BOOK ONE
THE IMPULSE
FIRE IN THE EYE
DAVID TREADUP was born in the incorporated village of Salt Branch, New York, on July 7, 1878, at 4:36 p.m., or 5:17 p.m., or 5:23 p.m.
Discrepancies of this sort, and of deeper kinds, too, matters of linkage of body and soul, were to plague the entire future of this infant. One birthtime is written in a wobbling script on the flyleaf of the Treadup family Bible. The second appears in a ledger kept by Prudence Chin, the assisting midwife. The third is on David’s birth certificate, attested to by Pastor Philip Bokase of the Salt Branch Methodist Church, who was hastily called in at the delivery because of the alarming weakness of the mother toward the end of her labor. The inconsistencies evidently arose because no one noticed, in the confusion of an anxious delivery, just what time it was when the newborn David first cried out to greet life. The pull of what John Wesley had called “assurance”—the confidence that with enough faith, alertness, and willpower anyone could attain the Kingdom of Heaven—must have been such that each independently felt the need to summon up for God’s notice of this small event a speculative minute of the day. It speaks to the profound reserve of these people that they never pooled their guesses.
There is no doubt that the delivery was a dangerous one. In her ledger the midwife, Mrs. Chin, after recording the fee of one dollar and fifty cents for her ministrations, entered in a column headed “Particulars” a laconic note, “A fierce fight.” David Treadup wrote in his journal in China, when his mother died six decades later at a great distance from him, “I almost murdered her by the mere act of arrival in this world.” Hannah Treadup was a tiny, light-boned woman, and everyone agreed that David weighed at birth a monstrous twelve pounds and two ounces. Further entries in the family Bible show David to have been the fifth and last of Brownson and Hannah Treadup’s children, girl boy boy girl boy; perhaps, but for this “fierce fight,” there might have been several other births.
As for the baptism, David, wearing a long, lace-trimmed dress that had been handed down through his mother’s family for just this single use, was at six weeks touched with water on his forehead and admitted to the religion that would one day make a foreign legionnaire of him.
HE WENT home from his baptism crying and did not stop. It was as if the holy water had scalded him. On and on, all day after day, for weeks, he made a wild, discontented noise. As a student at Syracuse, writing self-consciously in his diary about his own startlingly loud voice in elocution class, David reported having been told that his father, hearing his crying in those weeks, had said he sounded “like Pastor Bokase singing ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me.’ ” Hannah grew frightened. Prudence Chin was called in. She weighed David on her balance; he had lost four pounds. She said it was clear: The baby was starving. Hannah, battered by the delivery, had come up nearly dry and had been too worn and depressed even to realize it.
There followed an anxious period, because Prue Chin said that she had neither served at, nor heard of, any other births in the village for nearly a year: a freakish drought of dragon seed in Blaine County. Finally news came of a sturdy nursing mother in Turcott, twelve miles from the Treadup farm. She was the wife of a blacksmith there, a fat and somewhat slovenly but warmhearted woman, people said; she was willing to suckle the Treadup child, but in exchange for her milk she wanted what the Treadups did not have: cash. Brownson Treadup went to Pastor Bokase, and the preacher arranged for some women of the church to “adopt” the baby, at least to the extent of raising money for the wet nurse. David was taken to Turcott and lived there, in a tight and dark little house, for eight months.
He was soon well; his gigantic little frame became fully fleshed out.
David Treadup believed in later years that he had a distinct and clear memory of being nursed by the Turcott woman. A memory from infancy? He insisted on it. It had come to him one night when he was in college, he claimed, as a kind of sudden bright picture; and it never left him after that. He described it in the manuscript he called “Search,” which he wrote many years later—in 1943—in a period when he felt a need to settle his mind about his past.
I see a window’s rectangle of light. All around me is a massive welcome of flesh. I can make no distinction between shoulder, arm, breast, though I always know where the dear bud is. The mass is warm. I am in a bath of love. My hands mold the source. I have the most exquisite sense of comfort and well-being.
When he was about seven, long before this “memory” had come to him, David was told by Will, the third child and second Treadup son, of his having been sent away to be nursed. Will put it in a triumphant older brother’s way: “You don’t belong to us.” David, who never kept in anything that caused him anger, went straight to his mother, told her what Will had said, and asked if it was true that he had been shipped away to be fed. Her answer was not completely forthcoming: “Of course you belong to us.” By the time he was twelve, David had been confided more about the “milker” by his complacent siblings, and he kept asking his mother who she was. His mother would never tell him the woman’s name. He could never even find out whether his mother had visited him in Turcott.
When, at eighteen, David went away to board at the Enderbury Institute, in Turcott, he began keeping a Line-a-Day diary, and one finds frequent notations: “Looked for the woman.” And once: “Looked for the other mother.” What clues could he have followed?
THE REAL MOTHER, Hannah Bledsoe Treadup, was a nimble little rabbit of a woman who did her share of heavy work on the Treadup farm; yet she also rigidly reserved certain hours for stillness—for reading, both to herself and in a murmur to her children. She kept apart an existence in books. “Words,” David wrote after she died, “were her amethysts, beryls, chalcedonies, and diamonds.” She evidently had a need to give these stones their settings, and she wrote everything down; David’s lifelong recording mania must have come from hers.
Serenity, poise, and sweetness changed guard in her with sudden sallies of a sharp tongue, fleeting looks of having been grossly cheated, and frowns implying that a Bledsoe had been intended for something more edifying than sterilizing the cream separator or hacking at a lump of suet for the obligatory mince pie of a winter Sunday. In a strong light one could see a tiny glint of hysteria in the sharp pupils of her dark brown eyes. These impressions come from David, who once wrote in his journal that his mother pulled at the kitchen pump as if she had Lucifer by the tail.
She came from old New England stock, and as she stirred things up in the western New York State village where fate had landed her, she made the bite of that heritage felt. “Resistance to something,” Henry Adams was to write, “was the law of New England nature…. The chief charm of New England was harshness of contrasts of extremes of sensibility—a cold that froze the blood, and a heat that boiled it—so that the pleasure of hating—one’s self if no better victim offered—was not its rarest amusement.” So with Hannah Treadup. She was, in her terms, though, a loving mother (save for chariness with the material gift of warm life at the breast), and such emanations of hatred as David caught from her were very weak. Indeed, all through life he shed on those around him an intermittent radiance of unsentimental love, which in his huge adult frame often grew very hot.
Hannah Treadup was cursed with a hopeless gentility: hopeless because it was never connected with money. She was pathetically proud of some odd pieces of majolica ware, which she always kept behind glass in a sideboard for fear that use might bring breakage in a family of such turbulent energies as hers had.
SHE PUT David down on paper. “He is a headstrong tyke,” she wrote in his Baby Book on his first birthday. Later: “He is much sunnier than the others. He passes off hardships.” Then this:
He will not be denied. Brownie whittled him a tiny little pig—too small. He chewed at it. I took it away. He howled for three days, as if with those old hunger pains. I could not hurt him so, and gave it back, and he was sweet. My land! He swallowed it whole. Now he missed it but did not take on the way he had. I was most anxious. He grew cranky. The second day he took a fever. Brownie did not want to trouble Dr. Fosco all the way from the village. I blamed Brownie severely, but he said a baby’s guts are like a goat’s, he would pass the little bung. On the third day he did. After I tidied him that baby gave me the same look he had given me when I returned the toy to him. Dearly sweet, but also something of Mama, you are too easy a mark.
Another time: “So big for his age! He has begun to walk. He is like a huge sailor on a pitching deck.” “He closes his eyes when I read to him, but I know he is not asleep.” “When the others tease him he neither sulks nor laughs. Sometimes I am afraid he will be hard.” “In his bath he cares only for the little boat Brownie carved out for him. I think he can say boat.” “Fire, fire, fire in David’s eye. God have mercy on the poor boy.” “A tinkerer. Fits things together. Potlid to pot. Hat to head. Brownson sits for his evening think and behind him comes David with the hat.” “His voice is as big as the rest of him. It seems to alarm even himself. He says bird. He says turtle.” “He watches the clock. He listens to the ticking.” “The other day Brownie took David to see the train come in. Now when the locomotive whistles before the hump, David jumps up and down and that look I fear comes in his eyes.” “I am teaching him to pray, Jesus friend of little children. He takes the boat to bed with him at night.” “O my big boy do not rush so at life.”
THE INFANT’S father, Brownson Treadup, was big, wily, resourceful, loud, restless, expansive—and disorganized. He was descended from early trappers in this region near Lake Ontario, and though the frontier had long since swept on westward, he still manifested traits of the huntsman. He hated confinement, and he was triply restrained: by his rundown farm; by the hot eye of his bantam wife; and by his religion, which, though he never quite understood it, was always somehow overhead, day and night—a heaven up there disturbingly unsettled by clouds of doubt.
The farm had belonged to Hannah’s father, Stephen Bledsoe, who had had seven daughters and no sons. On marrying Hannah, Brownson Treadup had moved into the Bledsoe farmstead, and when the old man died, Hannah and Brownson inherited the place. Hannah held over him heavy reminders of this delayed dowry, his whole worth. He was always poor. In need, he sold off a third of the original land. He had forever to trot here and trot there to stay one half pace ahead of Winthrop Jall, the mortgage officer of the Salt Branch National Bank—often mentioned in family correspondence.
Thus there were storms and alarms in the Treadup household, but there were also decent measures of civility, aspiration, and thought. At table, David later noted, his father talked not only of the prices corn and oats would fetch, but also of the new rolling stock of the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg Railroad; of the unusual tumbler and fantail pigeons raised by the character down in the village whom people called Irondequoit Pete; of Uncle Don Treadup, the rich spender of the family, who one year bought a hotel, another year a traveling circus; of Mark Twain and Sarah Orne Jewett and even Charles Darwin, with his message—no matter how rude to the Book of Genesis—of hope for the planet, if it was indeed true that all God’s creatures could adapt.
The Treadup farm was two miles north of Salt Branch village, on the Clearport road. It comprised fifty-three acres, about half of which were in ill-kept woodlots; there were some five acres of worthless swampland in its back reaches, near stretches of the lower Branch. Brownson Treadup grew feed corn, wheat, oats, barley, and hay; kept a herd of milch cows, usually numbering twelve, and a pen for four or five pigs; had an ox and three horses for draft; tended a kitchen garden; and raised chickens and, in some years, turkeys.
There were never enough hands. As soon as they could toddle, the children were assigned chores, and by the time they were about ten they were drawn into heavy labor of the farm. David’s father worked desperately hard, and David’s later testimony was that he never heard a word of complaint to a member of the family from his father, never a curseword, never an angry speech to his mother; he reserved his bluster for the livestock and for men in the village.
But Brownson was a hopeless planner. As a missionary, his son David came to be known as almost ferociously meticulous in laying out every undertaking—outlines, lists, schedules to the split minute, gear lined up in neat bundles; this exactness may have been a response to his father’s maddening sloppiness. Day after day on the farm brought a critical, yet somehow familiar, surprise. Brownson was always having to send for an emergency hired hand, usually a boy from the village who would not need to be paid much. Once, mown hay lay mildewing in the meadows because Brownson, having three times forgotten to pay his mortgage installments (how easy for debts to drop out of mind!), had to spend two days in the village arguing with Winthrop Jall.
For the children, their father’s disorganized ways were deeply confusing. Impressed by his stoic example, by his working to bleak exhaustion for their sakes, they arose each morning docile and willing to do whatever chores they must. But they never knew what to do. Instead of rotating regular assignments, Brownson told each child where to dash off to, and what to do, each morning, as he noticed, as if for the first time in his life, what various jobs needed doing to get the day under way.
From this perhaps unlikely parentage—from a father stamped with a loud and blustering but finally indecisive masculinity, a mother of gentle intellect edged with ferocity and dissatisfaction—stemmed not only the great persistence, the ragelike energy, and the occasional narrow follies of the grown David Treadup, but also his immense reserves of courage, hope, humor, and free-floating love.
“I LIKE crowds,” David wrote many years later in China. “I am a school fish.”
The small house on the Salt Branch farm contained a preparatory turmoil of children and animals. From the time when David could sleep in a bed, all five children shared one bedroom. They clattered up and down the narrow stairs; they whooped and shrieked in the echoing rooms till their mother put her hands over her ears. There were two dogs, four to seven cats, a series of canaries, off-and-on turtles, and two squirrels for a time which ran and ran forever in squeaky circular wire treadmills, like little Ferris wheels, which the father built within their cage. Here was the Treadup brood when David was, as his mother wrote, “Terrible Mr. Two”: Sarah, the oldest, was eight; Paul was seven; Will, five; Grace, four; and then the Terrible Two, already nearly as tall as Will. Besides the seven Treadups in the house, there were often boarders for the sake of a few dollars; hired hands who slept in a shed but ate with the family; visiting relatives who stayed longer than invited; vagrants whom Hannah’s charity could not deny; drummers and canvassers and schoolmarms and Pastor Bokase—eaters all. No wonder the Treadups were poor.
Of the older children, only two figured importantly in David’s life: Paul and Grace. Sarah was to die at twelve, of diphtheria. Will, who always hated David, went “into business,” it was said; in fact, he worked all his life in the mail room of the National Cereal Company, in Niagara Falls. He became a bitter, narrow man, and he and David almost never wrote to each other.
Paul was a tall, sensitive boy whom their father, for some reason, could not help tormenting. Being the oldest male child, Paul always drew the heaviest chores, and he never seemed to get them done to Brownson Treadup’s satisfaction. Paul was nevertheless gentle and considerate. “You are the kindest person I ever knew,” David wrote him in a letter from China. “I think you are the one, more than anyone else, who caused me to want to help others in life.” Paul became David’s protector against Will. The two developed a tender fraternal love. It is clear from their correspondence that David was his older brother’s most important hero. Paul tried to carry on the farm awhile after their father’s death, but he was not strong enough, and he became a much beloved teacher of small children in a public school in Geneseo.
The bond with Grace was quite another matter. She was a mischievous, pigtailed runt—she had her mother’s build—and she and David kept up, for many years, a teasing, joking, bantering relationship. They called each other by their names spelled backwards: Ecarg and Divad. They could always find something to laugh about. Often, alas, it was Will, and as the sense of humor grew large with David’s frame, one could see firming in him a narrow streak of cruelty—never gross, always witty, but essential in his laughter as it so often is in the wildest of humor. Ecarg and Divad always behaved like a couple of puppies rolling on the floor and nipping at each other. Grace never married. She became a librarian in the town of Cato.
