the dim morning light.
* * * * *
The towns in which Hugh lived during the first three years after he began
his eastward journey were all small places containing a few hundred people,
and were scattered through Illinois, Indiana and western Ohio. All of
the people among whom he worked and lived during that time were farmers
and laborers. In the spring of the first year of his wandering he passed
through the city of Chicago and spent two hours there, going in and out at
the same railroad station.
He was not tempted to become a city man. The huge commercial city at the
foot of Lake Michigan, because of its commanding position in the very
center of a vast farming empire, had already become gigantic. He never
forgot the two hours he spent standing in the station in the heart of the
city and walking in the street adjoining the station. It was evening when
he came into the roaring, clanging place. On the long wide plains west of
the city he saw farmers at work with their spring plowing as the train went
flying along. Presently the farms grew small and the whole prairie dotted
with towns. In these the train did not stop but ran into a crowded network
of streets filled with multitudes of people. When he got into the big dark
station Hugh saw thousands of people rushing about like disturbed insects.
Unnumbered thousands of people were going out of the city at the end of
their day of work and trains waited to take them to towns on the prairies.
They came in droves, hurrying along like distraught cattle, over a bridge
and into the station. The in-bound crowds that had alighted from through
trains coming from cities of the East and West climbed up a stairway to the
street, and those that were out-bound tried to descend by the same stairway
and at the same time. The result was a whirling churning mass of humanity.
Every one pushed and crowded his way along. Men swore, women grew angry,
and children cried. Near the doorway that opened into the street a long
line of cab drivers shouted and roared.
Hugh looked at the people who were whirled along past him, and shivered
with the nameless fear of multitudes, common to country boys in the city.
When the rush of people had a little subsided he went out of the station
and, walking across a narrow street, stood by a brick store building.
Presently the rush of people began again, and again men, women, and boys
came hurrying across the bridge and ran wildly in at the doorway leading
into the station. They came in waves as water washes along a beach during
a storm. Hugh had a feeling that if he were by some chance to get caught
in the crowd he would be swept away into some unknown and terrible place.
Waiting until the rush had a little subsided, he went across the street and
on to the bridge to look at the river that flowed past the station. It was
narrow and filled with ships, and the water looked gray and dirty. A pall
of black smoke covered the sky. From all sides of him and even in the air
above his head a great clatter and roar of bells and whistles went on.
With the air of a child venturing into a dark forest Hugh went a little
way into one of the streets that led westward from the station. Again he
stopped and stood by a building. Near at hand a group of young city roughs
stood smoking and talking before a saloon. Out of a nearby building came a
young girl who approached and spoke to one of them. The man began to swear
furiously. "You tell her I'll come in there in a minute and smash her
face," he said, and, paying no more attention to the girl, turned to stare
at Hugh. All of the young men lounging before the saloon turned to stare at
the tall countryman. They began to laugh and one of them walked quickly
toward him.
Hugh ran along the street and into the station followed by the shouts of
the young roughs. He did not venture out again, and when his train was
ready, got aboard and went gladly out of the great complex dwelling-place
of modern Americans.
Hugh went from town to town always working his way eastward, always seeking
the place where happiness was to come to him and where he was to achieve
companionship with men and women. He cut fence posts in a forest on a large
farm in Indiana, worked in the fields, and in one place was a section hand
on the railroad.
On a farm in Indiana, some forty miles east of Indianapolis, he was for
the first time powerfully touched by the presence of a woman. She was the
daughter of the farmer who was Hugh's employer, and was an alert, handsome
woman of twenty-four who had been a school teacher but had given up the
work because she was about to be married. Hugh thought the man who was to
marry her the most fortunate being in the world. He lived in Indianapolis
and came by train to spend the week-ends at the farm. The woman prepared
for his coming by putting on a white dress and fastening a rose in her
hair. The two people walked about in an orchard beside the house or went
for a ride along the country roads. The young man, who, Hugh had been told,
worked in a bank, wore stiff white collars, a black suit and a black derby
hat.
On the farm Hugh worked in the field with the farmer and ate at table with
his family, but did not get acquainted with them. On Sunday when the young
man came he took the day off and went into a nearby town. The courtship
became a matter very close to him and he lived through the excitement of
the weekly visits as though he had been one of the principals. The daughter
of the house, sensing the fact that the silent farm hand was stirred by
her presence, became interested in him. Sometimes in the evening as he sat
on a little porch before the house, she came to join him, and sat looking
at him with a peculiarly detached and interested air. She tried to make
talk, but Hugh answered all her advances so briefly and with such a half
frightened manner that she gave up the attempt. One Saturday evening when
her sweetheart had come she took him for a ride in the family carriage, and
Hugh concealed himself in the hay loft of the barn to wait for their
return.
Hugh had never seen or heard a man express in any way his affection for a
woman. It seemed to him a terrifically heroic thing to do and he hoped by
concealing himself in the barn to see it done. It was a bright moonlight
night and he waited until nearly eleven o'clock before the lovers returned.
In the hayloft there was an opening high up under the roof. Because of his
great height he could reach and pull himself up, and when he had done so,
found a footing on one of the beams that formed the framework of the barn.
The lovers stood unhitching the horse in the barnyard below. When the city
man had led the horse into the stable he hurried quickly out again and went
with the farmer's daughter along a path toward the house. The two people
laughed and pulled at each other like children. They grew silent and when
they had come near the house, stopped by a tree to embrace. Hugh saw the
man take the woman into his arms and hold her tightly against his body.
He was so excited that he nearly fell off the beam. His imagination was
inflamed and he tried to picture himself in the position of the young
city man. His fingers gripped the boards to which he clung and his body
trembled. The two figures standing in the dim light by the tree became
one. For a long time they clung tightly to each other and then drew apart.
They went into the house and Hugh climbed down from his place on the beam
and lay in the hay. His body shook as with a chill and he was half ill of
jealousy, anger, and an overpowering sense of defeat. It did not seem to
him at the moment that it was worth while for him to go further east or to
try to find a place where he would be able to mingle freely with men and
women, or where such a wonderful thing as had happened to the man in the
barnyard below might happen to him.
Hugh spent the night in the hayloft and at daylight crept out and went into
a nearby town. He returned to the farmhouse late on Monday when he was sure
the city man had gone away. In spite of the protest of the farmer he packed
his clothes at once and declared his intention of leaving. He did not wait
for the evening meal but hurried out of the house. When he got into the
road and had started to walk away, he looked back and saw the daughter of
the house standing at an open door and looking at him. Shame for what he
had done on the night before swept over him. For a moment he stared at
the woman who, with an intense, interested air stared back at him, and
then putting down his head he hurried away. The woman watched him out of
sight and later, when her father stormed about the house, blaming Hugh
for leaving so suddenly and declaring the tall Missourian was no doubt a
drunkard who wanted to go off on a drunk, she had nothing to say. In her
own heart she knew what was the matter with her father's farm hand and was
sorry he had gone before she had more completely exercised her power over
him.
* * * * *
None of the towns Hugh visited during his three years of wandering
approached realization of the sort of life Sarah Shepard had talked to him
about. They were all very much alike. There was a main street with a dozen
stores on each side, a blacksmith shop, and perhaps an elevator for the
storage of grain. All day the town was deserted, but in the evening the
citizens gathered on Main Street. On the sidewalks before the stores young
farm hands and clerks sat on store boxes or on the curbing. They did not
pay any attention to Hugh who, when he went to stand near them, remained
silent and kept himself in the background. The farm hands talked of their
work and boasted of the number of bushels of corn they could pick in a day,
or of their skill in plowing. The clerks were intent upon playing practical
jokes which pleased the farm hands immensely. While one of them talked
loudly of his skill in his work a clerk crept out at the door of one of the
stores and approached him. He held a pin in his hand and with it jabbed
the talker in the back. The crowd yelled and shouted with delight. If the
victim became angry a quarrel started, but this did not often happen. Other
men came to join the party and the joke was told to them. "Well, you should
have seen the look on his face. I thought I would die," one of the
bystanders declared.
Hugh got a job with a carpenter who specialized in the building of barns
and stayed with him all through one fall. Later he went to work as a
section hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like one
compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On all sides
of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life went on that
did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns, inhabited only by
farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was being developed. Men
worked hard but were much in the open air and had time to think. Their
minds reached out toward the solution of the mystery of existence. The
schoolmaster and the country lawyer read Tom Paine's "Age of Reason"
and Bellamy's "Looking Backward." They discussed these books with their
fellows. There was a feeling, ill expressed, that America had something
real and spiritual to offer to the rest of the world. Workmen talked to
each other of the new tricks of their trades, and after hours of discussion
of some new way to cultivate corn, shape a horseshoe or build a barn,
spoke of God and his intent concerning man. Long drawn out discussions of
religious beliefs and the political destiny of America were carried on.
And across the background of these discussions ran tales of action in a
sphere outside the little world in which the inhabitants of the towns
lived. Men who had been in the Civil War and who had climbed fighting over
hills and in the terror of defeat had swum wide rivers, told the tale of
their adventures.
