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Illustration: Tom was fronting the firebrand Dabney like a man.
THE QUICKENING
By
FRANCIS LYNDE
Author of
The Grafters,
The Master of Appleby,
etc., etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
BY E.M. ASHE
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright 1906
Francis Lynde
March
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOKBINDERS AND PRINTERS
BROOKLYN, N.Y.
To My Mother
CHAPTER PAGE
I Bethesda 1
II The Cedars of Lebanon 11
III Of the Fathers Upon the Children 21
IV The Newer Exodus 25
V The Dabneys of Deer Trace 32
VI Blue Blood and Red 44
VII The Prayer of the Righteous 57
VIII The Backslider 65
IX The Race to the Swift 75
X The Shadow of the Rock 90
XI The Trumpet-Call 99
XII The Iron in the Forge Fire 107
XIII A Sister of Charity 116
XIV On Jordan's Bank 124
XV Noël 140
XVI The Bubble, Reputation 145
XVII Absalom, My Son! 160
XVIII The Awakening 172
XIX Issachar 188
XX Dry Wells 201
XXI Gilgal 216
XXII Love 226
XXIII Tarred Ropes 242
XXIV The Under-Depths 255
XXV The Plow in the Furrow 265
XXVI As With a Mantle 279
XXVII Swept and Garnished 294
XXVIII The Burden of Habakkuk 306
XXIX As Brutes That Perish 319
XXX Through a Glass Darkly 331
XXXI The Net of the Fowler 338
XXXII Whoso Diggeth a Pit 347
XXXIII The Wine-Press of Wrath 357
XXXIV The Smoke of the Furnace 366
XXXV A Soul in Shackles 378
XXXVI Free Among the Dead 387
XXXVII Whose Yesterdays Look Backward 399
THE QUICKENING
I
BETHESDA
The revival in Paradise Valley, conducted by the Reverend Silas Crafts,
of South Tredegar, was in the middle of its second week, and the
field--to use Brother Crafts' own word--was white to the harvest.
Little Zoar, the square, weather-tinged wooden church at the head of the
valley, built upon land donated to the denomination in times long past
by an impenitent but generous Major Dabney, stood a little way back from
the pike in a grove of young pines. By half-past six of the June evening
the revivalist's congregation had begun to assemble.
Those who came farthest were first on the ground; and by the time
twelve-year-old Thomas Jefferson, spatting barefooted up the dusty pike,
had reached the church-house with the key, there was a goodly sprinkling
of unhitched teams in the grove, the horses champing their feed noisily
in the wagon-boxes, and the people gathering in little neighborhood
knots to discuss gravely the one topic uppermost in all minds--the
present outpouring of grace on Paradise Valley and the region
round-about.
"D'ye reckon the Elder'll make it this time with his brother-in-law?"
asked a tall, flat-chested mountaineer from the Pine Knob uplands.
"Samantha Parkins, she allows that Caleb has done sinned away his day o'
grace," said another Pine Knobber, "but I ain't goin' that far. Caleb's
a sight like the iron he makes in that old furnace o' his'n--honest and
even-grained, and just as good for plow-points and the like as it is for
soap-kittles. But hot 'r cold, it's just the same; ye cayn't change hit,
and ye cayn't change _him_."
"That's about right," said a third. "It looks to me like Caleb done sot
his stakes where he's goin' to run the furrow. If livin' a dozen years
and mo' with such a sancterfied woman as Martha Gordon won't make out to
toll a man up to the pearly gates, I allow the' ain't no preacher goin'
to do it."
"Well, now; maybe that's the reason," drawled Japheth Pettigrass, the
only unmarried man in the small circle of listeners; but he was promptly
put down by the tall mountaineer.
"Hold on thar, Japhe Pettigrass! I allow the' ain't no dyed-in-the-wool
hawss-trader like you goin' to stand up and say anything ag'inst Marthy
Gordon while I'm a-listenin'. I'm recollectin' right now the time when
she sot up day and night for more'n a week with my Malviny--and me
a-smashin' the whisky jug acrost the wagon tire to he'p God to forgit
how no-'count and triflin' I'd been."
Thomas Jefferson had opened the church-house doors and windows and was
out among the unhitched teams looking for Scrap Pendry, who had been one
of a score to go forward for prayers the night before. So it happened
that he overheard the flat-chested mountaineer's tribute to his mother.
It warmed him generously; but there was a boyish scowl for Japheth
Pettigrass. What had the horse-trader been saying to make it needful for
Bill Layne to speak up as his mother's defender? Thomas Jefferson
recorded a black mark against Pettigrass's name, and went on to search
for Scrap.
"What you hiding for?" he demanded, when the newly-made convert was
discovered skulking in the dusky shadows of the pines beyond the
farthest outlying wagon.
"I ain't hidin'," was the half-defiant answer.
"You're a liar," said Thomas Jefferson coolly, ducking skilfully to
escape the consequences.
But there were no consequences. Young Pendry's heavy face flushed a dull
red,--that could be seen even in the growing dusk,--but he made no move
retaliatory. Thomas Jefferson walked slowly around him, wary as a wild
creature of the wood, and to the full as curious. Then he stuck out his
hand awkwardly.
"I only meant it 'over the left,' Scrap, hope to die," he said. "I
allowed I'd just like to know for sure if what you done last night made
any difference."
Scrap was silent, glibness of tongue not being among the gifts of the
East Tennessee landward bred. But he grasped the out-thrust hand
heartily and crushed it forgivingly.
