meant to tell me--what you have partly told me already--where is there
any meaning in our being here at all? Let us have some excuse for this
senseless accident. Do you believe much in accidents? How foolish”--Paul
sighed--“for you and me to be afraid of each other! Two men who have
parted with everything but the privilege of speaking the truth!”
The packer raised himself in his bunk slowly, like one in pain. He
looked long at the listless figure crouching by the fire; then he sank
back again with a low groan. “What was it you heared me say? Come!”
“I can't give you the exact words. The words were nothing. Haven't you
watched the sparks blow up, at night, when the wind goes searching over
the ashes of an old camp-fire? It was the fever made you talk, and
your words were the sparks that showed where there had been fire once.
Perhaps I had no right to track you by your own words when you lay
helpless, but I couldn't always leave you. Now I'd like to have my share
of that--whatever it was--that hurt you so, at One Man Station.”
“You ought to been a lawyer,” said the packer, releasing his breath.
There was less strain in his voice. It broke with feeling. “You put up a
mighty strong case for your way of looking at it. I don't say it's best.
There, if you will have it! Sonny--my son! It--it's like startin' a
snow-slide.”
The sick man broke down and sobbed childishly.
“Take it quietly! Oh, take it quietly!” Paul shivered. “I have known it
a long time.”
Hours later they were still awake, the packer in his bunk, Paul in his
blankets by the winking brands. The pines were moving, and in pauses of
the wind they could hear the incessant soft crowding of the snow.
“When they find us here in the spring,” said the packer humbly, “it
won't matter much which on us was 'Mister' and which was 'John.'”
“Are you thinking of that!” Paul answered with nervous irritation. “I
thought you had lived in the woods long enough to have got rid of all
that nonsense!”
“I guess there was some of it where you've been living.”
“We are done with all that now. Go to sleep,--Father.” He pronounced
the word conscientiously to punish himself for dreading it. The darkness
seemed to ring with it and give it back to him ironically. “Father!”
muttered the pines outside, and the snow, listening, let fall the
word in elfin whispers. Paul turned over desperately in his blankets.
“Father!” he repeated out loud. “Do _you_ believe it? Does it do you any
good?”
“I wouldn't distress myself, one way or t' other, if it don't come
natural,” the packer spoke, out of his corner in the darkness. “Wait
till you can feel to say it. The word ain't nothing.”
“But do you feel it? Is it any comfort to you at all?”
“I ain't in any hurry to feel it. We'll get there. Don't worry. And
s'pose we don't! We're men. Man to man is good enough for me.”
Paul spent some wakeful hours after that, trying not to think of Moya,
of his mother and Christine. They were of another world,--a world that
dies hard at twenty-four. Towards morning he slept, but not without
dreams.
He was in the pent-road at Stone Ridge. It was sunset and long shadows
striped the lane. A man stood, back towards him, leaning both arms on
the stone fence that bounds the lane to the eastward,--a plain farmer
figure, gazing down across the misty fields as he might have stood a
hundred times in that place at that hour. Paul could not see his face,
but something told him who it must be. His heart stood still, for he saw
his mother coming up the lane. She carried something in her hand covered
with a napkin, and she smiled, walking carefully as if carrying a treat
to a sick child. She passed the man at the fence, not appearing to have
seen him.
“Won't you speak to him, mother? Won't you speak to”--He could not utter
the name. She looked at him bewildered. “Speak? who shall I speak to?”
The man at the fence had turned and he watched her, or so Paul imagined.
He felt himself choking, faint, with the effort to speak that one word.
Too late! The moment passed. The man whom he knew was his father, the
solemn, quiet figure, moved away up the road unquestioned. He never
looked back. Paul grew dizzy with the lines of shadow; they stretched on
and on, they became the ties of a railroad--interminable. He awoke,
very faint and tired, with a lost feeling and the sense upon him of some
great catastrophe. The old man was sleeping deeply in his bunk, a ray
of white sunlight falling on his yellow features. He looked like one who
would never wake again. But as Paul gazed at him he smiled, and sighed
heavily. His lips formed a name; and all the blood in Paul's body dyed
his face crimson. The name was his mother's.
