The Urban Test
UNCLE HENRY was talking to my father down by the yards one evening. I was hanging on the gate and I heard him.
‘It’s all right for you and Mary,’ he said. ‘You seem well enough satisfied out here. But what about the children? You can’t let them grow up ignorant. They really ought to be having proper advantages.’
I turned my head and seemed to be looking inattentively the other way. At an interesting point in a conversation it was customary, I had learned, to devise some errand for any children within hearing, and I did want to hear what my father was going to say. But he only looked thoughtfully across at my brother Henry sitting in the open door of a low barn-loft, his legs dangling happily in space.
Uncle Henry’s young son Ahthuh (only we said Arrthurr, except when we were making fun of him behind his mother’s New England back) was seated painfully aloft on our tall old Jude, his knees hugging Jude’s lean sides; and Henry was joyfully daring him to dismount by the natural method. But Arthur looked fearfully at the distant ground and curled his feet up higher. Finally he urged Jude slowly up to a convenient fence, stretched an exploring foot to find the top rail, and slid carefully off. Henry meanwhile produced a long stick from the hay behind him, pole-vaulted airily down from his perch, and came over to join us, pausing on his way to give a proprietary dig to the well-rounded side of his pet calf.
‘What did you name your calf, Henry?’ asked my father, leaving Uncle Henry unanswered for the moment, to my disappointment. That interesting discussion was evidently to be deferred until there were fewer children about.
‘Eurydice,’ said Henry simply.
Uncle Henry adjusted his glasses and looked with interest at the spotted myth, at this moment engaged in securing unmythical sustenance, bunting the maternal side, and stamping and whisking in an ecstasy of appetite.
‘I never saw a calf named Eurydice before,’ he said; ‘does she come?’
Henry obligingly experimented with a half-screech, half-whistle, a wild travesty of lyric notes. The calf waved its tail blandly, but did not look round.
‘Sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t,’ he said. ‘That’s why she’s Eurydice.’
‘Who was Eurydice?’ asked Arthur.
But he was unattended, because Henry was saying jeeringly that I had named my calf Zenobia Joan-of-Arc Victoria, and I was answering spiritedly,— having brothers helps to nourish one’s spirit, — ‘Well, I only had one calf.’
Uncle Henry laughed, more than I thought was needful. Every one knew that it was our privilege to name the animals on the place, if they were distinguished enough to deserve names, and the spring crop of beasts wore evidence of all our winter’s reading. So there was really nothing much to be amused about. Of course in the result strange companions were housed side by side. Daniel Boone espoused Cleopatra, and Silas Marner nosed his feedtrough in belligerent fellowship with Æneas or Elaine. For a while we named animals after relatives and acquaintances, but that custom led several times to embarrassing episodes and They bade us desist, even when tempting resemblances clamored for recognition.
We usually had a waiting list of names, and quarreled regularly over the privilege of godparenting the blinking new occupants of the yards and stables. Henry and John said Mary and I had no sense of fitness of names — colts should have a different kind of names from kittens. It is true that my confidence did have a blow occasionally. After I had bought, with my half of one of Alaldy’s turnovers, the authority to name a pet chicken Felicia Hemans — Henry wanted to call it Ivanhoe, but I had just committed He Never Smiled Again and I was firm; and Felicia grew up to be the most quarrelsome gamey old rooster we had — I became less assertive of my rights and judgment. When the appearance of his first tail-feathers bore an appalling truth to me, I tried to meet the circumstance by cutting them back to an appropriate feminine length. But masculinity will tell in spite of dress. I could cut off the tail-feathers, but I could not eliminate the crow, the right and sign of his sex. So I only made Felicia Hemans ridiculous for life, and myself so for nearly that long.
