A Son of the Middle Border Part 42

Up to this month I had retained my position in the Boston School of Oratory, but I now notified Brown that I should teach no more in his school or any other school.

His big shoulders began to shake and a chuckle preceded his irritating joke--"Going back to shingling?" he demanded.

"No," I replied, "I'm not going to shingle any more--except for exercise after I get my homestead in the west--but I think--I'm not sure--I _think_ I can make a living with my pen."

He became serious at this and said, "I'm sorry to have you go--but you are entirely right. You have found your work and I give you my blessing on it. But you must always count yourself one of my teachers and come and speak for us whenever you can." This I promised to do and so we parted.

Early in September I went west and having put myself in the hands of the State Central Committee of Iowa, entered the field, campaigning in the interests of the People's Party. For six weeks I travelled, speaking nearly every day--getting back to the farms of the west and harvesting a rich fund of experiences.

It was delightful autumn weather, and in central Iowa the crops were fairly abundant. On every hand fields of corn covered the gentle hills like wide rugs of lavender velvet, and the odor of melons and ripening leaves filled the air. Nature's songs of cheer and abundance (uttered by innumerable insects) set forth the monstrous injustice of man's law by way of contrast. Why should children cry for food in our cities whilst fruits rotted on the vines and wheat had no value to the harvester?

With other eager young reformers, I rode across the odorous prairie swells, journeying from one meeting place to another, feeling as my companions did that something grandly beneficial was about to be enacted into law. In this spirit I spoke at Populist picnics, standing beneath great oaks, surrounded by men and women, work-worn like my own father and mother, shadowed by the same cloud of dismay. I smothered in small halls situated over saloons and livery stables, travelling by freight-train at night in order to ride in triumph as "Orator of the Day" at some county fair, until at last I lost all sense of being the writer and recluse.

As I went north my indignation burned brighter, for the discontent of the people had been sharpened by the drought which had again cut short the crop. At Millbank, Cyrus, one of my old Dry Run neighbors, met me.

He was now a grave, stooping middle-aged man also in the midst of disillusionment. "Going west" had been a mistake for him as for my father--"But here we are," he said, "and I see nothing for it but to stick to the job."

Mother and father came to Aberdeen to hear me speak, and as I looked down on them from the platform of the opera house, I detected on their faces an expression which was not so much attention, as preoccupation.

They were not listening to my words, they were thinking of my relationship to them, of the mystery involved in my being there on the platform surrounded by the men of the county whom they most respected.

They could not take my theories seriously, but they did value and to the full, the honor which their neighbors paid me--their son! Their presence so affected me that I made, I fear, but an indifferent address.

We did not have much time to talk over family affairs but it was good to see them even for a few moments and to know that mother was slowly regaining the use of her limbs.

Another engagement made it necessary for me to take the night train for St. Paul and so they both went down to the station with me, and as the time came to part I went out to the little covered buggy (which was all the carriage my father owned) to start them off on their lonely twelve-mile trip back to the farm. "I don't know how it is all coming about, mother, but sometime, somewhere you and I are going to live together,--not here, back in Osage, or perhaps in Boston. It won't be long now."

She smiled, but her voice was tremulous. "Don't worry about me. I'm all right again--at least I am better. I shall be happy if only you are successful."

This meeting did me good. My mother's smile lessened my bitterness, and her joy in me, her faith in me, sent me away in renewed determination to rescue her from the dest.i.tution and loneliness of this arid land.

My return to Boston in November discovered a startling change in my relationship to it. The shining city in which I had lived for seven years, and which had become so familiar to me (and so necessary to my progress), had begun to dwindle, to recede. The warm, broad, unkempt and tumultuous west, with its clamorous movement, its freedom from tradition, its vitality of political thought, re-a.s.serted its power over me. New England again became remote. It was evident that I had not really taken root in Ma.s.sachusetts after all. I perceived that Boston was merely the capital of New England while New York was fast coming to be the all-conquering capital of The Nation.

