recalls Poe’s _Raven_, was in Paris sight-seeing with friends, he
happened to pause, by accident, one day in the Louvre, beside the
marble bust of Lucius Verus. To their amazement, his friends found
that the head of Silvá and that of the dissolute Roman lover of
Faustine, were identical. A photograph of Silvá with hair and beard
dressed like the statue, was made the next day, and the result is
something that no one can explain. They are as alike as two peas. I
have the pictures.
Years ago the _Mercure de France_ sent its representative all the
way to South America, and then on to Bogotá, city no railroad has
succeeded approaching, to secure information about _The Nocturn_
which critics call the greatest poem written in the Americas. The
only notice of him in the U. S. was my translation of the poem of
which the dead poet’s publishers approved.
If you wish to revel in the beauties of the tropics, minus the long
voyage to South America, weeks perhaps of sea-sickness, read Chocano,
who laughingly calls himself _the spirit of the Andes_. He has
pictured, in ringing verse, this glowing, romantic continent, from
which, in days of old, clipper ships, used to go back to Europe with
scuppers awash with emeralds, gold, with amethysts. Reading Chocano
gives the rich sensations of the tropics. It is like wandering
through vast gardens filled with flaming orchids, curious in shape,
amazing in color. Just so evocative is he, varied. Just so seemingly
inexhaustible.
Another poet, but in the Portuguese tongue, to the south, is Machado
de Assis, of the celebrated poems which all Brazilians know: _Uma
Creatura_, _Suave Mare Magno_, _No Alto_. The sonnet which he wrote
to his wife is one of the noblest in the Portuguese tongue.
Machado de Assis was telling South America of Chinese poets,
translating and publishing versions of them, an half century ago. We
are just getting around to it. They have kept over us of the north,
the æsthetic superiority of Mediterranean peoples among whom they
originated.
We are forced to admit that the outlook of Germany is vast. It is
not easy to comprehend how vast. In it, individual welfare has
been sacrificed as ruthlessly as the Samurai Creed sacrificed it,
centuries ago, in Japan. We call this _barbarism_. Germany has been
cut latest of the European nations by the disease, _civilization_. As
smallpox, other ills of flesh, are more fatal in a young, fresh race,
not before visited by it, so young Germany fresh from the forests,
the fens, felt the disease, _civilization_. For her it has been most
deadly.
I recall the school on the plains. School is probably too important a
word. It was a few bare rooms over a business block. No building for
the purpose had been put up. From the windows we could look across
the Main Street into upper rooms of other buildings. These rooms had
been rented to houses of ill fame. Any time we could turn from our
lessons and see the painted creatures lolling in the rooms, with
their lovers. They were fat, greasy, disheveled, and clad in gay,
cotton _Mother Hubbards_.
Beneath one of these houses there was a saloon. From the windows we
could look over tops of screens that cut the too plain view from the
sidewalk, and see Greasers, Indians, the stragglers of the plains,
drinking, gambling. They quarreled frequently. Occasionally they
fought with knives, with pistols. But the thrust of a knife that
killed, in the lonely silence of the circling prairie was unimportant.
It was as if I saw it all far off through sheets of crystal. There
was nothing I wanted. It represented the forces from which I longed
to get away. As I walked about the streets of this settlement on the
plains, drenched with sun and breeze-swept, I was conscious of an
unknown world of art. I used to say to myself: I can not know the
heights of life, wealth, power. I can not have things that do not
depend upon myself. But, with my brain, I can know the heights of
art. I can know all men have dreamed. I learned languages as other
women learn to sew. For me they kept few difficulties. My foreign
tutor, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude, who knew many tongues, was
introducing me to books of the Old World. He had a library of his
own, of which he was good enough to give me use. His name was Arnold
Jeannerett.
I was dazed at first, breathless, at this introduction to the
sumptuous Palaces of Thought. Less and less I saw the world about
me. It faded away with its crudity, harsh, noisy contrasts;
discomforts; its persistent attempt to make life miserable for me.
Nothing remained but a place of enchantment where there were no
imperfections, and everything was as I wished.
I read Ariosto. I learned to know Petrarch, and the classics of
Italy. I read the splendid prose of France; Bossuet, Fenelon,
Chateaubriand, Rousseau. I read the lyric poets of Germany. Hidden
upon my person somewhere, either in a pocket in my calico petticoat,
or else within the lining of my hat, was some tiny book of the Old
World.
But an unexpected complication arose. It made the women of the
village angry. And in no slight degree. What right had I to amuse
myself in ways not theirs? There was nothing left undone within their
inventive range, which I soon learned to my sorrow was considerable,
to make me understand their displeasure.
Sweeping past my eyes there was the picturesque panorama of the
plains. Interesting things peculiar to isolation were happening.
