|To know the Wyantenaug thoroughly is to be wise in rivers; which if any
one doubts, let him follow it from its springs to the sea--a possible
fortnight--and consider then how he is a changed man with respect to
rivers. Not that by any means it is the epitome of rivers. It is no
spendthrift flood-stream to be whirling over the bottom-lands in April
and scarcely able to wet its middle stones in August, but a shrewd and
honest river, a canny river flowing among a canny folk, a companionable
river, loving both laughter and sentiment, with a taste for the
varieties of life and a fine vein of humor. Observe how it dances and
sputters down the rapids--not really losing its temper, but pretending
to be nervous--dives into that sloping pass where the rocks hang high
and drip forever, runs through it like a sleuth-hound, darkly and
savagely, and saunters out into the sunlight, as who should say in a
guileless manner, “You don't happen to know where I'm going?” Then
it wanders about the valley, spreads out comfortably and lies quiet a
space, “But it really makes no difference, you know”; and after that
gives a chuckle, rounds a bunch of hills and goes scampering off, quite
taken up with a new idea. And so in many ways it is an entertaining and
friendly river, with a liking for a joke and a pretty notion of dramatic
effect.
But, of all times and places, I think it most beautiful in the twilight
and along that stretch, called of late the Haunted Water, opposite the
village of Preston Plains. The Cattle Ridge with its long heaving spine
comes down on the valley from the east, seeming to have it very much in
mind to walk over and do something to Preston Plains three miles beyond;
but it thought better of that long ago. The Wyantenaug goes close
beneath it in sheer bravado: “You try to cross me and you get jolly
wet”; for the Wyantenaug is very deep and broad just here. The Cattle
Ridge, therefore, merely wrinkles its craggy brows with a puzzled air,
and Preston Plains is untroubled save of its own inhabitants. As to that
matter the people of the village of Hagar have opinions. The valley
road goes on the other side of the river--naturally, for there are the
pastures, the feeding cattle, the corn-fields, and farmhouses--and the
Cattle Ridge side is steep, and threaded by a footpath only, for a mile
or more, up to Hants Corby's place. Hants Corby's is not much of a place
either.
In old times the footpath was seldom used, except by the Leather Hermit.
No boy in Hagar would go that way for his life, though we often went up
and down on the river, and saw the Leather Hermit fishing. The minister
in Hagar visited him once or twice, and probably went by the footpath.
I remember distinctly how he shook his head and said that the Hermit
sought salvation at any rate by a narrow way, and how the miller's wife
remonstrated with him for seeming to take the Hermit seriously.
“You don't mean to say he ain't crazy,” she said, in anxious defence of
standard reason.
“Oh, I suppose so, yes.”
The minister sighed and rubbed his chin uneasily, and Mrs. Mather
recovered her ordinary state of mind, which was a state of suppressed
complaint.
I was saying that the footpath was seldom used. Hants Corby would have
used it--for he was too shiftless to be afraid--if the river had run
the other way. As it was, he preferred to drift down in his boat and
row back when he had to. He found that easier, being very shiftless. The
Hermit himself went on the river, except in the spring when the current
below was too strong.
The opinions of the Leather Hermit may be shown in this way. If you came
on him, no matter suddenly, and asked whose land that was across the
river, he would answer promptly, “The devil's”; whereas it belonged
to Bazilloa Armitage, a pillar of the church in Preston Plains, who
quarrelled zealously with the other pillars; so that, as one sees, the
Leather Hermit was not in sympathy with the church in Preston Plains.
The people of the valley differed about him according to humor, and he
used strong language regarding the people of the valley according
to opportunity, especially regarding Bazilloa Armitage. He denounced
Bazilloa Armitage publicly in Preston Plains as a hypocrite, a
backbiter, and a man with a muck rake--with other language stronger
still. Bazilloa Armitage felt hurt, for he was, in fact, rather close,
and exceedingly respectable. Besides it is painful to be damned by a man
who means exactly what he says.
