My Island Home

by JAMES NORMAN HALL

THOSE lines were written fifty years ago by a woodshed poet who lived in the little town of Colfax, Iowa—population 1749—in the heart of the prairie country. He was twelve years old and little knew, then, that the Stranger appealed to would, in the course of time, prove to be himself, looking to the northward toward the days of his boyhood and youth from his home on the island of Tahiti, in the South Pacific. But so it is, and, despite the distance of time and space, I am happy to find that some of the memories of those days stand out as clearly as though the events of them had happened last week.

The Hall-family woodshed stood a little way back of the house on the northern slope of a hill that gave a wide view of the country in that direction. Both woodshed and barn have long since vanished, but I still see them in the mind’s eye, their walls covered with the early compositions of the woodshed poet. “Look to the Northward,”of four stanzas, was penciled by the woodshed window, overlooking the barn farther down the hill.

Colfax, in the days before the arrival of motorcars, was one of those small country towns healthy, commercially, because the farmers living around them within a radius of from six to ten miles did their trading in them; and “trading" it was, in a real sense, for the farmers’ wives brought with them fowls and eggs and homemade butter to be exchanged for various articles which the combined dry-goods and grocery stores of those days had to sell. The town had a reason for being that was later to be partly lost. As motorcars increased and dirt roads vanished the farmers’ custom went to larger towns. Colfax, like many another small town, is now only the ghost of what it was in the 1890s and early 1900s. There were no wealthy residents in the town, nor were there any poor. Modern conveniences were few. During my boyhood I remember only two houses furnished with bathrooms and indoor toilets. All dwellings were heated either by wood stoves, pothellied stoves that burned sofi coal, or those glorious bringers of indoor cheer, “hard-coal burners.”Furnaces were then unknown except for a few in store buildings. As for house furnishings, most of them came, I believe, from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a few other emporiums in or near Chicago. It. was all in atrocious taste, and rocking chairs in particular were monstrosities that would have to be seen to be believed.

Our house, on its exposed hilltop where it. took the buffetings of the bitter midwinter winds sweeping down from Canada, was a story-and-a-half frame building wit h a porch eight feet wide, trimmed with gingerbread scrollwork, fronting the dining room. The only water faucet in the house was in the cellar, for this was believed to lessen the risk of the pipe freezing in winter, but it froze nevertheless. All water was carried up to the kitchen. On a small back porch we had an icebox; but Iowa summers were as hot as the winters were cold, and those precious blocks of ice would vanish before the day was done.

Copyright 1952, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Borton l6, Mass. All rights reserved.

But that old frame house was a home in the best sense of the word. Comforts and conveniences there were none, but they were not missed because we had never known them. What amazes me now, as I think of boyhood days, is how our mother managed to raise five children, three boys and two younger girls, doing practically all of the work herself when we were little. Only the family washing was sent out. Everything else she did, with the help of an occasional “hired girl.”We children helped, of course, when we were old enough, but I still wonder how Mother managed when we were too young to be of use.

Many boys of my generation, like the boys of Tom Sawyer’s and Huck Finn’s generation, went to bed betimes on summer nights, but not always to sleep. And we were quite as skillful at making exits through upstairs windows; or we could creep downstairs, shoes in hand, as noiseless as cats. Alas! Having emerged from our parents’ dwellings, we found no Mississippi River flowing past our dooryards, majestic, mysterious, under the light of the moon. In summer the Skunk River was little more than a prairie slough filled with sandbanks, mudbanks, and the trunks and branches of dead trees that had been swept into the channel during the spring rains. But we were not without adventure. Our Stream of Travel was of a different kind but none the less romantic: the C.R.I. & P. Railroad.

