empty and the streets began to fill. About four o'clock the "Parade"
commenced, what we should in England call a procession. Every one who
owned a car had it out, carrying roses and ferns and flags. There was
a continual hooting and coughing of motor-horns, and an increasing
buzz of talk. The "Eighth Regimental Band" appeared, and stood with
their instruments in the roadway, chatting to passers-by and being
admired. The firemen came with new hats on--their work at the Opera
House happily concluded. They now bore on their shoulders wreaths,
which were to be carried to the graves of the heroes in the cemetery
outside the town. The High School band formed up. A tall man brought
a new-bought banner of the Stars and Stripes, which hung from a
bird-headed pole. Boy Scouts came in costume--as it were in the rags of
the war. The marching order was formed, and then came up what I thought
to be the Town Militia, but which turned out to be the representatives
of the Mechanics Union, with special decorations and medals on their
breasts. The bands began to play; the automobiles, full of flowers
and flags, began to cough and shoot forward; the flocks of promenaders
on the side-walk and in the roadway set themselves to march in step
to the festal music. I watched the whole procession, from the Eighth
Regimental Band that went first to the eight veterans of the Spanish
War, who, with muskets on their shoulders, took up the rear. I stopped
several people in the procession and asked them who they were, what
exactly was their rôle, for what reason were they decorated with
medals,--and every one was glad to satisfy my curiosity. I found that
the eight veterans considered themselves technically a squad, and their
function was to fire a salute over the graves of the "heroes."
The procession marched round the town to the strains of "Onward,
Christian soldiers" and "O come, all ye faithful." All the people of
Clearfield accompanied--Americans, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovaks--for
Clearfield has its foreign mining population as well as its Anglo-Saxon
urban Americans. As I was going alongside, a young boy ran up and put
his hand on my shoulder and addressed me in Polish.
"What's that you say?" I asked.
"Vairy good!" said he, and pointed to the procession. "I like it."
"What are you,--Ruthenian, Polish?" I asked.
"Slavish."
I spoke to him in Russian.
"Oh-ho, he-he, da-da, I thought you were a Polak."
And now he thought I was a Russian! It touched me rather tenderly. I
was dressed like an American, and my attire was not like that of a
Russian at all. How enthusiastic this boy was! It was a real holiday
for him. The Slav peoples are emotional; they need every now and then a
means of publicly expressing their feelings. This procession from the
town to the graveyard was a link with the customs of their native land,
where at least twice a year the living have a feast among the crosses
and mounds of the cemetery, and share their joys and interests with the
dear dead, whose bodies have been given back to earth.
Among those accompanying the procession were Austrian Slavs, in
soot-coloured, broad-brimmed, broken-crowned hats, not yet cast away;
and I noted solemn-faced, placid Russian peasants in overalls staring
with half-awakened comprehension. I saw a negro attired in faultless
black cloth, having a bunchy umbrella in his hand, a heavy gold chain
across his waistcoat, a cigar in his mouth, a soft smoky hat on his
head. He tried to get to the front, and I heard one white man say to
another, "Make way for him, it's not _your_ funeral." The negro is a
pretty important person--considering that the war was really fought for
him. Perhaps not many actively remember that now; it is not soothing
to do so. It is the American hero who matters more than the cause
for which he fell; though of course America, the idea of America,
matters more than either the heroes or the cause. It is a pity that
on Decoration Day there is a tendency to decorate the graves of those
who fell in the Spanish War and to pin medals on the survivors of that
conflict rather than to perpetuate the memory of the struggle for the
emancipation of the negro. America's great problem is the negro whom
she has released; but the Spanish War meant no more than that America's
arm proved strong enough to defeat a European power inclined to meddle
with her civilisation.
It was, however, at the oldest grave in the cemetery that the
procession stopped and the people gathered. All the men were uncovered,
and there was a feeling of unusual respect and emotion in the crowd.