"Come on out where the folks are," urged Thomas Jefferson. "Sim Cantrell
and the other fellows are allowin' you're afeard."
"I ain't afeard," denied the convert.
"No; but you're sort o' 'shamed, and that's about the same thing, I
reckon. Come on out; I'll go 'long with you."
Then spake the new-born love in the heart of the big, rough, country
boy. "I cayn't onderstand how you can hold out, Tom-Jeff. I've come
thoo', praise the Lord! but I jest natchelly _got_ to have stars for my
crown. You say you'll go 'long with me, Tom-Jeff: say it ag'in, and mean
it."
Again the doubtful-curious look came into Thomas Jefferson's gray eyes,
and he would not commit himself. Nevertheless, one point was safely
established, and it was a point gained: the miraculous thing called
conversion was beyond question real in Scrap's case. He turned to lead
the way between the wagons. The lamps were lighted in the church and the
people were filling the benches, while the choir gathered around the
tuneless little cottage organ to practise the hymns.
"I--I'm studyin' about it some, Scrap," he confessed, half angry with
himself that the admission sent the blood to his cheeks. "Let's go in."
It was admitted on all sides that Brother Crafts was a powerful
preacher. Other men had wrestled mightily in Zoar, but none to such
heart-shaking purpose. When he expatiated on the ineffable glories of
Heaven and the joys of the redeemed, which was not too often, the
reflection of the celestial effulgences could be seen rippling like
sunshine on the sea of faces spreading away from the shore of the pulpit
steps. When he spoke of hell and its terrors, which was frequently and
with thrilling descriptive, even so hardened a scoffer as Japheth
Pettigrass was wont to declare that you could hear the crackling of the
flames and the cries of the doomed.
The opening exercises were over--the Bible reading, the long,
impassioned prayer, the hymn singing--and the preacher stood up in a
hush that could be felt, and stepped forward to the small desk which
served for a pulpit.
He was a tall man, thin and erect, with a sallow, beardless face
unrelieved by any line of mobility, but redeemed and almost glorified by
the deep-set, eager, burning eyes. He had a way of bending to his
audience when he spoke, with one long arm crooked behind him and the
other extended to mark the sentences with a pointing finger, as if to
remove the final trace of impersonality; to break down the last of the
barriers of reserve which might be thrown up by the impenitent heart.
The hush remained unbroken till he announced his text in a voice that
rang like an alarm-bell pealed in the dead of night. There are voices
and voices, but only now and then one which is pitched in the key of the
spheral harmonies. When the Reverend Silas hurled out the Baptist's
words, _Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!_ the responsive
thrill from the packed benches was like the sympathetic vibration of
harp-strings answering a trumpet blast.
The thin, large-jointed hand went up for silence, as if there could be a
silence more profound than that which already hung on his word. Then he
began slowly, and in phrase so simple that the youngest child could not
fail to follow him, to draw the picture of that Judean morning scene on
the banks of the Jordan, of the wild, unkempt, skin-clad forerunner,
thundering forth his message to a sin--cursed world. On what deaf ears
had it fallen among the multitude gathered on Jordan's bank! On what
deaf ears would it fall in Zoar church this night!
He classed them rapidly, and with a prescient insight into the mazes of
human frailty that made it seem as if the doors of all hearts were open
to him: the Pharisee, who paid tithes--mint, anise and cummin--and
prayed daily on the street corners, and saw no need for repentance; the
youth and the maiden, with their lips to the brimming cup of worldly
pleasures, saying to the faithful monitor, yet a little while longer and
we will hear thee; the man and woman grown, fighting the battle for
bread, living toilfully for time and the things that perish, and hearing
the warning voice faintly and ever more faintly as the years pass; the
aged, steeped and sodden in sin unrepented of, and with the spiritual
senses all dulled and blunted by lifelong rebellion, willing now to hear
and obey, it might be, but calling in vain on the merciful and
long-suffering God they had so long rejected.
Then, suddenly, he passed from pleading to denunciation. The setting of
The Great White Throne and the awful terrors of the Judgment Day were
depicted in words that fell from the thin lips like the sentence of an
inexorable judge.
"'Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the
devil and his angels!'" he thundered, and a shudder ran through the
crowded church as if an earthquake had shaken the valley. "There is your
end, impenitent soul; and, alas! for you, it is only the beginning of a
fearful eternity! Think of it, you who have time to think of everything
but the salvation of your soul, your sins, and the awful doom which is
awaiting you! Think of it, you who are throwing your lives away in the
pleasures of this world; you who have broken God's commands; you who
have stolen when you thought no eye was on you; you who have so often
committed murder in your hating hearts! Think not that you will be
suffered to escape! Every servant of the most high God who has ever
declared His message to you will be there to denounce you: I, Silas
Crafts, will meet you at the judgment-seat of Christ to bear my witness
against you!"
A man, red-faced and with the devil of the cup of trembling peering from
under his shaggy eyebrows, rose unsteadily from his seat on the bench
nearest the door.
"'Sh! he's fotched Tike Bryerson!" flew the whisper from lip to ear; but
the man with the trembling madness in his eyes was backing toward the
door. Suddenly he stooped and rose again with a backwoodsman's rifle in
his hands, and his voice sheared the breathless silence like the snarl
of a wild beast at bay.
"No, by jacks, ye won't witness ag'inst me, Silas Crafts; ye'll be
dead!"
