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A HOOSIER HOLIDAY
------------------------------------
BY THEODORE DREISER
===================
-------------------
THE “GENIUS”
SISTER CARRIE
JENNIE GERHARDT
A TRAVELER AT FORTY
PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL
THE FINANCIER }
THE TITAN } A TRILOGY OF DESIRE
*** ***** }
[Illustration:
THE WARSAW HOME
The Mecca of this trip
_Frontispiece_
]
A HOOSIER
HOLIDAY
BY
THEODORE DREISER
WITH ILLVSTRATIONS
BY FRANKLIN BOOTH·
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
LONDON: JOHN LANE
THE BODLEY HEAD
MCMXVI
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
JOHN LANE COMPANY
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.
TO
MY MOTHER
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE ROSE WINDOW 13
II. THE SCENIC ROUTE 20
III. ACROSS THE MEADOWS TO THE PASSAIC 24
IV. THE PIETY AND EGGS OF PATERSON 29
V. ACROSS THE DELAWARE 35
VI. AN AMERICAN SUMMER RESORT 42
VII. THE PENNSYLVANIANS 50
VIII. BEAUTIFUL WILKES-BARRE 58
IX. IN AND OUT OF SCRANTON 65
X. A LITTLE AMERICAN TOWN 75
XI. THE MAGIC OF THE ROAD AND SOME TALES 81
XII. RAILROADS AND A NEW WONDER OF THE WORLD 92
XIII. A COUNTRY HOTEL 98
XIV. THE CITY OF SWAMP ROOT 107
XV. A RIDE BY NIGHT 116
XVI. CHEMUNG 123
XVII. CHICKEN AND WAFFLES AND THE TOON O’ BATH 131
XVIII. MR. HUBBARD AND AN AUTOMOBILE FLIRTATION 141
XIX. THE REV. J. CADDEN MCMICKENS 150
XX. THE CAPITAL OF THE FRA 159
XXI. BUFFALO OLD AND NEW 169
XXII. ALONG THE ERIE SHORE 176
XXIII. THE APPROACH TO ERIE 182
XXIV. THE WRECKAGE OF A STORM 190
XXV. CONNEAUT 197
XXVI. THE GAY LIFE OF THE LAKE SHORE 204
XXVII. A SUMMER STORM AND SOME COMMENTS ON THE PICTURE 214
POSTCARD
XXVIII. IN CLEVELAND 221
XXIX. THE FLAT LANDS OF OHIO 229
XXX. OSTEND PURGED OF SIN 234
XXXI. WHEN HOPE HOPPED HIGH 244
XXXII. THE FRONTIER OF INDIANA 256
XXXIII. ACROSS THE BORDER OF BOYLAND 264
XXXIV. A MIDDLE WESTERN CROWD 273
XXXV. WARSAW AT LAST 283
XXXVI. WARSAW IN 1884-6 290
XXXVII. THE OLD HOUSE 298
XXXVIII. DAY DREAMS 305
XXXIX. THE KISS OF FAIR GUSTA 309
XL. OLD HAUNTS AND OLD DREAMS 317
XLI. BILL ARNOLD AND HIS BROOD 327
XLII. IN THE CHAUTAUQUA BELT 335
XLIII. THE MYSTERY OF COINCIDENCE 346
XLIV. THE FOLKS AT CARMEL 357
XLV. AN INDIANA VILLAGE 370
XLVI. A SENTIMENTAL INTERLUDE 379
XLVII. INDIANAPOLIS AND A GLYMPSE OF FAIRYLAND 385
XLVIII. THE SPIRIT OF TERRE HAUTE 396
XLIX. TERRE HAUTE AFTER THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS 401
L. A LUSH, EGYPTIAN LAND 409
LI. ANOTHER “OLD HOME” 419
LII. HAIL, INDIANA! 428
LIII. FISHING IN THE BUSSERON AND A COUNTY FAIR 434
LIV. THE FERRY AT DECKER 440
LV. A MINSTREL BROTHER 448
LVI. EVANSVILLE 454
LVII. THE BACKWOODS OF INDIANA 465
LVIII. FRENCH LICK 475
LIX. A COLLEGE TOWN 486
LX. “BOOSTER DAY” AND A MEMORY 496
LXI. THE END OF THE JOURNEY 505
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Warsaw Home _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
The Old Essex and Morris Canal 38
Wilkes-Barre 58
A Coal Breaker Near Scranton 62
Franklin Studies an Obliterated Sign 70
Factoryville Bids Us Farewell 88
The Great Bridge at Nicholsen 94
Florence and the Arno, at Owego 110
Beyond Elmira 132
Franklin Dreams Over a River Beyond Savona 136
The “Toon O’ Bath” 140
Egypt at Buffalo 178
Pleasure before Business 186
