A Story of Seven Aristocrats and a Soap-Kettle.
WITH no sorrow in my heart, with no money in my pocket, with no
baggage but a lunch, the most dazzling feature of which was a piece of
gingerbread, I walked away from a wind-swept North Carolina village,
one afternoon, over the mountain ridges toward Lake Toxaway. I turned
to the right once too often, and climbed Mount Whiteside. There was
a drop of millions of miles, and a Lilliputian valley below like a
landscape by Charlotte B. Coman. I heard some days later that once a
man tied a dog to an umbrella and threw him over. Dog landed safely,
barking still. Dog was able to eat, walk, and wag as before. But the
fate of the master was horrible. Dog never spoke to him again.
Having no umbrella, I retraced my way. I stepped into the highway that
circumscribes the tremendous amphitheatre of Cashier’s Valley. I met
not a soul till eight o’clock that night. The mountain laurel, the
sardis bloom, the violet, and the apple blossom made glad the margins
of the splendidly built road; and, as long as the gingerbread lasted, I
looked upon these things in a sort of sophisticated wonder.
This was because the gingerbread was given me by a civilized man,
to whom John Collier had written for me a letter of introduction:
Mr. Thomas G. Harbison, Botanical Collector; American tree seeds a
specialty.
Back there by the village he was improving the breed of mountain apples
by running a nursery. He was improving the children with a school
he taught without salary, and was using the most modern pedagogy.
Something in his manner made me say, “You are like a doctor out of
one of Ibsen’s plays, only you are optimistic.” Then we talked of
Ibsen. He debated art versus science, he being a science-fanatic, I
an art-fanatic. He concluded the argument with these words: “You are
bound to be wrong. I am bound to be wrong. What is the use of either
of us judging the other?” That is not the mountain way of ending a
discussion.
For the purposes of the tale, as well as for his own merits, we must
praise this civilized man who entertained me a day and a half so well.
His mountain cottage was a permanent civilized camp. Without intruding
on his privacy, we can show what that means. Cross a few states to the
west with me.
Have you watched the camps of the up-to-date visitors, in the oldest
parts of Colorado? They begin with tent, axe, blanket, bacon, and
frying-pan, as miners do. In ten summers, though they climb as much as
the miners, wear uglier boots, and rougher clothes, their tents are
highly organized. They are convenient and free from clutter as the
best New York flat. The axe has multiplied rustic benches, bridges,
shelters. It has made a refrigerator in the stream. The frying-pan
has changed into a camp-stove and a box of white granite dishes.
The blanket flowers and Mariposa lilies that made the aspen groves
celestial have been gathered in jardinières.
Meanwhile, in the big houses of the veteran miners of the villages are
the axe, the blanket, and the frying-pan, though their lords have been
through half a dozen fortunes since pioneer days. Those houses have
the single great advantage of a rich tradition. They seem to grow up
out of the ground.
Musing these matters, I munched my gingerbread, walking past sweet
waterfalls, groves of enormous cedars, many springs, and one deserted
cabin. I was homesick for that great civilized camp, New York, and the
sober-minded pursuit of knowledge there.
But civilization lost her battle at twilight, when I swallowed my last
gingerbread crumb. Immediately I was in the land beyond the nowhere
place, willing to sleep twelve hours by a waterfall, or let the fairies
wake me before day. The road went deeper into savagery. I blundered on,
rejoicing in the fever of weariness. In the piercing light of the young
stars, the house that came at last before me seemed even more deeply
rooted in the ground than the oaks around it. What new revelation lies
here? Knock, knock, knock, O my soul, and may Heaven open a mystery
that will give the traveller a contrite heart.
Let us tell a secret, even before we enter. If, with the proper magic
in our minds, we were guests here, a year or a day, we might write the
world’s one unwritten epic. All day, in one of these tiny rooms, amid
appointments that fill the spirit with the elation of simple things, we
would write. At evening we would dream the next event by the fire. The
epic would begin with the opening of the door.
There appeared a military figure, with a face like Henry Irving’s in
contour, like Whistler’s in sharpness, fantasy, and pride.
“May I have a night’s lodging? I have no money.”
“Come in.... We never turn a man away.”
We were inside. He asked: “What might be your name?” I gave it. He gave
his. The circle by the fire did not turn their heads, but presumably
I was introduced. One child ran into the kitchen. My host gave me her
chair. All looked silently into the great soap-kettle in the midst of
the snapping logs.
