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Fessenden, who had long since proposed to Grace and been listlessly accepted, started as usual for the Hunters’ one evening, striking through the woods. The moon illuminated the recesses, in which the snow still lingered, and Fessenden strode along, idealizing even that beautiful forest; for would it not, in another hour, shelter two divinely selected beings? He still trod the upper ether, but even in that rarefied atmosphere he experienced a slight chill as he saw Jeff Hunter hastening towards him through the romantic reaches.
Jeff, who under Fessenden’s training had acquired a direct and uncompromising method of speech, wasted no time in coming to the point.
“I’ve got bad news for you,” he announced. “Grace’s gone, and she won’t come back, neither.”
Fessenden, who had a confused sense that he was tumbling through space, merely stared at Jeff, who continued:
“Her ma came this morning and yanked her off—said she’d have no such nonsense with a girl who was not strong enough to darn her own stockings, let alone getten’ married. Grace cried, of course—all girls do whenever they get an excuse—but soon dried up when her ma said she’d take her out West and show her something of the world. Grace told me to tell you she guessed it was all right, she hadn’t felt much like getten’ married, anyway; she’d only said yes because it wouldn’t have been any use to say no; and the old lady told me to tell you that it was no sort of use to follow her, for she was coverin’ up her tracks—she’s a tartar, that one, and I guess you needn’t cry that you ain’t goin’ to have her for a mother-in-law; and I guess she’s got enough money to go ’s fur ’s she likes—she told me she’d be five hundred miles away before night. As for Grace, Fess, she ain’t worth one of the ribs inPocahontas—that’s the reason I didn’t warn you this morning.”
“Good-night,” said Fessenden.
The blood had rushed to his head. It remained there and confused him, until, after a brief sleep, he awoke next morning; then he burst in upon the astonished Morris and raged like a madman. He smashed a window and two chairs, vowed that he would walk to the West, that he knew Grace loved him, and that if she did not he had no use for life anyway.
Morris brought him partly to his senses by the ironic method, to which Fessenden was peculiarly susceptible, and then suggested that he put a sandwich in his pocket and spend the day in the woods.
“When you are a rational being once more I shall be glad to see you again and talk it over. I sincerely hope I may be able to help you in some way. But we all have to go through this, my boy. It is as inevitable as the phenomenon of man and woman itself, and must be taken as philosophically as the ills of the flesh, which under the proper diffusion of scientific knowledge will be obviated in time. It is to be hoped that puppy-love will prove an equally amenable microbe. Now take to the woods and think like a man.”
Fessenden took to the woods, but the time was not yet come when he could think like a man. Calf-love has furnished the mills of the wits since the first pen impaled the emotions; but it may be a hideous experience to youths in whom are the makings of strong and passionate men. The academic standard arbitrarily established by our literary powers has given the world an entirely false idea of the American temperament, which, in its masculine half, at least, is excitable and sentimental. It is their capacity for intense and powerful emotion, making them in mob capable of the maddest excesses of enthusiasm, which is the deep indestructible bond of unity in the American race; that has saved it from passing off long since in fireworks; that, when it has found the courage and acquired the brain-power to struggle through its artificial envelope, will permit it to become as great as it now thinks it is.
Poor Fessenden had not yet reached the analytical stage. He went out into the forest and suffered horribly. He wept and raved, and believed that so far as he was concerned the world had reached its finish. For the time he was primeval man balked of the first woman; later, when the acute stage had passed, and imagination had returned, every fine impulse and need of his nature which had leaped to assertion under the quickeningprocess of idealized woman seemed to have withered out of him under the sudden blight. He felt shorn, impoverished, hopeless; worse than all, helpless. To pursue would be less than folly. Only a fortune and a detective could have found the indifferent girl, hidden in the skirts of a determined mother; and he had not a penny. The little he made beyond what Nettlebeck charged him for his board went, after the replenishment of his rough wardrobe, to New York for books. His helplessness degraded his manhood, added to the sum of his miseries. He stood two days of this mental hell, during which he ate little and slept less, and then he shouldered his axe and put a sandwich in his pocket.
“I’m going over to the river to get a job driving logs,” he said to Nettlebeck. “I’ve had fourteen years of this, and I’d like a change for a week or two. When the logging is over I’ll come home.”
The river was twelve miles distant. Ten minutes after he had started on his tramp through the forest he heard a shout behind him. He answered mechanically, and a moment later was joined by Dolf.
“I thought I’d come along,” panted the younger Nettlebeck. “I ain’t seen drivin’ for six years or so, and it’s good exercise; you have to jump so lively.”
