expectation of any sudden change. All wars were over--in our opinion.
The world was at last definitely at peace, and we in America, like the
world in general, had nothing to do but to go on getting richer and
happier, so happy that we could be just. We were all young--not one of
us had gray hair. Life, for each of us as for the Nation, moved
futureward on tranquil, shining course, as a river slips southward to
the sea, confident, effortless, and serene. Heavenly skies, how happy we
were!
That I was aware in some degree of the idyllic, evanescent charm of
those days is made certain in a note which I find in my diary, the
record of a walk in the woods with Zulime. Her delight in the tender
loveliness of leaf and vine, in the dapple of sunlight on the path, I
fully shared. Another page tells of a horseback excursion which we made
across the river. She rode well, very well, indeed, and her elation, her
joy in the motion of the horse, as well as her keen delight in the
landscape, added to my own pleasure. We stayed to supper at the
Heckmans' that night, and walked back to the camp at nine, loitering
through the most magical light of the Harvest Moon.
As she manifested a delightful interest in what I was writing, I fell
into the habit of reading to her some pages out of my new manuscript, in
order that I might have the value of her comment on it. Of course I
expected comment to be favorable, and it was. That this was an unfair
advantage to take of a nice girl, I was aware, even then, but as she
seemed willing to listen I was in a mood to be encouraged by her smiles
and her words of praise.
My growing confidence led to an enlargement of my plans concerning the
homestead. "You are right," I wrote to my mother. "A new daughter will
make other improvements in the house absolutely necessary. Not merely a
new dining-room, but an extra story must be added to the wing--" And in
the glow of this design I reluctantly cut short my visit and returned to
West Salem, to apprise the carpenters of the radical changes in my
design.
Jestingly, and more by way of reconciling my mother to the renewed noise
and confusion of the building, I described the walks and rides I had
taken with Zulime, warning her at the same time not to enlarge upon
these facts. "Miss Taft's interest may be only friendliness," I added.
My words had precisely an opposite effect: thereafter she spoke of my
hopes as if they were certainties, and insisted on knowing all about
"Zuleema," as she persisted in calling Miss Taft.
"Now, Mother," I again protested, "you must not talk that way to _any_
of your callers, for if you do you'll get me into a most embarrassing
situation. You'll make it very hard for me to explain in case of
failure."
"You mustn't fail," she responded wistfully. "I can't afford to wait
much longer."
It was incredible to her that any sane girl would reject such an
alliance, but I was very far from her proud confidence.
In this doubt of success, I was entirely honest. I had never presumed on
any manly charm, I made no claim to beauty--on the contrary, I had
always been keenly aware of my rude frame and clumsy hands. I realized
also my lack of nice courtesy and genial humor. Power I had (and relied
upon), but of the lover's grace--nothing. That I was a bear was quite as
evident to me as to my friends. "If I win this girl it must be on some
other score than that of beauty," I admitted.
In the midst of the bustle and cheer of this week another swift and
sinister cloud descended upon me. One evening, as mother and I were
sitting together, she fell into a terrifying death-like trance from
which I could not rouse her, a condition which alarmed me so deeply that
I telegraphed to my father in Dakota and to my brother in Chicago,
telling them to come at once. It seemed to me that the final moment of
our parting was at hand.
All through that night, one of the longest I had ever known (a time of
agony and remorse as well as of fear), I blamed myself for bringing on
the wild disorder of the building. "If I had not gone away, if I had not
enlarged my plan, the house would now be in order," was the thought
which tortured me.
The sufferer's speech had failed, and her pitiful attempts to make her
wishes known wrung my heart with helpless pity. Her eyes, wide, dark and
beautiful, pleaded with me for help, and yet I could only kneel by her
side and press her hand and repeat the doctor's words of comfort. "It
will pass away, mother, just as your other attacks have done. I am sure
of it. Don't try to talk. Don't worry."
As the night deepened, dark and sultry, distant flashes of silent
lightning added to the lurid character of my midnight vigil. It seemed
that all my plans and all my hopes had gone awry. Helpless, longing for
light, I wore out the lagging hours beside my mother's bed, with very
little change in her condition to relieve the strain of my anxiety.
"Will she ever speak again? Have I heard her voice for the last time?"
These questions came again and again to my mind.
Dawn crept into the room at last, and Franklin came on the early train.
With his coming, mother regained some part of her lost courage. She grew
rapidly stronger before night came again, and was able to falter a few
words in greeting and to ask for father.
During the following day she steadily improved, and in the afternoon was
able to sit up in her bed. One of the first of her interests was a
desire to show my brother a new bonnet which I had recently purchased
for her in the city, and at her request I put it into her hands.
Her love and gratitude moved us both to tears. Her action had the
intolerable pathos of a child's weakness united with a kind of delirium.
To watch her feeble hands exhibiting a head-dress which I feared she
would never again wear--displaying it with a pitiful smile of pride and
joy--was almost more than I could bear. Her face shone with happiness as
she strove to tell my brother of the building I was doing to make her
more comfortable. "Zuleema is coming," she said. "My new daughter--is
coming."
When Franklin and I were alone for a moment, I said: "She must not die.
_I won't let her die._ She must live a little longer to enjoy the new
rooms I am building for her."
It would appear that the intensity of my desire, the power of my resolve
to bring her back to life, strengthened her, wrought upon her with
inexplicable magic, for by the time my father arrived she was able to
speak and to sit once more in her wheeled chair. She even joked with me
about "Zuleema."
"You'd better hurry," she said, and then the shadow came back upon me
with bitter chill. How insecure her hold on life had become!
Haste on the building was now imperative--so much, at least, I could
control. With one crew of carpenters, another of painters, and a third
of tinners, all working at the same time, I rushed the construction
forward. At times my action presented itself to me as a race against
death, or at least with death's messenger. What I feared, most of all,
was a sudden decline to helpless invalidism on my mother's part, a
condition in which a trained nurse would be absolutely necessary. To get
the rooms in order while yet our invalid was able to move about the
house, was now my all-absorbing interest.
With no time to dream of love, with no thought of writing, I toiled
like a slave, wet with perspiration, dusty and unkempt. With my shirt
open at the throat and my sleeves rolled to the elbow, I passed from one
phase of the job to another, lending a hand here and a shoulder there.
In order that I might hasten the tearing down and clearing away, I
plunged into the hardest and dirtiest tasks, but at night, after the men
were gone, dark moods of deep depression came over me, moments in which
the essential futility of my powers overwhelmed me with something like
despair.
"What right have you to ask that bright and happy girl--any girl--to
share the uncertainties, the parsimony, the ineludible struggle of your
disappointing life?" I demanded of myself, and to this there was but one
answer: "I have no right. I have only a need."
Nevertheless, I wrote her each day a short account of my doings, and her
friendly replies were a source of encouragement, of comfort. She did not
know (I was careful to conceal them) the torturing anxieties through
which I was passing, and her pages were, for the most part, a pleasant
reflection of the uneventful, care-free routine of the camp. In spite of
her caution she conveyed to me, beneath her elliptical phrases, the fact
that she missed me and that my return would not be displeasing to her.
"When shall we see you?" she asked.
In one of her letters she mentioned--casually--that on Monday she was
going to Chicago with her sister, but would return to the camp at the
end of the week.
Something in this letter led me to a sudden change of plan. As mother
was now quite comfortable again I said to her, "Zuleema has gone to
Chicago to do some shopping. I think I'll run down and meet her and ask
her to help me select the curtains and wall-paper for your new room.
What do you say to that?"
"Go along!" she said instantly, "but I expect you to bring her home with
you."
"Oh, I can't do that," I protested. "I haven't any right to do
that--yet!"
The mere idea of involving the girl in my household problem seemed
exciting enough, and on my way down to the city I became a bit less
confident. I decided to approach the matter of my shopping
diplomatically. She might be alarmed at my precipitancy.
She was not alarmed--on the contrary her pleased surprise and her keen
interest in my mother's new chamber gave me confidence. "I want you to
help me buy the furnishings for the new rooms," I said almost at once.
"I shall be glad to help," she replied in the most natural way.
Evidently, _she_ saw nothing especially significant in my request, but
to me it was a subtle stratagem. To have her take part in my
bargain-hunting was almost as exciting as though we were furnishing OUR
home, but I dared not assume that she was thinking along these dangerous
lines. That she was genuinely interested in my household problems was
evident, but I was not justified in asking anything further. She was
distinctly closer to me that day, more tenderly intimate than she had
ever been before, and her womanly understanding of my task--the deep
sympathy she expressed when I told her of my mother's recent
illness--all combined to give me comfort--and hope!
A few days later we rode back to Eagle's Nest Camp together, and all
through those three hours on the train a silent, subconscious, wordless
adjustment went on between us. That she was secretly debating the
question of accepting me was certain, and there was nothing in her
manner to dishearten me; on the contrary, she seemed to enjoy playing
round the perilous suggestion.
We dined at "the Castle" as usual, and late that night, as we walked
slowly over to the camp through the odorous woods, hearing the
whippoorwill's cry and the owlets hoot from their dark coverts, I was
made aware that my day's work had drawn her closer into my life. I had
made her aware of my need.
The day which followed our return to camp was my thirty-ninth birthday,
and I celebrated it by taking a long walk and talk with her. She took
some sewing with her, and as we rested under a great oak tree, we spoke
of many intimate, personal things, always with the weight of our
unsolved problem on our mind.
At last, in approaching my plea for help, I stated the worst of my case.
"I am poor and shall always remain poor," I said. "My talent is small
and my work has only a very limited appeal. I see no great improvement
in my fortunes. I have done an enormous amount of work this year (I've
written three volumes), but all of them conjoined will not bring in as
much cash as a good stone-mason can earn. But that isn't the worst of
it! The hopeless part of it is--I _like_ my job. I wouldn't change to a
more profitable one if I could. I have only one other way of earning
money, and that is by physical labor. If the worst comes to the worst, I
can farm or do carpenter work."
