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[Illustration: The Markis and the Major. (_See page 15._) ]
THE OPEN WINDOW
TALES OF THE MONTHS
TOLD BY
BARBARA
AUTHOR OF “THE GARDEN OF A COMMUTER’S WIFE,”
“PEOPLE OF THE WHIRLPOOL,” ETC., ETC.
NEW YORK
G R O S S E T & D U N L A P
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1908,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
* * * * *
Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1908. Reprinted
July, August, November, 1908; February, 1910.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
THIS BOOK
IS INSCRIBED TO
REV. ALLEN E. BEEMAN
IN RETURN
FOR A THOUGHT
CONTENTS
I. THE MARKIS AND THE MAJOR _January_
II. THE STALLED TRAIN _February_
III. THE VANDOO _March_
IV. THE IMMIGRANTS _April_
V. TREE OF LIFE _May_
VI. WIND IN THE GRASS _June_
VII. THE SIMPLE LIFE _July_
VIII. THE ADOPTION OF ALBERT AND VICTORIA _August_
IX. GROUNDSEL-TREE _September_
X. THE OPEN WINDOW _October_
XI. THE RAT-CATCHER _November_
XII. TRANSITION _December_
I
THE MARKIS AND THE MAJOR
TOLD BY BARBARA, THE COMMUTER’S WIFE
=JANUARY=—THE HARD MOON
When Christmas has passed it is useless to make believe that it is not
winter, even if the snow has merely come in little flurries quickly
disappearing in the leaves that now lie suppliant with brown palms
curved upward.
Early December is often filled with days that, if one does not compare
the hours of the sun’s rise and setting, might pass for those of an
early spring. Sharp nights but soft noon air, meadow larks in voice down
in the old fields, uneasy robins in the spruces, a song sparrow in the
shelter of the honeysuckle wall, goldfinches feeding among the dry
stalks of what two months gone was a scarlet flame of zinnias, or else
in their rhythmic, restless flight binding the columns where the seeded
clematis clings, in chains of whispered song.
All through the month the garden, thriftily trimmed, and covered
according to its need, refused to sleep in peace and thrust forth its
surprises. One day it was a pansy peeping from beneath a box bush, then
a dozen sturdy Russian violets for the man’s buttonhole, that, fading in
an hour, were outlived by their perfume, while on the very eve of
Christmas itself, the frosted wall flowers yielded a last bouquet, just
a bit pinched and drawn like reduced gentlefolks of brave heart, whose
present garb is either cherished or overlooked from a half-reminiscent
pleasure in their society.
Many say that the ending of the year with Christmas week is only an
arbitrary time division, and so is meaningless. But this cannot be so.
The natural year has ended and it begins anew, even though we do not at
once see its processes, for intervals in nature there are none, and the
first law of being is emergence from unseen sleep, wherein is stamped
the pattern for the after-growth.
Thus with Christmas passed, we all must yield to Winter. Playtime with
its dalliance outdoors is over for man, and the little beasts lie in
their lairs, except when hunger prods.
The poor, God help them, drawing their heads down into their garments,
prepare to endure. They have not two or three changes of raiment to
match the graded weather from September to January—the relentless hard
moon of the Indian calendar. Resistance is their final set of winter
flannels, which must be worn sleeping or waking.
With January the rabbit season is over, and the sturdy dogs, the merry,
tireless beagles, left to themselves, abandon the trail after a sniff or
two, or else return from the run with stiff, wounded feet: for does not
a spear lurk in every blade of frozen stubble? and, after nosing into
the house, they lie in relaxed comfort by the kitchen stove. That is,
unless the thaw from their hair-set foot-pads annoys the cook (and few
recognize dog needs and rights as did Martha Corkle), in which case they
slink out again sheepish under reproof, and, loping uphill to the
cottage, charge at Martha’s kitchen door until she opens it, protesting
as usual at their lack of manners and the mess “the beasties” make.
This, however, is wholly from principle, because protest against dirt in
any form becomes a thrifty British housewife, even though transplanted
to America.
In truth all the while her heart is swelling with pleasure at their
recognition, voiced as it presently is in a baying chorus, heads well
thrown back, throats swelling, tails held aloft and firm, for sweet as
the voice of love is hound music to the people of the English hunting
country, however far from it their lives have led them. Then presently,
after a meal of stew seasoned to each dog’s liking (for Lark is fond of
salt and likes to chew his biscuits dry and lap the gravy after, while
Cadence and old Waddles, being scant of teeth, prefer to guzzle the
softened food and like a pinch of sugar), they fall prone before the
fire, their bellies replete, and round, pressing the floor as close as
their heavy heads. Whereupon Martha heaves a sigh of deep content and
seats herself in the window corner of the front room, behind her
geranium pots, with her white needlework of scallop, sprig, and eyelet
hole, a substantial old-time craft lately returned to favour.
This occupation also is a sign that it is winter without doubt, for not
until the Christmas puddings have been made and eaten and the results
have worn away, does Martha Saunders (born Corkle) sit in the bay window
of her front room shedding abroad the light of her rosy face and her
bright geraniums by day, while the gloom of night is pierced by her
clear lamp with its gay shade, whereon an endless steeple-chase is
portrayed against a screen of ruby isinglass. Here in Oaklands whoever
sets a drinking trough before his door in summer-time to succour man and
thirsty beasts receives so much a year from the town fathers. Why should
not those who, in the dark season, set a row of jovial red geraniums
behind the window-pane by day or a well-trimmed light by night, be
equally rewarded? Is not the thirst for light, colour, and other home
symbols as keen a desire of the winter wayfarer as his thirst for water
in the torrid season?