Number Six was due at Colfax at 10.45 P.M., but a good five minutes before that time it appeared around the curve westward, at the top of the Mitchellville grade, six miles away. The headlight proelaimed the glory of its coming, and the first faraway whistle was like a call to adventure in the summer night, sending shivers of delight up and down the spines of three of us more than ready to respond to it — Buller Sharpe, “Preacher” Stahl, son of the Methodist minister, and myself. Number Six took water at Colfax, and we waited beneath the water tank about fifty yards past the east end of the station. We would hear the fireman climb onto the tender and pull down the iron spout with the canvas nozzle attached; then silence, save for the plash of water pouring in and the gentle yet powerful brenthing of the engine. Presently up went the spout, spilling the water remaining in it onto the ground just beyond where we were concealed. Then came the “high-ball” — that most stirring of signals — two short sharp blasts of the whistle. Peering out from behind the posts supporting the water tank we would see the conductor swinging his lantern from the station platform. The fireman gave a pull at the bell rope; the great wheels began to move, and at the first mighty “hough!” of the engine we skipped out, leaped on the pilot — or “cowcatcher” as it was called by the uninitiated — and vanished into the pool of darkness just beneath the headlight.

What were the adventures of later years, compared with those summer-night rides on the pilot of Number Six? There was happiness almost too great for the hearts of boyhood to contain. The deeptoned whistle echoed among the wooded hills east of town. The great engine, rounding the sharp curves along the serpentine stretch of track skirting the hills, communicated the keen thrill of excitement from its own huge body to those of the twelveand thirteen-year-olds who felt themselves a part of it. The headlight threw shafts of glory into the wooded land along the river; then, the curves passed, we felt sharp nudges from behind as the train gathered speed, and the long shaft of brilliant light now reached far ahead along the right-of-way.

A great part of our enjoyment came from being so close to the earth, which gave us the keen sense of traveling at enormous speed and with effortless power. All the odors of the summer night were ours: the cool dank fragrance of bottom lands along the river, mingled with that of skunk, one of the healthiest of all smells; the perfume of drying cloverhay; the pungent odors of weeds and field flowers lying in swathes along the right-of-way as the scythes of the section hands had left them; the mingled odors of manure, horse sweat, and harness coming from barns. And, best of all, the deeptoned whistle of Number Six, and we traveling with it! It was splendid compensation for the many times when we heard train whistles from afar, the sound growing fainter and fainter until heard no more.

Grinnell, thirty-two miles from Colfax, was our usual destination. In the horse-and-buggy days a town thirty or forty miles distant was unknown territory to most small boys, with the romantic appeal that distance lends it, and this was enhanced with the hour approaching midnight, the strange streets empty, and most of the houses dark. The three of us would hasten away from the station and the business part of town, for the night constable would be making his rounds in that neighborhood and we had no desire to be questioned by him. In those days when trains carried all the traffic of the nation we could be sure of catching a westbound freight that would take us home before daylight. And so, carefree and curious, we wandered at ease along broad residence streets where maple trees and overarching elms were “chandeliers of darkness” against the starry sky. On one of the earliest of these journeys I had my first view of Grinnell College, or Iowa College as it was then called.

I have often thought of the importance of the effect those midnight rambles over the Grinnell College campus were to have on the events of my later life. I had the feeling of being in another world, as remote from that I knew as though it had been a thousand miles away. The beautiful lawns and the trees that shaded them; the buildings that looked so august and venerable compared with the mean little churches of Colfax, which, together with the schoolhouse, were the only public buildings in town — all of this stirred in me a vague longing.

The nocturnal visits of Sharpe, Stahl, and me had all been summer ones when the College was closed; hut upon one never-to-be-forgotten occasion we saw the campus on a night in early October, shortly after the students had returned. This must have been in the autumn of 1902 or 1903. We witnessed a torchlight procession coming along the street bordering the west side of the campus. Thirty or forty men were singing what I afterward learned was called “The Glee Club Marching Song”: —

On they went, their bodies casting huge shadows in the torchlight, the singing dying away far in the distance. At the time I remembered only fragments of the song, but having been born an idealist, a romanticist, even in boyhood anything beautiful heard or seen was immediately enhanced in the imagination and formed dream pictures in my mind. So it was on this occasion: the street bordering the campus was no ordinary street, nor the houses ordinary houses.

