THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW WAY
WHEN next Haddon and his wife met at the breakfast table Haddon was
more than ordinarily out of sorts, his wife rather more than ordinarily
grave and silent. At length he flung back from the table.
“Well, don’t it beat the devil,” said he, “how ungrateful some people
are! Here our hill-billy turns up missing this morning. Where do you
suppose he is?”
“I fancy he’ll find his way back. Perhaps we’ll hear from him soon.”
She spoke quietly, not evincing any of her own uneasiness over Joslin’s
disappearance.
“You seem to have a very good notion of him and his ways! I’ll say he
didn’t have much politeness about him—just to pull his freight without
a word of thanks. He may have left town for all I know.”
“He’s a strange man in some ways!”
“Well, if he’s gone, he’s thrown over the best chance he ever had in
his life. He didn’t have a cent when we picked him up. I think he was
a nut, that’s what I think he was, talking about starting a college
when he didn’t have the price of a pair of shoes to his name. Why, our
Company’d build him a half-dozen colleges if he’d come along with us.
I just wanted a little more talk with him, and here he’s gone, no one
knows where.”
“I gave him the name of a little school out in the town where I was
born—don’t you know—Brandon College?”
“Well, Brandon, Ohio, don’t happen to be on the map of New York or the
Cumberland Land and Mineral Company.” He was scowling, his red face
puffy, unlovable.
“Good-by,” he concluded abruptly. “I’ve got to get downtown to a
meeting—and I’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do. This
Kentucky friend of yours has put me in strictly Dutch.”
Without further salutation he turned to the hall door. She rose,
sighing, and passed out of the room.
At just about the moment that the foregoing conversation was taking
place in Haddon’s home, another interview was advancing, in the smoking
room of a west-bound passenger train heading from the city. Of the
speakers one was a grizzled old passenger conductor who had spent his
life on the line, who stood now regarding a tall raw-boned young man,
whom he had been obliged to accost for a second time, so much absorbed
did he seem in a certain book over which he was poring.
“_Tick_-ets, please!”
“Good mornin’,” said the young man, looking up. “I didn’t buy any
ticket, sir, because I didn’t have no money. They let me through the
gate in the crowd.”
“Well,” said the conductor, “you’ve no business here without one. Where
do you want to go?”
“I’m a-goin’ to Brandon, Ohio,” replied the young man, his fingers now
between the pages of his closed book. “I’ve got thirty-five cents to my
name.”
“Brandon, Ohio—on thirty-five cents! What do you think we are?”
“I didn’t expect ye to carry me all the way to Brandon fer that much,”
replied David Joslin. “I only wanted to git out into the aidge of town
if I could, so I could find work. Please put me down whar thar’s a
brickyard, an’ I kin work my way. I’m a-goin’ out thar to study to be a
preacher, ye see.”
The gray old railway conductor looked at him steadily for a time. There
was something so frank in the gray eyes that all he could do was to
shake his head. “I’ll see you when I’ve finished making my train,” he
growled, frowning; but he purposely delayed until after the train was
more than two hundred miles west of the city!
“Well, young man,” said he then, “I guess you’d better get off about
here. My run ends here. This is quite a manufacturing town, and you
can get work in a brickyard, or most any place, I should think. Lord
knows, labor’s scarce enough so that anyone can find work who really
wants to work.”
“I thank ye very much, sir,” said David Joslin, simply. “Ye’ve been
right kind to me. I believe the Lord will bless ye.”
The conductor, abashed, made no reply whatever, but stood looking after
him as he slowly strode up the station platform, his gaze this way and
that.
The kindly advice of the railroad man proved useful Before
mid-afternoon Joslin had once more engaged in day labor in one of the
brickyards of this place, a city devoted to manufacturing interests. He
was delighted to find that here his wages would be as much as a dollar
and a half a day. The foreman showed him a row of little buildings
where, among foreigners of all sorts, it might be possible to get
quarters and food sufficient to keep soul and body together. Here,
then, in a little room half lighted by flaring gas light, within the
sound of profanity and continuous card-playing, David Joslin sat down
for his first evening alone in the great world of the Outside.
He began his daily practice of copying the letters of the alphabet,
using a piece of brown paper which he had found, and the stub of a
broken pencil. Having completed a certain amount of this exercise,
he turned to the pages of his book, laboriously to read, as best he
could, the words of old John Calvin, written long ago, about Eve, and
the Garden, and the Serpent and the first great Sin.
He read until he slept even as he sat. But as he slept he dreamed and
started moaning. He felt on him all the weight of the original Sin.
BOOK II
CHAPTER XIII
THE CLANS
IN THE two years that passed after David Joslin left his home, no word
was received from him by any of his friends or his kin, even by his old
grandma left alone in the hill cabin. Even had he written, few could
have read. But no letter came to the little post-office. David Joslin
had vanished as though swallowed up by the great Outside. His enemies
sneeringly declared him dead or else “run out.” His friends had much to
do to keep their faith in him, Afterward a report came up from Windsor
that he had been seen there. None might know that David Joslin was
biding his time.
It was two years before a vague stirring came into the life of the
little settlement near which he had lived. Then, upon a certain day
of the late summer time, there came winding down the rugged pathways
of the Cumberland coves, along the rocky creek bottoms, and at length
along the well-beaten trails of the larger streams, little groups of
riders. For the most part they were tall and silent men, their eyes
watchful as they rode. All of them were armed. In many cases a woman
sat back of her husband on the family mule. It was a gathering of the
clans, and it was well known that in case a man were hurt, his own
women folks could nurse him better than anyone else. As for that, the
women of the mountains were as grim and savage as their lords and
masters.
Slowly, steadily, watchful, alert, these strange people of the
hills came riding down, the little threads of the broken procession
converging toward the Forks where, so went the vague word, there was
going to be a sort of meeting for a day or two—for what purpose, few
seemed to know. The general understanding was that this meeting was
to be held at the old mill building across the river. The village
postmaster and the village blacksmith had passed the assembly call
impartially.
There was other advice of import tacitly accepted, but, while it was
generally understood that there might be, and probably would be, a
reckoning between the tribes of the Gannts and the Joslins, those not
immediately concerned in the family quarrel treated both parties with
politeness. To carry word from one to the other would have been an
act of treason, and punishable by the unwritten law of that country.
Men went about their daily duties and talked little even to their own
families.
The single street of the little village—scarce half a hundred houses
and shops in all—was filled now with groups of men idly strolling,
every one of than armed, old and young. Among these were boys, some
not older than fifteen years, yet each confident in his own ability to
draw quick and hold straight, and longing for the chance. The fingers
of many a youth itched to get at the handle of the brand-new gun with
which before now he had practiced so faithfully, saving his coppers
for “hulls” to feed it. The older men strolled about unagitated. Group
passed group upon the street, each man staring into the eyes of his
enemy, his own face immobile, over his eye an impenetrable film—the
eye of the dangerous man.
Men who casually estimated the respective representation of the Joslins
and the Gannts thought there were forty or fifty men on each side. It
was doubted if half of these would ever get out of town unhurt. The
sheriff was somewhere far to the west, at the county seat. There was
no peace officer, nor would it have been a good place for one. It was
a meeting of the clans. The Cumberlands were going about their ancient
business in their own ancient way.
Some, fitfully interested, spoke of the new railway now advancing from
the Middle Fork up Hell-fer-Sartin. There was talk that a pike road had
been built in as far as the county seat from somewhere very far in the
west, as much as twenty miles. In a general way there seemed to hang
in the air an unsettled feeling, as though all knew great events yet
might happen. The war Outside—the railroad now impending—the old feud
now about to break aflame again—it was a grave time for these strange,
somber folk.
But a day passed, two days, and nothing broke. The leaders studiously
kept away from the young men all that fiery liquor which, would be
certain to set them beyond control. The tenseness of the long hours
began to tell on all. Men became restless—boys stood here and there
in groups, talking sullenly, looking this way and that, nodding a head
hither or yon. But after their old and usual fashion, the leaders of
both factions held them together—old Absalom Gannt and Chan Bullock
and their respective attendants. “Wait, fellers,” was the arresting
word that went around. “Come to the meetin’ at the mill.”
The main floor of the mill building at the Forks afforded a room
perhaps fifty feet in one dimension, low-ceiled and dark. The reticent
postmaster and the blacksmith had provided a few flickering lamps.
And finally thither, soon after twilight of the appointed day, the
mountaineers turned, group by group, man after man, silently, two score
Joslins and as many or more of the Gannts, all of them too proud to
stay away even though a stern mystery lay ahead. Every man of them
was armed, every one of them ready for what might come. The old mill
building, the only meeting place tacitly held neutral and the only
practical town hall available, bade fair to see red history this night.
And there was history done that very night. They had all gathered, the
men of both clans, thronging the dark interior. For half an hour they
had sat, silent and alert, squatting here or there on their heels,
slouching on sacks of grain or something of the sort. The Gannts were
on the left-hand side, the Joslins on the right, as one entered the
door. No one seemed to know what was expected. There still was mystery
as to what had brought them here. Perhaps the postmaster and the
blacksmith knew. If so, they would tell in time. That word had been
passed to the Gannts that the Joslins would be here, and to the Joslins
that the Gannts would come, was the only sure thing; and it was quite
enough.
The blacksmith and the postmaster passed here and there, setting
alight their lamps. No man spoke on either side. Both factions sat
looking across the little white-floored lane of No Man’s Land which
lay between them. A quick motion, a shout, the sound of a shot, would
have been fatal to half the men present here; but if any one of them
felt agitation, it was not manifest by any word or sign, by any paling
of the face or trembling of the hand. Unagitated, calm, they sat, each
with his eye on his own selected man, ready for what might happen.
What did happen was this: The door darkened against the pale
starlight. There stepped slowly into the interior, where the shadows
lay heavy upon the floor, the figure of a tall man.
It was a man whom they all knew. As he came into the circle lighted by
the lamps, a sort of sigh went up, audible in its united volume.
It was David Joslin!
Now they knew why they were to come here. The leader of the Joslins
had come back! That meant trouble. He had not died—everybody knew
that—everybody had heard from down the river that he had run out and
left the country. But now he had got courage to come back!
Yes, it meant trouble. The men on both sides eased off their pistol
belts, loosened their holsters, under pretense of settling their coat
tails or fumbling for tobacco.
But David Joslin raised his hand at once. “Wait!” said he. So, still
silent, still motionless, they sat and looked at him, many in contempt,
as many in judgment suspended.
He seemed thinner even than when he had left. His face bore a certain
scholarly whiteness visible even under the burning of the sun—Joslin
did not tell them so, but the truth was he had walked more than half
the way from Brandon College—where for two years he had slaved at
learning as no man in all the history of that school had been thought
able to slave. Penniless at his hopeless start, he still was penniless
after his overleaping of all rules and schedules and curricula. He had
walked to this, his great trial. In some way he had been fed. In his
own conviction that had been by direct act of God.
Better clad than when he had left, in a dark suit of clothing which did
not fit him ill, with shoes at least not badly broken, and with certain
touches of refinements of the civilization outside, none the less he
remained the mountain man they had known so well. But something in his
voice seemed different His diction had altered perceptibly, if not
consistently. He stood before them now at ease, a leader, a speaker,
even an orator of some sort, at least in the possession of that gift of
oratory which in simple terms commands the attention of an audience.
“Wait!” said David Joslin. “Don’t make any move. I know why you’re here
as well as you do, maybe a good deal better. I sent word in for you all
to come. I’ve asked you to come here myself—I arranged this meeting
with some of my friends here at the Forks. I wanted every moonshiner
and feudist in the mountains to be right here to-night, where I could
look him in the eye, and he could look me in the eye, and we could have
it out together.
