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A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

BY THEODORE DREISER

THE “GENIUS”

SISTER CARRIE

JENNIE GERHARDT

A TRAVELER AT FORTY

PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL

THE WARSAW HOME
The Mecca of this trip
Frontispiece

A HOOSIER
HOLIDAY

BY

THEODORE DREISER

WITH ILLVSTRATIONS

BY FRANKLIN BOOTH·

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY

LONDON: JOHN LANE

THE BODLEY HEAD

MCMXVI

Copyright, 1916, by

John Lane Company

Press of

J. J. Little & Ives Company

New York, U. S. A.

TO

MY MOTHER

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

CHAPTER I
THE ROSE WINDOW

It was at a modest evening reception I happened to be giving to a new poet of renown that the idea of the holiday was first conceived. I had not seen Franklin, subsequent companion of this pilgrimage, in all of eight or nine months, his work calling him in one direction, mine in another. He is an illustrator of repute, a master of pen and ink, what you would call a really successful artist. He has a studio in New York, another in Indiana—his home town—a car, a chauffeur, and so on.

I first met Franklin ten years before, when he was fresh from Indiana and working on the Sunday supplement of a now defunct New York paper. I was doing the same. I was drawn to him then because he had such an air of unsophisticated and genial simplicity while looking so much the artist. I liked his long, strong aquiline nose, and his hair of a fine black and silver, though he was then only twenty-seven or eight. It is now white—a soft, artistic shock of it, glistening white. Franklin is a Christian Scientist, or dreamy metaphysician, a fact which may not commend him in the eyes of many, though one would do better to await a full metaphysical interpretation of his belief. It would do almost as well to call him a Buddhist or a follower of the Bhagavad Gita. He has no hard and fast Christian dogmas in mind. In fact, he is not a Christian at all, in the accepted sense, but a genial, liberal, platonic metaphysician. I know of no better way to describe him. Socalled sin, as something wherewith to reproach one, does not exist for him. He has few complaints to make concerning people’s weaknesses or errors. Nearly everything is well. He lives happily along, sketching landscapes and trees and drawing many line simplicities and perfections. There is about him a soothing repose which is not religious but human, which I felt, during all the two thousand miles we subsequently idled together. Franklin is also a very liberal liver, one who does not believe in stinting himself of the good things of the world as he goes—a very excellent conclusion, I take it.

At the beginning of this particular evening nothing was farther from my mind than the idea of going back to Indiana. Twentyeight years before, at the age of sixteen, I had left Warsaw, the last place in the state where I had resided. I had not been in the town of my birth, Terre Haute, Indiana, since I was seven. I had not returned since I was twelve to Sullivan or Evansville on the Ohio River, each of which towns had been my home for two years. The State University of Indiana at Bloomington, in the south central portion of the state, which had known me for one year when I was eighteen, had been free of my presence for twentysix years.

And in that time what illusions had I not built up in connection with my native state! Who does not allow fancy to color his primary experiences in the world? Terre Haute! A small city in which, during my first seven years, we lived in four houses. Sullivan, where we had lived from my seventh to my tenth year, in one house, a picturesque white frame on the edge of the town. In Evansville, at 1413 East Franklin Street, in a small brick, we had lived one year, and in Warsaw, in the northern part of the state, in a comparatively large brick house set in a grove of pines, we had spent four years. My mother’s relatives were all residents of this northern section. There had been three months, between the time we left Evansville and the time we settled in Warsaw, Kosciusko County, which we spent in Chicago—my mother and nearly all of the children; also six weeks, between the time we left Terre Haute and the time we settled in Sullivan, which we spent in Vincennes, Indiana, visiting a kindly friend.

We were very poor in those days. My father had only comparatively recently suffered severe reverses, from which he really never recovered. My mother, a dreamy, poetic, impractical soul, was serving to the best of her ability as the captain of the family ship. Most of the ten children had achieved comparative maturity and had departed, or were preparing to depart, to shift for themselves. Before us—us little ones—were all our lives. At home, in a kind of intimacy which did not seem to concern the others because we were the youngest, were my brother Ed, two years younger than myself; my sister Claire (or Tillie), two years older, and occasionally my brother Albert, two years older than Claire, or my sister Sylvia, four years older, alternating as it were in the family home life. At other times they were out in the world working. Sometimes there appeared on the scene, usually one at a time, my elder brothers, Mark and Paul, and my elder sisters, Emma, Theresa, and Mary, each named in the order of their ascending ages. As I have said, there were ten all told—a restless, determined, halfeducated family who, had each been properly trained according to his or her capacities, I have always thought might have made a considerable stir in the world. As it was—but I will try not to become too technical.

But in regard to all this and the material and spiritual character of our life at that time, and what I had done and said, and what others had done and said, what notions had not arisen! They were highly colored ones, which might or might not have some relationship to the character of the country out there as I had known it. I did not know. Anyhow, it had been one of my dearly cherished ideas that some day, when I had the time and the money to spare, I was going to pay a return visit to Indiana. My father had once owned a woolen mill at Sullivan, still standing, I understood (or its duplicate built after a fire), and he also had managed another at Terre Haute. I had a vague recollection of seeing him at work in this one at Terre Haute, and of being shown about, having a spinning jenny and a carder and a weaver explained to me. I had fished in the Busseron near Sullivan, nearly lost my life in the Ohio at Evansville in the dead of winter, fallen in love with the first girls I ever loved at Warsaw. The first girl who ever kissed me and the first girl I ever ventured to kiss were at Warsaw. Would not that cast a celestial light over any midwestern village, however homely?

Well, be that as it may, I had this illusion. Someday I was going back, only in my plans I saw myself taking a train and loafing around in each village and hamlet hours or days, or weeks if necessary. At Warsaw I would try to find out about all the people I had ever known, particularly the boys and girls who went to school with me. At Terre Haute I would look up the house where I was born and our old house in Seventh Street, somewhere near a lumber yard and some railroad tracks, where, in a cool, roomy, musty cellar, I had swung in a swing hung from one of the rafters. Also in this lumber yard and among these tracks where the cars were, I had played with Al and Ed and other boys. Also in Thirteenth Street, Terre Haute, somewhere there was a small house (those were the darkest days of our poverty), where I had been sick with the measles. My father was an ardent Catholic. For the first fifteen years of my life I was horrified by the grim spiritual punishments enunciated by that faith. In this house in Thirteenth Street I had been visited by a long, lank priest in black, who held a silver crucifix to my lips to be kissed. That little house remains the apotheosis of earthly gloom to me even now.

At Sullivan I intended to go out to the Basler House, where we lived, several blocks from the local or old Evansville and Terre Haute depot. This house, as I recalled, was a charming thing of six or seven rooms with a large lawn, in which roses flourished, and with a truck garden north of it and a wonderful clover field to the rear (or east) of it. This clover field—how shall I describe it?—but I can’t. It wasn’t a clover field at all as I had come to think of it, but a honey trove in Arcady. An army of humble bees came here to gather honey. In those early dawns of spring, summer and autumn, when, for some reason not clear to me now, I was given to rising at dawn, it was canopied by a wonderful veil of clouds (tinted cirrus and nimbus effects), which seemed, as I looked at them, too wonderful for words. Across the fields was a grove of maples concealing a sugar camp (not ours), where I would go in the early dawn to bring home a bucket of maple sap. And directly to the north of us was a large, bare Gethsemane of a field, in the weedy hollows of which were endless whitening bones, for here stood a small village slaughter house, the sacrificial altar of one local butcher. It was not so gruesome as it sounds—only dramatic.

But this field and the atmosphere of that home! I shall have to tell you about them or the import of returning there will be as nothing. It was between my seventh and my tenth year that we lived there, among the most impressionable of all my youth. We were very hard pressed, as I understood it later, but I was too young and too dreamy to feel the pinch of poverty. This lower Wabash valley is an Egyptian realm—not very cold in winter, and drowsy with heat in summer. Corn and wheat and hay and melons grow here in heavy, plethoric fashion. Rains come infrequently, then only in deluging storms. The spring comes early, the autumn lingers until quite New Year’s time. In the beech and ash and hickory groves are many turtle doves. Great hawks and buzzards and eagles soar high in the air. House and barn martins circle in covies. The bluejay and scarlet tanager flash and cry. In the eaves of our cottage were bluebirds and wrens, and to our trumpet vines and purple clematis came wondrous humming birds to poise and glitter, tropic in their radiance. In old Kirkwood’s orchard, a quarter of a mile away over the clover field, I can still hear the guinea fowls and the peacocks “calling for rain.”

Sometimes the experiences of delicious years make a stained glass window—the rose window of the west—in the cathedral of our life. These three years in “dirty old Sullivan,” as one of my sisters once called it (with a lip-curl of contempt thrown in for good measure), form such a flower of stained glass in mine. They are my rose window. In symphonies of leaded glass, blue, violet, gold and rose are the sweet harmonies of memory with all the ills of youth discarded. A bare-foot boy is sitting astride a high board fence at dawn. Above him are the tinted fleeces of heaven, those golden argosies of youthful seas of dream. Over the blooming clover are scudding the swallows, “my heart remembers how.” I look, and in a fence corner is a spider web impearled with dew, a great yellow spider somewhere on its surface is repairing a strand. At a window commanding the field, a window in the kitchen, is my mother. My brother Ed has not risen yet, nor my sister Tillie. The boy looks at the sky. He loves the feel of the dawn. He knows nothing of whence he is coming or where he is going, only all is sensuously, deliriously gay and beautiful. Youth is his: the tingle and response of a new body; the bloom and fragrance of the clover in the air; the sense of the mystery of flying. He sits and sings some tuneless tune. Of such is the kingdom of heaven.

Or it is a great tree, say, a hundred yards from the house. In its thick leaves and widespreading branches the wind is stirring. Under its shade Ed and Tillie and I are playing house. What am I? Oh, a son, a husband, or indeed anything that the occasion requires. We play at duties—getting breakfast, or going to work, or coming home. Why? But a turtle dove is calling somewhere in the depths of a woodland, and that gives me pause. “Bob white” cries and I think of strange and faroff things to come. A buzzard is poised in the high blue above and I wish I might soar on wings as wide.

Or is it a day with a pet dog? Now they are running side by side over a stubbly field. Now the dog has wandered away and the boy is calling. Now the boy is sitting in a rocking chair by a window and holding the dog in his lap, studying a gnarled tree in the distance, where sits a hawk all day, meditating no doubt on his midnight crimes. Now the dog is gone forever, shot somewhere for chasing sheep, and the boy, disconsolate, is standing under a tree, calling, calling, calling, until the sadness of his own voice and the futility of his cries moves him nearly to tears.

These and many scenes like these make my rose window of the west.

CHAPTER II
THE SCENIC ROUTE

It was a flash of all this that came to me when in the midst of the blathering and fol de rol of a gay evening Franklin suddenly approached me and said, quite apropos of nothing: “How would you like to go out to Indiana in my car?”

“I’ll tell you what, Franklin,” I answered, “all my life I’ve been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it. I was born in Terre Haute, down in the southwest there below you, and I was brought up in Sullivan and Evansville in the southern part of the state and in Warsaw up north. Agree to take me to all those places after we get there, and I’ll go. What’s more, you can illustrate the book if you will.”

“I’ll do that,” he said. “Warsaw is only about two hours north of our place. Terre Haute is seventyfive miles away. Evansville is a hundred and fifty. We’ll make a oneday trip to the northern part and a three-day trip to the southern. I stipulate but one thing. If we ruin many tires, we split the cost.”

To this I agreed.

Franklin’s home was really central for all places. It was at Carmel, fifteen miles north of Indianapolis. His plan, once the trip was over, was to camp there in his country studio, and paint during the autumn. Mine was to return direct to New York.

We were to go up the Hudson to Albany and via various perfect state roads to Buffalo. There we were to follow other smooth roads along the shore of Lake Erie to Cleveland and Toledo, and possibly Detroit. There we were to cut southwest to Indianapolis—so close to Carmel. It had not occurred to either of us yet to go direct to Warsaw from Toledo or thereabouts, and thence south to Carmel. That was to come as an afterthought.