Conneaut, Ohio 200
The Bridge That Is to Make Franklin Famous 218
Where I Learn That I Am Not to Live Eighty Years 222
Cedar Point, Lake Erie 238
Hicksville 268
With the Old Settlers at Columbia City, Indiana 276
Central Indiana 330
In Carmel 362
The Best of Indianapolis 382
The Standard Bridge of Fifty Years Ago 390
Franklin’s Impression of My Birthplace 398
Terre Haute from West of the Wabash 404
My Father’s Mill 422
Vincennes 432
The Ferry at Decker 444
The Ohio at Evansville 458
A Beautiful Tree on a Vile Road 468
A Cathedral of Trees 472
French Lick 478
A HOOSIER HOLIDAY
CHAPTER I
THE ROSE WINDOW
It was at a modest evening reception I happened to be giving to a new
poet of renown that the idea of the holiday was first conceived. I had
not seen Franklin, subsequent companion of this pilgrimage, in all of
eight or nine months, his work calling him in one direction, mine in
another. He is an illustrator of repute, a master of pen and ink, what
you would call a really successful artist. He has a studio in New York,
another in Indiana—his home town—a car, a chauffeur, and so on.
I first met Franklin ten years before, when he was fresh from Indiana
and working on the Sunday supplement of a now defunct New York paper. I
was doing the same. I was drawn to him then because he had such an air
of unsophisticated and genial simplicity while looking so much the
artist. I liked his long, strong aquiline nose, and his hair of a fine
black and silver, though he was then only twenty-seven or eight. It is
now white—a soft, artistic shock of it, glistening white. Franklin is a
Christian Scientist, or dreamy metaphysician, a fact which may not
commend him in the eyes of many, though one would do better to await a
full metaphysical interpretation of his belief. It would do almost as
well to call him a Buddhist or a follower of the Bhagavad Gita. He has
no hard and fast Christian dogmas in mind. In fact, he is not a
Christian at all, in the accepted sense, but a genial, liberal, platonic
metaphysician. I know of no better way to describe him. Socalled sin, as
something wherewith to reproach one, does not exist for him. He has few
complaints to make concerning people’s weaknesses or errors. Nearly
everything is well. He lives happily along, sketching landscapes and
trees and drawing many line simplicities and perfections. There is about
him a soothing repose which is not religious but human, which I felt,
during all the two thousand miles we subsequently idled together.
Franklin is also a very liberal liver, one who does not believe in
stinting himself of the good things of the world as he goes—a very
excellent conclusion, I take it.
At the beginning of this particular evening nothing was farther from my
mind than the idea of going back to Indiana. Twentyeight years before,
at the age of sixteen, I had left Warsaw, the last place in the state
where I had resided. I had not been in the town of my birth, Terre
Haute, Indiana, since I was seven. I had not returned since I was twelve
to Sullivan or Evansville on the Ohio River, each of which towns had
been my home for two years. The State University of Indiana at
Bloomington, in the south central portion of the state, which had known
me for one year when I was eighteen, had been free of my presence for
twentysix years.
