A Story Teller’s Story

OTHER BOOKS BY
SHERWOOD ANDERSON

• WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON, A novel
• MARCHING MEN, A novel
• MID-AMERICAN CHANTS, Chants
• WINESBURG, OHIO, A book of tales
• POOR WHITE, A novel
• THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG, A book of tales
• MANY MARRIAGES, A novel
• HORSES AND MEN, A book of tales

A Story Teller’s Story

The tale of an American writer’s journey through his own imaginative world and through the world of facts, with many of his experiences and impressions among other writers—told in many notes—in four books—and an Epilogue.

Sherwood Anderson

New York B. W. Huebsch, Inc. Mcmxxiv

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.

TO ALFRED STIEGLITZ,
who has been more than father to so many
puzzled, wistful children of the arts in this
big, noisy, growing and groping America, this
book is gratefully dedicated.

Portions of this book have been published in the American Mercury, Century and Phantasmus and to these magazines the author makes due acknowledgment.

CONTENTS.

A Story Teller’s Story

A STORY-TELLER’S STORY

IN all the towns and over the wide countrysides of my own mid-American boyhood there was no such thing as poverty, as I myself saw it and knew it later in our great American industrial towns and cities.

My own family was poor, but of what did our poverty consist? My father, a ruined dandy from the South, had been reduced to keeping a small harness-repair shop and, when that failed, he became ostensibly a house-and-barn painter. However, he did not call himself a house-painter. The idea was not flashy enough for him. He called himself a “sign-writer.” The day of universal advertising had not yet come and there was but little sign-writing to do in our town, but still he stuck out bravely for the higher life. At any time he would let go by the board the privilege of painting Alf Mann the butcher’s house (it would have kept him busily at work for a month) in order to have a go at lettering signs on fences along country roads for Alf Granger the baker.

There was your true pilgrimage abroad, out into the land. Father engaged a horse and a spring wagon and took the three older of his sons with him. My older brother and the one next younger than myself were, from the first, adept at sign-writing, while both father and myself were helpless with a brush in our hands. And so I drove the horse and father supervised the whole affair. He had a natural boyish love for the supervision of affairs and the picking out of a particular fence on a particular road became to him as important a matter as the selection of a site for a city, or the fortification that was to defend it.

And then the farmer who owned the fence had to be consulted and if he refused his consent the joy of the situation became intensified. We drove off up the road and turned into a wood and the farmer went back to his work of cultivating corn. We watched and waited, our boyish hearts beating madly. It was a summer day and in the small wood in which we were concealed we all sat on a fallen log in silence. Birds flew overhead and a squirrel chattered. What a delicate tinge of romance spread over our commonplace enough business!

Father was made for romance. For him there was no such thing as a fact. It had fallen out that he, never having had the glorious opportunity to fret his little hour upon a greater stage, was intent on fretting his hour as best he could in a money-saving prosperous corn-shipping, cabbage-raising Ohio village.

He magnified the danger of our situation. “He might have a shotgun,” he said, pointing to where in the distance the farmer was again at work. As we waited in the wood he sometimes told us a story of the Civil War and how he with a companion had crept for days and nights through an enemy country at the risk of their lives. “We were carrying messages,” he said, raising his eyebrows and throwing out his hands. By the gesture there was something implied. “Well, it was an affair of life or death. Why speak of the matter? My country needed me and I, and my intrepid companion, had been selected because we were the bravest men in the army,” the raised eyebrows were saying.

And so with their paint pots and brushes in their hands my two brothers presently crept out of the wood and ran crouching through cornfields and got into the dusty road. Quickly and with mad haste they dabbed the name of Alf Granger on the fence with the declaration that he baked the best bread in the State of Ohio, and when they returned to us we all got back into the spring wagon and drove back along the road past the sign. Father commanded me to stop the horse. “Look,” he said, frowning savagely at my two brothers, “your N is wrong. You are being careless again with your Bs. Good gracious, will I never teach you two how to handle a brush?”

If our family was poor, of what did our poverty consist? If our clothes were torn the torn places only let in the sun and wind. In the winter we had no overcoats, but that only meant we ran rather than loitered. Those who are to follow the arts should have a training in what is called poverty. Given a comfortable middle-class start in life, the artist is almost sure to end up by becoming a bellyacher, constantly complaining because the public does not rush forward at once to proclaim him.

The boy who has no warm overcoat throws back his head and runs through the streets, past houses where smoke goes up into a clear cold sky, across vacant lots, through fields. The sky clouds and snows come and the bare hands are cold and chapped. They are raw and red but at night, before the boy sleeps, his mother will come with melted fat and rub it over the raw places.

The warm fat is soothing. The touch of a mother’s fingers is soothing. Well, you see, with us, we were all of us—mother father and the children—in some way outlaws in our native place and that thought was soothing to a boy. It is a soothing thought in all my memories of my boyhood. Only recently one connected with my family said to me: “You must remember, now that you are an author, you have a respectable place in the world to maintain”; and for a moment my heart swelled with pride in the thought.

And then I went out of the presence of the cautious one to associate with many other respectables and into my mind flashed thoughts of the sweetness I have seen shining in the eyes of others—of waiters, horsemen, thieves, gamblers, women, driven by poverty to the outer rim of society. Where were the respectables among those who had been kindest and sweetest to me?

Whatever may be said in this matter, and I admit my feet have slipped many times toward solid respectability we of our family were not too respectable then.

For one thing father never paid his rent and so we were always living in haunted houses. Never was such a family to take the haunts out of a house. Old women riding white horses, dead men screaming, groans, cries—all were quieted when we came to live in a haunted house. And how often because of this talent—inherent in my family—we lived for months scot-free in a fairly comfortable house, while at the same time conferring a benefit on the property owner. It is a system—I recommend it to poets with large families.

There were not enough bedclothes so three boys slept in one bed and there was a window that, in summer, looked out upon fields, but in winter had been painted by the hand of the frost king so that moonlight came softly and dimly into the room. It was no doubt the fact that there were three of us in one bed that drove away all fear of the “haunts.”

Mother was tall and slender and had once been beautiful. She had been a bound girl in a farmer’s family when she married father, the improvident young dandy. There was Italian blood in her veins and her origin was something of a mystery. Perhaps we never cared to solve it—wanted it to remain a mystery. It is so wonderfully comforting to think of one’s mother as a dark, beautiful and somewhat mysterious woman. I later saw her mother—my own grandmother—but that is another story.

She the dark evil old woman with the broad hips and the great breasts of a peasant and with the glowing hate shining out of her one eye would be worth a book in herself. It was said she had shuffled off four husbands and when I knew her, although she was old, she looked not unwilling to tackle another. Some day perhaps I shall tell the tale of the old woman and the tramp who tried to rob the farm house when she was staying alone; and of how she, after beating him into submission with her old fists, got drunk with him over a barrel of hard cider in a shed and of how the two went singing off together down the road—but not now.

Our own mother had eyes that were like pools lying in deep shadows at the edge of a wood but when she grew angry and fell into one of her deep silences lights danced in the pools. When she spoke her words were filled with strange wisdom (how sharply yet I remember certain comments of hers—on life—on your neighbors!), but often she commanded all of us by the strength of her silences.

She came into the bedroom where three boys lay on one bed, carrying in one hand a small kerosene lamp and in the other a dish in which was warm melted fat.

There were three boys in one bed, two of them almost of the same size. The third was then a small silent fellow. Later his life was to be very strange. He was one who could not fit himself into the social scheme and, until he was a grown man, he stayed about, living sometimes with one, sometimes with another of his brothers—always reading books, dreaming, quarreling with no one.

He, the youngest of the three, looked out at life always as from a great distance. He was of the stuff of which poets are made. What instinctive wisdom in him. All loved him but no one could help him in the difficult business of living his life and when on summer evenings, as the three lay in the bed the two older boys fought or made great plans for their lives, he lay beside them in silence—but sometimes he spoke and his words came always as from a far place. We were perhaps discussing the wonders of life. “Well,” he said, “it is so and so. There will be no more babies, but the new babies do not come as you say. I know how they come. They come the same way you grow corn. Father plants seed in the earth and mother is the earth in which the seed grows.”

I am thinking of my younger brother after he had grown a little older—I am thinking of him grown into a man and become habitually silent like mother—I am thinking of him as he was just before he mysteriously disappeared out of our lives and never came back.

Now, however, he is in bed with the other brother and myself. An older brother, he who crept through the cornfields to paint the name of Alf Granger on the fence, had already gone from our lives. He had a talent for drawing, and a drunken half-insane cutter of stones for graveyards has taken him away from our town to another town where he is already sitting at a desk drawing designs for gravestones. A dove descends out of the sky and holds a leaf in its bill. There is an angel clinging to a rock in the midst of a storm at sea.

Rock of ages, cleft for me,

Let me hide myself in Thee.

The three boys are in the bed in the room and there are not enough bedclothes. Father’s overcoat, now too old to be worn, is thrown over the foot of the bed and the three boys have been permitted to undress downstairs, in the kitchen of the house, by the kitchen stove.

The oldest of the boys remaining at home (that is myself) must undress first and must arrange his clothes neatly on a kitchen chair. Mother does not scold about such a trifling matter. She stands silently looking and the boy does as he has been told. There is something of my grandmother in a certain look that can come into her eyes. “Well, you’d better,” it says. How unsuccessfully I have tried all my life to cultivate just that look, for myself!

And now the boy has undressed and must run in his white flannel nightgown barefooted through the cold house, past frosted windows, up a flight of stairs and, with a flying leap into the bed. The flannel nightgown has been worn almost threadbare by the older brother—now gone out into the world—before it has come down to him who wears it now.

