CHAPTER XIPOET IN HOMESPUN

Great was the exasperation among the local school teachers when it became known that Nathan was not going on into high school in September.

Cora Hastings, Nathan’s last teacher and the good woman, by the way, who did more than all others to encourage his literary fluency and poetical promise, took it upon her sparse, capable shoulders to wait upon the boy’s father and “speak him a piece of her mind.”

“Don’t you know your boy has been the brightest English scholar in the whole eight grades?” she demanded scathingly.

“Well,” retorted Johnathan, “just what is it your business”

“I’ve been his teacher and I know what’s in him. Let alone to study and equip himself, Nathan will make his mark in the world. Take him from school now, and all you may have is a mere working man.”

“I’m not ashamed of having him a working man. His folks were all working people. Look at me! No airs to us!”

“Do you want your boy to turn out a fool?”

“Better a working fool than an educated fool. But I’m not afraid of his bein’ a fool. Work never made a fool out of nobody.”

“Don’t you want him to be a success?”

“If he’s got it in him to be a success it’ll come out anyhow, school or no school. If he hasn’t, schoolin’ ‘ll be wasted. But it isn’t wholly that. I need his money. I don’t make no bones about saying so. I’m a poor man, ma’am. It’s about time the boy commenced paying me back for some of the trouble and expense he’s been since he was born.”

“Why should he? He didn’t ask to be born!”

Johnathan dodged that. “I had to work at his age and pay back my father.”

“And hasn’t the memory of that injustice softened you toward you own son?”

“Injustice? What injustice? I always had to work. I never even had as much schoolin’ as Nat has already. And look at me!”

“Yes, look at you!—A bigoted, psalm-singing, heart-hardened, petulant-mouthed, intolerable old hypocrite! There!”

“What? What’s that you say?”

“You heard me! You’re all of that and more. And the whole town knows it. You’ve got a boy as rare and fine and promising as you’re common and coarse and vulgar. And you’re deliberately wrecking his life by taking him away from his studies, setting him at work in a horrid smelly tannery for a few easy dollars. Somebody ought to have the law on you!”

“And you’re nothing but a fussy, homely, trouble-messin’ old maid. You better go find a man and have a few young ones of your own before you come ’round tellin’ other people how to raise theirs. If this is all you come to see me about, I guess you can hoof it!”

“Don’t you know your boy is capable of writing poetry!” demanded the now hysterical teacher.

It was the worst thing she could have said.

“No, I don’t. But if he is, all the more reason why he should go to the tannery and learn to skin cows! And the sooner the better!”

“Don’t you want to see your own son famous?”

“I’ve got no guarantee he’ll be famous. But I’m sure, darned sure, of the money he can earn between now and the time he’s twenty-one. Anyhow, knowing how to work and earn money ain’t goin’ to stop him bein’ famous, as a poet or anything else, if he’s got it in him!”

“But these years of his life are the most valuable he’ll ever have!”

“The more reason why he ought to learn to make money in ’em!”

“It’s a mystery why God sends children to such as you!”

“Well, He sends ’em and I reckon He knows his business.He’s been running this planet a darned long time.”

Threat, appeal, argument did no good. Nathan went into Caleb Gridley’s tannery, into the foul, revolting, messy, nauseating part of the business, and for six days of working from 6:30 in the morning until 6:30 at night he received four dollars, not in cash but in credit on the old harness bill. In sixteen weeks the debt was paid. Then Johnathan “began realizing good hard cash” on Nathan’s earning abilities.

Nathan’s sister went on through the graded school and high school. It was Nathan’s money which bought her graduation dress.

It was a very pretty dress. It cost twenty-nine dollars.

Never did a boy change so completely or age so quickly as Nathan in the three years which followed. He was sick and broken the first two or three weeks at the sights he was compelled to witness and the smells which adhered to him like a plague wherever he moved. I tried to get him to come out on Sundays.

“I dunno, Bill,” he would answer, “I don’t seem to care much about fooling ’round. Seems as if I’m tired these days, tired all the while. I no more’n get home Saturday night than it’s Monday morning and I gotta go back to it all. Oh, Bill, it’ll kill me sure. You don’t know anything about it. It’s awful!”

The boy lost weight. He grew more and more listless—bitter, moody.