And in that time what illusions had I not built up in connection with my
native state! Who does not allow fancy to color his primary experiences
in the world? Terre Haute! A small city in which, during my first seven
years, we lived in four houses. Sullivan, where we had lived from my
seventh to my tenth year, in one house, a picturesque white frame on the
edge of the town. In Evansville, at 1413 East Franklin Street, in a
small brick, we had lived one year, and in Warsaw, in the northern part
of the state, in a comparatively large brick house set in a grove of
pines, we had spent four years. My mother’s relatives were all residents
of this northern section. There had been three months, between the time
we left Evansville and the time we settled in Warsaw, Kosciusko County,
which we spent in Chicago—my mother and nearly all of the children; also
six weeks, between the time we left Terre Haute and the time we settled
in Sullivan, which we spent in Vincennes, Indiana, visiting a kindly
friend.
We were very poor in those days. My father had only comparatively
recently suffered severe reverses, from which he really never recovered.
My mother, a dreamy, poetic, impractical soul, was serving to the best
of her ability as the captain of the family ship. Most of the ten
children had achieved comparative maturity and had departed, or were
preparing to depart, to shift for themselves. Before us—us little
ones—were all our lives. At home, in a kind of intimacy which did not
seem to concern the others because we were the youngest, were my brother
Ed, two years younger than myself; my sister Claire (or Tillie), two
years older, and occasionally my brother Albert, two years older than
Claire, or my sister Sylvia, four years older, alternating as it were in
the family home life. At other times they were out in the world working.
Sometimes there appeared on the scene, usually one at a time, my elder
brothers, Mark and Paul, and my elder sisters, Emma, Theresa, and Mary,
each named in the order of their ascending ages. As I have said, there
were ten all told—a restless, determined, halfeducated family who, had
each been properly trained according to his or her capacities, I have
always thought might have made a considerable stir in the world. As it
was—but I will try not to become too technical.
But in regard to all this and the material and spiritual character of
our life at that time, and what I had done and said, and what others had
done and said, what notions had not arisen! They were highly colored
ones, which might or might not have some relationship to the character
of the country out there as I had known it. I did not know. Anyhow, it
had been one of my dearly cherished ideas that some day, when I had the
time and the money to spare, I was going to pay a return visit to
Indiana. My father had once owned a woolen mill at Sullivan, still
standing, I understood (or its duplicate built after a fire), and he
also had managed another at Terre Haute. I had a vague recollection of
seeing him at work in this one at Terre Haute, and of being shown about,
having a spinning jenny and a carder and a weaver explained to me. I had
fished in the Busseron near Sullivan, nearly lost my life in the Ohio at
Evansville in the dead of winter, fallen in love with the first girls I
ever loved at Warsaw. The first girl who ever kissed me and the first
girl I ever ventured to kiss were at Warsaw. Would not that cast a
celestial light over any midwestern village, however homely?
Well, be that as it may, I had this illusion. Someday I was going back,
only in my plans I saw myself taking a train and loafing around in each
village and hamlet hours or days, or weeks if necessary. At Warsaw I
would try to find out about all the people I had ever known,
particularly the boys and girls who went to school with me. At Terre
Haute I would look up the house where I was born and our old house in
Seventh Street, somewhere near a lumber yard and some railroad tracks,
where, in a cool, roomy, musty cellar, I had swung in a swing hung from
one of the rafters. Also in this lumber yard and among these tracks
where the cars were, I had played with Al and Ed and other boys. Also in
Thirteenth Street, Terre Haute, somewhere there was a small house (those
were the darkest days of our poverty), where I had been sick with the
measles. My father was an ardent Catholic. For the first fifteen years
of my life I was horrified by the grim spiritual punishments enunciated
by that faith. In this house in Thirteenth Street I had been visited by
a long, lank priest in black, who held a silver crucifix to my lips to
be kissed. That little house remains the apotheosis of earthly gloom to
me even now.
At Sullivan I intended to go out to the Basler House, where we lived,
several blocks from the local or old Evansville and Terre Haute depot.
This house, as I recalled, was a charming thing of six or seven rooms
with a large lawn, in which roses flourished, and with a truck garden
north of it and a wonderful clover field to the rear (or east) of it.