My realization of this shift of values was sharpened by the announcement that Howells had definitely decided to move to the Metropolis, and that Herne had broken up his little home in Ashmont and was to make his future home on Convent Avenue in Harlem. The process of stripping Boston to build up Manhattan had begun.

My brother who was still one of Herne's company of players in _Sh.o.r.e Acres_, had no home to break up, but he said, "I'm going to get some sort of headquarters in New York. If you'll come on we'll hire a little apartment up town and 'bach' it. I'm sick of theatrical boarding houses."

With suddenly acquired conviction that New York was about to become the Literary Center of America, I replied, "Very well. Get your flat. I'd like to spend a winter in the old town anyway."

My brother took a small furnished apartment on 105th Street, and together we camped above the tumult. It was only twelve-and-a-half feet wide and about forty-eight long, and its furnishings were ugly, frayed and meager, but its sitting room opened upon the sun, and there, of a morning, I continued to write in growing content. At about noon the actor commonly cooked a steak or a chop and boiled a pot of coffee, and after the dishes were washed, we both merrily descended upon Broadway by means of a Ninth Avenue elevated train. Sometimes we dined down town in reckless luxury at one of the French restaurants, "where the tip was but a nickel and the dinner thirty cents," but usually even our evening meal was eaten at home.

Herne was playing an unlimited engagement at the Broadway theater and I spent a good deal of time behind the scenes with him. His house on Convent Avenue was a handsome mansion and on a Sunday, I often dined there, and when we all got going the walls resounded with argument. Jim was a great wag and a delightful story teller, but he was in deadly earnest as a reformer, and always ready to speak on The Single Tax. He took his art very seriously also, and was one of the best stage directors of his day. Some of his dramatic methods were so far in advance of his time that they puzzled or disgusted many of his patrons, but without doubt he profoundly influenced the art of the American stage. Men like William Gillette and Clyde Fitch quite frankly acknowledged their indebtedness to him.

Jim and Katharine both had an exaggerated notion of my importance in the world of art and letters, and listened to me with a respect, a fellowship and an appreciation which increased my sense of responsibility and inspired me to greater effort as a novelist. Together we hammered out questions of art and economics, and planned new plays.

Those were inspiring hours to us all and we still refer to them as "the good old Convent Avenue days!"

New York City itself was incredibly simpler and quieter than it is now, but to me it was a veritable h.e.l.l because of the appalling inequality which lay between the palaces of the landlords and the tenements of the proletariat. The monstrous injustice of permitting a few men to own the land on which millions toiled for the barest living tore at my heart strings then, as it does now, and the worst of it rested in the fact that the landless seemed willing to be robbed for the pleasure of those who could not even dissipate the wealth which rolled in upon them in waves of unearned rent.

And yet, much as I felt this injustice and much as the city affected me, I could not put it into fiction. "It is not my material," I said. "My dominion is the West."

Though at ease, I had no feeling of being at home in this tumult. I was only stopping in it in order to be near the Hernes, my brother, and Howells. The Georges, whom I had come to know very well, interested me greatly and often of an evening I went over to the East Side, to the unpretentious brick house in which The Prophet and his delightful family lived. Of course this home was doctrinaire, but then I liked that flavor, and so did the Hernes, although Katharine's keen sense of humor sometimes made us all seem rather like thorough-going cranks--which we were.

In the midst of our growing security and expanding acquaintanceship, my brother and I often returned to the problem of our aging parents.

My brother was all for bringing them east but to this I replied, "No, that is out of the question. The old pioneer would never be happy in a city."

"We could buy a farm over in Jersey."

"What would he do there? He would be among strangers and in strange conditions.--No, the only solution is to get him to go back either to Iowa or to Wisconsin. He will find even that very hard to do for it will seem like failure but he must do it. For mother's sake I'd rather see him go back to the LaCrosse valley. It would be a pleasure to visit them there."

"That is the thing to do," my brother agreed. "I'll never get out to Dakota again."