The crack of the rifle went with the words, and at the flash of the
piece the man sprang backward through the doorway and was gone. Happily,
he had been too drunk or too tremulous to shoot straight. The preacher
was unhurt, and he was quick to quell the rising tumult and to turn the
incident to good account.
"There went the arrow of conviction quivering to the heart of a
murderer!" he cried, dominating the commotion with his marvelous voice.
"Come back here, Japheth Pettigrass; and you, William Layne: God
Almighty will deal with that poor sinner in His own way. For him, for
every impenitent soul here to-night, the hour has struck. 'Now is the
accepted time; now is the day of salvation.' While we are singing, _Just
as I am, without one plea_, let the doors of divine mercy stand opened
wide, and let every hard heart be softened. Come, ye disconsolate; come
forward to the mercy-seat as we sing."
The old, soul-moving, revival hymn was lifted in a triumphant burst of
sound, and Thomas Jefferson's heart began to pound like a trip-hammer.
Was this his call--his one last chance to enter the ark of safety? Just
there was the pinch. A saying of Japheth Pettigrass's, overheard in
Hargis's store on the first day of the meetings, flicked into his mind
and stuck there: "Hit's scare, first, last, and all the time, with
Brother Silas. He knows mighty well that a good bunch o' hickories,
that'll bring the blood every cut, beats a sugar kittle out o' sight
when it comes to fillin' the anxious seat." Was it really his call? Or
was he only scared?
The twelve-year-old brain grappled hardily with the problem which has
thrown many an older wrestler. This he knew: that while he had been
listening with outward ears to the restless champing and stamping of the
horses among the pines, but with his inmost soul to the burning words of
his uncle, the preacher, a great fear had laid hold of him--a fear
mightier than desire or shame, or love or hatred, or any spring of
action known to him. It was lifting him to his feet; it was edging him
past the others on the bench and out into the aisle with the mourners
who were crowding the space in front of the pulpit platform. At the turn
he heard his mother's low-murmured, "I thank Thee, O God!" and saw the
grim, set smile on his father's face. Then he fell on his knees on the
rough-hewn floor, with the tall mountaineer called William Layne on his
right, and on his left a young girl from the choir who was sobbing
softly in her handkerchief.
* * * * *
June being the queen of the months in the valleys of Tennessee, the
revival converts of Little Zoar had the pick and choice of all the
Sundays of the year for the day of their baptizing.
The font was of great nature's own providing, as was the mighty temple
housing it,--a clear pool in the creek, with the green-walled aisles in
the June forest leading down to it, and the blue arch of the flawless
June sky for a dome resplendent.
All Paradise was there to see and hear and bear witness, as a matter of
course; and there were not wanting farm-wagon loads from the great
valley and from the Pine Knob highlands. Major Dabney was among the
onlookers, sitting his clean-limbed Hambletonian, and twisting his huge
white mustaches until they stood out like strange and fierce-looking
horns. Also, in the outer ranks of skepticism, Major Dabney's foreman
and horse-trader, Japheth Pettigrass, found a place. On the opposite
bank of the stream were the few negroes owning Major Dabney now as
"Majah Boss," as some of them,--most of them, in fact--had once owned
him as "Mawstuh Majah"; and mingling freely with them were the laborers,
white and black, from the Gordon iron-furnace.
Thomas Jefferson brought up memories from that solemn rite administered
so simply and yet so impressively under the June sky, with the
many-pointing forest spires to lift the soul to heights ecstatic. One
was the singing of the choir, minimized and made celestially sweet by
the lack of bounding walls and roof. Another was the sight of his
father's face, with the grim smile gone, and the steadfast eyes gravely
tolerant as he--Thomas Jefferson--was going down into the water. A
third--and this might easily become the most lasting of all--was the
memory of how his mother clasped him in her arms as he came up out of
the water, all wet and dripping as he was, and sobbed over him as if her
heart would break.
II
THE CEDARS OF LEBANON
Thomas Jefferson's twelfth summer fell in the year 1886; a year
memorable in the annals of the Lebanon iron and coal region as the first
of an epoch, and as the year of the great flood. But the herald of
change had not yet blown his trumpet in Paradise Valley; and the world
of russet and green and limestone white, spreading itself before the
eyes of the boy sitting with his hands locked over his knees on the top
step of the porch fronting the Gordon homestead, was the same world
which, with due seasonal variations, had been his world from the
beginning.
Centering in the broad, low, split-shingled house at his back, it
widened in front to the old-fashioned flower garden, to the dooryard
with its thick turf of uncut Bermuda grass, to the white pike splotched
by the shadows of the two great poplars standing like sentinels on
either side of the gate, to the wooded hills across the creek.
It was a hot July afternoon, a full month after the revival, and Thomas
Jefferson was at that perilous pass where Satan is said to lurk for the
purpose of providing employment for the idle. He was wondering if the
shade of the hill oaks would be worth the trouble it would take to
reach it, when his mother came to the open window of the living-room: a
small, fair, well-preserved woman, this mother of the boy of twelve,
with light brown hair graying a little at the temples, and eyes
remindful of vigils, of fervent beseeching, of mighty wrestlings against
principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world.
"You, Thomas Jefferson," she said gently, but speaking as one having
authority, "you'd better be studying your Sunday lesson than sitting
there doing nothing."
