INDIANAPOLIS AND A GLIMPSE OF FAIRYLAND
Indianapolis, the first city on our way south and west, was another like
Cleveland, Buffalo, Toledo, only without the advantage of a great lake
shore which those cities possess. It is boasted as one of the principal
railroad centers of America, or the world. Good, but what of it? Once
you have seen the others, it has nothing to teach you, and I grow tired
of the mere trade city devoid of any plan or charm of natural
surroundings. The best of the European cities, or of later years,
Chicago and New York—Chicago from the lake, vast, frowning giant that it
is, and New York, like a pearly cloud lying beyond her great green wet
meadows on her sea—ho, Americans, there are two pictures! Travel far and
wide, see all that the earth has to show, view Delhi, Venice, Karnak,
the sacred temples of the Ganges—there are no such scenes as these.
Already one beholds them with a kind of awe, conscious that they may not
be duplicated within a thousand or two thousands of years. What could be
more astounding than New York’s financial area, or Chicago’s commercial
heart!
All that these minor American cities like Indianapolis (and I do not
wish to belittle my own state or its capital) have to show is a few high
buildings in imitation of New York or Chicago. If any one of them had
any natural advantages which would suggest a difference in treatment,
they would not follow it. No, no, let us be like Chicago or New York—as
like as we may. A few artistic low buildings might have more appeal, but
that would not be like New York. A city may even have been laid out
perfectly, like Savannah, but do you think it appreciates its difference
sufficiently to wish to remain so? Never! Destroy the old, the
different, and let’s be like New York! Every time I see one of these
tenth-rate imitations, copying these great whales, I want to swear.
Yet, aside from this, Indianapolis was not so bad—not unpleasing in
places, really. There is a river there, the White, with which nothing
seems to have been done except to build factories on it at one place;
but, on the other hand, a creek called Broad Ripple—pretty name,
that—has been walled and parked and made most agreeable to look upon.
One or two streets, it seemed to me, were rather striking, lined as they
were with pretentious dwellings and surrounded by gardens and enclosed
in walls—but, oh, the little streets, the little streets!
“Here is where Senator Fairbanks lives.”
“There is where Benjamin Harrison lived before he became President.”
Quite so! Quite so! But I am thinking of the little streets just the
same, and the great, inordinate differences between things at times.
Franklin pointed out the First and Second Churches of Christ,
Scientist—large, artistic, snow-white buildings—and a little later, at
my request, the home of James Whitcomb Riley, laureate of all that
perfect company of Hoosiers to be found in his sympathetic, if small,
volumes. I revere James Whitcomb with a whole heart. There is something
so delicate, so tender, so innocent not only about his work but about
him. His house in Lockerbie Street was about as old and homely as it
could be, as indeed was Lockerbie Street itself—but, shucks, who cares.
Let the senators and the ex-presidents and the beef packers have the big
places. What should the creator of “Old Doc Sifers” be doing in a great
house, anyhow? Think of “Little Orphant Annie” being born in a mansion!
Never. Only over my dead body. We didn’t go in. I wanted to, but I felt
a little bashful. As I say, I had heard that he didn’t approve of me. I
suggested that we might come another time, Franklin knowing him quite
well; but I knew I wouldn’t. Yet all my loving thoughts went out to
him—most sympathetic and pleasing wishes for a long life and a happy
life.
The run to Terre Haute was more or less uninteresting, a flat and
lifeless country. We arrived there at nearly dusk, entering along a
street whose name was changed to Wabash shortly after my brother’s song
became so popular. Among the first things I saw were the buildings and
grounds of the Rose Polytechnic Institute—an institution which, famous
though it is, was only of interest to me because the man who founded it,
Chauncey Rose, was once a friend and admirer of my father’s. At the time
my father’s mill burned in Sullivan and he was made penniless, it was
this man who came forward and urged him to begin anew, offering to
advance him the money. But my father was too much of a religious and
financial and moral coward to risk it. He was doubtful of success—his
nerve had been broken—and he feared he might not be able to repay Mr.
Rose and so, in event of his dying, his soul would be in danger of
purgatory. Of such is the religious mind.
. . . . . . .
