Adventures in Silence

by Herbert W. Collingwood

It was a tiny one-room affair, built of sods piled up like bricks, with a roof made of poles covered with sods and wild hay; it boasted a wooden floor. There were a stove, a table, three chairs and a small cot. In these days there would be a phonograph and a collection of the latest music, but this herder’s only constant companions were a dog and a canary bird. For fuel there was a small pile of cottonwood sticks, a box of buffalo chips, and a barrel containing bunches of wild hay tied into knots. Two other men were there, also driven in by the blizzard. I shall always feel that the mental picture revealed to me by the contrast between those two men in that lonely hut had the greatest deciding influence in helping me to fit myself for the life of the silent world.

They were both white-haired old men, though full of vigor. One I recognized as the cattle king of Northern Colorado. His cattle were everywhere; he owned half a town and an army ran at his beck and call, yet he could barely write his own name. It was said he always signed his checks “Z,” because he could not be sure of spelling “Zachariah” properly. He had no poetry or imagination, except what he could drink out of a jug. In the old days, when the plains were ruled by brute force, this man was happy, for life becomes tolerable only as we can equal our friends in manners and education. But how the plains had changed! Schools, churches, music, culture, were working in with the towns—the leaven which was to change the soggy biscuit of the old life to the “riz bread” of the new. That strange, fateful, overmastering thing we call education was separating the people of the new prairie towns into classes more distinct than money and material power had ever been able to create. This old man had railed and cursed at the change, for a premonition of what was to come had entered his heart, and something told him that his blunt philosophy of life was all wrong. In this country a man may climb from poverty up to wealth, or he may leave wealth to others, but it is not possible for him to climb in the same way up into education, and he cannot leave these benefits to those who follow him. The old man had begun to fear that he had climbed the wrong ladder. There he sat, bitter and hateful, chained to prejudice, the slave of ignorance. He had no companion to share his narrow prison except his money—the most useless and irritating single companion that any man can have for the harvest years.

His companion was about the same age, an educated man, a “lunger,” forced to spend the rest of his life in these dry plains. I had seen him before at the county convention, where there had been talk of nominating him for county clerk—a much-desired political job. He might have been nominated but for his own actions. He stood straight up in the convention and said:

“Gentlemen, I refuse to let my name go before this convention. I have been approached by certain people who would compromise my manhood, and now I would not accept your nomination, even if you offered it.”

“Made a fool of himself. Had a cinch and threw it away!”

That was the way they talked in the street afterwards; but I remember going home that night with this thought dancing through my brain:

“I wish I could get up and do such things.”

He would have ranked as a poor man, or at best one of modest competence, yet in his enforced exile from home and friends he was sustained and comforted by a mighty host of men and women who came trooping out of history at his call.

There they sat in the dimly lighted room—the cattle king and the scholar, a slave of disease. Their chosen companions were about them, and these had turned the king into a slave, the slave into a monarch. For one there were only the spirits of hopeless gloom, grinning, snarling as though they knew that fate disdains money in exchange for the things which alone can bring comfort and courage into the shadow of years. For the other man the dim room was crowded with a goodly company—the great spirits who live forever in song and story, who gladly come back from the unknown country at the call of those who have learned to know them.

I saw all this, and then I seemed to see myself in the years that were coming, in the shadow of the impending affliction, a resident of the silent world. It was evidently to be a choice of masters. I remember now as though it were yesterday how on that howling night in that dim sod house I made a desperate vow that I would, if need be, go through fire and acid before I would end my days or sit alone in the silence as mentally hopeless and impotent as that “cattle king.” And I had been ready to say “me, too,” only a short time before to the cowboy who said: