A Far Country | Page 9

home had never seen.
Often during the heat of summer noons when we were assembled under
the big maple beside the lattice fence in the Peters' yard, the spirit
would move me to relate the most amazing of adventures. Our train, for
instance, had been held up in the night by a band of robbers in black

masks, and rescued by a traveller who bore a striking resemblance to
my Cousin Robert Breck. He had shot two of the robbers. These
fabrications, once started, flowed from me with ridiculous ease. I
experienced an unwonted exhilaration, exaltation; I began to believe
that they had actually occurred. In vain the astute Julia asserted that
there were no train robbers in the east. What had my father done? Well,
he had been very brave, but he had had no pistol. Had I been frightened?
No, not at all; I, too, had wished for a pistol. Why hadn't I spoken of
this before? Well, so many things had happened to me I couldn't tell
them all at once. It was plain that Julia, though often fascinated against
her will, deemed this sort of thing distinctly immoral.
I was a boy divided in two. One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm of
his own weaving, and the other part was a commonplace and protesting
inhabitant of a world of lessons, disappointments and discipline. My
instincts were not vicious. Ideas bubbled up within me continually from
an apparently inexhaustible spring, and the very strength of the
longings they set in motion puzzled and troubled my parents: what I
seem to see most distinctly now is a young mind engaged in a ceaseless
struggle for self-expression, for self-development, against the inertia of
a tradition of which my father was the embodiment. He was an enigma
to me then. He sincerely loved me, he cherished ambitions concerning
me, yet thwarted every natural, budding growth, until I grew
unconsciously to regard him as my enemy, although I had an affection
for him and a pride in him that flared up at times. Instead of confiding
to him my aspirations, vague though they were, I became more and
more secretive as I grew older. I knew instinctively that he regarded
these aspirations as evidences in my character of serious moral flaws.
And I would sooner have suffered many afternoons of his favourite
punishment--solitary confinement in my room-- than reveal to him
those occasional fits of creative fancy which caused me to neglect my
lessons in order to put them on paper. Loving literature, in his way, he
was characteristically incapable of recognizing the literary instinct, and
the symptoms of its early stages he mistook for inherent frivolity, for
lack of respect for the truth; in brief, for original sin. At the age of
fourteen I had begun secretly (alas, how many things I did secretly!) to
write stories of a sort, stories that never were finished.
He regarded reading as duty, not pleasure. He laid out books for me,

which I neglected. He was part and parcel of that American
environment in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness.
And no one who has not experienced that environment can have any
conception of the pressure it exerted to stifle originality, to thrust the
new generation into its religious and commercial moulds. Shall we ever,
I wonder, develop the enlightened education that will know how to take
advantage of such initiative as was mine? that will be on the watch for
it, sympathize with it and guide it to fruition?
I was conscious of still another creative need, that of dramatizing my
ideas, of converting them into action. And this need was to lead me
farther than ever afield from the path of righteousness. The concrete
realization of ideas, as many geniuses will testify, is an expensive
undertaking, requiring a little pocket money; and I have already
touched upon that subject. My father did not believe in pocket money.
A sea story that my Cousin Donald Ewan gave me at Christmas
inspired me to compose one of a somewhat different nature;
incidentally, I deemed it a vast improvement on Cousin Donald's book.
Now, if I only had a boat, with the assistance of Ham Durrett and Tom
Peters, Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and other friends, this
story of mine might be staged. There were, however, as usual, certain
seemingly insuperable difficulties: in the first place, it was winter time;
in the second, no facilities existed in the city for operations of a
nautical character; and, lastly, my Christmas money amounted only to
five dollars. It was my father who pointed out these and other
objections. For, after a careful perusal of the price lists I had sent for, I
had been forced to appeal to him to supply additional