Her reply to all this was not entirely disheartening. "To make money is
not the most important thing in the world," she said, and then told me
of her own childhood in Illinois, of the rigid economies which had
always been necessary in the Taft home. "My father's salary as a
professor of geology was small, and with six people to feed and clothe,
and four children to be educated, my poor little mother had a very busy
and anxious time of it. I know by personal experience what it is to lack
money for food and clothes. The length of my stay in Paris was dependent
on rigid daily economy. I hadn't an extra franc to spare."
This confession of her own lifelong poverty should have turned me aside
from my fell purpose, but it did not--it merely encouraged me to go on.
In place of saying, "My dear girl, as compensation for all those years
of care and humiliating poverty you deserve a spacious home, with
servants and a carriage. Realizing that I can offer you only continued
poverty and added anxiety, I here and now relinquish my design. I
withdraw in favor of a better and richer man"--instead of uttering these
noble words, what did I do? I did the exact opposite! I proceeded to
press my selfish, remorseless, unwarranted demand!
It is customary for elderly men to refer either flippantly or with
gentle humor to their days of courtship, forgetting (or ignoring) the
tremulous eagerness, the grave questioning and the tender solemnity of
purpose with which they weighed the joys and responsibilities of married
life. It is easy to be cynical or evasive or unduly sentimental in
writing of our youthful love affairs, when the frosts of sixty years
have whitened our heads, after years of toil and care have dimmed our
eyes and thinned our blood, but I shall permit neither of these unworthy
moods to color my report of this day's emotion. I shall not deny the
alternating moments of hope and doubt, of bitterness and content, which
made that afternoon both sweet and sad.
The thing I was about to do was tragically destructive--I knew that. To
put out a hand, to arrest this happy and tranquil girl, saying, "Come,
be my wife. Come, suffer with me, starve with me," was a deed whose
consequences scared me while they allured me. I felt the essential
injustice of such a marriage, and I foresaw some of its accompanying
perplexities, but I did not turn aside as I should have done. With no
dependable source of income, with an invalid mother to care for, I asked
this artist, so urban, so native to the studio, so closely knit to her
joyous companions in the city, to go with me into exile, into a country
town, to be the housekeeper of a commonplace cottage filled with aged
people! "It is monstrous selfishness; it is wrong," I said, "but I want
you."
My philosophy, even at that time, was essentially individualistic. I
believed in the largest opportunity to every human soul. Equal rights
_meant_ Equal rights in my creed. I had no intention of asking Zulime
Taft to sink her individuality in mine. I wanted her to remain herself.
Marriage, as I contemplated it, was to be not a condition where the
woman was a subordinate but an equal partner, and yet how unequal the
sacrifice! "I ask you to join your future with mine. It's a frightful
risk, but I am selfish enough to wish it."
Under no illusion about my own character, I admitted that there is no
special charm in a just man. To have a sense of honor is fine, but to
have a joyous and lovely disposition makes a man a great deal easier to
live with. I was perfectly well aware that as a husband I would prove
neither lovely nor joyous. My temper was not habitually cheerful. Like
most writers, I was self-absorbed, filled with a sense of the importance
of my literary designs. To be "just" was easy, but to be charming and
considerate--these were the points on which I was sure to fail, and I
knew it. Did that deter me? Not at all! Bitterly unwilling to surrender
Zulime to the richer and kindlier man who was, undoubtedly, waiting at
that moment to receive her and cherish her, I pleaded with her to share
my poverty and my hope of future fame.
Shaken by my appeal, she asked for time in which to consider this
problem. "I ought to talk with Lorado," she said.
The mere fact that she could not decide against me at the moment gave me
confidence. "Very well," I said. "Mother wants me--I shall go home for
a week. Let me know when I can come again. I hope it will not be more
than a week."
In this arrangement we rested, and as we walked back to camp I cared
nothing for the sly words or glances of our fellow artists. I believed I
had won my case.
My mother's demand for my presence did not arise--I soon learned--from
any return of her malady, but from a desire for news of my courtship.
"Where's my new daughter? Why didn't you bring her?" she demanded.
"She couldn't come this time. The question is still unsettled."
"Go right back and settle it," she urged. "Go quick, before some one
else gets her. Write to her. Tell her to come right up. Send her a
telegram. Seems as though I can't wait another week."
Her urgency made me laugh, even while I perceived the pathos of it. "I
can't bring her to you, mother, till she is willing to come as a
bride--but she's thinking about it, and I am going back next week to get
my answer. Be patient a little while longer. I promise you the whole
question will be settled soon, and I _hope_ it will be settled our way.
Zulime seems to like me."
Dear old mother! Her stammering, tremulous utterance made me smile and
it made me weep. She was growing old prematurely, and the need of haste
was urgent. "If I can possibly persuade her to come," I added very
gravely, "I'll fetch her home to eat Thanksgiving dinner with you."
My tone, rather than my words, silenced her, and gave her a measure of
content, although she was childishly impatient of even a day's delay.
All that week I alternately hoped and doubted, assembling all the items
on the credit side of my ledger, and at last a letter came in which
Zulime indicated that she wished to see me. "I am still undecided," she
said, "but you may come." I left at once for the camp, feeling that her
confession of indecision was in my favor.
Lorado was not markedly favorable to me as a brother-in-law. He liked me
and respected me as a friend, but as a suitor for the hand of his
sister--well, that was another and far more serious matter.
The camp "Equipage" met me at the station, and I consented to ride in it
as far as the Heckman gate, hoping that Zulime would be there to welcome
me. In this I was not disappointed, and something in her face and the
firm clasp of her hand reassured me.
For nearly a week, in the midst of the most glorious October landscape,
surrounded by the scarlet and gold and crimson branches of the maples
and the deep-reds and bronze-greens of the oaks, she and I walked and
rode and boated in almost constant companionship. Idyllic days! Days of
a quality I had lost all hope of ever again reliving. Days of quiet
happiness and almost perfect content, for on an afternoon of dreamlike
beauty, in a glade radiant with hazy golden sunshine and odorous with
the ripening leaves, she spoke the all-important words which joined her
future life with mine.
We were seated at the moment on our favorite bank, under a tall oak
tree, gorgeous as a sunset cloud, and as silent. I had been reading to
her, and she was busy with some delicate embroidery. The crickets were
chirping sleepily in the grass at our feet, and the jays calling harshly
seemed warning us of the passing of summer and the coming on of frost.
"Let the wedding day be soon," I pleaded as we rose to return to camp.
"I am nearing the dead-line. I am almost forty years old--I can't afford
to wait. I want you to come to me now--at once. The old folks are
waiting for you. They want you for Thanksgiving Day. Your presence
would make them happier than any other good fortune in this world."
She understood my way of putting the argument. She knew that I was
veiling my own eagerness under my mother's need, and after a little
reflection she said, "I am going out to my father's home in Kansas. You
may come for me there on the twenty-third of November. That is--if you
still want me at that time."
The end of the camp season was at hand; everybody was packing up, and so
my girl and I turned with deep regret from the golden halls of our
sylvan meeting-place. "This is my Indian summer," I said to her, "and
that you may never have cause to regret the decision which this day has
brought to you, is my earnest hope."
More than twenty years have gone over our heads, and as I write these
lines our silver wedding is not far off. Our lives have not been all
sunshine, but Zulime has met all storms with a brave sweetness, which I
cannot overpraise. If she has regrets, she does not permit me to know
them. My poverty--which persists--has not embittered her or caused her,
so far as I know, a single mood of self-commiseration.
CHAPTER NINE
A Judicial Wedding
On reaching my Elm Street home the next day, I was surprised and deeply
gratified to find on my desk a letter from William Dean Howells, in
which he said: "I am at the Palmer House. I hope you will come to see me
soon, for I start for Kansas on a lecture trip in a few days."
Although I had long been urging that he should come to Chicago, he had
steadfastly declined to accept a lecture engagement west of Ohio, and I
could not quite understand what had led him so far afield as Kansas. I
hastened to call upon him, and, at the first appropriate pause in the
conversation, I spoke to him of my engagement. "Miss Taft loves your
books and would keenly appreciate the honor of meeting you."
With instant perception of my wish to have him know my future wife, he
replied, "My dear fellow, I am eager to meet _her_. Perhaps my gray
hairs will excuse your bringing her to call upon me."
"At your convenience," I replied eagerly. "I want you to know her. She
is very much worth while."
"I am sure of that," he smilingly retorted.
He was billed to speak that night, and as he was leaving for Rock Island
the following day he arranged that I should bring Zulime to the hotel
just before he started for his lecture.
After telling her of his wish to see her, I explained the significance
of it. "You must understand that Mr. Howells is a kind of literary
father confessor to me. He is a man of most delicate courtesy. Once you
have seen him, once you have looked into his face, you will love him."
She was as ready as I was to take her, and promptly on the minute we
sent up our names and took seats in the Ladies' Parlor. It had been
years since I had entered the Palmer House, and as we waited we compared
memories of its old-time splendor. "My father still regards it as the
grandest hotel in the West, and it is probable that Mr. Howells knew of
no other. So far as I know he has never been in Chicago before, unless
possibly for a few days during the World's Fair."
Zulime was much excited at the thought of meeting the great novelist,
but when he came, she took his hand with graceful composure, expressing
just the right mingling of reserve and pleasure. I was proud of her, and
the fact that Howells instantly and plainly approved of her, added to my
satisfaction.
"I congratulate you both," he said as we were leaving. "You see," he
added, addressing himself to Zulime, "your husband-elect is one of my
boys. I am particularly concerned with his good fortune. I like his
bringing you to see me, and I hope we shall see you both in New York."
