I tell you, in those days, wonderful, amazing moods were generated in the blood of me. I felt and saw things which have never come true—glories, moods, gayeties, perfections. There was a lilt in my heart and my soul. I wanted, oh! I wanted all that Nature can breed in her wealth of stars and universes—and I found—what have I found——?
The frame of any man is an infinitesimal shell. The soul of him so small, a pale lamp which he carries in his hands! The passions of which we boast or from whose imagined horrors we flee are such little things—rush lights—scarcely able to glimmer in so great a dark. People rage at men and women for their passions! At best, granting a Hero, a Caligula, an Alexander, a Napoleon—what small, greedy insects indeed they were. They blazed and bestrode the earth. They fought, conquered, reveled. Against the vast illimitable substance and force of things, what pale flames they really were, after all; so trivial, so unimportant. As well seek out the captains and generals and emperors of ants. In the vast something or nothing of life they are as much worth recording personally. I have eaten and drunken, and thirsted after all, but should the curtain descend now, how little have I had! How little could any man ever have!
Oh, great, scheming, dreaming Prince of Life—what is that you are after? What blood moods in your soul is it that we, your atoms, hurry to fulfill? Do you love? Do you hate? By billions sweating, blazing, do we fulfill some quaint desire of yours? Drop you the curtain then on me. I do not care—I am very tired. Drop it and let me dream no more the endless wonders and delights that never, never, can be.
CHAPTER XLI
BILL ARNOLD AND HIS BROOD
West of Warsaw about twelve miles lies the town of Silver Lake, on a small picturesque lake of the same name—a place to which, during our residence at Warsaw, Ed and I more than once repaired to visit a ne’er-do-well uncle and his wife, the latter my mother’s half sister. This family was so peculiar and so indifferent to all worldly success and precedence, so utterly trifling and useless, that I am tempted to tell about them even though they do not properly belong in this narrative. William or “Bill” Arnold, as he was called locally, was really the cause of it all. He was the father, but little more than a country wastrel. He had a fiddle on which he could play a little. He had a slightly cocked eye and a nasal voice, high and thin. He had no more education than a squirrel and no more care for things of place and position than any rabbit or woodchuck. His wife, a kindly, inarticulate and meditative woman, who looked like my mother, was all out of sorts and down at heels in soul and body because of his indifference to all things material or spiritual. They lived in an old tumble-down, paintless house, the roof of which leaked and the eaves sagged, and here, and in other houses like it, no doubt, they had had four children, one of whom, the eldest, became a thief (but a very clever one, I have heard); the second a railroad brakeman; the third the wife of an idle country loafer as worthless as her father; the fourth, a hunchbacked boy, was to me, at least, a veritable sprite of iniquity, thinking up small deviltries the whole day long. He was fond of fighting with his sister and parents, shouting vile names when angry, and so conducting himself generally that he was an object almost of loathing to such of our family as knew him.
Their home was a delightful place for me to come to, so fresh, so new, so natural—not at all like our ordered home. I felt as though I were housed with a kind of genial wild animal—a fox or prairie dog or squirrel or coyote. Old Arnold had no more morals than a fox or squirrel. He never bathed. He would get up in the morning and feed his pigs and two horses, the only animals he owned—and then, if the weather was suitable and he had no absolutely compelling work to do, he would hunt rabbits (in winter) or squirrel or “patridges,” or go fishing, or go down to the saloon to fiddle and sing or to a dance. He was always driving off to some dance where he earned a few cents as a fiddler (it was his great excuse), and then coming home at two or three in the morning, slightly tipsy and genial, to relate his experiences to anyone who would listen. He was not afraid of his wife or children exactly, and yet he was not the master of them either, and it used to scandalize me to have him called a loafer and an “old fool,” not by her so much as by them. My own father was so strict, so industrious, so moral, that I could scarcely believe my ears.
I used to love to walk west from Warsaw on a fine summer’s day, when my mother would permit me, and visit them—walk the whole twelve miles. Once she empowered me to negotiate for a cow which this family owned and for which we paid twentyfive dollars. Ed and I drove the cow up from Silver Lake. Another time we bought three (or four) pigs, and drove them (Ed and I) the whole twelve miles on a hot July day. Great heavens! What a time we had to get them to come along straight! They ran into bogs and woods—wherever there was a fence down—and we had to chase them until they fell exhausted—too far gone to run us farther. Once they invaded a tangled, low growing swamp, to wallow in the muck, and we had to get down on our hands and knees—our bellies actually—to see where they had gone. We were not wearing shoes and stockings; but we took off our trousers, hung them over our arms, and went in after them. If we didn’t beat those pigs when we got near enough! Say! We chased them for nearly a mile to exhaust and punish them, and then we switched them along the rest of the way to “get even.”
I remember one hot July afternoon, when I was visiting here, how my Aunt Susan read my fortune in the grounds of a coffee cup. It was after a one o’clock farmhand dinner. Uncle Bill and one or two of the other children had come and gone. I was alone with her, and we sat in the shade of an east porch, comfortable in the afternoon. I can see the wall of trees over the way, even yet, the bees buzzing about an adjacent trumpet vine, the grass hot and dry but oh! so summery.
“Now, let’s see what it says about you in your cup,” and she took it and turned it round and round, upside down three times. Then she looked into it meditatively and after a while began: “Oh, I see cities, cities, cities, and great crowds, and bridges, and chimneys. You are going to travel a long way—all over the world, perhaps. And there are girls in your cup! I see their faces.” (I thrilled at that.) “You won’t stay here long. You’ll be going soon, out into the world. Do you want to travel?” she asked.
“Yes, indeed I do,” I replied.