SUCH a birth in an Ohio Village--the neighbor women coming in to
help--rather fat women in aprons.
They have had children of their own and are not too excited, but stand
about, waiting and indulging in gossip. “If the men had to have the
babies there would never be more than one child in a family. What
do men know about suffering? It’s the women who have to do all the
suffering in life, I always said--I said a woman feels everything
deeper than a man--don’t you think so? A woman has intuition, that’s
what it is.”
And then the doctor coming hurriedly, father having run for him. He
would be a large man with side whiskers and large red hands. Well; he
is a doctor of the new school, a modernist, like the child he is about
to help into the world. What he believes in, is fresh air. Wherever he
goes, and no matter what the disease he is treating, he always says
the same things. Modernists sometimes are like that. “Clean and fresh
air--that’s what I believe in. Throw open the doors and the windows.
Let’s have some fresh air in here.”
While the child is being born he tells his one joke. One might as well
be cheerful. Cheerfulness is a great healer, and what he believes in is
in making his patients smile in the midst of suffering. “Do you want
to know why I’m so strong on cleanliness?” he asks. “It’s because I’m a
damned sinner, I guess, and I don’t go to church, and I’ve heard that
cleanliness is next to Godliness. I’m trying to slip into Heaven on a
cake of soap--ha! that’s what I’m up to.”
A quick nervous laugh from the lips of father. He goes out of the
house to tell the story to a neighbor he has seen raking leaves in a
near-by yard. It is September now. He is a little unstrung. Under such
conditions a man feels faintly guilty. People conspire to give him
the feeling. It is as though all the women of the town were pointing
accusing fingers and as though all the men were laughing, “greasy-eyed
married men,” Bernard Shaw once called them. One will have to set up
the cigars to the men, darn ’em. As for the women--they are saying,
half jokingly, half in earnest: “There, you devil; see what you have
done--this is your doings.”
Father stands beside the fence telling the doctor’s joke to the
neighbor, who has heard it many times before but who, out of sympathy,
now laughs heartily. As though drawn toward each other by some
invisible cord they both sidle along the fence until they are standing
close together. It is a moment of masculine obscurity. Men must stand
shoulder to shoulder. The women have the centre of the stage--as father
would have said later, when he became an actor and loved to sling the
actor’s jargon, they were “hogging the footlights.”
Not quite succeeding however. This is the moment for me to come upon
the stage. The two men stand closely together, father fingering
nervously the heavy gold watch chain--he is soon to lose it with all
his other property in one of his frequent business failures--and from
the house comes a faint cry. To the two men standing there it sounds
not unlike the cry of a puppy inadvertently stepped on by a careless
master, and father jumps suddenly aside so that his neighbor laughs
again.
And that is myself--just being actually born into the world.
* * * * *
Which is one thing, but sometimes one’s fancy wants something else.
As I lay, deep buried in the hay in the barn on another fall day, and
as the resentment--born in me through having been made the son of
two decaying, gentle families--grew deeper and deeper, and also as
the grateful warmth of the departed summer--captured and held by the
hay--stole over my body, cold from the day of tramping in the wood in
a cold rain in pursuit of the squirrels--as the warmth took hold of my
body, the scene of my actual birth hour, just depicted, faded. I fled
from the field of fact and into the field of fancy.
Upon the sand on a desolated coast far down on the Gulf of Mexico an
athletic looking man of perhaps thirty lies looking out over the sea.
What cruel eyes he has, like the eyes of some cunning beast of prey.
He is perhaps thirty years of age, but one can see well enough, just by
looking at him casually, that he has retained all the youthful strength
and elasticity of his splendid body. He has a small black mustache and
black hair and his skin is burned to a deep brown. Even as he lies,
relaxed and listless, on the yellow sand a glow of life and of strength
seems to emanate from him.