In a literary sense this was my paternal blessing, for "Mr. Howells" had
been a kind of spiritual progenitor and guide ever since my first
meeting with him in '87. His wisdom, his humor, his exquisite art, had
been of incalculable assistance to me, as they had been to Clemens,
Burroughs, and many others of my fellow-craftsmen, and his commendation
of me to my intended wife almost convinced me, for the moment, of my
worthiness. How delightful he was! How delicate--how understanding! We
both went away, rich in the honor of his approval of our prospective
union.
Rich in his friendship, I was but poorly furnished in other respects. I
recall with shame the shopping tour which I made along State Street,
searching for an engagement ring, a gauge which Zulime, knowing my
poverty, stoutly insisted that she did not need--a statement which I was
simple enough to believe until her sister enlightened me. "That's only
Zuhl's way. Of course she wants a ring--every girl does. Don't fail to
get her one--a nice one!"
I found one at last that Zulime thought I could afford. It was a small
gold band with five opals, surrounded by several very minute diamonds,
all of which could be had for the sum of thirty-eight dollars. As I
bought this ring Zulime's girlish delight in it touched as well as
instructed me. Each time she held her finger up for me to see (she had a
beautiful hand) I regretted that I had not purchased a better ring. Why
did I take a ring at thirty-eight dollars! Why not fifty dollars? But
what could be expected of a man who never before had spent so much as
one dollar on a piece of jewelry, a man whose chief way of earning money
was to save it? Whenever I look at that poor little jewel now I
experience a curious mingling of shame and regret. I had so little money
at that time, and the future was so uncertain!
Zulime was living with her sister, and there I spent most of my evenings
and some of my afternoons during the following week, scarcely able to
realize my change of fortune except when alone with her, discussing our
future. She agreed at last to a date for the wedding which would enable
us to spend Thanksgiving at West Salem, and then for some reason, not
clear to me now, I suddenly took the train for Gallup, New Mexico, with
the Navajo Indian Agency for final destination.
Just why I should have chosen to visit Ganado at this precise time is
inexplicable, but there is no mystery in my leaving Chicago. My future
sister-in-law bluntly informed me that my absence from the city would
greatly facilitate the necessary dressmaking. Although an obtuse person
in some ways, I know when I am bumped. Three days after Fuller's
luncheon to Howells, I reached the town of Gallup, which is the point of
departure for the Navajo Agency, some twenty-five or thirty miles north
of the Santa Fe railway.
For nearly ten years I had been going to the Rocky Mountains at least
once during the summer season, and it is probable that I felt the need
of something to offset the impressions of my tour in England and
France--to lose touch with my material even for twelve months was to be
cheated--then, too, I hoped in this way to shorten the weeks of waiting.
Anyhow, here I was in Gallup, a drab little town which would have been a
horror to my bride-elect.
One of the reasons for my being in New Mexico I am sure about. With the
prospect of having some sort of an apartment in the city and a cabin at
the camp, I was in the market for Navajo rugs, and silver, and Hopi
pottery. It was in pursuit of these (and of literary material) that I
mounted the stage the next morning and set off up the sun-lit valley to
the north.
In leaving Gallup behind, my spirits rose. I wished that Zulime might
have shared this strange landscape with me. On the right a distant,
dimly-blue wall of mountains ran, while to the west rolled high,
treeless hills, against which an occasional native hut showed like a
wolf's den, half-hid among dwarf pinon trees and surrounded by naked
children and savage dogs.
At intervals we came upon solitary shepherds tending their piebald
flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That
these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs
weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of sparse cedar
trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was
incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of
a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, and every mile
carried me deeper into the silence and serenity of their tribal home.
Brown boys, belted with silver and wearing shirts of gay calico, met us,
riding their wiry little ponies with easy grace. Children, naked, shy as
foxes, arrested their play beside dry clumps of sage-brush and stared in
solemn row, whilst their wrinkled, leathery grand-sires hobbled out,
cupping their thin brown hands in prayer for tobacco.
There was something Oriental, fictive in it all, and when at the end of
the day I found myself a guest in a pleasant cottage at the Agency, I
was fully awake to the contrasts of my "material." My ears, as well as
my eyes, were open to the drama of this land whose prehistoric customs
were about to pass. For the moment I was inclined to rest there and
study my surroundings, but as the real objective of my journey was
Ganado, about thirty miles to the west of the Fort, I decided to go on.
Ganado was the home of a famous Indian trader named Hubbell, whose store
was known to me as a center of Navajo life. Toward this point I set
forth a few days later, attended by a young Navajo whose _hogan_ was in
that direction, and who had promised to put me on my trail.
He was a fine, athletic youth of pleasant countenance, mounted upon a
spotted pony and wearing a shirt of purple calico. With a belt of silver
disks around his waist and a fillet of green cloth binding his glossy
black hair, he was distinctly and delightfully colorful.
Our way rose at once to the level of a majestic plateau, sparsely set
with pines and cedars, a barren land from which the grass and shrubs had
long since been cropped by swarms of sheep and goats. Nevertheless, it
was lovely to the eye, and as we rode forward we came upon a party of
Navajo girls gathering pinon nuts, laughing and singing in happy
abandon, untroubled by the white man's world. They greeted my guide with
jests, but became very grave as he pointed out a fresh bear-track in the
dust of the trail.
"Heap bears," he said to me. "Injun no kill bears. Bears big medicine,"
and as we rode away he laughed back at the panic-stricken girls, who
were hurriedly collecting their nuts in order to flee the spot.
At last my guide halted. "I go here," he signed with graceful hand. "You
keep trail; bimeby you come deep valley--stream. On left white man's
house. You stop there." All of which was as plain as if in spoken words.
As I rode on alone, the peace, the poetry, the suggestive charm of that
silent, lonely, radiant land took hold upon me with compelling power.
Here in the midst of busy, commonplace America it lay, a section of the
Polished Stone Age, retaining the most distinctive customs, songs and
dances of the past. Here was a people going about its immemorial
pursuits, undisturbed by the railway and the telephone. Its shepherds,
like the Hittites, who wandered down from the hills upon the city of
Babylon two thousand years before the Christian Era, were patriarchal
and pastoral. They asked but a tent, a piece of goat's flesh, and a cool
spring.
Late in the afternoon (I loitered luxuriously) I came to the summit of a
long ridge which overlooked a broad, curving valley, at the far-away
western rim of which a slender line of water gleamed. How beautiful it
all was, but how empty! No furrow, no hut, no hint of human habitation
appeared, a land which must ever be lonely, for it is without rains, and
barren of streams for irrigation.
An hour later I rode up to the door of a long, low, mud-walled building,
and was met by the trader, a bush-bearded, middle-aged man with piercing
gray eyes and sturdy, upright figure. This was Lorenzo Hubbell, one of
the best-known citizens of New Mexico, living here alone, a day's ride
from a white settler.
Though hairy and spectacled he was a comparatively young man, but his
mixed blood had already given him a singular power over his dark-skinned
neighbors of the territory.
His wife and children were spending the summer in Albuquerque, and in
the intimacy of our long days together I spoke of my approaching
marriage. "I want to buy some native blankets and some Navajo silver for
our new home."
His interest was quick. "Let me send your wife a wedding present. How
would she like some Hopi jars?"
The off-hand way in which he used the words, "your wife," startled
me--reminded me that in less than two weeks I was due at Professor
Taft's home to claim my bride. I accepted his offer of the vases and
began to collect silver and turquoise ornaments, in order that I might
carry back to Zulime some part of the poetry of this land and its
people.
"The more I think about it," I wrote to her, "the more I want you to
share my knowledge of 'the High Country.' Why not put our wedding a week
earlier and let me take you into the mountains? If you will advance the
date to the eighteenth of November, we can have an eight-day trip in
Colorado and still reach mother and the Homestead in time for
Thanksgiving. I want to show you my best beloved valleys and peaks."
Though addressing the letter to her Chicago home, I knew that she was
about to leave for Kansas; therefore I added a postscript: "I am
planning to meet you in your father's house about the eighteenth of the
month, and I hope you will approve my scheme."
In the glow of my plan for a splendid Colorado wedding journey, I lost
interest in Ganado and its Indians. Making arrangements for the shipment
of my treasures, I saddled my horse one morning, waved Hubbell a joyous
farewell, and started back toward the Agency in the hope of finding
there a letter from my girl.
In this I was not disappointed. She wrote: "I shall leave for Kansas on
the Burlington, Sunday night. You can write me at Hanover." It was plain
she had not received my latest word.
I began to figure. "If I leave here to-morrow forenoon, and catch the
express at Gallup to-morrow night, I can make the close connection at
Topeka, and arrive in St. Joseph just half an hour before Zulime's train
comes in on Monday morning. I shall surprise her--and delight myself--by
having breakfast with her!"
However, I could not get away till morning, and with an evening to wear
away I accepted the Agent's invitation to witness a native dance which
had been announced to him by one of the young Navajo policemen. I had
never seen a Navajo dance, and gladly accepted the opportunity to do so.
It was a clear, crisp November evening as we started out, the clerk, his
sister, one of the teachers and myself riding in a two-seated open
wagon, drawn by a pair of spirited horses. The native village was some
ten miles to the north, and all the way up hill, so that before we came
in sight of it darkness had fallen, and in the light of a bonfire the
dancers were assembling.
Of the village, if there was a village, I could see little, but a tall
old man (the town crier) was chanting an invitation or command of some
sort, and dark forms were moving to and fro among the shadows of the
pinon trees. How remote it all was from the white man's world, how
self-sufficing and peaceful--how idyllic!
The master of ceremonies met us and gave us seats, and for three hours
we sat in the glow of the fire, watching the youthful, tireless dancers
circle and leap in monotonous yet graceful evolutions. Here was love and
courtship, and jealousy and faithful friendship, just as among the white
dancers of Neshonoc. Roguish black eyes gleamed in the light of the
fire, small feet beat the earth in joyous rhythm, and the calm faces of
the old men lent dignity and a kind of religious significance to the
scene. They were dreaming of the past, when no white man had entered
their world.
