THE BABE JEROME
Time, 1892
Thecivil engineer sat at breakfast with his sister. Their table was a stationary one, on stakes driven into the ground, and they drank their coffee from tin camp cups with hooked handles. But the cook served them with broiled fish and game stew, brown pancakes and honey.
The tree overhead was still wet with dew. Lilian had a scarlet shawl around her. She was a girl whose dark eyes and distinct eyebrows you noticed at once, adding afterwards to her personality hair inclined to cluster about the face, and a general elegance of figure which her camp dress suggested instead of outlined.
“As I was bringing my birds in,” said the civil engineer, “I saw Jerome and hisgander sitting on the top rail of a fence, side by side. Jerome had his neck stretched up, whispering to the sky, and the gander had its neck stretched up, hissing its meditations. They were a divine pair!”
“As divine as Minerva and her owl, I should think,” said Miss Brooks. “He seems to me a tragic figure. How can you laugh at him?”
“How can you help laughing at him? But I do pity the old father.”
“And the blind aunt. Eric, I’m going across the river to see her. I told Mr. Marsh I would, the next time he came to camp.”
“He’s coming now. There’s his boat on the river.”
Lilian watched the boat and the Wabash. The expanse of limpid water was so shallow in places that its pebbles glittered in the sun, or a sand-bar showed under the surface, while the current in its channel ran deep and strong. Woods clothed its banks,and a gauze of blue hung over its southern bend. Northward a bridge stood on mighty legs of masonry, screening the work of the engineer among rapids beyond. A flat-boat ferry was being poled diagonally across from the east shore to the west, having for passengers a farmer and his horse.
The approaching skiff grounded also, and Jerome’s father stepped slowly out and came across a stretch of gravel and sward to the camp. Quantities of gray hair and beard, a stoop in his shoulders, and a staff in his hand made him venerable, yet his arms were strong and his eyes black and piercing. He was the richest man in his county, and the man most indifferent to externals. Over his jeans garments he wore a blue woolen cape edged with ancient gimp, evidently taken at random from women’s clothing.
He saw with approval the camp appointments: the civil engineer’s men breakfasting at their long table; the cook moving in and out of a canvas kitchen; and the younglady’s tent, revealing a pink net-screened bed, rugs, and stout book-shelves.
“You’re right well fixed over here,” he called out before the campers could wish him good-morning.
The engineer said he always tried to make his camp comfortable.
“And this is as pretty a stretch,” continued the visitor, drawing nearer, “as you’ll find between New Harmony and the Ohio. But ain’t it lonesome for sis here by herself all day when you and the men’s out?”
“Our cook stays in camp,” said Lilian. “He has lived in our family since I was a child. So I feel secure. The friend who was to have been my companion here was detained at the last minute. But I made my brother bring me, anyhow. Will you have some breakfast, Mr. Marsh?”
“No, I’m obliged: I’ve e’t. I come across to look after the Babe. He forgits to have his breakfast sometimes. Seen him on this side—the Babe Jerome?”
“He’s in the woods with his white gander,” said the engineer.
Mr. Marsh rested against the tree and braced himself with his staff.
“Billy’s never far off from Jerome. The Babe gets lonesome on the river, like sis here, and that gander’s great company for him. But the Babe likes to be lonesome. We still call him the Babe,” apologized the old man, “though he’s twenty-five year old; scarlet fever done it. He was the smartest boy on the river. I ’lowed to settle in Shawnytown, and send him to college. His mother was a scholar. Now there’s nothing to do but let him play his music. He’s a good babe. He never gives me no uneasiness except forgittin’ his breakfast.”
“Do you think he would breakfast with us?” inquired Lilian.
“Call him,” suggested her brother. “As for me, I must be excused. There’s a big day’s work to be done on that bar—time the men were in the boats.”
Captain Eric caught up his broad hat, and flourished it in adieu. The cook ran after him with a list of needed supplies. Lilian watched him sitting with folded arms on his camp-chair in the stern of his boat, until the rise and fall of oars and the song of the men drew off to remoteness. She turned to speak to her visitor, and found Jerome standing with him.
