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The Project Gutenberg EBook of Poor White, by Sherwood Anderson.
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Title: Poor White

Author: Sherwood Anderson

Release Date: February, 2005 [EBook #7414]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on April 26, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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[Note: The evident misprint of Book Six for Book Five in the original
is preserved here.]
























BOOK I




CHAPTER I


Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the
western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri. It was
a miserable place in which to be born. With the exception of a narrow
strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back from the
town--called in derision by river men "Mudcat Landing"--was almost entirely
worthless and unproductive. The soil, yellow, shallow and stony, was
tilled, in Hugh's time, by a race of long gaunt men who seemed as exhausted
and no-account as the land on which they lived. They were chronically
discouraged, and the merchants and artisans of the town were in the same
state. The merchants, who ran their stores--poor tumble-down ramshackle
affairs--on the credit system, could not get pay for the goods they handed
out over their counters and the artisans, the shoemakers, carpenters and
harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work they did. Only the town's two
saloons prospered. The saloon keepers sold their wares for cash and, as the
men of the town and the farmers who drove into town felt that without drink
life was unbearable, cash always could be found for the purpose of getting
drunk.

Hugh McVey's father, John McVey, had been a farm hand in his youth but
before Hugh was born had moved into town to find employment in a tannery.
The tannery ran for a year or two and then failed, but John McVey stayed in
town. He also became a drunkard. It was the easy obvious thing for him to
do. During the time of his employment in the tannery he had been married
and his son had been born. Then his wife died and the idle workman took his
child and went to live in a tiny fishing shack by the river. How the boy
lived through the next few years no one ever knew. John McVey loitered in
the streets and on the river bank and only awakened out of his habitual
stupor when, driven by hunger or the craving for drink, he went for a day's
work in some farmer's field at harvest time or joined a number of other
idlers for an adventurous trip down river on a lumber raft. The baby was
left shut up in the shack by the river or carried about wrapped in a soiled
blanket. Soon after he was old enough to walk he was compelled to find work
in order that he might eat. The boy of ten went listlessly about town at
the heels of his father. The two found work, which the boy did while the
man lay sleeping in the sun. They cleaned cisterns, swept out stores and
saloons and at night went with a wheelbarrow and a box to remove and dump
in the river the contents of out-houses. At fourteen Hugh was as tall as
his father and almost without education. He could read a little and could
write his own name, had picked up these accomplishments from other boys who
came to fish with him in the river, but he had never been to school. For
days sometimes he did nothing but lie half asleep in the shade of a bush on
the river bank. The fish he caught on his more industrious days he sold for
a few cents to some housewife, and thus got money to buy food for his big
growing indolent body. Like an animal that has come to its maturity he
turned away from his father, not because of resentment for his hard youth,
but because he thought it time to begin to go his own way.

In his fourteenth year and when the boy was on the point of sinking into
the sort of animal-like stupor in which his father had lived, something
happened to him. A railroad pushed its way down along the river to his town
and he got a job as man of all work for the station master. He swept out
the station, put trunks on trains, mowed the grass in the station yard and
helped in a hundred odd ways the man who held the combined jobs of ticket
seller, baggage master and telegraph operator at the little out-of-the-way
place.

Hugh began a little to awaken. He lived with his employer, Henry Shepard,
and his wife, Sarah Shepard, and for the first time in his life sat down
regularly at table. His life, lying on the river bank through long summer
afternoons or sitting perfectly still for endless hours in a boat, had bred
in him a dreamy detached outlook on life. He found it hard to be definite
and to do definite things, but for all his stupidity the boy had a great
store of patience, a heritage perhaps from his mother. In his new place the
station master's wife, Sarah Shepard, a sharp-tongued, good-natured woman,
who hated the town and the people among whom fate had thrown her, scolded
at him all day long. She treated him like a child of six, told him how
to sit at table, how to hold his fork when he ate, how to address people
who came to the house or to the station. The mother in her was aroused by
Hugh's helplessness and, having no children of her own, she began to take
the tall awkward boy to her heart. She was a small woman and when she stood
in the house scolding the great stupid boy who stared down at her with
his small perplexed eyes, the two made a picture that afforded endless
amusement to her husband, a short fat bald-headed man who went about clad
in blue overalls and a blue cotton shirt. Coming to the back door of his
house, that was within a stone's throw of the station, Henry Shepard stood
with his hand on the door-jamb and watched the woman and the boy. Above
the scolding voice of the woman his own voice arose. "Look out, Hugh," he
called. "Be on the jump, lad! Perk yourself up. She'll be biting you if you
don't go mighty careful in there."

Hugh got little money for his work at the railroad station but for the
first time in his life he began to fare well. Henry Shepard bought the
boy clothes, and his wife, Sarah, who was a master of the art of cooking,
loaded the table with good things to eat. Hugh ate until both the man and
woman declared he would burst if he did not stop. Then when they were not
looking he went into the station yard and crawling under a bush went to
sleep. The station master came to look for him. He cut a switch from the
bush and began to beat the boy's bare feet. Hugh awoke and was overcome
with confusion. He got to his feet and stood trembling, half afraid he was
to be driven away from his new home. The man and the confused blushing boy
confronted each other for a moment and then the man adopted the method
of his wife and began to scold. He was annoyed at what he thought the
boy's indolence and found a hundred little tasks for him to do. He devoted
himself to finding tasks for Hugh, and when he could think of no new ones,
invented them. "We will have to keep the big lazy fellow on the jump.
That's the secret of things," he said to his wife.

The boy learned to keep his naturally indolent body moving and his clouded
sleepy mind fixed on definite things. For hours he plodded straight ahead,
doing over and over some appointed task. He forgot the purpose of the job
he had been given to do and did it because it was a job and would keep him
awake. One morning he was told to sweep the station platform and as his
employer had gone away without giving him additional tasks and as he was
afraid that if he sat down he would fall into the odd detached kind of
stupor in which he had spent so large a part of his life, he continued
to sweep for two or three hours. The station platform was built of rough
boards and Hugh's arms were very powerful. The broom he was using began to
go to pieces. Bits of it flew about and after an hour's work the platform
looked more uncleanly than when he began. Sarah Shepard came to the door of
her house and stood watching. She was about to call to him and to scold him
again for his stupidity when a new impulse came to her. She saw the serious
determined look on the boy's long gaunt face and a flash of understanding
came to her. Tears came into her eyes and her arms ached to take the great
boy and hold him tightly against her breast. With all her mother's soul she
wanted to protect Hugh from a world she was sure would treat him always
as a beast of burden and would take no account of what she thought of as
the handicap of his birth. Her morning's work was done and without saying
anything to Hugh, who continued to go up and down the platform laboriously
sweeping, she went out at the front door of the house and to one of
the town stores. There she bought a half dozen books, a geography, an
arithmetic, a speller and two or three readers. She had made up her mind to
become Hugh McVey's school teacher and with characteristic energy did not
put the matter off, but went about it at once. When she got back to her
house and saw the boy still going doggedly up and down the platform,
she did not scold but spoke to him with a new gentleness in her manner.
"Well, my boy, you may put the broom away now and come to the house," she
suggested. "I've made up my mind to take you for my own boy and I don't
want to be ashamed of you. If you're going to live with me I can't have you
growing up to be a lazy good-for-nothing like your father and the other men
in this hole of a place. You'll have to learn things and I suppose I'll
have to be your teacher.

"Come on over to the house at once," she added sharply, making a quick
motion with her hand to the boy who with the broom in his hands stood
stupidly staring. "When a job is to be done there's no use putting it off.
It's going to be hard work to make an educated man of you, but it has to be
done. We might as well begin on your lessons at once."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hugh McVey lived with Henry Shepard and his wife until he became a grown
man. After Sarah Shepard became his school teacher things began to go
better for him. The scolding of the New England woman, that had but
accentuated his awkwardness and stupidity, came to an end and life in his
adopted home became so quiet and peaceful that the boy thought of himself
as one who had come into a kind of paradise. For a time the two older
people talked of sending him to the town school, but the woman objected.
She had begun to feel so close to Hugh that he seemed a part of her own
flesh and blood and the thought of him, so huge and ungainly, sitting in a
school room with the children of the town, annoyed and irritated her. In
imagination she saw him being laughed at by other boys and could not bear
the thought. She did not like the people of the town and did not want Hugh
to associate with them.

