|The hut was built two sides and the roof of sodded poles; the roof
had new clapboards of birch bark, but the rest had once belonged to a
charcoal burner; the front side was partly poled and partly open, the
back was the under-slope of a rock. For it stood by a cliff, one of the
many that show their lonely faces all over the Cattle Ridge, except that
this was more tumultuous than most, and full of caves made by the clumsy
leaning bowlders; and all about were slim young birch trees in white and
green, like the demoiselles at Camelot. Old pines stood above the cliff,
making a soft, sad noise in the wind. In one of the caves above the
leafage of the birches we kept the idols, especially Baal, whom we
thought the most energetic; and in front of the cave was the altar-stone
that served them all, a great flat rock and thick with moss, where ears
of com were sacrificed, or peas or turnips, the first-fruits of the
field; or of course, if you shot a chipmunk or a rabbit, you could
have a burnt offering of that kind. Also the altar-stone was a council
chamber and an outlook.
It was all a secret place on the north side of the Cattle Ridge, with
cliffs above and cliffs below. Eastward half a mile lay the Cattle Ridge
Road, and beyond that the Ridge ran on indefinitely; southward, three
miles down, the road took you into Hagar; westward the Ridge, after all
its leagues of length and rigor of form, broke down hurriedly to the
Wyantenaug River, at a place called the Haunted Water, where stood
the Leather Hermit's hut and beyond which were Bazilloa Armitage's
bottom-lands and the Preston Plains railroad station. The road from
the station across the bridge came through Sanderson Hollow, where the
fields were all over cattle and lively horses, and met the Cattle Ridge
Road to Hagar. And last, if you looked north from the altar-stone, you
saw a long, downward sweep of woodland, and on and on miles and miles to
the meadows and ploughed lands toward Wimberton, with a glimpse of the
Wyantenaug far away to the left. Such were the surroundings of the place
of abandoned gods. No one but ourselves came there, unless possibly the
Hermit. If any one had come it was thought that Baal would pitch him
over the cliffs in some manner, mystically. We got down on our hands and
knees, and said, “O Baal!” He was painted green, on a shingle; but
his eyes were red. The place was reached from the Cattle Ridge Road by
trail, for the old wood-road below was grown up to blackberry brambles,
which made one scratched and bloody and out of patience, unless it were
blackberry time.
And on the bank, where the trail drops into the climbing highway, there
Aaron and Silvia were sitting in the June afternoon, hand in hand, with
the filtered green light of the woods about them. We came up from Hagar,
the three of us, and found them. They were strangers, so far as we knew.
Strangers or townsmen, we never took the trail with any one in sight;
it was an item in the Vows. But we ranged up before them and stared
candidly. There was nothing against that. Her eyes were nice and blue,
and at the time they contained tears. Her cheeks were dimpled and pink,
her brown dress dusty, and her round straw hat cocked a bit over one
tearful blue eye. He seemed like one who had been growing fast of late.
His arms swung loosely as if fastened to his shoulders with strings. The
hand that held her small hand was too large for its wrist, the wrist too
large for the arm, the arm too long for the shoulder. He had the first
growth of a downy mustache, a feeble chin, a humorous eye, and wore a
broad-brimmed straw hat and a faded black coat, loose and flopping to
his knees. A carpet bag lay at his feet, only half full and fallen over
with an air of depression. He seemed depressed in the same way.
“What's she crying for?” asked Moses Durfey, stolidly.
Aaron peered around at her shyly.
“She's scared to go home. I ain't, but I mote be 'fore I got there.”
“What's your name?”
“We-ell--”
He hesitated. Then, with loud defiance:
“It's Mr. and Mrs. Bees.”
A red squirrel clambered down a low-hanging branch overhead, and
chattered sharply, scattering flakes of bark. Aaron, still holding
Silvia's hand, leaned back on the bank and looked up. All lines of
trouble faded quickly from his face. He smiled, so that his two front
teeth stood out startlingly, and held up a long forefinger.
“Cherky little cuss, ain't he?”