But, after all, the naming of animals is a mild amusement, and no one but ourselves saw much fun in it. Arthur did not care for it in the least, nor did any of our other childish visitors. And after Uncle Henry got through laughing at me he walked away with my father. I gave up following them as I had first thought of doing, and let their conversation go unheard. Arthur, apparently with a sense that he had been appearing to disadvantage, began to tell us of a dog-and-pony show he had seen. We had never seen a dog-andpony show, and Arthur’s familiarity with one seemed, in his mind at least, to compensate for his inability either to stay on a horse or to get off one. In fact, it somehow appeared to be a credit to him to have seen one, and before he had finished his account his recent mortification was forgotten, and he was patronizing us and condescending to us after his usual fashion. There is no superiority so superior as that of the ten-year-old.
It was a superiority we often met. It was really exasperating, the attitude toward us and our experience assumed by children who came with their parents to visit us. Usually visitors who came on the train left their children at home, having dark fears and suspicions concerning this strange and unproved land to which they were coming. Actuated by the vague but powerful apprehension that ‘something might happen,’ they left their offspring within the safe confines of the long-sanctioned East, where we were allowed to suppose that nothing happened, and risked only themselves to the possibility of an experience they had never had before, and the undesirable chance of a new sensation.
But occasionally an adventurous and Providence-trusting parent brought a child or two along, to expose them to the prairie, as it were. We hailed them always with delight, for there were none too many children to play with out on the prairie, and such as we knew were often either inaccessible or forbidden. The little brokenspeeched Germans on the east of us, and the little sandy Irish on the west, were as impossible as the little aborigines in the hollow, who came from the bluffs and had underwear made out of discarded flour-sacks. Undemocratic Maldy thought them beneath us, and all but forbade them the place. We were but meagrely furnished with companions of the right age, and that is why our parents used to urge visiting friends to bring their children with them.
The experiment had variable results, though it always started with the same promising beginning, — from our shy welcome of our guests in the presence of the elders, to the moment when we dexterously segregated them from the hampering grown-up society and took them to the outdoors, the only place where acquaintance could really begin. Before the end of the first day something was defined, usually; the subtle adjustment of eastern sophistication and western immaturity, to use a euphemism, was begun. But let no one think that such an adjustment was easily accomplished. Two such combinations of elements required nice balancing. On the one hand was the God-given superiority, modestly but inevitably expressed, of the comer from beyond the Alleghanies. Coupled with this was the misbegotten but wholly natural vanity bred of contact with street-cars and grade-schools and icecream sodas and electric lights and firecompanies, and the augmented importance of the recent three-days’ trip on the train, with all its experience. It is hard for the most modest person to go three days from home and not derive added importance from the circumstance.
Beside all these glories what had our meagre experience to show? We were on our own ground to be sure, but when it comes to matching tales, that is not an unmixed advantage. We could ride our ponies like little Indians, but our visitors could tell of a Wild West Show. We could beat them out and out at chess and such things, but they knew roller-skates and skating rinks. We were regular little Tom Twists, but they had seen League games, even football games. We had read more books than they had looked into, commonly, but they had been to vaudeville. Our disadvantages are plainly to be seen.
Our little resources and amusements used to shrink and seem colorless before their critical eyes, and had it not been for some degree of contrariness in ourselves, we should have been almost ashamed of our meagre sources of entertainment. The little city-bred visitors did not see any fun in our manyroomed playhouses, with pursley for doormats; or in our rival farms staked off elaborately in the orchard, with fields for all kinds of grain and small potatoes for cattle in one pasture and grains of white corn for sheep in another, and tiny rustic houses constructed on a basis of crotched twigs. They did not enter with sufficient zest into the halfdozen games in which tumble-weeds played a part, for they did not see the possibilities we did in the erratic elusive globes, bounding alertly over the ground with a life of their own, — frolicsome teasing things, that invited and then avoided, and put the very impulse of play into one. Why has no one sung the lyric of the tumble-weeds? But our visitors put themselves altogether in the wrong by seeing in them only dry weeds.
