But, of course, he kept silent, as the young usually do when they hear
the old maundering, and he gave up as he heard the stupid dolt returning
to his old refrain: "I left school when I was twelve years old. Ain't
had a day sence, and I can't say as I've been exactly a failure. Best
hardware store in Carthage and holdin' my own in spite of bad business."
Joel slunk away, unconvinced but baffled. One summer he brought all his
pressure to bear on Luke to persuade him to run away from his job and
strike out for the big city where the big opportunities grew.
But Luke shook his head. He lacked initiative. Perhaps that was where
his talent was not genius. It blistered him, but it made no steam.
Shakespeare had known enough to leave Stratford. He had had to hold
horses outside the theatre, and even then he had organized a little
business group of horse holders called "Shakespeare's boys." He had the
business sense, and he forced his way into the theatre and became a
stockholder. Shakespeare was always an adventurer. He had to work in a
butcher's shop, but before he was nineteen he was already married to a
woman of twenty-six, and none too soon for the first child's sake.
Luke Mellows had not the courage or the recklessness to marry Kitty,
though he had as good a job as Shakespeare's. Shakespeare would not let
a premature family keep him from his ambition.
He was twenty-one when he went to London, but he went.
London was a boom town then, about the size of Trenton, or Grand Rapids,
or Spokane, and growing fast. Boys were running away from the farms and
villages as they always have done. Other boys went to London from
Stratford. John Sadler became a big wholesale grocer and Richard Field
a publisher. They had as various reasons then as now.
But the main thing was that they left home. That might mean a noble or a
selfish ambition, but it took action.
Luke Mellows would not go. He dreaded to abandon his mother to the
father who bullied them both. He could not bear to leave Kitty alone
with the wretched mother who ruled her with tears.
Other boys ran or walked away from Carthage, some of them to become
failures, and some half successes, and some of them to acquire riches
and power. And other boys stayed at home.
Girls, too, had won obscurity by inertia or had swung into fame. Some of
the girls had stayed at home and gone wrong there. Some had gone away in
disgrace, and redeemed or damned themselves in larger parishes. There
were Aspasias and Joans of Arc in miniature, minor Florence Nightingales
and Melbas and Rosa Bonheurs. But they had all had to leap from the nest
and try their wings. Of those that did not take the plunge, none made
the flight.
Cowardice held some back, but the purest self-sacrifice others. Joel
felt that there ought to be a heaven for these latter, yet he hoped that
there was no hell for the former. For who can save himself from his own
timidity, and who can protect himself from his own courage?
Given that little spur of initiative, that little armor of selfish
indifference to the clinging hands at home, and how many a soul might
not have reached the stars? Look at the women who were crowding the
rolls of fame of late just because all womankind had broken free of the
apron strings of alleged respectability.
Joel had no proof that Luke Mellows would have amounted to much.
Perhaps, if he had ventured over the nest's edge, he would have perished
on the ground, trampled into dust by the fameward mob, or devoured by
the critics that pounce upon every fledgling and suck the heart out of
all that cannot fling them off.
But Joel could not surrender his childhood faith that Luke Mellows had
been meant for another Shakespeare. Yet Mellows had never written a
play or an act of a play. But, for that matter, neither had Shakespeare
before he went to London. He was only a poet at first, and some of his
poems were pretty poor stuff--if you took Shakespeare's name off it. And
his first poems had to be published by his fellow townsman Field.
There were the childish poems by Luke Mellows that Joel's father had
published in the Carthage "Clarion." Joel had forgotten them utterly,
and they were probably meritorious of oblivion. But there was one poem
Luke had written that Joel memorized.
It appeared in the "Clarion" years after Joel was a success in wool. His
father still sent him the paper, and in one number Joel was rejoiced to
read these lines: