Crossing James River in an ancient flat-bottomed, open ferry-boat, we
rode at leisure through the July weather, dined at a farm-house, and
in the golden afternoon light, by a road sufficiently long, rough,
and steep, climbed the mountain. Well below the rocky top we found a
makeshift shed with spring water, and with hay piled in a corner.
Boreas and Conrad's mare Jenny we left here and climbed on afoot. At
the top stood a cabin and stood watching us the solitary caretaker.
He greeted us, "Evenin'!"
"Evening!" we answered.
"I'm not," he said, "the regular man. He's taking his Fourth of
July. But I reckon I kin make you comfortable."
The hut was not remarkably clean, but we would not let that trouble
us. The man set about filling the stove with wood. "You-all take
coffee? I kin make good coffee."
We left him making it and went without to see the sunset. A great
boulder propped us. Four thousand feet in air, we looked and saw the
cone shadow of the mountain lying purple upon the land. We sat and
gazed. "We've got a fair earth! Look at the geometry of it--the
circle and the cone."
Conrad answered, "It's a 'tarnation queer place--old earth!"
The sun sank, but great rays, lanes of light in the sky, spread like
an open fan. The Chinese lanterns of last night came into mind.
"Variousness!" said Conrad. "My God! what an Artist!"
The air changed its quality, a carpet of violets covered the earth,
Venus was born in the western gold sea. The caretaker spoke from
behind us. "I thought maybe you'd like your coffee and bread out
here," and put down upon the rock a battered tray. There were three
cups and three plates and we sat and ate together. He was a man of
thirty-five, long, tawny, with blue eyes and a drooping tawny
mustache. He had a drawling voice like dropping honey. When we had
eaten and drunk he piled the dishes upon the tray and set it aside,
then leaning back against the boulder, lit a brier-root pipe. By now
he knew our names and whence we had ridden and where we were going.
We knew, too, his name, and that he had a bit of a farm, and that he
had been in the war the last year, when he was seventeen, and had
been wounded at Cold Harbor, and hadn't any education beyond a little
free schooling, but wished that he had. He was married and had
children.
There was yet coral in the sky. Below us, in the vast expanse of
hill and vale flattened by our height, lights, separate and small,
were twinkling forth. The day had been warm, and the night up here
struck only pleasantly cool, like July water. "You see a right fair
slice of Virginia," said the man. "Thar! Did you see that
shooting-star?"
It was a considerable meteor and dripped gold. Ship and wake went
out. "You've been to the university," said the man. "I wish you'd
tell me what that is--"
One of us told him what the text-books said. "That's interestin',"
he remarked and smoked his pipe. "I take spells of wonderin'.... A
smashed-up earth--a-shootin' for ages in little pieces here and there
as it gets drawn. Well--"
He and Conrad smoked. I did not smoke. We all watched the sky where
now the stars were pressing thickly. "I was raised a Baptist," said
the caretaker. "I've got an inquirin' mind, and I gather that all
kinds of strange notions are goin' around. Do you believe in
damnation?"
I said I didn't--not in the old way. Conrad said he didn't know. I
said that I thought I believed in occasional, finite
damnations--temporary damnations, so to speak.
"But they could last a long time?"
I agreed as to that. "And one might tumble into them again and
again."
"But you don't believe in hell-fire?"
I said that I thought that was a metaphor. But that it might get
mighty near reality sometimes.
"Damned near!" said the man. "Well, who do you think damns you--or
saves you?"
I said that I thought that I did.
"That's the way I twist," said the tawny man. "Times air changing!
We're like the past and we ain't just like it.... Old Daddy
Religion's got a son that appears to him somehow different! Might as
well own him. That's what I tell the preachers when they get after
me."
Conrad yawned.
"I heard much talk of it about and about,
But where I went in I still came out!
Listen to the locusts in those bushes! They haven't stopped talking
since Troy fell!"
"I've got a habit of thinkin' and thinkin'," said the tawny man.
"Kind of rememberin' and rememberin'.... Anyhow, I believe in
kindness!"
We looked again around us--Scorpio in the south, the Bear in the
north, the Eagle in the east, the Lion in the west, and right
overhead the Crown. The tawny man took up the tray of dishes and we
all moved to the cabin. I have slept in better beds, but Conrad and
I were tired and we slept. Waking once or twice, I heard without the
window the locusts still talking.