Sarah Shepard had come from a people and a country quite different in
its aspect from that in which she now lived. Her own people, frugal New
Englanders, had come West in the year after the Civil War to take up
cut-over timber land in the southern end of the state of Michigan. The
daughter was a grown girl when her father and mother took up the westward
journey, and after they arrived at the new home, had worked with her father
in the fields. The land was covered with huge stumps and was difficult to
farm but the New Englanders were accustomed to difficulties and were not
discouraged. The land was deep and rich and the people who had settled upon
it were poor but hopeful. They felt that every day of hard work done in
clearing the land was like laying up treasure against the future. In New
England they had fought against a hard climate and had managed to find a
living on stony unproductive soil. The milder climate and the rich deep
soil of Michigan was, they felt, full of promise. Sarah's father like most
of his neighbors had gone into debt for his land and for tools with which
to clear and work it and every year spent most of his earnings in paying
interest on a mortgage held by a banker in a nearby town, but that did not
discourage him. He whistled as he went about his work and spoke often of a
future of ease and plenty. "In a few years and when the land is cleared
we'll make money hand over fist," he declared.

When Sarah grew into young womanhood and went about among the young people
in the new country, she heard much talk of mortgages and of the difficulty
of making ends meet, but every one spoke of the hard conditions as
temporary. In every mind the future was bright with promise. Throughout
the whole Mid-American country, in Ohio, Northern Indiana and Illinois,
Wisconsin and Iowa a hopeful spirit prevailed. In every breast hope fought
a successful war with poverty and discouragement. Optimism got into the
blood of the children and later led to the same kind of hopeful courageous
development of the whole western country. The sons and daughters of these
hardy people no doubt had their minds too steadily fixed on the problem
of the paying off of mortgages and getting on in the world, but there was
courage in them. If they, with the frugal and sometimes niggardly New
Englanders from whom they were sprung, have given modern American life a
too material flavor, they have at least created a land in which a less
determinedly materialistic people may in their turn live in comfort.

In the midst of the little hopeless community of beaten men and yellow
defeated women on the bank of the Mississippi River, the woman who had
become Hugh McVey's second mother and in whose veins flowed the blood of
the pioneers, felt herself undefeated and unbeatable. She and her husband
would, she felt, stay in the Missouri town for a while and then move on
to a larger town and a better position in life. They would move on and up
until the little fat man was a railroad president or a millionaire. It was
the way things were done. She had no doubt of the future. "Do everything
well," she said to her husband, who was perfectly satisfied with his
position in life and had no exalted notions as to his future. "Remember to
make your reports out neatly and clearly. Show them you can do perfectly
the task given you to do, and you will be given a chance at a larger task.
Some day when you least expect it something will happen. You will be called
up into a position of power. We won't be compelled to stay in this hole of
a place very long."

The ambitious energetic little woman, who had taken the son of the indolent
farm hand to her heart, constantly talked to him of her own people. Every
afternoon when her housework was done she took the boy into the front room
of the house and spent hours laboring with him over his lessons. She worked
upon the problem of rooting the stupidity and dullness out of his mind
as her father had worked at the problem of rooting the stumps out of the
Michigan land. After the lesson for the day had been gone over and over
until Hugh was in a stupor of mental weariness, she put the books aside and
talked to him. With glowing fervor she made for him a picture of her own
youth and the people and places where she had lived. In the picture she
represented the New Englanders of the Michigan farming community as a
strong god-like race, always honest, always frugal, and always pushing
ahead. His own people she utterly condemned. She pitied him for the
blood in his veins. The boy had then and all his life certain physical
difficulties she could never understand. The blood did not flow freely
through his long body. His feet and hands were always cold and there was
for him an almost sensual satisfaction to be had from just lying perfectly
still in the station yard and letting the hot sun beat down on him.

Sarah Shepard looked upon what she called Hugh's laziness as a thing of
the spirit. "You have got to get over it," she declared. "Look at your own
people--poor white trash--how lazy and shiftless they are. You can't be
like them. It's a sin to be so dreamy and worthless."

Swept along by the energetic spirit of the woman, Hugh fought to overcome
his inclination to give himself up to vaporous dreams. He became convinced
that his own people were really of inferior stock, that they were to be
kept away from and not to be taken into account. During the first year
after he came to live with the Shepards, he sometimes gave way to a desire
to return to his old lazy life with his father in the shack by the river.
People got off steamboats at the town and took the train to other towns
lying back from the river. He earned a little money by carrying trunks
filled with clothes or traveling men's samples up an incline from the
steamboat landing to the railroad station. Even at fourteen the strength in
his long gaunt body was so great that he could out-lift any man in town,
and he put one of the trunks on his shoulder and walked slowly and stolidly
away with it as a farm horse might have walked along a country road with a
boy of six perched on his back.

The money earned in this way Hugh for a time gave to his father, and when
the man had become stupid with drink he grew quarrelsome and demanded that
the boy return to live with him. Hugh had not the spirit to refuse and
sometimes did not want to refuse. When neither the station master nor his
wife was about he slipped away and went with his father to sit for a half
day with his back against the wall of the fishing shack, his soul at peace.
In the sunlight he sat and stretched forth his long legs. His small sleepy
eyes stared out over the river. A delicious feeling crept over him and for
the moment he thought of himself as completely happy and made up his mind
that he did not want to return again to the railroad station and to the
woman who was so determined to arouse him and make of him a man of her own
people.

Hugh looked at his father asleep and snoring in the long grass on the
river bank. An odd feeling of disloyalty crept over him and he became
uncomfortable. The man's mouth was open and he snored lustily. From his
greasy and threadbare clothing arose the smell of fish. Flies gathered
in swarms and alighted on his face. Disgust took possession of Hugh. A
flickering but ever recurring light came into his eyes. With all the
strength of his awakening soul he struggled against the desire to give way
to the inclination to stretch himself out beside the man and sleep. The
words of the New England woman, who was, he knew, striving to lift him out
of slothfulness and ugliness into some brighter and better way of life,
echoed dimly in his mind. When he arose and went back along the street
to the station master's house and when the woman there looked at him
reproachfully and muttered words about the poor white trash of the town, he
was ashamed and looked at the floor.

Hugh began to hate his own father and his own people. He connected the man
who had bred him with the dreaded inclination toward sloth in himself.
When the farmhand came to the station and demanded the money he had earned
by carrying trunks, he turned away and went across a dusty road to the
Shepard's house. After a year or two he paid no more attention to the
dissolute farmhand who came occasionally to the station to mutter and swear
at him; and, when he had earned a little money, gave it to the woman to
keep for him. "Well," he said, speaking slowly and with the hesitating
drawl characteristic of his people, "if you give me time I'll learn. I want
to be what you want me to be. If you stick to me I'll try to make a man of
myself."

