The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

I left the valley for a visit home, on the last week of the month on Friday night, and started back on foot, a walk of fifteen or twenty miles, on Sunday afternoon, too late for convenience as I discovered in the event. That portion of the valley of the Mohawk, a broad and level plain, is bounded on the west by a range or ranges of hills divided by deep valleys running north and south, perpendicular to the course of the river, and in one of these valleys lay the township of Princeton, in the middle of which was the schoolhouse, the farms of the community being scattered over the hills around, and some of them at distances of a mile or two. It was the head of the glen, and the lay of the land was almost that of an amphitheatre, cannily chosen by the father of the colony, the old Cameronian whose prayers and long services grated so on my New England Puritanism. Before I turned out of the Mohawk valley into that of Princeton, the sun had set, with all the signs of a coming snowstorm, which broke on me suddenly in the glen with a furious north wind tearing down the gorge and drifting the snow as it fell, so that before I had gone a mile with the snow in my face, it was almost impossible to force my way against snow and wind. I wore a long Spanish cloak, such as was much in vogue then and there; wrapping my face in it so that only my eyes were free, I fought on, sometimes only able to walk backward from the cutting cold against my face and eyes, making very slow progress; but it was Sunday night, and the school must be opened at 9 A.M. on Monday. The snow gathered in drifts often up to my middle, with bare, wind-swept spaces between, and these drifts at times were crusted with wind-packed snow too hard to be waded through, and I was obliged to break the snow crust by throwing myself at full length on it. In this way I struggled on till ten at night, when I came to a solitary house by the roadside, at which I stopped to ask a night's lodging, for I could fight the weather no longer. The house was dark and the family asleep, but I was admitted. The bed given me was as cold as the snow outside, but it was luxury compared to some of the quarters I had in my school district. At one of the houses at which I had to take my turn, I remember that there had been, as an afterthought of the house architect, a door cut between the room I slept in and the farmyard, but, whether from indifference or inability, the door had never been put in, and a curtain which supplied its place and was intended to keep the snow out, did it so incompletely that I found in the morning—after a snowy night—that a heavy drift had formed between the opening and the bed. In this room, too, I shared the bed of the hired man, who was paid the same wages as mine, and in the eyes of the community was therefore in every way my equal.

On reaching the schoolhouse the next morning, I found gathered there not only a part of the scholars, but some of their parents,—including the trustees of the school,—and was not long in learning that my absence had been made use of by the disaffected of the district to depose me. We had a brief debate, not on the question whether I should go or not, but on the grounds of disaffection. The father of my lazy boy was, of course, the spokesman, and it seemed as if he resented his son's not being flogged, for want of discipline and partiality were the burden of his complaint. This gave me ample opportunity for a statement of my principles in instruction, and to say that his son was the laziest and most stupid boy in the school, and that instruction was wasted on him, and to contrast his progress and qualities with those of my Latin boy. It was malicious, I admit, but it was successful in infuriating the debate, and as I saw by the gathering that the majority had decided to avail themselves of the month's conditional engagement to dismiss me, I was quite indifferent to the discord I left behind me.

"It's all very fine for you," said my antagonist, whose Scotch I will not attempt to reproduce, "to sit up there on your desk and get your sixteen dollars a month, as if you were a hard-working man,"—to which I replied, "Perhaps you think you can come up here and earn it." As I was quite indifferent to the dismissal, and only did not avail myself of the privilege of going because I always had an obstinate way of sticking to a thing I had begun till it was finished, I made no attempt to conciliate, and it was with neither surprise nor serious annoyance that I received my notice of dismissal. The only things I had enjoyed, indeed, during the month, had been the walks through the dense forest from the farmhouses to the schoolhouse in the quiet sunshine of the winter mornings. The woods were more natural and older than those around my home, and there was a freshness in the early day which I never had realized so fully as in these morning walks to school, and I shall always remember the snowy silence of that forest, the first, on that scale, I had become familiar with.

