OLD HAUNTS AND OLD DREAMS
But the school next door gave me the cruellest shock of all. I went into
it because, it being mid August, the preliminary autumn repairs were
under way and the place was open. Workingmen were scattered
about—carpenters, painters, glaziers. I had no idea how sound my memory
was for these old scenes until I stepped inside the door and saw the
closets where we used to hang our hats and coats on _our_ nails and
walked up the stairs to the seventh grade room, which is the one in
which I had been placed on our arrival in Warsaw.
Here it was, just as I had left it, apparently—the same walls, the same
benches, the same teacher’s table. But how small the benches had grown,
scarcely large enough for me to squeeze into now, even though I allowed
for a tight fit! The ceiling and walls seemed not nearly so high or so
far as they had once seemed. At that very table sat Mae Calvert, our
teacher—dead now, so someone told me later—a blooming girl of nineteen
or twenty who at that time seemed one of the most entrancing creatures
in all the world. She had such fine blue eyes, such light brown hair,
such a rounded, healthy, vigorous body. And she had been so fond of me.
Once, sitting at my little desk (it was the fifth from the front in the
second aisle, counting from the west side of the room), she paused and
put her hand on my head and cheek, pinching my neck and ear, and I
colored the while I thrilled with pleasure. You see, hitherto, I had
been trained in a Catholic school, what little I had been, and the
process had proved most depressing—black garbed, straight laced nuns.
But here in this warm, friendly room, with girls who were attractive and
boys who were for the larger part genial and companionable, and with a
teacher who took an interest in me, I felt as though I were in a kind of
school paradise, the Nirvana of the compulsorily trained.
Another time (it was in reading class) she asked me to read a paragraph
and when I had and paused, she said: “I can’t tell you how beautifully
you read, Theodore. It is so natural; you make everything so real.” I
blushed again, for I felt for the moment by some odd transposition that
she was making fun of me. When I looked up into her face and saw her
eyes—the way in which she looked at me—I understood. She was actually
fond of me.
At later times and in various ways during this year she drew me out of
an intense dreamy shyness by watching over me, expending an affection
which I scarcely knew how to take. She would occasionally keep me after
school to help me with my grammar—a profound mystery, no least rudiment
of which I ever mastered—and when she gradually discovered that I knew
absolutely nothing concerning it, she merely looked at me and pinched my
cheek.
“Well, don’t you worry; you can get along without grammar for a while
yet. You’ll understand it later on.”
She passed me in all my examinations, regardless I presume, though I
have reason to believe that I was highly intelligent in respect to some
things. At the end of the year, when we were clearing up our papers and
I was getting ready to leave, she put her arms about me and kissed me
goodbye. I remember the day, the warm, spring sunlit afternoon, the
beauty and the haunting sense of the waning of things that possessed me
at the time. I went home, to think and wonder about her.
I saw her a year or so later, a much stouter person, married and with a
baby, and I remember being very shocked. She didn’t seem the same, but
she remembered me and smiled on me. For my part, not having seen her for
so long a time, I felt very strange and bashful-almost as though I were
in the presence of one I had never known.
But the feeling which I had here today passed over this last unheeded.
It concerned only the particular days in which I was here, the days of a
new birth and freedom from horrific Spartan restraint, plus the
overawing weight of the lapse of time. Never before I think, certainly
not since my mother’s death, was I so impressed by the lapse of time,
the diaphanous nothingness of things. I was here thirtytwo years before
and all that I saw then had body and substance—a glaring material state.
Here was some of the same material, the same sunlight, a few of the same
people, perhaps, but time had filched away nearly all our
characteristics. That boy—was his spiritual substance inside of me still
unchanged, merely overlaid by experience like the heart of a palm? I
could not even answer that to myself. The soul within me could not say.
And at least foursevenths of my allotted three score years and ten had
gone.
Down the street from this school about five doors was another house
which was very familiar. I went up the narrow brick walk and knocked. A
tall, lean, sallow creature of no particular figure but with piercing
black eyes and long, thin hands came to the door. Her hair, once jet
black, was thinly streaked with grey. She must have been all of
thirtyfive or forty when I knew her as a boy. That made her sixtyfive or
seventy now; yet I could see no particular change, so vigorous and
energetic was she.
“Well, Ed,” she exclaimed, “or is it Theodore? Well, of all things! Come
right in here. I’m glad to see you. Land o' goodness! And Nate will be
pleased to death. Nate! Nate!” she called into an adjoining room. “Come
in here. If here isn’t Theodore—or is it Ed?” (“It’s Theodore,” I
interjected quickly.) “You know it’s been so long since I’ve seen you
two I can scarcely tell you apart. But I remember both as well as if it
were yesterday. And it’s been—let me see—how long has it been? Nearly
thirty years now, hasn’t it? Well, of all things! I do declare! And
you’re getting stout, too. And you’ve grown to be over six feet, at
least. Well, I do declare! To think of your walking in on me like this.
Just you sit right down here and make yourself comfortable. Well, of all
things!”
By now I must have been smiling like a Cheshire cat.
