The Wolf's Long Howl
by
Stanley Waterloo
Part 1 out of 4
Distributed Proofreaders
THE WOLF'S LONG HOWL
by Stanley Waterloo
1899
CONTENTS
THE WOLF'S LONG HOWL
AN ULM
THE HAIR OF THE DOG THAT BIT HIM
THE MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE
A TRAGEDY OF THE FOREST
THE PARASANGS
LOVE AND A TRIANGLE
AN EASTER ADMISSION
PROFESSOR MORGAN'S MOON
RED DOG'S SHOW WINDOW
MARKHAM'S EXPERIENCE
THE RED REVENGER
A MURDERER'S ACCOMPLICE
A MID-PACIFIC FOURTH
LOVE AND A LATCH-KEY
CHRISTMAS 200,000 B.C.
THE CHILD
THE BABY AND THE BEAR
AT THE GREEN TREE CLUB
THE RAIN-MAKER
WITHIN ONE LIFE'S SPAN
THE WOLF'S LONG HOWL
George Henry Harrison, though without living near kinfolk, had never
considered himself alone in the world. Up to the time when he became
thirty years of age he had always thought himself, when he thought of
the matter at all, as fortunate in the extent of his friendships. He was
acquainted with a great many people; he had a recognized social
standing, was somewhat cleverer than the average man, and his instincts,
while refined by education and experience, were decidedly gregarious and
toward hearty companionship. He should have been a happy man, and had
been one, in fact, up to the time when this trustworthy account begins;
but just now, despite his natural buoyancy of spirit, he did not count
himself among the blessed.
George Henry wanted to be at peace with all the world, and now there
were obstacles in the way. He did not delight in aggressiveness, yet
certain people were aggressive. In his club--which he felt he must soon
abandon--he received from all save a minority of the members a hearty
reception, and in his club he rather enjoyed himself for the hour,
forgetting that conditions were different outside. On the streets he met
men who bowed to him somewhat stiffly, and met others who recognized him
plainly enough, but who did not bow. The postman brought daily a bunch
of letters, addressed in various forms of stern commercial handwriting
to George Henry Harrison, but these often lay unopened and neglected on
his desk.
To tell the plain and unpleasant truth, George Henry Harrison had just
become a poor man, a desperately poor man, and already realized that it
was worse for a young man than an old one to rank among those who have
"seen better days." Even after his money had disappeared in what had
promised to be a good investment, he had for a time maintained his
place, because, unfortunately for all concerned, he had been enabled to
get credit; but there is an end to that sort of thing, and now, with his
credit gone after his money, he felt his particular world slipping from
him. He felt a change in himself, a certain on-creeping paralysis of his
social backbone. When practicable he avoided certain of his old friends,
for he could see too plainly written on their faces the fear that he was
about to request a trifling loan, though already his sense of honor,
when he considered his prospects, had forced him to cease asking favors
of the sort. There were faces which he had loved well which he could not
bear to see with the look of mingled commiseration and annoyance he
inspired.
And so it came that at this time George Henry Harrison was acquainted
chiefly with grief--with the wolf at his door. His mail, once blossoming
with messages of good-will and friendliness, became a desert of duns.
"Why is it," George Henry would occasionally ask himself--there was no
one else for him to talk to--"why is it that when a man is sure of his
meals every day he has endless invitations to dine out, but that when
those events are matters of uncertainty he gets not a bidding to the
feast?" This question, not a new one, baffling in its mystery and
chilling to the marrow, George Henry classed with another he had heard
somewhere: "Who is more happy: the hungry man who can get nothing to
eat, or the rich man with an overladen table who can eat nothing?" The
two problems ran together in his mind, like a couple of hounds in leash,
during many a long night when he could not shut out from his ears the
howling of the wolf. He often wondered, jeering the while at his own
grotesque fancy, how his neighbors could sleep with those mournful yet
sinister howlings burdening the air, but he became convinced at last
that no one heard the melancholy solo but himself.
"'The wolf's long howl on Oonalaska's shore' is not in it with that of
mine," said George Henry--for since his coat had become threadbare his
language had deteriorated, and he too frequently used slang--"but I'm
thankful that I alone hear my own. How different the case from what it
is when one's dog barks o' nights! Then the owner is the only one who
sleeps within a radius of blocks. The beasts are decidedly unlike."
Not suddenly had come all this tribulation to the man, though the final
disappearance of all he was worth, save some valueless remnants, had
been preceded by two or three heavy losses. Optimistic in his ventures,
he was not naturally a fool. Ill fortune had come to him without
apparent provocation, as it comes to many another man of intelligence,
and had followed him persistently and ruthlessly when others less
deserving were prospering all about him. It was not astonishing that he
had become a trifle misanthropic. He found it difficult to recover from
the daze of the moment when he first realized his situation.
The comprehension of where he stood first came to George Henry when he
had a note to meet, a note for a sum that would not in the past have
seemed large to him, but one at that time assuming dimensions of
importance. He thought when he had given the note that he could meet it
handily; he had twice succeeded in renewing it, and now had come to the
time when he must raise a certain sum or be counted among the wreckage.
He had been hopeful, but found himself on the day of payment without
money and without resources. How many thousands of men who have engaged
in our tigerish dollar struggle have felt the sinking at heart which
came to him then! But he was a man, and he went to work. Talk about
climbing the Alps or charging a battery! The man who has hurried about
all day with reputation to be sustained, even at the sacrifice of pride,
has suffered more, dared more and knows more of life's terrors than any
reckless mountain-climber or any veteran soldier in existence. George
Henry failed at last. He could not meet his bills.
Reason to himself as he might, the man was unable to endure his new
condition placidly. He tried to be philosophical. He would stalk about
his room humming from "The Mahogany Tree":
"Care, like a dun, stands at the gate.
Let the dog wait!"
and seek to get himself into the spirit of the words, but his efforts in
such direction met with less than moderate success. "The dog does wait,"
he would mutter. "He's there all the time. Besides, he isn't a dog: he's
a wolf. What did Thackeray know about wolves!" And so George Henry
brooded, and was, in consequence, not quite as fit for the fray as he
had been in the past.
To make matters worse, there was a woman in the case; not that women
always make matters worse when a man is in trouble, but in this instance
the fact that a certain one existed really caused the circumstances to
be more trying. There was a charming young woman in whom George Henry
had taken more than a casual interest. There was reason to suppose that
the interest was not all his, either, but there had been no definite
engagement. At the time when financial disaster came to the man, there
had grown up between him and Sylvia Hartley that sort of understanding
which cannot be described, but which is recognized clearly enough, and
which is to the effect that flowers bring fruit. Now he felt glad, for
her sake, that only the flower season had been reached. They were yet
unpledged. Since he could not support a wife, he must give up his love.
That was a matter of honor.
The woman was quite worthy of a man's love. She was clever and good. She
had dark hair and a wonderfully white skin, and dark, bright eyes, and
when he explained to her that he was a wreck financially, and said that
in consequence he didn't feel justified in demanding so much of her
attention, she exhibited in a gentle way a warmth of temperament which
endeared her to him more than ever, while she argued with him and tried
to laugh him out of his fears. He was tempted sorely, but he loved her
in a sufficiently unselfish way to resist. He even sought to conceal his
depth of feeling under a disguise of lightness. He admitted that in his
present frame of mind he ought to be with her as much as possible, as
then, if ever, he stood in need of a sure antidote for the blues, and
with a half-hearted jest he closed the conversation, and after that call
merely kept away from her. It was hard for him, and as hard for her; but
if he had honor, she had pride. So they drifted apart, each suffering.
Who shall describe with a just portrayal of its agony the inner life of
the reasonably strong man who feels that he is somehow going down hill
in the world, who becomes convinced that he is a failure, and who
struggles almost hopelessly! George Henry went down hill, though setting
his heels as deeply as he could. His later plans failed, and there came
a time when his strait was sore indeed--the time when he had not even
the money with which to meet the current expenses of a modest life. To
one vulgar or dishonest this is bad; to one cultivated and honorable it
is far worse. George Henry chanced to come under the latter
classification, and so it was that to him poverty assumed a phase
especially acute, and affected him both physically and mentally.
His first experience was bitter. He had never been an extravagant man,
but he liked to be well dressed, and had remained so for a time after
his business plans had failed. He was not a gormand, but he had
continued to live well. Now, with almost nothing left to live upon, he
must go shabby, and cease to tickle his too fastidious palate. He must
buy nothing new to wear, and must live at the cheapest of the
restaurants. He felt a sort of Spartan satisfaction when this resolve
had been fairly reached, but no enthusiasm. It required great resolution
on his part when, for the first time, he entered a restaurant the sign
in front of which bore the more or less alluring legend, "Meals fifteen
cents."
George Henry loved cleanliness, and the round table at which he found a
seat bore a cloth dappled in various ways. His sense of smell was
delicate, and here came to him from the kitchen, separated from the
dining-room by only a thin partition, a combination of odors, partly
vegetable, partly flesh and fish, which gave him a new sensation. A
faintness came upon him, and he envied those eating at other tables.
They had no qualms; upon their faces was the hue of health, and they
were eating as heartily as the creatures of the field or forest do, and
with as little prejudice against surroundings. George Henry tried to
philosophize again and to be like these people, but he failed. He noted
before him on the table a jar of that abject stuff called carelessly
either "French" or "German" mustard, stale and crusted, and remembered
that once at a dinner he had declared that the best test of a gentleman,
of one who knew how to live, was to learn whether he used pure,
wholesome English mustard or one of these mixed abominations. His ears
felt pounding into them a whirlwind of street talk larded with slang. He
ordered sparingly. He did not like it when the waiter, with a yell,
translated his modest order of fried eggs and coffee into "Fried,
turned," and "Draw one," and he liked it less when the food came and he
found the eggs limed and the coffee muddy. He ate little, and left the
place depressed. "I can't stand this," he muttered, "that's as sure as
God made little apples."
His own half-breathed utterance of this expression startled the man. The
simile he had used was a repetition of what he had just heard in a
conversation between men at an adjoining table in the restaurant. He had
often heard the expression before, but had certainly never utilized it
personally. "The food must be affecting me already," he said bitterly,
and then wandered off unconsciously into an analysis of the metaphor. It
puzzled him. He could not understand why the production of little apples
by the Deity had seemed to the person who at some time in the past had
first used this expression as an illustration of a circumstance more
assured than the production of big apples by the same power, or of the
evolution of potatoes or any other fruit or vegetable, big or little.
His foolish fancies in this direction gave him the mental relief he
needed. When he awoke to himself again the restaurant was a memory, and
he, having recovered something of his tone, resolved to do what could be
done that day to better his fortunes.
Then came work--hard and exceedingly fruitless work--in looking for
something to do. Then Nature began paying attention to George Henry
Harrison personally, in a manner which, however flattering in a general
way, did not impress him pleasantly. His breakfast had been a failure,
and now he was as hungry as the leaner of the two bears of Palestine
which tore forty-two children who made faces at Elisha. He thought first
of a free-lunch saloon, but he had an objection to using the fork just
laid down by another man. He became less squeamish later. He was
resolved to feast, and that the banquet should be great. He entered a
popular down-town place and squandered twenty-five cents on a single
meal. The restaurant was scrupulously clean, the steak was good, the
potatoes were mealy, the coffee wasn't bad, and there were hot biscuits
and butter. How the man ate! The difference between fifteen and
twenty-five cents is vast when purchasing a meal in a great city. George
Henry was reasonably content when he rose from the table. He decided
that his self-imposed task was at least endurable. He had counted on
every contingency. Instinctively, after paying for his food, he strolled
toward the cigar-stand. Half-way there he checked himself, appalled.
Cigars had not been included in the estimate of his daily needs. Cigars
he recognized as a luxury. He left the place, determined but physically
unhappy. The real test was to come.
