Between "try-ons" of the new suit I began to meet the men I was most interested in. I lunched with James Barrie and called upon Bret Harte, Sir Walter Besant and Thomas Hardy. Bernard Shaw wrote asking me to Hindhead for a week-end, and Conan Doyle invited me to see a cricket match with him—but all these events were subordinate to the authors' dinner and the accursed suit in which I was about to lose my identity. "My shirt will 'buckle,' my shoes will hurt my feet, my tie will slip up over my collar—I shall take cold in my chest——" (As a hardened diner-out I look back with wonder and a certain incredulity on that uneasy week.)
These were a few of the fears I entertained, but on the fateful night—an hour before the time to start out, I assumed the whole "outfit" and viewed myself as best I could in my half-length mirror and was gratified to note that I resembled almost any other brown-bearded man of forty. I couldn't see my feet and legs in the glass, but my patent leather shoes were illustrious. I began to think I might pull through without accident.
Zangwill with a mischievous grin on his face, met me at the door of the hotel at seven, and conducted me to the reception hall which was already filled with a throng of most distinguished guests running from Sir Walter Besant, the president of the Authors' Society, to Lord Rosebery, who was to be one of the speakers. Zangwill, who seemed to be known of everybody, kept me in hand, introducing me to many of the writers, and kind Sir Walter said, "As an American over-seas member your seat is at the speakers' table"—an honor which I accepted with a swift realization that it was made possible by the new coat and vest I presented to the world.
Zangwill parted with me, smilingly. "I am but one of lower orders," said he, "but I shall have an eye to you during dinner."
My left-hand neighbor at the table was a short, gray, gloomy individual whose name I failed to catch, but the man on my right was Henry Norman, of the London Chronicle, and after we had established friendly relations I leaned to him and whispered, "Who is the self-absorbed, gloomy chieftain on my left?"
"That," said he, "is Henry M. Stanley."
"What!" I exclaimed, "not Henry M. Stanley of Africa?"
"Yes, Stanley of Uganda."
It seemed a pity to sit in silence beside this great explorer, who had been one of my boyish heroes, and I decided to break the ice of his reserve in some way. Turning to him suddenly I asked, "Sir Henry, how do you pronounce the name of that poisonous African fly—is it Teetsie or Tettsie?"
He brightened up at once. I was not so great a bore as he feared. After he had given me a great deal of information about this fly, and the sleeping sickness, I asked him what he thought of the future of the continent, to which he responded with growing geniality. We were off!
After a proper interval I volunteered some valuable data concerning the mosquitoes and flies I had encountered on my recent trip into the wilderness of British Columbia. He became interested in me. "Oh! You've been to the Klondike!"
This quite broke down his wall. Thereafter he listened respectfully to all that I could tell him of the black flies, the huge caribou flies, the orange-colored flies, and the mosquitoes who worked in two shifts (the little gray ones in hot sunlight, the big black ones at night), and by the time the speaking began we were on the friendliest terms. "What a bore these orators are!" I said, and in this judgment he instantly agreed.
Sitting there in the faces of hundreds of English authors, I achieved a peaceful satisfaction with my outfit. A sense of being entirely inconspicuous, a realization that I was committed to convention, produced in me an air of perfect ease. By conforming I had become as much a part of the scene as Sir Walter or the waiter who shifted my plates and filled my glass. "Zangwill is right," I said, "the clawhammer coat is in truth the most democratic of garments."
It pleased me also to dwell upon the fact that the moment of my capitulation had been made glorious by a meeting with Stanley and Hardy and Barrie, and that the dinner which marked this most important change in lifelong habits of dress was appropriately notable. That several hundred of the best known men and women of England had witnessed my fall softened the shock, and when—on the way out—Zangwill nudged my elbow and said, "Cow-boy, you wore 'em to the manner born," I smiled in lofty disregard of future comment. I faced Chicago and New York with serene and confident composure.
