, at this time, the well-known head of the Ethnological Bureau, and I
frequently saw him at the Cosmos Club, grouped with Langley, Merriam,
Howard and other of my scientific friends. He was a somber, silent, and
rather unkempt figure, with the look of a dreaming lion on his face. It
was hard to relate him with the man who had conquered the Grand Cañon of
the Colorado.
His direct antithesis was Edward Eggleston, whose residence was a small
brick house just back of the Congressional Library. Eggleston, humorous,
ready of speech, was usually surrounded by an attentive circle of
delighted listeners and I often drew near to share his monologue. He was
a handsome man, tall and shapely with abundant gray hair and a full
beard, and was especially learned in American early history. "Edward
loves to monologue," his friends smilingly said as if in criticism, but
to me his talk was always interesting.
We became friends on the basis of a common love for the Western prairie,
which he, as a "circuit rider" in Minnesota had minutely explored. I
told him, gladly and in some detail, of my first reading of The Hoosier
School-master, and in return for my interest he wrote a full page of
explanation on the fly leaf of a copy which I still own and value
highly, for I regard him now, as I did then, as one of the brave
pioneers of distinctive Middle Border fiction.
Roosevelt considered me something of a Populist, (as I was), and I well
remember a dinner in Senator Lodge's house where he and Henry Adams
heckled me for an hour or more in order to obtain a statement of what I
thought "ailed" Kansas, Nebraska and Dakota. They all held the notion
that I understood these farmer folk well enough to reflect their secret
antagonisms, which I certainly did. I recall getting pretty hot in my
plea, but Roosevelt seemed rather proud of me as I warmly defended my
former neighbor. "The man on the rented farm who is raising corn at
fifteen cents per bushel to pay interest on a mortgage is apt to be
bitter," I argued.
However, this evening was an exception. Generally we talked of the West,
of cattle ranching, of trailing and of the splendid types of pioneers
who were about to vanish from the earth. One night as we sat at dinner
in his house, he suddenly leaned back in his chair and said with a smile
"I can't tell you how I enjoy having a man at my table who knows the
difference between a parfleche and an aparejo."
Although I loved the trail I had given up shooting. I no longer carried
a gun even in the hills—although, I will admit, I permitted my
companions to do so. Roosevelt differed from me in this. He loved "the
song of the bullet." "It gives point and significance to the trail," he
explained.
I recall quoting to him one of his own vividly beautiful descriptions of
dawn among the hills, a story which led up to the stalking and the death
of a noble elk. "It was fine, all fine and true and poetic," I declared,
"but I should have listened with gratitude to the voice of the elk and
watched him go his appointed way in peace."
"I understand your position perfectly," he replied, "but it is
illogical. You must remember every wild animal dies a violent death. Elk
and deer and pheasants are periodically destroyed by snows and storms of
sleet—and what about the butcher killing lambs and chickens for your
table? I notice you accept my roast duck."
He was greatly interested in my proposed trip into the Yukon. "By
George, I wish I could go with you," he said, and I had no doubt of his
sincerity. Then his tone changed. "We are in for trouble with Spain and
I must be on the job."
To this I replied, "If I really knew that war was coming, I'd give up my
trip, but I can't believe the Spaniards intend to fight, and this is my
last and best chance to see the Northwest."
In my notebook I find this entry: "Jan., 1898. Dined again last night
with Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, a man who is
likely to be much in the public eye during his life. A man of great
energy, of noble impulses, and of undoubted ability."
I do not put this forward as evidence of singular perception on my part,
for I imagine thousands were saying precisely the same thing. I merely
include it to prove that I was not entirely lacking in penetration.
Henry B. Fuller, who came along one day in January, proved a joy and
comfort to me. His attitude toward Washington amused me. Assuming the
air of a Cook tourist, he methodically, and meticulously explored the
city, bringing to me each night a detailed report of what he had seen.
His concise, humorous and self-derisive comment was literature of a
most delightful quality, and I repeatedly urged him to write of the
capital as he talked of it to me, but he professed to have lost his
desire to write, and though I did not believe this, I hated to hear him
say it, for I valued his satiric humor and his wide knowledge of life.
He was amazed when I told him of my plan to start, in April, for the
Yukon, and in answer to his question I said, "I need an expedition of
heroic sort to complete my education, and to wash the library dust out
of my brain."
In response to a cordial note, I called upon John Hay one morning. He
received me in a little room off the main hall of his house, whose
spaciousness made him seem diminutive. He struck me as a dapper man,
noticeably, but not offensively, self-satisfied. His fine black beard
was streaked with white, but his complexion was youthfully clear. Though
undersized he was compact and sturdy, and his voice was crisp, musical,
and decisive.
We talked of Grant, of whom he had many pleasing personal recollections,
and when a little later we went for a walk, he grew curiously wistful
and spoke of his youth in the West and of the simple life of his early
days in Washington with tenderness. It appeared that wealth and honor
had not made him happy. Doubtless this was only a mood, for in parting
he reassumed his smiling official pose.
A few days later as I entered my Hotel I confronted the tall figure and
somber, introspective face of General Longstreet whom I had visited a
year before at his home in Gainesville, Georgia. We conversed a few
moments, then shook hands and parted, but as he passed into the street I
followed him. From the door-step I watched him slowly making his
cautious way through throngs of lesser men (who gave no special heed to
him), and as I thought of the days when his dread name was second only
to Lee's in the fear and admiration of the North, I marveled at the
change in twenty years. Now he was a deaf, hesitant old man, sorrowful
of aspect, poor, dim-eyed, neglected, and alone.
"Swift are the changes of life, and especially of American life," I made
note. "Most people think of Longstreet as a dead man, yet there he
walks, the gray ghost of the Confederacy, silent, alone."
As spring came on and the end of my history of Grant drew near, my
longing for the open air, the forest and the trail, made proof-reading a
punishment. My eyes (weary of newspaper files and manuscripts) filled
with mountain pictures. Visioning my plunge into the wilderness with
keenest longing, I collected a kit of cooking utensils, a sleeping bag
and some pack saddles (which my friend, A. A. Anderson, had invented),
together with all information concerning British Columbia and the proper
time for hitting The Long Trail.
In showing my maps to Howells in New York, I casually remarked, "I shall
go in here, and come out there—over a thousand miles of Trail," and
as he looked at me in wonder, I had a sudden realization of what that
remark meant. A vision of myself, a minute, almost indistinguishable
insect—creeping hardily through an illimitable forest filled my
imagination, and a momentary awe fell upon me.
"How easy it would be to break a leg, or go down with my horse in an icy
river!" I thought. Nevertheless, I proceeded with my explanations, gayly
assuring Howells that it was only a magnificent outing, quoting to him
from certain circulars, passages of tempting descriptions in which
"splendid savannahs" and "herds of deer and caribou" were used with fine
effect.
In my secret heart I hoped to recapture some part of that Spirit of the
Sunset which my father had found and loved in Central Minnesota in
Fifty-eight. Deeper still, I had a hope of reënacting, in helpful
degree, the epic days of Forty-nine, when men found their painful way
up the Platte Cañon, and over the Continental Divide to Oregon. "It is
my last chance to do a bit of real mountaineering, of going to school to
the valiant wilderness," I said, "and I can not afford to miss the
opportunity of winning a master's degree in hardihood."
That I suffered occasional moments of depression and doubt, the pages of
my diary bear witness. At a time when my stories were listed in half the
leading magazines, I gravely set down the facts of my situation. "In far
away Dakota my father is living alone on a bleak farm, cooking his own
food and caring for a dozen head of horses, while my mother, with
failing eyes and shortening steps, waits for him and for me in West
Salem with only an invalid sister-in-law to keep her company. In a very
real sense they are all depending upon me for help and guidance. I am
now the head of the house, and yet—here I sit planning a dangerous
adventure into Alaska at a time when I should be at home."
My throat ached with pity whenever I received a letter from my mother,
for she never failed to express a growing longing for her sons, neither
of whom could be with her. To do our chosen work a residence in the city
was necessary, and so it came about that all my victories, all my small
successes were shadowed by my mother's failing health and loneliness.
* * * * * *
It remains to say that during all this time I had heard very little of
Miss Zulime Taft. No letters had passed between us, but I now learned
through her brother that she was planning to come home during the
summer, a fact which should have given me a thrill, but as more than
four years had passed since our meeting in Chicago, I merely wondered
whether her stay in Paris had greatly changed her character for the
better. "She will probably be more French than American when she
returns," I said to Lorado, when he spoke of her.
"Her letters do not sound that way," he answered. "She seems eager to
return, and says that she intends to work with me here in Chicago."
Early in March, I notified Babcock to meet me at Ashcroft in British
Columbia on April 15th. "We'll outfit there, and go in by way of
Quesnelle," I added, and with a mind filled with visions of splendid
streams, grassy valleys and glorious camps among eagle-haunted peaks, I
finished the final pages of my proof and started West, boyishly eager to
set forth upon the mighty circuit of my projected exploration.
"This is the end of my historical writing," I notified McClure. "I'm
going back to my fiction of the Middle Border."
On a radiant April morning I reached the homestead finding mother fairly
well, but greatly disturbed over my plan. "I don't like to have you go
exploring," she said. "It's dangerous. Why do you do it?"
Her voice, the look of her face, took away the spirit of my adventure. I
felt like giving it up, but with all arrangements definitely made I
could do nothing but go on. The weather was clear and warm, with an
odorous south wind drawing forth the leaves, and as I fell to work,
raking up the yard, the smell of unfolding blooms, the call of exultant
"high-holders" and the chirp of cheerful robins brought back with a
rush, all the sweet, associated memories of other springs and other
gardens, making my gold-seeking expedition seem not only chimerical, but
traitorous to my duties.
The hens were singing their cheerful, changeless song below the stable
wall; calves were bawling from the neighboring farm-yards and on the
mellow soil the shining, broadcast seeders were clattering to their
work, while over the greening hills a faint mist wavered, delicate as a
bride's veil. Was it not a kind of madness to exchange the security, the
peace, the comfort of this homestead, for the hardships of a trail whose
circuit could not be less than ten thousand miles, a journey which
offered possible injury and certain deprivation?
The thought which gave me most uneasiness was not my danger but the
knowledge that in leaving my mother to silently brood over the perils
which she naturally exaggerated, I was recreant to my pledge. Expression
was always elliptical with her; and I shall never know how keenly she
suffered during those days of preparation. Instead of acquiring a new
daughter, she seemed on the point of losing a son.
She grudged every moment of the hours which I spent in my study. There
was so little for her to do! She kept her chair during her waking hours
either on the porch overlooking the garden or in the kitchen supervising
the women at their work. Every slightest event was pitifully important
in her life. The passing of the railway trains, the milking of the cow,
the watering of the horses, the gathering of the eggs—these were
important events in her diary. My incessant journeyings, my distant
destinations lay far beyond her utmost imagining. To her my comings and
goings were as mysterious, as incalculable as the orbits of the moon,
and I think she must have sometimes questioned whether Hamlin Garland,
the historian, could possibly be the son for whom she had once knit
mittens and repaired kites.
If I had not been under contract, if I had not gone so far in
preparation and announcement that to quit would have been disgraceful, I
would have given up my trip on her account. "I am ashamed to turn back.
I must go on," I said. "I won't be gone long. I'll come out by way of
the Stickeen."
When the time came to say good-bye, she broke down utterly and I went
away with a painful constriction in my own throat, a lump which lasted
for hours. Not till on the second day as I saw droves of Canadian
antelope racing with the train, whilst flights of geese overhead gave
certain sign of the wilderness, did I regain my desire to explore the
valleys of the North. That lonely old woman on the porch of the
Homestead was never absent from my mind.
Promptly on the afternoon of my arrival at Ashcroft on the Canadian
Pacific Railway, Burton Babcock, wearing a sombrero and a suit of
corduroy, dropped from the eastbound train, a duffel bag in his right
hand, and a newly-invented camp-stove in the other. "Well, here I am,"
he said, with his characteristic chuckle.
Ready for the road, and with no regrets, no hesitancies, no fears, he
set to work getting our outfit together leaving me to gather what
information I could concerning the route which we had elected to
traverse.
It was hard for me to realize that this bent, bearded, grizzled
mountaineer was Burt Babcock, the slim companion of my Dry Run Prairie
boyhood—it was only in peculiar ways of laughter, and in a certain
familiar pucker of wrinkles about his eyes, that I traced the connecting
link. I must assume that he found in me something quite as
alien—perhaps more so, for my life in Boston and New York had given to
me habits of speech and of thought which obscured, no doubt, most of my
youthful characteristics.
As I talked with some of the more thoughtful and conscientious citizens
of the town, I found them taking a very serious view of the trip we were
about to undertake. "It is a mighty long, hard road," they said, "and a
lot of men are going to find it a test of endurance. Nobody knows
anything about the trail after you leave Quesnelle. You want to go with
a good outfit, prepared for two months of hardship."
In view of this warning I was especially slow about buying ponies. "I
want the best and gentlest beasts obtainable," I said to Burton. "I am
especially desirous of a trustworthy riding horse."
That evening, as I was standing on the hotel porch, my attention was
attracted to a man mounted on a spirited gray horse, riding up the
street toward the hotel. There was something so noble in the proud arch
of this horse's neck, something so powerful in the fling of his hooves
that I exclaimed to the landlord, "There is the kind of saddle-horse I
am looking for! I wonder if by any chance he is for sale?"
The landlord smiled. "He is. I sent word to the owner and he has come on
purpose to see you. You can have the animal if you want him bad enough."
The rider drew rein and the landlord introduced me as the man who was in
need of a mount. Each moment my desire to own the horse deepened, but I
was afraid to show even approval. "How much do you want for him?" I
asked indifferently.
"Well, stranger, I must have fifty dollars for this horse. There is a
strain of Arabian in him, and he is a trained cow-pony besides."
Fifty dollars for an animal like that! It was like giving him away. I
was at once suspicious. "There must be some trick about him. He is
locoed or something," I remarked to my partner.
We could find nothing wrong, however, and at last I passed over a fifty
dollar bill and led the horse away.
Each moment increased my joy and pride in that dapple-gray gelding.
Undoubtedly there was Arabian blood in his veins. He had a thoroughbred
look. He listened to every word I spoke to him. He followed me as
cheerfully and as readily as a dog. He let me feel his ears (which a
locoed horse will not do) and at a touch of my hand made room for me in
his stall. In all ways he seemed exactly the horse I had been looking
for, and I began to think of my long ride over the mountains with
confidence.
To put the final touch to my security, the owner as he was leaving the
hotel said to me, with a note of sadness in his voice, "I hate to see
that horse take the long trail. Treat him well, partner."
Three days later, mounted on my stately gray "Ladrone," I led my little
pack-train out of Ashcroft, bound for Teslin Lake, some twelve hundred
miles to the Northwest. It was a lovely spring afternoon, and as I rode
I made some rhymes to express my feeling of exultation.
|
I mount and mount toward the sky,
The eagle's heart is mine.
I ride to put the clouds below
Where silver lakelets shine.
The roaring streams wax white with snow,
The granite peaks draw near,
The blue sky widens, violets grow,
The air is frosty clear.
And so from cliff to cliff I rise,
The eagle's heart is mine;
Above me, ever-broadening skies—
Below, the river's shine.
|
The next day as we were going down a steep slope, one of the pack horses
bolted and ran round Ladrone entangling me in the lead rope. When I came
to myself I was under my horse, saddle and all, and Ladrone was looking
down at me in wonder. The tremendous strain on the rope had pulled me
saddle and all under his belly, and had he been the ordinary cayuse he
would have kicked me to shreds. To my astonishment and deep gratitude he
remained perfectly quiet while I scrambled out from under his feet and
put the saddle in place.
My partner, white with excitement, drew near. "I thought you were a
goner," he said, huskily. "That horse of yours is a wonder."
As I thought of the look in that gray pony's brown eyes whilst I lay,
helpless beneath him, my heart warmed with gratitude and affection. "Old
boy," I said, as I patted his neck, "I will never leave you to starve
and freeze in the far north. If you carry me through to Telegraph Creek,
I will see that you are comfortable for the remaining years of your
life."
I mention this incident for the reason that it had far-reaching
consequences—as the reader will discover.
In The Trail of the Goldseekers, I have told in detail my story of our
expedition. Suffice it to say, at this point, that we were seventy-nine
days in the wilderness, that we were eaten by flies and mosquitoes, that
we traveled in the rain, camped in the rain, packed our saddles in the
rain. We toiled through marshes, slopped across miles of tundra, swam
our horses through roaring glacial streams and dug them out of
bog-holes. For more than two hundred miles we walked in order to lighten
the loads of our weakened animals, and when we reached Glenora we were
both past-masters of the art of camping through a wilderness. No one
could tell us anything about packing, bushing in a slough or managing a
pack-train. We were master-trailers!
Burton, though a year or two older than I, proved an invincible
explorer, tireless, uncomplaining and imperturbable. In all our harsh
experiences, throughout all our eighty days of struggle with mud, rocks,
insects, rain, hunger and cold, he never for one moment lost his
courage. Kind to our beasts, defiant of the weather, undismayed by any
hardship, he kept the trail. He never once lifted his voice in anger.
His endurance of my moods was heroic.
Assuming more than half of the physical labor he loyally said, "You are
the boss, the historian of this expedition. You are the proprietor. I am
only the hired-man."
Such service could not be bought. It sprang from a friendship which had
begun twenty-eight years before, an attachment deep as our lives which
could not be broken.
On the seventy-ninth day, ragged, swarthy, bearded like Forty-niners,
with only a handful of flour and a lump of bacon left in our kit we came
down to the Third Fork of the Stickeen River, without a flake of gold to
show for our "panning" the sands along our way. My diaries state that
for more than thirty days of this journey it rained, and as I look back
upon our three weeks in the Skeena valley I shiver with a kind of
retrospective terror. At one time it looked as though we must leave all
our horses in that gloomy forest. Ladrone lost the proud arch of his
neck and the light lift of his small feet. He could no longer carry me
up the steeps and his ribs showed pitifully.
At Glenora, in beautiful sunny weather, we camped for two weeks in
blissful leisure while our horses recovered their strength and courage.
We were all hungry for the sun. For hours we lay on the grass soaking
our hides full of light and heat, discussing gravely but at our ease,
the situation.
Our plan had been to pack through to Teslin Lake, build a raft there and
float down the Hotalinqua into the Yukon and so on to Dawson City, but
at Glenora I found a letter from my mother waiting for me, a pitiful
plea for me to "hurry back," and as we were belated a month or more, and
as winter comes early in those latitudes, I decided to turn over the
entire outfit to Babcock and start homeward by way of Fort Wrangell.
"I can't afford to spend the winter on the Yukon," I said to Burton. "My
mother is not well and is asking for me. I will keep Ladrone—I am going
to take him home with me—but the remainder of the outfit is yours. If
you decide to go on to Teslin—which I advise against—you will need a
thousand pounds of food and this I will purchase for you.—It is hard
to quit the trail. I feel as if running a pack-train were the main
business of my life and that I am deserting my job in going out, but
that is what I must do."
The last Hudson Bay trading steamer was due at about this time and I
decided to take passage to Fort Wrangell with Ladrone, who was almost as
fat and handsome as ever. Two weeks of delicious grass had done wonders
for him. I knew that every horse driven through to Teslin Lake would be
turned out to freeze and starve at the end of the trail, and I could not
think of abandoning my brave pony to such a fate. He had borne me over
mud, rocks and streams. He had starved and shivered for me, and now he
was to travel with me back to a more amiable climate at least. "I could
never look my readers in the face if I left him up here," I explained to
my partners who knew that I intended to make a book of my experiences.
It was a sad moment for my partner as for me when I led my horse down to
the steamer. Ladrone seemed to realize that he was leaving his comrades
of the trail for he called to them anxiously, again and again. He had
led them for the last time. When the cry "HYak KILpy" came next day he
would not be there!
Having seen him safely stowed below deck I returned to the trail for a
final word with Burton.
There he stood, on the dock, brown with camp-fire smoke, worn and
weather beaten, his tireless hands folded behind his back, a remote,
dreaming, melancholy look in his fearless eyes. His limp sombrero rested
grotesquely awry upon his shaggy head, his trousers bulged awkwardly at
the knees—but he was a warrior! Thin and worn and lame he was about to
set forth single-handedly on a journey whose circuit would carry him far
within the Arctic Circle.
The boat began to move. "Good luck, Old Man," I called.
"Good Luck!" he huskily responded. "My love to the folks."
I never saw him again.
I went to Wrangell, and while camped there waiting for a boat to take me
back to the States I heard of a "strike" at Atlin, somewhere back of
Skaguay. I decided to join this rush, and so, leaving my horse to
pasture in the lush grass of the hill-side, I took steamer for the
north. Again I outfitted, this time at Skaguay. I crossed the famous
White Pass. I reached Atlin City. I took a claim.
A month later I returned to Wrangell, picked up Ladrone, shipped with
him to Seattle and so ceased to be a goldseeker.
In Seattle my wonder and affection for Ladrone increased. He had never
seen a big town before, or heard a street car, or met a switching
engine, and yet he followed me through the city like a trustworthy dog,
his nose pressed against my shoulder as if he knew I would protect him.
At the door of the freight car which I had chartered, he hesitated, but
only for an instant. At the word of command he walked the narrow plank
into the dark interior and there I left him with food and water, billed
for St. Paul where I expected to meet him and transfer him to a car for
West Salem. It all seemed very foolish to some people and my only
explanation was suggested by a brake-man who said, "He's a runnin'
horse, ain't he?"
"Yes, he's valuable. Take good care of him. He is Arabian."
CHAPTER SIX
The Return of the Artist
After an absence of five months I returned to La Crosse just in time to
eat Old Settlers Dinner with my mother at the County Fair, quite as I
used to do in the "early days" of Iowa. It was the customary annual
round-up of the pioneers, a time of haunting, sweetly-sad recollections,
and all the speeches were filled with allusions to the days when deer on
the hills and grouse in the meadows gave zest to life upon the farms.
How peaceful, how secure, how abundant my native valley appeared to me,
after those gloomy toilsome months in the cold, green forests of British
Columbia—and how incredible my story must have seemed to my mother as I
told her of my journey eastward by boat and train, bringing my saddle
horse across four thousand miles of wood and wave, in order that he
might spend his final years with me in the oat-filled, sheltered valley
of Neshonoc. "His courage and faithfulness made it impossible for me to
leave him up there," I explained.
He had arrived on the train which preceded me, and was still in the car.
At the urgent request of my Uncle Frank I unloaded him, saddled him, and
rode him down to the fair-ground, wearing my travel-scarred sombrero, my
faded trailer's suit and my leggings, a mild exhibition of vanity which
I trust the reader will overlook, for in doing this I not only gave keen
joy to my relatives, but furnished another "Feature" to the show.
My friend, Samuel McKee, the Presbyterian minister in the village, being
from Kentucky, came nearer to understanding the value of my horse than
any other spectator. "I don't wonder you brought him back," he said,
after careful study. "He is a beauty. There's a strain of Arabian in
him."
My mother's joy over my safe return was quite as wordless as her sorrow
at our parting (in April) had been. To have me close beside her, to lay
her hand upon my arm, filled her with inexpressible content. She could
not imagine the hundredth part of the hardships I had endured, and I
made no special effort to enlighten her—I merely said, "You needn't
worry, mother, one such experience is enough. I shall never leave you
for so many months again," and I meant it.
With a shy smile and a hesitant voice, she reverted to a subject which
was of increasing interest to her. "What about my new daughter? When am
I to see her? I hope now you'll begin to think of a wife. First thing
you know you'll be too old."
My reply was vaguely jocular. "Be patient a little while longer. I shall
seriously set to work and see what I can find for you by way of a
daughter-in-law."
"Choose a nice one," she persisted. "One that will like the old
house—and me. Don't get one who will be too stylish to live here with
us."
In this enterprise I was not as confident as I appeared, for the problem
was not simple. "The girl who can consent to be my wife must needs have
a generous heart and a broad mind, to understand (and share) the humble
conditions of my life, and to tolerate the simple, old-fashioned notions
of my people. It will not be easy," I acknowledged. "I can not afford to
make a mistake—one that will bring grief and not happiness to the
homestead and its mistress."
However, I decided to let that worry stand over. "Sufficient unto the
day is the evil thereof," was a saying which my father often
repeated—and yet I was nearing the dead line! I was thirty-eight.
That first night of my return to the valley was of such rich and tender
beauty that all the suffering, the hardships of my exploration were
forgotten. The moon was at its full, and while the crickets and the
katydids sang in unison, the hills dreamed in the misty distance like
vast, peaceful, patient, crouching animals. The wheat and corn burdened
the warm wind with messages of safely-garnered harvests, and my mind,
reacting to the serenity, the peace, the opulence of it all, was at
rest. The dark swamps of the Bulkley, the poisonous plants of the
Skeena, the endless ice-cold marshes of the high country, the stinging
insects of the tundra, and the hurtling clouds of the White Pass, all
seemed events of another and more austere planet.
On the day following the fair, just as I was stripping my coat and
rolling my sleeves to help my father fence in a pasture for Ladrone, a
neighbor came along bringing a package from the post office. It was a
book, a copy of my Life of Grant, the first I had seen; and, as I
opened it I laughed, for I bore little resemblance to a cloistered
historian at the moment. My face was the color of a worn saddle; my
fingers resembled hooks of bronze, and my feet carried huge, hob-nail
shoes. "What would Dr. Brander Matthews, Colonel Church and Howells, who
had warmly commended the book, think of me at this moment?" I asked
myself.
Father was interested, of course, but he was not one to permit a
literary interest to interfere with a very important job. "Bring that
spade," commanded he, and putting my history on top of a post, I set to
work, digging another hole, rejoicing in my strength, for at that time I
weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, all bone and muscle. So much the
trail had done for me.
I had broadened my palms to the cinch and the axe—I had laid my breast
to the rain.
Nothing physical appalled me, and no labor really wearied me.
Oh, the wealth of that day's sunlight, the opulence of those nearby
fields—the beauty of those warmly-misted hills! In the evening, as I
mounted Ladrone and rode him down the lane, I had no desire to share
Burton's perilous journey down the Hotalinqua.
As my mother's excitement over my return passed away, her condition was
disturbing to me. She was walking less and less and I began at once to
consider a course of treatment which might help her. At my aunt's
suggestion I wrote to a physician in Madison whose sanitarium she had
found helpful, and as my brother chanced to be playing in Milwaukee, I
induced mother to go with me to visit him. She consented quite readily
for she was eager to see him in a real theater and a real play.
We took lodging in one of the leading hotels, which seemed very splendid
to her and that night she saw Franklin on the stage as one of "the three
Dromios" in a farce called "Incog," a piece which made her laugh till
she was almost breathless.
Next day we took her shopping. That is to say she went along with us a
helpless victim, while we purchased for her a hat and cloak, at an
expense which seemed to her almost criminal. They were in truth very
plain garments, and comparatively inexpensive, but her tender heart
overflowed with pride of her sons and a guilty joy in their
extravagance. Many times afterward I experienced, as I do at this
moment, a sharp pang of regret that I did not insist on a better cloak,
a more beautiful hat. I only hope she understood!
In this way, or some other way, I bribed her to go with me to Madison,
to the Sanitarium. "You must not run home," I said to her. "Make a fair
trial of the Institution."
To this she uttered no reply and as she did not appear homesick or
depressed, I prepared to leave, with a feeling that she was in good
hands, and that her health would be greatly benefited by the regimen. "I
must go to the city and look up that new daughter," I said to her in
excuse for deserting her, and this made her entirely willing to let me
go.
Chicago brilliantly illuminated, was filled with the spirit of the Peace
Jubilee, as I entered it. State Street, grandly impressive under the
sweep of a raw east wind, was gay with banners and sparkling with
looping thousands of electric lights, but I hurried at once to my study
on Elm Street. In half an hour I was deep in my correspondence. The
Telegraph Trail was a million miles away, New York and its publishers
claimed my full attention once again.
At two o'clock next day I entered Taft's studio, where I received many
cordial congratulations on my return. "I can't understand why you went,"
Lorado said, and when, at the close of the afternoon, Browne, his
brother-in-law, invited me to dinner, saying, "You'll find Miss Zulime
Taft there," I accepted. Although in some doubt about Miss Taft's desire
to meet me, I was curious to know what four years of Paris had done for
her.
Browne explained that she was going to take up some sort of work in
Chicago. "She's had enough of the Old World for the present."
As he let us into the hall of his West Side apartment, I caught a
momentary glimpse of a young woman seated in the living room, busily
sewing. She rose calmly, though a little surprised at our invasion, and
with her rising, spools of thread and bits of cloth fell away from her
with comic effect, although her expression remained loftily serene.
"Hello, sister Zuhl," called Browne. "Here is an old-time friend of
yours."
As she greeted me with entire self-possession I hardly recognized her
relationship to the pale, self-possessed art-student, with whom I had
held unprofitable argument some four years before. She was much more
mature and in better health than when I last saw her. She carried
herself with dignity, and her gown, graceful of line and rich in color,
fitted her beautifully.
With no allusion to our former differences she was kind enough to say
that she had been a delighted reader of my stories in the magazines, and
that she approved of America. "I've come back to stay," she said, and we
all applauded her statement.
As the evening deepened I perceived that her long stay in England and in
France had done a great deal for Zulime Taft. She was not only well
informed in art matters, she conversed easily and tactfully, and her
accent was refined without being affected. As we settled into our seats
around the dinner table, I was glad to find her opposite me.
