THE ORGAN BUILDER'S HOUSE
The Hudson River has not only the opulence that Washington Irving
portrayed, not only the swelling of soft hills and majesty of toppling
mountains and slopes that spell fecundity of farmland but it has,
along palisade and headland, another opulence. Under those mountains
that throw down thunder-storms, and along the rocky walls climbed by
winding roads magnificent homes testify to the imperialism that has
not yet been cleansed from the heart of man. The instinct for choosing
imposing sites for impressive homes would be difficult to trace to its
beginning. Robber barons built their castles inaccessibly for very good
reasons; the prelates' palaces were on the hills that all might see
and be reminded of Mother Church. The Roman Roads, unlike the furtive
sunken roads of the cavemen, were built high because of fearlessness
and pride. But the American who builds his home, or one of his homes,
on the Hudson does not do so just because he longs to feast his eyes
on sumptuous natural terrace and broad natural waterway; he does so
because in his instinctive choice of surroundings, he selects an
expressive background for his own dignity and his own importance.
All night long the great steamers of the Hudson River glide
majestically up and down, the long white fingers of their
search-lights pointing to this and that lordly residence. The Oil King,
the Copper King, the Pill King, and the Shoe King, whose white palaces
and miles of stocked and fruited domain are gated and avenued away from
the public, are silently indicated to such humble travelers as care
to look. One can hardly travel the Hudson River nowadays and worship
the great Creator, for the great Creator is a little overshadowed by
the aforesaid King of Commerce, the great Producer. But in spite of
the sleepiness and lethargic atmosphere that the Dutch traditions have
strangely imparted to the strings of villages, there are in certain
moods superb freedoms and freshnesses along the Hudson. There are still
spiritual emphasis and quests along red sandstone shores, where the
green hemlocks gather. The sunrises in the Westchester Hills are like
black tents with banners streaming. The waters of the Tappan Zee are
then a great glittering field of cloth of gold, and at sunset when the
houses on the Irvington Hills are all ablaze with sunstruck window
glass, the bold, black breasts of Palisades and Hook Mountain front the
river like African slaves guarding some inner mystery of valley, some
clean, unspoiled fastness of forest and field and stream.
To a man who sat at his table in a bleak old wooden house high up on
the western range, these night and morning scenes spelled only two
things, the Human Will, as yet absorbed only in the passions of an
aggressive aggrandizement, and the proud subservience of nature to
the little schemes of men. Nature, lying down like a great beast of
destiny, to let the little shapes and enterprises swarm and crowd
over her! "Only," thought Watts Shipman, "only when the great beast
starts to rise and take new positions, look out then, little shapes.
Either you will be raised on some great mountain of Nature's mysterious
changes or you will slip into some new uncharted sea or who knows, you
may spill altogether out of the world!"
It was this wistful attitude toward nature, the great mystery, the
great Book of Worship and Wonder that had taken Watts Shipman from his
clubs and cliques and corporations, away from success and "putting it
over" and their accompanying shiftiness and meanness, and had taken him
for the season of a summer into the country, to think.
Yes, just that--"to think," was what he replied to complaining letters
and telegrams--"Watts, what are you doing, stuck up there on the rim
of nowhere?" His confrères laughed at the curt answer "Thinking." For
a lawyer so able, so successful, there could be no comment of "queer"
or "crazy"; Watts' partners shrugged their shoulders and went on with
the business which, as he had denied them telephone access, they had
sometimes to refer to him by long night letters. "Drat your thinking,"
writes the senior partner, "don't I think?" To which came the teasing
telegram by code, "You don't think, you calculate."
Watts' house, planted high on the spur of the mountain a few miles
above Willow Roads, the little Dutch village where Sard lived, had
been owned by an organ builder about whom the Willow Roaders liked
to say "nobody knew anything." The Willow Roaders, complacent in the
usual village life where everyone thinks he knows "everything about
everyone" disdained knowing anything about a mere organ builder. The
house, surrounded as it was by hanging boulders and pine trees, looked
gravely down on the big field of river and on all the little steeples
and turrets and gingerbread conservativeness of Willow Roads. Watts
liked to commune with the spirit of the man who had once lived here.
"I'll bet he stole some notes out of the Dawn," the man thought, "and
think of nights here--like last evening, with the hermit thrush and the
sky gold through the trees. 'The Organ Builder'--I can just see him, a
seedy chap, possibly with too many children, probably half starving,
working up here with the village below curious and gossiping, thinking
maybe an organ builder was immoral."
It was a soft yet cool spring night. The little frogs in mountain rain
pools kept up a croaking like rusty wheels; the pungent smells of earth
and leaf mould came through the window. Fire burned quietly and soft
lamplight fell on books and rugs and flickered over the cast of the
Winged Victory, over the dingy chimneypiece. Watts' eyes, through the
smoke of his pipe, went to this. "Nice girl," he grunted in approval,
"nice girl--afraid of nothing--ready for anything, yet somehow all
woman, true to type but not crystallized by type." The man, rising,
walked up and down the rather bare room where one or two fine rugs
caught the warm fire colors. "I can say this for the Greeks, they,
themselves, fastened nothing upon civilization but healthy ideals for
men and women; harvest making, home keeping, child bearing, strong
bodies, imaginative minds, it wasn't until their æsthetics and the
Roman plutocrats got hold of all they gave the world that their
philosophies were debased." The lawyer's eyes, sombre in strength and
depth, looked fixedly at the gracious woman figure; he compared it
with the figures on Fifth Avenue, tripping in affected coquettishness
or striding in callous mannishness. "Not clever of you, ladies, to
find no middle path," he considered. "Who made you as you are to-day,
Paris--the war? That's what you and the newspapers and magazines say,
but come now, didn't you make yourselves? You wanted to be 'popular,'
you want to be 'in' things, behold the result." Watts' mouth curled
with slow mockery on his pipe.
