THEIR APPOINTED ROUNDS
They were destined to dislike each other on sight, those two whose appointed rounds, unexpectedly interlacing, had brought them together under the ancient pines keeping watch over the grave of a Revolutionary soldier. The man disliked the boy, because he himself had at that moment a loathing and a horror of himself and his probable fate, and the lad’s pliant figure vividly recalled to him what his own had been, in days long past. The boy’s reason for disliking the man was far more obscure, but no less potent.
That little pine-clad hill with the graves was pleasantly sheltered by hills higher than itself. The pines were very tall and shapely. They soared skyward like clustering brown masts, decked out at their far tops with tossing banners of holiday green. The summer sunlight paid long visits at their feet. If you should lay down your head under those trees, and then lift your eyes, you would be startled to discover the unbelievablepurple pomp of those woven branches, and the intense blueness beyond. The shadows on the ground were more golden there than elsewhere, the sunbeams more serious-minded. They had all played together there for so many years, seeing the same sights and thinking the same thoughts, that they had at last come to look somewhat like each other. L’Allegro and Il Penseroso had mingled their identities. A scarlet tanager flared down from a far purple bough, to sing the peace that brooded over the place. Both the man and the boy had their reasons for seeking peace. Though unknown to each other, they knew that peace might be found under those pines, but they had no mind for sharing it with each other.
The boy Royal had a poem of his own make in his pocket, and being on his travels, he had climbed up from the east to rest himself, and to re-read his verses yet again in solitude. Perhaps he was about to add to them some touch of immortality, some wistful trace of that philosophy which may not revisit the mind of man after his seventeenth year, but day by day loses itself more deeply in the underbrush of uncharted,enchanted woodways. The poem was about a maiden called Amaryllis. In the prose of private life, Royal’s Amaryllis was a wholly good and pretty girl a little older than himself. Her name was Mary, but even at nineteen she was still signing herself Maimée. However, what is poetry for, unless to quicken and rechristen all worlds into strangeness and beauty? Let Royal keep his Amaryllis a while longer, I beg!
Is there any good and comfortable thing that the heart of youth will not flee from, in its longing for the untrodden way? The boy Royal was a fugitive from the eggs-and-bacon type of breakfast. He was in search of some ambrosial, sit-by-the-brookside food more precious and sustaining to his spirit, so he dreamed, than any of the comestibles, fine or gross, involving his parents in worrisome monthly bills at the grocer’s. For him, life and letters were mingled mysteriously in the same sparkling cup, and he wanted to drink of that cup freely. One can do such things better away from home. He had therefore wrung from his mother, his father being absent in the city, working for the wherewithal, her unwilling consent to a solitary three days’ walking tour, his entire luggage to consist of a flashlight, the Iliad, and a toothbrush.Oh, of course, a full tin of provender slung across the back of his Norfolk jacket! You will doubtless understand what his twin brother Peter meant when he said that the difference between Royal’s travels and R. L. S.’s was all in one word; a preposition, don’t they call it? Stevenson’s Travels were With a Donkey, Royal’s were Of a Donkey. Peter was sore because he had not been invited to be a donkey too.
The twins loved one another dearly, but now that adolescence was upon them, they often wounded one another sorely. Each boy, recognizing certain superiorities in the other, felt all the more bound to rescue and protect and assert his own individuality. Who knows what dire harm to ourselves may issue from our brother’s excellences? And Royal, even more than Peter, longed for a more emphatic identity of his own—something so distinct and compelling that the world would forever cease contrasting and comparing him with another.
Their father was a painter, their mother a writer. Peter took to colors, Royal to ink. But Peter, luckily for the world, was no such born-in-the-blood Romantic as poor Royal then was, and might forever be, unless something could be doneabout it! That boy’s parents had showered upon him all the benefits of education, dentistry, operations for adenoids. They had even had him psycho-analyzed, since Uncle Tom’s business in life was exactly that. My uncle the psychiatrist; the boys often stuck the phrase into their cheeks, for the benefit of their mates. The work on Royal had been done with the utmost secrecy, of course. Uncle Tom had made a mental diagram of Royal’s case, as carefully as for a paying patient. In seven closely typewritten pages, bristling with words like prognosis, adolescence, stimuli, adaptability, environment, Royal’s young soul-history may still be found among Uncle Tom’s files. And Uncle Tom would be the first to tell you that for the unlearned, those seven pages might be summed up in seven words: a poet is growing, let him alone. Royal’s parents were cheered by that report. They had always rejoiced in the harmonious understanding that existed between the uncle and nephew. There was a strong family likeness between the two; they turned their heads to the same side when arguing, and waved a good-bye in the same manner. Often Royal at his most poetical made observations that staggered Uncle Tom at his most psychological. Uncle Tom sometimesfound it ludicrous when, simply because “maxima debetur puero reverentia,” he had refrained from saying something, and then found that Royal, with immense earnestness, was saying it himself.
