Part 21

So is a man born and implanted in his own generation. And if by strength he invades the next generation beyond, he does not go far before he finds he is a stranger utterly. In the current talk of men there are new smartnesses of speech built upon the old maternal tongue. There are new vogues of dress, new schools of thought, new modes even of play. Perhaps, again, new vices that the older simpler life kept dormant give the faces of this fresh generation a look and a difference strange and sinister.

A hundred years old! There are to be found, notably in steadily moving rural communities, not a few who endure to ninety hardily enough; but rare and singular are the cases where a man is to be found, except as dust in a coffin, a century after his birth. Old Dalton had inherited from his mother the qualities that are the basis of longevity--a nature simple and serene, a physique perfect in all involuntary functions and with the impulse of sane and regular usages to guide voluntary ones, an appetite and zest for work. She had married at eighteen and had lived to see her son reach his eightieth year, herself missing the century mark by only a few months.

But Old Dalton had breasted the tape, the first of his race to do it. And if it had not been for this wave of loneliness; this parching, astringent wind of sorrow that seemed to dry up the oil of his joints, evaporate the simple liquor of his thought, put out the vital sparkle in his eye; and now, latest act of dispossession, to milk his old veins of their warmth--if it had not been for this influence and prescience, Old Dalton might have run hardily quite a good little way into his second century.

But somewhere, afar and apart, the finger was about to descend upon the chronometer that timed his race. The dust atoms that a hundred years ago had been exalted to make a man now clamored for their humble rehabilitation. Man shall never, in this mortal body we use, exemplify perpetual motion.

Old Dave Dalton turned in his bed. Something beyond the chilliness was wrong with him, and he did not know what it was. There is no condition so vexatious as an unexplainable lack of ease; and Old Dalton twisted, gathered up his knees, straightened them again, tensed, relaxed, shifted the bedclothes, and busily but vainly cast about for the source of his disquiet.

Ah!--the thought slipped into his mind like a late guest.

"Et's thame sticks I forgot, ey," the old man muttered as he forthwith and arduously rose into a sitting position and pushed the blankets off him. "Ey, ey, that's it--the sticks for the mornin'!"

The chopping of the wood for the morning fire, in order that the sower, haymaker, or harvester, as the seasonal case might be, should have as little delay as possible in getting to his field or meadow; this had been a regular chore of Old Dalton's, a function never omitted before in all the scope of his methodical and assiduous days.

"Ey, but I never thought now that I'd ever lave that job not done," he muttered as he shuffled slowly and sheepishly down the stairs. "Ey, ey ... ma!"

There she was, at the foot of the stairs! Old Dalton saw her, as plainly as if it had been daylight. Gray apron with its horseshoe pattern almost obliterated by many washings, waist bulging halely, shoulders bowed forward, old wool hood tied over her head. There she was, with her visage, that in all their years together had not changed for him, squeezed and parched into the wrinkles of her thirty-four thousand days. (The only difference Old Dalton could see, as he stopped, his elbows bent a little, and regarded her in his quelling masculine way, resided in the eyes. Instead of being held downcast in the old attitude of deference, they now looked across at him, straight level, and--summoning!)

Immobile age and Old Dalton's habit kept him from any visible expression of the welcome that lay warm (though tempered by an odd feeling of strangeness due to that look she carried in her eyes) in his soul.

"Ey, ma--back?" he murmured, as he looked her up and down a moment, to get used to the sight of her, and then edged on in a vague, indifferent way toward the outside door and the chip-pile.

Mother Dalton followed, without comment or change of expression, but a tear seemed to flit and zigzag its way down the dried courses of her thousand wrinkles. She stood in the doorway, facing the moon as it rose above the roof of the granary. If she was a little translucent for so solid-shaped an old presence, Old Dalton did not notice it, as he picked up his ax and went handily to his wood-chopping.

