A Son of the Middle Border Part 18

This date may be taken as fairly ending my boyhood, for I was rapidly taking on the manners of men. True, I did not smoke or chew tobacco and I was not greatly given to profanity, but I was able to shoulder a two bushel sack of wheat and could hold my own with most of the harvesters.

Although short and heavy, I was deft with my hands, as one or two of the neighborhood bullies had reason to know and in many ways I was counted a man.

I read during this year nearly one hundred dime novels, little paper-bound volumes filled with stories of Indians and wild hors.e.m.e.n and dukes and d.u.c.h.esses and men in iron masks, and sewing girls who turned out to be daughters of n.o.bility, and marvellous detectives who bore charmed lives and always trapped the villains at the end of the story--

Of all these tales, those of the border naturally had most allurement.

There was the _Quaker Sleuth_, for instance, and _Mad Matt the Trailer_, and _Buckskin Joe_ who rode disdainfully alone (like Lochinvar), rescuing maidens from treacherous Apaches, cutting long rows of death notches on the stock of his carbine. One of these narratives contained a phantom troop of skeleton hors.e.m.e.n, a grisly squadron, which came like an icy wind out of the darkness, striking terror to the hearts of the renegades and savages, only to vanish with clatter of bones, and click of hoofs.

In addition to these delight-giving volumes, I traded stock with other boys of the neighborhood. From Jack Sheet I derived a bundle of _Sat.u.r.day Nights_ in exchange for my _New York Weeklys_ and from one of our harvest hands, a near-sighted old German, I borrowed some twenty-five or thirty numbers of _The Sea Side Library_. These also cost a dime when new, but you could return them and get a nickel in credit for another,--provided your own was in good condition.

It is a question whether the reading of all this exciting fiction had an ill effect on my mind or not. Apparently it had very little effect of any sort other than to make the borderland a great deal more exciting than the farm, and yet so far as I can discover, I had no keen desire to go West and fight Indians and I showed no disposition to rob or murder in the manner of my heroes. I devoured _Jack Harkaway_ and _The Quaker Sleuth_ precisely as I played ball--to pa.s.s the time and because I enjoyed the game.

Deacon Garland was highly indignant with my father for permitting such reading, and argued against it furiously, but no one paid much attention to his protests--especially after we caught the old gentleman sitting with a very lurid example of "The d.a.m.nable Lies" open in his hand. "I was only looking into it to see how bad it was," he explained.

Father was so tickled at the old man's downfall that he said, "Stick to it till you find how it turns out."

Grandsire, we all perceived, was human after all. I think we liked him rather better after this sign of weakness.

It would not be fair to say that we read nothing else but these easy-going tales. As a matter of fact, I read everything within reach, even the copy of _Paradise Lost_ which my mother presented to me on my fifteenth birthday. Milton I admit was hard work, but I got considerable joy out of his cursing pa.s.sages. The battle scenes also interested me and I went about spouting the extraordinary harangues of Satan with such vigor that my team one day took fright of me, and ran away with the plow, leaving an erratic furrow to be explained. However, my father was glad to see me taking on the voice of the orator.

The five years of life on this farm had brought swift changes into my world. Nearly all the open land had been fenced and plowed, and all the cattle and horses had been brought into pasture, and around most of the buildings, groves of maples were beginning to make the homesteads a little less barren and ugly. And yet with all these growing signs of prosperity I realized that something sweet and splendid was dying out of the prairie. The whistling pigeons, the wailing plover, the migrating ducks and geese, the soaring cranes, the shadowy wolves, the wary foxes, all the untamed things were pa.s.sing, vanis.h.i.+ng with the blue-joint gra.s.s, the dainty wild rose and the tiger-lily's flaming torch.

Settlement was complete.

CHAPTER XVII

A Taste of Village Life

The change from farm to village life, though delightful, was not so complete as we had antic.i.p.ated, for we not only carried with us several cows and a span of horses, but the house which we had rented stood at the edge of town and possessed a large plot; therefore we not only continued to milk cows and curry horses, but set to work at once planting potatoes and other vegetables almost as if still upon the farm.

The soil had been poorly cultivated for several years, and the weeds sprang up like dragons' teeth. Work, it seemed, was not to be escaped even in the city.

Though a little resentful of this labor and somewhat disappointed in our dwelling, we were vastly excited by certain phases of our new surroundings. To be within a few minutes' walk of the postoffice, and to be able to go to the store at any moment, were conditions quite as satisfactory as we had any right to expect. Also we slept later, for my father was less disposed to get us out of bed at dawn and this in itself was an enormous gain, especially to my mother.

