CHAPTER V
THE physical as well as the mental and moral boundaries of the community of Griggsby, in northern New England, were fitted to inspire eloquence. The town lay between two mountain ranges crowned with primeval forests, and near the shore of a beautiful lake, with the Canadian line a little north of it. There lived among us a lawyer from the state of Maine who had sung of its “forests, lakes, and rivers, and the magnificent sinuosities of its coast,” but he had been silenced by Colonel Buckstone's “towering, cloud-capped, evergreen galleries above the silver floor of our noble lake.”
There were also our mental and moral boundaries; on the east, hard times and history; on the west, the horse-traders of York State, mingled with wild animals and backed by pathless woods; on the north, the Declaration of Independence; on the south, the Democratic party; while above was a very difficult heaven, and beneath a wide open and most accessible hell.
Our environment had some element that appealed to every imagination, and was emphasized by the solemn responsibilities of the time. Our ancient enemies in the South had begun to threaten the land under the leadership of Seymour and Blair. The oratory of New England was sorely taxed.
My own imagination had been touched by all these influences, and by another—the dear and beautiful girl of whom I have said not half enough. There was no flower in all the gardens of Griggsby so graceful in form or so beautiful in color as Florence Dunbar. I felt a touch of the tender passion every time I looked into her eyes. No, she was not of the “sweet Alice” type; she was too full-blooded and strong-armed for that. She never entered a churchyard without being able to walk out of it, and if she had loved “Ben Bolt” she would have got him, to his great happiness and advantage. She was a modest, fun-loving, red-cheeked, sweet-souled girl, with golden hair and hazel eyes, and seventeen when first I saw her. Candor compels me to admit that she had a few freckles, but I remember that I liked the look of them; they had come of the wind and the sunlight.
The father of my chum Henry and his sister Florence had gone West from Griggsby with his bride in the early fifties, and had made a fortune. Florence and her brother had grown up on a ranch, and had been sent back to enjoy the educational disadvantages of Griggsby. They could ride like Indians, and their shooting had filled us with astonishment. With a revolver Florence could hit a half dollar thrown in the air before it touched the ground.
Her brother Henry was two years older, and as many inches taller than I, and always in my company, as I have said. He had begun to emulate the leading lights of the neighborhood. He and Ralph Buckstone, the handsome and gifted son of the great Colonel, were friends and boon companions.
Having been chastened by misfortune, like the great Dan'l Webster Smead, and being in dire need of money, Henry and I went straight to Florence's room the morning of our return from the horse races at Diddlebery, and confessed our ruin and the folly that had led to it. Henry urged me to do it, and said that he would do all the talking, for I told him that I would ask no favor of Florence—coward that I was.
She was kind, but she added to our conviction of guilt a sense of idiocy which was hard to bear. I secretly resolved to keep my brain unspotted by suspicion thereafter, whatever might happen to my soul. We gladly promised to be good. We would have given our notes for a million acts of virtue.
“We are for reform,” I assured her. “Henry and Mr. Smead and I have had a long talk about ourselves and the village. We are going to do what we can to improve the place. He spoke of buying The Little Corporal and drowning out the gamblers and drunkards with publicity.”
“That would be fun!” she exclaimed. “I will write to my father about that. Maybe it's lucky after all that you have had this trouble. I am grateful to you, Havelock, and I am going to help you, but you—” She hesitated, and I was quick to say: “I will not take your help unless you will let me return the money. I can work Saturdays in the mill and do it.”
“Oh, don't think of it again!” she said, with sympathy.
“I must think of it,” was my answer, “and with God's help I will not be so unfair to you again.”
She did not know how deeply I felt the words, and added:
“I am afraid that Mr. Hall may send you both home.”
That, indeed, was our great fear.
I have tried to make it dear that there were some good men in Griggsby; and I must not fail to tell of one of them, the Rev. Appleton Hall, head of the academy, a plain, simple, modest citizen. What a splendid figure of a man he was—big, strong-armed, hard-handed, with black eyes and a beautiful, great head crowned with a wavy mass of blonde hair. That and its heavy, curling beard were as yellow as fine gold. What a tower of rugged strength and fatherly kindness! We loved the touch of his hand and the sound of his voice—when we did not fear them. As he stood with his feet in the soil of his garden and his collar loose at his throat he reminded me of that man of old of whom it was written: “A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.”
