|Between the mill and the miller's house in Hagar the Mill Stream made
a broad pool with a yellow bottom of pebbles and sand. It was sometimes
called the Mediterranean. If you wished to cross the Mill Stream, there
was a plank below, which was good to jounce on also, though apt to tip
you into the water. The pool was shallow, about twenty feet across and
as long as you might care to go upstream,--as far as the clay bank,
anyway, where Chub Leroy built the city of Alexandria. Jeannette Paulus
walked all over Alexandria to catch a frog, and made a mess of it,
and did not catch the frog. That is the way of things in this world.
Alexandria fell in a moment, with all her palaces and towers. But there
were other cities, and commerce was lively on the Mediterranean.
On the nearer side, against the gray, weatherbeaten flank of the
miller's house was a painted bench, for convenience of the morning sun
and afternoon shade; and I call it now the Elders' Seat, because Captain
David Brett and others were often to be seen sitting there in the sun
or shade. I remember the minister was there, and Job Mather, the miller,
whenever his grist ran low, so that he let his stem millstones cease
to grind. These were the three to whom the Elders' Seat seemed to us to
belong by right of continuance, because our short memories ran not to
the contrary. Captain David was well in his seventies, the miller not
far behind, and Mr. Royce already gray-haired. They sat and watched the
rise and fall of cities, the growth and decay of commerce, the tumult of
conquests, and the wreck of high ambition. They noticed that one thing
did not change nor cease, namely, the ripple of the stream; just as
if, in history, there really were a voice distinguishable that went
murmuring forever.
After the fall of Alexandria Damascus was built, but inland, so that it
had to be reached by caravan; and Moses Durfey laid the foundations of
Byzantium where the pool narrowed into rushing water, and Venice was
planted low in a marshy place hard by the seven hills of Rome. But you
must know that Bobby Bell built the city of Rome absurdly, and filled it
with pot-holes to keep frogs in and floating black bugs, so that it
was impossible to hold it against the Carthaginians. There were wars in
those days. These were the main marts of trade, but there were quays
and fortresses elsewhere; and it should be told sometime how the Barbary
pirates came down. Rome was in a bad way, for Bobby had one aquarium in
the Campus Martius, and another where the Forum should have been. There
was nothing flourishing but the aqueducts.
The three Elders would sit leaning forward, watching the changes of
fortune and event that went on from hour to hour by the Mediterranean.
The captain smoked his pipe; the minister rested his chin on his cane;
the miller's hands were on his knees, his large white face stolid,
his heavy lips seldom moving. He was a thinking man, the miller,--a
slow-moving, slow-speaking, persistent man, and a fatalist in his way of
thinking, though he used no such term; it was his notion of things.
They talked of old history out of Gibbon and Grote and the Seven
Monarchies, and they talked of things that had happened to them as
men in the world; but the things which they thought of most often, in
watching the children and the Mill Stream, they said little about, for
these had not happened a thousand or two thousand years before, nor
twenty or thirty, but just sixty or seventy. And this was why they came
so often to the Elders' Seat, because something dim and happy seemed to
come up to them, like a mist, from the Mill Stream, where the children
quarrelled and contrived.
“I'll tell ye what ailed Rome,” said Captain David. “She needed to be
keeled and scraped. She fouled her bottom!”
The minister answered slowly: “No, she was rotten within. She lost the
faith in God and in man that keeps a people sound.”
“Ho! Well, then she wa'n't handled right.”
The miller rubbed his thumb slowly on the palm of his hand. “She was
grinded out,” he said. “She couldn't help it. Corn can't keep itself
from meal when the stones gets at it. No more a man can't keep his bones
from dust, nor a people, either, I'm thinking, when its time comes.”
The minister shook his head. “I don't like that.”
“I don't know as I do, either. And I don't know as that makes any
difference.”
“Ho!” said the captain. “Bobby's got a new frog!”
And Chub Leroy cried out in despair: “Look out, Bobby! You're stepping
on the Colosseum!”
I would not pretend to say how long the Elders' Seat had stood there, or
how many years the Elders had come to it now and again; but I remember
that it seemed to us very permanent, in a world of shifting empires,
where Alexandria was suddenly walked upon and deserted, and Venice went
down the current in a rainy night, and was spoken of no more. We could
not remember when it had not stood in its place. It was a kind of
Olympus to us, or Delphi, where we went for oracles on shipping and
other matters.
Afterward we grew up, and became too old to dabble and make beautiful
things of gray clay, except Chub Leroy, who is still doing something
of that kind, cutting and building with clay and stone. But the Elders'
Seat remained, and the Elders watched other children, as if nothing had
happened. Only, Captain David had trouble to keep his pipe in his mouth.
So that when the Elders' Seat took its first journey, it seemed very
difficult for us to understand,--even for those who were too old to
dabble in gray clay.