       *       *       *       *       *

Hugh McVey lived in the Missouri town under the tutelage of Sarah
Shepard until he was nineteen years old. Then the station master gave up
railroading and went back to Michigan. Sarah Shepard's father had died
after having cleared one hundred and twenty acres of the cut-over timber
land and it had been left to her. The dream that had for years lurked in
the back of the little woman's mind and in which she saw bald-headed,
good-natured Henry Shepard become a power in the railroad world had begun
to fade. In newspapers and magazines she read constantly of other men who,
starting from a humble position in the railroad service, soon became rich
and powerful, but nothing of the kind seemed likely to happen to her
husband. Under her watchful eye he did his work well and carefully but
nothing came of it. Officials of the railroad sometimes passed through
the town riding in private cars hitched to the end of one of the through
trains, but the trains did not stop and the officials did not alight and,
calling Henry out of the station, reward his faithfulness by piling new
responsibilities upon him, as railroad officials did in such cases in the
stories she read. When her father died and she saw a chance to again turn
her face eastward and to live again among her own people, she told her
husband to resign his position with the air of one accepting an undeserved
defeat. The station master managed to get Hugh appointed in his place, and
the two people went away one gray morning in October, leaving the tall
ungainly young man in charge of affairs. He had books to keep, freight
waybills to make out, messages to receive, dozens of definite things to do.
Early in the morning before the train that was to take her away, came to
the station, Sarah Shepard called the young man to her and repeated the
instructions she had so often given her husband. "Do everything neatly and
carefully," she said. "Show yourself worthy of the trust that has been
given you."

The New England woman wanted to assure the boy, as she had so often assured
her husband, that if he would but work hard and faithfully promotion would
inevitably come; but in the face of the fact that Henry Shepard had for
years done without criticism the work Hugh was to do and had received
neither praise nor blame from those above him, she found it impossible to
say the words that arose to her lips. The woman and the son of the people
among whom she had lived for five years and had so often condemned, stood
beside each other in embarrassed silence. Stripped of her assurance as to
the purpose of life and unable to repeat her accustomed formula, Sarah
Shepard had nothing to say. Hugh's tall figure, leaning against the post
that supported the roof of the front porch of the little house where she
had taught him his lessons day after day, seemed to her suddenly old and
she thought his long solemn face suggested a wisdom older and more mature
than her own. An odd revulsion of feeling swept over her. For the moment
she began to doubt the advisability of trying to be smart and to get on in
life. If Hugh had been somewhat smaller of frame so that her mind could
have taken hold of the fact of his youth and immaturity, she would no doubt
have taken him into her arms and said words regarding her doubts. Instead
she also became silent and the minutes slipped away as the two people stood
before each other and stared at the floor of the porch. When the train on
which she was to leave blew a warning whistle, and Henry Shepard called to
her from the station platform, she put a hand on the lapel of Hugh's coat
and drawing his face down, for the first time kissed him on the cheek.
Tears came into her eyes and into the eyes of the young man. When he
stepped across the porch to get her bag Hugh stumbled awkwardly against a
chair. "Well, you do the best you can here," Sarah Shepard said quickly and
then out of long habit and half unconsciously did repeat her formula. "Do
little things well and big opportunities are bound to come," she declared
as she walked briskly along beside Hugh across the narrow road and to the
station and the train that was to bear her away.

After the departure of Sarah and Henry Shepard Hugh continued to struggle
with his inclination to give way to dreams. It seemed to him a struggle
it was necessary to win in order that he might show his respect and
appreciation of the woman who had spent so many long hours laboring with
him. Although, under her tutelage, he had received a better education than
any other young man of the river town, he had lost none of his physical
desire to sit in the sun and do nothing. When he worked, every task had
to be consciously carried on from minute to minute. After the woman left,
there were days when he sat in the chair in the telegraph office and fought
a desperate battle with himself. A queer determined light shone in his
small gray eyes. He arose from the chair and walked up and down the station
platform. Each time as he lifted one of his long feet and set it slowly
down a special little effort had to be made. To move about at all was a
painful performance, something he did not want to do. All physical acts
were to him dull but necessary parts of his training for a vague and
glorious future that was to come to him some day in a brighter and more
beautiful land that lay in the direction thought of rather indefinitely as
the East. "If I do not move and keep moving I'll become like father, like
all of the people about here," Hugh said to himself. He thought of the man
who had bred him and whom he occasionally saw drifting aimlessly along
Main Street or sleeping away a drunken stupor on the river bank. He was
disgusted with him and had come to share the opinion the station master's
wife had always held concerning the people of the Missouri village.
"They're a lot of miserable lazy louts," she had declared a thousand times,
and Hugh, agreed with her, but sometimes wondered if in the end he might
not also become a lazy lout. That possibility he knew was in him and for
the sake of the woman as well as for his own sake he was determined it
should not be so.

The truth is that the people of Mudcat Landing were totally unlike any of
the people Sarah Shepard had ever known and unlike the people Hugh was to
know during his mature life. He who had come from a people not smart was to
live among smart energetic men and women and be called a big man by them
without in the least understanding what they were talking about.

Practically all of the people of Hugh's home town were of Southern origin.
Living originally in a land where all physical labor was performed by
slaves, they had come to have a deep aversion to physical labor. In the
South their fathers, having no money to buy slaves of their own and being
unwilling to compete with slave labor, had tried to live without labor. For
the most part they lived in the mountains and the hill country of Kentucky
and Tennessee, on land too poor and unproductive to be thought worth
cultivating by their rich slave-owning neighbors of the valleys and plains.
Their food was meager and of an enervating sameness and their bodies
degenerate. Children grew up long and gaunt and yellow like badly nourished
plants. Vague indefinite hungers took hold of them and they gave themselves
over to dreams. The more energetic among them, sensing dimly the unfairness
of their position in life, became vicious and dangerous. Feuds started
among them and they killed each other to express their hatred of life.
When, in the years preceding the Civil War, a few of them pushed north
along the rivers and settled in Southern Indiana and Illinois and in
Eastern Missouri and Arkansas, they seemed to have exhausted their energy
in making the voyage and slipped quickly back into their old slothful way
of life. Their impulse to emigrate did not carry them far and but a few of
them ever reached the rich corn lands of central Indiana, Illinois or Iowa
or the equally rich land back from the river in Missouri or Arkansas. In
Southern Indiana and Illinois they were merged into the life about them and
with the infusion of new blood they a little awoke. They have tempered the
quality of the peoples of those regions, made them perhaps less harshly
energetic than their forefathers, the pioneers. In many of the Missouri and
Arkansas river towns they have changed but little. A visitor to these parts
may see them there to-day, long, gaunt, and lazy, sleeping their lives away
and awakening out of their stupor only at long intervals and at the call of
hunger.

As for Hugh McVey, he stayed in his home town and among his own people for
a year after the departure of the man and woman who had been father and
mother to him, and then he also departed. All through the year he worked
constantly to cure himself of the curse of indolence. When he awoke in the
morning he did not dare lie in bed for a moment for fear indolence would
overcome him and he would not be able to arise at all. Getting out of bed
at once he dressed and went to the station. During the day there was not
much work to be done and he walked for hours up and down the station
platform. When he sat down he at once took up a book and put his mind to
work. When the pages of the book became indistinct before his eyes and he
felt within him the inclination to drift off into dreams, he again arose
and walked up and down the platform. Having accepted the New England
woman's opinion of his own people and not wanting to associate with them,
his life became utterly lonely and his loneliness also drove him to labor.