She maintained her position on the step quietly, her hands folded across her waistband, her feet bluish and bare upon the pine sill. But, though she did not interrupt by word or movement, Old Dalton (who had used to be no more conscious of her than of the wind or the daylight) felt to-night as embarrassed by her proximity as though she were a stranger and a hostile presence. He was sweating and irritable when he finished his sticks; and, as he stood his ax against the end of a log, twisted his head around sharply, with the intent of asking the old woman why she was "gappin' there, place o' goin' and gettin' thon bed warmed up."

But the old pioneer himself fell agape as he encountered the look on her face. There is a vast respect in the country for that many-phased quality called "second sight"; and, if Old Dalton had ever seen signs of the possession of it on a human face, he saw them on his old woman's now. It struck him, too, for the first time definitely, as he groped about in the fog of his old mind for the reason she looked so queer, so like a stranger to him, that Mother Dalton had brought some odd quality back from this "visit" she had been making.

There grew upon Old Dalton something of fear. He stood fumbling and tetering, his hands wandering nervously up and down the edge of his coat.

Mother Dalton stood upon that step, facing the half-moon that looked down from above the grove. Her glance was not directed toward him, but up and away. In the pupils of her eyes was a shine which seemed a refraction of the silver-gray beams of the moon. There was about her gaze a something heavy, mournful, and boding which old Dave could not understand, but which made him think of the expression she had lifted in the old homesteading days toward the hail-cloud that swept from eastward to beat down their little, hard-sown crop.

"They 's trouble a-comin'." The voice was hers--at least it came from her direction--yet it seemed to Old Dalton that the words came not from her, but _through_ her. "Ey, Davie ... there 's trouble a-comin' ... trouble a-comin'. Ess time you was movin' ... movin' on...."

Old Dave Dalton had never, in the long, long course of his years, had a sensation like that which took him, as the queer voice melted away, blending imperceptibly with the homely rustlings and lowings of the farm night. The ache he had carried in his heart for those last weeks seemed suddenly to bulge and burst, like a bubble. The old moon, the hills and trees and trail of his long travel; the night, the world, and the odd old figure over against him, were bundled up with a sudden vast infolding in a blanket of black, a corner of which seemed thrust against his mouth, gagging him and cutting off his breath. He was lifted, lifted as in a great wind--lifted by shoulders, crown, and knees, and whirled around--around ... then set again on his feet very softly, with the blackness gone and the clear country night above him as before.

He should have been giddy after that cataclysm, but he stood upright and steady. He should have been tired and shaken, but he was fresh and calm. He should have been heavy and stiff and held to the earth by the ball and chain of a hundred years; yet he seemed scarcely more solid, scarcely less light, than an embodied wind. He should have been (for the atmosphere of the home in which you have dwelt for a century is not so easily dissipated) a doddering old corporeality, yet he felt he was now all thought and glorious essence of life. He should have seen on the step that old wife who had stood so uncannily by while he sweat over his wood-splitting; yet the presence that moved toward him from the pine sill, though wholly familiar and intimate and full of kind emanations, had neither wrinkles nor grayness nor any of the attributes and qualities of mortality. He should have bespoken that kindred presence in halting colloquialities, yet the greeting he gave flowed from him in the form of a thought untranslated into any sluggish medium of language. He should have been filled with a vague curiosity about that trouble she had just presaged, yet now he knew wholly....

"Let us thank God that our sojourn ended within the bourne of His peace!" was the thought exchanged as these two dutiful ones, cleared and lightened for swift voyaging, turned their faces toward the Gates of the Day.

On the earth they had left midnight was wearing toward morning--the morning of August the First, Nineteen Hundred and Fourteen!

MESSENGERS[16]

[Note 16: Copyright, 1919, by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright, 1920, by Calvin Johnston.]

From _The Saturday Evening Post_

BY CALVIN JOHNSTON

The group before the fire at the Engineers' Club were listening, every one--though nothing was being said; nor was it the crackle of apple logs or fluttering sails and drowning cries of the northeaster in the chimney that preoccupied them. Rather some still, distant undertone in their own breasts, arresting their conversation, gestures, thoughts--they glanced at one another surreptitiously, uneasily.

