XXI
Old Town Revisited
I FOUND Professor Maturin, the other evening, recently returned from a visit to the home of his youth with a bundle of such pleasant memories that I set them down as nearly in his own words as possible, without any of the inquiries and the interruptions of appreciation that they inevitably drew from me.
“In the first part of the journey thither, repeated efforts failed to conjure up anything like a full and definite picture of the place. But, suddenly, as so often happens, the mists of memory cleared, and it seemed as though I had never been away. This almost theatrical change causing me to look about with surprise, I became quickly aware that the train had swung into the beginning of what we used to call ‘The Happy Valley.’ With a sigh of content, I sank back into the comfort of old adjustments, with a sense of their completeness that could come only from a knowledge of later maladjustments to compare them with.
“This valley, perhaps a hundred miles long and from a dozen to a score of miles wide, is walled in by blue mountain ridges of from twelve to two thousand feet in height, their bases sweeping nearer or farther and their sky-lines higher or lower in a series of almost symmetrical curves. The same restrained variety characterizes the surface of the valley, which billows and rolls throughout like a solidified section of mid-ocean. The mountains, foothills, and small patches of the valley are still covered with oak and chestnut, pine and cedar timber, which make springtime delightful and the autumn splendid. Elsewhere all is fertile farm land, squarely fenced or marked with low walls of ever available limestone, which also provides firm, smooth roads stretching in every direction over hill and meadow. Many farm-houses and barns are built of this stone, softened with the mellowness of years. Later structures of local brick with slate roofs seem scarcely less sturdy.
“This same pleasant variety of surface and solidity of building characterizes the town itself. Cheerful two-and-one-half story houses, of red brick, with green shutters still prevail, although about the central square and along the business blocks the height is usually greater. I well remember the builder of the first three-story house in town. The first four-story structure was reared in my boyhood. Its completion was celebrated with fire-works and the first electric lights seen in the town. Now there are even cut-stone bank fronts, and they are building an apartment house and a five-story department store. Near the edges of the town, where the dwellings stand back from the streets with lawns and flowers and trees, the march of improvement is particularly noticeable—as indeed it well might be, for the place has doubled in size since I left.
“These dwellings indicated to me that local prosperity had caused the tide of physical well-being to rise to the second or shelter stage. Formerly, ideas of luxury centred chiefly in food, which was consumed in a variety and abundance that would have made a dietitian shudder. The land is still one of plenty and good cheer, and a progress through the town would delight the monarch who said, ‘Let me have men about me that are fat,’ but other creature comforts have come to be considered also. The stage of personal adornment has yet to be reached: the men seldom have their hair trimmed or their trousers pressed, and the costume of the women is simple. The local attention to such matters seemed interestingly different from the metropolitan order of clothing, shelter, food.
“But as it was not progress that I had chiefly come to see, I found myself returning repeatedly to the old town hall, which once sheltered the oldest bank and is still surmounted by a tower of strange local architecture, bearing an equally erratic clock. All this, like everything else in the place, seemed by no means so large or so imposing as I had remembered it, and the bank’s disappearance prevented the repetition of our one local author’s jest concerning ‘the bank where the wild thyme grows.’ But when I once more climbed the tower and picked out, one by one, the old landmarks, I felt all of my early fondness for the place return. No one, I believe, can be without a certain proprietary affection for a place upon which he has often looked down from a tower.
“There, above the town, my memory of many of its personages became vivid. First, always, we admired the old Governor—we never called him ‘ex,’ although he had been that for many years. A fine, burly figure, even in old age, he was usually seen driving to or from his model farms in a vehicle which must have antedated the one-hoss shay. And he seldom passed without some one relating how, when a misguided ram, not being in position to be awed by his countenance, had made the conventional attack, he expanded to his fullest height and, with his favorite, historic, expletive, thundered: ‘Continental dam, sheep! What do you mean?’
“The Senator, who logically came next, was by no means so impressive; for, being regarded chiefly as a provider of political places, he was forced, when he walked abroad, to assume an abstraction profound enough to make him oblivious of the hungry eyes of his constituents. I fear that his was not a happy life, at least when he was at home, which grew to be more and more seldom.
“The General, however, loved to parade his tall, proud figure. It was currently reported that he wore stays; certainly he carried his shoulders always ready for epaulettes and his head poised for a chapeau. For years he longed to be elected a Congressman, but always in vain. A tradition that he had once compared a poor man to a wet dog embodied the popular distrust of his aristocratic nature; and his set speech of compliment to each village where he spoke—that the fairness of its daughters almost persuaded him to renounce his bachelorhood—usually waked sarcasm rather than applause.