|Boston has worn itself out. The artificial centre of an unnatural
sickly exotic culture ever alien to the American soil, it has gone on
studying, criticising, analysing, till all the vigour and spontaneity it
may ever have possessed has utterly died out of it from pure inanition.
The Nemesis of sterility has fallen upon its head in the second
generation. It has cultivated men, fastidious critics, receptive and
appreciative intellects by the thousand; but of thinkers, workers,
originalities, hardly now a single one.
Lothrop Audouin was the very embodiment of the discontent and mocking
intellectual nihilism begotten of this purely critical unoriginative
attitude. Reaction against American materialism was the mainspring of
his inner being. He felt himself out of harmony with the palace cars
on the New York Central Railroad; jarring and conflicting with the
big saloons of the Windsor Hotel; unappreciative of the advertising
enterprise on the rocks of the Hudson River; at war with mammoth
concerns, gigantic newspapers, Presidential booms, State legislatures,
pop corn, saw mills, utilisation of water power, and all the other
component elements of the great American civilisation. Therefore, being
happily endowed by fate and his ancestors with a moderate competence,
even as moderate competences go on the other side of the Atlantic, he
had fled from Boston and the world to take refuge in the woods and
the marshes. For some years he had hidden himself in the western hill
district of Massachusetts; but being driven thence by the march of
intellect (enthroned on a steam plough), he had just removed to a new
cottage on the shore of Muddy Creek, not far from its entry into Lake
Ontario. There he lived a solitary life, watching the birds and beasts
and insects, sketching the trees and shrubs and flowers, and
shunning for the most part his fellow-man, save only his friend, the
distinguished ornithologist, Professor Ezra P. Hipkiss, of Harvard
College, Massachusetts.
The Professor had left them, intending to return home by himself; and
Audouin walked back alone with the boy, noticing at every step his sharp
appreciation of all the natural signs and landmarks around him. At
last a sudden thought seemed to strike Hiram. He drew back a second in
momentary hesitation.
'Say,' he said falteringly, 'you ain't one of Father Noyes's crowd at
Oneida, are you?'
Audouin smiled half contemptuously.
Father Noyes is a New Haven fanatic who has established an Agapemone
of his own in northern New York; and to Hiram, who had heard the Oneida
community spoken of with vague horror by all the surrounding farmers
from his babyhood upward, the originally separate and distinct notions
of Father Noyes and the Devil had so coalesced that even now in his
maturer years they were not completely differentiated or demarcated.
'No, no,' Audouin answered reassuringly: 'I'm not one of the Oneida
people, my boy: I'm quite free from any taint of that sort. I'm a Boston
man; a Boston man, I said; even in the woods that sticks to me. “Patriæ
quis exul,” I think the line runs, “se quoque fugit.”' Hiram didn't
understand exactly what he was driving at, but he went along satisfied
at least that his strange acquaintance, though he spoke with tongues,
was not directly connected either with Father Noyes or the Devil.
By-and-by they reached the high-road, and came at last opposite the bare
gate that gave access to Deacon Winthrop's yard. Audouin gazed about him
drearily at the dreary prospect. 'A very American view, Hiram,' he said
slowly: 'civilisation hard at work here; my boy, we must try to redeem
you out of it.'
Hiram looked up in the stranger's face curiously. He had grown up among
his native surroundings so unquestioningly, after the fashion of boys,
that, though he knew it was all very ugly, hopelessly and hideously
ugly, it would never even have occurred to him to say so in so many
words. He took it for granted that all the world was of course dull and
uninteresting, except the woods, and the weeds, and the marshes, and
the vermin. He expected always to find all man's handicraft a continuous
course of uglification, and he never suspected that there could by
any possibility be anything beautiful except untouched and unpolluted
nature. If you had told him about the wonders and glories of art, he
would simply have listened to you then in mute incredulity.
Audouin lifted up the latch of the gate and walked into the yard; and
the deacon, seeing him approach, strode to meet him, in no very amiable
frame of mind, thinking it probable that this was only another one
of Hiram's undesirable trapper acquaintances. To say the truth, the
misapprehension was a natural one. Audouin was coarsely dressed in rough
country clothes, and even when he spoke a nature like the deacon's was
hardly of the sort to be much impressed by his quiet cultivated manner.
