Like all invalids, Morris had little affection for any one but himself,
but what he lacked in human sympathy he atoned for in courtesy of
manner and nicety of conscience. He instructed Fessenden until that
restless youngster besought Nettlebeck to find him many “chores.”
But Fessenden was still too small to chop down trees, to plough ice,
or to saw wood, and there is little other work in the mountains in
winter. There was no alternative but to accommodate himself to his new
condition, and brace his endurance by repeating his father’s advice
and attempting to understand it. At the end of the long winter he
was studying hard and fighting less. Now that he did not recite on
the neighboring farm, there was no one to fight with, except on such
rare occasions as when a boy came to borrow of Christina after some
culinary disaster at home or some unexpected shortage at the mountain
“store.” Fessenden, no matter how deep in study, seemed to scent the
messenger from afar, and was standing in the middle of the slippery
road, his muscles bunched, his eye glaring like a tiger’s, when his
expectant foe, uttering a hideous war-whoop, flung his bag into a
snowdrift and hurled himself upon the champion. Upon these occasions,
Dolf, the younger of the Nettlebeck brothers, always dropped his
work and encouraged the sport. When it was over, no matter what the
issue, Christina invariably cuffed Fessenden, then made him a cake;
and gentle old Mrs. Nettlebeck wept profusely as she sponged him off,
convinced that it would yet be her mournful duty to lay him out. Her
own sons had the peaceful blood of the German peasant in them, and
this enterprising American lad was a dear and perpetual mystery. Upon
one occasion, when he looked like a blind puppy, and study was out of
the question for two days, Morris improved the occasion in the interest
of reform.
“You are a great fighter, Fess,” he began, tactfully; “and it does my
poor blood good to watch so much energy explode. Only it seems to me a
waste. Why don’t you concentrate your energy in your brain and become a
leader by the force of superior will and intelligence?”
“When I fight with my head I fight with its outside,” replied Fessenden
dryly. “I’ve got to make myself understood, and I do, you bet. And I’m
not complaining of the headache next day, neither.”
“Think of what I’ve said, however. You have established your reputation
as a fighter; you occupy the proud position of champion among boys of
your own age and older. The raging hate which must saturate you when
fighting like a savage would make me feel mean and terrified for days
after. It is all very well to know how to use your fists, and no doubt
they are of service to you here, and at your age; but they will play
a small part in after-life, and your character will play a very great
one. You are so constituted that if you would learn to control yourself
you could command your fellows with little effort; and at least when
you fight try not to hate so hard.”
“How would you like Christina’s puddings with all the raisins left out?
Would you mind reading to me?”
“As long as you like.” And Morris made him comfortable on the sofa, and
read from the lives of ancient warriors until the heir of the ages fell
asleep.
Fessenden’s mind at this time was a virgin field into which seeds fell
to rise again and be tended by a curious young tiller. Those flung
into a fertile crevice by Morris, who took the responsibility very
seriously, put out their green heads in time. Fessenden nodded his
recognition, and, although they were by no means his favorite products,
between their insistency and a decreasing lack of opportunity, he
arrived, in the course of another year, at the conclusion that it
might be interesting to make boys follow his lead without resorting
to primitive methods. “I suppose one might as well wait till one has
a real call to fight,” he remarked to himself with philosophy. “The
animals don’t fight till they have to--none, that is, but dogs, and
perhaps that’s living so much with us--we sickin’ them on and all that.
It’s good to fight, though,” he added, with a long sigh, “even if the
headache does last longer than the fun--that’s a point. Perhaps Mr.
Morris is right, although I’d like to know what he knows about it.
Maybe I’ll try the other tack and see what there’s in it, but there are
some things will make my fists fly till I’m eighty. I guess I wasn’t
cut out for a Sunday-school teacher.” Nevertheless, he worked himself
into such a terrific rage the next time he was challenged--after
an unusual period of virtuous abstinence--that he was thoroughly
frightened at the result: for several days he felt flat and peevish,
and more worn out in mind than in body. Morris came upon him in the
forest where he was seated on a stump dismally chewing a cud, and
embraced an obvious opportunity.
“After all,” he said sympathetically, “what you fight for is supremacy,
is it not? Why not get it some other way? Although you poison yourself
with the hate you feel while actually fighting, hate is never the
motive of battle with you. You like all these boys well enough, but
you must find out who is the best man or burst. Find it out some other
way--or rather, having decided that point, try others. Besides, the
great man uses the brute force of others, he rarely indulges in it
himself. Did not Napoleon sit aloft on a hill while his hundreds of
thousands of nameless minions did the fighting? So long as they could
see that being whom they looked upon as an emanation from the divine
intellect, they were willing to fight like fanatics, but if he had
rushed forward with a musket and fallen, the ranks would have scattered
in irretrievable panic. Are you cultivating your prowess to fight years
hence when a great man orders you out?”