Royal was a lean, rangy, bright-haired lad, with a clear skin and a good carriage. He had nobly-set blue eyes whose depths seemed practically bottomless, the young eyes that suggest both heaven and hell. He had also a determined chin that often pushed him into positions in which his undetermined nose was of no use whatever. Oh, quite the ordinary type of boy whose unusualness is chiefly within! Perhaps the most striking thing about him, thus far, was his passion for beauty; beauty to be seen, heard, tasted, clasped, protected, prayed to. There was Scotch blood in him; he had plenty of second sight, but was often found lacking in that vulgar variety of first sight known as common sense.
In planning his travels, he had seen himself, now as a sailor in tarry trousers, jingling strange coins in foreign ports that reeked with incredible oaths and aromas; now as a gifted young scholar, teaching French to some sturdy blacksmith’s fair daughters, in exchange for a noggin of milk and a brace of doughnuts, since you can’t expectcakes and ale in this country; and now as a prince-in-disguise mechanic out of work, in smutched overalls, with nothing clean at all about him but his teeth; his toothbrush would tell the world. Royal recognized the weakness of his own fables. He knew well enough that, unlike practical Peter he himself could scarcely tell a bolt from a bit-stock, or a belaying-pin from a bo’s’n’s whistle; and also (here Peter would be no better off) that he would certainly be unable to explain away the French subjunctive, in case the prettier of the blacksmith’s daughters should show an unfortunate curiosity about a topic so repugnant. Yes, Royal was a stern critic of his own castles, and therefore spent much time in rebuilding them.
Royal on his travels soon found that three days were all too brief a term for such adventures as he sought. His mother and he had been reading the “Crock of Gold” together, and he knew that she would understand him when he wrote, on the second day of his faring:
“Dear Mother, I am with the leprecauns, and so shall not return as early as we said. Fear not, all is well with me. The world is wide, the weather fine, and the extra $3.75 you gave me is hardly touched as yet. Besides, I can earn what I need,if I need more than I have. I love the feel of this life in the open, and you know how much I want to spin the wheel of life, in my own philosopher fashion.”
Thus wrote Royal, giving neither date nor address, and incontinently planning to reach far cities by means of gondola cars. His mother was hurt, irritated, and anxious, in equal parts; but she understood her boy well enough to know that there was some fabric to his fustian. Uncle Tom jeered openly, saying that people who breakfast with the leprecauns may have to sup with the lepers, if they don’t watch out. These psychiatrists have a way of taking the worm’s-eye view of high doings.
Within a week, the Royal progress had swept through parts of three of our United States, without serious damage either to the lad or to the landscape. The curve of operations was now fast shaping itself into a circle. Day and night, the weather had been magically lovely. Royal had gladly passed the first three nightsà la belle étoile; with keen relish, he rolled the phrase under his tongue, thinking that now not a boy in FroggyBeaurivage’s French Literature classes understood its charm as well as he. His Norfolk coat, a bore by day, proved a godsend in the chill hours before dawn, and he knew the use of a Sunday paper as a mattress. Before falling asleep, he would gaze with delight into the skies; thrilled with their beauty and immensity, he would say to himself, “After this, I am changed forever; I shall always be something more than I was before I came here.” No doubt he was right.
And his days were no less wondrous, for their sun, and shade, and good going. Sometimes, when he was beginning to feel dusty or weary, an unexpected pool would signal to him from beside a shaded road; and when he came up from it, he was a new-made creature. He liked being solitary, yet he liked stopping at sudden inns for frugal meals, and he liked chatting with the wayfarers he met. The latter half of the week had moments less idyllic. His fourth night he spent in a box car, his fifth in a boarding-house for Polish immigrants, and his sixth, in part at least, in the jail-room of a village town-hall, where he had been held in custody on a false charge of having stolen an automobile.
