Poor White quotes

Hugh McVey was born in a little hole of a town stuck on a mud bank on the western shore of the Mississippi River in the State of Missouri.

It was a miserable place in which to be born.

With the exception of a narrow strip of black mud along the river, the land for ten miles back from the town—called in derision by river men “Mudcat Landing”—was almost entirely worthless and unproductive.

The merchants, who ran their stores—poor tumble-down ramshackle affairs—on the credit system, could not get pay for the goods they handed out over their counters and the artisans, the shoemakers, carpenters and harnessmakers, could not get pay for the work they did.

Only the town's two saloons prospered.

The saloon keepers sold their wares for cash and, as the men of the town and the farmers who drove into town felt that without drink life was unbearable, cash always could be found for the purpose of getting drunk.

The fish he caught on his more industrious days he sold for a few cents to some housewife, and thus got money to buy food for his big growing indolent body.

Like an animal that has come to its maturity he turned away from his father, not because of resentment for his hard youth, but because he thought it time to begin to go his own way.

In his fourteenth year and when the boy was on the point of sinking into the sort of animal-like stupor in which his father had lived, something happened to him.

The tannery ran for a year or two and then failed, but John McVey stayed in town. He also became a drunkard.

It was the easy obvious thing for him to do.

During the time of his employment in the tannery he had been married and his son had been born. Then his wife died and the idle workman took his child and went to live in a tiny fishing shack by the river.

In every mind the future was bright with promise. Throughout the whole Mid-American country, in Ohio, Northern Indiana and Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa a hopeful spirit prevailed.

In every breast hope fought a successful war with poverty and discouragement.

Optimism got into the blood of the children and later led to the same kind of hopeful courageous development of the whole western country.

The tall Missouri countryman sat down on a log near the edge of the cliff and tried to see the water in the river below.

Nothing was visible but a bed of stars that danced and twinkled in the darkness.

He had made his way to a place far above the railroad bridge, but presently a through passenger train from the West passed over it and the lights of the train looked also like stars, stars that moved and beckoned and that seemed to fly …

Boys from the town came sometimes to spend an hour with him, but in their presence he was embarrassed and a little annoyed.

He wanted to be left alone with his dreams.

One of the boys, a sickly, pale, undeveloped lad of ten, often stayed with him through an entire summer afternoon. He was the son of a merchant in the town and grew quickly tired when he tried to follow other boys about.

Hugh got a job with a carpenter who specialized in the building of barns and stayed with him all through one fall. Later he went to work as a section hand on a railroad. Nothing happened to him.

He was like one compelled to walk through life with a bandage over his eyes.

On all sides of him, in the towns and on the farms, an undercurrent of life went on that did not touch him. In even the smallest of the towns, inhabited only by farm laborers, a quaint interesting civilization was being developed.

Within the invisible circle and under the great roof every one knew his neighbor and was known to him. Strangers did not come and go swiftly and mysteriously and there was no constant and confusing roar of machinery and of new projects afoot.

For the moment mankind seemed about to take time to try to understand itself.

In Bidwell there was a man named Peter White who was a tailor and worked hard at his trade, but who once or twice a year got drunk and beat his wife.

The air of Bidwell began to stir with talk of new times. The evil things said of the new life coming were soon forgotten.

The youth and optimistic spirit of the country led it to take hold of the hand of the giant, industrialism, and lead him laughing into the land.

The cry, “get on in the world,” that ran all over America at that period and that still echoes in the pages of American newspapers and magazines, rang in the streets of Bidwell.

“I know my trade and do not have to bow down to any man,” he declared. He expressed the old tradesman's faith in his craft and the rights it gave the craftsman. “Learn your trade. Don't listen to talk,” he said earnestly. “

The man who knows his trade is a man. He can tell every one to go to the devil.

”

From all sides the voice of the new age that was to do definite things shouted at them. Eagerly they took up the cry and ran with it. Millions of voices arose. The clamor became terrible, and confused the minds of all men.