'Wal, cap'n,' the deacon said, coming towards them, 'what might you be
lookin' after this mornin', eh? I presume you air on the look-out for
horses?'
Audouin smiled and bowed with a dignity which suited strangely with his
rude outer aspect. 'No, sir,' he answered in his bland voice. 'I'm
not looking out for horses. I met your son here--a very interesting
boy--down by the Creek, and I have come up here with him because his
individuality attracted me. I wanted to have a talk with you about him.'
As it happened, to speak well of Hiram, and before his face too (the
scapegrace!), wasn't exactly the surest path to the deacon's esteem and
affection. He coughed nervously, and then inquired in his dry manner,
'Trapper?' 'No, not exactly a trapper,' Audouin replied, smiling again
faintly. The faint smile and the 'exactly' both misled and exasperated
the deacon.
'Farmer, then?' he continued laconically, after the fashion of the
country.
'No, nor farmer either,' the New Englander answered in his soft voice.
'I am Mr. Audouin, of Lakeside Cottage.'
The deacon scanned him contemptuously from head to foot. 'Oh, _Mister_
Audouin,' he said significantly. 'Wal, _Mister_ Audouin, so you've
bought up that thar ramshackle place of Hitchcock's, hev you? And what
air you goin' to dew with it naow you've got it? Clear off the timber, I
reckon, and set up rafting.'
'God forbid,' Audouin replied hastily. (The deacon frowned slightly at
such obvious profanity.) 'I've taken the place just because of its very
wildness, and I merely wish to live in it and watch and sympathise with
nature. I see your son loves nature, too, and that has formed a bond of
union between us.'
'Wal,' the deacon murmured meditatively, 'that's all accordin' to taste.
Hiram is my own son, an' if the Lord has bin pleased to afflict us in
him, mother an' me ain't the ones to say nothin' agin him to casual
strangers, anyway. But I don't want to part with him, _Mister_ Audouin;
we ain't lookin' out for a place for him yet. Thar's work enough for him
to do on this farm, I kin tell you, ef on'y he'd do it. You wasn't in
want of any butter or eggs now, was you?'
'No, Mr. Winthrop,' Audouin answered seriously, leaning against the gate
as he spoke. 'I see you quite misunderstand me. Allow me a moment to
explain the position. I'm a Boston man, a man of independent means, and
I've taken Lakeside because I wish to live alone, away from a world in
which I have really very little interest. You may possibly know, by name
at least, my uncle, Senator Lothrop, of Syracuse;' (that was a horrid
bit of snobbery, worthy almost of the old world, Audouin thought to
himself as he uttered it; but it was necessary if he was to do anything
for Hiram). 'Well, that's my card--some use in civilisation after
all--Lothrop Audouin; and I was wandering in the woods by the Creek this
morning with my friend, Professor Hipkiss of Harvard, when I happened
to fall in quite accidentally with your son here. He charmed us by his
knowledge of nature all around, and, indeed, I was so much interested in
him that I thought I would just step over and have a little conversation
with you about his future.'
The deacon took the little bit of pasteboard suspiciously, and looked
with slowly melting incredulity at Audouin's rough dress from head to
foot. Even upon his dense, coarse, materialised mind the truth began to
dawn slowly that he was dealing with a veritable gentleman. 'Wal, Mr.
Audouin,' he said, this time without the ironical emphasis upon the
'Mister,' 'what do yer want to dew with the boy, eh, sir? I don't see as
I kin spare him;'pears to me, ef he's goin anywhar, he may as well go to
a good farmer's.'
'You mistake me still,' Audouin went on. 'My meaning is this. Your son
has talked to the Professor and myself, and has shown us some of his
sketches.' The deacon nodded ominously. 'Now, his conversation is so
intelligent and his drawings so clever, that we both think you ought to
make an effort to give him a good education. He would well repay it. We
have both a considerable influence in educational quarters, and we would
willingly exert it for his benefit.'