"Yes'm," said the boy, but he made no move other than to hug his knees a
little closer. He wished his mother would stop calling him "Thomas
Jefferson." To be sure, it was his name, or at least two-thirds of it;
but he liked the "Buddy" of his father, or the "Tom-Jeff" of other
people a vast deal better.
Further, the thought of studying Sunday lessons begot rebellion. At
times, as during those soul-stirring revival weeks, now seemingly
receding into a far-away past, he had moments of yearning to be wholly
sanctified. But the miracle of transformation which he had confidently
expected as the result of his "coming through" was still unwrought. When
John Bates or Simeon Cantrell undertook to bully him, as aforetime,
there was the same intoxicating experience of all the visible world
going blood-red before his eyes--the same sinful desire to slay them,
one or both. And as for Sunday lessons on a day when all outdoors was
beckoning--
He stole a glance at the open window of the living-room. His mother had
gone about her housework, and he could hear her singing softly, as
befitted the still, warm day:
"O for a heart to praise my God!"
and it nettled him curiously. All hymns were beginning to have that
effect, and this one in particular always renewed the conflict between
the yearning for sanctity and a desire to do something desperately
wicked; the only middle course lay in flight. Hence, the battle being
fairly on, he stole another glance at the window, sprang afoot, and ran
silently around the house and through the peach orchard to clamber over
the low stone wall which was the only barrier on that side between the
wilderness and the sown.
Once under the trees on the mountain side, the pious prompting knocked
less clamorously at the door of his heart; and with its abatement the
temptation to say or do the desperate thing became less insistent, also.
It was always that way. When he was by himself in the forest, with no
particularly gnawing hunger for righteousness, the devil let him alone.
The thick wood was the true whisk to brush away all the naggings and
perplexities that swarmed, like house-flies in the cleared lands. Nance
Jane, the cow that did not know enough to come home at milking-time,
knew that. In the hot weather, when the blood-sucking horse-flies and
sweat-bees were worst, she would crash through the thickest underbrush
and so be swept clean of her tormentors.
Emulating Nance Jane, Thomas Jefferson stormed through the nearest
sassafras thicket and emerged regenerate. What next? High up on the
mountain side, lifted far above Sunday lessons and soul conflicts and
perplexing questions that hung answerless in a person's mind, was a
place where the cedars smelled sweet and the west wind from the "other
mountain" plashed cool in your face what time a sun-smitten Paradise
Valley was like an oven. It would be three good hours before he would
have to go after Nance Jane; and the Sunday lesson--but he had already
forgotten about the Sunday lesson.
Three-quarters of the first hour were gone, and he was warm and thirsty
when he topped the last of the densely-wooded lower slopes and came out
on a high, rock-strewn terrace thinly set with mountain cedars. Here his
feet were on familiar ground, and a little farther on, poised on the
very edge of the terrace and overtopping the tallest trees of the lower
slopes, was the great, square sandstone boulder which was his present
Mecca.
On its outward face the big rock, gray, lichened and weather-worn, was a
miniature cliff as high as the second story of a house; and at this
cliff's foot was a dripping spring with a deep, crystalline pool for its
basin. There was a time when Thomas Jefferson used to lie flat on his
stomach and quench his thirst with his face thrust into the pool. But
that was when he had got no farther than the Book of Joshua in his
daily-chapter reading of the Bible. Now he was past Judges, so he knelt
and drank from his hands, like the men of Gideon's chosen three hundred.
His thirst assuaged, he ascended the slope of the terrace to a height
whence the flat top of the cubical boulder could be reached by the help
of a low-branching tree. The summit of the great rock was one of the
sacred places in the temple of the solitudes; and when the earth became
too thickly peopled for comfort, he would come hither to lie on the very
brink of the cliff overhanging the spring, heels in air, and hands for a
chin-rest, looking down on a removed world mapping itself in softened
outlines near and far.
Men spoke of Paradise as "the valley," though it was rather a sheltered
cove with Mount Lebanon for its background and a semicircular range of
oak-grown hills for its other rampart. Splitting it endwise ran the
white streak of the pike, macadamized from the hill quarry which, a full
quarter of a century before the Civil War, had furnished the stone for
the Dabney manor-house; and paralleling the road unevenly lay a ribbon
of silver, known to less poetic souls than Thomas Jefferson's as Turkey
Creek, but loved best by him under its almost forgotten Indian name of
Chiawassee.
Beyond the valley and its inclosing hills rose the "other mountain,"
blue in the sunlight and royal purple in the shadows--the Cumberland:
source and birthplace of the cooling west wind that was whispering
softly to the cedars on high Lebanon. Thomas Jefferson called the
loftiest of the purple distances Pisgah, picturing it as the mountain
from which Moses had looked over into the Promised Land. Sometime he
would go and climb it and feast his eyes on the sight of the Canaan
beyond; yea, he might even go down and possess the good land, if so the
Lord should not hold him back as He had held Moses.
That was a high thought, quite in keeping with the sense of overlordship
bred of the upper stillnesses. To company with it, the home valley
straightway began to idealize itself from the uplifted point of view on
the mount of vision. The Paradise fields were delicately-outlined
squares of vivid green or golden yellow, or the warm red brown of the
upturned earth in the fallow places. The old negro quarters on the
Dabney grounds, many years gone to the ruin of disuse, were vine-grown
and invisible save as a spot of summer verdure; and the manor-house
itself, gray, grim and forbidding to a small boy scurrying past it in
the deepening twilight, was now no more than a great square roof with
the cheerful sunlight playing on it.
