Agreatdramatist is authority for the statement that—
The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones.
The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones.
That is no doubt in a measure true; yet it would be grossly unfair to blame personally certain great ones of the past for the evil that has lived after them and borne their names. For instance, it may be doubted whether Louis XIV of France was all that he should have been. His private life would hardly have escaped censure in Upper Montclair, N. J., or West Newton, Mass., and his public acts were not always calculated to promote social justice and universal brotherhood. But to blame him for all the gilt furniture which has ever since stood around the walls of hotel ballrooms and borne his name is a libel even on that lax and luxurious monarch. Yet such is his fate. You who are familiar with history, I who know next to nothing about it, are alike in this—when we hear the wordsLouis XIVwe do not think of a great monarch with a powdered wigand a powdered mistress, of magnificent fountains and courtiers and ladies dancing the gavotte, of a brilliant court and striking epoch. Not at all. We think, both of us, of a gilt chair with a brocaded seat (slightly worn), and maybe a sofa to match. If you say that you don't, I must politely but firmly—well, differ with you.
Alas! poor Louis XIV was not the only worthy (or unworthy) of the past who has come down to the present, not as a personality but as a piece of furniture, a dog, a boot, or some other equally ignominious thing. Speaking of furniture, there's the Morris chair. The man who made the Morris chair was a great and good man—not because he made the Morris chair, but in spite of it! He composed haunting poems, he wrote lovely prose romances of the far-off days of knights and ladyes and magic spells, such as that hightThe Water of the Wondrous Isles, a right brave book mayhap you have not perused, to your exceeding great loss, for beautiful it is and fair to read and full of the mighty desire of a man for a maid. Beside all this, he printed lovely books by other writers, and designed wall-paper, and painted pictures, and thundered against the deadening effect on men of mechanical toil, and in social theories was far in advance of his age. Such a man was William Morris—known to-day to the mass of mankind for one of the most accursedarticles of furniture ever devised by human ingenuity gone astray! Every day, in a million homes, men and women sit in Morris chairs (made by machinery) and read Robert W. Chambers and Florence Barclay. Such, alas, is fame!
Then there was Queen Anne—in many respects an estimable woman, though leaving much to be desired as a monarch. She had her Rooseveltian virtues, being the mother of seventeen children (none of whom lived to grow beyond infancy, to be sure); and she had what the world just now has come to regard as the monarchical vice of autocracy. In her reign science and literature flourished, though without much aid from her, and the English court buzzed with intrigue and politics. But speak the nameQueen Annealoud, and then tell me the picture you get. Is it a picture of the lady or her period? Is it a picture of Pope and Dryden sitting in a London coffee-house? No, it is not—that is, unless you are a very learned, or a very young, person. It is a picture of a horrible architectural monstrosity built about thirty or forty years ago in any American city or suburb, and bearing certain vague resemblances to a home for human beings. Whatever else Queen Anne was, she was not an architect, and she wasn't to blame for those houses, any more than she was to blame for Pope's “Essay on Man.” But that doesn'tcount. She gets the blame, just the same. She is known forever now by those gables and that gingerbread, those shingles and stains.
She had a predecessor on the English throne by the name of Charles. Like Louis in France, he wasn't all he should have been, and there were those in his own day who didn't entirely approve of him. But it wasn't because of his dogs. However, if you mention King Charles now, it is a dog you think of—a small, eary dog, with somewhat splay feet and a seventeenth-century monarchical preference for the society of ladies and the softest cushion. Maybe the royal gentleman didn't deserve anything better of posterity; but, anyhow, that's what he got.
St. Bernhard fared better. If one had to be remembered by a dog, what better dog could he select, save possibly an Airedale? Big, strong, faithful, wise, true to type for centuries, the most reliable of God's creatures (including Man by courtesy in that category), the St. Bernhard is a monument for—well, not for a king, and a king didn't get him; for a saint, rather. It is doubtful if the old monk is playing any lamentations on his harp.
But I'm not so sure about that peerless military leader, General A. E. Burnside. When you have risen to lead an army corps against your country's foes, when you have commanded men and sat your horse for a statue on the groundsof the state capitol or the intersection of Main and State Streets, it really is rather rough to be remembered for your whiskers. Of course, as a wit remarked of Shaw, no man is responsible for his relatives, but his whiskers are his own fault. Nevertheless, how is a great general to know that his military exploits will be forgotten, while his whiskers thunder down the ages, as it were, progressing in the course of time with the changing fashions from bank presidents to Presbyterian elders, and finally to stage butlers? At last even the stage butlers are shaving clean, and a stroke of the razor wipes out a military reputation, blasts a general's immortality! Fame is a fickle jade.
An artistic reputation lasts longer, and resists the barber, proving the superiority of the arts to militarism. “Van Dyke” is still a generally familiar appellation and sounds the same, no matter which way you spell it. Of course, there's no rhyme nor reason in it—artist and whiskers should be spelled the same way. Only they're not. “Something ought to be done about it.” However, to resume.... If you tell me John Jones has a Vandyke, I don't visualize John as an art-collector standing in his gallery in rapt contemplation of a masterpiece by the great Flemish painter. I visualize him as a man with a certain type of beard. I may later think of the master who put these beards upon his portraits.Then again, I may not. Exactly the same would be true if I told you John Jones had a Vandyke, instead of the other way about. Don't contradict me—you know it's so. It is nearly as difficult to-day to own a Van Dyke canvas as it is to paint one, but anybody can raise a Vandyke beard. In fact, many still do, and thus keep the master's memory green. “By their whiskers ye shall know them.”