Nor did such visitors follow us very sympathetically in our borrowings from books to enliven actualities. They did not care for long games of chess in which Macbeth was pitted endlessly against Julius Cæsar, or for the daily reproduction of the Punic wars in every sort of contest, from berry-picking to forbidden races on the lumbering farm-horses. That was an affair that never ended — there really was no reason why there should not be a thousand Punic wars as well as three. It was our way of exercising the delight of partisanship, which every one must find in some form. Henry, with large masculine vision, helped to his conclusion by the Supposed Speech of Regulus, insisted that the success of Rome was better for the world, and I did n’t see what that had to do with it. For my part, my imagination was fired by Hannibal’s vow, made at an age that seemed to put him in our class, and by the ever-dramatic descent into Italy. My imagination was at fault, however, for I fear I never quite lost the impression of an early picture I formed of him seating his army neatly on a glacier and sliding nobly down to the gates of Rome.
Anyway, rivalry on such an epic scale had a great fascination for us, and for one whole summer we gave life to everyday matters by weaving it into them. But we found it hard to interest our grade-school visitors in it. They knew more dates than we did, but they did not know how to snatch the dramatic from the historic for their own delight.
We were not very good hosts, I am afraid, for we frankly tired of continual activity and returned to our books for hours at a time. It is a severe test of the virtue of hospitality to be obliged to give up one’s personal habits. And who would want to give up the long afternoons when we lay stretched on the grass under a box-elder tree, two reading from one book which neither could wait for, with elbow to elbow and shoulder to shoulder and no word between us but ‘Ready to turn?’ Who could give up reading like this, even for company? We did n’t always, I am sorry to say, and were frequently snatched back from happy isles with the chiding reminder that we must be about entertaining our guests. The spirit in which we returned to our social duties was no credit to us.
Some of the children caught the spirit of our games and so endeared themselves to us. But some of them, very ill-trained from our point of view, could find no use or charm in any toys that did not come out of a store, all adapted for a specified purpose. They did not know the joys that we knew in using things for purposes for which they were never intended; and it is a joy that cannot be taught. One little slender-legged maiden would not play out of doors at all, because we had no sidewalk and the ground hurt her feet.
But there was one point in which they all found delight. That was in tellling us about the things that they had and we did not have. The field was large, but I must own that the expositors did justice to it, for no department of it was left unvisited. I think they had not known how great their opportunities and advantages were until they came to see us, who had not had the same. Then, upon discovering their own distinction, they spread themselves like little bay-trees, with every leaf a brazen horn, and boasted loudly of everyday matters which they had always before taken for granted. It must have been a very great descent for them when they returned to their own kind and lost this transient factitious importance. I suppose that they then, with the easy inconsistency of childhood, began to boast of their western trip.
It was not that we objected to being told things. In fact, we rejoiced in every picture of a world outside our own. But it was the manner of telling that irked us. In our own plain language, we could n’t stand bragging. We disliked Arthur’s assumption of proprietorship of everything east of the Mississippi. Being still very young, we did not know how hard it is for one to go away from home and not take credit to himself for everything of merit or interest in his habitat. We could not know then that even we should in time be arrogating to ourselves all the virtues and charms of the West.
When they could keep the element of personal satisfaction out of it, we listened to their account with the greatest delight. There was nothing we did not want to know. We had never seen Coney Island or Central Park or parades or floats or soldiers or theatres or elevators or water-works — or a thousand things that we were most willing to hear about, if the account were properly given. No wonder the limitations of our knowledge invited illumination.
It was this painful lack of experience on our part that Uncle Henry referred to in his talk with my father, and that led him, before he and Arthur left, that summer, to make his Great Proposition. He would take us benighted younglings to the nearest city for a day and put as much enlightenment as could be into twelve well-spent hours. He could not bring up all the arrears of a neglected education in that limited time, but he could at least show us some of the things that were worth while, like elevators and illuminated signs. And incidentally he could treat himself to the never-to-be-outgrown delight of causing surprise and giving a sensation. One likes to cause amazement, even in a child. That interpretation of his motive, however, is a surmise of later years.
But anyway the elders yielded a dubious assent, and Henry and I — the rest were too young or too old — were to go to the City for a day, under convoy of Uncle Henry, with Arthur as aide. And ah me, the things that we were to see! — things we had heard of and read of and dreamed of, but had only glimpsed occasionally on trips with our parents. Arthur’s elaborate tales could not surpass our imaginings. Uncle Henry was a benefactor of benefactors!
To go to the city meant to rise at a period of the night that children hardly know exists, — in fact, scarcely to go to bed at all, — and to drive away through the still darkness to take a train that gathered us up and carried us on toward a faint, faint streak of the early summer dawning. It was all a tremendous experience. To be called out of sleep and to see midnight for the first time in our lives, so far as we knew, and find the elders all walking around and doing things that are done in daytime; to discover that cocks crowed in the middle of the night, and to sit down, in the echoes of Felicia Hemans’s retort to a rooster across the creek, to a meal that was neither supper nor breakfast but had all the best elements of both — that was a beginning! Even to have Them solicitous that we should eat enough, gave a rare sort of introduction to the whole affair.
Then came the swift ride along the prairie roads behind our fastest horses, and we faced the midnight charm of the sky, and saw the pale, useless thread of a moon glide under or out from the thin clouds, while the constant spat, spat, of the horses’ feet went steadily on.
My mother’s last solicitous words had been, ‘See that they don’t fall out if they go to sleep.’ Arthur did promptly go to sleep, after wishing that we had some arc-lights along the road; and Henry, too, finally yielded. But sleep never touched me on all that long ride. Everything was too wonderful for that. Whatever great things we were to see on the morrow, the Dark was enough for me now. I seemed never to have known a real dark before.
Sometimes the clouds gathered and swept up almost threateningly, and everything was hidden but the faint line of road ahead of us and a vague suggestion of the stretches of land on each side. We crossed a long bridge that seemed to span Nothing. I could have found a horror in it all if delight had not made that impossible. There was no need to people the gloom with horrors of any sort. The darkness was living enough. I had sometimes wakened for a moment in the night and found in the blackness of the room a mere negation which I had given quality to by fancying the Things in the corners, before I dropped back into sleep again. But this darkness needed no mere fancies. When we went through some bits of timber and the man driving pulled the horses down to a slow cautious walk, I met a Dark I had never known to exist. The shadows of the trees could not accentuate it; the places where thick shade lay in daylight had lost their distinction. I stared into it with all my might, trying to explore its degree. But nothing met me, only its assertion of itself. My eyes ached with staring, but I did not for a moment tire of its uneventful blackness.
But we would come out from the woods again, and the clouds would scatter and grow thin, and the prairie would lie spread out in the pale light. For we were following bias folk-roads, that wound along ridges, skirting farms, or dipped into an occasional hollow to cross a little stream. Everything lay in a faint, almost unmarked, gray. But it was a gray that was warm and distinct, for under it lay the living green of the prairie, or of the young crops on a farm. It faded off into mist on an indistinguishable horizon. The same cold night-mist lay in the hollows by the streams. I breathed hard to get the full effect of its coldness. I had not dreamed that the prairie held such mystery as the night gave it. The steady baldness of t he day was gone. The very fact that it could so change its appearance and present itself as a thing strange to me, made it into a wonder.
Arthur and Henry slept on through all the jog and jostle of our quick ride, and Uncle Henry and the man who was driving us talked about the price of land. Men were always talking about the price of land. So far as I could tell they were always saying the same thing. I believe that their talk affected my notions of the prairie, unprecocious though I was, and helped to make it the unromantic thing it seemed to me. A man could buy up miles of prairie — a whole landscape, in fact — at so much an acre, and write his name on a little strip of paper to pay for it all. I had seen it done; and while I admired the man, comparing his resources with the loose-rattling contents of my little iron bank, I could n’t help thinking less of the prairie, thus handed about as a chattel. All the triple-laid gold of a hillside of sunflowers, or the generous waves of the slough-grass, could be transferred from man to man in a fiveminute transaction. After I had seen it done, beauty seemed less an absolute thing than before.
After the ride came the train, where we all cuddled down and slept for hours. And after the train and breakfast came — the City.
‘You’ll be surprised to death,’ said Arthur for the fourth time, as we emerged from the station hotel, our feelings in leash for the great experience.
We had already been surprised, though we had not mentioned the fact, by certain peculiar flavors in the hotel breakfast, and by the difficulty of sitting down in a chair while it was being pushed under us. We had looked with interest at the liquid called cream, and the solid called potatoes. They were novelties to us. But these were mere details, and we put them aside for the moment, to consider fully at a later time, and came out of the dining-room all alert for the world. We longed to be surprised, even to the point of spasms.
‘There’s a policeman!’ exclaimed Arthur as we finally emerged on the street; and Uncle Henry looked expectantly at us.
We looked the policeman over. We had been familiar with his figure ever since we had had one in an early box of toys, and we had seen, first and last, some dozens of pictures of policemen, all of them exactly alike. This was undoubtedly a policeman. We recognized his well-filled blue suit and his supine majesty.
‘That thing he wears is a helmet,’ said Arthur, ‘and that stick is his billy. It’s awfully heavy.’
As we had not been trained in the conventions of conversation it did not occur to us to reply to the obvious, and we remained silent. A policeman was an interesting object and his moveless grandeur was very impressive, but unless he would obligingly arrest some one before our very eyes we saw nothing to say about him.
They kindly passed over our silence as due to our rustic stupefaction, and we moved on.
‘That building is fifteen stories high,’ said Uncle Henry respectfully, as we turned the corner; and he led us across the street to where we could take in its full magnificence.
‘It’s pretty high,’ we said, throwing appreciation into our voices, as Uncle Henry waited for our awed comment. But really it looked just as we had known it would. Having seen a onestory building, we could easily imagine a fifteen-story or even a hundred-story one, for that matter. It was merely a process of multiplication, and our imaginations had been stimulated by a course in mental arithmetic.
Well, details are embarrassing. Even now I don’t like to go over the events of that day. Uncle Henry was most devoted, and Arthur was an indefatigable cicerone. If we did not see the whole of the impedimenta and artillery of the army of industry it was not his fault. He even dragged us off after diliner to see a park. Fancy showing a pathetic made park to country children, even prairie children. We did not think much of it. We saw buildings and buildings, and streets and streets, and fire-boxes and letter-boxes, and surface cars and elevated cars, and wonderful stores and a fine hotel and a fire-station and elevators and the central post office and an opportune funeral and the Salvation Army and a boy that was begging, actually, and a blind man and a sandwich-man— and everything else worth seeing. And we had an ice-cream soda and saw part of a matinée vaudeville.
But on the whole the day was not a success. Uncle Henry found us dull little stupids to play the guide to. He, I privately suspect, had seen himself in the rôle of a beneficent and well-informed fairy, showing off the city to us with urban toleration of our ignorance, and amusement at our excitement. But instead of being entertained — and indirectly flattered — by our wondering and ecstatic comment and deliciously amusing blunders, which he could repeat to the people at home as illustrations of western ignorance, he found us stolid and inarticulate. We failed to wonder in the right place or we admired in the wrong place, and Arthur said over and over, ‘Well, you certainly are queer kids!’
Once when Uncle Henry met an acquaintance and they talked apart a few minutes, I heard him say, ‘Yes, it’s surprising what a difference there is between city children and country children. Now, my Arthur—’I was more inarticulate than ever when he rejoined us.
But really we were not seeing such novelties as he supposed. For the most part we were merely identifying the material forms of things we had heard about and read about and seen pictured, all our little lives. We were delighted enough to see them, but we were not in the least surprised. They fulfilled our expectations — or if they did not we thought it impolite to say so, as Uncle Henry took such a proprietary interest in them. But there was nothing much to say about them. So we merely looked and were ready to pass on. And no guide, not even one paid by the hour, would like that.
