The purple rhododendron is rare. Up in the Gap here, Bee Rock, hung
out over Roaring Rock, blossoms with it--as a gray cloud purples with
the sunrise. This rock was tossed lightly on edge when the earth was
young, and stands vertical. To get the flowers you climb the mountain
to one side, and, balancing on the rock's thin edge, slip down by roots
and past rattlesnake dens till you hang out over the water and reach
for them. To avoid snakes it is best to go when it is cool, at
daybreak.
I know but one other place in this southwest corner of Virginia where
there is another bush of purple rhododendron, and one bush only is
there. This hangs at the throat of a peak not far away, whose ageless
gray head is bent over a ravine that sinks like a spear thrust into the
side of the mountain. Swept only by high wind and eagle wings as this
is, I yet knew one man foolhardy enough to climb to it for a flower.
He brought one blossom down: and to this day I do not know that it was
not the act of a coward; yes, though Grayson did it, actually smiling
all the way from peak to ravine, and though he was my best friend--best
loved then and since. I believe he was the strangest man I have ever
known, and I say this with thought; for his eccentricities were
sincere. In all he did I cannot remember having even suspected
anything theatrical but once.
We were all Virginians or Kentuckians at the Gap, and Grayson was a
Virginian. You might have guessed that he was a Southerner from his
voice and from the way he spoke of women--but no more. Otherwise, he
might have been a Moor, except for his color, which was about the only
racial characteristic he had. He had been educated abroad and, after
the English habit, had travelled everywhere. And yet I can imagine no
more lonely way between the eternities than the path Grayson trod alone.
He came to the Gap in the early days, and just why he came I never
knew. He had studied the iron question a long time, he told me, and
what I thought reckless speculation was, it seems, deliberate judgment
to him. His money "in the dirt," as the phrase was, Grayson got him a
horse and rode the hills and waited. He was intimate with nobody.
Occasionally he would play poker with us and sometimes he drank a good
deal, but liquor never loosed his tongue. At poker his face told as
little as the back of his cards, and he won more than admiration--even
from the Kentuckians, who are artists at the game; but the money went
from a free hand, and, after a diversion like this, he was apt to be
moody and to keep more to himself than ever. Every fortnight or two he
would disappear, always over Sunday. In three or four days he would
turn up again, black with brooding, and then he was the last man to
leave the card-table or he kept away from it altogether. Where he went
nobody knew; and he was not the man anybody would question.
One night two of us Kentuckians were sitting in the club, and from a
home paper I read aloud the rumored engagement of a girl we both
knew--who was famous for beauty in the Bluegrass, as was her mother
before her and the mother before her--to an unnamed Virginian. Grayson
sat near, smoking a pipe; and when I read the girl's name I saw him
take the meerschaum from his lips, and I felt his eyes on me. It was a
mystery how, but I knew at once that Grayson was the man. He sought me
out after that and seemed to want to make friends. I was willing, or,
rather he made me more than willing; for he was irresistible to me, as
I imagine he would have been to anybody. We got to walking together
and riding together at night, and we were soon rather intimate; but for
a long time he never so much as spoke the girl's name. Indeed, he kept
away from the Bluegrass for nearly two months; but when he did go he
stayed a fortnight.
This time he came for me as soon as he got back to the Gap. It was
just before midnight, and we went as usual back of Imboden Hill,
through moon-dappled beeches, and Grayson turned off into the woods
where there was no path, both of us silent. We rode through tremulous,
shining leaves--Grayson's horse choosing a way for himself--and,
threshing through a patch of high, strong weeds, we circled past an
amphitheatre of deadened trees whose crooked arms were tossed out into
the moonlight, and halted on the spur. The moon was poised over
Morris's farm; South Fork was shining under us like a loop of gold, the
mountains lay about in tranquil heaps, and the moon-mist rose luminous
between them. There Grayson turned to me with an eager light in his
eyes that I had never seen before.