"But listen--I am telling you," said old Con O'Connel, the railroad builder, his voice rolling and sweet as the bells of Shandon: "To-night I hear a footfall in the rain--that of Tim Cannon, the messenger."

So that was the undertone which had arrested their thoughts; the rush of footfalls symbolizing to the group, every one, the pursuit of himself by a belated messenger. They settled themselves, relieved and smiling; after all the thing had been naturally suggested to them by the echo of rain on the broad plate windows. And they nodded their heads to Con, still listening.

The footfall of Tim Cannon, a name of ancient days on the P. D. Railroad; but as the story does not concern him except as Molly Regan's messenger I will leave him come into it in his own time and take up with the Regans themselves.

Two of them there were to begin with--young Michael, swinging a lusty pick in a construction gang of the Great Southwest Railway; and Molly, a pretty bride with solemn wondering gaze and air of listening to things which no one else could hear.

Often Mike would smile at her queer fancies that there are things to learn and do beyond the day's work, and after the Great Southwest has been builded and he has laid aside pick and shovel to become track boss at Turntable Station this queerness of Molly's leads her into playing a great joke on her husband.

For she saves her odd pennies against his birthday and presents him with a book. "A book of higher knowledge, it is," she says, while Mike scratches his head in awe; and she must kiss him for the kind interest he takes and that evening read to him a page in a voice like the song of soldiers marching. Mike toils after in mind with his big fists gripping and forehead glistening in the struggle to remember the journey, but at the end a darkness comes down on him, and the two gaze at each other uneasily and the page is read over again.

But devil a bit can Mike remember of it, so that he sits despairing with his head between his hands. "Do not mind, Molly," he says then; "you shall study on alone at the higher knowledge, having a joy of it which is not for me." He says this, looking up to smile, and yet the big hands hold on to hers as if fearing she was being stolen away.

But Molly answers him back so clear and strong that the song of soldiers marching is nothing to it. "'T is only the joke I am playing. Am I the wife to bother you with learning when you know already so much," she says, "and have the care of the section on your mind, with ties to lay straight and rails to spike fast so that the great railroad may run?" And when he speaks once more of the study she should make of knowledge Molly closes the big book and sets it on the mantel along with the clock.

"'T is for ornament, and now you know why I bought it from the peddler," she explains; "for every household of pretension must have a book."

So they admire the shiny binding and gold letters, and after five years when their new cottage is built it is given a shelf of its own.

Danny is born, the same who in Molly's lifetime shall be an official of the great railroad; and when in the course of time he is turned a sturdy boy of seven, with coal-black eyes and a round cropped head, she would place the book in his hands for purposes of learning. But detecting the fear of Michael as he smokes in the evening with eyes on the shelf, that the mysterious volume may contain matter treasonable to their state and condition, she ignores the higher knowledge completely and is content to send Danny only to the Turntable school.

A cruel one he is to the old master there, inking the pages of his reader and carving a locomotive on his desk; and when he is twelve he has decided against all books and school and is interested only in things of the Turntable yard.

So that one evening he comes home, and when Molly kisses him because he brought all his books as if to study Danny explains, "Mother, I am now a man and have a job calling crews, so study is of no more use."

He stacks his reader and arithmetic on the shelf by the old book, and Michael hearing the news that evening laughs with pleasure that the boy has completed his education so soon and promises to put half Danny's salary in bank in his own name. Time passes and the books fade in their bindings, and are forgotten even by Molly; but the eyes of her shine more clearly than ever as if studying in pages which no one else could see. When Danny is about eighteen years old, and already operator at Turntable, she notices that a habit has come over him of pausing in the doorway at dusk, and there he will stand gazing out into the yards with folded arms till at last his mother asks the reason with timid eagerness.