His code was very explicit as to stealing. Hemade a point of stealing and begging nothing but rides of various sorts. He had begged and received rides in hay-carts, touring-cars, lumber-trucks: he had also managed to get without cost considerable railroad transportation. It sounds crooked, to me! But of course each type of ride has its good and bad points. He took whatever fruit he saw lying on the ground, on the public side of fences; it was astonishing what excellent pickings were to be had in this way; he felt that an essay on economics might be written on this subject. But he never entered an orchard, never even shook a wayside tree. His head was full of these delicate distinctions. From Kipling he had imbibed the idea that the white man’s burden can best be sustained in dark lands by the unfailing practice of wearing a dinner jacket in the evening, no matter how solitary the meal.Noblesse oblige!And it keeps you from sinking. The idea had appealed to Royal, and he had invented a variant of it to use in his travels. He would at all times deal with the fruits of the earth exactly as if the owner of them were watching him. No unheroic task! If he should fall once, he told himself, it would be all the easier to fall again, and yet again; and then where are you? As a matter of exact record, hedid not fall once; and I see no reason why this may not be set down to his credit. It is of course regrettable that a principle which worked so well for agriculture could not have been applied to transportation also.
Thus, by being partly prig, partly poet, partly his own stage-manager, and altogether boy, Royal was taking steps toward being a man. There was absolute truth in his protestations before the one-armed justice of the peace (apparently the universal functionary of the village) that he knew nothing of the stolen car, nothing whatever, from fender to tail-light. Unluckily, on being asked his father’s name and address, he gave a wholly fantastic reply, his brain being stuffed to capacity with material for such purposes. I believe that he had a laudable idea of protecting the family by “putting one over” on the village Dogberry. But by a lamentable oversight, disclosed to the one-armed man on consulting directories and maps, the county of Chesterfolk, in the adjoining State, acknowledged no township called Four Bridges; and even had there been such a place, it still remains doubtful whether Royal’s putative father, Algernon M. Hollingsworth, that splendid creatureborn of necessity’s invention, would ever have been content to live there. Other questions were put; Royal’sWhitherwas found to be fully as obscure as hisWhence. He was therefore clapped as a “suspicious vagrant” into the jail-room, a high and narrow cubicle left over from the previous century, and unused for years except for the occasional storing of the movie-man’s impedimenta on wet evenings.
In lieu of a left hand, the one-armed justice of the peace had a steel hook, which he managed with an address that Royal could but admire. He carefully examined our poet’s possessions; his purse, food, poems, matches, wristwatch, toothbrush, Iliad, flashlight. The purse, poems, and food he regarded as negligible. The Iliad received from him both respect and scorn; respect because it was print, scorn because it was print he couldn’t read.
“Your Koran, ain’t it?” He asked the question with the irony he thought due to those who gave false addresses. Royal trembled when hand and hook turned those Homeric pages. His father’s bookplate might give the whole show away. But fortunately that telltale emblem escaped the hook-and-eye of justice. And the man’sidea of calling the book a Koran had in it something that appealed strongly to the inventor’s own imagination; he played upon the theme with alliterative variations.
“Kid carries Koran,” he ejaculated while pulling out a rickety settee for the repose of the accused. Hooking up Royal’s flashlight, he discovered a tattered blanket belonging to the movie-man, and this he threw over the settee, still improvising. “Koran concealed on Courteous Kid.” Perhaps that fancy of his softened his fibre. He had pocketed Royal’s matches, and was about to confiscate his flashlight also, when a humane thought occurred to him. For our humor may at times produce humanity in ourselves, if not in those whom we expose to it.
“Well, kid, I guess I’ll leave you your light to read your Koran by. Sorry we can’t give you a prayer-rug too, but our finest Orientals are in storage, this season.” (He’d show the young fella ’t givin’ false addresses was a game two could play at!) Royal was relieved when at last the justice really locked the door, and departed. Something to tell old Peter, this.
He wondered what Peter, the practical genius, would do in that ill-smelling hole. Peter, he concluded,would explore things. Royal’s flashlight revealed two flimsy packing-cases; the movie-man was his Providence, that night. He waited until midnight, by his watch. He then set one box on the other, and by cautious climbing, managed to reach the tiny barred window, high in the wall. The bars were ancient in their shallow sockets; Royal was lean, even leaner than usual; in a twinkling he had leaped down crashing into some mournful sumac trees, and after that, escape was easy, along the adjoining church and churchyard. Surely the leprecauns were on his side! All of a sudden he realized that his act of self-preservation from so-called justice was one of the most practical bits of work he had ever performed in his life. He had a momentary gleam of shame for his impractical, un-Peter-like past, and even gave a thought to his father, in his hot city studio, working for the wherewithal. But that mood soon passed. The ecstasy of escape from the troubles he had brought on himself gave him wings. Until nearly dawn, he swept straight ahead, under a favoring moon. He was composing a Sonnet to Some Sumacs.
