A Son of the Middle Border Part 34

"The Junior" as I called my brother, being footloose and discontented, wrote to say that he was planning to go farther west--to Montana, I think it was. His letter threw me into dismay. I acknowledged once again that my education had in a sense been bought at his expense. I recalled the many weeks when the little chap had plowed in my stead whilst I was enjoying the inspiration of Osage. It gave me distress to think of him separating himself from the family as David had done, and yet my own position was too insecure to warrant me promising much in his aid.

Nevertheless, realizing that mother would suffer less if she knew her two sons were together, I wrote, saying, "If you have definitely decided on leaving home, don't go west. Come to Boston, and I will see if I cannot get you something to do."

It ended in his coming to Boston, and my mother was profoundly relieved. Father gave no sign either of pleasure or regret. He set to work once more increasing his acreage, vigorous and unsubdued.

Frank's coming added to my burden of responsibility and care, but increased my pleasure in the city, for I now had someone to show it to.

He secured a position as an accountant in a railway office and though we seldom met during the week, on Sundays we roamed the parks, or took excursions down the bay, and in a short time he too became an enthusiastic Bostonian with no thought of returning to Dakota. Little Jessie was now the sole stay and comfort of our mother.

As I look back now upon the busy, happy days of 1885 and 1886, I can grasp only a few salient experiences.... A terrific storm is on the sea.

We are at Nantasket to study it. The enormous waves are charging in from the illimitable sky like an army of horses, only to fall and waste themselves in wrath upon the sand. I feel the stinging blast against my face.... I am riding on a train over the marshes on my way to my cla.s.s in Chelsea. I look across the level bay and behold a soaring banner of sunshot mist, spun by a pa.s.sing engine, rising, floating, vanishing in the air.... I am sitting in an old grocery shop in Waltham listening to the quaint aphorism of a group of loafers around the stove.... I am lecturing before a summer school in Pepperel, New Hampshire.... I am at the theater, I hear Salvini thunderously clamoring on the stage. I see Modjeska's beautiful hands. I thrill to Sarah Bernhardt's velvet somber voice....

It is summer, Frank and I are walking the lovely lanes of Milton under gigantic elms, or lying on the gra.s.s of the park in West Roxbury, watching the wild birds come and go, hearing the sound of the scythestone in the meadow. Day by day, week by week, Boston, New England, comes to fuse that part of me which is eastern. I grow at last into thinking myself a fixture. Boston is the center of music, of art, of literature. My only wish now is to earn money enough to visit my people in the West.

And yet, notwithstanding all this, neither of us ever really became a Bostonian. We never got beyond a feeling for the beauty, the picturesqueness and the charm of our surroundings. The East caused me to cry out in admiration, but it did not inspire me to write. It did not appeal to me as my material. It was rather as a story already told, a song already sung.

When I walked a lane, or saw the sloping roof of a house set against a hillside I thought of Whittier or Hawthorne and was silent. The sea reminded me of Celia Thaxter or Lucy Larcom. The marshes brought up the _Wayside Inn_ of Longfellow; all, all was of the past. New England, rich with its memories of great men and n.o.ble women, had no direct inspiration for me, a son of the West. It did not lay hold upon my creative imagination, neither did it inspire me to sing of its glory. I remained immutably of the Middle Border and strange to say, my desire to celebrate the West was growing.

Each season dropped a thickening veil of mist between me and the scenes of my youth, adding a poetic glamour to every rememberable form and fact. Each spring when the smell of fresh, uncovered earth returned to fret my nostrils I thought of the wide fields of Iowa, of the level plains of Dakota, and a desire to hear once more the prairie chicken calling from the ridges filled my heart. In the autumn when the wind swept through the bare branches of the elm, I thought of the lonely days of plowing on the prairie, and the poetry and significance of those wild gray days came over me with such power that I instinctively seized my pen to write of them.

One day, a man shoveling coal in the alley below my window reminded me of that peculiar ringing _sc.r.a.pe_ which the farm shovel used to make when (on the Iowa farm) at dusk I scooped my load of corn from the wagon box to the crib, and straightway I fell a-dreaming, and from dreaming I came to composition, and so it happened that my first writing of any significance was an article depicting an Iowa corn-husking scene.

It was not merely a picture of the life my brother and I had lived,--it was an attempt to set forth a typical scene of the Middle Border. "The Farm Life of New England has been fully celebrated by means of innumerable stories and poems," I began, "its husking bees, its dances, its winter scenes are all on record; is it not time that we of the west should depict our own distinctive life? The middle border has its poetry, its beauty, if we can only see it."

To emphasize these differences I called this first article "The Western Corn Husking," and put into it the grim report of the man who had "been there," an insistence on the painful as well as the pleasant truth, a quality which was discovered afterwards to be characteristic of my work.

The bitter truth was strongly developed in this first article.

Up to this time I had composed nothing except several more or less high-falutin' essays, a few poems and one or two stories somewhat in imitation of Hawthorne, but in this my first real shot at the delineation of prairie life, I had no models. Perhaps this clear field helped me to be true. It was not fiction, as I had no intention at that time of becoming a fictionist, but it was fact, for it included the mud and cold of the landscape as well as its bloom and charm.

