right that he should go on with his living. He as you shall hear in the history of him, does not really belong to the adolescent metallic world around him, and yet there was not that vital steadfast singularity inside him that custom passion and a feel for mother earth can breed in men. He did not have it really for him, custom, passion, certainty of place and means of living, stability within himself and around him, a feeling to be really free inside him and strong to be singular in his clothes and in his ways of living.
But now to make again a beginning, to tell of the father David Hersland and the ways he had in him to make himself strong and important inside to him and to prove the right way to educate his children and the singularities the old world had stamped on him.
David Hersland believed in hardening his children. He believed that everyone should make for himself his own beginning, that every one should win for himself his own freedom. This was always strong inside him with all the uncertain ways that he had in him, with all the strong starts and sudden changes in his way of educating the three children who had such different ways in them from the things he meant to give them.
Mostly at first they the children felt this in him in the ways they were ashamed of him in just the simple ways he had of doing in the ordinary every day living.
It is hard on children when the father has queer ways in him. Even when they love him they can never keep themselves from having shame inside them when all the people are looking and wondering and laughing and giving him a name for the queer ways of him.
Mr. Hersland as I have been often saying was in some ways a splendid kind of person, and that was one way one could look at him. In other ways he was an uncertain changeful angry irritable kind of a person with a strong feeling of being important to himself inside him and not always certain to make other men see why he had so much important feeling in him. And then one could think of him, as children when they were young girls and boys felt him, queer in the ways he had of doing things that made them feel a little ashamed to say he was a father to them when other children spoke about him.
These are some of the queer ways he had in him, the ways that made his children feel uncomfortable beside him. They were mostly just simple things in their ordinary living that gave his children this uncomfortable feeling for him.
David Hersland was a big man. He was big in the size of him and in his way of thinking. His eyes were brown and little and sharp and piercing and sometimes dancing with laughing and often angry with irritation. His hands would be quiet a long time and then impatient in their moving. His hair was grey now, his eyebrows long and rough and they could give his eyes a very angry way of looking, and yet one could love him, in a way one was not afraid of him. He never would go so far as his irritation seemed to drive him, and somehow one always knew that of him. He had not so much terror for his children as fathers with more kindness and more steadfast ways of doing. One always had a kind of feeling that what one needed to protect one from him was to stand up strongly against him. He would stop short of where he seemed to be going, anger was there but it would not force him on to the final end of angry acting. All one had to do was to say then to him "Alright but I've got a good right to my opinion. You started us in this way of doing, you have no right to change now and say that its no way for us to be acting." And so each one of the three children, Martha, Alfred and David would each in their own way resist him, and it made a household where there was much fierce talking and much frowning, and then the father would end with pounding on the table and threatening and saying that he was the father they were the children, he was the master, they must obey else he would know the way to make them. And the little unimportant mother would be all lost then in between the angry father and the three big resentful children. But all this was when they were beginning to be grown young men and women. When they were still children there was not any fierceness in the house among them.
And now to come back to the queer ways of him. As I was saying the father was a big man. He liked eating, he liked strange ways of educating his children and he was always changing, and sometimes he was very generous to them and then he would change toward them and it would be hard for them to get even little things that they needed in the position that was given to them by their father's fortune and large way of living.
In the street in his walking, and it was then his children were a little ashamed of him, he always had his hat back on his head so that it always looked as if it were falling, and he would march on, he was a big man and loved walking, with two or three of his children following behind him or with one beside him, and he always forgetting all about them, and everybody would stop short to look at him, accustomed as they were to see him, for he had a way of tossing his head to get freedom and a way of muttering to himself in his thinking and he had always a movement of throwing his body and his shoulders from side to side as he was arguing to himself about things he wanted to be changing, and always he had the important feeling to himself inside him.
And then as I was saying he was a big man and he was very fond of eating, he had had a brother who had died a glutton, and he liked to buy things that looked good to him, and it would always be a very big one, he never liked to undertake anything that was not large in its beginning. The only time in his life that he ever took a little thing was when he chose his wife the little gentle Fanny Hissen who as I have often been saying could only be sad not angry when any bad thing happened to them, but yet she had a fierce little temper in her that could be very stubborn when it was well roused inside her and she sometimes had such a sharp angry feeling at some of the ways her husband had of doing, mostly when it concerned his not giving things she thought they needed to the children. But mostly they lived very well together the father and mother and three children, that is when they were young children, later it was harder for them when the father would get his very angry feeling and the mother was a little ailing and the fierce little temper broke into weakness and helplessness inside her and the three big struggling young grown men and women were seeking each one his own freedom and his own beginning. But now as children it was just the little uncomfortable feeling of being ashamed of the queer ways he had of doing that his children had to endure with him, then he was joyous and it was mostly pleasant enough living with him, and the mother was gentle and pleasant then with them and strong enough to support her little temper that could be very stubborn whenever it arose against him.
But even when he was not doing really queer things there was always a marked character about him. It came from inside him, from the strong ways he had of beginning, from the important feeling he had always inside him from his continual thinking and in a different way from that in which all the other people around about him were thinking, and this thinking somehow marked him even when he was just simply walking and then stopping to talk with somebody or just stopping to ask a question of some stranger or to talk about the weather or other just ordinary enough talking, the kind of thing anybody could be saying, and yet the power of being free inside him made him a marked man even then, and nobody could take him to be an ordinary person or ever forget him.
As he would be walking along with a child beside him or several of them behind him, he would stop and sweep the prospect with his cane and begin talking and somebody near him would come to listen. It was just ordinary talking that he would be doing, about the weather or the country or the fruit and it did not seem to have any deep meaning but it was the power and completeness of the identification of this big man with all creation that forced people to think of him. This man was big as all the world in his beginning, it was nothing in him even if he did not always keep going, he had been as big as all the world once in his feeling and that he never could lose with him.
And so he would stand talking and the unhappy uncomfortable child beside him would keep saying, when he was not afraid to break in on him, "Come on papa all those people are looking."
"What!" the father was not listening to him but would keep right on with his talking. The child as much as he dared would twitch or pull at him, "What!" but the father never really heard him and he would go on with the queer ways in him. Slowly his children learned endurance of him. Later in their life they were queer too like him.
Often