The fact was, it was as much a disappointment to me as it was to Uncle Henry. I don’t know what I had expected, but I had thought things would be different. I suppose the mystery of the night-ride was a bad preparation for the matter-of-factness of the city day. Perhaps if Uncle Henry and Arthur had not known so much and rattled off so many facts and explanations, things would have gone better. But they did n’t leave a single possibility unprovided for. When they got through, a street-car was simply a street-car, and an elevated road merely an elevated road — not a thing for strange unknown people to go to strange wonderful places on, for all sorts of unguessed purposes. Mysterious buildings changed before our very eyes, to steel and brick and stone, and what went on within them became a negligible thing.
But, on the other hand, there were the people, and no one could tell us about them. I wished they could. What were trolleys and tall buildings and elevators? The crowd was the thing. I stumbled along, upheld by Uncle Henry’s coercive hand. He thought my eyes were on store windows and street-cars and beer-wagons and such things; but they were not. Where were all the people going, and where did they belong, and who were they, and who lived at home with them, and what were they doing ? Every one of them might belong to a kind of life I knew nothing about. When I stumbled or pulled loiteringly at Uncle Henry’s overtaxed arm, it was usually because I was following some face of a quality I had never seen before, or trying to catch flying bits of talk as speakers passed. This was the stuff that stories were made of — if I could only get at it. I was divided between rapture and poignant perplexity. The world was all there, but I could not touch it.
A carriage stopped in the street and a gentleman handsome enough to be anything came to it and talked deferentially to a lady inside. And to this very day I want to know what he was saying. Two ladies in wonderful dresses and more wonderful hats waited on a corner for a car, and they talked so earnestly that they let their car pass — so I gathered from their gestures. And what were they talking about? And in another place a carriage drove up in a great hurry and a man jumped out and dashed into a building, an uninteresting building with nothing in the windows. But why was he in such a hurry?
Once a lady that was visiting us had with her a copy of one of Mary J. Holmes’s novels, and I surreptitiously began to read it. But before I had reached the end of the first chapter the lady departed and her novel with her, and I have never yet had a chance to finish it. It is a tragedy almost without parallel to have the full cup of a luscious novel snatched away from you when the first sip has barely passed your lips. Not all the other novels in the world will ever compensate for that lost one. That experience was multiplied a hundred times that day. No later assurance of the probable stupidity of those people and the flatness of their lives can ever console me for the things I did not learn. Why did that man hurry into that building? And what were the storified ladies talking about? I still want to know.
But there was no answer to such questions. I was as much outside things as I was on the prairie at home. I think I was glad when we were taken back to the gloomy, ugly station; and doubly glad when the train carried us away across the jolty, clanking, smoky, railroad yards, and we finally left the city behind. We left Uncle Henry and Arthur too, for they were going on east. Arthur’s last words were, ‘But you just ought to see the New York Central! ’
Some time after midnight the conductor put us off the train at our own little station, hardly discernible in the dark — and so back along the roads, to find Felicia Hemans welcoming us and daylight in one raucous hurrah, and Maldy getting ready the earliest breakfast we had ever known.
That second ride in the dark, with the laint color of dawn finally growing out of the gloom, seemed to drop a curtain over the day’s experience and shut it off into a space of its own. It seemed to be a thing that was completed for all time, with nothing following it. I meditated on the contradiction of things; for lo, I seemed, as we rode across the prairie, to be coming back to the bookuniverse, instead of turning my face away from it. One could see more in the city, but one could imagine more in the country. The city did not epitomize books, as I had thought it would — only newspapers and trade-catalogues and advertisements, and other things that were really a waste of the noble art of print. I was no nearer my desired verse-world and story-world than I had been before. But somehow that ride helped to reëstablish my faith in it. Even the sweet darkness of the prairie and the soft pink line of dawn gave an assurance of its reality, for that very dimness had a mystery and a presence that belonged to nothing I had seen that day. For the first time I found in me some love of the prairie.