There were few who knew--and, frankly, there were few who seemed to care
to know--what Old Dalton meant when he mumbled, in his aspirate and
toothless quest for expression of the thoughts that doddered through his
misty old brain, "Thay wur-rld luks diff'rent now--all diff'rent now,
yagh!" Sometimes he would go on, after a pause, in a kind of laborious
elucidation: "Na, na! Ma there, now, she's gone. I--egh, egh--I went to
school 'long of her; an' et didn't matter so much, mun, about th' rest
going, 's long as she wer' here. But now--she's gone, ey. Agh-m! Ey, now
she's gone-like, an' th' ain't nobody to help me keep--keep a-hold o'
things. I'm a hundred years old, mun. Agh-m! You wouldn't--you wouldn't
know what I was meanin', now, when I tell you this here world has growed
all yellow-like, this month back. Ey, that's it, mun--all queer-like.
Egh, it's time I was movin' on--movin' on."
Part of this monologue--a very small part--was Old Dalton's own,
repeated over and over, and so kept in mind ever since the more
initiative years a decade ago when he first began to think about his
age. Another part of the utterance--more particularly that about "movin'
on"--consisted of scraps of remarks that had been addressed to him,
which he had hoarded up as an ape lays away odds and ends, and which he
repeated, parrotlike, when the sun and his pipe warmed Old Dalton into
speech. But that idea that the earth was growing yellow--that was a
recent uncanny turn of his fancy, his own entirely.
He was pretty well past having any very definite inclination, but there
seemed no special reason why the old man should wish to "move on." He
appeared comfortable enough, pulling away at his blackened old pipe on
the bench by the door. No man above fifty, and few below that age,
enjoyed better health than he had; and many of fifty there are who
_look_ nearer death than Old Dalton did.
"Crack me a stick 'r two o' wood, grampa," his married
great-granddaughter, with whom he lived, would sometimes say; and up and
at it the old man would get--swinging his ax handily and hitting his
notch cleanly at every clip.
Assuredly, his body was a wonderful old machine--a grandfather's clock
with every wheel, bearing, and spring in perfect order and alignment.
Work had made it so, and work kept it so, for every day after his smoke
Old Dalton would fuss about at his "chores" (which, partly to please
him, were designedly left for him to do)--the changing of the bull's
tether-picket, watering the old horse, splitting the evening's wood,
keeping the fence about the house in repair, and driving the cows o'
nights into the milking-pen.
To every man in this world is assigned his duty. To every man is given
just the mental and physical equipment he needs for that duty. Some men
obtusely face away from their appointed work; some are carried afield by
exigency; some are drawn by avarice or ambition into alien paths; but a
minor proportion of happy ones follow out their destiny. There do not
occur many exceptions to the rule that the men who find their work and
do it, all other conditions being equal, not only live to old age, but
to an extreme, a desirable, a comfortable, and a natural old age.
Old Dalton had been built and outfitted to be a simple, colloquial
home-maker, family-raiser, and husbandman. His annals were never
intended to be anything more than plain and short. His was the function
of the tree--to grow healthily and vigorously; to propagate; to give
during his life, as the tree gives of its fruit and shade, such
pleasant dole and hospitable emanation as he naturally might; and in the
fullness of time to return again to the sod.
He had found and done thoroughly this appointed work of his. He was
doing it still, or at least that part of it which, at the age of one
hundred years, fittingly remained for him to do. He was tapering off,
building the crown of his good stack. When Death, the great Nimrod,
should come to Old Dalton, he would not find him ready caught in the
trap of decrepitude. He would find him with his boots on, up and
about--or, if in bed, not there except as in the regular rest intervals
of his diurnal round.
And the fact that he, a polyp in the great atoll of life, had found his
exact place and due work was the reason that, at one hundred years, life
was yet an orange upon the palate of Old Dalton.
Nanny Craig--who later became Mother Dalton--had, in remote eighteen
hundred and twenty, been a squalling, crabbed baby, and had apparently
started life determined to be crotchety. If she had adhered to this
schedule she would have been buried before she was sixty and would have
been glad to go. But Old Dalton--then young Dave Dalton--married her out
of hand at seventeen, and so remade and conserved her in the equable,
serene, and work-filled atmosphere of the home he founded that Nanny far
outdid all her family age records, recent or ancestral, and lived to
ninety-three. She was seven years younger than Dave, and now three
months dead.