Farther down the valley, near the place where the white pike twisted
itself between two of the rampart hills to escape into the great valley
of the Tennessee, the split-shingled roof under which Thomas Jefferson
had eaten and slept since the earliest beginning of memories became also
a part of the high-mountain harmony; and the ragged, red iron-ore beds
on the slope above the furnace were softened into a blur of joyous
color.
The iron-furnace, with its alternating smoke puff and dull red flare,
struck the one jarring note in a symphony blown otherwise on great
nature's organ-pipes; but to Thomas Jefferson the furnace was as much a
part of the immutable scheme as the hills or the forests or the creek
which furnished the motive power for its air-blast. More, it stood for
him as the summary of the world's industry, as the white pike was the
world's great highway, and Major Dabney its chief citizen.
He was knocking his bare heels together and thinking idly of Major
Dabney and certain disquieting rumors lately come to Paradise, when the
tinkling drip of the spring into the pool at the foot of his perch was
interrupted by a sudden splash.
By shifting a little to the right he could see the spring. A girl of
about his own age, barefooted, and with only her tangled mat of dark
hair for a head covering, was filling her bucket in the pool. He broke a
dry twig from the nearest cedar and dropped it on her.
"You better quit that, Tom-Jeff Gordon. I taken sight o' you up there,"
said the girl, ignoring him otherwise.
"That's my spring, Nan Bryerson," he warned her dictatorially.
The girl looked up and scoffed. Hers was a face made for scoffing: oval
and finely lined, with a laughing mouth and dark eyes that had both the
fear and the fierceness of wild things in them.
"Shucks! it ain't your spring any more'n it's mine!" she retorted.
"Hit's on Maje' Dabney's land."
"Well, don't you muddy it none," said Thomas Jefferson, with threatening
emphasis.
For answer to this she put one brown foot deep into the pool and
wriggled her toes in the sandy bottom. Things began to turn red for
Thomas Jefferson, and a high, buzzing note, like the tocsin of the bees,
sang in his ears.
"Take your foot out o' that spring! Don't you mad me, Nan Bryerson!" he
cried.
She laughed up at him and flung him a taunt. "You don't darst to get
mad, Tommy-Jeffy; _you've got religion_."
It is a terrible thing to be angry in shackles. There are similes--pent
volcanoes, overcharged boilers and the like--but they are all
inadequate. Thomas Jefferson searched for missiles more deadly than dry
twigs, found none, and fell headlong--not from the rock, but from grace.
"_Damn!_" he screamed; and then, in an access of terrified remorse: "Oh,
hell, hell, hell!"
The girl laughed mockingly and took her foot from the pool, not in
deference to his outburst, but because the water was icy cold and gave
her a cramp.
"Now you've done it," she remarked. "The devil'll shore get ye for
sayin' that word, Tom-Jeff."
There was no reply, and she stepped back to see what had become of him.
He was prone, writhing in agony. She knew the way to the top of the
rock, and was presently crouching beside him.
"Don't take on like that!" she pleaded. "Times I cayn't he'p bein' mean:
looks like I was made thataway. Get up and slap me, if you want to. I
won't slap back."
But Thomas Jefferson only ground his face deeper into the thick mat of
cedar needles and begged to be let alone.
"Go away; I don't want you to talk to me!" he groaned. "You're always
making me sin!"
"That's because you're Adam and I'm Eve, ain't it? Wasn't you tellin' me
in revival time that Eve made all the 'ruction 'twixt the man and God? I
reckon she was right sorry; don't you?"
Thomas Jefferson sat up.
"You're awfully wicked, Nan," he said definitively.
"'Cause I don't believe all that about the woman and the snake and the
apple and the man?"
"You'll go to hell when you die, and then I guess you'll believe," said
Thomas Jefferson, still more definitively.
She took a red apple from the pocket of her ragged frock and gave it to
him.
"What's that for?" he asked suspiciously.
"You eat it; it's the kind you like--off 'm the tree right back of Jim
Stone's barn lot," she answered.
"You stole it, Nan Bryerson!"
"Well, what if I did? You didn't."
He bit into it, and she held him in talk till it was eaten to the core.
"Have you heard tell anything more about the new railroad?" she asked.
Thomas Jefferson shook his head. "I heard Squire Bates and Major Dabney
naming it one day last week."
"Well, it's shore comin'--right thoo' Paradise. I heard tell how it was
goin' to cut the old Maje's grass patch plumb in two, and run right
smack thoo' you-uns' peach orchard."
"Huh!" said Thomas Jefferson. "What do you reckon my father'd be doing
all that time? He'd show 'em!"
A far-away cry, long-drawn and penetrating, rose on the still air of the
lower slope and was blown on the breeze to the summit of the great rock.
"That's maw, hollerin' for me to get back home with that bucket o'
water," said the girl; and, as she was descending the tree ladder: "You
didn't s'picion why I give you that apple, did you, Tommy-Jeffy?"
"'Cause you didn't want it yourself, I reckon," said the second Adam.
"No; it was 'cause you said I was goin' to hell and I wanted comp'ny.
That apple was stole and you knowed it!"
Thomas Jefferson flung the core far out over the tree-tops and shut his
eyes till he could see without seeing red. Then he rose to the serenest
height he had yet attained and said: "I forgive you, you wicked, wicked
girl!"