But this Hudson-Albany-State-road route irritated me from the very first. Everyone traveling in an automobile seemed inclined to travel that way. I had a vision of thousands of cars which we would have to trail, consuming their dust, or meet and pass, coming toward us. By now the Hudson River was a chestnut. Having traveled by the Pennsylvania and the Central over and over to the west, all this mid-New York and southern Pennsylvania territory was wearisome to think of. Give me the poor, undernourished routes which the dull, imitative rabble shun, and where, because of this very fact, you have some peace and quiet. I traveled all the way uptown the next day to voice my preference in regard to this matter.

“I’d like to make a book out of this,” I explained, “if the material is interesting enough, and there isn’t a thing that you can say about the Hudson River or the central part of New York State that hasn’t been said a thousand times before. Poughkeepsie, Albany, Troy, Syracuse, Rochester—all ghastly manufacturing towns. Why don’t we cut due west and see how we make out? This is the nicest, dryest time of the year. Let’s go west to the Water Gap, and straight from there through Pennsylvania to some point in Ohio, then on to Indianapolis.” A vision of quaint, wild, unexpected regions in Pennsylvania came to me.

“Very good,” he replied genially. He was playing with a cheerful, pop-eyed French bull. “Perhaps that would be better. The other would have the best roads, but we’re not going for roads exactly. Do you know the country out through there?”

“No,” I replied. “But we can find out. I suppose the Automobile Club of America ought to help us. I might go round there and see what I can discover.”

“Do that,” he applauded, and I was making to depart when Franklin’s brother and his chauffeur entered. The latter he introduced as “Speed.”

“Speed,” he said, “this is Mr. Dreiser, who is going with us. He wants to ride directly west across Pennsylvania to Ohio and so on to Indianapolis. Do you think you can take us through that way?”

A blond, lithe, gangling youth with an eerie farmerlike look and smile ambled across the room and took my hand. He seemed half mechanic, half street-car conductor, half mentor, guide and friend.

“Sure,” he replied, with a kind of childish smile that won instantly—a little girl smile, really. “If there are any roads, I can. We can go anywhere the car’ll go.”

I liked him thoroughly. All the time I was trying to think where I had seen Speed before. Suddenly it came to me. There had been a car conductor in a recent comedy. This was the stage character to life. Besides he reeked of Indiana—the real Hoosier. If you have ever seen one, you’ll know what I mean.

“Very good,” I said. “Fine. Are you as swift as your name indicates, Speed?”

“I’m pretty swift,” he said, with the same glance that a collie will give you at times—a gay, innocent light of the eyes!

A little while later Franklin was saying to me that he had no real complaint against Speed except this: “If you drive up to the St. Regis and go in for half an hour, when you come out the sidewalk is all covered with tools and the engine dismantled—that is, if the police have not interfered.”

“Just the same,” put in Fred Booth, “he is one of the chauffeurs who led the procession of cars from New York over the Alleghanies and Rockies to the coast, laying out the Lincoln Highway.” (Afterwards I saw testimonials and autographed plates which proved this.) “He can take a car anywhere she’ll go.”

Then I proceeded to the great automobile club for information.

“Are you a member?” asked the smug attendant, a polite, airy, bufferish character.

“No, only the temporary possessor of a car for a tour.”

“Then we can do nothing for you. Only members are provided with information.”

On the table by which I was standing lay an automobile monthly. In its pages, which I had been idly thumbing as I waited, were a dozen maps of tours, those deceptive things gotten up by associated roadhouses and hotels in their own interest. One was labeled “The Scenic Route,” and showed a broad black line extending from New York via the Water Gap, Stroudsburg, Wilkes-Barré, Scranton, Binghamton, and a place called Watkins Glen, to Buffalo and Niagara Falls. This interested me. These places are in the heart of the Alleghanies and of the anthracite coal region. Visions of green hills, deep valleys, winding rivers, glistering cataracts and the like leaped before my mind.

“The Scenic Route!” I ventured. “Here’s a map that seems to cover what I want. What number is this?”

“Take it, take it!” replied the lofty attendant, as if to shoo me out of the place. “You are welcome.”

“May I pay you?”

“No, no, you’re welcome to it.”

I bowed myself humbly away.

“Well, auto club or no auto club, here is something, a real route,” I said to myself. “Anyhow it will do to get us as far as Wilkes-Barré or Scranton. After that we’ll just cut west if we have to.”

On the way home I mooned over such names as Tobyhanna, Meshoppen, Blossburg, and Roaring Branch. What sort of places were they? Oh, to be speeding along in this fine warm August weather! To be looking at the odd places, seeing mountains, going back to Warsaw and Sullivan and Terre Haute and Evansville!

CHAPTER III
ACROSS THE MEADOWS TO THE PASSAIC

I assume that automobiling, even to the extent of a two-thousand-mile trip such as this proved to be, is an old story to most people. Anybody can do it, apparently. The difference is to the man who is making the trip, and for me this one had the added fillip of including that pilgrimage which I was certain of making some time.

There was an unavoidable delay owing to the sudden illness of Speed, and then the next morning, when I was uncertain as to whether the trip had been abandoned or no, the car appeared at my door in Tenth Street, and off we sped. There were some amusing preliminaries. I was introduced to Miss H——, a lady who was to accompany us on the first day of our journey. A photograph was taken, the bags had to be arranged and strapped on the outside, and Speed had to examine his engine most carefully. Finally we were off—up Eighth Avenue and across Fortysecond Street to the West Fortysecond Street Ferry, while we talked of non-skid chains and Silvertown tires and the durability of the machines in general—this one in particular. It proved to be a handsome sixty-horsepower Pathfinder, only recently purchased, very presentable and shiny.

As we crossed the West Fortysecond Street Ferry I stood out on the front deck till we landed, looking at the refreshing scene the river presented. The day was fine, nearly mid-August, with a sky as blue as weak indigo. Flocks of gulls that frequent the North River were dipping and wheeling. A cool, fresh wind was blowing.

As we stood out in front Miss H—— deigned to tell me something of her life. She is one of those self-conscious, carefully dressed, seemingly prosperous maidens of some beauty who frequent the stage and the studios. At present she was Franklin’s chief model. Recently she had been in some pantomime, dancing. A little wearied perhaps (for all her looks), she told me her stage and art experiences. She had to do something. She could sing, dance, act a little, and draw, she said. Artists seemed to crave her as a model—so-—-

She lifted a thin silk veil and dabbed her nose with a mere rumor of a handkerchief. Looking at her so fresh and spick in the morning sunlight, I could not help feeling that Franklin was to be congratulated in the selection of his models.

But in a few minutes we were off again, Speed obviously holding in the machine out of respect for officers who appeared at intervals, even in Weehawken, to wave us on or back. I could not help feeling as I looked at them how rapidly the passion for regulating street traffic had grown in the last few years. Everywhere we seemed to be encountering them—the regulation New York police cap (borrowed from the German army) shading their eyes, their air of majesty beggaring the memories of Rome—and scarcely a wagon to regulate. At Passaic, at Paterson—but I anticipate.

As we hunted for a road across the meadows we got lost in a maze of shabby streets where dirty children were playing in the dust, and, as we gingerly picked our way over rough cobbles, I began to fear that much of this would make a disagreeable trip. But we would soon be out of it, in all likelihood—miles and miles away from the hot, dusty city.

I can think of nothing more suited to my temperament than automobiling. It supplies just that mixture of change in fixity which satisfies me—leaves me mentally poised in inquiry, which is always delightful. Now, for instance, we were coming out on a wide, smooth macadam road, which led, without a break, as someone informed us, into Passaic and then into Paterson. It was the first opportunity that Speed had had to show what the machine could do, and instantly, though various signs read, “Speed limit: 25 miles an hour,” I saw the speedometer climb to thirtyfive and then forty and then fortyfive. It was a smooth-running machine which, at its best (or worst), gave vent to a tr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r which became after a while somewhat like a croon.

Though it was a blazing hot day (as any momentary pause proved, the leather cushions becoming like an oven), on this smooth road, and at this speed, it was almost too cool. I had decked myself out in a brown linen outing shirt and low visored cap. Now I felt as though I might require my overcoat. There was no dust to speak of, and under the low branches of trees and passing delightful dooryards all the homey flowers of August were blooming in abundance. Now we were following the Hackensack and the Passaic in spots, seeing long, low brick sheds in the former set down in wind rhythmed marsh grass, and on the latter towering stacks and also simple clubs where canoes were to be seen—white, red and green—and a kind of August summer life prevailing for those who could not go further. I was becoming enamored of our American country life once more.

Paterson, to most New Yorkers, and for that matter to most Americans, may be an old story. To me it is one of the most interesting pools of life I know. There is nothing in Paterson, most people will tell you, save silk mills and five-and-ten-cent stores. It is true. Yet to me it is a beautiful city in the creative sense—a place in which to stage a great novel. These mills—have you ever seen them? They line the Passaic river and various smooth canals that branch out from it. It was no doubt the well-known waterfall and rapids of this river that originally drew manufacturers to Paterson, supplied the first mills with water, and gave the city its start. Then along came steam and all the wonders of modern electricity-driven looms. The day we were there they were just completing a power plant or city water supply system. The ground around the falls had been parked, and standing on a new bridge one could look down into a great round, grey-black pit or cup, into which tumbled the water of the sturdy little river above. By the drop of eighty or a hundred feet it was churned into a white spray which bounded back almost to the bridge where we stood. In this gay sunlight a rainbow was ever present—a fine five-striped thing, which paled and then strengthened as the spray thinned or thickened.

Below, over a great flume of rocks, that stretched outward toward the city, the expended current was bubbling away, spinning past the mills and the bridges. From the mills themselves, as one drew near, came the crash of shuttles and the thrum of spindles, where thousands of workers were immured, weaving the silk which probably they might never wear. I could not help thinking, as I stood looking at them, of the great strike that had occurred two years before, in which all sorts of nameless brutalities had occurred, brutalities practised by judges, manufacturers and the police no less than by the eager workers themselves.

In spite of all the evidence I have that human nature is much the same at the bottom as at the top, and that the restless striker of today may be the oppressive manufacturer or boss of tomorrow, I cannot help sympathizing with the working rank and file. Why should the man at the top, I ask myself, want more than a reasonable authority? Why endless houses, and lands, and stocks, and bonds to flaunt a prosperity that he does not need and cannot feel? I am convinced that man in toto—the race itself—is nothing more nor less as yet than an embryo in the womb of something which we cannot see. We are to be protected (as a race) and born into something (some state) which we cannot as yet understand or even feel. We, as individual atoms, may never know, any more than the atoms or individual plasm cells which constructed us ever knew. But we race atoms are being driven to do something, construct something—(a race man or woman, let us say)—and like the atoms in the embryo, we are struggling and fetching and carrying. I did not always believe in some one “divine faroff event” for the race. I do not accept the adjective divine even now. But I do believe that these atoms are not toiling for exactly nothing—or at least, that the nothingness is not quite as undeniable as it was. There is something back of man. An avatar, a devil, anything you will, is trying to do something, and man is His medium, His brush, His paint, His idea. Against the illimitable space of things He is attempting to set forth his vision. Is the vision good? Who knows! It may be as bad as that of the lowest vaudeville performer clowning it before a hoodlum audience. But good or bad, here it is, struggling to make itself manifest, and we are of it!

What if it is all a mad, aimless farce, my masters? Shan’t we clown it all together and make the best of it?

Ha ha! Ho ho! We are all crazy and He is crazy! Ha ha! Ho ho!

Or do I hear someone crying?

CHAPTER IV
THE PIETY AND EGGS OF PATERSON

But in addition to mills and the falls, Paterson offered another subject of conversation. Only recently there had been completed there an evangelical revival by one “Billy” Sunday, who had addressed from eight to twenty thousand people at each meeting in a specially constructed tabernacle, and caused from one to five hundred or a thousand a day to “hit the trail,” as he phrased it, or in other words to declare that they were “converted to Christ,” and hence saved.