"'T is the lanterns," says Dan. "Beckon they do to things beyond Turntable."

"To things beyond," repeats Molly with hand on her heart. "Turn to me," she says; and Dan does so, grinning at his fancy; but as she studies the black-browed face a fierce frown like the fluff and smoke of powder passes over it, with the white teeth gleaming out.

"Beckon they do, mother," he says steadily, "to the job of trainmaster and superintendent, and even beyond to places high and powerful. And there I must trample my way whoever has to be pulled down to make room."

In that instant she sees him as he is, the Regan of them all; and after a bit she smiles and nods, but never again does she ask about the beckoning of the lanterns.

So time passes again, and Dan goes up to division headquarters at Barlow to dispatch trains, and Michael gives a last order as assistant roadmaster and comes home to his long sickness. And now Molly is alone in the little house, settled down to keep blooming the memories of it along with the hollyhocks of the garden beyond the lattice with the morning-glory vines trailing over. Time fades her face, but 't is still uplifted and lighted, and later she is seen among the flowers till they die in the fall, and winter coming down she sits at her window knitting a shawl as the snow is knitted without.

But deep is her grieving over Dan, who is by this time superintendent, with his policy of pull-down and trample-under, dreaded by all round him. Two or three times a year he will stop his special at Turntable, and seated in the little parlor he seems a glowing metal mass of a man to Molly, standing apart in awe of him. But the time is at hand when she must appeal to him or never at all in this world, so the saints inspire her to speak a message to the man of power and she smiles with shy pride of their confidence in her.

"Faith, I will talk to him as a boy again," she plans; "'Danny,' I will say, 'when the lanterns of the yard do beckon to your ambition is there not one light above and beyond, brighter than all the others, which beckons the spirit?' Then he will be guided by it," reasons old Molly with her solemn gaze fixed on the future of Dan.

But it chances that Dan's visit is delayed and Molly feels that the saints are impatient of her worldly lingering.

"I must put the message into writing lest it be lost entirely," she says then. "Anyhow Danny will read it over and over in memory of me, having that tender a heart toward his mother, for all his hardness to others."

So that the message of the farthest lantern is at last about to be written, on an evening when the little cottage with crusted eaves and hoary glimmering windows seems but the bivouac of winter elves in folk story. And as old Molly by the cleared table, with pen in hand and bottle of ink and the paper she bought when Michael died--to write his second cousin in Kildare a letter of sympathy, y' understand--as old Molly makes ready for the writing, after a stick laid on the fire and hearth brushed, the snow drifts solidly to the window but is swept clean of the doorstep, leaving a scratch of firelight under the door on the path beyond.

"The Farthest Lantern," she writes, as a headline, for 't is certain that Danny before reading will wish to know what it is about; and then pleased with the successful beginning she holds it up to the shaded lamp to read over, then because of the wrinkled hands shaking lays it down on the table, surely as steady as rock.

Divil a thing can she make out except blots and scratches, so that the headline is done over with more care. And only then it becomes plain that what with the rheumatism and palsy Molly has written her last, except scratches, which the most credulous could not accept at all as a message of interest, y' understand.

Now well would it be for old Mistress Regan's memory if she had put aside the message with resignation and thought no more about it. But there is no doubt that the look of solemn wonder flitted suddenly from her face, leaving it haggard and fierce, and that like a stab with a dagger she drove the splintering pen into the desk as into the breast of an enemy. So much is known, for there is little done that can be screened from mortal ken.

As for her thoughts--here no man can tell, for she held her words behind grim set lips. But the guess cannot be far amiss that when old Molly discovered she was destined to die with never a word of warning or counsel to Dan she broke into bitter revolt. Not a word of all the wisdom she had stored with this one purpose could be written or spoken to him--and it never was. Far be it from me to blackguard an old lady fallen in with disappointment but it is a fact proved by witness that her trembling hands upraised and her lips, always so faintly smiling, curled as with a curse--and whether it was launched at the fiend or heaven itself is not for me to say who have no proof that her voice was heard above the howling of the blizzard.