FOREBEARS
WHERE did the missionary impulse come from? David Treadup’s heritage was somewhat ambiguous as it bore on his calling. On his mother’s side: a line of New England divines, shrewd petty manufacturers, and farmers bitterly dissatisfied with what the glacier had dealt them, their harsh Calvinist temperaments modulating, after their western trek, toward a warmer Methodist optimism. On his father’s: the vigor, tough athleticism, self-sufficiency, and forest raptures of the trapper’s life, followed by the Indian-threatened farming of newly opened land, and an almost mute religiosity, having to do with the suspected presence of the eye of God in the tops of trees and in the mysterious depths of trout pools in clear country streams. On both sides: strong fiber, ample courage, a constant uneasy dialogue with ancient values, and outcroppings, all along the way, of excess.
THE NAME of William Bledsoe, Hannah Treadup’s first American ancestor, is found in the records of New Town, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a place later known as Cambridge. The family gift of dissatisfaction promptly cropped up. Along with Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone and others, William Bledsoe quarreled, two years after they landed, with the narrow-minded and repressive authorities of the colony, over what we do not know, and migrated to establish the Hartford Colony.
David Treadup was proud of his descent from this cantankerous William Bledsoe because Bledsoe was listed as one of the freemen who helped draw up the Hartford Colony’s Fundamental Orders, the first coherent frame of an orderly and decent polity on the American continent—a document which influenced the later constitutions of Connecticut and other states, and which embodied the ringing principle that the foundation of authority of a government is the consent of its people. In his early years as a missionary Treadup often urged this simple rule of power on Chinese officials. As time passed, it slowly dawned on him that this idea, which was apt for the Hartford Colony and later as an American ideal, might not work quite so well in a country habituated for thousands of years to “the four obediences”—of subject to prince, son to father, wife to husband, younger brother to older brother.
BLEDSOES appear to have been valued citizens up and down the Connecticut River Valley in subsequent years. We find townspeople of that name, several of the men Congregationalist pastors, in Wethersfield, Windsor, Holyoke, and Greenfield; and Bledsoes held numerous town offices, as fence viewer, haywarden, train-band ensign, sheep-mark recorder, and, in two cases, selectman. Like other colonists of that area and era, the Bledsoes must have been thrifty, self-reliant, and industrious, but also stubborn, suspicious of outsiders, and strong-minded. The farmers among them worked a trashy soil and with their stoic oxen dragged rocks on stone boats year after year to the ragged walls that marked the outermost limits of their strength and patience.
NOAHDIAH SANDERS, a Calvinist forebear of Hannah Treadup, was the Congregationalist minister of Stapleton, Connecticut; one of his two daughters married David’s maternal great-great-grandfather Reuben Bledsoe.
“Preacher Sanders’s later years,” the Stapleton town history tells us, “were clouded by a great tragedy.” It seems that when Reverend Sanders was about forty, an orphaned niece was taken by necessity into the Sanders home. This was a young woman of eighteen, “a plain-faced but rounded girl.” To his great shame, Reverend Sanders began to feel a lust for this woman which grew more and more relentless. “When she was seated in a forward pew of the meeting house,” the history says, “he could not conduct divine service in an orderly or regular manner, and her presence in his home distracted him almost beyond reason.” In 1764, he caused to be built in one corner of the room where he wrote his sermons a wooden pen or cage, “to which he used to go voluntarily when he felt that his want of the woman Ruth Cloggs was moving beyond his control, and he would order his wife to lock him in.” One day the Cloggs woman, who wonderfully did not know herself to be the cause of this unusual precaution, entered Reverend Sanders’s workroom, while the minister was pent up, and began cleaning and dusting. “She was leaning far over,” the record tells, “when she heard a most terrible bellowing and then a crash, for Reverend Sanders had burst through the locust saplings of his cage and had escaped his durance. He stood near her for a time, moaning, then ran from the room, crying out, ‘Lord God, help me!’ ” He then had the cage rebuilt with four-inch locust posts, and from then on, with his wife’s help, he was safe. “The reading to him by his wife of his own sermons, and the recalling to him of his mother’s name and love, would exorcise the evil spirit and restore him to calmness. ‘Thank you, my cherished helpmeet,’ he would say to his wife, ‘you may release me now.’ ” This practice continued until Reverend Sanders was sixty-one years of age and Ruth Cloggs was thirty-nine; she finally found a nondescript husband, who took her away. Noahdiah Sanders died in his chair eight weeks later.
REUBEN BLEDSOE, whom Reverend Sanders’s daughter Rebecca married, was an identical twin. Reuben and Benjamin were called “the two Bens.” According to the Stapleton town history, “They were of widespread fame as players on the bagpipes, and the wonder of small boys was how two such little men, who, windbags and all, would hardly weigh as much as a pair of full-grown bullfrogs, could make so much noise.”
One day in 1794, tiny Reuben left Stapleton alone on ponyback. He said he was going to Albany to visit a sick cousin. The town history, while not denying that this cousin ever existed, does say that “by this time Reuben Bledsoe had earned a reputation as a swift fox.” He had lied about going to Albany. He turned up instead in Schenectady, nosing around the offices of some western-territory land jobbers. Soon he made a compact with a certain Trent, “a weasel.”
This was his interest: In the western part of New York, due south from Sodus through Seneca Lake and on to the Pennsylvania border ran what was called the Pre-emption Line. The land to the west of this line belonged to Massachusetts, which had retained its colonial claim to a strip across New York when yielding its western territory to Congress; New York had sovereignty over the whole region, Massachusetts owned the real estate. That land was sold in a more or less orderly way. But on the eastern side of the Pre-emption Line stood the so-called Military Tract, the vast acreage of which was being sold to pay off the New York veterans of the Revolutionary War; and because military warrants could be bought and sold, most of the lands were cornered by jobbers, and trading in them was highly speculative. Weasel Trent was one of these jobbers, and Fox Bledsoe became his agent in central Connecticut.
Reuben returned to Stapleton. His cousin in Albany was mended, he said. Now the fox bought a small letterpress. (His twin Benjamin, a farmer, had nothing to do with Reuben’s ventures.) There soon began to flutter through all the neighboring valleys a series of vivid broadsides, advertising in the most alluring terms the Paradise of the West. These circulars touched the nerves of those who were restless: those with spent land in which the rocks were breeding; those with many children and few acres; those who had had scrapes with the law; the disgruntled, the greedy, the aspiring. The broadsides’ most notable feature was a flood of ecstatic letters from early arrivals in the Military Tract.
Reuben’s harvest was bountiful. By 1795 “Genesee fever” had set in. Soon five hundred wagons a day were moving out on the Mohawk Trail. But now there began to arrive in Stapleton some disturbing letters from former residents who had dealt for land with Reuben Bledsoe. Questions hung in the air. Finally the town selectmen called on Reuben. Had he, in the richness of his fantasy, himself composed the letters in his broadsides that were supposed to have come from ecstatic buyers? His answers were evasive. Further protests, that Bledsoe’s prices had been grossly out of line, bombarded the authorities.
In May 1796, the town constable arrested the man he thought to be Reuben Bledsoe. Later, at the barn of the town hall, where the lockup was maintained, the elders charged him with fraud and extortion.
The prisoner loudly protested that they had the wrong twin; he was the farmer.
The next day the constable went to Benjamin’s farm, but Benjamin was not at home; his wife said he had been away from home overnight: more she would not say.
Scouting parties went out. Near Hartford they found on horseback the other twin, who stoutly affirmed that he was the farmer, on his way to the capital to borrow money from the bank.
Both were now locked up, to make sure. The innocent Bledsoe, whichever he was, was so outraged by this treatment that he connived with his twin. Some days both would say they were Benjamin; some days both were Reuben. The upshot was that after a week, hounded by the scolding Bledsoe wives, the frustrated selectmen dropped the accusation. How could they even know that when the pair was released, the right twin would go to the right home?
The real Reuben Bledsoe quietly let it be known, a month or two later, that his cousin in Albany had passed away.
IN 1793, before the start of this shady real estate game, Reuben Bledsoe’s second son, Jonathan, had volunteered for a road-building team on the Mohawk Trail. This was something like military service; young men of good family went off for a few fair-weather months, attracted by adventure in country where Indians were still resisting the advance of the white man. Jonathan worked on a highway that branched away northeastward from the Mohawk Turnpike, headed for Seneca Lake.
Did they call this a highway? The team chopped out small trees and underbrush in a swath averaging twenty feet in width; they sawed off heavier boles eighteen inches from the ground and left the larger trees to stand right in the middle of the thoroughfare. Such was the road. In wet weather it was a quagmire; at best, it was as rough as a sea passage through a typhoon. The team built log bridges over only the smallest streams; rivers had to be crossed by fords or ferries.
Jonathan, never having seen an Indian, returned to Stapleton with a dream of emigration. He married a sturdy, devout woman, and in 1799 his father, to be rid of a son who was nearly two feet taller than he, gave Jonathan two hundred fifty acres, one half of Lot 68, out there in the Military Tract—land that Reuben had bought for one dollar an acre—and soon Jonathan was driving his wagon, no doubt complaining all the way about the condition of the trail he had helped to hack out.
The father also gave Jonathan the means to become “an equipped farmer.” It eventually cost Jonathan, to establish his farm, $5 an acre to have the land cleared; $70 for split-rail fencing; $225 for tools and machines; $100 for two oxen and a horse; $35 for a log cabin; and $80 for food until his own first crops came in.
He laid the foundation of his log cabin, thirty feet by eighteen, on November 12, 1799, hoping to be in by the first day of the last year of the century, but three feet of snow fell on the fifteenth of November. He and his wife wintered with a Haverkamp family. He shoveled out the snow in February, built his cabin, and moved in on March 1, 1800.
So it was that the mother’s side of David’s family found its way to Salt Branch.
NOTHING is known, beyond word of his existence as a trapper and fur trader in the region east of Lake Ontario, of David Treadup’s paternal great-great-grandfather, Jacob Treadup.
Of his type we know that such fur traders needed much air to breathe. There is a story of a trapper in what was later the Oswego area, a certain William Palliter, who shot one John Fent dead because Fent had intolerably crowded him by building a cabin twelve miles away from his. These trappers were resourceful, and they were trained down to muscle and gristle. They lived on the flesh of the deer, the bear, and the wild turkey, and later on that of the steer, the hog, and the ram; they supped, for trimmings, on bean porridge, mush and milk, toasted bread, and amber cider.
They had to coexist with the Cayugas, Senecas, and Onondagas, and they took on the Indians’ ways, borrowing their clothes, their woodcraft, their planting lore, and sometimes their women. It is quite possible that David Treadup had some distant Indian blood; he speculates about this more than once in his diaries, and it is not at all clear that he likes the idea.
Trappers such as Jacob Treadup helped prepare for later settlers by “civilizing” the natives—ironic analogue of the subsequent Western penetration of China—by giving them guns to shoot their enemies, whiskey to inflame their pleasures, knives and knickknacks to swell their greed, technology to raddle their culture, and syphilis to pollute their offspring (though of course it should not be suggested that Jacob Treadup in New York or the missionary army in China traded at all in this last item). As for taking, trappers like Jacob Treadup must have caught from these superior tribes something of their dignity and their irreducible morale.
THE TRAPPERS’ volatile relationship with the Indians bore strange fruit in the next generation, in the experience of Jacob Treadup’s son Roger. The story of his great-grandfather is one that David Treadup often told to colleagues in China; he seems to have been haunted by it, perhaps because of its elements of exile, hardihood, and primitive survival. In somewhat homesick letters from China to his brother Paul, he sometimes referred to “my hard exile here.”
In his middle years Jacob Treadup bought some land for his two sons near the center later called New Haven, New York (where in due course, though the fact has no bearing on this tale, there would be situated a nuclear power plant), and Roger and his older married brother cleared it for rough farming; each son had title to fifty patrimonial acres of hardship. They lived in the same house.
One July day in 1789, Roger Treadup, then twenty-one, took part in a cabin raising for a new settler, the communal labor of which was capped by the serving of a tub of hard cider. Roger drank his share, or more. “Very inconsiderately, and out of mere wanton sport,” the account goes,
he cut off the tail of a dog belonging to an Indian, who, a stranger and entirely unknown, happened to be in the vicinity. The master of the dog, though he uttered no complaint, manifested such emotions of ill will and revenge that Treadup before they separated deemed it prudent for himself to attempt to pacify him. He sought therefore a reconciliation, by proposing to drink together, and offered, moreover, reparation for the injury. But the Indian rejected all overtures and left the ground, evidently in a surly and unreconciled mood of mind.
Not long afterward, Roger Treadup and his brother invited their friends to a corn-husking party in the yard of their house. As they talked after dark, Roger said he planned to try early the next morning to find his horse, which was feeding in the forest to the west of the settlement. “This conversation, as it appears from the sequel, was overheard by Indians, who must have been, at that time, lurking about the house.”
Early the next morning Treadup took a bridle and went into the woods to look for his horse. As he turned to skirt some boggy ground, three Indians jumped out from hiding in the underbrush and overpowered him; they tied his hands behind his back with the throat latch of the bridle and marched him off.
They were Onondagas, and they joined a party that was migrating north toward Canada. One chilly night Treadup, with his arms pinioned, was laid beside a fire. “Mischievous ones among the Indian children tickled his tender bare feet with grass, and in his rage he kicked his tormentors away and tumbled two of them into the fire. He expected to be killed for this aggression, but instead the fathers of the burnt children patted him on the shoulders and said, ‘Boon, boon.’ ” [Was this “Bon, bon”?]
In Canada, where the group joined a tribal encampment, Roger was forced to run naked through a gauntlet, whipped and bludgeoned along the way. He lost his nerve and bolted from the line into an old squaw’s tent. She gave him sanctuary, at what may have seemed a steep price: “He was,” as the account puts it, “obliged to assume the carnal duties of a husband.”
He lived under the squaw’s protection for five years. Then one winter day, pulling her on a sled to a venison feast on the top of a steep hill, he slipped and fell and, “either by design or unable to hold on,” he let go the harness of the sled, which ran down to the foot of the hill and hit a stump; the old woman was crippled. Treadup “affected sadness,” but he soon arranged, “through the agency, it is said, of a Papist priest,” to have himself sold to a Frenchman, who allowed him to work as a weaver, on a wage.
In two years he had earned enough to buy his freedom, and he made his way on foot back to New Haven, where he “appeared as one risen from the dead.” His brother, asserting that after so many years Roger had legally ceased to exist, refused to take him in, and Roger Treadup drifted to Salt Branch. He took work in a lumber mill.