The deacon opened his eyes with astonishment. That lad intelligent? Why,
he was no judge at all of a bullock, and he knew scarcely anythin' more
about fall wheat'n a greenhorn that might hev kem out from Ireland by
the last steamer. However, he contented himself upon that head with
smiling sardonically, and muttered half to himself, 'Edoocation;
edoocational influence; not with members of the Hopkinsite connection, I
reckon.'
Audouin carefully checked the smile that threatened to pull up the
corners of his delicate mouth. He was beginning to understand now what
manner of man he had got to deal with, and for Hiram's sake he was
determined to be patient. Fancy such a lad living always exposed to the
caprices of such a father!
'No,' he said gravely, 'not with the Hopkin-sites, but with the
Congregationalists and others, where your boy would not be interfered
with in his religious convictions.'
''Tain't entirely satisfactory,' the deacon continued. 'Consider
my persition as one set in authority, as it were, in the Hopkinsite
connection. Hiram ain't bin nowhar so far, 'ceptin' to common school,
an' I dunno as I hev made up my mind ever to send him any-whar else.
Boys loses a lot o' time over this here edoocation. But ef I was to, I
guess I should send him to Bethabara Seminary. We hev a seminary of our
own, sir--we of the Believin' Church, commonly known as the Hopkinsite
connection--at Athens in Madison County, which we call Bethabara,
because we surmise it's the on'y place in America whar the Gospel
is taught on thorough-goin' Baptist principles. We air not only for
immersion as agin sprinklin', mister, but also for scriptooral immersion
in runnin' water as agin the lax modern practice of or'nary immersion in
tanks or reservoyers. That's why we call our seminary Bethabara--Athens
bein' sitooated on the Musk-rat river close above its junction with the
Jordan; an' that's why, ef I was goin' to send Hiram any whar, I should
send him whar he could hear the Gospel expounded accordin' to the
expositions an' opinions of Franklin V. Hopkins, of Massachusetts, which
air the correck ones.'
'This question will take a little time to thrash out,' Audouin answered
with unruffled gravity. 'May I ask, deacon, whether you will courteously
permit me to take a chair in your house and talk it over fully with
you?'
'Why, certainly,' the deacon answered with a doubtful look that clearly
belied his spoken words. 'Hiram, you jest go an' drive up the cows,
sonny, an' mind you put up the fence behind you, jest the same as you
find it.'
They went together into the dreary living-room, a room such as Audouin
had seen in duplicate ten thousand times before, with a bare wooden
floor, bare walls, a white pine table, a rocking-chair, a bunk,
some cane seats, a stove, and a cheap lithograph of a vacant-looking
gentleman in a bag-wig and loose collar, whom an inscription surmounted
by a spread eagle declared largely to have been first in war, first in
peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. (Lithographs of
the sort are common in American farmhouses, and are understood to be
posthumous libels on the intelligence and personal appearance of George
Washington.) Audouin seated himself humbly on the bunk, and the deacon
took his accustomed place in the rocking-chair, where he continued to
sway himself violently to and fro during the whole interview.
Audouin began by pleading hard for education for Hiram, and suggesting,
as delicately as he was able, that if pecuniary difficulties barred the
way, they might perhaps be easily smoothed over. (As a matter of fact,
he would willingly have given freely of that dirty paper, stamped with
the treasury stamp, that they call money, to free such a lad as Hiram
Winthrop from the curse of that material civilisation that they both so
cordially detested.) He praised Hiram's intelligence and his wonderful
talent for drawing: spoke of the wrongfulness of not allowing full play
to his God-given faculties: and even condescended to point out that
Hiram educated would probably make a much larger fortune (ugh! how he
shuddered over it) than Hiram set to do the drudgery of a farm which he
hated and always would hate. The deacon listened, half-wrathful; such
open aiding and abetting of sinful rebelliousness and repining was
almost too much for him; his only consolation was that Hiram wasn't
along to listen to it all and drink in more unfilial sentiments from it.
