IV
Like all invalids, Morris had little affection for any one but himself, but what he lacked in human sympathy he atoned for in courtesy of manner and nicety of conscience. He instructed Fessenden until that restless youngster besought Nettlebeck to find him many “chores.” But Fessenden was still too small to chop down trees, to plough ice, or to saw wood, and there is little other work in the mountains in winter. There was no alternative but to accommodate himself to his new condition, and brace his endurance by repeating his father’s advice and attempting to understand it. At the end of the long winter he was studying hard and fighting less. Now that he did not recite on the neighboring farm, there was no one to fight with, except on such rare occasions as when a boy came to borrow of Christina after some culinary disaster at home or some unexpected shortage at the mountain “store.” Fessenden, no matter how deep in study, seemed to scent the messenger from afar, and was standing in the middle of the slippery road, his muscles bunched, his eye glaring like a tiger’s, when his expectant foe, uttering a hideous war-whoop, flung his bag into a snowdrift and hurled himself upon the champion. Upon these occasions, Dolf, the younger of the Nettlebeck brothers, always dropped his work and encouraged the sport. When it was over, no matter what the issue, Christina invariably cuffed Fessenden, then made him a cake; and gentle old Mrs. Nettlebeck wept profusely as she sponged him off, convinced that it would yet be her mournful duty to lay him out. Her own sonshad the peaceful blood of the German peasant in them, and this enterprising American lad was a dear and perpetual mystery. Upon one occasion, when he looked like a blind puppy, and study was out of the question for two days, Morris improved the occasion in the interest of reform.
“You are a great fighter, Fess,” he began, tactfully; “and it does my poor blood good to watch so much energy explode. Only it seems to me a waste. Why don’t you concentrate your energy in your brain and become a leader by the force of superior will and intelligence?”
“When I fight with my head I fight with its outside,” replied Fessenden dryly. “I’ve got to make myself understood, and I do, you bet. And I’m not complaining of the headache next day, neither.”
“Think of what I’ve said, however. You have established your reputation as a fighter; you occupy the proud position of champion among boys of your own age and older. The raging hate which must saturate you when fighting like a savage would make me feel mean and terrified for days after. It is all very well to know how to use your fists, and no doubt they are of service to you here, and at your age; but they will play a small part in after-life, and your character will play a very great one. You are so constituted that if you would learn to control yourself you could command your fellows with little effort; and at least when you fight try not to hate so hard.”
“How would you like Christina’s puddings with all the raisins left out? Would you mind reading to me?”
“As long as you like.” And Morris made him comfortable on the sofa, and read from the lives of ancient warriors until the heir of the ages fell asleep.
Fessenden’s mind at this time was a virgin field into which seeds fell to rise again and be tended by a curiousyoung tiller. Those flung into a fertile crevice by Morris, who took the responsibility very seriously, put out their green heads in time. Fessenden nodded his recognition, and, although they were by no means his favorite products, between their insistency and a decreasing lack of opportunity, he arrived, in the course of another year, at the conclusion that it might be interesting to make boys follow his lead without resorting to primitive methods. “I suppose one might as well wait till one has a real call to fight,” he remarked to himself with philosophy. “The animals don’t fight till they have to—none, that is, but dogs, and perhaps that’s living so much with us—we sickin’ them on and all that. It’s good to fight, though,” he added, with a long sigh, “even if the headache does last longer than the fun—that’s a point. Perhaps Mr. Morris is right, although I’d like to know what he knows about it. Maybe I’ll try the other tack and see what there’s in it, but there are some things will make my fists fly till I’m eighty. I guess I wasn’t cut out for a Sunday-school teacher.” Nevertheless, he worked himself into such a terrific rage the next time he was challenged—after an unusual period of virtuous abstinence—that he was thoroughly frightened at the result: for several days he felt flat and peevish, and more worn out in mind than in body. Morris came upon him in the forest where he was seated on a stump dismally chewing a cud, and embraced an obvious opportunity.
“After all,” he said sympathetically, “what you fight for is supremacy, is it not? Why not get it some other way? Although you poison yourself with the hate you feel while actually fighting, hate is never the motive of battle with you. You like all these boys well enough, but you must find out who is the best man or burst. Find it out some other way—or rather, having decided that point, try others. Besides, the great man uses thebrute force of others, he rarely indulges in it himself. Did not Napoleon sit aloft on a hill while his hundreds of thousands of nameless minions did the fighting? So long as they could see that being whom they looked upon as an emanation from the divine intellect, they were willing to fight like fanatics, but if he had rushed forward with a musket and fallen, the ranks would have scattered in irretrievable panic. Are you cultivating your prowess to fight years hence when a great man orders you out?”
“Not much,” growled Fessenden.
“Well, take me out in your canoe now. We’ll talk it over further this evening.”