But the poverty of the lives of these prosperous farmers was a revelation even to me, accustomed as I was to a domestic simplicity which would surprise modern Americans of any degree. New books were a luxury none of them indulged in; beyond the Bible and two or three volumes of general information, there was no reading except a weekly newspaper, and the diet was such as I had never been used to, even at De Ruyter. But for the vegetables of the farm, sailors at sea would fare better than these landsmen. In later years I boarded with one of the farmers in an adjoining valley, where I was engaged in painting a cascade of great beauty, and for the six weeks I lived in the family I saw only two articles of animal food—salt mackerel for breakfast and salt pork for dinner. The narrowness of intellectual range and the bigotry—political and religious—prevailing amongst them was such as I had in no experience ever encountered, even in the "straitest sect of the Pharisees," the Seventh Day Baptist Church of my youth. In the community in which I had grown, there was always the early influence of the sea to widen the range of thought and sympathy, but here, in the narrow valley to which the farmer was confined, neither nature nor religion seemed to have any liberating or liberalizing power. A sturdy independence was the dominant trait of character, but this independence was converted into a self-enslavement by the narrow range of thought which everywhere prevailed. The old Cameronian patriarch, in his sectarian exaltation, seemed almost a luminary in the intellectual twilight of that secluded community, and it was possible there to understand how even a narrow religious fanaticism could become an ennobling element in the character of a community living in such a restricted and materializing atmosphere. A few weeks in such a state of society enables one to understand better the irresistible attraction of cities and the life in the midst of multitudes to the rustic, born and raised in the back-water stagnation of a rural life like that of the farmers of my school district.

The remaining two months of the broken term of the college course and the better part of the vacation were spent in my father's workshop, where the work was rather pressing and the shop short-handed. My father's business was mainly the manufacture of certain mechanical implements for which he and his brother held the patents, and in the spring and autumn he was accustomed to carry the consignments of them to his customers in New York. His workshop was resorted to by several ingenious fellow New Englanders who had inventions to work out, and in the execution of these I was found useful. Among these was one Daniel Ball, whose specialty was locks, of which he invented, patented, and sold the patents of a new one every year, all worked out in my father's shop. Ball was a man of remarkable mechanical ingenuity and extraordinary profanity—of a savage temper, and very exclusive in his human sympathies; but he had a profound reverence for my father, of whom he used to say that "Old Joe Stillman was the only honest man God ever made," and I am inclined to think, looking back on a long life and wide experience in men of all classes and many nations, that Ball was justified in the esteem he held my father in, though admissibly wrong in his exclusiveness,—for I cannot recall, in all my memories of the old man, a single instance of his hesitating over the most trivial transaction in which a question of honesty was involved, and I have known him to relinquish his clear rights rather than to provoke a disagreement with a neighbor. He had a profound aversion to any ostentation of religious fervor, as had my mother. If he had lived to-day he would certainly have been an advanced evolutionist; even then his liberality in matters of doctrine and his unbounded charity towards all differences of opinion in religious questions used to cause my mother great anxiety as to his orthodoxy. He thought the fields and woods better places to pass the Sabbath in than a meeting-house, and this was a subject of great pain to her, the more that he developed the same feeling in me; but he never deferred in these matters to anybody, and never held a shade of that reverence for the clergy which was almost a passion in my mother's nature. While of an extreme tenderness of heart to all suffering or hardship outside the family, even towards animals, his domestic discipline was brutal and narrow. In the latter respect he was a survival of the old New England system; in the former, himself.

I had a parrot given me by one of my brothers returning from the Southern States, and the bird took an extravagant fondness for my father rather than for me. He was allowed to go free about the house and garden, and would go and sit on the fence when my father should be coming back from the workshop to dinner and supper, and run to meet his footstep long before he was in sight, chuckling and chattering with delight. Early one morning the parrot got shut, by chance, in the cupboard, and, attempting to gnaw his way out, was mistaken for a rat, and father took the shovel to kill him, while mother carefully opened the door so that the rat might squeeze his way out to be killed, but poor Poll got the blow instead, and had his neck broken. All that day my father stayed at home weeping for Polly, and no business misfortune in my recollection ever affected him as the death of the parrot did. He could flog me without mercy, but he could not see the suffering of a domestic or wild animal without tears, nor would he tolerate in us children the slightest tendency to cruelty to the least living thing.