DAVID TREADUP’S two grandfathers: the frugal, slight-bodied, sobersided Stephen Bledsoe, active in the Methodist church, conservative, a good manager, a gentle and kindly man surrounded by women—his mother, his wife, and seven daughters; and the millworker’s son, Samuel Treadup, a hulking, dashing, carefree loner, who bought a rundown farm out on the Turcott road and, in David Treadup’s words, “tried the old game of wrestling with a whiskey bottle, with the usual result—to get thrown.”
IN THIS missionary’s ancestry, religion was a constant presence but by no means an overbearing or crushing presence. The original Puritan colonists, who were mostly drawn from the ranks of English country gentlemen and middle-class entrepreneurs, had other motives besides the desire for religious freedom in emigrating to Massachusetts Bay: theirs was a time of political and economic unrest and change in England, and their discontents were material as well as spiritual; much of their daily concern, and that of their descendants, was worldly. Some of the early Bledsoe ministers undoubtedly preached the brutal Calvinist doctrine of predestination, but John Wesley had intervened in the eighteenth century, and David Treadup’s more immediate religious heritage was that of a merciful and confident Methodism, which preached of a loving God who appealed to the free will of all men and women, every one of whom might achieve redemption. And though the Treadup family prayed together daily, and Hannah often read aloud from the Bible, this Methodism was largely a Sabbath matter in Salt Branch, less a constant scourge than a social mode.
Off and on all through his life, David Treadup kept commonplace books, in which he copied prose passages and poems, and noted observations, recollections, scraps for speeches, items of world news—whatever he thought might be useful in his calling. In one entry in 1909 he copied a passage from Jonathan Edwards’s famous Enfield sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” and then commented on it:
“The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire…. Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to hold a fallen rock.”
No! no! no! This is not the God I know, not my God of the New Testament. In my family we were not afraid of him, we felt sure of his friendship. [David Treadup never followed the convention of capitalizing pronouns referring to God or to Jesus Christ.] I remember a story about my great-grandfather Roger Treadup, who learned to play both the fife and the fiddle. He had the habit, after he came home from work at the lumber mill, of taking his fiddle, gathering his children around him on the stoop, and “chasing dull care away.” One evening, while he was playing this way, the driver of the Oswego stage, passing by, stopped his horses so the passengers might listen. Having an audience incited Roger to greater effort, and he sawed his sweetest. As he finished the strain, one lady exclaimed, “That is good music, I declare. I hope we shall have as good as that in heaven.” Quick as thought, and at the same time drawing his bow, my great-grandfather said, “You will, madam. I shall be there.”
Our folks felt they could even afford to be playful with God. I recall another family story—this one about old Jonathan Bledsoe, who originally cleared our place and put it on a workable footing. One Sunday morning he walked to his dam and was surprised to see a large school of perch. He told his sons about this sight and said it was a shame that it was the Sabbath, which was even stricter then than now, so that the work—or sport—of fishing would have been quite forbidden. When he sat down for dinner a large baked perch was put before him. He began his blessing, “Dear Lord, we thank thee for thy miracles,” ate a large portion, and asked no questions.
TRACES of Treadups and Bledsoes in the written record, of which we have seen examples here, may have given a somewhat distorted picture of the lineages. Town histories abound with “characters,” one-sided personalities, eccentrics, and cranks, mostly male. There must have been among David Treadup’s forebears many who would not have appeared in such records—unspectacular people of steady habits, sound and stable and probably often dull men and women. We are to see in this missionary, at any rate, a constant tension between the trembling side and a part of him which is granite. Between the possible saint and the mere healthy man. What is moving in his story, what may in the end be thought to redeem the obvious failure of his mission in China, is his lifelong struggle to subdue the greater but sicker saint in himself and give himself to a more modest state of being: one of balance, sanity, serenity, and realized human love in the face of a shifting and violent and mostly hateful world.
FARM AND VILLAGE: THE SHAPING YEARS
SALT BRANCH, lying in what had been mostly Onondagan hunting grounds, on gently rolling wooded land not far from the eastern end of Lake Ontario, was an ideal missionary seedbed. In one sense it was merely a place of pause. It was a way station of the westward push. Many moved on. “I grew up quite aware of the great American urge to counter the rotation of the earth,” Treadup once wrote: New England in one generation, western New York State the next, then the Old Northwest, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, the Mississippi Valley—and on and on, as if American genes were coded with westing; so that the leap David Treadup eventually took, westward even beyond Pacific sunsets, to China, and westward even there, seemed just one tiny inevitable aspect of the endless counterrevolving that had started with religious nonconformity and persecutions in Europe and England.
“BROTHERS PAUL and Will and I worked hard on farm,” David wrote as a senior at Syracuse in a memoir, telegraphic in tone, which he entitled “Events of My Early Life.” “Father believed boys should work hard and I fear did not give us as much time for play as boys should have. The girls not spared either. We were taught seven days.”
A “simple life,” one might think. Open country sparsely settled. A pure high sky. Pungent odors—of the creamery, of fresh bread rising, of the hayloft, of the steaming manure heap, of new rain on plowed clods. Mother canning. Father shaping a beam with ax and adze. Cheese press, butter churn. Peepers, catbirds, bullfrogs, cows lowing. The time-stopping quiet of snowbound days.
But life on the Treadup farm was in truth a scrape, a push, a fever. “Father in debt for farm,” David wrote in “Events.” “He and mother always worked to bone.” An agricultural revolution was taking place in mainstream America, but Brownson Treadup was in an eddy of habit and poverty. Farming elsewhere was being mechanized, but the reaper, the thresher, the binder, the baler were far beyond his means. When David, in his sophomore year at Syracuse, turning toward science, took botany and discovered Edmund Ruffin’s Essay on Calcareous Manures, published seventy years before, he wrote his father an excited letter. In part:
This man Ruffin—he could have made things easier for you. He was a Fire-Eater, Dad. He lived in Virginia, but he was a hair-brained [sic] states righter and he moved to Charleston and they gave him the honor—imagine, Dad—of firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. A manure man!
As he learned about these things, David wrote further letters to his father—on the work on wheat rust, of Mark Carlton; on corn strains, of George Hoffer; on hybrids, of Luther Burbank. Yet when David went home during Easter, summer, and Thanksgiving breaks, the notes he wrote in his diaries were the same old ones: “Planted corn in orchard.” “Put ashes on corn all day for Father.” “Hoed corn.” “Helped draw wheat.” “Bound wheat all day. Hands sore.”
Labor in his childhood years was the habit of life: not a principle, not an aspect of an ethic, simply an unrelenting dark-to-dark fact. Yet so deeply did this habit enter the soul of this young boy that it eventually became a kind of passion, an excruciating joy. In “Events” he writes:
I was always very ambitious, often beyond my strength. I used to go to village and pick fruits for Dr. Fosco, and later for C. F. Jonson—weighed 90 lbs. I turned a paring machine for hire, pared 50 bu. a day. I sat next to a large man and tried to keep up with him—used to be very tired.
And another passage:
I shall always remember a record I made in husking corn. It was after my sickness and I was not very strong. I husked 34 bu. and tied my stalks in the forenoon, and Father would not let me continue in afternoon.
THE BAD NAME missionaries have been given in popular American lore was at least partly earned for all of them by those who were barren-minded, the devotees and bigots, who were often immensely shrewd but were seldom immensely intelligent. “How could a Protestant God have stomached such stupid enthusiasts?” David once burst out in his diary, after a brush with a pair of “narrow” fundamentalists. Whatever David Treadup’s other faults may have been, he was not stupid. He was, besides, very lucky in the phases of the training of his mind. The opening stage came in District No. 5 School, of Salt Branch, “located on the Isaiah Chase land on the east side of the Clearport Road next to a buttonball tree.” He wrote in “Events”:
From age six I rode to school on Nellie after she was pretty bad wind-broken. The scholars from outside the village stabled their horses in the barn at the rear. It was understood we were to care for our animals and clean the stables: a chore, atop of home chores, not appreciated by this scholar. Some of my teachers were Delia Mason, P. C. Jenkins, Minnie Winters, Lillian Sea, Ed Quennell, Maud Chase. They gave me the knack of curiosity. I did not go to school regularly after I was ten or twelve years old but helped on farm in fall and spring and went to school in winter. I never went two consecutive entire years until my Soph and Junior years in college. All the same, something caught me by the ears. We had Curl’s Grammar, Robinson’s Arithmetic, Steel’s Philosophy. I wanted to know how things worked!
THE VILLAGE atmosphere of Salt Branch was crucial in the formation of the missionary. The village was the magnet of his boyhood. There grew his love of being among people. The farm was remote, isolated, and dully the same from day to day, while down in the village there were laughter, eccentricity, preaching and praying, parades, scuffles, tippling, gestures of gentility.
Buggies whirled up dust on unpaved streets lined with maples. Sidewalks were of wooden boards. Late in the day the lamplighter pushed his wheelbarrow loaded with stuff to trim wicks, replenish oil, and polish chimneys, and he stood his short ladder against each lamppost to service and light the lamps. At the center of the main intersection was a bandstand, where once a week in the summer the village cornet band gave concerts. And at every turning, it seemed, one’s eyes rose to the spearhead of a church spire.
A village historian records that a decade before David Treadup’s birth there were in Salt Branch
many blacksmith shops, four carriage shops, six grocery and provision stores, mills turning out grist, lumber, shingles, woolens, and flax skeins, two boot and shoe shops, two milliners, a butcher shop, a tailor, a dressmaker, two harness and trunk makers, a hotel proprietor, a livestock dealer, an insurance agent, two masons, a number of carpenters and builders, a livery stable owner, an undertaker, and a photographer.
By David’s time there were also a tannery, a bakery, and a barbershop with a billiard parlor.
Often, later, David would write about “characters” he had seen around the village when he lived on the farm: Dr. Semplimus, with his German accent and bib of a red beard, willing to stop and dispense medicines from his black satchel right in the middle of the street; Irondequoit Pete, fussing and muttering pigeon sounds at his dovecote; Win Southly, who grew ginseng beyond the pond and mostly sat and whittled—said he could whittle anything right down to crutches for a mosquito. From China David wrote brother Paul:
I have encountered many a human oddity out in this field. But after some of those dear friends in Salt Branch I can never fault a person for mere strangeness. I am scornful of fools, enraged by destroyers, but Paul—fixations make the world go round!
Some of the By-Laws of the Incorporated Village suggest that besides eccentrics, there were a few miscreants around:
x. Any person who shall be intoxicated in any street, alley, lane, store, shop, hotel, mill, or other public place in said village, shall forfeit and pay a penalty of ten dollars for each offense….
xiv. Every person who shall keep, maintain, or be an inmate of any house of illfame within the limits of said village shall forfeit and pay a penalty of ten dollars for each offense.
And though the frontier had pushed on westward, it had left a pattern of violence, both accidental and purposeful, that has never since been absent from American life. A few years before David’s birth it was recorded that
twenty-one persons have died in this corporation, either by violent or untimely deaths: of which number six were drowned, three were killed with firearms, four were found abroad, dying or dead, one was killed with a pen-knife, two children were burned to death in a charcoal pit, and five were murdered.
AMONG the devout in Salt Branch, Methodists predominated. They had begun to meet in the homes of those of their persuasion as early as 1800, and in 1813 Salt Branch was established as a preaching point of the Sodus Circuit of the Genesee Conference. The first church was of white wood; a more solid fort for the Deity, a brick edifice, had gone up eight years before Treadup was born. Presbyterians formed a church in 1818. Baptists founded one in 1841, but this was destined to fade away until, in 1925, there being more than one way to deal with hell’s flames, it became a firehouse. Catholics formed a parish in 1862 but did not have a church until 1875.
The religious life of the village tended to be vivid. Central and western New York seem to have received two sorts of stock from New England, one of them virile, intelligent, and industrious, the other mystical, rather unstable, sometimes fanatical, given to following cults. Salt Branch had weathered the anti-Masonic furor of 1826; the visions and hallucinatory revelations of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, in the twenties; the end-of-the-world excitement of the Millerites in the early forties; the spiritualistic “Rochester rappings” of the Fox sisters, with trances, sightings, involuntary dancing, in the late forties; and the wild revivalism of preachers like Asabel Nettleton and Charles G. Finney, culminating in the great evangelistic awakening of 1857.
DAVID was nine when something happened to which he often referred in the writings of his adult years as the event that first caused him to believe in God. His fullest account of it is in his “Search” of 1943, written at a time when his belief was beginning to run thin:
One of my chores was to deliver milk for sale to the creamery in town. Father, Paul, and Will would load the full milk cans in the wagon designed to hold them, while I put the harness on Custer and backed him between the shafts. The ride to the village and back—I must emphasize this, it set my mind for what happened later—put me in a hazy, dreamy mood: the steady rhythm of the great muscles in Custer’s glistening haunches, the drumming of his footfalls, the sunshot passage of dusty elderberry and birch and swamp maple leaves—all worked on me to reassure me and sweeten me.
No other child of nine delivered milk. I drew breath deep into my chest, to expand it to the dimensions of a plowman’s, as I pulled into the line of wagons waiting their turns. The much older boys and men whom I wished to impress greeted me always as one of them, with unforced courtesy. Some of these farmhands were tough, bitter, violent men, drunks and thieves, but without exception they treated me as a fellow Citizen of the Republic. It was ingrained in them. There hung about the creamery a clean fragrance that reached deep into the darkest places of memory. When my turn came, the creamery attendant, Milo, with much ill-tempered shouting, lowered the hook for me to slip into each milk-can handle, cranked the windlass inside, tipped the milk into the huge weigh tank, then lowered the empty to the wagon. After the lot was weighed and recorded, I would drive the wagon down the ramp to the south side of the creamery and pump out as much whey for the pigs as I had delivered milk that day. Then came the unhurried, meditative ride back out.
It was in the benign, milky, grownup mood of this errand that I stopped off, one morning, at the Paxons’ farm, intending merely to say hello to Renny and make some plan with him for the next Sunday. I hitched Custer to the post off the road. Renny did not respond to my hail, and I quickly ran, in order to recharge the chambers of my imagination, to the pile of trash lumber at the back of the Paxons’ yard, which Renny and I had transformed, simply by willing the transformation through the urgency of our restlessness, into a clipper ship, on which we had found ourselves able to visit ocean reaches that invested the meager grass plot around us with mad combers, whale spouts, foaming reefs, and, sometimes, unbearable albatrossy calms: Roaring Forties, Cape Horn, Sargasso Sea, the Doldrums.
As I stood there I suddenly heard a high-pitched yet guttural cry, a land cry, nearby, which caused my scalp and buttocks to prickle. I recognized an appeal for help of a sort I knew I could not give. It was repeated. I followed the sound. It led me to a place against the Paxons’ milk shed, where their dog Tub, a terrier-hound mix, lay in obvious agony. I could see that she was deathly sick. My approach caused her to cry out more pathetically than ever. She was in a knot of suffering. I crouched down. I thought she had been poisoned. I grew very frightened, because I had never seen Death, and I heard Death rattling in Tub’s throat. Then after an immense spasm a horrible, slimy, gray-pink mass plopped out of her rear end. This drove me to my feet in terror. “She has shat her own guts,” I thought. Then something even more revolting happened: She turned and began licking this shapeless excrement. Could it be that Death meant that one had to eat oneself bit by bit? Then…then…the miracle for which I was wholly untutored and unprepared slowly unfolded before my eyes. The vile tumor, as Tub licked away its grease-like coating, began to tremble, then to move. In a short time it took shape. It was a perfect new life. Without eyes to see its way, it dragged itself toward Tub and was soon sucking, with the great instinctual eagerness of the will to live, on one of her dugs. I repeat: I was utterly unprepared. No one had ever breathed to me a word—save the monotonous ‘begats’ of the Old Testament—of the great circle of sex. Now I saw six pups whelped that way.
Ever since that morning, whenever I have felt fear, I have felt within the fear an incipience of a wonderful surprise, the promise of a great delight and thrill. People have always said I was fearless. No, I have felt fear. But I have always felt that I was taught by nature, that morning, that whatever is terrifying has its superb reason.
Now I have begun to wonder: Reason?—or a mad intelligence behind it all?—or mere randomness? Fear has begun to seem real to me now. Poor Tub. Poor Tub.
IF THE BEGINNING of belief, for David, came with his innocent discovery of “the great circle of sex,” the church often seemed, during his adolescent years, to stand for smaller concentric circles within the great circle. As information and misinformation about sex began to trickle his way, first from his friend Renny and later from the toughs who hung around the bakery in the village, there was the troubling matter of Mary, who became Jesus’s mother without having performed what was known in the bakery circle as It. Then, perhaps even more unsettling, there was the strange epicene quality of Jesus himself. “It bothered me, haunted me,” David wrote in “Search,” “when one day Roger Trent down at the bakery asked, ‘Where does J.C. come off being kissed by his chum Judas? Why would a man kiss a man? The gang made a whole lot of that.”
Almost everything to do with the brick church in the village was pleasurable, because from infancy David’s entire social life was centered there—cradle roll, Sunday school, Christian Endeavor, choir practice, “socials,” suppers. One gathers between the lines of David’s scrawl, whenever the subject came up, that from the earliest years this social experience was drenched with sensual hopes and imaginings. Girls—not mere sisters—were there, tricked out in their best clothes and brightest expectations. The substance of the teenagers’ Epworth League meetings was boring, but the hour was electric with anticipation, for it was followed by the socially sanctioned two-by-two walk home. The exquisite sensation of the touch of hand to hand! The slightest advance was a great event. “One church supper in particular I remember,” David wrote Paul in one of his early homesick letters from China:
Perhaps you will remember it, too. I mean the time when Melville Horton brought his automobile to a supper—it was that ’94 Haynes—remember?—just a buggy without a horse, really—and sold rides for 10¢. Those rides raised more money than all the fancy linen and dishes and silver and ice cream and cakes the ladies had brought round to a dozen suppers. Goodness knows where I got two dimes to rub together, but I took Cassie Berns for a ride. When we went over the bumps at 15 m.p.h. we jounced against each other—it was bully—how I trembled—ten dollars worth of thrills.
In “Events” he writes of a perhaps “fast” older woman:
At fifteen, through choir practice, I fell very much in love with Gertrude Jonson, an alto. She was older than I by a year and married a man twice her age when she was twenty.
And in “Search”:
The first organ was a foot-pedal reed instrument, later replaced by a large organ with some fake pipes for show and a long lever on the side for pumping air into the bellows. I got the job! It was in full sight of the choir. There I was, during hymns and anthems, working away, and there across the choirloft was Gertrude, watching me!
“I WAS both excited and abashed by the violence of the big boys at the bakery,” David wrote in “Search.”
The Treadups’ one indulgence of David was letting him play in the concerts of the cornet band. In his youth Brownson Treadup had bought and half learned to play a battered secondhand B-flat cornet, and, beginning when David was ten, after much begging, the father allowed the son to take some lessons on it after school in wintertime. Being in the band meant being able in summer to take two evening horseback trips each week to the village, once for rehearsal, once for the concert in the bandstand.
David apparently fudged his departures a bit, arriving in Salt Branch each time a half hour or so early. And each time he would hurry down for a few minutes at the bakery, where the heroes and giants of toughdom hung out, pals of the doughboys who worked there. After the day’s baking was done, there would be rounds of the sport of self-defense in the back room, with betting in silver money.
They hooted for bloodied noses. They wanted blood. My heart beat very fast. I was afraid of blood, and I think I may have wanted it. Also, being very big for my age, I was terrified they would make me put on the gloves. Yet I went.
After one of the fights, the very second time David had showed his face in the back room, a bakery worker named Sam, still in his long white apron and white cloth hat like a muffin, and with eyebrows and mustache whitened with flour, came running out of the oven room and called out, “Listen here, you fellows. We’re in a pickle. We may lose our Number Two oven ‘less we get an oven-stretcher in a hurry.”
One of the other doughboys shouted, “Hey! I mind Dr. Appleton has one!”
The first: “Who’ll volunteer to fetch it for us?” He turned at once to David, and said, “Here’s a strapping fellow. You look strong enough to carry it. Help us out, lad? You know where Doc Appleton lives, don’t you?”
“I ran as fast as I could,” David tells us,
because I wanted to make an impression on the bakery boys. Dr. Appleton had one of the big houses in the village, and I gave the bell pull eight or ten strong yanks. He must have thought there was a hurry-up call for a dying patient. He came to the door putting on his black coat, and he said, “Young Treadup, what’s up?” I panted out my report, that there was a crisis at the bakery, they needed an oven-stretcher awful bad. Dr. Appleton had gentle eyes that cured people, I think, more likely than his pills, and he shook his head and put his hands on my shoulders, and he said, “I’m afraid you’ve been gulled, young Treadup. There’s no such animal as an oven-stretcher. Those fellows down at the bakery have had you up for a sucker.” I think I may have begun to cry. “It’s all right, young man,” he said. “You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last.”
He was not the last. He had the courage to go straight back to the bakery to face the laughter, knowing that he would be branded a skulker if he did not. He was thenceforth accepted as a big boob who had leave to stand around and watch, and in time he was tickled to death to see other raw recruits sent out on later occasions to fetch a rubber crowbar; a left-handed monkey wrench; a bucket of steam from the depot.
IN A LETTER to Paul in 1924, after a train trip from Tientsin to Peitaiho, David wrote:
The depot! Remember how we used to go down on Sundays to watch the trains? Remember the waiting-room benches, with the curved, slippery seats? The tapping of the telegraph key in the ticket office? The men lounging on the platform swapping stories? The express!—slowed down enough for the mail clerk to snatch the out-bag off the hook, after he’d flopped the in-bag onto the platform. The section gang riding along, pumping the handle of their handcar. The flag shanty at the crossing. Oh, and the rotary plow going through after a snowstorm! Remember that winter when they had to have a hundred men shovel by hand ahead of the plow?
Just about when you and I were down there watching trains, Paul, out here a Chinese thinker named Wang T’ao was writing: “The steamship and the railway are the carriages of the ways of life.” What he meant was that those inventions might bring together and unify the nations of the world. We thought something like that, too, didn’t we?
David had had from his earliest years the desire to understand the linkages and couplings of physical phenomena (potlid to pot, hat to head)—the fitting together of parts, in literal works and as a metaphor for the possibility of order in the baffling chaos of the universe. Since the Civil War and during his youth a great traffic of new wonders had been coming into public use: railroad trains and steamships; electric lights; telegraph, telephone, cable, wireless; typewriters, adding machines, cash registers, linotype machines. The rate of the world’s change was itself exponentially changing. All these new devices thrilled David in their particulars, their clickings and clankings, their push toward speed and power.
And none so much as the railroad train. Beginning when he was minus seven years old, tracks of the Lake Ontario Shore Railroad had been laid down along the old trail from Oswego to Irondequoit. Later absorbed into the Rome, Watertown, and Ogdensburg line, and later still into that of the New York Central, this loop was finally to become, after David’s death, part of the Conrail System, its tracks poorly maintained but still able to sustain an occasional slow-moving freight train. The through line was linked up just two years before David was born. The long grade, seventy-five feet per mile, from Silver Station to Salt Branch was locally called “the hump,” and it usually took two engines to haul freight over it.
From that early moment, which his mother had recorded, when his father had taken him down as a baby to see the engine watered at the depot, David had almost seemed to want to be a locomotive. “I feel I shall burst with joy this morning,” he wrote in his journal one day in North China in 1912; and then he added:
I seem to see in my mind’s eye the engine pulling into the S.B. station. Old 415 has made the hump! The stacks belch, hisses of white plumes below. I can see the glistening contours atop the boiler: the smokestack, then the dome of the sandbox, then the bell, then the throttle valve dome, then the brass whistle, then the safety valve dome, then after all the curves the rectangular roof of the cab. I know it all as I know my own body. The great animal trembles with its strength—and I feel the strength!
In the sight of this metal creature in the Salt Branch station there had been the incipient dream of motion toward the sunset. Spikes had joined the rails of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah, within a decade before David was born, and by the time he was six the Northern Pacific, the Southern Pacific, and the Santa Fe had also reached their long fingers to the far ocean. The Treadup mealtimes rang with tales and legends: Pikes Peak, Roughing It, the Black Hills gold rush, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the massive droving of cattle into the High Plains; and the new statehoods emerging, resonant new names on the distant horizons—Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho. In “Search”: “I think I heard whispers of the faraway sea in the whooshes of steam escaping from the big steel machine.”
ONE NIGHT, in bed, with a stocking cap on, David’s Uncle Don Treadup whispered in his wife’s ear that he had bought a traveling circus that afternoon. She was used to surprises. Once he had taken her to Chicago and bought a freightcarload of horses. Another time he had disappeared for three weeks and had come home with a tuba, saying he had been taking lessons in Rochester. He was a nonbeliever, but when the brick church was built, he ordered a bell all the way from Philadelphia and dragged it from the station to the church on a stoneboat; it was said that when the bell rang, it intoned, “Come, Don. Come, Don.” But Don never came.
All his life he had been a circus buff. He had hung around the wagons, talking to gang bosses, clowns, fat ladies, and roustabouts. He seemed to be able to crack the codes of animal sounds. He now moved a black bear and a lion into the two-story barn behind the house, and he had long talks with them. There were constant conferences with humans, too, during the booking season: advance man and poster man, band director and boss canvasman, as well as the wire-walking “drunk,” the Italian head-balancer, the iron-jaw lady who could spin hanging by her teeth, and a certain Hans Pfefferhalz and his performing animals (elephant, camel, pony, fox terrier).
This was the brief and shining period when Uncle Don Treadup became David’s interim deity. The craze lasted three years, after which time Uncle Don sold his cumbersome plaything. In the year of the purchase, David was eleven. Uncle Don had no children, and from David’s birth he had been fascinated by his nephew’s oversized frame, and now he kept borrowing the big little boy for short stretches, to clean out lion and bear manure, to coil tent ropes, to sell tickets for home stands. Don persuaded Hannah and Brownson to let him take David on one of his road trips. From that magic month of his eleventh year onward, the place where he happened at any moment to be was never again world enough for David Treadup.
AFTER church meeting one Sunday when David was thirteen, Uncle Don suddenly appeared at the farm, shouting, “Where’s that roustabout boy?” He said he wanted to take David down to the village to show him something.
The something turned out to be a lapstraked, double-ended rowing wherry with varnished ribs, bronze rowlocks, and a thwart with a cane seat. “It was a corker, and he had bought it just for me. After all the dream voyages Renny and I had taken on our lumber-pile ship!”
The rowboat became the center of David’s life. He portaged it around the dam of the pond and rowed it down to where the Branch ran past the farm. All summer he would get up at five to have a half hour’s row before breakfast, and after supper each night he was off again, skimming all the reaches of the Branch. His mother was deeply angry at David’s having been singled out for such a luxury, when the family was so poor, and it took weeks of teasing, begging, whining, and cajoling before David could get permission to row on Sabbath afternoons.
On Sundays, finally, with his mother still calling it a sin, he would go upstream to the pond, where he won great prestige as a generous giver of rides: the passenger would huddle in the stern, making the dink’s bow ride high, and David would lean into his strokes “with indescribable pleasure in my chest—it was like being in love.” In this role he was evidently in love with himself. It was many years later, in “Search,” that David first asked himself whether his generosity and solicitude for others masked a need to establish some sort of power over them.
There were other boats on the pond, sorry articles—except for one—in comparison with Ecarg (for David had named his craft for his little sister): squarish, flat-bottomed rowboats used for setting rabbit snares along the banks of the Branch. The exception was a flaring, sharp-prowed dory which belonged to Stanton Jessup, a banker who, it happened, heartily disliked Don Treadup.
One day Olin Tanner, one of the bakery toughs, a sixteen-year-old, announced that Mr. Jessup had offered his dory to anyone who wanted to race it against “that Cleopatra’s barge belonging to Mr. D. Treadup.” Olin said he would bet David four bits he could thrash him in a race, giving David ten yards’ start.
David said he couldn’t bet but he’d dearly love to race.
There was a big turnout on the shore of the pond: the whole bakery crowd. David, with strong arms and legs and gut from a month’s conditioning, won easily. Then he beat Olin from a scratch start. Then he gave Olin ten yards and beat him. He beat all comers. All summer. Everyone said he won because of the shape of his boat. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he didn’t. In any case, the competitive hook was set deep in David Treadup’s flesh.
IN WINTER there would be skating parties on the pond, with a bonfire in the cove at the top, hot cocoa, roasted frankfurters and marshmallows, games of snap-the-whip, sail-skating downwind with a burlap bag on a sprit frame for a sail.
Then, when the ice was a foot thick, came the ice harvesting. And at the ice harvesting, in the winter when David was sixteen, he saw something happen that gave him a model of physical courage for the rest of his life. His testimony, at age sixty-five, was that “whenever I was in danger in China, that picture of my father rose before my eyes, challenging me to be as brave as he.”
