In those days I knew Hamilton only by the light in the south; for in Hagar men said, “That light in the south is Hamilton,” as they would say, “The sunrise in the east, the sunset in the west, the aurora in the north,” illuminations that were native in their places. Hamilton was a yellow glimmer on clear nights, and on cloudy nights a larger glow. It crouched low in the sky, pale, secret, enticing.
Also I knew that Hamilton was twenty miles away, like Sheridan's ride. How great and full of palaces and splendors that must be which shone so far! How golden its streets, and jewelled its gates, like the Celestial City, which is described in Revelations and “The Progress” in an unmistakable manner, if not as one would wish in the matter of some details. Yet to speak justly, “The Progress” was considered a passable good story, though not up to the “Arabian Nights”; and Revelations had its points, though any one could see the writer was mixed in his mind, and upset probably by the oddness of his adventures, and rather stumped how to relate them plainly.
But this story does not include the city of Hamilton, although touching on the lights in the south. It left its mark upon me and cast a shadow over many things that did not seem connected with it, being a kind of introduction for me to what might be called the Greater Melancholies.
There are four roads that meet in Hagar: the Cattle Ridge, the Salem, the Windless Mountain, and the Red Rock. The Salem is broad, level, and straight; the Windless sweeps around the mountain, deep through the pines, the jungle of other woods, and the gorge of the falling Mill Stream; the Red Rock is a high, clean hill road, open and bare; the Cattle Ridge Road comes down from highest of all, from far up on the windy brows of the Ridge, and dips and courtesies all the way into Hagar. Some time I would like to make more plain the nature and influence of the Four Roads. But the adventure began on the Cattle Ridge Road with a wide-armed chestnut tree, where certain red squirrels lived who were lively and had thin tails. I went out over the road on a long limb with Moses Durfey and Chub Leroy, seeing Mr. Cummings driving a load of hay down from the Cattle Ridge: it seemed desirable to drop on the hay when it passed beneath. Mr. Cummings was sleepy. He sat nodding far down in front, while we lit softly on the crest and slid over behind.
And next you are to know that Chub Leroy's feet came down thump on the head of a monstrous man, half buried in the hay, who sat up and looked around, vast, shaggy, black-bearded, smoking a corncob pipe, composed, and quite ragged in his clothes.
“Humph!” he said mildly, and rubbed his head.
After a few moments looking us over, he pointed with his thumb through the hay at Mr. Cummings, and leaned toward us and winked.
“Same as me,” he whispered, and shook all over his fatness, silently, with the laughter and pleasure he was having inside.
It is a good thing in this world to have adventures, and it is only a matter of looking around a bit in country or city. For each fellow his quest is waiting at the street corner, or hides in the edge of the woods, peering out of green shadows. On all highways it is to be met with and is seldom far to seek—though no harm if it were—because the world is populous with men and animals, and no moment like another. It may be, if you drop on a hay-load, you will have a row with the driver, or you will thump on the head such a free traveller as ours, vast, shaggy, primeval, pipe-smoking, of wonderful fatness.
He seemed a sleepy, contented man, not in point of fact minding thumps on the head. The hay-cart rolled on gently in the dust. Mr. Cummings drowsed in front, unaware, and the Free Traveller drowsed behind, smoking listlessly. The rest of us grew sleepy too and liked everything. For it was odd but pleasant in a way to look down from the secrecy of the hay on familiar things, on the village dooryards and the tops of hats. We seemed to fall into silent league with the Free Traveller, to be interested in things, but not anxious, observing the hats of labor and ambition, careless of appearance, primitive, easy, seeing little importance in where the cart might go, because anywhere was good enough.
Instead of turning east at the cross-roads, Mr. Cummings drove drowsily ahead on the Windless Road, although the Cummings place is east on the Salem; so that the hay was plainly going to the little pasture barn, three miles off, all one to us, and better for the Free Traveller, as it appeared after. But he was not interested then, being in a fair way to sleep. We lay deep in the hay and looked up at the blue of the sky and the white of the creeping clouds, till the pine trees closed suddenly over the road, the cliffs of Windless Mountain on one side and the Mill Stream on the other, deep under its bank. A strong south wind came under the pines, skirting the corner of the mountain, hissed through the pine needles, and rumpled the hay.
And there was a great smoke and blaze about us. “Humph!” said the Free Traveller.
He went off the back of the hay-cart into the middle of the road, and we too fell off immediately, each in his own way, on the pine needles. Mr. Cummings came up over the top of the load with a tumult of mixed language, and the horses ran away.
The great load sped down the green avenue smoking, crackling, blazing, taking with it Mr. Cummings to unknown results, and leaving the Free Traveller sitting up in the middle of the road and looking after it mildly. He heaved himself up puffing. “There!” he said. “There goes my pipe.”
“It's all your fault,” shouted Moses Durfey. “You shouldn't smoke on hay-loads.”
“Maybe Mr. Cummings is a deader,” said Chub Leroy, thoughtfully.