Although I carried this suit with me to Bernard Shaw's (on a week-end visit), I was not called upon to wear it, for he met me in snuff-colored knickerbockers and did not change to any other suit during my stay. Sunday dinner at Conan Doyle's was a midday meal, and Barrie and Hardy and other of my literary friends I met at teas or luncheons. I took my newly-acquired uniform to Paris but as my meetings with my French friends were either teas or lunches, it so happened that—eager as I was to display it I did not put this suit on till after I reached home. My first appearance in it was in the nature of a masquerade, my second was by way of a joke to please my mother.
Knowing that she had never seen a man in evening dress I arrayed myself, one night, as if for a banquet, and suddenly descended upon her with intent to surprise and amuse her. I surprised her but I did not make her laugh in the way I had expected. On the contrary she surveyed me with a look of pride and then quietly remarked, "I like you in it. I wouldn't mind if you dressed that way every day."
This finished my opposition to the swallow-tail coat. If my mother, the daughter of a pioneer, a woman of the farm, accepted it as something appropriate to her son, its ultimate acceptance by all America was inevitable. Thereafter I lay in wait for an opportunity to display myself in all my London finery.
* * * * * *
Two months later as I was mounting the central staircase of the Chicago Art Institute, on my way to the Annual Reception, I met two of my fellow republicans in Prince Albert Frock suits. At sight of me they started with surprise—surprise and sorrow—exclaiming, "Look at Hamlin Garland!" Assuming an expression of patrician ease, I replied, "Oh, yes, I have conformed. In London one must conform, you know.—The English are quite inexorable in all matters of dress, you understand."
Howells, when I saw him next, smilingly listened to my tale and heartily approved of my action, but Burroughs regarded it as a weak surrender. "A silk hat and steel-pen coat on a Whitman Democrat," he said, "seems like a make-believe," which, in a sense, it was.
* * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Choice of the New Daughter
Although my mother met me each morning with a happy smile, she walked with slower movement, and in studying her closely, after three months' absence, I perceived unwelcome change. She was not as alert mentally or physically as when I went away. A mysterious veil had fallen between her wistful spirit and the outer world. Her vision was dimmer and her spirit at times withdrawn, remote. She laughed in response to my jesting, but there was an absent-minded sweetness in her smile, a tremulous quality in her voice which disturbed me.
Her joy in my return, so accusing in its tenderness, led me to declare that I would never again leave her, not even for a month. "You may count on me hereafter," I said to her. "I'm going to quit traveling and settle down near you."
"I hope you mean it this time," she replied soberly, and her words stung for I recalled the many times I had disappointed her.
With a mass of work and correspondence waiting my hand I went from my breakfast to my study. My forenoons thereafter were spent at my desk, but with the understanding that if she got lonesome, mother was privileged to interrupt, and it often happened that along about eleven I would hear a softly-opened stair-door and then a call,—a timid call as if she feared to disturb me—"Haven't you done enough? Can't you come now?" There was no resisting this appeal. Dropping my pen, I went below and gave the rest of my day to her.
We possessed an ancient low-hung "Surrey," a vehicle admirably fitted for an invalid, and in this conveyance with a stout mare as motive power we often drove away into the country of a pleasant afternoon, sometimes into Gill's Coulee, sometimes to Onalaska.
On these e
xcursions my mother rode in silence, busied with the past. Each hill, each stream had its tender association. Once as we were crossing the Kinney Hill she said, "We used to pick plums along that creek." Or again as we were driving toward Mindora, she said, "When McEldowney built that house we thought it a palace."
She loved to visit her brother William's farm, and to ride past the old McClintock house in which my father had courted her. Her expression at such times was sweetly sorrowful. The past appeared so happy, so secure, her present so precarious, so full of pain. She sensed the mystery, the tragedy of human life, but was unable to express her conceptions,—and I was of no value as a comforter. I could only jest with a bitter sense of helplessness.