There were no refrigerators in those days; cakes of ice were delivered from house to house on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, at ten cents for a fifty-pound cake, which the average icebox could take. For the harvesting, a communal enterprise, various farmers would supply teams of horses in rotation. First a team would clear away the snow with a six-foot scoop steered by two men. Then the ice field would be marked for cutting by a horse-drawn gauge with metal points that scribed the ice in parallel lines, perpendicular to each other, making a grid of rectangles about eighteen inches by two feet. The ice then had to be sawed by hand, with huge-toothed saws six feet long. The broken-off cakes were scooted or floated toward the mouth of a sloping trough at the ice house, where a man would slip a metal cage over a pair of cakes, and then a team of horses would walk out onto the ice, drawing the cage up into the ice house on block and tackle. The ice was stacked inside the house a foot or so from the outside walls, and the gaps were filled with sawdust, which cost twenty-five cents a wagonload at various sawmills. This insulation, which was also eventually spread on the top layer of ice, would keep the remaining cakes intact right through the following summer.
One day in January 1896 it had come to be Brownson Treadup’s turn to supply the team for the afternoon shift of the haul of blocks up the trough. It was three above zero, with an overcast sky and “a wolf-fanged north wind.” David managed to keep warm, for he was manning one of the twenty handsaws. The men sang songs to make a rhythm for their strokes; the bodies heaved in a dance of echelons. From time to time there would be ominous deep-throated cracking sounds—dismissed as something the men called “underfreeze.”
Then suddenly there was a kind of thunder underfoot that did not stop. David looked up to see a huge floe tipping under Custer and Bonaparte, and the horses slid into the water. The sawing ceased. The men gasped and shouted. David saw that his father was safe on firm ice. He had an impression that the horses’ heads, tossing above the water, consisted of nothing but huge eyes and nostrils. Then—no time seemed to have passed—his father was in the water, feeding a rope around Custer’s neck; then one around Bonaparte’s. Then men were hauling his father up on the ice, and others were pulling at the ropes. For the only way to save the horses, David knew from old lore, was to choke them until, heaving breath in but unable to expel it, they would become bloated and would float high so men could—and they now did—roll them out on the ice.
At sixty-five, recalling this episode, David Treadup had no memory of how his father must have been bundled up and taken off to the nearest house to be restored, or how the horses, which came through unharmed, must have been run and rubbed down. He only remembered the ice forming on his father’s beard, and his father’s eyes seeking his own eyes, and Paul’s, and Will’s, with a father’s angry defiance, as if to say, “Could you do that?” “Often when I have prayed,” David wrote, “I have visualized an utterly dependable God with frost like that in his beard and searching, piercing, furious eyes like those.”
“THERE WAS a break in my life at about seventeen,” David wrote in “Events,”
and I became careless and rebelled at the strictness of my home. I started in school and grew careless during the fall until I was severely ill with blood poisoning. I was confined to the house for three months and was left in a weak condition.
So David moved into a period of stress, prefiguring the crisis that led to his conversion in his sophomore year at Syracuse; the same malady recurred just before his late-life crisis in 1943. We know from the later sickness that the disease was not exactly blood poisoning—a term which in those days, like “virus” in a later time, covered many a mystery—but was osteomyelitis: an inflammation of an area of bone and marrow of the humerus of his left arm, about midway between shoulder and elbow.
During his weeks in bed, a door opened in David’s mind. He had nothing to do but read—a pastime for which the way had been prepared by his mother’s fierce love of books. But it was not his mother who brought this breakthrough. One of his teachers, Maud Chase, who must have been excited by sparks she had seen struck from David’s mind in her classroom, took it on herself to be his librarian, and with brother Paul as intermediary, she sent book after book to the young patient.
For David her choices were like a lottery. She managed to establish in him a firm liking for bad poetry. She bombarded him with volumes by Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Bayard Taylor, Henry Richard Stoddard, Richard Watson Gilder. Two slim, poorly edited books of Emily Dickinson’s poems had been published by the time of David’s sickness, but the ripples they caused had apparently not reached Salt Branch; nor do we find in David’s notes any mention of Whitman. Among the appalling false starts in his understanding of China, he noted in his diary after he had gone there, was one put in his way during his illness by Maud Chase: Bret Harte’s most popular poem, about the California Chinaman, Ah Sin, cheating at cards, an effusion which Harte himself called “possibly the worst poem anybody ever wrote”:
…for ways that are dark
And for tricks that are vain
The Heathen Chinee is peculiar.
Understandably missing from the prose works Maud Chase sent David were the novels of Howells and James, which dealt with social worlds far from the humble realities of Salt Branch. But in those months at home David did make two explosive discoveries: Huckleberry Finn, with its long dream of floating on waters (how he must have been missing his Ecarg!) and, more important, with its powerful message of Huck’s love for Jim, a creature of another race; and Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail, with its deep affinities, noted many years later in Treadup’s commonplace books, to Melville’s Typee and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—“searches all, in faraway places,” he wrote, “into the raw and untamed recesses of the Self as set against an Other”—the Parkman through its unashamed yet distanced staring at naked members of yet another race, the Sioux. These two books fed both David’s restlessness and his fascination with whoever might be called a stranger.
In “Events” he wrote:
My arm, in which the blood poisoning was, was left in bad shape and I finally after a year had an operation to remove part of the bone. The wound was kept open with a gauze drain in it for several weeks. Then it was sound. I afterward became ambitious to be strong and took better care of myself. I also took a renewed interest in the Christian life. I have sometimes thought it was a providential sickness.
ABSOLOM CARTER
MAIN STREET, in front of Gavin’s Grain and Seed. Yellowish June daylight. Five boys, all about seventeen years old, lounge in swaggering poses against the wall of the store—hips thrust sideways, arms folded, heads tilted back. Treadup’s right hand, hidden behind his back, grasps a large hub wrench. He has, as each of them has, a sore place on the tip of the middle finger of his right hand, for they have all recently sworn themselves to secrecy with blood from razor cuts there. The young men are all former gulls of the bakery crowd, but they now call themselves by a better bird’s name. They are the Cayuga Eagles.
A farmer drives up in a battered red wagon, hitches his horse, and goes in the store. Young Treadup dimly recognizes him as one who works a place out the Silver Junction road, but does not know his name. When the store’s fly-mesh door slams, the boys look at each other. Treadup, the leader, nods. Casually all five sidle out toward the wagon. The other four screen Treadup, who quickly ducks down by the right rear wheel, applies the wrench, and loosens the hub nut to its last couple of threads. He is up again. No one has seen anything. The five ease back to the wall of the store and wait.
Wonderful! The farmer is buying a big load of things—potash in bags, rolls of tar paper, some milk cans. The boys eagerly offer to help him load up. He gratefully accepts their offer. He unhitches. One of the boys takes the horse’s bridle and guides it as it backs out. The farmer salutes his thanks. A hundred yards along, the right rear wheel of the wagon begins to gollywobble. The driver seems not to notice. Then—beautiful! The wheel careers off on a course of its own, as if it would rather go to Oswego. Slowly, slowly, the bed of the wagon tilts. The farmer throws up his arms. The milk cans sing as they roll off. The horse rears in twisted shafts. The farmer fights the reins at the peak of his wreck. All the goods are in the dust.
The Eagles run around to the far side of the store to let their laughter free.
ON JUNE 23 the through passenger “up” train, due in Salt Branch just after noon, was delayed five hours. Late that afternoon word went around town that there had been a derailment of a freight car in a “down” train just west of Silver Junction.
In the middle of the night one of the Eagles lost his nerve. The secrecy-cut on his fingertip all too well healed, he confessed to his parents that just after the band concert the previous night, he had gone down to the depot freight siding with David Treadup and the other boys in the gang, and they had borrowed tools from the yard shed, which was never locked, and David had loosened bolts in the undercarriage of one of the freight cars.
At six the next morning the stationmaster sent a flagman out to the Treadup farm to summon David to the depot. By eight o’clock the whole town knew the news. At about eight fifteen, within a few minutes of each other, two adults showed up at the station to look out for the Treadup boy’s interest. One was Maud Chase, his teacher; the other was Dr. Ferdinand Fosco.
Of Maud Chase, little is known. During David’s sickness she guided his reading, as we have seen, and she now cared enough about him to walk right out of a schoolroom and rush to his defense.
Dr. Fosco, an elderly man with a grand presence, had graduated from the University of Vermont and had emigrated first to Silver Junction, in Cayuga County, and then to Salt Branch. Of the three doctors in the village, he had been the Treadups’ choice as family physician because he was active, as they were, in the Methodist Church. As Sunday school superintendent he had pinned attendance badges on David’s lapel, and he had put in David’s hand, as a prize for memorizing psalms, a Bible which David kept for most of his life, said to have been bound in thin boards of olive wood from the Mount of Olives (David half believed this). On the Sunday school wall hung a large portrait of Dr. Fosco, posed beside a studio tree stump on which sat, as a symbol of the good doctor’s wisdom, a stuffed owl. The doctor had often hired David to do odd jobs around his home. No matter how Christian, how kind, Dr. Fosco may have been, there must have been something special about this young boy, there must have been some metallic glitter of mind behind the things he had casually said to his employer, which had impressed a busy physician enough to make him drop his rounds on sudden notice and have a shot at lawyering for a bad boy.
The outcome of the conference in the depot ticket office was a characteristic one for an intimate village like Salt Branch in those days: The stationmaster entrusted David to whatever correction the teacher and doctor might settle upon.
THE AGREEMENT Maud Chase and Ferdinand Fosco reached must have surprised and chagrined the railroad man. It was that David was made for a bigger world than Salt Branch. He was bad, they decided, because he was bored; he needed the challenge of better schooling than Salt Branch could offer. (Their charitable diagnosis was surely correct; but much later in life Treadup became aware of eruptions of what he called “my badness”—involuntary outbursts of prankishness and destructiveness, which each time signaled the onset of a period of low spirits.)
But sending David away would take money. Dr. Fosco knew from his own dealings with the Brownson Treadups how poor they were. He went to David’s Uncle Don, the former circus owner, whose bell summoned the faithful to the doctor’s church; doubtless Fosco knew of the childless eccentric’s fostering of David. And between them, in due course, these three oddly assorted angels, Maud Chase, Ferdinand Fosco, and Don Treadup, brought the first great swerve in David’s life, which rescued him from a poverty-racked farm existence and headed him toward a decent education and, eventually, faraway China.
IN TURCOTT, that very autumn, an imposing brick-and-stone building with the lines, much reduced in scale but not at all in aspiration, of the Hall of Languages at Syracuse University was rising on five acres of high ground that commanded Turcott village. It was to cost an impressive $27,355.86 (carpenters were paid $1.50 a day that year, masons $2.50, and common laborers, $1.25), and its beams, floors, and millwork were to consume forty thousand board feet of Georgia pine lumber. By early November the capstone of the arch over the entrance was raised into place:
ENDERBURY INSTITUTE 18 FREE SCHOOL 96
The weather snapped cold just then, and for the final bricklaying in the next month the men had to mix gasoline into the mortar and then burn it to keep the mortar from freezing. Workmen slated the roof in January, finished plastering in early March, and hung the bell in the tower on March 31.
There were two sorts of secondary education in that region and time. One was the “academic” school, often privately funded, which prepared students for college or business or teaching; such had been the Enderbury Institute, founded in 1856 by Isaac Enderbury, a native of Watertown, Connecticut, who had settled in Turcott a couple of decades earlier, an energetic and public-spirited citizen who had eventually represented the district in the state legislature. The other kind was the free district school, which typically gave its pupils a fair literacy, and ability to figure and reason well enough to get along as farmers or craftsmen or clerks. In Turcott in 1869 the two had been consolidated into a single entity.
Now opportunely just after David’s delinquency its new building stood spanking and ready, and the three angels decided that this would be the ideal place for him.
DR. FOSCO broached the idea of the Turcott school to the family.
David’s parents balked. Brownson said he needed the boy’s arms on the farm; especially he needed his aptitude, much greater than that of the other sons, with tools and gear. Just when the boys were coming to the age when they could, at last, give their father’s back a rest, were they to be torn away, one by one?
As soon as Hannah learned that Don Treadup was involved in the plan, she denounced it as “a conspiracy to kidnap my son.” She would never allow such a crime, she said.
And David, even though he knew he was on probation to Fosco and Chase, did not want to leave Salt Branch. It would mean deserting his companion Renny Paxon and the Eagles; he would be cut off from church social events, choir practice, organ pumping, Gertrude Jonson, Cassie Berns. And what about his rowboat?
David took refuge in his parents’ bristling resistance—until, one day, Dr. Fosco asked him to come to his house in the village to mow and prune. Dr. Fosco, with the intuition of a family doctor of those days, refrained from playing on David’s guilt over his gang’s dangerous “jokes,” and instead touched the nerve ends of David’s ambition, which the illness—perhaps his reading—had laid bare.
“I went home that day on fire,” David wrote in “Search.” “I was going to whip the world.”
DAVID went to see the school, and it was on the day of that visit that he met a man who was to be one of the two most important models for his future life as a missionary.
“The first sight I had of Mr. Carter,” David wrote in a letter to brother Paul in 1918 (after the teacher had been killed by a locomotive, when his Ford stalled at a track crossing),
was in the science room on the day I inspected the school, or vice versa, the school inspected me. He was wearing a green celluloid eyeshade and he had rubber sleeveguards holding up his sleeves. He picked up a fifty-pound wooden case for beakers and test tubes by one handle as if it were a teacup. Said to myself: “David if you come here to school, this is a person to whom you will have to be polite.” He was 28 or 29, but from my perspective then he was middle-aged—at his prime—in mental powers, in magnetism, in wisdom. When he began to speak! O he was going to be so much more than my match—as I came to know so well in my terms under his tutelage. He was a polymath. He remembered every word of every book he had ever read. He had an off eye—a mote, or a wall eye rather—and sometimes you could not tell whether he was looking past you or right through you. He did not need to look at the surface of you because he already knew as much about your innermost secrets as he did about those of Augustus, Charlemagne, Copernicus, Shakespeare, the vireo, the snapdragon, sulphur brimstone, and the fleas on your dog—in other words, of every thing. Everything. Everything. Could I ever know the thousandth part of what he knew?
Absolom Carter had graduated from Cornell, summa cum laude, in 1888. He had been captain of football and track, and by a weird coincidence had been a casual friend of the man who would one day be the second model for David Treadup: the other big man on the Cornell campus then, the head of the Christian Association, James B. Todd.
