Yet any wise observer of our poor dust would have known at once, on
seeing the two travellers together, that the hand of art had been laid
inevitably on each; lightly and graciously enough on the youth, rudely
and ironically and with stripes and lashes on the man. Phœbus Apollo
hardly knew, as yet, whether he should ever really need the boy Royal or
not. However, he meant to lend the child his lute for a summer morning or
two, and hear whatever trailing wisps of song those smooth young fingers
could coax goldenly from its strings. Yes, Royal was a true probationer
of Apollo. But with the man, the god would plainly have no more to do,
except by way of bitter punishment. For the man was too old, too ill,
too evil, even, to be of any further service in the temple of the Muses.
Those ladies do not carry a pardoner’s wallet. They have no pension
system; uncompromising dames, the Nine, when all is told.
Little as he liked the looks of the man in his tumbled tweeds, Royal
nevertheless gave him a good-day. Why not? The man enveloped the boy with
a strange, hunted-yet-hunting glance, and after returning the salutation
in a mannerly enough way, threw himself down heavily on the pleasant
pine leaves, rather close to the spot that Royal had chosen for his own
perfect seclusion with song. Our poet’s second sight instantly declared
that there was something wrong. What if this were the wretch who had
really stolen the car whose loss had threatened the Royal liberties?
Well, if so, that was the one-armed justice’s affair, not Royal’s. The
boy had lately read in a newspaper that our Anglo-Saxon law presupposes
the innocence of the accused, until proven guilty. An excellent idea!
Fair play for all, then, including the disinherited.
Still, it was but natural that he should try to put a self-protecting
distance between himself and the other, tramps though they both were.
So he hid his ode in his pocket, and pulled out his Iliad, that epic
which before now had laid heavy conditions upon him, and was likely to
do so in the future. Impressive gesture! Royal had several times used
it to advantage during his travels. Pulling out your Iliad, no matter
how amiably, is a way of drawing the line. This particular Iliad had,
it is true, been something of a disappointment to him, at the start. He
had meant to carry his school copy, a pocket edition that contained only
one book of the poem, with English notes so copious as to constitute a
“pony.” In the confusion of a brother’s departure, mischievous Peter had
contrived to dislodge Royal’s own Iliad from its place in Royal’s pocket,
and to substitute for it an Iliad from his father’s library. The parental
Iliad, though like the other in size and shape, was a poor thing. It had
all the books of the poem, to be sure, but in solid Greek; not a word
of English from cover to cover. Some German had printed it that way.
Annoying! But after his first dismay was over, Royal had managed very
well with the volume; to-day, he drew it out as readily as if it had the
English notes.
With this man, however, the trick was wasted. When the boy laid his Iliad
down casually beside him, the man picked it up, no less casually. Homer
had no terrors for him, it would seem. With a hand whose trembling he
could not quite conceal, he turned over the leaves to regain his lost
breath. In a leisurely, yet largely gesticulating way, he adjusted his
black-ribboned eyeglass, and contemplated both bookplate and title-page.
He then made short work of Royal’s pretensions to classic learning,
merely by turning to Book XXIII, virgin soil as yet untrod by any foot in
Royal’s form. Book XXIII appeared to interest him. Suddenly he began to
read out, in orotund English, the episode of the funeral pyre, with all
its meaty details.
As a matter of fact, this was but a gesture of the traveller; a gesture
fully as empty as Royal’s, a scrap of drama within a drama. The rascal
was not translating. He was reciting from memory a fragment from Lord
Derby’s translation. In palmier days, he had constantly used those twenty
lines with telling effect, in his popular dramatic elocution classes. He
had even incorporated them, with full directions as to tempo, emphasis,
and climax, into his Dramatic Interludes No. 1, a book which, though not
precisely a best seller, had often been bought along the borderline that
separates the real stage folk from the stage-struck fringe of the shadowy
general public. And now, for an audience of one, that “slow-pac’d ox,”
those “jars of honey,” the “four powerful horses,” the “nine dogs,” were
all presented with an unction that seemed incredible in a stout man so
out of breath a moment before. The reciter licked his lips feverishly
over his “slaughtered carcasses,” and yet was able to reserve some
climacteric gusto for the closing lines,
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
He appeared to find this an especially appetizing detail, and repeated
the couplet, laying his hot fingers on Royal’s wrist.
The boy’s second sight had been caught napping during that recitation,
but at the touch, sprang up, alert.
“Royal child,” she whispered, “quick, quick! Whatever are you about?
Can’t you see that this wretched actor-man is far uncleaner and viler
than anything you observed, with fearful curiosity, in the Polish
boarding-house?”
And when Royal saw those fat fingers on his wrist, they looked to him
like worms, and he wanted to be gone. But he wanted to be a man of the
world, too, if a poet may; one who would needlessly insult no passer-by.
“Hot stuff, eh,” he remarked carelessly as he rose from the pine leaves.