“No! I don’t mean to have it out in the old way. I want to tell you
those times are past I see you sitting there, Absalom Gannt—I know
you’re not a-scared of me, and I’m not a-scared of you. You’re
fighting men, every one of you. And you’ve come here to fight each
other once more—to kill each other, just like you and I and our
fathers have been doing here in these mountains farther back than any
of us can remember. You don’t know why you do that, but you think you
ought to do it. It’s a sort of religion with us, just to kill each
other. We don’t know no better—we never have.
“You thought I was a coward because I didn’t tell anyone where I was
going. I didn’t tell any of my own people. In a way, I just sneaked out
of this country, that’s true, because I wasn’t yet sure about it all.
I went down the river. I got to the railroad. I went up North. After a
while I got so that I could go to school. That’s what taken me out of
the mountains.
“Before I left these hills I had resolved to learn how to read and
write and to cipher a little bit. I didn’t know then how much there was
to be learned in the world. I didn’t know how hard it was to start—nor
how easy once you get started.
“I’ve been at school less than a quarter of the time any boy of these
hills ought to have been there. I’ve learned more than I thought
there was to be learned anywhere. And this is the first thing I’ve
learned—that it’s time we mountaineers stopped raising our children
for the slaughter.
“I’ve learned that the only way to stop that sort of thing is by way
of schools. You know how my own father died, and he was a preacher.
I’m a-going to be a preacher myself some time—I’ve preached once or
twice—they made me, up North there. But I don’t want to preach now. I
just want to talk to my neighbors.
“Now, I didn’t run away. You know I won’t flicker. If it’s war, I’m
here for war—but I don’t want it to be war.
“Outside, in the Old World, where our great-grandpaps came from once,
maybe, they’re having war. It’s worse than any of you dream. But
they’re all fighting for a principle, as they think. We’re fighting for
nothing down here.
“Now, I want to see peace in the Cumberlands. I’m telling you, I want
to start a college right here, on the hill yonder. I’m going to do that
some time. Don’t you believe me?”
He was looking straight at old Absalom Gannt, and the old man, his eyes
fixed steadily upon the speaker, answered him now.
“What law have we got to believe ye? Ye’ve got no money to start a
school. Ye couldn’t keep a teacher thar if ye did.” Thus old Absalom.
“That’s true,” replied David Joslin quietly. “That’s the Gospel truth!
As I stand here now I haven’t got two dollars in my pockets. It’s plumb
taken all the money I’ve got to keep the soul alive in my body so I
could study hard as I had to. But when I do get through up there, I
promise you I’ll come here and start a college. Money or no money—help
or no help—I’ll come and start that college! If I do, will you promise
me that between now and that time you’ll not start any trouble here?”
The grizzled old man—leader of his people, therefore leader by
strength of mind as well as body—sat silent now, looking him straight
in the face, and Joslin returned his gaze with equal fearlessness.
“You know I never flickered, Absalom Gannt! You know my people won’t
run away, not one of them. You know I won’t run away. You all know why
I left; and now you know why I’ve come back.
“I’ve come here to do a mighty work, you’ll have to admit that fair.
It’s a terrible task for all of us. We’ve got to change the ways we’ve
been living here for more than a hundred years. We’ve got to break a
hole in this wall that shuts us out of the world where we belong, that
makes us children and paupers where we ought to be men and citizens.
We’ve got to make our own way out.
“Now, if I agree with you to make you a college, and keep it open—a
place where the children of these mountains can come to learn to read
and write and cipher, and maybe go higher than that—if I can bring
people here from the outside to show you what a big world it is that
you don’t know about—tell me, will you promise me to keep the peace
ontel I’ve succeeded or failed—ontel I’ve made good or ontel I’ve told
you I’m a failure?
“Oh, I haven’t got much,” he went on hurriedly. “I’ve had a hard
enough time up there—they laughed at me at first—I was ignorant as a
child—I was only a savage, a wild man, ignorant as any nigger in the
world—and wild—wild. And I was as big a sinner as any in the world—I
had a lot of things to forget—me trying to be a preacher. Oh! haven’t
I sinned! But I thought if I would come down here and get you all
together and promise you that if you didn’t like what I told you, you
could kill me here—it seemed to me it would part way make up for the
heap of sinning I’ve done in my life, young as I am.
“I’m a Joslin. You’re Gannts over there—you and your kinpeople. We’re
fine men, both families of us here. We can kill fifty fine men here in
three minutes. Or we can build a school up yonder on the hill, across
the river, inside of a couple of years. Which do you want to do?”
He stood silent for a long time, and all he heard was the heavy,
half-panting breathing of the men at his right, at his left. There was
not the shuffling of a foot, not the movement of a hand on either side.
The eyes of each faction were glued upon the faces of the other. A
tenser scene could not have been; nor could aught but starkest courage
have evoked and dared it.
There came a movement upon one side of the dimly lighted room. A
hundred hands went backward, a hundred pairs of eyes gleamed.
It was old Absalom Gannt who had moved. But his right hand went up
above his shoulder, above his head. And it was empty!
He rose slowly now to his full, gnarled height, and stood, his right
hand, empty, still above his head.
“Wait, boys!” he said. He turned and looked toward his right. Silently
as a cat in his motion, Chan Bullock had also risen. But as he saw
Absalom’s hand thrown up thus, he himself paused. The two faced one
another, each sternly gazing into the face of his foe.
Joslin himself stood motionless, looking from the one to the other, his
own hands dropped empty at his sides. He had spoken. But he knew that
the fate of the Cumberlands rested here on the decision of these two
men.
One false movement on the part of anyone, and the closed space had been
a shambles. But Bullock with a quick gesture threw his own right hand
above his head. He advanced toward old Absalom, the latter toward him,
steadily, grimly, each with boring eyes that never yet had “flickered.”
Then there was heard a strong and calm voice.
“Fer’s I’m concerned,” said old Absalom Gammt, “I’m through if ye
fellers air.”
“Suits me,” rejoined Bullock.
And so closed the meeting at the Forks of the Kentucky.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CROSSROADS
IF EVER was happy wayfarer, that was David Joslin, as now he held his
course back to the little Ohio village which had been his home these
past two years. He walked eagerly, hurrying as does a man who realizes
that there is much to be done with little time for the doing.
He had no staff nor scrip, nor needed any in the course of his journey
out from the Cumberlands to the edge of the great plateau. Here he
found the railway leading to the north, and followed its line as any
common tramp, for the good reason that he had not money for railway
fare. Certain gentry of the road he met, but they neither accepted him
as one of the guild, nor hindered him in his going, for they could not
classify this man who walked slightly stooped, with pale face, but with
long and steady stride, a man whose clothing betokened no luxury, but
who still had something about him which did not grade him as one of the
hopeless drifters of the world.
At a little town along the road another kindly railway conductor
lifted him far along his northern journey, so that presently he was
coming to the lower edge of what might have been called the North; for
now he approached the great Ohio River and its scattered string of
thriving communities. He had eaten only when he found the means to pay
for what he ate. Twice he found it necessary to stop in a little town
and work for a period of a day or so. Rarely did he sleep in a room. He
was still a man of the wilderness.
And he was happy, was David Joslin. For the first time, it seemed to
him, the clouds were lifting from his soul. Now, it seemed to him, he
had done something to offset his own sin.
Driving his worn body mercilessly, he was footsore and weary when at
length he arrived in one of the little towns on the banks of the Ohio
River, a junction point where all the north and south railway was
crossed by one of the greater systems running east and west, a place of
some five or six thousand inhabitants—one of those many communities
which have their own pretensions at metropolitanism, each like to a
thousand others.
Certain features of these centers of civilization still continued to
interest Joslin, a man of such extraordinary lack of opportunity.
He stood to-day, therefore, boylike, reading the lettering on the
Strattonville billboards which announced certain attractions in the
theaters and cinema houses for that evening. And he saw something which
caused him to flinch as though smitten.
He could not turn away from the great letters which he saw, two feet or
more, widely displayed.
POLLY PENDLETON! POLLY PENDLETON!
HER OWN COMPANY
DIRECT FROM HER GREAT BROADWAY SUCCESS
Polly Pendleton! Polly Pendleton! David Joslin knew not how many times
the name stood there in print. That a team of vaudeville artists had
grown into a certain vogue in the city; that this vogue had become,
for one of the performers, a sort of reputation; that a concert singer
had grown into being something of an actress, and the actress into
some sort of a star heading a company of her own; that this star and
her company—whether for reasons of success or lack of success—had
left the city to tour “the provinces”—David Joslin knew none of these
things. All he knew, or cared to know, or could understand, was that
without doubt she was here! She, the _corpus delicti_ of his sin!
As the criminal will return to the very place of his crime, so now
David Joslin found his feet going where he did not list. There came
into his soul a great recklessness. He forgot the occupation of his
last two years, forgot the long road before him. Independence,
prodigality, seized him as fully as it might any gilded youth. So,
since prodigality also is a wholly relative thing, David Joslin
bought him a ticket to the theater that night, repaired to a nearby
restaurant, and ate what was to him the most expensive meal of all his
life.
No longer the happy wayfarer, but an anxious, downcast and distraught
man, on his soul a shadow, he found his way to his seat—his first time
in any actual theater. The whirl of it all, the light, the warmth, the
color, the music, at first were things rather of torture to him. Where
was she?
But presently she came, bowing, smiling, light-footed—it was she, her
very self! Yes, these were her eyes, dark and large as ever. Her little
mouth, turned up a-corner, was as sweet as ever. Her dark hair curled
as it did that other time. Her straight young figure was the same, with
all its tender curves. Above all, her frank smile, her compelling air
of comradery, were just the same as then, that time, two years ago.
She had the same little habit of balancing up and down on her toes,
impatient for the music to give her her cue. Her little chuckling laugh
of sheer enjoyment in herself and in life was just the same. She was
still the very spirit of life and joy she had been yonder, two years
ago—two centuries ago it seemed to David Joslin! Then he had been
another man. And now—he was again that other man!
As to the play, so-called, it was nothing to him, and he knew not how
long it endured. The concordance of the strings and brasses meant
naught to-night, though otherwise they might have meant much indeed,
new as they were to his acquaintance. He sat mute, his eyes fixed
steadily upon one figure upon the stage, the sum total of the sensuous
appeal lost for him in the charm of its central figure.
And then, electric, a clash in the music touched him to the marrow. The
orchestra leader waved his baton. A few violins, a flute or two, struck
into the opening bars of an air that David Joslin knew!
Polly Pendleton was at that moment off-stage, but now ran tripping from
the wings, smiling, shrugging up her scant shoulder strap as she came.
Her violin was under her arm. She waved a hand to quiet the enthusiasm,
and played with the orchestra a few staves of the air.
“You’re the Only Man for Me”—that was what Polly Pendleton would play,
of course. Did not David Joslin know?
When she came to the chorus, she stepped down to the footlights and
extended her two round, white arms, bare to the shoulder—her slender,
up-curved little fingers reaching almost to the face of the bald-headed
leader of the orchestra, himself of a family of eight. To him she
sang, her eyes dark and pleading, her little feet tiptoeing, her
voice no less than blandishment itself—“For you are my Baby—you are
my Baby—you’re the only, only, _only_ man for me!” And then Polly
Pendleton laughed with her audience at the jest of it.
She ran off-stage, but must come back again, to be sure. This time
she raised her hands and her eyes to a solid-looking citizen, who sat
in a proscenium box—a banker and a leading figure of the town, it
chanced, well known to all in the audience. To him also, pleadingly,
bewitchingly, she asserted, “You’re the only, only, _only_ man for me!”
And so in time Polly Pendleton hitched up her shoulder-strap once more,
and ran off in her final exit.
David Joslin found himself, slightly reeling, passing out to the open
air with the others. Some men whistled, others bore copies of a song,
which they had purchased from the ushers at the door. He never could
remember how or why he went to the principal hotel. Certainly it was
not to find quarters for himself. Aimlessly he walked down the cross
hall of the lobby to another entrance; and so sheer accident favored
him.