The smoking habit affects different men in different ways. To some
tobacco is a stimulant, to others a narcotic. The first class can
abandon tobacco more easily than can the second. The man to whom
tobacco is a stimulant becomes sleepy and dull when he ceases its use,
and days ensue before he brightens up on a normal plane. To the one who
finds it a narcotic, the abandonment of tobacco means inviting the
height of all nervousness. To George Henry tobacco had been a narcotic,
and now his nerves were set on edge. He had pluck, though, and irritable
and suffering, endured as well as he could. At length came, as will come
eventually in the case of every healthy man persisting in self-denial,
surcease of much sorrow over tobacco, but in the interval George Henry
had a residence in purgatory, rent free.
And so--these incidents are but illustrative--the man forced himself
into a more or less philosophical acceptance of the new life to which
necessity had driven him. If he did not learn to like it, he at least
learned to accept its deprivations without a constant grimace.
But more than mere physical self-denial is demanded of the man on the
down grade. The plans of his intellect a failure, he turns finally to
the selling of the labor of his body. This selling of labor may seem an
easy thing, but it is not so to the man with neither training nor skill
in manual labor of any sort. George Henry soon learned this lesson, and
his heart sank within him. He had reached the end of things. He had
tried to borrow what he needed, and failed. His economies had but
extended his lease of tolerable life.
Shabby and hungry, he sought a "job" at anything, avoiding all
acquaintances, for his pride would not allow him to make this sort of an
appeal to them. Daily he looked among strangers for work. He found none.
It was a time of business and industrial depression, and laborers were
idle by thousands. He envied the men working on the streets relaying the
pavements. They had at least a pittance, and something to do to distract
their minds.
Weeks and months went by. George Henry now lived and slept in his little
office, the rent of which he had paid some months in advance before the
storms of poverty began to beat upon him. Here, when not making
spasmodic excursions in search of work, he dreamed and brooded. He
wondered why men came into the feverish, uncertain life of great cities,
anyhow. He thought of the peace of the country, where he was born; of
the hollyhocks and humming-birds, of the brightness and freedom from
care which was the lot of human beings there. They had few luxuries or
keen enjoyments, but as a reward for labor--the labor always at
hand--they had at least a certainty of food and shelter. There came upon
him a great craving to get into the world of nature and out of all that
was cankering about him, but with the longing came also the remembrance
that even in the blessed home of his youth there was no place now for
him.
One day, after what seemed ages of this kind of life, a wild fancy took
hold of George Henry's mind. Out of the wreckage of all his unprofitable
investments one thing remained to him. He was still a landed proprietor,
and he laughed somewhat bitterly at the thought. He was the owner of a
large tract of gaunt poplar forest, sixteen hundred acres, in a desolate
region of Michigan, his possessions stretching along the shores of the
lake. An uncle had bought the land for fifty cents an acre, and had
turned it over to George Henry in settlement of a loan made in his
nephew's more prosperous days. George Henry had paid the insignificant
taxes regularly, and as his troubles thickened had tried to sell the
vaguely valued property at any price, but no one wanted it. This land,
while it would not bring him a meal, was his own at least, and he
reasoned that if he could get to it and build a little cabin upon it, he
could live after a fashion.
The queer thought somehow inspirited him. He would make a desperate
effort. He would get a barrel of pork and a barrel or two of flour and
some potatoes, a gun and an axe; he knew a lake captain, an old friend,
who would readily take him on his schooner on its next trip and land him
on his possessions. But the pork and the flour and the other necessaries
would cost money; how was he to get it? The difficulty did not
discourage him. The plan gave him something definite to do. He resolved
to swallow all pride, and make a last appeal for a loan from some of
those he dreaded to meet again. Surely he could raise among his friends
the small sum he needed, and then he would go into the woods. Maybe his
head and heart would clear there, and he would some day return to the
world like the conventional giant refreshed with new wine.
It is astonishing how a fixed resolution, however grotesque, helps a
man. The very fact that in his own mind the die was cast brought a new
recklessness to George Henry. He could look at things objectively again.
He slept well for the first time in many weeks.
The next morning, when George Henry awoke, he had abated not one jot of
his resolve nor of his increased courage. The sun seemed brighter than
it had been the day before, and the air had more oxygen to the cubic
foot. He looked at the heap of unopened letters on his desk--letters he
had lacked, for weeks, the moral courage to open--and laughed at his
fear of duns. Let the wolf howl! He would interest himself in the music.
He would be a hero of heroes, and unflinchingly open his letters, each
one a horror in itself to his imagination; but with all his newly found
courage, it required still an effort for George Henry to approach his
desk.
Alone, with set teeth and drooping eyes, George Henry began his task. It
was the old, old story. Bills of long standing, threats of suits,
letters from collecting agencies, red papers, blue, cream and
straw-colored--how he hated them all! Suddenly he came upon a new
letter, a square, thick, well addressed letter of unmistakable
respectability.
"Can it be an invitation?" said George Henry, his heart beating. He
opened the sturdy envelope and read the words it had enclosed. Then he
leaned back, very still, in his chair, with his eyes shut. His heart
bled over what he had suffered. "Had" suffered--yes, that was right, for
it was all a thing of the past. The letter made it clear that he was
comparatively a rich man. That was all.
It was the despised--but not altogether despised, since he had thought
of making it his home--poplar land in Michigan. The poplar supply is
limited, and paper-mills have capacious maws. Prices of raw material had
gone up, and the poplar hunters had found George Henry's land the most
valuable to them in the region. A syndicate offered him one hundred
dollars an acre for the tract.
Joy failed to kill George Henry Harrison. It stunned him somewhat, but
he showed wonderful recuperative powers. As he ate a free-lunch after a
five-cent expenditure that morning, there was something in his air which
would have prevented the most obtuse barkeeper in the world from
commenting upon the quantity consumed. He was not particularly depressed
because his hat was old and his coat gray at the seams and his shoes
cracked. His demeanor when he called upon an attorney, a former friend,
was quite that of an American gentleman perfectly at his ease.
Within a few days George Henry Harrison had deposited to his credit in
bank the sum of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, minus the slight
cost of certain immediate personal requirements. Then one morning he
stalked over to his little office, now clean and natty. He leaned back
in his chair again and devoted himself to thinking, the persons on whom
his mind dwelt being his creditors.
The proper title for the brief account which follows should be The Feast
of the Paying of Bills. Here was a man who had suffered, here was a man
who had come to doubt himself, and who had now become suddenly and
arrogantly independent. His creditors, he knew, were hopeless. That he
had so few lawsuits to meet was only because those to whom he owed money
had reasoned that the cost of collection would more than offset the sum
gained in the end from this man, who had, they thought, no real property
behind him. Their attitude had become contemptuous. Now he stood forth
defiant and jaunty.
There is a time in a man's failing fortunes when he borrows and gives
his note blithely. He is certain that he can repay it. He runs up bills
as cheerfully, sure that they will easily be met at the end of thirty
days. With George Henry this now long past period had left its
souvenirs, and the torture they had inflicted upon him has been partly
told.
Now came the sweet and glorious hour of his relief.
It was a wonderful sensation to him. He marveled that he had so
respectfully thought of the creditors who had dogged him. They were
people, he now said, of whom he should not have thought at all. He
became a magnificently objective reasoner. But there was work to be
done.
George Henry decided that, since there were certain people to whom he
must write, each letter being accompanied by a check for a certain sum
of money, each letter should appropriately indicate to its recipient the
calm and final opinion of the writer regarding the general character and
reputation of the person or firm addressed. The human nature of George
Henry asserted itself very strongly just here. He set forth paper and
ink, took up his pen, and poised his mind for a feast of reason and flow
of soul which should be after the desire of his innermost heart.
First, George Henry carefully arranged in the order of their date of
incurring a list of all his debts, great and small--not that he intended
to pay them in that order, but where a creditor had waited long he
decided that his delay in paying should be regarded as in some degree
extenuating and excusing the fierceness of the assaults made upon a
luckless debtor. The creditors chanced to have had no choice in the
matter, but that did not count. Age hallowed a debt to a certain slight
extent.
This arrangement made, George Henry took up his list of creditors, one
hundred and twenty in all, and made a study of them, as to character,
habits and customs. He knew them very well indeed. In their intercourse
with him, each, he decided, had laid his soul bare, and each should be
treated according to the revelations so made. There was one man who had
loaned him quite a large sum, and this was the oldest debt of all,
incurred when George Henry first saw the faint signs of approaching
calamity, but understood them not. This man, a friend, recognizing the
nature of George Henry's struggle, had never sought payment--had, in
fact, when the debtor had gone to him, apologetically and explaining,
objected to the intrusion and objurgated the caller in violent language
of the lovingly profane sort. He would have no talk of payment, as
things stood. This claim, not only the oldest but the least annoying,
should, George Henry decided, have the honor of being "No. 1"--that is,
it should be paid first of all. So the list was extended, a careful
analysis being made of the mental and moral qualities of each creditor
as exposed in his monetary relations with George Henry Harrison. There
were some who had been generous and thoughtful, some who had been
vicious and insulting; and in his examination George Henry made the
discovery that those who had probably least needed the money due them
had been by no means the most considerate. It seemed almost as if the
reverse rule had obtained. There was one man in particular, who had
practically forced a small loan upon him when George Henry was still
thought to be well-to-do, who had developed an ingenuity and insolence
in dunning which gave him easy altitude for meanness and harshness among
the lot. He went down as "No. 120," the last on the list.
There were others. There were the petty tradesmen who in former years
had prospered through George Henry's patronage, whose large bills had
been paid with unquestioning promptness until came the slip of his cog
in the money-distributing machine. They had not hesitated a moment. As
the peccaries of Mexico and Central America pursue blindly their prey,
so these small yelpers, Tray, Blanche and Sweetheart, of the trade
world, had bitten at his heels persistently from the beginning of his
weakness up to the present moment. Toward these he had no malice. He
counted them but as he had counted his hunting dogs in better days. They
were narrow, but they were reckoned as men; they transacted business and
married the females of their kind, and bred children--prodigally--and
after all, against them he had no particular grievance. They were as
they were made and must be. He gathered a bunch of their bills
together, and decided that they should be classed together, not quite at
the end of the list.
The grade of each individual creditor fixed, the list was carefully
divided into five parts, twenty in each, of which twenty should receive
their letters and checks one day, twenty the next, and so on. Then the
literature of the occasion began.
The thoughtful debtor who has had somewhat continuous relations with a
creditor can, supposing he has even a moderate gift, write a very neat,
compact and thought-compelling little letter to that creditor when he
finally settles with him, if, as in the case of George Henry, the debtor
will have balance enough left after all settlements to make him easy and
independent. George Henry felt the strength of this proposition as he
wrote. In casual, easily written conversation with his meanest creditors
he rather excelled himself. Of course he sent abundant interest to
everybody, though apologizing to the gentlemen among the lot for doing
so, but telling them frankly that it would relieve him if they accepted
the proper sum for the use of the money, saying nothing about it; while
of the mean ones he demanded prompt receipts in full. That was the
general tenor of the notes, but there were certain moderate
extravagances in either direction, if there be such a thing as a
"moderate extravagance."
To the worst, the most irritating of his creditors, George Henry
indicted his masterpiece. He admitted his obligation, he expressed his
satisfaction at paying an interest which made it a good investment for
the creditor, and then he entered into a little disquisition as to the
creditor's manner and scale of thought and existence, followed by
certain mild suggestions as to improvements which might be made in the
character under observation. He pledged himself to return at any time
the favor extended him, and promised also never to mention it after it
had been extended. He apologized for the lack of further and more
adequate treatment of the subject, expressing his conviction that the
more delicate shades of meaning which might be employed after a more
extended study would not be comprehended by the person addressed.
George Henry--it is with regret that it is admitted--had a wild hope
that this creditor would become enraged to the point of making a
personal assault on him from this simple summing up of affairs, because
he had an imbedded desire to lick, or anyway try to lick, this
particular person, could he be provoked into an encounter. It is as well
to say here that his dream was never gratified. The nagging man is never
a fighting man.