In the evening, after his day of work in the field or on the railroad with
the section hands, Hugh did not know what to do with himself. That he
did not go to bed immediately after the evening meal was due to the fact
that he looked upon his tendency to sleep and to dream as an enemy to his
development; and a peculiarly persistent determination to make something
alive and worth while out of himself--the result of the five years of
constant talking on the subject by the New England woman--had taken
possession of him. "I'll find the right place and the right people and then
I'll begin," he continually said to himself.
And then, worn out with weariness and loneliness, he went to bed in one of
the little hotels or boarding houses where he lived during those years,
and his dreams returned. The dream that had come that night as he lay on
the cliff above the Mississippi River near the town of Burlington, came
back time after time. He sat upright in bed in the darkness of his room
and after he had driven the cloudy, vague sensation out of his brain, was
afraid to go to sleep again. He did not want to disturb the people of the
house and so got up and dressed and without putting on his shoes walked up
and down in the room. Sometimes the room he occupied had a low ceiling and
he was compelled to stoop. He crept out of the house carrying his shoes in
his hand and sat down on the sidewalk to put them on. In all the towns he
visited, people saw him walking alone through the streets late at night
or in the early hours of the morning. Whispers concerning the matter ran
about. The story of what was spoken of as his queerness came to the men
with whom he worked, and they found themselves unable to talk freely and
naturally in his presence. At the noon hour when the men ate the lunch they
had carried to work, when the boss was gone and it was customary among the
workers to talk of their own affairs, they went off by themselves. Hugh
followed them about. They went to sit under a tree, and when Hugh came to
stand nearby, they became silent or the more vulgar and shallow among them
began to show off. While he worked with a half dozen other men as a section
hand on the railroad, two men did all the talking. Whenever the boss went
away an old man who had a reputation as a wit told stories concerning his
relations with women. A young man with red hair took the cue from him. The
two men talked loudly and kept looking at Hugh. The younger of the two
wits turned to another workman who had a weak, timid face. "Well, you," he
cried, "what about your old woman? What about her? Who is the father of
your son? Do you dare tell?"
In the towns Hugh walked about in the evening and tried always to keep his
mind fixed on definite things. He felt that humanity was for some unknown
reason drawing itself away from him, and his mind turned back to the figure
of Sarah Shepard. He remembered that she had never been without things
to do. She scrubbed her kitchen floor and prepared food for cooking;
she washed, ironed, kneaded dough for bread, and mended clothes. In the
evening, when she made the boy read to her out of one of the school books
or do sums on a slate, she kept her hands busy knitting socks for him or
for her husband. Except when something had crossed her so that she scolded
and her face grew red, she was always cheerful. When the boy had nothing to
do at the station and had been sent by the station master to work about the
house, to draw water from the cistern for a family washing, or pull weeds
in the garden, he heard the woman singing as she went about the doing of
her innumerable petty tasks. Hugh decided that he also must do small tasks,
fix his mind upon definite things. In the town where he was employed as
a section hand, the cloud dream in which the world became a whirling,
agitated center of disaster came to him almost every night. Winter came on
and he walked through the streets at night in the darkness and through the
deep snow. He was almost frozen; but as the whole lower part of his body
was habitually cold he did not much mind the added discomfort, and so great
was the reserve of strength in his big frame that the loss of sleep did not
affect his ability to labor all day without effort.
Hugh went into one of the residence streets of the town and counted the
pickets in the fences before the houses. He returned to the hotel and made
a calculation as to the number of pickets in all the fences in town. Then
he got a rule at the hardware store and carefully measured the pickets. He
tried to estimate the number of pickets that could be cut out of certain
sized trees and that gave his mind another opening. He counted the number
of trees in every street in town. He learned to tell at a glance and with
relative accuracy how much lumber could be cut out of a tree. He built
imaginary houses with lumber cut from the trees that lined the streets. He
even tried to figure out a way to utilize the small limbs cut from the tops
of the trees, and one Sunday went into the wood back of the town and cut a
great armful of twigs, which he carried to his room and later with great
patience wove into the form of a basket.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER III
Bidwell, Ohio, was an old town as the ages of towns go in the Central West,
long before Hugh McVey, in his search for a place where he could penetrate
the wall that shut him off from humanity, went there to live and to try
to work out his problem. It is a busy manufacturing town now and has a
population of nearly a hundred thousand people; but the time for the
telling of the story of its sudden and surprising growth has not yet come.
From the beginning Bidwell has been a prosperous place. The town lies in
the valley of a deep, rapid-flowing river that spreads out just above the
town, becomes for the time wide and shallow, and goes singing swiftly along
over stones. South of the town the river not only spreads out, but the
hills recede. A wide flat valley stretches away to the north. In the days
before the factories came the land immediately about town was cut up into
small farms devoted to fruit and berry raising, and beyond the area of
small farms lay larger tracts that were immensely productive and that
raised huge crops of wheat, corn, and cabbage.
When Hugh was a boy sleeping away his days in the grass beside his father's
fishing shack by the Mississippi River, Bidwell had already emerged out of
the hardships of pioneer days. On the farms that lay in the wide valley to
the north the timber had been cut away and the stumps had all been rooted
out of the ground by a generation of men that had passed. The soil was easy
to cultivate and had lost little of its virgin fertility. Two railroads,
the Lake Shore and Michigan Central--later a part of the great New York
Central System--and a less important coal-carrying road, called the
Wheeling and Lake Erie, ran through the town. Twenty-five hundred people
lived then in Bidwell. They were for the most part descendants of the
pioneers who had come into the country by boat through the Great Lakes or
by wagon roads over the mountains from the States of New York and
Pennsylvania.
The town stood on a sloping incline running up from the river, and the Lake
Shore and Michigan Central Railroad had its station on the river bank at
the foot of Main Street. The Wheeling Station was a mile away to the north.
It was to be reached by going over a bridge and along a piked road that
even then had begun to take on the semblance of a street. A dozen houses
had been built facing Turner's Pike and between these were berry fields and
an occasional orchard planted to cherry, peach or apple trees. A hard path
went down to the distant station beside the road, and in the evening this
path, wandering along under the branches of the fruit trees that extended
out over the farm fences, was a favorite walking place for lovers.
The small farms lying close about the town of Bidwell raised berries that
brought top prices in the two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, reached by
its two railroads, and all of the people of the town who were not engaged
in one of the trades--in shoe making, carpentry, horse shoeing, house
painting or the like--or who did not belong to the small merchant and
professional classes, worked in summer on the land. On summer mornings,
men, women and children went into the fields. In the early spring when
planting went on and all through late May, June and early July when berries
and fruit began to ripen, every one was rushed with work and the streets
of the town were deserted. Every one went to the fields. Great hay wagons
loaded with children, laughing girls, and sedate women set out from Main
Street at dawn. Beside them walked tall boys, who pelted the girls with
green apples and cherries from the trees along the road, and men who went
along behind smoking their morning pipes and talking of the prevailing
prices of the products of their fields. In the town after they had gone a
Sabbath quiet prevailed. The merchants and clerks loitered in the shade of
the awnings before the doors of the stores, and only their wives and the
wives of the two or three rich men in town came to buy and to disturb their
discussions of horse racing, politics and religion.
In the evening when the wagons came home, Bidwell awoke. The tired berry
pickers walked home from the fields in the dust of the roads swinging their
dinner pails. The wagons creaked at their heels, piled high with boxes of
berries ready for shipment. In the stores after the evening meal crowds
gathered. Old men lit their pipes and sat gossiping along the curbing at
the edge of the sidewalks on Main Street; women with baskets on their arms
did the marketing for the next day's living; the young men put on stiff
white collars and their Sunday clothes, and girls, who all day had been
crawling over the fields between the rows of berries or pushing their way
among the tangled masses of raspberry bushes, put on white dresses and
walked up and down before the men. Friendships begun between boys and girls
in the fields ripened into love. Couples walked along residence streets
under the trees and talked with subdued voices. They became silent and
embarrassed. The bolder ones kissed. The end of the berry picking season
brought each year a new outbreak of marriages to the town of Bidwell.
In all the towns of mid-western America it was a time of waiting. The
country having been cleared and the Indians driven away into a vast distant
place spoken of vaguely as the West, the Civil War having been fought and
won, and there being no great national problems that touched closely their
lives, the minds of men were turned in upon themselves. The soul and its
destiny was spoken of openly on the streets. Robert Ingersoll came to
Bidwell to speak in Terry's Hall, and after he had gone the question of
the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens. The
ministers preached sermons on the subject and in the evening it was talked
about in the stores. Every one had something to say. Even Charley Mook, who
dug ditches, who stuttered so that not a half dozen people in town could
understand him, expressed his opinion.
In all the great Mississippi Valley each town came to have a character of
its own, and the people who lived in the towns were to each other like
members of a great family. The individual idiosyncrasies of each member of
the great family stood forth. A kind of invisible roof beneath which every
one lived spread itself over each town. Beneath the roof boys and girls
were born, grew up, quarreled, fought, and formed friendships with their
fellows, were introduced into the mysteries of love, married, and became
the fathers and mothers of children, grew old, sickened, and died.
