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Title: The Garotters
Author: William D. Howells
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I.
My name is Hugh Paret.
I was a corporation lawyer,
but by no means a typical one,
the choice of my profession being merely incidental,
and due,
as will be seen,
to the accident of environment.
The book I am about
to write might aptly be called The Autobiography of a Romanticist.
In that sense,
if in no other,
I have been a typical American,
regarding my country as the happy hunting-ground of enlightened self-interest,
as a function of my desires.
Whether or not I have completely got rid of this romantic virus I must leave
to those the aim of whose existence is
to eradicate it from our literature and our life.
A somewhat Augean task! I have been impelled therefore
to make an attempt at setting forth,
with what frankness and sincerity I may,
with those powers of selection of which I am capable,
the life I have lived in this modern America;
the passions I have known,
the evils I have done.
I endeavour
to write a biography of the inner life;
but in order
to do this I shall have
to relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that take place in the world of space and time,
in the four walls of the home,
in the school and university,
in the noisy streets,
in the realm of business and politics.
I shall try
to set down,
impartially,
the motives that have impelled my actions,
to reveal in some degree the amazing mixture of good and evil which has made me what I am to-day:
to avoid the tricks of memory and resist the inherent desire
to present myself other and better than I am.
Your American romanticist is a sentimental spoiled child who believes in miracles,
whose needs are mostly baubles,
whose desires are dreams. Expediency is his motto.
Innocent of a knowledge of the principles of the universe,
he lives in a state of ceaseless activity,
admitting no limitations,
impatient of all restrictions.
What he wants,
he wants very badly indeed.
This wanting things was the corner-stone of my character,
and I believe that the science of the future
ill bear me out when I say
that it might have been differently built upon.
Certain it is that the system
of education in vogue in the 70's and 80's
never contemplated the search
for natural corner-stones.
At all events,
when I look back upon the boy I was,
I see the beginnings of a real person
who fades little by little
as manhood arrives and advances,
until suddenly I am aware
that a stranger has taken his place....
I lived in a city
which is now some twelve hours distant
from the Atlantic seaboard.
A very different city,
too,
it was in youth,
in my grandfather's day
and my father's,
even in my own boyhood,
from what it has since become
in this most material of ages.
There is a book of my photographs,
preserved by my mother,
which I have been looking over lately.
First is presented a plump child of two,
gazing in smiling trustfulness
upon a world of sunshine;
later on a lean boy in plaided kilts,
whose wavy,
chestnut-brown hair
has been most carefully parted
on the side by Norah,
his nurse.
The face is still childish.
Then appears a youth of fourteen or thereabout
in long trousers
and the queerest of short jackets,
standing beside a marble table
against a classic background;
he is smiling still
in undiminished hope and trust,
despite increasing vexations and crossings,
meaningless lessons
which had to be learned,
disciplines
to rack an aspiring soul,
and long,
uncomfortable hours
in the stiff pew
of the First Presbyterian Church.
Associated with this torture
is a peculiar Sunday smell
and the faint rustling of silk dresses.
I can see the stern black figure
of Dr. Pound,
who made interminable statements
to the Lord.
"Oh,
Lord,"
I can hear him say,
"thou knowest..."
These pictures,
though yellowed and faded,
suggest vividly the being I once was,
the feelings that possessed and animated me,
love
for my playmates,
vague impulses struggling
for expression in a world
forever thwarting them.
I recall,
too,
innocent dreams of a future
unidentified,
dreams from which I emerged vibrating
with an energy that was lost
for lack of a definite objective:
yet it was constantly being renewed.
I often wonder
what I might have become
if it could have been harnessed,
directed! Speculations are vain.
Calvinism,
though it had begun
to make compromises,
was still a force in those days,
inimical
to spontaneity and human instincts.
And when I think of Calvinism I see,
not Dr. Pound,
who preached it,
but my father,
who practised and embodied it.
I loved him,
but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy,
but punishment,
the,
suppression rather than the expansion of aspirations.
His religion seemed woven all of austerity,
contained no shining threads
to catch my eye.
Dreams,
to him,
were matters
for suspicion and distrust.
I sometimes ask myself,
as I gaze upon his portrait now,
the duplicate of the one painted
for the Bar Association,
whether he ever could have felt the secret,
hot thrills I knew and did not identify
with religion.
His religion was real
to him,
though he failed utterly
to make it comprehensible
to me.
The apparent calmness,
evenness of his life awed me.
A successful lawyer,
a respected and trusted citizen,
was he lacking somewhat in virility,
vitality?
I cannot judge him,
even to-day.
I never knew him.
There were times in my youth when the curtain of his unfamiliar spirit was withdrawn a little:
and once,
after I had passed the crisis of some childhood disease,
I awoke
to find him bending over my bed
with a tender expression that surprised and puzzled me.
He was well educated,
and from his portrait a shrewd observer might divine in him a genteel taste
for literature.
The fine features bear witness
to the influence of an American environment,
yet suggest the intellectual Englishman of Matthew Arnold's time.
The face is distinguished,
ascetic,
the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my own;
the side whiskers are not too obtrusive,
the eyes blue-grey.
There is a large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin,
and the coat has odd,
narrow lapels.
His habits of mind were English,
although he harmonized well enough
with the manners and traditions of a city whose inheritance was Scotch-Irish;
and he invariably drank tea
for breakfast.
One of my earliest recollections is of the silver breakfast service and egg-cups which my great-grandfather brought
with him from Sheffield
to Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution.
His son,
Dr. Hugh Moreton Paret,
after whom I was named,
was the best known physician of the city in the decorous,
Second Bank days.
My mother was Sarah Breck.
Hers was my Scotch-Irish side.
Old Benjamin Breck,
her grandfather,
undaunted by sea or wilderness,
had come straight from Belfast
to the little log settlement by the great river that mirrored then the mantle of primeval forest on the hills.
So much
for chance.
He kept a store
with a side porch and square-paned windows,
where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed paper hung beside ploughs and calico prints,
barrels of flour,
of molasses and rum,
all of which had been somehow marvellously transported over the passes of those forbidding mountains,--passes we blithely thread to-day in dining cars and compartment sleepers.
Behind the store were moored the barges that floated down on the swift current
to the Ohio,
carrying goods
to even remoter settlements in the western wilderness.
Benjamin,
in addition
to his emigrant's leather box,
brought
with him some of that pigment that was
to dye the locality
for generations a deep blue.
I refer,
of course,
to his Presbyterianism.
And in order the better
to ensure
to his progeny the fastness of this dye,
he married the granddaughter of a famous divine,
celebrated in the annals of New England,--no doubt
with some injustice,--as a staunch advocate on the doctrine of infant damnation.
My cousin Robert Breck had old Benjamin's portrait,
which has since gone
to the Kinley's.
Heaven knows who painted it,
though no great art were needed
to suggest on canvas the tough fabric of that sitter,
who was more Irish than Scotch.
The heavy stick he holds might,
with a slight stretch of the imagination,
be a blackthorn;
his head looks capable of withstanding many blows;
his hand of giving many.
And,
as I gazed the other day at this picture hanging in the shabby suburban parlour,
I could only contrast him
with his anaemic descendants who possessed the likeness.
Between the children of poor Mary Kinley,-- Cousin Robert's daughter,
and the hardy stock of the old country there is a gap indeed! Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune.
It was his son who built on the Second Bank the wide,
corniced mansion in which
to house comfortably his eight children.
There,
two tiers above the river,
lived my paternal grandfather,
Dr. Paret,
the Breck's physician and friend;
the Durretts and the Hambletons,
iron-masters;
the Hollisters,
Sherwins,
the McAlerys and Ewanses,--Breck connections,--the Willetts and Ogilvys;
in short,
everyone of importance in the days between the
'thirties and the Civil War.
Theirs were generous houses surrounded by shade trees,
with glorious back yards--I have been told--where apricots and pears and peaches and even nectarines grew.
The business of Breck and Company,
wholesale grocers,
descended
to my mother's first cousin,
Robert Breck,
who lived at Claremore.
The very sound of that word once sufficed
to give me a shiver of delight;
but the Claremore I knew has disappeared as completely as Atlantis,
and the place is now a suburb
(hateful word!)
cut up into building lots and connected
with Boyne Street and the business section of the city by trolley lines.
Then it was
"the country,"
and fairly saturated
with romance.
Cousin Robert,
when he came into town
to spend his days at the store,
brought
with him some of this romance,
I had almost said of this aroma.
He was no suburbanite,
but rural
to the backbone,
professing a most proper contempt
for dwellers in towns.
Every summer day that dawned held Claremore as a possibility.
And such was my capacity
for joy that my appetite would depart completely when I heard my mother say,
questioningly and
with proper wifely respect
"If you're really going off on a business trip
for a day or two,
Mr. Paret"
(she generally addressed my father thus formally),
"I think I'll go
to Robert's and take Hugh."
"Shall I tell Norah
to pack,
mother,"
I would exclaim,
starting up.
"We'll see what your father thinks,
my dear."
"Remain at the table until you are excused,
Hugh,"
he would say.
Released at length,
I would rush
to Norah,
who always rejoiced
with me,
and then
to the wire fence which marked the boundary of the Peters domain next door,
eager,
with the refreshing lack of consideration characteristic of youth,
to announce
to the Peterses--who were
to remain at home the news of my good fortune.
There would be Tom and Alfred and Russell and Julia and little Myra
with her grass-stained knees,
faring forth
to seek the adventures of a new day in the shady western yard.
Myra was too young not
to look wistful at my news,
but the others pretended indifference,
seeking
to lessen my triumph.
And it was Julia who invariably retorted
"We can go out
to Uncle Jake's farm whenever we want to.
Can't we,
Tom?"
...
No journey ever taken since has equalled in ecstasy that leisurely trip of thirteen miles in the narrow-gauge railroad that wound through hot fields of nodding corn tassels and between delicious,
acrid-smelling woods
to Claremore.
No silent palace
"sleeping in the sun,"
no edifice decreed by Kubla Khan could have worn more glamour than the house of Cousin Robert Breck.
It stood half a mile from the drowsy village,
deep in its own grounds amidst lawns splashed
with shadows,
with gravel paths edged--in barbarous fashion,
if you please
with shells.
There were flower beds of equally barbarous design;
and two iron deer,
which,
like the figures on Keats's Grecian urn,
were ever ready poised
to flee,--and yet never fled.
For Cousin Robert was rich,
as riches went in those days:
not only rich,
but comfortable.
Stretching behind the house were sweet meadows of hay and red clover basking in the heat,
orchards where the cows cropped beneath the trees,
arbours where purple clusters of Concords hung beneath warm leaves:
there were woods beyond,
into which,
under the guidance of Willie Breck,
I made adventurous excursions,
and in the autumn gathered hickories and walnuts.
