On to Boston
With plenty of time to think, I thought, crouched low in my seat silent
as an owl. True, I dozed off now and again but even when shortened by
these periods of forgetfulness, the journey seemed interminable and when
I reached the grimy old shed of a station which was the Chicago terminal
of the Northwestern in those days, I was glad of a chance to taste
outside air, no matter how smoky it reported itself to be.
My brother, who was working in the office of a weekly farm journal, met
me with an air of calm superiority. He had become a true Chicagoan.
Under his confident leadership I soon found a boarding place and a
measure of repose. I must have stayed with him for several days for I
recall being hypnotized into ordering a twenty-dollar tailor-made suit
from a South Clark street merchant--you know the kind. It was a "Prince
Albert Soot"--my first made-to-order outfit, but the extravagance seemed
justified in face of the known elegance of man's apparel in Boston.
It took me thirty-six hours more to get to Boston, and as I was ill all
the way (I again rode in the smoking car) a less triumphant Jason never
entered the City of Light and Learning. The day was a true November day,
dark and rainy and cold, and when I confronted my cloud-built city of
domes and towers I was concerned only with a place to sleep--I had
little desire of battle and no remembrance of the Golden Fleece.
Up from the Hoosac Station and over the slimy, greasy pavement I trod
with humped back, carrying my heavy valise (it was the same
imitation-leather concern with which I had toured the city two years
before), while gay little street cars tinkled by, so close to my
shoulder that I could have touched them with my hand.
Again I found my way through Haymarket Square to Tremont street and so
at last to the Common, which presented a cold and dismal face at this
time. The glory of my dream had fled. The trees, bare and brown and
dripping with rain, offered no shelter. The benches were sodden, the
paths muddy, and the sky, lost in a desolate mist shut down over my head
with oppressive weight. I crawled along the muddy walk feeling about as
important as a belated beetle in a July thunderstorm. Half of me was
ready to surrender and go home on the next train but the other half, the
obstinate half, sullenly forged ahead, busy with the problem of a roof
and bed.
My experience in Rock River now stood me in good hand. Stopping a
policeman I asked the way to the Young Men's Christian Association. The
officer pointed out a small tower not far away, and down the Tremont
street walk I plodded as wretched a youth as one would care to see.
Humbled, apologetic, I climbed the stairway, approached the desk, and in
a weak voice requested the address of a cheap lodging place.
From the cards which the clerk carelessly handed to me I selected the
nearest address, which chanced to be on Boylston Place, a short narrow
street just beyond the Public Library. It was a deplorably wet and
gloomy alley, but I ventured down its narrow walk and desperately
knocked on the door of No. 12.
A handsome elderly woman with snow-white hair met me at the threshold.
She looked entirely respectable, and as she named a price which I could
afford to pay I accepted her invitation to enter. The house swarmed with
life. Somebody was strumming a banjo, a girl was singing, and as I
mounted the stair to the first floor, a slim little maid of about
fourteen met us. "This is my daughter Fay," said the landlady with
manifest pride.
Left to myself I sank into a chair with such relief as only the poor
homeless country boy knows when at the end of a long tramp from the
station, he lets slip his hand-bag and looks around upon a room for
which he has paid. It was a plain little chamber, but it meant shelter
and sleep and I was grateful. I went to bed early.
I slept soundly and the world to which I awoke was new and resplendent.
My headache was gone, and as I left the house in search of breakfast I
found the sun shining.
Just around the corner on Tremont street I discovered a little old man
who from a sidewalk booth, sold delicious coffee in cups of two
sizes,--one at three cents and a larger one at five cents. He also
offered doughnuts at a penny each.
Having breakfasted at an outlay of exactly eight cents I returned to my
chamber, which was a hall-room, eight feet by ten, and faced the north.
It was heated (theoretically) from a register in the floor, and there
was just space enough for my trunk, a cot and a small table at the
window but as it cost only six dollars per month I was content. I
figured that I could live on five dollars per week which would enable me
to stay till spring. I had about one hundred and thirty dollars in my
purse.
From this sunless nook, this narrow niche, I began my study of Boston,
whose historic significance quite overpowered me. I was alone. Mr.
