Scribner's Magazine, Volume 26, July 1899
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Title: Scribner's Magazine, Volume 26, July 1899
Author: Various
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE, VOLUME 26, JULY 1899 ***
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[Illustration: DANIEL WEBSTER.
Engraved by Gustav Kruell; after a daguerreotype in the possession of
Josiah J. Hawes, Boston.]
SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE
PUBLISHED MONTHLY
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME XXVI JULY-DECEMBER
1899
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON & Co. LIMITED LONDON
Copyright, 1899,
By Charles Scribner's Sons.
Printed by
Trow Directory, Printing and Bookbinding Company,
New York, U. S. A.
CONTENTS
OF
SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE
VOLUME XXVI JULY-DECEMBER, 1899.
PAGE
ACCENT, A QUESTION OF. Point of View, 380
AGUINALDO'S CAPITAL--WHY MALOLOS
WAS CHOSEN, LIEUT.-COL. J. D. MILEY, 320
Illustrated with drawings by Jules Guérin and F. D.
Steele, from photographs.
"AMERICAN LANGUAGE, THE." Point of View, 762
AMERICAN SOCIETY AND THE ARTIST, ALINE GORREN, 628
AMERICAN URBANITIES. Point of View, 121
ANNE. A Story, MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, 116
ANTARCTIC, AMERICAN SEAMEN IN THE, ALBERT WHITE VORSE, 700
Illustrations drawn from photographs taken by Frederick
A. Cook, M.D., during the recent voyage of the "Belgica."
ANTARCTIC EXPLORATION, THE POSSIBILITIES OF,
FREDERICK A. COOK, M.D. (Of the "Belgica" Expedition), 705
With drawings from the author's photographs.
ARCHIBALD, JAMES F. J. _Havana Since the Occupation_, 86
ARCHITECTURE, THE USE AND ABUSE OF DECORATIVE CONVENTIONS
IN. Field of Art, FREDERIC CROWNINSHIELD, 381
ART IN THE SCHOOLS--FIRST CONSIDERATIONS. Field of Art, 509
ART IN THE SCHOOLS--THE NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHS, 637
AUNT MINERVY ANN, THE CHRONICLES OF, JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS.
IV. AN EVENING WITH THE KU-KLUX,
Illustrated by A. B. Frost, 34
V. HOW JESS WENT A-FIDDLIN', 310
VI. HOW SHE AND MAJOR PERDUE FRAILED OUT THE GOSSETT BOYS, 413
VII. HOW SHE JOINED THE GEORGIA LEGISLATURE, 439
AUTHOR'S STORY, AN, MAARTEN MAARTENS, 685
BALZAC, THE PARIS OF HONORÉ DE, BENJAMIN ELLIS MARTIN
and CHARLOTTE M. MARTIN, 588
Illustrated by J. Fulleylove,
BAXTER, SYLVESTER. _The Great November Storm of 1898_, 515
BIRRELL, AUGUSTINE. _John Wesley--Some Aspects of the
Eighteenth Century in England_, 753
BROWNE, WILLIAM MAYNADIER.
_The Royal Intent_, 496
_A Royal Ally_, 221
BROWNELL, W. C. _The Painting of George Butler_, 301
BUTLER, THE PAINTING OF GEORGE, W. C. BROWNELL, 301
With reproductions of Mr. Butler's work.
CAHAN, ABRAHAM. _Rabbi Eliezer's Christmas_, 661
CHANNING, GRACE ELLERY. _Francisco and Francisca_, 227
CHAT, E. G. _The Foreign Mail Service at New York_, 61
CHINON, ERNEST C. PEIXOTTO, 737
Illustrated by Mr. Peixotto,
COLTON, ARTHUR. _The Portate Ultimatum_, 713
COLVIN, SIDNEY. _See Stevenson Letters_.
COOK, FREDERICK A., M.D. _The Possibilities of
Antarctic Exploration_, 705
COPLEY BOY, A, CHARLES WARREN, 326
Illustrated by F. C. Yohn,
CROWNINSHIELD, FREDERIC. _The Use and Abuse of
Decorative Conventions in Architecture_, 381
CUBA. See _Havana Since the Occupation_.
DAVIS, RICHARD HARDING. _The Lion and the Unicorn_, 129
DEWEY RECEPTION IN NEW YORK, THE SCULPTURES OF THE,
Field of Art,
Illustrated from telephotographs by Dwight L. Elmendorf. 765
DREW, MRS. JOHN, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HER SON, JOHN DREW--I.-II., 417, 553
Illustrations from photographs and prints in the
collections of Peter Gilsey, Douglas Taylor, and
John Drew, and from a Painting by Sully, engraved
by H. Wolf; with Biographical Notes by Douglas Taylor.
ELMENDORF, DWIGHT L. _Telephotography_, 457
ENGLISH VOICE ON THE AMERICAN STAGE. Point of View, 123
FIELD OF ART, THE.
Architecture, The Use and Abuse of Decorative Conventions
in, 381
Art in the Schools--First Considerations, 509
Art in the Schools--The New York Photographs, 637
Dewey Reception in New York, The Sculptures of the, 765
Modern House, One Way of Designing a, 125
Painters Who Express Themselves in Words, Concerning, 254
FRANCISCO AND FRANCISCA, GRACE ELLERY CHANNING, 277
Illustrated by Walter Appleton Clark.
GIBSON, C. D. _The Seven Ages of American Women_, 669
GORREN, ALINE. _American Society and the Artist_, 628
GRANT, ROBERT. _Search-Light Letters_, 104, 364
HADLEY, ARTHUR T. _The Formation and the Control of
Trusts_, 604
HARRIS, JOEL CHANDLER. _The Chronicles of Aunt
Minervy Ann_, 34, 310, 413, 439
HAVANA SINCE THE OCCUPATION, JAMES F. J. ARCHIBALD, 86
Illustrated with drawings by Jules Guérin, E. C. Peixotto,
T. Chominski, and F. D. Steele, and from photographs.
HOAR, SENATOR GEORGE F. _Daniel Webster_, 74, 213
"HUNDRED THOUSAND COPIES, A." Point of View, 253
INANIMATE OBJECTS, ETIQUETTE TOWARD. Point of View, 636
IRLAND, FREDERIC. _Where the Water Runs Both Ways_, 259
JAPANESE FLOWER ARRANGEMENT, THEODORE WORES, 205
Illustrations from paintings by Mr. Wores.
KNOX, JUDSON. _The Man from the Machine_, 447
LA FARGE, JOHN. _Concerning Painters Who Express
Themselves in Words_, 254
LA FARGE, JOHN, RUSSELL STURGIS, 3
Illustrations from unpublished drawings and from paintings
by Mr. La Farge.
LION AND THE UNICORN, THE, RICHARD HARDING DAVIS, 129
Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.
MAARTENS, MAARTEN. _An Author's Story_, 685
MAIL SERVICE AT NEW YORK, THE FOREIGN, E. G. CHAT, 61
Illustrated by W. R. Leigh.
MAN FROM THE MACHINE, THE, JUDSON KNOX, 447
Illustrated by F. D. Steele.
MAN ON HORSEBACK, THE, WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE, 538
Illustrated by A. I. Keller.
MARTIN, BENJAMIN ELLIS AND CHARLOTTE M. _The Paris of
Honoré de Balzac_, 588
MATTHEWS, BRANDER. _In the Small Hours_, 502
MAX--OR HIS PICTURE, OCTAVE THANET, 739
Illustrated by Howard Chandler Christy.
MILEY, LIEUT.-COL. J. D. _Aguinaldo's Capital_, 320
MILITARISM AND WOMEN. Point of View, 507
MODERN HOUSE, ONE WAY OF DESIGNING A. Field of Art, 125
NAVY, ON A TEXT FROM THE. Point of View, 763
PAGE, THOMAS NELSON. _The Spectre in the Cart_, 179
PAINTERS WHO EXPRESS THEMSELVES IN WORDS, CONCERNING.
Field of Art, JOHN LA FARGE, 254
PEACEMAKER, THE, BLISS PERRY, 643
Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
PEIXOTTO, ERNEST C. _Chinon_, 737
PERRY, BLISS. {_The White Blackbird_, 96
{_The Peacemaker_, 643
PHILIPPINES. See _Aguinaldo's Capital_.
"PLAY'S THE THING, THE," ALBERT WHITE VORSE, 167
Illustrations by W. Glackens, reproduced in color.
PHOTOGRAPHY, PICTORIAL, ALFRED STIEGLITZ, 528
Illustrated by the author's photographs.
POINT OF VIEW, THE.
Accent, A Question of, 380
American Language, The, 762
American Urbanities, 121
English Voice on the American Stage, The, 123
"Hundred Thousand Copies, A," 253
Inanimate Objects, Etiquette Toward, 636
Militarism and Women, 507
Navy, On a Text from the, 763
Superstitious, A Convention of the, 634
Vain Seeking, A, 506
Women, The Public Manners of, 122
World with No Country, A, 635
PORTATE ULTIMATUM, THE, ARTHUR COLTON, 713
Illustrated in color by W. Glackens.
PRAED, THE EDUCATION OF, ALBERT WHITE VORSE, 290
Illustrated by Henry McCarter.
QUILLER-COUCH, A. T. _The Ship of Stars_, 47, 234, 354, 402, 611
RABBI ELIEZER'S CHRISTMAS, ABRAHAM CAHAN, 661
Illustrated by W. Glackens.
REAL ONE, THE, JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS, 620
Illustrated by Henry Hutt.
ROYAL ALLY, A, WILLIAM MAYNADIER BROWNE, 221
Illustrated by A. I. Keller.
ROYAL INTENT, THE, WILLIAM MAYNADIER BROWNE, 496
ROYLE, EDWIN MILTON. _The Vaudeville Theatre_, 485
SANDHILL STAG, THE TRAIL OF THE, ERNEST SETON-THOMPSON, 191
Author of "Wild Illustrated by Animals I Have Known."
Mr. Thompson.
SEARCH-LIGHT LETTERS, ROBERT GRANT.
III. Letter To a Young Man Wishing To Be an American, 104
IV. Letter To a Political Optimist, 364
SENIOR READER, THE, ARTHUR COSSLETT SMITH, 725
Illustrations by Albert Sterner.
SEVEN AGES OF AMERICAN WOMEN, THE, C. D. GIBSON, 669
A series of drawings.
SHIP OF STARS, THE, A. T. QUILLER-COUCH (Q.),
Chapters XIV.-XXIX., 47, 234, 351
(_Concluded_.), 402, 611
SMALL HOURS, IN THE, BRANDER MATTHEWS, 502
SMITH, ARTHUR COSSLETT. _The Senior Reader_, 725
SPECTRE IN THE CART, THE, THOMAS NELSON PAGE, 179
Full-page illustration by F. C. Yohn.
STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS, THE LETTERS OF.
Edited by SIDNEY COLVIN.
FROM BOURNEMOUTH, 1884-85, 20
DRAWING by E. C. Peixotto.
BOURNEMOUTH (CONTINUED), 1885-86, 242
SARANAC LAKE--WINTER, 1887-88, 338
Illustrated with drawings from photographs by Jules
Guérin.
THE VOYAGE OF THE CASCO; HONOLULU (JULY, 1888-JUNE, 1889), 469
LIFE IN SAMOA: NOVEMBER, 1890-DECEMBER, 1894, 570
(Concluded.)
STEVENSON, MRS. ROBERT LOUIS. _Anne_, 116
STIEGLITZ, ALFRED. _Pictorial Photography_, 528
STORM OF 1898, THE GREAT NOVEMBER, SYLVESTER BAXTER, 515
Illustrations by H. W. Ditzler.
STURGIS, RUSSELL. _John La Farge_, 3
SUPERSTITIOUS, A CONVENTION OF THE. Point of View, 634
TELEPHOTOGRAPHY, DWIGHT L. ELMENDORF, 457
Illustrated by the author's photographs and
telephotographs.
THANET, OCTAVE. _Max--Or His Picture_, 739
THOMPSON, ERNEST SETON. _The Trail of the Sandhill Stag_, 191
TRUSTS, THE FORMATION AND THE CONTROL OF, ARTHUR T. HADLEY, 604
President of Yale University.
VAILLANTCOEUR, HENRY VAN DYKE, 153
Illustrated by Walter Appleton Clark.
VAIN SEEKING, A. Point of View, 506
VAN DYKE, HENRY. _Valiantcoeur_, 153
VAUDEVILLE THEATRE, THE, EDWIN MILTON ROYLE, 485
Illustrations by W. Glackens.
VORSE, ALBERT WHITE. {"_The Play's the Thing_," 167
{_The Education of Praed_, 290
{_American Seamen in the
Antarctic_, 700
WARREN, CHARLES. _A Copley Boy_, 326
WATER-FRONT OF NEW YORK, THE, JESSE LYNCH WILLIAMS, 385
Illustrated from drawings by Henry McCarter, Jules
Guérin, E. C. Peixotto, W. R. Leigh, C. L. Hinton,
G. A. Shipley, and G. W. Peters.
WEBSTER, DANIEL. I., II. WITH UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS AND
SOME EXAMPLES OF HIS PREPARATION FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING,
GEORGE F. HOAR, 74, 213
Senator from Massachusetts.
With a portrait and fac-similes.
WESLEY, JOHN--SOME ASPECTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY IN ENGLAND, AUGUSTINE BIRRELL, 753
WHERE THE WATER RUNS BOTH WAYS, FREDERIC IRLAND, 259
Illustrated with photographs by the author, and with
drawings by Jules Guérin, H. L. Brown, and Howard Giles
from photographs.
WHITE BLACKBIRD, THE, BLISS PERRY, 96
WHITE, WILLIAM ALLEN. _The Man on Horseback_, 538
WILLIAMS, JESSE LYNCH. {_The Water-Front of New York_, 385
{_The Real One_, 620
WOMEN, THE PUBLIC MANNERS OF. Point of View, 122
WORES, THEODORE. _Japanese Flower Arrangement_, 205
WORLD WITH NO COUNTRY, A. Point of View, 635
POETRY
ADVERTISING SIGN, AN, MARVIN R. VINCENT, 751
BALLAD, J. RUSSELL TAYLOR, 220
CELEBRANTS, THE, CAROLYN WELLS, 85
Illustrated by Oliver Herford.
CRICKET SONG, THE, R. H. STODDARD, 526
Illustrations in color by Harvey Ellis.
ENDURING, THE, JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY, 103
HERB O' GRACE, THE, ARTHUR COLTON, 401
Illustrated by Orson Lowell.
HEY NONNY NO. A Song, MARGUERITE MERINGTON, 416
HUSH! A Sonnet, JULIA C. R. DORR, 120
LONELINESS, J. H. ADAMS, 712
NARCISSUS, GUY WETMORE CARRYL, 525
NEMESIS, BENJAMIN PAUL BLOOD, 72
OLD HOME HAUNTS, THE, F. COLBURN CLARKE, 289
Illustrated by Henry Hutt.
POPPY-GARDEN, IN A, SARA KING WILEY, 325
ROMANCE 363
SILENT WAYFELLOW, THE, BLISS CARMAN, 446
SLUMBER SONG, A. _For the Fisherman's Child_, HENRY VAN DYKE, 298
Illustrated by Maude Cowles.
SONG WITH A DISCORD, A, ARTHUR COLTON, 603
SUICIDE, THE, EDWIN MARKHAM, 551
TEARS. A Sonnet, LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE, 569
THREE KINGS, THE. HARRISON S. MORRIS, 653
A Christmas Ballad,
Illustrated in color by Walter Appleton Clark;
decorations by T. Guernsey Moore.
URBAN HARBINGER, AN, E. S. MARTIN, 190
With an illustration by W. Glackens.
VEERY-THRUSH, THE, J. RUSSELL TAYLOR, 350
WIND AT THE DOOR, THE, BLISS CARMAN, 652
SCRIBNER'S MAGAZINE
VOL. XXVI. JULY, 1899. NO. 1.
JOHN LA FARGE
By Russell Sturgis
[Illustration: A Study.]
The artist of four hundred years ago, or of any great time for
individual effort as opposed to the associated and unrecorded work of
more primitive times, was a many-sided man. He was probably a
traveller, if not a monk; he was almost certainly a man of adventure;
a man of thought, whether monk or layman. The artist did not travel
far; but he encountered more personal risk between Florence and Naples
than our contemporary does in voyaging to the Isles of Summer; he
encountered in Sicily, in Hungary, or in Spain a people as remote from
him as the Japanese are from us; and he had still Constantinople and
Cairo to visit, places more distant and as inaccessible to him as
Thibet or Kafiristan in the nineteenth century. The old artist was
something of a scholar, too, with a habit of study and meditation, if
not master of many books. And, moreover, the old artist was very much
in love with his work and loved to play with it as well as to work in
it; so that he touched many materials, handled many processes, and
used many methods of artistic utterance. Again it is worth noting that
no one had discovered, in 1499, that architecture was an art to be
practised without regard to the other manifestations of the artistic
spirit; nor yet that the sculptor and the painter were two workmen
whose art was to be practised apart from and independent of building
or other industrial occupation.
All these things have been so much changed of late that it is
noticeable in Mr. La Farge's life that he should be, in many ways,
like a painter of old time, that is, traveller, reader, collector and
student; colorist and decorator; painter in large and in little. He
has been a working artist for forty years, and has done many things.
He has made many book illustrations which have been published and many
which have never been given to the world. The illustrations to
Browning's book, "Men and Women," as it was originally published in
1855, are among these; and there are reproduced here the full-page
design for the beginning of _Protus_ and also two studies for _Fra
Lippo Lippi_:
The little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim's son.
This was early work. The illustration to _Misconceptions_ is as
mystical as that for _Protus_; and that which concludes _Bishop
Blougram's Apology_ is as realistic as these studies of children.
[Illustration: Study for Browning's "Men and Women."]
Then, still of his early days, are to be considered the faithful
little studies and close-to-nature drawings which served as a
foundation for a structure of knowledge which was to pile itself high
enough. _Sic itur ad astra_; and with a different result from the
tower-building recorded in Genesis. The reproduction given [on page 9]
is from a sketch-book of 1860; and the work has been a careful drawing
in black on white, done in the flat country about Bayou Têche. These
are drawings _in values_, or made for values; that is to say, the
relative force of darkness or of light is carefully preserved. A
certain green of the trees may be lighter than the blue, still water
below, but is very much darker than the same water where it reflects
the pale evening sky; the reflection in the water of those same trees
is a shade or two darker than the mass of trees themselves; and so on,
forever. Of the same epoch is this drawing of a beacon [page 10], a
flaming cresset, a signal light seen against a night sky. These are
warnings to steamboats on the Mississippi to avoid a shoal or to make
a landing. Other studies, those of pure line and those of masses,
those of his youth and those of his maturity, are scattered over these
pages.
He has produced also a very great number of water-color drawings,
generally small, and very commonly having for their subjects pieces of
foreground detail, such as one or several blossoms in a pool of water,
or a water-lily or two afloat on the surface of a still pond. It might
almost be said that his water-colors were generally of such detail as
this, except that the work done during his journeys into tropical and
oriental lands has resulted differently.
Again he has produced, during those years of work, a few large
pictures painted in oil-color or by a process which he learned in his
youth and in which melted wax has a part; though this is not the
encaustic process of antiquity or of modern revival. One or two of
these are portraits, several are landscapes, several are studies of
interesting details which he wished to preserve and which for some
reason or other had struck him as more easily rendered on a large
scale and in the more solid material; and some are, to all appearance,
concepts for mural decoration--advance studies for that which was to
be painted on a still larger scale, or in combination with other parts
of a large composition, and finally to be fixed upon the wall where it
was to remain permanently. Some, also, of the water-colors produced
in recent years are, though not large in superficies, very large in
treatment. A glowing color composition suggested by the mountain
country of Fiji, a monochrome study of a river landscape in Japan, may
be as grandiose in character and may contain as much matter, both in
represented detail and in artistic purpose, as an oil-painting of four
times the surface-measurement. Some illustrations given on another
page of this treatise may partly show the qualities here suggested.
[Illustration: Study for Browning's "Men and Women."]
He has produced, also, a few such mural paintings as those whose
intention is assumed in the last paragraph. Of these, much the largest
is that which covers the end wall of the Church of the Ascension in
New York. There are others in St. Thomas's Church and in the Church of
the Incarnation, both in New York City; the interior of Trinity Church
in Boston was painted by him with a series of figure subjects, though
the chromatic treatment of this interior does not include any large
single painting of great importance; and of late years, two lunettes
in the Villard-Reid house in New York and one in the Walker Art
Gallery at Bowdoin College have been added to this summary list. There
is reproduced here the last-named picture [page 17]; a picture of
fantastic subject in the "literary" or narrative sense. _Athens_ is
its given name; but it represents Pallas making a drawing of the
lovely and unadorned genius of the open country or wood, while the
robed and crowned impersonated City looks affectionately at both the
subject and the recording goddess. To be classed under the head of
mural paintings also is the remarkable composition of small pictures
involved in a large design with panels and arabesques, which decorates
the wooden vaults of that gallery in Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt's house,
which used to be called the Water-Color Room, and which now, since the
alteration of the house and the removal of this painted vault into the
new building, may be considered the gallery of entrance for stately
entertainments. To a limited extent, the work of other painters is
associated with his own in the last-named achievement, as also in
Trinity Church. In this, the work of the artist comes very near to
decoration pure and simple. The reader is not to understand that any
sharp distinction is made here between decoration and that painting
which is not so designated. It is to be hoped that he, the reader,
will see as he reads that to deny this distinction is part of the
life-purpose of John La Farge; a purpose which his critic is glad to
recognize and to second. It is merely with reference to its
placing--to its apparent intended service--to its fixed location and
its consequent exclusion from the category of "gallery pictures" or
"easel pictures" that the words decoration and decorative are here
applied to certain paintings. For throughout his career this artist
has leaned strongly toward the treatment of his expressional and
significant painting in a decorative way.
[Illustration: Panel, from One of the Ceilings in Cornelius
Vanderbilt's House. Inlaid glass, ivory, bronze, marble and silver,
and mother-of-pearl.]
[Illustration: Figure from the Vanderbilt Ceiling.]
Decoration in the more usual sense has been also a large part of his
work. Thus, when in 1878 he contracted with Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt
for a carved ceiling, it appeared that his intentions in the matter
were those which could have been suggested only by a mind full of the
decorative idea. "A carved ceiling" might have been almost anything;
but this one was an elaborate composition of colored sculpture, or, if
you please, of polychromy in relief; certainly one of the most
remarkable undertakings of the time. What seem to be (for the true
constructional character of the ceiling is not here guaranteed) what
seem to be the beams, the constructional part of the ceiling, were of
light-colored walnut. The panels within were filled with figures of
armed warriors and of draped women of about half life-size, and these
panels were framed by rim within rim, moulding within moulding, of
elaborate sculptured pattern. All these sculptured patterns, all these
figures, were invested with color in a way which it is hard to
describe; for different chosen woods, alloys of metal of which some
are of Japanese origin, opaque and colored glass, ivory,
mother-of-pearl, and even coral are combined to give delicately tinted
color and subtle variety of surface to the work. That ceiling has been
broken up; but there has been great good judgment shown in its
rearrangement. The panels of the ceiling are now arranged so that they
are well lighted both by day and by night, and show admirably.
Although the original design has disappeared, the separate panels,
each with its enclosing mouldings and woodwork, at least four by six
feet in superficies, are well displayed. One of these panels is here
engraved [page 6]. Here also is given part of a decorative frieze in
which castings specially made of blue glass were used with ivory and
with carvings in solid _nacre_, in combination with the carved walnut.
[Illustration: Dry Bed of the Dayagawa River.
_Drawn by John La Farge._]
[Illustration: Study for Values.]
Similar work has been done by Mr. La Farge in connection with his own
paintings, and sometimes where no paintings were used. This use, on a
large scale, of rich material, rich in color, in surface and in
lustre, as a medium for sculpture, is almost peculiar to this artist
among modern men. Others who have cared for color in sculpture have
played with it, rather, in small objects of the cabinet; and this
remains true in a general way in spite of a pleasant use of enamel in
some French work in bronze of a more important or, at least, more
pretentious character.
At a time not far removed from the undertaking of the ceiling and the
mantelpiece above mentioned, a monument was put up in the Newport
Cemetery under the direction of Mr. La Farge [page 16]. He associated
with himself in this task the sculptor, since so widely known, but
then a young man, Augustus St. Gaudens, who had already worked with
him on the carved and colored ceiling. Every student of architectural
designs will be struck by the informal character of this design: the
steps which are clearly not meant to be ascended and which have an
obvious symbolic meaning; the horizontal cross sunk in the table of
the monument in such a way that few persons can be so placed as to see
it favorably; the inscription carved upon the butt or foot of that
cross; the apparently disproportionate slenderness of the upright
cross with its thin cylindrical shaft; the placing of other
inscriptions on the body of the massive base in which no specially
arranged panels or medallions have been prepared for them; and, most
of all, the treatment of the leaf sculpture which, though composed
carefully enough and far enough in itself from being a piece of crude
realism, is yet realistic in its disposition--suggesting the natural
fall of sprays and branches of leafage allowed to dry and harden in
the sun. No architect--as we now understand the term--no architect,
even one who had kept himself free from the neo-classic influence and
the teaching of the schools, could have designed such a piece as this.
It is the more interesting to see how the highly trained decorative
artist who has not been fettered by the taught maxims of the
architect's school or the architect's office has handled this
problem--a problem rarely met by decorators of modern experience.
About 1876 these same demands upon him for decoration led him to the
careful observation of ancient stained glass, with a view to providing
the modern world with something which might be to it what the windows
of Reims Cathedral and Fairford Church were to the Middle Ages. It
appeared to the modern artist that there was still a course open to
him which had not been tried by the decorators of the Middle Ages,
early or late. It appeared that the modern materials and processes of
glassmaking might give to the artist in glass a "palette" such as the
mediæval man had never possessed. What is called opal glass, opaline,
and also opalescent glass may be said to have formed the basis of a
new system of window decoration, though the other essential, the
leaden framework, was to play its own part in the artistical result.
Uncolored opaline glass has a milky-white look when seen by reflected
light; but by transmitted light its color passes from a cloudy
bluish-gray to red, with a yellow spark. If, now, such glass be
charged with color of many shades, the chromatic effects producible by
the combination of such translucent materials, at once contrasting in
color and harmonized by the opaline quality, might prove successful
beyond what had been known. To this, then, La Farge set himself; to
obtain glass of richness, depth, and glow of color hitherto
unattempted, and in a multitude of tints; so that, whereas the
thirteenth-century artist had five or six colors in all, susceptible
of nothing more than a gradation from darker to lighter, as the glass
was thicker or thinner or more or less thickly flashed--now, colors
were to be supplied by the score, each color capable of these same
gradations in darker and lighter, and each color harmonized with all
the other colors by the common quality of softness and a certain misty
iridescence caused by the opaline stain. Even in a piece of glass so
brilliant in color that the opalescence is hardly perceptible, its
presence in that part of the general chromatic scheme will surely be
felt.
[Illustration: On the Bayou Têche; Study for Values.]
A window is, when considered as a work of fine art in color, a
translucent composition, there being no part of it which can appeal to
the eye by other than transmitted light. The artist has, then, the
need of something strong to lean upon, some background, some _fond_
upon which to relieve his more brilliant pieces of translucency; for
it can be easily understood that color composition which is wholly
translucent will tend toward feebleness, toward paleness, toward a
certain evanescent and doubtful character of its colors, from which it
must be saved. This needed background was found in the use of the
leads; that is to say, of those strips of lead made generally in the
form of a capital I, in which the edges of the separate pieces of
glass are held. By taking these leads as the artistic sub-structure of
the composition, by placing them where needed, and by cutting the
glass accordingly, by combining the colors of the glass in such a way
as to allow the leads to be put where they were needed for this
purpose of background, results were obtained which no artist in glass
had ever yet attempted. La Farge's use of leads, in this way, remains
peculiarly his own in the subtlety and refinement of the linear
design. Occasionally, indeed, a certain amount of opaque painting, of
that solid non-translucent painting which the men of the Middle Ages
used continually, has been used to increase the area of his lead
sash-bars or to diminish the brilliancy of a background. All artists
recognize the need of the _repentir_, of the amendment made after the
work is partly done, or even, to all eyes but their own, completed;
and painting in opaque color has been used by La Farge when it has
appeared that the lead-sash was not quite sufficient for the
background needed. In like manner, painting in translucent colored
enamels has been used by him where it has appeared to him that no
glass available would produce the tone desired. As such instances are
occasional and rare, these devices are not a part of the essence of La
Farge's work in glass, and they are mentioned here merely because
their existence must be understood as accidental. The treatment of
heads and hands and other necessarily nude parts of the body, in order
that these surfaces may harmonize with the generally unpainted drapery
and background, would require pages of discussion if entered upon at
all.
[Illustration: Study of a Mullein-stalk.]
The purpose of this article is not, however, to dwell in detail upon
the historical development of his art, but to criticise it in its main
features, and to institute an inquiry into those traits of La Farge's
personality which have made his work especially interesting to all
persons who care for the retention of noble design in that which is
obviously novel, original, modern in art.
[Illustration: Study of a Beacon.]
In the first place, then, Mr. La Farge is very individual as a
designer. He hardly belongs to any school of designers. The reader
will suggest at once that, as there is no school of designers at the
present day, a man of force is compelled to be individual; and this
dictum will be readily accepted. Inasmuch as there has been no time
since La Farge reached the age of intelligence and of interest in
art--no time when he has not been a student of Japanese art; inasmuch
as he began, as long ago as 1860, to buy and study what few pieces of
Japanese art and handicraft he could find--it has been thought that he
is strongly influenced by Japanese design; but this it will be hard
to establish. His design is individual and personal, and it is that
whether we take design to mean his way of conceiving the human figure;
or his way of composing human figures in large groups with care for
the effect of line and mass; or whether we think, rather, of the
filling of the panel or the canvas, the parallelogram or the
half-circle, with masses of color and tendencies of line.
[Illustration: Study for a Decoration for a Page of Browning's "Men
and Women," 1861.]
Now, in this individuality of his art, there is a weaker as well as a
stronger side. It cannot be ignored by those who admire his larger and
statelier designs that they lack something of stateliness. The figures
in his small woodcuts are carried out of the strict and grave system
of academic drawing into an extreme of freedom of gesture and
movement, and that with the evident purpose of expressing in the
strongest possible way the intense meaning of the artist; but this
hardly allows of mention except as a virtue. Bishop Hatto in his
screaming agony, as the rats attack him on every side while he
crouches at the foot of the column on the capital of which the cat has
taken refuge (for each and all the details of which see Southey's
poem)--Bishop Hatto is almost liquified, has almost lost the solid
substance of his corporeal form, in his horror and hopelessness. Enoch
Arden, "the long-haired, long-bearded solitary," hardly shows the
strong man, the vigorous sailor under his rags and through his
squalor; the emphasis is laid on the fourteen years' solitary
confinement in this lonely island, and the "strong heroic soul" which
the poet drew has not interested the artist as part of this design.
These are small drawings for wood-engraving and for book illustration;
but the same character of design occurs again and again in the larger
and statelier pieces; and it may there be less easy to accept. The
impression made upon a student of mural painting, ancient and modern,
by such a painting as that in the Church of the Ascension is that it
is, in a sense, lacking in repose. The Adoring Angels around the
risen Saviour are individual in their gestures, in the pose of their
bodies, in the expression of their faces. They are personalities
rather than parts of a "Glory of Angels." The figure of Christ itself
has the same peculiarity and is marked by a singularly free and
unconventional pose of the body and gesture of the right arm,
suggestive rather of the teacher of men than of the Son taken up to
his Father. Moreover, this effect as of too much movement and
incident, as of too little stability and gravity, is heightened by the
flowing drapery, which is so marked a feature of the composition that
it remains uppermost in the minds of many students to the very end of
their study of the picture. Something of this may be seen in the
illustration given here of the noble window which was sent to the
Exhibition of 1889 [page 15]. The subject is the Sealing of the
Servants of God. These groups are of indubitable truth and power as
illustrations of the passage in the Apocalypse; but as parts of a
solemn color design another standard needs to be applied to them.
[Illustration: Study for the Wolf-Charmer.]
[Illustration: Another Study for the Wolf-Charmer.]
So much for the less agreeable side of this familiar and personal way
of designing. In the favorable aspect there would, of course, be very
much to be said, for he is no illustrator, he is no story-teller, he
is no composer of pictured fable or pictured record who does not
understand how to give his figures that life and movement, that action
and expression, which will explain all that is explainable of their
purpose and their function. Nothing, for instance, can be more perfect
as a bit of mystical story-telling than the Wolf-Charmer, the picture
in which the gaunt and haggard magician, with his pipe at his lips,
comes out of the forest surrounded by his drove of gigantic wolves.
Two studies for the wolves are given here; and the spirit of the
design is interesting to trace in them. To give the savage creatures
something more than their due size, and, above all, something more
than their due ferocity, is a natural and obvious device; but to
express, as the artist has expressed, their familiarity with their
leader, their sympathy with him, their spirit entering into his as he
heads and controls them, is something admirable in descriptive art. So
in that grim picture in which some part of the spirit of feudal Japan
is contained; the picture which tells the tale of little Kio-Sai; the
rushing and turbulent stream between its high banks is gray and sombre
as if with the swollen waters of a flood; and upon it, whirled along
in its course, the severed head which frightened the child floats face
upward with something of its living expression still lingering about
the eyes and lips, but still as dead, as corpse-like as a severed head
could be. This powerful drawing, made within the last two years, is to
be cited as a characteristic specimen of expressional art. There is
nothing in the picture but whirling water and floating head; and yet
the stern, fierce, half-savage, feudal system of Japan, which
coexisted with an almost too subtle refinement of manners and of
thought, both literary and artistic, is expressed in this little
square of grave coloring. So, in the numerous South Sea Island studies
which have filled many a frame and delighted so many a student of
water-color drawings, it is hard to say whether the pictures of
movement and action, of fishing with cormorants, of riding and
marching, of bustle and life, or the pictures of tropical and oriental
men and women in repose, are more delightful--half naked girls
carrying canoes, seated dancers going through the sacred movements of
the _siva_, portraits of individuals, and studies of groups intended
to preserve for the artist the recollection, and for the instruction
of those at home the singular life, of these brown islanders, so
different from the negroids of the southern groups, so over-civilized
in ceremony and tradition, with all their lack of policing and of
steady social conditions. In all this work the artist's indifference
to the accepted conventional ways of expressing his meaning is
altogether fortunate for his art. He knows how to tell a story in
pictures which have very much, if not all, of his highest artistic
qualities, and this he would hardly be capable of were he more
fettered than he is by the rules of the academies as to how the action
of man should be put into form and color.
[Illustration: The Floating Head.]
In connection with this matter, the question comes up how far Mr. La
Farge is a thorough draughtsman. It hardly becomes one who is not
ready to go into the minute examination of his work, figure by figure,
to challenge its merit in the way of anatomical correctness and
academic severity of drawing; but it is to be said, at least, that the
strongest reason exists for the belief that many of the draped figures
would prove incorrect if an absolutely accurate drawing of the nude
body in the position assumed by the draped figure could be laid upon
the drapery. It is difficult here to express one's exact meaning,
because there is no such thing as an absolutely correct drawing of the
nude body in any position; but if we take a draped angel or a draped
St. Peter or a draped Buddhist priest from this gallery of pictured
men and women, we can imagine the consummate draughtsman, the Paul
Veronese of the present, if there were such a man, pointing out that a
figure seated or standing in that position could not get within the
drapery which the artist has pictured. We can even imagine the painter
aware of the fact--in advance of all criticism by others. It will be
observed that La Farge has seldom painted the nude. His early work
involved a great deal of drawing, both from the nude model and in the
way of designed and composed nude figures. Naked figures represented
on a small scale, as among his numerous Eastern subjects, exist, of
course, in his work in great numbers; but the nude in the larger
European sense of elaborately rendered, well modelled, thoroughly
understood naked figures, male and female, is rare in his work. Mural
painting in churches hardly allows of that; glass is, of course,
wholly foreign in its purpose and mission from such art as includes
the nude, and hardly allows even of the naked hands and head. Now, let
it be admitted for the moment not only that La Farge is not given to
drawing the nude, but even that he has not done consummate work in
that direction; let that be admitted, and let us then see how that
affects his pictures and drawings. It need not be asked whether it
affects the decorative value of his work--considered as a body of art
it cannot affect it badly; we need think, now, only of fine drawing
considered by itself. It is a part of the true traditional doctrine of
art that no man should paint from the model, nude or draped; that no
man should draw from the model, nude or draped, with the intention of
using the drawing upon his wall surface or canvas. It is a tradition
which ought to have been left intact as it came from older men, that
when the artist composes it is his duty to forget his anatomy and to
forget the preparatory drawings which he has made by hundreds, and to
draw directly upon his canvas or sheet of paper the figure which he
now conceives as a part of his design, the figure which he desires to
put into his composition as one of its elements. He is free then to do
what La Farge himself does freely, to compare this result with the
model, nude or draped, or first nude and then draped; but this
comparison has for its purpose, not the correction of the drawing or
the picture with reference to its anatomical correctness nearly so
much as it has in view the lifelike appearance of the figure. Given a
draped figure which does not seem to stand quite as firmly upon its
feet, or to be moving quite as freely, as the composer himself
desires, it is required by consultation of the model to rectify those
errors in the drawing which have led to this unfortunate result and to
give to that figure the lifelike character which it does not yet
possess.
[Illustration: A Study.]
[Illustration: Study for Bacchanal Drawing.]
[Illustration: Study for the Watson Window, 1889.
This is the one carried out and sent to the Paris Exposition.]
It is a characteristic of Mr. La Farge's art as a painter that he is
primarily a colorist. Now it is fairly safe to say that no man since
the great Venetians has been at once a consummate draughtsman of the
human figure and a consummate master of color; and that apparently the
mind of the workman cannot lead his artistic production in such paths
that both of these excellences may be attained at once. The workman,
if he is sincere, and if he is well advised, follows the course which
is easiest for him, and if he conceives of every figure and every
group of figures with their setting of landscape or architecture
primarily as a piece of splendid coloring, to be taken from nature as
an abstract piece of coloring, and so modified that it will tell as
an abstract piece of coloring on canvas or on wall--if that is the
artist's object he will not improve the work produced on these lines
by giving his time and strength to the proposed consideration of
accuracy of drawing.
[Illustration: Monument in Newport Cemetery Erected Under the
Direction of John La Farge and Augustus St. Gaudens.]
To ask whether La Farge's work would be artistically better if it were
consummate in drawing is to ask a question which no one can answer. It
is certain that no wise student will go to La Farge to learn figure
drawing in the technical sense. It is not that which his art offers
the student. There are, however, two large pictures, which can hardly
be challenged--the two lunettes in the Villard-Reid house; and it is
probable that if these pictures were within easy reach of the public,
and could be seen as the wall paintings in the Congressional Library
can be seen by all the world and every day, they would tend to raise
the general opinion of La Farge's capacity and range as a painter
beyond what even his admirers now hold. The pictures represent "The
Dance" and "Music." In each of them, smiling landscape forms the
background, a landscape not to be called sunny because the work of the
true colorist hardly allows of sunshine. Sunshine and full glowing
color are not generally found possible of simultaneous presentation,
and La Farge certainly makes no attempt to combine them. If, then, we
consider one of these two groups of six or eight maidens invested in
rather bright and high-lighted colors and set off by a landscape
somewhat deeper in tone than their own figures--if we consider each of
these pictures as a mural painting intended to be festal in character
and to glorify and heighten the beauty of the room which it adorns,
while at the same time it is in itself a piece of coloring of almost
the highest quality--we have then, perhaps, the fairest and most
complete idea of what one of these lunettes is as a work of art--what
it has been in the artist's well-realized purpose. The beauty of
composition in line and mass in either of the pictures, noticeable as
it is, is not important in comparison. The power of line-composition
is not very rare; except in its very highest manifestation, it is
almost like correct spelling; necessary, but deserving no special
remark. But when it is said of any picture that it is a piece of
coloring of the highest or almost the highest rank, there has been
said of it the utmost that can be said of a work of graphic art. It is
not claimed that color is essentially greater or nobler than form, but
that color is the graphic artist's especial domain, in which he alone
can rule; and further, that color is peculiarly artistical, ideal,
abstract, and in this way loftier. Is it possible for the mind of man
to conceive of anything more perfect, more remote from, and, in a
sense, superior to, whatever else there is in the world of humanity
than a color composition of the highest quality? There is only one
product of the human mind which can be compared with it; a musical
composition of the highest class; a symphony of Beethoven, alone, can
be compared to a great composition by Titian. That such a color-gift
and such a color-purpose are to be seen in all of Mr. La Farge's work
alike would be hardly too much to say. The touch of the consummate
colorist is not as evident, but is as discoverable by one who knows
how to look, in a piece of nature-study from Fiji, six inches square,
as it is in a large composition of saints and angels. The disposition
and the power to give to tinted paper the glow, the radiance, the
wealth and charm of that strange and inexplicable thing, the mingling
of tints into a resulting color-scheme--these are in small work the
same essentially that they are in large. Nor is the background of the
Ascension picture in the eponymic church to be exalted above the bits
of hillside and surf in the drawings of oceanic life, otherwise than
as its greater size allows it greater splendor.
[Illustration: "Athens." Mural Painting in the Walker Art Gallery at
Bowdoin College.]
That this power over color is the life and soul of the decorator need
hardly be urged. Decoration which is applied to a flat surface and
which is not in relief, except, perhaps, to a slight extent and
occasionally, has for its main object, its main _desideratum_,
richness or refinement of coloring, or both. If one has a wall to
decorate, the first idea of the true decorator is to invest it with
splendor or with delicate strength of color. He seeks for fresco, or
the encaustic process, or mosaic, or, as in modern times, oil-painting
upon a strained canvas, indifferently and according to the spirit of
his time and the practice of his contemporaries; but his object is one
and the same--to invest his wall or ceiling with noble color. Little
may he care what the subject of the painting or mosaic may be.
According to the requirements of the epoch or community in which he
lives, it may be a procession of saints or a dance of bacchanals; the
primary object which he has in view is to procure a most enjoyable
and delightful piece of color--and other things are of secondary
importance. Glass, then, would seem to be especially prepared for La
Farge's work, and La Farge especially prepared for glass. Consider the
memorial window which fills a window-opening in a church at North
Easton, Mass., a town which owes much to the lady whose memory is thus
honored. Upon a background of broken and changing blue are relieved
the three figures larger than life-size which nearly fill the opening.
