A Son of the Middle Border Part 41

"My stories were not written for farmers' wives," I replied. "They were written to convict the selfish monopolistic liars of the towns."

"I hope the liars read 'em," was her laconic retort.

Nevertheless, in spite of all the outcry against my book, words of encouragement came in from a few men and women who had lived out the precise experiences which I had put into print. "You have delineated my life," one man said. "Every detail of your description is true. The sound of the prairie chickens, the hum of the threshing machine, the work of seeding, corn husking, everything is familiar to me and new in literature."

A woman wrote, "You are entirely right about the loneliness, the stagnation, the hardship. We are sick of lies. Give the world the truth."

Another critic writing from the heart of a great university said, "I value your stories highly as literature, but I suspect that in the social war which is coming you and I will be at each other's throats."

This controversy naturally carried me farther and farther from the traditional, the respectable. As a rebel in art I was p.r.o.ne to arouse hate. Every letter I wrote was a challenge, and one of my conservative friends frankly urged the folly of my course. "It is a mistake for you to be a.s.sociated with cranks like Henry George and writers like Whitman," he said. "It is a mistake to be published by the _Arena_. Your book should have been brought out by one of the old established firms.

If you will fling away your radical notions and consent to amuse the governing cla.s.ses, you will succeed."

Fling away my convictions! It were as easy to do that as to cast out my bones. I was not wearing my indignation as a cloak. My rebellious tendencies came from something deep down. They formed an element in my blood. My patriotism resented the failure of our government. Therefore such advice had very little influence upon me. The criticism that really touched and influenced me was that which said, "Don't preach,--exemplify.

Don't let your stories degenerate into tracts." Howells said, "Be fine, be fine--but not too fine!" and Gilder warned me not to leave Beauty out of the picture.

In the light of this friendly council I perceived my danger, and set about to avoid the fault of mixing my fiction with my polemics.

The editor of the _Arena_ remained my most loyal supporter. He filled the editorial section of his magazine with praise of my fiction and loudly proclaimed my non-conformist character. No editor ever worked harder to give his author a national reputation and the book sold, not as books sell now, but moderately, steadily, and being more widely read than sold, went far. This proved of course, that my readers were poor and could not afford to pay a dollar for a book, at least they didn't, and I got very little royalty from the sale. If I had any illusions about that they were soon dispelled. On the paper bound book I got five cents, on the cloth bound, ten. The sale was mainly in the fifty-cent edition.

It was not for me to criticise the methods by which my publisher was trying to make me known, and I do not at this moment regret Flower's insistence upon the reforming side of me,--but for the reason that he was essentially ethical rather than esthetic, some part of the literary significance of my work escaped him. It was from the praise of Howells, Matthews and Stedman, that I received my enlightenment. I began to perceive that in order to make my work carry its message, I must be careful to keep a certain balance between Significance and Beauty. The artist began to check the preacher.

Howells gave the book large s.p.a.ce in "The Study" in _Harper's_ and what he said of it profoundly instructed me. Edward Everett Hale, Mary E.

Wilkins, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Charles Dudley Warner, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and many others were most generous of applause. In truth I was welcomed into the circle of American realists with an instant and generous greeting which astonished, at the same time that it delighted me.

I marvel at this appreciation as I look back upon it, and surely in view of its reception, no one can blame me for considering my drab little volume a much more important contribution to American fiction than it really was.

It was my first book, and so, perhaps, the reader will excuse me for being a good deal uplifted by the noise it made. Then too, it is only fair to call attention to the fact that aside from Edward Eggleston's _Hoosier Schoolmaster_, _Howe's Story of a Country Town_, and _Zury_, by Joseph Kirkland, I had the middle west almost entirely to myself. Not one of the group of western writers who have since won far greater fame, and twenty times more dollars than I, had at that time published a single volume. William Allen White, Albert Bigelow Payne, Stewart Edward White, Jack London, Emerson Hough, George Ade, Meredith Nicholson, Booth Tarkington, and Rex Beach were all to come. "Octave Thanet" was writing her stories of Arkansas life for _Scribners_ but had published only one book.

Among all my letters of encouragement of this time, not one, except perhaps that from Mr. Howells, meant more to me than a word which came from Walt Whitman, who hailed me as one of the literary pioneers of the west for whom he had been waiting. His judgment, so impersonal, so grandly phrased, gave me the feeling of having been "praised by posterity."

