MY LIFE
[Illustration: From a photograph taken in 1894]
[Illustration: Signature]
_MY LIFE_
BY
JOSIAH FLYNT
Author of "Tramping with Tramps," "The World of Graft," Etc.
With an Introduction by ARTHUR SYMONS
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
MCMVIII
Copyright, 1908, by
THE OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
DEDICATION
I dedicate this book to all those human beings, who, like myself, have
come under the spell of that will-o'-the-wisp, _Die Ferne_, the
disappearing and fading Beyond, and who, like myself again, are doomed
sooner or later to see the folly of their quest, _Die Ferne_ receding
meanwhile farther and farther away from their vision. "It is the way of
the World," says the Philosopher. That my fellow dupes in the fruitless
chase may all become sweet-natured philosophers in the end, is my
earnest wish and prayer.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION--_By Arthur Symons_ xi
FOREWORD xxiii
I EARLIEST REMINISCENCES 3
II YOUTHFUL DAYS AT EVANSTON 18
III REST COTTAGE 30
IV EARLY COLLEGE DAYS 53
V MY FIRST IMPRISONMENT 75
VI IN A REFORM SCHOOL 86
VII EARLY TRAMPING EXPERIENCES 101
VIII MY VOYAGE TO EUROPE 120
IX UNTER DEN LINDEN 141
X BERLIN UNIVERSITY 152
XI WANDERINGS IN GERMANY 167
XII A VISIT TO LONDON 177
XIII THE BLOOMSBURY GUARDS 190
XIV SOME LONDON ACQUAINTANCES 196
XV TWO TRAMPING EXPERIENCES 201
XVI SWITZERLAND AND GERMANY 206
XVII A VISIT TO TOLSTOY 227
XVIII SOME ANECDOTES OF TOLSTOY 241
XIX I MEET GENERAL KUROPATKIN 248
XX IN ST. PETERSBURG 258
XXI I RETURN TO AMERICA 269
XXII NEW YORK AGAIN 273
XXIII RAILROAD EXPERIENCES 287
XXIV TRYING TO LIVE BY MY PEN 295
XXV WITH THE POWERS THAT PREY 302
XXVI HONOR AMONG THIEVES SO CALLED 323
JOSIAH FLYNT--An Appreciation--_By Alfred Hodder_ 341
JOSIAH FLYNT--An Impression--_By Emily M. Burbank_ 348
A FINAL WORD--_By Bannister Merwin_ 356
ILLUSTRATIONS
Josiah Flynt _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
The Boy--Josiah Flynt 20
Oliver Atherton Willard 116
Madam Willard 170
Frances E. Willard 250
Josiah Flynt, in his "garb of the road," while tramping in Russia 304
INTRODUCTION
I
It seems a long time since the day when Josiah Flynt came to me in the
Temple, with a letter of introduction from his sister, whom I had met at
the house of friends in London. The contrast was startling. I saw a
little, thin, white, shriveled creature, with determined eyes and tight
lips, taciturn and self-composed, quietly restless; he was eying me
critically, as I thought, out of a face prepared for disguises, yet with
a strangely personal life looking out, ambiguously enough, from
underneath. He spoke a hybrid speech; he was not interested apparently
in anything that interested me. I had never met any one of the sort
before, but I found myself almost instantly accepting him as one of the
people who were to mean something to me. There are those people in life,
and the others; the others do not matter.
The people who knew me wondered, I think, at my liking Flynt; his
friends, I doubt not, wondered that he could get on with me. With all
our superficial unlikeness, something within us insisted on our being
comrades. We found out the points at which undercurrents in us flowed
together. Where I had dipped, he had plunged, and that aim, which I was
expressing about then, to "roam in the sun and air with vagabonds, to
haunt the strange corners of cities, to know all the useless, and
improper, and amusing people who are alone very much worth knowing," had
been achieved by him. I was ready for just such a companion, hesitating
on the edge of a road which he had traveled.
We went together, not only about London, but on little journeys to
France and Belgium, and on a longer visit to Germany. All that was
ceaselessly entertaining to me, and came as a sort of margin to the not
more serious enterprises of "The Savoy," the days of Beardsley, Conder,
and Dowson. Flynt never quite fitted into that group, but he watched it
with curiosity, as part of the material for his study of life.
