David came to see us several times during the spring and his talk was all about "going west." He was restless under the conditions of his life on a farm. I don't know why this was so, but a growing bitterness clouded his voice. Once I heard him say, "I don't know what use I am in the world. I am a failure." This was the first note of doubt, of discouragement that I had heard from any member of my family and it made a deep impression on me. Disillusionment had begun.
During the early part of the summer my brother and I worked in the garden with frequent days off for fishing, swimming and berrying, and we were entirely content with life. No doubts assailed us. We swam in the pond at Rice's Mill and we cast our hooks in the sunny ripples below it. We saw the circus come to town and go into camp on a vacant lot, and we attended every movement of it with a delicious sense of leisure. We could go at night with no long ride to take after it was over.—The fourth of July came to seek us this year and we had but to step across the way to see a ball-game. We were at last in the center of our world.
In June my father called me to help in the elevator and this turned out to be a most informing experience. "The Street," as it was called, was merely a wagon road which ran along in front of a row of wheat ware-houses of various shapes and sizes, from which the buyers emerged to meet the farmers as they drove into town. Two or three or more of the men would clamber upon the load, open the sacks, sample the grain and bid for it. If one man wanted the load badly, or if he chanced to be in a bad temper, the farmer was the gainer. Hence very few of them, even the members of the Grange, were content to drive up to my father's elevator and take the honest market price. They were all hoping to get a little more than the market price.
This vexed and embittered my father who often spoke of it to me. "It only shows," he said, "how hard it will be to work out any reform among the farmers. They will never stand together. These other buyers will force me off the market and then there will be no one here to represent the farmers' interest."
These merchants interested me greatly. Humorous, self-contained, remorseless in trade, they were most delightful companions when off duty. They liked my father in his private capacity, but as a factor of the Grange he was an enemy. Their kind was new to me and I loved to linger about and listen to their banter when there was nothing else to do.
One of them by reason of his tailor-made suit and a large ring on his little finger, was especially attractive to me. He was a handsome man of a sinister type, and I regarded his expressionless face as that of a gambler. I didn't know that he was a poker player but it amused me to think so. Another buyer was a choleric Cornishman whom the other men sometimes goaded into paying five or six cents more than the market admitted, by shrewdly playing on his hot temper. A third was a tall gaunt old man of New England type, obstinate, honest, but of sanguine temperament. He was always on the bull side of the market and a loud debater.—The fourth, a quiet little man of smooth address, acted as peacemaker.
Among these men my father moved as an equal, notwithstanding the fact of his country training and prejudices, and it was through the man Morley that we got our first outlook upon the bleak world of Agnosticism, for during the summer a series of lectures by Robert Ingersoll was reported in one of the Chicago papers and the West rang with the controversy.
On Monday as soon as the paper came to town it was the habit of the grain-buyers to gather at their little central office, and while Morley, the man with the seal ring, read the lecture aloud, the others listened and commented on the heresies. Not all were sympathizers with the great iconoclast, and the arguments which followed were often heated and sometimes fiercely personal.
After they had quite finished with the paper, I sometimes secured it for myself, and hurrying back to my office in the elevator pored over it with intense zeal. Undoubtedly my father as well as I was profoundly influenced by "The Mistakes of Moses." The faith in which we had been reared had already grown dim, and under the light of Ingersoll's remorseless humor most of our superstitions vanished. I do not think my father's essential Christianity was in any degree diminished, he merely lost his respect for certain outworn traditions and empty creeds.
My work consisted in receiving the grain and keeping the elevator going and as I weighed the sacks, made out checks for the payment and kept the books—in all ways taking a man's place,—I lost all sense of being a boy.
The motive power of our hoisting machinery was a blind horse, a handsome fellow weighing some fifteen hundred pounds, and it was not long before he filled a large space in my thoughts. There was something appealing in his sightless eyes, and I never watched him (as he patiently went his rounds in the dusty shed) without pity. He had a habit of kicking the wall with his right hind foot at a certain precise point as he circled, and a deep hollow in the sill attested his accuracy. He seemed to do this purposely—to keep count, as I imagined, of his dreary circling through sunless days.
A part of my duty was to watch the fanning mill (in the high cupola) in order that the sieves should not clog. Three flights of stairs led to the mill and these had to be mounted many times each day. I always ran up the steps when the mill required my attention, but in coming down I usually swung from beam to beam, dropping from footway to footway like a monkey from a tall tree. My mother in seeing me do this called out in terror, but I assured her that there was not the slightest danger—and this was true, for I was both sure-footed and sure-handed in those days.
This was a golden summer for us all. My mother found time to read. My father enjoyed companionship with the leading citizens of the town, while Franklin, as first assistant in a candy store, professed himself to be entirely content. My own holidays were spent in fishing or in roving the woods with Mitchell and George, but on Sundays the entire family dressed for church as for a solemn social function, fully alive to the dignity of Banker Brush, and the grandeur of Congressman Deering who came to service regularly—but on foot, so intense was the spirit of democracy among us.
Theoretically there were no social distinctions in Osage, but after all a large house and a two seated carriage counted, and my mother's visitors were never from the few pretentious homes of the town but from the farms. However, I do not think she worried over her social position and I know she welcomed callers from Dry Run and Burr Oak with cordial hospitality. She was never envious or bitter.
In spite of my busy life, I read more than ever before, and everything I saw or heard made a deep and lasting record on my mind. I recall with a sense of gratitude a sermon by the preacher in the Methodist Church which profoundly educated me. It was the first time I had ever heard the power of art and the value of its mission to man insisted upon. What was right and what was wrong had been pointed out to me, but things of beauty were seldom mentioned.
With most eloquent gestures, with a face glowing with enthusiasm, the young orator enumerated the beautiful phases of nature. He painted the starry sky, the sunset clouds, and the purple hills in words of prismatic hue and his rapturous eloquence held us rigid. "We have been taught," he said in effect, "that beauty is a snare of the evil one; that it is a lure to destroy, but I assert that God desires loveliness and hates ugliness. He loves the shimmering of dawn, the silver light on the lake and the purple and snow of every summer cloud. He honors bright colors, for has he not set the rainbow in the heavens and made water to reflect the moon? He prefers joy and pleasure to hate and despair. He is not a God of pain, of darkness and ugliness, he is a God of beauty, of delight, of consolation."
In some such strain he continued, and as his voice rose in fervent chant and his words throbbed with poetry, the sunlight falling through the window-pane gave out a more intense radiance, and over the faces of the girls, a more entrancing color fell. He opened my eyes to a new world, the world of art.
I recognized in this man not only a moving orator but a scholar and I went out from that little church vaguely resolved to be a student also, a student of the beautiful. My father was almost equally moved and we all went again and again to hear our young evangel speak but never again did he touch my heart. That