The house was a rambling,
wooden mansion painted grey,
with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair furniture inside.
Oh,
the smell of its darkened interior on a midsummer day! Like the flavour of that choicest of tropical fruits,
the mangosteen,
it baffles analysis,
and the nearest I can come
to it is a mixture of matting and corn-bread,
with another element too subtle
to define.
The hospitality of that house! One would have thought we had arrived,
my mother and I,
from the ends of the earth,
such was the welcome we got from Cousin Jenny,
Cousin Robert's wife,
from Mary and Helen
with the flaxen pig-tails,
from Willie,
whom I recall as permanently without shoes or stockings.
Met and embraced by Cousin Jenny at the station and driven
to the house in the squeaky surrey,
the moment we arrived she and my mother would put on the dressing-sacks I associated
with hot weather,
and sit sewing all day long in rocking-chairs at the coolest end of the piazza.
The women of that day scorned lying down,
except at night,
and as evening came on they donned starched dresses;
I recall in particular one my mother wore,
with little vertical stripes of black and white,
and a full skirt.
And how they talked,
from the beginning of the visit until the end! I have often since wondered where the topics came from.
It was not until nearly seven o'clock that the train arrived which brought home my Cousin Robert.
He was a big man;
his features and even his ample moustache gave a disconcerting impression of rugged integrity,
and I remember him chiefly in an alpaca or seersucker coat.
Though much less formal,
more democratic--in a word--than my father,
I stood in awe of him
for a different reason,
and this I know now was because he possessed the penetration
to discern the flaws in my youthful character,
--flaws that persisted in manhood.
None so quick as Cousin Robert
to detect deceptions which were hidden from my mother.
His hobby was carpentering,
and he had a little shop beside the stable filled
with shining tools which Willie and I,
in spite of their attractions,
were forbidden
to touch.
Willie,
by dire experience,
had learned
to keep the law;
but on one occasion I stole in alone,
and promptly cut my finger
with a chisel.
My mother and Cousin Jenny accepted the fiction that the injury had been done
with a flint arrowhead that Willie had given me,
but when Cousin Robert came home and saw my bound hand and heard the story,
he gave me a certain look which sticks in my mind.
"Wonderful people,
those Indians were!"
he observed.
"They could make arrowheads as sharp as chisels."
I was most uncomfortable....
He had a strong voice,
and spoke
with a rising inflection and a marked accent that still remains peculiar
to our locality,
although it was much modified in my mother and not at all noticeable in my father;
with an odd nasal alteration of the burr our Scotch-Irish ancestors had brought
with them across the seas.
For instance,
he always called my father Mr. Par- r-ret.
He had an admiration and respect
for him that seemed
to forbid the informality of
"Matthew."
It was shared by others of my father's friends and relations.
"Sarah,"
Cousin Robert would say
to my mother,
"you're coddling that boy,
you ought
to lam him oftener.
Hand him over
to me
for a couple of months--I'll put him through his paces....
So you're going
to send him
to college,
are you?
He's too good
for old Benjamin's grocery business."
He was very fond of my mother,
though he lectured her soundly
for her weakness in indulging me.
I can see him as he sat at the head of the supper table,
carving liberal helpings which Mary and Helen and Willie devoured
with country appetites,
watching our plates.
"What's the matter,
Hugh?
You haven't eaten all your lamb."
"He doesn't like fat,
Robert,"
my mother explained.
"I'd teach him
to like it if he were my boy."
"Well,
Robert,
he isn't your boy,"
Cousin Jenny would remind him....
His bark was worse than his bite.
Like many kind people he made use of brusqueness
to hide an inner tenderness,
and on the train he was hail fellow well met
with every Tom,
Dick and Harry that commuted,--although the word was not invented in those days,--and the conductor and brakeman too.
But he had his standards,
and held
to them....
Mine was not a questioning childhood,
and I was willing
to accept the scheme of things as presented
to me entire.
In my tenderer years,
when I had broken one of the commandments on my father's tablet
(there were more than ten),
and had,
on his home-coming,
been sent
to bed,
my mother would come softly upstairs after supper
with a book in her hand;
a book of selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound had set the seal of his approval,
with a glazed picture cover,
representing Daniel in the lions'
den and an angel standing beside him.
On the somewhat specious plea that Holy Writ might have a chastening effect,
she was permitted
to minister
to me in my shame.
The amazing adventure of Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego particularly appealed
to an imagination needing little stimulation.
It never occurred
to me
to doubt that these gentlemen had triumphed over caloric laws.
But out of my window,
at the back of the second storey,
I often saw a sudden,
crimson glow in the sky
to the southward,
as though that part of the city had caught fire.
There were the big steel-works,
my mother told me,
belonging
to Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton,
the father of Ralph Hambleton and the grandfather of Hambleton Durrett,
my schoolmates at Miss Caroline's.
I invariably connected the glow,
not
with Hambleton and Ralph,
but
with Shadrach,
Meshach and Abednego! Later on,
when my father took me
to the steel-works,
and I beheld
with awe a huge pot filled
with molten metal that ran out of it like water,
I asked him--if I leaped into that stream,
could God save me?
He was shocked.
Miracles,
he told me,
didn't happen any more.
"When did they stop?"
I demanded.
"About two thousand years ago,
my son,"
he replied gravely.
"Then,"
said I,
"no matter how much I believed in God,
he wouldn't save me if I jumped into the big kettle
for his sake?"
For this I was properly rebuked and silenced.
My boyhood was filled
with obsessing desires.
If God,
for example,
had cast down,
out of his abundant store,
manna and quail in the desert,
why couldn't he fling me a little pocket money?
A paltry quarter of a dollar,
let us say,
which
to me represented wealth.
To avoid the reproach of the Pharisees,
I went into the closet of my bed-chamber
to pray,
requesting that the quarter should be dropped on the north side of Lyme Street,
between Stamford and Tryon;
in short,
as conveniently near home as possible.
Then I issued forth,
not feeling overconfident,
but hoping.
Tom Peters,
leaning over the ornamental cast-iron fence which separated his front yard from the street,
presently spied me scanning the sidewalk.
"What are you looking for,
Hugh?"
he demanded
with interest.
"Oh,
something I dropped,"
I answered uneasily.
"What?"
Naturally,
I refused
to tell.
It was a broiling,
midsummer day;
Julia and Russell,
who had been warned
to stay in the shade,
but who were engaged in the experiment of throwing the yellow cat from the top of the lattice fence
to see if she would alight on her feet,
were presently attracted,
and joined in the search.
The mystery which I threw around it added
to its interest,
and I was not inconsiderably annoyed.
Suppose one of them were
to find the quarter which God had intended
for me?
Would that be justice?
"It's nothing,"
I said,
and pretended
to abandon the quest--to be renewed later.
But this ruse failed;
they continued obstinately
to search;
and after a few minutes Tom,
with a shout,
picked out of a hot crevice between the bricks--a nickel!
"It's mine!"
I cried fiercely.
"Did you lose it?"
demanded Julia,
the canny one,
as Tom was about
to give it up.
My lying was generally reserved
for my elders.
"N-no,"
I said hesitatingly,
"but it's mine all the same.
It was--sent
to me."
"Sent
to you!"
they exclaimed,
in a chorus of protest and derision.
And how,
indeed,
was I
to make good my claim?
The Peterses,
when assembled,
were a clan,
led by Julia and in matters of controversy,
moved as one.
How was I
to tell them that in answer
to my prayers
for twenty-five cents,
God had deemed five all that was good
for me?
"Some--somebody dropped it there
for me."
"Who?"
demanded the chorus.
"Say,
that's a good one!"
Tears suddenly blinded me.
Overcome by chagrin,
I turned and flew into the house and upstairs into my room,
locking the door behind me.
An interval ensued,
during which I nursed my sense of wrong,
and it pleased me
to think that the money would bring a curse on the Peters family.
At length there came a knock on the door,
and a voice calling my name.
"Hugh! Hugh!"
It was Tom.
"Hughie,
won't you let me in?
I want
to give you the nickel."
"Keep it!"
I shouted back.
"You found it."
Another interval,
and then more knocking.
"Open up,"
he said coaxingly.
"I--I want
to talk
to you."
I relented,
and let him in.
He pressed the coin into my hand.
I refused;
he pleaded.
"You found it,"
I said,
"it's yours."
"But--but you were looking
for it."
"That makes no difference,"
I declared magnanimously.
Curiosity overcame him.
"Say,
Hughie,
if you didn't drop it,
who on earth did?"
"Nobody on earth,"
I replied cryptically....
Naturally,
I declined
to reveal the secret.
Nor was this by any means the only secret I held over the Peters family,
who never quite knew what
to make of me.
They were not troubled
with imaginations.
Julia was a little older than Tom and had a sharp tongue,
but over him I exercised a distinct fascination,
and I knew it.
Literal himself,
good-natured and warm-hearted,
the gift I had of tingeing life
with romance
(to put the thing optimistically),
of creating kingdoms out of back yards--at which Julia and Russell sniffed--held his allegiance firm.
II.
I must have been about twelve years of age when I realized that I was possessed of the bard's inheritance.
A momentous journey I made
with my parents
to Boston about this time not only stimulated this gift,
but gave me the advantage of which other travellers before me have likewise availed themselves--of being able
to take certain poetic liberties
with a distant land that my friends at home had never seen.
Often during the heat of summer noons when we were assembled under the big maple beside the lattice fence in the Peters'
yard,
the spirit would move me
to relate the most amazing of adventures.
Our train,
for instance,
had been held up in the night by a band of robbers in black masks,
and rescued by a traveller who bore a striking resemblance
to my Cousin Robert Breck.
He had shot two of the robbers.
These fabrications,
once started,
flowed from me
with ridiculous ease.
I experienced an unwonted exhilaration,
exaltation;
I began
to believe that they had actually occurred.
In vain the astute Julia asserted that there were no train robbers in the east.
What had my father done?
Well,
he had been very brave,
but he had had no pistol.
Had I been frightened?
No,
not at all;
I,
too,
had wished
for a pistol.
Why hadn't I spoken of this before?
Well,
so many things had happened
to me I couldn't tell them all at once.
It was plain that Julia,
though often fascinated against her will,
deemed this sort of thing distinctly immoral.
I was a boy divided in two.
One part of me dwelt in a fanciful realm of his own weaving,
and the other part was a commonplace and protesting inhabitant of a world of lessons,
disappointments and discipline.
My instincts were not vicious.
Ideas bubbled up within me continually from an apparently inexhaustible spring,
and the very strength of the longings they set in motion puzzled and troubled my parents:
what I seem
to see most distinctly now is a young mind engaged in a ceaseless struggle
for self-expression,
for self-development,
against the inertia of a tradition of which my father was the embodiment.