He is the oldest of the brothers at home and must take the first plunge into the icy bed, but soon the others come running. They are lying like little puppies in the bed but as they grow warmer the two older boys begin to fight. There is a contest. The point is not to be compelled to lie on the outside where the covers may come off in the night. Blows are struck and tense young bodies are intertwined. “It’s your turn to-night! No it’s yours! You’re a liar! Take that! Well then, take that! I’ll show you!”

The youngest brother of the three brothers has already taken one of the two outside positions. It is his fate. He is not strong enough to fight with either of the other two and perhaps he does not care for fighting. He lies silently in the cold in the darkness while the fight between the other two goes on and on. They are of almost equal strength and the fight might possibly last for an hour.

But there is now the sound of the mother’s footsteps on the stairs and that is the end of the struggle. Now—at this moment—the boy who has the coveted position may keep it. That is an understood thing.

The mother puts the kerosene lamp on a little table by the bed and beside it the dish of warm, comforting melted fat. One by one six hands are thrust out to her.

There is a caress in her long toil-hardened fingers.

In the night and in the dim light of the lamp her dark eyes are like luminous pools.

The fat in the little cracked china dish is warm and soothing to burning itching hands. For an hour she has had the dish sitting at the back of the kitchen stove in the little frame house far out at the edge of the town.

The strange, silent mother! She is making love to her sons, but there are no words for her love. There are no kisses, no caresses.

The rubbing of the warm fat into the cracked hands of her sons is a caress. The light that now shines in her eyes is a caress.

* * * * *

The silent woman has left deep traces of herself in one of her sons. He is the one now lying stilly in the bed with his two noisy brothers. What has happened in the life of the mother? In herself, in her own physical life, even the two quarreling, fighting sons feel that nothing can matter too much. If her husband, the father of the boys, is a no-account and cannot bring money home—the money that would feed and clothe her children in comfort—one feels it does not matter too much. If she herself, the proud quiet one, must humiliate herself, washing—for the sake of the few dimes it may bring in—the soiled clothes of her neighbors, one knows it does not matter too much.

And yet there is no Christian forbearance in her. She speaks sometimes as she sits on the edge of the bed in the lamplight rubbing the warm fat into the cracked frost-bitten hands of her children and there is often a kind of smoldering fire in her words.

* * * * *

One of the boys in the bed has had a fight with the son of a neighbor. He, the third son of the family, has taken a hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hands. We had been cramming ourselves with the contents of a book, “The Last of the Mohicans,” and the neighbor boy, whose father is the town shoemaker, had the hatchet given him as a Christmas present. He would not lend it, would not let it go out of his hands and so my brother, the determined one, has snatched it away.

The struggle took place in a little grove of trees half a mile from the house. “Le Renard Subtil,” cries my brother jerking the hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hand. The neighbor boy did not want to be the villain—“Le Renard Subtil.”

And so he went crying off toward his home, on the farther side of the field. He lived in a yellow house just beyond our own and near the end of the street at the edge of the town.

My brother now had possession of the hatchet and paid no more attention to him but I went to stand by a fence to watch him go.

It is because I am a white man and understand the whites better than he. I am Hawkeye the scout, “La Longue Carabine,” and as I stand by the fence la longue carabine is lying across the crook of my arm. It is represented by a stick. “I could pick him off from here, shall I do it?” I ask, speaking to my brother with whom I fight viciously every night after we have got into bed but who, during the day, is my sworn comrade in arms.

Uncas—“Le Cerf Agile”—pays no attention to my words and I rest the stick over the fence, half determined to pick off the neighbor boy but at the last withholding my fire. “He is a little pig, never to let a fellow take his hatchet. Uncas was right to snatch it out of his hand.”

As I withhold my fire and the boy goes unscathed and crying across the snow-covered field I feel very magnanimous—since at any moment I could have dropped him like a deer in flight. And then I see him go crying into his mother’s house. Uncas has, in fact, cuffed him a couple of times in the face. But was it not justified? “Dare a dirty Huron—a squaw man—dare such a one question the authority of a Delaware? Ugh!”

And now “Le Renard Subtil” has gone into his mother’s house and has blabbed on us, and I tell Uncas the news but, with the impenetrable stoicism of a true savage, he pays no attention. He is as one sitting by the council fire. Are words to be wasted on a dog of a Huron?

And now “Le Cerf Agile” has an idea. Drawing a line in the snow, he stands some fifty feet from the largest of the trees in the grove and hurls the hatchet through the air.

What a determined fellow! I am of the paleface race myself and shall always depend for my execution upon la longue carabine but Uncas is of another breed. Is there not painted on his breast a crawling tortoise? In ink I have traced it there myself from a drawing he has made.

During the short winter afternoon the hatchet will be thrown not once but a hundred, perhaps two hundred, times. It whirls through the air. The thing is to throw the hatchet so that, at the end of its flight, the blade goes, just so, firmly into the soft bark of the tree. And it must enter the bark of the tree at just a particular spot.

The matter is of infinite importance. Has not Uncas, “The Last of the Mohicans,” broad shoulders? He will later be a strong man. Now is the time to acquire infinite skill.

He has measured carefully the spot on the body of the tree where the blade of the hatchet must enter with a soft chug, deep into the yielding bark. There is a tall warrior, a hated Huron, standing by the tree and young Uncas has measured carefully so that he knows just where the top of the warrior’s head should come. An idea has come to him. He will just scalp the unsuspecting warrior with the blade of the tomahawk; and has not he, Uncas, crept for many weary miles through the forest, going without food, eating snow for his drink? A skulking Huron has dared creep into the hunting grounds of the Delawares and has learned the winter abiding place of our tribe. Dare we let him go back to his squaw-loving people, bearing such knowledge? Uncas will show him!

He, Uncas, is absorbed in the problem before him and has not deigned to look off across the fields to where the neighbor boy has gone crying to his mother. “Le Renard Subtil” will be heard from again but for the present is forgotten. The foot must be advanced just so. The arm must be drawn back just so. When one hurls the hatchet the body must be swung forward just so. An absolute silence must be maintained. The skulking Huron who has dared come into our hunting grounds is unaware of the presence of the young Uncas. Is he, Uncas, not one whose feet leave no traces in the morning dew?

Deep within the breasts of my brother and myself there is a resentment that we were born out of our time. By what a narrow margin in the scroll of time have we missed the great adventure! Two, three, at the most a dozen generations earlier and we might so well have been born in the virgin forest itself. On the very ground where we now stand Indians have indeed stalked one another in the forest, and how often Uncas and myself have discussed the matter. As for our father, we dismiss him half contemptuously. He is born to be a dandy of the cities and has turned out to be a village house-painter, in the dwelling places of the paleface. The devil!—with luck he might have turned out to be an actor, or a writer or some such scum of earth but never could he have been a warrior. Why had not our mother, who might have been such a splendid Indian princess, the daughter of a great chief, why had she also not been born a few generations earlier? She had just the silent stoicism needed for the wife of a great warrior. A deep injustice had been done us, and something of the feeling of that injustice was in the stern face of Uncas as he crept each time to the line he had marked out in the snow and sent the hatchet hurtling through the air.

The two boys, filled with scorn of their parentage, on the father’s side, are in a little grove of trees at the edge of an Ohio town. In later days the father—also born out of his place and time—will come to mean more to them but now he has little except their contempt. Now Uncas is determined—absorbed—and I, who have so little of his persistence, am impressed by his silent determination. It makes me a little uncomfortable for, since he has snatched the hatchet out of the neighbor boy’s hand, saying, “Go on home, cry-baby,” no word has passed his lips. There is but a small grunting sound when the hatchet is hurled and a scowl on his face when it misses the mark.

And “Le Renard Subtil” has gone home and blabbed to his mother, who in turn has thrown a shawl over her head and has gone to our house, no doubt to blab, in her turn, to our mother. “La Longue Carabine,” being a paleface, is a little intent on disturbing the aim of “Le Cerf Agile.” “We’ll catch hell,” he says, looking at the hatchet thrower who has not so far unbent from the natural dignity of the Indian as to reply. He grunts and taking his place solemnly at the line poises his body. There is the quick abrupt swing forward of the body. What a shame Uncas did not later become a professional baseball player. He might have made his mark in the world. The hatchet sings through the air. Well, it has struck sideways. The Huron is injured but not fatally, and Uncas goes and sets him upright again. He has marked the place where the Huron warrior’s head should be by pressing a ball of snow into the wrinkled bark of the tree and has indicated the dog’s body by a dead branch.

And so Hawkeye the scout—“La Longue Carabine”—has gone creeping off among the trees to see if there are any more Hurons lurking about and has come upon a great buck, pawing the snow and feeding on dry grass at the edge of a small creek. Up goes la longue carabine and the buck pitches forward, dead, on the ice. Hawkeye runs forward and swiftly passes his hunting knife across the neck of the buck. It will not do to build a fire now that there are Hurons lurking in the hunting ground of the Delawares so Uncas and he must feed upon raw meat. Well, the hunter’s life for the hunter! What must be must be! Hawkeye cuts several great steaks from the carcass of the buck and makes his way slowly and cautiously back to Uncas. As he approaches he three times imitates the call of a catbird and an answering call comes from the lips of “Le Cerf Agile.”

“Aha! the night is coming on,” Uncas now says, having at last laid the Huron low. “Now that the dirty lover of squaws is dead we may build a fire and feast. Cook the venison ere the night falls. When darkness has come we must show no fire. Do not make much smoke—big fires for the paleface, but little fires for us Indians.”

Uncas stands for a moment, gnawing the bone of the buck, and then of a sudden becomes still and alert. “Aha! I thought so,” he says, and goes back again to where he has drawn the mark in the snow. “Go,” he says; “see how many come.”

