CHEMUNG
Next morning I was aroused at dawn, it seemed to me, by a pounding on a
nearby door.
“Get up, you drunken hound!” called a voice which was unmistakably that
of the young man who had rented us the room. “That’s right, snore, after
you stay up all night,” he added; and he beat the door vehemently again.
I wanted to get up and protest against his inconsiderateness of the
slumber of others and would have, I think, only I was interested to
discover who the “drunken hound” might be and why this youth should be
so abrupt with him. After all, I reflected, we were in a very poor
hotel, the boy doing the knocking was a mere farm hand translated to the
country hotel business, and anyhow we should soon be out of here. It was
all life and color and if I didn’t like it I needn’t have stayed here
the night before. Franklin would have gone on. But who was the “drunken
hound”? The sound had ceased almost as abruptly as it had begun. The boy
had gone downstairs. After awhile the light grew stronger and Franklin
seemed to stir. I rose and pulled the shutters to, but could not sleep
any more. The world outside looked so inviting. There were trees and
great fields of grass and a few white houses scattered here and there
and a heavy dew. I at once thought how delightful it would be to get up
and ride on again.
“This is a typical middle west country hotel, even if it is in New
York,” said Franklin, sitting up and running his hand through his
tousled hair. “That fellow he’s calling a ‘drunken hound’ must be his
father. I heard him tell Speed last night that his father slept in
there.”
Presently we threw open the shutters and made what use we could of the
bowl and pitcher and the two small towels provided.
“How did you ever come to be an artist, Franklin?” I inquired idly, as I
watched him stare out at the surrounding fields, while he sat putting on
his shoes. “You told me once that you were a farm hand until you were
nearly twentyfive.”
“Nearly twentysix,” he corrected. “Oh, I always wanted to draw and did,
a little, only I didn’t know anything about it. Finally I took a course
in a correspondence school.”
“Get out,” I replied incredulously.
“Yes, I did,” he went on. “They sent me instructions how to lay in with
pen and ink various sorts of line technique on sheets of paper that were
ruled off in squares—long lines, short lines, stipple, ‘crosspatch’ and
that sort of thing. They made some other suggestions that had some
value: what kind of ink and pens and paper to buy. I used to try to draw
with ordinary writing ink and pens.”
“But a correspondence school——” I protested.
“I know,” he said. “It seems ridiculous. It’s true, just the same. I
didn’t know where else to go and besides I didn’t have the money. There
was a school in Indianapolis but they wanted too much—I tried it awhile
but the instructor knew very little. The correspondence school wanted
only six dollars for fifteen lessons, and they took it in part
payments.”
He smiled reminiscently.
“Well, how did you come to get started, finally?”
“Oh, I worked most of my method out for myself. Art is a matter of
feeling, anyhow. The drawing in squares gave me an idea which made me
abandon the squares. I used to write poetry too, of sorts—or tried
to—and one day I wrote a poem and decided to illustrate it and take it
down to one of the Indianapolis newspapers, because I had seen others in
there somewhat like it—I mean illustrated in pen and ink. It was a poem
about October, or something. My father thought I was wasting my time. He
wanted me to tend the farm. But I took the poem down and they bought it
right away—gave me six dollars for it.”
“And then what?” I asked, deeply interested.
“Well, that rather astonished my father—as much, if not more, than it
did me. He never imagined there was any money in that sort of thing—and
unless you were going to make money——” He waved his hand deprecatively.
“I know,” I agreed. “And then what?”
“Well, they bought another and my father began to think there was
something in it—in art, you know, if you want to call it that, in
Indiana, at that time!”—he paused. “Still I can’t tell you how much
feeling I put in those things, either,—the trees, the birds flying, the
shocked corn. I used to stop when I was plowing or reaping and stand and
look at the sky and the trees and the clouds and wish I could paint them
or do something. The big cities seemed so far off. But it’s Indiana that
seems wonderful to me now.”