XII
THE BLOOD-WITE
A few hours seemed days, after the great disclosure. Both men had
recoiled from it and were feeling the strain of the new relation. Three
times since their first meeting the elder had adjusted himself quietly
to a change in the younger's manner to him. First there had been
respectful curiosity in the presence of a new type, combined with the
deference due a leader and an expert in strange fields. Then indignant
partisanship, pity, and the slight condescension of the nurse. This had
hurt the packer, but he took it as he accepted his physical downfall.
The last change was hardest to bear; for now the time was short, and, as
Paul himself had said, they were in the presence of the final unveiling.
So when Paul made artificial remarks to break the pauses, avoiding his
father's eye and giving him neither name nor title, the latter became
silent and lay staring at the logs and picking at his hands.
“If I was hunting up a father,” he said to himself aloud one day, “I'd
try to find a better lookin' one. I wouldn't pa'm off on myself no such
old warped stick as I be.” The remark seemed a tentative one.
“I had the choice, to take or leave you,” Paul responded. “You were an
unconscious witness. Why should I have opened the subject at all?”
Both knew that this answer was an evasion. By forcing the tie they had
merely marked the want of ease and confidence between them. As “Packer
John” Paul could have enjoyed, nay, loved this man; as his father, the
sum and finality of his filial dreams, the supplanter of that imaginary
husband of his mother's youth, the thing was impossible. And the father
knew it and did not resent it in the least, only pitied the boy for
his needless struggle. He was curious about him, too. He wanted to
understand him and the life he had come out of: his roundabout way of
reaching the simplest conclusions; his courage in argument, and his
personal shying away from the truth when found. More than all he longed
for a little plain talk, the exile's hunger for news from home. It
pleased him when Paul, rousing at this deliberate challenge, spoke up
with animation, as if he had come to some conclusion in his own mind. It
could not be expected he would express it simply. The packer had become
used to his oddly elaborate way of putting things.
“If we had food enough and time, we might afford to waste them
discussing each other's personal appearance. _I_ propose we talk to some
purpose.”
“Talking sure burns up the food.” The packer waited.
“I wish I knew what my father was doing with himself, all those years
when his family were giving him the honors of the dead.”
“I warned ye about this pumping out old shafts. You can't tell what
you'll find in the bottom. I suppose you know there are things in this
world, Boy, a good deal worse than death?”
“Desertion is worse. It is not my father's death I want explained, it
is his life, your life, in secret, these twenty years! Can you explain
that?”
The packer doubled his bony fist and brought it down on the bunk-side.
“Now you talk like a man! I been waiting to hear you say that. Yes, I
can answer that question, if you ain't afeard of the answer!”
“I am keeping alive to hear it!” said Paul in a guarded voice.
“You might say you're keeping me alive to tell it. It's a good thing to
git off of one's mind; but it's a poor thing to hand over to a son. All
I've got to leave ye, though: the truth if you can stand it! Where do
you want I should begin?”
“At the night when you came back to One Man Station.”
“How'd you know I come back?”
“You were back there in your fever, living over something that happened
in that place. There was a wind blowing and the door wouldn't shut. And
something had to be lifted,”--the old man's eyes, fixed upon his son,
took a look of awful comprehensions,--“something heavy.”
“Yes; great Lord, it was heavy! And I been carrying it ever since!” His
chest rose as if the weight of that load lay on it still, and his breath
expired with a hoarse “haugh.” “I got out of the way because it was _my_
load. I didn't want no help from them.” He paused and sat picking at his
hands. “It's a dreadful ugly story. I'd most as soon live it over again
as have to tell it in cold blood. I feel sometimes it _can't be!_”
“You need not go back beyond that night. I know how my mother was left,
and what sort of a man you were forced to leave her with. Was it--the
keeper?”
“That's what it was. That was the hard knot in my thread. Nothing
wouldn't go past that. Some, when they git things in a tangle, they just
reach for the shears an' cut the thread. I wa'n't brought up that way.
I was taught to leave the shears alone. So I went on stringin' one year
after another. But they wouldn't join on to them that went before. There
was the knot.”
“It was between you and him--and the law?” said Paul.
“You've got it! I was there alone with it,--witness an' judge an' jury;
I worked up my own case. Manslaughter with extenuatin' circumstances,
I made it--though he was more beast than man. I give myself the outside
penalty,--imprisonment for life. And I been working out my sentence
ever since. The Western country wa'n't home to me then--more like a big
prison. It's been my prison these twenty-odd years, while your mother
was enjoying what belonged to her, and making a splendid job of your
education. If I had let things alone I might have finished my time out:
but I didn't, and now the rest of it's commuted--for the life of my
son!”