Bashford, in Portland, Maine, was the only person in all the east on
whom I could call for aid or advice in case of sickness. My father wrote
me that he had relatives living in the city but I did not know how to
find them. No one could have been more absolutely alone than I during
that first month. I made no acquaintances, I spoke to no one.
A part of each day was spent in studying the historical monuments of the
city, and the remaining time was given to reading at the Young Men's
Union or in the Public Library, which stood next door to my lodging
house.
At night I made detailed studies of the habits of the cockroaches with
which my room was peopled. There was something uncanny in the action of
these beasts. They were new to me and apparently my like had never
before been observed by them. They belonged to the shadow, to the cold
and to the damp of the city, whereas I was fresh from the sunlight of
the plain, and as I watched them peering out from behind my wash-basin,
they appeared to marvel at me and to confer on my case with almost
elfish intelligence.
Tantalized by an occasional feeble and vacillating current of warm air
from the register, I was forced at times to wear my overcoat as I read,
and at night I spread it over my cot. I did not see the sun for a month.
The wind was always filled with rain or sleet, and as the lights in
Bates' Hall were almost always blazing, I could hardly tell when day
left off and night began. It seemed as if I had been plunged into
another and darker world, a world of storm, of gray clouds, of endless
cold.
Having resolved to keep all my expenses within five dollars per week, I
laid down a scientific plan for cheap living. I first nosed out every
low-priced eating place within ten minutes walk of my lodging and soon
knew which of these "joints" were wholesome, and which were not. Just
around the corner was a place where a filling dinner could be procured
for fifteen cents, including pudding, and the little lunch counter on
Tremont street supplied my breakfast. Not one nickel did I spend in
carfare, and yet I saw almost every celebrated building in the city.
However, I tenderly regarded my shoe soles each night, for the cost of
tapping was enormous.
My notion of studying at some school was never carried out. The Boston
University classes did not attract me. The Harvard lectures were
inaccessible, and my call upon the teacher of "Expression" to whom Mr.
Bashford had given me a letter led to nothing. The professor was a
nervous person and made the mistake of assuming that I was as timid as I
was silent. His manner irritated me and the outburst of my resentment
was astonishing to him. I was hungry at the moment and to be patronized
was too much!
This encounter plunged me into deep discouragement and I went back to my
reading in the library with a despairing resolution to improve every
moment, for my stay in the east could not last many weeks. At the rate
my money was going May would see me bankrupt.
I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske,
Helmholtz, Haeckel,--all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I
had not hitherto been able to open. For diversion I dived into early
English poetry and weltered in that sea of song which marks the
beginnings of every literature, conning the ballads of Ireland and
Wales, the epics of Ireland, the early German and the songs of the
troubadours, a course of reading which started me on a series of
lectures to be written directly from a study of the authors themselves.
This dimly took shape as a volume to be called _The Development of
English Ideals_, a sufficiently ambitious project.
Among other proscribed books I read Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ and
without doubt that volume changed the world for me as it did for many
others. Its rhythmic chants, its wonderful music filled me with a keen
sense of the mystery of the near at hand. I rose from that first reading
with a sense of having been taken up into high places. The spiritual
significance of America was let loose upon me.
Herbert Spencer remained my philosopher and master. With eager haste I
sought to compass the "Synthetic Philosophy." The universe took on order
and harmony as, from my five cent breakfast, I went directly to the
consideration of Spencer's theory of the evolution of music or painting
or sculpture. It was thrilling, it was joyful to perceive that
everything moved from the simple to the complex--how the bow-string
became the harp, and the egg the chicken. My mental diaphragm creaked
with the pressure of inrushing ideas. My brain young, sensitive to every
touch, took hold of facts and theories like a phonographic cylinder, and
while my body softened and my muscles wasted from disuse, I skittered
from pole to pole of the intellectual universe like an impatient bat. I
learned a little of everything and nothing very thoroughly. With so many
peaks in sight, I had no time to spend on digging up the valley soil.
My only exercise was an occasional slow walk. I could not afford to
waste my food in physical effort, and besides I was thinly dressed and
could not go out except when the sun shone. My overcoat was considerably
more than half cotton and a poor shield against the bitter wind which
drove straight from the arctic sea into my bones. Even when the weather
was mild, the crossings were nearly always ankle deep in slush, and
walking was anything but a pleasure, therefore it happened that for days
I took no outing whatsoever. From my meals I returned to my table in
the library and read until closing time, conserving in every way my
thirty cents' worth of "food units."