The first New Year callers were out before sunrise this morning while
the hoar-frost lay thick on the porch of father’s office, for here,
Whirlpool customs to the contrary, the country doctor and his tribe
expect a gentle drift of friendly visitors, as much as do the people at
the parsonage, and often with them there come homespun good-will gifts.
These early guests were nameless, and left their gift upon the door-mat,
where father found it. A pair of redheads, duck and drake by chance,
such as the gunners at this season harvest from the still-water inside
the lighthouse at the bayhead.
Any one interested in following backward the tracks these callers left
would have found that they began at the edge of the bare, drifted sand
beach and followed the wavering fence of the shore road until the
outline of that also disappearing, the footprints crossed the upland
fields to the lower end of the village street, where many of the houses,
old, sedate, and self-sufficient in their ancestry, were prouder in
their garb of mossy shingles than the Bluff cottages in all their
bravery of new paint, and porches supported by stone pillars.
Entering by the yard of one of the humbler of these houses, through the
back garden, the footsteps meandered toward the side porch that served
both as well-house and wood-shed; there the owners of the feet left a
similar burden of ducks on the well-worn oak door-sill instead of on the
door-mat, for that was thriftily housed within. To leave it out all
night would be to incur the criticism of the Misses Falcon, dealers in
village patronage and censors in chief, next door, a most disastrous
thing for the single dweller in the house, whose livelihood depended
upon the public, as announced by a quaint glass sign, lettered in black,
that filled the right-hand lower corner of the foreroom window. =C.
Hallet. Tailoring, Nursing, and Accommodating, done with Neatness and
Despatch.= The last of the three accomplishments meaning that in
the between seasons of her more serious work, Charity Hallet would
accommodate her neighbours in any way, from putting up jellies and jams
for the slothful to turning carpets, or setting a house solemnly to
rights for a funeral.
After leaving the yard, also by the back gate, that no telltale prints
might mar the plumpness of the front walk, or jar the white rime that
made mammoth cakes of the box bushes on either side the door, the
footprints took a short cut to the hill road and paused at our steps,
evidently with some scuffing and stamping, and none of the precautions
used in approaching the other door.
Here the two sets of footprints, those of dog and man, alone told of who
had come and gone, and yet we knew as plainly as if the social cardboard
had been left. The overlapping, shifty human footprints, suggesting a
limp or halting gait, were those of a rubber-booted man. The round
pad-marks of a four-foot, with a dragging trail, spoke of a dog either
old or weak in his hind quarters.
As I, answering father’s call, scanned the tracks, our eyes met and we
said, as with one voice, “The Markis and the Major,” whereby hangs a
pleasant winter’s tale. A comedy that was turned from tragedy merely by
the blowing of the bitter northeast wind among the sedge grass. A simple
enough story, like many another gleaned from between the leaves that lie
along the village fences or the lanes and byways of the lonelier hill
country.
Down in a little hut, by the bay-side, lived the village ne’er-do-weel;
this was a year ago. He was not an old man in action, but at times he
looked more than his fifty odd years, for life had dealt grudgingly with
his primitive tastes, and besides being well weathered by an outdoor
life, both eyes and gait had the droop of the man of middle age who,
lacking good food, has made up for it by bad drink. Yet, in spite of a
general air of shiftlessness, there was that about him still that told
that he had once not only been nearly handsome, but had been possessed
of a certain wild gypsy fascination coupled with a knack with the violin
that had turned the heads, as well as the feet, of at least two of the
village lassies of his day who, though rigidly brought up, had eyes and
ears for something beyond the eternal sowings, hoeings, reapings, and
sleepings of farm life. Even in his boyhood he was looked upon as a
detrimental, until, partly on the principle of “Give a dog a bad name
and he will earn it,” he absolutely earned one by default, so to speak,
for the things that he left undone, rather than deeds committed.
He was side-branched from thrifty country stock; his father, a proxy
farmer and the captain of a coastwise lumber schooner, had on a
northbound trip married a comely Canadian-French woman, half-breed it
was whispered, who was possessed of the desire for liberty and the
outdoor life, far beyond her desire to observe the village _p_’s and
_q_’s. This new strain in the cool New England blood caused neighbourly
bickerings, bred mischief, and had finally made the only child of the
marriage a strolling vagabond, who instinctively shunned the inside of a
schoolhouse, as a rat does a trap. So that after his mother died when he
was sixteen, all his after days he had lived in the open by rod and gun,
fish-net and clam fork, berry picking, or playing his fiddle at village
picnics and other festivals.