But Audouin soon made one convert at least. Mrs. Winthrop, with her hard
unlovable face, sat silently listening beside the stove, and picking
over the potatoes for the spring planting. In her shrivelled
mother's heart, she had always been proud of Hiram; proud even of his
stubbornness and rebellion, which in some dim, half-unconscious fashion
she vaguely knew to be really a higher, nobler sort of thing at bottom
than the deacon's stern, unbending fidelity to the principles of
Solomon and the Hopkinsite Confession. Somewhere away down in the dark
unfathomed depths of Mehitabel Winthrop's stunted personality there
lay a certain stifled, undeveloped, long-since-smothered germ of human
romance and feminine sympathy which had blossomed out in Hiram into
true love of art and of nature. Deadened as it was in her by the cruel
toilsome life of Muddy Creek, with its endless round of dull monotonous
labour, as well as by the crushing defeat experienced by all her
girlish ideals in the awful reality of the married state with Zephaniah
Winthrop, the deacon's wife still retained in some half-buried corner of
her soul a little smouldering spark of the divine fire which enabled her
in a doubtful halffrightened fashion to sympathise with Hiram. It was
very wrong and weak of her, she knew: father was right, and Hiram was a
no-account, idle loiterer: but still, when he spoke up to father, to
his very face, about his novel-reading, and his birds-nesting, and his
drawing, Mrs. Winthrop was somehow aware of a sneaking admiration and
pride in him which she never felt towards the deacon, even during his
most effective and unctuous exhortation. And now, when she heard Audouin
praising and speaking well of her boy for those very, things that the
deacon despised and rejected, she felt that here was somebody else who
could appreciate Hiram, and that perhaps, after all, her own instinct
had not in the end entirely misled her.
'Zeph,' she said at last--it was many years since she had called him
'Zeph' habitually, instead of 'Father' or 'Deacon'--'Zeph, I think we
might manage to send Hiram to college.'
The deacon started. _Et tu, Brute!_ This was really almost too much for
him. He began to wonder whether the universe was turned upside down,
and all the powers that be were hereafter to be ranged on the side of
rebelliousness and opposition. To say the truth, his godly horror was
not altogether feigned. According to his lights, his dusky and feeble
lights, the deacon wished and believed himself to be a good father. He
held it his clear duty, as set forth in his reading of the prophets and
apostles, to knock this idle nonsense out of Hiram, and train him up
in the way he should go, to be a respectable corn-raising farmer and
shining light of the Hopkinsite connection. These habits of hunting
'coons and making pictures of rattlesnakes, into which the boy had
lapsed, were utterly abhorrent to the deacon's mind as idle, loitering,
vagabond ways, deserving only of severe castigation His reading of
English classics appeared as a crime only one degree less heinous than
frequenting taverns, playing cards, or breaking the Sabbath. The boy was
a bad boy, a hopelessly bad boy, given him as a thorn in the flesh to
prevent spiritual boasting: on that hypothesis alone could the deacon
account for such a son of perdition being born of such believing and on
the whole (as poor worms go) extremely creditable parents.
And now, here was this fine-spoken, incomprehensible Boston critter, who
had took that ramshackle place of Hitchcock's, and didn't even mean
to farm it--here was this unaccountable phenomenon of a man positively
interested in and pleased with Hiram, just because of these very
self-same coon-hunting, snake-drawing, vagabond proclivities. The
Deacon's self-love and selfrespect were deeply wounded. Audouin had
already been talking with the boy: no doubt he had set him even more
agin his own father than ever. No doubt he had told Hiram that there
was something fine in his heathenish love for Injun tommy-hawks, in his
Bohemian longings for intercourse with ungodly trappers (men to whom
the Sabbath was absolutely indifferent), in his wicked yearning after
Pickwick's Papers, and the Complete Dramatic Works of William Wakefield.
The deacon couldn't bear to stultify himself after all, by sending
Hiram to school at the request of this favourer of rebellion, this vile
instigator of revolt against paternal authority, this Ahithophel who
would lure on a foolish Absalom with guileful counsel to his final
destruction.
'Wal, Het,' the Deacon said slowly, 'I dunno about it. We must take time
to consider and to wrastle over it.'
