Poor White: Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Hugh's first inventive effort stirred the town of Bidwell deeply. When
word of it ran about, the men who had been listening to the talk of Judge
Horace Hanby and whose minds had turned toward the arrival of the new
forward-pushing impulse in American life thought they saw in Hugh the
instrument of its coming to Bidwell. From the day of his coming to live
among them, there had been much curiosity in the stores and houses
regarding the tall, gaunt, slow-speaking stranger at Pickleville. George
Pike had told Birdie Spinks the druggist how Hugh worked all day over
books, and how he made drawings for parts of mysterious machines and left
them on his desk in the telegraph office. Birdie Spinks told others and the
tale grew. When Hugh walked alone in the streets during the evening and
thought no one took account of his presence, hundreds of pairs of curious
eyes followed him about.

A tradition in regard to the telegraph operator began to grow up. The
tradition made Hugh a gigantic figure, one who walked always on a plane
above that on which other men lived. In the imagination of his fellow
citizens of the Ohio town, he went about always thinking great thoughts,
solving mysterious and intricate problems that had to do with the new
mechanical age Judge Hanby talked about to the eager listeners in the
drug-store. An alert, talkative people saw among them one who could not
talk and whose long face was habitually serious, and could not think of him
as having daily to face the same kind of minor problems as themselves.

The Bidwell young man who had come down to the Wheeling station with a
group of other young men, who had seen the evening train go away to the
south, who had met at the station one of the town girls and had, in order
to escape the others and be alone with her, taken her to the pump in George
Pike's yard on the pretense of wanting a drink, walked away with her into
the darkness of the summer evening with his mind fixed on Hugh. The young
man's name was Ed Hall and he was apprentice to Ben Peeler, the carpenter
who had sent his son to Cleveland to a technical school. He wanted to marry
the girl he had met at the station and did not see how he could manage it
on his salary as a carpenter's apprentice. When he looked back and saw Hugh
standing on the station platform, he took the arm he had put around the
girl's waist quickly away and began to talk. "I'll tell you what," he said
earnestly, "if things don't pretty soon get on the stir around here I'm
going to get out. I'll go over by Gibsonburg and get a job in the oil
fields, that's what I'll do. I got to have more money." He sighed heavily
and looked over the girl's head into the darkness. "They say that telegraph
fellow back there at the station is up to something," he ventured. "It's
all the talk. Birdie Spinks says he is an inventor; says George Pike told
him; says he is working all the time on new inventions to do things by
machinery; that his passing off as a telegraph operator is only a bluff.
Some think maybe he was sent here to see about starting a factory to make
one of his inventions, sent by rich men maybe in Cleveland or some other
place. Everybody says they'll bet there'll be factories here in Bidwell
before very long now. I wish I knew. I don't want to go away if I don't
have to, but I got to have more money. Ben Peeler won't never give me a
raise so I can get married or nothing. I wish I knew that fellow back there
so I could ask him what's up. They say he's smart. I suppose he wouldn't
tell me nothing. I wish I was smart enough to invent something and maybe
get rich. I wish I was the kind of fellow they say he is."

Ed Hall again put his arm about the girl's waist and walked away. He forgot
Hugh and thought of himself and of how he wanted to marry the girl whose
young body nestled close to his own--wanted her to be utterly his. For
a few hours he passed out of Hugh's growing sphere of influence on the
collective thought of the town, and lost himself in the immediate
deliciousness of kisses.

And as he passed out of Hugh's influence others came in. On Main Street in
the evening every one speculated on the Missourian's purpose in coming to
Bidwell. The forty dollars a month paid him by the Wheeling railroad could
not have tempted such a man. They were sure of that. Steve Hunter the
jeweler's son had returned to town from a course in a business college at
Buffalo, New York, and hearing the talk became interested. Steve had in him
the making of a live man of affairs, and he decided to investigate. It was
not, however, Steve's method to go at things directly, and he was impressed
by the notion, then abroad in Bidwell, that Hugh had been sent to town by
some one, perhaps by a group of capitalists who intended to start factories
there.

