fishing saw a tall, strong, black-haired stranger standing in the trail
and holding a large packet of furs. He told the child to take the
packet and ask his father for a bushel of seed-corn and a bag of salt.
He specified that the man who brought it was to leave it just where
they then stood and go away without waiting.
The child’s father was a rough, half-civilized, good-natured trapper,
who had had troubles of his own with unreasonable officers of the
law in York State. When the child told his story, the father laughed
knowingly, took the skins, got the seed-corn and the salt, left them
in the place indicated, and kept a neighborly shut mouth. He could not
read or write, had never heard of Shays’ Rebellion, and supposed the
man in hiding to be in the same situation as himself. Living as he
did, it seemed no awful fate to make one’s living out of the woods, and
he thought little of the fact that he had a new neighbor.
After this, Colonel Shays began a little cultivation of the ground,
in scattered places, hidden behind screens of thick trees, in a
few natural clearings in the forest. He used to say that life was
infinitely more tolerable to him after the addition to his diet of salt
and cereals. After some months he risked a little more, and, buying
them with furs worth forty times their value, he secured a few tools
and some gunpowder. The transactions were always carried on through the
child, the only one to see the fugitive.
Nothing has come down to me of what this terrible dead halt in
mid-career, and this grim isolation from the world meant to the active,
intelligent, ambitious man at the height of his powers. None of the
old people who heard him talk seem to have asked him about this, or to
have had any curiosity on the subject. Only the bare facts are known,
that he lived thus for many years, till the little boy grew up, till
his own hair turned gray and then white, till the few families in that
valley were quite used to the knowledge that a queer, harmless old man
was living up in the woods near the northern pass of the mountains,
miles from any neighbor. Once in a great while, now, some one saw
him--a boy fishing, a hunter far on the trail of a deer, or a group
of women picking berries. He occasionally exchanged a few words with
his neighbors at such times, but he had almost forgotten how to speak
aloud. All the stories about him mention the rough, deep, hoarseness of
his unused voice.
One day his nearest neighbor, meaning to do him a kindness, told him
with a rough good-will that he might as well quit hiding now, “Whatever
’tis you done, ’tis so long past now! And up here ... nobody from your
part of the country, wherever ’tis, would ever be coming up here. And
if they did they wouldn’t know you. Why, your own mother wouldn’t know
you in them clothes, and with that white beard.”
It is said that Colonel Shays on hearing this, drew back and looked
down at himself with a strange air of astonishment.
Apparently the advice stuck in his mind, for, some weeks after this,
he decided to risk it, and to make the trip to Cambridge, the nearest
town to those mountain settlements. Early one morning the people of the
Sandgate valley were astonished to see the old man going down the trail
of the valley which led into the State road going to Cambridge. Well,
that was something to talk about! He was going to town at last like
anybody else.
Now, this happened a good many years after Shays’ Rebellion had failed,
and the bitterness of the feeling about it had died down. Although
Colonel Shays could not know this, most people had even forgotten all
about him, and as for looking for him to arrest him, nobody would have
dreamed of doing it. There were many other things in the world to
think of by that time and although to himself Colonel Shays was still
the dramatically hunted fugitive with every man’s hand against him,
to other people he had begun to sink into the history-book paragraph,
which he has since remained. His family and friends in Massachusetts
had waited till the occasion seemed favorable, and then petitioned for
his pardon, on the ground that he must be, if still living, an old
man now, quite harmless, and that it would be only decent to let him
come back to spend his last days in his own home; and if he were dead,
his pardon would clear his family name, and straighten out certain
complications about his property. At first they had not succeeded.
People still remembered too vividly the treasonable attempt to
overturn the authority of the State, only just established and none too
strong. But by and by, the pertinacity of the petitioners wore out the
fading hostility to his name. He was proclaimed pardoned, and notices
were sent to all American newspapers informing him that he could now
return. This had happened a year before Colonel Shays had started down
to Cambridge, but you may be sure that at that period no newspapers
found their way to the Sandgate valley.