Osage, a small town, hardly more than a village, was situated on the edge of a belt of hardwood timber through which the Cedar River ran, and was quite commonplace to most people but to me it was both mysterious and dangerous, for it was the home of an alien tribe, hostile and pitiless--"The Town Boys."

Up to this time I had both hated and feared them, knowing that they hated and despised me, and now, suddenly I was thrust among them and put on my own defenses. For a few weeks I felt like a young rooster in a strange barn-yard,--knowing that I would be called upon to prove my quality. In fact it took but a week or two to establish my place in the tribe for one of the leaders of the gang was Mitch.e.l.l Scott, a powerful lad of about my own age, and to his friends.h.i.+p I owe a large part of my freedom from persecution.

Uncle David came to see us several times during the spring and his talk was all about "going west." He was restless under the conditions of his life on a farm. I don't know why this was so, but a growing bitterness clouded his voice. Once I heard him say, "I don't know what use I am in the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun.

During the early part of the summer my brother and I worked in the garden with frequent days off for fis.h.i.+ng, swimming and berrying, and we were entirely content with life. No doubts a.s.sailed us. We swam in the pond at Rice's Mill and we cast our hooks in the sunny ripples below it.

We saw the circus come to town and go into camp on a vacant lot, and we attended every movement of it with a delicious sense of leisure. We could go at night with no long ride to take after it was over.--The fourth of July came to seek us this year and we had but to step across the way to see a ball-game. We were at last in the center of our world.

In June my father called me to help in the elevator and this turned out to be a most informing experience. "The Street," as it was called, was merely a wagon road which ran along in front of a row of wheat ware-houses of various shapes and sizes, from which the buyers emerged to meet the farmers as they drove into town. Two or three or more of the men would clamber upon the load, open the sacks, sample the grain and bid for it. If one man wanted the load badly, or if he chanced to be in a bad temper, the farmer was the gainer. Hence very few of them, even the members of the Grange, were content to drive up to my father's elevator and take the honest market price. They were all hoping to get a little more than the market price.

This vexed and embittered my father who often spoke of it to me. "It only shows," he said, "how hard it will be to work out any reform among the farmers. They will never stand together. These other buyers will force me off the market and then there will be no one here to represent the farmers' interest."

These merchants interested me greatly. Humorous, self-contained, remorseless in trade, they were most delightful companions when off duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing else to do.

One of them by reason of his tailor-made suit and a large ring on his little finger, was especially attractive to me. He was a handsome man of a sinister type, and I regarded his expressionless face as that of a gambler. I didn't know that he was a poker player but it amused me to think so. Another buyer was a choleric Cornishman whom the other men sometimes goaded into paying five or six cents more than the market admitted, by shrewdly playing on his hot temper. A third was a tall gaunt old man of New England type, obstinate, honest, but of sanguine temperament. He was always on the bull side of the market and a loud debater.--The fourth, a quiet little man of smooth address, acted as peacemaker.

Among these men my father moved as an equal, notwithstanding the fact of his country training and prejudices, and it was through the man Morley that we got our first outlook upon the bleak world of Agnosticism, for during the summer a series of lectures by Robert Ingersoll was reported in one of the Chicago papers and the West rang with the controversy.

On Monday as soon as the paper came to town it was the habit of the grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley, the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened and commented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great iconoclast, and the arguments which followed were often heated and sometimes fiercely personal.

After they had quite finished with the paper, I sometimes secured it for myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly influenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been reared had already grown dim, and under the light of Ingersoll's remorseless humor most of our superst.i.tions vanished. I do not think my father's essential Christianity was in any degree diminished, he merely lost his respect for certain outworn traditions and empty creeds.

My work consisted in receiving the grain and keeping the elevator going and as I weighed the sacks, made out checks for the payment and kept the books--in all ways taking a man's place,--I lost all sense of being a boy.

The motive power of our hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before he filled a large s.p.a.ce in my thoughts. There was something appealing in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled, and a deep hollow in the sill attested his accuracy. He seemed to do this purposely--to keep count, as I imagined, of his dreary circling through sunless days.

A part of my duty was to watch the fanning mill (in the high cupola) in order that the sieves should not clog. Three flights of stairs led to the mill and these had to be mounted many times each day. I always ran up the steps when the mill required my attention, but in coming down I usually swung from beam to beam, dropping from footway to footway like a monkey from a tall tree. My mother in seeing me do this called out in terror, but I a.s.sured her that there was not the slightest danger--and this was true, for I was both sure-footed and sure-handed in those days.

