Hugh McVey left the town of Mudcat Landing in early September of the
year eighteen eighty-six. He was then twenty years old and was six feet
and four inches tall. The whole upper part of his body was immensely
strong but his long legs were ungainly and lifeless. He secured a pass
from the railroad company that had employed him, and rode north along
the river in the night train until he came to a large town named
Burlington in the State of Iowa. There a bridge went over the river, and
the railroad tracks joined those of a trunk line and ran eastward toward
Chicago; but Hugh did not continue his journey on that night. Getting
off the train he went to a nearby hotel and took a room for the night.
It was a cool clear evening and Hugh was restless. The town of
Burlington, a prosperous place in the midst of a rich farming country,
overwhelmed him with its stir and bustle. For the first time he saw
brick-paved streets and streets lighted with lamps. Although it was
nearly ten o'clock at night when he arrived, people still walked about
in the streets and many stores were open.
The hotel where he had taken a room faced the railroad tracks and stood
at the corner of a brightly lighted street. When he had been shown to
his room Hugh sat for a half hour by an open window, and then as he
could not sleep, decided to go for a walk. For a time he walked in the
streets where the people stood about before the doors of the stores but,
as his tall figure attracted attention and he felt people staring at
him, he went presently into a side street.
In a few minutes he became utterly lost. He went through what seemed to
him miles of streets lined with frame and brick houses, and occasionally
passed people, but was too timid and embarrassed to ask his way. The
street climbed upward and after a time he got into open country and
followed a road that ran along a cliff overlooking the Mississippi
River. The night was clear and the sky brilliant with stars. In the
open, away from the multitude of houses, he no longer felt awkward and
afraid, and went cheerfully along. After a time he stopped and stood
facing the river. Standing on a high cliff and with a grove of trees
at his back, the stars seemed to have all gathered in the eastern sky.
Below him the water of the river reflected the stars. They seemed to be
making a pathway for him into the East.
The tall Missouri countryman sat down on a log near the edge of the
cliff and tried to see the water in the river below. Nothing was visible
but a bed of stars that danced and twinkled in the darkness. He had
made his way to a place far above the railroad bridge, but presently a
through passenger train from the West passed over it and the lights of
the train looked also like stars, stars that moved and beckoned and that
seemed to fly like flocks of birds out of the West into the East.
For several hours Hugh sat on the log in the darkness. He decided that
it was hopeless for him to find his way back to the hotel, and was glad
of the excuse for staying abroad. His body for the first time in his
life felt light and strong and his mind was feverishly awake. A buggy
in which sat a young man and woman went along the road at his back,
and after the voices had died away silence came, broken only at long
intervals during the hours when he sat thinking of his future by
the barking of a dog in some distant house or the churning of the
paddle-wheels of a passing river boat.
All of the early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent
within sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He
had seen it in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay
baked and cracked along the edge of the water; in the spring when the
floods raged and the water went whirling past, bearing tree logs and
even parts of houses; in the winter when the water looked deathly cold
and ice floated past; and in the fall when it was quiet and still and
lovely, and seemed to have sucked an almost human quality of warmth out
of the red trees that lined its shores. Hugh had spent hours and days
sitting or lying in the grass beside the river. The fishing shack in
which he had lived with his father until he was fourteen years old was
within a half dozen long strides of the river's edge, and the boy had
often been left there alone for a week at a time. When his father had
gone for a trip on a lumber raft or to work for a few days on some farm
in the country back from the river, the boy, left often without money
and with but a few loaves of bread, went fishing when he was hungry and
when he was not did nothing but idle the days away in the grass on the
river bank. Boys from the town came sometimes to spend an hour with him,
but in their presence he was embarrassed and a little annoyed. He wanted
to be left alone with his dreams. One of the boys, a sickly, pale,
undeveloped lad of ten, often stayed with him through an entire summer
afternoon. He was the son of a merchant in the town and grew quickly
tired when he tried to follow other boys about. On the river bank he lay
beside Hugh in silence. The two got into Hugh's boat and went fishing
and the merchant's son grew animated and talked. He taught Hugh to write
his own name and to read a few words. The shyness that kept them apart
had begun to break down, when the merchant's son caught some childhood
disease and died.
In the darkness above the cliff that night in Burlington Hugh remembered
things concerning his boyhood that had not come back to his mind in
years. The very thoughts that had passed through his mind during those
long days of idling on the river bank came streaming back.
