I record this story not to brag of my memory for all gifts are handicaps in life; but to show how kind Western Americans were to young folk and because the irresistible, unique appeal of Swinburne to youth has never been set forth before, so far as I know.
In a comfortable room at the Eldridge House, in the chief street of Lawrence, I met my brother: Willie seemed woefully surprised by my appearance: “You’re as yellow as a guinea; but how you’ve grown”, he cried. “You may be tall yet but you look ill, very ill!”
He was the picture of health and even better-looking than I had remembered him: a man of five feet ten or so with good figure and very handsome dark face: hair, small moustache and goatee beard jet black, straight thin nose and superb long hazel eyes with black lashes: he might have stood for the model of a Greek god were it not that his forehead was narrow and his eyes set close.
In three months he had become enthusiastically American, “America is the greatest country in the world”, he assured me from an abysmal ignorance; “any young man who works can make money here; if I had a little capital I’d be a rich man in a very few years; it’s some capital I need, nothing more.” Having drawn my story out of me especially the last phase when I divided up with the boys, he declared I must be mad. “With five thousand dollars”, he cried, “I could be rich in three years, a millionaire in ten. You must be mad; don’t you know that everyone is for himself in this world: good gracious! I never heard of such insanity: if I had only known!”
For some days I watched him closely and came to believe that he was perfectly suited to his surroundings, eminently fitted to succeed in them. He was an earnest Christian, I found, who had been converted and baptised in the Baptist Church; he had a fair tenor voice and led the choir; he swallowed all the idiocies of the incredible creed; but drew some valuable moral sanctions from it; he was a teetotaler and didn’t smoke; a Nazarene, too, determined to keep chaste as he called a state of abstinence from women, and weekly indulgence in self-abuse which he tried to justify as inevitable.
The teaching of Jesus himself had little or no practical effect on him; he classed it all together as counsels of an impossible perfection, and like the vast majority of Americans, accepted a childish Pauline-German morality while despising the duty of forgiveness and scorning the Gospel of Love.
A few days after our first meeting, Willie proposed to me that I should lend him a thousand dollars and he would give me twenty-five per cent for the use of the money. When I exclaimed against the usurious rate, twelve per cent being the State limit, he told me he could lend a million dollars if he had it, at from three to five per cent a month on perfect security. “So you see,” he wound up, “that I can easily afford to give you two hundred and fifty dollars a year for the use of your thousand: one can buy real estate here to pay fifty per cent a year; the country is only just beginning to be developed”, and so forth and so on in wildest optimism: the end of it being that he got my thousand dollars, leaving me with barely five hundred, but as I could live in a good boardinghouse for four dollars a week, I reckoned that at the worst I had one carefree year before me and if Willie kept his promise, I would be free to do whatever I wanted to do for years to come.
It was written that I was to have another experience in Lawrence much more important than anything to do with my brother. “Coming events cast their shadows before”, is a poetic proverb, singularly inept: great events arrive unheralded, were truer.
One evening I went to a political meeting at Liberty Hall near my hotel. Senator Ingalls was going to speak and a Congressman on the Granger movement, the first attempt of the Western farmers to react politically against the exploitation of Wall Street. The hall was packed: just behind me sat a man between two pretty grey-eyed girls. The man’s face attracted me even at first sight: I should be able to picture him for even as I write his face comes before me as vividly as if the many long years that separate us, were but the momentary closing of my eyes.
At the end of this chapter I reproduce a perfect portrait of him and need only add the coloring and expression: the large eyes were hazel and set far apart under the white, over-hanging brow; the hair and whiskers were chestnut-brown tinged with auburn; but it was the eyes that drew and fascinated me for they were luminous as no other eyes that I have ever seen; frank too, and kind, kind always.