I sent "The Corn Husking" to the _New American Magazine_, and almost by return mail the editor, William Wyckoff, wrote an inspiring letter to the effect that the life I had described was familiar to him, and that it had never been treated in this way. "I shall be very glad to read anything you have written or may write, and I suggest that you follow up this article by others of the same nature."

It was just the encouragement I needed. I fell to work at once upon other articles, taking up the seasons one by one. Wyckoff accepted them gladly, but paid for them slowly and meagerly--but I did not blame him for that. His magazine was even then struggling for life.

It must have been about this time that I sold to _Harper's Weekly_ a long poem of the prairie, for which I was paid the enormous sum of twenty-five dollars. With this, the first money I ever had received for magazine writing, I hastened to purchase some silk for my mother, and the _Memoirs of General Grant_ for my father, with intent to suitably record and celebrate my entrance into literature. For the first time in her life, my mother was able to wear a silk dress, and she wrote, soon after, a proud and grateful letter saying things which blurred my eyes and put a lump into my throat. If only I could have laid the silk in her lap, and caught the light of her happy smile!

CHAPTER XXVIII

A Visit to the West

At twenty-seven years of age, and after having been six years absent from Osage, the little town in which I went to school, I found myself able to revisit it. My earnings were still humiliatingly less than those of a hod-carrier, but by shameless economy I had saved a little over one hundred dollars and with this as a travelling fund, I set forth at the close of school, on a vacation tour which was planned to include the old home in the Coulee, the Iowa farm, and my father's house in Dakota. I took pa.s.sage in a first cla.s.s coach this time, but was still a long way from buying a berth in a sleeping car.

To find myself actually on the train and speeding westward was deeply and pleasurably exciting, but I did not realize how keen my hunger for familiar things had grown, till the next day when I reached the level lands of Indiana. Every field of wheat, every broad hat, every honest treatment of the letter "r" gave me a.s.surance that I was approaching my native place. The reapers at work in the fields filled my mind with visions of the past. The very weeds at the roadside had a magical appeal and yet, eager as I was to reach old friends, I found in Chicago a new friend whose sympathy was so stimulating, so helpful that I delayed my journey for two days in order that I might profit by his critical comment.

This meeting came about in a literary way. Some months earlier, in May, to be exact, Hurd of the _Transcript_ had placed in my hands a novel called _Zury_ and my review of it had drawn from its author, a western man, a letter of thanks and a cordial invitation to visit him as I pa.s.sed through Chicago, on my way to my old home. This I had gladly accepted, and now with keen interest, I was on my way to his home.

Joseph Kirkland was at this time nearly sixty years of age, a small, alert, dark-eyed man, a lawyer, who lived in what seemed to me at the time, plutocratic grandeur, but in spite of all this, and notwithstanding the difference in our ages, I liked him and we formed an immediate friendship. "Mrs. Kirkland and my daughters are in Michigan for the summer," he explained, "and I am camping in my study." I was rather glad of this arrangement for, having the house entirely to ourselves, we could discuss realism, Howells and the land-question with full vigor and all night if we felt like it.

Kirkland had read some of my western sketches and in the midst of his praise of them suddenly asked, "Why don't you write fiction?"

To this I replied, "I can't manage the dialogue."

"Nonsense!" said he. "You're lazy, that's all. You use the narrative form because it's easier. Buckle to it--you can write stories as well as I can--but you must sweat!"

This so surprised me that I was unable to make any denial of his charge.

The fact is he was right. To compose a page of conversation, wherein each actor uses his own accent and speaks from his own point of view, was not easy. I had dodged the hard spots.

The older man's bluntness and humor, and his almost wistful appreciation of my youth and capacity for being moved, troubled me, absorbed my mind even during our talk. Some of his words stuck like burrs, because they seemed so absurd. "When your name is known all over the West," he said in parting, "remember what I say. You can go far if you'll only work. I began too late. I can't emotionalize present day western life--you can, but you must bend to your desk like a man. You must grind!"

I didn't feel in the least like a successful fictionist and being a household word seemed very remote,--but I went away resolved to "grind"

if grinding would do any good.

Once out of the city, I absorbed "atmosphere" like a sponge. It was with me no longer (as in New England) a question of warmed-over themes and appropriated characters. Whittier, Hawthorne, Holmes, had no connection with the rude life of these prairies. Each weedy field, each wire fence, the flat stretches of gra.s.s, the leaning Lombardy trees,--everything was significant rather than beautiful, familiar rather than picturesque.

Something deep and resonant vibrated within my brain as I looked out upon this monotonous commonplace landscape. I realized for the first time that the east had surfeited me with picturesqueness. It appeared that I had been living for six years amidst painted, neatly arranged pasteboard scenery. Now suddenly I dropped to the level of nature unadorned, down to the ugly unkempt lanes I knew so well, back to the pungent realities of the streamless plain.