He was an enigma
to me then.
He sincerely loved me,
he cherished ambitions concerning me,
yet thwarted every natural,
budding growth,
until I grew unconsciously
to regard him as my enemy,
although I had an affection
for him and a pride in him that flared up at times.
Instead of confiding
to him my aspirations,
vague though they were,
I became more and more secretive as I grew older.
I knew instinctively that he regarded these aspirations as evidences in my character of serious moral flaws.
And I would sooner have suffered many afternoons of his favourite punishment--solitary confinement in my room-- than reveal
to him those occasional fits of creative fancy which caused me
to neglect my lessons in order
to put them on paper.
Loving literature,
in his way,
he was characteristically incapable of recognizing the literary instinct,
and the symptoms of its early stages he mistook
for inherent frivolity,
for lack of respect
for the truth;
in brief,
for original sin.
At the age of fourteen I had begun secretly
(alas,
how many things I did secretly!)
to write stories of a sort,
stories that never were finished.
He regarded reading as duty,
not pleasure.
He laid out books
for me,
which I neglected.
He was part and parcel of that American environment in which literary ambition was regarded as sheer madness.
And no one who has not experienced that environment can have any conception of the pressure it exerted
to stifle originality,
to thrust the new generation into its religious and commercial moulds.
Shall we ever,
I wonder,
develop the enlightened education that will know how
to take advantage of such initiative as was mine?
that will be on the watch
for it,
sympathize
with it and guide it
to fruition?
I was conscious of still another creative need,
that of dramatizing my ideas,
of converting them into action.
And this need was
to lead me farther than ever afield from the path of righteousness.
The concrete realization of ideas,
as many geniuses will testify,
is an expensive undertaking,
requiring a little pocket money;
and I have already touched upon that subject.
My father did not believe in pocket money.
A sea story that my Cousin Donald Ewan gave me at Christmas inspired me
to compose one of a somewhat different nature;
incidentally,
I deemed it a vast improvement on Cousin Donald's book.
Now,
if I only had a boat,
with the assistance of Ham Durrett and Tom Peters,
Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and other friends,
this story of mine might be staged.
There were,
however,
as usual,
certain seemingly insuperable difficulties:
in the first place,
it was winter time;
in the second,
no facilities existed in the city
for operations of a nautical character;
and,
lastly,
my Christmas money amounted only
to five dollars.
It was my father who pointed out these and other objections.
For,
after a careful perusal of the price lists I had sent for,
I had been forced
to appeal
to him
to supply additional funds
with which
to purchase a row- boat.
Incidentally,
he read me a lecture on extravagance,
referred
to my last month's report at the Academy,
and finished by declaring that he would not permit me
to have a boat even in the highly improbable case of somebody's presenting me
with one.
Let it not be imagined that my ardour or my determination were extinguished.
Shortly after I had retired from his presence it occurred
to me that he had said nothing
to forbid my making a boat,
and the first thing I did after school that day was
to procure,
for twenty-five cents,
a second-hand book on boat construction.
The woodshed was chosen as a shipbuilding establishment.
It was convenient--and my father never went into the back yard in cold weather.
Inquiries of lumber-yards developing the disconcerting fact that four dollars and seventy-five cents was inadequate
to buy the material itself,
to say nothing of the cost of steaming and bending the ribs,
I reluctantly abandoned the ideal of the graceful craft I had sketched,
and compromised on a flat bottom.
Observe how the ways of deception lead
to transgression:
I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis,
the carpenter,
a good-natured Englishman,
coarse and fat:
in our neighbourhood his reputation
for obscenity was so well known
to mothers that I had been forbidden
to go near him or his shop.
Grits Jarvis,
his son,
who had inherited the talent,
was also contraband.
I can see now the huge bulk of the elder Jarvis as he stood in the melting,
soot- powdered snow in front of his shop,
and hear his comments on my pertinacity.
"If you ever wants another man's missus when you grows up,
my lad,
Gawd
'elp
'im!"
"Why should I want another man's wife when I don't want one of my own?"
I demanded,
indignant.
He laughed
with his customary lack of moderation.
"You mind what old Jarvis says,"
he cried.
"What you wants,
you gets."
I did get his boards,
by sheer insistence.
No doubt they were not very valuable,
and without question he more than made up
for them in my mother's bill.
I also got something else of equal value
to me at the moment,--the assistance of Grits,
the contraband;
daily,
after school,
I smuggled him into the shed through the alley,
acquiring likewise the services of Tom Peters,
which was more of a triumph than it would seem.
Tom always had
to be
"worked up"
to participation in my ideas,
but in the end he almost invariably succumbed.
The notion of building a boat in the dead of winter,
and so far from her native element,
naturally struck him at first as ridiculous.
Where in Jehoshaphat was I going
to sail it if I ever got it made?
He much preferred
to throw snowballs at innocent wagon drivers.
All that Tom saw,
at first,
was a dirty,
coal-spattered shed
with dim recesses,
for it was lighted on one side only,
and its temperature was somewhere below freezing.
Surely he could not be blamed
for a tempered enthusiasm! But
for me,
all the dirt and cold and discomfort were blotted out,
and I beheld a gallant craft manned by sturdy seamen forging her way across blue water in the South Seas.
Treasure Island,
alas,
was as yet unwritten;
but among my father's books were two old volumes in which I had hitherto taken no interest,
with crude engravings of palms and coral reefs,
of naked savages and tropical mountains covered
with jungle,
the adventures,
in brief,
of one Captain Cook.
I also discovered a book by a later traveller.
Spurred on by a mysterious motive power,
and
to the great neglect of the pons asinorum and the staple products of the Southern States,
I gathered an amazing amount of information concerning a remote portion of the globe,
of head-hunters and poisoned stakes,
of typhoons,
of queer war-craft that crept up on you while you were dismantling galleons,
when desperate hand-to-hand encounters ensued.
Little by little as I wove all this into personal adventures soon
to be realized,
Tom forgot the snowballs and the maddened grocery-men who chased him around the block;
while Grits would occasionally stop sawing and cry out:--
"Ah,
s'y!"
frequently adding that he would be G--d--d.
The cold woodshed became a chantry on the New England coast,
the alley the wintry sea soon
to embrace our ship,
the saw-horses--which stood between a coal-bin on one side and unused stalls filled
with rubbish and kindling on the other--the ways;
the yard behind the lattice fence became a backwater,
the flapping clothes the sails of ships that took refuge there--on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Even my father was symbolized
with unparalleled audacity as a watchful government which had,
up
to the present,
no inkling of our semi-piratical intentions! The cook and the housemaid,
though remonstrating against the presence of Grits,
were friendly confederates;
likewise old Cephas,
the darkey who,
from my earliest memory,
carried coal and wood and blacked the shoes,
washed the windows and scrubbed the steps.
One afternoon Tom went
to work....
The history of the building of the good ship Petrel is similar
to that of all created things,
a story of trial and error and waste.
At last,
one March day she stood ready
for launching.
She had even been caulked;
for Grits,
from an unknown and unquestionably dubious source,
had procured a bucket of tar,
which we heated over afire in the alley and smeared into every crack.
It was natural that the news of such a feat as we were accomplishing should have leaked out,
that the
"yard"
should have been visited from time
to time by interested friends,
some of whom came
to admire,
some
to scoff,
and all
to speculate.
Among the scoffers,
of course,
was Ralph Hambleton,
who stood
with his hands in his pockets and cheerfully predicted all sorts of dire calamities.
Ralph was always a superior boy,
tall and a trifle saturnine and cynical,
with an amazing self-confidence not wholly due
to the wealth of his father,
the iron- master.
He was older than I.
"She won't float five minutes,
if you ever get her
to the water,"
was his comment,
and in this he was supported on general principles by Julia and Russell Peters.
Ralph would have none of the Petrel,
or of the South Seas either;
but he wanted,--so he said,--"to be in at the death."
The Hambletons were one of the few families who at that time went
to the sea
for the summer,
and from a practical knowledge of craft in general Ralph was not slow
to point out the defects of ours.
Tom and I defended her passionately.
Ralph was not a romanticist.
He was a born leader,
excelling at organized games,
exercising over boys the sort of fascination that comes from doing everything better and more easily than others.
It was only during the progress of such enterprises as this affair of the Petrel that I succeeded in winning their allegiance;
bit by bit,
as Tom's had been won,
fanning their enthusiasm by impersonating at once Achilles and Homer,
recruiting while relating the Odyssey of the expedition in glowing colours.
Ralph always scoffed,
and when I had no scheme on foot they went back
to him.
Having surveyed the boat and predicted calamity,
he departed,
leaving a circle of quaint and youthful figures around the Petrel in the shed:
Gene Hollister,
romantically inclined,
yet somewhat hampered by a strict parental supervision;
Ralph's cousin Ham Durrett,
who was even then a rather fat boy,
good-natured but selfish;
Don and Harry Ewan,
my second cousins;
Mac and Nancy Willett and Sam and Sophy McAlery.
Nancy was a tomboy,
not
to be denied,
and Sophy her shadow.
We held a council,
the all-important question of which was how
to get the Petrel
to the water,
and what water
to get her to.
The river was not
to be thought of,
and Blackstone Lake some six miles from town.
Finally,
Logan's mill-pond was decided on,--a muddy sheet on the outskirts of the city.
But how
to get her
to Logan's mill-pond?
Cephas was at length consulted.
It turned out that he had a coloured friend who went by the impressive name of Thomas Jefferson Taliaferro
(pronounced Tolliver),
who was in the express business;
and who,
after surveying the boat
with some misgivings,--for she was ten feet long,--finally consented
to transport her to
"tide-water"
for the sum of two dollars.
But it proved that our combined resources only amounted
to a dollar and seventy-five cents.
Ham Durrett never contributed
to anything.
On this sum Thomas Jefferson compromised.
Saturday dawned clear,
with a stiff March wind catching up the dust into eddies and whirling it down the street.
No sooner was my father safely on his way
to his office than Thomas Jefferson was reported
to be in the alley,
where we assembled,
surveying
with some misgivings Thomas Jefferson's steed,
whose ability
to haul the Petrel two miles seemed somewhat doubtful.
Other difficulties developed;
the door in the back of the shed proved
to be too narrow
for our ship's beam.
But men embarked on a desperate enterprise are not
to be stopped by such trifles,
and the problem was solved by sawing out two adjoining boards.
These were afterwards replaced
with skill by the ship's carpenter,
Able Seaman Grits Jarvis.
Then the Petrel by heroic efforts was got into the wagon,
the seat of which had been removed,
old Thomas Jefferson perched himself precariously in the bow and protestingly gathered up his rope-patched reins.