The whistle of a westbound freight would hurry us back to the railway yards. On the homeward journey we usually rode on top of a boxcar to have a better view of the countryside. Often the train was a fast freight that went thundering through Colfax, gathering speed for the long Mitchellville grade; but there was no need for concern: the grade conquered the best of them. When halfway up, the freight would be traveling no faster than a boy could trot. Sharpe, “Preacher,” and I would hop off there, walk the rest of the way back, and be safely in bed and asleep well before daylight.

2

THE first book bought with my own money was a fifty-cent edition of Burns’s poems, published by Hurst & Company, in New York. I still have this copy, fragrant with the memories, and the pages marked with the sacred finger grime, of boyhood. The earliest of its associations goes back to the time when I wrote “The Skunk River in Spring.”

I regretted that our little river was named the Skunk. It deserved a better one, I thought, and later discovered that it had a better one: a beautiful Indian name, the Checaqua, but it was never so marked on the maps. I envied Robert Burns who had rivers so beautifully named to immortalize: “Flow gently, sweet Afton” . . . “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon. . . .” Insofar as I knew, no one had ever written a poem about the Skunk River. I resolved to do so, slipping the name in as unobtrusively as possible.

I wrote of a tragic event: little W illy King, whose parents lived only two blocks from our house, had been drowned in the river while learning to swim.

Comparing this with

I felt deeply discouraged and wondered whether I could ever become a poet. Curiously enough, it was Burns himself who, later, gave me new heart and courage to continue the struggle.

During my last two years in high school I worked, evenings and on Saturdays, and during summer vacations, in H. G. Gould’s clothing store. Mr. Gould was not a resident of Colfax; he lived in another part of the state, but had bought several clothing stores in Iowa towns. The one in Colfax was managed by two cousins, John and Billy Davis. I was sweeper-out of the store, kept the furnace going in winter, dusted shirt-and-collar boxes, and was slowly learning to wait on trade. But diffidence, the bane of my life, then and since, was a great handicap, and this was increased by the rebuffs received from farmers and their wives who little trusted a young salesman.

The store, in the Craigan block, extended from the street to the alleyway behind. The Davis boys trained me as well as they could. Often when a customer entered they sent me forward to see what was wanted. The customer was, usually, one of my old enemies before whom I went down to inevitable defeat. With a forlorn attempt at brisk self-confidence I would approach and say: “Is there something, Mrs. Rorabaugh?” or “Well, Mr. Phlaum! What will it be today?” knowing very well what it would be. Mrs. Rorabaugh would fold her arms over her ample stomach and reply, coldly: “I want to see John”; and Mr. Phlaum would scowl and mutter, “Where’s Billy?” or walk right past as though he had not even seen me. On rare occasions when both the Davis boys were busy a customer might permit me to sell him half a dozen bone collar buttons or a pair of corn-husking gloves, but that is about as far as their confidence in me went.

There were splendid compensations for this side of the clothing business, particularly on stormy winter days when customers were few. The Davis boys, of Welsh blood, were born singers. John had a superb tenor voice, and when we were busy at routine tasks he could no more keep from singing than from breathing. He could make spring of winter when he sang, “Every morn I bring thee violets” or “I know a bank whereon the wild thyme grows.” This last was identified, for me, with my favorite hill east of town.

My love for male quartet music, aroused early, became a passion during the years in the clothing store. There were some coal mines a few miles south and west of town and for this reason we had a population including both Welsh and Negro families, and all of them could sing. The store was a rendezvous for the songbirds. Some of my happiest memories are of winter days when the railway spurs to the mines were so deeply buried in snow that the miners could not go to work, nor could farmers reach town to do any trading. The Banks brothers, Babe and George, colored boys, would saunter in. George, a strapping fellow with a voice like Paul Robeson’s, would say: “Billy, any objection to a little harmony?” There never was. Then we would tune up, and once the singing started, others would quickly gather, both white and colored, until, sometimes, we had a full glee club. We had a large repertoire of songs. “Come Where the Lilies Bloom” was one of my favorites.