As he lies thus one can tell, any schoolboy could tell, that he is
physically made to be the very ideal of American romance. He is a man
of action--young and strong--there can be little doubt he is a man
of daring. What might not be done with such a man! Throw him back
into the days of the early pioneers and he will turn you out another
Daniel Boone. He will creep through hundreds of miles of forests,
never disturbing a grass blade, and bring you back the fair daughter
of the English nobleman, traveling in this country, whose daughter
inadvertently went for an afternoon’s stroll in the wood and was
captured by a skulking Indian; or he will shoot you a squirrel in the
eye at five hundred yards with his faithful rifle, called, playfully,
“Old Betsy.” Move him up a little now. Let, say Bret Harte, have him.
There he is, fine and dandy. He is a gambler in a Western mining camp
now, wearing a silk shirt and a Stetson hat. He will lose you a whole
fortune without the bat of an eye, but his personal associates are a
bit rough. He is always being seen about with Black Peg, who runs a
house of prostitution, and with Silent Smith, the killer.
Until, well, until one day when a New England school-teacher comes
into the rough mining camp. One night she is set upon and is about to
be outraged by a drunken miner. Then he, the associate of Black Peg,
steps forward and shoots the miner. Ten minutes before, he was drunk
and lying in the gutter, so drunk in fact that flies had been using
his eyeballs as sliding places, but the danger to the school-teacher
had sobered him instantly. He is a gentleman now. He offers the
school-teacher his arm and they walk to her cabin discussing Emerson
and Longfellow, and then our central figure of romance leaves her at
her cabin door and goes to a lonely spot in the mountains. He sits down
to wait until winter and the deep snows come, in order that he may
freeze to death. He has realized that he loves the New England lady
and is, in the language of the Far West, as set forth in all the best
books, “not fitten for her.”
The truth is that father, that is to say, my fanciful father, might
well have been used by any one of a dozen of our American hero-makers.
He is in the goods. That is the idea. In the hands of a Jack London
he might have been another Sea Wolf or a musher trudging through
the deep snow of the frozen North, cornering some fair virgin in an
isolated cabin, only to let her off at the last moment out of respect
for her dead mother, who expected something quite different of her.
Then later he might have gone to Yale, and after that become a stock
broker, taking daring chances with railroad stocks, married a woman who
loved only the glare and shine of social life, chucked her, failed in
business, gone farming, and turned out a clean man after all, say in
the pages of the _Saturday Evening Post_. It could have been done.
Where my fanciful father was unfortunate, however, was in that he had
to live in the fancy of a boy in a hay barn--one who had as yet had
little or no experience with heroes.
And then there is no doubt he, from the first, had certain weaknesses.
He wasn’t always kind to old women and children and, as you will see
in the sequel, he wasn’t to be trusted with a virgin. He just wouldn’t
behave himself, and when it comes to this matter of virgins, perhaps
the least said about any man’s attitude toward them--except, to be
sure, in novels and in the movies--the better. As Mr. Howells once
pointed out, “it is better to present to the readers only the brighter
and more pleasant aspects of our common lives.”
However, let us return to the man lying on the sand. There he is, you
see, and it was sure he had been all his life, at any rate, a man of
action. The Civil War had just come to an end a few years before and
during the war he had been rather busily engaged. He had gone into
the war as a spy for the Federal government and when he had got into
the South had managed to engage himself as a spy for the Confederate
side also. This had permitted him to move rather freely back and forth
and to do well carrying contraband goods. When he had no special
information to give to one or the other of his employers he could
invent information--during a war that is always easy. He was, as I have
said, a man of action. He aimed to get results, as they say in the
advertising profession.
The war at an end, he had gone into the South, having several projects
in mind and, at the time we meet him first, he was waiting on the
lonely coast to sight a ship that was to bring some business associates
of his. In a bayou, near the mouth of the river, some ten miles away,
there was a ship, manned by his own men, awaiting his return. He was
engaged in the business of smuggling firearms to various revolutionary
parties in South American republics and was now only waiting for the
coming of a man who was to hand over to him certain monies.
And so the day passed and the evening came and at last an hour before
darkness settled down over the lonely sand dunes a ship appeared. My
mythical father arose and, fastening a cloth to the end of a stick,
waved it back and forth over his head. The ship drew near and two boats
were lowered. Some ten or twelve men were coming ashore and with them
a woman. When they had got into the boats the ship did not wait but
immediately steamed away.