“I don’t care whether I live or die,” he wailed one day when I mentioned that after the Academy I was going on to college. “Sometimes I wish old ‘Cock-eye’ Richards’ knife would slip when he’s skinnin’ and take me right acrost the throat.”

The boy’s life suddenly became a hopeless, hideous slavery. The horror of his work lay in his imagination. A lad of coarser fiber would have become inured to the tannery. Nathan never became inured to it. Yet he stuck it through. There was no alternative.

Sunday afternoons he would wander over the hills, lieon his back beside some peaceful meadow brook and dream his dreams. He began taking a pad and pencil on these solitary excursions, or a book. He cared little for Old Cap Collier or King Brady or the other penny-dreadfuls which were then in their heyday. His choice was poetry, fairy tales, Shakespeare.

“What’s the use of reading that stuff?” he demanded contemptuously one day, after finishing a sample hair-curler I had shown him. “It’s all coarse and mechanical, and you know the villain’s going to die at the right minute, anyhow, and the hero win out and all live happily ever after. And if you know it in advance what’s the use of spending a whole day readin’ through it to find it out?” Then the boy pulled a volume of poems from beneath him, a book that Miss Cora Hastings had loaned him. He read me “Grey’s Elegy.”

I confess that, red-blooded, hob-raising kid that I was, the sweet melancholy of the lines, as Nathan read them, “got” me. Often I found myself watching my friend, at a loss to understand him.

The other day while searching among the compartments in an old wallet, I came upon a folded, time-yellowed sheet of foolscap on which some verses had once been penned in a youthful but symmetrical hand. It was a poem which Nathan composed back in those years before he had “found” himself. These are sample lines of what this sixteen-year-old was producing:

DAY DREAMS“Somewhere over the miles, dear heart,Off over a turquoise sea,There’s a pleasant isle that is set apartFor your rendezvous with me.There’ll be never a cloud in its skies, dear heart,And the days will be always fair,For free as the summer winds that blowWe will live in our Eden there,Somewhere!“There’ll be no more heartache to spoil our dreams,There’ll be no more griefs to grieve,We’ll wander down eons of golden yearsThrough the vales of Make-Believe.And I’ll drink of your lips, your eyes, your arms,Till I’m drunk with their beauty rare,And you’ll nestle me down till my stupor goes,On a bed of your glorious hair.Somewhere!“The wealth of the earth and the sun shall be ours,We shall know neither pride nor shameNor ever grow weary of too much romanceNor spoil our sweet isle with a name.And no one shall find our rendezvous,No world break the spell with its blare,For that will be Heaven—just you and I,With no one to part us or care.Somewhere!”

DAY DREAMS

“Somewhere over the miles, dear heart,Off over a turquoise sea,There’s a pleasant isle that is set apartFor your rendezvous with me.There’ll be never a cloud in its skies, dear heart,And the days will be always fair,For free as the summer winds that blowWe will live in our Eden there,Somewhere!

“Somewhere over the miles, dear heart,

Off over a turquoise sea,

There’s a pleasant isle that is set apart

For your rendezvous with me.

There’ll be never a cloud in its skies, dear heart,

And the days will be always fair,

For free as the summer winds that blow

We will live in our Eden there,

Somewhere!

“There’ll be no more heartache to spoil our dreams,There’ll be no more griefs to grieve,We’ll wander down eons of golden yearsThrough the vales of Make-Believe.And I’ll drink of your lips, your eyes, your arms,Till I’m drunk with their beauty rare,And you’ll nestle me down till my stupor goes,On a bed of your glorious hair.Somewhere!

“There’ll be no more heartache to spoil our dreams,

There’ll be no more griefs to grieve,

We’ll wander down eons of golden years

Through the vales of Make-Believe.

And I’ll drink of your lips, your eyes, your arms,

Till I’m drunk with their beauty rare,

And you’ll nestle me down till my stupor goes,

On a bed of your glorious hair.

Somewhere!

“The wealth of the earth and the sun shall be ours,We shall know neither pride nor shameNor ever grow weary of too much romanceNor spoil our sweet isle with a name.And no one shall find our rendezvous,No world break the spell with its blare,For that will be Heaven—just you and I,With no one to part us or care.Somewhere!”

“The wealth of the earth and the sun shall be ours,

We shall know neither pride nor shame

Nor ever grow weary of too much romance

Nor spoil our sweet isle with a name.

