The Making of Americans, Being a History of a Family's Progress (9 page)

     They had mixed up very well. They had made a good enough success with their living.
     They had had five children through her. Two of these had died as little children. Three of them had grown up and were now grown young men and women, and these three are of them who are to be always in this history of us young grown men and women to us, for it is only thus that we can ever feel them to be real inside in us, them who are of the same generation with us.
     The mother, little gentle Mrs. Hersland, was very loving in her feeling to all of her children, but they had been always all three, after they had stopped being very little children, too big for her ever to control them. She could not lead them nor could she know what they needed inside them. She could not help them, she could only be hurt not angry when any bad thing happened to them.
     She loved them and was very proud of all three of them. Often she wondered as she looked at them, how could they be so perfect and so wonderful and yet all three of them be so different from the others of them that there was hardly anything alike in the three of them.
     They were big children and each one of them in his own way was strong to do what they needed to find themselves free inside them. They were big children and she was only a very little mother to them. And they were not very loving children, they were too strong at finding their own way to feel free and important each one to himself inside him. They were to her very good children. She never had any trouble with them. And now she was a little ailing and they were good but then she never had been very important to them.
     Now we begin to learn more about the Hersland family and their way of living.
     As I was saying the father David Hersland was in some ways a very splendid kind of person but he had some very uncertain things inside him. He too was very proud of his children but it was not easy for them to be free of him. Sometimes he was very angry with them. Sometimes it came to his doing very hard pounding on the table at which they would be sitting and disputing, and ending with the angry word that he was the father, they were his children, they must obey him, he was master and he knew how to make them do as he would have them. Such scenes were very hard on the little gentle mother woman who was all lost in between the angry father and the three big resentful children who knew very well what they needed to have given to them so that they could be free inside them.
     This is the way the three Hersland children grew up to be strong each one to be free inside him. They were all big in themselves and in their way of winning. Soon you will learn slowly the history of each one of them, how each one was important to himself in him, and how they won a kind of freedom for themselves each one inside them.
     The little mother was not very important to them. They were good enough children in their daily living but they were never very loving to her inside them. They had it too strongly in them to win their own freedom.
     They turned to their father, altogether, in their thinking. It was against him inside, and strongly always around them, that they had to do the fighting for their freedom. Now the mother was a little ailing. She was all lost between the father and the three big struggling children.
     In their young days the father was proud of his children, proud that they were important each one to himself inside him, proud that they needed to win for themselves their own freedom. Always then he encouraged their disputing, he wanted then that they should fight and win out against him. As I was saying David Hersland the father of these big resentful children was in some ways a splendid kind of person. But now things were going less easily around him. Joy was a little dim inside now for all of them. Now he would often be angry and be given to pounding on the table and loudly declaring, he was the father, they were the children, they must obey else he would know how to make them. And the gentle little mother who every day was giving signs of weakening would sit scared, and afterwards she would be weeping, lost between the father and the three big resentful children.
     But this was all when they had become grown young men and women and joy was a little dim inside for all of them.
     Now listen to their lives as children, their early struggles each one to find for themselves freedom, the abundant father in them in those days full of joyous beginning, proud of himself and of his children, glad to feel that they were strong all of them to make for themselves their own beginning.
     Now I will tell you more of the Hersland ways of living in the old home with the wind and the sun and the rain beating, and the dogs and chickens and the open life, and the hay, and the men working, and the father's way of educating the three children so that they could be strong to make for themselves their own beginning, and the gentle little mother who was not very important to them, who had sometimes a fierce little temper that could be very stubborn but mostly she was only sad, not angry, when any bad thing happened to them, and the three children with the mixed up father and the little unimportant mother in them.
     As I was saying Mr. Hersland was big and abundant and always was very full of new ways of thinking. Always he was abundant and joyous and determined and always powerful in starting. Also sometimes he would be irritable and impatient and uncertain. Also he was in his way important inside to him, and all these things came out in his educating of his children.
     Truly he loved education. It was to him almost all there is of living. He did not do it with steadfast steady working, things always were a little uncertain with him. One never knew which way it would break out from him the things he was very good at starting and then other things would happen to him and to all the people around who were dependent on him.
     It was a very good kind of living the Hersland children had in their beginning, and their freedom in the ten acres where all kinds of things were growing, where they could have all anybody could want of joyous sweating, of rain and wind, of hunting, of cows and dogs and horses, of chopping wood, of making hay, of dreaming, of lying in a hollow all warm with the sun shining while the wind was howling, of knowing all queer poor kinds of people that lived in this part of Gossols where the Herslands were living and where no other rich people were living. And so they grew up with this kind of living, such kind of queer poor, for them, people around them, such uncertain ways of getting education that they had from the father's passion for all kinds of educating, from his strong love of starting and the uncertain things he had inside him.
     Altogether it was a good way of living for them who had a passion to be free inside them and this was true of all three of the Hersland children but mostly with Martha the eldest and the only daughter living, and the youngest David who was always searching to decide in him and no one could ever understand him, from day to day what life meant to him to make it worth his living. It was less in Alfred, this love of freedom, in Alfred who was soon now to be marrying Julia Dehning. He had some of it in him but not so strongly inside him as Martha and David and his father had it in them.