America strikes me as an exceedingly intelligent land at times, with its far-flung states, its fine mechanical equipment, its good homes and liberal, rather non-interfering form of government, but when one contemplates such a mountebank spectacle as this, what is one to say? I suppose one had really better go deeper than America and contemplate nature itself. But then what is one to say of nature?

We discussed this while passing various mills and brown wooden streets, so poor that they were discouraging.

“It is curious, but it is just such places as Paterson that seem to be afflicted with unreasoning emotions of this kind,” observed Franklin wearily. “Gather together hordes of working people who have little or no skill above machines, and then comes the revivalist and waves of religion. Look at Pittsburg and Philadelphia. See how well Sunday did there. He converted thousands.”

He smiled heavily.

“‘Billy’ Sunday comes from out near your town,” volunteered Speed informatively. “He lives at Winona Lake. That’s a part of Warsaw now.”

“Yes, and he conducts a summer revival right there occasionally, I believe,” added Franklin, a little vindictively, I thought.

“Save me!” I pleaded. “Anyhow, I wasn’t born there. I only lived there for a little while.”

This revival came directly on the heels of a great strike, during which thousands were compelled to obtain their food at soup houses, or to report weekly to the local officers of the union for some slight dole. The good God was giving them wrathful, condemnatory manufacturers, and clubbing, cynical police. Who was it, then, that “revived” and “hit the trail”? The same who were starved and clubbed and lived in camps, and were railroaded to jail? Or were they the families of the bosses and manufacturers, who had suppressed the strike and were thankful for past favors (for they eventually won, I believe)? Or was it some intermediate element that had nothing to do with manufacturers or workers?

The day we went through, some Sunday school parade was preparing. There were dozens of wagons and auto-trucks and automobiles gaily bedecked with flags and bunting and Sunday school banners. Hundreds, I might almost guess thousands, of children in freshly ironed white dresses and gay ribbons, carrying parasols, and chaperoned by various serious looking mothers and elders, were in these conveyances, all celebrating, presumably, the glory and goodness of God!

A spectacle like this, I am free to say, invariably causes me to scoff. I cannot help smiling at a world that cannot devise some really poetical or ethical reason for worshiping or celebrating or what you will, but must indulge in shrines and genuflections and temples to false or impossible ideas or deities. They have made a God of Christ, who was at best a humanitarian poet—but not on the basis on which he offered himself. Never! They had to bind him up with the execrable yah-vah of the Hebrews, and make him now a God of mercy, and now a God of horror. They had to dig themselves a hell, and they still cling to it. They had to secure a church organization and appoint strutting vicars of Christ to misinterpret him, and all that he believed. This wretched mountebank “who came here and converted thousands”—think of him with his yapping about hell, his bar-room and race-track slang, his base-ball vocabulary. And thousands of poor worms who could not possibly offer one reasonable or intelligible thought concerning their faith or history or life, or indeed anything, fall on their knees and “accept Christ.” And then they pass the collection plate and build more temples and conduct more revivals.

What does the God of our universe want, anyway? Slaves? Or beings who attempt to think? Is the fable of Prometheus true after all? Is autocracy the true interpretation of all things—or is this an accidental phase, infinitely brief in the long flow of things, and eventually to be done away with? I, for one, hope so.

Beyond Paterson we found a rather good road leading to a place called Boonton, via Little Falls, Singac, and other smaller towns, and still skirting the banks of the Passaic River. In Paterson we had purchased four hard-boiled eggs, two pies, four slices of ham and some slices of bread, and four bottles of beer, and it being somewhere near noon we decided to have lunch. The task of finding an ideal spot was difficult, for we were in a holiday mood and content with nothing less than perfection. Although we were constantly passing idyllic scenes—waterfalls, glens, a canal crossing over a stream—none would do exactly. In most places there was no means of bringing the car near enough to watch it. One spot proved of considerable interest, however, for, although we did not stay, in spying about we found an old moss-covered, red granite block three feet square and at least eight feet long, on which was carved a statement to the effect that this canal had been completed in 1829, and that the following gentlemen, as officers and directors, had been responsible. Then followed a long list of names—Adoniram this, and Cornelius that, good and true business men all, whose carved symbols were now stuffed with mud and dust. This same canal was very familiar to me, I having walked every inch of it from New York to the Delaware River during various summer holidays. But somehow I had never before come upon this memorial stone. Here some twenty men, of a period so late as 1829, caused their names to be graven on a great stone which should attest their part in the construction of a great canal—a canal reaching from New York Bay to the Delaware River—and here lies the record under dust and vines! The canal itself is now entirely obsolete. Although the State of New Jersey annually spends some little money to keep it clean, it is rarely if ever used by boats. It was designed originally to bring hard coal from that same region around Wilkes-Barré and Scranton, toward which we were speeding. A powerful railroad corporation crept in, paralleled it, and destroyed it. This same corporation, eager to make its work complete, and thinking that the mere existence of the canal might some day cause it to be revived, and wanting no water competition in the carrying of coal, had a bill introduced into the State legislature of New Jersey, ordering, or at least sanctioning that it should be filled in, in places. Some citizens objected, several newspapers cried out, and so the bill was dropped. But you may walk along a canal costing originally fifty million dollars, and still ornamented at regular intervals with locks and planes, and never encounter anything larger than a canoe. Pretty farm houses face it now; door yards come down to the very water; ducks and swans float on its surface and cattle graze nearby. I have spent as much as two long springtimes idling along its banks. It is beautiful—but it is useless.

We did eventually come to a place that suited us exactly for our picnic. The river we were following widened at this point and skirted so near the road that it was no trouble to have our machine near at hand and still sit under the trees by the waterside. Cottages and tents were sprinkled cheerily along the farther shore, and the river was dotted with canoes and punts of various colors. Under a group of trees we stepped out and spread our feast. It was all so lovely that it seemed a bit out of fairyland or a sketch by Watteau. Franklin being a Christian Scientist, it was his duty, as I explained to him, to “think” any flies or mosquitoes away—to “realize” for us all that they could not be, and so leave us to enjoy our meal in peace. Miss H—— was to be the background of perfection, the color spot, the proof of holiday, like all the ladies in Watteau and Boucher. The machine and Speed, his cap adjusted to a rakish angle, were to prove that we were gentlemen of leisure. On leaving New York I saw that he had a moustache capable of that upward twist so admired of the German Emperor, and so now I began to urge him to make the ends stand up so that he would be the embodiment of the distingué. Nothing loath, he complied smilingly, that same collie-like smile in his eyes that I so much enjoy.

It was Franklin who had purchased the eggs. He had gone across the street in Paterson, his belted dust-coat swinging most impressively, and entering a little quick lunch room, had purchased these same eggs. Afterward he admitted that as he was leaving he noticed the black moustached face of a cook and the villainous head of a scullion peering after him from a sort of cook’s galley window with what seemed to him “a rumor of a sardonic smile.” But suspecting nothing, he went his way. Now, however, I peeled one of these eggs, and touching it with salt, bit into it. Then I slowly turned my head, extracted as much as I could silently with a paper napkin, and deposited it with an air of great peace upon the ground. I did not propose to be the butt of any ribald remarks.

Presently I saw Franklin preparing his. He crushed the shell, and after stripping the glistening surface dipped it in salt. I wondered would it be good. Then he bit into it and paused, took up a napkin with a very graceful and philosophic air, and wiped his mouth. I was not quite sure what had happened.

“Was your egg good?” he said finally, examining me with an odd expression.

“It was not,” I replied. “The most villainously bad egg I have had in years. And here it goes, straight to the fishes.”

I threw it.

“Well, they can have mine,” observed Miss H——, sniffing gingerly.

“What do you know about that?” exclaimed Speed, who was sitting some distance from the rest of us and consuming his share. “I think the man that sold you those ought to be taken out and slapped gently,” and he threw his away. “Say! And four of them all at once too. I’d just like to get a camera and photograph him. He’s a bird, he is.”

There was something amazingly comic to me in the very sound of Speed’s voice. I cannot indicate just what, but his attempt at scorn was so inadequate, so childlike.

“Well, anyhow, the fishes won’t mind,” I said. “They like nice, fresh Franklin eggs. Franklin is their best friend, aren’t you, Franklin? You love fishes, don’t you?”

Booth sat there, his esoteric faith in the wellbeing of everything permitting him to smile a gentle, tolerant smile.

“You know, I wondered why those two fellows seemed to smile at me,” he finally commented. “They must have done this on purpose.”

“Oh no,” I replied, “not to a full fledged Christian Scientist! Never! These eggs must be perfect. The error is with us. We have thought bad eggs, that’s all.”

We got up and tossed the empty beer bottles into the stream, trying to sink them with stones. I think I added one hundred stones to the bed of the river without sinking a single bottle. Speed threw in a rock pretending it was a bottle and I even threw at that before discovering my mistake. Finally we climbed into our car and sped onward, new joys always glimmering in the distance.

“Just to think,” I said to myself, “there are to be two whole weeks of this in this glorious August weather. What lovely things we shall see!”

CHAPTER V
ACROSS THE DELAWARE

The afternoon run was even more delightful than that of the morning. Yet one does not really get free of New York—its bustle and thickness of traffic—until one gets west of Paterson, which is twentyfive miles west, and not even then. New York is so all embracing. It is supposed to be chiefly represented by Manhattan Island, but the feel of it really extends to the Delaware Water Gap, one hundred miles west, as it does to the eastern end of Long Island, one hundred miles east, and to Philadelphia, one hundred miles south, or Albany, one hundred miles north. It is all New York.

But west of Paterson and Boonton the surge of traffic was beginning to diminish, and we were beginning to taste the real country. Not so many autotrucks and wagons were encountered here, though automobiles proper were even more numerous, if anything. This was a wealthy residence section we were traversing, with large handsome machines as common as wagons elsewhere, and the occupants looked their material prosperity. The roads, too, as far as Dover, our next large town, thirty miles on, were beautiful—smooth, grey and white macadam, lined mostly with kempt lawns, handsome hedges, charming dwellings, and now and then yellow fields of wheat or oats or rye, with intermediate acres of tall, ripe corn. I never saw better fields of grain, and remembered reading in the papers that this was a banner season for crops. The sky, too, was wholly entrancing, a clear blue, with great, fleecy clouds sailing along in the distance like immense hills or ships. We passed various small hotels and summer cottages, nestling among these low hills, where summer boarders were sitting on verandas, reading books or swinging in hammocks or crocheting, American fashion, in rocking chairs. All my dread of the conventional American family arose as I surveyed them, for somehow, as idyllic as all this might appear on the surface, it smacked the least bit of the doldrums. Youths and maidens playing croquet and tennis, mother (and much more rarely father) seated near, reading and watching. The three regular meals, the regular nine o’clock hour for retiring! Well, I was glad we were making forty miles an hour.

As we passed through Dover it was three o’clock. As we passed Hopatcong, after pausing to sketch a bridge over the canal, it was nearing four. There were pauses constantly which interrupted our speed. Now it was a flock of birds flying over a pool, all their fluttering wings reflected in the water, and Franklin had to get out and make a pencil note of it. Now a lovely view over some distant hills, a small town in a valley, a factory stack by some water side.

“Say, do these people here ever expect to get to Indiana?” remarked Speed in an aside to Miss H——.

We had to stop in Dover—a city of thirty thousand—at the principal drug store, for a glass of ice cream soda. We had to stop at Hopatcong and get a time table in order to learn whether Miss H—— could get a train in from the Water Gap later in the evening. We had to stop and admire a garden of goldenglows and old fashioned August flowers.

Beyond Hopatcong we began to realize that we would no more than make the Water Gap this day. The hills and valleys were becoming more marked, the roads more difficult to ascend. As we passed Stanhope, a small town beyond Hopatcong, we got on the wrong road and had to return, a common subsequent experience. Beyond Stanhope we petitioned one family group—a mother and three children—for some water, and were refused. A half mile further on, seeing a small iron pump on a lawn, we stopped again. A lean, dreamy woman came out and we asked her. “Yes, surely,” she replied and re-entered the house, returning with a blue pitcher. Chained to a nearby tree a collie bitch which looked for all the world like a fox jumped and barked for joy.

