The annual dinner of the Institute of Arts and Letters that year was not cheering. With the loss of four members, Stedman, Aldrich, MacDowell and St. Gaudens, I realized as never before the swift changes at work in American letters. It was my duty and my privilege to speak that night in memory of MacDowell who had so often been my seat-mate, and as I looked around that small circle of familiar faces, a scene of loss, a perception of decay came over me like a keen wind from out a desolate landscape. On every head the snows had thickened, on every face a shadow rested. All—all were hastening to be history.
* * * * * *
From that circle of my elders in the East, I returned to my children in the West with a sense of returning to the future. The radiant joy of Mary Isabel's face as I displayed her presents, a ring and a story book, restored me to something like a normal faith in the world. "Wead to me, wead to me!" was now her insistent plea, and putting aside all other concerns I turned the pages of her new book, realizing that to her the universe was still a great and never-ending fairy tale, and her Daddy a wonder-working magician, an amiable ogre. Her eager voice, her raptured attention enabled me to recover, for a moment, a wholesome faith and joy in my world—a world which was growing gray and wan and cold with terrifying swiftness.
"Your childhood shall be as happy as my powers will permit," I vowed once again as I looked into her uplifted face. "You shall have only pleasant memories of me," and in this spirit I gave her the best of myself. I taught her to read, I told her stories which linked her mind with that of her pioneer grandmother, filling her brain with traditions of the middle border. Dear little daughter, her daddy was veritably a nobleman, her mother a queen—in those days!
My wife says that for ten years I was always either on the point of going somewhere, or just returning, and as I turn the pages of my diaries, I find this to be true, but also I find frequent mention of meetings with John Burroughs, Bacheller, Gilder, Alexander, Madame Modjeska, William Vaughn Moody and many others of my friends distinguished in the arts.
All my publishing interests and most of my literary friends were in New York (my support came from there), hence my frequent coming and going. Whether this constant change, these sudden and violent contrasts in my way of life strengthened my fictional faculty or weakened it, I can not say, but I do know that as the head of a family I found concentrated effort increasingly difficult and at times very nearly impossible. Constance was ailing for a year, and was a source of care, of pain to me, as to her mother. At times, many times, her sufferings filled me with a passionate pity, a sense of rage, of helplessness. Indeed both children were subject to throat and lung disorders, especially when in the city.
Oh, those cruel coughing spells, those nights of burning fever, those alarming hours of stupor or of terrifying delirium! "Can science find no check upon these recurrent forms of disease?" I demanded of our doctor. "Must humanity forever suffer the agonies of diphtheria and pneumonia? If so why bring children into the world?"
We always knew when these disorders had set in, we knew all the signs but no medicine availed to stop their progress. Each attack ran its course in spite of nurse and drug whilst I raged helplessly and Zulime grew hollow-eyed with anxious midnight vigil. Death was a never-absent hovering shadow when those bitter winter winds were blowing, and realizing this I came to hate the great desolate city in which we lived, and to long with the most passionate ardor for the coming of April's sun.
One of the first signs of spring (so far as Mary Isabel was concerned) was the opening of the "White City," a pleasure park near us, and the second event quite as conclusive and much more exciting was the coming of the circus. These were the red letter days in her vernal calendar, and were inescapable outings, for her memory was tenacious. Each May she demanded to be taken to the "Fite City" and later "the Kings and Queens" and "the fairies" of the circus claimed her worship. Together we saw these glorious sights, which filled her little soul with rapture.
For two years my estrangement from the old Homestead was complete, but when one April day I found myself passing it on my way to St. Paul, I was constrained to stop off just to see how my father and the garden were coming on.
This was late April, and the day warm, windless and musical with sounds of spring. The maples and the elms had adorned themselves with most bewitching greens, the dandelions beckoned from sunny banks, and through the radiant mist, the nesting birds were calling. In a flood, all the ancient witchery of the valley, all of the Homestead's loveliest associations came back to soften my mood, to regain my love. Wrought upon by the ever-returning youth of the world—a world to which my daughters were akin, I relented, "We will come back. Cruel as some of its memories are, this is home, I belong here, and so does Mary Isabel."
The sunlight streaming into my mother's chamber lay like a fairy carpet on the floor, waiting for the dancing feet of her grandchildren. Her spirit filled the room, calling to me, consoling me, convincing me.
All day I worked at trimming vines, and planting flowers while the robins chuckled from the lawn, and the maples expanded overhead. How spacious and wide and safe the yard appeared, a natural playground for the use of children.
And so it came about that on June seventeenth, just before Constance's second birthday, Mary Isabel and I took the night train for West Salem, leaving Zulime and the nurse to follow next morning. Greatly excited at the prospect of going to sleep on the cars my daughter went to her bed. "I kick for joy," she said, her eyes shining with elfin delight.
She loved the "little house" as she called her berth, and for an hour she lay peering out at the moon. "It follows us!" she cried out in pleased surprise.
"Yes, it is a kindly moon. It will keep right along overhead all the way to West Salem. But you must go to sleep now. I shall call you early in the morning to meet Grandfather."
