Poor White: A Novel Read online

  CHAPTER II

  Hugh McVey left the town of Mudcat Landing in early September of theyear eighteen eighty-six. He was then twenty years old and was six feetand four inches tall. The whole upper part of his body was immenselystrong but his long legs were ungainly and lifeless. He secured a passfrom the railroad company that had employed him, and rode north alongthe river in the night train until he came to a large town namedBurlington in the State of Iowa. There a bridge went over the river, andthe railroad tracks joined those of a trunk line and ran eastward towardChicago; but Hugh did not continue his journey on that night. Gettingoff 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 ofBurlington, a prosperous place in the midst of a rich farming country,overwhelmed him with its stir and bustle. For the first time he sawbrick-paved streets and streets lighted with lamps. Although it wasnearly ten o'clock at night when he arrived, people still walked aboutin the streets and many stores were open.

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

  In a few minutes he became utterly lost. He went through what seemed tohim miles of streets lined with frame and brick houses, and occasionallypassed people, but was too timid and embarrassed to ask his way. Thestreet climbed upward and after a time he got into open country andfollowed a road that ran along a cliff overlooking the MississippiRiver. The night was clear and the sky brilliant with stars. In theopen, away from the multitude of houses, he no longer felt awkward andafraid, and went cheerfully along. After a time he stopped and stoodfacing the river. Standing on a high cliff and with a grove of treesat 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 bemaking a pathway for him into the East.

  The tall Missouri countryman sat down on a log near the edge of thecliff and tried to see the water in the river below. Nothing was visiblebut a bed of stars that danced and twinkled in the darkness. He hadmade his way to a place far above the railroad bridge, but presently athrough passenger train from the West passed over it and the lights ofthe train looked also like stars, stars that moved and beckoned and thatseemed 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 thatit was hopeless for him to find his way back to the hotel, and was gladof the excuse for staying abroad. His body for the first time in hislife felt light and strong and his mind was feverishly awake. A buggyin 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 longintervals during the hours when he sat thinking of his future bythe barking of a dog in some distant house or the churning of thepaddle-wheels of a passing river boat.

  All of the early formative years of Hugh McVey's life had been spentwithin sound of the lapping of the waters of the Mississippi River. Hehad seen it in the hot summer when the water receded and the mud laybaked and cracked along the edge of the water; in the spring when thefloods raged and the water went whirling past, bearing tree logs andeven parts of houses; in the winter when the water looked deathly coldand ice floated past; and in the fall when it was quiet and still andlovely, and seemed to have sucked an almost human quality of warmth outof the red trees that lined its shores. Hugh had spent hours and dayssitting or lying in the grass beside the river. The fishing shack inwhich he had lived with his father until he was fourteen years old waswithin a half dozen long strides of the river's edge, and the boy hadoften been left there alone for a week at a time. When his father hadgone for a trip on a lumber raft or to work for a few days on some farmin the country back from the river, the boy, left often without moneyand with but a few loaves of bread, went fishing when he was hungry andwhen he was not did nothing but idle the days away in the grass on theriver 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 wantedto be left alone with his dreams. One of the boys, a sickly, pale,undeveloped lad of ten, often stayed with him through an entire summerafternoon. He was the son of a merchant in the town and grew quicklytired when he tried to follow other boys about. On the river bank he laybeside Hugh in silence. The two got into Hugh's boat and went fishingand the merchant's son grew animated and talked. He taught Hugh to writehis own name and to read a few words. The shyness that kept them aparthad begun to break down, when the merchant's son caught some childhooddisease and died.

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

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

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

  On the Sunday afternoons in the woods south of Mudcat Landing Hugh hadlain perfectly still in the grass for hours. The smell of dead fish thathad always been present about the shack where he spent his boyhood, wasgone and there were no swarms of flies. Above his head a breeze playedthrough the branches of the trees, and insects sang in the grass.Everything about him was clean. A lovely stillness pervaded the riverand the woods. He lay on his belly and gazed down over the river out ofsleep-heavy eyes into hazy distances. Half formed thoughts passed likevisions through his mind. He dreamed, but his dreams were unformed andvaporous. For hours the half dead, half alive state into which he hadgot, persisted. He did not sleep but lay in a land between sleeping andwaking. Pictures formed in his mind. The clouds that floated in the skyabove the river took on strange, grotesque shapes. They began to move.One of the clouds separated itself from the others. It moved swiftlyaway into the dim distance and then returned. It became a half humanthing and seemed to be marshaling the other clouds. Under its influencethey became agitated and moved restlessly about. Out of the body of themost active of the clouds long vaporous arms were extended. They pulledand 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 thatnight in Burlington, was deeply stirred. Again he was a boy lying inthe woods above his river, and the visions that had come to him therereturned with startling clearness. He got off the log and lying in thewet grass, closed his eyes. His body became warm.