It was at one of these festivities that he first met Charity Hallet,
called in those days Cheery from her disposition that fairly bubbled
over with happiness. A fiery sort of wooing followed; that is, fiery and
unusual for a staid New England town, where sitting evening after
evening by the best room lamp or “buggy dashing” through the wild lanes
of a moonlight night or of a Sunday afternoon were considered the only
legitimate means of expression. Alack! this man possessed neither horse
nor buggy, or the means of hiring one, and the door of the Hallets’ best
room was closed to him, as well as every other door of the house. What
would you have? Swift dances snatched when some one else relieved the
fiddler; meetings by stealth in the woods, intricate journeys through
the winding marsh watercourses where, hidden by tall reeds, a duck boat
slipped in and out, holding a half-anxious, half-happy girl, while a
tall, bronzed youth either poled the craft along or sometimes pushed it
as he strode beside it waist deep in water, his eyes fixed upon the
merry ones beside him.
Of course discovery came at last, and Charity’s father sent her to spend
a winter with an aunt in another State and “finish” school there.
Meanwhile for half a dozen years the youth followed the sea and on his
return found Charity an orphan in possession of the house and a snug
income, and though she was still unmarried, a vein of prudence or a
change of heart, just as one happens to view it, had at least diluted
her romance.
“Get some employment with a name to it; I couldn’t stand an idle man
hanging about,” she had said when man and dog (there had always been and
always would be a dog following at this man’s heels) for the first time
entered the Hallet front door and prepared, without ceremony, to resume
the boy and girl footing as a matter of course.
The man, of primitive instincts and no responsibility, had looked at her
dumbly for a minute, and then the light of her meaning breaking upon him
he jumped to his feet and bringing his heels sharply together, said, “I
thought you were fond o’ me, Cheery, and that women sort o’ liked
somebody they were fond of hanging around ’em,” and without further ado
he called the dog, and closing door and gate carefully behind him,
turned from the village street to the shore road with easy, swinging
gait; but from that day his fiddle never played for the village dancers.
The thrifty half of Charity Hallet congratulated the half that was
longing to open door and heart to man, dog, and violin in the face of
prudence and the village, upon its escape. But sometimes prudence and
the wind race together, for the next year the most trusted man in the
township, under cover of decorous business, made way with all of
Charity’s little property, except the house; and the glass sign, once
used by a great aunt, was rescued from the attic rafters, placed in the
foreroom window; and at twenty-five Charity, who had been sought far and
near, and had been wholly independent in action, began the uphill road
of being a self-supporting old maid.
The man’s feet never again turned toward her front gate, though the
dog’s did, and many a bone and bit did he get there, for the dog who
grew old, evidently bequeathed knowledge of Charity’s hospitality to his
puppy successor, and so the years went. If mysterious heaps of clams,
big lobsters from the deep fishing, delicate scallops or seasonable game
appeared in the morning under the well house, no word was spoken.
Five, fifteen, twenty years went by, and the very face of the country
itself had changed and Cheery Hallet had almost forgotten how to smile.
The man’s natural hunting grounds being largely reclaimed from wildness,
the game becoming scarcer and the laws of season and selling close
drawn, like many an Indian brother of old, too unskilled to work, too
old to learn, he found himself absolutely facing extinction, while in
these years the drink habit had gradually crept upon and gripped him.
A few days after Christmas he was sitting outside his shore hut, that,
lacking even the usual driftwood fire, was colder than the chilly
sunshine, facing hunger and his old red setter dog, the Major, who gazed
at him with a brow furrowed by anxiety and then laid his gaunt, grizzled
muzzle against his master’s face that rested on his hands. The turkey
won at the raffle in Corrigan’s saloon had been devoured,—flesh, bones,
skin, and I had almost said feathers,—so ravenous had been the pair,
for Charity Hallet being ill was tended by a neighbour, who would rather
burn up plate scraps than feed tramp dogs, as she designated the Major,
who as usual had come scratching at the kitchen door, and so for many
days he had crept away empty.
A few days only remained of the upland open season, but for that matter
the sportsmen speeding from all quarters in their motors to the most
remote woodlands and brush lots had changed the luck and ways of foot
hunting, and what birds remained had been so harried that they huddled
and refused to rise. His duck boat was rotten to the danger point, while
the clam banks that had meant a certain weekly yield had the past season
been ruthlessly dug out by the summer cottagers, who herded in a string
of cheap and gaudy shore houses and knew no law.
This was the plight of Marquis Lafayette Burney, fantastically
christened thus at his mother’s command, and called from his youth “The
Markis,” in well-understood derision.
Feeling the dog’s caress, the man raised his head and gazed at his
solitary friend, then out upon the water. The wind that ruffled the sand
into little ridges raised the hair upon the dog’s back, plainly
revealing its leanness. Out on the bay beyond the bar the steel-blue
tide chafed and fretted; within the protecting arm lay still-water
without a trace of ice on it, while in and out among the shallows the
wild ducks fed and at night would bed down inside the point.
Along the beach itself there was no life or sound, a wide band of dull
blue mussel shells thrown up by a recent storm only intensified the look
of cold, while the gulls that floated overhead carried this colour
skyward, and cast it upon the clouds.
“It’s come jest ter this, Maje,” the Markis muttered, “there’s nothin’
ter eat! nothin’ ter eat! Do you sense that, old man? Come fust o’ the
year, if we hold out to then, we’ll hev to make other arrang’ments, you
and me! Town farm’s a good place fer the winter, some say, and some say
bad, certain sure we won’t be over het up there, that’s what I dre’d in
gettin’ in out o’ the air!” Then as a new thought struck him, he cried
aloud, “God! suppose they won’t take you in along o’ me!” and the Markis
started back aghast at the thought and then peered about with blinking
eyes that he shielded with a shaking hand, for the Major had
disappeared.