And no one shall find our rendezvous,

No world break the spell with its blare,

For that will be Heaven—just you and I,

With no one to part us or care.

Somewhere!”

I submit this poem for what it is worth. The meter undoubtedly might be improved. Yet it shows the way the lad’s mind was leaning, the romancer, the idealist, the colorist, the emotionalist, always.

Johnathan Forge viewed a certain change in his son with satisfaction.

“Thank God,” he cried, “I’ve broken that boy’s false pride at last. Now maybe he’ll get solid ground under his feet and amount to something.”

Yet one noontime in the October which followed, Nathan so deported himself in a certain pugilistic situation that the matter of broken pride was left open to reasonable doubt.

The boy had drawn apart to work upon a rime in a notebook. He found no recreation in sitting around the edge of the yard listening to cheap opinion, telling off-color stories, pitching horseshoes or flipping pennies. In a warm spot in the sunshine he worked upon a new poem which he had titled “Girl-Without-a-Name.” One Silas Plumb stole up and snatched the notebook from him. Worse and more mortifying, Si headed back for his fellow laborers. Noting that what he had snatched was poetry, he was seized with unholy glee. Disregarding Nathan’s cries of anger, Plumb leaped on a crate and dramatically began to “elocute”—

“Listen, fellers! This is rich! Poetry! Listen! ‘You came to me in my dreams last night, Dear Girl-Without-a-Name——”

Blind, unreasoning rage boiled upward through Nathan. Chagrin and indignation fired every nerve in the boy’s body to murderous retaliation. Plumb was a heavy-footed, rumple-clothed, corn-fed son of a typical Vermont small town. He was blue-eyed, shocky-headed, red-cheeked and three years Nathan’s senior. But to have the innermost privacies of his romantic soul ballyhooed for the bucolic ribaldry and bovine amusement of the tannery men was like maddening vitriol poured on Nat’s naked flesh. He lurched for the notebook and when Si held on, Nathan struck him the hardest smash in the face he had ever received in his life.

Si held his sickly grin for about ten seconds. Then it froze on his mouth. He spat out blood and teeth. Purple rage flooded his features.

“I’m goin’ to get you for that!” he swore.

He dropped off his coat, smeared his bloody mouth with the back of his big hand and fell into clumsy fighting posture. Loafers in the tannery came a-running. Nathan was pale but resolute. Silas struck him. Stung to fury, Nathan hit back twice. The epochal battle began. That battle was tannery talk for weeks, for months, for years.

“Si had the punch to push his dukes through the side of a plank fence,” a local enthusiast described it afterward. “But young Forge hit him three times and run around him twice while Si was makin’ up his mind where he’d hit once.”

Back and forth across the enclosure the two youths struggled, upsetting boxes, knocking down hides, tripping on yard refuse, falling backward into the circle of wildly applauding spectators. Great pile-driver blows the larger fellow smashed at his lighter opponent. Nathan’s counter-attack was swift and rapier-keen, taking the other by surprise, getting inside his defenses, smashing his nose, closing his eyes, lacerating his lips, but always lacking the bodily weight to strike the other down or finish him off with a knock-out.

There is something vitally fine and fair in an Americancrowd. It wants to see the under dog get the best of it. Nathan, because of his slenderness, was the under dog. Si sensed that the moral support of the tanners was not with him. He grew Germanically furious.

The moral support of his fellow workers meant little to Nathan, however. He had to finish Plumb or be finished himself. And those who, through that summer, had called Nat a mollycoddle because he was finer grained than themselves, were swift and fair in revising their opinion and giving the stripling all the credit his proven prowess deserved.

The two came together in clinches only to break away when one saw an opening for a telling blow. Twice they both went down. The battle each time turned into a wrestling match, with any sort of a “hold” permitted,—biting, eye-gouging and hair-tearing being eminently permissible so long as it brought results.

At a quarter to one the fight had started. Fifteen minutes later it was still going strong,—arms and faces of both combatants bleeding, shirts ripped to ribbons, lungs bursting. The employees paid no attention to the tannery whistle for the reason that no tannery whistle was blown. The engineer and fireman were enthusiastically howling in the front row of spectators. The absence of the whistle was responsible for bringing Caleb Gridley down into the yard. But the old war-horse of the local leather business was immediately too interested himself to interfere or start his factory. He stood with a fierce, hard joy in his eye, awaiting the finish.

