XIV

A few hours later Roger awakened. His lower berth was still pitch dark. The train had stopped, and he had been roused by a voice outside his window. Rough and slow and nasal, the leisurely drawl of a mountaineer, it came like balm to Roger’s ears. He raised the curtain and looked out. A train hand with a lantern was listening to a dairy man, a tall young giant in top boots. High overhead loomed a shadowy mountain and over its rim came the glow of the dawn. With a violent lurch the train moved on. And Roger, lying back on his pillow, looked up at the misty mountain sides all mottled in the strange blue light with patches of firs and birches and pines. In the narrow valley up which the train was thundering, were small herds of grazing cattle, a lonely farmhouse here and there. From one a light was twinkling. And the city with its heat and noise, its nervous throb, its bedlam nights, all dropped like a fever from his soul.

Now, close by the railroad track, through a shallow rocky gorge a small river roared and foamed. Its cool breath came up to his nostrils and gratefully he breathed it in. For this was the Gale River, named after one of his forefathers, and in his mind’s eye he followed the stream back up its course to the little station where he and Deborah were to get off. There the narrowing river bed turned and wound up through a cleft in the hills to the homestead several miles away. On the dark forest road beside it he pictured George, his grandson, at this moment driving down to meet them in a mountain wagon with one of the two hired men, a lantern swinging under the wheels. What an adventure for young George.

Presently he heard Deborah stirring in the berth next to his own.

At the station George was there, and from a thermos bottle which Edith had filled the night before he poured coffee piping hot, which steamed in the keen, frosty air.

“Oh, how good!” cried Deborah. “How thoughtful of your mother, George. How is she, dear?”

“Oh, she’s all right, Aunt Deborah.” His blunt freckled features flushed from his drive, George stood beaming on them both. He appeared, if anything, tougher and scrawnier than before. “Everything’s all right,” he said. “There ain’t a sick animal on the whole farm.”

As Roger sipped his coffee he was having a look at the horses. One of them was William, his cob.

“Do you see it?” inquired his grandson.

“What?”

“The boil,” George answered proudly, “on William’s rump. There it is⁠—on the nigh side. Gee, but you ought to have seen it last week. It was a whale of a boil,” said George, “but we poulticed him, me and Dave did⁠—and now the swelling’s nearly gone. You can ride him tomorrow if you like.”

Luxuriously Roger lit a cigar and climbed to the front seat with George. Up the steep and crooked road the stout horses tugged their way, and the wagon creaked, and the Gale River, here only a brook, came gurgling, dashing to meet them⁠—down from the mountains, from the farm, from Roger’s youth to welcome him home. And the sun was flashing through the pines. As they drew near the farmhouse through a grove of sugar maples, he heard shrill cries of, “There they come!” And he glimpsed the flying figures of George’s brothers, Bob and Tad. George whipped up the horses, the wagon gained upon the boys and reached the house but a few rods behind the little runners. Edith was waiting by the door, fresh and smiling, blooming with health. How well this suited her, Roger thought. Amid a gay chorus of greetings he climbed down heavily out of the wagon, looked about him and drew a deep breath. The long lazy days on the farm had begun.

From the mountain side the farm looked down on a wide sweeping valley of woods and fields. The old house straggled along the road, with addition after addition built on through generations by many men and women. Here lay the history, unread, of the family of Roger Gale. Inside there were steps up and down from one part to another, queer crooks in narrow passageways. The lower end was attached to the woodshed, and the woodshed to the barn. Above the house a pasture dotted with gray boulders extended up to a wood of firs, and out of this wood the small river which bore the name of the family came rushing down the field in a gully, went under the road, swept around to the right and along the edge of a birch copse just below the house. The little stream grew quieter there and widened into a mill pond. At the lower end was a broken dam and beside it a dismantled mill. Here was peace for Roger’s soul. The next day at dawn he awakened, and through the window close by his bed he saw no tall confining walls; his eye was carried as on wings out over a billowy blanket of mist, soft and white and cool and still, reaching over the valley. From underneath to his sensitive ears came the numberless voices of the awakening sleepers there, cheeps and tremulous warbles from the birch copse just below, cocks crowing in the valley, and ducks and geese, dogs, sheep and cattle faintly heard from distant farms. Just so it had been when he was a boy. How unchanged and yet how new were these fresh hungry cries of life. From the other end of the house he heard Edith’s tiny son lustily demanding his breakfast, as other wee boys before him had done for over a hundred years, as other babies still unborn would do in the many years to come. Soon the cry of the child was hushed. Quiet fell upon the house. And Roger sank again into deep happy slumber.

