hell''
That was accurate enough, though put in figures of speech, but the Kid
was still more accurate regarding Bill Smith:
“Nobody knows who Bill Smith is,
His kin nor yet his kith,
An nobody cares who Bill Smith is,
An neither does Bill Smith;”
which was perfectly true. Anyhow the Kid could not have taken the wad,
nor Little Irish. It must have been Bill Smith.
“It was Bill,” he decided.
He did not make any special comments. Some thing or other happens to a
man every day. He went down-stairs, through a dim narrow hallway.
“Hope there don't any one want something of me. I don't believe they 'll
get it.”
There were sounds in the basement, but no one met him. In the street the
Ninth Avenue car rolled by, a block away. He saw a restaurant sign which
said fearlessly that a stew cost ten cents, went in and breakfasted for
fifteen, waited on by a thin, weary woman, who looked at his blue coat
and braided hat with half-roused interest.
The cobble-stones on Sixth Avenue were shining and wet. Here and there
some one in the crowd turned to look after him. It might have been the
uniform, the loafer's slouch of the hat, taken with the face being young
and too white.
The hands of the station clock stood at ten. He took a ticket to the
limit of eighty-five cents, heard dimly the name of a familiar junction;
and then the rumble of the train was under him for an hour. Bill Smith
had left him his pipe and tobacco. Bill had good points. Sandy was
inclined to think kindly of Bill's thoughtfulness, and envy him his
enterprise. The roar of the car-wheels sounded like Kid Sadler's voice,
hoarse and choky, “A-alas, a-alas!”
It was eleven o'clock at the junction. The mist of the earlier morning
had become a slow drizzle. Trains jangled to and fro in the freight
yards. He took a road which led away from the brick warehouses, streets
of shady trees and lawns, and curved to the north, along the bank of a
cold, sleepy river.
There was an unpainted, three-room house somewhere, where a fat woman
said “Good land!” and gave him a plate full of different things, on a
table covered with oil-cloth. He could not remember afterward what he
ate, or what the woman said further. He remembered the oil-cloth, which
had a yellow-feverish design of curved lines, that twisted snakily, and
came out of the cloth and ran across the plate. Then out in the gray
drizzle again.
All the morning his brain had seemed to grow duller and duller, heavy
and sodden; but in the afternoon red lights began dancing in the
mist. It might have been five miles or twenty he had gone by dusk; the
distinction between miles and rods was not clear--they both consisted
of brown mud and gray mist. Sometimes it was a mile across the road. The
dusk, and then the dark, heaved, and pulsed through blood-red veins, and
peeled, and broke apart in brilliant cracks, as they used to do nights
in the field hospital. There seemed to be no hope or desire in him,
except in his feet, which moved on. The lights that travelled with him
got mixed with lights on each side of a village street, and his feet
walked in through a gate. They had no reason for it, except that the
gate stood open and was painted white. He pushed back the door of a
little garden tool-house beside the path, and lay down on the floor.
He could not make out which of a number of things were happening. The
Fourteenth Infantry appeared to be bucking a steep hill, with the smoke
rolling down over it; but on the other hand Kid Sadler was singing
hoarsely, but distinctly, “A-alas, a-alas!” and moreover, a dim light
shone through a white-curtained window somewhere between a rod and a
mile away, and glimmered down the wet path by the tool-house. Some one
said, “Some of it's jag and some of it's the yellow. About half and
half.” He might have been making the remark himself, except that he
appeared to be elsewhere. The rain kept up a thin whisper on the roof
of the tool-house. Gasps, shouts, thumping of feet, clash of rifle and
canteen. The hill was as steep as a wall. Little Irish said, “His legs
was too short to shtep on the back av his neck wid the shteepness av the
hill.”
“A-alas! A comin' home.”
“Oh, shut up, Kid!”
“A-alas, a-alas!” The dark was split with red gashes, as it used to be
in the field hospital. The rain whispered on the roof and the wet path
glimmered like silk.
It was the village of Zoar, which lies far back to the west of
Wyantenaug Valley, among low waves of hills, the house the old Hare
Place, and Miss Elizabeth Hare and Gracia lived there behind the white
gateway.