The wreaths were put down and the flags lowered as the little memorial
service commenced. We sang an old hymn, slowly, sweetly, and very
sadly, so that one's very soul melted. A hymn of the war, I suppose:
_Let him sleep,_
_Calmly sleep,_
_While the days and the years roll by._
_Let him sleep,_
_Sweetly sleep,_
_Till the call of the roll on high._
In the time of the war, in the dark hours of danger and distress, in
the times of loss and appalling personal sorrow the Americans were
very near and dear to God and to one another--nearer than they are
to-day in their peace and prosperity.
When the hymn had been sung, an old grey-headed man came to the foot of
the grave and read a portion of the speech made by Abraham Lincoln at
the great cemetery at Gettysburg:
_Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. We are now engaged in
a great Civil War, testing whether that nation so conceived and so
dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield ...
to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for
those who have given their lives that the nation might live. It is
altogether fitting and proper that we should do this._
_But in a larger sense we cannot consecrate this ground. The dead
themselves have consecrated it. It is rather for us, the living,
to consecrate ourselves to the work they died for, that we resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation
shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the
people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the
earth._
The reading of these words was most impressive. I realised in it the
Gospel of America--something more national than even the starry flag.
When the reading was accomplished the eight veterans fired their
salute, not up at heaven, but across and over the people's heads, as at
an unseen enemy. Then the old grey-headed man who had read the words of
Lincoln pronounced the blessing:
_The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your
hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God...._
And we dispersed to wander among the graves and see the decorations,
and add decorations of our own if we willed. Wherever I went, the
haunting air was in my ears:
Let him sleep,
Sweetly sleep,
Till the call of the roll on high.
Americans believe very really in the roll-call. They believe that
they will answer to their names on a great last day--"When the roll
is called up yonder, I'll be there," says a popular hymn. It is all
important to the American that he feels he lives and dies for the
Right, for the moral virtues. The glory of the wars which the Americans
have fought in their history is not only that they, the Americans, were
victorious, but that they were morally right before ever they started
out to fight.
Well, civilisation has approved the abolition of slavery. The great
mass of people nowadays consider slavery as something wrong in itself.
The North took up its weapons and convinced the South, and the negro
was freed. The peculiar horrors of slavery no longer exist--no one
man has power of life and death over the African. That much the war
has achieved. But it is strange that for the rest the negro seems
to have become worse off, and that America feels that she cannot
extend the personal privileges of democracy to the blacks. America has
brutalised the nigger; has made of a very gentle, loving and lovable
if very simple creature, an outcast, a beast, who may not sit beside
an ordinary man. It has in its own nervous imagination accused him of
hideous crimes which he did not commit, did not even imagine; it has
deprived him of the law, tortured him, flayed him, burned him at the
stake. It has made a black man a bogey; so that a fluttering white
woman, finding herself alone in the presence of a negro, will rush
away in terror, crying "murder," "rape," "fire," just because she has
seen the whites of his eyes. Then the hot-blooded southern crowd comes
out....
The war was a healthy war. It did much good, it strengthened the roots
of many American families; it gave the nation a criterion for future
development; it brought many individuals nearer to reality, brought
them to the mystery of life, caused them to say each day their prayers
to God. But if a war must be judged by its political effect, then as
regards the happiness of the negro the war has not yet proved to be a
success. The service by the graveside, and the apt words of Abraham
Lincoln were a reminder to the American people that though they realise
to themselves the maximum of prosperity the New World affords, and yet
lose their souls, it profits them nothing. America by her unwritten
but infallible charter is consecrated to freedom. If America is going
to be true to itself it must work for freedom, it must carry out the
idea of freedom. The emigrant from Europe expects to realise in America
the idea of freedom, the opportunity for personal and individual
development. He does not expect to find repeated there the caste system
and relative industrial slavery of the East.