I have been reading over his kindly and playful sayings about me in this
book, which are veracious enough in the main substance of them, and it
hurts me to think that I shall never go round to the Crown with him any
more, or sit with him again in a café in Berlin. It was there, at the
Embergshalle, that I found a poem of mine which is called "Emmy," but it
was not for the sake of "material," or for those "impressions and
sensations" of which he speaks, that I went about with him, but for the
sake of the things themselves; and I wondered if he realized it. So what
pleases me most now is when he says that he never thought of my books,
or of myself as a literary man, when we were together. It was because he
was so much more, in his way, than a literary man, that I cared for him
so much, and it was of things more intimate than books that I liked to
talk with him.
His ideas were always his own, and seemed to most people to be
eccentric. He had come to them by way of his own experience, or by
deduction from the experience of others whom he had learned to know from
inside. His mind was stubborn; you saw it in his dogged face, in which
the thin lips were pressed tightly together and the eyes fixed level. He
was rarely turned out of his ground by an argument, for he avoided
debating about things that he did not know. I never saw him conscious of
the beauty of anything; I do not think he read much, or cared for books.
His talk was generally cynical, and he believed in few people and few
opinions.
Flynt had no sense of style, and when he began to try to write down what
he had seen and what he thought of it, the first result was at once
tedious and formal, the life all gone out of what had so literally been
lived. I was a fierce critic, and drove and worried him to be natural in
his writing, to write as he would talk, in a dry, curt, often ironical
way. His danger in writing was to be too literal for art and not quite
literal enough for science. He was too completely absorbed in people and
things to be able ever to get aloof from them; and to write well of what
one has done and seen one must be able to get aloof from oneself and
from others. If ever a man loved wandering for its own sake it was
George Borrow; but George Borrow had a serious and whimsical brain
always at work, twisting the things that he saw into shapes that
pleased him more than the shapes of the things in themselves. I tried to
get Flynt to read Borrow, but books were of little use to him. He did
finally succeed in saying more or less straightforwardly what he wanted
to say, but his work will remain a human document, of value in itself,
behind which one can divine only a part of the whole man. There was far
more in his mind, his sensations were far subtler, his curiosity was
more odd and rare, than any one who did not know him will ever recognize
from his writing. His life was a marvelous invention: he created it in
action, and the words in which he put it down are only a kind of
commentary, or footnote to it.
Human curiosity: that made up the main part of Flynt's nature; and with
it went the desire to find out everything by trying it, not merely by
observing. None of the great wanderers of letters, Borrow or Stevenson,
was so really a born vagabond; none had so little in the way of second
thoughts behind him on his way through the world. The spectacle, the
material, all that was so much to these artists, was to him only so much
negligible quantity, an outer covering which he had to get through. He
went to see Tolstoy in Russia, and was taken into his house, and digged
in his garden. He went to see Ibsen at Munich. To neither did he go for
anything but that for which he went to the tramps and convicts: to find
out what sort of human beings they were at close quarters.
Whatever he has written of value has been the record of personal
experience, and after several books in which there is much serious
instruction as well as external fact and adventure, he ended with this
candid story of himself, of what he knew about himself, and of that
larger part which he did not understand, except that it led him where he
had to go. The narrative breaks off before he had time to end it, with
what was really the comedy of his life: the vagabond, ending by becoming
so fantastically useful a member of society; the law, which he had
defied, clever enough to annex him; he himself, clever enough to take
wages for doing over again what he had done once for nothing, at its
expense. Was it a way of "ranging" himself a little, and would he, if
things had gone well, have answered the question, which I was fond of
asking: What would remain for him in the world when he had tramped over
all the roads of it? As it happened, he got short benefit from the
change of position. He made more money than was good for him, out of
detective service, first for the railroads, then for the police, and
what had been one of the temptations of his life was easier, indeed
seemed to him now necessary, to be succumbed to. He had an inherited
tendency to drink, which had been partly kept down; now this new
contact, so perilous for him, reawakened and strengthened the tendency
into permanence. Gradually things slipped through his hands; the demand
for books, articles, lectures, increased, as his power of complying with
that demand ebbed out of him. He had friends, who held by him as long as
he would let them. One of them was the only woman whom he had ever
seriously cared for, besides his mother and his sisters. For three
years he was rarely sober, and drink killed him. At the end he shut
himself away in his room at the hotel in Chicago, as Dowson shut himself
away in his lodgings in Featherstone Buildings, and Lionel Johnson in
his rooms in Gray's Inn; as a sick animal goes off into a lonely corner
in the woods to die in.