He fought against the powers of darkness for the sake of the boys. He was handicapped; he could not denounce the great men of the village by name as pestilential enemies of decency and order. Perhaps that should have been done by the churches. Old “App” Hall, as some called him, warned and watched us; but, with his rugged figure, his old-fashioned clothes, and his farmer dialect, he had not the appeal—the darling appeal of Websterians like Griggs and Colonel Buckstone. However, there was something fatherly about him that made it easy to confess both our truancy and our money loss. Of course, he forgave us, but with stern advice, which did not get under our jackets, as had that of Dan'l Webster Smead. He said we were fools; but we knew that, and would have admitted more.
I began to attend to business as a student, but Henry went on with his skylarking. Dan'l Webster Smead went to work buying produce for the Boston market, and spent every evening at home. He got his wife a hired girl, and the poor woman soon had a happier look in her face. The children wore new clothes, and a touch of the buoyant spirit of the racer Montravers, now cast out of his life, soon entered the home of Smead.
Ralph Buckstone and I had become the special favorites of Appleton Hall. Florence had managed to keep me out of mischief for some time. Naturally, my love for her had led to the love of decency and honor, which meant that I must do the work set before me and keep on fairly good terms with myself. It was Florence, I am sure, who had had a like effect upon Ralph. We took no part, thereafter, in the ranker deviltry of the boys and did fairly good work in school.
One evening Ralph came to my room and told me that he had had a quarrel with his father. It seemed that a clever remark of Florence about the last spree of the Colonel had reached his ears. The Colonel, boiling with indignation, had made some slighting reference to her and all other women in the presence of his son. High words and worse had followed, in the course of which the sacred, gold-headed cane of the Colonel, presented to him by the Republican electors of the town, had been splintered in a violent gesture. The cane had been used, not for assault, but for emphasis. Ralph had been blamed by the Colonel for the loss of his temper and the loss of his cane. The great man might have forgiven the former, but the latter went beyond his power of endurance. So he turned the boy out of doors, and Ralph came directly to my room, where his father found and forgave him with great dignity in the morning, and bade him return to his home.
There was some drunken brawling in the streets by night, and now and then a memorable battle, followed by prosecution and repairs. About then Appleton Hall gave a lecture on the morals of Griggsby, which was the talk of the school and the village for a month or more. In it were the words about Daniel Webster and the first Bunker Hill oration which I quoted at the beginning of this little history. People began to wake up.
Our preachers came back from Samaria and Egypt, “from Africa's sunny fountains and India's coral strands,” and began to think about Griggsby. At last they seemed to recognize that foreign heathens were inferior to the home-made article; that they were not to be compared with the latter in finish and general efficiency. They turned their cannons of oratory and altered the range of their fire. A public meeting was held in the town hall, and the curses of the village were discussed and berated. A chapter of the Cadets of Temperance was organized, and Ralph and I joined. We carried torch lights in a small procession led by Samantha Simpson, and cheered and shouted and had a grand time; but we failed to overawe the enemy. Nothing resulted that could be discerned by the naked contemporary eye save the ridicule that was heaped upon us. If one wanted to create a laugh in a public speech he would playfully refer to the Cadets of Temperance. Good people were wont to say, “What's the use?”
The people are a patient ox. A big woolen mill polluted the stream that flowed through the village. It was our main water supply. The people permitted the pollution until the water was not fit to use. Then they went back to the wells and springs again. There was some futile talk about the shame of it. Letters of complaint were printed in The Little Corporal, our local paper. By and by a meeting was held and a committee appointed to see what could be done. They made sundry suggestions, most of which were ridiculed, and the committee succeeded only in getting themselves disliked.