Steve thought he would go easy. In Buffalo, where he had gone to the
business college, he had met a girl whose father, E. P. Horn, owned a soap
factory; had become acquainted with her at church and had been introduced
to her father. The soap maker, an assertive positive man who manufactured
a product called Horn's Household Friend Soap, had his own notion of what
a young man should be and how he should make his way in the world, and had
taken pleasure in talking to Steve. He told the Bidwell jeweler's son of
how he had started his own factory with but little money and had succeeded
and gave Steve many practical hints on the organization of companies. He
talked a great deal of a thing called "control." "When you get ready to
start for yourself keep that in mind," he said. "You can sell stock and
borrow money at the bank, all you can get, but don't give up control. Hang
on to that. That's the way I made my success. I always kept the control."

Steve wanted to marry Ernestine Horn, but felt that he should show what he
could do as a business man before he attempted to thrust himself into so
wealthy and prominent a family. When he returned to his own town and heard
the talk regarding Hugh McVey and his inventive genius, he remembered the
soap maker's words regarding control, and repeated them to himself. One
evening he walked along Turner's Pike and stood in the darkness by the old
pickle factory. He saw Hugh at work under a lamp in the telegraph office
and was impressed. "I'll lay low and see what he's up to," he told himself.
"If he's got an invention, I'll get up a company. I'll get money in and
I'll start a factory. The people here'll tumble over each other to get into
a thing like that. I don't believe any one sent him here. I'll bet he's
just an inventor. That kind always are queer. I'll keep my mouth shut and
watch my chance. If there is anything starts, I'll start it and I'll get
into control, that's what I'll do, I'll get into control."

* * * * *

In the country stretching away north beyond the fringe of small berry farms
lying directly about town, were other and larger farms. The land that made
up these larger farms was also rich and raised big crops. Great stretches
of it were planted to cabbage for which a market had been built up in
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati. Bidwell was often in derision called
Cabbageville by the citizens of nearby towns. One of the largest of the
cabbage farms belonged to a man named Ezra French, and was situated on
Turner's Pike, two miles from town and a mile beyond the Wheeling station.

On spring evenings when it was dark and silent about the station and when
the air was heavy with the smell of new growth and of land fresh-turned by
the plow, Hugh got out of his chair in the telegraph office and walked in
the soft darkness. He went along Turner's Pike to town, saw groups of men
standing on the sidewalks before the stores and young girls walking arm
in arm along the street, and then came back to the silent station. Into
his long and habitually cold body the warmth of desire began to creep.
The spring rains came and soft winds blew down from the hill country to
the south. One evening when the moon shone he went around the old pickle
factory to where the creek went chattering under leaning willow trees, and
as he stood in the heavy shadows by the factory wall, tried to imagine
himself as one who had become suddenly clean-limbed, graceful, and agile. A
bush grew beside the stream near the factory and he took hold of it with
his powerful hands and tore it out by the roots. For a moment the strength
in his shoulders and arms gave him an intense masculine satisfaction. 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.

The Ezra French farm lay beside Turner's Pike a mile north of the Wheeling
station and contained two hundred acres of land of which a large part was
planted to cabbages. It was a profitable crop to raise and required no more
care than corn, but the planting was a terrible task. 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. Taking the plant, dropped on the
ground by one of the plant droppers, he made a hole in the soft ground with
a small three-cornered hoe, and with his hands packed the earth about the
plant roots. Then he crawled on again.