  Hugh thought his mind had gone out of his body and up into the skyto join the clouds and the stars, to play with them. From the sky hethought he looked down on the earth and saw rolling fields, hills andforests. He had no part in the lives of the men and women of the e
arth,but was torn away from them, left to stand by himself. From his place inthe 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 hewas a boy down below lying on his belly in the wood. He saw men pass inboats and could hear their voices dimly. A great quiet prevailed and helooked abroad beyond the wide expanse of the river and saw fields andtowns. They were all hushed and still. An air of waiting hung overthem. And then the river was whipped into action by some strange unknownforce, something that had come out of a distant place, out of the placeto which the cloud had gone and from which it had returned to stir andagitate the other clouds.

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

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

  The dreaming man felt himself a part of something significant andterrible that was happening to the earth and to the peoples of theearth. Again he struggled to awake, to force himself back out of thedream world into consciousness. When he did awake, day was breakingand he sat on the very edge of the cliff that looked down upon theMississippi River, gray now in the dim morning light.

  * * * * *

  The towns in which Hugh lived during the first three years after hebegan his eastward journey were all small places containing a fewhundred people, and were scattered through Illinois, Indiana and westernOhio. All of the people among whom he worked and lived during thattime were farmers and laborers. In the spring of the first year of hiswandering he passed through the city of Chicago and spent two hoursthere, going in and out at the same railroad station.

  He was not tempted to become a city man. The huge commercial city at thefoot of Lake Michigan, because of its commanding position in the verycenter of a vast farming empire, had already become gigantic. He neverforgot the two hours he spent standing in the station in the heart ofthe city and walking in the street adjoining the station. It was eveningwhen he came into the roaring, clanging place. On the long wide plainswest of the city he saw farmers at work with their spring plowing as thetrain went flying along. Presently the farms grew small and the wholeprairie dotted with towns. In these the train did not stop but ran intoa crowded network of streets filled with multitudes of people. When hegot into the big dark station Hugh saw thousands of people rushing aboutlike disturbed insects. Unnumbered thousands of people were going out ofthe city at the end of their day of work and trains waited to takethem to towns on the prairies. They came in droves, hurrying along likedistraught cattle, over a bridge and into the station. The in-boundcrowds that had alighted from through trains coming from cities of theEast and West climbed up a stairway to the street, and those that wereout-bound tried to descend by the same stairway and at the same time.The result was a whirling churning mass of humanity. Every one pushedand crowded his way along. Men swore, women grew angry, and childrencried. Near the doorway that opened into the street a long line of cabdrivers shouted and roared.

  Hugh looked at the people who were whirled along past him, and shiveredwith the nameless fear of multitudes, common to country boys in thecity. When the rush of people had a little subsided he went out of thestation and, walking across a narrow street, stood by a brick storebuilding. Presently the rush of people began again, and again men,women, and boys came hurrying across the bridge and ran wildly in atthe doorway leading into the station. They came in waves as water washesalong a beach during a storm. Hugh had a feeling that if he were bysome chance to get caught in the crowd he would be swept away intosome unknown and terrible place. Waiting until the rush had a littlesubsided, he went across the street and on to the bridge to look at theriver 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 thesky. From all sides of him and even in the air above his head a greatclatter and roar of bells and whistles went on.

  With the air of a child venturing into a dark forest Hugh went a littleway into one of the streets that led westward from the station. Againhe stopped and stood by a building. Near at hand a group of youngcity roughs stood smoking and talking before a saloon. Out of a nearbybuilding 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 ina minute and smash her face," he said, and, paying no more attention tothe girl, turned to stare at Hugh. All of the young men lounging beforethe saloon turned to stare at the tall countryman. They began to laughand one of them walked quickly toward him.

  Hugh ran along the street and into the station followed by the shouts ofthe young roughs. He did not venture out again, and when his trainwas ready, got aboard and went gladly out of the great complexdwelling-place of modern Americans.

  Hugh went from town to town always working his way eastward, alwaysseeking the place where happiness was to come to him and where he was toachieve companionship with men and women. He cut fence posts in a foreston a large farm in Indiana, worked in the fields, and in one place was asection hand on the railroad.