"Folks'll
'low I'se plum crazy,
drivin'
dis yere boat,"
he declared,
observing
with concern that some four feet of the stern projected over the tail-board.
"Ef she topples,
I'll git
to heaven quicker'n a bullet."
When one is shanghaied,
however,--in the hands of buccaneers,--it is too late
to withdraw.
Six shoulders upheld the rear end of the Petrel,
others shoved,
and Thomas Jefferson's rickety horse began
to move forward in spite of himself.
An expression of sheer terror might have been observed on the old negro's crinkled face,
but his voice was drowned,
and we swept out of the alley.
Scarcely had we travelled a block before we began
to be joined by all the boys along the line of march;
marbles,
tops,
and even incipient baseball games were abandoned that Saturday morning;
people ran out of their houses,
teamsters halted their carts.
The breathless excitement,
the exaltation I had felt on leaving the alley were now tinged
with other feelings,
unanticipated,
but not wholly lacking in delectable quality,--concern and awe at these unforeseen forces I had raised,
at this ever growing and enthusiastic body of volunteers springing up like dragon's teeth in our path.
After all,
was not I the hero of this triumphal procession?
The thought was consoling,
exhilarating.
And here was Nancy marching at my side,
a little subdued,
perhaps,
but unquestionably admiring and realizing that it was I who had created all this.
Nancy,
who was the aptest of pupils,
the most loyal of followers,
though I did not yet value her devotion at its real worth,
because she was a girl.
Her imagination kindled at my touch.
And on this eventful occasion she carried in her arms a parcel,
the contents of which were unknown
to all but ourselves.
At length we reached the muddy shores of Logan's pond,
where two score eager hands volunteered
to assist the Petrel into her native element.
Alas! that the reality never attains
to the vision.
I had beheld,
in my dreams,
the Petrel about
to take the water,
and Nancy Willett standing very straight making a little speech and crashing a bottle of wine across the bows.
This was the content of the mysterious parcel;
she had stolen it from her father's cellar.
But the number of uninvited spectators,
which had not been foreseen,
considerably modified the programme,--as the newspapers would have said.
They pushed and crowded around the ship,
and made frank and even brutal remarks as
to her seaworthiness;
even Nancy,
inured though she was
to the masculine sex,
had fled
to the heights,
and it looked at this supreme moment as though we should have
to fight
for the Petrel.
An attempt
to muster her doughty buccaneers failed;
the gunner too had fled,--Gene Hollister;
Ham Durrett and the Ewanses were nowhere
to be seen,
and a muster revealed only Tom,
the fidus Achates,
and Grits Jarvis.
"Ah,
s'y!"
he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing hordes.
"Stand back,
carn't yer?
I'll bash yer face in,
Johnny.
Whose boat is this?"
Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency?
Here,
in truth,
was the drama staged,--my drama,
had I only been able
to realize it.
The good ship beached,
the headhunters hemming us in on all sides,
the scene prepared
for one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had so graphically related as an essential part of our adventures.
"Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar,"
proposed one of the head- hunters,--meaning me.
"I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him,"
said Grits,
and then resorted
to appeal.
"I s'y,
carn't yer stand back and let a chap
'ave a charnst?"
The head-hunters only jeered.
And what shall be said of the Captain in this moment of peril?
Shall it be told that his heart was beating wildly?--bumping were a better word.
He was trying
to remember that he was the Captain.
Otherwise,
he must admit
with shame that he,
too,
should have fled.
So much
for romance when the test comes.
Will he remain
to fall fighting
for his ship?
Like Horatius,
he glanced up at the hill,
where,
instead of the porch of the home where he would fain have been,
he beheld a wisp of a girl standing alone,
her hat on the back of her head,
her hair flying in the wind,
gazing intently down at him in his danger.
The renegade crew was nowhere
to be seen.
There are those who demand the presence of a woman in order
to be heroes....
"Give us a chance,
can't you?"
he cried,
repeating Grits's appeal in not quite such a stentorian tone as he would have liked,
while his hand trembled on the gunwale.
Tom Peters,
it must be acknowledged,
was much more of a buccaneer when it was a question of deeds,
for he planted himself in the way of the belligerent chief of the head-hunters
(who spoke
with a decided brogue).
"Get out of the way!"
said Tom,
with a little squeak in his voice.
Yet there he was,
and he deserves a tribute.
An unlooked-for diversion saved us from annihilation,
in the shape of one who had a talent
for creating them.
We were bewilderingly aware of a girlish figure amongst us.
"You cowards!"
she cried.
"You cowards!"
Lithe,
and fairly quivering
with passion,
it was Nancy who showed us how
to face the head-hunters.
They gave back.
They would have been brave indeed if they had not retreated before such an intense little nucleus of energy and indignation!...
"Ah,
give
'em a chanst,"
said their chief,
after a moment....
He even helped
to push the boat towards the water.
But he did not volunteer
to be one of those
to man the Petrel on her maiden voyage.
Nor did Logan's pond,
that wild March day,
greatly resemble the South Seas.
Nevertheless,
my eye on Nancy,
I stepped proudly aboard and seized an
"oar."
Grits and Tom followed,--when suddenly the Petrel sank considerably below the water-line as her builders had estimated it.
Ere we fully realized this,
the now friendly head-hunters had given us a shove,
and we were off! The Captain,
who should have been waving good- bye
to his lady love from the poop,
sat down abruptly,--the crew likewise;
not,
however,
before she had heeled
to the scuppers,
and a half-bucket of iced water had run it.
Head-hunters were mere daily episodes in Grits's existence,
but water...
He muttered something in cockney that sounded like a prayer....
The wind was rapidly driving us toward the middle of the pond,
and something cold and ticklish was seeping through the seats of our trousers.
We sat like statues....
The bright scene etched itself in my memory--the bare brown slopes
with which the pond was bordered,
the Irish shanties,
the clothes-lines
with red flannel shirts snapping in the biting wind;
Nancy motionless on the bank;
the group behind her,
silent now,
impressed in spite of itself at the sight of our intrepidity.
The Petrel was sailing stern first....
Would any of us,
indeed,
ever see home again?
I thought of my father's wrath turned
to sorrow because he had refused
to gratify a son's natural wish and present him
with a real rowboat....
Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water creeping around the gunwale,
and the very muddiness of it seemed
to enhance its coldness,
to make the horrors of its depths more mysterious and hideous.
The voice of Grits startled us.
"O Gawd,"
he was saying,
"we're a-going
to sink,
and I carn't swim! The blarsted tar's give way back here."
"Is she leaking?"
I cried.
"She's a-filling up like a bath tub,"
he lamented.
Slowly but perceptibly,
in truth,
the bow was rising,
and above the whistling of the wind I could hear his chattering as she settled....
Then several things happened simultaneously:
an agonized cry behind me,
distant shouts from the shore,
a sudden upward lunge of the bow,
and the torture of being submerged,
inch by inch,
in the icy,
yellow water.
Despite the splashing behind me,
I sat as though paralyzed until I was waist deep and the boards turned under me,
and then,
with a spasmodic contraction of my whole being I struck out--only
to find my feet on the muddy bottom.
Such was the inglorious end of the good ship Petrel!
for she went down,
with all hands,
in little more than half a fathom of water....
It was not until then I realized that we had been blown clear across the pond! Figures were running along the shore.
And as Tom and I emerged dragging Grits between us,--for he might have been drowned there abjectly in the shallows,--we were met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty hair,
I remember,
was drawn into a tight knot behind her head;
and who seized us,
all three,
as though we were a bunch of carrots.
"Come along wid ye!"
she cried.
Shivering,
we followed her up the hill,
the spectators of the tragedy,
who by this time had come around the pond,
trailing after.
Nancy was not among them.
Inside the shanty into which we were thrust were two small children crawling about the floor,
and the place was filled
with steam from a wash-tub against the wall and a boiler on the stove.
With a vigorous injunction
to make themselves scarce,
the Irishwoman slammed the door in the faces of the curious and ordered us
to remove our clothes.
Grits was put
to bed in a corner,
while Tom and I,
provided
with various garments,
huddled over the stove.
There fell
to my lot the red flannel shirt which I had seen on the clothes-line.
She gave us hot coffee,
and was back at her wash-tub in no time at all,
her entire comment on a proceeding that seemed
to Tom and me
to have certain elements of gravity being,
"By's will be by's!"
The final ironical touch was given the anti- climax when our rescuer turned out
to be the mother of the chief of the head-hunters himself! He had lingered perforce
with his brothers and sister outside the cabin until dinner time,
and when he came in he was meek as Moses.
Thus the ready hospitality of the poor,
which passed over the heads of Tom and me as we ate bread and onions and potatoes
with a ravenous hunger.
It must have been about two o'clock in the afternoon when we bade good-bye
to our preserver and departed
for home....
At first we went at a dog-trot,
but presently slowed down
to discuss the future looming portentously ahead of us.
Since entire concealment was now impossible,
the question was,--how complete a confession would be necessary?
Our cases,
indeed,
were dissimilar,
and Tom's incentive
to hold back the facts was not nearly so great as mine.
It sometimes seemed
to me in those days unjust that the Peterses were able on the whole
to keep out of criminal difficulties,
in which I was more or less continuously involved:
for it did not strike me that their sins were not those of the imagination.
The method of Tom's father was the slipper.
He and Tom understood each other,
while between my father and myself was a great gulf fixed.
Not that Tom yearned
for the slipper;
but he regarded its occasional applications as being as inevitable as changes in the weather;
lying did not come easily
to him,
and left
to himself he much preferred
to confess and have the matter over with.
I have already suggested that I had cultivated lying,
that weapon of the weaker party,
in some degree,
at least,
in self-defence.
Tom was loyal.
Moreover,
my conviction would probably deprive him
for six whole afternoons of my company,
on which he was more or less dependent.
But the defence of this case presented unusual difficulties,
and we stopped several times
to thrash them out.
We had been absent from dinner,
and doubtless by this time Julia had informed Tom's mother of the expedition,
and anyone could see that our clothing had been wet.
So I lingered in no little anxiety behind the Peters stable while he made the investigation.
Our spirits rose considerably when he returned
to report that Julia had unexpectedly been a trump,
having quieted his mother by the surmise that he was spending the day
with his Aunt Fanny.
So far,
so good.
The problem now was
to decide upon what
to admit.
For we must both tell the same story.
It was agreed that we had fallen into Logan's Pond from a raft:
my suggestion.
Well,
said Tom,
the Petrel hadn't proved much better than a raft,
after all.
I was in no mood
to defend her.
This designation of the Petrel as a
"raft"
was my first legal quibble.
The question
to be decided by the court was,
What is a raft?
just as the supreme tribunal of the land has been required,
in later years,
to decide,
What is whiskey?