That finish came at ten minutes after one. Silas, worsted but unconquered, picked up a piece of board and swung it terribly for Nathan’s head. A howl of protest arose, then approval as Nathan dodged. But Nathan had not dodged far enough nor soon enough. The board ripped his left ear from the side of his head. Silas followed in, raising one of his big boots to kick his opponent below the belt. By accident more than design, Nathan tripped him. As Silas went down, Nathan sent a left jab to his jaw. It rocked the roughneck’s head. He sagged, grinned, pitched downward on his forehead, and went peacefully off to hear little birds sing sweetly.

The fight was finished. Likewise both participants. ForNathan saw his man prostrate, took three steps and crumpled—senseless.

Old Caleb pushed forward. “Take the kid to the office,” he ordered curtly. Grim satisfaction lay on his paving-block jaw. “As for that low-brow, leave him lie busted. I stand for the man that fights fair!”

They carried the unconscious Nathan to tannery headquarters. Doctor Johnson was summoned by telephone. Nat was losing alarming quantities of blood from the ragged ear and more was trickling out between his teeth. First aid was administered, but it was a sickening business.

“That’s nasty bad,” Johnson commented as he tried to wash the wound. “It’s almost tore from his head—this ear!”

“Sew it back,” commanded Caleb.

“But he’ll bear the scar for life.”

“Can’t help that! Sew it back! Mustn’t have so gamey a little bantam goin’ through life with one ear missin’!”

Johnson phoned for Doctor Birch to help him. Birch brought a crude anesthetizing outfit. The ear was sewed at once to prevent the loss of more blood. The lad was as white as paper in his coma. The exertion of the past half-hour had been terrific. It showed grisly on his features.

Two o’clock arrived before the surgery was finished. Nat’s head was swathed in bandages which were reduced to ribbons in the boy’s thrashings, as he came out from under the anesthetic.

“Leave him here!” ordered Caleb. “He’s gotta stay here till he’s stronger.” Then as Nathan gradually quieted, he demanded of the yard boss: “What started that mix-up, anyhow?”

“Poetry!” said old Richards. “This!” And he proffered a torn and besmirched notebook.

“Poetry!” cried Caleb. “Lemme see!”

“He’s always moonin’ ’round, writin’ poetry,” volunteered Richards. “Si yanked it outer his hands and Nat waded into him. We always thought Nat was a mollycoddle, sort of, ‘count of his poetry and dandified talk. But I guess after this he can do as he pleases.”

Nathan’s weakened condition quickly induced sleep. It was night when he awoke. He was at home and his mother was bending above him.

“My poor, poor boy!” she crooned. And for the instant, groggy and faint with fiery pain as he was, a great up-welling tenderness toward his mother came in Nathan. When she kissed him, his arms went up around her frail shoulders and he clung to her.

But when he awoke the following morning all suggestions of tenderness were missing in the petulant, whining Job’s comfort she gave him.

“You’ve bloodied all my best sheets and pillow cases!” she cried; “besides getting your clothes all ripped and markin’ yourself for life! Oh, you do make it so hard for your dear, dear mother—so bitter, bitter hard!”

Nathan’s father came up during the noon hour and sat down beside the bed. Gravely he looked at his son and admiration lurked in his weak blue eyes.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve shown some starch at last,” he commented. “I’d begun to think I was raising a sissy.”

Thereupon, the seventeenth time for his son’s edification and future emulation, Johnathan launched good-humoredly into a recount of how he (Johnathan) had whipped the town bully at fifteen, against tremendous odds, a brick wall, and a pair of brass knuckles.

It was Johnathan’s way of being kind and showing his appreciation of what his boy had done. The reports about town of Nathan’s prowess had come to the father as sweet music.

Praise of his boy’s artistry, poetic talent and romantic temperament had touched only as the wind which bloweth where it listeth. But that his offspring had gone into a brute encounter, drawn blood, broken teeth, gouged eyes and torn hair—coming off victor though the struggle would mark him for life—was grand and noble and a cause for pride and satisfaction altogether. Johnathan felt that he, too, must not be found wanting.

So he finished off the town bully and then recounted various other deeds of a heroic nature in which he had also played the chief male lead.

