John and I went to Restwell. I cannot say that I missed Miriam, for
I seemed to take Miriam with me. I missed the others at Flowerfield.
But Restwell was most dear to me. I loved mother and grandfather and
Aunt Sarah, Daddy Guinea, Mammy, Ahasuerus, and the rest, the animals
and the trees and the house, and every other aspect. I loved the
graveyard and the bank going down to the river, and the river itself.
John knew all the haunts, but now he learned them better with me.
What my grandfather had not read in these four years I do not know.
Colonel Forth's pecuniary affairs were yet shot with strain and
difficulty. But somehow--and I know here how greatly my mother
helped him--he managed to pay the interest on the mortgage. The old
Restwell shelter sheltered still. Around him the affairs of the
South were slowly bettering. The war was no longer blindingly,
thunderously present. It had changed its shape, lowered its voice.
Its boulder weight was become spread sand. It was always there,
always would be there. You could as little kill the war as kill
anything else. On thundered the long freight-train stacked with
effects. At every station something was deposited. But also other
unkillable things breathed on, such as man's ineradicable hope of
understanding all, of enjoying all, of being all.
My grandfather looked older and gentler. He was busy all day with a
thousand active, patient adjustments. But after supper, by
lamplight, until almost midnight, he read. He had found his way to
Jacob Boehme, to Spinoza, to Blake.
My aunt Sarah read less, I thought, than she used to do--less, that
is, in books. Remembering, I am aware, by the now stronger light,
that she had turned to that inner library, greater than any housed
collection. There two and two, in a thousand places, came together
and made four.
My mother burned, as always, a light, a warmth, fed steadily by a
willing sacrifice. She herself went with joy into the fire of
herself.
Oh, Restwell, and all that made Restwell!
John and I, in good and bad weather, walked to Whitechurch and walked
home again. Hilltop Academy rose at the edge of town. The distance
was nothing to strong youths, country bred. We carried our books and
our dinner. The many and many things that along the way we
ruminated, debated! All the way there and the way back again, the
two hundred and odd school-days in each year, three years on end!
There are trees that rise in memory hung with talk as with fruit.
Hilltop Academy, brick, long and gaunt, had the luck to have gathered
about it a dozen really splendid cedars. Except for these its hill
was a somewhat bare and windy one. As each morning we approached it
we might see the boys running, jumping, playing ball, or knotted
together--the younger ones--over marbles. In memory a wind seems
always to blow. Sometimes snow falls. There is a high, shifting
veil, and it and the boys are all of a piece. Boarding pupils and
town and country pupils, there were not far from a hundred boys. Out
of this number a score made our group. Out of this group two or
three pressed closer. They and John and I heard very nearly the same
sounds. One of them, Gamaliel Young, came closer than the others.
The principal of the academy was his father, Dr. Abner Young.
I would say at once that Doctor Young was estimable. There was even
about him a kind of sweetness, some errant fragrance, some spice
lurking beneath fold after fold of mummy linen. His archaic rigidity
of line was not without distinction.... Lot's wife looked back,
remembered too exclusively the plain--the plane--that must be left,
and became a pillar of salt. Salt preserves. Where it is too
abundant green things do not grow. She loved the past not wisely,
but too well. Yet love is love and covereth a multitude. And little
by little, doubtless, age by age, the rain and the wind and the fire
undid the form.
Hilltop Academy employed a number of teachers. But Doctor Young kept
in his own hands Greek and Latin, history and English. In the letter
of the languages he taught well. In the letter of history and of the
literature of England he had knowledge. But he was mineralized, and
what he did and what he gave partook of that quality. An honest
mineral, with mineral beauty.
Each morning, at the ringing of a bell, occurred a Scripture reading,
a short homily, a prayer. Doctor Young read, expounded, prayed. The
hundred boys sat as still as they could. Sometimes something caught
them, oftener nothing. It was a mill-wheel turning. One must feel
reverential when one sat by the mill-race and the wheel began to
turn. But the wheat in the hopper very rarely indeed made any
connection with one's own private oven. (Doubtless, now I think of
it, that was because the oven was not large enough.) The mill-wheel
stopped, the church feeling flew away, out trooped the hundred boys
into the big, bare, echoing hall.
Each Wednesday, at two in the afternoon, Doctor Young lectured. He
made these talks into occasions. They took place in the
assembly-hall. The smallest boys were excused, but the rest of us
sat in solemn rows with clean hands and smoothed hair. All the
teachers were there, seated where they might observe both us and the
principal. It happened--it grew by degrees into settled custom--that
friends of the academy, of Doctor Young, leading citizens of
Whitechurch, seeking culture, came to these Wednesday talks. There
was always a little block of comfortable chairs, filled from
Whitechurch. Ladies and gentlemen both attended. They seemed to
think it necessary to listen very closely, to nod their heads at
regular intervals. They did not applaud, because it seemed too much
like church and the Word of God. I have forgotten to say that in his
early manhood Doctor Young had been a minister. He believed with
intensity that he still ministered to souls.
