THE REV. J. CADDEN McMICKENS
The last twelve miles of the run into Portageville had seemed if
anything the most perfect of all. Before we reached Canaseraga we
traversed a number of miles of dirt road—"one of the finest dirt roads
anywhere," a local enthusiast described it,—and it was excellent, very
much above the average. After Canaseraga it continued for twelve miles,
right into Portageville and the Falls, and even on to Warsaw and East
Aurora, some forty miles farther, as we found out later. Following it we
skirted a hillside with a fine valley below it, and few, if any, houses
to evidence the thriving farm life which the fields seemed to suggest.
Evening gnats were whirling everywhere. Breaths of cool air were
beginning to emanate from the grove of woods which we occasionally
passed. The long rays of the sun slanted so heavily that they came under
my visor and found my eyes. A fine vigorous type of farm boy swinging
along with an axe over his shoulder, and beads of perspiration on his
brow, informed us that we were on the right road. I envied him his pink
cheeks and his lithe body and his clear blue eyes.
But the Falls, when we found them, were not quite all that I expected.
Three Falls—an upper, a lower and a middle—were all included in a park
called “Letchworth,” but it did not seem to me that much parking had
been accomplished. A great house near them at the spot where a railroad
crosses on a high trestle, deceived us into thinking that we had found a
delightful hotel for the night; but no, it was an institution of some
kind. Deep down in a valley below the Falls we found Portageville, a
small, crossroads place that looked for all the world like one of those
cowboy towns one sees so persistently displayed in the moving pictures.
There were two or three frame hotels of drab or green shades, facing a
large open square, and a collection of small white frame houses, with a
host of rather primitive looking Americans sitting outside the hotels in
rocking or arm chairs, the men in their shirt sleeves. Franklin, who is
precise in his apparel, was rather irritated, I think. He was not
expecting anything quite so crude. We inquired as to rooms and meals and
found that we could have both, only the evening meal should be eaten
very soon, if we wanted any. The hour for it was from six to seven, with
no à la carte service.
The individual who volunteered this information was a little, short,
stout man in belted trousers and shirt sleeves who stood beside the car
as it lay alongside the hotel platform, picking his teeth with a
toothpick. He was so blandly unconscious of the fact that the process
might be a little annoying that he was amusing. I got the feeling that
things would not be so comfortable here as they might be, and so I was
glad when Franklin suggested that we seek a more perfect view of the
Falls, which someone had said was to be obtained from below the Falls.
It would take only ten or fifteen minutes, so the proprietor
suggested,—straight up the road we were on—so we went on seeking it. We
did not return.
In the first place, we could not find the view indicated, and in the
second place, we encountered a man who wanted to ride and who told such
a queer story of being robbed of his bicycle while assisting another man
to repair his machine, that we began to suspect he was a little crazy or
that he had some scheme in mind of robbing us,—just which we could not
determine. But in parleying with him and baffling him by suggesting we
were going back into the village instead of the way he thought we were
going, we lost so much time that it was night, and we did not think we
would get a decent meal if we did return. So we questioned another
stranger as to the route to Warsaw, found that it was only twenty miles,
and struck out for it.
Over a road that was singularly smooth for a dirt one, and through land
as flat as Illinois, a tableland on the top of a ridge,—which proved the
last we were to see—we raced Warsaw-ward. It was strangely like my
school days home, or I romanticised myself into the belief that it was.
It was the same size as Warsaw, Indiana, when I left it—thirtyfive
hundred—and its principal east and west street, as I discovered the next
morning, was named Buffalo, as at home. It differed in one respect
greatly, and that was that it had no courthouse square, and no lakes
immediately adjoining it; but otherwise its general atmosphere was quite
the same. It had a river, or small stream about the size of the
Tippecanoe. The similarity is not so startling when one considers how
many towns of thirtyfive hundred are county seats in the middle west,
and how limited their opportunities for difference are. Assemble four or
five hundred frame and brick houses of slightly varying size and
architecture and roominess, surround them with trees and pleasing grass
plots, provide the town a main street and one cross street of stores,
place one or two red brick school houses at varying points in them, add
one white sandstone courthouse in a public square, and a railroad
station, and four or five or six red brick churches, and there you have
them all. Give one town a lake, another a stream, another a mill pond—it
makes little difference.
And actually, as we dashed along toward Warsaw under a starry sky, with
a warm, summery wind blowing, a wind so warm that it felt suspiciously
like rain, I allowed myself to sink into the most commemorative state.
