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POOR WHITE
A NOVEL BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
AUTHOR OF
WINESBURG, OHIO
TO
TENNESSEE MITCHELL ANDERSON
[Note: The evident misprint of Book Six for Book Five in the original is
preserved here.]
BOOK I
CHAPTER I
Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on
the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri.
It was a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a
narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back
from the town--called in derision by river men “Mudcat Landing”--was
almost entirely worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow
and stony, was tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long gaunt men who
seemed as exhausted and no-account as the land on which they lived. They
were chronically discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of the
town were in the same state. The merchants, who ran their stores--poor
tumble-down ramshackle affairs--on the credit system, could not get pay
for the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, the
shoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work
they did. Only the town's two saloons prospered. The saloon keepers sold
their wares for cash and, as the men of the town and the farmers who
drove into town felt that without drink life was unbearable, cash always
could be found for the purpose of getting drunk.
Hugh McVey's father, John McVey, had been a farm hand in his youth
but before Hugh was born had moved into town to find employment in a
tannery. The tannery ran for a year or two and then failed, but John
McVey stayed in town. He also became a drunkard. It was the easy obvious
thing for him to do. During the time of his employment in the tannery he
had been married and his son had been born. Then his wife died and the
idle workman took his child and went to live in a tiny fishing shack
by the river. How the boy lived through the next few years no one ever
knew. John McVey loitered in the streets and on the river bank and
only awakened out of his habitual stupor when, driven by hunger or the
craving for drink, he went for a day's work in some farmer's field at
harvest time or joined a number of other idlers for an adventurous trip
down river on a lumber raft. The baby was left shut up in the shack by
the river or carried about wrapped in a soiled blanket. Soon after he
was old enough to walk he was compelled to find work in order that he
might eat. The boy of ten went listlessly about town at the heels of his
father. The two found work, which the boy did while the man lay sleeping
in the sun. They cleaned cisterns, swept out stores and saloons and at
night went with a wheelbarrow and a box to remove and dump in the river
the contents of out-houses. At fourteen Hugh was as tall as his father
and almost without education. He could read a little and could write his
own name, had picked up these accomplishments from other boys who came
to fish with him in the river, but he had never been to school. For days
sometimes he did nothing but lie half asleep in the shade of a bush on
the river bank. The fish he caught on his more industrious days he sold
for a few cents to some housewife, and thus got money to buy food for
his big growing indolent body. Like an animal that has come to its
maturity he turned away from his father, not because of resentment for
his hard youth, but because he thought it time to begin to go his own
way.
In his fourteenth year and when the boy was on the point of sinking into
the sort of animal-like stupor in which his father had lived, something
happened to him. A railroad pushed its way down along the river to his
town and he got a job as man of all work for the station master. He
swept out the station, put trunks on trains, mowed the grass in the
station yard and helped in a hundred odd ways the man who held the
combined jobs of ticket seller, baggage master and telegraph operator at
the little out-of-the-way place.
Hugh began a little to awaken. He lived with his employer, Henry
Shepard, and his wife, Sarah Shepard, and for the first time in his life
sat down regularly at table. His life, lying on the river bank through
long summer afternoons or sitting perfectly still for endless hours in
a boat, had bred in him a dreamy detached outlook on life. He found it
hard to be definite and to do definite things, but for all his stupidity
the boy had a great store of patience, a heritage perhaps from his
mother. In his new place the station master's wife, Sarah Shepard, a
sharp-tongued, good-natured woman, who hated the town and the people
among whom fate had thrown her, scolded at him all day long. She treated
him like a child of six, told him how to sit at table, how to hold his
fork when he ate, how to address people who came to the house or to
the station. The mother in her was aroused by Hugh's helplessness and,
having no children of her own, she began to take the tall awkward boy
to her heart. She was a small woman and when she stood in the house
scolding the great stupid boy who stared down at her with his small
perplexed eyes, the two made a picture that afforded endless amusement
to her husband, a short fat bald-headed man who went about clad in blue
overalls and a blue cotton shirt. Coming to the back door of his house,
that was within a stone's throw of the station, Henry Shepard stood with
his hand on the door-jamb and watched the woman and the boy. Above the
scolding voice of the woman his own voice arose. “Look out, Hugh,” he
called. “Be on the jump, lad! Perk yourself up. She'll be biting you if
you don't go mighty careful in there.”
