SO there was father, sitting comfortably in the warm farmhouse living
room--he and Aldrich having been well fed at the table of a prosperous
farmer--and having before him what he most loved, an attentive and
absorbed audience. By this time the farmer’s wife would be deeply
moved by the fate of that son of the South that father had represented
himself as being; and as for Tilly--while, in the fanciful picture
he is making, he stands in the cold and wet outside the door of that
southern mansion, Heaven knows what is going on in poor Tilly’s heart.
It is however bleeding with sympathy, one may be sure of that.
So there is father and, in the meantime, what of his own actual
flesh-and-blood family, the family he had left behind in an Ohio
village when he set forth on his career as an actor?
It is not suffering too much. One need not waste too much sympathy on
his family. Although he was never what we called in our Ohio country,
“a good provider,” he had his points and as one of his sons I at least
would be loath to trade him for a more provident shrewd and thoughtful
father.
It must however have been a fairly hard winter, for mother at least and
in connection with that winter and others that followed I have often
since had an amusing thought. In later years, when my own name had a
little got up in the world as a teller of tales I was often accused
of having got my impulse, as a story-teller, from the Russians. The
statement is a plausible one. It is, in a way, based upon reason.
When I had grown to be a man, and when my stories began to be published
in the pages of the more reckless magazines, such as _The Little
Review_, the old _Masses_ and later in _The Seven Arts_
and _The Dial_, and when I was so often accused of being under the
Russian influence, I began to read the Russians, to find out if the
statement, so often made concerning me and my work, could be true.
This I found, that in Russian novels the characters are always eating
cabbage soup and I have no doubt Russian writers eat it too.
This was a revelation to me. Many of the Russian tales are concerned
with the lives of peasants and a Boston critic once said I had brought
the American peasant into literature; and it is likely that Russian
writers, like all the other writers who have ever lived and have not
pandered to the popular demand for sentimental romances were fortunate
if they could live as well as a peasant. “What the critics say is no
doubt true,” I told myself; for, like so many of the Russian writers, I
was raised largely on cabbage soup.
Let me explain.
The little Ohio farming community, where I lived as a lad had in it,
at that time, no factories, and the merchants artisans lawyers and
other townspeople were all either owners of land which they rented out
to tenant farmers, or they sold goods or their services to farmers.
The soil on the farms about the town was a light sandy loam that
would raise small fruits, corn, wheat, oats or potatoes, but that did
particularly well when planted to cabbages.
As a result the raising of cabbages became a sort of specialty with
us in our country; and there are now, I believe, in my native place,
some three or four prosperous factories, devoted to the making of what
before the war was called “sauerkraut.” Later, to help win the war, it
was called: “Liberty Cabbage.”
The specialization in the raising of cabbage began in our Ohio country
in my day, and in a good year some of the fields produced as high as
twenty tons of cabbage an acre.
The cabbage fields grew larger and larger and, as we grew older, my
brothers and I went every spring and fell to work in the fields. We
crawled across the fields, setting out cabbage plants in the spring,
and in the fall went out to cut cabbages. The huge round hard heads
of cabbage were cut from their stalks and pitched to a man who loaded
them upon a hay wagon; and on fall days I have often seen twenty or
thirty wagons, each bearing its two or three tons of cabbages and
waiting its turn to get to the cars on the railroad siding. The waiting
wagons filled our streets as tobacco-laden wagons fill the streets of a
Kentucky town in the fall, and in the stores and houses everyone for a
time talked of nothing but cabbages. “What would the crop bring on the
markets at Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh, for some reason I have
never understood, had a passion for cabbages; and why Pittsburgh hasn’t
produced more so-called realistic writers, in the Russian manner, I
cannot understand.
However, one may well leave that to the modern psychologists.
During the fall of that year, after father had set out on his
adventures as an actor, mother did something she had often done before.
By a stroke of strategy she succeeded in getting a winter’s supply of
cabbages for her family, without the expenditure of any monies.
The fall advanced, father had gone, and the annual village cut-up time,
called among us “Hallowe’en,” came on.
