My Life. Flynt Josiah
be narrow and his task to fulfill a tiresome routine.
CHAPTER I
EARLIEST REMINISCENCES
My old nurse once told me that I came into this world with a "cowl," which had to be snatched off quickly, else I should have laid there to be a prophet. Why a state of blindness at one's birth should premise extraordinary vision, spiritual or otherwise, later on, is not clear. No such vision has ever been vouchsafed to me; on the contrary, as my story will reveal, that early blindness continued in one form or another all through my search for Die Ferne.
My very earliest remembrance is a runaway trip, culminating in the village lockup. Although my mother declares that I was at least five years old when this happened, I have always believed that I was nearer four; at any rate, I remember that I wore dresses. The circumstances of the truancy and imprisonment were as follows: My parents were in the neighboring city for the day, and I had been left at home with the nurse. She had punished me pretty severely for some slight offense, and had then gone to the lake for water, leaving me in a lane in front of the house, very much disquieted. A sudden impulse to run took hold of me – anywhere, it did not matter, so long as the nurse could not find me.[Pg 3][Pg 4] So off I started with a rush for the main street of the village, my little white panties dangling along after me. That was my first conscious and determined effort to see the world in my own way and at my own discretion. It was the beginning of that long series of runaway excursions which have blessed or marred my life ever since. No child ever had a greater measure of unalloyed joy in his soul than I did when I dashed down that village lane, and no later escapade has ever brought me quite the same fine shade of satisfaction.
In the main street the village police officer stopped me, and on learning who I was, took me to the lockup for safe-keeping until my parents returned in the evening. I was not actually put in a cell – the lockup was fire station and village prison in one, and I was given the freedom of the so-called engine room. I remember that I spent most of the time sucking a stick of candy and marveling at the fire apparatus. Nevertheless it was imprisonment of a kind, and I knew it. It was the only punishment I received. My parents picked me up in the evening, apparently much amused. Could my father have realized what that initial truancy was to lead to I should probably have received one of his whippings, but fortunately he was in a mood to consider it humorously.
My father died at the early age of forty-two, when I was eight years old (1877). He was a tall, slender man, lithe, nervous and possessed of a long brown beard which always impressed me when looking at him. He was the editor-in-chief of a Chicago daily newspaper, which died six months after his demise. I have heard it said that he was the only man who could have made the paper a success, and trying to do this probably wore him out. He had experimented with various activities before taking the newspaper position, but he thought that he had at last found his life-work when he developed into an editor. The last year of his life he became very much interested in church matters. He came of good New England stock, his American progenitor helping to found the town of Concord, Mass.
I have often heard it said that my father was a brilliant man gifted with a remarkable sense of humor. He did not favor me with his humorous side very often, but I do recall a funny incident in which he revealed to all of us children a phase of his character which my mother probably knew much more about. Although my father had to leave the old brown house early in the morning in order to catch his customary train for the city, he insisted rigidly on holding family prayers before leaving. These prayers did not mean much to me whatever they may have stood for with him, but there was one morning when they did please me. My old cat had brought a litter of kittens into the world over night, and at prayer time had deposited them in father's chair. Not noticing them, he took the Bible and proceeded to sit down. There ensued a great deal of miyowing and spitting. "Damn the cats!" exclaimed my father, springing up, and then taking another chair he continued with the prayers. I laughed over this happening all day, and my father never again exposed himself to me in such human garb.
Perhaps my older sister was his favorite child, if he played any favorites. Whether she understood him better than the rest of us did I cannot say, but her whippings seemed to me to come very infrequently. Her ability to get him out of a punishing mood is well illustrated by the following incident.
Something that she had done had vexed him, as I remember the story, and she was in a fair way to be punished – "whaled," indeed, my father being unwilling to distinguish between the sexes in whippings as they applied to children. My sister had an inspiration as we considered it at the time – climbing into her father's lap, and gently stroking his almost straight hair, she said softly: "What lovely, curly locks you have, Papa!" The incongruity of her remark made him smile, and when he had once passed this Rubicon in his punishing moods he became friendly. I was never as clever as my sister in interviews of this character. What boy is as clever as his sister, when it comes to acting?
My father gone, the battle of life for us children shifted to my mother. My father left very few funds behind him, and it was necessary for my mother to be mother and bread-winner at the same time. I shall not enter into an account of her various activities to keep the family together, but she did this somehow in most honorable and useful ways for nearly ten years, departing then for Germany with the two girls to engage in educational work. No man ever made a braver struggle against fearful odds than did this mother of mine, and when I think of my almost unceasing cussedness throughout her struggle a remorse comes over me which is best not described. We stayed in the village during the ten years in question, and I grew to be a youth well on in my teens, but never looking my years, nor do I to-day in spite of the hard life I have led, and a great many days and nights spent in hospitals. This is not said to coddle my vanity. I merely mean that I got from my parents a wonderful constitution. I hardly think that the average man, had he risked his health as I have done, would have pulled through so well.
Our village, since developed into one of Chicago's most beautiful and fashionable suburbs – I sometimes think it is the most entrancing spot near a large city, so far as nature alone goes, that exists – was a strange locality for a wanderer of my caliber to grow up in. Settled originally by sturdy New Englanders and central New Yorkers, it early became a Western stronghold of Methodism. My people on both sides were early comers, my mother's father being a divinity professor in the local theological institute. My father's people inclined to Congregationalism I think, but they swung round, and when I knew my grandmother she was an ardent communicant among the Methodists. Such church instruction as I could stand was also found in this fold – or shall I say party? Some years ago an ex-governor of Colorado was saying nice things about my mother to the United States Minister in Berlin, and to clinch his argument why the Minister should look out for my mother, the ex-governor said: "And, Mr. Phelps, she belongs to the greatest political party in our country – the Methodist Church!" It never interested me very much to look into the church's machinery – I had what seemed much more important and seductive work in planning and carrying out my runaway trips – but in later years I must confess to having been impressed with similarities in Methodism as a religious policy and politics as a business. Methodism considered simply as a religious organization, ought to be described by some one who can study it impartially. The struggle for the high places in the church at conferences is woefully like that in political conventions. Men who want to be bishops pull wires and secure supporters in almost identically the same way that office seekers in conventions make their arrangements, and the fat jobs in the ministry are as earnestly coveted by aspiring preachers as are political offices in the nation at large. Perhaps this is all right; certainly, if figures, churches and converts count, the Methodists have done a great work; but Methodism as a religious cult had to pass me by.
The good villagers tried numberless times to have me "converted," and officially I have gone through this performance a number of times. Strangely enough, after nearly every one of my earlier runaway trips and my humble return to the village, bedraggled and torn, some revivalist had preceded me, and was holding forth at a great rate in the "Old First," where my people communed. My grandmother, my father's mother, invariably insisted on my attending the revival services in the hope that finally I would come to my senses and really "get religion." As much as anything else to show that I was sorry for the anxiety I had caused my mother during the latest escapade, I would take my grandmother's advice and join the mourners at the mercy seat. Two or three visits usually sufficed