That gateway had once been an ancient arch overhead, with a green wooden
ball topping it. Some one cut a face on the ball, that leered into the
street. It did not in the least resemble Miss Elizabeth, whose smile
was gentle and cool; but it was taken down from its station of half a
century; and Gracia cried secretly, because everything would needs be
disconsolate without an arch and a proper wooden ball on top of it,
under which knights and witch ladies might come and go, riding and
floating. It seemed to break down the old garden life. Odd flowers would
not hold conversations any more, tiger-lilies and peonies bother
each other, the tigers being snappish and the peonies fat, slow, and
irritating. Before Gracia's hair had abandoned yellow braids and become
mysterious, when she learned neat sewing and cross-stitch, she used to
set the tigers and peonies quarrelling to express her own feelings about
neat sewing and cross-stitch. Afterward she found the memory of that
wickedness too heavy, and confessed it to Miss Elizabeth, and added the
knights and witch ladies. Miss Elizabeth had said nothing, had seemed
disinclined to blame, and, going out into the garden, had walked to and
fro restlessly, stopping beside the tigers and peonies, and seeming to
look at the arched gateway with a certain wistfulness.
Miss Elizabeth had now a dimly faded look, the charm of a still
November, where now and then an Indian summer steals over the chill. She
wore tiny white caps, and her hair was singularly smooth; while Gracia's
appeared rather to be blown back, pushed by the delicate fingers of a
breeze, that privately admired it, away from her eager face, with its
gray-blue eyes that looked at you as if they saw something else as well.
It kept you guessing about that other thing, and you got no further than
to wonder if it were not something, or some one, that you might be,
or might have been, if you had begun at it before life had become so
labelled and defined, so plastered over with maxims.
The new gateway was still a doubtful quantity in Gracia's mind. It was
not justified. It had no connections, no consecrations; merely a white
gate against the greenery.
It was the whiteness which caught Sandy Cass's dulled eyes, so that he
turned through, and lay down in the tool-house, and wondered which of a
number of incongruous things was really happening: Little Irish crying
plaintively that his legs were too short--“A-alas, a-alas!”--or the
whisper of the rain on the roof.
Gracia lifted the white curtains, looked out, and saw the wet path
shining.
“Is it raining, Gracia?”
“It drizzles like anything, and the tool-house door is open, and, oh,
aunty! the path shines quite down to the gate.”
“It generally shines in the rain, dear.”
“Oh!” said Gracia, thoughtfully. She seemed to be examining a sudden
idea, and began the pretence of a whistle which afterward became a true
fact.
“I wish it wouldn't be generally, don't you? I wish things would all be
specially.”
“I wouldn't wi--I wouldn't whistle, if I were you,” said Miss Elizabeth,
gently.
“Oh!” Gracia came suddenly with a ripple and coo of laughter, and
dropped on her knees by Miss Elizabeth. “You couldn't, you poor aunty,
if you tried. You never learned, did you?”
Miss Elizabeth hesitated.
“I once tried to learn--of your father. I used to think it sounded
cheerful. But my mother would n't allow it. What I really started to say
was, that I wouldn't, if I were you, I wouldn't wish so many things to
be other than they are. I used to wish for things to be different, and
then, you know, when they stay quite the same, it's such a number of
troubles.”
Gracia clasped her fingers about one knee, studied the neatly built fire
and the blue and white tiles over it, and thought hard on the subject of
wishes. She thought that she had not wished things to be different, so
much as to remain the same as of old, when one wore yellow braids, and
could whistle with approval, and everything happened specially. Because
it is sad when you begin to suspect that the sun and moon and the
growths of spring do not care about you, but only act according to
habits they have fallen into, and that the shining paths, which seem
to lead from beyond the night, are common or accidental and not meant
specially. The elder romancers and the latest seers do insist together
that they are, that such highways indeed as the moon lays on the water
are translunary and come with purposes from a celestial city. The
romancers have a simple faith, and the seers an ingenious theory about
it. But the days and weeks argue differently. They had begun to trouble
the fealty that Gracia held of romance, and she had not met with the
theory of the seers.
Sandy Cass went through experiences that night which cannot be written,
for there was no sequence in them, and they were translunary and
sub-earthly; some of them broken fragments of his life thrown up at him
out of a kind of smoky red pit, very much as it used to be in the field
hospital. His life seemed to fall easily into fragments. There had not
been much sequence in it, since he began running away from the house of
the squire at fifteen. It had ranged between the back and front doors of
the social structure these ten years. The squire used to storm, because
it came natural to him to speak violently; but privately he thought
Sandy no more than his own younger self, let loose instead of tied down.
He even envied Sandy. He wished he would come oftener to entertain him.
Sandy was a periodical novel continued in the next issue, an irregular
and barbarous Odyssey, in which the squire, comparing with his Pope's
translation, recognized Scylla and Charybdis, Cyclops and Circe, and
the interference of the quarrelling gods. But that night the story went
through the Land of Shadows and Red Dreams. Sandy came at last to the
further edge of the Land; beyond was the Desert of Dreamless Sleep; and
then something white and waving was before his eyes, and beyond was a
pale green shimmer. He heard a gruff voice:
“Hm--Constitution, Miss Hare. That chap had a solid ancestry. He ought
to have had a relapse and died, and he 'll be out in a week.”
Another voice said in an awed whisper:
“He's like my Saint George!”
“Hm--Legendary? This St. G. looks as if he'd made up with his devil.
Looks as if they'd been tolerably good friends.”
A third voice remonstrated:
“Doctor!”
“Hm, hm--My nonsense, Miss Gracia, my nonsense.”
The two ladies and the doctor went out.
It was a long, low room, white, fragrant, and fresh. Soft white curtains
waved in open windows, and outside the late sunlight drifted shyly
through the pale green leaves of young maples. There were dainty things
about, touches of silk and lace, blue and white china on bureau and
dressing-table, a mirror framed with gilded pillars at the sides and a
painted Arcadia above.
“Well, if I ain't an orphan!” grumbled Sandy, feebly.
An elderly woman with a checked apron brought him soup in a bowl. She
was quite silent and soon went out.
“It's pretty slick,” he thought, looking around. “I could n't have done
better if I'd been a widow.”
The drifting quiet of the days that Sandy lay there pleased him for the
time. It felt like a cool poultice on a wound. The purity and fragility
of objects was interesting to look at, so long as he lay still and did
not move about among them. But he wondered how people could live
there right along. They must keep everything at a distance, with a
feather-duster between. He had an impression that china things always
broke, and white things became dirty. Then it occurred to him that there
might be some whose nature, without any worry to themselves, was to keep
things clean and not to knock them over, to touch things in a feathery
manner, so that they did not have to stay behind a duster. This subject
of speculation lasted him a day or two, and Miss Elizabeth and Gracia
began to interest him as beings with that special gift. He admired
any kind of capability. Miss Elizabeth he saw often, the woman in the
checked apron till he was tired of her. But Gracia was only now and then
a desirable and fleeting appearance in the doorway, saying:
“Good morning, Saint George.”
She never stayed to tell him why “Saint George.” It came to the point
that the notion of her yellow hair would stay by him an hour or more
afterward. He began to wake from his dozes, fancying he heard “Good
morning, Saint George,” and finally to watch the doorway and fidget.
“This lying abed,” he concluded, “is played out.” He got up and hunted
about for his clothes. His knees and fingers trembled. The clothes hung
in the closet, cleaned and pressed, in the extraordinary neighborhood of
a white muslin dress. Sandy sat down heavily on the bed. Things seemed
to be whizzing and whimpering all about him. He waited for them to
settle, and pulled on his clothes gradually. At the end of an hour he
thought he might pass on parade, and crept out into the hall and down
the stairs. The sunlight was warm in the garden and on the porch, and
pale green among the leaves. Gracia sat against a pillar, clasping one
knee. Miss Elizabeth sewed; her work-basket was fitted up inside on an
intricate system. Gracia hailed him with enthusiasm, and Miss Elizabeth
remonstrated. He looked past Miss Elizabeth to find the yellow hair.
“This lying abed,” he said feebly, “is played out.”
Sitting in the sunlight, Sandy told his story gradually from day to day.
It was all his story, being made up of selections. He was skilful
from practice on the squire, but he saw the need of a new principle
of selection and combination. His style of narrative was his own. It
possessed gravity, candor, simplicity, an assumption that nothing could
be unreasonable or surprising which came in the course of events, that
all things and all men were acceptable. Gracia thought that simplicity
beautiful, that his speech was like the speech of Tanneguy du Bois,
and that he looked like Saint George in the picture which hung in her
room--a pale young warrior, such as painters once loved to draw, putting
in those keen faces a peculiar manhood, tempered and edged like a sword.
Sandy looked oddly like him, in the straight lines of brow and mouth.
Saint George is taking a swift easy stride over the dead dragon, a kind
of level-eyed daring and grave inquiry in his face, as if it were Sandy
himself, about to say, “You don't happen to have another dragon? This
one wasn't real gamy. I'd rather have an average alligator.” She laughed
with ripples and coos, and struggled with lumps in her throat, when
Sandy through simplicity fell into pathos. It bewildered her that the
funny things and pathetic things were so mixed up and run together, and
that he seemed to take no notice of either of them. But she grew
stern and indignant when Bill Smith, it was but probable, robbed the
unsuspecting sleep of his comrade.
