I had my tongue in my cheek for almost everything that came off a
printing-press. I was tired of red blood; I was even more tired of the
blue blood that drips out of a fountain-pen. I was tired--oh, very
tired--of “penny plain,” and almost more tired of “twopence colored.” I
had hunted for a real, healthy thrill in the books spread out before me,
until I believed there was no such thing. I was like the boy in the
folk-tale who could not shiver. I had searched the newspapers for a
sensation and found there nothing but musical comedy. Most mysteries
turn into farce. Do you remember the Italian opera company that went
broke in Samarkand? Or the true tale of Death Valley Scotty? Or the
gentleman who discreetly offered a fine Tudor house rent-free for a year
to any one intending murder? The prima donna was entertained by the
Russian governor-general; Death Valley Scotty (I believe) went into
vaudeville; and the gentleman with the Tudor mansion was the mildest of
men: a thwarted romantic who wanted an authentic ghost on the premises,
and had to be content with an expensive mechanical device that
frightened his friends but never, alas! deluded him. Even life seemed to
have declined in quality from Gilbert and Sullivan to comic movies.
All this, not so very long ago, suddenly became acute, and I planned an
escape. I decided to leave town, and go for a solitary walking-tour in
and about and over a certain range of mountains. I knew some of the more
important points in the region, but I had never explored the remoter
valleys, though I was aware that they were lonely and lovely and
sparsely inhabited. Be it understood that I did not go in search of
mystery: I went to get back my appetite for plainer food and simpler
sensations; to savor to the core the blessed impossibility of reading
over-night, and reviewing the next day, ten volumes of the latest trash.
I went to get back my tone; to recapture a normal attitude. The return
to Nature, if taken seriously, is apt to have bad effects; but I was in
no danger of growing mawkish over a woodchuck, or addressing the
garter-snake as “brother.” I was willing to pay for hillwinds as I would
have paid for a good brand of Burgundy; and to have the sunset thrown in
like the smile of the perfect waiter. These things had a value and a
charm, a positive virtue of their own. I could not get them in town; so
Mohammed went to the mountains, though in no transcendental frame of
mind. He took with him survey maps, a rubber cape, a flask, plenty of
tobacco, and some of the other things that Baedeker recommends to the
pedestrian.
I shall not chart my course for you; I shall not name my mountains or my
valleys. I shall make no sociological estimates of the people I met; I
shall not account for them in any recognizable way, by descent or
occupation, politics or dialect. Let me content myself with describing
accurately. Too many people know the trains I took, the towns through
which I passed, and the names of the heights I crossed. I have, above
all, no wish to fling discredit on that loveliest and loneliest of
remote valleys which I shall call Martin’s Hollow. Perhaps I am more
sensitive than I need be, because in my early youth I spent many summers
in and about these mountains, and have, myself, a vicarious patriotism
for the locality. Good men, honest citizens and prosperous, have come
out of the district school in Martin’s Hollow--but few of them live in
Martin’s Hollow now.
I had been tramping a week or more when the rain came on. Usually I had
managed to spend the night in some village hotel or other, but this once
I had had to make shift with an atrocious boarding-house half-way up a
lovely wooded slope. It was filled with women in cheap frills, who
walked on the narrow porches with their arms round each other’s waists,
and danced awkwardly together, after the dining-room was cleared, to the
nasal tones of a cheap victrola. Some of the older ones played halma in
the corners. After a talk with the melancholy proprietor, the next
morning, I decided to spend that night on the mountain that lifted
itself above the boarding-house. I was to climb it that day, and by the
next night I could probably get to one of the bigger hotels in the
second valley beyond.
I started out early, and presently struck a trail of which the
boarding-house-keeper had told me. It was not on my map. All went well
until I reached the summit--or what I took to be the summit. The
mountain was wooded to the top, and there was no clearing from which one
could get a view. I had a glimpse of the sky, however, from a desolate
spot which had, at some time, been cut over; and the sky looked
ominous. I decided to make for lower ground and the possibility of a
barn-roof, if nothing else, over my head. I always leave behind
something of importance, and this time I had forgotten my compass. I had
no means of knowing surely into which valley I was going to drop; but I
took a trail that came to hand. It looked like an old one; which augured
well, I thought, for habitations below me. The rain came on; and I
dripped my way along between the dripping trees, at a tremendous
downward slant. A little past sunset-time the rain let up, and I stopped
on a rock by a spring to eat and drink and look at my map. It marked the
trail I had taken; and I gathered from the somewhat unfeatured section
of the map that I should presently strike the Martin’s Hollow brook,
which, carefully followed, would lead me into Martin’s Hollow.
