A Son of the Middle Border Part 25

Meanwhile I had become acquainted with a young clergyman in one of the churches, and had showed to him certain letters and papers to prove that I was not a tramp, and no doubt his word kept my boarding mistress from turning me into the street.

Mr. Eaton was a man of books. His library contained many volumes of standard value and we met as equals over the pages of Scott and d.i.c.kens.

I actually forced him to listen to a lecture which I had been writing during the winter and so wrought upon him that he agreed to arrange a date for me in a neighboring country church.--Thereafter while I glowed with absurd dreams of winning money and renown by delivering that lecture in the churches and school-houses of the state, I continued to seek for work, any work that would bring me food and shelter.

One bitter day in my desperate need I went down upon the lake to watch the men cutting ice. The wind was keen, the sky gray and filled with glittering minute flecks of frost, and my clothing (mainly cotton) seemed hardly thicker than gossamer, and yet I looked upon those working men with a distinct feeling of envy. Had I secured "a job" I should have been pulling a saw up and down through the ice, at the same time that I dreamed of touring the west as a lecturer--of such absurd contradictions are the visions of youth.

I don't know exactly what I would have done had not my brother happened along on his way to a school near Chicago. To him I confessed my perplexity. He paid my board bill (which was not very large) and in return I talked him into a scheme which promised great things for us both--I contracted to lecture under his management! He was delighted at the opportunity of advancing me, and we were both happy.

Our first engagement was at Cyene, a church which really belonged to Eaton's circuit, and according to my remembrance the lecture was a moderate success. After paying all expenses we had a little money for carfare, and Franklin was profoundly impressed. It really seemed to us both that I had at last entered upon my career. It was the kind of service I had been preparing for during all my years at school--but alas! our next date was a disaster. We attempted to do that which an older and fully established lecturer would not have ventured. We tried to secure an audience with only two days' advance work, and of course we failed.

I called a halt. I could not experiment on the small fund which my father had given Frank for his business education.

However, I borrowed a few dollars of him and bought a ticket to Rock River, a town near Chicago. I longed to enter the great western metropolis, but dared not do so--yet. I felt safe only when in sight of a plowed field.

At a junction seventy miles out of the city, we separated, he to attend a school, and I to continue my education in the grim realities of life.

From office to office in Rock River I sullenly plodded, willing to work for fifty cents a day, until at last I secured a clerkship in a small stationery jobbing house which a couple of school teachers had strangely started, but on Sat.u.r.day of the second week the proprietor called me to him and said kindly, but firmly, "Garland, I'm afraid you are too literary and too musical for this job. You have a fine baritone voice and your ability to vary the text set before you to copy, is remarkable, and yet I think we must part."

The reasons for this ironical statement were (to my mind) ign.o.ble; first of all he resented my musical ability, secondly, my literary skill shamed him, for as he had put before me a badly composed circular letter, telling me to copy it one hundred times, I quite naturally improved the English.--However, I admitted the charge of insubordination, and we parted quite amicably.

It was still winter, and I was utterly without promise of employment. In this extremity, I went to the Y. M. C. A. (which had for one of its aims the a.s.sistance of young men out of work) and confided my homelessness to the secretary, a capital young fellow who knew enough about men to recognize that I was not a "b.u.m." He offered me the position of night-watch and gave me a room and cot at the back of his office. These were dark hours!

During the day I continued to pace the streets. Occasionally some little job like raking up a yard would present itself, and so I was able to buy a few rolls, and sometimes I indulged in milk and meat. I lived along from noon to noon in presentable condition, but I was always hungry. For four days I subsisted on five cents worth of buns.

Having left my home for the purpose of securing experience in the world, I had this satisfaction--I was getting it! Very sweet and far away seemed all that beautiful life with Alice and Burton and Hattie at the Seminary, something to dream over, to regret, to versify, something which the future (at this moment) seemed utterly incapable of reproducing. I still corresponded with several of my cla.s.smates, but was careful to conceal the struggle that I was undergoing. I told them only of my travels and my reading.

As the ironical jobber remarked, I had a good voice, and upon being invited to accompany the Band of Hope which went to sing and pray in the County Jail, I consented, at least I took part in the singing. In this way I partly paid the debt I owed the a.s.sociation, and secured some vivid impressions of prison life which came into use at a later time. My three a.s.sociates in this work were a tinner, a clothing salesman and a cabinet maker. More and more I longed for the spring, for with it I knew would come seeding, building and a chance for me.

At last in the midst of a grateful job of raking up yards and planting shrubs, I heard the rat-tat-tat of a hammer, and resolved upon a bold plan. I decided to become a carpenter, justifying myself by reference to my apprenticeship to my grandfather. One fine April morning I started out towards the suburbs, and at every house in process of construction approached the boss and asked for a job. Almost at once I found encouragement. "Yes, but where are your tools?"

