My Life

"Suppose you write the words 'All Right,'" I replied. "I have been practicing on them a good deal." The good old soul wrote for me the desired "copy" quite unsuspectingly, and to allay any suspicions that she might otherwise have had, I dutifully copied her writing as best I could. Then I thanked her, and on the way home, trimmed my grandmother's "All Right" to the size of the slips held by the teacher. I did not seem to realize that the teacher wrote any differently from my grandmother, or that my mother was well acquainted with my grandmother's handwriting. Indeed, for a lad who could be as "cute and slick as they make 'em," when it came to a real runaway trip, I was capable at other times of doing the most stupid things – to wit, the "All Right" adventure. My mother detected the trick of course, and I was reported to my father, but he seemed to see the humorous side of the affair, and let me off with a scowl.

Winter underclothing and overcoats assisted in making my public school attendance a trial. For some reason I abhorred these garments, and my mother very rightfully insisted on their being worn, particularly when I trudged to the schoolhouse in winter. The coat was shed as soon as I was out of my mother's sight, and the underclothing was hidden in an outhouse in the schoolyard until time to go home. At home also I discarded such things whenever possible, and, one day, I was caught in the act, as it were, by one of our family physicians, a woman. I was sitting on her lap, and she was tickling me near the knee. She noticed that my stockings seemed rather "thin," and began to feel for my underclothing. "Why, where is it, Josiah?" she finally exclaimed.

"Oh, it's rolled up," I replied nonchalantly. Again the good woman tried to locate it, but without success. "Rolled up where?" she asked. "Oh, 'way up," I answered, trying to look unconcerned. Pressed to tell exactly how "high up" the rolling had gone, I finally confessed that the garments were rolled up in my bureau drawer. Again the humor of the situation saved me from a whipping, and I gradually became reconciled to the clothing in question.

Village playmates, the cosmopolitans of the main street as I considered them, entered very little into my life under ten, and I associated principally with my brothers and sisters and a neighbor's boy – the nephew of a celebrated writer – who lived very near our great brown house. Whether other children quarreled and wrangled the way we did it is hard to say – I hope not – but without doubt we gave our mother a great deal of trouble. Strangely enough, for I was very prone at times to assert my rights and fight for them, too, I once outdid my older brother and sister in a competitive struggle to be good for one week. It was while my father was still alive. He had promised us a prize, and when anything like that was in sight, I was willing to make a try for it anyhow. So I shut off steam for a week, minded my p's and q's pretty carefully, and lo, and behold! when Saturday night came, and my mother was asked to give the decision, I was the lucky competitor. The prize was the New Testament – a typical gift – bound in soft red leather, with a little strap to hold it shut when not in use. On the fly-leaf my father wrote these words: "To Josiah, from his father, for having behaved for one week better than his older brother and sister." The victory over the older children was my main gratification, but I found the Testament useful also, committing to memory from it for twenty-five cents, at my grandmother's request, the fourteenth chapter of John.

I can only account for a very "soft" thing that I let myself into not long after winning the prize to the weakening process in being good for the week in question.

My father had a cane, a twisted and gnarled affair, which he seldom used, but preserved very carefully in a closet off the "spare room" of the house. I have always believed that my brother and sister broke it, but they got around me, and wheedled me into saying that I had done it. Indeed, they bribed me with marbles and a knife, and said that the voluntary confession would be so manly that my father could not possibly punish me. Consequently, I did not wait for the broken cane to be discovered, but went boldly to my father, one night, and told him that I was the culprit, and how sorry I was. He looked at me earnestly with his immense blue eyes for a moment, and then, putting his long, thin hand on my shoulder, said: "Noble lad! to have come and told me. Perhaps we can mend it somehow," and that was the last that was ever heard of the matter.