Something happened to him. Although his body would not and never did become
active, his mind began suddenly to work with feverish eagerness. The vague
thoughts and feelings that had always been a part of him but that had been
indefinite, ill-defined things, like clouds floating far away in a hazy
sky, began to grow definite. In the evening after his work was done and he
had locked the station for the night, he did not go to the town hotel where
he had taken a room and where he ate his meals, but wandered about town and
along the road that ran south beside the great mysterious river. A hundred
new and definite desires and hungers awoke in him. He began to want to talk
with people, to know men and most of all to know women, but the disgust for
his fellows in the town, engendered in him by Sarah Shepard's words and
most of all by the things in his nature that were like their natures, made
him draw back. When in the fall at the end of the year after the Shepards
had left and he began living alone, his father was killed in a senseless
quarrel with a drunken river man over the ownership of a dog, a sudden, and
what seemed to him at the moment heroic resolution came to him. He went
early one morning to one of the town's two saloon keepers, a man who had
been his father's' nearest approach to a friend and companion, and gave
him money to bury the dead man. Then he wired to the headquarters of the
railroad company telling them to send a man to Mudcat Landing to take his
place. On the afternoon of the day on which his father was buried, he
bought himself a handbag and packed his few belongings. Then he sat down
alone on the steps of the railroad station to wait for the evening train
that would bring the man who was to replace him and that would at the same
time take him away. He did not know where he intended to go, but knew that
he wanted to push out into a new land and get among new people. He thought
he would go east and north. He remembered the long summer evenings in the
river town when the station master slept and his wife talked. The boy who
listened had wanted to sleep also, but with the eyes of Sarah Shepard fixed
on him, had not dared to do so. The woman had talked of a land dotted with
towns where the houses were all painted in bright colors, where young girls
dressed in white dresses went about in the evening, walking under trees
beside streets paved with bricks, where there was no dust or mud, where
stores were gay bright places filled with beautiful wares that the people
had money to buy in abundance and where every one was alive and doing
things worth while and none was slothful and lazy. The boy who had now
become a man wanted to go to such a place. His work in the railroad station
had given him some idea of the geography of the country and, although he
could not have told whether the woman who had talked so enticingly had in
mind her childhood in New England or her girlhood in Michigan, he knew in
a general way that to reach the land and the people who were to show him
by their lives the better way to form his own life, he must go east. He
decided that the further east he went the more beautiful life would become,
and that he had better not try going too far in the beginning. "I'll go
into the northern part of Indiana or Ohio," he told himself. "There must be
beautiful towns in those places."

Hugh was boyishly eager to get on his way and to become at once a part of
the life in a new place. The gradual awakening of his mind had given him
courage, and he thought of himself as armed and ready for association with
men. He wanted to become acquainted with and be the friend of people whose
lives were beautifully lived and who were themselves beautiful and full of
significance. As he sat on the steps of the railroad station in the poor
little Missouri town with his bag beside him, and thought of all the things
he wanted to do in life, his mind became so eager and restless that some of
its restlessness was transmitted to his body. For perhaps the first time
in his life he arose without conscious effort and walked up and down the
station platform out of an excess of energy. He thought he could not bear
to wait until the train came and brought the man who was to take his place.
"Well, I'm going away, I'm going away to be a man among men," he said to
himself over and over. The saying became a kind of refrain and he said it
unconsciously. As he repeated the words his heart beat high in anticipation
of the future he thought lay before him.




CHAPTER II


Hugh McVey left the town of Mudcat Landing in early September of the year
eighteen eighty-six. He was then twenty years old and was six feet and four
inches tall. The whole upper part of his body was immensely strong but his
long legs were ungainly and lifeless. He secured a pass from the railroad
company that had employed him, and rode north along the river in the night
train until he came to a large town named Burlington in the State of Iowa.
There a bridge went over the river, and the railroad tracks joined those of
a trunk line and ran eastward toward Chicago; but Hugh did not continue his
journey on that night. Getting off the train he went to a nearby hotel and
took a room for the night.

It was a cool clear evening and Hugh was restless. The town of Burlington,
a prosperous place in the midst of a rich farming country, overwhelmed him
with its stir and bustle. For the first time he saw brick-paved streets and
streets lighted with lamps. Although it was nearly ten o'clock at night
when he arrived, people still walked about in the streets and many stores
were open.

The hotel where he had taken a room faced the railroad tracks and stood at
the corner of a brightly lighted street. When he had been shown to his room
Hugh sat for a half hour by an open window, and then as he could not sleep,
decided to go for a walk. For a time he walked in the streets where the
people stood about before the doors of the stores but, as his tall figure
attracted attention and he felt people staring at him, he went presently
into a side street.

In a few minutes he became utterly lost. He went through what seemed to
him miles of streets lined with frame and brick houses, and occasionally
passed people, but was too timid and embarrassed to ask his way. The street
climbed upward and after a time he got into open country and followed a
road that ran along a cliff overlooking the Mississippi River. The night
was clear and the sky brilliant with stars. In the open, away from the
multitude of houses, he no longer felt awkward and afraid, and went
cheerfully along. After a time he stopped and stood facing the river.
Standing on a high cliff and with a grove of trees at his back, the stars
seemed to have all gathered in the eastern sky. Below him the water of the
river reflected the stars. They seemed to be making a pathway for him into
the East.

The tall Missouri countryman sat down on a log near the edge of the cliff
and tried to see the water in the river below. Nothing was visible but a
bed of stars that danced and twinkled in the darkness. He had made his way
to a place far above the railroad bridge, but presently a through passenger
train from the West passed over it and the lights of the train looked also
like stars, stars that moved and beckoned and that seemed to fly like
flocks of birds out of the West into the East.

For several hours Hugh sat on the log in the darkness. He decided that it
was hopeless for him to find his way back to the hotel, and was glad of the
excuse for staying abroad. His body for the first time in his life felt
light and strong and his mind was feverishly awake. A buggy in which sat a
young man and woman went along the road at his back, and after the voices
had died away silence came, broken only at long intervals during the hours
when he sat thinking of his future by the barking of a dog in some distant
house or the churning of the paddle-wheels of a passing river boat.

All of the early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spent within
sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. He had seen it
in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud lay baked and cracked
along the edge of the water; in the spring when the floods raged and the
water went whirling past, bearing tree logs and even parts of houses; in
the winter when the water looked deathly cold and ice floated past; and in
the fall when it was quiet and still and lovely, and seemed to have sucked
an almost human quality of warmth out of the red trees that lined its
shores. Hugh had spent hours and days sitting or lying in the grass beside
the river. The fishing shack in which he had lived with his father until he
was fourteen years old was within a half dozen long strides of the river's
edge, and the boy had often been left there alone for a week at a time.
When his father had gone for a trip on a lumber raft or to work for a few
days on some farm in the country back from the river, the boy, left often
without money and with but a few loaves of bread, went fishing when he was
hungry and when he was not did nothing but idle the days away in the grass
on the river bank. Boys from the town came sometimes to spend an hour with
him, but in their presence he was embarrassed and a little annoyed. He
wanted to be left alone with his dreams. One of the boys, a sickly, pale,
undeveloped lad of ten, often stayed with him through an entire summer
afternoon. He was the son of a merchant in the town and grew quickly tired
when he tried to follow other boys about. On the river bank he lay beside
Hugh in silence. The two got into Hugh's boat and went fishing and the
merchant's son grew animated and talked. He taught Hugh to write his own
name and to read a few words. The shyness that kept them apart had begun to
break down, when the merchant's son caught some childhood disease and died.

In the darkness above the cliff that night in Burlington Hugh remembered
things concerning his boyhood that had not come back to his mind in years.
The very thoughts that had passed through his mind during those long days
of idling on the river bank came streaming back.

After his fourteenth year when he went to work at the railroad station Hugh
had stayed away from the river. With his work at the station, and in the
garden back of Sarah Shepard's house, and the lessons in the afternoons,
he had little idle time. On Sundays however things were different. Sarah
Shepard did not go to church after she came to Mudcat Landing, but she
would have no work done on Sundays. On Sunday afternoons in the summer she
and her husband sat in chairs beneath a tree beside the house and went to
sleep. Hugh got into the habit of going off by himself. He wanted to sleep
also, but did not dare. He went along the river bank by the road that ran
south from the town, and when he had followed it two or three miles, turned
into a grove of trees and lay down in the shade.

The long summer Sunday afternoons had been delightful times for Hugh, so
delightful that he finally gave them up, fearing they might lead him to
take up again his old sleepy way of life. Now as he sat in the darkness
above the same river he had gazed on through the long Sunday afternoons, a
spasm of something like loneliness swept over him. For the first time he
thought about leaving the river country and going into a new land with a
keen feeling of regret.