Hugh got little money for his work at the railroad station but for the
first time in his life he began to fare well. Henry Shepard bought
the boy clothes, and his wife, Sarah, who was a master of the art of
cooking, loaded the table with good things to eat. Hugh ate until both
the man and woman declared he would burst if he did not stop. Then when
they were not looking he went into the station yard and crawling under
a bush went to sleep. The station master came to look for him. He cut a
switch from the bush and began to beat the boy's bare feet. Hugh awoke
and was overcome with confusion. He got to his feet and stood trembling,
half afraid he was to be driven away from his new home. The man and the
confused blushing boy confronted each other for a moment and then the
man adopted the method of his wife and began to scold. He was annoyed at
what he thought the boy's indolence and found a hundred little tasks
for him to do. He devoted himself to finding tasks for Hugh, and when he
could think of no new ones, invented them. “We will have to keep the big
lazy fellow on the jump. That's the secret of things,” he said to his
wife.
The boy learned to keep his naturally indolent body moving and his
clouded sleepy mind fixed on definite things. For hours he plodded
straight ahead, doing over and over some appointed task. He forgot the
purpose of the job he had been given to do and did it because it was
a job and would keep him awake. One morning he was told to sweep the
station platform and as his employer had gone away without giving him
additional tasks and as he was afraid that if he sat down he would fall
into the odd detached kind of stupor in which he had spent so large
a part of his life, he continued to sweep for two or three hours. The
station platform was built of rough boards and Hugh's arms were very
powerful. The broom he was using began to go to pieces. Bits of it flew
about and after an hour's work the platform looked more uncleanly than
when he began. Sarah Shepard came to the door of her house and stood
watching. She was about to call to him and to scold him again for his
stupidity when a new impulse came to her. She saw the serious determined
look on the boy's long gaunt face and a flash of understanding came to
her. Tears came into her eyes and her arms ached to take the great boy
and hold him tightly against her breast. With all her mother's soul she
wanted to protect Hugh from a world she was sure would treat him always
as a beast of burden and would take no account of what she thought of
as the handicap of his birth. Her morning's work was done and without
saying anything to Hugh, who continued to go up and down the platform
laboriously sweeping, she went out at the front door of the house and
to one of the town stores. There she bought a half dozen books, a
geography, an arithmetic, a speller and two or three readers. She
had made up her mind to become Hugh McVey's school teacher and with
characteristic energy did not put the matter off, but went about it
at once. When she got back to her house and saw the boy still going
doggedly up and down the platform, she did not scold but spoke to him
with a new gentleness in her manner. “Well, my boy, you may put the
broom away now and come to the house,” she suggested. “I've made up my
mind to take you for my own boy and I don't want to be ashamed of you.
If you're going to live with me I can't have you growing up to be a lazy
good-for-nothing like your father and the other men in this hole of a
place. You'll have to learn things and I suppose I'll have to be your
teacher.
“Come on over to the house at once,” she added sharply, making a quick
motion with her hand to the boy who with the broom in his hands stood
stupidly staring. “When a job is to be done there's no use putting it
off. It's going to be hard work to make an educated man of you, but it
has to be done. We might as well begin on your lessons at once.”
* * * * *
Hugh McVey lived with Henry Shepard and his wife until he became a grown
man. After Sarah Shepard became his school teacher things began to go
better for him. The scolding of the New England woman, that had but
accentuated his awkwardness and stupidity, came to an end and life in
his adopted home became so quiet and peaceful that the boy thought of
himself as one who had come into a kind of paradise. For a time the two
older people talked of sending him to the town school, but the woman
objected. She had begun to feel so close to Hugh that he seemed a part
of her own flesh and blood and the thought of him, so huge and ungainly,
sitting in a school room with the children of the town, annoyed and
irritated her. In imagination she saw him being laughed at by other boys
and could not bear the thought. She did not like the people of the town
and did not want Hugh to associate with them.
Sarah Shepard had come from a people and a country quite different in
its aspect from that in which she now lived. Her own people, frugal New
Englanders, had come West in the year after the Civil War to take up
cut-over timber land in the southern end of the state of Michigan.