My playmate over the fence, the celebrated writer's nephew, was my most intimate companion during all this period; I was nearer to him in play and study than to either of my sisters or brother. Although a good boy in every way, as I now recall him, I fear that our companionship did us both harm for a while. He was stockier and taller than I was, and if he had realized and been willing to exercise his strength, he could have put me in my right place very soon, but he did not appreciate his power. The consequence was that he allowed me to bully him unmercifully, and his accounts of my prowess gained for me a fighter's reputation in the village, a fictitious notoriety which clung to me strangely enough for several years. Besides being called a "bad" boy I became known as a youngster who knew how to use his fists – a myth if there ever was one – and I was enough of an actor and sufficiently cautious in my encounters to be able to give some semblance of truth to this report. The evil effects of this posing on me were that I allowed myself to be put in a false light as a "scrapper," and I was continually on the watch not to risk my reputation in any fair struggle; my companion over the fence lost confidence in himself, and allowed me to bully and browbeat him, his manliness suffering accordingly.

Many and varied were our escapades in our part of the village, and for years we were seldom seen apart. The most reckless adventure that I can recall now occurred when my companion's house was being built, a three-story affair. The other boy and I were exercising our skill one day on the floor timbers of the third story, or garret, walking across the beams, a leg to a beam, the space between the beams running through to the cellar. Suddenly I made a misstep, and fell through the open space to the cellar, partially breaking the fall by my hands clutching madly at the cellar-floor beams. I escaped with a few scratches, but I now count the escape one of the narrowest of several that I have had.

As a playmate I was generally tractable and willing, but I never lost an opportunity to "boss," if I could do so without loss of prestige. Bird-nesting, baseball, riding bareback on an old farm horse, swimming and walking were the main summer pastimes; in winter, there was skating, sledding, snow-balling, and "shinny" – both sets of amusements being typical of a Middle West boy's life twenty to thirty years ago. There was also fishing and hunting, but I was too fidgety to fish successfully, and I was never presented with a gun. "Vealish" love affairs with girl companions were indulged in by some of the boys, but my uncertain reputation and a "faked" or natural indifference to girls, I know not which, kept me out of such entanglements; probably bashfulness had as much to do with the indifference as anything else. That I was so bashful and at the same time a bully and would-be leader sounds inconsistent, but at the time of my father's death, there was probably not a boy in the village who could be made to shrink up, as it were, from social timidity, as I could. Indeed, this characteristic impresses me now, on looking back over my childhood, as the predominant one in my nature at that time, and even to-day, it crops out inconveniently, on occasion. A friend, who knows me well, recently remarked to a common friend of both of us: "Why is it that Flynt draws into his shell when strangers join us at dinner. When we three are alone, he talks as much as any of us. Let an outsider or two drop in, and he shuts down instanter. Can you explain it?" I can. Those silent fits are an aftermath of the exaggerated bashfulness of my childhood – I simply cannot overcome them.

CHAPTER III

REST COTTAGE

Not long after my father died our family deserted the old brown house which remains in my memory still as the one independent home I have known in life. The old building has long since flown away on wings of fire and smoke, but I recall every nook and cranny in it from cellar to garret. There we children came to consciousness of ourselves, got acquainted with one another as a family, and played, quarreled, made up again until the old house must have known us very intimately. I prize very highly having had this early love for a house – it redeems somewhat those bad traits in my character which were so deplored.

An interim home was found for us in the village proper until an addition for our use could be built to my grandmother's house, not far from the main street.

One of my teachers, while we lived in the interim house, was a distant relative, who had a home a few doors removed from ours. I also went to the public school, at intervals, but of my teachers at that time I remember best Miss B – . She taught my older sister and myself such things as it interested her to teach, and in a way we got a smattering knowledge, at least, of History, Art, Mathematics (a plague on them!) and, I think, French. Nothing that the good dame taught us, however, ever made the impression on me that certain of her mannerisms did. She was a spinster, no longer young, and her mannerisms were doubtless the result of living much alone. An expression which she constantly used, in and out of season, was "For that." Putting a book down on the table, or straightening a disordered desk, called forth a "For that" after every move she made. It had no significance or meaning at any time that I heard her use it, but if she used it once in a day she did so a hundred times at least. I finally came to call her "Miss For That."

