Chapter 17

“It's queer there's no one about,” Rosemary Roselle observed. They reached the imposing pillars of an entrance--the wooden gate was chained, and they were obliged to turn aside and search for an opening in a great mock-orange hedge. Before them a wide sweep of lawn led up to a formal dark façade; a tanbark path was washed, the grass ragged and uncut. Involuntarily they quickened their pace.

Elim saw that towering brown pillars rose to the roof of the dwelling and that low wings extended on either hand. Before the portico a stiffly formal garden lay in withered neglect.

The flower beds, circled with masoned rims and built up like wired bouquets, held only twisted and broken stems.

A faint odor of wet plaster and dead vegetation rose to meet them. On the towering wall of the house every window was tightly shuttered. The place bore a silent and melancholy air of desertion.

The girl gave a dismayed gasp. Elim hastily placed his load on the steps and, mounting, beat upon the door. Only a dull echo answered. Dust fell from the paneling upon his head.

“Maybe they have shut up the front for protection,” he suggested. He made his way to the rear; all was closed. Through the low limbs of apple trees he could see a double file of small sad brick quarters for the slaves. They, too, were empty. The place was without a living being. He stood, undecided, when suddenly he heard Rosemary Roselle calling with an acute note of fear.

He ran through the binding grass back to the garden.

“Elim Meikeljohn!” She stumbled forward to meet him. “Oh, Elim,” she cried; “there's no one in the world----” A sob choked her utterance.

He fell on his knees before her:

“There's always me.”

She sank in a fragrant heap into his arms.

Elim Meikeljohn laughed over her shoulder at his entire worldly goods on the steps--the fragmentary fruit cake and a bottle of champagne.

Here they are lost on the dimming mirror of the past.

THE THRUSH IN THE HEDGE

I

Harry Baggs came walking slowly over the hills in the blue May dusk. He could now see below him the clustered roofs and tall slim stack of a town. His instinct was to avoid it, but he had tramped all day, his blurred energies were hardly capable of a detour, and he decided to settle near by for the night. About him the country rose and fell, clothed in emerald wheat and pale young corn, while trees filled the hollows with the shadowy purple of their darkening boughs. A robin piped a belated drowsy note; the air had the impalpable sweetness of beginning buds.

A vague pleasant melancholy enveloped him; the countryside swam indistinctly in his vision--he surrendered himself to inward sensations, drifting memories, unformulated regrets. He was twenty and had a short powerful body; a broad dusty patient face. His eyes were steady, light blue, and his jaw heavy but shapely. His dress--the forlorn trousers, the odd coat uncomfortably drawn across thick shoulders, and incongruous hat--held patently the stamp of his worldly position: he was a tramp.

He stopped, looking about. The road, white and hard, dipped suddenly down; on the right, windows glimmered, withdrawn behind shrubbery and orderly trees; on the left, a dark plowed field rose to a stiff company of pines and the sky. Harry Baggs stood turned in the latter direction, for he caught the faint odor of wood smoke; behind the field, a newly acquired instinct told him, a fire was burning in the open. This, now, probably meant that other wanderers--tramps--had found a place of temporary rest.

Without hesitation he climbed a low rail fence, found a narrow path trod in the soft loam and followed it over the brow into the hollow beyond. His surmise was correct--a fire smoldered in a red blur on the ground, a few relaxed forms gathered about the wavering smoke, and at their back were grouped four or five small huts.

Harry Baggs walked up to the fire, where, with a conventional sentence, he extended his legs to the low blaze. A man regarded him with a peering suspicious gaze; but any doubts were apparently laid, for the other silently resumed a somnolent indifference. His clothes were an amazing and unnecessary tangle of rags; his stubble of beard and broken black hat had an air of unreality, as though they were the stage properties of a stupid and conventional parody of a tramp.

Another, sitting with clasped knees beyond the fire, interrupted a monotonous whining recital to question Harry Baggs. “Where'd you come from?”

“Somewhere by Lancaster.”

“Ever been here before?” And, when Baggs had said no: “Thought I hadn't seen you. Most of us here come back in the spring. It's a comfortable dump when it don't rain cold.” He was uncommonly communicative. “The Nursery's here for them that want work; and if not nobody's to ask you reasons.”

