Chapter 14
Miss Martin was not only pretty and competent, but she was firm of purpose, as was shown by her encounter with Elzaphan Hall, who had domineered over two generations of amateur librarians. The old man had received strict orders to preserve silence in the reading-room when the librarian could not be there, and yet one day she returned from the stack-room to find the place in a most shocking state of confusion. Everybody was laughing, Elzaphan himself most of all, and they did not stop when she brought her severe young face among them. Elzaphan explained, waving his hand at a dark Rembrandt looking gloomily down upon them, that Elnathan Pritchett had said that if _he_ had such a dirty face as that he'd _wash_ it, if he had to go as far as from here to the Eagle Rock Spring to get the water! This seemed the dullest of bucolic wit to Miss Martin, and she chilled Elnathan to the marrow by her sad gaze of disappointment in him. Jennie Foster was very jealous of Miss Martin (as were all the girls in town), and she rejoiced openly in Elnathan's witticism, continuing to laugh at intervals after the rest of the room had cowered into silence under the librarian's eye.
Miss Martin took the old janitor aside and told him sternly that if such a thing happened again she would dismiss him; and when the old man, crazily trying to show his spirit, allowed a spelling-match to go on, full blast, right in library hours, she did dismiss him, drawing on the endless funds at her disposal to import a young Irishman from Albany, who was soon playing havoc with the pretty French-Canadian girls. Elzaphan Hall, stunned by the blow, fell into bad company and began to drink heavily, paying for his liquor by exceedingly comic and disrespectful imitations of Miss Martin's talks on art.
It was now about the middle of the winter, and the knoll which in June had been the center of gratefully cool breezes was raked by piercing north winds which penetrated the picturesquely unplastered, wood-finished walls as though they had been paper. The steam-heating plant did not work very well, and the new janitor, seeing fewer and fewer people come to the reading-room, spent less and less time in struggling with the boilers, or in keeping the long path up the hill shoveled clear of snow. Miss Martin, positively frightened by the ferocity with which winter flings itself upon the high narrow valley, was helpless before the problem of the new conditions, and could think of nothing to do except to buy more fuel and yet more, and to beseech the elusive Celt, city-trained in plausible excuses for not doing his duty, to burn more wood. Once she remarked plaintively to Elnathan Pritchett, as she sat beside him at a church supper (for she made a great point of "mingling with the people"), that it seemed to her there must be something the _matter_ with the wood in Hillsboro.
Everybody within earshot laughed, and the saying was repeated the next day with shameless mirth as the best joke of the season. For the wood for the library had had a history distinctly discreditable and as distinctly ludicrous, at which Hillsboro people laughed with a conscious lowering of their standards of honesty. The beginning had been an accident, but the long sequence was not. For the first time in the history of the library, the farmer who brought the first load of wood presented a bill for this service. He charged two dollars a cord on the scrawled memorandum, but Miss Martin mistook this figure for a seven, corrected his total with the kindest tolerance for his faulty arithmetic, and gave the countryman a check which reduced him for a time to a paralyzed silence. It was only on telling the first person he met outside the library that the richness of a grown person knowing no more than that about the price of wood came over him, and the two screamed with laughter over the lady's beautifully formed figures on the dirty sheet of paper.
Miss Martin took the hesitating awkwardness of the next man presenting himself before her, not daring to ask the higher price and not willing to take the lower, for rustic bashfulness, and put him at his ease by saying airily, "Five cords? That makes thirty-five dollars. I always pay seven dollars a cord." After that, the procession of grinning men driving lumber-sleds toward the library became incessant. The minister attempted to remonstrate with the respectable men of his church for cheating a poor young lady, but they answered roughly that it wasn't her money but Camden's, who had tossed them the library as a man would toss a penny to a beggar, who had now quite forgotten about them, and, finally, who had made his money none too honestly.
Since he had become of so much importance to them they had looked up his successful career in the Chicago wheat pit, and, undazzled by the millions involved, had penetrated shrewdly to the significance of his operations. The record of his colossal and unpunished frauds had put to sleep, so far as he was concerned, their old minute honesty. It was considered the best of satires that the man who had fooled all the West should be fooled in his turn by a handful of forgotten mountaineers, that they should be fleecing him in little things as he had fleeced Chicago in great. There was, however, an element which frowned on this shifting of standards, and, before long, neighbors and old friends were divided into cliques, calling each other, respectively, cheats and hypocrites. Hillsboro was intolerably dull that winter because of the absence of the usual excitement over the entertainment, and in that stagnation all attention was directed to the new joke on the wheat king. It was turned over and over, forward and back, and refurbished and made to do duty again and again, after the fashion of rustic jokes. This one had the additional advantage of lining the pockets of the perpetrators. They egged one another on to fresh inventions and variations, until even the children, not to be left out, began to have exploits of their own to tell. The grocers raised the price of kerosene, groaning all the time at the extortions of the oil trust, till the guileless guardian of Mr. Camden's funds was paying fifty cents a gallon for it. The boys charged a quarter for every bouquet of pine-boughs they brought to decorate the cold, empty reading-room. The washer-woman charged five dollars for "doing-up" the lace sash-curtains. As spring came on, and the damages wrought by the winter winds must be repaired, the carpenters asked wages which made the sellers of firewood tear their hair at wasted opportunities. They might have raised the price per cord! The new janitor, hearing the talk about town, demanded a raise in salary and threatened to leave without warning if it were not granted.