The Free Traveller rubbed his leg.
“You're same as me. If he ain't dead he'll come back with a strap and lam some of us. That ain't me. I'm going to light out.”
He slid under the rail and down the bank to the stream, handling himself wonderfully for so weighty a man; for he seemed to accommodate himself to obstacles like a jellyfish, and somehow to get around them. So he was over the bowlders and across the stream, which there divides Windless Mountain from the Great South Woods.
We were indignant that he should leave us to be “lammed” for his carelessness. We shouted after, and Moses Durfey said he was a “chump.”
“You might come along,” retorted the Free Traveller with an injured manner. “What's hindering? I lugs nobody. I lets folks alone.”
He was at the wood's edge by this time, where a dim green path went in, looked over his shoulder a moment, and then disappeared. We scrambled down the bank and over the bowlders, for it was not desirable to wait for Mr. Cummings, and Hagar itself would be no refuge. Hagar was a place where criticisms were made, while the green woods have never a comment on any folly, but are good comrades to all who have the temper to like them. We caught up with him by dint of running and followed silently. It grew dusky with the lateness of the afternoon, the pale green light turning dark, and we were solemn and rather low in our minds. The Free Traveller seemed to grow more vast in outline. Being short of wind he wheezed and moaned and what with his swaying as he walked, and his great humpy shoulders and all, he looked less and less like a man, and more and more like a Thing. Sometimes a tree would creak suddenly near at hand, and I fancied there were other people in the woods, whispering and all going the way we went, to see what would come to us in the end.
So it went on till we came on a little clearing, between the forest and a swamp. A black pond, tinted a bit with the sunset, lay below along the edge of the swamp; and we knew mainly where we were, for there was a highway somewhere beyond the swamp, connecting the valleys of the Wyantenaug and the Pilgrim. But none the less for the highway it seemed a lonely place, fit for congregations of ghosts. The pond was unknown to me, and it looked very still and oily. The forest seemed to crowd about and overhang the clearing. On the western side was a heap of caverned bowlders, and a fire burned in front with three persons sitting beside it.
The Free Traveller slid along the wood's edge noiselessly but without hesitation, and coming to the fire was greeted. One of those who sat there was a tall old man with very light blue eyes and prominent, his beard white and long. As we came to know, he was called the “Prophet.” He said:
“How do, Humpy?” so that we knew the Free Traveller was called Humpy, either for the shape of his shoulders or for the word he used to express himself. There was a younger man, with a retreating chin, and a necktie, but no collar, and there was a silent woman with a shawl over her head.
“These are friends o' mine,” said the Free Traveller to the older man. “Make you acquainted. That's Showman Bobby, and that's the Prophet.”
A vast chuckle of mirth started then from deep within him and surged through his throat,—such a laugh as would naturally come from a whale or some creature of a past age, whose midriff was boundless.
“Ho!” he said. “Bloke with a hay-load lit under him. Ho, Ho!”
“Gen'leman,” said the Prophet with a fluent wave of his hand. “Friends of Humpy's. That's enough. Any grub, Humpy?”
The Free Traveller brought out a round loaf and some meat done up in a newspaper. He might have carried a number of such things about him without making any great difference in his contour. The Prophet did not ask about the hay-load, or where the bread and meat came from.
The daylight was fading now in the clearing, and presently a few thin stars were out. It might have occurred to persons of better regulated fancies than ours that they were due at supper long since with other friends of staider qualities, and that now the wood-paths were too dark to follow. Perhaps it did; but it could not have seemed a fair reason to be troubled, that we were last seen in company with the Free Traveller, so fat and friendly a man. I remember better that the Black Pond reflected no stars, that the gleams from the fire played fearful games along the wood's edge and the bowlders, and how, beyond the Black Pond, the swamp and the close-cuddled hills, the lights of Hamilton crouched low under the sky. Opposite us across the fire sat that woman who said nothing, and her face was shadowed by her shawl.
Showman Bobby and the Free Traveller went to sleep, Bobby on his face and the Free Traveller accommodating himself. The Prophet sat up and kept us company; for we asked him questions naturally, and he seemed interested to answer, and was fluent and striking in his speech. They were a runout Company and very low in their luck; and it seemed that Bobby was the manager, a tumbler himself by profession and in that way of life since childhood; and the Free Traveller was apt to be an Australian giant now, but in earlier years had been given to footing from place to place and living as he might. The Prophet called him a skilful man at getting things out of women, partly by experience, and partly by reason of his size and the mildness of his manners. As for the Black Pond Clearing, it was well known to people of the road, even to orange-men and pack-peddlers, being a hidden place with wood and water and shelter in the caves from rain.
“That light in the south is Hamilton,” said Chub Leroy.
The Prophet started and looked anxiously across the fire, but the woman did not move. Then he drew nearer us and spoke lower.
“You look out,” he said. “She ain't right in her head. Bobby painted the kid for a pappoose. It took the shakes and died queer. You'd better lie down, Cass,” speaking across the fire to the woman, who turned her head and stared at him directly. “You'd better lie down.”
