The life of Francis Hume began in an old yet very real tragedy. His
mother, a lovely young woman, died at the birth of her child: an event
of every-day significance, if you judge by tables of mortality and the
probabilities of being. She was the wife of a man well-known among
honored American names, and her death made more than the usual ripple
of nearer pain and wider condolence. To the young husband it was an
afflicting calamity, entirely surprising even to those who were
themselves acquainted with grief. He was not merely rebellious and
wildly distraught, in the way of mourners. He sank into a cold
sedateness of change. His life forsook its accustomed channels. Vividly
alive to the one bright point still burning in the past, toward the
present world he seemed absolutely benumbed. Yet certain latent
conceptions of the real values of existence must have sprung up in him,
and protested against days to be thereafter dominated by artificial
restraints. He had lost his hold on life. He had even acquired a sudden
distaste for it; but his previous knowledge of beauty and perfection
would not suffer him to shut himself up in a cell of reserve, and
isolate himself thus from his kind. He could become a hermit, but only
under the larger conditions of being. He had the firmest conviction
that he could never grow any more; yet an imperative voice within bade
him seek the highest out-look in which growth is possible. He had
formed a habit of beautiful living, though in no sense a living for any
other save the dual soul now withdrawn; and he could not be satisfied
with lesser loves, the makeshifts of a barren life. So, turning from
the world, he fled into the woods; for at that time Nature seemed to
him the only great, and he resolved that Francis, the son, should be
nourished by her alone.
One spring day, when the boy was eight years old, his father had said
to him:--
"We are going into the country to sleep in a tent, catch our own fish,
cook it ourselves, and ask favors of no man."
"Camping!" cried the boy, in ecstasy.
"No; living."
The necessities of a simple life were got together, and supplemented by
other greater necessities,--books, pictures, the boy's violin,--and
they betook themselves to a spot where the summer visitor was yet
unknown, the shore of a lake stretching a silver finger toward the
north. There they lived all summer, shut off from human intercourse
save with old Pierre, who brought their milk and eggs and constituted
their messenger-in-ordinary to the village, ten miles away. When autumn
came, Ernest Hume looked into his son's brown eyes and asked,--
"Now shall we go back?"
"No! no! no!" cried the boy, with a child's passionate cumulation of
accent.
"Not when the snow comes?"
"No, father."
"And the lake is frozen over?"
"No, father."
"Then," said Hume, with a sigh of great content, "we must have a
log-cabin, lest our bones lie bleaching on the shore."
Next morning he went into the woods with Pierre and two men hastily
summoned from the village, and there they began to make axe-music, the
requiem of the trees. The boy sat by, dreaming as he sometimes did for
hours before starting up to throw himself into the active delights of
swimming, leaping, or rowing a boat. Next day, also, they kept on
cutting into the heart of the forest. One dryad after another was
despoiled of her shelter; one after another, the green tents of the
bird and the wind were folded to make that sacred tabernacle--a home.
Sometimes Francis chopped a little with his hatchet, not to be left out
of the play, and then sat by again, smoothing the bruised fern-forests,
or whistling back the squirrels who freely chattered out their opinions
on invasion. Then came other days just as mild winds were fanning the
forest into gold, when the logs went groaning through the woods, after
slow-stepping horses, to be piled into symmetry, tightened with
plaster, and capped by a roof. This, windowed, swept and garnished,
with a central fireplace wherein two fires could flame and roar, was
the log-cabin. This was home. The hired builders had protested against
its primitive form; they sighed for a snug frame house, French roof and
bay windows. "'Ware the cold!" was their daily croak.
"We'll live in fur and toughen ourselves," said Ernest Hume. And
turning to his boy that night, when they sat together by their own
fire, he asked,--
"Shall we fashion our muscles into steel, our skin into armor? Shall we
make our eyes strong enough to face the sun by day, and pure enough to
meet the chilly stars at night? Shall we have Nature for our only love?
Tell me, sir!"
And Francis, who hung upon his father's voice, even when the words were
beyond him, answered, "Yes, father, please!" and went on feeding birch
strips to the fire, where they turned from vellum to mysterious missals
blazoned by an unseen hand.
The idyl continued unbroken for twelve years. Yet it was not wholly
idyllic, for, even with money multiplying for them out in the world,
there were hard personal conditions against which they had to fight.