Two of these figures are clothed, one in drapery of the most vivid
green, the other in drapery of orange-brown; that is to say, these are
the general colors offered to the eye of the spectator by the infinite
number of minor tints, all passing into one another in subtle
gradation, which make up the general mass of drapery. It is to be
observed, then, that these figures are also seen to be clothed in
rags, and that the idea, the notion of wretchedness and tatters is
maintained in spite of the sumptuous clothing of glowing color which
invests it all. That is an instance as good as can be found of what
the colorist has to do in this world. He does not ask whether beggars
have ever been dressed in such garments as have been described, but he
has to express the two-fold image, Beggary and splendid color, and out
of these he makes up his work of art, as unlike as may be to anything
in nature, but none the worse for that. To return to mural painting;
there is one merit which all La Farge's brother-painters agree in
awarding to him, and that is the power of putting a painting upon the
wall so that it does not change the character of the wall as a part of
the building. His painting takes nothing away from the solidity of the
wall which it invests. The upright mass retains its rigidity and
weight, it still carries the roof, it still holds firmly to the
adjoining walls, it is a massive and trustworthy part of the
construction, and the painted picture has added to rather than taken
from its permanent and resting quality. How this is done is fully as
inexplicable as is the glow and splendor of color itself. No one can
say abstractly and without having the picture immediately before him
how any such result is attained, nor is it easy to explain the
picture, even to the looker-on, in any such terms as will fully
express this quality. It is one of the most valuable qualities which
mural painting can possess--mural painting which fluctuates between
the flatness which is also feebleness and a kind of realism which
carries with it the effect of out-of-doors--of a hole in the wall. The
same thing obtains in his minor work, and here the background, the
temple, or rock, forty feet away, is as perfectly detached from the
foreground figures as would be a distant and airy mountain miles away,
while still the picture remains flat cardboard or flat canvass
invested with light and shade and color.
We are brought naturally to the consideration of Mr. La Farge's
landscape. He is not generally considered as a landscape painter; and
yet he has produced a great deal of landscape in the secondary or
accessory part of his work. He has also painted landscape of first
intention, so to speak, landscape which is nothing but landscape, and
that, at different times in his life; always succeeding, and yet
always turning away from landscape to what seems to be his chosen work
of figure subject used decoratively. Landscape-painting is
unquestionably the art of our epoch, the one branch of the art of
painting which this century has excelled in; and, therefore, La Farge
was inevitably drawn toward landscape painting, he being a man of his
time, if also a man of strong individual peculiarities. It would be
hard for a student of art in the abstract, a theorizer, a critic and a
lover of the arts of the past, to avoid painting landscape when
everybody around him is painting landscape; and accordingly La Farge
has turned his attention to that, but the odd thing is that he has not
stayed there, that he has not continued to be a landscape painter
primarily. It would seem to the hasty observer of landscape painting
that this department of art alone would have afforded material for all
of his artistic dreams and for all his artistic purposes, for what is
more truly decorative than landscape such as is shown in the wonderful
Paradise Valley? That picture is made up of light and color. The
surface of thick, lush, summer grass, the surface of rock dimly seen,
the surface of ocean, the hazy sky, all together go to form a mass of
glowing and yet delicate color the like of which it is very hard to
find in simple landscape anywhere in ancient or modern art. Until
recent years there were only half a dozen such pictures of wide
landscape, numerous as were his studies in that style; for otherwise
his finished landscapes were chiefly those composed of foreground
rock, of iris seen against a wild-rose covered bank, of three or four
water-lily blossoms and a dozen little buds floating on still water;
or else they were landscape backgrounds to figure subjects in which
the landscape was evidently made, of deliberate purpose, a thing of
less intention and of inferior interest. During the last ten years,
however, La Farge has produced an immense number of singularly
effective drawings in monochrome and in color, made either on the spot
in Samoa, in Fiji, in Japan, or elsewhere in the far East, or made
after his return home, from studies carefully noted during his stay
abroad. Of these landscape drawings, some are of extended and really
vast stretches of country. Mountains are introduced which are several
miles away, and show in relief against a pale sky, every detail of the
mountain being rendered as the eye could have seen it from the point
of view occupied by the painter, and the whole wrought into a
wonderfully glowing panorama of green passing into blue against the
green mystery of the firmament. There are also among these drawings
pictures which are Turnerian in their love of and sympathy with mist
and vapor and their enjoyment of pure and delightful color produced by
sunlight upon such vapor. Among these are four drawings of the Valley
of Tokio seen from a hill above the city, the vision of the artist
reaching across the valley and including its whole extent and the
mountains which form the boundary. In other words, each of these
landscapes includes a range of one hundred square miles of country at
least, and its investing and overflowing drapery of cloud and of
low-lying vapor; and yet these were four small drawings, mere studies
on leaves of a sketch-book. It is the greatest misfortune to Americans
that they have been scattered among four different owners. If it were
possible for the Boston Museum, under its wise direction, to gather
these four drawings into its ownership and to exhibit them side by
side well lighted and isolated from other conflicting art, a real
service would be done to the whole community of art students; for
there is in them an abundance of the true landscape feeling, of the
true landscape sympathy, of that love of the magnificence, and the
refinement of nature which no transcript can give, but which the
thought of the artist when stimulated powerfully by the contemplation
of the glory of nature will transfer to his material medium.
Much of this character exists in the sepia drawing of the "Dry Bed of
the Dayagawa River," [page 7] which hardly needs analysis in words,
since it is capable of fairly complete reproduction.
[Illustration: A Study.]
[Illustration: Skerryvore.]
THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Edited by Sidney Colvin
FROM BOURNEMOUTH: 1884-1885
In order of date the letters now to be quoted follow next on those
from the French Riviera which were printed in the April number. When
in the late spring of 1884 Stevenson was prostrated by the worst of
all his many attacks of hemorrhage from the lung, he was still
residing in that chalet at Hyères which he had hoped to make his
permanent abode. Partly the renewed failure of his health, and partly
a bad outbreak of cholera in the old Provençal town, which occurred in
the ensuing summer, compelled him to abandon this hope. As soon as he
recovered strength enough to be able to travel by even the easiest
stages, he moved to Royat in Auvergne, and thence in the course of
July to England. After consultation with several doctors, all of whom
held out good hopes of ultimate recovery in spite of the gravity of
his present symptoms, he moved to Bournemouth. Here he found in the
heaths and pine-woods some distant semblance of the landscape of his
native Scotland, and in sandy curves of the Channel coast a passable
substitute for the bays and promontories of his beloved Mediterranean.
At all events he liked the place well enough to be willing to try it
for a home: and such it became for all but three years, from
September, 1884, to August, 1887. These, although in the matter of
health the worst and most trying years of his life, were in the matter
of work some of the most active and successful. For the first two or
three months the Stevensons occupied a lodging on the West Cliff
called Wensleydale; for the next three or four, from December, 1884,
to March, 1885, they were tenants of a house named Bonallie Towers,
pleasantly situated amid the pine-woods of Branksome Park; and
lastly, about Easter, 1885, they entered into occupation of a house of
their own, given by the elder Stevenson to his son, and re-named by
the latter Skerryvore, in reminiscence of one of the great lighthouse
works carried out by the family firm off the Scottish coast. During
all the time of Stevenson's residence at Bournemouth he was compelled
to lead the life, irksome to him above all men, but borne with
invincible sweetness and patience, of a chronic invalid and almost
constant prisoner to the house. He was hardly ever free for more than
a few weeks at a time from fits of hemorrhage, fever, and prostration,
accompanied by the nervous exhaustion and general distress consequent
equally upon the attacks themselves and upon the remedies which the
physicians were constrained to employ against them. A great part of
his time was spent in bed, and there almost all his literary work was
produced. Often for days, and sometimes for weeks together, he was
forbidden to speak aloud, and compelled to carry on conversation with
his family and friends in whispers or with the help of pencil and
paper. The few excursions to a distance which he attempted--most
commonly to my house, at the British Museum, once to Matlock, once to
Exeter, and once in 1886 as far as Paris--these excursions almost
always ended in a break-down and a hurried retreat to home and bed.
Nevertheless, seizing on and making the most of every week, nay, every
day and hour of respite, he contrived to produce work surprising
alike, under the circumstances, by quantity and quality. During the
first two months of his life at Bournemouth the two plays _Admiral
Guinea_ and _Beau Austin_ were written in collaboration with Mr.
Henley. In 1885 he published three volumes, viz.: _More New Arabian
Nights_, the _Child's Garden of Verses_, and _Prince Otto_ (the two
latter, it is true, having been for the most part written a year or
two earlier, at Hyères). In 1886 appeared _The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ and _Kidnapped_, the two books which, together
with _Treasure Island_, did most to win for him the fame and honor
which he ever afterward enjoyed among readers on both sides of the
Atlantic. At the same time he was a fairly frequent contributor of
essays to magazines and of stories to Christmas annuals and other
periodical collections. The year 1887, the last of his life in the old
country, was chiefly, with the exception of the _Life of Fleeming
Jenkin_, a year of collections and re-prints; in it were published
_Underwoods, The Merry Men_, _Memories and Portraits_, and the _Black
Arrow_ in volume form.
The correspondence of these three invalid years at Bournemouth is
naturally in a less buoyant key than that of the relatively
flourishing and happy year at Hyères which preceded them. But it is
none the less full of interest, and of that vivid play of mood and
character which never failed in him whether he was sick or well. The
specimens which I shall here give will be taken, with a few
exceptions, from his communications with his brother men of letters,
including some whose acquaintance or friendship he had now for the
first time formed, as Mr. Henry James, Mr. William Archer, and Mr.
Locker-Lampson, besides such intimate friends and associates of
earlier days as Mr. Henley, Mr. Gosse, Mr. Symonds and myself.
But first come two or three to his parents and other correspondents:
BOURNEMOUTH,
Sunday, 28th September, 1884.
MY DEAR PEOPLE,--I keep better, and am to-day downstairs for the first
time. I find the lockers entirely empty; not a cent to the front. Will
you pray send us some? It blows an equinoctial gale, and has blown for
nearly a week. Nimbus Britannicus; piping wind, lashing rain; the sea
is a fine colour, and wind-bound ships lie at anchor under the Old
Harry rocks, to make one glad to be ashore.
The Henleys are gone, and two plays practically done. I hope they may
produce some of the ready.--I am, ever affectionate son,
R. L. S.
WENSLEYDALE, BOURNEMOUTH,
October 3rd, 1884.
DEAR MR. CHATTO.--I have an offer of £25 for Otto from America. I do
not know if you mean to have the American rights; from the nature of
the contract, I think not; but if you understood that you were to sell
the sheets, I will either hand over the bargain to you, or finish it
myself and hand you over the money if you are pleased with the
amount. You see, I leave this quite in your hands. To parody an old
Scotch story of servant and master: if you don't know that you have a
good author, I know that I have a good publisher. Your fair, open, and
handsome dealings are a good point in my life, and do more for my
crazy health than has yet been done by any doctor.--Very truly yours,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
[Mr. Stevenson, the elder, had read the play of _Admiral Guinea_,
written in September by his son and Mr. Henley in collaboration, and
had objected, with his usual energy of expression, to the stage
confrontation of profane blackguarding, in the person of Pew, with
evangelical piety in that of the reformed slaving captain who gives
his name to the piece.]
BONALLIE TOWERS,
BRANKSOME PARK,
BOURNEMOUTH,
(The three B's),
(November 5th, 1884).
MY DEAR FATHER,--Allow me to say, in a strictly Pickwickian sense,
that you are a silly fellow. I am pained indeed, but how should I be
offended? I think you exaggerate; I cannot forget that you had the
same impression of the _Deacon;_ and yet, when you saw it played, were
less revolted than you looked for; and I will still hope that the
_Admiral_ also is not so bad as you suppose. There is one point,
however, where I differ from you very frankly. Religion is in the
world; I do not think you are the man to deny the importance of its
rôle; and I have long decided not to leave it on one side in art. The
opposition of the _Admiral_ and Mr. Pew is not, to my eyes, either
horrible or irreverent; but it may be, and it probably is, very ill
done: what then? This is a failure; better luck next time; more power
to the elbow, more discretion, more wisdom in the design, and the old
defeat becomes the scene of the new victory. Concern yourself about no
failure; they do not cost lives, as in engineering; they are the
_pierres perdues_ of successes. Fame is (truly) a vapour; do not think
of it; if the writer means well and tries hard, no failure will injure
him, whether with God or man.
I wish I could hear a brighter account of yourself; but I am inclined to
acquit the _Admiral_ after having a share in the responsibility. My very
heavy cold is, I hope, drawing off; and the change to this charming
house in the forest will, I hope, complete my re-establishment.--With
love to all, believe me, your ever affectionate,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
[About the same time, Mr. T. Stevenson was in some hesitation as to
letting himself be proposed for the office of President of the Royal
Society of Edinburgh.]
BONALLIE TOWERS, BOURNEMOUTH,
November, 1884.
MY DEAR FATHER,--I have no hesitation in recommending you to let your
name go up; please yourself about an address; though, I think, if we
could meet, we could arrange something suitable; but what you propose
would be well enough in a way; but so modest as to suggest a whine.
From that point of view it would be better to change a little; but
this, whether we meet or not, we must discuss. Tait, Crystal, the
Royal Society, and I, all think you amply deserve this honour and far
more; it is not the True Blue to call this serious compliment a
"trial"; you should be glad of this recognition. As for resigning,
that is easy enough if found necessary; but to refuse would be husky,
unsatisfactory, and a trifle rotten. _Sic subs._
R. L. S.
My cold is still very heavy; but I carry it well. Fanny is very much
out of sorts, principally through perpetual misery with me. I fear I
have been a little in the dumps, which, _as you know, sir_, is a very
great sin. I must try to be more cheerful; but my cough is so
severe--my uvula, larynx, and pharynx being all to pot--that I have
sometimes most exhausting nights and very peevish wakenings. However,
this shall be remedied, and last night I was distinctly better than
the night before. There is, my dear Mr. Stevenson (so I moralise
blandly as we sit together on the devil's garden-wall), no more
abominable sin than this gloom, this plaguey peevishness; why (say I)
what matters it if we be a little uncomfortable--that is no reason
for mangling our unhappy wives. And then I turn and _girn_ on the
unfortunate Cassandra.--Your fellow culprit, R. L. S.
With reference to the two following letters, it should be explained
that Stevenson and his old Edinburgh friend and comrade, Mr. Baxter
(who was also his man of business), were accustomed in their
correspondence, as the whim took them, to merge their own identities
in those of two fictitious personages, Johnson-Thomson and
Thomson-Johnson, ex-elders of the Kirk and types of a certain cast of
Edinburgh character. Their language is of the broadest Scots; and for
some readers it may be desirable to mention that "hoast" means cough
and "sculduddery" loose talk.
BONALLIE TOWERS, BRANKSOME PARK,
BOURNEMOUTH,
November 11th.
MY DEAR CHARLES,--I am in my new house, thus proudly styled, as you
perceive: but the deevil a tower ava' can be perceived (except out of
window); this is not as it should be; one might have hoped, at least,
a turret. We are all vilely unwell. I put in the dark watches
imitating a donkey with some success, but little pleasure; and in the
afternoon I indulge in a smart fever, accompanied by aches and
shivers. There is thus little monotony to be deplored; and what might
still weigh upon me my wife lightens by various inexplicable attacks,
now in the pleasant morn, now at the noon of night. I, at least, am a
_regular_ invalid; I would scorn to bray in the afternoon; I would
indignantly refuse the proposal to fever in the night. What is bred in
the bone will come out, sir, in the flesh; and the same spirit that
prompted me to date my letter regulates the hour and character of my
attacks.--I am, sir, yours,
THOMSON.
Postmark, BOURNEMOUTH,
13th November, 1884.
MY DEAR THOMSON,--It's a maist remarkable fac', but nae shüner had I
written yon braggin', blawin' letter aboot ma business habits, when
bang! that very day, my hoast begude in the aifternune. It is really
remaurkable; it's providenshle, I believe. The ink wasnae fair dry,
the wards werenae well ooten ma mouth, when bang, I got the lee. The
mair ye think o't, Thomson, the less ye'll like the looks o't.
Proavidence (I'm no sayin') is all verra weel _in its place_; but if
proavidence has nae mainners, wha's to learn't? Proavidence is a fine
thing, but hoo would you like proavidence to keep your till for ye?
The richt place for proavidence is in the Kirk; it has naething to do
wi' private correspondence between twa gentlemen, nor freendly cracks,
nor a wee bit word of sculduddery ahint the door, nor, in shoart, wi'
ony _hole-and-corner wark_, what I would call. I'm pairfec'ly willin'
to meet in wi' Proavidence, I'll be prood to meet in wi' him, when my
time's come and I _cannae doe nae_ better; but if he's to come
skinking aboot my stairfit, damned, I might as weel be deid for a' the
comfort I'll can get in life. Cannae he no be made to understand that
it's beneath him? Gosh, if I was in his business, I wouldnae steer my
heid for a plain, auld ex-elder that, tak him the way he taks himsel',
's just aboot as honest as he can weel afford, an' but for a wheen
auld scandals, near forgotten noo, is a pairfectly respectable and
thoroughly decent man. Or if I fashed wi' him ava', it wad be kind o'
handsome like; a punnote under his stair door, or a bottle o' auld,
blended malt to his bit marnin', as a teshtymonial like you ye ken sae
weel aboot, but mair successfu'.
Dear Thomson, have I ony money. If I have, _send it_ for the loard's
sake.
JOHNSON.
[The following to Mr. Henry James, who from about this time began to
be a frequent and ever welcome visitor at the Bournemouth home, refers
to the essay of R. L. S. called a "Humble Remonstrance," which had
just appeared in Longman's Magazine. Mr. James had written holding out
the prospect of a continuance of the friendly controversy which had
thus been opened up between them on the aims and qualities of
fiction.]
BONALLIE TOWERS, BRANKSOME PARK,
BOURNEMOUTH,
December 8th, 1884.
MY DEAR HENRY JAMES,--This is a very brave hearing from more points
than one. The first point is that there is a hope of a sequel. For
this I laboured. Seriously, from the dearth of information and
thoughtful interest in the art of literature, those who try to
practice it with any deliberate purpose run the risk of finding no fit
audience. People suppose it is "the stuff" that interests them; they
think, for instance, that the prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments
in Shakespeare impress by their own weight, not understanding that the
unpolished diamond is but a stone. They think that striking
situations, or good dialogue, are got by studying life; they will not
rise to understand that they are prepared by deliberate artifice and
set off by painful suppressions. Now, I want the whole thing well
ventilated, for my own education and the public's; and I beg you to
look as quick as you can, to follow me up with every circumstance of
defeat where we differ, and (to prevent the flouting of the laity) to
emphasise the points where we agree. I trust your paper will show me
the way to a rejoinder; and that rejoinder I shall hope to make with
so much art as to woo or drive you from your threatened silence. I
would not ask better than to pass my life in beating out this quarter
of corn with such a seconder as yourself.
Point the second, I am rejoiced indeed to hear you speak so kindly of
my work: rejoiced and surprised. I seem to myself a very rude,
left-handed countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by
a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. You will
happily never have cause to understand the despair with which a writer
like myself considers (say) the park scene in Lady Barberina. Every
touch surprises me by its intangible precision; and the effect when
done, as light as syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with
envy. Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but
when we come to speak of performance, I recognise myself, compared
with you, to be a lout and slouch of the first water.
Where we differ, both as to the design of stories and the delineation
of character, I begin to lament. Of course, I am not so dull as to ask
you to desert your walk; but could you not, in one novel, to oblige a
sincere admirer, and to enrich his shelves with a beloved volume,
could you not, and might you not, cast your characters in a mould a
little more abstract and academic (dear Mrs. Pennyman had already,
among your other work, a taste of what I mean), and pitch the
incidents, I do not say, in any stronger, but in a slightly more
emphatic key--as it were an episode from one of the old (so-called)
novels of adventure? I fear you will not; and I suppose I must
sighingly admit you to be right. And yet, when I see, as it were, a
book of Tom Jones handled with your exquisite precision and shot
through with those side-lights of reflection in which you excel, I
relinquish the dear vision with regret. Think upon it.
As you know, I belong to that besotted class of man, the invalid; this
puts me to a stand in the way of visits. But it is possible that some
day you may feel that a day near the sea and among pinewoods would be
a pleasant change from town. If so, please let us know; and my wife
and I will be delighted to put you up and give you what we can to eat
and drink (I have a fair bottle of claret).--On the back of which,
believe me, yours sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
P.S.--I reopen this to say that I have re-read my paper, and cannot
think I have at all succeeded in being either veracious or polite. I
knew, of course, that I took your paper merely as a pin to hang my own
remarks upon; but, alas! what a thing is any paper! What fine remarks
can you not hang on mine! How I have sinned against proportion and,
with every effort to the contrary, against the merest rudiments of
courtesy to you! You are, indeed, a very acute reader to have divined
the real attitude of my mind, and I can only conclude, not without
closed eyes and shrinking shoulders, in the well-worn words
Lay on, Macduff!
[During a crippling fit of ill-health, Stevenson had received a
commission for a sensational story for the Christmas number of the
_Pall Mall Gazette_. The commission ended in his sending the managers
of the paper a recast of a gruesome tale which he had written and
condemned in the Highlands three years before, _The Body-Snatcher_.
