Chapter II

Granpap’s toleration of me passed into liking very slowly. His stolidity often brought my imagination down as if it had struck a wall; and while I gathered up the pieces, the wall would become human and wonder why I had given such an invidious thrust. Naturally the essence of comradeship eluded us for some time. But finally he understood that my assaults were harmless; that he merely happened to be on the horizon when my enthusiasm was spraying the skies; and I began to see that he was too much a part of Nature to become consciously her note-book. He wore externality as a tree wears its bark, receiving all winds with passionless impartiality; but those winds of change were his breath of life.

One day I asked him if he did not sometimes feel that he would like to live in a city.

“No,” he said, “I have to stay whar thar’s somethin’ happenin’.”

Not an eyelash of me betrayed my glee. The least sign of emotion, and the gates of confidence would be snapped and sealed.

“In a city,” he said, “you don’t have seasons--jest weather.”

In the cabin with him lived his son Sam, Sam’s wife, Coretta, and their children. Once he returned home after a night away, and was much puzzled on learning of their “goin’s-on” in his absence. Cecil having the earache, the father and mother had risen in the dead of night, built a fire, and administered the usual remedy--warm rabbit’s oil poured into the ear. So far granpap understood.

“But how,” said he, “could they think the roosters were crowin’ for daylight when it was only midnight--an’ git breakfast too?”

“But, granpap,” explained Coretta, “we had been asleep for hours, and how could you ’a’ knowed the time, with the night cloudy-gray, an’ no stars, an’ the clock stopped?”

“Kain’t you _feel_ the time?” he asked, in concerned surprise, as if she were pathetically deformed. And later he said to me: “K’rettie kain’t feel the time at all. I hope the little feller ain’t goin’ to take arter her.”

“Cecil? Oh, no! He’s a Merlin. You can count on that. Don’t you like the boy’s name, granpap?”

He slowly cut a twig from the nearest dogwood and peeled it carefully.

“You noticed I never handle his name?”

“I’ve noticed.”

“K’rettie ain’t high-stocked with brains, but she’s got enough fer a woman; an’ she’s not great on housekeepin’, but ’tain’t every man can git hold of a woman like Cyn was. I ain’t got nothin’ agin K’rettie but her namin’ the boy like that. He might as well be a furriner. I counted on his bein’ named Dick,--Richard Merlin,--like my father an’ grandfather, an’ my oldest brother who was killed in the war. But this sissy name, it’s bitterer’n this dogwood. I jest ain’t a-goin’ to say it.”

He cut the twig into inch-long pieces and dropped them into his pocket to be used as a substitute for tobacco.

That afternoon I remembered that I wanted to see Coretta about making me a mattress of new splintered shucks. I did not often seek Coretta. Married at fifteen, at twenty-two she was the mother of four. If she had taken her maternal honors lightly, as a child should, I could have gone happily to and from her presence. But she was determined “to do right by the Lord’s gifts,” and her soft scramble for any crumbs of wisdom that I inadvertently dropped usually hurried my departure to a spot more suitable for meditation, where I could wonder what I had said anyhow. I should have liked to carry off Coretta’s children and free her petunia-blue eyes from clouds; but I remembered that I had once impulsively taken a broom from a child who was struggling to use it, and then found that I could not stay to do the child’s work. I really had to be going. And four children might prove more embarrassing than a broom. Four futures billowing to seas, and my life already pinched for room! No; better the hurried step and remote gaze as I passed.

In the least matter of business, the Unakasian expects to be approached by polite indirection. The more you curve and circle, softly as an Indian in the enemy’s woods, casually as a sparrow hops, the surer you may be of attaining your object. A straight march to the point, and you will find yourself gesturing to empty air, so swiftly will he withdraw from negotiations; so surely your breach of manners will be punished.

In half an hour’s talk with Coretta, I came somewhat hastily to the mattress, and she sat troubled. I could safely begin on my home curve.

“His name is Richard Cecil, isn’t it? Richard is a fine old name. I suppose you’ll call him that when he is older.”

Her surprised eyes swam in the gauze-light of pathos that I had learned to ignore.

“Cecil is good enough for a little boy. But so many famous men have been named Richard.”

“What men?”

“There was Richard Lovelace.”

“What did he do?”

“He wrote poetry.”

“Like you write?”

“Yes--no--not exactly,” I hastened. “And there was Richard Burbage, a great actor.”

“One o’ them movie men?”

“No, he played in great plays--not like you see nowadays. And Richard Lion-Heart, a mighty king. They buried him in that place I showed you the picture of--Westminster Abbey,” I ventured, though I had visions of his death in the arms of Saladin somewhere beyond the Balkans.

She was impressed, and I thrust on.