Thomas Moore was another friend of those days, although I knew only the poems set to music that appeared in our high school songbook. Three of them, “Oft in the Stilly Night,” “There’s Music in the Air,” and “A Canadian Boat-Song,” are as intimately connected with Iowa as though I had written them; in fact, it seemed at times that I must have written them. “Oft in the stilly night” . . . after the lapse of forty years this line calls up a picture of my Hill. To this day I love “stilly night” far better than “still night” or “quiet night”; it reaches farther and implies more. There is no such thing as a still night except, perhaps, in the Far North in the dead of winter, and even there one hears the occasional sharp crack of frost and both sees and hears the awe-inspiring music of the northern lights. It was never a still night on my Hill. I heard the quavering stilly music of frogs along the river below and the songs of the whippoorwills in the woodland bordering it; the faint hum in so many different keys of night-flying insects. A stilly night is one when silence is made the deeper by such Midsummer Night’s Dream music.

I do not mean to give the impression that I did nothing but read verse and attempt to write it during my middle teens. My daily life was like that of the average boy. As permanent reminders of the period I have four bulged knuckles on the fingers of my right hand, mementos of futile but persistent efforts to become an expert catcher behind home plate. The night rides on Number Six continued, and there were longer daylight journeys on freights, both cast and west. Parents of those days should have known the value to boys of this kind of education, that “riding the rods” was not as hazardous as it seemed to be, and that a summer’s-day journey through beautiful pastoral country viewed from the open door of an empty boxcar, the pupils sitting there swinging their legs as the varying landscapes flowed by, was worth a month of geography lessons. But parents are often deficient in understanding a boy’s point of view, and ours were bound to note absences, sometimes overnight because, in our love of travel, we journeyed too far. Furthermore, the great C.R.I. & P. Railroad System itself took notice of the fact, reported by various train officials, that three boys from a small town in central Iowa had become confirmed pilot jumpers and riders of night trains. A letter was received by “The Mayor, Colfax, Iowa,” reporting the matter. The identity of the boys was discovered and reported, in turn, to the parents; and there was an end to those wonderful journeys.

My friend, Elmer Black, had taken no part in the railway journeys because he lived on a farm north of town; but now we began to make other journeys together, including voyages down the Skunk River. The first was made in a flat-bottomed rowboat. Being inland born and ignorant of the boatbuilding craft, neither of us knew the value of lightness in construction; and our boat, although it drew little water, was as heavy as though made of cement. When it was finished we were so eager to be off that we started before the paint was dry. The Skunk empties into the Mississippi in the southeastern corner of the state a little above Fort Madison. Our hoped-for destination was an island in the Mississippi below Hannibal, Missouri; but at Brighton, Iowa, we had to give up. We had dragged our rowboat a distance of almost halfway across the state. The summer chanced to be an unusually dry one and by the time we reached Brighton what water was left would scarcely have floated a twig.

Later Elmer built a small launch from blueprints of the Brooks boatbuilding plans for boys; it was equipped with a 2½-horsepower engine. Knowing the fickleness of the Skunk in summer as to depth of water, we made our second voyage down the Des Moines River — destination, New Orleans. This time we reached the Mississippi and had the unforgettable thrill of visiting Huck Finn’s island; but at St. Louis our funds gave out; and so, alas! home once more, hoofing it and sleeping in the fields at night, crossing our old friend, the Skunk, on several occasions by means of wagon bridges.

In those days the Skunk was a river or a creek at least. It wandered in great loops and bends, often returning upon itself as though enamored of such beautiful, bird-frequented country and reluctant to leave it. In later years, when monstrous ditchers and dredgers began improving the country according to their engineers’ ideas of what country should be, our meandering little river became a ditch, and those who made it so convinced everyone that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Much land was redeemed, temporarily, at least. But on various occasions since, I have stood on the banks of “New Ditch,” the modern name for the sleepy old Checaqua, watching the swift current foaming Mississippi-ward, carrying with it hundreds of thousands of tons of rich topsoil. My belief is that Mother Earth knows best how her rivers should flow.

3

ON the night of June 15, 1904, Elmer Black and I, with our classmates, took part in the graduation exercises of the Colfax High School. I had writ ten my Commencement oration on “The Nineteenth Century: The Eighth Wonder of the World,” and a fragment of the opening sentence, “One hundred years ago the morning broke ...” kept repeating itself like the words on a worn phonograph record with the needle stuck in a groove.

