WARSAW IN 1884-6
And right here I began to ponder on the mystery of association and
contact, the chemistry and physics of transference by which a sky or a
scene becomes a delicious presence in the human brain or the human
blood, carried around for years in that mystic condition described as “a
memory” and later transferred, perhaps, or not, by conversation, paint,
music, or the written word, to the brains of others, there to be carried
around again and possibly extended in ever widening and yet fading
circles in accordance with that curious, so-called law (is it a law?) of
the transmutation of energy. That sounds so fine, that law of
transmutation, and yet it makes such short work of that other fine
palaver about the immortality of the soul. How many impressions have you
transferred in this way? How much of you has gone from you in this way
and died? A thin and pathetic end, I say, if all go on, being thinned
and transmuted as they go.
Warsaw was an idyllic town for a youth of my temperament and age to have
been brought to just at that time. It was so young, vigorous and
hopeful. I recall with never-ending delight the intense sense of beauty
its surrounding landscape gave me, its three lakes, the Tippecanoe
River, which drained two of them, the fine woods and roads and bathing
places which lay in various directions. People were always coming to
Warsaw to shoot ducks in the marshes about, or to fish or summer on the
lakes. Its streets were graced with many trees—they were still here in
various places as we rode about today, and not so much larger, as I
could see, than when I was here years before. The courthouse, new in my
day, standing in an open square and built of white Indiana limestone,
was as imposing as ever, and, as we came upon it now turning a corner,
it seemed a really handsome building, one of the few in towns of this
size which I had seen which I could honestly say I liked. The principal
streets, Centre, Buffalo and South, were better built, if anything, than
in my time, and actually wider than I had recalled them as being. They
were imbued with a spirit not different to that which I had felt while
living here. Only on the northwest corner of Centre and Buffalo Streets
(the principal street corner opposite this courthouse) where once had
stood a bookstore, and next to that a small restaurant with an oyster
counter, and next to that a billiard and pool room, the three
constituting in themselves the principal meeting or loafing place for
the idle young of all ages, the clever workers, school boys, clerks and
what not of the entire town, and I presume county—all this was entirely
done away with, and in its place was a stiff, indifferent, exclusive
looking bank building of three stories in height, which gave no least
suggestion of an opportunity for such life as we had known to exist
here.
Where do the boys meet now, I asked myself, and what boys? I should like
to see. Why, this was the very center and axis of all youthful joy and
life in my day. There is a kind of freemasonry of generations which
binds together the youths of one season, plus those of a season or two
elder, and a season or two younger. At this corner, and in these places,
to say nothing of the village post office, Peter’s Shoe Repairing and
Shine Parlor, and Moon’s and Thompson’s grocery stores, we of ages
ranging from fourteen to seventeen and eighteen—never beyond nineteen or
twenty—knew only those who fell within these masonic periods. To be of
years not much less nor more than these was the _sine qua non_ of happy
companionship. To have a little money, to be in the high or common
school (upper grades), to have a little gaiety, wit, and intelligence,
to be able to think and talk of girls in a clever, flirtatious (albeit
secretly nervous manner), were almost as seriously essential.
A fellow by the name of Pierre (we always called him Peary) Morris ran
this bookstore, which was the most popular meeting place of all. Here,
beginning with the earliest days after our arrival, I recognized a
sympathetic atmosphere, though I was somewhat too young to share in it.
My mother (my father was still working in Terre Haute) placed us in what
was known as the West Ward School. It adjoined an old but very
comfortable house we had rented; the school yard and our yard touched.