When you forget the now and go back a number of years and change
yourself into a boy and view old scenes and see old faces, what an
unbelievably strange and inexplicable thing life becomes! We attempt
solutions of this thing, but to me it is the most vacuous of all
employments. I rather prefer to take it as a strange, unbelievable,
impossible orchestral blending of sounds and scenes and moods and odors
and sensations, which have no real meaning and yet which, tinkling and
kaleidoscopic as they are, are important for that reason. I never ride
this way at night, or when I am tired by day or night, but that life
becomes this uncanny blur of nothingness.
Why should something want to produce two billion people all alike,—ears,
eyes, noses, hands, unless for mere sensory purposes,—to sensitize fully
and voluptuously something that is delicious? Why billions of trees,
flowers, insects, animals, all seeking to feel, unless feeling without
socalled reason is the point? Why reason, anyway? And to what end?
Supposing, for instance, that one could reason through to the socalled
solution, actually found it, and then had to live with that bit of exact
knowledge and no more forever and ever and ever! Give me, instead, sound
and fury, signifying nothing. Give me the song sung by an idiot, dancing
down the wind. Give me this gay, sad, mad seeking and never finding
about which we are all so feverishly employed. It is so perfect, this
inexplicable mystery.
And it was with some such thoughts as these that I was employed, sitting
back in the car and spinning along over these roads this night. I was
only half awake and half in a dreamland of my own creating. The houses
that we passed with open doors, lamp on table, people reading, girls
playing at pianos, people sitting in doorsteps, were in the world of
twentyfive or thirty years before, and I was entering the Warsaw of my
school days. There was no real difference. “What ideas have we today
that we did not have then?” I was dreamily asking myself. “How do people
differ? Are the houses any better, or the clothes? Or the people in
their bodies and minds? Or are their emotions any richer or keener or
sweeter?” Euripides wrote the Medea in 440 B. C. Shakespeare wrote
“Macbeth” in 1605 A. D. “The Song of Songs”—how old is that? Or the
Iliad? The general feeling is that we are getting on, but I should like
to know what we can get on to, actually. And beyond the delight of
sensory response, what is there to get on to? Mechanicalizing the world
does not, _cannot_, it seems to me, add to the individual’s capacity for
sensory response. Life has always been vastly varied. How, by inventing
things, can we make it more so? As a matter of fact, life, not man, is
supplying its own inventions and changes, adding some, discarding
others. To what end? Today we have the automobile. Three thousand years
ago we had the chariot. Today we fight with forty-centimeter guns and
destructive gases. Three thousand years ago we fought with catapults and
burning pitch and oil. Man uses all the forces he can conceive, and he
seems to be able to conceive of greater and greater forces, but he does
not understand them, and his individual share in the race’s sensory
response to them is apparently no greater than ever. We are capable of
feeling so much and no more. Has any writer, for instance, felt more
poignantly or more sweetly than those whose moods and woes are now the
Iliad? And when Medea speaks, can anyone say it is ancient and therefore
less than we can feel today? We know that this is not true.
I may seem to grow dim in my researches, but I can conceive of no least
suggestion of real change in the sensory capacity of life. As it was in
the beginning, so it appears that it is now—and shall I say, ever shall
be? I will not venture that. I am not all-wise and I do not know.
When we entered Warsaw I had just such thoughts in my mind, and a
feeling that I would like very much to have something to eat. Since it
was early Saturday evening, the streets were crowded with country
vehicles, many automobiles, and a larger percentage of tumble-down
buggies and wagons than I had so far seen elsewhere. Why? The oldest,
poorest, most ratty and rickety looking auto I had seen in I don’t know
when was labeled “For Hire.”
“Gee whiz!” exclaimed Speed when he caught sight of it. And I added,
“Who would want to ride in that, anyhow?”
Yet, since it was there, it would seem as if somebody might want to do
so.
However, at the north end of the principal street, and close to a small
park, we discovered one of the most comfortable little hotels
imaginable. All the rooms were done in bright, cheerful colors, and
seemed to be properly cared for. There were baths and an abundance of
hot water and towels, and electric lights and electric call
bells,—rather novel features for a country hotel of this size. The lobby
was as smart and brisk as most hotels of a much more expensive
character. We “spruced up” considerably at the sight of it. Franklin
proceeded with his toilet in a most ambitious manner, whereupon I
changed to a better suit. I felt quite as though I were dressing for an
adventure of some kind, though I did not think there was the slightest
likelihood of our finding one in a town of this size, nor was I eager
for the prospect. A half dozen years before—perhaps earlier—I would have
been most anxious to get into conversation with some girl and play the
gallant as best I could, or roam the dark in search of adventure, but
tonight I was interested in no such thing, even if I might have.