“Want to go back over?” his father inquired tenderly.
Jerome shook his head. His visible flesh had a porcelain quality, like the unstained clearness of infancy. His hair glittered in the sun, and he had a long golden mustache, parting in the centre and trailing down his mouth corners below his chin. So strong and manly an ornament sorted strangely with perplexed blue eyes, that, in spite of a puzzling world, laughed with the delicious joy of life. Jerome’s head stood upon a column of slender body. His clothes, to which a few burrs were sticking, would haveseemed too fine for his environment if they had not so exactly suited him.
“Lost his hat again!” bantered the father. “That’s the fifth straw hat I’ve bought him this summer.”
“If you will have some breakfast with me, Jerome,” said Lilian, “I will go to your house and eat dinner with you.”
“That’s a bargain, ain’t it, Babe?”
The Babe Jerome looked from one to the other, and smiled, and sat down. His gander, lifting and shaking both wings, quavered a remark and waddled to his feet.
“How white Billy is!” said the young lady, after the cook had brought fresh food and she had helped her guest.
“The’ ain’t a gray quill on Billy,” observed Mr. Marsh, his bearded lips relaxing with contentment.
“And his eyes are blue—blue as the sky! His bill, with such funny nostrils in it, is the purest coral. I didn’t know geese could be so beautiful. You pretty fellow! Will he hiss me?”
“No!” spoke Jerome forcibly, startling her as she stretched a timorous hand to brush Billy’s plumage. It had satin firmness. The gander squatted on his webs and observed in his own language that the caress was agreeable.
Jerome left off eating and leaned on his folded arms to smile. He was a sylvan creature, strayed out of pastoral days into the hazy regions of the Wabash.
He rowed the boat back, his father sitting in idle comfort on the other bench, and Lilian facing the oarsman. She enjoyed the grace of his torso, the veins swelling on his hands, the steady innocence of his gaze, with the same kind of satisfaction given by a scent of sycamore leaves, or the exquisite outline of an island. Billy swam after the boat, the water curling away from his breast; and before it could be beached he had left his web marks on the home sands.
The Marsh double cabin, with central chimney hospitable enough to engulf thousandsof swallows, stood on a low bluff. Another and more imposing house was rising near it. The workmen’s noise mingled with stable-yard cackle.
“How I love to hear chickens!” exclaimed Lilian. “They remind me of some wonderfully good time I had when I was a child, though I can’t recall it. You have all the cheerful racket on your side of the river. And how sweet the building wood smells!”
“Some of that’s sweet pine,” explained Mr. Marsh. “The Babe, he carries them chips, and sassafras bark, and spice-wood, and all kinds of woods things, in his pockets.”
The Babe looked at Lilian, repeating slowly what he had told himself many a lonely day, in forest or on river,—
“I—haven’t got—right sense.”
“Oh, don’t say that!” she begged.
The father’s mouth corners fell into leather grooves.
“But Babe’s got idees,” he maintained. “He takes to nice things. So did hismother. I’d have built the new house long ago if she’d lived. And I wouldn’t build it now if it wasn’t for the Babe. Betsey and me like the cabin. We’ll miss the big fireplace, and them hooks in the jice beams. I took Jerome and Betsey down to Shawnytown to stay one winter, and I’d ’a’ died if I hadn’t come back here every two weeks.”
“This is a lovely spot,” said Lilian. “When you are really settled in your new house, you will enjoy it more than ever.”
“I don’t know. It’s just as the Babe turns out to like it. The cabin’s been his cradle. If the new one goes against him I’ll lock it up and bring him back home. Come in,” invited the old man, climbing his doorstep. “Here’s Betsey will be glad to see you.”