But this city of my birth! Now that I was in it, it had a strong and
mournful fascination for me. Nothing that I was doing or being was
altered thereby, but——
Suppose, once upon a time in a very strange wonderland, so wonderful
that no mere earthborn mortal could tell anything about it or make you
feel how wonderful it was, you had been a very little boy who had gotten
in there somehow (how, he could not tell) and after a very few years had
been taken out again, and never after that saw it any more. And that
during that time many strange and curious things happened—things so
strange and curious that, though you lived many years afterward and
wandered here and there and to and fro upon the earth, still the things
that happened in that wonderland, the colors of it and the sounds and
the voices and the trees, were ever present, like a distant mirage or a
background of very far off hills, but still present.
And supposing, let us say, that in this strange land there was once a
house, or two or three or four or five houses, what difference? In one
of them (someone later said it stood at Twelfth and Walnut in a city
called Terre Haute, but if you went there now you could not find it)
there was a cellar, damp and dark. The mother of the little boy, to
whose skirts he used to cling when anything troubled or frightened him,
once told him that in the cellar of this house lived a Cat-man, and that
if he went near it, let alone down into it, the Cat-man might appear and
seize him and carry him off.
The small boy firmly believed in the Cat-man. He listened at times and
thought he heard him below stairs, stirring about among the boxes and
barrels there. In his mind’s eye he saw him, large and dark and toothy,
a Hottentot’s dream of a demon. Finally, after meditating over it
awhile, he got his brother Ed and conferred with him about it. They
decided that Prince, the family dog, might help to chase the Cat-man
out, and so rid them of this evil. Prince, the dog, was no coward; a
friendly, gay, and yet ferocious animal. He was yellow and lithe, a
fighter. He plainly believed in the Cat-man too (upon request, anyhow),
for the cellar stairs door being opened and the presence of the Cat-man
indicated, he sniffed and barked and made such an uproar that the mother
of the children came out and made them go into the yard. And then they
heard her laughing over the reality of the Cat-man, and exclaiming:
“Yes, indeed, you’d just better be careful and not go down there. He’ll
catch Prince too!”
But then there was a certain tree in this same yard or garden where once
of a spring evening, at dusk, there was a strange sound being made, a
sawing and rasping which in later years the boy was made quite well
aware was a locust. But just at that time, at that age, in that strange
land, with the soft, amethystine shadows pouring about the world, it
seemed as though it must be the Catman come at last out of the cellar
and gotten into the tree. The child was all alone. His mother was in the
house. Sitting on the back porch meditating over the childish interests
of the day, this sound began—and then the next minute he was frantically
clasping his mother’s knees, burying his face in her skirts and weeping.
“The Cat-man! The Cat-man!” (Oh, what a horror! sawing there in that
tree and leering! The child saw his eyes!)
And then the mother said: “No, there isn’t any Cat-man; it is all a
foolish fancy. There, there!” But to the child, for a long time, he was
real enough, just the same.
And then there was “Old Mr. Watchman,” an old man with one arm who used
to come by the house where the small boy lived. He was a watchman
somewhere at a railroad crossing, a solid, weary, brown faced white
haired man who in winter wore a heavy great coat, in summer a loose,
brown jacket, the pockets of which, or one pocket, at least, always, and
every day, nearly, contained something which, if the little boy would
only hurry out each morning or evening and climb on the fence and reach
for, he might have.
“Mr. Watchman! Mr. Watchman!” I can hear him crying yet.
And somehow I seem to see a kindly gleam in the old blue eyes, and a
smile on the brown face, and a big, rough hand going over a very little
head.
“Yes, there we have it. That’s the nice boy.”
And then someone would call from the house or the gate, a father or
mother, perhaps, “And now what do we say?”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Watchman. Thank you.”
And then the old watchman would go trudging onward with his bucket on
his arm, and the boy would munch his candy or his peanuts or his apple
and forget how kind and strange old Mr. Watchman really was—and how
pathetic.
Then one day, some time later, after a considerable absence or silence
on the part of Mr. Watchman, the small boy was taken to see him where he
was lying very still in a very humble little cottage, in a black box,
with nickels on his eyes—and the little boy wanted to take the nickels,
too.
