Daughter of Middle Border

by Garland, Hamlin

  Whether Zulime had similar memories of her girlhood or not I do not know. She was not given to emotional expression, but she several times declared herself entirely content with our orderly easeful life and professed herself willing to remain in the homestead until spring. "I like it here," she repeated, but I was certain that she liked the city and her own kind, better, and that a longer stay would prove a deprivation and a danger. After all, she was an alien in the Valley,—a gracious and kindly alien, but an alien nevertheless. Her natural habitat was among the studios of Chicago or New York, and my sense of justice would not permit me to take advantage of her loyalty and her womanly self-sacrifice.

  "Pack your trunk," I said to her one December day, with an air of high authority. "We are going East in continuation of our wedding trip."

  Two days after making this decision we were in Washington, at a grand hotel, surrounded by suave waiters who had abundant leisure to serve us, for the reason that Congress was not in session, and the city was empty of its lobbyists and its law-makers.

  The weather was like October and for several days we walked about the streets without thinking of outside wraps. We went at once to the Capitol from whose beautiful terraces we could look across the city, back and upward along our trail, above the snows of Illinois soaring on and up into the far cañons of the San Juan Divide, retracing in memory the first half of our wedding journey with a sense of satisfaction, a joy which now took on double value by reason of its contrast to the marble terrace on which we stood. From the luxury of our city surroundings the flaming splendors of the Needle Range appeared almost mystical.

  We ate our Christmas dinner in royal isolation, attended by negroes whose dusky countenances shone with holiday desire to make us happy. With no visitors and no duties we gave ourselves to the business of seeing the Capitol and enjoying the gorgeous sunlight. Zulime, who looked at everything in the spirit of a youthful tourist, was enchanted and I played guide with such enthusiasm as a man of forty could bring to bear. It was a new and pleasant schooling for me, a time which I look back upon with wistful satisfaction, after more than twenty years.

  Philadelphia, our next stop, had an especial significance to me (something quite apart from its historical significance). Outwardly professing a keen interest in the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, and other objects which enthralled my young wife, I was secretly planning to offer Lorimer of The Post, the serial rights of my novel The Eagle's Heart, and I had an engagement to talk with Edward Bok about a novelette.

  Bok, a friend of several years' standing, received us most cordially, and Mrs. Bok, who came in next day to meet us, not only instantly and heartily approved of my wife, but quite openly said so, a fact which added another quality to the triumphal character of our progress. I was certain that all of my other Eastern friends would find her admirable.

  We reached New York on New Year's Eve, and the streets were roaring with the customary riot of youth, but in our rooms at the Westminster we were as remote from the tumult as if we had been at the bottom of a Colorado mine. We would have heard nothing of the horns and hootings of the throngs had not Zulime expressed a wish to go forth and mix with them. With a feeling of disgust of the hoodlums who filled Broadway, I took her as far north as Forty-second Street, but she soon tired of the rude men and their senseless clamor, and gladly returned to our hotel willing to forget it all.

  In my diary I find these words, "I am beginning the New Year with two thousand dollars in the bank, and a pending sale which will bring in as much more. I feel pretty confident of a living during the year 1900."

  Evidently the disposal of my serial to Lorimer, the results of my deal with Brett, and the growing interest of other publishers in my work had engendered a confidence in the future which I had never before attained—and yet I must admit that most of my prosperity was expected rather than secured, a promise, rather than a fulfillment, and the fact that I permitted Zulime to settle upon a three-room suite in an obscure Hotel on Fifteenth Street, is proof of my secret doubts. Eighteen dollars per week seemed a good deal of money to pay for an apartment.

  As I think back to this transaction I am bitten by a kind of remorseful shame. It was such a shabby little lodging for my artist bride, and yet, at the moment, it seemed all that we could safely afford, and she cheerfully made the best of it. Never by word or sign did she hint that its tiny hall and its dingy and unfashionable furnishings were unworthy of us both, on the contrary she went ahead with shining face.