In short, I was a.s.sured that my face was set in the right direction and that the future was mine, for I was not yet thirty-one years of age, and thirty-one is a most excellent period of life!

And yet, by a singular fatality, at this moment came another sorrow, the death of Alice, my boyhood's adoration. I had known for years that she was not for me, but I loved to think of her as out there walking the lanes among the roses and the wheat as of old. My regard for her was no longer that of the lover desiring and hoping, and though I acknowledged defeat I had been too broadly engaged in my ambitious literary plans to permit her deflection to permanently cloud my life. She had been a radiant and charming figure in my prairie world, and when I read the letter telling of her pa.s.sing, my mind was irradiated with the picture she had made when last she said good-bye to me. Her gentle friendship had been very helpful through all my years of struggle and now in the day of my security, her place was empty.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

The Spirit of Revolt

During all this time while I had been living so busily and happily in Boston, writing stories, discussing Ibsen and arguing the cause of Impressionism, a portentous and widespread change of sentiment was taking place among the farmers of the Middle Border. The discouragement which I had discovered in old friends and neighbors in Dakota was finding collective expression. A vast and non-sectional union of the corn-growers, wheat-raisers, and cotton-growers had been effected and the old time politicians were uneasy.

As ten cent corn and ten per cent interest were troubling Kansas so six-cent cotton was inflaming Georgia--and both were frankly sympathetic with Montana and Colorado whose miners were suffering from a drop in the price of silver. To express the meaning of this revolt a flying squadron of radical orators had been commissioned and were in the field. Mary Ellen Lease with Ca.s.sandra voice, and Jerry Simpson with shrewd humor were voicing the demands of the plainsman, while "Coin" Harvey as champion of the Free Silver theory had stirred the Mountaineer almost to a frenzy. It was an era of fervent meetings and fulminating resolutions.

The Grange had been social, or at most commercially co-operative in its activities, but The Farmers' Alliance came as a revolt.

The People's Party which was the natural outcome of this unrest involved my father. He wrote me that he had joined "the Populists," and was one of their County officers. I was not surprised at this action on his part, for I had known how high in honor he held General Weaver who was the chief advocate of a third party.

Naturally Flower sympathized with this movement, and kept the pages of his magazine filled with impa.s.sioned defenses of it. One day, early in '91, as I was calling upon him in his office, he suddenly said, "Garland, why can't you write a serial story for us? One that shall deal with this revolt of the farmers? It's perfectly legitimate material for a novel, as picturesque in its way as _The Rise of the Vendee_--Can't you make use of it?"

To this I replied, with some excitement--"Why yes, I think I can. I have in my desk at this moment, several chapters of an unfinished story which uses the early phases of the Grange movement as a background. If it pleases you I can easily bring it down to date. It might be necessary for me to go into the field, and make some fresh studies, but I believe I can treat the two movements in the same story. Anyhow I should like to try."

"Bring the ma.n.u.script in at once," replied Flower. "It may be just what we are looking for. If it is we will print it as a serial this summer, and bring it out in book form next winter."

In high excitement I hurried home to dig up and re-read the fragment which I called at this time _Bradley Talcott_. It contained about thirty thousand words and its hero was a hired man on an Iowa farm. Of course I saw possibilities in this ma.n.u.script--I was in the mood to do that--and sent it in.

Flower read it and reported almost by return mail.

"We'll take it," he said. "And as soon as you can get away, I think that you'd better go out to Kansas and Nebraska and make the studies necessary to complete the story. We'll pay all your expenses and pay you for the serial besides."

The price agreed upon would seem very small in these days of millionaire authors, but to me the terms of Flower's commission were n.o.bly generous.

They set me free. They gave me wings!--For the first time in my life I was able to travel in comfort. I could not only eat in the dining car, and sleep in the sleeping car, but I could go to a hotel at the end of my journey with a delightful sense of freedom from worry about the bills. Do you wonder that when I left Boston a week or two later, I did so with elation--with a sense of conquest?

Eager to explore--eager to know every state of the Union and especially eager to study the far plains and the Rocky Mountains, I started westward and kept going until I reached Colorado. My stay in the mountain country was short, but my glimpses of Ouray and Telluride started me on a long series of stories of "the high trails."