II
Josiah Flynt was never quite at home under a roof or in the company of
ordinary people, where he seemed always like one caught and detained
unwillingly. An American, who had studied in a German university,
brought up, during his early life, in Berlin, he always had a fixed
distaste for the interests of those about him, and an instinctive
passion for whatever exists outside the border-line which shuts us in
upon respectability. There is a good deal of affectation in the literary
revolt against respectability, together with a child's desire to shock
its elders, and snatch a lurid reputation from those whom it professes
to despise. My friend never had any of this affectation; life was not a
masquerade to him, and his disguises were the most serious part of his
life. The simple fact is, that respectability, the normal existence of
normal people, did not interest him; he could not even tell you why,
without searching consciously for reasons; he was born with the soul of
a vagabond, into a family of gentle, exquisitely refined people: he was
born so, that is all. Human curiosity, which in most of us is
subordinate to some more definite purpose, existed in him for its own
sake; it was his inner life, he had no other; his form of
self-development, his form of culture. It seems to me that this man, who
had seen so much of humanity, who had seen humanity so closely, where it
has least temptation to be anything but itself, really achieved culture,
almost perfect of its kind, though the kind were of his own invention.
He was not an artist, who can create; he was not a thinker or a dreamer,
or a man of action; he was a student of men and women, and of the
outcasts among men and women, just those people who are least
accessible, least cared for, least understood, and therefore, to one
like my friend, most alluring. He was not conscious of it, but I think
there was a great pity at the heart of this devouring curiosity. It was
his love of the outcast which made him like to live with outcasts, not
as a visitor in their midst, but as one of themselves.
For here is the difference between this man and the other adventurers
who have gone about among tramps, and criminals, and other misunderstood
or unfortunate people. Some have been philanthropists, and have gone
with the Bible in their hands; others have been journalists, and have
gone with note-books in their hands; all have gone as visitors, plunging
into "the bath of multitude," as one might go holiday making to the
seaside and plunge into the sea. But this man, wherever he has gone, has
gone with a complete abandonment to his surroundings; no tramp has ever
known that "Cigarette" was not really a tramp; he has begged, worked,
ridden outside trains, slept in workhouses and gaols, not shirked one of
the hardships of his way; and all the time he has been living his own
life (whatever that enigma may be!) more perfectly, I am sure, than when
he was dining every day at his mother's or his sister's table.
The desire of traveling on many roads, and the desire of seeing many
foreign faces, are almost always found united in that half-unconscious
instinct which makes a man a vagabond. But I have never met any one in
whom the actual love of the road is so strong as it was in Flynt. I
remember, some ten years ago, when we had given one another rendezvous
at St. Petersburg, that I found, when I got there, that he was already
half-way across Siberia, on the new railway which they were in the act
of making. But for the most part he walked. Wherever he walked he made
friends; when we used to walk about London together he would get into
the confidence of every sailor whom we came upon in the pot-houses about
the docks. He was not fastidious, and would turn his hand, as the phrase
is, to anything. And he went through every sort of privation, endured
dirt, accustomed himself to the society of every variety of his
fellow-creatures, without a murmur or regret.
After all, comfort is a convention, and pleasure an individual thing to
every individual. "To travel is to die continually," wrote a half-crazy
poet who spent most of the years of a short fantastic life in London.
Well, that is a line that I have often found myself repeating as I
shivered in railway stations on the other side of Europe, or lay in a
plunging berth as the foam chased the snow flakes off the deck. One
finds, no doubt, a particular pleasure in looking back on past
discomforts, and I am convinced that a good deal of the attraction of
traveling comes from an unconscious throwing forward of the mind to the
time when the uncomfortable present shall have become a stirring memory
of the past. But I am speaking now for those in whom a certain
luxuriousness of temperament finds itself in sharp conflict with the
desire of movement. To my friend, I think, this was hardly a conceivable
state of mind. He was a stoic, as the true adventurer should be. Rest,
even as a change, did not appeal to him. He thought acutely, but only
about facts, about the facts before him; and so he did not need to
create an atmosphere about himself which change might disturb. He was
fond of his family, his friends; but he could do without them, like a
man with a mission. He had no mission, only a great thirst; and this
thirst for the humanity of every nation and for the roads of every
country drove him onward as resistlessly as the drunkard's thirst for
drink, or the idealist's thirst for an ideal.
And it seems to me that few men have realized, as this man realized,
that "not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end."