As a matter of fact, the leading merchants and lawyers, and even the churches, derived a profit from the presence of the woolen mill. Then, too, about every man in Griggsby had his own imperishable views, and loved to ridicule those of his neighbor. Indolence, jealousy, and conceit were piled in the path of reform, which was already filled with obstacles.
Now, in those evil days a thing happened which I wish it were not my duty to recall. Unpleasant gossip had gone about concerning Florence and me. As to its source I had my suspicions. Colonel Buckstone had seen us sitting together by the roadside adjoining the meadow where we had gathered flowers. To Colonel Buckstone that was a serious matter, especially in view of the fact that Florence had expressed strong disapproval of his general conduct. Men like him are ever trying to hold the world in leash and to pull it back to the plane of their own morals.
Griggsby was like most country towns. The county fair had passed; the trotters had retired; Colonel Buckstone had not slid off his eminence for some time, and the material for conversation had run low; somebody had to be sacrificed. The inventive talent of the village got busy. It needed a gay Lothario, and I was nominated and elected without opposition, save that of my own face. It ought to have turned the tide, but it did not. My decency was all assumed. At heart I was a base and subtle villain.
Florence naturally turned to me for advice, and I felt the situation bitterly.
“You poor thing!” said she, with a tearful laugh. “I'm sorry for you, but don't worry. Your honor shall be vindicated.”
“I'll fight the Colonel,” I said.
“You shall not fight him,” said she. “Go and fight somebody else. I want to save him for myself.”
That is the way she took it, bravely, calmly. She did not ask any one to be sorry for her. A less courageous spirit would have given up and gone home in disgust; but she stood her ground, with the fatherly encouragement of Appleton Hall, and stored the lightning that by and by was to fall from her hand upon the appalled citizens of Griggsby.
I was at work in my room one evening when Dan'l Webster Smead came to my door.
“Florence Dunbar and a friend have called to see you,” he said. “They are waiting in the parlor.”
I went down to meet them at once. Florence and Miss Elizabeth Collins, Colonel Buckstone's stenographer, rose to greet me.
Neither I nor any other man knew at that time that Florence had done her family a great favor when the Collins home had been threatened by a mortgage. Years after it helped me to understand the conduct of Elizabeth. In a moment I had heard their story.
Before going home that evening the Colonel had dictated a letter to Roswell Dunbar, Florence's father, calculated to fill his mind with alarm and cause him to recall her from Griggsby. Miss Collins had left the office with her employer, who had put the letter with others in his overcoat pocket, intending to mail them in the morning, the post office having closed for the night. She said that the Colonel had been imbibing freely that day and had gone to the Palace Hotel for supper.
“I have decided to start for home in the morning,” said Florence. “I must reach there before the letter does, and probably I shall not come back.”
“Don't go,” I said. “I'll attend to the letter.”
“How?” she asked.
“I don't know, but in some way,” I said, with the strong confidence of youth in its own capacity. “I only ask that you give me permission to consult my friend Dan'l Webster Smead in strict confidence. It won't do to let the Colonel drive us out of town. He is the one to be driven out.”
Florence agreed with me, and I walked home with the girls, and left them in a better frame of mind.
I asked Smead to come to my room with me, and laid the facts before him. He sat smoking thoughtfully, and said not a word until I had finished. Then he said in that slow drawl of his:
“I take it that you are willing to suffer, if need be, for the sake of decency and fair women.”
“I am,” was my response.
“Then again I ask you to follow me,” he said, rising; and together we left his house as the old town dock was striking nine; Mr. Smead wore his great overcoat with its fur collar and cuds.
“The Colonel has often admired it,” said he. “He's a great swapper when he's drinking, and perhaps—”
“I shall fight the Colonel, if necessary,” I suggested.
“Hush, boy! Let us first try eloquence,” said he. “It is only the vulgar mind that resorts to muscle when the tongue may do as well. Eloquence, my dear boy, is the jimmy of Griggsby; it is also the gold brick, the giant powder, the nitroglycerin of Griggsby. Let us see what it can accomplish.” We went on in silence, and soon heard sounds of revelry in a bar-room. We stopped and listened a moment, after which he led me farther up the street.
