“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.”