THEODORE DREISER

WITH ILLVSTRATIONS BY FRANKLIN BOOTH-

A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

BY THEODORE DREISER

THE "GENIUS" SISTER CARRIE JENNIE GERHARDT A TRAVELER AT FORTY

PLAYS OF THE NATURAL AND THE SUPERNATURAL

THE FINANCIER]

THE TITAN [ A TRILOGY OF DESIRE,

* * * * * * * *

THE WARSAW HOME

The Mecca of this trip

Frontispiece

AHGDSIER HOLIDAY

BY"

THEODORE DREISER

WITH ILLVSTRATIONS BY FRANKLIN BOOTH-

NEWYORK: JOHNLANE COMPANY

LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEYHEAD

MCMXVI

J1

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY

Press ol

J. J. Little & Ives Company New York, U.S.A.

TO MY MOTHER

372249

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE ROSE WINDOW 13

II. THE SCENIC ROUTE 20

III. ACROSS THE MEADOWS TO THE PASSAIC . 24

IV. THE PIETY AND EGGS OF PATERSON . . 29 V. ACROSS THE DELAWARE 35

VI. AN AMERICAN SUMMER RESORT .... 42

VII. THE PENNSYLVANIANS 50

VIII. BEAUTIFUL WILKES-BARRE 58

IX. IN AND OUT OF SCRANTON 65

X. A LITTLE AMERICAN TOWN 75

~XI. THE MAGIC OF THE ROAD AND SOME TALES . 81

XII. RAILROADS AND A NEW WONDER OF THE

WORLD 92

XIII. A COUNTRY HOTEL 98

XIV. THE CITY OF SWAMP ROOT 107

XV. A RIDE BY NIGHT 116

XVI. CHEMUNG 123

XVII. CHICKEN AND WAFFLES AND THE TOON

O' BATH 131

XVIII. MR. HUBBARD AND AN AUTOMOBILE FLIR TATION 141

XIX. THE REV. J. CADDEN McMiCKENS . . . 150

XX. THE CAPITAL OF THE FRA 159

XXI. BUFFALO OLD AND NEW 169

XXII. ALONG THE ERIE SHORE 176

XXIII. THE APPROACH TO ERIE 182

XXIV. THE WRECKAGE OF A STORM 190

XXV. CONNEAUT 197

XXVI. THE GAY LIFE OF THE LAKE SHORE . . 204

XXVII. A SUMMER STORM AND SOME COMMENTS ON

THE PICTURE POSTCARD 214

CONTENTS

X5

j KX;

IN CLEVELAND 221

THE FLAT LANDS OF OHIO 229

OSTEND PURGED OF SIN 234

WHEN HOPE HOPPED HIGH 244

THE FRONTIER OF INDIANA 256

ACROSS THE BORDER OF BOYLAND . . . 264

A MIDDLE WESTERN CROWD 273

WARSAW AT LAST 283

WARSAW IN 1884-6 290

CHAPTER PAGE

XXVIII. XXIX. XXX. XXXI.

:xn.

XXXIII.

xxxiv.

