“That’s just what it does, mister,” he replied most courteously, “but thar ain’t nothin' to see. The water just sorta peters out as it goes along. You can’t see nothin' but just dry stones. I don’t know exactly where it does come up again. Out here Orangeville way, I think. There are a lot of underground caves around here.”
We went on, but on discovering a splendid stretch of road and speeding on it, we forgot all about Lost River.
Throughout this and the next county north, the roads seemed to attain a maximum of perfection, possibly due to the amazing quarries at Bedford, beyond. We traveled so fast that we ran down a hen and left it fluttering in the road, a sight which gave me the creeps and started a new train of speculation. I predicted then, to myself privately, that having run down one thing we would run down another before the trip was over, for, as I said before, this is the sort of thing that is always happening to me—what Nietzsche would call my typical experience. If I should stop at one pretentious hotel like the Kittatinny, on a trip like this, I would be sure to stop at another, like French Lick, before I was through, or if I lost a valuable ring on Monday, I would be sure to lose a valuable pin on Thursday or thereabouts. Life goes on in pairs for me. My one fear in connection with this chicken incident was that the loss might prove something much more valuable than a chicken, and the thought of death by accident, to others than myself, always terrifies me.
Through the region that suggested the beauty and sweep of western New York, we now sped into Bedford City, a city that seemed to have devoted hundreds of thousands of dollars to churches. I never saw so many large and even quite remarkable churches in so small a town. It only had twelve thousand population, yet the churches looked as though they might minister to thirty thousand.
Just at the edge of this town, north, we came to quarries, the extent and impressiveness of which seemed to me a matter of the greatest import. Carrara, in Italy, is really nothing compared with this. There some of the pure white stone is mined—cut from tunnels in the sides of the hills. Here the quarries are all open to the sky and reaching for miles, apparently, on every hand. Our road lay along a high ridge which divided two immense fields of stone, and sitting in our car we could see derricks and hear electrically driven stone drills on every hand for miles. There were sheer walls of stone, thirty, forty, and as it seemed to me, even fifty feet high, cut true to plummet, and which revealed veins of unquarried stone suggesting almost untold wealth. At the bottom of these walls were pools of dull green water, the color of a smoky emerald, and looking like a precious stone. In the distance, on every hand, were hills of discarded stone, or at least stone for which there was no present use. I fancy they were veined or broken or slightly defective blocks which are of no great value now, but which a more frugal generation may discover how to use. In every direction were car tracks, spurs, with flat cars loaded or waiting to be loaded with these handsome blocks. As we went north from here, following a line of railroad that led to Bloomington, Indiana, the ways seemed to be lined with freight trains hauling this stone. We must have passed a dozen such in our rapid run to Bloomington.
In approaching this town my mind was busy with another group of reminiscences. As I thought back over them now, it seemed to me that I must have been a most unsatisfactory youth to contemplate at this time, one who lacked nearly all of the firm, self-directive qualities which most youths of my age at that time were supposed to have. I was eighteen then, and all romance and moonshine. I had come down from Chicago after these several years at Warsaw and two in Chicago, in which I had been trying to connect commercially with life, and as I may say now, I feel myself to have been a rather poor specimen. I had no money other than about three hundred dollars loaned to me, or rather forced upon me, by an ex-teacher of mine (one who had conducted the recitation room in the high school at Warsaw) who, finding me working for a large wholesale hardware company in Chicago, insisted that I should leave and come here to be educated.
“You may never learn anything directly there, Theodore,” she counseled, “but something will come to you indirectly. You will see what education means, what its aim is, and that will be worth a great deal. Just go one year, at least, and then you can decide for yourself what you want to do after that.”
She was an old maid, with a set of false upper teeth, and a heavenly, irradiating smile. She had led a very hard life herself, and did not wish me to. She was possessed of a wondrously delicate perception of romance, and was of so good a heart that I can scarcely ever think of her without a tendency to rhapsodize. She was not beautiful, and yet she was not unattractive either. Four years later, having eventually married, she died in child-birth. At this time, for some reason not clear to myself, she yearned over me in a tender, delicate, motherly way. I have never forgotten the look in her eyes when she found me in the wholesale hardware house (they called me down to the office and I came in my overalls), nor how she said, smiling a delicate, whimsical, emotional smile:
“Theodore, work of this kind isn’t meant for you, really. It will injure your spirit. I want you to let me help you go to school again.”
I cannot go into the romance of this—it is too long a story. I forget, really, whether I protested much or not. My lungs and stomach were troubling me greatly and I was coughing and agonizing with dyspepsia nearly all the while. After some conferences and arrangements made with my mother, I came—and for an entire college year dreamed and wondered.