Rulers of kings: A novel

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Morris brought him partly to his senses by the ironic method, to which Fessenden was peculiarly susceptible, and then suggested that he put a sandwich in his pocket and spend the day in the woods.

“When you are a rational being once more I shall be glad to see you again and talk it over. I sincerely hope I may be able to help you in some way. But we all have to go through this, my boy. It is as inevitable as the phenomenon of man and woman itself, and must be taken as philosophically as the ills of the flesh, which under the proper diffusion of scientific knowledge will be obviated in time. It is to be hoped that puppy-love will prove an equally amenable microbe. Now take to the woods and think like a man.”

Fessenden took to the woods, but the time was not yet come when he could think like a man. Calf-love has furnished the mills of the wits since the first pen impaled the emotions; but it may be a hideous experience to youths in whom are the makings of strong and passionate men. The academic standard arbitrarily established by our literary powers has given the world an entirely false idea of the American temperament, which, in its masculine half, at least, is excitable and sentimental. It is their capacity for intense and powerful emotion, making them in mob capable of the maddest excesses of enthusiasm, which is the deep indestructible bond of unity in the American race; that has saved it from passing off long since in fireworks; that, when it has found the courage and acquired the brain-power to struggle through its artificial envelope, will permit it to become as great as it now thinks it is.

Poor Fessenden had not yet reached the analytical stage. He went out into the forest and suffered horribly. He wept and raved, and believed that so far as he was concerned the world had reached its finish. For the time he was primeval man balked of the first woman; later, when the acute stage had passed, and imagination had returned, every fine impulse and need of his nature which had leaped to assertion under the quickening process of idealized woman seemed to have withered out of him under the sudden blight. He felt shorn, impoverished, hopeless; worse than all, helpless. To pursue would be less than folly. Only a fortune and a detective could have found the indifferent girl, hidden in the skirts of a determined mother; and he had not a penny. The little he made beyond what Nettlebeck charged him for his board went, after the replenishment of his rough wardrobe, to New York for books. His helplessness degraded his manhood, added to the sum of his miseries. He stood two days of this mental hell, during which he ate little and slept less, and then he shouldered his axe and put a sandwich in his pocket.

“I’m going over to the river to get a job driving logs,” he said to Nettlebeck. “I’ve had fourteen years of this, and I’d like a change for a week or two. When the logging is over I’ll come home.”

The river was twelve miles distant. Ten minutes after he had started on his tramp through the forest he heard a shout behind him. He answered mechanically, and a moment later was joined by Dolf.

“I thought I’d come along,” panted the younger Nettlebeck. “I ain’t seen drivin’ for six years or so, and it’s good exercise; you have to jump so lively.”

Fessenden shrugged his shoulders ungraciously, and declined conversation, but even here he did not recognize the ever-watchful spirit of his father. Nevertheless the thought of that sympathetic parent spontaneously occurred to him. He was the one person to whom he could have spoken, but he remembered his fiercely reacting pride at the age of thirteen; moreover, he was bound to respect his father’s mandate of complete separation. He had puzzled deeply over the motive which had prompted this decision in a proud and affectionate parent, but had finally put the question aside, as so far beyond his limited experience that he had better apply his inquiring mind elsewhere. He had perfect faith in both the wisdom and the love of his father, in spite of occasional outbursts of disappointment, and although the kind firm hand that guided his destinies and smoothed his path without weakening his spirit was too well covered to attract his attention, some spiritual emanation from it kept his heart from closing and the bitterness of neglect from entering his soul.

They reached the river in three hours, hearing from the forest the roar of the dam, the loud shouts of the men. On their side the woods grew down to the stream, but on the heights opposite and far beyond hundreds of virgin trees had been sacrificed that the people of New York might have their daily news. The gates had just been opened, the river was foaming and racing over the rocks, its surface already crowded with long sections of tree-trunks, while others were rolling down the hill. The boss was short of men, and Fessenden and Dolf were employed at once, for the logs were already becoming jammed. Fessenden had watched “driving” many times, and, jumping from log to log to avoid crushing his feet, while at the same time he pried refractory logs into position and relieved jams, he was soon so deeply occupied learning his new trade, to say nothing of preserving his bones, that Grace lay down among the memories. His passion for proving himself the best man replaced the other, and applying all his intelligence to the task, he was very soon the most expert driver on the river. This elated him and sent consoling rays through the dark recesses of his soul. At night he was so tired that, after the evening meal—a repetition of the two preceding ones of pork, beans, bread, and coffee—he was asleep before he had settled himself in his bunk; and although his spirit may have wept over the hearse in the back alleys of his memory, for he awoke depressed and rebellious, he sprang out of bed at once, ate his beans with a relish, and went to work.

As he tramped home at night two weeks later, he informed himself that he was cured, and when he reached his own comfortable bed he slept until late on the following day; moreover, he enjoyed Christina’s savory dinner with a relish which, as a rule, associates only with an untroubled mind. Then he went for a stroll through his favorite haunts of the forest—a guilty sense of disloyalty had led him to avoid Pocahontas since the day he met Grace—and it all came back. As it rushed upon him, as he realized that he was still in bondage, he trembled in panic. The horror of returning into the torments of a fortnight since was as strong as the overwhelming passion itself. He ran back to the house, the blood pounding in his head, and searched the shelf over Fritz Nettlebeck’s desk, where letters for the household and neighbors awaited the leisurely claimant.