THE GOING OF SLIPPY MCGEE
Little by little, so quietly as to be unnoticeable in the working, but
with, cumulative effect; built under the surface like those coral
reefs that finally rear themselves into palm-crowned peaks upon the
Pacific, during the years' slow upward march had John Flint grown.
Nature had never meant him for a criminal. The evil conditions that
society saddles upon the slums had set him wrong because they gave him
no opportunity to be right. Now even among butterflies there are
occasional aberrants, but they are the rare exceptions. Give the grub
his natural food, his chance to grow, protect him from parasites in
the meanwhile, and he will presently become the normal butterfly. That
is the Law.
At a crucial phase in this man's career his true talisman--a gray
moth--had been put into his hand; and thereby he came into his
rightful heritage.
I count as one of my red-letter days that on which I found him
brooding over the little gray-brown chrysalis of the Papilio
Cresphontes, that splendid swallowtail whose hideous caterpillar we in
the South call the orange puppy, from the fancied resemblance the hump
upon it bears to the head of a young dog. Its chrysalis looks so much
like a bit of snapped-off twig that the casual eye misses it,
fastened to a stem by a girdle of silk or lying among fallen leaves.
"I watched it ooze out of an egg like a speck of dirty water. I
watched it eat a thousand times its own weight and grow into the
nastiest wretch that crawls. I saw it stop eating and spit its stomach
out and shrivel up, and crawl out of its skin and pull its own head
off, and bury itself alive in a coffin made out of itself, a coffin
like a bit of rotting wood. Look at it! There it lies, stone-dead for
all a man's eyes can see!
"And yet this thing will answer a call no ears can hear and crawl out
of its coffin something entirely different from what went into it!
I've seen it with my own eyes, but how it's done I don't know; no, nor
no man since the world was made knows, or could do it himself. What
does it? What gives that call these dead-alive things hear in the
dark? What makes a crawling ugliness get itself ready for what's
coming--how does it _know_ there's ever going to be a call, or that
it'll hear it without fail?"
"Some of us call it Nature: but others call it God," said I.
"Search me! I don't know what It is--but I do know there's got to be
Something behind these things, anyhow," said he, and turned the
chrysalis over and over in his palm, staring down at it thoughtfully.
He had used Westmoreland's words, once applied to his own case! "Oh,
yes, there's Something, because I've watched It working with grubs,
getting 'em ready for five-inch moths and hand-colored butterflies,
Something that's got the time and the patience and the know-how to
build wings as well as worlds." He laid the little inanimate mystery
aside.
"It's come to the point, parson, where I've just _got_ to know more. I
know enough now to know how much I don't know, because I've got a peep
at how much there is to know. There's a God's plenty to find out, and
it's up to me to go out and find it."
"Some of the best and brightest among men have given all the years of
their lives to just that finding out and knowing more--and they found
their years too few and short for the work. But such help as you need
and we can get, you shall have, please God!" said I.
"I'm ready for the word to start, chief." And heaven knows he was.
His passion transformed him; he forgot himself; took his mind off
himself and his affairs and grievances and hatreds and fears; and thus
had chance to expand and to grow, in those following years of
patientest effort, of untiring research and observance, of lovingest
study. Days in the open woods and fields burned his pale skin a good
mahogany, and stamped upon it the windswept freshness of out of doors.
The hunted and suspicious glance faded from his eyes, which took on
more and more the student's absorbed intensity; the mouth lost its
sinister straightness; and while it retained an uncompromising
firmness, it learned how to smile. He was a familiar figure, tramping
from dawn to dusk with Kerry at his heels, for the dog obeyed Mary
Virginia's command literally. He looked upon John Flint as his special
charge, and made himself his fourlegged red shadow. I am sure that if
we had seen Kerry appear in the streets of Appleboro without John
Flint, we would have incontinently stopped work, sounded a general
alarm, and gone to hunt for his body. And to have seen John Flint
without Kerry would have called forth condolences.
Sometimes--when I had time--I went with him moth-hunting at night; and
never, never could either of us forget those enchanted hours under the
stars!
