Daughter of Middle Border

by Garland, Hamlin

  It is probable that the lonely old scholar rejoiced in me as a comprehending, or at least a sympathetic, listener, for he talked on and on, a steady, slow-moving stream. I was content to listen. That I allowed him to think of me as a fellow-student, I confess, but in my failure to undeceive him I was only adding to the comfort which he took in my company. It would have been a cruelty to have confessed my ignorance. It was after all only a negative deception, one which did neither of us any harm.

  Furthermore, I was aware that he was in a sense "trying me out." He not only wanted to measure my understanding—he was especially eager to know what my "religion" was. He dreaded to find me a sectarian, and when he discovered that I, too, was a student of Darwin and a disciple of Herbert Spencer, he frankly expressed his pleasure. He rejoiced, also, in the fact that I was earning my own living, and to him I seemed to be in possession of a noble income. With all his love of scholarship he remained the thrifty son of New England.

  Here again I fear I permitted him to assume too much, but when one's prospective father-in-law is asking how one expects to support a wife, one is tempted to give a slightly more favorable report than the conditions will warrant. I explained my contract with Macmillans, and named the prices I obtained for my stories, and with these he was properly impressed. It was absurd yet gratifying to have a son-in-law who could sell "lies" for hard cash, and his respect for me increased.

  As we walked homeward that night, I expressed my wish to have the marriage a judicial ceremony. "I make no objection to having the service read by a clergyman," I explained, "but I prefer to employ the highest legal authority in the county—a judge, if possible. However, I will leave it all to Zulime. As an individualist I consider her a full and equal partner in all phases of this enterprise. I do not expect her to even promise to obey me, but I hope she will always find my requests reasonable—if she does not, she has the right to ignore them. Her signature shall be as good as mine at the bank."

  This statement startled the banker, for he held rather old-fashioned ideas concerning women and money; but Zulime was his favorite child, and he hastened to assure me that she would not waste my substance. "I think we can induce the district judge to come over and perform the ceremony," he concluded.

  If my notion to employ a judge of the district shocked my bride, she artfully deceived me, for she cheerfully consented, and a day or two later, with her brother Florizel for a guide, I drove over to the county town and laid my request before Judge Sturgis of the District Court.

  The judge knew Don Carlos and (as a reader of the magazines) had some knowledge of me; therefore he at once declared his willingness to assist. "It will be an honor," he added heartily; "I'll adjourn court if necessary. You may depend on me."

  He also agreed to meet our wishes as to the character of the ceremony. "I'll make it as short as you like," he said. "I'll reduce it to its lowest legal terms," and with this understanding I procured my license and returned to Hanover.

  In spite of all these practical details the whole adventure seemed curiously unreal, as though it concerned some other individual, some character in one of my novels. It was a play in which I acted as manager rather than as leading man. There was nothing in all this preparation which remotely suggested any of the weddings in which I had been concerned as witness, and I suspect that Zulime was almost equally unconvinced of its reality. Poor girl! It was all as far from the wedding of her girlish dreams as her bridegroom fell short of the silver-clad knight of romance, but I promised her that she would find something grandiose and colorful in our wedding journey. "Our wedding will be prosaic, but wait until you see the sunset light on the Crestones! Our week in the High Country shall be a poem."

  This was a characteristic attitude with me. I was always saying, "Wait! These flowers are lovely, but those just ahead of us are more beautiful still." Zulime's attitude, as I soon discovered, was precisely opposite: "Let us make the most of the flowers at our hand," was her motto.

  The Taft home had something of the same unesthetic quality which marked Neshonoc. It was simple, comfortable, and entirely New England. Throughout the stern vicissitudes of his life on the Middle Border, Don Carlos Taft had carried the memories and the accents of his New Hampshire town. His beginnings had been as laboriously difficult as those of my father. In many ways they were alike; that is to say, they were both Yankee in training and tradition.