In making way for the newer, broader brotherhood into which men are some day to emerge, in extending the invisible roofs of the towns and cities to cover the world, men cut and crushed their way through the bodies of men.

And while the voices became louder and more excited and the new giant walked about making a preliminary survey of the land, Hugh spent his days at the quiet, sleepy railroad station at Pickleville and tried to adjust his mind to the realization of the …

Adventurous boys came out along the road from town and climbed, shouting and laughing, over the rafters in the deserted pickle factory across the tracks or went to fish in the creek in the shade of the factory walls.

Their shrill voices added to the loneliness of the spot.

It became almost unbearable to Hugh.

He thought of how powerfully he could hold the body of a woman against his body and the spark of the fires of spring that had touched him became a flame.

He felt new-made and tried to leap lightly and gracefully across the stream, but stumbled and fell in the water.

Later he went soberly back to the station and tried again to lose himself in the study of the problems he had found in his books.

Thousands of plants that had been raised from seeds planted in a seed-bed back of the barn had to be laboriously transplanted. The plants were tender and it was necessary to handle them carefully.

The planter crawled slowly and painfully along, and from the road looked like a wounded beast striving to make his way to a hole in a distant wood.

He crawled forward a little and then stopped and hunched himself up into a ball-like mass.

“I'd rather be a horse or a cow than what I am,” the complaining voice went on. “

What's the good being alive if you have to work like this?

”

Some day a wise man, one who has not read too many books but who has gone about among men, will discover and set forth a very interesting thing about America.

The land is vast and there is a national hunger for vastness in individuals. One wants an Illinois-sized man for Illinois, an Ohio-sized man for Ohio, and a Texas-sized man for Texas.

To be sure, Steve Hunter had no notion of all this. He never did get a notion of it.

Having employed a man for the purpose, they are themselves children enough to believe the myth they have paid money to have created.

Every rich man in the country unconsciously hates his press agent.

Although he had never read a book, Steve was a constant reader of the newspapers and had been deeply impressed by the stories he had read regarding the shrewdness and ability of the American captains of industry.

Steve hadn't the courage of the lie he had told.

He did not have imagination enough to understand how powerful a thing is a lie.

He walked quickly along until he came to the Wheeling Station at Pickleville, and then, not having the courage to confront Hugh at once, went past the station and crept in behind the deserted pickle factory that stood across the tracks.

Modern men and women who live in industrial cities are like mice that have come out of the fields to live in houses that do not belong to them.

They live within the dark walls of the houses where only a dim light penetrates, and so many have come that they grow thin and haggard with the constant toil of getting food and warmth.

Intelligence began to come into the eyes of the man who all his life had whittled meaningless wooden chains, baskets formed out of peach stones, and ships intended to float in bottles.

Love and understanding began a little to do for him what words could not have done.

One day when a part Hugh had fashioned would not work the half-wit himself made the model of a part that worked perfectly.

When the model of the machine appeared in the jeweler's window, a fever of excitement took hold of the minds of the people. Every one declared himself either for or against it. Something like a revolution took place. Parties were formed.

Men who had no interest in the success of the invention, and in the nature of things could not have, were ready to fight any one who dared to doubt its success.

Among the farmers who drove into town to see the new wonder were many who said the machine would not, could not, work. “It isn't practical,” they said. Going off by themselves and forming groups, they whispered warnings. A hundred objections sprang to their lips.

In the fast-growing towns, men who were engaged in organizing companies representing a capital of millions lived in houses thrown hurriedly together by carpenters who, before the time of the great awakening, were engaged in building barns.

It was a time of hideous architecture, a time when thought and learning paused.

Without music, without poetry, without beauty in their lives or impulses, a whole people, full of the native energy and strength of lives lived in a new land, rushed pell-mell into a new age.

In one county in southern Michigan, over five hundred patents for woven wire farm fencing were taken out in one year, and almost every patent was a magnet about which a company for the manufacture of fence formed itself.

A vast energy seemed to come out of the breast of earth and infect the people.

Thousands of the most energetic men of the middle States wore themselves out in forming companies, and when the companies failed, immediately formed others.