After his fourteenth year when he went to work at the railroad station
Hugh had stayed away from the river. With his work at the station, and
in the garden back of Sarah Shepard's house, and the lessons in the
afternoons, he had little idle time. On Sundays however things were
different. Sarah Shepard did not go to church after she came to
Mudcat Landing, but she would have no work done on Sundays. On Sunday
afternoons in the summer she and her husband sat in chairs beneath a
tree beside the house and went to sleep. Hugh got into the habit of
going off by himself. He wanted to sleep also, but did not dare. He went
along the river bank by the road that ran south from the town, and when
he had followed it two or three miles, turned into a grove of trees and
lay down in the shade.
The long summer Sunday afternoons had been delightful times for Hugh, so
delightful that he finally gave them up, fearing they might lead him to
take up again his old sleepy way of life. Now as he sat in the darkness
above the same river he had gazed on through the long Sunday afternoons,
a spasm of something like loneliness swept over him. For the first time
he thought about leaving the river country and going into a new land
with a keen feeling of regret.
On the Sunday afternoons in the woods south of Mudcat Landing Hugh had
lain perfectly still in the grass for hours. The smell of dead fish that
had always been present about the shack where he spent his boyhood, was
gone and there were no swarms of flies. Above his head a breeze played
through the branches of the trees, and insects sang in the grass.
Everything about him was clean. A lovely stillness pervaded the river
and the woods. He lay on his belly and gazed down over the river out of
sleep-heavy eyes into hazy distances. Half formed thoughts passed like
visions through his mind. He dreamed, but his dreams were unformed and
vaporous. For hours the half dead, half alive state into which he had
got, persisted. He did not sleep but lay in a land between sleeping and
waking. Pictures formed in his mind. The clouds that floated in the sky
above the river took on strange, grotesque shapes. They began to move.
One of the clouds separated itself from the others. It moved swiftly
away into the dim distance and then returned. It became a half human
thing and seemed to be marshaling the other clouds. Under its influence
they became agitated and moved restlessly about. Out of the body of the
most active of the clouds long vaporous arms were extended. They pulled
and hauled at the other clouds making them also restless and agitated.
Hugh's mind, as he sat in the darkness on the cliff above the river that
night in Burlington, was deeply stirred. Again he was a boy lying in
the woods above his river, and the visions that had come to him there
returned with startling clearness. He got off the log and lying in the
wet grass, closed his eyes. His body became warm.
Hugh thought his mind had gone out of his body and up into the sky
to join the clouds and the stars, to play with them. From the sky he
thought he looked down on the earth and saw rolling fields, hills and
forests. He had no part in the lives of the men and women of the earth,
but was torn away from them, left to stand by himself. From his place in
the sky above the earth he saw the great river going majestically along.
For a time it was quiet and contemplative as the sky had been when he
was a boy down below lying on his belly in the wood. He saw men pass in
boats and could hear their voices dimly. A great quiet prevailed and he
looked abroad beyond the wide expanse of the river and saw fields and
towns. They were all hushed and still. An air of waiting hung over
them. And then the river was whipped into action by some strange unknown
force, something that had come out of a distant place, out of the place
to which the cloud had gone and from which it had returned to stir and
agitate the other clouds.
The river now went tearing along. It overflowed its banks and swept
over the land, uprooting trees and forests and towns. The white faces of
drowned men and children, borne along by the flood, looked up into the
mind's eye of the man Hugh, who, in the moment of his setting out into
the definite world of struggle and defeat, had let himself slip back
into the vaporous dreams of his boyhood.
As he lay in the wet grass in the darkness on the cliff Hugh tried
to force his way back to consciousness, but for a long time was
unsuccessful. He rolled and writhed about and his lips muttered words.
It was useless. His mind also was swept away. The clouds of which he
felt himself a part flew across the face of the sky. They blotted out
the sun from the earth, and darkness descended on the land, on the
troubled towns, on the hills that were torn open, on the forests that
were destroyed, on the peace and quiet of all places. In the country
stretching away from the river where all had been peace and quiet,
all was now agitation and unrest. Houses were destroyed and instantly
rebuilt. People gathered in whirling crowds.
The dreaming man felt himself a part of something significant and
terrible that was happening to the earth and to the peoples of the
earth. Again he struggled to awake, to force himself back out of the
dream world into consciousness. When he did awake, day was breaking
and he sat on the very edge of the cliff that looked down upon the
Mississippi River, gray now in the dim morning light.