To speak particularly, this was in the year 1875; for the next year we
camped near the spot, and Hants Corby tried to frighten us into seeing
the Hermit's ghost. Bazilloa Armitage was denounced in June, and Hants
Corby on the second Friday in August, as Hants and the Hermit fished
near each other on the river. The Hermit denounced him under three
heads--sluggard, scoffer, and beast wallowing in the sty of his own
lustful contentment. On Saturday the Hermit rowed up to Hants Corby's
place in the rain and denounced him again.
Sunday morning the Hermit rose early, turned his back on the Wyantenaug,
and climbed the cliff, onward and up through the pines. The prophets of
old went into high places when they prayed; and it was an idea of his
that those who would walk in the rugged path after them could do no
better. Possibly the day was an anniversary, for it was of an August
day many years gone--before ever a charcoal pit was built on the Cattle
Ridge--that the Hermit first appeared on the Wyantenaug, with his
leather clothes in a bundle on his back, and perhaps another and
invisible burden beneath it. A third burden he took up immediately, that
of denouncing the sins of Wyantenaug Valley, as I have said.
All that Sabbath day the river went its way, and late in the afternoon
the sunlight stretched a thin finger beneath the hemlocks almost to the
Hermit's door. Across the river the two children of Bazilloa Armitage,
boy and girl, came down to the water's edge. The boy pulled a pole
and line out of some mysterious place in the bank. The little girl sat
primly on the grass, mindful of her white pinafore.
“You better look out, Cis,” he said. “Any fish you catch on Sunday
is devils. You don't touch him. You cut the line and let him dry till
Monday.”
“Oh, Tad!” gasped the little girl, “won't the Leather Hermit tell?”
“Well,” said Tad, sturdily, “father said he'd get even, if it took
a month of Sundays, and that's six Sundays by this time. There ain't
anything bothers the Hermit like catching the fish on Sundays, specially
if you catch a lot of 'em. Blamed old fool!” grumbled Tad.
“Oh, Tad,” gasped the little girl again, in awed admiration, “that's
swearing.”
But Tad did not mind. “There's Hants Corby,” he exclaimed; “he's going
to fish, too.”
Hants Corby floated down in his old boat, dropped anchor opposite the
children, and grinned sociably.
“He daren't touch his boat to-day,” he said in a husky whisper. “He'll
raise jinks in a minute. You wait.”
“Fishes is devils on Sunday, aren't they, Hants?”
“Trout,” returned Hants, decisively, “is devils any time.”
Both Tad Armitage and Hants Corby ought to have known that the Leather
Hermit sometimes went up the Cattle Ridge on Sundays to wrestle with
an angel, like Jacob, who had his thigh broken. We knew that much in
Hagar--and it shows what comes of living in Preston Plains instead of
Hagar.
Hants Corby motioned with his thumb toward the Hermit's hut.
“Him,” he remarked, “he don't let folks alone. He wants folks to let him
alone particular. That ain't reasonable.”
“Father says he's a fernatic,” ventured Tad. “What's a fernatic, Hants?”
“Ah,” said Hants, thoughtfully, “that's a rattlin' good word.”
Time dragged on, and yet no denouncing voice came from the further
shore. The door of the hut was a darker hole in the shade of the
hemlocks. Hants Corby proposed going over to investigate.
“If he ain't there, we'll carry off his boat.”
Tad fell into Hants's boat quite absorbed in the greatness of the
thought. It was not a good thing generally to follow Hants Corby, who
was an irresponsible person, apt to take much trouble to arrange a bad
joke and shiftlessly slip out from under the consequences. If he left
you in a trap, he thought that a part of the joke, as I remember very
well.