“You see,” said Sandy, apologetically, “Bill was restless, that was the
reason. It was his enterprise kept bothering him. Likely he wanted
it for something, and he could n't tell how much I might need without
waking me up to ask. And he couldn't do that, because that'd have been
ridiculous, would n't it? Of course, if he'd waked me up to ask how
much I wanted, because he was going to take the rest with him, why, of
course, I'd been obliged to get up and hit him, to show how ridiculous
it was. Of course Bill saw that, and what could he do? Because there
wasn't any way he could tell, don't you see? So he left the pipe and
tobacco, and a dollar for luck, and lit out, being--a--restless.”
And Gracia wondered at and gloried in the width of that charity, that
impersonal and untamed tolerance.
Then Sandy took up the subject of Kid Sadler. He felt there was need of
more virtue and valor. He took Kid Sadler and decorated him. He fitted
him with picturesque detail. The Kid bothered him with his raucous
voice, froth-dripped mustache, lean throat, black mighty hands, and
smell of uncleanness. But Sandy chose him as a poet. It seemed a good
start. Gracia surprised him by looking startled and quite tearful, where
the poet says:
“Nobody cares who Bill Smith is,
An neither does Bill Smith;”
which had seemed to Sandy only an accurate statement.
But the Kid's poetry needed expurgation and amendment. Sandy did it
conscientiously, and spent hours searching for lines of similar rhyme,
which would not glance so directly into byways and alleys that were
surprising.
“A comin' home,
A roamin' home--”
“I told the Kid,” he added critically, “roamin' wasn't a good rhyme, but
he thought it was a pathetic word.”
“Oh, when I was a little boy 't was things I did n't know,
An when I growed I knowed a lot of things that was n't so;
An now I know a few things that's useful an selected:
As how to put hard liquor where hard liquor is expected--”
and so on, different verses, which the Kid called his “Sing Song.”
Sandy's judgment hung in doubt over this whether the lines were
objectionable. He tempered the taste of the working literary artist
for distinct flavor, and his own for that which is accurate, with the
cautions of a village library committee, and decided on,
“An puts them things in moral verse to uses onexpected.”
“I don't know what he meant by 'onexpected,'” Sandy commented with a
sense of helplessness, “but maybe he meant that he didn't know what he
did mean. Because poets,” getting more and more entangled, “poets are
that kind they can take a word and mean anything in the neighborhood, or
something that'll occur to 'em next week.”
Gracia admired the Kid, though Miss Elizabeth thought she ought to refer
to him as Mr. Sadler, which seemed a pity. And she declared a violent
love for Little Irish, because “his auburn hair turned bricky red with
falling down a well,” and because he wished to climb hills by stepping
on the back of his neck. It was like Alice's Adventures, and especially
like the White Knight's scheme to be over a wall by putting his head on
top and standing on his head.
After all humors and modifications, Sandy's story was a wild and strange
thing. It took new details from day to day, filling in the picture.
To Gracia's imagination it spread out beyond romance, full of glooms,
flashes, fascinations, dangers of cities, war and wilderness, and
in spite of Sandy's self-indifference, it was he who dominated the
pilgrimage, coloring it with his comment. The pilgrim appeared to be a
person to whom the Valley of the Shadow of Death was equally interesting
with Vanity Fair, and who entering the front gate of the Celestial City
with rejoicing would presently want to know whither the back gate would
take him. It seemed a pilgrimage to anywhere in search of everything,
but Gracia began to fancy it was meant to lead specially to the new
garden gate that opened so broadly on the street, and so dreamed the
fancy into belief. She saw Sandy in imagination coming out of the
pit-black night and lying down in the tool-house by the wet shining
path. The white gate was justified.
Sandy's convalescence was not a finished thing, but he was beginning to
feel energy starting within him. Energy! He knew the feeling well. It
was something that snarled and clawed by fits.
“I'm a wildcat,” he said to himself reflectively, “sitting on eggs.
Why don't he get off? Now,” as if addressing a speculative question for
instance to Kid Sadler, “he could n't expect to hatch anything, could
he?”
It was such a question as the Kid would have been pleased with, and have
considered justly. “Has he got the eggs?”
“I don't know. It's a mixed figure, Kid.”
“Does he feel like he wanted to hatch 'em?”
“What'd he do with 'em hatched? That's so, Kid.”
“_Is_ he a wildcat?”
“Yep.”
“He is. Can a wildcat hatch eggs? No, he can't.”