We moved in a quiet fresh and dewy, with the night wind upon us like a
benediction. Sometimes we skirted a cypress swamp and saw the shallow
black water with blacker trees reflected upon its bosom, and heard the
frogs' canorous quarrelings, and the stealthy rustlings of creatures
of the dark. We crossed dreaming fields, and smelt leaves and grasses
and sleeping flowers. We saw the heart of the wood bared to the magic
of the moon, which revealed a hidden and haunting beauty of places
commonplace enough by day; as if the secret souls of things showed
themselves only in the holy dark.
For the world into which we stepped for a space was not our world, but
the fairy world of the Little People, the world of the Children of the
Moon. And oh, the moths! Now it was a tiger, with his body banded with
yellow and his white opaque delicate wings spotted with black; now the
great green silken Luna with long curved tails bordered with lilac or
gold, and vest of ermine; now some quivering Catocala, with afterwings
spread to show orange and black and crimson; now the golden-brown Io,
with one great black velvet spot; and now some rarer, shyer fellow
over which we gloated.
How they flashed and fluttered about the lantern, or circled about the
trees upon which the feast had been spread! The big yellow-banded
sphinx whirred hither and thither on his owl-like wings, his large
eyes glowing like rubies, hung quivering above some flower for a
moment, and then was off again as swift as thought. The light drew the
great Regalis, all burnished tawny brown, striped and spotted with raw
gold; and the Cynthia, banded with lilac, her heavy body tufted with
white. The darkness in which they moved, the light which, for a moment
revealed them, seemed to make their colors _alive_; for they show no
such glow and glory in the common day; they pale when the moon pales,
and when the sun is up they are merely moths; they are no longer the
fantastic, glittering, gorgeous, throbbing Children of the Dark.
Home we would go, at an hour when the morning star blazed like a
lighted torch, and the pearl-gray sky was flushing with pink. No haul
he had ever made could have given him such joy as the treasures
brought home in dawns like these, so free of evil that his heart was
washed in the night dew and swept by the night wind.
My mother, after her pleasant, housewifely fashion, baked a big iced
cake for him on the day he replaced his clumsy wooden peg with the
life-like artificial limb he himself had earned and paid for. I had
wished more than once to hasten this desirable day; but prudently
restrained myself, thinking it best for him to work forward unaided.
It had taken months of patient work, of frugality, and planning, and
counting, and saving, to cover a sum which, once on a time, he might
have gotten in an hour's evil effort. And it represented no small
achievement and marked no small advance, so that it was really the
feast day we made of it. That limb restored him to a dignity he seemed
to have abdicated. It hid his obvious misfortune--you could not at
first glance tell that he was a cripple, a something of which he had
been morbidly conscious and savagely resentful. He would never again
be able to run, or even to walk rapidly for any length of time,
although he covered the ground at a good and steady gait; and as he
grew more and more accustomed to the limb there was only a slight limp
to distinguish him. The use of the stick he thought best to carry
became perfunctory. I have seen Kerry carrying that stick when his
master had forgotten all about it.
Meeting him now upon the streets, plainly but really well-dressed,
scrupulously brushed, his linen immaculate, and with his trimmed red
beard, his eyeglasses, and his soft hat, he conveyed the impression of
being a professional man--say a pleasantly homely and scholarly
college professor. There was a fixed sentiment in Appleboro that I
knew very much more about Mr. Flint's past than I would tell--which
was perfectly true, and went undenied by me; that he had seen better
days; that he had been the black sheep of a good family, gotten into a
scrape of some sort, and had then taken to traveling a rough road into
a far country, eating husks with the swine, like many another
prodigal; and that aware of this I had kept him with me until he found
himself again.
So when folks met him and Kerry they smiled and spoke, for we are
friendly people and send no man to Coventry without great cause. And
there wasn't a child, black or white, who didn't know and like the
man with the butterfly net.
The country people for miles around knew and loved him, too; for he
walked up and down the earth and went to and fro in it, full of
curious and valuable knowledge shared freely as the need arose. He
would glance at your flower-garden, for instance, and tell you what
insect visitors your flowers had, and what you should do to check
their ravages. He'd walk about your out-buildings and commend
white-wash, and talk about insecticides; and you'd learn that bees are
partial to blue, but flies are not; and that mosquitoes seem to
dislike certain shades of yellow. And then he'd leave you to digest
it.
He was a quiet evangelist, a forerunner of that Grand Army which will
some day arise, not to murder and maim men, but to conquer man's
deadliest foe and greatest economic menace--the injurious insect.