The Markis whistled and waited. Presently from behind the dunes loped
the Major carrying something in his mouth; with a cheerful air of pride
he laid before his master a turkey drumstick, sand-covered and dry, the
last bone in the dog’s ground larder; then, stepping back with a short,
insistent bark, he fixed his eyes on the Markis with lip half raised in
a persuasive grin.
As the man slowly realized the meaning of the bone, his bleared eyes
filled and the knotting of his throat half stopped his breath. Pulling
the slouch hat that he always wore still lower to hide his face, though
only gulls were near to see, he drew the Major close between his knees
and hugged him. Who dares say that any man o’ersteps salvation when a
dog yet sees in him the divine spark that he recognizes and serves as
master?
Into the hut went the Markis, took down his gun from its rest above a
tangle of shad nets that he had been mending before cold weather, picked
up a pair of skilfully made duck decoys, and looked at them regretfully,
saying, “A couple o’ dollars would fix that boat in shape, but where’s a
couple o’ dollars?” the last coin he had fingered having gone to pay the
Major’s license on instalments, the final quarter being yet due, and
only two days of grace.
Still rummaging he picked up some bits of fish line and flexible wire;
these he dropped into a ragged pocket together with a handful of
unhulled buckwheat. Then he padlocked the door of the cabin carefully,
threw his gun over his shoulder, and set off along the road that led up
country, with his slow slouching gait, the Major to heel, muttering to
himself,—“I hain’t never done it before, I allers hunted square, but
time’s come when I’ll jest hev ter set a couple o’ snares and see
what’ll turn up. I know where I can place a pair o’ grouse for two
dollars at this time o’ year, and two dollars means another week
together for us,—yes, another week!”
Two hours later the Markis and the Major crept out of the lane that ran
between a brush lot and stubble field on the Lonetown side of the Ridge.
Both master and dog were footsore and weary, while the Markis wore a
shifting, guilty look; for he had spoken truly: pot-hunter he had always
been, but never a setter of snares, except for mink or muskrat. To be
sure he would come to the front door to offer berries that he frankly
said were gathered in one’s own back lot, but this day was the first
time that he had thought to set a loop to catch a partridge by the neck
instead of shooting it in fair hunting.
Straightening himself for a moment he glanced shoreward down the rolling
hills, while the Major dropped upon a heap of dry leaves and dozed with
twitching limbs. The sun came from behind the wind clouds with which he
had been running a race all day, and suddenly the face of nature melted
as with a smile and grew more tender. A big gray squirrel ran along the
stone fence, a blue jay screamed, but the Markis started nervously and
once more looked shoreward.
What was that flickering and glimmering far away upon the beach? Merely
the sunlight flashing upon the single window of his cabin? No, a puff of
smoke was running along the dry grasses from the inlet of the creek,
where the men who watch the oyster grounds had beached their boat and
kindled a bit of fire to heat their coffee.
Another puff, and the smoke arose in a cone the shape of the Markis’s
cabin that the hungry flames were devouring!
With a harsh cry the man dropped his half-made snare and fled
impotently, for now indeed were the Markis and the Major homeless
vagabonds!
* * * * *
When father, being sent for by a farmer of the marsh road who said that
both man and dog had doubtless perished in the hut, reached the shore a
little before sunset, he stumbled over the Markis lying among the broken
sedge and seaweed, numb with cold and despair, the Major keeping watch
beside.
When, after being shaken awake and some stimulant hastily forced between
his lips, the Markis started up muttering a plea to be left alone, and
saw who was bending over him, he whispered, for his voice was hoarse and
uncertain, “It’s you, Doc, is it? Well, I’d ruther you’n another! For
it’s all up this time; it’s either go to the town farm to-night, or be a
stiff, and I’m near that now. We thought mebbe we could pull through
till the next shad run, Maje and me, but now the nets and all hev gone!”
Then, sitting up and pulling himself together with an effort, “Would
you—I wouldn’t ask it of any other man—would you house the Maje, Doc,
until maybe he’d drop off comfortable and quiet, or I get round again?
and once in a time jest say, quick like, ‘Maje, where’s the Markis?’ to
keep me in mind?”
This time the Markis made no effort to hide the tears that washed
roadways down his grimy cheeks.
“But there is no need of this,” father replied, as, clearing his throat
and wiping his nose, he tried to look severe and judicial, (dear Dad!
how well I know this particularly impossible and fleeting expression of
yours)—“I got you the promise of work at Mrs. Pippin’s only last week,
to do a few light errands and keep her in split kindlings for three
square meals a day, and pay in money by the hour for tinkering and
carpentering, and you only stayed one morning! Man alive! you are
intelligent! why can’t you work? The day is over when hereabout men can
live like wild-fowl!”
