Small Memories

I. A DESERT TOWN

ALTHOUGH it had a name on the map of a transcontinental railroad, it could hardly be called a town. There were a combined general store and restaurant in an unpainted shack with a false front, a small brick depot, three ancient box cars converted into dwellings for the Mexican section hands and their families, a railway water tank, and nothing else. Eastward and westward the rails stretched without a curve across the desert to horizons that seemed immeasurably distant. A branch line ran off in a northerly direction to some mines hidden in a range of mountains sixty miles away. These mountains, for all their remoteness, were outlined in such purity of detail that one would have thought them within easy walking distance.

There was a slight stir in the settlement when the section hands came in for their midday meal — a stir of movement only, not of sound. The men dispersed to their houses without a word, moving as noiselessly as their shadows over the deep sand. I had my lunch — some tinned salmon and hard biscuits — at the restaurant, which was kept by an elderly Chinaman. He looked on with interest while I ate, and at length, when I put down my knife and fork, ‘You finish?’ he asked eagerly. I nodded. He scraped the remnants of food from my plate into a pan which he then carried to a pig dejectedly nosing among clumps of sagebrush at the rear of the building. I have never seen a bonier animal; its ribs seemed on the point of bursting through the tightly stretched hide. It made short work of the scraps. The Chinaman then scraped out the empty salmon tin, cut it open with a pair of heavy scissors, and, having carefully trimmed and flattened out the strip of metal, placed it with a stack of others on a shelf behind the counter.

‘What are you going to do with those?’ I asked.

‘Bimeby make little house keep sun off pig,’ he replied.

At one o’clock the section hands went away again down the main line. I watched their hand car dwindling and dwindling until it vanished in the sparkle of light where the two lines of rails seemed to meet.

The station agent, a man with watery blue eyes, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a wrinkled, leathery skin, sat in his office reading a ‘story magazine.’ It was a grimy, tattered copy, so well thumbed that the pages were as limp as dishcloths. The agent wet his finger as he turned them. Now and then the telegraph instrument clicketyclicked for a moment or two, throwing out minute, hard pellets of sound that impinged sharply on the eardrums. Presently the telephone rang. It rang again, more insistently. The agent, still reading, took his feet from the table and groped for the receiver.

‘Yeah?’ he said, and waited. . . . ‘Yeah.’ . . . ‘Yeah.’

He hung up the receiver and resumed his reading.

I strolled a little way down the track, but the glare of the sun on the sand was too blinding to be endured for long. My eyes ached and my skin felt parched and dry. The only shade the settlement afforded at that early hour of the afternoon was a circular patch under the water tank. Several swarthy children were gathered there. One of them, a boy of seven or eight, held a tin cup under a damp spot in the planking where the water seeped through. It dripped — ping, ping, ping — into the cup, very slowly. When a little had collected in the bottom of it, the boy drained it at a gulp and reluctantly gave place to another youngster. It made me thirsty to watch them.

After a while a woman appeared in the doorway of one of the box-car houses and looked down the track to the eastward, shading her eyes with her hand. Following her gaze I saw a black speck no larger than a pinhead, which I at first thought was the hand car returning, but it grew too rapidly for that. Then four tiny puffs of steam emerged from it, and long afterward the sound of a whistle reached us: a deep-toned woo-o-o-o, woo-o-o-o, woowoo-o-o-o, so faint that it scarcely ruffled the surface of that immense pool of silence; but the children at the water tank heard it and came running to the station. One little girl remained behind to hold the tin cup under the leak. The old Chinaman shuffled along the platform, drew back into the meagre strip of shadow made by the overhanging eaves, and stood gazing pensively at his slippers. The station agent came to the doorway and leaned against the lintel, one leg crossed over the other.

The train thundered by at tremendous speed. I had a glimpse of blurred faces at blurred windows, and of a glassed-in observation platform vanishing at once in a cloud of dust.

When I took my hands from my face the dust was settling again. High in air a fragment of colored newspaper was rising and falling in the windy wake of the train. It fluttered slowly down, dancing over the sand before coming to rest. The children ran to fetch it at once. They spread it out on a baggage truck, examining the pictures — it was a comic supplement — with grave, interested faces.