The Methodist church was packed. Elmer Black and I sat with our classmates on the flower-banked platform; our parents were seated a dozen rows back, and on their faces was the expression of worried hopefulness common to the parents of high school graduates upon such occasions. I looked anxiously around the church for my brother, Harvey, but he was nowhere to be seen. I felt easier after that.

I heard vaguely the Reverend Popplewell’s invocation. It was an earnest appeal for blessing upon “these young people just at the threshold of life, and now going out into the world.” In those days very few high school graduates went on to college. Commencement meant just that: the period of formal education was now behind them.

My ordeal was slowly approaching. Bessie Wood’s violin solo — “Czardas” — gave tremulous voice to the feeling of apprehension of the next-butone on the program; and Hazel Swihart’s recitation, “Modern Lady with the Lamp,” lighted the way inexorably toward me and the Eighth Wonder. My oration had nothing to do with the wonders of invention or mechanical achievement during the century; I was to speak of the growth of tolerance, whether religious, racial, or national, of the new birth of freedom during the century, and development in the arts and sciences (outside the mechanical), with special reference to the art of poetry. It was rather a large assignment for a seventeen-yearold and a ten-minute oration; but I felt that I had covered the field pretty thoroughly if only I could remember the words I’d covered it with.

Hazel Swihart was again in her seat, having sustained the record, unbroken so far by the members of the Class of 1904, for the ease and assurance with which the orations had been delivered. Mr. Mischler, our high school superintendent, rose once more and adjusted his spectacles.

“The next oration is by Norman Hall. His subject is ‘The Eighth Wonder of the World: The Nineteenth Century.’ ”

As I stepped forward to speak I saw my brother, Harvey, sitting in the front row of pews directly below me. Harvey was familiar with all the works of the woodshed poet that had appeared on the walls of the barn and woodshed and had often quoted them for his own purposes, in the presence of other boys. I had given him two or three bloody noses for this brotherly devotion, and Harvey had treasured up the memory of these affronts, knowing that his day would come. And now, at last, it had. Our mother had promised me that Harvey would be in one of the seats farthest from the platform where I would not be able to see him; nor had I seen him all through the program until just before I rose to orate. How he had managed to sneak up to the first row was more than I could guess, and I had no time for guessing at the moment.

He had a command of facial expression that was, truly, implike. He neither smiled nor giggled, but looked up at me with an innocent air of feigned interest that would have fussed a wooden image. As I stood there, appalled at the sight of him, his lips moved, and I knew that he was forming the words: “Look to the northward, Stranger.” He then crossed his arms and waited with an air of grave expectancy.

“One hundred years ago the morning broke, and in the light of a dawning era, the remnants of oncemighty hosts, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Superstition, were seen scattering in full retreat toward the Night of the Past.”

Do what I would, I was forced to glance again at Harvey. He waited with the same air of blandly grave expectancy as though he were saying: “Yes? . . . And then?”

Not one of my classmates had faltered. I had to be the first. The silence in the church was beyond all silence. For a moment my mind was blank; but thought of the shame it would be to go down in defeat before this imp of a kid brother aroused me to a truly heroic effort. I was saved by the sight of Mr. Logston, janitor of the church, whom I saw standing in the rear of the auditorium. I began again, and by keeping my eyes fixed upon him I brought the nineteenth century to a triumphant conclusion.

I had a wonderful revenge upon my brother Harvey. As a graduation gift my father presented me with a week’s visil at the St. Louis Exposition, and Elmer Black received the same gift from his father. My brother was so miserable at not being permitted to come with us that I refrained from gloating over him; but a slighl return for the moment of agony he had caused me was, certainly, called for.

