THE WRECKAGE OF A STORM
The next day was another of travel in a hot sun over a country that in
part lacked charm, in other parts was idyllically beautiful. We should
have reached Sandusky and even the Indiana line by night, if we had been
traveling as we expected. But to begin with, we made a late start, did
not get out of Erie until noon, and that for various reasons,—a late
rising, a very good breakfast and therefore a long one, a shave, a
search for picture cards and what not. Our examination of the wreck made
by the great storm and flood was extended, and having been up late the
night before we were in a lazy mood anyhow.
Erie proved exceedingly interesting to me because of two things. One of
these was this: that the effects of the reported storm or flood were
much more startling than I had supposed. The night before we had entered
by some streets which apparently skirted the afflicted district, but
today we saw it in all its casual naturalness, and it struck me as
something well worth seeing. Blocks upon blocks of houses washed away,
upset, piled in heaps, the debris including machinery, lumber, household
goods, wagons and carts. Through one wall front torn away I saw a mass
of sewing machines dumped in a heap. It had been an agency. In another
there was a mass of wool in bags stacked up, all muddied by the water
but otherwise intact. Grocery stores, butcher shops, a candy store, a
drug store, factories and homes of all kinds had been broken into by the
water or knocked down by the cataclysmic onslaught of water and nearly
shaken to pieces. Ceilings were down, plaster stripped from the walls,
bricks stacked in great heaps,—a sorry sight. We learned that thirtyfive
people had been killed and many others injured.
Another was that, aside from this Greek-like tragedy, it looked like the
native town of Jennie Gerhardt, my pet heroine, though I wrote that she
was born in Columbus, a place I have never visited in my life.
[That reminds me that a Columbus book reviewer once remarked that it was
easy to identify the various places mentioned in Columbus, that the
study was so accurate!] But never having seen Columbus, and having
another small city in mind, it chanced now that Erie answered the
description exactly. These long, narrow, small housed, tree-shaded
streets (in many instances saplings) dominated at intervals by large
churches or factories,—this indubitably was the world in which Jennie
originally moved, breathed, and had her being. I was fascinated when I
arose in the morning, to find that this hotel was one such as the
pretentious Senator Brander might have chosen to live in, and the
polished brasses of whose handrails and stairsteps a woman of Mrs.
Gerhardt’s limited capabilities would have been employed to polish or
scrub. Even the great plate-glass windows lined within and without by
comfortable chairs commanding, as they did, the principal public square
or park and all the fascinating forces of so vigorous and young a town,
were such as would naturally be occupied by the bloods and sports of the
village, the traveling salesmen, and the idling big-wigs of political
and other realms. It was an excellent hotel, none better; as clean,
comfortable and tasteful as one would wish in this workaday world; and
past its windows when I first came down looking for a morning paper,
were tripping a few shop girls and belated workers carrying lunch boxes.
“Jennie’s world to the life,” I thought. “Poor little girl.”
But the seventyfive thousand people here—how did they manage to pass
their lives without the manifold opportunities and diversions which
fill, or can, at least, the minds of the citizens of Paris, Rome,
London, Chicago, New York? Here were all these thousands, working and
dreaming perhaps, but how did they fill their lives? I pictured them
as dressing at breakfast time, going to work each morning, and then
after a day at machines or in stores, with lunches on counter or
workbench, returning at night, a fair proportion of them at any rate,
to the very little houses we had seen coming in; and after reading
those impossible, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hodge-podges of
rumor, false witness, romance, malice, evil glamour and what not—the
evening newspapers—retiring to their virtuous couches, socalled, to
rise again the next day.
I am under no illusions as to these towns, and I hold no highflown
notions as to our splendid citizenry, and yet I am intensely sympathetic
with them. I have had too much evidence in my time of how they do and
feel. I always wonder how it is that people who entertain such highflown
ideas of how people are and what they think and say—in writing,
theorizing, editorializing—manage to hold such practical and even fierce
relations with life itself. Every one of those simple American towns
through which we had been passing had its red light district. Every one
had its quota of saloons and dives, as well as churches and honorable
homes. Who keeps the vulgar, shabby, gross, immoral, inartistic end of
things going, if we are all so splendid and worthy as so many current,
top-lofty theorizers would have us believe? Here in this little city of
Erie, as in every other peaceful American hamlet, you would find the
more animal and vigorous among them turning to those same red streets
and dives we have been speaking of, while the paler, more storm-beaten,
less animal or vigorous, more life-harried, take to the darksome doors
of the church. Necessity drives the vast majority of them along paths
which they fain would not travel, and the factories and stores in which
they work eat up a vitality which otherwise might show itself in wild
and unpleasant ways.
Here, as I have said, in these plain, uninteresting streets was more
evidence of that stern destiny and inconsiderateness of the gods which
the Greeks so well understood and with such majesty noted, and which
always causes me to wonder how religion manages to survive in any form.