This clover field—how shall I describe it?—but I can’t. It wasn’t a
clover field at all as I had come to think of it, but a honey trove in
Arcady. An army of humble bees came here to gather honey. In those early
dawns of spring, summer and autumn, when, for some reason not clear to
me now, I was given to rising at dawn, it was canopied by a wonderful
veil of clouds (tinted cirrus and nimbus effects), which seemed, as I
looked at them, too wonderful for words. Across the fields was a grove
of maples concealing a sugar camp (not ours), where I would go in the
early dawn to bring home a bucket of maple sap. And directly to the
north of us was a large, bare Gethsemane of a field, in the weedy
hollows of which were endless whitening bones, for here stood a small
village slaughter house, the sacrificial altar of one local butcher. It
was not so gruesome as it sounds—only dramatic.
But this field and the atmosphere of that home! I shall have to tell you
about them or the import of returning there will be as nothing. It was
between my seventh and my tenth year that we lived there, among the most
impressionable of all my youth. We were very hard pressed, as I
understood it later, but I was too young and too dreamy to feel the
pinch of poverty. This lower Wabash valley is an Egyptian realm—not very
cold in winter, and drowsy with heat in summer. Corn and wheat and hay
and melons grow here in heavy, plethoric fashion. Rains come
infrequently, then only in deluging storms. The spring comes early, the
autumn lingers until quite New Year’s time. In the beech and ash and
hickory groves are many turtle doves. Great hawks and buzzards and
eagles soar high in the air. House and barn martins circle in covies.
The bluejay and scarlet tanager flash and cry. In the eaves of our
cottage were bluebirds and wrens, and to our trumpet vines and purple
clematis came wondrous humming birds to poise and glitter, tropic in
their radiance. In old Kirkwood’s orchard, a quarter of a mile away over
the clover field, I can still hear the guinea fowls and the peacocks
“calling for rain.”
Sometimes the experiences of delicious years make a stained glass
window—the rose window of the west—in the cathedral of our life. These
three years in “dirty old Sullivan,” as one of my sisters once called it
(with a lip-curl of contempt thrown in for good measure), form such a
flower of stained glass in mine. They are my rose window. In symphonies
of leaded glass, blue, violet, gold and rose are the sweet harmonies of
memory with all the ills of youth discarded. A bare-foot boy is sitting
astride a high board fence at dawn. Above him are the tinted fleeces of
heaven, those golden argosies of youthful seas of dream. Over the
blooming clover are scudding the swallows, “my heart remembers how.” I
look, and in a fence corner is a spider web impearled with dew, a great
yellow spider somewhere on its surface is repairing a strand. At a
window commanding the field, a window in the kitchen, is my mother. My
brother Ed has not risen yet, nor my sister Tillie. The boy looks at the
sky. He loves the feel of the dawn. He knows nothing of whence he is
coming or where he is going, only all is sensuously, deliriously gay and
beautiful. Youth is his: the tingle and response of a new body; the
bloom and fragrance of the clover in the air; the sense of the mystery
of flying. He sits and sings some tuneless tune. Of such is the kingdom
of heaven.
Or it is a great tree, say, a hundred yards from the house. In its thick
leaves and widespreading branches the wind is stirring. Under its shade
Ed and Tillie and I are playing house. What am I? Oh, a son, a husband,
or indeed anything that the occasion requires. We play at duties—getting
breakfast, or going to work, or coming home. Why? But a turtle dove is
calling somewhere in the depths of a woodland, and that gives me pause.
“Bob white” cries and I think of strange and faroff things to come. A
buzzard is poised in the high blue above and I wish I might soar on
wings as wide.
Or is it a day with a pet dog? Now they are running side by side over a
stubbly field. Now the dog has wandered away and the boy is calling. Now
the boy is sitting in a rocking chair by a window and holding the dog in
his lap, studying a gnarled tree in the distance, where sits a hawk all
day, meditating no doubt on his midnight crimes. Now the dog is gone
forever, shot somewhere for chasing sheep, and the boy, disconsolate, is
standing under a tree, calling, calling, calling, until the sadness of
his own voice and the futility of his cries moves him nearly to tears.
These and many scenes like these make my rose window of the west.