“Are you going to Hackettstown?” asked our hostess simply.

“We’re going through to Indiana,” confided Franklin in a neighborly fashion.

A look of childlike wonder at the far off came into the woman’s voice and eyes. “To Indiana?” she replied. “That’s a long way, isn’t it?”

“Oh, about nine hundred miles,” volunteered Speed briskly.

As we sped away—vain of our exploit, I fancy—she stood there, pitcher in hand, looking after us. I wished heartily she might ride all the long distances her moods might crave. “Only,” I thought, “would it be a fair exchange for all her delightsome wonder?”

This side of Hackettstown we careened along a ridge under beautiful trees surveying someone’s splendid country estate, with a great house, a lake and hills of sheep. On the other side of Hackettstown we had a blow out and had to stop and change a tire. A Russian moujik, transplanted to America and farming in this region, interested me. A reaper whirring in a splendid field of grain informed me that we were abroad at harvest time—we would see much reaping then. While the wheel was being repaired I picked up a scrap of newspaper lying on the road. It was of recent issue and contained an advertisement of a great farm for sale which read “Winter is no time to look at a farm, for then everything is out of commission and you cannot tell what a farm is worth. Spring is a dangerous time, for then everything is at its best, and you are apt to be deceived by fields and houses which later you would not think of buying. Mid-August is the ideal time. Everything is bearing by then. If a field or a yard or a house or cattle look good at that time you may be sure that they will look as good or better at others. Examine in mid-August. Examine now.”

“Ah,” I said, “now I shall see this eastern half of the United States at the best time. If it looks good now I shall know pretty well how good eastern America is.”

And so we sped on, passing a little farther on a forlorn, decadent, gloomy hamlet about which I wanted to write a poem or an essay. Edgar Allan Poe might have lived here and written “The Raven.” The house of Usher might have been a dwelling in one of these hypochondriacal streets. They were so dim and gloomy and sad. Still farther on as we neared the Delaware we came into a mountain country which seemed almost entirely devoted to cattle and the dairy business. It was not an ultra prosperous land—what mountain country is? You can find it on the map if you choose, lying between Phillipsburg and the river.

THE OLD ESSEX AND MORRIS CANAL

Something—perhaps the approach of evening, perhaps the gloom of great hills which make darksome valleys wherein lurk early shadows and cool, damp airs; perhaps the tinkle of cowbells and the lowing of homing herds; perhaps the presence of dooryards where laborers and farmers, newly returned from work, were washing their hands in pans outside of kitchen doors; or the smoke curl of evening fires from chimneys, or the glint of evening lamps through doors and windows—was very touching about all this; anyhow, as we sped along I was greatly moved. Life orchestrates itself at times so perfectly. It sings like a prima donna of humble joys, and happy homes and simple tasks. It creates like a great virtuoso, bow in hand, or fingers upon invisible keys, a supreme illusion. The heart hurts; one’s eyes fill with tears. We skirted great hills so close that at times, as one looked up, it seemed as though they might come crashing down on us. We passed thick forests where in this mid-August weather, one could look into deep shadows, feeling the ancient childish terror of the woods and of the dark. I looked up a cliff side—very high up—and saw a railroad station labeled Manunka-Chunk. I looked into a barnyard and saw pigs grunting over corn and swill, and a few chickens trying to flutter up into a low tree. The night was nigh.

Presently, in this sweet gloom we reached a ferry which crosses the river somewhere near the Water Gap and which we were induced to approach because we knew of no bridge. On the opposite side, anchored to a wire which crossed the river, was a low flat punt, which looked for all the world like a shallow saucepan. We called “Yoho!” and back came the answer “All right!” Presently the punt came over and in a silvery twilight Speed maneuvered the car onto the craft. A tall, lank yokel greeted us.

“Goin’ to the Water Gap?”

“Yes, how far is it?”

“Seven miles.”

“What time is it?”

“Seven o’clock.”

That gave us an hour in which to make Miss H——’s train.

“That’s Pennsylvania over there, isn’t it?”

“Yep, that’s Pennsylvania. There ain’t nothing in New Jersey ’cept cows and mountains.”

He grinned as though he had made a great joke.

Speed, as usual, was examining the engine. Franklin and I were gazing enraptured at the stately hills which sentinel this stream. In the distance was the Water Gap, a great cleft in the hills where in unrecorded days the river is believed to have cut its way through. One could see the vast masonry of some bridge which had been constructed farther up the stream.

We clambered up the bank on the farther side, the car making a great noise. In this sweet twilight with fireflies and spirals of gnats and “pinchin' bugs,” as Speed called them, we tore the remainder of the distance, the eyes of the car glowing like great flames. Along this river road we encountered endless groups of strolling summer boarders—girls with their arms about each other, quiescent women and older maids idling in the evening damp.

“A land of summer hotels this, and summer boarding houses,” I said.

“Those are all old maids or school teachers,” insisted Speed with Indiana assurance, “or I’ll eat my hat.”

In the midst of our flight Speed would tell stories, tossing them back in the wind and perfumes. Miss H—— was singing “There Was an Old Soldier.” In no time at all—though not before it was dark—we were entering a region compact of automobiles, gasoline smoke, and half concealed hotel windows and balconies which seemed to clamber up cliffs and disappear into the skies. Below us, under a cliff, ran a railroad, its freight and passenger trains seeming to thunder ominously near. We were, as I could see, high on some embankment or shelf cut in the hill. Presently we turned into a square or open space which opened out at the foot of the hill, and there appeared a huge caravansary, The Kittatinny, with a fountain and basin in the foreground which imitated the colored waters of the Orient. Lackeys were there to take our bags—only, since Miss H—— had to make her train, we had to go a mile farther on to the station under the hill. To give Franklin and Miss H—— time Speed parked the car somewhere near the station and I went to look for colored picture cards.

I wandered off into a region of lesser hotels and stores—the usual clutter of American mountain resort gayety. It brought back to me Tannersville and Haines Corners in the Catskills, Excelsior Springs and the Hot Springs of Virginia and the Ozarks. American summer mountain life is so naive, so gauche, so early Victorian. Nothing could be duller, safer, more commonplace apparently, and yet with such a lilt running through it, than this scene. Here were windows of restaurants or ball rooms or hotel promenades, all opened to the cool mountain air and all gaily lighted. An orchestra was to be heard crooning here and there. The one street was full of idlers, summer cottagers, hotel guests, the natives—promenading. Many electric lamps cast hard shadows provided by the trees. It was all so delightfully cool and fragrant. All these maidens were so bent on making catches, apparently, so earnest to attract attention. They were decked out in all the fineries and fripperies of the American summer resort scene. I never saw more diaphanous draperies—more frail pinks, blues, yellows, creams. All the brows of all the maidens seemed to be be-ribboned. All the shoulders were flung about with light gauzy shawls. Noses were powdered, lips faintly rouged, perhaps. The air was vibrant with a kind of mating note—or search.

“Well, well,” I exclaimed, and bought me all the truly indicative postcards I could find.

CHAPTER VI
AN AMERICAN SUMMER RESORT

I have no quarrel with American summer resorts as such—they are as good as any—but I must confess that scenes like this do not move me as they once did. I can well recall the time—and that not so many years ago—when this one would have set me tingling, left me yearning with a voiceless, indescribable pain. Life does such queer things to one. It takes one’s utmost passions of five years ago and puts them out like a spent fire. Standing in this almost operatic street, I did my best to contrast my feelings with those of twenty, fifteen and even ten years before. What had come over the spirit of my dreams? Well, twenty years before I knew nothing about love, actually—ten years before I was not satisfied. Was that it? Not exactly—no—I could not say that it was. But now at least these maidens and this somewhat banal stage setting were not to be accepted by me, at least, at the value which unsophistication and youth place on them. The scene was gay and lovely and innocent really. One could feel the wonder of it. But the stage-craft was a little too obvious.

Fifteen years before (or even ten) these gauche maidens idling along would have seemed most fascinating. Now the brow bands and diaphanous draperies and pink and blue and green slippers were almost like trite stage properties. Fifteen or twenty years before I would have been ready to exclaim with any of the hundred youths I saw bustling about here, yearning with their eyes: “Oh, my goddess! Oh, my Venus! Oh, my perfect divinity! But deign to cast one encouraging glance upon me, your devoted slave, and I will grovel at your feet. Here is my heart and hand and my most sacred vow—and my pocket book. I will work for you, slave for you, die for you. Every night for the next two thousand nights of my life, all my life in fact, I will come home regularly from my small job and place all my earnings and hopes and fears in your hands. I will build a house and I will run a store. I will do anything to make you happy. We will have three, seven, nine children. I will spade a garden each spring, bring home a lawnmower and cut the grass. I will prove thoroughly domesticated and never look at another woman.”

That, in my nonage, was the way I used to feel.

And as I looked about me I could see much the same emotions at work here. These young cubs—how enraptured they were; how truly like young puppies with still blinded eyes! The air was redolent of this illusion. That was why the windows and balconies were hung with Japanese lanterns. That was why the orchestras were playing so—divinely! To me now it tanged rather hollowly at moments, like a poor show. I couldn’t help seeing that the maidens weren’t divinities at all, that most of them were the dullest, most selfish, most shallow and strawy mannikinesses one could expect to find. Poor little half-equipped actors and actresses.

“But even so,” I said to myself, “this is the best the master of the show has to offer. He is at most a strolling player of limited equipment. Perhaps elsewhere, in some other part of the universe, there may be a showman who can do better, who has a bigger, better company. But these——”

I returned to the hotel and waited for Franklin. We were assigned a comfortable room on the second or third floor, I forget which, down a mile of corridor. Supper in the grill cost us five dollars. The next morning breakfast in the Persian breakfast room cost us three more. But that evening we had the privilege of sitting on a balcony and watching a herd of deer come down to a wire fence and eat grass in the glare of an adjacent arc light. We had the joy of observing the colored fountains (quenched at twelve) and seeing the motoring parties come tearing up or go flying past, wild with a nameless gayety. In the parlors, the music rooms, the miles of promenade balconies, were hosts of rich mammas and daughters—the former nearly all fat, the latter all promising to be, and a little gross. For the life of me I could not help but think of breweries, distilleries, soap factories, furniture factories, stove companies and the like. Where did all these people come from? Where did they all get the money to stay here weeks and weeks at six, eight, and even fifteen and twenty a day a person? Our poor little six dollar rooms! Good Heavens! Some of them had suites with three baths. Think of all the factories, the purpose of which (aside from supplying the world with washtubs, flatirons, sealing wax, etc.) was to supply these elderly and youthful females with plumpness and fine raiment.

While we were in the grill eating our rather late dinner (the Imperial Egyptian dining room was closed), several families strolled in, “pa,” in one case, a frail, pale, meditative, speculative little man who seemed about as much at home in his dressy cutaway coat as a sheep would in a lion’s skin. He was so very small and fidgety, but had without doubt built up a wholesale grocery or an iron foundry or something of that sort. And “ma” was so short and aggressive, with such a firm chin and such steady eyes. “Ma” had supplied “pa” with much of his fighting courage, you could see that. As I looked at “pa” I wondered how many thousand things he had been driven to do to escape her wrath, even to coming up here in August and wearing a cutaway coat and a stiff white shirt and hard cuffs and collars. He did look as though he would prefer some quiet small town veranda and his daily newspaper.

And then there was “Cerise” or “Muriel” or “Albertina” (I am sure she had some such name), sitting between her parents and obviously speculating as to her fate. Back at Wilson’s Corner there may have been some youth at some time or other who thought her divine and implored her to look with favor on his suit, but behold “pa” was getting rich and she was not for such as him.

“Jus' you let him be,” I could hear her mother counseling. “Don’t you have anything to do with him. We’re getting on and next summer we’re going up to the Kittatinny. You’re sure to meet somebody there.”

