A Hoosier holiday

by Theodore Dreiser

In the first place, we could not find the view indicated, and in the second place, we encountered a man who wanted to ride and who told such a queer story of being robbed of his bicycle while assisting another man to repair his machine, that we began to suspect he was a little crazy or that he had some scheme in mind of robbing us,—just which we could not determine. But in parleying with him and baffling him by suggesting we were going back into the village instead of the way he thought we were going, we lost so much time that it was night, and we did not think we would get a decent meal if we did return. So we questioned another stranger as to the route to Warsaw, found that it was only twenty miles, and struck out for it.

Over a road that was singularly smooth for a dirt one, and through land as flat as Illinois, a tableland on the top of a ridge,—which proved the last we were to see—we raced Warsaw-ward. It was strangely like my school days home, or I romanticised myself into the belief that it was. It was the same size as Warsaw, Indiana, when I left it—thirtyfive hundred—and its principal east and west street, as I discovered the next morning, was named Buffalo, as at home. It differed in one respect greatly, and that was that it had no courthouse square, and no lakes immediately adjoining it; but otherwise its general atmosphere was quite the same. It had a river, or small stream about the size of the Tippecanoe. The similarity is not so startling when one considers how many towns of thirtyfive hundred are county seats in the middle west, and how limited their opportunities for difference are. Assemble four or five hundred frame and brick houses of slightly varying size and architecture and roominess, surround them with trees and pleasing grass plots, provide the town a main street and one cross street of stores, place one or two red brick school houses at varying points in them, add one white sandstone courthouse in a public square, and a railroad station, and four or five or six red brick churches, and there you have them all. Give one town a lake, another a stream, another a mill pond—it makes little difference.

And actually, as we dashed along toward Warsaw under a starry sky, with a warm, summery wind blowing, a wind so warm that it felt suspiciously like rain, I allowed myself to sink into the most commemorative state. When you forget the now and go back a number of years and change yourself into a boy and view old scenes and see old faces, what an unbelievably strange and inexplicable thing life becomes! We attempt solutions of this thing, but to me it is the most vacuous of all employments. I rather prefer to take it as a strange, unbelievable, impossible orchestral blending of sounds and scenes and moods and odors and sensations, which have no real meaning and yet which, tinkling and kaleidoscopic as they are, are important for that reason. I never ride this way at night, or when I am tired by day or night, but that life becomes this uncanny blur of nothingness.

Why should something want to produce two billion people all alike,—ears, eyes, noses, hands, unless for mere sensory purposes,—to sensitize fully and voluptuously something that is delicious? Why billions of trees, flowers, insects, animals, all seeking to feel, unless feeling without socalled reason is the point? Why reason, anyway? And to what end? Supposing, for instance, that one could reason through to the socalled solution, actually found it, and then had to live with that bit of exact knowledge and no more forever and ever and ever! Give me, instead, sound and fury, signifying nothing. Give me the song sung by an idiot, dancing down the wind. Give me this gay, sad, mad seeking and never finding about which we are all so feverishly employed. It is so perfect, this inexplicable mystery.

And it was with some such thoughts as these that I was employed, sitting back in the car and spinning along over these roads this night. I was only half awake and half in a dreamland of my own creating. The houses that we passed with open doors, lamp on table, people reading, girls playing at pianos, people sitting in doorsteps, were in the world of twentyfive or thirty years before, and I was entering the Warsaw of my school days. There was no real difference. “What ideas have we today that we did not have then?” I was dreamily asking myself. “How do people differ? Are the houses any better, or the clothes? Or the people in their bodies and minds? Or are their emotions any richer or keener or sweeter?” Euripides wrote the Medea in 440 B. C. Shakespeare wrote “Macbeth” in 1605 A. D. “The Song of Songs”—how old is that? Or the Iliad? The general feeling is that we are getting on, but I should like to know what we can get on to, actually. And beyond the delight of sensory response, what is there to get on to? Mechanicalizing the world does not, cannot, it seems to me, add to the individual’s capacity for sensory response. Life has always been vastly varied. How, by inventing things, can we make it more so? As a matter of fact, life, not man, is supplying its own inventions and changes, adding some, discarding others. To what end? Today we have the automobile. Three thousand years ago we had the chariot. Today we fight with forty-centimeter guns and destructive gases. Three thousand years ago we fought with catapults and burning pitch and oil. Man uses all the forces he can conceive, and he seems to be able to conceive of greater and greater forces, but he does not understand them, and his individual share in the race’s sensory response to them is apparently no greater than ever. We are capable of feeling so much and no more. Has any writer, for instance, felt more poignantly or more sweetly than those whose moods and woes are now the Iliad? And when Medea speaks, can anyone say it is ancient and therefore less than we can feel today? We know that this is not true.

I may seem to grow dim in my researches, but I can conceive of no least suggestion of real change in the sensory capacity of life. As it was in the beginning, so it appears that it is now—and shall I say, ever shall be? I will not venture that. I am not all-wise and I do not know.

When we entered Warsaw I had just such thoughts in my mind, and a feeling that I would like very much to have something to eat. Since it was early Saturday evening, the streets were crowded with country vehicles, many automobiles, and a larger percentage of tumble-down buggies and wagons than I had so far seen elsewhere. Why? The oldest, poorest, most ratty and rickety looking auto I had seen in I don’t know when was labeled “For Hire.”

“Gee whiz!” exclaimed Speed when he caught sight of it. And I added, “Who would want to ride in that, anyhow?”

Yet, since it was there, it would seem as if somebody might want to do so.

However, at the north end of the principal street, and close to a small park, we discovered one of the most comfortable little hotels imaginable. All the rooms were done in bright, cheerful colors, and seemed to be properly cared for. There were baths and an abundance of hot water and towels, and electric lights and electric call bells,—rather novel features for a country hotel of this size. The lobby was as smart and brisk as most hotels of a much more expensive character. We “spruced up” considerably at the sight of it. Franklin proceeded with his toilet in a most ambitious manner, whereupon I changed to a better suit. I felt quite as though I were dressing for an adventure of some kind, though I did not think there was the slightest likelihood of our finding one in a town of this size, nor was I eager for the prospect. A half dozen years before—perhaps earlier—I would have been most anxious to get into conversation with some girl and play the gallant as best I could, or roam the dark in search of adventure, but tonight I was interested in no such thing, even if I might have.