* * * * * * *
Clearfield was much touched by the graveside service. The whole evening
after it the men in the hotel lounge talked American sentiment. The
lads and lasses crowded into the cinema houses, and watched with
much edification the specially instructive set of films which, on
the recommendation of the town council, had been specially installed
for the occasion,--the perils of life for a young girl going to
dance-halls, the Soudanese at work, Japanese children at play, the
ferocious habits of the hundred-legs, a review of troops at Tiflis,
a portrait of the Governor of Mississippi wearing a high silk hat,
pottery-making in North Borneo, the Pathé news. It was good to see
so many pictures of foreign and dark-skinned people presented in an
interesting and sympathetic manner. The Americans need to care more
for the national life of other races. For they are often strangely
contemptuous of the people they conceive to be wasting their time.
I had a pleasant talk with a doctor who was extremely keen on
"temperance." He struck up acquaintance with me by complimenting me
on my complexion, and betting I didn't touch spirituous liquors. "The
war's still going on," said he. "I wage my part against drink and
disease. I'd like to make the medical profession a poor one to enter,
yes, sirr. I'd like to uproot disease, and if I could stop the drinking
in America I'd do it. Never touch liquor and you'll never have gout,
live to a good age, and be happy. I am glad to meet you, sir, glad
to meet a Briton. America will stand shoulder and shoulder with the
British in war or peace. They are of the same blood. The only two
civilised nations in the world."
All the same, Clearfield regarded me with some suspicion, and as I sat
at my bedroom window at night a young man called up:
"English Gawd: Lord Salisbury."
XI
WAYFARERS OF ALL NATIONALITIES
The men whom you meet during the day are like a hand of cards dealt out
to you by Providence. But they are more than that, for you feel that
luck does not enter into it. You feel there is no such thing as luck,
and that the wayfarer is in his way a messenger sent to you by the
hospitable spirit of man. He brings a sacred opportunity.
I sit tending my fire, and watching and balancing the kettle upon it;
or I sit beside the cheerful blaze on which I have cooked my breakfast
or my dinner, and I hold my mug of coffee in my hand and my piece
of bread; I chip my just-boiled eggs, or I am digging into a pot of
apple-jelly or cutting up a pine-apple, and I feel very tender towards
the man who comes along the road and stops to pass a greeting and give
and take the news of the day and the intelligence of the district.
There is a sort of hermit's charity. It is to have a spirit that is
quietly joyful, to be in that state towards man that a gentle woodsman
is towards the shy birds who are not afraid of him as he lies on a
forest bank and watches them tripping to and from their little nests.
Your fellow-man instinctively knows you and trusts you, and he puts
aside the mask in which he takes refuge from other fellow-travellers
who are alert and busy. I cherish as very precious all the little talks
I had with this man and that man who came up to me in America.
As I sat one day by the side of my pleasant Susquehanna road, an
oil-carrier met me, a gentle-voiced man in charge of four tons of
kerosene and petrol, which his horses were dragging over the mountains
from village to village and store to store. I was an opportunity to
rest the horses, and the driver pulled up, relaxed his reins and
entered into converse with me. Was I going far? Why was I tramping?
What nationality was I? I told him what I was doing, and he said he
would like to give up his job and do the same; he also was of British
origin, though his mother was a German. He was a descendant of Sir
Robert Downing. "There used to be many English about here," said he,
"but they wore off." He went on to tell me what a wild district it
had once been. His grandfather had shot a panther on the mountains.
But there were no panthers now. The railways and the automobiles
had frightened the wild things away. The change had come about very
suddenly. He remembered when there were no telephone-poles along the
road, but only road-poles. It used to be a posting-road, and a good
one too; but now the automobiles had torn up all the surface, and no
one would take any trouble about the needs of horse vehicles.
One hot noontide, on the road to Shippenville and Oil City, I was
having luncheon when a very pleasant Swede came down the road carrying
a bucket in his hand,--Mr. G. B. Olson, bossing a gang of workers on
the highway. He was going down the hill to a special spring to draw
water for his thirsty men, but he could hardly resist the smoke of my
wayside fire, and he told me, as it seemed, his whole story. He had
come to America in 1873, and had worked on a farm in Illinois before
the great Chicago fire. He was twenty-four then, and was sixty-five now.
