A Daughter of the Middle Border Part 31

As I walked the shaded street, perceiving these veterans of the hoe and plow, digging feebly in the earth of their small gardens, or sitting a-dream on the narrow porches of their tiny cottages my joy was embittered. Age, age was everywhere. Here in the midst of the flowering trees the men of the Middle Border were withering into dust.

In the city one does not come into anything like this close relationship with a dying generation. The tragedy is obscured. Here Zulime and I, young and strong, were living in the midst of an almost universal senility and decay. There was no escape from these grim facts.

Looked at from a distance there was comfort in the thought of these pioneers, released from the grind of their farm routine, dozing at ease beneath the maple trees, but closely studied they became sorrowful. I knew too much about them. Several of them had been my father's companions in those glorious days in fifty-five. Yonder white-haired invalid, sitting in the sun silently watching his bees, had been a famous pilot on the river, and that bushy-haired giant, halting by on a stick, was the wreck of a mighty hunter. The wives of these men equally worn, equally rheumatic and even more querulous, had been the rosy, laughing, dancing companions of Isabel McClintock in the days when Richard Garland came a-courting. All, all were camping in lonely cottages while their sons and daughters, in distant cities or far-off mountain valleys, adventuring in their turn, were taking up the discipline and the duties of a new border, a new world.

As a novelist I could not fail to observe these melancholy features of a life which on its surface seemed idyllic. In New York, in Chicago I was concerned mainly with happy, busy people of my own age or younger,--here I was brought into close contact daily--almost hourly--with the pa.s.sing of my father's generation and, also, I was made aware of the coming in of an alien, uninspiring race. The farms of the Dudleys, the McKinleys, the Coburns were being taken by the Smeckpeffers, the Heffelfingers, and the Bergmans! Already the pages of the village newspaper were peppered with such names, and a powerful Congregation was building a German church on the site of the old-time Methodist meeting house of my boyhood. My strain was dying out--a new and to my mind less admirable America was coming on.

As June deepened my father (who realized something of the changes going on) proposed a trip to the town in Iowa near which we had lived for twelve years, and to this I consented, feeling that this visit could not safely be postponed another year.

He had never been back to our prairie farm in Mitch.e.l.l County since leaving it, over twenty years before, and now (with money and leisure) he was eager to go, and as my old Seminary a.s.sociates had asked me to speak at their Commencement, we rode away one lovely June day up along the Mississippi to Winona, thence by way of a winding coulee, to the level lands, and so across to Mitch.e.l.l County, our old home. The railroad, which was new to us, ran across Dry Run prairie within half a mile of our school-house, but so flat and monotonous did the whole country now appear, we could not distinguish any familiar landmarks. The "hills" along the creek were barely noticeable from the car, and all the farm-steads were hidden by groves of trees. We pa.s.sed our former home without recognizing it!

Osage, we soon discovered, was almost as much of an asylum for the aged as West Salem. It, too, was filled with worn-out farmers, men with whom my father had subdued the sod in the early days. Osmond b.u.t.ton, William Frazer, Oliver Cole, David Babc.o.c.k were all living "in town" on narrow village lots, "taking it easy" as they called it, but they were by no means as contented as they seemed to the casual onlooker. Freed from the hard daily demands of the farm, many of them acknowledged a sense of uselessness, a fear of decay.

As fast as they learned of our presence, scores of loyal friends swarmed about us expressing a sincere regard for my father, and a kind of wondering respect for me. Some of them clung to my father's hand as though in hope of recovering through him some gleam of the beauty, some part of the magic of the brave days gone--days when the land was new and they were young. "You must come home with me," each man insisted, "the women folks all want to see you."