He chose his life for himself, and he has lived it, regardless of
anything else in the world. He has desired strange, almost inaccessible
things, and he has attained whatever he has desired. Once, as he was
walking with a friend in the streets of New York, he said suddenly: "Do
you know, I wonder what it is like to chase a man? I know what it is
like to be chased, but to chase a man would be a new sensation." The
other man laughed, and thought no more about it. A week later Flynt came
to him with an official document; he had been appointed a private
detective. He was set on the track of a famous criminal (whom, as it
happened, he had known as a tramp); he made his plans, worked them out
successfully, and the criminal was caught. To have done it was enough:
he had had the sensation; he had no need, at that moment, to do any more
work as a detective. Is there not, in this curiosity in action, this
game mastered and then cast aside, a wonderful promptness, sureness, a
moral quality which is itself success in life?
To desire so much, and what is so human; to make one's life out of the
very fact of living it as one chooses; to create a unique personal
satisfaction out of discontent and curiosity; to be so much oneself in
learning so much from other people: is not this, in its way, an ideal,
and has not this man achieved it? He had the soul and the feet of a
vagabond. He cared passionately for men and women, where they are most
vividly themselves, because they are no longer a part of society. He
wandered across much of the earth, but he did not care for the beauty or
strangeness of what he saw, only for the people. Writing to me once from
Samarcand, he said: "I have seen the tomb of the Prophet Daniel; I have
seen the tomb of Tamerlane." But Tamerlane was nothing to him, the
Prophet Daniel was nothing to him. He mentioned them only because they
would interest me. He was trying to puzzle out and piece together the
psychology of the Persian beggar whom he had left at the corner of the
way.
ARTHUR SYMONS.
FOREWORD
This book explains itself in most ways, I hope, and a prefatory portico
almost seems superfluous. In general, such addenda are distasteful to
me; they look like an apology for what the author has to offer later on.
No portico would be attached to the edifice I have now constructed were
it not that there are two points I want to make clear and have failed to
do so sufficiently to my satisfaction in the narrative proper.
First, it is fair to state at the outset that an autobiography coming
from a man under forty is, to say the least, an unconventional
performance which requires some explanation. I believe it was no less a
genius than Goethe, however, who hazarded the remark that what a man is
going to do that's worth while he does before thirty. Goethe's own life
gives the lie to the statement, but there is a kernel of truth in its
suggestiveness. In my case there happens to be much more than a mere
kernel of truth in the remark. What I am going to do as a passionate
explorer of _Die Ferne_--the ever-disappearing Beyond--has been done for
all time, so far as the Under World is concerned. The game is over and
the dealer retires. My dead Self I herewith put aside, and begin afresh
with a new world. The old Self died hard. I can hear its bones rattling
yet. But there came a time when it had to go, and now that I know that
it is really and truly gone, that to-morrow morning, for instance, to
find peace and contentment for the day it will not be necessary for me
to take up my staff and go nervously through the same antics and
searchings as of old, a sweet satisfaction steals over me and I am glad
to be alive. This book puts a finish for the present, at any rate, on
all that I have heretofore written about the Under World, and sums up
what I won and lost during my wanderings.
The second point to be cleared up I will put interrogatively--Was it
worth while, after living the life, finishing with it, and passing on to
pastures new and green, to tell the story? Benvenuto Cellini, that
cheerful romancer, declares that a man, on reaching forty, if he has
done anything of value and importance, is justified in putting his
exploits down in writing, that he is morally bound to do so indeed if he
would hold up his head among his fellows. For nearly forty years I
chased the Beyond--that misty and slippery sorceress, ever beckoning
onward to the wanderer, yet never satisfying, never showing herself in
her true deceitful colors, until after long years of acquaintance. The
chase is made by many travelers of the Upper World, hypnotized as I was,
but by me perforce in that strange Under World from which so many
explorers never return. This, it seems to me, is worth telling about. I
have made the story as simple and direct as possible. May he who reads
it, if perchance the sorceress is tempting him, too, hold fast to a
better ideal, although his life be narrow and his task to fulfill a
tiresome routine.
MY LIFE
CHAPTER I
EARLIEST REMINISCENCES
My old nurse once told me that I came into this world with a "cowl,"
which had to be snatched off quickly, else I should have laid there to
be a prophet. Why a state of blindness at one's birth should premise
extraordinary vision, spiritual or otherwise, later on, is not clear. No
such vision has ever been vouchsafed to me; on the contrary, as my story
will reveal, that early blindness continued in one form or another all
through my search for _Die Ferne_.