“Don't put it that way! I am no lamb of sacrifice. Why, how can we let
things alone in this world! Should I have stood off from this secret and
never asked my father for his defense?”
“Do you mean to say a boy like you can take hold of this thing and
understand it?”
“I can,” said Paul. “I could almost tell the story myself.”
“Put it up then!” said the packer. The fascination of confession was
strong upon him.
“You had been out in the mountains--how long?”
“Two days and three nights, just as I left camp.”
“You were crazed with anxiety for us. You came back to find your camp
empty, the wife and baby gone. You had reason to distrust the keeper.
Not for what he did--for what you knew he meant to do.”
“For what he meant and tried to do. I seen it in his eye. The devil that
wanted him incited him to play with me and tell me lies about my wife.
She scorned the brute and he took his mean revenge. He kep' back her
letter, and he says to me, leerin' at me out of his wicked eyes, 'Your
livestock seems to be the strayin' kind. The man she went off with
give me that,'--he lugged a gold piece out of his clothes and showed
me,--'give me that,' he says, 'to keep it quiet.' He kep' it quiet! Half
starved and sick's I was, the strength was in me. But vengeance in the
hand of a man, it cuts both ways, my son! His bunk had a sharp edge
to it like this. He fell acrost it with my weight on top of him and he
never raised up again. There wasn't a mark on him. His back was broke.
He died slow, his eyes mocking me.
“'You fool,' he says. 'Go look in that coat hangin' on the wall.' I
found her letter there inside of one from Granger. He watched me read it
and he laughed. 'Now, go tell her you've killed a man!' He knew I didn't
come of a killin' breed. There was four hours to think it over. Four
hours! I thought hard, I tell you! 'T was six of one and half a dozen of
t' other 'twixt him and me, but I worked it back 'n' forth a good long
while about her. First, taking her away from her father, an old man
whose bread I'd eat. She was like a child of my own raising. I always
had felt mean about that. We'd had bad luck from the start,--my
luck,--and now disgrace to cap it all. Whether I hid it or told her and
stood my trial, I'd never be a free man again. There he lay! And a sin
done in secret, it's like a drop of nitric acid: it's going to eat its
way out--and in!
“I knew she'd have friends enough, once she was quit of me. That was the
case between us. The thing that hurt me most was to put her letter
back where I found it, and leave it, there with him. Her little cry to
me--and I couldn't come! I read the words over and over, I've said 'em
to myself ever since. I've lived on them. But I had to leave the letter
there to show I'd never come back. I put it back after he was dead.
“The sins of the parents shall be visited,--when it's in the blood! But
I declare to the Almighty, murder wa'n't in my blood! It come on me like
a stroke of lightning hits a tree, and I had a clear show to fall alone.
“That's the answer. Maybe I didn't see all sides of it, but there never
was no opening to do different, after that night. Now, you've had an
education. I should be glad to hear your way of looking at it?”
“I should think you might stand your trial, now, before any judge or
jury, in this world or the next,” Paul answered.
“There is only one Judge.” The packer smiled a beautiful quiet smile
that covered a world of meanings. “What a man re'ly wants, if he'd own
up it, is a leetle shade of partiality. Maybe that's what we're all
going to need, before we git through.”
Paul was glad to be saved the necessity of speech, and he felt the swift
discernment with which the packer resumed his usual manner. “Got any
more of that stuff you call soup? Divide even! I won't be made no baby
of.”
“We might as well finish it up. It's hardly worth making two bites of a
cherry.”
“Call this 'cherry'! It's been a good while on the bough. What's it
mostly made of?”
“Rind of bacon, snow water,--plenty of water,--and a tablespoonful of
rice.”
“Good work! Hungry folks can live on what the full bellies throw away.”
“Oh, I can save. But there comes a time when you can't live by saving
what you haven't got.”
“That's right! Well, let's talk, then, before the bacon-rind fades out
of us.”
The packer's face and voice, his whole manner, showed the joy of a soul
that has found relief. Paul was not trying now to behave dutifully; they
were man to man once more. The quaint, subdued humor asserted itself,
and the narrator's speech flowed on in the homely dialect which
expressed the man.