Within the invisible circle and under the great roof every one knew his
neighbor and was known to him. Strangers did not come and go swiftly and
mysteriously and there was no constant and confusing roar of machinery and
of new projects afoot. For the moment mankind seemed about to take time to
try to understand itself.
In Bidwell there was a man named Peter White who was a tailor and worked
hard at his trade, but who once or twice a year got drunk and beat his
wife. He was arrested each time and had to pay a fine, but there was a
general understanding of the impulse that led to the beating. Most of the
women knowing the wife sympathized with Peter. "She is a noisy thing and
her jaw is never still," the wife of Henry Teeters, the grocer, said to her
husband. "If he gets drunk it's only to forget he's married to her. Then
he goes home to sleep it off and she begins jawing at him. He stands it as
long as he can. It takes a fist to shut up that woman. If he strikes her
it's the only thing he can do."
Allie Mulberry the half-wit was one of the highlights of life in the town.
He lived with his mother in a tumble-down house at the edge of town on
Medina Road. Beside being a half-wit he had something the matter with his
legs. They were trembling and weak and he could only move them with great
difficulty. On summer afternoons when the streets were deserted, he hobbled
along Main Street with his lower jaw hanging down. Allie carried a large
club, partly for the support of his weak legs and partly to scare off dogs
and mischievous boys. He liked to sit in the shade with his back against a
building and whittle, and he liked to be near people and have his talent as
a whittler appreciated. He made fans out of pieces of pine, long chains of
wooden beads, and he once achieved a singular mechanical triumph that won
him wide renown. He made a ship that would float in a beer bottle half
filled with water and laid on its side. The ship had sails and three tiny
wooden sailors who stood at attention with their hands to their caps in
salute. After it was constructed and put into the bottle it was too large
to be taken out through the neck. How Allie got it in no one ever knew. The
clerks and merchants who crowded about to watch him at work discussed the
matter for days. It became a never-ending wonder among them. In the evening
they spoke of the matter to the berry pickers who came into the stores,
and in the eyes of the people of Bidwell Allie Mulberry became a hero. The
bottle, half-filled with water and securely corked, was laid on a cushion
in the window of Hunter's Jewelry Store. As it floated about on its own
little ocean crowds gathered to look at it. Over the bottle was a sign with
the words--"Carved by Allie Mulberry of Bidwell"--prominently displayed.
Below these words a query had been printed. "How Did He Get It Into The
Bottle?" was the question asked. The bottle stayed in the window for months
and merchants took the traveling men who visited them, to see it. Then they
escorted their guests to where Allie, with his back against the wall of a
building and his club beside him, was at work on some new creation of the
whittler's art. The travelers were impressed and told the tale abroad.
Allie's fame spread to other towns. "He has a good brain," the citizen of
Bidwell said, shaking his head. "He don't appear to know very much, but
look what he does! He must be carrying all sorts of notions around inside
of his head."
Jane Orange, widow of a lawyer, and with the single exception of Thomas
Butterworth, a farmer who owned over a thousand acres of land and lived
with his daughter on a farm a mile south of town, the richest person in
town, was known to every one in Bidwell, but was not liked. She was called
stingy and it was said that she and her husband had cheated every one with
whom they had dealings in order to get their start in life. The town ached
for the privilege of doing what they called "bringing them down a peg."
Jane's husband had once been the Bidwell town attorney and later had
charge of the settlement of an estate belonging to Ed Lucas, a farmer who
died leaving two hundred acres of land and two daughters. The farmer's
daughters, every one said, "came out at the small end of the horn," and
John Orange began to grow rich. It was said he was worth fifty thousand
dollars. All during the latter part of his life the lawyer went to the city
of Cleveland on business every week, and when he was at home and even in
the hottest weather he went about dressed in a long black coat. When she
went to the stores to buy supplies for her house Jane Orange was watched
closely by the merchants. She was suspected of carrying away small articles
that could be slipped into the pockets of her dress. One afternoon in
Toddmore's grocery, when she thought no one was looking, she took a half
dozen eggs out of a basket and looking quickly around to be sure she was
unobserved, put them into her dress pocket. Harry Toddmore, the grocer's
son who had seen the theft, said nothing, but went unobserved out at the
back door. He got three or four clerks from other stores and they waited
for Jane Orange at a corner. When she came along they hurried out and Harry
Toddmore fell against her. Throwing out his hand he struck the pocket
containing the eggs a quick, sharp blow. Jane Orange turned and hurried
away toward home, but as she half ran through Main Street clerks and
merchants came out of the stores, and from the assembled crowd a voice
called attention to the fact that the contents of the stolen eggs having
run down the inside of her dress and over her stockings began to make a
stream on the sidewalk. A pack of town dogs excited by the shouts of the
crowd ran at her heels, barking and sniffing at the yellow stream that
dripped from her shoes.
An old man with a long white beard came to Bidwell to live. He had been a
carpet-bag Governor of a southern state in the reconstruction days after
the Civil War and had made money. He bought a house on Turner's Pike close
beside the river and spent his days puttering about in a small garden. In
the evening he came across the bridge into Main Street and went to loaf in
Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked with great frankness and candor of his
life in the South during the terrible time when the country was trying to
emerge from the black gloom of defeat, and brought to the Bidwell men a new
point of view on their old enemies, the "Rebs."
The old man--the name by which he had introduced himself in Bidwell was
that of Judge Horace Hanby--believed in the manliness and honesty of
purpose of the men he had for a time governed and who had fought a long
grim war with the North, with the New Englanders and sons of New Englanders
from the West and Northwest. "They're all right," he said with a grin. "I
cheated them and made some money, but I liked them. Once a crowd of them
came to my house and threatened to kill me and I told them that I did not
blame them very much, so they let me alone." The judge, an ex-politician
from the city of New York who had been involved in some affair that made it
uncomfortable for him to return to live in that city, grew prophetic and
philosophic after he came to live in Bidwell. In spite of the doubt every
one felt concerning his past, he was something of a scholar and a reader of
books, and won respect by his apparent wisdom. "Well, there's going to be a
new war here," he said. "It won't be like the Civil War, just shooting off
guns and killing peoples' bodies. At first it's going to be a war between
individuals to see to what class a man must belong; then it is going to be
a long, silent war between classes, between those who have and those who
can't get. It'll be the worst war of all."
The talk of Judge Hanby, carried along and elaborated almost every evening
before a silent, attentive group in the drug store, began to have an
influence on the minds of Bidwell young men. At his suggestion several
of the town boys, Cliff Bacon, Albert Small, Ed Prawl, and two or three
others, began to save money for the purpose of going east to college. Also
at his suggestion Tom Butterworth the rich farmer sent his daughter away to
school. The old man made many prophecies concerning what would happen in
America. "I tell you, the country isn't going to stay as it is," he said
earnestly. "In eastern towns the change has already come. Factories are
being built and every one is going to work in the factories. It takes an
old man like me to see how that changes their lives. Some of the men stand
at one bench and do one thing not only for hours but for days and years.
There are signs hung up saying they mustn't talk. Some of them make more
money than they did before the factories came, but I tell you it's like
being in prison. What would you say if I told you all America, all you
fellows who talk so big about freedom, are going to be put in a prison, eh?
"And there's something else. In New York there are already a dozen men who
are worth a million dollars. Yes, sir, I tell you it's true, a million
dollars. What do you think of that, eh?"
Judge Hanby grew excited and, inspired by the absorbed attention of his
audience, talked of the sweep of events. In England, he explained, the
cities were constantly growing larger, and already almost every one either
worked in a factory or owned stock in a factory. "In New England it is
getting the same way fast," he explained. "The same thing'll happen here.
Farming'll be done with tools. Almost everything now done by hand'll be
done by machinery. Some'll grow rich and some poor. The thing is to get
educated, yes, sir, that's the thing, to get ready for what's coming. It's
the only way. The younger generation has got to be sharper and shrewder."
The words of the old man, who had been in many places and had seen men and
cities, were repeated in the streets of Bidwell. The blacksmith and the
wheelwright repeated his words when they stopped to exchange news of their
affairs before the post-office. Ben Peeler, the carpenter, who had been
saving money to buy a house and a small farm to which he could retire when
he became too old to climb about on the framework of buildings, used the
money instead to send his son to Cleveland to a new technical school. Steve
Hunter, the son of Abraham Hunter the Bidwell jeweler, declared that he was
going to get up with the times, and when he went into a factory, would go
into the office, not into the shop. He went to Buffalo, New York, to attend
a business college.
The air of Bidwell began to stir with talk of new times. The evil things
said of the new life coming were soon forgotten. The youth and optimistic
spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant,
industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land. The cry, "get on in
the world," that ran all over America at that period and that still echoes
in the pages of American newspapers and magazines, rang in the streets of
Bidwell.
