To Boone Wellver, Louisville had become a city lying without the zone of
personal experience. Like a steamer which has altered its sailings, he
made it no longer a port of call.
That mad hiatus of apostacy, in which he had been willing to throw down
all the shrines of his acquired faith, had become to him an evil dream
of the past--yet out of it something had remained. The fog which had
bemused him then had left uncleared certain minors of realization. Just
as he had not yet recognized that the Commonwealth's attorney had sent
him away unsatisfied because he had come making his demands to the
arrogant tune of insult, so he failed, too, to appreciate that Anne had
held the silence, which, without her permission, he was resolved not to
break, because he had violently rebuffed her.
He had refused to read the papers on the day set for her wedding,
because he could not bear the torture of what he had expected to find
there, and McCalloway had not spoken of the postponement because it fell
within the boundaries of a topic upon which he had set a ban of silence,
unless the younger man broached it. So with what would have seemed an
impossible coincidence, it was weeks later that Boone ceased to
flagellate himself with the thought of a honeymoon that had never begun.
Even then he, unlike the more sophisticated of the circle to which he
had once been admitted, accepted without question the reason given for
the deferred marriage, and saw for himself no brightening of
possibility.
With the curtain rung down on the thrilling drama whose theme had been
dominated by love, work seemed to Boone increasingly the motif of
things. Service appeared more and more the purpose meant in the blind
gropings of existence toward some end. Otherwise there was nothing.
But one day long after all this, when the months had run to seasons,
Boone broke his law of self-appointed exile and went to Louisville. He
did not go from Marlin Town but came the other way--from Washington.
For now the mountain man had his place on Capitol Hill and no longer
felt the uncertainty of diffidence in answering when he heard himself
recognized from the speaker's chair as "the gentleman from Kentucky."
It was not at all the Washington he had pictured. In many ways it was a
more wonderful, and in many a less wonderful, place than that known from
photographs and print and fancy.
Life had caught him out of meagre and primitive beginnings and led him,
for a while, through corridors of romanticism. Before his eyes,
imagination-kindled, had been the colours of dreams and the beckoning of
an evening star. The colours had been evanescent, and the star had set.
The corridor of visionary promise had come to an end, and its door had
opened on Commonplace.
He told himself that he was done with romance. In his life it had been,
perhaps, necessary as a stage through which experience must lead him.
Henceforth his deity was to be Reason, a cold and austere goddess but a
constant one.
But Boone did not quite know himself. Sentiment still lay as strong in
him as the spring life that sleeps under the winter sleet. The man in
whom it does not survive is one whose spiritual arteries have hardened.
One lesson he modestly believed he had learned out of his journeying
from his log-cabin down to the Bluegrass and up to Capitol Hill. He had
become an apostle of Life's mutability, chained to no fixed post of
unplastic thought.
Upon these things his reflections had been running as he made the
journey back to Kentucky, and of them he was thinking now, as, having
arrived, he stood with bared head in the billowing stretches of Cave
Hill Cemetery.
Victor McCalloway had been in Marlin County hardly at all during these
last two years and he was not there now. As usual, when the veteran was
absent, Boone had no idea to what quarter of the globe, or in response
to what mysterious call, his steps had turned. He thought, though, that
it would be his preceptor's wish to be represented as the body of
General Prince was lowered to its last rest.
He saw again in memory two figures before a cabin hearth, debating with
the heat of devotees, the calibre and qualities of today's and
yesterday's military leaders in general, of Hector Dinwiddie in
particular. He saw himself again sitting huddled in the chimney corner,
nursing the patched knees of an illiterate boy.
Now one was dead--he could not even be sure that both were not dead--and
Boone, no longer in homespun, had come from Washington to uncover his
head under the winter sky as the words of the last rites were spoken
over the body of General Prince.
Into that grave, it seemed to him, was going something unreplaceable.
This man was the embodiment of a passing tradition, almost of a dead
era, in the altering life of the nation itself.
The ideas and beliefs for which his early life had stood were already
buried, and now he lay himself at rest, a link between present and
past--as much an exemplification of chivalry as though his feet had been
crossed and his sword laid in the crusader's posture of repose.
Boone heard the austere beauty of the service--but he felt more
poignantly the picture that his eyes looked on: the coffin draped with
two flags that overlapped their folds--though once a tide of
cannon-smother ran between them--the Stars and Stripes of the Nation and
the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy.