The thing
to be concealed if possible was the building of the
"raft,"
although this information was already in the possession of a number of persons,
whose fathers might at any moment see fit
to congratulate my own on being the parent of a genius.
It was a risk,
however,
that had
to be run.
And,
secondly,
since Grits Jarvis was contraband,
nothing was
to be said about him.
I have not said much about my mother,
who might have been likened on such occasions
to a grand jury compelled
to indict,
yet torn between loyalty
to an oath and sympathy
with the defendant.
I went through the Peters yard,
climbed the wire fence,
my object being
to discover first from Ella,
the housemaid,
or Hannah,
the cook,
how much was known in high quarters.
It was Hannah who,
as I opened the kitchen door,
turned at the sound,
and set down the saucepan she was scouring.
"Is it home ye are?
Mercy
to goodness!"
(this on beholding my shrunken costume)
"Glory be
to God you're not drownded! and your mother worritin'
her heart out! So it's into the wather ye were?"
I admitted it.
"Hannah?"
I said softly.
"What then?"
"Does mother know--about the boat?"
"Now don't ye be wheedlin'."
I managed
to discover,
however,
that my mother did not know,
and surmised that the best reason why she had not been told had
to do
with Hannah's criminal acquiescence concerning the operations in the shed.
I ran into the front hall and up the stairs,
and my mother heard me coming and met me on the landing.
"Hugh,
where have you been?"
As I emerged from the semi-darkness of the stairway she caught sight of my dwindled garments,
of the trousers well above my ankles.
Suddenly she had me in her arms and was kissing me passionately.
As she stood before me in her grey,
belted skirt,
the familiar red-and-white cameo at her throat,
her heavy hair parted in the middle,
in her eyes was an odd,
appealing look which I know now was a sign of mother love struggling
with a Presbyterian conscience.
Though she inherited that conscience,
I have often thought she might have succeeded in casting it off--or at least some of it--had it not been
for the fact that in spite of herself she worshipped its incarnation in the shape of my father.
Her voice trembled a little as she drew me
to the sofa beside the window.
"Tell me about what happened,
my son,"
she said.
It was a terrible moment
for me.
For my affections were still quiveringly alive in those days,
and I loved her.
I had
for an instant an instinctive impulse
to tell her the whole story,--South Sea Islands and all! And I could have done it had I not beheld looming behind her another figure which represented a stern and unsympathetic Authority,
and somehow made her,
suddenly,
of small account.
Not that she would have understood the romance,
but she would have comprehended me.
I knew that she was powerless
to save me from the wrath
to come.
I wept.
It was because I hated
to lie
to her,--yet I did so.
Fear gripped me,
and--like some respectable criminals I have since known--I understood that any confession I made would inexorably be used against me....
I wonder whether she knew I was lying?
At any rate,
the case appeared
to be a grave one,
and I was presently remanded
to my room
to be held over
for trial....
Vividly,
as I write,
I recall the misery of the hours I have spent,
while awaiting sentence,
in the little chamber
with the honeysuckle wall-paper and steel engravings of happy but dumpy children romping in the fields and groves.
On this particular March afternoon the weather had become morne,
as the French say;
and I looked down sadly into the grey back yard which the wind of the morning had strewn
with chips from the Petrel.
At last,
when shadows were gathering in the corners of the room,
I heard footsteps.
Ella appeared,
prim and virtuous,
yet a little commiserating.
My father wished
to see me,
downstairs.
It was not the first time she had brought that summons,
and always her manner was the same! The scene of my trials was always the sitting room,
lined
with grim books in their walnut cases.
And my father sat,
like a judge,
behind the big desk where he did his work when at home.
Oh,
the distance between us at such an hour! I entered as delicately as Agag,
and the expression in his eye seemed
to convict me before I could open my mouth.
"Hugh,"
he said,
"your mother tells me that you have confessed
to going,
without permission,
to Logan's Pond,
where you embarked on a raft and fell into the water."
The slight emphasis he contrived
to put on the word raft sent a colder shiver down my spine than the iced water had done.
What did he know?
or was this mere suspicion?
Too late,
now,
at any rate,
to plead guilty.
"It was a sort of a raft,
sir,"
I stammered.
"A sort of a raft,"
repeated my father.
"Where,
may I ask,
did you find it?"
"I--I didn't exactly find it,
sir."
"Ah!"
said my father.
(It was the moment
to glance meaningly at the jury.)
The prisoner gulped.
"You didn't exactly find it,
then.
Will you kindly explain how you came by it?"
"Well,
sir,
we--I--put it together."
"Have you any objection
to stating,
Hugh,
in plain English,
that you made it?"
"No,
sir,
I suppose you might say that I made it."
"Or that it was intended
for a row-boat?"
Here was the time
to appeal,
to force a decision as
to what constituted a row-boat.
"Perhaps it might be called a row-boat,
sir,"
I said abjectly.
"Or that,
in direct opposition
to my wishes and commands in forbidding you
to have a boat,
to spend your money foolishly and wickedly on a whim,
you constructed one secretly in the woodshed,
took out a part of the back partition,
thus destroying property that did,
not belong
to you,
and had the boat carted this morning
to Logan's Pond?"
I was silent,
utterly undone.
Evidently he had specific information....
There are certain expressions that are,
at times,
more than mere figures of speech,
and now my father's wrath seemed literally towering.
It added visibly
to his stature.
"Hugh,"
he said,
in a voice that penetrated
to the very corners of my soul,
"I utterly fail
to understand you.
I cannot imagine how a son of mine,
a son of your mother who is the very soul of truthfulness and honour--can be a liar."
(Oh,
the terrible emphasis he put on that word!)
"Nor is it as if this were a new tendency--I have punished you
for it before.
Your mother and I have tried
to do our duty by you,
to instil into you Christian teaching.
But it seems wholly useless.
I confess that I am at a less how
to proceed.
You seem
to have no conscience whatever,
no conception of what you owe
to your parents and your God.
You not only persistently disregard my wishes and commands,
but you have,
for many months,
been leading a double life,
facing me every day,
while you were secretly and continually disobeying me.
I shudder
to think where this determination of yours
to have what you desire at any price will lead you in the future.
It is just such a desire that distinguishes wicked men from good."
I will not linger upon a scene the very remembrance of which is painful
to this day....
I went from my father's presence in disgrace,
in an agony of spirit that was overwhelming,
to lock the door of my room and drop face downward on the bed,
to sob until my muscles twitched.
For he had,
indeed,
put into me an awful fear.
The greatest horror of my boyish imagination was a wicked man.
Was I,
as he had declared,
utterly depraved and doomed in spite of myself
to be one?
There came a knock at my door--Ella
with my supper.
I refused
to open,
and sent her away,
to fall on my knees in the darkness and pray wildly
to a God whose attributes and character were sufficiently confused in my mind.
On the one hand was the stern,
despotic Monarch of the Westminster Catechism,
whom I addressed out of habit,
the Father who condemned a portion of his children from the cradle.
Was I one of those who he had decreed before I was born must suffer the tortures of the flames of hell?
Putting two and two together,
what I had learned in Sunday school and gathered from parts of Dr. Pound's sermons,
and the intimation of my father that wickedness was within me,
like an incurable disease,--was not mine the logical conclusion?
What,
then,
was the use of praying?...
My supplications ceased abruptly.
And my ever ready imagination,
stirred
to its depths,
beheld that awful scene of the last day:
the darkness,
such as sometimes creeps over the city in winter,
when the jaundiced smoke falls down and we read at noonday by gas-light.
I beheld the tortured faces of the wicked gathered on the one side,
and my mother on the other amongst the blessed,
gazing across the gulf at me
with yearning and compassion.
Strange that it did not strike me that the sight of the condemned whom they had loved in life would have marred if not destroyed the happiness of the chosen,
about
to receive their crowns and harps! What a theology--that made the Creator and Preserver of all mankind thus illogical! III.
Although I was imaginative,
I was not morbidly introspective,
and by the end of the first day of my incarceration my interest in that solution had waned.
At times,
however,
I actually yearned
for someone in whom I could confide,
who could suggest a solution.
I repeat,
I would not
for worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Pound,
of whom I had a wholesome fear,
or perhaps an unwholesome one.
Except at morning Bible reading and at church my parents never mentioned the name of the Deity,
save
to instruct me formally.
Intended or no,
the effect of my religious training was
to make me ashamed of discussing spiritual matters,
and naturally I failed
to perceive that this was because it laid its emphasis on personal salvation....
I did not,
however,
become an unbeliever,
for I was not of a nature
to contemplate
with equanimity a godless universe....
My sufferings during these series of afternoon confinements did not come from remorse,
but were the result of a vague sense of injury;
and their effect was
to generate within me a strange motive power,
a desire
to do something that would astound my father and eventually wring from him the confession that he had misjudged me.
To be sure,
I should have
to wait until early manhood,
at least,
for the accomplishment of such a coup.
Might it not be that I was an embryonic literary genius?
Many were the books I began in this ecstasy of self-vindication,
only
to abandon them when my confinement came
to an end.
It was about this time,
I think,
that I experienced one of those shocks which have a permanent effect upon character.
It was then the custom
for ladies
to spend the day
with one another,
bringing their sewing;
and sometimes,
when I unexpectedly entered the sitting-room,
the voices of my mother's visitors would drop
to a whisper.
One afternoon I returned from school
to pause at the head of the stairs.
Cousin Bertha Ewan and Mrs. McAlery were discussing
with my mother an affair that I judged from the awed tone in which they spoke might prove interesting.
"Poor Grace,"
Mrs. McAlery was saying,
"I imagine she's paid a heavy penalty.
No man alive will be faithful under those circumstances."
I stopped at the head of the stairs,
with a delicious,
guilty feeling.
"Have they ever heard of her?"
Cousin Bertha asked.
"It is thought they went
to Spain,"
replied Mrs. McAlery,
solemnly,
yet not without a certain zest.
"Mr. Jules Hollister will not have her name mentioned in his presence,
you know.
And Whitcomb chased them as far as New York
with a horse-pistol in his pocket.
The report is that he got
to the dock just as the ship sailed.
And then,
you know,
he went
to live somewhere out West,--in Iowa,
I believe."
"Did he ever get a divorce?"
Cousin Bertha inquired.
"He was too good a church member,
my dear,"
my mother reminded her.
"Well,
I'd have got one quick enough,
church member or no church member,"
declared Cousin Bertha,
who had in her elements of daring.
"Not that I mean
for a moment
to excuse her,"
Mrs. McAlery put in,
"but Edward Whitcomb did have a frightful temper,
and he was awfully strict
with her,
and he was old enough,
anyhow,
to be her father.
Grace Hollister was the last woman in the world I should have suspected of doing so hideous a thing.
She was so sweet and simple."