And now Hawkeye must creep through the thick forests, climb mountains, leap canyons. Word has come that “Le Renard Subtil” but feigned when he went off crying, across the field—fools that we were! While we have been in the forest he has crept into the very teepee of our people and has stolen the princess, the mother of Uncas. And now “Le Renard Subtil,” with subtle daring, drags the stoical princess right across the path of her warrior son. In one moment from a great height Hawkeye draws the faithful Deer Killer to his shoulder and fires, and at the same moment the tomahawk of Uncas sinks itself in the skull of the Huron dog.

“‘Le Renard Subtil’ had drunk firewater and was reckless,” says Uncas, as the two boys go homeward in the dusk.

* * * * *

The older of the two boys now homeward bound is somewhat afraid but Uncas is filled with pride. As they go homeward in the gathering darkness and come to the house, where lives “Le Renard Subtil,” to which he has gone crying but a few hours before, an idea comes to him. Uncas creeps in the darkness, halfway between the house and the picket fence in front and, balancing the hatchet in his hand, hurls it proudly. Well for the neighbor’s family that no one came to the door at that moment for Uncas’ long afternoon of practicing has got results. The hatchet flies through the air and sinks itself fairly and deeply into the door panel as Uncas and Hawkeye run away home.

* * * * *

And now they are in the bed and the mother is rubbing the warm grease into their chapped hands. Her own hands are rough, but how gentle they are! She is thinking of her sons, of the one already gone out into the world and most of all at the moment of Uncas.

There is something direct brutal and fine in the nature of Uncas. It is not quite an accident that in our games he is always the Indian while I am the despised white, the paleface. It is permitted me to heal my misfortune a little by being, not a storekeeper or a fur trader but that man nearest the Indian’s nature of all the palefaces who ever lived on our continent, “La Longue Carabine”; but I cannot be an Indian and least of all an Indian of the tribe of the Delawares. I am not persistent patient and determined enough. As for Uncas, one may coax and wheedle him along any road and I am always clinging to that slight sense of leadership that my additional fifteen months of living gives me, by coaxing and wheedling, but one may not drive Uncas. To attempt driving him is but to arouse a stubbornness and obstinacy that is limitless. Having told a lie to mother or father, he will stick to the lie to the death while I—well, perhaps there is in me something of the doglike, the squaw man, the paleface, the very spirit of “Le Renard Subtil”—if the bitter truth must be told. In all my after years I shall have to struggle against a tendency toward slickness and plausibility in myself. I am the tale-teller, the man who sits by the fire waiting for listeners, the man whose life must be led into the world of his fancies, I am the one destined to follow the little, crooked words of men’s speech through the uncharted paths of the forests of fancy. What my father should have been I am to become. Through long years of the baffling uncertainty, that only such men as myself can ever know, I am to creep with trembling steps forward in a strange land, following the little words, striving to learn all the ways of the ever-changing words, the smooth-lying little words, the hard, jagged, cutting words, the round, melodious, healing words. All the words I am in the end to come to know a little and to attempt to use for my purpose have, at the same time, the power in them both to heal and to destroy. How often am I to be made sick by words, how often am I to be healed by words, before I can come at all near to man’s estate!

And so as I lie in the bed putting out my chapped hands to the healing touch of mother’s hands I do not look at her. Already I am often too conscious of my own inner thoughts to look directly at people and now, although I am not the one who has cuffed the neighbor boy and jerked the hatchet out of his hands, I am nevertheless busily at work borrowing the troubles of Uncas. I cannot let what is to be be, but must push forward striving to change all by the power of words. I dare not thrust my words forward in the presence of mother, but they are busily getting themselves said inside myself.

There is a consciousness of Uncas also within me. Another curse that is to lie heavily on me all through my life has its grip on me. I am not one to be satisfied to act for myself, think for myself, feel for myself but I must also attempt to think and feel for Uncas.

At the moment slick plausible excuses for what has happened during the afternoon are rising to my lips, struggling for expression. I am not satisfied with being myself and letting things take their course, but must be inside the very body of Uncas, striving to fill his stout young body with the questioning soul of myself.

As I write this I am remembering that my father, like myself, could never be singly himself but must always be a playing some rôle, everlastingly strutting on the stage of life in some part not his own. Was there a rôle of his own to be played? That I do not know and I fancy he never knew, but I remember that he once took it into his head to enact the rôle of the stern and unyielding parent to Uncas and what came of it.

The tragic little comedy took place in the woodshed back of one of the innumerable houses to which we were always moving when some absurd landlord took it into his head that he should have some rent for the house we occupied, and Uncas had just beaten with his fists a neighbor boy who had tried to run away with a baseball bat belonging to us. Uncas had retrieved the bat and had brought it proudly home, and father, who happened along the street at that moment, had got the notion fixed in his mind that the bat belonged, not to us, but to the neighbor boy. Uncas tried to explain, but father, having taken up the rôle of the just man, must needs play it out to the bitter end. He demanded that Uncas return the bat into the hands of the boy from whom he had just ravaged it and Uncas, growing white and silent, ran home and hid himself in the woodshed where father quickly found him out.

“I won’t,” declared Uncas; “the bat’s ours”; and then father—fool that he was for ever allowing himself to get into such an undignified position—began to beat him with a switch he had cut from a tree at the front of the house. As the beating did no good and Uncas only took it unmoved, father, as always happened with him, lost his head.

And so there was the boy, white with the sense of the injustice being done, and no doubt father also began to feel that he had put his foot into a trap. He grew furious and, picking up a large stick of wood from a woodpile in the shed, threatened to hit Uncas with it.

What a moment! I had run to the back of the shed and had thrown myself on the ground where I could look through a crack and as long as I live I shall never forget the next few moments—with the man and the boy, both white, looking at each other; and, that night, in the bed later, when mother was rubbing my chapped hands and when I knew there was something to be settled between her and Uncas, that picture danced like a crazy ghost in my fancy.

I trembled at the thought of what might happen, at the thought of what had happened that day in the shed.

Father had stood—I shall never know how long—with the heavy stick upraised, looking into the eyes of his son, and the son had stared, with a fixed determined stare, back into the eyes of his father.

At the moment I had thought that—boy as I was—I understood how such a strange unaccountable thing as a murder could happen. Thoughts did not form themselves definitely in my mind but after that moment I knew that it is always the weak, frightened by their own weakness, who kill the strong, and perhaps I also knew myself for one of the weak ones of the world. At the moment, as father stood with the stick upraised, glaring at Uncas, my own sympathies (if my own fancy has not tricked me again) were with father. My heart ached for him.

He was saved by mother. She came to the door of the shed and stood looking at him and his eyes wavered, and then he threw the stick back upon the pile from which he had taken it and went silently away. I remembered that he tramped off to Main Street and that, later in the evening when he came back to the house, he was drunk and went drunken to bed. The trick of drunkenness had saved him from the ordeal of looking into the eyes of Uncas or of mother, as so often words have later saved me from meeting fairly some absurd position into which I have got myself.

* * * * *

And so there was I now, in the bed and up to one of father’s tricks: upstart that I was, dog of a Huron myself, I was trembling for mother and for Uncas—two people very well able to take care of themselves.

Mother dropped my hand and took the outstretched hand of my brother.

“What happened?” she asked.

And Uncas told her, fairly and squarely. “He was a cry-baby and a big calf and I walloped him one. I wanted the hatchet and so I took it—that’s what I did. I banged him one on the nose and jerked it out of his hand.”

Mother laughed—a queer unmirthful little laugh. It was the kind of laugh that hurts. There was irony in it and that got to Uncas at once. “It doesn’t take much of a fellow to snatch a hatchet out of the hands of a cry-baby,” she said.

That was all. She kept on rubbing his hands and now it was my eyes, and not the eyes of Uncas, that could look directly into our mother’s eyes.

Perhaps it was in that moment, and not in the moment when I lay on the ground peeking through the crack into the shed, that the first dim traces of understanding of all such fellows as father and myself came to me. I looked at mother with adoration in my own eyes, and when she had taken the kerosene lamp and had gone away, and when we boys were all again curled quietly like sleeping puppies in the bed, I cried a little, as I am sure father must have cried sometimes when there was no one about. Perhaps his getting drunk, as he did on all possible occasions, was a way of crying too.

And I cried also, I suppose, because in Uncas and mother there was a kind of directness and simplicity that father and all fellows, who like myself are of the same breed with him, can never quite achieve.

NOTE II

A FAMILY of five boys and two girls—a mother who is to die, outworn and done for at thirty—

A father, whose blood and whose temperament I am to carry to the end of my days. How futile he was—in his physical life as a man in America in his time—what dreams he must have had!

There was a dream he had of something magnificent—a lone rider on a horse, dressed in shining armor and riding in a city before a vast multitude of people—the beating of drums.... “The man—he comes! Hurra!” People who live their lives by facts can never understand such a fellow. “He comes! All hail!” What has he done? Well, never mind—something grand, you may be sure of that. The dream that never can become a fact in life can become a fact in fancy. “There he goes.... ‘Teddy the magnificent’!” One both laughs and cries over the memory of him.

The showman was there, in him—it flowered within him—and it is in me too. When Carl Sandburg, the poet, long after said to me—speaking of his lecturing and reading his poetry aloud, to make a living—“I give ’em a good show,” I understood what he meant and I understood the pride in his voice when he said it. And then, later still, when I was writing my own novel, “Poor White”; and when my boyhood friend, John Emerson, gave me a job—doing publicity for movie people, in order that I might have some income to write at my leisure—and for a time I saw a good deal of that strange perverted band, I could understand them also. They were people like my own father, robbed of their inheritance. In an odd way they were my own people too.