“The Colonel began to slide from his eminence to-day,” my companion whispered. “I doubt not he is still sliding, and what I hope to hear are sundry deep-voiced remarks about the 'witchin' hour of night.”'
We came soon to the lighted windows of the Palace Hotel, through which a loud and mirthful joy floated into the still night. We listened again. I could hear the rumbling words, “When churchyards yawn and graves give up their dead.”
“Those graves and churchyards are counterfeit,” Smead whispered. “They have not the Buckstonian ring to them. Let's go in for a minute.”
We entered. About the stove in the office was the usual crowd of horsemen with meerschaum pipes. I took the only vacant chair by the side of a maudlin old soldier who did chores for his keep, and who addressed me with incoherent mumbles. The air was heavy with tobacco smoke and the odor of rum and molasses. “Rat” Emerson, a driver, was telling how he had worn out a faster horse than his in the scoring and won a race. Through the open door of the bar-room I could see a man with his glass raised, and hear him saying in a stentorian tone:
“Ye call me chief, and ye do well to call him chief who for twelve long years has met upon the arena every shape of man or beast the broad empire of Rome could furnish, and who never yet lowered his arm.”
This tournament of orators was interrupted by Smead, who was suddenly and almost simultaneously embraced by every member of the group, while the barkeeper was preparing to minister to his needs.
“Again I am in the grasp of the octopus of intemperance,” I heard Smead say, whereat the others roared with laughter.
Soon he disengaged himself, and I saw him speaking to the bartender. In a moment he came out, and we left the place together.
“Colonel Buckstone is taking the nine-thirty train to St. Johnstown,” he whispered. “We must hurry and get aboard. There is yet time.”
We ran to the depot and caught the train. Colonel Buckstone sat near the center of the smoking-car with Thurst Giles, a town drunkard, of Griggsby. Fortunately, we got a seat just behind them. I remember that, of the two, Thurst was much the soberer. Shabby and unshaven, he was an odd sort of extravagance for the imposing Colonel to be indulging in. The latter was arrayed in broadcloth and fine linen, and crowned with a beaver hat.
“Giles, I like you,” said Buckstone, in a thick, maudlin voice; “but, sir, I feel constrained to remind you that in the matter of dress and conduct you are damnably careless. You, sir, are in the unfortunate position of a man climbing to a great height. You are all right as long as you do not look down.”
Giles laughed, as did others near them.
“But be of good cheer,” the Colonel went on, as he passed him a roll of greenbacks. “I appoint you Chancellor of the Exchequer, and shall at once look after the improvement of your person. All I demand of you is that you pay the bills and keep sober, sir. Do not worry about me, but rest assured that I can drink enough for both of us, and that your occupation as paymaster will be sufficient.”
A fanner with a long beard was passing down the aisle of the car.
“My friend, your beard annoys me,” said the Colonel. “Are you much attached to it?”
“No; it's attached to me,” the farmer answered, as he stopped and looked at the statesman in a flurry of laughter.
“If you don't mind, sir, I presume that it wouldn't hurt the feelings of your beard to part with you. Please have it removed. It makes me nervous.”
“I'll have it cut and boxed and shipped to you,” said the farmer.
“Giles, give the gentleman ten dollars, and take his note payable in whiskers,” the statesman directed.
At the next station a number entered the car, and among them was the Websterian form of John Henry Griggs, with its stovepipe hat and gold-headed cane.
“Hello, Senator. Would you allow me to look at your hat?” the Colonel demanded of him.
“Certainly,” said the gentleman addressed, as he laughingly passed his beaver to the Colonel, having halted by the seat of the latter.
The Colonel examined it critically, and asked, “How much will you take for it?”
“Well, to-night it's a pretty valuable hat,” said the other. “I wouldn't care to take less than twenty-five dollars for it.”
“And it is easily worth that to my needy friend here, who seeks admittance to the higher circles of society,” the Colonel answered. “Giles, you will kindly settle with the Senator.”
