That the Professor, with fear at his heels and the devils of
retribution clutching at his flying coat-tails, should have plunged
into silence when the bush closed around him was not strange. Every
circumstance of his parting argued a long absence, a discreet
obliteration of self. But Penelope left the valley in prosaic fashion,
in a livery wagon, with a man as easy to find as his own bustling,
pushing town; yet the dust-clouds which closed around them as they
drove away shut them from my ken as the mountains had enclosed her
father in their most secret hiding-places. It was the fault of Rufus
Blight. He had blown beautiful bubbles to divert us in those last
hours of his visit, and bubbles bursting silently into nothingness were
not more fragile than his promises. To the true value of those
promises I awoke slowly, as the months went by and there came no hint
of their fulfilment.
I wrote to Penelope. My letters would have made volumes were their
length commensurate with the pain of composition. Even the heart of
Rufus Blight would have been touched could he have seen me, bent over a
table, digging my teeth into my tongue and my pen into the paper as
letter by letter and word by word I constructed those messages of my
boyish love. But he knew only the finished gem, and not the labor of
its cutting. The more I sought to break the silence, the surer I
became that he, the omnipotent one, had ordained it, and I fancied him
reading my letters and destroying them, a thin smile lighting his
chubby face as he thought of the easy way in which I was being
outwitted. I went to my mother for help. She knew nothing of my
unavailing struggles, and was herself offended and heart-sick. At my
entreaty she overcame her pride and wrote to Mr. Blight inquiring as to
Penelope's welfare. In return her existence was recognized; hardly
more than that, for the great man did not trouble himself with a
personal answer. His reply was given vicariously, through one P. T.
Mallencroft, his secretary, on flawless paper, three sentences in bold
clear type and a Spencerian signature closing it. It was a bloodless
thing. It spoke the commands of omnipotence as though carved on
tablets of stone.
Mrs. Malcolm's favor of the 10th ultimo was acknowledged; Mr. Blight
instructed Mr. Mallencroft to thank Mrs. Malcolm for the interest which
she had shown, and to assure her that Miss Penelope was quite well.
It was perfectly polite. It was the finished bow with which Rufus
Blight was backing from our presence, never to trouble us again. I
knew this when I saw the sheet drop from my mother's limp fingers and,
sinking to a chair, she tossed her apron over her head and rocked
violently to an accompaniment of muffled sobs.
It was clear to me that Rufus Blight was not only neglectful of our
claims, but had been so with purpose, and as I wandered aimlessly
through the fields in the wake of James, and as in the evening I sat
again with him on the barn-bridge, looking over the darkening valley,
there held one enduring thought in the chaos of my brain. Looking back
now, I see in my childish enmity toward Rufus Blight the impulse that
set me on my course. But for that I might have stayed in the valley,
dozing, as the Professor had said, like the very dogs. In Rufus Blight
I was conscious of an opposing force. He had taken Penelope from me;
he had cheated me with flattery and broken promises; and the dominating
sense in my mind was one of conflict with him. I looked to the west.
Mountains rose there, range beyond range, and beyond them, miles away,
was his bustling, pushing town. To cross them and to close with him
was my one desire, and though time dulled the edges of my purpose and
the figures of the Professor, of Penelope and of Rufus Blight grew dim
in the distance, and at last the old motive was lost beneath a host of
new impelling forces, still it was Mallencroft's letter that touched
the quick and aroused me from my canine slumber.
The Professor's words came back to me. The mountains seemed to echo
them always. "Wake up, Davy! Do something; be somebody; get out of
the valley." Here was my shibboleth. I must do something; I must be
somebody; I must get out of the valley! And then I should go to
Penelope Blight, and a hundred urbane, unctuous uncles could not
defraud me of my right in her.
In my father I found the first mountain on the way that I had chosen,
for to his mind my destiny was settled and to be envied. All that was
his would some day be mine--the best farm in the county, his
Pennsylvania Railroad stock, his shares in the bridge company, and his
Kansas bonds. The dear soul had arranged my course so comfortably and
in such detail that in me he would have been living his own life over
again. And what my father said, my mother echoed. Was I too proud to
follow in his footsteps? Was I, a child in years, to hold myself above
the ways of my forebears?
Such arguments came too late to my rebellious spirit. I should no
longer have told the Professor that I was going to be like my father.
Necessity had made me more ambitious. I dreamed now of the power and
fame of a Washington, a Webster, a Grant--names which stood to me as
symbols of accomplishment. So what my parents at first brushed aside
as the idle dreaming of a boy they soon realized to be a vague but
persistent purpose which must be beaten down. They gave me a certain
dignity by descending to debate. What did I want to be? How could I
answer, who could not even name the vocations in which men won their
way to coveted heights? My mother gave me the key which opened the
world to me.