Ezra the cabbage farmer had come west from one of the New England states
and had grown comfortably wealthy, but he would not employ extra labor for
the plant setting and the work was done by his sons and daughters. He was a
short, bearded man whose leg had been broken in his youth by a fall from
the loft of a barn. As it had not mended properly he could do little work
and limped painfully about. To the men of Bidwell he was known as something
of a wit, and in the winter he went to town every afternoon to stand in the
stores and tell the Rabelaisian stories for which he was famous; but when
spring came he became restlessly active, and in his own house and on the
farm, became a tyrant. During the time of the cabbage setting he drove his
sons and daughters like slaves. When in the evening the moon came up, he
made them go back to the fields immediately after supper and work until
midnight. They went in sullen silence, the girls to limp slowly along
dropping the plants out of baskets carried on their arms, and the boys to
crawl after them and set the plants. In the half darkness the little group
of humans went slowly up and down the long fields. Ezra hitched a horse to
a wagon and brought the plants from the seed-bed behind the barn. He went
here and there swearing and protesting against every delay in the work.
When his wife, a tired little old woman, had finished the evening's work
in the house, he made her come also to the fields. "Come, come," he said,
sharply, "we need every pair of hands we can get." Although he had several
thousand dollars in the Bidwell bank and owned mortgages on two or three
neighboring farms, Ezra was afraid of poverty, and to keep his family at
work pretended to be upon the point of losing all his possessions. "Now is
our chance to save ourselves," he declared. "We must get in a big crop. If
we do not work hard now we'll starve." When in the field his sons found
themselves unable to crawl longer without resting, and stood up to stretch
their tired bodies, he stood by the fence at the field's edge and swore.
"Well, look at the mouths I have to feed, you lazies!" he shouted. "Keep
at the work. Don't be idling around. In two weeks it'll be too late for
planting and then you can rest. Now every plant we set will help to save us
from ruin. Keep at the job. Don't be idling around."

In the spring of his second year in Bidwell, Hugh went often in the evening
to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the French farm. He
did not make his presence known but hid himself in a fence corner behind
bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the stooped misshapen figures
crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like
cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim
light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the
crouched crawling men. They came down the long row toward him, wriggling
into his line of sight like grotesquely misshapen animals driven by some
god of the night to the performance of a terrible task. An arm went up. It
came down again swiftly. The three-cornered hoe sank into the ground. The
slow rhythm of the crawler was broken. He reached with his disengaged hand
for the plant that lay on the ground before him and lowered it into the
hole the hoe had made. With his fingers he packed the earth about the roots
of the plant and then again began the slow crawl forward. There were four
of the French boys and the two older ones worked in silence. The younger
boys complained. The three girls and their mother, who were attending to
the plant dropping, came to the end of the row and turning, went away into
the darkness. "I'm going to quit this slavery," one of the younger boys
said. "I'll get a job over in town. I hope it's true what they say, that
factories are coming."

The four young men came to the end of the row and, as Ezra was not in
sight, stood a moment by the fence near where Hugh was concealed. "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?"

For a moment as he listened to the voices of the complaining workers, Hugh
wanted to go to them and ask them to let him share in their labor. Then
another thought came. The crawling figures came sharply into his line of
vision. He no longer heard the voice of the youngest of the French boys
that seemed to come out of the ground. The machine-like swing of the bodies
of the plant setters suggested vaguely to his mind the possibility of
building a machine that would do the work they were doing. His mind took
eager hold of that thought and he was relieved. There had been something in
the crawling figures and in the moonlight out of which the voices came that
had begun to awaken in his mind the fluttering, dreamy state in which he
had spent so much of his boyhood. To think of the possibility of building
a plant-setting machine was safer. It fitted into what Sarah Shepard had
so often told him was the safe way of life. As he went back through the
darkness to the railroad station, he thought about the matter and decided
that to become an inventor would be the sure way of placing his feet at
last upon the path of progress he was trying to find.

Hugh became absorbed in the notion of inventing a machine that would do the
work he had seen the men doing in the field. All day he thought about it.
The notion once fixed in his mind gave him something tangible to work upon.
In the study of mechanics, taken up in a purely amateur spirit, he had
not gone far enough to feel himself capable of undertaking the actual
construction of such a machine, but thought the difficulty might be
overcome by patience and by experimenting with combinations of wheels,
gears and levers whittled out of pieces of wood. From Hunter's Jewelry
Store he got a cheap clock and spent days taking it apart and putting it
together again. He dropped the doing of mathematical problems and sent away
for books describing the construction of machines. Already the flood of new
inventions, that was so completely to change the methods of cultivating the
soil in America, had begun to spread over the country, and many new and
strange kinds of agricultural implements arrived at the Bidwell freight
house of the Wheeling railroad. There Hugh saw a harvesting machine
for cutting grain, a mowing machine for cutting hay and a long-nosed
strange-looking implement that was intended to root potatoes out of the
ground very much after the method pursued by energetic pigs. He studied
these carefully. For a time his mind turned away from the hunger for human
contact and he was content to remain an isolated figure, absorbed in the
workings of his own awakening mind.