A military reputation, as we have already proved by the case of General Burnside, is a precarious thing. How many patrons of Atlantic City, I wonder, know the hero of the wars in the Low Countries and his greatest triumph by a certain hotel on the Board Walk, and would be hard put to say which half of the hyphenated name was the general and which the battle? Then there was Wellington, who at one time threatened to be remembered for his boots, and Blucher who still is remembered for his. A certain Massachusetts statesman (anybody elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives is a statesman) once said that the greatest triumph of Napoleon was when Theodore Roosevelt stood silent at his tomb. This is witty, but like most witty sayings, not quite true. It was a great triumph, of course, but rather spectacular. The greatest triumphs are not showy. What actually proves Napoleon's greatness is the fact that he is still remembered as a commander after generationshave selected from the tray of French pastry the detectable and indigestible morsel of sugar, flour and lard that bears his name. To have a toothsome article of food named after you, and then to be still remembered for your actual achievements, is the ultimate test of human greatness. Only a Napoleon can meet it. Even Washington might not now be known as the father of his country if his pie had been a better one.
Who was King, for instance? Was he the cook, or the man cooked for? I fancy I knew once, but I have forgotten. But chicken-à-la-king will live to perpetuate his name as long as there are chickens to be eaten and men to eat them. Even Sardou, spectacular dramatist, for all hisToscasandFédoras(and ten to one you think of Fedora as a hat!), lives for me, a dramatic critic, by virtue of eggs Victorien Sardou, a never-to-be-too-much-enjoyed concoction secured at the old Brevoort House in New York. He may actually have invented this recipe himself, for he was a great lover of the pleasures of the table. If so, it was his masterpiece. An egg is poached on the tender heart of an artichoke, and garnished with a peculiar yellow sauce, topped with a truffle. Around all four sides are laid little bunches of fresh asparagus tips. What isToscacompared to this?
Then, of course, there was Mr. Baldwin. Who was Mr. Baldwin? The people of Wilmington, Mass., know, because there is a monument to the original tree in that town. But we don't know, any more than we know who Mr. Bartlett was, when we eat one of his pears, or Mr. Logan, father of the wine-red berry. In this case the Scripture is indeed verified, that by their fruits shall ye know them.
Two or three times a year my wife gets certain clothes of mine from the closet and combs them for moths, hangs them flapping in the breeze for a while, and puts them back. Among the lot is a garment once much worn by congressmen, church ushers and wedding guests, known to the fashion editors as “frock coats”, and to normal human beings as Prince Alberts. Doubtless, in the flux of styles (like a pendulum, styles swing forth and back again), the Prince Albert will once more be correct, and my wife's labor will not have been in vain, while the estimable consort of England's haircloth sofa and black-walnut bureau queen will continue to be remembered of posterity by this outlandish garment. Poor man, after all, he achieved little else to be remembered by!
And as for the queen herself, she will be remembered by a state of mind. Already “mid-Victorian” has little or nothing to do with Victoria, and is losing its suggestion, even, of a time-period.It is coming to stand for a mental and moral attitude—in fact, for priggishness and moral timidity. Queen Victoria was a great and good lady, and her home life was, as the two women so clearly pointed out when they left the theatre, totally different from that of Cleopatra. But she is going to give her name to a mental attitude, just the same, even as the Philistines and the Puritans. It pays to pick the period you queen it over rather carefully. Elizabeth had better luck. To be Elizabethan is to be everything gay and dashing and out-doory and adventuresome, with insatiable curiosity and the gift of song. Of course, Shakespeare, Drake, Raleigh, ought to have the credit—but they don't get it, any more than Tennyson comes in on the Victorian discredit. The head that wears a crown may well lie uneasy.
The memory of many a man has been perpetuated, all unwittingly, by the manufacturers and advertising agencies. Here I tread on dangerous ground, but surely I shall not be accused of commercial collusion if I point out that so “generously good” a philanthropist as George W. Childs became a name literally in the mouth of thousands. He became a cigar. Then there was Lord Lister. He, too, has become a name in the mouths of thousands—as a mouth wash. And how about the only daughter of the Prophet? Fatima was her name.
Who was Lord Raglan, or was he a lord? He is a kind of overcoat sleeve now. Who was Mr. Mackintosh? Was it Lord Brougham, too? Gasolene has extinguished his immortality. Gladstone has become a bag, Gainsborough is a hat. The beautiful Madame Pompadour, beloved of kings, is a kind of hair-cut now. The Mikado of Japan is a joke, set to music, heavenly music, to be sure, but with its tongue in its angelic cheek. An operetta did that. You cannot think of the Mikado of Japan in terms of royal dignity. I defy you to try. Ko-ko and Katisha keep getting in the way, and you hear the pitty-pat of Yum-Yum's little feet, and the bounce of those elliptical billiard balls. Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta is perhaps the most potent document for democracy since the Communist Manifesto!
