Ralph Tower, Alwyn’s father, was not an educated man. Because of their
poverty his parents could not hope to send more than one son away to
school. They wanted a preacher in the family, for no calling was so
honorable as the ministry. Jim, their eldest, was more studious than
the other two boys, spoke fluently, and took pains with his appearance.
So, while still almost a child, he was chosen to receive an education,
and it was useless for Ralph and Evan to have ambitions; they would
have to stay on the farm in any case.
The three grew up together happily and roughly. Their mother
disciplined them with a worn army belt which hung behind the door;
their father ignored them unless there was work to be done. They spent
all their spare time in the woods, hunting coons by lantern light,
trapping muskrats and skunks, which they drowned and washed in a
deserted well. One evening a cow who had dropped her calf alone in the
marshes, charged them, and Ralph, the last of the three to take flight,
broke his leg. Later Evan fell from a beam in the barn without being
seriously hurt, and when he was eleven a furious ram kept him in a
tree for several hours. Their clothes and their bodies exhaled a faint
animal odor, which, according to their father, made the house smell
like a wigwam. They were afraid of girls, and preferred each other to
their friends. Undernourished but energetic, half savage but hopeful,
a poor farmer’s ordinary sons, dressed in overalls or grown men’s
clothes hastily cut down, with copper toes on their boots and rabbits’
feet in their pockets for good luck--until their late adolescence they
were as much alike as young dogs of the same litter.
Then mature character developed out of the characterlessness of
boyhood, and they drew apart, at first imperceptibly, then with
decision, as if, while roving like aimless wild animals over the
countryside, they had come upon roads leading in three directions; and
Jim, suddenly sober and self-conscious, began to look toward the future
which the piety of his parents had chosen for him.
Those were hard times in Wisconsin. They heard their father say to
their mother that the farm would have to be mortgaged before long; and
for some time the younger boys thought they were as well off as Jim,
for apparently, in that family, no one could have a start in life.
But in 1894 Timothy Davis began to send their uncle Leander money
from the West every month. Leander was in poor health, and one day he
proposed to his brother and sister-in-law that an “old bachelor’s wing”
be added to their house; the money Timothy sent should pay for it, keep
them from running into debt, and enable them to send Jim to college as
well. Henry and Rose promised to care for him as long as he lived; so
he gave up the mail route, sold his house and garden, and as soon as
the new rooms were completed made his home in one of them, where he sat
by himself all day, paying no attention to the farmwork, rarely taking
part in family discussions, and watching his nephews with the timid
solicitude which is an old bachelor’s way of loving another man’s sons.
The youngest, Evan, was a wistful, freckled stripling with a quick
temper. The path of an unlucky life seemed to have been blazed ahead
of this boy by his peculiar spirit which no one understood, and people
began to say that he would come to a bad end. He loved no one but his
uncle, and it was certain that he and his father would never be at
peace. He kept threatening to run away from home, and Ralph at least
knew that sooner or later he would.
Ralph wanted to go to a school in Milwaukee and become a veterinary
surgeon, having a passion for animals, dreaming of race horses, and
prize bulls, and dogs worth as much as a whole farm. But he was
obviously the one who would never go anywhere, who would have to make
sacrifices, and learn to be patient with their father as he grew old
and arbitrary. His brothers were going to leave the country, but he
would have to turn back among the still only half-cultivated hills, to
go on being what they had all been as ignorant children, what their
forefathers had been: a child of nature. He was strong, obedient, and
moody, resenting what the future might do, as if, mysteriously, at the
age of eighteen, the past had already done its worst.
In the autumn of 1895 Jim, the lucky one, went off alone to a little
college town to learn how to preach virtue and pious progress and the
fear of God: a rudely handsome young man, anxious, awkward, and eager
to please. The allowance which he received from home was inadequate,
though it looked so generous to his puritan father, so magical to his
brothers; but his pleasant face made it easy to find employment in the
afternoons and evenings; he was used to harder work, and study was
child’s play.