For here, several weeks before, was this simple, virtuous town (if we
are to believe the moralistic tosh which runs through all our American
papers), sitting down after its dinner and a hard day’s work to read the
evening paper. It was deserving not only of the encomiums of men, but of
gods, presumably. And then, the gods presiding over and regulating all
things in the interest of man, a rainstorm comes up and swells a small
creek or rivulet running through the heart of the town and under small
bridges, culverts and even houses—so small is it—into a kind of foaming
torrent. All is going well so far. The culverts and bridges and stream
beds are large enough to permit the water to be carried away. Only a few
roofs are blown off, a few churches struck by lightning, one or two
people killed in an ordinary, electric storm way.
Enters then the element of human error. This is always the great point
with all moralists. Once the crimes or mistakes or indifferences of the
ruling powers could be frankly and squarely placed on the shoulders of
the devil. No one could explain how a devil who could commit so much
error came to live and reign in the same universe with an omnipotent
God, but even so. The devil, however, having become a mythical and
threadbare scapegoat, it finally became necessary to invent some new
palliative of omnipotent action, and so human error came into being as a
whipping dummy—man’s troubles are due to his own mistaken tendencies,
though there is a God who creates and can guide him and who does punish
him for doing the things which he ought to know better than to do.
Selah! So be it. But here in Erie is this honest or reprehensible
community, as you will, and here is the extra severe thunder and rain
storm,—a cloudburst, no less. The small brook or rivulet swells and
swells. People notice it, perhaps, looking out of their doors and
windows, but it seems to be doing well enough. Then, unknown to the
great majority of them, a barn a number of blocks out, a poor, humanly
erroneous barn, is washed away against a fair-sized culvert, blocking it
completely.
The gully beyond the culvert, upstream, is very large and it fills and
fills with water. Because of its somewhat widening character a small
lake forms,—a heavy body of water pressing every moment more and more
heavily against the culvert. When the former has swollen to a great size
this latter gives way. There is a downward rush of water—a small
mountain of water, no less. Bridges, culverts, houses built over the
brook, houses for two blocks on either hand, are suddenly pressed
against or even partially filled by water. Citizens reading their
evening newspapers, or playing the accordeon or the victrola or cards or
checkers or what you will, feel their houses begin to move. Chimneys and
plaster fall. Houses collapse completely. In one house eight are
instantly killed,—a judgment of God, no doubt, on their particular kind
of wickedness. In another house three, in another house four; death
being apportioned, no doubt, according to the quality of their crimes.
Altogether, thirtyfive die, many are injured, and scores upon scores of
houses, covering an area of twentysix blocks in length, are moved,
upset, floated blocks from their normal position, or shaken to pieces or
consumed by fire.
The fire department is called out and the Pennsylvania mounted police.
The moving picture camera men come and turn an honest penny. Picture
postcard dealers who make money out of cards at a cent apiece photograph
all the horrors. The newspapers get out extras, thereby profiting a few
dollars, and all Erie, and even all America is interested, entertained,
emotionalized. Even we, coming several weeks later and seeing only
carpenters, masons, and plumbers at work, where houses are lying about
in ruins, are intensely concerned. We ride about examining all the
debris and getting a fine wonder out of it, until we are ordered back,
at one place, by a thick-witted mounted policeman whose horse has taken
fright at our machine; a thing which a mounted policeman’s horse should
never do, and which makes a sort of fool of him and so irritates him
greatly.
“Get out of here!” he shouted angrily at one street corner, glaring at
us, “sticking your damn noses into everything!”
“What the hell ails you anyhow?” I replied, equally irritable, for we
had just been directed by another mounted policeman whose horse had not
been frightened by us, to come down in here and see some real
tragedy—"The policeman at the last corner told us to come in here."
“Well, you can’t come in. Get out!” and he flicked his boot with his
hand in a contemptuous way.
“Ah, go to hell,” I replied angrily, but we had to move just the same.
The law in boots and a wide rimmed hat, à la Silver City, was before us.
We got out, cursing the mounted policeman, for who wants to argue with a
long, lean, thin-faced, sallow Pennsylvanian armed with a great sixteen
shot revolver? God has never been just to me. He has never made me a
mounted policeman. As we cruised about in Franklin’s car, looking at all
the debris and ruin, I speculated on this problem in ethics and morals
or theism or what you will: Why didn’t God stop this flood if he loved
these people? Or is there no God or force or intelligence to think about
them at all? Why are we here, anyhow? Were there any _unjust_, or only
_just_ among them? Why select Erie when He might have assailed Pittsburg
or Broadway and Fortysecond Street, New York, or Philadelphia? Think of
what a splendid evidence of judgment that last would have been, or
Brooklyn! Oh, God, why not Brooklyn? Why eight people in one house and
only one in another and none in many others? Do I seem much too ribald,
dear reader? Were the people themselves responsible for not building
good barns or culverts or anticipating freshets? Will it come about
after a while that every single man will think of the welfare of all
other men before he does anything, and so build and so do that no other
man will be injured by any action of his? And will every man have the
brains (given by God) so to do—or will God prevent freshets and washouts
and barns being swept against weak culverts?
I am an honest inquirer. I was asking myself these very questions,
wondering over the justice or injustice of life. Do you think there is
any such thing as justice, or will you agree with Euripides, as I
invariably feel that I must?
“Great treasure halls hath Zeus in heaven,
From whence to man strange dooms are given
Past hope or fear.
And the end looked for cometh not,
And a path is there where no man thought.
So hath it fallen here.”