It is wilder.
It is more horrible.
It is more beautiful.
We need not stop and think we have found a solution. We have not even found a beginning. We do not know. And my patriotic father wanted us all to believe in the Catholic church and the infallibility of the Pope and confession and communion!
Great Pan of the Greeks, and you, Isis of the Egyptians, save me! These moderns are all insane!
But I was talking of the effect of the approach of Warsaw upon me. And I want to get back to my mother, for she was the center of all my experiences here. Such a woman! Truly, when I think of my mother I feel that I had best keep silent. I certainly had one of the most perfect mothers ever a man had. Warsaw, in fact, really means my mother to me, for here I first came to partially understand her, to view her as a woman and to know how remarkable she was. An open, uneducated, wondering, dreamy mind, none of the customary, conscious principles with which so many conventional souls are afflicted. A happy, hopeful, animal mother, with a desire to live, and not much constructive ability wherewith to make real her dreams. A pagan mother taken over into the Catholic Church at marriage, because she loved a Catholic and would follow her love anywhere. A great poet mother, because she loved fables and fairies and half believed in them, and once saw the Virgin Mary standing in our garden (this was at Sullivan), blue robes, crown and all, and was sure it was she! She loved the trees and the flowers and the clouds and the sound of the wind, and was wont to cry over tales of poverty almost as readily as over poverty itself, and to laugh over the mannikin fol de rols of all too responsive souls. A great hearted mother—loving, tender, charitable, who loved the ne’er do well a little better than those staid favorites of society who keep all laws. Her own children frequently complained of her errors and tempers (what mortal ever failed so to do?) and forgot their own beams to be annoyed by her motes. But at that they loved her, each and every one, and could not stay away from her very long at a time, so potent and alive she was.
I always say I know how great some souls can be because I know how splendid that of my mother was. Hail, you! wherever you are!
In drawing near to Warsaw, I felt some of this as of a thousand other things which had been at that time and now were no more.
We came in past the new outlying section of Winona, a region of summer homes, boat houses and casinos scattered about a lake which in my day was entirely surrounded by woods, green and still, and thence along a street which I found out later was an extension of the very street on which we had originally lived, only now very much lengthened to provide a road out to Winona. Lined on either side by the most modern of cottages, these new style verandaed, summer resorty things hung with swings and couch hammocks which one sees at all the modern American watering places, it was too new and smart to suit me exactly and carried with it no suggestion of anything that I had been familiar with. A little farther on, though, it merged into something that I did know. There were houses that looked as though they might have endured all of forty years and been the same ones I had known as the houses of some of my youthful companions. I tried to find the home of Loretta Brown, for instance, who was killed a few years later in a wreck in the West, and of Bertha Stillmayer, who used to hold my youthful fancy, at a distance. I could not find them. There was a church, also, at one corner, which I was almost sure I knew, and then suddenly, as we neared another corner, I recognized two residences. One was that of the principal lumber dealer of our town, a man who with his son and daughter and a few other families constituted the elite, and next to it, the home of the former owner of the principal dry goods store; very fine houses both of them, and suggesting by their architecture and the arrangement of their grounds all that at one time I thought was perfect—the topmost rung of taste and respectability!
In my day these were very close to the business heart, but so was everything in Warsaw then. In the first and better one, rather that of the wealthier of the two men, for they were both very much alike in their physical details, was, of all things, an automobile show room—an interesting establishment of its kind, made possible, no doubt, by the presence of the prosperous summer resort we had just passed. On the porch of this house and its once exclusive walk were exhibition tires and posters of the latest automobiles. In the other house, more precious to me still because of various memories, was the present home of the local Knights of Pythias, an organization I surely need not describe. In front of it hung a long, perpendicular glass sign or box, which could be lighted from within by incandescent globes. The lettering was merely “K. of P.”