Her laugh was a screaming taunt.
"But you've et the apple!" she cried; "and if you wasn't scared of goin'
to hell, you'd cuss me again--you know you would! Lemme tell you,
Tom-Jeff, if the preacher had dipped me in the creek like he did you,
I'd be a mighty sight holier than what you are. I cert'nly would."
And now anger came to its own again.
"You don't know what you're talking about, Nan Bryerson! You're nothing
but a--a miserable little heathen; my mother said you was!" he cried out
after her.
But a back-flung grimace was all the answer he had.
III
OF THE FATHERS UPON THE CHILDREN
Thomas Jefferson's grandfather, Caleb the elder, was an old man before
his son, Caleb the younger, went to the wars, and he figured in the
recollections of those who remembered him as a grim, white-haired
octogenarian who was one day carried home from the iron-furnace which he
had built, and put to bed, dead in every part save his eyes. The eyes
lived on for a year or more, following the movements of the sympathetic
or curious visitor with a quiet, divining gaze; never sleeping, they
said--though that could hardly be--until that last day of all when they
fixed themselves on the wall and followed nothing more in this world.
Caleb, the son, was well past his first youth when the Civil War broke
out; yet youthful ardor was not wanting, nor patriotism, as he defined
it, to make him the first of the Paradise folk to write his name on the
muster-roll of the South. And it was his good fortune, rather than any
lack of battle hazards, that brought him through the four fighting years
to the Appomattox end of that last running fight on the Petersburg and
Lynchburg road in which, with his own hands, he had helped to destroy
the guns of his battery.
Being alive and not dead on the memorable April Sunday when his
commander-in-chief signed the articles of capitulation in Wilmer
McLean's parlor in Appomattox town, this soldier Gordon was one among
the haggard thousands who shared the enemy's rations to bridge over the
hunger gap; and it was the sane, equable Gordon blood that enabled him
to eat his portion of the bread of defeat manfully and without
bitterness.
Later it was the steadfast Gordon courage that helped him to mount the
crippled battery horse which had been his own contribution to the lost
cause; to mount and ride painfully to the distant Southern valley,
facing the weary journey, and the uncertain future in a land despoiled,
as only a brave man might.
His homing was to the old furnace and the still older house at the foot
of Lebanon. The tale of the years succeeding may be briefed in a bare
sentence or two. It was said of him that he reached Paradise and the old
homestead late one evening, and that the next day he was making ready
for a run of iron in the antiquated blast-furnace. This may be only
neighborhood tradition, but it depicts the man: sturdy, tenacious,
dogged; a man to knot up the thread of life broken by untoward events,
following it thereafter much as if nothing had happened.
Such men are your true conservatives. When his son was born, nine years
after the great struggle had passed into history, Caleb, the soldier,
was still using charcoal for fuel and blowing his cupola fire with the
wooden air-pump whose staves had been hooped together by the hands of
his father, and whose motive power was a huge overshot wheel swinging
rhythmically below the stone dam in the creek.
The primitive air-blast being still in commission, it may itself say
that the South, in spite of the war upheaval and the far more seismic
convulsion of the reconstruction period, was still the Old South when
Caleb married Martha Crafts.
It was as much a love match as middle-age marriages are wont to be, and
following it there was Paradise gossip to assert that Caleb's wife
brought gracious womanly reforms to the cheerless bachelor house at the
furnace. Be this as it may, she certainly brought one innovation--an
atmosphere of wholesome, if somewhat austere, piety hitherto unbreathed
by the master or any of his dusky vassals.
Such moderate prosperity as the steadily pulsating iron-furnace could
bring was Martha Gordon's portion from the beginning. Yet there was a
fly in her pot of precious ointment; an obstacle to her complete
happiness which Caleb Gordon never understood, nor could be made to
understand. Like other zealous members of her communion, she took the
Bible in its entirety for her creed, striving, as frail humanity may, to
live up to it. But among the many admonitions which, for her, were no
less than divine commands, was one which she had wilfully disregarded:
_Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers._
Caleb respected her religion; stood a little in awe of it, if the truth
were known, and was careful to put no straw of hindrance in the thorny
upward way. But there are times when neutrality bites deeper than open
antagonism. In the slippery middle ground of tolerance there is no
foothold for one who would push or pull another into the kingdom of
Heaven.
Under such conditions Thomas Jefferson was sure to be the child of many
prayers on the mother's part; and perhaps of some naturally prideful
hopes on Caleb's. When a man touches forty before his firstborn is put
into his arms, he is likely to take the event seriously. Martha Gordon
would have named her son after the great apostle of her faith, but Caleb
asserted himself here and would have a manlier name-father for the boy.
So Thomas Jefferson was named, not for an apostle, nor yet for the
statesman--save by way of an intermediary. For Caleb's "Thomas
Jefferson" was the stout old schoolmaster-warrior, Stonewall Jackson;
the soldier iron-master's general while he lived, and his deified hero
ever afterward.
When the mother was able to sit up in bed she wrote a letter to her
brother Silas, the South Tredegar preacher. On the margin of the paper
she tried the name, writing it "Reverend Thomas Jefferson Gordon." It
was a rather appalling mouthful, not nearly so euphonious as the name of
the apostle would have been. But she comforted herself with the thought
that the boy would probably curtail it when he should come to a
realizing sense of ownership; and "Reverend" would fit any of the
curtailments.