… poor little houses had been lived in for a long time, after children had been born and men had died, after men and women had suffered and had moments of joy together in the tiny rooms under the low roofs, a subtle change took place.

The houses became almost beautiful in their old humanness.

Each of the houses began vaguely to shadow forth the personality of the people who lived within its walls.

In the stillness there could be heard the hammers of the carpenters building a new house for the son of a merchant who had married the daughter of a blacksmith. A sense of quiet growth awoke in sleeping minds.

It was the time for art and beauty to awake in the land.

Instead, the giant, Industry, awoke.

Hired writers called these men great, and there was no maturity of mind in the people with which to combat the force of the statement, often repeated.

Like children the people believed what they were told.

While the new factory was being built with the carefully saved dollars of the people, young men from Bidwell went out to work in other places.

Joe wanted to look at the tall gaunt man from the West, and had some notion of trying to get into conversation with him and of asking his opinion of the possibilities of the success of the new machine.

The man of the age of flesh and blood wanted to walk in the presence of the man who belonged to the new age of iron and steel.

When he got to the factory it was dark and on an express truck in front of the Wheeling Station the two city workmen sat smoking their evening pipes.

Her cheeks burned and her hands trembled. As she walked slowly through the clumps of grass and weeds that grew between the trees where the sunlight struggled through, bees coming home to the hives heavily laden with honey flew in droves about her head.

There was something heady and purposeful about the song of labor that arose out of the beehives.

It got into her blood and her step quickened. The words of Jim Priest that kept running through her mind seemed a part of the same song the bees were singing. “The sap has begun to run up the tree,” she repeated aloud.

At the moment she was in a girlish period of being disgusted at what she thought of as the vulgarity of the men who worked on the place. At the table they ate noisily and greedily like hungry animals.

She wanted youth that was like her own youth, crude and uncertain perhaps, but reaching eagerly out into the unknown. She wanted to draw very near to something young, strong, gentle, insistent, beautiful.

When the farm hand looked up and saw her standing and looking intently at him, she was embarrassed.

After a misunderstanding his wife put her arms about his neck and kissed the bald spot on the top of his head. Then the subject was forgotten.

Life in the Woodburn house was lived without words.

After the stir and bustle of the farm, the silence of the house for a long time frightened Clara. Even when she was alone in her own room she walked about on tiptoe.

“I know that wasn't square,” she said. “I know now, when I talk to you, but I didn't know then. With the school teacher I was as unfair as John May and my father were with me.

Why do men and women have to fight each other? Why does the battle between them have to go on?

”

Being part women, we know how to approach women. We are not blundering and crude. Men want a certain thing from you. It is delicate and easy to kill. Love is the most sensitive thing in the world. It's like an orchid.

Men try to pluck orchids with ice tongs, the fools.

”

He had confused her, but that was perhaps her own fault. He had not insisted on himself at all. Frank Metcalf had done nothing else.

“One should be able,” she thought, “to find somewhere a man who respects himself and his own desires but can understand also the desires and fears of a woman.”

The street car went bouncing along over railroad crossings and along residence streets. Clara looked at her companion, who stared straight ahead, and then turned to look out of the car window.

“I know how dissatisfied and unhappy you sometimes are. I often feel that way myself. Sometimes I think it's marriage I want. I really think I want to draw close to some one. I believe every one is hungry for that experience.

We all want something we are not willing to pay for. We want to steal it or have it given us.

That's what's the matter with me, and that's what's the matter with you.”

You interrupted our talk and wanted to walk with us: what for? You wanted to be in our company: now tell us what you've got to contribute. You can't just come and walk with us like dumb things.

What have you got to offer that you think will make it worth while for us to break up our conversation with each other and spend the time talking with you?

”

The afternoon slipped away and the shadows of the trees lengthened. On such a day and alone there in the quiet wood, it was impossible for her to remain in the angry mood in which she had left the house.

Over her father's farm brooded the passionate fulfillment of summer.