In the harness shop belonging to Joseph Wainsworth it one day struck a
new note. The harness maker was a tradesman of the old school and was
vastly independent. He had learned his trade after five years' service as
apprentice, and had spent an additional five years in going from place to
place as a journeyman workman, and felt that he knew his business. Also he
owned his shop and his home and had twelve hundred dollars in the bank. At
noon one day when he was alone in the shop, Tom Butterworth came in and
told him he had ordered four sets of farm work harness from a factory in
Philadelphia. "I came in to ask if you'll repair them if they get out of
order," he said.
Joe Wainsworth began to fumble with the tools on his bench. Then he turned
to look the farmer in the eye and to do what he later spoke of to his
cronies as "laying down the law." "When the cheap things begin to go to
pieces take them somewhere else to have them repaired," he said sharply. He
grew furiously angry. "Take the damn things to Philadelphia where you got
'em," he shouted at the back of the farmer who had turned to go out of the
shop.
Joe Wainsworth was upset and thought about the incident all the afternoon.
When farmer-customers came in and stood about to talk of their affairs
he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man and his apprentice, Will
Sellinger, son of the Bidwell house painter, was puzzled by his silence.
When the boy and the man were alone in the shop, it was Joe Wainsworth's
custom to talk of his days as a journeyman workman when he had gone from
place to place working at his trade. If a trace were being stitched or a
bridle fashioned, he told how the thing was done at a shop where he had
worked in the city of Boston and in another shop at Providence, Rhode
Island. Getting a piece of paper he made drawings illustrating the cuts of
leather that were made in the other places and the methods of stitching. He
claimed to have worked out his own method for doing things, and that his
method was better than anything he had seen in all his travels. To the
men who came into the shop to loaf during winter afternoons he presented
a smiling front and talked of their affairs, of the price of cabbage in
Cleveland or the effect of a cold snap on the winter wheat, but alone with
the boy, he talked only of harness making. "I don't say anything about it.
What's the good bragging? Just the same, I could learn something to all the
harness makers I've ever seen, and I've seen the best of them," he declared
emphatically.
During the afternoon, after he had heard of the four factory-made work
harnesses brought into what he had always thought of as a trade that
belonged to him by the rights of a first-class workman, Joe remained silent
for two or three hours. He thought of the words of old Judge Hanby and
the constant talk of the new times now coming. Turning suddenly to his
apprentice, who was puzzled by his long silence and who knew nothing of
the incident that had disturbed his employer, he broke forth into words.
He was defiant and expressed his defiance. "Well, then, let 'em go to
Philadelphia, let 'em go any damn place they please," he growled, and
then, as though his own words had re-established his self-respect, he
straightened his shoulders and glared at the puzzled and alarmed boy. "I
know my trade and do not have to bow down to any man," he declared. He
expressed the old tradesman's faith in his craft and the rights it gave the
craftsman. "Learn your trade. Don't listen to talk," he said earnestly.
"The man who knows his trade is a man. He can tell every one to go to the
devil."
CHAPTER IV
Hugh McVey was twenty-three years old when he went to live in Bidwell. The
position of telegraph operator at the Wheeling station a mile north of town
became vacant and, through an accidental encounter with a former resident
of a neighboring town, he got the place.
The Missourian had been at work during the winter in a sawmill in the
country near a northern Indiana town. During the evenings he wandered on
country roads and in the town streets, but he did not talk to any one. As
had happened to him in other places, he had the reputation of being queer.
His clothes were worn threadbare and, although he had money in his pockets,
he did not buy new ones. In the evening when he went through the town
streets and saw the smartly dressed clerks standing before the stores, he
looked at his own shabby person and was ashamed to enter. In his boyhood
Sarah Shepard had always attended to the buying of his clothes, and he made
up his mind that he would go to the place in Michigan to which she and her
husband had retired, and pay her a visit. He wanted Sarah Shepard to buy
him a new outfit of clothes, but wanted also to talk with her.
Out of the three years of going from place to place and working with other
men as a laborer, Hugh had got no big impulse that he felt would mark the
road his life should take; but the study of mathematical problems, taken
up to relieve his loneliness and to cure his inclination to dreams, was
beginning to have an effect on his character. He thought that if he saw
Sarah Shepard again he could talk to her and through her get into the
way of talking to others. In the sawmill where he worked he answered the
occasional remarks made to him by his fellow workers in a slow, hesitating
drawl, and his body was still awkward and his gait shambling, but he did
his work more quickly and accurately. In the presence of his foster-mother
and garbed in new clothes, he believed he could now talk to her in a way
that had been impossible during his youth. She would see the change in his
character and would be encouraged about him. They would get on to a new
basis and he would feel respect for himself in another.
Hugh went to the railroad station to make inquiry regarding the fare to the
Michigan town and there had the adventure that upset his plans. As he stood
at the window of the ticket office, the ticket seller, who was also the
telegraph operator, tried to engage him in conversation. When he had given
the information asked, he followed Hugh out of the building and into the
darkness of a country railroad station at night, and the two men stopped
and stood together beside an empty baggage truck. The ticket agent spoke of
the loneliness of life in the town and said he wished he could go back to
his own place and be again with his own people. "It may not be any better
in my own town, but I know everybody there," he said. He was curious
concerning Hugh as were all the people of the Indiana town, and hoped to
get him into talk in order that he might find out why he walked alone at
night, why he sometimes worked all evening over books and figures in his
room at the country hotel, and why he had so little to say to his fellows.
Hoping to fathom Hugh's silence he abused the town in which they both
lived. "Well," he began, "I guess I understand how you feel. You want to
get out of this place." He explained his own predicament in life. "I got
married," he said. "Already I have three children. Out here a man can make
more money railroading than he can in my state, and living is pretty cheap.
Just to-day I had an offer of a job in a good town near my own place in
Ohio, but I can't take it. The job only pays forty a month. The town's all
right, one of the best in the northern part of the State, but you see the
job's no good. Lord, I wish I could go. I'd like to live again among people
such as live in that part of the country."
The railroad man and Hugh walked along the street that ran from the station
up into the main street of the town. Wanting to meet the advances that had
been made by his companion and not knowing how to go about it, Hugh adopted
the method he had heard his fellow laborers use with one another. "Well,"
he said slowly, "come have a drink."
The two men went into a saloon and stood by the bar. Hugh made a tremendous
effort to overcome his embarrassment. As he and the railroad man drank
foaming glasses of beer he explained that he also had once been a railroad
man and knew telegraphy, but that for several years he had been doing other
work. His companion looked at his shabby clothes and nodded his head. He
made a motion with his head to indicate that he wanted Hugh to come with
him outside into the darkness. "Well, well," he exclaimed, when they had
again got outside and had started along the street toward the station. "I
understand now. They've all been wondering about you and I've heard lots of
talk. I won't say anything, but I'm going to do something for you."
Hugh went to the station with his new-found friend and sat down in the
lighted office. The railroad man got out a sheet of paper and began to
write a letter. "I'm going to get you that job," he said. "I'm writing the
letter now and I'll get it off on the midnight train. You've got to get on
your feet. I was a boozer myself, but I cut it all out. A glass of beer now
and then, that's my limit."
He began to talk of the town in Ohio where he proposed to get Hugh the
job that would set him up in the world and save him from the habit of
drinking, and described it as an earthly paradise in which lived bright,
clear-thinking men and beautiful women. Hugh was reminded sharply of the
talk he had heard from the lips of Sarah Shepard, when in his youth she
spent long evenings telling him of the wonder of her own Michigan and New
England towns and people, and contrasted the life lived there with that
lived by the people of his own place.
Hugh decided not to try to explain away the mistake made by his new
acquaintance, and to accept the offer of assistance in getting the
appointment as telegraph operator.
The two men walked out of the station and stood again in the darkness. The
railroad man felt like one who has been given the privilege of plucking a
human soul out of the darkness of despair. He was full of words that poured
from his lips and he assumed a knowledge of Hugh and his character entirely
unwarranted by the circumstances. "Well," he exclaimed heartily, "you see
I've given you a send-off. I have told them you're a good man and a good
operator, but that you will take the place with its small salary because
you've been sick and just now can't work very hard." The excited man
followed Hugh along the street. It was late and the store lights had been
put out. From one of the town's two saloons that lay in their way arose a
clatter of voices. The old boyhood dream of finding a place and a people
among whom he could, by sitting still and inhaling the air breathed by
others, come into a warm closeness with life, came back to Hugh. He stopped
before the saloon to listen to the voices within, but the railroad man
plucked at his coat sleeve and protested. "Now, now, you're going to cut it
out, eh?" he asked anxiously and then hurriedly explained his anxiety. "Of
course I know what's the matter with you. Didn't I tell you I've been there
myself? You've been working around. I know why that is. You don't have to
tell me. If there wasn't something the matter with him, no man who knows
telegraphy would work in a sawmill.
"Well, there's no good talking about it," he added thoughtfully. "I've
given you a send-off. You're going to cut it out, eh?"
