The older professor looked up at the assistant, fumbling fretfully with a
pile of papers. "Farrar, what's the _matter_ with you lately?" he said
sharply.
The younger man started, "Why...why..." the brusqueness of the other's
manner shocked him suddenly into confession. "I've lost my nerve,
Professor Mallory, that's what the matter with me. I'm frightened to
death," he said melodramatically.
"What _of_?" asked Mallory, with a little challenge in his tone.
The flood-gates were open. The younger man burst out in exclamations,
waving his thin, nervous, knotted fingers, his face twitching as he spoke.
"Of myself...no, not myself, but my body! I'm not well...I'm getting worse
all the time. The doctors don't make out what is the matter...I don't
sleep ... I worry...I forget things, I take no interest in life...the
doctors intimate a nervous breakdown ahead of me...and yet I rest ... I
rest...more than I can afford to! I never go out. Every evening I'm in bed
by nine o'clock. I take no part in college life beyond my work, for fear
of the nervous strain. I've refused to take charge of that summer-school
in New York, you know, that would be such an opportunity for me ... if I
could only sleep! But though I never do anything exciting in the
evening ... heavens! what nights I have. Black hours of seeing myself in a
sanitarium, dependent on my brother! I never ... why, I'm in
hell ... that's what the matter with me, a perfect hell of ignoble
terror!"
He sat silent, his drawn face turned to the window. The older man looked
at him speculatively. When he spoke it was with a cheerful, casual quality
in his voice which made the other look up at him surprised.
"You don't suppose those great friends of yours, the nerve specialists,
would object to my telling you a story, do you? It's very quiet and
unexciting. You're not too busy?"
"Busy! I've forgotten the meaning of the word! I don't dare to be!"
"Very well, then; I mean to carry you back to the stony little farm in the
Green Mountains, where I had the extreme good luck to be born and raised.
You've heard me speak of Hillsboro; and the story is all about my
great-grandfather, who came to live with us when I was a little boy."
"Your great-grandfather?" said the other incredulously. "People don't
remember their great-grandfathers!"
"Oh, yes, they do, in Vermont. There was my father on one farm, and my
grandfather on another, without a thought that he was no longer young, and
there was 'gran'ther' as we called him, eighty-eight years old and just
persuaded to settle back, let his descendants take care of him, and
consent to be an old man. He had been in the War of 1812--think of that,
you mushroom!--and had lost an arm and a good deal of his health there. He
had lately begun to get a pension of twelve dollars a month, so that for
an old man he was quite independent financially, as poor Vermont farmers
look at things; and he was a most extraordinary character, so that his
arrival in our family was quite an event.
"He took precedence at once of the oldest man in the township, who was
only eighty-four and not very bright. I can remember bragging at school
about Gran'ther Pendleton, who'd be eighty-nine come next Woodchuck day,
and could see to read without glasses. He had been ailing all his life,
ever since the fever he took in the war. He used to remark triumphantly
that he had now outlived six doctors who had each given him but a year to
live; 'and the seventh is going downhill fast, so I hear!' This last was
his never-failing answer to the attempts of my conscientious mother and
anxious, dutiful father to check the old man's reckless indifference to
any of the rules of hygiene.
"They were good disciplinarians with their children, and this naughty old
man, who would give his weak stomach frightful attacks of indigestion by
stealing out to the pantry and devouring a whole mince pie because he had
been refused two pieces at the table--this rebellious, unreasonable,
whimsical old madcap was an electric element in our quiet, orderly life.
He insisted on going to every picnic and church sociable, where he ate
recklessly of all the indigestible dainties he could lay his hands on,
stood in drafts, tired himself to the verge of fainting away by playing
games with the children, and returned home, exhausted, animated, and quite
ready to pay the price of a day in bed, groaning and screaming out with
pain as heartily and unaffectedly as he had laughed with the pretty girls
the evening before.
"The climax came, however, in the middle of August, when he announced his
desire to go to the county fair, held some fourteen miles down the valley
from our farm. Father never dared let gran'ther go anywhere without
himself accompanying the old man, but he was perfectly sincere in saying
that it was not because he could not spare a day from the haying that he
refused pointblank to consider it. The doctor who had been taking care of
gran'ther since he came to live with us said that it would be crazy to
think of such a thing. He added that the wonder was that gran'ther lived
at all, for his heart was all wrong, his asthma was enough to kill a
young man, and he had no digestion; in short, if father wished to kill his
old grandfather, there was no surer way than to drive fourteen miles in
the heat of August to the noisy excitement of a county fair.