“And to me,” I said. “Like a mother. Because we were brought up there, I
suppose.”
Sitting on the edge of this wretched hotel bed, Franklin smiled vaguely,
his fine hand moving through his glistening white hair.
“And then?”
“Well, one day the editor in Indianapolis said I ought to send some of
my drawing down to New York, or go down—that I would get along. He
thought I ought to study art.”
“Yes?”
“Well, I saved enough drawing for the _Indianapolis News_ and writing
poetry and pitching hay and plowing wheat to go that autumn to Chicago;
I spent three months in the Art Institute. Being in those days a good
Sunday School boy, a publisher of religious literature, socalled, bought
some work of me and at Christmas time I sold a half page to the old
Chicago _Record_. The following fall I went to New York. I found a
little room and sold sketches, and then I got on a paper—the _News_. You
remember.”
“Certainly. Was that your first place?”
“The very first.”
“And I thought you had been in New York years and years.”
I can see Franklin even yet, standing before his drawingboard in the
newspaper office, making horrible Sunday “layouts.” He was so gentle,
good looking and altogether attractive.
“Yes, and then what?”
“Well, after my year’s contract which started with the _News_ had
expired, I tried freelancing. This didn’t go very well; so I determined
not to spend all my savings visiting art editors. I boarded a boat one
day and went to Europe. Four months later, I returned to New York and
rented a studio. After I had paid my first month’s rent I was broke. At
the magazines I would say that I had just returned from abroad, so that
I got plenty of work, but I owned neither easel nor chair. After a few
days the janitor, if you please, came to me and said that he and his
wife had been talking about me and thought perhaps I needed some money
and that they had eighty dollars upstairs which I could have right away
if I wanted to use it. It sounds wild, but it’s true. They said I could
take it and pay it back whenever I got ready, in six months or a year or
two years.”
My estimate of poor old human nature was rapidly rising.
“Did you take it?”
“Yes, a part of it. I had to, in a way; but I paid it back in a little
while. I often think of those people.”
We stopped talking about his career then and went down to look in the
diningroom and after our car. The place was so unsatisfactory and it was
still so early we decided not to remain for breakfast.
As I was sitting on the porch, Franklin having gone off to rout out
Speed, an automobile approached containing a man and three women and
bearing a plumcolored pennant labeled “Lansing, Michigan.” Pennants seem
to be a habit with cars coming from the west. These tourists halted, and
I was morally certain that they did so because of my presence here. They
thought others were breakfasting. With much fluttering of their motoring
regalia, the women stepped out and shook themselves while their escort
departed to make inquiries. Presently he returned and with him our young
host, who in the clear morning light seemed much more a farmer than
ever—a plow hand. Something about his crude, untutored strength and
energy appealed to me. I thought of his drunken father and how he might
be trying to make the best of this place, against lack of experience and
with a ne’er do well parent on his hands. Now he fixed me with a steady
eye.
“You people goin' to have breakfast?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, pleasantly.
“You ain’t?”
“No.”
“Well,” he went on, turning to the newcomers, “then ’_you_ people can
have breakfast.”
So, I thought, these people will have to eat the very poor breakfast
that is being prepared for us. It will serve them right—the vulgar,
showy creatures. As we were departing, however, Franklin explained that
there was an extra charge which he had not troubled to dispute, for
something which we had apparently not had. I explained that it was for
the meal we had not eaten.
Once more, then, we drove off along more of those delightful country
roads which in the early morning sun, with the fields glistening with
dew, and laborers making their way to work, and morning birds on the
wing, were too lovely. The air, after our stuffy room, was so
refreshing, ’_I_ began to sing. Little white houses hugged distant green
hillsides, their windows shining like burnished gold. Green branches
hung over and almost brushed our faces. The sky, the shade, the dew was
heavenly. I thought of Franklin and his father and of him in his
father’s fields at dawn, looking at the trees—those fog wrapped trees of
dawn—and wishing he was an artist.