She had met many interesting and distinguished people, both in London
and on the Continent, and she brought to our little circle that night
the latest word in French art. Indeed, her comment was so entertaining,
and so valuable, that I was quite converted to her brother's judgment
concerning her term of exile: "Whether you go on with your sculpture or
not," he said, "those four years of Europe have done more for you than a
college course."
She represented everything antithetic to the trail and the farm. She
knew little of New England and nothing of the Mountain West. In many
ways she was entirely alien to my life and yet—or rather because of
that—she interested me. Filled with theories concerning
art—enthusiasms with which the "American Colony" in Paris was aflame,
she stated them clearly, forcibly and with humor. Her temper in argument
was admirable and no man had occasion to talk down at her—as Browne,
who was a good deal of a conservative, openly acknowledged.
She was all for "technique," it appeared. "What America needs more than
subject is skill, knowledge of how to paint," she declared. "Anything
can be made beautiful by the artist's brush."
At the close of a most delightful evening Fuller and I took our
departure together, and we were hardly out of the door before he began
to express open, almost unrestrained admiration of Zulime Taft. "She's a
very remarkable girl," he said. "She will prove a most valuable addition
to our circle."
"Yes," I admitted with judicial poise, "she is very intelligent."
"Intelligent!" he indignantly retorted. "She's a beauty. She's a prize.
Go in and win."
Although I did not decide at that moment to go in and win, I was
profoundly affected by his words. Without knowing anything more about
her than these two meetings gave me, I took it for granted—quite
without warrant, that Fuller had learned from Lorado that she was not
committed to any one. It was fatuous in me but on this assumption I
acted.
By reference to letters and other records I find that I dined at the
Browne's on the slightest provocation. I suspect I did so without any
invitation at all, for while Miss Taft did not betray keen interest in
me she did not precisely discourage me. I sought her company as often as
possible without calling especial attention to my action, and as she
gave no hint of being friendlier with any other man, I went cheerily,
blindly along.
One afternoon as I was taking tea at one of the great houses of the Lake
Shore Drive, she came into the room with the easy grace of one
habituated to meeting people of wealth and distinction. Neither arrogant
nor humble, her self-respecting composure fairly sealed her conquest so
far as I was concerned.
The group of artists surrounding Taft had formed an informal Saturday
night club, which met in a "Camp Supper," and in these jolly, intimate
evenings Miss Taft and her sister, Mrs. Browne, were guiding spirits.
Being included in this group I acknowledged these parties to be the most
delightful events of my life in Chicago. They appeared a bit of Bohemia,
"transmogrified" to suit our conditions, and they made the city seem
less like a drab expanse of desolate materialism.
Sometimes a great geologist would help to make the coffee, while an
architect carved the turkey; and sometimes banker Hutchinson was
permitted to aid in distributing plates and spoons, but always Zulime
Taft was one of the hostesses, and no one added more to the distinction
and the charm of the company. She was never out of character, never at a
loss in an effort to entertain her guests, and yet she did this so
effectively that her absence was instantly felt—I, at least, always
resented the action of those wealthy guests who occasionally hurried
away with her to the Thomas Concert at eight-fifteen. My mood was all
the more bitter for the reason that I could not afford to take her there
myself. To ask her to sit in the gallery was disgraceful, and seats in
the balcony were not only expensive, but almost impossible to get. They
were all sold, in advance, for the season. For all these reasons I
frequently watched her departure with a sense of defeat.
Israel Zangwill, who came to town at about this time to lecture, was
brought to one of our suppers and proved to be of the true artist
spirit. During his stay in the city Taft made a quick sketch of him,
catching most admirably the characteristics of his homely face! He was a
quaint yet powerful personality, witty and wise, and genial, and made
friends wherever he went.
Meanwhile, notwithstanding many pleasant meetings with Miss
Taft—perhaps because of them—I had my moments of gloomy introspection
wherein I cast up accounts in order to determine what I had gained by
my six months' vacation in the wilderness. First of all I had become a
master trailer—so much was assured, but this acquirement did not
promise to be of any practical benefit to me except possibly in the way
of a lecture tour. Broadening my hand to the cinch and the axe did not
make me any more attractive as a suitor and certainly did not add
anything to my capital.
My outing had cost me twice what I had calculated upon, and, thus far, I
had only syndicated a few letters and a handful of poems. The book which
I had in mind to write was still a mass of notes. My horse, whose
transportation and tariff had cost me a thousand dollars, was of little
use to me, although I hoped to get back a part of his cost by means of a
story. My lecture on "The Joys of the Trail" promised to be moderately
successful, and yet with all these things conjoined I did not see myself
earning enough to warrant me in asking Zulime Taft or any woman to be
the daughter which my mother was so eagerly awaiting.
It was a time of halting, of transition for me. For six years—even
while writing my story of Ulysses Grant I had been absorbing the
mountain west in the growing desire to put it into fiction, and now with
a burden of Klondike material to be disposed of, I was subconsciously at
work upon a story of the plains and the Rocky Mountain foothills. In
short, as a cattleman would say, I was "milling" in the midst of a wide
landscape.
I should have gone on to New York at once, but with the alluring
associations of Taft's studio, I lingered on through November and
December, excusing myself by saying that I could work out my problem
better in my own room on Elm Street than in a hotel in New York, and as
a matter of fact I did succeed in writing several chapters of the
Colorado novel which I called The Eagle's Heart.
At last, late in December, I bundled my manuscripts together and set
out for the East. Perhaps this decision was hastened by some editorial
suggestion—at any rate I arrived, for I find in my diary the record of
a luncheon with Brander Matthews who said he liked my Grant book,—a
verdict which heartened me wonderfully. I believed it to be a good book
then, as I do now, but it was not selling as well as we had confidently
expected it to do and my publishers had lost interest in it.
The reason for the failure of this book was simple. The war with Spain
had thrust between the readers of my generation and the Civil War, new
commanders, new slogans and new heroes. To this later younger public
"General Grant" meant Frederick Grant, and all hats were off to Dewey,
Wood and Roosevelt. "You are precisely two years late with your story of
the Great Commander," I was told, and this I was free to acknowledge.
There is an old proverb which had several times exactly described my
situation and which described it then. "It is always darkest just before
dawn," proved to be true of this particular period of discouragement,
for one day while at The Players, Brett, the head of Macmillans, came up
to me and said, "Why don't you let me take over your Main Traveled
Roads, Prairie Folks, and Rose of Dutcher's Coolly? I will do this
provided you will write two new books for me, one to be called Boy Life
on the Prairie and the other a Klondike book based on your experiences
in the North."
This offer cleared my sky. It not only gave direction to my pen—it
roused my hopes of having a home of my own, for Brett's offer involved
the advance of several thousand dollars in royalty. I began to think of
marriage in a more definite way. My case was not so hopeless after all.
Perhaps Zulime Taft——
Taking a room on Twenty-fifth street I set to work with eager intensity
to get these five books in shape for the Macmillan press, and in two
weeks I had carefully revised Rose and was hard at work on the record
of my story of the Northwest which I called The Trail of the Gold
Seekers. I was done with "milling." I was headed straight for a home.
In calling upon Howells soon after my arrival I referred to our last
meeting wherein I had lightly remarked (putting my finger on the map),
"I shall go in here at Quesnelle and come out there, on the Stickeen,"
and said, "I am now able to report. I did it. In spite of all the
chances for failure I carried out my program."
He asked about the dangers I had undergone, and I replied by saying, "A
trailer meets his dangers and difficulties one by one. In the mass they
are appalling but singly they are surmountable. We took each mile as it
came."
"What do you intend to do with your experiences?" he asked.
"I don't know, but I think they will take the form of a chronicle, a
kind of diary, wherein each chapter will be called a camp. Camp One,
Camp Two, and the like."
"That sounds original and promising," he said, and with his
encouragement I set to work.
Israel Zangwill was often in the city and we met frequently during
January and February. I recall taking him to see Howells whom he greatly
admired but had never met. They made a singularly interesting contrast
of East and West. Howells was serious, almost sad for some reason,
unassuming, self-unconscious and yet masterly in every word. Zangwill on
the contrary overflowed with humor, emitting a shower of epigrams
concerning America and the things he liked and disliked, and soon had
Howells smiling with pleased interest.
As we were leaving the house Zangwill remarked in a musing tone, "What
fine humility, or rather modesty. I can't imagine any other man of
Howells' eminence taking that tone."
Kipling had just returned to America, and I went at once to call upon
him. I had not seen him since the dinner which he gave to Riley and me
in the early Nineties, and I was in doubt as to his attitude toward the
States. I found him in a very happy mood, surrounded by callers. In the
years of his absence the American public had learned to place a very
high value on his work and thousands of his readers were eager to do him
honor.
"They come in a perfect stream," he said, and there was a note of
surprise as well as of pleasure in his voice.
He inquired of Riley and Howells and other of our mutual friends, making
it plain that he held us all in his affections. I mention his youth, his
happiness, his joy with special emphasis for he was stricken with
pneumonia a few days later and came so near death that only the most
skillful nursing was able to bring him back to health. For two nights
his life was despaired of, and when he recovered consciousness it was
only to learn that one of his children had died while he himself was at
lowest ebb. It was a most tragic reversal of fortune but it had this
compensation, it called forth such a flood of sympathy on the part of
his public that the daily press carried hourly bulletins of his
conditions. It was as if a great ruler were in danger.
On Saturday the eleventh of February, I attended a meeting (the first
meeting) of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Charles Dudley
Warner presided, but Howells was the chief figure. Owen Wister, Robert
Underwood Johnson, Augustus Thomas and Bronson Howard took an active
part. Warner appointed Thomas and me as a committee to outline a
Constitution and By-laws, and I set down in my diary this comment, "Only
a few men were out and these few were chilled by a cold room but
nevertheless, this meeting is likely to have far-reaching
consequences."
In these months of my stay in New York I had a very busy and profitable
time with Howells, Burroughs, Stedman, Matthews, Herne and their like as
neighbors but after all, my home was in the West, and many times each
day my mind went back to my mother waiting in the snow-covered little
village thirteen hundred miles away. As I had established her in
Wisconsin to be near me, it seemed a little like desertion to be
spending the winter in the East.
My thoughts often returned to the friendly circle in Taft's studio, and
late in February I was keenly interested in a letter from Lorado in
which he informed me that Wallace Heckman, Attorney for The Art
Institute, had offered to give the land to found a summer colony of
artists and literary folk on the East bank of Rock River about one
hundred miles west of Chicago. "You are to be one of the trustees,"
Lorado wrote, "and as soon as you get back, Mr. Heckman wants to take us
all out to look at the site for the proposed camp."
My return to Chicago on the first day of March landed me in the midst of
a bleak period of raw winds, filthy slush and all-pervading grime—but
with hopes which my new contract with Macmillans had inspired I defied
the weather. I rejoined Lorado's circle at once in the expectation of
meeting his sister, and in this I was not disappointed.
Lorado referred at once to Heckman's offer to deed to our group a tract
of land. "He wants you to be one of the trustees and has invited us all
to go out at once and inspect the site."
Upon learning that Miss Taft was to be one of the members of the colony
I accepted the trusteeship very readily. With three thousand dollars
advance royalty in sight, I began to imagine myself establishing a
little home somewhere in or near Chicago, and the idea of an
inexpensive summer camp such as my artist friends had in mind, appealed
to me strongly.
Alas for my secret hopes!—Whether on this tour of inspection or a few
days later I cannot now be sure, but certainly close upon this date
Lorado (moved by some confiding remark concerning my interest in his
sister Zulime) explained to me with an air of embarrassment that I must
not travel any farther in that direction. "Sister Zuhl came back from
Paris not to paint or model but to be married. She is definitely
committed to another man." He finally, bluntly said.
This was a bitter defeat. Although one takes such blows better at
thirty-nine than at nineteen, one doesn't lightly say "Oh, well—such is
life!" I was in truth disheartened. All my domestic plans fell with a
crash. My interest in the colony cooled. The camp suppers lost their
charm.
It is only fair to me to say that Miss Taft had never indicated in any
way that she was mortgaged to another, and no one—so far as I could
see, was more in her favor than I, hence I was not entirely to blame in
the case. My inferences were logical. So far as her words and actions
were concerned I was justified in my hope that she might consent.
However, regarding Lorado's warning as final I turned to another and
wholly different investment of the cash with which my new contract had
embarrassed me. I decided to go to England.
For several years my friends in London had been suggesting that I visit
them and I had a longing to do so. I wanted to see Barrie, Shaw, Hardy,
Besant, and other of my kindly correspondents and this seemed my best
time to make the journey.
Rose of Dutcher's Coolly had won for me many English friends. Henry
James had reviewed it, Barrie had written to me in praise of it and
Stead had republished it in a cheap edition which had gained a wide
circle of readers. "In going abroad now I shall be going among friends,"
I said to Fuller who was my confidant, as usual.
Henry James in a long and intimate letter had said, "It is high time for
you to visit England. I shall take great pleasure in having you for a
week-end here at Old Rye"—and a re-reading of this letter tipped the
scale. I took the train for Wisconsin to see my mother and prepare her
for my immediate trip to London.
Dear soul! She was doubly deeply disappointed, for I not only failed to
bring assurance of a new daughter, I came with an avowal of desertion in
my mouth. Pathetically counting on my spending the summer with her, she
must now be told that I was about to sail for the Old World!
It was not a happy home-coming. I acknowledged myself to be a base,
unfilial, selfish wretch, "and yet—if I am ever to see London now is my
time. Each year my mother will be older, feebler. The sooner I make the
crossing the safer for us all. Furthermore I am no longer young—and
just now with Barrie, Shaw, Zangwill, Doyle and Henry James, England
will be hospitable to me. The London Macmillans are to bring out my
books and so——"
Mother consented at last, tearfully, begging me not to stay long and to
write often, to which I replied, "You may count on me in July. I shall
only be gone three months—four at the outside. I shall send Frank to
stay with you—and I shall write every day."
Just before coming to West Salem (with a feeling of guilt in my heart) I
had purchased a mechanical piano in the hope that it would cheer her
lonely hours, and as this instrument had arrived I unboxed it and set it
up in the music room, eager to please the old folks to whom it was an
amazing contrivance.
It was on Sunday and Uncle Will came in together with several of the
neighbors, and while I manipulated the stops and worked the pedals, they
all sat in silence, marveling at the cunning of the mechanism rather
than enjoying "The Ride of the Valkyries." However as I played some
simpler things, a song of MacDowells, a study by Grieg, my Uncle's head
bowed, and on his face came that somber brooding look which recalled to
me the moods of David, his younger brother, whose violin had meant so
much to me when as a boy, I lay before the fire and listened with sweet
Celtic melancholy to the wailing of its strings.
Something in these northern melodies sank deep into my mother's
inherited memories, also, and her eyes were wide and still with inward
vision, but my Aunt Susan said, "That's a fine invention, but I'd rather
hear you sing," and in this judgment Maria concurred. "It's grand," she
admitted, "but 'tain't like the human voice."
In the end I put the machine back in the corner and sang for them, some
of the familiar songs. The instrument was surprising and new and
wonderful but it did not touch the hearts of my auditors like "Minnie
Minturn" and "The Palace of the King."
On the day following I set the date of my departure and at the end of my
announcement mother sat in silence, her face clouded with pain, her eyes
looking away into space. She had nothing to say in opposition, not a
word—she only said, "If you're going I guess the quicker you start the
better."
CHAPTER SEVEN
London and Evening Dress
Confession must now be made on a personal matter of capital importance.
Up to my thirty-ninth year I had never worn a swallow-tail evening coat,
and the question of conforming to a growing sartorial custom was
becoming, each day, of more acute concern to my friends as well as to
myself.
My first realization of the differences which the lack of evening dress
can make in a man's career, came upon me clearly during the social stir
of the Columbian Exposition, for throughout my ten years' stay in Boston
I had accepted (with serene unconsciousness of the incongruity of my
action) the paradoxical theory that a "Prince Albert frock coat" was the
proper holiday or ceremonial garment of an American democrat. The
claw-hammer suit was to me, as to my fellow artist, "the livery of
privilege" worn only by monopolistic brigands and the poor parasites who
fawned upon and served them, whereas the double-breasted black coat,
royal, as its name denoted, was associated in my mind with judges,
professors, senators and doctors of divinity.
It was, moreover, a dignified and logical garment. It clothed with equal
charity a man's stomach and his stern. Generous of its skirts, which
went far to conceal wrinkled trousers, it could be worn with a light tie
at a formal dinner or with a dark tie at a studio tea, and was equally
appropriate at a funeral or a wedding. For all these several reasons it
remained the uniform of professional men throughout the Middle Border.
From my earliest childhood it had been my ideal of manly elegance. Even
in New York I had kept pretty close to the social level where it was
still accepted.
The World's Fair in '93, however, had not only brought to Chicago many
of the discriminating social customs of the East, but also many
distinguished guests from the old world to whom dress was a formal,
almost sacred routine. To meet these noble aliens, we, the artists and
writers of the city, were occasionally invited; and the question "Shall
we conform" became ever more pressing in its demand for final
settlement. One by one my fellows had deserted from the ranks and were
reported as rubbing shoulders with plutocrats in their great
dining-rooms or escorting ladies into gilded reception parlors, wearing
garments which had no relationship to learning, or art, or law, as I had
been taught to believe. Lorado Taft, Oliver Dennett Grover, and even
Henry Fuller had gone over to the shining majority, leaving me almost
alone in stubborn support of the cylindrical coat.
To surrender was made very difficult for me by Eugene Field, who had
publicly celebrated me as "the sturdy opponent of the swallow-tail
suit," and yet he himself,—though still outwardly faithful—had been
heard to say, "I may be forced to wear the damned thing yet."
In all this I felt the wind of social change. That I stood at the
parting of the ways was plain to me. To continue on my present line of
march would be to have as exemplars Walt Whitman, Joaquin Miller, John
Burroughs and other illustrious non-conformists to whom long beards,
easy collars, and short coats were natural and becoming. To take the
other road was to follow Lowell and Stedman and Howells. To shorten my
beard—or remove it altogether,—to wear a standing collar, and attached
cuffs—to abandon my western wide-rimmed hat—these and many other
"reforms" were involved in my decision. Do you wonder that I hesitated?
That I was being left out of many delightful dinners and receptions had
been painfully evident to me for several years, but the consideration
which had most weight with me, at this time, was expressed by one of my
friends who bluntly declared that all the desirable young women of my
acquaintance not only adored men in evening dress but ridiculed those of
us who went about at all hours of the day and night in "solemn, shiny,
black frocks." I perceived that unless I paid a little more attention to
tailors and barbers and haberdashers my chances for bringing a new
daughter to my mother were dishearteningly remote. Secretly alarmed and
meditating a shameful surrender, I was held in check by the thought of
the highly involved system of buttons, ties, gloves, hats, and shoes
with which I would be called upon to wrestle.
Zangwill, to whom I confided my perplexity, bluntly advised me to
conform. "In truth," said he, "the steel pen suit is the most democratic
of garments. It renders the poor author indistinguishable from the
millionaire."
As usual I referred the problem to Howells. After explaining that I had
in mind a plan to visit England I said, "Every one but John Burroughs
says I must get into the swallow-tail coat; and I will confess that even
here in New York I am often embarrassed by finding myself the only man
in a frock suit at a dinner."
Howells smiled and with delightful humor and that precision of phrase
which made him my joy and my despair, answered, "My dear fellow, why
don't you make your proposed visit to England, buy your evening suit
there and on your return to Chicago plead the inexorability of English
social usages?"
He had pointed the way out. "By George, I'll do just that," I declared,
vastly elated.
In this account of my hesitations I am still the historian. In stating
my case I am stating the perplexities of thousands of my fellow
citizens of the Middle Border. It has its humorous phases—this reversal
of social habit in me, but it also has wide significance. My surrender
was coincident with similar changes of thought in millions of other
young men throughout the West. It was but another indication that the
customs of the Border were fading to a memory, and that Western society,
which had long been dominated by the stately figures of the minister and
the judge, was on its way to adopt the manners and customs of the
openly-derided but secretly admired "four hundred."
Having decided on my sailing date I asked Howells for a few letters of
introduction to English authors.
He surprised me by saying, "I have very few acquaintances in England but
I will do what I can for you."
At the moment of embarkation I disappointed myself by remaining quite
calm. Even when the great ship began to heave and snort and slide away
from the wharf I experienced no thrill—it was not till an hour or two
later, as I stood on the forward deck, watching the sun go down over the
tumbling spread of water, which had something of the majesty I had known
in the prairies, that I became exalted. The vast expanse seemed
strangely like an appalling desert and lifting my eyes to the cloudy
horizon line I could almost imagine myself back on the rocks of Walpi
overlooking the Navajo reservation.
In a letter to my mother I gave the story of my trip. "Feeling a bit
queer along about nine o'clock I went to my state room.—When I came on
deck the next time, my eyes rested upon the green hills of Ireland!—I
am certain the ship's restaurant realized the highest possible profit in
my case for I remember but two meals, one as we were leaving Sandy Hook,
the other as we signaled Queenstown. It may be that I imbibed a bowl of
soup in the interim,—I certainly swallowed a great many doses of
several kinds of medicine. The ship's doctor declared me to be the
worst sailor he had even known in all his thirty years' experience,—so
much of distinction I may definitely claim."
In the dark hours of that interminable week, I went over my trail into
the Skeena Valley during the previous May, with retrospective delight.
In contrast to these endless days of lonely misery in my ship bed those
weeks of rain and mud and mosquitoes became a joyous outing. So far from
giving any thought to problems of dress or social intercourse I was only
interested in reaching land—any land.
"In two minutes after I landed at Liverpool I was perfectly well," I
wrote to my mother. "The touch of solid earth under my feet instantly
restored my sanity. My desire to live returned. In an hour I was aboard
one of the quaint little coaches of the Midland Express and on my way to
London.
"Lush meadows, flecked with fat red cattle feeding beside slow streams;
broad lawns rising to wooded hills, on which many-towered gray buildings
rose; sudden thick-walled towns; factories, winding streams, noble
trees, and finally a yellow mist and London!
"I am at a small inn, near the Terminal Hotel. I ate my dinner last
night surrounded by English people. With brain still pulsing with the
motion of the sea, I went to my bed, rejoicing to feel around me the
solid stone walls of this small but ancient hotel."
After a long walk in search of my publishers I was repaid by finding
several letters awaiting me, and among them was one from Zangwill, who
wrote, "Come at once to my house. I have a message for you."
His address was almost as quaint in my ear as that of Sir Walter Besant,
which was Frognals End—or something like it, but I found it at last on
the way to 'Ampstead 'Eath. The house was a modest one but his study was
made cheery by a real fire of "coals," and many books.
He greeted me heartily and said, "I have an invitation for you to the
Authors' Society Dinner which comes next week. It will be what you would
call 'a big round-up' and you can't afford to miss it. You must go at
once and order that evening suit."
The idea of the dinner allured me but I shuffled, "Can't I go as I am?"
"Certainly not. It is a full-dress affair."
I argued, "But George Bernard Shaw is reported to be without the dress
suit."
"Yes," admitted Zangwill, "Shaw goes everywhere in tweeds, but then he
is Shaw, and can afford to do as he pleases. You will not see him at
this dinner. He seldom goes to such functions."
With a shudder I plunged. "I'll do it! If I must surrender, let it be on
a grand occasion like this. I am in your hands."
Zangwill was highly amused. "We will go at once. That suit must be ready
for the dinner which comes on Thursday. There's not a moment to spare.
The cow-boy must be tamed."
My hesitation may seem comical to my reader as it did to Zangwill, but I
really stood in deep dread of the change. The thought of bulging shirt
fronts, standing collars, varnished shoes and white ties appalled me.
With especial hatred and timidity I approached the cylindrical hat,
which was so wide a departure from my sombrero.—Nevertheless decision
had been taken out of my hands! With wry face I followed my guide.
In most unholy glee Zangwill stood looking on whilst I was being
measured. "This is the beginning of your moral debacle," said he. "What
will they say of you in Wisconsin, when they hear of your appearance at
an English dinner wearing 'the livery of the oppressor'?"
I made no reply to these questions, but I felt like the traitor he
reported me to be.
However, being in so far I decided to go clean through. I bought a white
tie, some high collars, two pairs of gloves and a folding opera hat. I
could not bring myself to the point of wearing a high hat in the day
time (that was almost too much of a change from my broad brim), although
my Prince Albert Frock, which I wore morning, noon, and night, was in
conformity with English custom. Even the clerks were so attired.
Meanwhile, Zangwill's study was the only warm place in London—so far as
I knew. His glowing fire of hard coal was a powerful lure, and I was
often there, reacting to the warmth of his rug like a chilled insect. On
his hearth I thawed into something like good humor, and with his
knowledge of American steam heat he was fitted to understand my vocal
delight.
From my Strand hotel I set out each morning, riding about the city on
the tops of buses and in this way soon got "the lay of the land." I was
able to find Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the Houses of
Parliament, and a few other landmarks of this character. I spent a week
or more, roaming about the old city, searching out, as most Americans
do, the literary, the historic. I wanted to see the Tower, "The Cheshire
Cheese," and the Law Courts of the Temple. The modern London, which was
almost as ugly as Chicago, did not interest me at all.
Between "try-ons" of the new suit I began to meet the men I was most
interested in. I lunched with James Barrie and called upon Bret Harte,
Sir Walter Besant and Thomas Hardy. Bernard Shaw wrote asking me to
Hindhead for a week-end, and Conan Doyle invited me to see a cricket
match with him—but all these events were subordinate to the authors'
dinner and the accursed suit in which I was about to lose my identity.
"My shirt will 'buckle,' my shoes will hurt my feet, my tie will slip up
over my collar—I shall take cold in my chest——" (As a hardened
diner-out I look back with wonder and a certain incredulity on that
uneasy week.)
These were a few of the fears I entertained, but on the fateful
night—an hour before the time to start out, I assumed the whole
"outfit" and viewed myself as best I could in my half-length mirror and
was gratified to note that I resembled almost any other brown-bearded
man of forty. I couldn't see my feet and legs in the glass, but my
patent leather shoes were illustrious. I began to think I might pull
through without accident.
Zangwill with a mischievous grin on his face, met me at the door of the
hotel at seven, and conducted me to the reception hall which was already
filled with a throng of most distinguished guests running from Sir
Walter Besant, the president of the Authors' Society, to Lord Rosebery,
who was to be one of the speakers. Zangwill, who seemed to be known of
everybody, kept me in hand, introducing me to many of the writers, and
kind Sir Walter said, "As an American over-seas member your seat is at
the speakers' table"—an honor which I accepted with a swift realization
that it was made possible by the new coat and vest I presented to the
world.
Zangwill parted with me, smilingly. "I am but one of lower orders," said
he, "but I shall have an eye to you during dinner."
My left-hand neighbor at the table was a short, gray, gloomy individual
whose name I failed to catch, but the man on my right was Henry Norman,
of the London Chronicle, and after we had established friendly
relations I leaned to him and whispered, "Who is the self-absorbed,
gloomy chieftain on my left?"
"That," said he, "is Henry M. Stanley."
"What!" I exclaimed, "not Henry M. Stanley of Africa?"
"Yes, Stanley of Uganda."
It seemed a pity to sit in silence beside this great explorer, who had
been one of my boyish heroes, and I decided to break the ice of his
reserve in some way. Turning to him suddenly I asked, "Sir Henry, how do
you pronounce the name of that poisonous African fly—is it Teetsie or
Tettsie?"
He brightened up at once. I was not so great a bore as he feared. After
he had given me a great deal of information about this fly, and the
sleeping sickness, I asked him what he thought of the future of the
continent, to which he responded with growing geniality. We were off!
After a proper interval I volunteered some valuable data concerning the
mosquitoes and flies I had encountered on my recent trip into the
wilderness of British Columbia. He became interested in me. "Oh! You've
been to the Klondike!"
This quite broke down his wall. Thereafter he listened respectfully to
all that I could tell him of the black flies, the huge caribou flies,
the orange-colored flies, and the mosquitoes who worked in two shifts
(the little gray ones in hot sunlight, the big black ones at night), and
by the time the speaking began we were on the friendliest terms. "What a
bore these orators are!" I said, and in this judgment he instantly
agreed.
Sitting there in the faces of hundreds of English authors, I achieved a
peaceful satisfaction with my outfit. A sense of being entirely
inconspicuous, a realization that I was committed to convention,
produced in me an air of perfect ease. By conforming I had become as
much a part of the scene as Sir Walter or the waiter who shifted my
plates and filled my glass. "Zangwill is right," I said, "the clawhammer
coat is in truth the most democratic of garments."
It pleased me also to dwell upon the fact that the moment of my
capitulation had been made glorious by a meeting with Stanley and Hardy
and Barrie, and that the dinner which marked this most important change
in lifelong habits of dress was appropriately notable. That several
hundred of the best known men and women of England had witnessed my
fall softened the shock, and when—on the way out—Zangwill nudged my
elbow and said, "Cow-boy, you wore 'em to the manner born," I smiled in
lofty disregard of future comment. I faced Chicago and New York with
serene and confident composure.
Although I carried this suit with me to Bernard Shaw's (on a week-end
visit), I was not called upon to wear it, for he met me in snuff-colored
knickerbockers and did not change to any other suit during my stay.