"So father for once said 'No,' in the tone that we children had come to
recognize as final. Gran'ther grimly tied a knot in his empty sleeve--a
curious, enigmatic mode of his to express strong emotion--put his one hand
on his cane, and his chin on his hand, and withdrew himself into that
incalculable distance from the life about him where very old people spend
so many hours.
"He did not emerge from this until one morning toward the middle of
fair-week, when all the rest of the family were away--father and the
bigger boys on the far-off upland meadows haying, and mother and the girls
off blackberrying. I was too little to be of any help, so I had been left
to wait on gran'ther, and to set out our lunch of bread and milk and
huckleberries. We had not been alone half an hour when gran'ther sent me
to extract, from under the mattress of his bed, the wallet in which he
kept his pension money. There was six dollars and forty-three cents--he
counted it over carefully, sticking out his tongue like a schoolboy doing
a sum, and when he had finished he began to laugh and snap his fingers and
sing out in his high, cracked old voice:
"'We're goin' to go a skylarkin'! Little Jo Mallory is going to the county
fair with his Granther Pendleton, an' he's goin' to have more fun than
ever was in the world, and he--'
"'But, gran'ther, father said we mustn't!' I protested, horrified.
"'But I say we _shall_! I was your gre't-gran'ther long before he was your
feyther, and anyway I'm here and he's not--so, _march_! Out to the barn!'
"He took me by the collar, and, executing a shuffling fandango of triumph,
he pushed me ahead of him to the stable, where old white Peggy, the only
horse left at home, looked at us amazed.
"'But it'll be twenty-eight miles, and Peg's never driven over eight!' I
cried, my old-established world of rules and orders reeling before my
eyes.
"'Eight--and--twenty-eight! But I--am--_eighty-eight_!'
"Gran'ther improvised a sort of whooping chant of scorn as he pulled the
harness from the peg. 'It'll do her good to drink some pink lemonade--old
Peggy! An' if she gits tired comin' home, I'll git out and carry her part
way myself!'
"His adventurous spirit was irresistible. I made no further objection, and
we hitched up together, I standing on a chair to fix the check-rein, and
gran'ther doing wonders with his one hand. Then, just as we
were--gran'ther in a hickory shirt, and with an old hat flapping over his
wizened face, I bare-legged, in ragged old clothes--so we drove out of the
grassy yard, down the steep, stony hill that led to the main valley road,
and along the hot, white turnpike, deep with the dust which had been
stirred up by the teams on their way to the fair. Gran'ther sniffed the
air jubilantly, and exchanged hilarious greetings with the people who
constantly overtook old Peg's jogging trot. Between times he regaled me
with spicy stories of the hundreds of thousands--they seemed no less
numerous to me then--of county fairs he had attended in his youth. He was
horrified to find that I had never been even to one.
"'Why, Joey, how old be ye? 'Most eight, ain't it? When I was your age I
had run away and been to two fairs an' a hangin'.' "'But didn't they lick
you when you got home?' I asked shudderingly.
"'You _bet_ they did!' cried gran'ther with gusto.
"I felt the world changing into an infinitely larger place with every word
he said.
"'Now, this is somethin' _like_!' he exclaimed, as we drew near to
Granville and fell into a procession of wagons all filled with country
people in their best clothes, who looked with friendly curiosity at the
little, shriveled cripple, his face shining with perspiring animation, and
at the little boy beside him, his bare feet dangling high above the floor
of the battered buckboard, overcome with the responsibility of driving a
horse for the first time in his life, and filled with such a flood of new
emotions and ideas that he must have been quite pale."
Professor Mallory leaned back and laughed aloud at the vision he had been
evoking--laughed with so joyous a relish in his reminiscences that the
drawn, impatient face of his listener relaxed a little. He drew a long
breath, he even smiled a little absently.
"Oh, that was a day!" went on the professor, still laughing and wiping his
eyes. "Never will I have such another! At the entrance to the grounds
gran'ther stopped me while he solemnly untied the knot in his empty
sleeve. I don't know what kind of hairbrained vow he had tied up in it,
but with the little ceremony disappeared every trace of restraint, and we
plunged head over ears into the saturnalia of delights that was an
old-time county fair.