  On a farm in Indiana, some forty miles east of Indianapolis, he was forthe first time powerfully touched by the presence of a woman. She wasthe 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 hadgiven up the work because she was about to be married. Hugh thought theman who was to marry her the most fortunate being in the world. He livedin 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 andfastening a rose in her hair. The two people walked about in an orchardbeside the house or went for a ride along the country roads. Theyoung man, who, Hugh had been told, worked in a bank, wore stiff whitecollars, a black suit and a black derby hat.

  On the farm Hugh worked in the field with the farmer and ate at tablewith his family, but did not get acquainted with them. On Sunday whenthe young man came he took the day off and went into a nearby town. Thecourtship became a matter very close to him and he lived throughthe excitement of the weekly visits as though he had been one of theprincipals. The daughter of the house, sensing the fact that thesilent 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 detachedand interested air. She tried to make talk, but Hugh answered all heradvances so briefly and with such a half frightened manner that she gaveup the attempt. One Saturday evening when her sweetheart had come shetook him for a ride in the family carriage, and Hugh concealed himselfin 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 fora woman. It seemed to him a terrifically heroic thing to do and hehoped by concealing himself in the barn to see it done. It was a brightmoonlight night and he waited until nearly eleven o'clock before thelovers returned. In the hayloft there was an opening high up under theroof. 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 formedthe framework of the barn. The lovers stood unhitching the h
orse in thebarnyard below. When the city man had led the horse into the stable hehurried quickly out again and went with the farmer's daughter along apath toward the house. The two people laughed and pulled at each otherlike 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 hisarms and hold her tightly against his body. He was so excited that henearly fell off the beam. His imagination was inflamed and he triedto picture himself in the position of the young city man. His fingersgripped the boards to which he clung and his body trembled. The twofigures standing in the dim light by the tree became one. For a longtime they clung tightly to each other and then drew apart. They wentinto the house and Hugh climbed down from his place on the beam andlay in the hay. His body shook as with a chill and he was half ill ofjealousy, anger, and an overpowering sense of defeat. It did not seem tohim at the moment that it was worth while for him to go further east orto try to find a place where he would be able to mingle freely with menand women, or where such a wonderful thing as had happened to the man inthe barnyard below might happen to him.

  Hugh spent the night in the hayloft and at daylight crept out and wentinto a nearby town. He returned to the farmhouse late on Monday whenhe was sure the city man had gone away. In spite of the protest ofthe farmer he packed his clothes at once and declared his intention ofleaving. He did not wait for the evening meal but hurried out of thehouse. When he got into the road and had started to walk away, he lookedback and saw the daughter of the house standing at an open door andlooking at him. Shame for what he had done on the night before sweptover 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 hehurried away. The woman watched him out of sight and later, when herfather stormed about the house, blaming Hugh for leaving so suddenly anddeclaring the tall Missourian was no doubt a drunkard who wanted to gooff on a drunk, she had nothing to say. In her own heart she knew whatwas the matter with her father's farm hand and was sorry he had gonebefore she had more completely exercised her power over him.

  * * * * *

  None of the towns Hugh visited during his three years of wanderingapproached realization of the sort of life Sarah Shepard had talked tohim about. They were all very much alike. There was a main street witha dozen stores on each side, a blacksmith shop, and perhaps an elevatorfor the storage of grain. All day the town was deserted, but in theevening the citizens gathered on Main Street. On the sidewalks beforethe stores young farm hands and clerks sat on store boxes or on thecurbing. They did not pay any attention to Hugh who, when he went tostand near them, remained silent and kept himself in the background. Thefarm hands talked of their work and boasted of the number of bushels ofcorn they could pick in a day, or of their skill in plowing. The clerkswere intent upon playing practical jokes which pleased the farm handsimmensely. While one of them talked loudly of his skill in his work aclerk crept out at the door of one of the stores and approached him. Heheld a pin in his hand and with it jabbed the talker in the back. Thecrowd yelled and shouted with delight. If the victim became angry aquarrel started, but this did not often happen. Other men came to jointhe party and the joke was told to them. "Well, you should have seenthe look on his face. I thought I would die," one of the bystandersdeclared.