It was on the fifth of June, a year to a day after the arrival of Mr. Camden in his automobile, that Miss Martin yielded to this last extortion, and her action made the day as memorable as that of the year before. The janitor, carried away by his victory, celebrated his good fortune in so many glasses of hard cider that he was finally carried home and deposited limply on the veranda of his boarding-house. Here he slept till the cold of dawn awoke him to a knowledge of his whereabouts, so inverted and tipsy that he rose, staggered to the library, cursing the intolerable length of these damn Vermont winters, and proceeded to build a roaring fire on the floor of the reading-room. As the varnished wood of the beautiful fittings took light like a well-constructed bonfire, realization of his act came to him, and he ran down the valley road, screaming and giving the alarm at the top of his lungs, and so passed out of Hillsboro forever.
The village looked out of its windows, saw the wooden building blazing like a great torch, hurried on its clothes and collected around the fire. No effort was made to save the library. People stood around in the chilly morning air, looking silently at the mountain of flame which burned as though it would never stop. They thought of a great many things in that silent hour as the sun rose over Hemlock Mountain, and there were no smiles or their faces. They are ignorant and narrow people in Hillsboro, but they have an inborn capacity unsparingly to look facts in the face.
When the last beam had fallen in with a crash to the blackened cellar-hole Miss Martin, very pale and shaken, stepped bravely forward. "I know how terribly you must be feeling about this," she began in her carefully modulated voice, "but I want to assure you that I _know_ Mr. Camden will rebuild the library for you if--"
She was interrupted by the chief man of the town, Squire Pritchett, who began speaking with a sort of bellow only heard before in exciting moments in town-meeting. "May I never live to see the day!" he shouted; and from all the tongue-tied villagers there rose a murmur of relief at having found a voice. They pressed about him closely and drank in his dry, curt announcement: "As selectman I shall write Mr. Camden, tell him of the fire, thank him for his kindness, and inform him that we don't want any more of it" Everybody nodded. "I don't know whether his money is what they call tainted or not, but there's one thing sure, it ain't done us any good." He passed his hand over his unshaven jaw with a rasping wipe and smiled grimly as he concluded, "I'm no hand to stir up lawbreakin' and disorder, but I want to say right here that I'll never inform against any Hillsboro man who keeps the next automobile out of town, if he has to take a ax to it!"
People laughed, and neighbors who had not spoken to one another since the quarrel over the price of wood fell into murmured, approving talk.
Elnathan Pritchett, blushing and hesitating, twitched at his father's sleeve. "But, father--Miss Martin--We're keeping her out of a position."
That young lady made one more effort to reach these impenetrable people. "I was about to resign," she said with dignity. "I am going to marry the assistant to the head of the Department of Bibliography at Albany."
The only answer to this imposing announcement was a giggle from Jennie Foster, to whose side Elnathan now fell back, silenced.
People began to move away in little knots, talking as they went. Elzaphan Hall stumped hastily down the street to the town hall and was standing in the open door as the first group passed him.
"Here, Mis' Foster, you're forgittin' somethin'," he said roughly, with his old surly, dictatorial air. "This is your day to the library."
Mrs. Foster hesitated, laughing at the old man's manner.
"It seems foolish, but I don't know why _not_!" she said. "Jennie, you run on over home and bring a broom for Elzaphan. The book must be in an _awful_ state!"
When Jennie came back, a knot of women stood before the door, talking to her mother and looking back at the smoldering ruins. The girl followed the direction of their eyes and of their thoughts. "I don't believe but what we can plant woodbine and things around it so that in a month's time you won't know there's been anything there!" she said hopefully.
SALEM HILLS TO ELLIS ISLAND
A single sleighbell, tinkling down The virgin road that skirts the wood, Makes poignant to the lonely town Its silence and its solitude.