XXXV. -XXXVI.

XXXVII. THE OLD HOUSE 298

XXXVIII. DAY DREAMS . 305

XXXIX. THE Kiss OF FAIR GUSTA 309

— XL. OLD HAUNTS AND OLD DREAMS . . . . 317

XLI. BILL ARNOLD AND His BROOD . . . .327

XLII. IN THE CHAUTAUQUA BELT 335

XLIII. THE MYSTERY OF COINCIDENCE .... 346

XLIV. THE FOLKS AT CARMEL 357

-~*-XLV. AN INDIANA VILLAGE 370

XLVI. A SENTIMENTAL INTERLUDE 379

XLVII. INDIANAPOLIS AND A GLYMPSE OF FAIRY LAND 385

-~*XLVIII. THE SPIRIT OF TERRE HAUTE .... 396

XLIX. TERRE HAUTE AFTER THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS 401

L. A LUSH, EGYPTIAN LAND 409

LI. ANOTHER "OLD HOME" 419

-^LII. HAIL, INDIANA! 428

LIII. FISHING IN THE BUSSERON AND A COUNTY

FAIR 434

LIV. THE FERRY AT DECKER 440

LV. A MINSTREL BROTHER 448

LVI. EVANSVILLE 454

'••""LVI I. THE BACKWOODS OF INDIANA .... 465

LVI II. FRENCH LICK 475

LIX. A COLLEGE TOWN 486

-»«~-LX. "BOOSTER DAY" AND A MEMORY ... 496

~— LXL THE END OF THE JOURNEY 505

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Warsaw Home Frontispiece

FACING PAGE

The Old Essex and Morris Canal 38

Wilkes-Barre 58

A Coal Breaker Near Scranton 62

Franklin Studies an Obliterated Sign 70

Factoryville Bids Us Farewell 88

The Great Bridge at Nicholsen 94

Florence and the Arno, at Owego no

Beyond Elmira 132

Franklin Dreams Over a River Beyond Savona . . . 136

The "Toon O' Bath" 140

Egypt at Buffalo 178

Pleasure before Business 186

Conneaut, Ohio 200

The Bridge That Is to Make Franklin Famous . . . 218

Where I Learn That I Am Not to Live Eighty Years . 222

Cedar Point, Lake Erie 238

Hicksville 268

With the Old Settlers at Columbia City, Indiana . . 276

Central Indiana 330

In Carmel 362

The Best of Indianapolis 382

The Standard Bridge of Fifty Years Ago 390

Franklin's Impression of My Birthplace 398

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

Terre Haute from West of the Wabash 404

My Father's Mill 422

Vincennes 432

The Ferry at Decker 444

The Ohio at Evansville 458

A Beautiful Tree on a Vile Road 468

A Cathedral of Trees 472

French Lick 478

A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

CHAPTER I

THE ROSE WINDOW

•

IT was at a modest evening reception I happened to be giving to a new poet of renown that the idea of the holi day was first conceived. I had not seen Franklin, sub sequent companion of this pilgrimage, in all of eight or nine months, his work calling him in one direction, mine in another. He is an illustrator of repute, a master of pen and ink, what you would call a really successful artist. He has a studio in New York, another in Indiana — his home town — a car, a chauffeur, and so on.

I first met Franklin ten years before, when he was fresh from Indiana and working on the Sunday supple ment of a now defunct New York paper. I was doing the same. I was drawn to him then because he had such an air of unsophisticated and genial simplicity while look ing so much the artist. I liked his long, strong aquiline nose, and his hair of a fine black and silver, though he was then only twenty-seven or eight. It is now white — a soft, artistic shock of it, glistening white. Franklin is a Christian Scientist, or dreamy metaphysician, a fact which may not commend him in the eyes of many, though one would do better to await a full metaphysical inter pretation of his belief. It would do almost as well to call him a Buddhist or a follower of the Bhagavad Gita. He has no hard and fast Christian dogmas in mind. In fact, he is not a Christian at all, in the accepted sense, but a genial, liberal, platonic metaphysician. I know of no better way to describe him. Socalled sin, as some thing wherewith to reproach one, does not exist for him. He has few complaints to make concerning people's weak-

13

14 A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

nesses or errors. Nearly everything is well. He lives happily along, sketching landscapes and trees and draw ing many fine simplicities and perfections. There is about him a soothing repose which is not religious but human, which I felt, during all the two thousand miles we sub sequently idled together. Franklin is also a very liberal liver, one who does not believe in stinting himself of the good things of the world as he goes — a very excellent conclusion, I take it.

At the beginning of this particular evening nothing was farther from my mind than the idea of going back to Indiana. Twentyeight years before, at the age of sixteen, I had left Warsaw, the last place in the state where I had resided. I had not been in the town of my birth, Terre Haute, Indiana, since I was seven. I had not returned since I was twelve to Sullivan or Evansville on the Ohio River, each of which towns had been my home for two years. The State University of Indiana at Bloomington, in the south central portion of the state, which had known me for one year when I was eighteen, had been free of my presence for twentysix years.