The squirrel became more excited. Aaron's finger seemed to draw him
like a loadstone. He slid down nearer and nearer, as far as the branch
allowed, to a foot or two away, chattering his teeth fearfully. We knew
that any one who could magnetize so flighty and malicious a person as a
red squirrel, must be a magician, however simple he might be otherwise.
Aaron snapped his finger and the squirrel fled. “We'd better be movin',
Silvy.”
Silvia's tears flowed the faster, and the lines of trouble returned to
Aaron's face.
“Why don't she want to go home?” persisted Moses, stolidly.
We drew close beside them now and sat on the bank, Moses and I by Aaron,
Chub Leroy by Silvia. Chub was thoughtful. Silvia dried her eyes and
said with a gulp:
“It's pa.”
“That's it.” Aaron nodded and rubbed his sharp nose. “Old man Kincard,
it's him.”
They both looked at us trustfully. Moses saw no light in the matter.
“Who's he?”
“He's my father-in-law. He ain't goin' to like it. He's a sneezer. What
he don't like generally gets out of the way. My snakes! He 'll put Silvy
up the chimney and me in the stove, and he 'll light the fire.”
He chuckled and then relapsed into trouble. His emotions seemed to flit
across his face like sunbeams and shadows on a wall, leaving no trace
behind them, or each wiped out by the next.
“Snakes! We might just as well sit here.”
Silvia wept again. Moses's face admitted a certain surprise.
“What'll he do that for?”
While Aaron told their story, Silvia sometimes commented tearfully
on his left, Moses stolidly on his right, and the red squirrel with
excitement overhead; Chub and I were silent; the woods for the most part
kept still and listened too, with only a little sympathetic murmur of
leaves and tremble of sunbeam and shadow.
The Kincard place, it seemed, lay five miles away, down the north side
till you cleared the woods, and then eastward among the foothills. Old
Kincard's first name was James. And directly across the road stood the
four-roomed house where the Bees family once lived. It was “rickety
now and rented to rats.” The Bees family had always been absent-minded,
given to dying off and leaving things lying around. In that way Aaron
had begun early to be an orphan and to live with the Kincards. He was
supposed to own the old house and the dooryard in front of it, but the
rats never paid their rent, unless they paid it to the old man or the
cat; and Mr. Kincard had a low opinion of Aaron, as being a Bees, and
because he was built lengthwise instead of sidewise and knew more about
foxes than cows. It seemed to Aaron that a fox was in himself a more
interesting person; that this raising more potatoes than you could eat,
more tobacco than you could smoke, this making butter and cheese and
taking them to Wimberton weekly, and buying little except mortgages
and bank accounts, somewhere involved a mistake. A mortgage was an
arrangement by which you established strained relations with a neighbor,
a bank account something that made you suspicious of the bank. Now in
the woods one dealt for direct usefulness, comfort, and freedom of mind.
If a man liked to collect mortgages rather than fox-skins, it was the
virtue of the woods to teach tolerance; but Mr. Kincard's opinion of
Aaron was low and active. There was that difference between a Kincard
and a Bees point of view.
Aaron and Silvia grew up a few years apart on the old spread-out farm,
with the wooded mountainside heaving on the south and stretching east
and west. It was a neighborhood of few neighbors, and no village within
many miles, and the old man was not talkative commonly, though he'd open
up sometimes. Aaron and Silvia had always classed themselves together in
subdued opposition to their grim ruler of destiny. To each other they
called him “the old man,” and expressed by it a reverential but opposed
state of mind. To Aaron the undoubted parts of life were the
mountain-side of his pleasures and the level fields of his toil.
Wimberton was but a troubled glimpse now and then, an improbable memory
of more people and houses than seemed natural. Silvia tended to see
things first through Aaron's eyes, though she kept a basal judgment of
her own in reserve.
“He always licked us together since we was little,” said Aaron, looking
at Silvia with softly reminiscent eye. “It was two licks to me for
Silvy's one. That was square enough, and the old man thought so. When he
got set in a habit he'd never change. It was two to me for Silvy's one.”