The following morning as I came up from the barn, Harvey was standing on the back porch, looking more than glum. I grinned, but he made no response. At the kitchen door I turned to favor him wilh a variation on a theme which came to mind while I was milking Hattie, our cow: —

At Des Moines, Elmer Black and I boarded a Minneapolis & St. Louis train, St. Louis bound. We sat in a day coach, our grips on the rack overhead. with an abundance of literature concerning the Fair on the seats beside us: maps of the Exposition grounds, folders showing the separate buildings and the exhibits within them; splendid panoramic views of the Fair as a whole, clustered around the main attraction, to me, at least — the beautiful lagoon with its ornamental bridges and groups of statuary, bordered with lawns and promenades; and on the lagoon, gondolas floating above their mirrored reflections, or being propelled smoothly along by gondoliers who actually came from Venice.

The joy of anticipation was increased by reading, while on route to the Fair, of the wonders we were to see. The wheels of our day coach clicked over the rails in perfect cadence with: —

No need to tell us where Flossie was at, or the wording of the message she had left on the table for her husband:—

For memory stirrers, what can compare with popular songs? I have only to hum this one, soundlessly, and the St. Louis Exposition is still open and thronged with visitors, among them two entranced members of the 1904 graduating class of the Colfax High School.

Elmer and I saw everything together; I even stayed with him through miles and hours of wandering past machinery exhibits. Thanks to Elmer’s keen interest not one was missed, but the only one I remember with any vividness was that of steamlocomotive engines. I had an inborn distrust of machines, but not of this kind. They were not machines to me but superb, humanized landships plying along the great Stream of Travel that, passed through our home town; as beautiful to me as clipper ships were to the boys of the Atlantic seaboard during the 1850s and ‘60s, or Mississippi River steamboats to the youngsters of Mark Twain’s day.

Of the exhibits in the Hall of Industry, I think it was called, I best remember a bubble fountain displayed by some soap manufacturer. Millions of bubbles cascaded down sloping walls of glass, through shafts of colored lights. It was pretty, but at the same time a disappointment: there were too many signs calling attention to the kind of soap from which the bubbles were made. Furthermore, a soap bubble, a single one, is a beautiful thing, a symbol of perfection, and is not to be improved upon by multiplying the number.

The spectacle at the Fair never to be forgotten was that of the lagoon at night, reflecting the light of thousands of lamps, the Venetian gondolas silhouetted against it. Every night Elmer and I sat by the lagoon listening to the songs of the gondoliers, to the accompaniment of guitars and mandolins: “O Sole Mio,” “Santa Lucia,” the “Miserere” from Il Trovatore; we heard them for the first time at the Fair.

I returned from the Fair the same dreamy, callow , unavvakened youth I had been the week before, and from the moment of arriving at home the feeling of melancholy deepened. The transition from the lagoons and gondolas of the Exposition to the commonplace sights of Colfax had been loo sudden. I resumed without enthusiasm my customary labors at the clothing store, and grim dogged effort helped me to conquer some of my diffidence, so that customers began to accept me as a good enough salesman. Saturday night was hand-concert night and all the stores were open on that evening until 10.30. The Colfax Cornet Band was a first-class organization, and formerly I had deeply enjoyed their concerts. But now, its I listened from the clothing store, shoehorn in hand, slipping farmers’ feet into $3.50 W. L. Douglas shoes, I would see the groat lagoon at the Fair, hear the “Miserere” as sung by the gondoliers, and fall to dreaming while sitting on the shoe stool. But even while dreaming I could say, “Stand up in it and see how it feels.”

The wooded hill was now more than ever my refuge. I “brooded" there on many a Sunday afternoon and many a moonlight night. A curious thing happened at this time. Burns, whom I had been residing with such pleasure and profit only a short time before, had done me a great deal of good. His sturdy independence had brought me to the realization that I had veins of it in my own nature. I had been fumbling my way through and trying to emerge from the inner chrysalis of the adolescent period. Then came the week at the Fair, and as a result of it I became more dreamily adolescent than ever. Longfellow in his most sentimental moods now became my favorite companion. This was a prolific period in composition. I took a kind of pride in keeping “the burden laid upon me,”of I didn’t know what, out of public view. Sometimes I forgot to remember that I was bearing it and became quite cheerful.

