A Son of the Middle Border
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I clearly perceived that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the hymn of fugitives!
And yet all this did not prevent me from acknowledging the beauty of the earth. On the contrary, social injustice intensified nature's prodigality. I said, "Yes, the landscape is beautiful, but how much of its beauty penetrates to the heart of the men who are in the midst of it and battling with it? How much of consolation does the worn and weary renter find in the beauty of cloud and tree or in the splendor of the sunset? – Grace of flower does not feed or clothe the body, and when the toiler is both badly clothed and badly fed, bird-song and leaf-shine cannot bring content." Like Millet, I asked, "Why should all of a man's waking hours be spent in an effort to feed and clothe his family? Is there not something wrong in our social scheme when the unremitting toiler remains poor?"
With such thoughts filling my mind, I passed through this belt of recent settlement and came at last into the valley of the James. One by one the familiar flimsy little wooden towns were left behind (strung like beads upon a string), and at last the elevator at Ordway appeared on the edge of the horizon, a minute, wavering projection against the sky-line, and half an hour later we entered the village, a sparse collection of weather-beaten wooden houses, without shade of trees or grass of lawns, a desolate, drab little town.
Father met me at the train, grayer of beard and hair, but looking hale and cheerful, and his voice, his peculiar expressions swept away all my city experience. In an instant I was back precisely where I had been when I left the farm. He was Captain, I was a corporal in the rear ranks.
And yet he was distinctly less harsh, less keen. He had mellowed. He had gained in sentiment, in philosophy, that was evident, and as we rode away toward the farm we fell into intimate, almost tender talk.
I was glad to note that he had lost nothing either in dignity or manliness in my eyes. His speech though sometimes ungrammatical was vigorous and precise and his stories gave evidence of his native constructive skill. "Your mother is crazy to see you," he said, "but I have only this one-seated buggy, and she couldn't come down to meet you."
When nearly a mile away I saw her standing outside the door of the house waiting for us, so eager that she could not remain seated, and as I sprang from the carriage she came hurrying out to meet me, uttering a curious little murmuring sound which touched me to the heart.
The changes in her shocked me, filled me with a sense of guilt. Hesitation was in her speech. Her voice once so glowing and so jocund, was tremulous, and her brown hair, once so abundant, was thin and gray. I realized at once that in the three years of my absence she had topped the high altitude of her life and was now descending swiftly toward defenseless age, and in bitter sadness I entered the house to meet my sister Jessie who was almost a stranger to me.
She had remained small and was quaintly stooped in neck and shoulders but retained something of her childish charm. To her I was quite alien, in no sense a brother. She was very reticent, but it did not take me long to discover that in her quiet fashion she commanded the camp. For all his military bluster, the old soldier was entirely subject to her. She was never wilful concerning anything really important, but she assumed all the rights of an individual and being the only child left in the family, went about her affairs without remark or question, serene, sweet but determined.
The furniture and pictures of the house were quite as humble as I had remembered them to be, but mother wore with pride the silk dress I had sent to her and was so happy to have me at home that she sat in silent content, while I told her of my life in Boston (boasting of my success of course, I had to do that to justify myself), and explaining that I must return, in time to resume my teaching in September.
Harvest was just beginning, and I said, "Father, if you'll pay me full wages, I'll take a hand."
This pleased him greatly, but he asked, "Do you think you can stand it?"
"I can try," I responded. Next day I laid off my city clothes and took my place as of old on the stack.
On the broad acres of the arid plains the header and not the binder was then in use for cutting the wheat, and as stacker I had to take care of the grain brought to me by the three header boxes.
It was very hard work that first day. It seemed that I could not last out the afternoon, but I did, and when at night I went to the house for supper, I could hardly sit at the table with the men, so weary were my bones. I sought my bed early and rose next day so sore that movement was torture. This wore away at last and on the third day I had no difficulty in keeping up my end of the whiffletree.
