A Daughter of the Middle Border Part 36

I was in the midst of a novel at this time, another story of Colorado, which I called _Money Magic_, and without doubt all this distraction and travel weakened it, although Howells spoke well of it. "It is one of your best books," he said, when we next met.

[Mary Isabel reads the book at intervals and places it next to _Hesper_ and _The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop_.]

Marriage, paternity, householding, during these years unquestionably put the brakes on my work as a writer, but I had no desire to return to bachelorhood. Undoubtedly I had lost something, but I had gained more.

As a human being I was enriched beyond my deserving by a wife and a child.

Perhaps I would have gone farther and mounted higher as a selfish solitary bachelor, but that did not trouble me then, and does not now.

Concerned with the problem of providing a comfortable winter home for my family, and happy in maintaining the old house in West Salem as a monument to the memory of my mother, I wrote, committed carpentry and lectured.

My frequent absences from home soon made a deep impression on my daughter's mind, and whenever she was naughty I had but to say, "If you do that again Papa will go away to New York," and she would instantly say, "I'm doodie now papa, I'm doodie----" and yet my mention of going to New York could not have been altogether a punishment for I always brought to her some toy or book. Nothing afforded me keener joy than the moment when I showed her the presents I had brought.

The fact that she loved to have her heavy-handed old Daddy near her, was a kind of miracle, a concession for which I could not be too grateful.

"You shall have a happy childhood," I vowed, "no matter what comes later, you shall remember these days with unalloyed delight. They shall be your heaven, your fairyland."

Each month I set down in my diary some new phrase, some development, some significant event in her life, and when she found this out she loved to have me read what she had said, "When I was a little baby." She listened gravely, contrasting her ignorance at two with her wisdom at five. "Was I cute, Daddy? Did you like me then?" she would ask.

She early learned the meaning of Decoration Day, which she called "Flag Day," and took pride in the fact that her grand-sire was a soldier. Each year she called for her flag and asked to be taken to the cemetery to see the decorations and to hear the bugles blow above the graves, and I always complied; although to me, each year, a more poignant pathos quavered in the wailing cadence of "Lights out," and the pa.s.sing of the veterans, thinning so rapidly--was like the march of men toward their open graves.

Happily my daughter did not realize any part of this tragic concept. For her it was natural that a soldier should be old and bent. Waving her little flag and shouting with silver-sweet voice she saluted with vague admiration those who were about to die--an age about to die--and in her eyes flamed the spirit of her grand-sire, the love of country which will carry the Republic through every storm no matter from which quarter the wind may spring.

So far as I could, I taught her to take up the traditions which were about to slip from the hands of Richard Garland and his sons, "She shall be our representative, the custodian of our faith."

For four years she remained our only child, and yet I can not say that she was either spoiled or exacting, on the contrary she was a constant, joyous pupil and a lovely appealing teacher. Through her I rediscovered the wonder of the sunrise and the stars. In the study of her face the lost beauty of the rainbow returned to me, in her presence I felt once more the mystic charm of dusk. I reaccepted the universe, putting aside the measureless horror of its recorded wars. I grew strangely selfish.

My interests narrowed to my own country, my own home, to my fireside.

Counting upon the world well lost, I built upon my daughter's love.

That my wife was equally happy in her parentage was obvious for at times she treated Mary Isabel as if she were a doll, spending many hours of many days designing dainty gowns and hoods for her delight. She could hardly be separated from the child, even for a night and it was in her battles with croup and other nocturnal enemies that her maternal love was tested to the full. I do not a.s.sume to know what she felt as a wife, but of her devotion as a mother I am able to write with certainty. On her fell the burden of those hours of sickness in the city, and when the time came for us to go back to the birds and trees of our beloved valley she rejoiced as openly as her daughter. "Now we shall be free of colds and fever," she said.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Entirely subject to my daughter, who regarded me as a wonder-working giant, I paid tribute to her in song, in story, and in frankincense and myrrh. Led by her trusting little hand I re- discovered the haunts of fairies and explored once more the land beneath the rainbow.]

For the most part this was true. For several summers our daughter lived and throve at her birthplace, free of pain and in idyllic security--and then suddenly, one September day, like the chill shadow from an Autumn stormcloud, misfortune fell upon us. Our daughter became sick, how sick I did not realize until on the eighth day as I took her in my arms I discovered in her a horrifying weakness. Her little body, thinned with fever, hung so laxly, so lightly on my knee that my blood chilled with sudden terror.