She was furthermore the cause of my coining a word which is still used in our immediate family. Some one asked me, one afternoon, how Miss B – impressed me, and I am alleged to have replied: "She's so spunctuated." To the rest of the family it seemed a very good characterization of the lady, they understanding the word apparently quite as well as I thought that I did. Later I was often asked what I meant by the word, and it has never been easy to tell exactly; our family took it in and harbored it because they knew Miss B – and seemed to grasp immediately my meaning. What the word conveyed to me was this: that Miss B – was inordinately prim and orderly, and that as in a written sentence, with its commas, and semi-colons, her verbal sentences needed just so many "For Thats" to satisfy her sense of neatness. I even found her form of punishment for me, when I had been unruly, "spunctuated." I had to sit in the coal hod on such occasions, and the way Miss B – ordered me into the bucket, with an inevitable "For that" or two, sandwiched in with the command, increased her "spunctuatedness" in my estimation very noticeably.

The good woman eventually married, and I think lost some of her painful primness; but the word she helped me to invent still survives. I have been told that friends who have visited our home and could appreciate the word's meaning, have also incorporated it in their vocabularies. In some ways human beings the world over could be divided up into the "spunctuated" and the "unspunctuated."

In the annex attached to my grandmother's home my village life and early boyhood found their completion. When we left this home the family became scattered, one going one way and the others some other way; we have never all been together since the break-up. My brother, for instance, I have not seen in nearly twenty years, and have no idea where he is to-day. He also was possessed of Wanderlust, indeed we might as well call ourselves a Wanderlust family, because every one of us has covered more territory at home and abroad than the average person can find time, or cares, to explore. While living in the interim house my mother tried an experiment with me. She sent me away to a boys' boarding school about fifty miles north of Chicago. There had been a general family council of grandparents, uncles and aunts, and it was hoped that a change of control and discipline would achieve changes for the better in me.

The school was in the hands of an old English pastor and his wife, and they had succeeded in giving a certain English look to the old white building and grounds. My mother and I arrived at this institution of learning, so-called, one evening about supper time. The other boys, twenty-odd in number, ranging in years from ten to eighteen, were in the dining room munching their bread and molasses. It seemed to me at the time that I should certainly die when my mother left, and I should be alone with that rabble. Compromises and taking a back seat were to be inevitable in all intercourse with the larger boys, and the lads of my own age looked able to hold their own with me in any struggle that might occur. It was plain that I could bully no longer, and there was a possibility that the tables would be turned, and that I should be the one bullied. These thoughts busied me very much that night, which I spent with the master in his room. By morning I had half-a-dozen escapes well planned, leading back to the home village, and they lightened the parting from my mother, who seemed quite pleased with the school.

Getting acquainted with the other scholars proved a less arduous task than I had anticipated, which may be partly explained by the fact that my room-mate had arrived on the same day that I did, and we were able to feel our way together, as it were. As a lad, and to-day as well, if there is any strange territory to be covered, or an investigation is on, I feel pretty much at a loss without some kind of a companion, either human or canine.

The experience at the school, however, fairly pleasant and instructive though it became as I got over a preliminary homesickness, made such a faint impression on my character, one way or the other, that there is but little of interest, beyond my abrupt French leave-taking, to report. There had been several abortive attempts to get away before the final departure, but we – I always had companions in these adventures – were invariably overhauled and brought back. A well-meant "lecture" followed our capture, that was all. Indeed the days spent in the school were the only days of my early boyhood free of whippings. They were sometimes promised, but the good old pastor relented at the last moment and let me off with a reprimand.