  At last the epoch-marking day came marching across the eastern plain. The inevitable bustle began with the dawn. I packed my trunk and dispatched it to the station in confident expectation of our mid-afternoon departure, and Zulime did the same, although it must have seemed more illusory to her than to me. The Judge arrived precisely at noon, and at half-past twelve the family solemnly gathered in the living-room, and there, in plain traveling garb, Zulime Taft stood up with me, while the Judge gravely initiated her into a perilous partnership, a coalition in which she took the heaviest chances of sorrow and regret.

  The Judge was as good as his word. He made the ceremony a short but very serious interchange of intentions, and at last, in sonorous and solemn tones, pronounced us man and wife.

  Altogether, it did not take five minutes, and then, at twelve-forty, while the man of law was writing out the certificate, the "breakfast" was announced and we all sat down to what was really a dinner, a meal to which the Judge did full justice, for he had been up since early morning, and had ridden twelve or fifteen miles.

  If the old professor retained any anxieties concerning his daughter's future, he masked them with a smile and discoursed genially of the campaigns of Cyrus—or some such matter. At the close of the meal, the Judge, comfortable and friendly, rose to go. With him, he said, it had not only been a duty but a pleasure, and as he had given to our brief wedding just the right touch of dignity, we were grateful to him. It was the kind of service which cannot be obtained by any fee.

  At four o'clock we took a dusty, hesitating local train for the small town in Nebraska where we expected to catch the express for Colorado Springs. In such drab and unromantic fashion did Zulime Taft and Hamlin Garland begin their long journey together. "But wait!" I repeated. "Wait till you see the Royal Gorge and Shavano!"

  * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  The New Daughter and Thanksgiving

  At about half-past seven of a clear November morning I called my bride to the car window and presented to her, with the air of a resident proprietor, a first view of Pike's Peak, a vast silver dome rising grandly above the Rampart Range. "Well, there it is," I remarked. "What do you think of it?"

  Her cry of surprise and her words of delight were both entirely genuine. "Oh, how beautiful!" she exclaimed, as soon as she recovered breath.

  It was beautiful. Snow covered, flaming like burnished marble, the range, with high summits sharply set against the cloudless sky, upreared in austere majesty, each bleak crag gilded with the first rays of the morning sun. Above the warm, brown plain the giants towered remotely alien like ancient kings on purple thrones, and the contrast of their gleaming drifts of snow, with the dry, grassy foothills through which we were winding our way, was like that of deep winter set opposite to early September. However, I would not permit Zulime to exhaust her vocabulary of admiration. "Keep some of your adjectives till we reach Ouray," I said with significant gravity.

  Before the train came to a stop at the platform of Colorado Springs, I caught sight of the red, good-humored face of Gustave, coachman for Louis Ehrich, one of my Colorado friends. Gustave was standing beside the road wagon in which I had so often ridden, and when he saw me alight he motioned to me. "You are to come with me," he explained as I approached. "I have orders to bring you at once to the house—breakfast is waiting for you."

  I had written to the Ehrichs, saying that my wife would be with me in the Springs for a few days, and that I wanted them to meet her—but I did not expect to be met or to receive an invitation to breakfast.

  Zulime hesitated till I assured her that the Ehrich
s were old friends and not the kind of people who say one thing and mean another. "They will never permit us to go to the hotel—I know them." With that she consented, and fifteen minutes later Louis and Henriette met us at their threshold and took Zulime to their hearts, as though they had known her for years.

  The house stood on the bank of a stream, and, from the windows of the room they gave us, the Lord of the Range loomed in distant majesty directly above the Garden of the Gods, and our first day of married life was filled with splendor. Each hour of that day had for us its own magical color, its own drama of flying cloud and resisting rock. From the commonplace Kansas village we had been transported as if by an enchanted carpet to a land of beauty and romance, of changeful charm, a region of which I was even then beginning to write with joyous inspiration. That my bride and I would forever recall this day and this house with gratitude and delight I was even then aware.