Sunday dinner at Conan Doyle's was a midday meal, and Barrie and Hardy
and other of my literary friends I met at teas or luncheons. I took my
newly-acquired uniform to Paris but as my meetings with my French
friends were either teas or lunches, it so happened that—eager as I was
to display it I did not put this suit on till after I reached home. My
first appearance in it was in the nature of a masquerade, my second was
by way of a joke to please my mother.
Knowing that she had never seen a man in evening dress I arrayed myself,
one night, as if for a banquet, and suddenly descended upon her with
intent to surprise and amuse her. I surprised her but I did not make her
laugh in the way I had expected. On the contrary she surveyed me with a
look of pride and then quietly remarked, "I like you in it. I wouldn't
mind if you dressed that way every day."
This finished my opposition to the swallow-tail coat. If my mother, the
daughter of a pioneer, a woman of the farm, accepted it as something
appropriate to her son, its ultimate acceptance by all America was
inevitable. Thereafter I lay in wait for an opportunity to display
myself in all my London finery.
* * * * * *
Two months later as I was mounting the central staircase of the Chicago
Art Institute, on my way to the Annual Reception, I met two of my fellow
republicans in Prince Albert Frock suits. At sight of me they started
with surprise—surprise and sorrow—exclaiming, "Look at Hamlin
Garland!" Assuming an expression of patrician ease, I replied, "Oh, yes,
I have conformed. In London one must conform, you know.—The English
are quite inexorable in all matters of dress, you understand."
Howells, when I saw him next, smilingly listened to my tale and heartily
approved of my action, but Burroughs regarded it as a weak surrender. "A
silk hat and steel-pen coat on a Whitman Democrat," he said, "seems like
a make-believe," which, in a sense, it was.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Choice of the New Daughter
Although my mother met me each morning with a happy smile, she walked
with slower movement, and in studying her closely, after three months'
absence, I perceived unwelcome change. She was not as alert mentally or
physically as when I went away. A mysterious veil had fallen between her
wistful spirit and the outer world. Her vision was dimmer and her spirit
at times withdrawn, remote. She laughed in response to my jesting, but
there was an absent-minded sweetness in her smile, a tremulous quality
in her voice which disturbed me.
Her joy in my return, so accusing in its tenderness, led me to declare
that I would never again leave her, not even for a month. "You may count
on me hereafter," I said to her. "I'm going to quit traveling and settle
down near you."
"I hope you mean it this time," she replied soberly, and her words stung
for I recalled the many times I had disappointed her.
With a mass of work and correspondence waiting my hand I went from my
breakfast to my study. My forenoons thereafter were spent at my desk,
but with the understanding that if she got lonesome, mother was
privileged to interrupt, and it often happened that along about eleven I
would hear a softly-opened stair-door and then a call,—a timid call as
if she feared to disturb me—"Haven't you done enough? Can't you come
now?" There was no resisting this appeal. Dropping my pen, I went below
and gave the rest of my day to her.
We possessed an ancient low-hung "Surrey," a vehicle admirably fitted
for an invalid, and in this conveyance with a stout mare as motive power
we often drove away into the country of a pleasant afternoon, sometimes
into Gill's Coulee, sometimes to Onalaska.
On these excursions my mother rode in silence, busied with the past.
Each hill, each stream had its tender association. Once as we were
crossing the Kinney Hill she said, "We used to pick plums along that
creek." Or again as we were driving toward Mindora, she said, "When
McEldowney built that house we thought it a palace."
She loved to visit her brother William's farm, and to ride past the old
McClintock house in which my father had courted her. Her expression at
such times was sweetly sorrowful. The past appeared so happy, so secure,
her present so precarious, so full of pain. She sensed the mystery, the
tragedy of human life, but was unable to express her conceptions,—and I
was of no value as a comforter. I could only jest with a bitter sense of
helplessness.
On other days, when she was not well enough to drive, I pushed her about
the village in a wheeled chair, which I had bought at the World's Fair.
In this way she was able to make return calls upon such of her neighbors
as were adjacent to side-walks. She was always in my thought,—only when
Franklin took her in charge was it possible for me to concentrate on the
story which I had begun before going abroad, and in which I hoped to
embody some of the experiences of my trip. Boy Life on the Prairie was
also still incomplete, and occasionally I put aside The Hustler, as I
called my fiction, in order to recover and record some farm custom, some
pioneer incident which my mother or my brother brought to my mind as we
talked of early days in Iowa.
The story (which Gilder afterward called Her Mountain Lover) galloped
along quite in the spirit of humorous extravaganza with which it had
been conceived, and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it for the reason that in
it I was able to relive some of the noblest moments of my explorations
of Colorado's peaks and streams. It was an expression of my indebtedness
to the High Country.
I made the mistake, however, of not using the actual names of
localities. Just why I shuffled the names of trails and towns and
valleys so recklessly, I cannot now explain, for there was abundant
literary precedent for their proper and exact use. Perhaps I resented
the prosaic sound of "Sneffles" and "Montrose Junction." Anyhow,
whatever my motive, I covered my tracks so well that it was impossible
even for a resident to follow me. In The Eagle's Heart I was equally
elusive, but as only part of that book referred to the High Country the
lack of definite nomenclature did not greatly matter.
Personally I like Her Mountain Lover, which is still in print, and for
the benefit of the possible reader of it, I will explain that the "Wagon
Wheel Gap" of the story is Ouray, and that the Grizzly Bear Trail leads
off the stage road to Red Mountain.
Our red raspberries were just coming into fruit, and a few strawberries
remained on the vines, therefore it happened that during the season we
had a short-cake with cream and sugar almost every night for
supper,—and such short-cakes!—piping hot, buttered, smothered in
berries. I fear they were not very healthful either for my mother or for
her sons, but as short-cakes were an immemorial delicacy in our home I
could not bring myself to forbid them.
Mother insisted on them all the more firmly when I told her that the
English knew nothing of short-cake or our kind of pies, and then, more
to amuse her than for any other reason, I told of a visit to my English
publisher and of my bragging about her short-cake so shamelessly that
he had finally declared: "I am coming to Chicago next year, and I shall
journey all the way to West Salem just to test your mother's
short-cake."
This made her chuckle. "Let him come," she said confidently. "We'll feed
him on it."
Notwithstanding her reaction to my jesting, my anxiety concerning her
deepened. The long periods of silence into which she fell alarmed me,
and at times, as she sat alone, I detected on her face an expression of
pain which was like that of one in despair. When I questioned her, she
could not define the cause of her distress, but I feared it came from
some weakening of her heart.
She was failing,—that was all too evident to me—failing faster than
her years warranted, and then (just as I was becoming a little
reassured) she came to me one morning, with both her hands outstretched,
as if feeling her way, her face white, her eyes wide and deep and dark
with terror. "I can't see! I can't see!" she wailed.
With a sense of impending tragedy I took her in my arms and led her to a
chair. "Don't worry, mother!" was all I could say. "It will pass soon.
Keep perfectly quiet."
Under the influence of my words she gradually lost her fear, and by the
time the doctor arrived she was quite calm and could see—a
little—though in a strange way.
In answer to his question she replied with a pitiful little smile, "Yes,
I can see you, but only in pieces. I can only see a part of your
face,—the rest of you is all black."
This reply seemed to relieve the doctor's mind. His face lighted up. "I
understand! Don't worry a mite. You will be all right in a few minutes.
It is only a temporary nerve disturbance."
This proved to be true, and as her lips resumed their placid sweetness
my courage came back. In a few hours she was able to see quite clearly,
or at least as clearly as was normal to her age. Nevertheless I accepted
this attack as a distinct and sinister warning. It not only emphasized
her dependence upon me, it made me very definitely aware of what would
happen to our household if she were to become a helpless invalid. Her
need of a larger bed-chamber, with a connecting bathroom was imperative.
"I know you will both suffer from the noise and confusion of the
building," I said to my aunt, "but I am going to enlarge mother's room
and put in water and plumbing. If she should be sick in that small
bedroom it would be horrible."
Up to this time our homestead had remained simply a roomy farmhouse on
the edge of a village. I now decided that it should have the
conveniences of a suburban cottage, and to this end I made plans for a
new dining-room, a new porch, and a bath-room.
Mother was appalled at the audacity of my designs. She wanted the larger
chamber, of course, but my scheme for putting in running water appealed
to her as something almost criminally extravagant. She was troubled,
too, by the thought of the noise, the dirt, the change which were
necessary accompaniments of the plan.
I did my best to reassure her. "It won't take long, mother, and as for
the expense, you just let me walk the floor."
She said no more, realizing, no doubt, that I could not be turned aside
from my purpose.
There were no bathrooms in West Salem in 1899—the plumber was still the
tinner, and when the news of my ambitious designs got abroad it created
almost as much comment as my brother's tennis court had roused some five
years earlier. As a force making toward things high-fi-lutin, if not
actually un-American, I was again discussed. Some said, "I can't
understand how Hamlin makes all his money." Others remarked, "Easy come,
easy go!" Something unaccountable lay in the scheme of my life. It was
illogical, if not actually illegal.
"How can he go skittering about all over the world in this way?" asked
William McEldowney, and Sam McKinley said to my mother, "I swear, I
don't see how you and Dick ever raised such a boy. He's a
'sport,'—that's what he is, a freak." To all of which mother answered
only with a silent laugh.
The carpenters came, together with a crew of stonemasons, and the old
kitchen began to move southward, giving place for the foundations of the
new dining-room. By the end of the week, the lawn was littered with
material and tools, and the frame-work was enclosed.
My mother, in her anxiety to justify the enormous outlay said, "Well,
anyhow, these improvements are not entirely for me, they will make the
house all the nicer for my New Daughter when she comes."
"That's true," I answered, "I hadn't thought of that."
"It's time you thought of it. You're almost forty years old," she
replied with humorous emphasis, then she added, "I begin to think I
never will see your wife."
"Just you wait," I jestingly replied. "The case is not so hopeless as
you think—I have just received a letter which gives me a 'prospect.'"
I said this merely to divert her, but she seized upon my remark with
alarming seriousness. "Read me the letter. Where does she live?—Tell me
all about her."
Being in so far I thought it could do no harm to go a little farther. I
described (still in bantering mood) my first meeting with Zulime Taft
more than five years before. I pictured her as she looked to me then,
and as she afterward appeared when I met her a second time in the home
of her sister in Chicago. "I admit that I was greatly impressed by her,"
I went on, "but just when I had begun to hope for a better
understanding, her brother Lorado chilled me with the information that
she was about to be claimed by another man. To be honest about it,
mother, I am not sure that she is interested in me even now; although
one of her friends has just written me to say that Lorado was mistaken,
and that Zulime is not engaged to any one. I am going down to visit some
friends at the camp to test the truth of this; but don't say a word
about it, for my information may be wrong."
My warning went for nothing! My confession was too exciting to be kept a
secret, and soon several of mother's most intimate friends had heard of
my expedition, and in their minds, as in hers, my early marriage was
assured. Did not the proof of it lie in the fact that I was pushing my
building with desperate haste? Was this not done in order to make room
for my bride?—No other reason was sufficient to account for the
astounding improvements which I had planned, and which were going
forward with magical rapidity.
Of course no one could convince my mother that her son's "attractions"
might not prove sufficiently strong to make his "prospect" a
possibility, for to her I was not only a distinguished author, but a
"Good provider," something which outweighed literary attainment in a
home like ours.
She could not or would not speak of the girl as "Miss Taft," but
insisted upon calling her "Zuleema," and her mind was filled with plans
for making her at home.
Privately I was more concerned than I cared to show, and I would be
giving a false impression if I made light of my feeling at this time. I
spoke to mother jestingly in order to prevent her from building her
hopes on an unstable foundation.
In the midst of my busiest day I received a letter from my good friends,
Wallace and Tillie Heckman, and though I was but a clumsy farmer in all
affairs of the heart, I perceived enough of hidden meaning in their
invitation to visit Eagle's Nest, to give me pause even in the welter
of my plumbing. I replied at once accepting their hospitality, and on
Saturday took the train for Oregon to stay over Sunday at least.
Squire Heckman was good enough to meet me at the train, and as he drove
me up the hill to "Ganymede," which was his summer home, he said, "You
will breakfast with us, and as it is our custom to dine at the Camp on
Sunday we will take you with us and introduce you to the campers,
although most of them are known to you."
Mrs. Heckman, who was cordial in her welcome, informed me at breakfast
that Miss Taft was the volunteer stewardess of the Camp. "She is
expecting us to bring you to dinner to-day."
"As one of the Trustees of the Foundation, a tour of inspection is a
duty," I replied.
There was a faint smile on Mrs. Heckman's demure lips, but Wallace,
astute lawyer that he was, presented the bland face of a poker player.
Without a direct word being spoken I was made to understand that Miss
Taft was not indifferent to my coming, and when at half-past eleven we
started for Eagle's Nest I had a sense of committing myself to a
perilous campaign.
A walk of half a mile through a thick grove of oaks brought us out upon
a lovely, grassy knoll, which rose two hundred feet or more above the
Rock River, and from which a pleasing view of the valley opened to the
north as well as to the south. The camp consisted of a small kitchen
cabin, a dining tent, a group of cabins, and one or two rude studios to
which the joyous off-hand manners of the Fine Arts Building had been
transferred. It was in fact a sylvan settlement of city dwellers—a
colony of artists, writers and teachers out for a summer vacation.
Miss Zulime Taft, acting as volunteer housekeeper for the colony, had charge of the long rude table under the tent-fly to which the campers assembled with the appetites of harvest hands and the gayety of uncalculating youth.
In
holiday mood Browne, Taft, and Clarkson greeted me warmly, upbraiding
me, however, for having so long neglected my official duties as trustee.
"We need your counsel."
Mrs. Heckman, laconic, quizzical, walked about "the reservation" with
me, and in her smiling eyes I detected a kind of gentle amusement with
her unconventional neighbors. She said nothing then (or at any time)
which could be interpreted as criticism, but a merry little quirk in the
corner of her lip instructed me.
Miss Taft was not visible. "As house-keeper she is busy with
preparations for dinner," Mrs. Heckman explained, and so I concealed my
disappointment as best I could.
At last at one o'clock, Lorado, as Chief of the tribe, gave the signal
for the feast by striking a huge iron bar with a hammer, a sound which
brought the campers from every direction, clamoring for food, and when
all were seated at the dining table beneath a strip of canvas, some one
asked, "Where's Zuhl?"
Browne answered with blunt humor, "Primping! She's gone to smooth her
ruffled plumage."
A cry arose, "Here she comes!" and Spencer Fiske the classical scholar
of the camp with fervent admiration exclaimed "By Jove—a veritable
Diana!"
Browne started the Toreador's song, and all began to beat upon the
tables with their spoons in rhythmical clamor. Turning my head I
perceived the handsome figure of a girl moving with calm and stately
dignity across the little lawn toward the table. She was bareheaded, and
wore a short-sleeved, collarless gown of summer design, but she carried
herself with a leisurely and careless grace which made evident the fact
that she was accustomed to these moments of uproar. As she neared the
tent, however, I detected a faint flicker of amusement in the lines
about her mouth.
This entrance so dramatic and so lovely was precisely the kind of
picture to produce on my mind a deeply influencing impression. I thought
her at the moment one of the most gracious and admirable women of my
world, a union of European culture and the homely grace of the prairie.
She greeted me with a pleasant word, and took a seat opposite, making no
reply to the jocular comment of her boarders. It was evident that she
was not only accustomed to demonstrations of this sort, but considered
them a necessary part of her stewardship, an office which was entirely
without salary—and scantily repaid in honor.
No complaints about the scarcity of butter, or questions concerning the
proportions of milk in the cream jug, had power to draw her into
defensive explanation. At last her tormentors unable to stampede her by
noise, or plague her by petitions, subsided into silence or turned to
other matters, and we all settled down to an abundant and very jolly
dinner.
It was because the camp loved Zulime Taft that they could carry on in
this way. It was all studio blague, and she knew it and offered no
defense of her economies.
Most of the artists and writers in the camp were already known to me.
They were all of small income, some of them were almost as poor as I,
and welcomed a method by which they were able to spend a summer
comfortably and inexpensively. A common kitchen, and an old white horse
and wagon also owned collectively, made it possible to offer board at
four dollars per week!
The Heckman home, which the campers called "the Castle," or "The Manor
House," a long, two-story building of stone which stood on the southern
end of the Bluff, overlooked what had once been Black Hawk's Happy
Hunting Ground. It was not in any sense a château, but it pleased
Wallace Heckman's artist-tenants to call it so, and by contrast with
their cook-house it did, indeed, possess something like grandeur.
Furthermore "the Lord of the Manor" added to the majesty of his position
by owning and driving a coach (this was before the day of the
automobile), and at times those of his tenants most highly in favor,
were invited to a seat on this stately vehicle.
"Lady" Heckman possessed a piano, another evidence of wealth, and the
pleasantest part of my recollections of this particular visit concerns
the evenings I spent with her in singing "Belle Mahone" and "Lily Dale,"
while Lorado and his sisters sat in the corner and listened—at least I
infer that they listened—now that I grow more clear in my mind I recall
that Tillie Heckman did not sing, she only played for me; and my
conviction is that I sang very well. I may be mistaken in this for (at
times) I detected Wallace Heckman addressing a jocose remark to Miss
Taft when he should have been giving his undivided attention to my song.
Miss Taft was accused of having a keen relish for the fare at Castle
Heckman, and in this relish I shared so frankly that when Tillie invited
me to stay on indefinitely, and Wallace suggested that I might make the
little pavilion on the lawn serve as my study, I yielded. "Work on the
homestead must wait," I wrote to my mother. "Important business here
demands my attention."
Zulime Taft appeared pleased when I announced my acceptance of the
Heckman hospitality, and Wallace immediately offered me the use of his
saddle horses and his carriage, and when he said, "Miss Taft loves to
ride," I was convinced not only of his friendly interest but of his
hearty coöperation. Furthermore as Mrs. Heckman often kept Miss Taft for
supper, I had the pleasant task of walking back to camp with her.
In some way (I never understood precisely how) the campers, one and all,
obtained the notion that I was significantly interested in Miss Taft;
but, as I was proceeding with extraordinary caution, wearing the bland
expression of a Cheyenne chieftain, I could not imagine any one
discovering in my action anything more than a frank liking, a natural
friendship between the sister of my artist comrade and myself.
It is true I could not entirely conceal the fact that I preferred her
company to that of any other of the girls, but there was nothing
remarkable in that—nevertheless, the whole camp, as I learned afterward
(long afterward), was not only aware of my intentions but, behind my
back, almost under my nose, was betting on my chances. Wagers were being
offered and taken, day by day, as to whether I would win or lose!
Fortunately, nothing of this disgraceful business reached me. I was
serenely unconscious of it all.
Demure as Tillie Heckman looked, slyly humorous as she occasionally
showed herself to be, she was a woman of understanding, and from her I
derived distinct encouragement. She not only indicated her sympathy; she
conveyed to me her belief that I had a fair chance to win. I am not
sure, but I think it was from her that I received the final statement
that Miss Taft was entirely free. However, this did not clear me from
other alarms, for on Friday night the train brought Henry Fuller and
several young men visitors who were all quite willing to walk and talk
with Miss Taft. It was only during the midweek that I, as the only
unmarried man in camp, felt entirely secure.
Henry Fuller stayed on after the others went back to the city, and I
would have been deeply disturbed by Zulime's keen interest in him, had I
not been fully informed of their relationship, which was entirely that
of intellectual camaraderie. Fuller was not merely a resolved bachelor;
he was joyously and openly opposed to any form of domesticity. He loved
his freedom beyond all else. The Stewardess knew this and revelled in
his wit, sharing my delight in his bitter ironies. His verbal
inhumanities gave her joy, because she didn't believe in them. They were
all "literature" to her.
The weather was glorious September, and as my writing was going forward,
my companionship ideal, and my mother's letters most cheerful, I
abandoned myself, as I had not done in twenty years, to a complete
enjoyment of life. Golden days! Halcyon days! Far and sweet and serene
they seem as I look back upon them from the present—days to review with
wistful regret that I did not more fully employ them in the way of
youth, for alas! my mornings were spent in writing when they should have
been given to walking with my sweetheart; yet even as I worked I had a
sense of her nearness, and the knowledge that the shimmering summer
landscape was waiting for me just outside my door, comforted me.
However, I was not wholly neglectful of my opportunities. My afternoons
were given over to walking or riding with her, and our evenings were
spent in long and quiet excursions on the river or sitting with the
artists in the light of a bonfire on the edge of the bluff, talking and
singing.
The more I knew of Miss Taft the more her versatility amazed me. She
could paint, she could model, she could cook and she could sew. As
Stewardess, she took charge of the marketing, and when the kitchen fell
into a flutter, her masterly taste and skill brought order—and a
delicious dinner—out of chaos. It remains to say that, in addition to
all these, her intellectual activities, she held her own in the fierce
discussions (concerning Art) which broke out at the table or raged like
whirlwinds on the moonlit bluff—discussions which centered around such
questions as these: "Can a blue shadow painting ever be restful?" "Is
Local Color essential to fiction?" I particularly admired the Stewardess
in these moments of controversy, for she never lost her temper or her
point of view.
Incredibly sweet and peaceful that week appears as I view it across the
gulf which the World War has thrust between that year and this.
We had no fear of hunger in those days, no dread of social unrest, no
expectation of any sudden change. All wars were over—in our opinion.
The world was at last definitely at peace, and we in America, like the
world in general, had nothing to do but to go on getting richer and
happier, so happy that we could be just. We were all young—not one of
us had gray hair. Life, for each of us as for the Nation, moved
futureward on tranquil, shining course, as a river slips southward to
the sea, confident, effortless, and serene. Heavenly skies, how happy we
were!
That I was aware in some degree of the idyllic, evanescent charm of
those days is made certain in a note which I find in my diary, the
record of a walk in the woods with Zulime. Her delight in the tender
loveliness of leaf and vine, in the dapple of sunlight on the path, I
fully shared. Another page tells of a horseback excursion which we made
across the river. She rode well, very well, indeed, and her elation, her
joy in the motion of the horse, as well as her keen delight in the
landscape, added to my own pleasure. We stayed to supper at the
Heckmans' that night, and walked back to the camp at nine, loitering
through the most magical light of the Harvest Moon.
As she manifested a delightful interest in what I was writing, I fell
into the habit of reading to her some pages out of my new manuscript, in
order that I might have the value of her comment on it. Of course I
expected comment to be favorable, and it was. That this was an unfair
advantage to take of a nice girl, I was aware, even then, but as she
seemed willing to listen I was in a mood to be encouraged by her smiles
and her words of praise.
My growing confidence led to an enlargement of my plans concerning the
homestead. "You are right," I wrote to my mother. "A new daughter will
make other improvements in the house absolutely necessary. Not merely a
new dining-room, but an extra story must be added to the wing—" And in
the glow of this design I reluctantly cut short my visit and returned to
West Salem, to apprise the carpenters of the radical changes in my
design.
Jestingly, and more by way of reconciling my mother to the renewed noise
and confusion of the building, I described the walks and rides I had
taken with Zulime, warning her at the same time not to enlarge upon
these facts. "Miss Taft's interest may be only friendliness," I added.
My words had precisely an opposite effect: thereafter she spoke of my
hopes as if they were certainties, and insisted on knowing all about
"Zuleema," as she persisted in calling Miss Taft.
"Now, Mother," I again protested, "you must not talk that way to any
of your callers, for if you do you'll get me into a most embarrassing
situation. You'll make it very hard for me to explain in case of
failure."
"You mustn't fail," she responded wistfully. "I can't afford to wait
much longer."
It was incredible to her that any sane girl would reject such an
alliance, but I was very far from her proud confidence.
In this doubt of success, I was entirely honest. I had never presumed on
any manly charm, I made no claim to beauty—on the contrary, I had
always been keenly aware of my rude frame and clumsy hands. I realized
also my lack of nice courtesy and genial humor. Power I had (and relied
upon), but of the lover's grace—nothing. That I was a bear was quite as
evident to me as to my friends. "If I win this girl it must be on some
other score than that of beauty," I admitted.
In the midst of the bustle and cheer of this week another swift and
sinister cloud descended upon me. One evening, as mother and I were
sitting together, she fell into a terrifying death-like trance from
which I could not rouse her, a condition which alarmed me so deeply that
I telegraphed to my father in Dakota and to my brother in Chicago,
telling them to come at once. It seemed to me that the final moment of
our parting was at hand.
All through that night, one of the longest I had ever known (a time of
agony and remorse as well as of fear), I blamed myself for bringing on
the wild disorder of the building. "If I had not gone away, if I had not
enlarged my plan, the house would now be in order," was the thought
which tortured me.
The sufferer's speech had failed, and her pitiful attempts to make her
wishes known wrung my heart with helpless pity. Her eyes, wide, dark and
beautiful, pleaded with me for help, and yet I could only kneel by her
side and press her hand and repeat the doctor's words of comfort. "It
will pass away, mother, just as your other attacks have done. I am sure
of it. Don't try to talk. Don't worry."
As the night deepened, dark and sultry, distant flashes of silent
lightning added to the lurid character of my midnight vigil. It seemed
that all my plans and all my hopes had gone awry. Helpless, longing for
light, I wore out the lagging hours beside my mother's bed, with very
little change in her condition to relieve the strain of my anxiety.
"Will she ever speak again? Have I heard her voice for the last time?"
These questions came again and again to my mind.
Dawn crept into the room at last, and Franklin came on the early train.
With his coming, mother regained some part of her lost courage. She grew
rapidly stronger before night came again, and was able to falter a few
words in greeting and to ask for father.
During the following day she steadily improved, and in the afternoon was
able to sit up in her bed. One of the first of her interests was a
desire to show my brother a new bonnet which I had recently purchased
for her in the city, and at her request I put it into her hands.
Her love and gratitude moved us both to tears. Her action had the
intolerable pathos of a child's weakness united with a kind of delirium.
To watch her feeble hands exhibiting a head-dress which I feared she
would never again wear—displaying it with a pitiful smile of pride and
joy—was almost more than I could bear. Her face shone with happiness as
she strove to tell my brother of the building I was doing to make her
more comfortable. "Zuleema is coming," she said. "My new daughter—is
coming."
When Franklin and I were alone for a moment, I said: "She must not die.
I won't let her die. She must live a little longer to enjoy the new
rooms I am building for her."
It would appear that the intensity of my desire, the power of my resolve
to bring her back to life, strengthened her, wrought upon her with
inexplicable magic, for by the time my father arrived she was able to
speak and to sit once more in her wheeled chair. She even joked with me
about "Zuleema."
"You'd better hurry," she said, and then the shadow came back upon me
with bitter chill. How insecure her hold on life had become!
Haste on the building was now imperative—so much, at least, I could
control. With one crew of carpenters, another of painters, and a third
of tinners, all working at the same time, I rushed the construction
forward. At times my action presented itself to me as a race against
death, or at least with death's messenger. What I feared, most of all,
was a sudden decline to helpless invalidism on my mother's part, a
condition in which a trained nurse would be absolutely necessary. To get
the rooms in order while yet our invalid was able to move about the
house, was now my all-absorbing interest.
With no time to dream of love, with no thought of writing, I toiled
like a slave, wet with perspiration, dusty and unkempt. With my shirt
open at the throat and my sleeves rolled to the elbow, I passed from one
phase of the job to another, lending a hand here and a shoulder there.
In order that I might hasten the tearing down and clearing away, I
plunged into the hardest and dirtiest tasks, but at night, after the men
were gone, dark moods of deep depression came over me, moments in which
the essential futility of my powers overwhelmed me with something like
despair.
"What right have you to ask that bright and happy girl—any girl—to
share the uncertainties, the parsimony, the ineludible struggle of your
disappointing life?" I demanded of myself, and to this there was but one
answer: "I have no right. I have only a need."
Nevertheless, I wrote her each day a short account of my doings, and her
friendly replies were a source of encouragement, of comfort. She did not
know (I was careful to conceal them) the torturing anxieties through
which I was passing, and her pages were, for the most part, a pleasant
reflection of the uneventful, care-free routine of the camp. In spite of
her caution she conveyed to me, beneath her elliptical phrases, the fact
that she missed me and that my return would not be displeasing to her.
"When shall we see you?" she asked.
In one of her letters she mentioned—casually—that on Monday she was
going to Chicago with her sister, but would return to the camp at the
end of the week.
Something in this letter led me to a sudden change of plan. As mother
was now quite comfortable again I said to her, "Zuleema has gone to
Chicago to do some shopping. I think I'll run down and meet her and ask
her to help me select the curtains and wall-paper for your new room.
What do you say to that?"
"Go along!" she said instantly, "but I expect you to bring her home with
you."
"Oh, I can't do that," I protested. "I haven't any right to do
that—yet!"
The mere idea of involving the girl in my household problem seemed
exciting enough, and on my way down to the city I became a bit less
confident. I decided to approach the matter of my shopping
diplomatically. She might be alarmed at my precipitancy.
She was not alarmed—on the contrary her pleased surprise and her keen
interest in my mother's new chamber gave me confidence. "I want you to
help me buy the furnishings for the new rooms," I said almost at once.
"I shall be glad to help," she replied in the most natural way.
Evidently, she saw nothing especially significant in my request, but
to me it was a subtle stratagem. To have her take part in my
bargain-hunting was almost as exciting as though we were furnishing OUR
home, but I dared not assume that she was thinking along these dangerous
lines. That she was genuinely interested in my household problems was
evident, but I was not justified in asking anything further. She was
distinctly closer to me that day, more tenderly intimate than she had
ever been before, and her womanly understanding of my task—the deep
sympathy she expressed when I told her of my mother's recent
illness—all combined to give me comfort—and hope!