The stump of a lighted cigar which someone had thrown from the train was lying by the side of the track, sending up a thin ribbon of smoke. One of the Mexican women noticed it from afar and came to pick it up. She pinched out the fire, crumbled the tobacco between her palms, rolled part of it into a cigarette, and placed the rest in the pocket of her apron.

One other bit of treasure-trove, the core of an apple, was found by the old Chinaman’s pig. It consumed this delicacy with an expression of pure sensual enjoyment comical to behold.

The station agent stood motionless in the doorway, picking his teeth with a match stick, gazing absent-mindedly after the train, which was now miles away. He watched it disappear over the rim of the world, then returned to his office, put on his green eye shade, and again settled himself to his reading. He was still reading when I passed his window an hour later.

‘How’s the local train?’ I asked. ‘On time?’

‘Yeah,’ he replied, without looking up.

Nothing, not even breath, was wasted in that lonely desert town.

II. AND POINTS WEST

I left New York in an agreeable frame of mind. I had a railroad ticket to San Francisco, a steamship ticket from that port to a group of Pacific islands four thousand miles farther on, and nearly eight hundred dollars in cash. Wheels would be turning and propellers spinning under me for many days; I was going from winter to perpetual summer, and by husbanding my resources I could loaf, if I chose, for two or three months after arriving at my destination, one of the authentic ends of the earth. There was reason for contentment, and as I watched the snowy landscape flowing past I considered myself a fortunate man.

But the mood changed before we had reached the Ohio boundary. The Christmas season was responsible for that. The train was filled with students homeward bound from Eastern colleges and universities, young fathers and mothers with small eager children on the way to family reunions — all sorts and conditions of people with expressions of happy anticipation on their faces. There was a holiday, home-going spirit in the air and it aroused in me a feeling of loneliness.

For I was merely traveling, as I had long been doing, from one place to another, from one group of strangers to another group. I was not, to be sure, weary of travel. On the contrary, pleasure in movement and in change of scene was keener if anything than it had ever been. ‘But it may be,’ I thought, ‘that satiety is not far distant. It may come at any moment, and what is to be done then?’ One could hardly expect to find lifelong enjoyment in wandering, and meanwhile I was not forming those close associations, either with places or with people, which are said to be the consolation of one’s later years. My allegiance was to the world at large — a world too large, perhaps, even in these days, to be faithful to. Assuredly faithfulness could not be expected from it. Where was home to me? I could think of a dozen places that might have been, but of none that was. This was all very well for the present, but what of twenty years, thirty years hence? Where would 1960 find me? Hobbling in to the table d’hôte of some dingy Paris pension? Playing solitaire in front of a clubroom fire? So I mused as the train sped westward and people around me were talking joyfully of home.

We arrived at Chicago on the afternoon of the twenty-fourth. I decided to remain there over Christmas Day and, forgetting my resolve to husband resources, I chose as a stopping place a large, luxurious-looking hotel on the lake front. That evening I went to a theatre. Afterward I had supper in a deserted hotel grillroom. Then to bed in my sixteenth-floor eyrie.

It was a raw, gray Christmas, with low-hanging clouds shaking out damp flakes of snow, melting as they fell. From my window I could see the glistening tops of a few taxicabs drawn up at the curb. There was almost no pedestrian traffic. The avenue, as far as I could see in either direction, was black, wet, and empty.

Flop! Something was dropped outside my door. It was a morning paper. Far in the distance down the greencarpeted passageway a man or a boy — I could not be sure which — dropped other papers at the doors of a few occupied rooms. Picking up mine, I found attached to it a small white card with ‘Good Morning!’ printed on it. Under this was another card, decorated with a sprig of printed holly and bearing the inscription, ‘Merry Christmas!’

I winced. The greeting was well meant, no doubt, but it was too impersonal, and it seemed even less personal when I remembered that this hotel was one of many under the same management to be found in cities scattered all over the continent. I could imagine some super proprietor-inchief, in New York perhaps, issuing orders several weeks earlier to the effect that ‘On Christmas Day the season’s greetings, in the form of neatly printed cards, will be extended to the guests in all of our hotels. These will be distributed with the newspapers, and are in addition to the usual “Good Morning” cards.’ I tried without success to humanize this greeting. It depressed rather than comforted me to be wished a Merry Christmas by a chain of hotels.