Before her, seen through the trees, lay yellow wheat fields, ripe for the cutting; insects sang and danced in the air about her head; a soft wind blew and made a gentle singing noise in the tops of the trees;

After a few weeks he slopped consulting Joe at all. “You're no good,” he exclaimed, laughing. “What you're doing in business I don't know.” The old harness maker stared at him for a minute and then went to his bench and to work.

“Business,” he muttered, “what do I know about business? I'm a harness maker, I am.”

After Jim came to work for him, Joe made in one year almost twice the amount he had lost in the failure of the plant-setting machine factory. The money was not invested in stock of any factory but lay in the bank.

then when I got a little ahead I shut up the shop and went on a big drunk. I was no good for a month. When I work for some one else I'm all right. I get drunk on Saturdays and that satisfies me.

I like to work and scheme for money, but it ain't any good to me when I get it and never will be.

What I want you to do here is to shut your eyes and give me a chance. That's all I ask. Just shut your eyes and give me a chance.”

Other young fellows in the factory were getting a dollar and a half a day. At the end of the week he got twenty-five dollars, almost three times as much.

The money was an indication of superiority. There could be no doubt about that.

Ever since he had been a boy he had heard older men speak respectfully of men who possessed money. “Get on in the world,” they said to young men, when they talked seriously. Among themselves they did not pretend that they did not want money.

From all sides men reached out their hands to him: and more than one woman thought she would like to be his wife.

All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they themselves have built, and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls.

Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is impersonal, useful, and beautiful. Word of his activities is carried over the walls.

and more than one woman thought she would like to be his wife. All men lead their lives behind a wall of misunderstanding they themselves have built, and most men die in silence and unnoticed behind the walls.

Now and then a man, cut off from his fellows by the peculiarities of his nature, becomes absorbed in doing something that is impersonal, useful, and beautiful.

Word of his activities is carried over the walls.

… start manufacturing the corn-cutters, had affected the lives of fewer people, but it had carried the Missourian's name into other places and had also made a new kind of poetry in railroad yards and along rivers at the back of cities where ships are loaded.

On city nights as you lie in your houses you may hear suddenly a long reverberating roar. It is a giant that has cleared his throat of a carload of coal.

Hugh McVey helped to free the giant. He is still doing it. In Bidwell, Ohio, he is still at it, making new inventions, cutting the bands that have bound the giant.

Hugh took hold of the school teacher's arm and drew her away down a side street. They walked home in silence, but when they got to the house and were about to go in, the school teacher hesitated.

She wanted to ask Hugh to walk about in the darkness with her but did not have the courage of her desires.

As they stood at the gate and as the tall man with the long serious face looked down at her, she remembered the speaker's words. “How could he care for me?

Hugh tried to keep hold of the plate which the school teacher tried to snatch away and for a few minutes they struggled laughing. Her cheeks were flushed and Hugh thought she looked bewitching. An impulse he had never had before came to him.

He wanted to shout at the top of his lungs, throw the plate at the ceiling, sweep all of the dishes off the table and hear them crash on the floor, play like some huge animal loose in a tiny world.

He looked at Rose and his hands trembled from the strength of the strange impulse. As he stood staring she took the plate out of his hand and went into the kitchen.

As he talked his eyes began to shine and he seemed to be looking, not at her face or body, but at something within her.

For a time, perhaps for fifteen minutes, there was a possibility that the two people would love each other.

Then the young man went away and later she saw him walking under the trees on the college campus with the little black-eyed town girl.

Like every other citizen of America she believed in heroes. In books and magazines she had read of heroic men who had come up out of poverty by some strange alchemy to combine in their stout persons all of the virtues.

The broad, rich land demanded gigantic figures, and the minds of men had created the figures.

Lincoln, Grant, Garfield, Sherman, and a half dozen other men were something more than human in the minds of the generation that came immediately after the days of their stirring performance. Already industry was creating a new set of semi-mythical figures.

After tossing in his bed for two or three hours he got up and crept quietly out of the house.

He was like a man who, having an unmusical voice, sings to himself in a bath-room while the water is making a loud, splashing noise.