On the Sunday afternoons in the woods south of Mudcat Landing Hugh had lain
perfectly still in the grass for hours. The smell of dead fish that had
always been present about the shack where he spent his boyhood, was gone
and there were no swarms of flies. Above his head a breeze played through
the branches of the trees, and insects sang in the grass. Everything about
him was clean. A lovely stillness pervaded the river and the woods. He lay
on his belly and gazed down over the river out of sleep-heavy eyes into
hazy distances. Half formed thoughts passed like visions through his mind.
He dreamed, but his dreams were unformed and vaporous. For hours the half
dead, half alive state into which he had got, persisted. He did not sleep
but lay in a land between sleeping and waking. Pictures formed in his
mind. The clouds that floated in the sky above the river took on strange,
grotesque shapes. They began to move. One of the clouds separated itself
from the others. It moved swiftly away into the dim distance and then
returned. It became a half human thing and seemed to be marshaling the
other clouds. Under its influence they became agitated and moved restlessly
about. Out of the body of the most active of the clouds long vaporous arms
were extended. They pulled and hauled at the other clouds making them also
restless and agitated.

Hugh's mind, as he sat in the darkness on the cliff above the river that
night in Burlington, was deeply stirred. Again he was a boy lying in the
woods above his river, and the visions that had come to him there returned
with startling clearness. He got off the log and lying in the wet grass,
closed his eyes. His body became warm.

Hugh thought his mind had gone out of his body and up into the sky to join
the clouds and the stars, to play with them. From the sky he thought he
looked down on the earth and saw rolling fields, hills and forests. He had
no part in the lives of the men and women of the earth, but was torn away
from them, left to stand by himself. From his place in the sky above the
earth he saw the great river going majestically along. For a time it was
quiet and contemplative as the sky had been when he was a boy down below
lying on his belly in the wood. He saw men pass in boats and could hear
their voices dimly. A great quiet prevailed and he looked abroad beyond the
wide expanse of the river and saw fields and towns. They were all hushed
and still. An air of waiting hung over them. And then the river was whipped
into action by some strange unknown force, something that had come out of a
distant place, out of the place to which the cloud had gone and from which
it had returned to stir and agitate the other clouds.

The river now went tearing along. It overflowed its banks and swept over
the land, uprooting trees and forests and towns. The white faces of drowned
men and children, borne along by the flood, looked up into the mind's eye
of the man Hugh, who, in the moment of his setting out into the definite
world of struggle and defeat, had let himself slip back into the vaporous
dreams of his boyhood.

As he lay in the wet grass in the darkness on the cliff Hugh tried to force
his way back to consciousness, but for a long time was unsuccessful. He
rolled and writhed about and his lips muttered words. It was useless. His
mind also was swept away. The clouds of which he felt himself a part flew
across the face of the sky. They blotted out the sun from the earth, and
darkness descended on the land, on the troubled towns, on the hills that
were torn open, on the forests that were destroyed, on the peace and quiet
of all places. In the country stretching away from the river where all had
been peace and quiet, all was now agitation and unrest. Houses were
destroyed and instantly rebuilt. People gathered in whirling crowds.

The dreaming man felt himself a part of something significant and terrible
that was happening to the earth and to the peoples of the earth. Again
he struggled to awake, to force himself back out of the dream world into
consciousness. When he did awake, day was breaking and he sat on the very
edge of the cliff that looked down upon the Mississippi River, gray now in
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
again, and then they came to the hotel where Hugh lived and he turned to
go back to the station and wait for the midnight train that would carry
the letter away and that would, he felt, carry also his demand that a
fellow-human, who had slipped from the modern path of work and progress
should be given a new chance. He felt magnanimous and wonderfully gracious.
"It's all right, my boy," he said heartily. "No use talking to me. To-night
when you came to the station to ask the fare to that hole of a place in
Michigan I saw you were embarrassed. 'What's the matter with that fellow?'
I said to myself. I got to thinking. Then I came up town with you and right
away you bought me a drink. I wouldn't have thought anything about that if
I hadn't been there myself. You'll get on your feet. Bidwell, Ohio, is full
of good men. You get in with them and they'll help you and stick by you.
You'll like those people. They've got get-up to them. The place you'll work
at there is far out of town. It's away out about a mile at a little kind of
outside-like place called Pickleville. There used to be a saloon there and
a factory for putting up cucumber pickles, but they've both gone now. You
won't be tempted to slip in that place. You'll have a chance to get on your
feet. I'm glad I thought of sending you there."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Wheeling and Lake Erie ran along a little wooded depression that cut
across the wide expanse of open farm lands north of the town of Bidwell. It
brought coal from the hill country of West Virginia and southeastern Ohio
to ports on Lake Erie, and did not pay much attention to the carrying of
passengers. In the morning a train consisting of a combined express and
baggage car and two passenger coaches went north and west toward the lake,
and in the evening the same train returned, bound southeast into the Hills,
The Bidwell station of the road was, in an odd way, detached from the
town's life. The invisible roof under which the life of the town and the
surrounding country was lived did not cover it. As the Indiana railroad
man had told Hugh, the station itself stood on a spot known locally as
Pickleville. Back of the station there was a small building for the storage
of freight and near at hand four or five houses facing Turner's Pike. The
pickle factory, now deserted and with its windows gone, stood across the
tracks from the station and beside a small stream that ran under a bridge
and across country through a grove of trees to the river. On hot summer
days a sour, pungent smell arose from the old factory, and at night its
presence lent a ghostly flavor to the tiny corner of the world in which
lived perhaps a dozen people.

All day and at night an intense persistent silence lay over Pickleville,
while in Bidwell a mile away the stir of new life began. In the evenings
and on rainy afternoons when men could not work in the fields, old Judge
Hanby went along Turner's Pike and across the wagon bridge into Bidwell and
sat in a chair at the back of Birdie Spink's drug store. He talked. Men
came in to listen to him and went out. New talk ran through the town. A new
force that was being born into American life and into life everywhere all
over the world was feeding on the old dying individualistic life. The new
force stirred and aroused the people. It met a need that was universal. It
was meant to seal men together, to wipe out national lines, to walk under
seas and fly through the air, to change the entire face of the world in
which men lived. Already the giant that was to be king in the place of old
kings was calling his servants and his armies to serve him. He used the
methods of old kings and promised his followers booty and gain. Everywhere
he went unchallenged, surveying the land, raising a new class of men to
positions of power. Railroads had already been pushed out across the
plains; great coal fields from which was to be taken food to warm the blood
in the body of the giant were being opened up; iron fields were being
discovered; the roar and clatter of the breathing of the terrible new
thing, half hideous, half beautiful in its possibilities, that was for
so long to drown the voices and confuse the thinking of men, was heard
not only in the towns but even in lonely farm houses, where its willing
servants, the newspapers and magazines, had begun to circulate in ever
increasing numbers. At the town of Gibsonville, near Bidwell, Ohio, and at
Lima and Finley, Ohio, oil and gas fields were discovered. At Cleveland,
Ohio, a precise, definite-minded man named Rockefeller bought and sold
oil. From the first he served the new thing well and he soon found others
to serve with him. The Morgans, Fricks, Goulds, Carnegies, Vanderbilts,
servants of the new king, princes of the new faith, merchants all, a new
kind of rulers of men, defied the world-old law of class that puts the
merchant below the craftsman, and added to the confusion of men by taking
on the air of creators. They were merchants glorified and dealt in giant
things, in the lives of men and in mines, forests, oil and gas fields,
factories, and railroads.

And all over the country, in the towns, the farm houses, and the growing
cities of the new country, people stirred and awakened. Thought and poetry
died or passed as a heritage to feeble fawning men who also became servants
of the new order. Serious young men in Bidwell and in other American towns,
whose fathers had walked together on moonlight nights along Turner's Pike
to talk of God, went away to technical schools. Their fathers had walked
and talked and thoughts had grown up in them. The impulse had reached back
to their father's fathers on moonlit roads of England, Germany, Ireland,
France, and Italy, and back of these to the moonlit hills of Judea where
shepherds talked and serious young men, John and Matthew and Jesus, caught
the drift of the talk and made poetry of it; but the serious-minded sons of
these men in the new land were swept away from thinking and dreaming. From
all sides the voice of the new age that was to do definite things shouted
at them. Eagerly they took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices
arose. The clamor became terrible, and confused the minds of all men. In
making way for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day
to emerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities to
cover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies of men.