She drew back from the fire noiselessly and lay down, wrapping her shawl about her head.
“I ain't been a circus heeler all my time,” began the Prophet. “I been a gentleman. Neither has Humpy, I reckon. When I met Bobby it was West and he ran a dime museum. He took me in for being a gifted talker, and I was that low in my luck. She and Bobby was married sometime, and she did acts like the Circassian Beauty, and the Headless Woman, and the Child of the Aztecs. Humpy's gifts lies in his size, and he's a powerful strong man, too, more than you'd think, and he can get himself up for a savage to look like a loose tornado. Look at him now. Ain't he a heap? There was a three-eyed dog in the show that you could n't tell that the extra eye was n't so hardly, and a snake that was any kind of a snake according as you fixed him, his natural color being black. We came East with Forepaugh's. Bobby bought a tent in Chicago, and we came to Hamilton a fortnight ago. Now there's Hamilton that's a-shining off there with its lights. And we run away from it in the night a week come to-morrow, or next day, I forget. We left the tent and outfit which was come down on by a Dutch grocer for debt, and Cassie's baby was dead in the tent. Bobby painted him too thick. And there was a lot of folks looking for us with sticks. Now, that was n't right. Think Bobby'd have poisoned his own kid if he'd known better about painting him, a kid that was a credit to the show! That's what they said. Think folks coming round with sticks and a-howling blasphemous is going to help out any family mourning! That ain't my idea.
“Then a fellow says, 'I don't know anything about it,' he says, 'and I don't want to, but I know you get out of here quick.'
“And they drove us out of Hamilton that night ten miles in a covered cart, and left us in the road. And the Dutch grocer got the outfit. I reckon the circus and the city has buried the kid between 'em. Hey? Sh! She's got a quirk. All I know is Fore-paugh's shook us as if we was fleas.”
The Prophet looked over to where Cassie lay, but she did not stir. Anyway, if she heard, it was the Prophet's fault. “They're awful poor company,” he said plaintively, “Bobby and Cass. She takes on terrible. She's took a notion that baby ain't buried right. She thinks—well, I don't know. Now that ain't my way of looking at things, but I did n't own the outfit. It was Bobby's outfit, and the Dutch grocer got it.”
He was silent for a moment. We could hear the Free Traveller asleep and rumbling in his throat.
“Where might you chaps come from?” asked the Prophet, suddenly. “Not that it's my business. Maybe there might be a town over there? Hey? Yes.”
He grumbled in his beard a few moments more, and then lay down to sleep. We drew together and whispered. The three men slept, and the woman said nothing.
It is seen that sometimes your most battered and world-worn of men is the simplest in his way of looking at things. Or else it was because the Prophet was a talker by nature, and Bobby and Cass such poor company, that he fell into speech with us on such equal terms. I have set down but little of what he said, only enough for the story of the Company, and as I happen to recollect it.
It should have been something earlier than nine o'clock when the Prophet lay down to sleep, and half an hour later when we first noticed that the woman, Cass, was sitting up. She had her back to us and was looking toward the lights of Hamilton. There was no moon and the stars only shone here and there between clouds that hurried across the sky, making preparations for the storm that came in the morning. The fire burned low, but there was no need of it for warmth. The outlines of the hills could be seen. The swamp, the pond, and most of the clearing were dark together.
Presently she looked cautiously around, first at the three sleepers, and then at us. She crept nearer slowly and crouched beside the dull fire, throwing back her shawl. Her hair was black and straggled about her face, and her eyes were black too, and glittering. The glow of the embers, striking upward, made their sockets cavernous, but the eyes stood out in the midst of the caverns. One knows well enough that tragedies walk about and exchange agreeable phrases with each other. Your tragedy is yours, and mine is mine, and in the meanwhile see to it that we look sedate, and discuss anything, provided it is of no importance to either. One does not choose to be an inscribed monument to the fame of one's private affair. But Cassie had lost that instinct of reserve, and her desolation looked out of her eyes with dreadful candor. The lines of her face, the droop of her figure and even little motions of the hand, signified but one thought. I suppose all ideas possible to the world had become as one to her, so that three boys cowering away from her seemed only a natural enough part of the same subject. It was all one; namely, a baby painted brown, who died queerly in a side tent in Hamilton Fair Grounds.
We stared at her breathlessly.
“You tell 'em I'm going,” she whispered.
“Where?” asked Chub.
“They ain't no right to—to—Who are you?”
But this was only in passing. She did not wait to be answered.
“You tell 'em I'm going.”
“What for?” persisted Chub.
“It's six days. Maybe they throwed him where the tin cans are. You tell 'em I'm going.”
And she was gone. She must have slipped along the edge of the woods where the shadows were densest.