A third, in a grimy light overcoat, with a short bristling red mustache and morose countenance, said harshly: “Got any money?”

“Maybe two bits.”

“Let's send him in for beer,” the other proposed; and a new animation stirred the dilapidated one and the talker.

“You can go to hell!” Baggs responded without heat.

“That ain't no nice way to talk,” the second proclaimed. “Peebles, here, meant that them who has divides with all that hasn't.”

Peebles directed a hard animosity at Harry Baggs. His gaze flickered over the latter's heavy-set body and unmoved face. “Want your jaw slapped crooked?” he demanded with a degree of reservation.

“No,” the boy placidly replied.

A stillness enveloped them, accentuated by the minute crackling of the disintegrating wood. The dark increased and the stars came out; the clip-clip of a horse's hoofs passed in the distance and night. Harry Baggs became flooded with sleep.

“I s'pose I can stay in one of these brownstones?” he queried, indicating the huts.

No one answered and he stumbled toward a small shelter. He was forced to bend, edge himself into the close damp interior, where he collapsed into instant unconsciousness on a heap of bagging. In the night he cried out, in a young strangely distressed voice; and later a drift of rain fell on the roof and ran in thin cold streams over his still body.

II

He woke late the following morning and emerged sluggishly into a sparkling rush of sunlight. The huts looked doubly mean in the pellucid day. They were built of discarded doors and variously painted fragments of lumber, with blistered and unpinned roofs of tin, in which rusted smokepipes had been crazily wired; strips of moldy matting hung over an entrance or so, but the others gaped unprotected. The clay before them was worn smooth and hard; a replenished fire smoked within blackened bricks; a line, stretched from a dead stump to a loosely fixed post, supported some stained and meager red undergarb.

Harry Baggs recognized Peebles and the loquacious tramp at the edge of the clearing. The latter, clad in a grotesquely large and sorry suit of ministerial black, was emaciated and had a pinched bluish countenance. When he saw Baggs he moved forward with a quick uneven step.

“Say,” he proceeded, “can you let me have something to get a soda-caffeine at a drug store? This ain't a stall; I got a fierce headache. Come out with a dime, will you? My bean always hurts, but to-day I'm near crazy.”

Harry Baggs surveyed him for a moment, and then, without comment, produced the sum in question. The other turned immediately and rapidly disappeared toward the road.

“He's crazy, all right, to fill himself with that dope,” Peebles observed; “it's turning him black. You look pretty healthy,” he added. “You can work, and they're taking all the men they can get at the Nursery.”

The boy was sharply conscious of a crawling emptiness--hunger. He had only fifteen cents; when that was gone he would be without resources. “I don't mind,” he returned; “but I've got to eat first.”

“Can't you stick till night?” his companion urged. “There's only half a day left now. If you go later there'll be nothing doing till tomorrow.”

“All right,” Harry Baggs assented.

The conviction seized him that this dull misery of hunger and dirt had settled upon him perpetually--there was no use in combating it; and, with an animal-like stoicism, he followed the other away from the road, out of the hollow, to where row upon row of young ornamental trees reached in mathematical perspective to broad sheds, glittering expanses of glass, a huddle of toolhouses, and office.

His conductor halted at a shed entrance and indicated a weather-bronzed individual.

“Him,” he said. “And mind you come back when you're through; we all dish in together and live pretty good.”

Harry Baggs spent the long brilliant afternoon burning bunches of condemned peach shoots. The smoke rolled up in a thick ceaseless cloud; he bore countless loads and fed them to the flames. The hungry crawling increased, then changed to a leaden nausea; but, accepting it as inevitable, he toiled dully on until the end of day, when he was given a dollar and promise of work to-morrow.

He saw, across a dingy street, a small grocery store, and purchased there coffee, bacon and a pound of dates. Then he returned across the Nursery to the hollow and huts. More men had arrived through the day, other fires were burning, and an acrid odor of scorched fat and boiling coffee rose in the delicate evening. A small group was passing about a flasklike bottle; a figure lay in a stupor on the clay; a mutter of voices, at once cautious and assertive, joined argument to complaint.

