Part 10

With deepest affection, JOHN BURROUGHS.

Doubtless it is a wise provision of Nature that we find our mates in our opposites. It is some natural law working for the good of the race, something to maintain the balance and uniformity of mankind. Certainly in many ways two people could not have been more unlike than Father and Mother. She said he was as weak as water, and he said he could get tipsy on a glass of water. He always said that Mother made the housekeeping an end in itself, and she said, "You know how he is, he never takes care of anything." How many evenings have I spent in the study when the lamp would begin to burn low for lack of oil and Father would have to run and fill lit and Mother would complain, "Just like you, come mussing around after dark. Why didn't you fill it by daylight?" Ah, me, when it was daylight Father did not need the lamp! It was Mother who filled the lamps, trimmed them and polished the chimneys regularly in the afternoon, while the sun was still up; but it was Father who trimmed and filled his lamp and let it so shine that all the world might see! After all, I am not sure but what Mother was just the wife for him; he had a streak stubborn determination along with his ambition to write that carried him through any trials of housecleaning or complaints about the housework. A wife in full sympathy with his work, who coddled him and made him think that everything he wrote was perfect, would never have done at all, nor would a selfish, extravagant, or society-mad woman. Father was temperamental, moody, irritable, easily influenced, easily led, suffering at times with attacks of melancholy, with but one fixed purpose, and that was to write. Mother was economical, thrifty, material, suspicious of people, determined to bring their ship to a snug harbour before old age, and she took the best of care of Father and held him steady and no doubt by her strength of character and firmness gave strength and firmness to his life. Their last years were most happy together and filled with a sympathy and understanding that were beautiful.

Sometimes Father would talk to himself, though but very seldom, and the following two letters are almost as though he were talking to himself. "I am far less forlorn when he is here," he says of himself and Uncle Hiram. With all his self-analysis he did not see that being forlorn was part of the price he must pay for the simple but intense joy he experienced from the beauty life and Nature.

W. P. Tuesday, Jan. 25 {1897}.

MY DEAR JULIAN,

It still keeps mild here--snow nearly gone, but ice in the river to the elbow. We do not get away yet. Your mother will not stir and Hiram and I will probably go to Slabsides, as she wants to shut up the house.

Hiram came a week ago and stays and eats here in the study--I am far less forlorn when he is here. It probably seems strange to you, I know you have never looked upon him very kindly. But you have never seen Hiram--not the Hiram I see. This little dull ignorant old man whom you have seen is only a transparent mask through which I see the Hiram of my youth, and see the old home, the old days and father and mother and all the life on the old farm. It is a feeling you cannot understand, but you may if you live to be old.

I hope you have given up that boat crew business by this time. It is not the thing for you. You do not go to Harvard for that. As I wrote you, you have not the athletic temperament, but something finer and better. Good sharp daily exercise you need, but not severe training. If you had been half my age probably those cold baths would have killed you. Old men often die in the cold bath. The blood is driven in and makes too great a strain on the arteries. Write me when you get this and tell me about yourself.

Your loving father,

J. B.

Very likely what I did write told Father much more than I suspected, and he always stood ready with any advice he could give, especially about matters of health. Those were the years when he had many troubles: insomnia, neuralgia, and especially a trouble he called malaria, but which was largely autotoxemia. One doctor seared his arm with a white-hot iron in an effort to do away with the pain of the neuralgia and years afterward Father would laugh about it--"just like African medicine man, driving out the devils in my arm with a white-hot iron--the trouble was not there, it was the poison in my system from faulty elimination." When at last he did discover the source of his troubles how happy he was!

Riverby, Feb. 3 {1898}

MY DEAR JULIAN,

Your letter came this morning. Winter is rugged here too. Snow about 20 inches and zero weather at night. I almost froze the top of my head up there in the old house. The ice men are scraping off the snow, ice 8 or 9 inches. Your mother is in Poughkeepsie, I was down there Monday night. I doubt if she comes to Cambridge and I am wondering whether I had better come or stay here and save my money. If you can come home on the Easter holidays perhaps I had better not come. If you get a week had you rather not come home then than to have me come now? Tell me how you feel. But I may feel different next week, I may be written out by that time. If I thought I could go on with my work there I would come at once. I am in excellent health and do not need a change. I could not do much with your English Exams. I have a poor opinion of such stuff. That is not the way to make writers or thinkers. I enclose my check for the bill which you must get receipted. Write me at once about the Easter holidays.

Your loving father,

JOHN BURROUGHS.

Later when he visited me in Cambridge he wrote a daily theme, and I copied it and handed it in as my own, and it promptly came back marked "sane and sensible," the instructor quite unconsciously and unknowingly having hit upon two salient qualities of Father's style. I remember the theme he wrote was about the statue of John Harvard who sits bareheaded in the open, exposed to all weathers. Father said he always wanted to go and hold something over him to keep off the snow or sun. The life he led here and the surroundings could not produce other than wholesome and sane writing. The old house spoken of was the original farmhouse that stood up near the road--it was torn down in 1903 and a new cottage put up just below it. Father and I spent one summer there when we rented Riverby to New York people and he spent time there later as for instance:

Saturday P. M., Jan. 29 {1898}.