He rightly thought this beneath his own standard of merit, and would
not take the full fee which had been offered for it. Two of the
following letters to Mr. Henley refer to this matter: Bloody Jack, or
Jacques, let it be understood, was his regular nickname for his
arch-enemy, hemorrhage from the lungs.]
[Dec. 1884.]
DEAR MAN,--1st Disagreeable. Do try and lay your hands on these three
poems; they were surely not lost in transmission? It seems hard I
should have to make them a _third_ time.
2d Disagreeable. I have done a kind of a damned machine for the P. M.
G., and have near died of it--(weakness, insomnia, Bloody
Jacquerie)--and am now so dissatisfied that I have told them not to
pay me till I see a proof. I think, or I fear I will think, it is not
worth the money offered; in which case, of course, I will not take
it.--Yours ever,
The pale wreck, }
The spectral phantom, } R. L. S.
The abhorred miscarriage, }
[Dec. 1884.]
DEAR LAD,--I have made up my mind about the P. M. G., and send you a
copy, which please keep or return. As for not giving a reduction, what
are we? Are we artists or city men? Why do we sneer at stockbrokers? O
nary; I will not take the £40. I took that as a fair price for my best
work; I was not able to produce my best; and I will be damned if I
steal with my eyes open. _Sufficit._ This is my lookout. As for the
paper being rich, certainly it is; but I am honourable. It is no more
above me in money than the poor slaveys and cads from whom I look for
honesty are below me. Am I Pepys, that because I can find the
countenance of "some of our ablest merchants," that because ---- and
---- pour forth languid twaddle and get paid for it, I, too, should
"cheerfully continue to steal"? I am not Pepys. I do not live much to
God and honour; but I will not wilfully turn my back on both. I am,
like all the rest of us, falling ever lower from the bright ideas I
began with, falling into greed, into idleness, into middle-aged and
slippered fireside cowardice; but is it you, my bold blade, that I
hear crying this sordid and rank twaddle in my ear? Preaching the
dankest Grundyism and upholding the rank customs of our trade--you,
who are so cruel hard upon the customs of the publishers? O man, look
at the Beam in our own Eyes; and whatever else you do, do not plead
Satan's cause, or plead it for all; either embrace the bad, or respect
the good when you see a poor devil trying for it. If this is the
honesty of authors--to take what you can get and console yourself
because publishers are rich--take my name from the rolls of that
association. 'Tis a caucus of weaker thieves, jealous of the
stronger.--Ever yours,
THE ROARING R. L. S.
You will see from the enclosed that I have stuck to what I think my
dues pretty tightly in spite of this flourish; these are my words for
a poor ten-pound note!
[Illustration: Stevenson's Skye Terrier "Bogue."
From a photograph made at Hyères.]
[Christmas, 1884.]
MY DEAR LAD,--Here was I in bed; Bloody Jack; not writing, not
hearing, and finding myself gently and agreeably ill used; and behold
I learn you are bad yourself. Get your wife to send us a word how you
are. I am better decidedly. Bogue got his Christmas card, and behaved
well for three days after. It may interest the cynical to learn that I
started this hæmorrhage by too sedulous attentions to my dear Bogue.
The stick was broken; and that night Bogue, who was attracted by the
extraordinary aching of his bones, and is always inclined to a serious
view of his own ailments, announced with his customary pomp that he
was dying. In this case, however, it was not the dog that died. (He
had tried to bite his mother's ankles.) I have written, with the aid
of bloudie Jack, a long and peculiarly solemn paper on the technical
elements of style. It is path-breaking and epoch-making; but I do not
think the public will be readily convoked to its perusal. Did I tell
you that S. C. had risen to the paper on James? At last! O but I was
pleased; he's (like Johnnie) been lang, lang o' comin', but here he
is. He will not object to my future manoeuvres in the same field, as
he has to my former. All the family are here; my father better than I
have seen him these two years; my mother the same as ever. I do trust
you are better, and I am yours ever, R. L. S.
[Winter, 1884-5.]
DEAR HENLEY,--We are all to pieces in health, and heavily handicapped
with Arabs. [Stories for the _New Arabian Nights_.] I have a dreadful
cough, whose attacks leave me _ætat 90_. Fanny is quite gone up with
my bad health. I never let up on the Arabs, all the same, and rarely
get less than eight pages out of hand, though hardly able to come
downstairs for twittering knees.
I shall put in ----'s letter. He says so little of his circumstances
that I am in an impossibility to give him advice more specific than a
copybook. Give him my love, however, and tell him it is the mark of
the parochial gentleman who has never travelled to find all wrong in a
foreign land. Let him hold on, and he will find one country as good as
another; and in the meanwhile let him resist the fatal British
tendency to communicate his dissatisfaction with a country to its
inhabitants. 'Tis a good idea, but it somehow fails to please. In a
fortnight, if I can keep my spirit in the box at all, I should be
nearly through this Arabian desert; so can tackle something
fresh.--Yours ever, R. L. S.
[BOURNEMOUTH,
Winter, 1884-5.]
DEAR BOY,--I trust this finds you well; it leaves me so-so. The
weather is so cold that I must stick to bed, which is rotten and
tedious, but can't be helped.
I find in the blotting book the enclosed, which I wrote to you the eve
of my blood. Is it not strange? That night, when I naturally thought I
was coopered, the thought of it was much in my mind; I thought it had
gone; and I thought what a strange prophecy I had made in jest, and
how it was indeed like to be the end of many letters. But I have
written a good few since, and the spell is broken. I am just as
pleased, for I earnestly desire to live. This pleasant middle age into
whose port we are steering is quite to my fancy. I would cast anchor
here, and go ashore for twenty years, and see the manners of the
place. Youth was a great time, but somewhat fussy. Now in middle age
(bar lucre) all seems mighty placid. It likes me; I spy a little
bright café in one corner of the port, in front of which I now propose
we should sit down. There is just enough of the bustle of the harbour
and no more; and the ships are close in, regarding us with
stern-windows--the ships that bring deals from Norway and parrots from
the Indies. Let us sit down here for twenty years, with a packet of
tobacco and a drink, and talk of art and women. By the by, the whole
city will sink, and the ships too, and the table, and we also; but we
shall have sat for twenty years and had a fine talk; and by that time,
who knows? exhausted the subject.
I send you a book which (or I am mistook) will please you; it pleased
me. But I do desire a book of adventure--a romance--and no man will
get or write me one. Dumas I have read and re-read too often; Scott,
too, and I am short. I want to hear swords clash. I want a book to
begin in a good way; a book, I guess, like _Treasure Island_, alas!
which I have never read, and cannot though I live to ninety. I would
God that some one else had written it! By all that I can learn, it is
the very book for my complaint. I like the way I hear it opens; and
they tell me John Silver is good fun. And to me it is, and must ever
be, a dream unrealised, a book unwritten: O my sighings after romance,
or even Skeltery, and O! the weary age which will produce me neither!
CHAPTER I
The night was damp and cloudy, the ways foul. The single horseman,
cloaked and booted, who pursued his way across Willesden Common, had
not met a traveller, when the sound of wheels--
CHAPTER I
"Yes, sir," said the old pilot, "she must have dropped into the bay a
little afore dawn. A queer craft she looks."
"She shows no colours," returned the young gentleman musingly.
"They're a-lowerin' of a quarter-boat, Mr. Mark," resumed the old
salt. "We shall soon know more of her."
"Ay," replied the young gentleman called Mark, "and here, Mr.
Seadrift, comes your sweet daughter Nancy tripping down the cliff."
"God bless her kind heart, sir," ejaculated old Seadrift.
CHAPTER I
The notary, Jean Rossignol, had been summoned to the top of a great
house in the Isle St. Louis to make a will; and now, his duties
finished, wrapped in a warm roquelaure and with a lantern swinging
from one hand, he issued from the mansion on his homeward way. Little
did he think what strange adventures were to befall him!--
That is how stories should begin. And I am offered HUSKS instead.
What should be: What is:
The Filibuster's Cache. Aunt Anne's Tea Cosy.
Jerry Abershaw. Mrs. Brierly's Niece.
Blood Money: A Tale. Society: A Novel.
R. L. S.
[The following letters to myself refer to a project, eagerly embraced
at first, but afterward abandoned for want of time and strength, for a
short life of Wellington to be contributed to a series edited by Mr.
Andrew Lang for Messrs. Longman. In the third letter to me, and in
that to Mr. J. A. Symonds which follows it, are expressed something of
the feelings of distress and bitterness with which, in common with,
but even more deeply than most Englishmen of sense and spirit,
Stevenson at this time felt the national disgrace of Gordon's fate in
the Soudan.]
BONALLIE TOWER, BRANKSOME PARK,
BOURNEMOUTH,
Jan. 4th, 1885.
DEAR S. C.,--I am on my feet again, and getting on my boots to do the
_Iron Duke_. Conceive my glee: I have refused the £100, and am to get
some sort of royalty, not yet decided, instead. 'Tis for Longman's
_English Worthies_, edited by A. Lang. Aw haw!
Now look here, could you get me a loan of the Despatches, or is that a
dream? I should have to mark passages I fear, and certainly note pages
on the fly. If you think it a dream, will Bain get me a second-hand
copy, or who would? The sooner, and cheaper, I can get it the better.
If there is anything in your weird library that bears on either the
man or the period, put it in a mortar and fire it here instanter: I
shall catch. I shall want, of course, an infinity of books: among
which, any lives there may be; a life of the Marquis Marmont (the
Maréchal), _Marmont's Memoirs_; _Greville's Memoirs_; _Peel's
Memoirs_; _Napier_; that blind man's history of England you once lent
me; Hamley's _Waterloo_; can you get me any of these? Thiers, idle
Thiers also. Can you help a man getting into his boots for such a huge
campaign? How are you? A good new year to you. I mean to have a good
one, but on whose funds I cannot fancy: not mine, leastways; as I am a
mere derelict and drift beam-on to bankruptcy.
For God's sake remember the man who set out for to conquer Arthur
Wellesley, with a broken bellows and an empty pocket.--Yours ever.
R. L. SHORTHOUSE.
BOURNEMOUTH,
Jan. or Feb. 1885.
DEAR S. C.,--I have addressed a letter to the G. O. M. _à propos_ of
Villainton; and I became aware, you will be interested to hear, of an
overwhelming respect for the old gentleman. I can _blaguer_ his
failures; but when you actually address him, and bring the two
statures and records to confrontation, dismay is the result. By mere
continuance of years, he must impose; the man who helped to rule
England, before I was conceived, strikes me with a new sense of
greatness and antiquity, when I must actually beard him with the cold
forms of correspondence. I shied at the necessity of calling him plain
"Sir"! had he been "My lord," I had been happier; no, I am no
equalitarian. Honour to whom honour is due; and if to none, why, then,
honour to the old!
These, O Slade Professor, are my unvarnished sentiments: I was a
little surprised to find them so extreme, and, therefore, I
communicate the fact.
Belabour thy brains, as to whom it would be well to question. I have a
small space; I wish to make a popular book, nowhere obscure, nowhere,
if it can be helped, unhuman. It seems to me the most hopeful plan to
tell the tale, so far as may be, by anecdote. He did not die till so
recently, there must be hundreds who remember him, and thousands who
have still ungarnered stories. Dear man, to the breach! Up, soldier of
the iron dook, up, Slades, and at 'em! (which, conclusively, he did
not say: the at 'em-ic theory is to be dismissed). You know piles of
fellows who must reek with matter; help! help!
R. L. S.
[BOURNEMOUTH,
Feb. 1885.]
MY DEAR COLVIN,--You are indeed a backward correspondent, and much may
be said against you. But in this weather, and O dear! in this
political scene of degradation, much must be forgiven. I fear England
is dead of Burgessry, and only walks about galvanised. I do not love
to think of my countrymen these days; nor to remember myself. Why was
I silent? I feel I have no right to blame any one: but I won't write
to the G. O. M. I do really not see my way to any form of signature,
unless "your fellow criminal in the eyes of God," which might disquiet
the proprieties.
About your book, I have always said go on. [This refers to some kind
of a scheme, I forget what, for the republication of stray
magazine-work of mine under the title Pictures, Places, and People.]
The drawing of character is a different thing from publishing the
details of a private career. No one objects to the first, or should
object, if his name be not put upon it; at the other, I draw the line.
In a preface, if you choose, you might distinguish: it is besides, a
thing for which you are eminently well equipped, and which you would
do with taste and incision. I long to see the book. People like
themselves (to explain a little more); no one likes his life, which is
a misgotten issue, and a tale of failure. To see these failures either
touched upon, or _coasted_, to get the idea of a spying eye and
blabbing tongue about the house is to lose all privacy in life. To see
that thing, which we do love, our character set forth, is ever
gratifying. See how my _Talk and Talkers_ went; everyone liked his own
portrait, and shrieked about other people's; so it will be with yours:
if you are the least true to the essential, the sitter will be
pleased: very likely not his friends, and that from _various motives_.
R. L. S.
When will your holiday be? I sent your letter to my wife, and forget.
Keep us in mind, and I hope we shall be able to receive you.
BOURNEMOUTH,
Feb. 1885.
MY DEAR SYMONDS,--Yes, we have both been very neglectful. I had horrid
luck: catching (from kind friends) two thundering influenzas in August
and November; I recovered from the last with difficulty: also had
great annoyance from hæmorrhagic leaking; but have come through this
blustering winter with some general success; in the house, up and
down. My wife, however, has been painfully upset by my health. Last
year, of course, was cruelly trying to her nerves; Nice and Hyères are
bad experiences; and though she is not ill, the doctors tell me that
prolonged anxiety may do her a real mischief. She is now at Hyères
collecting our goods; and she has been ill there, which has upset my
liver and driven me to the friendly calomel on which I now mainly
live: it is the only thing that stops the bleeding, which seems
directly connected with the circulation of the liver.
I feel a little old and fagged, and chary of speech, and not very sure
of spirit in my work; but considering what a year I have passed, and
how I have twice sat on Charon's pier-head, I am surprising. The
doctors all seem agreed in saying that my complaint is quite unknown,
and will allow of no prognosis.
My father has presented us with a very pretty home in this place, into
which we hope to move by May. My _Child's Verses_ come out next week.
_Otto_ begins to appear in April. _More New Arabian Nights_ as soon as
possible. Moreover, I am neck deep in Wellington; also a story on the
stocks: _The Great North Road_. O, I am busy! Lloyd is at college in
Edinburgh. That is, I think, all that can be said by the way of news.
Have you read _Huckleberry Finn_? It contains many excellent things;
above all, the whole story of a healthy boy's dealings with his
conscience, incredibly well done.
My own conscience is badly seared: a want of piety; yet I pray for it,
tacitly, every day; believing it, after courage, the only gift worth
having; and its want, in a man of any claims to honour, quite
unpardonable. The tone of your letter seemed to me very sound. In
these dark days of public dishonour, I do not know that one can do
better than carry our private trials piously. What a picture is this
of a nation! No man that I can see, on any side or party, seems to
have the least sense of our ineffable shame: the desertion of the
garrisons. I tell my little parable that Germany took England, and
then there was an Indian Mutiny, and Bismarck said: "Quite right: let
Delhi and Calcutta and Bombay fall; and let the women and children be
treated Sepoy fashion," and people say: "O, but that is very
different!" And then I wish I were dead. Millais (I hear) was painting
Gladstone when the news came of Gordon's death; Millais was much
affected, and Gladstone said: "Why? _It is the man's own temerity!_"
But why should I blame Gladstone, when I too am a Bourgeois? when I
have held my peace? Why did I hold my peace? Because I am a sceptic:
_i.e._ a Bourgeois. We believe in nothing, Symonds; you don't, and I
don't; and there are two reasons, out of a handful of millions, why
England stands before the world dripping with blood and daubed with
dishonour. I will first try to take the beam out of my own eye;
trusting that even private effort somehow betters and braces the
general atmosphere. See, for example, if England has shown (I put it
hypothetically) one spark of manly sensibility, they have been shamed
into it by the spectacle of Gordon. Police-Officer Cole is the only
man that I see to admire. I dedicate my _New Arabs_ to him and Cox, in
default of other great public characters.--Yours ever most
affectionately,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
BOURNEMOUTH,
March 16th, 1885.
MY DEAR HAMERTON,--Various things have been reminding me of my
misconduct: First, Swan's application for your address; second, a
sight of the sheets of your _Landscape_ book; and last, your note to
Swan, which he was so kind as to forward. I trust you will never
suppose me to be guilty of anything more serious than an idleness,
partially excusable. My ill-health makes my rate of life heavier than
I can well meet, and yet stops me from earning more. My conscience,
sometimes perhaps too easily stifled, but still (for my time of life
and the public manners of the age) fairly well alive, forces me to
perpetual and almost endless transcriptions. On the back of all this,
any correspondence hangs like a thunder-cloud; and just when I think I
am getting through my troubles, crack, down goes my health, I have a
long costly sickness, and begin the world again. It is fortunate for
me I have a father, or I should long ago have died; but the
opportunity of the aid makes the necessity none the more welcome. My
father has presented me with a beautiful house here--or so I believe,
for I have not yet seen it, being a cage bird but for nocturnal
sorties in the garden. I hope we shall soon move into it, and I tell
myself that some day perhaps we may have the pleasure of seeing you as
our guest. I trust at least that you will take me as I am, a
thoroughly bad correspondent, and a man, a hater, indeed, of rudeness
in others, but too often rude in all unconsciousness himself; and that
you will never cease to believe the sincere sympathy and admiration
that I feel for you and for your work.
About the _Landscape_ [Mr. Hamerton's book so called], which I had a
glimpse of while a friend of mine was preparing a review, I was
greatly interested, and could write and wrangle for a year on every
page; one passage particularly delighted me, the part about
Ulysses--jolly. Then, you know, that is just what I fear I have come
to think landscape ought to be in literature; so there we should be at
odds. Or perhaps not so much as I suppose, as Montaigne says it is a
pot with two handles, and I own I am wedded to the technical handle,
which (I likewise own and freely) you do well to keep for a mistress.
I should much like to talk with you about some other points; it is
only in talk that one gets to understand. Your delightful Wordsworth
trap I have tried on two hardened Wordsworthians, not that I am one
myself. By covering up the context, and asking them to guess what the
passage was, both (and both are very clever people, one a writer, one
a painter) pronounced it a guide-book. "Do you think it an unusually
good guide-book?" I asked, and both said, "No, not at all!" Their
grimace was a picture when I showed the original.
I trust your health and that of Mrs. Hamerton keep better; your last
account was a poor one. I was unable to make out the visit I had
hoped, as (I do not know if you heard of it) I had a very violent and
dangerous hæmorrhage last spring. I am almost glad to have seen death
so close with all my wits about me, and not in the customary lassitude
and disenchantment of disease. Even thus clearly beheld I find him not
so terrible as we suppose. But, indeed, with the passing of years, the
decay of strength, the loss of all my old active and pleasant habits,
there grows more and more upon me that belief in the kindness of this
scheme of things, and the goodness of our veiled God, which is an
excellent and pacifying compensation. I trust, if your health
continues to trouble you, you may find some of the same belief. But
perhaps my fine discovery is a piece of art, and belongs to a
character cowardly, intolerant of certain feelings, and apt to
self-deception. I don't think so, however; and when I feel what a weak
and fallible vessel I was thrust into this hurly-burly, and with what
marvellous kindness the wind has been tempered to my frailties, I
think I should be a strange kind of ass to feel anything but
gratitude.
I do not know why I should inflict this talk upon you; but when I
summon the rebellious pen, he must go his own way; I am no Michael
Scott, to rule the fiend of correspondence. Most days he will none of
me; and when he comes, it is to rape me where he will,--Yours very
sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
[With Mr. Will H. Low as intermediary, Stevenson had now been entering
into relations with Messrs. Scribner's Sons for the publication of his
works in America. The following letter refers to this matter and to
Mr. Low's proposed dedication to R. L. S. of one of the poems of Keats
which he had been illustrating.]
BONALLIE TOWER, BOURNEMOUTH,
March 13th, 1885.
MY DEAR LOW,--Your success has been immense. I wish your letter had
come two days ago: _Otto_, alas! has been disposed of a good while
ago; but it was only day before yesterday that I settled the new
volume of Arabs. However, for the future, you and the sons of the
deified Scribner are the men for me. Really they have behaved most
handsomely. I cannot lay my hand on the papers, or I would tell you
exactly how it compares with my English bargain: but it compares well.
Ah! if we had that copyright, I do believe it would go far to make me
solvent, ill health and all.
I wrote you a letter to the Rembrandt, in which I stated my views
about the dedication in a very brief form. It will give me sincere
pleasure; and will make the second dedication I have received: the
other being from John Addington Symonds. It is a compliment I value
much; I don't know any that I should prefer.
I am glad to hear you have windows to do; that is a fine business, I
think; but alas! the glass is so bad nowadays; realism invading even
that, as well as the huge inferiority of our technical resource
corrupting every tint. Still, anything that keeps a man to decoration
is in this age, good for the artist's spirit.
By the way, have you seen James and me on the novel? James, I think in
the August or September--R. L. S. in the December _Longman_. I own I
think the _école bête_, of which I am the champion, has the whiphand
of the argument; but as James is to make a rejoinder, I must not
boast. Anyway the controversy is amusing to see. I was terribly tied
down to space, which has made the end congested and dull. I shall see
if I can afford to send you the April _Contemporary_--but I daresay
you see it anyway--as it will contain a paper of mine on style, a sort
of continuation of old arguments on art in which you have wagged a
most effective tongue. It is a sort of start upon my Treatise on the
Art of Literature: a small, arid book that shall some day appear.