And so the Feast of the Paying of Bills went on to its conclusion. It
was a season of intense enjoyment for George Henry. When it was ended,
having money, having also a notable gift as a shot, he fled to the
northern woods, where grouse and deer fell plentifully before him, and
then after a month he returned to enjoy life at ease.
It was upon his return home that George Henry Harrison, well-to-do and
content, learned something which for a time made him think this probably
the hollowest of all the worlds which swing around the sun. He came
back, vigorous and hopeful of spirit, with the strength of the woods and
of nature in him, and with open heart and hand ready to greet his
fellow-beings, glad to be one with them. The thing which smote him was
odd. It was that he found himself a stranger among the fellow-beings he
had come to meet. He found himself still a Selkirk of the world of trade
and traffic and transfer of thought and well-wishing and strong-doing
and of all social life. He was like a strange bird, like an albatross
blown into unaccustomed seas, alighting upon an island where albatrosses
were unknown.
He found his office as bright and attractive as urgently and sternly
directed servitude could make it. There were no letters upon his desk,
however, the desk so overburdened in the past. The desk spoke of
loneliness. The new carpet, without a worn white strip leading from the
doorway, said loneliness. All was loneliness. He could not understand
it.
There was the abomination of clean and cold desolation in and all about
his belongings. He sat down in the easy-chair before his desk, and was
far, very far, from happy. He leaned back--the chair worked beautifully
upon its well-oiled springs--and wondered. He shut his eyes, and tried
to place himself in his position of a month before, and failed. Why had
there been no callers? His own branch of business was in a laggard way,
but of that he made no account. He thought of Oonalaska, and decided
that there were worse places in the world than on that shore, even with
the drawback of the howlings. He seemed to be in space.
To sum up all in an explanatory way, George Henry, having largely lost
his grip upon the world, had voluntarily, being too sensitive, severed
all connections save those he had to maintain with that portion of the
community interested in the paying of his bills. Now, since he had met
all material obligations, he thought the world would come to him again
unsought. It did not come.
Every one seemed to have gone away with the wolf. George Henry began
trying to determine what it was that was wrong. The letter-carrier, a
fine fellow, who had called upon him daily in the past, now never
crossed his threshold. Even book agents and peddlers avoided the place,
from long experience of rebuff. The bill-collectors came no more, of
course; and as George Henry looked back over the past months of
humiliation and agony he suddenly realized that to these same collectors
he had been solely indebted toward the last of his time of trial for
what human companionship had come to him. His friends, how easily they
had given him up! He thought of poor old Rip Van Winkle's plaint, "How
soon we are forgotten when we are gone!" and sarcastically amended it to
"How soon we are forgotten when we are here!" A few invitations
declined, the ordinary social calls left for some other time, and he was
apparently forgotten. He could not much blame himself that he had
voluntarily severed the ties. A man cannot dine in comfort with
comfortable friends when his heart is sore over his general
inconsequence in the real world. Play is not play when zest is not given
to it by work and duties. Even his social evenings with old and true
friends he had given up early in the struggle. He could not overcome the
bitterness of his lot sufficiently to sit easily among those he most
cared for. It is not difficult sometimes to drop out of life while yet
alive. Yet George Henry realized that possibly he had been an extended
error--had been too sensitive. He thought of his neglect of friends and
his generally stupid performances while under the spell of the wolf, but
he thought also of the excuse he had, and conscience was half appeased.
So he was alone, the same old Selkirk or Robinson Crusoe, without a man
Friday, without even a parrot and goats; alone in his once familiar
hotel and his office, in a city where he was distinctly of the native
sort, where he had seen, it seemed to him, every one of the great
"sky-scraping" buildings rise from foundation-stone to turret, where he
should be one whose passage along the street would be a series of
greetings. He yearned for companionship. His pulse quickened when he met
one of his lately persecuting bill-collectors on the street and received
from him a friendly recognition of his bow and smile. He became affable
with elevator-men and policemen. But he was lonely, very lonely.
The days drifted into long weeks, when one day the mail-carrier, once so
regular in his calls, now almost a stranger, appeared and cast upon
George Henry's desk a letter returned uncalled for. The recipient
examined it with interest. It did not require much to excite his
interest now.
The returned letter was one which he had sent enclosing a check to a Dr.
Hartley, to whom he had become indebted for professional services at one
time. He had never received a bill, but had sent the check at a venture.
Its return, with the postoffice comment, "Moved, left no address,"
startled him. Dr. Hartley was Her father. George Henry pondered. Was it
a dream or reality, that a few months ago, while he was almost submerged
in his sea of difficulties, he had read or heard of Dr. Hartley's death?
He had known the doctor but slightly, well as he had known his daughter
Sylvia, of the dark eyes, but it seemed impossible that in any state of
mind such a thing as Dr. Hartley's reported death should have made no
impression upon him. He was aroused now, almost for the first time, and
was really himself again. The benumbing influence of his face-to-face
fight with poverty and inactivity disappeared. Sylvia lived again,
fresh, vital and strong in her hold upon him. He was renewed by the
purpose in life which he had allowed to lapse in his desperate days of
defeat. He would find Sylvia. She might be in sorrow, in trouble; he
could not wait, but leaped out of his office and ran down the long
stairways, too hurried and restless to wait for the lagging elevator of
the great building where he had suffered so much. The search was longer
and more difficult than the seeker had anticipated. It required but
little effort to learn that Dr. Hartley had been dead for months, and
that his family had gone away from the roomy house where their home had
been for many years. To learn more was for a time impossible. He had
known little of the family kinship and connections, and it seemed as if
an adverse fate pursued his attempts to find the hidden links which bind
together the people of a great city. But George Henry persisted, and his
heart grew warm within him. He hummed an old tune as he walked quickly
along the crowded streets, smiling to himself when he found himself
singing under his breath the old, old song:
Who is Silvia? What is she
That all swains commend her?
In another quarter of the city, far removed from her former home and
neighbors, George Henry at last found Sylvia, her mother and a younger
brother, living quietly with the mother's widowed sister. During his
search for her the image of the woman he had once hoped might be his
wife had grown larger and dearer in his mind and heart. He wondered how
he had ever given her up, and how he had lived through so much
suffering, and then through relief from suffering, without the past and
present joy of his life. He wondered if he should find her changed. He
need have had no fears. He found, when at last he met her, that she had
not changed, unless, it may be, to have become even more lovable in his
eyes. In the moment when he first saw her now he knew he had found the
world again, that he was no longer a stranger in it, that he was living
in it and a part of it. A sweetheart has been a tonic since long before
knights wore the gloves of ladies on their crests. Within a week,
through Sylvia, he had almost forgotten that one can get lost, even as a
lost child, in this great, grinding world of ours, and within a year he
and Mrs. George Henry Harrison were "at home" to their friends.
After a time, when George Henry Harrison had settled down into steady
and appreciative happiness, and had begun to indulge his fancies in
matters apart from the honeymoon, there appeared upon the wall over the
fireplace in his library a picture which unfailingly attracted the
attention and curiosity of visitors to that hospitable hearth. The
scene represented was but that upon an island in the Bering Sea, and
there was in the aspect of it something more than the traditional
abomination of desolation, for there was a touch of bloodthirsty and
hungry life. Up away from the sea arose a stretch of dreary sand, and in
the far distance were hills covered with snow and dotted with stunted
pine, and bleak and forbidding, though not tenantless. In the
foreground, close to the turbid waters which washed this frozen almost
solitude, a great, gaunt wolf sat with his head uplifted to the lowering
skies, and so well had the artist caught the creature's attitude, that
looking upon it one could almost seem to hear the mournful but murderous
howl and gathering cry.
This was only a fancy which George Henry had--that the wolf should hang
above the fireplace--and perhaps it needed no such reminder to make of
him the man he proved in helping those whom he knew the wolf was
hunting. His eye was kindly keen upon his friends, and he was quick to
perceive when one among them had begun to hear the howlings which had
once tormented him so sorely; he fancied that there was upon the faces
of those who listened often to that mournful music an expression
peculiar to such suffering. And he found such ways as he could to cheer
and comfort those unfortunate during their days of trial. He was a
helpful man. It is good for a man to have had bad times.
AN ULM
"It is as you say; he is not handsome, certainly not beautiful as
flowers and the stars and women are, but he has another sort of beauty,
I think, such a beauty as made Victor Hugo's monster, Gwynplaine,
fascinating, or gives a certain sort of charm to a banded rattlesnake.
He is not much like the dove-eyed setter over whom we shot woodcock this
afternoon, but to me he is the fairest object on the face of the earth,
this gaunt, brindled Ulm. There's such a thing as association of ideas,
you know.
"What is there about an Ulm especially attractive? Well, I don't know.
About Ulms in the abstract very little, I imagine. About an Ulm in the
concrete, particularly the brute near us, a great deal. The Ulm is a
morbid development in dog-breeding, anyhow. I remember, as doubtless you
do as well, when the animals first made their appearance in this country
a few years ago. The big, dirty-white beasts, dappled with dark blotches
and with countenances unexplainably threatening, reminded one of hyenas
with huge dog forms. Germans brought them over first, and they were
affected by saloon-keepers and their class. They called them Siberian
bloodhounds then, but the dog-fanciers got hold of them, and they
became, with their sinister obtrusiveness, a feature of the shows; the
breed was defined more clearly, and now they are known as Great Danes or
Ulms, indifferently. How they originated I never cared to learn. I
imagine it sometimes. I fancy some jilted, jaundiced descendant of the
sea-rovers, retiring to his castle, and endeavoring, by mating some ugly
bloodhound with a wild wolf, to produce a quadruped as fierce and
cowardly and treacherous as man or woman may be. He succeeded only
partially, but he did well.
"Never mind about the dog, and tell you why I've been gentleman, farmer,
sportsman and half-hermit here for the last five years--leaving
everything just as I was getting a grip on reputation in town, leaving a
pretty wife, too, after only a year of marriage? I can hardly do
that--that is, I can hardly drop the dog, because, you see, he's part of
the story. Hamlet would be left out decidedly were I to read the play
without him. Besides, I've never told the story to any one. I'll do it,
though, to-day. The whim takes me. Surely a fellow may enjoy the luxury
of being recklessly confidential once in half a decade or so, especially
with an old friend and a trusted one. No need for going far back with
the legend. You know it all up to the time I was married. You dined with
me once or twice later. You remember my wife? Certainly she was a
pretty woman, well bred, too, and wise, in a woman's way. I've seen a
good deal of the world, but I don't know that I ever saw a more tactful
entertainer, or in private a more adorable woman when she chose to be
affectionate. I was in that fool's paradise which is so big and holds so
many people, sometimes for a year and a half after marriage. Then one
day I found myself outside the wall.
"There was a beautiful set to my wife's chin, you may recollect--a
trifle strong for a woman; but I used to say to myself that, as students
know, the mother most impresses the male offspring, and that my sons
would be men of will. There was a fullness to her lips. Well, so there
is to mine. There was a delicious, languorous craft in the look of her
eyes at times. I cared not at all for that. I thought she loved me and
knew me. Love of me would give all faithfulness; knowledge of me, even
were the inclination to wrong existent, would beget a dread of
consequences. My dear boy, we don't know women. Sometimes women don't
know men. She did not know me any more than she loved me. She has become
better informed.
"What happened! Well, now come in the dog and the man. The dog was given
me by a friend who was dog-mad, and who said to me the puppy would
develop into a marvel of his kind, so long a pedigree he had. I
relegated the puppy to the servants and the basement, and forgot him.
The man came in the form of an accidental new friend, an old friend of
my wife, as subsequently developed. I invited him to my house, and he
came often. I liked to have him there. I wanted to go to Congress--you
know all about that--and wasn't often at home in the evening. He made
the evenings less lonely for my wife, and I was glad of it. I told her I
would make amends for my absence when the campaign was over. She was all
patience and sweetness.