Apart from the flaw in his one eye, Absolom Carter made the perfect picture of the all-round thinker-athlete—the ideal of young American manhood for decades to come, and certainly what David would want to shape himself to be. It was not considered at all remarkable that a man of Carter’s brilliance and power should be glad to teach in a small school in a backwater of upstate New York, for the calling was regarded by all as a dignified one, and if he could, over the years, multiply himself by ten, by teaching and example, it would be thought that he had given society a great gift.
David came home from that meeting determined to become a scholar at Enderbury Institute.
NOW THERE came a new round of a curious habitual series of transactions between David and his mother. They often struggled this way. Their conflicts would spin themselves out over several days or even weeks.
He declared his heart’s desire—to go to the Turcott school. She refused permission; he must stay with his father. David teased and whined and wheedled. While intensifying her disapproval, she showed signs of being irresistibly drawn to David’s wish. She gave in. He then reversed himself and said he did not want anything she thought wrong. She then avidly urged him to go, her rage close under the surface of her eagerness. He submitted. She then held to the permission while savagely denouncing it.
So it had been between them from the very beginning, with the whittled piglet of his babyhood; so with rowing on the Sabbath; so now with the question of going out into the big world.
MR. AND MRS. TREADUP, the angels, the school, and David finally struck a bargain. The first year, David’s eighteenth, he would go to Turcott for the two winter quarters; the second year, for all four.
He would seek lodging in Turcott village. The angels persuaded the parents that though Turcott was only a few miles from Salt Branch, it would be important for David to be absolutely free of home chores and to live close to the school.
Mrs. Treadup’s price was that David should not be wholly dependent on Don Treadup’s charity. Uncle Don had undertaken to pay the expenses of a scholar from outside the district, eight dollars per term for the classical course, which would include the Latin and Greek that would be essential if David were to go on to college (something not yet even whispered about); and perhaps two or three dollars a week for lodging.
Absolom Carter provided the suggestion that saved face for Hannah Treadup. At one of the stiff conferences in the principal’s office on the second floor of the school (with a painting of old Isaac Enderbury, portrayed a bit lumpily by the school’s drawing teacher Helen Tackroom, brooding over the embarrassed boy and his angry mother), Mr. Carter pointed at the bell pull hanging down through a hole in one corner of the ceiling and asked Dr. Arthur, the principal, if part of David’s tuition each quarter might not be abated by his coming promptly at eight thirty each morning to ring the bell for fifteen minutes to call the children to school. (Mr. Carter did not mention that, up until this time, this had been one of his own duties; David found that out much later.)
Dr. Arthur said yes, two dollars could, each quarter.
ABSOLOM CARTER found a room for David. This was in the home of a Mrs. Farleigh, whose husband had been kicked in the head by a horse and killed two years before. She lived on New Hartford Street, just three blocks from the school.
David’s scattered early impressions in his Line-a-Day diary: “So big. Lots of blubber. You have to be careful passing her on the stairs.” “Pads around all day in rabbit-fur slippers.” “Very fussy about room, troubles me about lint under bed.” “Hovers over me like a big pea hen.” And once just the single eloquent word, “Faugh.”
But as the weeks passed and David began to get his first taste of his lifelong sensation of exile, and as, later, academic difficulties piled up and he plunged into a period of desperate homesickness, the negative comments began to give way to quite a different series of responses. “Big body big heart.” “She makes molasses cakes for me.” “Good old thing.”
In reality not so very old; she seems to have been in her mid-thirties, and it may have been that the constant proximity of David’s now splendidly handsome young frame had rather painfully softened her toward him. Finally, as the winter stretched on, we come on this: “She has the rheumatiz. Asks me to rub her upper arm. It soothes her. She reads to me, or quizzes me for school on nominative genitive dative accusative ablative, and I gently rub and rub. And rub.” Later: “Her whole shoulder is sore affected. Rub-a-dub-dub. I use camphorated oil.”
It is during this period that we begin to see the notations about looking around Turcott for “the other woman.” In February, this strange note: “Sometimes I wonder about Mrs. Farleigh.” Could it be that he was working it out that she might have been the other mother? Mrs. Farleigh was, at any rate, sharply different from his own real mother: chubby, chatty, immensely cheerful, a casual churchgoer, at times bawdy in speech, a lover of juicy foods, a witty lady with “a laugh that rolls like a round rock,” even-tempered, overflowing from corsets, pink, fragrant, and “comfortable as a wood stove in Feb.”
ABSOLOM CARTER taught anything and everything in the “academic” course at Enderbury, but on David Treadup he made in particular three powerful impressions:
FIRST
Indispensable for a young man who would one day tackle Chinese, Absolom taught David the tricks and joys of learning languages.
The two dealt simultaneously in Latin, Greek, and French—hard for David, like trying to carry three buckets of milk into the shed at once. David indeed had to juggle and struggle, and much later Greek and Latin were to prove heavy going for him. But in these two years Carter made the triple task seem like three delightful games to be won.
He showed David how to set up vocabulary cards; taught him how to mold the shapes of exotic sounds with conscious positioning of the tongue in the mouth and throat; gave the three systems of grammar organic lives, causing them to seem like the bone structure lying under the muscles of meaning; trained David to think from beginning to end in the new languages; and wove around each of them the mythology, the history, the poetry, the temperament of the race of men and women that used the language.
“I would carry my thrills back each evening to Mrs. Farleigh,” David wrote in the mourning letter to Paul.
I sometimes actually wept, and caused her to weep, at the excitement of discoveries. Mr. C. told me he thought one of the most beautiful words in Greek was avϵµoϵvτa [anemoenta], “windy.” I made the connection to Mrs. Farleigh that night that he had demonstrated an anemometer a few days before—the wind-measuring instrument with little whirling cups. Then I cried. I had remembered my mother’s favorite flower—the anemone—always since then, mine, too. The wind-flower!
SECOND
Like Maud Chase, Absolom kept urging books on the boy, and one day he put in David’s hand a worn leather-bound volume that turned out to be the most influential book of David’s life next to the Bible: Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.
Diary scribbles at first tell how David relished Franklin’s stories of his printing apprenticeship to his brother, his frugal trip to Philadelphia, his start on his own there; and especially of his later inventions, so offhandedly described. But we encounter an excitement we have never seen before in David’s writing—the hand actually trembles—when he reacts to Part Two, coming on Franklin’s “bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.”
Soon the diary reveals that David has copied out the thirteen names of Franklin’s virtues, and their accompanying precepts, and that he has ruled a little notebook with red ink, making a calendar of thirteen weeks, with lines for each of the virtues in each of the days of the week, and he has begun to keep score of his lapses.
Unfortunately the notebook did not survive. But we do know from his diary that the precept for the thirteenth virtue, Humility, troubled David so much that he went to Mr. Carter about it, for it adjured: Imitate Jesus and Socrates. How could there be an equivalence between Jesus and anyone else?
Wonderful!—and shocking! The young teacher gave David a translation of Plato’s dialogues, so David could watch the living Socrates. He also told David about other heathen authors’ lists of virtues and ways of enhancing them, in Xenophon’s Memorabilia and Aristotle’s Ethics, among others; and he had David read translations of some of Plutarch’s Lives, from which secular human values could be learned by example.
All this David carefully noted down. But his response to Franklin’s urgings turned out to be of a special and lasting kind. The reason for this was perhaps to be found in what Dr. Fosco, more clearly than Carter, saw in David: his ambition. For Franklin’s project was less in how to be good than in how to get ahead by being good. But the agnostic Carter’s instinct in giving David this extracurricular course in ethics was to bear fruit: Something skeptical, temporal, and sophisticated would stay with David all his life—and would give him difficulties as a missionary.
THIRD
Absolom made the laws of physics magical. Each day he would shut himself for half a minute into the classroom closet; then he would burst out in cape, top hat, and false mustache, and with a wand in hand. He would appoint a scholar as his assistant. Then, as if drawing silk scarves from nowhere, or materializing rabbits, he would flourish through a scientific demonstration—a hardboiled egg sucked through the narrow neck of a milk bottle by the partial vacuum set up inside the bottle by a candle flame; iron filings, randomly scattered on a paper on which two foolish faces had been drawn, suddenly scurrying to form fringes of whiskers on the faces at the approach from beneath of a magnet; a double pendulum, hinged halfway down, hung from the ceiling and set swinging in two directions, so that a tiny pen at its lower end would describe intricate diminishing curves—“harmonics”—on a piece of paper, like the delicate networks of curlicues on printed money.
“Abracadabra!” Mr. Carter would shout at each moment of revelation.
David loved best the wonders Absolom performed with a sparkling little gyroscope, which could dance on a string, or rise from the dead, or quickly stabilize a little vessel rocking in a galvanized tub of a sea.
TWO MAIDEN sisters named Packard taught at the school. One morning Miss Agnes, the school’s Preceptress, who presided over the study hall, returned to that room after a brief absence to find her desk strangely aslant. One leg had been propped up on a little wooden box. She summoned the janitor. He and three big boys lifted the desk while another boy removed the box. A natural curiosity led Agnes Packard to lift the lid of the box. A toad jumped out.
ONE MORNING Miss Mary Packard nearly fainted when, in the midst of an algebra lesson, a human skeleton, hanging by the neck from a rope, slowly ascended into the sky outside her classroom window. She sent a boy to summon the janitor and a girl to fetch a bottle of smelling salts from the principal’s office. On investigation, the janitor discovered the skeleton (filched from the closet of the science room) sitting on the ground, leaning back against the building. It had been let down by a very trig block and tackle, which had evidently been attached the night before to the mansard up above. It goes without saying that no one was to be found manning the fall of the tackle.
THERE CAME A day, several stunts later, when Absolom Carter learned that Dr. Arthur was on the point of dismissing from the school that unmanageable hulk of a farm boy, David Treadup. He had been caught hot-handed at one of his games. He had cut a rectangle from the cardboard cover of his history textbook and had glued in its place a small mirror and while pretending to study had been flashing reflected sunlight into the faces of girls. After an ordeal of two hours of what Dr. Arthur called “soul search,” Treadup had confessed to the whole string of pranks. Once again the boy found himself in the hands of a volunteer defense lawyer.
Mr. Carter respectfully reminded Dr. Arthur, first of all, of the statement in the Enderbury Institute Handbook, that the school’s discipline would be “strict and impartial yet exercised with kindness, and with a view to incite in the student a noble self-reliance and control.”
Next he pleaded that he himself was “partly to blame,” if indirectly, for these practical jokes, because Treadup had been applying, one by one, laws of physics and mechanics that Mr. Carter had “taught him too well” in science class: the law of leverage, enabling one person alone to lift Agnes Packard’s desk, the technique of overcoming large resistance with small force in the levitation of the skeleton with tackle, and so on.
Mr. Carter argued that “this young ox,” accustomed to heavy physical labor at home, simply had not the means in the normal school day of discharging the millions of ergs of his energy. He had heard tell of the young man’s rowing wherry. Treadup, he told Dr. Arthur, should be punished by being ordered to fetch the boat from home on a wagon, and being made to row it for two hours every afternoon on Turcott Creek, below the dams.
This Dr. Arthur with a stormy brow commanded David to do.
David obeyed with utter delight. In the great joy of manning his sweeps again, he was able to throw off not only the habit of prankishness but also the homesickness and sadness he had been feeling.
IF THE CRISIS that had led to the osteomyelitis was a species of mild breakdown, his convalescence in his first year at Turcott took all of his inner attention. With his full recovery in his second year, and as Absolom Carter’s teaching gave him competence and confidence, he moved into a period of enormous vitality and exuberance.
Despite his later claim that after his illness he “took a renewed interest in the Christian life,” his diary notes at the time and his letters home (he was less than twenty miles from the farm, but telephones were not yet available to poor people like the Treadups and Mrs. Farleigh, so he wrote every Saturday to his parents) seem to suggest, as much by omission and indirection as by assertion, that the future missionary was going through a decidedly arid period in his spiritual life.
On the physical side, however, he was vibrantly alive. He was now a splendid pillar of flesh: six feet four inches tall, with a cask of a chest, huge hands, and a face that might have been marred by an oversized jaw and a fullish nose had it not been that his flashing, burning dark eyes gave out such open beams of interest and friendliness.
David soon got his first glimpse of a mysterious magnetic pull on others which his splendid physique and high spirits evidently gave him. This came to him as an astonishment.
IN A BRIGHT flowery week of June, as he approached the age of twenty, David attended his first Epworth League district convention at the lake resort of Silver Bay.
The program of the convention consisted of a mixture of discussion sessions, prayer meetings, outdoor games, campfire parties, and, woven through everything else, a mock parliamentary process that was supposed to lead to a series of “life resolutions” on the final day, as if the conferees were delegates to an international congress of morality.
But David’s diary notes seem to have nothing at all to do with Christianity: “Played third base, handled two grounders!” “Hit a triple this aft!” “After hymn sing walked by lake with N.T.!” “ ‘Jack o’ Knaves’ Furman has asked me to be his campaign manager in the convention elections!” “N.T.—la belle dame sans mercy [sic]!”
A letter to his family announces the great surprise that has come to him:
Wait till I tell you what happened today! After the plates were cleared away from the noon meal we set up the chairs for the Committee of the Whole in the big dining room, and Mr. Clarendon called us to order for the Big Vote for Officers of the Convention. I was backing a fine chap from Sodus name of Jack Furman for Pres. He is a tenor—and can he pitch an outcurve! There were two other nominations. Then an Oswego boy Charlie Dubb got up and—jehosaphat—I couldn’t believe my ears—I had no idea!—he said, “I nominate David Treadup the Delegate from Salt Branch.” And Mom and Dad he said some things that would have made your ears burn to hear them about your son. Now I thought that’s all very well but now we have to count noses so don’t go a-counting chicks too soon. But wait! wait! Treadup 43, Furman 8, Cheshire 4, Hendry 3. I swan! To think that so many people respected me! I was so flabbergasted I couldn’t speak. I was as red as a beet. Think what this means, Mom and Dad. There is nothing I can’t do.
IN FEBRUARY of David’s second year at Enderbury, the U.S.S. Maine was blown up by a submarine mine in Havana harbor, and what followed, colored for David by Absolom Carter’s “great enthusiasm,” stirred up in this restless and rudderless young man his first urge to “take up the white man’s burden.”