He had many talents, and for four years he was pleasantly occupied by
small, gratifying successes. There were boating parties, Sunday night
suppers, and picnics; embarrassed, idealistic friendships; and a series
of best girls with rigid waists, pompous hats, and exciting flounces.
He took part in the brutal wedge-football of the period, winning as a
trophy a turtlenecked sweater adorned with a great scarlet A. His hair
parted in the middle and falling over each ear in a loose, blond wave,
he won an oratorical contest with a speech called “Macbeth and Iago, or
Intellect and Ambition.” He developed a fine bass voice, and traveled
all over the Middle West with a male quartet. He was photographed
again and again, usually in profile, and clippings from small-town
newspapers were sent back to the farm, where they were read aloud with
astonishment.
Though none of his friends were irreligious, culture seemed to be
more highly regarded than mere religion. He experienced some things
and thought about many others of which his father at least would
have disapproved. He was being prepared for life, not precisely, he
felt, for the ministry; for a glorious destiny, perhaps, but perhaps
it would seem inglorious to his loving, narrow-minded family; and he
began to think uneasily of the hard-working men on the farm and their
expectations.
The Spanish-American War broke out, and one day his mother wrote that
Evan, having nothing to look forward to at home, had joined the army.
America had been at peace since before Jim was born, and he thought of
war as if it were death itself, and pictured the island in the south
as a military graveyard, full of soldiers and flowers. At any rate,
reckless Evan would be the sort of soldier who has no future; he might
as well be dead. The family had grown smaller by one. Ralph would do
what their father had done before him--work the land and care for the
old people; there was no one but Jim left to do what their father had
wanted to do. Their father’s life had been a long, impatient prophecy,
a prophecy of success at last for one of the Towers, which Jim alone
bore the burden of having to fulfill. So he felt many tired, fanatic
eyes upon him--not only his father’s, but those of the other aging
pioneers who had conquered an empire in which no one had yet become
famous, and his envious brothers’ eyes, especially Ralph’s. Dreaming
of family councils around his bed during which it was decided that he
had wasted his opportunities, Jim began to feel that, like an heir
apparent, he had no right to dream, nor to make plans or friends, nor
even to marry, except as it furthered the ambitions which his family
had, and which he was obliged to represent.
There was a girl named Irene Geiger who, among others, wanted to marry
him. She also had a beautiful singing voice, and intended to prepare
herself for grand opera. They sang together. Her father, a wealthy
brewer of German birth, said with great feeling: “Young fellow, you
certainly sing fine. You must get your voice trained.”
Jim dreamed of changing the direction of his life, knowing that if
he married this cheerful, ambitious girl, her father would give him
every opportunity, sparing no expense. He told himself that his
family expected of him fame, having passed their lives in obscurity,
and prosperity which they might share, having for generations lived
and died in poverty; that he stood on the brilliant threshold of an
unexpected life, of a career more brilliant than the ministry; and
finally that music as well was a divine persuasion, like argument
and prayer. He pictured himself in a satin suit and the blaze of
footlights, singing as easily as a meadow lark, while the large
bouquets of admirers who had forgotten all their troubles fell on the
stage around him. He was at once listener and singer, and a flood that
was both light and sound troubled him and then made him forget his
trouble. A sort of excitement poured also from that imaginary stage
into his mind, even into his body, so that when he held Irene’s hand he
fancied that he loved her as the heroes of music loved their heroines;
for a moment he forgot not only the imaginary audience, but the actual
audience of father, mother, and brother, anxiously watching his life.
Would not his father and brother be ill at ease in that future
audience, with their Sunday coats glossy at the elbows, their
celluloid collars slipping up around their strong, red throats, their
hands hardened by hammers and shovels and harnesses? At the thought of
them, Jim felt lonesome and cold, though he stood with his sweetheart
under the chestnuts on the campus, and though those chestnuts were in
bloom; and he remembered how, when he was a six-year-old boy, walking
home alone in a winter twilight through the woods, having found a
handmade whistle in his pocket, he had blown on it as loudly as he
could, in order to forget that he might get lost and freeze to death;
perhaps that was what music was for....