This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My father enjoyed companions.h.i.+p with the leading citizens of the town, while Franklin, as first a.s.sistant in a candy store, professed himself to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fis.h.i.+ng or in roving the woods with Mitch.e.l.l and George, but on Sundays the entire family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering who came to service regularly--but on foot, so intense was the spirit of democracy among us.

Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all a large house and a two seated carriage counted, and my mother's visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her social position and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial hospitality. She was never envious or bitter.

In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a sense of grat.i.tude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of beauty were seldom mentioned.

With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one; that it is a lure to destroy, but I a.s.sert that G.o.d desires loveliness and hates ugliness. He loves the s.h.i.+mmering of dawn, the silver light on the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is not a G.o.d of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a G.o.d of beauty, of delight, of consolation."

In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world, the world of art.

I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I went out from that little church vaguely resolved to be a student also, a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again did he touch my heart. That one discourse was his contribution to my education and I am grateful to him for it. In after life I had the pleasure of telling him how much he had suggested to me in that sermon.

There was much to allure a farmer boy in the decorum of well-dressed men and the grace of daintily clad women as well as in the music and the dim interior of the church (which seemed to me of great dignity and charm) and I usually went both morning and evening to watch the regal daughters of the county aristocracy go up the aisle. I even joined a Sunday school cla.s.s because charming Miss Culver was the teacher. Outwardly a stocky, ungraceful youth, I was inwardly a bold squire of romance, needing only a steed and a s.h.i.+eld to fight for my lady love. No one could be more essentially romantic than I was at this time--but fortunately no one knew it!

Mingling as I did with young people who had been students at the Seminary, I naturally developed a new ambition. I decided to enter for the autumn term, and to that end gained from my father a leave of absence during August and hired myself out to bind grain in the harvest field. I demanded full wages and when one blazing hot day I rode on a s.h.i.+ning new Marsh harvester into a field of wheat just south of the Fair Ground, I felt myself a man, and entering upon a course which put me nearer the clothing and the education I desired.

Binding on a harvester was desperately hard work for a sixteen-year-old boy for it called for endurance of heat and hunger as well as for unusual celerity and precision of action. But as I considered myself full-grown physically, I could not allow myself a word of complaint. I kept my place beside my partner hour after hour, taking care of my half of ten acres of grain each day. My fingers, raw and bleeding with the briars and smarting with the rust on the grain, were a torture but I persisted to the end of harvest. In this way I earned enough money to buy myself a Sunday suit, some new boots and the necessary books for the seminary term which began in September.

Up to this time I had never owned an overcoat nor a suit that fitted me.

My s.h.i.+rts had always been made by my mother and had no real cuffs. I now purchased two boxes of paper cuffs and a real necktie. My intense satisfaction in these garments made mother smile with pleasure and understanding humor.

In spite of my store suit and my high-heeled calf-skin boots I felt very humble as I left our lowly roof that first day and started for the chapel. To me the brick building standing in the center of its ample yard was as imposing as I imagine the Harper Memorial Library must be to the youngster of today as he enters the University of Chicago.

To enter the chapel meant running the gauntlet of a hundred citified young men and women, fairly ent.i.tled to laugh at a clod-jumper like myself, and I would have balked completely had not David Pointer, a neighbor's son, volunteered to lead the way. Gratefully I accepted his offer, and so pa.s.sed for the first time into the little hall which came to mean so much to me in after years.

It was a large room swarming with merry young people and the Corinthian columns painted on the walls, the pipe organ, the stately professors on the platform, the self-confident choir, were all of such majesty that I was reduced to hare-like humility. What right had I to share in this splendor? Sliding hurriedly into a seat I took refuge in the obscurity which my youth and short stature guaranteed to me.

Soon Professor Bush, the princ.i.p.al of the school, gentle, blue-eyed, white-haired, with a sweet and mellow voice, rose to greet the old pupils and welcome the new ones, and his manner so won my confidence that at the close of the service I went to him and told him who I was.

Fortunately he remembered my sister Harriet, and politely said, "I am glad to see you, Hamlin," and from that moment I considered him a friend, and an almost infallible guide.

The school was in truth a very primitive inst.i.tution, hardly more than a high school, but it served its purpose. It gave farmers' boys like myself the opportunity of meeting those who were older, finer, more learned than they, and every day was to me like turning a fresh and delightful page in a story book, not merely because it brought new friends, new experiences, but because it symbolized freedom from the hay fork and the hoe. Learning was easy for me. In all but mathematics I kept among the highest of my cla.s.s without much effort, but it was in the "Friday Exercises" that I earliest distinguished myself.