“Not much,” growled Fessenden.
“Well, take me out in your canoe now. We’ll talk it over further this
evening.”
Fessenden’s twelfth birthday occurred a week later, and he persuaded
Christina to give him a party and invite his enemies. They came,
howling through the mountain passes, brandishing big sticks as a
manifest of their readiness for the fray. But although, having been
invited to dinner and birthday cake, they expected a respite of perhaps
two hours, they were disconcerted, and privately alarmed at being
received by young Abbott quite in the style of the grand seigneur. He
wore a new white sweater and a new pair of trousers, and he had been
scrubbed and brushed by Mrs. Nettlebeck until, to mountain taste, he
was offensively godly. He greeted his weather-beaten guests with a
hearty grip of the hand, insinuated his appreciation of the forgiving
spirit so touchingly displayed, and when he had them all seated about
the table in the large kitchen he entertained them brilliantly with
anecdotes from his most exciting books, while they devoured Christina’s
substantial dainties. When he had gorged them into a state of sleepy
good-nature, he led them out into the woods, and, mounting a stump,
invited them to spin yarns of personal prowess. Each youth in turn told
a tale of terrible adventure and glorious triumph, which Fessenden
applauded as a host should. When they were alert once more and ready
for action, he organized them into a band of pirates, and they scuttled
several ships with such demoniacal vigor that they worked off all
the steam that was left in them; and departed at nightfall vowing
that Fessenden--who was now dirty enough to satisfy the most exacting
standard--was the finest fellow in the woods, and that they’d never had
such a Time since they were born.
After supper Fessenden untied his canoe, _Pocahontas_--whom he loved
better than any mortal except his father--and pulled out into the
evening shadows. The Nettlebeck farm was on a clearing of some fifty
acres on the north and east shores of a large lake. Surrounding it on
three sides was the virgin unkempt forest, as yet undesecrated by the
lumberman or the logger. Just beyond the clearing the forest grew to
the shores of the lake--a body of water so clear that in the early
morning and evening, until the ice came, or except when the winds
raged, the great spruces and pines, the beeches and maples, looked as
if petrified in one of the old glaciers which had ground this vast
region into form. Beyond the lake, beyond the surrounding forest, rose
the encircling chain of gentle peaks, some barren rocks of eccentric
shape, others black with woods. This evening their upper slopes were
white with a late fall of snow. The Nettlebecks, like all American
farmers, had done what they could to make Nature hideous, and their
big house with its haphazard additions, the barns and boat-house, the
ragged orchard and vegetable garden, were like a patchwork apron on the
robes of a goddess. But Fessenden had turned his back on the Nettlebeck
outrage, and not a shingle could he see--not a column of smoke. The
blue shadows on the mountains were melting as the stars came out. The
silence was so intense that Nature seemed to laugh noiselessly at
man’s puny attempt to impress himself upon her higher solitudes.
Fessenden shot his canoe round a bend, and entered a long water-pass,
irregular, half-choked with reeds and swamp, dark from the forest on
the slopes of the gorge. It led to another lake, the second in a long
chain of lakes great and small, on many of which some farmer had made
his clearing and erected his monstrosities. But the gorge was long,
and the next lake too wild and rocky to invite the attentions of man.
Fessenden could paddle far, and fancy himself as alone in the great
Adirondack wilderness as the first Red Indian. From the day when Mrs.
Nettlebeck had allowed him to run unattended, much of his time had been
spent apart. The nearest neighbor lived three miles away, on the farm
where with several other boys he had attended school of a sort for four
months in the year. The boys were kept busy at other times, and only
sought him out when, like himself, they ached for a fight. Solitude had
become as necessary in his life as his bed and his bread; and except
when storms raged and the thermometer stood too far below zero, he left
the house the moment his studies with his tutor were over, and took his
reading into the woods or his canoe. On Saturdays and Sundays he was
not permitted to open a book, and during the short summer there were
no mental tasks. He spent these holidays in the woods or on the water,
only returning to the house for his evening meal and his hard bed.
Occasionally Morris accompanied him, and taught him much of practical
forestry; but although the man and the boy were good friends, each
preferred his solitudes--his long silences.