Hugh tried to protest and to explain that he was not addicted to the habit
of drinking, but the Ohio man would not listen. "It's all right," he said
* * * * *
The towns in which Hugh lived during the first three years after he began
his eastward journey were all small places containing a few hundred people,
and were scattered through Illinois, Indiana and western Ohio. All of
the people among whom he worked and lived during that time were farmers
and laborers. In the spring of the first year of his wandering he passed
through the city of Chicago and spent two hours there, going in and out at
the same railroad station.
He was not tempted to become a city man. The huge commercial city at the
foot of Lake Michigan, because of its commanding position in the very
center of a vast farming empire, had already become gigantic. He never
forgot the two hours he spent standing in the station in the heart of the
city and walking in the street adjoining the station. It was evening when
he came into the roaring, clanging place. On the long wide plains west of
the city he saw farmers at work with their spring plowing as the train went
flying along. Presently the farms grew small and the whole prairie dotted
with towns. In these the train did not stop but ran into a crowded network
of streets filled with multitudes of people. When he got into the big dark
station Hugh saw thousands of people rushing about like disturbed insects.
Unnumbered thousands of people were going out of the city at the end of
their day of work and trains waited to take them to towns on the prairies.
They came in droves, hurrying along like distraught cattle, over a bridge
and into the station. The in-bound crowds that had alighted from through
trains coming from cities of the East and West climbed up a stairway to the
street, and those that were out-bound tried to descend by the same stairway
and at the same time. The result was a whirling churning mass of humanity.
Every one pushed and crowded his way along. Men swore, women grew angry,
and children cried. Near the doorway that opened into the street a long
line of cab drivers shouted and roared.
Hugh looked at the people who were whirled along past him, and shivered
with the nameless fear of multitudes, common to country boys in the city.
When the rush of people had a little subsided he went out of the station
and, walking across a narrow street, stood by a brick store building.
Presently the rush of people began again, and again men, women, and boys
came hurrying across the bridge and ran wildly in at the doorway leading
into the station. They came in waves as water washes along a beach during
a storm. Hugh had a feeling that if he were by some chance to get caught
in the crowd he would be swept away into some unknown and terrible place.
Waiting until the rush had a little subsided, he went across the street and
on to the bridge to look at the river that flowed past the station. It was
narrow and filled with ships, and the water looked gray and dirty. A pall
of black smoke covered the sky. From all sides of him and even in the air
above his head a great clatter and roar of bells and whistles went on.
With the air of a child venturing into a dark forest Hugh went a little
way into one of the streets that led westward from the station. Again he
stopped and stood by a building. Near at hand a group of young city roughs
stood smoking and talking before a saloon. Out of a nearby building came a
young girl who approached and spoke to one of them. The man began to swear
furiously. "You tell her I'll come in there in a minute and smash her
face," he said, and, paying no more attention to the girl, turned to stare
at Hugh. All of the young men lounging before the saloon turned to stare at
the tall countryman. They began to laugh and one of them walked quickly
toward him.
Hugh ran along the street and into the station followed by the shouts of
the young roughs. He did not venture out again, and when his train was
ready, got aboard and went gladly out of the great complex dwelling-place
of modern Americans.
Hugh went from town to town always working his way eastward, always seeking
the place where happiness was to come to him and where he was to achieve
companionship with men and women. He cut fence posts in a forest on a large
farm in Indiana, worked in the fields, and in one place was a section hand
on the railroad.
On a farm in Indiana, some forty miles east of Indianapolis, he was for
the first time powerfully touched by the presence of a woman. She was the
daughter of the farmer who was Hugh's employer, and was an alert, handsome
woman of twenty-four who had been a school teacher but had given up the
work because she was about to be married. Hugh thought the man who was to
marry her the most fortunate being in the world. He lived in Indianapolis
and came by train to spend the week-ends at the farm. The woman prepared
for his coming by putting on a white dress and fastening a rose in her
hair. The two people walked about in an orchard beside the house or went
for a ride along the country roads. The young man, who, Hugh had been told,
worked in a bank, wore stiff white collars, a black suit and a black derby
hat.
On the farm Hugh worked in the field with the farmer and ate at table with
his family, but did not get acquainted with them. On Sunday when the young
man came he took the day off and went into a nearby town. The courtship
became a matter very close to him and he lived through the excitement of
the weekly visits as though he had been one of the principals. The daughter
of the house, sensing the fact that the silent farm hand was stirred by
her presence, became interested in him. Sometimes in the evening as he sat
on a little porch before the house, she came to join him, and sat looking
at him with a peculiarly detached and interested air. She tried to make
talk, but Hugh answered all her advances so briefly and with such a half
frightened manner that she gave up the attempt. One Saturday evening when
her sweetheart had come she took him for a ride in the family carriage, and
Hugh concealed himself in the hay loft of the barn to wait for their
return.
Hugh had never seen or heard a man express in any way his affection for a
woman. It seemed to him a terrifically heroic thing to do and he hoped by
concealing himself in the barn to see it done. It was a bright moonlight
night and he waited until nearly eleven o'clock before the lovers returned.
In the hayloft there was an opening high up under the roof. Because of his
great height he could reach and pull himself up, and when he had done so,
found a footing on one of the beams that formed the framework of the barn.
The lovers stood unhitching the horse in the barnyard below. When the city
man had led the horse into the stable he hurried quickly out again and went
with the farmer's daughter along a path toward the house. The two people
laughed and pulled at each other like children. They grew silent and when
they had come near the house, stopped by a tree to embrace. Hugh saw the
man take the woman into his arms and hold her tightly against his body.
He was so excited that he nearly fell off the beam. His imagination was
inflamed and he tried to picture himself in the position of the young
city man. His fingers gripped the boards to which he clung and his body
trembled. The two figures standing in the dim light by the tree became
one. For a long time they clung tightly to each other and then drew apart.
They went into the house and Hugh climbed down from his place on the beam
and lay in the hay. His body shook as with a chill and he was half ill of
jealousy, anger, and an overpowering sense of defeat. It did not seem to
him at the moment that it was worth while for him to go further east or to
try to find a place where he would be able to mingle freely with men and
women, or where such a wonderful thing as had happened to the man in the
barnyard below might happen to him.
Hugh spent the night in the hayloft and at daylight crept out and went into
a nearby town. He returned to the farmhouse late on Monday when he was sure
the city man had gone away. In spite of the protest of the farmer he packed
his clothes at once and declared his intention of leaving. He did not wait
for the evening meal but hurried out of the house. When he got into the
road and had started to walk away, he looked back and saw the daughter of
the house standing at an open door and looking at him. Shame for what he
had done on the night before swept over him. For a moment he stared at
the woman who, with an intense, interested air stared back at him, and
then putting down his head he hurried away. The woman watched him out of
sight and later, when her father stormed about the house, blaming Hugh
for leaving so suddenly and declaring the tall Missourian was no doubt a
drunkard who wanted to go off on a drunk, she had nothing to say. In her
own heart she knew what was the matter with her father's farm hand and was
sorry he had gone before she had more completely exercised her power over
him.
* * * * *
None of the towns Hugh visited during his three years of wandering
approached realization of the sort of life Sarah Shepard had talked to him
about. They were all very much alike. There was a main street with a dozen
stores on each side, a blacksmith shop, and perhaps an elevator for the
storage of grain. All day the town was deserted, but in the evening the
citizens gathered on Main Street. On the sidewalks before the stores young
farm hands and clerks sat on store boxes or on the curbing. They did not
pay any attention to Hugh who, when he went to stand near them, remained
silent and kept himself in the background. The farm hands talked of their
work and boasted of the number of bushels of corn they could pick in a day,
or of their skill in plowing. The clerks were intent upon playing practical
jokes which pleased the farm hands immensely. While one of them talked
loudly of his skill in his work a clerk crept out at the door of one of the
stores and approached him. He held a pin in his hand and with it jabbed
the talker in the back. The crowd yelled and shouted with delight. If the
victim became angry a quarrel started, but this did not often happen. Other
men came to join the party and the joke was told to them. "Well, you should
have seen the look on his face. I thought I would die," one of the
bystanders declared.
Hugh got a job with a carpenter who specialized in the building of barns
and stayed with him all through one fall. Later he went to work as a
section hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like one
compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On all sides
of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life went on that
did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns, inhabited only by
farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was being developed. Men
worked hard but were much in the open air and had time to think. Their
minds reached out toward the solution of the mystery of existence. The
schoolmaster and the country lawyer read Tom Paine's "Age of Reason"
and Bellamy's "Looking Backward." They discussed these books with their
fellows. There was a feeling, ill expressed, that America had something
real and spiritual to offer to the rest of the world. Workmen talked to
each other of the new tricks of their trades, and after hours of discussion
of some new way to cultivate corn, shape a horseshoe or build a barn,
spoke of God and his intent concerning man. Long drawn out discussions of
religious beliefs and the political destiny of America were carried on.
And across the background of these discussions ran tales of action in a
sphere outside the little world in which the inhabitants of the towns
lived. Men who had been in the Civil War and who had climbed fighting over
hills and in the terror of defeat had swum wide rivers, told the tale of
their adventures.