"Meanwhile that brute of a puppy in the basement had been developing. He
had grown into a great, rangy, long-toothed monster, with a leer on his
dull face, and the servants were afraid of him. I got interested and
made a pet of the uncouth animal. I studied the Ulm character. I learned
queer things about him. Despite his size and strength, he was frequently
overcome by other dogs when he wandered into the street. He was tame
until the shadows began to gather and the sun went down. Then a change
came upon him. He ranged about the basement, and none but I dared
venture down there. He was, in short, a cur by day, at night a demon. I
supposed the early dogs of this breed had been trained to night
slaughter and savageness alone, and that it was a case of atavism, a
recurrence of hereditary instinct. It interested me vastly, and I
resolved to make him the most perfect of watchdogs. I trained him to lie
couchant, and to spring upon and tear a stuffed figure I would bring
into the basement. I noticed he always sprang at the throat. 'Hard
lines,' thought I, 'for the burglar who may venture here!'
"It was a little later than this nonsense with the dog, which was a
piece of boyishness, a degree of relaxation to the strain of my fight
with down-town conditions, that there came in what makes a man think the
affairs of this world are not adjusted rightly, and makes recurrent the
impulse which was first unfortunate for Abel--no doubt worse for Cain.
There is no need for going into details of the story, how I learned, or
when. My knowledge was all-sufficient and absolute. My wife and my
friend were sinning, riotously and fully, but discreetly--sinning
against all laws of right and honor, and against me. The mechanism of it
was simple. The grounds back of my house, you know, were large, and you
may not have forgotten the lane of tall, clipped shrubbery that led up
from the rear to a summer-house. His calls in the evening were made
early and ended early. The pinkness of all propriety was about them. The
servants suspected nothing. But, his call ended, the graceful gentleman,
friend of mine, and lover of my wife, would walk but a few hundred
paces, then turn and enter my grounds at the rear gate I have mentioned,
and pass up the arbor to the pretty summer-house. He would find time for
pleasant anticipation there as he lolled upon one of the soft divans
with which I had furnished the charming place, but his waiting would not
be long. She would soon come to him, and time passed swiftly.
"That is the prologue to my little play. Pretty prologue, isn't it?--but
commonplace. The play proper isn't! The same conditions affect men
differently. When I learned what I have told--after the first awful five
minutes--I don't like to think of them, even now!--I became the most
deliberate man on the face of this earth peopled with sinners.
Sometimes, they say, the whole substance of a man's blood may be changed
in a second by chemical action. My blood was changed, I think. The
poison had transmuted it. There was a leaden sluggishness, but my head
was clear.
"I had odd fancies. I remember I thought of a nobleman who had another
torn slowly apart by horses for proving false to him at the siege of
Calais. His cruelty had been a youthful horror to me. Now I had a
tremendous appreciation of the man. 'Good fellow, good fellow!' I went
about muttering to myself in a foolish, involuntary way. I wondered how
my wife's lover could endure the strain of four strong Clydesdales, each
started at the same moment, one north, one south, one east, one west.
His charming personal appearance recurred to me, and I thought of his
fine neck. Women like a fine-throated man, and he was one. I wondered if
my wife's fancy tended the same way. It was well this idea came to me,
for it gave me an inspiration. I thought of the dog.
"There is no harm, is there, in training a dog to pull down a stuffed
figure? There is no harm, either, if the stuffed figure be given the
simulated habiliments of some friend of yours. And what harm can there
be in training the dog in a garden arbor instead of in a basement? I
dropped into the way of being at home a little more. I told my wife she
should have alternate nights at least, and she was grateful and
delighted. And on the nights when I was at home I would spend half an
hour in the grounds with the dog, saying I was training him in new
things, and no one paid attention. I taught him to crouch in the little
lane close to the summer-house, and to rush down and leap upon the
manikin when I displayed it at the other end. Ye gods! how he learned to
tear it down and tear its imitation throat! The training over, I would
lock him in the basement as usual. But one night I had a dispatch come
to me summoning me to another city. The other man was to call that
evening, and he came. I left before nine o'clock, but just before going
I released the dog. He darted for the post in the garden, and with
gleaming eyes crouched, as he had been accustomed to do, watching the
entrance of the arbor.
"I can always sleep well on a train. I suppose the regular sequence of
sounds, the rhythmic throb of the motion, has something to do with it.
I slept well the night of which I am telling, and awoke refreshed when I
reached the city of my destination. I was driven to a hotel; I took a
bath; I did what I rarely do, I drank a cocktail before breakfast, but I
wanted to be luxurious. I sat down at the table; I gave my order, and
then lazily opened the morning paper. One of the dispatches deeply
interested me.
"'Inexplicable Tragedy' was the headline. By the way, 'Inexplicable
Tragedy' contains just about the number of letters to fill a line neatly
in the style of heading now the fashion. I don't know about such things,
but it seems to me compact and neat and most effective. The lines which
followed gave a skeleton of the story:
"'A WELL-KNOWN GENTLEMAN KILLED BY A DOG.
"'THEORY OF THE CASE WHICH APPEARS THE ONLY ONE
POSSIBLE UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES.'
"I read the dispatch at length. A man is naturally interested in the
news from his own city. It told how a popular club man had been found in
the early morning lying dead in the grounds of a friend, his throat torn
open by a huge dog, an Ulm, belonging to that friend, which had somehow
escaped from the basement of the house, where it was usually confined.
The gentleman had been a caller at the residence the same evening, and
had left at a comparatively early hour. Some time later the mistress of
the place had gone out to a summer-house in the grounds to see that the
servants had brought in certain things used at a luncheon there during
the day, but had seen nothing save the dog, which snarled at her, when
she had gone into the house again. In the morning the gardener found the
body of Mr. ----- lying about midway of an arbor leading from a gateway
to the summer-house. It was supposed that the unfortunate gentleman had
forgotten something, a message or something of that sort, and upon its
recurrence to him had taken the shorter cut to reach the house again, as
he might do naturally, being an intimate friend of the family. That was
all there was of the dispatch.
"Oddly enough, I received no telegram from my wife, but under the
circumstances I could do nothing else than return to my home at once. I
sought my wife, to whom I expressed my horror and my sorrow, but she
said very little. The dog I found in the basement, and he seemed very
glad to see me. It has always been a source of regret to me that dogs
cannot talk. I see that some one has learned that monkeys have a
language, and that he can converse with them, after a fashion. If we
could but talk with dogs!
"I saw the body, of course. I asked a famous surgeon once which would
kill a man the quicker: severance of the carotid artery or the jugular
vein? I forget what his answer was, but in this case it really cut no
figure. The dog had torn both open. It was on the left side. From this I
infer that the dog sprang from the right, and that it was that big fang
in his left upper jaw that did the work. Come here, you brute, and let
me open your mouth! There, you see, as I turn his lips back, what a
beauty of a tooth it is! I've thought of having that particular fang
pulled, and of having it mounted and wearing it as a charm on my
watch-chain, but the dog is likely to die long before I do, and I've
concluded to wait till then. But it's a beautiful tooth!
"I've mentioned, I believe, that my wife was a woman of keen perception.
You will understand that after the unfortunate affair in the garden, our
relations were somewhat--I don't know just what word to use, but we'll
say 'quaint.' It's a pretty little word, and sounds grotesque in this
conversation. One day I provided an allowance for her, a good one, and
came away here alone to play farmer and shoot and fish for four or five
years. Somehow I lost interest in things, and knew I needed a rest. As
for her, she left the house very soon and went to her own home. Oddly
enough, she is in love with me now--in earnest this time. But we shall
not live together again. I could never eat a peach off which the street
vendors had rubbed the bloom. I never bought goods sold after a fire,
even though externally untouched. I don't believe much in salvage as
applied to the relations of men and women. I've seen, in the early
morning, the unfortunates who eat choice bits from the garbage barrels.
So they stifle a hunger, but I couldn't do it, you know. Odd, isn't it,
what little things will disturb the tenor of a man's existence and
interfere with all his plans?
"I came here and brought the dog with me. I'm fond of him, despite the
failings in his character. Notwithstanding his currishness and the
cowardly ferocity which comes out with the night, there is something
definite about him. You know what to expect and what to rely upon. He
does something. That is why I like Ulm.
"What am I going to do? Why, come back to town next year and pick up the
threads. My nerves, which seemed a little out of the way, are better
than they were when I came here. There's nothing to equal country air. I
must have that whirl in my district yet. I don't think the boys have
quite forgotten me. Have you noticed the drift at all? I could only
judge from the papers. How are things in the Ninth Ward?"
THE HAIR OF THE DOG THAT BIT HIM
I have read hundreds of queer histories. I have myself had various
adventures, but I know of no experience more odd than that of an old
schoolmate of mine named John Appleman. John was born in Macomb County,
southeastern Michigan, in the year 1830. His father owned a farm of one
hundred acres there. John's mother died when he was but a lad, and after
that he lived alone with his father upon the farm. In 1855 John's father
died. In 1856 John married a pretty girl of the neighborhood. A year
later a child was born to them, a daughter. This is the brief history of
John Appleman up to the time when he began to develop his real
personality.
He was a contented personage in his early married life. His wife, while
not a shrew, had undoubted force of character, but there was not much
attrition; and his little daughter was, in John's estimation, the
fairest child upon the continent. Personally, he was content with all
the world, though his wife was somewhat less so. John had his failings.
He was not counted among the farmers of the neighborhood as a "pushing"
man. There was still much woodland in Macomb County in the year 1857,
and in autumn the woods were most enticing. Squirrels, black and gray,
were still abundant where the oak and hickory were; the ruffled grouse
still fed in families upon beech-nuts on the ridges and the thorn-apples
of the lowlands. The wild turkey still strutted about in flocks rapidly
thinning, and occasionally a deer fell to the lot of the shrewd hunter.
John liked to hunt and fish. He wasted time that way, his neighbors
said, and his wife was of the same opinion. It is true, he possessed
certain qualities which, even in their utilitarian eyes, commanded some
slight respect. He was so close to nature in his thoughts and fancies
that he knew many things which they did not, and which had a money
value. It was he, for instance, who first recognized the superior
quality of the White Neshannock, the potato of the time. It was he who
grafted the Baldwin upon his apple-trees, recognizing the fact that this
particular apple was a toothsome and marketable and relatively
non-decaying fruit. And it was he who could judge best as to what
crosses and combinations would most improve the breed of horses and
cattle and hogs and sheep. They admitted his "faculty," as they called
it, in certain directions, but they had a profound contempt for him in
others. They could not understand why he would leave standing in the
midst of a wheat-field a magnificent soft maple, the branches of which
shaded and made untillable an area of scores of yards. They could not
understand why he hesitated to murder a tree. So it came that he was
with them while scarcely of them, and that Mrs. Appleman, who could not
comprehend, belonged to the majority.
It must not be understood that John Appleman was unpopular. On the
contrary, each sturdy farmer rather liked while he criticised him. Had
John run for township clerk, or possibly even for supervisor, that most
important of township honors throughout Michigan, he might have been
elected, but John did not know his strength. He recognized his own
weakness, after a fashion. He knew that he would work violently for a
month or two at a time, giving the vigorous hired man a decent test in
holding his physical own, and he knew that after that he would become
what the people called "slack," and a little listless; and it was in his
slack times that the squirrel and grouse most suffered. Between him and
the wife of his bosom had grown nothing, so grave as to be described as
an armed neutrality; but more and more he hesitated in entering the
house after an evening's work, and more and more he drifted down to the
Corners--that is, the cross-roads where were the postoffice and the
blacksmith-shop and the general store. He liked to be with the other
fellows. He liked human companionship; and since his fellows drank, he
began to drink with them. It is needless to explain how the habit grew
upon him. The man who drinks whisky affects his stomach, and the
stomach affects the nerves, and there is a sort of arithmetical
progression until the stimulant eventually seems to become almost a part
of life; and the man, unless he be one of great force of character, or
one most knowing and scientific, must yield eventually to the stress of
close conditions. Time came when John Appleman yielded, and carried
whisky home in a gallon jug and hid it in the haymow.