With every good wish from me and mine (should I not say "she and
hers"?) to you and yours, believe me yours ever,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Do you see much of Marius Townsend? Are you next door to the Doctor's
Daughter? or does "North" refer to another "Washington Square" than
Henry James's?
[The following to Mr. Gosse refers to the publication of that
gentleman's life of Gray, in Mr. Morley's series of English Men of
Letters, and of the writer's own, now classic, volume, _A Child's
Garden of Verses_.]
BONALLIE TOWER, BOURNEMOUTH,
March 12, 1885.
MY DEAR GOSSE,--I was indeed much exercised how I could be worked into
Gray; and lo! when I saw it, the passage seemed to have been written
with a single eye to elucidate the ... worst?... well, not a very good
poem of Gray's. Your little life is excellent, clean, neat, efficient.
I have read many of your notes, too, with pleasure. Your connection
with Gray was a happy circumstance; it was a suitable conjunction.
I did not answer your letter from the States, for what was I to say? I
liked getting it and reading it; I was rather flattered that you wrote
it to me; and then I'll tell you what I did--I put it in the fire.
Why? Well, just because it was very natural and expansive; and thinks
I to myself, if I die one of these fine nights, this is just the
letter that Gosse would not wish to go into the hands of third
parties. Was I well inspired? And I did not answer it because you were
in your high places, sailing with supreme dominion, and seeing life in
a particular glory; and I was peddling in a corner, confined to the
house, overwhelmed with necessary work, which I was not always doing
well, and, in the very mild form in which the disease approaches me,
touched with a sort of bustling cynicism. Why throw cold water? How
ape your agreeable frame of mind? In short, I held my tongue.
I have now published on 101 small pages _The Complete Proof of Mr. R.
L. Stevenson's Incapacity to Write Verse_, in a series of graduated
examples with table of contents. I think I shall issue a companion
volume of exercises: "Analyse this poem. Collect and comminate the
ugly words. Distinguish and condemn the _chevilles_. State Mr.
Stevenson's faults of taste in regard to the measure. What reasons can
you gather from this example for your belief that Mr. S. is unable to
write any other measure?"
They look ghastly in the cold light of print; but there is something
nice in the little ragged regimen; for all; the blackguards seem to me
to smile; to have a kind of childish treble note that sounds in my
ears freshly; not song, if you will, but a child's voice.
I was glad you enjoyed your visit to the States. Most Englishmen go
there with a confirmed design of patronage, as they go to France for
that matter; and patronage will not pay. Besides, in this year
of--grace, said I?--of disgrace, who should creep so low as an
Englishman? "It is not to be thought of that the flood"--ah,
"Wordsworth," you would change your note were you alive to-day!
I am now a beastly householder, but have not yet entered on my domain.
When I do, the social revolution will probably cast me back upon my
dung heap. There is a person called Hyndman whose eye is on me; his
step is beHynd me as I go. I shall call my house Skerryvore when I get
it: SKERRYVORE: _c'est bon pour la poéshie_. I will conclude with my
favourite sentiment: "The world is too much with me."
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
The Hermit of Skerryvore.
Author of "John Vane Tempest: a Romance," "Herbert and Henrietta: or
the Nemesis of Sentiment," "The Life and Adventures of Colonel Bludyer
Fortescue," "Happy Homes and Hairy Faces," "A Pound of Feathers and a
Pound of Lead," part author of "Minn's Complete Capricious
Correspondent: a Manual of Natty, Natural, and Knowing Letters," and
editor of the "Poetical Remains of Samuel Burt Crabbe, known as the
melodious Bottle-Holder."
Uniform with the above:
"The Life and Remains of the Reverend Jacob Degray Squah," author of
"Heave-yo for the New Jerusalem." "A Box of Candles; or the Patent
Spiritual Safety Match," and "A Day with the Heavenly Harriers."
[The two following letters refer to the sudden death of Professor
Fleeming Jenkin, with whom, and with his wife, Stevenson from his
early student days maintained unbroken kindness and friendship.]
SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH
[Midsummer, 1885].
MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--You know how much and for how long I have loved,
respected, and admired him; I am only able to feel a little with you.
But I know how he would have wished us to feel. I never knew a better
man, nor one to me more lovable; we shall all feel the loss more
greatly as time goes on. It scarce seems life to me; what must it be
to you? Yet one of the last things that he said to me was, that from
all these sad bereavements of yours he had learned only more than ever
to feel the goodness and what we, in our feebleness, call the support
of God; he had been ripening so much--to other eyes than ours, we must
suppose he was ripe, and try to feel it. I feel it is better not to
say much more. It will be to me a great pride to write a notice of
him: the last I can now do. What more in any way I can do for you,
please to think and let me know. For his sake and for your own, I
would not be a useless friend: I know, you know me a most warm one;
please command me or my wife, in any way. Do not trouble to write to
me; Austin, I have no doubt, will do so, if you are, as I fear you
will be, unfit.
My heart is sore for you. At least you know what you have been to him;
how he cherished and admired you, how he was never so pleased as when
he spoke of you; with what a boy's love, up to the last, he loved you.
This surely is a consolation. Yours is the cruel part: to survive; you
must try and not grudge to him his better fortune, to go first. It is
the sad part of such relations that one must remain and suffer; I
cannot see my poor Jenkin without you. Nor you indeed without him; but
you may try to rejoice that he is spared that extremity. Perhaps I (as
I was so much his confidant) know even better that you can do, what
your loss would have been to him; he never spoke of you but what his
face changed; it was--you were--his religion.
I write by this post to Austin and to the Academy.--Yours most
sincerely,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.
MY DEAR MRS. JENKIN,--I should have written sooner, but we are in a
bustle and I have been very tired, though still well. Your very kind
note was most welcome to me. I shall be very much pleased to have you
call me Louis, as he has now done for so many years. Sixteen, you say?
is it so long? It seems too short now; but of that we cannot judge and
must not complain.
I wish that either I or my wife could do anything for you; when we
can, you will, I am sure, command us.
I trust that my notice gave you as little pain as was possible. I
found I had so much to say, that I preferred to keep it for another
place and make but a note in the Academy. To try to draw my friend at
greater length, and say what he was to me and his intimates, what a
good influence in life and what an example, is a desire that grows
upon me. It was strange, as I wrote the note, how his old tests and
criticisms haunted me; and it reminded me afresh with every few words
how much I owe to him.
I had a note from Henley, very brief and very sad. We none of us yet
feel the loss; but we know what he would have said and wished.
Do you know that Dew-Smith has two photographs of him, neither very
bad; and one giving a lively, though not flattering air of him in
conversation? If you have not got them, would you like me to write to
Dew and ask him to give you proofs?
I was so pleased that he and my wife had at last made friends; that is
a great pleasure. We found and have preserved one fragment (the head)
of the drawing he made and tore up when he was last here. He had
promised to come and stay with us this summer. May we not hope, at
least, some time soon to have one from you?--Believe me, my dear Mrs.
Jenkin, with the most real sympathy, your sincere friend,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
Dear me, what happiness I owe to both of you!
SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH,
October 22nd, 1885.
MY DEAR LOW,--I trust you are not annoyed with me beyond forgiveness:
for indeed my silence has been devilish prolonged. I can only tell you
that I have been nearly six months (more than six) in a strange
condition of collapse when it was impossible to do any work and
difficult (more difficult than you would suppose) to write the merest
note. I am now better, but not yet my own man in the way of brains,
and in health only so-so. I turn more towards the liver and dyspepsia
business, which is damned unpleasant and paralysing; I suppose I shall
learn (I begin to think I am learning) to fight this vast, vague
feather-bed of an obsession that now overlies and smothers me; but in
the beginnings of these conflicts, the inexperienced wrestler is
always worsted; and I own I have been quite extinct. I wish you to
know, though it can be no excuse, that you are not the only one of my
friends by many whom I have thus neglected; and even now, having come
so very late into the possession of myself, with a substantial capital
of debts, and my work still moving with a desperate slowness--as a
child might fill a sandbag with its little handfuls--and my future
deeply pledged, there is almost a touch of virtue in my borrowing
these hours to write to you. Why I said 'hours' I know not; it would
look blue for both of us if I made good the word.
I was writing your address the other day, ordering a copy of my next,
_Prince Otto_, to go your way. I hope you have not seen it in parts;
it was not meant to be so read; and only my poverty (dishonourably)
consented to the serial evolution.
I will send you with this a copy of the English edition of the
_Child's Garden_. I have heard there is some vile rule of the
post-office in the States against inscriptions; so I send herewith a
piece of doggerel which Mr. Bunner may, if he thinks fit, copy off the
fly leaf.
Sargent was down again and painted a portrait of me walking about in
my own dining-room, in my own velveteen jacket and twisting as I go my
own moustache; at one corner a glimpse of my wife, in an Indian dress
and seated in a chair that was once my grandfather's, but since some
months goes by the name of Henry James's, for it was there the
novelist loved to sit--adds a touch of poesy and comicality. It is, I
think, excellent; but is too eccentric to be exhibited. I am at one
extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress and looking like a ghost,
is at the extreme other end; between us an open door exhibits my
palatial entrance hall and a part of my respected staircase. All this
is touched in lovely, with that witty touch of Sargent's; but of
course it looks dam queer as a whole.
Pray let me hear from you and give me good news of yourself and your
wife, to whom please remember me.--Yours most sincerely, my dear Low,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
(To be continued.)
[Illustration: "Well, he can't lead _me_."--Page 35.]
THE CHRONICLES OF AUNT MINERVY ANN
By Joel Chandler Harris
ILLUSTRATED BY A. B. FROST
AN EVENING WITH THE KU-KLUX
While in Halcyondale attending the county fair I had a good many talks
with Aunt Minervy Ann, who was the cook, housekeeper, and general
superintendent of Major Tumlin Perdue's household. Some of these
conversations have been reported on account of the whiff and flavor of
old times which caused them to live in my mind, while others perhaps
as important have been forgotten.
In the published reports of these conversations the name of Hamp, Aunt
Minervy's husband, often occurs. When a slave, Hamp had belonged to an
estate which was in the hands of the Court of Ordinary (or, as it was
then called, the Inferior Court), to be administered in the interest
of minor heirs. This was not a fortunate thing for the negroes, of
which there were above one hundred and fifty. Men, women, and children
were hired out, some far and some near. They came back home at
Christmas-time, enjoyed a week's frolic, and were then hired out
again, perhaps to new employers. But whether to new or old, it is
certain that hired hands in those days did not receive the
consideration that men gave to their own negroes.
This experience told heavily on Hamp's mind. It made him reserved,
suspicious, and antagonistic. He had few pleasant memories to fall
back on, and these were of the days of his early youth, when he used
to trot around holding to his old master's coat-tails--the kind old
master who had finally been sent to the insane asylum. Hamp never got
over the idea (he had heard some of the older negroes talking about
it) that his old master had been judged to be crazy simply because he
was unusually kind to his negroes, especially the little ones. Hamp's
after-experience seemed to prove this, for he received small share of
kindness, as well as scrimped rations, from those who hired him.
It was a very good thing for Hamp that he married Aunt Minervy Ann,
otherwise he would have become a wanderer and a vagabond when freedom
came. Even as it was, he didn't miss it a hair's breadth. He "broke
loose," as he described it, and went off, but finally came back and
tried to persuade Aunt Minervy Ann to leave Major Perdue. How he
failed in this has already been reported. He settled down, but he
acquired no very friendly feelings toward the white race.
He joined the secret political societies strangely called "Union
Leagues," and aided in disseminating the belief that the whites were
only awaiting a favorable opportunity to re-enslave his race. He was
only repeating what the carpet-baggers had told him. Perhaps he
believed the statement, perhaps not. At any rate, he repeated it
fervently and frequently, and soon came to be the recognized leader of
the negroes in the county of which Halcyondale was the capital. That
is to say, the leader of all except one. At church one Sunday night
some of the brethren congratulated Aunt Minervy Ann on the fact that
Hamp was now the leader of the colored people in that region.
"What colored people?" snapped Aunt Minervy Ann.
"We-all," responded a deacon, emphatically.
"Well, he can't lead _me_, I'll tell you dat right now!" exclaimed
Aunt Minervy Ann.
[Illustration: He wore a blue army overcoat and a stove-pipe
hat.--Page 36.]
Anyhow, when the time came to elect members of the Legislature (the
constitutional convention had already been held), Hamp was chosen to
be the candidate of the negro Republicans. A white man wanted to run,
but the negroes said they preferred their own color, and they had
their way. They had their way at the polls, too, for, as nearly all
the whites who would have voted had served in the Confederate army,
they were at that time disfranchised.
So Hamp was elected overwhelmingly, "worl' widout een'," as he put it,
and the effect it had on him was a perfect illustration of one aspect
of human nature. Before and during the election (which lasted three
days) Hamp had been going around puffed up with importance. He wore a
blue army overcoat and a stove-pipe hat, and went about smoking a big
cigar. When the election was over, and he was declared the choice of
the county, he collapsed. His dignity all disappeared. His air of
self-importance and confidence deserted him. His responsibilities
seemed to weigh him down.
He had once "rolled" in the little printing-office where the machinery
consisted of a No. 2 Washington hand-press, a wooden imposing-stone,
three stands for the cases, a rickety table for "wetting down" the
paper, a tub in which to wash the forms, and a sheet-iron
"imposing-stone." This chanced to be my head-quarters, and the day
after the election I was somewhat surprised to see Hamp saunter in. So
was Major Tumlin Perdue, who was reading the exchanges.
"He's come to demand a retraction," remarked the Major, "and you'll
have to set him right. He's no longer plain Hamp; he's the Hon.
Hamp--what's your other name?" turning to the negro.
"Hamp Tumlin my fergiven name, suh. I thought 'Nervy tol' you dat."
"Why, who named you after me?" inquired the Major, somewhat angrily.
"Me an' 'Nervy fix it up, suh. She say it's about de purtiest name in
town."
The Major melted a little, but his bristles rose again, as it were.
"Look here, Hamp!" he exclaimed in a tone that nobody ever forgot or
misinterpreted; "don't you go and stick Perdue onto it. I won't stand
that!"
"No, suh!" responded Hamp. "I started ter do it, but 'Nervy Ann say
she ain't gwine ter have de Perdue name bandied about up dar whar de
Legislatur's at."
Again the Major thawed, and though he looked long at Hamp it was with
friendly eyes. He seemed to be studying the negro--"sizing him up," as
the saying is. For a newly elected member of the Legislature, Hamp
seemed to take a great deal of interest in the old duties he once
performed about the office. He went first to the box in which the
"roller" was kept, and felt of its surface carefully.
"You'll hatter have a bran new roller 'fo' de mont's out," he said,
"an' I won't be here to he'p you make it."
Then he went to the roller-frame, turned the handle, and looked at the
wooden cylinders. "Dey don't look atter it like I use ter, suh; an'
dish yer frame monst'us shackly."
From there he passed to the forms where the advertisements remained
standing. He passed his thumb over the type and looked at it
critically. "Dey er mighty skeer'd dey'll git all de ink off," was his
comment. Do what he would, Hamp couldn't hide his embarrassment.
Meanwhile, Major Perdue scratched off a few lines in pencil. "I wish
you'd get this in Tuesday's paper," he said. Then he read: "The Hon.
Hampton Tumlin, recently elected a member of the Legislature, paid us
a pop-call last Saturday. We are always pleased to meet our
distinguished fellow-townsman and representative. We trust Hon.
Hampton Tumlin will call again when the Ku-Klux are in."
"Why, certainly," said I, humoring the joke.
"Sholy you-all ain't gwine put dat in de paper, is you?" inquired
Hamp, in amazement.
"Of course," replied the Major; "why not?"
"Kaze, ef you does, I'm a ruint nigger. Ef 'Nervy Ann hear talk 'bout
my name an' entitlements bein' in de paper, she'll quit me sho. Uh-uh!
I'm gwine 'way fum here!" With that Hamp bowed and disappeared. The
Major chuckled over his little joke, but soon returned to his
newspaper. For a quarter of an hour there was absolute quiet in the
room, and, as it seemed, in the entire building, which was a brick
structure of two stories, the stairway being in the centre. The
hallway was, perhaps, seventy-five feet long, and on each side, at
regular intervals, there were four rooms, making eight in all, and,
with one exception, variously occupied as lawyers' offices or sleeping
apartments, the exception being the printing-office in which Major
Perdue and I were sitting. This was at the extreme rear of the
hallway.
[Illustration: "Sholy you-all ain't gwine put dat in de paper, is
you?"--Page 36.]
I had frequently been struck by the acoustic properties of this
hallway. A conversation carried on in ordinary tones in the
printing-office could hardly be heard in the adjoining room.
Transferred to the front rooms, however, or even to the sidewalk
facing the entrance to the stairway, the lightest tone was magnified
in volume. A German professor of music who for a time occupied the
apartment opposite the printing-office was so harassed by the
thunderous sounds of laughter and conversation rolling back upon him
that he tried to remedy the matter by nailing two thicknesses of
bagging along the floor from the stairway to the rear window. This
was, indeed, something of a help, but when the German left, being of
an economical turn of mind, he took his bagging away with him, and
once more the hall-way was torn and rent, as you may say, with the
lightest whisper.
Thus it happened that, while the Major and I were sitting enjoying an
extraordinary season of calm, suddenly there came a thundering sound
from the stairway. A troop of horse could hardly have made a greater
uproar, and yet I knew that less than half a dozen people were
ascending the steps. Some one stumbled and caught himself, and the
multiplied and magnified reverberations were as loud as if the roof
had caved in, carrying the better part of the structure with it. Some
one laughed at the misstep, and the sound came to our ears with the
deafening effect of an explosion. The party filed with a dull roar
into one of the front rooms, the office of a harum-scarum young lawyer
who had more empty bottles behind his door than he had ever had briefs
on his desk.
"Well, the great Gemini!" exclaimed Major Perdue, "how do you manage
to stand that sort of thing?"
I shrugged my shoulders and laughed, and was about to begin anew a
very old tirade against caves and halls of thunder, when the Major
raised a warning hand. Some one was saying----
"He hangs out right on ol' Major Perdue's lot. He's got a wife there."
"By jing!" exclaimed another voice; "is that so? Well, I don't wanter
git mixed up wi' the Major. He may be wobbly on his legs, but I don't
wanter be the one to run up ag'in 'im."
The Major pursed up his lips and looked at the ceiling, his attitude
being one of rapt attention.
"Shucks!" cried another; "by the time the ol' cock gits his bellyful
of dram, thunder wouldn't roust 'im."
A shrewd, foxy, almost sinister expression came over the Major's rosy
face as he glanced at me. His left hand went to his goatee, an
invariable signal of deep feeling, such as anger, grief, or serious
trouble. Another voice broke in here, a voice that we both knew to be
that of Larry Pulliam, a big Kentuckian who had refugeed to
Halcyondale during the war.
"Blast it all!" exclaimed Larry Pulliam, "I hope the Major will come
out. Me an' him hain't never butted heads yit, an' it's gittin' high
time. Ef he comes out, you fellers jest go ahead with your
rat-killin'. _I_'ll 'ten' to him."
"Why, you'd make two of him, Pulliam," said the young lawyer.
"Oh, I'll not hurt 'im; that is, not _much_--jest enough to let 'im
know I'm livin' in the same village," replied Mr. Pulliam. The voice
of the town bull could not have had a more terrifying sound.
Glancing at the Major, I saw that he had entirely recovered his
equanimity. More than that, a smile of sweet satisfaction and
contentment settled on his rosy face, and stayed there.
"I wouldn't take a hundred dollars for that last remark," whispered
the Major. "That chap's been a-raisin' his hackle at me ever since
he's been here, and every time I try to get him to make a flutter he's
off and gone. Of course it wouldn't do for me to push a row on him
just dry so. But now----" The Major laughed softly, rubbed his hands
together, and seemed to be as happy as a child with a new toy.
"My son," said he after awhile, "ain't there some way of finding out
who the other fellows are? Ain't you got some word you want Seab
Griffin"--this was the young lawyer--"to spell for you?"
Spelling was the Major's weakness. He was a well-educated man, and
could write vigorous English, but only a few days before he had asked
me how many, _f_'s there are in _graphic_.
"Let's see," he went on, rubbing the top of his head. "Do you spell
_Byzantium_ with two _y_'s, or with two _i_'s, or with one _y_ and one
_i_? It'll make Seab feel right good to be asked that before company,
and he certainly needs to feel good if he's going with that crowd."
So, with a manuscript copy in my hand, I went hurriedly down the hall
and put the important question. Mr. Griffin was all politeness, but
not quite sure of the facts in the case. But he searched in his books
of reference, including the Geographical Gazette, until finally he was
able to give me the information I was supposed to stand in need of.
While he was searching, Mr. Pulliam turned to me and inquired what day
the paper came out. When told that the date was Tuesday, he smiled and
nodded his head mysteriously.
"That's good," he declared; "you'll be in time to ketch the news."
"What news?" I inquired.
"Well, ef you don't hear about it before to-morrer night, jest inquire
of Major Perdue. He'll tell you all about it."