"This has a new beauty to-night!" he said; and then "I told her about
you, and she said that she used to know you--well." I was glad my face
was in shadow--I could hardly keep back a brutal laugh--and Grayson,
unseeing, went on to speak of her as I had never heard any man speak of
any woman. In the end, he said that she had just promised to be his
wife. I answered nothing. Other men, I knew, had said that with the
same right, perhaps, and had gone from her to go back no more. And I
was one of them. Grayson had met her at White Sulphur five years
before, and had loved her ever since. She had known it from the first,
he said, and I guessed then what was going to happen to him. I
marvelled, listening to the man, for it was the star of constancy in
her white soul that was most lustrous to him--and while I wondered the
marvel became a commonplace. Did not every lover think his loved one
exempt from the frailty that names other women? There is no ideal of
faith or of purity that does not live in countless women to-day. I
believe that; but could I not recall one friend who walked with
Divinity through pine woods for one immortal spring, and who, being
sick to death, was quite finished--learning her at last? Did I not
know lovers who believed sacred to themselves, in the name of love,
lips that had been given to many another without it? And now did I not
know--but I knew too much, and to Grayson I said nothing.
That spring the "boom" came. Grayson's property quadrupled in value
and quadrupled again. I was his lawyer, and I plead with him to sell;
but Grayson laughed. He was not speculating; he had invested on
judgment; he would sell only at a certain figure. The figure was
actually reached, and Grayson let half go. The boom fell, and Grayson
took the tumble with a jest. It would come again in the autumn, he
said, and he went off to meet the girl at White Sulphur.
I worked right hard that summer, but I missed him, and I surely was
glad when he came back. Something was wrong; I saw it at once. He did
not mention her name, and for a while he avoided even me. I sought him
then, and gradually I got him into our old habit of walking up into the
Gap and of sitting out after supper on a big rock in the valley,
listening to the run of the river and watching the afterglow over the
Cumberland, the moon rise over Wallen's Ridge and the stars come out.
Waiting for him to speak, I learned for the first time then another
secret of his wretched melancholy. It was the hopelessness of that
time, perhaps, that disclosed it. Grayson had lost the faith of his
childhood. Most men do that at some time or other, but Grayson had no
business, no profession, no art in which to find relief. Indeed, there
was but one substitute possible, and that came like a gift straight
from the God whom he denied. Love came, and Grayson's ideals of love,
as of everything else, were morbid and quixotic. He believed that he
owed it to the woman he should marry never to have loved another. He
had loved but one woman, he said, and he should love but one. I
believed him then literally when he said that his love for the Kentucky
girl was his religion now--the only anchor left him in his sea of
troubles, the only star that gave him guiding light. Without this
love, what then?
I had a strong impulse to ask him, but Grayson shivered, as though he
divined my thought, and, in some relentless way, our talk drifted to
the question of suicide. I was not surprised that he rather defended
it. Neither of us said anything new, only I did not like the way he
talked. He was too deliberate, too serious, as though he were really
facing a possible fact. He had no religious scruples, he said, no
family ties; he had nothing to do with bringing himself into life;
why--if it was not worth living, not bearable--why should he not end
it? He gave the usual authority, and I gave the usual answer.
Religion aside, if we did not know that we were here for some purpose,
we did not know that we were not; and here we were anyway, and our duty
was plain. Desertion was the act of a coward, and that Grayson could
not deny.
