THE FOLKS AT CARMEL
The run to Carmel, Franklin’s home, was not long—say, forty miles—and we
made it in a downpour and were silent most of the way. It was so dark
and damp and gloomy that no one seemed to want to talk, and yet I took a
melancholy comfort in considering how absolutely cheerless the day was.
I could not help reflecting, as we sped along, how at its worst life
persistently develops charm, so that if one were compelled to live
always in so gloomy a world, one would shortly become inured to it, or
the race would, and think nothing of it.
Once Speed called my attention to a group of cattle with their heads to
wind and rain, and asked, “Do you know why they stand that way?”
“No,” I replied.
“Well, all animals turn their fighting end to any trouble. If those were
horses, now, their rump would be to the rain.”
“I see,” I said. “They fight with their heels.”
“Like some soldiers,” said Franklin drily.
In another place we saw another great stretch of beech woods, silvery in
the rain, and Franklin commented on the characteristic presence of these
groves everywhere in Indiana. There was one near his home, he said, and
there had been one in every town I had ever lived in in this state.
At dusk we reached Westfield, only six miles from his home, where the
Quakers lived. This was one of those typical community towns, with
standardized cottages of grey-white wood and rather stately trees in
orderly rows. Because of a difficulty here with one of the lamps, which
would not light, we had to stop a while, until it grew quite dark. A
lost chicken ran crying out of a neighboring cornfield, and we shooed it
back towards its supposed home, wondering whether the rain and wind or
some night prowler would not kill it. It was very much excited, running
and squeaking constantly—a fine call to any fox or weasel. Chickens are
so stupid.
Presently we came into Carmel, in the night and rain, but there being
few lights, I could not make out anything. The car turned into a yard
somewhere and stopped at a side door, or porch. We got out and a little
woman, grey and small, cheerful and affectionate, as became a doting
mother, came out and greeted us, kissing Franklin.
“What kept you so long?” she asked, in a familiar motherly fashion. “We
thought you were going to get here by noon.”
“So did we,” replied Franklin drily. “I wired you, though.”
“Yes, I know. Your father’s gone to bed. He stayed up as long as he
could. Come right in here, please,” she said to me, leading the way,
while Franklin stopped to search the car. I followed, damp and heavy,
wondering if the house would be as cheerful as I hoped.
It was. It was the usual American small-town home, built with the number
of rooms supposed to be appropriate for a given number of people or
according to your station in life. A middle class family of some means,
I believe, is supposed to have a house containing ten or twelve rooms,
whether they need them or not. A veranda, as I could see, ran about two
sides, and there was a lawn with trees. Within, the furnishings were
substantial after their kind—good middle-west furniture. (Franklin’s
studio, at the back, as I discovered later, was charmingly appointed.)
There were some of his early drawings on the wall, which love had framed
and preserved. They reminded me of my family’s interest in me. A tall,
slim, dark girl, anæmic but with glistening black eyes, came in and
greeted me. She was a sister, I understood—a milliner, by trade, taking
her vacation here. As she came, she called to another girl who would not
come—why I could not at first comprehend. This was a niece to whom
Franklin more than once on the way out had referred as being superiorly
endowed temperamentally, and as possessing what spiritualists or
theosophists refer to as an “old soul,” she was so intelligent. He could
not explain her natural wisdom save on the ground of her having lived
before.
“Some people just insist on being shy,” said the sister. “They are so
temperamental.”
She showed me to my room, and then went off to help get us something to
eat.
Alone, I examined my surroundings, unpacked my things, opened a double
handful of mail, and then came down and sat with the mother and sister
at supper. It being late, bacon and eggs were our portion, and some
cake—a typical late provision for anyone in America.
I wish I might accurately portray, in all its simplicity, and placidity,
the atmosphere I found here. This house was so still—and the town. Mrs.
Booth, Franklin’s mother, seemed so essentially the middle West, even
Indiana mother, with convictions and yet a genial tolerance of much.
Making the best of a difficult world was written all over the place.