So now we see to what high calling Thomas Jefferson's mother purposed
devoting him while yet he was a helpless monad in pinning-blankets; to
what end she had striven with many prayers and groanings that could not
be uttered, from year to year of his childhood.
Does it account in some measure for the self-conscious young Pharisee
kneeling on the top of the high rock under the cedars, and crying out on
the girl scoffer that she was no better than she should be?
IV
THE NEWER EXODUS
One would always remember the first day of a new creation; the day when
God said, _Let there be light_.
It has been said that nothing comes suddenly; that the unexpected is
merely the overlooked. For weeks Thomas Jefferson had been scenting the
unwonted in the air of sleepy Paradise. Once he had stumbled on the
engineers at work in the "dark woods" across the creek, spying out a
line for the new railroad. Another day he had come home late from a
fishing excursion to the upper pools to find his father shut in the
sitting-room with three strangers resplendent in town clothes, and the
talk--what he could hear of it from his post of observation on the porch
step--was of iron and coal, of a "New South," whatever that might be,
and of wonderful changes portending, which his father was exhorted to
help bring about.
But these were only the gentle heavings and crackings of the ground
premonitory of the real earthquake. That came on a day of days when, as
a reward of merit for having faultlessly recited the eighty-third Psalm
from memory, he was permitted to go to town with his father. Behold him,
then, dangling his feet--uncomfortable because they were stockinged and
shod--from the high buggy seat while the laziest of horses ambled
between the shafts up the white pike and around and over the hunched
shoulder of Mount Lebanon. This in the cool of the morning of the day of
revelations.
In spite of the premonitory tremblings, the true earthquake found Thomas
Jefferson totally unprepared. He had been to town often enough to have a
clear memory picture of South Tredegar--the prehistoric South Tredegar.
There was a single street, hub-deep in mud in the rains, beginning
vaguely at the steamboat landing, and ending rather more definitely in
the open square surrounding the venerable court-house of pale brick and
stucco-pillared porticoes. There were the shops--only Thomas Jefferson
and all his kind called them "stores"--one-storied, these, the wooden
ones with lying false fronts to hide the mean little gables; the brick
ones honester in face, but sadly chipped and crumbling and dingy with
age and the weather.
Also, there were houses, some of them built of the pale red brick, with
pillared porticoes running to the second story; hip-roofed, with a
square balustered observatory on top; rather grand looking and
impressive till you came near enough to see that the bricks were
shaling, and the portico floors rotting, and the plaster falling from
the pillars to show the grinning lath-and-frame skeletons behind.
Also, on the banks of the river, there was the antiquated iron-furnace
which, long before the war, had given the town its pretentious name. And
lastly, there was the Calhoun House, dreariest and most inhospitable inn
of its kind; and across the muddy street from it the great echoing
train-shed, ridiculously out of proportion to every other building in
the town, the tavern not excepted, and to the ramshackle, once-a-day
train that wheezed and rattled and clanked into and out of it.
Thomas Jefferson had seen it all, time and again; and this he
remembered, that each time the dead, weather-worn, miry or dusty
dullness of it had crept into his soul, sending him back to the
freshness of the Paradise fields and forests at eventide with grateful
gladness in his heart.
But now all this was to be forgotten, or to be remembered only as a
dream. On the day of revelations the earlier picture was effaced,
blacked out, obliterated; and it came to the boy with a pang that he
should never be able to recall it again in its entirety. For the genius
of modern progress is contemptuous of old landmarks and impatient of
delays. And swift as its race is elsewhere, it is only in that part of
the South which has become "industrial" that it came as a thunderclap,
with all the intermediate and accelerative steps taken at a bound. Men
spoke of it as "the boom." It was not that. It was merely that the
spirit of modernity had discovered a hitherto overlooked corner of the
field, and made haste to occupy it.
So in South Tredegar, besprent now before the wondering eyes of a Thomas
Jefferson. The muddy street had vanished to give place to a smooth black
roadway, as springy under foot as a forest path, and as clean as the
pike after a sweeping summer storm. The shops, with their false fronts
and shabby lean-to awnings, were gone, or going, and in their room
majestic vastnesses in brick and cut stone were rising, by their own
might, as it would seem, out of disorderly mountains of building
material.
Street-cars, propelled as yet by the patient mule, tinkled their bells
incessantly. Smart vehicles of many kinds strange to Paradise eyes
rattled recklessly in and out among the street obstructions. Bustling
throngs were in possession of the sidewalks; of the awe-inspiring
restaurant, where they gave you lemonade in a glass bowl and some people
washed their fingers in it; of the rotunda of the Marlboro, the mammoth
hotel which had grown up on the site of the old Calhoun
House,--distressing crowds and multitudes of people everywhere.
Thomas Jefferson, awe-struck and gaping, found himself foot-loose for a
time in the Marlboro rotunda while his father talked with a man who
wanted to bargain for the entire output of the Paradise furnace by the
year. The commercial transaction touched him lightly; but the moving
groups, the imported bell-boys, the tesselated floors, frescoed ceiling
and plush-covered furniture--these bit deeply. Could this be South
Tredegar, the place that had hitherto figured chiefly to him as
"court-day" town and the residence of his preacher uncle? It seemed
hugely incredible.
After the conference with the iron buyer they crossed the street to the
railway station; and again Thomas Jefferson was foot-loose while his
father was closeted with some one in the manager's office.
