A Son of the Middle Border Part 31

CHAPTER XXVI

On to Boston

With plenty of time to think, I thought, crouched low in my seat silent as an owl. True, I dozed off now and again but even when shortened by these periods of forgetfulness, the journey seemed interminable and when I reached the grimy old shed of a station which was the Chicago terminal of the Northwestern in those days, I was glad of a chance to taste outside air, no matter how smoky it reported itself to be.

My brother, who was working in the office of a weekly farm journal, met me with an air of calm superiority. He had become a true Chicagoan.

Under his confident leadership I soon found a boarding place and a measure of repose. I must have stayed with him for several days for I recall being hypnotized into ordering a twenty-dollar tailor-made suit from a South Clark street merchant--you know the kind. It was a "Prince Albert Soot"--my first made-to-order outfit, but the extravagance seemed justified in face of the known elegance of man's apparel in Boston.

It took me thirty-six hours more to get to Boston, and as I was ill all the way (I again rode in the smoking car) a less triumphant Jason never entered the City of Light and Learning. The day was a true November day, dark and rainy and cold, and when I confronted my cloud-built city of domes and towers I was concerned only with a place to sleep--I had little desire of battle and no remembrance of the Golden Fleece.

Up from the Hoosac Station and over the slimy, greasy pavement I trod with humped back, carrying my heavy valise (it was the same imitation-leather concern with which I had toured the city two years before), while gay little street cars tinkled by, so close to my shoulder that I could have touched them with my hand.

Again I found my way through Haymarket Square to Tremont street and so at last to the Common, which presented a cold and dismal face at this time. The glory of my dream had fled. The trees, bare and brown and dripping with rain, offered no shelter. The benches were sodden, the paths muddy, and the sky, lost in a desolate mist shut down over my head with oppressive weight. I crawled along the muddy walk feeling about as important as a belated beetle in a July thunderstorm. Half of me was ready to surrender and go home on the next train but the other half, the obstinate half, sullenly forged ahead, busy with the problem of a roof and bed.

My experience in Rock River now stood me in good hand. Stopping a policeman I asked the way to the Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation. The officer pointed out a small tower not far away, and down the Tremont street walk I plodded as wretched a youth as one would care to see.

Humbled, apologetic, I climbed the stairway, approached the desk, and in a weak voice requested the address of a cheap lodging place.

From the cards which the clerk carelessly handed to me I selected the nearest address, which chanced to be on Boylston Place, a short narrow street just beyond the Public Library. It was a deplorably wet and gloomy alley, but I ventured down its narrow walk and desperately knocked on the door of No. 12.

A handsome elderly woman with snow-white hair met me at the threshold.

She looked entirely respectable, and as she named a price which I could afford to pay I accepted her invitation to enter. The house swarmed with life. Somebody was strumming a banjo, a girl was singing, and as I mounted the stair to the first floor, a slim little maid of about fourteen met us. "This is my daughter Fay," said the landlady with manifest pride.

Left to myself I sank into a chair with such relief as only the poor homeless country boy knows when at the end of a long tramp from the station, he lets slip his hand-bag and looks around upon a room for which he has paid. It was a plain little chamber, but it meant shelter and sleep and I was grateful. I went to bed early.

I slept soundly and the world to which I awoke was new and resplendent.

My headache was gone, and as I left the house in search of breakfast I found the sun shining.

Just around the corner on Tremont street I discovered a little old man who from a sidewalk booth, sold delicious coffee in cups of two sizes,--one at three cents and a larger one at five cents. He also offered doughnuts at a penny each.

Having breakfasted at an outlay of exactly eight cents I returned to my chamber, which was a hall-room, eight feet by ten, and faced the north.

It was heated (theoretically) from a register in the floor, and there was just s.p.a.ce enough for my trunk, a cot and a small table at the window but as it cost only six dollars per month I was content. I figured that I could live on five dollars per week which would enable me to stay till spring. I had about one hundred and thirty dollars in my purse.

From this sunless nook, this narrow niche, I began my study of Boston, whose historic significance quite overpowered me. I was alone. Mr.

Bashford, in Portland, Maine, was the only person in all the east on whom I could call for aid or advice in case of sickness. My father wrote me that he had relatives living in the city but I did not know how to find them. No one could have been more absolutely alone than I during that first month. I made no acquaintances, I spoke to no one.

A part of each day was spent in studying the historical monuments of the city, and the remaining time was given to reading at the Young Men's Union or in the Public Library, which stood next door to my lodging house.