* * * * *
The towns in which Hugh lived during the first three years after he
began his eastward journey were all small places containing a few
hundred people, and were scattered through Illinois, Indiana and western
Ohio. All of the people among whom he worked and lived during that
time were farmers and laborers. In the spring of the first year of his
wandering he passed through the city of Chicago and spent two hours
there, going in and out at the same railroad station.
He was not tempted to become a city man. The huge commercial city at the
foot of Lake Michigan, because of its commanding position in the very
center of a vast farming empire, had already become gigantic. He never
forgot the two hours he spent standing in the station in the heart of
the city and walking in the street adjoining the station. It was evening
when he came into the roaring, clanging place. On the long wide plains
west of the city he saw farmers at work with their spring plowing as the
train went flying along. Presently the farms grew small and the whole
prairie dotted with towns. In these the train did not stop but ran into
a crowded network of streets filled with multitudes of people. When he
got into the big dark station Hugh saw thousands of people rushing about
like disturbed insects. Unnumbered thousands of people were going out of
the city at the end of their day of work and trains waited to take
them to towns on the prairies. They came in droves, hurrying along like
distraught cattle, over a bridge and into the station. The in-bound
crowds that had alighted from through trains coming from cities of the
East and West climbed up a stairway to the street, and those that were
out-bound tried to descend by the same stairway and at the same time.
The result was a whirling churning mass of humanity. Every one pushed
and crowded his way along. Men swore, women grew angry, and children
cried. Near the doorway that opened into the street a long line of cab
drivers shouted and roared.
Hugh looked at the people who were whirled along past him, and shivered
with the nameless fear of multitudes, common to country boys in the
city. When the rush of people had a little subsided he went out of the
station and, walking across a narrow street, stood by a brick store
building. Presently the rush of people began again, and again men,
women, and boys came hurrying across the bridge and ran wildly in at
the doorway leading into the station. They came in waves as water washes
along a beach during a storm. Hugh had a feeling that if he were by
some chance to get caught in the crowd he would be swept away into
some unknown and terrible place. Waiting until the rush had a little
subsided, he went across the street and on to the bridge to look at the
river that flowed past the station. It was narrow and filled with ships,
and the water looked gray and dirty. A pall of black smoke covered the
sky. From all sides of him and even in the air above his head a great
clatter and roar of bells and whistles went on.
With the air of a child venturing into a dark forest Hugh went a little
way into one of the streets that led westward from the station. Again
he stopped and stood by a building. Near at hand a group of young
city roughs stood smoking and talking before a saloon. Out of a nearby
building came a young girl who approached and spoke to one of them.
The man began to swear furiously. “You tell her I'll come in there in
a minute and smash her face,” he said, and, paying no more attention to
the girl, turned to stare at Hugh. All of the young men lounging before
the saloon turned to stare at the tall countryman. They began to laugh
and one of them walked quickly toward him.
Hugh ran along the street and into the station followed by the shouts of
the young roughs. He did not venture out again, and when his train
was ready, got aboard and went gladly out of the great complex
dwelling-place of modern Americans.
Hugh went from town to town always working his way eastward, always
seeking the place where happiness was to come to him and where he was to
achieve companionship with men and women. He cut fence posts in a forest
on a large farm in Indiana, worked in the fields, and in one place was a
section hand on the railroad.
On a farm in Indiana, some forty miles east of Indianapolis, he was for
the first time powerfully touched by the presence of a woman. She was
the daughter of the farmer who was Hugh's employer, and was an alert,
handsome woman of twenty-four who had been a school teacher but had
given up the work because she was about to be married. Hugh thought the
man who was to marry her the most fortunate being in the world. He lived
in Indianapolis and came by train to spend the week-ends at the farm.
The woman prepared for his coming by putting on a white dress and
fastening a rose in her hair. The two people walked about in an orchard
beside the house or went for a ride along the country roads. The
young man, who, Hugh had been told, worked in a bank, wore stiff white
collars, a black suit and a black derby hat.
On the farm Hugh worked in the field with the farmer and ate at table
with his family, but did not get acquainted with them. On Sunday when
the young man came he took the day off and went into a nearby town. The
courtship became a matter very close to him and he lived through
the excitement of the weekly visits as though he had been one of the
principals. The daughter of the house, sensing the fact that the
silent farm hand was stirred by her presence, became interested in him.