And in that time what illusions had I not built up in connection with my native state ! Who does not allow fancy to color his primary experiences in the world? Terre Haute! A small city in which, during my first seven years, we lived in four houses. Sullivan, where we had lived from my seventh to my tenth year, in one house, a picturesque white frame on the edge of the town. In Evansville, at 1413 East Franklin Street, in a small brick, we had lived one year, and in Warsaw, in the northern part of the state, in a comparatively large brick house set in a grove of pines, we had spent four years. My mother's relatives were all residents of this northern section. There had been three months, be tween the time we left Evansville and the time we settled in Warsaw, Kosciusko County, which we spent in Chicago — my mother and nearly all of the children; also six weeks, between the time we left Terre Haute and the

THE ROSE WINDOW 15

time we settled in Sullivan, which we spent in Vincennes, Indiana, visiting a kindly friend.

We were very poor in those days. My father had only comparatively recently suffered severe reverses, from which he really never recovered. My mother, a dreamy, poetic, impractical soul, was serving to the best of her ability as the captain of the family ship. Most of the ten children had achieved comparative maturity and nad departed, or were preparing to depart, to shift for them selves. Before us — us little ones — were all our lives. At home, in a kind of intimacy which did not seem to concern the others because we were the youngest, were my brother Ed, two years younger than myself; my sis ter Claire (or Tillie), two years older, and occasionally my brother Albert, two years older than Claire, or my sister Sylvia, four years older, alternating as it were in the family home life. At other times they were out in the world working. Sometimes there appeared on the scene, usually one at a time, my elder brothers, Mark and Paul, and my elder sisters, Emma, Theresa, and Mary, each named in the order of their ascending ages. As I have said, there were ten all told — a rest less, determined, halfeducated family who, had each been properly trained according to his or her capacities, I have always thought might have made a considerable stir in the world. As it was — but I will try not to become too technical.

But in regard to all this and the material and spirit ual character of our life at that time, and what I had done and said, and what others had done and said, what notions had not arisen ! They were highly colored ones, which might or might not have some relationship to the character of the country out there as I had known it. I did not know. Anyhow, it had been one of my dearly cherished ideas that some day, when I had the time and the money to spare, I was going to pay a return visit to Indiana. My father had once owned a woolen mill at Sullivan, still standing, I understood (or its duplicate built after a fire), and he also had managed another

1 6 A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

at Terre Haute. I had a vague recollection of seeing him at work in this one at Terre Haute, and of being shown about, having a spinning jenny and a carder and

Tmni 11 m i uiiifcinwn.i i«|fl fa •ilfii ••mi i|M •- •»•

a weaver explained to me. I had tishgd in the Busseron near Sullivan, nearly lost my life in the Ohio at Evans- ville in the dead of winter, fallen in love with the first girls I ever loved at Warsaw. The first girl who ever kissed me and the first girl I ever ventured to kiss were at Warsaw. Would not that cast a celestial light over any midwestern village, however homely?

Well, be that as it may, I had this illusion. Someday I was going back, only in my plans I saw myself taking a train and loafing around in each village and hamlet hours or days, or weeks if necessary. At Warsaw I would try to find out about all the people I had ever known, particularly the boys and girls who went to school with me. At Terre Haute I would look up the house where I was born and our old house in Seventh Street, somewhere near a lumber yard and some railroad tracks, where, in a cool, roomy, musty cellar, I had swung in a swing hung from one of the rafters. Also in this lumber yard and among these tracks where the cars were, I had played with Al and Ed and other boys. Also in Thirteenth Street, Terre Haute, somewhere there was a small house (those were the darkest days of our pov erty), where I had been sick with the measles. My father was an ardent Catholic. For the first fifteen years of my life I was horrified by the grim spiritual punish ments enunciated by that faith. In this house in Thir teenth Street I had been visited by a long, lank priest in black, who held a silver crucifix to my lips to be kissed. That little house remains the apotheosis of earthly gloom to me even now.

At Sullivan I intended to go out to the Easier House, where we lived, several blocks from the local or old Evansville and Terre Haute depot. This house, as I re called, was a charming thing of six or seven rooms with a large lawn, in which roses flourished, and with a truck garden north of it and a wonderful clover field to the

THE ROSE WINDOW 17

rear (or east) of it. This clover field — how shall I describe it? — but I can't. It wasn't a clover field at all as I had come to think of it, but a honey trove in Arcady. An army of humble bees came here to gather honey. In those early dawns of spring, summer and autumn, when, for some reason not clear to me now, I was given to rising at dawn, it was canopied by a wonderful veil of clouds (tinted cirrus and nimbus effects), which seemed, as I looked at them, too wonderful for words. Across the fields was a grove of maples concealing a sugar camp (not ours), where I would go in the early dawn to bring home a bucket of maple sap. And directly to the north of us was a large, bare Gethsemane of a field, in the weedy hollows of which were endless whitening bones, for here stood a small village slaughter house, the sacri ficial altar of one local butcher. It was not so gruesome as it sounds — only dramatic.