My very earliest remembrance is a runaway trip, culminating in the
village lockup. Although my mother declares that I was at least five
years old when this happened, I have always believed that I was nearer
four; at any rate, I remember that I wore dresses. The circumstances of
the truancy and imprisonment were as follows: My parents were in the
neighboring city for the day, and I had been left at home with the
nurse. She had punished me pretty severely for some slight offense, and
had then gone to the lake for water, leaving me in a lane in front of
the house, very much disquieted. A sudden impulse to run took hold of
me--anywhere, it did not matter, so long as the nurse could not find
me. So off I started with a rush for the main street of the village, my
little white panties dangling along after me. That was my first
conscious and determined effort to see the world in my own way and at my
own discretion. It was the beginning of that long series of runaway
excursions which have blessed or marred my life ever since. No child
ever had a greater measure of unalloyed joy in his soul than I did when
I dashed down that village lane, and no later escapade has ever brought
me quite the same fine shade of satisfaction.
In the main street the village police officer stopped me, and on
learning who I was, took me to the lockup for safe-keeping until my
parents returned in the evening. I was not actually put in a cell--the
lockup was fire station and village prison in one, and I was given the
freedom of the so-called engine room. I remember that I spent most of
the time sucking a stick of candy and marveling at the fire apparatus.
Nevertheless it was imprisonment of a kind, and I knew it. It was the
only punishment I received. My parents picked me up in the evening,
apparently much amused. Could my father have realized what that initial
truancy was to lead to I should probably have received one of his
whippings, but fortunately he was in a mood to consider it humorously.
My father died at the early age of forty-two, when I was eight years old
(1877). He was a tall, slender man, lithe, nervous and possessed of a
long brown beard which always impressed me when looking at him. He was
the editor-in-chief of a Chicago daily newspaper, which died six months
after his demise. I have heard it said that he was the only man who
could have made the paper a success, and trying to do this probably wore
him out. He had experimented with various activities before taking the
newspaper position, but he thought that he had at last found his
life-work when he developed into an editor. The last year of his life he
became very much interested in church matters. He came of good New
England stock, his American progenitor helping to found the town of
Concord, Mass.
I have often heard it said that my father was a brilliant man gifted
with a remarkable sense of humor. He did not favor me with his humorous
side very often, but I do recall a funny incident in which he revealed
to all of us children a phase of his character which my mother probably
knew much more about. Although my father had to leave the old brown
house early in the morning in order to catch his customary train for the
city, he insisted rigidly on holding family prayers before leaving.
These prayers did not mean much to me whatever they may have stood for
with him, but there was one morning when they did please me. My old cat
had brought a litter of kittens into the world over night, and at prayer
time had deposited them in father's chair. Not noticing them, he took
the Bible and proceeded to sit down. There ensued a great deal of
miyowing and spitting. "Damn the cats!" exclaimed my father, springing
up, and then taking another chair he continued with the prayers. I
laughed over this happening all day, and my father never again exposed
himself to me in such human garb.
Perhaps my older sister was his favorite child, if he played any
favorites. Whether she understood him better than the rest of us did I
cannot say, but her whippings seemed to me to come very infrequently.
Her ability to get him out of a punishing mood is well illustrated by
the following incident.
Something that she had done had vexed him, as I remember the story, and
she was in a fair way to be punished--"whaled," indeed, my father being
unwilling to distinguish between the sexes in whippings as they applied
to children. My sister had an inspiration as we considered it at the
time--climbing into her father's lap, and gently stroking his almost
straight hair, she said softly: "What lovely, curly locks you have,
Papa!" The incongruity of her remark made him smile, and when he had
once passed this Rubicon in his punishing moods he became friendly. I
was never as clever as my sister in interviews of this character. What
boy is as clever as his sister, when it comes to acting?
My father gone, the battle of life for us children shifted to my mother.
My father left very few funds behind him, and it was necessary for my
mother to be mother and bread-winner at the same time. I shall not enter
into an account of her various activities to keep the family together,
but she did this somehow in most honorable and useful ways for nearly
ten years, departing then for Germany with the two girls to engage in
educational work. No man ever made a braver struggle against fearful
odds than did this mother of mine, and when I think of my almost
unceasing cussedness throughout her struggle a remorse comes over me
which is best not described. We stayed in the village during the ten
years in question, and I grew to be a youth well on in my teens, but
never looking my years, nor do I to-day in spite of the hard life I have
led, and a great many days and nights spent in hospitals. This is not
said to coddle my vanity. I merely mean that I got from my parents a
wonderful constitution. I hardly think that the average man, had he
risked his health as I have done, would have pulled through so well.