Mr. Pulliam's tone was so supercilious that I was afraid the Major
would lose his temper and come raging down the hallway. But he did
nothing of the kind. When I returned he was fairly beaming. The Major
took down the names in his note-book--I have forgotten all except
those of Buck Sanford and Larry Pulliam--and seemed to be perfectly
happy. They were all from the country except Larry Pulliam and the
young lawyer.
After my visit to the room, the men spoke in lower tones, but every
word came back to us as distinctly as before.
"The feed of the bosses won't cost us a cent," remarked young Sanford.
"Tom Gresham said he'd 'ten' to that. They're in the stable right
now. And we're to have supper in Tom's back room, have a little game
of ante, and along about twelve or one we'll sa'nter down and yank
that derned nigger from betwixt his blankets, ef he's got any, and
leave him to cool off at the cross-roads. Won't you go 'long, Seab,
and see it well done?"
[Illustration: Inquired what day the paper came out.--Page 38.]
"I'll go and see if the supper's well done, and I'll take a shy at
your ante," replied Mr. Griffin. "But when it comes to the balance of
the programme--well, I'm a lawyer, you know, and you couldn't expect
me to witness the affair. I might have to take your cases and prove an
alibi, you know, and I couldn't conscientiously do that if I was on
hand at the time."
"The Ku-Klux don't have to have alibis," suggested Larry Pulliam.
"Perhaps not, still--" Apparently Mr. Griffin disposed of the matter
with a gesture.
When all the details of their plan had been carefully arranged, the
amateur Ku-Klux went filing out, the noise they made dying away like
the echoes of a storm.
Major Perdue leaned his head against the back of his chair, closed his
eyes, and sat there so quietly that I thought he was asleep. But this
was a mistake. Suddenly he began to laugh, and he laughed until the
tears ran down his face. It was laughter that was contagious, and
presently I found myself joining in without knowing why. This started
the Major afresh, and we both laughed until exhaustion came to our
aid.
"O Lord!" cried the Major, panting, "I haven't had as much fun since
the war, and a long time before. That blamed Pulliam is going to walk
into a trap of his own setting. Now you jest watch how he goes out
ag'in."
"But I'll not be there," I suggested.
"Oh, yes!" exclaimed the Major, "you can't afford to miss it. It'll be
the finest piece of news your paper ever had. You'll go to supper with
me--" He paused. "No, I'll go home, send Valentine to her Aunt Emmy's,
get Blasengame to come around, and we'll have supper about nine.
That'll fix it. Some of them chaps might have an eye on my house, and
I don't want 'em to see anybody but me go in there. Now, if you don't
come at nine, I'll send Blasengame after you."
"I shall be glad to come, Major. I was simply fishing for an
invitation."
"_That_ fish is always on your hook, and you know it," the Major
insisted.
As it was arranged, so it fell out. At nine, I lifted and dropped the
knocker on the Major's front door. It opened so promptly that I was
somewhat taken by surprise, but in a moment the hand of my host was on
my arm, and he pulled me inside unceremoniously.
[Illustration: "I was on the lookout," the Major explained.]
"I was on the lookout," the Major explained. "Minervy Ann has fixed to
have waffles, and she's crazy about havin' 'em just right. If she
waits too long to make 'em, the batter'll spoil; and if she puts 'em
on before everybody's ready, they won't be good. That's what she says.
Here he is, you old Hessian!" the Major cried, as Minervy Ann peeped
in from the dining-room. "Now slap that supper together and let's get
at it."
"I'm mighty glad you come, suh," said Aunt Minervy Ann, with a
courtesy and a smile, and then she disappeared. In an incredibly short
time, supper was announced, and though Aunt Minervy has since informed
me confidentially that the Perdues were having a hard time of it at
that period, I'll do her the credit to say that the supper she
furnished forth was as good as any to be had in that town--waffles,
beat biscuit, fried chicken, buttermilk, and coffee that could not be
surpassed.
"How about the biscuit, Minervy Ann?" inquired Colonel Blasengame, who
was the Major's brother-in-law, and therefore one of the family.
"I turned de dough on de block twelve times, an' hit it a hunderd an
forty-sev'm licks," replied Aunt Minervy Ann.
"I'm afeard you hit it one lick too many," said Colonel Blasengame,
winking at me.
"Well, suh, I been hittin' dat away a mighty long time," Aunt Minervy
Ann explained, "and I ain't never hear no complaints."
"Oh, I'm not complainin', Minervy Ann." Colonel Blasengame waved his
hand. "I'm mighty glad you did hit the dough a lick too many. If you
hadn't, the biscuit would 'a' melted in my mouth, and I believe I'd
rather chew on 'em to get the taste."
"He des runnin' on, suh," said Aunt Minervy Ann to me. "Marse Bolivar
know mighty well dat he got ter go 'way fum de Nunited State fer ter
git any better biscuits dan what I kin bake."
Then there was a long pause, which was broken by an attempt on the
part of Major Perdue to give Aunt Minervy Ann an inkling of the
events likely to happen during the night. She seemed to be both hard
of hearing and dull of understanding when the subject was broached; or
she may have suspected the Major was joking or trying to "run a rig"
on her. Her questions and comments, however, were very characteristic.
"I dunner what dey want wid Hamp," she said. "Ef dey know'd how
no-count he is, dey'd let 'im 'lone. What dey want wid 'im?"
"Well, two or three of the country boys and maybe some of the town
chaps are going to call on him between midnight and day. They want to
take him out to the cross-roads. Hadn't you better fix 'em up a little
snack? Hamp won't want anything, but the boys will feel a little
hungry after the job is over."
"Nobody ain't never tell me dat de Legislatur' wuz like de Free
Masons, whar dey have ter ride a billy goat an' go down in a dry well
wid de chains a-clankin'. I done tol' Hamp dat he better not fool wid
white folks' do-in's."
"Only the colored members have to be initiated," explained the Major,
solemnly.
"What does dey do wid um?" inquired Aunt Minervy Ann.
"Well," replied the Major, "they take 'em out to the nearest
cross-roads, put ropes around their necks, run the ropes over limbs,
and pull away as if they were drawing water from a well."
"What dey do dat fer?" asked Aunt Minervy Ann, apparently still
oblivious to the meaning of it all.
"They want to see which'll break first, the ropes or the necks," the
Major explained.
"Ef dey takes Hamp out," remarked Aunt Minervy Ann,
tentatively--feeling her way, as it were--"what time will he come
back?"
"You've heard about the Resurrection Morn, haven't you, Minervy Ann?"
There was a pious twang in the Major's voice as he pronounced the
words.
"I hear de preacher say sump'n 'bout it," replied Aunt Minervy Ann.
"Well," said the Major, "along about that time Hamp will return. I
hope his record is good enough to give him wings."
"Shuh! Marse Tumlin! you-all des fool'n' me. I don't keer--Hamp ain't
gwine wid um. I tell you dat right now."
"Oh, he may not want to go," persisted the Major, "but he'll go all
the same if they get their hands on him."
"My life er me!" exclaimed Aunt Minervy Ann, bristling up, "does
you-all 'speck I'm gwine ter let um take Hamp out dat away? De fus'
man come ter my door, less'n it's one er you-all, I'm gwine ter fling
a pan er hot embers in his face ef de Lord'll gi' me de strenk. An' ef
dat don't do no good, I'll scald um wid b'ilin' water. You hear dat,
don't you?"
"Minervy Ann," said the Major, sweetly, "have you ever heard of the
Ku-Klux?"
"Yasser, I is!" she exclaimed with startling emphasis. She stopped
still and gazed hard at the Major. In response, he merely shrugged his
shoulders and raised his right hand with a swift gesture that told the
whole story.
"Name er God! Marse Tumlin, is you an' Marse Bolivar and dish yer
young genterman gwine ter set down here flat-footed and let dem
Ku-kluckers scarify Hamp?"
[Illustration: "Dat's some er 'Nervy Ann's doin's, suh." Page 43.]
"Why should _we_ do anything? You've got everything arranged. You're
going to singe 'em with hot embers, and you're going to take their
hides off with scalding water. What more do you want?" The Major spoke
with an air of benign resignation.
Aunt Minervy Ann shook her head vigorously. "Ef deyer de Kukluckers,
fire won't do um no harm. Dey totes der haids in der han's."
"Their heads in their hands?" cried Colonel Blasengame, excitedly.
"Dat what dey say, suh," replied Aunt Minervy Ann.
Colonel Blasengame looked at his watch. "Tumlin, I'll have to ask you
to excuse me to-night," he said. "I--well, the fact is, I have a
mighty important engagement up town. I'm obliged to fill it." He
turned to Aunt Minervy Ann: "Did I understand you to say the Ku-Klux
carry their heads in their hands?"
"Dat what folks tell me. I hear my own color sesso," replied Aunt
Minervy Ann.
"I'd be glad to stay with you, Tumlin," the Colonel declared;
"but--well, under the circumstances, I think I'd better fill that
engagement. Justice to my family demands it."
"Well," responded Major Perdue, "if you are going, I reckon we'd just
as well go, too."
"Huh!" exclaimed Aunt Minervy Ann, "ef gwine's de word, dey can't
nobody beat me gittin' way fum here. Dey may beat me comin' back, I
ain't 'sputin' dat; but dey can't beat me gwine 'way. I'm ol', but I
got mighty nigh ez much go in me ez a quarter-hoss."
[Illustration: In the third he placed only powder.--Page 44.]
Colonel Blasengame leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling.
"It seems to me, Tumlin, we might compromise on this. Suppose we get
Hamp to come in here. Minervy Ann can stay out there in the kitchen
and throw a rock against the back door when the Ku-Klux come."
Aunt Minervy Ann fairly gasped. "_Who? Me?_ I'll die fust. I'll t'ar
down dat do'; I'll holler twel ev'ybody in de neighborhood come
a-runnin'. Ef you don't b'lieve me, you des try me. I'll paw up dat
back-yard."
Major Perdue went to the back door and called Hamp, but there was no
answer. He called him a second time, with the same result.
"Well," said the Major, "they've stolen a march on us. They've come
and carried him off while we were talking."
"No, suh, dey ain't, needer. I know right whar he is, an' I'm gwine
atter 'im. He's right 'cross de street dar, colloguin' wid dat ol'
Ceely Ensign. Dat's right whar he is."
[Illustration: We administered to his hurts the best we could.--Page
45.]
"Old! Why, Celia is young," remarked the Major. "They say she's the
best cook in town."
Aunt Minervy Ann whipped out of the room, and was gone some little
time. When she returned, she had Hamp with her, and I noticed that
both were laboring under excitement which they strove in vain to
suppress.
"Here I is, suh," said Hamp. "'Nervy Ann say you call me."
"How is Celia to-night?" Colonel Blasengame inquired, suavely.
This inquiry, so suddenly and unexpectedly put, seemed to disconcert
Hamp. He shuffled his feet and put his hand to his face. I noticed a
blue welt over his eye, which was not there when he visited me in the
afternoon.
"Well, suh, I speck she's tolerbul."
"_Is she? Is she? Ah-h-h!_" cried Aunt Minervy Ann.
"She must be pretty well," said the Major. "I see she's hit you a clip
over the left eye."
"Dat's some er 'Nervy Ann's doin's, suh," replied Hamp, somewhat
disconsolately.
"Den what you git in de way fer?" snapped Aunt Minervy Ann.
"Marse Tumlin, dat ar 'oman ain't done nothin' in de roun' worl'. She
say she want me to buy some hime books fer de church when I went to
Atlanty, an' I went over dar atter de money."
"_I himed 'er an' I churched 'er!_" exclaimed Aunt Minervy Ann.
"Here de money right here," said Hamp, pulling a small roll of
shinplasters out of his pocket; "an' whiles we settin' dar countin' de
money, 'Nervy Ann come in dar an' frail dat 'oman out."
"Ain't you hear dat nigger holler, Marse Tumlin?" inquired Minervy
Ann. She was in high good-humor now. "Look like ter me dey could
a-heerd 'er blate in de nex' county ef dey'd been a-lis'nin'. 'Twuz
same ez a picnic, suh, an' I'm gwine 'cross dar 'fo' long an' pay my
party call."
Then she began to laugh, and pretty soon went through the whole
episode for our edification, dwelling with unction on that part where
the unfortunate victim of her jealousy had called her "Miss 'Nervy."
The more she laughed the more serious Hamp became.
[Illustration: "I'd a heap rather you'd pull your shot-gun on me than
your pen."--Page 46.]
At the proper time he was told of the visitation that was to be made
by the Ku-Klux, and this information seemed to perplex and worry him
no little. But his face lit up with genuine thankfulness when the
programme for the occasion was announced to him. He and Minervy Ann
were to remain in the house and not show their heads until the Major
or the Colonel or their guest came to the back door and drummed on it
lightly with the fingers.
Then the arms--three shot-guns--were brought out, and I noticed with
some degree of surprise, that as the Major and the Colonel began to
handle these, their spirits rose perceptibly. The Major hummed a tune
and the Colonel whistled softly as they oiled the locks and tried the
triggers. The Major, in coming home, had purchased four pounds of
mustard-seed shot, and with this he proceeded to load two of the guns.
In the third he placed only powder. This harmless weapon was intended
for me, while the others were to be handled by Major Perdue and
Colonel Blasengame. I learned afterward that the arrangement was made
solely for my benefit. The Major and the Colonel were afraid that a
young hand might become excited and fire too high at close range, in
which event mustard-seed shot would be as dangerous as the larger
variety.
At twelve o'clock I noticed that both Hamp and Aunt Minervy Ann were
growing restless.
"You hear dat clock, don't you, Marse Tumlin?" said Minervy as the
chimes died away. "Ef you don't min', de Ku-kluckers'll be a-stickin'
der haids in de back do'."
But the Major and the Colonel were playing a rubber of seven-up (or
high-low-Jack) and paid no attention. It was a quarter after twelve
when the game was concluded and the players pushed their chairs back
from the table.
"Ef you don't fin' um in de yard waitin' fer you, I'll be fooled
might'ly," remarked Aunt Minervy Ann.
"Go and see if they're out there," said the Major.
"_Me_, Marse Tumlin? _Me?_ I wouldn't go out dat do' not for ham."
The Major took out his watch. "They'll eat and drink until twelve or a
little after, and then they'll get ready to start. Then they'll have
another drink all 'round, and finally they'll take another. It'll be a
quarter to one or after when they get in the grove in the far end of
the lot. But we'll go out now and see how the land lays. By the time
they get here, our eyes will be used to the darkness."
The light was carried to a front room, and we groped our way out at
the back door the best we could. The night was dark, but the stars
were shining. I noticed that the belt and sword of Orion had drifted
above the tree-tops in the east, following the Pleiades. In a little
while the darkness seemed to grow less dense, and I could make out the
outlines of trees twenty feet away.
Behind one of these trees, near the outhouse in which Hamp and Aunt
Minervy lived, I was to take my stand, while the Major and the Colonel
were to go farther into the wood-lot so as to greet the would-be
Ku-Klux as they made their retreat, of which Major Perdue had not the
slightest doubt.
"You stand here," said the Major in a whisper. "We'll go to the
far-end of the lot where they're likely to come in. They'll pass us
all right enough, but as soon as you see one of 'em, up with the gun
an' lam aloose, an' before they can get away give 'em the other
barrel. Then you'll hear from us."
Major Perdue and Colonel Blasengame disappeared in the darkness,
leaving me, as it were, on the inner picket line. I found the
situation somewhat ticklish, as the saying is. There was not the
slightest danger, and I knew it, but if you ever have occasion to
stand out in the dark, waiting for something to happen, you'll find
there's a certain degree of suspense attached to it. And the
loneliness and silence of the night will take on shape almost
tangible. The stirring of the half-dead leaves, the chirping of a
belated cricket, simply emphasized the loneliness and made the silence
more profound. At intervals, all nature seemed to heave a deep sigh,
and address itself to slumber again.
In the house I heard the muffled sound of the clock chime one, but
whether it was striking the half-hour or the hour I could not tell.
Then I heard the stealthy tread of feet. Some one stumbled over a
stick of timber, and the noise was followed by a smothered exclamation
and a confused murmur of voices. As the story-writers say, I knew that
the hour had come. I could hear whisperings, and then I saw a tall
shadow steal from behind Aunt Minervy's house, and heard it rap gently
on the door. I raised the gun, pulled the hammer back, and let drive.
A stream of fire shot from the gun, accompanied by a report that tore
the silence to atoms. I heard a sharp exclamation of surprise, then
the noise of running feet, and off went the other barrel. In a moment
the Major and the Colonel opened on the fugitives. I heard a loud cry
of pain from one, and, in the midst of it all, the mustard-seed shot
rattled on the plank fence like hominy-snow on a tin roof.
The next instant I heard some one running back in my direction, as if
for dear life. He knew the place apparently, for he tried to go
through the orchard, but just before he reached the orchard fence, he
uttered a half-strangled cry of terror, and then I heard him fall as
heavily as if he had dropped from the top of the house.
It was impossible to imagine what had happened, and it was not until
we had investigated the matter that the cause of the trouble was
discovered. A wire clothes-line, stretched across the yard, had caught
the would-be Ku-Klux under the chin, his legs flew from under him, and
he had a fall, from the effects of which he did not recover for a long
time. He was a young man about town, very well connected, who had gone
into the affair in a spirit of mischief. We carried him into the
house, and administered to his hurts the best we could; Aunt Minervy
Ann, be it said to her credit, being more active in this direction
than any of us.
On the Tuesday following, the county paper contained the news in a
form that remains to this day unique. It is hardly necessary to say
that it was from the pen of Major Tumlin Perdue.
"Last Saturday afternoon our local editor was informed by a prominent
citizen that if we would apply to Major Purdue we would be put in
possession of a very interesting piece of news. Acting upon this hint,
ye local yesterday went to Major Perdue, who, being in high
good-humor, wrote out the following with his own hand:
"'Late Saturday night, while engaged with a party of friends in
searching for a stray dog on my premises, I was surprised to see four
or five men climb over my back fence and proceed toward my residence.
As my most intimate friends do not visit me by climbing over my back
fence, I immediately deployed my party in such a manner as to make the
best of a threatening situation. The skirmish opened at my
kitchen-door, with two rounds from a howitzer. This demoralized the
enemy, who promptly retreated the way they came. One of them, the
leader of the attacking party, carried away with him two loads of
mustard-seed shot, delivered in the general neighborhood and region of
the coat-tails, which, being on a level with the horizon, afforded as
fair a target as could be had in the dark. I understand on good
authority that Mr. Larry Pulliam, one of our leading and deservedly
popular citizens, has had as much as a quart of mustard-seed shot
picked from his carcass. Though hit in a vulnerable spot, the wound is
not mortal.--T. PERDUE.'"
I did my best to have Mr. Pulliam's name suppressed, but the Major
would not have it so.
"No, sir," he insisted; "the man has insulted me behind my back, and
he's got to cut wood or put down the axe."
Naturally this free and easy card created quite a sensation in
Halcyondale and the country round about. People knew what it would
mean if Major Perdue's name had been used in such an off-hand manner
by Mr. Pulliam, and they naturally supposed that a fracas would be the
outcome. Public expectation was on tiptoe, and yet the whole town
seemed to take the Major's card humorously. Some of the older citizens
laughed until they could hardly sit up, and even Mr. Pulliam's friends
caught the infection. Indeed, it is said that Mr. Pulliam, himself,
after the first shock of surprise was over, paid the Major's audacious
humor the tribute of a hearty laugh. When Mr. Pulliam appeared in
public, among the first men he saw was Major Perdue. This was natural,
for the Major made it a point to be on hand. He was not a ruffler, but
he thought it was his duty to give Mr. Pulliam a fair opportunity to
wreak vengeance on him. If the boys about town imagined that a row was
to be the result of this first meeting, they were mistaken. Mr.
Pulliam looked at the Major and then began to laugh.
"Major Perdue," he said, "I'd a heap rather you'd pull your shot-gun
on me than your pen."
And that ended the matter.
[Illustration]
THE SHIP OF STARS
By A. T. Quiller-Couch
(Q.)
XIV
VOICES FROM THE SEA
Before winter and the long nights came round again, Taffy had become
quite a clever carpenter. From the first his quickness fairly
astonished the Bryanite, who at the best was but a journeyman and soon
owned himself beaten.
"I doubt," said he, "if you'll ever make so good a man as your father;
but you can't help making a better workman." He added, with his eyes
on the boy's face, "There's one thing in which you might copy 'em. He
hasn't much of a gift, _but he lays it 'pon the altar_."
By this time Taffy had resumed his lessons. Every day he carried a
book or two in the satchel with his dinner, and read or translated
aloud while his father worked. Two hours were allowed for this in the
morning, and again two in the afternoon. Sometimes a day would be set
apart during which they talked nothing but Latin. Difficulties in the
text of their authors they postponed until the evening, and worked
them out at home, after supper, with the help of grammar and
dictionary.
The boy was not unhappy, on the whole; though for weeks together he
longed for sight of George Vyell, who seemed to have vanished into
space, or into that limbo where his childhood lay like a toy in a
lumber-room. Taffy seldom turned the key of that room. The stories he
imagined now were not about fairies or heroes, but about himself. He
wanted to be a great man and astonish the world. Just how the world
was to be astonished he did not clearly see, even in his dreams; but
the triumph, in whatever shape it came, was to involve a new gown for
his mother, and for his father a whole library of books.
Mr. Raymond never went back to his books now, except to help Taffy.
The Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews was laid aside. "Some
day!" he told Humility. The Sunday congregation had dwindled to a very
few, mostly farm people; Squire Moyle having threatened to expel any
tenant of his who dared to set foot within the church.
In the autumn two things happened which set Taffy wondering.
During the first three years at Nannizabuloe old Mrs. Venning had
regularly been carried downstairs to dine with the family. The sea-air
(she said) had put new life into her. But now she seldom moved from
her room, and Taffy seldom saw her except at night, when--after the
old childish custom--he knocked at her door to wish her pleasant
dreams and pull up the weights of the tall clock which stood by her
bed's head.
One night he asked, carelessly, "What do you want with the clock?
Lying here you don't need to know the time; and its ticking must keep
you awake."
"So it does, child; but, bless you, I like it."
"Like being kept awake?"
"Dear, yes! I have enough of rest and quiet up here. You mind the
litany I used to say over to you?--Parson Kempthorne taught it to us
girls when I was in service with him; 'twas made up, he said, by
another old Devonshire parson, years and years ago--
When I lie within my bed
Sick in heart and sick in head,
And with doubts discomforted,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
When the house do sigh and weep--
That's it. You wouldn't think how quiet it is up here all day. But at
night, when you're in bed and sleeping, all the house begins to talk;
little creakings of the furniture, you know, and the wind in the
chimney, and sometimes the rain in the gutters running--it's all talk
to me. Mostly it's quite sociable too; but sometimes, in rainy
weather, the tune changes, and then it's like some poor soul in bed
and sobbing to itself. That's when the verse comes in:
"When the house do sigh and weep
And the world is drowned in sleep,
Yet my eyes the watch do keep,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
"And then the clock's ticking is a wonderful comfort. _Tick-tack,
tick-tack!_ and I think of you stretched asleep and happy and growing
up to be a man, and the minutes running and trickling away to my
deliverance----"
"Granny!"
"My dear, I'm as well off as most; but that isn't saying I sha'n't be
glad to go and take the pain in my joints to a better land. Before we
came here, in militia-time, I used to lie and listen for the buglers,
but now I've only the clock. No more bugles for me, I suppose, till I
hear them blown on t'other side of Jordan."
Taffy remembered how he too had lain and listened to the bugles; and
with that he suddenly saw his childhood, as it were a small round
globe set within a far larger one and wrapped around with other folks'
thoughts. He kissed his grandmother and went away wondering; and as he
lay down that night it still seemed wonderful to him that she should
have heard those bugles, and more wonderful that night after night for
years she should have been thinking of him while he slept, and he
never have guessed it.
One morning, some three weeks later, he and his father were putting on
their oilskins before starting to work--for it had been blowing hard
through the night and the gale was breaking up in floods of rain--when
they heard a voice hallooing in the distance. Humility heard it too
and turned swiftly to Taffy. "Run upstairs, dear. I expect it's
someone sent from Tresedder Farm; and if so, he'll want to see your
father alone."
Mr. Raymond frowned. "No," he said; "the time is past for that."
A fist hammered on the door. Mr. Raymond threw it open.
"Brigantine--on the sands--half a mile this side of the lighthouse!"
Taffy saw across his father's shoulder a gleam of yellow oilskins and
a flapping sou-wester' hat. The panting voice belonged to Sam Udy--son
of old Bill Udy--a laborer at Tresedder.
"I'll go at once," said Mr. Raymond. "Run you for the coast-guard."
The oilskins went by the window; the side gate clashed to.
"Is it a wreck?" cried Taffy. "May I go with you?"
"Yes, there may be a message to run with."
From the edge of the towans, where the ground dipped steeply to the
long beach, they saw the wreck, about a mile up the coast and, as well
as they could judge, a hundred or a hundred-and-fifty yards out. She
lay almost on her beam-ends, with the waves sweeping high across her
starboard quarter, and never less than six ranks of ugly breakers
between her and dry land. A score of watchers--in the distance they
looked like emmets--were gathered by the edge of the surf. But the
coast-guard had not arrived yet.
"The tide is ebbing, and the rocket will reach. Can you see anyone
aboard?"
Taffy spied through his hands, but could see no one. His father set
off running and he followed, half-blinded by the rain, at every fourth
step foundering knee-deep in loose sand or tripping in a rabbit hole.
They had covered three-fourths of the distance when Mr. Raymond pulled
up and waved his hat as the coast-guard carriage swept into view over
a ridge to the right and came plunging across the main valley of the
towans. It passed them close--the horses fetlock-deep in sand, with
heads down and heaving, smoking shoulders; the coast-guardsmen with
keen strong faces like heroes'--and the boy longed to copy his father
and send a cheer after them as they went galloping by. But something
rose in his throat.
He ran after the carriage, and reached the shore just as the first
rocket shot singing out toward the wreck. By this time at least a
hundred miners had gathered, and between their legs he caught a
glimpse of two figures stretched at length on the wet sand. He had
never looked on a dead body before. The faces of these were hidden by
the crowd; and he hung about the fringe of it, dreading and yet
courting a sight of them.
The first rocket was swept down the wind to leeward of the wreck. The
chief officer judged his second beautifully and the line fell clean
across the vessel and all but amidships. A figure started up from the
lee of the deckhouse and springing into the main shrouds grasped it
and made it fast. The beach being too low for them to work the cradle
clear above the breakers, the coast-guardsmen carried the shore end of
the line up the shelving cliff and fixed it. Within ten minutes the
cradle was run out, and within twenty, the first man came swinging
shoreward.
Four men were brought ashore alive, the captain last. The other two of
the crew of six lay on the sands, with Mr. Raymond kneeling beside
them. He had covered their faces, and, still on his knees, gave the
order to lift them into the carriage. Taffy noticed that he was obeyed
without demur or question. And there flashed on his memory a gray
morning, not unlike this one, when he had missed his father at
breakfast: "He had been called away suddenly," Humility had explained,
"and there would be no lessons that day," and had kept the boy indoors
all the morning and busy with a netting-stitch he had been bothering
her to teach him.
"Father," he asked as they followed the cart, "does this often
happen?"
"Your mother hasn't thought it well for you to see these sights."
"Then it _has_ happened often?"
"I have buried seventeen," said Mr. Raymond.
That afternoon he showed Taffy their graves. "I know the names of all
but two. The bodies have marks about them--tattooed, you know--and
that helps. And I write to their relatives or friends, and restore
whatever small property may be found on them. I have often wished to
put up some grave-stone, or a wooden cross, with their names. I keep a
book and enter all particulars, and where each is laid."
He went to his chest in the vestry and took out the volume--a cheap
account book, ruled for figures. Taffy turned over the pages.
_Nov. 3rd. 187-. Brig "James and Maria:" J. D., fair-haired, height 5
ft. 8 in., marked on chest with initials and cross swords, tattooed,
also anchor and coil of rope on right fore-arm: large brown mole on
right shoulder-blade. Striped flannel drawers: otherwise naked: no
property of any kind.
Ditto. Grown man, age 40 or thereabouts: dark; iron gray beard;
lovers' knot tattooed on right fore-arm, with initials R. L., E. W.,
in the loops: clad in flannel shirt, guernsey, trousers (blue
sea-cloth), socks (heather-mixture), all unmarked. Silver chain in
pocket, with free-mason's token: a half-crown, a florin, and
four-pence_----and so on. On the opposite page were entered the full
names and details afterwards discovered, with notes of the Vicar's
correspondence, and position of the grave.
"They ought to have grave-stones," said Mr. Raymond. "But as it is I
can only get about thirty shillings for the funeral from the county
rate. The balance has come out of my pocket--from two to three pounds
for each. From the beginning the squire refused to help to bury
sailors. He took the ground that it wasn't a local claim."
"Hullo!" said Taffy: for as he turned the leaves his eye fell on this
entry:--
_Jan. 30th, 187-. S. S. "Rifleman" (all hands). Cargo, China-clay: W.
P., Age, about eighteen, fair skin, reddish hair, short and curled,
height 5 ft. 10¾ in. Initials tattooed on chest under a three-masted
ship and semi-circle of seven stars; clad in flannel singlet and
trousers (cloth): singlet marked with same initial in red cotton:
pockets empty_----
"But he was in the navy!" cried Taffy, with his finger on the entry.
"Which one? Yes, he was in the Navy. You'll see it on the opposite
page. He deserted, poor boy, in Cork Harbor, and shipped on board a
tramp steamer as donkey-man. She loaded at Fowey and was wrecked on
the voyage back. William Pellow he was called; his mother lives but
ten miles up the coast; she never heard of it until six weeks after."
"But we--I, I mean--knew him. He was one of the sailor boys on Toby's
van. You remember their helping us with the luggage at _Indian
Queen's_? He showed me his tattoo marks that day."
And again he saw his childhood as it were set about with an enchanted
hedge, across which many voices would have called to him, and some
from near, but all had hung muted and arrested.
The inquest on the two drowned sailors was held next day at the
_Fifteen Balls_, down in Innis village. Later in the afternoon, the
four survivors walked up to the church, headed by the Captain.
"We've been hearing," said the Captain, "of your difficulties, sir:
likewise your kindness to other poor sea-faring chaps. We have liked
to make ye a small offering for your church, but sixteen shillings is
all we can raise between us. So we come to say that if you can put us
on to a job, why we're staying over the funeral, and a day's work or
more after that won't hurt us one way or another."
Mr. Raymond led them to the chancel and pointed out a new beam, on
which he and Jacky Pascoe had been working a week past, and over which
they had been cudgelling their brains how to get it lifted and fixed
in place.
"I can send to one of the miners and borrow a couple of ladders."
"Ladders? Lord love ye, sir, and begging your pardon, we don't want
ladders. With a sling, Bill, hey?--and a couple of tackles. You leave
it to we, sir."
He went off to turn over the gear salved from his vessel, and early
next forenoon had the apparatus rigged up and ready. He was obliged to
leave it at this point, having been summoned across to Falmouth, to
report to his agents. His last words before starting were addressed to
his crew. "I reckon you can fix it now, boys. There's only one thing
more, and don't you forget it: any man that wants to spit must go
outside."
That afternoon Taffy learnt for the first time what could be done with
a few ropes and pulleys. The seamen seemed to spin ropes out of
themselves like spiders. By three o'clock the beam was hoisted and
fixed; and they broke off work to attend their shipmates' funeral.
After the funeral they fell to, again, though more silently, and
before nightfall the beam shone with a new coat of varnish.
They left early next morning, after a good deal of handshaking, and
Taffy looked after them wistfully as they turned to wave their caps
and trudged away over the rise toward the cross-roads. Away to the
left in the wintry sunshine, a speck of scarlet caught his eye against
the blue-gray of the town. He watched it as it came slowly toward him,
and his heart leapt--yet not quite as he had expected it to leap.
For it was George Vyell. George had lately been promoted to "pink" and
made a gallant figure on his strapping gray hunter. For the first time
Taffy felt ashamed of his working suit and would have slipped back to
the church. But George had seen him, and pulled up.
"Hullo!" said he.
"Hullo!" said Taffy; and, absurdly enough, could find no more to say.
"How are you getting on?"
"Oh, I'm all right." There was another pause. "How's Honoria?"
"Oh, she's all right. I'm riding over there now; they meet at
Tredinnis to-day." He tapped his boot with his hunting crop.
"Don't you have any lessons now?" asked Taffy, after awhile.
"Dear me, yes; I've got a tutor. He's no good at it. But what made you
ask?"
Really Taffy could not tell. He had asked merely for the sake of
saying something. George pulled out a gold watch.
"I must be getting on. Well, good-by!"
"Good-by!"
And that was all.
XV
TAFFY'S APPRENTICESHIP
They could manage the carpentering now. And Jacky Pascoe, who in
addition to his other trades was something of a glazier, had taken the
damaged east window in hand. For six months it had remained boarded
up, darkening the chancel. Mr. Raymond removed the boards and fixed
them up again on the outside, and the Bryanite worked behind them
night after night. He could only be spied upon through two lancet
windows at the west end of the church, and these they curtained.
But what continually bothered them was their ignorance of iron-work.
Staples, rivets, hinges were for ever wanted. At length, one evening
toward the end of March, the Bryanite laid down his tools.
"Tell 'ee what 'tis, Parson. You must send the boy to someone that'll
teach 'er smithy-work. There's no sense in this cold hammering."
"Wheelwright Hocken holds his shop and cottage from the Squire."
"Why not put the boy to Mendarva the Smith, over to Benny Beneath?
He's a first-rate workman."
"That is more than six miles away."
"No matter for that. There's Joll's Farm close by; Farmer Joll would
board and lodge 'en for nine shilling a week, and glad of the chance;
and he could come home for Sundays."
Mr. Raymond, as soon as he reached home, sat down and wrote a letter
to Mendarva the Smith and another to Farmer Joll. Within a week the
bargains were struck, and it was settled that Taffy should go at once.
"I may be calling before long, to look you up," said the Bryanite,
"but mind you do no more than nod when you see me."
Joll's Farm lay somewhere near Carwithiel, across the moor where Taffy
had gone fishing with George and Honoria. On the Monday morning when
he stepped through the white front gate, with his bag on his shoulder,
and paused for a good look at the building, it seemed to him a very
comfortable farmstead, and vastly superior to the tumble-down farms
around Nannizabuloe. The flagged path, which led up to the front door
between great bunches of purple honesty, was swept as clean as a
dairy.
A dark-haired maid opened the door and led him to the great kitchen at
the back. Hams wrapped in paper hung from the rafters, and strings of
onions. The pans over the fireplace were bright as mirrors, and
through the open window he heard the voices of children at play as
well as the clacking of poultry in the town-place.
"I'll go and tell the mistress," said the maid; but she paused at the
door. "I suppose you don't remember me, now?"
"No," said Taffy, truthfully.
"My name's Lizzie Pezzack. You was with the young lady, that day, when
she bought my doll. I mind you quite well. But I put my hair up last
Easter, and that makes a difference."
"Why, you were only a child."
"I was seventeen last week. And--I say, do you know the Bryanite, over
to Innis?--Preacher Jacky Pascoe?"
He nodded, remembering the caution given him.
"I got salvation off him. Master and mis'ess, they've got salvation
too; but they take it very quiet. They're very fond of one another; if
you please one you'll please both. They let me walk over to
prayer-meetin' once a week. But I don't go by Mendarva's shop--that's
where you work--though 'tis the shortest way; because there's a woman
buried in the road there, with a stake through her, and I'm a terrible
coward for ghosts."
She paused as if expecting him to say something; but Taffy was staring
at a "neck" of corn, elaborately plaited, which hung above the
mantle-shelf. And just then Mrs. Joll entered the kitchen.
Taffy--without any reason--had expected to see a middle-aged
house-wife. But Mrs. Joll was hardly over thirty; a shapely woman,
with a plain, pleasant face and auburn hair, the wealth of which she
concealed by wearing it drawn straight back from the forehead and
plaited in the severest coil behind. She shook hands.
"You'll like a drink of milk before I show you your room?"
Taffy was grateful for the milk. While he drank it, the voices of the
children outside rose suddenly to shouts of laughter.
"That will be their father come home," said Mrs. Joll and going to the
side-door called to him. "John, put the children down; Mr. Raymond's
son is here."
Mr. Joll, who had been galloping round the farmyard with a small girl
of three on his back, and a boy of six tugging at his coat-tails,
pulled up, and wiped his good-natured face.
"Glad to see you," said he, coming forward and shaking hands, while
the two children stared at Taffy.
After a minute, the boy said, "My name's Bob. Come and play horses,
too."
Farmer Joll looked at Taffy shyly. "Shall we?"
"Mr. Raymond will be tired enough already," his wife suggested.
"Not a bit," declared Taffy; and hoisting Bob on his back, he set off
furiously prancing after the farmer.
By dinner-time he and the family were fast friends, and after dinner
the farmer took him off to be introduced to Mendarva the Smith.
Mendarva's forge stood on a triangle of turf beside the high-road,
where a cart-track branched off to descend to Joll's Farm in the
valley. And Mendarva was a dark giant of a man with a beard like those
you see on the statues of Nineveh. On Sundays he parted his beard
carefully and tied the ends with little bows of scarlet ribbon; but on
week days it curled at will over his mighty chest. He had one
assistant whom he called "the Dane;" a red-haired youth as tall as
himself and straighter from the waist down. Mendarva's knees had come
together with years of poising and swinging his great hammer.
"He's little, but he'll grow," said he, after eying Taffy up and down.
"Dane, come fore and tell me if we'll make a workman of 'en."
The Dane stepped forward and passed his hands over the boy's shoulders
and down his ribs. "He's slight, but he'll fill out. Good pair o'
shoulders. Give's hold o' your hand, my son."
Taffy obeyed; not very well liking to be handled thus.
"Hand like a lady's. Tidy wrist, though. He'll do, master."
So Taffy was passed, given a leathern apron, and set to his first task
of keeping the forge-fire raked and the bellows going, while the
hammers took up the music he was to listen to for a year to come.
This music kept the day merry; and beyond the window along the bright
high-road there was usually something worth seeing--farm-carts,
jowters' carts, the doctor and his gig, pedlars and Johnny-fortnights,
the miller's wagons from the valley-bottom below Joll's Farm, and on
Tuesdays and Fridays, the market van going and returning. Mendarva
knew or speculated upon everybody, and, with half the passers-by,
broke off work and passed the time of day, leaning on his hammer. But
down at the farm all was strangely quiet, in spite of the children's
voices; and at night the quietness positively kept Taffy awake,
listening to the pur-r of the pigeons in their cote against the
house-wall, thinking of his grandmother awake at home and listening to
the _tick-tack_ of her tall clock. Often when he woke to the early
summer daybreak and saw through his attic-window the gray shadows of
the sheep, still and long, on the slope above the farmstead, his ear
was wanting something, asking for something; for the murmur of the sea
never reached this inland valley. And he would lie and long for the
chirruping of the two children in the next room and the drawing of
bolts and clatter of milk-pails below stairs.
He had a plenty to eat, and that plenty simple and good; and clean
linen to sleep between. The kitchen was his, except on Saturday
nights, when Mrs. Joll and Lizzie tubbed the children there; and then
he would carry his books off to the best parlor, or stroll around the
farm with Mr. Joll and discuss the stock. There were no loose rails in
Mr. Joll's gates, no farm implements lying out in the weather to rust.
Mr. Joll worked early and late, and his shoulders had a tell-tale
stoop--for he was a man in the prime of life, perhaps some five years
older than his wife.
One Saturday evening he unburdened his heart to Taffy. It happened at
the end of the hay-harvest, and the two were leaning over a gate
discussing the yet unthatched rick.
"What I say is," declared the farmer, quite inconsequently, "a man
must be able to lay his troubles 'pon the Lord. I don't mean his work,
but his troubles; and go home and shut the door and be happy with his
wife and children. Now I tell you that for months--iss, years--after
Bob was born, I kept plaguing mysel' in the fields, thinking that some
harm might have happened to the child. Why, I used to make an excuse
and creep home, and then if I see'd a blind pulled down, you wouldn't
think how my heart'd go thump; and I'd stand wi' my hand on the
door-hapse an' say, 'If so be the Lord have took'n, I must go and
comfort Susan--not my will but Thine, Lord--but, Lord, don't 'ee be
cruel this time!' And then find the cheeld right as ninepence and the
blind only pulled down to keep the sun off the carpet! After awhile my
wife guessed what was wrong--I used to make up such poor twiddling
pretences. She said, 'Look here, the Lord and me'll see after Bob;
and if you can't keep to your own work without poking your nose into
ours, then I married for worse and not for better.' Then it came upon
me that by leaving the Lord to look after my job I'd been treating Him
like a farm-laborer. It's the things you can't help He looks
after--not the work."
A few evenings later there came a knock at the door, and Lizzie, who
went to open it, returned with the Bryanite skipping behind her.
"Blessings be upon this here house!" he cried, cutting a sort of
double-shuffle on the threshold. He shook hands with the farmer and
his wife, and nodded toward Taffy. "So you've got Parson Raymond's boy
here!"
"Yes," said Mrs. Joll; and turned to Taffy. "He've come to pray a bit;
perhaps you would rather be in the parlor?"
Taffy asked to be allowed to stay; and presently Mr. Pascoe had them
all down on their knees. He began by invoking God's protection on the
household; but his prayer soon ceased to be a prayer. It broke into
ejaculations of praise--"Friends, I be too happy to ask for
anything--Glory, glory! The blood! The precious blood! O deliverance!
O streams of redemption running!" The farmer and his wife began to
chime in--"Hallelujah!" "Glory!" and Lizzie Pezzack to sob. Taffy,
kneeling before a kitchen chair, peeped between his palms and saw her
shoulders heaving.
The Bryanite sprang to his feet, over-turning the settle with a crash.
"Tid'n no use. I must skip. Who'll dance wi' me?"
He held out his hands to Mrs. Joll. She took them, and skipped once
shamefacedly. Lizzie, with flaming cheeks, pushed her aside. "Leave me
try, mis'ess; I shall die if I don't." She caught the preacher's
hands, and the two leapt about the kitchen. "I can dance higher than
mis'ess! I can dance higher than mis'ess!" Farmer Joll looked on with
a dazed face. "Hallelujah!" "Amen!" he said at intervals, quite
mechanically. The pair stood under the bacon rank and began to whirl
like dervishes--hands clasped, toes together, bodies leaning back and
almost rigid. They whirled until Taffy's brain whirled with them.