JSut this field and the atmosphere of that home! I shall have to tell you about them or the import of re turning there will be as nothing. It was between my seventh and my tenth year that we lived there, among the most impressionable of all my youth. We were very hard pressed, as I understood it later, but I was too young and too dreamy to feel the pinch of poverty. This lower Wabash valley is an Egyptian realm — not very cold in winter^ and drowsy with heat in summer. Corn and wheat and hay and melons grow here in heavy, plethoric fashion. Rains come infrequently, then only in deluging storms. The spring comes early, the autumn lingers until quite New Year's time. In the beech and ash and hickory groves are many turtle doves. Great hawks and buzzards and eagles soar high in the air. House and barn martins circle in covies. The bluejay and scarlet tanager flash and cry. In the eaves of our cottage were bluebirds and wrens, and to our trumpet vines and purple clematis came wondrous humming birds to poise and glitter, tropic in their radiance. In old Kirkwood's orchard, a quarter of a mile away over the

i8 A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

clover field, I can still hear the guinea fowls and the pea cocks "calling for rain."

Sometimes the experiences of delicious years make a i stained glass window — the rose window of the west — in the cathedral of our life. These three years in "dirty old Sullivan," as one of my sisters once called it (with a lip-curl of contempt thrown in for good measure), form such a flower of stained glass in mine. They are my rose window. In symphonies of leaded glass, blue, violet, gold and rose are the sweet harmonies of memory with all the ills of youth discarded. A bare-foot boy is sit ting astride a high board fence at dawn. Above him are the tinted fleeces of heaven, those golden argosies of youthful seas of dream. Over the blooming clover are scudding the swallows, "my heart remembers how." I look, and in a fence corner is a spider web impearled with dew, a great yellow spider somewhere on its sur face is repairing a strand. At a window commanding the field, a window in the kitchen, is my mother. My brother Ed has not risen yet, nor my sister Tillie. The boy looks at the sky. He loves the feel of the dawn. He knows nothing of whence he is coming or where he is going, only all is sensuously, deliriously gay and beau tiful. Youth is his: the tingle and response of a new body; the bloom and fragrance of the clover in the air; the sense of the mystery of flying. He sits and sings some tuneless tune. Of such is the kingdom of heaven.

Or it is a great tree, say, a hundred yards from the house. In its thick leaves and widespreading branches the wind is stirring. Under its shade Ed and Tillie and I are playing house. What am I? Oh, a son, a hus band, or indeed anything that the occasion requires. We play at duties — getting breakfast, or going to work, or coming home. Why? But a turtle dove is calling some where in the depths of a woodland, and that gives me pause. "Bob white" cries and I think of strange and faroff things to come. A buzzard is poised in the high blue above and I wish I might soar on wings as wide.

Or is it a day with a pet dog? Now they are running

THE ROSE WINDOW 19

side by side over a stubbly field. Now the dog has wan dered away and the boy is calling. Now the boy is sitting in a rocking chair by a window and holding the dog in his lap, studying a gnarled tree in the distance, where sits a hawk all day, meditating no doubt on his midnight crimes. Now the dog is gone forever, shot somewhere for chasing sheep, and the boy, disconsolate, is standing under a tree, calling, calling, calling, until the sadness of his own voice and the futility of his cries moves him nearly to tears.

These and many scenes like these make my rose win dow of the west.

CHAPTER II

THE SCENIC ROUTE

IT was a flash of all this that came to me when in the midst of the blathering and fol de rol of a gay evening Franklin suddenly approached me and said, quite apropos of nothing: "How would you like to go out to Indiana in my car?"

"I'll tell you what, Franklin," I answered, "all my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it. I was born in Terre Haute, down in the southwest there below you, and I was brought up in Sullivan and Evansville in the southern part of the state and in Warsaw up north. Agree to take me to all those places after we get there, and I'll go. What's more, you can illustrate the book if you will."