After a year had gone by, and no sign came from the fugitive, people
generally thought him dead. But a fellow-townsman who had known him
well by sight and who, some years after his flight, had married his
youngest sister, volunteered to try to spread the news more widely
than by newspaper. There had been a faint notion among his kinspeople
that he had fled to Vermont, although they had taken care to keep
this to themselves as long as he was an outlaw, and had now almost
forgotten about it. Acting on this notion, Shays’ brother-in-law took
the long journey on horseback up into Vermont. He entered the state
at Bennington and slowly worked his way north, branching off at every
practicable road. But nowhere did he find any one who had ever heard of
any such man as his wife’s brother. Colonel Shays had hidden himself
only too well.
The Massachusetts man began to think his errand a futile one, and
prepared to turn back. But on a chance he rode down to Cambridge, just
over the New York line. Cambridge was the nearest town to a number of
small valley settlements in Vermont. He would ask there if any one had
seen or heard of the man he was seeking. He knew that men from the
remote outlying settlements came to Cambridge to do their trading. He
arrived rather late one evening and as he was no longer young, and very
much tired by his long and fruitless journey, he slept that night in
the Cambridge Inn.
For the rest of the story there are plenty of details, for Colonel
Shays told over and over exactly what happened and just how he felt,
and why he acted as he did. It seared deep into him, and to the end of
his days, he always showed a consuming agitation in speaking of it.
He walked along the road, the first road he had seen since the night
so many years ago when he had fled along the roads in Massachusetts.
It seemed like iron to his buckskin-shod feet. He walked slowly for
this and other reasons. Every house which came into view along the
road brought him up short with a jerk like a frightened horse. The
instinct to hide, to trust himself in no man’s sight, had deformed
his whole nature so that the bold leader of men halted, trembling and
white-faced, at the sight of an ordinary farm-house. He forced himself
to go on, to pass those sleeping homes, but after he had passed each
one with his silent, stealthy wood-dweller’s tread, he quickened his
pace and looked fearfully over his shoulder, expecting to see men run
out after him with warrants for his arrest.
By the time he approached Cambridge, the nervous strain was telling on
him. He was wet with sweat, and as tired as though he had been four
times over the mountains. Only a few people were abroad as it was the
breakfast hour. Partly from the old fear of years, partly from the mere
habit of total isolation, every strange face was startling to him. He
felt his knees weak under him and sat down on a bench in front of the
kitchen door of the Cambridge Inn to get his breath. He had been a man
of powerful will and strong self-control or he never could have lived
through those terrible years of being buried alive, and he now angrily
told himself there was nothing to fear in this remote little hamlet,
where everybody was used to the sight of men in buckskins coming down
to trade their furs for gunpowder and salt. At the sight of all those
human faces taking him back to the days of his human life, a deep
yearning had come upon him to get back into the world of living men. He
could have wept aloud and taken them into his arms like brothers. He
was determined to master his tense nerves, to learn to move about among
his fellow-men once more. In a moment, just a moment, he decided he
would stand up and move casually over to the general store across the
street where a lad was then unlocking the door. He would go in and make
a purchase--the first in so many years!
He turned his head to glance into the kitchen of the Inn, and as he did
so, the door opened, and a man came in, a traveler with a face familiar
to him in spite of gray hair and wrinkles, a man he had known in
Massachusetts, who knew him, and no friend of his, a man who had been
on the other side in the Rebellion.
Colonel Shays’ heart gave a staggering leap. He caught at the door-jamb
and shrank out of sight. He heard the other voice say, “I stepped in
to ask if any of you know whether Colonel Shays was ever heard of in
this....”
And then the old man, running madly for his life, fled back to his den
in the woods.
A whole decade passed after this, before he happened to learn in a
conversation overheard between two trappers, that for eleven priceless,
irreplaceable years, he had been a free man.
