A Son of the Middle Border Part 19

It was the custom at the close of every week's work to bring a section of the pupils upon the platform as essayists or orators, and these "exercises" formed the most interesting and the most pa.s.sionately dreaded feature of the entire school. No pupil who took part in it ever forgot his first appearance. It was at once a pillory and a burning. It called for self-possession, memory, grace of gesture and a voice!

My case is typical. For three or four days before my first ordeal, I could not eat. A mysterious uneasiness developed in my solar plexus, a pain which never left me--except possibly in the morning before I had time to think. Day by day I drilled and drilled and drilled, out in the fields at the edge of the town or at home when mother was away, in the barn while milking--at every opportunity I went through my selection with most impa.s.sioned voice and lofty gestures, sustained by the legends of Webster and Demosthenes, resolved upon a blazing victory. I did everything but mumble a smooth pebble--realizing that most of the boys in my section were going through precisely the same struggle. Each of us knew exactly how the others felt, and yet I cannot say that we displayed acute sympathy one with another; on the contrary, those in the free section considered the antics of the suffering section a very amusing spectacle and we were continually being "joshed" about our lack of appet.i.te.

The test was, in truth, rigorous. To ask a bashful boy or shy girl fresh from the kitchen to walk out upon a platform and face that crowd of mocking students was a kind of torture. No desk was permitted. Each victim stood bleakly exposed to the pitiless gaze of three hundred eyes, and as most of us were poorly dressed, in coats that never fitted and trousers that climbed our boot-tops, we suffered the miseries of the d.a.m.ned. The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were, of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking down--but the fear of forgetting their lines also contributed to their dread and terror.

While the names which preceded mine were called off that first afternoon, I grew colder and colder till at last I shook with a nervous chill, and when, in his smooth, pleasant tenor, Prof. Bush called out "Hamlin Garland" I rose in my seat with a spring like Jack from his box.

My limbs were numb, so numb that I could scarcely feel the floor beneath my feet and the windows were only faint gray glares of light. My head oscillated like a toy balloon, seemed indeed to be floating in the air, and my heart was pounding like a drum.

However, I had pondered upon this scene so long and had figured my course so exactly that I made all the turns with moderate degree of grace and succeeded finally in facing my audience without falling up the steps (as several others had done) and so looked down upon my fellows like Tennyson's eagle on the sea. In that instant a singular calm fell over me, I became strangely master of myself. From somewhere above me a new and amazing power fell upon me and in that instant I perceived on the faces of my cla.s.smates a certain expression of surprise and serious respect. My subconscious oratorical self had taken charge.

I do not at present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably _Catiline's Defense_ or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of cla.s.sic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the smiling face of my princ.i.p.al exalted me.

Closing amid hearty applause, I stepped down with a feeling that I had won a place among the orators of the school, a belief which did no harm to others and gave me a good deal of satisfaction. As I had neither money nor clothes, and was not of figure to win admiration, why should I not express the pride I felt in my power to move an audience? Besides I was only sixteen!

The princ.i.p.al spoke to me afterwards, both praising and criticising my method. The praise I accepted, the criticism I naturally resented. I realized some of my faults of course, but I was not ready to have even Prof. Bush tell me of them. I hated "elocution" drill in cla.s.s, I relied on "inspiration." I believed that orators were born, not made.

There was one other speaker in my section, a little girl, considerably younger than myself, who had the mysterious power of the born actress, and I recognized this quality in her at once. I perceived that she spoke from a deep-seated, emotional, Celtic impulse. Hardly more than a child in years, she was easily the most dramatic reader in the school. She too, loved tragic prose and pa.s.sionate, sorrowful verse and to hear her recite,

One of them dead in the East by the sea And one of them dead in the West by the sea,

was to be shaken by inexplicable emotion. Her face grew pale as silver as she went on and her eyes darkened with the anguish of the poet mother.

Most of the students were the sons and daughters of farmers round about the county, but a few were from the village homes in western Iowa and southern Minnesota. Two or three boys wore real tailor-made suits, and the easy flow of their trouser legs and the set of their linen collars rendered me at once envious and discontented. "Some day," I said to myself, "I too, will have a suit that will not gape at the neck and crawl at the ankle," but I did not rise to the height of expecting a ring and watch.

Shoes were just coming into fashion and one young man wore pointed "box toes" which filled all the rest of us with despair. John Cutler also wore collars of linen--real linen--which had to be laundered, but few of us dared fix our hopes as high as that. John also owned three neckties, and wore broad cuffs with engraved gold b.u.t.tons, and on Fridays waved these splendors before our eyes with a malicious satisfaction which aroused our hatred. Of such complexion are the tragedies and triumphs of youth!

