Chapter 23

The Fairy World of Childhood

One night just before leaving for the city, I invited a few of my father's old cronies to come in and criticize my new chimney. They all came,--Lottridge, Stevens, Shane, Johnson, McKinley, all the men who meant the most to my sire, and as they took seats about the glowing hearth, the most matter-of-fact of them warmed to its poetic associations, and the sternest of them softened in face and tone beneath its magic light.

Each began by saying, "An open fire is nice to sit by, but not much good as a means of heating the house," and having made this concession to the practical, they each and all passed to minute and loving descriptions of just the kind of fireplaces their people used to have back in Connecticut or Maine or Vermont. Stevens described the ancestral oven, Lottridge told of the family hob and crane, and throughout all this talk a note of wistful tenderness ran. They were stirred to their depths and yet concealed it. Not one had the courage to build such a chimney but every man of them covertly longed for it, dimly perceiving its value as an altar of memory, unconsciously acknowledging its poignant youthful associations. The beauty of vanished faces, the forms of the buried past drew near, and in the golden light of reminiscent dream, each grizzled head took on a softer, nobler outline. The prosaic was forgot. The poetry of their lives was restored.

Father was at his best, hospitable, reminiscent, jocund. His pride in me was expressed in his faith in my ability to keep this fire going.

"Hamlin don't mind a little expense like this chimney," he said. "He put it in just to amuse the baby,--so he says and I believe him. He can afford it--so I'm not saying a word, in fact I like an open fire so well I'm thinking of putting one into my own house."

To this several replied by saying, "We'd have a riot in our house if we put in such an extravagance." Others declared, "It's all a question of dirt. Our wives would never stand the ashes."

We had provided apples and nuts, doughnuts, cider and other characteristic refreshments of the older day, but alas! most of our guests no longer took coffee at night, and only one or two had teeth for popcorn or stomach for doughnuts. As a feast our evening was a failure.

"I used to eat anything at any time," Lottridge explained, "probably that is the reason why I can't do it now. In those days we didn't know anything about 'calories' or 'balanced rations.' We et what was set before us and darn glad to get it."

Shane with quiet humor recalled the days when buckwheat cakes and sausages swimming in pork fat and covered with maple syrup, formed his notion of a good breakfast. "Just one such meal would finish me now," he added with a rueful smile.

These were the men who had been the tireless reapers, the skilled wood-choppers, the husky threshers of the olden time, and as they talked, each of them reverting to significant events in those heroic days, I sobered with a sense of irreparable loss. Pathos and humor mingled in their talk of those far days!

Shane said, "Remember the time I 'bushed' you over in Dunlap's meadow?" To this my father scornfully replied, "You bushed me! I can see you, now, sitting there under that oak tree mopping your red face. I had you 'petered' before ten o'clock."

It all came back as they talked,--that buoyant world of the reaper and the binder, when harvesting was a kind of Homeric game in which, with rake and scythe, these lusty young sons of the East contended for supremacy in the field. "None of us had an extra dollar," explained Stevens, "but each of us had what was better, good health and a faith in the future. Not one of us had any intention of growing old."

"Old! There _weren't_ any old people in those days," asserted Lottridge.

Along about the middle of the evening they all turned in on a game of "Rummy," finding in cards a welcome relief from the unexpressed torment of the contrast between their decrepit, hopeless present and the glowing, glorious past.

My departure on a lecture trip at ten o'clock disturbed their game only for a moment, and as I rode away I contrasted the noble sanity and the high courage of those white-haired veterans of the Border, with the attitude of certain types of city men I knew. Facing death at something less than arm's length, my father and his fellows nevertheless remained wholesomely interested in life. None of them were pious, some of them were not even religious, but they all had a sturdy faith in the essential justice of the universe. They were still playing the game as best they knew.

Like Eugene Ware they could say--

"Standing by life's river, deep and broad, I take my chances, ignorant but unawed."

As I sat among my fellow members at the Club, three days later, I again recalled my father and his group. Here, too, I was in the Zone of Age. A. M. Palmer, a feeble and melancholy old man, came in and wandered about with none to do him reverence, and St. Gaudens, who was in the city for medical treatment, shared his dry toast and his cereal coffee with me of a morning. George Warner, who kept a cheerful countenance, admitted that he did so by effort. "I don't like the thought of leaving this good old earth," he confessed one afternoon. "It gives me a pang every time I consider it." None of these men faced death with finer courage than my sire.