A few days later we rode back to Eagle's Nest Camp together, and all
through those three hours on the train a silent, subconscious, wordless
adjustment went on between us. That she was secretly debating the
question of accepting me was certain, and there was nothing in her
manner to dishearten me; on the contrary, she seemed to enjoy playing
round the perilous suggestion.
We dined at "the Castle" as usual, and late that night, as we walked
slowly over to the camp through the odorous woods, hearing the
whippoorwill's cry and the owlets hoot from their dark coverts, I was
made aware that my day's work had drawn her closer into my life. I had
made her aware of my need.
The day which followed our return to camp was my thirty-ninth birthday,
and I celebrated it by taking a long walk and talk with her. She took
some sewing with her, and as we rested under a great oak tree, we spoke
of many intimate, personal things, always with the weight of our
unsolved problem on our mind.
At last, in approaching my plea for help, I stated the worst of my case.
"I am poor and shall always remain poor," I said. "My talent is small
and my work has only a very limited appeal. I see no great improvement
in my fortunes. I have done an enormous amount of work this year (I've
written three volumes), but all of them conjoined will not bring in as
much cash as a good stone-mason can earn. But that isn't the worst of
it! The hopeless part of it is—I like my job. I wouldn't change to a
more profitable one if I could. I have only one other way of earning
money, and that is by physical labor. If the worst comes to the worst, I
can farm or do carpenter work."
Her reply to all this was not entirely disheartening. "To make money is
not the most important thing in the world," she said, and then told me
of her own childhood in Illinois, of the rigid economies which had
always been necessary in the Taft home. "My father's salary as a
professor of geology was small, and with six people to feed and clothe,
and four children to be educated, my poor little mother had a very busy
and anxious time of it. I know by personal experience what it is to lack
money for food and clothes. The length of my stay in Paris was dependent
on rigid daily economy. I hadn't an extra franc to spare."
This confession of her own lifelong poverty should have turned me aside
from my fell purpose, but it did not—it merely encouraged me to go on.
In place of saying, "My dear girl, as compensation for all those years
of care and humiliating poverty you deserve a spacious home, with
servants and a carriage. Realizing that I can offer you only continued
poverty and added anxiety, I here and now relinquish my design. I
withdraw in favor of a better and richer man"—instead of uttering these
noble words, what did I do? I did the exact opposite! I proceeded to
press my selfish, remorseless, unwarranted demand!
It is customary for elderly men to refer either flippantly or with
gentle humor to their days of courtship, forgetting (or ignoring) the
tremulous eagerness, the grave questioning and the tender solemnity of
purpose with which they weighed the joys and responsibilities of married
life. It is easy to be cynical or evasive or unduly sentimental in
writing of our youthful love affairs, when the frosts of sixty years
have whitened our heads, after years of toil and care have dimmed our
eyes and thinned our blood, but I shall permit neither of these unworthy
moods to color my report of this day's emotion. I shall not deny the
alternating moments of hope and doubt, of bitterness and content, which
made that afternoon both sweet and sad.
The thing I was about to do was tragically destructive—I knew that. To
put out a hand, to arrest this happy and tranquil girl, saying, "Come,
be my wife. Come, suffer with me, starve with me," was a deed whose
consequences scared me while they allured me. I felt the essential
injustice of such a marriage, and I foresaw some of its accompanying
perplexities, but I did not turn aside as I should have done. With no
dependable source of income, with an invalid mother to care for, I asked
this artist, so urban, so native to the studio, so closely knit to her
joyous companions in the city, to go with me into exile, into a country
town, to be the housekeeper of a commonplace cottage filled with aged
people! "It is monstrous selfishness; it is wrong," I said, "but I want
you."
My philosophy, even at that time, was essentially individualistic. I
believed in the largest opportunity to every human soul. Equal rights
meant Equal rights in my creed. I had no intention of asking Zulime
Taft to sink her individuality in mine. I wanted her to remain herself.
Marriage, as I contemplated it, was to be not a condition where the
woman was a subordinate but an equal partner, and yet how unequal the
sacrifice! "I ask you to join your future with mine. It's a frightful
risk, but I am selfish enough to wish it."
Under no illusion about my own character, I admitted that there is no
special charm in a just man. To have a sense of honor is fine, but to
have a joyous and lovely disposition makes a man a great deal easier to
live with. I was perfectly well aware that as a husband I would prove
neither lovely nor joyous. My temper was not habitually cheerful. Like
most writers, I was self-absorbed, filled with a sense of the importance
of my literary designs. To be "just" was easy, but to be charming and
considerate—these were the points on which I was sure to fail, and I
knew it. Did that deter me? Not at all! Bitterly unwilling to surrender
Zulime to the richer and kindlier man who was, undoubtedly, waiting at
that moment to receive her and cherish her, I pleaded with her to share
my poverty and my hope of future fame.
Shaken by my appeal, she asked for time in which to consider this
problem. "I ought to talk with Lorado," she said.
The mere fact that she could not decide against me at the moment gave me
confidence. "Very well," I said. "Mother wants me—I shall go home for
a week. Let me know when I can come again. I hope it will not be more
than a week."
In this arrangement we rested, and as we walked back to camp I cared
nothing for the sly words or glances of our fellow artists. I believed I
had won my case.
My mother's demand for my presence did not arise—I soon learned—from
any return of her malady, but from a desire for news of my courtship.
"Where's my new daughter? Why didn't you bring her?" she demanded.
"She couldn't come this time. The question is still unsettled."
"Go right back and settle it," she urged. "Go quick, before some one
else gets her. Write to her. Tell her to come right up. Send her a
telegram. Seems as though I can't wait another week."
Her urgency made me laugh, even while I perceived the pathos of it. "I
can't bring her to you, mother, till she is willing to come as a
bride—but she's thinking about it, and I am going back next week to get
my answer. Be patient a little while longer. I promise you the whole
question will be settled soon, and I hope it will be settled our way.
Zulime seems to like me."
Dear old mother! Her stammering, tremulous utterance made me smile and
it made me weep. She was growing old prematurely, and the need of haste
was urgent. "If I can possibly persuade her to come," I added very
gravely, "I'll fetch her home to eat Thanksgiving dinner with you."
My tone, rather than my words, silenced her, and gave her a measure of
content, although she was childishly impatient of even a day's delay.
All that week I alternately hoped and doubted, assembling all the items
on the credit side of my ledger, and at last a letter came in which
Zulime indicated that she wished to see me. "I am still undecided," she
said, "but you may come." I left at once for the camp, feeling that her
confession of indecision was in my favor.
Lorado was not markedly favorable to me as a brother-in-law. He liked me
and respected me as a friend, but as a suitor for the hand of his
sister—well, that was another and far more serious matter.
The camp "Equipage" met me at the station, and I consented to ride in it
as far as the Heckman gate, hoping that Zulime would be there to welcome
me. In this I was not disappointed, and something in her face and the
firm clasp of her hand reassured me.
For nearly a week, in the midst of the most glorious October landscape,
surrounded by the scarlet and gold and crimson branches of the maples
and the deep-reds and bronze-greens of the oaks, she and I walked and
rode and boated in almost constant companionship. Idyllic days! Days of
a quality I had lost all hope of ever again reliving. Days of quiet
happiness and almost perfect content, for on an afternoon of dreamlike
beauty, in a glade radiant with hazy golden sunshine and odorous with
the ripening leaves, she spoke the all-important words which joined her
future life with mine.
We were seated at the moment on our favorite bank, under a tall oak
tree, gorgeous as a sunset cloud, and as silent. I had been reading to
her, and she was busy with some delicate embroidery. The crickets were
chirping sleepily in the grass at our feet, and the jays calling harshly
seemed warning us of the passing of summer and the coming on of frost.
"Let the wedding day be soon," I pleaded as we rose to return to camp.
"I am nearing the dead-line. I am almost forty years old—I can't afford
to wait. I want you to come to me now—at once. The old folks are
waiting for you. They want you for Thanksgiving Day. Your presence
would make them happier than any other good fortune in this world."
She understood my way of putting the argument. She knew that I was
veiling my own eagerness under my mother's need, and after a little
reflection she said, "I am going out to my father's home in Kansas. You
may come for me there on the twenty-third of November. That is—if you
still want me at that time."
The end of the camp season was at hand; everybody was packing up, and so
my girl and I turned with deep regret from the golden halls of our
sylvan meeting-place. "This is my Indian summer," I said to her, "and
that you may never have cause to regret the decision which this day has
brought to you, is my earnest hope."
More than twenty years have gone over our heads, and as I write these
lines our silver wedding is not far off. Our lives have not been all
sunshine, but Zulime has met all storms with a brave sweetness, which I
cannot overpraise. If she has regrets, she does not permit me to know
them. My poverty—which persists—has not embittered her or caused her,
so far as I know, a single mood of self-commiseration.
CHAPTER NINE
A Judicial Wedding
On reaching my Elm Street home the next day, I was surprised and deeply
gratified to find on my desk a letter from William Dean Howells, in
which he said: "I am at the Palmer House. I hope you will come to see me
soon, for I start for Kansas on a lecture trip in a few days."
Although I had long been urging that he should come to Chicago, he had
steadfastly declined to accept a lecture engagement west of Ohio, and I
could not quite understand what had led him so far afield as Kansas. I
hastened to call upon him, and, at the first appropriate pause in the
conversation, I spoke to him of my engagement. "Miss Taft loves your
books and would keenly appreciate the honor of meeting you."
With instant perception of my wish to have him know my future wife, he
replied, "My dear fellow, I am eager to meet her. Perhaps my gray
hairs will excuse your bringing her to call upon me."
"At your convenience," I replied eagerly. "I want you to know her. She
is very much worth while."
"I am sure of that," he smilingly retorted.
He was billed to speak that night, and as he was leaving for Rock Island
the following day he arranged that I should bring Zulime to the hotel
just before he started for his lecture.
After telling her of his wish to see her, I explained the significance
of it. "You must understand that Mr. Howells is a kind of literary
father confessor to me. He is a man of most delicate courtesy. Once you
have seen him, once you have looked into his face, you will love him."
She was as ready as I was to take her, and promptly on the minute we
sent up our names and took seats in the Ladies' Parlor. It had been
years since I had entered the Palmer House, and as we waited we compared
memories of its old-time splendor. "My father still regards it as the
grandest hotel in the West, and it is probable that Mr. Howells knew of
no other. So far as I know he has never been in Chicago before, unless
possibly for a few days during the World's Fair."
Zulime was much excited at the thought of meeting the great novelist,
but when he came, she took his hand with graceful composure, expressing
just the right mingling of reserve and pleasure. I was proud of her, and
the fact that Howells instantly and plainly approved of her, added to my
satisfaction.
"I congratulate you both," he said as we were leaving. "You see," he
added, addressing himself to Zulime, "your husband-elect is one of my
boys. I am particularly concerned with his good fortune. I like his
bringing you to see me, and I hope we shall see you both in New York."
In a literary sense this was my paternal blessing, for "Mr. Howells" had
been a kind of spiritual progenitor and guide ever since my first
meeting with him in '87. His wisdom, his humor, his exquisite art, had
been of incalculable assistance to me, as they had been to Clemens,
Burroughs, and many others of my fellow-craftsmen, and his commendation
of me to my intended wife almost convinced me, for the moment, of my
worthiness. How delightful he was! How delicate—how understanding! We
both went away, rich in the honor of his approval of our prospective
union.
Rich in his friendship, I was but poorly furnished in other respects. I
recall with shame the shopping tour which I made along State Street,
searching for an engagement ring, a gauge which Zulime, knowing my
poverty, stoutly insisted that she did not need—a statement which I was
simple enough to believe until her sister enlightened me. "That's only
Zuhl's way. Of course she wants a ring—every girl does. Don't fail to
get her one—a nice one!"
I found one at last that Zulime thought I could afford. It was a small
gold band with five opals, surrounded by several very minute diamonds,
all of which could be had for the sum of thirty-eight dollars. As I
bought this ring Zulime's girlish delight in it touched as well as
instructed me. Each time she held her finger up for me to see (she had a
beautiful hand) I regretted that I had not purchased a better ring. Why
did I take a ring at thirty-eight dollars! Why not fifty dollars? But
what could be expected of a man who never before had spent so much as
one dollar on a piece of jewelry, a man whose chief way of earning money
was to save it? Whenever I look at that poor little jewel now I
experience a curious mingling of shame and regret. I had so little money
at that time, and the future was so uncertain!
Zulime was living with her sister, and there I spent most of my evenings
and some of my afternoons during the following week, scarcely able to
realize my change of fortune except when alone with her, discussing our
future. She agreed at last to a date for the wedding which would enable
us to spend Thanksgiving at West Salem, and then for some reason, not
clear to me now, I suddenly took the train for Gallup, New Mexico, with
the Navajo Indian Agency for final destination.
Just why I should have chosen to visit Ganado at this precise time is
inexplicable, but there is no mystery in my leaving Chicago. My future
sister-in-law bluntly informed me that my absence from the city would
greatly facilitate the necessary dressmaking. Although an obtuse person
in some ways, I know when I am bumped. Three days after Fuller's
luncheon to Howells, I reached the town of Gallup, which is the point of
departure for the Navajo Agency, some twenty-five or thirty miles north
of the Santa Fé railway.
For nearly ten years I had been going to the Rocky Mountains at least
once during the summer season, and it is probable that I felt the need
of something to offset the impressions of my tour in England and
France—to lose touch with my material even for twelve months was to be
cheated—then, too, I hoped in this way to shorten the weeks of waiting.
Anyhow, here I was in Gallup, a drab little town which would have been a
horror to my bride-elect.
One of the reasons for my being in New Mexico I am sure about. With the
prospect of having some sort of an apartment in the city and a cabin at
the camp, I was in the market for Navajo rugs, and silver, and Hopi
pottery. It was in pursuit of these (and of literary material) that I
mounted the stage the next morning and set off up the sun-lit valley to
the north.
In leaving Gallup behind, my spirits rose. I wished that Zulime might
have shared this strange landscape with me. On the right a distant,
dimly-blue wall of mountains ran, while to the west rolled high,
treeless hills, against which an occasional native hut showed like a
wolf's den, half-hid among dwarf piñon trees and surrounded by naked
children and savage dogs.
At intervals we came upon solitary shepherds tending their piebald
flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That
these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs
weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of sparse cedar
trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was
incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of
a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, and every mile
carried me deeper into the silence and serenity of their tribal home.
Brown boys, belted with silver and wearing shirts of gay calico, met us,
riding their wiry little ponies with easy grace. Children, naked, shy as
foxes, arrested their play beside dry clumps of sage-brush and stared in
solemn row, whilst their wrinkled, leathery grand-sires hobbled out,
cupping their thin brown hands in prayer for tobacco.
There was something Oriental, fictive in it all, and when at the end of
the day I found myself a guest in a pleasant cottage at the Agency, I
was fully awake to the contrasts of my "material." My ears, as well as
my eyes, were open to the drama of this land whose prehistoric customs
were about to pass. For the moment I was inclined to rest there and
study my surroundings, but as the real objective of my journey was
Ganado, about thirty miles to the west of the Fort, I decided to go on.
Ganado was the home of a famous Indian trader named Hubbell, whose store
was known to me as a center of Navajo life. Toward this point I set
forth a few days later, attended by a young Navajo whose hogan was in
that direction, and who had promised to put me on my trail.
He was a fine, athletic youth of pleasant countenance, mounted upon a
spotted pony and wearing a shirt of purple calico. With a belt of silver
disks around his waist and a fillet of green cloth binding his glossy
black hair, he was distinctly and delightfully colorful.
Our way rose at once to the level of a majestic plateau, sparsely set
with pines and cedars, a barren land from which the grass and shrubs had
long since been cropped by swarms of sheep and goats. Nevertheless, it
was lovely to the eye, and as we rode forward we came upon a party of
Navajo girls gathering piñon nuts, laughing and singing in happy
abandon, untroubled by the white man's world. They greeted my guide with
jests, but became very grave as he pointed out a fresh bear-track in the
dust of the trail.
"Heap bears," he said to me. "Injun no kill bears. Bears big medicine,"
and as we rode away he laughed back at the panic-stricken girls, who
were hurriedly collecting their nuts in order to flee the spot.
At last my guide halted. "I go here," he signed with graceful hand. "You
keep trail; bimeby you come deep valley—stream. On left white man's
house. You stop there." All of which was as plain as if in spoken words.
As I rode on alone, the peace, the poetry, the suggestive charm of that
silent, lonely, radiant land took hold upon me with compelling power.
Here in the midst of busy, commonplace America it lay, a section of the
Polished Stone Age, retaining the most distinctive customs, songs and
dances of the past. Here was a people going about its immemorial
pursuits, undisturbed by the railway and the telephone. Its shepherds,
like the Hittites, who wandered down from the hills upon the city of
Babylon two thousand years before the Christian Era, were patriarchal
and pastoral. They asked but a tent, a piece of goat's flesh, and a cool
spring.
Late in the afternoon (I loitered luxuriously) I came to the summit of a
long ridge which overlooked a broad, curving valley, at the far-away
western rim of which a slender line of water gleamed. How beautiful it
all was, but how empty! No furrow, no hut, no hint of human habitation
appeared, a land which must ever be lonely, for it is without rains, and
barren of streams for irrigation.
An hour later I rode up to the door of a long, low, mud-walled building,
and was met by the trader, a bush-bearded, middle-aged man with piercing
gray eyes and sturdy, upright figure. This was Lorenzo Hubbell, one of
the best-known citizens of New Mexico, living here alone, a day's ride
from a white settler.
Though hairy and spectacled he was a comparatively young man, but his
mixed blood had already given him a singular power over his dark-skinned
neighbors of the territory.
His wife and children were spending the summer in Albuquerque, and in
the intimacy of our long days together I spoke of my approaching
marriage. "I want to buy some native blankets and some Navajo silver for
our new home."
His interest was quick. "Let me send your wife a wedding present. How
would she like some Hopi jars?"
The off-hand way in which he used the words, "your wife," startled
me—reminded me that in less than two weeks I was due at Professor
Taft's home to claim my bride. I accepted his offer of the vases and
began to collect silver and turquoise ornaments, in order that I might
carry back to Zulime some part of the poetry of this land and its
people.
"The more I think about it," I wrote to her, "the more I want you to
share my knowledge of 'the High Country.' Why not put our wedding a week
earlier and let me take you into the mountains? If you will advance the
date to the eighteenth of November, we can have an eight-day trip in
Colorado and still reach mother and the Homestead in time for
Thanksgiving. I want to show you my best beloved valleys and peaks."
Though addressing the letter to her Chicago home, I knew that she was
about to leave for Kansas; therefore I added a postscript: "I am
planning to meet you in your father's house about the eighteenth of the
month, and I hope you will approve my scheme."
In the glow of my plan for a splendid Colorado wedding journey, I lost
interest in Ganado and its Indians. Making arrangements for the shipment
of my treasures, I saddled my horse one morning, waved Hubbell a joyous
farewell, and started back toward the Agency in the hope of finding
there a letter from my girl.
In this I was not disappointed. She wrote: "I shall leave for Kansas on
the Burlington, Sunday night. You can write me at Hanover." It was plain
she had not received my latest word.
I began to figure. "If I leave here to-morrow forenoon, and catch the
express at Gallup to-morrow night, I can make the close connection at
Topeka, and arrive in St. Joseph just half an hour before Zulime's train
comes in on Monday morning. I shall surprise her—and delight myself—by
having breakfast with her!"
However, I could not get away till morning, and with an evening to wear
away I accepted the Agent's invitation to witness a native dance which
had been announced to him by one of the young Navajo policemen. I had
never seen a Navajo dance, and gladly accepted the opportunity to do so.
It was a clear, crisp November evening as we started out, the clerk, his
sister, one of the teachers and myself riding in a two-seated open
wagon, drawn by a pair of spirited horses. The native village was some
ten miles to the north, and all the way up hill, so that before we came
in sight of it darkness had fallen, and in the light of a bonfire the
dancers were assembling.
Of the village, if there was a village, I could see little, but a tall
old man (the town crier) was chanting an invitation or command of some
sort, and dark forms were moving to and fro among the shadows of the
piñon trees. How remote it all was from the white man's world, how
self-sufficing and peaceful—how idyllic!
The master of ceremonies met us and gave us seats, and for three hours
we sat in the glow of the fire, watching the youthful, tireless dancers
circle and leap in monotonous yet graceful evolutions. Here was love and
courtship, and jealousy and faithful friendship, just as among the white
dancers of Neshonoc. Roguish black eyes gleamed in the light of the
fire, small feet beat the earth in joyous rhythm, and the calm faces of
the old men lent dignity and a kind of religious significance to the
scene. They were dreaming of the past, when no white man had entered
their world.
The young people were almost equally indifferent to us, and as the night
deepened we who were white merged more and more indistinguishably with
the crowd of dusky onlookers. It was easy to imagine ourselves back in
the sixteenth century, looking upon this scene from the wondering
viewpoint of the Spanish explorers. Whence came these people, these
dances, these ceremonials?
At last the time came for us to set forth upon our long ride back to the
Agency, and so, silently, we rose and slipped away into the darkness,
leaving the dancers to end their immemorial festival without the aliens'
presence. They had no need of us, no care for us. At a little distance I
turned and looked back. The songs, interrupted by shrill, wolfish
howlings and owl-like hootings, rang through the night with singular
savage charm, a chant out of the past, a chorus which was carrying
forward into an individualistic white man's world the voices of the
indeterminate tribal past.
The sky was moonless, the air frosty, and after we had entered the
narrow cañon, which was several miles long and very steep, the clerk,
who was not very skilled with horses, turned the reins over to me, and
for an hour or more I drove with one foot on the brake, trusting mainly
to the horses to find their way. It was bitter cold in the cañon, and my
cramped right leg became lame—so lame that I could hardly get out of
the wagon after we reached the Agency. Excruciating pain developed in
the sciatic nerve, and though I passed a sleepless night I was
determined to leave next morning. "I shall go if I have to be carried to
my horse," I said grimly to the clerk, who begged me to stay in bed.
Fortunately, the trader was going to the railway and kindly offered to
take me with him; and so, laden with Navajo silver (bracelets, buckles
and rings), I started out, so lame that I dragged one leg with a groan,
hoping that with the warmth of the sun my pain would pass away.
Reaching Gallup at noon, I spent the afternoon sitting in the sun,
waiting for the train. At six o'clock it came, and soon I was washed and
shaved and eating dinner on the dining-car of the Continental Limited.
All that night and all the next day and far into the second night I
rode, my fear of missing connection at Topeka uniting with my rheumatism
to make the hours seem of interminable length. It seemed at times a
long, long "shot"—but I made it! I reached the station at Topeka just
in time to catch the connecting train, and I was on the platform at St.
Joseph at sun-rise a full half-hour before the Burlington coaches from
Chicago were due.
As I walked up and down, I smiled with anticipation of the surprise I
had in store. "If she keeps her schedule I shall see her step from the
Pullman car without the slightest suspicion that I am within six hundred
miles of her," I thought, doing my best to walk the kink out of my leg,
which was still painful. "She is coming! My wife is coming!" I repeated,
incredulous of the fact.
At eight o'clock the engine came nosing in, and while watching the line
of passengers descend, I lost hope. It was too much to expect!
She was there! I saw her as she stepped down from the rear Pullman, and
just as she was about to take her valise from the porter, I touched her
on the shoulder and said, "I'll take charge of that."
She started and turned with a look of alarm, a look which changed to
amazement, to delight. "Oh!" she gasped. "Where did you come from?"
"From the Navajo reservation," I replied calmly.
"But how did you get here?"
"By train, like yourself."
"But when—how long ago?"
"About thirty minutes," I laughed. "I'm a wizard at making close
connections." Then, seeing that she must know all about it at once, I
added, "Come into the station restaurant, and while we are eating
breakfast I will tell you where I have been and what brought me back so
soon."
While waiting for our coffee I took from my valise a bracelet of silver,
a broad band shaped and ornamented by some Navajo silversmith. "Hold out
your arm," I commanded. She obeyed, and I clasped the barbaric gyve
about her wrist. "That is a sign of your slavery," I said gravely.
Smilingly, meditatively, she fingered it, realizing dimly the grim truth
which ran beneath my jesting. She was about to take on a relationship
which must inevitably bring work and worry as well as joy.
(That silver band has never left her wrist for a moment. For twenty-two
years she has worn it, keeping it bright with service for me, for her
children and for her friends. There is something symbolic in the fact
that it has never lost its clear luster and that it has never tarnished
the arm it adorns.)
Her joy in this present, her astonishment at my unexpected appearance
on the railway platform, amused and delighted me. I could scarcely
convince her that at six o'clock on Saturday night I was in a New Mexico
town, waiting for the eastern express. It was all a piece of miraculous
adventure on my part, but her evident pleasure in its successful working
out made me rich—and very humble. "What did you do it for?" she asked;
then, with a look of dismay, she added, "What am I going to do with you
in Hanover?"
"I think I can find something to do," I answered, and entered upon a
detailed statement of my plan. "I want you to see the mountains. We'll
set our wedding day for the eighteenth—that will give us a week in
Colorado, and enable us to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the old folks at
the homestead. You say you have never seen a real mountain—well, here's
your chance! Say the word, and I'll take you into the heart of the San
Juan Range. I'll show you the splendors of Ouray and the Uncompagre."
Holding the floor, in order that she might not have a chance to protest,
I spread an alluring panorama of peaks and valleys before her eyes, with
an eloquence which I intended should overcome every objection. That she
was giving way to my appeal was evident. Her negatives, when they came,
were rather feeble. "I can't do it. It would be lovely, but—oh, it is
impossible!"
"It is done—it is arranged!" I replied. "I have already sent for the
railway tickets. They will be at your home to-morrow night. All is
settled. We are to be married on the eighteenth, and——"
"But our cards are all in Chicago and printed for the twenty-third!"
"What of that? Get some more—or, better still, forget 'em! We don't
need cards."
"But—my sewing?"
"Never mind your sewing. Would you let a gown come between you and a
chance to see the Needle Peak? I am determined that you shall see Ouray,
Red Mountain, and the San Juan Divide."
At last she said, "I'll think about it."
She was obliged to think about it. All the forenoon, as the train ambled
over the plain toward the village in which Professor Taft had
established his bank, I kept it in her mind. "It may be a long time
before we have another chance to visit Colorado. It will be glorious
winter up there. Think of Marshall Pass, think of Uncompagre, think of
the Toltec Gorge!" My enthusiasm mounted. "Ouray will be like a town in
the Andes. We must plan to stay there at least two days."
She fell into silence, a dazed yet smiling silence, but when at last I
said, "Every hour in the low country is a loss—let's be married
to-morrow," she shook her head. I had gone too far.
She confessed that a stay in Hanover was in the nature of a punishment.
"I never liked it here, and neither did my little mother," she said, and
then she described her mother's life in Hanover. "I was called home to
nurse her in the last days of her illness," she explained. "Poor little
mamma! She came out here unwillingly in the first place, and I always
resented her living so far away from the city. After her death I seldom
came here. Father does not care. He is so absorbed in his business and
in his books that it doesn't matter where he lives."
Professor Taft and his son, Florizel, were both at the train to meet
Zulime, and both were properly amazed when I appeared. As a totally
unexpected guest I was a calamity—but they greeted me cordially. What
Zulime said in explanation of my presence I do not know, but the family
accepted me as an inevitable complication.
My lameness, which dated from that ride down the Navajo cañon,
persisted, which was another worriment; for Zulime was too busy with
sewing-women to give much time to me and walking was very painful, hence
I spent most of my day down at the bank, talking with my prospective
father-in-law, who interested me much more than the sordid little
village and its empty landscape. He was a sturdy, slow-moving man with
long, gray beard, a powerful and strongly individual thinker, almost as
alien to his surroundings as a Hindoo Yoghi would have been. With the
bland air of a kindly teacher he met his customers in the outer office
and genially discoursed to them of whatever happened to be in his own
mind—what they were thinking about was of small account to him.
As a deeply-studied philosopher of the old-fashioned sort, his words,
even when addressed to a German farmer, were deliberately chosen, and
his sentences stately, sonorous and precise. Regarding me as a man of
books, he permitted himself to roam widely over the fields of medieval
history, and to wander amid the gardens of ancient faiths and dimly
remembered thrones.
Although enormously learned, his knowledge was expressed in terms of the
past. His quotations, I soon discovered, were almost entirely confined
to books whose covers were of a faded brown. His scientists, his
historians were all of the Victorian age or antecedent thereto. Breasted
and Ferrero did not concern him. His biologists were of the time of
Darwin, his poets of an age still earlier, and yet, in spite of his
musty citations, he was a master mind. He knew what he knew (he guessed
at nothing), and, sitting there in that bare little bank, I listened in
silence what time he marched from Zoroaster down to Charlemagne, and
from Rome to Paris. He quoted from Buckle and Bacon and Macaulay till I
marveled at the contrast between his great shaggy head and its
commonplace surroundings, for in the midst of a discussion of the bleak
problems of Agnosticism, or while considering Gibbon's contribution to
the world's stock of historical knowledge, certain weather-worn Bavarian
farmers came and went, studying us with half-stupid, half-suspicious
glances, having no more kinship with Don Carlos Taft than so many
Comanches.