Surely I must be getting along in years, I said to myself, to be thus
indifferent to these early enthusiasms. Twenty years before, if anyone
had told me that I could go forth into a brisk Saturday evening crowd
such as was filling this one street, and, seeing the young girls and
boys and women and men going about, feel no least thrill of possible
encounters, I would have said that life, under such circumstances, would
not be worth living. Yet here I was, and here we were, and this was
exactly what I was doing and life seemed fairly attractive.
Out in the buzzing country street we did nothing but stroll about, buy
picture postcards, write on and address them, buy some camera films, get
our shoes shined, and finally go for our dinner to a commonplace country
restaurant. I was interested in the zealous, cadaverous, overambitious
young man who was the proprietor, and a young, plump blonde girl acting
as waitress, who might have been his wife or only a hired girl. Her eyes
looked swollen and as though she had been crying recently. And he was in
a crotchety, non-palliative mood, taking our orders in a superior,
contemptuous manner, and making us feel as though we were of small
import.
“What ails mine host, do you suppose?” I asked of Franklin.
“Oh, he thinks that we think we’re something, I suppose, and he’s going
to prove to us that we’re not. You know how country people are.”
I watched him thereafter, and I actually think Franklin’s interpretation
was correct.
As we ambled about afterwards, Speed told us the harrowing story of the
descent of the Rev. J. Cadden McMickens on the fair city of Kokomo,
Indiana, some few years before, when he was working there as a test man
for one of the great automobile companies. After a reasonable period of
religious excitement and exhortation, in which the Rev. J. Cadden
conducted a series of meetings in a public hall hired for the occasion
and urged people to reform and repent of their sins, he suddenly
announced that on a given day the end of the world would certainly take
place and that all those not reformed or “saved” by that date would be
damned. On the night before the fatal morning on which the earth was to
be consumed by fire or water, or both, Speed suddenly awoke to the fact
that he was not “saved” and that he could not get a train out of Kokomo
to Carmel, Indiana, where his mother lived. To him at that time the
world was surely coming to an end. Fire, brimstone, water, smoke, were
already in the air. As he related this story to us I got the impression
that his knees knocked under him. In consequence of the thought of never
being able to see his dear mother any more, or his sister or brothers,
he nearly succumbed of heart failure. Afterwards, finding that the earth
was not destroyed and that he was as safe and sound as ever, he was
seized by a great rage against the aforesaid Rev. J. Cadden McMickens,
and went to seek him out in order that he might give him “a damned good
licking,” as he expressed it, but the Rev. J. Cadden, having seen his
immense prophecy come to nothing, had already fled.
“But, Speed,” I protested, “how comes it that you, a sensible young
fellow, capable of being a test man for a great automobile factory like
that of the H—— Company, could be taken in by such fol de rol? Didn’t
you know that the earth was not likely to be consumed all of a sudden by
fire or water? Didn’t you ever study geology or astronomy or anything
like that?”
“No, I never,” he replied, with the only true and perfect Hoosier
response to such a query. “I never had a chance to go to school much. I
had to go to work when I was twelve.”
“Yes, I know, Speed,” I replied sympathetically, “but you read the
newspapers right along, don’t you? They rather show that such things are
not likely to happen—in a general way they do.”
“Yes, I know,” he replied, “but I was just a kid then. That doggone
skunk! I’d just like to have a picture of him, I would, frightening me
like that.”
“But, Speed,” I said, “surely you didn’t believe that the earth was
going to be swallowed by fire that next morning after you were so
frightened?”
“Yes, I did, too,” he replied. “He was just agettin' out papers and
handbills with great big type, and hollerin' there on the corner. It was
enough to scare anybody. Why wouldn’t I? Just the same, I wasn’t the
only one. There were hundreds—mostly everybody in Kokomo. I went over to
see an old lady I knew, and she said she didn’t know if it would happen
or not—she wasn’t sure.”
“You poor kid,” I mumbled.
“Well, what did you do, Speed, when you found you couldn’t get out of
town?” inquired Franklin. “Why didn’t you walk out?”
“Yes, walk out,” replied Speed resentfully. “I have a picture of myself
walking out, and Carmel forty miles away or more. I wanted to be with my
mother when the earth burned up.”
“And you couldn’t make it by morning,” I commented.
“No, I couldn’t,” he replied.
“Well, then, what did you do?” persisted Franklin.
“Well, I went to see this old lady where I boarded once, and I just
stayed with her. We sat and waited together.”
At this point I was troubled between a desire to laugh and to weep. This
poor youth! And the wild-eyed J. Cadden McMickens! And Kokomo! And the
hundreds who believed! Can’t you see Speed and the old lady—the young
boy and the woman who didn’t know and couldn’t be sure, and Kokomo, and
the Rev. J. Cadden McMic——
I feel as if I would like to get hold of the Rev. J. Cadden even at this
late date and shake him up a bit. I won’t say kick him, but——