Here was nothing new and disturbing. Edith’s children? Yes, they were new, but they were not disturbing. Their growth each summer was a joy, a renewal of life in the battered old house. Here was no huge tenement family crowding in with dirty faces, clamorous demands for aid, but only five delightful youngsters, clean and fresh, of his own blood. He loved the small excitements, the plans and plots and discoveries, the many adventures that filled their days. He spent hours with their mother, listening while she talked of them. Edith did so love this place and she ran the house so beautifully. It was so cool and fragrant, so clean and so old-fashioned.

Deborah, too, came under the spell. She grew as lazy as a cat and day by day renewed her strength from the hills and from Edith’s little brood. Roger had feared trouble there, for he knew how Edith disapproved of her sister’s new ideas. But although much with the children, Deborah apparently had no new ideas at all. She seemed to be only listening. One balmy day at sunset, Roger saw her lying on the grass with George sprawled by her side. Her head upon one arm, she appeared to be watching the cattle in the sloping pasture above. Slowly, as though each one of them was drawn by mysterious unseen chains, they were drifting down toward the barn where it was almost milking time. George was talking earnestly. She threw a glance at him from time to time, and Roger could see how intent were her eyes. Yes, Deborah knew how to study a boy.

Only once during the summer did she talk about her work. On a walk with her father one day she took him into a small forlorn building, a mere cabin of one room. The white paint had long been worn away, the windows were all broken, half the old shingles had dropped from the roof and on the flagpole was no flag. It was the district schoolhouse where for nearly half his life Deborah’s grandfather had taught a score of pupils. Inside were a blackboard, a rusty stove, a teacher’s desk and a dozen forms, grown mouldy and worm-eaten now. A torn and faded picture of Lincoln was upon one wall, half hidden by a spider’s web and by a few old dangling rags which once had been red, white and blue. Below, still clinging to the wall, was an old scrap of paper, on which in a large rugged hand there had been written long ago a speech, but it had been worn away until but three words were legible⁠—“conceived and dedicated⁠—”

“Tell me about your school,” she said. “All you can remember.” Seated at her grandfather’s desk she asked Roger many questions. And his recollections, at first dim and hazy, began to clear a little.

“By George!” he exclaimed. “Here are my initials!”

He stooped over one of the benches.

“Oh, dearie! Where?” He pointed them out, and then while he sat on the rude old bench for some time more she questioned him.

“But your school was not all here,” she said musingly at last, “it was up on the farm, besides, where you learned to plough and sow and reap and take care of the animals in the barn, and mend things that were broken, and⁠—oh, turn your hand to anything. But millions of children nowadays are growing up in cities, you see.”

Half frowning and half smiling she began to talk of her work in town. “What is there about her,” Roger asked, “that reminds me so of my mother?” His mind strayed back into the past while the low quiet voice of his daughter went on, and a wistful expression crept over his face. What would she do with the family name? What life would she lead in those many years?⁠ ⁠… “What a mother she would make.” The words rose from within him, but in a voice which was not his own. It was Deborah’s grandmother speaking, so clearly and distinctly that he gave a start almost of alarm.

“And if you don’t believe they’ll do it,” Deborah was saying, “you don’t know what’s in children. Only we’ve got to help bring it out.” What had she been talking about? He remembered the words “a new nation”⁠—no more. “We’ve got to grope around in the dark and hunt for new ways and learn as we go. And when you’ve once got into the work and really felt the thrill of it all⁠—well, then it seems rather foolish and small to bother about your own little life.”

Roger spent much of his time alone. He took long rides on William along crooked, hilly roads. As the afternoon drew to its end, the shadows would creep up the mountain sides to their summits where glowed the last rays of the sun, painting the slate and granite crags in lovely pink and purple hues. And sometimes mighty banks of clouds would rear themselves high overhead, gigantic mountains of the air with billowy, misty caverns, cliffs and jagged peaks, all shifting there before his eyes. And he would think of Judith his wife. And the old haunting certainty, that her soul had died with her body, was gone. There came to him the feeling that he and his wife would meet again. Why did this hope come back to him? Was it all from the glory of the sun? Or was it from the presence, silent and invisible, of those many other mortals, folk of his own flesh and blood, who at their deaths had gone to their graves to put on immortality? Or was this deepening faith in Roger simply a sign of his growing old age?