Here we dwelt for one year and part of another, then moved directly
across the street, south, into an old brick house known as the Thralls
Mansion, one of the first—as I understood it, actually _the_ first—brick
house to be built in the county years and years before. Here, in these
two houses, we spent all the time that I was in Warsaw. From the frame
or “old Grant house,” I sallied each day to my studies of the seventh
grade in the school next door. From the Thralls house I accompanied my
sister Tillie each day to the high school, in the heart of the town, not
far from this court house, where I completed my work in the eighth grade
and first year high. I have (in spite of the fact that I have been
myself all these years) but a very poor conception of the type of youth
I was, and yet I love him dearly. For one thing, I know that he was a
dreamer. For another, somewhat cowardly, but still adventurous and
willing, on most occasions, to take a reasonable chance. For a third, he
was definitely enthusiastic about girls or beauty in the female form,
and what was more, about beauty in all forms, natural and otherwise.
What clouds meant to him! What morning and evening skies! What the
murmur of the wind, the beauty of small sails on our lakes, birds
a-wing, the color and flaunt and rhythm of things!
Walking, playing, dreaming, studying, I had finally come to feel myself
an integral part of the group of youths, if not girls, who centered
about this bookstore and this corner. Judson Morris, or Jud Morris, as
we called him, a hunchback, and the son of the proprietor, was a fairly
sympathetic and interesting friend. Frank Yaisley, the brother of Dora,
and two years older; George Reed, since elevated to a circuit judgeship
somewhere in the West; “Mick” or Will McConnell, who died a few years
later of lockjaw contracted by accidentally running a rusty nail into
his foot; Harry Croxton, subsequently a mining engineer who died in
Mexico and was buried there, and John and George Sharp, sons of the
local flour mill owner and grandnephews of my mother; Rutger Miller,
Orren Skiff, and various others were all of this group. There were still
others of an older group who belonged to the best families and somehow
seemed to exchange courtesies here and, in addition, members of a
younger group than ourselves, who were to succeed us, as freshman class
succeeds freshman class at college.
My joy in this small world and these small groups of youths, and what
the future held in store for us, was very great. As I figured it out,
the whole duty of men was to grow, get strong, eat, drink, sleep, get
married, have children and found a family, and so fulfill the Biblical
injunction to “multiply and replenish the earth.” Even at this late date
I was dull to such things as fame, lives of artistic achievement, the
canniness and subtlety of wealth, and all such things, although I knew
from hearing everyone talk that one must and did get rich eventually if
one amounted to anything at all. A perfect, worldly wise dogma, but not
truer, really, than any other dogma.
But what a change was here, not so much materially as spiritually! Have
you ever picked up an empty beetle shell at the end of the summer—that
pale, transparent thing which once held a live and flying thing? Did it
not bring with it a sense of transmutation and lapse—the passing of all
good things? Here was this attractive small town, as brisk and gay as
any other, no doubt, but to me now how empty! Here in these streets, in
the two houses in which we had lived, in this corner bookstore and its
adjacent restaurant, in the West Ward and Central High Schools, in the
local Catholic Church where mass was said only once a month, and in the
post office, swimming holes, and on the lakes which surrounded us like
gems, had been spent the three happiest years of my boyhood.
Only the year before we came here I had been taken out of a Catholic
school at Evansville, Indiana. The public school was to me like a
paradise after the stern religiosity of this other school. Education
began to mean something to me. I wanted to read and to know. There was a
lovely simplicity about the whole public school world which had nothing
binding or driving about it. The children were urged, coaxed, pleaded
with—not driven. Force was a last resort, and rarely indulged in. Can’t
you see how it was that I soon fell half in love with my first teacher,
a big, soft, pink-cheeked, buxom blonde, and with our home and our life
here?
