A Taste of Village Life
The change from farm to village life, though delightful, was not so
complete as we had anticipated, for we not only carried with us several
cows and a span of horses, but the house which we had rented stood at
the edge of town and possessed a large plot; therefore we not only
continued to milk cows and curry horses, but set to work at once
planting potatoes and other vegetables almost as if still upon the farm.
The soil had been poorly cultivated for several years, and the weeds
sprang up like dragons' teeth. Work, it seemed, was not to be escaped
even in the city.
Though a little resentful of this labor and somewhat disappointed in our
dwelling, we were vastly excited by certain phases of our new
surroundings. To be within a few minutes' walk of the postoffice, and to
be able to go to the store at any moment, were conditions quite as
satisfactory as we had any right to expect. Also we slept later, for my
father was less disposed to get us out of bed at dawn and this in itself
was an enormous gain, especially to my mother.
Osage, a small town, hardly more than a village, was situated on the
edge of a belt of hardwood timber through which the Cedar River ran, and
was quite commonplace to most people but to me it was both mysterious
and dangerous, for it was the home of an alien tribe, hostile and
pitiless--"The Town Boys."
Up to this time I had both hated and feared them, knowing that they
hated and despised me, and now, suddenly I was thrust among them and put
on my own defenses. For a few weeks I felt like a young rooster in a
strange barn-yard,--knowing that I would be called upon to prove my
quality. In fact it took but a week or two to establish my place in the
tribe for one of the leaders of the gang was Mitchell Scott, a powerful
lad of about my own age, and to his friendship I owe a large part of my
freedom from persecution.
Uncle David came to see us several times during the spring and his talk
was all about "going west." He was restless under the conditions of his
life on a farm. I don't know why this was so, but a growing bitterness
clouded his voice. Once I heard him say, "I don't know what use I am in
the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of
discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made
a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun.
During the early part of the summer my brother and I worked in the
garden with frequent days off for fishing, swimming and berrying, and we
were entirely content with life. No doubts assailed us. We swam in the
pond at Rice's Mill and we cast our hooks in the sunny ripples below it.
We saw the circus come to town and go into camp on a vacant lot, and we
attended every movement of it with a delicious sense of leisure. We
could go at night with no long ride to take after it was over.--The
fourth of July came to seek us this year and we had but to step across
the way to see a ball-game. We were at last in the center of our world.
In June my father called me to help in the elevator and this turned out
to be a most informing experience. "The Street," as it was called, was
merely a wagon road which ran along in front of a row of wheat
ware-houses of various shapes and sizes, from which the buyers emerged
to meet the farmers as they drove into town. Two or three or more of the
men would clamber upon the load, open the sacks, sample the grain and
bid for it. If one man wanted the load badly, or if he chanced to be in
a bad temper, the farmer was the gainer. Hence very few of them, even
the members of the Grange, were content to drive up to my father's
elevator and take the honest market price. They were all hoping to get a
little more than the market price.
This vexed and embittered my father who often spoke of it to me. "It
only shows," he said, "how hard it will be to work out any reform among
the farmers. They will never stand together. These other buyers will
force me off the market and then there will be no one here to represent
the farmers' interest."
These merchants interested me greatly. Humorous, self-contained,
remorseless in trade, they were most delightful companions when off
duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of
the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to
linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing else to
do.
One of them by reason of his tailor-made suit and a large ring on his
little finger, was especially attractive to me. He was a handsome man of
a sinister type, and I regarded his expressionless face as that of a
gambler. I didn't know that he was a poker player but it amused me to
think so. Another buyer was a choleric Cornishman whom the other men
sometimes goaded into paying five or six cents more than the market
admitted, by shrewdly playing on his hot temper. A third was a tall
gaunt old man of New England type, obstinate, honest, but of sanguine
temperament. He was always on the bull side of the market and a loud
debater.--The fourth, a quiet little man of smooth address, acted as
peacemaker.
Among these men my father moved as an equal, notwithstanding the fact of
his country training and prejudices, and it was through the man Morley
that we got our first outlook upon the bleak world of Agnosticism, for
during the summer a series of lectures by Robert Ingersoll was reported
in one of the Chicago papers and the West rang with the controversy.
On Monday as soon as the paper came to town it was the habit of the
grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley,
the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened
and commented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great
iconoclast, and the arguments which followed were often heated and
sometimes fiercely personal.