There was a little boy here, adopted from somewhere because his parents
were dead, who seemed inordinately fond of Franklin, as indeed Franklin
seemed of him. I had had stories of this boy all the way out, and how
through him Franklin was gaining (or regaining, perhaps, I had better
say) a knowledge of the ethics and governing rules of boy-land. It was
amusing to see them together now, the boy with sharp, bird-like eyes
devouring every detail of his older friend’s appearance and
character—Franklin amused, fatherly, meditative, trying to make the most
and best of all the opportunities of life. We sat in the “front room,”
or “parlor,” and listened to the Victrola rendering pieces by Bert
Williams and James Whitcomb Riley and Tchaikowsky and Weber and Fields
and Beethoven—the usual medley of the sublime and the ridiculous found
in so many musical collections. Franklin had told me that of late—only
in the last two or three years—his father had begun to imagine that
there might or must be in music something which would explain the
world’s, to him, curious interest in it! Hitherto, on his farm, where
there had been none, he had scoffed at it!
The next morning I arose early, as I thought—eight o’clock—and going out
on the front porch encountered an old, grizzled man, who looked very
much like the last portraits of the late General Sherman, and who seemed
very much what he was, or had been—a soldier, and then latterly a
farmer. Now he was all gnarled and bent. His face was grizzled with a
short, stubby grey beard. The eyes were rather small and brown and
looked canny. He got up with difficulty, a cane assisting him, and
offered me a withered hand. I felt sympathy for all age.
“Well, ya got here, did ya?” he inquired shortly. There was a choppy
brevity about his voice which I liked. He seemed very self sufficient,
genial and shrewd, for all his years. “We expected ya last night. I
couldn’t wait up, though. I did stay up till eight. That’s pretty late
for me—usually go to bed at seven. Have a nice trip?”
We sat down and I told him. His eyes went over me like a swift feeling
hand.
“Well, you’re just the man I want to talk to,” he said, with a kind of
crude eagerness. “You from New York State?”
“Yes.”
“Franklin tells me that Governor Whitman has got in bad, refusing to
pardon that fellow Becker. He says he thinks it will hurt him
politically. What do you think?”
“No,” I replied. “I think not. I believe it will help him, if he doesn’t
injure himself in any other way.”
“That’s what I think,” he exclaimed, with a kind of defiant chuckle. “I
never did think he knew what he was talking about.”
On our way west, as I have indicated, Franklin had been telling me much
of his father’s and his own upbringing. They were types, as I judged,
not much calculated either to understand or sympathize with each
other—Franklin the sensitive, perceptive artist; his father the sheer,
aggressive political soldier type. The one had artistic imagination, the
other scarcely any imagination at all. I could see that. Yet both had a
certain amount of practical understanding backed by conviction, which
could easily bring them into conflict. I felt a touch of something here,
as though this father would be rather gratified if he could prove his
son to be in a false position. It amused me, for I knew from what I had
heard that Franklin would be amused too. He was so tolerant.
More than that, I discovered a streak in the father which I think is to
be found in thousands of countrymen the world over, in all lands,
namely, that of pruriency, and that in the face of a rural
conventionalism and even a religious bent which frowns on evidence of
any tendency in that direction on the part of others, especially those
most immediately related to them. Rural life is peculiar in this
respect, somewhat different to that of the tribes of the city, who have
so much more with which to satisfy themselves. Most isolated
countrymen—or perhaps I had better modify that and say many confined to
the silences of the woods and fields and the ministrations of one woman,
or none—have an intense curiosity in regard to sex; which works out in
strange, often naïve ways. In this instance it showed itself shortly in
connection with some inquiry I made in regard to local politics—how the
next election was coming out (I knew that would interest him) and who
the local leaders were. Soon this resulted in the production of a worn
and dingy slip of paper which he handed me, chuckling.
“What do you think of that?” he asked. I took it and read it, smiling
the while.