And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giant
walked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent his days
at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried to adjust
his mind to the realization of the fact that he was not to be accepted as
fellow by the citizens of the new place to which he had come. During the
day he sat in the tiny telegraph office or, pulling an express truck to the
open window near his telegraph instrument, lay on his back with a sheet
of paper propped on his bony knees and did sums. Farmers driving past on
Turner's Pike saw him there and talked of him in the stores in town. "He's
a queer silent fellow," they said. "What do you suppose he's up to?"

Hugh walked in the streets of Bidwell at night as he had walked in the
streets of towns in Indiana and Illinois. He approached groups of men
loafing on a street corner and then went hurriedly past them. On quiet
streets as he went along under the trees, he saw women sitting in the
lamplight in the houses and hungered to have a house and a woman of his
own. One afternoon a woman school teacher came to the station to make
inquiry regarding the fare to a town in West Virginia. As the station agent
was not about Hugh gave her the information she sought and she lingered for
a few moments to talk with him. He answered the questions she asked with
monosyllables and she soon went away, but he was delighted and looked upon
the incident as an adventure. At night he dreamed of the school teacher and
when he awoke, pretended she was with him in his bedroom. He put out his
hand and touched the pillow. It was soft and smooth as he imagined the
cheek of a woman would be. He did not know the school teacher's name but
invented one for her. "Be quiet, Elizabeth. Do not let me disturb your
sleep," he murmured into the darkness. One evening he went to the house
where the school teacher boarded and stood in the shadow of a tree until he
saw her come out and go toward Main Street. Then he went by a roundabout
way and walked past her on the sidewalk before the lighted stores. He did
not look at her, but in passing her dress touched his arm and he was so
excited later that he could not sleep and spent half the night walking
about and thinking of the wonderful thing that had happened to him.

The ticket, express, and freight agent for the Wheeling and Lake Erie at
Bidwell, a man named George Pike, lived in one of the houses near the
station, and besides attending to his duties for the railroad company,
owned and worked a small farm. He was a slender, alert, silent man with a
long drooping mustache. Both he and his wife worked as Hugh had never seen
a man and woman work before. Their arrangement of the division of labor
was not based on sex but on convenience. Sometimes Mrs. Pike came to the
station to sell tickets, load express boxes and trunks on the passenger
trains and deliver heavy boxes of freight to draymen and farmers, while her
husband worked in the fields back of his house or prepared the evening
meal, and sometimes the matter was reversed and Hugh did not see Mrs. Pike
for several days at a time.

During the day there was little for the station agent or his wife to do
at the station and they disappeared. George Pike had made an arrangement
of wires and pulleys connecting the station with a large bell hung on top
of his house, and when some one came to the station to receive or deliver
freight Hugh pulled at the wire and the bell began to ring. In a few
minutes either George Pike or his wife came running from the house or
fields, dispatched the business and went quickly away again.

Day after day Hugh sat in a chair by a desk in the station or went outside
and walked up and down the station platform. Engines pulling long caravans
of coal cars ground past. The brakemen waved their hands to him and then
the train disappeared into the grove of trees that grew beside the creek
along which the tracks of the road were laid. In Turner's Pike a creaking
farm wagon appeared and then disappeared along the tree-lined road that led
to Bidwell. The farmer turned on his wagon seat to stare at Hugh but unlike
the railroad men did not wave his hand. Adventurous boys came out along the
road from town and climbed, shouting and laughing, over the rafters in the
deserted pickle factory across the tracks or went to fish in the creek in
the shade of the factory walls. Their shrill voices added to the loneliness
of the spot. It became almost unbearable to Hugh. In desperation he turned
from the rather meaningless doing of sums and working out of problems
regarding the number of fence pickets that could be cut from a tree or
the number of steel rails or railroad ties consumed in building a mile of
railroad, the innumerable petty problems with which he had been keeping
his mind busy, and turned to more definite and practical problems. He
remembered an autumn he had put in cutting corn on a farm in Illinois and,
going into the station, waved his long arms about, imitating the movements
of a man in the act of cutting corn. He wondered if a machine might not be
made that would do the work, and tried to make drawings of the parts of
such a machine. Feeling his inability to handle so difficult a problem
he sent away for books and began the study of mechanics. He joined a
correspondence school started by a man in Pennsylvania, and worked for days
on the problems the man sent him to do. He asked questions and began a
little to understand the mystery of the application of power. Like the
other young men of Bidwell he began to put himself into touch with the
spirit of the age, but unlike them he did not dream of suddenly acquired
wealth. While they embraced new and futile dreams he worked to destroy the
tendency to dreams in himself.

Hugh came to Bidwell in the early spring and during May, June and July
the quiet station at Pickleville awoke for an hour or two each evening.
A certain percentage of the sudden and almost overwhelming increase in
express business that came with the ripening of the fruit and berry crop
came to the Wheeling, and every evening a dozen express trucks, piled high
with berry boxes, waited for the south bound train. When the train came
into the station a small crowd had assembled. George Pike and his stout
wife worked madly, throwing the boxes in at the door of the express car.
Idlers standing about became interested and lent a hand. The engineer
climbed out of his locomotive, stretched his legs and crossing a narrow
road got a drink from the pump in George Pike's yard.

Hugh walked to the door of his telegraph office and standing in the shadows
watched the busy scene. He wanted to take part in it, to laugh and talk
with the men standing about, to go to the engineer and ask questions
regarding the locomotive and its construction, to help George Pike and his
wife, and perhaps cut through their silence and his own enough to become
acquainted with them. He thought of all these things but stayed in the
shadow of the door that led to the telegraph office until, at a signal
given by the train conductor, the engineer climbed into his engine and the
train began to move away into the evening darkness. When Hugh came out of
his office the station platform was deserted again. In the grass across
the tracks and beside the ghostly looking old factory, crickets sang. Tom
Wilder, the Bidwell hack driver, had got a traveling man off the train and
the dust left by the heels of his team still hung in the air over Turner's
Pike. From the darkness that brooded over the trees that grew along the
creek beyond the factory came the hoarse croak of frogs. On Turner's Pike a
half dozen Bidwell young men accompanied by as many town girls walked along
the path beside the road under the trees. They had come to the station
to have somewhere to go, had made up a party to come, but now the half
unconscious purpose of their coming was apparent. The party split itself
up into couples and each strove to get as far away as possible from the
others. One of the couples came back along the path toward the station and
went to the pump in George Pike's yard. They stood by the pump, laughing
and pretending to drink out of a tin cup, and when they got again into
the road the others had disappeared. They became silent. Hugh went to the
end of the platform and watched as they walked slowly along. He became
furiously jealous of the young man who put his arm about the waist of his
companion and then, when he turned and saw Hugh staring at him, took it
away again.

The telegraph operator went quickly along the platform until he was out of
range of the young man's eyes, and, when he thought the gathering darkness
would hide him, returned and crept along the path beside the road after
him. Again a hungry desire to enter into the lives of the people about him
took possession of the Missourian. To be a young man dressed in a stiff
white collar, wearing neatly made clothes, and in the evening to walk about
with young girls seemed like getting on the road to happiness. He wanted
to run shouting along the path beside the road until he had overtaken the
young man and woman, to beg them to take him with them, to accept him
as one of themselves, but when the momentary impulse had passed and he
returned to the telegraph office and lighted a lamp, he looked at his
long awkward body and could not conceive of himself as ever by any chance
becoming the thing he wanted to be. Sadness swept over him and his gaunt
face, already cut and marked with deep lines, became longer and more
gaunt. The old boyhood notion, put into his mind by the words of his
foster-mother, Sarah Shepard, that a town and a people could remake him and
erase from his body the marks of what he thought of as his inferior birth,
began to fade. He tried to forget the people about him and turned with
renewed energy to the study of the problems in the books that now lay in
a pile upon his desk. His inclination to dreams, balked by the persistent
holding of his mind to definite things, began to reassert itself in a new
form, and his brain played no more with pictures of clouds and men in
agitated movement but took hold of steel, wood, and iron. Dumb masses of
materials taken out of the earth and the forests were molded by his mind
into fantastic shapes. As he sat in the telegraph office during the day or
walked alone through the streets of Bidwell at night, he saw in fancy a
thousand new machines, formed by his hands and brain, doing the work that
had been done by the hands of men. He had come to Bidwell, not only in
the hope that there he would at last find companionship, but also because
his mind was really aroused and he wanted leisure to begin trying to do
tangible things. When the citizens of Bidwell would not take him into their
town life but left him standing to one side, as the tiny dwelling place
for men called Pickleville where he lived stood aside out from under the
invisible roof of the town, he decided to try to forget men and to express
himself wholly in work.