It is probable that the lonely old scholar rejoiced in me as a
comprehending, or at least a sympathetic, listener, for he talked on and
on, a steady, slow-moving stream. I was content to listen. That I
allowed him to think of me as a fellow-student, I confess, but in my
failure to undeceive him I was only adding to the comfort which he took
in my company. It would have been a cruelty to have confessed my
ignorance. It was after all only a negative deception, one which did
neither of us any harm.
Furthermore, I was aware that he was in a sense "trying me out." He not
only wanted to measure my understanding—he was especially eager to know
what my "religion" was. He dreaded to find me a sectarian, and when he
discovered that I, too, was a student of Darwin and a disciple of
Herbert Spencer, he frankly expressed his pleasure. He rejoiced, also,
in the fact that I was earning my own living, and to him I seemed to be
in possession of a noble income. With all his love of scholarship he
remained the thrifty son of New England.
Here again I fear I permitted him to assume too much, but when one's
prospective father-in-law is asking how one expects to support a wife,
one is tempted to give a slightly more favorable report than the
conditions will warrant. I explained my contract with Macmillans, and
named the prices I obtained for my stories, and with these he was
properly impressed. It was absurd yet gratifying to have a son-in-law
who could sell "lies" for hard cash, and his respect for me increased.
As we walked homeward that night, I expressed my wish to have the
marriage a judicial ceremony. "I make no objection to having the service
read by a clergyman," I explained, "but I prefer to employ the highest
legal authority in the county—a judge, if possible. However, I will
leave it all to Zulime. As an individualist I consider her a full and
equal partner in all phases of this enterprise. I do not expect her to
even promise to obey me, but I hope she will always find my requests
reasonable—if she does not, she has the right to ignore them. Her
signature shall be as good as mine at the bank."
This statement startled the banker, for he held rather old-fashioned
ideas concerning women and money; but Zulime was his favorite child, and
he hastened to assure me that she would not waste my substance. "I think
we can induce the district judge to come over and perform the ceremony,"
he concluded.
If my notion to employ a judge of the district shocked my bride, she
artfully deceived me, for she cheerfully consented, and a day or two
later, with her brother Florizel for a guide, I drove over to the county
town and laid my request before Judge Sturgis of the District Court.
The judge knew Don Carlos and (as a reader of the magazines) had some
knowledge of me; therefore he at once declared his willingness to
assist. "It will be an honor," he added heartily; "I'll adjourn court if
necessary. You may depend on me."
He also agreed to meet our wishes as to the character of the ceremony.
"I'll make it as short as you like," he said. "I'll reduce it to its
lowest legal terms," and with this understanding I procured my license
and returned to Hanover.
In spite of all these practical details the whole adventure seemed
curiously unreal, as though it concerned some other individual, some
character in one of my novels. It was a play in which I acted as manager
rather than as leading man. There was nothing in all this preparation
which remotely suggested any of the weddings in which I had been
concerned as witness, and I suspect that Zulime was almost equally
unconvinced of its reality. Poor girl! It was all as far from the
wedding of her girlish dreams as her bridegroom fell short of the
silver-clad knight of romance, but I promised her that she would find
something grandiose and colorful in our wedding journey. "Our wedding
will be prosaic, but wait until you see the sunset light on the
Crestones! Our week in the High Country shall be a poem."
This was a characteristic attitude with me. I was always saying, "Wait!
These flowers are lovely, but those just ahead of us are more
beautiful still." Zulime's attitude, as I soon discovered, was precisely
opposite: "Let us make the most of the flowers at our hand," was her
motto.
The Taft home had something of the same unesthetic quality which marked
Neshonoc. It was simple, comfortable, and entirely New England.
Throughout the stern vicissitudes of his life on the Middle Border, Don
Carlos Taft had carried the memories and the accents of his New
Hampshire town. His beginnings had been as laboriously difficult as
those of my father. In many ways they were alike; that is to say, they
were both Yankee in training and tradition.
At last the epoch-marking day came marching across the eastern plain.
The inevitable bustle began with the dawn. I packed my trunk and
dispatched it to the station in confident expectation of our
mid-afternoon departure, and Zulime did the same, although it must have
seemed more illusory to her than to me. The Judge arrived precisely at
noon, and at half-past twelve the family solemnly gathered in the
living-room, and there, in plain traveling garb, Zulime Taft stood up
with me, while the Judge gravely initiated her into a perilous
partnership, a coalition in which she took the heaviest chances of
sorrow and regret.
The Judge was as good as his word. He made the ceremony a short but very
serious interchange of intentions, and at last, in sonorous and solemn
tones, pronounced us man and wife.
Altogether, it did not take five minutes, and then, at twelve-forty,
while the man of law was writing out the certificate, the "breakfast"
was announced and we all sat down to what was really a dinner, a meal to
which the Judge did full justice, for he had been up since early
morning, and had ridden twelve or fifteen miles.
If the old professor retained any anxieties concerning his daughter's
future, he masked them with a smile and discoursed genially of the
campaigns of Cyrus—or some such matter. At the close of the meal, the
Judge, comfortable and friendly, rose to go. With him, he said, it had
not only been a duty but a pleasure, and as he had given to our brief
wedding just the right touch of dignity, we were grateful to him. It was
the kind of service which cannot be obtained by any fee.
At four o'clock we took a dusty, hesitating local train for the small
town in Nebraska where we expected to catch the express for Colorado
Springs. In such drab and unromantic fashion did Zulime Taft and Hamlin
Garland begin their long journey together. "But wait!" I repeated. "Wait
till you see the Royal Gorge and Shavano!"
CHAPTER TEN
The New Daughter and Thanksgiving
At about half-past seven of a clear November morning I called my bride
to the car window and presented to her, with the air of a resident
proprietor, a first view of Pike's Peak, a vast silver dome rising
grandly above the Rampart Range. "Well, there it is," I remarked. "What
do you think of it?"
Her cry of surprise and her words of delight were both entirely genuine.
"Oh, how beautiful!" she exclaimed, as soon as she recovered breath.
It was beautiful. Snow covered, flaming like burnished marble, the
range, with high summits sharply set against the cloudless sky, upreared
in austere majesty, each bleak crag gilded with the first rays of the
morning sun. Above the warm, brown plain the giants towered remotely
alien like ancient kings on purple thrones, and the contrast of their
gleaming drifts of snow, with the dry, grassy foothills through which we
were winding our way, was like that of deep winter set opposite to early
September. However, I would not permit Zulime to exhaust her vocabulary
of admiration. "Keep some of your adjectives till we reach Ouray," I
said with significant gravity.
Before the train came to a stop at the platform of Colorado Springs, I
caught sight of the red, good-humored face of Gustave, coachman for
Louis Ehrich, one of my Colorado friends. Gustave was standing beside
the road wagon in which I had so often ridden, and when he saw me
alight he motioned to me. "You are to come with me," he explained as I
approached. "I have orders to bring you at once to the house—breakfast
is waiting for you."
I had written to the Ehrichs, saying that my wife would be with me in
the Springs for a few days, and that I wanted them to meet her—but I
did not expect to be met or to receive an invitation to breakfast.
Zulime hesitated till I assured her that the Ehrichs were old friends
and not the kind of people who say one thing and mean another. "They
will never permit us to go to the hotel—I know them." With that she
consented, and fifteen minutes later Louis and Henriette met us at their
threshold and took Zulime to their hearts, as though they had known her
for years.
The house stood on the bank of a stream, and, from the windows of the
room they gave us, the Lord of the Range loomed in distant majesty
directly above the Garden of the Gods, and our first day of married life
was filled with splendor. Each hour of that day had for us its own
magical color, its own drama of flying cloud and resisting rock. From
the commonplace Kansas village we had been transported as if by an
enchanted carpet to a land of beauty and romance, of changeful charm, a
region of which I was even then beginning to write with joyous
inspiration. That my bride and I would forever recall this day and this
house with gratitude and delight I was even then aware.
"This compensates for the humble scene of our wedding, doesn't it?" I
demanded.
"It is more than I dreamed of having," she replied.
In truth no blood relations could have been more sympathetic, more
generous, more considerate than the Ehrichs. They rejoiced in us.
Skilled and happy hosts, they did their utmost to make our honeymoon an
unforgettable experience. Each hour of our stay was arranged with
kindness. We drove, we ate, we listened to music, with a grateful wonder
at our good fortune.
They would have kept us indefinitely had I not carefully explained my
plan to show my bride the Crestones and Marshall Pass. "We must make the
Big Circle and get back to Wisconsin in time for Thanksgiving," I said
to Louis, who, as a loyal Colorado man, immediately granted the force of
this excuse. He understood also the pathos of the old mother in West
Salem, watching, waiting, longing to see her new daughter. "You are
right," he said. "To fail of that dinner would be cruel."
That night we took the Narrow Gauge train, bound for Marshall Pass and
the splendors of the Continental Divide.
At daylight the next morning we were looping our way up the breast of
Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College
Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like
prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun,
lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal
drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged
into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When we emerged we were sliding
swiftly down into a sun-warmed valley sloping to the west, where hills
as lovely as jewels alternated with smooth opalescent mesas over which
white clouds gleamed. The whole wide basin glowed with August colors,
and yet from Montrose Junction, where we lunched, the rugged slopes of
Uncompagre, hooded with snow and dark with storms, were plainly visible,
so violently dramatic was the land.
"From here we proceed directly toward those peaks," I explained to
Zulime, who was in awe of the land I was exhibiting.
As we approached the gateway to Ouray, the great white flakes began to
fall athwart the pines, and when we entered the prodigious amphitheater
in which the town is built, we found ourselves again in mid-winter,
surrounded by icy cliffs and rimy firs. Dazzling drifts covered the
rocks and almost buried the cottages from whose small windows, lights
twinkled like gleaming eyes of strange and roguish animals. Every detail
was as harmonious as an ideally conceived Christmas card. It was the
antithesis of Kansas.
Upon entering our room at the hotel, I exultantly drew Zulime's
attention to the fact that the sky-line of the mountains to the South
cut across the upper row of our window panes. "You are in the heart of
the Rockies now," I declared as if somehow that fact exalted me in her
regard.
When we stepped into the street next morning, the snow had ceased to
fall, but the sky was magnificently, grandly savage. Great clouds in
career across the valley momentarily caught and dung to the crags, but
let fall no frost, and as the sun rose laggardly above the dazzlingly
white wall, the snow-laden pines on the lower slopes appeared delicate
as lace with distance. At intervals enormous masses of vapor, gray-white
but richly shot with lavender, slid suddenly in, filling the
amphitheater till all its walls were hid, then quite as suddenly shifted
and streamed away. From time to time vistas opened toward the west,
wondrous aisles of blinding splendor, highways leading downward to the
glowing, half-hid, irridescent plain. In all my experience of the
mountains I had never seen anything more gorgeous, more stupendous—what
it must have meant to my bride, who had never seen a hill, I can only
faintly divine.
At two o'clock, the sky having cleared, I hired a team and sleigh, and
we drove up the high-climbing mining trail which leads toward Telluride,
a drive which in itself was worth a thousand-mile journey, an experience
to be remembered all our lives. Such majesty of silent, sunny cliffs!
Such exquisite tones, such balance of lights and shadows, such tracery
of snow-laden boughs! It was impossible for my lowland bride to conceive
of any mountain scene more gorgeous, more sumptuous, more imperial.
For two hours we climbed, and then, at a point close to timber-line, I
reluctantly halted. "We must turn here," I said regretfully. "It will be
dark by the time we reach the hotel."
Slowly we rode back down the valley, entranced, almost oppressed, by the
incommunicable splendor of forested hills and sunset sky. It was with a
sense of actual relief that we reëntered our apartment. Our eyes ached
with the effort to seize and retain the radiance without, and our minds,
gorged with magnificence, were grateful for the subdued light, the ugly
furniture, the dingy walls of our commonplace little hotel.
To some of my readers, no doubt, this wedding trip will seem a lunatic,
extravagant fantasy on my part; but Zulime declared herself grateful to
me for having insisted upon it, and for three days we walked and drove
by daylight or by moonlight amid these grandiose scenes, absorbing with
eager senses the sounds, sights and colors which we might never again
enjoy, returning now and then to a discussion of our future.
"We'll go East after our visit to the old folks," I declared. "This is
only the first half of our wedding journey; the other part shall include
Washington, Boston, and New York."
Zulime looked somewhat incredulous (she didn't know me yet), but her
eyes glowed with pleasure at the thought of the capital, of which she
knew nothing, and of New York, which she knew only as a seaport. "I
thought you were poor," she said.
"So I am," I replied, "but I intend to educate you in American
geography."
The railway enters the Ouray amphitheater from the west and stops—for
the very good reason that it can go no farther!—but from the railway
station a stage road climbs the precipitous eastern wall and leads on to
Red Mountain, as through an Alpine pass. Over this divide I now planned
to drive to Silverton, and thence to Durango by way of Las Animas Cañon.
Zulime, with an unquestioning faith in me—a faith which I now think of
with wonder—agreed to this crazy plan. Her ignorance of the cold, the
danger involved, made her girlishly eager to set forth. She was like a
child in her reliance on my sagacity and skill.
We left Ouray, at eight of a bitter morning, in a rude sleigh with only
a couple of cotton quilts to defend us from the cold, and when, after a
long climb up a wall of stupendous cliffs with roaring streams shouting
from their icy beds upon our right, we entered an aisle of frosty pines
edging an enormous ledge, where frozen rills hung in motionless
cascades, Zulime, enraptured by the radiant avenues which opened out at
every turn of our icy upward trail, became blind to all danger. The
flaming, golden light flinging violet shadows, vivid as stains of ink
along the crusted slopes, dazzled her, caused her to forget the icy wind
or, at any rate, to patiently endure it.
At Red Mountain, a mournful, half-buried, deserted mining town, we left
our sleigh and stumbled into the dingy little railway station, so
chilled, so cramped, that we could scarcely walk, and yet we did not
regret our ride. However, we were glad of the warmth of the dirty little
coach into which we climbed a few minutes later. It seemed delightfully
safe to Zulime, and I was careful not to let her know that from this
town the train descended of its own weight all the way to Silverton!
Fortunately, nothing happened, and at Silverton we changed to a real
train, with a real engine, and as we dropped into Las Animas Cañon we
left December behind. At six o'clock we emerged from the cañon at
Durango into genial September—or so it seemed after our day of
midwinter in the heights. Next day we returned to Colorado Springs.
Our stay in the mountains was at an end, but the memory of those
burnished domes, those dark-hued forests, and the sound of those foaming
streams, remain with us to this day.—All the way down the long slope to
the Mississippi River, we reverted to this "circuit," recalling its most
impressive moments, its noblest vistas. It had been for my bride a
procession of wonders, a colossal pageant—to me it was a double
satisfaction because of her delight. With a feeling that I had in some
degree atoned for my parsimony in the matter of an engagement ring and
for the drab prose of our marriage ceremony, I brought the first half of
our wedding journey to a close in Chicago.
I now looked forward to the meeting between my mother and her new
daughter. This was, after all, the important part of my venture. Would
my humble home content my artist bride?
In preparation I began to sing small. "Don't expect too much of the
Garland Homestead," I repeated. "It is only an angular, slate-colored
farm-house without a particle of charm outside or in. It is very far
from being the home I should like you to be mistress of, and my people
you must bear in mind, are pioneers, survivals of the Border. They are
remote from all things urban."
To this the New Daughter responded loyally, "I am sure I shall like your
home and I know I shall love your mother."
As women of her race have done from the most immemorial times, she had
left her own tribe and was about to enter the camp of her captor, but
she pretended to happiness, resolute to make the best of whatever came.
Our friends in Chicago smiled when I told them where we had been. Lorado
said, "A Honeymoon in the heart of the Rockies is just like you"—but I
cared nothing for his gibes so long as Zulime was content, and I had but
to over-hear her account of her trip to be reassured. To her it had been
a noble exploration into a marvelous country.
This was the day before Thanksgiving, and with a knowledge that the old
folks were counting the hours which intervened, I wrested Zulime from
her friends, and hurried her to the train. "Dear old mother! I know just
how she is waiting and watching for you. We must not fail her."
It was just daylight as we stepped down from the Pullman at West Salem,
but father was there! Seated in our "canopy-top surrey" and holding
restless ramping Black Dolly to her place, he was too busy to glance at
us, but I could tell, by the set of his head, that he was emotionally
intense.
"There's your new father," I said, pointing him out to Zulime, "and that
is your family coach."
Father couldn't even shake hands, for Dolly was still pawing and
plunging but he smiled as we approached and called out in reference to
Dolly, "She'll quiet down in a minute."
While the train was pulling out I explained to Zulime that Dolly's fury
was all assumed, "She'll soon be stolid as a stump."
It wasn't in the least the tender meeting I had expected to enjoy, but
when at last my father was able to reach his hand down to Zulime, he
said, "I'm glad to meet you, my daughter," and the tenderness in his
vibrant voice touched me. "We were afraid you weren't coming," he added,
and a little later I saw him wipe the tears from his eyes. The fact that
he used a bandanna for this purpose, did not destroy the moving quality
of his emotion.
The village looked woefully drab and desolate under that misty November
sky. The elm trees, stripped of every leaf, the gardens weedy, ragged
and forlorn, together with the ugly little houses suggested the sordid
reality of the life to which I had brought my bride. It was all a far
cry from the towering cliffs and colorful cañons of Colorado.
The Homestead shared in the general ugliness of that rain-swept dawn.
Its maples were gaunt skeletons, its garden a sodden field over which
the chickens were wandering in sad and aimless fashion. To my city-bred
wife this home-coming must have been a cruel shock, but it was the best
I could do, and whatever the girl felt, she concealed with a smile,
resolute to make the best of me and mine.
Mother was waiting for us on the porch, tremulous with excitement, too
eager to remain in doors, and as I took her in my arms, and kissed her,
I said, "Mother, I've brought your new daughter."
For just a moment she hesitated (the grace and dignity of the tall girl
awed her, confused her), then Zulime went to her, and the two women, so
diverse, yet so dear to me, met in an embrace of mutual love and
confidence.
Isabel Garland entered into possession of the daughter she had so long
hoped for, and Zulime Taft became a member of the household of which
Richard Garland was the head.
Breakfast was waiting for us, a noble meal, a sumptuous wedding
breakfast, for mother and her two helpers (daughters of a neighboring
farmer), had been up since five o'clock and while it was a good deal
like a farmer's Sunday dinner, Zulime thanked the girls when father
presented them to her, but was a bit startled when one of them took her
seat at the table with us. She was not accustomed to this democratic
custom of the village.
My aunt, Susan Bailey, a gentle, frail little body also joined our
circle, adding one more pair of eyes to those whose scrutiny must have
been somewhat trying to the bride. To meet these blunt, forthright folk
at such a table without betraying amusement or surprise, required tact,
but the New Daughter succeeded in winning them all, even Mary, the cook,
who was decidedly difficult.
Almost immediately after taking his seat my father began: "Well now,
daughter, you are the captain. Right here I abdicate. Anything you want
done shall be done. What you say about things in the kitchen shall be
law. I will furnish the raw materials—you and the girls must do the
rest. We like to be bossed, don't we, Belle?" He ended addressing
mother.
In her concise, simple fashion, she replied: "Yes, the house is yours. I
turn it all over to you."
It was evident that all this had been discussed many times for they
seemed in haste to get its statement off their minds, and I could not
check them or turn them aside.
Zulime made light of it. "I'd rather not be captain," she laughingly
protested. "I'd rather be passenger for a while."
Father was firm. "No, we need a commanding officer, and you must take
charge. Now I've got a turkey out there—and cranberries—" He was off!
He told just what he had laid in for the dinner, and ended by saying,
"If there's anything I've forgot, you just let me know, and I'll go
right up town and get it."
As he talked, the tones of his resonant voice, the motions of his hands,
the poise of his head, brought back to me a boyish feeling of
subordination. I laughed, but I submitted to his domination, entirely
willing that he should play the part of the commander for the last time.
It was amusing, but it had its pathetic side for my mother's silence was
significant of her weakness. She said nothing—not a word, but with
Zulime sitting beside her, she was content, so happy she could not find
words in which to express her satisfaction. Her waiting was at an end!
My father made a handsome picture. His abundant white hair, his shapely
beard, and his keen profile pleased me. Though a little stooped, he was
still alert and graceful, and his voice rang like a trumpet as he
entered upon an account of his pioneer experiences.
"I've always lived on the Border," he explained, "and I don't know much
about the ways of city folks, so you must excuse me when I do the wrong
thing. My will is the best in the world, and I'll do anything I can to
please you."
That breakfast was the exact opposite of a "Continental Breakfast."
Steak, doughnuts, buckwheat cakes, cookies, apple sauce made me groan
but Zulime smiled. She understood the care which had gone into its
making.
When at last she and I were alone in my study I began, "Well, how do you
like West Salem and the Garlands?"
"Your mother is a dear!" she replied, and her voice was convincing—"and
I like your father. He's very good looking. And the breakfast was—well
it was like one of your stories—Do you always have steak and
doughnuts for breakfast?"
"No," I replied, "not always, but breakfast is a real meal with us."
The sky darkened and a sleety rain set in during the forenoon, but
mother did not mind the gloom outside, for within she had her daughter.
Upon our return to the sitting room, she led Zulime out into the kitchen
to take account of all that was going on for dinner, and while the
maids, with excited faces stood about waiting for orders from their new
boss, Zulime laughingly protested that she had no wish to interfere. "Go
on in your own way," she said.
To me, on her return to the sitting room, she exclaimed: "You should see
the food in preparation out there! Enough to feed all the Eagle's Nest
campers.—How many are coming to dinner?"
"No one but the McClintocks—and only a few of them," I soberly
replied. "Uncle William and Aunt Maria, Frank and Lorette—and Deborah,
all old people now. I don't know of any one else." In fact, we had less
than this number, for Maria was not well enough to come out in the rain.
Our circle was small, but the spirit of Thanksgiving was over it, and
when I saw my stately city wife sitting among my rough-hewn relations,
listening to the quaint stories of Uncle Frank, or laughing at the
humorous sallies of Aunt Lorette, I wondered what they thought of her.
She made a lovely picture, and all—even caustic Deborah—capitulated to
her kindliness and charm. If she had failed of complete comprehension
and sympathy I could not have blamed her, but to have her perfectly at
home among these men and women of the vanishing Border displayed her in
a new and noble guise.
If anything was lacking—any least quality of adaptation, it was
supplied when, that evening, my uncles and my father discovered that
Zulime could not only read music, but that she could play all the old
songs which they loved to have me sing. This accomplishment completed
their conquest, for under her deft hands the piano revived the wistful
melodies of Minnie Minturn, Maggie, and Nellie Wildwood, and when
my mother's voice, sweet as ever, but weak and hesitant, joined with
mine in singing for our guests, I was both glad and sad, glad of my
young wife, sad with a realization of my mother's weakness and age.
She did not reproach me for not bringing the daughter sooner. She had
but one regret. "I wish Frank was here," she said, her thought going out
to her other son.
How far away, how remote, how tender that evening seems to me after more
than twenty years work and travel! To Zulime it unrolled like a scene
from one of my novels, to me it was the closing, fading picture of an
era, the end of an epoch, the passing of a race, for the Garlands and
McClintocks, warriors of the western conquest, representatives of a
heroic generation were even then basking in the light of a dying
camp-fire, recounting the deeds of brave days gone.
When we were again alone in my study, Zulime said, "I'm going to enjoy
it here. I like your people, and I hope they liked me."
* * * * * *
It was in this humble fashion that I brought to my mother the new
daughter for whom she had longed, and it was in this homely way that the
Garlands and McClintocks received my wife. Amid surroundings which were
without grace of art or touch of poetry, the informal and very plain
ceremony took place, but the words were sincere, and the forms and
features of the speakers deeply significant of the past. No matter what
my mother's storms and sorrows had been, she was now at peace. With a
smiling face she confronted the future.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My Father's Inheritance
At half-past six on the morning following our arrival at the Homestead,
my father opened the stairway door and shouted, just as he had been wont
to do in the days when I was a boy on the farm—"Hamlin! Time to get
up!" and with a wry grin I called to Zulime and explained, "In our
family, breakfast is a full and regular meal at which every member of
the household is expected promptly at seven."
It was not yet fully dawn and the thought of rising in a cold room at
that time of night was appalling to a city woman, but with heroic
resolution Zulime dressed, and followed me down the narrow stairway to
the lamp-lit dining-room, where a steaming throng of dishes, containing
oatmeal, potatoes, flap-jacks and sausage (supplemented by cookies,
doughnuts and two kinds of jam), invited us to start the day with
indigestion.
The dim yellow light of the kerosene lamp, the familiar smell of the
buckwheat cakes and my father's clarion voice brought back to me very
vividly and with a curious pang of mingled pleasure and regret, the
corn-husking days when I habitually ate by candlelight in order to reach
the field by daybreak. I recalled to my father's memory one
sadly-remembered Thanksgiving Day when he forced us all to husk corn
from dawn to sunset in order that we might finish the harvest before the
snowstorm covered the fallen stalks. "But mother's turkey dinner saved
the day," I remarked to Zulime. "Nothing can ever taste so good as that
meal. As we came into the house, cold, famished and weary, the smell of
the kitchen was celestial."
My mother smiled but father explained in justification, "I could feel a
storm in the air and I knew that we had just time to reach the last row
if we all worked, and worked hard. As a matter of fact we were all done
at four o'clock."
"O, we worked!" I interpolated. "Frank and I had no vote in those days."
During the week which followed most of my relatives, and a good many of
the neighbors, called on us, and as a result Zulime spent several highly
educational afternoons listening to the candid comments of elderly
widows and sharp-eyed old maids. Furthermore, being possessed of a most
excellent digestion, she was able to accept the daily invitations to
supper, at which rich cakes and home-made jams abounded. She was also
called upon to examine "hand-made paintings in oil," which she did with
tender care. No one could have detected in her smile anything less than
kindly interest in the quaint interior decorations of the homes. Her
comment to me was a different matter.
That she was an object of commiseration on the part of the women I soon
learned, for Mrs. Dunlap was overheard to say, "She's altogether too
good for him" (meaning me), and Mrs. McIlvane, with the candor of a
life-long friendship, replied, "That's what I told Belle."
Uncle William, notwithstanding a liking for me, remarked with feeling,
"She's a wonder! I don't see how you got her."
To which I replied, "Neither do I."
In setting down these derogatory comments I do not wish to imply that I
was positively detested but that I was not a beloved county institution
was soon evident to my wife. Delegations of school children did not call
upon me, and very few of my fellow citizens pointed out my house to
travelers—at that time. In truth little of New England's regard for
authorship existed in the valley and my head possessed no literary
aureole. The fact that I could—and did—send away bundles of manuscript
and get in return perfectly good checks for them, was a miracle of
doubtful virtue to my relatives as well as to my neighbors. My money
came as if by magic, unasked and unwarranted, like the gold of sunset.
"I don't see how you do it," my Uncle Frank said to me one day, and his
tone implied that he considered my authorship a questionable kind of
legerdemain, as if I were, somehow, getting money under false pretenses.
Rightly or wrongly, I had never pretended to a keen concern in the
"social doings" of my village. Coming to the valley out of regard for my
father and mother and not from personal choice, the only folk who
engaged my attention were the men and women of the elder generation,
rugged pioneer folk who brought down to me something of the humor, the
poetry, and the stark heroism of the Border in the days when the Civil
War was a looming cloud, and the "Pineries" a limitless wilderness on
the north. Men like Sam McKinley, William Fletcher, and Wilbur Dudley
retained my friendship and my respect, but the affairs of the younger
generation did not greatly concern me. In short, I considered the
relationship between them and myself fortuitous.
Absorbed in my writing I was seldom in the mood during my visits to
entertain curious neighbors, in fact I had met few people outside my
relatives. All this was very ungracious, no doubt, but such had been my
attitude for seven years. I came there to work and I worked.
Even now, in the midst of my honeymoon, I wrote busily. Each morning
immediately after breakfast I returned to my study, where the manuscript
of a novel (Her Mountain Lover) was slowly growing into final shape,
but in the afternoons Zulime and I occasionally went sleighing with
Dolly and the cutter, or we worked about the house.
It was a peaceful time, with only one thought to stir the pool of my
content. I began to realize that the longer we stayed, the harder it
would be for my mother to let us go. She could hardly permit her New
Daughter to leave the room. She wanted her to sit beside her or to be in
the range of her vision all day long. So far from resenting her loss of
household authority she welcomed it, luxuriating in the freedom from
care which the young wife brought.
This growing reliance upon Zulime made me uneasy. "I cannot, even for
mother's sake, ask my city-bred wife to spend the winter in this small
snow-buried hamlet," I wrote to my brother, "and, besides, I have
planned a wedding trip to Washington and New York."
In announcing to my mother the date of our departure, I said, "We won't
be gone long. We'll be back early in the spring."
"See that you do," she replied, but her eyes were deep and dark with
instant sadness. She had hoped with childish trust that we would stay
all winter with her.
It was beautiful in Neshonoc at this time. Deep, dazzling snows
blanketed the hills, and covered the fields, and frequently at sunset or
later, after the old people were asleep, Zulime and I went for a swift
walk far out into the silent country, rejoicing in the crisp clear air,
and in the sparkle of moonbeams on the crusted drifts. At such times the
satin sheen of sled-tracks in the road, the squeal of dry flakes under
my heel (united with the sound of distant sleigh bells) brought back to
me sadly-sweet memories of boyish games, spelling school, and the voices
of girls whose laughter had long since died away into silence.