In this way I covered a wide literary and scientific territory. Humped
over my fitful register I discussed the Nebular Hypothesis. My poets and
scientists not merely told me of things I had never known, they
confirmed me in certain conceptions which had come to me without effort
in the past. I became an evolutionist in the fullest sense, accepting
Spencer as the greatest living thinker. Fiske and Galton and Allen were
merely assistants to the Master Mind whose generalizations included in
their circles all modern discovery.
It was a sad change when, leaving the brilliant reading room where my
mind had been in contact with these masters of scientific world, I crept
back to my minute den, there to sit humped and shivering (my overcoat
thrown over my shoulders) confronting with scared resentment the sure
wasting of my little store of dollars. In spite of all my care, the
pennies departed from my pockets like grains of sand from an hour-glass
and most disheartening of all I was making no apparent gain toward
fitting myself for employment in the west.
Furthermore, the greatness, the significance, the beauty of Boston was
growing upon me. I felt the neighboring presence of its autocrats more
definitely and powerfully each day. Their names filled the daily papers,
their comings and goings were carefully noted. William Dean Howells,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, John G. Whittier, Edwin Booth, James Russell
Lowell, all these towering personalities seemed very near to me now, and
their presence, even if I never saw their faces, was an inspiration to
one who had definitely decided to compose essays and poems, and to write
possibly a history of American Literature. Symphony concerts, the
Lowell Institute Lectures, the _Atlantic Monthly_--(all the distinctive
institutions of the Hub) had become very precious to me notwithstanding
the fact that I had little actual share in them. Their nearness while
making my poverty more bitter, aroused in me a vague ambition to
succeed--in something. "I won't be beaten, I will not surrender," I
said.
Being neither a resident of the city nor a pupil of any school I could
not take books from the library and this inhibition wore upon me till at
last I determined to seek the aid of Edward Everett Hale who had long
been a great and gracious figure in my mind. His name had been among the
"Authors" of our rainy-day game on the farm. I had read his books, and I
had heard him preach and as his "Lend-a-hand" helpfulness was
proverbial, I resolved to call upon him at his study in the church, and
ask his advice. I was not very definite as to what I expected him to do,
probably I hoped for sympathy in some form.
The old man received me with kindness, but with a look of weariness
which I quickly understood. Accustomed to helping people he considered
me just another "Case." With hesitation I explained my difficulty about
taking out books.
With a bluff roar he exclaimed, "Well, well! That is strange! Have you
spoken to the Librarian about it?"
"I have, Dr. Hale, but he told me there were twenty thousand young
students in the city in precisely my condition. People not residents and
with no one to vouch for them cannot take books home."
"I don't like that," he said. "I will look into that. You shall be
provided for. Present my card to Judge Chamberlain; I am one of the
trustees, and he will see that you have all the books you want."
I thanked him and withdrew, feeling that I had gained a point. I
presented the card to the librarian whose manner softened at once. As a
protege of Dr. Hale I was distinguished. "I will see what can be done
for you," said Judge Chamberlain. Thereafter I was able to take books to
my room, a habit which still further imperilled my health, for I read
fourteen hours a day instead of ten.
Naturally I grew white and weak. My Dakota tan and my corn-fed muscle
melted away. The only part of me which flourished was my hair. I
begrudged every quarter which went to the barbers and I was cold most of
the time (except when I infested the library) and I was hungry _all_ the
time.
I knew that I was physically on the down-grade, but what could I do?
Nothing except to cut down my expenses. I was living on less than five
dollars a week, but even at that the end of my _stay_ in the city was
not far off. Hence I walked gingerly and read fiercely.
Bates' Hall was deliciously comfortable, and every day at nine o'clock I
was at the door eager to enter. I spent most of my day at a desk in the
big central reading room, but at night I haunted the Young Men's Union,
thus adding myself to a dubious collection of half-demented, ill-clothed
derelicts, who suffered the contempt of the attendants by reason of
their filling all the chairs and monopolizing all the newspaper racks.
We never conversed one with another and no one knew my name, but there
came to be a certain diplomatic understanding amongst us somewhat as
snakes, rabbits, hyenas, and turtles sometimes form "happy families."