Nathan had seen his father pale before the six-pound fist of Caleb Gridley. He had seen him shiver and quake inwardly when a neighbor announced that he would shoot Johnathan Forge on sight for having wrung the necks of the said neighbor’s chickens and tossed the dead birds overthe fence in penalty for wandering into the Forge garden. And Nat wondered at just what point between boyhood and manhood his father had lost his bellicosity and proclivities toward the manly art of self-defense.

That is, he asked himself consciously. But in his heart he knew his father had never whipped any bullies or any one else. He was about as heroic as an old mop. The recount for emulation he was passing on to his boy was pure fabrication in which the end justified the means.

Besides, Nat had heard of these Roman holidays so many times that he could repeat them verbatim, even correct his embattled sire when multiple narration brought exaggeration, or the father went astray on minor detail. Nat turned over wearily, therefore, and went to sleep—in the center of a victory over the Foxboro selectmen in which “all hands had been ingloriously humbled and brought down to the dust”—meaning that the Foxboro selectmen had apologized and paid costs. Which they had not.

“And I used to tell that boy stories by the hour,” Johnathan averred in later years, “—all sorts of virile, manly stories. But he never cared a great deal for anything I said to him. The boy and I simply couldn’t hitch. He had his mother’s blood—he was a Farman through and through!”

Nathan came back to consciousness and realized his father was still by his side, demanding angrily, “Are you listening?” and that Caleb Gridley’s name was mentioned.

“He’s sent word he wants to see you as soon’s you’re fit—over to his office. And for your own sake, young man, let’s hope he doesn’t fire you for this mix-up!”

The father eventually went out and Nathan passed from dreams with his eyes closed to dreams with his eyes open, pondering.

Out of Nat’s convalescence the mother remembered that she “had nursed him faithfully till she was about sick from the strain.” That she had “made of him”—meaning undoubtedly the moment of his awakening when he had embraced her and she had kissed him—and had done her best by him according as the Lord gave her strength.

The father remembered he had “told the lad stories by the hour” (actual talking time, twenty-four minutes of a single half-noon) and “cheered him by praising him for not taking the back talk of anybody.”

But Nathan! He only remembered that his mother had fussed about the blood on the bed clothing; that his father had come in and “reeled off the same old pack of lies” about his own boyhood and ended by reminding him that if he lost his job at the tannery, God help him for the father would not, needing his money just then more than ever.

Nat left his bed and idled about the house. His father came home at noon and contended that if he were strong enough to “fool around the place” he was strong enough to “get back on the job.” So that afternoon Nat took an hour to reel a dizzy way to the tannery office.

Caleb looked up from a pile of freight bills.

“Dad says you wanted to see me,” announced the lad. He hoped old Gridley would “fire” him. Any job would be better than returning to the horrors of the tannery.

“Siddown,” ordered Caleb with a wave of his slab-like hand.

The boy accepted a seat and waited, his head whirling lightly. Caleb finished his business and then jerked his head toward a side room where the two could talk alone. It had an unused desk, an old iron stove, a battered table, a few chairs, an old green safe.

Caleb closed the door, motioned to a seat, found one himself and proceeded to fall into deep thought. He cut an enormous corner from a chunk of “chewin’.”

“Perty good scrap you put up the other day, bub,” he remarked at length.

Nathan sought to keep his mental balance, wishing some one would get him a drink, oh, for ice water!

“Thank you,” he said weakly.

“I allus admire to see a man that can use his dukes. Head hurt you much?”

“Yes,” the boy said truthfully.

“Hard luck! But you gotta expect bangs and bruisesin this world, bub. What’s your old man think about it?”

“He said if it lost me my job here, God help me,” returned Nathan defiantly.

Caleb was silent for a time. Grim humor lurked in his hard old eye. Twice he lurched forward, raised the cover and spat in the bowels of the dead iron stove.

“That so? Sort of a goldarn slave-driver, your old man, ain’t he?”

Nathan offered no comment.

“Whatcher want to go gettin’ into that fuss with Plumb for, anyhow?”

“I was writing something—private—and Si came up and grabbed it away. Then he wouldn’t give it back.”

Nathan stood in awe of old Gridley, partly because he was the boy’s employer, mostly because he washerfather.

“Yeah,” affirmed Caleb, “what was it?”

“It was—it was—poetry,” the lad confessed lamely. He wished he could get a drink, any kind of water if only it would keep the office from spinning around and around.