Twenty years had wrought great changes in the men as well as in the county, and my father was bewildered and saddened by the tale. One by one he called the names of those who had been his one-time friends and neighbors. Some were dead, others had moved away--only one or two remained where he had left them, and it was in the hope of seeing these men and at the same time to visit the farm and school-house on Dry Run, and the church at Burr Oak, that I hired a carriage and drove my father out along the well-remembered lane to the north and east--I say "well-remembered" although the growth of the trees and the presence of new buildings made its appeal mixed and unsatisfactory to us both.

We found our house almost hid in the trees which we had planted on the bare prairie thirty years before. As we stood in the yard I spoke of the silver wedding which took place there. The yard was attractive but the house (infested by the family of a poor renter) was repulsive. The upstairs chamber in which I had slept for so many years presented a filthy clutter of chicken feathers, cast-off furniture and musty clothing. Our stay was short.

Strangers were in all of the other houses along the way--we found but two of our former neighbors at home, and the farther we drove the more melancholy we both became.

One of the places which I wished especially to revisit was the school-house at Burr Oak, the room which had been our social center in the early eighties. In it we had listened to church service in summer, and there in winter our Grange Suppers and Friday Lyceums had been held.

It was there, too, that I had worshiped at the shrine of Hattie's girlish beauty, when as a shock-haired lad I forgot, for a day, the loneliness of my prairie home.

Alas! the tall oaks which in those days had given dignity and charm to the yard had all been cut down, and the building, once glorified by the waving shadows of the leaves, now stood bare as a bone beside the road.

An alien lived where Betty once reigned, and the white cottage from which Agnes was wont to issue in her exquisite Sunday frock, was untenanted and falling into decay.

How lovely those girls had seemed to me as I watched them approach, walking so daintily the path beside the fence! What rich, alluring color flamed in Bettie's cheek, what fire flashed in Aggie's dark and roguish eyes!

To a stranger, Burr Oak--my Burr Oak--even in Seventy-two was only a pleasant meeting place of prairie lanes on the margin of a forest, but to me it had been a temple of magic. I had but to shut my eyes to desolating changes, turning my vision inward, in order to see myself (a stocky awkward boy in a Sunday suit with a torturing collar) standing on the porch waiting to see those white-clad maidens pa.s.s into the vestibule.

Too shy in those days to meet their eyes, too worshipful to ever hope for word or smile, I remained their silent adorer. Here and now I set down the tribute which I could not then express:

O maids to whom I never spoke, to whom My dreaming ran in lonely field, Because of you I saw the bloom Of Maytime more abundantly revealed.

From you each bud new magic caught.

When you were near, my skies Were brighter, for your beauty brought A poet's rapture to my eyes.

Men tell me you are bent and gray, And worn with toil and pain; And so I pray the Wheel of Chance May never set us face to face again.

Better that I should think of you As you then were, strong and sweet, Walking your joyous sunlit way Between the wheat and roses of the lane-- _Pa.s.s on, O weary women of today--_ _Remain forever 'mid the roses and the wheat,_ _O girls with laughing lips and dancing feet!_

That ride and the people I met closed a gate for me. I accomplished a painful relinquishment. That noon-day sun divided my past from my present as with the stroke of a flaming sword. Up to this moment I had retained, in formless fashion, a belief that I could some time and somehow reach out and regain, at least in part, the substance of the life I had once lived here in this scene. Now I confessed that not only was my youth gone but that the friends and the place of my youth had vanished. My heart, wrung with a measureless regret filled my throat with pain, and as I looked in my father's face I perceived that he, too, was feeling the force of Time's inexorable decree.

We started homeward in silence, speaking only now and then when some object made itself recognizable to us.

"I shall never ride this lane again," I said as we were nearing the town. "It has been a sad experience. The world of my boyhood--the world we both knew--is utterly gone. It exists only in your memory and mine. I want to get away--back to Zulime and the present."

"I'm ready to go," replied my father. "I thought I'd enjoy visiting the old place and seeing old neighbors, but I haven't. It's all too melancholy. I'm ready to go back to the LaCrosse Valley and stay there what little time I've got left to me."