With a louder sob, Lizzie let go her hold, and tottered back into a
chair, laughing hysterically. The Bryanite leaned against the table,
panting.
There was a long pause. Mrs. Joll took a napkin from the dresser and
fell to fanning the girl's face, then to slapping it briskly. "Get up
and lay the table," she commanded; "the preacher'll stay to supper."
"Thank 'ee, ma'am, I don't care if I do," said he; and ten minutes
latter they were all seated at supper and discussing the fall in wheat
in the most matter-of-fact voices. Only their faces twitched, now and
again.
"I hear you had the preacher down to Joll's last night," said Mendarva
the Smith. "What'st think of 'en?"
"I can't make him out," was Taffy's colorless but truthful answer.
"He's a bellows of a man. I do hear he's heating up th' old Squire
Moyle's soul, to knack an angel out of 'en. He'll find that a job and
a half. You mark my words, there'll be Hamlet's ghost over in your
parish one o' these days."
During work-hours Mendarva bestowed most of his talk on Taffy. The
Dane seldom opened his lips, except to join in the Anvil Chorus--
Here goes one--
Sing, sing, Johnny!
Here goes two--
Sing, Johnny, sing!
Whack'n till he's red
Whack'n till he's dead
And whop! goes the widow with a brand new ring!
and when the boy took a hammer and joined in, he fell silent. Taffy
soon observed that a singular friendship knit these two men, who were
both unmarried. Mendarva had been a famous wrestler in his day, and
his great ambition now was to train the other to win the County belt.
Often, after work, the pair would try a hitch together on the triangle
of turf, with Taffy for stickler; Mendarva illustrating and
explaining, the Dane nodding seriously whenever he understood, but
never answering a word. Afterwards the boy recalled these bouts very
vividly--the clear evening sky, the shoulders of the two big men
shining against the level sun as they gripped and swayed, their long
shadows on the grass under which (as he remembered) the poor
self-murdered woman lay buried.
He thought of her at night, sometimes, as he worked alone at the
forge: for Mendarva allowed him the keys and use of the smithy
overtime, in consideration of a small payment for coal, and then he
blew his fire and hammered with a couple of candles on the bench and a
Homer between them; and beat the long hexameters into his memory. The
incongruity of it never struck him. He was going to be a great man,
and somehow this was going to be the way. These scraps of iron--these
tools of his forging--were to grow into the arms and shield of
Achilles. In its own time would come the magic moment, the shield find
its true circumference and swing to the balance of his arm, proof and
complete.
ἐν δ' ἐτίθει ποταμοῖο μέγα σθένος Ὠκεανοῖο
ἄντυγα παρ' πυμάτην σάκεος πύκα ποιητοῖο.
XVI
LIZZIE AND HONORIA
His apprenticeship lasted a year and six months, and all this while he
lived with the Jolls, walking home every Sunday morning and returning
every Sunday night, rain or shine. He carried his deftness of hand
into his new trade, and it was Mendarva who begged and obtained an
extension of the time agreed on. "Rather than lose the boy I'll tache
'en for love." So Taffy stayed on for another six months.
He was now in his seventeenth year--a boy no longer. One evening, as
he blew up his smithy fire, the glow of it fell on the form of a woman
standing just outside the window and watching him. He had no silly
fears of ghosts; but the thought of the buried woman flashed across
his mind and he dropped his pincers with a clatter.
"'Tis only me," said the woman. "You needn't to be afeared." And he
saw it was the girl Lizzie.
She stepped inside the forge and seated herself on the Dane's anvil.
"I was walking back from prayer-meeting," she said. "'Tis nigher this
way, but I don't ever dare to come. Might, I dessay, if I'd somebody
to see me home."
"Ghosts?" asked Taffy, picking up the pincers and thrusting the bar
back into the hot cinders.
"I dunno; I gets frightened o' the very shadows on the road sometimes.
I suppose, now, you never walks out that way?"
"Which way?"
"Why, toward where your home is. That's the way I comes."
"No, I don't." Taffy blew at the cinders until they glowed again.
"It's only on Sundays I go over there."
"That's a pity," said Lizzie, candidly. "I'm kept in, Sunday evenings,
to look after the children while farmer and mis'ess goes to Chapel.
That's the agreement I came 'pon."
Taffy nodded.
"It would be nice now, wouldn't it--" She broke off, clasping her
knees and staring at the blaze.
"What would be nice?"
Lizzie laughed confusedly. "Aw, you make me say 't. I can't abear any
of the young men up to the Chapel. If me and you----"
Taffy ceased blowing. The fire died down and in the darkness he could
hear her breathing hard.
"They're so rough," she went on, "And t'other night I met young Squire
Vyell riding along the road, and he stopped me and wanted to kiss me."
"George Vyell? Surely he didn't?" Taffy blew up the fire again.
"Iss he did. I don't see why not, neither."
"Why he shouldn't kiss you?"
"Why he shouldn't want to."
Taffy frowned, carried the white hot bar to his anvil and began to
hammer. He despised girls, as a rule, and their ways. Decidedly Lizzie
annoyed him: and yet as he worked he could not help glancing at her
now and then, as she sat and watched him. By and by he saw that her
eyes were full of tears.
"What's the matter?" he asked, abruptly.
"I--I can't walk home alone. I'm afeared."
He tossed his hammer aside, raked out the fire, and reached his coat
off its peg. As he swung round in the darkness to put it on, he
blundered against Lizzie or Lizzie blundered against him. She clutched
at him nervously.
"Clumsy! can't you see the doorway?"
She passed out, and he followed and locked the door. As they crossed
the turf to the highroad, she slipped her arm into his. "I feel safe,
that way. Let it stay, co!" After a few paces, she added, "You're
different from the others--that's why I like you."
"How?"
"I dunno; but you _be_ diff'rent. You don't think about girls, for one
thing."
Taffy did not answer. He felt angry, ashamed, uncomfortable. He did
not turn once to look at her face, dimly visible by the light of the
young moon--the Hunter's moon--now sinking over the slope of the hill.
Thick dust--too thick for the heavy dew to lay--covered the cart-track
down to the farm, muffling their footsteps. Lizzie paused by the gate.
"Best go in separate," she said; paused again and whispered, "You may,
if you like."
"May do what?"
"What--what young Squire Vyell wanted."
They were face to face now. She held up her lips, and as she did so,
they parted in an amorous murmurous little laugh. The moonlight was on
her face. Taffy bent swiftly and kissed her.
"Oh, you hurt!" With another little laugh, she slipped up the
garden-path and into the house.
Ten minutes later Taffy followed, hating himself.
* * * * *
For the next fortnight he avoided her; and then, late one evening, she
came again. He was prepared for this, and had locked the door of the
smithy and let down the shutter while he worked. She tapped upon the
outside of the shutter with her knuckles.
"Let me in!"
"Can't you leave me alone?" he answered, pettishly. "I want to work,
and you interrupt."
"I don't want no love-making--I don't indeed. I'll sit quiet as a
mouse. But I'm afeared, out here."
"Nonsense!"
"I'm afeared o' the ghost. There's something comin'--let me in, co!"
Taffy unlocked the door and held it half open while he listened.
"Yes, there's somebody coming, on horseback. Now, look here--it's no
ghost, and I can't have you about here, with people passing. I--I
don't want you here at all; so make haste and slip away home--that's a
good girl."
Lizzie glided like a shadow into the dark lane as the trample of hoofs
drew close, and the rider pulled up beside the door.
"You're working late, I see. Is it too late to make a shoe for
Aide-de-camp here?"
It was Honoria. She dismounted and stood in the doorway, holding her
horse's bridle.
"No," said Taffy; "that is, if you don't mind the waiting."
With his leathern apron he wiped the Dane's anvil for a seat, while
she hitched up Aide-de-camp and stepped into the glow of the
forge-fire.
"The hounds took us six miles beyond Carwithiel: and there, just as
they lost, Aide-de-camp cast his off-hind shoe. I didn't find it out
at first, and now I've had to walk him all the way back. Are you alone
here?"
"Yes."
"Who was that I saw leaving as I came up?"
"You saw someone?"
"Yes." She nodded, looking him straight in the face. "It looked like a
woman. Who was she?"
"That was Lizzie Pezzack, the girl who sold you her doll, once. She's
a servant down at the farm where I lodge."
Honoria said no more for the moment, but seated herself on the Dane's
anvil, while Taffy chose a bar of iron and stepped out to examine
Aide-de-camp's hoof. He returned and in silence began to blow up the
fire.
"I dare say you were astonished to see me," she remarked at length.
"Yes."
"I'm still forbidden to speak to you. The last time I did it,
grandfather beat me."
"The old brute!" Taffy nipped the hot iron savagely in his pincers.
"I wonder if he'll do it again. Somehow I don't think he will."
Taffy looked at her. She had drawn herself up, and was smiling. In her
close riding-habit she seemed very slight, yet tall, and a woman
grown. He took the bar to the anvil and began to beat it flat. His
teeth were shut, and with every blow he said to himself "Brute!"
"That's beautiful," Honoria went on. "I stopped Mendarva, the other
day, and he told me wonders about you. He says he tried you with a
hard-boiled egg and you swung the hammer and chipped the shell all
round without bruising the white a bit. Is that true?"
Taffy nodded.
"And your learning--the Latin and Greek, I mean; do you still go on
with it?"
He nodded again, toward a volume of Euripides that lay open on the
work-bench.
"And the stories you used to tell George and me; do you go on telling
them to yourself?"
He was obliged to confess that he never did. She sat for awhile
watching the sparks as they flew. Then she said, "I should like to
hear you tell one again. That one about Aslog and Orm, who ran away by
night across the ice-fields and took a boat and came to an island with
a house on it, and found a table spread and the fire lit, but no
inhabitants anywhere--You remember? It began 'Once upon a time, not
far from the city of Drontheim, there lived a rich man----'"
Taffy considered a moment and began "Once upon a time, not far from
the city of Drontheim----" He paused, eyed the horse-shoe cooling
between the pincers, and shook his head. It was no use. Apollo had
been too long in service with Admetus, and the tale would not come.
"At any rate," Honoria persisted, "you can tell me something out of
your books: something you have just been reading."
So he began to tell her the story of Ion, and managed well enough in
describing the boy and how he ministered before the shrine at Delphi,
sweeping the temple and scaring the birds away from the precincts; but
when he came to the plot of the play and, looking up, caught Honoria's
eyes, it suddenly occurred to him that all the rest of the story was a
sensual one and he could not tell it to her. He blushed, faltered, and
finally broke down.
"But it was beautiful," said she, "so far as it went; and it's just
what I wanted. I shall remember that boy Ion now, whenever I think of
you helping your father in the church at home. If the rest of the
story is not nice, I don't want to hear it."
How had she guessed? It was delicious, at any rate, to know that she
thought of him, and Taffy felt how delicious it was, while he fitted
and hammered the shoe on Aide-de-camp's hoof, she standing by with a
candle in either hand, the flame scarcely quivering in the windless
night.
When all was done, she raised a foot for him to give her a mount.
"Good-night!" she called, shaking the reins. Taffy stood by the door
of the forge, listening to the echoes of Aide-de-camp's canter, and
the palm of his hand tingled where her foot had rested.
XVII
THE SQUIRE'S WEIRD
He took leave of Mendarva and the Jolls just before Christmas. The
smith was unaffectedly sorry to lose him. "But," said he, "the Dane
will be entered for the Championship next summer, so I s'pose I must
look forward to that."
Everyone in the Joll household gave him a small present on his
leaving. Lizzie's was a New Testament, with her name on the fly-leaf,
and under it "Converted, April 19, 187-." Taffy did not want the gift,
but took it rather than hurt her feelings.
Farmer Joll said, "Well, wish 'ee well! Been pretty comfiable, I hope.
Now you'm goin', I don't mind telling 'ee I didn't like your coming a
bit. But now 'tis wunnerful to me you've been wi' us less'n two year';
we've made such progress."
At home Taffy bought a small forge and set it up in the church, at the
west end of the north aisle. Mr. Raymond, under his direction, had
been purchasing the necessary tools for some months past; and now the
main expense was the cost of coal, which pinched them a little. But
they managed to keep the fire alight, and the work went forward
briskly. Save that he still forbade the parish to lend them the least
help, the old Squire had ceased to interfere.
Mr. Raymond's hair was grayer; and Taffy might have observed--but did
not--how readily, toward the close of a day's laborious carpentry, he
would drop work and turn to Dindorf 's _Poetæ Scenici Græci_, through
which they were reading their way. On Sundays, the congregation rarely
numbered a dozen. It seemed that as the end of the Vicar's task drew
nearer, so the prospect of filling the church receded and became more
shadowy. And if his was a queer plight, Jacky Pascoe's was a queerer.
The Bryanite continued to come by night and help, but at rarer
intervals. He was discomforted in mind, as anyone could see; and at
length he took Mr. Raymond aside and made confession.
"I must go away; that's what 'tis. My burden is too great for me to
bear."
"Why," said Mr. Raymond, who had grown surprisingly tolerant during
the past twelve months, "what cause have you, of all men, to feel
dejected? You can set the folk here on fire like flax." He sighed.
"That's azackly the reason--I can set 'em afire with a breath; but I
can't hold 'em under. I make 'em too strong for me--_and I'm afeard_.
Parson, dear, it's the gospel truth; for two years I've a been
strivin' agen myself, wrastlin' upon my knees, and all to hold this
parish in." He mopped his face. "'Tis like fightin' with beasts at
Ephesus," he said.
"Do you want to hold them in?"
"I do and I don't. I've got to try, anyway. Sometimes I tell mysel'
'tis putting a hand to the plough and turning back; and then I reckon
I'll go on. But when the time comes, I can't. I'm afeard, I tell 'ee."
He paused. "I've laid it before the Lord, but He don't seem to help.
There's two voices inside o' me. 'Tis a terrible responsibility."
"But the people, what are you afraid of their doing?"
"I don't know. You don't know what a runaway hoss will do, but you're
afeard all the same." He sank his voice. "There's wantonness, for one
thing--six love-children born in the parish this year, and more
coming. They do say that Vashti Clemow destroyed her child. And Old
Man Johns--him they found dead on the rocks under the Island--he
didn't go there by accident. 'Twas a calm day, too."
As often as not Taffy worked late--sometimes until midnight--and blew
his forge-fire alone in the church, the tap of his hammer making
hollow music in the desolate aisles. He was working thus one windy
night in February, when the door rattled open and in walked a totally
unexpected visitor--Sir Harry Vyell.
"Good-evening! I was riding by and saw your light in the windows
dancing up and down. I thought I would hitch up the mare and drop in
for a chat. But go on with your work."
Taffy wondered what had brought him so far from his home at that time
of night, but asked no questions. And Sir Harry placed a hassock on
one of the belfry steps and, taking his seat, watched for awhile in
silence. He wore his long riding boots and an overcoat with the collar
turned up about a neck-cloth less nattily folded than usual.
"I wish," he said at length, "that my boy George was clever like you.
You were great friends once--you remember Plymouth, hey? But I dare
say you've not seen much of each other lately."
Taffy shook his head.
"George is a bit wild. Oxford might have done something for him; made
a man of him, I mean. But he wouldn't go. I believe in wild oats to a
certain extent. I have told him from the first he must look after
himself and decide for himself. That's my theory. It makes a youngster
self-reliant. He goes and comes as he likes. If he comes home late
from hunting, I ask no questions; I don't wait dinner. Don't you agree
with me?"
"I don't know," Taffy answered, wondering why he should be consulted.
"Self-reliance is what a man wants."
"Couldn't he have learnt that at school?"
Sir Harry fidgeted with the riding-crop in his hands. "Well, you see,
he's an only son----. I dare say it was selfish of me. You don't mind
my talking about George?"
Taffy laughed. "I like it."
Sir Harry laughed too, in an embarrassed way. "But you don't suppose I
rode over from Carwithiel for that? You're not so far wrong, though.
The fact is--one gets foolish as one grows old--George went out
hunting this morning, and didn't turn up for dinner. I kept to my
rule, and dined alone. Nine o'clock came; half-past; no George. At ten
Hoskings locked up as usual, and off I went to bed. But I couldn't
sleep. After awhile, it struck me that he might be sleeping here over
at Tredinnis; that is, if no accident had happened. No sleep for me
until I made sure; so I jumped out, dressed, slipped down to the
stables, saddled the mare and rode over. I left the mare by Tredinnis
great gates and crept down to Moyle's stables like a house-breaker;
looked in through the window, and, sure enough, there was George's
gray in the loose box to the right. So George is sleeping there, and
I'm easy in my mind. No doubt you think me an old fool?"
But Taffy was not thinking anything of the sort.
"I couldn't wish better than that. You understand?" said Sir Harry,
slyly.
"Not quite."
"He lost his mother early. He wants a woman to look after him, and for
him to think about. If he and Honoria would only make up a match....
And Carwithiel would be quite a different house."
Taffy hesitated, with a hand on the forge-bellows.
"I dare say it's news to you, what I'm telling. But it has been in my
mind this long while. Why don't you blow up the fire? I bet Miss
Honoria has thought of it too; girls are deep. She has a head on her
shoulders. I'll warrant she'd send half a dozen of my servants packing
within a week. As it is, they rob me to a stair. I know it, and I
haven't the pluck to interfere."
"What does the old Squire say?" Taffy managed to ask.
"It has never come to _saying_ anything. But I believe he thinks of
it, too, when he happens to think of anything but his soul. He'll be
pleased; everyone will be pleased. The properties touch, you see."
"I see."
"To tell you the truth, he's failing fast. This religion of his is a
symptom; all of his family have taken to it in the end. If he hadn't
the constitution of a horse, he'd have been converted ten years before
this. What puzzles me is, he's so quiet. You mark my words"--Sir Harry
rose, buttoned his coat and shook his riding-crop prophetically--"he's
brewing up for something. There'll be the devil of a flare-up before
he has done."
* * * * *
It came with the midsummer bonfires. At nine o'clock on St. John's
Eve, Mr. Raymond read prayers in the church. It was his rule to
celebrate thus the vigils of all saints in the English calendar and
some few Cornish saints besides; and he regularly announced these
services on the preceding Sundays; but no parishioner dreamed of
attending them.
To-night, as usual, he and Taffy had prayed alone; and the lad was
standing after service at the church door, with his surplice on his
arm (for he always wore a surplice and read the lessons on these
vigils), when the flame of the first bonfire shot up from the headland
over Innis village.
Almost on the moment a flame answered it from the point where the
lighthouse stood; and within ten minutes the horizon of the towans was
cressetted with these beacon-fires; surely (thought Taffy) with many
more than usual. And he remembered that Jacky Pascoe had thrown out a
hint of a great revival to be held on Baal-fire Night (as he had
called it).
The night was sultry and all but windless. For once the tormented sands
had rest. The flame of the bonfires shone yellow--orange-yellow--and
steady. He could see the dark figures of men and women passing between
him and the nearest, on the high wastrel in front of Tredinnis great
gates. Their voices reached him in a confused murmur, broken now and
then by a child's scream of delight. And yet a hush seemed to hang
over sea and land: an expectant hush. For weeks the sky had not
rained. Day after day, a dull indigo blue possessed it, deepening with
night into duller purple, as if the whole heavens were gathering into
one big thunder-cloud, which menaced but never broke. And in the hush
of those nights a listener could almost fancy he heard, between
whiles, the rabbits stirring uneasily in their burrows.
By and by, the bonfire on the wastrel appeared to be giving out specks
of light, which blazed independently; yet without decreasing its own
volume of flame. The sparks came dancing, nearer and larger; the
voices grew more distinct. The spectators had kindled torches and were
advancing in procession to visit other bonfires. The torches, too,
were supposed to bless the fields they passed across.
The procession rose and sank as it came over the uneven ridges like a
fiery snake; topped the nearest ridge and came pouring down past the
churchyard wall. At its head danced Lizzie Pezzack, shrieking like a
creature possessed, her hair loose and streaming, while she whirled
her torch. Taffy knew these torches; bundles of canvas steeped in tar
and fastened in the middle to a stout stick or piece of chain.
Lizzie's was fastened to a chain, and as he watched her uplifted arm
swinging the blazing mass he found time to wonder how she escaped
setting her hair on fire. Other torch-bearers tossed their arms and
shouted as they passed. The smoke was suffocating, and across the
patch of quiet graveyard the heat smote on Taffy's face. But in the
crowd he saw two figures clearly--Jacky Pascoe and Squire Moyle; and
the Bryanite's face was agitated and white in the glare. He had given
an arm to the Squire, who was clearly the centre of the procession,
and tottered forward with jaws working and cavernous eyes.
"He's saved!" a voice shouted.
Others took up the cry. "Saved!" "The Squire's saved!" "Saved
to-night--saved to glory!"
The Squire paused, still leaning on the Bryanite's arm. While the
procession swayed around him, he gazed across the gate, as a man who
had lost his bearings. No glint of torchlight reached his eyes; but
the sight of Mr. Raymond's surpliced figure, standing behind Taffy's
shoulders in the full glare, seemed to rouse him. He lifted a fist and
shook it slowly.
"Com'st along, sir!" urged the Bryanite.
But the Squire stood irresolute, muttering to himself.
"Com'st along, sir!"
"Lev' me be, I tell 'ee!" He laid both hands on the gate and spoke
across it to Mr. Raymond, his head nodding while his voice rose.
"D'ee hear what they say? I'm saved. I'm the Squire of this parish,
and I'm going to Heaven. I make no ac
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