“So you’re a poet?”

“I like to read poetry and try writing it—sometimes.”

“So I heard. I’m a bit of a poet myself!”

For an instant Nathan was dumbfounded. Had he heard aright? The boy fought off his vertigo and stared. Was the old man jesting? But apparently Old Caleb was never more serious in his life. Moreover, he too was confused, as though chagrined by the confession. Nathan would have accepted that his employer had speared grizzlies, kicked over baby carriages, fired orphan asylums and kicked the crutches from cripples. But a poet! It was cataclysmic.

“Did you—did you—ever write any poetry?”

“Once!”

“What for? What came of it?”

“That was a perty good piece you started to write when Plumb interrupted you. Jake gimme the book. Then again, my wife lemme see a piece you writ and give to my daughter a while back. You seem to be a perty good poet. I’ll show you somethin’.”

To Nathan’s utter bewilderment, Caleb went to the green box safe. He selected an old wallet from its cavernous compartments and returned to his creaking seat. With his elbows on his enormous knees, he leaned forward. Hewent through the wallet until he came to a paper he sought. He drew it out with sausage-like fingers, a sheet of rusty, mildewed parchment on which some verses had been written in violet ink. Reverently he handed it across as though it were a million-dollar government bond.

Nathan read:

“To G. H.“Your eyes are like the twinkling stars.Your voice is like the dewI sit upon the hill and dreamOf you, my love, of you.“You are the inspiration of my lifeTo you I will ever be trueWhen I am old and my hair is grayI’ll ever think of you.“All of us have a secret loveSome, memories of yesterday,Like cake to finish a good square mealIt cheers us on our way.—Caleb Gridley.”Paris, Vt., June 2, 1871.

“To G. H.

“Your eyes are like the twinkling stars.Your voice is like the dewI sit upon the hill and dreamOf you, my love, of you.

“Your eyes are like the twinkling stars.

Your voice is like the dew

I sit upon the hill and dream

Of you, my love, of you.

“You are the inspiration of my lifeTo you I will ever be trueWhen I am old and my hair is grayI’ll ever think of you.

“You are the inspiration of my life

To you I will ever be true

When I am old and my hair is gray

I’ll ever think of you.

“All of us have a secret loveSome, memories of yesterday,Like cake to finish a good square mealIt cheers us on our way.—Caleb Gridley.”

“All of us have a secret love

Some, memories of yesterday,

Like cake to finish a good square meal

It cheers us on our way.

—Caleb Gridley.”

Paris, Vt., June 2, 1871.

The old man watched the youth’s face closely as he read. There was pathetic anxiety in the question which followed:

“Well,” demanded Caleb, “what’s your opinion? There was folks said it was good enough to have published—once! But I couldn’t—I couldn’t!”

The tanner sighed and arose. He walked to the window looking down on the cluttered yard. There he stuck his big hands in his stomach pockets and “rolled his chew.”

With the tactlessness of boyhood, Nathan announced, “The meter’s off and besides—it doesn’t really say anything—that is, in a nice smooth way.”

If he had struck old Caleb with a rock he could not have surprised the tanner more dynamically.

“Don’t say anything! Smooth way! Meter? What’s meter?”

“In poetry it’s the character of a stanza. It’s made up of any given number of lines, divided into measures equal in time—and length of syllables—and rhythmic construction.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” cried Caleb. “Where did you learn that—them big words and all?”

“Miss Hastings showed me. The rest sort of always came easy to me.”

“Then what the hell are you doin’ workin’ here in my place, when you got book-learnin’ like that?”

“My father makes me.”

“He must be a dog-gone bigger fool than I allus took him for. Say that book-learnin’ over!”

Nathan complied.

“Now what does it mean in plain Vermont jaw-music?”

Nathan was beginning to forget his dizziness.

“It means that to make poetry read smoothly the lines in each verse must have exactly the same number of syllables. They must be emphasized in the same way in the same place in all the verses and yet give perfect emphasis. You’ve just got a lot of lines here with the final words rhyming.”

“But you said it didn’t say anything!” Caleb was not angry so much as hurt, grievously hurt. “I allus thought it said a lot,” he added, with a little catch in his voice.

“I mean something really fine and beautiful and rare different from the ordinary way we write or think or talk, if you understand what I mean. For instance, you say in your first line that somebody’s eyes are like the stars and his voice——”

“Hervoice!” corrected old Caleb.