We were up for the sunrise. The man called us while the stars still
lighted the sky, and gave us hot coffee and corn-cakes. He had been
down, he told us, to the horses and had watered and fed them. We ate
and drank, the thin light stealing in. Then we went out again to our
boulder, but faced now the east. Silver--silver and
amethyst--amethyst; a cloud shoal turning gold, in the forest below
us bird song, then the sun and the hollow of the air and the earth
beneath warm and sheen.... So we said good-by to the tawny man, paid
our reckoning, ran down the rough way to Boreas and Jenny, and in the
saddle again departed the mountain.
We rode and we rode on through Virginia, and we saw our state a
lovely country, aiming at being lovelier--lovelier--lovelier, body
and soul!
In two weeks more Conrad and I bade each other good-by. He rode to
his own home, and I to Restwell.
I came to Restwell in a shimmery, warm afternoon. Uncle Carter and
Aunt Harriet were very kind.
I had my old room.... I rose when the cocks were crowing, dressed,
and, letting myself out, went over the gray fields to the graveyard.
I saw the dawn from there, lying with my head upon my mother's grave.
That afternoon I came here again with Aunt Sarah.... Aunt Sarah and
I clung together, though not with any bodily touch. It was one of
her "ways," the standing aside from all that. I never saw her give
physical caress or embrace, or invite caress or embrace. But her
spirit hovered, inclosed, was kind.
She said that she was happy--that they let alone her island,
respected territorial waters. "They're the best--the very best--of
Nineveh, Babylon, and Rome! They let me go softly in my far
Atlantides." We sat beneath the oak, and then she took the dead
bloom from the roses, and I held the basket for her as of old.
Dorothea, Carter, and Royal were at home. Royal was more to me than
were the others--for all that there was a picket fence somewhere
which, from his side, he refused to cross, and I from my side
refused. But there was something of the colossal in Royal that must
be recognized. He made me think of a vast, tireless, mental rather
than physical bull-god--Apis who was acting very simply, according to
his nature, and yet was big ... and feared ... and sacrificed to, and
on some sides certainly might be admired--and even loved.
I had a strange feeling about Royal. Now he attracted me and now he
repelled. Either way, I understood him. It seemed to me that far
down time we had been nearer together. I did not seek him again, but
I felt the pull of him.
Carter was a smaller person altogether--amiable, a little weak. He
was a handsome fellow, with an agreeable voice, and he danced well
and was talkative and Aunt Harriet's idol. His father was ambitious
for him, his eldest son, named for him. But by degrees it grew
evident that Carter might adorn a fortune, or a society built on
fortunes, but that he could neither make a fortune nor strongly help
others to make one. He was able to spend. He was good-natured, and
I do not know that he ever did any especial harm.
Dorothea was another proposition. I did not know whether I liked or
disliked Dorothea. She had a sultry beauty, and an arrogance that
fitted her like a low-lying haze, a misty, heat atmosphere. Out of
this started at times twisted beauties of thought or deed....
My cousins meant to be kind and were kind. There must have been a
general agreement that it would be hard for me to return so to
Restwell, and that it must be made to seem like home and family.
They did their best. I was not, I hope, ungrateful.
There were guests besides myself. The Warringers kept the house
filled, entertained with something of the old before-the-war
lavishness. Here were two sons and a daughter who must be persuaded
not to miss the Old White and Old Point. Aunt Harriet liked, too,
many and young faces about her.
Twice or thrice I rode into Whitechurch. There I saw Mr. Millwood
and everybody else--and Doctor Young, to whom I did not speak of
Gamaliel--and Mr. Gilbert, the druggist, to whom I did. Gamaliel
still lived in Baltimore, earning and studying with a chemist there.
He wrote to me, but less frequently than at first he had written. In
his last letter, after a paragraph of surface details, he had
suddenly dropped a line and written: "How long and wide have we
lived, anyhow? Where do we begin or stop, or are beginning and
stopping words of ignorance? I am going to work until I find
out--possibly after I find out."
Mr. Gilbert showed me a letter from the Baltimore chemist. Gilbert's
drug-store had before it a vast horse-chestnut, giving in summer a
solid shade. The place rests in mind forever dim and cool, small,
old-time, dispensing few articles besides drugs, having no throng of
customers. One went down a step to go in at the door. A bell rang,
the door opened, there came a waft of odors compounded so that one
caught far times and far lands. A gnomelike, bright-eyed, elderly
man shuffled in from a back room. Something that tasted of eternity
was in the place.
The Baltimore chemist stated that Gamaliel Young was getting on very
well. He attended to business and in his odd hours studied hard. "I
should say that he had a streak of genius--but he's as unsociable as
any hermit-crab! He's got some queer associates. They aren't wild,
except in their thinking. They're wild enough there!"