She was a reasonable soul, entirely confident of my care, and so, putting her head on my arm, she went away to dreamland. At such times my literary ambitions and failures were of no account. [To wish myself back there with that tiny form beside me is folly—but I do—I do!]
In the cool lusciousness of the June morning we met Grandpa, and as we entered the gate of the Homestead (which Mary Isabel only dimly remembered), I said, "This is your home, daughter, you belong here."
"Can I pick the flowers? Can I walk on the grass?" she asked quickly.
"Yes, pick all you want. You can roll on the grass if you wish."
Too excited to eat any breakfast, she ran from posy bed to posy bed, and from tree to tree, indefatigable as a bee or humming-bird. At five in the afternoon Zulime and Constance came.
In the weeks which followed I renewed my childhood. To Mary Isabel as to me at her age, the cornfield was a vast mysterious forest, and the rainbow an overpowering miracle.
"Don't they have rainbows in the city?" she asked one evening as we were watching a glorious arch fade out of the sky above the hills.
"Not such big beautiful double ones," I replied. "They haven't room for them in the city."
She took the same delight in the flame and flare of the Fourth of July which I once owned. She loved to walk in the fields. Snakes, bugs, worms and spiders enthralled her. Each hour brought its vivid message, its wonder and its delight, and when now and again she was allowed to explore the garden with me at night, the murk and the stars, and the stealthily moving winds in the corn, scared, awed her. At such moments the universe was a delicious mystery. Keeping close hold upon my hand she whispered with excitement, "What was that, Poppie? What was that noise? Was it a gnome?"
For her I built a "House" high in the big maple, and there she often climbed, spending many happy hours singing to her dollies or conning over her picture books. Her face shone down upon me radiant with life's ecstasy. Baby Constance was to her a toy, a doll, I was her companion, her playmate. The garden seemed fashioned for her uses, and whenever I saw her among the flowers or sitting on the lawn, I forgot my writing, realizing that these were golden days for me as we
ll as for her,—days that would pass like waves of light across the wheat.
Together with Zulime I received the house back into my affection. Once more I thought of it as something permanent, a sure refuge in time of trouble. It gave us both a comforting sense of security to know that we could, at need, come back to it and live in comfort. With no hope of attaining a larger income, saving money was earning money for us both. In this spirit I put in another bathroom, and enlarged the dining-room—doing much of the work with my own hands.
Nothing could be more idyllic than our daily routine that summer. Our diversions, dependent on a love of odorous fields, colorful hills and fruitful vines, were of arcadian content. Our wealth expressed in nuts and apples and berries was ample. With Mary Isabel I assumed that wild grapes were enormously important articles of food. "Without them we might grow hungry this winter," I warned her. In this spirit we harvested, intent as chipmunks.
After the nurse left us the two children slept together on an upstairs screened-in porch, and every night, just before they went to sleep, it was my habit to visit them. Lying down between them with a small head on each arm, I told them stories or answered the questions which were suggested by the trees and the sky. "What are stars? What makes the moon spotted? What does iron come from? How do people make wall paper?" and many others equally elemental. It was a tender hour for me and a delicious one for them.
Gradually as they grew older, they fell into the habit of saying, "Now tell us about when you were a little boy," and so I was led to freshen up on A Son of the Middle Border, which I had begun to rewrite. They could never get enough of these reminiscences and when, at nine o'clock, I said, "Daughties, you must go to sleep," they pleaded for "Just one more," and from this interest I derived a foolish hope that the book, if it should ever get published, would be successful.
It was sweet to hear those soft voices demanding an explanation of the universe whose wonders they were rediscovering in their turn. Every changing season, every expanding leaf was magical to them. A bat skittering about the chimney, the rustle of a breeze in the maples, were of sinister significance requiring explanation, and when at last I went away and they began to softly sing their wistful little evening prayer, one which Mary Isabel had composed, life seemed worthwhile even to me. I forgot the irrevocable past and confronted old age with composure.
Meanwhile my father's mind was becoming more and more reminiscent. His stories once so vivid and so full of detail had narrowed down to a few familiar phrases. "Just then Sherman and his staff came riding along," or "When I was camped on the upper waters of the Wisconsin." His memory was failing and so was his sense of hearing. He seldom quoted from a book, but he still cited Blaine's speeches or referred to Lincoln's anecdotes, and certain of Grant's phrases were often on his lips. In all his interests he remained objective, concerned with the world of action not with the library, and while he made no effort to talk down to Mary Isabel, he contrived to win her adoration, perhaps because she detected in his voice his adoring love for her. In the mist of his glance was the tender worship of youth on the part of age.
Always of a Sunday we sang for him and sometimes Uncle Frank, the last of the McClintocks, gray haired and lean and bent, came in with his fiddle and played while the children danced in the light of our fire, so lithe, so happy, so fairy-like in their loveliness that he and Lorette sat in silence, a silence which was at once tender and tragic. There was something alien as well as marvelous in the dramatic movements of those small forms.
Witnessing such scenes, moved by something elemental in their decay, I continued to brood over the manuscript which was to be a kind of autobiography, the blended story of the vicissitudes of the Garlands and the McClintocks. At times I worked upon it to the exclusion of all else, and when I read a part of the tale to Mary Isabel and found that she understood it and liked it, I was heartened.
