CHAPTER IX
Lescott had come to the mountains anticipating a visit of two weeks. His accident had resolved him to shorten it to the nearest day upon which he felt capable of making the trip out to the railroad. Yet, June had ended; July had burned the slopes from emerald to russet-green; August had brought purple tops to the ironweed, and still he found himself lingering. And this was true although he recognized a growing sentiment of disapproval for himself. He knew indubitably that he stood charged with the offense for which Socrates was invited to drink the hemlock: "corrupting the morals of the youth, and teaching strange gods." Feeling the virtue of his teaching, he was unwilling as Socrates to abandon the field. In Samson he thought he recognized twin gifts: a spark of a genius too rare to be allowed to flicker out, and a potentiality for constructive work among his own people, which needed for its perfecting only education and experience. Having aroused a soul's restiveness in the boy, he felt a direct responsibility for it and him, to which he added a deep personal regard. Though the kinsmen looked upon him as an undesirable citizen, bringing teachings which they despised, the hospitality of old Spicer South continued unbroken and a guarantee of security on Misery.
"Samson," he suggested one day when they were alone, "I want you to come East. You say that gun is your tool, and that each man must stick to his own. You are in part right, in part wrong. A mail uses any tool better for understanding other tools. You have the right to use your brains and talents to the full."
The boy's face was somber in the intensity of his mental struggle, and his answer had that sullen ring which was not really sullenness at all, but self-repression.
"I reckon a feller's biggest right is to stand by his kinfolks. Unc'
Spicer's gittin' old. He's done been good ter me. He needs me here."
"I appreciate that. He will be older later. You can go now, and come back to him when he needs you more. If what I urged meant disloyalty to your people, I would cut out my tongue before I argued for it. You must believe me in that. I want you to be in the fullest sense your people's leader. I want you to be not only their Samson—but their Moses."
The boy looked up and nodded. The mountaineer is not given to demonstration. He rarely shakes hands, and he does not indulge in superlatives of affection. He loved and admired this man from the outside world, who seemed to him to epitomize wisdom, but his code did not permit him to say so.
"I reckon ye aims ter be friendly, all right," was his conservative response.
The painter went on earnestly:
"I realize that I am urging things of which your people disapprove, but it is only because they misunderstand that they do disapprove. They are too close, Samson, to see the purple that mountains have when they are far away. I want you to go where you can see the purple. If you are the sort of man I think, you won't be beguiled. You won't lose your loyalty. You won't be ashamed of your people."
"I reckon I wouldn't be ashamed," said the youth. "I reckon there hain't no better folks nowhar."
"I'm sure of it. There are going to be sweeping changes in these mountains. Conditions here have stood as immutably changeless as the hills themselves for a hundred years. That day is at its twilight. I tell you, I know what I'm talking about. The State of Kentucky is looking this way. The State must develop, and it is here alone that it can develop. In the Bluegrass, the possibilities for change are exhausted. Their fields lie fallow, their woodlands are being stripped. Tobacco has tainted the land. It has shouldered out the timber, and is turning forest to prairie. A land of fertile loam is vying with cheap soil that can send almost equal crops to market. There is no more timber to be cut, and when the timber goes the climate changes. In these hills lie the sleeping sources of wealth. Here are virgin forests and almost inexhaustible coal veins. Capital is turning from an orange squeezed dry, and casting about for fresher food. Capital has seen your hills. Capital is inevitable, relentless, omnipotent. Where it comes, it makes its laws. Conditions that have existed undisturbed will vanish. The law of the feud, which militia and courts have not been able to abate, will vanish before Capital's breath like the mists when the sun strikes them. Unless you learn to ride the waves which will presently sweep over your country, you and your people will go under. You may not realize it, but that is true. It is written."
The boy had listened intently, but at the end he smiled, and in his expression was something of the soldier who scents battle, not without welcome.
"I reckon if these here fellers air a-comin' up here ter run things, an' drownd out my folks, hit's a right good reason fer me ter stay here —an' holp my folks."
"By staying here, you can't help them. It won't be work for guns, but for brains. By going away and coming back armed with knowledge, you can save them. You will know how to play the game."
"I reckon they won't git our land, ner our timber, ner our coal, without we wants ter sell hit. I reckon ef they tries thet, guns will come in handy. Things has stood here like they is now, fer a hundred years. I reckon we kin keep 'em that-away fer a spell longer." But it was evident that Samson was arguing against his own belief; that he was trying to bolster up his resolution and impeached loyalty, and that at heart he was sick to be up and going to a world which did not despise "eddication." After a little, he waved his hand vaguely toward "down below."
