A Far Country, Book 1

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A FAR COUNTRY

By Winston Churchill


BOOK 1.



I.

My name is Hugh Paret. I was a corporation lawyer, but by no means a
typical one, the choice of my profession being merely incidental, and
due, as will be seen, to the accident of environment. The book I am about
to write might aptly be called The Autobiography of a Romanticist. In
that sense, if in no other, I have been a typical American, regarding my
country as the happy hunting-ground of enlightened self-interest, as a
function of my desires. Whether or not I have completely got rid of this
romantic virus I must leave to those the aim of whose existence is to
eradicate it from our literature and our life. A somewhat Augean task!

I have been impelled therefore to make an attempt at setting forth, with
what frankness and sincerity I may, with those powers of selection of
which I am capable, the life I have lived in this modern America; the
passions I have known, the evils I have done. I endeavour to write a
biography of the inner life; but in order to do this I shall have to
relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that take place in
the world of space and time, in the four walls of the home, in the school
and university, in the noisy streets, in the realm of business and
politics. I shall try to set down, impartially, the motives that have
impelled my actions, to reveal in some degree the amazing mixture of good
and evil which has made me what I am to-day: to avoid the tricks of
memory and resist the inherent desire to present myself other and better
than I am. Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled child who
believes in miracles, whose needs are mostly baubles, whose desires are
dreams. Expediency is his motto. Innocent of a knowledge of the
principles of the universe, he lives in a state of ceaseless activity,
admitting no limitations, impatient of all restrictions. What he wants,
he wants very badly indeed. This wanting things was the corner-stone of
my character, and I believe that the science of the future will bear me
out when I say that it might have been differently built upon. Certain it
is that the system of education in vogue in the 70's and 80's never
contemplated the search for natural corner-stones.

At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see the beginnings
of a real person who fades little by little as manhood arrives and
advances, until suddenly I am aware that a stranger has taken his
place....

I lived in a city which is now some twelve hours distant from the
Atlantic seaboard. A very different city, too, it was in youth, in my
grandfather's day and my father's, even in my own boyhood, from what it
has since become in this most material of ages.

There is a book of my photographs, preserved by my mother, which I have
been looking over lately. First is presented a plump child of two, gazing
in smiling trustfulness upon a world of sunshine; later on a lean boy in
plaided kilts, whose wavy, chestnut-brown hair has been most carefully
parted on the side by Norah, his nurse. The face is still childish. Then
appears a youth of fourteen or thereabout in long trousers and the
queerest of short jackets, standing beside a marble table against a
classic background; he is smiling still in undiminished hope and trust,
despite increasing vexations and crossings, meaningless lessons which had
to be learned, disciplines to rack an aspiring soul, and long,
uncomfortable hours in the stiff pew of the First Presbyterian Church.
Associated with this torture is a peculiar Sunday smell and the faint
rustling of silk dresses. I can see the stern black figure of Dr. Pound,
who made interminable statements to the Lord.

"Oh, Lord," I can hear him say, "thou knowest..."

These pictures, though yellowed and faded, suggest vividly the being I
once was, the feelings that possessed and animated me, love for my
playmates, vague impulses struggling for expression in a world forever
thwarting them. I recall, too, innocent dreams of a future unidentified,
dreams from which I emerged vibrating with an energy that was lost for
lack of a definite objective: yet it was constantly being renewed. I
often wonder what I might have become if it could have been harnessed,
directed! Speculations are vain. Calvinism, though it had begun to make
compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to spontaneity and
human instincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound, who
preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied it. I loved him,
but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy,
but punishment, the, suppression rather than the expansion of
aspirations. His religion seemed woven all of austerity, contained no
shining threads to catch my eye. Dreams, to him, were matters for
suspicion and distrust.

I sometimes ask myself, as I gaze upon his portrait now, the duplicate of
the one painted for the Bar Association, whether he ever could have felt
the secret, hot thrills I knew and did not identify with religion. His
religion was real to him, though he failed utterly to make it
comprehensible to me. The apparent calmness, evenness of his life awed
me. A successful lawyer, a respected and trusted citizen, was he lacking
somewhat in virility, vitality? I cannot judge him, even to-day. I never
knew him. There were times in my youth when the curtain of his unfamiliar
spirit was withdrawn a little: and once, after I had passed the crisis of
some childhood disease, I awoke to find him bending over my bed with a
tender expression that surprised and puzzled me.

