The Coward: A Novel of Society and the Field in 1863

by Henry Morford

"Perhaps so," said the Rambler, without one indication on his features that he was either frightened or moved by the suggestions. "I am long past the middle of life—my limbs are not quite so nimble as they once were—and if I do make a miss-step some time and get killed, I hope that they will allow me to lie peaceably where I fall!"

After which strange wish the conversation went no further. Breakfast was just breaking up; and a few moments afterwards some who were standing on the piazza saw the Rambler stepping away down the road, haversack of bread, cheese, and meats strapped under his left arm, and his weather-beaten slouched hat thrown forward to shield his eyes from the morning sun that came streaming low and broad up the Notch.

It was perhaps an hour afterwards when two wagons drew up at the door, ready to bear some score of the visitors up Mount Willard for the expected pic-nic. A third wagon had started ahead, bearing provisions enough to have supplied a small army—all to be wasted or made into perquisites for the servants by a frolic dictated a little by ennui and not a little by a love for any thing novel or merry. Two or three of the young men staying at the house had been up Mount Willard a few days before, and on their return they had brought such flattering accounts of a magnificent broad, green plateau which they had discovered (how many times it had before been discovered is not stated) not far from the end of the carriage-road, on the southern brow of the mountain and overlooking the cascades and the edge of the Devil's Den,—that the effect produced on the as yet untravelled people at the Crawford by the announcement was very much the same that we may suppose to have been manifested at the Court of Castile and Leon when Columbus came back with the Indians, the birds'-feathers and the big stories. The young men had signalized their own faith in the desirableness of the land as a place of permanent occupation, by possessing themselves of a small coil of inch rope, lying unused in one of the out-houses since the re-erection of the Crawford (after the fire of the winter before), in 1859, carting it in a wagon up the mountain and to the tempting plateau, and there using one end of it and a seat-board to make such a stupendous swing between two high trees that stood on one side of the green space, as had probably never been seen before in any locality where the clouds every morning tangled themselves among the branches. One of them had declared that he had the "highest old swing," in that "scup," ever taken by mortal, and a good many believed him. The swing, with its hundred feet or more of super-abundant rope, had remained as a permanence; a few of the ladies at the house had been coaxed into going up Mount Willard especially to indulge in that "scupping" which ordinarily belonged to low lands and lazier watering-places; and for two or three days before preparations and arrangements for a pic-nic had been in progress, destined to culminate on that splendid cloudless morning of early August.

So much premised, nothing more need be said than that all the few persons connected with this relation and yet remaining at the Crawford, were members of the pic-nic party of twenty or twenty-five, a pleasant mingling of both sexes but not of all the ages; that Captain Hector Coles and Margaret Hayley went up especially in each other's company, as was both usual and proper; that Mrs. Burton Hayley, getting ready to go on to the Glen and a little absorbed in one of the ministerial brethren whom she had found, did not ascend a mountain on any such vain and frivolous errand as a mere pic-nic; that Horace Townsend rode up, in a different wagon from that occupied by Margaret and her cavalier, and with no one in charge, or even in especial company—precisely as he had gone up Mount Washington; that the party, in both wagons, was very merry and tuned to the highest possible pitch of enjoyment; that the usual jolts incidental to very bad mountain roads were periodically encountered, and the little screams and jerkings at protecting coats, ordinarily consequent thereupon, were evoked; that a few magnificent views down the Notch and among the sea of peaks were enjoyed, with a few contretemps among the riders adding zest thereto; that nearly every one would have been willing to make oath that they had been "all but upset down the mountain" several times, when they had not really been even once in that threatening predicament; and that after something more than an hour of riding they found themselves and their pic-nic preparations at the end of the carriage-road and very near the diminutive promised land which they had been invited and enticed to come up and occupy.

It was indeed, as those who had never before visited the place found upon reaching it through a little clump of trees and bushes beyond the termination of the road—a spot well worthy the attention of any visitor to the Notch. Nothing else like it, probably, could have been found in the whole chain of the White Mountains, following them from the head waters of the Androscoggin to the mouth of the Pemigawasset. For the purposes of this veracious narration it becomes necessary to describe some of the features of the spot more closely than they would demand under ordinary circumstances; and the reader may find it equally necessary to make close application of the details of description, in order fully to appreciate that which must inevitably follow, beyond the control of either reader or writer.