From the smoked and chinked interior groped a large woman so delicately and completely white that the blanching appeared to extend through her eyes, for the lids revealed them colorless. She wore a blacknet cap and a dress and a cape of faded lawn. Her heelless soles made no sound on the bare boards. The palms which she spread before her had the texture of shriveled dogwood petals. The stirring of the lawn clothes set free scarcely detected perfumes,—of apples, and mint, and the old-fashioned roses which grow nowhere now except in remote and dewy country gardens.
“It’s the young lady from the camp, Betsey, come to visit us to-day.”
“That sounds heartsome,” the blind sister responded. Lilian took one of her fluttering hands; the other half unconsciously, with the swiftness of custom, moved up the girl’s shoulder and passed over cheek and head. Lilian noticed in what masses of wrinkles this handsome old face hung, and wondered at the miracle of age; at the childish sweetness that comes back to toothless talk. “I love to have the young around. It’s been missly in the house since Babe’s mother died.”
“Well, take a cheer,” said Mr. Marsh, “and I’ll look into the kitchen and tell Marthy Dempsey who’s for dinner. Marthy she keeps house for us, and she’s a good cook; she used to work in a tavern down at Shawnytown.”
Jerome lingered on the log step while his father performed the sacred rite of seating a guest. Aunt Betsey groped toward him.
“But where’s the Babe?”
“The Babe’s as far in as he likes to come,” said his father. “The Babe’s great for outdoors in summer time.”
“The dew’s off the garden,” spoke Jerome.
“He never disremembers my walk,” chuckled the blind woman. “As soon as the jew is dry he fetches my bonnet.”
Miss Brooks herself tipped the sunbonnet at a satisfactory angle over the black net cap, so that its crown sighted the heavens. Jerome helped his aunt to the ground, and guided her around the house, his arm onher waist. He glanced backward often, to draw Lilian along, and she sauntered close, glad to be a part of all this innocent life.
Woods stood at the rear of the garden, and abrupt Indian mounds ruffled their tufts of fern almost overhead. It was growing warm; scarcely a trace of the humid morning remained, even under burdock leaves, which Martha Dempsey prized for her butter. There was a rank hot smell of marigolds in the sun, with a peppery addition of bouncing betties. The sweet-williams were fragrant as honey and long spikes of red or white hollyhocks swayed in the faintest of breezes. Aunt Betsey scented the camomile bed and picked bits of sweet-mary and basil for Miss Brooks. The sound of the workmen’s hammers on the house, the rippling of the river, and the summer call of insects and birds filled the air, until it seemed to tremble over green distances with this weight of pleasant life.
There was a cherry-tree full of ripe blackfruit. Martha Dempsey came out bare-armed, but with a sunbonnet pinned shut below her nose, and, with the unconscious arrogance of the country maid, ordered Jerome to pick her some fruit for pies. He pulled down the lowest branches and filled her tin pail. Then his aunt and Miss Brooks sat under the tree and had their laps weighted with ruby globes on platters of burdock leaves.
“I like cherries best of any fruit,” said Lilian, “and these rich red ones most of all. They get a wicked clip on your tongue that is delightful.”
Jerome considered her, and said with conviction, “You look like a cherry.”
“Then these tart fire-drops ought to be my natural food.”
“This is Babe’s tree,” said Aunt Betsey. “He planted it, and it has growed with his growth.”
It was quite dusk when Jerome landed Miss Brooks at the camp. Her brother met her, and she exclaimed to him:—
“I have had a lovely day! And I persuaded Jerome to bring his violin and play for us a while. His playing is wonderful, Eric.”
“So is Long John’s singing,” observed the captain with contempt.
From the men’s quarters came an unmelodious shout of—“Injun puddin’ and a punkin pie! O, Je-ru-sa-lam!” But this wavered and ceased when Jerome took up his violin. His fingers floated along the strings, and the score he played was never set down in any brain but his own.
The moon came up, and he played straight on, tilting his head back and smiling at floating films in the sky. The cook drew near from his tent, and the men, smoking, crept as near as they felt discipline would allow to the captain’s quarters. Jerome, in the full beatitude of his one unspoiled talent, knew no audience. With a final triumphant cry of the strings, he got up and walked off without saying good-night.