"Jennings was very attractive,"
said my Cousin Bertha.
"I don't think I ever saw a handsomer man.
Now,
if he had looked at me--"
The sentence was never finished,
for at this crucial moment I dropped a grammar....
I had heard enough,
however,
to excite my curiosity
to the highest pitch.
And that evening,
when I came in at five o'clock
to study,
I asked my mother what had become of Gene Hollister's aunt.
"She went away,
Hugh,"
replied my mother,
looking greatly troubled.
"Why?"
I persisted.
"It is something you are too young
to understand."
Of course I started an investigation,
and the next day at school I asked the question of Gene Hollister himself,
only
to discover that he believed his aunt
to be dead! And that night he asked his mother if his Aunt Grace were really alive,
after all?
Whereupon complications and explanations ensued between our parents,
of which we saw only the surface signs....
My father accused me of eavesdropping
(which I denied),
and sentenced me
to an afternoon of solitary confinement
for repeating something which I had heard in private.
I have reason
to believe that my mother was also reprimanded.
It must not be supposed that I permitted the matter
to rest.
In addition
to Grits Jarvis,
there was another contraband among my acquaintances,
namely,
Alec Pound,
the scrape-grace son of the Reverend Doctor Pound.
Alec had an encyclopaedic mind,
especially well stocked
with the kind of knowledge I now desired;
first and last he taught me much,
which I would better have got in another way.
To him I appealed and got the story,
my worst suspicions being confirmed.
Mrs. Whitcomb's house had been across the alley from that of Mr. Jennings,
but no one knew that anything was
"going on,"
though there had been signals from the windows--the neighbours afterwards remembered....
I listened shudderingly.
"But,"
I cried,
"they were both married!"
"What difference does that make when you love a woman?"
Alec replied grandly.
"I could tell you much worse things than that."
This he proceeded
to do.
Fascinated,
I listened
with a sickening sensation.
It was a mild afternoon in spring,
and we stood in the deep limestone gutter in front of the parsonage,
a little Gothic wooden house set in a gloomy yard.
"I thought,"
said I,
"that people couldn't love any more after they were married,
except each other."
Alec looked at me pityingly.
"You'll get over that notion,"
he assured me.
Thus another ingredient entered my character.
Denied its food at home,
good food,
my soul eagerly consumed and made part of itself the fermenting stuff that Alec Pound so willing distributed.
And it was fermenting stuff.
Let us see what it did
to me.
Working slowly but surely,
it changed
for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil instead of a holy one.
The knowledge of the tragedy of Grace Hollister started me
to seeking restlessly,
on bookshelves and elsewhere,
for a secret that forever eluded me,
and forever led me on.
The word fermenting aptly describes the process begun,
suggesting as it does something closed up,
away from air and sunlight,
continually working in secret,
engendering forces that fascinated,
yet inspired me
with fear.
Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due
to the pernicious dualism of their orthodox Christianity,
in which love was carnal and therefore evil,
and the flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit,
but something
to be deplored and condemned,
exorcised and transformed by the miracle of grace.
Now love had become a terrible power
(gripping me)
whose enchantment drove men and women from home and friends and kindred
to the uttermost parts of the earth....
It was long before I got
to sleep that night after my talk
with Alec Pound.
I alternated between the horror and the romance of the story I had heard,
supplying
for myself the details he had omitted:
I beheld the signals from the windows,
the clandestine meetings,
the sudden and desperate flight.
And
to think that all this could have happened in our city not five blocks from where I lay! My consternation and horror were concentrated on the man,--and yet I recall a curious bifurcation.
Instead of experiencing that automatic righteous indignation which my father and mother had felt,
which had animated old Mr. Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his daughter's name
to be mentioned in his presence,
which had made these people outcasts,
there welled up within me an intense sympathy and pity.
By an instinctive process somehow linked
with other experiences,
I seemed
to be able
to enter into the feelings of these two outcasts,
to understand the fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that had led them
to elude the vigilance and probity of a world
with which I myself was at odds.
I pictured them in a remote land,
shunned by mankind.
Was there something within me that might eventually draw me
to do likewise?
The desire in me
to which my father had referred,
which would brook no opposition,
which twisted and squirmed until it found its way
to its object?
I recalled the words of Jarvis,
the carpenter,
that if I ever set my heart on another man's wife,
God help him.
God help me! A wicked man! I had never beheld the handsome and fascinating Mr. Jennings,
but I visualised him now;
dark,
like all villains,
with a black moustache and snapping black eyes.
He carried a cane.
I always associated canes
with villains.
Whereupon I arose,
groped
for the matches,
lighted the gas,
and gazing at myself in the mirror was a little reassured
to find nothing sinister in my countenance....
Next
to my father's faith in a Moral Governor of the Universe was his belief in the Tariff and the Republican Party.
And this belief,
among others,
he handed on
to me.
On the cinder playground of the Academy we Republicans used
to wage,
during campaigns,
pitched battles
for the Tariff.
It did not take a great deal of courage
to be a Republican in our city,
and I was brought up
to believe that Democrats were irrational,
inferior,
and--with certain exceptions like the Hollisters--dirty beings.
There was only one degree lower,
and that was
to be a mugwump.
It was no wonder that the Hollisters were Democrats,
for they had a queer streak in them;
owing,
no doubt,
to the fact that old Mr. Jules Hollister's mother had been a Frenchwoman.
He looked like a Frenchman,
by the way,
and always wore a skullcap.
I remember one autumn afternoon having a violent quarrel
with Gene Hollister that bade fair
to end in blows,
when he suddenly demanded:--
"I'll bet you anything you don't know why you're a Republican."
"It's because I'm
for the Tariff,"
I replied triumphantly.
But his next question floored me.
What,
for example,
was the Tariff?
I tried
to bluster it out,
but
with no success.
"Do you know?"
I cried finally,
with sudden inspiration.
It turned out that he did not.
"Aren't we darned idiots,"
he asked,
"to get fighting over something we don't know anything about?"
That was Gene's French blood,
of course.
But his question rankled.
And how was I
to know that he would have got as little satisfaction if he had hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light processions which sometimes passed our house at night,
with drums beating and fifes screaming and torches waving,--thousands of citizens who were
for the Tariff
for the same reason as I:
to wit,
because they were Republicans.
Yet my father lived and died in the firm belief that the United States of America was a democracy! Resolved not
to be caught a second time in such a humiliating position by a Democrat,
I asked my father that night what the Tariff was.
But I was too young
to understand it,
he said.
I was
to take his word
for it that the country would go
to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the Tariff were taken away.
Here,
in a nutshell,
though neither he nor I realized it,
was the political instruction of the marching hordes.
Theirs not
to reason why.
I was too young,
they too ignorant.
Such is the method of Authority! The steel-mills of Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton,
he continued,
would be forced
to shut down,
and thousands of workmen would starve.
This was just a sample of what would happen.
Prosperity would cease,
he declared.
That word,
Prosperity,
made a deep impression on me,
and I recall the certain reverential emphasis he laid on it.
And while my solicitude
for the workmen was not so great as his and Mr. Durrett's,
I was concerned as
to what would happen
to us if those twin gods,
the Tariff and Prosperity,
should take their departure from the land.
Knowing my love
for the good things of the table,
my father intimated,
with a rare humour I failed
to appreciate,
that we should have
to live henceforth in spartan simplicity.
After that,
like the intelligent workman,
I was firmer than ever
for the Tariff.
Such was the idealistic plane on which--and from a good man--I received my first political instruction! And
for a long time I connected the dominance of the Republican Party
with the continuation of manna and quails,
in other words,
with nothing that had
to do
with the spiritual welfare of any citizen,
but
with clothing and food and material comforts.
My education was progressing....
Though my father revered Plato and Aristotle,
he did not,
apparently,
take very seriously the contention that that government alone is good
"which seeks
to attain the permanent interests of the governed by evolving the character of its citizens."
To put the matter brutally,
politics,
despite the lofty sentiments on the transparencies in torchlight processions,
had only
to do
with the belly,
not the soul.
Politics and government,
one perceives,
had nothing
to do
with religion,
nor education
with any of these.
A secularized and disjointed world! Our leading citizens,
learned in the classics though some of them might be,
paid no heed
to the dictum of the Greek idealist,
who was more practical than they would have supposed.
"The man who does not carry his city within his heart is a spiritual starveling."
One evening,
a year or two after that tariff campaign,
I was pretending
to study my lessons under the student lamp in the sitting-room while my mother sewed and my father wrote at his desk,
when there was a ring at the door-bell.
I welcomed any interruption,
even though the visitor proved
to be only the druggist's boy;
and there was always the possibility of a telegram announcing,
for instance,
the death of a relative.
Such had once been the case when my Uncle Avery Paret had died in New York,
and I was taken out of school
for a blissful four days
for the funeral.
I went tiptoeing into the hall and peeped over the banisters while Ella opened the door.
I heard a voice which I recognized as that of Perry Blackwood's father asking
for Mr. Paret;
and then
to my astonishment,
I saw filing after him into the parlour some ten or twelve persons.
With the exception of Mr. Ogilvy,
who belonged
to one of our old families,
and Mr. Watling,
a lawyer who had married the youngest of Gene Hollister's aunts,
the visitors entered stealthily,
after the manner of burglars;
some of these were heavy-jowled,
and all had an air of mystery that raised my curiosity and excitement
to the highest pitch.
I caught hold of Ella as she came up the stairs,
but she tore herself free,
and announced
to my father that Mr. Josiah Blackwood and other gentlemen had asked
to see him.
My father seemed puzzled as he went downstairs....
A long interval elapsed,
during which I did not make even a pretence of looking at my arithmetic.
At times the low hum of voices rose
to what was almost an uproar,
and on occasions I distinguished a marked Irish brogue.
"I wonder what they want?"
said my mother,
nervously.
At last we heard the front door shut behind them,
and my father came upstairs,
his usually serene face wearing a disturbed expression.
"Who in the world was it,
Mr. Paret?"
asked my mother.
My father sat down in the arm-chair.
He was clearly making an effort
for self-control.
"Blackwood and Ogilvy and Watling and some city politicians,"
he exclaimed.
"Politicians!"
she repeated.
"What did they want?
That is,
if it's anything you can tell me,"
she added apologetically.
"They wished me
to be the Republican candidate
for the mayor of this city."
This tremendous news took me off my feet.
My father mayor!
"Of course you didn't consider it,
Mr. Paret,"
my mother was saying.
"Consider it!"
he echoed reprovingly.
"I can't imagine what Ogilvy and Watling and Josiah Blackwood were thinking of! They are out of their heads.
I as much as told them so."
This was more than I could bear,
for I had already pictured myself telling the news
to envious schoolmates.
"Oh,
father,
why didn't you take it?"