On other days, when she was not well enough to drive, I pushed her about the village in a wheeled chair, which I had bought at the World's Fair. In this way she was able to make return calls upon such of her neighbors as were adjacent to side-walks. She was always in my thought,—only when Franklin took her in charge was it possible for me to concentrate on the story which I had begun before going abroad, and in which I hoped to embody some of the experiences of my trip. Boy Life on the Prairie was also still incomplete, and occasionally I put aside The Hustler, as I called my fiction, in order to recover and record some farm custom, some pioneer incident which my mother or my brother brought to my mind as we talked of early days in Iowa.
The story (which Gilder afterward called Her Mountain Lover) galloped along quite in the spirit of humorous extravaganza with which it had been conceived, and I thoroughly enjoyed doing it for the reason that in it I was able to relive some of the noblest moments of my explorations of Colorado's peaks and streams. It was an expression of my indebtedness to the High Country.
I made the mistake, however, of not using the actual names of localities. Just why I shuffled the names of trails and towns and valleys so recklessly, I cannot now explain, for there was abundant literary precedent for their proper and exact use. Perhaps I resented the prosaic sound of "Sneffles" and "Montrose Junction." Anyhow, whatever my motive, I covered my tracks so well that it was impossible even for a resident to follow me. In The Eagle's Heart I was equally elusive, but as only part of that book referred to the High Country the lack of definite nomenclature did not greatly matter.
Personally I like Her Mountain Lover, which is still in print, and for the benefit of the possible reader of it, I will explain that the "Wagon Wheel Gap" of the story is Ouray, and that the Grizzly Bear Trail leads off the stage road to Red Mountain.
Our red raspberries were just coming into fruit, and a few strawberries remained on the vines, therefore it happened that during the season we had a short-cake with cream and sugar almost every night for supper,—and such short-cakes!—piping hot, buttered, smothered in berries. I fear they were not very healthful either for my mother or for her sons, but as short-cakes were an immemorial delicacy in our home I could not bring myself to forbid them.
Mother insisted on them all the more firmly when I told her that the English knew nothing of short-cake or our kind of pies, and then, more to amuse her than for any other reason, I told of a visit to my English publisher and of my bragging about her short-cake so shamelessly that he had finally declared: "I am coming to Chicago next year, and I shall journey all the way to West Salem just to test your mother's short-cake."
This made her chuckle. "Let him come," she said confidently. "We'll feed him on it."
Notwithstanding her reaction to my jesting, my anxiety concerning her deepened. The long periods of silence into which she fell alarmed me, and at times, as she sat alone, I detected on her face an expression of pain which was like that of one in despair. When I questioned her, she could not define the cause of her distress, but I feared it came from some weakening of her heart.
She was failing,—that was all too evident to me—failing faster than her years warranted, and then (just as I was becoming a little reassured) she came to me one morning, with both her hands outstretched, as if feeling her way, her face white, her eyes wide and deep and dark with terror. "I can't see! I can't see!" she wailed.
With a sense of impending tragedy I took her in my arms and led her to a chair. "Don't worry, mother!" was all I could say. "It will pass soon. Keep perfectly quiet."
Under the influence of my words she gradually lost her fear, and by the time the doctor arrived she was quite calm and could see—a little—though in a strange way.
In answer to his question she replied with a pitiful little smile, "Yes, I can see you, but only in pieces. I can only see a part of your face,—the rest of you is all black."
This reply seemed to relieve the doctor's mind. His face lighted up. "I understand! Don't worry a mite. You will be all right in a few minutes. It is only a temporary nerve disturbance."
This proved to be true, and as her lips resumed their placid sweetness my courage came back. In a few hours she was able to see quite clearly, or at least as clearly as was normal to her age. Nevertheless I accepted this attack as a distinct and sinister warning. It not only emphasized her dependence upon me, it made me very definitely aware of what would happen to our household if she were to become a helpless invalid. Her need of a larger bed-chamber, with a connecting bathroom was imperative.
