A Far Country, Book 1

W >> Winston Churchill >> A Far Country, Book 1


We were more decorous, or rather more awkward now, and the party began
with a formal period when the boys gathered in a group and pretended
indifference to the girls. The girls were cleverer at it, and actually
achieved the impression that they were indifferent. We kept an eye on
them, uneasily, while we talked. To be in Nancy's presence and not alone
with Nancy was agonizing, and I wondered at a sang-froid beyond my power
to achieve, accused her of coldness, my sufferings being the greater
because she seemed more beautiful, daintier, more irreproachable than I
had ever seen her. Even at that early age she gave evidence of the social
gift, and it was due to her efforts that we forgot our best clothes and
our newly born self-consciousness. When I begged her to slip away with me
among the currant bushes she whispered:--"I can't, Hugh. I'm the hostess,
you know."

I had gone there in a flutter of anticipation, but nothing went right
that day. There was dancing in the big rooms that looked out on the
garden; the only girl with whom I cared to dance was Nancy, and she was
busy finding partners for the backward members of both sexes; though she
was my partner, to be sure, when it all wound up with a Virginia reel on
the lawn. Then, at supper, to cap the climax of untoward incidents, an
animated discussion was begun as to the relative merits of the various
colleges, the girls, too, taking sides. Mac Willett, Nancy's cousin, was
going to Yale, Gene Hollister to Princeton, the Ewan boys to our State
University, while Perry Blackwood and Ralph Hambleton and Ham Durrett
were destined for Harvard; Tom Peters, also, though he was not to
graduate from the Academy for another year. I might have known that Ralph
would have suspected my misery. He sat triumphantly next to Nancy
herself, while I had been told off to entertain the faithful Sophy.
Noticing my silence, he demanded wickedly:--"Where are you going, Hugh?"

"Harvard, I think," I answered with as bold a front as I could muster. "I
haven't talked it over with my father yet." It was intolerable to admit
that I of them all was to be left behind.

Nancy looked at me in surprise. She was always downright.

"Oh, Hugh, doesn't your father mean to put you in business?" she
exclaimed.

A hot flush spread over my face. Even to her I had not betrayed my
apprehensions on this painful subject. Perhaps it was because of this
very reason, knowing me as she did, that she had divined my fate. Could
my father have spoken of it to anyone?

"Not that I know of," I said angrily. I wondered if she knew how deeply
she had hurt me. The others laughed. The colour rose in Nancy's cheeks,
and she gave me an appealing, almost tearful look, but my heart had
hardened. As soon as supper was over I left the table to wander, nursing
my wrongs, in a far corner of the garden, gay shouts and laughter still
echoing in my ears. I was negligible, even my pathetic subterfuge had
been detected and cruelly ridiculed by these friends whom I had always
loved and sought out, and who now were so absorbed in their own prospects
and happiness that they cared nothing for mine. And Nancy! I had been
betrayed by Nancy!... Twilight was coming on. I remember glancing down
miserably at the new blue suit I had put on so hopefully for the first
time that afternoon.

Separating the garden from the street was a high, smooth board fence with
a little gate in it, and I had my hand on the latch when I heard the
sound of hurrying steps on the gravel path and a familiar voice calling
my name.

"Hugh! Hugh!"

I turned. Nancy stood before me.

"Hugh, you're not going!"

"Yes, I am."

"Why?"

"If you don't know, there's no use telling you."

"Just because I said your father intended to put you in business! Oh,
Hugh, why are you so foolish and so proud? Do you suppose that
anyone--that I--think any the worse of you?"

Yes, she had read me, she alone had entered into the source of that
prevarication, the complex feelings from which it sprang. But at that
moment I could not forgive her for humiliating me. I hugged my grievance.

"It was true, what I said," I declared hotly. "My father has not spoken.
It is true that I'm going to college, because I'll make it true. I may
not go this year."

She stood staring in sheer surprise at sight of my sudden, quivering
passion. I think the very intensity of it frightened her. And then,
without more ado, I opened the gate and was gone....

That night, though I did not realize it, my journey into a Far Country
was begun.

The misery that followed this incident had one compensating factor.
Although too late to electrify Densmore and Principal Haime with my
scholarship, I was determined to go to college now, somehow, sometime. I
would show my father, these companions of mine, and above all Nancy
herself the stuff of which I was made, compel them sooner or later to
admit that they had misjudged me. I had been possessed by similar
resolutions before, though none so strong, and they had a way of sinking
below the surface of my consciousness, only to rise again and again until
by sheer pressure they achieved realization.