Need does not exist for any going into details, for telling of what
happened at the cross-roads store, of what good stories were related day
by day and week by week and month by month, while the cup went round; it
is sufficient to say that the stomach of John Appleman became querulous
when he had not taken a stimulant within a limited number of hours, and
that he was in a fair way of becoming an ordinary drunkard. With his
experience and decadence came, necessarily, an expertness of judgment as
to the quality of that which he drank. He could tell good liquor from
bad, the young from the old.
It came that, being thoughtful and imaginative, John Appleman decided
that he, at least, should drink better liquor than did tipplers in
general. He would not be seen a weakly vagrant, buying his jugful at the
corner store; neither would he drink raw liquor. He would buy it in
quantity and let it age upon his farm, and so with each replenishing of
the jug from his private store would come an increase in quality derived
from greater age, until in time each daily tipple would be an absorption
of something so smooth and potent that immediate subsequent existence
would be a thing desirable in all ways. And John Appleman had a plan.
The Appleman barn and house stood perhaps three hundred yards apart,
near the crest of what was hardly worthy the name of hill, which sloped
downward into what they called the "flats," through which the creek ran.
The barn stood very close to uncleared woodland, and the banks ending
the woodland showed a decidedly rocky exterior. Appleman, chasing a
woodchuck one day, had seen him scurry into a hole in this rocky
surface, and prying away with a handspike had unloosed a small mass of
rock and discovered a cave; not much of a cave, it is true, but one of
at least twenty feet in length and eight or ten in breadth, and full six
feet in height. This discovery occurred a year or two before John felt
the grip of any stimulant. He had forgotten all about it until there
came to him the idea of drinking better whisky than did other people.
John had sold a yoke of oxen and a Blackhawk colt, and two hundred
dollars in gold were resting heavily in his little cherry-wood desk in
the farm-house sitting-room. One day he took ten of these gold-pieces
and went to town; not to the cross-roads, but to the larger place, some
ten miles distant, where was a distillery, and there he bought two
barrels of whisky. Whisky in those days, before the time of present
taxes, was sold from the distillery at prices ranging from thirty-five
to fifty cents a gallon, about forty-seven gallons to a barrel. The team
of horses dragged wearily home the heavy load; but they did not stop
when home was reached, either in front of the house or at the barn-yard
gate. Instead, they were turned aside through a rude gate leading into
the flats, and thence drew the load to the mouth of the little cave,
where, unseen by any one, Appleman tilted the barrels out and left them
lying on the sward.
Other things had been bought in town that day, and Appleman had no
difficulty in giving reasons for the lateness of his home-coming. Next
day, though, he was a busy man. By the exercise of main strength, and
the leverage afforded with a strong ironwood handspike, he succeeded in
rolling both those barrels into the cave and uptilting them, and leaving
them standing high and dry. The cave was as dry as a bone. He noted with
satisfaction the overhanging clay bank above, and felt that if he were
to be called away his treasure would be safe, since the opening would
doubtless soon be hidden from the sight of anybody. When he went to bed
that night he thought much of the hidden barrels.
An incident has been neglected in this account. When John Appleman
bought those barrels, the son of the distiller, a boy of ten, was told
to see that two designated barrels were rolled out from the storeroom.
The boy marked them, utilizing the great chunk of red chalk which every
country boy carried in his pocket some forty years ago. Furthermore,
being a boy and having time to waste, he decorated the barrels with
various grotesque figures, the ungainly fruit of his imagination. This
boy's work with that piece of red chalk had an effect upon the future of
John Appleman.
So things drifted, the whisky in the cave getting a little older, the
friction between John Appleman and his more business-like wife getting
somewhat more vigorous and emitting more domestic sparks, until there
came a change to every one. The farmer, who had read of martial music,
heard with his own ears the roll of the drum and the shrieking,
encouraging call of the fife. War was on, and good men abandoned homes
and families and surroundings because of what we call patriotism and
principle. As for John Appleman, he was among the very first to enlist.
He went into the army blithely. It is to be feared that John Appleman,
like many a worthier man, preferred the various conditions appertaining
to the tented field and the field of battle to that narrower scene of
conflict called the home. Before leaving, however, he crept into the
cave and varnished those two barrels with exceeding thoroughness.
"That will rather modify the process of evaporation. There will be good
whisky there when I come home next year," he said.
John Appleman went to the war with a Michigan regiment, and it is but
justice to him to say that he made an amazingly good soldier. He was
made corporal and sergeant, and later second lieutenant, and filled that
position gallantly until the war ended. That was his record in the great
struggle. Meanwhile his home relations had somewhat changed.
Rather happier in the army than on the farm, John Appleman had felt a
sense of half-gratitude that there had been no objection to his
departure, and for months after he left Michigan he sent most of his
soldier's pay home to his wife. Then came promotion and little attendant
expenses, and he sent less. There came no letter, and after a while he
sent nothing at all. "They have a good farm there which should support
them," so he said to himself; "as for me, I am a poor fellow battling
along down here, and what little I get I need." There ceased to be any
remittances, and there ceased to be any correspondence.
The war ended and John Appleman was free again; but he had a personal
acquaintance with a friend of the Confederate Major John Edwards of
Missouri, the right-hand man of the daring General Joe Shelby. There
were meetings and an exchange of plans and confidences, and the end of
it all was, that Appleman rode into Mexico on that famous foray led by
Shelby, when the tottering throne of Maximilian was almost given new
foundation by the quixotic raiders. The story of that foray is well
known, and there is no occasion for repeating it. It need only be said
that when Shelby's men rode gayly home again, John Appleman was not in
their company. He had met an old friend in the turbulent City of Mexico;
had, with due permission, abandoned the ranks of the wild riders, and
had fled away to where were supposable peace and quiet. There was
something of cowardice in his action now. He had delayed his home-going;
he should have been in Michigan shortly after Appomattox, and now he was
afraid to face his vigorous wife and make an explanation. In Guaymas, on
the western coast, he thought peace might be. So he bestrode a mule, and
with his friend traveled laboriously to the shores of the Pacific, and
there with this same friend dropped into the lazy but long life of the
latitude.
If one had no memory one could do many things. Memory clings ever to a
man's coat-tails and drags him back to where he was before. There was a
tug upon the coat-tails of John Appleman. He was homesick at times. The
musky odors of the coast in blooming time often oppressed him. The
fragrance of the tropic blossom had never become sweeter in his nostrils
than the breath of northern pines. He wanted to go home, but feared to
do so. Mrs. Appleman was assuming monumental proportions in his
estimation. And so the years went by, and John Appleman, dealing out
groceries in Guaymas for such brief hours of the day as people bought
things, his partner relieving him half the time, hungered more with each
passing year to see southeastern Michigan, and with each passing year
became more alarmed over the prospect of facing the partner of his joys
and sorrows there. He was an Anglo-Saxon, far away from home, and the
racial instinct and the home instinct were very strong upon him.
With a tendency toward becoming a drunkard when he left home, John
Appleton had not developed into one, either during his long experience
as a soldier, or later in western Mexico. There was nothing
unexplainable in this. Certain men of a certain quality, worried and
hampered, are liable to resort to stimulants; the same sort of men,
unhampered, need no stimulants at all. To such as these pure air and
nature are stimulants sufficient. Whoever heard of a drunken pioneer and
facer of natural difficulties, from Natty Bumpo of imagination to Kit
Carson of reality? John Appleman as a soldier did not drink. As a half
idler in Guaymas he tried, casually, _mescal_ and _aguardiente_ and all
Mexican intoxicants, but cast them aside as things unnecessary. More
years passed, and finally fear of Mrs. Appleman became to an extent
attenuated, while the scent of the clover-blossoms gained intensity. And
one morning in April, of the good year of our Lord one thousand eight
hundred and ninety-four, John Appleman said to himself: "I am going home
to take the consequences. The old lady"--thus honestly he spoke to
himself--"can't be any worse than this hunger in me. I am going to
Michigan."
So he started from Guaymas. He had very little money. The straightening
up of affairs showed him to possess only about four hundred dollars to
the good, but he started gallantly, shirking in his mind the meeting,
but overpowered by the homing instinct, the instinct which leads the
carrier-pigeon to its cot.
Meanwhile there had been living and change upon the farm. Mother and
daughter, left together, existed comfortably for some years, with the
aid of the one hired man. The war over, the wife waited patiently the
return of the husband from whom no letter had come for a long time, but
who she knew was still alive, learning this from returning members of
his company, who had told of his good services. She had learned later of
his companionship with the Confederate group under Shelby; but as time
passed and no word came, doubt grew upon her. She wrote to some of the
leaders of that wild campaign, and learned from their kindly answers
that her husband had been lost from them somewhere in Mexico. Both she
and her daughter finally decided that he must have met death. In 1867
Mrs. Appleman put on mourning, and she and Jane, the daughter, settled
down into the management of their own affairs.
As heretofore indicated, the farm had not been a bonanza, even when its
master was in charge, though its soil was rich and it was a most
desirable inheritance. Even less profitable did it become under the
management of the supposed widow and her daughter. They struggled
courageously and faithfully, but they were at a disadvantage. The
mowing-machine and the reaper had taken the place of the scythe and
cradle. The singing of the whetstone upon steel was heard no longer in
the meadows nor among the ripened grain. The harrow had cast out the
hoe. The work of the farm was accomplished by patent devices in wood and
steel. To utilize these aids, to keep up with the farming procession,
required a degree of capital, and no surplus had accrued upon the
Appleman farm. Mrs. Appleman was compelled to borrow when she bought her
mowing-machine, and the slight mortgage then put upon the place was
increased when other necessary purchases were made in time. The mortgage
now amounted to eleven hundred dollars, and had been that for over four
years, the annual interest being met with the greatest difficulty. The
farm, even with the few improved facilities secured, barely supported
the widow and her daughter. They could lay nothing aside, and now, in
1894, there was not merely a threat, but the certainty, of a foreclosure
unless the eleven hundred dollars should be paid. It was due on the
twentieth of September. It was the first of September when John Appleman
started from Guaymas for home. It was nine days later when he left the
little Michigan station in the morning and walked down the country road
toward his farm.
He was sixty-four years of age now, but he was a better-looking man than
he was when he entered the army. His step was vigorous, his eye was
clear, and there was lacking all that dull look which comes to the
countenance of the man who drinks intoxicants. He was breathing deeply
as he walked, and gazing with a sort of childish delight upon the
Michigan landscape about him.
It seemed to Appleman as if he were awakening from a dream. Real dreams
had often come to him of this scene and his return to it, but the
reality exceeded the figments of the night. A quail whistled, and he
compared its note with that of its crested namesake in Mexico, much to
the latter's disadvantage. A flicker passed in dipping flight above the
pasture, and it seemed to him that never before was such a golden color
as that upon its wings. Even the call of the woodpecker was music to
him, and the chatter and chirr of a red squirrel perched jauntily on the
rider of a rail fence seemed to him about the most joyous sound he had
ever heard. He felt as if he were somehow being born again. And when his
own farm came into view, the feeling but became intensified. He thought
he had never seen so fair a place.
He crossed the bridge above the creek which flowed through his own farm,
and saw a man engaged in cutting away the willow bush which had assumed
too much importance along the borders of the little stream. He called
the man to him, and did what was a wise thing, something of which he had
thought much during his long railroad journey.
"Are you working for Mrs. Appleman?" he asked.
The man answered in the affirmative.
"Well," said John, "I want you to go up to the house and say to her that
her husband has come back and will be there in a few minutes."
The man started for the house. Appleman sat down on the edge of the
bridge and let his legs dangle above the water, just as he had done many
years ago when he was a barefooted boy and had fished for minnows with a
pin hook. How would his wife receive him, and what could he say to her?