The runaway trip that finally succeeded was most carefully planned and executed. For days four of us discussed routes, places where we could get something to eat, and railway time-tables; and the boy who knew Chicago best arranged for our reception there, if we should get that far. This time we were not going to take to the railroad near the village; we had failed there too often. We knew of another railroad some eight miles inland, and this became our first objective. We left the school at night when the master and the scholars were asleep. Carrying our shoes in our hands, our pockets stuffed with surplus socks and handkerchiefs, we stole out of the old white building unobserved, and on into a cornfield, where we put on our shoes and made sure once again that we had not been followed. Then, light-hearted and happy in the thought that we were free, we tramped rapidly to the railroad. Reaching a good sized station about one o'clock, we awaited an express train due in an hour or so. It came thundering along on schedule time, and two boys "made" the "blind baggage," while the Chicago boy and I perched ourselves just behind the cow-catcher. After this dare-devil fashion we rode into Chicago, arriving there just as the milkman and baker-boy were going their rounds. The darkness, of course, had helped us immensely. We had no money for car-fare, and had to pick our way through a labyrinth of streets before we found our Chicago companion's barn, where we rolled ourselves up in some very dirty carpets on the floor and fell asleep to dream of freedom and its delights.

This escape, so thorough and cleancut, satisfied my mother that the school was not the place for me, and I was taken back to the village, the new home adjoining my grandmother's, and handed over to the tender mercies of tutors again. A new life began for me, a new life in a number of ways. Although the two houses were connected, and our family could pass over into grandmother's quarters and vice versa, we children were cautioned to keep on our own side of the fence most of the time. Nevertheless, our grandmother was almost always accessible, particularly when her daughter, our noted aunt, was away on a lecturing tour. This was a great boon in many respects, because our mother was in the city all day, and we certainly used to get tired of the governess.

This grandmother of mine stands out in my memory of childhood more distinctly than any other character, except, of course, my mother. She was one of the most remarkable women it has been my good fortune to know well. A famous English lady, who visited my aunt years after our particular family had scattered, insisted on calling my grandmother "Saint Courageous," and I have always thought that she well deserved this title. For years, while my aunt was traveling over the country, lecturing on temperance and woman's rights, my grandmother would live patiently alone with a Swedish servant, glorying in her daughter's fame and usefulness, and carefully pasting press notices of her work in a scrapbook.

My brother, "Rob," was grandmother's pet. He was her son's firstborn and her first grandchild, and what Rob did, good or bad, found praise and excuses in her eyes. We other children had to take a back seat, so to speak, when Rob was at home, but this was only intermittently, after he undertook to be a civil engineer. When I last saw him he had experimented with about as many activities as he had lived years, and he was still very undecided about any one of them. In a way this has been a family characteristic among us children, at any rate among us boys. Mother early noticed this tendency, and literally begged of us to let her see us through college, as did our grandmother, so that, whatever we undertook later on, we might have educational qualifications for any opportunity that presented itself. She was doomed to disappointment in this matter in the case of all four. Each one of us has experimented with college life, and I, as will be told later on in detail, smuggled myself into the Berlin University as a student of political economy, but there is not a diploma to-day among the four of us.

My grandmother's room on her side was in the front, and here she spent most of her time, reading, tending her scrapbook and flowers, keeping track of her famous daughter's travels, and nearly every day receiving visits from some of us children. I have spent some of the happiest hours of my life in that quaint room, telling grandmother about my school life, what I wanted to be, and reading to her such things, usually verses, as she or I liked. She thought that I read well, and if the "piece" was pathetic, I used to gauge my rendering of it by the flow of tears from grandmother's eyes. I watched them furtively on all pathetic occasions. Gradually the lids would redden, a tear or two would drop, her dear old lips would quiver – and I had succeeded. Grandmother seemed to enjoy the weeping as much as I enjoyed its implied praise. These "sittings" in her room have overcome many and many an impulse on my part to run away; and I can recall purposely going to her room and society to try and conquer the temptation that was besetting me, although I did not tell her what I had come to her for. What she meant to the other children I do not know, but, my mother being away so much, and the governess representing solely discipline and control, grandmother became almost as dear to me as my mother. Strange to relate, however, I was never demonstratively affectionate with her, nor she with me, whereas I was very distinctly so with my mother when I was trying to be good. They tell a story about me to-day of how, when after supper mother had settled herself in one of the large chairs near the stove, I would climb into her lap and say: "Hug me, mother, I need it." Probably no lad ever needed mothering more than I did, but out on the road, curiously enough, while still quite young, I could dig a hole in a hay-stack and fall asleep as easily as at home in my own bed, which goes to show what a bundle of contrasts and mixtures I was. One day, as tractable a scholar and playmate as the village contained; the next, very possibly, irritable, cross, moody and wavering, like a half-balanced stick, between a vamose or home.