Yet I might have returned to Nancy if something had not occurred which I
would have thought unbelievable: she began to show a marked preference
for Ralph Hambleton. At first I regarded this affair as the most obvious
of retaliations. She, likewise, had pride. Gradually, however, a feeling
of uneasiness crept over me: as pretence, her performance was altogether
too realistic; she threw her whole soul into it, danced with Ralph as
often as she had ever danced with me, took walks with him, deferred to
his opinions until, in spite of myself, I became convinced that the
preference was genuine. I was a curious mixture of self-confidence and
self-depreciation, and never had his superiority seemed more patent than
now. His air of satisfaction was maddening.

How well I remember his triumph on that hot, June morning of our
graduation from Densmore, a triumph he had apparently achieved without
labour, and which he seemed to despise. A fitful breeze blew through the
chapel at the top of the building; we, the graduates, sat in two rows
next to the platform, and behind us the wooden benches nicked by many
knives--were filled with sisters and mothers and fathers, some anxious,
some proud and some sad. So brief a span, like that summer's day, and
youth was gone! Would the time come when we, too, should sit by the
waters of Babylon and sigh for it? The world was upside down.

We read the one hundred and third psalm. Then Principal Haime, in his
long "Prince Albert" and a ridiculously inadequate collar that emphasized
his scrawny neck, reminded us of the sacred associations we had formed,
of the peculiar responsibilities that rested on us, who were the
privileged of the city. "We had crossed to-day," he said, "an invisible
threshold. Some were to go on to higher institutions of learning.
Others..." I gulped. Quoting the Scriptures, he complimented those who
had made the most of their opportunities. And it was then that he called
out, impressively, the name of Ralph Forrester Hambleton. Summa cum
laude! Suddenly I was seized with passionate, vehement regrets at the
sound of the applause. I might have been the prize scholar, instead of
Ralph, if I had only worked, if I had only realized what this focussing
day of graduation meant! I might have been a marked individual, with
people murmuring words of admiration, of speculation concerning the
brilliancy of my future!... When at last my name was called and I rose to
receive my diploma it seemed as though my incompetency had been
proclaimed to the world...

That evening I stood in the narrow gallery of the flag-decked gymnasium
and watched Nancy dancing with Ralph.

I let her go without protest or reproach. A mysterious lesion seemed to
have taken place, I felt astonished and relieved, yet I was heavy with
sadness. My emancipation had been bought at a price. Something hitherto
spontaneous, warm and living was withering within me.




V.

It was true to my father's character that he should have waited until the
day after graduation to discuss my future, if discussion be the proper
word. The next evening at supper he informed me that he wished to talk to
me in the sitting-room, whither I followed him with a sinking heart. He
seated himself at his desk, and sat for a moment gazing at me with a
curious and benumbing expression, and then the blow fell.

"Hugh, I have spoken to your Cousin Robert Breck about you, and he has
kindly consented to give you a trial."

"To give me a trial, sir!" I exclaimed.

"To employ you at a small but reasonable salary."

I could find no words to express my dismay. My dreams had come to this,
that I was to be made a clerk in a grocery store! The fact that it was a
wholesale grocery store was little consolation.

"But father," I faltered, "I don't want to go into business."

"Ah!" The sharpness of the exclamation might have betrayed to me the pain
in which he was, but he recovered himself instantly. And I could see
nothing but an inexorable justice closing in on me mechanically; a blind
justice, in its inability to read my soul. "The time to have decided
that," he declared, "was some years ago, my son. I have given you the
best schooling a boy can have, and you have not shown the least
appreciation of your advantages. I do not enjoy saying this, Hugh, but in
spite of all my efforts and of those of your mother, you have remained
undeveloped and irresponsible. My hope, as you know, was to have made you
a professional man, a lawyer, and to take you into my office. My father
and grandfather were professional men before me. But you are wholly
lacking in ambition."

And I had burned with it all my life!

"I have ambition," I cried, the tears forcing themselves to my eyes.

"Ambition--for what, my son?"