John Emerson, a boyhood friend from my own village, had given me the movie job, knowing I would be no good at it. He was a successful man, a moneymaker, and was always planning out schemes for giving me money and leisure. I went often to the movie studios and watched the men and the women at work. Children, playing with dreams—dreams of an heroic kind of desperado cowboy, doing good deeds at the business end of a gun—dreams of an ever-virtuous womanhood walking amid vice—American dreams—Anglo-Saxon dreams. How they wanted to be the things they were always playing, and how impossible it all was!

My father lived in a land and in a time when what one later begins to understand a little as the artist in man could not by any possibility be understood by his fellows. Dreams then were to be expressed in building railroads and factories, in boring gas wells, stringing telegraph poles. There was room for no other dream and since father could not do any of these things he was an outlaw in his community. The community tolerated him. His own sons tolerated him.

As for the movie people I saw, they worked in a strange land of fragments of dreams. The parts they were to play were given them in fragments. Everything was fragmentary and unfinished. A kind of insanity reigned. A “set” having been made, at a certain cost in dollars and cents, half a dozen little bits of the dream they were to enact were gone through—sometimes a dozen times—and the very piece the actors were supposed to play they often did not know. A strange greenish light fell down over them, and when they were not playing, they sat stupidly hour after hour arrayed in their motley, often pawing one another over listlessly with their hands and seeking outside the studios—in drink, in dope, in futile love-making, in trying to carry on an absurd pretense to being ladies and gentlemen of parts—seeking in all these things to compensate themselves for being robbed of their inheritance as artists—the right to pour their emotional energies into their work.

The result of all this perversion of workmanship and of emotional energy in the movie world seemed to me to reduce human beings to a state that most of all suggested to my mind angleworms squirming in a boy’s bait-can; and why any human being, under the conditions in which they must work and with the materials with which they must work, should want to be a movie actor or a writer for the movies is beyond my comprehension.

But to return to my father. At least, there was little of the dull listlessness of the angleworm in him. He created his own, “dope,” inside himself, most of the time.

Once he actually set up as a showman. With a man of our town, named Aldrich, who owned a broken-down horse and a spring wagon he went forth to strut his own little hour upon the boards.

It was winter and there was no work for father to be had in our town and I presume Aldrich also had no work. I remember him as a quiet-looking middle-aged man with a red face. He also was a house-painter, during the summer months, and he and father had by some chance got hold of a secondhand magic-lantern outfit.

They were to show at country schoolhouses in the farming districts of northern Ohio. There was to be a sheet hung across the end of the room, near the place where the teacher’s desk would sit, and on this would be thrown certain pictures Aldrich had got hold of.

Those of you who have lived in the farming sections of mid-America, in the days before the movies, will understand that show. There would be a picture of Niagara Falls—taken in the winter—Niagara Falls frozen into a series of ice bridges and with small black figures of men running over the bridges.

These, you are to understand, however, would not be moving men. They would be frozen still and still—petrified men with legs upraised to take a step, and holding them there—to the end of time—forever.

Then there would be a picture of President McKinley and one of Abe Lincoln and Grover Cleveland—one of an emigrant wagon going across the Western plains to California, with Indians on ponies circling in the middle distance—a picture of the driving of the last railroad spike, when the railroad builders coming from the West had met the railroad builders coming from the East—somewhere out on the plains. The spike would be a golden one, as everyone in the audience would know, but in the picture it would be black. Several men with silk hats on their heads stood about while a workman drove the spike. The hammer was upraised. It stayed there. In the background was an engine, and several Indians wrapped in blankets and looking sad, as though to say: “This cooks our bacon.”

Most of the pictures would be in dead blacks and whites, but there would be, at the very end, in colors, the old flag floating—that last of all. It was as good for a hand then as it was later when George Cohan got rich and became famous with it, and father and Aldrich evidently knew it would “go.”

The admission charge would be ten cents.

As I have said, Aldrich was a red-faced mild middle-aged appearing man. What things will not such quiet-looking fellows sometimes do? No one in the world would ever be understood at all if your mild quiet-looking man did not have, buried away in him somewhere, the possibility of being almost any known sort of a fool.

In the arrangement that had been made father was to be the actor—a comedian. He was to sing certain songs.

First, a few pictures from the magic lantern; then a song by father, with a little dance. Then more pictures and another song; and at last the colored pictures, ending with the flag flying. The inference might be that the flag, at any rate, had survived the ordeal.

And a dream of a harvest of dimes too. As for expense—well, let us say, a dollar for the use of the country schoolhouse and enough firewood to heat it for the evening. A boy would build the fire for the chance to be admitted free; and the horse and the two men would be fed at the bounty of some farmer. Father would have promised that—he would have been very sure of being able to accomplish that—would have depended upon his personal charm. I can fancy him explaining to Aldrich, or rather not explaining. He would smile and throw out his hands in a peculiar way. “You leave that to me, just you leave that to me.”

And his hopes would not be unjustified either. What a boon for a quiet, dull, farming family in the winter, to have such a one light down upon it! He and his companion would have to stay in the one school district for two or three days. Arrangements would have to be made about getting the schoolhouse, and he and Aldrich would have to drive around the neighborhood and distribute the play bills:

AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE
FRIDAY EVENING
MAJOR IRWIN ANDERSON
THE ACTOR
IN SONG AND DANCE
MARVELOUS MAGIC-LANTERN SHOW
A VISIT TO ALL THE WONDERS
OF THE WORLD
10 CENTS

And then the evenings in the farmhouses! Aldrich would sit like an Indian in his corner by the farmhouse stove; and he must have been saying to himself constantly: “Now, how did I get into this? How did I get into this?”

The farmer’s wife, the hired man and perhaps a grown daughter would be there and there would be a maiden of uncertain age—the farm woman’s sister, who had never married and so just stayed about and worked for her board—and, in a corner, two or three towheaded boys who would presently have to go off to bed.

All the others silent, but father talking and talking. An actor in the house! It was wonderful, like having Charlie Chaplin to dinner with you nowadays!

Father was in his element now. This was pie for him. No hungry sons about, no sick wife, no grocery bills or rent to be paid. This the golden age—timeless; there was no past, no future—the quiet, unsophisticated people in the room were putty to his hands.

Surely there was something magnificent in my father’s utter disregard for the facts of life. In the picture I have of him—that is to say in my fancy—in the picture I have of him during his pilgrimages of that winter I always see his partner in the affair, Aldrich, fast asleep in a chair.

But the farmer and his wife, and the wife’s sister—they are not asleep. The unmarried woman in the house is, let us say, thirty-eight. She is tall and gaunt and has several teeth missing and her name is Tilly. It would be bound to be Tilly.

And when father has been in the house two hours he is calling her “Tilly,” and the farmer he is addressing familiarly as “Ed.”

After the evening meal the farmer has had to go to his stable to look at his stock, to bed the stock down for the night, and father has gone with him. Father runs about the stable holding the lantern. He boasts about the horses and cattle in his father’s stables when he was a boy. Whether that early home of his ever existed anywhere but in his fancy is doubtful.

What a fellow, wanting to be loved, was my father!

And now he is in the farmhouse sitting room and it is late evening and the towheaded children have gone regretfully to bed. There is something in the air of the room, a kind of suspense, a feeling that something is about to happen. Father has so carefully worked that up. He would do it by silences, by sudden breakings out into suppressed laughter, and then by quickly looking sad. I have seen him do the thing, oh, many times. “My dear people—you wait! There is something inside me that is wonderful, and if you will only be patient you will presently see or hear it come forth,” he seemed to be saying.

He is by the fire with his legs spread out and his hands are in his trousers pockets. He stares at the floor. He is smoking a cigar. In some ways he always managed to keep himself supplied with the little comforts of life.

And he has so placed his chair that he can look at Tilly, who has retired into her corner, without anyone else in the room seeing the look. Now she is sitting in deep shadows, far away from the kerosene lamp with which the room is lighted and as she sits there, half lost in the darkness, there is suddenly something—a haunting kind of beauty hangs over her.

She is a little excited by something father has managed in some indescribable way to do to the very air of the room. Tilly also was once young and must at some time have had her grand moment in life. Her moment was not very prolonged. Once, when she was a young woman, she went to a country dance and a man, who dealt in horses, took a fancy to her and carried her home after the dance in his buggy. He was a tall man with a heavy mustache and she—it was a moonlight night in October—she grew sad and wistful. The horse dealer half intended—well, he had been buying horses for a trucking company at Toledo, Ohio, had secured all he wanted and was leaving the neighborhood on the next day—the thing he felt during that evening later quite went out of his mind.

As for father he is, at the moment perhaps thinking of mother, when she was young and lovely and was a bound girl in just such another farmhouse, and surely he wanted something lovely for mother then as he does for Tilly now. I have no doubt at all that father always wanted lovely things for people—to happen to people—and that he had also an absurd and never-dying faith in himself—that he was, in some inscrutable way, appointed to be the bearer of lovely things to obscure people.

However, there is something else in his mind also. Is he not the fellow who, by his personal charm, is to earn for himself, Aldrich and the horse, board, a bed, a welcome—without pay—until the show is pulled off at the schoolhouse? That is his business now and this is his hour.

In fancy I can hear the tale he would now begin telling. There was that one about his escape from the guards when he was a Union soldier in the Civil War and was being marched off to a Southern prison camp. He would no doubt use that. It was a bull’s-eye story and always hit the mark! Oh, how often and under what varying circumstances has not my father escaped from prisons! Benvenuto Cellini or the Count of Monte Cristo had nothing on him.

Yes, the story he would now tell would be that once when it rained and the Union prisoners, father among them—some forty men in all—were being marched off along a road in the deep mud—

That was indeed a night of adventure! It was a tale he loved telling, and what realistic touches he could put into it: the rain that wet the prisoners to the skin—the cold—the chattering teeth—the groans of weary men—the closeness of the dark forest on either hand—the steady weary chug-chug of the feet of the prisoners in the mud—the line of guards at either side of the road, with the guns over their shoulders—the curses of the Rebel guards when they stumbled in the darkness.