When he heard I was British he told me how he had come from Europe
_via_ Leith and Glasgow, and had been fifteen and a half days crossing
the Atlantic.
"Have you ever been back to Sweden?" I asked.
"No, sirr, never."
"Are you content with America?"
"Yes, sirr; it's the finest country under the sun. It gives the working
man a show."
"The Americans speak very kindly of your countrymen. They like them."
"Yes. We gave the Americans a good lift, we Swedes, Norwegians, Danes,
and Germans, by settling the land when the rest of the colonists were
running to the towns. We came in and did the rough pioneer work that
had to be done if America was going to be more than a mushroom growth.
Where would America be to-day if it were not for us in Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Iowa? You can't keep up big cities unless you've got plenty
of men working in the background on the land."
The Swede went on to compliment me on my English. I spoke pretty clear
for one who had been only three months in the country. He had met many
British who spoke "very broken," especially Scotch. "I shouldn't have
been able to understand them," said he, "but that I am a foreigner
myself, and know what it is not to speak good."
"Well, I must be off," he added, and pointed to the bucket.
"You've got a gang of men working up above?"
"Yes. I'm bossing them for the State. A good job it is too, good money,
and I don't have to work much."
"I should say you'd make a kind boss!"
"Yes. I never do anything against them. I get a good day's work out of
the men, but I never put myself above them. I've got authority, that's
all--it doesn't make me better'n they. I've got to boss them, they've
got to work. That's how it's turned out.... Well, I must be off to
water my hands!"
And he hastened away down the hill, whilst I put my things together and
shouldered my pack.
The strange thing about this American journey was the diversity of
nationality I encountered, and the friendly terms in which it was
possible for me as a man on the road to converse with them.
On leaving Clearfield I fell in with Peter Deemeff, a clever little
Bulgarian immigrant, and spent two days in his company. He was
an unpractical, rebellious boy, a student by inclination, but a
labourer by necessity, nervous in temperament, and alternately gay
and despondent. He was thin-bodied, broad-browed, clean-shaven, but
blue-black with the multitude of his hair-roots; he had two rows of
faultless, little, milk-white teeth; an angelic Bulgarian smile, and an
occasional ugly American grimace.
We tramped along the most beautiful Susquehanna road to Curwenville,
and then through magnificent gorges to the height of Luthersburg.
"Ho! Where you going?" said one of a group of Italian labourers at
Curwenville.
"Oil City," I answered.
"You'll be sore," the Italian rejoined, and slapped his thigh. "Why not
stop here and get good job?"
But Peter and I were not looking for a job just then, and we went on. I
was glad the Bulgarian was not tempted, for I relished his company, and
he was pleasantly loquacious.
"Do you like the Americans?" I asked him.
He raised his eyebrows. Evidently he did not like them very much.
"Half-civilise," said he. "When I say my boss, 'I go,' he want me
fight. He offens me. I say, 'You Americans--bulldogs, no more,
half-civilise.' And I go all the same and no fight great big fat
American."
"You think Bulgaria a better country?"
"'S a poor country, that's all. There's more life in Europe. Americans
don't know what they live for."
I looked with some astonishment on this day-labourer in shabby attire
talking thus intelligently, and withal so frankly.
He told me he hated the English. They had said, anent the Balkan War,
"The fruits must not be taken from the victors"; but when Montenegro
took Scutari they were the first to say to King Nicholas "Go back, go
back." He thought I was a Slav immigrant like himself, or he would not
have struck up acquaintance with me. But he seemed relieved when I told
him my sympathies were entirely with the Slavs.
We talked of Russian literature, and of Tolstoy in particular.
"Tolstoy understood about God," said he. "He said God is within you,
not far away or everywhere, but in yourself. By that I understand life.