An absurd and amusing thing happened. After the impulse to try to invent a
plant-setting machine came to him, he went every evening to conceal himself
in the fence corner and watch the French family at their labors. Absorbed
in watching the mechanical movements of the men who crawled across the
fields in the moonlight, he forgot they were human. After he had watched
them crawl into sight, turn at the end of the rows, and crawl away again
into the hazy light that had reminded him of the dim distances of his own
Mississippi River country, he was seized with a desire to crawl after
them and to try to imitate their movements. Certain intricate mechanical
problems, that had already come into his mind in connection with the
proposed machine, he thought could be better understood if he could get
the movements necessary to plant setting into his own body. His lips began
to mutter words and getting out of the fence corner where he had been
concealed he began to crawl across the field behind the French boys. "The
down stroke will go so," he muttered, and bringing up his arm swung it
above his head. His fist descended into the soft ground. He had forgotten
the rows of new set plants and crawled directly over them, crushing them
into the soft ground. He stopped crawling and waved his arm about. He tried
to relate his arms to the mechanical arms of the machine that was being
created in his mind. Holding one arm stiffly in front of him he moved it up
and down. "The stroke will be shorter than that. The machine must be built
close to the ground. The wheels and the horses will travel in paths between
the rows. The wheels must be broad to provide traction. I will gear from
the wheels to get power for the operation of the mechanism," he said aloud.

Hugh arose and stood in the moonlight in the cabbage field, his arms still
going stiffly up and down. The great length of his figure and his arms was
accentuated by the wavering uncertain light. The laborers, aware of some
strange presence, sprang to their feet and stood listening and looking.
Hugh advanced toward them, still muttering words and waving his arms.
Terror took hold of the workers. One of the woman plant droppers screamed
and ran away across the field, and the others ran crying at her heels.
"Don't do it. Go away," the older of the French boys shouted, and then he
with his brothers also ran.

Hearing the voices Hugh stopped and stared about. The field was empty.
Again he lost himself in his mechanical calculations. He went back along
the road to the Wheeling station and to the telegraph office where he
worked half the night on a rude drawing he was trying to make of the parts
of his plant setting machine, oblivious to the fact that he had created a
myth that would run through the whole countryside. The French boys and
their sisters stoutly declared that a ghost had come into the cabbage
fields and had threatened them with death if they did not go away and
quit working at night. In a trembling voice their mother backed up their
assertion. Ezra French, who had not seen the apparition and did not believe
the tale, scented a revolution. He swore. He threatened the entire family
with starvation. He declared that a lie had been invented to deceive and
betray him.

However, the work at night in the cabbage fields on the French farm was at
an end. The story was told in the town of Bidwell, and as the entire French
family except Ezra swore to its truth, was generally believed. Tom Foresby,
an old citizen who was a spiritualist, claimed to have heard his father say
that there had been in early days an Indian burying-ground on the Turner
Pike.

The cabbage field on the French farm became locally famous. Within a year
two other men declared they had seen the figure of a gigantic Indian
dancing and singing a funeral dirge in the moonlight. Farmer boys, who
had been for an evening in town and were returning late at night to
lonely farmhouses, whipped their horses into a run when they came to the
farm. When it was far behind them they breathed more freely. Although he
continued to swear and threaten, Ezra never again succeeded in getting his
family into the fields at night. In Bidwell he declared that the story of
the ghost invented by his lazy sons and daughters had ruined his chance for
making a decent living out of his farm.

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