And so here they were—Cerise dressed in the best that Scranton or Wilkes-Barré or even New York could afford. Such organdies, voiles, swisses, silk crepes—trunks full of them, no doubt! Her plump arms were quite bare, shoulders partly so, her hair done in a novel way, white satin shoes were on her feet—oh dear! oh dear! She looked dull and uninteresting and meaty.

But think of Harvey Anstruther Kupfermacher, son of the celebrated trunk manufacturer of Punxsutawney, who will shortly arrive and wed her! It will be a “love match from the first.” The papers of Troy, Schenectady, and Utica will be full of it. There will be a grand church wedding. The happy couple will summer in the Adirondacks or the Blue Ridge. If the trunk factory and the iron foundry continue successful some day they may even venture New York.

“Wilson’s Corner? Well I guess not!”

There was another family, the pater familias large and heavy, with big hands, big feet, a bursting pink complexion, and a vociferous grey suit. “Pa” leads his procession. “Ma” is very simple, and daughter is comparatively interesting, and rather sweet. “Pa” is going to show by living at the Kittatinny what it means to work hard and save your money and fight the labor unions and push the little fellow to the wall. “Pa” thinks, actually, that if he gets very rich—richer and richer—somehow he is going to be supremely happy. Money is going to do it. “Yessiree, money can do anything, good old American dollars. Money can build a fine house, money can buy a fine auto, money can give one a splendid office desk, money can hire obsequious factotums, money can make everyone pleasant and agreeable. Here I sit,” says Pa, “right in the grill room of the Kittatinny. Outside are colored fountains. My shoes are new. My clothes are of the best. I have an auto. What do I lack?”

“Not a thing, Pa,” I wanted to answer, “save certain delicacies of perception, which you will never miss.”

“'Soul, take thine ease; eat, drink and be merry.'”

The next morning we were up bright and early for a long drive. Owing to my bumptiousness in having set aside the regular route of the trip I could see that Franklin was now somewhat depending on me to complete my career as a manager and decide when and where to go. My sole idea was to cut direct through Pennsylvania, but when I consulted a large map which hung on the wall of the baggage room of the Kittatinny I was not so sure. It was about six feet long and two feet high and showed nothing but mountains, mountains, mountains, and no towns, let alone cities of any size. We began to speculate concerning Pennsylvania as a state, but meanwhile I consulted our “Scenic Route” map. This led us but a little way into Pennsylvania before it cut due north to Binghamton, and the socalled “good roads” of New York State. That did not please me at all. At any rate, after consulting with a most discouraging porter who seemed to be sure that there were no good roads in Pennsylvania, I consoled myself with the thought that Wilkes-Barré and Scranton were west of us, and that the “Scenic Route” led through these places. We might go to Wilkes-Barré or Scranton and then consult with the local automobile association, who could give us further information. Quite diplomatically I persuaded Franklin to do that.

The difficulty with this plan was that it left us worrying over roads, for, after all, the best machine, as anyone knows who has traveled much by automobiles, is a delicate organism. Given good roads it can seemingly roll on forever at top speed. Enter on a poor one and all the ills that flesh or machinery is heir to seem at once to manifest themselves. A little mud and water and you are in danger of skidding into kingdom come. A few ruts and you feel momentarily as though you were going to be thrown into high heaven. A bad patch of rocks and holes and you soon discover where all the weak places in your bones and muscles are. Punctures eventuate from nowhere. Blowouts arrive one after another with sickening frequency. The best of engines snort and growl on sharp grades. Going down a steep hill a three-thousand-pound car makes you think always—"My God! what if something should break!" Then a spring may snap, a screw work loose somewhere.

But before we left the Water Gap what joys of observation were not mine! This was such an idle tour and such idle atmosphere. There was really no great need for hurry, as we realized once we got started, and I was desirous of taking our time, as was Franklin, though having no wish to stay long anywhere. We breakfasted leisurely while Speed, somewhere, was doctoring up our tires. Then we strolled out into this summer village, seeing the Water Gappers get abroad thus early. The town looked as kempt by day as it did by night. Our fat visitors of heavy purses were still in bed in the great hotels. Instead you saw the small town American busy about his chores; an ancient dame, for instance, in black bonnet and shawl, driving a lean horse and buggy, the latter containing three milk cans all labeled “Sunset Farm Dairy Co.”; a humpnosed, thinbodied, angular grocer, or general store keeper, sweeping off his sidewalk and dusting off his counters; various citizens in “vests” and shirt sleeves crossing the heavily oiled roads at various angles and exchanging the customary American morning greetings:

“Howdy, Jake?”

“Hi, Si, been down t' the barn yet?”

“Did Ed get that wrench he was lookin' for?”

“Think so, yep.”

“Well, look at old Skeeter Cheevers comin' along, will yuh”—this last apropos of some hobbling septuagenarian with a willow basket.

I heaved a kind of sigh of relief. I was out of New York and back home, as it were—even here at the Delaware River—so near does the west come to the east.

Sitting in willow chairs in front of a garage where Speed was looking for a special kind of oil which evidently the more pretentious hotel could not or would not supply, Franklin and I discussed the things we had heard and seen. I think I drew a parallel between this hotel here and similar hotels at Monte Carlo and Nice, where the prices would be no higher, if so high.

It so happened that in the morning, when I had been dressing, there had been a knocking at the door of the next room, and listening I had heard a man’s voice calling “Ma! Ma! Have you got an undershirt in there for me?”

I looked out to see a tall, greyheaded man of sixty or more, very intelligent and very forceful looking, a real American business chief.

“Yes,” came the answer after a moment. “Wait a minute. I think there’s one in Ida’s satchel. Is Harry up yet?”

“Yes, he’s gone out.”

This was at six A. M. Here stood the American in the pretentious hall, his suspenders down, meekly importuning his wife through the closed door.

Imagine this at Nice, or Cannes, or Trouville!

And then the lackadaisical store keeper where I bought my postcards.

“Need any stamps, cap?” was his genial inquiry.

Why the “cap”? An American civility—the equivalent of Mister, Monsieur, Sir,—anything you please.

I had of late been reading much magazine sociology of the kind that is labeled “The Menace of Immigration,” etc. I was saying to Franklin that I had been fast coming to believe that America, east, west, north, and south, was being overrun by foreigners who were completely changing the American character, the American facial appearance, the American everything. Do you recall the Hans Christian Andersen story of the child who saw the king naked? I was inclined to be that child. I could not see, from the first hundred miles or so we had traveled, that there was any truth in the assertions of these magazine sociologists. Franklin and I agreed that we could see no change in American character here, or anywhere, though it might be well to look sharply into this matter as we went along. In the cities there were thousands of foreigners, but they were not unamericanizing the cities, and I was not prepared to believe that they are doing any worse by the small towns. Certainly there was no evidence of it here at the Water Gap. All was almost “offensively American,” as an Englishman would say. The “caps,” “docs,” and “howdys” were as common here as in—Indiana, for instance—so Franklin seemed to think—and he lives in Indiana a goodly part of the year. In the Water Gap and Stroudsburg, and various towns hereabout where, because of the various summer hotels and cottages, one might expect a sprinkling of the foreign element, at least in the capacity of servitors, in the streets and stores, yet they were not even noticeably dotted with them. If all that was American is being wiped out the tide had not yet reached northern New Jersey or eastern Pennsylvania. I began to take heart.

CHAPTER VII
THE PENNSYLVANIANS

And then there was this matter of Pennsylvania and its rumored poor roads to consider, and the smallness and non-celebrity of its population, considering the vastness of its territory—all of which consumed at least an hour of words, once we were started. This matter interested us greatly, for now that we had come to think of it we could not recall anyone in American political history or art or science who had come from Pennsylvania. William Penn (a foreigner) occurred to me, Benjamin Franklin and a certain Civil War governor of the name of Cameron, and there I stuck. Certain financial geniuses, as Franklin was quick to point out, had made money there; a Carnegie, Scotchman; Frick, an American; Widener, an American; Dolan, an Irishman; Elkins, and others; although, as we both agreed, America could not be vastly proud of these. The taint of greed or graft seemed to hang heavy in their wake.

“But where are the poets, writers, painters?” asked Franklin.

I paused. Not a name occurred to me.

“What Pennsylvanian ever did anything?” I asked. “Here is a state one hundred and sixty miles wide, and more than three hundred miles long from east to west, and with five or six fair-sized cities in it, and not a name!” We tried to explain it on the ground that mountainous countries are never prolific of celebrities, but neither of us seemed to know very much about mountainous countries, and so we finally dropped the subject.

But what about Pennsylvania, anyhow? Why hasn’t it produced anything in particular? How many millions of men must live and die before a real figure arises? Or do we need figures? Are just men better?

The run from the Water Gap to Factoryville was accomplished under varying conditions. The day promised to be fine, a milky, hazy atmosphere which was still warm and bright like an opal. We were all in the best of spirits, Speed whistling gaily to himself as we raced along. Our way led first through a string of small towns set in great hills or mountains—Stroudsburg, Bartonsville, Tannersville, Swiftwater. We were trying to make up our minds as we rode whether we would cut Wilkes-Barré, since, according to our map, it appeared to be considerably south of a due west course, or whether, because of its repute as a coal center, we would go there. Something, a sense of mountains and picturesque valleys, lured me on. I was for going to Wilkes-Barré if it took us as much as fifty miles out of our course.

But meanwhile our enjoyment in seeing Pennsylvania was such that we did not need to worry very much over its lack of human distinction. Everything appeared to be beautiful to such casual travelers. As we climbed and climbed out of the Water Gap, we felt a distinct change between the life of New Jersey and that of this hilly, almost mountainous land. Great slopes rose on either hand. We came upon long stretches of woodland and barren, rocky fields. The country houses from here to Wilkes-Barré, which we finally reached, were by no means so prosperous. Stroudsburg seemed a stringy, mountain-top town, composed principally of summer hotels, facing the principal street, hotels and boarding houses. Bartonsville and Tannersville, both much smaller, were much the same. The air was much lighter here, almost feathery compared to that of the lowlands farther east. But the barns and houses and stock were so poor. At Swiftwater, another small town or crossroads, we came to a wood so dense, so deep, so black and even purple in its shades that we exclaimed in surprise. The sun was still shining in its opalescent way, but in here was a wonder of rare darks and solitudes which seemed like the depths of some untenanted cathedral at nightfall. And there was a river or stream somewhere nearby, for stopping the car we could hear it tumbling over rough stones. We dismounted, quite spontaneously, and without any “shall we’s,” and wandered into this bit of forest which was such a splendid natural wonder. Under these heavy cedars and tangled vines all was still, save for the river, and at the foot of trees, in a mulch of rich earth, were growing whole colonies of Indian pipes, those rare fragile, waxylooking orchids. Neither Franklin nor Speed had ever seen any and I aired my knowledge with great gusto. Speed was quite taken aback by the fact that they really looked like pipes with a small fire in their bowls. We sat down—it was too wonderful to leave instantly. I felt that I must come back here some time and camp.

It was about here that our second blowout occurred. Back in Stroudsburg, passing through the principal street, I had spied a horseshoe lying in the road—a new shoe—and jumped out to get it as a sign of good luck. For this I was rewarded by an indulgent glance from Franklin and considerable show of sympathetic interest from Speed. The latter obviously shared my belief in horseshoes as omens of good fortune. He promptly hung it over the speedometer, but alas, within the next three-quarters of an hour this first breakdown occurred. Speed was just saying that now he was sure he would get through safely, and I was smiling comfortably to think that my life was thus charmingly guarded, when “whee!”—have you heard a whistle blowout? It sounds like a spent bullet instead of a revolver shot. Out we climbed to contemplate a large jagged rent in the rim of the tire and the loss of fifteen minutes. This rather dampened my ardor for my omen. Luck signs and omens are rather difficult things at best, for one can really never connect the result with the fact. I have the most disturbing difficulties with my luck signs. A cross-eyed man or boy should mean immediate good luck, but alas, I have seen scores and scores of cross-eyed boys at one time and another and yet my life seemed to go on no better than usual. Cross-eyed women should spell immediate disaster, but to my intense satisfaction I am able to report that this does not seem to be invariably true. Then Franklin and I sat back in the cushions and began to discuss blowouts in general and the mystic power of mind to control such matters—the esoteric or metaphysical knowledge that there is no such thing as evil and that blowouts really cannot occur.