It seemed to him an appropriate thing to say about a funeral pyre found
in the classics. The man had dropped the book; the boy swooped easily
down, Discobolus-like, and swept it to safety within his pocket. “Well,
I’m off! Date down below. Afraid I’m late, as it is.” His eyes were
appalled by the ferocious hunger of the eyes they met; the hunger, the
anger, the fatigue, the despair. Had he but known in his own young
body and soul just what these things meant, and just how horribly they
were gnawing that man’s vitals, he would have stayed, in common human
kindness. But he could not know. Besides, his second sight had him
cannily in her grip, and with all her might and main was pushing him
straight home. Curiously enough, unaware as he was of “my uncle the
psychiatrist’s” worm’s-eye prophecies, he said to himself, using Uncle
Tom’s very words, “I started out with the leprecauns, and now perhaps
I’m winding up with the lepers!” It gave him a pleased sense of his own
individuality, that Fate had arranged it so. It was the sort of thing
that didn’t happen to most boys, he thought. Without knowing why, he
added to himself, “Just as well, perhaps.” Yet he felt sorry for the
tweed-clad flesh down there at his feet. “Whatever’s the matter with the
poor fish? Sure there’s something bothering his bean. The Ford, perhaps.”
Whatever it was, he knew he could not stop to set it right. But at any
rate, he could offer a sandwich. The law of the road’s hospitality was
in his heart. He opened his tin box, and with his inimitable rippling
puppy-dog grace, emptied out its contents beside the stranger. The
articles thus disclosed had by now attained a composite flavor through
close contact within the sun-warmed tin. Royal suddenly knew this, and
was sorry. There were the three thick railway sandwiches, the two black
cigars, and several bars of chocolate he had bought the day before at
the Charlemont five-and-ten, from a radiant, chiffon-clad girl whom he
had secretly christened Lalage; for his next poem, of course, after the
Amaryllis one was done, oh, quite, quite done. He kept for himself one
bar of the chocolate. Its cover had the color of the girl’s warm dark
eyes, and so would be a material witness, during his inspiration for the
Lalage stanzas.
“Excuse me, but you seem to be a traveller, like myself. I’d be awfully
glad if you can use these things.” From his jacket pocket he drew out two
ripe peaches, oozing, and these he added to the store. “Cheero!” He loped
down the hill, with long, uneasy strides, not really happy until he was
far away. His thoughts were confused. “What a dreadful old beast! Actor,
of course, probably screen. Face seemed familiar, too familiar. Some
villain, what? Needed the car to make a getaway from something or other.”
All of a sudden the Homeric couplet mouthed by the man returned with
terrific force to his mind.
“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed,
Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”
The poet stopped short in his tracks. “Golly-dieu! I see it all now. I’ve
been talking with a _murderer_! And they always come back to revisit
the scene, every one knows that. Of course, he didn’t do up as many as
twelve. It was remorse made him nutty about the number. I wonder now—”
His wonder lit his eyes and freshened his steps until he reached the
garden-gate, with the great apple tree over it, and the carved millstone
below as a tread. Old Peter was probably just coming up from the
pool. He himself needed a bath, frightfully! Then he saw his mother,
in the white-and-purple iris dress he loved, walking toward the green
tea-table under the pergola. Agnes with her tray would soon appear. For
the present, Royal’s appointed rounds were over. An immense wave of
tenderness suffused his whole being. Mother, bath, scones, sanctuary!
Those first and last words he called aloud. Mother, sanctuary!
V
Left to himself, the elder traveller pounced on the peaches and devoured
them, smearing their juice on his dry lips. He then tore the meat from
the poor hearts of the sandwiches, and began to eat it greedily. It was
his first meat in four days, and he was distinctly of the carnivorous
order, and no mere nut-eater. The maid at the Canaan inn had looked
suspiciously at him, four days ago, and from that moment, fear had
palsied him. Not daring to buy gas under the pitiless publicity of the
red pump, he had abandoned his stolen Ford. Like Royal, he was now on a
solitary walking tour.
Since the incident at the inn, he had lived on package food, bought
at obscure crossroads grocery stores. All his life, he had kept a fine
contempt for package food, the various frugal tinned and cartoned things
the _bourgeois_ eat. He himself always wanted everything fresh from the
vine, he used to say. Everything except the grape; that was different.
Just at present, he was more thirsty than hungry. Royal’s black cigars
were a poor substitute for a living drink.
“Blast the boy with his clean airs! ‘A traveller like myself!’ Little
Lord Bountiful, to be sure!”
His face looked very old in the afternoon light. It was purplish red as
to the forehead, and that whitishness around the mouth was not wholly
to be explained by a four days’ stubble of graying beard. Even while he
blasted the boy, he likened himself to him. “Just what I was at his age,
a little Lord Bountiful! And, God, look at me now!”
If ever a man needed God’s look at that moment, it was this fugitive. Let
it be understood clearly, however, he was not at all the murderer Royal’s
imagination had conjured up. That boy’s second sight had been working
overtime, and had fallen into error. Except in an indirect way, the man
had never been a murderer. He had never desired the death of any human
being. Yet he had undoubtedly turned the feet of at least “twelve noble
youths” into the roads that lead to death. Also, he was revisiting a
scene. Therefore we may as well admit that Royal’s imaginings had strange
truths mingled with their errors. Perhaps his visions, like yours and
mine, were made up wholly from truths, but truths mysteriously misplaced;
truths disordered, and so, unserviceable.