Excited scraps in his diary tell us that he suddenly cares about liberty for the Cubans, that Mr. Carter has given him Admiral Mahan’s book on sea power, that he thrills to Hoban’s attempt to sink the collier Merrimac so as to block Santiago harbor. The message gets through to Garcia! “You may fire when ready, Gridley!” “Don’t cheer, boys, the poor fellows are dying!” The Rough Riders have left their horses in Florida! McKinley the hesitant cannot decide for a long time which Philippine Islands to annex; then David records that the President has told a delegation of Methodists he has finally decided to “take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.” The sense of America’s inescapable destiny of exporting her blessings to all who might be wanting was in the air David breathed. Puerto Rico annexed…. Hawaii annexed…. Later he records, with approval embedded in the act of copying it out, a protest of McKinley’s against the anti-imperialist outcries of Cleveland, Bryan, Gompers, William James, Mark Twain, and others: “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind. They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose…. If we can benefit these remote people, who will object?”
In all of David’s reactions at this stage there is a boyish enthusiasm, reflecting Absolom Carter’s manly one—a tendency to whoop. Right after his notice of Congress’s declaration of war against Spain, he sets down the words of a song that is “all the rage”:
When you hear dem-a bells go ding, ling, ling,
All join round and sweetly you must sing,
And when the verse am through
In the chorus all join in:
There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!
BY THE END of that second year at Enderbury, there were at least three people who shared with David the conviction that there would be nothing he could not do—provided he went on to college. They were Absolom Carter; Dr. Arthur, the Enderbury principal; and Dr. Fosco. Each of them spoke to David, separately, urging him to go on. Syracuse, which was a Methodist institution and was not far away from home, seemed the logical choice, and in the spring of 1899, not long before he was twenty-one, David did apply. Don Treadup, again joining the band of angels, said he would bank the lad for whatever he could not earn on his own. Brownson and Hannah Treadup were apparently baffled and dismayed by the pretension of their farmboy son, but in the American way they could only support and applaud.
ENTRANCE into Syracuse, as into any American university, was no light matter at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century. To get in, David Treadup would have to present evidence of having passed examinations in Greek (grammar, composition, oral and written sight translation; three books of the Anabasis and either three books of the Iliad or four of the Odyssey); Latin (grammar, comp, and sight reading; the first four books of Caesar, six of Cicero’s Orations, six books of the Aeneid, ten of Virgil’s Eclogues); English (general knowledge of the authors’ lives and subject matter of certain texts: Scott’s Abbott, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Irving’s Sketch Book, Longfellow’s Evangeline, Macaulay’s Essay on Addison, and readings from the Spectator); Greek, Roman, and American history; mathematics (algebra through quadratics, including radicals; plane geometry; ratio, logarithms, the binomial formula); and science (physics, physical geography, and one of botany, physiology, or zoology).
In setting these requirements, Syracuse was pretty much following the national pattern. As to science and modern languages, the university was relatively conservative. At Harvard one could enter with either Greek or Latin; Columbia, Yale, and some other colleges were beginning to require French or German. Williams, Stanford, Yale, and Harvard required trigonometry, which Syracuse did not. Shortly before David applied, Chancellor James Roscoe Day made a statement about a mild revision of the Syracuse curriculum:
While holding firmly to the classical course and making it possible to extend studies in this direction farther than ever, we have opened out to students lines of suited or special aptitudes in philosophy, science, and literature. It is our endeavor to fit the courses to the students rather than the students to the courses. We offer one hundred and twenty-five variations thus giving…the possibility of pursuing a line for which one is evidently fitted….
Modifications like these in all American colleges presaged the overwhelming flood of new scientific and technological knowledge of the coming years, which would eventually erode the classical learning to the vanishing point. But Syracuse was so far “holding firmly to the classical course” because it was thought that American youth should realize that modern Western civilization had admirable ancient roots.
This—with a reverse twist—was indeed to be the significance for the future missionary of his classical studies: Those studies would have prepared him to export “modern civilization” to a foreign country without having revealed to him the fact that that country, too, had a civilization of its own, with deep roots in its own classical literature. David’s ignorance of Chinese history, culture, and daily life, when he set out for his life’s mission, was to be both appalling and unexceptional. The eventual irony was to be that a band of Westerners trained in their classics, David Treadup (though rather weakly) among them, would abet and applaud as China abandoned its civil examination system, abandoned largely the classical Chinese written language, the wen-li, and opened up to the populace a vulgate language—a process without which China’s rush to join the “advanced” nations of the world would probably not have come as soon as it did.
DAVID’S diary note just after he had taken the New York State Regents’ examinations at the end of his time at Enderbury said: “I struck the math and physics hard, survived in Eng. lit, barely passed L, think I flunked G.” Eventually word came that he had passed even Greek. That he had been able to meet the requirements in Latin and Greek, even barely, after only a year and a half of study was remarkable testimony, not only to the mettlesome capacity for hard work of a youth of that time, but also to the fusion of David’s gifts with those of his artful young mentor, Absolom Carter. Much later in Treadup’s career there would come, as well, a dramatic fusion of his and Carter’s styles and methods.
SYRA-SYRA-SYRA WAH-HOO-WAH
“THE FALL of ’99, I entered Syracuse University, poorly prepared but determined to make something of myself.”
Syracuse at the turn of the century was a small denominational school, like so many private American colleges and universities which by mid-twentieth century were to become largely secularized. There were a few more than two hundred students, about two-to-one male to female, in David’s class.
The university capped a then bleak hill, its buildings evoking the cultural aspirations of a faraway Europe of a distant past. The centerpiece was the baroque Hall of Languages, built of stones of two colors and partly covered with ivy. Behind it, a bit to the west, stood the gymnasium, as Gothic as a temple of sweat could hope to be, of dark brick, with high windows. Also to the west was the university library, later to become the administration building. Farther still to the west and south, on another rise overlooking the city, was the dark Gothic cathedral-like spire of Crouse College, in which Fine Arts were housed. Wooden walkways, some of them dilapidated, ran between these buildings. There were no trees to speak of. In a muddy depression called the Oval, sports contests were held. To the southeast of the Hall of Languages were tracts of meadowland, the hay from which was sold each year to support the university budget.
Syracuse was Methodist. On the top floor of the Hall of Languages, at the crown of the castle, radiating its influence over the campus, was the chapel. There every midmorning the students gathered to sing and pray. For the past five years the university had been presided over with dictatorial benevolence by a huge-bodied, large-voiced Methodist minister, James Roscoe Day, previously pastor of Calvary Church in New York City. At his inauguration he had said that Syracuse
is to be a Christian university, with a mission emphasized by that fact, something superior to the state or secular school in its moral atmosphere and equal to it in its curriculum and work. But it is to be a Christian university upon the broad foundation of Christ’s Christianity, which welcomes men and does not exclude them. It is to be far more Christian than denominational…. It will be a university Christian enough to make a Hebrew as much at home as a Christian; to afford equal facility to Catholic and Protestant.*1 There is no creed in mathematics or in natural science. Syracuse University will be a brain manufactory, taking its material from all sources of usable brains. It will be Christian not by exclusion, not by magnifying a sect, but by magnifying human learning and contributing to the same.
The style of this brain manufactory was flamboyantly “collegiate.” Freshmen wore demeaning green caps. Sophomores carried canes. Greek-letter fraternities and sororities dominated college social life—and occasionally the city newspapers noted with disapproval the forcible entry of male students into a sorority. Victories in sports called for parades and bonfires. Hard-fought football games were followed by bitter recriminations and broken-off relations—from Colgate when David entered, from Cornell two years later. Each day after chapel students lingered in the corridors of the Hall of Languages singing class and college anthems and popular songs: “Quod Libet,” “Bingo,” “Go Down, Moses,” “Ten Little Indians,” “Peter Gray.” Outdoors there were tugs of war and pranks. The favorite entertainment was a curious form of party called a “literary,” or “lit”—“a strange combination of the corn-husking, Irish wake, and horning party.”
In his first months the hayseed David Treadup threw himself into all these callithumpian doings with a whole heart—and nearly to the point of disaster.
DAVID’S first letter home is taken up entirely with the “salt rush,” a ritual annual free-for-all that had had its origin in Syracuse’s parent institution, Genesee College. The foremost industry of the city of Syracuse in the nineteenth century was its Onondaga salt works, and the custom developed at Genesee of “salting” the new students by sprinkling the first-year benches in chapel, one day early in the year, with salt, the aim being to take the freshness out of the freshmen. Later at Syracuse the technique of the ritual was improved on: Salt was rubbed in the yearlings’ hair. Of course the victims fought back, and eventually the exercise became a formalized melee. David wrote:
I don’t know where the word came from—it got round like a snake in the grass—today was Salt Rush day. The entire student body was all a-whisper during chapel. Chancellor Day shouted his prayers and frowned up a storm. The second we were dismissed, all we Frosh and the Sophs—men, I mean—dashed helter-skelter down the stairs of the Hall of Languages, the Juns and Sens and all the women behind us, and ran round back of Crouse College, where the Sophs formed up a ring at the crest of the knoll, and we formed a circle lower down.
Then they began taunting us, making mewling sounds, crybabying, shouting “Nyaaa! Nyaaa!” and calling out in unison a parody of one of our class yells:
Syra-Syra-Syra
Wah-Hoo-Wah
Oughty-three, oughty-three,
I want my ma!
The upperclassmen were egging us on, too, and the ladies were watching. I’ll tell you something, Ma and Da, I felt really small. Remember how I confessed once how the bullies in the bakery at S.B. both frightened me yet I also worshiped them? Up there the Sophs seemed like the bakery boys. They were Syracuse men. We were babes and rubes. I truly hung back.
But some Freshmen I don’t know—there’s a certain click of cronies who stand out for breaking Frosh rules—they burst into class songs without waiting for the upperclassmen to finish—they carry canes—they smoke pipes on campus—now they gave out a whoop and they charged, and we all felt we had to follow. And when we got up there, well, those Sophs were just young fellows like us, and I suddenly realized I may be David but I’m Goliath, too. I had some salt thrown at me, but no Soph was going to pickle my scalp I tell you. I had my shirt torn but no bruises. Just as many Sophs as Frosh wound up with shiners and nosebleeds and split cheeks.
It was all over in fifteen minutes, a senior blew a whistle and the Sophs all sang “Orange” and then their spokesman invited us to boxing and wrestling in the gym in the P.M. and a reception at the Y.M.C.A. in the evening. Do you want to know something? I didn’t even go to the fisticuffs. Just because I’m big and strong doesn’t mean I want to become a bakery boy. But the reception, in fact the whole Salt Rush, made me feel like a Syracuse man.
A few days later Hannah Treadup answered her son’s letter:
That you should have waited three long weeks to write us about your new life, and then that you should regale us with nothing but tribal warfare and mob rule came as a painful surprise to your parents. Your father is making a great sacrifice of sinew and sweat for your sake, and you are up there hooliganizing. For shame. It is time to fit your brain to the proportions of your body, son David.
GOLIATH had been noticed. The morning after the salt rush, after chapel, two seniors stopped David on the stairs of the Hall of Languages and solicited his meat for football.
“Declined,” David’s diary laconically announces.
The decision was not as offhand as that single word would make it seem. David had other plans, no less ambitious—for he held up always before himself the ideal of the thinker-athlete, on the model of Absolom Carter. The first football game of the autumn led to a procession and victory bonfire. “Roman splendors!” David wrote in his diary; but then added: “Still glad I held out for the Navy.” In a letter home in the winter David told his family he missed his lovely wherry (“she must be all dried out in the barn”), but it was all right because “there’s big talk about a new sport up here.”
Early in 1899, Chancellor Day, as much a promoter as a preacher, had convened at the Yates Hotel in the city a meeting which founded the Lake Side Yacht and Boat Club and made plans for building an $18,000 boathouse on the west side of Onondaga Lake. Named as commodore was Lyman Cornelius Smith, proprietor of the L. C. Smith Typewriter Company. A city newspaper next day revealed the chancellor’s motive:
Onondaga Lake offers an excellent place for rowing, and there is no reason why Syracuse University shouldn’t train a crew on Onondaga Lake as well as Cornell University on Cayuga Lake.
Students cheered and whistled when, four days after the meeting, the chancellor announced in chapel that L. C. Smith was donating an eight-oared shell to the university. At once the students formed what they called the Navy and began discussing tryouts, and whether to adopt the Yale or Cornell style of rowing. Mr. Smith went to Ithaca to interview the great Charles Courtney, who had retired from sculling in 1883 (amateur: 88 wins, 0 defeats; professional: 39 wins, 7 defeats) to train the Cornell rowers and become the preeminent crew coach of his era (eventual record: 146 races, 101 firsts). Courtney stressed, among other things, the need for a rowing machine, to train rowers on dry land before putting them in a shell. Dr. Day soon announced that a university trustee was donating such a machine, and L. C. Smith added two four-oared gigs to his previous gift. And soon afterward the Athletic Board chose as football coach a Cornell graduate, Edwin Sweetland, who had starred at Ithaca in football, baseball, track, and crew—and who, being a Courtney product, would coach the Navy David’s first spring at Syracuse.
JUDGING by the exclamation points in David’s diary, what caused him the most giddy turmoil in his first weeks at Syracuse was being in the daily presence of a large number of women. Mores, death, taboos, pranks, and God were curiously intermixed in his telegraphic notes about flirtations—God being mentioned at this period mainly as someone who would help choose and soften the right woman.
Syracuse had been coeducational from its founding in 1870. With a liberality rare then in American higher education, Syracuse had laid down the organic law that “admission shall be equal to all persons”—giving notice in the use, a century early, of that word “persons,” that it was “the clear and well defined purpose of the trustees,” as Dr. Jesse T. Peck said in his inaugural charge to the founding faculty, “that there shall be no invidious discriminations here against women.”
There was a strong undercurrent of dissent, however, among Syracuse alumni and male students, often expressed in the campus paper, The University Herald: Woman’s duty was to her husband and children; her feminine charm was blunted and hardened by campus life; her imperviousness to advanced learning, especially in science, was notorious. Undergraduate men apparently felt inferior to the masculine populations of Yale and Princeton, two rival institutions much on the minds of Syracuse males. And within the university there were distinctions, perhaps best summed up by the fact that of seventy-six women who received undergraduate degrees when David graduated six years later, fifty-one took “certificates” in education, fine arts, and nursing. Except for the important Y.W.C.A., most mainline undergraduate activities were male. Women’s sports were somehow not “serious”: David saw the ladies’ basketball team trot out, like Florodora girls, smothered in yard goods—in bloomers and blouses of white piped in orange, with great orange sashes, and with long capes trimmed in orange which fluttered behind the runners on the court.