An express train, with hissing air-brakes, Solomon-magnificent sleeping
cars, and a locomotive large enough to swallow whole the small affair
that used to bring the once-a-day train from Atlanta, had just backed
in, and the boy took its royal measure with eager and curious eyes,
walking slowly up one side of it and down the other.
At the rear of the string of Pullmans was a private car, with a deep
observation platform, much polished brass railing, and sundry other
luxurious appointments, apparent even to the eye of unsophistication.
Thomas Jefferson spelled the name in the medallion, "Psyche,"--spelled
it without trying to pronounce it--and then turned his attention to the
people who were descending the rubber-carpeted steps and grouping
themselves under the direction of a tall man who reminded Thomas
Jefferson of his Uncle Silas with an indescribable something left out of
the face.
"As I was about to say, General, this station building is one of the
relics. You mustn't judge South Tredegar--our new South Tredegar--by
this. Eh?--I beg your pardon, Mrs. Vanadam? Oh, the hotel? It is just
across the street, and a very good house; remarkably good, indeed, all
things considered. In fact, we're quite proud of the Marlboro."
One of the younger women smiled.
"How enthusiastic you are, Mr. Parley. I thought we had outgrown all
that--we moderns."
"But, my dear Miss Elleroy, if you could know what we have to be
enthusiastic about down here! Why, these mountains we've been passing
through for the last six hours are simply so many vast treasure-houses;
coal at the top, iron at the bottom, and enough of both to keep the
world's industries going for ages! There's millions in them!"
Thomas Jefferson overheard without understanding, but his eyes served a
better purpose. Away back in the line of the Scottish Gordons there
must have been an ancestor with the seer's gift of insight, and some
drop or two of his blood had come down to this sober-faced country boy
searching the faces of the excursionists for his cue of fellowship or
antipathy.
For the sweet-voiced young woman called Miss Elleroy there was love at
first sight. For a severe, be-silked Mrs. Vanadam there was awe. For the
portly General with mutton-chop whiskers, overlooking eyes and the air
of a dictator, there was awe, also, not unmingled with envy. For the
tall man in the frock-coat, whose face reminded him of his Uncle Silas,
there had been shrinking antagonism at the first glance--which keen
first impression was presently dulled and all but effaced by the
enthusiasm, the suave tongue, and the benignant manner. Which proves
that insight, like the film of a recording camera, should have the dark
shutter snapped on it if the picture is to be preserved.
Thomas Jefferson made way when the party, marshaled by the enthusiast,
prepared for its descent on the Marlboro. Afterward, the royalties
having departed and a good-natured porter giving him leave, he was at
liberty to examine the wheeled palace at near-hand, and even to climb
into the vestibule for a peep inside.
Therewith, castles in the air began to rear themselves, tower on wall.
Here was the very sky-reaching summit of all things desirable: to have
one's own brass-bound hotel on wheels; to come and go at will; to give
curt orders to a respectful and uniformed porter, as the awe-inspiring
gentleman with the mutton-chop whiskers had done.
Time was when Thomas Jefferson's ideals ran quite otherwise: to a lodge
in some vast wilderness, like the rock-strewn slopes of high Lebanon; to
the company of the birds and trees, of the wide heavens and the shy wild
creatures of the forest. But it is only the fool or the weakling who may
not reconsider.
Notwithstanding, when the day of revelations was come to an end, and the
ambling horse was inching the ancient buggy up the homeward road, the
boy found himself turning his back on the wonderful new world with
something of the same blessed sense of relief as that which he had
experienced in former home-goings from South Tredegar, the commonplace.
At the highest point on the hunched shoulder of the mountain Thomas
Jefferson twisted himself in the buggy seat for a final backward look
into the valley of new marvels. The summer day was graying to its
twilight, and a light haze was stealing out of the wooded ravines and
across from the river. From the tall chimneys of a rolling-mill a dense
column of smoke was ascending, and at the psychological moment the slag
flare from an iron-furnace changed the overhanging cloud into a fiery
ægis.
Having no symbolism save that of Holy Writ, Thomas Jefferson's mind
seized instantly on the figure, building far better than it knew. It was
a new Exodus, with its pillar of cloud by day and its pillar of fire by
night. And its Moses--though this, we may suppose, was beyond a boy's
imaging--was the frenzied, ruthless spirit of commercialism, named
otherwise, by the multitude, Modern Progress.
V
THE DABNEYS OF DEER TRACE
If you have never had the pleasure of meeting a Southern gentleman of
the patriarchal school, I despair of bringing you well acquainted with
Major Caspar Dabney until you have summered and wintered him. But the
Dabneys of Deer Trace--this was the old name of the estate, and it
obtains to this day among the Paradise Valley folk--figure so largely in
Thomas Jefferson's boyhood and youth as to be well-nigh elemental in
these retrospective glimpses.
To know the Major even a little, you should not refer him to any of the
accepted types, like Colonel Carter, of Cartersville, or that other
colonel who has made Kentucky famous; this though I am compelled to
write it down that Major Caspar wore the soft felt hat and the
full-skirted Prince Albert coat, without which no reputable Southern
gentleman ever appears in the pages of fiction. But if you will ignore
these concessions to the conventional, and picture a man of heroic
proportions, straight as an arrow in spite of his sixty-eight years,
full-faced, well-preserved, with a massive jaw, keen eyes that have lost
none of their lightnings, and huge white mustaches curling upward
militantly at the ends you will have the Major's outward presentment.