Well, he would tell her the truth, that was all, and take the chances.
He rose and went up the road until opposite his own gate. How familiar
the yard seemed to him! There was the gravel path leading from the gate
to the door, and the later flowers, the asters and dahlias, were in
bloom on either side, just as they were when he went away in 1861. The
brightness of the forenoon was upon everything, and it was all
invigorating. He opened the gate and walked toward the house, and just
as he reached his hand toward the latch of the door, it opened, and a
woman whose hair was turning gray put her arms about his neck and drew
him inside, weeping, and with the exclamation, "Oh, John!"
There was another woman, fair-faced and demure, whom he did not
recognize at first, but who kissed him and called him father. Of what
else happened at this meeting I do not know. The reunion was at least
good, and John Appleman was a very happy man.
But the practical phases of life are prompt in asserting themselves. It
was not long before John Appleman knew the problem he had to face. There
was a mortgage nearly due for eleven hundred dollars on the farm, and he
had in his possession only about three hundred dollars. A shrewder
financier than he might have known how to renew the mortgage, or to lift
it by making a new one elsewhere, for the farm was worth many times the
sum involved. But Appleman was not a financier. The burden of anxiety
which had rested upon his wife and daughter now descended upon him. He
brooded and worried until he saw the hour of execution only five days
off, with no reasonable existent prospect of saving himself. He wandered
about the fields, plotting and planning vaguely, but to little purpose.
One day he stood beside the creek, gazing absent-mindedly toward the
hillside.
Something about the hillside, some association of ideas, perhaps the
view of a gnarled honey-suckle-bush where he had gathered flowers in his
childhood, set his memory working, and there flashed upon him the
incident of the cave, and what he had left concealed there when he went
into the army. He looked for the cave's entrance, but saw none. The
matter began to interest him. Why there was no entrance visible was
easily explained. Clay had overrun with the spring rains from the
cultivated field above, building gradually upward from the bottom of the
little hill until the aperture had been entirely hidden. This deposit of
clay, a foot perhaps in depth, reached nearly to the summit of the
slight declivity. Appleman began speculating as to where the cave might
be, and his curiosity so grew upon him that he resolved to learn. He cut
a stout blue-beach rod and sharpened one of it, and estimating as
closely as he could where the little cave had been, thrust in his
testing-pole. Scarcely half a dozen ventures were required to attain his
object. He found the cave, then went to the barn and secured a spade and
came back to do a little digging. He had begun to feel an interest in
the fate of those two whisky barrels. It was not a difficult work to
effect an entrance to the cave, and within an hour from the time he
began digging Appleman was inside and examining things by the aid of a
lantern which he had brought. He was astonished. The cave had evidently
never been entered by any one save himself; all was dry and clean, and
the two barrels stood apparently just as he had left them, over thirty
years ago. He decided that they must be empty, that their contents must
have long since evaporated; but when he tried to tilt one of them over
upon its side he found it very heavy. He made further test that day,
boring a hole into the top of one of the barrels, with the result that
there came forth a fragrance compared with which, to a judge of good
liquor, all the perfumes of Araby the Blest would be of no importance.
He measured the depth of the remaining contents, and found that each
barrel was more than two-thirds full. Then he hitched a horse to a buggy
and drove to town--drove to the same distillery where he had bought
those barrels in the latter 'fifties. The distiller of that time had
passed away and his son reigned in his stead--the youth who had
decorated the barrels with the red chalk-marks. To him, now a keen,
middle-aged business man, Appleman told his story. The distiller was
deeply interested, but incredulous. "I will drive back with you," he
said; and late that afternoon the two men visited the cave.
The visit was a brief one. No sooner did the distiller observe those
lurid hieroglyphics upon the barrels than he uttered a shout of delight.
There came back to him the memory of that afternoon so many years ago,
and of his boyish exploit in decoration. He applied his nose judicially
to the auger-hole in the barrel's top. He estimated the amount of
spirits in each. "I wouldn't have believed it," he said, "if I hadn't
seen it. It's because you varnished the barrels. That made evaporation
slow. I'll give you twenty dollars a gallon for all there is of it."
"I'll take it," said John Appleman.
There were in those two barrels just seventy-six gallons of whisky, to
compare with which in quality there was practically nothing else upon
the continent; at least so swore the distiller. Twenty times seventy-six
dollars is fifteen hundred and twenty dollars. The mortgage on the farm
was paid, and John Appleman and wife and daughter leaned back content,
out of debt, and, counting the little John had brought home, with four
or five hundred dollars to the good in the county bank. They are doing
very well now. Appleman regrets the disappearance of the deer, wild
turkey and ruffed grouse, but the quail are abundant, and the flowers
bloom as brightly and the birds sing as sweetly as in the days before
the war. Time, just as it improved the whisky, has improved his wife,
and she has a mellower flavor. He prefers Michigan to Mexico.
I have read somewhere that there is a moral to the life of every man. I
have often speculated as to the moral appertaining to the career of
Appleman. If he had never bought those two barrels of whisky he would
have lost his farm. On the other hand, had he never taken to drink, he
might have remained at home an ordinary decent citizen, and his farm
have never been in peril. The only moral I have been able to deduce is
this: If by any chance you come into possession of any quantity of
whisky, don't drink it, but bury it for thirty-five years at least, and
see what will happen.
THE MAN WHO FELL IN LOVE
He lived in one of the great cities in this country, the man who fell in
love, and was in that city a character at least a little above the
ordinary rut of men. He had talent and energy, and there had come to him
a hard schooling in city ways, though he was born in the forest, and his
youth had been passed upon a farm sloping downward to the shore of the
St. Clair River, that wonderful strait and stretch of water which flows
between broad meadowlands and wheat-fields and connects Lake Huron with
the lower lake system, and itself becomes at last the huge St. Lawrence
tumbling down into the Atlantic Ocean. Upon the St. Clair River now
passes hourly, in long procession, the huge fleet of the lakes, the
grain and ore laden crafts of Lake Superior, queer "whalebacks" and big
propellers, and the vast fleet of merchantmen from Chicago and Milwaukee
and other ports of the inland seas. The procession upon the watery blue
ribbon a mile in width, stretching across the farm lands, is something
not to be seen elsewhere upon the globe. The boats seen from a distance
appear walking upon the land. Broad sails show white and startling
against green groves upon the shore, and the funnels of steamers rear
themselves like smoking stumps of big trees beyond a corn-field. Here
passes a traffic greater in tonnage than that of the Suez Canal, of the
Mersey, or even of the Thames. But it was not so when the man who fell
in love was a boy. There were dense forests upon the river's banks then,
and only sailing crafts and an occasional steamer passed, for that was
half a century ago.
The man who was to fall in love, as will be told, had, in the whirl of
city life, almost forgotten the sturdy days when he was a youngster in
the little district school, when at other times he rode a mare dragging
an old-fashioned "cultivator," held by his father between the corn rows,
and when the little farm hewed out of the woodland had yet stumps on
every acre, when "loggings" and "raisings" drew the pioneers together,
and when he, one of the first-born children of that region, had fled for
comfort in every boyish strait to a gentle, firm-faced woman who was his
mother. He had, with manhood, drifted to the city, and had become one of
the city's cream in all acuteness and earnestness and what makes the
pulse of life, when thousands and tens and hundreds of thousands
congregate to live together in one vast hive. He was a man of affairs, a
man of the world, easily at home among traders and schemers for money,
at a political meeting, at a banquet, or in society. Sometimes, in the
midst of things, would float before his eyes a vision of woods, of dark
soil, of a buckwheat field, of squirrels on brush fences, of a broad,
blue river, and finally of a face, maternal and sweet, with brown eyes,
hovering over him watchfully and lovingly. He would think of the
earnest, thoughtful, bold upbringing of him, and his heart would go out
to the woman; but the tide of city affairs rose up and swept away the
vision. Still, he was a good son, as good sons at a distance go, and
occasionally wrote a letter to the woman growing older and older, or
sent her some trifle for remembrance. He was reasonably content with
himself.
Here comes another phase of description in this brief account of affairs
of the man who fell in love. One afternoon a woman sat in an arm-chair
on the long porch in front of what might have by some been called a
summer cottage, by others a farm-house, overlooking the St. Clair River.
The chair she sat in was of oak, with no arms, and tilted easily
backward, yet with no chance of tipping clear over. It must have cost
originally about four dollars. In its early days it had possessed a cane
back and cane bottom, through the round holes of which the little
children were accustomed to thrust their fingers, getting them caught
sometimes, and howling until released. Now its back was of stout canvas,
and its seat of cords, upon which a cushion rested. It was in general
appearance, though stout enough, a most disreputable chair among the
finer and more modern ones which stood along the porch upon either
side. But it was this chair that the aging woman loved. "It was this
chair he liked," she would say, "and it shall not be discarded. He used
to sit in it and rock and dream, and it shall stay there while I live."
She spoke the truth. It was that old chair the boy, now the city man,
had liked best of all.
She sat there, this gray-haired woman, a picture of one of the mothers
who have made this nation what it is. The hair was drawn back simply
from the broad, clear forehead, and her strong aquiline features were
sweet, with all their force. Her dress was plain. She sat there, looking
across the blue waters thoughtfully, and at moments wistfully.
Not far from the woman on the long, broad porch was a pretty younger
woman, and beside her two children were playing. The younger woman, the
mother of the tumbling youngsters, was the niece of the elder one in the
rude old rocking-chair. She spoke to the two children at times,
repressing them when they became too boisterous, or petting and soothing
when misadventure came to either of them in their gambols. At last she
moved close to the elder, and began to talk. The conversation was about
the children, and there was much to say, the gray-haired woman listening
kindly and interestedly. Finally she spoke.
"Take comfort with the children now, Louisa," she said, gently, "because
it will be best for you. It is a strange thing; it is something we
cannot comprehend, though doubtless it is all for the best, but I often
think that my happiest days were when my children were little, climbing
about my skirts, dependent upon me for everything, as birds in the nest
are dependent, and with all my anxiety over them, giving me the greatest
comfort that can come to a woman. But the years passed, and the children
went away. They are good men and women; I am proud of them, but they are
mine no longer. They love the old mother, too, I know that--when they
think of her. But, oh, Louisa! there is lead in my heart sometimes. I
want something closer. But I'll not complain. Why should I? It is the
law of nature." And she sighed and looked again across the blue water.
There were tears in the corners of her eyes.
The niece, hopeful in the pride of young motherhood, replied
consolingly: "Aunt, you should be proud of your children. Even Jack, the
oldest of them all, is as good as he can be. Think of his long letters
once in a while. He loves you dearly."
"Yes," the old lady replied; "I know he loves me--when he thinks of old
times and his boyhood. But, Louisa, I am very lonesome."
And again her eyes sought the water and the yellow wheat-fields of the
farther shore.
The road which follows the American bank of the St. Clair River is a
fine thing in its way. It is what is known as a "dirt" road, well kept
and level, of the sort beloved of horses and horsemen, and it lies
close to the stream, between it and the farm lands. At every turn a new
and wonderful panorama of green and yellow landscape and azure expanse
of water bursts upon the lucky traveler along this blessed highway.
Still, being a "dirt" road, when one drives along it at speed there
arises in midsummer a slight pillar of dust as the conveyance passes,
and one may from a distance note the approach of a possible visitor.
"There's a carriage coming, aunt," said the younger woman.
The carriage came along rapidly, and with a sudden check the horses were
brought to a standstill in front of the house upon the porch of which
the two women were sitting. Out of the carriage bounded a
broad-shouldered gentleman, who stopped only for a moment to give
directions to the driver concerning the bringing of certain luggage to
the house, and who then strode up the pathway confidently. The elder
woman upon the porch looked upon the performance without saying a word,
but when the man had got half-way up the walk she rose from the chair,
moved swiftly for a woman of her age to where the broad steps from the
pathway led up to the porch, and met the ascending visitor with the
simple exclamation:
"Jack, my boy!"