We listened a moment or two stupidly. Then we sprang up. It seems as if the three men were on their feet at the same instant, wakened by some common instinct or pressure of fear. It was a single sound of splashing we heard off in the darkness. Bobby was gone, then the Free Traveller, then the Prophet. We fell into hollows, over rocks and stumps, and came to the pond. The reflection of a star or two glimmered there. The water looked heavy, like melted lead, and any ripple that had been was gone, or too slight to see. The Free Traveller and Bobby went in and waded about.
“Don't you step on her,” said Bobby, hoarsely.
The bottom seemed to shelve steeply from the shore. They moved along chest-deep, feeling with their feet, and we heard them whispering. The Prophet sat down and whimpered softly. They waded a distance along the shore, and back. They came close in, whispered together, and went out again.
“Here! I got it,” said the Free Traveller. They came out, carrying something large and black, and laid it on the ground.
“It ain't Cassie!” whimpered the Prophet. “It ain't Cassie, is it?”
They all stood about it. The face was like a dim white patch on the ground.
“Hold your jaw,” said Bobby. “Hark!”
There were voices in the woods above, and a crashing of the branches. They were coming nearer and lights were twinkling far back in the wood-path, where we had entered the clearing. I do not know what thought it was—some instinct to flee and hide—that seized the outcasts. They slid away into the darkness together, swiftly and without speaking. The Free Traveller had Cassie's body on his shoulder, carrying it as a child carries a rag doll. The darkness swallowed them at a gulp, and we stood alone by the Black Pond. Several men came into the clearing with lanterns, villagers from Hagar, Harvey Cummings, the minister, and others, who swung their lanterns and shouted.
Now, I suppose that Cassie lies buried to-day somewhere in the South Woods, and it may be that no man alive knows where. For none of the Company were ever seen again in that part of the country, nor have been heard of anywhere now these many years. We can see the lights of Hamilton from Hagar as of old, but we seldom think of the Celestial City, or any palaces and splendors, but of the multitude of various people who go to and fro, each carrying a story.
The coming and going of aliens made little difference with Hagar. I suppose it was more important there, that Harvey Cummings's hay-load went up lawlessly in smoke and flame, and never came to the little pasture barn on the Windless Mountain Road.
On Friday afternoon, the twenty-eighth of June, Deacon Crockett's horse ran away. It was not a suitable thing, not at all what a settled community had a right to expect of a horse with stubby legs and no mane to speak of, who had grown old in the order of decent conduct. He ran into Mrs. Cullom Sanderson's basket phaeton and spilled Mrs. Cullom on the ground, which was taking a grave responsibility. It was done in the midst of Hagar. Harvey Cummings jumped out of the way and said, “Deb it!” There was no concealment about it. Everybody heard of it and said it was astonishing.
The name of the deacon's horse was Joppa. The deacon's father-in-law, Captain David Brett, had an iron-gray named Borneo. Borneo and Joppa did not agree, on account of Borneo's kicking Joppa in the ribs to show his contempt. It was natural that he should have this contempt, being sleek and spirited himself, with a nautical gait that every one admitted to be taking; and Joppa did not think it unnatural in him to show it. Without questioning the justice of Borneo's position, he disliked being kicked in the ribs.
Borneo had been eating grass by the roadside; Joppa stood harnessed in front of the horse-block; Mrs. Crockett stood on the horse-block; Borneo came around and kicked Joppa in the ribs; Joppa ran away; Mrs. Crockett shrieked; Harvey Cummings said “Deb it!” and Mrs. Cullom Sanderson was spilled. She weighed two hundred pounds and covered a deal of ground when she was spilled.
He crossed the bridge and tore along the Salem Road, his stubby legs pattering under him, and a great fear in his soul of the shouting village behind. Angelica and Willy Flint saw him coming.
“It's a runaway!” shouted Angelica.
Willy Flint continued swinging on the gate. He thought it his place to be self-contained and accurate.
“It's Joppa,” he said calmly.
But Angelica did not care for appearances. She shied a clam-shell at Joppa, said “Hi there!” and jumped around.
Joppa swerved sharply, the deacon's buggy turned several sides up, if that is possible, bobbed along behind, and then broke loose at the thills. Joppa fled madly up the side road that leads to Scrabble Up and Down, and disappeared over the crest of the hill, leaving Angelica and Willy Flint to gloat over the wreck of the buggy. It gratified a number of their instincts.
The region called Scrabble Up and Down, as well as the road which leads to it, is distinguished by innumerable small steep hills and hollows. For the rest, it is a sandy and ill-populated district, and a lonely road. Westward of it lies a wilderness of underbrush and stunted trees, rising at last into exultant woods and billowing over the hills mile upon mile to the valley of the Wyantenaug. The South Woods do not belong to Scrabble Up and Down. They are put there to show Scrabble Up and Down what it cannot do.