The least of the Wednesday talks lasted half an hour. I have known
them to run over the hour. He spoke well, without a ragged edge,
without a sign of indefiniteness, and always as one having authority.
He had a thin, severe enthusiasm, very far from unction, but carrying
over. Unwavering belief in one's own revelation cannot but do it.
He was the Apostle of the _Status quo Ante_.
Gamaliel sat with John and me and fidgeted. This father and son
loved each other, but it was love dashed with profound care and
dissent. Doctor Young felt the impatience in the corner. His eyes
darted over. I remember more than once or twice in the sequence of
Wednesdays a pause, a "Keep order there!" I remember an angry
"Gamaliel"!
Gamaliel broke off his absent-minded drumming upon the desk before
him. He sat up and looked at the speaker. The father looked back.
Struggle was in the air. "You will break from me!"--"I am breaking
from you!"--"Yet you are me!"--"Yet I will carry you with
me--Anchises on Æneas's shoulders!" There were, of course, no such
articulate words.
These Wednesday discourses varied as to subject. Doctor Young was
intensely interested in keeping the world good--in salting it down,
so to speak. To do this one must be active and wary on all sides.
Weeds would grow! But he would do what he could to fix the soil in
the young minds before him. Specifically and sharply to fix it in
Gamaliel's mind. There was jealousy of Gamaliel. He must not take
the Inheritance and riot with it.
The Inheritance was stored in treasure-houses labeled
Religion--Political Life--Economics--Science--Arts and Letters.
Doctor Young stood before the door of each and expounded how all
things must be kept and polished.
He was a strict disciplinarian. The younger boys--the little
fellows--came in, not infrequently, for corporal punishment.
Gamaliel was not among the younger boys. But out of school, in the
father's bare study, he might yet taste the whip. It was not often,
and this mode of dealing with him ceased before he was fifteen. And
no doubt Doctor Young prayed afterward a quarter of the night.
I speak as though I did not like the pillar of salt. But I did.
There were yearnings and sincerity, and an Egyptian moonlight of old
beauty, and great willingness to be kind if only we would stay within
bounds!
I hear him now upon the mad--that was a great word with him--the mad
attempt, originating in England, to undermine the Christian Religion.
He withered with irony Messrs. Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall.
Hilltop Academy must sooner or later go forth into the world. He
would arm its units against insidious modernity! He proceeded to arm
us. I remember that Mr. Millwood was among those from the town who
was present that day. I see now the big head and shoulders vibrating
assent. The flaying of the evolutionists lasted an hour.
Again political economy. Doctor Young gave up the divine right of
kings, but quite subtly and passionately inculcated divine right of
class. He was devoted to the point of romance to class, order,
hierarchy, successiveness. How feudal, reasonable, logical he was!
Out of his numerous "literary" talks I recall most plainly that upon
"Paradise Lost." He labored Shakespeare, but he loved Milton. I
remember, too, a scorching warning away from most modern novels,
poems, and other works--"modern" and highly explosive, that is, in
1876, to country-living folk. George Eliot was armed against no less
than George Sand. A young poet then writing, named Swinburne we must
never touch! There were qualities in Browning, but also dangerous
heresies, to say nothing of impossible style. The evolutionists--how
few were untainted by the evolutionists! Coming to our own country,
Mr. Emerson was undoubtedly able, but could be followed only a little
way and through careful selection. Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier
were safe. Mr. Millwood, who was again among the listeners, shook
his head, remembering utterances "against the South."
But Doctor Young differed here from Mr. Millwood. It was not the
South that he thought of, but the moral nationality.... I think of
him as a kind of Switzerland, shot up high from a narrow base.
Gamaliel had a stub of a pencil and the back of a long envelop and
was drawing while his father talked. He drew a man reading and made
the figure look like himself. The book held in both hands was quite
large. The pencil hesitated, then printed on the cover, SWINBURNE.
He next stood on end around the reader a number of volumes, the back
of each of which he proceeded to letter. GEORGE SAND--GEORGE
ELIOT--EMERSON--DARWIN. There was just a tremor, then the pencil
added INGERSOLL.
Now I know Gamaliel, and he was not in the least trying to be
"smart." Father and son were alike in dead earnest.
In the late summer, just before the beginning of my second year at
Hilltop, I met with an accident. A colt that I was breaking threw me
and broke my ankle. It was set and healed, but for a long time was
weak. Doctor Gilbert said that I must not walk each day to and from
Whitechurch. It ended in my becoming, from October to Christmas, one
of the boarding boys.
Mrs. Young was an invalid. She lay on a sofa and looked with dark,
hollow eyes at some inner pageant. The house where ate and slept and
forgathered twenty boys, under the eyes of four teachers and of
Doctor Young, was kept by two maiden sisters, cousins of the
principal. It was well kept after our easy-going Southern fashion.