It seemed that some local wag—the owner of the principal drug store—had
written and circulated a humorous _double entendre_ description of a
golf game and someone’s failure as a golfer, which was intended really
to show that the man in the case was impotent. You can easily imagine
how the thing was worked out. It was cleverly done, and to a grown-up
person was quite harmless.
But the old gentleman was obviously greatly stirred by it. It fascinated
and no doubt shocked him a little (all the more so since sex was over
for him) and aroused in him a spirit of mischief.
“Well, it’s very funny,” I said. “Rather good. What of it?”
“What do you think of a man that’ll get up a thing like that and hand it
around where children are apt to get a hold of it?”
“As regards the children,” I commented, “it’s rather bad, I suppose,
although I’ve seen but few children in my life that weren’t as sexually
minded, if not more so, than their elders. I wouldn’t advise putting
this in their hands, however. As for grownups, well, it’s just a trivial
bit of business, I should say,” I concluded.
“You think so?” he said, restoring the paper to his vest pocket and
twinkling his grey eyes.
“Yes,” I persisted.
“Well, the fellow that got this up and handed it around here wants to
head the republican county ticket this fall. I think I’ve got him, with
this. I don’t mean that he shall.”
“Do you mean he’s a bad character?” I smiled.
“Oh, no, not that exactly. He’s not a bad fellow, but he’s not a good
leader. He’s got too big a head. He can’t win and he oughtn’t to be
nominated, and I don’t mean that he shall be, if I can prevent it.”
He was chewing tobacco as he talked, quite as a farmer at a fence
corner, and now he expectorated solemnly, defiantly, conclusively.
[Illustration:
IN CARMEL
Franklin’s Home Town
]
“You don’t like him personally, then?” I queried, curious as to the
reason for this procedure.
“Oh, I like him well enough. He ain’t no good as a leader, though—not to
my way of thinking.”
“Do you mean to say you intend to use this against him in the campaign?”
“I told him so, and some of the other fellows too, down at the post
office the other day. I told him they’d better not nominate him. If they
did, I’d circulate this. He knows it’ll kill him if I do. I showed it to
the Quaker minister here the other night, and he ’lowed it ’ud do for
him.”
“What’s a Quaker minister?” I asked, suddenly interrupting the main
theme of our conversation, curious as to the existence of such an
official. “I never heard of the Quakers having a minister. I know they
have elders and ministers in a general or democratic sense—men whose
counsels are given more or less precedence over that of others, but no
particular minister.”
“Well, they have out here,” he replied. "I don’t know where or when they
got ’em. This one lives right over there next the Quaker Church.
“So you have a Quaker Church instead of a meeting house, do you?” I
commented.
“Yes, and they have congregational singing and an organ,” observed the
dark-eyed sister, who was just coming up now. “You don’t hear of
anything like that in a Friends' meeting house in the East, but you will
here tomorrow.” She smiled and called us in to breakfast.
It appeared that our host had eaten at six A. M., or five, but he came
in with me for sociability’s sake.
The discussion of the pornographic jocosity and its political use was
suspended while we had breakfast, but a little later, the veranda being
cleared and the old gentleman still sitting here, rocking and
ruminating, I said:
“Do you mean to say you intend to use that leaflet against this man in
case he runs?”
“I intend to use it,” he replied definitely, but still with a kind of
pleasant, chuckling manner, as though it were a great joke. “I don’t
think they’ll nominate him, though, but if they do, it’ll kill him
sure.”
He smiled enigmatically and went on rocking.
“But you’re a republican?”
“Yes, I’m a republican.”
“And he’s a republican?”
“Yes.”
“Well, politics must certainly be stirring things out here,” I
commented.
He chuckled silently, like an old rooster in a garden, the while he
moved to and fro in his rocker, ruminating his chew of tobacco, and then
finally he added, “It’ll do for him sure.”
I had to smile. The idea of stirring up a fight over so pornographic a
document in a strictly religious community, and thus giving it a wider
circulation than ever it could have in any other way, by a man who would
have called himself religious, I suppose, had an element of humor in it.