Grandmother's visits to our side of the house were comparatively infrequent – she loved to be in her room – but when we children got to fighting, her tall, majestic form and earnest face were sure to appear. "Children, children!" she would cry, "'tis for dogs and cats to bark and bite. Josiah, leave Robert alone!" On one occasion the governess had been utterly powerless to control us, and my older sister and I were determined to "do up" Rob, grandmother's pet, once and for all. We thought that he had been teasing us unmercifully, and we went at him, sister unarmed and I with a stove poker. How I managed it at the time I cannot say now, for he was decidedly stronger and larger than I was; but I succeeded somehow, with sister's help, in getting him down on the floor, where I was whacking him manfully with the poker, sister looking on well satisfied, when grandmother appeared. "Josiah!" she shouted, stamping her foot, "let your brother up." Whack went the poker, and, of course, Rob yelled. Indeed, the noise made during this fisticuff exceeded that of any previous encounter, and the neighbors probably said: "Those Flynt children are at it again." "Josiah!" my grandmother roared this time, "I'll have the police, this can't go on. Release your brother instantly." I gave him a final whack, and judiciously retreated with the poker and my sister. Rob was for renewing the attack, but grandmother led him off to her room for repairs, and the physical victory at least was ours.

But all of our days were not accompanied by battles. Several days, perhaps, could go by, without even harsh words being spoken, and peace reigned on both sides of the house, which, before we children got into it, was gladly known as and called "Rest Cottage." In name, and except when our quarrels went echoing through the older side, grandmother's part was also in fact a haven of rest for herself and my much traveled aunt. But I have often thought that if some of the many pilgrims who have gone to the village merely to see the house could have surprised us children in one of our quarrels, they would have scouted the propriety of the cottage's name.

When my brother was away, which was the case more often than not, after he refused to continue his schooling, I was inclined to idealize him, and when he had been absent, say for several months and news came of his home-coming, I was very proud and happy. On one occasion he came back with his voice much changed, it had begun to take on a mannish tone, and I was prodigiously impressed with this metamorphosis, running secretly to grandmother, and whispering: "Rob's back! His voice has gone way down deep," and I put my hand on my stomach by way of illustration. My brother's elevation on a pedestal in my imagination, however, never lasted long, because we invariably crossed tempers within a few days, and that meant vulgar familiarity.

For years, nevertheless, I persisted in using him as a bluff in all threatening fisticuffs with playmates of my size, whether he was at home or not. "If I can't lick you," I was wont to say, "Bob can, and he'll do it, too." For a time this boast kept me out of all serious entanglements, but I had posed so long as a winner, and had bragged so much about what Bob could do, that a Waterloo was inevitable, and at last it came. Bob was unfortunately for me away from home at the time.

The fight was a fixed-up affair among three brothers, the second oldest being desirous of giving me a good hiding as a preliminary advertisement of his prowess. The four of us met by agreement in the alley behind "Rest Cottage," and my antagonist and I were soon at it. He was easily a half-head taller than I was, and a good deal stockier, but I think that I had said that I could whip him, and I honestly tried to make good. He remained cool and collected, delivering well directed and telling blows on my physiognomy. The gore ran from my nose, and tears of rage from my eyes, as never before or since. But I fought on blindly, hitting my adversary only occasionally, and even then with very little force. At last, utterly beaten and exposed, I ran from the field-of-battle, shouting back over my shoulder, "Bob'll do you all up, you spalpeens." My grandmother mopped my battered face, and tried to console me, but it was a hard task. I knew what she didn't know, that my bluff had been called, and that I was no longer an uncertain quantity in the village fighting world; I had been "shown up." For days I shunned my regular playmates, and I can say that after that defeat I never fought another mill, and I never expect to fight one again. In five minutes I was completely converted to the peace movement, and have earnestly advocated its principles from the day of the fight to this very moment.