Aaron told him, but a week now gone, that himself and Silvia would wish
to be married, and he seemed surprised. In fact he came at Aaron with
the hoe-handle, but could not catch him, any more than a lonesome
rabbit. Then he opened up astonishingly, and told Aaron of his low
opinion of him, which was more spread-out and full of details than you'd
expect. He wasn't going to give Aaron any such “holt on him as that,”
with a guaranty deed, whatever that was, on eternity to loaf in, and he
set him the end of the week to clear out, to go elsewhere forever. To
Aaron's mind that was an absurd proposal. He wasn't going to do any
such foolishness. The rather he sold his collection of skins to a farmer
named Shore, and one morning borrowed a carpet bag and came over the
Cattle Ridge hand in hand with Silvia.
From Preston Plains they hired a team, drove over the line into York
State, and were married. The farmer named Shore laid that out for them.
He had a back score of trouble with the old man.
“And Silvy's got a cat,” added Aaron, “and she catches rats to please
herself. Silvy thinks she ought to catch rats to be obligin'. Folks that
live up these trees don't act that way. No more did Shore.”
Here Aaron looked shrewd and wise.
“I wish Sammy was here,” murmured Silvia, lovingly.
“First-rate cat,” Aaron admitted. “Now, we didn't marry to oblige each
other. Each of us obliged himself. Hey?”
Silvia opened her eyes wide. The idea seemed a little complicated. They
clasped hands the tighter.
“Now,” said Aaron, “Silvy's scared. I ain't, but I mote be when I got
there.”
A blue-jay flew shrieking down the road. Aaron looked after it with a
quick change of interest.
“See him! Yes, sir. You can tell his meanness the way he hollers. Musses
folks' eggs.”
Aaron no longer surprised us now, nor did Silvia. We accepted them.
We had standards of character and conduct, of wisdom and of things
possible, but they were not set for us by the pulpit, the statute book,
or the market-place. We had often gone forth on expeditions into the
mystical beyond, always with a certain purpose to achieve there, and at
some point it had been necessary to come home and face the punishment,
if there were any, to have supper, and go to bed. Home could not be left
permanently and another existence arranged, any more than the feet could
be taken from the earth permanently. It had been found impractical.
Aaron and Silvia were like ourselves. They might conceive of living away
from the farmhouse under the mountain-side a few days. They shrank from
facing old Kincard with his hoe-handle or horse-whip, but one must
go back eventually. We recognized that their adventure was bold and
peculiar; we judged the price likely to be appalling; we gave them
frank admiration for both. None of us had ever run away to be definitely
married, or suffered from a hoe-handle or a horse-whip, and yet all
these were things to be conceived of and sympathized with.
“I knew a blue-jay,” went on Aaron, thoughtfully, “that lived near the
end of Shore's land, and he never appeared to like anything agreeable.
He used to hang around other folks' nests and holler till they were
distracted.”
Silvia's snuffling caught his ear, and once more the rapid change passed
over his face.
“We-ell,” he said, “the old man'll be lively, that's sure. I'd stay
in the woods, if it was me, but women”--with a large air of
observation--“have to have houses.”.
“We've got a house,” broke in Chub, suddenly. We exchanged looks
furtively.
“They'll have to take the Vows,” I objected. “We've took 'em,” said
Aaron. “Parson--”
“You'll have to solemn swear,” said Moses. “Will you solemn swear?”
“I guess so.”
“And if you tell, you hope you drop dead.”
The blue-jay flew up the road again, shrieking scornfully. The red
squirrel trembled and chattered his teeth on the branch overhead. All
else in the woods was silent while Aaron and Silvia took the Vows.
And so we brought them, in excitement and content, to the place of the
abandoned gods. Baal lurked far back in his cave, the cliff looked down
with lonely forehead, the distant prospect was smooth and smoky. Neither
the gods nor the face of the world offered any promise or threat. But
Aaron and Silvia seemed to believe in the kindness of not human things.
