A Prairie Caravansery

WHEN we left the country road and turned into the drive, on our way home from school, there was usually a moment of excited expectation among us — unless the interest of getting the tag of the neighbor-children who lived farther down the road put other matters out of mind for the minute. But generally when we entered, or more likely climbed, our own gate and started up through the maple grove, we dropped school and neighbor-children from our minds. Two far more important questions immediately confronted us, — what would old Makly have for us to eat, and who would be visiting at the house?

There was a combination of certainty and curiosity in both matters. As for the first, we knew that Maldy was even at that moment looking at the clock and getting out something for us to fall upon. For at any time after four o’clock we were painfully, unbearably hungry, and we now hurried along the drive as if famine itself dogged our footsteps. When one came home from school one went to the kitchen-door; because somehow when one appeared in the front of the house, — if one were a little girl,— with dinner-pail on arm and hair-ribbon off’ and straight hair flying and apron mussed and hat hanging by its elastic, — They did not look approving. For, after the manner of children, we gave distinct remoteness to the older generation by calling them, collectively, They.

Defined extensively, They included our parents, who both belonged and did not belong, an intermittent grandparent or two, some floating uncles and aunts, the teacher when she boarded with us, all grown-up visitors who stayed over a week at once, any preachers at the place, however brief their visit, and any one else who might be regarded as embodying Mature Opinion.

No, the thing to do was to race around to the kitchen-door and burst clamorously in on Maldy with ravenous demands for food. Maldy was sure to be cross at this time of day, and scolded us roundly as she set out her savings for us. Maldy’s temper was as uncertain as her origin. What was her race no one knew, and we were afraid to ask. She had some German words of curious form and pronounciation, but when she was good-natured she called us mavourneen; and none of the strange men who came to the place ever succeeded in claiming her as a compatriot. But no mere American ever had the instinct for serving that Maldy had, and if she did assume the right to scold, it was as one long identified with the family and regardful of the morals and manners of its heirs. All the time she was berating us, she was setting before us substantial delights that made us quite impervious to her scoldings. And it eased the situation that, while she grumbled at us, she denounced at the same time the constant stream of visitors that came to our doors and interfered with her work and added to the cooking.

Maldy had many aversions, but the first, last, and greatest, was ‘stoppers’ as she called them. They were an everpresent trouble to her, for visitors, of one sort or another, were almost as constant an element in our prairie home as the family itself. Towns were far apart and roads were uncertain, and it was easy to establish a tradition of hospitality. The Plantation, as for some reason they called our farm, seemed to be the right distance from every place to make it convenient for travelers to stay all night with us. This circumstance afforded the second interest that hurried our steps as we neared the house.

What sort of strangers would be there to-day? As we made the last turn in the drive, rivalry ran high as to who would be the first to see if a springwagon, — there were only two carriages among all our acquaintance, — or top-buggy, or even a lumber-wagon, were in sight. If the vehicle were hitched before the house, that indicated merely callers; if it stood out by the barn, some one was going to stay all night, and we opened our minds for entertainment. Visitors did not always prove entertaining, it is true, but we kept our eyes on their possibilities. We seemed to live on the edge of a stream of people, constantly passing, but pausing momentarily as they passed. So far as we were concerned, we regarded the whole thing as arranged for our benefit. In a sense, this long kaleidoscopic line of humanity, passing by and through our house, was a social world to us. Our very fragmentary knowledge of classes and varieties of people, of professions and grades and manner of living, came, when not derived from books, from our observation of the people that trickled steadily past us.

To be sure we were discouraged by Them from intercourse with this rather motley assortment, in which the plain respectability of our own real visitors was mixed with a medley of all sorts of wayfarers. Such variety of guests as we had! Well-dressed friends from the east, coming out with a detached air to look over the country curiously; relatives, doubtful of the propriety of living so far from a daily paper; speculators and prospectors catching at an accidental acquaintance as a basis for claiming hospitality; prairie folk, prosecuting a newly-formed friendship with western readiness; preachers and colporteurs, and propagandists of all sorts, trying to plant their isms and ologies in a new land; candidates dashing in upon us and offering to stay all night because they were to speak at the schoolhouse; wayfarers of every sort, begging any kind of shelter and pleading the distance to the nearest town; peddlers, agents, ‘ movers,’ cattle-buyers; and, ever and anon, passers-by driven in by the storm, or stopped by heat or cold.

