Home > Authors Index > Robert Herrick > Clark's Field > This page
Clark's Field, a novel by Robert Herrick |
||
Clark's Field (Preface) |
||
| Table of content |
Next > |
|
|
________________________________________________
_ The other day I happened to be in the town where I was born and not far from the commonplace house in the humbler quarter of the town where my parents were living at the time of my birth, half a century and more ago. I am not fond of my native town, although I lived in the place until I was seventeen or eighteen years old. It was never a distinguished spot and seems to have gained nothing as yet from having been my birthplace. It has some reputation of its own, however, but that is due to the enduring popularity of a certain cookstove that has long been manufactured there, the "Stearns and Frost Cooker," known to many housewives of several generations. In my youth the Stearns and Frost stove works were reputed to be the largest in the world, and most of the plain citizens of Alton were concerned in one way or another with them. I do not happen to be interested in the manufacture or sale, or I may add the use, of the domestic cookstove. As a boy I always thought the town a dull, ugly sort of place, and although it has grown marvelously these last thirty years, having been completely surrounded and absorbed by the neighboring city of B----, it did not seem to me that day when I revisited it to have grown perceptibly in grace.... Having a couple of spare hours before meeting a dinner engagement, I descended into a subway and was shot out in less than ten minutes from the heart of the city to the old "Square" of Alton,--a journey that took us formerly from half to three quarters of an hour, and in cold or rainy weather, of which there is a good deal in Alton, seemed truly interminable. From the "Square," which no longer had the noble amplitude of my memory, the direct way to Fuller Place lay up the South Road,--a broad thoroughfare, through the center of which there used to trickle occasionally a tiny horse-drawn vehicle to and from the great city of B----. South Road, I found, had changed its name to the more pompous designation of State Avenue, and it was noisy and busy enough to accord with my childish imagination of it, but none too large for the mammoth moving-vans in which the electric railroad now transported the inhabitants. These shot by me in bewildering numbers. I had chosen to make the rest of my journey on foot, trying leisurely to revive old memories and sensations. For a few blocks I succeeded in picking out here and there a familiar object, but by the time I reached the cross-street where we used to descend from the street-cars and penetrate the lane that led to Fuller Place I was completely at sea. The ample wooden houses fronting the South Road, each surrounded by its green lawn with appropriate shrubbery, had all given way before the march of brick business blocks. Even the "Reformed Methodist" church on the corner of Lamb Street had been replaced by a stone structure that discreetly concealed its denominational quality from the passer-by. Beyond the church there had been a half-mile of unoccupied land fronting on the Road, but now the line of "permanent improvements" ran unbroken as far as the eye could see. Into this maze of unfamiliar buildings I plunged and wandered at random for half an hour through blocks of brick stores, office buildings, factories, tenements,--chiefly tenements it seemed to me. Off in one corner of the district instead of high tenement buildings there was something almost worse, rows of mean, little two-story brick cottages that ranged upwards along a gentle slope that I tried to fancy was Swan's Hill,--a dangerous descent where my older brothers and I were once allowed to coast on our "double-runner." I will not weary the reader with further details of my wandering with its disappointment and shattered illusions, which can in no way be of interest to any but the one in search of his past, and of purely sentimental importance to him. It is, of course, a common form of egotism to chronicle such small-beer of one's origin, but it happens to have nothing to do with my purpose. Enough to say that at last I discovered Fuller Place,--a mean, little right-angled street that led nowhere; but from one end to the other I could not find my old home. Its site must now be occupied by one of those ugly five-story apartment boxes that spring like weeds in old towns and cities. As I lingered in front of the brick wall that I judged must very nearly cover the site of my birthplace, I tried to understand the sensation of utter unfamiliarity with which the whole place filled me. The answer came to me in a flash as I turned away from Fuller Place,--Clark's Field no longer existed! Its place was completely filled by the maze of brick and mortar in which for the better part of an hour I had lost myself. There was nothing surprising that after a third of a century a large, vacant field should have been carved up into streets, alleys, and lots, and be covered with buildings to house the growing population of a city. It is one of the usual commonplaces in our American cities and towns. But to me the total disappearance of Clark's Field seemed momentous. That large, open tract near my old home had more significance, at least in memory, than the home itself. It was intricately interwoven with all the imaginative and more personal life that I had known as a boy. One corner of the irregular open land known as Clark's Field had abutted my father's small property in Fuller Place, and I and my older brothers and our friends had taken advantage of this fact to open an unauthorized entrance into the Field through the board fence in the rear yard. Over that fence lay freedom from parental control and family tasks, and there was also, it happened, a certain bed of luscious strawberries which we regularly looted until the market gardener, who at the time leased this corner of Clark's Field, resigned himself to the inevitable and substituted winter cabbages for the strawberries,--a crop he had never been able to get to market. From the gardener's beds and small forcing-houses the land stretched away unbroken by cultivation or building to that Swan's Hill where we coasted and farther to the suburban estates of several affluent citizens,--I presume the homes of Stearns and Frost of stove fame and others no longer remembered. These places, with their stately trees and greenhouses and careful lawns, have also been merged into the domain of brick and mortar and concrete. To the right of the market garden, between us and the South Road, lay the level, treeless tract, about fifty acres in extent, which was specifically known as Clark's Field, although all the unused land in the neighborhood had originally belonged to the Clark farm. The Field was carefully fenced in with high white palings,--too high for a small boy to climb safely in a hurry. Certain large signs, at the different corners, averred that the Field was for sale and would be divided into suitable lots for building