Sitting on a pierhead jutting from the Seattle water front one
Sunday afternoon in April Robin surrendered himself to a mood that
he had been choking down all winter.
Materially he had done well enough. He had sought sanctuary in this
seaport city and found what he sought. He had walked the streets
with an assurance that he was lost in the swarming ant heap. So far
as Montana, the Block S, those far wide ranges went, he had ceased
to be. And since he had not come there seeking glory and fortune by
the white-collar route he had soon found work that he could do and
for which he was well paid.
But he didn’t fit. He was an alien in an alien land. These people
did not speak his tongue. His ways were not their ways. Even now the
lessened rumble of Sunday traffic beat on his brain, a faint
distasteful sound, which in midweek roar annoyed and irritated him
with its clang of complicated machinery, its feverish scurrying of
crowds--there seemed no more purpose in this medley of unrest than
there was in the senseless milling of a herd--except that the human
herd went surging this way and that under the constant pressure of
the invisible riders of necessity.
Here on this April afternoon the sun shone on rippling water at his
feet. The surrounding hills and Sound islands all washed clean by
drenching rain were bright with spring growth. For weeks, for
months, Robin had lived and moved under the gloom of murky skies,
great clouds that wept eternal tears. He had shivered on his wagon
in damp fogs carrying a chill like the clammy hands of death. The
sun was lost in that gloom. It was all gray, gray sky, gray streets,
gray sea. Sometimes the very soul in him turned gray.
He was too far from all that he had known and cared about. Voluntary
exile he might have endured with better grace, knowing that he could
return if he wished. But he could not go back. If he could not go
back to places and things he knew he did not care where he went.
So chafing, he could not fit himself in here. Sometimes he said to
himself that it was all in his mind, that men and women, work and
pleasure were the same anywhere. Only he couldn’t make that a
reality for himself in Seattle. Such pleasures as he sought only
made him sad. Life flowed about him in a surging stream and he was
like a chip in the swirls. He had laid that feeling of loneliness,
that depressing sense of isolation, to being a stranger, to living
under a sodden, weeping sky that never cleared to let him see the
blue. He had never known anything but brightness, air that was
crystal-clear, a look that swept to a far horizon. Here the eyes
were in a prison, shut in by streets like canyons, miles of houses
monotonously alike, dark dripping forests that began where the last
suburban cottages lifted among the raw stumps where logging outfits
had taken their toll of the great trees.
Robin had said to himself that when he knew people, when spring
came, it would be different. It _was_ different. But the difference
took the form of a more acute nostalgia. Robin had never wandered
among the poets, but he knew spring fever and he was learning in
bitterness of heart the meaning of homesickness.
He turned now to face the city rising above him in terraced avenues.
Smoke from ten thousand chimneys cast a haze against the soft blue
sky. The rustle and noise and confusion had stilled a little, though
not wholly, on this day of rest. There was a transient hush along
the water front. An atmospheric beauty hovered upon the Sound. The
Olympics stood out blue toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Yet the
city faced Robin like a maelstrom from which he desired to be afar.
He was sick with a subtle sorrow. The medicine to cure him was a
good horse between his legs, a look from some high ridge out over a
hundred miles of grassland all green now and sprinkled with blue
windflowers. There would be mountains in the distance too; clean,
upstanding peaks like Gothic cathedrals rising, as the Sweet Grass
and the Bear Paws rose, abruptly from the level of the great plains.
The sharp smell of bruised sage, the white tents of a round-up camp
in a creek bottom, the howl of a wolf far off in the night--these
Robin’s heart suddenly ached for--and for something else, that he
felt deep within him but would never admit.
“By God, I’ve a mind to go back and face the music!” he said aloud.
“They can’t hang me. I’d as soon spend two or three years in Deer
Lodge as here.”
Of so little value did freedom seem to him in that moment. There was
more than homesickness. A man’s liberty is dear but so is pride.
Only cowards fled the field. He hadn’t fought a rear guard action.
For four months that inner sense of shame had been slowly
accumulating in Robin. All that he cared about, his little cosmos in
its entirety, lay under the shadow of the Bear Paws. He had been
stampeded into flight from a danger real enough, but which he should
have faced.
Robin rose from the weather-beaten pile.
“I _will_ go back,” he said to himself. “I’ve had enough of this. I
shouldn’t have run.”
Within twenty-four hours he was aboard a Great Northern train
rolling east through a gloomy pass in the Coast Range. He lay in a
berth, his face pressed to a window pane, watching the dark forest
slip by, a formless blur in the night, listening to the click-clack
of rail joints under the iron wheels. He felt shut in, oppressed by
those walls of dusky timber draped with mossy streamers, clouds
above and a darksome aisle in the forest down which the train
thundered. No place for a man hungry for bright sun and blue skies.
At dawn the train dropped into the Yakima country. The land opened
up in wide vistas. Cattle grazed on rolling hills, dark moving dots
on pale green. Robin threw open a window. He leaned out sniffing.
Sagebrush ran up to the right of way, receded into the distance,
silver-gray in the first sunlight. He could smell it, sweet in his
nostrils as camp fire smoke to an Arab.
He lay back in his berth with a strange sense of relief. As the
sailor sick of shore sights and sounds goes gladly down to the sea
so Robin returned to his own country.