The road winds around hillocks and down hollows in an aimless fashion; and for that reason it is not possible to see much of it at a time. When the villagers of Hagar reached the top of the first hill, Joppa was nearly a mile away, his stubby legs rather tired, his spirit more tranquil, and himself out of sight of the villagers of Hagar. He saw no point in turning back. Hagar gave him but a dull and unideal life, plodding between shafts before the austere and silent deacon, unaccountably smacked with a whip, and in constant contrast with Borneo's good looks. Joppa had not many ideas and little imagination. He did not feel drawn to go back. Moreover he smelt something damp and fresh in the direction of the woods which absorbed him. He stopped, sniffed, and looked around. The fence was broken here and there, as fences generally were in Scrabble Up and Down. The leaves were budding; there was a shimmer of green on the distant woods; and presently Joppa was wandering through the brush and scrub trees westward. The broken shafts dragged quietly beside him. He lifted his head a little higher than usual and had an odd feeling, as if he were enjoying himself.
A tumult, row, or excitement of any kind was considered by the children of Hagar a thing to be desired, assisted, and remembered gratefully. Some of the elders were much of the same mind. Joppa's action was therefore popular in Hagar, the more so that it was felt to be incongruous; and, when by no search that Friday afternoon nor the following Saturday could he be found, his reputation rose in leaps. He had gone over the hill and vanished like a ghost, commonplace, homely, plodding, downcast Joppa, known to Hagar in that fashion these dozen or more years and suddenly become the loud talk of the day. The road to Scrabble Up and Down and the roads far beyond were searched. Inquiry spread to Salem and to Gilead. On Saturday night notices were posted here and there by happy jokers relating to Joppa, one on the church door of Hagar requesting the prayers of the congregation. Mr. Atherton Bell thought the deacon's horse like “the deacon's one-hoss shay,” in that he had lasted an extraordinary time intact, and then disintegrated. Joppa had become a mystery, an excitement, a cause of wit. A definite addition had been made to the hoarded stock of tradition and jest; the lives of all seemed the richer. An atmosphere of deep and tranquil mirth pervaded the village, a kind of mellow light of humor, in the focus of which stood Deacon Crockett, and writhed.
It was hoped that the minister would preach on Joppa. He preached on “human insignificance,” and read of the war-horse, “Hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?” but it was thought not to refer to Joppa.
As for the children of Hagar, did they not dream of him, and hear him thumping and blundering by in the winds of the dim night? They saw no humor in him, nor in the deacon. Rather it was a serious mystery, and they went about with the impression of it on their faces, having faith that the outcome would be worthy of the promise.
Harvey Cummings thought that the war-horse did not refer to Joppa, and said so on the steps of the church. “There wan'd no thudder aboud him. He was the meekest hoss in Hamilton County. He run away on accound of his shyness.”
Mr. Cummings had no palate to speak of, and his consonants were uncertain. Mr. Atherton Bell threw out his chest, as an orator should, put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, and gazed at Mr. Cummings with a kindling eye.
“For a meek horse,” he said impressively, “he showed—a—great resolution when he spilled Mrs. Cullom Sanderson. I declare to you, Harvey, I give you my word, sir, I would not have missed seeing Mrs. Cullom spilled for a government contract.”
“Oh, indeed, Mr. Bell!” said Mrs. Cullom Sanderson, rustling past, “clothed with thunder” and black silk. Mr. Atherton Bell recovered himself slowly and moved to a greater distance from the church door. He was a politician and a legislator, but he found diplomacy difficult. Several others gathered around, desiring to hear the statesman. “Now suppose, Harvey, suppose the deacon too should take a notion to run away, knock over Mrs. Cullom, you know, and—a—disappear. Imagine it, Harvey.”
Mr. Cummings shook his head.
“Can't do it.”
Mr. Bell took off his hat and smiled expansively.
“It's a pleasing thought, ha! He might be translated—a—Elijah, you know. He might leave his mantle to—to me. Hitherto the deacon has lacked dramatic interest. Contact between Mrs. Cullom and Deacon Crockett would—” (here his hearers stirred appreciatively) “would have dramatic interest—Ah, good morning, deacon, good morning, sir. We were speaking of your loss. We—a—trust it will not be permanent.”
The deacon moved on without answering. Mr. Atherton Bell's spirit fell again, and he wiped his forehead nervously.
It would be a painful thing if a man were suddenly to enter into full sight of himself as others see him; it is a measure of distress even to have a passing glimpse—not so much because he sees a worse man, but because he sees a stranger.
Deacon Crockett had never asked himself how others saw him. He was not a flexible man. The grooves in which his life ran had been worn slowly in a hard substance. Its purports and ends had always seemed to him accurately measured and bounded. He exacted his rights, paid his dues, and had no doubts about either; held his conscience before him as a sword, dividing truth from falsehood. He stood by the faith of his forefathers, gave up no jot or tittle of it; there were no hazy outlying regions in that faith.
When a man observes himself to be a well-defined thing in certain relations with other well-defined things, has no more doubt of the meaning of his presence on the earth than of the function of a cogwheel in his watch, his footing seems singularly secure; the figure he makes in his own eyes not only grows rigid with habit, but seems logically exact to begin with. To doubt the function of the cog-wheel is to put in question the watch, which is impossible and a sufficient demonstration. Other men's opinions, if worth anything or considered at all, are assumed to be respectful; and the assumption seems just.