“A wildcat”--the Kid would have enjoyed following this figure--“ain't
an incubator. There ain't enough peacefulness in him. He'd make a yaller
mess of 'em an' take to the woods with the mess on his whiskers. It
stands to reason, don't it? He ain't in his own hole on a chickadee's
nest.”
Sandy stood looking over the gate into the village street, which was
shaded to dimness by its maples, a still, warm, brooding street.
“Like an incubator,” he thought, and heard Gracia calling from up the
path:
“Saint George!”
Sandy turned. She came down the path to the gate.
“Aren't you going to fix the peony bed?”
“Not,” said Sandy, “if you stay here by the gate.”
Gracia looked away from him quickly into the street.
“It's warm and quiet, isn't it? It's like--”
Zoar was not to her like anything else.
“Like an incubator,” said Sandy, gloomily, and Gracia looked up and
laughed.
“Oh, I shouldn't have thought of that.”
“Kid Sadler would have said it, if he'd been here.”
“Would he?”
“Just his kind of figure. And he'd be saying further it was time Sandy
Cass took to the woods.”
He had an irritating spasm of desire to touch the slim white fingers
on the gate. Gracia moved her hands nervously. Sandy saw the fingers
tremble, and swore at himself under his breath.
“Why, Saint George?”
“Thinking he was a wildcat and he'd make a yel--a--Maybe thinking he
didn't look nat--I mean,” Sandy ended very lamely, “the Kid'd probably
use figures of speech and mean something that'd occur to him by and by.”
“You're not well yet. You're not going so soon,” she said, speaking
quite low.
Sandy meditated a number of lies, and concluded that he did not care for
any of them. He seemed to dislike them as a class.
This kind of internal struggle was new and irritating. He had never
known two desires that would not compromise equably, or one of them
recognize its place and get out of the road. The savage restlessness in
his blood, old, well-known, expected, something in brain and bone, had
always carried its point and always would. He accounted for all things
in all men by reference to it, supposing them to feel restless, the
inner reason why a man did anything. But here now was another thing,
hopelessly fighting it, clinging, exasperating; somewhere within him it
was a kind of solemn-eyed sorrow that looked outward and backward over
his life, and behold, the same was a windy alkali desert that bore
nothing and was bitter in the mouth; and at the ends of his fingers
it came to a keen point, a desire to touch Gracia's hair and the slim
fingers on the gate.
Gracia looked up and then away.
“You're not well yet.”
“You've been uncommonly good to me, and all--”
“You mustn't speak of it that way. It spoils it.” It seemed to both as
if they were swaying nearer together, a languid, mystical atmosphere
thickening about them. Only there was the drawback with Sandy of an
inward monitor, with a hoarse voice like Kid Sadler's, who would be
talking to him in figures and proverbs.
“Keep away from china an' lace; they break an' stain; this thing has
been observed. Likewise is love a bit o' moonlight, sonny, that's all,
an' a tempest, an' a sucked orange. Come out o' that, Sandy, break away;
for, in the words o' the prophet, 'It's no square game,' an' this here
girl, God bless her! but she plays too high, an' you can't call her,
Sandy, you ain't got the chips. Come away, come away.”
“And that,” Sandy concluded the council, “is pretty accurate. I'm broke
this deal.”
He stood up straight and looked at Gracia with eyes drawn and narrowed.
She felt afraid and did not understand.
“You don't know me. If you knew me, you'd know I have to go.”
The wind rose in the afternoon, and blew gustily through street and
garden. The windows of Miss Elizabeth's sitting-room were closed. The
curtains hung in white, lifeless folds. But in Gracia's room above the
windows were open, and the white curtains shook with the wind. Delicate
and tremulous, they clung and moulded themselves one moment to the
casement, and then broke out, straining in the wind that tossed the
maple leaves and went up and away into the wild sky after the driving
clouds.
Sandy turned north up the village street, walking irresolutely. It might
be thirty miles to Wimberton. The squire had sent him money. He could
reach the railroad and make Wimberton that night, but he did not seem to
care about it.
Out of the village, he fell into the long marching stride, and the
motion set his blood tingling. Presently he felt better; some burden was
shaken off; he was foot-loose and free of the open road, looking to the
friction of event. At the end of five miles he remembered a saying of
Kid Sadler's, chuckled over it, and began humming other verses of the
“Sing Song,” so called by the outcast poet.
“Oh, when I was a little boy, I laughed an then I cried,
An ever since I done the same, more privately, inside.
There's a joke between this world an me 'n it's tolerable grim,
An God has got his end of it, an some of it's on him.