It was not more than a quarter of a mile from the mill, past the drug
store, the Crocketts' house, where Captain David lived, and so on by
the crossroads, to the minister's, with the graveyard just beyond. I
remember how very yellow and dusty the road was in the summer of '86, so
that the clay bottom cracked off in flat pieces, which could be gathered
up; and then, if you climbed the wall with care enough, you could scale
them at woodchucks. August was sultry and still. The morning-glories
drooped on Captain David's porch, and the pigeons on the roof went to
sleep more than was natural.
The minister and Job Mather sat, one afternoon, in the Elders' Seat;
for Captain David, he had not gone out through his gate those many days.
There was history enough in process on the Mediterranean. The Americans
and Carthaginians were preparing to have a battle, on account of docks
that ran too near together. The Elders discovered that they did not care
about it.
The miller got to his feet, and lifted one end of the bench. “Come,” he
said gruffly. “Let's move it.”
“Hey!” said the minister, looking troubled and a bit lost. Then his lips
trembled. “Yes, Job. That's so, Job. We'd better move it.”
The children came up from the Mediterranean in a body, and stared. It
was much to them as if, in Greece, the gods had risen up and gone away,
for unknown reasons, taking Olympus with them. The old men went along
the yellow, dusty road with very shuffling steps, carrying the Elders'
Seat, one at each end, till they turned into Captain David's garden and
put it down against the porch. Mrs. Crockett came to the door, and held
up her hands in astonishment. Captain David was helped out. He was faded
and worn with pain. He settled himself in the Elders' Seat. It did not
seem possible to say anything. The captain smoked his pipe; the minister
rested his chin on his cane; the miller's hands were on his knees, his
large white face stolid and set.
“I'm goin' to shell those peas to-morrow,” began the captain at last.
Then his voice broke, and a mist came into his eyes.
“I bet ye the Americans are licking the Carthaginians.”
On the contrary, the Americans and Carthaginians, with other nations,
were hanging over the picket fence, staring and bewildered. What was the
use of mere human wars, if primeval things could be suddenly changed?
The grass might take a notion to come up pink or the seas to run out at
the bottom, and that sort of thing would make a difference.
The sun dropped low in the west, and presently Chub Leroy, who built the
city of Alexandria ten years before, came slowly along in the shadow
of the maples, and St. Agnes Macree was with him. She was old Caspar
Macree's granddaughter, and he was a charcoal-burner on the Cattle Ridge
long ago. They were surprised to see the Elders' Seat, and stopped a
moment. St. Agnes looked up at him and smiled softly, and Chub's eyes
kept saying, “Sweetheart, sweetheart,” all the time. Then they went on.
“I remember--” said Captain David, and stopped short.
“Eh! So do I,” said the minister.
“You do! Well, Job, do you remember? Ain't it the remarkablest thing!”
The miller's heavy face was changed with a slow, embarrassed smile. And
all these three sat a long time very still, while the sunlight slanted
among the morning-glories and the pigeons slept on the roof.
There came a day in September when the minister and the miller were
alone again on the Elders' Seat, but Captain David lay in his bed near
the window. He slept a great deal, and babbled in his half dreams:
sometimes about ships and cordage, anchorage in harbors and whaling in
the south seas; and at times about some one named “Kitty.” I never heard
who Kitty was. He said something or other “wasn't right.” He took the
trouble and the end of things all in good part, and bore no grudge to
any one for it; it seemed only natural, like coming to anchor at last.
“When a man gets legs like mine,” he said, “it's time he took another
way of getting round. Something like a fish'd be my notion. Parson, a
man gets the other side of somewhere, he can jump round lively-like,
same as he was a boy, eh?”
The minister murmured something about “our Heavenly Father,” and Captain
David said softly: “I guess he don't call us nothing but boys. He says,
'Shucks! it ain't natural for 'em to behave.' Don't ye think, parson?
Him, he might see an old man like me and tell him, 'Glad to see ye,
sonny'; same as Harrier in Doty's Slip. The boys come in after a year
out, or maybe three years, and old man Harrier, he says, 'Glad to see
ye, sonny'; and the boys gets terrible drunk. He kept a junk-shop,
Harrier.”
The minister tried to answer, but could not make it out.
“I saw a ship go down sudden-like. It was in '44. It was inside Cape
Cod. Something blowed her up inside. Me, I've took my time, I have. What
ye grumbling about, parson?”
In the morning the shutters were closed, and all about the house was
still. The pigeons were cooing on the roof of the porch; and Captain
David was dead, without seeing any reason to grumble. Down at the mill
the miller watched his monotonous millstones grinding slowly.
The Elders' Seat was moved once more after Captain David died, not
back to the Mediterranean, but further up the yellow road and into the
minister's yard, facing westward. From there the captain's white slab
could be seen through the cemetery gate. The two Elders occupied the
seat some years, and then went in through the gate.
But the Elders' Seat and its journeys from place to place seemed to
have some curious meaning, hardly to be spelled. I imagine this far, at
least: that at a certain point it became to the two more natural, more
quiet and happy, to turn their eyes in the direction the captain had
gone than in the direction they had all come. It pleased them then to
move the Elders' Seat a little nearer to the gate. And when the late
hour came, it was rather a familiar matter. The minister went in to look
for his Master, and the miller according to his' notion of things.