Back-Trailers from the Middle Border | Page 6

past No one spoke
confidently of the future All were enduring with fortitude the monotony
of sun and wind and barren sod.
"Of what value is such a life?" I thought "One by one these toil-worn
human beings will sink into this ocean of grass as small broken ships
sink into the sea. With what high hopes and 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