With a conviction that I dared not even admit to myself, I put her back into her mother's keeping and hurried to the telephone. In ten minutes I had called to her aid the best medical men of the region. Especially did I appeal to Doctor Evans, who had helped to bring her into the world.

"You must come," I said to him. "It is life or death."

He came, swiftly, but in a few moments after his arrival he gravely announced the dreadful truth. "Your child is in the last stages of diphtheria. I will do what I can for her but she should have had the ant.i.toxin five days ago."

For forty-eight hours our baby's life was despaired of, yet fought for by a heroic nurse who refused to leave her for a single hour.

Oh, the suspense, the agony of those days and nights, when her mother and I, helpless to serve, were shut away from her, not even permitted to look at her. We could do nothing--nothing but wait through the interminable hours, tortured by the thought that she might be calling for us. During one entire dreadful night we writhed under one doctor's sentence, "The child can not live," and in these hours I discovered that it is the sweetest love that casts the blackest shadow. My joy in my daughter was an agony of fear and remorse--why had I not acted sooner?

As I imagined my world without that radiant face, that bird-like voice, I fell into black despair. My only hope was in the nurse, who refused to give her up. I could not talk or write or think of any other thing. The child's sufferings filled my mind with an intolerable ache of apprehension. I had possessed her only a few years and yet she was already woven into the innermost fibers of my heart.

That night, which I dare not dwell upon, put my youth definitely behind me. When the blessed word came that she would live, and I was permitted to look upon her small wasted face, I was a care-worn middle-aged man--willing to give up any part of my life to win that tiny sufferer back to health and happiness.

Pitiful little Mary Isabel, pale wraith of my st.u.r.dy comrade! When she lifted her beseeching eyes to me and faintly, fleetingly smiled--unable to even whisper my name, I, forbidden to speak, could only touch her cheek with my lips and leave her alone with her devoted nurse--for, so weak was she that a breath might have blown her away, back into the endless shadow and silence of the grave.

At that moment I asked myself, "What right have men and women to bring exquisite souls like this into a world of disease and death? Why maintain the race? What purpose is subserved by keeping the endless chain of human misery lengthening on?"

In times like these I was weaker than my wife. I grant her marvelous fort.i.tude, sustained by something which I did not possess and could not acquire. She met every crisis. I leaned upon her serenity, her courage, her faith in the future which was in no sense a religious creed. It was only a womanly inheritance, something which came down the long line of her maternal Anglo-Saxon ancestors.

At last the day came when the nurse permitted me to take my daughter again in my arms and carry her out to the easy chair before the fire.

The moment was perfect. The veil of snow falling without, the leaping firelight on the hearth, and the presence of my wife and father, united to fill me with happiness. I became the fond optimist again--the world was not so black--our year was worthy of Thanksgiving after all.

Nevertheless I was aware that a bitter ineradicable dusk had gathered in the corners and crannies of the old house. Something depressing, repellent, was in the air. My sense of joy, my feeling of comfort in its seclusion were gone.

"Never again will this be a restful home for you or for me," I declared to my daughter. "Its shadow is now an enemy, its isolation a menace." To my wife I said, "Let us go back to the city where the highest type of medical science is at the end of the telephone wire."

She consented, and taking the child in my arms, I left the village with no intention of ever returning to it. The fire on my family altar seemed dead, never again to be rekindled.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Old Soldier Gains a New Granddaughter

For nearly two years I did not even see the Homestead. My aversion to it remained almost a hatred. The memory of those desolate weeks of quarantine when my little daughter suffered all the agonies of death, still lingered over its walls, a poisonous shadow which time alone could remove. "I shall never live in it again," I repeated to my friends, and when some one wanted to rent it for the summer I consented--with a twinge of pain I must confess, for to open it to strangers even for a few weeks seemed an act of disloyalty to the memory of my mother.

Meanwhile I remained a moderately happy and very busy citizen of Chicago. Not content with esthetic conditions and in the belief that my home for years to come must be somewhere in the city's confines, I had resolved to establish a Club which should be (like the Players in New York) a meeting place for artists and writers, a rallying point for Midland Arts. Feeling very keenly the lack of such a rendezvous I said to Lorado, "I believe the time has come when a successful literary and artistic club can be established and maintained."

The more I pondered on the situation, the greater the discrepancy between the Chicago of my day and the Boston of my father's day became.

"Why was it that the Boston of 1860, a city of three hundred thousand people, should have been so productive of great writers, while this vast inland metropolis of over two million of people remains almost negligible in the world of Art and Letters?"