In the evening, after his day of work in the field or on the railroad with
the section hands, Hugh did not know what to do with himself. That he
did not go to bed immediately after the evening meal was due to the fact
that he looked upon his tendency to sleep and to dream as an enemy to his
development; and a peculiarly persistent determination to make something
alive and worth while out of himself--the result of the five years of
constant talking on the subject by the New England woman--had taken
possession of him. "I'll find the right place and the right people and then
I'll begin," he continually said to himself.
And then, worn out with weariness and loneliness, he went to bed in one of
the little hotels or boarding houses where he lived during those years,
and his dreams returned. The dream that had come that night as he lay on
the cliff above the Mississippi River near the town of Burlington, came
back time after time. He sat upright in bed in the darkness of his room
and after he had driven the cloudy, vague sensation out of his brain, was
afraid to go to sleep again. He did not want to disturb the people of the
house and so got up and dressed and without putting on his shoes walked up
and down in the room. Sometimes the room he occupied had a low ceiling and
he was compelled to stoop. He crept out of the house carrying his shoes in
his hand and sat down on the sidewalk to put them on. In all the towns he
visited, people saw him walking alone through the streets late at night
or in the early hours of the morning. Whispers concerning the matter ran
about. The story of what was spoken of as his queerness came to the men
with whom he worked, and they found themselves unable to talk freely and
naturally in his presence. At the noon hour when the men ate the lunch they
had carried to work, when the boss was gone and it was customary among the
workers to talk of their own affairs, they went off by themselves. Hugh
followed them about. They went to sit under a tree, and when Hugh came to
stand nearby, they became silent or the more vulgar and shallow among them
began to show off. While he worked with a half dozen other men as a section
hand on the railroad, two men did all the talking. Whenever the boss went
away an old man who had a reputation as a wit told stories concerning his
relations with women. A young man with red hair took the cue from him. The
two men talked loudly and kept looking at Hugh. The younger of the two
wits turned to another workman who had a weak, timid face. "Well, you," he
cried, "what about your old woman? What about her? Who is the father of
your son? Do you dare tell?"
In the towns Hugh walked about in the evening and tried always to keep his
mind fixed on definite things. He felt that humanity was for some unknown
reason drawing itself away from him, and his mind turned back to the figure
of Sarah Shepard. He remembered that she had never been without things
to do. She scrubbed her kitchen floor and prepared food for cooking;
she washed, ironed, kneaded dough for bread, and mended clothes. In the
evening, when she made the boy read to her out of one of the school books
or do sums on a slate, she kept her hands busy knitting socks for him or
for her husband. Except when something had crossed her so that she scolded
and her face grew red, she was always cheerful. When the boy had nothing to
do at the station and had been sent by the station master to work about the
house, to draw water from the cistern for a family washing, or pull weeds
in the garden, he heard the woman singing as she went about the doing of
her innumerable petty tasks. Hugh decided that he also must do small tasks,
fix his mind upon definite things. In the town where he was employed as
a section hand, the cloud dream in which the world became a whirling,
agitated center of disaster came to him almost every night. Winter came on
and he walked through the streets at night in the darkness and through the
deep snow. He was almost frozen; but as the whole lower part of his body
was habitually cold he did not much mind the added discomfort, and so great
was the reserve of strength in his big frame that the loss of sleep did not
affect his ability to labor all day without effort.
Hugh went into one of the residence streets of the town and counted the
pickets in the fences before the houses. He returned to the hotel and made
a calculation as to the number of pickets in all the fences in town. Then
he got a rule at the hardware store and carefully measured the pickets. He
tried to estimate the number of pickets that could be cut out of certain
sized trees and that gave his mind another opening. He counted the number
of trees in every street in town. He learned to tell at a glance and with
relative accuracy how much lumber could be cut out of a tree. He built
imaginary houses with lumber cut from the trees that lined the streets. He
even tried to figure out a way to utilize the small limbs cut from the tops
of the trees, and one Sunday went into the wood back of the town and cut a
great armful of twigs, which he carried to his room and later with great
patience wove into the form of a basket.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER III
Bidwell, Ohio, was an old town as the ages of towns go in the Central West,
long before Hugh McVey, in his search for a place where he could penetrate
the wall that shut him off from humanity, went there to live and to try
to work out his problem. It is a busy manufacturing town now and has a
population of nearly a hundred thousand people; but the time for the
telling of the story of its sudden and surprising growth has not yet come.
From the beginning Bidwell has been a prosperous place. The town lies in
the valley of a deep, rapid-flowing river that spreads out just above the
town, becomes for the time wide and shallow, and goes singing swiftly along
over stones. South of the town the river not only spreads out, but the
hills recede. A wide flat valley stretches away to the north. In the days
before the factories came the land immediately about town was cut up into
small farms devoted to fruit and berry raising, and beyond the area of
small farms lay larger tracts that were immensely productive and that
raised huge crops of wheat, corn, and cabbage.
When Hugh was a boy sleeping away his days in the grass beside his father's
fishing shack by the Mississippi River, Bidwell had already emerged out of
the hardships of pioneer days. On the farms that lay in the wide valley to
the north the timber had been cut away and the stumps had all been rooted
out of the ground by a generation of men that had passed. The soil was easy
to cultivate and had lost little of its virgin fertility. Two railroads,
the Lake Shore and Michigan Central--later a part of the great New York
Central System--and a less important coal-carrying road, called the
Wheeling and Lake Erie, ran through the town. Twenty-five hundred people
lived then in Bidwell. They were for the most part descendants of the
pioneers who had come into the country by boat through the Great Lakes or
by wagon roads over the mountains from the States of New York and
Pennsylvania.
The town stood on a sloping incline running up from the river, and the Lake
Shore and Michigan Central Railroad had its station on the river bank at
the foot of Main Street. The Wheeling Station was a mile away to the north.
It was to be reached by going over a bridge and along a piked road that
even then had begun to take on the semblance of a street. A dozen houses
had been built facing Turner's Pike and between these were berry fields and
an occasional orchard planted to cherry, peach or apple trees. A hard path
went down to the distant station beside the road, and in the evening this
path, wandering along under the branches of the fruit trees that extended
out over the farm fences, was a favorite walking place for lovers.
The small farms lying close about the town of Bidwell raised berries that
brought top prices in the two cities, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, reached by
its two railroads, and all of the people of the town who were not engaged
in one of the trades--in shoe making, carpentry, horse shoeing, house
painting or the like--or who did not belong to the small merchant and
professional classes, worked in summer on the land. On summer mornings,
men, women and children went into the fields. In the early spring when
planting went on and all through late May, June and early July when berries
and fruit began to ripen, every one was rushed with work and the streets
of the town were deserted. Every one went to the fields. Great hay wagons
loaded with children, laughing girls, and sedate women set out from Main
Street at dawn. Beside them walked tall boys, who pelted the girls with
green apples and cherries from the trees along the road, and men who went
along behind smoking their morning pipes and talking of the prevailing
prices of the products of their fields. In the town after they had gone a
Sabbath quiet prevailed. The merchants and clerks loitered in the shade of
the awnings before the doors of the stores, and only their wives and the
wives of the two or three rich men in town came to buy and to disturb their
discussions of horse racing, politics and religion.
In the evening when the wagons came home, Bidwell awoke. The tired berry
pickers walked home from the fields in the dust of the roads swinging their
dinner pails. The wagons creaked at their heels, piled high with boxes of
berries ready for shipment. In the stores after the evening meal crowds
gathered. Old men lit their pipes and sat gossiping along the curbing at
the edge of the sidewalks on Main Street; women with baskets on their arms
did the marketing for the next day's living; the young men put on stiff
white collars and their Sunday clothes, and girls, who all day had been
crawling over the fields between the rows of berries or pushing their way
among the tangled masses of raspberry bushes, put on white dresses and
walked up and down before the men. Friendships begun between boys and girls
in the fields ripened into love. Couples walked along residence streets
under the trees and talked with subdued voices. They became silent and
embarrassed. The bolder ones kissed. The end of the berry picking season
brought each year a new outbreak of marriages to the town of Bidwell.
In all the towns of mid-western America it was a time of waiting. The
country having been cleared and the Indians driven away into a vast distant
place spoken of vaguely as the West, the Civil War having been fought and
won, and there being no great national problems that touched closely their
lives, the minds of men were turned in upon themselves. The soul and its
destiny was spoken of openly on the streets. Robert Ingersoll came to
Bidwell to speak in Terry's Hall, and after he had gone the question of
the divinity of Christ for months occupied the minds of the citizens. The
ministers preached sermons on the subject and in the evening it was talked
about in the stores. Every one had something to say. Even Charley Mook, who
dug ditches, who stuttered so that not a half dozen people in town could
understand him, expressed his opinion.
In all the great Mississippi Valley each town came to have a character of
its own, and the people who lived in the towns were to each other like
members of a great family. The individual idiosyncrasies of each member of
the great family stood forth. A kind of invisible roof beneath which every
one lived spread itself over each town. Beneath the roof boys and girls
were born, grew up, quarreled, fought, and formed friendships with their
fellows, were introduced into the mysteries of love, married, and became
the fathers and mothers of children, grew old, sickened, and died.