A GREAT LOVE
When my pretty young cousin and god-daughter, Flossie, fell in love
with Peter Carr, we all felt rather apprehensive about her future. But
Flossie faced the facts with an honest, even a rather grim resolution
which surprised us. She said with only a little tremor in her voice
that she never expected to occupy the place in Peter’s heart which
Eleanor Arling had taken forever, but that she loved him so much she
was willing to take whatever he could give her. It wasn’t _his_ fault,
she said, with the quaintest chivalric defiance of us, if poor Peter
hadn’t more to give. She thought a great love like that “was a noble
thing in any one’s life, even if it did make them perfectly miserable.”
If Miss Arling felt that personal happiness must be sacrificed for her
art, why, that was an exalted attitude to take, and Peter’s sorrow was
“sacred in her eyes”; and so on and so forth--the usual things that
are said in such cases by people who are in sympathy with that sort of
thing.
So they were married, with the understanding that Peter could still go
on worshiping the very sound of Eleanor Arling’s name and turning white
when he came across a mention of her or of her pictures in the cabled
news of the art world in Paris. Flossie was, so we all agreed, a good
sport if there ever was one, and she stuck gamely to her bargain. She
had transferred the big silver-framed photograph of Miss Arling from
Peter’s bachelor quarters to the wall of their new living room, and she
dusted it as conscientiously as she did the Botticelli Spring which I
gave her for a wedding present. It was not easy for her. I have seen
her flush deeply and set her lips hard as Peter looked up at the dusky
brooding eyes shadowed by the casque of black braids. Flossie is one of
the small, quick, humming-bird women, with nothing to set against Miss
Arling’s massive classic beauty, and by her expression at such moments,
I know she felt her defenselessness bitterly. But she never let Peter
see how she felt. She had taken him, the darkness of his unrequited
passion heavy on him, and if she ever regretted it, she gave no sign.
She flashed about the house, keeping it in perfect order, feeding Peter
the most delicious food, and after the twins came, caring for them with
no strain or nervous tension, with only a bright thankful enjoyment
of them that was warm on your heart like sunshine. Peter enjoyed his
pretty home and devoted wife and lively babies and excellent food. He
began to lay on flesh, and to lose the haggard, gray leanness which,
just after Miss Arling had gone away, had made people turn and look
after him in the street. Architecture is, even when you are busy and
successful as Peter is, a rather sedentary occupation, offering no
resistance to such cooking as Flossie’s. Peter’s skin began to grow
rosy and sleek, his hair from being rough and bristling, began to look
smooth and glossy. It was quite beautiful hair as long as it lasted;
but as the years went on and the twins began to be big children, it,
unlike the rest of Peter, began to look thinner. Peter with a bald spot
was queer enough, but before he was thirty-five it was not a mere spot,
but all the top of his head. We thought it very becoming to him as it
gave him a beneficent, thoughtful, kindly look, like a philosopher.
And his added weight was also distinctly an improvement to his looks.
We often said to each other that nobody would ever have thought that
crazy-looking boy would make such a nice-looking man.
Flossie had not changed an atom. Those tiny, slight women occasionally
remain stationary in looks as though they were in cold storage. She
continued to worship Peter, and as he had made a good husband, we had
nothing to say, although of course you never can understand what an
excessively devoted wife sees in her husband, year after year. Flossie
never mitigated in the least the extremity of her attention to Peter’s
needs. When he was called away on a business trip she always saw that
his satchel was packed with just what he would need; and she would have
risen from her grave to put exactly the right amount of cream and sugar
into his coffee.
The rest of us had forgotten all about Miss Arling’s connection with
Peter, and had grown so used to the big photograph of the big, handsome
woman that we did not see it any more, when one morning I found Flossie
waiting for me as I came downstairs. She was very pale, with dark
circles under her eyes. She was holding a newspaper in her clenched
hand--the New York newspaper they had always taken on account of its
full, gossipy “Happenings in the World of Art” column. Flossie opened
it to that column now, and read in a dry voice: “American art lovers
are promised a treat in the visit of the famous Eleanor Arling who
arrives on the _Mauretania_. Miss Arling plans an extensive trip in
her native country from which she has been absent for many years. She
will visit New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Denver and San Francisco. Her
keen artistic memory is shown by her intention of breaking her trip for
a few days at ...” Flossie’s voice broke.... “She’s coming _here_!”
she gasped. Then collecting herself, she continued reading, “Miss
Arling told our interviewer that she once passed some weeks there and
remembers with pleasure a composition of cliff, water, and pine trees.