I have, since then, heard about Martin’s Hollow. It is one of the
“shiftless” valleys; a place where the farms have a curse on them and
every other family will probably count its degenerates. There are plenty
such among our older mountain communities, as every one knows. They get
a bad name, and the best element goes away to other countrysides. The
feeble and the mad and the shiftless and the hard drinkers are apt to
stay; and when they too are withdrawn, their houses fall to ruin, until
in after years you trace human histories by old cellar foundations. None
of this was in my mind when I took the trail from somewhere near the top
of Silvernail Mountain. Martin’s Hollow was a mere name on a map to me;
a place where I hoped to find shelter of some sort from the gregarious
showers that were chasing each other about the hills.
It must have been eight o’clock when I got below the timber-line on the
southern spur of Silvernail. Darkness was thickening, and I could see
little except a few separated lights below and beyond me to the
southward. The valley is very narrow and very steep; at the bottom, in
the middle, there is room only for the brook and a little bordering
meadowland. The noose-like road runs higher up, on the hillsides, and
along it the farms are scattered. I say noose-like; and yet the loop is
incomplete, for the curved head of the hollow is all woods and
wilderness, and there is no road across. If you wish to make the tour of
the little valley, you can only go up one side, make your way back
nearly to the mouth, where the single cross-road lies, and take the
other side. The valley opens out at the mouth ever so slightly, so that
from the head, on a fine day, you would get a magnificent mountain
glimpse.
Here, then, at the head of Martin’s Hollow, I found myself, in the
twilight. I knew from the mere look of the place in the dimness that the
farms were not good. There was no big bulk of barns, and the hillsides
had the rough outline of rocky pasture. Here and there, before me, I
could see the glimmer of an irregular and desultory patch of buckwheat.
I cursed the weather and my compassless condition, which had combined to
pitch me into this stupid gorge. I also cursed a blister on my heel,
which had joined itself to the catastrophes of the afternoon. The
proprietor of the boarding-house had not mentioned Martin’s Hollow by
name. “Better go through the next valley and over to Woodelton,” he had
advised. “Or, better still, keep along the lower ridge of Silvernail and
Kettletop, and drop right into Woodelton itself.” I had not inquired
further, for I had intended fully to sleep on Silvernail and walk for
miles through the woods along the irregular ridge, until I found the
Woodelton trail. But here I was in Martin’s Hollow; and if the people
were an unprosperous lot, I could the more easily induce them to let me
sleep in a haymow. The houses would be impossible--of that I was sure. I
had seen shiftless valleys before.
And now I come to my adventure: which is nothing more, really, than my
single fluttering contact with the devil. If I cannot explain how the
walk down the valley, with its casual encounters, was like a sudden
hypochondria progressing by leaps and bounds, I cannot make you feel why
even the climax seemed to have the terror of inexorable logic, as well
as its own unpleasantness, to inflict. I know how Dante felt--except
that I had no Virgil by my side.
The first farmstead I came upon was a small, ramshackle, malodorous
place. There was a light somewhere within at the back, which illuminated
a filthy bit of barnyard. Some tuneless drunken singing of Moody and
Sankey hymns was going on inside. I decided to knock and ask for
information. There are worse people in the world than men who sing hymns
in their cups. The knock called forth the hoarse barking of a dog, but
the singing stopped. A youth opened the door. He was surly, but sober.
He did not think there was any place in the Hollow where I could sleep,
but perhaps Foster’s might take me in. They were over on the other side,
beyond the cross-road. But I had better go six miles on to the village.
He slammed the door to; the barking subsided, and another hymn began,
more tuneless than ever. I went out into the road, slightly depressed.
The clouds were ominous; I could hear the soft mutter of distant
thunder, and there were already a few practice flashes of lightning. As
I got into the road, an upper window was flung up, and I heard the wail
of a baby. I turned, but could see nothing. A cracked voice issued from
the window, however, bidding me “go away, go away.” I went, with what
dignity I could muster--tired of the _rücksack_ on my back, tired of my
own spleen and depression, wearying unspeakably for the fly-blown
boarding-house of the night before.