Meanwhile, my mind was busy with the sharp contrast this whole progress
was presenting to my tour of Europe, even the poorest and most deserted
regions I visited. In England, France, Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium,
Switzerland, there was so much to see—so much that was memorable or
quaint or strange or artistic—but here; well, here there were just towns
like this one and Binghamton and Scranton and Wilkes-Barré, places the
best for which you could say was that they were brisk and vivid and
building something which in the future will no doubt seem very
beautiful,—I’m sure of it.
And yet I kept saying to myself that notwithstanding all this, all I
could sum up against America even, it was actually better than Europe.
And why? Well, because of a certain indefinable something—either of hope
or courage or youth or vigor or illusion, what you will; but the average
American, or the average European transplanted to America, is a better
or at least a more dynamic person than the average European at home,
even the Frenchman. He has more grit, verve, humor, or a lackadaisical
slapdash method which is at once efficient, self-sustaining, comforting.
His soul, in spite of all the chains wherewith the ruling giants are
seeking to fetter him, is free. As yet, regardless of what is or may be,
he does not appear to realize that he is not free or that he is in any
way oppressed. There are no ruling classes, to him. He sings, whistles,
jests, laughs boisterously; matches everybody for cigars, beers, meals;
chews tobacco, spits freely, smokes, swears, rolls to and fro, cocks his
hat on one side of his head, and altogether by and large is a regular
“hell of a feller.” He doesn’t know anything about history, or very
little, and doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t know anything about
art,—but, my God, who with the eternal hills and all nature for a
background cannot live without representative art? His food isn’t
extraordinarily good, though plentiful, his clothes are made by
Stein-Bloch, or Hart, Schaffner & Marx, and altogether he is a noisy,
blatant, contented mess—but oh, the gay, selfsufficient soul of him! no
moans! no tears! Into the teeth of destiny he marches, whistling “Yankee
Doodle” or “Turkey in the Straw.” In the parlance of his own streets,
“Can you beat him?”
Nevertheless my sympathies kept reverting to the young innkeeper and I
finally got out a map to see if I could discover the name of the very
small town or crossroads where this hotel was situated. It proved to be
Chemung.
Instantly I recalled the story of a gubernatorial aspirant of twenty
years before who had come from this very place or county in New York.
Previously a district attorney or lieutenant governor, he had one day
been nominated for the governorship, on the reigning ticket. His chances
were splendid. There was scarcely a cloud in the sky. He was believed to
be brilliant, promising, a presidential possibility of the future. An
important meeting was called in New York, I believe, at Madison Square
Garden very likely, to ratify and celebrate his nomination. All the
élite politically who customarily grace such events were present. The
Garden was filled. But, alas, at the sound of the applause called forth
by his opening burst of oratory, he paused and took off his coat—quite
as he would at an upstate rally, here in Chemung. The audience gasped.
The sophisticated leaders of the city groaned. What! Take off your coat
at a political address in Madison Square Garden? A candidate for
governorship of the state of New York? It completely destroyed him. He
was never heard of more. I, a mere stripling at the time, brooded long
over this sudden turn of fortune as exemplifying a need to discriminate
between audiences and classes. It put a cool, jesuitical thought in my
mind that I did not soon forget. “Never remove your coat in the wrong
place,” was a maxim that dwelt with me for some time. And here we were
in Chemung, the place to which this man subsequently retired, to
meditate, no doubt, over the costly follies and errors we sometimes
commit without the ability or the knowledge to guard against them.
An hour and a half later we were having breakfast at Elmira, a place
much like Binghamton, in the customary “Rathskeller-Grill-Café de
Berlin.” This one was all embossed with gold paper and Teutonic hunting
scenes, and contained the usual heavy mission tables, to say nothing of
a leftover smell of cigarettes burned the night before. There were negro
waiters too, and another group of motorists having a most elaborate
breakfast and much talk of routes and cars and distant cities. Here it
was necessary for us to decide the course of our future progress, so we
shortly set off in search of the local automobile club.