It was he who spread the tidings of Corn and Poultry and Live Stock
Clubs, stopping by many a lonely farm to whisper a word in the ears of
discouraged boys, or to drop a hint to unenlightened fathers and
mothers.
He carried about in his pockets those invaluable reports and bulletins
which the government issues for the benefit and enlightenment of
farmers; and these were left, with a word of praise, where they would
do the most good.
Those same bulletins from the Bureau of Entomology had planted in John
Flint's heart the seed which bore such fruit of good citizenship. The
whole course of his early years had tended to make him suspicious of
government, which spelt for him police and prison, the whole grim
machinery which threatened him and which he in turn threatened. He had
feared and hated it; it caught men and shut them up and broke them. If
he ever asked himself, "What can my government do for me?" he had to
answer: "It can put me in prison and keep me there; it can even send me
to the Chair." Wherefore government was a thing to hate, to injure--and
to escape from.
The first thing he had ever found worthy of respect and admiration in
this same government was one of its bulletins.
"Where'd you get this?"
"I asked for it, and the Bureau sent it."
"Oh! You've got a friend there!"
"No. The bulletins are free to any one interested enough to ask for
them."
"You mean to say the government gets up things like this--pays men to
find out and write 'em up--pays to have 'em printed--and then gives
'em away to _anybody_? Why, they're valuable!"
"Yes; but they are nevertheless quite free. I have a number, if you'd
like to go over them. Or you can send for new ones."
"But why do they do it? Where's the graft?" he wondered.
"The graft in this case is common sense in operation. If farms can be
run with less labor and loss and more profit and pleasure, why, the
whole country is benefited, isn't it? Don't you understand, the
government is trying to help those who need help, and therefore is
willing to lend them the brains of its trained and picked experts? It
isn't selfish thwart that aim, is it?"
He said nothing. But he read and re-read the bulletins I had, and sent
for more, which came to him promptly. They didn't know him, at the
Bureau; they asked him no questions; he wasn't going to pay anybody so
much as a penny. They assumed that the man who asked for advice and
information was entitled to all they could reasonably give him, and
they gave it as a matter of course. That is how and why he found
himself in touch with his Uncle Sam, a source hitherto disliked and
distrusted. This source was glad to put its trained intelligence at
his service and the only reward it looked to was his increased
capacity to succeed in his work! He simply couldn't dislike or
distrust that which benefited him; and as his admiration and respect
for the Department of Agriculture grew, unconsciously his respect and
admiration for the great government behind it grew likewise. After
all, it was _his_ government which was reaching across intervening
miles, conveying information, giving expert instruction, telling him
things he wanted to know and encouraging him to go right on and find
out more for himself!
_Now_ if he had asked himself what his government could do for him, he
had to answer: "It can help me to make good."
And he began to understand that this was possible because he obeyed
the law, and that only in intelligent obedience and co-operation is
there any true freedom. The law no longer meant skulking by day and
terror by night; it was protection and peace, and a chance to work in
the open, and the sympathy and understanding and comradeship of
decent folks. The government was no longer a brute force which
arbitrarily popped men into prison; it was the common will of a free
people, just as the law was the common conscience.
I dare not say that he learned all this easily, or all at once, or
even willingly. None of us learns our great lessons easily. We have to
live them, breathe them, work them out with sweat and tears. That we
do learn them, even inadequately, makes the glory and the wonder of
man.
And so John Flint went to school to the government of the United
States, and carried its little text-books about with him and taught
them to others in even more need that he; and heckled hopeless boys
into Corn Clubs; and coaxed sullen mothers and dissatisfied girls into
Poultry and Tomato Clubs; and was full of homely advice upon such
living subjects as the spraying of fruit trees, and how to save them
from blight and scale-insects, and how to get rid of flies, and
cut-worms, and to fight the cattle-tick, which is our curse; and the
preservation of birds, concerning which he was rabid. His liking for
birds began with Miss Sally Ruth's pigeons and the friendly birds in
our garden. And as he learned to know them his love for them grew. I
have seen him daily visit a wren's nest without once alarming the
little black-eyed mother. I have heard him give the red-bird's call,
and heard that loveliest of all birds answer him. And I have seen the
impudent jays, within reach of his hand, swear at him unabashed and
unafraid, because he fed a vireo first.
