A Hoosier holiday

by Theodore Dreiser

Quite so! Quite so! But I am thinking of the little streets just the same, and the great, inordinate differences between things at times.

Franklin pointed out the First and Second Churches of Christ, Scientist—large, artistic, snow-white buildings—and a little later, at my request, the home of James Whitcomb Riley, laureate of all that perfect company of Hoosiers to be found in his sympathetic, if small, volumes. I revere James Whitcomb with a whole heart. There is something so delicate, so tender, so innocent not only about his work but about him. His house in Lockerbie Street was about as old and homely as it could be, as indeed was Lockerbie Street itself—but, shucks, who cares. Let the senators and the ex-presidents and the beef packers have the big places. What should the creator of “Old Doc Sifers” be doing in a great house, anyhow? Think of “Little Orphant Annie” being born in a mansion! Never. Only over my dead body. We didn’t go in. I wanted to, but I felt a little bashful. As I say, I had heard that he didn’t approve of me. I suggested that we might come another time, Franklin knowing him quite well; but I knew I wouldn’t. Yet all my loving thoughts went out to him—most sympathetic and pleasing wishes for a long life and a happy life.

The run to Terre Haute was more or less uninteresting, a flat and lifeless country. We arrived there at nearly dusk, entering along a street whose name was changed to Wabash shortly after my brother’s song became so popular. Among the first things I saw were the buildings and grounds of the Rose Polytechnic Institute—an institution which, famous though it is, was only of interest to me because the man who founded it, Chauncey Rose, was once a friend and admirer of my father’s. At the time my father’s mill burned in Sullivan and he was made penniless, it was this man who came forward and urged him to begin anew, offering to advance him the money. But my father was too much of a religious and financial and moral coward to risk it. He was doubtful of success—his nerve had been broken—and he feared he might not be able to repay Mr. Rose and so, in event of his dying, his soul would be in danger of purgatory. Of such is the religious mind.

. . . . . . .

But this city of my birth! Now that I was in it, it had a strong and mournful fascination for me. Nothing that I was doing or being was altered thereby, but——

Suppose, once upon a time in a very strange wonderland, so wonderful that no mere earthborn mortal could tell anything about it or make you feel how wonderful it was, you had been a very little boy who had gotten in there somehow (how, he could not tell) and after a very few years had been taken out again, and never after that saw it any more. And that during that time many strange and curious things happened—things so strange and curious that, though you lived many years afterward and wandered here and there and to and fro upon the earth, still the things that happened in that wonderland, the colors of it and the sounds and the voices and the trees, were ever present, like a distant mirage or a background of very far off hills, but still present.

And supposing, let us say, that in this strange land there was once a house, or two or three or four or five houses, what difference? In one of them (someone later said it stood at Twelfth and Walnut in a city called Terre Haute, but if you went there now you could not find it) there was a cellar, damp and dark. The mother of the little boy, to whose skirts he used to cling when anything troubled or frightened him, once told him that in the cellar of this house lived a Cat-man, and that if he went near it, let alone down into it, the Cat-man might appear and seize him and carry him off.

The small boy firmly believed in the Cat-man. He listened at times and thought he heard him below stairs, stirring about among the boxes and barrels there. In his mind’s eye he saw him, large and dark and toothy, a Hottentot’s dream of a demon. Finally, after meditating over it awhile, he got his brother Ed and conferred with him about it. They decided that Prince, the family dog, might help to chase the Cat-man out, and so rid them of this evil. Prince, the dog, was no coward; a friendly, gay, and yet ferocious animal. He was yellow and lithe, a fighter. He plainly believed in the Cat-man too (upon request, anyhow), for the cellar stairs door being opened and the presence of the Cat-man indicated, he sniffed and barked and made such an uproar that the mother of the children came out and made them go into the yard. And then they heard her laughing over the reality of the Cat-man, and exclaiming: “Yes, indeed, you’d just better be careful and not go down there. He’ll catch Prince too!”

But then there was a certain tree in this same yard or garden where once of a spring evening, at dusk, there was a strange sound being made, a sawing and rasping which in later years the boy was made quite well aware was a locust. But just at that time, at that age, in that strange land, with the soft, amethystine shadows pouring about the world, it seemed as though it must be the Catman come at last out of the cellar and gotten into the tree. The child was all alone. His mother was in the house. Sitting on the back porch meditating over the childish interests of the day, this sound began—and then the next minute he was frantically clasping his mother’s knees, burying his face in her skirts and weeping. “The Cat-man! The Cat-man!” (Oh, what a horror! sawing there in that tree and leering! The child saw his eyes!)

And then the mother said: “No, there isn’t any Cat-man; it is all a foolish fancy. There, there!” But to the child, for a long time, he was real enough, just the same.