On one hand, in a grizzled honour-guard, stood old men in the same mist
grey that he had worn with a general's stars until Lee surrendered, and
on the other hand was ranged an equally frosted and withered squad in
Grand Army blue. Then at last a clear and flawless sweetness floated
away from the lips of the militia bugler, who, in accordance with the
General's wish, was sounding taps across his closing grave.
Something rose in Boone Wellver's throat, and a strange idea stole, not
facetiously but with reverent sincerity, into his thoughts. He wished it
might have been possible for him to stand there as the clods fell, not
as he stood now in the dress of a gentleman, but in homespun and
butternut, clasping in his tight hands the coon-skin cap that his
boyhood had known. For in this gathering, that was like a quiet pageant
of passing eras, he stood for an elder thing than any other here. He
was, in effect, by birth and by beginning, the ancestor of them all, for
he had been born a pioneer!
* * * * *
The school, which had become a home to Happy Spradling, had grown
marvellously since that day when the old mountaineer wrote with his
donation of rocky acres: "I have heart and cravin' that our young people
may grow better, and I deed my land to a school as long as the
Constitution of the United States stands."
It was a precarious undertaking with no endowment except its spirit, but
it is not recorded that Elijah went hungry when his commissary was in
the keeping of ravens--for back of the ravens was the Promise.
From year to year, dependent upon the generosity of those whom its
accomplishments convinced, the school not only existed but grew, and in
order that the springs which fed it might not run dry there were,
several times each year, the "begging trips" of the women who "went
out."
For that was the phrase they used, just as in all wilderness life it is
the phrase with which men speak of journeys from the solitudes.
When Miss Shorte went east or west, she carried to the outer world a
living and vivid portraiture of that folk immured behind the ridge and
its elder life. Then somehow the undertakings, absurdly impractical from
a material viewpoint, realized themselves, and a new school building, a
tiny hospital or a needed dormitory rose among the hardwood and the
pines of Marlin County.
In the fall of 1913 Miss Shorte brought east with her a younger woman
also from the school, to sing for her audiences those quaint
"song-ballets" that sound around smoky mountain hearths to the
accompaniment of banjo and "dulcimore."
Because no dollar could go out from the school's closely guarded
treasury without assurance that it would bring other dollars back, the
experiment of increasing the traveling expenses by including this girl
in the journey to New York had been discussed back of Cedar Mountain
with prayerful earnestness, and the girl herself had greeted the final
decision as one of the great moments of her life.
Now that girl stood beside the piano a little tremulous with stage
fright as she looked out over an audience more sophisticated than any to
which she had ever sung before. It was in one of the women's university
clubs in the Forties and to her uninitiated eye the light fell on a
confusing display of evening dress and worldly-wise faces full of
self-containment.
They would listen with politeness but how could her offering interest
these men and women to whom great voices were familiar? Hers was
untrained and the songs were crude vehicles for folk-lore compositions,
plaintive with uncultivated minors.
That elderly gentleman, sitting far back near the door, had been
identified to her in a whisper. He was a music critic whose word carried
the force of authority--and she wondered if he sat near the exit with
thought of escape from her inflictions. Just now he was writing a series
of magazine articles on folk-lore music in America, and the girl felt
herself the subject of a cold experiment in mental vivisection.
The lady with the white pompadour was one whose name she had known with
awe on the school's list of patronesses and even here in New York it was
a great name.
The mountain singer's knees trembled a little as the accompanist struck
the keys, and her first note stole out, sweetly clear and naturally
fresh.
She finished her first song and retreated to her chair on the platform,
wishing that there had been a trap-door through which she might have
escaped that barrage of human sight.
Then her glance caught the elderly man with the great reputation in the
music world. He had not yet fled. He was making notes on a scrap of
paper and his keenly alert, finely chiselled face wore the expression of
unmistakable interest. The singer glanced at the white-haired lady--the
great Mrs. Ariton--and she read "well-done, my child," in a smile of
moist eyes.
She could not know that there was a direct simplicity of pathos and
artless humour in her ballads, borne on a bird-like sweetness of voice,
to the hearts of these people. She could not know that she was bringing
to the touch of their sympathy phrases and forms that had seemed as
remote and unreal as lines from Chaucer and Shakespeare.
