THE OLD HOUSE
Dora Yaisley and her sister, insofar as I could learn this day, had
fared no better than some of the others. Indeed, life had slipped along
for all and made my generation, or many of the figures in it, at least,
seem like the decaying leaves that one finds under the new green shoots
and foliage of a later spring. Dora had married a lawyer from some other
town, so my gossip believed, but later, talking to another old resident
and one who remembered me, I was told that she had run away and turned
up married—to leave again and live in another place. As for another
beauty of my day, it was said that she had been seen in hotels in
Indianapolis and Fort Wayne with some man not her husband. The book man
with whom I first talked volunteered this information.
“But she’s working now right here in Warsaw,” he volunteered a little
later. “If you know her, you might go to see her. I’m sure she’d be glad
to see you. She hasn’t any relative around now.”
“You don’t say!” I exclaimed, astonished. “Is she as good looking as
ever?”
“No,” he replied with a faint wryness of expression, “she’s not
beautiful any more. She must be over forty. But she’s a very nice woman.
I see her around here occasionally. She goes regularly to my church.”
After browsing here so long with this man, Franklin having gone to seek
something else, I returned to the car and requested that we proceed out
Centre Street to the second house in which we had lived—the Thralls
Mansion—that having been the most important and the more picturesque of
the two. On nearing it I was again surprised and indeed given a sharp,
psychic wrench which endured for hours and subsequently gave me a
splitting headache. It was not gone, oh, no, not the formal walls, but
everything else was. Formerly, in my day, there had been a large grove
of pines here, with interludes, in one of which flourished five chestnut
trees, yielding us all the chestnuts we could use; in another a group of
orchard trees, apples, pears, peaches, cherries. The house itself stood
on a slope which led down to a pond of considerable size, on which of a
moonlight night, when our parents would not permit us to go farther, we
were wont to skate. On the other side of this pond, to the southeast of
it, was a saw and furniture mill, and about it, on at least two sides,
were scattered dozens upon dozens of oak, walnut and other varieties of
logs, stored here pending their use in the mill. Jumping logs was a
favorite sport of all us school boys from all parts of the town—getting
poles and leaping from pile to pile like flying squirrels. It was a
regular Saturday morning and week day evening performance, until our
mother’s or sister’s or brother’s warning voices could be heard calling
us hence. From my bedroom window on the second floor, I could
contemplate this pond and field, hear the pleasant droning of the saw
and planes of the mill, and see the face of the town clock in the court
house tower, lighted at night, and hear the voice of its bell tolling
the hours regularly day and night.
This house found and has retained a place in my affections which has
never been disturbed by any other—and I have lived in many. It was so
simple—two stories on the north side, three on the south, where the hill
declined sharply, and containing eleven rooms and two cellar rooms, most
convenient to our kitchen and dining-room.
It was, as I have said, a very old house. Even when we took it age had
marred it considerably. We had to replace certain window sashes and
panes and fix the chimney and patch the roof in several places where it
leaked. The stairs creaked. Being almost entirely surrounded by pines
which sighed and whispered continually, it was supposed to be damp but
it was not. In grey or rainy weather the aspect of the whole place was
solemn, historic. In snowy or stormy weather, it took on a kind of
patriarchal significance. When the wind was high these thick, tall trees
swirled and danced in a wild ecstasy. When the snow was heavy they bent
low with their majestic plumes of white. Underneath them was a floor of
soft brown pine needles as soft and brown as a rug. We could gather
basket upon basket of resiny cones with which to start our morning
fires. In spring and summer these trees were full of birds, the grackle
of blackbird particularly, for these seemed to preempt the place early
in March and were inclined to fight others for possession. Nevertheless,
robins, bluebirds, wrens and other of the less aggressive feathers built
their nests here. I could always tell when spring was certainly at hand
by the noise made by a tree full of newly arrived blackbirds on some
chill March morning. Though snow might still be about, they were
strutting about on the bits of lawn we were able to maintain between
groups of pines, or hopping on the branches of trees, rasping out their
odd speech.
But now, as we rolled out my familiar street, I noted that the sawmill
was no longer. The furniture factory had been converted into an
electrical supply works. Furthermore, the pond at the foot of our house
was filled up, not a trace of it remaining, and all saw logs, of course,
long since cleaned away. Worse and worse, the pine grove had disappeared
completely. In the front or west part of our premises now stood two new
houses of a commonplace character, with considerable lawn space about
them, but not a tree. And there had been so many fine ones! Furthermore,
the ground about the house proper was stripped bare, save for one lone
crab apple tree which stood near our north side door. It was still
vigorous, and the ground under it was littered with bright red-yellow
crabs which were being allowed to decay. From the front door, which once
looked out upon a long cobble and brick walk, which ran between double
rows of pine trees to our very distant gate (all gone now) protruded a
sign which read, “Saws Filed.” A path ran from this door southward over
the very pond on which we used to skate! Near at hand was the “old Grant
house” in which we had lived before we moved into this one, and it was
still there, only it had been moved over closer to the school and
another house crowded in beside it, on what was once our somewhat
spacious lawn. The old school lawn, which once led down to the street
that passed its gate, was gone, and instead this street came up to the
school door, meeting the one which had formerly passed our house and
ended at a stile, giving on to the school lawn. The school yard trees
were gone, and facing the new street made of the old school lawn were
houses. Only our old Thralls house remained standing as it was, on the
right hand side.