"Ef I went down thar," he questioned suddenly and irrelevantly, "would
I hev' ter cut my ha'r?"
"My dear boy," laughed Lescott, "I can introduce you in New York studios to many distinguished gentlemen who would feel that their heads had been shorn if they let their locks get as short as yours. In New York, you might stroll along Broadway garbed in turban and a burnouse without greatly exciting anybody. I think my own hair is as long as yours."
"Because," doggedly declared the mountaineer, "I wouldn't allow nobody ter make me cut my ha'r."
"Why?" questioned Lescott, amused at the stubborn inflection.
"I don't hardly know why—" He paused, then admitted with a glare as though defying criticism: "Sally likes hit that-away—an' I won't let nobody dictate ter me, that's all."
The leaven was working, and one night Samson announced to his Uncle from the doorstep that he was "studyin' erbout goin' away fer a spell, an' seein' the world."
The old man laid down his pipe. He cast a reproachful glance at the painter, which said clearly, though without words:
"I have opened my home to you and offered you what I had, yet in my old age you take away my mainstay." For a time, he sat silent, but his shoulders hunched forward with a sag which they had not held a moment before. His seamed face appeared to age visibly and in the moment. He ran one bony hand through his gray mane of hair.
"I 'lowed you was a-studyin' erbout thet, Samson," he said, at last. "I've done ther best fer ye I knowed. I kinder 'lowed thet from now on ye'd do the same fer me. I'm gittin' along in years right smart…."
"Uncle Spicer," interrupted the boy, "I reckon ye knows thet any time ye needed me I'd come back."
The old man's face hardened.
"Ef ye goes," he said, almost sharply, "I won't never send fer ye. Any time ye ever wants ter come back, ye knows ther way. Thar'll be room an' victuals fer ye hyar."
"I reckon I mout be a heap more useful ef I knowed more."
"I've heered fellers say that afore. Hit hain't never turned out thet way with them what has left the mountings. Mebby they gets more useful, but they don't git useful ter us. Either they don't come back at all, or mebby they comes back full of newfangled notions—an' ashamed of their kinfoiks. Thet's the way, I've noticed, hit gen'ally turns out."
Samson scorned to deny that such might be the case with him, and was silent. After a time, the old man went on again in a weary voice, as he bent down to loosen his brogans and kick them noisily off on to the floor:
"The Souths hev done looked to ye a good deal, Samson. They 'lowed they could depend on ye. Ye hain't quite twenty-one yet, an' I reckon I could refuse ter let ye sell yer prop'ty. But thar hain't no use tryin' ter hold a feller when he wants ter quit. Ye don't 'low ter go right away, do ye?"
"I hain't plumb made up my mind ter go at all," said the boy, shamefacedly. "But, ef I does go, I hain't a-goin' yit. I hain't spoke ter nobody but you about hit yit."
Lescott felt reluctant to meet his host's eyes at breakfast the next morning, dreading their reproach, but, if Spicer South harbored resentment, he meant to conceal it, after the stoic's code. There was no hinted constraint of cordiality. Lescott felt, however, that in Samson's mind was working the leaven of that unspoken accusation of disloyalty. He resolved to make a final play, and seek to enlist Sally in his cause. If Sally's hero-worship could be made to take the form of ambition for Samson, she might be brought to relinquish him for a time, and urge his going that he might return strengthened. Yet, Sally's devotion was so instinctive and so artless that it would take compelling argument to convince her of any need of change. It was Samson as he was whom she adored. Any alteration was to be distrusted. Still, Lescott set out one afternoon on his doubtful mission. He was more versed in mountain ways than he had been. His own ears could now distinguish between the bell that hung at the neck of Sally's brindle heifer and those of old Spicer's cows. He went down to the creek at the hour when he knew Sally, also, would be making her way thither with her milk-pail, and intercepted her coming. As she approached, she was singing, and the man watched her from the distance. He was a landscape painter and not a master of genre or portrait. Yet, he wished that he might, before going, paint Sally. She was really, after all, a part of the landscape, as much a thing of nature and the hills as the hollyhocks that had come along the picket-fences. She swayed as gracefully and thoughtlessly to her movements as do strong and pliant stems under the breeze's kiss. Artfulness she had not; nor has the flower: only the joy and fragrance of a brief bloom. It was that thought which just now struck the painter most forcibly. It was shameful that this girl and boy should go on to the hard and unlighted life that inevitably awaited them, if neither had the opportunity of development. She would be at forty a later edition of the Widow Miller. He had seen the widow. Sally's charm must be as ephemeral under the life of illiterate drudgery and perennial child-bearing as her mother's had been. Her shoulders, now so gloriously straight and strong, would sag, and her bosom shrink, and her face harden and take on that drawn misery of constant anxiety. But, if Samson went and came back with some conception of cherishing his wife—yes, the effort was worth making. Yet, as the girl came down the slope, gaily singing a very melancholy song, the painter broke off in his reflections, and his thoughts veered. If Samson left, would he ever return? Might not the old man after all be right? When he had seen other women and tasted other allurements would he, like Ulysses, still hold his barren Ithaca above the gilded invitation of Calypso? History has only one Ulysses. Sally's voice was lilting like a bird's as she walked happily. The song was one of those old ballads that have been held intact since the stock learned to sing them in the heather of the Scotch highlands before there was an America.