Nate, or Nathaniel, one-time carpenter and builder (and still such, for
all I know), strolled in. It was late in the afternoon, and he was
lounging about in a white cotton shirt and grey trousers, his suspenders
down about his hips, a pipe in his mouth and an evening paper in his
hand.
“Well, Dorse,” he called, “where do you come from?”
I told him.
“Think of that, now,” exclaimed Mrs. McConnell, “and a car! And you came
all the way through from New York? Well, lots of them do that now.
Charlie Biggers went through from here to Pennsylvania in a Ford not
long ago.”
She cackled stridently. I was fascinated by her vigor in age.
“Nate here,” she went on, “says he thinks we ought to get a machine one
of these days, but lawsie! I don’t know whether I could learn to run it,
and I’m certain _he_ couldn’t.” Her keen birdlike eyes devoured me, and
she smiled. “And so you’re a writer? Well, what do you write? Novels?”
“Well, some people condescend to call them that,” I answered. “I’d
hesitate to tell you what some others call them.”
“It’s funny I never heard of any of ’em. What’s the names of some of
’em?”
I enlightened her.
“Well, now, that’s strange. I never heard of a one of them—I must get
two or three and see how you write.”
“That’s good of you,” I chuckled, in the best of spirits.
“Bertie Wilkerson—you remember Bertie, don’t you?—he was the son of the
justice of the peace here—well, he’s on one of the Cleveland papers now,
writing in some way. There’s a woman over here in Wabash (I knew the
name of the novelist coming now) has made a big reputation for herself
with her books. They have whole stacks of ’em here in the stores, I see.
I read one of ’em. They tell me she’s worth four or five hundred
thousand dollars by now. You’ve heard of her, haven’t you?” She gave me
her name.
“Yes,” I replied very humbly, “I have.”
“Well, I don’t suppose you make that much, anyhow, do you?” she queried.
“No,” I replied. “I’m very sorry, I don’t.”
I could see by the stress she laid on the four or five hundred thousand
dollars and the stacks of books in the local store that my type of
authorship would never appeal to her.
Be that as it may, we found other things equally interesting to both to
talk about. The town had changed. She began to tell when and in what
manner and why the old pond had been filled in; why the leading banker,
whose wide verandahed house had been a subject of wonder and envy to me,
had moved it off the old property and built an even more splendiferous
home. Children and grand-children had come to live with him. I could see
the old house in its new position on the other side of the pond—a poor
affair compared to what I thought it was. Why do our memories lie so?
Could anyone or anything be a greater liar than the average memory?
When I came out of there after a time and returned to the car Franklin
was still patiently sketching, making good use of his time, whereas
Speed was sitting with his feet on a part of his engine equipment
cleaning a chain. They were partly surrounded now: (1) by old Mr.
Gridley, he of my former room, who was retailing the story of his son’s
death; (2) by a short, dusty, rotund, rather oily-haired man who
announced that he was the owner of the property which had formerly
sheltered me, and who by virtue of having cut down all the trees and
built the two abominable houses in front seemed to think that he was
entitled to my friendship and admiration—a _non sequitur_ which
irritated me greatly; (3) by a small boy from somewhere in the vicinity
who stood with his legs very far apart, his hands in his pockets, and
merely stared and listened while Mr. Gridley related the moving details
of his son’s death and the futility of the campaign at the Dardanelles.
The owner of the houses in front kept trying to interject bits of his
personal history as carpenter, builder, land speculator, and the like.
It was most entertaining.
“I was just saying to your friend here,” said the latter, who had never
met me until this moment, “that if you’re in town long enough you must
come and take dinner with me. We’re just plain people, but we can give
you plenty to eat. Anyone who lived here as long ago as you did——”
I felt no least desire to dine with him, largely because he had cut down
all the fine trees and built such trashy houses.
He chattered on in an impossible fashion. I could see he was greatly
impressed by our possession of this car. And to have come all the way
from New York! I wanted to annihilate him for having destroyed the
trees—the wretch!
But I felt that we ought to be getting on. Here it was after five and I
still had various things to see—the old Central High School, where so
long ago I finished my eighth grade common and my first year German and
algebra; the lakes, Centre and Pike, where with many others I had been
accustomed to row, swim, skate, fish, and camp; the old swimming hole
out in the Tippecanoe (three miles out, I thought, at least); our old
Catholic Church, where I regularly went to confession and communion; the
woods where I had once found a dead peddler, lying face down,
self-finished, at the foot of a great oak; and so on and so
forth—endless places, indeed. Besides, there were various people I
wanted to see, people who, like the wiry Mrs. McConnell, could tell me
much—perhaps.
Alas for intentions and opportunities! I suppose I might have spent days
browsing and communing, but now that I was here and actually seeing
things, I did not feel inclined to do it. What was there really to see,
I asked myself, aside from the mere exterior or surface of things? In
one more hour I could examine exteriorly or in perspective all of these
things—the lakes, the school, the swimming hole, the church—they were
all near at hand—unless I wanted to linger here for weeks. Did I really
want to stay longer than this dusk?