Don’t you suppose Mr. Watchman must have smiled, wherever he was, if he
could?
And then one last picture, though I might recall a hundred from
fairyland—a thousand. It is a hot day and a house with closed shutters
and drawn blinds, and in the center of a cool, still room a woman
sitting in a loose negligée, and at her feet the child playing with the
loose, worn slippers on her feet. The boy is very interested in his
mother, he loves her, and for that reason, to his small mind her feet
and her worn slippers are very dear to him.
“See poor mama’s shoes. Aren’t you sorry for her? Think how she has to
wear such poor torn shoes and how hard she has to work.”
“Yes, poor shoes. Poor mummy.”
“When you grow up are you going to get work and buy poor mother a good
pair—like a nice, strong, big man?”
“Yes, work. Yes, I get mummy shoes.”
Suddenly, something in the mother’s voice is too moving. Some mystic
thread binding the two operates to convey and enlarge a mood. The child
bursts into tears over the old pattens. He is gathered up close, wet
eyed, and the mother cries too.
At the same time, this city of my birth was identified with so much
struggle on the part of my parents, so many dramas and tragedies in
connection with relatives and friends, that by now it seemed quite
wonderful as the scene of almost an epic. I might try to indicate the
exact character of it as it related to me; but instead, here at any
rate, I will only say that from the time the mill burned until after
various futile attempts to right ourselves, at Sullivan and Evansville,
we finally left this part of the country for good, it was one unbroken
stretch of privation and misery.
[Illustration:
THE STANDARD BRIDGE OF FIFTY YEARS AGO
Reelsville, Indiana
]
In that brilliant and yet defective story entitled “The Turn of the
Balance,” by Brand Whitlock, there is narrated the career of an
unfortunate German family which might almost have been ours, only in
order to deal with so many children as there were in our family, the
causes would necessarily have been further enlarged, or the data greatly
condensed. In addition, there was no such complete collapse involved.
The more I think of my father, and the more I consider the religious and
fearful type of mind in general, the more certain I am that mere
breeding of lives (raising a family without the skill to engineer it
through the difficulties of infancy and youth) is one of the most
pathetic, albeit humanly essential, blunders which the world contains.
Yet, and perhaps wisely so, it is repeated over and over, age in and age
out, _ad infinitum_. Governments love large families. These provide
population, recruit large armies and navies, add the necessary
percentage to the growth of cities and countries, fill the gaping maws
of the factories. The churches love large families, for they bring
recruits to them and give proof of that solid morality which requires
that sex shall result in more children and that these shall be
adequately raised in the fear of God, if not in the comforts of life.
Manufacturers and strong men generally like large families. Where else
would they get the tools wherewith they work—the cheap labor—and the
amazing contrasts between poverty and wealth, the contemplation of which
gives them such a satisfaction in their own worth and force? Nature
loves large families, apparently, because she makes so many of them.
Vice must love large families because from them, and out of their needs
and miseries, it is principally recruited. Death must love them too, for
it gathers its principal toll there. But if an ordinary working man, or
one without a serene and forceful capacity for toil and provision, could
see the ramifications and miseries of birth in poverty, he would not
reproduce himself so freely.
My father was of that happy religionistic frame of mind which sees in a
large family—a very large family indeed, for there were thirteen of
us—the be all and the end all of human existence. For him work, the
rearing of children, the obligations of his religion and the liberal
fulfilling of all his social obligations, imaginary or otherwise, were
all that life contained. He took life to be not what it is, but what it
is said to be, or written to be, by others. The Catholic volumes
containing that inane balderdash, “The Lives of the Saints,” were truer
than any true history—if there is such a thing—to him. He believed them
absolutely. The pope was infallible. If you didn’t go to confession and
communion at least once a year, you were eternally damned. I recall his
once telling me that, if a small bird were to come only once every
million or trillion years and rub its bill on a rock as big as the
earth, the rock would be worn out before a man would see the end of
hell—eternal, fiery torture—once he was in it. And then he would not see
the end of it, but merely the beginning, as it were. I recall invoking
his rather heated contempt, on this occasion, by asking (or suggesting,
I forget which) whether God might not change His mind about hell and let
somebody out after a time. It seemed to him that I was evidently
blasphemously bumptious, and that I was trifling with sacred things!