To-night Fessenden was in a strangely exultant mood which he was
anxious to understand. He was tired, for he had played hard; but it was
a pleasant languor beside the exhaustion which followed his pitched
battles, to say nothing of their accompaniment of gaping wounds and
nervous depression. He had passed successfully through his first
attempt at diplomacy and self-command; his fists had ached more than
once, for Jeff Hunter was in fine fighting trim and invariably lashed
his crimson tide; and he tasted all the sweets of power, of dominating
in a new rôle, of discovering unsuspected talents, and of using them
easily in the control of his fellows. He looked back upon his career of
fists and blood, this youngster of twelve, with much the same disgust
and contempt as might animate a debauchee crossing the threshold of
reform. He did not return home until midnight, and in those lonely
hours under the stars, in the profoundest stillness that America can
give us, his ambition was born. He felt able to go out and conquer
the world then and there; but he was modest by an earlier endowment,
and the value of a sound education had been impressed upon his
responsive mind. But his soul took a long flight, and met on high vague
and beautiful shapes, which, when he was older, he knew men called
ideals--looked down upon a wonderful world far beyond these mountains,
wherein was stored the records of an eternity of great deeds, where
greater still were doing; where, in the nebulous galleries of time,
things beyond human imaginings awaited the quickening touch of men
still in the making.
Fessenden returned and raided the pantry for a glass of milk, but it
was some time before he sought his bed. In the depths of his soul the
sleeping man still muttered, and he felt like Mercury poised for a
flight and not knowing which way to turn, but half drunk with wondrous
possibilities. The full moon hung low on the reflecting lake. The
mountain-tops were white, their lower forests black. The deer came
noiselessly out of the woods and drank. The sublime and lonely scene
murmured voicelessly of its greater kin in the highest valleys of the
alpine world. Fessenden, standing on the upper veranda of the house,
again saw only Nature, unchanged since a thousand years. Her silences
might never have been broken.
“You--kid!” cried a shrill voice as a window flew open. “What on earth
are you doin’ up this time of night? Lands sakes! Git into bed this
minute or I’ll come out and cuff you good.” And Fessenden, who had a
wholesome respect for Christina, fled to his room and was asleep in ten
minutes.
V
But although solitude moulded unceasingly in the structure of Fessenden
Abbott’s character, and with coincident intellectual development opened
Gothic spaces in his soul which made him lastingly different from the
city-bred man, yet was his life on the whole much like that of any
healthy youngster of his age who lived his boyhood in an American
wilderness. He played pioneer to his complete satisfaction, and
blazed trails in all directions through the forest. In company with
the redoubtable Jeff Hunter, he built a hut on an island in a lake of
wild and uninhabitable surroundings, and impersonated Crusoe to his
old enemy’s Friday. This social triumph was not won without another
struggle, partly fistic, partly diplomatic; and Fessenden regarded the
issue as his greatest achievement. After the first supper, cooked by
Friday and eaten with the graciousness of royalty by his master, Jeff
succumbed amiably and followed Fessenden on such adventurous tramps as
his hard-working father would permit. They spent many days and nights,
during the summer months, on the island, from which they sallied
forth into the forest or to the high peaks of the range in search of
Nature’s dearest terrors. They were once treed by a bear, whose cubs
they stumbled over; but managed to escape, by climbing from tree-top
to tree-top, when the bear was obliged to return to maternal duties;
they had, with what discrimination was possible, selected trees too
slender for the bear to mount. During one of Mr. Abbott’s visits he
was entertained on the island; and by the light of a camp-fire and
to the accompaniment of ominous sounds in the surrounding forest was
regaled by an account of this adventure, to say nothing of one with
a panther, and yet another with a catamount, told by Fessenden in a
direct unvarnished style which made his father tingle with pride and
an echo of youth. Shortly after, Fritz Nettlebeck remarked to the boys
that he had two shotguns which “he guessed they were old enough to use,
and he’d teach ’em and give ’em the loan of the guns provided they
learned how to shoot straight and would promise to be careful.” The
immediate result was an indiscriminate slaughter and loud protests from
Christina, who viewed an overstocked and gory larder with disfavor.
When, however, they had riddled and dragged home a bear, they were
thereafter too proud to kill small game for other than purposes of
replenishment. In the hunting season they spent their Saturdays on the
runs, and killed more deer than the law allowed. One fine buck was
shipped to Mr. Abbott by Nettlebeck. Fessenden had brought it down, and
it was the prize of the season. Having achieved this fresh distinction,
Fessenden, who, if he now fought rarely, still burned with youthful
ambitions, which had no relation to the swirling yet luminous desires
in his soul, organized a canoe race in which boys from seven lakes
competed. As his practice had been constant for three years, and as he
applied a very superior brain to the sport, he not unnaturally came
off best man; but this he did not realize, and he embraced his canoe
that night in a glow of complete happiness. He had named her after
his favorite girl in history, and he loved her with his first boyish
passion.