The part of labor that I hated was the dirt. Night after night as I came in covered with dust, too tired to bathe, almost too weary to change my shirt, I declared against any further harvesting. However, I generally managed to slosh myself with cold water from the well, and so went to my bed with a measure of self-respect, but even the "spare room" was hot and small, and the conditions of my mother's life saddened me. It was so hot and drear for her!
Every detail of the daily life of the farm now assumed literary significance in my mind. The quick callousing of my hands, the swelling of my muscles, the sweating of my scalp, all the unpleasant results of severe physical labor I noted down, but with no intention of exalting toil into a wholesome and regenerative thing as Tolstoi, an aristocrat, had attempted to do. Labor when so prolonged and severe as at this time my toil had to be, is warfare. I was not working as a visitor but as a hired hand, and doing my full day's work and more.
At the end of the week I wrote to my friend Kirkland, enclosing some of my detailed notes and his reply set me thinking. "You're the first actual farmer in American fiction, – now tell the truth about it," he wrote.
Thereafter I studied the glory of the sky and the splendor of the wheat with a deepening sense of the generosity of nature and monstrous injustice of social creeds. In the few moments of leisure which came to me as I lay in the shade of a grain-rick, I pencilled rough outlines of poems. My mind was in a condition of tantalizing productivity and I felt vaguely that I ought to be writing books instead of pitching grain. Conceptions for stories began to rise from the subconscious deeps of my thought like bubbles, noiseless and swift – and still I did not realize that I had entered upon a new career.
At night or on Sunday I continued my conferences with father and mother. Together we went over the past, talking of old neighbors and from one of these conversations came the theme of my first story. It was a very simple tale (told by my mother) of an old woman, who made a trip back to her York state home after an absence in the West of nearly thirty years. I was able to remember some of the details of her experience and when my mother had finished speaking I said to her, "That is too good to lose. I'm going to write it out." Then to amuse her, I added, "Why, that's worth seventy-five dollars to me. I'll go halves with you."
Smilingly she held out her hand. "Very well, you may give me my share now."
"Wait till I write it," I replied, a little taken aback.
Going to my room I set to work and wrote nearly two thousand words of the sketch. This I brought out later in the day and read to her with considerable excitement. I really felt that I had struck out a character which, while it did not conform to the actual woman in the case, was almost as vivid in my mind.
Mother listened very quietly until I had finished, then remarked with sententious approval. "That's good. Go on." She had no doubt of my ability to go on – indefinitely!
I explained to her that it wasn't so easy as all that, but that I could probably finish it in a day or two. (As a matter of fact, I completed the story in Boston but mother got her share of the "loot" just the same.)
Soon afterward, while sitting in the door looking out over the fields, I pencilled the first draft of a little poem called Color in the Wheat which I also read to her.
She received this in the same manner as before, from which it appeared that nothing I wrote could surprise her. Her belief in my powers was quite boundless. Father was inclined to ask, "What's the good of it?"
Of course all of my visit was not entirely made up of hard labor in the field. There were Sundays when we could rest or entertain the neighbors, and sometimes a shower gave us a few hours' respite, but for the most part the weeks which I spent at home were weeks of stern service in the ranks of the toilers.
There was a very good reason for my close application to the fork-handle. Father paid me an extra price as "boss stacker," and I could not afford to let a day pass without taking the fullest advantage of it. At the same time, I was careful not to convey to my pupils and friends from Boston the disgraceful fact that I was still dependent upon my skill with a pitch-fork to earn a living. I was not quite sure of their approval of the case.
At last there came the time when I must set my face toward the east.
It seemed a treachery to say good-bye to my aging parents, leaving them and my untrained sister to this barren, empty, laborious life on the plain, whilst I returned to the music, the drama, the inspiration, the glory of Boston. Opposite poles of the world could not be farther apart. Acute self-accusation took out of my return all of the exaltation and much of the pleasure which I had expected to experience as I dropped my harvester's fork and gloves and put on the garments of civilization once more.