What a night of weary anguish on the part of the prisoners! When they stopped to rest the guards went into a house and left the prisoners to stand outside in the rain, or lie on the bare ground, guarded by part of the company. If any died of exposure—well, there would be that many less men to feed when they were got into the Southern prison camp.

And now, after many days and nights, marching thus, the souls of the prisoners were sick with weariness. A dreary desolated look would come upon father’s face as he spoke of it.

They marched steadily along in the deep mud and the rain. How cold the rain was! Now and then, in the darkness, a dog barked, far away somewhere. There was a break in the solid line of timber along the road and the men marched across the crest of a low hill. There are lights to be seen now, in distant farmhouses, far away across a valley—a few lights like stars shining.

The story-teller has got his audience leaning forward in their chairs. Outside the farmhouse in which they sit a wind begins to blow and a broken branch from a near-by tree is blown against the side of the house. The farmer, a heavy, stolid-looking man, starts a little and his wife shivers as with cold and Tilly is absorbed—she does not want to miss a word of the tale.

And now father is describing the darkness of the valley below the hill and the lights seen, far off. Will any of the little company of prisoners ever see their own homes again, their wives, their children, their sweethearts? The lights of the farmhouses in the valley are like stars in the sky of a world turned upside down.

The Rebel commander of the guard has issued a warning and a command: “It’s pretty dark here, and if any of the Yanks make a stir to move out of the centre of the road fire straight into the mass of them. Kill them like dogs.”

A feeling creeps over father. He is, you see, a southern man himself, a man of the Georgia hills and plains. There is no law that shall prevent his having been born in Georgia, although to-morrow night it may be North Carolina or Kentucky. But to-night his birthplace shall be Georgia. He is a man who lives by his fancy and to-night it shall suit his fancy and the drift of his tale to be a Georgian.

And so he, a prisoner of the Rebels, is being marched over the low hill, with the lights from distant farmhouses shining like stars in the darkness below, and suddenly a feeling comes to him, a feeling such as one sometimes has when one is alone in one’s own house at night. You have had the feeling. You are alone in the house and there are no lights and it is cold and dark. Everything you touch—feel with your hands in the darkness—is strange and at the same time familiar. You know how it is.

The farmer is nodding his head and his wife has her hands gripped, lying in her lap. Even Aldrich is awake now. The devil! Father has given this particular tale a new turn since he told it last. “This is something like.” Aldrich leans forward to listen.

And there is the woman Tilly, in the half darkness. See, she is quite lovely now, quite as she was on that evening when she rode with the horse dealer in the buggy! Something has happened to soften the long, harsh lines of her face and she might be a princess sitting there now in the half-light.

Father would have thought of that. It would be something worth while now to be a tale-teller to a princess. He stops talking to consider for a moment the possibilities of the notion, and then with a sigh gives it up.

It is a sweet notion but it won’t do. Tale-teller to a princess, eh! Evenings in a castle and the prince has come in from hunting in a forest. The tale-teller is dressed in flashy clothes and with a crowd of courtiers, ladies in waiting—whatever hangers-on a princess has—is sitting by an open fire. There are great, magnificent dogs lying about too.

Father is considering whether or not it is worth trying sometime—the telling of a tale of himself in just that rôle. An idea crosses his mind. The princess has a lover who creeps one night into the castle and the prince has become aware of his presence, is told of his presence by a trusty varlet. Taking his sword in hand the prince creeps through the dark hallways to kill his rival, but father has warned the lovers and they have fled. It afterward comes to the ears of the prince that father has protected the lovers and he—that is to say, father—is compelled to flee for his life. He comes to America and lives the life of an exile, far from the splendor to which he has been accustomed.

Father is thinking whether it would be worth trying—the telling of such a fable of his former existence, some evening at some farmhouse where he and Aldrich are staying; and for a moment a sort of George Barr McCutcheon light comes into his eyes, but with a sigh he gives it up.

It wouldn’t go over—not in a farmhouse in northern Ohio, he concludes.

He returns to the tale, that so evidently is going over; but, before he resumes, casts another glance at Tilly. “Oh, Tilly, thou dear lovely one,” he sighs inwardly.

The farmhouse is in the North and he has set himself forth as a southerner enlisted in the northern army. An explanation is in order, and he makes it, with a flourish.

Born a southerner, the son of a proud southern family, he was sent to school, to a college in the North. In college he had a roommate, a dear fellow from the state of Illinois. The “roommate’s father was owner and editor of the Chicago Tribune” he explains.

And during one summer, a few years before the breaking out of the war, he went on a visit to the home of his Illinois friend, and while he was there he, with his friend, went to hear the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. It was odd, but the facts were that the young fellow from Illinois became enamored of the brilliant Douglas while he—well, to tell the truth, his own heart was wrung by the simplicity and nobility of the rail-splitter, Lincoln. “Never shall I forget the nobility of that countenance,” he says in speaking of it. He appears about to cry and does in fact take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his eyes. “Oh, the noble, the indescribable effect upon my boyhood heart of the stirring words of that man. There he stood like a mighty oak of the forest breasting the storms. ‘A nation cannot exist half slave and half free. A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ he said, and his words thrilled me to the very marrow of my being.”

And then father would have described his homecoming after that terrific experience. War was coming on and all the South was aflame.

One day at table in his southern home, with his brothers, his father and mother and his beautiful and innocent young sister sitting with him, he dared to say something in defense of Lincoln.

What a storm was then raised! The father getting up from his place at table pointed a trembling finger at his son. All eyes, except only those of his younger sister, were turned on him in wrath and disapproval. “Mention that hated name again in this house and I will shoot you like a dog, though you are my son,” his father said, and the son got up from the table and went away, filled with the sense of filial duty that would not let a born southerner answer his own father, but nevertheless determined to stick to the faith aroused in him by the words of the noble Lincoln.

And so he had ridden away from his southern home in the night and had finally joined the Union forces.

What a night—riding away from his father’s house in the darkness, leaving his mother behind, leaving all tradition behind, condemning himself to be an outlaw in the hearts of those he had always loved—for the sake of duty!

One can imagine Aldrich blinking a little and rubbing his hands together. “Teddy is laying it on rather thick,” he no doubt says to himself; but he must nevertheless have been filled with admiration.

However, let us, who are together revisiting the scene of my father’s triumph on that evening in the farmhouse long ago, be not too much in fear for the heart of the woman Tilly. At any rate her physical self, if not her heart, was safe.

Although there can be little doubt that the presence of the virgin Tilly, sitting in the half darkness, and the kindliness of the shadows that had temporarily enhanced her failing beauty, may have had a good deal to do with father’s talent on that evening, I am sure nothing else ever came of it. Father, in his own way, was devoted to mother.

And he had his own way of treasuring her. Did he not treasure always the lovelier moments of her?

He had found her in a farmhouse when he was by way of being something of a young swell himself and she was a bound girl; and she was then beautiful—beautiful without the aid of shadows cast by a kerosene lamp.

In reality she was the aristocrat of the two, as the beautiful one is always the aristocrat; and oh, how little beauty in woman is understood! The popular magazine covers and the moving-picture actresses have raised the very devil with our American conception of womanly beauty.

But father had delicacy, of a sort, of that you may be quite sure; and do you not suppose that Tilly, in the Ohio farmhouse, sensed something of his attitude toward what fragment of beauty was left in her, and that she loved him for that attitude—as I am sure my own mother also did?

My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of the others, over the top of the wall.

And now the weary prisoners with their escort have come down off the hillside to a valley and are approaching a large old southern mansion, standing back from the road they have been traveling, and the officers in charge of the prisoners—there were two of them—command the guards to turn in at a gate that leads to the house.

There is an open space before the house where the prisoners are gathered and the ground—covered with firm turf during most of the year—has, under the continuous rains, become soft and yielding. Where each prisoner stands a puddle gathers about his feet.

The house is dark, but for a single light at the back, and one of the officers begins shouting. A large pack of hunting dogs have come from a shed, hidden away in the darkness somewhere, and are gathered growling and barking in a half circle about the prisoners.

One of the dogs rushes through the mass of prisoners and with a glad cry leaps upon father, and all the others follow so that guards are compelled to drive the dogs off, kicking them and using the butts of their guns. Lights are lit inside the house. The people are astir.

You will understand what a moment this was for father. By one of those strange streaks of fate—which he is very careful to explain to his audience happen much more frequently in life than one imagines—he had been led, as a prisoner on his way to a southern prison pen, right to the door of his own father’s house.

What a moment indeed! Being a prisoner he has of course no idea how long he will be kept there. Thank God, he has grown a thick, bushy beard since he left home.

As to his fate—if the prisoners are kept in the yard until daylight comes—well, he knows his own mother.

His own father, old man though he is, has gone off to the war and all his brothers have gone; and his mother has come from a proud old southern family, one of the oldest and proudest. Had she known he was there among the prisoners she would have seen him hanged without a protest and would herself have lent a hand at pulling the rope.

* * * * *

Ah, what had not my father given for his country! Where will his equal be found, even among the whole world’s heroes? In the eyes of his own mother and father, in his brother’s eyes, in the eyes of all the branches and ramifications of his southern family, in the eyes of all—except only one unsophisticated and innocent girl—he had brought everlasting disgrace on one of the proudest names of the South.

Indeed it was just because he, the son, had gone off to fight with the northern army that his father, a proud old man of sixty, had insisted on being taken into the southern army. “I have a strong old frame and I insist,” he had said. “I must make good the loss to my Southland for my own son, who has proven himself a dog and a renegade.”

