Back-Trailers from the Middle Border | Page 6

confident spirits they (and I) entered claims upon this land forty years ago'"
My stay was short. I could not endure the wistful voices in the unending wind, nor the tragic faces of these pioneers whose failing faculties filled me with dismay. Eager to escape the contagion of their despair I fled to my train,
. . .
On my way back to Chicago, I stopped off for a day at West Salem to put the homestead in order for my wife and daughters who were already longing for its wide rooms and sunlit porches. My own pleasure in it revived along with a hope of release from my pain "Surely another summer in the comfort and security of my native valley will set me right i Open air and rest and sunshine must restore me to the health which is my due--"
With several lecture dates in the East, I returned to New York in March, and in my diary I find this entry. "At dinner Mark Sullivan fell to talking of the corrupting effect of commercial magazines. He said, "I exist and my magazine exists like all the others: to make certain products known. It was not so twenty years ago. As we take on new multiples of subscribers, our field of thought narrows; We have more prejudices to consider. We more and more sacrifice our own taste and ideals. We are standardizing everything, food, clothing, habits and art. We corrupt good writers and illustrators to make our advertising bulletins pay."
I give the substance of his talk which showed me plainly that he resented the domination of the advertising department.
Notwithstanding my physical disabilities, I kept my places on the several committees to which I was attached and also worked steadily on some novelettes for Collier's Weekly. It was a busy month for me and when I returned to Chicago, it was almost time to take my family to our Wisconsin home. I was as eager to go as they, in the expectation of an immediate improvement in my health.
This hope was not realized. Sunshine, peace, the best of food--nothing availed. Unable to write, unable to sleep, unable to walk, I sat out the summer, a morose and irritating invalid. I could not even share the excursions which my good friend George Dudley arranged, so painful had certain movements become. I moped and hobbled about week after week until one day my little daughters, extemporizing a stage of chairs and quilts, enacted a play in which I was depicted as a "grouchy old man." This startled me into action.
"The only thing left for me is to go East and secure the best medical aid," I set down as a record on the night before I left "It is a kind of miracle that my daughters should still love me in the midst of my savage helplessness and deepening gloom, but they do! They have just been dancing and singing for me, and if it should happen that I am never to see this house again, I shall remember this evening with joy."
Precisely what my daughters felt as they watched me limp away to the train on that morning, I cannot say, but my own outlook was one of profound weakness and distrust. To remain was an admission of defeat. To go on required all the resolution I possessed.
CHAPTER II
Moving Picture Promises.
ONE of the tasks to which I was returning and one which promised immediate reward, was the revision of a manuscript which Mark Sullivan, editor of Cottier's Weekly, had requested. It was the second part of a manuscript called A Son of the Middle Border, upon which I had been at work for nearly six years and of which Collier's had already printed several chapters "In spite of the changes wrought by the war, this serial is good material," Sullivan wrote, "and I shall use the remainder of it as soon as I can find a place for it," and so, just before my fifty-fifth birthday, I took this manuscript and some short stories for which I hoped to find a market and set forth to retrieve my fortunes.
My stop-over at my home in Chicago was short, and to Henry Fuller who came in to stay with me for a day or two, I bluntly stated my plans.
"My days of pioneering in an esthetic sense, as well as in a material way, are over," I said in substance. "My father's death has broken the bond which held me to Wisconsin and I have no deep roots here in Chicago I intend to establish a home in the vicinity of New York. It is not without reason that my sense of security increases with every mile of progress toward Fifth Avenue. Theoretically La Crosse should be my home. To go into western history properly,