“A prisoner pent, I flew to your fond arms,And maybe broke a few of them, my dears”;—
“A prisoner pent, I flew to your fond arms,And maybe broke a few of them, my dears”;—
“A prisoner pent, I flew to your fond arms,And maybe broke a few of them, my dears”;—
“A prisoner pent, I flew to your fond arms,
And maybe broke a few of them, my dears”;—
A wonderful beginning! It would require some fine work withcharms,harms,alarms; withfears,cheers,reveres. But Royal was perfectly happy; and no one can say that his inspiration was not authentic.
Not twenty miles from his own home with its bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, he saw a belated or else be-earlied furniture-van approaching from a wooded road that met the highway. Its driver, so Royal judged as a bearded face emerged out of the morning mist, was one of those how-could-I-help-it persons who are always a little late or a little early, a type toward which he felt drawn. He waited there, at the heart of the crossroads. The man hailed him, and Royal, in his character-part of young man out of work, accepted the proffered lift, and ate heartily of the rude liberal bread and cheese that tasted of the leather seat. They chatted at ease of brakes, tires, clutches, and children, as they rode quietly into the morning. Royal contributed most of the listening; he was quite as much at home among elderly workers for a living as with frivolous persons of his own age.
When they reached Falmouth Junction, a railway centre of note, their ways diverged. At thestation, Royal bought coffee, sandwiches, and fruit, all of which he shared with the man; and the man gave him two black cigars at parting. Royal liked that furniture-fellow. He considered that when compared with the one-armed miscarrier of justice, the man had the makings of an excellent leprecaun in him; his beard sticking out of the mist was just like a leprecaun’s. But although the man, in his dreamy behindhand (or else beforehand) way, had confided much to Royal, with a wealth of detail as to his youngest child, “cutest kid of the bunch, and a reg’lar Dannle Webster with his spellin’-book,” our traveller did not in return open his heart about his escape from the jail-room. For a long time after that incident, Royal was inclined to suspect both justice and peace in quarters where they were least intended. Falmouth town boasts a traffic policeman; Royal, on spying those bright buttons, took swiftly to the road again.
And now, on the last stretch of his wander-week, he bethought himself of the soldier grave on that little hill, scarcely an hour’s walk from the very end of his appointed round. He loved the place; he felt drowsy, in spite of the railway coffee and the fresh morning air, and he wanted to liedown and sleep for a pleasant hour under those pines, his head pillowed on heroic ashes. He phrased it thus to himself, although he knew that he would probably find a better resting-place on the warm ground somewhat removed from the grave. After a good little snatch of sleep, there would be time for a few last touches on the Amaryllis poem, and then, home. The Sumac Sonnet could wait. After all, a beefsteak luncheon has its merits.
Royal was more tired than he knew. His pleasant hour of sleep multiplied itself by two, by three, by four. He woke with a start to find that the day was no longer young. He would have to step lively if he hoped to reach home by tea-time; scones, fresh from the oven! But he had just had a very marvellous dream, and surely, before the glamour of it should vanish, he owed it to the world to put some breath of it into his poem.
Enthralled by his verses, the poet resented the approach of that other traveller, just puffing up over the western slope of the little hill. The man was forty-five or fifty or even sixty, the boy guessed; oh, ever so old! He was soiled, obese, crumpled, out of breath; he needed a shave. Limp gray hairs straggled behind his plaided cap.His profile was fattened, yet highly predacious. But his tweeds seemed rather better in quality than Royal’s, his shoes no worse. Royal’s bookish theory that you can always tell at a glance whether a man is a gentleman or not fell to pieces under that fugitive’s weary, wary eye. Certainly no poet, our sumac sonneteer decided. Villon never looked quite like that, nor Poe, nor Vachel Lindsay.
Yet any wise observer of our poor dust would have known at once, on seeing the two travellers together, that the hand of art had been laid inevitably on each; lightly and graciously enough on the youth, rudely and ironically and with stripes and lashes on the man. Phœbus Apollo hardly knew, as yet, whether he should ever really need the boy Royal or not. However, he meant to lend the child his lute for a summer morning or two, and hear whatever trailing wisps of song those smooth young fingers could coax goldenly from its strings. Yes, Royal was a true probationer of Apollo. But with the man, the god would plainly have no more to do, except by way of bitter punishment. For the man was tooold, too ill, too evil, even, to be of any further service in the temple of the Muses. Those ladies do not carry a pardoner’s wallet. They have no pension system; uncompromising dames, the Nine, when all is told.