He knew that the rustle of skirts at the door of the “ladies’ parlor”
meant the presence of the woman he sought—knew it by some strange
super-sense that came to him. A moment later Polly Pendleton herself
appeared at the door, looking across the hall to the open door of the
café upon the other side.
“All right, Jimmy,” she called out to someone beyond, invisible to
Joslin. “I’ll be in right away. Order me a milk-fed, won’t you, and a
bottle of pale—with you in just a minute.”
She stepped back into the parlor. Without announcement, Joslin followed
on in, and so once more found himself face to face with her.
She stepped back, startled, surprised, frightened almost. “Oh!” she
exclaimed; and then frowned. “I didn’t ask for anyone. Who are you?”
she demanded.
Then with a sudden revelation she remembered. Yes, pale and hot-eyed as
when she had seen him last; it was the same man, the wild man from the
mountains!
She could not quite evade him. “What do you want? How did you get in
here?” she gasped.
He did not answer at first, and she herself, not knowing what manner
of scene might be expected, resourcefully took him by the sleeve and
led him far over to the further corner, where a sofa afforded seats
for two. She pushed him down into one end of it, and moved as far as
possible into the other.
“You don’t remember me?” His voice was broken and hoarse. She nodded.
“Don’t talk so loud. They’ll hear us.”
He seemed unconscious of her warning.
“Why are you here?” he demanded, as though she owed him an explanation.
“Haven’t you seen? We’re playing here to-night This one-night business
is getting my goat.”
David Joslin stared at her. “I know—I saw it all. Sometimes a man’s
hard to manage.” His voice was savage.
“That’s the truth!” said Polly Pendleton. “I’m not big enough to throw
you out, and I don’t like to call the porter, but I’ve got to have my
supper before long. Have you had yours?”
“Yes. It cost me six bits. That’s the mostest I ever spent for one meal
in all my life.”
“Is that so?” said Polly wistfully. “I wish I could get mine down to
that scale! Sometimes it’s—well, rather more.”
“It left me thirty-five cents,” said David Joslin, smiling bitterly.
“Huh! That’s just about what you had the last time you saw me. Is it
the same thirty-five cents you had then?”
Again she laughed, and then rippled out in her irrepressible
generosity, her sympathy. “Poor chap!” said she. “Haven’t you got ahead
any farther than that in two years?” Polly Pendleton could not see any
suffering unmoved. She herself had lived.
“It’s odd,” she said, something of his old story coming back to her.
“You must be thirty-five or six, aren’t you?—or maybe forty?”
“Not yet quite thirty,” said he.
“And you said you were married?”
“I was—once.”
“Then what are you doing here? What were you doing there in my
apartments in New York? Don’t you ever stop to think?”
“I’ve stopped to think about everything in my life except this. But
now all that’s done. I’m not going back to school any more.” He looked
directly at her now.
“Why? What do you mean? Why do you say that? You talk foolish! Why,
listen, where do you get this sort of stuff, anyhow? What are you
making me out to be? Have I ever asked anything of you, I’d like to
know? What do I owe you, or you owe me? I don’t get you, neighbor.”
“No, I reckon not,” said David Joslin, still staring at her steadily
from his end of the sofa in the dim light. “I don’t reckon you do. I
don’t reckon a woman like you can understand a man like me.”
“Am I so bad, then? God! I wish there wasn’t a man in all the world,
that’s all—I’m sick of them! I’ve got to make a living, haven’t I?
Well, it’s jolly hard business sometimes to do that. Why, listen—it’s
only an angel, and a good one, that’s kept us on our feet. I’m wearing
all my old clothes and hats and things. And I don’t know if I can go
back to Broadway again. You don’t have all the trouble in the world.”
“An angel?” said David Joslin, not in the least understanding her, more
than she had him in his last remark, which she thought so slighting
to herself. “Yes, I reckon it was an angel brought you to me. I was
walking through here, going back to my school, and here I find you! It
was as though an angel of heaven had brought us two together. What for?”
“You can search me!” said Polly Pendleton. “I haven’t got the answer.
All sorts of things happen in this game, of course, but I’m free to say
I wasn’t looking for you to-night—and to tell the truth”—she rippled
out in laughter again—“I don’t know what to do with you now I’ve got
you. Won’t you please go away? I’m getting pretty hungry, man!”
“Miss Pendleton,” said David Joslin, “that’s not the way to treat me.”
Silence fell between them. Polly Pendleton, hurt and grieved still
over the sting of his earlier words—which he had spoken only in
condemnation of himself, not her, began to tremble about her lips.
She heard his low, vibrant voice go on. “I couldn’t bear to see you
reach out your hands to those men there to-night. You touched _me_,
once! For sake of that, I’m quitting my school.”
“It was only in a song!” she broke out “I’ve done that to a thousand
men, I expect, and I didn’t care a cent for any one of them. It’s in
the game—it’s part of my way of making a living. I’ve got to live.”
She laughed now with half a sob. “There can’t be in all the world any
one man for me, I suppose—that’s the price we have to pay, who do this
sort of thing.”
“I don’t understand you at all.”
“Well, I don’t—I won’t—there isn’t——” replied Polly somewhat
incoherently. “Listen, man! You’ve got to stop this! I can’t stand it.
This means too much to you. You’ve taken it all in earnest when there
wasn’t anything to it but a joke—a game—a business. And besides—I
told you——”
“What do you mean that you told me?”
“I told you—that—that I wasn’t good! Do you think that’s easy for me
to say?”
“A woman as beautiful as you could not be anything but good.”
“Don’t! I can’t stand this—I told you once before I couldn’t stand it.”
“How can I help it? I told you a man is hard to manage.”
“You’re the hardest to manage I ever saw. What can I do with you? I
want to be as good a scout as I can—I don’t really want to take money
away from blind babies, nor love’n affection from idiot Johnnies. I
don’t want you at all, and you mustn’t want anything to do with me at
all. Do you suppose it’s easy for me to say that? Why don’t I let you
make a fool of yourself the way they all do? Search me—I don’t know!
Listen—have you ever doped this thing out all the way down the line?
What’s in your mind—what would you like to do?—what would you like to
have me do?”
“I never thought it out I—I don’t know. I don’t understand this at
all. I don’t know why I came here to-night, to see you again.”
“Well, let’s suppose now that I was a single woman, and you were a
single man. It isn’t true in your case, and we won’t say anything
about mine. Suppose we were both free to do as we liked? How far do
you suppose, my friend, that thirty-five cents would go in backing a
theatrical company like this, that carries thirty-eight performers, its
own sets and its own brass?”
Polly Pendleton, dependable always to do the unexpected, was not
laughing now, but half sobbing, and wiping her eyes on the corner of
her skirt.
“I wish’t you wouldn’t do that. Please don’t!” he exclaimed. “I can’t
tell you how it hurts me.”
“Well, it’s you that’s done it,” she flared at him over the corner of
her ruffles, forgetting a half limb exposed. “Did I ask you to come
here? Is it the part of a real man to make it harder for a fellow like
me, that’s trying to get on in the world?”
“I don’t reckon I’ve thought of that,” said David Joslin with sudden
contrition. “I reckon I was just thinking of my own self. I know the
place in my book that covers that. It’s about Adam——”
“Never mind about Adam!” said Polly Pendleton. “Don’t I know! If you
were just a case of an average Johnnie that had money and no brains,
I’d maybe take you on and jolly well separate you. Such things have
happened. But here you are with no money and a lot of brains. Excuse
me, my friend, but you don’t seem to just qualify for running a
theatrical company. Besides—I like you a lot. I told you that before.
But when I sing, ‘You’re the only man for me,’ that’s what I _don’t_
mean—what I _never_ mean. Can’t you understand that? I wish you’d
never seen me.”
“I didn’t know there could be a woman like you in all the world—I
didn’t know what a woman really meant.”
“It’d be fine to have a man really believe in you;” half sobbing now.
“It’d be mighty fine to listen to that line of talk, even if you
couldn’t believe in it.”
Polly Pendleton shrank back into her corner of the sofa, and wrung her
little white hands together; but finally she suddenly turned to him
once more, one knee bent, her foot under her, as she faced him on the
sofa at last.
“There may be women who could break a man and throw away the pieces for
the fun of it. Nix on the vamp for little Polly. Oh, dear! I don’t want
to talk. I’m tired. What made you come here at all? The trouble with
you is, you don’t know what an angel face is. You think I’m the way I
look. I’m not!”
Polly was sobbing freely now into the corner of her skirt. “I’m not, I
tell you! Don’t you know—and I’d rather have told that to anybody in
all the world than you—you’re so damned honest!”
He made no answer at all, and she went on.
“You’ve been such a boob that you haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve
got your education ahead of you. I’m twenty-six years old, and I know
more than you will when you’re a hundred and twenty-six. You don’t need
to have a house fall on you, do you? Come now! I don’t”—and here, in
spite of all, she laughed through her unwilling tears—“I don’t want
your little old thirty-five cents at all! Take it and go on, and save
the country, friend.”
David Joslin sat for a long time. “Sometimes things are hard to figure
out,” said he at last.
“Yes!” said Polly Pendleton in a low voice. “Don’t I know?”
There was no answer save his white-knuckled hands.
After a time she hitched up the other foot on the sofa, and sat, her
arms about her knees, staring at him that way, her eyes gleaming in the
dim light, impulsive still as a child herself—as indeed she was always
to remain.
“Listen!” said she. “I’ve got an idea. Come now—you seem rather like a
priest to me—it didn’t seem wrong for me to tell you things. Will you
make a trade, honor bright?”
“If I gave you my word,” said David Joslin soberly, “I’d keep it.”
“If you’ll promise to go on and do what you said you’d do—your
education—your college—I’ll agree to quit this business in about two
months, and when I do I’ll go into the Red Cross.”
He did not answer her at all. Unconsciously, after how long a time
neither of them could have told, they both had arisen. He stood before
her, motionless, she herself slightly swaying. Impulsively, she
extended her hands towards him in the twilight of the room.
“I know you!” said she. “I know what you want You want to kiss me,
don’t you?” She looked at him gravely.
He could not answer. He made no motion. But Polly Pendleton knew now
that if any salutation came from this man it would be from a different
man than the one who had entered this room a half-hour previous. In
short, she knew, whether or not he knew it, that David Joslin was saved.
“Among so many——” began Polly Pendleton, trying to laugh and half
sobbing. “Oh, well——”
He never knew how or when he found the street.
Across the hall appeared the red and irate face of a gentleman who,
apparently, had long been waiting.
“Where on earth have you been, kid?” he demanded querulously.
“Everything’s getting cold.”
“Oh, have a heart, old dear,” said Polly Pendleton, dabbing
indefinitely at her countenance with a handkerchief. “I had to powder
my nose, didn’t I?”
CHAPTER XV
THE ORIGINAL SIN
AS JOSLIN wandered along a street unknown to him, lighted by flickering
arc lights, he was not conscious of the exercise of any of his
faculties, but a faint, sweetish smell came to him, a thing familiar in
its way. It was the smell of distilled liquors. He looked up, and saw
by the sign above the door that here one by the name of John Moran sold
aged whiskeys bonded in the wood.
Inside, the room was still light, though now the proprietor was
beginning to put away his bottles for the night, it being past
midnight. Joslin turned in at the door without any definite purpose
in his mind. The proprietor looked at him inquiringly, standing at
attention behind the bar. Joslin swayed slightly as he approached, and
placed his last two coins upon the counter. The bar man was of the very
plausible belief that his customer was already the worse for liquor.
“Sir,” said he, “that’s all the money I have. I want to rest here
to-night if I may. I want to give you the dime, and I want you to let
me keep this quarter.”