Why should he not feel impregnable in his personal dignity, who sees himself sufficiently fulfilling his function in an ordered scheme, a just man, elected to become perfect? Personal dignity is at least not a vulgar ambition. It was the deacon's ambition, the thing which he wished to characterize his life.
The deacon walked down the path from the church. He walked quietly and stiffly as usual, but the spirit within him was worse than angry; it was confused. The whole neighborhood seemed to be laughing at him; his fingers tingled at the thought.
But that was not the source of his confusion. It was, strangely, that there seemed to be no malice in the laughter, only a kind of amused friendliness. An insult and a resentment can be understood by a man of function, within his function; his resentment maintains his equilibrium. But, quite the contrary, his neighbors seemed timidly to invite him into the joke. Of all the hidden ways of laughter one comes last to that in which he may walk and be amused with himself; although it is only there that he is for the first time entirely comfortable in the world. Tim Rae, the town drunkard, met him where the path across the Green joins the road. It was Tim's habit to flee from the deacon's approach with feeble subterfuges, not because the deacon ever lectured him, but because the deacon's presence seemed to foreshorten his stature, and gave him a chill in the stomach, where he preferred “something warm.” Yet he ambled amiably across the road, and his air of good-fellowship could not have been greater if they had met in a ditch on equal terms of intoxication.
“What think, deacon,” he gurgled. “I was dream-in' las' night, 'bout Joppa comin' down my chimney, damned if he did n't.”
The deacon stopped and faced him.
“You may be drunk, sir,” he said slowly, “on Saturday night, and you may curse on the Sabbath; but youmay notexpect me to sympathize with you—in either.”
Then Tim Rae slunk away foreshortened of stature and cold in the stomach.
Monday morning was the first of May; and on May-day, unless the season were backward and without early flowers, the children of Hagar would go after ground-pine for the May-baskets, and trailing arbutus to fill them with. They would hang the baskets on the door-handles of those who were thought worthy, popular persons such as the minister and Sandy Campbell; on Mr. Atherton Bell's door-handle on account of Bobby Bell, who was a gentleman but not allowed to be out nights because of his inferior age.
Ground-pine grows in many places, but early arbutus is a whimsical flower, as shy as first love. It is nearly always to be found somewhere in the South Woods. And the South Woods are to be reached, not by Scrabble Up and Down, but along the Windless Mountain Road, across the Mill Stream, and by cart-paths which know not their own minds.
The deacon drove home from Gilead Monday afternoon, and saw the children noisily jumping the Mill Stream where the line of bowlders dams up the stream and makes deep quiet water above. Their voices, quarrelling and laughing, fell on his ear with an unfamiliar sound. Somehow they seemed significant, at least suggesting odd trains of thought. He found himself imagining how it would seem to go Maying; and the incongruity of it brought a sudden frown of mental pain and confusion to his forehead. And so he drove into Hagar.
But if he had followed the May-day revellers, as he had oddly imagined himself doing, he would have gone by those winding cart-paths, fragrant with early growth, and might have seen the children break from the woods with shouts into a small opening above a sunken pond; he might even have heard the voice of Angelica Flint rise in shrill excitement:
“Why, there's Joppa!”
Some minutes after six, the first shading of the twilight being in the air, the villagers of Hagar, whose houses lay along the north and south road, rose on one impulse and came forth into the street. And standing by their gates and porches, they saw the children go by with lost Joppa in their midst. Around his neck was a huge flopping wreath of ground-pine and arbutus. The arbutus did not stay in very well, and there was little of it—only bits stuck in here and there. Joppa hung his head low, so that the wreath had to be held on. He did not seem cheerful; in fact, the whole cortège had a subdued though important air, as if oppressed by a great thought and conscious of ceremony.
The minister and the other neighbors along the street came out and followed. Some dozen or more at last stood on the brow of the slight hill looking down to the deacon's house; and they too felt conscious of something, of a ceremony, a suspense.
Mr. Atherton Bell met the children and drove his buggy into the ditch, stood up and gazed over the back of it with an absorbed look.
“I feel curious how the deacon will take it,” said the minister. “I—I feel anxious.”
Mr. Atherton Bell said, it got him. He said something too about “dramatic interest” and “a good betting chance he'll cut up rough”; but no one answered him.
The procession halted outside the deacon's gate. A tendency to giggle on the part of certain girls was sternly suppressed by Angelica Flint. Willy Flint led Joppa cautiously up the board walk and tied him to a pillar of the porch; the company began to retreat irregularly.
Suddenly the deacon, tall and black-coated, stood in the doorway, Mrs. Crockett at his elbow pouring forth exclamations; and the retreat became a flight. Little Nettie Paulus fell behind; she stood in the middle of the road and wailed piteously.
