AT THE CASTLE.
By the time August reached Andrew Anderson's castle it was dark. The
castle was built in a hollow, looking out toward the Ohio River, a river
that has this peculiarity, that it is all beautiful, from Pittsburgh to
Cairo. Through the trees, on which the buds were just bursting, August
looked out on the golden roadway made by the moonbeams on the river. And
into the tumult of his feelings there came the sweet benediction of
Nature. And what is Nature but the voice of God?
Anderson's castle was a large log building of strange construction.
Everything about it had been built by the hands of Andrew, at once its
lord and its architect. Evidently a whimsical fancy had pleased itself
in the construction. It was an attempt to realize something of medieval
form in logs. There were buttresses and antique windows, and by an
ingenious transformation the chimney, usually such a disfigurement to a
log-house, was made to look like a round donjon keep. But it was
strangely composite, and I am afraid Mr. Ruskin would have considered it
somewhat confused; for while it looked like a rude castle to those who
approached it from the hills, it looked like something very different to
those who approached the front, for upon that side was a portico with
massive Doric columns, which were nothing more nor less than maple logs.
Andrew maintained that the natural form of the trunk of a tree was the
ideal and perfect form of a pillar.
To this picturesque structure, half castle, half cabin, with hints of
church and temple, came August Wehle on Saturday evening. He did not go
round to the portico and knock at the front-door as a stranger would
have done, but in behind the donjon chimney he pulled an alarm-cord.
Immediately the head of Andrew Anderson was thrust out of a Gothic
hole--you could not call it a window. His uncut hair, rather darker than
auburn, fell down to his waist, and his shaggy red beard lay upon his
bosom. Instead of a coat he wore that unique garment of linsey-woolsey
known in the West as wa'mus (warm us?), a sort of over-shirt. He was
forty-five, but there were streaks of gray in his hair and board, and he
looked older by ten years.
"What ho, good friend? Is that you?" he cried. "Come up, and right
welcome!" For his language was as archaic and perhaps as incongruous as
his architecture. And then throwing out of the window a rope-ladder, he
called out again, "Ascend! ascend! my brave young friend!"
And young Wehle climbed up the ladder into the large upper room. For it
was one peculiarity of the castle that the upper part had no visible
communication with the lower. Except August, and now and then a literary
stranger, no one but the owner was ever admitted to the upper story of
the house, and the neighbors, who always had access to the lower rooms,
regarded the upper part of the castle with mysterious awe. August was
often plied with questions about it, but he always answered simply that
he didn't think Mr. Anderson would like to have it talked about. For the
owner there must have been some inside mode of access to the second
story, but he did not choose to let even August know of any other way
than that by the rope-ladder, and the few strangers who came to see his
books were taken in by the same drawbridge.
[Illustration: THE CASTLE.]
The room was filled with books arranged after whimsical associations.
One set of cases, for instance, was called the Academy, and into these
he only admitted the masters, following the guidance of his own
eccentric judgment quite as much as he followed traditional estimate.
Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton of course had undisputed possession of
the department devoted to the "Kings of Epic," as he styled them.
Sophocles, Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that he
admitted to his list of "Kings of Tragedy." Lope he rejected on literary
grounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency bad. He
rejected Rabelais from his chief humorists, but accepted Cervantes, Le
Sage, Molière, Swift, Hood, and the then fresh Pickwick of Boz. To these
he added the Georgia Scenes of Mr. Longstreet, insisting that they were
quite equal to Don Quixote. I can only stop to mention one other
department in his Academy. One case was devoted to the "Best Stories,"
and an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine were worthy
to go into such company. His purity of feeling, almost ascetic, led him
to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted Chaucer and some of Balzac's, and
Smollett, Goldsmith, and De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's Rip
Van Winkle, Bernardin St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," and "Three
Months under the Snow," and Charles Lamb's generally overlooked
"Rosamund Gray." There were eases for "Socrates and his Friends," and
for other classes. He had amused himself for years in deciding what
books should be "crowned," as he called it, and what not. And then he
had another case, called "The Inferno." I wish there was space to give a
list of this department. Some were damned for dullness and some for
coarseness. Miss Edgeworth's Moral Tales, Darwin's Botanic Garden,
Rollin's Ancient History, and a hideously illustrated copy of the Book
of Martyrs were in the First-class, Don Juan and some French novels in
the second. Tupper, Swinburne, and Walt Whitman he did not know.
In the corner next the donjon chimney was a little room with a small
fireplace. Thus the hermit economized wood, for wood meant time, and
time meant communion with his books. All of his domestic arrangements
were carried on after this frugal fashion. In the little room was a
writing-desk, covered with manuscripts and commonplace books.
"Well, my young friend, you're thrice welcome," said Andrew, who never
dropped his book language. "What will you have? Will you resume your
apprenticeship under Goethe, or shall we canter to Canterbury with
Chaucer? Grand old Dan Chaucer! Or, shall we study magical philosophy
with Roger Bacon--the Friar, the Admirable Doctor? or read good Sir
Thomas More? What would Sir Thomas have said if he could have thought
that he would be admired by two such people as you and I, in the woods
of America, in the nineteenth century? But you do not want books! Ah! my
brave friend, you are not well. Come into my cell and let us talk. What
grieves you?"
And Andrew took him by the hand with the courtesy of a knight, with the
tenderness of a woman, and with the air of an astrologer, and led him
into the apartment of a monk.
[Illustration: THE SEDILIUM AT THE CASTLE.]
"See!" he said, "I have made a new chair. It is the highest evidence of
my love for my Teutonic friend. You have now a right to this castle. You
shall be perpetually welcome. I said to myself, German scholarship shall
sit there, and the Backwoods Philosopher will sit here. So sit down on
my _sedilium_, and let us hear how this uncivil and inconstant world
treats you. It can not deal worse with you than it has with me. But I
have had my revenge on it! I have been revenged! I have done as I
pleased, and defied the world and all its hollow conventionalities."
These last words were spoken in a tone of misanthropic bitterness common
to Andrew. His love for August was the more intense that it stood upon a
background of general dislike, if not for the world, at least for that
portion of it which most immediately surrounded him.
August took the chair, ingeniously woven and built of rye straw and
hickory splints. He knew that all this formality and apparent pedantry
was superficial. He and Andrew were bosom friends, and as he had often
opened his heart to the master of the castle before, so now he had no
difficulty in telling him his troubles, scarcely heeding the appropriate
quotations which Andrew made from time to time by way of embellishment.