"William," she said, addressing my father, "I do believe Davy is
thinking of being a minister and is kind of ashamed to own it."
I caught the softening note in my mother's voice and in her eyes a
light of pride as she regarded me inquiringly. Whatever obligation lay
on me to till the ancestral acres, there was a higher duty which would
absolve it. This she had pointed out. My plans at once took a
concrete form, and though my first faltering assent might have savored
of hypocrisy, I was soon sincere in my determination. And now the
opposition crumbled and my parents found pride in a son whose heart at
the age of ten was stirred by the need of lost humanity. My father
discovered that it had been his own early ambition to be a minister; it
was as though I was to erect the edifice to which he had feared to put
his strength, and it comforted him. He delighted to lay his hand upon
my head in the presence of company and to announce that his David was
going to do the work to which he had always believed he had himself
been called. With my mother the son's gifts became a subject on which
she never tired dilating, and naturally such flattery reconciled me to
a calling far removed from all my old ambitions; but had it been
intimated to me that I might become a plumber I should have accepted
that vocation just as readily, provided that by following it I should
go out of the valley, over the mountains, to Pittsburgh and the
presence of Rufus Blight.
Now arose Mr. Pound to help me. Here was the crowning incongruity in a
chain of incongruous events. I had never liked Mr. Pound. He had
overwhelmed me too often. His sermon was the rack on which I was
stretched for an hour every Sunday to endure untold agonies of
restlessness; his house the temple to which too often I had to carry
propitiatory offerings of vegetables and chickens. And then his
persecution of my friend the Professor still rankled in me. Yet I
found myself, of necessity, using him as the one known quantity in the
equation over which I worked. He became my model. I fancied myself
attaining a mien like his, a deep, resonant voice and a vocabulary of
marvellous words. I dressed myself in material garments like his, in
spreading folds of awe-inspiring black; I wrapped myself in his
immaterial cloak, his dignity and goodness. I faced Rufus Blight and
he quailed before a presence so imposing, and when I spoke in a voice
vibrating truth my eloquence smothered his feeble, shifty protests.
Always I asserted my right to Penelope and led her from her prison.
And always, it seemed, with that victory I cast off my Pound-like
sanctity and became as other men. With it the great task of my
ministry was accomplished, though there was a certain charm in the idea
of continuing it in the hunting fields of Africa, an appeal of romance
in a kraal, a cork hat, and the picture of Penelope and me setting
forth with a band of faithful converts to the slaughter of elephants
and lions.
Idle dreams of boyhood! Absurd, incongruous fancies! And but for them
I might at this very moment be dozing in the valley; I might be another
distinguished Judge Malcolm, with my little court of ministers and
squires, with old Mr. Smiley as master-of-the-horse and Miss Agnes
Spinner as lady-in-waiting. Instead? I did not stay in the valley.
Aroused by the sense of antagonism to Rufus Blight, and spurred on by
the ambition to confront and defeat him, I began my struggle to cross
the mountains, and Mr. Pound became my support and guide. He never
knew the real truth behind my commendable resolution. The inspiring
thought in my mind, as he insisted on judging it, was born of his own
teaching. As my father had planned to live his life over again in me,
so Mr. Pound saw a hope of his own intellectual immortality. Were not
the evidences of grace so suddenly revealed in me the reward of his own
labors?
When he came to the house, summoned in consultation over my future, he
placed a hand upon my head and solemnly repeated the lines of the grand
old hymn: "God works in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform."
There was here a gentle hint that my past had not been altogether good
or full of promise, and as Mr. Pound undoubtedly believed this, it made
more generous his conduct toward me. He was a narrow man, an egotist,
unlearned, too, save in the cruder forms of his calling, but he was
sincere. He sought to mould me to what he thought the form a man
should take, and now as I look back on the five years through which he
labored with me, I may smile at the memory of his mien, his pomposity,
his bigotry, yet I smile too with affection. He taught me without pay.
His study became my school-room, and when at times I chafed under his
vigilant tutelage and wearied in my well-doing, he steeled himself with
the remembrance that Job endured more than he without complaint. In my
sulkiness or open rebellion he found evidences to confirm his belief in
the doctrine of innate evil; he seemed to rush singing into battle with
the devil that was in me.