Little as he liked the looks of the man in his tumbled tweeds, Royal nevertheless gave him a good-day. Why not? The man enveloped the boy with a strange, hunted-yet-hunting glance, and after returning the salutation in a mannerly enough way, threw himself down heavily on the pleasant pine leaves, rather close to the spot that Royal had chosen for his own perfect seclusion with song. Our poet’s second sight instantly declared that there was something wrong. What if this were the wretch who had really stolen the car whose loss had threatened the Royal liberties? Well, if so, that was the one-armed justice’s affair, not Royal’s. The boy had lately read in a newspaper that our Anglo-Saxon law presupposes the innocence of the accused, until proven guilty. An excellent idea! Fair play for all, then, including the disinherited.
Still, it was but natural that he should try to put a self-protecting distance between himself and the other, tramps though they both were. So hehid his ode in his pocket, and pulled out his Iliad, that epic which before now had laid heavy conditions upon him, and was likely to do so in the future. Impressive gesture! Royal had several times used it to advantage during his travels. Pulling out your Iliad, no matter how amiably, is a way of drawing the line. This particular Iliad had, it is true, been something of a disappointment to him, at the start. He had meant to carry his school copy, a pocket edition that contained only one book of the poem, with English notes so copious as to constitute a “pony.” In the confusion of a brother’s departure, mischievous Peter had contrived to dislodge Royal’s own Iliad from its place in Royal’s pocket, and to substitute for it an Iliad from his father’s library. The parental Iliad, though like the other in size and shape, was a poor thing. It had all the books of the poem, to be sure, but in solid Greek; not a word of English from cover to cover. Some German had printed it that way. Annoying! But after his first dismay was over, Royal had managed very well with the volume; to-day, he drew it out as readily as if it had the English notes.
With this man, however, the trick was wasted. When the boy laid his Iliad down casually besidehim, the man picked it up, no less casually. Homer had no terrors for him, it would seem. With a hand whose trembling he could not quite conceal, he turned over the leaves to regain his lost breath. In a leisurely, yet largely gesticulating way, he adjusted his black-ribboned eyeglass, and contemplated both bookplate and title-page. He then made short work of Royal’s pretensions to classic learning, merely by turning to Book XXIII, virgin soil as yet untrod by any foot in Royal’s form. Book XXIII appeared to interest him. Suddenly he began to read out, in orotund English, the episode of the funeral pyre, with all its meaty details.
As a matter of fact, this was but a gesture of the traveller; a gesture fully as empty as Royal’s, a scrap of drama within a drama. The rascal was not translating. He was reciting from memory a fragment from Lord Derby’s translation. In palmier days, he had constantly used those twenty lines with telling effect, in his popular dramatic elocution classes. He had even incorporated them, with full directions as to tempo, emphasis, and climax, into his Dramatic Interludes No. 1, a book which, though not precisely a best seller, had often been bought along the borderlinethat separates the real stage folk from the stage-struck fringe of the shadowy general public. And now, for an audience of one, that “slow-pac’d ox,” those “jars of honey,” the “four powerful horses,” the “nine dogs,” were all presented with an unction that seemed incredible in a stout man so out of breath a moment before. The reciter licked his lips feverishly over his “slaughtered carcasses,” and yet was able to reserve some climacteric gusto for the closing lines,
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
He appeared to find this an especially appetizing detail, and repeated the couplet, laying his hot fingers on Royal’s wrist.
The boy’s second sight had been caught napping during that recitation, but at the touch, sprang up, alert.
“Royal child,” she whispered, “quick, quick! Whatever are you about? Can’t you see that this wretched actor-man is far uncleaner and viler than anything you observed, with fearful curiosity, in the Polish boarding-house?”
And when Royal saw those fat fingers on his wrist, they looked to him like worms, and he wanted to be gone. But he wanted to be a manof the world, too, if a poet may; one who would needlessly insult no passer-by.