The daughter was a grown girl when her father and mother took up the
westward journey, and after they arrived at the new home, had worked
with her father in the fields. The land was covered with huge stumps
and was difficult to farm but the New Englanders were accustomed to
difficulties and were not discouraged. The land was deep and rich and
the people who had settled upon it were poor but hopeful. They felt
that every day of hard work done in clearing the land was like laying
up treasure against the future. In New England they had fought against
a hard climate and had managed to find a living on stony unproductive
soil. The milder climate and the rich deep soil of Michigan was, they
felt, full of promise. Sarah's father like most of his neighbors had
gone into debt for his land and for tools with which to clear and work
it and every year spent most of his earnings in paying interest on a
mortgage held by a banker in a nearby town, but that did not discourage
him. He whistled as he went about his work and spoke often of a future
of ease and plenty. “In a few years and when the land is cleared we'll
make money hand over fist,” he declared.
When Sarah grew into young womanhood and went about among the young
people in the new country, she heard much talk of mortgages and of
the difficulty of making ends meet, but every one spoke of the hard
conditions as temporary. In every mind the future was bright with
promise. Throughout the whole Mid-American country, in Ohio, Northern
Indiana and Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa a hopeful spirit prevailed.
In every breast hope fought a successful war with poverty and
discouragement. Optimism got into the blood of the children and later
led to the same kind of hopeful courageous development of the whole
western country. The sons and daughters of these hardy people no doubt
had their minds too steadily fixed on the problem of the paying off of
mortgages and getting on in the world, but there was courage in them. If
they, with the frugal and sometimes niggardly New Englanders from whom
they were sprung, have given modern American life a too material
flavor, they have at least created a land in which a less determinedly
materialistic people may in their turn live in comfort.
In the midst of the little hopeless community of beaten men and yellow
defeated women on the bank of the Mississippi River, the woman who had
become Hugh McVey's second mother and in whose veins flowed the blood
of the pioneers, felt herself undefeated and unbeatable. She and her
husband would, she felt, stay in the Missouri town for a while and then
move on to a larger town and a better position in life. They would
move on and up until the little fat man was a railroad president or a
millionaire. It was the way things were done. She had no doubt of the
future. “Do everything well,” she said to her husband, who was perfectly
satisfied with his position in life and had no exalted notions as to his
future. “Remember to make your reports out neatly and clearly. Show them
you can do perfectly the task given you to do, and you will be given
a chance at a larger task. Some day when you least expect it something
will happen. You will be called up into a position of power. We won't be
compelled to stay in this hole of a place very long.”
The ambitious energetic little woman, who had taken the son of the
indolent farm hand to her heart, constantly talked to him of her own
people. Every afternoon when her housework was done she took the boy
into the front room of the house and spent hours laboring with him over
his lessons. She worked upon the problem of rooting the stupidity and
dullness out of his mind as her father had worked at the problem of
rooting the stumps out of the Michigan land. After the lesson for the
day had been gone over and over until Hugh was in a stupor of mental
weariness, she put the books aside and talked to him. With glowing
fervor she made for him a picture of her own youth and the people and
places where she had lived. In the picture she represented the New
Englanders of the Michigan farming community as a strong god-like race,
always honest, always frugal, and always pushing ahead. His own people
she utterly condemned. She pitied him for the blood in his veins. The
boy had then and all his life certain physical difficulties she could
never understand. The blood did not flow freely through his long body.
His feet and hands were always cold and there was for him an almost
sensual satisfaction to be had from just lying perfectly still in the
station yard and letting the hot sun beat down on him.
Sarah Shepard looked upon what she called Hugh's laziness as a thing of
the spirit. “You have got to get over it,” she declared. “Look at your
own people--poor white trash--how lazy and shiftless they are. You can't
be like them. It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless.”
Swept along by the energetic spirit of the woman, Hugh fought to
overcome his inclination to give himself up to vaporous dreams. He
became convinced that his own people were really of inferior stock, that
they were to be kept away from and not to be taken into account. During
the first year after he came to live with the Shepards, he sometimes
gave way to a desire to return to his old lazy life with his father in
the shack by the river. People got off steamboats at the town and took
the train to other towns lying back from the river. He earned a little
money by carrying trunks filled with clothes or traveling men's samples
up an incline from the steamboat landing to the railroad station. Even
at fourteen the strength in his long gaunt body was so great that he
could out-lift any man in town, and he put one of the trunks on his
shoulder and walked slowly and stolidly away with it as a farm horse
might have walked along a country road with a boy of six perched on his
back.