At night I made detailed studies of the habits of the c.o.c.kroaches with which my room was peopled. There was something uncanny in the action of these beasts. They were new to me and apparently my like had never before been observed by them. They belonged to the shadow, to the cold and to the damp of the city, whereas I was fresh from the sunlight of the plain, and as I watched them peering out from behind my wash-basin, they appeared to marvel at me and to confer on my case with almost elfish intelligence.

Tantalized by an occasional feeble and vacillating current of warm air from the register, I was forced at times to wear my overcoat as I read, and at night I spread it over my cot. I did not see the sun for a month.

The wind was always filled with rain or sleet, and as the lights in Bates' Hall were almost always blazing, I could hardly tell when day left off and night began. It seemed as if I had been plunged into another and darker world, a world of storm, of gray clouds, of endless cold.

Having resolved to keep all my expenses within five dollars per week, I laid down a scientific plan for cheap living. I first nosed out every low-priced eating place within ten minutes walk of my lodging and soon knew which of these "joints" were wholesome, and which were not. Just around the corner was a place where a filling dinner could be procured for fifteen cents, including pudding, and the little lunch counter on Tremont street supplied my breakfast. Not one nickel did I spend in carfare, and yet I saw almost every celebrated building in the city.

However, I tenderly regarded my shoe soles each night, for the cost of tapping was enormous.

My notion of studying at some school was never carried out. The Boston University cla.s.ses did not attract me. The Harvard lectures were inaccessible, and my call upon the teacher of "Expression" to whom Mr.

Bashford had given me a letter led to nothing. The professor was a nervous person and made the mistake of a.s.suming that I was as timid as I was silent. His manner irritated me and the outburst of my resentment was astonishing to him. I was hungry at the moment and to be patronized was too much!

This encounter plunged me into deep discouragement and I went back to my reading in the library with a despairing resolution to improve every moment, for my stay in the east could not last many weeks. At the rate my money was going May would see me bankrupt.

I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske, Helmholtz, Haeckel,--all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I had not hitherto been able to open. For diversion I dived into early English poetry and weltered in that sea of song which marks the beginnings of every literature, conning the ballads of Ireland and Wales, the epics of Ireland, the early German and the songs of the troubadours, a course of reading which started me on a series of lectures to be written directly from a study of the authors themselves.

This dimly took shape as a volume to be called _The Development of English Ideals_, a sufficiently ambitious project.

Among other proscribed books I read Whitman's _Leaves of Gra.s.s_ and without doubt that volume changed the world for me as it did for many others. Its rhythmic chants, its wonderful music filled me with a keen sense of the mystery of the near at hand. I rose from that first reading with a sense of having been taken up into high places. The spiritual significance of America was let loose upon me.

Herbert Spencer remained my philosopher and master. With eager haste I sought to compa.s.s the "Synthetic Philosophy." The universe took on order and harmony as, from my five cent breakfast, I went directly to the consideration of Spencer's theory of the evolution of music or painting or sculpture. It was thrilling, it was joyful to perceive that everything moved from the simple to the complex--how the bow-string became the harp, and the egg the chicken. My mental diaphragm creaked with the pressure of inrushing ideas. My brain young, sensitive to every touch, took hold of facts and theories like a phonographic cylinder, and while my body softened and my muscles wasted from disuse, I skittered from pole to pole of the intellectual universe like an impatient bat. I learned a little of everything and nothing very thoroughly. With so many peaks in sight, I had no time to spend on digging up the valley soil.

My only exercise was an occasional slow walk. I could not afford to waste my food in physical effort, and besides I was thinly dressed and could not go out except when the sun shone. My overcoat was considerably more than half cotton and a poor shield against the bitter wind which drove straight from the arctic sea into my bones. Even when the weather was mild, the crossings were nearly always ankle deep in slush, and walking was anything but a pleasure, therefore it happened that for days I took no outing whatsoever. From my meals I returned to my table in the library and read until closing time, conserving in every way my thirty cents' worth of "food units."

In this way I covered a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis. My poets and scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest sense, accepting Spencer as the greatest living thinker. Fiske and Galton and Allen were merely a.s.sistants to the Master Mind whose generalizations included in their circles all modern discovery.

It was a sad change when, leaving the brilliant reading room where my mind had been in contact with these masters of scientific world, I crept back to my minute den, there to sit humped and shivering (my overcoat thrown over my shoulders) confronting with scared resentment the sure wasting of my little store of dollars. In spite of all my care, the pennies departed from my pockets like grains of sand from an hour-gla.s.s and most disheartening of all I was making no apparent gain toward fitting myself for employment in the west.