The young people were almost equally indifferent to us, and as the night
deepened we who were white merged more and more indistinguishably with
the crowd of dusky onlookers. It was easy to imagine ourselves back in
the sixteenth century, looking upon this scene from the wondering
viewpoint of the Spanish explorers. Whence came these people, these
dances, these ceremonials?
At last the time came for us to set forth upon our long ride back to the
Agency, and so, silently, we rose and slipped away into the darkness,
leaving the dancers to end their immemorial festival without the aliens'
presence. They had no need of us, no care for us. At a little distance I
turned and looked back. The songs, interrupted by shrill, wolfish
howlings and owl-like hootings, rang through the night with singular
savage charm, a chant out of the past, a chorus which was carrying
forward into an individualistic white man's world the voices of the
indeterminate tribal past.
The sky was moonless, the air frosty, and after we had entered the
narrow canon, which was several miles long and very steep, the clerk,
who was not very skilled with horses, turned the reins over to me, and
for an hour or more I drove with one foot on the brake, trusting mainly
to the horses to find their way. It was bitter cold in the canon, and my
cramped right leg became lame--so lame that I could hardly get out of
the wagon after we reached the Agency. Excruciating pain developed in
the sciatic nerve, and though I passed a sleepless night I was
determined to leave next morning. "I shall go if I have to be carried to
my horse," I said grimly to the clerk, who begged me to stay in bed.
Fortunately, the trader was going to the railway and kindly offered to
take me with him; and so, laden with Navajo silver (bracelets, buckles
and rings), I started out, so lame that I dragged one leg with a groan,
hoping that with the warmth of the sun my pain would pass away.
Reaching Gallup at noon, I spent the afternoon sitting in the sun,
waiting for the train. At six o'clock it came, and soon I was washed and
shaved and eating dinner on the dining-car of the Continental Limited.
All that night and all the next day and far into the second night I
rode, my fear of missing connection at Topeka uniting with my rheumatism
to make the hours seem of interminable length. It seemed at times a
long, long "shot"--but I made it! I reached the station at Topeka just
in time to catch the connecting train, and I was on the platform at St.
Joseph at sun-rise a full half-hour before the Burlington coaches from
Chicago were due.
As I walked up and down, I smiled with anticipation of the surprise I
had in store. "If she keeps her schedule I shall see her step from the
Pullman car without the slightest suspicion that I am within six hundred
miles of her," I thought, doing my best to walk the kink out of my leg,
which was still painful. "She is coming! My wife is coming!" I repeated,
incredulous of the fact.
At eight o'clock the engine came nosing in, and while watching the line
of passengers descend, I lost hope. It was too much to expect!
She was there! I saw her as she stepped down from the rear Pullman, and
just as she was about to take her valise from the porter, I touched her
on the shoulder and said, "I'll take charge of that."
She started and turned with a look of alarm, a look which changed to
amazement, to delight. "Oh!" she gasped. "Where did _you_ come from?"
"From the Navajo reservation," I replied calmly.
"But how did you _get here_?"
"By train, like yourself."
"But when--how long ago?"
"About thirty minutes," I laughed. "I'm a wizard at making close
connections." Then, seeing that she must know all about it at once, I
added, "Come into the station restaurant, and while we are eating
breakfast I will tell you where I have been and what brought me back so
soon."
While waiting for our coffee I took from my valise a bracelet of silver,
a broad band shaped and ornamented by some Navajo silversmith. "Hold out
your arm," I commanded. She obeyed, and I clasped the barbaric gyve
about her wrist. "That is a sign of your slavery," I said gravely.
Smilingly, meditatively, she fingered it, realizing dimly the grim truth
which ran beneath my jesting. She was about to take on a relationship
which must inevitably bring work and worry as well as joy.
(That silver band has never left her wrist for a moment. For twenty-two
years she has worn it, keeping it bright with service for me, for her
children and for her friends. There is something symbolic in the fact
that it has never lost its clear luster and that it has never tarnished
the arm it adorns.)
Her joy in this present, her astonishment at my unexpected appearance
on the railway platform, amused and delighted me. I could scarcely
convince her that at six o'clock on Saturday night I was in a New Mexico
town, waiting for the eastern express. It was all a piece of miraculous
adventure on my part, but her evident pleasure in its successful working
out made me rich--and very humble. "What did you do it for?" she asked;
then, with a look of dismay, she added, "What am I going to do with you
in Hanover?"
"I think I can find something to do," I answered, and entered upon a
detailed statement of my plan. "I want you to see the mountains. We'll
set our wedding day for the eighteenth--that will give us a week in
Colorado, and enable us to eat Thanksgiving dinner with the old folks at
the homestead. You say you have never seen a real mountain--well, here's
your chance! Say the word, and I'll take you into the heart of the San
Juan Range. I'll show you the splendors of Ouray and the Uncompagre."
Holding the floor, in order that she might not have a chance to protest,
I spread an alluring panorama of peaks and valleys before her eyes, with
an eloquence which I intended should overcome every objection. That she
was giving way to my appeal was evident. Her negatives, when they came,
were rather feeble. "I can't do it. It would be lovely, but--oh, it is
impossible!"
"It is done--it is arranged!" I replied. "I have already sent for the
railway tickets. They will be at your home to-morrow night. All is
settled. We are to be married on the eighteenth, and----"
"But our cards are all in Chicago and printed for the twenty-third!"
"What of that? Get some more--or, better still, forget 'em! We don't
need cards."
"But--my sewing?"
"Never mind your sewing. Would you let a gown come between you and a
chance to see the Needle Peak? I am determined that you shall see Ouray,
Red Mountain, and the San Juan Divide."
At last she said, "I'll think about it."
She was obliged to think about it. All the forenoon, as the train ambled
over the plain toward the village in which Professor Taft had
established his bank, I kept it in her mind. "It may be a long time
before we have another chance to visit Colorado. It will be glorious
winter up there. Think of Marshall Pass, think of Uncompagre, think of
the Toltec Gorge!" My enthusiasm mounted. "Ouray will be like a town in
the Andes. We must plan to stay there at least two days."
She fell into silence, a dazed yet smiling silence, but when at last I
said, "Every hour in the low country is a loss--let's be married
to-morrow," she shook her head. I had gone too far.
She confessed that a stay in Hanover was in the nature of a punishment.
"I never liked it here, and neither did my little mother," she said, and
then she described her mother's life in Hanover. "I was called home to
nurse her in the last days of her illness," she explained. "Poor little
mamma! She came out here unwillingly in the first place, and I always
resented her living so far away from the city. After her death I seldom
came here. Father does not care. He is so absorbed in his business and
in his books that it doesn't matter where he lives."
Professor Taft and his son, Florizel, were both at the train to meet
Zulime, and both were properly amazed when I appeared. As a totally
unexpected guest I was a calamity--but they greeted me cordially. What
Zulime said in explanation of my presence I do not know, but the family
accepted me as an inevitable complication.
My lameness, which dated from that ride down the Navajo canon,
persisted, which was another worriment; for Zulime was too busy with
sewing-women to give much time to me and walking was very painful, hence
I spent most of my day down at the bank, talking with my prospective
father-in-law, who interested me much more than the sordid little
village and its empty landscape. He was a sturdy, slow-moving man with
long, gray beard, a powerful and strongly individual thinker, almost as
alien to his surroundings as a Hindoo Yoghi would have been. With the
bland air of a kindly teacher he met his customers in the outer office
and genially discoursed to them of whatever happened to be in his own
mind--what they were thinking about was of small account to him.
As a deeply-studied philosopher of the old-fashioned sort, his words,
even when addressed to a German farmer, were deliberately chosen, and
his sentences stately, sonorous and precise. Regarding me as a man of
books, he permitted himself to roam widely over the fields of medieval
history, and to wander amid the gardens of ancient faiths and dimly
remembered thrones.
Although enormously learned, his knowledge was expressed in terms of the
past. His quotations, I soon discovered, were almost entirely confined
to books whose covers were of a faded brown. His scientists, his
historians were all of the Victorian age or antecedent thereto. Breasted
and Ferrero did not concern him. His biologists were of the time of
Darwin, his poets of an age still earlier, and yet, in spite of his
musty citations, he was a master mind. He knew what he knew (he guessed
at nothing), and, sitting there in that bare little bank, I listened in
silence what time he marched from Zoroaster down to Charlemagne, and
from Rome to Paris. He quoted from Buckle and Bacon and Macaulay till I
marveled at the contrast between his great shaggy head and its
commonplace surroundings, for in the midst of a discussion of the bleak
problems of Agnosticism, or while considering Gibbon's contribution to
the world's stock of historical knowledge, certain weather-worn Bavarian
farmers came and went, studying us with half-stupid, half-suspicious
glances, having no more kinship with Don Carlos Taft than so many
Comanches.
It is probable that the lonely old scholar rejoiced in me as a
comprehending, or at least a sympathetic, listener, for he talked on and
on, a steady, slow-moving stream. I was content to listen. That I
allowed him to think of me as a fellow-student, I confess, but in my
failure to undeceive him I was only adding to the comfort which he took
in my company. It would have been a cruelty to have confessed my
ignorance. It was after all only a negative deception, one which did
neither of us any harm.
Furthermore, I was aware that he was in a sense "trying me out." He not
only wanted to measure my understanding--he was especially eager to know
what my "religion" was. He dreaded to find me a sectarian, and when he
discovered that I, too, was a student of Darwin and a disciple of
Herbert Spencer, he frankly expressed his pleasure. He rejoiced, also,
in the fact that I was earning my own living, and to him I seemed to be
in possession of a noble income. With all his love of scholarship he
remained the thrifty son of New England.