The man on the beach began gathering a great pile of sticks and bits of
driftwood, preparative to building a fire, and now and then he turned
his head to look toward the approaching boats. That there was a woman
among his visitors bothered him. Women were always interfering with
business. Why had they wanted to bring a woman? “To the deuce with
women!” he growled, making his way through the deep sand with a great
pile of sticks in his arms.
Then the boat had landed and there was the old Harry to pay. A
revolutionary party in one of the South American republics had gone
to pieces and nearly all its members had been arrested and were to be
executed. There was no money to pay for the firearms that were to have
been shipped, and the little band of men, now standing on the lonely
beach and facing the smugglers, had barely escaped with their lives.
They had rowed out to sea in two boats and had been picked up by a
steamer, and one among them had in his possession money enough to bribe
the steamer captain to bring them to this spot, where they were to
have landed, just at this time, under quite different circumstances.
Different circumstances indeed!
The lady of the party--well, she was something special--the daughter of
one of the wealthiest sugar planters of her native land, she had given
her young soul to the cause of the revolution and when the smash came
had been compelled to fly with the others. Her own father disowned her
in a moment of cowardice and the death sentence was out against her.
What else could she do but flee?
If they had brought nothing else, they had brought food ashore from the
ship, and the party might as well eat, since they would, in any event,
have to spend the night on the beach. In the morning, it was the hope
expressed by the leader of the party, that the firearms smuggler would
guide them inland. They had friends in America but had they landed
at a regular port of entry it might well have turned out that their
own government would have asked the American government to send them
home--to face the consequences of their folly.
With a grim smile on his cruel lips my fanciful father had heard them
out in silence and now began building a fire. Night came and he moved
softly about. A strange and new impulse had come into his hard and
cruel heart. He had fallen instantly in love with the young female
leader of revolution from the foreign land and was trying to figure out
how he could get away from the others and have a talk with her.
At last when food had been prepared and eaten, he spoke, agreeing to
perform all that had been asked of him, but declaring that the young
woman could not be compelled to spend the night in such a place.
Speaking in the Spanish language--with which he was marvelously
conversant--he commanded the others to stay by the fire while he took
the young woman inland to where, some two miles away, he declared he
had some horses concealed in the stable of an oyster thief, a friend of
his who lived up the bay.
The others consenting, he and the young woman set off. She was very
beautiful and, as they had all been seated about the fire, she had kept
her eyes almost constantly upon the American.
He was of the type of which American heroes are made, you see, and she
had, in her young girlhood, read American novels. In American novels,
as in American plays--as everyone knows--a man can, just as well as
not, be a horse thief, a desperado, a child-kidnapper, a gentleman
burglar, or a well-poisoner for years and years, and then, in an
instant, become the sweetest and most amiable fellow possible, and with
perfect manners too. It is one of the most interesting things about us
Americans. No doubt it came to us from the English. It seems to be an
Anglo-Saxon trait and a very lovely one too. All anyone need do is to
mention in the presence of any one of us at any time the word “mother,”
or leave one of us alone in the darkness in a forest in a lonely cabin
on a mountain at night with a virgin.
With some of us--that is to say, with those of us who have gone into
politics--the same results can sometimes be had by speaking of the
simple and humble laboring man, but it is the virgin that gets us every
shot. In bringing out all the best in us she is a hundred per cent.
efficient.
In the presence of a virgin something like a dawn among mountains
creeps over the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon and a gentle light comes into
his eyes. If he has a dress suit anywhere about he goes and puts it on.
Also he gets himself a shave and a hair cut, and you would be surprised
to see how everything clears up after that.
* * * * *
I, however, digress. In my enthusiasm for my fellows I jerk myself too
violently out of my boyhood. No boy could so wholeheartedly appreciate
or understand our national traits.
The story I had set myself down to tell was that of my own birth into
the world of fancy--as opposed to the rather too realistic birth
already depicted--and that, as I have explained, took place in Camden,
Ohio.
Very well, then, a year has passed and I am being born a second time,
as it were, but this second birth is quite different from the one in
the Ohio town. There is more punch to it. Reading of it will lift you,
who have been patient enough to follow me so far, out of your common
everyday humdrum existences.