“I’m just closing up,” began the man, pushing back his bottles upon the
shelf.
Joslin looked at him straight as he replied:
“I know, but I’m alone in this town, and I’ve no place to lay my head.
I’m in trouble. Perhaps you know what trouble means?”
The man looked at him curiously, accustomed as he was to all the
vagaries of alcohol.
“Have one on the house,” said he at length, and pushed the bottle once
more toward his customer.
Joslin picked up the flask with trembling hand, and poured out a full
drink into the glass. He raised it to his lips, but did not drink.
“Sir,” said he, “I find I do not need to drink.”
The proprietor, was disposed to be irritable. “On your way, neighbor,”
said he, “This is a saloon, and we sell liquor here.”
Joslin perhaps did not fully understand all that he said. Once more he
pushed both the coins back across the bar top. “Please, my friend,”
said he, “I’m very tired. I come to you as to one who will aid the
needy. Let me sit to-night in that chair by the little table yonder.
Put the glass on the table by me. In the morning I’ll be here if the
liquor in the glass has not been tasted—and then I can go on my way,
as you say. If the liquor is gone, you will have had pay for it—take
this larger coin—but I will not be here then.
“I’d like to sit here and read, that’s all,” he added after a while,
since the other made no reply. “I have no other place to go.”
“Who are you, bo?” asked the saloon-keeper curiously. His education in
human nature did not often lead him astray. He knew now this was no
ordinary drunk, and no ordinary man. “What’s your line?” he asked again.
“I’m a preacher, sir,” replied Joslin, “or I was to have been—till
to-night.”
The barkeeper laughed shortly. “Well, I believe you’d fight fair,”
said he. And then quickly, “Say, I’ll take a chance with you! I’ll
leave you here to-night. I believe you’re up against it. You can drink
yourself crazy, or steal all the stock if you like. Or you can do as
you say—stay here until I come back in the morning.”
Joslin looked at him, still swaying slightly, his hands upon the
polished wood, steadying himself.
“To some men I’d say, ‘Take a drink and pull together,’ but with you I
won’t,” said the proprietor. “Fight it out. It’s a man’s game, friend.
By morning you’ll know whether you’re going up or down.”
“And you’ll accept that risk with a stranger?” said Joslin.
“You’ve got the risk—this night will have bigger chances in it for
you than for me! Two or three drinks and I might find you on the floor
in the morning. None at all, and I may find you sitting there. Risk’s
yours, not mine. If that’s the way you want it——
“Well, fly to it, friend,” he concluded, chuckling grimly. “Don’t ask
it again—I don’t know what I might do.”
“No,” said Joslin, “I shall never have another night like this. Let me
sit here and read to-night. I will thank you al-_ways_.”
“You’re a mountain man,” said the saloon-keeper suddenly, noticing the
accent on the last syllable.
Joslin nodded.
“They’re hardy, and sometimes they can keep away from liquor. Well,
luck to you.”
He pulled down the apron screening the shelves of bottles, and coming
around the end of the bar stood for a moment looking at his visitor.
Joslin was sitting now at the table, the glass of liquor close at hand.
“If you’re going to read,” said he, “you’ll have to have a light—I’ll
leave this one burning for you.” A moment later he had passed out of
his own door, which he left unlocked. Joslin felt for him a strange
kinship, so that greater loneliness fell on him when he had left.
The reek of liquor was still in the air, the sawdust itself was
redolent of it. But none of this now stirred the blood of David Joslin.
Two or three times he raised the half-full glass in front of him level
with his eye—and placed it back again untasted on the table. At last,
quietly, pale, he took from his coat pocket a heavy volume, which often
he had carried there.
There were certain worn places where the book fell open readily.
Familiar words stared up at him.
The solitary reader, trained to literal interpretations, pondered what
he read. He endeavored to restore the vision of the Garden, the first
home of Man. He undertook to conceive the Temptation, to picture the
Serpent himself; indeed, tried to think as John Calvin thought when he
wrote his words:
But, since it could not have been a trivial offense, but must have
been a detestable crime, that was so severely punished by God, we must
consider the nature of Adam’s sin, which kindled the dreadful flame of
divine wrath against the whole human race.
Augustine properly observes, that pride was the first of all evils.
But we may obtain a more complete definition from the nature of the
temptation as described by Moses. For as the Woman, by the subtlety of
the Serpent, was seduced to discredit the word of God, it is evident
that the fall commenced in disobedience. This is also confirmed by
Paul, who states that all men were ruined by the disobedience of one.
With propriety, therefore, Bernard teaches that the gate of salvation
is opened to us, when in the present day we receive the Gospel with
our ears, as death was once admitted at the same doors when they lay
open to Satan.
Augustine? Bernard? Who were they? Dust and forgotten for the most
part. But after them and before them men had lived, human beings,
hoping, aspiring, falling, sinning. David Joslin, mountaineer, turned
once more to the pages of the old dogmatist.
This is that hereditary corruption which the fathers called _original
sin_; meaning by sin, the depravation of a nature previously good and
pure; on which subject they had much contention. Yet this timidity
could not prevent Pelagius from arising, who profanely pretended
that the sin of Adam only ruined himself, and did not injure his
descendants. But the temerity of the Pelagians and Celestians will not
appear surprising to him who perceives from the writings of Augustine
what a want of modesty they discover in everything else.
Every descendant from the impure source is born infected with the
contagion of sin; and even before we behold the light of life, we are
in the sight of God defiled and polluted. For “who can bring a clean
thing out of an unclean?” The Book of Job tells us, “Not one.”
We have heard that the impurity of the parents is so transmitted
to the children that all, without a single exception, are polluted
as soon as they exist. But we shall not find the origin of this
pollution, unless we ascend to the first parent of us all, as to the
fountain which sends forth all the streams. Thus it is certain that
Adam was not only the progenitor, but as it were the root of mankind,
and therefore, that all the race were necessarily vitiated in his
corruption. What cavil will the Pelagians raise here?
And then John Calvin went on to tell David Joslin, sitting here in the
saloon of John Moran, what sin was:
Wherefore, Augustine, though he frequently calls it the sin of
another, the more clearly to indicate its transmission to us by
propagation, yet, at the same time, also asserts it properly to belong
to every individual. And the apostle himself expressly declares, that
“death has therefore passed upon all men, for that all have sinned;”
that is, have been involved in original sin, and defiled with its
blemishes. And therefore infants themselves, as they bring their
condemnation into the world with them, are rendered obnoxious to
punishment by their own sinfulness, not by the sinfulness of another.
For though they have not yet produced the fruits of their iniquity,
yet they have the seed of it within them.
When arguing respecting corrupt nature, Paul not only condemns the
inordinate motions of the appetites, but principally insists on the
blindness of the mind and the depravity of the heart; and the third
chapter of his Epistle to the Romans is nothing but a description of
original sin.
We say, therefore, that man is corrupted by a natural depravity. Thus
vanishes the foolish and nugatory system of the Manichæans who, having
imagined in man a substantial wickedness, presumed to invent for him a
new Creator, that they might not appear to assign the cause and origin
of evil to a righteous God.
The dour words of the savage old doctrinaire looked up familiarly to
David Joslin. More than once alone he had pondered upon the cavilings
of the Pelagians, the deeds of the Manichæans, the Celestians, and
others who had fallen under the invectives of this stern leader of the
past. Once they had seemed adequate to him. That very day they would
have seemed adequate to him. But not to-night.
Two years ago he had closed the pages of his own past. Now he knew that
he was closing the book upon yet another stage of his own development.
Fellowship, understanding, sympathy, the common human struggles! From
John Calvin’s interpretation David Joslin turned to an interpretation
of his own. He read from larger pages.
The night passed at length. Dawn grayed the dull windows of the saloon
front, opaqued that passers-by might not see what went on within. But
this dull dawn was the opening of a new horizon to David Joslin. He saw
a wider world. He had learned that dogma is not life.
He heard the door open. The owner of the place entered, his usually
impassive face curiously turned toward the interior. Joslin walked
forward to meet him, on his face now at least the semblance of a smile.
John Moran himself smiled, as he looked and saw the untouched glass
upon the table.
“Well, friend, you’ve won,” said he. “Here’s your quarter back again.”
Joslin felt in his hand the weight of a gold piece, but he put it
back, his lip somewhat trembling. “I thank you,” said he, “but I can’t
take it.”
“Don’t you need it?”
“Yes. But I’ll have to finish my own way, I reckon,” said David Joslin.
“You see, I’ve been going to school up North here. But now I’ve
concluded not to go there any more. No—I don’t need it.”
He smiled now, as he extended his hand with that quality upon his face
which brought friends to him so quickly, and held them so staunchly.
“Good-by,” said he, clasping his brother’s hand in his own large one.
“I thank you more than I can tell you. I’m better than when I came in
here last night. You’ve been a good Samaritan.”
And so David Joslin passed out into a larger world and a wider dawn.
BOOK III
CHAPTER XVI
THE CITY ON THE HILL
IN THE Cumberlands, at the Forks of the Kentucky life went on as it had
from time immemorial. There were few more houses than there had been a
hundred years ago, no more roads, little more of civilization. But one
morning, while yet the dawn was young, a man standing contemplatively
on the stoop of his house, hands in pockets, looked idly up to the
summit of the tall hill, which dominated the little town, and the gaze
of this man lingered. There seemed to be someone up there, so far away
that he could not be identified.
A certain mild interest arose in the observer’s mind. The figure yonder
moved about slowly, rising and stooping curiously. Now and again it
disappeared behind the crown of the hill. Then it would return, slowly,
stooped as though carrying some heavy burden, would drop that burden
and start back again.
It was Old Granny Williams who took down the first authentic word
regarding the strange work of the man on the hilltop—she had gone up
to take him something to eat.
“Hit’s Davy!” said she. “He’s done come back home! He’s a-startin’ of
his collidge. He war a-layin’ the stones in rows, this way and that. He
done dug a long sort of trench, like, whar the ground was level, up on
top of the hill. He shore air a-goin’ to build something.”
Some scoffed at all this. Others looked up still more curiously all
that day. Word passed that David Joslin had come back home to stay. The
next day, at about ten in the morning, as David Joslin dropped in its
place a heavy slab of sandstone, which he had carried in his hands from
his quarry on the hillside, he looked up to see the cause of a shadow
on the ground.
“Good morning, Absalom,” said he quietly.
Absalom Gannt said nothing at first, but laid off his coat.
“Damn _me_, Davy!” said he. “Hit hain’t nuvver goin’ to be said that no
Joslin could do more’n a Gannt. Ye a-workin’ up here all alone!”
The grizzled old man stood for a time, hands on hips, and looked about
him.
“What’s that blood on that rock yander?” he asked, pointing to a stain
on the slabs at the corner.
“I mashed my hand between a couple of rocks,” said David. He held up
his hand. The edge of the palm, livid and dark blue, had been bruised
off in a large half-open wound, from which the blood still oozed
slowly. “It’s nothing,” said he. “I swore—before I thought. It’ll be
all right.”
“I haven’t any tool except this old piece of crowbar,” he went on. “Dan
Bagsley, down at the shop, put a edge on this iron. I managed to quarry
some rock with it on the face of the hill yonder.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” remarked Absalom quietly, and, having so
expressed himself, he did not fall to work, but set off down the hill
without further comment.
Joslin sat down to rest on the corner stone, which, with his own hands,
he had laid. The blood oozing from his hand still further stained the
rock, the color spreading slowly as he sat. Under the corner stone lay
something else of the life of David Joslin.
He had buried here the old book of John Calvin, outlived of late, since
he had found that religion and democracy, and, indeed, hope itself, are
naught but human sympathy and human understanding. Between the leaves
of the fierce old pragmatist’s volume there lay the photograph of a
woman—a little picture Joslin himself had bought one day in a shop;
the picture of a woman with large eyes, dark, curling hair, a smile
upon her lips, as she leaned her face upon her folded hands. Joslin was
putting away the past, not regretfully, not longingly, but reverently.