The blurred outlines of the hills, the barking of sentinel dogs at
farm-yard gates, and the light from snow-laden cottage windows filled
my heart with a dull illogical ache, an emotion which was at once a
pleasure and a pain.
|
O, witchery of the winter night,
(With broad moon shouldering to the west),
Before my feet the rustling deeps
Of untracked snows, in shimmering heaps,
Lie cold and desolate and white.
I hear glad girlish voices ring
Clear as some softly-stricken string—
(The moon is sailing toward the west),
The sleigh-bells clash in homeward flight,
With frost each horse's breast is white—
(The moon is falling toward the west)—
"Good night, Lettie!"
"Good night, Ben!"
(The moon is sinking at the west)—
"Good night, my sweetheart,"—Once again
The parting kiss, while comrades wait
Impatient at the roadside gate,
And the red moon sinks beyond the west!
|
Such moments as these were meeting places of the old and the new, the
boy and the man. The wistful, haunting dreams of the past, contended
with the warm and glowing fulfillment of the present. For the past a
song, for the present the woman at my side!
Whether Zulime had similar memories of her girlhood or not I do not
know. She was not given to emotional expression, but she several times
declared herself entirely content with our orderly easeful life and
professed herself willing to remain in the homestead until spring. "I
like it here," she repeated, but I was certain that she liked the city
and her own kind, better, and that a longer stay would prove a
deprivation and a danger. After all, she was an alien in the Valley,—a
gracious and kindly alien, but an alien nevertheless. Her natural
habitat was among the studios of Chicago or New York, and my sense of
justice would not permit me to take advantage of her loyalty and her
womanly self-sacrifice.
"Pack your trunk," I said to her one December day, with an air of high
authority. "We are going East in continuation of our wedding trip."
Two days after making this decision we were in Washington, at a grand
hotel, surrounded by suave waiters who had abundant leisure to serve us,
for the reason that Congress was not in session, and the city was empty
of its lobbyists and its law-makers.
The weather was like October and for several days we walked about the
streets without thinking of outside wraps. We went at once to the
Capitol from whose beautiful terraces we could look across the city,
back and upward along our trail, above the snows of Illinois soaring on
and up into the far cañons of the San Juan Divide, retracing in memory
the first half of our wedding journey with a sense of satisfaction, a
joy which now took on double value by reason of its contrast to the
marble terrace on which we stood. From the luxury of our city
surroundings the flaming splendors of the Needle Range appeared almost
mystical.
We ate our Christmas dinner in royal isolation, attended by negroes
whose dusky countenances shone with holiday desire to make us happy.
With no visitors and no duties we gave ourselves to the business of
seeing the Capitol and enjoying the gorgeous sunlight. Zulime, who
looked at everything in the spirit of a youthful tourist, was enchanted
and I played guide with such enthusiasm as a man of forty could bring to
bear. It was a new and pleasant schooling for me, a time which I look
back upon with wistful satisfaction, after more than twenty years.
Philadelphia, our next stop, had an especial significance to me
(something quite apart from its historical significance). Outwardly
professing a keen interest in the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and
other objects which enthralled my young wife, I was secretly planning to
offer Lorimer of The Post, the serial rights of my novel The Eagle's
Heart, and I had an engagement to talk with Edward Bok about a
novelette.
Bok, a friend of several years' standing, received us most cordially,
and Mrs. Bok, who came in next day to meet us, not only instantly and
heartily approved of my wife, but quite openly said so, a fact which
added another quality to the triumphal character of our progress. I was
certain that all of my other Eastern friends would find her admirable.
We reached New York on New Year's Eve, and the streets were roaring with
the customary riot of youth, but in our rooms at the Westminster we were
as remote from the tumult as if we had been at the bottom of a Colorado
mine. We would have heard nothing of the horns and hootings of the
throngs had not Zulime expressed a wish to go forth and mix with them.
With a feeling of disgust of the hoodlums who filled Broadway, I took
her as far north as Forty-second Street, but she soon tired of the rude
men and their senseless clamor, and gladly returned to our hotel willing
to forget it all.
In my diary I find these words, "I am beginning the New Year with two
thousand dollars in the bank, and a pending sale which will bring in as
much more. I feel pretty confident of a living during the year 1900."
Evidently the disposal of my serial to Lorimer, the results of my deal
with Brett, and the growing interest of other publishers in my work had
engendered a confidence in the future which I had never before
attained—and yet I must admit that most of my prosperity was expected
rather than secured, a promise, rather than a fulfillment, and the fact
that I permitted Zulime to settle upon a three-room suite in an obscure
Hotel on Fifteenth Street, is proof of my secret doubts. Eighteen
dollars per week seemed a good deal of money to pay for an apartment.
As I think back to this transaction I am bitten by a kind of remorseful
shame. It was such a shabby little lodging for my artist bride, and yet,
at the moment, it seemed all that we could safely afford, and she
cheerfully made the best of it. Never by word or sign did she hint that
its tiny hall and its dingy and unfashionable furnishings were unworthy
of us both, on the contrary she went ahead with shining face.
One extravagance I did commit, one that I linger upon with
satisfaction—I forced her to choose a handsome coat instead of a plain
one. It was a long graceful garment of a rich brown color, an
"Individual model" the saleslady called it. It was very becoming to my
wife—at any rate I found it so—but the price was sixty-five
dollars—"marked down from eighty-five" the saleslady said. Neither of
us had ever worn a coat costing more than twenty-five dollars and to pay
almost three times as much even for a beautiful "creation" like this was
out of the question—and my considerate young wife decided against it
with a sigh.
I was in reckless mood. "We will take it," I said to the saleswoman.
"Oh no! We can't afford it!" protested Zulime in high agitation. "It is
impossible!" She looked scared and weak.
"You may do up the old coat," I went on in exalted tone. "My wife will
wear the new one."
In a tremor of girlish joy and gratitude Zulime walked out upon the
street wearing the new garment, and the expression of her face filled me
with desire to go on amazing her. She had owned so few pretty things in
her life that I took a keen pleasure in scaring her with sudden
presents. I bought a crescent-shaped brooch set with small diamonds
which cost one hundred dollars—Oh, I was coming on!
[She is wearing these jewels yet and she says she loves them—but as I
think back to that brown cloak I am not so sure that her approval was
without misgiving. It may be that she secretly hated that coat for it
was an unusual color, and while its lines were graceful in my eyes it
may have been "all out of style."—What became of it, finally, I am
unable to say. No matter, it expressed for me a noble sentiment and it
shall have a place on this page with the Oriental brooch and the
amethyst necklace.]
Humble as our quarters were we rejoiced in distinguished visitors.
William Dean Howells called upon us almost immediately and so did
Richard Watson Gilder, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Burroughs, and many
other of my valued, old-time friends. Furthermore, with a courage at
which I now marvel at, Zulime announced that we would be "at home" every
afternoon, and thereafter our tiny sitting-room was often crowded with
her friends—for she had begun to find out many of her artist
acquaintances. In fact, we were forever discovering people she had known
in Paris. It seemed to me that she had met the entire American Colony
during her four years in France.
My social and domestic interests quite cut me off from my club, and we
joked about this. "I am now one of the newly-weds," I admitted, "and my
absence from the club is expected. Members invariably desert the club
during the first year or two of their married life, but they all come
back!—Sooner or later, they drop in for lunch or while wifey is away,
and at last are indistinguishable from the bachelors."
Mrs. James A. Herne, who had meant so much to me in my Boston days, was
one of our very first callers, and no one among all my friends
established herself more quickly in my wife's regard. Katharine's
flame-like enthusiasm, her never-failing Irish humor, and her quick
intelligence, made her a joyous inspiration, and whilst she and Zulime
compared experiences like a couple of college girls, I sat and smiled
with a kind of proprietary pride in both of them.
Fortunately my wife approved of my associates. "You have a delightful
circle," she said one night as we were on our way home from a dinner
with a group of distinguished literary folk.
Her remark comforted me. Having no money with which to hire cabs or
purchase opera tickets, I could at least share with her the good
friendships I had won, confidently, believing that she would gain
approval,—which she did. Not all of my associates were as poor as I
(some of them, indeed, lived in houses of their own), but they were
mostly concerned with the arts in some form, and with such people Zulime
was entirely at ease.
With a lecture to deliver in Boston I asked her to go with me. "I cannot
forego the pleasure of showing you about 'the Hub,'" I urged. "I want
Hurd and other of my faithful friends of former days to know you. We'll
take rooms at the Parker House which used to fill me with silent awe. I
want to play the part, for a day or two, of the successful author."
As she had never seen Boston, she joyfully consented, and the most
important parts of my grandiose design were carried out. We took rooms
at the hotel in which I first met Riley, and from there we sent out
cards to several of my acquaintances. Hurd, who was still Literary
Editor of the Transcript, came at once to call, and so did Flower of
the Arena, but for the most part Zulime and I did the calling for she
was eager to see the homes and the studios of my artist friends.
By great good fortune, James A. Herne was playing "Sag Harbor" at one of
the theaters, and as I had told Zulime a great deal about "Shore Acres"
and other of Herne's plays, I hastened to secure seats for a
performance. Herne was growing old, and in failing health but he showed
no decline of power that night. His walk, his voice, his gestures
filled me with poignant memories of our first meeting in Ashmont, and
our many platform experiences, while the quaint Long Island play brought
back to me recollections of his summer home on Peconic Bay. How much he
had meant to me in those days of Ibsen drama and Anti-poverty
propaganda!
To go about Boston with my young wife was like reliving one by one my
student days. Many of my haunts were unchanged, and friends like Dr.
Cross and Dr. Tompkins, with whom I had lived so long in Jamaica Plain,
were only a little grayer, a little thinner. They looked at me with
wondering eyes. To them I was an amazing success. Flower, still as
boyish in face and figure as when I left the city in '92, professed to
have predicted my expanding circle of readers, and I permitted him to
imagine it wider than it was.
Some of my former neighbors had grown in grace, others had stagnated or
receded, a fact which saddened me a little. A few had been caught in a
swirl of backwater, and seemed to be going round and round without
making the slightest advance. Their talk was all of small things, or the
unimportant events of the past.
Alas! Boston no longer inspired me. It seemed small and alien and
Cambridge surprised me by revealing itself as a sprawling and rather
drab assemblage of wooden dwellings, shops and factories. Even the
University campus was less admirable, architecturally, than I had
supposed it to be, and the residences of its famous professors were
hardly the stately homes of luxury I had remembered them. Upon looking
up the house on Berkley Street in which Howells had lived while editing
The Atlantic Monthly, I found it smaller and less beautiful than my
own house in Wisconsin. Dr. Holmes' mansion on "the water side of Beacon
Street" and the palaces of Copley Square left me calm, their glamor had
utterly vanished with my youth (I fear Lee's Hotel in Auburndale would
have been reduced in grandeur), and when we took the train for New
York, I confessed to a feeling of sadness, of definite loss.
Naturally, inevitably the Boston of my early twenties had vanished. My
youthful worship of the city, my faith in the literary supremacy of New
England had died out. Manifestly increasing in power as a commercial
center, roaring with new interests, new powers, new people, the Hub had
lost its scholastic distinction, its historic charm. Each year would see
it more easily negligible in American art. It hurt me to acknowledge
this, it was like losing a noble ancestor, but there was no escape from
the conclusion.
"Little that is new is coming out of Boston," I sadly remarked to
Zulime. "Her illustrious poets of the Civil War period are not being
replaced by others of National appeal. Her writers, her artists, like
those of Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco, are coming to New York.
New England is being drained of talent in order that Manhattan shall be
supreme."
While we were away on this trip my friends Grace and Ernest
Thompson-Seton had sent out cards for a party "in honor of Mr. and Mrs.
Hamlin Garland," but when, a few nights later, a throng of writers,
artists and musicians filled the Seton studio, I was confirmed in a
growing suspicion that I was only the lesser half of a fortunate
combination. A long list of invitations to dinner or to luncheon
testified to the fact that while they tolerated me, they liked my wife,
and in this judgment I concurred.
One day while calling on a charming friend and fellow-fictionist, Juliet
Wilbur Tompkins, we met for the first time Frank Norris, another
California novelist, who captivated us both, not merely because of his
handsome face and figure, but by reason of his keen and joyous spirit.
He had been employed for some time in the office of Doubleday and Page,
and though I had often passed him at his desk, I had never before
spoken with him. We struck up an immediate friendship and thereafter
often dined together. He told me of his plan to embody modern California
in a series of novels, and at my request read some of his manuscript to
me.
Zulime, although she greatly admired Norris, still maintained that
Edward MacDowell was the handsomest man of her circle, and in this I
supported her, for he was then in the noble prime of his glorious
manhood, gay of spirit, swift of wit and delightfully humorous of
speech. As a dinner companion he was unexcelled and my wife quite lost
her heart to him. Between Frank Norris and Edward MacDowell I appeared
but a rusty-coat. I sang small. Fortunately for me they were both not
only loyal friends but devoted husbands.
I remembered saying to Zulime as we came away: "America need not despair
of her art so long as she has two such personalities as Edward MacDowell
and Frank Norris."
Edwin Booth's daughter, Mrs. Grossman, who was living at this time in a
handsome apartment on Eighteenth Street, was one of those who liked my
wife, and an invitation to take tea with her produced in me a singular
and sudden reversal to boyish timidity, for to me she had almost the
quality of royalty. I thought of her as she had looked to me, fifteen
years before, when on the occasion of Edwin Booth's last performance of
Macbeth in Boston, she sat in the stage-box with her handsome young
husband, and applauded her illustrious father.
"An enormous audience was present," I explained to Zulime, "and most of
us were deeply interested in the radiant figure of that happy girl. To
me she was a princess, and I observed that as the curtain rose after
each act and the great tragedian came forth to bow, his eyes sought his
daughter's glowing face. Each time the curtain fell his final glance was
upon her. Her small hands seemed the only ones whose sound had value in
his ears."
How remote, how royal, how unattainable she had appeared to me that
night! Now here she was a kindly, charming hostess, the mother of a
family who regarded me as "a distinguished author." To make that radiant
girl in the stage box and my lovely hostess coalesce was difficult, but
as I studied her profile and noted the line of her expressive lips I was
able to relate her to the princely player whose genius I had worshiped
from the gallery.
It will be evident to the reader that life in New York pleased me better
than life in West Salem or even in Chicago, and I would gladly have
stayed on till spring, but Zulime decided to go back to Chicago, and
this we did about the first of February.
The last of the many notable entertainments in which my wife shared was
an open meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (which I
had helped to found), where she met many of the leading writers and
artists of the city. Howells, who presided over the program, was
especially fine, restrained, tactful yet quietly authoritative, and when
I told him that our wedding journey was nearly over he expressed a
regret which was highly flattering to us both. At one o'clock on the day
following this historic meeting we entered a car headed for the west,
acknowledging with a sigh, yet with a comfortable sense of having
accomplished our purpose, that it would be profitable to go into
retirement and ruminate for a month or two. The glories of New York had
been almost too exciting for Zulime, "I am ready to go home," she said.
Home! There was my problem. The only city residence I possessed was my
bachelor apartment on Elm Street, and at the moment I had no intention
of asking my wife to share its narrow space except as a temporary
lodging, and to take her back into that snow-covered little Wisconsin
village, back to a shabby farm house filled with ailing elderly folk
would amount to crime. From the high splendor of our stay in New York we
now fell to earth with a thump. My duties as a son, my cares as the head
of a household returned upon me, and my essential homelessness took away
all that assurance of literary success which my Eastern friends had
helped me attain. Of the elation in which I had moved while in New York
I retained but a shred. Once more the hard-working fictionist and the
responsible head of a family, I began to worry about the future. My
honeymoon was over.
The basic realities of my poverty again cropped out in a letter from my
mother who wrote that my aunt was very ill and that she needed me. To
Zulime I said, "You stay here with your sister and your friends while I
go up to the Homestead and see what I can do for our old people."
This she refused to do. "No," she loyally said, "I am going with you,"
and although I knew that she was choosing a dreary alternative I was too
weak, too selfishly weak, to prevent her self-sacrifice. We left that
night at the usual hour and arrived in time to eat another farmer's
breakfast with father and mother next morning. Aunt Susan was unable to
meet us.
Her sweet spirit was about to leave its frail body, that was evident to
me as I looked down at her, but she knew me and whispered, "I'm glad to
have you at home." She showed no fear of death, in fact she appeared
unconscious of her grave condition. She was a beautiful character and to
see her lying there beneath her old-fashioned quilt, so small and
helpless, so patient, lonely and sad, made speech difficult for me. She
had meant much in my life. The serene dignity with which she and her
mother had carried the best New England traditions into the rough front
rank of the Border, was still written in the lines of her face. I had
never seen her angry or bitter, and I had never heard her utter an
unkind word.
Zulime took charge of the work about the house with a cheerfulness which
amazed me. My mother with pathetic confidence leaned upon her daughter's
strong young shoulders and the music of my stern old father's voice as
he said, "Well, daughter, I'm glad you're here," was a revelation to me.
He already loved her as if she were his very own, and she responded to
his affection in a way which put me still more deeply in her debt. It
would have been disheartening, but not at all surprising, had she found
the village and my home intolerable, but she did not—she appeared
content, sustained we will say, by her sense of duty.
Her situation was difficult. Imprisoned in the snowy silences of the
little valley, dependent on her neighbors for entertainment, and
confronted with the care of two invalids and a fretful husband, she was
put to a rigid test.
Beside our base-burning stove she sat night after night playing cinch or
dominoes to amuse my father, while creaking footsteps went by on the
frosty board-walks and in a distant room my aunt lay waiting for the
soft step of the Grim Intruder. It must have seemed a gray outlook for
my bride but she never by word or look displayed uneasiness.
Without putting our conviction into words, we all realized that my
aunt's departure was but a matter of a few days. "There is nothing to
do," the doctor said. "She will go like a person falling asleep. All you
can do is wait—" And so the days passed.
We went to bed each night at ten and quite as regularly rose at
half-past six. Dinner came exactly at noon, supper precisely at six.
Although my upstairs study was a kind of retreat, we spent less time in
it than we had planned to do, for mother was so appealingly wistful to
have us near her that neither of us had the heart to deny her. She could
not endure to have us both absent. Careful not to interrupt my writing,
she considered Zulime's case in different light. "You can read, or sew
or knit down here just as well as up there," she said. "It is a comfort
for me just to have you sit where I can look at you."
She loved to hear me read aloud, and this I often did in the evening
while she sat beside Zulime and watched her fingers fly about her
sewing. These were blissful hours for her, and in these after years I
take a measure of comfort in remembering the part I had in making them
possible.
Slowly but steadily Susan Garland's vital forces died out, and at last
there came a morning when her breath faltered on her lips. She had gone
away, as she had lived, with quiet dignity. Notwithstanding her almost
constant suffering she had always been a calmly cheerful soul and her
passing, while it left us serious did not sadden us. Her life came to
its end without struggle and her face was peaceful.
She was the last of my father's immediate family, and to him was
transmitted in due course of law, the estate with which her husband had
left her, a dower, which though small had enabled her to live
independently of her relatives and in simple comfort. It was a matter of
but a few thousand dollars, but its possession now made the most
fundamental change in my father's way of life. The effect of this
certain income upon his character was almost magical. He took on a sense
of security, a feeling of independence, a freedom from worry such as he
had been trying for over sixty years, without success, to attain.
It released him from the tyranny of the skies. All his life he had
been menaced by the "weather." Clouds, snows, winds, had been his
unrelenting antagonists. Hardly an hour of his past had been free from a
fear of disaster. The glare of the sun, the direction of the wind, the
assembling of clouds at sunset,—all the minute signs of change, of
storm, of destruction had been his incessant minute study. For over
fifty years he had been enslaved to the seasons. His sister's blessing
liberated him. He agonized no more about the fall of frost, the slash of
hail, the threat of tempest. Neither chinch bugs nor drought nor army
worms could break his rest. He slept in comfort and rose in confidence.
He retained a general interest in crops, of course, but he no longer ate
his bread in fear, and just in proportion as he realized his release
from these corroding, long-endured cares, did he take on mellowness and
humor. He became another man altogether. He ceased to worry and hurry.
His tone, his manner became those of a citizen of substance, of genial
leisure. He began to speak of travel!
Definitely abandoning all intention of farming, he put his Dakota land
on sale and bought several small cottages in West Salem. As a landlord
in a modest way, he rejoiced in the fact that his income was almost
entirely free from the results of harvest. It irked him (when he thought
of it) to admit that all his pioneering had been a failure, that all his
early rising, and his ceaseless labor had availed so little, but the
respect in which he was now held as householder, and as President of the
village, compensated him in such degree that he was able to ignore his
ill success as a wheat raiser.
"This legacy proves once again the magic of money," I remarked to
Zulime. "Father can now grow old with dignity and confidence. His living
is assured."
It remains to say that this inheritance also lifted indirectly a part of
my own burden. It took from me something of the financial responsibility
concerning the household whose upkeep I had shared for ten years or
more. Mother was still my care, but not in the same sense as before, for
my father with vast pride volunteered to pay all the household expenses.
He even insisted upon paying for an extra maid and gardener. Now that he
no longer needed the cash returns from the garden, he began to express a
pleasure in it. He was content with making it an esthetic or at most a
household enterprise.
CHAPTER TWELVE
We Tour the Oklahoma Prairie
One of the disadvantages of being a fictionist lies in the fact that the
history of one's imaginary people halts just in proportion as one's mind
is burdened with the sorrowful realities of one's own life. A troubled
bank clerk can (I believe) cast up a column of figures, an actor can
declaim while his heart is breaking, but a novelist can't—or at any
rate I can't—write stories while some friend or relative is in pain and
calling for relief. Composition is dependent in my case upon a
delicately adjusted mood, and a very small pebble is sufficient to turn
the currents of my mind into a dry channel.
My aunt's death was a sad shock to my mother and until she regained
something of her cheerful temper, I was unable to take up and continue
the action of my novel. I kept up the habit of going to my study, but
for a week or more I could not write anything but letters.
By the tenth of March we were all longing with deepest hunger for the
coming of spring. According to the old almanac's saying we had a right
to expect on the twenty-first a relenting of the rigors of the north,
but it did not come. "March the twenty-first is spring and little birds
begin to sing" was not true of the Valley this year. For two weeks
longer, the icy winds continued to sweep with Arctic severity across the
crests of the hills, and clouds of snow almost daily sifted down through
the bare branches of the elms. At times the landscape, mockingly
beautiful, was white and bleak as January. Drafts filled the lanes and
sleigh-bells jingled mockingly.
At last came grateful change. The wind shifted to the South. At mid-day
the eaves began to drip, and the hens, lifting their voices in jocund
song, scratched and burrowed, careening in the dusty earth which
appeared on the sunward side of the barn. Green grass enlivened the
banks of the garden, and on the southern slopes of the hills warmly
colored patches appeared, and then came bird-song and budding
branches!—so dramatic are the changes in our northern country.
No sooner was spring really at hand than Zulime and I, eager to share in
the art life which was so congenial to us both, returned to my former
lodging in Chicago; and a little later we went so far as to give a
party—our first party since our marriage. Fuller, who came early and
stayed late, appeared especially amused at our make-shifts. "This isn't
Chicago," he exclaimed as he looked around our rooms. "This is a lodging
in London!"
It was at this party that I heard the first word of the criticism under
which I had expected to suffer. One of our guests, an old and privileged
friend, remarked with a sigh, "Well, now that Zuhl has married a writer,
I suppose her own artistic career is at an end."
"Not at all!" I retorted, somewhat nettled. "I am an individualist in
this as in other things. I do not believe in the subordination of a wife
to her husband. Zulime has all the rights I claim for myself—no more,
no less. If she fails to go on with her painting or sculpture the fault
will not be mine. Our partnership is an equal one."
I meant this. Although dimly aware that mutual concessions must be made,
it was my fixed intention to allow my wife the fullest freedom of
action. Proud of her skill as an artist, I went so far as to insist on
her going back into her brother's studio to resume her modeling. "You
are not my house-keeper—you are a member of a firm. I prefer to have
you an artist."
Smiling, evasive, she replied, "I haven't at the present moment the
slightest 'call' to be an artist. Perhaps I shall—after a while; but at
present I'd rather keep house."
"But consider me!" I insisted. "Here am I, a public advocate of the
rights of women, already denounced as your 'tyrant husband,' 'a selfish
egotistic brute!'—I'll be accused—I am already accused—of cutting
short your career as a sculptor. Consider the injustice you are doing
me!"
She refused to take my protest or her friends' comment seriously; and so
we drifted along in pleasant round of parties till the suns of May,
brooding over the land lured us back to the Homestead, in which Zulime
could house-keep all day long if she wished to do so, and she did!
Full of plans for refurnishing and redecorating, she was busy as a
bumble-bee. As the mistress of a big garden and a real kitchen she
invited all her Chicago friends to come and share her good fortune. She
was filled with the spirit of ownership and exulted over the four-acre
patch as if it were a noble estate in Surrey.
It chanced that Lorado on his way to St. Paul was able to stop off, and
Zulime not only cooked a special dinner for him, but proudly showed him
all about the garden, talking gaily of the number of jars of berries and
glasses of jelly she was planning to put up.
"Well, Zuhl," he said resignedly, "I suppose it's all for the best, but
I don't quite see the connection between your years of training in
sculpture and the business of canning fruit."
It was a perfect spring day, and the Homestead was at its best. The
entire demesne was without a weed, and the blooming berry patches, the
sprouting asparagus beds and the budding grape vines all come in for the
eminent sculptor's enforced inspection, until at last with a yawn of
unconcealed boredom he turned away. "You seem to like your slavery,"
he remarked to Zulime, a note of comical accusation in his voice.
On the station platform when about to say good-bye to me, he became
quite serious. "This marriage appears to be working out," he admitted,
musingly. "I confess I was a little in doubt about it at first, but Zuhl
seems to be satisfied with her choice and so—well, I've decided to let
matters drift. Whether she ever comes back to sculpture or not is
unimportant, so long as she is happy."
Knowing that Zulime had always been his intellectual comrade, and
realizing how deeply he felt the separation which her growing interest
in my affairs had brought about, I gave him my hand in silent renewal of
a friendship into which something new and deeply significant had come.
"I hope she will never regret it," was all I could say.
Zulime was not deceived as to my income. My property, up to this time,
consisted of a small, a very small library, a dozen Navajo rugs, several
paintings, a share in four acres of land and my book rights (which were
of negligible value so far as furnishing a living was concerned), and my
wife perceived very clearly that our margin above necessity was narrow,
but this did not disturb her faith in the future, or if it did, she gave
no sign of it—her face was nearly always smiling. Nevertheless I had no
intention of keeping her in West Salem all summer. I could not afford to
wear out her interest in it.
One day, shortly after Lorado's visit, I received a letter from Major
Stouch, the Indian Agent with whom I had campaigned at Lamedeer in '97.
He wrote: "I have just been detailed to take charge of the Cheyenne
Agency at Darlington, Oklahoma. Mrs. Stouch and I are about to start on
a survey of my new reservation and I should like to have you and your
wife come down and accompany us on our circuit. We shall hold a number
of councils with the Indians, and there will be dances and pow-wows. It
will all be material for your pen."
This invitation appealed to me with especial force for I had long
desired to study the Southern Cheyennes, and a tour with Stouch promised
a rich harvest of fictional themes, for me. Furthermore it offered a
most romantic experience for Zulime—just the kind of enlightenment I
had promised her.
With no time to lose, we packed our trunks and took train for Kansas
City enroute for Indian Territory, the scene of many of the most
exciting romances of my youth, the stronghold of bank robbers, and the
hiding place of military renegades.
On our way to Oklahoma, we visited Professor Taft in Hanover and I find
this note recorded: "All day the wind blew, the persistent, mournful
crying wind of the plain. The saddest, the most appealing sound in my
world. It came with a familiar soft rush, a crowding presence, uttering
a sighing roar—a vague sound out of which voices of lonely children and
forgotten women broke. To the solitary farmer's wife such a wind brings
tears or madness. I am tense with desire to escape. This bare little
town on the ridge is appalling to me. Think of living here with the
litany of this wind forever in one's ears."
By contrast West Salem, with its green, embracing hills, seemed a
garden, a place of sweet content, a summer resort, and yet in this
Kansas town Zulime had spent part of her girlhood. In this sun-smit
cottage she had left her mother to find a place in the outside world
just as I had left my mother in Dakota. From this town she had gone
almost directly to Paris! It would be difficult to imagine a more
amazing translation—and yet, now that she was back in the midst of it,
she gave no sign of the disheartenment she must have felt. She met all
her old friends and neighbors with unaffected interest and gayety.
Twenty-four hours later we were in the midst of a wide, sunny prairie,
across which, in white-topped prairie schooners, settlers were moving
just as they had passed our door in Iowa thirty years before. Plowmen
were breaking the sod as my father had done in '71, and their women
washing and cooking in the open air, offered familiar phases of the
immemorial American drama,—only the stations on the railway broke the
spell of the past with a modern word.
Swarms of bearded, slouchy, broad-hatted men filled the train and
crowded the platforms of the villages. Cow-boys, Indians in white men's
clothing, negroes (black and brown), and tall, blonde Tennessee
mountaineers made up this amazing population—a population in which
libraries were of small value, a tobacco-chewing, ceaselessly spitting
unkempt horde, whose stage of culture was almost precisely that which
Dickens and other travelers from the old world had found in the Central
West in the forties.