"I'll do that," he said. "Warsaw is only about two hours north of our place. Terre Haute is seventyfive miles away. Evansville is a hundred and fifty. We'll make a oneday trip to the northern part and a three- day trip to the southern. I stipulate but one thing. If we ruin many tires, we split the cost."

To this I agreed.

Franklin's home was really central for all places. It was at Carmel, fifteen miles north of Indianapolis. His plan, once the trip was over, was to camp there in his country studio, and paint during the autumn. Mine was to return direct to New York.

We were to go up the Hudson to Albany and via various perfect state roads to Buffalo. There we were to follow other smooth roads along the shore of Lake Erie to Cleveland and Toledo, and possibly Detroit. There we were to cut southwest to Indianapolis — so close to Carmel. It had not occurred to either of us yet to

20

THE SCENIC ROUTE 21

go direct to Warsaw from Toledo or thereabouts, and thence south to Carmel. That was to come as an after thought.

But this Hudson-Albany-State-road route irritated me from the very first. Everyone traveling in an automobile seemed inclined to travel that way. I had a vision of thousands of cars which we would have to trail, con suming their dust, or meet and pass, coming toward us. By now the Hudson River was a chestnut. Having trav eled by the Pennsylvania and the Central over and over to the west, all this mid-New York and southern Pennsyl vania territory was wearisome to think of. Give me the poor, undernourished routes which the dull, imitative rabble shun, and where, because of this very fact, you have some peace and quiet. I traveled all the way up town the next day to voice my preference in regard to this matter.

"I'd like to make a book out of this," I explained, "if the material is interesting enough, and there isn't a thing that you can say about the Hudson River or the central part of New York State that hasn't been said a thou sand times before. Poughkeepsie, Albany, Troy, Syra cuse, Rochester — all ghastly manufacturing towns. Why don't we cut due west and see how we make out? This is the nicest, dryest time of the year. Let's go west to the Water Gap, and straight from there through Penn sylvania to some point in Ohio, then on to Indianapolis." A vision of quaint, wild, unexpected regions in Pennsyl vania came to me.

"Very good," he replied genially. He was playing with a cheerful, pop-eyed French bull. "Perhaps that would be better. The other would have the best roads, but we're not going for roads exactly. Do you know the country out through there?"

"No," I replied. "But we can find out. I suppose the Automobile Club of America ought to help us. I might go round there and see what I can discover."

"Do that," he applauded, and I was making to depart

22 A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

when Franklin's brother and his chauffeur entered. The latter he introduced as uSpeed."

"Speed," he said, "this is Mr. Dreiser, who is going with us. He wants to ride directly west across Penn sylvania to Ohio and so on to Indianapolis. Do you think you can take us through that way?"

A blond, lithe, gangling youth with an eerie farmer- like look and smile ambled across the room and took my hand. He seemed half mechanic, half street-car con ductor, half mentor, guide and friend.

"Sure," he replied, with a kind of childish smile that ; won instantly — a little girl smile, really. "If there are any roads, I can. We can go anywhere the car'll go."

I liked him thoroughly. All the time I was trying to think where I had seen Speed before. Suddenly it came to me. There had been a car conductor in a re cent comedy. This was the stage character to life. Be sides he reeked of Indiana — the real Hoosier. If you have ever seen one, you'll know what I mean.

"Very good," I said. "Fine. Are you as swift as your name indicates, Speed?"

"I'm pretty swift," he said, with the same glance that a collie will give you at times — a gay, innocent light of the eyes !

A little while later Franklin was saying to me that he had no real complaint against Speed except this: "If you drive up to the St. Regis and go in for half an hour, when you come out the sidewalk is all covered with tools and the engine dismantled — that is, if the police have not interfered."

"Just the same," put in Fred Booth, "he is one of the chauffeurs who led the procession of cars from New York over the Alleghanies and Rockies to the coast, laying out the Lincoln Highway." (Afterwards I saw testimonials and autographed plates which proved this.) "He can take a car anywhere she'll go."

Then I proceeded to the great automobile club for information.

THE SCENIC ROUTE 23

"Are you a member?" asked the smug attendant, a polite, airy, bufferish character.

"No, only the temporary possessor of a car for a

tour."