It was the custom among the lads of our town, particularly among those
who lived on the farms near town, to make cabbages part of their
celebration of the occasion. Such lads, living as they did in the
country, had the use of horses and buggies, and on Hallowe’en they
hitched up and drove off to town.
On the way they stopped at the cabbage fields and, finding in some of
the fields many cabbages yet uncut, pulled them out by the roots and
piled them in the backs of their buggies.
The country lads, giggling with anticipated pleasure, drove into one
of the quieter residence streets of our town and, leaving the horse
standing in the road, one of them got out of the buggy and took one
of the cabbages in his hand. The cabbage had been pulled out of the
ground with the great stalklike root still clinging to it and the lad
now grasped this firmly. He crept toward one of the houses, preferably
one that was dark--an indication that the people of the house, having
spent a hard day at labor, had already gone to bed. Approaching the
house cautiously, he swung the cabbage above his head, holding it by
the long stalk, and then he let it go. The thing was to just hurl the
cabbage full against the closed door of the house. It struck with a
thunderous sound and the supposition was that the people of the house
would be startled and fairly lifted out of their beds by the hollow
booming noise, produced when the head of cabbage landed against the
door and, as a matter of fact, when a stout country boy had hurled the
cabbage the sound produced was something quite tremendous.
The cabbage having been thrown the country boy ran quickly into the
road, leaped into his buggy and, striking his horse with the whip,
drove triumphantly away. He was not likely to return unless pursued,
and there it was that mother’s strategy came into play.
On the great night she made us all sit quietly in the house. As soon
as the evening meal was finished the lights were put out and we waited
while mother stood just at the door, the knob in her hand. No doubt it
must have seemed strange to the boys of our town that one so gentle and
quiet as mother could be so infuriated by the hurling of a cabbage at
the door of our house.
But there was the simple fact of the situation to tempt and darkness
had no sooner settled down upon our quiet street that one of the lads
appeared. It was worth while throwing cabbages at such a house. One was
pursued, one was scolded, threats were hurled: “Don’t you dare come
back to this house! I’ll have the town marshal after you, that’s what
I’ll do! If I get my hands on one of you I’ll give you a drubbing!”
There was something of the actor in mother also.
What a night for the lads! Here was something worth while and all
evening the game went on and on. The buggies were not driven to our
house, but were stopped at the head of the street, and town boys went
on pilgrimages to cabbage fields to get ammunition and join in the
siege. Mother stormed scolded and ran out into the darkness waving a
broom while we children stayed indoors, enjoying the battle--and when
the evening’s sport was at an end, we all fell to and gathered in
the spoils. As she returned from each sally from the fort mother had
brought into the house the last cabbage thrown--if she could find it;
and now, late in the evening when our provident tormentors were all
gone, we children went forth with a lantern and got in the rest of our
crop. Often as many as two or three hundred cabbages came our way and
these were all carefully gathered in. They had been pulled from the
ground, with all the heavy outer leaves still clinging to them, so that
they were comparatively uninjured and, as there was also still attached
to them the heavy stalklike root, they were in fine shape to be kept.
A long trench was dug in our back yard and the cabbages buried, lying
closely side by side, as I am told the dead are usually buried after a
siege.
Perhaps indeed we were somewhat more careful with them than soldiers
are with their dead after a battle. Were not the cabbages to be, for
us, the givers of life? They were put into the trench carefully and
tenderly with the heads downward and the stalks sticking up, mother
supervising, and about each head straw was carefully packed--winding
sheets. One could get straw from a strawstack in a near-by field at
night, any amount of it, and one did not pay or even bother to ask.
When winter came quickly, as it did after Hallowe’en, mother got small
white beans from the grocery and salt pork from the butcher, and a
thick soup, of which we never tired, was concocted. The cabbages were
something at our backs. They made us feel safe.
And there was also a sense of something achieved. In the land in which
we lived one did not need to have a large income. There was food all
about, plenty of it, and we who lived so precariously in the land of
plenty had, by our “mother’s wit,” achieved this store of food without
working for it. A common sense of pride in our cleverness held us
together.