All life springs from inside. What comes from outside is nahthing. That
is how Americans live--in outside things, going to shows, baseball
matches.... I know Shakespeare was the mirror of life, that's not
what I mean.... To be educated mentally is light and life; to be
developed only physically is death and.... That's why I say bulldogs,
not civilise. When I was in Philadelphia I hear a Socialist in the Park
and he asked, 'How d'ye fellows live?--eat--work, eat--work--drink,
eat--work--sleep, eat--work--sleep. Machines, that's what y'are.'"
The most astonishing evidence of thought and culture that Peter Deemeff
gave me was contained in a reflection he made half-aloud, in a pause in
the conversation--"A great writer once said, 'If God had not existed,
man would have invented his God'--that is a good idea, eh?" Fancy that
from the lips of an unskilled labourer! These foreign working-men are
bringing something new to America. If they only settle down to be
American citizens and look after their children's education!
"Do many Bulgarians think?" I asked him.
"Yes, many--they think more than I do."
We spent the night under great rocks; he under one, I under another.
My bed, which I made soft with last year's bracken, was under three
immense boulders, a natural shelter, a deep dark cavern with an opening
that looked across the river-gorge to the forested cliff on the other
side. The Bulgarian, less careful about his comfort, lay in a ferny
hollow, just sheltered by an overhanging stone. Before lying down he
commended himself to God, and crossed himself very delicately and
trustfully. With all his philosophy he had not cast off the habits of
the homeland. And almost directly he laid himself down he fell asleep.
It was a wonderful night. As I lay in my cave and the first star was
looking down at me from over the great wooded cliff, what was my
astonishment to see a living spark go past the entrance of the cave,
a flame on wings--the firefly. I lay and watched the forest lose its
trees, and the cliff become one great black wall, ragged all along the
crest. Mists crept up and hid the wall for a while, and then passed.
An hour and a half after I had lain down, and the Bulgarian had fallen
asleep, I opened my eyes and looked out at the black wall--little lamps
were momentarily appearing and disappearing far away in the mysterious
dark depths of the cliff. It seemed to me that if when we die we perish
utterly, then that living flame moving past my door was something
like the passing of man's life. It was strange to lie on the plucked
rustling bracken, and have the consciousness of the cold sepulchre-like
roof of the cave, and look out at the figure of man's life. But the
river chorus lulled me to sleep. Whenever I reawakened and looked out I
saw the little lights once more, appearing and vanishing, like minutest
sprites searching the forest with lanterns.
Peter and I woke almost at the same time in the morning in a dense
mist. I sent him for water, and I collected wood for a fire. We made
tea, took in warmth, and then set off once more.
"Let us go to a farmhouse and get some breakfast," said I.
"We get it most likely for nothing, because it's Sunday," said Peter
with a smile.
The Americans are much more hospitable on Sundays than on week days.
They do not, however, like to see you tramping the road on the day of
rest; it is thought to be an infraction of the Sabbath--though it is
difficult to see what tramps can do but tramp on a Sunday.
We had a splendid breakfast for ten cents apiece at a stock-breeding
farm below Luthersburg,--pork and beans, bread and butter and cookies,
strawberry jam and home-canned plums, pear-jelly. I thanked the lady of
the establishment when we had finished, and remarked that I thought it
very cheap at the price. She answered that she didn't serve out lunches
for a profit, but wouldn't let decent men pass hungry.
"Are you hiking to the next burg?" she asked.
"Chicago," said I.
"Gee!"
We came to Luthersburg, high up on the crest of the hills, a large
village, with two severe-looking churches.
"When I see these narrow spires I'm afraid," said the Bulgarian. "I
should have to wither my soul and make it small to get into one of
these churches. I like a church with walls of praise and a spire of
yearning,--Tolstoy, eh? That spire says to me 'I feared Thee, O God,
because Thou art an austere man.'"
I, for my part, thought it strange that Americans, taking so many risks
in business, and daring and imagining so large-heartedly in the secular
world, should be satisfied with so cramped an expression of their
religion.