THE WARDENS OF THE RIVER
While men are going about with a bit of lens and a measure of acid,
explaining the hidden things of this world, I should be very glad if
they would explain why it is that the evening of an autumn day always
recalls the lost Kingdom of the Little. The sun squinting behind the
mountains, the blue haze deepening in the hollows of the hills, the cool
air laden with faint odours from the nooks and corners of the
world,--what have these to do with the land of the work-a-day?
Long and long ago in that other country it meant that the fairies were
gathering under the hill for another raid on the province of the goblins
across the sedge-fields; that the owls were going up on the ridges to
whisper with the moon; that the elves one by one, in their quaint yellow
coats, were stealing along under the oak trees on the trail of the wolf
spider. But what can it mean in the grown-up country?
When the Golden Land is lost to us, when turning suddenly we find the
enchanted kingdom vanished, do we give up the hope of finding it again?
We know that it is somewhere across the world, and we ought to find it,
and we know, too, that its out-country is like these October afternoons,
and our hearts beat wildly for a moment, then the truth strikes and we
see that this is not The Land.
But it brings the memory of the heyday of that other land, where, in my
babyhood, like the kings of Bagdad, I had a hundred bay horses in their
stables, each bridled with a coloured woollen string, and stalled in the
palings of the garden, and each with his high-sounding name, and
princely lineage, and his thrilling history, and where I had a thousand
black cattle at pasture in the old orchard.
It might be that an ancient, passing, would not see the drove, because
his eyes were hide-bound, but he would see me as I galloped along by the
hot steers, and hear the shouting, and he could not doubt that they were
there. I was tremendously busy in those earlier days. No cattle king of
the Hills had one-half the wonderful business. I dropped to sleep in old
Liza's arms with my mighty plans swimming in my head. I had long rides
and many bunches of cattle to gather on to-morrow, and I must have a
good night's rest.
Or I rode in Ward's arms, when he went to salt the cattle, and sat in
the saddle while he threw the handfuls of salt on the weeds, and I
noticed all the wonders of the land into which we came. I saw the
golden-belted bee booming past on his mysterious voyage, and he was a
pirate sailing the summer seas. I heard the buzzing curse of the bald
hornet, and I wished him hard luck on his robbing raid. And the swarms
of yellow butterflies were bands of stranger fairies travelling
incognito. I knew what these fellows were about, but I said nothing. The
ancients were good enough folk, but their idea of perspective was
abominably warped. I gave them up pretty early.
The hills by the great Valley River are a quiet country, sodded deep,
with here and there an open grove like those in which the dreamers
wandered with a garland of meadowsweet, or the fauns piped when the
world was young. Through them, now and then, a little stream goes
laughing, fringed with bulrushes and beds of calamus and fragrant mint,
a narrow stream that runs chuckling through the stiff sod and spreads
dimpling over the road on a bed of white sand, for all the world like a
dodging sprite of the wood who laughs suddenly in some sunlit corner.
We splashed through one of these little brooks as the sun was setting,
and El Mahdi's feet sank in the white sand. I watched the crystal water
go bubbling over his hoofs and then pour with a gush into the shoe
tracks which held the print like a mould. We left a silver trail or, now
when the sun was slanting, a golden trail, big with the air of enchanted
ventures.
When we came on the brow of the hills flanking the approaches to the
Valley River it was already night. The outlines of the far-off mountains
were blending into one huge shadow. It was now the wall of the world,
with no path for a human foot. The hills were a purple haze, the trees
along their crests making fantastic pictures against the sky. Beyond the
land of living men, it seemed, an owl hooted, and a belated dove called
and called like a moaning spirit wandering in some lost tarn of the
Styx.
We rode down to the bend of the Valley River over a stretch of sandy
land pre-empted by the cinque-foil and the running brier, the country of
the woodcock and the eccentric kildee. We could hear the low, sullen
roar of the river sweeping north around this big bend, long before we
came to it. Under the stars there is no greater voice of power. We rode
side by side in the deepening twilight, making huge shadows on the
crunching sand. Up to this hour it seemed to me that we had been idling
through some long and pleasant ride, with the loom of evil afar off in
the front. We had talked of peril merrily together, as men loitering in
a tavern talk easily of the wars. But now in the night, under the spell
of the booming water, the atmosphere of responsibility returned.