I decided to have breakfast in my room and ordered it by telephone. A voice at the other end of the wire said, ‘Yes, sir; very good, sir,’ and a few moments later, while I was having my bath, someone knocked. ‘Come in!’ I called — the outer door had been left ajar. I hurried into my dressing gown, but when I came from the bathroom I found the table laid and breakfast awaiting me. Whoever had brought it had gone. I was greatly disappointed, for I felt the need of talking to someone, and a newspaper is a poor companion of a Christmas morning. However, it served as well as it could while I breakfasted. The food was excellent, and each lump of sugar on the silver platter was separately wrapped, with the name of the hotel stamped in gold, on blue paper.

Meanwhile the snow had turned to rain, which was falling in a fine drizzle. The hotel was so vast that I decided to have a morning constitutional indoors. As I came from my room someone was entering one a few doors farther down. I saw a withdrawing trouser leg and a patent-leather shoe; then the door closed with a dull boom. That was as much as I saw of any guest during my morning walk.

My feet sank noiselessly into the thick carpet. I went on and on, past innumerable doors, and at length, upon turning a distant corner, I was slightly startled at observing a woman seated in a small niche there. She was an elderly woman, dressed in black, with immaculate collar and cuffs. Her back was toward me, but I had a glimpse of an expressionless face reflected from a mirror. I then noticed that two mirrors hung in front of her in such a position that she commanded a view down the length of both corridors. There was a telephone on a small table beside her. She sat quite motionless, her hands folded in her lap. I started to speak, thought better of it, and went on.

On the floor below there was another woman seated at a corresponding corner in the hallway, and dressed in precisely the same fashion, and yet another on the floor below that. There must have been eighteen or twenty of them in all — one for each floor. I suppose their duties were to direct the maid service, and to keep watch and report any suspicious-looking prowlers along the hallways. One of them looked at me rather suspiciously, I thought. The others gave me, by way of their mirrors, such brief, impersonal glances that any desire I may have had to wish them a Merry Christmas was stillborn. I was glad, afterward, that I had refrained. It would have been a tactless wish. Who could have a Merry Christmas in a hotel corridor?

I walked down to the street floor — thirty-two flights of steps — and returned by elevator. My bed had been made and the room tidied during my absence. A hand bag I had left open in the middle of the floor was on the luggage stand, and my typewriter was placed by the side of the writing desk where clean new pens and penholders seemed to be saying, ‘Use us!’ and snowy sheets of hotel stationery, ‘Write on us!' But I didn’t feel like writing, the place was so depressingly neat and orderly—like a show bedroom in a furniture dealer’s display window.

From afar, through the closed door, I heard the faint moaning of a vacuum cleaner. ‘Lord!’ I thought. ‘What a wretched life, this perpetual moving from place to place! How could I ever have believed that it had attraction?’ Here I was, on Christmas Day, alone, among strangers, with the dreary prospect of a hotel dinner before me! Well, I should have to get through it, somehow. It occurred to me that it might be advisable to write after all. I might compose a ‘whimsical ’ article on ‘The Joys of Wandering.’ The time would pass more quickly, and perhaps, later, I could sell the article for a sum equal to my hotel bill. So, placing the table by the window, I got out my typewriter, and began: —

I have often wondered at the disfavor with which hotels are regarded by the generality of men. Forced, upon occasion, to resort to them, they do so with an air of melancholy, melancholy to behold. They seem to have lost — if ever they have had — the faculty to enjoy their moments of freedom from the humdrum of settled domestic life. The blood of nomadic ancestors has long since been bred out of them; they are never so miserable as when compelled to sleep in a strange bed, and it is curious that this should have come to pass in an age when the opportunities for travel are as varied and pleasant as the inns where one may refresh one’s self at the end of a journey.