Silvia fell to chattering, laughing, in unforeboding relief from sudden
and near-by evil.
Aaron had a surprising number of silver dollars, due to Shore and the
fox-skins, by means of which we should bring them supplies from Hagar;
and so we left them to the whispering gossip of leaves, the lonely
cliff, the lurking Baal, and the smooth, smoky prospect.
No doubt there were times to Aaron and Silvia of trembling awe,
dumb delight, conversations not to the point, so that it seemed more
successful merely to sit hand in hand and let the moon speak for them,
pouring light down silvery gulfs out of the abundant glory within her.
There could be seen, too, the dawn, as pink as Silvia's cheeks, but,
after all, not so interesting. A hermit-thrush sang of things holy at
dawn, far down the woodland, while the birch leaves trembled delicately
and the breeze was the sigh of a world in love; and of things quietly
infinite at sunset in the growth of rosy gloom.
“It's nice,” Silvia might whisper, leaning to Aaron.
“That's a hermit-thrush down there, Silvy. He opens his mouth, and oh!
Kingdom's comin'.”
“Yes.”
“Little brown chap with a scared eye. You don't ever see him hardly.”
“You don't want to, do you, Aaron?” after a long silence.
“Don't know as you do.”
There would be a tendency, at least, to look at things that way,
and talk duskily as the dusk came on, and we would leave them on the
altar-stone to take the trail below.
But early in the afternoon it would be lively enough, except that Silvia
had a prejudice against Baal, which might have been dangerous if Baal
had minded it; but he did her no harm. She referred to Elijah and those
prophets of Baal, and we admitted he had been downed that time, for it
took him when he was not ready, and generally he was low in his luck
ever since. But we had chosen him first for an exiled dignity, who must
needs have a deadly dislike for the other dignity who had once conquered
him vaingloriously, and so must be in opposition to much that we
opposed, such as Sunday-school lessons, sermons, and limitations of
liberty. It might be that our reasonings were not so concrete and
determined, but the sense of opposition was strong. We put it to Silvia
that she ought to respect people's feelings, and she was reasonable
enough.
Old Kincard, it seemed, was an interesting and opinionated heathen, and
Silvia had not experienced sermons and Sunday-schools. That explained
much. But she had read the Bible, which her mother had owned, before
she died; and we could follow her there, knowing it to be a book of
naturally strong points, as respects David for instance, Joseph, and
parts of Revelation.
Aaron did not care for books, and had no prejudice toward any being
or supposition that might find place in the woods. The altar-stone was
common to many gods and councils, and we offered it to Silvia, to use as
she liked. I judge she used it mostly to sit there with Aaron, and hear
the hermit-thrush, or watch the thick moonlight pour down the scoop of
the mountain.
That stretch of the Wyantenaug which is called the Haunted Water is
quiet and of slow current, by reason of its depth, and dark in color, by
reason of the steep fall of the Cattle Ridge and the pines which crowd
from it to the water's edge. The Leather Hermit's hut stood up from the
water in the dusk of the pines.
He came to the valley in times within the memories of many who would
speak if they were asked, but long enough ago to have become a settled
fact; and if any did not like him, neither did they like the Wyantenaug
to flood the bottom-lands in spring. The pines and the cliffs belonged
to the Sandersons, who cared little enough for either phenomenon.
We often met him on the Cattle Ridge, saw him pass glowering through the
thicket with shaggy gray beard and streaming hair. Sometimes he wore
a horse-blanket over his leathern vestment. He was apt to be there
Sundays, wandering about, and maybe trying to make out in what respect
he differed from Elijah the Tishbite; and although we knew this, and
knew it was in him to cut up roughly if he found out about Baal, being
a prophet himself both in his looks and his way of acting, still he went
to and fro for the most part on the other side of the crest, where he
had a trail of his own; and you could not see the altar-stone from
the top of the cliff, but had to climb down till you came to a jam of
bowlders directly over it.
We did not know how long he may have stood there, glowering down on us.