Here again I fear I permitted him to assume too much, but when one's
prospective father-in-law is asking how one expects to support a wife,
one is tempted to give a slightly more favorable report than the
conditions will warrant. I explained my contract with Macmillans, and
named the prices I obtained for my stories, and with these he was
properly impressed. It was absurd yet gratifying to have a son-in-law
who could sell "lies" for hard cash, and his respect for me increased.
As we walked homeward that night, I expressed my wish to have the
marriage a judicial ceremony. "I make no objection to having the service
read by a clergyman," I explained, "but I prefer to employ the highest
legal authority in the county--a judge, if possible. However, I will
leave it all to Zulime. As an individualist I consider her a full and
equal partner in all phases of this enterprise. I do not expect her to
even promise to obey me, but I hope she will always find my requests
reasonable--if she does not, she has the right to ignore them. Her
signature shall be as good as mine at the bank."
This statement startled the banker, for he held rather old-fashioned
ideas concerning women and money; but Zulime was his favorite child, and
he hastened to assure me that she would not waste my substance. "I think
we can induce the district judge to come over and perform the ceremony,"
he concluded.
If my notion to employ a judge of the district shocked my bride, she
artfully deceived me, for she cheerfully consented, and a day or two
later, with her brother Florizel for a guide, I drove over to the county
town and laid my request before Judge Sturgis of the District Court.
The judge knew Don Carlos and (as a reader of the magazines) had some
knowledge of me; therefore he at once declared his willingness to
assist. "It will be an honor," he added heartily; "I'll adjourn court if
necessary. You may depend on me."
He also agreed to meet our wishes as to the character of the ceremony.
"I'll make it as short as you like," he said. "I'll reduce it to its
lowest legal terms," and with this understanding I procured my license
and returned to Hanover.
In spite of all these practical details the whole adventure seemed
curiously unreal, as though it concerned some other individual, some
character in one of my novels. It was a play in which I acted as manager
rather than as leading man. There was nothing in all this preparation
which remotely suggested any of the weddings in which I had been
concerned as witness, and I suspect that Zulime was almost equally
unconvinced of its reality. Poor girl! It was all as far from the
wedding of her girlish dreams as her bridegroom fell short of the
silver-clad knight of romance, but I promised her that she would find
something grandiose and colorful in our wedding journey. "Our wedding
will be prosaic, but wait until you see the sunset light on the
Crestones! Our week in the High Country shall be a poem."
This was a characteristic attitude with me. I was always saying, "Wait!
These flowers _are_ lovely, but those just ahead of us are more
beautiful still." Zulime's attitude, as I soon discovered, was precisely
opposite: "Let us make the most of the flowers at our hand," was her
motto.
The Taft home had something of the same unesthetic quality which marked
Neshonoc. It was simple, comfortable, and entirely New England.
Throughout the stern vicissitudes of his life on the Middle Border, Don
Carlos Taft had carried the memories and the accents of his New
Hampshire town. His beginnings had been as laboriously difficult as
those of my father. In many ways they were alike; that is to say, they
were both Yankee in training and tradition.
At last the epoch-marking day came marching across the eastern plain.
The inevitable bustle began with the dawn. I packed my trunk and
dispatched it to the station in confident expectation of our
mid-afternoon departure, and Zulime did the same, although it must have
seemed more illusory to her than to me. The Judge arrived precisely at
noon, and at half-past twelve the family solemnly gathered in the
living-room, and there, in plain traveling garb, Zulime Taft stood up
with me, while the Judge gravely initiated her into a perilous
partnership, a coalition in which she took the heaviest chances of
sorrow and regret.
The Judge was as good as his word. He made the ceremony a short but very
serious interchange of intentions, and at last, in sonorous and solemn
tones, pronounced us man and wife.
Altogether, it did not take five minutes, and then, at twelve-forty,
while the man of law was writing out the certificate, the "breakfast"
was announced and we all sat down to what was really a dinner, a meal to
which the Judge did full justice, for he had been up since early
morning, and had ridden twelve or fifteen miles.
If the old professor retained any anxieties concerning his daughter's
future, he masked them with a smile and discoursed genially of the
campaigns of Cyrus--or some such matter. At the close of the meal, the
Judge, comfortable and friendly, rose to go. With him, he said, it had
not only been a duty but a pleasure, and as he had given to our brief
wedding just the right touch of dignity, we were grateful to him. It was
the kind of service which cannot be obtained by any fee.
At four o'clock we took a dusty, hesitating local train for the small
town in Nebraska where we expected to catch the express for Colorado
Springs. In such drab and unromantic fashion did Zulime Taft and Hamlin
Garland begin their long journey together. "But wait!" I repeated. "Wait
till you see the Royal Gorge and Shavano!"
CHAPTER TEN
The New Daughter and Thanksgiving
At about half-past seven of a clear November morning I called my bride
to the car window and presented to her, with the air of a resident
proprietor, a first view of Pike's Peak, a vast silver dome rising
grandly above the Rampart Range. "Well, there it is," I remarked. "What
do you think of it?"
Her cry of surprise and her words of delight were both entirely genuine.
"Oh, how beautiful!" she exclaimed, as soon as she recovered breath.
It _was_ beautiful. Snow covered, flaming like burnished marble, the
range, with high summits sharply set against the cloudless sky, upreared
in austere majesty, each bleak crag gilded with the first rays of the
morning sun. Above the warm, brown plain the giants towered remotely
alien like ancient kings on purple thrones, and the contrast of their
gleaming drifts of snow, with the dry, grassy foothills through which we
were winding our way, was like that of deep winter set opposite to early
September. However, I would not permit Zulime to exhaust her vocabulary
of admiration. "Keep some of your adjectives till we reach Ouray," I
said with significant gravity.
Before the train came to a stop at the platform of Colorado Springs, I
caught sight of the red, good-humored face of Gustave, coachman for
Louis Ehrich, one of my Colorado friends. Gustave was standing beside
the road wagon in which I had so often ridden, and when he saw me
alight he motioned to me. "You are to come with me," he explained as I
approached. "I have orders to bring you at once to the house--breakfast
is waiting for you."
I had written to the Ehrichs, saying that my wife would be with me in
the Springs for a few days, and that I wanted them to meet her--but I
did not expect to be met or to receive an invitation to breakfast.
Zulime hesitated till I assured her that the Ehrichs were old friends
and not the kind of people who say one thing and mean another. "They
will never permit us to go to the hotel--I know them." With that she
consented, and fifteen minutes later Louis and Henriette met us at their
threshold and took Zulime to their hearts, as though they had known her
for years.
The house stood on the bank of a stream, and, from the windows of the
room they gave us, the Lord of the Range loomed in distant majesty
directly above the Garden of the Gods, and our first day of married life
was filled with splendor. Each hour of that day had for us its own
magical color, its own drama of flying cloud and resisting rock. From
the commonplace Kansas village we had been transported as if by an
enchanted carpet to a land of beauty and romance, of changeful charm, a
region of which I was even then beginning to write with joyous
inspiration. That my bride and I would forever recall this day and this
house with gratitude and delight I was even then aware.
"This compensates for the humble scene of our wedding, doesn't it?" I
demanded.
"It is more than I dreamed of having," she replied.
In truth no blood relations could have been more sympathetic, more
generous, more considerate than the Ehrichs. They rejoiced in us.
Skilled and happy hosts, they did their utmost to make our honeymoon an
unforgettable experience. Each hour of our stay was arranged with
kindness. We drove, we ate, we listened to music, with a grateful wonder
at our good fortune.
They would have kept us indefinitely had I not carefully explained my
plan to show my bride the Crestones and Marshall Pass. "We must make the
Big Circle and get back to Wisconsin in time for Thanksgiving," I said
to Louis, who, as a loyal Colorado man, immediately granted the force of
this excuse. He understood also the pathos of the old mother in West
Salem, watching, waiting, longing to see her new daughter. "You are
right," he said. "To fail of that dinner would be cruel."
That night we took the Narrow Gauge train, bound for Marshall Pass and
the splendors of the Continental Divide.
At daylight the next morning we were looping our way up the breast of
Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College
Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like
prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun,
lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal
drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged
into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When we emerged we were sliding
swiftly down into a sun-warmed valley sloping to the west, where hills
as lovely as jewels alternated with smooth opalescent mesas over which
white clouds gleamed. The whole wide basin glowed with August colors,
and yet from Montrose Junction, where we lunched, the rugged slopes of
Uncompagre, hooded with snow and dark with storms, were plainly visible,
so violently dramatic was the land.
"From here we proceed directly toward those peaks," I explained to
Zulime, who was in awe of the land I was exhibiting.
As we approached the gateway to Ouray, the great white flakes began to
fall athwart the pines, and when we entered the prodigious amphitheater
in which the town is built, we found ourselves again in mid-winter,
surrounded by icy cliffs and rimy firs. Dazzling drifts covered the
rocks and almost buried the cottages from whose small windows, lights
twinkled like gleaming eyes of strange and roguish animals. Every detail
was as harmonious as an ideally conceived Christmas card. It was the
antithesis of Kansas.
Upon entering our room at the hotel, I exultantly drew Zulime's
attention to the fact that the sky-line of the mountains to the South
cut across the upper row of our window panes. "You are in the heart of
the Rockies now," I declared as if somehow that fact exalted me in her
regard.
When we stepped into the street next morning, the snow had ceased to
fall, but the sky was magnificently, grandly savage. Great clouds in
career across the valley momentarily caught and dung to the crags, but
let fall no frost, and as the sun rose laggardly above the dazzlingly
white wall, the snow-laden pines on the lower slopes appeared delicate
as lace with distance. At intervals enormous masses of vapor, gray-white
but richly shot with lavender, slid suddenly in, filling the
amphitheater till all its walls were hid, then quite as suddenly shifted
and streamed away. From time to time vistas opened toward the west,
wondrous aisles of blinding splendor, highways leading downward to the
glowing, half-hid, irridescent plain. In all my experience of the
mountains I had never seen anything more gorgeous, more stupendous--what
it must have meant to my bride, who had never seen a hill, I can only
faintly divine.
