IT was Sunday morning in the middle of March. I was stranded in
Jacksonville, Florida. After breakfast I had five cents left. Joyously
I purchased a sack of peanuts, then started northwest on the railway
ties straight toward that part of Georgia marked “Swamp” on the map.
Sunset found me in a pine forest. I decided to ask for a meal and
lodging at the white house looming half a mile ahead just by the track.
I prepared a speech to this effect:--
“I am the peddler of dreams. I am the sole active member of the ancient
brotherhood of the troubadours. It is against the rules of our order
to receive money. We have the habit of asking a night’s lodging in
exchange for repeating verses and fairy-tales.”
As I approached the house I forgot the speech. All the turkeys gobbled
at me fiercely. The two dogs almost tore down the fence trying to get
a taste of me. I went to the side gate to appeal to the proud old
lady crowned with a lace cap and enthroned in the porch rocker. Her
son, the proprietor, appeared. He shall ever be named the dog-man. His
tone of voice was such, that, to speak in metaphor, he bit me in the
throat. He refused me a place in his white kennel. He would not share
his dog-biscuit. The being on the porch assured me in a whanging yelp
that they did not take “nobody in under no circumstances.” Then the
dog-man, mollified by my serene grin, pointed with his thumb into the
woods, saying: “There is a man in there who will take you in sure.” He
said it as though it were a reflection on his neighbor’s dignity. That
I might not seem to be hurrying, I asked if his friend kept watch-dogs.
He assured me the neighbor could not afford them.
The night with the man around the corner was like a chapter from that
curious document, “The Gospel according to St. John.” He “could not
afford to turn a man away” because once he slept three nights in the
rain when he walked here from west Georgia. No one would give him
shelter. After that he decided that when he had a roof he would go
shares with whoever asked. Some strangers were good, some bad, but he
would risk them all. Imagine this amplified in the drawling wheeze of
the cracker sucking his corn-cob pipe for emphasis.
His real name and address are of no consequence. I found later that
there were thousands like him. But let us call him “The Man Under the
Yoke.” He was lean as an old opium-smoker. He was sooty as a pair of
tongs. His Egyptian-mummy jaws had a two-weeks’ beard. His shirt had
not been washed since the flood. His ankles were innocent of socks. His
hat had no band. I verily believe his pipe was hereditary, smoked first
by a bond-slave in Jamestown, Virginia.
He could not read. I presume his wife could not. They were much
embarrassed when I wanted them to show me Lakeland on the map. They had
warned me against that village as a place where itinerant strangers
were shot full of holes. Well, I found that town pretty soon on the
map, and made the brief, snappy memorandum in my note-book: “Avoid
Lakeland.”
There were three uncertain chairs on the porch, one a broken rocker.
Therefore the company sat on the railing, loafing against the pillars.
The plump wife was frozen with diffidence. The genial, stubby neighbor,
a man from away back in the woods, after telling me how to hop
freight-cars, departed through an aperture in the wandering fence.
The two babies on the floor, squealing like shoats, succeeded in being
good without being clean. They wrestled with the puppies who emerged
from somewhere to the number of four. I wondered if the Man Under the
Yoke would turn to a dog-man when the puppies grew up and learned to
bark.
Supper was announced with the admonition, “Bring the chairs.” The
rocking chair would not fit the kitchen table. Therefore the two babies
occupied one, and the lord of the house another, and the kitchen chair
was allotted to your servant. The mother hastened to explain that she
was “not hungry.” After snuffing the smoking lamp that had no chimney,
she paced at regular intervals between the stove and her lord, piling
hot biscuits before him.
I could not offer my chair, and make it plain that some one must stand.
I expressed my regrets at her lack of appetite and fell to. Their
hospitality did not fade in my eyes when I considered that they ate
such provisions every day. There was a dish of salt pork that tasted
like a salt mine. We had one deep plate in common containing a soup of
luke-warm water, tallow, half-raw fat pork and wilted greens. This dish
was innocent of any enhancing condiment. I turned to the biscuit pile.