The deacon glared at Joppa and Joppa's grotesque necklace, looked after the fleeing children and saw on the brow of the hill the group of his fellow-townsmen. His forehead flushed and he hesitated. At last he took the wreath awkwardly from Joppa's neck, went into the house and shut the door. The wreath hung in his front window seven months, and fell to pieces about the end of November. Joppa died long after of old age and rheumatism.
Between the mill and the miller's house in Hagar the Mill Stream made a broad pool with a yellow bottom of pebbles and sand. It was sometimes called the Mediterranean. If you wished to cross the Mill Stream, there was a plank below, which was good to jounce on also, though apt to tip you into the water. The pool was shallow, about twenty feet across and as long as you might care to go upstream,—as far as the clay bank, anyway, where Chub Leroy built the city of Alexandria. Jeannette Paulus walked all over Alexandria to catch a frog, and made a mess of it, and did not catch the frog. That is the way of things in this world. Alexandria fell in a moment, with all her palaces and towers. But there were other cities, and commerce was lively on the Mediterranean.
On the nearer side, against the gray, weatherbeaten flank of the miller's house was a painted bench, for convenience of the morning sun and afternoon shade; and I call it now the Elders' Seat, because Captain David Brett and others were often to be seen sitting there in the sun or shade. I remember the minister was there, and Job Mather, the miller, whenever his grist ran low, so that he let his stem millstones cease to grind. These were the three to whom the Elders' Seat seemed to us to belong by right of continuance, because our short memories ran not to the contrary. Captain David was well in his seventies, the miller not far behind, and Mr. Royce already gray-haired. They sat and watched the rise and fall of cities, the growth and decay of commerce, the tumult of conquests, and the wreck of high ambition. They noticed that one thing did not change nor cease, namely, the ripple of the stream; just as if, in history, there really were a voice distinguishable that went murmuring forever.
After the fall of Alexandria Damascus was built, but inland, so that it had to be reached by caravan; and Moses Durfey laid the foundations of Byzantium where the pool narrowed into rushing water, and Venice was planted low in a marshy place hard by the seven hills of Rome. But you must know that Bobby Bell built the city of Rome absurdly, and filled it with pot-holes to keep frogs in and floating black bugs, so that it was impossible to hold it against the Carthaginians. There were wars in those days. These were the main marts of trade, but there were quays and fortresses elsewhere; and it should be told sometime how the Barbary pirates came down. Rome was in a bad way, for Bobby had one aquarium in the Campus Martius, and another where the Forum should have been. There was nothing flourishing but the aqueducts.
The three Elders would sit leaning forward, watching the changes of fortune and event that went on from hour to hour by the Mediterranean. The captain smoked his pipe; the minister rested his chin on his cane; the miller's hands were on his knees, his large white face stolid, his heavy lips seldom moving. He was a thinking man, the miller,—a slow-moving, slow-speaking, persistent man, and a fatalist in his way of thinking, though he used no such term; it was his notion of things.
They talked of old history out of Gibbon and Grote and the Seven Monarchies, and they talked of things that had happened to them as men in the world; but the things which they thought of most often, in watching the children and the Mill Stream, they said little about, for these had not happened a thousand or two thousand years before, nor twenty or thirty, but just sixty or seventy. And this was why they came so often to the Elders' Seat, because something dim and happy seemed to come up to them, like a mist, from the Mill Stream, where the children quarrelled and contrived.
“I'll tell ye what ailed Rome,” said Captain David. “She needed to be keeled and scraped. She fouled her bottom!”
The minister answered slowly: “No, she was rotten within. She lost the faith in God and in man that keeps a people sound.”
“Ho! Well, then she wa'n't handled right.”
The miller rubbed his thumb slowly on the palm of his hand. “She was grinded out,” he said. “She couldn't help it. Corn can't keep itself from meal when the stones gets at it. No more a man can't keep his bones from dust, nor a people, either, I'm thinking, when its time comes.”
The minister shook his head. “I don't like that.”
“I don't know as I do, either. And I don't know as that makes any difference.”
“Ho!” said the captain. “Bobby's got a new frog!”
And Chub Leroy cried out in despair: “Look out, Bobby! You're stepping on the Colosseum!”
I would not pretend to say how long the Elders' Seat had stood there, or how many years the Elders had come to it now and again; but I remember that it seemed to us very permanent, in a world of shifting empires, where Alexandria was suddenly walked upon and deserted, and Venice went down the current in a rainy night, and was spoken of no more. We could not remember when it had not stood in its place. It was a kind of Olympus to us, or Delphi, where we went for oracles on shipping and other matters.
Afterward we grew up, and became too old to dabble and make beautiful things of gray clay, except Chub Leroy, who is still doing something of that kind, cutting and building with clay and stone. But the Elders' Seat remained, and the Elders watched other children, as if nothing had happened. Only, Captain David had trouble to keep his pipe in his mouth. So that when the Elders' Seat took its first journey, it seemed very difficult for us to understand,—even for those who were too old to dabble in gray clay.