At two o'clock, the sky having cleared, I hired a team and sleigh, and
we drove up the high-climbing mining trail which leads toward Telluride,
a drive which in itself was worth a thousand-mile journey, an experience
to be remembered all our lives. Such majesty of silent, sunny cliffs!
Such exquisite tones, such balance of lights and shadows, such tracery
of snow-laden boughs! It was impossible for my lowland bride to conceive
of any mountain scene more gorgeous, more sumptuous, more imperial.
For two hours we climbed, and then, at a point close to timber-line, I
reluctantly halted. "We must turn here," I said regretfully. "It will be
dark by the time we reach the hotel."
Slowly we rode back down the valley, entranced, almost oppressed, by the
incommunicable splendor of forested hills and sunset sky. It was with a
sense of actual relief that we reentered our apartment. Our eyes ached
with the effort to seize and retain the radiance without, and our minds,
gorged with magnificence, were grateful for the subdued light, the ugly
furniture, the dingy walls of our commonplace little hotel.
To some of my readers, no doubt, this wedding trip will seem a lunatic,
extravagant fantasy on my part; but Zulime declared herself grateful to
me for having insisted upon it, and for three days we walked and drove
by daylight or by moonlight amid these grandiose scenes, absorbing with
eager senses the sounds, sights and colors which we might never again
enjoy, returning now and then to a discussion of our future.
"We'll go East after our visit to the old folks," I declared. "This is
only the first half of our wedding journey; the other part shall include
Washington, Boston, and New York."
Zulime looked somewhat incredulous (she didn't know me yet), but her
eyes glowed with pleasure at the thought of the capital, of which she
knew nothing, and of New York, which she knew only as a seaport. "I
thought you were poor," she said.
"So I am," I replied, "but I intend to educate you in American
geography."
The railway enters the Ouray amphitheater from the west and stops--for
the very good reason that it can go no farther!--but from the railway
station a stage road climbs the precipitous eastern wall and leads on to
Red Mountain, as through an Alpine pass. Over this divide I now planned
to drive to Silverton, and thence to Durango by way of Las Animas Canon.
Zulime, with an unquestioning faith in me--a faith which I now think of
with wonder--agreed to this crazy plan. Her ignorance of the cold, the
danger involved, made her girlishly eager to set forth. She was like a
child in her reliance on my sagacity and skill.
We left Ouray, at eight of a bitter morning, in a rude sleigh with only
a couple of cotton quilts to defend us from the cold, and when, after a
long climb up a wall of stupendous cliffs with roaring streams shouting
from their icy beds upon our right, we entered an aisle of frosty pines
edging an enormous ledge, where frozen rills hung in motionless
cascades, Zulime, enraptured by the radiant avenues which opened out at
every turn of our icy upward trail, became blind to all danger. The
flaming, golden light flinging violet shadows, vivid as stains of ink
along the crusted slopes, dazzled her, caused her to forget the icy wind
or, at any rate, to patiently endure it.
At Red Mountain, a mournful, half-buried, deserted mining town, we left
our sleigh and stumbled into the dingy little railway station, so
chilled, so cramped, that we could scarcely walk, and yet we did not
regret our ride. However, we were glad of the warmth of the dirty little
coach into which we climbed a few minutes later. It seemed delightfully
safe to Zulime, and I was careful not to let her know that from this
town the train descended of its own weight all the way to Silverton!
Fortunately, nothing happened, and at Silverton we changed to a real
train, with a real engine, and as we dropped into Las Animas Canon we
left December behind. At six o'clock we emerged from the canon at
Durango into genial September--or so it seemed after our day of
midwinter in the heights. Next day we returned to Colorado Springs.
Our stay in the mountains was at an end, but the memory of those
burnished domes, those dark-hued forests, and the sound of those foaming
streams, remain with us to this day.--All the way down the long slope to
the Mississippi River, we reverted to this "circuit," recalling its most
impressive moments, its noblest vistas. It had been for my bride a
procession of wonders, a colossal pageant--to me it was a double
satisfaction because of her delight. With a feeling that I had in some
degree atoned for my parsimony in the matter of an engagement ring and
for the drab prose of our marriage ceremony, I brought the first half of
our wedding journey to a close in Chicago.
I now looked forward to the meeting between my mother and her new
daughter. This was, after all, the important part of my venture. Would
my humble home content my artist bride?
In preparation I began to sing small. "Don't expect too much of the
Garland Homestead," I repeated. "It is only an angular, slate-colored
farm-house without a particle of charm outside or in. It is very far
from being the home I should like you to be mistress of, and my people
you must bear in mind, are pioneers, survivals of the Border. They are
remote from all things urban."
To this the New Daughter responded loyally, "I am sure I shall like your
home and I _know_ I shall love your mother."
As women of her race have done from the most immemorial times, she had
left her own tribe and was about to enter the camp of her captor, but
she pretended to happiness, resolute to make the best of whatever came.
Our friends in Chicago smiled when I told them where we had been. Lorado
said, "A Honeymoon in the heart of the Rockies is just like you"--but I
cared nothing for his gibes so long as Zulime was content, and I had but
to over-hear her account of her trip to be reassured. To her it had been
a noble exploration into a marvelous country.
This was the day before Thanksgiving, and with a knowledge that the old
folks were counting the hours which intervened, I wrested Zulime from
her friends, and hurried her to the train. "Dear old mother! I know just
how she is waiting and watching for you. We must not fail her."
* * * * *
It was just daylight as we stepped down from the Pullman at West Salem,
but father was there! Seated in our "canopy-top surrey" and holding
restless ramping Black Dolly to her place, he was too busy to glance at
us, but I could tell, by the set of his head, that he was emotionally
intense.
"There's your new father," I said, pointing him out to Zulime, "and that
is your family coach."
Father couldn't even shake hands, for Dolly was still pawing and
plunging but he smiled as we approached and called out in reference to
Dolly, "She'll quiet down in a minute."
While the train was pulling out I explained to Zulime that Dolly's fury
was all assumed, "She'll soon be stolid as a stump."
It wasn't in the least the tender meeting I had expected to enjoy, but
when at last my father was able to reach his hand down to Zulime, he
said, "I'm glad to meet you, my daughter," and the tenderness in his
vibrant voice touched me. "We were afraid you weren't coming," he added,
and a little later I saw him wipe the tears from his eyes. The fact that
he used a bandanna for this purpose, did not destroy the moving quality
of his emotion.
The village looked woefully drab and desolate under that misty November
sky. The elm trees, stripped of every leaf, the gardens weedy, ragged
and forlorn, together with the ugly little houses suggested the sordid
reality of the life to which I had brought my bride. It was all a far
cry from the towering cliffs and colorful canons of Colorado.
The Homestead shared in the general ugliness of that rain-swept dawn.
Its maples were gaunt skeletons, its garden a sodden field over which
the chickens were wandering in sad and aimless fashion. To my city-bred
wife this home-coming must have been a cruel shock, but it was the best
I could do, and whatever the girl felt, she concealed with a smile,
resolute to make the best of me and mine.
Mother was waiting for us on the porch, tremulous with excitement, too
eager to remain in doors, and as I took her in my arms, and kissed her,
I said, "Mother, I've brought your new daughter."
For just a moment she hesitated (the grace and dignity of the tall girl
awed her, confused her), then Zulime went to her, and the two women, so
diverse, yet so dear to me, met in an embrace of mutual love and
confidence.
Isabel Garland entered into possession of the daughter she had so long
hoped for, and Zulime Taft became a member of the household of which
Richard Garland was the head.
Breakfast was waiting for us, a noble meal, a sumptuous wedding
breakfast, for mother and her two helpers (daughters of a neighboring
farmer), had been up since five o'clock and while it was a good deal
like a farmer's Sunday dinner, Zulime thanked the girls when father
presented them to her, but was a bit startled when one of them took her
seat at the table with us. She was not accustomed to this democratic
custom of the village.
My aunt, Susan Bailey, a gentle, frail little body also joined our
circle, adding one more pair of eyes to those whose scrutiny must have
been somewhat trying to the bride. To meet these blunt, forthright folk
at such a table without betraying amusement or surprise, required tact,
but the New Daughter succeeded in winning them all, even Mary, the cook,
who was decidedly difficult.
Almost immediately after taking his seat my father began: "Well now,
daughter, you are the captain. Right here I abdicate. Anything you want
done shall be done. What you say about things in the kitchen shall be
law. I will furnish the raw materials--you and the girls must do the
rest. We like to be bossed, don't we, Belle?" He ended addressing
mother.
In her concise, simple fashion, she replied: "Yes, the house is yours. I
turn it all over to you."
It was evident that all this had been discussed many times for they
seemed in haste to get its statement off their minds, and I could not
check them or turn them aside.
Zulime made light of it. "I'd rather not _be_ captain," she laughingly
protested. "I'd rather be passenger for a while."
Father was firm. "No, we need a commanding officer, and you must take
charge. Now I've got a turkey out there--and cranberries--" He was off!
He told just what he had laid in for the dinner, and ended by saying,
"If there's anything I've forgot, you just let me know, and I'll go
right up town and get it."
As he talked, the tones of his resonant voice, the motions of his hands,
the poise of his head, brought back to me a boyish feeling of
subordination. I laughed, but I submitted to his domination, entirely
willing that he should play the part of the commander for the last time.
It was amusing, but it had its pathetic side for my mother's silence was
significant of her weakness. She said nothing--not a word, but with
Zulime sitting beside her, she was content, so happy she could not find
words in which to express her satisfaction. Her waiting was at an end!
My father made a handsome picture. His abundant white hair, his shapely
beard, and his keen profile pleased me. Though a little stooped, he was
still alert and graceful, and his voice rang like a trumpet as he
entered upon an account of his pioneer experiences.