purposes, and also that trespassers were so little desired that they would be prosecuted by law. These signs were regularly defaced with stones and snowballs according to season, and were as regularly reerected every spring by the hopeful owner or his agent. For in spite of its difficult paling and warning signs, Clark's Field remained our favorite ball-field and recreation spot where in summer we dug caves and skated when the autumn rains were obliging enough to come before the frost. I suppose that we destroyed the signs as a point of honor, and preferred Clark's Field to all the other open land free to us because we could see no reason for the prohibition. At any rate, we "trespassed" upon it at all hours of day and night, and many a time have I ripped my clothes on the sharp points of those palings in my breathless haste to escape some real or fancied pursuit by one in authority. We had not only the regular police--the "cops"--to contend with, but we believed that old man Clark employed private watchmen and even descended to the mean habit of sneaking about the Field himself, peering through the close palings to snare us. There must have been some fire in all this smoke of memory, for I distinctly recall one occasion that resulted disastrously to me and has left with me such a vivid picture that its origin must have been real. I was one of the younger and less athletic of our gang and had been nabbed by the fat policeman on our beat and led ignominiously through the streets of Alton by the collar of my coat,--not to the police station in the "Square," nor to my father's house where my older brothers had often been brought in similar disgrace. This time the policeman, with the ingenuity of a Persian cadi, took me through the public streets direct to headquarters,--the home of Mr. Samuel Clark. It was, I believe, the only occasion on which I ever met the owner of Clark's Field, certainly the only time I ever had speech with him; not that there was much speech from me then. As I was reluctantly urged up the long graveled drive of the respectable wooden house near the Square, I saw an old, white-haired man getting into his family carriage with some difficulty. The large, heavy person of the owner of Clark's Field seemed to me a very formidable object when he turned upon me a pair of dark, scowling eyes beneath bushy white brows and muttered something about "bad boys." Those eyes and a curious trembling of the heavy limbs--due to palsy, I suppose--are the only things I recollect of Samuel Clark. Nor do I remember what he said to me beyond calling me a bad boy or what judgment he meted out. All I know is that I returned home without visiting the "lockup" behind the Square and became the subject of a protracted and animated family discussion. My mother, unexpectedly, took my part, inveighing against the "ogre" of a Clark who deprived "nice" boys of the enjoyment of his useless field, and urged my father, who had some acquaintance with fact as well as with law, to "do something about Clark's Field." My father, I think, was at last persuaded to visit the owner of the field to see what lawful arrangements could be made so that well-behaved boys might freely and honorably use the Field for their pleasure, until it should be disposed of to builders. (Which, of course, would have taken from it every shred of charm!) Whether in fact he made some such arrangement I cannot remember, nor whether having been once caught I was sufficiently intimidated by my visit to old Clark. All I know is that as long as we remained in Alton, the Field continued its useless, forlorn, unoccupied existence, jealously surrounded by a dilapidated though constantly patched fence, with its numerous signs inviting prospective purchasers to consult with the "owner"--signs that were regularly destroyed by succeeding generations of boys. Already in my youth the busy town was growing far beyond Clark's Field, along the South Road towards the new railroad station; but the Field remained in dreary isolation from all this new life until long after I had left the town. As I have said, this empty field of fifty acres was the most permanent experience of my youth. Its large, level surface, so persistently offered to unwilling purchasers of real estate, seized hold of my boyish imagination. I invented mysterious reasons for its condition, which as time went on must have been influenced by what I heard at the family table of the Clarks and their possessions. Now it is all inextricably woven in my memory into a web of fact and fancy. The Field stood for me during those fertile years as the physical symbol of the unknown, the mysterious,--the source of adventure and legend,--long, long after I had outgrown childish imaginings and had become fully involved in what we like to call the serious matters of life. To-day I had but to close my eyes and think of Fuller Place and my boyhood there to see that lonely field, jealously hedged about by its fence of tall white palings,--see it in all its former emptiness and mystery. Of Clark's Field and the Clarks I mused as I retraced my way through the maze of living that had been planted upon the old open land. All this close-packed brick and mortar, these dull streets and high business buildings, had been crowded man-fashion into the free, wind-swept field of my fancy. Five thousand people at least must now be living and largely have their being on our old playground,--a small town in itself. And the change had come about in the last fifteen years or less. How had it been brought to pass? Why after all the years of idleness that it had endured had a use for Clark's Field been found? Something must have broken that spell which had effectually restrained prospective purchasers of real estate through all the years when the city was pressing on beyond this point far away into the country.... The facts are not all dime-novelish, but very human and significant, and by chance the main thread of the real story of Clark's Field came to my knowledge shortly after my visit, correcting and enlarging the impressions I had formed from family gossip, the talk of playmates, and my own imagination. And this story--the story of Clark's Field--I deem well worth setting forth.... That same evening, when I entered the city hotel where I was to dine, I found my friend walking impatiently up and down the lobby, for in my search for the past I had forgotten my engagement and was late. Scarcely greeting my guest, I burst out,-- "Edsall, do you remember Clark's Field?" (For Edsall had once lived in Alton, though not in my part of the town.) "Yes," he replied, somewhat surprised by my breathless eagerness. "What about it?" "I want to know what happened to it and why?" Edsall, being a lawyer with a special interest in real estate, could tell me many of the known facts about the Clark property over which there had been some curious litigation. So the story grew that evening over our dinner, to be filled in later by many details that came to me unexpectedly,--I suppose because I was interested in the fate of Clark's Field. _ |
||