Through this intimate association I became a little Mr. Pound. How
could it have been otherwise when day after day, books in hand, I
walked down to his house to recite my lesson of Latin and Greek, and
with him worked through the mysteries of algebraic calculation and
studied the strange habits of the right line? He pressed me into his
mould. Years went by. In the valley the Professor was forgotten, and
to me Penelope was but a dim figure in the past. Even the memory of
Rufus Blight ceased to awaken rancor, and I could contemplate with
growing cynicism my old-time hatred of him. Unconsciously new
ambitions stirred within me, and they were fostered by the flattery of
my elders. In that Africa of my dream-land I no longer pictured myself
in a cork helmet slaying lions, but dying at the stake, a martyr to my
duty and--must I add it?--being preached about afterward from a
thousand pulpits.
Mr. Pound was my model of deportment, my glass of fashion. I see him
now as we used to sit, vis-a-vis, at his study table. Samson's
physical strength came from his hair. From the same source, it seemed
to me, Mr. Pound derived that mental vigor with which he pulled down
the temples of ignorance and slew the thousand devils of unorthodoxy
which sprang from my doubting mind. From the top of his head a red
lock flamed up, licking the air; over its sides the hair tumbled in
cataracts, breaking about his ears; then the surging hair lost itself
in orderly currents which flowed, waving, from his cheeks, leaving a
rift from which sprang a generous nose and a round chin with many
folds. His mouth was formed for the enunciation of large words and
pompous phrases. From it monosyllables fell like bullets from a
cannon. He seldom descended to conversation. He declaimed. He sought
to impress on me the importance of using resounding sentences which he
said would keep reverberating in the caverns of the mind. For this
effect he had a theory that words ending in "ation" and "ention" were
especially fitted. Trumpet-words, he called them, brazen notes which
penetrated the deepest crevices of the brain. I must admit that in the
practice of his theory he was wonderfully successful, for after thirty
years I can still hear his sonorous voice filling the church with the
announcement that the "Jewish congregation was a segregation for the
preservation of the Jewish nation." I can see him pausing in his
discourse to lubricate his vocal chords with a glass of ice-water, and
then drawing himself to his full height, fix his eyes on his hushed
people and cry: "What did I say the Jewish congregation was? Let me
refresh your recollection." His answer must ring to-day in the caverns
of many minds. Others of his phrases, I know, still echo in my own.
But this is because so often in my own room I practised declaiming
them, striving to enunciate them with my mentor's finish.
Was it a wonder that I became a little Mr. Pound? I suppose, too, that
I became a veritable little cad. Conscious of my advantages in birth
and breeding, much impressed on me by my mother, I had never been
intimate with the village boys. Now I shunned them altogether. To me
they were thoughtless heathen and unprofitable company. I strove for a
time to correct their evil ways and to bring them to repentance. That
was something which I could properly do without unnecessary
association. I had for my reward only taunts. They called me "Goody"
and "Miss Malcolm," and like names contemplated to shame me from the
course which I had chosen, but in the martyrdom which they made me
suffer I only gloried, and I could have let them stone me to death and
forgiven them, provided, of course, that Mr. Pound preached about me
afterward and that my name were enrolled in the company of well-known
martyrs. Looking back, I realize that I was playing. There was a fine
excitement in being hunted in my comings and goings through the
village. It became my Africa, where any tree might hide a deadly
enemy, and any fence an ambush. I discovered secret passages through
backyards. I matched cunning against overwhelming force, and
sometimes, when the odds were not too great against me, I remembered
Joshua and another David and turned on the Philistines and smote them
right manfully. At other times the hostilities lagged, but they never
ceased entirely, and often they broke out suddenly with increased fury.
It was a mass and class war. To the butcher's son and the blacksmith's
boy and their like, the restless masses, I was indeed a bumptious
Malcolm. Conscious of the superior quality of the blood of the
McLaurins, and a little inflated with the pride of wealth, I had long
patronized them, so there was needed only my assumption of virtue to
fan the flames. But as I grew in years and knowledge, and the days of
my departure from the valley drew nearer, I relied less on my fists for
protection and more on a defensive armor of dignity. I became less a
target for missiles and more an object of jibes. These I met with
contempt, for I was going to college; I was going to McGraw University,
the alma mater of Mr. Pound, and this thought alone nerved me to step
out of the course of a flying stone with unconcern and to move down the
street with Pound-like mien.