Fessenden shrugged his shoulders ungraciously, and declined conversation, but even here he did not recognize the ever-watchful spirit of his father. Nevertheless the thought of that sympathetic parent spontaneously occurred to him. He was the one person to whom he could have spoken, but he remembered his fiercely reacting pride at the age of thirteen; moreover, he was bound to respect his father’s mandate of complete separation. He had puzzled deeply over the motive which had prompted this decision in a proud and affectionate parent, but had finally put the question aside, as so farbeyond his limited experience that he had better apply his inquiring mind elsewhere. He had perfect faith in both the wisdom and the love of his father, in spite of occasional outbursts of disappointment, and although the kind firm hand that guided his destinies and smoothed his path without weakening his spirit was too well covered to attract his attention, some spiritual emanation from it kept his heart from closing and the bitterness of neglect from entering his soul.
They reached the river in three hours, hearing from the forest the roar of the dam, the loud shouts of the men. On their side the woods grew down to the stream, but on the heights opposite and far beyond hundreds of virgin trees had been sacrificed that the people of New York might have their daily news. The gates had just been opened, the river was foaming and racing over the rocks, its surface already crowded with long sections of tree-trunks, while others were rolling down the hill. The boss was short of men, and Fessenden and Dolf were employed at once, for the logs were already becoming jammed. Fessenden had watched “driving” many times, and, jumping from log to log to avoid crushing his feet, while at the same time he pried refractory logs into position and relieved jams, he was soon so deeply occupied learning his new trade, to say nothing of preserving his bones, that Grace lay down among the memories. His passion for proving himself the best man replaced the other, and applying all his intelligence to the task, he was very soon the most expert driver on the river. This elated him and sent consoling rays through the dark recesses of his soul. At night he was so tired that, after the evening meal—a repetition of the two preceding ones of pork, beans, bread, and coffee—he was asleep before he had settled himself in his bunk; and although his spirit may have wept over the hearse in the back alleys of his memory,for he awoke depressed and rebellious, he sprang out of bed at once, ate his beans with a relish, and went to work.
As he tramped home at night two weeks later, he informed himself that he was cured, and when he reached his own comfortable bed he slept until late on the following day; moreover, he enjoyed Christina’s savory dinner with a relish which, as a rule, associates only with an untroubled mind. Then he went for a stroll through his favorite haunts of the forest—a guilty sense of disloyalty had led him to avoidPocahontassince the day he met Grace—and it all came back. As it rushed upon him, as he realized that he was still in bondage, he trembled in panic. The horror of returning into the torments of a fortnight since was as strong as the overwhelming passion itself. He ran back to the house, the blood pounding in his head, and searched the shelf over Fritz Nettlebeck’s desk, where letters for the household and neighbors awaited the leisurely claimant.
There was nothing for him; and then he realized that, subconsciously, he had expected Grace to defy her mother and write to him—had believed the separation to be a matter of a few weeks; that the time would come when her demand would be as imperative as his own. He leaped up the stairs to his room and rummaged among the papers on his table; there were fragments of exercises in five languages, dead and alive, brief studies of public men, but there was no letter, even from his father. He returned to the forest, his hands and knees trembling, his brain whirling, his panic increasing, muttering vague phrases, filled with terror of the future, confusion, a mad desire for annihilation. Then, as his ego reached its depths and grovelled there, he straightened himself suddenly and, flinging his fist against a tree, exclaimed: “By God, what slavery!” What he had seen of religion as expressed by itinerant and ignorantpreachers had left him cold, but he had entire faith in some great force pervading the Universe, although he did not think it worth while to apply a name to it. He bethought himself of this force, and by a violent effort put himself in relation with it, demanding imperiously that some of its strength should pass into him and relieve him from this intolerable state of slavery. His prayer was answered so quickly that for a moment he stood as dazed as if he had been transferred abruptly to another planet. Then he shrugged his shoulders, laughed at his recent self, went down to the lake, and tookPocahontasout for a long, confidential, and somewhat cynical conversation.
He half expected that the obsession would return, but it did not, even when, missing his agonies, he endeavored to evoke their ghosts. Finally he sat down and wrote a long letter to his father.
“It has taught me two things,” he concluded: “the advisability of keeping a tight hold on the bulk of your energies until you are sure of having found the right woman, and the danger of praying for strength to annihilate unless you are quite sure you are not making a mistake. In this case it was all right, but she might have been the one woman; there might have been merely a misunderstanding, and the result would have been the same. I dragged the strength from out there into myself and blasted the thing to the roots. I am convinced that I can evoke that strength whenever I will, but it rather frightens me to think that I might have made this discovery at the wrong time.”