"'She's pizened me, mother, make my bed soon,
Fer I'm sick at my heart and I fain would lay doon.'"
The man rose and went to meet her.
"Miss Sally," he began, uncertainly, "I want to talk to you."
She was always very grave and diffident with Lescott. He was a strange new type to her, and, though she had begun with a predilection in his favor, she had since then come to hold him in adverse prejudice. Before his arrival, Samson had been all hers. She had not missed in her lover the gallantries that she and her women had never known. At evening, when the supper dishes were washed and she sat in the honeysuckle fragrance of the young night with the whippoorwills calling, she had been accustomed to hear a particular whippoorwill-note call, much like the real ones, yet distinct to her waiting ears. She was wont to rise and go to the stile to meet him. She had known that every day she would, seemingly by chance, meet Samson somewhere along the creek, or on the big bowlder at the rift, or hoeing on the sloping cornfield. These things had been enough. But, of late, his interests had been divided. This painter had claimed many of his hours and many of his thoughts. There was in her heart an unconfessed jealousy of the foreigner. Now, she scrutinized him solemnly, and nodded.
"Won't you sit down?" he invited, and the girl dropped cross-legged on a mossy rock, and waited. To-day, she wore a blue print dress, instead of the red one. It was always a matter of amazement to the man that in such an environment she was not only wildly beautiful, but invariably the pink of neatness. She could climb a tree or a mountain, or emerge from a sweltering blackberry patch, seemingly as fresh and unruffled as she had been at the start. The man stood uncomfortably looking at her, and was momentarily at a loss for words with which to commence.
"What was ye a-goin' ter tell me?" she asked.
"Miss Sally," he began, "I've discovered something about Samson."
Her blue eyes flashed ominously.
"Ye can't tell me nothin' 'bout Samson," she declared, "withouten hit's somethin' nice."
"It's something very nice," the man reassured her.
"Then, ye needn't tell me, because I already knows hit," came her prompt and confident announcement.
Lescott shook his head, dubiously.
"Samson is a genius," he said.
"What's thet?"
"He has great gifts—great abilities to become a figure in the world."
She nodded her head, in prompt and full corroboration.
"I reckon Samson'll be the biggest man in the mountings some day."
"He ought to be more than that."
Suspicion at once cast a cloud across the violet serenity of her eyes.
"What does ye mean?" she demanded.
"I mean"—the painter paused a moment, and then said bluntly—"I mean that I want to take him back with me to New York."
The girl sprang to her feet with her chin defiantly high and her brown hands clenched into tight little fists. Her bosom heaved convulsively, and her eyes blazed through tears of anger. Her face was pale.
"Ye hain't!" she cried, in a paroxysm of fear and wrath. "Ye hain't a- goin' ter do no sich—no sich of a damn thing!" She stamped her foot, and her whole girlish body, drawn into rigid uprightness, was a-quiver with the incarnate spirit of the woman defending her home and institutions. For a moment after that, she could not speak, but her determined eyes blazed a declaration of war. It was as though he had posed her as the Spirit of the Cumberlands.
He waited until she should be calmer. It was useless to attempt stemming her momentary torrent of rage. It was like one of the sudden and magnificent tempests that often swept these hills, a brief visit of the furies. One must seek shelter and wait. It would end as suddenly as it had come. At last, he spoke, very softly.