And if you have read Freud you will find it of additional interest
that, in my fanciful birth, I have retained the very form and substance
of my earthly mother while getting an entirely new father, whom I set
up--making anything but a hero of him--only to sling mud at him. I am
giving myself away to the initiated, that is certain.
But be that as it may, however, there is mother lying in bed in a
lonely cabin on another long sandy beach, also on the Gulf of Mexico.
(In my fanciful life I have always had a hunger for the warm South.)
Mother has been honorably married to my fanciful father on that very
evening when she went with him from among her fellow-countrymen,
sitting by the fire on that other beach, and after just such a
metamorphosis of his character as she had come to expect through having
read American novels and through having seen two or three American
plays produced in the capital of her native land.
After having secured the horses from the stable of the oyster thief
they had ridden off together and had come at last into a deep forest of
magnolia trees in blossom. A southern moon came up into the sky and so
soft was the night, so gentle the breezes from the now distant sea, and
so sweet the hum of insect life under their horses’ feet, that mother
found herself speaking of her lost home and of her mother.
To my fanciful father the combination--the deep forest, the scent of
the magnolia blossoms and the word “mother”--together with the fact
that he was alone in a dark place with a virgin, an innocent one, these
things were all irresistible to him. The metamorphosis spoken of above
took place, and he proposes marriage and on the spot proposed to live a
better life.
And so they rode together out of the forest and were married, but, in
his case, the metamorphosis did not hold.
Within a few months he had gone back to his old life, leaving mother
alone in a strange land until the time should come when I, having been
born, could take up the task of being her protector and guardian.
And now I am being born. It is late in the afternoon of a still hot
day and I, having just been ushered into the world by the aid of a
fisherman’s wife, who also does duty as a midwife in that isolated
place and who has now left to return again late at night--I, having
been so born, am lying on the bed beside mother and thinking my first
thoughts. In my own fancy I was, from the very first, a remarkable
child and did not cry out as most newly born infants do, but lay buried
in deep thought. In the little hut it is stifling hot, and flies and
other winged insects of the warm South are buzzing in the air. Strange
insects of gigantic size crawl over the walls and, from far-away
somewhere, there comes the murmur of the sea. Mother is lying beside
me, weak and wan.
We lie there for a long time and, young as I am, I realize that she is
tired and discouraged about life. “Why has not life in America turned
out as it always did in the novels and plays?” she is asking herself;
but I, having at that time still retained all my young courage and
freshness of outlook, am not discouraged.
There is a sound outside the cabin, the swishing sound of heavy feet
dragged through the hot dry sands, and the low moaning sound of a woman
crying.
Again a steamer, from foreign parts, has visited that lonely coast
and again a boat has been lowered. In the boat is my fanciful father
accompanied by four of his evil henchmen and accompanied also by
another woman. She is young and fair, another virgin; but now, alas,
father has become hardened on that subject!
The strange woman is terribly afraid but is at the same time in love
with her captor (owing to the strange natures of women, this, you
will understand, is entirely possible), and father has had the cruel
impulse to bring the two women together. Perhaps he wants to see them
suffer the pangs of jealousy.
But he will get no such pangs from mother. With her son beside her she
lies silently waiting.
For what? That is the question that, try as he would, the son could not
answer.
And so the two lie there in silence on the poor bed in the hut while
that strange monster of a man drags another woman across the yellow
sands and in at the door of the hut. What has happened is that he has
gone back to his old wicked life and, with his comrade, has joined
another revolutionary party in another South American republic, and
this time the revolution has been successful and he and his partners
have helped sack a South American city.
At the forefront of the invaders was my fanciful father and--whatever
else may be said of him it can never be said that he lacked in
courage--it was from him, in fact, that I got my own courage.
Into the invaded city he had rushed at the head of his men and, when
the city was being sacked, he demanded riches for his men but took none
for himself. For his own portion of the loot he had taken the virginal
daughter of the leader of the Federal forces and it was this woman he
was now dragging in at the door of our hut.
She was very beautiful and perhaps, had I been older, I should not have
blamed father, but at that time the love of right was very strong in me.