The smoke of the sacrifice was beginning to curl up. Baal was
backed against a stone, looking off into anywhere and taking things
indifferently. Silvia sat aside, twirled her hat scornfully, and said we
were “silly.” Aaron chewed a birch twig, and was very calm.
We got down on our hands and knees, and said, “O Baal!”
And the Hermit's voice broke over us in thunder and a sound as of
falling mountains. It was Sunday, June 26, 1875.
He denounced us under the heads of “idolaters, gone after the
abornination of the Assyrians; babes and sucklings, old in sin, setting
up strange gods in secret places; idle mockers of holy things, like the
little children of Bethel, whereby they were cursed of the prophet and
swallowed of she-bears”; three headings with subdivisions.
Then he came down thumping on the left. Silvia shrieked and clung to
Aaron, and we fled to the right and hid in the rocks. He fell upon Baal,
cast him on the altar-fire, stamping both to extinction, and shouted:
“I know you, Aaron Bees and Silvia Kincard!”
“N-no, you don't,” stammered Aaron. “It's Mrs. Bees.”
The Hermit stood still and glared on them.
“Why are you here, Aaron and Silvia Bees?”
Aaron recovered himself, and fell to chewing his birch twig.
“We-ell, you see, it's the old man.”
“What of him?”
“He'd lick us with a hoe-handle, wouldn't he? And maybe he'd throw
us out, after all. What'd be the use? Might as well stay away,” Aaron
finished, grumbling. “Save the hoe.”
The Hermit's glare relaxed. Some recollection of former times may have
passed through his rifted mind, or the scent of a new denunciation drawn
it away from the abornination of Assyria, who lay split and smoking
in the ashes. He leaped from the altar-stone, and vanished under the
leafage of the birches. We listened to him crashing and plunging,
chanting something incoherent and tuneless, down the mountain, till the
sound died away.
Alas, Baal-Peor! Even to this day there are twinges of shame, misgivings
of conscience, that we had fled in fear and given him over to his enemy,
to be trampled on, destroyed and split through his green jacket and red
eye. He never again stood gazing off into anywhere, snuffing the fumes
of sacrifice and remembering Babylon. The look of things has changed
since then. We have doubted Baal, and-found some restraints of liberty
more grateful than tyrannous. But it is plain that in his last defeat
Baal-Peor did not have a fair chance.
Concerning the Hermit's progress from this point, I can only draw upon
guesses and after report. He struck slantingwise down the mountain, left
the woods about at the Kincard place, and crossed the fields.
Old Kincard sat in his doorway smoking his pipe, thick-set,
deep-chested, long-armed, with square, rough-shaven jaws, and steel-blue
eyes looking out of a face like a carved cliff for length and edge. The
Hermit stood suddenly before and denounced him under two heads--as a
heathen unsoftened in heart, and for setting up the altar of lucre and
pride against the will of the Lord that the children of men should marry
and multiply. Old Kincard took his pipe from his mouth.
“Where might them marriers and multipliers be just now?”
The Hermit pointed to the most westward cliff in sight from the doorway.
“If you have not in mind to repent, James Kincard, I shall know it.”
“Maybe you'd put them ideas of yours again?”
The Hermit restated his position accurately on the subject of heathen
hearts and the altar of lucre.
“Ain't no mistake about that, Hermit? We-ell, now--”
The Hermit shook his head sternly, and strode away. Old Kincard gave a
subterranean chuckle, such as a volcano might give purposing eruptions,
and fixed his eyes on the western cliff, five miles away, a grayish spot
in the darker woods.
Alas, Baal-Peor!
Yet he was never indeed a wood-god. He was always remembering how fine
it had been in Babylon. He had not cared for these later devotions. He
had been bored and weary. Since he was gone, split and dead, perhaps it
was better so. He should have a funeral pyre.
“And,” said Chub Leroy, “we'll keep his ashes in an urn. That's the way
they always did with people's ashes.”
