"The potatoes need hilling, and then you'll feel like having a dip in
the pool."
The young man, it seems, wrote back to the friend in the city who had
sent him--"This Doctor cannot understand my case: he tells me to dig
potatoes and bathe in a swimming pool. That is all! All!" But the
friend, who was an old member of the Brotherhood, telegraphed back--"Dig
and swim, you fool!" Sam took the message at the telephone while we were
dining, and repeated it faithfully to the young man within the hearing
of all. A laugh rose that was hard in dying, and I think the Doctor's
lips wreathed in smile.... In the old days they say the Master gave
medicine like other doctors. That was when he spent part of the year in
the city and had an office there and believed in drugs. But as he gave
up going to the city, the stock of drugs in the cabinet at the end of
the study became exhausted, and was never renewed. All who needed
medicine were sent to an old Brother, who had settled down the valley at
Stowe. "He knows more about pills than I do," the Doctor said. "At least
he can give you the stuff with confidence." Few of the inmates of the
Inn ever went to Stowe, though Dr. Williams was an excellent physician.
And it was from about this time that we began to drop the title of
doctor, calling him instead the Master; and the younger men sometimes,
Father. He seemed to like these new terms, as denoting affection and
respect for his authority.
By the time that we called him Master, the Inn had come to its maturity.
Altogether it could hold eighteen guests, and if more came, as in
midsummer or autumn, they lived in tents in the orchard or in the hill
camps. The Master was still adding to the forest land--fish and game
preserve the village people called it; for the Master was a hunter and a
fisherman. But up among those curving hills, when he looked out through
the waving trees, measuring by eye a fir or a pine, he would say,
nodding his head--"Boys, behold my heirs--from generation to
generation!"
He was now fifty and had ceased altogether to go to the city. There were
ripe men in the great hospitals that still remembered him as a young man
in the medical school; but he had dropped out, they said--why? He might
have answered that, instead of following the beaten path, he had spoken
his word to the world through men--and spoken widely. For there was no
break in the stream of life that flowed upward to the old Inn. The
"cells" were always full, winter and summer. Now there were coming
children of the older Brothers, and these, having learned the ways of
the place from their fathers, were already house-broken, as we said,
when they came. They knew that no door was locked about the Inn, but
that if they returned after ten it behooved them to come in by the pool
and make no noise. They knew that when the first ice formed on the pool,
then they were not expected to get out of bed for the morning plunge.
They knew that there was an old custom which no one ever forgot, and
that was to put money in the house-box behind the hall door on leaving,
at least something for each day of the time spent, and as much more as
one cared to give. For, as everyone knew, all in the box beyond the
daily expense went to maintain the School on the road below the village.
So the books of the Inn were easy to keep--there was never a word about
money in the place--but I know that many a large sum of money was found
in this box, and the School never wanted means.
That I might tell more of what took place in the Inn, and what the
Master said, and the sort of men one found there, and the talk we all
had summer evenings beside the pool and winter nights in the hall!
Winter, I think, was the best time of all the year, the greatest beauty
and the greatest joy, from the first fall of the snow to the yellow
brook water and the floating ice in White River. Then the broad velvety
shadows lay on the hills between the stiff spruces, then came rosy
mornings out of darkness when you knew that some good thing was waiting
for you in the world. After you had drunk your bowl of coffee, you got
your axe and followed the procession of choppers, who were carefully
foresting the Doctor's woods. In the spring, when the little brooks had
begun to run down the slopes, there was road making and mending; for the
Master kept in repair most of the roads about Albany, grinding the rock
in his pit, saying that--"a good road is one sure blessing."
And the dusks I shall never forget--those gold and violet moments with
the light of immortal heavens behind the rampart of hills; and the
nights, so still, so still like everlasting death, each star set
jewel-wise in a black sky above a white earth. How splendid it was to
turn out of the warm hall where we had been reading and talking in to
the frosty court, with the thermometer at twenty below and still
falling, and look down across the broad white valley, marked by the
streak of bushy alders where the dumb river flowed, up to the little
frozen water courses among the hills, up above where the stars
glittered! You took your way to your room in the silence, rejoicing that
it was all so, that somewhere in this tumultuous world of ours there was
hidden all this beauty and the secret of living; and that you were of
the brotherhood of those who had found it....
Thus was the Inn and its Master in the year when he touched sixty, and
his hair and beard were more white than gray.