He was well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd observer might
divine in him a genteel taste for literature. The fine features bear
witness to the influence of an American environment, yet suggest the
intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time. The face is
distinguished, ascetic, the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my
own; the side whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey. There
is a large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin, and the coat has
odd, narrow lapels. His habits of mind were English, although he
harmonized well enough with the manners and traditions of a city whose
inheritance was Scotch-Irish; and he invariably drank tea for breakfast.
One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast service and
egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought with him from Sheffield to
Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution. His son, Dr. Hugh Moreton
Paret, after whom I was named, was the best known physician of the city
in the decorous, Second Bank days.

My mother was Sarah Breck. Hers was my Scotch-Irish side. Old Benjamin
Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by sea or wilderness, had come straight
from Belfast to the little log settlement by the great river that
mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills. So much for
chance. He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned windows, where
hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung beside
ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, of molasses and rum, all of
which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes of those
forbidding mountains,--passes we blithely thread to-day in dining cars
and compartment sleepers. Behind the store were moored the barges that
floated down on the swift current to the Ohio, carrying goods to even
remoter settlements in the western wilderness.

Benjamin, in addition to his emigrant's leather box, brought with him
some of that pigment that was to dye the locality for generations a deep
blue. I refer, of course, to his Presbyterianism. And in order the better
to ensure to his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married the
granddaughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New
England,--no doubt with some injustice,--as a staunch advocate on the
doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin's
portrait, which has since gone to the Kinley's. Heaven knows who painted
it, though no great art were needed to suggest on canvas the tough fabric
of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch. The heavy stick he holds
might, with a slight stretch of the imagination, be a blackthorn; his
head looks capable of withstanding many blows; his hand of giving many.
And, as I gazed the other day at this picture hanging in the shabby
suburban parlour, I could only contrast him with his anaemic descendants
who possessed the likeness. Between the children of poor Mary
Kinley,--Cousin Robert's daughter, and the hardy stock of the old country
there is a gap indeed!

Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune. It was his son who built
on the Second Bank the wide, corniced mansion in which to house
comfortably his eight children. There, two tiers above the river, lived
my paternal grandfather, Dr. Paret, the Breck's physician and friend; the
Durretts and the Hambletons, iron-masters; the Hollisters, Sherwins, the
McAlerys and Ewanses,--Breck connections,--the Willetts and Ogilvys; in
short, everyone of importance in the days between the 'thirties and the
Civil War. Theirs were generous houses surrounded by shade trees, with
glorious back yards--I have been told--where apricots and pears and
peaches and even nectarines grew.

The business of Breck and Company, wholesale grocers, descended to my
mother's first cousin, Robert Breck, who lived at Claremore. The very
sound of that word once sufficed to give me a shiver of delight; but the
Claremore I knew has disappeared as completely as Atlantis, and the place
is now a suburb (hateful word!) cut up into building lots and connected
with Boyne Street and the business section of the city by trolley lines.
Then it was "the country," and fairly saturated with romance. Cousin
Robert, when he came into town to spend his days at the store, brought
with him some of this romance, I had almost said of this aroma. He was no
suburbanite, but rural to the backbone, professing a most proper contempt
for dwellers in towns.

Every summer day that dawned held Claremore as a possibility. And such
was my capacity for joy that my appetite would depart completely when I
heard my mother say, questioningly and with proper wifely respect--

"If you're really going off on a business trip for a day or two, Mr.
Paret" (she generally addressed my father thus formally), "I think I'll
go to Robert's and take Hugh."

"Shall I tell Norah to pack, mother," I would exclaim, starting up.

"We'll see what your father thinks, my dear."

"Remain at the table until you are excused, Hugh," he would say.

Released at length, I would rush to Norah, who always rejoiced with me,
and then to the wire fence which marked the boundary of the Peters domain
next door, eager, with the refreshing lack of consideration
characteristic of youth, to announce to the Peterses--who were to remain
at home the news of my good fortune. There would be Tom and Alfred and
Russell and Julia and little Myra with her grass-stained knees, faring
forth to seek the adventures of a new day in the shady western yard. Myra
was too young not to look wistful at my news, but the others pretended
indifference, seeking to lessen my triumph. And it was Julia who
invariably retorted "We can go out to Uncle Jake's farm whenever we want
to. Can't we, Tom?"...