Irene was very much in love, and often embarrassed him by forcing her
way into his heart, as a woman might throw open a door and rustle into
a room where a young man--his heavy head in his hands, his forehead
wrinkled, his eyes half closed--broods upon his limited resources, and
his ambitions, and the opposition to them which may arise. But his
new ambitions were hers as well, and she held in her generous hands
resources which seemed to him scarcely limited at all. So at last he
made up his mind to marry her.
At the end of May, chaperoned by her cousin, a sturdy German spinster,
he took her to Hope’s Corner to be seen by his parents, taking with
him as well for their approval his new plans for the future, about
which he had not dared to write a letter. As they drew near the farm
he thought of the old-fashioned morality of which it was an unbroken
stronghold, and began to study the bright, overdressed girl beside him
with anxiety, almost with disapprobation; and he wished that Evan were
there, so that by contrast he might seem to his father an obedient
son--that his uncle Leander were there to defend him, as he always
defended the young against the old.
After Evan had gone away to war, Leander had fallen ill, and upon his
recovery had announced that he was going to California. “A sick spell
at my time of life shows the way the wind is blowing. I want to see
Tim again before I die.” Knowing that he overestimated his strength,
and hoping that he still had a long time to live, the family had
discouraged him; but a little before Jim’s visit he had set out alone.
So Jim would have to speak for himself; and in imagination, he heard
himself stuttering, or saw himself unable to say anything at all.
In the evening, after the preliminary greetings had been accomplished
by his parents with a noncommittal, awkward, but faultless courtesy,
the German girl, eager and unabashed, sat down on the organ stool, and
sang, “_I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls_.” Jim sang, and joined her
in one or two duets. Then she played the prelude of a passionate aria;
the old cabinet organ rattled as her vigorous tread filled the bellows
with air, as her capable hands pulled out stop after stop; and when she
pressed open the swell-box, her skirt spread out over her knees like a
great satin bagpipe. But Jim whispered that this piece would not please
the family, and they sang instead a two-part anthem. Irene looked
appealingly, as it were over the series of strong, high notes, toward
his parents, and gazed at Ralph as a woman in love does gaze at a young
man who may become her brother-in-law--gazed, in fact, a moment longer
than she ought to have done.
The stern father, though proud of Jim’s talent and his own
understanding of music, listened suspiciously. Little Flora wept
with pleasure. Their mother said, “Now that--that is singing I can
appreciate. I wish Evan and Leander were here to enjoy it.”
Then Flora was sent to bed. Ralph took a lamp, escorted the two ladies,
who pretended to be tired, to their room, and returned. Jim was
standing dramatically in front of the organ, as if he were going to
sing again--without accompaniment this time.
“Pa--ma--” he said, “I want to marry Irene.”
Ralph blushed. Jim looked at his mother, and she looked at her husband
for permission to congratulate her son, but his face was inexpressive;
his twisted hands, one on each knee, did not move.
The silence was miserable. Jim ran his forefinger around his collar.
“I want to be a singer. I guess I’ll give concerts, with her. I can do
that better, better than be a minister.”
At last the father answered. “No. It’s not right. I won’t have it.
We’ve spent too much on your schooling--”
“It won’t cost you a cent,” Jim pleaded. “Irene’s father is well off.
I’ll be trained with her.”
“How did he make all this money?” his father inquired scornfully.
“He’s a ... He was a--brewer,” the young man admitted.
“There you are. A brewer!” his father snapped. “I tell you, it’s enough
to make a man lose heart!”
Jim’s mother said, “Now, Henry, if he’s set his mind on it--”
“No, sir. I didn’t bring up my son to be a good-for-nothing singer.”
There followed another sharp silence.
Jim bit his lips, cried, “I’m a grown man,” and strode out of the room.
Presently Ralph said, “Good night, pa and ma,” and followed his brother.