He frowned at the thought and shook it off, and again stared up at the light on the hills. “You will live on in our children’s lives.” Was there no other immortality?

He often thought of his boyhood here. On a ride one day he stopped for a drink at a spring in a grove of maples surrounding a desolate farmhouse not more than a mile away from his own. And through the trees as he turned to go he saw the stark figure of a woman, poorly clad and gaunt and gray. She stood motionless watching him with a look of sullen bitterness. She was the last of “the Elkinses,” a mountain family run to seed. As he rode away he saw in the field a boy with a pitchfork in his hands, a meager ragged little chap. He was staring into the valley at a wriggling, blue smoke serpent made by the night express to New York. And something leaped in Roger, for he had once felt just like that! But the woman’s harsh voice cut in on his dream, as she shouted to her son below, “Hey! Why the hell you standin’ thar?” And the boy with a jump of alarm turned back quickly to his work. At home a few days later, George with a mysterious air took his grandfather into the barn, and after a pledge of secrecy he said in swift and thrilling tones, “You know young Bill Elkins? Yes, you do⁠—the boy up on the Elkins place who lives alone with his mother. Well, look here!” George swallowed hard. “Bill has cleared out⁠—he’s run away! I was up at five this morning and he came hiking down the road! He had a bundle on his back and he told me he was off for good! And was he scared? You bet he was scared! And I told him so and it made him mad! ‘Aw, you’re scared!’ I said. ‘I ain’t neither!’ he said. He could barely talk, but the kid had his nerve! ‘Where you going?’ I asked. ‘To New York,’ he said. ‘Aw, what do you know of New York?’ I said. And then, by golly, he busted right down. ‘Gee!’ he said, ‘Gee! Can’t you lemme alone?’ And then he beat it down the road! You could hear the kid breathe, he was hustling so! He’s way off now, he’s caught the train! He wants to be a cabin boy on a big ocean liner!” For a moment there was silence. “Well?” the boy demanded, “What do you think of his chances?”

“I don’t know,” said Roger huskily. He felt a tightening at his throat. Abruptly he turned to his grandson.

“George,” he asked, “what do you want to be?” The boy flushed under his freckles.

“I don’t know as I know. I’m thinking,” he answered very slowly.

“Talk it over with your mother, son.”

“Yes, sir,” came the prompt reply. “But he won’t,” reflected Roger.

“Or if you ever feel you want to, have a good long talk with me.”

“Yes, sir,” was the answer. Roger stood there waiting, then turned and walked slowly out of the barn. How these children grew up inside of themselves. Had boys always grown like that? Well, perhaps, but how strange it was. Always new lives, lives of their own, the old families scattering over the land. So the great life of the nation swept on. He kept noticing here deserted farms, and one afternoon in the deepening dusk he rode by a graveyard high up on a bare hillside. A horse and buggy were outside, and within he spied a lean young woman neatly dressed in a plain dark suit. With a lawn mower brought from home she was cutting the grass on her family lot. And she seemed to fit into the landscape. New England had grown very old.

Late one night toward the end of July, there came a loud honk from down the hill, then another and another. And as George in his pajamas came rushing from his bedroom shouting radiantly, “Gee! It’s dad!”⁠—they heard the car thundering outside. Bruce had left New York at dawn and had made the run in a single day, three hundred and eleven miles. He was gray with dust all over and he was worn and hollow eyed, but his dark visage wore a look of solid satisfaction.

“I needed the trip to shake me down,” he pleaded, when Edith scolded him well for this terrific manner of starting his vacation. “I had to have it to cut me off from the job I left behind me. Now watch me settle down on this farm.”

But it appeared he could not settle down. For the first few days, in his motor, he was busy exploring the mountains. “We’ll make ’em look foolish. Eh, son?” he said. And with George, who mutely adored him, he ran all about them in a day. Genially he gave everyone rides. When he’d finished with the family, he took Dave Royce the farmer and his wife and children, and even both the hired men, for Bruce was an hospitable soul. But more than anyone else he took George. They spent hours working on the car, and at times when they came into the house begreased and blackened from their work, Edith reproved them like bad boys⁠—but Deborah smiled contentedly.

But at the end of another week Bruce grew plainly restless, and despite his wife’s remonstrances made ready to return to town. When she spoke of his hay fever he bragged to her complacently of his newly discovered cure.

