NOT SO FAR OUT OF THE WORLD.
Men with guns came down the road, shouting "mad dog." The cry was taken
up and it echoed among the hills. In barbaric Europe, when every village
was a principality unto itself, the cry at midnight, summoning men from
their beds to butcher or be butchered, could not have been more
startling than the noon-tide cry of "mad dog" in rural Tennessee.
Mothers seized their children, fathers caught up guns and axes. The
cross-roads merchant slammed his door and locked it. Oxen, catching the
alarm, bellowed in the fields.
Starbuck went out into the road to meet the men. "Say," he said, in
answer to their shout, "if you air lookin' for a mad dog I kin let you
have one cheap. He's round thar."
The dog was dragged away and the community returned to the allegiance
which it owed to quietude and laziness; the shiftless lout loitered
along the road, and the old woman, on the gray mare, followed by the
fuzzy mule colt, carried down to the "commercial emporium," "a settin'
o' goose aigs" to be swopped for a handful of coffee and a lump of brown
sugar.
"Ma'm," said Starbuck to Mrs. Mayfield, as he went back into the house,
"you see that we don't live so fur outen the world atter all. Of co'se
thar air places that have got mo' l'arnin' than we have, but we kin
skeer up a mad dog an' git rid o' him as quick as the best of 'em. An' I
reckon by this time you find that our affairs ain't so uneventful as you
put it. Young feller," he went on, speaking to Tom, "I like the way you
acted under fire. Thar was a time when I believed that a feller with
store clothes on was easy skeered, and I laughed when I seed 'em j'inin'
the army--'lowed they would w'ar out in a day or two; but they
outmarched us fellers that follered the plow an' when the time come they
tuck their red medicine an' never whimpered. Ricolleck one little chap
that didn't look like he was strong enough to pull up a handful o' white
clover--snatched up a flag, butted his way to the front and put his
colors on the breastworks o' the inimy."
"I thank you," Tom replied. "But you don't seem to be astonished that
the preacher wasn't scared."
"Who, Jim? Oh, no. Jim's a Starbuck."
"Don't make me out any worse than I naturally am, Uncle Jasper," said
Jim, smiling in that mild consciousness of humor sometimes necessary and
always appropriate to the pulpit.
Mrs. Mayfield smiled upon him, and bade him come with her to the place
where the short shade of noon-time was napping on the hill-top. He
clutched his hat and followed her and old Jasper snorted. "Follers her
like a pet lamb," said the old man to his wife when Tom and Lou also had
strolled off. "I mean Jim do. But to tell you the truth she'll never
marry him; don't know that he wants her, you understand, but if he do
he's in a bad fix. She's good and as putty as a red-bird, but I don't
reckon that she'd like to be the wife of a mountain preacher. And come
to think about it, I don't see why a woman would want to be the wife of
any preacher--much. Not that the preacher wouldn't be good to her, but
because she'd be a settin' herse'f up as a mark fur all the other women
in the neighborhood. Ef a preacher's wife laugh they say she ain't a
takin' no intrust in church work, an' ef she is sorrowful they say it's
all put on."
"Jasper, you don't know what you're a talkin' about, but you air
puffeckly nat'ral as long as you're a sayin' suthin' ag'in women. You
don't understand 'em at all."
"And ef I did I'd be smarter than old Solomon. He had fo' or five
hundred of 'em about him and he didn't understand even the most foolish
one of 'em. How air you goin' to understand a critter that don't
understand herse'f? But I tell you this here Miz Mayfield is
smart--talks like a new book that's got picturs in it."
"Oh! Then I reckon I can't talk at all."
"Have you hearn anybody hint that you can't talk? Did you ever notice
that when a man begins to talk about a woman, makes no diffunce who, his
wife puts it up that he's a talkin' about her? Did you?"
"No, nor you nuther. Gracious above!--book with picturs in it! But if
Jim wants to marry her, why don't he say so? What do he want allus to
be a steppin' round her skirts like a frost-bit chicken?"