Furthermore, the greatness, the significance, the beauty of Boston was growing upon me. I felt the neighboring presence of its autocrats more definitely and powerfully each day. Their names filled the daily papers, their comings and goings were carefully noted. William Dean Howells, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, Edwin Booth, James Russell Lowell, all these towering personalities seemed very near to me now, and their presence, even if I never saw their faces, was an inspiration to one who had definitely decided to compose essays and poems, and to write possibly a history of American Literature. Symphony concerts, the Lowell Inst.i.tute Lectures, the _Atlantic Monthly_--(all the distinctive inst.i.tutions of the Hub) had become very precious to me notwithstanding the fact that I had little actual share in them. Their nearness while making my poverty more bitter, aroused in me a vague ambition to succeed--in something. "I won't be beaten, I will not surrender," I said.

Being neither a resident of the city nor a pupil of any school I could not take books from the library and this inhibition wore upon me till at last I determined to seek the aid of Edward Everett Hale who had long been a great and gracious figure in my mind. His name had been among the "Authors" of our rainy-day game on the farm. I had read his books, and I had heard him preach and as his "Lend-a-hand" helpfulness was proverbial, I resolved to call upon him at his study in the church, and ask his advice. I was not very definite as to what I expected him to do, probably I hoped for sympathy in some form.

The old man received me with kindness, but with a look of weariness which I quickly understood. Accustomed to helping people he considered me just another "Case." With hesitation I explained my difficulty about taking out books.

With a bluff roar he exclaimed, "Well, well! That is strange! Have you spoken to the Librarian about it?"

"I have, Dr. Hale, but he told me there were twenty thousand young students in the city in precisely my condition. People not residents and with no one to vouch for them cannot take books home."

"I don't like that," he said. "I will look into that. You shall be provided for. Present my card to Judge Chamberlain; I am one of the trustees, and he will see that you have all the books you want."

I thanked him and withdrew, feeling that I had gained a point. I presented the card to the librarian whose manner softened at once. As a protege of Dr. Hale I was distinguished. "I will see what can be done for you," said Judge Chamberlain. Thereafter I was able to take books to my room, a habit which still further imperilled my health, for I read fourteen hours a day instead of ten.

Naturally I grew white and weak. My Dakota tan and my corn-fed muscle melted away. The only part of me which flourished was my hair. I begrudged every quarter which went to the barbers and I was cold most of the time (except when I infested the library) and I was hungry _all_ the time.

I knew that I was physically on the down-grade, but what could I do?

Nothing except to cut down my expenses. I was living on less than five dollars a week, but even at that the end of my _stay_ in the city was not far off. Hence I walked gingerly and read fiercely.

Bates' Hall was deliciously comfortable, and every day at nine o'clock I was at the door eager to enter. I spent most of my day at a desk in the big central reading room, but at night I haunted the Young Men's Union, thus adding myself to a dubious collection of half-demented, ill-clothed derelicts, who suffered the contempt of the attendants by reason of their filling all the chairs and monopolizing all the newspaper racks.

We never conversed one with another and no one knew my name, but there came to be a certain diplomatic understanding amongst us somewhat as snakes, rabbits, hyenas, and turtles sometimes form "happy families."

There was one old ruffian who always sniffled and snuffled like a fat hog as he read, monopolizing my favorite newspaper. Another member of the circle perused the same page of the same book day after day, laughing vacuously over its contents. Never by any mistake did he call for a different book, and I never saw him turn a leaf. No doubt I was counted as one of this group of irresponsibles.

All this hurt me. I saw no humor in it then, for I was even at this time an intellectual aristocrat. I despised brainless folk. I hated these loafers. I loathed the clerk at the desk who dismissed me with a contemptuous smirk, and I resented the formal smile and impersonal politeness of Mr. Baldwin, the President. Of course I understood that the attendants knew nothing of my dreams and my ambitions, and that they were treating me quite as well as my looks warranted, but I blamed them just the same, furious at my own helplessness to demonstrate my claims for higher honors.

During all this time the only woman I knew was my landlady, Mrs. Davis, and her daughter Fay. Once a week I curtly said, "Here is your rent, Mrs. Davis," and yet, several times she asked with concern, "How are you feeling?--You don't look well. Why don't you board with me? I can feed you quite as cheaply as you can board yourself."

It is probable that she read slow starvation in my face, but I haughtily answered, "Thank you, I prefer to take my meals out." As a matter of fact, I dreaded contact with the other boarders.

As a member of the Union a certain number of lectures were open to me and so night by night, in company with my fellow "nuts," I called for my ticket and took my place in line at the door, like a charity patient at a hospital. However, as I seldom occupied a seat to the exclusion of anyone else and as my presence usually helped to keep the speaker in countenance, I had no qualms.