WARSAW AT LAST!
Getting to Warsaw was a matter of an hour or so at most from here. I
think my principal sensation on entering Indiana and getting thus far
was one of disappointment that nothing had happened, and worse, nothing
could happen. From here on it was even worse. It is all very well to
dream of revisiting your native soil and finding at least traces, if no
more, of your early world, but I tell you it is a dismal and painful
business. Life is a shifting and changing thing. Not only your own
thoughts and moods, but those of all others who endure, undergo a mighty
alteration. Houses and landscapes and people go by and return no more.
The very land itself changes. All that is left of what you were, or of
what was, in your own brain, is a dwindling and spindling thing.
Not many miles out from Warsaw, we passed through the town of Pierceton,
where lived two girls I barely knew at school, and here we picked up a
typical Hoosier, who, because we asked the road of the principal
storekeeper, volunteered to ride along and show us. “I’m going for a
couple of miles in that direction. If you don’t mind I’ll get in and
show you.”
Franklin welcomed him. I objected to the shrewd type, a cross between a
country politician and a sales agent, who manages his errands in this
way, but I said nothing. He made himself comfortable alongside Speed and
talked to him principally the small change of country life.
As we sped along I began to feel an ugly resentment toward all life and
change, and the driving, destroying urge of things. The remorselessness
of time, how bitterly, irritatingly clear it stood out here! We talk
about the hardness and cruelty of men! Contrast their sharpest, most
brutal connivings with the slow, indifferent sapping of strength and
hope and joy which nature practices upon each and every one of us. See
the utter brutality with which every great dream is filched from the
mind, all the delicate, tendril-like responsiveness of youth is taken
away, your friends and pleasures and aspirations slain. I looked about
me, and beginning to recognize familiar soil, such as a long stretch of
white road ending in an old ice house, a railroad track out which I had
walked, felt a sudden, overpowering, almost sickening depression at the
lapse of time and all that had gone with it. Thirty years, nearly, had
passed and with them all the people and all the atmosphere that
surrounded them, or nearly so, and all my old intimacies and loves and
romantic feelings. A dead world like this is such a compound—a
stained-glass window at its best; a bone yard at its worst.
Approaching Warsaw after thirty years, my mind was busy gathering up a
thousand threads long since fallen and even rotting in the grass of
time. Here was the place, I said to myself, where we, the depleted
portion of our family that constituted “we” at the time, came to
stabilize our troubled fortunes and (it was my mother’s idea) to give
the three youngest children, of whom I was one, an opportunity to get a
sensible American free school education. Hitherto our family (to
introduce a little private history) had been more or less under the
domination of my dogmatic father, who was a Catholic and a bigot. I
never knew a narrower, more hidebound religionist, nor one more tender
and loving in his narrow way. He was a crank, a tenth rate Saint Simon
or Francis of Assisi, and yet a charming person if it had been possible
to get his mind off the subject of religion for more than three seconds
at a time. He worked, ate, played, slept and dreamed religion. With no
other thought than the sanctity and glory and joy of the Catholic
Church, he was constantly attempting to drive a decidedly recalcitrant
family into a similar point of view.
In the main (there were ten of us living) we would none of it. The
majority, by some trick of chemistry which produces unheard of reactions
in the strangest manner (though he and, to a much less extent, my
mother, were religiously minded) were caught fast by the material,
unreligious aspect of things. They were, one and all, mastered by the
pagan life stream which flows fresh and clean under all our religions
and all our views, moralistic and otherwise. It will have none of the
petty, narrowing traps and gins wherewith the mistaken processes of the
so-called minds of some would seek to enslave it. Life will not be boxed
in boxes. It will not be wrapped and tied up with strings and set aside
on a shelf to await a particular religious or moral use. As yet we do
not understand life, we do not know what it is, what the laws are that
govern it. At best we see ourselves hobbling along, responding to this
dream and that lust and unable to compel ourselves to gainsay the fires
and appetites and desires of our bodies and minds. Some of these, in
some of us, strangely enough (and purely accidentally, of that I am
convinced) conform to the current needs or beliefs of a given society;
and if we should be so fortunate as to find ourselves in that society,
we are by reason of these ideals, favorites, statesmen, children of
fortune, poets of the race. On the other hand, others of us who do not
and cannot conform (who are left-over phases of ancient streams,
perhaps, or portentous striæ of new forces coming into play) are looked
upon as horrific, and to be stabilized, or standardized, and brought
into the normal systole-diastole of things. Those of us endowed with
these things in mind and blood are truly terrible to the mass—pariahs,
failures, shams, disgraces. Yet life is no better than its worst
elements, no worse than its best. Its perfections are changing
temporalities, illusions of perfection that will be something very
different tomorrow. Again I say, we do not know what life is—not nearly
enough to set forth a fixed code of any kind, religious or otherwise.
But we do know that it sings and stings, that it has perfections,
entrancements, shames—each according to his blood flux and its chemical
character. Life is rich, gorgeous, an opium eater’s dream of something
paradisiacal—but it is never the thin thing that thin blood and a weak,
ill nourished, poorly responding brain would make it, and that is where
the majority of our religions, morals, rules and safeguards come from.