And so the old man had marched off with a gun on his shoulder, insisting on being taken as a common soldier and put where he could face constant and terrible danger, and the seeds of an undying hatred against the son had been planted deep in the hearts of the whole family.

The dullest mind surely will comprehend now what a position father was in when, in answer to the shouts of the officer, lights began to appear all through the house. Was it not a situation to wring tears from the heart of a man of stone! As for a woman’s heart—one can scarcely speak of the matter.

And in the house, before father’s eyes, there was one—a pure and innocent southern girl of rare beauty—a pearl of womanhood in fact—rarest example of the famed spotless womanhood of the Southland—his younger sister—the only woman child of the family.

You see, as father would so carefully have explained that evening in the farmhouse, he did not care so much for his own life. That had already been given to his country, he would have said proudly.

But, as you will understand quickly enough, had his presence among the prisoners been discovered, his proud mother—eager to wipe out the only stain on the family escutcheon—would at once have insisted that he be hanged to the doorpost of the very house in which he was born, her own hand pulling at the rope that was to jerk him up, into the arms of death—to make white again the family escutcheon, you understand.

Could a proud southern woman do less?

And in the event of such an outcome to the adventures of the night, see how that younger sister—the love of his life at that time—see how she would have suffered.

There she was, the pure and innocent girl, the one who understood nothing, to be sure, of the import of his decision to stick to the old flag and fight for the land of Washington and Lincoln, and who, in her innocent way, just loved him. On that day at his father’s table, when he—so deeply affected by the Lincoln-Douglas debates—had dared say a word for the cause of the North, it had been her eyes and her eyes alone that had looked at him with love, when all the other eyes of his family had looked at him with hatred and loathing.

And she would just be bursting into womanhood now. The aroma of awakening womanhood would be lying over her as perfume over the opening rosebud.

Think of it! There she, the pure and innocent one, would have to stand and see him hanged. A blight would be brought down upon her young life and her head would, ever after that night, be bowed in lonely and silent sorrow. That brave pure and just girl made old before her time. Ah; well might it be that in one night the mass of golden locks, that now covered her head like a cloud just kissed by the evening sun—that very golden hair might be turned as white as snow!

I can, in fancy, hear my father saying the words I have set down here and coming very near to crying himself as he said them. At the moment he would have believed without question the story he himself was telling.

* * * * *

And now the front door to the old southern mansion is thrown open and there, in the doorway facing the prisoners in the rain, stands a gigantic young negro—my father’s own body servant before he left home. (Father stops the flow of his talk long enough to explain how he and the negro boy, as lads together, had fought, wrestled, hunted, fished and lived together like two brothers. I will not go into that, however. Any professional southerner will tell you all about it, if you care to hear. It would have been the most trite part of father’s evening’s effort.)

Anyway, there the gigantic young negro stands in the doorway and he is holding in his hand a candle. Back of him stands my grandmother and back of her the young and innocent sister.

The figure of father’s mother is erect. She is old but she is yet tall and strong. One of the officers explains to her that he and his men have been on an all-night march, taking the crowd of Yankee prisoners to a prison camp, and asks for the hospitality of the house. Being a southerner himself he knows that southern hospitality can never fail, even at midnight. “A bite to eat and a cup of hot coffee in the name of our Southland,” he asks.

It is granted, of course. The proud woman beckons him and his brother officer into the house and herself steps out into the cold, drizzling rain.

She has ordered the young negro to stand on the porch, holding the candle aloof, and now, marching across the wet lawn, approaches the prisoners. The southern guards have stepped aside, bowing low before southern womanhood, and she goes near the prisoners and looks at them, as well as one may in the uncertain light. “I have a curiosity to see some of the unmannerly dogs of Yanks,” she says, leaning forward and staring at them. She is very near her own son now but he has turned his face away and is looking at the ground. Something however causes him to raise his head just as she, to express more fully her contempt, spits at the men.

A little speck of her white spittle lands upon father’s thick, tawny beard.

And now his mother has gone back into the house and it is again dark on the lawn in front. The Rebel guards are relieved—two at a time—to go to the kitchen door, where they are given hot coffee and sandwiches. And once his young sister, she of the tender heart, tries to creep to where the prisoners stand in the darkness. She is accompanied by an old negro woman and has planned to give food aid and comfort to the weary men but is prevented. Her mother has missed her inside the house and coming to the door calls to her. “I know your tender heart,” she says, “but it shall not be. The teeth of no Yankee dog shall ever bite into food raised on the land of your father. It shall not happen, at least while your mother is alive to prevent.”

NOTE III

SO there was father, sitting comfortably in the warm farmhouse living room—he and Aldrich having been well fed at the table of a prosperous farmer—and having before him what he most loved, an attentive and absorbed audience. By this time the farmer’s wife would be deeply moved by the fate of that son of the South that father had represented himself as being; and as for Tilly—while, in the fanciful picture he is making, he stands in the cold and wet outside the door of that southern mansion, Heaven knows what is going on in poor Tilly’s heart. It is however bleeding with sympathy, one may be sure of that.

So there is father and, in the meantime, what of his own actual flesh-and-blood family, the family he had left behind in an Ohio village when he set forth on his career as an actor?

It is not suffering too much. One need not waste too much sympathy on his family. Although he was never what we called in our Ohio country, “a good provider,” he had his points and as one of his sons I at least would be loath to trade him for a more provident shrewd and thoughtful father.

It must however have been a fairly hard winter, for mother at least and in connection with that winter and others that followed I have often since had an amusing thought. In later years, when my own name had a little got up in the world as a teller of tales I was often accused of having got my impulse, as a story-teller, from the Russians. The statement is a plausible one. It is, in a way, based upon reason.

When I had grown to be a man, and when my stories began to be published in the pages of the more reckless magazines, such as The Little Review, the old Masses and later in The Seven Arts and The Dial, and when I was so often accused of being under the Russian influence, I began to read the Russians, to find out if the statement, so often made concerning me and my work, could be true.

This I found, that in Russian novels the characters are always eating cabbage soup and I have no doubt Russian writers eat it too.

This was a revelation to me. Many of the Russian tales are concerned with the lives of peasants and a Boston critic once said I had brought the American peasant into literature; and it is likely that Russian writers, like all the other writers who have ever lived and have not pandered to the popular demand for sentimental romances were fortunate if they could live as well as a peasant. “What the critics say is no doubt true,” I told myself; for, like so many of the Russian writers, I was raised largely on cabbage soup.

Let me explain.

The little Ohio farming community, where I lived as a lad had in it, at that time, no factories, and the merchants artisans lawyers and other townspeople were all either owners of land which they rented out to tenant farmers, or they sold goods or their services to farmers. The soil on the farms about the town was a light sandy loam that would raise small fruits, corn, wheat, oats or potatoes, but that did particularly well when planted to cabbages.

As a result the raising of cabbages became a sort of specialty with us in our country; and there are now, I believe, in my native place, some three or four prosperous factories, devoted to the making of what before the war was called “sauerkraut.” Later, to help win the war, it was called: “Liberty Cabbage.”

The specialization in the raising of cabbage began in our Ohio country in my day, and in a good year some of the fields produced as high as twenty tons of cabbage an acre.

The cabbage fields grew larger and larger and, as we grew older, my brothers and I went every spring and fell to work in the fields. We crawled across the fields, setting out cabbage plants in the spring, and in the fall went out to cut cabbages. The huge round hard heads of cabbage were cut from their stalks and pitched to a man who loaded them upon a hay wagon; and on fall days I have often seen twenty or thirty wagons, each bearing its two or three tons of cabbages and waiting its turn to get to the cars on the railroad siding. The waiting wagons filled our streets as tobacco-laden wagons fill the streets of a Kentucky town in the fall, and in the stores and houses everyone for a time talked of nothing but cabbages. “What would the crop bring on the markets at Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh, for some reason I have never understood, had a passion for cabbages; and why Pittsburgh hasn’t produced more so-called realistic writers, in the Russian manner, I cannot understand.

However, one may well leave that to the modern psychologists.

During the fall of that year, after father had set out on his adventures as an actor, mother did something she had often done before. By a stroke of strategy she succeeded in getting a winter’s supply of cabbages for her family, without the expenditure of any monies.

The fall advanced, father had gone, and the annual village cut-up time, called among us “Hallowe’en,” came on.

It was the custom among the lads of our town, particularly among those who lived on the farms near town, to make cabbages part of their celebration of the occasion. Such lads, living as they did in the country, had the use of horses and buggies, and on Hallowe’en they hitched up and drove off to town.

On the way they stopped at the cabbage fields and, finding in some of the fields many cabbages yet uncut, pulled them out by the roots and piled them in the backs of their buggies.

The country lads, giggling with anticipated pleasure, drove into one of the quieter residence streets of our town and, leaving the horse standing in the road, one of them got out of the buggy and took one of the cabbages in his hand. The cabbage had been pulled out of the ground with the great stalklike root still clinging to it and the lad now grasped this firmly. He crept toward one of the houses, preferably one that was dark—an indication that the people of the house, having spent a hard day at labor, had already gone to bed. Approaching the house cautiously, he swung the cabbage above his head, holding it by the long stalk, and then he let it go. The thing was to just hurl the cabbage full against the closed door of the house. It struck with a thunderous sound and the supposition was that the people of the house would be startled and fairly lifted out of their beds by the hollow booming noise, produced when the head of cabbage landed against the door and, as a matter of fact, when a stout country boy had hurled the cabbage the sound produced was something quite tremendous.

The cabbage having been thrown the country boy ran quickly into the road, leaped into his buggy and, striking his horse with the whip, drove triumphantly away. He was not likely to return unless pursued, and there it was that mother’s strategy came into play.

