Children of the Market Place. Edgar Lee Masters
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facts of contradiction in Douglas' attitude and thinking. Reverdy was equally unable to state the case against Douglas, which he felt a keener critic of thought would easily do. Meanwhile young Lamborn stood with us while we fumbled these doubtful things. He seemed reluctant to leave. I wondered in a vague way what kept him from going. What did he want?
And when Douglas did come to see me, which was within a few days of the night of the debate, Lamborn came with him. It was in the afternoon and they were on their way to a country dance. I could not help but observe that Lamborn had been drinking. What a strange taste—this whisky drinking! We did it in England, to be sure. But here it was done everywhere and at all hours and in all degrees of immoderation and vulgarity. Lamborn, however, was not unduly under the influence of drink; he was rather laughing and genial and humorously familiar. Douglas had doubtless taken as much as Lamborn, but he was quite equal to resisting its relaxing effects.
Douglas and I sat under a tree by the brook. The buds were coming out. There was the balmy warmth of spring in the air. I had a chance now to revise my first impressions of him. His charm could not be denied. His frankness, the quickness of his thought, his intellectual power, his vitality, his capacity for work, the tirelessness of his energies, were manifested in his speech, his movements, the clear and rapid glances of his eyes.
At the same time I found angles to him. I sensed a ruthlessness in him. I saw him as a fearless and sleepless antagonist, but always open and fair. There was only once when his nature broke ground and revealed something of his inner self, something of a sensitiveness which suffers for subtler things and penetrates to finer understandings. This was when he was telling me of the effect of his uncle's broken promise to educate him. He had suffered deeply for this; and he was sure his whole life would be influenced by it. It had stirred all the reserve ambition and power of his nature. It had thrown him forward in a redoubled determination to overcome the default, to succeed in spite of the lost opportunity.
Hence he had read many books. He had studied the history of America, and other countries as well. His mind ran to statecraft. He thought of nothing else. He sensed men as groups—thinking, desiring, trading, building—and for these ends organized into neighborhoods, villages, cities, and states. His genius, even then, was interested in using these groups for progressive ends, such as he had in view. He was a super-man who sees empires of progress and achievement for the race through the haze of the unformed future, and who takes the responsibility of carving that future out and of forcing history into the segment that his creative imagination has opened. He would guide and make the future, while serving men.
Here he was then just past twenty-one, born on April 23d, the reputed birthday of Shakespeare; young, and yet old with a maturity with which he was invested at his entrance into the world. He was in every way a new type to me. We were mutually drawn to each other. I knew that his courage could never stoop to littleness. His integrity, even when his judgment might err, seemed to me an assured quality of nature. As for me, he doubtless thought that I was one of the coming men of the community. Whatever I was, I was dependable. If I should become attached to him he could rely upon me in case of need. This, I think, made him regard me at this early stage of our friendship as a person not to be neglected in his business of creating adherents. When I spoke to him in terms of wonder and congratulation of his defeat of Wyatt, he took it with a smile and as a matter of course. He had found it an easy thing to rout Wyatt. Wyatt had stirred his fighting blood; and everything pertinent to the discussion had come to his mind in the heat of the debate. …
And now we began to hear the sound of a fiddle, scraped in a loose and erratic fashion and giving forth an occasional note of a tune. I looked around and saw Lamborn sitting in the doorway of the hut. Zoe was near him, laughing at his half-drunken attempts to manage the instrument. Douglas looked up. A quick smile shot across his face. He glanced into my eyes in a searching manner which mystified me and sent a sudden thrill through me. What was he thinking? Surely he knew of my relation to Zoe. I caught out of his expression the prejudice of the time against the social equality that I was maintaining in standing by Zoe and having her with me. I had not shirked my heritage. Perhaps Douglas admired me too much to speak what was in his mind; or perhaps he was too much of the politician to trench upon ground so personal. At all events, we were silent for a moment. And then Douglas called to Lamborn. It was time to go. Lamborn rose to his feet, swaying a little as he did so, and came to where we sat. He looked me over in a scrutinizing way, then shot forth his hand for me to take it. It was an awkward act and out of place! Yet I felt compelled to give him my hand. And with good-bys they bestrode their horses and were gone. I began to have ominous reflections.
I went to the hut and asked Zoe what Lamborn had been saying to her. She laughed and seemed reluctant to tell me. I pressed her then; and she said that he had followed her through the house and tried to kiss her; that she had come around to the front door so as to be in sight of Douglas and me; then that Lamborn had taken the fiddle down and had begun to play it.
All the possibilities of Lamborn's attitude dawned on me instantly. How dearly might I pay in some way for my father's desire to be rich! If Douglas had taken his initial hurt in life from his uncle's failure to educate him, I had begun the weaving of my destiny with these threads which my father had bequeathed to me. What would my complications be if Zoe eloped with a wild fellow like Lamborn, bringing his personality into the texture of my affairs; the matter of this land, and Zoe's interest in it? I could sense ahead an unending difficulty, an ever deepening annoyance, or even tragedy. Had I gone too far in dividing the estate with Zoe? For the first time the presence of the negro in the state, the complications that it created, were forced upon me concretely and with impressive effect. My heart registered a vague apprehension. I warned Zoe against Lamborn, and decided that he should not come about me again.
The work on my house was now progressing rapidly. I wished to move into it on my birthday, June 18th. I watched its completion day by day, and in addition I had much to do around the farm. I had made a start with a few calves toward raising cattle. In every way I was forging ahead as fast as I could. But my greatest delight was the house. I wanted to make it as beautiful as possible, and I did not need to spare expense. I decided to go to St. Louis for curtains and chairs, for beds and lounges, chests and bureaus. When the last of May came I set out for the city.
CHAPTER XIV
This June weather in Illinois! Such glorious white clouds floating in the boundless hemisphere of fresh blue! The warmth and the vitality of the air! The glistening leaves of the forest trees! The deep green shading into purples and blues of the distant woodlands! The sweet winds, bending the prairie grasses for miles and miles! Glimpses of cool water in little ponds, in small lakes, in the brook! The whispering of rushes and the song of thrushes, so varied, so melodious! The call of the plowman far afield, urging the horses ahead in the great work of bringing forth the corn! The great moon at night, and the spectacle of the stars in the hush of my forest hut!
I was superbly well. And for diversion went farther into the woods to hear a fiddler and to have him teach me the art which fled my dull fingers and the unwieldy bow. And this fiddler! His curly hair, always wet from his lustrations for the evening meal; his cud of tobacco; his racy locutions; his happy and contented spirit; and his merry wife and the many children, wild like woodland creatures, with sparkling eyes and overflowing vitality! Many evenings I spent at this fiddler's hut. And such humbleness! Only the earth for a floor! Only one room where all his family ate and slept and lived!
In going to St. Louis I took the same stage that had brought me to Jacksonville. This time I rode on the City of Alton, a better boat than the one that had brought me from La Salle to Bath; but all the conditions were the same. There was the same roistering and sprawling crowd; the same loudness and profanity; the same abundance of whisky and its intemperate indulgence; the same barbaric hilarity of negroes, driven and cursed. And now many goatees, and much talk of politics, of Whigs and Democrats.
St. Louis was languid, weary and old. The buildings had an air of decay. The stream of life moved sluggishly, not swiftly as in New York or Buffalo, or even in the village of Chicago. There were