No journey ever taken since has equalled in ecstasy that leisurely trip
of thirteen miles in the narrow-gauge railroad that wound through hot
fields of nodding corn tassels and between delicious, acrid-smelling
woods to Claremore. No silent palace "sleeping in the sun," no edifice
decreed by Kubla Khan could have worn more glamour than the house of
Cousin Robert Breck.

It stood half a mile from the drowsy village, deep in its own grounds
amidst lawns splashed with shadows, with gravel paths edged--in barbarous
fashion, if you please with shells. There were flower beds of equally
barbarous design; and two iron deer, which, like the figures on Keats's
Grecian urn, were ever ready poised to flee,--and yet never fled. For
Cousin Robert was rich, as riches went in those days: not only rich, but
comfortable. Stretching behind the house were sweet meadows of hay and
red clover basking in the heat, orchards where the cows cropped beneath
the trees, arbours where purple clusters of Concords hung beneath warm
leaves: there were woods beyond, into which, under the guidance of Willie
Breck, I made adventurous excursions, and in the autumn gathered
hickories and walnuts. The house was a rambling, wooden mansion painted
grey, with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair furniture inside.
Oh, the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer day! Like the
flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits, the mangosteen, it baffles
analysis, and the nearest I can come to it is a mixture of matting and
corn-bread, with another element too subtle to define.

The hospitality of that house! One would have thought we had arrived, my
mother and I, from the ends of the earth, such was the welcome we got
from Cousin Jenny, Cousin Robert's wife, from Mary and Helen with the
flaxen pig-tails, from Willie, whom I recall as permanently without shoes
or stockings. Met and embraced by Cousin Jenny at the station and driven
to the house in the squeaky surrey, the moment we arrived she and my
mother would put on the dressing-sacks I associated with hot weather, and
sit sewing all day long in rocking-chairs at the coolest end of the
piazza. The women of that day scorned lying down, except at night, and as
evening came on they donned starched dresses; I recall in particular one
my mother wore, with little vertical stripes of black and white, and a
full skirt. And how they talked, from the beginning of the visit until
the end! I have often since wondered where the topics came from.

It was not until nearly seven o'clock that the train arrived which
brought home my Cousin Robert. He was a big man; his features and even
his ample moustache gave a disconcerting impression of rugged integrity,
and I remember him chiefly in an alpaca or seersucker coat. Though much
less formal, more democratic--in a word--than my father, I stood in awe
of him for a different reason, and this I know now was because he
possessed the penetration to discern the flaws in my youthful
character,--flaws that persisted in manhood. None so quick as Cousin
Robert to detect deceptions which were hidden from my mother.

His hobby was carpentering, and he had a little shop beside the stable
filled with shining tools which Willie and I, in spite of their
attractions, were forbidden to touch. Willie, by dire experience, had
learned to keep the law; but on one occasion I stole in alone, and
promptly cut my finger with a chisel. My mother and Cousin Jenny accepted
the fiction that the injury had been done with a flint arrowhead that
Willie had given me, but when Cousin Robert came home and saw my bound
hand and heard the story, he gave me a certain look which sticks in my
mind.

"Wonderful people, those Indians were!" he observed. "They could make
arrowheads as sharp as chisels."

I was most uncomfortable....

He had a strong voice, and spoke with a rising inflection and a marked
accent that still remains peculiar to our locality, although it was much
modified in my mother and not at all noticeable in my father; with an odd
nasal alteration of the burr our Scotch-Irish ancestors had brought with
them across the seas. For instance, he always called my father Mr.
Par-r-ret. He had an admiration and respect for him that seemed to forbid
the informality of "Matthew." It was shared by others of my father's
friends and relations.

"Sarah," Cousin Robert would say to my mother, "you're coddling that boy,
you ought to lam him oftener. Hand him over to me for a couple of
months--I'll put him through his paces.... So you're going to send him to
college, are you? He's too good for old Benjamin's grocery business."