Dave had missed her sorely. People had said the Message would not be
long coming to him after she went. Perhaps if he had been in the usual
case of those who have passed the seventh decade--weary and halt and
without employment or the ability or wish for it--he would have brooded
and worried himself into the grave very soon after the passing of his
old "mate" and one living contemporary. But he was a born, inured, and
inveterate worker, and as long as there were "chores" for him to do he
felt ample excuse for continuing to exist. Old Dalton still had the
obsession, too, that while and where he lived he was "boss" and manager;
and one solid, sustaining thought that helped to keep him living was
that if he died the Dalton farm (it was the original old homestead that
these young descendants of his occupied) would be without its essential
head and squire.
So sturdy, so busy, and so well had he been always that all the deaths
he had seen in his journey down a hundred years of mortality had failed
to bring home to him the grave and puissant image of death as a personal
visitant.
"Ey, I'm always out wur-rkin' when they send fur me, I guess," was the
joke he had made at eighty and repeated so often since that now he said
it quite naively and seriously, as a fact and a credible explanation.
But, although it took time to show its effect, Nanny's going hit him a
little harder than any of the other deaths he had witnessed. She had
traveled with him so long and so doughtily that he had never been able
to form any anticipative picture of himself without her. Indeed, even
now it felt as if she had merely "gone off visitin'," and would be back
in time to knit him a pair of mitts before the cold weather came.
It was the odd idea about the world growing "yellow-lookin'"--sometimes
he said "red-lookin'" and at other times seemed not quite certain which
description conveyed the vague hue of his fancy--that appeared to be
pulling him to pieces, undermining him, more than any other influence.
Most people, however, were accustomed to consider the hallucination an
effect of Mother Dalton's removal and a presage of Old Dalton's own
passing.
This odd yellowness (or redness), as of grass over which chaff from the
threshing-mill has blown, lay across the old pasture on this afternoon
of his second century, as Old Dalton went to water the superannuated
black horse that whinnied at his approach.
"Ey, Charley," he said, reflectively, as he took the old beast by the
forelock to lead it up to the pump--"ey, Charley-boy"; then, as the
horse, diminishing the space between its forefoot and his heel with a
strange ease, almost trod on him--"ey, boy--steady there, now. Es yur
spavin not throublin' ye th' day, then? Ye walk that free. S-steady,
boy--ey!"
But Grace, the granddaughter, glancing across the pasture as she came
to the kitchen door to empty potato peelings, put it differently.
"See how hard it be's gettin' for grampa to get along, Jim," she said to
her husband, who sat mending a binder-canvas at the granary door. "I
never noticed it before, but that old lame Charley horse can keep right
up to him now."
Jim Nixon stuck his jack-knife into the step beside him, pushed a rivet
through canvas and fastening-strap, and remarked, casually: "He ought to
lay off now--too old to be chorin' around. Young Bill could do all the
work he's doin', after he comes home from school, evenings."
"He's not bin the same sence gramma died," Gracie Nixon observed,
turning indoors again. "It ain't likely we'll have him with us long now,
Jim."
The old man, coming into the house a little haltingly that evening,
stopped sharply as his granddaughter, with a discomposingly intent look,
asked, "Tired to-night, grampa?"
"Ey?" His mouth worked, and his eyes, the pupils standing aggressively
and stonily in the center of the whites, abetted the protest of the
indomitable old pioneer. "Tired nothin'. You young ones wants t'l maind
yur own business, an' that'll--egh--kape yous busy. Where's me pipe,
d'ye hear, ey? An' the 'bacca? Yagh, that's it." The old man's fingers
crooked eagerly around the musty bowl. He lit, sucked, and puffed
noisily, lowering himself on a bench and feeling for the window-sill
with his elbow. "In my taime," he continued, presently, in an aggrieved
tone, "young ones was whopped fur talkin' up t'l thur elders like that.
Lave me be, now, an' go 'n' milk thame cows I just fetched. Poor beasts,
their bags es that full--ey, that full. They're blattin' to be eased."