“Hot stuff, eh,” he remarked carelessly as he rose from the pine leaves. It seemed to him an appropriate thing to say about a funeral pyre found in the classics. The man had dropped the book; the boy swooped easily down, Discobolus-like, and swept it to safety within his pocket. “Well, I’m off! Date down below. Afraid I’m late, as it is.” His eyes were appalled by the ferocious hunger of the eyes they met; the hunger, the anger, the fatigue, the despair. Had he but known in his own young body and soul just what these things meant, and just how horribly they were gnawing that man’s vitals, he would have stayed, in common human kindness. But he could not know. Besides, his second sight had him cannily in her grip, and with all her might and main was pushing him straight home. Curiously enough, unaware as he was of “my uncle the psychiatrist’s” worm’s-eye prophecies, he said to himself, using Uncle Tom’s very words, “I started out with the leprecauns, and now perhaps I’m winding up with the lepers!” It gave him a pleased sense of his own individuality, that Fate had arranged it so. It was the sort of thing thatdidn’t happen to most boys, he thought. Without knowing why, he added to himself, “Just as well, perhaps.” Yet he felt sorry for the tweed-clad flesh down there at his feet. “Whatever’s the matter with the poor fish? Sure there’s something bothering his bean. The Ford, perhaps.”
Whatever it was, he knew he could not stop to set it right. But at any rate, he could offer a sandwich. The law of the road’s hospitality was in his heart. He opened his tin box, and with his inimitable rippling puppy-dog grace, emptied out its contents beside the stranger. The articles thus disclosed had by now attained a composite flavor through close contact within the sun-warmed tin. Royal suddenly knew this, and was sorry. There were the three thick railway sandwiches, the two black cigars, and several bars of chocolate he had bought the day before at the Charlemont five-and-ten, from a radiant, chiffon-clad girl whom he had secretly christened Lalage; for his next poem, of course, after the Amaryllis one was done, oh, quite, quite done. He kept for himself one bar of the chocolate. Its cover had the color of the girl’s warm dark eyes, and so would be a material witness, during his inspiration for the Lalage stanzas.
“Excuse me, but you seem to be a traveller, like myself. I’d be awfully glad if you can use these things.” From his jacket pocket he drew out two ripe peaches, oozing, and these he added to the store. “Cheero!” He loped down the hill, with long, uneasy strides, not really happy until he was far away. His thoughts were confused. “What a dreadful old beast! Actor, of course, probably screen. Face seemed familiar, too familiar. Some villain, what? Needed the car to make a getaway from something or other.”
All of a sudden the Homeric couplet mouthed by the man returned with terrific force to his mind.
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
The poet stopped short in his tracks. “Golly-dieu! I see it all now. I’ve been talking with amurderer! And they always come back to revisit the scene, every one knows that. Of course, he didn’t do up as many as twelve. It was remorse made him nutty about the number. I wonder now—”
His wonder lit his eyes and freshened his steps until he reached the garden-gate, with the great apple tree over it, and the carved millstone belowas a tread. Old Peter was probably just coming up from the pool. He himself needed a bath, frightfully! Then he saw his mother, in the white-and-purple iris dress he loved, walking toward the green tea-table under the pergola. Agnes with her tray would soon appear. For the present, Royal’s appointed rounds were over. An immense wave of tenderness suffused his whole being. Mother, bath, scones, sanctuary! Those first and last words he called aloud. Mother, sanctuary!
Left to himself, the elder traveller pounced on the peaches and devoured them, smearing their juice on his dry lips. He then tore the meat from the poor hearts of the sandwiches, and began to eat it greedily. It was his first meat in four days, and he was distinctly of the carnivorous order, and no mere nut-eater. The maid at the Canaan inn had looked suspiciously at him, four days ago, and from that moment, fear had palsied him. Not daring to buy gas under the pitiless publicity of the red pump, he had abandoned his stolen Ford. Like Royal, he was now on a solitary walking tour.
Since the incident at the inn, he had lived onpackage food, bought at obscure crossroads grocery stores. All his life, he had kept a fine contempt for package food, the various frugal tinned and cartoned things thebourgeoiseat. He himself always wanted everything fresh from the vine, he used to say. Everything except the grape; that was different. Just at present, he was more thirsty than hungry. Royal’s black cigars were a poor substitute for a living drink.
“Blast the boy with his clean airs! ‘A traveller like myself!’ Little Lord Bountiful, to be sure!”
His face looked very old in the afternoon light. It was purplish red as to the forehead, and that whitishness around the mouth was not wholly to be explained by a four days’ stubble of graying beard. Even while he blasted the boy, he likened himself to him. “Just what I was at his age, a little Lord Bountiful! And, God, look at me now!”
If ever a man needed God’s look at that moment, it was this fugitive. Let it be understood clearly, however, he was not at all the murderer Royal’s imagination had conjured up. That boy’s second sight had been working overtime, and had fallen into error. Except in an indirect way, the man had never been a murderer. He had never desired the death of any human being. Yet hehad undoubtedly turned the feet of at least “twelve noble youths” into the roads that lead to death. Also, he was revisiting a scene. Therefore we may as well admit that Royal’s imaginings had strange truths mingled with their errors. Perhaps his visions, like yours and mine, were made up wholly from truths, but truths mysteriously misplaced; truths disordered, and so, unserviceable.