“He can sling a bow!” commented one of the listeners. “They say around here he plays the birds off the bushes.”
“He is like a girl,” said Miss Brooks to her brother. “I enjoy having him about almost as unreservedly as if he were a girl.”
“Glad of it,” replied the captain. “He can pilot you through the woods. It’s a pity the poor harmless fellow is daft. He might have been something.”
Jerome came to camp every day, Billy attending him. Miss Brooks in her bathing dress floated on the river, holding to his boat; and he kept a maternal eye on her while she disported herself. He brought her Indian hatchets, and arrow-heads, and a piece or two of pottery left by the Shawnee tribe. The two explored creeks and islands to such extent that Billy frequently left them in disgust. He snipped grass, and quavered to himself, while Miss Brooks read or talked to Jerome.
She talked to Jerome as if he were a rationalbeing. His delight in the woods was even keener than hers, and his knowledge of wild creatures much greater. He taught her skill in fishing. His joyful father brought offerings of eggs and cream and Martha Dempsey’s peach preserves.
“The Babe pretty nigh lives on this side of the river now. I ’low I ought to help victual the camp.”
“We can’t do without him,” said the girl. “He makes all our good times.”
“The Babe seems to be growin’ older-like this summer,” mused his father. “He ain’t to say manlier, but he’s different.”
“Do you think so?” said Miss Brooks, startled. Her color faded to ivory. She was sitting in a hammock, and occasionally stretched out a sandaled foot to propel it. The old man felt her beauty with a dumb jealousy of all bright young creatures who had not been robbed, like his boy, of their birthright.
Jerome came later in the afternoon, andfound his daily companion still in her hammock, but changed toward him.
He had just finished an æolian harp for her. It had required days to properly season the wood, and other days to assort the colors and dry the glue which held different layers together. The instrument was a thing of beauty, with even little keys to wind the strings. He had worked over it with all his faculties excited; and now when he stood before her, holding it very tenderly on his arm, she scarcely looked at it.
But Jerome knew what to do. He moved off with his harp and fixed it in the low fork of a tree. Then he raised its bridges, and turned to watch her face. The harp sighed, and began on a high key “The Last Rose of Summer,” but after two or three bars, lost its score in a flood of delicious organ harmonies. Now it rose to a cry in the zenith, and now it returned to the “Last Rose,” and died to a whisper of melody. It was the passionate revelation of a human heart.
Jerome smiled and nodded his head; for the girl’s chin and lips trembled. She let her book slip down the hammock.
“Talks,” insisted Jerome, claiming her attention for the harp. “I made it to talk to you.”
“But it’s so sorrowful,” said Lilian.
“It—isn’t—quite right,” explained Jerome. “Can’t carry its tune.”
“And you made it for me?”
“Yes. I been a month.”
“You do too much for me. I have been very selfish to take so much of your time.”
Jerome put up his lip like a grieved child.
“Don’t do that!” said Miss Brooks sharply, blanching white.
“What must I do?”
“Sit down here, and let me read to you.”
He sat on the grass and she read austerely, the weird heart-cry of the wind harp curving around her voice or whipping it with ravelings of sweetness. She read while the sun slipped lower and lower, and dared not lookat the rapt face watching her. Then she shut the book and said with careful modulation:—
“Thank you very much for the wind harp. I shall take it home with me, and whenever it plays I shall think of you.”
His grieved lip instantly smiled. “If you fasten it in your window it will play all the time!”
“There is one other thing I would love to have, and that is a feather from Billy.”
Jerome stretched out an arm and drew his familiar toward him. Billy twitched his short tail and curved a suspicious neck while his master stretched one glistening pinion.
“Do you want his whole wing?” inquired Jerome, groping for a knife.
“Not for the world!” exclaimed Miss Brooks. “Only one of dear Billy’s tiniest feathers, to put away and look at.”