Sometimes in the evening as he sat on a little porch before the house,
she came to join him, and sat looking at him with a peculiarly detached
and interested air. She tried to make talk, but Hugh answered all her
advances so briefly and with such a half frightened manner that she gave
up the attempt. One Saturday evening when her sweetheart had come she
took him for a ride in the family carriage, and Hugh concealed himself
in the hay loft of the barn to wait for their return.
Hugh had never seen or heard a man express in any way his affection for
a woman. It seemed to him a terrifically heroic thing to do and he
hoped by concealing himself in the barn to see it done. It was a bright
moonlight night and he waited until nearly eleven o'clock before the
lovers returned. In the hayloft there was an opening high up under the
roof. Because of his great height he could reach and pull himself up,
and when he had done so, found a footing on one of the beams that formed
the framework of the barn. The lovers stood unhitching the horse in the
barnyard below. When the city man had led the horse into the stable he
hurried quickly out again and went with the farmer's daughter along a
path toward the house. The two people laughed and pulled at each other
like children. They grew silent and when they had come near the house,
stopped by a tree to embrace. Hugh saw the man take the woman into his
arms and hold her tightly against his body. He was so excited that he
nearly fell off the beam. His imagination was inflamed and he tried
to picture himself in the position of the young city man. His fingers
gripped the boards to which he clung and his body trembled. The two
figures standing in the dim light by the tree became one. For a long
time they clung tightly to each other and then drew apart. They went
into the house and Hugh climbed down from his place on the beam and
lay in the hay. His body shook as with a chill and he was half ill of
jealousy, anger, and an overpowering sense of defeat. It did not seem to
him at the moment that it was worth while for him to go further east or
to try to find a place where he would be able to mingle freely with men
and women, or where such a wonderful thing as had happened to the man in
the barnyard below might happen to him.
Hugh spent the night in the hayloft and at daylight crept out and went
into a nearby town. He returned to the farmhouse late on Monday when
he was sure the city man had gone away. In spite of the protest of
the farmer he packed his clothes at once and declared his intention of
leaving. He did not wait for the evening meal but hurried out of the
house. When he got into the road and had started to walk away, he looked
back and saw the daughter of the house standing at an open door and
looking at him. Shame for what he had done on the night before swept
over him. For a moment he stared at the woman who, with an intense,
interested air stared back at him, and then putting down his head he
hurried away. The woman watched him out of sight and later, when her
father stormed about the house, blaming Hugh for leaving so suddenly and
declaring the tall Missourian was no doubt a drunkard who wanted to go
off on a drunk, she had nothing to say. In her own heart she knew what
was the matter with her father's farm hand and was sorry he had gone
before she had more completely exercised her power over him.
* * * * *
None of the towns Hugh visited during his three years of wandering
approached realization of the sort of life Sarah Shepard had talked to
him about. They were all very much alike. There was a main street with
a dozen stores on each side, a blacksmith shop, and perhaps an elevator
for the storage of grain. All day the town was deserted, but in the
evening the citizens gathered on Main Street. On the sidewalks before
the stores young farm hands and clerks sat on store boxes or on the
curbing. They did not pay any attention to Hugh who, when he went to
stand near them, remained silent and kept himself in the background. The
farm hands talked of their work and boasted of the number of bushels of
corn they could pick in a day, or of their skill in plowing. The clerks
were intent upon playing practical jokes which pleased the farm hands
immensely. While one of them talked loudly of his skill in his work a
clerk crept out at the door of one of the stores and approached him. He
held a pin in his hand and with it jabbed the talker in the back. The
crowd yelled and shouted with delight. If the victim became angry a
quarrel started, but this did not often happen. Other men came to join
the party and the joke was told to them. “Well, you should have seen
the look on his face. I thought I would die,” one of the bystanders
declared.
Hugh got a job with a carpenter who specialized in the building of barns
and stayed with him all through one fall. Later he went to work as a
section hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like one
compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On all
sides of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life
went on that did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns,
inhabited only by farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was
being developed. Men worked hard but were much in the open air and
had time to think. Their minds reached out toward the solution of the
mystery of existence. The schoolmaster and the country lawyer read Tom
Paine's “Age of Reason” and Bellamy's “Looking Backward.” They discussed
these books with their fellows. There was a feeling, ill expressed, that
America had something real and spiritual to offer to the rest of the
world. Workmen talked to each other of the new tricks of their trades,
and after hours of discussion of some new way to cultivate corn, shape
a horseshoe or build a barn, spoke of God and his intent concerning
man. Long drawn out discussions of religious beliefs and the political
destiny of America were carried on.