When father saw that I had already been born he staggered back for a
step and leaned against the wall of the cabin, still however clinging
to the hand of his new-found woman. “I had hoped to arrive before or
at the very hour of birth, I had counted on that,” he muttered, cursing
under his breath.
For a moment he stood looking at mother and myself and both of us
looked calmly at him.
“Birth--the birth hour--is the test of womanhood,” he said, taking
hold of the shoulder of his new woman and shaking her violently, as
though to fix her attention. “I wanted you to see how the women of my
own race meet bravely all such trying situations; for, as you must
know, by the customs of my country, the woman who marries an American
becomes instantly an American, with all the American virtues. It is our
climate, I dare say, and it happens to people very quickly.
“At any rate there it is. The woman you see before you I really love,
but she has become Anglo-Saxon, through having married me, and is
therefore above me, as far above me as the stars.
“I cannot live with her. She is too good, too brave,” said my fanciful
father, staggering through the door and dragging his woman after him.
Outside the door I heard him still talking loudly to his new woman as
they went away. “Our Anglo-Saxon women are the most wonderful creatures
in the world,” I heard him saying. “In a few years now they will run
the world.”
* * * * *
It was growing dark in the hayloft in the barn in the state of Ohio.
Did I, as I lay deeply buried in the warm hay, really imagine the
absurd scene depicted above? Although I was very young I had already
read many novels and stories.
In any event the whole silly affair has remained in my fancy for years.
When I was a lad I played with such fanciful scenes as other boys play
with brightly colored marbles. From the beginning there has been, as
opposed to my actual life, these grotesque fancies. Later, to be sure,
I did acquire more or less skill in bringing them more and more closely
into the world of the actual. They were but the raw materials with
which the story-writer must work as the worker in woods works with
trees cut in a forest.
As for the fancies themselves, they have always seemed to me like trees
that have grown without having been planted. Later, after the period
in my own life of which I am now writing, I worked for many years as
a laborer in many places, and gradually as I stood all day beside a
lathe in some factory, or later went about among business men trying
to sell some article, in which I was myself not interested, I began to
look at other men and to wonder what absurd fancies went on in secret
within them. There was that curiosity and there was something else. I
had perhaps, as I have no doubt all people have, a great desire to be
loved and a little respected. My own fancies rule me. Even to-day I
cannot go into a movie theatre and see there some such national hero
as, say, Bill Hart, without wishing myself such another. In the theatre
I sit looking at the people and see how they are all absorbed in the
affairs of the man on the stage. Now he springs lightly off a horse and
goes toward the door of a lonely cabin. We, in the theatre, know that
within the cabin are some ten desperate men all heavily armed with guns
and with them, bound to a chair, is a fair woman, another virgin got
off the reservation, as it were. Bill stops at the door of the cabin
and takes a careful look at his guns, and we, in the audience, know
well enough that in a few minutes now he will go inside and just shoot
all of those ten fellows in there to death, fairly make sieves of them,
and that he will get wounded himself but not seriously--just enough to
need the help of the virgin in getting out of the cabin and onto his
horse--so he can ride to her father’s ranch house and go to bed and get
well after a while, in time for the wedding.
All these things we know, but we love our Bill and can hardly wait
until the shooting begins. As for myself I never see such a performance
but that I later go out of the theatre and, when I get off into a quiet
street alone, I become just such another. Looking about to see that I
am unobserved, I jerk two imaginary guns out of my hip pockets and draw
a quick bead on some near-by tree. “Dog,” I cry, “unhand her!” All my
early reading of American literature comes into my mind and I try to
do a thing that is always being spoken of in the books. I try to make
my eyes narrow to pin points. Bill Hart can do it wonderfully in the
pictures and why not I? As I sat in the movie house it was evident
that Bill Hart was being loved by all the men women and children
sitting about and I also want to be loved--to be a little dreaded and
feared, too, perhaps. “Ah! there goes Sherwood Anderson! Treat him with
respect. He is a bad man when he is aroused. But treat him kindly and
he will be as gentle with you as any cooing dove.”