Jerome plucked a quill and handed it to her.
“You may have him all, if you want him.”
“But what would you do without Billy?”
He repeated, “Do without?” several times, turning the suggestion in his mind, and gazing at her.
A couple of hours later Miss Brooks said to her brother:—
“Eric, I believe I will go home at once.”
“Guess not,” responded the captain. “We shift camp next week. I want you to stay until then. Aren’t you having a good time?”
“I’ve been bathing too much in the river, perhaps. Mr. Marsh says it’s aguish. I shall have ague if I stay.”
“The doctor is coming,” said her brother.
“I must go home, Eric; indeed, I must!”
“You can’t wait until Jack arrives, I suppose?”
“Jack! Is Jack coming?”
“We were going to surprise you; one ofthe men rowed to the station for him this afternoon.”
Miss Brooks’s face expressed lively anticipation.
“Jack is coming! Then I may run back with him to-morrow, without waiting longer for Marie.”
“Don’t you want to give the poor fellow any taste of the camp?” demanded her indignant brother.
The wind harp, rousing from silence, burst out again with the bars it would never finish, and meandered into saddening minors.
“What machine is making that doleful sound?”
Lilian turned her tragic face away. Before Jack arrived she had taken down Jerome’s offering, wrapped it carefully, and hid it in the heart of her luggage. The spirit of the Wabash gave this large and engaging young arrival its cold shoulder. Not a drop of rain had tarnished the sunshine in a month; but he reached camp ina chill drizzle. The wind became so sharp that evening fires were built. The river hissed against its banks; and the cook reported a broken trot-line, and consequent failure in the catch of fish.
“This is fine!” commented Jack, turning up his collar as he smoked with the captain, and Lilian huddled to the fire. “Every letter has been full of the pleasures of camp life; and now I experience them myself!”
“Give the camp a chance,” remonstrated Eric. “You couldn’t drag me back to town! Six months in a year, thank heaven! I am a man! I live outdoors, free from the trammels of a soft civilization!”
“We don’t mind the trammels of a soft civilization, do we, Jack?” said the girl, snugly slipping her hand into her lover’s.
Jerome appeared at the other side of the campfire, looking through thin smoke at her. He had his violin bag on his shoulder.
“Hello!” the civil engineer hailed him. “Pull up a chunk, and sit down, Jerome.”
Lilian ran to her own tent for another camp-chair. But Jerome stood still, outside the wilderness hearth, and looked at the stranger whose every imposing line was illuminated by the fire, and who acknowledged his presence with a nod.
“One of our neighbors from the Illinois side,” explained the captain.
“Isn’t the river rough to-night?” inquired Miss Brooks.
Jerome heard the tremor in her voice. He answered “Yes.”
“It was so good of you to come. I wanted to hear you play once more. We may go home to-morrow.”
“Sit down, boy,” urged the captain; while Jack smoked peacefully.
“No,” said Jerome. “I’ll play out there.”
“Out where?”
“Out there; on the moving water.”
“But I want to talk to you!” exclaimed Lilian, following him a step, relaxing under the eye of the man she was to marry. “Iwant to send messages to your father and aunt—I may not see them again.”
“Singular chap,” observed Jack as Jerome walked on into darkness.
“Half witted,” explained Eric.
“He’s not half witted!” vehemently denied Lilian.
“Quarter witted, then,” amended her brother.
“He’s an unfortunate child, lost out of paradise, at the mercy of careless, cruel wretches like us below. I never saw a woman with a nature so spotless.”
“It occurs to me you’re partial to your Wabash angel,” observed Jack.
Jerome began to play. He was evidently in his boat plunging with the current. One could imagine him pressing against his neck the instrument which holds the saddest possibilities of sound. It wailed down river, and ceased. After an interval it began again up river. Jerome had rowed back against the current, and he went floatingpast the camp once more, pouring through the violin the vagaries of a mind in double darkness.