The other day I heard a woman say that she had got to begin banting. A nice verb, to bant, though not approved of by the dictionary, which scornfully terms it “humorous and colloquial”. The humor, to be sure, is usually for other people, not for the person banting. Do you know, I wonder, the derivation of this word? It means, of course, to induce this too, too solid flesh to melt, by the careful avoidance of farinaceous, saccharine and oily foods, and occasionally its meaning is stretched by the careless to include also rolling on the bedroom floor fifteen timesbefore breakfast, and standing up twenty minutes after meals. Yet the word is derived from the name of William Banting, who was a London cabinet-maker. Cabinet-making is a worthy trade; indeed, it is one of the most appealing of all trades; in fact, it's not a trade, it's an art. I haven't a doubt that William made splendid furniture, especially chairs, for nobody appreciates a nice, roomy, strong chair like a fat man. I haven't a doubt that it was his ambition in life to be remembered for his furniture, even as the brothers Adam, as Chippendale and Sheraton. But it was not to be. In an unfortunate moment, William discovered that by eating fewer potatoes and cutting out two lumps of sugar from his tea he could take off some of the corpulence that troubled him. He told of his discovery—and the world knows him now as a method of getting number 44 ladies into a perfect 38. I have always felt sorry for William Banting. He is one of the tragic figures of history.
Of course, there are many more, if none other quite so poignant, but you must recall them for yourself. For some paragraphs now I have been working up to a climax of prophecy. I have been planning to predict what Kaiser William II will be noted for in the days that are to come. It seemed to me that would make rather a neat conclusion for this little essay. But, Gentle Reader, I've got to turn that job over to you, also.Not that the space is lacking, but after long and painful concentration I have been unable to think of anything bad enough. It may turn out that he will be known simply by the meek and nourishing kaiser roll on the breakfast table—the only surviving relic of a monarchical vocabulary in a peaceful and democratic universe. Perhaps, for him, that would be the bitterest fate of all, the ultimate irony.
Iwonderif other wayfarers through New England greet, as I do, with special affection the old house on the bend of the road? It is so characteristic of an earlier civilization, so suggestive of a vanished epoch—and withal so picturesque! Even if you are unfortunate enough to “tour” in a motor-car, which of course is far from the ideal way to savor the countryside, still you cannot miss the old house on the bend, even though you do miss the feel of the land, the rise and dip of the road, the fragrance of the clematis by the wall, the already fading gold of the evening primroses when you start off after breakfast.
Even for a motorist, however, the old house on the bend stands up to view, especially if you are on the front seat with the driver. The car swings into a straightaway, lined, perhaps, with sugar-maples and gray stone walls. Between the trunks are vistas of the green fields and far hills. But the chief vista is up the white perspective of the road, which seems to vanish directly into the front door of the solid, mouse-gray house on the bend.
The ribbon of road rushes toward you, as if a great spool under your wheels were winding it up. The house rushes on with it; grows nearer; details emerge. You see the great square chimney; the tiny window-panes, six to a sash, some of them turned by time, not into the purple of Beacon Hill but into a kind of prismatic sheen like oil on water; the bit of classic egg-and-dart border on the door-cap; the aged texture of the weathered clapboard; the graceful arch of the wide woodshed entrance, on the kitchen side; the giant elm rising far above the roof. You rush on so near to the house, indeed, that the car seems in imminent danger of colliding with the front door, when suddenly the wheels bite the road, you feel the pull of centrifugal force, and the car swings away at right angles, leaving an end view of the ancient dwelling behind you, so that when you turn for a final glance you see the long slant of the roof at the rear, going down within six or eight feet of the ground.
Such is the view from the motor-car. If you are traveling on foot, however, there is much more to be observed, such as the great doorstep made from a broken millstone, the gigantic rambler by the kitchen window, the tiger-lilies gone wild in the dooryard, and above all, the view from the front windows. Since the house was visible far up the road, conversely a long stretch of the road is visible from the house. Standingin front of it, you can see a motor or wagon approaching a mile away, and from the end windows, too, can be seen all approaching vehicles from the other angle. Moreover, if you lived within, you could not only see who was coming, but you could step out of your door a pace or two and converse with him as he passed. The old house is strategically placed.
When it was built, a century or even a century and a half ago, no motors went by on that road, and not enough of any kind of traffic to raise a dust. The busy town to the south, the summer resort to the north, were alike small villages, given over to agriculture. There were no telephones, no newspapers even. Fortunate indeed was the man whose farm abutted on a bend, for there he could set his house, close to the road, viewing the approaches in either direction, and no traveler could get by him, or at any rate by his wife, without yielding the latest gossip from the town above or below, perhaps from the greater world beyond. The highroad was then the sole artery of commerce, of communication, of intercourse of man with man.
How neighborly was the house on the bend, shedding its parlor-candle rays like a beacon by night down the mile of straightaway, or flapping its chintz curtains in the June sunshine! What a testimony it is, in its present gray ruin, to the human hunger for news and gossip and friendliness!
The old order has changed, indeed. We no longer build on the bend. We don't have bends if we can help it. They are dangerous and hard to maintain. A house on one would be uninhabitable with the dust. We do not seek the neighborliness of the road, but retire as far as we can to the back of our lot, with our telephone and newspaper. The old house on the bend now stands deserted. From country estates dimly seen in their remote privacy of trees and gardens, the stone highway leads to other estates equally remote and scornful of publicity. Between them the motors rush. The old house is dusty and falling into ruin, and every passing car kicks up some bit of crushed stone into its tangled dooryard. It looks pathetically down the road with unseeing eyes, the last relic of a vanishing order.