CHAPTER V


Hugh's first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When
word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of Judge
Horace Hanby and whose minds had turned toward the arrival of the new
forward-pushing impulse in American life thought they saw in Hugh the
instrument of its coming to Bidwell. From the day of his coming to live
among them, there had been much curiosity in the stores and houses
regarding the tall, gaunt, slow-speaking stranger at Pickleville. George
Pike had told Birdie Spinks the druggist how Hugh worked all day over
books, and how he made drawings for parts of mysterious machines and left
them on his desk in the telegraph office. Birdie Spinks told others and the
tale grew. When Hugh walked alone in the streets during the evening and
thought no one took account of his presence, hundreds of pairs of curious
eyes followed him about.

A tradition in regard to the telegraph operator began to grow up. The
tradition made Hugh a gigantic figure, one who walked always on a plane
above that on which other men lived. In the imagination of his fellow
citizens of the Ohio town, he went about always thinking great thoughts,
solving mysterious and intricate problems that had to do with the new
mechanical age Judge Hanby talked about to the eager listeners in the
drug-store. An alert, talkative people saw among them one who could not
talk and whose long face was habitually serious, and could not think of him
as having daily to face the same kind of minor problems as themselves.

The Bidwell young man who had come down to the Wheeling station with a
group of other young men, who had seen the evening train go away to the
south, who had met at the station one of the town girls and had, in order
to escape the others and be alone with her, taken her to the pump in George
Pike's yard on the pretense of wanting a drink, walked away with her into
the darkness of the summer evening with his mind fixed on Hugh. The young
man's name was Ed Hall and he was apprentice to Ben Peeler, the carpenter
who had sent his son to Cleveland to a technical school. He wanted to marry
the girl he had met at the station and did not see how he could manage it
on his salary as a carpenter's apprentice. When he looked back and saw Hugh
standing on the station platform, he took the arm he had put around the
girl's waist quickly away and began to talk. "I'll tell you what," he said
earnestly, "if things don't pretty soon get on the stir around here I'm
going to get out. I'll go over by Gibsonburg and get a job in the oil
fields, that's what I'll do. I got to have more money." He sighed heavily
and looked over the girl's head into the darkness. "They say that telegraph
fellow back there at the station is up to something," he ventured. "It's
all the talk. Birdie Spinks says he is an inventor; says George Pike told
him; says he is working all the time on new inventions to do things by
machinery; that his passing off as a telegraph operator is only a bluff.
Some think maybe he was sent here to see about starting a factory to make
one of his inventions, sent by rich men maybe in Cleveland or some other
place. Everybody says they'll bet there'll be factories here in Bidwell
before very long now. I wish I knew. I don't want to go away if I don't
have to, but I got to have more money. Ben Peeler won't never give me a
raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that fellow back there
so I could ask him what's up. They say he's smart. I suppose he wouldn't
tell me nothing. I wish I was smart enough to invent something and maybe
get rich. I wish I was the kind of fellow they say he is."

Ed Hall again put his arm about the girl's waist and walked away. He forgot
Hugh and thought of himself and of how he wanted to marry the girl whose
young body nestled close to his own--wanted her to be utterly his. For
a few hours he passed out of Hugh's growing sphere of influence on the
collective thought of the town, and lost himself in the immediate
deliciousness of kisses.

And as he passed out of Hugh's influence others came in. On Main Street in
the evening every one speculated on the Missourian's purpose in coming to
Bidwell. The forty dollars a month paid him by the Wheeling railroad could
not have tempted such a man. They were sure of that. Steve Hunter the
jeweler's son had returned to town from a course in a business college at
Buffalo, New York, and hearing the talk became interested. Steve had in him
the making of a live man of affairs, and he decided to investigate. It was
not, however, Steve's method to go at things directly, and he was impressed
by the notion, then abroad in Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by
some one, perhaps by a group of capitalists who intended to start factories
there.

Steve thought he would go easy. In Buffalo, where he had gone to the
business college, he had met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned a soap
factory; had become acquainted with her at church and had been introduced
to her father. The soap maker, an assertive positive man who manufactured
a product called Horn's Household Friend Soap, had his own notion of what
a young man should be and how he should make his way in the world, and had
taken pleasure in talking to Steve. He told the Bidwell jeweler's son of
how he had started his own factory with but little money and had succeeded
and gave Steve many practical hints on the organization of companies. He
talked a great deal of a thing called "control." "When you get ready to
start for yourself keep that in mind," he said. "You can sell stock and
borrow money at the bank, all you can get, but don't give up control. Hang
on to that. That's the way I made my success. I always kept the control."

Steve wanted to marry Ernestine Horn, but felt that he should show what he
could do as a business man before he attempted to thrust himself into so
wealthy and prominent a family. When he returned to his own town and heard
the talk regarding Hugh McVey and his inventive genius, he remembered the
soap maker's words regarding control, and repeated them to himself. One
evening he walked along Turner's Pike and stood in the darkness by the old
pickle factory. He saw Hugh at work under a lamp in the telegraph office
and was impressed. "I'll lay low and see what he's up to," he told himself.
"If he's got an invention, I'll get up a company. I'll get money in and
I'll start a factory. The people here'll tumble over each other to get into
a thing like that. I don't believe any one sent him here. I'll bet he's
just an inventor. That kind always are queer. I'll keep my mouth shut and
watch my chance. If there is anything starts, I'll start it and I'll get
into control, that's what I'll do, I'll get into control."

       *       *       *       *       *

In the country stretching away north beyond the fringe of small berry farms
lying directly about town, were other and larger farms. The land that made
up these larger farms was also rich and raised big crops. Great stretches
of it were planted to cabbage for which a market had been built up in
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Bidwell was often in derision called
Cabbageville by the citizens of nearby towns. One of the largest of the
cabbage farms belonged to a man named Ezra French, and was situated on
Turner's Pike, two miles from town and a mile beyond the Wheeling station.

On spring evenings when it was dark and silent about the station and when
the air was heavy with the smell of new growth and of land fresh-turned by
the plow, Hugh got out of his chair in the telegraph office and walked in
the soft darkness. He went along Turner's Pike to town, saw groups of men
standing on the sidewalks before the stores and young girls walking arm
in arm along the street, and then came back to the silent station. Into
his long and habitually cold body the warmth of desire began to creep.
The spring rains came and soft winds blew down from the hill country to
the south. One evening when the moon shone he went around the old pickle
factory to where the creek went chattering under leaning willow trees, and
as he stood in the heavy shadows by the factory wall, tried to imagine
himself as one who had become suddenly clean-limbed, graceful, and agile. A
bush grew beside the stream near the factory and he took hold of it with
his powerful hands and tore it out by the roots. For a moment the strength
in his shoulders and arms gave him an intense masculine satisfaction. He
thought of how powerfully he could hold the body of a woman against his
body and the spark of the fires of spring that had touched him became a
flame. He felt new-made and tried to leap lightly and gracefully across the
stream, but stumbled and fell in the water. Later he went soberly back to
the station and tried again to lose himself in the study of the problems he
had found in his books.