The fugitive’s crime, that is to say, the particular crime for which he was at that moment being hunted from hill to hill, was one known to the most ancient civilizations. It takes its title from shameful lost cities engulfed under Divine wrath. Yet to-day there are gentle communities where even its Biblical name, if heard by chance in the pulpit fulminations of some itinerant preacher, would not be understood. And because, deep-rooted in the nature of mankind, there is that which cries out upon this crime as an abomination, the law defines it darkly, and punishes it strictly. “La nature a de ces bizarreries”? Only a long-descended Mediterranean intellect, with a planetary point of view, could calmly make that comment on the case!
The outlaw lit one of the black cigars, andthrust the thin bars of chocolate into his pocket. Loathsome package food, again, but better than nothing, if worse came to the worst. Of late, he had feared even to enter the crossroads grocery stores, with their meagre yet apparently varied supplies, with their horribly unexpected little electric bulbs illuminating a customer whose trembling hope had been to remain unseen!
Royal’s cigar sickened him, and he dropped it, still burning, into the brown pine needles. He watched the tiny, red-rimmed hole it was making. The circle grew larger and larger. Curse it, why not let this be the end-all here? But just as the slowly widening red rim really flickered into a faint blaze, the red on his forehead rushed fiercely over the rest of his face. No, by God, no! Not that way! With his woollen cap he stifled the flame. It died down utterly, and with it his own last remnant of vigor.
Stiffly, and with manifest suffering, he rose from the ground. Yet, in a very real sense, he had a far better right to a place under those pines than even the poet Royal himself could claim. In his fevered outlaw imagination, conjuring up terrors where none existed, and courting dangers unaware, that place to him was sanctuary. The onespot on earth! For his fathers had cleared those hills above, and ploughed the fields beneath. That soldier of the Revolution was his own ancestor. Their names given in baptism and granted by birth were the same, Jeremiah Burton. In the year eighteen-twenty, one Jeremiah Burton had departed this life, full of honors; and now, a century later, this other Jeremiah Burton was still living, and under an exceeding weight of dishonor. A fugitive from justice, he was seeking sanctuary among his own kin. And no person in that State knew him for the Burton that he was.
No less than the boy Royal, he had aspired to the arts. Writing, painting, dancing, acting, he had loved them, every one. Yet never to the extent of drudgery, or self-sacrifice, surely! Art for a good time’s sake was his motto. He had always joyously avowed himself a “‘carpe diem’ fellow, don’t you know.” Perhaps his Burton ancestors, in their passion for honest toil and meritorious self-immolation, had drawn too heavily on springs of energy, both physical and spiritual, that should have been reserved for their descendants. So young Jeremiah Burton wrote skits, painted landscapes, acted in vaudeville; seldom very well, never at great pains. Of all his various arenas forthe exhibition of his personality, he had concluded that the stage offered the most glamorous possibilities. Still, Jeremiah is no name to be pasted gayly up on the billboards, is it? And even Burton itself has a melancholy look when printed. Very early in life, therefore, the Jeremiah Burton of the flushed forehead and fat predatory nose had Geraldized his Christian name, and given a twist, even more romantic, to his surname. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had hoped, when scarcely older than the boy Royal, to take the world by storm from behind the footlights. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had studied and strutted and caroused through the downward zigzag of his middle years. It was as Gerald Bertello that he was designated in the warrant for his arrest. But it was as Jeremiah Burton that he was making his last stand, there on the hill, among his kinsmen. Sanctuary!
The slate stone that marked the soldier’s grave still stood erect. One could read every word carved upon it. Its willow tree wept in a perennial freshness of stem and leaf. The cherub and skull and crossbones had not turned a hair. But the more pretentious marble slab placed over the warrior’s relict, Thanksgiving Burton, was altogethera weaker vessel; at least, its foundations were less sure. It had lately fallen down flat under the hilltop winds, and in falling, had laid low a part of the slender iron fence that enclosed the graves of those early Burtons; Burtons who had wrestled with that soil and conquered it, until the soil, in turn, conquered them.