"The Winged Victory didn't want to be popular," he decided. "She didn't
want to be in things.
"She wanted to live. Who fastened the modern woman on us, anyway?"
Watts demanded sternly of his dog. "Why have we got to stand for her?"
The silken-haired, electric-muscled beast came over to him softly.
Friar Tuck, with tail tossing, laid a devoted head on the brown
golf-trousered knee. Watts tousled the long ears. "Always the henchman,
aren't you, you old brute--why do you play that game?" The lawyer
looked long and questioningly into his dog's eyes. "Why don't you get
up and give me an order; how do you know I'm superior to you? You are
probably equal to me."
He considered the bowl of his pipe then rubbed it on Friar Tuck's head.
"Just as I suppose, if men only knew it, they could be equal to Christ
and the angels. Say, look here." Watts lifted the dog by his forefeet.
He put the two forepaws against his breast. "How do you know I'm
superior to you? Why do you play this game--do you just want to be
'popular' with me?"
* * * * *
Not to accept dogma--to be ready for the new light, to trim one's
mental sails for the breeze from a fresh quarter, it had given the
great criminal lawyer a profound insight into the human heart, an
almost awful power over the souls of men. Wastrel after wastrel had
tried to look Watts Shipman in the eye, and had known that some strange
God of Equity sat watchful in this man--that only in proportion to
their actual guilt would they be dealt with. Men and women had broken
down and told him all, only because of the unendurable patience and
remorseless gravity of his uncondemning gaze. He had fathered many a
boy and stood many a woman on her own feet, and yet Life, the Great
Mother, had held back from him what he, as human, knew must be the
ultimate and only gift. Women had angled for Watts Shipman because of
his fame; they had tried to use him politically; they had trusted him,
feared him and been penitent before him. No woman had ever loved him.
Staring at the Victory, the man smoked silently. Half ruefully he
passed his hand over the russet head on his knee, he threw back his own
great black-haired head with its dapple of white spots; he stretched
his long limbs and his deep-lined humorous face saddened. "Women want
to play," he said softly, "uncertain, funny little things, they want
to play"--tenderly, "and, not necessarily, to play fair--and I'm no
plaything, although," he waved his pipe toward the bas-relief over the
fire piece, "I could play with you, Miss Victory."
The word play made him think of something; pushing away the dog, Watts
rose and went to a table drawer, taking out, with a smile, a little
envelope with "Pudge" scrawled on it. The lawyer, still smiling, slid
out the contents, two Indian arrow-heads, one white, the other gray
flint. Thoughtfully he turned them over in his large palm. "Poor good
little Indians," he murmured, "we're still teaching our children that
you were devils, aren't we? Aren't we funny? We rather owe you an
apology, you strange, mysterious men who never knew fulfilment--who
ranged these Hudson River shores and thronged New Jersey and New
England and were mighty hunters and happy until you came up against the
white man and gunpowder and tobacco and whiskey! Well"--Watts chuckled,
"Pudgy shan't be prejudiced. I'll write you a good character for him."
Knocking his pipe out, laying it tenderly on the mantel, the big man
sprawled like a schoolboy over the table writing in long hand the
letter that was to accompany the arrow-heads.
"Dear Pudge--How are you? What are you doing, helping Mother or raising
the roof with noise and destruction. How are the guinea pigs? I often
think of them. Well, Pudge, I rather hope you are helping Mother a
lot, because she's such a good friend of yours and mine and she looks
so pretty and seems so wise, though perhaps you and I are sometimes
wiser. I'm sending you two arrow-heads I found in a field up North in
Rockland County. I was fishing up near the Ramapo Mountains where the
stone walls run like great serpents up and down the hills. There's a
lot of history lying around loose near here, Major André and Washington
and the Dutch and the Indians. I'll show you these places some day. The
Indians, to my way of thinking, were fine fellows. They took long steps
when they walked and knew how to set traps and hunt and fish, and they
were for the most part real religious men. But men who knew how to make
war just to get more money, came and took their land away from them,
and then the Indians turned naughty the way you and I do sometimes,
Pudge. My! my! how they tore around and howled and took scalps, which
were not nice to keep. No gentleman would ever scalp a lady, it is so
uncomfortable, and yet these Indians scalped many ladies!
"It's a pity the Indians were bad and forgot their manners, for if they
could have remembered to be polite and gentlemanly they could have
stayed here and they would have been the real Americans and you and I
would have probably tried to imitate them and never used anything but
wampum, which means shells; same as money to buy ice-cream cones with.
I think it would have been a heap more sensible if the white man had
made lasting friends of the Indians and learned a lot of things that
the Indians knew but which the white men have since been too stupid to
learn. But you see, the white men had a new machine called a 'gun,'
and there was nothing to do with it but shoot it at somebody, and
that made trouble. And the Indians, eager to learn, got guns too, and
thought it was funny to point them at people. And their guns went off
all right and there was the dickens to pay. Machines are nice things,
Pudgy, but the men who make the machines must be sure to have their
minds go ahead of the machines, or some day the machines will just get
up and smash the world.
"Good-night, Pudgy, old chap--I wish you could hear all the funny
sounds up on this mountain. Friar Tuck smells, besides hearing; he
reads the night with his nose, the same way we would read a book--and
he smells out such stories! Here are the arrow-heads; I'm sending them
to you as if you were my own little boy, for see, Pudge--big man as I
am, I have no little boy of my own--and that sometimes happens to big
men ..."
* * * * *
Suddenly the man's head dropped. The pen rolled to the floor, and Friar
Tuck nosed at it a moment then tucked his head into his folded paws.
Watts Shipman sat at the table, his own face buried in his arms.