Chief Joseph, with the warriors who murdered Custer, with their
squaws and children, were being removed to a northern Reservation.
They stopped in our village. Chief Joseph made a speech which one of
the tribal interpreters put into English. The old chief described the
massacre. He did it with relish. I sat in front of him, on a board
upheld by two nail kegs. When he came to the horrors of it, over his
dull eyes, which years had given singular expressionlessness, grey
mists floated like spring across black winter. The memory was sweet.
The Main Street with its ugly, flat-topped buildings stretched from
north to south. Through this artificial canal swept the wind, having
come across desolate plains. Drifting through this street until
midnight, moved a strangely assorted crowd, laughing, talking,
drinking, quarreling. There were buck Indians in beaded moccasins,
a striped calico about their loins, and tin bracelets upon thin,
muscled arms. They walked with dignity. Sleek squaws, who toed in,
toddled after them. Tin rings were in their ears. There were Mexicans
with black, wide faces and white hats; Greasers, whom on-rushing
civilization would soon annihilate; cowboys with fringed leggings
and high heels, and gamblers with angular, prairie faces. There were
soldiers from nearby forts and a few great-hearted pioneers who loved
lonely places and who lived their adventures instead of writing them.
The thing I loved best was the clouds that rose high above the
levels. They painted pictures. They satisfied my longing to get away.
I loved them when they were white, glittering mountains looking down
upon some fairy land.
I used to ride out upon the levels, stop my horse, observe them,
feeling happily upon face and arms, the warm, rollicking wind of the
south, from unknown spaces where perhaps flowers grew. One longed
sometimes here for the lonely comfort of long rains.
Then I would turn my horse and ride home through the twilight, when
the little stars first began to prick the day. I like to think of it
all again. And the moons of my youth, which poised so superbly above
the plains.
I said nothing ever came again. I was wrong. The Strip Opening came.
THE STRIP OPENING
BY
EARL UNDERWOOD
Then the little place resembled any cow-town at time of the county
fair or the reunion of the Veterans of the Civil War, except that
the crowd did not have a carnival spirit. The crowd was made up of
cattle-men driven from their former pasture land, old adventurers
still looking for a fortune, wanderers of all kinds, professional
gamblers who resembled human buzzards, homeless stragglers from
everywhere. There were old men with weather beaten faces from the
Klondike, from the gold fields of Arizona, and old Mexico. There
were poor, honest, but unsuccessful farmers from other states
looking for new homes and considering this a kind of Promised Land
for inability of all kinds. They came in _boomer wagons_. They came
from every point of the compass. There were some successful Middle
West farmers who had just sold their own land for a large price and
brought their family here, hoping to get a new start for their sons.
The crowd slept in _boomer wagons_; they slept on the ground; they
slept on cots along the streets; they slept on the floors of empty
buildings. Seventy-five thousand people were poured into a little
village that had barely accommodations for ten thousand.
It was hot. Everyone suffered. The ground was sun-baked until it
cracked open in wide fissures. There had been no rain for four
months. Daily the south wind blew until the atmosphere kept the hue
of a twilight that did not change. The corn was burned and sere.
The leaves withered; all the vegetation was colorless and dry. The
intense heat was unchanging. The day was followed by a night without
dew. The continued milling of horses, wagons, people on foot, ground
up the dirt until it became an impalpable powder that penetrated
everywhere, even the sides of the houses. And through all this dry,
parching heat there was an agonizing lack of water. There were poor
families here who had waited, in wagons, for years for the gift of
this free land. There were legitimate people who really wanted homes
and were willing to work for them. There was a large class too of
shiftless, chronic boomers from the entire West, whose lives had
been spent in looking for something for nothing. There were chronic
wanderers seeking sensation. After this Strip Opening was over, they
would sadly turn away, hoping for similar, fresh excitement somewhere
else.
It was a prohibition country, but saloons and gambling houses and
houses of prostitution were open day and night. Everyone went armed.
A man who did not have a gun upon his hip was something to remark
about.
The scarcity of water increased from day to day. Horses, dogs, and
mules went about sadly with their swollen tongues hanging out. The
entire prairie was parched like another Sahara. Over it bent a sky
that was just as blue, just as cloudless, just as brazen and wind
beaten.
Along with the gamblers came the prostitutes, the Three Card Monte
men, from the deserts of Arizona, from the deserts of New Mexico,
from Arkansas, and Texas. The prostitutes were not segregated nor
isolated. They occupied the second story, front, of the business
houses along the one Main Street. Among them were two Cherokee Indian
girls, sisters; Violet and May. May was built like the Venus. She
was her little sister in the flesh, as far as beauty went. She had
thin, fine lined features, coal black hair that reached her ankles,
and a complexion the color of a cape-jessamine. The only marks of
the Indian were her silence and suppleness; and the grace of her
body. Both had been convent bred. After these years of forced and
disagreeable restraint in the convent, they turned to the easiest
way, or else some law of atavism asserted itself, and swept upon them
the insistent instincts of their Indian past.