4

ONE day when the Davis boys had gone to lunch and I was alone in the store, Mr. Gould, our boss, came in. As already mentioned, his home was in another part of the state. Now, having retired from the cattle business, he spent much of his time visiting the towns where he had bought clothing or grocery stores. He greatly enjoyed coming to Colfax, particularly in the wintertime, and would sit in the rear of the store talking with farmers and cattle feeders who made the place a kind of club, He stopped at the Mason House and his visits were anywhere from two to six weeks long.

Whenever I think of this particular visit I think of fleece-lined underwear, for I was unpacking a case of this merchandise when Mr. Gould came in. It was a stormy February day and I had a good fire going in the furnace. Mr. Gould took his customary chair by the hot-air register and questioned me in his kindly way about one thing and another while I went on with my work. Then he picked up the morning Des Moines paper and laid it on his lap while he took a cigar from his vest pocket. I enjoyed watching him light a cigar, he did it with such deliberation, to prolong the anticipatory pleasure, He would lean back, worm his big brown hand into his trousers pocket for his penknife; then with the greatest care he would clip off the end of the cigar and replace the penknife. I le made a rite of lighting the cigar and the glow of deep sensual satisfaction as he did so was that of a man who knows how to make the most of the small amenities of life. In these days when I see editors, literary agents, motion-picture directors, or business executives of whatever kind lighting cigarettes while answering several sets of telephones, taking a drag or two, pressing out the fire in an ash tray, then immediately lighting another until the tray is heaped with mangled cigarettes, I think of Mr. Gould and his way of smoking. It is an indication of the vast change in the tempo of life from the 1900s to the 1940s. His was pure enjoyment; theirs is an unconscious display of tension and nervous strain.

He now read for half an hour or so. I was marking price tags for the underwear when he laid the paper aside. “Norman, knock off for a bit,” he said. “Want to have a little talk with you. Come and sit down.”

I took a chair on the opposite side of the register, waiting while he gazed meditatively at his cigar as though estimating the enjoyment left in it.

“Been lookin’ around up north,”he said. ‘Met a man in Belle Fourche, South Dakota, He’s sellin’ out his clothing business and goin to California. Good many Iowa people doin’ the same thing. Lot of sissies! Can’t stand Iowa winters.”

He spat disgustedly down the hot-air register and the sizzling sound that followed seemed to indicate the frying of the renegades who would choose California as a place to live.

“What’ll they do out in California—sit around in the sun all day, whittlin’ sticks? They’re no good, that kind of people. Don’t belong in Iowa; didn’t belong in the first place. No pioneer blood in their veins. Good riddance if they all go to California. Get ‘em cleared out and we’ll have Iowa the way it ought to be.”

The California trek of Iowans, then just beginning, filled Mr. Gould with contempt. He died before the great migration was under way. I wonder what he would have thought of the huge annual picnics of later years, held in the vicinity of Long Beach, where the migrants gather by counties to talk of “home,” to sing: —

But I myself am one of those exiles, although it was not to escape Iowa winters that I became one, and I did not follow my fellow Iowans to Long Beach.

I was-puzzled as to why Mr. Gould should be discussing this matter with me when he broke off and was silent for a moment. Then he added: “I bought that clothing store in Belle Fourche. How would you like to run it for me?”

I was so taken aback that, for a moment , I could only stare at him. I was not yet eighteen, and the prospect of going to another town in another state, not as a clerk, but to manage a clothing store, outtopped any that I could have dreamed for myself.

“John and Billy tell me you’re getting to be a good clothing salesman,” he said. “I like to give a young fellow a start in life, and here’s yours if you want it.”

He went on to say that the former proprietor of the clothing store had agreed to manage it for him until the next autumn, when he planned to leave for the West Coast. I would take over then and have the intervening months for further training with the Davis boys.

“I’m not so young as I was, Norman. Before long I’ll want to take things easier; not have so many irons in the fire. Well, if you dig in and work hard and save your money, you’ll end up by being proprietor of that store. I’ll sell out to you on terms you’ll be able to meet without any trouble. You’ll be wanting to get married a few years from now; and there you’ll be, settled for life, with a nice thrivin’ business in a fine little town. How does that strike you as an end to work toward?”