This brings me again to Christian Science, which somehow hung over this whole tour, not so much as a religious irritant as a pleasant safeguard. It wasn’t religious or obtrusive at all. Franklin, as I have said, is inclined to believe that there is no evil, though he is perfectly willing to admit that the material appearances seem all against that assumption at times.

“It’s a curious thing,” he said to me and Speed, “but that makes the fifth blowout to occur in that particular wheel. All the trouble we have had this spring and summer has been in that particular corner of the wagon. I don’t understand it quite. It isn’t because we have been using poor tires on that wheel or any other. As a matter of fact I put a set of new Silvertown cord tires on the wheels last May. It’s just that particular wheel.”

He gazed meditatively at the serene hills around us, and I volunteered that it might be “just accident.” I could see by Franklin’s face that he considered it a lesion in the understanding of truth.

“It may be,” he said. “Still you’ll admit it’s a little curious.”

A little later on we ran on to a wonderful tableland, high up in the mountains, where were a lake, a golf course, a perfect macadam road, and interesting inns and cottages—quite like an ideal suburban section of a great city. As we neared a four corners or railway station center I spied there one of those peculiarly constructed wagons intended originally to haul hay, latterly to convey straw-ride parties around the country in mountain resorts—a diversion which seems never to lose its charm for the young. This one, or rather three, for there turned out to be three in a row, was surrounded by a great group of young girls, as I thought, all of them in short skirts and with a sort of gymnasium costume which seemed to indicate that they were going out to indulge in outdoor exercises.

As we drew nearer we discovered, however, to our astonishment, that a fair proportion were women over forty or fifty. It seemed more like a school with many monitors than a mountain outing.

Contemplating this very modern show of arms and legs, I felt that we had come a very long way from the puritanic views of the region in which I had been raised if an inland summer resort permitted this freedom of appearance. In my day the idea of any woman, young or old, save those under fourteen, permitting anything more than their shoe tip and ankles to be seen was not to be thought of. And here were mothers and spinsters of forty and fifty as freely garbed as any bather at a summer resort.

Speed and Franklin and myself were fascinated by the spectacle. There was a general store near at hand and Franklin went to buy some chocolate. Speed sat upright at his wheel and curled his mustachios. I leaned back and endeavored to pick out the most beautiful of the younger ones. It was a difficult task. There were many beauties.

By this spectacle we were led to discuss for a few moments whether sex—the tendency to greater freedom of relationship between men and women—was taking America or the world in an unsatisfactory direction. There had been so much talk on the subject of late in the newspapers and elsewhere that I could not resist sounding Franklin as to his views. “Are we getting better or worse?” I inquired.

“Oh, better,” he replied with the air of one who has given the matter a great deal of thought. “I cannot feel that there is any value in repression, or certainly very little. Life as it appeals to me is a flowering out, not a recession. If it is flowering it is becoming richer, fuller, freer. I can see no harm in those girls showing their legs or in peoples' bodies coming into greater and greater evidence. It seems to me it will make for a kind of natural innocence after a while. The mystery will be taken out of sex and only the natural magnetism left. I never see boys bathing naked in the water but what I wish we could all go naked if the climate would only permit.” And then he told me about a group of boys in Carmel whom he had once seen on a rainy day racing naked upon the backs of some horses about a field near their swimming hole, their white, rain-washed bodies under lowering clouds making them look like centaurs and fawns. Personally I follow life, or like to, with a hearty enthusiasm wherever it leads.

As we were talking, it began to rain, and we decided to drive on more speedily. A few miles back, after some cogitation at a crossroads, we had decided to take the road to Wilkes-Barré. I shall never feel grateful enough for our decision, though for a time it looked as though we had made a serious mistake. After a time the fine macadam road ended and we took to a poorer and finally a rutty dirt road. The grades became steeper and steeper—more difficult to ascend and descend. In a valley near a bounding stream—Stoddartsville the place was—we had another blowout—or something which caused a flat tire, in the same right rear wheel; and this time in a driving rain. We had to get out and help spread tools in the wet road and hunt leaks in the rubber rim. When this was repaired and the chains put on the wheels we proceeded, up hill and down dale, past miles of apparently tenantless woods and rocky fields—on and on in search of Wilkes-Barré. We had concluded from our maps and some signs that it must be about thirtysix miles farther. As it turned out it was nearly seventy. The roads had a tendency to curve downwards on each side into treacherous hollows, and as I had recently read of an automobile skidding on one of these, overturning and killing three people, I was not very giddy about the prospect. Even with the chains the machine was skidding and our able driver kept his eye fixed on the road. I never saw a man pay more minute attention to his wheel nor work harder to keep his machine evenly balanced. A good chauffeur is a jewel, and Speed was one.

But this ride had other phases than a mere bad road. The clouds were so lowery and the rain so heavy that for a part of the way we had to have the storm curtains on. We could see that it was a wonderful country that we were traversing, deliciously picturesque, but a sopping rain makes one’s spirits droop. Franklin sat in his corner and I in mine with scarcely a word. Speed complained at times that we were not making more than four miles an hour. I began to calculate how long it would take to get to Indiana at that rate. Franklin began to wonder if we were not making a mistake trying to cut straight across the poorly equipped state of Pennsylvania.

“Perhaps it would have been better after all if we had gone up the Hudson.”

I felt like a criminal trying to wreck a three thousand dollar car.

But beyond a place called Bear Creek things seemed to get better. This was a town in a deep ravine with a railroad and a thundering stream, plunging over a waterfall. The houses were charming. It seemed as if many well-to-do people must live here, for the summer anyhow. But when we asked for food no one seemed to have any. “Better go to Wilkes-Barré,” advised the local inn keeper. “It’s only fifteen miles.” At four miles an hour we would be there in four hours.

Out we started. The rain ceased for a time, though the clouds hung low, and we took up the storm curtains. It was now nearly two o’clock and by three it was plain we were nearing Wilkes-Barré. The roads were better; various railroads running in great cuts came into view. We met miners with bright tin buckets, their faces as black as coal, their caps ornamented with their small lamps. There were troops of foreign women and poorly clad children carrying buckets to or from the mines. Turning a corner of the road we came suddenly upon one of the most entrancing things in the way of a view that I have ever seen. There are city scapes that seem some to mourn and some to sing. This was one that sang. It reminded me of the pen and ink work of Rops or Vierge or Whistler, the paintings of Turner and Moran. Low hanging clouds, yellowish or black, or silvery like a fish, mingled with a splendid filigree of smoke and chimneys and odd sky lines. Beds of goldenglow ornamented and relieved a group of tasteless low red houses or sheds in the immediate foreground, which obviously sheltered the heavy broods of foreign miners and their wives. The lines of red, white, blue and grey wash, the honking flocks of white geese, the flocks of pigeons overhead, the paintless black fences protecting orderly truck gardens, as well as the numerous babies playing about, all attested this. As we stood there a group of heavy-hipped women and girls (the stocky peasant type of the Hungarian-Silesian plains) crossed the foreground with their buckets. Immense mounds of coal and slag with glimpses of distant breakers perfected the suggestion of an individual and characterful working world. Anyhow we paused and applauded while Franklin got his sketching board and I sauntered to find more, if any, attractive angles. In the middle distance a tall white skyscraper stood up, a prelude, or a foretouch to a great yellowish black cloud behind it. A rich, smoky, sketchy atmosphere seemed to hang over everything.

“Isn’t Walkes-Barré wonderful?” I said to Franklin. “Aren’t you glad now you’ve come?”

“I am coming down here to paint soon,” he said. “This is the most wonderful thing I have seen in a long while.”

And so we stood on this hillside overlooking Wilkes-Barré for a considerable period while Franklin sketched, and finally, when he had finished and I had wandered a mile down the road to see more, we entered.

CHAPTER VIII
BEAUTIFUL WILKES-BARRÉ

My own interest in Wilkes-Barré and this entire region indeed dated from the great anthracite coal strike in 1902, in my estimation one of the fiercest and best battles between labor and capital ever seen in America. Who does not know the history of it, and the troubles and ills that preceded it? I recall it so keenly—the complaints of the public against the rising price of coal, the rumors of how the Morgans and the Vanderbilts had secured control of all these coal lands (or the railroads that carried their coal for them), and having this latter weapon or club, proceeded to compel the independent coal operators to do their will. How, for instance, they had detained the cars of the latter, taxed them exorbitant carrying charges, frequently declining to haul their coal at all on the ground that they had no cars; how they charged the independent mine operator three times as much for handling his hard coal (the product of the Eastern region) as they did the soft coal men of the west, and when he complained and fought them, took out the spur that led to his mine on the ground that it was unprofitable.

WILKES-BARRE
A rich, smoky, sketchy atmosphere

Those were great days in the capitalistic struggle for control in America. The sword fish were among the blue fish slaying and the sharks were after the sword fish. Tremendous battles were on, with Morgan and Rockefeller and Harriman and Gould after Morse and Heinze and Hill and the lesser fry. We all saw the end in the panic of 1907, when one multimillionaire, the scapegoat of others no less guilty, went to the penitentiary for fifteen years, and another put a revolver to his bowels and died as do the Japanese. Posterity will long remember this time. It cannot help it. A new land was in the throes of construction, a strange race of men with finance for their weapon were fighting as desperately as ever men fought with sword or cannon. Individual liberty among the masses was being proved the thin dream it has always been.

I have found in my book of quotations and labeled for my own comfort “The Great Coal Appeal,” a statement written by John Mitchell, then president of the United Mine Workers of America, presenting the miners' side of the case in this great strike of 1902 which was fought out here in Wilkes-Barré, and Scranton and all the country we were now traversing. It was written at the time when the “Coal Barons,” as they were called, were riding around in their private cars with curtains drawn to keep out the vulgar gaze and were being wined and dined by governors and presidents, while one hundred and fifty thousand men and boys, all admittedly underpaid, out on strike nearly one hundred and sixty days—a half a year—waited patiently the arbitration of their difficulties. The total duration of the strike was one hundred and sixtythree days. It was a bitter and finally victorious protest against an enlarged and burdensome ton, company houses, company stores, powder at $2.75 a keg which anywhere else could be bought for ninety cents or $1.10.

The quotation from Mitchell reads:

In closing this statement I desire to say that we have entered and are conducting this struggle without malice and without bitterness. We believe that our antagonists are acting upon misrepresentation rather than in bad faith, we regard them not as enemies but as opponents, and we strike in patience until they shall accede to our demands or submit to impartial arbitration the difference between us. We are striking not to show our strength but the justice of our cause, and we desire only the privilege of presenting our case to a fair tribunal. We ask not for favors but for justice and we appeal our case to the solemn judgment of the American people.

Here followed a detailed statement of some of the ills they were compelled to hear and which I have in part enumerated above. And then:

Involved in this fight are questions weightier than any question of dollars and cents. The present miner has had his day. He has been oppressed and ground down; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the noise and blackness of the breaker. It is for these children that we are fighting. We have not underestimated the strength of our opponents; we have not overestimated our own power of resistance. Accustomed always to live upon a little, a little less is no unendurable hardship. It was with a quaking of hearts that we called for a strike. It was with a quaking of hearts that we asked for our last pay envelopes. But in the grimy, bruised hand of the miner was the little white hand of the child, a child like the children of the rich, and in the heart of the miner was the soul rooted determination to starve to the last crust of bread and fight out the long dreary battle to the end, in order to win a life for the child and secure for it a place in the world in keeping with advancing civilization.