MY DEAR JULIAN,

Hiram and I are with the Ackers {who were living in the old house then}. I find the food and give them the rent and they do the work. I shall have peace now and it will taste good. If I come to C when would you rather I should come? I am not done with my writing yet but may be in eight or ten days. Writing is like duck hunting, one doesn't know what game he will get or when he will be back: that is why I am undecided. I make everything wait upon my writing. It is cold here, down to four two mornings; good sleighing. I rec'd your letter yesterday, I do not know about those plays--ask Mr. Page or Rodman. I hope you are prospering in your exams. This is the new pen, do not like it much yet. The prospect for an ice harvest brightens. Write.

Your loving father

J.B.

W. P., Saturday Jan. 15 {1898}

MY DEAR JULIAN,

I was glad to get your letter and to see you in such high feather. I hope you will keep so. Watch your health and habits and you may. Still your letter did not give me unmixed satisfaction. If you knew how I dislike slang, especially the cheap vulgar kind, you would spare me the affliction of it. There is slang and slang. Some has wit in it some is simply a stupid perversion of language. The latter I dislike as I do the tobacco habit to which it is close akin. You had so far escaped the tobacco habit and I had hoped you would escape the slang habit. It is not a bit more manly than the cigaret or cigar. Some slang phrases, like "you're not in it" or "you're off your trolley" and others, may do in familiar conversation with friends, but "bunches of cold" or "cuts no ice" etc., are simply idiotic. When you write return me again the postal card that I may see what words I misspelled. It still keeps very mild here, but is snowing this morning. Nip and I have had some fine skating--like a mirror for over a mile here in front: but the ice is getting thin. I do not know when I will come to Cambridge. Your mother has just been passing through the winter solstice of her temper and declares she is not going anywhere. I shall get away by and by, even if she stays here. I read Balzac and enjoyed it. The first half is much the best. The ending is weak and absurd. The old miser is clearly and strongly drawn, so are most of the characters. But we do not pity or sympathize with the heroine. How large and fine is that New Paltz girl, but probably like a big apple, she lacks flavour....

Your affectionate father, J. B.

It was very easy to see why Father disliked slang--it was a perversion of his art, and as I have said he had the true pride of the craftsman in his art. No one loved more the apt and witty expression; he was forever seeking them, and slang was something that overstepped the bounds and was therefore something truly abhorrent. Often I have heard him tell the story with delighted relish of some men who were spending a winter night in a country hotel. Eugene Field I think it was who made the remark that so delighted Father, and J. T. Trowbridge recounts it in "My own Story." It was a bitter cold night and covers were scanty; and more than that, there were several panes out of the window. Field rummaged about in the closet and found the hoops of an old hoop skirt, just then going out of fashion, and these he hung over the broken window, saying "That will keep out the coarsest of the cold!" "Coarsest of the cold," Father would repeat the expression and laugh again. I remember his envious acknowledgment of an apt illustration: two famous wood choppers were chopping in a match to see which could fell his tree first, and so great was their skill and so swift their blows that the chips literally poured out of the tree as though it had sprung a leak. "That is good," he said of the phrase and lowered his eyes. Once we were motor-boating upon the Champlain Canal and we were delayed all day by the numbers of slow canal boats. Yet some of the lock tenders said business was very slack. One of our party commented upon this and said that there were enough canal boats as it was, that the canal seemed pretty well gummed up with them. "Pretty well gummed up with them," Father repeated over and over and laughed like a child each time. Often I complained about the stone house at Riverby, that Father in planning it did not plan to use the winter sunshine; not only were the windows not placed right but there were spruce trees in the way. "You write a book on 'Winter Sunshine' and you let none in your house," I told him and he said that if he had the winter sunshine in his house he might not have written the book. A statement which has a large element of fundamental truth, at least in his case.

In those days we had much fun skating; Father had a curious pair of old skates that he fastened on a pair of shoes so that they would not come off. These shoes he tucked, skates and all, under his arm and we were off. He would slip off his "Congress" shoes and slip on the shoes with skates attached and start over the ice, his dog running by his side. Once he rigged up an attempt at a sail with one of his army blankets and some pieces of moulding left over from building the study, but it would not work. People on shore said they thought it was some kind of a life-saving contraption in case he broke through the ice. One day in the Shataca we had as fine a skate as we ever could imagine--there had been a thaw with high water and Black Creek had flooded the swamp, the water going out over the heavily timbered Shataca back to the upland. This had then frozen and the water gone out from under it, leaving the glassy ice hanging from the boles of the trees. The ice sagged a little between the trees which gave one a most delightful up and down motion as they glided over it on skates, as near flying as one could imagine at that time.