I have a high opinion of the fine people of the South, and gratefully
remember the scattering of gentlefolk so good as to entertain me in
their mansions. But in this cottage, with one glance at those fixed,
flushed faces, I said: “This is the best blood I have met in this
United States.” The five children were night-blooming flowers. There
were hints of Doré in the shadow of the father, cast against the log
walls of the cabin. He sat on the little stairway. He was a better Don
Quixote than Doré ever drew.
I said, “Every middle-aged man I have met in Florida, Georgia, and
North Carolina has been a soldier, and I suppose you were.”
He looked at me long, as though the obligation of hospitality did not
involve conversation. He spoke at last: “I fought, but I could not help
it. It was for home, or against home. I fought for this cabin.”
“It is a beautiful cabin.”
He relented a bit. “We have kept it just so, ever since my
great-grandfather came here with his pack-mule and made his own trail.
I--I hated the war. We did not care anything about the cotton and
niggers of the fire-eaters. The niggers never climbed this high.”
I changed the subject. “This is the largest fireplace I have seen in
the South. A man could stand up in it.”
He stiffened again. “_This is not the South. This is the Blue Ridge._”
An inner door opened. It was plain the woman who stood there was his
wife. She had the austere mouth a wife’s passion gives. She had the
sweet white throat of her youth, that made even the candle-flame
rejoice. She looked straight at me, with ink-black eyes. She was dumb,
like some one struggling to awake.
“Everything is ready,” she said at length to her husband.
He turned to me: “Your supper is now in the kitchen, ‘if what we have
is good enough.’” It was the usual formula for hospitality.
I turned to the wife. “My dear woman, I did not know that this was
going on. It is not right for you to set a new supper at this hour. I
had enough on the road.”
“But you have walked a long way.” Then she uttered the ancient proverb
of the Blue Ridge. “‘A stranger needs takin’ care of.’”
In the kitchen there was a cook-stove. Otherwise there was nothing
to remind one of the world this side of Beowulf. I felt myself in a
stronghold of barbarian royalty.
“Do you do your own spinning and weaving?”
She lifted the candle, lighting a corner. “Here are the cards and the
wools.” She held it higher. “There is the spinning wheel.”
“Where is the loom?”
“Up stairs, just by where you will sleep.”
I knew that if there was a loom, it was a magic one, for she was a
witch of the better sort, a fine, serious witch, and a princess withal.
Her ancestors wore their black hair that simple way when their lords
won them by fighting dragons. She was prouder than the pyramids. If
the epic is ever written, let it tell how the spinner of the wizard
wools did stand to serve the stranger, that being the custom of her
house. This was a primitive camp indeed. There was no gingerbread.
There was not one thing to remind me of the last table at which I had
eaten. But every gesture said, “Good prince, you are far from your
court. Therefore, this, our royal trencher, is yours. May you find your
way to your own kingdom in peace.” But for a long time her lips were
still. She had the spareness of a fertile, toiling mother. And, ah, the
motherhood in her voice when she said at last, “My son, you are tired.”
Let the epic tell that, when the stranger returned to the fireplace,
a restless, expectant silence settled down upon the circle. There was
portent in the hiss of the flames. When I spoke to the children they
only stared at me as at a curious shadow. Their lips moved not. The
eldest, about seventeen, had inherited, no doubt, his love of strange
brewing. He looked sideways into the soap-kettle. I said to myself, “He
sees more hippogriffs than steam-engines.” He eyed every move of the
circle with restless approval or disapproval. Every chip his little
brother threw on the fire seemed to be a symbol of some precious thing
sacrificed, every curl of steam seemed to have something to do with the
destiny of the house.
He took out of his pocket a monthly magazine. It was the sort that
costs ten cents a year. No doubt, had he gone to school to the
admirable man who gave me gingerbread, he would have learned to read
scientific and technical monthlies. But a magazine of any sort is a
terribly intrusive thing at this juncture. The boy, and a sister just a
little younger, read in a loud whisper to one another an advertisement
they did not want me to hear. At their stage of culture it was
impossible to read silently. The advertisement, if I remember, went
about this way:--
“Free, free, free! A sewing machine! Send us a two-cent stamp, your
name and address, mentioning the name of this magazine. We will tell
you how to get an up-to-date sewing machine absolutely free. This offer
is good for thirty days.”
They wrote a most unscholarly letter, spelling it aloud. It required
their total and united culture to produce it. When the girl returned
to the fire, she was provoked by her pride into an astonishing flush.
