Daughter of Middle Border

by Garland, Hamlin

  Another deterrent lay in the inexperience of our carpenters and masons, not one of whom had even built a chimney. Everybody had fireplaces in pioneer days, in the days of the Kentucky rifle, the broad-axe and the tallow-dip; but as the era of frame houses came on, the arches had been walled up, and iron stoves of varying ugliness had taken their places. In all the country-side (outside of LaCrosse) there was not a hearthstone of the old-fashioned kind, and though some of the workmen remembered them, not one of them could tell how they were constructed, and the idea of an outside chimney was comically absurd.

  All these forces working against me had, thus far, prevented me from experimenting, and perhaps even now the towering base-burner would have remained our family shrine had not Mary Isabel put in a wordless plea. Less than four hundred days old, she was, nevertheless wise in fireplaces. She had begun to burble in the light of the Severances' hearth in Minnesota, and her eyes had reflected the flame and shadow of a noble open fire in Katharine Herne's homestead on Peconic Bay. Her cheeks had reddened like apples in the glory of that hickory flame, and when she came to our small apartment in New York City she had seemed surprised and sadly disappointed by the gas pipes and asbestos mat, which made up a hollow show under a gimcrack mantel. Now here, in her own home, was she to remain without the witchery of crackling flame?

  As the cold winds of September began to blow my resolution was taken. "That fireplace must be built. My daughter shall not be cheated of beamed ceilings and the glory of the blazing log."

  Zulime, in alarm, again cried out as mother used to do: "Consider the expense!"

  "Hang the expense! Consider the comfort, the beauty of the embers. Think of Mary Isabel with her eyes reflecting their light. Imagine the old soldier sitting on the hearth holding his granddaughter——"

  She smiled in timorous surrender. "I can see you are bound to do it," she said, "but where can it be built?"

  Alas! there was only one available space, a narrow wall between the two west windows. "We'll cut the windows down, or move them," I said, with calm resolution.

  "I hate a little fireplace," protested Zulime.

  "It can't be huge," I admitted, "but it can be real. It can be as deep as we want it."

  Having decided upon the enterprise I hurried forth to engage the hands to do the work. I could not endure a day's delay.

  The first carpenter with whom I spoke knew nothing about such things. The next one had helped to put in one small "hard-coal, wall pocket," and the third man had seen fireplaces in Norway, but remembered little about their construction. After studying Zulime's sketch of what we wanted, he gloomily remarked, "I don't believe I can make that thing gee."

  Zulime was disheartened by all this, but Mary Isabel climbed to my knee as if to say, "Boppa, where is my fireplace?"

  My courage returned. "It shall be built if I have to import a mason from Chicago," I declared, and returned to the campaign.

  "Can't you build a thing like this?" I asked a plasterer, showing him a magazine picture of a fireplace.

  He studied it with care, turning it from side to side. "A rough pile o' brick like that?"

  "Just like that."

  "Common red brick?"

  "Yes, just the kind you use for outside walls."

  "If you'll get a carpenter to lay it out maybe I can do it," he answered, but would fix no date for beginning the work.

  Three days later when I met him on the street he looked a little shame-faced. "I hoped you'd forgot about that fireplace," he said. "I don't know about that job. I don't just see my way to it. However, if you'll stand by and take all the responsibility, I'll try it."

  "When can you come?"

  "To-morrow," he said.

  "I'll expect you."

  I hastened home. I climbed to the top of the old chimney, hammer in hand, and began the work of demolition.

  The whole household became involved in the campaign. While the gardener and my father chipped the mortar from the bricks which I threw down, Zulime drew another plan for the arch and the hearth, and Mary Isabel sat on the lawn, and shouted at her busy father, high in the sky.

  A most distressing clutter developed. The carpenters attacked the house like savage animals, chipping and chiseling till they opened a huge gap from window to window, filling the room with mortar, dust and flies. Zulime was especially appalled by the flies.

  "I didn't know you had to slash into the house like that," she said. "It's like murder."