"Wall, he ain't had time to ax her yit. It took the gospel mo' than a
thousand years to reach America, an' we oughtn't to expect preachers to
be in a rush."
She scowled at him and he went away, laughing, and she stood in the
door, shading her eyes with her hand, watching Tom and Lou as slowly
they walked down the road. Over to the right, in the dazzle of the sun,
Jim and Mrs. Mayfield were climbing a hill; and reaching the top, she
sat down on a rock and bade him sit near her, but he shook his head and
said that he preferred to stand where he was, and then, realizing that
his remark was abrupt, sat down by her and was silent. At her feet the
violets were blooming. There came a breeze, and the blossom of a poplar
sapling brushed her face and shed its perfume in her hair.
"In the city all is struggle and plot," she said, and musing for a time
in silence, she continued: "But here all seems to be innocence and
beauty."
"Not all innocence, ma'm," the preacher replied. "The poisonous insect
sometimes lives where the air is sweet. There is no land that is not in
need of the doctrine of gentleness. To the lovely eye almost all things
may look lovely--"
"Thank you," she broke in.
"Oh, not at all," he replied, unable to remember his ease of a moment
ago. "The fact is I don't believe we are goin' to have any rain for some
time yet. Needin' it a little, now, too."
"You were talking in a different strain just now and I interrupted you.
I am sorry. Let me lead you back."
"I don't hardly know where I was, ma'm. The fact is, I'm always about
half lost when I'm with you."
"Mr. Reverend, don't embarrass me."
"Embarrass you? Ma'm, I haven't had a fight in a good while, but if a
feller was to come along and embarrass you, why he'd soon have reason to
think that scarlet fever had broke out in the neighborhood."
"Now, please don't talk that way. Let us get back to where we were. You
were saying that all lands were in need of the doctrine of gentleness. I
suppose it is true, but this land needs only the doctrine while there
are others that are in need of the lash--I might say, the sword. I am
not as high in the social world as you may suppose, but what I know of
society leads me to believe that we polish a barbarism and call it a
brilliant grace. Politeness is charming to look at and to hear, but it
is the art of telling and acting a lie. Among these hills we hear a
laugh and we know that some one is amused. In society we see a smile and
we feel that some one is a hypocrite."
"I hope it ain't that bad, ma'm."
"But it is that bad."
"When Uncle Jasper asked you if yo' husband was dead, you said worse
than that--divorced. Was he very mean to you, ma'am?"
"He was a brute, Mr. Reverend."
"Did anybody knock him down for you?"
"Oh, no."
"Is he livin'?"
"Yes, I suppose so."
"Do you want him knocked down?"
"Why, Mr. Reverend! Just now you were talking of the doctrine of
gentleness, and now you speak of knocking some one down. How can you be
so changeable."
"I'm not changeable, ma'm. The doctrine of gentleness don't apply to a
snake, and if that man didn't treat you right he is a snake. And I'm a
preacher; I go out among them that needs prayer and I pray; in the night
when it seems that everybody else in the world is asleep, I have gone
out and knelt down in the dirt and prayed that the pain and the
bitterness might be taken from the troubled hearts of my neighbors. I've
gone to see many a young feller and begged him to give up fightin'--I've
done all that, but if you was to tell me where I could find that
man--man that was a brute to you, I'd hunt him and with my fist I would
mash the teeth out of his mouth. Where does he live?"
"We must not think of him, Mr. Reverend. And besides, when I speak of
him, how do you know that I tell the truth?"
"Ma'm, if a man should inspire you with a lie, it would be proof enough
that he is a brute."
She clapped her hands and laughed. "Oh, Troubadour, recite your soul to
me!"
"What did you say, ma'm?"
"Oh, nothing." She pointed and Jim saw Tom and Lou enter the vine-hung
gulch leading to the place where corn had been ground at night.