* * * * *
As a boy lying buried in the hay I presume I had some such notion as
that, and later as a man standing by a lathe in some factory some such
notion must have still been in my mind. I wanted then to be something
heroic in the eyes of my own mother, now dead, and at the same time
wanted to be something heroic in my own eyes too.
One could not do the thing in actual life, so one did it in a new world
created within one’s fancy.
And what a world that fanciful one--how grotesque, how strange, how
teeming with strange life! Could one ever bring order into that world?
In my own actual work as a tale-teller I have been able to organize and
tell but a few of the fancies that have come to me. There is a world
into which no one but myself has ever entered and I would like to take
you there; but how often when I go, filled with confidence, to the very
door leading into that strange world, I find it locked! Now, in the
morning, I myself cannot enter the land into which all last night, as I
lay awake in my bed, I went alone at will.
There are so many people in that land of whom I should like to tell
you. I should like to take you with me through the gate into the land,
let you wander there with me. There are people there with whom I should
like you to talk. There is the old woman accompanied by the gigantic
dogs who died alone in a wood on a winter day, the stout man with the
gray eyes and with the pack on his back, who stands talking to the
beautiful woman as she sits in her carriage, the little dark woman with
the boyish husband who lives in a small frame house by a dusty road far
out, in the country.
These and many other figures, all having a life of their own, all
playing forever in the field of my fancy. The fanciful shadowy life
striving to take on flesh, to live as you and I live, to come out of
the shadowy world of the fancy into the actuality of accomplished art.
When I had grown to be a man, and had begun to try a little to organize
this inner life, I wondered often if a woman, being pregnant, and
walking about through the streets, past factory doors, in the “loop
district” of Chicago, let us say, if such a woman being conscious of
something alive within--that is, at the moment a part of herself, flesh
of her flesh, and that will presently come out of herself to live its
own life, in a world her eyes now see passing before her--if such a
woman does not have dreadful moments of fear.
To the tale-teller, you must understand, the telling of the tale is
the cutting of the natal cord. When the tale is told it exists outside
oneself and often it is more living than the living man from whom it
came. The imagined figure may well live on and on in the fanciful life
of others after the man from whose lips it came, or whose fingers
guided the pen that wrote the tale, long after he is forgotten, and
I have myself had some curious experiences of this sort. A public
speaker, in speaking of my Winesburg tales, praised me as a writer
but spoke slightingly of the figures that lived in the tales. “They
weren’t worth telling about,” he said; and I remember that I sat at the
back of the room, filled with people, hearing him speak, and remember
sharply also just the sense of horror that crept over me at the moment.
“It is a lie. He has missed the point,” I cried to myself. Could the
man not understand that he was doing a quite unpermissible thing? As
well go into the bedroom of a woman during her lying-in and say to
her: “You are no doubt a very nice woman, but the child to which you
have just given birth is a little monster and will be hanged.” Surely
any man can understand that, to such a one, it might be permitted to
speak at any length regarding her own failings as a woman, but--if the
child live--surely this other thing must not be done. “It must not be
condemned for the failings of the mother,” I thought, shivering with
fright. As I sat listening certain figures, Wing Biddlebaum, Hugh
McVey, Elizabeth Willard, Kate Swift, Jesse Bentley, marched across the
field of my fancy. They had lived within me, and I had given a kind
of life to them. They had lived, for a passing moment anyway, in the
consciousness of others beside myself. Surely I myself might well be
blamed--condemned--for not having the strength or skill in myself to
give them a more vital and a truer life--but that they should be called
people not fit to be written about filled me with horror.
However, I again find myself plunging forward into a more advanced
and sophisticated point of view than could have been held by the boy,
beginning to remake his own life more to his own liking by plunging
into a fanciful life. I shall be blamed. Those of my critics who
declare I have no feeling for form will be filled with delight over the
meandering formlessness of these notes.
It does not matter. My point is that, in the boy, as later in the man
into whom the boy is to grow, there are two beings, each distinct, each
having its own life and each of importance to the man himself.
The boy who lives in the world of fact is to help his father put a
priming coat on a new house built by a prosperous Ohio farmer. In my
day we used a dirty yellow ochre for the purpose. The color satisfied
no sensual part of myself. How I hated it! It was used because it was
cheap and later was to be covered up, buried away out of sight. Ugly
colors, buried away out of sight, have a way of remaining always in
sight in the consciousness of the painter who has spread them.