It was not more than a quarter of a mile from the mill, past the drug store, the Crocketts' house, where Captain David lived, and so on by the crossroads, to the minister's, with the graveyard just beyond. I remember how very yellow and dusty the road was in the summer of '86, so that the clay bottom cracked off in flat pieces, which could be gathered up; and then, if you climbed the wall with care enough, you could scale them at woodchucks. August was sultry and still. The morning-glories drooped on Captain David's porch, and the pigeons on the roof went to sleep more than was natural.
The minister and Job Mather sat, one afternoon, in the Elders' Seat; for Captain David, he had not gone out through his gate those many days. There was history enough in process on the Mediterranean. The Americans and Carthaginians were preparing to have a battle, on account of docks that ran too near together. The Elders discovered that they did not care about it.
The miller got to his feet, and lifted one end of the bench. “Come,” he said gruffly. “Let's move it.”
“Hey!” said the minister, looking troubled and a bit lost. Then his lips trembled. “Yes, Job. That's so, Job. We'd better move it.”
The children came up from the Mediterranean in a body, and stared. It was much to them as if, in Greece, the gods had risen up and gone away, for unknown reasons, taking Olympus with them. The old men went along the yellow, dusty road with very shuffling steps, carrying the Elders' Seat, one at each end, till they turned into Captain David's garden and put it down against the porch. Mrs. Crockett came to the door, and held up her hands in astonishment. Captain David was helped out. He was faded and worn with pain. He settled himself in the Elders' Seat. It did not seem possible to say anything. The captain smoked his pipe; the minister rested his chin on his cane; the miller's hands were on his knees, his large white face stolid and set.
“I'm goin' to shell those peas to-morrow,” began the captain at last. Then his voice broke, and a mist came into his eyes.
“I bet ye the Americans are licking the Carthaginians.”
On the contrary, the Americans and Carthaginians, with other nations, were hanging over the picket fence, staring and bewildered. What was the use of mere human wars, if primeval things could be suddenly changed? The grass might take a notion to come up pink or the seas to run out at the bottom, and that sort of thing would make a difference.
The sun dropped low in the west, and presently Chub Leroy, who built the city of Alexandria ten years before, came slowly along in the shadow of the maples, and St. Agnes Macree was with him. She was old Caspar Macree's granddaughter, and he was a charcoal-burner on the Cattle Ridge long ago. They were surprised to see the Elders' Seat, and stopped a moment. St. Agnes looked up at him and smiled softly, and Chub's eyes kept saying, “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” all the time. Then they went on.
“I remember—” said Captain David, and stopped short.
“Eh! So do I,” said the minister.
“You do! Well, Job, do you remember? Ain't it the remarkablest thing!”
The miller's heavy face was changed with a slow, embarrassed smile. And all these three sat a long time very still, while the sunlight slanted among the morning-glories and the pigeons slept on the roof.
There came a day in September when the minister and the miller were alone again on the Elders' Seat, but Captain David lay in his bed near the window. He slept a great deal, and babbled in his half dreams: sometimes about ships and cordage, anchorage in harbors and whaling in the south seas; and at times about some one named “Kitty.” I never heard who Kitty was. He said something or other “wasn't right.” He took the trouble and the end of things all in good part, and bore no grudge to any one for it; it seemed only natural, like coming to anchor at last.
“When a man gets legs like mine,” he said, “it's time he took another way of getting round. Something like a fish'd be my notion. Parson, a man gets the other side of somewhere, he can jump round lively-like, same as he was a boy, eh?”
The minister murmured something about “our Heavenly Father,” and Captain David said softly: “I guess he don't call us nothing but boys. He says, 'Shucks! it ain't natural for 'em to behave.' Don't ye think, parson? Him, he might see an old man like me and tell him, 'Glad to see ye, sonny'; same as Harrier in Doty's Slip. The boys come in after a year out, or maybe three years, and old man Harrier, he says, 'Glad to see ye, sonny'; and the boys gets terrible drunk. He kept a junk-shop, Harrier.”
The minister tried to answer, but could not make it out.
“I saw a ship go down sudden-like. It was in '44. It was inside Cape Cod. Something blowed her up inside. Me, I've took my time, I have. What ye grumbling about, parson?”
In the morning the shutters were closed, and all about the house was still. The pigeons were cooing on the roof of the porch; and Captain David was dead, without seeing any reason to grumble. Down at the mill the miller watched his monotonous millstones grinding slowly.
The Elders' Seat was moved once more after Captain David died, not back to the Mediterranean, but further up the yellow road and into the minister's yard, facing westward. From there the captain's white slab could be seen through the cemetery gate. The two Elders occupied the seat some years, and then went in through the gate.
But the Elders' Seat and its journeys from place to place seemed to have some curious meaning, hardly to be spelled. I imagine this far, at least: that at a certain point it became to the two more natural, more quiet and happy, to turn their eyes in the direction the captain had gone than in the direction they had all come. It pleased them then to move the Elders' Seat a little nearer to the gate. And when the late hour came, it was rather a familiar matter. The minister went in to look for his Master, and the miller according to his' notion of things.