Fuller, who refused, characteristically, to endorse my plan, was openly discouraging. To him the town was a pestilential slough in which he, at any rate, was inextricably mired, and though he was not quite so definite with me, he said to others, "Garland's idea is sure to fail."

Clarkson, Browne and Taft, however, heartily joined my committee, and the "Cliff Dwellers," a union of workers in the fine arts, resulted. As president of the organization, I set to work on plans for housing the club, and for months I was absorbed in this work.

On the eighteenth of June, 1908, in the midst of my work on the club affairs, another daughter was born to us, a vigorous and shapely babe, with delicate limbs, gray eyes, and a lively disposition, and while my wife, who came through this ordeal much better than before, was debating a choice of names for her, Mary Isabel gravely announced that she had decided to call her sister "Marjorie Christmas," for the reason, as she explained, that these were the nicest names she knew. Trusting first born!--she did not realize the difference which this new-found playmate was about to make in her life, and her joy in being permitted to hold the tiny stranger in her arms was pathetic.

My own att.i.tude toward "Marjorie Christmas" was not indifferent but I did not receive her with the same intensity of interest with which I had welcomed my first child. Her place was not waiting for her as was the case of Mary Isabel. She was a lovely infant and perhaps I would have taken her to my arms with keen paternal pride had it not been for the realization that in doing so I was neglecting her sister whose comrades.h.i.+p with me had been so close (so full of exquisite moments) that it could not be transferred to another daughter, no matter how alluring. A second child is--a second child.

To further complicate our problem, Constance (as we finally called her), pa.s.sed under the care of a nursemaid, and for two years I had very little to do with her. I seldom sang this child to sleep as I had done countless times with Mary Isabel. She did not ride on the crook of my elbow, or climb on my back, or look at picture books with me, until she was nearly three years old. We regained her, but we could not regain the hours of companions.h.i.+p we had sacrificed. This experience enables me to understand the unhappiness which comes to so many homes, in which the children are only boarders, foundlings in the care of nurses and governesses. My poverty, my small dwelling have given me the most precious memories of my daughters in their childish innocence.

[Connie, who is now as tall as her mother and signs her drawings "Constance Hamlin Garland" is looking over my shoulder at this moment with a sly smile. It has long been known to her that she was, for several years, very much "in the discard" but she does not hold it against me. She knows that it would be hard for me to make a choice between my two jewels to-day--I allude to them as mine because I am writing this book. My wife has a different angle of vision concerning them.]

My father came down from West Salem to see this second granddaughter, and on the whole, approved of her, although his tenderest interest, like mine, remained with Mary Isabel, who was now old enough to walk and talk with him. To watch her trotting along the street with that white-haired warrior, her small hand linked with his, was to gain a deeply moving sense of the continuity of life. How slender the link between the generations appears in such a case!

Nothing, not even the birth of a new grandchild, could divert my father from his accustomed round of city sight-seeing. As in other times, so now he again demanded to be shown the Stockyards, the Wheat Pit, the Masonic Temple and Lincoln Park. I groaned but I consented.

It happened that Ira Morris, one of the owners of the Stockyards, was an acquaintance, and the courtesy and attentions which were shown us gave the old farmer immense satisfaction--and when he found that Frank Logan, of "Logan & Bryan," (a Commission firm to which he had been wont to send his wheat) was also my friend, he began to find in my Chicago life certain compensating particulars, especially as in his presence I a.s.sumed a prosperity I did not possess.

On paper I sounded fairly well. I was one of the vice-presidents of the National Inst.i.tute of Arts and Letters. I had a "Town house" as well as a "country place," and under cover of the fact that very few of my friends had ever inspected both properties, I was able in some degree to camouflage my situation. In the city I alluded casually to "my Wisconsin Homestead," and when in West Salem I referred with quiet affluence to "my residence in Woodlawn." Explaining that it was a three story house I pa.s.sed lightly over the fact that it was only eighteen feet wide!

Similarly, in speaking of "our country home" I did not explain to all my friends that it was merely an ugly old farmhouse on the edge of a commonplace village. I stated the truth in each case but not the whole truth.

If my city friend, Charles Hutchinson, imagined me spending my summers in a n.o.ble mansion on the bank of a s.h.i.+ning river it was not my duty to shock him by declaring that there was no water in sight and that my garden was only a truck patch. On the other hand, if my neighbors in West Salem thought of me as living in a handsome brick mansion in Chicago, and writing my stories in a s.p.a.cious study walled with books, I was not obliged to undeceive them.