The money earned in this way Hugh for a time gave to his father, and
when the man had become stupid with drink he grew quarrelsome and
demanded that the boy return to live with him. Hugh had not the spirit
to refuse and sometimes did not want to refuse. When neither the station
master nor his wife was about he slipped away and went with his father
to sit for a half day with his back against the wall of the fishing
shack, his soul at peace. In the sunlight he sat and stretched forth his
long legs. His small sleepy eyes stared out over the river. A delicious
feeling crept over him and for the moment he thought of himself as
completely happy and made up his mind that he did not want to return
again to the railroad station and to the woman who was so determined to
arouse him and make of him a man of her own people.
Hugh looked at his father asleep and snoring in the long grass on the
river bank. An odd feeling of disloyalty crept over him and he became
uncomfortable. The man's mouth was open and he snored lustily. From his
greasy and threadbare clothing arose the smell of fish. Flies gathered
in swarms and alighted on his face. Disgust took possession of Hugh.
A flickering but ever recurring light came into his eyes. With all the
strength of his awakening soul he struggled against the desire to give
way to the inclination to stretch himself out beside the man and sleep.
The words of the New England woman, who was, he knew, striving to lift
him out of slothfulness and ugliness into some brighter and better way
of life, echoed dimly in his mind. When he arose and went back along the
street to the station master's house and when the woman there looked at
him reproachfully and muttered words about the poor white trash of the
town, he was ashamed and looked at the floor.
Hugh began to hate his own father and his own people. He connected
the man who had bred him with the dreaded inclination toward sloth in
himself. When the farmhand came to the station and demanded the money
he had earned by carrying trunks, he turned away and went across a
dusty road to the Shepard's house. After a year or two he paid no more
attention to the dissolute farmhand who came occasionally to the station
to mutter and swear at him; and, when he had earned a little money, gave
it to the woman to keep for him. “Well,” he said, speaking slowly and
with the hesitating drawl characteristic of his people, “if you give me
time I'll learn. I want to be what you want me to be. If you stick to me
I'll try to make a man of myself.”
* * * * *
Hugh McVey lived in the Missouri town under the tutelage of Sarah
Shepard until he was nineteen years old. Then the station master gave up
railroading and went back to Michigan. Sarah Shepard's father had died
after having cleared one hundred and twenty acres of the cut-over timber
land and it had been left to her. The dream that had for years lurked
in the back of the little woman's mind and in which she saw bald-headed,
good-natured Henry Shepard become a power in the railroad world had
begun to fade. In newspapers and magazines she read constantly of other
men who, starting from a humble position in the railroad service, soon
became rich and powerful, but nothing of the kind seemed likely to
happen to her husband. Under her watchful eye he did his work well and
carefully but nothing came of it. Officials of the railroad sometimes
passed through the town riding in private cars hitched to the end of one
of the through trains, but the trains did not stop and the officials
did not alight and, calling Henry out of the station, reward his
faithfulness by piling new responsibilities upon him, as railroad
officials did in such cases in the stories she read. When her father
died and she saw a chance to again turn her face eastward and to live
again among her own people, she told her husband to resign his position
with the air of one accepting an undeserved defeat. The station master
managed to get Hugh appointed in his place, and the two people went
away one gray morning in October, leaving the tall ungainly young man in
charge of affairs. He had books to keep, freight waybills to make out,
messages to receive, dozens of definite things to do. Early in the
morning before the train that was to take her away, came to the station,
Sarah Shepard called the young man to her and repeated the instructions
she had so often given her husband. “Do everything neatly and
carefully,” she said. “Show yourself worthy of the trust that has been
given you.”
The New England woman wanted to assure the boy, as she had so often
assured her husband, that if he would but work hard and faithfully
promotion would inevitably come; but in the face of the fact that Henry
Shepard had for years done without criticism the work Hugh was to do and
had received neither praise nor blame from those above him, she found
it impossible to say the words that arose to her lips. The woman and
the son of the people among whom she had lived for five years and had
so often condemned, stood beside each other in embarrassed silence.