I had gone a third of a mile, still on the same side of the Hollow,
before I came to another habitation. The darkness had grown thicker: it
was virtually night. There was no rain yet, but the wind was tearing
over the top of Silvernail, behind me, and the mutter of the thunder had
deepened into long, weary, reverberating rolls. Each casual
lightning-flash showed me the pinkish road winding on ahead of me. This
house was larger than the other, but there was no light in it. I knew
all about country hours, and hesitated to rouse folk from their beds;
but I should have the rain pelting on my shoulders in five minutes, and
I was desperate. There was a bigger barn, and I had hopes of bribing
them to drive me to the village. So I knocked. There was dead silence
for two minutes. People sleeping so soundly as that would not want to
drive any one anywhere, even if they waked to hear my request. I turned
to go away again, thoroughly disgusted, for there was no doubt that this
wind carried rain with it. Just as I turned, a sudden creak broke
through the perfect silence--the door was flung open. I started: for
there had not been the faintest sound of footsteps. You would have
thought that the person who opened had been sleeping against the door,
like an animal. I grasped my stick firmly in my hand and lifted my cap.
A lightning-flash came to help me out--the tenant of the house had no
light--and I saw a bent and toothless old man staring at me. I put my
question, but got no answer. He did not even shake his head. He simply
looked me over with an incompetent and hostile eagerness. His eyes
rested on my stick, and peered over my shoulder at my _rücksack_. He
was, clearly, very much interested in me, but he did not speak. I pulled
the matches out of my pocket, struck one, and gave him stare for stare.
He did not seem insulted by my inspection; only craned his neck a little
more, as if to see the _rücksack_ better. Apparently his examination was
reassuring; but he still made no sound. I tried sign language, thinking
he might be dumb; I pointed in various directions queryingly. He made no
gesture of reply; simply continued to look me over, with a slow,
snakelike motion of the head. Apparently he was satisfied by the time I
grew utterly disgusted, for as I turned my back on him he shut the door.
I was, for some indefinite reason, on my guard; and I stopped and
listened after the door was shut. I heard no voices, but I thought I
caught a faint, senile cackle. If there had been whispering, I could not
have heard it, for, though it was a warm night, the windows were all
shut. I stumbled over a rusted woodchuck trap, and found myself in the
road again.
Then the rain came on in earnest--great sheets of it torn from the skies
and flung broadcast through the valley. I was tempted to climb through a
pasture to the shelter of trees, but the thunder and lightning had now
reached the Hollow, peal simultaneous with flash, and I pushed on, with
my rubber cape over my shoulders. The violence of the shower took half
an hour to spend itself, and in that half-hour--though, to be sure, I
walked very slowly, impeded at every step by the gurgling mud of the
road--I passed no inhabited dwelling. One ruined house I saw, and I
thought of climbing in through one of the paneless windows and taking
such shelter as I could; but some fastidiousness of the imagination
restrained me. In that hour, I dare say, the trash I spent my life in
scorning told upon me. I preferred encountering any of the detrimentals
of Martin’s Hollow to spending the night in a hole those detrimentals
had forsaken. I do not think, at the moment, I would have accepted the
shelter of the noblest castle if I had had to sleep in the haunted room.
I leaned against the house wall for a few moments--porch or other
outside shelter there was none--but went on.
The thunder and lightning had pretty well stopped by the time I reached
the cross-road. The rain still fell and the wind churned up and down the
gorge, so that I had reason to expect another shower would presently
cross the ridge of Silvernail. I quickened my pace as well as I could
for the mud, for I saw lights ahead on the other side of the valley. The
six miles to the village--five, by this time--were not to be thought of.
At that house I would stop, until the rain was over, at least, come what
might.
It was about nine o’clock, I fancy, when I reached the house with the
lights--just beyond the cross-road, a little way up the valley on the
other side. I lit a match on the door-step before I knocked. It was an
ancient stone house, low and small, but at least not ruinous. One of the
lights I had seen must have been a lantern carried between house and
barn, for at present only one window was illuminated. My knock was
answered at last by the sliding of a bolt, and an uncouth young fellow
stood in the door before me. He was heavily built and strong, but looked
stupid. Behind him two fraternal faces appeared. One of the youths
behind carried a gun.