He was very fond of my mother, though he lectured her soundly for her
weakness in indulging me. I can see him as he sat at the head of the
supper table, carving liberal helpings which Mary and Helen and Willie
devoured with country appetites, watching our plates.

"What's the matter, Hugh? You haven't eaten all your lamb."

"He doesn't like fat, Robert," my mother explained.

"I'd teach him to like it if he were my boy."

"Well, Robert, he isn't your boy," Cousin Jenny would remind him.... His
bark was worse than his bite. Like many kind people he made use of
brusqueness to hide an inner tenderness, and on the train he was hail
fellow well met with every Tom, Dick and Harry that commuted,--although
the word was not invented in those days,--and the conductor and brakeman
too. But he had his standards, and held to them....

Mine was not a questioning childhood, and I was willing to accept the
scheme of things as presented to me entire. In my tenderer years, when I
had broken one of the commandments on my father's tablet (there were more
than ten), and had, on his home-coming, been sent to bed, my mother would
come softly upstairs after supper with a book in her hand; a book of
selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the seal of his
approval, with a glazed picture cover, representing Daniel in the lions'
den and an angel standing beside him. On the somewhat specious plea that
Holy Writ might have a chastening effect, she was permitted to minister
to me in my shame. The amazing adventure of Shadrach, Meshach and
Abednego particularly appealed to an imagination needing little
stimulation. It never occurred to me to doubt that these gentlemen had
triumphed over caloric laws. But out of my window, at the back of the
second storey, I often saw a sudden, crimson glow in the sky to the
southward, as though that part of the city had caught fire. There were
the big steel-works, my mother told me, belonging to Mr. Durrett and Mr.
Hambleton, the father of Ralph Hambleton and the grandfather of Hambleton
Durrett, my schoolmates at Miss Caroline's. I invariably connected the
glow, not with Hambleton and Ralph, but with Shadrach, Meshach and
Abednego! Later on, when my father took me to the steel-works, and I
beheld with awe a huge pot filled with molten metal that ran out of it
like water, I asked him--if I leaped into that stream, could God save me?
He was shocked. Miracles, he told me, didn't happen any more.

"When did they stop?" I demanded.

"About two thousand years ago, my son," he replied gravely.

"Then," said I, "no matter how much I believed in God, he wouldn't save
me if I jumped into the big kettle for his sake?"

For this I was properly rebuked and silenced.

My boyhood was filled with obsessing desires. If God, for example, had
cast down, out of his abundant store, manna and quail in the desert, why
couldn't he fling me a little pocket money? A paltry quarter of a dollar,
let us say, which to me represented wealth. To avoid the reproach of the
Pharisees, I went into the closet of my bed-chamber to pray, requesting
that the quarter should be dropped on the north side of Lyme Street,
between Stamford and Tryon; in short, as conveniently near home as
possible. Then I issued forth, not feeling overconfident, but hoping. Tom
Peters, leaning over the ornamental cast-iron fence which separated his
front yard from the street, presently spied me scanning the sidewalk.

"What are you looking for, Hugh?" he demanded with interest.

"Oh, something I dropped," I answered uneasily.

"What?"

Naturally, I refused to tell. It was a broiling, midsummer day; Julia and
Russell, who had been warned to stay in the shade, but who were engaged
in the experiment of throwing the yellow cat from the top of the lattice
fence to see if she would alight on her feet, were presently attracted,
and joined in the search. The mystery which I threw around it added to
its interest, and I was not inconsiderably annoyed. Suppose one of them
were to find the quarter which God had intended for me? Would that be
justice?

"It's nothing," I said, and pretended to abandon the quest--to be renewed
later. But this ruse failed; they continued obstinately to search; and
after a few minutes Tom, with a shout, picked out of a hot crevice
between the bricks--a nickel!

"It's mine!" I cried fiercely.

"Did you lose it?" demanded Julia, the canny one, as Tom was about to
give it up.

My lying was generally reserved for my elders.

"N-no," I said hesitatingly, "but it's mine all the same. It was--sent to
me."

"Sent to you!" they exclaimed, in a chorus of protest and derision. And
how, indeed, was I to make good my claim? The Peterses, when assembled,
were a clan, led by Julia and in matters of controversy, moved as one.
How was I to tell them that in answer to my prayers for twenty-five
cents, God had deemed five all that was good for me?