On that night Hugh wanted to be an orator. As he stumbled in the darkness along Turner's Pike he imagined himself Governor of a State addressing a multitude of people.

Almost at once he decided that the thing he had seen in Clara's eyes and that was sister to something he had seen in Rose McCoy's eyes had nothing to do with him.

The mantle of vanity he had been wearing dropped off and left him naked and sad.

“What would she be wanting of me?” he asked himself, and got up from the log to look with critical eyes at his long, bony body.

The workman went on his way, grumbling at his wife who paid no attention to his words.

Her breath was needed for the labor of walking, and as for the matter of marriage, that had been attended to.

She saw no reason for wasting words over the matter. Hugh went to the shop and stood leaning against the door frame. Two or three workmen were busy near the back door and had lighted gas lamps that hung over the work benches.

The horse trotted swiftly along and Hugh in the buggy beside Clara was lost in the same dense silence that all the evening had lain over him like a cloak. In a dim way he was resentful and felt that time was running too fast.

The hours and the passing events were like the waters of a river in flood time, and he was like a man in a boat without oars, being carried helplessly forward.

Occasionally he thought courage had come to him and he half turned toward Clara and opened his mouth, hoping words would come to his lips, but the silence that had taken hold of him was like a disease whose grip on its victim could not …

Fires were lighted and smoke crawled lazily up through the roofs. In a field that lay beyond the smoke houses a man came to plow. The child, curled into a little, warm ball in the window seat, was happy.

When she closed her eyes fancies came like flocks of white sheep running out of a green wood.

Although she was later to become a tomboy and run wild over the farm and through the barns, and although all her life she loved the soil and the sense of things growing and of food for hungry mouths being prepared, there was in her, …

They had done that when her mother came to the house as a bride. Then they had all gone away and her father had taken his bride upstairs. He was drunk, and her own husband Hugh was now getting drunk. Her mother had submitted.

Her life had been a story of submission.

Kate Chanceller had said it was so married women lived, and her mother's life had proven the truth of the statement. In the farmhouse kitchen, where now three or four cooks worked so busily, she had worked her life out alone.

It was past two o'clock when the feast came to an end. When the guests began to depart, Clara stood for a moment alone and tried to get herself in hand.

Something inside her felt cold and old.

If she had often thought she wanted a man, and that life as a married woman would put an end to her problems, she did not think so at that moment. “What I want above everything else is a woman,” she thought.

It only lasted a moment and when it happened both women were somewhat embarrassed. Kate laughed and taking hold of Clara's arm pulled her along the sidewalk.

“Let's walk like the devil,” she said, “come on, let's get up some speed.”

Clara put her hands to her eyes as though to shut out the scene in the room. “If I could have been with Kate this evening I could have come to a man believing in the possible sweetness of marriage,” she thought.

How vividly Clara now remembered that night! It came sharply back as she stood with closed eyes in the farm kitchen and waited for the consummation of the adventure on which she had set out. With it came other memories.

“How many fleeting dreams and half visions of beauty I have had!”

she thought.

With it came other memories. “How many fleeting dreams and half visions of beauty I have had!” she thought.

Everything in life that she had thought might in some way lead toward beauty now seemed to Clara to lead to ugliness.

“What a lot I've missed,” she muttered, and opening her eyes went back into the dining-room and spoke to Hugh, still standing and staring out into the darkness.

They, like himself, were married men and lived in a house with a woman. At night they went boldly into the presence of the woman. He had not done that when the opportunity offered, and Clara could not come to him. He could understand that.

His hands had builded a wall and the passing days were huge stones put on top of the wall.

What he had not done became every day a more and more impossible thing to do.

Hugh was sure he had missed the great opportunity of his life.

He had married, but his marriage was not a marriage.

He had got himself into a position from which there was no possibility of escaping. “I'm a coward,” he thought, looking at the other workmen in the shop. They, like himself, were married men and lived in a house with a woman.