Ernest Hume delighted in the fierceness of the winter wind, the cold
resistance of the snow; cut off, as he honestly felt himself to be,
from spiritual growth, he had great joy in strengthening his physical
being until it waxed into insolent might. Francis, too, took so happily
to the stern yet lovely phases of their life that his father never
thought of possible wrong to him in so shaping his early years. As for
Ernest Hume, he had bound himself the more irrevocably to right living
by renouncing artificial bonds. He had removed his son from the world,
and he had thereby taken upon himself the necessity of becoming a
better world. Therefore he did not allow himself in any sense to rust
out. He did a colossal amount of mental burnishing; and, a gentleman by
nature, he adopted a daily purity of speech and courtesy of manner
which were less like civilized life than the efflorescence of chivalry
at its best. He had chosen for himself a part; by his will, a Round
Table sprang up in the woods, though two knights only were to hold
counsel there.
The conclusion of the story--so far as a story is ever concluded--must
be found in the words of Francis Hume. Before he was twenty, his
strength began stirring within him, and he awoke, not to any definite
discontent, but to that fever of unrest which has no name. Possibly a
lad of different temperament might not have kept housed so long; but he
was apparently dreamy, reflective, in love with simple pleasures, and,
though a splendid young animal, inspired and subdued by a thrilling
quality of soul. And he woke up. How he awoke may be learned only from
his letters.
These papers have, by one of the incredible chances of life, come into
my hands. I see no possible wrong in their publication, for now the
Humes are dead, father and son; nay, even the name adopted here was not
their own. They were two slight bubbles of being, destined to rise, to
float for a time, and to be again resolved into the unknown sea. Yet
while they lived, they were iridescent; the colors of a far-away sun
played upon them, and they sent him back his gleams. To lose them
wholly out of life were some pain to those of us who have been
privileged to love them through their own written confessions. So here
are they given back to the world which in no other way could adequately
know them.
[Sidenote: _Francis Hume to the Unknown Friend_[1]]
[1] This title is adopted by the editor that the narrative may be
at least approximately clear. The paragraphs headed thus were
scribblings on loose sheets: a sort of desultory journal.
I never had a friend! Did any human creature twenty years old ever
write that before, unless he did it in a spirit of bitterness because
he was out of humor with his world? Yet I can say it, knowing it to be
the truth. My father and I are one, the oak and its branch, the fern
and its fruitage; but for somebody to be the mirror of my own thoughts,
tantalizingly strange, intoxicatingly new, where shall I look? Ah, but
I know! I will create him from my own longings. He shall be born of the
blood and sinew of my brain and heart. Stand forth, beautiful one, made
in the image of my fancy, and I will tell thee all--all I am ashamed to
tell my father, and tired of imprisoning in my own soul. What shall I
call thee? Friend: that will be enough, all-comprehending and rich in
joy. To-day I have needed thee more than ever, though it is only to-day
that I learned to recognize the need. All the morning a sweet languor
held me, warm, like the sun, and touched with his fervor, so that I
felt within me darts of impelling fire. I sat in the woods by the
spring, my eyes on the dancing shadows at my feet, not thinking, not
willing, yet expectant. I felt as if something were coming, and that I
must be ready to meet it when the great moment should strike. Suddenly
my heart beat high in snatches of rhythm; my feet stirred, my ears woke
to the whir of wings, and my eyes to flickering shade. My whole self
was whelmed and suffocated in a wave of sweet delight. And then it was
that my heart cried out for another heart to beat beside it and make
harmony for the two; then it was that thou, dear one, wast born from my
thought. I am not disloyal in seeking companionship. My father is
myself. Let me say that over and over. When I tell him my fancies, he
smiles sadly, saying they are the buds of youth, born never to flower.
To him Nature is goddess and mother; he turns to her for sustenance by
day, and lies on her bosom at night. After death he will be content to
rest in her arms and become one flesh with her mould. But I--I! O, is
it because I am young; and will the days chill out this strange, sweet
fever, as they have in him? Two years ago--yes, a year--I had no higher
joy than to throw myself, body and soul, into motion: to row, fish,
swim, to listen, in a dream of happiness, while my father read old
Homer to me in the evening, or we masterfully swept through
duets--'cello and violin--that my sleep was too dreamless to repeat to
me. And now the very world is changed; help me to understand it, my
friend; or, if I am to blame, help me to conquer myself.