I like to think of his intimate friendship with the wholesome country
children--not the least of his blessings. He was their chief visitor
from the outside world. He knew wonderful secrets about things one
hadn't noticed before, and he could make miracles with his quick
strong fingers. He'd sit down, his stick and knapsack beside him, his
glamorous dog at his feet, and while you and your sisters and brothers
and friends and neighbors hung about him like a cluster of tow-headed
bees, he'd turn a few sticks and bits of cloth and twine and a tack or
two, and an old roller-skate wheel he took out of his pocket, into an
air-ship! He could go down by your little creek and make you a
water-wheel, or a windmill. He could make you marvelous little men,
funny little women, absurd animals, out of corks or peanuts. He knew,
too, just exactly the sort of knife your boy-heart ached for--and at
parting you found that very knife slipped into your enraptured palm.
You might save the pennies you earned by picking berries and gathering
nuts, but you could never, never find at any store any candy that
tasted like the sticks that came out of his pockets, and you needn't
hope to try. He had the inviolable secret of that candy, and he
imparted to it a divine flavor no other candy ever possessed. If you
were a little doll-less girl, he didn't leave you with the provoking
promise that Santa Claus would bring you one if you were good. He was
so sure you were good that he made you right then and there a
wonderful doll out of corn-husks, with shredded hair, and a frock of
his own handkerchief. When he came again you got another doll--a store
doll; but I think your child-heart clung to the corn-baby with the
handkerchief dress. I have often wondered how many little cheeks
snuggled against John Flint's home-made dollies, how many innocent
breasts cradled them; how many a little fellow carried his knife to
bed with him, afraid to let it get out of reach of a hard little hand,
because he might wake up in the morning and find he had only dreamed
it! No, I hardly think the country children were the least of John
Flint's blessings. They would run to meet him, hold on to his hands,
drag him here and there to show him what wonders their sharp eyes had
discovered since his last visit; and give him, with shining eyes, such
cocoons and caterpillars, and insects as they had found for him. It
was they who called him the Butterfly Man, a name which spread over
the whole country-side. If you had asked for John Flint, folks would
have stared. And if you described him--a tall man in a Norfolk suit,
with a red beard and a red dog, and an insect case:
"Oh, you mean the Butterfly Man! Sure. You'll find him about somewhere
with the kids." If there was anything he couldn't have, in that
county, it was because folks hadn't it to give if he should ask.
At home his passion for work at times terrified me. When I protested:
"I was twenty-five years old when I landed here," he reminded me. "So
I've got twenty-five years' back-work to catch up with."
He had taken over a correspondence that had since become voluminous,
and which included more and more names that stood for very much.
Sometimes when I read aloud a passage from a letter that praised him,
he turned red, and writhed like a little boy whose ears are being
relentlessly washed by his elders.
By this time he had learned to really classify; heavens, how
unerringly he could place an insect in its proper niche! It was a sort
of sixth sense with him. That cold, clear, incisive power of brain
which on a time had made Slippy McGee the greatest cracksman in
America, was, trained and disciplined in a better cause, to make John
Flint in later years an international authority upon lepidoptera, an
observer to whom other observers deferred, a naturalist whose dictum
settled disputed points. And I knew it, I foresaw it!
_Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!_ I grew as vain over his enlarging
powers as if I had been the Mover of the Game, not a pawn. I felt,
gloriously, that I had not lived for nothing. A great naturalist is
not born every day, no, nor every year, nor even every century. And I
had caught me a great burglar and I had hatched me a great naturalist!
My Latin soul was enraptured with this ironic anomaly. I could not
choose but love the man for that.
I really had some cause for vanity. Others than myself had been
gradually drawn to the unassuming Butterfly Man. Westmoreland loved
him. A sympathetic listener who seldom contradicted, but often
shrewdly suggested, Flint somehow knew how to bring out the big
doctor's best; and in consequence found himself in contact with a mind
above all meanness and a nature as big and clean as a spray-swept
beach.
"Oh, my, my, my, what a surgeon gone to waste!" Westmoreland would
lament, watching the long, sure fingers at work. "Well, I suppose it's
all for the best that Father De Rancé beat me to you--at least you've
done less damage learning your trade." So absorbed would he become
that he sometimes forget cross patients who were possibly fuming
themselves into a fever over his delay.