The approach of a storm was commonly accompanied by a little flock of wayfarers scurrying up the drive to ask shelter. Sometimes they were overtaken and came driven in, all battered and drenched, and stood, dripping, around the kitchen stove while my mother and Maldy hunted out dry garments of assorted sizes for them. There were times when our wardrobes did not furnish variety enough. I remember one corpulent and jolly matron who sat through the evening attired in a coat of my father’s and an ample gray blanket, pinned around her waist; and, on another occasion, a round-headed little urchin who spent the whole of his sojourn with us on the floor behind his mother’s chair, because he was attired in my too-feminine garments. There was one time, referred to for years as the Big Storm, when the house was overcrowded and travelers begged for a place to lie on the floor. The kitchen floor looked to us the next morning — that was a great day for us children, and we rose early to be sure to miss nothing — like a picture of Mohammedans at prayer. Maldy was crossly picking her way around among the prostrate forms, none too careful of outlying fingers, while she prepared a breakfast on the scale of a barbecue.

Haphazard ‘stoppers’ like these were of an entertaining quality far beyond that of the real visitors, who slept in the best bed, and for whom we had breakfast a little later than usual. We knew all about them beforehand, but these strange people who appeared suddenly at our gates and flitted in the morning, moved in a halo of the unknown. And in spite of all injunctions we would hang about and stare and eavesdrop, alert for dramatic elements. It was possible that they represented a whole scheme of life that we knew nothing about, and we were always hoping to find in them samples of romance.

There were three general classes of sojourners: those who were given the spare bed, — we had the only one within five miles, it was said; those who were put in the big bare kitchen chamber that held three beds, and was known as the Barrack; and those who were sent to the barn to sleep on the hay. This class, I must say, struck us as the most interesting of all, and only Their vigilance kept us from slipping out to pursue acquaintance with them. We spent a good deal of time in the unsatisfactory effort to match bits of real episodes to books, as a shopper would match goods by a sample; and were always finding misfit specimens of Dickens or Irving.

There was once an opportunity that we regarded as rare. One sleety night an unkempt little old man came driven in, asking, or rather offering to accept, supper and a bed. Maldy had my mother out to look him over, and for a moment she stood doubtful, divided between compassion and housewifely scruples. But it was a bitter night and the sleet on the window decided her. The old man, meanwhile, stood with an air of indifferent dignity, as if waiting to see if his offer was to be accepted. It was not until Maldy had set his supper that he made his greatness known. He was, he said, appointed by the government to inspect all cases of hog-cholera in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska; and he was, moreever, next to Fowler, the greatest phrenologist on the continent. Then he looked up under his eyebrows at the little row of youngsters watching him from behind the kitchen table, and made some off-hand reference to my too-well-known dislike for home-duties. And while I blushed and the boys grinned and nudged me, the old man mentioned, with a casual air, Henry’s difficulties with arithmetic; then as we stood appalled, he followed up these thrusts with other home-truths and a side reference to Maldy that made her glower at him across her dish-pan.

It was uncanny. We fled to carry the news and seek reinforcement, and before the scientist had cleared the table — he emptied every dish — the entire household was in the kitchen. Those who were not too sensitive or too squeamish had their heads bumped, while the delighted remainder commented on the results. Any witticisms or jeers from the audience were unwise, however, for they drew down on the speaker an estimate of himself expressed without euphemism or reserve. It was the first time we had ever heard of the faded-out science, and the whole affair was as marvelous to us as secondsight. For myself, I shrank from having any too intimate knowdedge of my character made public, so I remained discreetly in the background, privately resolving to seek the man early in the morning to get encouragement for my modest hopes of a poet’s career. But in the morning he was gone, off on his hog-cholera quest, doubtless, leaving Maldy raging because in return for her kindness he had told her what kind of temperament she should select in a husband.