With heart sore with grief and rebellion at "the inexorable trend of things," I entered the car, and when from its window I looked back upon my grieving mother, my throat filled with a suffocating sense of guilt. I was deserting her, recreant to my blood! – That I was re-enacting the most characteristic of all American dramas in thus pursuing an ambitious career in a far-off city I most poignantly realized and yet – I went! It seemed to me at the time that my duty lay in the way of giving up all my selfish plans in order that I might comfort my mother in her growing infirmity, and counsel and defend my sister – but I did not. I went away borne on a stream of purpose so strong that I seemed but a leak in its resistless flood.
This feeling of bitterness, of rebellion, of dissatisfaction with myself, wore gradually away, and by the time I reached Chicago I had resolved to climb high. "I will carry mother and Jessie to comfort and to some small share, at least, in the world of art," was my resolve. In this way I sought to palliate my selfish plan.
Obscurely forming in my mind were two great literary concepts – that truth was a higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of justice should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The merely beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the happiness of others a monstrous egotism.
In the spirit of these ideals I returned to my small attic room in Jamaica Plain and set to work to put my new conceptions into some sort of literary form.
CHAPTER XXIX
I Join the Anti-Poverty Brigade
In the slow procession of my struggling fortunes this visit to the West seems important, for it was the beginning of my career as a fictionist. My talk with Kirkland and my perception of the sordid monotony of farm life had given me a new and very definite emotional relationship to my native state. I perceived now the tragic value of scenes which had hitherto appeared merely dull or petty. My eyes were opened to the enforced misery of the pioneer. As a reformer my blood was stirred to protest. As a writer I was beset with a desire to record in some form this newly-born conception of the border.
No sooner did I reach my little desk in Jamaica Plain than I began to write, composing in the glow of a flaming conviction. With a delightful (and deceptive) sense of power, I graved with heavy hand, as if with pen of steel on brazen tablets, picture after picture of the plain. I had no doubts, no hesitations about the kind of effect I wished to produce. I perceived little that was poetic, little that was idyllic, and nothing that was humorous in the man, who, with hands like claws, was scratching a scanty living from the soil of a rented farm, while his wife walked her ceaseless round from tub to churn and from churn to tub. On the contrary, the life of such a family appealed to me as an almost unrelievedly tragic futility.
In the few weeks between my return and the beginning of my teaching, I wrote several short stories, and outlined a propagandist play. With very little thought as to whether such stories would sell rapidly or not at all I began to send them away, to the Century, to Harper's, and other first class magazines without permitting myself any deep disappointment when they came back – as they all did!
However, having resolved upon being printed by the best periodicals I persisted. Notwithstanding rejection after rejection I maintained an elevated aim and continued to fire away.
There was a certain arrogance in all this, I will admit, but there was also sound logic, for I was seeking the ablest editorial judgment and in this way I got it. My manuscripts were badly put together (I used cheap paper and could not afford a typist), hence I could not blame the readers who hurried my stories back at me. No doubt my illegible writing as well as the blunt, unrelenting truth of my pictures repelled them. One or two friendly souls wrote personal notes protesting against my "false interpretation of western life."
The fact that I, a working farmer, was presenting for the first time in fiction the actualities of western country life did not impress them as favorably as I had expected it to do. My own pleasure in being true was not shared, it would seem, by others. "Give us charming love stories!" pleaded the editors.
"No, we've had enough of lies," I replied. "Other writers are telling the truth about the city, – the artisan's narrow, grimy, dangerous job is being pictured, and it appears to me that the time has come to tell the truth about the barn-yard's daily grind. I have lived the life and I know that farming is not entirely made up of berrying, tossing the new-mown hay and singing The Old Oaken Bucket on the porch by moonlight.