Yet, because it was all so new and strange, the air seemed heavy to her
with a terrifying formality, as the incense laden atmosphere of a
cathedral might have been. So she looked, as she rose to sing again, for
the comforting presence of some face that might reassure her with a
kin-ship of human simplicity.
Then she saw slip quietly through the entrance door, and drop into a
seat near the critic, a young woman who was unaccompanied and who, at
first glance, seemed to carry in her fine eyes the burthen of habitual
weariness.
These eyes were deeply violet and though sadness haunted them and
bespoke ghosts that stirred uneasily and often back in their depths they
still held the hint of fires that had flashed, once, into gay and
spontaneous whimseys. The singer had a momentary sense of looking at a
face made for gracious and merry expressions, but drawn into the short
and desperate outlook of one who has fallen into deep and angry waters,
and who can see nothing ahead beyond the struggle to keep afloat.
The newcomer was tall and slender, even thin, but there was still an
intrinsic gallantry about the swing of her shoulders that made one think
of invincible qualities, though the plain severity of her clothing
brought into that contrasting company the undeniable assertion of
poverty.
The singer finished her ballad and once again went back to her chair.
This time with a diminished diffidence. She was thinking about the other
young woman at the back who looked poor and sick and who, in spite of
these things, gave her an indescribable impression of distinction. The
two of them, thought the mountain girl, had a bond of sympathy in that
they were each set quite apart from all these others unified by the
stamp of affluence.
Miss Shorte was talking now; telling the story of the school and its
work; flashing before her hearers as if her words were pictures imbued
with colour and form, the patriarchal conditions with which this work
was surrounded. Laughter interrupted her lighter recitals, and when she
spoke of graver phases there was that light clearing of throats that
carries from an audience to a stage the proclamation of stirred emotion,
and of tears not far from the surface.
The speaker gave a few illustrations of the sort of manhood and
womanhood that is sometimes wrought out of that crude ore when the
tempering of help and education is available to refine it.
Lincoln had sprung from such stock. Even now the member in Congress from
that district was a man born in a log shack of illiterate parents. He
had fought feudal animosities and gone upward by a rugged ascent. Now
he was recognized by his colleagues as a man of ability and breadth. So
far had he outgrown the strictures of provincialism, that he was a
member of the Foreign Relations Committee. But better than that his own
people swore by him because they knew "their lives and deaths were his
to him"--because in a land where men had been afraid to serve on juries
and to enforce the law, they were no longer afraid.
The school sought to develop other Boone Wellvers from the same
beginnings ... to help others toward a similar fulfilment.
The musical critic heard a faint gasping breath from the chair at his
side. He turned quickly and was startled by the pale, emotion-drawn face
of the young woman who sat there without escort. For an instant he
thought that some poor creature actually pinched by want had crept in,
attracted by the light and warmth for a brief interval of rest, then he
looked with a more piercing appraisement at the features and discarded
that idea.
"Are you ill?" he demanded in a low voice. "Can I serve you?"
The young woman shook her head and forced a smile whose graciousness
must have come less from conscious effort than from life habit.
"No, thank you," she answered in a low voice that had meaning to one who
knew music wherever he found it. "It was nothing ... I came late ... who
is the girl who sang?"
"She was introduced as Miss Happy Spradling," said the critic.
His questioner's hands were at her sides where he did not see them
tighten convulsively, but he saw the pale cheeks go a shade whiter and
wondered if she was going to faint.
She did not faint, and though through the course of the evening the
elderly man found time, more than once, to turn his friendly glance of
solicitude her way he did not again intervene with questions. Clearly
this young woman, whatever the cause, was in a condition of nerves that
might mean skirting the precipitous edge of collapse. Clearly too she
had that fortitude which can resist and after a shock bring itself back
to the poise of equilibrium. What had shocked her? He could not guess,
but he knew that in the depleted condition that her pale cheeks and
thinness argued, unaccountable trifles may assume the gravity of a
crisis. And besides the critic found his attention and interest
elsewhere engaged. That other girl who was singing claimed them both.
She was having a little triumph there on the platform beside the piano.
On her smooth, dark face was a pink flush and her deep eyes glowed with
pleasure for the enthusiasm that had capped the cordiality of her
reception.