But this I know, that on the instant she hears a summons that breaks the spell of anger as no threat of purgatory would have done. A moment she hesitates, the old hands sink unclenching, the fierceness fades from her eyes, and once again with wondering uplifted look Molly Regan turns to the things beyond, which no one else may see.

At the wide-open welcoming door she stands, peering amid the squall of snow; and there in the center of the blur of light stands Tim the messenger, in aftertime the ruin of Dan Regan's fortunes.

The boy's hands are clasped as those of a frozen corpse, the wind whistles in his rags, but he glowers at her with narrowed brows and a gleam of teeth. Here he is, come to demand retribution for her rebellion against the will of God, and since Molly cannot live to pay it is ordained that she shall give instead into Tim Cannon's hands the means of trampling under Dan Regan and his fortune. 'T is little we know.

"Come," says Molly, "come in to the fire, and the hot coffee; you are frozen with the wind and snow. Glory be, that I am still here to make comfortable for the waif on my doorstep."

The wisp of old woman in mourning dress, with blown white hair and out-stretched hand; the crackling hearth, and coziness of the room beyond--these are hostess and haven enough to any waif of winter tempest; and Molly knowing it to be so steps aside for him, laughing with eagerness to see him at the fireside, dry and warm in Danny's old clothes, sniffing the steam of his coffee cup.

But this is no ordinary outcast, y' understand, submissive to charity, but an agent of retribution, who stands with frozen folded hands, and wind whistling in his rags, looking on with a threatening manner. And when the moment has come for him to enter, and not until then, he stalks stiffly past the outheld hand to the center of the room and turns slowly in his tracks to study the features of the place, as an agent of destiny should always do. His pinched little face is dirty, his black hair tousled by the storm, which has blown away his cap; and now the lamp-light touching his temple reveals the deep scar there. A wild and awesome waif is this, and Molly studying with startled interest his behavior feels at last that she is entertaining some veteran campaigner of regions beyond Turntable to whom the mischances of earthly wandering in cold and snow are nothing.

Not a word does he say but spreads his stiffened fingers before the blaze, and Molly with the strangest of hopes dawning so soon after her rebellion bustles briskly about the coffee making. And presently it is brewed and Tim Cannon stands by the table drinking and munching toast and cold meat.

"Ye must be seated in the chair," urges Molly, "and be comfortable, and it will seem like home to you."

At this Tim Cannon rubs his scar with remembrance of his drunken grandfather and their home in the city slums. Then he eats the faster till he is done, studying her with peculiar interest.

"You should have seen the money before I began the eats," he says by way of advice on the entertainment of wayfarers.

"Do you mean you can't pay?" asks Molly after a moment's reflection. "Now what am I to do?"

"Throw me out," instructs Tim, with contempt of her ignorance.

"Into the storm? Oh, no!"

"Why not?" he asks with suspicion.

"Faith, I wouldn't treat a dog so," replied Molly.

"Sure, not a dog," agrees Tim; and waiting to be driven out stands arrow-straight in Danny's old clothes, which are too big for him, wondering what the dog has to do with the matter.

"But you can pay," says Molly after a moment. Faintly and eagerly she speaks, her hand pressing her heart to steady it in against the impulse of hope. "You can pay for that and much more--food and drink and warmth all the days of my life--and without money." Tim shrewdly glances his question, but Molly shakes her head for answer.

"To-night I will keep secret and plan how to arrange it--and you may sleep here on the sofa before the fire and dream of good things for to-morrow; and only then"--she nods with mystery in her smile--"I will say what ye are to do."

And Tim gives her a glance of his level eyes, reflecting in the wisdom of experience that here is crooked business to be done for his keep.

"Sure," he answers in a way to inspire confidence, and the bargain being struck Molly says good night, and the guest is soon stretched in sleep on the couch.