On the great night she made us all sit quietly in the house. As soon as the evening meal was finished the lights were put out and we waited while mother stood just at the door, the knob in her hand. No doubt it must have seemed strange to the boys of our town that one so gentle and quiet as mother could be so infuriated by the hurling of a cabbage at the door of our house.

But there was the simple fact of the situation to tempt and darkness had no sooner settled down upon our quiet street that one of the lads appeared. It was worth while throwing cabbages at such a house. One was pursued, one was scolded, threats were hurled: “Don’t you dare come back to this house! I’ll have the town marshal after you, that’s what I’ll do! If I get my hands on one of you I’ll give you a drubbing!” There was something of the actor in mother also.

What a night for the lads! Here was something worth while and all evening the game went on and on. The buggies were not driven to our house, but were stopped at the head of the street, and town boys went on pilgrimages to cabbage fields to get ammunition and join in the siege. Mother stormed scolded and ran out into the darkness waving a broom while we children stayed indoors, enjoying the battle—and when the evening’s sport was at an end, we all fell to and gathered in the spoils. As she returned from each sally from the fort mother had brought into the house the last cabbage thrown—if she could find it; and now, late in the evening when our provident tormentors were all gone, we children went forth with a lantern and got in the rest of our crop. Often as many as two or three hundred cabbages came our way and these were all carefully gathered in. They had been pulled from the ground, with all the heavy outer leaves still clinging to them, so that they were comparatively uninjured and, as there was also still attached to them the heavy stalklike root, they were in fine shape to be kept. A long trench was dug in our back yard and the cabbages buried, lying closely side by side, as I am told the dead are usually buried after a siege.

Perhaps indeed we were somewhat more careful with them than soldiers are with their dead after a battle. Were not the cabbages to be, for us, the givers of life? They were put into the trench carefully and tenderly with the heads downward and the stalks sticking up, mother supervising, and about each head straw was carefully packed—winding sheets. One could get straw from a strawstack in a near-by field at night, any amount of it, and one did not pay or even bother to ask.

When winter came quickly, as it did after Hallowe’en, mother got small white beans from the grocery and salt pork from the butcher, and a thick soup, of which we never tired, was concocted. The cabbages were something at our backs. They made us feel safe.

And there was also a sense of something achieved. In the land in which we lived one did not need to have a large income. There was food all about, plenty of it, and we who lived so precariously in the land of plenty had, by our “mother’s wit,” achieved this store of food without working for it. A common sense of pride in our cleverness held us together.

One went out into our back yard on a winter’s night when there was snow on the ground and looked abroad. Already we lads read books, and snow-covered fields stretching away under the winter moon suggested strange, stirring thoughts—travelers beset by wolves on the Russian Steppes—emigrant trains lost in whirling snowstorms on the Western sagebrush deserts of our own country, men in all sorts of strange terrible places wandering, desperate and starving, under the winter moon—and what of us? The place where the cabbages were buried made a long white mound, directly across our back yard, and when one looked at it there was a sense of fullness and plenty in the land. One remembered that down under the snow, buried away in the straw, were those long rows of cabbages. Deer, buffaloes, wild horses and equally wild long-horned cattle, far out on the Western plains, did not worry about food because the ground was covered with snow. With their hoofs they pawed the snow away, and found buried beneath the snow the sweet little clusters of bunch grass, that again sent the warmth of life singing through their bodies.

It was a chance for the fancy to play, to kick up its heels and have a good time. One could imagine the house in which one lived as a fort, set far out on the Western frontier. The cabbages had been put into the ground with the stalks straight up. They stuck up straight and stiff, like sentinels standing and, after looking, one went into the fort and slept quietly and peacefully. There the soldiers were—they were standing firm and unyielding. Were there enemies prowling out there in the white darkness, the little wild dogs of want? One could laugh at such thoughts. Were not the sentinels standing—quietly and firmly waiting? One could go into the fort and sleep in peace, hugging that thought.

To us at home, father was always, somewhat strangely, a part and at the same time not a part of our lives. He flew in and out as a bird flies in and out of a bush, and I am quite sure that, all through the years of our childhood, it never occurred to him to ask, when he set off on one of his winter adventures, whether or not there was anything to eat in our house. The fall came with its snows, and the little creeping fear of actual starvation for her brood, that must often have been in mother’s mind, followed by the spring, the warm rains, the promise of plenty and his return. If he brought no money, he did bring something—a ham, some combs of honey, a jug of cider, or even perhaps a quarter of beef. There he was again and there was food on the table. He made a gesture. “There!” he seemed to be saying; “you see! Who says I’m not a provider?”

There were tales to be told and he was the teller of tales. “It is sufficient. Can man live by bread alone? There is food on the table now. Eat! Stuff yourselves! Spring has come and there are signs to be painted. The night has passed and it is another day. I am a man of faith. I tell you a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without my notice. I will make a tale of it—tell why and how it fell. The most marvelous tale in the world might be made from the fall of a sparrow. Is not the workman worthy of his hire? What about the lilies of the field, eh? They toil not and neither do they spin—do they?”

And yet, was Solomon, in all his glory, arrayed like one of these?

* * * * *

I remember a day in the early spring when we were compelled to move out of one house and into another. The rent for the house in which we had lived all during the winter had been long unpaid and mother had no money. Father had just returned from one of his long adventures, but early in the day of the moving he disappeared again and, as we could not afford a moving wagon, mother and we boys carted our poor belongings to the new place on our backs.

As for father, he had managed to borrow a horse and a spring wagon from a neighbor and had set off again into the country. The house to which we were moving was far out at the edge of the town and next to it was a field in which there was a great straw stack—a convenience, as what we called our “bed ticks,” on which we slept, had to be emptied of the straw that had become fine and dustlike from long use, and then refilled with the new straw.

When all was done and we were quite settled in the new place, father drove into the yard. He had noticed, he explained, a special kind of straw at a farmhouse some five miles away, at a place he had visited during his wanderings of the winter just past, and he had thought he would give us all a treat by getting that particular kind of straw for our beds.

And so he had driven off at daybreak, and, while we packed our furniture to the new place, had dined with the farmer and his family and had now returned. Although our beds had been made for the night the bed ticks must all be brought down again, the straw tumbled out and the special straw put in. “There,” he said, with one of his grand gestures, as we lads tramped wearily up the stairs with the refilled bags and as mother stood smiling—a little resentfully perhaps, but still smiling; “there, you kids, try sleeping on that. There is nothing on earth too good for my kids.”

NOTE IV

LET us, however, return to father and the tale he is telling as he sits in the farmhouse on the winter’s evening. I am too good a son of my father to leave such a tale hanging forever thus, in the air.

As it turned out on that night, when it rained and when he in his young manhood stood just outside the door of that southern mansion house of his childhood, and when his mother, that proud woman of the Southland, spat at him and his companions in misery, so that a white speck of her spittle landed on his beard—where, as he said, it lay like a thing of fire burning into his soul—on that night, I say, he did, by a stroke of fortune, escape the fate that seemed to have him in its clutches.

Dawn was just beginning to break when the two Confederate officers came out at the door of the house and marched their prisoners away.

“We went off into the gray dawn, up out of the valley and over the hills, and then I turned to look back,” father explained. Gray and weary and half dead with starvation, he turned to look. If he dropped dead from starvation and weariness on his way to the prison pen, what did it matter now? The light of his life had gone out. He was never again to see any of his own people, that he knew.

But even as he looked he did see something. The company had stopped to rest for a moment and stood where a sharp wind blew over them, just at the crest of a hill. Down in the valley the dawn was just breaking and, as father looked, he could see the gray of the old house and against the gray of it, on the front veranda, just a fleck of white.

That would be his young and innocent sister, come out of the house, you will understand, to look along the road taken by the prisoners, whose evident misery had touched her young heart.

For father it would be, as he would so elaborately explain, a very high spot in his life, perhaps the highest spot he was to reach in all his weary march to the grave.

He stood there on the hillside, quite cold and miserable—in just that utterly miserable and weary state when one is sometimes most alive—the senses, that is to say, are most alive. At the moment he felt, as any man must feel sometime in life, that an invisible cord does extend from the innermost parts of himself to the innermost parts of some other person. Love comes. For once in a lifetime a state of feeling becomes as definite a thing as a stone wall touched with the hand.

And father had that feeling, at that moment on the hill; and that the person for whom he had it was a woman and his own sister, made it even more an assured thing. He might have expressed the feeling by saying that, as by a miracle, the hill dropped away and he stood on dry level ground in the very presence of his younger sister, so close to her in fact that he might very easily have put out his hand and touched her. So strong was the feeling that he lost for the moment all sense of his presence among the prisoners, all sense of the cold hunger and weariness of the hour and—exactly as the thing might be done, quite ridiculously, by a second-rate actor in the movies—he did in fact step out from among the ranks of prisoners and, with his hands extended before him and his eyes shining, took several steps down the hillside, only to be stopped by an oath from one of the guards.

In the farmhouse, as he told of that moment he would get out of his chair and actually take several steps. He would at bottom be always a good deal of an actor as well as a story-teller, as every story-teller worth his salt inevitably is.

And then came the oath from the guard and an upraised gun, the heavy butt of a gun, ready to swing down upon his head, and back he goes into the ranks of prisoners. He mutters some excuse: “I just wanted to have a look”—and is thus jerked down from the high place, to which his imagination had suddenly lifted him, and back into the weariness of his apparently hopeless journey. Gone, he thought at the moment, was the sister he loved, his boyhood with its memories, all his past life, but it wasn’t quite true.

Father did make an escape. How many escapes he, in fancy, made from the hands of the enemy during that Civil War! He lived, you will understand, in a rather dull farming community and loved at least some air of probability hanging over his tales.

