And the women—elder and younger! wives and daughters of those men who have only recently begun to make money in easy sums and so to enjoy life. They reminded me of those I had seen in the Kittatinny at Delaware Water Gap. What breweries, what wagon works, what automobile factories may not have been grinding day and night for their benefit! Here they were, most circumspect, most quiescent, a gaudy and yet reserved company; but as I looked at some of them I could not help thinking of some of the places I had seen abroad, more especially the Abbaye Thélème in Paris and the Carlton at Monte Carlo, where, freed from the prying eyes of Terre Haute or Columbus or Peoria in summer or winter, the eager American abroad is free to dance and carouse and make up, in part, for some of the shortcomings of his or her situation here. Yes, you may see them there, the sons and daughters of these factory builders and paint manufacturers, a feverish hunger in their faces, making up for what Indiana or Illinois or Iowa would never permit them to do. Blood will tell, and the brooding earth forces weaving these things must have tremendous moods and yearnings which require expression thus.
But what interested me more, and this was sad too, were the tribes and shoals of the incomplete, the botched, the semi-articulate, all hungry and helpless, who never get to come to a place like this at all—who yearn for a taste of this show and flare and never attain to the least taste of it. Somehow the streets of this city suggested them to me. I know the moralists will not agree with me as to this, but what of it? Haven’t you seen them of a morning—very early morning and late evening, in their shabby skirts, their shapeless waists, their messes of hats, their worn shoes, trudging to and from one wretched task and another, through the great streets and the splendid places? And are you content always to dismiss them as just dull, or weak, or incapable of understanding those finer things which you think you understand so well? Are there not some possibly who are different? Oh, you brash thinkers who dismiss them all so lightly—Not so fast, pray! Do not lean too heavily upon the significance of your present state. Tonight, tomorrow, may begin the fierce blasts that will sweep away the last vestige of what was strength, or pride, or beauty, or power, or understanding. Even now the winds of disaster may be whining under your door. A good body is something, a brain is more. Taste, beauty, these are great gifts, not achievements. And that which gave so generously can as certainly take away again. When you see them trudging so hopelessly, so painfully, their eyes riveted by the flashing wonders of life, let it be not all contempt or all pride with which you view them. Hold to your strength if you will, or your subtlety; but this night, in your heart, on your knees, make obeisance. These are tremendous forces among which we walk. With their powers and their results we may have neither part nor lot. What, slave, do you strut and stare and make light of your fellow? This night may you be with them, not in paradise, but in eternal nothingness—voiceless, dreamless, not even so much as a memory of anything elsewhere. Nothing!
Even so! Even so!
CHAPTER XLIX
TERRE HAUTE AFTER THIRTYSEVEN YEARS
For good, bad, or indifferent, whether it had been painful or pleasant, the youth time that I had spent in Terre Haute had gone and would never come back again. My mother, as I remembered her then—and when is a mother more of a mother than in one’s babyhood?—was by now merely a collection of incidents and pains and sweetnesses lingering in a few minds! And my father, earnest, serious-minded German, striving to do the best he knew, was gone also—all of thirteen years. Those brothers and sisters whose ambitions were then so keen, whose blood moods were so high, were now tamed and sober, scattered over all the eastern portion of America. And here was I walking about, not knowing a single soul here really, intent upon finding one man perhaps who had known my father and had been kind to him; for the rest, looking up the houses in which we had lived, the first school which I had ever attended, the first church, and thinking over all the ills we had endured rather than the pleasures we had enjoyed (for of the latter I could scarcely recall any), was all with which I had to employ myself.
In the first place, the night before coming in, because it was nearly dark and because neither Franklin nor I cared to spend any more time in this southern extension than we could help, I wanted to find and look at as many of the old places as was possible in the summer twilight, for more than look at them once I could scarcely, or at least, would not care to do. It was not a difficult matter. At the time we lived there, the city was much smaller, scarcely more than one-third its present size, and the places which then seemed remote from the business heart were now a five-minute walk, if so much. I could see, in coming in, that to get to Ninth and Chestnut, where I was born, I would have to go almost into the business section, or nearly so. Again, the house at Twelfth and Walnut, where the first few years of my life were spent—say from one to five—was first on our route in, and it was best to have Bert turn in there, for the street labelings were all very plain and it was easy to find our way. It was very evident that Terre Haute was another manufacturing city, and a prosperous one, for smoke filled the air and there was a somewhat inspiriting display of chimneys and manufacturing buildings in one direction and another. The sound of engine bells and factory whistles at six o’clock seemed to indicate a cheerful prosperity not always present in larger and seemingly more successful cities. Franklin, as I have said, noted a temper or flare of youth and hope about the town, for he spoke of it.
“I like this place. It is interesting,” he said. “I had no idea Terre Haute was so fine as this.”
As for me, my mind was recurring to old scenes and old miseries, commingled with a child’s sensations. Once in this town, in company with Ed and Al, I picked coal off the tracks because we had no coal at home. Somewhere here Ed and I, going for a sack of cornmeal, lost the fifty cents with which to buy it, and it was our last fifty cents. In a small house in Thirteenth Street, as I have elsewhere indicated, the three youngest of us were sick, while my father was out of work, and my mother was compelled to take in washing. In some other house here—Seventh and Chestnut, I believe—there was a swing in a basement where I used to swing all alone by the hour, enjoying my own moods even at that time. From a small brick house in Fourteenth Street, the last I ever knew of Terre Haute, I carried my father’s dinner to him in a pail at a woolen mill, of which he was foreman or manager or something. He was never exactly a day laborer for anyone. I remember a “carder” and a “fuller” and a “blower” and a “spinning jenny” and his explaining their functions to me. Somewhere in this town was the remainder of St. Joseph’s School, or its site, at least, where at five years of age I was taken to learn my A B C's, and where a nun in a great flaring white bonnet and a black habit, with a rattling string of great beads, pointed at a blackboard with a stick and asked us what certain symbols stood for. I recall even now, very faintly, it is true, having trouble remembering what the sounds of certain letters were.
I remember the church attached to this school, and a bell in a tower that used to get turned over and wouldn’t ring until some one of us boys climbed up and turned it back—a great treat. I remember boating on a small, muddy pool, on boards, and getting my feet very wet, and almost falling in, and a serious sore throat afterwards. I remember a band—the first I ever heard—(Kleinbind’s Terre Haute Ringold Band as my father afterwards explained was its official title)—marching up the street, the men wearing red jackets with white shoulder straps and tall black Russian shakos. They frightened me, and I cried. I remember once being on the Wabash River with my brother Rome in a small boat—the yellow water seemed more of a wonder and terror to me then than it does now—and of his rocking the boat and of my screaming, and of his wanting to whip me—a brotherly bit of tenderness, quite natural, don’t you think? I remember, at Twelfth and Walnut, a great summer rainstorm, when I was very young, and my mother undressing me and telling me to run out naked in the great splattering drops making bubbles everywhere—an adventure which seemed very splendid and quite to my taste. I remember my brothers Paul and Rome as grownups—men really—when they were only boys, and of my elder sisters—girls of thirteen, fifteen, seventeen, seeming like great strong women.
Life was a strange, colorful, kaleidoscopic welter then. It has remained so ever since.