How these scenes affected my young wife I will not undertake to say; but
I remember that she kept pretty close to my elbow whenever we mingled
with the crowd, and the deeper we got into this raw world the more
uneasy she became. "Where shall we spend the night?" she asked.
Had I been alone I would not have worried about a hotel, but with a
young wife who knew nothing of roughing it, I became worried. To the
conductor I put an anxious question, "Is there a decent hotel in Reno?"
His answer was a bit contemptuous, "Sure," he exclaimed. "What do you
think you're doing—exploring?"
This was precisely what I feared we were doing. I said no more about
it, although I hadn't much confidence in his notions of a first class
hotel. There was nothing for it but to rest upon his assurance and go
hopefully forward to the end of the line.
It must have been about ten of a dark warm night as we came to a final
halt beside a low station marked "Reno," and at the suggestion of the
brakeman I called for "the Palace Hotel Bus," although none of the
waiting carriages or drivers seemed even remotely related to a palace.
My wife, filled with a high sense of our adventure, took her seat in
the muddy and smelly carriage, with touching trust in me.
The Palace Hotel, with its doorway brightly lighted with electricity,
proved a pleasant surprise. It looked clean and bright and new, and the
proprietor, a cheerful and self-respecting citizen, was equally
reassuring. We went to our rooms with restored confidence in Oklahoma.
The next morning, before we had finished our breakfast, a messenger from
the Agency came in to say that a carryall was at the door, and soon we
were on our way toward the Fort.
The roads were muddy, but the plain was vividly, brilliantly green, and
the sky radiantly blue. The wind, filled with delicious spring odors,
came out of the west; larks were whistling and wild ducks were in
flight. To my wife it was as strange as it was beautiful. It was the
prairie at its best—like the Jim River in 1881.
Fort Reno (a cluster of frame barracks), occupied a low hill which
overlooked the valley of the Canadian, on whose green meadows piebald
cattle were scattered like bits of topaz. Flowers starred the southern
slopes, and beside the stream near the willows (in which mocking birds
were singing), stood clusters of the conical tents of the Cheyennes,
lodges of canvas made in the ancient form. Our way led to the Agency
through one of these villages, and as we passed we saw women at their
work, and children in their play, all happy and quite indifferent to the
white man and his comment.
The Stouchs met us at the door of the big frame cottage which was the
agent's house, and while Mrs. Stouch took charge of Zulime the Major led
me at once to his office, in order that I might lose no time in getting
acquainted with his wards. In ten minutes I found myself deep in another
world, a world of captive, aboriginal warriors, sorrowfully concerned
with the problem of "walking the white man's trail."
All that day and each day thereafter, files of white-topped wagons
forded the river, keeping their westward march quite in the traditional
American fashion, to disappear like weary beetles over the long, low
ridge past the fort which stood like a guidon to the promised land. Here
were all the elements of Western settlement, the Indians, the soldiers,
the glorious sweeping wind and the flowering sod, and in addition to all
these the resolute white men seeking their fortunes beneath the sunset
sky, just as of old, remorselessly carrying their women and children
into hardship and solitude. Without effort I was able to imagine myself
back in the day of Sam Houston and Satanka.
Our trip around the reservation with the Agent began a few days later
with an exultant drive across the prairie to the South Fork of the
Canadian River. It was glorious summer here. Mocking birds were singing
in each swale, and exquisite flowers starred the sod beneath our wheels.
Through a land untouched by the white man's plow, we rode on a trail
which carried me back to my childhood, to the Iowa Prairie over which I
had ridden with my parents thirty years before. This land, this sky,
this mournful, sighing wind laid hold of something very sweet, almost
sacred in my brain. By great good fortune I had succeeded in overtaking
the vanishing prairie.
The arrival of the Agent at each sub-agency was the signal for an
assembly of all the red men round-about and Zulime had the pleasure of
seeing several old fashioned Councils carried on quite in the
traditional fashion, the chiefs in full native costume, their head
dresses presenting suggestions of the war-like past. The attitudes of
the men in the circle were at all times serious and dignified, and the
gestures of the orators instinct with natural grace.
One of the Cheyenne camps in which we lingered was especially charming.
Set amid the nodding flowers and waving grasses of a small meadow in the
elbow of a river, its lodges were filled with happy children, and under
sun-shades constructed of green branches, chattering women were at work.
Paths led from tent to tent, and in the deep shade of ancient walnut
trees, on the banks of the stream, old men were smoking in reminiscent
dream of other days.
As night fell and sunset clouds flamed overhead, primroses yearned
upward from the sward, and the teepees, lighted from within, glowed like
jewels, pearl-white cones with hearts of flame. Shouts of boys, laughter
of girls, and the murmur of mothers' voices suggested the care-free life
of the Algonquin in days before the invading conqueror enforced new
conditions and created new desires.
For two weeks we drove amid scenes like these, scenes which were of
inspirational value to me and of constant delight to Zulime. My notebook
filled itself with hints for poems and outlines for stories. In all my
tales of the Cheyennes, I kept in mind Major Powell's significant
remark, "The scalp dance no more represents the red man's daily life
than the bayonet-charge represents the white man's civilization." Having
no patience with the writers who regarded the Indian as a wild beast, I
based my interpretation on the experiences of men like Stouch and Seger
who, by twenty years' experience, had proved the red man's fine
qualities. As leading actors in the great tragedy of Western settlement
I resolved to present the Ogallallah and the Ute as I saw them.
At one of these informal councils between the Agent and some of the
Cheyenne headmen, I caught a phrase which gave me the title of a story
and at the same time pointed the moral of a volume of short stories.
White Shield, one of John Seger's friends, in telling of his
experiences, sadly remarked, "I find it hard to make a home among the
white men."
Instantly my mind grasped the reverse side of the problem. I took for
the title of my story these words: White Eagle, the Red Pioneer, and
presented the point of view of a nomad who turns his back on the
wilderness which he loves, and sets himself the task of leading his band
in settlement among the plowmen. In a collection of tales, some of which
have not been published even in magazines, I have grouped studies of red
individuals with intent to show that a village of Cheyennes has many
kinds of people just like any other village. "Hippy, the Dare Devil,"
"White Weasel, the Dandy," "Rising Wolf, the Ghost Dancer," are some of
the titles in this volume. Whether it will get itself printed in my
lifetime or not is a problem, for publishers are loath to issue a book
of short stories, any kind of short stories. "Stories about Indians are
no longer in demand," they say. Nevertheless, some day I hope these
stories may get into print as a volume complementary to Main Traveled
Roads, and They of the High Trails.
Among the most unforgettable of all our Oklahoma experiences was a
dinner which we had with the Jesuit Missionary priest at "Chickashay" on
the last day of our stay. It had been raining in torrents for several
hours, and as the Mission was four miles out I would have despaired of
getting there at all had it not been for the Agency Clerk who was a man
of resource and used to Oklahoma "showers." Commandeering for us the
Agency "hack," a kind of canvas-covered delivery wagon, he succeeded in
reaching the priest's house without shipwreck, although the road was a
river.
The priest, a short, jolly Alsatian, met us with shining face quite
unlike any other missionary I had ever seen. He was at once a delight
and an astonishment to Zulime. His laugh was a bugle note and his
hospitality a glow of good will. The dinner was abundant and well
served, the wine excellent, and our host's talk of absorbing interest.
We were waited upon by a Sister of severe mien, who, between courses,
stood against the wall with folded arms eyeing us with disapproving
countenance. It was plain that she was serving under compulsion, but
Father Ambrose paying no attention to her frowns, urged us to take a
second helping, telling us meanwhile of his first exploration of
Oklahoma, a story which filled us with laughter at his "greenness."
Chuckling with delight of the fool he was, he could not conceal the
heroic part he had played, for the hardships in those days were very
real to a young man just out of a monastery. "I was so green the cows
would have eaten me," he said.
The whole incident was like a chapter in a story of some other land than
ours. The Sisters, the little brown children, the book-walled sitting
room, the sturdy little priest recounting his struggles with a strange
people and a strange climate,—all these presented a charming picture of
the noble side of missionary life. Nothing broke the charm of that
dinner except an occasional peal of thunder which made us wonder whether
we would be able to navigate the hack back to the hotel or not.
What a waste the plain presented as we started on our return at ten
o'clock! The lightning, almost incessant, showed from time to time what
appeared to be a vast lake, shorelessly extending on every side of us, a
shallow sea through which the horses slopped, waded and all but swam
while Carroll, the Clerk, as pilot, did his best to reassure my wife. "I
know the high spots," he said, whereat I fervently (though secretly)
replied, "I hope you do," and when we swung to anchor in front of our
little hotel, I shook his hand in congratulations over his skill—and
good luck!
On our return to Chicago I found Lorado in his studio, modeling a more
or less conventional female form, and my resentment took words. "If you
will come with me, down among the Cheyennes, I will show you men who can
be nude without being naked. In White Eagle's camp you can study
warriors who have the dignity of Roman Senators and the grace of
Athenian athletes."
To illustrate one of my points, I caught up a piece of gray canvas and
showed him how the chiefs of various tribes managed their blankets.
Something in these motions or in the long gray lines of the robe which I
used fired his imagination. For the first time in our acquaintanceship,
I succeeded in interesting him in the Indian. He was especially excited
by the gesture of covering the mouth to express awe, and a few days
later he showed me several small figures which he had sketched,
suggestions which afterwards became the splendid monuments of Silmee and
Blackhawk. He never lost the effect of the noble gestures which I had
reproduced for him. The nude red man was a hackneyed subject, but Brown
Bear with his robe, afforded precisely the stimulus of which he stood in
need.
This trip to Indian Territory turned out to be a very important event in
my life. First of all it enabled me to complete the writing of The
Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, and started me on a long series of
short stories depicting the life of the red man. It gave me an enormous
amount of valuable material and confirmed me in my conviction that the
Indian needed an interpreter, but beyond all these literary gains, I
went back to Wisconsin filled with a fierce desire to own some of that
beautiful prairie over which we had ridden.
This revived hunger for land generated in me a plan for establishing a
wide ranch down there, an estate to which we could retire in February
and March. "We can meet the spring half-way," I explained to my father.
"I want a place where I can keep saddle horses and cattle. You must go
with me and see it sometime. It is as lovely as Mitchell County was in
1870."
To this end I wrote to my brother in Mexico. "Leave the rubber business
and come to Oklahoma. I am going to buy a ranch there and need you as
superintendent."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Standing Rock and Lake McDonald
It was full summer when we got back to Wisconsin, and The Old Homestead
was at its best. The garden was red with ripening fruit, the trees thick
with shining leaves, and the thrushes and catbirds were singing in quiet
joy. In the fields the growing corn was showing its ordered spears, and
the wheat was beginning to wave in the gentle wind. No land could be
more hospitable, more abounding or more peaceful than our valley.
With her New Daughter again beside her life seemed very complete and
satisfying to my mother, and I was quite at ease until one night, as she
and I were sitting alone in the dusk, she confided to me, for the first
time, her conviction that she had but a short time to live. Her tone, as
well as her words, shocked me, for she had not hitherto been subject to
dark moods. She gave no reason for her belief, but that she was
suffering from some serious inner malady was evident,—I feared it might
concern the action of her heart—and I was greatly disturbed by it.
Of course I made light of her premonition, but thereafter I watched her
with minute care, and called on the doctor at the slightest sign of
change. We sang to her, we read to her, and Zulime spent long hours
reading to her or sitting beside her. She was entirely happy except
when, at intervals, her mysterious malady,—something she could not
describe,—filled her eyes with terror.
She loved to sit in the kitchen and watch her new daughter presiding
over its activities, and submitted, with pathetic pride, to any change
which Zulime proposed. "I am perfectly contented," she said to me,
"except——"
"Except what, mother?"
"The grandchild. I want to see my grandchild."
One of our regular excursions for several years had been a drive
(usually on Sunday) over the ridge to Lewis Valley, where Frank
McClintock still lived. Among my earliest memories is a terror of this
road, for it led up a long, wooded hill, which seemed to me, as a child,
a dangerous mountain pass. Many, many times since then I had made the
climb, sometimes in the spring, sometimes in midsummer, but now my plans
included my wife. Mother was eager to go. "I can stand the ride if you
will drive and be careful going down hill," she said to me—and so,
although I was a little in doubt about the effect upon her heart, I
hired a team, and early of a clear June morning we started for Mindoro.
It was like riding back into the hopeful, happy past, for both the old
people. Father was full of wistful reminiscences of "the early days,"
but mother, who sat beside Zulime, made no comment, although her face
shone with inward joy of the scene, the talk—until we came to the steep
descent which scared her. Clinging to her seat with pitiful intensity
she saw nothing but dangerous abysses until we reached the level road on
the opposite side of the ridge.
It was glorious June, and in this I now rejoice, for it proved to be the
last time that we made the crossing of the long hill together. I was
glad to have her visit her brother's home once more. Change was coming
to him as well as to her. His prodigious muscles and his boyish gayety
were fading away together. Though still delightfully jolly and
hospitable, his temper was distinctly less buoyant. He still played the
fiddle; but like his brother, David, he found less and less joy in it,
for his stiffened fingers refused to do his bidding. The strings which
once sang clear and sweet, failed of their proper pitch, and these
discords irritated and saddened him.
Aunt Lorette, his handsome, rosy-cheeked wife, was beginning to complain
smilingly, of being lame and "no account," but she provided a beautiful
chicken dinner, gayly "visiting" while she did it, with mother sitting
by to watch her at the job as she had done so many times before.
Lorette, like all the rest of us, felt under the necessity of putting
her best foot forward in order that "Zuleema" should not be disappointed
in any way, and to Zulime she was like a character in a novel; indeed,
they all tried to live up to her notion of them. For her, father told
his best stories of bears and Indians, for her, Uncle Frank fiddled his
liveliest tunes, and for her Aunt Lorette recounted some of the comedies
which the valley had from time to time developed, and which (as she
explained) "had gone into one of Hamlin's books. Of course he fixed 'em
up a little," she added, "you couldn't expect him to be satisfied with a
yarn just as I told it, but all the same he got the idea of at least two
of his stories from me."
Valiant Aunt Lorette! Her face was always sunny, no matter how deep the
shadow in her heart; and her capacity for work was prodigious. She was
an almost perfect example of the happy, hard-working farmer's wife, for
her superb physical endowment and her serene temperament had survived
the strain of thirty years of unremitting toil. Her life had been, thus
far, a cheerful pilgrimage. She did not mind the loneliness of the
valley. The high hill which lay between her door and the village could
not wall her spirit in. She rejoiced in the stream of pure water which
flowed from the hillside spring to the tank at her kitchen door, and she
took pride in the chickens and cows and pigs which provided her table
with abundant food.
"Oh, yes, I like to go to town—once in a while," she replied, in answer
to Zulime's question. "But I'd hate to live there. I don't see how
people get along on a tucked up fifty-foot lot where they have to buy
every blessed thing they eat."
How good that dinner was! Hot biscuit, chicken, shortcake, coffee and
the most delicious butter and cream. At the moment it did seem a most
satisfactory way to live. We forgot that the dishes had to be washed
three times each day, and that the mud and rain and wind and snow often
shut the homestead in for weeks at a stretch. Seeing the valley at its
loveliest, under the glamor of a summer afternoon, we found it perfect.
After dinner we men-folks (leaving the women, in the "good old way," to
clear away the dinner dishes) went out on the grass under the trees, and
as I talked of my mountaineering Uncle Frank said, with a wistful note
in his voice, "I've always wanted to go out into that country with you.
Chasing a deer through a Wisconsin swamp don't satisfy me—I'd like to
get into the grizzly bear country—but now I'm too old."
Thereupon father stated his desires. "There are just two trips I want to
make—I'd like to go by a steamboat from Duluth to Detroit, and I want
to see Yellowstone Park."
"Well, why don't you do it?" demanded my Uncle. "You can afford it now."
Father's face became thoughtful. "I believe I will. Lottridge and Shane
are planning that boat trip. I could go with them."
"Sail ahead," said I, "and if you get back in time I'll take you through
Yellowstone Park. Zulime and I are going to Montana in July."
Neither of them had the slightest desire to see London or Paris or Rome,
but they both longed for a fuller knowledge of the West. They were
still pioneers, still explorers over whose imagination the trackless
waste exercised a deathless dominion. To my uncle I said, "If I could
afford it, I would take you with me on one of my trailing expeditions
and show you some real wilderness."
"I wish you would," he answered quickly. "I'd tend horses, cook, or
anything else in order to go along."
Of course this wistful longing was only a mood on his part, for he was
naturally of a cheerful disposition, but music and the wilderness always
stirred him to his deeps. Ten minutes later he was joking with Zulime,
giving a fine exhibition of the contented husbandman.
As the time came to leave, my mother glanced about her with an emotion
which she brokenly expressed when she said, "I don't suppose I shall
ever get over here again. You must come and see me, after this."
"Oh, you'll be comin' over oftener than ever, now that you've got a
daughter to lean on," retorted Lorette with easy grace.
On our way home, at the crest of the hill, I drew rein in order that we
might all look away over the familiar valley, stretching mistily toward
the sun, and I, too, had the feeling—which I was careful not to express
even by a look or tone—that mother and I would never again ride this
road or look out upon this lovely scene together, and something in her
eyes and the melancholy sweetness of her lips told me that she was
bidding the landscape a long farewell.
We rode the remaining portion of our way in somber mood, although we all
agreed that it was a colorful finish of a perfect day—a day to be
recalled in after years with a tender heart-ache.
[It is all changed now. Aunt Lorette has gone to her reward. Uncle
Frank, old and lonely, is living on the village side of the ridge and
strangers are in the old house!]
That night, Zulime and I talked over the agreement I had made with
father, and we planned a way to carry it out. Almost as excited about
the Yellowstone as he, she was quite ready to camp through as I
suggested. "We will hire a team at Livingston, and with our own outfit,
will be independent of stages and hotels—but first I must show you some
Indians. We will visit Standing Rock and see the Sioux in their 'Big
Sunday.' Father can meet us at Bismark after we come out."
With the confidence of a child she accepted my arrangement and on the
first day of July we were in the stage ambling across the hot, dry
prairie which lay between Bismark and Fort Yates. Empty, arid and
illimitable the rolling treeless landscape oppressed us both, and yet
there was a stern majesty in its sweep, and the racing purple shadows of
the dazzling clouds lent it color and movement. To me it was all
familiar, but when, after an all-day ride, we came down into the valley
of the Muddy Missouri, the sheen of its oily red current was quite as
grateful to me as to my weary wife.
Our only means of reaching the Agency was a small rowboat which seemed a
frail ferry even to me. How it appeared to Zulime, I dared not ask—but
she unhesitatingly stepped in and took her seat beside me. I think she
accepted it as a part of the strange and hardy world in which her
husband was at home.
We were both silent on that crossing, for our slender craft struggled
anxiously with the boiling, silent, turbid current, and when we landed,
the tense look on Zulime's face gave place to a smile.—Half an hour
later we were sitting at supper in a fly-specked boarding house,
surrounded by squaw-men and half-breed Sioux, who were enjoying the
luxury of a white man's table as a part of their Fourth of July
celebration. My artist wife was being educated swiftly!
The tribe was again encamped in a wide circle just west of the Fort,
precisely as when my brother and I had visited it three years before,
while the store and the Agency swarmed with native men and women, many
in mixed costume of cloth and skin. Zulime's artistic joy in them filled
me with complacent satisfaction. I had the air of a showman rejoicing in
his exhibition hall. With keen interest we watched the young warriors as
they came whirling in on their swift ponies, each in his gayest
garments, the tail of his horse decorated with rosettes and ribbons.
Possessing the swiftness and the grace of Centaurs, coming and going
like sudden whirlwinds, they were superb embodiments of a race which was
passing. Some of the older men remembered me, and greeted me as one
friendly to their cause—but for the most part the younger folk eyed us
with indifference.
That night a singular and savage change in the weather took place. The
wind shifted to the southeast and took on the heat of a furnace. By ten
o'clock next morning dirt was blowing in clouds and to walk the street
was an ordeal. All day Zulime remained in her room virtually a prisoner.
Night fell with the blast still roaring, and the dust rising from the
river banks like smoke, presented a strange and sinister picture of
wrath. It was as though the water, itself, had taken fire from the
lightning which plunged in branching streams across the sky. Thunder
muttered incessantly all through that singular and solemn night, a night
which somehow foreshadowed the doom which was about to overtake the
Sioux.
The following day, however, was clear and cool, and we spent most of it
in walking about the camp, visiting the teepees of which there were
several hundreds set in a huge ellipse, all furnished in primitive
fashion—some of them very neatly. Over four thousand Sioux were said to
be in this circle, and their coming and going, their camp fires and
feasting groups composed a scene well worth the long journey we had
endured. Strange as this life seemed to my wife it was quite familiar to
me. To me these people were not savages, they were folks—and in their
festivity I perceived something of the spirit of a county fair in
Wisconsin.
Our guide about the camp, the half-breed son of a St. Louis trader, was
a big, fine-featured, intelligent man of about my own age, whose
pleasant lips, and deep brown eyes attracted me. He knew everybody, both
white and red, and as soon as he understood my wish to write fairly of
his people, he gave himself unreservedly to our service. Taking us from
lodge to lodge, he introduced us to the men whose characters were of the
most value in my study and told them of my wish to report them with
sympathy and truth.
One of the games that day was a rough, outdoor drama, in which mimic war
parties sallied forth, scouts were captured and captives rescued in
stirring pantomime.
As I stood watching the play I observed that one man (no longer young)
was serving as "the enemy," alternately captured or slain. His role was
not only arduous—it was dangerous—dangerous and thankless, and as I
saw him cheerfully volunteering to be "killed" I handed Primeau a dollar
and said: "Give this to that old fellow, and tell him he should have
many dollars for his hard, rough work."
Primeau gave him the coin, but before he had time to know who gave it,
he was called back into the field.
At the Agency store I met a French-Canadian named Carignan who was a
most valuable witness, for he had been among the red men for many years,
first as a school teacher and later as trader. From him I secured much
intimate history of the Sioux. He had known the Sitting Bull well, and
gave me a very kindly account of him. "I taught the school in Rock Creek
near the Sitting Bull's camp, and he was often at my table," he
explained. "I saw no harm in him. I liked him and respected him. He was
an Indian but he was a thinker."
Vaguely holding in my brain a tale in which the Sitting Bull should be
protagonist, I talked with many who had known him, and a few days later
I accepted Primeau's invitation to visit the valley in which the chief
had lived, and which was the scene of the Ghost Dance, and the place of
the chief's death.
I suggested to Zulime that she would be more comfortable at the Agency
but she replied, "I'd rather go with you. I don't like being left here
alone."
"You'll find the ride tiresome and the lodging rough, I fear."
"I don't care," she retorted firmly, "I'm going with you."
Primeau was a very intelligent man and a good talker, and as we rode
along he gave us in detail the history of the rise of the Ghost Dance,
so far as the Sioux were concerned. "There was nothing war-like about
it," he insisted. "It was a religious appeal. It was a prayer to the
Great Spirit to take pity on the red man and bring back the world of the
buffalo. They carried no weapons, in fact they carried nothing which the
white man had brought to them. They even took the metal fringes off
their shirts. They believed that if they gave up all signs of the whites
the Great Spirit would turn his face upon them again."
"Did Sitting Bull take part in this?" I asked.
"He encouraged the meeting at his camp and gave his cattle to feed the
people, but he was never able to dream like the rest. He never really
believed in it. He wanted to but he couldn't. He was too deep a thinker.
He often talked with me about it."
At a point about twenty miles from The Fort, Primeau left us to visit a
ranchman with whom he had some business and left us to drive on with a
guide to his cattle-ranch where we were to stay all night.
The ranch house turned out to be a rude low shack, and here Zulime had
her first touch of genuine cowboy life. The foreman had not been
expecting ladies for supper and the food he had prepared was of the
usual camp sort. He explained that he and his men had finished their
meal, and then, leading the way to the kitchen, showed us the food and
said heartily, "Help yourself."
On the back of the stove was a pot half filled with a mixture of boiled
rice and prunes. In the oven was some soggy bread, and on the hearth
some cold bacon. A can half filled with pale brown coffee added the
finishing touch to a layout perfectly familiar to me. I thanked the cook
and proceeded to dish out some of the rice whose grayish color aroused
Zulime's distrust. She refused to even taste it. "It looks as if it were
filled with dirt—or ashes."
"That's its natural complexion," I explained. "This is the unpolished
kind of rice. It is much more nutritious than the other kind."
She could not eat any of the bread, and when she tried the coffee she
was utterly discouraged. Nevertheless her kindliness of heart led her to
conceal her disgust. She emptied her rice into the stove and threw her
cup of coffee from the window in order that the cook might think that
she had eaten her share of the supper.
The foreman who came in a few minutes later to see that we were getting
fed politely inquired, "Is there anything else I can get you, miss?"
She really needed something to eat and yet she was puzzled to know what
to ask for. At last, in the belief that she was asking for the simplest
possible thing, she smiled sweetly and said, "I should like a glass of
milk."
The foreman permitted no expression of surprise or displeasure to cross
his face, he merely turned to a tall young man in the doorway and
quietly remarked, "Mell, the lady would like some milk."
A glint of amusement was in the eyes of Mell, but he made no reply, just
quietly "sifted out," and a few moments later, while the foreman was in
the midst of a story, a most appalling tumult broke upon our ears.
Calves bawled, bulls bellowed, galloping hooves thundered, men shouted
and laughed—in a most amazing uproar.
Rushing to the door in search of the cause of this clamor, I found it to
be related to my wife's innocent request.
Tied near the cabin was a leaping, blatting, badly frightened calf while
inside the corral, a cow evidently its dam, was charging up and down the
fence, her eyes literally blazing with fury, pursued by Mell on a swift
pony, a rope swinging in his hand. On the top rails of the enclosure a
row of delighted loafers laughed and cheered and shouted good advice to
the roper.
"What is he doing?" asked my amazed wife, as Mell brought the cow to
earth in a cloud of dust.
"Milking the cow," replied the boss with calmly hospitable inflection.
"If you'll be patient jest a few minutes——"
The insane animal, strong as a lioness, in some way freed herself from
the rope and charged her enemy—Mell's pony fled. "O, don't let him hurt
her," pleaded Zulime. "I don't want any milk. I didn't know you had to
do that."
"It's the only way to milk a range cow," I explained.
"Don't worry, Miss," the foreman added reassuringly. "It's all in the
day's work for Mell."
Again the cow went to earth and Zulime, horrified at the sight, begged
them to restore the calf to its dam. At last this was done, and a
grateful peace settled over the scene.
The cowboys were highly delighted and I was amused, but Zulime was too
shocked to see any humor in Mell's defeat. "Do they really milk their
cows in that way?" she asked me.
"Yes, when they milk them at all," I replied, inwardly filled with
laughter. "As a matter of fact they get all their cream out of cans.
Milking that cow was a new departure for Mell, I think he was a little
disappointed at not being allowed to go through with it."
"I'm glad he didn't. I'll never mention milk again—in this country."
We slept in the bed of our wagon-box that night while the crew rode away
to fight a prairie fire. We heard them come quietly in toward dawn, and
when we awoke and looked out of our cover we saw them lying all about us
on the ground each rolled up in his tarpaulin like a boulder. Altogether
it was a stirring glimpse of ranch life for my city-bred wife.
Primeau's home ranch and store which we reached about eleven the next
forenoon was an almost equally sorry place for a delicate woman, a sad
spot in which to spend even a single night. Flies swarmed in the kitchen
like bees, and the air of our bedroom was hot and stagnant, and
mosquitoes made sleep impossible. Zulime became ill, and I bitterly
regretted my action in bringing her into this God forsaken land. "We
shall return at once to the fort," I promised her.
It was an iron soil. The valley was a furnace, the sky a brazen shield.
No green thing was in sight, and the curling leaves of the dying corn
brought back to me those desolate days in Dakota when my mother tried so
hard to maintain a garden. Deeply pitying the captive red hunters, who
were expected to become farmers under these desolate conditions, I was
able to understand how they had turned to the Great Spirit in a last
despairing plea for pity and relief. "Think of this place in winter," I
said to Zulime.
One of the men whom Primeau especially wished me to meet was Slohan, the
annalist of his tribe, one of the "Silent Eaters," a kind of bodyguard
to Sitting Bull. "He lives only a few miles up the valley," Primeau
explained, and so to find him we set off in a light wagon next morning
drawn by a couple of fleet ponies.
As we rode, Primeau told me more of "The Silent Eaters." "They were a
small band of young warriors organized for defense and council, and were
closely associated with Sitting Bull all his life. Slohan, the man we
are to see to-day, is one of those who stood nearest the chief. No man
living knows more about him. He can tell you just what you want to
know."
An hour later as we were riding along close to the bank of the creek,
Primeau stopped his team. "There he is now!" he exclaimed.
Looking where he pointed I discovered on a mound above the stream an old
man sitting motionless as a statue, with bowed head, and lax hands.
There was something strange, almost tragic in his attitude, and this
impression deepened as we approached him.
He was wrinkled with age and clad in ragged white man's clothing, but
his profile was fine, fine as that of a Roman Senator, and the lines of
his face were infinitely sad. In one fallen hand lay a coiled rope.
He did not look up as we drew near, did not appear to hear Primeau's
respectful greeting. Dejected, motionless, he endured the hot sunshine
like an Oriental Yoghi or a man deadened by some narcotic drug.
