V
Nat left his bed and idled about the house. His father came home at noon and contended that if he were strong enough to “fool around the place” he was strong enough to “get back on the job.” So that afternoon Nat took an hour to reel a dizzy way to the tannery office.
Caleb looked up from a pile of freight bills.
“Dad says you wanted to see me,” announced the lad. He hoped old Gridley would “fire” him. Any job would be better than returning to the horrors of the tannery.
“Siddown,” ordered Caleb with a wave of his slab-like hand.
The boy accepted a seat and waited, his head whirling lightly. Caleb finished his business and then jerked his head toward a side room where the two could talk alone. It had an unused desk, an old iron stove, a battered table, a few chairs, an old green safe.
Caleb closed the door, motioned to a seat, found one himself and proceeded to fall into deep thought. He cut an enormous corner from a chunk of “chewin’.”
“Perty good scrap you put up the other day, bub,” he remarked at length.
Nathan sought to keep his mental balance, wishing some one would get him a drink, oh, for ice water!
“Thank you,” he said weakly.
“I allus admire to see a man that can use his dukes. Head hurt you much?”
“Yes,” the boy said truthfully.
“Hard luck! But you gotta expect bangs and bruises in this world, bub. What’s your old man think about it?”
“He said if it lost me my job here, God help me,” returned Nathan defiantly.
Caleb was silent for a time. Grim humor lurked in his hard old eye. Twice he lurched forward, raised the cover and spat in the bowels of the dead iron stove.
“That so? Sort of a goldarn slave-driver, your old man, ain’t he?”
Nathan offered no comment.
“Whatcher want to go gettin’ into that fuss with Plumb for, anyhow?”
“I was writing something—private—and Si came up and grabbed it away. Then he wouldn’t give it back.”
Nathan stood in awe of old Gridley, partly because he was the boy’s employer, mostly because he was her father.
“Yeah,” affirmed Caleb, “what was it?”
“It was—it was—poetry,” the lad confessed lamely. He wished he could get a drink, any kind of water if only it would keep the office from spinning around and around.
“So you’re a poet?”
“I like to read poetry and try writing it—sometimes.”
“So I heard. I’m a bit of a poet myself!”
For an instant Nathan was dumbfounded. Had he heard aright? The boy fought off his vertigo and stared. Was the old man jesting? But apparently Old Caleb was never more serious in his life. Moreover, he too was confused, as though chagrined by the confession. Nathan would have accepted that his employer had speared grizzlies, kicked over baby carriages, fired orphan asylums and kicked the crutches from cripples. But a poet! It was cataclysmic.
“Did you—did you—ever write any poetry?”
“Once!”
“What for? What came of it?”
“That was a perty good piece you started to write when Plumb interrupted you. Jake gimme the book. Then again, my wife lemme see a piece you writ and give to my daughter a while back. You seem to be a perty good poet. I’ll show you somethin’.”
To Nathan’s utter bewilderment, Caleb went to the green box safe. He selected an old wallet from its cavernous compartments and returned to his creaking seat. With his elbows on his enormous knees, he leaned forward. He went through the wallet until he came to a paper he sought. He drew it out with sausage-like fingers, a sheet of rusty, mildewed parchment on which some verses had been written in violet ink. Reverently he handed it across as though it were a million-dollar government bond.
Nathan read:
“To G. H.
“Your eyes are like the twinkling stars.
Your voice is like the dew
I sit upon the hill and dream
Of you, my love, of you.
“You are the inspiration of my life
To you I will ever be true
When I am old and my hair is gray
I’ll ever think of you.
“All of us have a secret love
Some, memories of yesterday,
Like cake to finish a good square meal
It cheers us on our way.
—Caleb Gridley.”
Paris, Vt., June 2, 1871.
The old man watched the youth’s face closely as he read. There was pathetic anxiety in the question which followed:
“Well,” demanded Caleb, “what’s your opinion? There was folks said it was good enough to have published—once! But I couldn’t—I couldn’t!”
The tanner sighed and arose. He walked to the window looking down on the cluttered yard. There he stuck his big hands in his stomach pockets and “rolled his chew.”