“I stayed out all that winter, workin' towards the coast. One day, along
in March, I fetched a charcoal burner's camp, and the critter took me in
and nursed my frost-bites and didn't ask no questions, nor I of him. We
struck up a trade, my drivin' stock, mostly skin and bone, for a show in
his business. He wa'n't gettin' rich at it, that was as plain as the hip
bones on my mules. I kep' in the woods, cuttin' timber and tendin' kiln,
and he hauled and did the sellin'. Next year he went below to Portland
and brought home smallpox with him. It broke out on him on the road. He
was a terrible sick man. I buried him, and waited for my turn. It didn't
come. I seemed kind o' insured. I've been in lots of trouble since then,
but nothing ever touched me till now. I banked on it too strong, though.
I sure did! My pardner was just such another lone bird like me. If
he had any folks of his own he kep' still about them. So I took his
name--whether it was his name there's no knowing. Guess I've took full
as good care of it as he would. 'Hagar?' folk would say, sort o' lookin'
me over. 'You ain't Jim Hagar.' No, but I was John, and they let it go
at that.
“I heard of your mother that summer, from a prospector who came up past
my camp. He'd wintered in Mountain Home. He told me my own story, the
way they had it down there, and what straits your mother was in. I had
scraped up quite a few dollars by then, and was thinking how I'd shove
it into a bank like an old debt coming to Adam Bogardus. I was studying
how I was going to rig it. There wasn't any one who knew me down there,
so I felt safe to ventur' a few inquiries. What I heard was that she'd
gone home to her folks and was as well off as anybody need be. That
broke me all up at first. I must have had a sneakin' notion that maybe
some day I could see my way to go back to her, but that let me out
completely. I quit then, and I've stayed quit. The only break I made was
showin' up here at the 'leventh hour, thinking I could be some use to my
son!”
“It was to be,” said Paul. “For years our lives have been shaping
towards this meeting. There were a thousand chances against it. Yet here
we are!”
“Here we are!” the packer repeated soberly. “But don't think that I lay
any of my foolishness on the Almighty! Maybe it was meant my son should
close my eyes, but it's too dear at the price. Anybody would say so, I
don't care who.”
“But aside from the 'price,' is it something to you?”
“More--more than I've got words to say. And yet it grinds me, every
breath I take! Not that I wish you'd done different--you couldn't and be
a man. I knew it even when I was kickin' against it. Oh, well! It ain't
no use to kick. I thought I'd learned something, but I ain't--learned--a
thing!”
XIII
CURTAIN
A greater freedom followed this confession, as was natural. It became
the basis for lighter confidences and bits of autobiography that came to
the surface easily after this tremendous effort at sincerity. Paul found
that he could speak even of the family past, into which by degrees he
began to fit the real man in place of that bucolic abstraction which
had walked the fields of fancy. He had never dared to actuate the “hired
man,” his father, on a basis of fact. He knew the speech and manners of
the class from which he came,--knew men of that class, and talked with
them every summer at Stone Ridge; but he had brooded so deeply over the
tragic and sentimental side of his father's fate as to have lost sight
of the fact that he was a man.
Reality has its own convincing charm, not inconsistent with plainness or
even with commonness. To know it is to lose one's taste for toys of
the imagination. Paul, at last, could look back almost with, a sense of
humor at the doll-like progenitor he had played with so long. But when
it came to placing the real man, Adam Bogardus, beside that real woman,
once his wife, their son could but own with awe that there is mercy in
extinction, after all; in the chance, however it may come to us, for
slipping off those cruel disguises that life weaves around us.
In the strange, wakeful nights, full of starvation dreams, he saw his
mother as she would look on state occasions in the hostess's place at
her luxurious table; the odor of flowers, the smell of meats and wines,
tantalized and sickened him. Christine would come in her dancing frocks,
always laughing, greedy in her mirth; but Moya, face to face, he could
never see. It was torture to feel her near him, a disembodied embrace.
Passionate panegyrics and hopeless adjurations he would pour out to
that hovering loveliness just beyond his reach. The agony of
frustration would waken him, if indeed it were sleep that dissolved his
consciousness, and he would be irritable if spoken to.
The packer broke in, one morning, on these unnerving dreams. “You
wouldn't happen to have a picture of her along with you?”
Paul stared at him.
“No, of course you wouldn't! And I'd be 'most afeard to look at it, if
you had. She must have changed considerable. Time hasn't stood still
with her any more than the rest of us.”
