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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
In "A Hoosier Holiday," Theodore Dreiser embarks on a deeply personal exploration of his Midwestern roots, capturing the essence of Indiana's landscapes, culture, and people. Written in a style that harmonizes rich descriptive prose with candid autobiographical reflections, this work operates at the intersection of memoir, travel writing, and regionalism'Äîhallmarks of early 20th-century American literature. Dreiser's keen observations illuminate not only the beauty of the Hoosier State but also its social mores and economic realities, offering readers a nuanced understanding of small-town life against the backdrop of a rapidly industrializing nation. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was a prominent American novelist and a key figure in the naturalist literary movement, known for his keen psychological insight and willingness to confront social issues. Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, he drew from his own experiences and surroundings to shape his narratives. Dreiser'Äôs journey through poverty and success, coupled with a lifelong fascination for the American experience, undoubtedly influenced his desire to reflect on his formative years in "A Hoosier Holiday," emphasizing the intricate relationship between place and identity. This book is a must-read for those interested in American literature, regional studies, and the evolution of the self in relation to the broader society. Dreiser's evocative prose and sincere storytelling offer not just a nostalgic look at Indiana but also resonate with universal themes of belonging, cultural memory, and personal growth.
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A Hoosier holiday
Table of Contents
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!”