I hesitated. How could I tell him that my longings to do something, to be
somebody in the world were never more keen than at that moment? Matthew
Arnold had not then written his definition of God as the stream of
tendency by which we fulfil the laws of our being; and my father, at any
rate, would not have acquiesced in the definition. Dimly but passionately
I felt then, as I had always felt, that I had a mission to perform, a
service to do which ultimately would be revealed to me. But the
hopelessness of explaining this took on, now, the proportions of a
tragedy. And I could only gaze at him.

"What kind of ambition, Hugh?" he repeated sadly.

"I--I have sometimes thought I could write, sir, if I had a chance. I
like it better than anything else. I--I have tried it. And if I could
only go to college--"

"Literature!" There was in his voice a scandalized note.

"Why not, father?" I asked weakly.

And now it was he who, for the first time, seemed to be at a loss to
express himself. He turned in his chair, and with a sweep of the hand
indicated the long rows of musty-backed volumes. "Here," he said, "you
have had at your disposal as well-assorted a small library as the city
contains, and you have not availed yourself of it. Yet you talk to me of
literature as a profession. I am afraid, Hugh, that this is merely
another indication of your desire to shun hard work, and I must tell you
frankly that I fail to see in you the least qualification for such a
career. You have not even inherited my taste for books. I venture to say,
for instance, that you have never even read a paragraph of Plutarch, and
yet when I was your age I was completely familiar with the Lives. You
will not read Scott or Dickens."

The impeachment was not to be denied, for the classics were hateful to
me. Naturally I was afraid to make such a damning admission. My father
had succeeded in presenting my ambition as the height of absurdity and
presumption, and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner
my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs, Bohn's Standard
Library! Nor did it occur to him or to me that one might be great in
literature without having read so much as a gritty page of them....

He finished his argument by reminding me that worthless persons sought to
enter the arts in the search for a fool's paradise, and in order to
satisfy a reprehensible craving for notoriety. The implication was clear,
that imaginative production could not be classed as hard work. And he
assured me that literature was a profession in which no one could afford
to be second class. A Longfellow, a Harriet Beecher Stowe, or nothing.
This was a practical age and a practical country. We had indeed produced
Irvings and Hawthornes, but the future of American letters was, to say
the least, problematical. We were a utilitarian people who would never
create a great literature, and he reminded me that the days of the
romantic and the picturesque had passed. He gathered that I desired to be
a novelist. Well, novelists, with certain exceptions, were fantastic
fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who had no morals. In the
face of such a philosophy as his I was mute. The world appeared a dreary
place of musty offices and smoky steel-works, of coal dust, of labour
without a spark of inspiration. And that other, the world of my dreams,
simply did not exist.

Incidentally my father had condemned Cousin Robert's wholesale grocery
business as a refuge of the lesser of intellect that could not achieve
the professions,--an inference not calculated to stir my ambition and
liking for it at the start.

I began my business career on the following Monday morning. At breakfast,
held earlier than usual on my account, my mother's sympathy was the more
eloquent for being unspoken, while my father wore an air of unwonted
cheerfulness; charging me, when I departed, to give his kindest
remembrances to my Cousin Robert Breck. With a sense of martyrdom somehow
deepened by this attitude of my parents I boarded a horse-car and went
down town. Early though it was, the narrow streets of the wholesale
district reverberated with the rattle of trucks and echoed with the
shouts of drivers. The day promised to be scorching. At the door of the
warehouse of Breck and Company I was greeted by the ineffable smell of
groceries in which the suggestion of parched coffee prevailed. This is
the sharpest remembrance of all, and even to-day that odour affects me
somewhat in the manner that the interior of a ship affects a person prone
to seasickness. My Cousin Robert, in his well-worn alpaca coat, was
already seated at his desk behind the clouded glass partition next the
alley at the back of the store, and as I entered he gazed at me over his
steel-rimmed spectacles with that same disturbing look of clairvoyance I
have already mentioned as one of his characteristics. The grey eyes were
quizzical, and yet seemed to express a little commiseration.

"Well, Hugh, you've decided to honour us, have you?" he asked.

"I'm much obliged for giving me the place, Cousin Robert," I replied.

But he had no use for that sort of politeness, and he saw through me, as
always.

"So you're not too tony for the grocery business, eh?"

"Oh, no, sir."

"It was good enough for old Benjamin Breck," he said. "Well, I'll give
you a fair trial, my boy, and no favouritism on account of relationship,
any more than to Willie."