It iswell sometimes, when we are puffed up with our achievements as a race,—our conquest of the elements, our building of mighty bridges and lofty sky-scrapers, our invention of wireless telegraphy and horseless carriages and aëroplanes and machine guns and secret diplomacy and wage slavery and war,—it is well to indulge in the chastening reflection that there are still some things we cannot achieve. We may reflect that the appleless Eden has not yet been discovered, or that the actor without vanity is yet unborn, or the “treasonless” Senate yet unassembled. My own method is to reflect that the ideal hat-tree has never been constructed.
At present I have no hat-tree, because I live in an old farm house where there is a square piano and a hall closet, and we don't need one. In New York I never had one, either, because there is never room in the hall-way of a modern apartment both for a hat-tree and a passage-way. But occasionally I visit at the homes of friends who boast one of these arboreal adornments, and renewmy acquaintance with the species. I was to take a walk with one of these friends the other day.
“Wait,” he said, pausing in the hall, “till I get a pair of gloves.” Stooping over, he pulled at the hat-tree drawer. First it stuck on one side; then it stuck on the other side; then it yielded altogether, without warning. My friend sat down on the floor, the ridiculously shallow drawer in his hand, between his feet a sorry array of the odds and ends of the outside toilet,—broken hat pins, old veils, buttons, winter gloves rolled into wads, old gloves, new gloves, gloves pulled off in a hurry with the fingers inside out, dirty white gloves belonging to his charming sister. I turned away, feeling that I gazed on a domestic exposure. My friend spoke softly to the drawer.
“Sh!” said I, “your family! Put the drawer back.”
“I will not put it back,” he said. “We would never get started. Let the—”
Again I cautioned him, and we set out on our walk leaving the litter on the floor; and as we tramped through the marvelous sky-scraper wilderness which is Manhattan, we talked of hat-trees, and the futility of human effort, and sighed for a new Carlyle to write the philosophy of the hat-tree drawer.
How well I remembered the hat-tree that sheltered my caps in youth, beneath the protecting foliage of the paternal greatcoat and the maternal bonnet! I did not always use it; the piano was more convenient, or the floor. But there it stood in the hall in all its black-walnut impressive ugliness, with side racks for umbrellas, and square, metal drip-pans always full of the family rubbers. There was a mirror in the centre, so high I had to climb three stairs to see how uncle's hat fitted my small head. There were pegs up both sides; but, as is the way with hat-trees, only the top ones were useful; whatever was hung on them buried everything below. The only really safe place was the peak on top, just above the carved face of Minerva. Sometimes the paternal greatcoat lovingly carried off the maternal shawl of a morning, which would be found later somewhere between the door and the station. And this hat-tree also had a drawer, of course. There was the rub, indeed!
Summer or winter, wet or dry, that drawer always stuck. It had but one handle,—a ring in the middle. First one side would come out too far, and you would knock it back and pull again. Then the other side would come out too far, and you would knock that back. Then both sides, by diabolical agreement, would suddenly work as on greased ways, and you stood with an astonishingly shallow drawer danglingfrom your finger, its long-accumulated contents spread on the floor. The shock usually sent down two derbies and a bonnet to add to the confusion. When you had gathered up the litter and stuffed it back, wondering how so small a space ever held so much, the still harder task confronted you of putting the drawer in its grooves again. Sometimes you succeeded; more often you left it “for mother to do”—that depended on your temper and the time of your train. The drawer was a charnel-house of gloves and mittens and veils. When you cut your finger you were sent to it to get a “cot”, and it had a peculiar smell of its own, the smell of the hat-tree drawer. A whiff of old gloves still brings that odor back to me, out of childhood, stirring memories of little garments worn long ago, of a great blue cape that was a pride to my father's heart and a wound to my mother's pride,—but most of all of lost temper and incipient profanity caused by the baulky drawer.
My friend's recollections but supplemented and reinforced my own. We called to mind other hat-trees in houses where we had visited, and one and all they were alike perverse, ridiculous, ill-adapted for their mission in life. We thought of various substitutes for the hat-tree, such as a pole with pegs in it, which tips over when the preponderance of weight is hung on one side; the cluster of pegs on a frame suspendedfrom the wall like a picture, while a painted drain-pipe courts umbrellas in a corner; a long, low table (only possible in a palatial hall) on which the garments are placed by the butler in assorted piles, so that you feel like asking him for a check; the settle, often disastrous to hats. We found none of them satisfactory, though they eliminate the perils of the drawer.
Only the wooden pegs which were driven in a horizontal row into the board walls of grandfather's back entry ever approximated the ideal. But such a reversion to primitive principles would now be considered out of the question, even in my farm house—by the farmer's wife, at least. The problem of a satisfactory hat-tree, which baffled the genius of Chippendale, is still unsolved in Grand Rapids, and it probably will remain unsolved to the end of time, unless Eden should be found again, where the hat-tree is the least of the arboreal troubles.
“It wasrats,” said I.
“It was warts,” said Old Hundred.
“I know it was rats, I tell you,” I continued, “because my uncle Eben knew a man who did it. His house was full of rats, so he wrote a very polite note to them, setting forth that, much as he enjoyed their excellent society, the house was too crowded for comfort, and telling them to go over to the house of a certain neighbor, who had more room and no children nor cats. And the rats all went.”