That autumn the crash of '91 came across the water from England, and
Grayson gave up. He went to Richmond, and came back with money enough
to pay off his notes, and I think it took nearly all he had. Still, he
played poker steadily now--for poker had been resumed when it was no
longer possible to gamble in lots--he drank a good deal, and he began
just at this time to take a singular interest in our volunteer police
guard. He had always been on hand when there was trouble, and I
sha'n't soon forget him the day Senator Mahone spoke, when we were
punching a crowd of mountaineers back with cocked Winchesters. He had
lost his hat in a struggle with one giant; he looked half crazy with
anger, and yet he was white and perfectly cool, and I noticed that he
never had to tell a man but once to stand back. Now he was the first
man to answer a police whistle. When we were guarding Talt Hall, he
always volunteered when there was any unusual risk to run. When we
raided the Pound to capture a gang of desperadoes, he insisted on going
ahead as spy; and when we got restless lying out in the woods waiting
for daybreak, and the captain suggested a charge on the cabin, Grayson
was by his side when it was made. Grayson sprang through the door
first, and he was the man who thrust his reckless head up into the loft
and lighted a match to see if the murderers were there. Most of us did
foolish things in those days under stress of excitement, but Grayson, I
saw, was weak enough to be reckless. His trouble with the girl,
whatever it was, was serious enough to make him apparently care little
whether he were alive or dead. And still I saw that not yet even had
he lost hope. He was having a sore fight with his pride, and he got
body-worn and heart-sick over it. Of course he was worsted, and in the
end, from sheer weakness, he went back to her once more.
I shall never see another face like his when Grayson came back that
last time. I never noticed before that there were silver hairs about
his temples. He stayed in his room, and had his meals sent to him. He
came out only to ride, and then at night. Waking the third morning at
daybreak, I saw him through the window galloping past, and I knew he
had spent the night on Black Mountain. I went to his room as soon as I
got up, and Grayson was lying across his bed with his face down, his
clothes on, and in his right hand was a revolver. I reeled into a
chair before I had strength enough to bend over him, and when I did I
found him asleep. I left him as he was, and I never let him know that
I had been to his room; but I got him out on the rock again that night,
and I turned our talk again to suicide. I said it was small, mean,
cowardly, criminal, contemptible! I was savagely in earnest, and
Grayson shivered and said not a word. I thought he was in better mind
after that. We got to taking night rides again, and I stayed as
closely to him as I could, for times got worse and trouble was upon
everybody. Notes fell thicker than snowflakes, and, through the
foolish policy of the company, foreclosures had to be made. Grayson
went to the wall like the rest of us. I asked him what he had done
with the money he had made. He had given away a great deal to poorer
kindred; he had paid his dead father's debts; he had played away a good
deal, and he had lost the rest. His faith was still imperturbable. He
had a dozen rectangles of "dirt," and from these, he said, it would all
come back some day. Still, he felt the sudden poverty keenly, but he
faced it as he did any other physical fact in life--dauntless. He used
to be fond of saying that no one thing could make him miserable. But
he would talk with mocking earnestness about some much-dreaded
combination; and a favorite phrase of his--which got to have peculiar
significance--was "the cohorts of hell," who closed in on him when he
was sick and weak, and who fell back when he got well. He had one
strange habit, too, from which I got comfort. He would deliberately
walk into and defy any temptation that beset him. That was the way he
strengthened himself, he said. I knew what his temptation was now, and
I thought of this habit when I found him asleep with his revolver, and
I got hope from it now, when the dreaded combination (whatever that
was) seemed actually to have come.
I could see now that he got worse daily. He stopped his mockeries, his
occasional fits of reckless gayety. He stopped poker--resolutely--he
couldn't afford to lose now; and, what puzzled me, he stopped drinking.
The man simply looked tired, always hopelessly tired; and I could
believe him sincere in all his foolish talk about his blessed Nirvana:
which was the peace he craved, which was end enough for him.
Winter broke. May drew near; and one afternoon, when Grayson and I
took our walk up through the Gap, he carried along a huge spy-glass of
mine, which had belonged to a famous old desperado, who watched his
enemies with it from the mountain-tops. We both helped capture him,
and I defended him. He was sentenced to hang--the glass was my fee.
We sat down opposite Bee Rock, and for the first time Grayson told me
of that last scene with her. He spoke without bitterness, and he told
me what she said, word for word, without a breath of blame for her. I
do not believe that he judged her at all; she did not know--he always
said; she did not KNOW; and then, when I opened my lips, Grayson
reached silently for my wrist, and I can feel again the warning crush
of his fingers, and I say nothing against her now.