  "This compensates for the humble scene of our wedding, doesn't it?" I demanded.

  "It is more than I dreamed of having," she replied.

  In truth no blood relations could have been more sympathetic, more generous, more considerate than the Ehrichs. They rejoiced in us. Skilled and happy hosts, they did their utmost to make our honeymoon an unforgettable experience. Each hour of our stay was arranged with kindness. We drove, we ate, we listened to music, with a grateful wonder at our good fortune.

  They would have kept us indefinitely had I not carefully explained my plan to show my bride the Crestones and Marshall Pass. "We must make the Big Circle and get back to Wisconsin in time for Thanksgiving," I said to Louis, who, as a loyal Colorado man, immediately granted the force of this excuse. He understood also the pathos of the old mother in West Salem, watching, waiting, longing to see her new daughter. "You are right," he said. "To fail of that dinner would be cruel."

  That night we took the Narrow Gauge train, bound for Marshall Pass and the splendors of the Continental Divide.

  At daylight the next morning we were looping our way up the breast of Mount Shavano, leaving behind us in splendid changing vista the College Range, from whose lofty summits long streamers of snow wavered like prodigious silver banners. Unearthly, radiant as the walls of the sun, lonely and cold they stood. For three hours we moved amid colossal drifts and silent forests, and then, toward midday, our train plunged into the snow-sheds of the high divide. When we emerged we were sliding swiftly down into a sun-warmed valley sloping to the west, where hills as lovely as jewels alternated with smooth opalescent mesas over which white clouds gleamed. The whole wide basin glowed with August colors, and yet from Montrose Junction, where we lunched, the rugged slopes of Uncompagre, hooded with snow and dark with storms, were plainly visible, so violently dramatic was the land.

  "From here we proceed directly toward those peaks," I explained to Zulime, who was in awe of the land I was exhibiting.

  As we approached the gateway to Ouray, the great white flakes began to fall athwart the pines, and when we entered the prodigious amphitheater in which the town is built, we found ourselves again in mid-winter, surrounded by icy cliffs and rimy firs. Dazzling drifts covered the rocks and almost buried the cottages from whose small windows, lights twinkled like gleaming eyes of strange and roguish animals. Every detail was as harmonious as an ideally conceived Christmas card. It was the antithesis of Kansas.

  Upon entering our room at the hotel, I exultantly drew Zulime's attention to the fact that the sky-line of the mountains to the South cut across the upper row of our window panes. "You are in the heart of the Rockies now," I declared as if somehow that fact exalted me in her regard.

  When we stepped into the street next morning, the snow had ceased to fall, but the sky was magnificently, grandly savage. Great clouds in career across the valley momentarily caught and dung to the crags, but let fall no frost, and as the sun rose laggardly above the dazzlingly white wall, the snow-laden pines on the lower slopes appeared delicate as lace with distance. At intervals enormous masses of vapor, gray-white but richly shot with lavender, slid suddenly in, filling the amphitheater till all its walls were hid, then quite as suddenly shifted and streamed away. From time to time vistas opened toward the west, wondrous aisles of blinding splendor, highways leading downward to the glowing, half-hid, irridescent plain. In all my experience of the mountains I had never seen anything more gorgeous, more stupendous—what it must have meant to my bride, who had never seen a hill, I can only faintly divine.

  At two o'clock, the sky having cleared, I hired a team and sleigh, and we drove up the high-climbing mining trail which leads toward Telluride, a drive which in itself was worth a thousand-mile journey, an experience to be remembered all our lives. Such majesty of silent, sunny cliffs! Such exquisite tones, such balance of lights and shadows, such tracery of snow-laden boughs! It was impossible for my lowland bride to conceive of any mountain scene more gorgeous, more sumptuous, more imperial.

  For two hours we climbed, and then, at a point close to timber-line, I reluctantly halted. "We must turn here," I said regretfully. "It will be dark by the time we reach the hotel."