There never was any discussion in our family as to where I should take
my collegiate training. Had there been, Mr. Pound would speedily have
quelled it. McGraw was the one college of which I knew anything. The
little that I could learn of others was through the sporting pages of
my father's Philadelphia paper, and here the name of Mr. Pound's alma
mater was strangely missing. But he drew a real picture of it for me;
gave me a concrete conception which I could not form from records of
touch-downs and runs and three-baggers to left field. Sometimes in the
study I would rise to points of information on Harvard, Princeton, or
Yale, but I was promptly declared out of order. Mr. Pound admitted
that these universities were larger than McGraw, and acknowledged that
in some special lines of education they might be in advance of McGraw;
yet, withal, had he a son he would intrust him only to the care of
Doctor John Francis Todd. As an educator and builder of character
Doctor Todd had no equal in the country. Mr. Pound could prove this.
He pointed to his old friend Adam Silliman, who graduated at Princeton
and was to-day a struggling coal merchant in Pleasantville, and drank.
With him he contrasted Sylvester Bradley, who got his degree at McGraw
in exactly the same year, '73, and had been three times moderator of
the Pennsylvania Synod. Of such comparisons between McGraw men who had
succeeded and other university men who had failed Mr. Pound had so many
at his fingers' ends as to be absolutely overwhelming. So before I had
seen McGraw I was a McGraw man to the core, and my mentor, with a
subtlety astonishing for him, missed no opportunity to increase my
devotion. He even taught me the college yell in one of his lighter
moments, and I, in turn, taught it to James that it might ring out with
more volume from the barn-bridge of an evening.
You may think that I was to be disillusioned. That could not be. When
first I saw McGraw she was a giantess to my eyes. The time was to come
when I was to see her in a new light, to judge her from a new
perspective, to realize the incongruity between her aspiration and
accomplishment, to smile at her solemn adherence to academic ritual;
and yet to realize that in her littleness and poverty she gave me what
was good and all that was in her power. I may regret that I did not
delve deeper into the mysteries of those foot-ball scores and discover,
through them, the greater seats of learning. Perhaps I might have
known then that not all their sons became coal-merchants and drank, and
I might have gone much farther on that September day when first I set
out into the world beyond the mountains. But for all that I cannot
imagine the four years which I spent at that tiny college taken from my
life. For all the four years that might have been I would not exchange
them.
That September day? It is a tall white mile-stone on my way. I can
look back and see its every detail. On its eve James and I sat for the
last time on the barn-bridge and he sang of Annie Laurie and Nellie
Gray. And when we heard my mother calling me, we stood together and
gave the college yell.
"I s'pose, Davy," he said, as we were moving toward the house, "folks
will think I'm a little peculiar, but I'm going to give that cheer
every night, just for old times' sake--for your sake, Davy."
Our elders have a fashion of making like inopportune remarks when we
are struggling to keep our hearts high. It seemed as though they were
trying to break my spirit. My mother's white silence, my father's long
prayer, James feverishly coming and going on that last morning--little
things like these almost made me abandon my great plans. But pride
sustained me--that same pride which sends men into battle for foolish
causes. I wanted to hurry the fall of the blow. I even protested
against my parents and Mr. Pound driving with me to the railroad, and
they did not understand. I had to meet their last embraces under the
eyes of the motley crowd who had come to the station to see the train,
and under such conditions I dared not show emotion. Again they did not
understand and were a little hurt by my coldness. I sprang up the car
steps jauntily. To show my independence I stood by the smoker door and
waved a smiling farewell to the silent, wondering three. I did not
wait there, as they waited, looking after me, but turned, tossed my new
bag into a rack, threw myself into a seat, and crossed my legs with the
nonchalance of one who left home every day.
The river travelled with me out of the valley. I looked from the car
window and saw it at my side, and together we went away. I was silent,
wondering at the shadow which seemed to overcast the earth. The little
river was bright in the noonday sun--a cheery fellow-traveller through
the green land. I leaned from the car window in the suddenly born hope
that I might see the three still figures, back there in the hot glare
of the station. But the river had turned, and I saw not the roofs of
Pleasantville dozing in the sun like the very dogs, nor the court-house
tower and the tall steeples that pierced her shade, but a high wall of
mountains. We seemed to be driving straight for their heart. The
river's mood was mine. It shrank from that forbidding wall and the
mysteries beyond; it swept in a wide curve into pleasant lowlands. And
now I looked across it northward, to other mountains--to _my_
mountains, to the friendly heights that watched over _my_ valley.
Closing my eyes I saw it as on that morning when Penelope and I rode in
terror from the woods. I looked across it as it lay in the broad day,
under the kindly eye of God, across the rolling green, checkered with
the white of blossoming orchards and the brown of the fallow, past the
village spires and up the long slope to the roof among the giant oaks.
You've had enough, the river seemed to say; and, turning, it charged
boldly into the other mountain's heart. I went with it, but my face
was pressed against the pane, that those who travelled with me might
not see.