“Over this way,” Peebles called as Harry Baggs approached. The former inspected the purchased articles, then cursed. “Ain't you got a bottle on you?”

But when the bacon had been crisped and the coffee turned into a steaming thick liquid, he was amply appreciative of the sustenance offered. They were shortly joined by Runnel, the individual with the bluish poisoned countenance, and the elaborately ragged tramp.

“Did you frighten any cooks out of their witses?” Peebles asked the last contemptuously. The other retorted unintelligibly in his appropriately hoarse voice. “Dake knocks on back doors,” Peebles explained to Harry Baggs, “and then fixes to scare a nickel or grub from the women who open.”

Quiet settled over the camp; the blue smoke of pipes and cigarettes merged imperceptibly into the dusk of evening. Harry Baggs was enveloped by a momentary contentment, born of the satisfaction of food, relaxation after toil; and, leaning his head back on clasped hands, he sang:

_“I changed my name when I got free To Mister, like the res'. But now ... Ol' Master's voice I hears Across de river: 'Rome, You damn ol' nigger, come and bring Dat boat an' row me home!'”_

His voice rolled out without effort, continuous as a flowing stream, grave and round as the deep tone of a temple bell. It increased in volume until the hollow vibrated; the sound, rather than coming from a single throat, seemed to dwell in the air, to be the harmony of evening made audible. The simple melody rose and fell; the simple words became portentous, burdened with the tragedy of vain longing, lost felicity. The dead past rose again like a colored mist over the sordid reality of the present; it drifted desirable and near across the hill; it soothed and mocked the heart--and dissolved.

The silence that followed the song was sharply broken by a thin querulous question; a tenuous bent figure stumbled across the open.

“Who's singing?” he demanded.

“That's French Janin,” Peebles told Harry Baggs; “he's blind.”

“I am,” the latter responded--“Harry Baggs.”

The man came closer, and Baggs saw that he was old and incredibly worn; his skin clung in dry yellow patches to his skull, the temples were bony caverns, and the pits of his eyes blank shadows. He felt forward with a siccated hand, on which veins were twisted like blue worsted over fleshless tendons, gripped Harry Baggs' shoulder, and lowered himself to the ground.

“Another song,” he insisted; “like the last. Don't try any cheap show.”

The boy responded immediately; his serious voice rolled out again in a spontaneous tide.

“'Hard times,'” Harry Baggs sang; “'hard times, come again no more.'”

The old man said: “You think you have a great voice, eh? All you have to do to take the great roles is open your mouth!”

“I hadn't thought of any of that,” Baggs responded. “I sing because--well, it's just natural; no one has said much about it.”

“You have had no teaching, that's plain. Your power leaks like an old rain barrel. What are you doing here?”

“Tramping.”

Harry Baggs looked about, suddenly aware of the dark pit of being into which he had fallen. The fires died sullenly, deserted except for an occasional recumbent figure. Peebles had disappeared; Dake lay in his rags on the ground; Runnel rocked slowly, like a pendulum, in his ceaseless pain.

“Tramping to the devil!” he added.

“What started you?” French Janin asked.

“Jail,” Harry Baggs answered.

“Of course you didn't take it,” the blind man commented satirically; “or else you went in to cover some one else.”

“I took it, all right--eighteen dollars.” He was silent for a moment; then: “There was something I had to have and I didn't see any other way of getting it. I had to have it. My stepfather had money that he put away--didn't need. I wanted an accordion; I dreamed about it till I got ratty, lifted the money, and he put me in jail for a year.

“I had the accordion hid. I didn't tell them where, and when I got out I went right to it. I played some sounds, and--after all I'd done--they weren't any good. I broke it up--and left.”

“You were right,” Janin told him; “the accordion is an impossible instrument, a thing entirely vulgar. I know, for I am a musician, and played the violin at the Opéra Comique. You think I am lying; but you are young and life is strange. I can tell you this: I, Janin, once led the finale of Hamlet. I saw that the director was pale; I leaned forward and he gave me the baton. I knew music. There were five staves to conduct--at the Opéra Comique.”