  Our neighbors hitherto vastly entertained by our urban eccentricities expressed an intense interest in our plan for an open fire. "Do you expect it to heat the house?" asked Mrs. Dutcher, and Aunt Maria said: "An open fire is nice to look at, but expensive to keep going."

  Sam McKinley heartily applauded. "I'm glad to hear you're going back to the old-fashioned fireplace. They were good things to sit by. I'd like one myself, but I never'd get my wife to consent. She says they are too much trouble to keep in order."

  At last the mason came, and together he and I laid out the ground plan of the structure. By means of bricks disposed on the lawn I indicated the size of the box, and then, while the carpenter crawled out through the crevasse in the side of the house, we laid a deep foundation of stone. We had just brought the base to the level of the sill when—the annual County Fair broke out!

  All work ceased. The workmen went to the ball game and to the cattle show and to the races, leaving our living-room open to the elements, and our lawn desolate with plaster.

  For three days we suffered this mutilation. At last the master mason returned, but without his tender. "No matter," I said to him. "I can mix mortar and sand," and I did. I also carried brick, splashing myself with lime and skinning my hands,—but the chimney grew!

  Painfully, with some doubt and hesitancy, but with assuring skill, Otto laid the actual firebox, and when the dark-red, delightfully rude piers of the arch began to rise from the floor within the room, the entire family gathered to admire the structure and to cheer the workmen on their way.

  The little inequalities which came into the brickwork delighted us. These "accidentals" as the painters say were quite as we wished them to be. Privately, our bricklayer considered us—"Crazy." The idea of putting common rough brick on the inside of a house!

  The library floor was splotched with mortar, the dining-room was cold and buzzing with impertinent flies, but what of that—the tower of brick was climbing.

  The mason called insatiably for more brick, more mortar, and the chimney (the only outside chimney in Hamilton township) rose grandly, alarmingly above the roof—whilst I gained a reputation for princely expenditure which it will take me a long time to live down.

  Suddenly discovering that we had no fire-clay for the lining of the firebox, I ordered it by express (another ruinous extravagance), and the work went on. It was almost done when a cold rain began, driving the workmen indoors.

  Zulime fairly ached with eagerness to have an end of the mess, and the mason catching the spirit of our unrest worked on in the rain. One by one the bricks slipped into place.

  "Oh, how beautiful the fire would be on a day like this!" exclaimed Zulime. "Do you think it will ever be finished? I can't believe it. It's all a dream. It won't draw—or something. It's too good to be true."

  "It will be done to-night—and it will draw," I stoutly replied.

  At noon, the inside being done, Otto went outside to complete the top, toiling heroically in the drizzle.

  At last, for the fourth time we cleaned the room of all but a few chips of the sill, which I intended to use for our first blaze. Then, at my command, Zulime took one end of the thick, rough mantel and together we swung it into place above the arch. Our fireplace was complete! Breathlessly we waited the signal to apply the match.

  At five o'clock the mason from the chimney top cheerily called, "Let 'er go!"

  Striking a match I handed it to Zulime. She touched it to the shavings. Our chimney took life. It drew! It roared!!

  Pulling t
he curtains close, to shut out the waning daylight, we drew our chairs about our hearth whereon the golden firelight was playing. We forgot our troubles, and Mary Isabel pointing her pink, inch-long forefinger at it, laughed with glee. Never again would she sit above a black hole in the floor to warm her toes.

  Out of the corners of the room the mystic ancestral shadows leapt, to play for her sake upon the walls. "She will now acquire the poet's fund of sweet subconscious memories," I declared. "The color of all New England home-life is in that fire. Centuries of history are involved in its flickering shadows. We have put ourselves in touch with our Anglo-Saxon ancestors at last."

  "It already looks as ancient as the house," Zulime remarked, and so indeed it did, for its rude inner walls had blackened almost instantly, and its rough, broad, brick hearth fitted harmoniously into the brown floor. The thick plank mantle (stained a smoky-green) seemed already clouded with age. Its expression was perfect—to us, and when father "happened in" and drawing his armchair forward took Mary Isabel in his arms, the firelight playing over his gray hair and on the chubby cheeks of the child, he made a picture immemorial in its suggestion, typifying all the hearths and all the grandsires and fair-skinned babes of New England history.