A single taper's feeble flare Makes darker by its lonely light The cold and empty farmsteads square That blackly loom to left and tight;
And she who sews, by that dim flame, The patient quilt spread on her knees, Hears from her heirloom quilting-frame The frolic of forgotten bees.
Yea, all the dying village thrills With echoes of its cheerful past, The golden days of Salem Hills; Its only golden days? Its last?
II
From Salem Hills a voiceless cry Along the darkened valley rolls. Hear it, great ship, and forward ply With thy rich freight of venturous souls.
Hear it, O thronging lower deck, Brave homestead-seekers come from far; And crowd the rail, and crane the neck; In Salem Hills your homesteads are!
Where flourish now the brier and thorn, The barley and the wheat shall spring, And valleys standing thick with corn (Praise God, my heart!), shall laugh and sing.
AVUNCULUS
I
The library of Middletown College had been founded, like the college itself, in 1818, and it was a firm article of undergraduate belief that the librarian, Mr. J.M. Atterworthy, had sat behind his battered desk from that date on to the present time. As a matter of fact, he was but just gliding down-hill from middle age, having behind him the same number of years as the active and high-spirited president of the college. And yet there was ground for the undergraduate conviction that "Old J.M." as he was always called, was an institution whose beginnings dated back into the mists of antiquity, for of his sixty years he had spent forty-four in Middletown, and forty as librarian of the college.
He had come down, a shy, lanky freshman of sixteen, from a little village in the Green Mountains, and had found the only consolation for his homesick soul in the reading-room of the library. During his sophomore and junior years, there had sprung up in the bookish lad, shrinking from the rough fun of his fellows, the first shoots of that passionate attachment to the library which was later to bind him so irrevocably to the old building. In those early days there was no regular librarian, the professors taking turn and turn about in keeping the reading-room open for a few hours, three or four days a week. In his senior year, "J.M." (even at that time his real name was sunk in the initials, the significance of which he jealously concealed) petitioned the faculty to be allowed to take charge of the reading-room. They gave a shrug of surprise at his eccentricity, investigated briefly his eminently sober-minded college career, and heaved a sigh of relief as they granted his extraordinary request.
On the evening of Commencement day, J.M. went to the president and made the following statement: He said that his father and his mother had both died during his senior year, leaving him entirely alone in the world, with a small inheritance yielding about fifty dollars a month. He had no leaning to any profession, he shrank with all his being from the savage struggles of the business world, and he could not bear to return to Woodville, to find himself lonely and bereaved in the spot where he had had such a cloudlessly happy childhood. In short, Middletown was the only place he knew and liked, except Woodville, which he loved too poignantly to live there with the soul gone out of things; and the library was the only home he now had. If the president could get the trustees, at their next meeting, to allow him the use of the three rooms in the library tower, and if they would vote him a small nominal salary, say thirty dollars a month, enough to make him a regular member of the college corps, he would like nothing better than to settle down and be the librarian of his _alma mater_ for the rest of his life.
The president of that date was, like all the other presidents of Middletown College, a florid, hearty old gentleman with more red blood than he knew what to do with, in spite of his seventy years. He was vastly amused at the inexperienced young fellow's simple-minded notion, and, clapping him on the shoulder, said with his cheerfully Johnsonian rotundity: "Why, my dear young sir, your recent sad bereavement must have temporarily deranged your mental faculties, that at your age you can contemplate adopting such a desiccated mode of existence. Your proposition is, however, a highly advantageous one to your college, and I shall see that it is accepted. However, I am willing to lay a wager with you that a year will not be out before you are asking to be freed from your contract."
J.M., trembling in suspense, took in nothing of the president's speech beyond the acceptance of his offer, and, pale with relief, he tried to stammer his thanks and his devotion to his chosen cause. He made no attempt to contradict the president's confident prophecies; he only made the greatest possible haste to the tower-rooms which were to be his home. His eyes filled with thankfulness at his lot as he paced about them, and, looking out of the windows upon the campus, he had a prophetic vision of his future, of the simple, harmless, innocent life which was to be his.
Of the two prophets he proved himself the truer. The head of his college and one generation after another of similar presidents laughed and joked him about the _Wanderlust_ which would some day sweep him away from his old moorings, or the sensible girl who would some day get hold of him and make a man of him. He outlasted all these wiseacres, however, watching through mild, spectacled eyes the shifting changes of the college world, which always left him as immovable as the old elms before the library door. He never went away from Middletown, except on the most necessary trips to New York or Boston on business connected with book-buying for the library.