Stripped of her assurance as to the purpose of life and unable to repeat
her accustomed formula, Sarah Shepard had nothing to say. Hugh's tall
figure, leaning against the post that supported the roof of the front
porch of the little house where she had taught him his lessons day after
day, seemed to her suddenly old and she thought his long solemn face
suggested a wisdom older and more mature than her own. An odd revulsion
of feeling swept over her. For the moment she began to doubt the
advisability of trying to be smart and to get on in life. If Hugh had
been somewhat smaller of frame so that her mind could have taken hold of
the fact of his youth and immaturity, she would no doubt have taken
him into her arms and said words regarding her doubts. Instead she
also became silent and the minutes slipped away as the two people stood
before each other and stared at the floor of the porch. When the train
on which she was to leave blew a warning whistle, and Henry Shepard
called to her from the station platform, she put a hand on the lapel of
Hugh's coat and drawing his face down, for the first time kissed him on
the cheek. Tears came into her eyes and into the eyes of the young man.
When he stepped across the porch to get her bag Hugh stumbled awkwardly
against a chair. “Well, you do the best you can here,” Sarah Shepard
said quickly and then out of long habit and half unconsciously did
repeat her formula. “Do little things well and big opportunities are
bound to come,” she declared as she walked briskly along beside Hugh
across the narrow road and to the station and the train that was to bear
her away.
After the departure of Sarah and Henry Shepard Hugh continued to
struggle with his inclination to give way to dreams. It seemed to him a
struggle it was necessary to win in order that he might show his respect
and appreciation of the woman who had spent so many long hours laboring
with him. Although, under her tutelage, he had received a better
education than any other young man of the river town, he had lost none
of his physical desire to sit in the sun and do nothing. When he worked,
every task had to be consciously carried on from minute to minute.
After the woman left, there were days when he sat in the chair in the
telegraph office and fought a desperate battle with himself. A queer
determined light shone in his small gray eyes. He arose from the chair
and walked up and down the station platform. Each time as he lifted one
of his long feet and set it slowly down a special little effort had to
be made. To move about at all was a painful performance, something he
did not want to do. All physical acts were to him dull but necessary
parts of his training for a vague and glorious future that was to come
to him some day in a brighter and more beautiful land that lay in the
direction thought of rather indefinitely as the East. “If I do not move
and keep moving I'll become like father, like all of the people about
here,” Hugh said to himself. He thought of the man who had bred him
and whom he occasionally saw drifting aimlessly along Main Street or
sleeping away a drunken stupor on the river bank. He was disgusted with
him and had come to share the opinion the station master's wife had
always held concerning the people of the Missouri village. “They're a
lot of miserable lazy louts,” she had declared a thousand times, and
Hugh, agreed with her, but sometimes wondered if in the end he might not
also become a lazy lout. That possibility he knew was in him and for
the sake of the woman as well as for his own sake he was determined it
should not be so.
The truth is that the people of Mudcat Landing were totally unlike any
of the people Sarah Shepard had ever known and unlike the people Hugh
was to know during his mature life. He who had come from a people not
smart was to live among smart energetic men and women and be called
a big man by them without in the least understanding what they were
talking about.
Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of Southern
origin. Living originally in a land where all physical labor was
performed by slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physical
labor. In the South their fathers, having no money to buy slaves of
their own and being unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried to
live without labor. For the most part they lived in the mountains
and the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee, on land too poor and
unproductive to be thought worth cultivating by their rich slave-owning
neighbors of the valleys and plains. Their food was meager and of an
enervating sameness and their bodies degenerate. Children grew up long
and gaunt and yellow like badly nourished plants. Vague indefinite
hungers took hold of them and they gave themselves over to dreams.
The more energetic among them, sensing dimly the unfairness of their
position in life, became vicious and dangerous. Feuds started among them
and they killed each other to express their hatred of life. When, in
the years preceding the Civil War, a few of them pushed north along
the rivers and settled in Southern Indiana and Illinois and in Eastern
Missouri and Arkansas, they seemed to have exhausted their energy in
making the voyage and slipped quickly back into their old slothful way
of life. Their impulse to emigrate did not carry them far and but a few
of them ever reached the rich corn lands of central Indiana, Illinois
or Iowa or the equally rich land back from the river in Missouri or
Arkansas. In Southern Indiana and Illinois they were merged into the
life about them and with the infusion of new blood they a little awoke.
They have tempered the quality of the peoples of those regions,
made them perhaps less harshly energetic than their forefathers, the
pioneers. In many of the Missouri and Arkansas river towns they have
changed but little. A visitor to these parts may see them there to-day,
long, gaunt, and lazy, sleeping their lives away and awakening out of
their stupor only at long intervals and at the call of hunger.