They were raw in the middle. I kept up courage by watching the children
consume the tallow soup with zest. After taking one biscuit for meat,
and one for vegetables, I ate a third for good-fellowship. The mother
was anxious that her children should be a credit, and shook them too
sternly and energetically I thought, when they buried their hands in
the main dish.
Meanwhile the Man Under the Yoke told me how his bosses in the
lumber-camp kept his wages down to the point where the grocery bill
took all his pay; how he was forced to trade at the “company” store,
there in the heart of the pine woods. He had cut himself in the
saw-pit, had been laid up for a month, and “like a fool” had gone back
to the same business. Last year he had saved a little money, expecting
to get things “fixed up nice,” but the whole family was sick from June
till October. He liked his fellow-workmen. They had to stand all he
did. They loved the woods, and because of this love would not move to
happier fortunes. Few had gone farther than Jacksonville. They did
not understand travelling. They did not understand the traveller and
were “likely to be mean to him.” Then he asked me whether I thought
“niggers” had souls. I answered “Yes.” He agreed reluctantly. “They
have a soul, of course, but it’s a mighty small one.” We adjourned to
the front room, carrying our chairs down a corridor, where the open
doorways we passed displayed uncarpeted floors and no furniture. The
echo of the slow steps of the Man Under the Yoke reverberated through
the wide house like muffled drums at a giant’s funeral. Yet the
largeness of the empty house was wealth. I have been entertained since
in many a poorer castle; for instance, in Tennessee, where a deaf
old man, a crone, and her sister, a lame man, a slug of a girl, and a
little unexplained boy ate, cooked, and slept by an open fire. They had
neither stove, lamp, nor candle. I was made sacredly welcome for the
night, though it was a one-room cabin with a low roof and a narrow door.
Thanks to the Giver of every good and perfect gift, pine-knots cost
nothing in a pine forest. New York has no such fireplaces as that in
the front room of the Man Under the Yoke. I thought of an essay by a
New England sage on compensation. There were many old scriptures rising
in my heart as I looked into that blaze. The one I remembered most was
“I was a stranger, and ye took me in.” But though it was Sunday night,
I did not quote Scripture to my host.
It was seven o’clock. The wife had put her babies to bed. She sat on
the opposite side of the fire from us. Eight o’clock was bedtime, the
host had to go to work so early. But our three hearts were bright as
the burning pine for an hour.
You have enjoyed the golden embossed brocades of Hokusai. You have
felt the charm of Maeterlinck’s “The Blind.” Think of these, then think
of the shoulders of the Man Under the Yoke, embossed by the flame.
Think of his voice as an occult instrument, while he burned a bit of
crackling brush, and spoke of the love he bore that fireplace, the
memory of evenings his neighbors had spent there with him, the stories
told, the pipes smoked, the good silent times with wife and children.
It was said by hints, and repetitions, and broken syllables, but it
was said. We ate and drank in the land of heart’s desire. This man and
his wife sighed at the fitting times, and smiled, when to smile was to
understand, while I recited a few of the rhymes of the dear singers
of yesterday and to-day: Yeats and Lanier, Burns and even Milton.
This fire was the treasure at the end of the rainbow. I had not been
rainbow-chasing in vain.
As my host rose and knocked out his pipe, he told how interesting
lumbering with oxen could be made, if a man once understood how they
were driven. He assured me that the most striking thing in all these
woods was a team of ten oxen. He directed me to a road whereby I would
be sure to see half a dozen to-morrow. He said if ever I met a literary
man, to have him write them into verses. Therefore the next day I
took the route and observed: and be sure, if ever I meet the proper
minstrel, I shall exhort him with all my strength to write the poem of
the yoke.
As to that night, I slept in that room in the corner away from the
fireplace. One comfort was over me, one comfort and pillow between me
and the dark floor. The pillow was laundered at the same time as the
shirt of my host. There was every reason to infer that the pillow and
comfort came from his bed.
They slept far away, in some mysterious part of the empty house. I
hoped they were not cold. I looked into the rejoicing fire. I said:
“This is what I came out into the wilderness to see. This man had
nothing, and gave me half of it, and we both had abundance.”