At breakfast it was that I met the girl who refused to greet me the
night before. As I looked at her for the first time, it struck me that
life is constantly brewing new draughts of femininity, calculated to
bewray or affright the world—Helens or Circes. The moralists and
religionists and those who are saintly minded and believe that nature
seeks only a conservative or coolly virtuous state have these questions
to answer:
(1) How is it that for every saint born into the world there is also a
cruel or evil minded genius born practically at the same time? The twain
are ever present.
(2) That for every virtuous maid there is one who has no trace of
virtue?—possibly many?
(3) That while an evil minded person may be reforming, or an immoral
person becoming moral, nature itself (which religion is supposed to be
reforming) is breeding others constantly, fresh and fresh, new types of
those who, sex hungry or wealth hungry or adventure hungry, have no part
or parcel with morality? The best religion or morals appear to be able
to do is to contend with nature, which is constantly breeding the un- or
immoral, and generating blood lusts which result in all the crimes we
know, and by the same token, all the religions. How is that?
These thoughts were generated, more or less, by my observation of this
girl, for as I looked at her, solid and dimpling, I felt certain that
here nature had bred another example of that type of person whom the
moralists are determined to look upon as oversexed. She had all the
provocative force that goes with a certain kind of beauty. I am not
saying that she was so—merely that it was so she impressed me. Her
mouth, for one thing, was full—pouty—and she was constantly changing its
expression, as if aware of its import. Her eyes were velvety and
swimming. Her neck and arms were heavy—rounded in a sensuous way. She
walked with what to me seemed a distinct consciousness of the lines of
her body, although as a matter of fact she may not have been. She was
preternaturally shy and evasive, looking about as if something very
serious were about to happen, as if she had to be most careful of her
ways and looks, and yet really not being so. Her whole manner was at
once an invitation and repulsion—the two carefully balanced so as to
produce a static and yet an irritating state. I half liked and disliked
her. If she had been especially friendly, no doubt I should have liked
her very much. Since she was so wholly evasive, I fancied that I could
dislike her quite as much.
And at that we got on fairly well. I made no friendly overtures of any
kind, and yet I half felt as if she might be expecting something of the
kind. She hung about for a time, came to and fro, and then disappeared.
She changed her dress while we were down town, and seemed even more
attractive. She came out and sat on the porch next to me for a time, and
I tried to talk to her, but she made me feel uncomfortable, as though I
were trying to force attentions on her.
Apparently she was as much a puzzle to some others as she was to me, for
Franklin told me that she had once run away from the academy where she
was being schooled, and had come here instead, her parents being dead
and these being her nearest friends or relatives. Her guardian,
appointed by law, was greatly troubled by her. Also, that she had quite
a little money coming to her, and that once she had expressed a desire
to be given a horse and gun and allowed to go west—a sixteen-year-old
girl! She told me, among other things, that she wanted to go on the
stage, or into moving picture work. I could not help looking at her and
wondering what storms and disasters might not follow in the wake of such
a temperament. She would be so truly fascinating and possibly utterly
destructive.
In connection with this type of temperament or at any rate the
temperament which is not easily fixed in one passional vise, I have this
to say: that, in spite of all the theories which hold in regard to
morals and monogamy, life in general appears to be chronically and
perhaps incurably varietistic and pluralistic in its tastes and
emotions. We hear much of one life, one love, but how many actually
attain to that ideal—if it is one. Personally I have found it not only
possible, but by a curious and entirely fortuitous combination of
circumstances almost affectionately unavoidable, to hold three,
four—even as many as five and six—women in regard or the emotional
compass of myself, at one and the same time, not all to the same degree,
perhaps, or in the same way, but each for certain qualities which the
others do not possess. I will not attempt to dignify this by the name of
love. I do not assume for a moment that it is love, but that it is a
related state is scarcely to be questioned. Whether it is a weakness or
a strength remains to be tested by results in individual cases. To some
it might prove fatal, to others not. Witness the Mormons! As for myself
I do not think it is. Some of my most dramatic experiences and
sufferings, as well as my keenest mental illuminations, have resulted
from intimate, affectionate contact with women. I have learned most from
those strange, affectionately dependent and yet artistic souls who
somehow crave physical and spiritual sympathy in the great dark or light
in which we find ourselves—this very brief hour here. Observing their
moods, their vanities, their sanities, their affectional needs, I have
seen how absolutely impossible it is to balance up the socalled needs of
life in any satisfactory manner, or to establish an order which, however
seemingly secure for the time being, will not in the end dry rot or
decay.