Franklin was eager to get on. When first he invited me he had planned no
such extended tour as this, and these were not his sacred scenes. It was
all very well—but——
Nevertheless, we did cruise (as Speed was wont to express it), first to
Centre Lake, where many a moonlight when the ice was as thick as a beam
and as smooth as glass Ed, Tillie and I, along with a half hundred town
boys and girls, had skated to our hearts' content or fished through the
ice. My, how wonderful it was! To see them cutting ice on the lake with
horses and fishing through holes only large enough to permit the
extraction of a small sized fish when one bit. To my astonishment the
waters of the lake had receded or diminished fully a fifth of its
original circumference, and all the houses and boathouses which formerly
stood close to its edge were now fully two hundred feet inland. In
addition, all the smartness and superiority which once invested this
section were now gone—the region of the summer conferences at Winona
having superseded this. Houses I was sure I would be able to recall,
should they chance to be here—those of Maud Rutter, Augusta Nueweiler
(she of the fir tree kiss), Ada Sanguiat, were not discernible at all. I
knew they were here unchanged, but I could not find them.
We went out past an old bridge to the northeast of the town (scarcely a
half mile out) and found to my astonishment that the stream it once
spanned—the Tippecanoe, if you please—and that once drained Centre and
Pike Lakes, was now no more. There was only a new stone culvert here,
not the old iron and plank wagon bridge of my day—and no water
underneath it at all, only a seepy muck, overgrown with marsh grass!!
The whole river, a clear sandy-bottomed stream, was now gone—due to the
recession of the lake, I suppose. The swimming hole that I fancied must
be all of two or three miles out was not more than one, and it had
disappeared, of course, with the rest. There was not even a sign of the
footpath that led across the fields to it. All was changed. The wild
rice fields that once stood about here for what seemed miles to me, and
overrun in the summertime (July, August, and September, in particular)
with thousands upon thousands of blackbirds and crows, were now well
plowed cornland! I could not see more than the vaguest outlines of the
region I had known, and I could not recapture, save in the vaguest way,
any of the boyish moods that held me at the time. In my heart was a
clear stream and a sandy bottom and a troop of half-forgotten boys, and
birds, and blue skies, and men fishing by this bridge where was now this
culvert—Ed and I among them occasionally—and here was nothing at all—a
changed world.
“Oh, it’s all gone!” I cried to Franklin. “Why, an iron wagon bridge
used to hang here. This was a beautiful fishing pool. A path went across
here. Let’s go back.”
We went up to the old Central High School, looking exactly as it did in
my day, only now a ward instead of a high school—a new high having been
built since I left—and here I tried to recapture some of the emotions I
have always had in my dreams of it and have still. I saw troops of boys
and girls coming out of it at noon and at four in the afternoon—I and my
sister Tillie among them. I saw Dora Yaisley and Myrtle Taylor (of the
pale flower face and violet eyes), and Jess Beasley and Sadie and Dolly
Varnum—what a company! And there were George and John Sharp—always more
or less companionable with me, and “Jud” Morris and Frank Yaisley and Al
Besseler and a score of others—interesting souls all and now scattered
to the four corners of the earth.
But sitting in the car—suddenly I saw myself in my seat upstairs looking
out the north window which was nearest me, and dreaming of the future.
From where I sat in those days I could see up a long, clean alley, with
people crossing at its different street intersections for blocks away. I
could see far off to where the station was and the flour mill and where
the trains came in. I could hear their whistles—distant and
beckoning—feeling the tug and pull of my future life to come out and
away. I could see clouds and trees and little houses and birds over the
court house tower, and then I wanted to get out and fly too—to walk up
and down the great earth and be happy.
I tell you, in those days, wonderful, amazing moods were generated in
the blood of me. I felt and saw things which have never come
true—glories, moods, gayeties, perfections. There was a lilt in my heart
and my soul. I wanted, oh! I wanted all that Nature can breed in her
wealth of stars and universes—and I found—what have I found——?
The frame of any man is an infinitesimal shell. The soul of him so
small, a pale lamp which he carries in his hands! The passions of which
we boast or from whose imagined horrors we flee are such little
things—rush lights—scarcely able to glimmer in so great a dark. People
rage at men and women for their passions! At best, granting a Hero, a
Caligula, an Alexander, a Napoleon—what small, greedy insects indeed
they were. They blazed and bestrode the earth. They fought, conquered,
reveled. Against the vast illimitable substance and force of things,
what pale flames they really were, after all; so trivial, so
unimportant. As well seek out the captains and generals and emperors of
ants. In the vast something or nothing of life they are as much worth
recording personally. I have eaten and drunken, and thirsted after all,
but should the curtain descend now, how little have I had! How little
could any man ever have!
Oh, great, scheming, dreaming Prince of Life—what is that you are after?
What blood moods in your soul is it that we, your atoms, hurry to
fulfill? Do you love? Do you hate? By billions sweating, blazing, do we
fulfill some quaint desire of yours? Drop you the curtain then on me. I
do not care—I am very tired. Drop it and let me dream no more the
endless wonders and delights that never, never, can be.