Old Hundred listened patiently. “That's precisely right,” said he, “except it must have been warts. You have to be polite, and also tell them where to go. You rub the warts with a bean, wrap the bean up in the note, and burn both, or else throw them in the well. In a few days the warts will leave you and appear on the other fellow. My grandfather, when he was a boy, got warts that way, so he licked the other boy.”
“Rats!” said I.
“No, warts,” persisted Old Hundred.
So that was how we two aging and urbanized codgers came to leave the comfortable club for the Grand Central Station, whence we sent telegrams to our families and took train for the rural regions north-eastward. The point had to be settled. Besides, I stumped Old Hundred to go, and he never could refuse a stump.
But Old Hundred was fretful on the journey. We called him Old Hundred years ago, because he always proposed that tune at Sunday evening meetings, when the leader “called for hymns.” I address him as Old Hundred still, though he is a learned lawyer in line for a judgeship. He was fretful, he said, because we were sure to be terribly disillusioned. But he is not a man accustomed in these later years to act on impulse, and the prospect of a night on a sleeping car, without pajamas, did not, I fancy, appeal to him, now that he faced it from the badly ventilated car aisle, instead of the club easy-chair. Yet perhaps he did dread the disillusionment, too. It was always I, even when we were boys, who loved an adventure for its own sake, quite apart from the pleasure or pain of it—taking a supreme delight, in fact, in melancholy. I have still a copy of Moore's poems, stained with tears and gingerbread. Some of the happiest hours of my childhood were spent in weeping over this book, especially over “Go Where Glory Waits Thee,” which affected me with an incomprehensiblebut poignant woe. Accordingly it was I who rose cheerful in the morning and piloted a gloomy companion to breakfast and a barber, and so across Boston to the dingy station where dingy, dirty cars of ancient vintage awaited, and in one of which we rode, with innumerable stops, to a spot off the beaten tracks of travel, but which bore a name that thrilled us.
When we alighted from the train, a large factory greeted our vision, across the road from the railway station. We walked up a faintly familiar street to the village square. There we paused, with wry faces. Six trolley lines converged in its centre, and out of the surrounding country were rolling in great cars, as big almost as Pullmans. All the magnificent horse-chestnut trees that once lined the walks were down, to expose more brazenly to view the rows of tawdry little shops. These trees had once furnished shade and ammunition. I had to smile at the sign above the new fish-market—
IF IT SWIMS—WE HAVE IT.
But there was no smile on Old Hundred's face. Here and there, rising behind the little stores and lunch rooms, we could detect the tops of the old houses, pushed back by commerce. But most of the houses had disappeared altogether. Only the old white meeting-house at the head of the common looked down benignly, unchanged.
“The trail of the trolley is over it all!” Old Hundred murmured, as we hastened northward, out of the village.
After we had walked some distance, Old Hundred said, “It ought to be around here somewhere, to the right of the road. I can't make anything out, for these new houses.”
“There was a lane down to it,” said I, “and woods beyond.”
“Sure,” he cried, “Kingman's woods; and it was called Kingman's field.”
I sighted the ruins of a lane, between two houses. “Come on down to Kingman's, fellers,” I shouted, “an' choose up sides!”
Old Hundred followed my lead. We were in the middle of a potato patch, in somebody's back yard. It was very small.
“This ain't Kingman's,” wailed Old Hundred, lapsing into bad grammar in his grief. “Why, it took an awful paste to land a home run over right field into the woods! And there ain't no woods!”
There weren't. Nevertheless, this was Kingman's field. “See,” said I, trying to be cheerful, “here's where home was.” And I rooted up a potato sprout viciously. “You and Bill Nichols always chose up. You each put a hand round a bat, alternating up the stick, for the first choice. The one who could get his hand over the top enough to swing the bat round his head threetimes, won, and chose Goodknocker Pratt. First was over there where the wall isn't any more.”
“Remember the time we couldn't find my 'Junior League',” said Old Hundred, “and Goodknocker dreamed it was in a tree, and the next day we looked in the trees, and there it was? I wonder what ever became of old Goodknocker?”
He moved toward first base. The woods had been ruthlessly cut down, and the wall dragged away in the process. We climbed a knoll, through the stumps and dead stuff. At the top was a snake bush.
“Here's something, anyhow,” said Old Hundred. “You were Uncas and I was Hawk Eye, and we defended this snake bush from Bill's crowd of Iroquois. We made shields out of barrel heads, and spears out of young pine-tree tops. Wow, how they hurt!”
“About half a mile over is the swamp where the traps were,” said I. “Let's go. Maybe there's something in one of 'em.”
“Then times would be changed,” said he, smiling a little.
We walked a few hundred feet, and there was the swamp, quite dried up without the protection of the woods, a tangle of dead stuff, and in plain view of half a dozen houses. “Why” cried Old Hundred, “it was miles away fromanything!”
I looked at him, a woeful figure, clad in immaculate clothes, with gray gloves, a cane in hishand. “You ought to be wearing red mittens,” said I, “and carrying that old shot-gun, with the ramrod bent.”
“The ramrod was always bent,” said he. “It kept getting caught in twigs, or falling out. Gee, how she kicked! Remember the day I got the rabbit down there on the edge of the swamp? It made the snow all red, poor little thing. I guess I wasn't so pleased as I expected to be.”
“I remember the day you didn't get the wood pussy—soon enough,” I answered.