Ward was depending upon me and the two beside me. Woodford's men moved
back yonder in the Hills, and maybe they moved out there beyond the
water, and we could see nothing and hear nothing but the sand grinding
under the iron of a horse's shoe. In the night the face of the Valley
River was not a pleasant thing to see. It ran muddy and swift, even with
its banks, a bed of water a quarter of a mile in width, its yellow
surface gleaming now and then in the dim light of the evening like the
belly of some great snake.
Standing on its bank we could see the other shore, a line of grey fog.
The yellow tongues of the water lapped the bank, and crept muttering in
among the willows, an ominous, hungry brood.
The roar of the river, now that one stood beside it, seemed not so
great. It was dull, heavy, low pitched, as though the vast water growled
comfortably. The rains in the mountains had filled the bed brimming like
a cup, even in the drought of summer. The valley was wide and deep in
this bend,--too wide and too deep to be crossed by the ordinary
bridge,--so the early men had set up a sort of ferry when they first
came to this water.
It was a rude makeshift, the old men said, two dugouts of poplar lashed
together and paddled, a thing that would carry a man and his horse, or
perhaps a yoke of oxen. Now, the ferry was more pretentious. A wire
cable stretched across the river, fastened on the south bank to a post
set deep in the earth, and flanked by an abutment of sandstone, and on
the north bank wound round a huge elm that stood by the road within a
dozen yards of the river.
On this cable the boat ran, fastened with wire ropes and two pulleys, a
sort of long, flat barge that would carry thirty cattle. The spanning
cable made a great curve down the river, so that the strength of the
current was almost sufficient to force the barge across, striking it
obliquely against the dip of the wire. How the current could be made to
do this work was to me one of the mysteries, but it did do it, guided
and helped by the ferrymen. I have wondered at it a hundred times as I
sat under El Mahdi's nose with my feet dangling over the side of the
boat.
We stopped on the slope where the boat landed.
Jud threw back his shoulders and shouted; and someone answered from the
other side, "Who-ee!" a call that is said to reach farther than any
other human sound. It came high up over the water, clear enough, but as
from a great distance. There were no bells at the crossings in this
land. Every man carried a voice in his throat that could reach half a
mile to the grazing steers on the sodded knobs.
The two sons of old Jonas Horton maintained the ferry as their father
had done before them. It was an inheritance, and it was something more
than this. It was a trust, a family distinction, like a
title,--something which they were born into, as a Hindoo is born into
his father's trade. If they had been ousted from this ferry, they would
have felt themselves as hopelessly wronged as the descendants of an old
house driven from their baronial estate.
The two, Mart and Danel, lived with the mother, a flat, withered old
woman, in a log house by the river. They were tall, raw-boned, serious
men, rarely leaving the river, and at such times hurrying back uneasy.
Their faces at the church or in the village were anxious, as of one who
leaves his house closed with a fire roaring in the chimney; or better,
perhaps, of some fearful child who has stolen away from his daily
everlasting task. Sometimes the mother would say, "There is no meal in
the barrel," or, "You're drinking the last of the coffee;" and they
would look at each other across the table, troubled, as men dire beset
called upon to decrease the forces of a garrison. Then one would set out
with a bag on his shoulder, throwing his long body forward at each step
and dangling his arms, hurrying as though he ought not to take the time.
Presently the boat crept towards us out of the water, swung down swiftly
and ground its nose in the bank. The two ferrymen were bareheaded, in
their brown homespun coats. They had possibly been at supper, and turned
around on their bench to answer through the open door. They inquired if
we all wished to be set over, and we rode on to the boat for answer. The
man in the bow reached up and caught the cable with a sort of iron
wrench, and began to pull. The other took a pole lying by the horses'
feet, thrust it against the bank and forced the boat out into the water.
Then he also took a wrench from his pocket, and when his brother,
walking down the length of the barge from bow to stern, reached the end,
he caught the cable and followed, so that the pull on the wire was
practically continuous.
