A Letter From Dutch Flat

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Many thanks for your letter, which came to me some half-hour ago. Now everyone up and down the mountain for a mile in each direction knows that Bill Adams had a special delivery letter this morning; and all are asking questions of one another as to whether I have relatives, and if so where and who, and what can be amiss with them.
A special delivery letter is not really necessary in Dutch Flat, for we all go to the store whenever a mail comes in, which is twice a day. The boy who delivered this one at my kitchen door while I was taking my johnny cake out of the oven (I got up late this morning) arrived gasping, with popping eyes, and paused after I had taken it from him. So I said, ‘Hold on, Jimmie. Let’s see what it’s all about.’ And he came in and sat down. After I had read your letter I told Jimmie, ‘A feller back East has a hound pup and wants to know if I’d like him to send it to me.’ Jimmie said, ‘By George, tell him “sure”’ — for this is a deer-hunting country and everyone is always on the lookout for a good young hound. So I told Jimmie, ‘Don’t say nothin’ to no one. We’ll keep it quiet till the pup shows up.’ . . . And there you are!
So you think I have a book in me? Well, maybe I have. It would be straight autobiography. Fiction is right enough in its way, but life is what I like best. I suppose, though, that everyone thinks he or she has had a queerer life than most other folks have had.
I don’t know where I should begin. I might begin out in the back yard digging for worms on that showery day I remember so plainly. It began to rain and I went in, and, unseen by anyone, made my way upstairs. The house had been very silent all day. I went into a room where there was an empty bed. Two chairs stood by it, and on them was a long brown box. I tiptoed and looked down into it. Ah, me! . . . As I was stealing from that room next moment, two servant women came along the passage. They looked at me, and one said to the other, ’He’s seen his mother.’ Those are the first words of human talk that I remember from my babyhood. I was then four and a half years old.
My father ran away from home as a lad and enlisted in the Foreign Legion. They lost the colors in battle and he recaptured them. He carried them thenceforth. But he grew tired of the Legion and deserted. He was caught, tried, and sentenced to be shot. On the night ere the shooting was to be, he escaped and swam off to a ship, and so got back to England. Later he rode with the Heavy Brigade on Balaclava day, the day when the Light Brigade made its charge. His brother commanded the Guards at Inkerman and died of his wounds after the battle. Later still, my father rode with Sherman ‘from Atlanta to the sea.’ I was the child of his second wife. He was sixty-seven when I was born.
My father was penniless, and was taken care of by one of my maiden aunts, who disapproved of him altogether. After my mother died, I was taken away to a private school owned by my responsible aunt and her sister. The other boys hated them both and took it out on me. I was teased, pinched, tormented. The aunts, partly to show that they were just and did not favor me because I was their kin, were very severe on me. I was always in trouble. I got it both going and coming. I grew shy, sensitive, secretive. I was forever in fear.
Part of my aunts’ severity toward me proceeded from their wish to get out of my system any characteristics that I might have inherited from my disapproved-of father. I was forever being spanked. I was put in charge of a servant named Ada. How I abhor that name! She also was an old maid. One night when she had heard me say my prayers she told me that if I was n’t good my fingers would be cut off and I should be fed on bread and water. Thus were little children taught to be moral in the Victorian day! I knew sheer, utmost, appalling terror many and many a time. I was alone in the world, and it seemed to be all against me. I could not understand; I was a baby.
Well, how do I go on and be brief?
At the age of fourteen I won a scholarship at an English public school. I was not clever, but I was hard-working. There was no need for me to have taken the scholarship examination, for when I was nine my aunts had come into a large fortune and had disposed of their school. They had turned it over to two women who had been under-mistresses for them — Miss Minnie and Miss Louie. Very common women they were. For five years I stayed on there under them, and they forever held me up to ridicule before the other boys and made fun of my two old aunts.
At my public school I found myself jeered at as a scholarship boy, for to be poor is, among English public-school boys, a disgrace, and for me to have taken a scholarship proved that my people were too poor to pay my way. I grew more than ever shy and sensitive. I was different, and made no chum — nor sought to make any. I hated their compulsory game system and went my way alone. I came to be a member of the sixth form and wore a silk top hat, and kid gloves, and carried a walking stick on Sundays. And at seventeen, just after my father died (he was thrown from a horse when he was eighty-four), I went to sea. The moment I entered the half deck I was at home. I was among my own kind there.
I must be brief. ... In my book I plan to say hardly anything of my sea life. I had to leave the sea because of ill health, brought on by hardships endured while bringing a very undermanned ship round the Horn. I had to come ashore.