“Doctor Russell,” said the Markis, speaking slowly and raising a lean
forefinger solemnly, “did you ever try to keep Mis’s Pippin in
kettlewood for three square meals a day, likewise her opinion o’ you
thrown in for pepper, and talk o’ waiting hell fire for mustard, with
only one door to the woodshed and her a-standin’ in it? Not but the
meals was square enough, that was jest it,—they was too square, they
wouldn’t swaller! Give me a man’s job and I’ll take a brace and try it
for the Major here, but who takes one of us takes both, savvy? Beside,
when Mis’s Pippin was Luella Green she liked to dance ter my fiddlin’,
and now she don’t like ter think o’t and seein’ me reminds her!”
Here father broke down and laughed, he confesses, and with the change of
mood came the remembrance that the son of the rich Van Camps of the
Bluffs, whose sporting possessions dot the country from Canada to
Florida, needed a man to tend his boat house that lay further round the
bay, and to take him occasionally to the ducking grounds at the crucial
moment of wind and weather. Thus far, though several landsmen had
attempted it, no one had kept the job long owing to its loneliness, and
the fact that they lacked the outdoor knack, for the pay was liberal.
In a few words father told of the requirements. Shaking the sand from
his garments the Markis stood up, new light in his eyes,—“What! that
yaller boat house round the bend, with all the contraptions and the
tankboat painted about ’leven colours that Jason built? I’d better get
to work smart in the mornin’ and weather her up a bit, it ’ud scare even
a twice-shot old squaw the way it is! The weather is softenin’; come
to-morrow there’ll be plenty o’ birds comin’ in and we’ll soon learn him
how to fetch home a show of ’em, which is what most o’ them city chaps
wants more’n the eatin’,—won’t we, Maje? Yes, Doc, I’ll take the
ockerpation straight and honourable and won’t go back on you! Go home
with you for supper and the night? That’s kindly, we _air_ some used up,
that’s so! And something in advance of pay to-morrow? and he’ll let me
raise a shingle and pick up what I can takin’ other folks fishin’ and
shootin’ when he don’t need me? and he’ll most likely supply me
clothes,—a uniform like a yacht sailor’s, you say? Well, I suppose
these old duds are shabby, but me and they’s kept company this long time
and wild-fowl’s particular shy o’ new things, and the smell of them I
reckon! Weathered things is mostly best to my thinkin’, likewise
friends, Doc!”
When young Van Camp, arriving at the shore one day at dawn for his first
expedition, saw his new employee and his aged dog, he shuddered visibly
and for a moment inwardly questioned father’s sanity; but having been
about with half-breed guides too much to judge the outdoor man by mere
externals, he laughed good-naturedly and abandoned himself to the tender
mercies of the Markis and the Major, saying lightly as he glanced at the
faded sweater and soft hat, “It’s cold down here; I’m sending you a
reefer and some better togs to-morrow.”
So the three went out across the still-water to the ducking grounds and
brought back such a bunch before the fog closed in the afternoon that
Van Camp clapped the Markis on the back and declared the Major must be a
Mascot, and that he deserved the finest sort of collar!
“A Mascot! that’s what he is, in addition to being the wisest smell-dog
on the shore!” affirmed the Markis solemnly, the eyelid on the off side
drooping drolly. “All he has to do is to smell the tide when it turns
flood, and he knows jest where the ducks’ll bed next night!” All of
which Van Camp, Junior, believed, because it seemed suitable that the
dog he hired with the man should be superlatively something; and next
day there arrived, together with the reefer, a yacht captain’s cap, a
set of oil-skins, and a great tin of tobacco,—a broad brass-studded
collar, such as bull-dogs wear, but an ornament unknown to
self-respecting “smell-dogs” even if, like the Major, they were _bar
sinister_.
The morrow was New Year’s day, and the day after, just at evening, the
Markis, clad in a trim sailor suit from cap to trousers, was seen
sauntering down the village street toward the cross-roads at the Centre,
where his tangled trails to and from the two saloons had before-times
often puzzled the Major’s acute sense of smell. Behind the Markis loped
the Major with drooping tail and the heavy collar, too large for his
lean neck, hanging about his ears. But had not his master fastened the
hateful thing upon him? That was reason enough for wearing it, at least
for the time being!
Slowly the Markis passed the two saloons and nonchalantly entered the
market, where he carefully selected a whole bologna and a ham! Crossing
to the grocery he bought a month’s provisions to be sent to “Van Camp’s
Boat House, for Capt’n Burney!” Then pulling on a fresh corn-cob pipe in
leisurely fashion he stopped at the paint shop, from whence he took a
sign board, that he carried, letters toward him; next he repassed the
saloons and gradually gained the wooded lane that skirts the marsh
meadows.
Once under cover he pulled off the new reefer, wrapped it around the
board, and began to run, never pausing until he gained the boat house.
Throwing open the door he quickly stripped off the new stiff, confining
garments, and slipped eel-like into loose trousers and the gray sweater
that made him one with the seaweed and the sands. Then drawing the old
soft hat well down to his very eyes he opened the tool chest that stood
under the window and, taking therefrom gimlet, screw eyes, and hooks, he
mounted an empty box, and proceeded to fasten the sign he had brought
over the door. When it hung exactly even and to his liking, he walked
backward, slowly surveying his handiwork, talking to the dog meanwhile.
“What do you think of that, Maje? You and me hev got a business, we hev!
employment with a name to it! Don’t yer remember what she said? No, you
wasn’t the dog, though; ’twere old Dave, yer granddad! There’ll be jest
two o’ us in the business, man and dog. You know the saying as two’s a
company. Onct maybe I’d chose a woman partner! when they’re young
wimmen’s prettier, but fer age give me er dog! Dogs is more dependable,
likewise they don’t talk back, eh, Maje?”