Messieurs, I know the strong must rule the weak, the big brain the little one, but why not some small approximation towards equilibrium, just a slightly less heavily loaded table for Dives and a few more crumbs for Lazarus? I beg you—a few more crumbs! You will appear so much more pleasing because of your generosity.

Wilkes-Barré proved a city of charm—a city so instinct with a certain constructive verve that merely to enter it was to feel revivified. After our long, dreary drive in the rain the sun was now shining through sultry clouds and it was pleasant to see the welter of thriving foundries and shops, smoky and black, which seemed to sing of prosperity; the long, smooth red brick pavement of the street by which we entered, so very kempt and sanitary; the gay public square, one of the most pleasing small parks I have ever seen, crowded with long distance trolley cars and motors—the former bearing the names of towns as much as a hundred and a hundred and fifty miles away. The stores were bright, the throngs interesting and cheerful. We actually, spontaneously and unanimously exclaimed for joy.

Most people seem to have concluded that America is a most uninteresting land to travel in—not nearly so interesting as Europe, or Asia or Africa—and from the point of view of patina, ancient memories, and the presence of great and desolate monuments, they are right. But there is another phase of life which is equally interesting to me and that is the youth of a great country. America, for all its hundreds and some odd years of life, is a mere child as yet, or an uncouth stripling at best—gaunt, illogical, elate. It has so much to do before it can call itself a well organized or historic land, and yet humanly and even architecturally contrasted with Europe, I am not so sure that it has far to go. Contrasted with our mechanical equipment Europe is a child. Show me a country abroad in which you can ride by trolley the distance that New York is from Chicago, or a state as large as Ohio or Indiana—let alone both together—gridironed by comfortable lines, in such a way that you can travel anywhere at almost any time of the night or day. Where but in America can you at random step into a comfortable telephone booth and telephone to any city, even one so far as three thousand miles away; or board a train in almost any direction at any time, which will take you a thousand miles or more without change; or travel, as we did, two hundred miles through a fruitful, prosperous land with wonderful farms and farming machinery and a general air of sound prosperity—even lush richness? For this country in so far as we had traversed it seemed wonderfully prosperous to me, full of airy, comfortable homes, of spirited, genial and even witty people—a really happy people. I take that to be worth something—and a sight to see.

In Europe the country life did not always strike me as prosperous, or the people as intelligent, or really free in their souls. In England, for instance, the peasantry were heavy, sad, dull.

But Wilkes-Barré gave evidences of a real charm. All the streets about this central heart were thriving marts of trade. The buildings were new, substantial and with a number of skyscrapers—these inevitable evidences of America’s local mercantile ambitions, quite like the cathedrals religionists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries loved to build. As the Florentines, Venetians and European high mightinesses of the middle ages generally went in for castles, palaces, and “hotels de Ville,” so Americans of money today “go in” for high buildings. We love them. We seem to think they are typical of our strength and power. As the Florentines, Venetians, Pisans and Genoese looked on their leaning towers and campaniles, so we on these. When America is old, and its present vigor and life hunger has gone and an alien or degenerate race tramp where once we lived and builded so vigorously, perhaps some visitors from a foreign country will walk here among these ruins and sigh: “Ah, yes. The Americans were a great people. Their cities were so wonderful. These mouldy crumbling skyscrapers, and fallen libraries and post offices and city halls and state capitals!”

In Wilkes-Barré it was easy to find a very pretentious restaurant of the “grill” and “rathskeller” type, so familiar and so dear, apparently, to the American heart—a partly underground affair, with the usual heavy Flemish paneling, a colored frieze of knights and goose girls and an immense yellow bill of fare. And here from our waiter, who turned out to be one of those dreadful creatures one sees tearing along country roads in khaki, army boots and goggles—a motor cyclist—we learned there were not good roads west of Wilkes-Barré. He had motorcycled to all places within a hundred or so miles east of here—Philadelphia, Dover, the Water Gap; but he knew of no good roads west. They were all dirt or rubble and full of ruts.

Later advice from a man who owned a drug and stationery store, where we laid in a stock of picture postcards, was to the same effect. There were no large towns and no good roads west. He owned a Ford. We should take the road to Binghamton, via Scranton (our original “Scenic Route”), and from there on by various routes to Buffalo. We would save time going the long way round. It seemed the only thing to do. Our motor-cycling waiter had said as much.

A COAL BREAKER NEAR SCRANTON

By now it was nearly five o’clock. I was so enamored of this town with its brisk world of shoppers and motorists and its sprinkling of black faced miners that I would have been perfectly willing to make a night of it here—but the evening was turning out to be so fine that I could think of nothing better than motoring on and on. That feel of a cool breeze blowing against one, of seeing towns and hills and open fields and humble farm yards go scudding by! Of hearing the tr-r-r-r-r-r of this sound machine! The sun was coming out or at least great patches of blue were appearing in the heavy clouds and we had nineteen miles of splendid road, we understood, straight along the banks of the Susquehanna into Scranton and thence beyond, if we wished. As much as I had come to fancy Wilkes-Barré (I promised myself that I would certainly return some day), I was perfectly willing to go.

Right here began the most delightful portion of this trip—indeed one of the most delightful rides I have ever had anywhere. Hitherto the Susquehanna had never been anything much more than a name to me. I now learned that it takes its rise from Otsego Lake in Otsego County, New York, flows west to Binghamton and Owego and thence southeast via Scranton, Wilkes-Barré and Harrisburg to the Chesapeake Bay at Havre de Grace. Going west over the Pennsylvania I had occasionally seen a small portion of it gemmed with rocky islands and tumbling along, thinly bright it seemed to me, over a wide area of stones and boulders. Here at Wilkes-Barré, bordered for a part of the way by a public park, alongside of which our road lay, it was quite sizable, smooth and greenish grey. Perhaps it was due to the recent heavy rains that it was so presentable.

At any rate, sentineled by great hills, it seemed to come with gentle windings hither and yon, direct from the north. And the valley through which it moved—how beautiful it really was! Here and there, on every hand between Wilkes-Barré and Scranton were to be seen immense breakers with their attendant hills of coal or slag marking the mouths of mines. As we rode out tonight, finding it easy to make five to thirty miles an hour, even through the various mining towns we encountered on the way, we were constantly passing groups of miners, some on foot, some in trolleys, some in that new invention, the jitney bus, which seemed to be employed even on these stretches of road where one would have imagined the street car service was ample. How many long lines of miners' cottages and yellowish frame tenements we passed! I wonder why it is that a certain form of such poverty and work seems to be inseparably identified with yellow or drab paints? So many of these cheap wooden tenements were thus enameled, and then darkened or smudged by grey soot.

Many of the dwellers in these hives were to be seen camped upon their thresholds. We ran through one long dreary street—all these towns followed the shores of the river—and had the interest of seeing a runaway horse, drawing a small load of fence posts, dashing toward us and finally swerving and crashing into a tree. Again a group of boys, seeing the New York license tag on our car, hailed us with a disconcerting, “Eh, look at the New York bums!” Still farther on, finding some difficulty with the lamps, Speed drew up by the roadside to attend to them while Franklin made a rough sketch of a heavenly scene that was just below us—great hills, a wide valley, some immense breakers in the foreground, a few clouds tinted pink by the last expiring rays of the day. This was such a sky and such a scene as might prelude a voice from heaven.

CHAPTER IX
IN AND OUT OF SCRANTON

Darkness had fallen when we reached Scranton. We approached from the south along a ridge road which skirted the city and could see it lying below to the east and ablaze with arc lights. There is something so appealing about a city in a valley at dark. Although we had no reason for going in—our road lay really straight on—I wanted to go down, because of my old weakness, curiosity. Nothing is more interesting to me than the general spectacle of life itself in these thriving towns of our new land—though they are devoid of anything historic or in the main artistic (no memories even of any great import). I cannot help speculating as to what their future will be. What writers, what statesmen, what arts, what wars may not take their rise in some such place as this?

And there are the indefinable and yet sweet ways of just life. We dwellers in big cities are inclined to overlook or forget entirely the half or quarter cities in which thousands upon thousands spend all their lives. For my part, I am never tired of looking at just mills and factories and those long lines of simple streets where just common people, without a touch perhaps of anything that we think of as great or beautiful or dramatic, dwell. I was not particularly pleased with Scranton after I saw it—a sprawling world of perhaps a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand people without the verve or snap of a half hundred places half its size,—but still here were all these people. It was a warm night and as we descended into commonplace streets we could look through the open windows of homes or “apartments” or “flats” and see the usual humdrum type of furniture and hangings, the inevitable lace curtains, the centre tables, the huge, junky lamps, the upright pianos or victrolas. Whenever I see long, artless streets like these in the hot, breathless summer time, I feel a wave of commiseration sweep over me, and yet I am drawn to them by something which makes me want to live among these people.

Oh, to escape endless cogitation! To feel that a new centre table or a new lamp or a new pair of shoes in the autumn might add something to my happiness! To believe that mere eating and drinking, the cooking of meals, the prospect of promotion in some small job might take away the misery of life, and so to escape chemistry and physics and the horror of ultimate brutal law! “In the streets of Ur,” says an old Chaldean chronicle, “the women were weeping for that Bel was dead.” Bel was their Christ and they were weeping as some people weep on Good Friday to this day. Such women one might find here in Scranton, no doubt; believers in old tales of old things. After five or six thousand years there is still weeping in simple streets over myths as vain!

Once down in the heart of Scranton, I did not care for it at all. It was so customary—an American city like Utica or Syracuse or Rochester or Buffalo—and American cities of the hundred thousand class are so much alike. They all have the long principal street—possibly a mile long. They all have the one or two skyscrapers and the principal dry goods store and the hotel and the new post office building and the new Carnegie library and sometimes the new court house (if it’s a county seat), or the new city hall. Sometimes these structures are very charming in themselves—tastefully done and all that—but most American cities of this class have no more imagination than an owl. They never think of doing an original thing.

Do you think they would allow the natural configuration of their land or any river front, or lake, or water of any kind to do anything for them? Not at all. It’s the rarest exception when, as at Wilkes-Barré for instance, a city will take the slightest æsthetic advantage of any natural configuration of land or water.

What! put a park or esplanade or a wall along a handsome river bank in the heart of the town! Impossible. Put it far out in the residence section where it truly belongs and let the river go hang. Isn’t the centre of a city for business? What right has a park there?

Or perhaps it is a great lake front as at Buffalo or Cleveland, which could or should be made into something splendid—the municipal centre, for instance, or the site of a great park. No. Instead the city will bend all its energies to growing away from it and leave it to shabby factories and warehouses and tumble-down houses, while it constructs immense parks in some region where a park could never possibly have as much charm as on the water front.

Take the City of St. Louis as a case in point. Here is a metropolis which has a naturally fascinating water front along the Mississippi. Here is a stream that is quite wonderful to look at—broad and deep. Years ago, when St. Louis was small and river traffic was important, all the stores were facing this river. Later railroads came and the town built west. Today blocks and blocks of the most interesting property in the city is devoted to dead-alive stores, warehouses and tenements. It would be an easy matter and a profitable one for the city to condemn sufficient property to make a splendid drive along this river and give the city a real air. It would transform it instantly into a kind of wonder world which thousands would travel a long way to see. It would provide sites for splendid hotels and restaurants and give the city a suitable front door or facade.

But do you think this would ever be seriously contemplated? It would cost money. One had better build a park away from the river where there are no old houses. The mere thought of trading the old houses for a wonderful scene which would add beauty and life to the city is too much of a stretch of the imagination for St. Louisians to accomplish. It can’t be done. American cities are not given to imagination outside the walks of trade.

Scranton was no worse than many another American city of the same size and class that I have seen—or indeed than many of the newer European cities. It was well paved, well lighted and dull. There were the usual traffic policemen (like New York, b’gosh!), but with no traffic to guide, the one hotel designed to impress, the civic square surrounded by rows of thickly placed five-lamp standards. It was presentable, and, because Speed wanted to get oil and gasoline and we wanted to see what the town was like, we ran the machine into a garage and wandered forth, looking into shoe and bookstore windows and studying the people.