“Oh, bother your little blue bugs!” she cried.

“The bugs aren’t blue,” he explained to her, in a mild and patient voice that drove Edith nearly wild. “They’re so little they have no color at all. Poor friendly little devils⁠—”

“Bruce!” his wife exploded.

“They’ve been almighty good to me. You ought to have heard my friend the Judge, the last night I was with him. He patted his bottle and said to me, ‘Bruce, my boy, with all these simple animals right here as our companions why be a damn fool and run off to the cows?’ And there’s a good deal in what he says. You ought to be mighty thankful, too, that my summer pleasures are so mild. If you could see what some chaps do⁠—”

And Bruce started back for the city. George rode with him the first few miles, then left him and came trudging home. His spirits were exceedingly low.

As August drew toward a close, Deborah, too, showed signs of unrest. With ever growing frequency Roger felt her eagerness to return to her work in New York.

“You’re as bad as Bruce,” he growled at her. “You don’t have to be back,” he argued. “School doesn’t begin for nearly three weeks.”

“There’s the suffrage campaign,” she answered. He gave her a look of exasperation.

“Now what the devil has suffrage to do with your schools?” he demanded.

“When the women get the vote, we’ll spend more money on the children.”

“Suppose the money isn’t there,” was Roger’s grim rejoinder.

“Then we’ll act like old-fashioned wives, I suppose,” his daughter answered cheerfully, “and keep nagging till it is there. We’ll keep up such a nagging,” she added, in sweet even tones, “that you’ll get the money by hook or crook, to save yourselves from going insane.”

After this he caught her reading in the New York papers the list of campaign meetings each night, meetings in hot stifling halls or out upon deafening corners. And as she read there came over her face a look like that of a man who has given up tobacco and suddenly sniffs it among his friends. She went down the last night of August.

Roger stayed on for another two weeks, on into the best time of the year. For now came the nights of the first snapping frosts when the dome of the heavens was steely blue, and clear sparkling mornings, the woods aflame with scarlet and gold. And across the small field below the house, at sunset Roger would go down to the copse of birches there and find it filled with glints of light that took his glance far in among the slender, creamy stems of the trees, all slowly swaying to and fro, the leafage rich with autumn hues, warm orange, yellow and pale green. Lovely and silent and serene. So it had been when he was a boy and so it would be when he was dead. Countless trees had been cut down but others had risen in their stead. Now and then he could hear a bird warbling.

Long ago this spot had been his mother’s favorite refuge from her busy day in the house. She had almost always come alone, but sometimes Roger stealing down would watch her sitting motionless and staring in among the trees. Years later in his reading he had come upon the phrase, “sacred grove,” and at once he had thought of the birches. And sitting here where she had been, he felt again that boundless faith in life resplendent, conquering death, and serenely sweeping him on⁠—into what he did not fear. For this had been his mother’s faith. Sometimes in the deepening dusk he could almost see her sitting here.

“This faith in you has come from me. This is my memory living on in you, my son, though you do not know. How many times have I held you back, how many times have I urged you on, roused you up or soothed you, made you hope or fear or dream, through memories of long ago. For you were once a part of me. I moulded you, my little son. And as I have been to you, so you will be to your children. In their lives, too, we shall be there⁠—silent and invisible, the dim strong figures of the past. For this is the power of families, this is the mystery of birth.”

Suddenly he started. What was it that had thrilled him so? Only a tall dark fir in the birches. But looming in there like a shadowy phantom it had recalled a memory of a dusk far back in his boyhood, when seeing a shadow just like this he had thought it a ghost in very truth and had run for the house like a rabbit! How terribly real that fright had been! The recollection suddenly became so vivid in his mind, that as though a veil had been lifted he felt the living presence here, close by his side, of a small barefoot mountain lad, clothed in sober homespun gray, but filled with warm desires, dreams and curiosities, exploring upon every hand, now marching boldly forward, now stealing up so cautiously, now galloping away like mad! “I was once a child.” To most of us these are mere words. To few is it ever given to attain so much as even a glimpse into the warm and quivering soul of that little stranger of long ago. We do not know how we were made.

“I moulded you, my little son. And as I have been to you, so you will be to your children. In their lives, too, we shall be there.”

Darker, darker grew the copse and the chill of the night descended. But to Roger’s eyes there was no gloom. For he had seen a vision.