Phrenology was not the only form of knowledge that came our way. An engaging young man with a cough sat on the porch one summer night and mapped out the heavens for us, and peopled them with strange forms, until we knew more astronomy than we have ever known since. Once there came along a reverend old Jew, who asked to be allowed to spend his Sabbath with us, to avoid travel; and my father half-humorously consented on condition that he also spend our Sabbath, and avoid travel. So he stayed, and on the long Saturday and Sunday afternoons gave us children the history of his people from the restoration down. We had never heard of the Maccabees before, and had always supposed that Hebrew history ended with the book of Acts. In fact, we had always thought of the Jews as being merely a succession of moral illustrations; and we listened with amazement and growing delight to his long tales of romance and tragedy, of persecution and retribution and dreary suffering. It was all told with a passion and a fire of patriotism that made history, any history, for the first time a living thing to us. When he gave us his blessing and took himself and his beard away on Monday morning, we felt as if we had been on terms of conversation with the patriarchs themselves.

And once there was the most, wonderful lady, the wife of a traveling preacher, who recited, or half-chanted, old ballads to us for a whole evening, until we were fairly steeped in the things of balladry. We sat up until nine o’clock that night, and then went blinking off to bed, seeing knights and outlaws and steeds shod with gold. It was with great reluctance that we let her go in the morning. We clung to her after breakfast, and she appeased us by rattling off an Ingoldsby Legend while the men were putting on the horses, and then went gayly away. If her husband had not been there for prosaic evidence, we could never have believed she was a preacher’s wife.

With preachers themselves as a class we thought that we were fairly well-acquainted. Nothing was commoner than to see one driving in on a late afternoon and announcing his intention of staying all night, saying cheerfully, ‘You know we call this the preachers’ hotel.’ I don’t know where so many preachers came from, or why they seemed to be always going somewhere. We had no conception of them as being stationed permanently in a place. There were home missionaries, and Sunday-school organizers, and an occasional circuitrider, and broken-down ministers testing the climate, and candidates, and once in a while a colporteur who left us some new books, rather savorless for children devoted to Scott, but acceptable as being new. We found it a slight objection to the preachers that when they were asked to conduct prayers, they always prayed twice as long as was my father’s custom. And just after breakfast on a summer morning, when so many things are waiting to do, almost any prayer was long enough. Children are callous little indifferents, and we were grown up before we realized how much severe effort and endurance of hard things, and how many personal tragedies, perhaps, were represented in these men. Fortunately, They were less indifferent, and no tired minister ever left our door at nightfall.

But on the whole, to our discredit be it said, we did not find much entertainment in the preachers. I am afraid the only one whose periodical return we hailed with delight was the one who made faces. He seemed to have his facial muscles under control so long as he kept his eyes open, but as soon as he closed them, as in prayer, he began to make the most amazing contortions, as if his face played pranks as soon as it was out of sight. The elders, with their eyes properly closed, did not see him. In fact, the position directly in front of him was at a premium, to be schemed or bargained for, and from it we watched him in awful delight mixed with fear lest our mirth should escape bounds.

One of these same preachers was the first poet I ever saw. I had heard beforehand that this man was a poet, and I was all in a twitter to see him. I had written some experimental and carefully concealed verses myself, and I expected to find either encouragement or discouragement in the very look of the man. And lo, he was a funny little person in a queer greenish coat, and at the table — I had manœuvred to get the seat opposite him — he had a way of popping his food into his mouth as if he were secreting it, and giving a covert glance about the table after each bite. And he let my father and the candidate for Congress do all the talking.

But I still hoped. And sure enough, he finally got out a manuscript volume of poems and left it on the table while he went for a walk. Manners and poems have nothing to do with each other, and I pounced upon it. It was all written out in the finest, plainest little hand, and all paged and title-paged and everything — printing could not improve it. I opened it at random and began, ‘Said the Rose so red to the Lily white.’ That was not a virgilian dip. I could not exactly condemn the style, though it was not my own, but I already knew the type of verse in which roses and lilies were capitalized. I tried again and found,

That was not in the least like Tennyson or Moore. I learned then, once for all, that modern poetry is decadent. And when, an hour later, I heard the little man offering to read some of his poems, I slipped away and spent the afternoon in the top of a maple tree, selecting a new career for myself.