“A-a-a-ow!” wailed Cissy Armitage from the bank; for it dawned on her
that something tremendous was going forward, in which Tad was likely
to be suddenly obliterated. She sat on the bank with her stubby shoes
hanging over, staring with great frightened blue eyes, till she saw
them at last draw silently away from the further shore--and behold, the
Hermit's boat was in tow. Then she knew that there was no one in the
world so brave or so grandly wicked as Tad.
Cissy Armitage used to have fluffy yellow hair and scratches on her
shins. She was a sunny little soul generally, but she had a way of
imagining how badly other people felt, which interfered with her
happiness, and was not always accurate. Tad seldom felt so badly as she
thought he did. Tad thought he could imagine most things better on the
whole, but when it came to imagining how badly other people felt,
he admitted that she did it very well. Therefore when she set about
imagining how the Hermit felt, on the other side of the river, with no
boat to come across in, to where people were cosy and comfortable, where
they sang the Doxology and put the kittens to bed, she quite forgot that
the Hermit had always before had a boat, that he never yet had taken
advantage of it to make the acquaintance of the Doxology or the kittens,
and imagined him feeling very badly indeed.
Bazilloa Armitage held family prayers at six o'clock on Sunday
afternoons; and all through them Cissy considered the Hermit.
“I sink in deep waters,” read Bazilloa Armitage with a rising
inflection. “The billows go over my head, all his waves go over me,
Selah,” and Cissy in her mind saw the Hermit sitting on the further
shore, feeling very badly, calling Tad an “evil generation,” and saying:
“The billows go over my head, Selah,” because he had no boat. She
thought that one must feel desperately in order to say: “Selah,
the billows go over me.” And while Bazilloa Armitage prayed for the
President, Congress, the Governor, and other people who were in trouble,
she plotted diligently how it might be avoided that the Hermit should
feel so badly as to say “Selah,” or call Tad an “evil generation”; how
she might get the boat back, in order that the Hermit should feel better
and let bygones be; and how it might be done secretly, in order that Tad
should not make a bear of himself. Afterwards she walked out of the back
door in her sturdy fashion, and no one paid her any attention.
The Hermit muttered in the dusk of his doorway.
Leather clothes are stiff after a rain and bad for the temper; moreover,
other things than disordered visions of the heavens rolling away as a
scroll and the imperative duty of denouncing some one were present in
his clouded brain,--half memories, breaking through clouds, of a time
when he had not as yet begun to companion daily with judgment to come,
nor had those black spots begun to dance before his eyes, which black
spots were evidently the sins of the world. He muttered and shifted his
position uneasily.
There was once a little white house somewhere in the suburbs of a city.
It stood near the end of a half-built street, with a sandy road in
front. There was a child, too, that rolled its doll down the steps,
rolled after it, wept aloud and laughed through its tears.
The stiff leather rasped the Hermit's skin. The clouds closed in again;
he shook himself, and raised his voice threateningly in words familiar
enough to the denounced people of the Wyantenaug: “It is written, 'Thou
shalt have no other gods before me'; and your gods are multitudes.”
He stared with dazed eyes across the dusky river. The little ripples
chuckled, sobbed and gurgled in a soft, human way. Something seemed to
steal in upon him, like a gentle hand, pleading and caressing. He
made an angry motion to thrust it away, and muttered: “Judgment to
come--judgment to come.” He seemed to hear a sobbing and whispering,
and then two infinite things came together in his shattered brain with a
crash, leaving him stunned and still.
There was a syringa bush before the little white house, a picket fence,
too, white and neat. Who was it that when he would cry, “Judgment to
come!” would whisper and sob? That was not a child. That was--no--well,
there was a child. Evidently it rolled its doll down the steps and
rolled after it. There was a tan-yard, too, and the dressing of hides.
He dressed hides across a bench. The other men did not take much
interest in judgment to come. They swore at him and burned sulphur under
his bench. After that the child rolled its doll down the steps again,
and bumped after it pitifully.
The Hermit groaned and hid his face. He could almost remember it all, if
it were not for the black spots, the sins of the world. Something surely
was true--whether judgment to come or the child bumping down the steps
he could not tell, but he thought, “Presently I shall forget one of the
two.”