“He ain’t here.” The man spoke briefly.
I protested. “I don’t know whom you mean. I don’t belong in this place.
I’ve been on a walking-trip, and have got caught in the rain and want
some place to spend the night. If you know of a haymow anywhere in this
valley--” I stopped. By this time I did not in the least wish to spend
the night in his haymow.
The three men had closed in round the door. There was no consulting
among them, but presently the second one--the one with the gun--spoke in
exactly the tone of his brother.
“We ain’t got no haymow. We gin up keepin’ cattle. You better go on to
Foster’s. They got thirty cows.”
“Where is Foster’s? And how far is it?”
The third one spoke. “It’s on a piece, up the road. A white house with
two red barns. Them’s the only painted barns in the Hollow. You better
hustle. It’s gittin’ late.”
“Could you give me a glass of water?”
The first one answered. “We ain’t got no glass.” The door was shut in my
face.
I stepped down the bank into the road again and turned--but not in the
direction of “Foster’s.” It was foolish of me, I dare say, but my chief
desire was to get nearer the entrance to the Hollow, nearer the village,
nearer the world. “Foster’s” was the only suggestion of hospitality,
apparently, that the inhabitants of Martin’s Hollow could make. But
“Foster’s” was up the valley, nearer that unfinished loop where the
woods came down. I wanted every step I took to lead me out of the
Hollow, not deeper in. And “Foster’s” was problematical, in any case.
The painted barns sounded promising, as if they held whatever prosperity
the valley had to offer; yet the recurring suggestion might as easily be
sinister as helpful. At all events, I would not go up the gorge instead
of down. I was alone, by night, between two storms, in a valley where I
trusted no one. I would go down the road. There would be comfort in
seeing it--or, rather, feeling it--gradually widen to the outer world.
So I plodded on, away from the stone house, away from “Foster’s.”
The thing was becoming dreamlike: my clogged steps taking me, with
decreasing speed, nowhere; and each human encounter more sinister than
the last. The wind rose and fell, the trees swayed, and now and then
dark forms wavered in a hillside pasture. The atmosphere, too, was not
without that electrical suspense which is the very breath of thunderous
weather. The Hollow seemed to be keyed up, waiting for something. The
drunken singing, the foolish ancient’s curiosity, the malicious cackle
behind the closed door, the surly speech of the armed brothers, the way
in which I was flung to “Foster’s” at every turn--all made me feel an
imperilled outsider in some crazy tragedy. The very winds seemed to be
in the business: every one in that abominable valley was in it except
me. Whatever it was--if it was only a human mood--I did not wish to be
in it. I only desired, with a direct childlike passion, a roof over my
head, a chance to change into dry socks and shoes, and a stiff drink of
Scotch out of my flask against the chill. The very road seemed to catch
at my feet as I walked; the unbroken darkness ahead of me defied my
efforts to emerge from the detestable gorge, or to make connections with
anything, any one, of my own kind. I had lost all sense of time: I no
longer took out my watch, even for irony’s sake. I walked on and on,
wet, tired, footsore, fatalistically oppressed, dreading every rod of
the valley road that stretched on before me in the illimitable dark of a
nightmare. Only dawn could rescue me, I suspected; and dawn was far
away. But rest I would find; and shelter, even though I could not sleep
and a chill was unescapable. I would not, I felt with blind wrath, be
beaten by a few fools in a God-forsaken valley not ten miles from a
railway.
Finally, I came to another house, set far back from the road. The
shutters were closed, but between the slats I could see scattered lights
within. No flame could live in that wind, so this time I groped to the
bottom of my _rücksack_ and found my little electric flashlight. This
enabled me to get a good look at the place before I undertook the
flagged path. The house was large and ill-kept, but I could see by the
proportions and the general hint of detail that it had once had dignity.
Though it was in sad need of paint and, I suspected from my brief
survey, of repairs, it looked water-tight--which was all I cared for.
The same could hardly be said of the barns. Great gaps between the
boards, and a crazy inclination of the walls, showed that they had long
been unused to shelter anything. The roof of that house should cover my
head until morning, or I would know why. The perfectly responsible
pedestrian is by no means unknown in these hills, and I flattered myself
that, if I was disreputable, it was at all events not after the fashion
of a tramp. I knocked authoritatively on the front door with my
stick--making it rattle, and flaking off, I regret to say, a little more
of its scanty paint.
