In years and years I cannot recall anything giving me a sharper wrench. I was so surprised, although I was fully prepared not to be—not that I cared, really, whether these houses had changed or not—I didn’t. But in one of them, the present home of the K. of P., had lived in my time the Yaisley family, and this family was endeared to me, partly by its wealth (qualify this by the inexperience of youth and our personal poverty) and partly by the presence of Dora Yaisley, the youngest daughter, who was a girl of about my own age, possibly younger, and who, to me, was so beautiful that I used to dream about her all the time. As a matter of fact, from my fourteenth to my sixteenth year, from the first time I saw her until a long time after I had seen her no more, she was the one girl whose perfection I was sure of. Perhaps she would not be called beautiful by many. No doubt, if I could see her today, she would not appeal to me at all. But then——
CHAPTER XXXVI
WARSAW IN 1884-6
And right here I began to ponder on the mystery of association and contact, the chemistry and physics of transference by which a sky or a scene becomes a delicious presence in the human brain or the human blood, carried around for years in that mystic condition described as “a memory” and later transferred, perhaps, or not, by conversation, paint, music, or the written word, to the brains of others, there to be carried around again and possibly extended in ever widening and yet fading circles in accordance with that curious, so-called law (is it a law?) of the transmutation of energy. That sounds so fine, that law of transmutation, and yet it makes such short work of that other fine palaver about the immortality of the soul. How many impressions have you transferred in this way? How much of you has gone from you in this way and died? A thin and pathetic end, I say, if all go on, being thinned and transmuted as they go.
Warsaw was an idyllic town for a youth of my temperament and age to have been brought to just at that time. It was so young, vigorous and hopeful. I recall with never-ending delight the intense sense of beauty its surrounding landscape gave me, its three lakes, the Tippecanoe River, which drained two of them, the fine woods and roads and bathing places which lay in various directions. People were always coming to Warsaw to shoot ducks in the marshes about, or to fish or summer on the lakes. Its streets were graced with many trees—they were still here in various places as we rode about today, and not so much larger, as I could see, than when I was here years before. The courthouse, new in my day, standing in an open square and built of white Indiana limestone, was as imposing as ever, and, as we came upon it now turning a corner, it seemed a really handsome building, one of the few in towns of this size which I had seen which I could honestly say I liked. The principal streets, Centre, Buffalo and South, were better built, if anything, than in my time, and actually wider than I had recalled them as being. They were imbued with a spirit not different to that which I had felt while living here. Only on the northwest corner of Centre and Buffalo Streets (the principal street corner opposite this courthouse) where once had stood a bookstore, and next to that a small restaurant with an oyster counter, and next to that a billiard and pool room, the three constituting in themselves the principal meeting or loafing place for the idle young of all ages, the clever workers, school boys, clerks and what not of the entire town, and I presume county—all this was entirely done away with, and in its place was a stiff, indifferent, exclusive looking bank building of three stories in height, which gave no least suggestion of an opportunity for such life as we had known to exist here.
Where do the boys meet now, I asked myself, and what boys? I should like to see. Why, this was the very center and axis of all youthful joy and life in my day. There is a kind of freemasonry of generations which binds together the youths of one season, plus those of a season or two elder, and a season or two younger. At this corner, and in these places, to say nothing of the village post office, Peter’s Shoe Repairing and Shine Parlor, and Moon’s and Thompson’s grocery stores, we of ages ranging from fourteen to seventeen and eighteen—never beyond nineteen or twenty—knew only those who fell within these masonic periods. To be of years not much less nor more than these was the sine qua non of happy companionship. To have a little money, to be in the high or common school (upper grades), to have a little gaiety, wit, and intelligence, to be able to think and talk of girls in a clever, flirtatious (albeit secretly nervous manner), were almost as seriously essential.