"The working farmer," I went on to argue, "has to live in February as well as June. He must pitch manure as well as clover. Milking as depicted on a blue china plate where a maid in a flounced petticoat is caressing a gentle Jersey cow in a field of daisies, is quite unlike sitting down to the steaming flank of a stinking brindle heifer in flytime. Pitching odorous timothy in a poem and actually putting it into a mow with the temperature at ninety-eight in the shade are widely separated in fact as they should be in fiction. For me," I concluded, "the grime and the mud and the sweat and the dust exist. They still form a large part of life on the farm, and I intend that they shall go into my stories in their proper proportions."
Alas! Each day made me more and more the dissenter from accepted economic as well as literary conventions. I became less and less of the booming, indiscriminating patriot. Precisely as successful politicians, popular preachers and vast traders diminished in importance in my mind, so the significance of Whitman, and Tolstoi and George increased, for they all represented qualities which make for saner, happier and more equitable conditions in the future. Perhaps I despised idlers and time-savers unduly, but I was of an age to be extreme.
During the autumn Henry George was announced to speak in Faneuil Hall, sacred ark of liberty, and with eager feet my brother and I hastened to the spot to hear this reformer whose fame already resounded throughout the English-speaking world. Beginning his campaign in California he had carried it to Ireland, where he had been twice imprisoned for speaking his mind, and now after having set Bernard Shaw and other English Fabians aflame with indignant protest, was about to run for mayor of New York City.
I have an impression that the meeting was a noon-day meeting for men, at any rate the historical old hall, which had echoed to the voices of Garrison and Phillips and Webster was filled with an eager expectant throng. The sanded floor was packed with auditors standing shoulder to shoulder and the galleries were crowded with these who, like ourselves, had gone early in order to ensure seats. From our places in the front row we looked down upon an almost solid mosaic of derby hats, the majority of which were rusty by exposure to wind and rain.
As I waited I recalled my father's stories of the stern passions of anti-slavery days. In this hall Wendell Phillips in the pride and power of his early manhood, had risen to reply to the cowardly apologies of entrenched conservatism, and here now another voice was about to be raised in behalf of those whom the law oppressed. My brother had also read Progress and Poverty and both of us felt that we were taking part in a distinctly historical event, the beginning of a new abolition movement.
At last, a stir at the back of the platform announced the approach of the speaker. Three or four men suddenly appeared from some concealed door and entered upon the stage. One of them, a short man with a full red beard, we recognized at once, – "The prophet of San Francisco" as he was then called (in fine derision) was not a noticeable man till he removed his hat. Then the fine line of his face from the crown of his head to the tip of his chin printed itself ineffaceably upon our minds. The dome-like brow was that of one highly specialized on lines of logic and sympathy. There was also something in the tense poise of his body which foretold the orator.
Impatiently the audience endured the speakers who prepared the way and then, finally, George stepped forward, but prolonged waves of cheering again and again prevented his beginning. Thereupon he started pacing to and fro along the edge of the platform, his big head thrown back, his small hands clenched as if in anticipation of coming battle. He no longer appeared small. His was the master mind of that assembly.
His first words cut across the air with singular calmness. Coming after the applause, following the nervous movement of a moment before, his utterance was surprisingly cold, masterful, and direct. Action had condensed into speech. Heat was transformed into light.
His words were orderly and well chosen. They had precision and grace as well as power. He spoke as other men write, with style and arrangement. His address could have been printed word for word as it fell from his lips. This self-mastery, this graceful lucidity of utterance combined with a personal presence distinctive and dignified, reduced even his enemies to respectful silence. His altruism, his sincere pity and his hatred of injustice sent me away in the mood of a disciple.
Meanwhile a few of his followers had organized an "Anti-Poverty Society" similar to those which had already sprung up in New York, and my brother and I used to go of a Sunday evening to the old Horticultural Hall on Tremont Street, contributing our presence and our dimes in aid of the meeting. Speakers were few and as the weeks went by the audiences grew smaller and smaller till one night Chairman Roche announced with sad intonation that the meetings could not go on. "You've all got tired of hearing us repeat ourselves and we have no new speaker, none at all for next week. I am afraid we'll have to quit."
My brother turned to me – "Here's your 'call,'" he said. "Volunteer to speak for them."
Recognizing my duty I rose just as the audience was leaving and sought the chairman. With a tremor of excitement in my voice I said, "If you can use me as a speaker for next Sunday I will do my best for you."
Roche glanced at me for an instant, and then without a word of question, shouted to the audience, "Wait a moment! We have a speaker for next Sunday." Then, bending down, he asked of me, "What is your name and occupation?"
I told him, and again he lifted his voice, this time in triumphant shout, "Professor Hamlin Garland will speak for us next Sunday at eight o'clock. Come and bring all your friends."
"You are in for it now," laughed my brother gleefully. "You'll be lined up with the anarchists sure!"
That evening was in a very real sense a parting of the ways for me. To refuse this call was to go selfishly and comfortably along the lines of literary activity I had chosen. To accept was to enter the arena where problems of economic justice were being sternly fought out. I understood already something of the disadvantage which attached to being called a reformer, but my sense of duty and the influence of Herbert Spencer and Walt Whitman rose above my doubts. I decided to do my part.
All the week I agonized over my address, and on Sunday spoke to a crowded house with a kind of partisan success. On Monday my good friend Chamberlin, The Listener of The Transcript filled his column with a long review of my heretical harangue. – With one leap I had reached the lime-light of conservative Boston's disapproval!
Chamberlin, himself a "philosophical anarchist," was pleased with the individualistic note which ran through my harangue. The Single Taxers were of course, delighted for I admitted my discipleship to George, and my socialistic friends urged that the general effect of my argument was on their side. Altogether, for a penniless student and struggling story writer, I created something of a sensation. All my speeches thereafter helped to dye me deeper than ever with the color of reform.
However, in the midst of my Anti-Poverty Campaign, I did not entirely forget my fiction and my teaching. I was becoming more and more a companion of artists and poets, and my devotion to things literary deepened from day to day. A dreadful theorist in some ways, I was, after all, more concerned with literary than with social problems. Writing was my life, land reform one of my convictions.
High in my attic room I bent above my manuscript with a fierce resolve. From eight o'clock in the morning until half past twelve, I dug and polished. In the afternoon, I met my classes. In the evening I revised what I had written and in case I did not go to the theater or to a lecture (I had no social engagements) I wrote until ten o'clock. For recreation I sometimes drove with Dr. Cross on his calls or walked the lanes and climbed the hills with my brother.
In this way most of my stories of the west were written. Happy in my own work, I bitterly resented the laws which created millionaires at the expense of the poor.
These were days of security and tranquillity, and good friends thickened. Each week I felt myself in less danger of being obliged to shingle, though I still had difficulty in clothing myself properly.
Again I saw Booth play his wondrous round of parts and was able to complete my monograph which I called The Art of Edwin Booth. I even went so far as to send to the great actor the chapter on his Macbeth and received from him grateful acknowledgments, in a charming letter.
A little later I had the great honor of meeting him for a moment and it happened in this way. The veteran reader, James E. Murdock, was giving a recital in a small hall on Park Street, and it was privately announced that Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett would be present. This was enough to justify me in giving up one of my precious dollars on the chance of seeing the great tragedian enter the room.
He came in a little late, flushing, timid, apologetic! It seemed to me a very curious and wonderful thing that this man who had spoken to millions of people from behind the footlights should be timid as a maid when confronted by less than two hundred of his worshipful fellow citizens in a small hall. So gentle and kindly did he seem.
My courage grew, and after the lecture I approached the spot where he stood, and Mr. Barrett introduced me to him as "the author of the lecture on Macbeth." – Never had I looked into such eyes – deep and dark and sad – and my tongue failed me miserably. I could not say a word. Booth smiled with kindly interest and murmured his thanks for my critique, and I went away, down across the Common in a glow of delight and admiration.