I
There is romance in the very look of the land of which I write. Beauty
beyond belief, of a sort to make your breath come more quickly; and
drama--comedy or tragedy according to the eye and the mood of the seer.
Loneliness and comradeship, peace and conflict, friendship and enmity,
gayety and somberness, laughter and tears. The bold hills, little
cousins to the mountains, crowd close round each village; the clear
brooks thread wood and meadow; the birches and scrub hardwood are taking
back the abandoned farms. When the sun drops low in the west there is a
strange and moving purple tinge upon the slopes; and the shadows are as
blue as blue can be. When the sun is high there is a greenery about this
northern land which is almost tropical in its richness and variety.
The little villages lie for the most part in sheltered valley spots.
Not all of them. Liberty, for example, climbs up along a steep hill road
on your way to St. George’s Pond, or over the Sheepscot Ridge, for
trout. No spot lovelier anywhere. But you will come upon other little
house clusters, a white church steeple topping every one, at unsuspected
crossroads, with some meadowland round and about, and a brook running
through the village itself, and perhaps a mill sprawled busily across
the brook. It is natural that the villages should thus seek shelter; for
when the winter snows come down this is a harsh land, and bitter cold.
So is it all the more strange that the outlying farms are so often set
high upon the hills, bare to the bleak gales. And the roads, too, like
to seek and keep the heights. From Fraternity itself, for example, there
is a ten-mile ridge southwest to Union, and a road along the whole
length of the ridge’s crest, from which you may look for miles on either
side.
This is not a land of bold emprises; neither is it one of those
localities which are said to be happy because they have no history.
There is history in the very names of the villages hereabouts. Liberty,
and Union, and Freedom; Equality, and Fraternity. And men will tell you
how their fathers’ fathers came here in the train of General Knox, when
that warrior, for Revolutionary services rendered, was given title to
all the countryside; and how he sub-granted to his followers; and how
they cleared farms, and tilled the soil, and lumbered out the forests,
and exterminated deer and moose and bear. Seventy years ago, they will
tell you, there was no big game hereabouts; but since then many farms,
deserted, have been overrun by the forests; and the bear are coming
back, and there are deer tracks along every stream, and moose in the
swamps, and wildcats scream in the night. Twenty or thirty or forty
miles to the north the big woods of Maine begin; so that this land is an
outpost of the wilderness, thrust southward among the closer dwellings
of man.
The people of these towns are of ancient stock. The grandfathers of many
of them came in with General Knox; most of them have been here for fifty
years or more, they or their forbears. A few Frenchmen have drifted down
from Quebec; a few Scotch and Irish have come in here as they come
everywhere. Half a dozen British seamen escaped, once upon a time, from
a man-of-war in Penobscot Bay, and fled inland, and were hidden away
until their ship was gone. Whereupon they married and became part and
parcel of the land, and their stock survives. By the mere reading of the
names of these folk upon the R. F. D. boxes at their doors you may know
their antecedents. Bubier and Saladine, Varney and Motley, McCorrison
and MacLure, Thomas and Davis, Sohier and Brine--a five-breed blend of
French and English, Scotch and Welsh and Irish; in short, as clear a
strain of good Yankee blood as you are like to come upon.
Sturdy folk, and hardy workers. You will find few idlers; and by the
same token you will find few slavish toilers, lacking soul to whip a
trout brook now and then or shoot a woodcock or a deer. Most men
hereabouts would rather catch a trout than plant a potato; most men
would rather shoot a partridge than cut a cord of wood. And they act
upon their inclinations in these matters. The result is that the farms
are perhaps a thought neglected; and no one is very rich in worldly
goods; and a man who inherits a thousand dollars has come into money.
Yet have they all that any man wisely may desire; for they have food and
drink and shelter, and good comradeship, and the woods to take their
sport in, and what books they choose to read, and time for solid
thinking, and beauty ever before their eyes. Whether you envy or scorn
them is in some measure an acid test of your own soul. Best hesitate
before deciding.
Gregarious folk, these, like most people who dwell much alone. So there
are grange halls here and there; and the churches are white-painted and
in good repair; and now and then along the roads you will come to a
picnic grove or a dancing pavilion, set far from any town. Save in
haymaking time the men work solitary in the fields; but in the evening,
when cows have been milked and pigs fed and wood prepared against the
morning, they take their lanterns and tramp or drive half a mile or
twice as far, and drop in at Will Bissell’s store for the mail and for
an hour round Will’s stove.
You will hear tales there, tales worth the hearing, and on the whole
surprisingly true. There is some talk of the price of hay or of feed or
of apples; but there is more likely to be some story of the woods--of a
bull moose seen along the Liberty road or a buck deer in Luke Hills’
pasture or a big catch of trout in the Ruffingham Meadow streams. Now
and then, just about mail time in the evening, fishermen will stop at
the store to weigh their catches; and then everyone crowds round to see
and remark upon the matter.
The store is a clearing-house for local news; and this must be so, for
there is no newspaper in Fraternity. Whatever has happened within a
six-mile radius during the day is fairly sure to be told there before
Will locks up for the night; and there is always something happening in
Fraternity. In which respect it is very much like certain villages of a
larger growth, and better advertised.
There is about the intimacy of life in a little village something that
suggests the intimacy of life upon the sea. There is not the primitive
social organization; the captain as lord of all he surveys. But there is
the same close rubbing of shoulders, the same nakedness of impulse and
passion and longing and sorrow and desire. You may know your neighbor
well enough in the city, but before you lend him money, take him for a
camping trip in the woods or go with him to sea. Thereafter you will
know the man inside and out; and you may, if you choose, make your loan
with a knowledge of what you are about. It is hard to keep a secret in
a little village; and Fraternity is a little village--that and nothing
more.
On weekday nights, as has been said, Will Bissell’s store is the social
center of Fraternity. Men begin to gather soon after supper; they begin
to leave when the stage has come up from Union with the mail. For Will’s
store is post office as well as market-place. The honeycomb of mail
boxes occupies a place just inside the door, next to the candy counter.
Will knows his business. A man less wise might put his candies back
among the farming tools, and his tobacco and pipes and cigars in the
north wing, with the ginghams, but Will puts them by the mail boxes,
because everyone gets mail or hopes for it, and anyone may be moved to
buy a bit of candy while he waits for the mail to come.
This was an evening in early June. Will’s stove had not been lighted for
two weeks or more; but to-night there was for the first time the warm
breath of summer in the air. So those who usually clustered inside were
outside now, upon the high flight of steps which led up from the road.
Perhaps a dozen men, a dog or two, half a dozen boys. Luke Hills had
just come and gone with the season’s best catch of trout--ten of them;
and when they were laid head to tail they covered the length of a
ten-foot board. The men spoke of these trout now, and Judd, who was no
fisherman, suggested that Luke must have snared them; and Jim Saladine,
the best deer hunter in Fraternity and a fair and square man, told Judd
he was witless and unfair. Judd protested, grinning meanly; and Jean
Bubier, the Frenchman from the head of the pond, laughed and exclaimed:
“Now you, m’sieu’, you could never snare those trout if you come upon
them in the road, eh?”
They were laughing in their slow dry way at Judd’s discomfiture when the
hoofs of a horse sounded on the bridge below the store; and every man
looked that way.
It was Lee Motley who said, “It’s Evered.”
The effect was curious. The men no longer laughed. They sat quite still,
as though under a half-fearful restraint, and pretended not to see the
man who was approaching.