Within the invisible circle and under the great roof every one knew his
neighbor and was known to him. Strangers did not come and go swiftly and
mysteriously and there was no constant and confusing roar of machinery and
of new projects afoot. For the moment mankind seemed about to take time to
try to understand itself.
In Bidwell there was a man named Peter White who was a tailor and worked
hard at his trade, but who once or twice a year got drunk and beat his
wife. He was arrested each time and had to pay a fine, but there was a
general understanding of the impulse that led to the beating. Most of the
women knowing the wife sympathized with Peter. "She is a noisy thing and
her jaw is never still," the wife of Henry Teeters, the grocer, said to her
husband. "If he gets drunk it's only to forget he's married to her. Then
he goes home to sleep it off and she begins jawing at him. He stands it as
long as he can. It takes a fist to shut up that woman. If he strikes her
it's the only thing he can do."
Allie Mulberry the half-wit was one of the highlights of life in the town.
He lived with his mother in a tumble-down house at the edge of town on
Medina Road. Beside being a half-wit he had something the matter with his
legs. They were trembling and weak and he could only move them with great
difficulty. On summer afternoons when the streets were deserted, he hobbled
along Main Street with his lower jaw hanging down. Allie carried a large
club, partly for the support of his weak legs and partly to scare off dogs
and mischievous boys. He liked to sit in the shade with his back against a
building and whittle, and he liked to be near people and have his talent as
a whittler appreciated. He made fans out of pieces of pine, long chains of
wooden beads, and he once achieved a singular mechanical triumph that won
him wide renown. He made a ship that would float in a beer bottle half
filled with water and laid on its side. The ship had sails and three tiny
wooden sailors who stood at attention with their hands to their caps in
salute. After it was constructed and put into the bottle it was too large
to be taken out through the neck. How Allie got it in no one ever knew. The
clerks and merchants who crowded about to watch him at work discussed the
matter for days. It became a never-ending wonder among them. In the evening
they spoke of the matter to the berry pickers who came into the stores,
and in the eyes of the people of Bidwell Allie Mulberry became a hero. The
bottle, half-filled with water and securely corked, was laid on a cushion
in the window of Hunter's Jewelry Store. As it floated about on its own
little ocean crowds gathered to look at it. Over the bottle was a sign with
the words--"Carved by Allie Mulberry of Bidwell"--prominently displayed.
Below these words a query had been printed. "How Did He Get It Into The
Bottle?" was the question asked. The bottle stayed in the window for months
and merchants took the traveling men who visited them, to see it. Then they
escorted their guests to where Allie, with his back against the wall of a
building and his club beside him, was at work on some new creation of the
whittler's art. The travelers were impressed and told the tale abroad.
Allie's fame spread to other towns. "He has a good brain," the citizen of
Bidwell said, shaking his head. "He don't appear to know very much, but
look what he does! He must be carrying all sorts of notions around inside
of his head."
Jane Orange, widow of a lawyer, and with the single exception of Thomas
Butterworth, a farmer who owned over a thousand acres of land and lived
with his daughter on a farm a mile south of town, the richest person in
town, was known to every one in Bidwell, but was not liked. She was called
stingy and it was said that she and her husband had cheated every one with
whom they had dealings in order to get their start in life. The town ached
for the privilege of doing what they called "bringing them down a peg."
Jane's husband had once been the Bidwell town attorney and later had
charge of the settlement of an estate belonging to Ed Lucas, a farmer who
died leaving two hundred acres of land and two daughters. The farmer's
daughters, every one said, "came out at the small end of the horn," and
John Orange began to grow rich. It was said he was worth fifty thousand
dollars. All during the latter part of his life the lawyer went to the city
of Cleveland on business every week, and when he was at home and even in
the hottest weather he went about dressed in a long black coat. When she
went to the stores to buy supplies for her house Jane Orange was watched
closely by the merchants. She was suspected of carrying away small articles
that could be slipped into the pockets of her dress. One afternoon in
Toddmore's grocery, when she thought no one was looking, she took a half
dozen eggs out of a basket and looking quickly around to be sure she was
unobserved, put them into her dress pocket. Harry Toddmore, the grocer's
son who had seen the theft, said nothing, but went unobserved out at the
back door. He got three or four clerks from other stores and they waited
for Jane Orange at a corner. When she came along they hurried out and Harry
Toddmore fell against her. Throwing out his hand he struck the pocket
containing the eggs a quick, sharp blow. Jane Orange turned and hurried
away toward home, but as she half ran through Main Street clerks and
merchants came out of the stores, and from the assembled crowd a voice
called attention to the fact that the contents of the stolen eggs having
run down the inside of her dress and over her stockings began to make a
stream on the sidewalk. A pack of town dogs excited by the shouts of the
crowd ran at her heels, barking and sniffing at the yellow stream that
dripped from her shoes.
An old man with a long white beard came to Bidwell to live. He had been a
carpet-bag Governor of a southern state in the reconstruction days after
the Civil War and had made money. He bought a house on Turner's Pike close
beside the river and spent his days puttering about in a small garden. In
the evening he came across the bridge into Main Street and went to loaf in
Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked with great frankness and candor of his
life in the South during the terrible time when the country was trying to
emerge from the black gloom of defeat, and brought to the Bidwell men a new
point of view on their old enemies, the "Rebs."
The old man--the name by which he had introduced himself in Bidwell was
that of Judge Horace Hanby--believed in the manliness and honesty of
purpose of the men he had for a time governed and who had fought a long
grim war with the North, with the New Englanders and sons of New Englanders
from the West and Northwest. "They're all right," he said with a grin. "I
cheated them and made some money, but I liked them. Once a crowd of them
came to my house and threatened to kill me and I told them that I did not
blame them very much, so they let me alone." The judge, an ex-politician
from the city of New York who had been involved in some affair that made it
uncomfortable for him to return to live in that city, grew prophetic and
philosophic after he came to live in Bidwell. In spite of the doubt every
one felt concerning his past, he was something of a scholar and a reader of
books, and won respect by his apparent wisdom. "Well, there's going to be a
new war here," he said. "It won't be like the Civil War, just shooting off
guns and killing peoples' bodies. At first it's going to be a war between
individuals to see to what class a man must belong; then it is going to be
a long, silent war between classes, between those who have and those who
can't get. It'll be the worst war of all."
The talk of Judge Hanby, carried along and elaborated almost every evening
before a silent, attentive group in the drug store, began to have an
influence on the minds of Bidwell young men. At his suggestion several
of the town boys, Cliff Bacon, Albert Small, Ed Prawl, and two or three
others, began to save money for the purpose of going east to college. Also
at his suggestion Tom Butterworth the rich farmer sent his daughter away to
school. The old man made many prophecies concerning what would happen in
America. "I tell you, the country isn't going to stay as it is," he said
earnestly. "In eastern towns the change has already come. Factories are
being built and every one is going to work in the factories. It takes an
old man like me to see how that changes their lives. Some of the men stand
at one bench and do one thing not only for hours but for days and years.
There are signs hung up saying they mustn't talk. Some of them make more
money than they did before the factories came, but I tell you it's like
being in prison. What would you say if I told you all America, all you
fellows who talk so big about freedom, are going to be put in a prison, eh?
"And there's something else. In New York there are already a dozen men who
are worth a million dollars. Yes, sir, I tell you it's true, a million
dollars. What do you think of that, eh?"
Judge Hanby grew excited and, inspired by the absorbed attention of his
audience, talked of the sweep of events. In England, he explained, the
cities were constantly growing larger, and already almost every one either
worked in a factory or owned stock in a factory. "In New England it is
getting the same way fast," he explained. "The same thing'll happen here.
Farming'll be done with tools. Almost everything now done by hand'll be
done by machinery. Some'll grow rich and some poor. The thing is to get
educated, yes, sir, that's the thing, to get ready for what's coming. It's
the only way. The younger generation has got to be sharper and shrewder."
The words of the old man, who had been in many places and had seen men and
cities, were repeated in the streets of Bidwell. The blacksmith and the
wheelwright repeated his words when they stopped to exchange news of their
affairs before the post-office. Ben Peeler, the carpenter, who had been
saving money to buy a house and a small farm to which he could retire when
he became too old to climb about on the framework of buildings, used the
money instead to send his son to Cleveland to a new technical school. Steve
Hunter, the son of Abraham Hunter the Bidwell jeweler, declared that he was
going to get up with the times, and when he went into a factory, would go
into the office, not into the shop. He went to Buffalo, New York, to attend
a business college.
The air of Bidwell began to stir with talk of new times. The evil things
said of the new life coming were soon forgotten. The youth and optimistic
spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant,
industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land. The cry, "get on in
the world," that ran all over America at that period and that still echoes
in the pages of American newspapers and magazines, rang in the streets of
Bidwell.