The cornerstone was a milestone for him—one of the greatest of his
life.
After a time men came, old Absalom Gannt at their head. They spoke
little, nor expressed any surprise; nor did Joslin’s mountain reticence
much relax at first He only said, quietly, that now he had come home to
build his school.
There were teams—two mule teams, a wagon, a plough. Some bore hammers,
others spades or axes. More than a dozen strong they were, and as he
looked at them Joslin saw among them men of his own kin, and men who
but now had been his enemies.
Some now extended the excavation along the line where Joslin already
had pegged out the course of his foundation. Others opened more fully
the vein of sandstone at the other side of the hill. The wagons carried
loads of rock now around the crest. This rock they laid with no great
skill, but steadily and soundly, into the rude continuance of the
foundation, which presently began to outline itself definitely and
surely.
It was to be a building far larger than any of these men had ever seen;
but, as one said to the other, Davy had been Outside, so he would know.
And David himself, sitting now and again, somewhat wearily, on his
bloody cornerstone, looked at this advancement of his labors and was
content.
Toward evening of the day when they had finished the foundation, Joslin
called his band of workmen together.
“Friends,” said he, “we have begun. There will be no more feuds in
these mountains. This is your school as much as mine—I don’t deserve
the credit for it any more than you-all do.”
The steady warmth and trust of their friendship came all about his
heart now. After all, they were his people. All they ever had needed
was a leader and a chance.
He now dropped naturally and unconsciously more or less into the
vernacular that had been his, swiftly as his own diction had changed in
his two years of miraculously hard work.
“We hain’t been a part of our own state so far,” said he, “but
we’re a-goin’ to be. Now we’ve got to have papers from our state—a
charter—afore we kin run our school. We’ll call it the Cumberland
Institute, I reckon. Here’s our application fer it. I want each of you
men to sign this paper. We’ll be the trustees. Hit’s right we should
be, because we started this work all by ourselves, with the help of the
Lord.
“Absalom,” said he, turning to the old leader of the clan of Gannts, “I
want ye to sign yore name right here. I’ve signed it first—I took that
liberty. Sign here, Absalom.”
The old man stood, his jaws working hard under his dense gray beard.
“Davy,” said he gently, “ye know I kain’t read or write.”
“I know it,” said Joslin. “I’ve put yore name down fer ye, Absalom.
Make yore mark. That’ll stand just the same. There’s fifteen of us
here, and we’ll all put our names down. We’ve been plumb forgot, here
in the Cumberlands. This will show that we asked our state to accept us
and our work.”
“You, Chan,” said he, nodding to the next man, “come and sign.” And
Chan came and signed as Absalom had signed—making his mark. And the
others followed, each taking in his hand the bit of pencil. Of the
fifteen of them only three could write their names. And those names,
thus written, stand to-day, in reproach to one of the proudest states
in the Union.
As one of the workmen expressed it, “things sort of begun to drift in,
like.” Material arrived, and men to handle it. Women now brought up
meals. So strangely animated did the men become that they grudged the
time spent even in their eating, nor did the hours of daylight seem
long enough for them. Some found that shavings made an excellent bed
for the night. They slept sometimes in the shavings for mattress, with
their coats for covering.
Thus in time there arose, gaunt against the skyline, the frame of the
first college building in the Cumberlands. A sober, steady, quiet
plebiscite went on. The entire population of the village was engaged.
Many folk from the country around about came in. None asked questions.
The common thing was for a man to arrive, and to lay off his coat.
The least was said, and all was mended among these. The work of one
strong, faith-keeping man had been done. There was not a weapon on the
hill.
Slowly, with incredible toil, the unskilled hands of these unpaid
laborers advanced the task which they had set for themselves. Still
the building extended itself against the skyline. About the bottom of
the walls now slowly arose the covering of rough-hewn boards, so that
it was more apparent what the finished structure would be, if ever it
might be finished. The hill folk marveled at the vast size of this
building, wondering at Davy Joslin when he told them there were yet
larger in the world outside.
Joslin worked steadily with the others, growing gaunter and gaunter as
the weeks passed. A faint line of gray had come at his temples, though
he yet was young. He had driven body and mind alike without mercy these
last years.
None the less, in these surroundings so familiar, among these friends
so simple and sincere in their confidence, the soul of the man, so
long sad and dour, began to thaw, to show itself beneath the wintry
aspect of a nature wholly absorbed in a compelling purpose. To his
lips came now more often the light jest, the grim quip, the merry
retort, which once had marked him as a younger man. Day by day, not
unsettling himself in the new respect in which they held him for his
wider experience, he grew into, or fell back into, the old ways of the
earlier days.
At times when the work was done for the day and dusk had fallen, they
would light a lamp in one of the more sheltered rooms of the unfinished
building, and Joslin would read to them for an hour or so, explaining
to them what he had read, telling them of the greater world of thought
and activity in affairs, which lay beyond their knowledge, and thus
proving to them all the better the need of this work in which they were
engaged. No Homer of old was ever more a god to his listeners than
David Joslin here in the rude structure of his unfinished building.
Again, a yet lighter side of the nature of the mountain man would
manifest itself—few, indeed, were more human than himself at heart.
With a wide smile, upon occasion, he might call a halt in the labors
for a time, and, taking from under a board the new violin, which
represented his sole acquisition in the outer world from which he now
had exiled himself in turn, he would motion to them to clear a space
upon the floor, and fall to dancing for his playing. For the time,
the natural fervor of the mountain soul would forget itself in the
ancient relaxation of their kind, and men and women, or even children,
would follow the measure of his bow. He played with a certain native
skill, if with unfinished art, but knowing well the power of music as
incentive and as stimulus. These matters now strengthened him in the
regard of his fellows, so that he became a leader indeed, not of one
clan, but of many, of all. His word was law to them now. Had he cared
to preach, he could, indeed, have stood before them now, and swayed
them with his words. But David Joslin did not preach.
It was thus that the city grew, and thus that the feuds passed, no man
might say when. There had come from among the people, as always there
does come in time of need, a man who had learned and lived, had joyed
and sorrowed with them, and who, therefore, was fit to lead them, and
to speak with the tongue of law and of prophecy. Alone, Joslin was
wide-eyed and sorrowing, as any man must be who carries burdens other
than his own. Unconsciously, he was learning the great truth that human
sympathy is the only foundation for human leadership.
“Fer a man who kin read the way he kin, four syllerbles and all, Davy
hain’t stuck up none at all,” said old Absalom Gannt. “No, I reckon
he’s all right. He hain’t changed a bit inside.”
“He kin play the fiddle yit, too,” assented Chan Bullock. “I dunno as
old Levi Gaines kin play ‘Turkey in the Straw’ any better than what
Davy does, an’ Levi’s been allowed to be e’en about the best fiddler in
these parts fer nigh on to forty year.”
“That’s a heap older than Davy is, no matter how he looks,” said
Absalom. “I re-colleck when he was borned all right, an’ he hain’t
thirty yit. I’ll say he’s a right servigerous man, young as he is.”
“Well,” explained Chan Bullock, resting his hands for the time on the
top of his mattock handle. “While he may have been a heap like the rest
of us one way of speakin’, Davy hain’t never been profligate. If he had
been, I don’t reckon he’d of been called.”
CHAPTER XVII
THESE TWAIN
ONE day, without explanation to his fellows, Joslin ceased in his
labors, and started down the hill. No one asked him his intention, for
he rarely spoke of his own plans. They saw his tall figure passing by
the road beyond the forks of the river—the direction of his home. A
half-hour before dusk that day, he arrived at the little gap in the
fence, which made the gate of his own scant acres, unvisited for two
years.
He walked steadily up to his own door, and, without announcement,
pushed it open.
Two women stared at him without speech, as he stood in the half-light.
One of these was his wife, the other his grandmother—the latter had
come in upon one of her not infrequent visits, for in the Cumberlands
kinship is held a sacred thing, and the ravens of the Lord have never
forgotten their ancient errand.
Old Granny Joslin was the first to speak. “Well, Davy?” said she, as
though she had been expecting him.
He did not answer her, did not bend in token of greeting to the
other woman who sat sullenly silent. He took his own place at the
fireside—the chief’s place of counsel in a cabin home. It once had
been his own fireside. He was a stranger here to-day.
He stared silently at the ashes after the fashion of the mountaineers,
who mostly do so because they have few thoughts. But David Joslin had
many thoughts now, riotous thoughts, that left his mind a scene of
combat.
This squalid interior, the unmade bed, the grimy pillow coverings, the
table littered with the dishes of the earlier meal, the entire lack of
neatness, cleanliness and order that left the place a hovel, and not a
home—all this was as when he had left the place. There arose for him
the comparison of this with the sweet quiet of other homes.
He had the feeling that gaunt fingers were reaching out to claim him
once more. These who sat here—they were flesh of his flesh, bone of
his bone. They were his people. He was of them. What, then, was his
duty? And why could he not set out of his mind the comparison that
urged in upon him—of these with others whom he had seen in a wider
and lovelier world than this? These were ignorant as once he had
been—caught in the shallows of life, victims of dwarfing poverty all
their days.
Of these two was one whom David Joslin had sworn to love, honor and
cherish, cleaving to none other. He had lived after the fashion of his
people. Corn bread and hog meat; pot hooks and the early bed for the
woman, crops and the occasional “frolic” for the man—that was the life
all of them had known. This might have been any home; this woman, any
wife of these hills. But other pictures rose before him—before David
Joslin, a man with a conscience and a will to do the right.
Joslin shifted in his chair, but there was no greeting in his gaze. He
did not reach out his hand to touch that of his wife—indeed, he never
would have done that in the presence of another, for that would have
been in violation of the creed of the hills.
“Well, Meliss’,” said he at last, “I’ve come back.”
“I see ye hev,” said she. “Hit’s nigh about time ye did.”
“That may be. At least I’m here.”
“We heerd tell of ye, Davy,” said his grandmother. “We heerd tell all
about what’s happened. I don’t reckon folks’ll laugh at ye no more. How
far along is the big house by now, Davy?”
“The walls are up, Granny,” said he. “It looks right fine, up on top of
the hill. We’re out of nails now—I’ve got to go down the river before
long to see if I can get trusted for a keg of nails at Windsor.” The
corners of his mouth suggested a grim smile.
“Ye’d better see if ye kain’t git trusted fer a sack of meal,” sneered
his wife. “How ye suppose we-all was a-goin’ to live here? Hit’s two
year sence ye left.”
“I didn’t suppose, Meliss’,” said he. “If I had supposed anything at
all I’d have stayed right here. When a thing has got to be done, you
can’t look at what lies between you and it.”
“Ye’re a fine preacher o’ the Gospel,” said she contemptuously.
“I’m not a preacher of the Gospel,” replied David Joslin quietly.
“How come ye hain’t, Davy?” demanded his granddam. “I done tolt
everybody ye was called. How come ye hain’t a preacher? If ye was, that
explains a heap of things. Preachers, they hain’t held responserble.”
“It’s not yet time, Granny,” said Joslin gently. “Some time, maybe. I
don’t know.”
“Not time! When’s it a-goin’ to be time then? When yore pap beginned
to preach, he jest up an’ beginned, that’s all, an’ he was helt as
powerful a preacher as ary in these mountings. Don’t I mind how over on
the Buffalo he preached fer two weeks without a showin’ o’ grace, an’
he kep’ right on, an’ come evenin’ of the fourteenth day things begun
fer to break, an’ within the next two days he baptized over two hundred
souls, tell he taken a chill an’ liken enough to die from it, excusin’
the quinine I gin him.”
“Yes,” said Joslin, “I know about that. But if I don’t preach there,
someone else will.”