"Then we can do nothing for you. Only members are provided with information. "

On the table by which I was standing lay an automo bile monthly. In its pages, which I had been idly thumb ing as I waited, were a dozen maps of tours, those de ceptive things gotten up by associated roadhouses and hotels in their own interest. One was labeled "The Scenic Route," and showed a broad black line extending from New York via the Water Gap, Stroudsburg, Wilkes- Barre, Scranton, Binghamton, and a place called Watkins Glen, to Buffalo and Niagara Falls. This interested me. These places are in the heart of the Alleghanies and of the anthracite coal region. Visions of green hills, deep valleys, winding rivers, glistering cataracts and the like leaped before my mind.

"The Scenic Route!" I ventured. "Here's a map that seems to cover what I want. What number is this?"

"Take it, take it!" replied the lofty attendant, as if to shoo me out of the place. "You are welcome."

"May I pay you?"

"No, no, you're welcome to it."

I bowed myself humbly away.

"Well, auto club or no auto club, here is something, a real route," I said to myself. "Anyhow it will do to get us as far as Wilkes-Barre or Scranton. After that we'll just cut west if we have to."

On the way home I mooned over such names as To- byhanna, Meshoppen, Blossburg, and Roaring Branch. What sort of places were they? Oh, to be speeding along in this fine warm August weather! To be looking at the odd places, seeing mountains, going back to Warsaw and Sullivan and Terre Haute and Evansville!

CHAPTER III

ACROSS THE MEADOWS TO THE PASSAIC

I ASSUME that automobiling, even to the extent of a two-thousand-mile trip such as this proved to be, is an old story to most people. Anybody can do it, appar ently. The difference is to the man who is making the trip, and for me this one had the added fillip of includ ing that pilgrimage which I was certain of making some time.

There was an unavoidable delay owing to the sudden illness of Speed, and then the next morning, when I was uncertain as to whether the trip had been abandoned or no, the car appeared at my door in Tenth Street, and off we sped. There were some amusing preliminaries.

I was introduced to Miss H , a lady who was to

accompany us on the first day of our journey. A photo graph was taken, the bags had to be arranged and strapped on the outside, and Speed had to examine his engine most carefully. Finally we were off — up Eighth Avenue and across Fortysecond Street to the West Forty- second Street Ferry, while we talked of non-skid chains and Silvertown tires and the durability of the machines in general — this one in particular. It proved to be a handsome sixty-horsepower Pathfinder, only recently purchased, very presentable and shiny.

As we crossed the West Fortysecond Street Ferry I stood out on the front deck till we landed, looking at the refreshing scene the river presented. The day was fine, nearly mid-August, with a sky as blue as weak indigo. Flocks of gulls that frequent the North River were dip ping and wheeling. A cool, fresh wind was blowing.

As we stood out in front Miss H deigned to tell

me something of her life. She is one of those self-

24

ACROSS THE MEADOWS TO THE PASSAIC 25

conscious, carefully dressed, seemingly prosperous maid ens of some beauty who frequent the stage and the studios. At present she was Franklin's chief model. Recently she had been in some pantomime, dancing. A little wearied perhaps (for all her looks), she told me her stage and art experiences. She had to do something. She could sing, dance, act a little, and draw, she said. Artists seemed to crave her as a model — so

She lifted a thin silk veil and dabbed her nose with a mere rumor of a handkerchief. Looking at her so fresh and spick in the morning sunlight, I could not help feeling that Franklin was to be congratulated in the selection of his models.

But in a few minutes we were off again, Speed obvi ously holding in the machine out of respect for officers who appeared at intervals, even in Weehawken, to wave us on or back. I could not help feeling as I looked at them how rapidly the passion for regulating street traffic had grown in the last few years. Everywhere we seemed to be encountering them — the regulation New York police cap (borrowed from the German army) shading their eyes, their air of majesty beggaring the memories of Rome — and scarcely a wagon to regulate. At Passaic, at Paterson — but I anticipate.

As we hunted for a road across the meadows we got lost in a maze of shabby streets where dirty children were playing in the dust, and, as we gingerly picked our way over rough cobbles, I began to fear that much of this would make a disagreeable trip. But we would soon be out of it, in all likelihood — miles and miles away from the hot, dusty city.