Jack, the "my boy" of the occasion, seemed a trifle affected himself. He
looked the city man, every inch of him, and was one known under most
circumstances to be self-contained, but upon this occasion he varied a
little from his usual form. He stooped to kiss the woman who had met
him, and then, changing his mind, reached out his arms and hugged her a
little as he kissed her. It was a good meeting.
There was much to talk about, and the mother's face was radiant; but the
instinct of caring and providing for the being whom she had brought into
the world soon became paramount in her breast, and she moved, as she had
done decades ago, to provide for the physical needs of her child. This
man of the world from the city was but the barefooted six-year-old whom
she had borne and loved and fed and guarded in the years that were past.
She must care for him now. And so she told him that he must have supper,
and that he must let her go; and there was a sweet tinge of motherly
authority in her words--unconsciously to her, arbitrary and
unconsciously to him, submissive--and she left him to smoke upon the
broad porch, and dawdle in the chair he remembered so well, and talk
with the bright Louisa.
As for the supper--it would in the city have been called a dinner--it
was good. There were fine things to eat. What about biscuits, so light
and fragrant and toothsome that the butter is glad to meet them? What
about honey, brought by the bees fresh from the buckwheat-field? What
about ham and eggs, so fried that the appetite-tempting look of the
dish and the smell of it makes one a ravenous monster? What about
old-fashioned "cookies" and huckleberry pie which melts in the mouth?
What about a cup of tea--not the dyed green abomination, but luscious
black tea, with the rich old flavor of Confucian ages to it, and a
velvety smoothness to it and softness in swallowing? What about
preserves, recalling old memories, and making one think of bees and
butterflies and apples on the trees and pumpkins in the cornrows, and
robins and angle-worms and brown-armed men in the hay-fields? Eh, but it
was a supper!
It was late when the man from the city went to bed, and there was much
talk, for he had told his mother that he intended to stay a little
longer this time than in the past; that he had been bothered and fled
away from everything for rest. "We'll go up the river to-morrow," said
he, "just you and I, and 'visit' with each other."
He went to his room and got into bed, and then came a little tap at his
door. His mother entered. She asked the big strong man how he felt, and
patted his cheek and tucked the bedclothes in about his feet and kissed
him, and went away. He went back forty years. And he repeated
reverently--he could not help it--"Now I lay me," and slept well.
There was a breakfast as fine as had been the supper, and as for the
coffee, the hardened man of the city and jests and cynicism found
himself wondering that there should have developed jokes about what
"mother used to make." The more he thought of it, the madder he became.
"We are a nation of cheap laughers," he said to himself savagely.
At nine o'clock the mother came out to where the man was smoking on the
piazza, with her bonnet on and ready for the little boat-trip. They were
to go to the outlet of Lake Huron and back. They would have luncheon
either at Sarnia or Port Huron. They would decide when the time came.
They were two vagrants.
Dawdling in steamer chairs and looking upon the Michigan shore sat
little mother of the country and big son of the city. The woman--the
blessed silver-haired creature--forgot herself, and talked to the son as
a crony. She pointed out spots upon the shore where she, an early
teacher in the wilderness, had adventures before he was born. There was
Bruce's Creek, emptying into the river; and Mr. Bruce, most long-lived
of pioneers, had but lately died, aged one hundred and five years. There
was where the little school-house stood in which she once taught school
in 1836. There was where she, riding horseback with a sweetheart who
later became governor of the state, once joined with him in a riotous
and aimless chase after a black bear which had crossed the road. Her
cheeks, upon which there were not many wrinkles, glowed as she told the
story of her youth to the man beside her. He looked upon her with the
full intelligence of a great relationship for the first time in his
life. He fell in love with her.
It dawned upon this man, trained, cynical, an arrogant production of the
city, what this woman had been to him. She alone of all the human beings
in the world had clung to him faithfully. She had borne and bred, and
now she cherished him, and for one who could see beneath the shell and
see the mind and soul, she was wonderfully fair to look upon. He had
neglected her in all that is best and most appreciated of what would
make a mother happiest. But now he was in love. Here came in the man. He
had the courage to go right in to the woman, a little while after they
had reached home, and tell her all about it. And the foolish woman
cried!
A man with a sweetheart has, of course, to look after her and provide
for her amusement. So it happened that Jack the next morning announced
in arbitrary way to his mother that they were going to Detroit.
Men who have been successful in love will remember that after the first
declaration and general admission of facts the woman is for a time most
obedient. So it came that this man's sweetheart obeyed him implicitly,
and went upstairs to get ready for the journey. She came down almost
blushing.
"My bonnet," she said, as she came from her room smelling of lavender
and dressed for the journey, "is a little old-fashioned, but it just
suits me; I am old-fashioned myself."
She was smiling with the happy look of a girl.
Jack looked at her admiringly. She wore the black silk dress which every
American woman considers it only decent that she should have. It was
made plainly, without ruffles or bugles or lace, and it fitted her
erect, stately figure perfectly. A broad real lace collar encircled her
neck, and Jack recognized with delight the solid gold brooch--in shape
like nothing that was ever on sea or land--with which it was fastened.
It was a relic from the dim past. Jack remembered that piece of jewelry
as far back as his memory stretched.
The old lady's hands were neatly gloved, and her feet were shod with
substantial, well-kept laced shoes. Everything about her was immaculate.
Jack knew that she had never laid aside the white petticoats and
stockings it was her pride to keep spotless. She abominated the new
fashions of black and silk. Jack could hear her starched skirts rustle
as she came toward him. Her bonnet was black and in style of two or
three years back, and its silk and lace were a trifle rusty.
"Never mind, mother, we will buy you a bonnet 'as is a bonnet' before we
come back," the man said as he kissed the happy, shining face.
The steamers which ply between Detroit and Port Huron and Sarnia are big
and sumptuous, and upon them one sits under awnings in midsummer, and
if knowing, takes much delight in the wonderful scenery passed. The St.
Clair River pours into St. Clair Lake, and Lake St. Clair is one of the
great idling places of those upon this continent who can afford to idle.
It is a shallow lake, upon the American side stretching out into what
are known as the "Flats," a vast area of wild rice with deep blue
waterways through them, the haunt of the pickerel and black bass and of
duck and wild geese. Upon the Canadian side, the Thames River comes
through the lowlands, a deep and reed-fringed stream to contribute to
the lake's pure waters. It was upon the banks of this stream, a little
way from the lake, that the great Indian, Tecumseh, fought his last
fight and died as a warrior should. There is nothing that is not
beautiful on the waterway from Lake Huron to Lake St. Clair. It is just
the place in which to realize how good the world is. It is just the
place for lovers. So Jack, the man who had fallen in love, and his
gray-haired sweetheart were vastly content as the steamer bore them
toward Detroit.
The man looked upon the woman in a cherishing mood as she sat beside him
in a comfortable chair. He noted again the gray hair, thinner than it
was once, and thought of the time when he, a thoughtless boy, wondered
at its mass and darkness. He compared the pale, aquiline features with
the beauty of the woman who, centuries ago it seemed, was accustomed to
take him in her lap and cuddle him and make him brave when childish
misadventures came. A greater wave of love than ever came over him. He
regretted the lost years when he might have made her happier, might have
given her a greater realization of what she had done in the world with
her firm example, in a new country, and the strong brood she had borne
and suffered for. And he had manhood enough and a sudden impulse to tell
her all about it. She listened, but said nothing, and clasped his hand.
Mothers will cry sometimes.
The city was reached, and there was a proper luncheon, and then the
arbitrary son dragged his sweetheart out upon the street with him. The
first thing, the matter of great importance, was the bonnet, not that he
cared for the bonnet particularly, but he was a-sweethearting. He was
going to spoil his girl if he could, that was what he said. His girl
only looked up with glistening eyes, and submitted obediently to be
haled along in the direction of a "swell" milliner's place, the name of
which Jack had secured after much examination of the directory and much
inquiry in offices where he was acquainted.
As they walked along the busy street they met a lady of unmistakably
distinguished appearance. Instantly she recognized the mother and son,
and stopped to greet them.
She was an old playmate of Jack's and a protege of his mother's, now
the wife of a man of brains, influence, money, and a leader in the
social life of the City of the Straits.
There came an inspiration to the man. "Mrs. Sheldon," said he, "I want
you to help us. We are this moment about to engage in a business
transaction of great importance; in fact, if you must know the worst, we
are going to buy a bonnet!"
Mrs. Sheldon entered into the shopping expedition with a zest which
reminded Jack of the Scriptural battle-steed which sayeth "Ha-ha" to the
trumpets. When the brief but brisk and determined engagement was over,
Jack's mother appeared in a bonnet of delicate gray, just a shade darker
than her silver hair. There was a pink rose in that bonnet, half hidden
by lace, and in the cheeks of its wearer faintly bloomed two other pink
roses. It was just a dream in bonnets as suited to the woman. The mother
had protested prettily, had said the bonnet was "too young" and all
that, but had been browbeaten and overcome and made submissive. Mrs.
Sheldon was in her element, and happy. Well she knew the man of the
world who had demanded her aid, and much she wanted to please him; but
deeper than all, her woman's instinct told her of his suddenly realized
love for his old mother, and she was no longer a woman of fashion alone,
but a helpful human being. Even her own eyes were suspiciously moist as
she dragged the couple off to dine with her.
They were to go to the theater that evening, the man and his
sweetheart, and by chance stumbled upon a well-staged comic opera, with
good music and brilliant and picturesque although occasionally scanty
costumes. On the way down the son told the mother of how in Detroit, way
back in the sixties, he had seen for the first time a theatrical
performance. He told her what she had forgotten, how she had induced his
father to take him to the city, and how, in what was "Young Men's Hall,"
or something with a similar name, he had seen Laura Keene in "A School
for Scandal." Then she remembered, and was glad. They had seats in a box
at the theater, and from the rising of the curtain till its final drop
the man was in much doubt. The manner in which women were dressed upon
the stage had changed since the last time when his mother had visited
the theater. She was shocked when she saw the forms of women, which, if
at least well covered, were none the less outlined.
There was talking in that box. The son explained. The blessed woman
almost "bolted" once or twice, but finally accepted all that was told
her with the precious though sometimes mistaken confidence a woman has
in the matured judgment of the man-child she has borne. Then, having a
streak of the Viking recklessness in her which she had given to her son,
she enjoyed herself amazingly. It was a glorious outing.
Well, in the way which has been described, the man made love to the
woman for a day or two. Then he took her home, and bade her good-by for
a time, and told her, in an exaggeratedly formal way, which she
understood and smiled at, that he and she must meet each other much
oftener in the future. Then he hugged her and went away. And she, being
a mother whose heart had hungered, watched his figure as it disappeared,
and laughed and cried and was very happy.
"Louisa," said a dignified old lady, "I was mistaken in saying that all
happiness from children comes in their youth. It may come in a greater
way later--if!"
A TRAGEDY OF THE FOREST
It is Christmas eve. A man lies stretched on his blanket in a copse in
the depths of a black pine forest of the Saginaw Valley. He has been
hunting all day, fruitlessly, and is exhausted. So wearied is he with
long hours of walking, that he will not even seek to reach the
lumbermen's camp, half a mile distant, without a few moment's rest. He
has thrown his blanket down on the snow in the bushes, and has thrown
himself upon the blanket, where he lies, half dreaming. No thought of
danger comes to him. There is slight risk, he knows, even were he to
fall asleep, though the deep forests of the Saginaw region are not
untenanted. He is in that unexplainable mental condition which sometimes
comes with extreme exhaustion. His bodily senses are dulled and wearied,
but a phenomenal acuteness has come to those perceptions so hard of
definition--partly mental, partly psychological. The man lying in the
copse is puzzled at his own condition, but he does not seek to analyze
it. He is not a student of such phenomena. He is but a vigorous young
backwoodsman, the hunter attached to the camp of lumbermen cutting trees
in the vicinity. The man has lain for some time listlessly, but the
feeling which he cannot understand increases now almost to an
oppression. He sees nothing, but there is an unusual sensation which
alarms him. He recognizes near him a presence--fierce, intense,
unnatural. A rustle in the twigs a few feet distant falls upon his ears.
