The enclosed article is submitted for consideration with the title of "My Most Unforgettable Character." It is an extract from my autobiography, which is now being written and will not be published before late in 1971.
For information regarding myself, I refer you to Who's Who in America.
John G. Neihardt
MY MOST UNFORGETTABLE CHARACTER
by John G. Neihardt
It must have been during my fifteenth summer that I began hanging around the tombstone shop of "Professor" R. Durrin, near the old Wayne Opera House on upper Main Street. Maybe it was by accident that I came to know the "Professor"; but I don't think so. I am half-way convinced that there are dynamic patterns in our cosmos; that somehow some of us are caught up in such patterns and fulfuill them at any cost. I don't know just what I mean; but I suspect that I mean something worthy of consideration. Surely if this be true, I fell into one of the major patterns of my life when I first entered the shop full of tombstones in various stages of becoming--rough and polished, carved and lettered, doves and lilies, lambs and angels.
He was putting the finishing touches on a petrified angel when I stepped inside to take a look at what he was doing, for he was known to be devilish clever with chisel and mallet. Leaning over his work and tapping with great care, he was unaware of my presence for some time. Finally, rising to his full height, he gazed far down upon me, his keen gray eyes slowly coming into seeing focus, as though he had been a long way off and was just getting back. I can see him yet standing there, over six erect feet of him; and I can see his Raphael face, as finely chiselled as though he had done it himself. He must have been still in his early fifties, and the sprinkling of gray in his touselled dark hair was only marble dust.
Having brought the small barefooted boy into sharp focus, he smiled with a special sort of mock-serious smile he had said: "Well, well! It's the fellow who writes poetry, they say!" No doubt at this point I looked guilty and apologetic. "But don't feel too bad about it," he continued.
"Some very great men have done it. I even do it myself now and then!"
Suddenly that long-focus look came back into his eyes, and he seemed to have forgotten me as he turned back to his angel and began tapping intently and ever so lightly. For some time he worked in silence, now and then stepping back a pace to appraise the effect of his gentle tapping. This went on so long that I was about to go on my way, for I was on an errand for my mother at the time and had just looked in curiously on passing.
I had started for the door when he wakened on a sudden to my presence. "By the way," he said, still gazing at the the angel, "you wouldn't be wanting a job, I suppose? How about learning to polish marble? I could use a polisher.
Now turning upon me the full candlepower of a kindly gaze that I later learned to love, he added: "We could talk about poetry while we worked you know; and maybe spout it to each other. Eh?"
There was nothing at the moment that I wanted so much as to be a marble-polisher; so I was hired on the spot--just like that!
I have tried to remember if I ever actually received wages in coin of the realm, but memory fails me here; and, anyway, that was a trivial matter in the enchanted world of long vistas that I had entered.
"Professor" was certainly a conspicuous town character, respected, with some condescending reservations, for his unquestioned skill. Yet he was regarded, nonetheless, as a comic figure by those who did not know him, which is to say practically the entire village population. Indeed, they had their reasons. For instance, consider the spectacle when he made his routine excursion to the post office on nice days. Surely, it was something to see the tall, stately man with the touselled hair curling out from under his silk top hat, striding down the street, apparently oblivious of the human race, his piercing gaze fixed on distant vacuity, the tail of his cutaway coat flapping in the breeze he made!
Or maybe there were days when the walking was not so good, and the Professor would be seen at the mail-time (complete with top hat and cutaway) riding down Main Street in an elderly one-horse buggy, pulled by "Old Bill" at a mincing dogtrot. Bill was as much a town character as his doting master.
There were floating stories of his mysterious clairvoyant powers, one alleging that Bill needed no guidance in his goings and comings about town, but could read his master's mind and make straight for the desired objective, unerring as a homing pigeon. And there were rumors to the effect that, on various occasions, the Professor had been seen earnestly conversing with his horse as man to man.
When I had come to know the Professor well and had learned to appreciate his peculiar mock-serious sense of humor, I wondered if perhaps he was only ribbing the natives for his private entertainment--and theirs.