I can think of nothing more suited to my temperament than automobiling. It supplies just that mixture of change in fixity which satisfies me — leaves me mentally poised in inquiry, which is always delightful. Now, for instance, we were coming out on a wide, smooth macadam road, which led, without a break, as someone informed us, into Passaic and then into Paterson. It was the first opportunity that Speed had had to show what the ma-

26 A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

chine could do, and instantly, though various signs read, "Speed limit: 25 miles an hour," I saw the speedometer climb to thirtyfive and then forty and then fortyfive. It was a smooth-running machine which, at its best (or worst), gave vent to a tr-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r which became after a while somewhat like a croon.

Though it was a blazing hot day (as any momentary pause proved, the leather cushions becoming like an oven), on this smooth road, and at this speed, it was almost too cool. I had decked myself out in a brown linen outing shirt and low visored cap. Now I felt as though I might require my overcoat. There was no dust to speak of, and under the low branches of trees and passing delightful dooryards all the homey flowers of August were blooming in abundance. Now we were fol lowing the Hackensack and the Passaic in spots, seeing long, low brick sheds in the former set down in wind rhythmed marsh grass, and on the latter towering stacks and also simple clubs where canoes were to be seen — white, red and green — and a kind of August summer life prevailing for those who could not go further. I was becoming enamored of our American country life once more.

Paterson, to most New Yorkers, and for that matter to most Americans, may be an old story. To me it is one of the most interesting pools of life I know. There is nothing in Paterson, most people will tell you, save silk mills and five-and-ten-cent stores. It is true. Yet to me it is a beautiful city in the creative sense — a place in which to stage a great novel. These mills — have you ever seen them? They line the Passaic river and various smooth canals that branch out from it. It was no doubt the well- known waterfall and rapids of this river that originally drew manufacturers to Paterson, supplied the first mills with water, and gave the city its start. Then along came steam and all the wonders of modern electricity-driven looms. The day we were there they were just complet ing a power plant or city water supply system. The ground around the falls had been parked, and standing

ACROSS THE MEADOWS TO THE PASSAIC 27

on a new bridge one could look down into a great round, grey-black pit or cup, into which tumbled the water of the sturdy little river above. By the drop of eighty or a hundred feet it was churned into a white spray which bounded back almost to the bridge where we stood. In this gay sunlight a rainbow was ever present — a fine five- striped thing, which paled and then strengthened as the spray thinned or thickened.

Below, over a great flume of rocks, that stretched out ward toward the city, the expended current was bubbling away, spinning past the mills and the bridges. From the mills themselves, as one drew near, came the crash of shuttles and the thrum of spindles, where thousands of workers were immured, weaving the silk which probably they might never wear. I could not help thinking, as I stood looking at them, of the great strike that had oc curred two years before, in which all sorts of nameless brutalities had occurred, brutalities practised by judges, manufacturers and the police no less than by the eager workers themselves.

In spite of all the evidence I have that human nature is V much the same at the bottom as at the top, and that the'* restless striker of today may be the oppressive manufac turer or boss of tomorrow, I cannot help sympathizing with the working rank and file. Why should the man at the top, I ask myself, want more than a reasonable au thority? Why endless houses, and lands, and stocks, and bonds to flaunt a prosperity that he does not need and can not feel? I am convinced that man in toto — the race itself — is nothing more nor less as yet than an embryo in the womb of something which we cannot see. We are to be protected (as a race) and born into something (some state) which we cannot as yet understand or even feel. We, as individual atoms, may never know, any more than the atoms or individual plasm cells which con structed us ever knew. But we race atoms are being driven to do something, construct something — (a race man or woman, let us say) — and like the atoms in the embryo, we are struggling and fetching and carrying. I

28 A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

did not always believe in some one "divine faroff event" for the race. I do not accept the adjective divine even now. But I do believe that these atoms are not toiling for exactly nothing — or at least, that the nothingness is not quite as undeniable as it was. There is something back of man. An avatar, a devil, anything you will, is trying to do something, and man is His medium, His brush, His paint, His idea. Against the illimitable space of things He is attempting to set forth his vision. Is the vision good? Who knows! It may be as bad as that of the lowest vaudeville performer clowning it before a hoodlum audience. But good or bad, here it is, strug gling to make itself manifest, and we are of it!