Mr. Gilbert folded the letter. "Sampson's a good man, but he's a
pedant. He doesn't know eaglets when he sees them."
I said: "I think Gamaliel's an eaglet. I'm glad that you think so,
too, sir."
"I don't know what, precisely, he's hunting. But he's a seeker, all
right."
"He wants to find what he _is_--what we _are_," I said.
"Does he? Well, that's a considerable job!" said the druggist. "See
if you can find what we are not! When he's as old as I am he'll be
content if he has laid hand upon one new land. It takes a fleet made
up of fleets to find the universe!"
"In short, it takes the universe."
"Quite so! ... Well, and Michael, you're to be an engineer--"
Going out of town that day, I overtook Mr. Millwood upon the road to
Restwell, driving himself in an old buggy. He said that he wanted to
talk to me, and so, dismounting, I fastened Boreas behind the vehicle
and took my seat beside our old family friend. He talked about
Landon and the kind of place they said it was, and about my going
away, and about my mother and grandfather. But what he most wanted
to say was that he hoped that I would take the Lord Jesus with me.
Now I truly loved Jesus of Nazareth, but I could not talk nor think
of Him as Mr. Millwood talked and thought, as Mr. Millwood wished me
to talk and think. So it ended in silence on my part. Mr. Millwood
sighed. "One day you will know and love Him, Michael! A young man
may keep on hardening his heart, but the Lord is the Lord and will
break it in His hands!"
I said: "That sounds like Doctor Young, Mr. Millwood. I don't
suppose that I love Jesus well enough--that's true. But I profoundly
do not feel that He's my enemy nor that I am His enemy. I feel,
instead, that we are friends."
"But you must see that He is your Lord and Saviour! If you do not
see that, you see nothing!"
As we jogged on I had a vision of Canaan and Galilee, and of a young
Jewish man who walked in and out of little villages and talked with
the folk, or who sat solitary on hillsides or by the blue water. He
came warm against my heart. I could feel a brown, lean, strong hand
in mine, a hand with grip and meaning. I could and did feel for Him
love and vast reverence, but I could not feel that He alone was Only
God. I could feel the Christ Idea, that had always been in the
world, nearer Him, not so near to me, and to that extent He was
diviner than me. The extent might be huge. He might be adult and I
a babe. But Idea is free ocean and free atmosphere. I, too, swam
and flew toward myself as Risen Man.
Nor do I think that there was, this sunny day, more pride and self in
me, sitting there, than in the old priest of the temple who had
baptized me and who now quite sorrowfully believed that, despite it,
he might have eventually to number me among the lost. But Mr.
Millwood's imagination was not the imagination of Doctor Young. He
could not devise a great lurid picture of the damned like the sands
of the sea for number, and of hell like an illimitable Inquisition
torture-chamber. He felt discomfiture, some anger and solicitude.
But he was an optimistic, cheerful, ruddy man, and he could not
dislike me long, nor really picture me as sawn asunder and sawn
asunder again, or plunged into scalding oil in an eternal sequence of
horror. Before we came to the new bridge across the river he was
once more discoursing of Landon and the temptations and dangers,
broadcast before young men, which he trusted I would avoid. "But you
will!" he said. "Your father and mother, and grandfather and
grandmother have saved you from that."
So we came to Restwell. He missed old faces, but he was fond of Aunt
Harriet and she was fond of Mr. Millwood.
I stayed at Restwell three weeks. It was not only the big house and
those in it, but it was Daddy Guinea and Mammy and Mandy's Jim and
Ahasuerus. I loved these four a little more vigorously than I loved
Uncle Carter and Aunt Harriet--and, I may think, just as dutifully.
I should hardly see Daddy Guinea again on this stretch of the way.
No one knew how old he was, but he was very old. He would talk a
little, but then he would sit on the doorstep in long silences. I
sat with him, and I fell to looking back of him into Africa--back of
the fields, the slave-markets, the slave-ships, the enslavers, back,
back--back of the Guinea Coast into the center.... And the white
man, back, back, back--and here, too, were forests and miry, steamy
river bottoms and naked skins and the whirling rattle. There came
into my memory Blake's "The Little Black Boy." My mother read it to
me more than twice or thrice when I was little.
And those black bodies, and this sunburnt face,
Are but a cloud and like a shady grove ...
When I from black, and he from white cloud freed ...
And I thought of untruth and ungenerosity and unlove, clothed in
whatever color it might be, and of the relativity of all things.