But I was concerned now only with this corner book store and how it
looked today. Coming out from New York, I kept thinking how it would
look and how the square would look and whether there would be any of the
old atmosphere about the schools or the lakes, or our two houses, or the
houses of my friends, or the Catholic Church or anything. I wanted to
see our ex-homes and the schools and all these things. Turning into the
square after passing the first two houses mentioned, I looked at this
corner, and here was this new bank building and nothing more. It looked
cold and remote. A through car of a state-wide trolley system, which ran
all the way from Michigan City and Gary on Lake Michigan to
Indianapolis, Evansville, Terre Haute, and other places in the extreme
south, stood over the way. There had been no street car of any kind here
in my day. The court house was the same, the store in which Nueweiler’s
clothing store used to be (and because of Frank Nueweiler, an elderly
figure in “our crowd,” one of our rendezvous) was now a bookstore, the
successor, really, to the one I was looking for. The post office had
been moved to a new store building erected by the government. (I think
in every town we passed we had found a new post office erected by the
government.) The Harry Oram wagon works was in exactly the same position
at the northwest corner of the square, only larger. There was no trace
of Epstein’s Wool, Hide and Tallow Exchange, which had stood on another
corner directly across the way from the bookstore. A new building had
replaced that. All Epstein’s children had gone to Chicago, so a
neighboring hardware clerk told me, and Epstein himself had died fifteen
years before.
But what of the Yaisleys? What of the Yaisleys? I kept asking myself
that. Where had they gone? To satisfy myself as to that, before going
any farther, I went into this new bookstore in Nueweiler’s old clothing
emporium, and asked the man who waited on me while I selected postcards.
“What became of the Nueweilers who used to run this place as a clothing
store?” I asked as a feeler, before going into the more delicate matter
of the Yaisleys.
“Nueweiler?” he replied, with an air of slight surprise. “Why, he has
the dry goods store at the next corner—Yaisley’s old place.”
“Well, and what has become of Yaisley, then?”
“Oh, he died all of twenty years ago. You must be quite a stranger about
here.”
“I am,” I volunteered. “I used to live here, but I haven’t been here now
for nearly thirty years, and that’s why I’m anxious to know. I used to
know Frank and Will and Dora Yaisley, and even her elder sister, Bertha,
by sight, at least.”
“Oh, yes, Will Yaisley. There was an interesting case for you,” he
observed reminiscently. “I remember him, though I don’t remember the
others so well. I only came here in 1905, and he was back here then.
Why, he had been out West by then and had come back here broke. His
father was dead then, and the rest of the family scattered. He was so
down and out that he hung around the saloons, doing odd jobs of cleaning
and that sort of thing—and at other times laid cement sidewalks.”
“How old was he at that time, do you think?” I inquired.
“Oh, about forty, I should say.”
This unhappy end of Will Yaisley was all the more startling when I
contrasted it with what I had known of him (1884-1886). Then he was a
youth of twenty or twentyone or two, clerking in his father’s store,
which was the largest in town, and living in this fine house which was
now a K. of P. Club. He was brisk and stocky and red-headed—his sister
Dora had glints of red in her hair—and, like the rest of this family,
was vain and supercilious.
Aphrodite had many devotees in this simple Christian village. The soil
of the town, its lakes and groves, seemed to generate a kind of madness
in us all. I recall that during the short time I was there, there was
scandal after scandal, and seemingly innocent sex attractions, which
sprang up between boys and girls whom I knew, ended disastrously after I
had departed. One of the boys already referred to was found, after he
was dead, to have left a pretty, oversexed school girl, whom I also
knew, enceinte. The son of one of the richest land owners and a brother
of a very pretty school girl who sat near me in first year high, was
found, the year after I left, to have seduced a lovely tall girl with
fair hair and blue eyes, who lived only two blocks from us. The story
went round (it was retailed to me in Chicago) that she got down on her
knees to him (how should anyone have seen her do that?) and on his
refusing to marry her, committed suicide by swallowing poison. Her death
by suicide, and the fact that he had been courting her, were true
enough. I personally know of three other girls, all beauties, and all
feverish with desire (how keen is the natural urge to sex!) who were
easily persuaded, no doubt, and had to be sent away so that the scandal
of having a child at home, without having a husband to vouch for it,
might be hushed up.
Poor, dogma-bound humanity! How painfully we weave our way through the
mysteries, once desire has trapped us!