He explained this unheard-of stagnation by saying that the utter metamorphosis of the village after the college life stopped gave him change enough. Only once had he gone farther and, to one of the younger professors who had acquired an odd taste for old J.M.'s society, confessed hesitatingly that he did not go away because he had no place to which he could go, except to his childhood home. He said he couldn't bear to go there lest he find it so changed that the sight of it would rob him of his old memories, the dearest--in fact the only possessions of his heart. After a pause he had added to his young listener, who found the little old secular monk a tremendously pathetic figure: "Do you know, Layton, I sometimes feel that I have missed a great deal in life--and yet not at all what everybody thought I would miss, the stir of active life or the vulgar excitement of being in love. All that kind of thing seems as distasteful to me now as ever."
There he stopped and poked the fire until the young professor, overcome with sympathetic curiosity, urged him to go on. He sighed at this, and said: "Why, fortune ought not to have made me an only child, although I can't say that I've ever longed for brothers or sisters.... But now I feel that I should like very much to have some nephews and nieces. I never could have stood having children of my own--I should have been crushed under the responsibility; but a nephew, now--a young creature with a brain and soul developing--to whom I could be a help ... I find as I get older that I have an empty feeling as the college year draws to a close. I have kept myself so remote from human life, for fear of being dragged into that feverish center of it which has always so repelled me, that now I do not touch it at all." He ended with a gentle resignation, taking off his glasses and rubbing them sadly: "I suppose I do not deserve anything more, because I was not willing to bear the burdens of common life ... and yet it almost seems that there should be some place for such as I--?"
The heart of his young friend had melted within him at this revelation of the submissive isolation of the sweet-tempered, cool-blooded old scholar. Carelessly confident, like all the young, that any amount or variety of human affection could be his for the asking, he promised himself to make the dear old recluse a sharer in his own wealth; but the next year he married a handsome, ambitious girl who made him accept an advantageous offer in the commercial world. With his disappearance, the solitary door in the prison walls which kept J.M. remote from his fellows swung shut.
He looked so hopelessly dull and becalmed after this that the president was moved to force on him a little outing. Stopping one day with his touring-car at the door of the library, he fairly swept the sedentary little man off his feet and out to the machine. J.M. did not catch his breath during the swift flight to the president's summer home in a trim, green, elm-shaded village in the Berkshires. When he recovered a little he was startled by the resemblance of the place to his old recollections of Woodville. There were the same white houses with green shutters, and big white pillars to the porches, the same green lawns and clumps of peonies and carefully tended rose-gardens, and the same old-New-England air of distance from the hurry and smoky energy of modern commercial life.
He spoke of this to the president's wife and she explained that it was no wonder. The village was virtually owned by a summer colony of oldish people who had lived there in their youth and who devoted themselves to keeping the old place just as it had been. "We haven't any children to bother about any more," she said, laughing, "so we take it out in putting knockers on the doors instead of bells and in keeping the grocery-stores out of sight so that the looks of the village green shan't be spoiled."
After J.M. returned to deserted Middletown, he could not keep out of his mind the vision of the village he had just left, and the thought of the village like it which he had loved so well in his boyhood. It seemed to him that if Woodville kept its old aspect at all, he would find it a comfort to try to inspire the people now living there to preserve the old-timey look of it, as the president was doing for his old home. There was positively a thrill for J.M. in the thought of his possibly influencing other people, and before he knew it the plan had made itself the main interest of the interminably long, empty days of the summer vacation. His vague feeling of a lack in his life crystallized about a definite attempt at filling it. He was stirred from his inertia and, leaving word with the registrar of the college, a newcomer who was not at all surprised that the librarian should follow the example of all the rest of the faculty, J.M. made the three hours' journey which had separated him for so many years from the home of his youth.
As the train wound along the valley beside the river, and as the familiar outlines of the mountains rose up like the faces of dear, unforgotten friends, J.M. expanded and bloomed with delight in his new idea; but it was a very shriveled and dusty little old scholar who finally arrived at the farther end of the Main Street of Woodville and stood, in the hush of the noon hour, gazing back with a stricken face at the row of slovenly unlovely front yards separating the wretched old houses from the street.
He stood before the house that had been his home, and when he looked at it he turned very pale and sat down quickly as though his knees had failed him. Apparently the house had not been painted since his childhood, and certainly it had not been repaired. Broken, dangling shutters gave it a blear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidily pin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of the yard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes and crates and unsightly rags, and hung with a flapping, many-legged wash. From the three rural mail-delivery boxes at the gate, he gathered that three families were crowded into the house which had seemed none too large for his father, his mother, and himself. He put on his glasses and read the names shudderingly--Jean-Baptiste Loyette, Patrick McCartey, and S. Petrofsky.
"Good heavens!" he observed feebly to the vacant, dusty road beside him, and in answer a whistle from the big, barrack-like building at the other end of the street screamed so stridently that the heavy August air seemed to vibrate about him in hot waves.