"Some--somebody dropped it there for me."

"Who?" demanded the chorus. "Say, that's a good one!"

Tears suddenly blinded me. Overcome by chagrin, I turned and flew into
the house and upstairs into my room, locking the door behind me. An
interval ensued, during which I nursed my sense of wrong, and it pleased
me to think that the money would bring a curse on the Peters family. At
length there came a knock on the door, and a voice calling my name.

"Hugh! Hugh!"

It was Tom.

"Hughie, won't you let me in? I want to give you the nickel."

"Keep it!" I shouted back. "You found it."

Another interval, and then more knocking.

"Open up," he said coaxingly. "I--I want to talk to you."

I relented, and let him in. He pressed the coin into my hand. I refused;
he pleaded.

"You found it," I said, "it's yours."

"But--but you were looking for it."

"That makes no difference," I declared magnanimously.

Curiosity overcame him.

"Say, Hughie, if you didn't drop it, who on earth did?"

"Nobody on earth," I replied cryptically....

Naturally, I declined to reveal the secret. Nor was this by any means the
only secret I held over the Peters family, who never quite knew what to
make of me. They were not troubled with imaginations. Julia was a little
older than Tom and had a sharp tongue, but over him I exercised a
distinct fascination, and I knew it. Literal himself, good-natured and
warm-hearted, the gift I had of tingeing life with romance (to put the
thing optimistically), of creating kingdoms out of back yards--at which
Julia and Russell sniffed--held his allegiance firm.




II.

I must have been about twelve years of age when I realized that I was
possessed of the bard's inheritance. A momentous journey I made with my
parents to Boston about this time not only stimulated this gift, but gave
me the advantage of which other travellers before me have likewise
availed themselves--of being able to take certain poetic liberties with a
distant land that my friends at home had never seen. Often during the
heat of summer noons when we were assembled under the big maple beside
the lattice fence in the Peters' yard, the spirit would move me to relate
the most amazing of adventures. Our train, for instance, had been held up
in the night by a band of robbers in black masks, and rescued by a
traveller who bore a striking resemblance to my Cousin Robert Breck. He
had shot two of the robbers. These fabrications, once started, flowed
from me with ridiculous ease. I experienced an unwonted exhilaration,
exaltation; I began to believe that they had actually occurred. In vain
the astute Julia asserted that there were no train robbers in the east.
What had my father done? Well, he had been very brave, but he had had no
pistol. Had I been frightened? No, not at all; I, too, had wished for a
pistol. Why hadn't I spoken of this before? Well, so many things had
happened to me I couldn't tell them all at once. It was plain that Julia,
though often fascinated against her will, deemed this sort of thing
distinctly immoral.

I was a boy divided in two. One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm of
his own weaving, and the other part was a commonplace and protesting
inhabitant of a world of lessons, disappointments and discipline. My
instincts were not vicious. Ideas bubbled up within me continually from
an apparently inexhaustible spring, and the very strength of the longings
they set in motion puzzled and troubled my parents: what I seem to see
most distinctly now is a young mind engaged in a ceaseless struggle for
self-expression, for self-development, against the inertia of a tradition
of which my father was the embodiment. He was an enigma to me then. He
sincerely loved me, he cherished ambitions concerning me, yet thwarted
every natural, budding growth, until I grew unconsciously to regard him
as my enemy, although I had an affection for him and a pride in him that
flared up at times. Instead of confiding to him my aspirations, vague
though they were, I became more and more secretive as I grew older. I
knew instinctively that he regarded these aspirations as evidences in my
character of serious moral flaws. And I would sooner have suffered many
afternoons of his favourite punishment--solitary confinement in my
room--than reveal to him those occasional fits of creative fancy which
caused me to neglect my lessons in order to put them on paper. Loving
literature, in his way, he was characteristically incapable of
recognizing the literary instinct, and the symptoms of its early stages
he mistook for inherent frivolity, for lack of respect for the truth; in
brief, for original sin. At the age of fourteen I had begun secretly
(alas, how many things I did secretly!) to write stories of a sort,
stories that never were finished.