Eustis, who had met the Butterfly Man on the country roads and had
stopped his horse for an informal chat, would thereafter go out of his
way for a talk with him. These two reticent men liked each other
immensely. At opposite poles, absolutely dissimilar, they yet had odd
similarities and meeting-points. Eustis was nothing if not practical;
he was never too busy to forget to be kind. Books and pamphlets that
neither Flint nor I could have hoped to possess found their way to us
through him. Scientific periodicals and the better magazines came
regularly to John Flint's address. That was Eustis's way. This
friendship put the finishing touch upon the Butterfly Man's repute. He
was my associate, and my mother was devoted to him. Miss Sally Ruth,
whose pet pear-tree he had saved and whose pigeons he had cured,
approved of him, too, and said so with her usual openness.
Westmoreland was known to be his firm friend; nobody could forget the
incident of those butterflies in the doctor's hat! Major Cartwright
liked him so much that he even bore with the dogs, though Pitache in
particular must have sorely strained his patience. Pitache cherished
the notion that it was his duty to pass upon all visitors to the
Butterfly Man's rooms. For some reason, known only to himself, the
little dog also cherished a deep-seated grudge against the major, the
very sound of whose voice outside the door was enough to send him
howling under the table, where he lay with his head on his paws, a
wary eye cocked balefully, and his snarls punctuating the Major's
remarks.
"He smells my Unitarian soul, confound him!" said the major. "An' he's
so orthodox he thinks he'll get chucked out of dog-heaven, if he
doesn't show his disapproval."
The little dog did finally learn to accept the major's presence
without outward protest; though the major declared that Pitache always
hung down his tail when he came and hung it up when he left!
The Butterfly Man accepted whatever friendliness was proffered without
diffidence, but with no change in his natural reserve. You could tell
him anything: he listened, made few comments and gave no advice, was
absolutely non-shockable, and never repeated what he heard. The
unaffected simplicity of his manner delighted my mother. She said you
couldn't tell her--there was good blood in that man, and he had been
more than any mere tramp before he fell into our hands! Why, just
observe his manner, if you please! It was the same to everybody; he
had, one might think, no sense whatever of caste, creed, age, sex, or
color; and yet he neither gave offense nor received it.
Those outbursts which had so terrified me at first came at rare and
rarer intervals. If I were to live for a thousands years I should
never be able to forget the last and worst; which fell upon him
suddenly and without warning, on a fine morning while he sat on the
steps of his verandah, and I beside him with my Book of Hours in my
hand. In between the Latin prayers I sensed pleasantly the light wind
that rustled the vines, and how the Mayne bees went grumbling from
flower to flower, and how one single bird was singing to himself over
and over the self-same song, as if he loved it; and how the sunlight
fell in a great square, like a golden carpet, in front of the steps.
It was all very still and peaceful. I was just turning a page, when
John Flint jerked his pipe out of his mouth, swung his arm back, and
hurled the pipe as far as he could. I watched it, involuntarily, and
saw where it fell among our blue hydrangeas; from which a thin spiral
of smoke arose lazily in the calm air. But Flint shoved his hat back
on his head, sat up stiffly, and swore.
He had been with me then nearly four years, and I had learned to know
the symptoms:--restlessness, followed by hours of depressed and sullen
brooding. So I had heretofore in a sense been forewarned, though I
never witnessed one of these outbursts without being shaken to the
depths. This one was different--as if the evil force had invaded him
suddenly, giving him no time to resist. A glance at his face made me
lay aside the book hurriedly; for this was no ordinary struggle. The
words that had come to me at first came back now with redoubled
meaning, and rang through my head like passing-bells:
"_For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against ... the
rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of
wickedness_."
He tilted his head, looked upward, and swore steadily. As for me, my
throat felt as if it had been choked with ashes. I could only stare at
him, dumbly. If ever a man was possessed, he was. His voice rose,
querulously:
"I get up in the morning, and I catch bugs, and I study them, and I
dry them--and I go to bed. I get up in the morning, and I catch bugs,
and I study them, and I dry them--and I go to bed. I get up _every_
morning, and I do the same damn thing, over and over and over and
over, day in, day out, day in, day out. Nothing else.... No drinks, no
lights, no girls, no sprees, no cards, no gang, no risks, no jobs, no
bulls, no anything! God! I could say my prayers to Broadway, anywhere
from the Battery up to Columbus Circle! I want it all so hard I could
point my nose like a lost dog and howl for it!