She wishes to see it again.”
“Cliff, water, and pine trees,” repeated Flossie, her eyes blazing.
“Of course _we_ know it is nothing in the way of a _landscape_ she is
coming to see here!” I saw that her little fists were clenched. “I
won’t stand it!” she cried, “I won’t stand it!”
But she looked horribly frightened all the same.
“What can you do?” I asked, sympathizing painfully with the poor little
thing.
“I shall go to her the minute she reaches town.”
This threw me into a panic, “What good would _that_ do?” I cried,
alarmed at the prospect of scenes and goings-on.
“I don’t know! I don’t know! If I see her, I can think of some way to
make her go away and not ...” she said wildly.
I hoped devoutly that she would settle down from this hysterical state
of unreason, but three days after this she darted in, her face pinched,
and told me that the time was now, and that she wanted me to be with
her.... “I must have _some_body there,” she said piteously.
I was thoroughly alarmed, protested, tried desperately to back out,
but found myself in Flossie’s car driving at a dangerous rate of speed
towards Miss Arling’s hotel.
We were shown into the sitting room of her suite, and sat down, both
breathing hard. I am fond of Flossie and I was very sorry for her,
but I certainly wished her at the other end of the world just then.
If I had not feared she would have rushed to lock me in, I would have
tried to escape even then, but before I could collect myself, the door
opened, and a stout, middle-aged woman came in. Her straight gray hair
was bobbed and hanging in strings around a very red, glistening face.
It was terribly hot weather and she had, I suppose, just came in from
the long motor trip. She had a lighted cigarette in one hand. Her
cushiony shapeless feet were thrust into a pair of Japanese sandals.
She distinctly waddled as she walked. We supposed that she was Miss
Arling’s companion, and I said, because Flossie was too agitated to
speak, “We wished to speak to Miss Arling, please.”
“I am Miss Arling,” she said casually. “Won’t you sit down?” I don’t
know what I did, but I heard Flossie give a little squeak like a
terrified rabbit. So I hurried on, saying desperately the first thing
that came into my mind. “We heard you were coming ... in the newspapers
... we are old residents here ... a cliff, water, and pine trees.... I
know the view ... we thought perhaps we might show you where....”
She was surprised a little at my incoherence and Flossie’s strange
face, but she was evidently a much-experienced woman-of-the-world, whom
nothing could surprise very much. “Oh, that’s very kind,” she said
civilly, tossing her cigarette butt away and folding her strong hands
on her ample knees, “But I went that way on the road coming into town.
I remembered it perfectly I find. I used it as the background in a
portrait, some years ago.”
She saw no reason for expanding the topic and now stopped speaking.
I could think of nothing more to say. There was a profound silence.
Our hostess evidently took us for tongue-tied, small-town people who
do not know how to get themselves out of a room, and went on making
conversation for us with a vague, fluent, absent-minded kindness.
“It’s very pleasant to be here again. I stayed here once, you know,
a few weeks, many years ago, when I was young. We had quite a jolly
time, I remember. There was a boy here ... a slim, dark, tall fellow,
with the most perfect early-Renaissance head imaginable, quite like the
Jeune Homme Inconnu. I’ve been trying all day to remember his name?
Paul?... no. Walter?... it had two syllables it seems to me. Well, at
any rate, he had two great beauties, the pale, flat white of his skin,
and his great shaggy mass of dark hair. I’ve often used his hair in
drawings, since. But I don’t suppose he looks like that now.”
Flossie spoke. She spoke with the effect of a revolver discharging a
bullet, “Oh, yes, he does! He looks exactly like that still, only more
mature, more interesting,” she said in an indignant tone.
“Ah, indeed,” said the painter with an accent of polite acquiescence.
She sighed now and looked firmly at the clock. I rose and said since we
could not be of use to her, we would leave her to rest.