The fugitive’s crime, that is to say, the particular crime for which
he was at that moment being hunted from hill to hill, was one known
to the most ancient civilizations. It takes its title from shameful
lost cities engulfed under Divine wrath. Yet to-day there are gentle
communities where even its Biblical name, if heard by chance in the
pulpit fulminations of some itinerant preacher, would not be understood.
And because, deep-rooted in the nature of mankind, there is that which
cries out upon this crime as an abomination, the law defines it darkly,
and punishes it strictly. “_La nature a de ces bizarreries_”? Only a
long-descended Mediterranean intellect, with a planetary point of view,
could calmly make that comment on the case!
The outlaw lit one of the black cigars, and thrust the thin bars of
chocolate into his pocket. Loathsome package food, again, but better
than nothing, if worse came to the worst. Of late, he had feared even to
enter the crossroads grocery stores, with their meagre yet apparently
varied supplies, with their horribly unexpected little electric bulbs
illuminating a customer whose trembling hope had been to remain unseen!
Royal’s cigar sickened him, and he dropped it, still burning, into the
brown pine needles. He watched the tiny, red-rimmed hole it was making.
The circle grew larger and larger. Curse it, why not let this be the
end-all here? But just as the slowly widening red rim really flickered
into a faint blaze, the red on his forehead rushed fiercely over the
rest of his face. No, by God, no! Not that way! With his woollen cap he
stifled the flame. It died down utterly, and with it his own last remnant
of vigor.
Stiffly, and with manifest suffering, he rose from the ground. Yet, in a
very real sense, he had a far better right to a place under those pines
than even the poet Royal himself could claim. In his fevered outlaw
imagination, conjuring up terrors where none existed, and courting
dangers unaware, that place to him was sanctuary. The one spot on earth!
For his fathers had cleared those hills above, and ploughed the fields
beneath. That soldier of the Revolution was his own ancestor. Their names
given in baptism and granted by birth were the same, Jeremiah Burton. In
the year eighteen-twenty, one Jeremiah Burton had departed this life,
full of honors; and now, a century later, this other Jeremiah Burton was
still living, and under an exceeding weight of dishonor. A fugitive from
justice, he was seeking sanctuary among his own kin. And no person in
that State knew him for the Burton that he was.
No less than the boy Royal, he had aspired to the arts. Writing,
painting, dancing, acting, he had loved them, every one. Yet never to the
extent of drudgery, or self-sacrifice, surely! Art for a good time’s sake
was his motto. He had always joyously avowed himself a “‘_carpe diem_’
fellow, don’t you know.” Perhaps his Burton ancestors, in their passion
for honest toil and meritorious self-immolation, had drawn too heavily
on springs of energy, both physical and spiritual, that should have been
reserved for their descendants. So young Jeremiah Burton wrote skits,
painted landscapes, acted in vaudeville; seldom very well, never at great
pains. Of all his various arenas for the exhibition of his personality,
he had concluded that the stage offered the most glamorous possibilities.
Still, Jeremiah is no name to be pasted gayly up on the billboards, is
it? And even Burton itself has a melancholy look when printed. Very early
in life, therefore, the Jeremiah Burton of the flushed forehead and fat
predatory nose had Geraldized his Christian name, and given a twist, even
more romantic, to his surname. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had
hoped, when scarcely older than the boy Royal, to take the world by storm
from behind the footlights. It was as Gerald Bertello that he had studied
and strutted and caroused through the downward zigzag of his middle
years. It was as Gerald Bertello that he was designated in the warrant
for his arrest. But it was as Jeremiah Burton that he was making his last
stand, there on the hill, among his kinsmen. Sanctuary!
The slate stone that marked the soldier’s grave still stood erect. One
could read every word carved upon it. Its willow tree wept in a perennial
freshness of stem and leaf. The cherub and skull and crossbones had not
turned a hair. But the more pretentious marble slab placed over the
warrior’s relict, Thanksgiving Burton, was altogether a weaker vessel;
at least, its foundations were less sure. It had lately fallen down
flat under the hilltop winds, and in falling, had laid low a part of
the slender iron fence that enclosed the graves of those early Burtons;
Burtons who had wrestled with that soil and conquered it, until the soil,
in turn, conquered them.
The fugitive who had lately read to the boy Royal sonorous words of the
twelve youths of Troy felt strangely dizzy as he pondered on the carven
tribute to his ancestor. It began, as he well remembered, “A soldier of
the Revolution and of God.” Dizzy as he was, he would like to recite the
whole of that inscription, with the proper emphasis, for the youngster’s
benefit. Where was the kid, that little Lord Bountiful, “a traveller
like myself”? Oh, yes, he remembered now, but with immense, overpowering
difficulty. The boy had vanished, fled away on the wings of an Iliad. “A
soldier of the Revolution,”—but the words he was staring at were dizzier
than himself. Hell, they must be, whirling so! Blindly throwing out an
arm, he stumbled and fell, his hand striking the fallen marble slab in
memory of Thanksgiving Burton. Like Royal, he had for the present reached
the end of his appointed rounds.