From thin, petered out blood, and poor, nervous, noncommanding weak
brains.
Life is greater than anything we know.
It is stronger.
It is wilder.
It is more horrible.
It is more beautiful.
We need not stop and think we have found a solution. We have not even
found a beginning. We do not know. And my patriotic father wanted us all
to believe in the Catholic church and the infallibility of the Pope and
confession and communion!
Great Pan of the Greeks, and you, Isis of the Egyptians, save me! These
moderns are all insane!
But I was talking of the effect of the approach of Warsaw upon me. And I
want to get back to my mother, for she was the center of all my
experiences here. Such a woman! Truly, when I think of my mother I feel
that I had best keep silent. I certainly had one of the most perfect
mothers ever a man had. Warsaw, in fact, really means my mother to me,
for here I first came to partially understand her, to view her as a
woman and to know how remarkable she was. An open, uneducated,
wondering, dreamy mind, none of the customary, conscious principles with
which so many conventional souls are afflicted. A happy, hopeful, animal
mother, with a desire to live, and not much constructive ability
wherewith to make real her dreams. A pagan mother taken over into the
Catholic Church at marriage, because she loved a Catholic and would
follow her love anywhere. A great poet mother, because she loved fables
and fairies and half believed in them, and once saw the Virgin Mary
standing in our garden (this was at Sullivan), blue robes, crown and
all, and was sure it was she! She loved the trees and the flowers and
the clouds and the sound of the wind, and was wont to cry over tales of
poverty almost as readily as over poverty itself, and to laugh over the
mannikin fol de rols of all too responsive souls. A great hearted
mother—loving, tender, charitable, who loved the ne’er do well a little
better than those staid favorites of society who keep all laws. Her own
children frequently complained of her errors and tempers (what mortal
ever failed so to do?) and forgot their own beams to be annoyed by her
motes. But at that they loved her, each and every one, and could not
stay away from her very long at a time, so potent and alive she was.
I always say I know how great some souls can be because I know how
splendid that of my mother was. Hail, you! wherever you are!
In drawing near to Warsaw, I felt some of this as of a thousand other
things which had been at that time and now were no more.
We came in past the new outlying section of Winona, a region of summer
homes, boat houses and casinos scattered about a lake which in my day
was entirely surrounded by woods, green and still, and thence along a
street which I found out later was an extension of the very street on
which we had originally lived, only now very much lengthened to provide
a road out to Winona. Lined on either side by the most modern of
cottages, these new style verandaed, summer resorty things hung with
swings and couch hammocks which one sees at all the modern American
watering places, it was too new and smart to suit me exactly and carried
with it no suggestion of anything that I had been familiar with. A
little farther on, though, it merged into something that I did know.
There were houses that looked as though they might have endured all of
forty years and been the same ones I had known as the houses of some of
my youthful companions. I tried to find the home of Loretta Brown, for
instance, who was killed a few years later in a wreck in the West, and
of Bertha Stillmayer, who used to hold my youthful fancy, at a distance.
I could not find them. There was a church, also, at one corner, which I
was almost sure I knew, and then suddenly, as we neared another corner,
I recognized two residences. One was that of the principal lumber dealer
of our town, a man who with his son and daughter and a few other
families constituted the elite, and next to it, the home of the former
owner of the principal dry goods store; very fine houses both of them,
and suggesting by their architecture and the arrangement of their
grounds all that at one time I thought was perfect—the topmost rung of
taste and respectability!
In my day these were very close to the business heart, but so was
everything in Warsaw then. In the first and better one, rather that of
the wealthier of the two men, for they were both very much alike in
their physical details, was, of all things, an automobile show room—an
interesting establishment of its kind, made possible, no doubt, by the
presence of the prosperous summer resort we had just passed. On the
porch of this house and its once exclusive walk were exhibition tires
and posters of the latest automobiles. In the other house, more precious
to me still because of various memories, was the present home of the
local Knights of Pythias, an organization I surely need not describe. In
front of it hung a long, perpendicular glass sign or box, which could be
lighted from within by incandescent globes. The lettering was merely “K.
of P.”
In years and years I cannot recall anything giving me a sharper wrench.
I was so surprised, although I was fully prepared not to be—not that I
cared, really, whether these houses had changed or not—I didn’t. But in
one of them, the present home of the K. of P., had lived in my time the
Yaisley family, and this family was endeared to me, partly by its wealth
(qualify this by the inexperience of youth and our personal poverty) and
partly by the presence of Dora Yaisley, the youngest daughter, who was a
girl of about my own age, possibly younger, and who, to me, was so
beautiful that I used to dream about her all the time. As a matter of
fact, from my fourteenth to my sixteenth year, from the first time I saw
her until a long time after I had seen her no more, she was the one girl
whose perfection I was sure of. Perhaps she would not be called
beautiful by many. No doubt, if I could see her today, she would not
appeal to me at all. But then——