The teachers were intelligent and good-natured, the two maiden
sisters amiable, maternally-minded women. Every one intended
kindness. It was a pretty fair home. The twenty boys slept in four
rooms. I had the luck to be with Gamaliel. Moreover, two out of the
five in our room went home in November upon some contingency. The
remaining one was a "little fellow" of whom we were fond and who had
the good habit of going to sleep immediately upon getting into bed.
Gamaliel and I could talk till late.
But I do not speak now of the lasting nearness of Gamaliel and me.
With John and Miriam he came near. We were countrymen, though Miriam
and I were more closely countrymen than any. But we were all of one
language. Gamaliel spoke it with poignancy and thrill, differing
there from John's long, slow waves, quiet and massive.
Whitechurch rambled around the foot of Doctor Young's hill like a
pleasant trailing vine, then went up and down and over a hill of its
own. The spire of St. Matthew's, the spires of the Presbyterian,
Baptist, and Methodist churches, leaned against the sky. The square
old court-house held its place. There was Garth's Hotel with its row
of horse-chestnuts edging the brick pavement, pleasant for men's
souls who wished to loaf. The Bank was found retired behind a
sycamore beneath which Indians may have lighted council fires. Up
and down the High Street signs guided to stores where general
merchandise was bought and sold. Whitechurch expected a railroad,
but as yet only expected it. A ramshackle stage left Garth's in the
morning light and returned in the evening. Folk looked out of window
or stopped upon the sidewalk to see it pass, with or without
passengers. "There's the stage!" Back from the High Street, down
short ways named for pioneers, Indian fighters, and Colonial
governors, along Washington Street that paralleled High Street,
gathered the homes, brick and frame, large and small, each a unit
compounded of units, a person synthesizing persons--as Whitechurch
was a person, and the county a person, and the state a person, and
the country a person, and the world a person. Most of the houses had
gardens, large or small. In the spring there bloomed old shrubs,
bowery and fragrant, lilac and snowball and syringa and weigelia.
And there were trees and again trees, so many that in June the place
grew leafy and sang like a forest.
Whatever there had been before the war, or might be in the future,
the present Whitechurch had exceedingly little money. Just in these
years the whole country, North and South, knew financial depression.
Inflation met Nemesis in the road. Whitechurch was poor, but
Whitechurch prided itself upon its ability to rise above what it
called "material considerations." Mr. Millwood was a good leader
here, and Doctor Young likewise, and four or five other estimable
figures, men and women, whom I see now through a mist of laughing and
liking. There was plenty of grit in Whitechurch. It prided itself
upon its sense of values, religious, esthetic, and social.
Ten of the Hilltop boarding pupils were boys above fourteen. Out of
this number the principal saw sparks of promise in at least five.
And there were the boarding teachers who should, who must, give
scholastic distinction to the cultural life of Whitechurch. The
principal himself felt the weight of his responsibility. Doctor
Young, the four boarding teachers, the five boys that scintillated
and the five that were supposed to be deader coals, attended in a
body the fortnightly meetings of the Whitechurch Literary and
Debating Society. When there were concerts we went; when there came
to town stray lecturers (if Doctor Young approved their subjects) we
went. Twice or thrice when there were passionate political harangues
(Democratic) we went. Each summer and each winter each church had a
supper or festival or lawn party. The Women's Mite Society or the
Women's Missionary Society made, collected, and sold good things to
eat. We went to these fund-raising church affairs. And of course we
went to church. There Hilltop divided. Episcopalians went to St.
Matthew's, Presbyterians to Doctor Baird's church, Baptists to the
Baptist church, Methodists to the Methodist church. We had no
Catholics nor Quakers, nor Unitarians, nor other sectarians.
Church-going was not conceived of as among cultural activities. It
was a flat command of God. Commands of God were outside of question
or modification and outside of comparison with other activities. I
discussed this with Gamaliel. "Then something acts besides God?" He
answered. "Of course! Don't you know your devil?" We went to
Sunday-school and were in Doctor Young's class, and heard there
indeed of a fearful devil.... Only--only--he linked on so
beautifully to the devil Mandy's Jim believed in! He was a devil of
physical terror--but, even so, of grotesque terror!
For all the devil that it talked about Whitechurch, as a whole, was
of a sunny temperament. Evils were there, shadows of ignorance and
weakness, ancient falsehoods, lusts, vanities, arrogances, and
angers. But it wanted to do right, it wanted to grow. Gamaliel
wanted that, and I wanted that, and Doctor Young and Mr. Millwood,
and Mrs. Young upon her sofa, and the maiden cousins, and Aunt Ailsy
in the kitchen, and the teachers and the loafers about Garth's Hotel,
and all the townsfolk, those who had more momentum and those who had
less, souls ripening, and souls green and crude.