The Mayor of Warwick

by Herbert M. Hopkins

Through this rich and varied scene he sped swiftly, filled with all a Westerner's keen appreciation of a New England landscape, constantly contrasting the arid glories of deserts he had seen with the plenty about him. The farms of the fertile tracts of California were infinitely greater, the methods by which they were worked more modern, but about these smaller homesteads hung an atmosphere of history and romance. Leigh might champion the West in the presence of the bishop, but now, alone with his own thoughts, he paid tribute to the land in which the liberties of his country had been cradled. He seemed to have known it of old, though he now saw it for the first time. This experience was not a discovery, but a reacquaintance. From these old farmhouses, with their sagging roof-trees and windows filled with small panes, the minute men had issued with their muskets to repel the invader. At yonder sweep-well some English soldier had perhaps stopped in his dusty retreat for a drink of water, and had paid the penalty of his life for the delay. Above all, the fact that this was the native country of the woman he loved was ever present in his mind to add radiance to the afternoon.

At a point where the road took a sudden dip and curved in a wide sweep toward the southwest, his attention was arrested by an old house that lay nestled in the bend as in an encircling arm. The colour had once been red, but was now faded by many suns and washed thin by innumerable rains. A rampart of loose stones, overgrown with brambles and broken in places as if for the passage of cattle, enclosed the premises, and the typical well of the country lifted its curving pole in the front yard only a few feet from the roadway. Two women were seated on the worn stone slab in the opening that served for a gate, evidently basking in the afternoon sun and engaged in desultory chat. When Leigh dismounted from his wheel and asked for a drink of water, they moved slightly to let him pass, and he went up to the well to help himself. He lowered and raised the dripping bucket, not without awkwardness and a sense of pleasure in the unaccustomed task, as well as a memory of the poem which had immortalized that simple operation. It required only a casual glance about to see that this was a poultry farm. At the back of the house he saw a number of chicken runs, where a man was engaged in repair work. The air was filled with the comfortable clucking of hens, the most cheerful of country sounds. From his present slight elevation he had a view also of the trolley line which bisected the farm and crossed the road a few yards further on.

As he paused, before going on his way, to thank the women for their courtesy, he was struck, as he had not been at first, by the appearance of the younger. So delicate she seemed, so daintily dressed, that he wondered to find her in this rustic setting. In her lap she held a small basket of eggs, and he guessed correctly that she was a visitor, waiting for the next car to Warwick. He asked the distance to his destination, and from her appeal to the older woman he learned that they were mother and daughter. During these few moments he began to realise that she might well be called a beauty, though her pale, ethereal type was not one that made a personal appeal to him. Her whole figure was steept in sunshine, and as her lips parted in a smile, he noticed how the strong rays penetrated her cheeks, filling her mouth with a faint pink light and intensifying the whiteness of her teeth. Just so they penetrated the shells of the white eggs in her basket.

This picture remained with him for some time. The girl had appeared almost as fragile as the burden she carried, and suggested a train of thought concerning a certain type of New Englander whose strength is spent. It was such people, he reflected, who still clung to the old soil whence the sturdier representatives of the stock had long since departed, destined to give way at last to the swarming Polack, the French Canadian, and the Italian. The thought was melancholy, and coloured to no little extent the remainder of his ride. This incident, which was only one of several, was afterward revived to win a permanent place in his memory when he came to know the girl as Lena Harpster; for her part in the drama of the immediate future was destined to be connected strangely with his own.

Seven o'clock found him again upon the tower, setting the telescope in order and preparing for his guests. He could scarcely expect them for an hour, but he walked restlessly about the enclosure of the parapet, breathing gratefully the cool night air. The lamp within his cabin shone dimly through the small windows upon his promenade. Beyond the battlements to the east, the evening star, which the Roman poet called Noctifer, began to bicker and brighten in the serene sky, and the last vestige of the sun's afterglow had now faded from the west. It was already as dark as a summer midnight. Small and continuous sounds came floating up from the city beyond. Immediately below he heard the occasional voices of students passing on the stone walk, and from the meadows on the west came the melancholy hoot of an owl.

Accustomed though he had been to lonely vigils, he was impressed by the juxtaposition of the minute and the infinitely vast, of the transient and the eternal. He stood looking for some time at the track of the Milky Way, till his gaze plunged into one of those abysms of blackness where no star shines, and the ghastliness of the distance suggested flooded in upon him. This lost and shivering sensation, when the world itself seems to shrink away and send the watcher spinning into the void, is vouchsafed to the astronomer only at rare moments, and from it an escape is offered by exact and intricate calculations. Even figures that climb into the millions, incomprehensible as they may be, offer some consolation to microscopic man; but when this consolation is withdrawn, as it was withdrawn from Leigh for the moment, he stands, as it were, annihilated by immensity.

Lost in this mood, the voice of Emmet came to his ears with a shock, a mere succession of sounds with scarce a meaning.

"Hello, professor! Are you up here star-gazing? I saw the door open at the foot of the stairs, and followed my nose till I found you, though it's a wonder I did n't break it, for my matches gave out two flights below."

The incongruity of this interruption was almost as great as a shout of laughter at a funeral, and Leigh experienced a reaction akin to hilarity.

"I 'm glad to see you," he returned, "for I had rather given you up till after the election."