There was one old ruffian who always sniffled and snuffled like a fat
hog as he read, monopolizing my favorite newspaper. Another member of
the circle perused the same page of the same book day after day,
laughing vacuously over its contents. Never by any mistake did he call
for a different book, and I never saw him turn a leaf. No doubt I was
counted as one of this group of irresponsibles.
All this hurt me. I saw no humor in it then, for I was even at this time
an intellectual aristocrat. I despised brainless folk. I hated these
loafers. I loathed the clerk at the desk who dismissed me with a
contemptuous smirk, and I resented the formal smile and impersonal
politeness of Mr. Baldwin, the President. Of course I understood that
the attendants knew nothing of my dreams and my ambitions, and that they
were treating me quite as well as my looks warranted, but I blamed them
just the same, furious at my own helplessness to demonstrate my claims
for higher honors.
During all this time the only woman I knew was my landlady, Mrs. Davis,
and her daughter Fay. Once a week I curtly said, "Here is your rent,
Mrs. Davis," and yet, several times she asked with concern, "How are you
feeling?--You don't look well. Why don't you board with me? I can feed
you quite as cheaply as you can board yourself."
It is probable that she read slow starvation in my face, but I haughtily
answered, "Thank you, I prefer to take my meals out." As a matter of
fact, I dreaded contact with the other boarders.
As a member of the Union a certain number of lectures were open to me
and so night by night, in company with my fellow "nuts," I called for my
ticket and took my place in line at the door, like a charity patient at
a hospital. However, as I seldom occupied a seat to the exclusion of
anyone else and as my presence usually helped to keep the speaker in
countenance, I had no qualms.
The Union audience was notoriously the worst audience in Boston, being
in truth a group of intellectual mendicants waiting for oratorical
hand-me-outs. If we didn't happen to like the sandwiches or the dry
doughnuts given us, we threw them down and walked away.
Nevertheless in this hall I heard nearly all the great preachers of the
city, and though some of their cant phrases worried me, I was benefited
by the literary allusions of others. Carpenter retained nothing of the
old-fashioned theology, and Hale was always a delight--so was Minot
Savage. Dr. Bartol, a quaint absorbing survival of the Concord School of
Philosophy, came once, and I often went to his Sunday service. It was
always joy to enter the old West Meeting House for it remained almost
precisely as it was in Revolutionary days. Its pews, its curtains, its
footstools, its pulpit, were all deliciously suggestive of the time when
stately elms looked in at the window, and when the minister, tall,
white-haired, black-cravatted arose in the high pulpit and began to read
with curious, sing-song cadences a chant from _Job_ I easily imagined
myself listening to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
His sermons held no cheap phrases and his sentences delighted me by
their neat literary grace. Once in an address on Grant he said, "He was
an atmospheric man. He developed from the war-cloud like a bolt of
lightning."
Perhaps Minot Savage pleased me best of all for he too was a disciple of
Spencer, a logical, consistent, and fearless evolutionist. He often
quoted from the poets in his sermon. Once he read Whitman's "Song of
Myself" with such power, such sense of rhythm that his congregation
broke into applause at the end. I heard also (at Tremont temple and
elsewhere) men like George William Curtis, Henry Ward Beecher, and
Frederick Douglass, but greatest of all in a certain sense was the
influence of Edwin Booth who taught me the greatness of Shakespeare and
the glory of English speech.
Poor as I was, I visited the old Museum night after night, paying
thirty-five cents which admitted me to a standing place in the first
balcony, and there on my feet and in complete absorption, I saw in
wondrous procession _Hamlet_, _Lear_, _Othello_, _Petruchio_, _Sir Giles
Overreach_, _Macbeth_, _Iago_, and _Richelieu_ emerge from the shadow
and re-enact their tragic lives before my eyes. These were my purple,
splendid hours. From the light of this glorious mimic world I stumbled
down the stairs out into the night, careless of wind or snow, my brain
in a tumult of revolt, my soul surging with high resolves.
The stimulation of these performances was very great. The art of this
"Prince of Tragedy" was a powerful educational influence along the lines
of oratory, poetry and the drama. He expressed to me the soul of English
Literature. He exemplified the music of English speech. His acting was
at once painting and sculpture and music and I became still more
economical of food in order that I might the more often bask in the
golden atmosphere of his world. I said, "I, too, will help to make the
dead lines of the great poets speak to the living people of today," and
with new fervor bent to the study of oratory as the handmaid of poetry.