Our village, since developed into one of Chicago's most beautiful and
fashionable suburbs--I sometimes think it is the most entrancing spot
near a large city, so far as nature alone goes, that exists--was a
strange locality for a wanderer of my caliber to grow up in. Settled
originally by sturdy New Englanders and central New Yorkers, it early
became a Western stronghold of Methodism. My people on both sides were
early comers, my mother's father being a divinity professor in the local
theological institute. My father's people inclined to Congregationalism
I think, but they swung round, and when I knew my grandmother she was an
ardent communicant among the Methodists. Such church instruction as I
could stand was also found in this fold--or shall I say party? Some
years ago an ex-governor of Colorado was saying nice things about my
mother to the United States Minister in Berlin, and to clinch his
argument why the Minister should look out for my mother, the ex-governor
said: "And, Mr. Phelps, she belongs to the greatest political party in
our country--the Methodist Church!" It never interested me very much to
look into the church's machinery--I had what seemed much more important
and seductive work in planning and carrying out my runaway trips--but in
later years I must confess to having been impressed with similarities in
Methodism as a religious policy and politics as a business. Methodism
considered simply as a religious organization, ought to be described by
some one who can study it impartially. The struggle for the high places
in the church at conferences is woefully like that in political
conventions. Men who want to be bishops pull wires and secure supporters
in almost identically the same way that office seekers in conventions
make their arrangements, and the fat jobs in the ministry are as
earnestly coveted by aspiring preachers as are political offices in the
nation at large. Perhaps this is all right; certainly, if figures,
churches and converts count, the Methodists have done a great work; but
Methodism as a religious cult had to pass me by.
The good villagers tried numberless times to have me "converted," and
officially I have gone through this performance a number of times.
Strangely enough, after nearly every one of my earlier runaway trips and
my humble return to the village, bedraggled and torn, some revivalist
had preceded me, and was holding forth at a great rate in the "Old
First," where my people communed. My grandmother, my father's mother,
invariably insisted on my attending the revival services in the hope
that finally I would come to my senses and really "get religion." As
much as anything else to show that I was sorry for the anxiety I had
caused my mother during the latest escapade, I would take my
grandmother's advice and join the mourners at the mercy seat. Two or
three visits usually sufficed to effect a change in me, and I would hold
up my hand with those who desired conversion. I was not insincere in
this, far from it. It came from nervousness and a desire to go home and
be able to say honestly that I meant to mend my ways. I shall never
forget the last time I attempted to get Divine grace and healing at one
of these meetings. The preceding escapade had been woefully bad, and it
was very much up to me to atone for it in no unmistakable manner. The
relatives were all looking at me askance, and the neighbors were
cautioning their children more particularly than usual to keep out of my
company. Indeed, I became at a jump the village "bad boy," and I never
really got over this appellation. I have heard good Methodist mothers
say, as I passed by in the street: "There goes that awful Flynt boy,"
and I came to look upon myself as the local boy outcast. In later years
I have changed considerably in my attitude toward people who criticise
and revile me, but at the time in question I was a timid, bashful lad in
temperament, and the ruthless remarks made by the Methodist mothers--the
Methodist fathers also discussed my "case" pretty mouthily--made scars
in my soul that are there yet. The truth of the matter is, I was not so
innately bad as my persistent running away and occasional pilfering
seemed to imply. I was simply an ordinary boy possessed of an
extraordinary bump for wandering, which, when the "go-fever" was in me,
sent me off to strange parts and peculiar adventures before any one had
time to realize that I was in one of my tantrums. The attack would come
so suddenly that I was off and away before I had myself fully realized
that I had been seized with one of the periodical fits.
But to return for a moment to that last revival, and my last
"conversion." "Josiah," said my grandmother, "there is a good man
holding forth in the church to-night, and do you go over and get good
from him." I was prepared to do anything to stop the critical glances of
the village, and that evening I made what was supposed to be a full
surrender and declared myself "converted" forever more. Whether the
"good man" hypnotized me into all this, whether I consciously made
public declaration of conversion from selfish motives, or whether it was
all sincere and upright I can't tell now. Probably all three agencies
were at work at the time. A retired captain in the army, himself a
convert of not many months, put my name down in his book among those who
had experienced a change of heart. "Josiah, this time you mean it, don't
you?" he asked, and I said "Yes." I walked out of the church in a warm
glow, and felt purged from sin as never before. A few weeks later I was
off on another _Wanderlust_ trip of exploration.
It is a pity in such cases that the truant's wanderings cannot be
directed, if wander he must. In my case there was plainly no doubt that
I possessed the nomadic instinct in an abnormal degree. Whippings could
not cure it, shutting me up in my room without any clothes only made
the next seizure harder to resist, and moral suasion fell flat as a
pancake. Revivals and conversions were serviceable merely in reinstating
me temporarily in the good graces of my grandmother. The outlook ahead
of me was dark indeed for my mother, and yet it was from her, as I have
learned to believe from what she has told me in later years, that I
probably got some of my wandering proclivities. There was a time in her
life, I have heard her say, when the mere distant whistle of a railroad
train would set her go-instincts tingling, and only a sense of duty and
fine control of self held her back. This call of _Die Ferne_, as the
Germans name it, this almost unexplainable sympathy with the slightest
appeal or temptation to project myself into the Beyond--the world
outside of my narrow village world--was my trouble from almost babyhood
until comparatively a few years ago. The longing to go would come upon
me without any warning in the dead of night sometimes, stealing into my
consciousness under varying disguises as the years went by and the
passion required fresh incentives to become active and alert. In the
beginning a sudden turn of the imagination sufficed to send me
worldwards, and I would be off without let or leave for a week at least,
usually bringing up at the home of relatives in northern Wisconsin. They
would entertain me for a time, and then I would be shipped back to the
village to await another seizure. On one of these return trips I
traveled on one of the most unconventional railroad passes I have ever
known. The relative who generally superintended the return to the
village was an editor well known in his locality and to railroad men on
the road. On one of the last visits paid to his home he determined not
to trust me with the necessary money for the ticket, but to give me a
personal note to the conductor, which he did. It read: "This is a
runaway boy. Please pass him to ---- and collect fare from me on your
return." It was as serviceable at the time as any _bona fide_ pass,
annual or otherwise, that I have had and used in later years.
As I got well on into my teens and was at work with my school books, it
naturally required a different kind of appeal to start me off on a trip
from the simple call of the railroad train which had sufficed in the
earlier years. For periods of time, long or short, as my temperament
dictated, I became definitely interested in my books and in trying to
behave, for my mother's sake, if for no other reason. I knew only too
well that my failing caused her much anxiety and worriment, and for
weeks I would honestly struggle against all appeals to vamose. Then,
without any warning, the mere reading of some biography of a self-made
man, who had struggled independently in the world from about my age on
to the Presidency perhaps, would fire me with a desire to do likewise in
some far-off community where there was the conventional academy and
attendant helps to fame and fortune. There was an academy in our own
village and I attended it, but the appeal to go elsewhere carried with
it a picture of independence, midnight oil and self-supporting work,
which fascinated me, and at an age when most boys have got over their
gusto for wandering, I would start off in secret, to return famous, some
day, I hoped.