We came up the Cattle Ridge Road Monday afternoon, talking of these
things. Chub carried the urn, which had once been a pickle-jar. Life
still was full of hope and ideas. The Hermit must be laid low in his
arrogance. Apollo, now, had strong points. Consider the pythoness
and the oracle. The Hermit couldn't prophesy in the same class with a
pythoness. The oracle might run,
“He who dwells by the Haunted Water alone,
He shall not remain, but shall perish.”
We came then to the hut, but Silvia would have, nothing to do with
Baal's funeral, so that she and Aaron wandered away among the birches,
that were no older than they, young birches, slim and white, coloring
the sunlight pale green with their leaves. And we went up to the
altar-stone, and made ready the funeral, and set the urn to receive the
ashes, decently, in order. The pyre was built four-square, of chosen
sticks. We did not try to fit Baal together much; we laid him on as he
came. And when the birch bark was curling up and the pitchy black smoke
of it was pouring upward, we fell on our faces and cried: “Alas, Baal!
Woe's me, Baal!”
It was a good ceremony. For when you are doing a ceremony, it depends on
how much your feelings are worked up, of course, and very few, if any,
of those we had done--and they were many--had ever reached such a point
of efficiency as the funeral of Baal-Peor. Moses howled mournfully,
as if it were in some tooth that his sorrow lay. The thought of that
impressiveness and luxury of feeling lay mellow in our minds long after.
“Alas, Baal!”
Somebody snorted near by. We looked up. Over our heads, thrust out
beyond the edge of the bowlders, was a strange old face, with heavy
brows and jaws and grizzled hair.
The face was distorted, the jaws working. It disappeared, and we sat up,
gasping at one another across the funeral pyre, where the black smoke
was rolling up faster and faster.
In a moment the face came out on the altar-stone, and looked at us with
level brows.
“What ye doin'?”
“My goodness!” gasped Moses. “You aren't another hermit?”
“What ye doin'?”
Chub recovered himself.
“It's Baal's funeral.”
“Just so.”
He sat down on a stone and wiped his face, which was heated. He carried
a notable stick in his hand. “Baal! We-ell, what ailed him?”
“Are you Silvia's old man?” asked Chub.
“Just so--er--what ailed Baal?”
Then we told him--seeing Baal was dead and the Vows would have to be
taken over again--we told him about Baal, and about the Leather Hermit,
because he seemed touched by it, and worked his face and blinked his
sharp hard eyes uncannily. Some hidden vein of grim ideas was coming to
a white heat within him, like a suppressed molten stratum beneath the
earth, unsuspected on its surface, that suddenly heaves and cracks the
faces of stone cliffs. He gave way at last, and his laughter was the
rending tumult of an earthquake.
Aaron and Silvia came up through the woods hastily to the altar-stone.
“I say,” cried Chub. “Are you going to lick them? It's two to Aaron for
one to Silvia.”
“Been marryin' and multiplying have ye?”
He suppressed the earthquake, but still seemed mainly interested in
Baal's funeral.
Aaron said, “She's Mrs. Bees, anyhow.”
“Just so. Baal's dead. That hermit's some lively.”
“We'll get an oracle on him,” said Moses. “What you going to do to Aaron
and Silvia?”
Here Silvia cast herself on the old man suddenly and wept on his
shoulder. One often noticed how girls would start up and cry on a
person.
Maybe the earthquake had brought up subsoils and mellowed things; at
least Kincard made no motion to lick some one, though he looked bored,
as any fellow might.
“Oh, we-ell, I don't know--er--what's that oracle?”
“He who dwells hy the Haunted Water alone,
He shall not remain, but shall perish.”
“It's going to be like that,” said Chub. “Won't it fetch him, don't you
think?”
“It ought to,” said the old man, working his jaw. “It ought to.”
The black smoke had ceased, and flames were crackling and dancing all
over the funeral pyre. The clearer smoke floated up against the face of
the lonesome cliff. Aaron and Silvia clasped hands unfrightened. The
old man now and then rumbled subterraneously in his throat. Peace was
everywhere, and presently Baal-Peor was ashes.