After they had quite finished with the paper, I sometimes secured it for
myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it
with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly
influenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been
reared had already grown dim, and under the light of Ingersoll's
remorseless humor most of our superstitions vanished. I do not think my
father's essential Christianity was in any degree diminished, he merely
lost his respect for certain outworn traditions and empty creeds.
My work consisted in receiving the grain and keeping the elevator going
and as I weighed the sacks, made out checks for the payment and kept the
books--in all ways taking a man's place,--I lost all sense of being a
boy.
The motive power of our hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome
fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before
he filled a large space in my thoughts. There was something appealing
in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his
rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the
wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled,
and a deep hollow in the sill attested his accuracy. He seemed to do
this purposely--to keep count, as I imagined, of his dreary circling
through sunless days.
A part of my duty was to watch the fanning mill (in the high cupola) in
order that the sieves should not clog. Three flights of stairs led to
the mill and these had to be mounted many times each day. I always ran
up the steps when the mill required my attention, but in coming down I
usually swung from beam to beam, dropping from footway to footway like a
monkey from a tall tree. My mother in seeing me do this called out in
terror, but I assured her that there was not the slightest danger--and
this was true, for I was both sure-footed and sure-handed in those days.
This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My
father enjoyed companionship with the leading citizens of the town,
while Franklin, as first assistant in a candy store, professed himself
to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fishing or in
roving the woods with Mitchell and George, but on Sundays the entire
family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive
to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering
who came to service regularly--but on foot, so intense was the spirit of
democracy among us.
Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all
a large house and a two seated carriage counted, and my mother's
visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from
the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her social position
and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial
hospitality. She was never envious or bitter.
In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I
saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a
sense of gratitude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church
which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the
power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was
right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of
beauty were seldom mentioned.
With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the
young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the
starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of
prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been
taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one;
that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness
and hates ugliness. He loves the shimmering of dawn, the silver light on
the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright
colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to
reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is
not a God of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a God of beauty, of
delight, of consolation."
In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant
and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the
window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the
girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world,
the world of art.
I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I
went out from that little church vaguely resolved to be a student also,
a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we
all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again
did he touch my heart. That one discourse was his contribution to my
education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the
pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon.
There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men
and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim
interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm)
and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters
of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school
class because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky,
ungraceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only
a steed and a shield to fight for my lady love. No one could be more
essentially romantic than I was at this time--but fortunately no one
knew it!
Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the
Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for
the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of
absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest
field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a
shining new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair
Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me
nearer the clothing and the education I desired.
Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old
boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for
unusual celerity and precision of action. But as I considered myself
full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I
kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, taking care of my half
of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the
briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I
persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to
buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the
seminary term which began in September.
Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me.
My shirts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now
purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense
satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and
understanding humor.
In spite of my store suit and my high-heeled calf-skin boots I felt very
humble as I left our lowly roof that first day and started for the
chapel. To me the brick building standing in the center of its ample
yard was as imposing as I imagine the Harper Memorial Library must be to
the youngster of today as he enters the University of Chicago.
To enter the chapel meant running the gauntlet of a hundred citified
young men and women, fairly entitled to laugh at a clod-jumper like
myself, and I would have balked completely had not David Pointer, a
neighbor's son, volunteered to lead the way. Gratefully I accepted his
offer, and so passed for the first time into the little hall which came
to mean so much to me in after years.
It was a large room swarming with merry young people and the Corinthian
columns painted on the walls, the pipe organ, the stately professors on
the platform, the self-confident choir, were all of such majesty that I
was reduced to hare-like humility. What right had I to share in this
splendor? Sliding hurriedly into a seat I took refuge in the obscurity
which my youth and short stature guaranteed to me.
Soon Professor Bush, the principal of the school, gentle, blue-eyed,
white-haired, with a sweet and mellow voice, rose to greet the old
pupils and welcome the new ones, and his manner so won my confidence
that at the close of the service I went to him and told him who I was.
Fortunately he remembered my sister Harriet, and politely said, "I am
glad to see you, Hamlin," and from that moment I considered him a
friend, and an almost infallible guide.