With indulgent haste, the young couple, smiling sheepishly at each other
like big children rebuked, picked up their strainer-pails and went away
to the corral. The old man, his pipe-bowl glowing and blackening in time
to his pulling at it, smoked on alone in the dusk. In the nibbling,
iterative way of the old, he started a kind of reflection; but it was as
if a harmattan had blown along the usual courses of his thought, drying
up his little brooklet of recollection and withering the old aquatic
star-flowers that grew along its banks. His mind, in its meandering
among old images, groped, paused, fell pensive. His head sank lower
between his shoulders, and the shoulders eased back against the wall
behind his bench. When Jim Nixon and his wife, chasing each other
merrily back and forth across the dewy path like the frolicsome young
married couple they were, reached the door-yard, they found the old man
fallen "mopy" in a way uncommon for him, and quite given over to a
thoughtless, expressionless torpor and staring.
"You'll be tired-like, grampa, eh?" Jim Nixon said, as he came over to
the veteran and put a strong hand under Old Dalton's armpit. "Come on,
then. I'll help you off to your bed."
But the old man flamed up again, spiritedly, although perhaps this time
his protest was a little more forced. "Ye'll not, then, boy," he
mumbled. "Ye'll just lave me be, then. I'm--egh, egh"--he eased
gruntingly into a standing position--"I'm going to bed annyway, though."
He moved off, his coattail bobbing oddly about his hips and his back
bowed. The two heard him stump slowly up the stairs.
Jim Nixon drew the boot-jack toward him and set the heel of his boot
thoughtfully into the notch. "They go quick, Gracie," he observed, "when
they get as old as him. They go all at onct, like. Hand me thon cleaver,
an' I'll be makin' a little kindlin' for th' mornin'."
The alcove where the old man's bed stood was only separated by a thin
partition from the room where the young couple slept; and the sounds of
their frolic, as they chased, slapped, and cast pillows at each other,
came to him companionably enough as he drew the blankets up about his
big, shrunken chest and turned the broad of his back to the comfortable
hay-stuffed bed-tick.
But all the merry noise and sociable proximity of the young people
staved not off the great joust with loneliness this mighty knight of
years had before he slept--a loneliness more than that of empty house
and echoing stair; more than that, even, of Crusoe's manless island;
utterly beyond even that of an alien planet; of spaces not even coldly
sown with God-aloof stars--the excellent, the superlative loneliness of
one soul for another. It is a strange, misty, Columbus-voyage upon which
that hardy soul goes who dares to be the last of his generation.
There was in that bed a space between him and the wall--a space kept
habitually yet for the Nanny who never came to fill it, who never again
would come to fill it. (There would have been no great demonstration on
the old man's part even if she had miraculously come. Merely a grunt of
satisfaction; perhaps a brief, "Ey, ma--back?" and then a contented
lapsing into slumber.) His want of her was scarcely emotional; at least
it did not show itself to him that way. It took more the form of a kind
of aching wish to see things "as they was" again. But that ache, that
uneasiness, had upon Old Dalton all the effect of strong emotion--for it
rode him relentlessly through all these days of his December, its weight
and presence putting upon the tired old heart an added task. The
ordinary strain of life he might have endured for another decade, with
his perfect old physique and natural habits of life. But this extra
pressure--he was not equipped for that!
"They go quick, at that age," his granddaughter's man had said. But,
although even he himself did not know it, Old Dalton had been "going"
for weeks--ever since the first confident feeling that "ma" would come
back again had given place to the ache of her coming long delayed.
To-night it was cold in bed for August. Old Dalton wished "they" would
fetch him another quilt.
But it should not have been cold that August evening. Beyond the wooden
bed a small, rectangular window with sash removed showed a square of
warm sky and a few stars twinkling dully in the autumnal haze. An
occasional impatient tinkle of the cow-bell down in the corral indicated
midges, only present on bland days and nights when there is in the air
no hint of frost to stiffen the thin swift mite-wings.
High summer, and he was cold! Bedlam in the next room, and he was
lonely! His sensations were getting out of hand, beyond the remedial
influences and friendly fraternal sounds of this world he had so long
tenanted. By a score of years he had exceeded his due claim upon
earth's good offices to man. He was a trespasser and an alien in this
strange present--he with his ancient interests, fogy ways of speech and
thought, obsolete images and ideals, and mind that could only regard
without attempt at comprehension the little and great innovations of the
new age.