“If the trot-line wasn’t already broken, he’d break it,” remarked Captain Eric, “raking back and forth.”
“Fine cheerful banshee for a night like this,” said Jack.
Lilian huddled by the end of a log, where she could hear the oozing sap complain. Again the music died on the river, and again it began farther up, with an orchestral support of lashing water and gathering weather.
“I can’t stand it!” she cried out, rising from her place. “I’m going to my tent.”
“Why did you set Jerome on?” inquired her brother in surprise. “He never knows when to quit. I’ll put a stop to it.”
So going close to the shore he shouted such a peremptory request as virile man offers to weaklings. He patronized Jerome also, representing that the water was toorough for a boy, and recommending the boy to go home.
Yet hours afterwards when the campfire smouldered, and the trees were wrestling, Lilian, sobbing and smothering her face with her pillow, heard the violin once more, playing softly in imitation of the wind harp.
Next morning the river was a valley of black and sulphurous vapors, like a smoking volcanic fissure. The ague season had undoubtedly set in. Captain Eric and a squad of his men rowed their departing guests and the young lady’s luggage up river to the steamboat landing, and from this the party walked to a station in the woods.
There was a bustle about tickets and checking. The station-master hurried out of his small general store with the mail-bag on his arm, for the train was already in sight.
Miss Brooks’s hair clung in damp rings to her face. She turned to impress woods and water stretches upon her mind in one lastglance, and her lips went white. Behind her stood Jerome, the porcelain quality of his face increased tenfold, the blueness of his eyes pierced by the keen anguish of a man. She crossed the platform to him, took his head between her hands, and rising on tiptoe kissed his forehead.
Immediately afterwards she was handed up the railway carriage steps, and Jack was making a place for her and her traveling bag. The little station slid away. She had forgotten to wave to Eric one of the hands which trembled as she adjusted her belongings over and over.
“Don’t say a word to me,” she commanded, meeting her lover’s eyes. “I didn’t know I was going to do it. I intend to marry you, Jack, because I would rather have you for a husband than any other man in the world. But he was my playmate. He brought back my childhood to me, and in return I gave him a wound!”
Quite a year passed before she had furthernews of the Babe Jerome. Her brother moved his camp two days after her departure, and stayed out until November. The following summer Lilian and her husband came face to face with Mr. Marsh in that magic White City which stood a brief season beside Lake Michigan. The blue cape was not around his shoulders, but some other incongruous garment marked him. Lilian grasped his hand. He greeted the young pair. His hairy cheeks were sunken, and the keenness of his eye appeared dulled.
“Are Jerome and his Aunt Betsey with you?”
“The Babe has gone off with the quick consumption that took his mother,” said the old man, and Lilian became aware that her nails must be cutting his hand. She gasped, but could not say a word.
“Yes; Betsey and me’s alone now,” he pursued. “I brung her up to the World’s Fair to turn her mind off it.... He never done well in the new house. I locked it upand carried him back to his log cradle. But the Babe had to go. I took him to Floridy, and I took him to Colorado.... I hadn’t orto repine at affliction. He was a good Babe.... He made a wind harp, like, and put it in the winder, in the teeth of the air; and that was all his interest, to listen while it played.”
Lilian found her husband supporting her, while water and sky and white palaces and hurrying people swam giddily in a far-off circle. She said “Thank you,” and clutched his arm.
“Sis here, she liked the Babe,” continued the old father, forced to wipe his eyes on the corner of a red handkerchief which he drew half way out of his side pocket. “And the Babe he liked her. I reelly thought he was pinin’ sometimes for young folks; for he done well while you was there.... Billy—you recollect Billy the gander? He takes it to heart like a dog.... I’m glad I seen you. I was goin’ alongfeelin’ too bitter in my thoughts about the Babe.”
Silently parting company, the old man walked on amidst wonders which he scarcely noticed, and the young pair turned aside from the crowds.
“Oh Jack!” said Lilian, when she could control her weeping, “I have killed the Babe Jerome!”