“I have no picture of my mother,” Paul replied.
The packer saw that his question had jarred; he had waited weeks to ask
it. He passed it off now with one of his homely similes. “If you was to
break a cup clean in two, and put the halves together again while the
break was fresh, they'd knit so you wouldn't hardly see a crack. But you
take one half and set it in the chainy closet and chuck the other half
out on the ash-heap,--them halves won't look much like pieces of the
same cup, come a year or two. The edges won't jine no more than the lips
of an old cut that's healed without stitches. No; married folks they
grow together or they grow apart, and they're a-doing of the one or the
other every minute of the time, breaks or no breaks. Does she go up to
the old place summers?”
“Not lately, except on business,” said Paul. “A company was formed to
open slate quarries on the upper farm, a good many years ago. They are
worth more than all the land forty times over.”
“I always said so; always told the old man he had a gold mine in that
ridge. Was this before he died?”
“Long after. It was my mother's scheme mainly. She controls it now. She
is a very strong business woman.”
“She got her training, likely, from that uncle in New York. He had the
business head. The old man had no more contrivance than one of the bulls
in his pastures. He could lock horns and stay there, but it wa'nt no
trouble to outflank him. More than once his brother Jacob got to the
windward of him in a bargain. He was made a good deal like his own land.
Winters of frost it took to break up that ground, and sun and rain to
meller it, and then't was a hatful of soil to a cartful of stone. The
plough would jump the furrows if you drew it deep. My arms used to ache
as if they'd been pounded, with the jar of them stones. They used to
tell us children a story how Satan, he flew over the earth a-sowing
it with rocks and stones, and as he was passing over our county a hole
bu'st through his leather apron and he lost his whole load right slam
there. I could 'a' p'inted out the very spot where the heft on it fell.
Ten Stone meadow, so-called. Ten million stone! I was pickin' stone in
that field all of one summer when I was fifteen year old. We built a
mile of fence with it.
“Them quarries must have brought a mint of money into the country.
Different sort of labor, too. Well, the world grows richer and poorer
every year. More difference every year between the way rich folks and
poor folks live. I wouldn't know where I belonged, 't ain't likely, if
I was to go back there. I'd be way off! One while I used to think a
good deal about going back, just to take a look around. It comes over
me lately like hunger and thirst. I think about the most curious things
when I'm asleep--foolish, like a child! I can smell all the good home
smells of a frosty morning: apple pomace, steaming in the barnyard;
sausage frying; Becky scouring the brass furnace-kittle with salt and
vinegar. Killin' time, you know--makes you think of boiling souse and
head-cheese. You ever eat souse?” The packer sucked in his breath with a
lean smile. “It ain't best to dwell on it. But you can't help yourself,
at night. I can smell Becky's fresh bread, in my dreams, just out of the
brick oven. Never eat bread cooked in a stove till I came out here. I
never drunk any water like that spring on the ridge. Last night I was
back there, and the maples were all yellow like sunshine. Once it
was spring, and apple-blooms up in the hill orchard. And little Emmy,
a-setting on the fence, with her bunnit throwed back on her neck.
'Addy!' she called, way across the lot; 'Addy, come, help me down!' She
was a master hand for venturin' up on places, but she didn't like the
gettin' down.
“Well, she 'a learned the ups and downs by this time. She don't need
Addy to help her. I'd have helped a big sight more if I had kep' my
distance. It's a thing so con-demned foolish and unnecessary--I can't be
reconciled to it noway!”
“You see only one side of it,” said Paul. Unspeakable thoughts had kept
pace with his father's words. “Nothing that happens, happens through
us--or to us--alone. There was a girl I knew, outside. She was as happy,
when I knew her first, as you say my mother used to be. Then she met
some one--a man--and the shadow of his life crossed hers. He would have
wrapped her up in it and put out her sunshine if he had stayed in the
same world. Now she can be herself again, after a while. It cannot take
long to forget a person you have known only a little over a year.”
The packer rose on one elbow. He reached across and shook his son.
“Where is that girl? Answer me! Take your face out of your hands!”
“At Bisuka Barracks. She is the commandant's daughter. I came out to
marry her.”
“What possessed ye not to tell me?”
“Why should I tell you? We buried the wedding-day months back, in the
snow.”
“Boy, boy!” the packer groaned.
“What difference can it make now?”