"... There is a Dutchman got a restaurant down on Eighth Avenue, and I
dream at nights about the hotdog-and-kraut, and the ham-and that they
give you there, and the jane that slings it. Hips on her like a horse,
she has, and an arm that shoves your eats under your nose in a way
you've got to respect. I smell those eats in my sleep. I want some
more Childs' bucks. I want to see the electrics winking on the roofs.
I want to smell wet asphalt and see the taxis whizzing by in the rain.
I want to see a seven-foot Mick cop with a back like a piano-box and a
paw like a ham and a foot like a submarine with stove-polish on it. I
want to see the subway in the rush hour and the dips and mollbuzzers
going through the crowd like kids in a berry patch. I want to see a
ninety-story building going up, and the wops crawling on it like ants.
I want to see the breadline, and the panhandlers, and the bums in
Union Square. I want a bellyful of the happy dust the old town hands
out--the whole dope and all there is of it! My God! I want everything
I haven't got!"
He looked at me, wildly. He was trembling violently, and sweat poured
down his face.
"Parson," he rasped, "I've bucked this thing for fair, but I've got to
go back and see it and smell it and taste it and feel it and know it
all again, or I'll go crazy. You're all of you so good down here
you're too much for me. _I'm home-sick for hell_. It--it comes over
me like fire over the damned. You don't fool yourself that folks who
know what it is to be damned can stay on in heaven without freezing,
do you? Well, they can't. I can't help it! I can't! I've got to
go--this time I've got to go!"
I sat and stared at him. Oh, what was it Paul had said we were to pray
for, at such a time as this?
"_And for me, that speech may be given to me ... that I may open my
mouth with confidence_..."
But the words wouldn't come.
"I've got to go! I've got to go, and try myself out!" he gritted.
"You--understand your risks," I managed to say through stiff lips. I
had always, in my secret heart, been more or less afraid of this.
Always had I feared that the rulers of the world of darkness, swooping
down and catching him unaware, might win the long fight in the end.
"Here you are safe. You are building up an honored name. You are
winning the respect and confidence of all decent people--and you wish
to undo it all. You wish to take such desperate chances--now!" I
groaned.
"I've got to go!" he burst forth, white-lipped. "You've never seen a
dip cut off from his dope, have you? Well, I'm it, when the old town
calls me loud enough for me to hear her plain. I've stood her off as
long as I could--and now I'm that crazy for her I could wallow in her
dust. Besides, there's not such a lot of risks. I don't have to leave
my card at the station-house to let 'em know I'm calling, do I? They
haven't been sitting on what they think is my grave to keep me from
getting up before Gabriel beats 'em to it, have they? No, they're not
expecting _me_. What I could do to 'em now would make the Big Uns look
like a bunch of pikers--and their beans would have to turn inside out
before they fell for it that _I'd_ come back to my happy home and was
on the job again."
"If--if you hadn't been so white, I'd have cut and run for it without
ever putting you wise. But I want to play fair. I'd be a hog if I
didn't play fair, and I'm trying to do it. I'm going because I can't
stay. I've got enough of my own money, earned honest, saved up, to pay
my way. Let me take it and go. And if I can come back, why, I'll
come."
He was stone deaf to entreaties, prayers, reasoning, argument. The
four years of his stay with me, and all their work, and study, and
endeavor, and progress, seemed to have slipped from him as if they had
never been. They were swept aside like cobwebs. He broke away from me
in the midst of my pleading, hurried into his bedroom, and began to
sort into a grip a few necessities.
"I'll leave on the three-o'clock," he flung over his shoulder to me,
standing disconsolate in the door. "I'll stop at the bank on my way."
I could do nothing; he had taken the bit between his teeth and was
bolting. I had for the time being lost all power of control over him,
and before I might hope to recover it he would be out of my reach.
Perhaps, I reflected wretchedly, the best thing to do under the
circumstances, would simply be to give him his head. I had seen horses
conquered like that. But the road before John Flint was so dark and so
crooked--and at the end of it waited Slippy McGee!