"We c'u'd make shift well enough with the things we had whin I was a
lad," Old Dalton had often said to those who talked to him of the fine
things men were inventing--the time-savers, space-savers, work-savers;
"we c'u'd make shift well enough. We got along as well as they do now,
too, we did; and, sir, we done better work, too. All men thinks of,
these days, is gettin' through quick. Yagh, that's it, that's
it--gettin' through quick-like, an' leavin' things half done."
So is a man born and implanted in his own generation. And if by strength
he invades the next generation beyond, he does not go far before he
finds he is a stranger utterly. In the current talk of men there are new
smartnesses of speech built upon the old maternal tongue. There are new
vogues of dress, new schools of thought, new modes even of play.
Perhaps, again, new vices that the older simpler life kept dormant give
the faces of this fresh generation a look and a difference strange and
sinister.
A hundred years old! There are to be found, notably in steadily moving
rural communities, not a few who endure to ninety hardily enough; but
rare and singular are the cases where a man is to be found, except as
dust in a coffin, a century after his birth. Old Dalton had inherited
from his mother the qualities that are the basis of longevity--a nature
simple and serene, a physique perfect in all involuntary functions and
with the impulse of sane and regular usages to guide voluntary ones, an
appetite and zest for work. She had married at eighteen and had lived to
see her son reach his eightieth year, herself missing the century mark
by only a few months.
But Old Dalton had breasted the tape, the first of his race to do it.
And if it had not been for this wave of loneliness; this parching,
astringent wind of sorrow that seemed to dry up the oil of his joints,
evaporate the simple liquor of his thought, put out the vital sparkle
in his eye; and now, latest act of dispossession, to milk his old veins
of their warmth--if it had not been for this influence and prescience,
Old Dalton might have run hardily quite a good little way into his
second century.
But somewhere, afar and apart, the finger was about to descend upon the
chronometer that timed his race. The dust atoms that a hundred years ago
had been exalted to make a man now clamored for their humble
rehabilitation. Man shall never, in this mortal body we use, exemplify
perpetual motion.
Old Dave Dalton turned in his bed. Something beyond the chilliness was
wrong with him, and he did not know what it was. There is no condition
so vexatious as an unexplainable lack of ease; and Old Dalton twisted,
gathered up his knees, straightened them again, tensed, relaxed, shifted
the bedclothes, and busily but vainly cast about for the source of his
disquiet.
Ah!--the thought slipped into his mind like a late guest.
"Et's thame sticks I forgot, ey," the old man muttered as he forthwith
and arduously rose into a sitting position and pushed the blankets off
him. "Ey, ey, that's it--the sticks for the mornin'!"
The chopping of the wood for the morning fire, in order that the sower,
haymaker, or harvester, as the seasonal case might be, should have as
little delay as possible in getting to his field or meadow; this had
been a regular chore of Old Dalton's, a function never omitted before in
all the scope of his methodical and assiduous days.
"Ey, but I never thought now that I'd ever lave that job not done," he
muttered as he shuffled slowly and sheepishly down the stairs. "Ey, ey
... ma!"
There she was, at the foot of the stairs! Old Dalton saw her, as plainly
as if it had been daylight. Gray apron with its horseshoe pattern almost
obliterated by many washings, waist bulging halely, shoulders bowed
forward, old wool hood tied over her head. There she was, with her
visage, that in all their years together had not changed for him,
squeezed and parched into the wrinkles of her thirty-four thousand days.
(The only difference Old Dalton could see, as he stopped, his elbows
bent a little, and regarded her in his quelling masculine way, resided
in the eyes. Instead of being held downcast in the old attitude of
deference, they now looked across at him, straight level,
and--summoning!)
Immobile age and Old Dalton's habit kept him from any visible expression
of the welcome that lay warm (though tempered by an odd feeling of
strangeness due to that look she carried in her eyes) in his soul.
"Ey, ma--back?" he murmured, as he looked her up and down a moment, to
get used to the sight of her, and then edged on in a vague, indifferent
way toward the outside door and the chip-pile.