One of the last excursions undertaken with an idea of setting myself up
in business or academic independence is worth describing. There had been
considerable friction in the household on my account for several days,
and I deliberately planned with a neighboring banker's son to light out
for parts unknown. I was the proud owner of two cows at the time,
furnishing milk to my mother and a few neighbors at an agreed upon
price. I had been able to pay for the cows out of the milk money, and my
mother frankly recognized that the cows were my property. The banker's
boy was also imbued with the irritating friction in his family--he was
considerably older and larger than I. We put our heads together and
decided to go West--where, in the West, was immaterial, but toward the
setting sun we were determined to travel. My companion in this strange
venture had no such property to contribute toward financing the trip as
I had, but he was the proud possessor of five greyhounds of some value,
several guns and a saddle. We looked about the village for a horse and
cart to carry us, and we at last dickered with a young man who owned a
poor, half-starved, spavined beast and a rickety cart. I gave him my two
cows in exchange for his outfit, a deal which netted him easily fifty
per cent. profit. The cart loaded, our outfit was the weirdest looking
expedition that ever started for the immortal West. The muzzles of guns
protruded under the covering on the sides, the five dogs sniffed
uneasily at the cart, and the dying steed threw his ears back in utter
horror. In this fashion, one bright afternoon in spring, our hearts
throbbing with excitement, we started forth on our Don Quixote trip,
choosing Chicago as our first goal. We arrived in that city, twelve
miles distant, after four days' travel and a series of accidents to both
cart and horse. It was a Sunday morning, and we had found our way
somehow to the fashionable boulevard, Michigan Avenue, about church
time. Our outfit caused so much embarrassing amusement to the people in
the street that we turned city-wards to find the station where the
C. B. & Q. R. R. started its trains West. We knew of no other way to go
West than to follow these tracks, I having already been over them as far
as Iowa. We came to grief and complete pause in Madison Street. I was
driving, and my companion was walking on the pavement. Suddenly, and
without any warning, a stylishly dressed man hailed my companion, and
asked him if his name was so-and-so, giving the young man's correct
name. The latter "acknowledged the corn," as he afterwards put it to me,
and I was told to draw up to the curb, where I learned that the dapper
stranger was none other than a Pinkerton operative. Our trip West was
nipped in the bud then and there. The cart was driven to a stable, and
we boys were taken to the Pinkerton offices, where I spent the day
pretty much alone, except when one of the Pinkertons, I think it was,
lectured me about the horrors and intricacies of the West, and exhorted
me to mend my ways and stay at home. Our horse succumbed to his
wanderings soon after being returned to his original owner, and my cows
were got back by process of law.
Later on, a good old major, a friend of my mother's, recommended that
she send me West in regular fashion, and let me see for myself. "A good
roughing-it may bring him to his senses," said the major, and I was
shipped to a tiny community in western Nebraska, consisting of a country
store about the size of a large wood-shed, and four sod cabins. An older
brother had preceded me here, and had been advised by letter to watch
out for my coming. I shall never forget the woe-begone look on his face
when I slipped off the snow-covered stage and said "Hello." He had not
yet received my mother's letter of advice. "_You_ here?" he groaned, and
he led me into one of the sod houses. I explained matters to him, and he
resigned himself to my presence, but I was never made to feel very
welcome and in six weeks was home again, chastened in spirit and
disillusionized about the West.
I must confess to still other runaway trips after this Western failure,
but I have always felt that that undertaking did as much to cure my
wandering disease as anything else. Dime novels soon ceased to have a
charm for me, and home became more of an attraction. In spite of all
this, however, in spite of some manly struggles to do right, my longest
and saddest disappearance from home and friends was still ahead of me.
It belongs to another section of the book, but I may say here that it
wound up the runaway trips forever. The travels that followed may have
been prompted by the call of _Die Ferne_, but they were aboveboard and
regular.
Now, whence came this strange passion, for such it was, found in milder
form probably in all boys and in some girls, but uncommonly lodged in
me? My pilferings and tendency to distort the truth when punishment was
in sight I account for principally by those miserable whalings my father
gave me. Punishment of some kind seemed to await me no matter how slight
the offense, and I probably reasoned, as I have suggested above, that if
"lickings" had to be endured it was worth while getting something that I
needed or wanted in exchange for them. My mother very charitably
accounts for my thefts and lies, on the ground that shortly before I was
born the family's material circumstances were pretty cramped, and that
this state of affairs may have reacted on me through her, producing my
illicit acquisitiveness.
But that insatiable _Wanderlust_, that quick response to the lightest
call of the seductive Beyond, that vagabond habit which caused my mother
so much pain and worriment--where did _that_ come from? It was a sorry
home-coming for my mother at night when the runaway fever had sent me
away again. She would come into the house, tired out, and ask the
governess for news of the children. The latter would make her daily
report, omitting reference to me. "And Josiah," my mother was wont to
say, "where is he?" "Gone!" the poor governess would wail, and my mother
would have to go about her duties the next day with a heavy heart. Now,
why was I so perverse and pig-headed in this matter, when I, myself,
the fever having subsided, suffered real remorse after each trip? Even
at this late day, after years of pondering over the case, I can only
make conjectures. I have hinted that probably I inherited from my mother
a love of being on the move, but she could control her desire to travel.
For years I was a helpless victim of the whims of the _Wanderlust_. All
that I have been able to evolve as a solution of the problem is this:
Granted the innate tendency to travel, living much solely with my own
thoughts, bashful and timid to a painful degree at times, and possessed
of an imagination which literally ran riot with itself every few months
or so, I was a victim of my own personality. This is all I have to offer
by way of explanation. I have never met a boy or man who had been
plagued to the same degree that I was.