The sun had set, and the dusk was creeping from the irregular hills
beyond, over the village of Preston Plains, over the house of Bazilloa
Armitage. Dark storm-clouds were bearing down from the north. A glitter
sprang once more into the Hermit's eyes, and he welcomed the clouds,
stretching out his hands toward them. Suddenly he dropped his hands, and
the glitter died out in a dull stare. Across the last red reflection of
the water glided a boat, his own boat, or one like it. A little child in
white rose up and stood in the prow, and, as though she were a spirit,
the light in the west passed into her hair. It was not the right way for
judgment to come. The dark clouds bearing down from the north--that
was judgment to come; but the spirit in the boat, that--could not be
anything--it was false--unless--unless it rolled down the steps. And
then once more the two infinite things came together with a crash. He
leaped to his feet; for a moment his hands went to and fro over his
head; he babbled mere sounds, and fell forward on his face, groaning.
Cissy Armitage achieved the top of the bank with difficulty, and
adjusted her pinafore. The Hermit lay on his face very still. It was
embarrassing.
“I--I brought back your boat, so you needn't feel bad. I--I feel bad.”
She stopped, hearing the Hermit moan once softly, and then for a time
the only sound was the lapping of the water. It was growing quite dark.
She thought that he must feel even worse than she had imagined.
“I'm sorry. It's awful lonesome. I--want to go home.”
The Hermit made no motion. Cissy felt that it was a bad case. She
twisted her pinafore and blinked hard. The lumps were rising in her
throat, and she did not know what to say that would show the Hermit how
badly she felt--unless she said “Selah.” It was strong language, but she
ventured it at last.
“I feel awful bad. The--the billows go over my head, Selah!” Then she
wished that she had let “Selah” quite alone.
The Hermit lifted his face. It was very white; his eyes were fixed and
dead-looking, and he got his feet under him, as if he intended to creep
forward. Cissy backed against a tree, swallowed lumps very fast, and
decided to kick if he came near. But he only looked at her steadily.
“What is your name?” he said in a slow, plaintive tone, as a man speaks
who cannot hear his own voice. Cissy thought it silly that he should not
know her name, having seen her often enough,--and this gave her courage.
“Cecilia Armitage. I want to go home.”
“No!” shouted the Hermit. He sat up suddenly and glared at her, so that
the lumps began climbing her throat again faster than ever. “That isn't
the name.” Then he dropped his head between his knees and began sobbing.
Cissy did not know that men ever cried. It seemed to tear him up, and
was much worse than “The billows go over me, Selah.” On the whole there
seemed to be no point in staying longer. She walked to the bank and
there hesitated diffidently.
“I want to go home. I--I want you to row me.”
There was a long silence; the Hermit's head was still hidden between his
knees. Then he came over and got into the boat, not walking upright, but
almost creeping, making no noise, nor lifting his head. He took the oars
and rowed, still keeping his head down, until the boat came under the
old willow, where the bank runs low on the edge of Bazilloa Armitage's
ten-acre lot. It struck the bank, but he sat still, with his head down.
Cissy Armitage scrambled up the roots of the willow, looked back, and
saw him sitting with his head down.
Cissy Armitage was the last to see the Leather Hermit alive, for Hants
Corby found him Monday afternoon in shallow water, about a rod from
shore. The anchor stone was clasped in his arms, and the anchor rope
wound around his waist, which would seem to imply that he was there
with a purpose. If that purpose was to discover which of two things
were true--judgment to come, or the child that rolled its doll down
the steps--every one is surely entitled to an opinion on its success or
failure. There was a copy-book, such as children use, found in his
hut. On the cover was written, “The Book of Judgment.” It contained
the record of his denunciations, with other odd things. The people of
Wyantenaug Valley still differ, according to humor; but any one of them
will give his or her opinion, if you ask it.