This day as we traveled through Wabash, Peru (the winter home of Hagenbeck’s and Wallace’s combined shows, b’gosh!), Kokomo, where the world very nearly came to an end for Speed and where James Whitcomb Riley once worked in a printer’s shop (I understood he had no love for my work)—and so on through Westfield, an old Quaker settlement, and to Carmel (where Franklin lives), and really to Indianapolis, for Carmel is little more than a suburb of the former,—I was more and more struck with the facts as I have outlined them here. Certain parts of the world are always in turmoil. Across the rasping grasses of Siberia or the dry sands of Egypt blow winds cold or hot, which make of the people restless, wandering tribes. To peaceful Holland and Belgium, the lowlands of Germany, the plains of France and Italy, and indeed all the region of the ancient world, come periodic storms of ambition or hate, which make of those old soils burying grounds not only of individual souls but of races. Here in America we have already had proof that certain sections of our land are destined apparently to tempestuous lives—the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards, Texas, Colorado, Kentucky, various parts of the South and the West and the Northwest, where conditions appear to engender the mood dynamic. From Chicago, or Colorado, or San Francisco one may expect a giant labor war or social upheaval of any kind; from Boston or Pennsylvania or New Mexico new religious movements may come—and have; New York, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Nebraska and Illinois can and have contributed vast political upheavals. This is even true of Ohio, its next door neighbor.
But Indiana lies in between all this—simple, unpretentious, not indifferent but quiescent,—a happy land of farms and simple industries which can scarcely be said to have worked any harm to any man.
Its largest cities have grown in an unobtrusive and almost unheralded way. Its largest contributions to American life so far have been a mildly soporific love literature of sorts, and an uncertain political vote. Anyone could look at these towns—all that we saw—and be sure that the natives were of an orderly, saving, genial and religious turn. I never saw neater small towns anywhere, nor more imposing churches and public buildings, nor fewer saloons, nor cleaner streets, nor better roads. A happy land, truly, where the local papers give large and serious attention to the most innocuous of social doings and the farmers take good care that all their land is under cultivation and well looked after.
As we were passing through Wabash, for instance—or was it Peru?—we came upon a very neat and pleasing church and churchyard, the front lawn of which an old man of a very energetic and respectable appearance—quite your “first citizen” type—was mowing with a lawnmower.
“Why should a man of that character be doing that work this weekday, do you suppose?” I inquired of Franklin.
“To get to heaven, of course. Can’t you see? Heaven is a literal, material thing to him. It’s like this church building and its grass. The closer he can identify himself with that here the nearer he will come to walking into his heaven there. I’ve noticed at home that the more prosperous and well to do farmers are usually the leaders in the church. They apply the same rules of getting on in religion that they do to their business. It is all a phase of the instinct of a man to provide for himself and his family. I tell you, these people expect to find more or less a duplication of what they have here—with all the ills and pinches taken out and all the refinements of their fancy, such as it is, added.”
I felt as I thought of that old man that this was true. He reminded me of my father, to whom to do the most menial work about a Catholic church was an honor—such as carrying in wood, building a fire, and the like. You were nearer God and the angels for doing it. Actually you were just outside the pearly gates. And if one could only die in a church—presto!—the gates would open and there you would be inside.
Truly, this day of riding south after my depressing afternoon in Warsaw was one of the most pleasant of any that had come to me. Now that I had recovered from my mood of the night before—a chemic and psychic disturbance which quite did for me—I was in a very cheerful frame of mind. Long before either Franklin or Speed had risen this morning—they had spent the evening looking around the town—I was up, had a cold bath, and had written various letters and visited the post office and studied the town in general.
It was a halcyon morning, partly grey with a faint tint of pink in the East, when I first looked out, and such an array of house martins on five telegraph or telephone wires over the way as I had not seen in a long time. Birds are odd creatures. Their gregariousness without speech always fascinates me. These, ranged as they were on the different wires, looked exactly like the notes of a complicated and difficult fugue—so much so that I said to a passing citizen who seemed to show an interest: “Now, if you had a piano or an organ just how would you play that?”
He looked up at the wires which a wave of my hand indicated, then at me. He was a man of over forty, who looked as though he might be a traveling salesman or hotelkeeper.