Just then a whistle shrieked. “Good Lord,” said Old Hundred, “there's one of those infernal trolleys! It must go right up the turnpike, past Sandy.”
“Let's take it!” I cried.
He looked at me savagely. “We'll walk!” he said.
“But it's miles and miles,” I remonstrated.
“Nevertheless,” said he, “we'll walk.”
It was difficult to find the short cut in this tangle of slaughtered forest, but we got back to the road finally, coming out by the school-house. At least, we came out by a little shallow hole in the ground, half filled with poison-ivy and fire-weed, and ringed by a few stones. We paused sadly by the ruins.
“I suppose the trolly takes the kids into the village now,” said I. “Centralization, you know.”
“There used to be a great stove in one corner, and the pipe went all across the room,” Old Hundred was saying, as if to himself. “If you sat near it, you baked; if you didn't, you froze. Do you remember Miss Campbell? What was it we used to sing about her? Oh, yes—
Three little mice ran up the stairsTo hear Biddy Campbell say her prayers;And when they heard her say Amen,The three little mice ran down again.
Three little mice ran up the stairsTo hear Biddy Campbell say her prayers;And when they heard her say Amen,The three little mice ran down again.
And, gee but you were the punk speller! Remember how there was always a spelling match Friday afternoons? I'll never forget the day you fell down on 'nausea.' You'd lasted pretty well that day, for you; everybody'd gone down but you and Myrtie Swett and me and one or two more. But when Biddy Campbell put that word up to you, you looked it, if you couldn't spell it!”
“Hum,” said I, “I wouldn't rub it in, if I were you. I seem to recall a public day when old Gilman Temple, the committee man, asked you what was the largest bird that flies, and you said, 'The Kangaroo.'”
Old Hundred grinned. “That's the day the new boy laughed,” said he. “Remember the new boy? I mean the one that wore the derby which we used to push down over his eyes? Sometimes in the yard one of us would squatbehind him, and then somebody else would push him over backward. We made him walk Spanish, too. But after that public day he and I went way down to the horse-sheds behind the meeting-house in the village, and had it out. I wonder why we always fought in the holy horse-sheds? The ones behind the town hall were never used for that purpose.”
This was true, but I couldn't explain it. “We couldn't always wait to get to the horse-sheds, as I remember it,” said I. “Sometimes we couldn't wait to get out of sight of school.”
I began hunting the neighborhood for the hide-and-seek spots. The barn and the carriage-shed across the road were still there, with cracks yawning between the mouse-gray boards. The shed was also ideal for “Anthony over.” And in the pasture behind the school stood the great boulder, by the sassafras tree. “I'll bet you can't count out,” said I.
“Pooh!” said Old Hundred. He raised his finger, pointed it at an imaginary line of boys and girls, and chanted—
“Acker, backer, soda cracker,Acker, backer, boo!If yer father chews terbacker,Out goes you.
“Acker, backer, soda cracker,Acker, backer, boo!If yer father chews terbacker,Out goes you.
And now you're it,” he finished pointing at me.
I was not to be outdone. “Ten, twenty, thirty, forty,—” I began to mumble. Then, “One thousand!” I shouted.
“Bushel o' wheat and a bushel o' rye,All 't 'aint hid, holler knee high!”
“Bushel o' wheat and a bushel o' rye,All 't 'aint hid, holler knee high!”
I looked for a stick, stood it on end, and let it fall. It fell toward the boulder. “You're up in the sassafras tree,” I said.
“No,” said Old Hundred, “that's Benny.”
Then we looked at each other and laughed.
“You poor old idiot,” said Old Hundred.
“You doddering imbecile,” said I, “come on up to Sandy.”
Somehow, it wasn't far to Sandy. It used to be miles. We passed by Myrtie Swett's house on the way. It stood back from the turnpike just as ever, with its ample doorway, its great shadowing elms, its air of haughty well-being. Myrtie, besides a prize speller, was something of a social queen. She was very beautiful and she affected ennui.
“Oh, dear, bread and beer,If I was home I shouldn't be here!”
“Oh, dear, bread and beer,If I was home I shouldn't be here!”
she used to say at parties, with a tired air that was the secret envy of the other little girls, who were unable to conceal their pleasure at being “here.” However, Myrtie never went home, we noticed. Rather did she take a leading partin every game of Drop-the-handkerchief, Post Office, or Copenhagen—tinglingly thrilling games, with unknown possibilities of a sentimental nature.
“If I thought she still lived in the old place, I'd go up and tell her I had a letter for her,” said Old Hundred.
“She'd probably give you a stamp,” I replied.
“Not unless she's changed!” he grinned.
But we saw no signs of Myrtie. Several children played in the yard. There was the face of a strange woman at the window, a very plain woman, who looked old, as she peered keenly at the two urban passers.
“Itcan'tbe Myrtie!” I heard Old Hundred mutter, as he hastened on.
Sandy was almost the most wonderful spot in the world. It was, as most swimming holes are, on the down-stream side of a bridge. The little river widened out, on its way through the meadows, here and there into swimming holes of greater or less desirability. There was Lob's Pond, by the mill, and Deep Pool, and Musk Rat, and Little Sandy. But Sandy was the best of them all. It was shaded on one side by great trees, and the banks were hidden from the road by alder screens. At one end there was a shelving bottom, of clean sand, where the “little kids” who couldn't swim sported in safety. Under the opposite bank the water ran deep for diving. Andin mid-stream the pool was so very deep that nobody had ever been able to find bottom there. In the other holes, you could hold your hands over your head and go down till your feet touched, without wetting your fingers. But not the longest fish-line had ever been long enough to plumb Sandy's depths. Indeed, it was popularly believed that there wasnobottom in Sandy, and a mythical horn pout, of gigantic proportions, was supposed to inhabit its dark, watery abysses.