I saw a light passing from room to room within the house, then saw it
extinguished. Presently I heard footsteps. The door was neither locked
nor bolted, evidently, for it opened easily.
The figure that stood before me on the threshold struck me dumb. I could
not get out my prepared speech, with its cunning combination of pathos,
simplicity, and graceful firmness. The room behind the woman was
lighted faintly by four candles set in a row on a central table. They
did not flicker in the draught from the open door. I dare say there was
no draught; that the wind was, at the moment, hurrying round the other
corners of the house, and that the exceeding stillness of the flames in
all that hurly-burly was natural enough. But, at the instant, it did not
seem natural; and I wondered, somewhere at the back of my brain, “Why
four? Why four?”
The woman who surveyed me in silence was enough, as I think any one
would have admitted, to put a curse on the candles for any traveller to
whom she stood suddenly revealed. She was well above middle height, but
her shoulders were fearfully bowed; and her thick white hair, cropped
short, stood out like a wild mane. The candles were behind her, so that
I could not see her eyes, but I could make out the thinness of the face,
and the nose and the chin that approached each other over the toothless
mouth. I knew at once that all the stage crones I had ever seen were
mere mockeries of make-up. Still I was absolutely silent, and still she
did not ask me my business. Over her misshapen shoulder, behind the
table, I saw four chairs precisely placed, and, behind those,
four-ill-assorted mirrors hung askew on the wall from which the paper
was peeling. And still we stared at each other with no word.
Finally she stood aside, obviously meaning for me to come in.
Then I stammered out the ruins of my speech--hypnotized, simply, by the
situation; for as soon as I saw her and the room in which she stood, my
intention to stop there had slipped quite away. She paid no attention to
my words, but put her hand on my arm and drew me inside the door. I
hardly realized what I was doing. Not a muscle opposed her touch. Only
when I found myself standing in the room itself, I wondered why I had
gone in. I put my hand on the knob, intending to pass back at once
across the threshold, but she shook her head. I waited, simulating
patience, to see what she would do, for one look at her eyes and one
quick comprehensive glance about the room had explained everything.
There were four spoons on the table and four shovels carefully stacked
in the corner against one of the doors. Otherwise--except for a heap of
red woollen cloth, evidently an old curtain, on the floor beside me--the
room was empty. The careful art of madness had arranged the room, and
the hand that had done it was the hand that, a moment since, had been
laid on my arm. The eyes and the room together told me everything.
Then she spoke. “Have you seen them?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t seen any one.” And I started to go out, but
she twisted herself behind me and shut the door.
She seemed disappointed. “You haven’t seen _her_, have you?” The
dreadful brown eyes came an inch nearer my face.
“No--no one.”
She nodded satisfied. “He isn’t here.”
“No, I am sure he isn’t. There isn’t any one here except you, is there?”
I spoke conversationally, edging my way to the door, pushing her
slightly before me. My hand was on the knob again.
“Oh, yes, the house is full. But he isn’t here. I wouldn’t let him in.
You know I wouldn’t.”
Her voice was very deep, and her speech, though ordinary enough, was not
the slipshod idiom of the other inhabitants of the Hollow whom I had
encountered.
I opened the door an inch or two--open it farther I could not, she was
so close to it. A big moth flew into one of the nearly burned-out
candles, sizzling loudly. She started towards it, and I opened the door
wider. I did not wish to make any sudden dash, for somewhere back in my
head was book-wisdom to the effect that one must be intensely quiet with
the insane. She pulled the moth out with her long fingers and came back.
Her movements were exceedingly quick, but before she reached me I had
time to open the door wide, and to pick up the red curtain and drop it
on the floor again between her and me. It parted and fell in four
pieces. She did not tread on it; she got down on her knees to push it
aside. But by that time I was on the flagging in front of the house.
“Good-night,” I said, as I turned--still forcing myself to move slowly.
“He isn’t here. Come in, come in.” The wind blew the white mop of hair
wildly as she craned her neck out into the darkness.
“I know he isn’t. But I have to go, you see.” I was half-way down the
path, walking very slowly, though every muscle cried haste, and I was
dripping with sweat.
“You’re going to find him,” the voice boomed after me. But, thank
heaven, she did not stir.