He turned his sightless face toward Harry Baggs.

“That means little to you,” he spoke sharply; “you know nothing. You have never seen a gala audience on its feet; the roses--”

He broke off. His wasted palms rested on knees that resembled bones draped with maculate clothing; his sere head fell forward. Runnel paced away from the embers and returned. Harry Baggs looked, with doubt and wonderment, at the ruined old man.

The mere word musician called up in him an inchoate longing, a desire for something far and undefined. He thought of great audiences, roses, the accompaniment of violins. Subconsciously he began to sing in a whisper that yet reached beyond the huts. He forgot his surroundings, the past without light, the future seemingly shorn of all prospect.

French Janin moved; he fumbled in precarious pockets and at last produced a small bottle; he removed the cork and tapped out on his palm a measure of white crystalline powder, which he gulped down. Then he struggled to his feet and wavered away through the night toward a shelter.

Harry Baggs imagined himself singing heroic measures; he finished, there was a tense pause, and then a thunderous acclamation. His spirit mounted up and up in a transport of emotional splendor; broken visions thronged his mind of sacrifice, renouncement, death. The fire expired and the night grew cold. His ecstasy sank; he became once more aware of the human wreckage about him, the detritus of which he was now a part.

III

He spent the next day moving crated plants to delivery trucks, where his broad shoulders were most serviceable, and in the evening returned to the camp, streaked with fine rich loam. French Janin was waiting for him and consumed part of Harry Baggs' unskilfully cooked supper. The old man was silent, though he seemed continually at the point of bursting into eager speech. However, he remained uncommunicative and followed the boy's movements with a blank speculative countenance. Finally he said abruptly:

“Sing that song over--about the 'damn ol' nigger.'”

Harry Baggs responded; and, at the end, Janin nodded.

“What I should have expected,” he pronounced. “When I first heard you I thought: 'Here, perhaps, is a great voice, a voice for Paris;' but I was mistaken. You have some bigness--yes, good enough for street ballads, sentimental popularities; that is all.”

An overwhelming depression settled upon Harry Baggs, a sense of irremediable loss. He had considered his voice a lever that might one day raise him out of his misfortunes; he instinctively valued it to an extraordinary degree; it had resembled a precious bud, the possible opening of which would flood his being with its fragrant flowering. He gazed with a new dread at the temporary shelters and men about him, the huts and men that resembled each other so closely in their patched decay.

Until now, except in brief moments of depression, he had thought of himself as only a temporary part of this broken existence. But it was probable that he, too, was done--like Runnel, and Dake, who lived on the fear of women. He recalled with an oath his reception in the village of his birth on his return from jail: the veiled or open distrust of the adults; the sneering of the young; his barren search for employment. He had suffered inordinately in his narrow cell--fully paid, it had seemed, the price of his fault. But apparently he was wrong; the thing was to follow him through life--and he would live a long while--; condemning him, an outcast, to the company of his fellows.

His shoulders drooped, his face took on the relaxed sullenness of those about him; curiously, in an instant he seemed more bedraggled, more disreputable, hopeless.

French Janin continued:

“Your voice is good enough for the people who know nothing. Perhaps it will bring you money, singing at fairs in the street. I have a violin, a cheap thing without soul; but I can get a thin jingle out of it. Suppose we go out together, try our chance where there is a little crowd; it will be better than piggin' in the earth.”

It would, Baggs thought, be easier than carrying heavy crates; subtly the idea of lessened labor appealed to him. He signified his assent and rolled over on his side, staring into nothingness.

French Janin went into the town the following day--he walked with a surprising facility and speed--to discover where they might find a gathering for their purpose. Harry Baggs loafed about the camp until the other returned with the failing of light.

“The sales about the country are all that get the people together now,” he reported; “the parks are empty till July. There's to be one tomorrow about eight miles away; we'll try it.”