The more I thought about this the lovelier it seemed. The hills, the farmhouses, the roads, the meadows all had delightful a.s.sociations in my mind, as I knew they must have in my mother's mind and the idea of a regained homestead in the place of my birth began to engage my thought whenever I had leisure to ponder my problem and especially whenever I received a letter from my mother.

There was a certain poetic justice in the return of my father and mother to the land from which they had been lured a quarter of a century before, and I was willing to make any sacrifice to bring it about. I take no credit for this, it was a purely selfish plan, for so long as they were alone out there on the plain my own life must continue to be troubled and uneasy.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

The End of the Sunset Trail

In February while attending a conference of reformers in St. Louis I received a letter from my mother which greatly disturbed me. "I wish I could see you," she wrote. "I am not very well this winter, I can't go out very often and I get very lonesome for my boys. If only you did not live so far away!"

There was something in this letter which made all that I was doing in the convention of no account, and on the following evening I took the train for Columbia, the little village in which my parents were spending the winter, filled with remorseful forebodings. My pain and self-accusation would not let me rest. Something clutched my heart every time I thought of my crippled mother prisoned in a Dakota shanty and no express train was swift enough to satisfy my desire to reach her. The letter had been forwarded to me and I was afraid that she might be actually ill.

That ride next day from Sioux City to Aberdeen was one of the gloomiest I had ever experienced. Not only was my conscience uneasy, it seemed that I was being hurled into a region of arctic storms. A terrific blizzard possessed the plain, and the engine appeared to fight its way like a brave animal. All day it labored forward while the coaches behind it swayed in the ever-increasing power of the tempest, their wheels emitting squeals of pain as they ground through the drifts, and I sitting in my overcoat with collar turned high above my ears, my hands thrust deep in my pockets, sullenly counted the hours of my discomfort.

The windows, furred deep with frost, let in but a pallid half-light, thus adding a mental dusk to the actual menace of the storm.

After each station the brakemen re-entered as if blown in by the blast, and a vapor, white as a shower of flour, filled the door-way, behind them. Occasionally as I cleared a s.p.a.ce for a peephole through the rimy panes, I caught momentary glimpses of a level, treeless earth, desolate as the polar ocean swept by ferocious elemental warfare.

No life was to be seen save here and there a suffering steer or colt, humped under the lee of a straw-stack. The streets of the small wooden towns were deserted. No citizen was abroad, only the faint smoke of chimneys testified to the presence of life beneath the roof-trees.

Occasionally a local pa.s.senger came in, puffing and whistling with loud explosions of excited comment over the storm which he seemed to treat as an agreeable diversion, but the conductor, who followed, threshing his hands and nursing his ears, swore in emphatic dislike of the country and climate, but even this controversy offered no relief to the through pa.s.sengers who sat in frozen stoical silence. There was very little humor in a Dakota blizzard for them--or for me.

At six o'clock that night I reached the desolate end of my journey. My father met me at the station and led the way to the low square bleak cottage which he had rented for the winter. Mother, still unable to lift her feet from the floor, opened the door to us, and reaching her, as I did, through that terrifying tempest, made her seem as lonely as a castaway on some gelid Greenland coast.

Father was in unwonted depression. His crop had again failed to mature.

With nearly a thousand acres of wheat, he had harvested barely enough for the next year's seed. He was not entirely at the end of his faith, however; on the contrary, he was filled with desire of the farther west.

"The irrigated country is the next field for development. I'm going to sell out here and try irrigation in Montana. I want to get where I can regulate the water for my crops."

"You'll do nothing of the kind," I retorted. "You'll go no further west.

I have a better plan than that."

The wind roared on, all that night and all the next day, and during this time we did little but feed the stove and argue our widely separated plans. I told them of Franklin's success on the stage with Herne, and I described my own busy, though unremunerative life as a writer, and as I talked the world from which I came shone with increasing splendor.

Little by little the story of the country's decay came out. The village of Ordway had been moved away, nothing remained but the grain elevator.

Many of our old neighbors had gone "to the irrigation country" and more were planning to go as soon as they could sell their farms. Columbia was also in desolate decline. Its hotel stood empty, its windows broken, its doors sagging.