And so the Civil War became for him the canvas, the tubes of paint, the brushes with which he painted his pictures. Perhaps one might better say his own imagination was the brush and the Civil War his paint pot. And he did have a fancy for escapes, as I myself have always had. My own tales, told and untold, are full of escapes—by water in the dark and in a leaky boat, escapes from situations, escapes from dullness, from pretense, from the heavy-handed seriousness of the half artists. What writer of tales does not dote upon escapes? They are the very breath in our nostrils.

It is just possible that upon that occasion, father would have put it to his audience, that the sight, or the imagined sight, of his sister that morning had given him new hope. She was a virgin and there was something catholic about father.

Very well, then, off he goes down the road with his head held high, thinking of the possible schemes for escape and of his sister. He had been given something, a new flair for life. A ray of new hope had come into the black night of his situation. He walked more stoutly.

Stout Cortez—

Silent upon a peak in Darien.

It was just that stout way in which he now walked that gave him his opportunity for escape—that time. All that day the other prisoners went with hanging heads, tramping through the deep mud of the southern roads in winter, but father walked with his head up.

Another night came and they were again in a forest, on a dark and lonely road, with the guards walking at the side and sometimes quite lost in the shadows cast by the trees—the prisoners a dark mass in the very centre of the road.

Father stumbled over a stick, the heavy branch of a tree, quite dead and broken off by the wind, and, stooping down, picked it up. Something, perhaps just the impulse of a soldier, led him to sling the stick lightly over his shoulder and carry it like a gun.

There he was, stepping proudly among those who were not proud—that is to say, the other prisoners—and not having any plan in mind—just thinking of his virginal sister back there, I dare say; and one of the two officers of the guard spoke to him kindly.

“Don’t walk in there so close to the Yanks, in the deep mud, John,” the officer said; “it’s better going out here. There is a path here at the side. Get in here back of me.”

By his very pride, lifted up out of the ranks of the prisoners, father’s mind acted quickly and with a muttered thanks he stepped to the side of the road and became as one of the guards. The men came out on the crest of another low hill and again, in the valley below, there was the faint light of a farmhouse. “Halt!” one of the officers gave command; and then—the younger of the two officers having been told by his superior to send a man down into the valley to the farmhouse to see if there was a chance for the guard and prisoners to rest for a few hours and to get food—he sent father. The officer touched him on the arm. “Go on you,” he said. “You go down and find out.”

So off father went, down a lane, holding the stick very correctly, like a gun, until he was safely out of sight of the others, and then he threw the stick away and ran.

The devil! He knew every inch of the ground on which he now stood. What an opportunity for escape! One of his boyhood friends had lived in the very house, toward which he was supposed to be going, and often, in his young manhood and when he had come home for vacation from the northern school, he had ridden and hunted along the very path his feet now touched. Why, the very dogs and “niggers” on the place knew him as they might have known their master.

And so, if he ran madly now, he ran knowing the ground under his feet. Ah, he would be sure! When his escape was discovered dogs might be set on his trail.

He plunged downward, getting clear of the trees, running across a field—the soft mud clinging to his feet—and so skirted the house and got to where there was a small creek down which he went for a mile in the darkness, walking in the cold water that often came up to his waist. That was to throw dogs off his trail, as any schoolboy should know.

By making a great circle he got back into the road, by which he and the other prisoners had been marched from his own father’s house. They had come some twelve miles during the day and early evening, but the night was still young and, after he had gone three or four miles, he knew a short cut through the woods by which several miles could be cut off.

And so, you see, father went back again to his old home after all and once again saw the sister he loved. The dawn was just breaking when he arrived, but the dogs knew him and the negroes knew him. The very negro who had held the light while his mother spat at the prisoners hid him away in the loft of a barn and brought him food.

Not only food was brought, but also a suit of his own clothes that had been left in the house.

And so he stayed hidden in the loft for three days, and then another night came when it rained and was dark.

Then he crept out, with food for the needs of his journey, and knowing that, when he had walked for a mile along the road that led back toward the distant Union camp, a negro would be standing in a little grove with a good horse saddled and bridled for him. The negro, in the late afternoon, had gone off to a distant town, ostensibly for mail and was to be bound to a tree where he would be discovered later by a party of other negroes sent in search of him. Oh, all was arranged—everything elaborately planned to ward off, from his helpers, the wrath of the mother.

There was the night and the rain, and father, with a dark cloak now about his shoulders, creeping from the stables and toward the house. By the window of one of the rooms downstairs his young sister sat playing an organ, and so he crept to the window and stood for a time looking. Ah; there was moving-picture stuff for your soul! Why, oh why, did not father live in another and later generation? In what affluence might we not all have flourished! The old homestead, a fire burning in the grate, the stern and relentless parent, and outside in the cold and wet father, the outcast son, the disowned, the homeless one, about to ride off into the night in the service of his country—never to return.

On the organ his sister would have been playing “The Last Link is Broken,” and there stands father with the great tears rolling down his cheeks.

Then to ride away into the night, to fight again for the flag he loved, and that to him meant more than home, more than family—ah! more than the love of the woman who was long afterward to come into his life, and to console him somewhat for the fair sister he had lost.

For he did love her, quite completely. Is it not odd, when one considers the matter, that the fair sister—who would have been my aunt, and who never perhaps existed except in father’s fancy, but concerning whom I have heard him tell so many touching tales—is it not odd that I have never succeeded in inventing a satisfactory name for her? Father never—if I remember correctly—gave her a name and I have never succeeded in doing so.

How often have I tried and without success! Ophelia, Cornelia, Emily, Violet, Eunice. You see the difficulty? It must have a quaint and southern sound and must suggest—what must it not suggest?

But father’s tale must have its proper dénouement. One could trust the tale-teller for that. Even had he lived in the days of the movies and had the dénouement quite killed his story—for movie purposes, at least in the northern towns, which would have been the best market—even in the face of all of such difficulties which he fortunately did not have to meet, one could be quite sure of the dénouement.

And he made it splashy. It was at the dreadful battle of Gettysburg, late in the war and on the third of July too. The Confederates had such a dreadful way of getting off on just the wrong foot on the very eve of our national holiday. Vicksburg and Gettysburg for Fourth of July celebrations. Surely it was, what, during the World War, would have been called, “bad war psychology.”

There can be no doubt that father had been a soldier of some sort during the Civil War and so, as was natural, he would give his tale a soldier’s dénouement, sacrificing even the beloved and innocent younger sister to his purpose (to be brought back to life—oh, many, many times later, and made to serve in many future tales).

It was the second day of that great, that terrible battle of Gettysburg, father had picked upon to serve as the setting for the end of his yarn.

That was a moment! All over the North the people stood waiting; farmers stopped working in the fields and drove into northern towns, waiting for the click of the little telegraph instruments; country doctors let the sick lie unattended and stood with all the others in the streets of towns, where was no running in and out of stores. The whole North stood waiting, listening. No time for talk now.

Ah! that Confederate General Lee—the neat quiet Sunday-school superintendent among generals! One could never tell what he would do next. Was it not all planned that the war should be fought out on southern soil?—and here he had brought a great army of his finest troops far into the North.

Everyone waited and listened. No doubt the South waited and listened too.

No Lincoln and Douglas debates now. “A nation cannot exist half slave and half free.”

Now there is the rattle of the box, and the dice that shall decide the fate of a nation are being thrown. In an obscure farmhouse, far in the North, long after the battle of those two terrible days was fought and half forgotten, father also has got his hands on the dice box. He is rattling words in it now. We poor tellers of tales have our moments too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier words into our battles. No uniforms for us, no riders springing away into the gray smoke-mist of battle to carry out orders. We must sit in lonely farmhouses or in cheap rooms in city lodging houses before our typewriters; but if we do not look like generals, we at least feel like that at moments anyway.

Father dropping his little rattling words into the hearts of the farmer, the farmer’s wife, Tilly’s heart too. At Gettysburg a nation in the death grapple. The innocent sister, fair virgin of the South, cast in too.

Look at the eyes of that stoic Aldrich. They are shining now, eh? Ah! he has been a soldier too. In his youth he also stood firmly amid shot and shell, but ever after, poor dear, he had to be satisfied with mere blank dumbness about it all. At the best he could but turn the crank of a magic-lantern machine or join the G. A. R., and march with other men through the streets of an Ohio town on Decoration days, when the real question in the minds of all the onlookers was as to whether Clyde or Tiffin, Ohio, would win the ball game to be played at Ame’s field that afternoon.

A poor sort Aldrich, being able to do nothing but fight. On Decoration days he marched dumbly through the dust to a graveyard and listened to an address made by a candidate for Congress, who had made his money in the wholesale poultry business. At best Aldrich could but speak in low tones to another comrade, as the file of men marched along. “I was with Grant at the Wilderness and before that at Shiloh. Where were you? Oh, you were with Sherman, one of Sherman’s bummers, eh?”

That and no more for Aldrich—but for father, ah!

The second day at Gettysburg and Pickett’s men ready for their charge. Was that not a moment? What men—those fellows of Pickett’s—the very flower of the Southland—young bearded giants, tough like athletes, trained to the minute.

It is growing late on that second day of the fight and Pickett’s men are to decide it all. The sun will soon be going down behind the hills of that low flat valley—the valley in which, but a few short days ago, farmers were preparing to gather the grain crops. On the slope of one of the hills a body of men lies waiting. It is the flower of the Union army too. Father is among them, lying there.

They wait.

They are not trembling, but back of them in a thousand towns men and women are both waiting and trembling. Freedom itself waits and trembles—liberty is trembling—“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time” is trembling like a broken reed. How many grand passages, words, Decoration day addresses, messages to Congress, Fourth of July addresses of the next two hundred years, not worth eight cents on the dollar at the moment!