In order to buy the tools I must work, work at anything. Therefore, at the next place I asked if there was any rough labor required around the house. The foreman replied: "Yes, there is some grading to be done."

Accordingly I set to work with a wheelbarrow, grading the bank around the almost completed building. This was hard work, the crudest form of manual labor, but I grappled with it desperately, knowing that the pay (a dollar and a half a day) would soon buy a kit of tools.

Oh, that terrible first day! The heavy shovel blistered my hands and lamed my wrists. The lifting of the heavily laden wheelbarrow strained my back and shoulders. Half-starved and weak, quite unfitted for sustained effort of this kind, I struggled on, and at the end of an interminable afternoon staggered home to my cot. The next morning came soon,--too soon. I was not merely lame, I was lacerated. My muscles seemed to have been torn asunder, but I toiled (or made a show of toiling) all the second day. On the warrant of my wages I borrowed twenty-five cents of a friend and with this bought a meat dinner which helped me through another afternoon.

The third day was less painful and by the end of the week, I was able to do anything required of me. Upon receiving my pay I went immediately to the hardware store and bought a set of tools and a carpenter's ap.r.o.n, and early on Monday morning sallied forth in the _opposite direction_ as a carpenter seeking a job. I soon came to a big frame house in course of construction. "Do you need another hand?" I asked. "Yes," replied the boss. "Take hold, right here, with this man."

"This man" turned out to be a Swede, a good-natured fellow, who made no comment on my deficiencies. We sawed and hammered together in very friendly fashion for a week, and I made rapid gains in strength and skill and took keen pleasure in my work. The days seemed short and life promising and as I was now getting two dollars per day, I moved out of my charity bed and took a room in a decayed mansion in the midst of a big lawn. My bearing became confident and easy. Money had straightened my back.

The spring advanced rapidly while I was engaged on this work and as my crew occasionally took contracts in the country I have vivid pictures of the green and pleasant farm lands, of social farmers at barn-raisings, and of tables filled with fatness. I am walking again in my stocking feet, high on the "purline plate," beetle in hand, driving home the oaken "pins." I am shingling on the broad roof of a suburban house from which I can see the sunny slopes of a meadow and sheep feeding therein.

I am mending a screen door for a farmer's wife while she confides to me the tragedy of her life--and always I have the foolish boyish notion that I am out in the world and seeing life.

Into the midst of this busy peaceful season of manual labor came my first deeply romantic admiration. Edwin Booth was announced as "the opening attraction of the New Opera House" and I fairly trembled with antic.i.p.atory delight, for to me the word _Booth_ meant all that was splendid and tragic and glorious in the drama. I was afraid that something might prevent me from hearing him.

At last the night came and so great was the throng, so strong the pressure on the doors that the lock gave way and I, with my dollar clutched tightly in my hand, was borne into the hall and half-way up the stairs without touching foot to the floor, and when at last, safe in my balcony seat I waited for the curtain to rise, I had a distinct realization that a shining milestone was about to be established in my youthful trail.

My father had told me of the elder Booth, and of Edwin's beautiful Prince of Denmark I had heard many stories, therefore I waited with awe as well as eagerness, and when the curtain, rising upon the court scene, discovered the pale, handsome face and graceful form of the n.o.ble Dane, and the sound of his voice,--that magic velvet voice--floated to my ear with the words, "Seems, madame, I know not seems," neither time nor s.p.a.ce nor matter existed for me--I was in an ecstasy of attention.

I had read much of Shakespeare. I could recite many pages of the tragedies and historical plays, and I had been a.s.sured by my teachers that _Hamlet_ was the greatest of all dramas, but Edwin Booth in one hour taught me more of its wonders, more of the beauty of the English language than all my instructors and all my books. He did more, he aroused in me a secret ambition to read as he read, to make the dead lines of print glow with color and throb with music. There was something magical in his interpretation of the drama's printed page. With voice and face and hand he restored for duller minds the visions of the poet, making Hamlet's sorrows as vital as our own.

From this performance, which filled me with vague ambitions and a glorious melancholy, I returned to my a.s.sociation with a tinker, a tailor, and a tinner, whose careless and stupid comments on the play both pained and angered me. I went to my work next day in such absorbed silence as only love is supposed to give.

I re-read my _Hamlet_ now with the light of Booth's face in my eyes and the music of his glorious voice in my ear. As I nailed and sawed at pine lumber, I murmured inaudibly the lofty lines of the play, in the hope of fixing forever in my mind the cadences of the great tragedian's matchless voice.

Great days! Growing days! Lonely days! Days of dream and development, needing only the girl to be perfect--but I had no one but Alice to whom I could voice my new enthusiasm and she was not only out of the reach of my voice, but serenely indifferent to my rhapsodic letters concerning _Hamlet_ and the genius of Edwin Booth.