I can only repeat that I was psychically wrenched, although I was saying
to myself that I felt no least interest in the visible scene. I had
lived here, true, but what of it? There was this of it, that somewhere
down in myself, far below my surface emotions and my frothy reasoning
faculties, something was hurting. It was not I, exactly. It was like
something else that had once been me and was still in me, somewhere,
another person or soul that was grieving, but was now overlayed or shut
away like a ghost in a sealed room. I felt _it_ the while I bustled
about examining this and that detail.
First I went up to the old house and walked about it trying to replace
each detail as it was, and as I did so, restoring to my mind scene after
scene and mood after mood of my younger days. What becomes of old scenes
and old moods in cosmic substance? Here had been the pump, and here it
was still, thank heaven, unchanged. Here, under a wide-armed fir which
once stood here, Ed, Al, Tillie and I had once taken turns stirring a
huge iron pot full of apple butter which was boiling over pine twigs and
cones, and also gathered cones to keep it going. Here, also, to the
right of the front door as you faced west, was my favorite lounging
place, a hammock strung between two trees, where of a summer day, or
when the weather was favorable at any time, I used to lie and read,
looking up between times through the branches of the trees to the sky
overhead and wondering over and rejoicing in the beauty of life. We were
poor in the main, and, worse yet, because of certain early errors of
some of the children (how many have I committed since!) and the foolish
imaginings of my parents, my father in particular, we considered
ourselves socially discredited. We hadn’t done so well as some people.
We weren’t rich. Some of us hadn’t been good!! But in books and nature,
even at this age, I managed to find solace for all our fancied
shortcomings, or nearly all, and though I grieved to think that we had
so little of what seemed to give others so much pleasure, and the right
to strut and stare, I also fancied that life must and probably did hold
something better for me than was indicated here.
After I had made the rounds once, Franklin sitting in the offing in his
car and sketching the house, I knocked at the front door and received no
answer. Finally I went inside and knocked at the first inside door,
which originally gave into our parlor. The place looked really very
tatterdemalion, like an isolated Eleventh Avenue, New York, tenement. No
one answered, but finally from what was formerly my sister Theresa’s
room, on the second floor, a stocky and somewhat frowsy woman of plainly
Slavic origin put her head over the balustrade of the handsome old
carved walnut staircase, and called, “Well?”
“I beg your pardon,” I said, “but once, a number of years ago, our
family used to live in this house, and I have come back to look it over.
Can you tell me who occupies it now?”
“Well, no one family has it now,” she replied pleasantly on hearing of
my mission. “There are four families in it, two on this floor up here,
one on that floor (indicating) and one in the basement. The people on
the first floor rent that front room to a boarder.”
“A tenement!” I exclaimed to myself.
“Well, there doesn’t appear to be anyone at home here,” I said to her.
“Do you mind if I look at your rooms? The room at the end of the hall
there was once my sleeping room.”
“Oh, not at all. Certainly. Certainly. Come right up.”
I mounted the stairs, now creakier than ever, and entered a room which
in our day seemed comparatively well furnished. It was memorable to me
because of a serious siege of illness which my sister, Theresa, had
undergone there, and because of several nights in which I had tried to
sit up and keep watch. Once from this room, at two in the morning, I had
issued forth to find our family physician, an old, grey-bearded man,
who, once I had knocked him up, came down to his door, lamp in hand, a
long white nightgown protecting his stocky figure, his whiskers
spreading like a sheaf of wheat, and demanded to know what I meant by
disturbing him.
“But, doctor,” I said timorously, “she’s very sick. She has a high
fever. She asked me to beg you to come right away.”
“A high fever! Shucks! Wasn’t I just there at four? Here I am, an old
man, needing my sleep, and I never get a decent night’s rest. It’s
always the way. As though I didn’t know. Suppose she has a little fever.
It won’t hurt her.”
“But will you come, doctor?” I pleaded, knowing full well that he would,
although he had begun irritably to close the door.
“Yes, I’ll come. Of course I’ll come, though I know it isn’t a bit
necessary. You run on back. I’ll be there.”
I hurried away through the dark, a little fearful of the silent streets,
and presently he came, fussing and fuming at the inconsiderateness of
some people.
I always think of old Dr. Woolley as being one of the nicest, kindest
old doctors that ever was.
But now this room, instead of being a happy combination of bed room and
study, was a kitchen, dining room and living room combined. There were
prints and pots and pans hung on the walls, and no carpet, and a big
iron cook stove and a plain deal table and various chairs and boxes, all
very humble and old. But the place was clean, I was glad to see, and the
warm, August sun was streaming through the west windows, a cheering
sight. I missed the sheltering pine boughs outside, and was just
thinking “how different” and asking myself “what is time, anyhow” when
there came up the stairs a Slavic workingman of small but vigorous
build. He had on grey jean trousers and a blue shirt, and carried a
bucket and a shovel.
“The gentleman once lived in this house. He’s come back to see it,”
explained his wife courteously.
“Well, I suppose it’s changed, eh?” he replied.
“Oh, very much,” I sighed. “I used to sleep in this end bedroom as a
boy.”
“Well, you’ll find another boy sleeping there if you look,” he said,
opening the door, and as he did so I saw a small, chubby, curly-haired
boy of four or five snoozing on his pillow, his face turned away from
the golden sun which poured into the room. The beauty of it touched me
deeply. It brought back the lapse of time with a crash.
How nature dashes its generations of new childhood against the beaches
of this old, old world, I thought. Our little day in the sun is so
short. Our tenure of the things of earth so brief. And we fight over
land and buildings and position. To my host and hostess I said,
“beautiful,” and then that whimpering thing in the sealed room began to
cry and I hurried down the stairs.