  One extravagance I did commit, one that I linger upon with satisfaction—I forced her to choose a handsome coat instead of a plain one. It was a long graceful garment of a rich brown color, an "Individual model" the saleslady called it. It was very becoming to my wife—at any rate I found it so—but the price was sixty-five dollars—"marked down from eighty-five" the saleslady said. Neither of us had ever worn a coat costing more than twenty-five dollars and to pay almost three times as much even for a beautiful "creation" like this was out of the question—and my considerate young wife decided against it with a sigh.

  I was in reckless mood. "We will take it," I said to the saleswoman.

  "Oh no! We can't afford it!" protested Zulime in high agitation. "It is impossible!" She looked scared and weak.

  "You may do up the old coat," I went on in exalted tone. "My wife will wear the new one."

  In a tremor of girlish joy and gratitude Zulime walked out upon the street wearing the new garment, and the expression of her face filled me with desire to go on amazing her. She had owned so few pretty things in her life that I took a keen pleasure in scaring her with sudden presents. I bought a crescent-shaped brooch set with small diamonds which cost one hundred dollars—Oh, I was coming on!

  [She is wearing these jewels yet and she says she loves them—but as I think back to that brown cloak I am not so sure that her approval was without misgiving. It may be that she secretly hated that coat for it was an unusual color, and while its lines were graceful in my eyes it may have been "all out of style."—What became of it, finally, I am unable to say. No matter, it expressed for me a noble sentiment and it shall have a place on this page with the Oriental brooch and the amethyst necklace.]

  Humble as our quarters were we rejoiced in distinguished visitors. William Dean Howells called upon us almost immediately and so did Richard Watson Gilder, Edmund Clarence Stedman, John Burroughs, and many other of my valued, old-time friends. Furthermore, with a courage at which I now marvel at, Zulime announced that we would be "at home" every afternoon, and thereafter our tiny sitting-room was often crowded with her friends—for she had begun to find out many of her artist acquaintances. In fact, we were forever discovering people she had known in Paris. It seemed to me that she had met the entire American Colony during her four years in France.

  My social and domestic interests quite cut me off from my club, and we joked about this. "I am now one of the newly-weds," I admitted, "and my absence from the club is expected. Members invariably desert the club during the first year or two of their married life, but they all come back!—Sooner or later, they drop in for lunch or while wifey is away, and at last are indistinguishable from the bachelors."

  Mrs. James A. Herne, who had meant so much to me in my Boston days, was one of our very first callers, and no one among all my friends established herself more quickly in my wife's regard. Katharine's flame-like enthusiasm, her never-failing Irish humor, and her quick intelligence, made her a joyous inspiration, and whilst she and Zulime compared experiences like a couple of college girls, I sat and smiled with a kind of proprietary pride in both of them.

  Fortunately my wife approved of my associates. "You have a delightful circle," she said one night as we were on our way home from a dinner with a group of distinguished literary folk.

  Her remark comforted me. Having no money with which to hire cabs or purchase opera tickets, I could at least share with her the good friendships I had won, confidently, believing that she would gain approval,—which she did.
Not all of my associates were as poor as I (some of them, indeed, lived in houses of their own), but they were mostly concerned with the arts in some form, and with such people Zulime was entirely at ease.

  With a lecture to deliver in Boston I asked her to go with me. "I cannot forego the pleasure of showing you about 'the Hub,'" I urged. "I want Hurd and other of my faithful friends of former days to know you. We'll take rooms at the Parker House which used to fill me with silent awe. I want to play the part, for a day or two, of the successful author."

  As she had never seen Boston, she joyfully consented, and the most important parts of my grandiose design were carried out. We took rooms at the hotel in which I first met Riley, and from there we sent out cards to several of my acquaintances. Hurd, who was still Literary Editor of the Transcript, came at once to call, and so did Flower of the Arena, but for the most part Zulime and I did the calling for she was eager to see the homes and the studios of my artist friends.