“Well, what then?” demanded the fierce old woman of him. “What’s the
matter with ye, boy? Hain’t ye as good a man as yore daddy, or air ye
made all of skim melk?”
He only shook his head, and tried to smile.
“Ye’re a-workin’ right alongside of them Gannts up thar, they tell me,”
went on the old dame. “Hit don’t look to me like ye had sand enough to
hurt a flea. Why hain’t ye killed old Absalom long afore this? My Lord,
looks to me like ye’d had chancet enough! Did ye come back fer yore
pistol?”
“No, Granny, I didn’t come back for my pistol.”
“If ye don’t kill that man I’ll do it myself some time!” exclaimed the
old woman savagely. “I hain’t a-skeered to do it, if ye air. An’ look
at Chan Bullock—he’s all the leader the Joslins has got now, sence
ye turned tail an’ run out. He’s a-workin’ now, too, along with the
Gannts—well, maybe he’s only waitin’ to git a good chancet. Maybe
he’ll git old Absalom yit some time.”
“I don’t think he will,” said David Joslin quietly. “They’ve slept side
by side for more than one night, and neither made a move. Neither of
them had a gun—there’s not a pistol in the whole lot.”
“Well, couldn’t Chan taken a hammer and mashed him while he was
asleep?” demanded the old woman. “What better chancet will he ever hev
than he’s got right now? Did them people ever give us ary chancet, I’d
like to know?”
“No; nor did we them until now, Granny. But that day’s gone by.”
“Don’t ye be too damn sure,” reiterated the fiery old dame. “They’ll
git ye yit, ef ye don’t watch out.”
“If they do,” said Joslin, “I’m ready to go. I tell you, times have
changed in these hills.”
“Huh!” began his wife again. “Ye’re takin’ a heap on yoreself, seems to
me, Davy Joslin. I reckon ye think ye done all this—in two year!”
“No, I don’t think so, Meliss’. I think the Lord did it.”
“And yet ye hain’t set up fer preachin’ yit! How’d ye come through
school, anyhow? I’ll bet ye’re pore as Job’s turkey right now.”
“I’m worse than that, Meliss’. I’ve got nothing.”
“That’s it! That’s right!” went on his wife heatedly. “Hit’s what I
expected. Ye’d let us starve. Well, I’ll fix ye anyhow.”
“What do you mean, Meliss’?” asked David Joslin curiously. Under his
words now, gentle as they were, was the fierceness of the mountaineer,
jealous of any liberties taken with him.
“Well,” she said, “ye quit me. Ye done left me fer full two year.”
“No, I didn’t, Meliss’. I didn’t quit you for two years. I told you
when I left it was for all my life.”
“Yes, an’ that throwed her on my hands,” growled Granny Joslin. “Still,
I wouldn’t complain if it hadn’t been them Gannts stole eight or ten
hawgs off en us last year.”
“Hit was a fine way to do,” went on his wife, with growing confidence
in her own powers now. “I nuvver seed a man in these mountings run away
from his wife that way, lessen he was obleeged to lay out er git free
from the law fer a while.”
“I didn’t leave the country,” replied David Joslin. “I left you. That
don’t mean that I’ve left any of my responsibilities. I told you I
didn’t dare look at the things I ought to do—it was only a question of
the thing I ought to do the most. I had to get my education first. Now
I’ve come back. I want to see now what I’d best to do about you.”
“Fine time to begin plannin’ now!” rejoined his wife sullenly.
“It’s true,” said he, “I can’t do much. I’ve got mighty little to do
with. Still, I want to pay my debts.”
She rose and stood before him, close to his chair, her hands clenched
into fists, her eyes flashing.
“Dang ye!” said she, with all the fury of the woman scorned in her
face. “Ye quit me yellow, that’s what ye did. Ye run away an’ left
me—ye was a coward—ye was a-skeered to stay in here—an’ now ye want
to come sneakin’ around, tryin’ to make peace with them Gannts that we
fit with all our lives, the hull of our fam’ly agin the hull of theirn!
Ye come a-crawlin’ in here atter dark, an’ talkin’ to me about plans!
Ye say the Lord has been a-holpin’ ye. I don’t reckon the Lord had much
to do with it. I reckon ye could tell a-plenty different story right
now if ye wanted to.”
“Yes,” said David Joslin, his forehead wet now, “I could.”
“Ye act to me like a houn’,” said she. “If ye’d been ary part of a man
ye wouldn’t of runned away an’ lef me.”
“David, I reckon ye got to call that kind of talk,” said the old woman
quietly.
“Yes, Granny,” said he, “I reckon I must.” But yet he sat silent, while
his wife, now lashed into a fury, reviled him in such words as need
not be repeated. Granny Joslin sat and chuckled ghoulishly, her pipe
between her toothless lips.
“Well, go on, Meliss’,” said she. “Ye’re a-gettin’ ready for a
trouncin’, ‘pears to me. Hain’t no Joslin’ll take that.”
But presently her grim face turned to the man who sat there silent,
staring into the ashes of the fire.
“What’s the matter with ye, boy?” said she. “_Air_ ye quittin’? Tell
me—have ye been actin’ up with ary other womern Outside? If ye hain’t,
it’s time ye tuk an’ taken a hand now in yore own house.”
“Granny,” said David Joslin suddenly, his face white in his resolution
for a “true confession and not a false defense,” “there are three
women in my life. Meliss’ here is one. There were two others—Outside.
If you’d mean that I’ve gone wrong—for always—with either, or any
other woman in the world, that’s not true. I came here to tell you the
truth. What I’ve done you know—as much as you’re big enough to know
or understand, Meliss’. Now, what do you mean? You say you’ve fixed
me—what do you mean?”
“As though I was a-goin’ to keep on standin’ it!” half screamed his
wife. “I tell ye I’m through with ye as much as ye air with me. That
new doctor filled yore mind with notions about our bein’ married. Well,
all right!”
“Yes, he did. It was wrong that we ever should have been married. But
I’ve ended that as far as I could. I studied over it for a long time.
What’s right for me to do? Whatever it is, I want to do it.”
“I didn’t need to study so much fer my own part,” retorted she. “Thar’s
lawyers as well as doctors comin’ in this way nowadays. Well, I’m
a-goin’ to git me a _di_vorce, that’s what _I’m_ a-goin’ to do. I done
sole the red hawg to pay the lawyer, and he done tolt me what to do.”
“Ye heerd her, Davy,” said Granny Joslin, nodding her head. “I’ve
knowed it. I was a-hopin’ ye’d give her a good thrashin’, though,
afore she tolt ye—hit would of been more manful if ye had. But it’s
true. She’s a-goin’ to git a _di_vorce—the fust time that word has
ever been heerd in our fam’ly.”
“Nor in mine neither,” rejoined the younger woman. “We was always
fitten to be married ontel the railroads come in here—with their new
doctors an’ their new lawyers. I’ve been mocked here in these mountings
because my man left me, an’ because I didn’t have no fam’ly. Well, I
said I fixed it. I’ve got out the papers.”
“But there was no law against cousins marrying in this state,” said
Joslin. “It was only a natural law we broke—that’s the pity of it all,
and the awful part of it all.”
“If thar was law agin hit thar’d be a heap of marriages ontied in these
mountings,” said Granny Joslin.
“Hit don’t need to be that,” expounded Meliss’. “The lawyer done tolt
me, if a man done lef’ his wife fer two year ‘thouten no support, she
could git a _di_vorce from him. Well, ye lef’ me two year ago—ye jest
been a-hintin’ at something of yore goin’s on fer two year. Live with
ye?—Not if ye was the last man on airth! I’m done—I’m a-goin’ to be
free.”
“You’ve different ideas from what I had,” said David Joslin, still
quietly. “I only thought it wasn’t right for us to live together. I
wasn’t thinking of shirking any duty, or breaking any promise, least
of all my marriage promise. I was going to pay you all I owed—all I
could in every way.”
“Ye kain’t pay me nothin’ an’ nohow!” stormed his wife. “I don’t need
ye noways on airth!”
“I’ve got mighty little in the world,” went on Joslin whitely after a
time. “I’ll deed you the farm here. I never asked you to do what you’ve
done—divorce is a thing unknown in our family or in these hills. But
one thing’s sure—not for any reason—not even if the first reason was
taken away—could I go on living with you now.”
Trembling in her rage at this, the first actual slight he had put upon
her, his wife rose and half ran from the room, deeds, speech and even
tears denied her. Joslin made no motion to restrain her, nor did the
old dame, chuckling over her pipe, even follow her with her eyes.
“It’s done, Granny,” said Joslin bitterly after a time. “She can do
what she likes about marrying again—I’ll not raise a hand to help her
or stop her. What I have is hers, all of it, and that’s all I can do.
As for me, I’ve not got a dollar, and I never will have while I live, I
suppose.”
“Thar!” exulted the old woman. “I fotched it! I knowed it—I knowed
thar was a other womern—but _two_! Tell me all about it, Davy.
Furriners, huh? Well, I must say, Davy, that’s more _like_—that’s more
like ye had some sort of a _man_-sperrit left to ye!”
Her shrill laughter now filled the room, and swayed her gnarled form as
she rocked to and fro, her pipe involuntarily falling from her mouth in
her merriment “Tell me about ‘em.”
“One was a married woman,” said David Joslin, speaking freely before
his grandmother as he could not have done before his wife. “I didn’t
know how fine and steady and sweet a woman could be till I saw her. I
never heard her say a word above her voice. She was fine, always. I
reckon she gave me my start—she showed what there was to hope and work
for in the world. And she was beautiful, too—in a way I can’t well
describe. She was so quiet, so still, folks never would think she was
much, maybe not even beautiful. She’s one worth more than the world’s
estimate. There are such—the finest of all in all the world, in all
its days. She’s married.”
“Go on, Davy,” chuckled the old dame. “Tell the rest—tell about the
_other_ furrin womern. Ye said thar was _two_ on ‘em. That’s some
sperrit, boy! I declar, I’m a-thinkin’ more of ye now than I done hafe
a hour ago! While ye’re confessin’, come on through an’ tell me the
hull story. Was this-un old or young—was she married or single?”
“Single,” said David Joslin, still staring into the fire; “and young.”
“What manner of gal was _she_? Was she purty?”
“I didn’t think any woman ever could be so beautiful, in one way,”
said Joslin soberly and truthfully. He raised his eyes now and looked
fair into the face of his granddam.
The old woman shrilled with laughter as she saw the pallor of his
cheek—the laughter of the old at the ways of life gone by. “Go on,
Davy!” said she. “What sort of lookin’ gal was _she_? Tell me now—was
she big or little—dark or fair?”
“She would just about go under my arm if I stood up,” said David Joslin
slowly. “She was dark—her hair and eyes both dark. She told me she was
French and Irish—she came from Boston, so she said.”
“French and Irish—oh, my God!” exclaimed the old dame. “Same as
_myself_! Law sakes, Meliss’,” she shrilled through the half-open door
beyond— “could you a-blame him? Didn’t I know his daddy, an’ don’t I
know him? Don’t I know _ary_ man, come to that——
“Well, Davy,” she added at last, “when air ye a-goin’ to leave us and
go on back Outside? I reckon _that’s_ the one ye’re a-goin’ back to,
huh?”
“I’ll never see her again, Granny,” said David Joslin quietly.
“But—now you ask me why I’m not a preacher—that’s why.”
Silence fell now in the little cabin, so agonized was he. The old woman
nodded her head slowly.
“I’m going away now, Granny,” he continued at last “I’ve hurt Meliss’
mightily, and I’m sorry. I sinned, and I was to blame for it, not she,
and I know that clear enough—she didn’t know any better. I’ve made
nothing but trouble all my life, for myself most of all. Sometimes it’s
hard to stand.”