"I've always lived on the Border," he explained, "and I don't know much
about the ways of city folks, so you must excuse me when I do the wrong
thing. My will is the best in the world, and I'll do anything I can to
please you."
That breakfast was the exact opposite of a "Continental Breakfast."
Steak, doughnuts, buckwheat cakes, cookies, apple sauce made me groan
but Zulime smiled. She understood the care which had gone into its
making.
When at last she and I were alone in my study I began, "Well, how do you
like West Salem and the Garlands?"
"Your mother is a dear!" she replied, and her voice was convincing--"and
I like your father. He's very good looking. And the breakfast was--well
it was like one of your stories--Do you _always_ have steak and
doughnuts for breakfast?"
"No," I replied, "not always, but breakfast is a real meal with us."
The sky darkened and a sleety rain set in during the forenoon, but
mother did not mind the gloom outside, for within she had her daughter.
Upon our return to the sitting room, she led Zulime out into the kitchen
to take account of all that was going on for dinner, and while the
maids, with excited faces stood about waiting for orders from their new
boss, Zulime laughingly protested that she had no wish to interfere. "Go
on in your own way," she said.
To me, on her return to the sitting room, she exclaimed: "You should see
the food in preparation out there! Enough to feed all the Eagle's Nest
campers.--How many are coming to dinner?"
"No one but the McClintocks--and only a few of them," I soberly
replied. "Uncle William and Aunt Maria, Frank and Lorette--and Deborah,
all old people now. I don't know of any one else." In fact, we had less
than this number, for Maria was not well enough to come out in the rain.
Our circle was small, but the spirit of Thanksgiving was over it, and
when I saw my stately city wife sitting among my rough-hewn relations,
listening to the quaint stories of Uncle Frank, or laughing at the
humorous sallies of Aunt Lorette, I wondered what they thought of her.
She made a lovely picture, and all--even caustic Deborah--capitulated to
her kindliness and charm. If she had failed of complete comprehension
and sympathy I could not have blamed her, but to have her perfectly at
home among these men and women of the vanishing Border displayed her in
a new and noble guise.
If anything was lacking--any least quality of adaptation, it was
supplied when, that evening, my uncles and my father discovered that
Zulime could not only read music, but that she could play all the old
songs which they loved to have me sing. This accomplishment completed
their conquest, for under her deft hands the piano revived the wistful
melodies of _Minnie Minturn_, _Maggie_, and _Nellie Wildwood_, and when
my mother's voice, sweet as ever, but weak and hesitant, joined with
mine in singing for our guests, I was both glad and sad, glad of my
young wife, sad with a realization of my mother's weakness and age.
She did not reproach me for not bringing the daughter sooner. She had
but one regret. "I wish Frank was here," she said, her thought going out
to her other son.
How far away, how remote, how tender that evening seems to me after more
than twenty years work and travel! To Zulime it unrolled like a scene
from one of my novels, to me it was the closing, fading picture of an
era, the end of an epoch, the passing of a race, for the Garlands and
McClintocks, warriors of the western conquest, representatives of a
heroic generation were even then basking in the light of a dying
camp-fire, recounting the deeds of brave days gone.
When we were again alone in my study, Zulime said, "I'm going to enjoy
it here. I like your people, and I hope they liked me."
* * * * *
It was in this humble fashion that I brought to my mother the new
daughter for whom she had longed, and it was in this homely way that the
Garlands and McClintocks received my wife. Amid surroundings which were
without grace of art or touch of poetry, the informal and very plain
ceremony took place, but the words were sincere, and the forms and
features of the speakers deeply significant of the past. No matter what
my mother's storms and sorrows had been, she was now at peace. With a
smiling face she confronted the future.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My Father's Inheritance
At half-past six on the morning following our arrival at the Homestead,
my father opened the stairway door and shouted, just as he had been wont
to do in the days when I was a boy on the farm--"Hamlin! Time to get
up!" and with a wry grin I called to Zulime and explained, "In our
family, breakfast is a full and regular meal at which every member of
the household is expected promptly at seven."
It was not yet fully dawn and the thought of rising in a cold room at
that time of night was appalling to a city woman, but with heroic
resolution Zulime dressed, and followed me down the narrow stairway to
the lamp-lit dining-room, where a steaming throng of dishes, containing
oatmeal, potatoes, flap-jacks and sausage (supplemented by cookies,
doughnuts and two kinds of jam), invited us to start the day with
indigestion.
The dim yellow light of the kerosene lamp, the familiar smell of the
buckwheat cakes and my father's clarion voice brought back to me very
vividly and with a curious pang of mingled pleasure and regret, the
corn-husking days when I habitually ate by candlelight in order to reach
the field by daybreak. I recalled to my father's memory one
sadly-remembered Thanksgiving Day when he forced us all to husk corn
from dawn to sunset in order that we might finish the harvest before the
snowstorm covered the fallen stalks. "But mother's turkey dinner saved
the day," I remarked to Zulime. "Nothing can ever taste so good as that
meal. As we came into the house, cold, famished and weary, the smell of
the kitchen was celestial."
My mother smiled but father explained in justification, "I could feel a
storm in the air and I knew that we had just time to reach the last row
if we all worked, and worked hard. As a matter of fact we were all done
at four o'clock."
"O, we worked!" I interpolated. "Frank and I had no vote in those days."
During the week which followed most of my relatives, and a good many of
the neighbors, called on us, and as a result Zulime spent several highly
educational afternoons listening to the candid comments of elderly
widows and sharp-eyed old maids. Furthermore, being possessed of a most
excellent digestion, she was able to accept the daily invitations to
supper, at which rich cakes and home-made jams abounded. She was also
called upon to examine "hand-made paintings in oil," which she did with
tender care. No one could have detected in her smile anything less than
kindly interest in the quaint interior decorations of the homes. Her
comment to me was a different matter.
That she was an object of commiseration on the part of the women I soon
learned, for Mrs. Dunlap was overheard to say, "She's altogether too
good for him" (meaning me), and Mrs. McIlvane, with the candor of a
life-long friendship, replied, "That's what I told Belle."
Uncle William, notwithstanding a liking for me, remarked with feeling,
"She's a wonder! I don't see how you got her."
To which I replied, "Neither do I."
In setting down these derogatory comments I do not wish to imply that I
was positively detested but that I was not a beloved county institution
was soon evident to my wife. Delegations of school children did not call
upon me, and very few of my fellow citizens pointed out my house to
travelers--at that time. In truth little of New England's regard for
authorship existed in the valley and my head possessed no literary
aureole. The fact that I could--and did--send away bundles of manuscript
and get in return perfectly good checks for them, was a miracle of
doubtful virtue to my relatives as well as to my neighbors. My money
came as if by magic, unasked and unwarranted, like the gold of sunset.
"I don't see how you do it," my Uncle Frank said to me one day, and his
tone implied that he considered my authorship a questionable kind of
legerdemain, as if I were, somehow, getting money under false pretenses.
Rightly or wrongly, I had never pretended to a keen concern in the
"social doings" of my village. Coming to the valley out of regard for my
father and mother and not from personal choice, the only folk who
engaged my attention were the men and women of the elder generation,
rugged pioneer folk who brought down to me something of the humor, the
poetry, and the stark heroism of the Border in the days when the Civil
War was a looming cloud, and the "Pineries" a limitless wilderness on
the north. Men like Sam McKinley, William Fletcher, and Wilbur Dudley
retained my friendship and my respect, but the affairs of the younger
generation did not greatly concern me. In short, I considered the
relationship between them and myself fortuitous.
Absorbed in my writing I was seldom in the mood during my visits to
entertain curious neighbors, in fact I had met few people outside my
relatives. All this was very ungracious, no doubt, but such had been my
attitude for seven years. I came there to work and I worked.
Even now, in the midst of my honeymoon, I wrote busily. Each morning
immediately after breakfast I returned to my study, where the manuscript
of a novel (_Her Mountain Lover_) was slowly growing into final shape,
but in the afternoons Zulime and I occasionally went sleighing with
Dolly and the cutter, or we worked about the house.
It was a peaceful time, with only one thought to stir the pool of my
content. I began to realize that the longer we stayed, the harder it
would be for my mother to let us go. She could hardly permit her New
Daughter to leave the room. She wanted her to sit beside her or to be in
the range of her vision all day long. So far from resenting her loss of
household authority she welcomed it, luxuriating in the freedom from
care which the young wife brought.
This growing reliance upon Zulime made me uneasy. "I cannot, even for
mother's sake, ask my city-bred wife to spend the winter in this small
snow-buried hamlet," I wrote to my brother, "and, besides, I have
planned a wedding trip to Washington and New York."
In announcing to my mother the date of our departure, I said, "We won't
be gone long. We'll be back early in the spring."
"See that you do," she replied, but her eyes were deep and dark with
instant sadness. She had hoped with childish trust that we would stay
all winter with her.
It was beautiful in Neshonoc at this time. Deep, dazzling snows
blanketed the hills, and covered the fields, and frequently at sunset or
later, after the old people were asleep, Zulime and I went for a swift
walk far out into the silent country, rejoicing in the crisp clear air,
and in the sparkle of moonbeams on the crusted drifts. At such times the
satin sheen of sled-tracks in the road, the squeal of dry flakes under
my heel (united with the sound of distant sleigh bells) brought back to
me sadly-sweet memories of boyish games, spelling school, and the voices
of girls whose laughter had long since died away into silence.
The blurred outlines of the hills, the barking of sentinel dogs at
farm-yard gates, and the light from snow-laden cottage windows filled
my heart with a dull illogical ache, an emotion which was at once a
pleasure and a pain.
O, witchery of the winter night,
(With broad moon shouldering to the west),
Before my feet the rustling deeps
Of untracked snows, in shimmering heaps,
Lie cold and desolate and white.