The boys who acted as ushers in the balcony came at length to know me,
and sometimes when it happened that some unlucky suburbanite was forced
to leave his seat near the railing, one of the lads would nod at me and
allow me to slip down and take the empty place.
In this way I got closer to the marvellous lines of the actor's face,
and was enabled to read and record the subtler, fleeter shadows of his
expression. I have never looked upon a face with such transcendent power
of externalizing and differentiating emotions, and I have never heard a
voice of equal beauty and majesty.
Booth taught millions of Americans the dignity, the power and the music
of the English tongue. He set a high mark in grace and precision of
gesture, and the mysterious force of his essentially tragic spirit made
so deep an impression upon those who heard him that they confused him
with the characters he portrayed. As for me--I could not sleep for hours
after leaving the theater.
Line by line I made mental note of the actor's gestures, accents, and
cadences and afterward wrote them carefully down. As I closed my eyes
for sleep I could hear that solemn chant "_Duncan is in his grave. After
life's fitful fever he sleeps well._" With horror and admiration I
recalled him, when as _Sir Giles_, with palsied hand helpless by his
side, his face distorted, he muttered as if to himself, "Some undone
widow sits upon my sword," or when as _Petruchio_ in making a playful
snatch at Kate's hand with the blaze of a lion's anger in his eye his
voice rang out, "Were it the paw of an angry bear, I'd smite it off--but
as it's Kate's I kiss it."
To the boy from the cabin on the Dakota plain these stage pictures were
of almost incommunicable beauty and significance. They justified me in
all my daring. They made any suffering past, present, or future, worth
while, and the knowledge that these glories were evanescent and that I
must soon return to the Dakota plain only deepened their power and added
to the grandeur of every scene.
Booth's home at this time was on Beacon Hill, and I used to walk
reverently by just to see where the great man housed. Once, the door
being open, I caught a momentary glimpse of a curiously ornate umbrella
stand, and the soft glow of a distant lamp, and the vision greatly
enriched me. This singularly endowed artist presented to me the radiant
summit of human happiness and glory, and to see him walk in or out of
his door was my silent hope, but alas, this felicity was denied me!
Under the spell of these performers, I wrote a series of studies of the
tragedian in his greatest roles. "Edwin Booth as Lear," "Edwin Booth as
Hamlet," and so on, recording with minutest fidelity every gesture,
every accent, till four of these impersonations were preserved on the
page as if in amber. I re-read my Shakespeare in the light of Booth's
eyes, in the sound of his magic voice, and when the season ended, the
city grew dark, doubly dark for me. Thereafter I lived in the fading
glory of that month.
These were growing days! I had moments of tremendous expansion, hours
when my mind went out over the earth like a freed eagle, but these
flights were always succeeded by fits of depression as I realized my
weakness and my poverty. Nevertheless I persisted in my studies.
Under the influence of Spencer I traced a parallel development of the
Arts and found a measure of scientific peace. Under the inspiration of
Whitman I pondered the significance of democracy and caught some part of
its spiritual import. With Henry George as guide, I discovered the main
cause of poverty and suffering in the world, and so in my little room,
living on forty cents a day, I was in a sense profoundly happy. So long
as I had a dollar and a half with which to pay my rent and two dollars
for the keepers of the various dives in which I secured my food, I was
imaginatively the equal of Booth and brother to the kings of song.
And yet one stern persistent fact remained, my money was passing and I
was growing weaker and paler every day. The cockroaches no longer amused
me. Coming as I did from a land where the sky made up half the world I
resented being thus condemned to a nook from which I could see only a
gray rag of mist hanging above a neighboring chimney.
In the moments when I closely confronted my situation the glory of the
western sky came back to me, and it must have been during one of these
dreary storms that I began to write a poor faltering little story which
told of the adventures of a cattleman in the city. No doubt it was the
expression of the homesickness at my own heart but only one or two of
the chapters ever took shape, for I was tortured by the feeling that no
matter how great the intellectual advancement caused by hearing Edwin
Booth in _Hamlet_ might be, it would avail me nothing when confronted by
the school committee of Blankville, Illinois.
I had moments of being troubled and uneasy and at times experienced a
feeling that was almost despair.