The warm south wind blew stiffly in our faces and the horses shifted
their feet uneasily. If the Valley River was ugly from its bank it was
uglier from its middle. It tugged at the boat as though with a thousand
clinging fingers, and growled and sputtered, and then seemed to quit it
for a moment and whisper around the oak boards like invisible
conspirators taking counsel in a closet. A scholar on that water nursing
his sallow face in the trough of his hand would have fallen a-brooding
on the grim boatman crossing to the shore that none may leave, or the
old woman of the Sanza, poling her ghostly, everlasting raft; and had he
listened, he could have heard the baying of the three-mouthed hound
arousing the wardens of the Vedic Underworld to their infernal watching
by that water we all must cross.
I think the hunchback had no idea of the moods of nature; at any rate
they never seemed to affect him. To him all water was something to drink
or something to swim in, and the earth was good pasture or hard road to
ride a horse over. The grasp of no agnostic was more cynical. He
inquired if any of Woodford's men had crossed that day, and was answered
that they had not.
Then he began to hum a hoary roundelay about the splendid audacity of
old Mister Haystack and his questionable adventures, set to an
unprintable refrain of "Winktum bolly mitch-a-kimo," or some such jumble
of words. I have never heard this song in the mouth of any other man. He
must have found it somewhere among the dusty trumpery of forgotten old
folk-lyrics, and when he sang it one caught the force of the Hebraic
simile about the crackling of thorns under a pot.
Jud laughed, and the hunchback piped a higher cackle and dangled his
bridle rein. "Humph," he said, "maybe you don't like that song."
"It ain't the song," replied Jud.
"Maybe you don't like the way I sing it," said he.
"It might be different," said Jud.
"Well," said he, "it wouldn't mean different."
Here I took a hand in the dialogue. "What does it mean anyhow?" I said.
"It's about the foolest song I ever heard."
"Quiller," replied the hunchback, propping his fist under his bony jaw,
"you've heard tell of whistlin' to keep up your courage. Well, that song
was made for them as can't whistle."
Jud turned in astonishment. "Afraid?" he said; "what are you afraid of?"
The hunchback leaned over as if about to impart a secret. "Ghosts!" he
whispered. I laughed at the discomfiture of the giant, but Ump went on
counterfeiting a deep and weird seriousness which, next to his singing,
was about the most ludicrous thing in the world. "Ghosts, my laddiebuck.
But not the white-sheeted lady that comes an' says, 'Foller me,' nor the
spook that carries his head under his arm tied up in a tablecloth, but
ghosts, my laddiebuck, that make tracks while they walk."
"I thought ghosts rode broomsticks," said Jud.
"Nary a broomstick," replied the hunchback. "When they are a-follerin'
Mister Ward's drovers, it's a little too peaked for long ridin'."
Then he broke off suddenly and called to the ferryman. "Danel," he said,
"how many cattle will this boat hold?"
"Big cattle or stockers?" inquired the man.
"Exporters," said Ump.
"Mart," called the brother, "can we carry thirty exporters?"
"Are they dehorned?" inquired Mart.
"Muley," said Ump.
"We can carry thirty muleys if they ain't nervous," replied the brother
called Mart. "Are you gatherin' up some cattle for Mister Ward?"
"Yes," said Ump. "We'll be here early in the morning with six hundred,
an' we want to git 'em set over as quick as you can. How long will it
take?"
"Well," said Danel, "mighty nigh up till noon, I reckon. Do you mind,
Mart, how long we were settin' over them Alkire cattle?"
"We begun in the morning, and we stopp'd for an afternoon bite. It took
the butt end of the day," replied the brother.
We had now reached the south bank of the Valley River, and when the boat
slipped up on the wet sod, we rode ashore, and turned into the pike that
runs by the river bank. The ferrymen, with the characteristic
hospitality of the Hills, requested us to dismount and share the evening
meal, but we declined, urging the lateness of the hour.
Through the open door I could see the unfinished supper, the sweet
corn-pone cut like a great cheese, the striped bacon, and the blue stone
milk pitcher with its broken ears.