That night, at the Seminary, I met the Alumni and spoke to them on some subject connected with the early history of the school, and in doing so I obtained once again a perception of the barrier which had risen between my cla.s.smates and myself. They were not only serious, they were piteously solemn. No one laughed, no one took a light and airy view of life. Once or twice I tried to jest or ventured a humorous remark, but these attempts to lighten the gloom were met with chilling silence. No one whispered or smiled or turned aside. It was like a prayer meeting in the face of famine.

Part of this was due no doubt to their habit of listening to sermons, but some of it arose I am sure from a feeling of poignant regret similar to that which burdened my own heart. As usual in such reunions the absent ones were named and the faces of the dead recalled. In all our songs the rustling of withered leaves could be heard. All felt the pitiless march of time and I respected them for their perception of life's essential enigma.

After the "Services" were finished, several of the women came up to me and introduced themselves. One handsome gray-haired woman said: "I am Rosa Clinton," and it shocked me to be unable to find in her the girl I once knew. Another matron whom I recognized at once, retained something inescapably girlish in both face and voice. It hurt me to detect in her withered lips the quaint twist which had once been so charming to me--but then she undoubtedly discovered in me equally distressing reminders of decay.

Not all my philosophy could prevent me from falling into profound melancholy. I went back to my hotel thinking of these men and women as they were when, as a youth of twenty, I trod with them the worn plank walks beneath the magical murmuring maple trees. The bitter facts of their lives gave rise to question. What was it all about? What was the value of their efforts or my own? Has the life of man any more significance than that of an insect?

Just before leaving for the train next day we called on Osmond b.u.t.ton, who clung to my father with piteous intensity. "Stay another day," he pleaded, but father would not listen to any postponement.

This old neighbor went to the train with us, knowing full well that he and my father would never meet again.

Thus it happened--curiously, yet most naturally--that the last man we saw as we left Osage was our first neighbor on Dry Run prairie in the autumn of Seventy-one.

From this melancholy review of the bent forms of ancient friends and neighbors, dreaming of the past, I returned to my wife, who was concerned entirely with the future. What had she to do with elderly folk? Life to her was sweet and promiseful. Intently toiling over the adornment of tiny caps, socks and gowns, joyful as a girl of seven making dresses for a doll, she insisted on displaying to me all of that lilliputian wardrobe. A dozen times each day she called on me to admire this or that garment, and I was greatly relieved to find that the growing wonder of the experience through which she was about to pa.s.s, prevented her from giving way to fear of it. Over me, at times, an icy shadow fell. Suppose--suppose----!

One night she dreamed that a babe had come to us, and that the nurse had carelessly allowed it to chill and die, but I had no such disturbing premonitions. Contrary to the statements of sentimental novelists and poets I almost never dreamed of my wife. I more often dreamed of Howells or Roosevelt or some of my editorial friends, indeed I often had highly technical literary dreams wherein I prepared ma.n.u.scripts for the press or composed speeches or poems, and sometimes my mother or Jessie came back to me--but Zulime had never up to this time entered my sleep.

One afternoon during this period of waiting and just after I had finished the writing of _Hesper_ we joined our good friends the Eastons on an excursion up the Mississippi on their house-boat, a glorious outing which I mention because it was the farthest removed from my boyhood life on Dry Run prairie whose scenes had just been vividly brought to mind.

Here was the flawless poetry of recreation, the perfection of travel. To sit in a reclining chair on the screened-in forward deck of a beautiful boat, what time it was being propelled by some invisible silent machinery, up a shining river, reflecting wooded bluffs, was like taking flight on the magic carpet of my boyhood's story book. The purple head-lands projecting majestically into the still flood took on once more the poetry and the mystery of the prehistoric. One by one those royal pyramids ordered and adorned themselves for our inspection while the narrow valleys opening their gates, displayed all their tranquil pastoral charm.