When the program came to its end the audience in large part gathered
about the platform and the meeting resolved itself into an informal
reception. Among the first to go forward was the critic and as he rose,
noticing a struggle between eagerness and hesitation in the violet eyes
of his chance neighbour, he yielded to an impulse of the moment.
"Shall we go up together," he smiled, "and introduce each other? I have
a question or two to ask her?"
But the girl shook her head. She had started nervously at the question
as though in realization that he had read her thoughts and as if she had
not wished them to be readable.
Still when he had left her she lingered in the door before she turned
out to the street as if some strong magnetism sought to draw her into
the group about the speaker and singer--a group in which her clothes
would have been conspicuous. Finally she turned and left and went
outside, where the obscurity was more merciful.
Her course took her southward and eastward and brought her at last to a
building that loomed large and dark now, but which in daylight sounded
to the shouts of immigrant children whose voices might have rung in the
sun-yellowed bazaars of Levantine towns or about the moujik habitations
of Russia. It was one of the settlement schools of the East Side where
the strident grind of the elevated was never silent, and in a small and
very bare room the girl took off her hat and coat. She was one of the
least important of the women who conducted the affairs of this mission
school. Its assembly rooms, _creches_ and diet kitchens constituted her
present world.
They had said that there was nothing she could do--a society girl with a
drawing room and hunting field equipment--and only the All-seeing and
herself knew how near true it had proven.
All these years, she reflected with a smile of self-derision, she had
harboured the thought of this mountain girl, caricatured by imagination
into a bare-foot sloven, before whose vulgar charms Boone's loyalty had
discreditably wavered. Now she had seen that girl and the dimensions of
her own injustice loomed in exaggeration before her self-accusation.
For a long while Anne Masters sat there in her bare room. Often she had
wondered whether she could go on enduring the strain of a life that had
emptied out all its fulness and become pinched and aching. It seemed to
her that now she stood as one having touched the depths and the fine
quality of her courage was not far from disintegration.
A great and hungry impulse filled her. She wanted to talk to Happy
Spradling--to talk to her under an assumed name--and to lay to the
bruises about her heart the solace of hearing something of those hills
she had once loved so intensely--something of the man who was now a
member of the Foreign Relations Committee of Congress! The wish grew
into an obsession and when, toward daylight, sleep came fitfully, it
wove itself into the troubled pattern of her dreams.
There were many reasons why she should repress that desire. If Happy
learned who she was, the secret of her hiding would be penetrated, and
she would show herself as conquered.
Yet the next day when the time came that gave her leisure from her
duties she went again, invincibly drawn, to the University Club in the
Forties.
Opposite the door, and across the street, she paused, holding herself
hard in hand against a tidal sweeping of emotions, and as she stood
there she saw the door open and Mrs. Ariton come out, followed by Happy.
The two crossed the sidewalk to the curb and stepped into the great
lady's limousine.
Anne still hesitated, then she shook her head and turned resolutely
away. The car rolled forward and rounded a corner, and the one possible
association with a part of Anne's old world was lost.
Anne herself went over to the avenue and climbed to the roof of a bus.
On the way downtown as the traffic crowded, the limousine and the
omnibus passed and repassed each other. It was a frostily clear forenoon
with Fifth Avenue sparkling like a string of jewel beads, and sometimes
Anne could see Happy's face thrust out with wonderment written large
upon its features. To her it was all new: this miracle of a city of
millions. Her heart was fluttering to the first sight of that tide of
men and motors; that crest-pluming of wealth and undertow of misery;
that gaiety and tragedy that rolls in vigour and in poison along a
mighty urban artery.
But Anne felt like a fragment of flotsam carried hopelessly on the
current.
When the limousine had turned into a side street of dignified old
houses, Anne rode on, and leaving the bus made her way on foot through
meaner streets where the smell of garlic hung pervasive and the
gutturals of Slavic speech came from bearded and beady eyed faces. She
went through the East Side's warrens of congestion and poverty,
slipping through crowds of shawled and haggling women who elbowed about
push-carts.
Yet when she had time to retreat again to the sanctuary of her own small
room, Anne felt that an element of augmented strength had come to her,
as if she had caught a breath of the laurel bloom from Slag-face through
the stenches and the jargons.
"If I can hold out," she told herself, "if I can only hold out, I'll
have my self-respect!" After a moment she added, "She will probably see
him soon, but she can't tell him she saw me--because she doesn't know
it."