Old Hundred and I stood on the bridge and looked down on a little pool. “I could jump across it now,” he sighed. “But I wish it were a warmer day. I'd go in, just the same.”
There was a honk up the road, and a touring car jolted over the boards behind us, with a load of veils and goggles. The dust sifted through the bridge, and we heard it patter on the water below.
“I fancy there's more travel now,” said I. “And the alder screen seems to be gone. Perhaps we'd better not go in.”
Old Hundred leaned pensively over the white rail—the sign of a State highway; for the dusty old Turnpike was now converted into a gray strip of macadam road, torn by the automobiles, with a trolley track at one side.
“There's a lucky bug on the water,” he said presently. “If we were in now, we might catch him, and make our fortunes.”
“And get our clothes tied up,” said I.
“As I recall it, you were the prize beef chawer,” he remarked. “I never could see why you didn't go into vaudeville, in a Houdini act. I used to soak the knots in your shirt and dry 'em, and soak 'em again; but you always untied 'em, often without using your teeth, either.”
“You couldn't, though,” I grinned.
“Charlo beef,The beef was tough,Poor Old HundredCouldn't get enough!
“Charlo beef,The beef was tough,Poor Old HundredCouldn't get enough!
“How many times have you gone home barefoot, with your stockings and your undershirt, in a wet knot, tied to your fish-pole?”
“Not many,” said he.
“What?” said I.
“It wasn't often that I wore stockings and an undershirt in swimming season,” he answered. “Don't you remember being made to soak your feet in a tub on the back porch before going to bed, and going fast asleep in the process?”
“If you put a horse hair in water, it will turn to a snake,” I replied, irrelevantly.
“Anybody knows that,” said Old Hundred. “If you toss a fish back in the water before you're done fishing, you won't get any more bites, because he'll go tell all the other fish. Betyer I can swim farther under the water 'n you can. Come on, it isn't very cold.”
I looked hesitantly at the pool.
“Stump yer!” he taunted.
I started for the bank. But just then the trolley wire, which we had quite forgotten, began to buzz. We paused. Up the pike came the car. It stopped just short of the bridge, by a cross-road, and an old man alighted. Then it moved on, shaking more dust down upon the brown water. The old man regarded us a moment, and instead of turning up the cross-road, came over to us.
(“Know him?” I whispered.)
(“Is it Hen Flint, that used to drive the meat wagon with the white top?” said Old Hundred. “Lord, is it so many years ago!”)
“How are you, Mr. Flint?” said I.
“Thot I didn't mistake ye,” said the old man, putting out a large, thin, but powerful hand. “Whar be ye now, Noo York? Come back to look over the old place, eh? I reckon ye find it some changed. Don't know it myself, hardly. You look like yer ma; sorter got her peak face.”
“Where's the swimming hole now?” asked Old Hundred.
“I don't calc'late thar be any,” said the old man. “The gol durn trolley an' the automobiles spiled the pool here, an' the mill-pond's no good since they tore down the mill, an' bust the dam.Maybe the little fellers git their toes wet down back o' Bill Flint's; I see 'em splashin' round thar hot days. But the old fellers have to wash in the kitchen, same's in winter.”
“But the boys must swim somewhere,” said I.
“I presume likely they go to the beaches,” said Henry Flint. “I see 'em ridin' off in the trolley.”
“Yes,” said I, “it must be easy to get anywhere now, with the trolleys so thick.”
“It's too durn easy,” he commented. “Thar hain't a place ye can't git to, though why ye should want to git thar beats me. Mostly puts high-flown notions in the women-folks' heads, and vegetable gardens on 'em.”
He shook hands again, lingeringly. “Yer father wus a fine man,” he said to Old Hundred—“a fine man. I sold yer ma meat before you wus born.”
Then he moved rather feebly away, down the cross-road. Presently a return trolley approached.
“Curse the trolleys!” exclaimed Old Hundred. “They go everywhere and carry everybody. They spoil the country roads and ruin the country houses and villages. Where they go, cheap loafing places, called waiting-rooms, spring up, haunted by flies, rotten bananas and village muckers. They trail peanut shells, dust and vulgarity; and they make all the country-side a back yard of the city. Let's take this one.”
We passed once more the hole where the school had been, and drew near a cross-road. I looked at Old Hundred, he at me. He nodded, and we signalled the conductor. The car stopped. We alighted and turned silently west, pursued by peering eyes. After a few hundred feet the cross-road went up a rise and round a bend, and the new frame houses along the Turnpike were shut from view. Over the brambled wall we saw cows lying down in a pasture.
“It's going to rain,” said I.
“No,” said Old Hundred, “that's only a sign when they lie down first thing in the morning.”
Then we were silent once more. Into the west the land, the rocky, rolling, stubborn, beautiful New England country-side, lay familiar—how familiar!—to our eyes. To the left, back among the oaks and hickories, stood a solid, simple house, painted yellow with green blinds. To the right almost opposite was a smaller house of white, with an orchard straggling up to the back door. And in one of them I was born, and in the other Old Hundred. Down the road was another house, a deep red, half hidden in the trees. Smoke was rising from the chimney now, and drifting rosily against the first flush of sunset.
