CHAPTER XXXIV
We Go to California
The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My love of the wilderness was increasing year by year, but all desire to plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life—a little solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my family could catch and cling.
All about me as I travelled, I now perceived the mournful side of American "enterprise." Sons were deserting their work-worn fathers, daughters were forgetting their tired mothers. Families were everywhere breaking up. Ambitious young men and unsuccessful old men were in restless motion, spreading, swarming, dragging their reluctant women and their helpless and wondering children into unfamiliar hardships—At times I visioned the Middle Border as a colony of ants—which was an injustice to the ants, for ants have a reason for their apparently futile and aimless striving.
My brother and I discussed my notion in detail as we sat in our six-by-nine dining room, high in our Harlem flat. "The house must be in a village. It must be New England in type and stand beneath tall elm trees," I said. "It must be broad-based and low—you know the kind, we saw dozens of them on our tramp-trip down the Connecticut Valley and we'll have a big garden and a tennis court. We'll need a barn, too, for father will want to keep a driving team. Mother shall have a girl to do the housework so that we can visit her often,"—and so on and on!
Things were not coming our way very fast but they were coming, and it really looked as though my dream might become a reality. My brother was drawing a small but regular salary as a member of Herne's company, my stories were selling moderately well and as neither of us was given to drink or cards, whatever we earned we saved. To some minds our lives seemed stupidly regular, but we were happy in our quiet way.
It was in my brother's little flat on One Hundred and Fifth Street that Stephen Crane renewed a friendship which had begun a couple of years before, while I was lecturing in Avon, New Jersey. He was a slim, pale, hungry looking boy at this time and had just written The Red Badge of Courage, in fact he brought the first half of it in his pocket on his second visit, and I loaned him fifteen dollars to redeem the other half from the keep of a cruel typist.
He came again and again to see me, always with a new roll of manuscript in his ulster. Now it was The Men in the Storm, now a bunch of The Black Riders, curious poems, which he afterwards dedicated to me, and while my brother browned a steak, Steve and I usually sat in council over his dark future.
"You will laugh over these lean years," I said to him, but he found small comfort in that prospect.
To him I was a man established, and I took an absurd pleasure in playing the part of Successful Author. It was all very comical—for my study was the ratty little parlor of a furnished flat for which we paid thirty dollars per month. Still to the man at the bottom of a pit the fellow on top, in the sunlight, is a king, and to Crane my brother and I were at least dukes.