A fellow by the name of Pierre (we always called him Peary) Morris ran this bookstore, which was the most popular meeting place of all. Here, beginning with the earliest days after our arrival, I recognized a sympathetic atmosphere, though I was somewhat too young to share in it. My mother (my father was still working in Terre Haute) placed us in what was known as the West Ward School. It adjoined an old but very comfortable house we had rented; the school yard and our yard touched. Here we dwelt for one year and part of another, then moved directly across the street, south, into an old brick house known as the Thralls Mansion, one of the first—as I understood it, actually the first—brick house to be built in the county years and years before. Here, in these two houses, we spent all the time that I was in Warsaw. From the frame or “old Grant house,” I sallied each day to my studies of the seventh grade in the school next door. From the Thralls house I accompanied my sister Tillie each day to the high school, in the heart of the town, not far from this court house, where I completed my work in the eighth grade and first year high. I have (in spite of the fact that I have been myself all these years) but a very poor conception of the type of youth I was, and yet I love him dearly. For one thing, I know that he was a dreamer. For another, somewhat cowardly, but still adventurous and willing, on most occasions, to take a reasonable chance. For a third, he was definitely enthusiastic about girls or beauty in the female form, and what was more, about beauty in all forms, natural and otherwise. What clouds meant to him! What morning and evening skies! What the murmur of the wind, the beauty of small sails on our lakes, birds a-wing, the color and flaunt and rhythm of things!
Walking, playing, dreaming, studying, I had finally come to feel myself an integral part of the group of youths, if not girls, who centered about this bookstore and this corner. Judson Morris, or Jud Morris, as we called him, a hunchback, and the son of the proprietor, was a fairly sympathetic and interesting friend. Frank Yaisley, the brother of Dora, and two years older; George Reed, since elevated to a circuit judgeship somewhere in the West; “Mick” or Will McConnell, who died a few years later of lockjaw contracted by accidentally running a rusty nail into his foot; Harry Croxton, subsequently a mining engineer who died in Mexico and was buried there, and John and George Sharp, sons of the local flour mill owner and grandnephews of my mother; Rutger Miller, Orren Skiff, and various others were all of this group. There were still others of an older group who belonged to the best families and somehow seemed to exchange courtesies here and, in addition, members of a younger group than ourselves, who were to succeed us, as freshman class succeeds freshman class at college.
My joy in this small world and these small groups of youths, and what the future held in store for us, was very great. As I figured it out, the whole duty of men was to grow, get strong, eat, drink, sleep, get married, have children and found a family, and so fulfill the Biblical injunction to “multiply and replenish the earth.” Even at this late date I was dull to such things as fame, lives of artistic achievement, the canniness and subtlety of wealth, and all such things, although I knew from hearing everyone talk that one must and did get rich eventually if one amounted to anything at all. A perfect, worldly wise dogma, but not truer, really, than any other dogma.
But what a change was here, not so much materially as spiritually! Have you ever picked up an empty beetle shell at the end of the summer—that pale, transparent thing which once held a live and flying thing? Did it not bring with it a sense of transmutation and lapse—the passing of all good things? Here was this attractive small town, as brisk and gay as any other, no doubt, but to me now how empty! Here in these streets, in the two houses in which we had lived, in this corner bookstore and its adjacent restaurant, in the West Ward and Central High Schools, in the local Catholic Church where mass was said only once a month, and in the post office, swimming holes, and on the lakes which surrounded us like gems, had been spent the three happiest years of my boyhood.
Only the year before we came here I had been taken out of a Catholic school at Evansville, Indiana. The public school was to me like a paradise after the stern religiosity of this other school. Education began to mean something to me. I wanted to read and to know. There was a lovely simplicity about the whole public school world which had nothing binding or driving about it. The children were urged, coaxed, pleaded with—not driven. Force was a last resort, and rarely indulged in. Can’t you see how it was that I soon fell half in love with my first teacher, a big, soft, pink-cheeked, buxom blonde, and with our home and our life here?