One went out into our back yard on a winter’s night when there was
snow on the ground and looked abroad. Already we lads read books, and
snow-covered fields stretching away under the winter moon suggested
strange, stirring thoughts--travelers beset by wolves on the Russian
Steppes--emigrant trains lost in whirling snowstorms on the Western
sagebrush deserts of our own country, men in all sorts of strange
terrible places wandering, desperate and starving, under the winter
moon--and what of us? The place where the cabbages were buried made a
long white mound, directly across our back yard, and when one looked at
it there was a sense of fullness and plenty in the land. One remembered
that down under the snow, buried away in the straw, were those long
rows of cabbages. Deer, buffaloes, wild horses and equally wild
long-horned cattle, far out on the Western plains, did not worry about
food because the ground was covered with snow. With their hoofs they
pawed the snow away, and found buried beneath the snow the sweet little
clusters of bunch grass, that again sent the warmth of life singing
through their bodies.
It was a chance for the fancy to play, to kick up its heels and have a
good time. One could imagine the house in which one lived as a fort,
set far out on the Western frontier. The cabbages had been put into the
ground with the stalks straight up. They stuck up straight and stiff,
like sentinels standing and, after looking, one went into the fort
and slept quietly and peacefully. There the soldiers were--they were
standing firm and unyielding. Were there enemies prowling out there
in the white darkness, the little wild dogs of want? One could laugh
at such thoughts. Were not the sentinels standing--quietly and firmly
waiting? One could go into the fort and sleep in peace, hugging that
thought.
To us at home, father was always, somewhat strangely, a part and at
the same time not a part of our lives. He flew in and out as a bird
flies in and out of a bush, and I am quite sure that, all through the
years of our childhood, it never occurred to him to ask, when he set
off on one of his winter adventures, whether or not there was anything
to eat in our house. The fall came with its snows, and the little
creeping fear of actual starvation for her brood, that must often have
been in mother’s mind, followed by the spring, the warm rains, the
promise of plenty and his return. If he brought no money, he did bring
something--a ham, some combs of honey, a jug of cider, or even perhaps
a quarter of beef. There he was again and there was food on the table.
He made a gesture. “There!” he seemed to be saying; “you see! Who says
I’m not a provider?”
There were tales to be told and he was the teller of tales. “It is
sufficient. Can man live by bread alone? There is food on the table
now. Eat! Stuff yourselves! Spring has come and there are signs to be
painted. The night has passed and it is another day. I am a man of
faith. I tell you a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without my
notice. I will make a tale of it--tell why and how it fell. The most
marvelous tale in the world might be made from the fall of a sparrow.
Is not the workman worthy of his hire? What about the lilies of the
field, eh? They toil not and neither do they spin--do they?”
And yet, was Solomon, in all his glory, arrayed like
one of these?
* * * * *
I remember a day in the early spring when we were compelled to move
out of one house and into another. The rent for the house in which we
had lived all during the winter had been long unpaid and mother had
no money. Father had just returned from one of his long adventures,
but early in the day of the moving he disappeared again and, as we
could not afford a moving wagon, mother and we boys carted our poor
belongings to the new place on our backs.
As for father, he had managed to borrow a horse and a spring wagon from
a neighbor and had set off again into the country. The house to which
we were moving was far out at the edge of the town and next to it was
a field in which there was a great straw stack--a convenience, as what
we called our “bed ticks,” on which we slept, had to be emptied of
the straw that had become fine and dustlike from long use, and then
refilled with the new straw.
When all was done and we were quite settled in the new place, father
drove into the yard. He had noticed, he explained, a special kind of
straw at a farmhouse some five miles away, at a place he had visited
during his wanderings of the winter just past, and he had thought he
would give us all a treat by getting that particular kind of straw for
our beds.
And so he had driven off at daybreak, and, while we packed our
furniture to the new place, had dined with the farmer and his family
and had now returned. Although our beds had been made for the night the
bed ticks must all be brought down again, the straw tumbled out and the
special straw put in. “There,” he said, with one of his grand gestures,
as we lads tramped wearily up the stairs with the refilled bags and as
mother stood smiling--a little resentfully perhaps, but still smiling;
“there, you kids, try sleeping on that. There is nothing on earth too
good for my kids.”