“—Her voice is like the dew. Well, that doesn’t really mean anything. Nobody ever saw a woman with eyes like actual stars or a voice like real dew, because dew doesn’t make any noise, anyhow, let alone having a voice. Poetry tries to say things better and softer and finer than any one has ever said ’em before and that’s where you’ve fallen down.”

“How would you say it?”

Caleb had come across, sunk down into the creaky chair with his knees parted, his bulbous finger tips pressed together between them, the world and business forgot,—a gray-haired man seeking pointers in rhyming from a minstrel with a bashed head.

“Well, what you want to express is that you sat on a hilltop thinking of a woman. And somehow the night wasso soft and wonderful you couldn’t help comparing her with the view around you. So suppose instead of saying you sat on the hill and thought of the woman having star-like eyes, you looked off to some star, the prettiest, brightest of them all. And her face seemed to come before you in it—Say, who is this woman, anyhow?” Nathan broke off suddenly.

Old Caleb’s gaze dropped to his horny hands. He stopped chewing.

“Once on a time, bub—once on a time—back in my life—there was a girl. Well—I loved her—and so—I writ this poetry.”

It seemed to the awe-struck boy as though a section of the universe slid back then and disclosed the mighty works which make the worlds go around.

Old Caleb Gridley, rich—as the village phrased it—“beyond dreams of avarice”, hard-cider drinker, leading selectman and poker-player Saturday nights under Jimmy Styles’ barber shop—most of all her father!—once upon a time old Caleb Gridley had been as other boys and men, even as Nathan. He had loved a girl and sought balm in hexameters.

“And did you marry her?” asked the astonished boy after a moment. He spoke as the superstitious refer to the dead. “Was it Mrs. Gridley?”

“No, b’dam, it warn’t Mrs. Gridley!”

A little tear squeezed out of the man’s hard eye—a ludicrously little tear on a ludicrously big and beefy face. It stayed there for a moment. Then it melted.

Nathan turned and tiptoed softly out of Eden. In quite another voice he suggested:

“I could show you, perhaps, how to polish this and make it better, by doing it with you as we go along.”

A red-haired girl thrust her flaming head in the door.

“Mike Sweeney’s come for them calfskins and they ain’t all bundled yet,” she whined.

“You tell Mike Sweeney to go to hell!” roared Caleb. “And if you interrupt me again with calfskins I’ll kill the both o’ ye and fire you beside!”

The girl closed the door. Caleb swore volubly for a half-moment about the deficiencies of certain hirelings “these days” in the matter of mental endowment. Then he begged:

“Go on, bub! Tell me what you was sayin’ about that poetry.”

“Let’s get a pencil and paper,” Nathan suggested. “We’ll work it out together.”

It was dark outside and the tannery had long been deserted when a pathetically pleased old war-horse of business and an addle-pated young poet ended the new version of Caleb Gridley’s youthful sentiment.

“Now read it all over, out loud,” ordered the tanner. He paced up and down with his dented, dusty, greenish derby on the back of his head, cant-hook thumbs in the armpits of his vest. Nat read:

“GRACIA“Sometimes, dear heart, in the quiet night,When the stars hang soft and low,I slip away from the clash and careTo the Hills of Long Ago.Across those Hills in the whisp’ring dark,With the night-breeze sighing through,I see those castles we’d planned to buildWhen our dreams had all come true.“Your face grows plain in an evening star,Ere the moon rides high and cold,And Memory tunes with the summer nightOn a chord that’s rare and old.The troth we pledged comes in sad rebukeTo a thousand loveless days,But wandering fires led me off and down,‘Long a thousand ambushed ways.“Yet somewhere deep in each tuneful nightPlays a softer, sweeter lay;Though life is gray with a thousand sighsIt has held one deep-pink day.And thus the glow of the Long AgoKeeps my path to you, dear, bright;Yet a little while and Our Morning dawnsSo good night, dear heart, good night!”

“GRACIA

“Sometimes, dear heart, in the quiet night,When the stars hang soft and low,I slip away from the clash and careTo the Hills of Long Ago.Across those Hills in the whisp’ring dark,With the night-breeze sighing through,I see those castles we’d planned to buildWhen our dreams had all come true.