I hear glad girlish voices ring
Clear as some softly-stricken string--
(The moon is sailing toward the west),
The sleigh-bells clash in homeward flight,
With frost each horse's breast is white--
(The moon is falling toward the west)--
"Good night, Lettie!"
"Good night, Ben!"
(The moon is sinking at the west)--
"Good night, my sweetheart,"--Once again
The parting kiss, while comrades wait
Impatient at the roadside gate,
And the red moon sinks _beyond_ the west!
Such moments as these were meeting places of the old and the new, the
boy and the man. The wistful, haunting dreams of the past, contended
with the warm and glowing fulfillment of the present. For the past a
song, for the present the woman at my side!
Whether Zulime had similar memories of her girlhood or not I do not
know. She was not given to emotional expression, but she several times
declared herself entirely content with our orderly easeful life and
professed herself willing to remain in the homestead until spring. "I
like it here," she repeated, but I was certain that she liked the city
and her own kind, better, and that a longer stay would prove a
deprivation and a danger. After all, she was an alien in the Valley,--a
gracious and kindly alien, but an alien nevertheless. Her natural
habitat was among the studios of Chicago or New York, and my sense of
justice would not permit me to take advantage of her loyalty and her
womanly self-sacrifice.
"Pack your trunk," I said to her one December day, with an air of high
authority. "We are going East in continuation of our wedding trip."
Two days after making this decision we were in Washington, at a grand
hotel, surrounded by suave waiters who had abundant leisure to serve us,
for the reason that Congress was not in session, and the city was empty
of its lobbyists and its law-makers.
The weather was like October and for several days we walked about the
streets without thinking of outside wraps. We went at once to the
Capitol from whose beautiful terraces we could look across the city,
back and upward along our trail, above the snows of Illinois soaring on
and up into the far canons of the San Juan Divide, retracing in memory
the first half of our wedding journey with a sense of satisfaction, a
joy which now took on double value by reason of its contrast to the
marble terrace on which we stood. From the luxury of our city
surroundings the flaming splendors of the Needle Range appeared almost
mystical.
We ate our Christmas dinner in royal isolation, attended by negroes
whose dusky countenances shone with holiday desire to make us happy.
With no visitors and no duties we gave ourselves to the business of
seeing the Capitol and enjoying the gorgeous sunlight. Zulime, who
looked at everything in the spirit of a youthful tourist, was enchanted
and I played guide with such enthusiasm as a man of forty could bring to
bear. It was a new and pleasant schooling for me, a time which I look
back upon with wistful satisfaction, after more than twenty years.
Philadelphia, our next stop, had an especial significance to me
(something quite apart from its historical significance). Outwardly
professing a keen interest in the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and
other objects which enthralled my young wife, I was secretly planning to
offer Lorimer of _The Post_, the serial rights of my novel _The Eagle's
Heart_, and I had an engagement to talk with Edward Bok about a
novelette.
Bok, a friend of several years' standing, received us most cordially,
and Mrs. Bok, who came in next day to meet us, not only instantly and
heartily approved of my wife, but quite openly said so, a fact which
added another quality to the triumphal character of our progress. I was
certain that all of my other Eastern friends would find her admirable.
We reached New York on New Year's Eve, and the streets were roaring with
the customary riot of youth, but in our rooms at the Westminster we were
as remote from the tumult as if we had been at the bottom of a Colorado
mine. We would have heard nothing of the horns and hootings of the
throngs had not Zulime expressed a wish to go forth and mix with them.
With a feeling of disgust of the hoodlums who filled Broadway, I took
her as far north as Forty-second Street, but she soon tired of the rude
men and their senseless clamor, and gladly returned to our hotel willing
to forget it all.
In my diary I find these words, "I am beginning the New Year with two
thousand dollars in the bank, and a pending sale which will bring in as
much more. I feel pretty confident of a living during the year 1900."
Evidently the disposal of my serial to Lorimer, the results of my deal
with Brett, and the growing interest of other publishers in my work had
engendered a confidence in the future which I had never before
attained--and yet I must admit that most of my prosperity was expected
rather than secured, a promise, rather than a fulfillment, and the fact
that I permitted Zulime to settle upon a three-room suite in an obscure
Hotel on Fifteenth Street, is proof of my secret doubts. Eighteen
dollars per week seemed a good deal of money to pay for an apartment.
As I think back to this transaction I am bitten by a kind of remorseful
shame. It was such a shabby little lodging for my artist bride, and yet,
at the moment, it seemed all that we could safely afford, and she
cheerfully made the best of it. Never by word or sign did she hint that
its tiny hall and its dingy and unfashionable furnishings were unworthy
of us both, on the contrary she went ahead with shining face.
One extravagance I did commit, one that I linger upon with
satisfaction--I forced her to choose a handsome coat instead of a plain
one. It was a long graceful garment of a rich brown color, an
"Individual model" the saleslady called it. It was very becoming to my
wife--at any rate I found it so--but the price was sixty-five
dollars--"marked down from eighty-five" the saleslady said. Neither of
us had ever worn a coat costing more than twenty-five dollars and to pay
almost three times as much even for a beautiful "creation" like this was
out of the question--and my considerate young wife decided against it
with a sigh.
I was in reckless mood. "We will take it," I said to the saleswoman.
"Oh no! We can't afford it!" protested Zulime in high agitation. "It is
impossible!" She looked scared and weak.
"You may do up the old coat," I went on in exalted tone. "My wife will
wear the new one."
In a tremor of girlish joy and gratitude Zulime walked out upon the
street wearing the new garment, and the expression of her face filled me
with desire to go on amazing her. She had owned so few pretty things in
her life that I took a keen pleasure in scaring her with sudden
presents. I bought a crescent-shaped brooch set with small diamonds
which cost one hundred dollars--Oh, I was coming on!
[She is wearing these jewels yet and she says she loves them--but as I
think back to that brown cloak I am not so sure that her approval was
without misgiving. It may be that she secretly hated that coat for it
was an unusual color, and while its lines were graceful in my eyes it
may have been "all out of style."--What became of it, finally, I am
unable to say. No matter, it expressed for me a noble sentiment and it
shall have a place on this page with the Oriental brooch and the
amethyst necklace.]
Humble as our quarters were we rejoiced in distinguished visitors.
William Dean Howells called upon us almost immediately and so did
Richard Watson Gilder, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Burroughs, and many
other of my valued, old-time friends. Furthermore, with a courage at
which I now marvel at, Zulime announced that we would be "at home" every
afternoon, and thereafter our tiny sitting-room was often crowded with
her friends--for she had begun to find out many of her artist
acquaintances. In fact, we were forever discovering people she had known
in Paris. It seemed to me that she had met the entire American Colony
during her four years in France.
My social and domestic interests quite cut me off from my club, and we
joked about this. "I am now one of the newly-weds," I admitted, "and my
absence from the club is expected. Members invariably desert the club
during the first year or two of their married life, but they all come
back!--Sooner or later, they drop in for lunch or while wifey is away,
and at last are indistinguishable from the bachelors."
Mrs. James A. Herne, who had meant so much to me in my Boston days, was
one of our very first callers, and no one among all my friends
established herself more quickly in my wife's regard. Katharine's
flame-like enthusiasm, her never-failing Irish humor, and her quick
intelligence, made her a joyous inspiration, and whilst she and Zulime
compared experiences like a couple of college girls, I sat and smiled
with a kind of proprietary pride in both of them.
Fortunately my wife approved of my associates. "You have a delightful
circle," she said one night as we were on our way home from a dinner
with a group of distinguished literary folk.
Her remark comforted me. Having no money with which to hire cabs or
purchase opera tickets, I could at least share with her the good
friendships I had won, confidently, believing that she would gain
approval,--which she did. Not all of my associates were as poor as I
(some of them, indeed, lived in houses of their own), but they were
mostly concerned with the arts in some form, and with such people Zulime
was entirely at ease.
With a lecture to deliver in Boston I asked her to go with me. "I cannot
forego the pleasure of showing you about 'the Hub,'" I urged. "I want
Hurd and other of my faithful friends of former days to know you. We'll
take rooms at the Parker House which used to fill me with silent awe. I
want to play the part, for a day or two, of the successful author."
As she had never seen Boston, she joyfully consented, and the most
important parts of my grandiose design were carried out. We took rooms
at the hotel in which I first met Riley, and from there we sent out
cards to several of my acquaintances. Hurd, who was still Literary
Editor of the _Transcript_, came at once to call, and so did Flower of
the _Arena_, but for the most part Zulime and I did the calling for she
was eager to see the homes and the studios of my artist friends.
By great good fortune, James A. Herne was playing "Sag Harbor" at one of
the theaters, and as I had told Zulime a great deal about "Shore Acres"
and other of Herne's plays, I hastened to secure seats for a
performance. Herne was growing old, and in failing health but he showed
no decline of power that night. His walk, his voice, his gestures
filled me with poignant memories of our first meeting in Ashmont, and
our many platform experiences, while the quaint Long Island play brought
back to me recollections of his summer home on Peconic Bay. How much he
had meant to me in those days of Ibsen drama and Anti-poverty
propaganda!
To go about Boston with my young wife was like reliving one by one my
student days. Many of my haunts were unchanged, and friends like Dr.
Cross and Dr. Tompkins, with whom I had lived so long in Jamaica Plain,
were only a little grayer, a little thinner. They looked at me with
wondering eyes. To them I was an amazing success. Flower, still as
boyish in face and figure as when I left the city in '92, professed to
have predicted my expanding circle of readers, and I permitted him to
imagine it wider than it was.
Some of my former neighbors had grown in grace, others had stagnated or
receded, a fact which saddened me a little. A few had been caught in a
swirl of backwater, and seemed to be going round and round without
making the slightest advance. Their talk was all of small things, or the
unimportant events of the past.