The school was in truth a very primitive institution, hardly more than a
high school, but it served its purpose. It gave farmers' boys like
myself the opportunity of meeting those who were older, finer, more
learned than they, and every day was to me like turning a fresh and
delightful page in a story book, not merely because it brought new
friends, new experiences, but because it symbolized freedom from the hay
fork and the hoe. Learning was easy for me. In all but mathematics I
kept among the highest of my class without much effort, but it was in
the "Friday Exercises" that I earliest distinguished myself.
It was the custom at the close of every week's work to bring a section
of the pupils upon the platform as essayists or orators, and these
"exercises" formed the most interesting and the most passionately
dreaded feature of the entire school. No pupil who took part in it ever
forgot his first appearance. It was at once a pillory and a burning. It
called for self-possession, memory, grace of gesture and a voice!
My case is typical. For three or four days before my first ordeal, I
could not eat. A mysterious uneasiness developed in my solar plexus, a
pain which never left me--except possibly in the morning before I had
time to think. Day by day I drilled and drilled and drilled, out in the
fields at the edge of the town or at home when mother was away, in the
barn while milking--at every opportunity I went through my selection
with most impassioned voice and lofty gestures, sustained by the legends
of Webster and Demosthenes, resolved upon a blazing victory. I did
everything but mumble a smooth pebble--realizing that most of the boys
in my section were going through precisely the same struggle. Each of us
knew exactly how the others felt, and yet I cannot say that we displayed
acute sympathy one with another; on the contrary, those in the free
section considered the antics of the suffering section a very amusing
spectacle and we were continually being "joshed" about our lack of
appetite.
The test was, in truth, rigorous. To ask a bashful boy or shy girl fresh
from the kitchen to walk out upon a platform and face that crowd of
mocking students was a kind of torture. No desk was permitted. Each
victim stood bleakly exposed to the pitiless gaze of three hundred eyes,
and as most of us were poorly dressed, in coats that never fitted and
trousers that climbed our boot-tops, we suffered the miseries of the
damned. The girls wore gowns which they themselves had made, and were,
of course, equally self-conscious. The knowledge that their sleeves did
not fit was of more concern to them than the thought of breaking
down--but the fear of forgetting their lines also contributed to their
dread and terror.
While the names which preceded mine were called off that first
afternoon, I grew colder and colder till at last I shook with a nervous
chill, and when, in his smooth, pleasant tenor, Prof. Bush called out
"Hamlin Garland" I rose in my seat with a spring like Jack from his box.
My limbs were numb, so numb that I could scarcely feel the floor beneath
my feet and the windows were only faint gray glares of light. My head
oscillated like a toy balloon, seemed indeed to be floating in the air,
and my heart was pounding like a drum.
However, I had pondered upon this scene so long and had figured my
course so exactly that I made all the turns with moderate degree of
grace and succeeded finally in facing my audience without falling up the
steps (as several others had done) and so looked down upon my fellows
like Tennyson's eagle on the sea. In that instant a singular calm fell
over me, I became strangely master of myself. From somewhere above me a
new and amazing power fell upon me and in that instant I perceived on
the faces of my classmates a certain expression of surprise and serious
respect. My subconscious oratorical self had taken charge.
I do not at present recall what my recitation was, but it was probably
_Catiline's Defense_ or some other of the turgid declamatory pieces of
classic literature with which all our readers were filled. It was
bombastic stuff, but my blind, boyish belief in it gave it dignity. As I
went on my voice cleared. The window sashes regained their outlines. I
saw every form before me, and the look of surprise and pleasure on the
smiling face of my principal exalted me.
Closing amid hearty applause, I stepped down with a feeling that I had
won a place among the orators of the school, a belief which did no harm
to others and gave me a good deal of satisfaction. As I had neither
money nor clothes, and was not of figure to win admiration, why should I
not express the pride I felt in my power to move an audience? Besides I
was only sixteen!
The principal spoke to me afterwards, both praising and criticising my
method. The praise I accepted, the criticism I naturally resented. I
realized some of my faults of course, but I was not ready to have even
Prof. Bush tell me of them. I hated "elocution" drill in class, I
relied on "inspiration." I believed that orators were born, not made.
There was one other speaker in my section, a little girl, considerably
younger than myself, who had the mysterious power of the born actress,
and I recognized this quality in her at once. I perceived that she spoke
from a deep-seated, emotional, Celtic impulse. Hardly more than a child
in years, she was easily the most dramatic reader in the school. She
too, loved tragic prose and passionate, sorrowful verse and to hear her
recite,
One of them dead in the East by the sea
And one of them dead in the West by the sea,
was to be shaken by inexplicable emotion. Her face grew pale as silver
as she went on and her eyes darkened with the anguish of the poet
mother.