There was one group of travelers that was a constant stimulus to our imaginations — the emigrants to Kansas and Nebraska, the ܘ movers.’ As soon as spring opened they began to pass, going hopefully westward. And until the last bright November days had ended they repassed, going back, now disheveled and worn, with signs of hopelessness even we could read. They were the objects of great curiosity to us, and more so as the abundant hospitality of the Plantation was not open to them freely. It was even an annoyance to our household that a favorite camping-place of theirs was at our gate, and that they came to the house for water, for fuel, for milk, for a quart of flour, for medicine for the baby, for apples, for Tight bread,’ for every sort of provision for nomadic housekeeping. The announcement that movers were at the gate was always followed by an intermittent procession to and from the house, of lank unshaven men, attended a few feet behind by small boys, in long trousers perseveringly hitched up.

Over the fire down by the gate, dusty-haired women, with a general limpness in manner and movement and dress, were cooking sizzling things in smoke-blackened skillets. I must have seen scores of movers, but I never saw a fat one. And no other class of people could have so nearly the effect of being invertebrate. But to us children they were almost too interesting to be pitiful, and had they looked fresh and well-fed and normal, our curiosity regarding them would have been much less. As they were, gaunt, and dusty and ambitionless, slack of movement and drooping of eye, they seemed to us almost a race by themselves.

Intercourse with them was forbidden by our elders, but we managed to slip away down to the roadside to watch them, poking our respectable home-keeping toes into the cracks of the gate and chinning the top rail. We tried at first to imagine them into gypsies, heroes of our reading. But we had to give that up. There was a charm and a mystery about the movers, but it was a different thing from the gypsy atmosphere, as we knew it. Even we recognized that these people were ridden by circumstances, instead of riding them. Sometimes there was a superficial bravado about them, though I don’t know that it went deeper than their grimy wagon-covers. On these used to be chalked up the last assertion of courage and gayety. ‘Going back to our wife’s folks,’ we used to spell out; or the couplet that we did not know was already a classic,—

It used to thrill us with what we regarded as its daring irreverence and mocking tragedy. Sometimes the emigrants were young men, only making a throw at fortune, willing to stand the consequences. They came back, if they came, as gayly as they went. But the older men, with their wives and children along, for whom success was a matter of life and death, they went scarcely less soberly than they returned when the drought drove them back. For the stern land beyond the river was taking its pick of all that came to it, and rejecting all that were mean of spirit or faint of resolve or slow of resource.

Perhaps they were not so pitiable a lot as they seem now to have been. But at times there was real tragedy among them. Once a wagon came that did not stop on the road, but came through the open gate, up the drive to the house. The cover was ragged and gray, and sagged between the ribs like the skin of an emaciated old horse. The horses themselves, absurdly ill-matched, were gaunt and patchy-looking. On the seat, under the front of the swaying canvas cover, sat a woman with a baby across her knees. She was driving, with an evident sense of urgency she could not impart to the poor horses, for all her futile ‘Get ups,’ and slapping of the lines on their skinny backs. ‘Can I stop here? I’ve got to stop,’ she said, with a mixture of shyness and insistence, the forced assertiveness of a timid woman. In the back of the wagon lay her husband, sick unto death.

For once our house was open to movers, with every resource and every help possible. The prairie was not yet educated to fear of tuberculosis. But in the morning the man died. And then presently there was a little funeral, to which a few busy neighbors kindly came, and a passing colporteur read a service, and the grave was made just beyond the edge of our lawn. To us children, hovering on the outskirts of an affair in which we had no part, it was all very strange and new. Then the baby and the mother were kept for a few days, while the baby was fed and petted and plumpened, and the poor mother was given a little room to take her grief away to. There she wrote a letter and waited for an answer to it. At last it came, and early one morning the queer horses, now fed and rested, were hitched to the old wagon, and the poor widow drove away into the sunrise to meet a brother who was at the same time starting westward to meet her.

There was another time, when, as I sat quietly with my mother in a summer early twilight, a great slatternly woman tore in through the open door and, it seemed to me, flung herself and a little yellow ghost of a baby on my mother’s lap, moaning, ‘Oh ma’am, my baby’s dying, — my baby’s dying! ’ I remember with what earnest calm my mother went about her hot baths and poultices and little doses, and how her undisturbed competence contrasted with the other woman’s impotent frenzy. Finally, the baby lay quiet in a pale little sleep, and my mother put this woman and child, in their turn, into the same little room the other had occupied. If she regretted it the next day as a housekeeper, she did not as a Samaritan, and calmly made the room ready for another wayfarer. The child’s father, by the way, smoked by his campfire all the evening, and received his wife on her return the next morning with merely a grunt, and she climbed into the wagon without a word. We children saw it, for we escorted our guests to the gate and hung on it to see them off, and to observe humanity.