I am glad that in this respect I am not as other men, for, being by profession an itinerant journalist, movement is of course necessary to me, and under favorable conditions a hotel of sorts awaits me nightly. You may have seen me, at one time or another, passing through some hotel lobby, with a small scuffed traveling bag in one hand and a portable typewriter in a black cloth-covered case in the other, disappearing through the revolving doors with that peculiar dust-shaking movement of the feet common to itinerant journalists. Or, perhaps, hurrying along the gusty street to the bosom of your family on Thanksgiving or Christmas Day, you may have observed me — not without pity — dining alone in an otherwise deserted hotel restaurant. It is true that I am a homeless man, but no tears of self-commiseration fall upon the page as I write these words, for I am homeless by preference, by a choice long since made and adhered to with increasing satisfaction.

Were you to offer me, as a freehold in perpetuity, the most comfortable of homes, one functioning smoothly, with loyal domestics going smilingly about their tasks, and an agreeable wife awaiting my coming with her children — somehow our children, all past the age for childish complaints and diseases — grouped around her in front of the fire; if I were to be gifted with this ménage on the sole condition that I should manage it, ‘No,’ I would reply, without a moment’s hesitation. ‘No, no! I am extremely grateful to you, sir (or madam), but this one condition makes the acceptance of your generous gift impossible.’ And why should I accept it when, at a nominal cost, all of these advantages, save only the doubtful one of the family, may be enjoyed at a hotel without further responsibility on my part or the least restriction on freedom of movement?

I was steadily gathering momentum, but upon reaching the bottom of the first page I made the mistake — always fatal to composition — of reading over what I had written. ‘Rubbish!’ I said. ‘And furthermore there’s not a word of truth in it!’ I crumpled the sheet and threw it into the waste-paper basket; but a moment later, prompted by the journalistic instinct, I fished it out again. Perhaps use could be found for it some day. Then I sat by the window, gazing at vacancy, trying to dream into existence the home and family I might have had, and the Christmas I might have been enjoying at that moment, while the vacuum cleaner went moaning past my door and on down the hallway as though it were a voice out of the aching void I felt within myself.

The hotel dinner was even more solitary than I had imagined it would be. A few waiters stood against the walls in attitudes of deep meditation, or conversed in whispers behind their hands. There must have been several acres of table linen in the immense room; all of the tables were set, and, with the exception of three or four, unoccupied. Far in the distance an elderly man with a shining bald head, shining nose glasses, and mutton-chop whiskers was complaining to the head waiter about his food. I heard him say, ‘Abominable! Old patron. I want you to see to it — ' He had a shrill, peevish voice that cut through the deep silence like the droning of a gnat’s wings.

After dinner I went to the hotel library, a large, comfortably furnished room with windows looking out on the lake front. By a happy chance I discovered there a copy of Captain Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone around the World, one of the most fascinating books of travel I have ever read. Hours passed like minutes. I forgot that I was alone, that it was Christmas Day, and upon reaching the end of the story I regretted with all my heart that there was no more of it. It was then nine o’clock and my train for San Francisco was to leave at ten-thirty.

I took a taxicab to the La Salle Street station. Snow was falling again and a cold wind swept through the empty streets. The station was warm and brilliantly lighted, and a crowd of incoming passengers was entering from the train shed, where the lines of rails gleamed like silver in the light of the arc lamps. An engine was panting quietly after its long journey — a deep, measured tsoo-tsoo, tsoo-tsoo, streaked with threadlike lines of metallic sound.

I had had no supper, so I went into the lunchroom for a piece of apple pie and a glass of milk. Whether it was the refreshment, or merely the fact that I was again in a railroad station, I can’t say, but certain it is that the last vestiges of my melancholy mood vanished at once. Then, of a sudden the walls and lofty ceilings of the waiting room echoed and reëchoed with a clear call that sounded like music in my ears: —

All aboard!

Ten-thirty Rock Island tra-ain!

Mo-line,

Rock Is-land,

Dav-en-port,

I-o-way Ci-ty,

Des Moines,

Coun-cil Bluffs,

O-ma-ha,

Lin-coln,

Ma-has-ka,

Belle-ville,

Man-ka-to,

Co-lo-rado Springs,

Denver,

And points we-e-st!