The streets looked like a scene from a comic opera. Red blanketed
Indians mixed freely with the whites, and Mexicans, wearing a fortune
in a silver hat band that glittered like a coiled snake around their
pointed-crowned, broad-brimmed, white hats. Notwithstanding the
fact that the Indian is a stoic and seldom gets excited himself,
he gravitates toward a crowd like a fly toward a bowl of sugar,
instinctively rebelling against the accumulated loneliness of the
past. He does not take any part to be sure, nor does he join in the
fun and the noise, but he has his own, ancient, silent, devious ways
of pleasure. He did not know of course, the silent watchful Indian,
that he was helping to celebrate his own funeral. All these tens of
thousands of white men congregated here, were at a given signal,
going to leap over the line of the Indian Territory and cut up, into
the checker-board squares of little farms, the old, happy hunting
ground of his ancestors.
The line-up was on the southern Kansas line. For weeks, for months,
they had been getting ready for this race; Texans on their long
winded cow-ponies, Kentuckians on their thoroughbreds, Illinois
farmers on their fat, overfed, pot-bellied horses, and Missouri
farmers driving wagons with mules. It was just like getting ready
for a world Marathon, which had fifty thousand entries, and no rules
and no judges. They trained hundreds of horses here for weeks;
for endurance, for speed, for that first great leap forward. Some
had picked out the land they wanted in advance and had a definite
objective. The rich paid fabulous sums for horses; tall, gaunt, clean
limbed Kentucky racers, or Virginia thoroughbreds, thin and nimble
bodied. There were fat mule teams that could not make twenty miles in
a day. But everyone was eager for a little square of that rich land.
On the morning of the big day, this entire mass moved to the State
Line which was only four miles away, where each one tried for first
place. From then until noon it surpassed Pandemonium itself or any
congregation of the lost in Purgatory. For a hundred miles this great
crowd was held back only by a little group of cavalry-men spread out
at intervals that were too great. High noon was the opening hour. It
was announced by a cannon. The announcement was passed down the line
by the echoing firing of troopers.
By noon the red, sun-baked plain was veiled with a blue haze of heat.
There was almost no vegetation. The great drought had killed it.
There was no grass, no weeds, no trees that were green, because of
months of wind and rainlessness. Nowhere was there a sign of water.
All the little _cricks_ were dry. Clouds of sand kicked up by the
wind curled derisively over all the former trickling water courses.
The thirst was terrible. It all but made men mad.
When at length the signal came, when the cannon roared, instantly
that long, black, wavering line became alive, leaped forward like a
long supple serpent, then separated into individual units that spread
out across the plain. Men on thoroughbreds who knew horses, and even
the riders of the humble cow-ponies, husbanded their strength wisely
and held their horses down to the long swinging lope of the prairies,
which the trained cow-pony can keep up all day. Less experienced
riders, senseless with haste and greed, many with expensive horses
which they had bought for the occasion, lashed into top speed at the
outset, and before two miles were covered they were down and out.
Prairie schooners, thousands of them, broke like a huge covey of
awkward quail, set out at speed over the levels, and then dropped
back to their old lumbering gait. Some had strong horses that pulled
vigorously, some, horses that were weary and old and harnessed with
ropes. There were even teams of oxen in this long, mad race. One
man went in on a thousand dollar Kentucky thoroughbred, and when
he reached the land he had picked out, he found a _sooner_ calmly
ploughing with his oxen. It occurred to no one that land just over
the line was as good as land twenty miles ahead. It was a woman on
foot who realized this. When the cannon boomed and the long black
line dashed away, she took one step forward, and stuck down in the
ground a stake on which she had whittled her name. She sat down on
the ground under a large black cotton umbrella and drank her bottled
lemonade, while the rest rushed away in the heat, for a claim or a
town lot. Cities were built in six hours.
Then came night in these cities of a few hours. What had been bare,
red ground at noon, was at night well ordered cities of tents. The
next day they elected a mayor and municipal officers and formed a
government. In a week there were hundreds of lumber buildings. The
second week they had electric lights. And the second day they had a
daily paper.
The first census showed people from every state in the Union and
from far away Australia. There were petty aristocrats from Europe.