In the long, dry grass in fence corners insects sang; in the young cabbage fields rabbits ran, flitting away like shadows in the moonlight. The cabbage fields were beautiful too.

Who has written or sung of the beauties of corn fields in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or of the vast Ohio cabbage fields?

In the cabbage fields the broad outer leaves fall down to make a background for the shifting, delicate colors of soils. The leaves are themselves riotous with color.

The leaves are themselves riotous with color. As the season advances they change from light to dark greens, a thousand shades of purples, blues and reds appear and disappear.

In silence the cabbage fields slept beside the roads in Ohio.

Not yet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashing lights—beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summer night—had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities.

Not yet had the motor cars come to tear along the roads, their flashing lights—beautiful too, when seen by one afoot on the roads on a summer night—had not yet made the roads an extension of the cities.

Akron, the terrible town, had not yet begun to roll forth its countless millions of rubber hoops, filled each with its portion of God's air compressed and in prison at last like the farm hands who have gone to the cities.

Detroit and Toledo had not begun to send forth their hundreds of thousands of motor cars to shriek and scream the nights away on country roads.

An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads, hurried toward the lights of the distant town. In Bidwell, the place that had been on other summer nights a sleepy town filled with gossiping berry pickers, things were astir.

Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air.

Perhaps in its own way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell that quiet summer night something happened that startled men.

she asked herself for perhaps the thousandth time as the car, having got into a long stretch of clear, straight road, seemed to leap and sail through the air like a bird.

“At any rate I have married me a husband and yet I have no husband, I have been in a man's arms but I have no lover, I have taken hold of life, but life has slipped through my fingers.”

Like her father, Hugh seemed to Clara absorbed in only the things outside himself, the outer crust of life. He was like and yet unlike her father. She was baffled by him. There was something in the man she wanted and could not find.

After that night when he ran away from her bridal bed, Clara had more than once thought the miracle had happened. It did sometimes. On that night when he came to her out of the rain it had happened.

There was a wall a blow could shatter, and she raised her hand to strike the blow.

The wall was shattered and then builded itself again. Even as she lay at night in her husband's arms the wall reared itself up in the darkness of the sleeping room.

He lay still and she had the impression of some great force holding him back, holding her back. A sharp sense of struggle filled the room. The air was heavy with it.

When words came they did not break the silence. The wall remained.

The words that came were empty, meaningless words. Hugh suddenly broke forth into speech. He spoke of his work at the shop and of his progress toward the solution of some difficult, mechanical problem.

The great men of whom the school-books talked had all been connected with the Government. In Ohio there had been Garfield, Sherman, McPherson the fighter and others. From Illinois had come Lincoln and Grant.

For a time the very ground of the mid-American country had seemed to spurt forth great men as now it was spurting forth gas and oil.

Government had justified itself in the men it had produced.

All such men seemed very far away.

“Everything worth while is very far away,” she thought bitterly.

“The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

All such men seemed very far away. “Everything worth while is very far away,” she thought bitterly.

“The machines men are so intent on making have carried them very far from the old sweet things.”

The motor flew along the roads and Tom thought of his old longing to own and drive fast racing horses. “I used to be half crazy to own fast horses,” he shouted to his son-in-law.

There was a problem for Hugh's mind, a problem that could not be solved in wood and steel. He walked and thought about it when he should have been making new parts for the hay-loading apparatus.

He had lived but little in the life of the imagination, had been afraid to live that life, had been warned and re-warned against living it.

The shadowy figure of the unknown inventor in the state of Iowa, who had been brother to himself, who had worked on the same problems and had come to the same conclusions, slipped away, followed by the almost equally shadowy figure of his father.

How grim the street in the late night! The berry pickers who once went along the road at evening were now gone forever. Like Ezra French's sons they had perhaps become factory hands.

Apple and cherry trees once grew along the road. They had dropped their blossoms on the heads of strolling lovers.

They also were gone. Hugh had once crept along the road at the heels of Ed Hall, who walked with his arm about a girl's waist. He had heard Ed complaining of his lot in life and crying out for new times.