Most of the students were the sons and daughters of farmers round about
the county, but a few were from the village homes in western Iowa and
southern Minnesota. Two or three boys wore real tailor-made suits, and
the easy flow of their trouser legs and the set of their linen collars
rendered me at once envious and discontented. "Some day," I said to
myself, "I too, will have a suit that will not gape at the neck and
crawl at the ankle," but I did not rise to the height of expecting a
ring and watch.
Shoes were just coming into fashion and one young man wore pointed "box
toes" which filled all the rest of us with despair. John Cutler also
wore collars of linen--real linen--which had to be laundered, but few of
us dared fix our hopes as high as that. John also owned three neckties,
and wore broad cuffs with engraved gold buttons, and on Fridays waved
these splendors before our eyes with a malicious satisfaction which
aroused our hatred. Of such complexion are the tragedies and triumphs of
youth!
How I envied Arthur Peters his calm and haughty bearing! Most of us
entered chapel like rabbits sneaking down a turnip patch, but Arthur and
John and Walter loitered in with the easy and assured manner of Senators
or Generals--so much depends upon leather and prunella. Gradually I lost
my terror of this ordeal, but I took care to keep behind some friendly
bulk like young Blakeslee, who stood six feet two in his gaiters.
With all these anxieties I loved the school and could hardly be wrested
from it even for a day. I bent to my books with eagerness, I joined a
debating society, and I took a hand at all the games. The days went by
on golden, noiseless, ball-bearing axles--and almost before I realized
it, winter was upon the land. But oh! the luxury of that winter, with no
snow drifts to climb, no corn-stalks to gather and no long walk to
school. It was sweet to wake each morning in the shelter of our little
house and know that another day of delightful schooling was ours. Our
hands softened and lightened. Our walk became each day less of a
"galumping plod." The companionship of bright and interesting young
people, and the study of well-dressed men and women in attendance upon
lectures and socials was a part of our instruction and had their
refining effect upon us, graceless colts though we were.
Sometime during this winter Wendell Phillips came to town and lectured
on _The Lost Arts_. My father took us all to see and hear this orator
hero of his boyhood days in Boston.
I confess to a disappointment in the event. A tall old gentleman with
handsome clean-cut features, rose from behind the pulpit in the
Congregational Church, and read from a manuscript--read quietly,
colloquially, like a teacher addressing a group of students, with
scarcely a gesture and without raising his voice. Only once toward the
end of the hour did he thrill us, and then only for a moment.
Father was a little saddened. He shook his head gravely. "He isn't the
orator he was in the good old anti-slavery days," he explained and
passed again into a glowing account of the famous "slave speech" in
Faneuil Hall when the pro-slavery men all but mobbed the speaker.
Per contra, I liked, (and the boys all liked) a certain peripatetic
temperance lecturer named Beale, for _he_ was an orator, one of those
who rise on an impassioned chant, soaring above the snows of Chimborazo,
mingling the purple and gold of sunset with the saffron and silver of
the dawn. None of us could tell just what these gorgeous passages meant,
but they were beautiful while they lasted, and sadly corrupted our
oratorical style. It took some of us twenty years to recover from the
fascination of this man's absurd and high falutin' elocutionary
sing-song.
I forgot the farm, I forgot the valley of my birth, I lived wholly and
with joy in the present. Song, poetry, history mingled with the sports
which made our life so unceasingly interesting. There was a certain
girl, the daughter of the shoe merchant, who (temporarily) displaced the
image of Agnes in the niche of my shrine, and to roll the platter for
her at a "sociable" was a very high honor indeed, and there was another,
a glorious contralto singer, much older than I--but there--I must not
claim to have even attracted her eyes, and my meetings with Millie were
so few and so public that I cannot claim to have ever conversed with
her. They were all boyish adorations.
Much as I enjoyed this winter, greatly as it instructed me, I cannot now
recover from its luminous dark more than here and there an incident, a
poem, a song. It was all delightful, that I know, so filled with joyous
hours that I retain but a mingled impression of satisfaction and
regret--satisfaction with life as I found it, regret at its inevitable
ending--for my father, irritated by the failure of his renter, announced
that he had decided to put us all back upon the farm.