I know there were times when jolly parties camped at our gate and kept us awake with their loud laughter and singing; and I am sure that some of those whose faces were turned westward must have looked thrifty and well-kept enough. But they were too much like the people we knew every day to make much impression on us. The novelty of the others as a class lay in their ethical and economic qualities. The prairie child has little opportunity to see either crime or real poverty. We had never seen a beggar or a thief, and we wanted to, tremendously; so the general repute in which the movers were held, only added piquancy and a sort of literary flavor to our interest in them. We could not help having a romantic regard for the man who, though now negotiating meekly for a little corn, might be going to steal our peaches overnight, or milk a cow at four o’clock in the morning. It was the only moral, or immoral, daring we knew anything about.

There was another itinerant class of endless interest to us. It was a day of grief when the agent began to supersede the peddler. There can be no comparison between the person who hastens light-armed from town to town, enticing his customers with samples or specimen-pages or a prospectus, and the peddler, trudging the long country roads, his honest wares on his weary back. At our house we always bought something from the peddler, because we lived so far from the road and it was a pity to have him come all that way for nothing. For the same reason we gave him dinner or supper often, and even allowed him to stay all night. Those were the best times of all, for then he did not open his pack until after supper and we could all sit around and see it, the children in an inside ring on the floor. Anything out of a peddler’s pack was much more desirable than an article from a store. For a store was merely a store; but this pack had been carried and carried along who knew what unknown country roads, and opened in what strange places. It had a flavor of strange regions.

The little men themselves, with their smooth commercial obsequiousness and their queer accent, had a strangeness very un-western. There was a remarkable likeness in their packs, when opened out. They always had fringed things, with red borders, towels, and napkins, and table-cloths, and always one or two good table-cloths, ‘real Irish linen, madam,’ and a poplin dresspattern, and beads, and jewelry in alluring sets, and thimbles and combs and zephyr shawls and cotton lace and bandanas and flowered silk handkerchiefs. If we could have had our way, we would have bought the whole pack of charming things outright, and sent the little man back to his mysterious source to get another. And yet the most fascinating part of the whole performance was to see the goods packed away again; we never missed watching him fit all his wares exactly and carefully into place, and tie his square of smelly black oilcloth over them.

Other itinerants claimed a momentary interest. Periodically there were candidates. I believe of all ‘stoppers’ they were the least interesting. We could never be enthusiastic over the fact that they had little girls at home just our size; while as for their vociferous talk about the tariff or the rights of the farmers, it was almost beneath notice. Such guests always raised the oft-recurring question, why it was so hard for grown people to be interesting. We used to stand around in the penumbra of affairs, apparently dumb with shyness, when really we were not very shy at all. We were simply summing our elders up according to our little standards; and while they were talking along so glibly, with an occasional patronizing word to us, we were sometimes wondering hazily why, if they knew so much, they did not know more.

Even Relations often proved lacking in unique attractiveness, well as we knew them — for first, last, and always, there were Relations among our visitors. Other company had periods of passage or sojourn, and came thickest in the summer months. But neither time nor season, seed-time nor harvest, affected the ebb and flow of visiting Relations. Uncle and aunt, cousin and second-cousin, came out of the mysterious east, either to pause a few days as birds of passage or to settle down for weeks and experience the country and the climate. They came by train to the railroad station fifteen long prairie miles away, and in the dim early hours some one started with a spring-wagon to get them and their luggage. They always came in with a little flurry of excitement over the long ride and the novelty of the prairie.

A conscious spirit of adventure hung about them, especially if they were making a first visit. They knew, and they expected every one else to be aware, that they were undertaking a great enterprise in coming away out here and bringing their trunks fifteen miles from a railroad. Presently the group of children was introduced and the Relations were surprised to find how big we were and how many there were of us, and got our names all mixed up. That was an ordeal, and none of us came out of it very well. It was a very attractive Relation who kept our interest and our respect through it all.