“Sometimes, dear heart, in the quiet night,

When the stars hang soft and low,

I slip away from the clash and care

To the Hills of Long Ago.

Across those Hills in the whisp’ring dark,

With the night-breeze sighing through,

I see those castles we’d planned to build

When our dreams had all come true.

“Your face grows plain in an evening star,Ere the moon rides high and cold,And Memory tunes with the summer nightOn a chord that’s rare and old.The troth we pledged comes in sad rebukeTo a thousand loveless days,But wandering fires led me off and down,‘Long a thousand ambushed ways.

“Your face grows plain in an evening star,

Ere the moon rides high and cold,

And Memory tunes with the summer night

On a chord that’s rare and old.

The troth we pledged comes in sad rebuke

To a thousand loveless days,

But wandering fires led me off and down,

‘Long a thousand ambushed ways.

“Yet somewhere deep in each tuneful nightPlays a softer, sweeter lay;Though life is gray with a thousand sighsIt has held one deep-pink day.And thus the glow of the Long AgoKeeps my path to you, dear, bright;Yet a little while and Our Morning dawnsSo good night, dear heart, good night!”

“Yet somewhere deep in each tuneful night

Plays a softer, sweeter lay;

Though life is gray with a thousand sighs

It has held one deep-pink day.

And thus the glow of the Long Ago

Keeps my path to you, dear, bright;

Yet a little while and Our Morning dawns

So good night, dear heart, good night!”

“Don’t you see,” argued Nathan, “you’ve said the very same thing, only this is smooth and dreamy. You have a feeling old Mr. Abbot, the music teacher, might play it on his ‘cello, maybe. That’s the meaning of real poetry, Mr. Gridley—at least as I see it—to say the common thing uncommon, sweet and soft and low, so it lurks in your mind like music.”

“I guess I understand, bub,” replied the old man huskily. “That’s a dam’ good piece we’ve writ here. If Sam Hod, o’ theDaily Telegraph, can’t make space for it, I’ll call his notes. Bub, what the plunkin’-hell does your old man be thinkin’ of, settin’ you to skinning cows? Want to make you at my age what I am, maybe?”

Nathan was silent for a moment. Then he answered sadly:

“It’s the money I can earn. He needs it.”

“Money? Money? Dam’ money! Once I might o’ writ pieces like this, bub—dam’ good pieces. But my dad put his foot down and said that I should make money too. An’ look at me! I ain’t worth nothin’ else. And all this town knows it.” The tanner’s voice broke and he began to chew furiously. He turned away.

“I can’t help myself,” lamented Nathan. “He makes me work and so I must. I’m only waiting to grow. And then I’ll go away, I guess, where he can never get trace of me again.”

“Bub, what say you and me be partners—in poetry?”

“Partners—inpoetry?”

“I’d like to write more pieces like this, with you, bub. B’dam, I ain’t had such a soul-satisfyin’ afternoon in thirty year! S’pose you quit the yard and come up here and see to things about the office. The brains o’ that redheaded girl rattle round in her head like a peanut in a wash boiler. And now and then we’ll fool with hexy—hexy——”

“Hexameters,” said Nathan gravely.

“Hexy-whatever you-call-’em,” said Caleb.

“You mean you aren’t going to fire me for fighting? You’ll give me a job up here in the office, instead?”

“That’s it, bub. You and me! Cow hides for bread and butter. Poems for dessert. Saturday afternoons and Sundays? What say?—what?”

“Th-Th-Thank you, Mr. Gridley,” was all that Nathan could call up. He felt a sudden grim affection for the old tanner who had been keeping the heart of a poet locked under his tough hide for two or three decades.

“The wages,” said Caleb, “will be two dollars more a week. I guess a poet oughta be worth it. But the real reason for the raise is keepin’ your mouth shut. The minute you go tellin’ what you and me’s mutually interested in—you’re fired!”

“I understand, Mr. Gridley. I’m much obliged.”

Overwhelmed with this sudden turn in his affairs, the boy began blindly picking up the scratch papers strewn about which they had spoiled. Carelessly he ripped them in strips until he came to the asinine lines of Caleb’s in 1871.

“You won’t need these any more, will you,” he asked, “now that we’ve written them better?”

The tanner rescued the sheet from the boy’s hand, however. Carefully folding it, he laid it away in the worn, brown wallet and locked it up in the old green safe.

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