I should not care so much to write my book were it not for my dear wife. She whom I had known since my babyhood died last November. She always wanted me to write a book some day. It was she who stood by my side through the long, tired years when I was a workingman, who endured far more hardship than I ever did. She was gently brought up. The daughter of wealthy people, she had never had so much as to make her own bed until she was eighteen. She was eight years older than I. We worked together on ranches, for all sorts of bosses. I was a tramp for a time. I was a cop for a time. In the war, I was a Y.M.C.A. secretary. I had done all manner of shore jobs until, in 1922, I sold a story. Then I quit, and my working neighbors all took it for granted that I must be bootlegging.
Now I live here all alone. We came here, to our first home, just four years ago. We were very happy here in the mountains. Our daughter is a teacher in a little mountain school across the divide, forty-five miles away. I see her seldom. But it will soon be vacation time. Together, she and I nursed my dear wife till death came. No hand save ours touched her at the last. No flowers were heaped upon her grave. Our simple mountain neighbors buried her.
My life is done. What comes now is but a sort of sequel; it does n’t matter so much. My comrade and I fought our little fight together. We had three and a half years here, happy after labors. Her picture smiles at me from the top of my desk — ‘Courage!’ She was always courageous, always laughing. And I can still laugh. Life has been very good. I’ve had a world of fun. I have friends who would take the shirts off their backs for me, friends who loved us both, and love me now that I am left without her.
I have a drawer full of letters from people all over the shop — old women of eighty, young lads. A lad of twentyfour has been writing to me for ten years from New Zealand; I have ‘raised’ him, as it were. He says, ‘Life is n’t hard now, Bill, because you’ve shown me the way.’ That is what life is for — to show others the way, to keep one’s end up and refuse to be beaten. I am apt to loathe churches. I abhor sermons. The sky is my temple roof; the stars are my preachers.
I don’t know how I’d end my book, nor just where in my life I’d end it. I have written some 45,000 words of it in the rough. I want to make people wriggle with laughter. I should like to paint pictures in words. I want no sadness, no grief, no whining. Strong hands on the rope, and the song of a man shouting back to the song of the howling storm wind, to the rage of the thunderous sea. I abhor cowardice and complaining.
My health is not very good. I have had a hard winter alone here. My bank failed some months ago, Till yesterday I had made just six dollars since New Year’s. Yesterday I sold a pot-boiler, and now I have enough to keep me for some weeks. I want to wiggle along on my way. It costs me forty-five cents a day for grub, for me and my dog. I owe a good deal of money — the first time I was ever in debt in my life. But I think I can wiggle along. I ’ll try to, anyway. You know, where I was brought up, — at sea in the days of sailing ships, — one did not fly a distress signal just because the ship was dismasted and rudderless and had her decks stove in and her pumps jammed. One went to work to refit her. One got a new rudder rigged somehow or other, and managed to step new masts and cross new spars. One brought the old ship in, if it was by any means possible to do so.
You suggest making me an advance. Well, suppose you did, and then I went and wrote a book that was no good. A lot you’d think of me then, eh? And what should I think of myself?
It has seemed of late, during these last months since my dear wife died, my bank failed, my health went back on me, that things have been trying to crowd me to the wall. Friends tell me that I have shown marvelous nerve and courage. I do not see it that way. I have not yet won my fight, not yet done my job. My book is not yet written. And I want to write it — very much I want to. I want to do it well, and I should like to do it alone, unaided. If you were to make me an advance, I think I should feel burdened. My present debts are none of them burdens. I can pay them when I am able. Should I die to-day, my daughter would in time pay them. We are rather independent-minded people. There is still such a thing as pride in the world.
Now, instead of working on my book, as I had meant to do this morning, I have tired myself writing this long letter. And perhaps it is not rightly explanatory. Writing is a very difficult thing with me. There is so much to write, and one must be careful to have things just thus and so. I like good clear English, with a bit of a lilt to it, here and there a dirge note, but the gay note prevailing. I have seen a deal of life, and know that for all the sorrow that man must meet and endure there is ample compensation.
I want, if possible, to keep right on with my book. I may have to leave it now and then to do a pot-boiler story. I hate to leave it. But one of the great lessons of life is that one must be patient. My dear wife always said that I was the most patient man on earth. She said, too, one day when she was dying, that there was no one who could make an invalid as comfortable as I could. That, too, is one of life’s lessons — strength with gentleness. There is nothing that I enjoy more than nursing, helping the sick and dying. A few days ago I sat with an old man of eighty-four who was dying. His wife took his arm to stroke it. He drew it away, and I took it. Then he said to his wife, ‘Leave him alone. He knows how.’
You, a publisher, are interested in books, just as Jimmie, who brought me your special delivery letter a while ago, is interested in hound dogs. You remember what I said to Jimmie? ‘Don’t say nothin’. We’ll keep it quiet till the pup shows up.’ That’s what we’d best do, I reckon. Eh?