His strong voice resounded through the store, and presently my cousin
Willie appeared in answer to his summons, the same Willie who used to
lead me, on mischief bent, through the barns and woods and fields of
Claremore. He was barefoot no longer, though freckled still, grown lanky
and tall; he wore a coarse blue apron that fell below his knees, and a
pencil was stuck behind his ear.

"Get an apron for Hugh," said his father.

Willie's grin grew wider.

"I'll fit him out," he said.

"Start him in the shipping department," directed Cousin Robert, and
turned to his letters.

I was forthwith provided with an apron, and introduced to the slim and
anaemic but cheerful Johnny Hedges, the shipping clerk, hard at work in
the alley. Secretly I looked down on my fellow-clerks, as one destined
for a higher mission, made out of better stuff,--finer stuff. Despite my
attempt to hide this sense of superiority they were swift to discover it;
and perhaps it is to my credit as well as theirs that they did not resent
it. Curiously enough, they seemed to acknowledge it. Before the week was
out I had earned the nickname of Beau Brummel.

"Say, Beau," Johnny Hedges would ask, when I appeared of a morning, "what
happened in the great world last night?"

I had an affection for them, these fellow-clerks, and I often wondered at
their contentment with the drab lives they led, at their
self-congratulation for "having a job" at Breck and Company's.

"You don't mean to say you like this kind of work?" I exclaimed one day
to Johnny Hedges, as we sat on barrels of XXXX flour looking out at the
hot sunlight in the alley.

"It ain't a question of liking it, Beau," he rebuked me. "It's all very
well for you to talk, since your father's a millionaire" (a fiction so
firmly embedded in their heads that no amount of denial affected it),
"but what do you think would happen to me if I was fired? I couldn't go
home and take it easy--you bet not. I just want to shake hands with
myself when I think that I've got a home, and a job like this. I know a
feller--a hard worker he was, too who walked the pavements for three
months when the Colvers failed, and couldn't get nothing, and took to
drink, and the last I heard of him he was sleeping in police stations and
walking the ties, and his wife's a waitress at a cheap hotel. Don't you
think it's easy to get a job."

I was momentarily sobered by the earnestness with which he brought home
to me the relentlessness of our civilization. It seemed incredible. I
should have learned a lesson in that store. Barring a few discordant days
when the orders came in too fast or when we were short handed because of
sickness, it was a veritable hive of happiness; morning after morning
clerks and porters arrived, pale, yet smiling, and laboured with
cheerfulness from eight o'clock until six, and departed as cheerfully for
modest homes in obscure neighbourhoods that seemed to me areas of exile.
They were troubled with no visions of better things. When the travelling
men came in from the "road" there was great hilarity. Important
personages, these, looked up to by the city clerks; jolly, reckless,
Elizabethan-like rovers, who had tasted of the wine of liberty--and of
other wines with the ineradicable lust for the road in their blood. No
more routine for Jimmy Bowles, who was king of them all. I shudder to
think how much of my knowledge of life I owe to this Jimmy, whose stories
would have filled a quarto volume, but could on no account have been
published; for a self-respecting post-office would not have allowed them
to pass through the mails. As it was, Jimmy gave them circulation enough.
I can still see his round face, with the nose just indicated, his wicked,
twinkling little eyes, and I can hear his husky voice fall to a whisper
when "the boss" passed through the store. Jimmy, when visiting us, always
had a group around him. His audacity with women amazed me, for he never
passed one of the "lady clerks" without some form of caress, which they
resented but invariably laughed at. One day he imparted to me his code of
morality: he never made love to another man's wife, so he assured me, if
he knew the man! The secret of life he had discovered in laughter, and by
laughter he sold quantities of Cousin Robert's groceries.

Mr. Bowles boasted of a catholic acquaintance in all the cities of his
district, but before venturing forth to conquer these he had learned his
own city by heart. My Cousin Robert was not aware of the fact that Mr.
Bowles "showed" the town to certain customers. He even desired to show it
to me, but an epicurean strain in my nature held me back. Johnny Hedges
went with him occasionally, and Henry Schneider, the bill clerk, and I
listened eagerly to their experiences, afterwards confiding them to
Tom....

There were times when, driven by an overwhelming curiosity, I ventured
into certain strange streets, alone, shivering with cold and excitement,
gripped by a fascination I did not comprehend, my eyes now averted, now
irresistibly raised toward the white streaks of light that outlined the
windows of dark houses....