* * * * *
In the hayloft the fat boy was awake now. Darkness was coming fast and
he must bestir himself, must if possible escape the wrath of his father
for the day wasted in entertaining me. He crawled up out of his own
hole and, reaching down, put a fat hand on my shoulder and shook me. He
had a plan for his own escape which he whispered to me as my head came
up into sight in the dim evening light in the loft.
He was an only son and his mother was fond of him--she would even lie
for him. Now he would creep away unseen to the house and frankly tell
his mother he has been fooling about with me all day long. She would
scold a little but, after a time, when his father came into the house
for supper and when in harsh tones he asked what the boy had been
doing, the gentle little lie would come. “It won’t really be a lie,”
the fat boy declared stoutly, defending the virtue of his mother. “Do
you expect me to do all the housework and the churning as well?” the
farm woman would ask her husband sharply. She, it seemed, was a person
of understanding and did not expect a boy to do a man’s work all the
time. “You’d think dad never was a kid,” he whispered to me. “He works
all the time and he wants me to work all the time too. I wouldn’t
never have no fun if it wasn’t for ma. Gee, I only wish I had a dad
like your’n. He’s just like a kid himself, isn’t he now?”
In the gathering darkness the farm boy and I crept down a ladder to the
floor of the barn and he ran away to the farmhouse, his feet making no
sound in the soft mud of the farmyard. The rain persisted and the night
would be cold. In another part of the barn the farmer was doing his
evening chores, assisted by father--always the accommodating one--who
held the lantern and ran to get ears of corn to throw into the horses’
feed-boxes. I could hear his voice, calling cheerfully. Already he knew
all the farm horses by name and spoke of them familiarly. “How many
ears for old Frank? Does Topsy get five ears too?”
Outside the barn, as I stood under the eaves, there was still a faint
streak of light in the western sky, and the new house we were to give
the priming coat, built close down to the road, could still be seen.
Little strings of water fell from the roof above and made a tiny
stream at my feet. The new house had two full stories and an attic.
How magnificent to be a man, to be rich and to be able to build such a
house! When the fat boy grew into manhood he would inherit the house
and many broad acres. He also would be rich and would have a great
house, with bathrooms and perhaps electric lights. The automobile had
come. No doubt he would have one. How magnificent a house, a farm, an
automobile--a beautiful wife to lie with him at night! I had been to
Sunday school and had heard the stories of the magnificent men of old,
Jacob and David and that young man Absalom, who had everything in the
world to look forward to but who nevertheless did unspeakable things.
And now the voices of the men inside the barn seemed far away. The
new house was in some queer way a menace to me. I wondered why. The
older house, the one the young New Englander had builded when he
had first come into the new land, stood far away from the road. One
went, from the barns, along a path to the right. The path lay beside
an apple orchard, and at the orchard’s end there was a bridge over a
small stream. Then one crossed the bridge and started climbing the
hill against the side of which the house had been built. It had been
built of logs, very solidly, on a small terrace, and as the farmer had
begun to prosper wings had been added. Back of the house stood forest
trees, some the same trees that had been there when the first room of
the cabin was built. The young farmer, with some of his neighbors,
had felled the trees for his house on the very ground on which it now
stood, and then during the long winter he had felled many other trees
in the flat plain below, where his farming land was to lie, and, on a
certain day, there had no doubt been a log-rolling, with other young
farmers and their women coming from far and near. A whole forest of
magnificent trees had been rolled into a great pile and burned--there
had been feastings, tests of physical strength among the young men, a
few unmarried fellows about, looking shyly at the unmarried girls, game
on the table, talk in the evening of the possibilities of a war with
the slaveholding farmers of the South.
All these things the older house had seen as it crouched on the side
of the hill, and now it seemed to have crept away out of sight in
the darkness, hidden itself among the trees still left standing on
the hill; but even as I stood looking lights began to appear at its
windows. The old house seemed smiling and calling to me. Now, myself
and my brothers had no home--the house in which we at that time lived
was not a home--for us there could be no home now that mother was not
there. We but stayed temporarily in a house, with a few sticks of
furniture--waiting--for what?