He raises his head. What he sees startles and at the same time robs him
of all volition. It is not fear. He is armed and is courageous enough.
It is something else; some indefinable connection with the object upon
which he looks which holds him. There, where it has drawn itself closely
and stealthily from its covert in the underbrush, is a huge gray wolf.
The man can see the gaunt figure distinctly, though the somber light is
deepening quickly into darkness. He can see the grisly coat, the yellow
fangs, the flaming eyes. He can almost feel the hot breath of the beast.
But something far more disturbing than that which meets his eye affects
him. His own individuality has become obscured and another is taking its
place. He struggles against the transformation, but in vain. He can read
the wolf's thoughts, or rather its fierce instincts and desires. He is
the wolf.
Undoubtedly there exists at times a relation between the souls of human
beings. One comprehends the other. There is a transfer of wishes,
emotions, impulses. Now something of the same kind has happened to the
man with this dreadful beast. He knows the wolf's heart. The man
trembles like one in fear. The perspiration comes in great drops upon
his forehead, and his features are distorted. It is a horrible thing.
Now a change comes. The wolf moves. He glides off in the darkness. The
spell upon the man is weakened, but it is not gone. He staggers to his
feet, and half an hour later is in the lumbermen's camp again. But he
comes in like one insane--pallid of face and muttering. His comrades,
startled by his appearance, ply him with questions, receiving only
incoherent answers. They place him in his rude bunk, where he lies
writhing and twisting about as under strong excitement. His eyes are
staring, as if they must see what those about him cannot see, and his
breath comes quickly. He pants like a wild beast. There is reason for
it. His thoughts are with the wolf. He is the wolf. The personalities of
the ravening brute and of the man are blended now in one, or rather the
personality of the man has been eliminated. The man's body is in the
lumbermen's camp, but his mind is in the depths of the forest. He is
seeking prey!
* * * * *
"I am hungry! I must have warm blood and flesh! The darkness is here,
and my time has come. There are no deer to-night in the pine forest on
the hill, where I have run them down and torn them. The deep snow has
driven them into the lower forest, where men have been at work. The
deer will be feeding to-night on the buds of the trees the men have
felled. How I hate men and fear them! They are different from the other
animals in the wood. I shun them. They are stronger than I in some way.
There is death about them. As I crept by the farm beside the river this
morning I saw a young one, a child with yellow hair. Ah, how I would
like to feed upon her! Her throat was white and soft. But I dare not
rush through the field and seize her. The man was there, and he would
have killed me. They are not hungry. The odor of flesh came to me in the
wind across the clearing. It was the same way at this time when the snow
was deep last year. It is some day on which they feast. But I will feed
better. I will have hot blood. The deer are in the tops of the fallen
trees now!"
Across frozen streams, gliding like a shadow through the underbrush,
swift, silent, with only its gleaming eyes to betray it, the gaunt
figure goes. Miles are past. The figure threads its way between the
trunks of massive trees. It passes over fallen logs with long, noiseless
leaps; it creeps serpent-like beneath the wreck left by a summer
"cyclone"; it crosses the barren reaches of oak openings, where the
shadows cast by huge pines adjacent mingle in fantastic figures; it
casts a shifting shadow itself as it sweeps across some lighter spot,
where faint moonbeams find their way to the ground through overhanging
branches. The figure approaches the spot where the lumbermen have been
at work. Among the tops of the fallen trees are other figures--light,
graceful, flitting about. The deer are feeding on the buds.
The eyes of the long gray figure stealing on grow more flaming still.
The yellow fangs are disclosed cruelly. Slowly it creeps forward. It is
close upon the flitting figures now. There is a rush, a fierce, hungry
yelp, a great leap. There is a crash of twigs and limbs. The flitting
figures assume another character; the beautiful deer, wild with fright,
bounding away with gigantic springs. The steady stroke of their hoofs
echoes away through the forest. In the tree-tops there is a great
struggle, and then the sound comes of another series of great leaps
dying off in the distance. The prey has escaped. But not altogether! The
grisly figure is following. The pace had changed to one of fierce
pursuit. It is steady and relentless.
* * * * *
The man in the bunk in the lumbermen's camp half leaps to his feet. His
eyes are staring more wildly, his breathing is more rapid. He appears a
man in a spasm. His comrades force him to his bed again, but find it
necessary to restrain him by sheer strength. They think he has gone mad.
But only his body is with them. He is in the forest. His prey has
escaped him. He is pursuing it.
* * * * *
"It has escaped me! I almost had it by its slender throat when it shook
me off and leaped away. But I will have it yet! I will follow swiftly
till it tires and falters, and then I will tear and feed upon it. The
old wolf never tires! Leap away, you fool, if you will. I am coming,
hungry, never resting. You are mine!"
With the speed of light the deer bounds away in the direction its
fellows have taken. Its undulating leaps are like the flight of a bird.
The snow crackles as its feet strike the frozen earth and flies off in a
white shower. The fallen tree-tops are left behind. Miles are covered.
But ever, in the rear, with almost the speed of the flying deer, sweeps
along the trailing shadow. It is long past midnight. The moon has risen
high, and the bright spots in the forest are more frequent. The deer
crosses these with a rush. A few moments later there is in the same
place the passage of shadow. Still they are far apart. Will they remain
so?
Swiftly between the dark pines again, across frozen streams again,
through valleys and over hills, the relentless chase continues. The
leaps of the fleeing deer become less vaulting, a look of terror in its
liquid eyes has deepened; its tongue projects from its mouth, its wet
flanks heave distressfully, but it flies on in desperation. The distance
between it and the dark shadow behind has lessened plainly. There is no
abatement to the speed of this silent thing. It follows noiselessly,
persistently.
The forest becomes thinner now. The flying deer bounds over a fence of
brushwood and suddenly into a sea of sudden light. It is the clearing in
the midst of which the farm-house stands. Across the sea of gold made by
the moonshine on the field of snow flies the deer, to disappear in the
depth of the forest beyond. It has scarcely passed from sight, when
emerging from the wood appears the pursuing figure. It is clearly
visible now. There are flecks of foam upon the jaws, the lips are drawn
back from the sharp fangs, and even the light from above does not dim
nor lessen the glare in the hungry eyes. The figure passes along the
long bright space. The same scene in the forest beyond, but intensified.
The distance between pursuer and pursued is lessening still. The leaps
of the deer are weakening now, its quick panting is painful. And the
thing behind is rushing along with its thirst for blood increased by its
proximity. But the darkness in the forest is disappearing. In the east
there is a faint ruddy tinge. It is almost morning.
"I shall have it! It is mine--the weak thing, with its rich, warm blood!
Swift of foot as it is, did it think to escape the old wolf? It falters
as it leaps. It is faint and tottering. How I will tear it! The day has
nearly come. How I hate the day! But the prey is mine. I will kill it
in the gray light."
* * * * *
The man in the bunk in the lumbermen's camp is seized with another
spasm. He struggles to escape from his friends, though he does not see
them. He is fiercely intent on something. His teeth are set and his eyes
glare fiercely. It requires half a dozen men to restrain him.
* * * * *
The deer struggles on, still swiftly but with effort. Its breath comes
in agony, its eyes are staring from its sockets. It is a pitiable
spectacle. But the struggle for life continues. In its flight the deer
had described a circle. Once more the forest becomes less dense, the
clearing with the farm-house is reached again. With a last desperate
effort the deer vaults over the brushwood fence. The scene has changed
again. The morning has broken. The great snowy surface which was a sea
of gold has become a sea of silver. The farm-house stands out revealed
plainly in the increasing light. With flagging movement the fugitive
passes across the field. But there is a sudden, slight noise behind. The
deer turns its head. Its pursuer is close upon it. It sees the death
which nears it. The monster, sure now of its prey, gives a fierce howl
of triumph. Terror lends the victim strength. It turns toward the
farm-house; it struggles through the banks of snow; it leaps the low
palings, where, beside great straw-stacks, the cattle of the farm are
herded. It disappears among them.
The door of the farm-house opens, and from it comes a man who strides
away toward where the cattle are gathered, lowing for their morning
feed. After the man there emerges from the door a little girl with
yellow hair. The child laughs aloud as she looks over the field of snow,
with its myriads of crystals flashing out all colors under the rays of
the morning sun. She dances along the footpath in a direction opposite
that taken by the man. Not far distant, creeping along a deep furrow, is
a lank, skulking figure.
"Can it be? Has it escaped me, when it was mine? I would have torn it at
the farm-house door but that the man appeared. Must I hunger for another
day, when I am raging for blood! What is that! It is the child, and
alone! It has wandered away from the farm-house. Where is the great
hound that guards the house at night? Oh, the child! I can see its white
throat again. I will tear it. I will throttle the weak thing and still
its cries in an instant!"
* * * * *
The man in the bunk in the lumbermen's camp is wild again. His comrades
struggle to hold him down.
* * * * *
A horrible, hairy thing, with flaming eyes and hot breath, which leaps
upon and bears down a child with yellow hair. A hoarse growl, the rush
of a great hound, a desperate struggle in the snow, and the still air of
morning is burdened suddenly with wild clamor. There is an opening of
doors, there are shouts and calls and flying footsteps; and then,
mingling with the cries of the writhing brutes, rings out sharply the
report of the farmer's rifle. There is a howl of rage and agony, and a
gaunt gray figure leaps upward and falls quivering across the form of
the child. The child is lifted from the ground unhurt. The great hound
has by the throat the old wolf--dead!
* * * * *
The man in the lumbermen's camp has leaped from his bunk. His appearance
is something ghastly. His comrades spring forward to restrain him, but
he throws them off. There is a furious struggle with the madman. He has
the strength of a dozen men. The sturdy lumbermen at last gain the
advantage over him. Suddenly he throws up his hands and pitches forward
upon the floor of the shanty--dead.
They could never understand--the simple lumbermen--why the life of the
merry, light-hearted hunter of the party came to an end so suddenly on
the eve of Christmas Day. He was well the day before, they said, in
perfect health, but he went mad on the eve of Christmas Day, and in the
morning died.
THE PARASANGS
My friends, the Parasangs, both died last week. Mr. Parasang was carried
off by a slight attack of pneumonia as dust is wiped away by a cloth,
and Mrs. Parasang followed him within three days. He was in life a
rather energetic man, and she always lagged a little behind him when
they went abroad walking together, keeping pretty close to him,
notwithstanding. So it was in death. It was the shock of the thing, they
say, that killed her, she lacking any great strength; but to me it seems
to have been chiefly force of habit and the effect of what romantic
people call being in love. She was in love with her husband, as he had
been with her. And what was the use of staying here, he gone?
They were buried together, and I was one of the pall-bearers at the
double funeral; indeed, I was the directing spirit, having been so
connected with the Parasangs that I was their close friend, and the
person to whom every one naturally turned in the adjustment of matters
concerning them. When Mr. Parasang died, the first instinct of his wife
was to tell them to send for me, and when I reached their home--for I
was absent from the city--I found that she had clung to and followed
him as usual, as he liked it to be. It was what he lived for as long as
he could live at all.
They had ordered a fine coffin for Parasang, and when I came he was
lying in it. Mrs. Parasang was lying where she had died, in bed. And
they had ordered another fine coffin for her. (Of course, when I refer
to the bodies as Mr. and Mrs. Parasang it must be understood that I
consider only the earthly tenements, for I am a religious man.) I did
not like it. I went to the undertaker and asked him if he could not make
a coffin for two. He answered that it was somewhat of an unusual order,
that there were styles and fashions in coffins just as there are in
shoes and hats and things of that sort, and that it would be a difficult
work for him to accomplish, in addition to being most expensive. I did
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