But women were all around, and David was huge and handsome, and choices were possible. The goal of flirtation was both forbidden and always there, like the heavy scent of honeysuckle in June. “Andrews told story,” David wrote in his diary, in the closest approach to smut ever recorded in it, “about a mother calling downstairs to ask her daughter if her fellow was there yet. Daughter answered, ‘He is getting there quite fast.’ ” David never speaks of “girls” in his diary; they are “ladies,” and their surnames, always preceded by “Miss,” come and go. Here, for an example—often repeated, with variations of casting—is a triangular drama working itself out:
| OCT. 18 | Miss McNair proposed that she get some music for piano and cornet. I told her she might. She seems to be warm after me! |
| 20 | Had sport with Miss Roberts at supper table… |
| 22 | Finished reading [Emerson’s] “Friendship,” which Miss Roberts lent me. This loan has doubtless strengthened my friendship with her! |
| 23 | Returned Miss Roberts’s book had pleasant chat… |
| 24 | Pleasant chat as usual… |
| 26 | Thinking about starting in company with Miss R! |
| 27 | A junior by name of Knight drowned in Ond Lake. Somewhat troubled in mind about lady affairs. Been with Miss Roberts at game. |
| 28 | The body of Mr. Knight was recovered this morning. |
| 30 | Bought tickets for Sousa’s band. $1.50. Was disappointed in getting the lady I wanted. Engaged Miss McNair for the evening. It was the finest entertainment I ever heard! Arthur Prior played a trombone solo. Miss McNair seemed much pleased to have my company. I put a good joke on Platzer! |
| NOV. 3 | Miss Roberts is going to leave our dining circle. This seems sad to me. It is doubtless God’s plan. |
| 4 | Went to gym in P.M. Saw Miss Roberts from a distance. |
| 5 | Not feeling up to snuff. |
A later sequence with another lady suggests stages beyond book lending, though of course the word used in it, “climax,” can hardly be expected to bear the weight of the euphemism it later became:
| NOV. 20 | Stayed with Miss Blain [not clear where] until after eleven. At this point in my life I find that I must trust everything to God who will surely open the best way. |
| 24 | Called on Miss Blain. |
| 25 | Was with Miss Blain until a quarter of eleven. |
| 26 | Was with Miss Blain until twelve. The climax was reached. We found that we were good friends but nothing more. I was ashamed that I proceeded by desire as I did, but feel that I did the manly thing. |
IN OCTOBER David achieved university-wide notice, not of the best kind.
Male upperclassmen carried canes; freshmen, who were not regarded as grown men, were not supposed to do so. Each autumn some freshmen would flaunt canes, often silver-headed ones to underline their daring. And each autumn, in yet another symbolic combat in the sophomore-freshman rivalry, a “cane rush” was held, in which the second-year men challenged the fledglings’ right to the sticks. This contest, like the salt rush, had become formalized over the years. It had been scheduled ahead of time, and when the opponents, who had discarded hats, coats, and vests, lined up in two facing teams twenty feet apart, their audience included a fair number of alumni, wearing high stiff collars and top hats. The referee, a senior, tossed a single cane between the two lines, and the two classes dashed to fight for it. Soon there were many scattered clusters of writhing combatants, trying to keep their opponent from going to the support of those actually struggling for possession of the cane. As the Herald later reported,
The yearling Treadup, a bull of a fellow, managed to keep his feet and remain unengaged. Perhaps no soph wanted to try muscles with such a Fafnir. At the right moment he put two fingers in his mouth and emitted a whistle to split a rock. At this signal a fellowclassman in the actual cane heap succeeded in flipping the cane out to Treadup, who put his long legs into action, bouncing sophs off as if they were puppy dogs, and he ran with the cane held aloft all the way off campus to University Place. The frosh were judged to have won for the first time in memory.
The congratulations David received from both men and women were redoubled after Chancellor Day in chapel the next morning delivered a sharp little sermon on public roughhousing, which was also reported in the paper:
We do not wish to threaten. We do not like to be threatened ourself, and hence imagine that others do not like to be threatened. But we do insist that every feature of this barbarous custom of campus warfare, open to the view of the public, shall be strictly forbidden. Any future violation will be disciplined by suspension and probably by expulsion. I trust I shall not be forced into a contest with the students, for [great emphasis] I will see every seat before me vacant before I will vary a hair’s breadth from my position. And in a contest I have a habit of winning. [Laughter.]
IN THE NEXT few days:
• Wooden sidewalks were found ripped up and leaning against nearby posts.
• A wagon straddled the peak of the gymnasium roof.
• A country outhouse stood one morning in front of the Hall of Languages.
• Benches from Professor Clark’s room in the Hall of Languages were arranged in rows on Walnut Street, and the Reverend Dr. Wilbur found Professor Clark’s desk on his front lawn.
• As the chancellor prayed in chapel “for the college, the nation, President McKinley and the Senate, the cause of Christianity and good government throughout the world, and the parents of students who in distant homes are watching with anxious eyes the struggles of their loved ones,” there were rustling sounds from near the organ, and a large poster rose slowly behind Dr. Day: a drawing unmistakably of the chancellor’s great head atop a tiny body which stood on a prostrate student holding a beer bottle and a corncob pipe in his outstretched hands.
WAS DAVID involved in these pranks? We have no way of knowing; his diary grows unusually discreet in this period. Earlier and later entries divulge that Professor Clark was his least favorite teacher. The lofted wagon does have in it a resonance of Absolom Carter’s lecture on overcoming large resistance with small force. At any rate, when the final caper of the series took place—a rather unpleasant nighttime splurge of vandalism in the city, resulting in broken streetcar windows and splashes of orange paint on monuments and buildings—David was one of four students who were caught in the act.
The probationary warning the quartet received next morning from Dr. Day seared itself into David’s mind for a lifetime. In his diary there is only one laconic line:
NOV. 5 Believe I must begin to apply myself.
THIS PERIOD of rebelliousness, like that of his seventeenth year, was the forerunner of a winter of low spirits almost as severe as the melancholy that went with his osteomyelitis. Only many years later did David begin to see that episodes of his “badness” signaled major downswings of mood. What proved to be remarkable was that for such a very long time after his conversion there were to be no such downturns; for years on end there would be only rare outcroppings of “badness,” and he would remain everlastingly buoyant and radiant. But now the hero of the cane rush fretted and was irritable and anxious.
He became acutely aware of his poverty. This was a time in the country of boom and bluster, of McKinley and gold and the trusts, of Standard Oil and Anaconda and railroad monopolies, of the Rockefeller and Harriman and Carnegie fortunes; and while Syracuse was not as much a seat of privilege as some of the older eastern universities, money-making possibilities seemed dense all around David. “Chancellor Day preached on a text from Luke 12,” David writes in his diary.
Eat, drink, and be merry: rich toward God. The rightness of getting wealth if our object is to benefit others. Investment in attaining wealth, health, and spiritual growth. Moody’s career. The dissatisfaction after attaining worldly goods.
But David’s dissatisfaction, so far, was with not having attained them. Scraping along drained his energies. He wore himself out with the striving and frugality of Ben Franklin, only to find himself in meaner and meaner straits.
| JAN. 12 | [1900] Platzer found a place where I can get a room for attending a furnace. Bought rubbers 80¢. |
| 14 | Disgusted with geom. teacher. Afraid I will fail the math exam. Carried out ashes at Leonard’s and Smith’s. Paid .24 for laundry. |
| 15 | Shoveled walks in the morning…. |
| 16 | Cleaned Dr. L’s walk. Cleaned walks at Univ. 2 hrs. |
| 17 | Not feeling extra well…. |
| 18 | 3 hrs. work for Curtis…. |
| 19 | 4 hrs. Curtis. Went skating at Lake. 2½ Curtis evening. |
| 20 | …Had trouble during night. |
There is no mention of the promised support from Uncle Don Treadup. It may be that by that time David had absorbed his mother’s stubborn pride about taking money from the quirky relative; or perhaps the mercurial Uncle Don had lost interest in the little giant, little no more. In early February David writes home, significantly appealing to his father through his mother:
Would you ask Da to send me twenty dollars as soon as he can spare it so I can finish this term? I had to buy a pair of shoes $2.00, then the apparatus and material I have had to get in botany class raise the amount until it scares me. I have worked harder this term than ever in my life. Prof. Curtis gives me chores. I have adopted the habit of getting up in the morning at half past five which helps some. Gloves cost 50¢.
The diary records the begrudging result:
FEB. 10 Classes as usual. Rcd. letter from Father. Grandma was buried last Sunday. Said he sold my cow for $35. Only sent me $15 of it. Andrus tells me he is $300 in debt.
David’s blithe autumn trip through the rites of passage into Syracuse manhood was now belatedly collecting its ticket. He was taking advanced algebra, Greek (Lysias, Plato, Demosthenes), Latin (Livy, Juvenal), German, Roman history, elocution, and botany. “The German hard for me. Took C in exam.” “The new German book Sappio very hard.” “I feel the need of a larger vocabulary to express more accurately my thoughts.” “Elocution at 8:30. Miss Richards said I had improved, but not enough in my opinion. I am so loud. A windbag.” “Was given a cheesing today in Greek, on third Philippic. I was mortally wounded by the mockery.” To put on a cheesing, a roomful of students stamped on the floor when a classmate showed signs of being unprepared for a recitation. “Eyes very very tired.” Gloom and fear hit him after each examination. After German: “My eyes troubling me. Not feeling at all well. Trust in the Lord and it will come out all right in the end.” After algebra: “My eyes very weak. Did not study in P.M. Quite blue.”
ALL THROUGH late winter and spring David struggled against his blue mood. He clung to the belief that willpower would give him the lift he needed. “Read a piece on happiness,” he wrote in his diary. “I am going to try and stop thinking so much on my ills and failings and take a brighter view of everything.”
He started a new commonplace book, with dated entries, into which he copied passages from books of the mind-cure literature that was much in vogue just then—works in an American vein astonishingly similar in intent, though dissimilar in content, to some of the self-help bestsellers of the late twentieth century.
FEB. 2 “Be unselfish; have an ideal outlook, see yourself as you would like to be, healthy, happy, well adjusted to life, helpful, wisely sympathetic, and ever ready with an encouraging word, looking for good, growing strong in wisdom and power, patiently awaiting occasions, yet always sufficiently occupied, so that you will have no time to be annoyed, fearful, restless, or morbid.”
The very act of copying in the commonplace book was part of the work of his struggle. Here, in a longer entry in it and a separate note in his diary on the same day, we see the effort he was making to apply the mind-cure homilies:
FEB. 12 “Quicken a man’s interest in so-called spiritual things, and you shall find him neglecting his body and the interests of his physical life…. Everywhere one finds a want of balance between theory and practice, mind and body, culture and the spirit, the demands of self and the needs of others; between the receiving, accumulating, and developing of property and ideas and the just distribution of that which is rightfully ours only that we may share it. Fragments of men one may find,—good theorists, laborers, and servants. But how far one must search for the well-rounded character, equally sound in mind and body….”
And the diary:
FEB. 12 I have neglected my body. Have rowed a great deal in ‘Ecarg’ in recent years. Decided to try Navy now. Coach Sweetland says I may compete. Perhaps this will bring a balance.
TRYING OUT for the crew offered none of the charms of rowing the Ecarg on country creeks—none of the dreams of the toy boat in the bathtub of babyhood. David had in fact let himself in for an abysmal spring.
For six weeks he labored indoors on the obstinate and unrewarding rowing machine, getting nowhere, with “Iron Jaw” Sweetland roaring abuse at him. On March 30 the coach sent David and six other freshmen on the squad out in rowboats on the Seneca River to chop away the thin layer of ice that still blocked the outlet to Lake Onondaga. Then David had to wait in the frigid cold while all the upperclassmen in the squad of twenty worked out in turns in one of the four-oared gigs L. C. Smith had donated. David was in the fifth and last seating. He and the others had to wade out through icy water to the gig. With Coach Sweetland shouting instructions on how much to feather the oars and how to be less jerky and stuttering, the freshmen splashed and swashed the half mile to the lake and back, gradually working up to a slow beat of eighteen strokes a minute.
The workouts continued to be nightmarish. The rowers changed clothes in a crude boat shed, open at one end. For baths after workouts they sloshed each other with cold lake water from wooden buckets, screaming as if the water were boiling. With castanet teeth they would dress and run to catch a trolley for the long ride back to the city. The next afternoon they would have to get into still-wet togs.
By early May the Navy men were on the edge of mutiny. After a protest meeting “in a small restaurant sandwiched between a shoe parlor and a saloon,” they went to a city reporter to unload their anger. From the Syracuse Telegram for May 6:
Not one dollar except the salary of the coach has been spent on the crew this season. The University promised Sweetland that the men would have a training table. The men go out on the water in the early afternoon and do not get back until 8 o’clock at night. It is then too late to get anything more than a lunch at their boardinghouses. In many cases all they can get is a bowl of bread and milk.
Nothing happened. The Athletic Board refused to provide a training table. The last straw for David came in word that after all his slogging work, the Board had scheduled just one race for the Navy for June 15 against the Francis Boat Club of Ithaca, and freshmen were not to be allowed to compete. The diary: “Why all the slaving? I feel used and abused.”
ON THE MAY MORNING after the last classes and before final exams, the college celebrated Moving Up Day.
This was an occasion of wild joy for the freshmen, who were liberated by it from the oppression of the sophomores, but to David, deeper in the dumps than ever, the cheers and catcalls of his classmates were bewildering and “truly sophomoric,” he sarcastically wrote. A ceremony in chapel marked this end forever of classes for seniors, who were virtually alumni now, entitled no longer to pews in chapel. They surrendered their seats to the juniors; the sophomores moved up into the juniors’ former seats; the freshmen, hooting and scrambling, took the sophomores’ rows; the seniors moved back to the freshman section.
The rest of the day was a holiday, and the freshmen, many dressed and daubed as Indians, paraded to the city, dragging a hearse with a coffin containing their loathed green caps. In the evening they had tugs of war and a bonfire, and someone painted a huge ’03 on the grandstand roof in the Oval.
David wrote in his diary:
I tried to join in the general good time. My body was present with the others but my spirit was truant. It all seemed like a huge cheesing to me, and I kept thinking, For David Treadup this is Moving Out Day.
So it proved. David failed both Greek and Latin, and his other grades were barely passing. He was penniless. He was exhausted. He was thoroughly disheartened. On the fourth of June Chancellor Day called him in and, according to the diary,
suggested what he called “a mutual separation.” In plain language: dismissal. Remote possibility of re-entry. Who can say now how rotten my life will be?