Gently, almost timidly, Primeau addressed him. "Slohan, this white man
has come a long way to see you. He wishes to talk with you about the
Sitting Bull and of the days of the buffalo."
At last the old man turned and lifted his bloodshot eyes and uttered in
a husky whisper, a few words which changed Primeau's whole expression.
He drew back. "Come away!" he said to me.
While we were walking toward our team he explained. "Slohan is mourning
the death of his little grandson. Long time he has been there wailing.
His voice is gone. He can cry no more. His heart is empty. He will not
talk with us."
What a revelation of the soul of a red warrior! Hopeless, tragic,
inconsolable, he was the type of all paternity throughout the world.
Primeau went on, "I told him of you and I think his mind is turned to
other things. I asked him to come to see you this afternoon. Perhaps he
will. Perhaps I have lifted his mind from his sorrow."
All the way down the valley I pondered on the picture that grandsire had
made there in the midst of that desolate valley.
Primeau told me of his grandson. "He was a handsome little fellow. I
can't blame the old man for weeping over his loss."
Slohan was a redoubtable warrior. He had been the leader of Sitting
Bull's bodyguard, he was accounted a savage, and yet for forty-eight
hours he had been sitting ceaselessly mourning for a child, crying till
his voice was only a husky whisper. Nothing that I had ever seen typed
the bitterness of barbaric grief more powerfully than this bent and
voiceless old man.
Late in the afternoon the mourner came in view, riding on a pony,
without a saddle, his face still very sad, but not entirely despairing.
His mind, in working backward to the splendid world of the past, the
world in which his chief had played such heroic and stirring parts, his
heart had been comforted—or at any rate lightened.
Although clothed in the customary rags of the mourner, his hair was
neatly brushed and braided, and he met my wife with gentle grace. There
was something tragic in his dim glance, something admirable in his low
words of greeting.
We gave him food and drink, and then while we all sat on the earth in
the scant shade thrown by Primeau's building, he began to talk, slowly,
hesitantly of the part his chief had taken in the wars against the white
man. He had the dignity and the eloquence of a fine New England judge. A
notable sweetness and a lofty poetry were blended in his expression; and
as he used the sign language in emphasizing his words (gestures finely
expressive and nobly rhythmical) he became, to my perception, the native
bard reciting the story of his clan. I was able to follow the broad
lines of his discourse and when at the close of the afternoon he rose to
go, I said to him, "I shall tell of the Sitting Bull as you have
spoken," and we parted in the glow of mutual esteem.
Zulime was feeling much better, and the air being cooler, I asked
permission to stay another day, in order that I might meet Looking Stag,
another of the warriors who had known the Sitting Bull.
Looking Stag's home was a few miles down the valley, and we found him in
his commodious lodge, entertaining a couple of headmen from Cheyenne
River. He was seated on a low bed opposite the door, and his guests were
placed on either hand of him. He glanced up at us, spoke a curt word to
Primeau and went on with his story. His cold greeting, and the evident
preoccupation of his manner made me feel like an intruder, which I was,
and this feeling was deepened when I perceived that my guide was
distinctly ill at ease. After all, he was only a half-breed trader,
while these men were red chieftains.
The Looking Stag was not contemptuous of me—he was merely indifferent.
Busied with honored guests he regarded the coming of a strange white man
to his lodge as something of a nuisance. He went on cutting tobacco, and
afterward ground it between his palms whilst his visitors talked on
quite oblivious to me.
Our host looked familiar, but as he was painted and wore a bonnet of
eagle feathers I could not remember where I had seen him.
At last, in a pause of the talk, Primeau said something to him which
caused him to break into a smile and thrust his open hand toward me.
"How! How! my friend," he called heartily.
Then I recognized him. He was the man who had so unweariedly taken the
part of "The Enemy" in the games at Standing Rock. Primeau had told him
that I was the man who had given him the money, and he now accepted me
as a friend.
He then told his visitors the story of my gift and message. They also
laughed and shook hands with me. Thereafter we were all on terms of high
respect and mutual confidence. I put my questions freely and they
replied with an air of candor.
As they approached the Custer fight, however, they paused, pondered,
checked up one another's statements, and at last produced what I
believed to be the truth regarding the share in that battle—and the
truth is incredible. They recreated the whole scene for me as Two Moons
had done. They corroborated all that I had obtained from the northern
Cheyennes.
I forgot the plow and the reaper while sitting there in conference with
those men for they were thinkers as well as warriors. Within the walls
of that lodge they were not despised outcasts, they were leaders,
councillors, men of weight. They had reëntered a world which caused
their faces to shine just as my father's face shone when he told of
Grant at Vicksburg or recounted the days of his youth on The Old
Wisconse. For a little while I inhabited their world, and when I left
them I carried with me a deepened sense of their essential manliness.
Alas! Zulime was less enthusiastic. The flies, the heat, the dust, the
bad food—so commonplace to me—were horrifying to her, and so for her
sake I cut short my historical studies and hurried her back to the Fort,
back to the wholesome fare of the officers' mess. With no consuming
literary interest to sustain her she found even the Agency a weariness;
and as the date for meeting my father was near, we took the stage back
to Bismark, she with a sense of relief, I with a feeling of regret that
I had not been able to push my investigations deeper. There was a big
theme here, but I had small faith in my ability to handle it. It
required an epic poet, rather than a realistic novelist.
Father, excited as a boy, came along on the train which reached Bismark
the morning following our arrival and we at once took him into the
Pullman car and forced him to share some of the comforts of travel. We
ate breakfast in the dining car at what seemed to him a wildly
extravagant price but I insisted on his being a guest. "Just sit here
and look out of the window and think of the Erie Canal Boats in which
you came west, or remember your ox-team in fifty-eight."
"All right," he said with a quizzical smile. "If you can stand the
expense, I can." A little later he said, "What a change my life has
witnessed. I helped to grade the first railway in the State of Maine,
and now here I am whirling along through 'the Great American Desert'
eating a steak and drinking my coffee in a flying hotel. I wish your
mother could be here with us."
This was the only shadow at our feast and we put it aside, taking
comfort in the thought that she was happy in a tree-embowered home,
surrounded by the abundance of a prolific garden. "Her days of travel
are over," I said, and turned to the task of making my father's outing a
shining success.
For ten days we camped with him in Yellowstone Park, moving from place
to place, in our own wagon and tent, and when we came out and he
started on his homeward way, he expressed complete satisfaction. "It has
been up to the bills," he conceded, and I could see that he was eager to
get back to Johnson's drug store, where he could discuss with Stevens
and McEldowney the action of geysers and the habits of grizzly bears, on
terms of equal information.
If he was satisfied, I was not. Insisting on showing Zulime the Cascade
Range and the Pacific Ocean, I kept on to the West. Together we viewed
Tacoma and Seattle, and from the boat on Puget Sound discovered the
Olympic Mountains springing superbly from the sea. For us Rainier
disclosed his dome above the clouds, and Lake McDonald offered its most
gorgeous sunset.
One of the points which I had found of most interest in '97 was the
Blackfoot Agency, and as we sat in our tent on the Northern shore of
Lake McDonald I gained Zulime's consent to go in there for a few days.
"The train lands us there late at night," I said, "and there is no hotel
at the station or the Agency, but we can set up our tent in a few
moments and be comfortable till morning."
To this she agreed—or perhaps I should say to this she submitted, and
at eleven o'clock the following night we found ourselves unloaded on the
platform of a lonely little station on the plain. It was a starlit
night, fortunately, and dragging our tent and bedding out on the crisp,
dry sod, we set to work. In ten minutes we had a house and bed in which
we slept comfortably till a freight train thundered by along about dawn.
Truly my artist wife was being schooled in the tactics of the trail!
At the Agency we hired a wagon and drove to the St. Mary's Lake. With a
Piegan (old Four Horns) for a guide we camped on the lower Lake, and
Zulime caught two enormous pike. At Upper St. Mary's, we set our tent
just below the dike. A "Chalet" on this spot now welcomes the tourist,
but in those days St. Mary's was a lone, and stormful mountain water
with not even a forest ranger's cabin to offer shelter. We lived in our
own tent and cooked our own food—a glorious experience to me, but to
Zulime (as I learned afterward) the trip was not an unmixed delight.
We visited several other Indian reservations on our way home, and all
along the way my mind was busy with the splendid literary problems here
suggested. Deep down in my brain a plan was forming to picture these
conditions. "First I must put together a volume of short stories to be
called The Red Pioneer; then I shall complete a prose poem of the
Sitting Bull to be called The Silent Eaters, and third, and most
important of all, I must do a novel of reservation life, with an army
officer as the agent."
In these volumes I planned to put the results of all my studies of the
Northwest during my many explorations of the wild. In this way I would
be doing my part in delineating the swiftly changing conditions of the
red man and the mountaineer.
Everywhere I went I studied soldiers, agents, missionaries, traders and
squaw-men with insatiable interest. My mind was like a sponge, absorbing
not facts, but impressions, pictures which were necessary to make my
stories seem like the truth. While in camp and on the train, I took
notes busily and actually formulated several tales while riding my horse
along the trail.
Perfectly happy in this work, I believed my wife to be equally content,
for she bravely declared that to tumble off a pullman in the middle of a
moonless night, and help me set up a tent on the prairie grass was fun.
She pretended to enjoy cooking our food at a smoking camp fire in a
drizzle of rain; but I now know that she was longing for the comforts,
the conveniences, the repose of West Salem.
"Oh, but it is good to be home," she said as we reached the old house,
and I too was ready for its freedom from care and its opportunity for
work, happy in the belief that I had bestowed on my wife some part of
the store of heroic and splendid experiences, which made up so large a
section of my own life, experiences which were to serve as the basis for
all my future work.
The flame of my ambition burned brightly at the close of these weeks of
inspirational exploration. "With nothing to distract or weaken me I
ought now, at least to justify the faith which Howells and other of my
literary friends and advisers had been kind enough to declare." Seizing
my pen with new resolution I bent to the task of putting into fiction
certain phases of the great Northwest which (up to this year) had not
been successfully portrayed.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Empty Room
My father was a loyal G. A. R. man. To him, naturally, the literature,
the ceremonies and the comradeship of the Grand Army of the Republic
were of heroic significance for, notwithstanding all other events of his
stirring life, his two years as a soldier remained his most moving, most
poetic experience. On all special occasions he wore the regulation blue
coat with the bronze button of the Legion in its lapel, and faithfully
attended all the local meetings of his "Post," but he had not been able
to take part in the National Conventions for the double reason that they
were always too far away from his Dakota home and invariably came at the
time when his presence was most needed on the farm. With a feeling of
mingled envy and sadness he had seen his comrades, year after year,
jubilantly set out for Washington or Boston or San Francisco whilst he
remained at work.
Now the case was different. He had the money, he had the leisure and the
Grand Review was about to take place in Chicago. "Hamlin," said he, on
the morning after my return from Montana, "I want you to go with me to
the G. A. R. meeting in Chicago."
Although I did not say so, I was sadly averse to making this trip.
Aching to write, impatient to get my new conceptions down on paper, I
could hardly restrain an expression of reluctance, but I did, for the
old soldier, more afraid of towns than of mountains, needed me in the
city.
"All right, father," I said, and put my notes away.
He made a handsome figure in his new suit, and his broad-rimmed hat with
its gold cord. He was as excited as a boy when we set out for the
station and commented with a tone of satisfaction on the number of his
comrades to be seen on the train. He was not in need of me during this
part of his excursion for he hailed every old soldier as "Comrade" and
made a dozen new friendships before we reached Madison. No one resented
his fraternal interest. Occasionally he brought one of his acquaintances
over to my seat, explaining with perfectly obvious pride that I had
written a history of General Grant and that I lived in Chicago. "I'm
taking him along to be my scout," he declared, at the close of each
introduction.
At my lodgings on Elm Street he made himself so beloved that I feared
for his digestion. The landlady and the cook were determined that he
should eat hot biscuit and jam and pie in addition to roast chicken and
gravy, and I was obliged to insist on his going to bed early in order to
be up and in good condition for the parade next day.
"I've no desire to march in the ranks," he said. "I'm perfectly content
to sit on the fence and see the columns pass."
"You needn't sit on the fence," I replied. "I've got two of the best
seats in the Grand Stand. You can rest there in comfort all through the
parade."
He didn't know how much I paid for our chairs, but a knowledge that he
was in the seats of the extravagant pleased him while it troubled him.
He was never quite at ease while enjoying luxury. It didn't seem
natural, someway, for him to be wholly comfortable.
We were in our places hours before the start (he was like a boy on
Circus Day—afraid of missing something), but that he was enjoying in
high degree his comfortable outlook, made me almost equally content.
At last with blare of bugle and throb of drum, that grand and melancholy
procession of time-scarred veterans came to view, and their tattered
flags and faded guidons brought quick tears to my father's eyes. Few of
them stepped out with a swing, many of them limped pitifully—all were
white-haired—an army on its downward slope, marching toward its final,
silent bivouac.
None of them were gay and yet each took a poignant pleasure in sharing
the rhythm of the column, and my father voiced this emotion when he
murmured, "I ought to be down there with my company."
To touch elbows just once more, to be a part of the file would have been
at once profoundly sad and sadly sweet, and he wiped the tears from his
cheeks in a silence which was more expressive than any words could have
been.
To me each passing phalanx was composed of piteous old men—to my sire
they were fragments of a colossal dream—an epic of song and steel. "In
ten years he and they will all be at rest in 'fame's eternal camping
ground,'" I thought with a benumbing realization of the swift,
inexorable rush of time—a tragedy which no fluttering of bright flags,
no flare of brave bugles could lighten or conceal. It was not an army in
review, it was an epoch passing to its grave.
After the parade was over, as we were going home in the car, tired,
silent and sad, I perceived my father as others saw him, a white-haired
veteran whose days of marching, of exploration were over. His powerful
figure, so resilient and so brave was stooping to its end. His restless
feet were weary.
However, this was only a mood with him. A night's sleep brought back his
courage, and his energy to a most amazing degree, and I was again called
upon to show him the "sights" of the city—that is to say, we once more
viewed the Stock Yards, the Masonic Temple and Lincoln Park. He also
asked me to go with him for a sail across the Lake, but at this point I
rebelled. "I am willing to climb tall buildings or visit the Zoo, but I
draw the line at a trip to Muskegon."
With guilty conscience I watched him start off for the dock alone, but
this sentiment on my part was wasted. A score of "comrades" on the boat
more than made up for my absence, and at sunset he returned beaming,
triumphant, perfectly satisfied with his day's sail. "Now, I'm ready to
go home," he announced.
After putting him on the train next day I opened my desk in my quiet
room on Elm Street, with a feeling of being half-in and half-out of the
state of matrimony. In some ways I liked being alone. A greater power of
concentration resulted. With no disturbing household influences, no
distracting interests, I wrote all the morning, but at night, when my
work was done, my mind went out toward my young wife. To have her moving
about the room would have been pleasant. To walk with her to the studio
would have been a joy. As a novelist, I bitterly resented all the minute
domestic worries, but as a human being I rejoiced in my new
relationship. "Can I combine the two activities? Will being a husband
and a householder cramp and defeat me as a novelist?"
These questions every writer who is ambitious to excel, must answer for
himself. So far as I was concerned, the decision had been made. Having
elected myself into the ranks of those who were carrying forward the
immemorial traditions of the race, there was no turning back for me. I
ended the week by going out to Eagle's Nest Camp, where Zulime met me to
renew the delight of our days of courtship.
Even here, I did not neglect my task. Wallace Heckman gave me a desk in
the attic and there each morning I hammered away, eager to get my
material "roughed out" while it was hot in my memory. I often wrote
four thousand words between breakfast and luncheon. One story took shape
as a brief prose epic of the Sioux, a special pleading from the
standpoint of a young educated red man, to whom Sitting Bull was a kind
of Themistocles. Though based on accurate information, I intended it to
be not so much a history as an interpretation. It interested me at the
time and so—I wasted a week!
Life at camp was very pleasant, but as my brother wrote me that he must
return to New York I felt it my duty to go home and see that my mother
"attended" the County Fair, which was a most important event to her.
"Mother's life retains so few interests," I explained to Zulime, "that
to miss the Fair would be to her a great deprivation. You can stay here
but I must go home and take her down to the old settlers' picnic in
Floral Hall."
Zulime understood. Loyally cutting short her pleasant companionship with
her fellow artists she returned with me to West Salem a few days before
the fair opened.
Fuller, who timed his visit to be with us during the exhibition,
professed a keen interest in every department of it. His attitude was
comically that of a serious-minded European tourist. He not only
purchased a catalogue, he treated it precisely as if it were the
hand-book of the Autumn Salon in Paris. Carrying it in his hand, he
spent busy hours minutely studying "Spatter Work," and carefully
inspecting decorated bedspreads. He tasted the prize bread, sampled the
honey, and twirled the contesting apples. Nothing escaped his notice. He
was as alert, and (apparently) as vitally concerned as any of the
"judges," but I, knowing his highly-critical mind, could only smile at
his reports.
He was a constant joy, not only to Zulime and to me, but to our friends,
the Eastons. One day as we were digging potatoes he gave me a lecture on
my duty as a Wisconsin novelist. "You should do for this country what
Thomas Hardy has done for Wessex," he said. "You have made a good start
in Main Traveled Roads, and Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, but you should
do more with it. It is a noble background."
"Why not do something with it yourself?" I retorted.
"You are almost as much a part of Wisconsin as I am. I've done my part
and moved on. My keenest interests now are in the Mountain West—a
larger field. There's no use saying 'Make more of this material!' I can
only do what I feel. Just now I am full of Montana. Why don't you
celebrate Eagle's Nest? If you weren't so myopic you'd perceive in that
little artist colony something quite as literary as the life which
Hawthorne lived at Brook Farm."
"I'm no Hawthorne," he replied. "I'm not even Margaret Fuller. I don't
want to write about Camp—in fact I don't want to write about anything.
I'd rather drive nails or superintend a tinner."
In this way our discussion usually ended—with each of us going his own
gait. In this instance his way led back to Chicago. "I must return to my
plumbing," he protested. "I've got some renters who are complaining of
their furnaces," and that was the end of his visit. We knew better than
to argue for delay. He was as inflexible as New England granite.
His going left a gap. We both liked to have him about. Never in the way,
never interfering with my work, he was always a stimulant. His judgment
(second only to Howells' in my estimation) kept me to my highest level.
He was the only man with whom I could discuss all my perplexities and be
enlightened.
As October came on my mother's condition called for increasing care. She
could not walk across the road and her outings were all taken in a
wheeled chair, which I pushed about the village each afternoon. She was
very happy when we were at home, but as she could neither sew nor read
she was piteously dependent upon the members of her household for
diversion. Life's walls were narrowing for her, that was sorrowfully
evident to me; and yet I did not—I would not consider the possibility
of her early passing. I thought of her as living on for many years
longer. It was her growing inability to employ her time which troubled
me and I gave the most of my afternoons to her amusement.
As my father wrote from Dakota early in October setting November 1st as
the date for his return, I began to plan another trip to New York,
feeling that it was better to go in the early autumn than to wait till
winter. "Winters are very hard on old folks in our valley," I remarked
to Zulime. To mother I said, "Our absence will not be long. We'll be
back in time for Thanksgiving," I assured her.
She dreaded our going. Clinging to us both as though she feared we might
never return she pleadingly said, "Wait till your father comes," and her
distress of mind caused me to put off our departure until father could
arrive.
These moods of depression, these periods of suffering which she could
not explain, were usually transitory, and this one soon passed. In a day
or two she was free from pain, and quite cheerful. "You may go," she
said at last, but warningly added, "Don't stay away too long!"
In spite of her smiling face, I kissed her good-by with a sense of
uneasiness, almost of guilt. "It seems a selfish act to leave her at
this time," I confessed to Zulime, "and yet if we are to get away at
all, it is safer to go now."
In order to save time for our eastern trip, we went through Chicago
almost without stopping, and upon reaching New York, took the same suite
of rooms on Fifteenth Street in which we had lived the previous year. In
an hour we were settled.
My brother, who was playing an engagement in the city, came at once to
inquire about the old folks and I gave a good report. "Mother has her
ups and downs," I explained, "but she is very comfortable in her new
rooms. Of course she misses her sons and her new daughter—I am not
sure, but she misses the new daughter more than she misses you and me,
but we shall soon return to her."
The Eagle's Heart, which had been running with favor as a serial, was
just being published in book form, and we were in high hopes of it.
At the same time the Century Company was preparing to issue Her
Mountain Lover, which had already been printed in the magazine.
Altogether my presence in New York seemed opportune, if not actually
necessary, a fact which I made much of in writing to the old folks in
the West.
Gilder, who met me on the street soon after our arrival in New York,
spoke to me in praise of Her Mountain Lover. "I predict a great
success for it. It has beauty——" here he smiled. "I am always
preaching 'beauty' to you, but you need it! You should remember that the
writing which is beautiful is the writing which lasts."
He was looking thin and bent and gray, and I experienced a keen pang of
fear. "Gilder is growing old," I thought, and this feeling of change was
deepened a few days later by the death of Charles Dudley Warner.
"The older literary men, the Writers who have been my guides and my
exemplars, are dropping away! I am no longer 'a young and promising
novelist.' It is time I delivered my message—if I have any," I reminded
myself, with a realization that I was now in the mid-ranks, pushed on by
younger and more vigorous authors. Frank Norris and Stewart Edward White
were crowding close upon my lagging heels. With this in my thought I got
out my manuscript and set to work.
I would have been entirely happy in the midst of many delightful
meetings with my fellow craftsmen had it not been for a growing sense
of anxiety concerning my mother's condition. Father's brief notes were
not reassuring. "Your mother needs you," he said, in effect, and I began
to plan our return. "We have a few engagements," I wrote, "but you may
expect us for our usual Thanksgiving Dinner."
I will not say that I had a definite premonition of trouble, I was just
uneasy. I felt inclined to drop all our social engagements and start for
home but I did not carry out the impulse.
On Sunday, the twenty-fifth of November, after a delightful dinner with
Augustus Thomas in his home at New Rochelle, Zulime and I returned to
our apartment in happiest humor, to be met by a telegram which went to
my heart like the thrust of a bayonet. It was from my father. "Your
mother is very low. Come at once."
For a few moments I remained standing, like a man stunned by a savage
blow. Then I awoke to the need of haste in getting away to the West. It
was five o'clock in the afternoon, and the last train which would enable
us to connect with the Milwaukee train from Chicago to West Salem, left
at half-past six. "We must make that train," I said to Zulime with a
desperate realization of the need of haste.
The rush of packing, the excitement of getting to the station kept me
from the sinking of spirit, the agony of self-accusation which set in
the moment we were safely in the sleeping car, and speeding on our
homeward way. "If only we can reach her before it is too late," was my
prayer. "I shall never forgive myself for leaving her. I knew she was
not well," I confessed to Zulime, whose serene optimism comforted me, or
at least dulled the edge of my self-reproach. Again I telegraphed that
we were coming, giving the name and number of our train, hoping to have
an encouraging reply from father or the doctor during the evening, but
none came.
The long agonizing hours wore on. A hundred times I accused myself, "I
should not have left her."
At all points where I attacked myself, my wife defended me, excused me,
and yet I could not clear myself—could not rest. In imagination I
pictured that dear, sweet face turned toward the door, and heard that
faint voice asking for me.
It is true I had done many considerate things for her, but I had not
done enough. Money I had given her, and a home, but I had not given her
as much of my time, my service, as I might have done,—as I should have
done. My going away to the city at the very moment when my presence was
most necessary seemed base desertion. While she had been suffering,
longing and lonely, I had been feasting. All my honors, all my writing,
seemed at this moment too slight, too trivial to counter-balance my
mother's need, my mother's love.
Midnight came without a message, and I went to bed, slightly comforted,
hoping that a turn for the better had taken place. I slept fitfully,
waking again and again to the bleak possibilities of the day. A
persistent vision of a gray-haired mother watching and waiting for her
sons filled my brain. That she was also longing for Zulime I knew, for
she loved her, and thought of her as a daughter.
In this agony of remorse and fear I wore out the night, and as no word
came in the morning, I ate my breakfast in half-recovered tranquillity.
"It must be that she is better," Zulime said, but at nine o'clock a
telegram from the doctor destroyed all hope. "Your mother is
unconscious. Do not hope to find her alive," was his desolating message.
Every devoted son who reads this line will shiver as I shivered. That
warning came like a wind from the dark spaces of a bleak, uncharted
deep. It changed my world. For twenty years my mother had been my chief
care. My daily thought ran to her. Only when deeply absorbed in my work
had she been absent from my conscious mind. For her I had planned, for
her I had saved, for her I had built, and now——!
That day was the longest, bitterest, I had ever known, for the reason
that, mixed with my grief, my sense of remorse, was a feeling of utter
helplessness. In desperate desire for haste I could only lumpishly wait.
Another day of agony, another interminable night of pain must pass
before I could reach the shadowed Homestead. Nothing could shorten the
interval. Then, too, I realized that she whom I would comfort had
already gone beyond my aid, beyond any comfort I could send.
Over and over I repeated, "If only we had started a few days sooner!"
The truth is I had failed of a son's duty just when that duty was most
needed, and this conviction brought an almost intolerable ache into my
throat. Nothing that Zulime could do or say removed that pain. I could
not eat, and I could not rest.
We reached Chicago in time to catch the night train at ten o'clock, and
in almost utter mental exhaustion I fell asleep about midnight, and
slept till nearly daylight.
Father met us at the train, as he had so often done before, but this
time there was something in the pinched gray look of his face, something
in the filmed light of his eagle eyes which denoted, movingly, the
tragic experiences through which he had just passed. Before he spoke I
knew that mother had passed beyond my reach.
As he gripped my hand I perceived that he was smitten but unbowed. He
was taking his orders like a soldier, without complaint or
question.—Only when Zulime kissed him did he give way.
As we entered the gate I perceived with a pang of dread the wheeled
chair, standing empty on the porch, pathetic witness of the one who had
no further need of it. Within doors, the house showed the disorder, the
desolate confusion, the terror which death had brought. The furniture
was disarranged—the floor muddy, and in the midst of the chill little
parlor rested a sinister, flower-strewn box. In this was all that
remained of Isabel McClintock, my mother.
For a few minutes I stood looking about me, a scalding blur in my eyes,
a choking in my throat. The south room, her room, was empty,
intolerably, accusingly empty. The gentle, gray-haired figure was no
longer in its place before the window. The smiling lips which had so
often touched my cheek on my return were cold. The sweet, hesitant voice
was forever silent.
Her dear face I did not see. I refused to look upon her in her coffin. I
wanted to remember her as she appeared when I said good-by to her that
bright October evening, her white hair gleaming in the light of the
lamp, while soft curves about her lips suggested a beautiful serenity.
How patient and loving she had been! Even though she feared that she
might never see us again she had sent us away in cheerful
self-sacrifice.
Father was composed but tense. He went about his duties with solemn
resignation, and, an hour or two later, he said to me, "You and I must
go down and select a burial lot, a place for your mother and me."
It was a desolate November morning, raw and gloomy, but the gray sky and
the patient, bare-limbed elms were curiously medicinal to my sore heart.
In some strange way they comforted me. Snow was in the air and father
mechanically weather-wise, said, without thinking of the bitter irony of
his words—"Regular Thanksgiving weather."
Thanksgiving weather! Yes, but what Thanksgiving could there be for him
or for me, now?
* * * * * *
The
day of the funeral was still more savagely cold and bleak, and I
resented its pitiless gloom. The wind which blew over the open grave of
my dead mother was sinister as hate, and the snow which fell,
intolerably stern. I turned away. I could not see that box lowered into
the merciless soil. My mother's spirit was not there—I knew that—and
yet I could not bear to think of those tender lips, those loving hands
going into the dark. It was a harsh bed for one so gentle and so dear.
Back to the Homestead we drove—back to an empty shell. The place in
which Isabel Garland's wish had been law for so many years was now
desolate and drear, and return would have been impossible for me had it
not been for the presence of my wife, whose serene soul was my comfort
and my stay. "You have done all that a son could do," she insisted, and
it was a comfort to have her say this even though I knew that it was not
true, her faith in me and her youth and beauty partly redeemed me from
the awful emptiness of that home. Without her (and all that she
represented) my father and I would have been victims of a black despair.
I had never possessed a definite belief in immortality and yet, as we
gathered about our table that night, I could not rid myself of a feeling
that my mother was in her room, and that she might at any moment cough,
or stir, or call to me. Realizing with appalling force that so far as my
philosophy went our separation was eternal, I nevertheless hoped that
her spirit was with us at that moment, I did not know it—I desired it.
In the sense which would have made belief a solace and relief, I was
agnostic.
"How strange it all seems!" my father exclaimed, and on his face lay
such lines of dismay as I had never seen written there before. "It seems
as though I ought to go and wheel her in to dinner."
I marvel now, as I marveled then, at the buoyant helpfulness, the brave
patience of my wife in the presence of her stricken and bewildered
household. She sorrowed but she kept her calm judgment, and set about
restoring the interrupted routine of our lives. Putting away all signs
of the gray intruder whose hands had scattered the ashes of ruin across
our floor, she called on me to aid in uniting our broken circle. Under
her influence I soon regained a certain composure. With a realization
that it was not fair that she should bear all the burden of the family
reorganization, I turned from death and faced the future with her. On
her depended the continuation of our family. She was its hope and its
saving grace.