As for Hugh McVey, he stayed in his home town and among his own people
for a year after the departure of the man and woman who had been father
and mother to him, and then he also departed. All through the year he
worked constantly to cure himself of the curse of indolence. When he
awoke in the morning he did not dare lie in bed for a moment for fear
indolence would overcome him and he would not be able to arise at all.
Getting out of bed at once he dressed and went to the station. During
the day there was not much work to be done and he walked for hours up
and down the station platform. When he sat down he at once took up
a book and put his mind to work. When the pages of the book became
indistinct before his eyes and he felt within him the inclination
to drift off into dreams, he again arose and walked up and down the
platform. Having accepted the New England woman's opinion of his own
people and not wanting to associate with them, his life became utterly
lonely and his loneliness also drove him to labor.
Something happened to him. Although his body would not and never did
become active, his mind began suddenly to work with feverish eagerness.
The vague thoughts and feelings that had always been a part of him but
that had been indefinite, ill-defined things, like clouds floating far
away in a hazy sky, began to grow definite. In the evening after his
work was done and he had locked the station for the night, he did not go
to the town hotel where he had taken a room and where he ate his meals,
but wandered about town and along the road that ran south beside the
great mysterious river. A hundred new and definite desires and hungers
awoke in him. He began to want to talk with people, to know men and
most of all to know women, but the disgust for his fellows in the town,
engendered in him by Sarah Shepard's words and most of all by the things
in his nature that were like their natures, made him draw back. When in
the fall at the end of the year after the Shepards had left and he
began living alone, his father was killed in a senseless quarrel with a
drunken river man over the ownership of a dog, a sudden, and what seemed
to him at the moment heroic resolution came to him. He went early one
morning to one of the town's two saloon keepers, a man who had been his
father's' nearest approach to a friend and companion, and gave him money
to bury the dead man. Then he wired to the headquarters of the railroad
company telling them to send a man to Mudcat Landing to take his place.
On the afternoon of the day on which his father was buried, he bought
himself a handbag and packed his few belongings. Then he sat down alone
on the steps of the railroad station to wait for the evening train that
would bring the man who was to replace him and that would at the same
time take him away. He did not know where he intended to go, but knew
that he wanted to push out into a new land and get among new people.
He thought he would go east and north. He remembered the long summer
evenings in the river town when the station master slept and his wife
talked. The boy who listened had wanted to sleep also, but with the eyes
of Sarah Shepard fixed on him, had not dared to do so. The woman had
talked of a land dotted with towns where the houses were all painted in
bright colors, where young girls dressed in white dresses went about in
the evening, walking under trees beside streets paved with bricks, where
there was no dust or mud, where stores were gay bright places filled
with beautiful wares that the people had money to buy in abundance and
where every one was alive and doing things worth while and none was
slothful and lazy. The boy who had now become a man wanted to go to such
a place. His work in the railroad station had given him some idea of the
geography of the country and, although he could not have told whether
the woman who had talked so enticingly had in mind her childhood in New
England or her girlhood in Michigan, he knew in a general way that to
reach the land and the people who were to show him by their lives the
better way to form his own life, he must go east. He decided that the
further east he went the more beautiful life would become, and that he
had better not try going too far in the beginning. “I'll go into the
northern part of Indiana or Ohio,” he told himself. “There must be
beautiful towns in those places.”
Hugh was boyishly eager to get on his way and to become at once a part
of the life in a new place. The gradual awakening of his mind had
given him courage, and he thought of himself as armed and ready for
association with men. He wanted to become acquainted with and be
the friend of people whose lives were beautifully lived and who were
themselves beautiful and full of significance. As he sat on the steps
of the railroad station in the poor little Missouri town with his bag
beside him, and thought of all the things he wanted to do in life, his
mind became so eager and restless that some of its restlessness was
transmitted to his body. For perhaps the first time in his life he arose
without conscious effort and walked up and down the station platform out
of an excess of energy. He thought he could not bear to wait until the
train came and brought the man who was to take his place. “Well, I'm
going away, I'm going away to be a man among men,” he said to himself
over and over. The saying became a kind of refrain and he said
it unconsciously. As he repeated the words his heart beat high in
anticipation of the future he thought lay before him.