Unfortunately for him, though really not for us, I think, in the long run, his children were differently minded. Owing to an arrogant and domineering disposition, he insisted on the first ten, or first five, let us say, being educated in the then Catholic parochial schools, where they learned nothing at all. Just before his failure, or the fire which ruined him, he gave the ground on which the church and school of St. Joseph in Terre Haute now stand, to the rector of that parish. Priests and bishops had the run of our home in the days when we were prosperous. After that they did not come so much, except to demand to know this, that, or the other, or to complain of our conduct. After my father’s failure, and because he did not feel himself courageous enough to venture on a new enterprise with the aid of the wealthy Mr. Rose, the then sufficiently grown children were supposed to go to work, the girls as housemaids, if necessary (for their education having been nothing, they had no skill for anything else), the boys as “hands” in the mill, the one thing my father knew most about, if they would (which they wouldn’t), in order to learn a trade of some kind.

Instead there was a revolt. They broke out into the world to suit themselves. To save expenses, my mother had taken the three youngest, Ed, Clair (or Tillie, as we always called her) and myself, first to a friend at Vincennes, Indiana, for a few weeks' stay, then to Sullivan, where we remained two years trying to maintain ourselves as best we could; thence to Evansville, where, my brother Paul having established himself rather comfortably, we remained two more; thence to Warsaw (via Chicago), where we remained three years and where I received my only intelligent schooling; thence out into the world, for the three youngest of us, at least, to become, as chance might have it, such failures or successes as may be. The others, too, after one type of career and another, did well enough. Paul, for one, managed to get a national reputation as a song writer and to live in comfort and even luxury. All of the girls, after varying years and degrees of success or failure, married and settled down to the average troubles of the married. One of these, the third from the eldest, was killed by a train in Chicago in her thirtysecond year, in 1897. One brother—the youngest (two years younger than myself)—became an actor. The brother next older than myself became an electrician. The fourth eldest, and one of the most interesting of all, as it seemed to me, a railroad man by profession, finally died of drunkenness (alcoholism is a nicer word) in a South Clark Street dive in Chicago, about 1905. So it goes. But all of them, in their way, were fairly intelligent people, no worse and no better than the average.

I can see the average smug, conventional soul, if one such should ever chance to get so deep into this book, chilling and sniffing over this frank confession. My answer is that, if he knows as much about life as I do or has the courage to say what he really knows or believes, he would neither be chilling or sniffing. If any individual in this dusty world has anything to be ashamed of, it is certainly not the accidents, ignorances and stark vicissitudes with which we are all more or less confronted. These last may be pathetic, but they have the merit nearly always of great and even beautiful drama; whereas, the treacheries, shams and poltrooneries which make for the creation and sustenance of the sniffy and the smug are really the things to be ashamed of. I can only think of Christ’s scathing denunciation of scribes, hypocrites and pharisees and his reference to the mote and the beam.

In Terre Haute, not elsewhere, we moved so often for want of means to pay our rent, or to obtain cheaper places, that it is almost painful to think of it in retrospect, though at the time I was too young to know anything much about it. There was so much sickness in the family, and at this time a certain amount of ill feeling between my mother and father. Several of the girls ran away and (in seeming, only in so far as the beliefs of my father were concerned) went to the bad. They did not go to the bad actually as time subsequently proved, though I might disagree with many as to what is bad and what good. One of the boys, Paul, got into jail, quite innocently it seems, and was turned out by my father, only to be received back again and subsequently to become his almost sole source of support in his later years. There was gloom, no work, often no bread, or scarcely any, in the house. Strange shifts were resorted to. My mother, and my father, for that matter, worked and slaved. Both, but she in particular, I am sure, because of her ambitious, romantic temperament, suffered the tortures of the damned.

Alas, she never lived to see our better days! My father did.

But Terre Haute! Terre Haute!

Here I was entering it now for the first time since I had left it, between seven and eight years of age, exactly thirtyseven years before.

CHAPTER XLVIII
THE SPIRIT OF TERRE HAUTE

Aside from these perfervid memories in connection with it, Terre Haute was not so different from Fort Wayne, or even Sandusky, minus the lake. It had the usual main street (Wabash Avenue) lighted with many lamps, the city hall, postoffice, principal hotel, and theatres; but I will say this for it, it seemed more vital than most of these other places—more like Wilkes-Barré or Binghamton. I asked Franklin about this, and he said that he felt it had exceptional vitality—something different.

“I can’t tell you what it is,” he said. “I have heard boys up in Carmel and Indianapolis who have been down here say it was a ‘hot town.’ I can understand now something of what they mean. It has a young, hopeful, seeking atmosphere. I like it.”