What if it is all a mad, aimless farce, my masters? Shan't we clown it all together and make the best of it?

Ha ha ! Ho ho ! We are all crazy and He is crazy ! Ha ha! Ho ho!

Or do I hear someone crying?

CHAPTER IV

THE PIETY AND EGGS OF PATERSON

BUT in addition to mills and the falls, Paterson offered another subject of conversation. Only recently there had been completed there an evangelical revival by one "Billy" Sunday, who had addressed from eight to twenty thousand people at each meeting in a specially constructed tabernacle, and caused from one to five hundred or a thousand a day to "hit the trail," as he phrased it, or in other words to declare that they were "converted to Christ," and hence saved.

America strikes me as an exceedingly intelligent land at times, with its far-flung states, its fine mechanical equipment, its good homes and liberal, rather non-inter fering form of government, but when one contemplates such a mountebank spectacle as this, what is one to say? I suppose one had really better go deeper than America and contemplate nature itself. But then what is one to say of nature?

We discussed this while passing various mills and brown wooden streets, so poor that they were discour aging. ^

"It is curious, but it is just such places as Paterson that seem to be afflicted with unreasoning emotions of this kind," observed Franklin wearily. "Gather together hordes of working people who have little or no skill above machines, and then comes the revivalist and waves of religion. Look at Pittsburg and Philadelphia. See how well Sunday did there. He converted thousands."

He smiled heavily.

* 'Billy* Sunday comes from out near your town," vol unteered Speed informatively. "He lives at Winona Lake. That's a part of Warsaw now."

29

30 A HOOSIER HOLIDAY

"Yes, and he conducts a summer revival right there occasionally, I believe," added Franklin, a little vin dictively, I thought.

"Save me !" I pleaded. "Anyhow, I wasn't born there. I only lived there for a little while."

This revival came directly on the heels of a great strike, during which thousands were compelled to obtain their food at soup houses, or to report weekly to the local officers of the union for some slight dole. The good God was giving them wrathful, condemnatory manufacturers, and clubbing, cynical police. Who was it, then, that "revived" and "hit the trail"? The same who were starved and clubbed and lived in camps, and were rail roaded to jail? Or were they the families of the bosses and manufacturers, who had suppressed the strike and were thankful for past favors (for they eventually won, I believe) ? Or was it some intermediate element that had nothing to do with manufacturers or workers?

The day we went through, some Sunday school parade was preparing. There were dozens of wagons and auto trucks and automobiles gaily bedecked with flags and bunting and Sunday school banners. Hundreds, I might almost guess thousands, of children in freshly ironed white dresses and gay ribbons, carrying parasols, and chaperoned by various serious looking mothers and elders, were in these conveyances, all celebrating, pre sumably, the glory and goodness of God !

A spectacle like this, I am free to say, invariably causes me to scoff. I cannot help smiling at a world that cannot devise some really poetical or ethical reason for wor shiping or celebrating or what you will, but must indulge in shrines and genuflections and temples to false or im possible ideas or deities. They have made a God of Christ, who was at best a humanitarian poet — but not on the basis on which he offered himself. Never! They had to bind him up with the execrable yah-vah of the Hebrews, and make him now a God of mercy, and now a God of horror. (They had to dig themselves a hell, and they still cling to it. They had to secure a church organ-

THE PIETY AND EGGS OF PATERSON 31

ization and appoint strutting vicars of Christ to misin terpret him, and all that he believed. This wretched mountebank "who came here and converted thousands" — think of him with his yapping about hell, his bar-room and race-track slang, his base-ball vocabulary. And thou sands of poor worms who could not possibly offer one reasonable or intelligible thought concerning their faith or history or life, or indeed anything, fall on their knees and "accept Christ." And then they pass the collection plate and build more temples and conduct more revivals.

What does the God of our universe want, anyway? Slaves? Or beings who attempt to think? Is the fable of Prometheus true after all? Is autocracy the true in terpretation of all things — or is this an accidental phase, infinitely brief in the long flow of things, and eventually to be done away with? I, for one, hope so.

Beyond Paterson we found a rather good road leading to a place called Boonton, via Little Falls, Singac, and other smaller towns, and still skirting the banks of the Passaic River. In Paterson we had purchased four hard- boiled eggs, two pies, four slices of ham and some slices