  By great good fortune, James A. Herne was playing "Sag Harbor" at one of the theaters, and as I had told Zulime a great deal about "Shore Acres" and other of Herne's plays, I hastened to secure seats for a performance. Herne was growing old, and in failing health but he showed no decline of power that night. His walk, his voice, his gestures filled me with poignant memories of our first meeting in Ashmont, and our many platform experiences, while the quaint Long Island play brought back to me recollections of his summer home on Peconic Bay. How much he had meant to me in those days of Ibsen drama and Anti-poverty propaganda!

  To go about Boston with my young wife was like reliving one by one my student days. Many of my haunts were unchanged, and friends like Dr. Cross and Dr. Tompkins, with whom I had lived so long in Jamaica Plain, were only a little grayer, a little thinner. They looked at me with wondering eyes. To them I was an amazing success. Flower, still as boyish in face and figure as when I left the city in '92, professed to have predicted my expanding circle of readers, and I permitted him to imagine it wider than it was.

  Some of my former neighbors had grown in grace, others had stagnated or receded, a fact which saddened me a little. A few had been caught in a swirl of backwater, and seemed to be going round and round without making the slightest advance. Their talk was all of small things, or the unimportant events of the past.

  Alas! Boston no longer inspired me. It seemed small and alien and Cambridge surprised me by revealing itself as a sprawling and rather drab assemblage of wooden dwellings, shops and factories. Even the University campus was less admirable, architecturally, than I had supposed it to be, and the residences of its famous professors were hardly the stately homes of luxury I had remembered them. Upon looking up the house on Berkley Street in which Howells had lived while editing The Atlantic Monthly, I found it smaller and less beautiful than my own house in Wisconsin. Dr. Holmes' mansion on "the water side of Beacon Street" and the palaces of Copley Square left me calm, their glamor had utterly vanished with my youth (I fear Lee's Hotel in Auburndale would have been reduced in grandeur), and when we took the train for New York, I confessed to a feeling of sadness, of definite loss.

  Naturally, inevitably the Boston of my early twenties had vanished. My youthful worship of the city, my faith in the literary supremacy of New England had died out. Manifestly increasing in power as a commercial center, roaring with new interests, new powers, new people, the Hub had lost its scholastic distinction, its historic charm. Each year would see it more easily negligible in American art. It hurt me to acknowledge this, it was like losing a noble ancestor, but there was no escape from the conclusion.

  "Little that is new is coming out of Boston," I sadly remarked to Zulime. "Her illustrious poets of the Civil War period are not being replaced by others of National appeal. Her writers, her artists, like those of Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco, are coming to New York. New England is being drained of talent in order that Manhattan shall be supreme."

  While we were away on this trip my friends Grace and Ernest Thompson-Seton had sent out cards for a party "in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Hamlin Garland," but when, a few nights later, a throng of writers, artists and musicians filled the Seton studio, I was confirmed in a growing suspicion that I was only the lesser half of a fortunate combination. A long list of invitations to dinner or to luncheon testified to the fact that while they tolerated me, they liked my wife, and in this judgment I concurred.

  One day while calling on a charming friend and fellow-fictionist, Juliet Wilbur Tompkins, we met for the first time Frank Norris, another California novelist, who captivated us both, not merely because of his handsome face and figure, but by reason of his keen and joyous spirit.

  He had been employed for some time in the office of Doubleday and Page, and though I had often passed him at his desk, I had never before spoken with him. We struck up an immediate friendship and thereafter often dined together. He told me of his plan to embody modern California in a series of novels, and at my request read some of his manuscript to me.

  Zulime, although she greatly admired Norris, still maintained that Edward MacDowell was the handsomest man of her circle, and in this I supported her, for he was then in the noble prime of his glorious manhood, gay of spirit, swift of wit and delightfully humorous of speech. As a dinner companion he was unexcelled and my wife quite lost her heart to him. Between Frank Norris and Edward MacDowell I appeared but a rusty-coat. I sang small. Fortunately for me they were both not only loyal friends but devoted husbands.