One winter evening as I was going home, I encountered at the mail-box a
young woman who shot at me a queer, twisted smile. I stood still, as
though stunned, looking after her, and when halfway across the slushy
street she turned and smiled again. Prodigiously excited, I followed her,
fearful that I might be seen by someone who knew me, nor was it until she
reached an unfamiliar street that I ventured to overtake her. She
confounded me by facing me.

"Get out!" she cried fiercely.

I halted in my tracks, overwhelmed with shame. But she continued to
regard me by the light of the street lamp.

"You didn't want to be seen with me on Second Street, did you? You're one
of those sneaking swells."

The shock of this sudden onslaught was tremendous. I stood frozen to the
spot, trembling, convicted, for I knew that her accusation was just; I
had wounded her, and I had a desire to make amends.

"I'm sorry," I faltered. "I didn't mean--to offend you. And you smiled--"
I got no farther. She began to laugh, and so loudly that I glanced
anxiously about. I would have fled, but something still held me,
something that belied the harshness of her laugh.

"You're just a kid," she told me. "Say, you get along home, and tell your
mamma I sent you."

Whereupon I departed in a state of humiliation and self-reproach I had
never before known, wandering about aimlessly for a long time. When at
length I arrived at home, late for supper, my mother's solicitude only
served to deepen my pain. She went to the kitchen herself to see if my
mince-pie were hot, and served me with her own hands. My father remained
at his place at the head of the table while I tried to eat, smiling
indulgently at her ministrations.

"Oh, a little hard work won't hurt him, Sarah," he said. "When I was his
age I often worked until eleven o'clock and never felt the worse for it.
Business must be pretty good, eh, Hugh?"

I had never seen him in a more relaxing mood, a more approving one. My
mother sat down beside me.... Words seem useless to express the
complicated nature of my suffering at that moment,--my remorse, my sense
of deception, of hypocrisy,--yes, and my terror. I tried to talk
naturally, to answer my father's questions about affairs at the store,
while all the time my eyes rested upon the objects of the room, familiar
since childhood. Here were warmth, love, and safety. Why could I not be
content with them, thankful for them? What was it in me that drove me
from these sheltering walls out into the dark places? I glanced at my
father. Had he ever known these wild, destroying desires? Oh, if I only
could have confided in him! The very idea of it was preposterous. Such
placidity as theirs would never understand the nature of my temptations,
and I pictured to myself their horror and despair at my revelation. In
imagination I beheld their figures receding while I drifted out to sea,
alone. Would the tide--which was somehow within me--carry me out and out,
in spite of all I could do?

"Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core...."

I did not shirk my tasks at the store, although I never got over the
feeling that a fine instrument was being employed where a coarser one
would have done equally well. There were moments when I was almost
overcome by surges of self-commiseration and of impotent anger: for
instance, I was once driven out of a shop by an incensed German grocer
whom I had asked to settle a long-standing account. Yet the days passed,
the daily grind absorbed my energies, and when I was not collecting, or
tediously going over the stock in the dim recesses of the store, I was
running errands in the wholesale district, treading the burning brick of
the pavements, dodging heavy trucks and drays and perspiring clerks who
flew about with memorandum pads in their hands, or awaiting the pleasure
of bank tellers. Save Harvey, the venerable porter, I was the last to
leave the store in the evening, and I always came away with the taste on
my palate of Breck and Company's mail, it being my final duty to "lick"
the whole of it and deposit it in the box at the corner. The gum on the
envelopes tasted of winter-green.

My Cousin Robert was somewhat astonished at my application.

"We'll make a man of you yet, Hugh," he said to me once, when I had
performed a commission with unexpected despatch....

Business was his all-in-all, and he had an undisguised contempt for
higher education. To send a boy to college was, in his opinion, to run no
inconsiderable risk of ruining him. What did they amount to when they
came home, strutting like peacocks, full of fads and fancies, and much
too good to associate with decent, hard-working citizens? Nevertheless
when autumn came and my friends departed with eclat for the East, I was
desperate indeed! Even the contemplation of Robert Breck did not console
me, and yet here, in truth, was a life which might have served me as a
model. His store was his castle; and his reputation for integrity and
square dealing as wide as the city. Often I used to watch him with a
certain envy as he stood in the doorway, his hands in his pockets, and
greeted fellow-merchant and banker with his genuine and dignified
directness. This man was his own master. They all called him "Robert,"
and they made it clear by their manner that they knew they were
addressing one who fulfilled his obligations and asked no favours.