At some day, no doubt many a long year before, whether caused by the melting of the snows at the top of the mountain or by some one of those internal convulsions which the earth seems to share with the human atom who inhabits it,—there had been a heavy "slide" from near the peak on the south-south-western side, coming down perhaps a quarter of a mile before earth and stone met with any check. Then the check had been sudden and severe, from some obstruction below, and as a consequence the slide had gone no farther downward but spread itself into a broad plateau of fifty or sixty feet by one hundred, nearly level though with a slight inclination downward towards the edge. There had chanced to be but few rocks at the top of this mass of earth, and the southern exposure and shelter from the north winds had no doubt tended to warm and fertilize it, so that while much of the top of the mountain was bald, scarred and bare, and all the remainder covered with wild, rough forest—this little plateau had really grown to be covered with grassy sward, of no particular luxuriance but quite a marvel at that bleak height. Behind it, upward, the mountain rose gradually towards the peak, seen through a younger growth of trees that had found their origin since the catastrophe which swept away all their predecessors. On both sides the thick tangled woods closed down heavily, leaving no view in either direction, except through their swaying branches; while in the direction of the slide itself, no tree intervening between the plateau and its edge, one of the most beautiful perspectives of the whole mountain range spread itself out to the admiring gaze.

Looking close as possible down the side of Mount Willard, at that point, the trees and undergrowth of the gorge below, some fifteen hundred or two thousand feet away, could be discerned, through that slight blue haze which marks distance and faintly suggests the great depth of the sky. Lifting the eye, it swept south-westward and took in a terribly rough range of wooded hills and minor mountain peaks, with a broad intervale lying between, through which glittered and flashed the little stream with its white cascades which gave name to the spot, hurrying down in foam and fury to join the Saco in the broad valley below. Further westward and at still greater distance rose the mountains lying behind Bethlehem, with the top of Lafayette, of the Franconia range, rising yet higher and beyond all, touched with the warm light of the noonday sun and supplying a perfect finish to what was truly an enchanting picture.

But at the edge of the plateau itself lay that which must command the most special notice in this connection. Whether formed before the slide or consequent upon it, one of the most precipitous of all the "schutes" of the mountains had its start at the very centre. It had worn away the earth of the plateau in the middle, until it reduced it nearly to the stone of the first formation; while at the side of the narrow trough thus formed, thick trees and undergrowth clustered as far down as the eye could extend, with one sharp bend outward at the right, and striking out still beyond that, the massive roots of a fallen tree, of which the trunk lay buried in the earth and covered with undergrowth, while one long thorn or fang of the root hung half way across the chasm and suggested that there of all places, above the dizzy depth beneath, one of those eagles should sit screaming, that are supposed ever to have kept position on some such outpost, shouting hoarse rage and defiance through far away and desolate Glencoe, ever since the massacre of the Macdonalds. Still below this and almost touching the stony bottom of the trough of the schute, another and much smaller fang of root extended, the broad bulk of the side-roots forming a close wall between the two branches and the hedge of undergrowth, almost as impervious to the hand of man and as unfavorable for any purpose of clinging, as the sloping stone itself. It was a dizzy thing to look down—that schute, as some of the stronger-sexed, clearer-headed and surer-footed of the pic-nic party found by venturing near the edge, and as they did not feel it necessary to reassure themselves by any second examination.

The baskets and hampers had been brought over from the baggage-wagon, at the same time that the party themselves made their arrival. Why it is that people who go out upon pic-nics, in any part of the country or indeed in any part of the globe, with high expectations of much enjoyment which is to be found in other modes than the use of the masticative apparatus,—why it is, we say, that all such persons, even though they may have eaten heartily not two hours before, become ravenously hungry the very moment they reach the ground designated and are good for nothing thereafter until they have rendered themselves helpless by over-eating,—why all this is, we say once more, passes human understanding; but the fact remains not the less patent. Let any frequenter of pic-nics think backward and try whether he or she can remember any instance to the contrary,—and whether the conclusion has not been more than once arrived at, in his or her particular mind, that the true aim and object of the pic-nic, as an institution, is to enjoy the eating of a bad dinner away from the ordinary table instead of a good one properly spread upon it.

The party on Mount Willard was mortal, and they bowed at once to this unaccountable weakness of mortality. Five minutes of inspecting the ground and viewing the scenery; and then, while the more selfish members of the company or those who had eaten heartier breakfasts, flirted, strolled, or indulged in the doubtful pleasures of the swing (which hung between two tall trees at the left of the plateau, with a loose hundred feet of rope at the root of one), the less selfish or the more hungry applied themselves to spreading out on the dry sward the half dozen of cloths that had been brought up from the hotel, and to laying out upon it, in various stages and phases of damage and disarrangement, eatables which had been appetizing enough when they left the Crawford, but of which, now, they would have been seriously puzzled to separate the fish from the farina or the maccaroni from the mustard.