Unfortunately for him, though really not for us, I think, in the long
run, his children were differently minded. Owing to an arrogant and
domineering disposition, he insisted on the first ten, or first five,
let us say, being educated in the then Catholic parochial schools, where
they learned nothing at all. Just before his failure, or the fire which
ruined him, he gave the ground on which the church and school of St.
Joseph in Terre Haute now stand, to the rector of that parish. Priests
and bishops had the run of our home in the days when we were prosperous.
After that they did not come so much, except to demand to know this,
that, or the other, or to complain of our conduct. After my father’s
failure, and because he did not feel himself courageous enough to
venture on a new enterprise with the aid of the wealthy Mr. Rose, the
then sufficiently grown children were supposed to go to work, the girls
as housemaids, if necessary (for their education having been nothing,
they had no skill for anything else), the boys as “hands” in the mill,
the one thing my father knew most about, if they would (which they
wouldn’t), in order to learn a trade of some kind.
Instead there was a revolt. They broke out into the world to suit
themselves. To save expenses, my mother had taken the three youngest,
Ed, Clair (or Tillie, as we always called her) and myself, first to a
friend at Vincennes, Indiana, for a few weeks' stay, then to Sullivan,
where we remained two years trying to maintain ourselves as best we
could; thence to Evansville, where, my brother Paul having established
himself rather comfortably, we remained two more; thence to Warsaw (via
Chicago), where we remained three years and where I received my only
intelligent schooling; thence out into the world, for the three youngest
of us, at least, to become, as chance might have it, such failures or
successes as may be. The others, too, after one type of career and
another, did well enough. Paul, for one, managed to get a national
reputation as a song writer and to live in comfort and even luxury. All
of the girls, after varying years and degrees of success or failure,
married and settled down to the average troubles of the married. One of
these, the third from the eldest, was killed by a train in Chicago in
her thirtysecond year, in 1897. One brother—the youngest (two years
younger than myself)—became an actor. The brother next older than myself
became an electrician. The fourth eldest, and one of the most
interesting of all, as it seemed to me, a railroad man by profession,
finally died of drunkenness (alcoholism is a nicer word) in a South
Clark Street dive in Chicago, about 1905. So it goes. But all of them,
in their way, were fairly intelligent people, no worse and no better
than the average.
I can see the average smug, conventional soul, if one such should ever
chance to get so deep into this book, chilling and sniffing over this
frank confession. My answer is that, if he knows as much about life as I
do or has the courage to say what he really knows or believes, he would
neither be chilling or sniffing. If any individual in this dusty world
has anything to be ashamed of, it is certainly not the accidents,
ignorances and stark vicissitudes with which we are all more or less
confronted. These last may be pathetic, but they have the merit nearly
always of great and even beautiful drama; whereas, the treacheries,
shams and poltrooneries which make for the creation and sustenance of
the sniffy and the smug are really the things to be ashamed of. I can
only think of Christ’s scathing denunciation of scribes, hypocrites and
pharisees and his reference to the mote and the beam.
In Terre Haute, not elsewhere, we moved so often for want of means to
pay our rent, or to obtain cheaper places, that it is almost painful to
think of it in retrospect, though at the time I was too young to know
anything much about it. There was so much sickness in the family, and at
this time a certain amount of ill feeling between my mother and father.
Several of the girls ran away and (in seeming, only in so far as the
beliefs of my father were concerned) went to the bad. They did not go to
the bad actually as time subsequently proved, though I might disagree
with many as to what is bad and what good. One of the boys, Paul, got
into jail, quite innocently it seems, and was turned out by my father,
only to be received back again and subsequently to become his almost
sole source of support in his later years. There was gloom, no work,
often no bread, or scarcely any, in the house. Strange shifts were
resorted to. My mother, and my father, for that matter, worked and
slaved. Both, but she in particular, I am sure, because of her
ambitious, romantic temperament, suffered the tortures of the damned.
Alas, she never lived to see our better days! My father did.
But Terre Haute! Terre Haute!
Here I was entering it now for the first time since I had left it,
between seven and eight years of age, exactly thirtyseven years before.