The fugitive who had lately read to the boy Royal sonorous words of the twelve youths of Troy felt strangely dizzy as he pondered on the carven tribute to his ancestor. It began, as he well remembered, “A soldier of the Revolution and of God.” Dizzy as he was, he would like to recite the whole of that inscription, with the proper emphasis, for the youngster’s benefit. Where was the kid, that little Lord Bountiful, “a traveller like myself”? Oh, yes, he remembered now, but with immense, overpowering difficulty. The boy had vanished, fled away on the wings of an Iliad. “A soldier of the Revolution,”—but the words he was staring at were dizzier than himself. Hell, they must be, whirling so! Blindly throwing out an arm, he stumbled and fell, his hand striking the fallen marble slab in memory of Thanksgiving Burton. Like Royal, he had for the present reached the end of his appointed rounds.
Below, just beyond a fork in the dusty stage-road, Remy Mariette, commissioner of highways, was finishing his day’s work of filling with gravel the deeper ruts and holes. He was a lithe, brown, ruddy-cheeked young man, known far and wide as a great worker, whether alone or in company. To-day he was alone. It happened that he was not only road commissioner, road laborer, mason, and the best bass of the choir; he was also the village constable. In the inner pocket of his frayed working coat was the secret warrant for the taking of Gerald Bertello. That document had been very much on his mind for the past few days, because, as he himself expressed it, “constabling was a new job for him.” However, he was not thinking, just then, of the cares of his office. He was thinking that before going home, he had plenty of time to skip up the hill and see whether the old gravestones were as badly off as reported at the last town meeting. If so, it meant another job for him; a good one, too, at mason’s wages. He swung briskly up the slope, his crowbar as staff. He might need it to pry at the fallen stone.
Well, well, a man asleep. Queer place to choose. Drunk, perhaps? Hey, there, you man asleep!
The constable leaned over the sleeper, and then drew back in mingled disgust and amazement. The disgust was for the criminal, the amazement because a criminal so clever should thus easily be caught. He knew his quarry in an instant. He recognized Gerald Bertello, in former years a summer-time figure making himself and his comrades mightily at home among the mountains. Gerald Bertello’s name and face had often been shown on the screen at the Monday movies. Looked the kind that might turn desperate, too. Just as well he had brought along the bar, in case. With his foot, yet not unkindly, he prodded the sleeper, once, twice, three times, and yet again. Gerald Bertello did not stir. Suddenly the young constable, who had a fading-flower wife whom he loved, and who was therefore wise beyond his years in the lore of hearts and pulses, knelt down by the man’s side.
When he rose, it was with a strange sense of he knew not what complexities. He was not given to self-analysis. But, because of the good French blood in his veins, he took off his cap, and bowed his head, very simply and sincerely, yet almostmechanically, in the presence of death. He was young for a constable, scarcely seven years older than the boy Royal. Indeed, the two had long been friends in that wide countryside. They were Remy and Royal together. Not without a touch of envy, Royal had last spring congratulated him on his appointment. Ah, this would be something to tell Royal about, when they should meet again; a queer boy, always wanting to know queer things!
Puzzled as to his immediate duty, the young man meditated a moment, then made a swift decision. Best leave everything untouched, and seek help and counsel from his elders, in the village below. He gazed at the sleeper’s cap, the cigars, the scattered bread, the little American flag left from last Decoration Day; but he did not alter anything he saw. Some sense of strict procedure in such cases constrained him.
Before descending the slope, he looked up curiously into the sky, to note what birds might be abroad. He remembered the crows he had seen early that morning in his new orchard; some of them were plucking deep bites from his ripest apples. So from his coat he took the warrant, and buttoned it into the pocket of his soldier shirt. Then he spread his coat carefully over the sleeper’sface, its profile half lost among the brown pine leaves and the sparse vine-wreaths springing up through them. He even succeeded in covering the hand lying against the edge of the fallen stone. He wondered whether the man had cried aloud for help. He noted, partly as a constable’s duty and partly as something to tell to the boy Royal, that the hand seemed to be stretched out in a dumb gesture, whether of hope or of despair, toward the stone and the writing on the stone,—
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,And that”
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,And that”
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,And that”
“I know that my Redeemer liveth,
And that”
The last line, in the stiff italic of the eighteen-thirties, was blotted out by lichens and earth-stains, but Remy Mariette knew the words well. They were in a chant the choir often sang. To-day they hurt him; since kneeling by that sleeper with the still heart, he had been thinking incessantly, with a tightening pain in his throat, of the flower-like wife at home. He leaned on his iron bar an instant, and shivered. The sun had gone away from that place. From a far wood a hermit thrush poured out its exquisite, passionless hymn of Paradise. Then it seemed to the young man that all the sadness in the world was brooding over the hill with the graves.