Our meals, delicately cooked and perfectly served, appeared as if by conjury, on a table in the dining-room amidships, and as we ate we watched the glory deepen on the clouds, while the waters, soundless as oil, rolled past our open doors. It was all a pa.s.sage to the Land of the Lotos to me. How had I, whose youth had been so full of penury and toil, earned a share in such leisure, such luxury? Was it right for me to give myself up to the enjoyment of it? For Zulime's sake I rejoiced in it, knowing that her days were long with waiting and suspense.

Without knowing much of the bitter anguish of the ordeal, I held maternity to be (as the great poets had taught me to hold it) a n.o.ble heroism. "If mankind is worth continuing on this earth," I had written, "then the mother is ent.i.tled to the highest honor, the tenderest care.

Science should do its best to lessen her pain, to make her birth-bed honorable."

In spite of my wife's brave smile I sensed in her a subconscious dread of what was coming, and this anxiety I shared so fully that I ceased to write and gave all my time to her. Together we walked the garden or drove about the country in the low-hung, easy-riding old surrey, tracing the wooded ways we loved the best, or climbing to where a wide view of the valley offered. I understood her laughing stoicism much better now, and it no longer deceived me. She made light of her own fears in order that I might not worry. The fact that she was past her first youth was my torment, for I had read that the danger increased with every year beyond twenty-five and the thought that we might never ride these lanes again came into my mind and would not be exorcised. At such moments as I could s.n.a.t.c.h I worked on a series of lectures which I was scheduled to deliver at the University of Chicago--lectures on Edwin Booth which brought back my Boston days.

At last the dreaded day came!--I shall not dwell upon the long hours of the mother's pain, or on the sleepless anxiety of my household, for I have no desire to relive them. I would rather make statement of my relief and grat.i.tude when after many, many hours of suffering, Edward Evans of LaCrosse, a scientific, deft and powerful surgeon, came to the mother's rescue. He was a master--the man who knew!

[Ill.u.s.tration: At last the time came when I was permitted to take my wife--lovely as a Madonna--out into the sunshine, and, as she sat holding Mary Isabel in her arms, she gathered to herself an ecstasy of relief, a joy of life which atoned, in part, for the inescapable sufferings of maternity.]

He saved both mother and child, and when the nurse laid in my arms a little babe, who looked up at me with grave, accusing blue eyes,--the eyes of her mother,--I wondered whether society had a right to put any woman to this cruel test--whether the race was worth maintaining at such a price.

Our loyal friend, Mary Easton (mother of five children), who was present to help us through our stern trial, a.s.sured me that maternity had its joys as well as its agonies, and after she had peered into the face of my small daughter she remarked to me with a delightful note of admiration, "Why, she is already a _person_!"

So indeed she was. Her head, large and shapely and her eyes wide, dark and curiously reflective, were like her mother's. True, she hadn't much nose, but her hair was abundant and her fingers exquisite. She lay in my big paws with what seemed to me to be tranquil confidence, and though her legs were comically rudimentary, her glance manifested an una.s.sailable dignity. My father insisted she resembled her grandmother.

At last came the blessed day when the nurse permitted me to wheel the convalescent out upon the porch. The morning was lovely, with just a hint of autumn in its coolness, and to Zulime it was heavenly sweet, for it seemed that she had emerged from a long dark night of agony and doubt.

As she sat with the babe in her lap looking over the familiar hills, she was more beautiful than she had ever been before. She was a being glorified.

Later in the day, as the sun was going down in a welter of gold and crimson, she came out again and in its splendor I chose to read the promise of a n.o.ble future for Mary Isabel. It gave me joy to know that she had taken up her life beneath the same roof and almost in the same room in which Isabel Garland had laid her burden down.

Yes, the Homestead had a new claimant. In the midst of my father's decaying world a new and vigorous life had miraculously appeared.

Beneath the moldering leaves of the leaning oaks a tender yet tenacious shoot was springing from the soil.