There was an Hungarian nobleman whose name it is not best to give,
because there is just one chance in a thousand that it might have
been his own name. Too bad, for it was an imposing name, made up of a
title, five given names and a double-deck family name. He resembled
a captain of cuirassiers. He was a hero of romance in real life;
tall, spare, dark; pointed mustache, snappy black eyes, and a very
distinguished manner; the cosmopolitan manner. He was an accomplished
linguist, who had disembarked at every great port of the world. He
knew Shanghai, Frisco, Rio, and the Straits Settlements. He came
as a respectable adventurer, because being an adventurer was a
profession here. He probably had no definite aim. Because however,
collectively, among such a crowd of people there must be money it
was an opportunity for him. And if they had money, his wits were
keen enough to get some of it, because that was his objective in
life. He lived lightly and easily upon the money which other people
worked to earn. He waited patiently and happily until they earned
it. And then he took it away from them. He used to relate to circles
of open-mouthed listeners, under the round white moon of those first
warm nights, when the dewless air was glittering and clear, how once
he had circled the world with a prince of the blood royal. The prince
had incurred his father’s displeasure so his father had decreed to
punish him by temporary banishment. By way of banishment he chartered
a yacht for a number of years, gave the boy a fortune in spending
money, and sent him away to look the world over.
Here, for a living, this Hungarian nobleman did the people. And he
did them successfully. To the German settlers he was a German; to the
Hungarian a Hungarian; to the French a Frenchman. To the townspeople
in general he was an international lawyer who had never seen the
inside of a law book in his life. He sold legal advice for cash. His
knowledge of all trickery was profound and worthy of respect. When
business in a legal line was dull, he sold clothing to measure. In
addition, he dealt in real estate. He was a broker of everything
who never failed to leave the person he dealt with broke. He was
royal in one thing, in the generous way he knew how to spend other
people’s money. Even in this isolated place he contrived to look like
a fashion plate. He had a large and elegantly selected wardrobe. He
never knew where the next meal was coming from, but he always got a
meal.
The superannuated politician from other states, who had worn out
the patience of all his constituents at home, was here. There were
Georgia colonels, Kentucky captains, with goatees or huge mustaches,
and narrow, down hanging, black, string ties. There were judges,
generals, old and _passés_, a conglomeration of ambition and proud
failure, looking hopefully for another chance from Fate. To dispute
with any one of them that his town would not have a hundred thousand
inhabitants in a year meant gun play.
Food was from the usual western lunch counter. Here every one
swung himself to a tall stool and ate. Food was reduced largely to
beefsteak, canned tomatoes, wet, soggy bread, and black creamless
coffee.
Night, in the towns, with the electric lights beating down upon dry
sand, was hard and cruel and white. The business streets were one
frame shack after another, each shack with an enormous front built up
high to make it look imposing. One town’s most popular and crowded
corner, was Reece Brothers’ Gambling House. Here roulette, faro,
craps, stud poker, kept the restless crowd busy throughout the night.
Of the Reece Brothers, Bill was what you would call the typical
gambler, an ideal movie gambler of today. Grey-eyed, thin-lipped,
with a mouth like a steel trap, at the ends of which there dangled
a long, pointed, limp, corn-silk, yellow mustache. He wore a poetic
Lord Byron collar, a flowing tie, a hugely plaided suit, and the
largest and most expensive sombrero in town. This was a dry country
because it was still under government control; an Indian country.
Notwithstanding this fact, however, enormous amounts of liquor were
sold openly over a regular bar.
Sam Reece was of a deeply religious bent. When Sunday morning came,
after his night shift at the faro table, as lookout, he put on his
long, black Prince Albert, tall, silk-plush hat ten years out of
date, worn black kid gloves with fancy stitching along the back, and
looking like an undertaker at a dry convention, he took his stately
way to church. The church was an oblong tent. It was unbearably hot
in summer, and in winter of course there was no heat in it. Sam had
various aspirations in life. His greatest aspiration was to sing
solos in the choir. It was his one genuine pleasure.
With night fall, the lonely little towns began to get busy. By eight
o’clock the unpaved dusty streets were packed with a crowd of men
and women milling back and forth, back and forth, from one gambling
house to another. Many of these people back home were not gamblers,
but church deacons, conservative business men, farmers, whom the
loneliness forced to seek excitement or companionship. Any one from
a corn doctor to an anarchist, could have a crowd of applauding
listeners about him, if he mounted the empty sugar barrel which stood
upon the Public Acre, and stood up to make a speech.
Nearly always the wind blew. It blew throughout the night, throughout
the day. The air was so dry it was something glittering, sweeping
continually past. The arc lights swinging wildly in the boisterous
wind, cast strange and grotesque shadows upon the unpainted shacks,
and the people who were moving about. The church and the gambling
houses and that long, black, restless ribbon which was the incoming
Santa Fé train, were the only civilizing forces that welded men
together, and helped drive away distance, homesickness, and
loneliness.