"People had little cash in those days, and gran'ther's six dollars and
forty-three cents lasted like the widow's cruse of oil. We went to see the
fat lady, who, if she was really as big as she looked to me then, must
have weighed at least a ton. My admiration for gran'ther's daredevil
qualities rose to infinity when he entered into free-and-easy talk with
her, about how much she ate, and could she raise her arms enough to do up
her own hair, and how many yards of velvet it took to make her gorgeous,
gold-trimmed robe. She laughed a great deal at us, but she was evidently
touched by his human interest, for she confided to him that it was not
velvet at all, but furniture covering; and when we went away she pressed
on us a bag of peanuts. She said she had more peanuts than she could
eat--a state of unbridled opulence which fitted in for me with all the
other superlatives of that day.
"We saw the dog-faced boy, whom we did not like at all; gran'ther
expressing, with a candidly outspoken cynicism, his belief that 'them
whiskers was glued to him.' We wandered about the stock exhibit, gazing at
the monstrous oxen, and hanging over the railings where the prize pigs
lived to scratch their backs. In order to miss nothing, we even
conscientiously passed through the Woman's Building, where we were very
much bored by the serried ranks of preserve jars.
"'Sufferin' Hezekiah!' cried gran'ther irritably 'Who cares how gooseberry
jel _looks_. If they'd give a felly a taste, now--'
"This reminded him that we were hungry, and we went to a restaurant under
a tent, where, after taking stock of the wealth that yet remained of
gran'ther's hoard, he ordered the most expensive things on the bill of
fare."
Professor Mallory suddenly laughed out again. "Perhaps in heaven, but
certainly not until then, shall I ever taste anything so ambrosial as that
fried chicken and coffee ice-cream! I have not lived in vain that I have
such a memory back of me!"
This time the younger man laughed with the narrator, settling back in his
chair as the professor went on:
"After lunch we rode on the merry-go-round, both of us, gran'ther clinging
desperately with his one hand to his red camel's wooden hump, and crying
out shrilly to me to be sure and not lose his cane. The merry-go-round had
just come in at that time, and gran'ther had never experienced it before.
After the first giddy flight we retired to a lemonade-stand to exchange
impressions, and finding that we both alike had fallen completely under
the spell of the new sensation, gran'ther said that we 'sh'd keep on
a-ridin' till we'd had enough! King Solomon couldn't tell when we'd ever
git a chance again!' So we returned to the charge, and rode and rode and
rode, through blinding clouds of happy excitement, so it seems to me now,
such as I was never to know again. The sweat was pouring off from us, and
we had tried all the different animals on the machine before we could tear
ourselves away to follow the crowd to the race-track.
"We took reserved seats, which cost a quarter apiece, instead of the
unshaded ten-cent benches, and gran'ther began at once to pour out to me a
flood of horse-talk and knowing race-track aphorisms, which finally made a
young fellow sitting next to us laugh superciliously. Gran'ther turned on
him heatedly.
"'I bet-che fifty cents I pick the winner in the next race!' he said
sportily, "'Done!' said the other, still laughing.
"Gran'ther picked a big black mare, who came in almost last, but he did
not flinch. As he paid over the half-dollar he said: 'Everybody's likely
to make mistakes about _some_ things; King Solomon was a fool in the head
about women-folks! I bet-che a dollar I pick the winner in _this_ race!'
and 'Done!' said the disagreeable young man, still laughing. I gasped, for
I knew we had only eighty-seven cents left, but gran'ther shot me a
command to silence out of the corner of his eyes, and announced that he
bet on the sorrel gelding.
"If I live to be a hundred and break the bank at Monte Carlo three times a
week," said Mallory, shaking his head reminiscently, "I could not know a
tenth part of the frantic excitement of that race or of the mad triumph
when our horse won. Gran'ther cast his hat upon the ground, screaming like
a steam-calliope with exultation as the sorrel swept past the judges'
stand ahead of all the others, and I jumped up and down in an agony of
delight which was almost more than my little body could hold.
"After that we went away, feeling that the world could hold nothing more
glorious. It was five o'clock and we decided to start back. We paid for
Peggy's dinner out of the dollar we had won on the race--I say 'we,' for
by that time we were welded into one organism--and we still had a dollar
and a quarter left. 'While ye're about it, always go the whole hog!' said
gran'ther and we spent twenty minutes in laying out that money in trinkets
for all the folks at home. Then, dusty, penniless, laden with bundles, we
bestowed our exhausted bodies and our uplifted hearts in the old
buckboard, and turned Peg's head toward the mountains. We did not talk
much during that drive, and though I thought at the time only of the
carnival of joy we had left, I can now recall every detail of the
trip--how the sun sank behind Indian Mountain, a peak I had known before
only through distant views; then, as we journeyed on, how the stars came
out above Hemlock Mountain--our own home mountain behind our house, and
later, how the fireflies filled the darkening meadows along the river
below us, so that we seemed to be floating between the steady stars of
heaven and their dancing, twinkling reflection in the valley.