With the tactlessness of boyhood, Nathan announced, “The meter’s off and besides—it doesn’t really say anything—that is, in a nice smooth way.”
If he had struck old Caleb with a rock he could not have surprised the tanner more dynamically.
“Don’t say anything! Smooth way! Meter? What’s meter?”
“In poetry it’s the character of a stanza. It’s made up of any given number of lines, divided into measures equal in time—and length of syllables—and rhythmic construction.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” cried Caleb. “Where did you learn that—them big words and all?”
“Miss Hastings showed me. The rest sort of always came easy to me.”
“Then what the hell are you doin’ workin’ here in my place, when you got book-learnin’ like that?”
“My father makes me.”
“He must be a dog-gone bigger fool than I allus took him for. Say that book-learnin’ over!”
Nathan complied.
“Now what does it mean in plain Vermont jaw-music?”
Nathan was beginning to forget his dizziness.
“It means that to make poetry read smoothly the lines in each verse must have exactly the same number of syllables. They must be emphasized in the same way in the same place in all the verses and yet give perfect emphasis. You’ve just got a lot of lines here with the final words rhyming.”
“But you said it didn’t say anything!” Caleb was not angry so much as hurt, grievously hurt. “I allus thought it said a lot,” he added, with a little catch in his voice.
“I mean something really fine and beautiful and rare different from the ordinary way we write or think or talk, if you understand what I mean. For instance, you say in your first line that somebody’s eyes are like the stars and his voice——”
“Her voice!” corrected old Caleb.
“—Her voice is like the dew. Well, that doesn’t really mean anything. Nobody ever saw a woman with eyes like actual stars or a voice like real dew, because dew doesn’t make any noise, anyhow, let alone having a voice. Poetry tries to say things better and softer and finer than any one has ever said ’em before and that’s where you’ve fallen down.”
“How would you say it?”
Caleb had come across, sunk down into the creaky chair with his knees parted, his bulbous finger tips pressed together between them, the world and business forgot,—a gray-haired man seeking pointers in rhyming from a minstrel with a bashed head.
“Well, what you want to express is that you sat on a hilltop thinking of a woman. And somehow the night was so soft and wonderful you couldn’t help comparing her with the view around you. So suppose instead of saying you sat on the hill and thought of the woman having star-like eyes, you looked off to some star, the prettiest, brightest of them all. And her face seemed to come before you in it—Say, who is this woman, anyhow?” Nathan broke off suddenly.
Old Caleb’s gaze dropped to his horny hands. He stopped chewing.
“Once on a time, bub—once on a time—back in my life—there was a girl. Well—I loved her—and so—I writ this poetry.”
It seemed to the awe-struck boy as though a section of the universe slid back then and disclosed the mighty works which make the worlds go around.
Old Caleb Gridley, rich—as the village phrased it—“beyond dreams of avarice”, hard-cider drinker, leading selectman and poker-player Saturday nights under Jimmy Styles’ barber shop—most of all her father!—once upon a time old Caleb Gridley had been as other boys and men, even as Nathan. He had loved a girl and sought balm in hexameters.
“And did you marry her?” asked the astonished boy after a moment. He spoke as the superstitious refer to the dead. “Was it Mrs. Gridley?”
“No, b’dam, it warn’t Mrs. Gridley!”
A little tear squeezed out of the man’s hard eye—a ludicrously little tear on a ludicrously big and beefy face. It stayed there for a moment. Then it melted.
Nathan turned and tiptoed softly out of Eden. In quite another voice he suggested:
“I could show you, perhaps, how to polish this and make it better, by doing it with you as we go along.”
A red-haired girl thrust her flaming head in the door.
“Mike Sweeney’s come for them calfskins and they ain’t all bundled yet,” she whined.
“You tell Mike Sweeney to go to hell!” roared Caleb. “And if you interrupt me again with calfskins I’ll kill the both o’ ye and fire you beside!”
The girl closed the door. Caleb swore volubly for a half-moment about the deficiencies of certain hirelings “these days” in the matter of mental endowment. Then he begged:
“Go on, bub! Tell me what you was sayin’ about that poetry.”
“Let’s get a pencil and paper,” Nathan suggested. “We’ll work it out together.”