Train now ready on track fo-o-our!

The mere enumeration of those westward-reaching towns made the pulses leap. It was poetry to me — a ‘Song for Wanderers’ in the finest sense. One would have said that a great portal had been flung open upon an immeasurable expanse of snowcovered prairie, of plains, of desert country, of cloud-shouldering mountains falling away to the sea, blue and sparkling in morning sunlight. Picking up my traveling bag and the portable typewriter in the black cloth-covered case, I joined the stream of travelers filing through the gates to the waiting train.

‘Tired of wandering?’ I said to myself. ‘Far from it! Not yet at any rate. Not while there are still Points West.’

III. INDIAN COUNTRY

A traveling salesman whom I met on the train assured me with enthusiasm that it was ‘ the best, busiest little city west of the Mississippi,’ and perhaps it was, and is, from a commercial point of view. From any other, in so far as I could judge after a five hours’ visit, it seemed to have but small claim to distinction. Indeed, there was nothing, not even a name, to distinguish it as a Western town, and a chance visitor, had he been set down blindfold in the main business thoroughfare, might easily have thought it a street in Albany, or Dayton, Ohio, or Indianapolis, or Los Angeles, or Atlanta, Georgia.

It was a busy place — there was no doubt of that — and growing rapidly, but to me it seemed mere rank increase without order or design, and one would have said that here dreary uniformity was something inherent in the principle of growth. It met the eye on every hand, and in the residence districts the machine-made individuality of the houses was even more depressing. Most of them, evidently, had been turned out wholesale by real-estate promoters. Dwellings of precisely the same design appeared again and again in street after street, and the same want of imagination was apparent in the public and semipublic buildings. The post office was in the Colonial style and looked as out of place in the setting as the city hall— a replica, with certain bizarre concessions to utility, of a Grecian temple. One of the Protestant churches, an enormous structure of yellow brick, was flanked by two squat towers surmounted by green domes. What sort of men, I wondered, were the City Fathers who permitted such things?

Then it occurred to me that there were no City Fathers any more in such towns as this. Perhaps there never had been. The development of the country had been too rapid. Migration had followed migration in quick succession; the population was still fluid, and, like water, its only business was to spread, to fill, and, rising to certain levels, to flow on.

I walked for miles over stone-covered prairie where, within the memory of living men, the buffalo had roamed. The business streets were lined with motor cars and filled with shoppers. Caught for a moment in a cross-street crush, I heard a fragment of conversation between two women behind me.

‘What’ll we do now?’ asked one.

‘I’m kinda tired, ain’t you?’ replied the other. ‘Let’s go sit in a movie.'

Having nothing better to do, I too acted upon this suggestion. The theatre was well filled even at that hour of the morning, and as I glanced at the rows of pale, expressionless faces behind me, faintly illuminated by the light from the screen, it seemed to me that all those people, like the two women whose conversation I had heard, must have come there merely to sit. The film was an utterly banal one, having nothing to commend it but the excellence of the photography. Part after part was reeled off, and one longed and half hoped for some demonstration on the part of the audience, some active protest against such an insult to common intelligence; but the rows of pale faces showed neither pleasure nor displeasure, neither amusement nor boredom, as though the minds behind them were as blank as they.

I left at the conclusion of the fifth part and resumed my aimless wanderings. Here and there, on side streets, I came upon buildings remaining, undoubtedly, from the early period of settlement. They had an appearance of immemorial antiquity, but this, I realized, was merely by reason of the contrast with the modern buildings around them, and because of the vast changes which had taken place, both fundamentally and in the externals, in American life since the beginning of the new century.

There was nothing, certainly, in the appearance of the principal hotel to remind one of pioneer days. It was a fourteen-story building with the date 1920 on the corner stone. Over the main entrance hung a large sign: —

WELCOME TO THE INTERSTATE RETAIL CLOTHING DEALERS’ ASSOCIATION!

CONVENTION HEADQUARTERS

Being tired after my long walk, I went in there to rest. The walls of the spacious lobby were covered with convention signs and advertisements of clothing, underwear, hosiery, and haberdashery of all sorts, and a throng of delegates wearing badges were listening or not, as they chose, to a concert of popular dance music furnished by radio from Kansas City.