  Slowly we rode back down the valley, entranced, almost oppressed, by the incommunicable splendor of forested hills and sunset sky. It was with a sense of actual relief that we reëntered our apartment. Our eyes ached with the effort to seize and retain the radiance without, and our minds, gorged with magnificence, were grateful for the subdued light, the ugly furniture, the dingy walls of our commonplace little hotel.

  To some of my readers, no doubt, this wedding trip will seem a lunatic, extravagant fantasy on my part; but Zulime declared herself grateful to me for having insisted upon it, and for three days we walked and drove by daylight or by moonlight amid these grandiose scenes, absorbing with eager senses the sounds, sights and colors which we might never again enjoy, returning now and then to a discussion of our future.

  "We'll go East after our visit to the old folks," I declared. "This is only the first half of our wedding journey; the other part shall include Washington, Boston, and New York."

  Zulime looked somewhat incredulous (she didn't know me yet), but her eyes glowed with pleasure at the thought of the capital, of which she knew nothing, and of New York, which she knew only as a seaport. "I thought you were poor," she said.

  "So I am," I replied, "but I intend to educate you in American geography."

  The railway enters the Ouray amphitheater from the west and stops—for the very good reason that it can go no farther!—but from the railway station a stage road climbs the precipitous eastern wall and leads on to Red Mountain, as through an Alpine pass. Over this divide I now planned to drive to Silverton, and thence to Durango by way of Las Animas Cañon. Zulime, with an unquestioning faith in me—a faith which I now think of with wonder—agreed to this crazy plan. Her ignorance of the cold, the danger involved, made her girlishly eager to set forth. She was like a child in her reliance on my sagacity and skill.

  We left Ouray, at eight of a bitter morning, in a rude sleigh with only a couple of cotton quilts to defend us from the cold, and when, after a long climb up a wall of stupendous cliffs with roaring streams shouting from their icy beds upon our right, we entered an aisle of frosty pines edging an enormous ledge, where frozen rills hung in motionless cascades, Zulime, enraptured by the radiant avenues which opened out at every turn of our icy upward trail, became blind to all danger. The flaming, golden light flinging violet shadows, vivid as stains of ink along the crusted slopes, dazzled her, caused her to forget the icy wind or, at any rate, to patiently endure it.

  At Red Mountain, a mournful, half-buried, deserted mining town, we left our sleigh and stumbled into the dingy little railway station, so chilled, so cramped, that we could scarcely walk, and yet we did not regret our ride. However, we were glad of the warmth of the dirty little coach into which we climbed a few minutes later. It seemed delightfully safe to Zulime, and I was careful not to let her know that from this town the train descended of its own weight all the way to S
ilverton!

  Fortunately, nothing happened, and at Silverton we changed to a real train, with a real engine, and as we dropped into Las Animas Cañon we left December behind. At six o'clock we emerged from the cañon at Durango into genial September—or so it seemed after our day of midwinter in the heights. Next day we returned to Colorado Springs.

  Our stay in the mountains was at an end, but the memory of those burnished domes, those dark-hued forests, and the sound of those foaming streams, remain with us to this day.—All the way down the long slope to the Mississippi River, we reverted to this "circuit," recalling its most impressive moments, its noblest vistas. It had been for my bride a procession of wonders, a colossal pageant—to me it was a double satisfaction because of her delight. With a feeling that I had in some degree atoned for my parsimony in the matter of an engagement ring and for the drab prose of our marriage ceremony, I brought the first half of our wedding journey to a close in Chicago.

  I now looked forward to the meeting between my mother and her new daughter. This was, after all, the important part of my venture. Would my humble home content my artist bride?

  In preparation I began to sing small. "Don't expect too much of the Garland Homestead," I repeated. "It is only an angular, slate-colored farm-house without a particle of charm outside or in. It is very far from being the home I should like you to be mistress of, and my people you must bear in mind, are pioneers, survivals of the Border. They are remote from all things urban."