I have alluded to the differences between him and my mother on the subject of education, the inutility of which, beyond a common-school standard, he made an article of faith, and the return to the workshop for the balance of the vacation, after my school-teaching failure, was the occasion of the final battle. As the vacation drew to an end, and the time which was still available for studying up the subjects of the last term, for the examination on reëntering, approached its imperative limit, I notified him that I must stop work. He said nothing until I had actually given it up and gone back to my study, about two weeks before the examination day. Coming home from the shop that day to dinner, in a very bad humor, he asked me why I had not been at work. I replied that I had barely the time absolutely necessary to make up my arrears of study to enter college for the next term. Then he broke out on me with a torrent of abuse as an idle, shirking boy, who only cared to avoid work, ending with the accusation that all I wanted was to "eat the bread of idleness," a phrase he was very fond of. I suppose I inherited some of his inequality of temper, and I replied by leaving the table, throwing my chair across the room as I did so; and, assuring him that when I ate another morsel of bread in his house he would know the reason why, I left the house in a towering rage. Having forewarned him days before that I must go, without his making the least objection, and having postponed the step to the latest possible moment, out of consideration for the work in hand, I considered this treatment as ungenerous, and was indignant.

I do not think that, weighing all the circumstances of the case, one could say that my father was entitled to impose his authority in a purely arbitrary interference with a matter in which the family council had decided on my course, and which involved all my future, or that my refusal to obey an irrational command implies any disrespect to him. At all events, I decided at once that I would not yield in this matter, and I made my preparations to seek another home, even with a modification in my career. If I must abandon the liberal education, I would not waste my life in a little workshop with three workmen, and no opportunity to widen the sphere of activity, or opening into a larger occupation. If I should be obliged to leave the college, it should be for something in the direction of art, and in this light I did not much regret the change. I had not, however, calculated on my mother's tenacity, or the imperceptible domination she exercised over my father.

When I returned to the house to get my clothes and make my preparations for leaving home for good, I had a most painful scene with my mother, and it was the only serious misunderstanding I ever had with her. She went through, in a rapid résumé, the history of my life, from the day when I was given her in consolation for the little brother before me, who died, with a word for each of the crises through which her care had carried me,—accidents, grave maladies, for I was apparently not a strong child, and at several conjunctures my life had been despaired of; all the story being told as she walked up and down rapidly in the chamber, with the tears running down her cheeks, and with a passionate vehemence I had never suspected her to be capable of, since she had the most complete self-restraint I ever knew in a woman. But it was an impasse—I neither could nor would go back from the career decided upon, nor would the family have consented, and to return to the workshop at my father's insistence was to lose everything. It seemed brutal to refuse mother's entreaties to ignore the collision of wills, and to go on as if nothing had happened, but to do this and remain in the house with my father, in the perpetual danger of another conflict, was impossible. The question had to be settled, and all I could do was to insist on father's making a distinct disavowal of any right or intention to demand my services in the shop at any future time, and leaving me free to follow the programme agreed on in the family council. It was in effect a frank apology that I wanted, but I knew him too well to suppose he would ever consent to make an apology in words, or to admit to me that he had made a mistake; and I left the solution in my mother's hands, with the understanding that the definite promise should be made to her, and I knew too that this would hold him as completely as if made to a public authority. Nothing could bring her to contradict him openly, and in all my life I never saw her make a sign of disrespect for his mastery in domestic things, but I knew that once this promise was made to her I could count on his being held to it sternly.

That evening the matter was settled, but of what had passed, or what was said, I never knew anything, for my mother never wasted words; and, while no apology was made, or any retraction expressed, neither my father nor myself ever alluded to the subject of my working in the shop again, nor did I ever, as before, go into it during the vacations, or offer to assist when affairs were hurried. The habit of asserting the paternal authority and the sense of it, in my father, were so strong that I never risked again reviving it.