     Yes I say it again now to all of you, all you who have it a little in them to be free inside them. I say it again to you, we must leave them, we cannot stay where there are none to know it, none who can tell us from the lowest from them who are simply poor or bad because they have no other way to do it. No here there are none who can know it, we must leave ourselves to a poor thing like Alfred Hersland to show it, one who is a little different with it, not with real singularity to be free in it, but it is better with him than to have no one to do it, and so we leave it, and we leave the Alfred Herslands to do it, poor things to represent it, singularity to be free inside with it, poor things and hardly our own in it, but all we can leave behind to show a little how some can begin to do it.
     Yes real singularity we have not made enough of yet so that any other one can really know it. I say vital singularity is as yet an unknown product with us, we who in our habits, dress-suit cases, clothes and hats and ways of thinking, walking, making money, talking, having simple lines in decorating, in ways of reforming, all with a metallic clicking like the type-writing which is our only way of thinking, our way of educating, our way of learning, all always the same way of doing, all the way down as far as there is any way down inside to us. We all are the same all through us, we never have it to be free inside us. No brother singulars, it is sad here for us, there is no place in an adolescent world for anything eccentric like us, machine making does not turn out queer things like us, they can never make a world to let us be free each one inside us.
     And yet a little I have made it too strong against us in saying Alfred Hersland was the only one who could in this adolescent world represent us. The father David Hersland we cannot count for us, it was an old world that gave him the stamp to be different from the adolescent world around us. But there is still some hope for us in the younger David who is different from the people all around us, in him who always was seeking to be free inside him, to know it in him, and no one could ever understand him, what it was inside him that made it right that he should go on with his living. He as you shall hear in the history of him, does not really belong to the adolescent metallic world around him, and yet there was not that vital steadfast singularity inside him that custom passion and a feel for mother earth can breed in men. He did not have it really for him, custom, passion, certainty of place and means of living, stability within himself and around him, a feeling to be really free inside him and strong to be singular in his clothes and in his ways of living.
     But now to make again a beginning, to tell of the father David Hersland and the ways he had in him to make himself strong and important inside to him and to prove the right way to educate his children and the singularities the old world had stamped on him.
     David Hersland believed in hardening his children. He believed that everyone should make for himself his own beginning, that every one should win for himself his own freedom. This was always strong inside him with all the uncertain ways that he had in him, with all the strong starts and sudden changes in his way of educating the three children who had such different ways in them from the things he meant to give them.
     Mostly at first they the children felt this in him in the ways they were ashamed of him in just the simple ways he had of doing in the ordinary every day living.
     It is hard on children when the father has queer ways in him. Even when they love him they can never keep themselves from having shame inside them when all the people are looking and wondering and laughing and giving him a name for the queer ways of him.
     Mr. Hersland as I have been often saying was in some ways a splendid kind of person, and that was one way one could look at him. In other ways he was an uncertain changeful angry irritable kind of a person with a strong feeling of being important to himself inside him and not always certain to make other men see why he had so much important feeling in him. And then one could think of him, as children when they were young girls and boys felt him, queer in the ways he had of doing things that made them feel a little ashamed to say he was a father to them when other children spoke about him.
     These are some of the queer ways he had in him, the ways that made his children feel uncomfortable beside him. They were mostly just simple things in their ordinary living that gave his children this uncomfortable feeling for him.
     David Hersland was a big man. He was big in the size of him and in his way of thinking. His eyes were brown and little and sharp and piercing and sometimes dancing with laughing and often angry with irritation. His hands would be quiet a long time and then impatient in their moving. His hair was grey now, his eyebrows long and rough and they could give his eyes a very angry way of looking, and yet one could love him, in a way one was not afraid of him. He never would go so far as his irritation seemed to drive him, and somehow one always knew that of him. He had not so much terror for his children as fathers with more kindness and more steadfast ways of doing. One always had a kind of feeling that what one needed to protect one from him was to stand up strongly against him. He would stop short of where he seemed to be going, anger was there but it would not force him on to the final end of angry acting. All one had to do was to say then to him “Alright but I've got a good right to my opinion. You started us in this way of doing, you have no right to change now and say that its no way for us to be acting.” And so each one of the three children, Martha, Alfred and David would each in their own way resist him, and it made a household where there was much fierce talking and much frowning, and then the father would end with pounding on the table and threatening and saying that he was the father they were the children, he was the master, they must obey else he would know the way to make them. And the little unimportant mother would be all lost then in between the angry father and the three big resentful children. But all this was when they were beginning to be grown young men and women. When they were still children there was not any fierceness in the house among them.
     And now to come back to the queer ways of him. As I was saying the father was a big man. He liked eating, he liked strange ways of educating his children and he was always changing, and sometimes he was very generous to them and then he would change toward them and it would be hard for them to get even little things that they needed in the position that was given to them by their father's fortune and large way of living.
     In the street in his walking, and it was then his children were a little ashamed of him, he always had his hat back on his head so that it always looked as if it were falling, and he would march on, he was a big man and loved walking, with two or three of his children following behind him or with one beside him, and he always forgetting all about them, and everybody would stop short to look at him, accustomed as they were to see him, for he had a way of tossing his head to get freedom and a way of muttering to himself in his thinking and he had always a movement of throwing his body and his shoulders from side to side as he was arguing to himself about things he wanted to be changing, and always he had the important feeling to himself inside him.