And across the background of these discussions ran tales of action in
a sphere outside the little world in which the inhabitants of the towns
lived. Men who had been in the Civil War and who had climbed fighting
over hills and in the terror of defeat had swum wide rivers, told the
tale of their adventures.
In the evening, after his day of work in the field or on the railroad
with the section hands, Hugh did not know what to do with himself. That
he did not go to bed immediately after the evening meal was due to the
fact that he looked upon his tendency to sleep and to dream as an enemy
to his development; and a peculiarly persistent determination to make
something alive and worth while out of himself--the result of the five
years of constant talking on the subject by the New England woman--had
taken possession of him. “I'll find the right place and the right people
and then I'll begin,” he continually said to himself.
And then, worn out with weariness and loneliness, he went to bed in
one of the little hotels or boarding houses where he lived during those
years, and his dreams returned. The dream that had come that night as
he lay on the cliff above the Mississippi River near the town of
Burlington, came back time after time. He sat upright in bed in the
darkness of his room and after he had driven the cloudy, vague sensation
out of his brain, was afraid to go to sleep again. He did not want to
disturb the people of the house and so got up and dressed and without
putting on his shoes walked up and down in the room. Sometimes the room
he occupied had a low ceiling and he was compelled to stoop. He crept
out of the house carrying his shoes in his hand and sat down on the
sidewalk to put them on. In all the towns he visited, people saw him
walking alone through the streets late at night or in the early hours of
the morning. Whispers concerning the matter ran about. The story of what
was spoken of as his queerness came to the men with whom he worked,
and they found themselves unable to talk freely and naturally in his
presence. At the noon hour when the men ate the lunch they had carried
to work, when the boss was gone and it was customary among the workers
to talk of their own affairs, they went off by themselves. Hugh followed
them about. They went to sit under a tree, and when Hugh came to stand
nearby, they became silent or the more vulgar and shallow among them
began to show off. While he worked with a half dozen other men as a
section hand on the railroad, two men did all the talking. Whenever the
boss went away an old man who had a reputation as a wit told stories
concerning his relations with women. A young man with red hair took the
cue from him. The two men talked loudly and kept looking at Hugh. The
younger of the two wits turned to another workman who had a weak, timid
face. “Well, you,” he cried, “what about your old woman? What about her?
Who is the father of your son? Do you dare tell?”
In the towns Hugh walked about in the evening and tried always to keep
his mind fixed on definite things. He felt that humanity was for some
unknown reason drawing itself away from him, and his mind turned back
to the figure of Sarah Shepard. He remembered that she had never been
without things to do. She scrubbed her kitchen floor and prepared food
for cooking; she washed, ironed, kneaded dough for bread, and mended
clothes. In the evening, when she made the boy read to her out of one of
the school books or do sums on a slate, she kept her hands busy knitting
socks for him or for her husband. Except when something had crossed her
so that she scolded and her face grew red, she was always cheerful.
When the boy had nothing to do at the station and had been sent by the
station master to work about the house, to draw water from the cistern
for a family washing, or pull weeds in the garden, he heard the woman
singing as she went about the doing of her innumerable petty tasks. Hugh
decided that he also must do small tasks, fix his mind upon definite
things. In the town where he was employed as a section hand, the cloud
dream in which the world became a whirling, agitated center of disaster
came to him almost every night. Winter came on and he walked through
the streets at night in the darkness and through the deep snow. He was
almost frozen; but as the whole lower part of his body was habitually
cold he did not much mind the added discomfort, and so great was the
reserve of strength in his big frame that the loss of sleep did not
affect his ability to labor all day without effort.
Hugh went into one of the residence streets of the town and counted the
pickets in the fences before the houses. He returned to the hotel and
made a calculation as to the number of pickets in all the fences in
town. Then he got a rule at the hardware store and carefully measured
the pickets. He tried to estimate the number of pickets that could be
cut out of certain sized trees and that gave his mind another opening.
He counted the number of trees in every street in town. He learned to
tell at a glance and with relative accuracy how much lumber could be cut
out of a tree. He built imaginary houses with lumber cut from the trees
that lined the streets. He even tried to figure out a way to utilize the
small limbs cut from the tops of the trees, and one Sunday went into the
wood back of the town and cut a great armful of twigs, which he carried
to his room and later with great patience wove into the form of a
basket.
BOOK TWO