The mother rose. “Well, Henry, they’ll have to get married sooner or
later. And live their own lives. We can’t stop them.”
“Say no more about it,” he replied.
She went into the kitchen, set the batter for the breakfast pancakes on
the stove to rise, and began to prepare for the night.
Henry Tower noticed that he had been left alone. After a time he pulled
open the top drawer of a bureau, took out his flutes and his fife,
unwrapped their flannel coverings, and lifted them one by one to his
lips. He gazed into the finger holes, which had looked up at him all
during the last war like a row of small, expressionless eyes. His
favorite son a good-for-nothing singer.... He was glad that Evan, the
least obedient, was a soldier; war was bad, but better than disgraceful
behavior. He blew very softly into the flutes, not only so that no one
in the house should know what he was doing--that part of him which
loved music playing so softly that the part of him which hated it
could not hear; as, of two people lying side by side, the one who is
sleepless whistles a little in the night. He knew what no one else had
discovered, that he was growing deaf. His rheumatic hands closed on the
flutes as if he meant to break them, and he walked across to the window
as if he meant to throw them away.
His wife opened the bedroom door. She saw him put away the instruments
and wished that she had not, knowing that when his weakness had been
exposed he never gave in to it. She sighed, for her husband, for her
son--whichever would have to give up in the end. The Towers would have
to settle their differences between them; she could not take sides.
Meanwhile, in the room over their heads, the boys were undressing
slowly. Jim sat in his nightshirt, staring angrily at an eagle woven in
the rag rug with its wings outspread; it was clear from his expression
that he meant to go against his father’s will.
Ralph threw his shirt and trousers on a chair, and removed them at
once, lest the odor of the stables be transferred to his brother’s
college clothes. “You can’t do it,” he said without any introduction.
“Can’t marry her, Jim.”
Jim looked up hopelessly. He expected sympathy and encouragement from
everyone as young or younger than he, but they were all against him;
Ralph on his father’s side.... “Pa’s too old-fashioned,” he muttered.
“Unreasonable. Things are changing.”
“I’m not talking about pa. Getting married doesn’t change much.”
“What do you mean, then?”
In the silent room both brothers breathed heavily, and the lamp gulped
on the table as the kerosene went up the wick, and they could hear the
blows of a horse’s hoofs in the stall, like those of a fist on a great
wooden opponent.
“Well ...” Ralph began gloomily--“Well, when I took her to her room,
that old maid went ahead. Your girl held my hand. She kissed me.”
Knowing his own passions, he expected to see an angry movement or a
change of color, but Jim only prodded the rag eagle with one foot.
“You know,” Ralph went on, “I’m going to get married pretty soon.
Marianne Duff. Her engagement to that bishop’s boy turned out to be
nothing. We love each other. She wouldn’t do what your girl did. I
couldn’t have such a thing happen.”
Jim stared in astonishment at his brother, his brother’s excited eyes,
his large earth-colored hands working to turn back the cuffs of the
nightshirt. Jealousy, the jealousy that a man ought to feel, that he
ought to feel and did not.... He asked himself if he really loved Irene.
“Besides,” Ralph insisted, “you hadn’t ought to be a singer. Pa’s made
sacrifices. Only one of us boys could have a chance. I gave up wanting
to be a veterinary so you could be a minister--we all want you to. You
sing well enough already. Singing doesn’t count--it’s not much of a
man’s job.”
Jim’s dream of a career changed. Everyone left the great hall in
which he had wanted to sing, that is, everyone he loved; just a few
supercilious strangers would be there, to make fun of the country
boy--no one who loved him. Suddenly he felt that it was a lonesome
business to have his good luck and be educated. Apparently, in a
measure, it would satisfy Ralph to have his lucky brother preaching
the gospel. Apparently music was a private, even a selfish pleasure,
whereas religion comforted everyone. It was a lonesome business to be
selfish.