“That’s right, Davy,” said his old granddam, nodding. “Yore way is
a-goin’ to be right hard, I kin see that. Ye got a heap of troubles,
one thing with another.”
“Well,” said he after a time. “It’s no use my hanging around. I’m going
back.”
“Goin’ back!” shrilled the old dame, in her toothless mirthfulness.
“We’ll look fer ye some day—but ye go on back now to that other
womern. French-Irish!—she’ll be givin’ ye the slip if ye don’t watch
out!”
“I’m not going back to her,” said David Joslin. “I told you that was
done. I’m not coming back here, either.”
“Huh!” commented his wrinkled ancestress. “Here ye was with _three_
wimmern on yore hands afore ye was thirty year old—Meliss’ an’ them
two others! Well, I’ve heerd tell of mounting boys that has went
Outside an’ made their fortunes an’ come back.—Ye been right busy, one
way of speakin’.”
Her grandson only stared at her, mute.
“As fer Meliss’,” she added maliciously, “the Lord has gave an’ the law
has took away. I don’t put it a-past her to marry agin—the lawyer man
tolt her she could if she liked an’ could find ary man’d take her.
She’s powerful homely now.”
Granny Joslin filled her pipe and went on smoking and chuckling. She
stared so steadily into the ashes of the fireplace, was so deeply
engaged with her own self-communings, that she scarcely noticed her
grandson as he pushed back his chair, arising.
“Good-by, Davy,” said she, as he reached the threshold.
He turned from her and once more closed the door. It was his door no
more.
“Meliss’,” said the old woman when at length she heard no more his feet
passing on the hard ground walk. “Come on back in. He’s done gone.”
“What did I say!” broke out the younger woman as she clumped in once
more. She flung herself into a chair, her face distorted with her
jealous anger. “I knowed it—I knowed it all along. I knowed he’d be
a-carryin’ on with wimmern-folks outside—he done owned up to two—ye
heerd him, didn’t ye? Us a-starvin’ here, an’ him livin’ soft with them
rich! Well, I fixed him, an’ I’m glad of it—he had it a-comin’ to him,
that’s one thing shore.”
“Well,” said Granny Joslin after a time, “hit don’t look to me like
thar was much hope; that’s right.”
“Hope!” half screamed the other, unrestrained. “I don’t want no hope.
If he quits me, I reckon I’ve quit him. I hain’t so old, come to that.
I kin raise my fam’ly yit, somewhars else. Thar’s other men in the
world besides him—an’ real men at that.”
“What do you mean, Meliss’?” said the old woman, quietly. “You’ve
said that twict now. I know the Joslins. He hain’t nuvver comin’
back agin—not in all his hull life. He’s done. He’ll have enough
trouble—but he’ll nuvver trouble ye agin. He’s _gone_.”
“All right, then,” retorted the other angrily. “Let him go. He’s been
gone fer two year, an’ he mought as well have been gone fer another
year afore that. What do I need with him, with all the other men thar
is in the world?”
“Huh!” rejoined the old lady, “as though I didn’t know ye’d been
a-carryin’ on a civil courtship already! Seen him lately, Meliss’?
‘Pears to me like ye git worse favored every year, Meliss’. Ye’re a
powerful homely womern, like I done tolt Davy now.” She still chuckled
savagely, fearless as ever.
“Go on home!” cried the irate woman who faced her. “I hate ye all, ye
Andy Joslins. Who air ye, anyways, to put on sech airs with me?”
But Granny Joslin did not go home for yet a while. Instead, she lighted
her pipe with a coal once more, pushing it down with a horny forefinger.
“To _dance_ through life, Meliss’,” said she, after a time, apropos of
nothing apparent,—“that’s what life is fer. Ye set mopin’ and dawncey
all the time—sour as a last month’s cornpone—do ye expect a man’s
a-goin’ to love ye fer that? Yore old one didn’t, an’ yore new one
won’t. But me—I kin dance yit!”
And suiting the action to the word, the old dame did arise, and
catching her scant skirts up in either hand, executed a sturdy jig
after the fashion of the olden times, stamping out the time on the
puncheon floor, with an occasional exclamation of her own, whirling and
turning, and now and then extending her skirts, at last snapping her
fingers as she ceased. She seemed not too weary nor out of breath as
she sank again into her chair.
“My God, Meliss’,” she said, “I’m glad thar’s one Joslin that’s showed
hisself a man!”
She spoke to a vacant room—the other and younger woman, gone fey
of her own savage humors, once more had flung from the room and was
standing, hands clenched, in the yard beyond. But old Granny Joslin
was not perturbed. She lighted her pipe once more and sat for a time
engaged in her own thoughts as before—her eyes fixed exactly on a
certain knot of a certain log in the rude wall—she voiced her own
conclusions to herself.
“I was about that height my own self when I was a gal. An’ Lord! hain’t
it sweet—to come just inside the arm of a strong man, Meliss’? Don’t I
know?
“I was a-wonderin’ fer a while which one of them two wimmern Davy’d
turn up with fustest. But, sakes! I know—he tolt me plenty, if he
didn’t Meliss’. French-Irish—dark and curly-haired—big eyes, like
enough—she come right under his arm when he stood up—the sort that’s
sort of squushy when you hug ‘em—maybe light on her feet—laughin’,
maybe! Wimmern that laughs has always got the aidge on them that cries.
Why, I kin see that womern dancin’ as she goes along, alive clar down
to her toes—that’s the one—you hear me now!”
And having demolished all argument on the part of the listening knot,
Granny Joslin at length did knock the last ashes from her pipe, and,
rising, leave the empty house and cold hearthfire of what was no longer
a home.
CHAPTER XVIII
MARCIA HADDON
DAVID JOSLIN wished nothing so much as to be quite alone. He did not
rejoin his companions on the hill. Pleading his errand at Windsor, he
set out at once down stream with no companion other than his own bitter
thoughts. It seemed to him he never had known a longer or more terrible
day, nor had the future ever appeared to him so hopeless and foredoomed.
It was yet daylight when he arrived at the little town, and he turned
once more to the boarding house of the Widow Dunham. As he reached
the gate he caught the fragrance of a cigar whose aroma was unusual
in these parts. Unwilling to meet strangers, he halted an instant;
but finding no way out of it, he advanced, an odd sort of conviction
suddenly in his mind. Sitting there, almost as they had sat two years
ago, he saw two figures, both familiar to him.
“Well, well,” growled the raucous voice of James Haddon as he turned.
“What, what? We meet again! How’s this happen, stranger? Where you been
all the while?”
Joslin shook the hand of each simply, without a word.
Haddon was heavier, redder, yet more coarsened by his manner of life,
than when he last had seen him. The flesh hung puffily on his cheeks,
drooped from his folded neck above his collar. His prominent eyes were
yet more prominent and bulging.
As for his wife, it seemed more than ever as though she did not belong
with him, as though she degraded herself by sitting even thus close to
him.
“We didn’t expect to see you here, Mr. Joslin,” said Marcia
Haddon—“nor anywhere else,” with a faint smile.
“I always planned one day to explain to you, Ma’am,” said Joslin. “I
didn’t want you to think me ungrateful. I may have seemed so.”
Marcia Haddon’s quick senses caught the increased dignity about the
man. She noted also, keenly, womanlike, the new shade of sadness on his
unsmiling face, and wondered what was the cause.
But Haddon himself had no interest in these matters. “Well,” he
growled, “I’m not going to say I was tickled to death at the way you
treated us. You double-crossed me—you threw me down, that’s all.”
“Mr. Haddon,” said David Joslin quietly. “I did not double-cross you. I
never did that in my life to anyone. You can’t call that to me.”
“Well, you didn’t go along,” rejoined Haddon testily. “I hate above
all things the man that won’t go along with the bunch. It knocks to
pieces any sort of business—big men go in front and plan things,
and some little fellow comes along and knocks it all out I’ve got no
patience with that sort of thing.”
Joslin’s pale face suddenly went white.
“I’ve not a dollar in my pocket now, Mr. Haddon,” said he at last. “I
didn’t have when I was in your country. I didn’t know the ways of your
country—I was ignorant. But you don’t know the ways of my country, and
you’re ignorant, or you’d not speak that way to me.”
“Don’t bring it all up again, Jim,” interposed Marcia Haddon quickly,
and raised an arm of intervention, although Joslin had not moved. She
tried to catch her husband’s eye, for she herself knew it was not far
to trouble now. “Why, Mr. Joslin,” she went on, “we were just talking
of you and wishing we had someone to take us in. We’re here just as
we were two years ago; and, as you say, we’re ignorant. We don’t know
this country any better now than we did then. You say you’re not
ungrateful—won’t you let us be grateful too?”
“He knows what I want now,” interrupted her husband testily. “It’s time
I knew something absolute and sure about my company’s investments in
there. Well, are you going to take me in this time, young fellow?” he
demanded brusquely of Joslin. “Let me tell you, I’m not going to turn
back again. Are you going to try to square it now a little by helping
the man that helped you?”
“If it’s any help to Mrs. Haddon to have me go in with you, I’ll be
glad,” said Joslin directly. “She has been very good to me. I’m going
back up river tomorrow as far as the Forks.
“But I’ve got to be going now,” he added, and so turned away to the
street gate, so shaken with white anger that he scarce cared where he
went.
Haddon, mumbling, rose and went into the house, leaving his wife
alone. Not long later she heard a giggle, a protest, a chuckle of low
laughter. James Haddon had chucked the comely Widow Dunham under the
chin, had cast an arm across her somewhat ample shoulders.
“Who was that talkin’ outside?” queried the widow.
“Oh, that? It was that long-legged chambermaid you had working here
last year—Jucklin—Joslin—— What’s his name? Never mind him—won’t I
do? At least I used to.”
The widow replied in such fashion as was obvious. Their joint murmured,
low-laughing conversation became unescapable for the single auditor on
the gallery. At length Marcia Haddon rose. Something came upon her on
the instant, some swift, unappointed revolt, an unspeakable disgust
with the married bondage she had so long borne unwillingly. She could
not speak with her husband—quietly she passed the two and went into
her own room.
He followed her, after a time, and there she turned upon him suddenly,
her cheeks burning in two red spots.
“Jim, I can’t stand this sort of thing any longer. I can’t—I
can’t—and I will not!”
He stood suddenly crestfallen at this sudden revolt of one long thought
so passive. She went on hurriedly.
“It’s gone too far. If it’s not one woman, it’s another. It’s in your
blood now—you’ve been at this sort of thing so long you can’t stop.
I’ve been ashamed for years. How can I help knowing?”
“If I did, who’s to blame?” he rejoined surlily. “A woman as cold as
you——”
“Yes, that’s true now, that’s true! But why should you care? Only, I’ll
not go on this way any farther.”
Hands in pockets, he only turned away, growling.
“Oh, yes, back home,” she went on, her hands at the sides of her
temples, “I seemed to be able to stand it. But here—things seem
plainer, some way.”
His sneer had the sullen anger of a man who knows the indefensibility
of his position. “That long-legged lout has taught you to cheek me too.
Damn him!”
“Jim,” said she, “I don’t like to hear such things of you. It’s not
worthy of the man you used to be. When we get back to the city we’ll
have to get on some other way. I’ll go on through with you now, because
I know your business interests are in real danger. I won’t say anything
now. But that’s all. I’m done. This is good-by for you and me.”
Dumfounded, Haddon left her and went out again into the darkness. He
sat moodily, his cigar hanging from his flabby lips. Mutiny such as
this he had never suspected as a possible thing from a woman like his
wife. There came to him, sternly facing him now, two influences—new
in his life of bluffing and jollying and pretending and evading and
deceiving—the indomitableness of a real man and the immutability of a
real woman.
CHAPTER XIX
THE NARROWS
BY MORNING, Haddon had become a trace more possible in his comportment.