I cried.
By this time,
when he turned
to me,
he had regained his usual expression.
"You don't know what you're talking about,
Hugh,"
he said.
"Accept a political office! That sort of thing is left
to politicians."
The tone in which he spoke warned me that a continuation of the conversation would be unwise,
and my mother also understood that the discussion was closed.
He went back
to his desk,
and began writing again as though nothing had happened.
As
for me,
I was left in a palpitating state of excitement which my father's self-control or sang-froid only served
to irritate and enhance,
and my head was fairly spinning as,
covertly,
I watched his pen steadily covering the paper.
How could he--how could any man of flesh and blood sit down calmly after having been offered the highest honour in the gift of his community! And he had spurned it as if Mr. Blackwood and the others had gratuitously insulted him! And how was it,
if my father so revered the Republican Party that he would not suffer it
to be mentioned slightingly in his presence,
that he had refused contemptuously
to be its mayor?...
The next day at school,
however,
I managed
to let it be known that the offer had been made and declined.
After all,
this seemed
to make my father a bigger man than if he had accepted it.
Naturally I was asked why he had declined it.
"He wouldn't take it,"
I replied scornfully.
"Office-holding should be left
to politicians."
Ralph Hambleton,
with his precocious and cynical knowledge of the world,
minimized my triumph by declaring that he would rather be his grandfather,
Nathaniel Durrett,
than the mayor of the biggest city in the country.
Politicians,
he said,
were bloodsuckers and thieves,
and the only reason
for holding office was that it enabled one
to steal the taxpayers'
money....
As I have intimated,
my vision of a future literary career waxed and waned,
but a belief that I was going
to be Somebody rarely deserted me.
If not a literary lion,
what was that Somebody
to be?
Such an environment as mine was woefully lacking in heroic figures
to satisfy the romantic soul.
In view of the experience I have just related,
it is not surprising that the notion of becoming a statesman did not appeal
to me;
nor is it
to be wondered at,
despite the somewhat exaggerated respect and awe in which Ralph's grandfather was held by my father and other influential persons,
that I failed
to be stirred by the elements of greatness in the grim personality of our first citizen,
the iron-master.
For he possessed such elements.
He lived alone in Ingrain Street in an uncompromising mansion I always associated
with the Sabbath,
not only because I used
to be taken there on decorous Sunday visits by my father,
but because it was the very quintessence of Presbyterianism.
The moment I entered its
"portals"--as Mr. Hawthorne appropriately would have called them--my spirit was overwhelmed and suffocated by its formality and orderliness.
Within its stern walls Nathaniel Durrett had made a model universe of his own,
such as the Deity of the Westminster Confession had no doubt meant his greater one
to be if man had not rebelled and foiled him....
It was a world from which I was determined
to escape at any cost.
My father and I were always ushered into the gloomy library,
with its high ceiling,
with its long windows that reached almost
to the rococo cornice,
with its cold marble mantelpiece that reminded me of a tombstone,
with its interminable book shelves filled
with yellow bindings.
On the centre table,
in addition
to a ponderous Bible,
was one of those old-fashioned carafes of red glass tipped
with blue surmounted by a tumbler of blue tipped
with red.
Behind this table Mr. Durrett sat reading a volume of sermons,
a really handsome old man in his black tie and pleated shirt;
tall and spare,
straight as a ramrod,
with a finely moulded head and straight nose and sinewy hands the colour of mulberry stain.
He called my father by his first name,
an immense compliment,
considering how few dared
to do so.
"Well,
Matthew,"
the old man would remark,
after they had discussed Dr. Pound's latest flight on the nature of the Trinity or the depravity of man,
or horticulture,
or the Republican Party,
"do you have any better news of Hugh at school?"
"I regret
to say,
Mr. Durrett,"
my father would reply,
"that he does not yet seem
to be aroused
to a sense of his opportunities."
Whereupon Mr. Durrett would gimble me
with a blue eye that lurked beneath grizzled brows,
quite as painful a proceeding as if he used an iron tool.
I almost pity myself when I think of what a forlorn stranger I was in their company.
They two,
indeed,
were of one kind,
and I of another sort who could never understand them,--nor they me.
To what depths of despair they reduced me they never knew,
and yet they were doing it all
for my good! They only managed
to convince me that my love of folly was ineradicable,
and that I was on my way head first
for perdition.
I always looked,
during these excruciating and personal moments,
at the coloured glass bottle.
"It grieves me
to hear it,
Hugh,"
Mr. Durrett invariably declared.
"You'll never come
to any good without study.
Now when I was your age..."
I knew his history by heart,
a common one in this country,
although he made an honourable name instead of a dishonourable one.
And when I contrast him
with those of his successors whom I was
to know later...! But I shall not anticipate.
American genius had not then evolved the false entry method of overcapitalization.
A thrilling history,
Mr. Durrett's,
could I but have entered into it.
I did not reflect then that this stern old man must have throbbed once;
nay,
fire and energy still remained in his bowels,
else he could not have continued
to dominate a city.
Nor did it occur
to me that the great steel-works that lighted the southern sky were the result of a passion,
of dreams similar
to those possessing me,
but which I could not express.
He had founded a family whose position was virtually hereditary,
gained riches which
for those days were great,
compelled men
to speak his name
with a certain awe.
But of what use were such riches as his when his religion and morality compelled him
to banish from him all the joys in the power of riches
to bring?
No,
I didn't want
to be an iron-master.
But it may have been about this time that I began
to be impressed
with the power of wealth,
the adulation and reverence it commanded,
the importance in which it clothed all who shared in it....
The private school I attended in the company of other boys
with whom I was brought up was called Densmore Academy,
a large,
square building of a then hideous modernity,
built of smooth,
orange-red bricks
with threads of black mortar between them.
One reads of happy school days,
yet I fail
to recall any really happy hours spent there,
even in the yard,
which was covered
with black cinders that cut you when you fell.
I think of it as a penitentiary,
and the memory of the barred lower windows gives substance
to this impression.
I suppose I learned something during the seven years of my incarceration.
All of value,
had its teachers known anything of youthful psychology,
of natural bent,
could have been put into me in three.
At least four criminally wasted years,
to say nothing of the benumbing and desiccating effect of that old system of education! Chalk and chalk-dust! The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map,
Italy a man's boot which I drew painfully,
with many yawns;
history no glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning of Things,
no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man,
but an endless marching and counter- marching up and down the map,
weary columns of figures
to be learned by rote instantly
to be forgotten again.
"On June the 7th General So-and-so proceeded
with his whole army--"
where?
What does it matter?
One little chapter of Carlyle,
illuminated by a teacher of understanding,
were worth a million such text-books.
Alas,
for the hatred of Virgil!
"Paret"
(a shiver),
"begin at the one hundred and thirtieth line and translate!"
I can hear myself droning out in detestable English a meaningless portion of that endless journey of the pious AEneas;
can see Gene Hollister,
with heart-rending glances of despair,
stumbling through Cornelius Nepos in an unventilated room
with chalk-rubbed blackboards and heavy odours of ink and stale lunch.
And I graduated from Densmore Academy,
the best school in our city,
in the 80's,
without having been taught even the rudiments of citizenship.
Knowledge was presented
to us as a corpse,
which bit by bit we painfully dissected.
We never glimpsed the living,
growing thing,
never experienced the Spirit,
the same spirit that was able magically
to waft me from a wintry Lyme Street
to the South Seas,
the energizing,
electrifying Spirit of true achievement,
of life,
of God himself.
Little by little its flames were smothered until in manhood there seemed no spark of it left alive.
Many years were
to pass ere it was
to revive again,
as by a miracle.
I travelled.
Awakening at dawn,
I saw,
framed in a port-hole,
rose-red Seriphos set in a living blue that paled the sapphire;
the seas Ulysses had sailed,
and the company of the Argonauts.
My soul was steeped in unimagined colour,
and in the memory of one rapturous instant is gathered what I was soon
to see of Greece,
is focussed the meaning of history,
poetry and art.
I was
to stand one evening in spring on the mound where heroes sleep and gaze upon the plain of Marathon between darkening mountains and the blue thread of the strait peaceful now,
flushed
with pink and white blossoms of fruit and almond trees;
to sit on the cliff-throne whence a Persian King had looked down upon a Salamis fought and lost....
In that port-hole glimpse a Themistocles was revealed,
a Socrates,
a Homer and a Phidias,
an AEschylus,
and a Pericles;
yes,
and a John brooding Revelations on his sea-girt rock as twilight falls over the waters....
I saw the Roman Empire,
that Scarlet Woman whose sands were dyed crimson
with blood
to appease her harlotry,
whose ships were laden
with treasures from the immutable East,
grain from the valley of the Nile,
spices from Arabia,
precious purple stuffs from Tyre,
tribute and spoil,
slaves and jewels from conquered nations she absorbed;
and yet whose very emperors were the unconscious instruments of a Progress they wot not of,
preserved
to the West by Marathon and Salamis.
With Caesar's legions its message went forth across Hispania
to the cliffs of the wild western ocean,
through Hercynian forests
to tribes that dwelt where great rivers roll up their bars by misty,
northern seas,
and even
to Celtic fastnesses beyond the Wall....
IV.
In and out of my early memories like a dancing ray of sunlight flits the spirit of Nancy.
I was always fond of her,
but in extreme youth I accepted her incense
with masculine complacency and took her allegiance
for granted,
never seeking
to fathom the nature of the spell I exercised over her.
Naturally other children teased me about her;
but what was worse,
with that charming lack of self-consciousness and consideration
for what in after life are called the finer feelings,
they teased her about me before me,
my presence deterring them not at all.
I can see them hopping around her in the Peters yard crying out:--
"Nancy's in love
with Hugh! Nancy's in love
with Hugh!"
A sufficiently thrilling pastime,
this,
for Nancy could take care of herself.
I was a bungler beside her when it came
to retaliation,
and not the least of her attractions
for me was her capacity
for anger:
fury would be a better term.
She would fly at them--even as she flew at the head-hunters when the Petrel was menaced;
and she could run like a deer.
Woe
to the unfortunate victim she overtook! Masculine strength,
exercised apologetically,
availed but little,
and I have seen Russell Peters and Gene Hollister retire from such encounters humiliated and weeping.
She never caught Ralph;
his methods of torture were more intelligent and subtle than Gene's and Russell's,
but she was his equal when it came
to a question of tongues.
"I know what's the matter
with you,
Ralph Hambleton,"
she would say.
"You're jealous."
An accusation that invariably put him on the defensive.
"You think all the girls are in love
with you,
don't you?"
These scenes I found somewhat embarrassing.
Not so Nancy.
After discomfiting her tormenters,
or wounding and scattering them,
she would return
to my side....