Even I--boy that I was--became aware that there were undisclosed chapters in the Professor's life story. He spoke freely, and with some pride, of his experience as a student under Thomas Buchanan Read, the once celebrated poet and sculptor. Occasionally, in unguarded moments, there were hints of better days; and his work, scattered helter-skelter through the cluttered tombstone shop, made one wonder what he was doing in our village. There were masterly drawings on marble plaques done by a process of his own invention. Thre were beautifullly wrought bas-reliefs and sculptured figures that drew much dust and little attention.
Only once, so far as I can remember, did he speak of personal matters to me. Thsi was some time after our first meeting. We were both working in silence, I at a polishing job and he carefully tapping out an epitaph. We had been silent for an unusually long time when he straightened up and turned his still unfocused eyes upon me. Then he began quoting some stanzas from a sentimental poem. I remember the concluding lines:
When he had finished, he turned again to his careful tapping and there was a long silence. Then again he turned his blank gaze on me, and asked if I had ever heard of Ella Wheeler. I told him I had; that everybody had heard of Ella Wheeler Wilcox, becaue of her book, Poems of Passion. "John," he said, "She nearly became Ella Wheeler Durrin, but her folks didn't like me. They said I was no good. I sometimes wonder if they were right, John. She wrote that poem the night after I left Delovan, our home town, for good."
He was silent for a long while, apparently intent upon carving in imperishable marble a soon-to-be-forgotten tale.
At length he ceased tapping, and, turning on me a mock-tragic countenance, he said, his voice trembling as with supporessed grief: "John, I have composed poor old Bill's epitaph, for surely he will need one before long; and here it is." In the grand manner, with all the swells pulled out, he gave forth like an inspired ham doing Shakespeare a favor:
Wiping his eyes on the back of his hands, he continued with his graven message to posterity.
It was conceivably true, as he once remarked to me, that he could make anything he could see in imagination. Once it was a life-size figure of a charming little boy, carved out of Cararra marble, simply for the joy of working with the precious stuff he loved--and that stuff was expensive! Once it was a pistol with ornately carved grip and shoulder stock, the barrel being wrought from the tine of a hay-rake. It was not only a thing of beauty; it was accurate. Done as a labor of love, this was given to Mrs. Durrin for a Christmas present; and it was good to witness her childish delight with the gift, although it is doubtful that she know which end was the muzzle.
And now let us meet this third and most important member of the family triumvirate, her ladyship, Mrs. Durrin. I never heard her first name, if indeed she had one, which is hard to imagine. What! Call her Annie, or Katy, or Beth, or Jennie? or even Adeline?! It could not be done! Even the adoring Professor invariably addressed her as "Mrs. Durrin"; and she quite as religiously called him "Professor." I do not attempt to spell the word phonetically in keeping with the lady's rich Virginia accent. Inherited from who knows how many ghostly ancestors, it was mellowly musical; and when she spoke to her great man, there was adoration in her voice and eyes.
As for the Professor's response to her idolatry, it was heart-warming to see the benevolent way he looked down upon her, his face glowing with amused affection and pride.
There were some who joked about her pronounced devotion to her man, and those might add a jocular remark or two about her royal forays into the plebian world--rather overdresssed, perhaps (or should one say "arrayed"?)
Neighbor women were never able to achieve a coffee-borrowing, fresh-bread-sharing familiarity with the lonely lady. There were discussions about the probable origin of her obviously expensive turnouts, the consensus favoring the rich-relative-back-home hypothesis.
I can see her yonder far away, a bit dimmed by the mist of time--or is it the Vergilian "tears of things"? I can see her in gorgeous raiment holding earnest conference with the embarrassed butcher over a dime's worth of three-cent boiling meat, like as not, and maybe a free slice or two of liver ("if it's nice and fresh"). I can see her in an evening gown out driving in her carriage (the elderly buggy) on a pleasant afternoon. I see her sitting stiffly like a statue. I see old Bill, half asleep in the shafts, performing faithfully with an air of patient boredom.
And I see that adoration in her eyes.
I see that look again, and I am no longer amused; but I wonder. Was it all, not clowning vanity, as we supposed, but rather a desperate striving to seem worthy of the Greatness she adored?