Giles paid for the hat, and was promptly crowned with it, to the great amusement of every occupant of the car. The big beaver came down upon his ears and settled until its after part rested on his coat collar. The Colonel passed his gold-headed cane to his new friend, singing as he did so:
“He often did right, and he often did wrong,
But he always remembered the poor.”
When the noisy laughter had subsided he shrewdly remarked to the passive Giles:
“Now, sir, you have the prime essentials of respectability.”
“I feel like a d—fool,” Giles protested.
“Never mind your feelings,” said the Colonel. “Take care of your looks, and your feelings will take care of themselves.”
At the next station a man entered the car leading a lank hound.
“How much for your dog?” the Colonel demanded.
“Ten dollars.”
“Make it fifteen, and I'll take him. I don't want a dog that's worth less than fifteen dollars.”
“All right!”
“Mr. Giles, kindly settle with the gentleman.”
The hound was paid for, and Giles promptly took possession of him.
“That is the Colonel's way of advertising,” Smead whispered to me. “When he buys anything of a farmer he always overpays him, and the farmer never ceases to talk about it.”
In the lull that followed Smead rose and showed himself to the Colonel.
“Ha! There is Senator Smead and his famous overcoat,” was Buckstone's greeting.
“That coat has always worried me. In all my plans for the improvement of Griggs-by that overcoat has figured more or less. What will you take for it?”
Smead drew off his coat, which had a rolling collar of brown fur.
“I should not care to sell it,” said Smead, “but I will trade even for yours.”
“Anything for the good of the old town,” said the obliging Colonel, as they exchanged overcoats.
In a moment each had put on his new coat.
“Here, I don't want your gloves,” said Buckstone, as he drew them out of a side pocket.
I observed that Smead had been feeling the contents of his coat.
“Keep them,” said he. “You shall have all that my coat contained, and I shall claim all that was in yours.”
The train entered the depot at St. Johnstown.
The Colonel and his new secretary followed the crowd to the station platform. Giles, in big boots and patched and threadbare garments, his big beaver hat resting on his ears, with the Colonel's bag in one hand while the other held his gold-headed cane and the leash of the lank and wistful hound, was an epic figure.
I doubt if Colonel Buckstone could have had a more able assistant in the task which lay before him that night, for in his lighter moods the Colonel was a most industrious merrymaker. We saw them buying another dog on the station platform, and presently they started for an inn, with two quarreling dogs and the bag and the gold-headed cane and the beaver hat, all in the possession of the faithful Giles.
“I have secured the letters,” said Smead. “As I suspected, they were in a pocket of this overcoat, and we can return to Griggsby by the midnight train; you must never tell what you know of this—not a word, not a syllable. He will land in New York in a day or two—always points that way when he's drinking—and will not think of the letter for weeks, anyhow. Tell Florence to write to her father and explain the Colonel's rage. That will take the edge off his razor.”
I promised, and we were soon riding back to Griggsby. It was a sleepless but a happy and wonderful night for me and Mr. Smead.
Early in the morning he went to the dormitory with a note that I had written to Florence. When I met her she took my hand, but did not speak. I knew why. For a long minute we walked together in silence; then she said, rather brokenly: “Havelock, you are the most wonderful boy that I ever met, and I owe you everything. What can I do for?”
The words were a new blow to me, for, as the read will understand, they put her farther away.
“Please take that back,” I said, almost woefully. “Please do not think that you owe me anything. I don't want you to feel that way. I didn't—”
I was about to say that it was not I who had obtained the letter from the Colonel, but I halted, suddenly remembering my promise.
“You strange, modest boy!” she exclaimed. “Don't you want me to be grateful to you?”
“Florence,” I said, with all the seriousness of my nature, “I'd almost rather you'd hate me.”
I have never forgotten the look in her face then, and how quickly it changed color. A sorry fool I was not to have understood it; but, then, what did I know about women? She, too, knew as little of the heart of a Puritan lad who had grown up in the edge of a wilderness.
A few days later the ragged Giles walked into Griggsby with a battered beaver hat on his head and a gold-headed cane in his left hand, while with his right he wielded a bull whip over the backs of a pair of oxen which the Colonel had purchased.