I bought a local paper at the news stand and sat down to glance through it. It was the kind of paper to be found everywhere in these days, with syndicated news columns, syndicated comic strips, syndicated editorials. Even the local news struck me as being the same local news I had read while passing through other American cities on my way westward. The Y. M. C. A. was making a drive for funds for a new building; a valuable property in the heart of the retail district had just been sold; the mayor had extended the freedom of the city to the members of the Retail Clothing Dealers’ Association, and so forth. I was about to lay the paper aside when my eye caught the heading of a column on an inside page_ ‘Fifty Years Ago: Items from the old Weekly Gazette for July 1872.’

Frank Holliday has sold his holdings on the north branch of the Smoky River and is going on west. He says this country is getting too settled-up to suit him. Frank is one of those men who have to have at least thirty miles of breathing room all their own in order to feel comfortable. He’s aiming now, he says, for the other side of the Rockies. . . .

A nest of rattlers was routed out from under the floor of the Plain Dealer saloon yesterday. The largest measured four feet, two and one half inches. Some of the boys played a joke on Joe McCracken, who was having a comfortable snooze at one of the tables in the Plain Dealer. They coiled up the dead snakes on the floor beside him, and when he woke up he gave a yell you could have heard all the way to St. Louis. Joe thought he ‘had ’em again.’ . . .

On Monday negotiations were at last opened up with the Indians of the Smoky River reservation for the disposal of their lands to the United States Government. Colonel George Godfrey and J. C. Appleby, acting for Uncle Sam, met the Indians in the grove of cottonwoods a mile east of town. They explainer! to the chiefs why the Government was making this request for purchase. Homesteaders are coming into the Smoky River Valley in increasing numbers, and it is only a matter of a few years before the country will be filled with settlers and the reservation completely surrounded. For this reason, the Government, having in mind the Indians’ own welfare, urged them to move to a fine site already chosen for a new reservation four hundred miles farther west, where they can live in peace and quiet.

The Indians, according to the usual custom, made their replies the following day. Most of them were firmly opposed to moving on. Chief Gray Wolf’s speech, which is a fair sample of the others, was as follows: —

‘I heard what you said. I don’t want to give up my lands. This country is like my mother. She has fed me and my children. When you moved us across the Missouri you said this valley was to be ours forever. You told us to build fences. You told us to plant corn. We did what you said. Now you want us to move again. It seems to me we have no home and you will always be driving us farther away from the lands of our fathers. We have gone tar enough. I don’t want to give up my lauds. I want to stay here.’

While we appreciate the Indians’ point of view, they cannot be allowed to stand in the way of progress. We hope, and believe, that our government agents will bring such pressure to bear as is needful for their removal from this rapidly developing country.

Under this, the present editor of the paper had appended the following note: —

It is hardly necessary to inform our readers that the hopes of the editor of the old Weekly Gazette were realized. The site of the cottonwood grove where this historic meeting was held is now in the very heart of the city and is occupied by the New Jefferson hotel.

Luncheon was being served in the hotel dining room, and the crowd in the lobby began to thin out. A bell boy passed, calling, ‘Mr. Goldberg, please! Mr. Goldberg, please!' with passionless insistence, and a man with a huge paunch and a shining red jowl, who was being massaged and manicured at the same time in the hotel barber shop, raised his head and shouted, ‘Here, boy!’ Several commercial travelers were shaking dice and exchanging banter with the girl at the cigar stand. From a near-by alcove came the busy clacking of the public stenographer’s typewriter. A telephone rang in the long-distance booth. A guest sitting beside me, who had been waiting for the call, opened the door and took down the receiver.

‘Hello. . . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . Hello! Is that you, Sam? Say, this is Charlie. How ’s every little thing in St. Jo? What? Yeah, I’m down here for the convention. Look here, Sam, I thought I’d call you up about that —’

The door of the booth slammed and I heard no more.

The Indians had passed on — no doubt of that. But it was hard even to imagine that they had ever been within a thousand miles, or years, of that spot.