"Gran'ther's dauntless spirit still surrounded me. I put out of mind
doubts of our reception at home, and lost myself in delightful ruminatings
on the splendors of the day. At first, every once in a while, gran'ther
made a brief remark, such as, ''Twas the hind-quarters of the sorrel I bet
on. He was the only one in the hull kit and bilin' of 'em that his
quarters didn't fall away'; or, 'You needn't tell _me_ that them Siamese
twins ain't unpinned every night as separate as you and me!' But later on,
as the damp evening air began to bring on his asthma, he subsided into
silence, only broken by great gasping coughs.
"These were heard by the anxious, heart-sick watchers at home, and, as old
Peg stumbled wearily up the hill, father came running down to meet us.
'Where you be'n?' he demanded, his face pale and stern in the light of his
lantern. 'We be'n to the county fair!' croaked gran'ther with a last flare
of triumph, and fell over sideways against me. Old Peg stopped short,
hanging her head as if she, too, were at the limit of her strength. I was
frightfully tired myself, and frozen with terror of what father would say.
Gran'ther's collapse was the last straw. I began to cry loudly, but father
ignored my distress with an indifference which cut me to the heart. He
lifted gran'ther out of the buckboard, carrying the unconscious little old
body into the house without a glance backward at me. But when I crawled
down to the ground, sobbing and digging my fists into my eyes, I felt
mother's arms close around me.
"'Oh, poor, naughty little Joey!' she said. 'Mother's bad, dear little
boy!'"
Professor Mallory stopped short.
"Perhaps that's something else I'll know again in heaven," he said
soberly, and waited a moment before he went on: "Well, that was the end of
our day. I was so worn out that I fell asleep over my supper, in spite of
the excitement in the house about sending for a doctor for gran'ther, who
was, so one of my awe-struck sisters told me, having some kind of 'fits,'
Mother must have put me to bed, for the next thing I remember, she was
shaking me by the shoulder and saying, 'Wake up, Joey Your
great-grandfather wants to speak to you. He's been suffering terribly all
night, and the doctor think's he's dying.'
"I followed her into gran'ther's room, where the family was assembled
about the bed. Gran'ther lay drawn up in a ball, groaning so dreadfully
that I felt a chill like cold water at the roots of my hair; but a moment
or two after I came in, all at once he gave a great sigh and relaxed,
stretching out his legs and laying his arms down on the coverlid. He
looked at me and attempted a smile.
"Well, it was wuth it, warn't it, Joey?" he said gallantly, and closed his
eyes peacefully to sleep.
"Did he die?" asked the younger professor, leaning forward eagerly.
"Die? Gran'ther Pendleton? Not much! He came tottering down to breakfast
the next morning, as white as an old ghost, with no voice left, his legs
trembling under him, but he kept the whole family an hour and a half at
the table, telling them in a loud whisper all about the fair, until father
said really he would have to take us to the one next year. Afterward he
sat out on the porch watching old Peg graze around the yard. I thought he
was in one of his absent-minded fits, but when I came out, he called me to
him, and, setting his lips to my ear, he whispered:
"'An' the seventh is a-goin' down-hill fast, so I hear!' He chuckled to
himself over this for some time, wagging his head feebly, and then he
said: 'I tell ye, Joey, I've lived a long time, and I've larned a lot
about the way folks is made. The trouble with most of 'em is, they're
fraid-cats! As Jeroboam Warner used to say--he was in the same rigiment
with me in 1812--the only way to manage this business of livin' is to give
a whoop and let her rip! If ye just about half-live, ye just the same as
half-die; and if ye spend yer time half-dyin', some day ye turn in and die
all over, without rightly meanin' to at all--just a kind o' bad habit
ye've got yerself inter.' Gran'ther fell into a meditative silence for a
moment. 'Jeroboam, he said that the evenin' before the battle of Lundy's
Lane, and he got killed the next day. Some live, and some die; but folks
that live all over die happy, anyhow! Now I tell you what's my motto, an'
what I've lived to be eighty-eight on--'"
Professor Mallory stood up and, towering over the younger man, struck one
hand into the other as he cried: "This was the motto he told me: 'Live
while you live, and then die and be done with it!'"