On the swinging white board, edged with bright blue, in blue letters he
read these words aloud, slowly, and with deep-drawn satisfaction:—
THE MARKIS AND THE MAJOR.
Decoys and Fishing Tackle to Rent.
Sailing, Gunning, Fishing and Retrieving done with Neatness
and Dispatch.
Reëntering the boat house he gazed about with a sigh of perfect content,
dropped into the ship-shaped bunk that was his bed, hat still on his
head, and stretching himself luxuriously, said to the Major, who
crouched beside, “I reckoned we’d hev ter make a change long first o’
the year, and I reckon we _hev_!” The coffee-pot upon the new stove in
the far corner brooded comfortably and gave little gasps before being
fully minded to excite itself to boiling, while the wild blood, even a
few drops of which often makes its owners think such long, long thoughts
that stretch back to the dawn of things, coursed evenly on its way until
a delicious sleep, such as had been unknown for months, laid its fingers
on the eyelids of the Markis.
Cautiously the Major rose to his feet, looked about the room narrowly,
sniffed the floor and then the air, shook his head and pawed
persistently until the heavy new collar slipped over his ears and
clattered to the floor. For a moment, minded to lie down again, he
paused, sniffed the fresh air from the open window in the corner, then
lifting the offending collar carefully in his mouth he gripped it firmly
and crossed the room, jumped for the open sash, missed, tried again, and
disappeared in the boat house shadows.
A loon laughed far out on the water, and the Major trembled guiltily.
Gaining the beach crest he kept on to tide-water mark, where, digging
deep, he buried the offending bit of leather, covering it well, kicking
backward at it, dog fashion, with snorts of contemptuous satisfaction.
Then trotting gaily back he entered by the window, and soon two rhythmic
snores, added to the bubbling of the overboiling coffee-pot, told that
the Markis and the Major slept the peaceful winter sleep, while the
sharp crescent moon of January slipped past the window, lingering over
still-water to cover the bedded wild-fowl with a silver sheet.
II
THE STALLED TRAIN
=FEBRUARY=—THE COON MOON
He was no kin to the man of Whittier’s eulogy, though he might well have
been; Jim Bradley was only the conductor on the milk freight that fussed
and fumed its way down the valley of the Moosatuck every evening, at
intervals leaving the single track road of the Sky Line to rest upon the
sidings while a passenger train or the through express took right of
way.
To Miranda Banks, however, Bradley seemed a hero as he sprang from the
caboose, swinging his lantern, when his train took the switch and halted
on the side track below the calf pastures.
To be sure his claim to heroism had, so far, rested upon the fact that
both he and his vocation moved. In Hattertown very few people or things
had moved these ten years past; they had groped as being between
daylight and dark. The beginning of this twilight period was when the
trade that gave the town both its name and reason for being, owing to
change of methods and market, vanished across the low gentian meadows of
the Moosatuck to install itself anew in Bridgeton, fifteen miles away.
The empty factory, long and vainly offered for sale, became a storage
place for the hay that speculators bought on the field from the
somnolent hillside farmers and held for the winter market. At the same
time the hay gave the building a good reputation among the travelling
brotherhood of the back roads, who work a week and tramp on again (an
entirely distinct clan from the hoboes who follow the railroad through
villages and alternate thieving with stolen rides upon freight trains),
and the factory became a wayfarers’ lodging-house, until gradually the
unpainted boards turned black and the building grew hollow-eyed as its
window panes were shattered.
When man wholly forsook it, swallows and swifts brought primitive life
to it again, the one nesting against its warped rafters, the others
lining the chimney, now free from plaster and very hospitable, with
their bracketed homes, until their flocks pouring forth from its mouth
at dawn and swirling and settling at evening, seemed in the distance a
curling column of smoke.
The row of cheap wooden houses where the factory hands had lived, had
also mouldered away and joined the general ruin, only a starved
grape-vine or rose-bush telling that they had once been homes; until, at
the time I first saw the place, the most depressing of all palls seemed
over it,—the shadow of a dead industry.
It was an October morning when Lavinia Cortright and I drove up into the
hill country with father, who went to see a woman who had applied for a
free bed in the Bridgeton hospital, an aunt of Miranda Banks, she
afterward proved to be; and while father went into the little
farm-house, that had bright geraniums in the windows and wore more of a
general air of thrift than any of those we had passed in the last mile
of our uphill ride, Lavinia and I sauntered along the road and finally
settled ourselves on a tumble-down stone wall in the midst of a wild
grape-vine whose fruit was black with sun-ripeness and bore the moist
bloom of the first light frost.
As we gazed idly over the fields toward the river, that seemed, as we
looked down upon it, to filter through the glowing branches of the swamp
maples, washing their colours with it, rather than to flow between banks
of earth, we sipped the pure wild grape wine where alone it may be
found,—between the skin and pulp of the grape itself, a few drops to
each globe,—and fell to moralizing.
“You like to find a reason for everything, Barbara,” said Lavinia
Cortright, after a long pause; “can you tell me exactly why the country
hereabout seems so desolate and impossible? It has all the colour and
atmosphere of the perfect autumn landscape, and yet the idea of living
here would be appalling.”
I had been thinking the same thing as Lavinia spoke; there was something
in the very wind that blew over the ruined factory settlement that was
deterrent; funerals might take place there, but how could enough impetus
ever exist to cause weddings or christenings?
At this moment the door of a small building, the schoolhouse at the
cross-roads immediately below, opened, and a dozen or more children
rushed out pell-mell, followed by the slim form of a young woman,
evidently the teacher, who closed the door and prepared to take a cross
cut through the fields, the worn track leading up to the pasture bars
close to where we were sitting. No bell, no whistle, no exodus of
labourers from the fields to mark the noon hour, the impulsive rush of
childhood breaking bounds was the only clock.
The woman disappeared in a dip of the land, and then presently her head
emerged from it and the whole figure appeared again walking between the
deep green bayberry bushes that make the dark patches in the waste
hillside fields. She walked without either energy or fatigue, looking
neither to the right nor left; the freckled face, tending to thinness,
interested me from the first glance, for though it wore very little
expression, it was in no wise vacant; the chin was firm, and there was a
good space between the eyes, which opened wide and had none of the
squinting shrewdness I have met with in my wanderings with father among
remote rural communities. It was an unawakened face, and as I began to
wonder what could ever come to give it the vital touch, she reached the
bars and seeing us for the first time, paused, scrutinized us slowly,
and then said with a tinge of irritation in the tone:—
“I wish you wouldn’t spoil those grapes, I’m going to spice them on
Saturday. I should have done it last week, but they are always better
for a touch of frost.”
I straightway disentangled myself from the vine with a guilty feeling,
and murmured the usual apology of the roadside depredators; that is,
when they deign to make excuses, about the grapes being wild and not
knowing that they belonged to any one, but my words fell upon deaf ears.
“There were full ten pounds of grapes here this morning, but with what
you’ve eaten and more that you’ve shaken off, there isn’t more than six
pounds left. How came you up here, anyhow? Nobody ever passes this way;
even the mail-man turns ’round below at four corners. I’m Randy Banks.”
This gave me my chance to explain father’s errand. “Do you think Dr.
Russell can get Aunt Lucy in?” she asked, eagerness bringing a pretty
colour to her cheeks. “It isn’t the care of her we mind, Ma and I,” she
added hastily, “but it’s the loneliness for her of days in winter when
I’m at school and Ma out nursing mebbe; being chair-tied at best,
there’s just nothing to break the time, for nothing ever happens.”
“Now that you have the Rural Free Delivery, you get your mail and papers
every day without having to go down to the Hattertown post-office,” I
said, trying to find a cheerful loophole.
“That’s no advantage to us, rather the other way. When town was alive
and we drove down to the post-office, even if we had no mail, and we
never do except the newspaper, somebody else had and maybe opened it
right there and told the news for the sake of talking it over with some
one else. Then market and store were in the same building and chances
were you’d be reminded of something you needed by seeing it, or maybe a
bit of fresh meat would look tempting and be sold reasonable, too, if it
was near week-end. But to go to that box at cross-roads, though it’s
only a step, and find it empty, it’s as lonesome and strange as a
draught coming from a shut-up room.”
Then as she realized that she was in a way complaining of her lot to a
stranger, a thing that the etiquette of the entire hill country quite
forbade, she broke off, and turning toward the house, said in a
perfectly unembarrassed way: “Won’t you come in? Mother will have dinner
ready. She’d be pleased to see you. I have to hurry back to school
to-day, for the committee man is coming to see if the old stove can be
mended or if we must have a new one, for it’s never done well since Joel
Fanton put a shotgun cartridge in it last winter.” Then we went in,
wondering if events would ever so shape themselves that she would become
an active factor on a wider path than that between the corner school and
the old farm-house.
It was three years before I saw Miranda again; meanwhile, a far-away
city had thrown a lariat of steel across country, and it had encircled
Hattertown; a railway that ran down the valley needed a southern outlet.
The survey ran by the ruined factory, and rounding Nob Hill, crossed the
river below the Banks’ farm, and disappeared on trestles over “calf
pastures,” a name given strangely enough to many a bit of waste river
meadow, as if calves did not need the best of material to become
successful cows.
At the sound of the first locomotive whistle, announcing that the branch
road was a thing accomplished and neither a scare nor a phantom boom,
the Rip Van Winkles awoke and rubbed their eyes. They had slept a
half-famished sleep. Rather than push and plan a way to sell their
produce, they had ceased producing.
The Sky Line Railroad had come. Cruft’s store was rented as a temporary
station and the name Hattertown appeared in dazzling white letters on
the black sign over the door. In one room were scales for weighing
freight and a baggage truck, in the other, a ticket booth took the place
of the old post-boxes, while on a shelf behind the little window, a
telegraph instrument ticked and told the doings of the outer world to
the only man in the neighbourhood that could interpret it. Time-tables
were tacked above the two benches in a corner that made the
waiting-room, but the greatest excitement of all was contained in a
great _poster_ that was not only stuck in conspicuous places in all the
settlements along the line, but put in the mail-boxes as well,
announcing that a milk train would be run nightly, Sundays included, and
urging all farmers, if they had no milk to market, to make immediate
arrangements for producing that commodity.