As I had a good deal of free time in the afternoon, and as I also had a room at the Club, I saw much of St. Gaudens. We really became acquainted. One morning as we met at breakfast he replied to my question with a groan and a mild cuss word: "Worse, thank you! I've just been to Washington, and on the train last night I ate ice-cream for dinner. I knew I'd regret it, but ice-cream is my weakness." He was at once humorous and savage for, as he explained, "the doctor will not let me work and there is nothing for me to do but sit around the Club library and read or write letters."

He wrote almost as many letters as I did, and so we often faced each other across a desk in the writing room. Sometimes he spoke of President Roosevelt who was employing him on the new designs for our coins, sometimes he alluded to the work awaiting him in his studio. Oh! how homesick we both were! Perhaps he felt the near approach of the hour when his cunning hand must drop its tool. I know the thought came to me, creating a tenderer feeling toward him. I saw him in a sorrowful light. He drew nearer to me, seeming more like a friend and neighbor.

I have said that I had a good deal of time on my hands, and so it seemed to me then and yet during this trip I visited many of my friends, prepared _The Tyranny of the Dark_ for serial publication, attended a dinner to Henry James, was one of the Guests of Honor at the Camp Fire Club and acted as teller (with Hopkinson Smith) in the election which founded the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a fairly full program as I look back upon it, but I had a great many hours to spend in writing to Zulime and in dreaming about Mary Isabel. In spite of all my noble companions, my dinners, speeches and honors I was longing for my little daughter and her fireplace, and at last I put aside all invitations and took the westward trail, counting the hours which intervened between my laggard coach and home.

At times I realized the danger which lay in building so much of my content on the life of one small creature, but for the most part I rejoiced in the fact that she was in my world, even though I had a growing sense of its illusory and generally unsatisfactory character. I found comfort in the knowledge that billions of other men had preceded me and billions more would follow me, and that the only real things in my world were the human relationships. To make my wife and child happy, to leave the world a little better than I found it, these formed my creed.

It was cold, crisp, clear winter when I returned to West Salem and the village again suggested a Christmas card illustration as I walked up the street. The snow cried out under my shoe soles with shrill familiar squeal, carrying me back to the radiant mornings in Iowa when I trod the boardwalks of Osage on my way to the Seminary Chapel, my books under my arm and the courage of youth in my heart. Now a wife and daughter awaited me.

A fire was crackling in the new chimney, and in the light of it, at her mother's feet, sat Mary Isabel. In a moment New York and Chicago were remote, almost mythic places. With my child in my arms, listening to Zulime's gossip of the town wherein the simple old-fashioned joys of life still persisted with wholesome effect, I asked myself, "Why struggle? Why travel, when your wife, your babe, and your hearthstone are here?"

"Once I threatened the world with fire, And thrust my fist in the face of wrong, Making my heart a sounding lyre-- Accusing the rulers of earth in song. Now, counting the world of creeds well lost And recking the greatest book no prize-- Withdrawn from the press and free from the cost Of fame and war--in my baby's eyes-- In the touch of her tiny, slender palm, I find the ease of a warrior's calm."

Calm! Did I say calm? It was the calm of abject slavery. At command of that minute despot I began to toil frenziedly. At her word I read over and over, and over once again, the Rhymes of _Mother Goose_ and the Tales of _Peter Wabbitt_. The _Tin Tan Book_ was her litany, and _Red Riding Hood_ her sweet terror. Her interest in books was insatiate. She loved all verses, all melodies, even those whose words were wholly beyond her understanding, and her rapt eyes, deep and dark, as my mother's had been, gave me such happiness that to write of it fills me with a pang of regret--for that baby is now a woman.

It will not avail my reader to say, "You were but re-enacting the experiences of innumerable other daddies," for this was _my_ child, these were _my_ home and _my_ fire. Without a shred of shame I rejoiced in my subjection then, as I long to recover its contentment now. Life for me was fulfilled. I was doing that which nature and the world required.

Here enters an incongruous fact,--something which I must record with the particularity it deserves. My wife who was accounted a genius, was in truth amazingly "clever" with brush and pencil. Not only had she spent five years in Paris, she had enjoyed several other years of study with her sculptor brother. She could model, she could paint and she could draw,--but--to whom did Mary Isabel turn when she wanted a picture? To her artist mother? Not at all! To me,--to her corn-husker daddy--of course. I was her artist as well as her reader.

To her my hand was a wonder-worker. She was always pleased with what I