How I envied Arthur Peters his calm and haughty bearing! Most of us entered chapel like rabbits sneaking down a turnip patch, but Arthur and John and Walter loitered in with the easy and a.s.sured manner of Senators or Generals--so much depends upon leather and prunella. Gradually I lost my terror of this ordeal, but I took care to keep behind some friendly bulk like young Blakeslee, who stood six feet two in his gaiters.

With all these anxieties I loved the school and could hardly be wrested from it even for a day. I bent to my books with eagerness, I joined a debating society, and I took a hand at all the games. The days went by on golden, noiseless, ball-bearing axles--and almost before I realized it, winter was upon the land. But oh! the luxury of that winter, with no snow drifts to climb, no corn-stalks to gather and no long walk to school. It was sweet to wake each morning in the shelter of our little house and know that another day of delightful schooling was ours. Our hands softened and lightened. Our walk became each day less of a "galumping plod." The companionship of bright and interesting young people, and the study of well-dressed men and women in attendance upon lectures and socials was a part of our instruction and had their refining effect upon us, graceless colts though we were.

Sometime during this winter Wendell Phillips came to town and lectured on _The Lost Arts_. My father took us all to see and hear this orator hero of his boyhood days in Boston.

I confess to a disappointment in the event. A tall old gentleman with handsome clean-cut features, rose from behind the pulpit in the Congregational Church, and read from a ma.n.u.script--read quietly, colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once toward the end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment.

Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and pa.s.sed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker.

Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic temperance lecturer named Beale, for _he_ was an orator, one of those who rise on an impa.s.sioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo, mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gorgeous pa.s.sages meant, but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary sing-song.

I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) displaced the image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another, a glorious contralto singer, much older than I--but there--I must not claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meetings with Millie were so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with her. They were all boyish adorations.

Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now recover from its luminous dark more than here and there an incident, a poem, a song. It was all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and regret--satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable ending--for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced that he had decided to put us all back upon the farm.

CHAPTER XVIII

Back to the Farm

Judging from the entries in a small diary of this date, I was neither an introspective youth nor one given to precocious literary subtleties.

On March 27th, 1877, I made this entry; "Today we move back upon the farm."

This is all of it! No more, no less. Not a word to indicate whether I regretted the decision or welcomed it, and from subsequent equally bald notes, I derive the information that my father retained his position as grain buyer, and that he drove back and forth daily over the five miles which lay between the farm and the elevator. There is no mention of my mother, no hint as to how she felt, although the return to the loneliness and drudgery of the farm must have been as grievous to her as to her sons.

Our muscles were soft and our heads filled with new ambitions but there was no alternative. It was "back to the field," or "out into the cold, cold world," so forth we went upon the soil in the old familiar way, there to plod to and fro endlessly behind the seeder and the harrow. It was harder than ever to follow a team for ten hours over the soft ground, and early rising was more difficult than it had ever been before, but I discovered some compensations which helped me bear these discomforts. I saw more of the beauty of the landscape and I now had an aspiration to occupy my mind.

My memories of the Seminary, the echoes of the songs we had heard, gave the morning chorus of the prairie chickens a richer meaning than before.

The west wind, laden with the delicious smell of uncovered earth, the tender blue of the sky, the cheerful chirping of the ground sparrows, the jocund whistling of the gophers, the winding flight of the prairie pigeons--all these sights and sounds of spring swept back upon me, bringing something sweeter and more significant than before. I had gained in perception and also in the power to a.s.similate what I perceived.

This year in town had other far-reaching effects. It tended to warp us from our father's designs. It placed the rigorous, filthy drudgery of the farm-yard in sharp contrast with the carefree companionable existence led by my friends in the village, and we longed to be of their condition. We had gained our first set of comparative ideas, and with them an unrest which was to carry us very far away.

True, neither Burton nor I had actually shared the splendors of Congressman Deering's house but we had obtained revelatory glimpses of its well-kept lawn, and through the open windows we had watched the waving of its lace curtains. We had observed also how well Avery Brush's frock coat fitted and we comprehended something of the elegant leisure which the sons and daughters of Wm. Petty's general store enjoyed.

Over against these comforts, these luxurious conditions, we now set our ugly little farmhouse, with its rag carpets, its battered furniture, its barren attic, and its hard, rude beds.--All that we possessed seemed very cheap and deplorably commonplace.

My brother, who had pa.s.sed a vivid and wonderful year riding race horses, clerking in an ice cream parlor, with frequent holidays of swimming and baseball, also went groaning and grumbling to the fields.

He too resented the curry-comb and the dung fork. We both loathed the smell of manure and hated the greasy clothing which our tasks made necessary. Secretly we vowed that when we were twenty-one we would leave the farm, never to return to it. However, as the ground dried off, and the gra.s.s grew green in the door-yard some part of this bitterness, this resentment, faded away, and we made no further complaint.