The Widow Banks had three cows. A dealer in Bridgeton had tried to buy
them late in the autumn when fodder was at a premium, but she had
withstood temptation and taken the risk of wintering them; if she had
not, Miranda would never have met Jim Bradley during the negotiations
for the transportation to the city of the polished tin can that cost the
little teacher many days’ pay, and was regarded by her as a speculation
as wild and daring as any gambler staking his all on a throw of dice,
nor would this story have found its way into father’s note-book.
Jim Bradley came of good up-country stock, but the yeast of desire to
see the world had led him upon the shining road, freight brakeman first
and now conductor. Visiting New York every other day, he seemed a
travelled man of the world to Miranda, whose outside life was bounded by
two trips a year to Bridgeton and the paragraphs upon racial traits,
habits and customs, exports and imports contained in the Geography which
she had heard droned and mispronounced annually for the five seasons she
had taught at the corners.
A year had passed, and now when Jim Bradley ran his train into the
siding at Hattertown, he could not have told which light he saw first,
the railway signal or the well-trimmed lamp in the Widow Banks’ kitchen;
this light, being always kept bright and clear, was lit at sunset with
the regularity of a lighthouse beacon, the reflector improvised from a
tin plate being turned so that the welcoming rays met the milk train as
it rounded the hills and left solid ground for the trestles between
eight and half-past every evening.
As the whistle of the eight-fifteen morning train spelt _school_ to
Miranda, so the whistle of the milk freight, one long and two short, not
only spelled but shouted _Jim Bradley_, and as a matter of course, she
took her hand lantern if the night was dark, or else trusted to the moon
and stars and following the now well-worn path through the corn patch to
“calf pastures,” reached the low shed by the water-tank almost at the
moment that the engine gave its final puff, and Jim Bradley swung
himself from the caboose and seeing that his rear lights were properly
set, promptly forgot his train for an interval ranging from twenty
minutes to perhaps half an hour, when traffic on the through express was
heavy.
Widow Banks had long since announced to inquiries both of the really
interested and maliciously curious order, that Randy and Jim Bradley
were keeping company, though, at the same time, regretting with a sigh
that his business didn’t allow of evenings spent in the austere “fore
room” where the one visible eye of the departed deacon’s portrait done
in air brush crayon, might witness the courting. Neither was it possible
for Randy to exhibit him to the neighbours in a bright and shining buggy
with a blue bow tied to the whip, of a Sunday afternoon, nor had they
the chance for the same reason to judge of his capacity at
prayer-meeting.
If either Randy or Jim had been questioned as to their relations to each
other, they would have been speechless upon the subject. Neither had
given the matter a thought, and therefore neither was worried by the
mazes of material analysis.
Miranda simply obeyed a call that made the spot where Jim Bradley was
the only possible place for her to be between eight and half past; but
when the train left the siding, crossed the bridge over the Moosatuck
and disappeared, she returned to the house and gave her mind up to the
correction of the smeared papers whereon the youth of Hattertown were
struggling along the Arithmetic road, and in striving to prepare for the
puzzling questions that the school’s bad boy might spring upon her on
the morrow.
Jim regarded matters much in the same way, that is, all through that
spring, summer, and autumn. When winter set in and the siding grew
chilly, the tank shed with its little stove became the only shelter,
for, without realizing why, it never occurred to the man that the
caboose with its bunk and litter of flags and lanterns was the place for
Randy.
One night she noticed that Jim had a heavy cold, and the next evening
she brought with her a basket in which a little pot of hot coffee and a
generous wedge of equally fresh-baked mince pie kept each other warm.
Jim smiled at Randy with a glance in which feigned indifference and
indulgence struggled, as by way of table-cloth she spread the napkin
that covered the basket, on a barrel top and motioned for him to eat,
saying as she handed him a paper of sugar, “I didn’t know how you like
your coffee sweetened, so I brought some sugar along.”
In some way the steam from that tin kettle as he looked across it,
altered the perspective of his existence and changed his terminal; for
the first time he wished that Hattertown was at one end or the other of
the route instead of a brief turnout in the middle.
Then as Randy under his guidance dropped the lumps of sugar in the pail
(cup and saucer lacking), he suddenly formulated for the first time the
fact of her refinement and the difference between her and the other
women that he met along the route. A sudden vision of a home other than
a caboose with meals taken at depot restaurants blazed comet-like across
his firmament in a way that startled—no, fairly frightened him. That
night the time passed so quickly that they were obliged to hurry up hill
at a pace that left Miranda flushed and with no breath for speech as she
opened the narrow storm door to the back porch and swinging her lantern
on a peg, turned to take the basket.
Jim Bradley looked at the girl, whose cape hung about her neck by a
single fastening, its hood that she had pulled up for her head covering,
falling back so that the glorious hair that was usually plastered and
twisted into the subjection fitting a schoolmarm, was loosed and fell
into its natural curves and waves. Then he looked out into the dark to
where one of his brakemen was waving the “time up” signal lantern
furiously. Buttoning his short coat with the air of making all snug and
fit that a man might have who was about to face some new and dangerous
situation, he stepped into the porch so quickly that Miranda was caught
betwixt him and the inner door at the moment when she had raised her
arms to smooth her rumpled hair.