“Betsy's getting Cap'n Charles's supper,” said Old Hundred.
“Then Betsy's about one hundred and six,” said I, “and the Cap'n one hundred and ten. Oh, John, it was a long, long time ago!”
“It doesn't seem so,” he answered. “It seems only yesterday that we met up there in your grove on Hallow-e'en to light our jack-lanterns, and crept down the road in the cold white moonlight to poke them up at Betsy's window. Remember when she caught us with the pail of water?”
“I remember,” said I, “the time you put a tack in the seat of Cap'n Charles's stool, in his little shoemaker's shop out behind the house, and he gave you five cents, to return good for evil; so the next day you did it again, in the hope of a quarter, but he decided there were times when the Golden Rule is best honored in the breach, and gave you a walloping.”
“It was some walloping, too,” said Old Hundred, with a reminiscent grin. “It would be a good time now,” he added, “to swipe melons, if Betsy's getting supper. Though I believe she had all those melon stems connected with an automatic burglar-alarm in the kitchen. She ought to have taken out a patent on that invention!”
He looked about him, first at his house, then at mine. “How small the orchard is now,” he mused. “The trees are like little old women. And look at Crow's Nest—it used to be a hundred feet high.”
The oak he pointed at still bore in its upper branches the remains of our tree-top retreat, a rotted beam or two straddling a crotch. “Peter Pan should rebuild it,” said I. “I shall drop a line to Wendy. Do you still hesitate to turn over in bed?”
“Always,” Old Hundred confessed. “I do turn over now, but it was years before I could bring myself to do it. I wonder where we got that superstition that it brought bad luck? If we woke in the night, up in Crow's Nest, and wanted to shift our positions, we got up and walked around the foot of the mattress, so we could lie on the other side without turning over. Remember?”
I nodded. Then the well-curb caught my eye. It was over the well we dug where old Solon Perkins told us to. Solon charged three dollars for the advice. He came with a forked elm twig, cut green, and holding the prongs tightly wrapped round his hands so that the base of the twig stuck out straight, walked back and fourth over the place, followed by my father and mother, and Old Hundred's father and mother, and Cap'n Charles and Betsy, and all the boys for a mile around, silently watching for the miracle. Finally the base of the twig bent sharply down. “Dig there,” said Solon. He examined the twig to see if the bark was twisted. It was, so he added, “Bent hard. Won't have ter dig more'nten foot.” We dug twenty-six, but water came. And such water!
“I want some of that water,” said I. “I don't want to go into the house; I don't even know who lives in it now. But I must have some of that water.”
We went up to the well and lowered the bucket, which slid bounding down against the cool stones till it hit the depths with a dull splash. As we were drinking, an old man came peering out of the house. Old Hundred recognized him first.
“Well, Clarkie Poor, by all that's holy!” he cried. “We've come to get our hair cut.”
Clarkson Poor blinked a bit before recognition came. “Yes,” he said, “I bought the old place a couple o' year back, arter them city folks you sold it to got sick on it. Too fer off the trolley line for them. John's house over yon some noo comers 'a' got. They ain't changed it none. This is about the only part o' town that ain't changed, though. Most o' the old folks is gone, too, and the young uns, like you chaps, all git ambitious fer the cities. I give up cuttin' hair 'bout three year back—got kinder onsteady an' cut too many ears.”
A sudden smile broke over Old Hundred's face. “Clarkie,” he said, “you were always up on such things—is it rats or warts that you write a note to when you want 'em to go away?”
“Yes, it's rats, isn't it?” I cried, also reminded, for the first time, of our real quest.
“Why,” said Clarkie, “you must be sure to make the note very partic'lar perlite, and tell 'em whar to go. Don't fergit that.”
“Yes, yes,” said we, “but is it warts or rats?”
“Well,” said Clarkie, “it's both.”
We looked one at the other, and grinned rather sheepishly.
“Only thar's a better way fer warts,” Clarkie went on. “I knew a boy once who sold his. That's the best way. Yer don't have actually to sell 'em. Just git another feller to say, 'I'll give yer five cents fer yer warts,' and you say, 'All right, they're yourn,' and then they go. Fact.”
We thanked him, and moved down to the road, declining his invitation to come into the house. Westward, the sun had gone down and left the sky a glowing amber and rose. The fields rolled their young green like a checkered carpet over the low hills—the sweet, familiar hills. For an instant, in the hush of gathering twilight, we stood there silent and bridged the years; wiping out the strife, the toil, the ambitions, we were boys again.
“Hark!” said Old Hundred, softly. Down through the orchard we heard the thin, sweet tinkle of a cow-bell. “There's a boy behind, with the peeled switch,” he added, “lookingdreamily up at the first star, and wishing on it—wishing for a lot of things he'll never get. But I'm sure he isn't barefoot. Let's go.”
As we passed down the turnpike, between the rows of cheap frame houses, we saw, in the increasing dusk, the ruins of a lane, and the corner of a small, back-yard potato patch, that had been Kingman's field. We hastened through the noisy, treeless village, and boarded the Boston train, rather cross for want of supper.
“I wonder,” said Old Hundred, as we moved out of the station, “whether we'd better go to Young's or the Parker House?”