America Moved. Booth Tarkington
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least that one dreadful lesson. As a girl she’d lived through the Mexican War and as a young matron through the incomparably more heart-rending Civil War; she was sure that nothing so horrible as war could ever happen again. Perhaps this was why my father’s sword and a great-grandfather’s Revolutionary musket were kept in the attic, where I used them fiercely in many solitary wars against invisibles.
Thus I may have been in myself a demonstration that war wasn’t extinct; for doesn’t a child’s life repeat the history of his species, and aren’t most nations still controlled by child instincts? My father, gentlest of men, didn’t think the world old enough to be free of war. In fact, he thought it possible that life on this planet might become so torn with fighting that a man would be safest as a trained soldier; so his plan for me was West Point—an idea always quietly but emotionally opposed by my mother.
My father’s thought that war would come again he founded upon observation of the world and upon reason, of course; but he had also developed a queer idea. It was a fancifully speculative one, he admitted, and he didn’t believe in it—he was always discriminating in his use of the word “believe”—yet he thought the thing could be possible. In the unbounded range of his reading he’d included many books upon the esoteric philosophies; he corresponded with an English expert upon the Law of Karma, and he thought the doctrine of reincarnation so plausible that a quarter of a century later, after an Italian sojourn, he wrote his piquant book upon the question, The Hermit of Capri. In that work, however, he didn’t mention the odd bit of looking forward militarily that made me shiver once or twice in my boyhood.
The thought was that terrific hordes of the disembodied entities of ancient fighting men—Carthaginian mercenaries, Roman legionaries, turbulent Alamanni, and what not—had perhaps already been reincarnated, some of them killing their way across Asia and into Europe with Genghis Khan maybe, and that the Law of Karma seemed to indicate that they were just about due in quantity upon this earth again. Great numbers of them, he thought, might be born into various nations during the next fifty years—many might already be alive—and, as they were in very essence savage warriors, their presence among mankind would so tend to create prodigious wars that the efforts of civilized peacemakers would be of little avail. The disturbances would not be calculable nor could the world go peacefully forward again until the truculent had been destroyed and the wave of this incarnation of theirs had passed.
The Golden Age
Thus, to me, the far future seemed uncomfortable to think about—with its shadowy crowds of terrible warrior souls fighting, and its skies meteored with winged people flying, and its tooting steamy vehicles frightening horses and ponies into runaways—but, naturally, I didn’t think about it often or for long. The younger we are, the more vivaciously we’re engaged with every present instant, and, for that matter, we were then all living in the Golden Age, though we didn’t know it. We never know such things till afterward, and, as my father pointed out, we seldom say, “I am happy!” though we often look back and say, “I was happy then.”
The happy world I lived in as a boy enjoyed the earlier years of a long period of peace for our country, and an enlightened civilization was advancing without having yet become elaborately mechanized. We could have got along pretty well, indeed, without any machinery at all, unless such things as a pump handle, a water-turned mill wheel, or the blade of a plow are to be called machinery. So far as machinery was concerned, my four grandparents, heartily alive throughout my boyhood, had grown up in a world that was almost the same as that of Julius Caesar. In their youth, ships could better sail into the wind than Roman ships could, and of course there was gunpowder; but virtually they lived in machineless country and were the sturdier and happier for the self-reliance and consequent independence of life and thought thus granted them.
I was not quite so fortunate. In my childhood, telegraph poles increasingly defaced the landscape, and on the new railroads we could go to almost any part of the country without changing cars at every junction. When I was eleven, the telephone here and there began to be in use—most likely between a mill in the country and its office in town—but abject dependence upon machinery hadn’t arrived, nor, all in all, had the complete change from the youthful life of my grandparents. How dizzied we’d all have been could we have looked forward accurately into this age of then unbelievable machines and incredible speeds—and, despite my father’s queer idea, with how crazy an optimism we’d have guessed what the effect of the machines and the speeds would be!
Crisis at Greencastle
At eleven, however, my real concern with the future being for the immediate one, I was little more altruistic about it than I’d been in my infancy; the self-centeredness of a boy is almost equal to a baby’s. Yet at this period I had two sharp anxieties about the health of two grown-up persons, one of whom I’d never seen. The other one was my Uncle George Ames.
I didn’t know Uncle George very well—he was my mother’s sister’s husband—and I was aware of him only as a handsome, gray-bearded, religious-looking man whom I didn’t see often, as he lived forty miles away at Greencastle. Nevertheless, that summer, when I heard that Uncle George was dangerously ill, I began to worry about him acutely because Adam Forepaugh’s Mammoth Circus was approaching Indianapolis and I thought that if anything very bad happened to Uncle George it was almost sure to interfere. I had a nervous week; every day the circus got nearer and Uncle George got worse.
The circus was for Saturday, and on Friday morning a telegram came; Uncle George had died. My father understood what I felt, and on Saturday after lunch, without saying anything about it to my mother, took me to the circus anyhow. I wondered a little if he was doing quite right by Uncle George; but I trusted him to know best and had a glorious afternoon. At the very entrance to the circus my father introduced me to Adam Forepaugh himself—he looked a little like Uncle George, I thought—and I had a full sack of popcorn to look at the animals with. We sat in splendid reserved seats with backs to them and even stayed for the concert after the Grand Performance.
At the concert I was transported when a little girl and a boy in white knee breeches appeared upon the distant platform, singing and dancing in a golden light. I paid no attention to the boy, the little girl so stirred me. I knew that the ballet-skirted bareback riders I’d seen flying through hoops were not little girls—they were specialized and sexless creatures, pretty but not recognizable as human beings exactly—but this little girl with the spangled knee-length pink dress, the jumping amber curls upon her shoulders, and the twinkling slippers that clinked and tinkled as she danced, seemed to me a transfigured sample of what one might actually meet at a children’s party—a children’s party almost in fairyland perhaps. For me to imagine her as probably nearer thirty than eleven was beyond the range of thought. The sparkling little dress exposed her pink silk legs, and female human legs weren’t visible or even known about except when they belonged to little girls.
Grown-up ladies who walked as if they didn’t have any were thought the most graceful, and I seldom saw even their whole feet. I’d had what I thought was an argument about legs with a schoolmate, a boy who told me one day that in older circles legs were highly regarded. I scoffed at him, but he maintained his point. “Grown-up men think a whole lot about legs,” he insisted. “It’s why they get in love and get married.”
I laughed at him loudly. “They do not!”
“They do, too!” He was of German parentage and obstinate. “Men like fat legs. They’ve got to be fat or they won’t pay any attention. The bigger women’s legs are, the worse the men want to marry ’em. My Cousin Emil got married to Cousin Gertrude because she’s got the biggest legs in Indianapolis.”
“Then he’s crazy,” I said. “And so are you. Men marry somebody they think’s got a pretty face. They don’t get married on account of legs or elbows or knuckles or anything like that; and even if they wanted to, how could they tell what kind of legs they are?”
“That’s easy,” Albert informed me. “When they’re getting in a streetcar or a buggy or something they can see whether they’re big or not. Then if they’re big enough they get married to them.”
I didn’t want to get married to the beautiful little girl dancing and singing enchantingly