I say it out of the depths of my life and observation that there is no
system ever established anywhere which is wholly good. If you establish
matrimony and monogamy, let us say, and prove that it is wholly ideal
for social entertainment, or the rearing and care of children, you at
once shut out the fact that it is the death of affectional and social
experience—that it is absolutely inimical to the roving and free soul
which must comb the world for understanding, and that the spectacles
which entertain the sober and stationary in art, literature, science,
indeed every phase of life, would never be if all maintained the order
and quiet which monogamy suggests.
Yet monogamy is good—nothing better for its purpose. Two souls are
entitled to cling together in affectional embrace forever and ever, if
they can. It is wholly wonderful and beautiful. But if all did so,
where, then, would be a story like Carmen, for instance, or an opera
like Tristan and Isolde, or I Pagliacci, or Madame Butterfly, or Louise?
If we all accepted a lock-step routine, or were compelled to—but need I
really argue? Is not life at its very best anachronistic? Does it not
grow by horrible alternatives—going so far along one line, on one leg,
as it were, and then suddenly abandoning everything in that direction
(to sudden decay and death, perhaps) and as suddenly proceeding in an
entirely different direction (apparently) on the other leg? All those
who find their fixed conditions, their orders and stable states suddenly
crumbling about them are inclined to cry: “There is no God,” “Life is a
cruel hell,” “Man is a beast—an insane egoist.”
Friends, let me suggest something. Have faith to believe that there is a
larger intelligence at work which does not care for you or me at all—or
if it does, only to this extent, that it desires to use us as a
carpenter does his tools, and does use us, whether we will or no. There
is some idle scheme of entertainment (possibly self-entertainment) which
is being accomplished by some power which is not necessarily outside
man, but working through him, of which he, in part, is the expression.
This power, in so far as we happen to be essential or useful to it,
appears beneficent. A great or successful person might be inclined to
look on it in that light. On the other hand, one not so useful, a
physical failure, for instance—one blind or halt or maimed—would look
upon it as maleficent, a brooding, destructive demon, rejoicing in evil.
Neither hypothesis is correct. It is as good as the successful and happy
feel it to be—as bad as the miserable think it is bad—only it is
neither. It is something so large and strange and above our
understanding that it can scarcely sense the pain or joy of one single
individual—only the pains or joys of masses.
It recognizes only a mass delight or a mass sorrow. Can you share, or
understand, the pains or delights of any one single atom in your body?
You cannot. Why may there not be an oversoul that bears the same
relationship to you that you bear to the individual atoms or ions of
your physical cosmos? Some undernourished, partially developed ion in
you may cry, “The power which rules me is a devil.” But you are not a
devil. Nor does it necessarily follow that the thing that makes you is
one. You really could not help that particular atom if you would. So
over us may be this oversoul which is as helpless in regard to us as we
are in regard to our constituent atoms. It is a product of something
else still larger—above it. There is no use trying to find out what that
is. Let the religionist call it God if he will, or the sufferer a devil.
Do you bring all your fortitude and courage to bear, and do all that you
can to keep yourself busy—serenely employed. There is no other answer.
Get all you can that will make you or others happy. Think as seriously
as you may. Count all the costs and all the dangers—or don’t count them,
just as you will—but live as fully and intelligently as you can. If, in
spite of cross currents of mood and passion, you can make any other or
others happy, do so. It will be hard at best. But strive to be employed.
It is the only surcease against the evil of too much thought.