The older people of our native town had gone out of themselves, warmly,
toward us. How many times had I been stopped on the street by some
solid citizen of our town, a carpenter, Vet Howard, a wheelwright,
Val Voght, a white bearded old merchant, Thad Hurd. In the eyes of
these older people, as they talked to me, there was something, a light
shining as the lights now shone from the farmhouse among the trees.
They knew father--loved him, too, in a way--but well they knew he was
not one to plan for his sons, help his sons in making their own plans.
Was there something wistful in their eyes as they stood talking to the
boy on the village street? I remember the old merchant spoke of God,
but the carpenter and the wheelwright spoke of something else--of the
new times coming. “Things are on the march,” they said, “and the new
generation will do great things. We older fellows belong to something
that is passing. We had our trades and worked at them, but you young
fellows have to think of something else. It is going to be a time when
money will count big, so save your money, boy. You have energy. I’ve
watched you. Now you are a little wild after the girls and going to
dances. I saw you going down toward the cemetery with that little
Truscan girl last Wednesday evening. Better cut that all out. Work.
Save money. Get into the manufacturing business if you can. The thing
now is to get rich, be in the swim. That’s the ticket.”
The older fellows had said these words to me, somewhat wistfully, as
the old house, hidden now in the darkness, seemed to look at me. Was it
because the men who said the words were themselves not quite convinced?
Did the old American farmhouse among the trees know the end of its life
was at hand and was it also calling wistfully to me?
One remains doubtful and, as I now sit writing, I am most doubtful of
all the veracity of this impression I am trying to give of myself as a
boy standing in the darkness in the shelter of the barn’s eaves.
Did I really want to be the son of some prosperous farmer with the
prospect ahead of some day owning land of my own and having a big new
house and an automobile? Or did my eyes but turn hungrily toward the
older house because it represented to my lonely heart the presence of a
mother--who would even go to the length of lying for a fellow?
I was sure I wanted something I did not have, could never (having my
father’s blood in me) achieve.
Old houses in which long lives have been lived, in which men and women
have lived, suffered and endured together--a people, my own people,
come to a day when entire lives are lived in one place, a people who
have come to love the streets of old towns, the mellow color of the
stone walls of old houses.
Did I want these things, even then? Being an American in a new land
and facing a new time, did I want even what Europe must have meant
in the hearts of many of the older men who had talked to the boy on
the streets of an Ohio town? Was there something in me that, at the
moment, went wandering back through the blood of my ancestors, through
the blood of the ancestors of the men about me--to England, to Italy,
Sweden, Russia, France, Germany--older places, older towns, older
impulses?
The new house, the farmer was having built, stood clear of the
forest and directly faced the dirt road that led into town. It had
instinctively run out to meet the coming automobile and the interurban
car--and how blatantly it announced itself! “You see I am new, I cost
money. I am big. I am bold,” it seemed to be saying.
And looking at it I crouched for a moment against the wall of the barn,
instinctively afraid.
Was it because the new house was, for all its size, cheaply constructed
and at bottom ugly? Could I have known that even as a boy? To make such
a declaration would, I am sure, be giving myself an early critical
instinct too much developed. It would be making something of a little
monster of the boy crouching there in the darkness by the barn.
All I can say is that I remember how the boy who, on that evening long
ago, went slowly away from the barn through the mud of the barnyard,
turned his back on the new house, and stopped for a moment on the
bridge leading to the old house, sad and frightened. Before him lay a
life of adventures (imagined if not actually experienced), but at the
moment he went not toward the future but toward the past. In the older
house there was, to be sure, a meal to be had without labor--in this
case a meal prepared at the hands of a kindly faced woman--and there
was also a warm bed into which the boy could crawl to indulge all night
long undisturbed in his dreams; but there was something else. A sense
of security? It may be, after all, just the sense of security, or
assurance of warmth, food, and leisure--most of all leisure--the boy
wanted on that evening, that, for some reason I cannot explain, marked
the end of boyhood for him.