He did not need to speak to Joslin further about the joining of forces
up the river, for the latter had his own supplies at the landing early,
ready for the embarkation, and had arranged to send down for his own
boat at a later time. They set about their journey in Haddon’s boat,
as being more commodious and faster. It did fairly well, the out-board
motor chugging along around bend after bend of the ancient river,
awakening echoes whose like had never before that time been known in
these hills where oar and paddle and sweep had served immemorially.
At noon they ate their luncheon on a shaded bank—not too happy a
company, for Haddon was strangely silent, his wife not less so, and
Joslin himself, always taciturn, found no reason for speech. As they
re-embarked Haddon did make some inquiry as to the length and character
of the remaining way.
“By and by, in four or five miles,” answered Joslin civilly, “we’ll
come to the foot of the Narrows. I reckon we’ll have to drag the boat
up through the Narrows. Between here and there we’ll have trouble—the
water shoals out in a good many places.”
This last was fair prophecy, as they were to find. It never occurred
to Haddon that he could go overboard and help in the progress of the
boat when it grounded. Joslin stepped out as he was, took the painter
of the boat across his shoulder, and, bent forward like any beast of
burden, waded on, dragging the heavy craft behind him. Marcia Haddon
sat watching all this, looking from the one man to the other. The
patience of the poor man, the carelessness of the rich man—these
things indeed came to her soul in the nature of a comparison. At length
Haddon had the bad taste and bad judgment to complain querulously about
the slowness of their progress.
“Damn it, man, is that as fast as you can go?” he exclaimed, perhaps
having in mind earlier experiences with half-breed guides in tourist
countries.
Joslin made no immediate reply, but stood rigid for a time, very pale.
At length, the painter of the boat still in his hand, he waded back
alongside the boat and looked the other man in the face, his own eyes
glowing.
“Mr. Haddon,” said he, “get out here in the water. If we both pull on
the line, we can get this lady up there a good deal faster.”
And Haddon, being wise, got out, accoutered as he was. Joslin, somber,
taciturn, did not speak to him at all for a half-hour or more.
At length they came, with an hour or so yet of daylight, to the foot of
the great pool which lay below the Narrows.
“Here’s where we’ll have to be careful,” said Joslin now, as rounding
the bend they caught the full roar of the waters which had assailed
their ears for so long. Before them lay a deep black pool with a high
ridge of white running down the middle. Above the pool a transverse bar
of white entirely crossed the river, here pinched down between two rock
walls. The stream plunged across a broken reef, dropping some feet in a
wide cascade. On either side were flat ledges of rock now exposed above
the water. Obviously, it was the intention of Joslin to walk alongside
and drag up the boat close to the shore.
“How far is it on from here?” demanded Haddon, sullenly. “It’s one hell
of a looking spot, ain’t it, you’ve brought us to—black already as
though it was night! I never did like water anyway.”
“There’s a short cut across the hills from here to town—only a few
miles,” Joslin answered quietly. “We can make good time once we get
above here.”
“It’s a mighty bad-looking place,” grumbled Haddon. “I don’t like the
looks of it at all. How are you ever going to get up through there?”
“It’s easy,” said Joslin. “I’ve been through a thousand times, I
reckon. I’ll take care of you, so don’t be afraid. Now, when I run
alongside the ledge yonder, Mrs. Haddon, you climb on out the best you
can.”
She did so quickly and lightly. Haddon clumsily scrambled out on his
knees, red of face, still grumbling, irritable.
They stood now on a flat ledge of the sandstone which made a fair
footway, broken here and there with steps as one eroded stratum after
another dropped down. The river itself had cut through the entire ledge
in the course of ages, and made a plunge, as has been stated, of many
feet. From their new place of vantage they could see the full height
of what the mountaineers called the “king breaker” of the Narrows—a
white crest of up-flung water which rolled back toward the foot of the
cascade before it was caught in the downward pull of the current. The
roar of the water was now full in their ears. The spot was gloomy,
oppressive.
“I wish it wasn’t so dark!” said Marcia Haddon, huddling her arms to
her. She scarce had spoken for an hour before. “It’s growing colder,
too.”
“We’ll not be long, Ma’am,” said Joslin. “Don’t be afraid at all. Just
walk on up, and I’ll get the boat up a little way.”
“Wait a minute,” said Haddon. “It’s late, but I just want to try to
make a picture here—I want to show the boys what sort of a place this
is that they’ve sent me to—I’ve left my camera on the boat seat. I’ll
have a try at it anyhow.”
As Joslin now paused, bracing back on the painter of the heavy skiff,
it was caught by a strong side current where the stream was flung back
from its impact against the rocky bank—a current which ran out, headed
almost midstream, toward the main break of the big wave. The boat,
held thus strongly, had no great bearing on the water at its bow, but
Haddon, unaccustomed to such matters, forgot that, or did not know it.
Before Joslin could stop him he was clumsily bending over as though to
climb once more into the boat, tugging at the gunwale to pull it closer
to him.
It was then, in some way—no one could tell how—that his foot stumbled
and caught at a ledge of the rock. He pitched forward into the unstable
portion of the boat, stumbled, and, as the wash of the water came
in-board, went over, still under the impetus of his fall, and sank,
directly into the outflung current. It all had happened in an instant,
nor could mortal man have prevented it.
Marcia Haddon for just half a moment saw the upturned face
of her husband as it disappeared, a face on which horror was
written—unspeakable and unforgettable horror. The next instant he was
gone—he was under.
“Quick!” called Joslin sharply to Marcia Haddon, and cast her the
rope. “Make it fast over something.”
But he did not stop to see whether or not her weak strength would serve
to hold the boat. He was kicking off his shoes, throwing off his coat,
even as he spoke, his eyes fixed on the water, as he made ready for a
leap few men would have dared.
A hat floated, far below. But nothing else showed—neither here in the
eddy, nor yonder in the side current, nor in the great pool below.
Haddon had gone deep in his fall, he might have been carried out
somewhere midstream, but why did he not show on the surface somewhere
in all this time?
All the time he called back over his shoulder reassuringly to Marcia
Haddon, but he could not see what she was doing—only he waited, eyes
outward, straining, to find some object on the waters—some object now
so fatally long delayed. But nothing showed. At length, hesitating no
longer, he did what no man ever had been known to do before. He dived
straight out for the foot of the up-flung crest of the Narrows of the
Kentucky—straight down under the roll of the “king breaker” itself.
Joslin before now had seen a log roll about here for hours in the
clutch of the back-turned wave, tossing up and down until at length
some freak of the current set it free. He fancied that perhaps Haddon
might be caught in something of the same way. It was one chance in ten
thousand for him now, one in hundreds for the man who was giving him
that chance. Would he win?
A myriad of blue-white bubbles made a veil across the current down in
below, and he saw this vaguely, although the sun was so low that the
water was lighted but ill at this hour. The yeast of the water did not
hold him up well—he sunk deeper, still deeper, he knew not how far
down. Blindly his arms reached out, feeling every way. They touched
nothing—the thin, oxygenated fluid hardly could be felt at all. He
rose, swam on across the stream, on, out, indeed, he knew not where. He
rose just beyond the foot of the main chute, having been down longer
than he dreamed a man might stay and live.
But when he found himself still able to swim and still able to see,
when he had flung the water from his eyes, he still saw nothing near
him, nothing on the black pool. He was alone. He could hear the cries
of a woman. He could not go back. It was all he could do to reach the
further shore.
He landed well toward the foot of the pool, with difficulty pulling
himself out upon the ledge there. But as he turned once more, nothing
but the black and the white water met his gaze. James Haddon was gone.
Where?
He dared not now look across to the woman whom he saw wringing her
hands. He ran to the head of the pool, toward the flat rock where lay
some charred embers of many earlier fires. Eagerly, intently, he looked
out and down upon the water for some sign of what he sought.
There was some sort of sign! Deep below the surface, it seemed to him
he saw some long dark object, floating, swinging, rising and falling,
but not going down on the current. It hung as though held. Was it some
log? Joslin knew it could not be.
Drawing his breath in deep and full, he sprang again far out, feeling
with his arms, with his feet, but at first touching nothing. Suddenly,
just inside the ridge of white water, there came up against his body
from below a heavy blow, as from some object flung upward by a giant
hand.
It was the body of James Haddon, swaying there. It was swaying
strangely, for some unknown reason. It was James Haddon’s free hand had
smitten Joslin in the face as though contemptuous of him even now.
But Joslin caught at the hand, tugged at it. The body would not
give—it swayed in the current, but it still was held!
Joslin knew now what it meant. Slowly, gasping, he turned once more to
his side of the river, and once more climbed out upon the ledge. He was
growing weaker, but there was yet much to be done. He dared not look
across the river now. In truth, Marcia Haddon’s face most of the time
was buried in her hands—only she raised it once in a while to see
what new terror was here for her.
She saw this strange man, apparently insane, on the farther side of the
river, once more pull himself up on the ledge, once more run up to the
head of the pool, once more stand there, at the edge, hesitating.
But Joslin was hesitating only to summon up his powers once more. When
he dived this time, the open blade of his pocket knife was in his
teeth. He swam out again, and she saw him working part of the time
above, part of the time below the water, the dark outline of his own
body now and again flung out, visible above the course of the white
water which ridged down into the dark pool.
At last she saw his head turn. He followed something, apparently, down
through the fast water, down into the black, down to the foot of the
pool. She guessed what it must be.
Joslin had known what held the body of James Haddon fast. Carried deep
down outward by the side current, Haddon had felt something floating
down there, had caught at it—a thing no larger than the straw at which
a drowning man will clutch. It was no larger than a straw—the thick
cord of a fisherman’s heavy set-line, armed with hooks depending on
short lines—two score hooks or more, each of them a man-trap in such
waters. As he had grasped at this line the current had carried him on
down. The first hook had impaled him, passing entirely through the
palm of his hand. He swung without any possibility of escape. Below
him somewhere two or more heavy catfish were tugging at the line,
themselves impaled without hope of escape.
All these things had caused what Joslin had seen—the strange swaying
of the man’s body back and forth there below the surface.
And Joslin knew by the time the body had reached the foot of the pool,
by the time he had cut loose the remaining line and dragged the body up
on the beach below, that all hope was long since gone for James Haddon.
Weakly now and inefficiently he did what he could to try to revive life
in the victim, but the bluish-purple face, the wide-open mouth, the
staring eyes, told him well enough the truth.
Joslin rose after a time. The woman was standing there still, her hands
at the side of her face, staring. He knew that she must know.
The boat was gone. Joslin looked down the stream. He saw it on his side
of the river, by freak of the stream grounded on the bar which made out
from the point. He hastened to the boat, waded out, caught it, and with
the oars by chance left in the boat made his way upstream to the foot
of the pool. With difficulty he got into the bottom of the boat the
heavy body of the dead man.
He did not speak at all when at length the boat lay once more along
shore on the left-hand bank, below the flat ledge on which Marcia
Haddon stood. He caught the painter now around the stump of a gnarled
cedar near the edge, and so turned toward her at last, facing the
hardest of all this grievous task.
She stepped slowly, horror-smitten, toward the brink, her hands at her
temples. Joslin held her by the arm as she looked down into the swaying
boat. The face of her husband stared up at her—bluish-white, the
thickened lips open, the eyes staring.
“You must go away,” said Joslin at last.—“Go over there in the brush
and sit down. I’ll have to drop the boat down.”
He did drop it down to a point where the ledge dipped so that he
could make some sort of landing. Slowly, with very much difficulty,
he managed to disembark the ghastly cargo. Able to do no more, he
literally dragged the body of James Haddon out and let it lie upon the
sand at the edge of a thicket. But she had followed him and looked down
speechless as she knelt now, her hands still at her face, her head
shaking from side to side.
“Jim! Jim!” she whispered. “Oh! Oh!”