Consider this! I now had a daughter to whom I could read my manuscript! Where did that personality come from? Was her soul merely the automatic reaction of a material organism against a material environment? Was her spirit dependent on the life of its little body or could it live on independent of the flesh? Acknowledging the benumbing, hopeless mystery of it all, I continued to live for my children, finding in them my comfort and my justification.
I have never known anything more perfect than some of those mid-August days when on some woodland slope, we gathered the luscious musky fruit of wild blackberry vines and at our camp fire broiled our steak and made our coffee for our evening, open-air meal.
There were no flies, no mosquitoes, no snakes, and the hillsides were abloom with luscious shining berries, berries so ripe they fell into our hands with the slightest touch, and so tender that they melted in our mouths. The wind filled with the odor of yellowing corn, and the smell of nuts and leaves, carried our songs to the mist-filled valley below us, and the children playing on the smooth sward found our world a paradise.
As the cool dusk began to cover the farms below us, we sang "Juanita" and "Kentucky Home" and told our last stories while the children lay at our feet, silent with rapture as I used to be, in similar circumstances, forty years before.
And then when the fire had died down and sleepy babies were ready to turn their faces bedward, we drove slowly down the winding lane to the dust-covered bridge, past the small cemetery where mother was sleeping, back to where the broad-roofed old house was waiting for us like some huge, faithful creature yearning to receive us once again beneath its wings. It was commonplace to our neighbors and without special significance to the world, but to my children it was noble and beautiful and poetic—it was home.
* * *
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
"Cavanagh" and the "Winds of Destiny"
No doubt the reader has come to the conclusion, at this point, that my habits as an author were not in the least like those of Burroughs or Howells. There has never been anything cloistered about my life, on the contrary my study has always been a point of departure rather than a cell of meditation. From Elm Street, from the Homestead, I frequently darted away to the plains or the Rocky Mountains, keenly aware of the fact that the miner and cattleman, the trapper and the trailer were being pushed into ever remoter valleys by the men of the hoe and the spade, and that the customs and habits which the mountaineer had established were about to pass, precisely as the blossoming prairies had long since been broken and fenced and made commonplace by the plow.
That the destruction of the eagle and the mountain lion marked another stage of that remorseless march which is called civilization I fully recognized and—in a certain sense—approved, although the raising of billions of hens and pigs admittedly useful, was not to me an inspiring employment of human energy. The long-horn white-faced steer was more picturesque than a "Mooly" cow.
Doubtless a dairyman is a more valuable citizen in the long run than a prospector or miner, but he does not so easily appeal to the imagination. To wade irrigating ditches, hoe in hand, is not incompatible with the noblest manhood, but it is none the less true that men riding the trail or exploring ledges of quartz are more alluring characters to the novelist—at least that was the way I felt in 1909 when I began to shape another book concerning the great drama which was going on in the forests of the High Country.
For more than fifteen years, while trailing among the mountains of Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, I had seen the Forest Service, under Gifford Pinchot's leadership, gradually getting into effect. I had seen the silver miner disappear and the army of forest rangers grow from a handful of hardy cowboys and "lonesome men" into a disciplined force of over two thousand young foresters who represented in some degree the science and the patriotism of their chief.
As in Hesper and The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop I had attempted to depict certain types of the red men, miners and ranchers. I now began to study the mountain vedettes from the point of view of the Forest Ranger, a federal officer who represented our newly acquired ideals of Conservation, and whose
duty it was to act as custodian of the National Forests. I decided to write a novel which should, in some degree, delineate the heroic side of this warden's solitary life as I had seen it and shared it in a half-dozen forests in Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.
In this writing I put myself at the opposite pole from the scenes of The Shadow World, a study of psychic phenomena with which I had been deeply involved for a year or more. From dark cabinets in murky seance chambers, from contact with morbid, death-fearing, light-avoiding residents of crowded apartments, I now found myself riding once again ten thousand feet above sea level with men who "took chances" almost every hour of their lives—not from any reckless defiance of death but merely by way of duty, men who lived alone and rode alone, men in whose ears the mountain streams as they fell from the white silences of the snows, uttered songs of exultation. In the presence of these hardy trailers the doings of darkened seance rooms seemed morbid, if not actually insane.
The stark heroism of these forest guards, their loyalty to a far-off chieftain (whom they knew only by name) appealed to me with increasing power. Their problem became my problem. More than this they kindled my admiration, for many of them possessed the cowboy's masterful skill with bronchos, his deft handling of rope and gun and the grace which had made him the most admired figure in our literature,—but in addition to all this, they had something finer, something which the cowboy often lacked. At their best they manifested the loyalty of soldiers. Heedful of the Federal Government, they strove to dispense justice over the lands which had been allotted to their care, and their flags—the Stars and Stripes—as I came upon them fluttering from the peaks of their cabins were to me the guidons of a new and valiant skirmish line. They were of the Border in a new and noble sense. In short the Federal Ranger was a hero made to my hand.
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