Fessenden’s twelfth birthday occurred a week later, and he persuaded Christina to give him a party and invite his enemies. They came, howling through the mountain passes, brandishing big sticks as a manifest of their readiness for the fray. But although, having been invited to dinner and birthday cake, they expected a respite of perhaps two hours, they were disconcerted, and privately alarmed at being received by young Abbott quite in the style of the grand seigneur. He wore a new white sweater and a new pair of trousers, and he had been scrubbed and brushed by Mrs. Nettlebeck until, to mountain taste, he was offensively godly. He greeted his weather-beaten guests with a hearty grip of the hand, insinuated his appreciation of the forgiving spirit so touchingly displayed, and when he had them all seated about the table in the large kitchen he entertained them brilliantly with anecdotes from his most exciting books, while they devoured Christina’s substantial dainties. When he had gorged them into a state of sleepy good-nature, he led them out into the woods, and, mounting a stump, invited them to spin yarns of personal prowess. Each youth in turn told a tale of terrible adventure andglorious triumph, which Fessenden applauded as a host should. When they were alert once more and ready for action, he organized them into a band of pirates, and they scuttled several ships with such demoniacal vigor that they worked off all the steam that was left in them; and departed at nightfall vowing that Fessenden—who was now dirty enough to satisfy the most exacting standard—was the finest fellow in the woods, and that they’d never had such a Time since they were born.
After supper Fessenden untied his canoe,Pocahontas—whom he loved better than any mortal except his father—and pulled out into the evening shadows. The Nettlebeck farm was on a clearing of some fifty acres on the north and east shores of a large lake. Surrounding it on three sides was the virgin unkempt forest, as yet undesecrated by the lumberman or the logger. Just beyond the clearing the forest grew to the shores of the lake—a body of water so clear that in the early morning and evening, until the ice came, or except when the winds raged, the great spruces and pines, the beeches and maples, looked as if petrified in one of the old glaciers which had ground this vast region into form. Beyond the lake, beyond the surrounding forest, rose the encircling chain of gentle peaks, some barren rocks of eccentric shape, others black with woods. This evening their upper slopes were white with a late fall of snow. The Nettlebecks, like all American farmers, had done what they could to make Nature hideous, and their big house with its haphazard additions, the barns and boat-house, the ragged orchard and vegetable garden, were like a patchwork apron on the robes of a goddess. But Fessenden had turned his back on the Nettlebeck outrage, and not a shingle could he see—not a column of smoke. The blue shadows on the mountains were melting as the stars came out. The silence was so intense that Natureseemed to laugh noiselessly at man’s puny attempt to impress himself upon her higher solitudes.
Fessenden shot his canoe round a bend, and entered a long water-pass, irregular, half-choked with reeds and swamp, dark from the forest on the slopes of the gorge. It led to another lake, the second in a long chain of lakes great and small, on many of which some farmer had made his clearing and erected his monstrosities. But the gorge was long, and the next lake too wild and rocky to invite the attentions of man. Fessenden could paddle far, and fancy himself as alone in the great Adirondack wilderness as the first Red Indian. From the day when Mrs. Nettlebeck had allowed him to run unattended, much of his time had been spent apart. The nearest neighbor lived three miles away, on the farm where with several other boys he had attended school of a sort for four months in the year. The boys were kept busy at other times, and only sought him out when, like himself, they ached for a fight. Solitude had become as necessary in his life as his bed and his bread; and except when storms raged and the thermometer stood too far below zero, he left the house the moment his studies with his tutor were over, and took his reading into the woods or his canoe. On Saturdays and Sundays he was not permitted to open a book, and during the short summer there were no mental tasks. He spent these holidays in the woods or on the water, only returning to the house for his evening meal and his hard bed. Occasionally Morris accompanied him, and taught him much of practical forestry; but although the man and the boy were good friends, each preferred his solitudes—his long silences.
To-night Fessenden was in a strangely exultant mood which he was anxious to understand. He was tired, for he had played hard; but it was a pleasant languor besidethe exhaustion which followed his pitched battles, to say nothing of their accompaniment of gaping wounds and nervous depression. He had passed successfully through his first attempt at diplomacy and self-command; his fists had ached more than once, for Jeff Hunter was in fine fighting trim and invariably lashed his crimson tide; and he tasted all the sweets of power, of dominating in a new rôle, of discovering unsuspected talents, and of using them easily in the control of his fellows. He looked back upon his career of fists and blood, this youngster of twelve, with much the same disgust and contempt as might animate a debauchee crossing the threshold of reform. He did not return home until midnight, and in those lonely hours under the stars, in the profoundest stillness that America can give us, his ambition was born. He felt able to go out and conquer the world then and there; but he was modest by an earlier endowment, and the value of a sound education had been impressed upon his responsive mind. But his soul took a long flight, and met on high vague and beautiful shapes, which, when he was older, he knew men called ideals—looked down upon a wonderful world far beyond these mountains, wherein was stored the records of an eternity of great deeds, where greater still were doing; where, in the nebulous galleries of time, things beyond human imaginings awaited the quickening touch of men still in the making.
Fessenden returned and raided the pantry for a glass of milk, but it was some time before he sought his bed. In the depths of his soul the sleeping man still muttered, and he felt like Mercury poised for a flight and not knowing which way to turn, but half drunk with wondrous possibilities. The full moon hung low on the reflecting lake. The mountain-tops were white, their lower forests black. The deer came noiselessly out of the woods anddrank. The sublime and lonely scene murmured voicelessly of its greater kin in the highest valleys of the alpine world. Fessenden, standing on the upper veranda of the house, again saw only Nature, unchanged since a thousand years. Her silences might never have been broken.
“You—kid!” cried a shrill voice as a window flew open. “What on earth are you doin’ up this time of night? Lands sakes! Git into bed this minute or I’ll come out and cuff you good.” And Fessenden, who had a wholesome respect for Christina, fled to his room and was asleep in ten minutes.