"I know you will both suffer from the noise and confusion of the building," I said to my aunt, "but I am going to enlarge mother's room and put in water and plumbing. If she should be sick in that small bedroom it would be horrible."
Up to this time our homestead had remained simply a roomy farmhouse on the edge of a village. I now decided that it should have the conveniences of a suburban cottage, and to this end I made plans for a new dining-room, a new porch, and a bath-room.
Mother was appalled at the audacity of my designs. She wanted the larger chamber, of course, but my scheme for putting in running water appealed to her as something almost criminally extravagant. She was troubled, too, by the thought of the noise, the dirt, the change which were necessary accompaniments of the plan.
I did my best to reassure her. "It won't take long, mother, and as for the expense, you just let me walk the floor."
She said no more, realizing, no doubt, that I could not be turned aside from my purpose.
There were no bathrooms in West Salem in 1899—the plumber was still the tinner, and when the news of my ambitious designs got abroad it created almost as much comment as my brother's tennis court had roused some five years earlier. As a force making toward things high-fi-lutin, if not actually un-American, I was again discussed. Some said, "I can't understand how Hamlin makes all his money." Others remarked, "Easy come, easy go!" Something unaccountable lay in the scheme of my life. It was illogical, if not actually illegal.
"How can he go skittering about all over the world in this way?" asked William McEldowney, and Sam McKinley said to my mother, "I swear, I don't see how you and Dick ever raised such a boy. He's a 'sport,'—that's what he is, a freak." To all of which mother answered only with a silent laugh.
The carpenters came, together with a crew of stonemasons, and the old kitchen began to move southward, giving place for the foundations of the new dining-room. By the end of the week, the lawn was littered with material and tools, and the frame-work was enclosed.
My mother, in her anxiety to justify the enormous outlay said, "Well, anyhow, these improvements are not entirely for me, they will make the house all the nicer for my New Daughter when she comes."
"That's true," I answered, "I hadn't thought of that."
"It's time you thought of it. You're almost forty years old," she replied with humorous emphasis, then she added, "I begin to think I never will see your wife."
"Just you wait," I jestingly replied. "The case is not so hopeless as you think—I have just received a letter which gives me a 'prospect.'"
I said this merely to divert her, but she seized upon my remark with alarming seriousness. "Read me the letter. Where does she live?—Tell me all about her."
Being in so
far I thought it could do no harm to go a little farther. I described (still in bantering mood) my first meeting with Zulime Taft more than five years before. I pictured her as she looked to me then, and as she afterward appeared when I met her a second time in the home of her sister in Chicago. "I admit that I was greatly impressed by her," I went on, "but just when I had begun to hope for a better understanding, her brother Lorado chilled me with the information that she was about to be claimed by another man. To be honest about it, mother, I am not sure that she is interested in me even now; although one of her friends has just written me to say that Lorado was mistaken, and that Zulime is not engaged to any one. I am going down to visit some friends at the camp to test the truth of this; but don't say a word about it, for my information may be wrong."
My warning went for nothing! My confession was too exciting to be kept a secret, and soon several of mother's most intimate friends had heard of my expedition, and in their minds, as in hers, my early marriage was assured. Did not the proof of it lie in the fact that I was pushing my building with desperate haste? Was this not done in order to make room for my bride?—No other reason was sufficient to account for the astounding improvements which I had planned, and which were going forward with magical rapidity.
Of course no one could convince my mother that her son's "attractions" might not prove sufficiently strong to make his "prospect" a possibility, for to her I was not only a distinguished author, but a "Good provider," something which outweighed literary attainment in a home like ours.
She could not or would not speak of the girl as "Miss Taft," but insisted upon calling her "Zuleema," and her mind was filled with plans for making her at home.
Daughter of Middle Border Page 10