"You don't understand me, Miss Sally. I'm not trying to take Samson away from you. If a man should lose a girl like you, he couldn't gain enough in the world to make up for it. All I want is that he shall have the chance to make the best of his life."
"I reckon Samson don't need no fotched-on help ter make folks acknowledge him."
"Every man needs his chance. He can be a great painter—but that's the least part of it. He can come back equipped for anything that life offers. Here, he is wasted."
"Ye mean"—she put the question with a hurt quaver in her voice—"ye mean we all hain't good enough fer Samson?"
"No. I only mean that Samson wants to grow—and he needs space and new scenes in which to grow. I want to take him where he can see more of the world—not only a little section of the world. Surely, you are not distrustful of Samson's loyalty? I want him to go with me for a while, and see life."
"Don't ye say hit!" The defiance in her voice was being pathetically tangled up with the tears. She was speaking in a transport of grief. "Don't ye say hit. Take anybody else—take 'em all down thar, but leave us Samson. We needs him hyar. We've jest got ter have Samson hyar."
She faced him still with quivering lips, but in another moment, with a sudden sob, she dropped to the rock, and buried her face in her crossed arms. Her slender body shook under a harrowing convulsion of unhappiness. Lescott felt as though he had struck her; as though he had ruthlessly blighted the irresponsible joyousness which had a few minutes before sung from her lips with the blitheness of a mocking- bird. He went over and softly laid a hand on her shoulder.
"Miss Sally—" he began.
She suddenly turned on him a tear-stained, infuriated face, stormy with blazing eyes and wet cheeks and trembling lips.
"Don't touch me," she cried; "don't ye dare ter touch me! I hain't nothin' but a gal—but I reckon I could 'most tear ye ter pieces. Ye're jest a pizen snake, anyhow!" Then, she pointed a tremulous finger off up the road. "Git away from hyar," she commanded. "I don't never want ter see ye again. Ye're tryin' ter steal everything I loves. Git away, I tells ye!—git away—begone!"
"Think it over," urged Lescott, quietly. "See if your heart doesn't say I am Samson's friend—and yours." He turned, and began making his way over the rocks; but, before he had gone far, he sat down to reflect upon the situation. Certainly, he was not augmenting his popularity. A half-hour later, he heard a rustle, and, turning, saw Sally standing not far off. She was hesitating at the edge of the underbrush, and Lescott read in her eyes the effort it was costing her to come forward and apologize. Her cheeks were still pale and her eyes wet, but the tempest of her anger had spent itself, and in the girl who stood penitently, one hand nervously clutching a branch of rhododendron, one foot twisting in the moss, Lescott was seeing an altogether new Sally. There was a renunciation in her eyes that in contrast with the child- like curve of her lips, and slim girlishness of her figure, seemed entirely pathetic.
As she stood there, trying to come forward with a pitiful effort at composure and a twisted smile, Lescott wanted to go and meet her. But he knew her shyness, and realized that the kindest thing would be to pretend that he had not seen her at all. So, he covertly watched her, while he assumed to sit in moody unconsciousness of her nearness.
Little by little, and step by step, she edged over to him, halting often and looking about with the impulse to slip out of sight, but always bracing herself and drawing a little nearer. Finally, he knew that she was standing almost directly over him, and yet it was a moment or two more before her voice, sweetly penitent, announced her arrival.
"I reckon—I reckon I've got ter ask yore pardon," she said, slowly and with labored utterance. He looked up to see her standing with her head drooping and her fingers nervously pulling a flower to pieces.
"I reckon I hain't a plumb fool. I knows thet Samson's got a right ter eddication. Anyhow, I knows he wants hit."
"Education," said the man, "isn't going to change Samson, except to make him finer than he is—and more capable."
She shook her head. "I hain't got no eddication," she answered. "Hit's a-goin' ter make him too good fer me. I reckon hit's a-goin' ter jest about kill me…. Ye hain't never seed these here mountings in the winter time, when thar hain't nothin' green, an' thar hain't no birds a-singin', an' thar hain't nothin' but rain an' snow an' fog an' misery. They're a-goin' ter be like thet all the time fer me, atter Samson's gone away." She choked back something like a sob before she went on. "Yes, stranger, hit's a-goin' ter pretty nigh kill me, but—" Her lips twisted themselves into the pathetic smile again, and her chin came stiffly up. "But," she added, determinedly, "thet don't make no difference, nohow."