Mother Dalton followed, without comment or change of expression, but a
tear seemed to flit and zigzag its way down the dried courses of her
thousand wrinkles. She stood in the doorway, facing the moon as it rose
above the roof of the granary. If she was a little translucent for so
solid-shaped an old presence, Old Dalton did not notice it, as he picked
up his ax and went handily to his wood-chopping.
She maintained her position on the step quietly, her hands folded across
her waistband, her feet bluish and bare upon the pine sill. But, though
she did not interrupt by word or movement, Old Dalton (who had used to
be no more conscious of her than of the wind or the daylight) felt
to-night as embarrassed by her proximity as though she were a stranger
and a hostile presence. He was sweating and irritable when he finished
his sticks; and, as he stood his ax against the end of a log, twisted
his head around sharply, with the intent of asking the old woman why she
was "gappin' there, place o' goin' and gettin' thon bed warmed up."
But the old pioneer himself fell agape as he encountered the look on her
face. There is a vast respect in the country for that many-phased
quality called "second sight"; and, if Old Dalton had ever seen signs of
the possession of it on a human face, he saw them on his old woman's
now. It struck him, too, for the first time definitely, as he groped
about in the fog of his old mind for the reason she looked so queer, so
like a stranger to him, that Mother Dalton had brought some odd quality
back from this "visit" she had been making.
There grew upon Old Dalton something of fear. He stood fumbling and
tetering, his hands wandering nervously up and down the edge of his
coat.
Mother Dalton stood upon that step, facing the half-moon that looked
down from above the grove. Her glance was not directed toward him, but
up and away. In the pupils of her eyes was a shine which seemed a
refraction of the silver-gray beams of the moon. There was about her
gaze a something heavy, mournful, and boding which old Dave could not
understand, but which made him think of the expression she had lifted in
the old homesteading days toward the hail-cloud that swept from eastward
to beat down their little, hard-sown crop.
"They 's trouble a-comin'." The voice was hers--at least it came from
her direction--yet it seemed to Old Dalton that the words came not from
her, but _through_ her. "Ey, Davie ... there 's trouble a-comin' ...
trouble a-comin'. Ess time you was movin' ... movin' on...."
Old Dave Dalton had never, in the long, long course of his years, had a
sensation like that which took him, as the queer voice melted away,
blending imperceptibly with the homely rustlings and lowings of the farm
night. The ache he had carried in his heart for those last weeks seemed
suddenly to bulge and burst, like a bubble. The old moon, the hills and
trees and trail of his long travel; the night, the world, and the odd
old figure over against him, were bundled up with a sudden vast
infolding in a blanket of black, a corner of which seemed thrust against
his mouth, gagging him and cutting off his breath. He was lifted, lifted
as in a great wind--lifted by shoulders, crown, and knees, and whirled
around--around ... then set again on his feet very softly, with the
blackness gone and the clear country night above him as before.
He should have been giddy after that cataclysm, but he stood upright and
steady. He should have been tired and shaken, but he was fresh and calm.
He should have been heavy and stiff and held to the earth by the ball
and chain of a hundred years; yet he seemed scarcely more solid,
scarcely less light, than an embodied wind. He should have been (for
the atmosphere of the home in which you have dwelt for a century is not
so easily dissipated) a doddering old corporeality, yet he felt he was
now all thought and glorious essence of life. He should have seen on the
step that old wife who had stood so uncannily by while he sweat over his
wood-splitting; yet the presence that moved toward him from the pine
sill, though wholly familiar and intimate and full of kind emanations,
had neither wrinkles nor grayness nor any of the attributes and
qualities of mortality. He should have bespoken that kindred presence in
halting colloquialities, yet the greeting he gave flowed from him in the
form of a thought untranslated into any sluggish medium of language. He
should have been filled with a vague curiosity about that trouble she
had just presaged, yet now he knew wholly....
"Let us thank God that our sojourn ended within the bourne of His
peace!" was the thought exchanged as these two dutiful ones, cleared and
lightened for swift voyaging, turned their faces toward the Gates of the
Day.
On the earth they had left midnight was wearing toward morning--the
morning of August the First, Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen!