Chapter XIII

The following summer John and I, Phillip Garrett, Royal Warringer, Conrad Conrad, and a number beside, graduated from the university. John saw before him the management of Flowerfield, and, if he cared for it, a partnership with his father. Phillip was for the law. But for him the law would prove but a stepping-stone to political life. Conrad, who had a little money, was boldly, flat-footedly, for travel. When the money gave out he proposed journalism. Royal had no immediate plans.

Major Dallas came to the university to see John and me step from formal tuition into a massive, unofficial school. How green was the lawn, the trees, how white the pillars, how warmly fragrant the air, how kindly, intoxicating, the ceremonies, the farewells! ... Arrived the moment when Uncle John, knocking at my door, was asked to enter and given the one good chair. I leaned against the mantel. "I wanted a moment to ourselves, Michael.... You've done mighty well! We're proud of you. We're sure of you."

I thanked him.

"Has Warringer spoken to you?"

"Yes. He says I may have the place of assistant engineer at Landon."

"Just so. Does it please you?"

I thought. "Yes. It's a long way off, but they say it's a big field. I should wish to earn promotion, sir."

"If you earn it you'll get it. The Landon concern has alliances all over the country. You'll find passages open. Well! Do your derndest, boy! Keep honest--keep kind--keep open to the big waves. You'll go, Carter says, to Landon in the fall. He proposed that in the mean time you come to them at Restwell."

"Yes."

"I told Carter that it was natural that that might be painful to you. I suggested that you go to them for two or three weeks, but then come to Flowerfield."

"Thank you, uncle. Conrad is going on a riding trip from one end of the valley to the other. He had asked me to go with him, and I should like that. Then if I might stay ten days at Restwell, and then come to Flowerfield--"

"All that's feasible. All right!"

I went and sat by the table near him. "I want to come to Flowerfield, uncle, but I want you and Aunt Kate to know something first.... I love Miriam. I want to marry her--just as soon as I can make and keep a home. We haven't spoken about it, but I am sure that she loves me and wants to marry me."

Uncle John, his elbow on the table, shaded his eyes with his hand. We sat very still. Laughter of men and women floated over the lawn, June groups going by.... I experienced, suddenly, strongly, the feeling of Miriam with me. I could have said, "Miriam!" I could have expected to hear her answer, "Michael!" Uncle John dropped his hand. "Well, I can't say that I am surprised, for I'm not. Neither Kate nor I.... Any one seeing you together must see that you and Miriam are happy together. Your differences don't seem to make any difference.... There's a feeling against first cousins marrying. I don't know whether it's right or not."

"It's right for us to marry," I said.

He smiled. "I suppose any cousin-couple would say that! ... Well, I shouldn't put it in your way if you truly love each other, and I believe that you do. But you'll have to wait, Michael. I wouldn't hear to your marrying before you were twenty-six."

I took his hand and the eyes of both of us were wet. "It's all right. It's all right!" he said. "You'll come to Flowerfield, and you and Miriam may talk it out together.... The world's built so--we take our turn at the building--to be good builders, that's the desideratum!"

I went home with Conrad from the university. General Warringer and Aunt Harriet were so good as to send Boreas to me there, Ahasuerus bringing him. Conrad's home held sisters and genial parents. We had a week of country gaiety, after which we set forth, like knights of old, upon that planned riding-jaunt. We meant to see good part of our state, to wander for a month. Around and about, we might cover some hundreds of miles. Riding so was an old fashion in Virginia, beginning now to fade with the tournaments, the barbecues, the camp-meetings, and twenty other features of the fields behind us.

Conrad was Conrad Conrad, though now he thought that he was Poe come again, and now darkly hinted at some earlier wight. Dark, not tall, slight, he was intent upon wearing his hair somewhat long and upon growing on lip and chin an imperial like Poe's. He wished, besides, to wear a cloak instead of an overcoat. Occasionally he tried to get drunk, but he did not really like whisky. As years went on he dropped the Poe and was content to be Conrad. The latter had idiosyncrasies enough to please him, without borrowing.

Conrad and I had great bouts of talk, alternating with as equally great, long and significant riots of silence. In some things each was the extreme of the other and so we met. I liked him, and I suppose that he liked me. I did not have to see everything as he saw it, but it interested me, what he saw.

So we rode green miles through Virginia in very good fellowship. The country lay beautiful, around, behind, before us. We slept in small towns of red-brick and frame houses, abounding in trees, or in farm-houses that were taking on a prosperous air. By 1882 Virginia wore a different look from that war-worn look I could remember. The South was beginning to prosper. As we rode we saw schools building, paint going on houses, fences standing whole, roads slowly bettering. Persons whom we met bore a cheerful aspect. An old farmer told us: "Yes, by gosh! Times air surely improving. Reckon we've pulled out of the mudhole!"

Conrad grumbled. We had another long, free silence, then out he came with his advocacy of the crumbled and broken-down. He was a lover, I told him, of vestigial remains. He grinned. "Well, you go in for germinal things! If I see the one, you go poking around for the other! You don't rest in this landscape, either. If it wasn't for your very comfortable, earthy sense of earthy drama you'd float--or perhaps fly!"

"If you hadn't built a raft out of a kind heart and a sense of harmony--down you'd sink!"

"I don't know about that. Look at that terrible house! They've fresh painted the house, and not only that, they've painted the fence and the horse-block and the well, and not only that, they've painted the trees!"

"They've mended the chimney, too!"

"There's a great career in truly going in for dilapidation."

I whistled as I rode; then I said, "If you'd turn you might become Lord Mayor of London."

"That is, there's as vast the other way."

"Vaster."

"Well, I don't know," said Conrad. "At any rate, I don't like paint on trees, and I don't believe that you do, either."

He showed me much as we traveled. He had a gift for the elusive, the just to be perceived then vanished. "Thought forms--affection forms," he called them, even then. His range of color was extraordinary. He showed me hues and combinations of which I had not been aware. He saw something through the dismal and ugly. He had an influx of enthusiasm for neglected territories which removed the neglect, gave them life, made them shine with a weird, metallic or vegetative beauty. The same thing poured over a decrepit horse, over wandering swine, over a cur dog which ran along the roadside. At last I caught the key--the gipsy, wild, aromatic, piteous values. First and last, Conrad gave me much. Everybody and everything gave me much.

We had no hard and fast route. From the Valley pike, up and down which had marched the weary armies, blue and gray, we turned aside through New Market Gap to the Caverns of Luray. We also went to Wier's Cave, near Staunton. After that, riding southward, we visited the Natural Bridge.

We felt what it was, in these caverns, to be in the deeps of the earth. We breathed the unmoving air, mortally still and cold; tasted beyond our candle rim the thick dark; saw the stony shapes, the stalactites and stalagmites. When we struck them, uncouth echoes were about us. There flowed underground water. We felt dark height above, and guessed that there was a roof to us that was a floor to beings who walked in a different world. When we came out the rushing air, the heat, the light, were for an appreciable time excessive, painful. It had been Conrad's whim to stay within the earth longer--much longer--than did the usual visitor, and he had paid our guide to cease descriptions and engage in silence.

Coming to the Natural Bridge, we found there a hotel filled with summer folk, and among them two or three acquaintances. We were welcomed with empressement--young men at summer resorts are always so welcomed. We saw pretty girls upon the porches, flitting in and out of rooms. We caught a glimpse of a tennis-court. Colored musicians, somewhere in the background, were tuning fiddles. Almost immediately a great supper-bell rang. The pretty girls came into the dining-room in thin silk or fine muslin dresses. If I remember correctly, it was the period of the polonaise. Conrad's and my acquaintances introduced us to heads of families and to their bright daughters. It appeared that there was to be a dance, and that we were counted upon. Fortunately, we had each with us a small portmanteau. We danced, and there was a long porch for promenading, and steps and dusky angles where groups of two might sit and murmur, and starlight and a midnight moon, and around all the place the herding shapes of the Blue Ridge. The fiddlers fiddled, we danced the lancers and we waltzed. There was punch. But dancing and all were held within bounds. Conrad and I had been in bed two hours when the cocks began to crow and the summer dawn overlaid stars and moon.

The coming day was the Fourth of July. During and after the war the South had scantly or not at all celebrated this day. But now it had come to be that the Fourth had stolen back, and this summer throng was going to celebrate it.

In the afternoon the country people were expected to come in. The hotel chanced temporarily to shelter a political light. The light had consented to shine. We were to have a Fourth of July oration. At night a novel thing would be done. Paper lanterns were being hung from the hotel to the gorge of Cedar Creek and down the steep path to the gorge floor where you stood and gazed upon the mighty rock bridge. Bonfires were heaping, above and below, and the bridge was to be illuminated by Bengal lights. There would be fireworks.

Conrad and I, descending, found ourselves counted upon in the office, upon the long porch, in the dining-room. There was to be a ramble under the bridge, to the cave, as far as the Lace Falls. Twenty pretty girls and certainly not, without us, twenty swains! I may say at once that it would have been a shock to us if we had not been counted upon.... My picture of the Natural Bridge of Virginia remains wreathed about with morning-glories.

Returning to the hotel, we had dinner with Fourth of July features.

By two o'clock country phaetons, carry-alls, buggies, sulkies, were arriving, together with horsemen and walkers. A pleasant, friendly country crowd spread itself over the lawn. Without the white social pale, within their own social pale, drawn under their own clump of trees, there had gathered, too, to hear the speaking, a number of colored folk. Speaking over, they would not further mix, but would go on to their church, some distance away, where under the pine-trees they would have their own festival. At night they might come back and look at the bridge when it was illuminated. Where the two colors came into chance neighborhood there fell neither harshness nor sullenness of greeting. That was due, perhaps, on both sides, to some genialness of inner climate.

Apparently the management at the Natural Bridge would outdo itself. It had provided a brass band, though a diminutive brass band. Now this discoursed music, "Dixie," "The Star-spangled Banner," "Yankee Doodle." The war was over by seventeen years.

The orator appeared. He had the build--tall, spare frame, great chest, smooth face, hair worn just a little longer than was the fashion. He had the voice. He had the tradition. And, a most fortunate plus, he had a fair share of insight and foresight.

He spoke from the steps of the hotel, the summer guests massed in the porch to right and left, the country gathering taking the foreground of grass and driveway, checkered with light and shade. The brass band ended "Hail, Columbia," a gentleman of the old school introduced the orator. We all applauded. Lord Orator bowed to all.... Virginia and the Revolution--Rockbridge County--Nature's Triumphal Arch at hand--George Washington who had climbed and cut his name far up upon it--Thomas Jefferson who often had ridden here to gaze upon it, who had called it in his Notes "the most sublime of Nature's works"--soldiers and statesmen who had gazed upon it--and now we, my friends--

Presently he was fingering the ancient thread of triumph over old Mother England. It was in the Fourth of July repertory of orators. This one overdid it less than others I have heard. Nor was he wildly, loosely, childishly spread-eagle. A change had come or was coming to the best of the type. There was state spread-eagleism and United States spread-eagleism. In Virginia inevitably still, at this period, it was state spread-eagleism--Southern spread-eagleism. But he muted it, used the soft pedal. Even when he talked of the Confederacy. He did not fight the war all over again. He quoted Wordsworth--

"Old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago,"

and left it at that. Presently he really was panegyrizing the whole country. It had to be a panegyric, being the Fourth of July. He had a word of good for New England, two for the Middle States, three for the unrolling West. Vaguely might be seen above him the angel of rapprochement, of unification, He spoke more and more appreciatively of the United States of America. A sense of enlarged being, a sense of nation, really stretched and shimmered around us, through us.

Emerson and Longfellow had died this year. The Fourth of July speaker at the Natural Bridge in Virginia gave them a meed. They were "ours." The Greely Expedition battled with Arctic seas. He spoke of "when we gain the Pole." There were Apache risings in Arizona. He spoke of "our" settlers out there. The East was beginning, accumulatively, to know labor troubles. He said, "I don't see the outcome for the country, but we'll hope for the best"--not, of course, that he said it short and unadorned like that. "The country." The phrase, slowly, bashfully, came in in place of "My state."

There occurred even an adumbration of a wider unity. He closed his hour's speech with something about "mankind."

There was applause. The band played "Dixie," "Yankee Doodle," "The Star-spangled Banner."

A lawyer from Lexington spoke. Plans and purposes of very huge moment of the Democratic party. There was applause. The band played "Home, Sweet Home."

Dusk sifted into the air, but with warmth yet and a faint glowing. The Chinese lanterns were lighted, there leaped a bonfire at the rim of the ravine. A ragged procession, here thick, here dwindled to an Indian file, crossed the plateau of the hotel and cottages and, beginning to descend, dipped beneath conifers--_Thuja occidentalis_, arbor-vitæ--which may have been standing when Columbus discovered America. Some of the figures themselves bore lanterns; below by the creek another bonfire flamed. Above, around, below, the craggy gorge with the bridge of rock was thrown into moving shadows and faint ruddy light.

The procession, breaking, established itself wherever was vantage-ground. Conrad and I, counted upon still, found a nook for four. Up and down spread a Doré illustration. The fireworks began, sent from the plateau above. The band still played. Roman candles shook forth bright planets. Rockets rising with energy curved far up, broke in stars red, green, and silver. The Chinese lanterns bobbed with delight. Up and down, bass, barytone, tenor, contralto, soprano, voices and voices rose into a chirping, singing sound. The great-boled trees, ever green, may have thought of old Indian acquaintances, of bear and wolf and panther, of parent and grandparent trees who held tradition of still a different earth. And yet all through had held the chirping, singing sound. Old and old and old--we are so old!

Down by the creekside dark figures touched off the colored light. The water, the tree masses, the seamed cliff, the arch of rock two hundred feet above the stream it spanned, turned fire-red, turned living orange. Ah! Ah!

The lights sank. A final lonely rocket burst into a last group of stars. The band had done its duty and its wages' worth; it wasn't going to play any more. In the Chinese lanterns the candles guttered down. There was indicated much helping up steep ways of those who counted upon us. The trees of life saw us go, settling back to their cool dark dream under the stars. Back upon the level before the hotel the wheels of all the country vehicles seemed in motion. Shadowy horsemen pushed away. After the Bengal lights, all the dark seemed spectral.

In the morning Conrad and I, too, rode away. We quitted the place in the sunshine, after breakfast, the porch filled with genial summerers. The twenty pretty maidens waved farewell, the young men whom we left behind us grinned cheerfully. We looked as well in the saddle as we knew how--we rode away, riding over the Natural Bridge, plunging into the green day. We were for the Peaks of Otter.