Ralph had nothing to add. He knelt on his side of the bed to say his
prayers, forcing Jim to his knees, though there was not a whisper of
thanksgiving in his heart and he did not know what to ask for. Looking
strangely weary and deaf, Ralph said his prayers proudly, with his
eyes only half shut, as at the end of a serious council the head of a
family prays for them all. Jim felt like a boy who has heard the last
words of a father or grandfather, and is afraid to try to get along
without a blessing. Ralph was younger than himself, but it takes youth
and strength to represent an authority as immortally old as that seemed
to be. Over the patchwork quilt--of serviceable materials that had
worn well, in dull colors that did not fade--Ralph’s dark head, as he
whispered almost perfunctorily to himself and God, nodded slightly as
if he were giving his consent to something and refusing something else.
Refusing Jim’s new ambitions; refusing, incidentally, the girl who was
not worthy of being his sister-in-law....
Then Jim thought that only a man who is nobody’s son and brother can do
what he likes--he had been a son and brother before he knew what music
was. He had seemed for a few months to be an exception to the family
rule of disappointment; there were to be no exceptions. His dream of
a career, the career of the dream itself, was over. Whether he liked
it or not, it would be a lifework in itself to recompense them for the
opportunities they had given him; whatever he wanted to represent, from
now on he would have to represent their ideals. Perhaps, he thought,
that is all it means to be a servant of God.
As a servant of God he felt exceedingly humble, so humble in fact that
he did not feel ashamed--not of having disappointed them, nor of being
about to disappoint Irene, nor of the likelihood of disappointing
himself all the rest of his life. Ralph, though younger, was more of a
man than he; as he stood up, Jim saw how his body was one hard, thick
knot from head to foot, which would never be untied. Love in Ralph’s
heart was the passion which he had pretended to feel, which he might
pretend to feel again, and perhaps never would. Ralph, at the end of a
hard day’s work, said his prayers with a sober passion, as he ought to
be able to do and was not. Ralph, as if by inheritance or by instinct,
had in his heart love, and religion, and obedience.
He himself, James Arthur Tower, had only his talents. A mouthpiece, to
sing only when the joy of others required song, which was not often; to
pray, whether he had anything to pray for or not, out loud, for others,
because he had a gift of speech.... Just as Ralph rose from his knees,
Jim thought of his prayer, the prayer of all such men as he: that he
might make use of other people’s passion, in his life--he would have
need of it; and that those who loved him should have no reason to be
ashamed of him; and that he might never be found out. His will had been
broken, and he felt as if he did not have a heart of his own to break.
Ralph blew out the lamp, and the two brothers slipped into bed.
Next morning the postman, Leander’s successor, brought the news of
Leander’s death. He had had a stroke of paralysis on his journey west,
had been taken from the train to a hospital in Oklahoma, and after
lying unconscious for three days, had passed away. The letter came from
the Catholic priest who had buried him.
In the sorrow and confusion of that morning Jim’s trouble was almost
forgotten. He could not wait for it to be remembered, having to return
to college with his guests. His father took leave of him with these
words: “Well, Jim, we know best. You’ll get over it.”
Jim gazed at Ralph; Ralph stared impassively at him.
“You’ve got a duty in this world,” their father added. “You’ve got to
bear witness for the Lord. Remember that.”
Irene overheard, and did not altogether misinterpret their glances,
in which there was evidence of mourning for something beside the old
bachelor’s death--mourning in which she, though a stranger, had a part.
As they went back in the little slow train, the German aunt who
believed that a prompt marriage must have been arranged, peering into
their gloomy faces, congratulated herself aloud on the fact that she
was an old maid.
Jim never told Irene that the visit had failed, that his father and
brother were stronger than he; she did not need to be told. A flood of
tears seemed to run into her heart whenever she thought of it, whenever
she sang; but all her friends and even she herself observed that it
gave her voice a new beauty, which encouraged her to go on with her
career alone.
Jim worked all summer as the college president’s secretary, entered a
theological seminary in the autumn, and at the end of September went
home to be the best man at his brother’s marriage to Marianne Duff.