But Audouin, now thoroughly in earnest, his sense of plot-interest
vividly aroused, would hear of no delay, but that the question must be
settled that very evening, he saw the deacon wouldn't entertain the
idea of Hiram being sent somewhere to prepare for Yale or Harvard, where
Audouin would have liked him to go: and so, with a diplomatic cleverness
which the deacon, if he could have read his visitor's mind, would
doubtless have characterised as devilish, he determined to shift his
ground, and beg only that Hiram might be sent to Bethabara. In a year or
two, he said to himself, the boy would be older and would have a mind of
his own; and then it would be possible, he thought, to send him to some
college where his intellectual and artistic nature might have freer
development than at the Hopkinsite Seminary. Bit by bit, the Deacon gave
way: he couldn't as a consistent church member and a father with
the highest interests of his son at heart, refuse to let him go to
Bethabara, when a mere stranger declared he saw in him signs of talent.
He yielded ungraciously at last, and told Audouin he wouldn't stand
in the way of the boy's receivin' a good edoocation, purvided allus it
wa'n't contrary to the principles of Franklin P. Hopkins.
'Very well,' Audouin said with a sigh of relief. 'I'll write and inquire
about the matter myself this very evening.'
'Address the Secatary,' Mr. Winthrop put in officially, 'Bethabara
Seminary, Athens, N.Y.' Audouin made a note in his memorandum book of
the incongruous address with a stifled sigh.
'Mother,' the deacon said, 'call in Hiram.' Mrs. Winthrop obeyed. Hiram,
who had been loitering about the wood-shed in wonder at what this long
interview could portend, slunk in timidly, and stood with his ragged hat
in his hand beside the table.
'Hiram,' said the deacon, solemnly, with the voice and air of a judge
publicly addressing a condemned criminal, 'that gentleman thar has been
conversin' with mother an' me relatively to the desirability of sendin'
you to an edoocational establishment, whar you may, p'raps, be cured
from your present oncommonly idle and desultory proclivities. Though
you hev allus bin, as I confess with shame, a most lazy lad, sonny, an'
hev never done anything to develop your nat'ral talents in any way, that
gentleman thar, who has received a college edoocation hisself at one of
our leadin' American Universities, an' who is competent by trainin' an'
experience to form an opinion upon the subjeck, believes that you
dew possess nat'ral talents of which you ain't yet giv any open
indication.'Tain't for me to say whether you may hev inherited them or
not: it is sufficient to point out that that thar gentleman considers
you might, with industry and application, dew credit in time to an
edoocational institoot. Such an institoot of our own denomination is
Bethabara Seminary, located at Athens, New York. Thar you would receive
instruction not at variance with the religious teachin' you hev enjoyed
in your own residence an' from your own parents. An eminent Hopkinsite
pastor is installed over that institoot as President; I allood to Elder
Ezra W. Coffin, with whose commentary on the prophet Ezekiel you air
already familiar. Mother an' me has decided, accordingly, that it will
be for your good, both temporal and sperritooal we hope, to enter
junior at Bethabara Seminary. That gentleman thar will make inquiries
relatively to the time when you kin be received into the institootion.
We trust that when you he ventered upon this noo stage in your career,
you will drop them habits of idleness an' insubordination for which it
has been my dooty on a great many occasions to correck you severely.'
Hiram stood there dazed and trembling, listening with blank amazement
to the deacon's exhortation (the same as if it was conference), and only
vaguely taking in the general idea that he was to be sent away shortly
to some school or other somewhere. Andouin saw at a glance the lad's
timid hesitation, and added kindly: 'Your father and mother think,
Hiram, that it would be well to send you to Bethabara' (he suppressed
his rising shudder), 'so that you may have opportunities of learning
more about all the things in which you're already so much interested.
You'll like it, my boy, I'm sure; and you'll get on there, I feel
confident.'
The boy turned to him gratefully: 'That's so, I guess,' he answered,
with his awkward country gratitude; 'I shall like it better'n this,
anyhow.'
The deacon frowned, but said nothing.
And so, before a week was over, Hiram had said good-bye to his mother
and Sam Churchill, and was driving over in the deacon's buggy to Muddy
Creek deepo, ong rowt for Athens, Madison County.