and, as my father pointed out, we seldom say, “I am happy!” though we often look back and say, “I was happy then.”
The happy world I lived in as a boy enjoyed the earlier years of a long period of peace for our country, and an enlightened civilization was advancing without having yet become elaborately mechanized. We could have got along pretty well, indeed, without any machinery at all, unless such things as a pump handle, a water-turned mill wheel, or the blade of a plow are to be called machinery. So far as machinery was concerned, my four grandparents, heartily alive throughout my boyhood, had grown up in a world that was almost the same as that of Julius Caesar. In their youth, ships could better sail into the wind than Roman ships could, and of course there was gunpowder; but virtually they lived in machineless country and were the sturdier and happier for the self-reliance and consequent independence of life and thought thus granted them.
I was not quite so fortunate. In my childhood, telegraph poles increasingly defaced the landscape, and on the new railroads we could go to almost any part of the country without changing cars at every junction. When I was eleven, the telephone here and there began to be in use—most likely between a mill in the country and its office in town—but abject dependence upon machinery hadn’t arrived, nor, all in all, had the complete change from the youthful life of my grandparents. How dizzied we’d all have been could we have looked forward accurately into this age of then unbelievable machines and incredible speeds—and, despite my father’s queer idea, with how crazy an optimism we’d have guessed what the effect of the machines and the speeds would be!
Crisis at Greencastle
At eleven, however, my real concern with the future being for the immediate one, I was little more altruistic about it than I’d been in my infancy; the self-centeredness of a boy is almost equal to a baby’s. Yet at this period I had two sharp anxieties about the health of two grown-up persons, one of whom I’d never seen. The other one was my Uncle George Ames.
I didn’t know Uncle George very well—he was my mother’s sister’s husband—and I was aware of him only as a handsome, gray-bearded, religious-looking man whom I didn’t see often, as he lived forty miles away at Greencastle. Nevertheless, that summer, when I heard that Uncle George was dangerously ill, I began to worry about him acutely because Adam Forepaugh’s Mammoth Circus was approaching Indianapolis and I thought that if anything very bad happened to Uncle George it was almost sure to interfere. I had a nervous week; every day the circus got nearer and Uncle George got worse.
The circus was for Saturday, and on Friday morning a telegram came; Uncle George had died. My father understood what I felt, and on Saturday after lunch, without saying anything about it to my mother, took me to the circus anyhow. I wondered a little if he was doing quite right by Uncle George; but I trusted him to know best and had a glorious afternoon. At the very entrance to the circus my father introduced me to Adam Forepaugh himself—he looked a little like Uncle George, I thought—and I had a full sack of popcorn to look at the animals with. We sat in splendid reserved seats with backs to them and even stayed for the concert after the Grand Performance.
At the concert I was transported when a little girl and a boy in white knee breeches appeared upon the distant platform, singing and dancing in a golden light. I paid no attention to the boy, the little girl so stirred me. I knew that the ballet-skirted bareback riders I’d seen flying through hoops were not little girls—they were specialized and sexless creatures, pretty but not recognizable as human beings exactly—but this little girl with the spangled knee-length pink dress, the jumping amber curls upon her shoulders, and the twinkling slippers that clinked and tinkled as she danced, seemed to me a transfigured sample of what one might actually meet at a children’s party—a children’s party almost in fairyland perhaps. For me to imagine her as probably nearer thirty than eleven was beyond the range of thought. The sparkling little dress exposed her pink silk legs, and female human legs weren’t visible or even known about except when they belonged to little girls.
Grown-up ladies who walked as if they didn’t have any were thought the most graceful, and I seldom saw even their whole feet. I’d had what I thought was an argument about legs with a schoolmate, a boy who told me one day that in older circles legs were highly regarded. I scoffed at him, but he maintained his point. “Grown-up men think a whole lot about legs,” he insisted. “It’s why they get in love and get married.”
I laughed at him loudly. “They do not!”
“They do, too!” He was of German parentage and obstinate. “Men like fat legs. They’ve got to be fat or they won’t pay any attention. The bigger women’s legs are, the worse the men want to marry ’em. My Cousin Emil got married to Cousin Gertrude because she’s got the biggest legs in Indianapolis.”
“Then he’s crazy,” I said. “And so are you. Men marry somebody they think’s got a pretty face. They don’t get married on account of legs or elbows or knuckles or anything like that; and even if they wanted to, how could they tell what kind of legs they are?”
“That’s easy,” Albert informed me. “When they’re getting in a streetcar or a buggy or something they can see whether they’re big or not. Then if they’re big enough they get married to them.”
I didn’t want to get married to the beautiful little girl dancing and singing enchantingly upon the circus concert platform; the exposure of her legs only proved that she truly was a little girl, and the charms that tingled into my heart from her were her flopping curls, her brilliant rose-and-white complexion, her clicky slippers, and the piercing silver voice with which she sang, “Oh, I’m happy, yes, as happy as can be!”
Almost all of the little girls I knew roused in me a feeling of annoyance, particularly those in my sister’s Sunday-school class when she had them come to our house for games and cake and lemonade. I was so bitter with them that once when one of them triumphed in argument with me by throwing my new straw hat over the fence, and I could obtain no redress from either my sister or my mother, I decided to run away from home—and did, for as much as two hours. This song-and-dance little girl, transcendently different, sweet, and glittering, was a beautiful revelation. I had dazzling fancies. Sometime, somehow, in a world apart, maybe she would perpetually sing and dance and I would forever look and listen.
Tribal Experience
On the train to Greencastle, next day, with my mother, I heard the car wheels clicking “Oh, I’m happy, yes, as happy as can be!” and amber curls ethereally bounced on spangled pink shoulders in my mind’s beglamoured eye; but when we arrived at Uncle George’s house and saw the solemn crape upon the front door, I was all interest in the tribal experience for the first time awaiting me. Figures in black moved hushedly about the house; the smell of tuberoses was powerful, and in the parlor there was Uncle George, stately, in his open coffin, waiting for his funeral on the morrow.
My mother was taken upstairs to my widowed aunt and her daughters; I was left alone—and presently, for a few moments, alone with Uncle George. I looked at him earnestly and became aware that he was not there; that the figure in the coffin was not a person at all. Out of curiosity, and with no other feeling whatever, I touched the chill forehead and at once found my investigative forefinger distasteful. Then, as people in black came softly into the room, whispering appropriate lamentations, I stepped out of the side door and into the big sunshiny yard.
There was an orchard behind the house, and, walking slowly with my head bent in imitation of the people I’d seen indoors, I went to stand mournfully beneath the apple trees. I looked as sorrowful as I possibly could, in case anybody should glance from a window; and I was startled when my Cousin George, Uncle George’s son, not long out of college, came briskly from the house and called in a cheerful voice, “Hello! How’s young Boothie?”
I’d heard that he and his father had never been very