At first I was so dazzled by the offer that I found it hard to express my gratitude to Mr. Gould; but as the weeks passed I began lo feel troubled, uneasy, about this end to work toward. It seemed too near the beginning, and “settled for life” perturbed rather than comforted me. The phrase kept repeating itself like the tolling of a bell. My father, the Davis boys, and other friends thought this a splendid opportunity and took it for granted that I would accept. As I have said, it was not customary in those days, at least, in Colfax, for a young man to go on to college.

In a notebook of those days I find this entry: “Growth in poetic power. Compare ‘Look to the northward, Stranger,’ with ‘The Peewee’s Call.’ “ The woodshed poet was, evidently, trying to convince his old enemy, Diffidence, that if he had faith in his wings and continued to use them, they would carry him farther than to Belle Fourche, South Dakota. I realized that I was approaching a crossroad and would be standing there in the autumn, regarding crossed signboards: one pointing toward Belle Fourche, and the other . . . I didn’t know where. One thing was certain: if I was to hold to the Muse it was time to get some unbiased opinions: the thing to do was to seek confirmation of my hopes from the editors of magazines.

One morning I “rode the blind” of the local westbound passenger train (just to keep my hand in) to Des Moines, and spent a full day in the public library reading the poetry in the magazines received there. I returned home with the addresses of the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, and half a dozen more.

From that time on I lived a double life. By day I was a clothing salesman, by night a would-be poetry salesman. In the latter occupation I received such courteous rebuffs that I was encouraged rather than disheartened. The letters were all alike: —

But what greater thrill, save an acceptance of a manuscript, could a woodshed poet have than that which comes with the taking-out, handling, and reading of these printed cards that actually came from an editor’s office and which had been slipped into the envelopes by his very hands? The returned manuscript gains both dignity and merit because it has been read, he hopes, by the editor himself.

Although the unbiased editorial opinions were all of a kind, I was not discouraged. With the coming of spring I went as usual to my Hill. The hepaticas were in glorious abundance. Their perfume alone convinced me that life was too precious to be spent in a clothing store, and that a young man who made the mistake of underestimating its value would have only himself to blame for the disillusionment of later years. I considered more and more seriously the prospect of going to college, and that meant Grinnell and no other place.

It is strange how a small event will be seized by a youngster and molded to his unconscious needs. I have long since realized the importance of the part the chance meeting with that band of brothers played in shaping the course of my life. The fragrance of hepaticas, of the woods in early spring, influenced my decision logo to college, but it might not have been Grinned except for the night rides on Number Six, and the Glee Club Marching Song heard at just the right moment. It gave me an ideal conception of comradeship that I have never lost.

Early in the summer I wrote to the Registrar’s office in Grinned for information about college entrance requirements. A week or two later a young man several years my senior came into the store. I did not know him, but supposing him a chance customer passing through Colfax, I went forward to wait on him.

“Are you Norman Hall?” he asked. He then introduced himself. He was Benjamin Dehaan, of Pella, Iowa, a member of the senior class (1906) at Grinned, and had been asked to call in response to my letter lo the Registrar. He explained that he was employed by the College during the summer vacation to call upon prospective students. The last thing I had expected was a personal call from anyone connected with the College. The experience taught me the importance of such cads by an upperclassman upon high school boys, particularly those affected with shyness. I had scores of questions to ask, about entrance requirements, curricula, student life in general. Ben Dehaan answered them all. He did not try to “sell" me the college — to use the expression that was to become current years later; I could not have bought it even if he had. But his love for Grinned was apparent in all that he said, and confirmed my own feeling about it, gained from my night prowls over the campus with my two friends, or as we lay in the grass, keeping our ears cocked ad the while for the whistle of a west bound freight.

That was a memorable meeting, and “the burden laid upon me” of being settled for life dropped from my spirit somewhere between the Gould clothing store and the C.R.I. & P. depot as I accompanied Ben Dehaan to his train. He stood on the car platform during the two minutes the train was at the station, answering further questions; then as it started to move he gave me a friendly nod. “So long,” he said. “Hope we’ll see you in the fall.”

(To he continued)