How it set off her temples, with their pattern of azure veins! With
her lotus-leaf hands, the hands of Hathor, goddess of love, she cooled
her cheeks again and again. There is something of breeding in the very
color of blood. Come, brothers of the road, all who travel with me
in fancy, will you not join the knighthood of the soap-kettle? Come,
ladies in mansions, will you not be one with us? None of you could have
gainsaid the maiden-in-chief of the assembly. She wore her homespun as
Zenobia, princess of Palmyra, wore her splendors. With her arms around
her two gipsy younger sisters she smiled at last into the soap-kettle.
When the epic is written, let it use words of marvelling, speaking of
her hair, so pale, so electrical, set in a thick, ingenious coronal.
All the little children stood up. “Uncle,” they shouted. Hoofs sounded
by the door. A man entered without knocking. When he saw me he became
ceremonious as a Mandarin.
“This is a traveller,” said my host.
The messenger indulged in inquiries about my welfare, journey, and
destination. My host interrupted.
“How’s mother? We have watched late to know.”
“She is much worse.” And the messenger went on to say that she might
not live two days, and the doctor was a careless, indifferent dog,
treating her as though she were an ordinary old woman.
“Does he still give her strychnine?”
“He won’t deny it.” The messenger explained that the doctor thought
strychnine in small doses was good for old people. The scientist who
gave me gingerbread should have been there to champion the doctor. In
the eyes of his judges that night he was suspected of poisoning or
treating with criminal folly, royalty itself.
The younger doctor was miles away, and might refuse to make the trip.
The two loyal sons seemed paralyzed because the time for decision
and the time for mourning came together. There were long silences,
interrupted by my host repeating in a sort of primitive song, “_I can’t
think of anything except my dying mother. I can’t think of anything
except mother is going to die._”
At last, with his brother’s consent, the messenger galloped and
galloped away, to find his only hope, the younger physician. As the
wife gave me the candle, sending me up stairs, I looked back at the
family circle.
Helpless grief made every face rigid. I looked again at the eldest
daughter. The moving shadows embroidered on her breast intricate
symbols of the fair years, passing by in the ghost of tapestry, things
that happened in the beginning of the world. Let the epic tell that
when the stranger slept there was a magic loom by his bed that wove
that history again in valiant colors, showing battles without number,
and sieges, and interminable sunny love-tales, and lotus-handed
ladies whispering over manuscript things too fine to be told, and
ruddy warriors sitting at watch-fires on battlements eternal; and let
the epic tell how, in the early dawn, the stranger half awoke, yet
saw this tapestry hung round the walls. If one could remember every
story for which the pictures stood, he might indeed write the world’s
unwritten epic. The last tapestry to be hung changed from gold to black
warp and woof upon which was written that because of a treacherous
prime minister who served a poisoned wine, the Empress of the White
Witches was perishing before her time, and the young wizard, with the
counter-spell, was riding night and day, but all the palace knew he
would arrive too late.
At breakfast the faces were stolid and white as frost. The father
answered me only when I said good-by.
He said he hardly knew whether I had had anything to eat, or whether
any one had been good to me. “You just had to take care of yourself.”
The son, feeling the demand of hospitality in his father’s voice,
walked to the road with me. He asked if I was walking to Asheville.
“Yes, by way of Mount Toxaway and Brevard.”
He told me it was good walking all the way, and added, in a difficult
burst of confidence, “I am going to Asheville.”
“Why not come along with me?” I asked. I meant it heartily.
He said he had to take horseback, and then the railway. He had to be
there to-morrow.
“What’s the hurry?”
“I have to witness in a whisky case, an internal revenue case.”
He said it like a Spanish Protestant called before the inquisition.
* * * * *
I said to my soul: “These were the revelations of a night and a
morning. What deeper troubles were in the House of the Loom that you
did not know?”
All through the country there had been that night what is called a
black frost. By the roadside it was deep and white as the wool on
a sheep. But it left things blighted and black, and destroyed the
chances of the fruit-bearing trees. All the way to Mount Toxaway I met
scattered mourners of the ill-timed visitation.
But the simple folly of spring was in me, and the strange elation of
gratitude. My soul said within itself: “A money-claim has definite
limits, but when will you ever discharge your obligation to the proud
and the fine in the House of the Loom? You intruded on their grief. Yet
they held their guest sacred as their grief.”