She accompanied us to the door pleasantly enough, with the
professional, impersonal courtesy of a celebrity.
Outside Flossie sprang into her car, leaving me stranded on the
sidewalk. “I must get Peter away,” she said between her teeth.
“But not now, surely!” I cried.
“Now more than ever,” she flung back at me, as she whirled the car
around.
Then as I stood open-mouthed, utterly at a loss, she drove the car
close to the curb and leaning to my ear, whispered fiercely, “You don’t
suppose I’d let him see how she looks _now_.”
Miss Arling was gone before they returned from the two-day fishing-trip
on which they started that night. I doubt if Peter ever heard that she
had been in town.
The morning after their return, as soon as Peter had gone downtown,
Flossie tore down the big photograph from the wall and flung it into
the garbage can.
I noticed its absence some days later, when I went over to see them,
and asked with a little apprehension, “What did Peter say when he found
it gone?”
The strangest expression came into her face. She said in a low tone,
“He has never even missed it.” And then she began to cry. As I looked
at her, I saw that she had suddenly begun to show her age.
SUPPLY AND DEMAND
The thoughtful intellectual people around the fire were talking with
animation and conviction, and I hoped the one business-man present, a
relative of mine, was appreciating his privileges. It was not often
that you could collect before your fire so many brilliant people
representing so many important varieties of human activity; and when
you had collected them it was not often that the talk fell on a subject
big enough to draw out of each one his most hotly held conviction.
The subject was big enough in all conscience: nothing more or less than
what is the matter with the world in general and with our country in
particular. They all had different ideas about what the trouble is and
about the best cure for it. The head nurse of the big City Hospital had
started the ball rolling by some of her usual scornful remarks about
the idiocy with which most people run their physical lives, and the
super-idiocy, as she put it, “which makes them think that doctors and
nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.”
“We’ll never have any health as a nation till we have health as
individuals,” she said. “See that the babies have clean milk; give the
children plenty of space and time for out-door play; keep the young
folks busy with athletic sports; run down all the diphtheria carriers
and make it a misdemeanor not to be both vaccinated for small-pox and
inoculated against typhoid ... and we’d be a nation such as the world
never saw before.”
The political reformer was sincerely shocked by the narrowness of her
views, and took her down in a long description of our villainously
mismanaged government. “Much good mere physical health would do against
our insane tolerance of such political ineptness and corruption!” he
ended. “What we need is an awakening to the importance of government as
every man’s personal business.”
Mrs. Maynard, the tragic-faced, eloquent Scotch expert on
birth-control, now said in that low, bitter voice of hers which always
makes every one stop to listen, “I would be obliged if you would point
out to me how either physical health or the very best of municipal
governments should alleviate in the slightest, the hideous ulcers of
our so-called respectable married homes. When the very foundation
of every-day human life is cemented in such unthinkable cruelty and
suffering to defenseless women, I don’t see how human beings with
hearts in their bosoms can stop for an instant to consider such puerile
non-essentials as athletics and party politics!”
The two or three happily married women in the group, startled by
her fierce acrimony, were silent, feeling abashed by the grossly
comfortable way we had managed to escape even a knowledge of the
horrors which she so urgently assured us were universal. But Mr.
Sharpless, the efficiency engineer, shook his head pityingly. “No, no,
my dear lady, you can’t cure anything by going at it with the hammer
and tongs of direct action. The economic key is the only one that
fits all locks, opens all doors. The women of what we call the ‘upper
classes’ do not suffer as you describe. You know they don’t. Now why do
we _call_ them the ‘upper classes’? Because they have money. You know
it! Hence, if everybody had money ...! I tell you the thing to do is to
reorganize our wretched old producing machinery till ever so much more
is produced, ever so much more easily; and then invent distributing
machinery that will ensure everybody’s getting his share. You may not
think home life is much affected by the chemist in his laboratory,
devising a way to get nitrogen chiefly from the air, or by the engineer
struggling with the problem of free power out of the tides or the
sun. But it is. Just once put _all_ women in the comfortable upper
classes....”