Furthermore I acknowledged a certain responsibility for the conditions of the settlers. I felt related to them, an intolerant part of them.

Once fairly out among the fields of northern Illinois everything became so homely, uttered itself so piercingly to me that nothing less than song could express my sense of joy, of power. This was my country--these my people.

It was the third of July, a beautiful day with a radiant sky, darkened now and again with sudden showers. Great clouds, trailing veils of rain, enveloped the engine as it roared straight into the west,--for an instant all was dark, then forth we burst into the brilliant sunshine careening over the green ridges as if drawn by runaway dragons with breath of flame.

It was sundown when I crossed the Mississippi river (at Dubuque) and the scene which I looked out upon will forever remain a splendid page in my memory. The coaches lay under the western bluffs, but away to the south the valley ran, walled with royal purple, and directly across the flood, a beach of sand flamed under the sunset light as if it were a bed of pure untarnished gold. Behind this an island rose, covered with n.o.ble trees which suggested all the romance of the immemorial river. The redman's canoe, the explorer's batteau, the hunter's lodge, the emigrant's cabin, all stood related to that inspiring vista. For the first time in my life I longed to put this n.o.ble stream into verse.

All that day I had studied the land, musing upon its distinctive qualities, and while I acknowledged the natural beauty of it, I revolted from the gracelessness of its human habitations. The lonely boxlike farm-houses on the ridges suddenly appeared to me like the dens of wild animals. The lack of color, of charm in the lives of the people anguished me. I wondered why I had never before perceived the futility of woman's life on a farm.

I asked myself, "Why have these stern facts never been put into our literature as they have been used in Russia and in England? Why has this land no story-tellers like those who have made Ma.s.sachusetts and New Hampshire ill.u.s.trious?"

These and many other speculations buzzed in my brain. Each moment was a revelation of new uglinesses as well as of remembered beauties.

At four o'clock of a wet morning I arrived at Charles City, from which I was to take "the spur" for Osage. Stiffened and depressed by my night's ride, I stepped out upon the platform and watched the train as it pa.s.sed on, leaving me, with two or three other silent and sleepy pa.s.sengers, to wait until seven o'clock in the morning for the "accommodation train." I was still busy with my problem, but the salient angles of my interpretation were economic rather than literary.

Walking to and fro upon the platform, I continued to ponder my situation. In a few hours I would be among my old friends and companions, to measure and be measured. Six years before I had left them to seek my fortune in the eastern world. I had promised little,--fortunately--and I was returning, without the pot of gold and with only a tinge of glory.

Exteriorly I had nothing but a crop of st.u.r.dy whiskers to show for my years of exile but mentally I was much enriched. Twenty years of development lay between my thought at the moment and those of my simpler days. My study of Spencer, Whitman and other of the great leaders of the world, my years of absorbed reading in the library, my days of loneliness and hunger in the city had swept me into a far bleak land of philosophic doubt where even the most daring of my cla.s.smates would hesitate to follow me.

A violent perception of the mysterious, the irrevocable march of human life swept over me and I shivered before a sudden realization of the ceaseless change and shift of western life and landscape. How few of those I knew were there to greet me! Walter and Charles were dead, Maud and Lena were both married, and Burton was preaching somewhere in the West.

Six short years had made many changes in the little town and it was in thinking upon these changes that I reached a full realization of the fact that I was no longer a "promising boy" of the prairie but a man, with a notion of human life and duty and responsibility which was neither cheerful nor resigned. I was returning as from deep valleys, from the most alien climate.

Looking at the sky above me, feeling the rush of the earth beneath my feet I saw how much I had dared and how little, how pitifully little I had won. Over me the ragged rainclouds swept, obscuring the stars and in their movement and in the feeling of the dawn lay something illimitable and prophetic. Such moments do not come to men often--but to me for an hour, life was painfully purposeless. "What does it all mean?" I asked myself.

At last the train came, and as it rattled away to the north and I drew closer to the scenes of my boyhood, my memory quickened. The Cedar rippling over its limestone ledges, the gray old mill and the pond where I used to swim, the farm-houses with their weedy lawns, all seemed not only familiar but friendly, and when at last I reached the station (the same grimy little den from which I had started forth six years before), I rose from my seat with the air of a world-traveller and descended upon the warped and splintered platform, among my one time friends and neighbors, with quickened pulse and seeking eye.

It was the fourth of July and a crowd was at the station, but though I recognized half the faces, not one of them lightened at sight of me. The 'bus driver, the ragged old dray-man (scandalously profane), the common loafers shuffling about, chewing and spitting, seemed absolutely unchanged. One or two elderly citizens eyed me closely as I slung my little Boston valise with a long strap over my shoulder and started up the billowing board sidewalk toward the center of the town, but I gave out no word of recognition. Indeed I took a boyish pride in the disguising effect of my beard.

How small and flat and leisurely the village seemed. The buildings which had once been so imposing in my eyes were now of very moderate elevation indeed, and the opera house was almost indistinguishable from the two-story structures which flanked it; but the trees had increased in dignity, and some of the lawns were lovely.