CHAPTER XXII

We Discover New England

Edwin Booth's performance of _Hamlet_ had another effect. It brought to my mind the many stories of Boston which my father had so often related to his children. I recalled his enthusiastic accounts of the elder Booth and Edwin Forrest, and especially his descriptions of the wonderful scenic effects in _Old Put_ and _The Gold Seekers_, wherein actors rode down mimic stone steps or debarked from theatrical ships which sailed into pictured wharves, and one day in the midst of my lathing and sawing, I evolved a daring plan--I decided to visit Boston and explore New England.

With all his feeling for the East my father had never revisited it. This was a matter of pride with him. "I never take the back trail," he said, and yet at times, as he dwelt on the old home in the state of Maine a wistful note had crept into his voice, and so now in writing to him, I told him that I intended to seek out his boyhood haunts in order that I might tell him all about the friends and relations who still lived there.

Without in any formal way intending it the old borderman had endowed both his sons with a large sense of the power and historic significance of Ma.s.sachusetts. He had contrived to make us feel some part of his idolatry of Wendell Phillips, for his memory of the great days of _The Liberator_ were keen and worshipful. From him I derived a belief that there were giants in those days and the thought of walking the streets where Garrison was mobbed and standing in the hall which Webster had hallowed with his voice gave me a profound antic.i.p.atory stir of delight.

As first a.s.sistant to a quaint and dirty old carpenter, I was now earning two dollars per day, and saving it. There was no occasion in those days for anyone to give me instructions concerning the care of money. I knew how every dollar came and I was equally careful to know where every nickel went. Travel cost three cents per mile, and the number of cities to be visited depended upon the number of dimes I should save.

With my plan of campaign mapped out to include a stop at Niagara Falls and fourth of July on Boston Common I wrote to my brother at Valparaiso, Indiana, inviting him to join me in my adventure. "If we run out of money and of course we shall, for I have only about thirty dollars, we'll flee to the country. One of my friends here says we can easily find work in the meadows near Concord."

The audacity of my design appealed to my brother's imagination. "I'm your huckleberry!" he replied. "School ends the last week in June. I'll meet you at the Atlantic House in Chicago on the first. Have about twenty dollars myself."

At last the day came for my start. With all my pay in my pocket and my trunk checked I took the train for Chicago. I shall never forget the feeling of dismay with which, an hour later, I perceived from the car window a huge smoke-cloud which embraced the whole eastern horizon, for this, I was told was the soaring banner of the great and gloomy inland metropolis, whose dens of vice and houses of greed had been so often reported to me by wandering hired men. It was in truth only a huge flimsy country town in those days, but to me it was august as well as terrible.

Up to this moment Rockford was the largest town I had ever seen, and the mere thought of a million people stunned my imagination. "How can so many people find a living in one place?" Naturally I believed most of them to be robbers. "If the city is miles across, how am I to get from the railway station to my hotel without being a.s.saulted?" Had it not been for the fear of ridicule, I think I should have turned back at the next stop. The shining lands beyond seemed hardly worth a struggle against the dragon's brood with which the dreadful city was a-swarm.

Nevertheless I kept my seat and was carried swiftly on.

Soon the straggling farm-houses thickened into groups, the villages merged into suburban towns, and the train began to clatter through sooty freight yards filled with box cars and switching engines; at last, after crawling through tangled, thickening webs of steel, it plunged into a huge, dark and noisy shed and came to a halt and a few moments later I faced the hackmen of Chicago, as verdant a youth as these experienced pirates had ever made common cause against.

I knew of them (by report), and was prepared for trouble, but their clanging cries, their cynical eyes, their clutching insolent hands were more terrifying than anything I had imagined. Their faces expressed something remorseless, inhuman and mocking. Their grins were like those of wolves.

In my hand I carried an imitation leather valise, and as I pa.s.sed, each of the drivers made a s.n.a.t.c.h at it, almost tearing it from my hands, but being strong as well as desperate, I cleared myself of them, and so, following the crowd, not daring to look to right or left, reached the street and crossed the bridge with a sigh of relief. So much was accomplished.

Without knowing where I should go, I wandered on, shifting my bag from hand to hand, till my mind recovered its balance. My bewilderment, my depth of distrust, was augmented by the roar and tumult of the crowd. I was like some wild animal with exceedingly sensitive ears. The waves of sound smothered me.

At last, timidly approaching a policeman, I asked the way to the Atlantic Hotel.

"Keep straight down the street five blocks and turn to the left," he said, and his kind voice filled me with a glow of grat.i.tude.

With ears benumbed and brain distraught, I threaded the rush, the clamor of Clark street and entered the door of the hotel, with such relief as a sailor must feel upon suddenly reaching safe harbor after having been buffeted on a wild and gloomy sea by a heavy northeast gale.

It was an inconspicuous hotel of the "Farmer's Home" type, but I approached the desk with meek reluctance and explained, "I am expecting to meet my brother here. I'd like permission to set my bag down and wait."

With bland impersonal courtesy the clerk replied, "Make yourself at home."