In spite of her frankly expressed preference
for me she had an elusiveness that made a continual appeal
to my imagination.
She was never obvious or commonplace,
and long before I began
to experience the discomforts and sufferings of youthful love I was fascinated by a nature eloquent
with contradictions and inconsistencies.
She was a tomboy,
yet her own sex was enhanced rather than overwhelmed by contact
with the other:
and no matter how many trees she climbed she never seemed
to lose her daintiness.
It was innate.
She could,
at times,
be surprisingly demure.
These impressions of her daintiness and demureness are particularly vivid in a picture my memory has retained of our walking together,
unattended,
to Susan Blackwood's birthday party.
She must have been about twelve years old.
It was the first time I had escorted her or any other girl
to a party;
Mrs. Willett had smiled over the proceeding,
but Nancy and I took it most seriously,
as symbolic of things
to come.
I can see Powell Street,
where Nancy lived,
at four o'clock on a mild and cloudy December afternoon,
the decorous,
retiring houses,
Nancy on one side of the pavement by the iron fences and I on the other by the tree boxes.
I can't remember her dress,
only the exquisite sense of her slimness and daintiness comes back
to me,
of her dark hair in a long braid tied
with a red ribbon,
of her slender legs clad in black stockings of shining silk.
We felt the occasion
to be somehow too significant,
too eloquent
for words....
In silence we climbed the flight of stone steps that led up
to the Blackwood mansion,
when suddenly the door was opened,
letting out sounds of music and revelry.
Mr. Blackwood's coloured butler,
Ned,
beamed at us hospitably,
inviting us
to enter the brightness within.
The shades were drawn,
the carpets were covered
with festal canvas,
the folding doors between the square rooms were flung back,
the prisms of the big chandeliers flung their light over animated groups of matrons and children.
Mrs. Watling,
the mother of the Watling twins--too young
to be present was directing
with vivacity the game of
"King William was King James's son,"
and Mrs. McAlery was playing the piano.
"Now choose you East,
now choose you West,
Now choose the one you love the best!"
Tom Peters,
in a velvet suit and consequently very miserable,
refused
to embrace Ethel Hollister;
while the scornful Julia lurked in a corner:
nothing would induce her
to enter such a foolish game.
I experienced a novel discomfiture when Ralph kissed Nancy....
Afterwards came the feast,
from which Ham Durrett,
in a pink paper cap
with streamers,
was at length forcibly removed by his mother.
Thus early did he betray his love
for the flesh pots....
It was not until I was sixteen that a player came and touched the keys of my soul,
and it awoke,
bewildered,
at these first tender notes.
The music quickened,
tripping in ecstasy,
to change by subtle phrases into themes of exquisite suffering hitherto unexperienced.
I knew that I loved Nancy.
With the advent of longer dresses that reached
to her shoe tops a change had come over her.
The tomboy,
the willing camp-follower who loved me and was unashamed,
were gone forever,
and a mysterious,
transfigured being,
neither girl nor woman,
had magically been evolved.
Could it be possible that she loved me still?
My complacency had vanished;
suddenly I had become the aggressor,
if only I had known how to
"aggress";
but in her presence I was seized by an accursed shyness that paralyzed my tongue,
and the things I had planned
to say were left unuttered.
It was something--though I did not realize it--to be able
to feel like that.
The time came when I could no longer keep this thing
to myself.
The need of an outlet,
of a confidant,
became imperative,
and I sought out Tom Peters.
It was in February;
I remember because I had ventured--with incredible daring--to send Nancy an elaborate,
rosy Valentine;
written on the back of it in a handwriting all too thinly disguised was the following verse,
the triumphant result of much hard thinking in school hours:-- Should you of this the sender guess Without another sign,
Would you repent,
and rest content
to be his Valentine I grew hot and cold by turns when I thought of its possible effects on my chances.
One of those useless,
slushy afternoons,
I took Tom
for a walk that led us,
as dusk came on,
past Nancy's house.
Only by painful degrees did I succeed in overcoming my bashfulness;
but Tom,
when at last I had blurted out the secret,
was most sympathetic,
although the ailment from which I suffered was as yet outside of the realm of his experience.
I have used the word
"ailment"
advisedly,
since he evidently put my trouble in the same category
with diphtheria or scarlet fever,
remarking that it was
"darned hard luck."
In vain I sought
to explain that I did not regard it as such in the least;
there was suffering,
I admitted,
but a degree of bliss none could comprehend who had not felt it.
He refused
to be envious,
or at least
to betray envy;
yet he was curious,
asking many questions,
and I had reason
to think before we parted that his admiration
for me was increased.
Was it possible that he,
too,
didn't love Nancy?
No,
it was funny,
but he didn't.
He failed
to see much in girls:
his tone remained commiserating,
yet he began
to take an interest in the progress of my suit.
For a time I had no progress
to report.
Out of consideration
for those members of our weekly dancing class whose parents were Episcopalians the meetings were discontinued during Lent,
and
to call would have demanded a courage not in me;
I should have become an object of ridicule among my friends and I would have died rather than face Nancy's mother and the members of her household.
I set about making ingenious plans
with a view
to encounters that might appear casual.
Nancy's school was dismissed at two,
so was mine.
By walking fast I could reach Salisbury Street,
near St. Mary's Seminary
for Young Ladies,
in time
to catch her,
but even then
for many days I was doomed
to disappointment.
She was either in company
with other girls,
or else she had taken another route;
this I surmised led past Sophy McAlery's house,
and I enlisted Tom as a confederate.
He was
to make straight
for the McAlery's on Elm while I followed Powell,
two short blocks away,
and if Nancy went
to Sophy's and left there alone he was
to announce the fact by a preconcerted signal.
Through long and persistent practice he had acquired a whistle shrill enough
to wake the dead,
accomplished by placing a finger of each hand between his teeth;--a gift that was the envy of his acquaintances,
and the subject of much discussion as
to whether his teeth were peculiar.
Tom insisted that they were;
it was an added distinction.
On this occasion he came up behind Nancy as she was leaving Sophy's gate and immediately sounded the alarm.
She leaped in the air,
dropped her school-books and whirled on him.
"Tom Peters! How dare you frighten me so!"
she cried.
Tom regarded her in sudden dismay.
"I--I didn't mean to,"
he said.
"I didn't think you were so near."
"But you must have seen me."
"I wasn't paying much attention,"
he equivocated,--a remark not calculated
to appease her anger.
"Why were you doing it?"
"I was just practising,"
said Tom.
"Practising!"
exclaimed Nancy,
scornfully.
"I shouldn't think you needed
to practise that any more."
"Oh,
I've done it louder,"
he declared,
"Listen!"
She seized his hands,
snatching them away from his lips.
At this critical moment I appeared around the corner considerably out of breath,
my heart beating like a watchman's rattle.
I tried
to feign nonchalance.
"Hello,
Tom,"
I said.
"Hello,
Nancy.
What's the matter?"
"It's Tom--he frightened me out of my senses."
Dropping his wrists,
she gave me a most disconcerting look;
there was in it the suspicion of a smile.
"What are you doing here,
Hugh?"
"I heard Tom,"
I explained.
"I should think you might have.
Where were you?"
"Over in another street,"
I answered,
with deliberate vagueness.
Nancy had suddenly become demure.
I did not dare look at her,
but I had a most uncomfortable notion that she suspected the plot.
Meanwhile we had begun
to walk along,
all three of us,
Tom,
obviously ill at ease and discomfited,
lagging a little behind.
Just before we reached the corner I managed
to kick him.
His departure was by no means graceful.
"I've got
to go;"
he announced abruptly,
and turned down the side street.
We watched his sturdy figure as it receded.
"Well,
of all queer boys!"
said Nancy,
and we walked on again.
"He's my best friend,"
I replied warmly.
"He doesn't seem
to care much
for your company,"
said Nancy.
"Oh,
they have dinner at half past two,"
I explained.
"Aren't you afraid of missing yours,
Hugh?"
she asked wickedly.
"I've got time.
I'd--I'd rather be
with you."
After making which audacious remark I was seized by a spasm of apprehension.
But nothing happened.
Nancy remained demure.
She didn't remind me that I had reflected upon Tom.
"That's nice of you,
Hugh."
"Oh,
I'm not saying it because it's nice,"
I faltered.
"I'd rather be
with you than--with anybody."
This was indeed the acme of daring.
I couldn't believe I had actually said it.
But again I received no rebuke;
instead came a remark that set me palpitating,
that I treasured
for many weeks
to come.
"I got a very nice valentine,"
she informed me.
"What was it like?"
I asked thickly.
"Oh,
beautiful! All pink lace and--and Cupids,
and the picture of a young man and a young woman in a garden."
"Was that all?"
"Oh,
no,
there was a verse,
in the oddest handwriting.
I wonder who sent it?"
"Perhaps Ralph,"
I hazarded ecstatically.
"Ralph couldn't write poetry,"
she replied disdainfully.
"Besides,
it was very good poetry."
I suggested other possible authors and admirers.
She rejected them all.
We reached her gate,
and I lingered.
As she looked down at me from the stone steps her eyes shone
with a soft light that filled me
with radiance,
and into her voice had come a questioning,
shy note that thrilled the more because it revealed a new Nancy of whom I had not dreamed.
"Perhaps I'll meet you again--coming from school,"
I said.
"Perhaps,"
she answered.
"You'll be late
to dinner,
Hugh,
if you don't go...."
I was late,
and unable
to eat much dinner,
somewhat
to my mother's alarm.
Love had taken away my appetite....
After dinner,
when I was wandering aimlessly about the yard,
Tom appeared on the other side of the fence.
"Don't ever ask me
to do that again,"
he said gloomily.
I did meet Nancy again coming from school,
not every day,
but nearly every day.
At first we pretended that there was no arrangement in this,
and we both feigned surprise when we encountered one another.
It was Nancy who possessed the courage that I lacked.
One afternoon she said:--
"I think I'd better walk
with the girls to-morrow,
Hugh."
I protested,
but she was firm.
And after that it was an understood thing that on certain days I should go directly home,
feeling like an exile.
Sophy McAlery had begun
to complain:
and I gathered that Sophy was Nancy's confidante.
The other girls had begun
to gossip.
It was Nancy who conceived the brilliant idea--the more delightful because she said nothing about it
to me--of making use of Sophy.
She would leave school
with Sophy,
and I waited on the corner near the McAlery house.
Poor Sophy! She was always of those who piped while others danced.
In those days she had two straw-coloured pigtails,
and her plain,
faithful face is before me as I write.
She never betrayed
to me the excitement that filled her at being the accomplice of our romance.
Gossip raged,
of course.
Far from being disturbed,
we used it,
so
to speak,
as a handle
for our love-making,
which was carried on in an inferential rather than a