On the way out as well as on the way back, I took part in meetings of rebellious farmers in bare-walled Kansas school-houses, and watched protesting processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as they filed through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked plain. I attended barbecues on drab and dusty fair grounds, meeting many of the best known leaders in the field.

Everywhere I came in contact with the discontented. I saw only those whose lives seemed about to end in failure, and my grim notions of farm life were in no wise softened by these experiences.

How far away all this seems in these days of three-dollar wheat and twenty-six cent cotton--these days of automobiles, tractor plows, and silos!

As I kept no diary in those days, I am a little uncertain about dates and places--and no wonder, for I was doing something every moment (I travelled almost incessantly for nearly two years) but one event of that summer does stand clearly out--that of a meeting with my father at Omaha in July.

It seems that some sort of convention was being held there and that my father was a delegate from Brown County, Dakota. At any rate I distinctly recall meeting him at the train and taking him to my hotel and introducing him to General Weaver. As a representative of the _Arena_ I had come to know many of the most prominent men in the movement, and my father was deeply impressed with their recognition of me. For the first time in his life, he deferred to me. He not only let me take charge of him, he let me pay the bills.

He said nothing to me of his pride in my position, but my good friends Robert and Elia Peattie told me that to them he expressed the keenest satisfaction. "I never thought Hamlin would make a success of writing,"

he said, "although he was always given to books. I couldn't believe that he would ever earn a living that way, but it seems that he is doing it."

My commission from Flower and the fact that the _Arena_ was willing to pay my way about the country, were to him indubitable signs of prosperity. They could not be misinterpreted by his neighbors.

Elia Peattie sat beside him at a meeting when I spoke, and she heard him say to an old soldier on the right, "I never knew just what that boy of mine was fitted for, but I guess he has struck his gait at last."

It may seem illogical to the reader, but this deference on the part of the old soldier did not amuse me. On the contrary it hurt me. A little pang went through me every time he yielded his leadership. I hated to see him display the slightest evidence of age, of weakness. I would rather have had him storm than sigh. Part of his irresolution, his timidity, was due, as I could see, to the unwonted noise, and to the crowds of excited men, but more of it came from the vague alarm of self-distrust which are signs of advancing years.

For two days we went about together, attending all the sessions and meeting many of the delegates, but we found time to discuss the problems which confronted us both. "I am farming nearly a thousand acres this year," he said, "and I'm getting the work systematized so that I can raise wheat at sixty cents a bushel--if I can only get fifteen bushels to the acre. But there's no money in the country. We seem to be at the bottom of our resources. I never expected to see this country in such a state. I can't get money enough to pay my taxes. Look at my clothes! I haven't had a new suit in three years. Your mother is in the same fix. I wanted to bring her down, but she had no clothes to wear--and then, besides, it's hard for her to travel. The heat takes hold of her terribly."

This statement of the Border's poverty and drought was the more moving to me for the reason that the old pioneer had always been so patriotic, so confident, so sanguine of his country's future. He had come a long way from the buoyant faith of '66, and the change in him was typical of the change in the West--in America--and it produced in me a sense of dismay, of rebellious bitterness. Why should our great new land fall into this slough of discouragement?

My sympathy with the Alliance took on a personal tinge. My pride in my own "success" sank away. How pitiful it all seemed in the midst of the almost universal disappointment and suffering of the West! In the face of my mother's need my resources were pitifully inadequate.

"I can't go up to see mother this time," I explained to my father, "but I am coming out again this fall to speak in the campaign and I shall surely run up and visit her then."

"I'll arrange for you to speak in Aberdeen," he said. "I'm on the County Committee."

All the way back to Boston, and during the weeks of my work on my novel, I pondered the significance of the spiritual change which had swept over the whole nation--but above all others the problem of my father's desperate attempt to retrieve his fortunes engaged my sympathy. "Unless he gets a crop this year," I reported to my brother--"he is going to need help. It fills me with horror to think of those old people spending another winter out there on the plain."

My brother who was again engaged by Herne to play one of the leading parts in _Sh.o.r.e Acres_ was beginning to see light ahead. His pay was not large but he was saving a little of it and was willing to use his savings to help me out in my plan of rescue. It was to be a rescue although we were careful never to put it in that form in our letters to the old pioneer.