The Ezra French farm lay beside Turner's Pike a mile north of the Wheeling
station and contained two hundred acres of land of which a large part was
planted to cabbages. It was a profitable crop to raise and required no more
care than corn, but the planting was a terrible task. Thousands of plants
that had been raised from seeds planted in a seed-bed back of the barn had
to be laboriously transplanted. The plants were tender and it was necessary
to handle them carefully. The planter crawled slowly and painfully along,
and from the road looked like a wounded beast striving to make his way to
a hole in a distant wood. He crawled forward a little and then stopped and
hunched himself up into a ball-like mass. Taking the plant, dropped on the
ground by one of the plant droppers, he made a hole in the soft ground with
a small three-cornered hoe, and with his hands packed the earth about the
plant roots. Then he crawled on again.

Ezra the cabbage farmer had come west from one of the New England states
and had grown comfortably wealthy, but he would not employ extra labor for
the plant setting and the work was done by his sons and daughters. He was a
short, bearded man whose leg had been broken in his youth by a fall from
the loft of a barn. As it had not mended properly he could do little work
and limped painfully about. To the men of Bidwell he was known as something
of a wit, and in the winter he went to town every afternoon to stand in the
stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for which he was famous; but when
spring came he became restlessly active, and in his own house and on the
farm, became a tyrant. During the time of the cabbage setting he drove his
sons and daughters like slaves. When in the evening the moon came up, he
made them go back to the fields immediately after supper and work until
midnight. They went in sullen silence, the girls to limp slowly along
dropping the plants out of baskets carried on their arms, and the boys to
crawl after them and set the plants. In the half darkness the little group
of humans went slowly up and down the long fields. Ezra hitched a horse to
a wagon and brought the plants from the seed-bed behind the barn. He went
here and there swearing and protesting against every delay in the work.
When his wife, a tired little old woman, had finished the evening's work
in the house, he made her come also to the fields. "Come, come," he said,
sharply, "we need every pair of hands we can get." Although he had several
thousand dollars in the Bidwell bank and owned mortgages on two or three
neighboring farms, Ezra was afraid of poverty, and to keep his family at
work pretended to be upon the point of losing all his possessions. "Now is
our chance to save ourselves," he declared. "We must get in a big crop. If
we do not work hard now we'll starve." When in the field his sons found
themselves unable to crawl longer without resting, and stood up to stretch
their tired bodies, he stood by the fence at the field's edge and swore.
"Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazies!" he shouted. "Keep
at the work. Don't be idling around. In two weeks it'll be too late for
planting and then you can rest. Now every plant we set will help to save us
from ruin. Keep at the job. Don't be idling around."

In the spring of his second year in Bidwell, Hugh went often in the evening
to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the French farm. He
did not make his presence known but hid himself in a fence corner behind
bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the stooped misshapen figures
crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like
cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim
light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the
crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, wriggling
into his line of sight like grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some
god of the night to the performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It
came down again swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The
slow rhythm of the crawler was broken. He reached with his disengaged hand
for the plant that lay on the ground before him and lowered it into the
hole the hoe had made. With his fingers he packed the earth about the roots
of the plant and then again began the slow crawl forward. There were four
of the French boys and the two older ones worked in silence. The younger
boys complained. The three girls and their mother, who were attending to
the plant dropping, came to the end of the row and turning, went away into
the darkness. "I'm going to quit this slavery," one of the younger boys
said. "I'll get a job over in town. I hope it's true what they say, that
factories are coming."

The four young men came to the end of the row and, as Ezra was not in
sight, stood a moment by the fence near where Hugh was concealed. "I'd
rather be a horse or a cow than what I am," the complaining voice went on.
"What's the good being alive if you have to work like this?"

For a moment as he listened to the voices of the complaining workers, Hugh
wanted to go to them and ask them to let him share in their labor. Then
another thought came. The crawling figures came sharply into his line of
vision. He no longer heard the voice of the youngest of the French boys
that seemed to come out of the ground. The machine-like swing of the bodies
of the plant setters suggested vaguely to his mind the possibility of
building a machine that would do the work they were doing. His mind took
eager hold of that thought and he was relieved. There had been something in
the crawling figures and in the moonlight out of which the voices came that
had begun to awaken in his mind the fluttering, dreamy state in which he
had spent so much of his boyhood. To think of the possibility of building
a plant-setting machine was safer. It fitted into what Sarah Shepard had
so often told him was the safe way of life. As he went back through the
darkness to the railroad station, he thought about the matter and decided
that to become an inventor would be the sure way of placing his feet at
last upon the path of progress he was trying to find.

Hugh became absorbed in the notion of inventing a machine that would do the
work he had seen the men doing in the field. All day he thought about it.
The notion once fixed in his mind gave him something tangible to work upon.
In the study of mechanics, taken up in a purely amateur spirit, he had
not gone far enough to feel himself capable of undertaking the actual
construction of such a machine, but thought the difficulty might be
overcome by patience and by experimenting with combinations of wheels,
gears and levers whittled out of pieces of wood. From Hunter's Jewelry
Store he got a cheap clock and spent days taking it apart and putting it
together again. He dropped the doing of mathematical problems and sent away
for books describing the construction of machines. Already the flood of new
inventions, that was so completely to change the methods of cultivating the
soil in America, had begun to spread over the country, and many new and
strange kinds of agricultural implements arrived at the Bidwell freight
house of the Wheeling railroad. There Hugh saw a harvesting machine
for cutting grain, a mowing machine for cutting hay and a long-nosed
strange-looking implement that was intended to root potatoes out of the
ground very much after the method pursued by energetic pigs. He studied
these carefully. For a time his mind turned away from the hunger for human
contact and he was content to remain an isolated figure, absorbed in the
workings of his own awakening mind.

An absurd and amusing thing happened. After the impulse to try to invent a
plant-setting machine came to him, he went every evening to conceal himself
in the fence corner and watch the French family at their labors. Absorbed
in watching the mechanical movements of the men who crawled across the
fields in the moonlight, he forgot they were human. After he had watched
them crawl into sight, turn at the end of the rows, and crawl away again
into the hazy light that had reminded him of the dim distances of his own
Mississippi River country, he was seized with a desire to crawl after
them and to try to imitate their movements. Certain intricate mechanical
problems, that had already come into his mind in connection with the
proposed machine, he thought could be better understood if he could get
the movements necessary to plant setting into his own body. His lips began
to mutter words and getting out of the fence corner where he had been
concealed he began to crawl across the field behind the French boys. "The
down stroke will go so," he muttered, and bringing up his arm swung it
above his head. His fist descended into the soft ground. He had forgotten
the rows of new set plants and crawled directly over them, crushing them
into the soft ground. He stopped crawling and waved his arm about. He tried
to relate his arms to the mechanical arms of the machine that was being
created in his mind. Holding one arm stiffly in front of him he moved it up
and down. "The stroke will be shorter than that. The machine must be built
close to the ground. The wheels and the horses will travel in paths between
the rows. The wheels must be broad to provide traction. I will gear from
the wheels to get power for the operation of the mechanism," he said aloud.

Hugh arose and stood in the moonlight in the cabbage field, his arms still
going stiffly up and down. The great length of his figure and his arms was
accentuated by the wavering uncertain light. The laborers, aware of some
strange presence, sprang to their feet and stood listening and looking.
Hugh advanced toward them, still muttering words and waving his arms.
Terror took hold of the workers. One of the woman plant droppers screamed
and ran away across the field, and the others ran crying at her heels.
"Don't do it. Go away," the older of the French boys shouted, and then he
with his brothers also ran.

Hearing the voices Hugh stopped and stared about. The field was empty.
Again he lost himself in his mechanical calculations. He went back along
the road to the Wheeling station and to the telegraph office where he
worked half the night on a rude drawing he was trying to make of the parts
of his plant setting machine, oblivious to the fact that he had created a
myth that would run thr