In the harness shop belonging to Joseph Wainsworth it one day struck a
new note. The harness maker was a tradesman of the old school and was
vastly independent. He had learned his trade after five years' service as
apprentice, and had spent an additional five years in going from place to
place as a journeyman workman, and felt that he knew his business. Also he
owned his shop and his home and had twelve hundred dollars in the bank. At
noon one day when he was alone in the shop, Tom Butterworth came in and
told him he had ordered four sets of farm work harness from a factory in
Philadelphia. "I came in to ask if you'll repair them if they get out of
order," he said.
Joe Wainsworth began to fumble with the tools on his bench. Then he turned
to look the farmer in the eye and to do what he later spoke of to his
cronies as "laying down the law." "When the cheap things begin to go to
pieces take them somewhere else to have them repaired," he said sharply. He
grew furiously angry. "Take the damn things to Philadelphia where you got
'em," he shouted at the back of the farmer who had turned to go out of the
shop.
Joe Wainsworth was upset and thought about the incident all the afternoon.
When farmer-customers came in and stood about to talk of their affairs
he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man and his apprentice, Will
Sellinger, son of the Bidwell house painter, was puzzled by his silence.
When the boy and the man were alone in the shop, it was Joe Wainsworth's
custom to talk of his days as a journeyman workman when he had gone from
place to place working at his trade. If a trace were being stitched or a
bridle fashioned, he told how the thing was done at a shop where he had
worked in the city of Boston and in another shop at Providence, Rhode
Island. Getting a piece of paper he made drawings illustrating the cuts of
leather that were made in the other places and the methods of stitching. He
claimed to have worked out his own method for doing things, and that his
method was better than anything he had seen in all his travels. To the
men who came into the shop to loaf during winter afternoons he presented
a smiling front and talked of their affairs, of the price of cabbage in
Cleveland or the effect of a cold snap on the winter wheat, but alone with
the boy, he talked only of harness making. "I don't say anything about it.
What's the good bragging? Just the same, I could learn something to all the
harness makers I've ever seen, and I've seen the best of them," he declared
emphatically.
During the afternoon, after he had heard of the four factory-made work
harnesses brought into what he had always thought of as a trade that
belonged to him by the rights of a first-class workman, Joe remained silent
for two or three hours. He thought of the words of old Judge Hanby and
the constant talk of the new times now coming. Turning suddenly to his
apprentice, who was puzzled by his long silence and who knew nothing of
the incident that had disturbed his employer, he broke forth into words.
He was defiant and expressed his defiance. "Well, then, let 'em go to
Philadelphia, let 'em go any damn place they please," he growled, and
then, as though his own words had re-established his self-respect, he
straightened his shoulders and glared at the puzzled and alarmed boy. "I
know my trade and do not have to bow down to any man," he declared. He
expressed the old tradesman's faith in his craft and the rights it gave the
craftsman. "Learn your trade. Don't listen to talk," he said earnestly.
"The man who knows his trade is a man. He can tell every one to go to the
devil."
CHAPTER IV
Hugh McVey was twenty-three years old when he went to live in Bidwell. The
position of telegraph operator at the Wheeling station a mile north of town
became vacant and, through an accidental encounter with a former resident
of a neighboring town, he got the place.
The Missourian had been at work during the winter in a sawmill in the
country near a northern Indiana town. During the evenings he wandered on
country roads and in the town streets, but he did not talk to any one. As
had happened to him in other places, he had the reputation of being queer.
His clothes were worn threadbare and, although he had money in his pockets,
he did not buy new ones. In the evening when he went through the town
streets and saw the smartly dressed clerks standing before the stores, he
looked at his own shabby person and was ashamed to enter. In his boyhood
Sarah Shepard had always attended to the buying of his clothes, and he made
up his mind that he would go to the place in Michigan to which she and her
husband had retired, and pay her a visit. He wanted Sarah Shepard to buy
him a new outfit of clothes, but wanted also to talk with her.
Out of the three years of going from place to place and working with other
men as a laborer, Hugh had got no big impulse that he felt would mark the
road his life should take; but the study of mathematical problems, taken
up to relieve his loneliness and to cure his inclination to dreams, was
beginning to have an effect on his character. He thought that if he saw
Sarah Shepard again he could talk to her and through her get into the
way of talking to others. In the sawmill where he worked he answered the
occasional remarks made to him by his fellow workers in a slow, hesitating
drawl, and his body was still awkward and his gait shambling, but he did
his work more quickly and accurately. In the presence of his foster-mother
and garbed in new clothes, he believed he could now talk to her in a way
that had been impossible during his youth. She would see the change in his
character and would be encouraged about him. They would get on to a new
basis and he would feel respect for himself in another.
Hugh went to the railroad station to make inquiry regarding the fare to the
Michigan town and there had the adventure that upset his plans. As he stood
at the window of the ticket office, the ticket seller, who was also the
telegraph operator, tried to engage him in conversation. When he had given
the information asked, he followed Hugh out of the building and into the
darkness of a country railroad station at night, and the two men stopped
and stood together beside an empty baggage truck. The ticket agent spoke of
the loneliness of life in the town and said he wished he could go back to
his own place and be again with his own people. "It may not be any better
in my own town, but I know everybody there," he said. He was curious
concerning Hugh as were all the people of the Indiana town, and hoped to
get him into talk in order that he might find out why he walked alone at
night, why he sometimes worked all evening over books and figures in his
room at the country hotel, and why he had so little to say to his fellows.
Hoping to fathom Hugh's silence he abused the town in which they both
lived. "Well," he began, "I guess I understand how you feel. You want to
get out of this place." He explained his own predicament in life. "I got
married," he said. "Already I have three children. Out here a man can make
more money railroading than he can in my state, and living is pretty cheap.
Just to-day I had an offer of a job in a good town near my own place in
Ohio, but I can't take it. The job only pays forty a month. The town's all
right, one of the best in the northern part of the State, but you see the
job's no good. Lord, I wish I could go. I'd like to live again among people
such as live in that part of the country."
The railroad man and Hugh walked along the street that ran from the station
up into the main street of the town. Wanting to meet the advances that had
been made by his companion and not knowing how to go about it, Hugh adopted
the method he had heard his fellow laborers use with one another. "Well,"
he said slowly, "come have a drink."
The two men went into a saloon and stood by the bar. Hugh made a tremendous
effort to overcome his embarrassment. As he and the railroad man drank
foaming glasses of beer he explained that he also had once been a railroad
man and knew telegraphy, but that for several years he had been doing other
work. His companion looked at his shabby clothes and nodded his head. He
made a motion with his head to indicate that he wanted Hugh to come with
him outside into the darkness. "Well, well," he exclaimed, when they had
again got outside and had started along the street toward the station. "I
understand now. They've all been wondering about you and I've heard lots of
talk. I won't say anything, but I'm going to do something for you."
Hugh went to the station with his new-found friend and sat down in the
lighted office. The railroad man got out a sheet of paper and began to
write a letter. "I'm going to get you that job," he said. "I'm writing the
letter now and I'll get it off on the midnight train. You've got to get on
your feet. I was a boozer myself, but I cut it all out. A glass of beer now
and then, that's my limit."
He began to talk of the town in Ohio where he proposed to get Hugh the
job that would set him up in the world and save him from the habit of
drinking, and described it as an earthly paradise in which lived bright,
clear-thinking men and beautiful women. Hugh was reminded sharply of the
talk he had heard from the lips of Sarah Shepard, when in his youth she
spent long evenings telling him of the wonder of her own Michigan and New
England towns and people, and contrasted the life lived there with that
lived by the people of his own place.
Hugh decided not to try to explain away the mistake made by his new
acquaintance, and to accept the offer of assistance in getting the
appointment as telegraph operator.
The two men walked out of the station and stood again in the darkness. The
railroad man felt like one who has been given the privilege of plucking a
human soul out of the darkness of despair. He was full of words that poured
from his lips and he assumed a knowledge of Hugh and his character entirely
unwarranted by the circumstances. "Well," he exclaimed heartily, "you see
I've given you a send-off. I have told them you're a good man and a good
operator, but that you will take the place with its small salary because
you've been sick and just now can't work very hard." The excited man
followed Hugh along the street. It was late and the store lights had been
put out. From one of the town's two saloons that lay in their way arose a
clatter of voices. The old boyhood dream of finding a place and a people
among whom he could, by sitting still and inhaling the air breathed by
others, come into a warm closeness with life, came back to Hugh. He stopped
before the saloon to listen to the voices within, but the railroad man
plucked at his coat sleeve and protested. "Now, now, you're going to cut it
out, eh?" he asked anxiously and then hurriedly explained his anxiety. "Of
course I know what's the matter with you. Didn't I tell you I've been there
myself? You've been working around. I know why that is. You don't have to
tell me. If there wasn't something the matter with him, no man who knows
telegraphy would work in a sawmill.
"Well, there's no good talking about it," he added thoughtfully. "I've
given you a send-off. You're going to cut it out, eh?"
Hugh tried to protest and to explain that he was not addicted to the habit
of drinking, but the Ohio man would not listen. "It's all right," he said