Here again I could see no evidence of that transformation of the American by the foreigner into something different from what he has ever been—the peril which has been so much discussed by our college going sociologists. On the contrary, America seemed to me to be making over the foreigner into its own image and likeness. I learned here that there were thousands of Poles, Czechs, Croatians, Silesians, Hungarians, etc., working here in the coal mines and at Wilkes-Barré, but the young men on the streets and in the stores were Americans. Here were the American electric signs in great profusion, the American bookstores and newsstands crowded with all that mushy adventure fiction of which our lady critics are so fond. Five hundred magazines and weekly publications blazed the faces of alleged pretty girls. “The automat,” the “dairy kitchen,” the “Boston,” “Milwaukee” or “Chicago” lunch, and all the smart haberdasheries so beloved of the ambitious American youth, were in full bloom. I saw at least a half dozen moving-picture theatres in as many blocks—and business and correspondence schools in ample array.

What becomes of all the young Poles, Czechs, Croatians, Serbians, etc., who are going to destroy us? I’ll tell you. They gather on the street corners when their parents will permit them, arrayed in yellow or red ties, yellow shoes, dinky fedoras or beribboned straw hats and “style-plus” clothes, and talk about “when I was out to Dreamland the other night,” or make some such observation as “Say, you should have seen the beaut that cut across here just now. Oh, mamma, some baby!” That’s all the menace there is to the foreign invasion. Whatever their original intentions may be, they can’t resist the American yellow shoe, the American moving picture, “Stein-Koop” clothes, “Dreamland,” the popular song, the automobile, the jitney. They are completely undone by our perfections. Instead of throwing bombs or lowering our social level, all bogies of the sociologist, they would rather stand on our street corners, go to the nearest moving pictures, smoke cigarettes, wear high white collars and braided yellow vests and yearn over the girls who know exactly how to handle them, or work to some day own an automobile and break the speed laws. They are really not so bad as we seem to want them to be. They are simple, gauche, de jeune, “the limit.” In other words, they are fast becoming Americans.

I think it was during this evening at Scranton that it first dawned on me what an agency for the transmission of information and a certain kind of railway station gossip the modern garage has become. In the old days, when railroads were new or the post road was still in force, the depot or the inn was always the centre for a kind of gay travelers' atmosphere or way station exchange for gossip, where strangers alighted, refreshed themselves and did a little talking to pass the time. Today the garage has become a third and even more notable agency for this sort of exchange, automobile travelers being for the most part a genial company and constantly reaching out for information. Anyone who knows anything about the roads of his native town and country is always in demand, for he can fall into long conversation with chauffeurs or tourists in general, who will occasionally close the conversation with an offer of a drink or a cigar, or, if he is going in their direction, take him for a part of the way at least as a guide.

Having found Scranton so dull that we could not make up our minds to remain overnight, we returned to the garage we were patronizing and found it crowded to the doors with cars of all descriptions and constantly being invaded by some others in search of something. Here were a group of those typical American hangers-on or loafers or city gossips or chair warmers—one scarcely knows what to call them—who, like the Roman frequenters of the Forum or the Greek “sitters at the place of customs,” gather to pass the time by watching the activity and the enthusiasm of others. Personally my heart rather yearns over that peculiar temperament, common enough to all the abodes of men, which for lack of spirit or strength or opportunity in itself to get up and do, is still so moved by the spectacle of life that it longs to be where others are doing. Here they were, seven or eight of them, leaning against handsome machines, talking, gesticulating and proffering information to all and sundry who would have it. Owing to the assertion of the proprietor’s helper (who was eager, naturally enough, to have the car housed here for the night, as he would get a dollar for it) that the roads were bad between here and Binghamton, a distance of sixtynine miles, we were a little uncertain whether to go on or no. But this charge of a dollar was an irritation, for in most garages, as Speed informed us, the night charge was only fifty cents. Besides, the same youth was foolish enough to confess, after Speed questioned him, that the regular charge to local patrons was only fifty cents.

Something in the youth’s description of the difficulties of the road between here and Binghamton caused me to feel that he was certainly laying it on a little thick. According to him, there had been terrible rains in the last few weeks. The road in spots was all but impassable. There were great hills, impossible ravines, and deadly railroad crossings. I am not so much of an enthusiast for night riding as to want to go in the face of difficulties—indeed I would much rather ride by day, when the beauties of the landscape can be seen,—still this attempt to frighten us irritated me.

FRANKLIN STUDIES AN OBLITERATED SIGN

And then the hangers-on joined in. Obviously they were friends of the owner and, like a Greek chorus, were brought on at critical moments to emphasize the tragedy or the terror or the joy, as the case might be. Instantly we were assailed with new exaggerations—there were dreadful, unguarded railway crossings, a number of robberies had been committed recently, one bridge somewhere was weak.

This finished me.

“They are just talking to get that dollar,” I whispered to Franklin.

“Sure,” he replied; “it’s as plain as anything. I think we might as well go on.”

“By all means,” I urged. “We’ve climbed higher hills and traversed worse or as bad roads today as we will anywhere else. I don’t like Scranton very well anyhow.”

My opposition was complete. Speed looked a little tired and I think would have preferred to stay. But my feeling was that at least we could run on to some small inn or country town hotel where the air would be fresher and the noises less offensive. After a long year spent in the heart of New York, I was sick of the city—any city.

So we climbed in and were off again.

It was not so long after dark. The road lay north, through summery crowded streets for a time and then out under the stars. A cool wind was blowing. One old working man whom we had met and of whom we had asked the way had given us something to jest over.

“Which way to Dalton?” we called. This was the next town on our road.

“Over the viderdock,” he replied, with a wave of his arm, and thereafter all viaducts became “viderdocks” for us. We sank into the deep leather cushions and, encountering no bad roads, went comfortably on. The trees in places hung low and seemed to make arched green arbors through which we were speeding, so powerful were our lamps. At one place we came upon a brilliantly lighted amusement resort and there we could not resist stopping. There was music and dancing and all the young clerks and beaus for miles around were here with their girls. I was so entranced that I wanted to stay on, hoping that some young girl might talk to me, but not one gave me even so much as a smile. Then we came to a country inn—an enticing looking thing among great trees—but we were awake now, enjoying the ride, and Speed was smoking a cigarette—why quit now? So on and on, up hills and down dale, and now and then we seemed to be skirting the Susquehanna. At other times we seemed to be off in side hills where there were no towns of any size. A railroad train came into view and disappeared; a trolley track joined us and disappeared; a toll road made us pay fifteen cents—and disappeared. At last as it neared unto midnight I began to get sleepy and then I argued that, whatever town came next, we should pause there for the night.

“All right,” said Franklin genially, and then more aisles and more streams and more stores—and then in the distance some manufactories came into view, brightly lighted windows reflected in some water.

“Here we are,” I sighed sleepily, but we weren’t, not quite. This was a crossroad somewhere—a dividing of the ways—but the readable signs to say which way were not visible. We got out and struck matches to make the words more intelligible. They had been obliterated by rust. I saw a light in a house and went there. A tall, spare man of fifty came out on the porch and directed us. This was Factoryville or near it, he said—another mile on we would find an inn. We were something like twentyfive miles from Scranton. If you stop and look at electric parks and watch the dancers, you can’t expect to make very good time. In Factoryville, as dark and silent as a small sleeping town may be, we found one light—or Franklin did—and behind it the village barber reading a novel. In the shadow of his doorway Franklin entered into a long and intimate discussion with him—about heaven only knows what. I had already noted of Franklin that he could take up more time securing seeming information than any human being I had ever known. It was astounding how he could stand and gossip, coming back finally with such a simple statement as, “He says turn to the right,” or “We go north.” But why a week to discover this, I used to think. Finally, almost arm in arm with the barber, they disappeared around a corner. A weary string of moments rolled past before Franklin strolled back to say there was no real inn—no hotel that had a license—but there was a man who kept a “kind of a hotel” and he had a barn or shed, which would do as a garage.

“Better stay, eh?” he suggested.

“Well, rather,” I answered.

When we had unslung our bags and coats, Speed took the car to the barn in the rear and up we went into a typical American papier mâché room. The least step, the least movement, and wooden floors and partitions seemed to shout. But there were two large rooms with three beds and, what was more, a porch with a wooden swing. There was a large porcelain bath in a room at the rear and pictures of all the proprietor’s relatives done in crayon.

How we slept! There were plenty of windows, with a fresh breeze blowing and no noises, except some katydids sawing lustily. I caught the perfume of country woods and fields and, afar off, as I stretched on an easy bed, I could hear a train whistling and rumbling faintly—that far off Ooh!—ooh!—oo!—oo!

I lay there thinking what a fine thing it was to motor in this haphazard fashion—how pleasant it was not to know where you were going or where you would be tomorrow, exactly. Franklin’s car was so good, Speed so careful. Then I seemed to be borne somewhere on great wings, until the dawn coming in at the window awakened me. The birds were singing.

“Oh, yes, Factoryville,” I sighed. “That’s where we are. We’re motoring to Indiana.”

And I turned over and slept another hour.

CHAPTER X
A LITTLE AMERICAN TOWN

Factoryville, as we found this morning, was one of these very small places which, to one weary of metropolitan life, occasionally prove entertaining through an extreme simplicity and a sense of rest and peace. It was, as I saw sitting in my dressing gown in our convenient wooden swing, a mere collection of white cottages with large lawns or country yard spaces and flowers in profusion and a few stores. Dr. A. B. Fitch, Druggist (I could see this sign on the window before which he stood), was over the way sweeping off the sidewalk in front of his store. I knew it was Dr. A. B. Fitch by his solemn proprietary air, his alpaca coat, his serious growth of thick grey whiskers. He was hatless and serene. I could almost hear him saying: “Now, Annie, you tell your mother that this medicine is to be taken one teaspoonful every three hours, do you hear?”

Farther down the street H. B. Wendel, hardware dealer, was setting out a small red and green lawnmower and some zinc cans capable of holding anything from rain water to garbage. This was his inducement to people to come and buy. Although it was still very early, citizens were making their way down the street, a working man or two, going to some distant factory not in Factoryville, a woman in a gingham poke bonnet standing at a corner of her small white home examining her flowers, a small barefooted boy kicking the damp dust of the road with his toes. It reminded me of the time when, as a youth in a similar town, I used to get up early and see my mother browsing over early, dew-laden blossoms. I was for staying in Factoryville for some time.

But Franklin, energetic soul, would have none of it. He had lived in a small town or on a farm for the greater part of his life and, unlike me, had never really deserted the country. Inside the room, on the balcony of which I was already swinging and idly musing, he was industriously shaving—a task I was reserving for some city barber. Presently he came out and sat down.

“Isn’t it wonderful—the country!” I said. “This town! See old Dr. Fitch over there, and that grocery man putting out his goods.”

“Yes!” replied Franklin. “Carmel is very much like this. There’s no particular life there. A little small-town trading. Of course, Indianapolis has come so near now that they can all go down there by trolley, and that makes a difference.”

Forthwith he launched into amusing tales of Carmelite character—bits too idle or too profane to be narrated here. One only I remember—that of some yokels who were compelled to find a new hangout because the old building they frequented was torn down. When Franklin encountered them in the new place he said quite innocently: “This place hasn’t as much atmosphere as the old one.” “Oh, yes, it has,” rejoined the rural. “When you open the back windows.”

Speed was shaving too by now, inside, and, hearing me sing the delights of rural life (windows and doors were open), he put in:

“Yes, that’s all well enough, but after you’d lived here awhile you mightn’t like it so much. Gee! people in the country aren’t any different from people anywhere else.”

Speed had a peculiarly pained and even frightened look on his face at times, like a cloud passing over a landscape or something that made me want to put my hand on his shoulder and say, “There, there.” I wondered sometimes whether he had often been hungry or thrown out of a job or put upon in some unkind way. He could seem momentarily so pathetic.

“I know, I know,” I said gaily, “but there are the cows and the trees and the little flower gardens and the farmers mowing hay and——”