I could not even now wish my worst enemy anything more malevolent than that the whole world could see him while he was being introduced to a family of six children, the parents pervading the scene. They used to fall on me with ‘And this is Mary!’ with evident satisfaction in their cleverness and cordiality — and I was not Mary at all, and the real Mary was no more pleased than I was. Then the elders all talked among themselves, while we children stood around the edges of things and formed provisional opinions of them.

Some time later they turned their attention to us again. They knew the duties of a guest. On our part we were willing but unexpectant, for we had been through the experience before; but, after all, Relations should have their chance, and the credit of the family lay momentarily in our hands. We knew what they would ask — how old we were, and how far on in school, and had we ever got lost on the prairie, and had we a pony, and so on. We answered politely, even fully, keeping hopeful watch for signs of originality. But expectation was really low; it seemed that Relations must always be, not only officially, but generically, Relations and no more.

One part of the interview we did hate tremendously: that was when they settled whom we looked like. We knew we must go through it with each relay of kinsfolk. And what difference in the world did it make whom we looked like? For my own part I suffered through a year of purgatory, while my plain little features were passed upon and hung up on various branches of the family tree. In our own circle it was understood that my looks were not to be mentioned. Pretty Mary did not mind the ordeal. No one ever came to the house who did not find her the exact image of a mother or a daughter or a sister. Her case was easily settled. But me, alas! no one claimed. The Marshalls remarked that I got my mouth from the Johnsons, and the Johnsons ascribed my nondescript little nose to the Marshalls. I early learned to recognize the tone of mingled toleration and superiority with which Relations spoke of the other side of the house. Finally a happy soul made the discovery that I looked like some extinct branch of ancestry, and brought out some infamous old daguerreotypes to prove it. One look at the pictures was enough for me, and I never saw them again except in dreams.

After the second day the visitors bothered us little. At least if they were ordinary negligible adults we saw very little of them, for all day long we were about our own pursuits. Of course, sometimes they were of didactic tendencies, and then we had to defend ourselves from them. There was a sweet-looking cushiony old lady, for instance, who seemed at first sight to be the very balm of Gilead. I hung about her a good deal at the outset, for her sweet bookish language. She referred to my frock and my pinafore, and asked me to pluck her a bloom. But I found she had a way of looking appraisingly at me and saying, ‘Is n’t there something a little girl like you could be doing to help her mother?’ That always gave me a moment of embarrassed silence before I faded away into the outdoors. Domestic duties lay strictly between my mother and me, and it was indelicate for an outsider, even if she were a great-something, to intrude.

There was a companion-piece to her, an old gentleman on the other side of the house, who used to turn on me with abrupt; questions about trivial facts. He would interrupt his conversation with the elders on my approach to interpolate, ‘Well, and where are the Himalaya Mountains?’ or ‘And what can you tell me about Hannibal?’ and multiply my confusion by recalling the fact that he had read Rollin’s Ancient History before he was ten. If these two persons happened to visit us at the same time we avoided the house entirely during their stay, except when we unobtrusively slipped in to meals.

Of course there were jolly young uncles who played croquet with us and gave us a hand up on the pony, and were altogether human; and young lady cousins, with pretty clothes and new hairdressing, who helped to make magazine stories realizable. And we liked the general atmosphere of company — real company — in the house. Discipline insensibly relaxed somewhat — the haphazard ‘stoppers’ only had the effect of making it more careful— and we were, both physically and intellectually, less the objects of conscientious attention. Guests hardly realize what a boon they may be conferring upon the children of the family.

But all these conditions of life changed even while we watched them. Neighboring places thickened upon the prairie. Towns came nearer, and bridges and roads appeared. The far horizon lost its smooth prairie-line, and was notched with houses and trees. The procession on the road was fuller than ever, but it did not pause so often. We seldom saw the rounded canvas top of a mover-wagon at our gate now, and trudging peddlers gave way to glib agents. The sudden little hurry and flurry caused by the arrival of unexpected guests or pathetic wayfarers occurred less and less often. Hospitality became a matter of choice, not a requirement of bare humanity. The glamour of the highway passed; the Road became merely a road. And we, alas and alas! grew up.