He went to the shelter, where he secured a scarred violin, with roughly shaped pegs and lacking a string. He motioned Harry Baggs to follow him and proceeded to the brow of the field, where he settled down against a fence, picking disconsolately at the burring strings and attempting to tighten an ancient bow. Baggs dropped beside him. Below them night flooded the winding road and deepened under the hedges; a window showed palely alight; the stillness was intense.

“Now!” French Janin said.

The violin went home beneath his chin and he improvised a thin but adequate opening for Harry Baggs' song. The boy, for the first time in his existence, sang indifferently; his voice, merely big, lacked resonance; the song was robbed of all power to move or suggest.

Janin muttered unintelligibly; he was, Harry Baggs surmised, speaking his native language, obscurely complaining, accusing. They tried a second song: “Hard times, hard times, come again no more.” There was not an accent of longing nor regret.

“That'll do,” French Janin told him; “good enough for cows and chickens.”

He rose and descended to the camp, a bowed unsubstantial figure in the gloom.

IV

They started early to the sale. Janin, as always, walked swiftly, his violin wrapped in a cloth beneath his arm. Harry Baggs lounged sullenly at his side. The day was filled with a warm silvery mist, through which the sun mounted rayless, crisp and round. Along the road plum trees were in vivid pink bloom; the apple buds were opening, distilling palpable clouds of fragrance.

Baggs met the morning with a sullen lowered countenance, his gaze on the monotonous road. He made no reply to the blind man's infrequent remarks, and the latter, except for an occasional murmur, fell silent. At last Harry Baggs saw a group of men about the fence that divided a small lawn and neatly painted frame house from the public road. A porch was filled with a confusion of furniture, china was stacked on the grass, and a bed displayed at the side.

The sale had not yet begun; A youth, with a pencil and paper, was moving distractedly about, noting items; a prosperous-appearing individual, with a derby resting on the back of his neck, was arranging an open space about a small table. Beyond, a number of horses attached to dusty vehicles were hitched to the fence where they were constantly augmented by fresh arrivals.

“Here we are!” Baggs informed his companion. He directed Janin forward, where the latter unwrapped his violin. A visible curiosity held the prospective buyers; they turned and faced the two dilapidated men on the road. A joke ran from laughing mouth to mouth. Janin drew his bow across the frayed strings; Harry Baggs cleared the mist from his throat. As he sang, aware of an audience, a degree of feeling returned to his tones; the song swept with a throb to its climax:

“'_You damn ol' nigger, come and bring Dat boat an' row me home_!'”

There was scattered applause.

“Take your hat round,” Janin whispered; and the boy opened the gate and moved, with his battered hat extended, from man to man.

Few gave; a careless quarter was added to a small number of pennies and nickels. Janin counted the sum with an unfamiliar oath.

“That other,” he directed, and drew a second preliminary bar from his uncertain instrument.

“Here, you!” a strident voice called. “Shut your noise; the sale's going to commence.”

French Janin lowered the violin.

“We must wait,” he observed philosophically. “These things go on and on; people come and go.”

He found a bank, where he sat, after stumbling through a gutter of stagnant water. Harry Baggs followed and filled a cheap ornate pipe. The voice of the auctioneer rose, tiresome and persistent, punctuated by bids, haggling over minute sums for the absurd flotsam of a small house keeping square of worn oilcloth, a miscellany of empty jars. A surprisingly passionate argument arose between bidders; personalities and threats emerged. Janin said:

“Listen! That is the world into which musicians are born; it is against such uproar we must oppose our delicate chords--on such hearts.” His speech rambled into French and a melancholy silence.

“It's stopped for a little,” Baggs reminded him.

Janin rose stiffly and the other guided him to their former place. The voice and violin rose, dominated a brief period, and the boy went among the throng, seeking newcomers. The mist thickened, drops of water shone on his ragged sleeves, and then a fine rain descended. The crowd filled the porch and lower floor, bulged apparently from door and windows. Harry Baggs made a motion to follow with his companion, but no one moved; there was no visible footing under cover. They stayed out stolidly in the wet, by an inadequate tree; and whenever chance offered Harry Baggs repeated his limited songs. A string of the violin broke; the others grew soggy, limp; the pegs would tighten no more and Janin was forced to give up his accompanying.