  Hugh got a job with a carpenter who specialized in the building of barnsand stayed with him all through one fall. Later he went to work as asection hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him. He was like onecompelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes. On allsides of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of lifewent on that did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns,inhabited only by farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization wasbeing developed. Men worked hard but were much in the open air andhad time to think. Their minds reached out toward the solution of themystery of existence. The schoolmaster and the country lawyer read TomPaine's "Age of Reason" and Bellamy's "Looking Backward." They discussedthese books with their fellows. There was a feeling, ill expressed, thatAmerica had something real and spiritual to offer to the rest of theworld. Workmen talked to each other of the new tricks of their trades,and after hours of discussion of some new way to cultivate corn, shapea horseshoe or build a barn, spoke of God and his intent concerningman. Long drawn out discussions of religious beliefs and the politicaldestiny of America were carried on.

  And across the background of these discussions ran tales of action ina sphere outside the little world in which the inhabitants of the townslived. Men who had been in the Civil War and who had climbed fightingover hills and in the terror of defeat had swum wide rivers, told thetale of their adventures.

  In the evening, after his day of work in the field or on the railroadwith the section hands, Hugh did not know what to do with himself. Thathe did not go to bed immediately after the evening meal was due to thefact that he looked upon his tendency to sleep and to dream as an enemyto his development; and a peculiarly persistent determination to makesomething alive and worth while out of himself--the result of the fiveyears of constant talking on the subject by the New England woman--hadtaken possession of him. "I'll find the right place and the right peopleand then I'll begin," he continually said to himself.

  And then, worn out with weariness and loneliness, he went to bed inone of the little hotels or boarding houses where he lived during thoseyears, and his dreams returned. The dream that had come that night ashe lay on the cliff above the Mississippi River near the town ofBurlington, came back time after time. He sat upright in bed in thedarkness of his room and after he had driven the cloudy, vague sensationout of his brain, was afraid to go to sleep again. He did not want todisturb the people of the house and so got up and dressed and withoutputting on his shoes walked up and down in the room. Sometimes the roomhe occupied had a low ceiling and he was compelled to stoop. He creptout of the house carrying his shoes in his hand and sat down on thesidewalk to put them on. In all the towns he visited, people saw himwalking alone through the streets late at night or in the early hours ofthe morning. Whispers concerning the matter ran about. The story of whatwas spoken of as his queerness came to the men with whom he worked,and they found themselves unable to talk freely and naturally in hispresence. At the noon hour when the men ate the lunch they had carriedto work, when the boss was gone and it was customary among the workersto talk of their own affairs, they went off by themselves. Hugh followedthem about. They went to sit under a tree, and when Hugh came to standnearby, they became silent or the more vulgar and shallow among thembegan to show off. While he worked with a half dozen other men as asection hand on the railroad, two men did all the talking. Whenever theboss went away an old man who had a reputation as a wit told storiesconcerning his relations with women. A young man with red hair took thecue from him. The two men talked loudly and kept looking at Hugh. Theyounger of the two wits turned to another workman who had a weak, timidface. "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 keephis mind fixed on definite things. He felt that humanity was for someunknown reason drawing itself away from him, and his mind turned backto the figure of Sarah Shepard. He remembered that she had never beenwithout things to do. She scrubbed her kitchen floor and prepared foodfor cooking; she washed, ironed, kneaded dough for bread, and mendedclothes. In the evening, when she made the boy read to her out of one ofthe school books or do sums on a slate, she kept her hands busy knittingsocks for him or for her husband. Except when something had crossed herso 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 thestation master to work about the house, to draw water from the cisternfor a family washing, or pull weeds in the garden, he heard the womansinging as she went about the doing of her innumerable petty tasks. Hughdecided that he also must do small tasks, fix his mind upon defi
nitethings. In the town where he was employed as a section hand, the clouddream in which the world became a whirling, agitated center of disastercame to him almost every night. Winter came on and he walked throughthe streets at night in the darkness and through the deep snow. He wasalmost frozen; but as the whole lower part of his body was habituallycold he did not much mind the added discomfort, and so great was thereserve of strength in his big frame that the loss of sleep did notaffect his ability to labor all day without effort.

  Hugh went into one of the residence streets of the town and counted thepickets in the fences before the houses. He returned to the hotel andmade a calculation as to the number of pickets in all the fences intown. Then he got a rule at the hardware store and carefully measuredthe pickets. He tried to estimate the number of pickets that could becut 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 totell at a glance and with relative accuracy how much lumber could be cutout of a tree. He built imaginary houses with lumber cut from the treesthat lined the streets. He even tried to figure out a way to utilize thesmall limbs cut from the tops of the trees, and one Sunday went into thewood back of the town and cut a great armful of twigs, which he carriedto his room and later with great patience wove into the form of abasket.