  I remembered saying to Zulime as we came away: "America need not despair of her art so long as she has two such personalities as Edward MacDowell and Frank Norris."

  Edwin Booth's daughter, Mrs. Grossman, who was living at this time in a handsome apartment on Eighteenth Street, was one of those who liked my wife, and an invitation to take tea with her produced in me a singular and sudden reversal to boyish timidity, for to me she had almost the quality of royalty. I thought of her as she had looked to me, fifteen years before, when on the occasion of Edwin Booth's last performance of Macbeth in Boston, she sat in the stage-box with her handsome young husband, and applauded her illustrious father.

  "An enormous audience was present," I explained to Zulime, "and most of us were deeply interested in the radiant figure of that happy girl. To me she was a princess, and I observed that as the curtain rose after each act and the great tragedian came forth to bow, his eyes sought his daughter's glowing face. Each time the curtain fell his final glance was upon her. Her small hands seemed the only ones whose sound had value in his ears."

  How remote, how royal, how unattainable she had appeared to me that night! Now here she was a kindly, charming hostess, the mother of a family who regarded me as "a distinguished author." To make that radiant girl in the stage box and my lovely hostess coalesce was difficult, but as I studied her profile and noted the line of her expressive lips I was able to relate her to the princely player whose genius I had worshiped from the gallery.

  It will be evident to the reader that life in New York pleased me better than life in West Salem or even in Chicago, and I would gladly have stayed on till spring, but Zulime decided to go back to Chicago, and this we did about the first of February.

  The last of the many notable entertainments in which my wife shared was an open meeting of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (which I had helped to found), where she met many of the leading writers and artists of the city. Howells, who presided over the program, was especially fine, restrained, tactful yet quietly authoritative, and when I told him that our wedding journey was nearly over he expressed a regret which was highly flattering to us both. At one o'clock on the day following this historic meeting we entered a car headed for the west, acknowledging with a sigh, yet with a comfortable sense of having accomplished our purpose, that it would be profitable to go into retirement and ruminate for a month or two. The glories of New York had been almost too exciting for Zulime, "I am ready to go home," she said.

  Home! There was my problem. The only
city residence I possessed was my bachelor apartment on Elm Street, and at the moment I had no intention of asking my wife to share its narrow space except as a temporary lodging, and to take her back into that snow-covered little Wisconsin village, back to a shabby farm house filled with ailing elderly folk would amount to crime. From the high splendor of our stay in New York we now fell to earth with a thump. My duties as a son, my cares as the head of a household returned upon me, and my essential homelessness took away all that assurance of literary success which my Eastern friends had helped me attain. Of the elation in which I had moved while in New York I retained but a shred. Once more the hard-working fictionist and the responsible head of a family, I began to worry about the future. My honeymoon was over.

  The basic realities of my poverty again cropped out in a letter from my mother who wrote that my aunt was very ill and that she needed me. To Zulime I said, "You stay here with your sister and your friends while I go up to the Homestead and see what I can do for our old people."

  This she refused to do. "No," she loyally said, "I am going with you," and although I knew that she was choosing a dreary alternative I was too weak, too selfishly weak, to prevent her self-sacrifice. We left that night at the usual hour and arrived in time to eat another farmer's breakfast with father and mother next morning. Aunt Susan was unable to meet us.

  Her sweet spirit was about to leave its frail body, that was evident to me as I looked down at her, but she knew me and whispered, "I'm glad to have you at home." She showed no fear of death, in fact she appeared unconscious of her grave condition. She was a beautiful character and to see her lying there beneath her old-fashioned quilt, so small and helpless, so patient, lonely and sad, made speech difficult for me. She had meant much in my life. The serene dignity with which she and her mother had carried the best New England traditions into the rough front rank of the Border, was still written in the lines of her face. I had never seen her angry or bitter, and I had never heard her utter an unkind word.