“And Dick Turpin,--Richard Turpin,--who was afraid of nothing.”

“Did they bury him in the Abbey, too?”

“No, but he died famously. Half of London went to his--er--funeral.”

She was silent a moment, and then said: “I’ll shore fix that bed for you as soon as Sam can shuck out the corn.”

With this grateful stab in my heart I left her; and Katy went with me to relate a story her papa had brought home. She pronounced “papa” as did all the children, like the flower, poppy, with a soft trail at the end, making a dear word more dear. Katy was eleven, the daughter of Sam’s first wife.

When war stretched a hand into the Unakas, and one by one, then dozen by dozen, the young men began to disappear, the people wondered more and more what it was about. As a rule, they were not reached by the daily papers which feed us truth and bathe us in illumination; and Katy’s story showed how they had adapted the chief argument that had sifted to them.

“There was a cripple, and he was a German. He was goin’ over to Briartown, and stopped at a man’s house. The man and woman were gone to the store. The childern were cookin’ some beans for dinner. The cripple ast to stir the beans. An’ he put something into the pot. Some powder or something. The woman come home and the childern told her. The man come home and the woman told him. They took up the dinner and ast the German to set to the table. He took a chair and passed the beans. Nobody took any. Then the man said: ‘Have some beans yerself.’ But the German said he wouldn’t choose any. Then the man got his gun, and said: ‘You will eat them beans or die.’ The German took some of the beans. And in an hour his tongue was swelled out of his head.”

She paused, lifting anxious eyes, to know if I thought the story was true.

“Yes, Katy,” I answered unflinchingly. Could such a climax be chance invention? A mere accident of art?

“Papa says it is true, for he found a cripple on the Briartown road one day an’ let him ride his horse for a mile. He couldn’t speak plain like papa, an’ he knows it was that German, but he don’t see how Abraham Ludd and Jim Dow let him git by.”

She was speaking of two neighbor boys in the service. One had risen to a captaincy, the other had been decorated.

“Jim Dow----”

“Captain Dow, Katy,” said I.

“He don’t write to Nellie Ludd any more.”

“Did Nellie tell you?”

“No, but she’s quit goin’ to the post-office. She’s ashamed to ast an’ git nothin’ every time.”

I wondered if that was why Nellie flitted so ghost-like about the hills, as difficult to capture as a bird fearing human hurt.

About supper-time I again called at the cabin, and as I sat by the superfluous fire, I heard Coretta say: “Granpap, please pass the sorghum to little Dick.”

And granpap, like a stone image with a movable arm, passed the sorghum.

The full Southern moon was savagely vivid that evening, devouring dreams as easily as it did the clouds that saluted too familiarly; so I left the house by what Sam called the stove-wood trail, a rear way softened by a lane of shadows. What trips the eye will halt the foot; and mine poised in air for a second or less as I sighted a hemlock bough like laced jet against the moon; as if Night, in defense, had thrown a torn bit of her garment over the face of the usurper. When I touched earth again, I was on new, mysterious ground, so quickly are worlds created for us, the ramblers of the universe, tenants insatiable. The mountains sat about me, cloaked sages waiting my indiscretions. Like the roll of a hidden sea, the valleys whispered upward with the life that stirs by night, the smaller wings, that dart fearlessly when the birds are asleep; and the lithe, furry dwellers in secret that come out of the earth to thread, more graceful than swimmers, the channels of shadow. But that purring wave was only the foam-flower of a vastly bedded silence; silence in which Nature dreamed of a way to reconquer her world and rule alone; while, against that dream, Beauty everywhere uncovered her soul. In behalf of man, the first to divine her, the first to adore, she arrayed her magic, invincible if so was his love. Everywhere she shone; on the laurel shedding a vapor of light, on the laps of the orange fungi with their creamy apron cascades; on the roots of trees, and the rocks that fed them endurance. Blue mosses, pale lichens, grasses with heads of mauve and pearl, gleamed in the unsubdued strips of golden light. The world of minute things pressed as hugely significant as the solar system. And as the sea, never hushed, the valley whisper reached for an intangible shore. High above me there was escape by way of a blue eternity, where two walls of cloud parted to show a chasm of sky. Lower down a mist wound reverently about a star, then crept elfishly to the most portentous peak, hanging there like a comic beard. While I waited its whim, a voice, too fervently human, came through the clump of bushes at my side. A second later, a tall figure bearing an armful of fagots was checkered disappearingly along the path toward the cabin.

The next morning when I recalled the sounds I had heard, and put them together understandingly, I had this: “K’rettie can make ’most as good headcheese as ever Cyn could.” And I knew that in Merlin language granpap had said: “My son’s wife, please God, is my daughter.”