  The old soldier and pioneer loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire. At such times he made a picture which typed forth to me all the chimney corners and all the Anglo-Saxon grandsires for a thousand years. In him I saw the past. In them I forecast the future. In him an era was dying, in them Life renewed her swiftly passing web.

  The grim old house had a soul. It was now in the fullest sense a hearth and a home. Oh, Mother and David, were you with us at that moment? Did you look upon us from the dusky corners, adding your faint voices to the chorus of our songs? I hope so. I try to believe so.

  That night when Mary Isabel was asleep and I sat alone beside the hearth, another and widely different magic came from those embers. Their tongues of flame, subtly interfused with smoke, called back to memory the many camp-fires I had builded beside the streams, beneath the pines of the mountain west.

  Each of my tenting places drew near. At one moment, far in the Skeena Valley, I sat watching the brave fire beat back the darkness and the rain—hearing a glacial river roaring from the night. At another I was encamped in the shelter of a mighty cliff, listening in awe while along its lofty shelves the lions prowled and in the cedars, amid the ruins of prehistoric cities, the wind chanted a solemn rune filled with the voices of those whose bones had long since been mingled with the dust.

  Oh, the good days on the trail!

  I cannot lose you—I will not!

  Here in the amber of my song

  I hold you.

  Here where neither time nor change

  Can do you wrong.

  I sweep you together,

  The harvest of a continent. The gold

  Of a thousand days of quest.

  So, when I am old,

  Like a chained eagle I can sit

  And dream and dream

  Of splendid spaces,

  The gleam of rivers,

  And the smell of prairie flowers.

  So, when I have quite forgot

  The heritage of books, I still shall know

  The splendor of the mountains, and the glow

  Of sunset on the vanished plain.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Fairy World of Childhood

  One night just before leaving for the city, I invited a few of my father's old cronies to come in and criticize my new chimney. They all came,—Lottridge, Stevens, Shane, Johnson, McKinley, all the men who meant the most to my sire, and as they took seats about the glowing hearth, the most matter-of-fact of them warmed to its poetic associations, and the sternest of them softened in face and tone beneath its magic light.

  Each began by saying, "An open fire is nice to sit by, but not much good as a means of heating the house," and having made this concession to the practical, they each and all passed to minute and loving descriptions of just the kind of fireplaces their people used to have back in Connecticut or Maine or Vermont. Stevens described the ancestral oven, Lottridge told of the family hob and crane, and throughout all this talk a note of wistful tenderness ran. They were stirred to their depths and yet concealed it. Not one had the courage to build such a chimney but every man of them covertly longed for it, dimly perceiving its value as an altar of memory, unconsciously acknowledging its poignant youthful associations. The beauty of vanished faces, the forms of the buried past drew near, and in the golden light of reminiscent dream, each grizzled head took on a softer, nobler outline. The prosaic was forgot. The poetry of their lives was restored.

  Father was at his best, hospitable, reminiscent, jocund. His pride in me was expressed in his faith in my ability to keep this fire going.

  "Hamlin don't mind a little expense like this chimney," he said. "He put it in just to amuse the baby,—so he says and I believe him. He can afford it—so I'm not saying a word, in fact I like an open fire so well I'm thinking of putting one into my own house."

  To this several replied by saying, "We'd have a riot in our house if we put in such an extravagance." Others declared, "It's all a question of dirt. Our wives would never stand the ashes."

  We had provided apples and nuts, doughnuts, cider and other characteristic refreshments of the older day, but alas! most of our guests no longer took coffee at night, and only one or two had teeth for popcorn or stomach for doughnuts. As a feast our evening was a failure.

  "I used to eat anything at any time," Lottridge explained, "probably that is the reason why I can't do it now. In those days we didn't know anything about 'calories' or 'balanced rations.' We et what was set before us and darn glad to get it."

  Shane with quiet humor recalled the days when buckwheat cakes and sausages swimming in pork fat and covered with maple syrup, formed his notion of a good breakfast. "Just one such meal would finish me now," he added with a rueful smile.

  These were the men who had been the tireless reapers, the skilled wood-choppers, the husky threshers of the olden time, and as they talked, each of them reverting to significant events in those heroic days, I sobered with a sense of irreparable loss. Pathos and humor mingled in their talk of those far days!

  Shane said, "Remember the time I 'bushed' you over in Dunlap's meadow?" To this my father scornfully replied, "You bushed me! I can see you, now, sitting there under that oak tree mopping your red face. I had you 'petered' before ten o'clock."

  It all came back as they talked,—that buoyant world of the reaper and the binder, when harvesting was a kind of Homeric game in which, with rake and scythe, these lusty young sons of the East contended for supremacy in the field. "None of us had an extra dollar," explained Stevens, "but each of us had what was better, good health and a faith in the future. Not one of us had any intention of growing old."

  "Old! There weren't any old people in those days," asserted Lottridge.

  Along about the middle of the evening they all turned in on a game of "Rummy," finding in cards a welcome relief from the unexpressed torment of the contrast between their decrepit, hopeless present and the glowing, glorious past.

  My departure on a lecture trip at ten o'clock disturbed their game only for a moment, and as I rode away I contrasted the noble sanity and the high courage of those white-haired veterans of the Border, with the attitude of certain types of city men I knew. Facing death at something less than arm's length, my father and his fellows nevertheless remained wholesomely interested in life. None of them were pious, some of them were not even religious, but they all had a sturdy faith in the essential justice of the universe. They were still playing the game as best they knew.

  Like Eugene Ware they could say—

  "Standing by life's river, deep and broad,

  I take my chances, ignorant but unawed."

  As I sat among my fellow members at the Club, three days later, I again rec
alled my father and his group. Here, too, I was in the Zone of Age. A. M. Palmer, a feeble and melancholy old man, came in and wandered about with none to do him reverence, and St. Gaudens, who was in the city for medical treatment, shared his dry toast and his cereal coffee with me of a morning. George Warner, who kept a cheerful countenance, admitted that he did so by effort. "I don't like the thought of leaving this good old earth," he confessed one afternoon. "It gives me a pang every time I consider it." None of these men faced death with finer courage than my sire.

  As I had a good deal of free time in the afternoon, and as I also had a room at the Club, I saw much of St. Gaudens. We really became acquainted. One morning as we met at breakfast he replied to my question with a groan and a mild cuss word: "Worse, thank you! I've just been to Washington, and on the train last night I ate ice-cream for dinner. I knew I'd regret it, but ice-cream is my weakness." He was at once humorous and savage for, as he explained, "the doctor will not let me work and there is nothing for me to do but sit around the Club library and read or write letters."

  He wrote almost as many letters as I did, and so we often faced each other across a desk in the writing room. Sometimes he spoke of President Roosevelt who was employing him on the new designs for our coins, sometimes he alluded to the work awaiting him in his studio. Oh! how homesick we both were! Perhaps he felt the near approach of the hour when his cunning hand must drop its tool. I know the thought came to me, creating a tenderer feeling toward him. I saw him in a sorrowful light. He drew nearer to me, seeming more like a friend and neighbor.

  I have said that I had a good deal of time on my hands, and so it seemed to me then and yet during this trip I visited many of my friends, prepared The Tyranny of the Dark for serial publication, attended a dinner to Henry James, was one of the Guests of Honor at the Camp Fire Club and acted as teller (with Hopkinson Smith) in the election which founded the American Academy of Arts and Letters—a fairly full program as I look back upon it, but I had a great many hours to spend in writing to Zulime and in dreaming about Mary Isabel. In spite of all my noble companions, my dinners, speeches and honors I was longing for my little daughter and her fireplace, and at last I put aside all invitations and took the westward trail, counting the hours which intervened between my laggard coach and home.