My responsibilities were now those of a man. I was nearly full grown, quick and powerful of hand, and vain of my strength, which was, in fact, unusual and of decided advantage to me. Nothing ever really tired me out. I could perform any of my duties with ease, and none of the men under me ever presumed to question my authority. As harvest came on I took my place on our new Marsh harvester, and bound my half of over one hundred acres of heavy grain.

The crop that year was enormous. At times, as I looked out over the billowing acres of wheat which must not only be reaped and bound and shocked and stacked but also threshed, before there was the slightest chance of my returning to the Seminary, my face grew long and my heart heavy.

Burton shared this feeling, for he, too, had become profoundly interested in the Seminary and was eager to return, eager to renew the friendships he had gained. We both wished to walk once more beneath the maple trees in clean well-fitting garments, and above all we hungered to escape the curry-comb and the cow.

Both of us retained our membership in the Adelphian Debating Society, and occasionally drove to town after the day's work to take part in the Monday meetings. Having decided, definitely, to be an orator, I now went about with a copy of Shakespeare in my pocket and ranted the immortal soliloquies of _Hamlet_ and _Richard_ as I held the plow, feeling certain that I was following in the footprints of Lincoln and Demosthenes.

Sundays brought a special sweet relief that summer, a note of finer poetry into all our lives, for often after a bath behind the barn we put on clean shirts and drove away to Osage to meet George and Mitch.e.l.l, or went to church to see some of the girls we had admired at the Seminary.

On other Sabbaths we returned to our places at the Burr Oak school-house, enjoying as we used to do, a few hours' forgetfulness of the farm.

My father, I am glad to say, never insisted upon any religious observance on the part of his sons, and never interfered with any reasonable pleasure even on Sunday. If he made objection to our trips it was usually on behalf of the cattle. "Go where you please," he often said, "only get back in time to do the milking." Sometimes he would ask, "Don't you think the horses ought to have a rest as well as yourselves?"

He was a stern man but a just man, and I am especially grateful to him for his non-interference with my religious affairs.

All that summer and all the fall I worked like a hired man, a.s.suming in addition the responsibilities of being boss. I bound grain until my arms were raw with briars and in stacking-time I wallowed round and round upon my knees, building great ricks of grain, taking obvious pride in the skill which this task required until my trousers, reinforced at the knees, bagged ungracefully and my hands, swollen with the act of grappling the heavy bundles as they were thrown to me, grew h.o.r.n.y and brown and clumsy, so that I quite despaired of ever being able to write another letter. I was very glad not to have my Seminary friends see me in this unlovely condition.

However, I took a well-defined pride in stacking, for it was a test of skill. It was clean work. Even now, as I ride a country lane, and see men at work handling oats or hay, I recall the pleasurable sides of work on the farm and long to return to it.

The radiant sky of August and September on the prairie was a never failing source of delight to me. Nature seemed resting, opulent, self-satisfied and honorable. Every phase of the landscape indicated a task fulfilled. There were still and pulseless days when slaty-blue clouds piled up in the west and came drifting eastward with thunderous accompaniment, to break the oppressive heat and leave the earth cool and fresh from having pa.s.sed. There were misty, windy days when the sounding, southern breeze swept the yellow stubble like a scythe; when the sky, without a cloud, was whitened by an overspreading haze; when the crickets sang sleepily as if in dream of eternal summer; and the gra.s.shoppers clicked and buzzed from stalk to stalk in pure delight of sunshine and the harvest.

Another humbler source of pleasure in stacking was the watermelon which, having been picked in the early morning and hidden under the edge of the stack, remained deliciously cool till mid-forenoon, when at a signal, the men all gathered in the shadow of the rick, and leisurely ate their fill of juicy "mountain sweets." Then there was the five o'clock supper, with its milk and doughnuts and pie which sent us back to our task--replete, content, ready for another hour of toil.

Of course, there were unpleasant days later in the month, noons when the skies were filled with ragged, swiftly moving clouds, and the winds blew the sheaves inside out and slashed against my face the flying grain as well as the leaping crickets. Such days gave prophecy of the pa.s.sing of summer and the coming of fall. But there was a mitigating charm even in these conditions, for they were all welcome promises of an early return to school.

Crickets during stacking time were innumerable and voracious as rust or fire. They ate our coats or hats if we left them beside the stack. They gnawed the fork handles and devoured any straps that were left lying about, but their mult.i.tudinous song was a beautiful inwrought part of the symphony.

That year the threshing was done in the fields with a traction engine.

My uncle David came no more to help us harvest. He had almost pa.s.sed out of our life, and I have no recollection of him till several years later.

Much of the charm, the poetry of the old-time threshing vanished with the pa.s.sing of horse power and the coming of the nomadic hired hand.