Chapter VII

John and I went to Restwell. I cannot say that I missed Miriam, for I seemed to take Miriam with me. I missed the others at Flowerfield.

But Restwell was most dear to me. I loved mother and grandfather and Aunt Sarah, Daddy Guinea, Mammy, Ahasuerus, and the rest, the animals and the trees and the house, and every other aspect. I loved the graveyard and the bank going down to the river, and the river itself. John knew all the haunts, but now he learned them better with me.

What my grandfather had not read in these four years I do not know. Colonel Forth's pecuniary affairs were yet shot with strain and difficulty. But somehow--and I know here how greatly my mother helped him--he managed to pay the interest on the mortgage. The old Restwell shelter sheltered still. Around him the affairs of the South were slowly bettering. The war was no longer blindingly, thunderously present. It had changed its shape, lowered its voice. Its boulder weight was become spread sand. It was always there, always would be there. You could as little kill the war as kill anything else. On thundered the long freight-train stacked with effects. At every station something was deposited. But also other unkillable things breathed on, such as man's ineradicable hope of understanding all, of enjoying all, of being all.

My grandfather looked older and gentler. He was busy all day with a thousand active, patient adjustments. But after supper, by lamplight, until almost midnight, he read. He had found his way to Jacob Boehme, to Spinoza, to Blake.

My aunt Sarah read less, I thought, than she used to do--less, that is, in books. Remembering, I am aware, by the now stronger light, that she had turned to that inner library, greater than any housed collection. There two and two, in a thousand places, came together and made four.

My mother burned, as always, a light, a warmth, fed steadily by a willing sacrifice. She herself went with joy into the fire of herself.

Oh, Restwell, and all that made Restwell!

John and I, in good and bad weather, walked to Whitechurch and walked home again. Hilltop Academy rose at the edge of town. The distance was nothing to strong youths, country bred. We carried our books and our dinner. The many and many things that along the way we ruminated, debated! All the way there and the way back again, the two hundred and odd school-days in each year, three years on end! There are trees that rise in memory hung with talk as with fruit.

Hilltop Academy, brick, long and gaunt, had the luck to have gathered about it a dozen really splendid cedars. Except for these its hill was a somewhat bare and windy one. As each morning we approached it we might see the boys running, jumping, playing ball, or knotted together--the younger ones--over marbles. In memory a wind seems always to blow. Sometimes snow falls. There is a high, shifting veil, and it and the boys are all of a piece. Boarding pupils and town and country pupils, there were not far from a hundred boys. Out of this number a score made our group. Out of this group two or three pressed closer. They and John and I heard very nearly the same sounds. One of them, Gamaliel Young, came closer than the others.

The principal of the academy was his father, Dr. Abner Young.

I would say at once that Doctor Young was estimable. There was even about him a kind of sweetness, some errant fragrance, some spice lurking beneath fold after fold of mummy linen. His archaic rigidity of line was not without distinction.... Lot's wife looked back, remembered too exclusively the plain--the plane--that must be left, and became a pillar of salt. Salt preserves. Where it is too abundant green things do not grow. She loved the past not wisely, but too well. Yet love is love and covereth a multitude. And little by little, doubtless, age by age, the rain and the wind and the fire undid the form.

Hilltop Academy employed a number of teachers. But Doctor Young kept in his own hands Greek and Latin, history and English. In the letter of the languages he taught well. In the letter of history and of the literature of England he had knowledge. But he was mineralized, and what he did and what he gave partook of that quality. An honest mineral, with mineral beauty.

Each morning, at the ringing of a bell, occurred a Scripture reading, a short homily, a prayer. Doctor Young read, expounded, prayed. The hundred boys sat as still as they could. Sometimes something caught them, oftener nothing. It was a mill-wheel turning. One must feel reverential when one sat by the mill-race and the wheel began to turn. But the wheat in the hopper very rarely indeed made any connection with one's own private oven. (Doubtless, now I think of it, that was because the oven was not large enough.) The mill-wheel stopped, the church feeling flew away, out trooped the hundred boys into the big, bare, echoing hall.

Each Wednesday, at two in the afternoon, Doctor Young lectured. He made these talks into occasions. They took place in the assembly-hall. The smallest boys were excused, but the rest of us sat in solemn rows with clean hands and smoothed hair. All the teachers were there, seated where they might observe both us and the principal. It happened--it grew by degrees into settled custom--that friends of the academy, of Doctor Young, leading citizens of Whitechurch, seeking culture, came to these Wednesday talks. There was always a little block of comfortable chairs, filled from Whitechurch. Ladies and gentlemen both attended. They seemed to think it necessary to listen very closely, to nod their heads at regular intervals. They did not applaud, because it seemed too much like church and the Word of God. I have forgotten to say that in his early manhood Doctor Young had been a minister. He believed with intensity that he still ministered to souls.

The least of the Wednesday talks lasted half an hour. I have known them to run over the hour. He spoke well, without a ragged edge, without a sign of indefiniteness, and always as one having authority. He had a thin, severe enthusiasm, very far from unction, but carrying over. Unwavering belief in one's own revelation cannot but do it. He was the Apostle of the _Status quo Ante_.

Gamaliel sat with John and me and fidgeted. This father and son loved each other, but it was love dashed with profound care and dissent. Doctor Young felt the impatience in the corner. His eyes darted over. I remember more than once or twice in the sequence of Wednesdays a pause, a "Keep order there!" I remember an angry "Gamaliel"!

Gamaliel broke off his absent-minded drumming upon the desk before him. He sat up and looked at the speaker. The father looked back. Struggle was in the air. "You will break from me!"--"I am breaking from you!"--"Yet you are me!"--"Yet I will carry you with me--Anchises on Æneas's shoulders!" There were, of course, no such articulate words.

These Wednesday discourses varied as to subject. Doctor Young was intensely interested in keeping the world good--in salting it down, so to speak. To do this one must be active and wary on all sides. Weeds would grow! But he would do what he could to fix the soil in the young minds before him. Specifically and sharply to fix it in Gamaliel's mind. There was jealousy of Gamaliel. He must not take the Inheritance and riot with it.

The Inheritance was stored in treasure-houses labeled Religion--Political Life--Economics--Science--Arts and Letters. Doctor Young stood before the door of each and expounded how all things must be kept and polished.

He was a strict disciplinarian. The younger boys--the little fellows--came in, not infrequently, for corporal punishment. Gamaliel was not among the younger boys. But out of school, in the father's bare study, he might yet taste the whip. It was not often, and this mode of dealing with him ceased before he was fifteen. And no doubt Doctor Young prayed afterward a quarter of the night.

I speak as though I did not like the pillar of salt. But I did. There were yearnings and sincerity, and an Egyptian moonlight of old beauty, and great willingness to be kind if only we would stay within bounds!

I hear him now upon the mad--that was a great word with him--the mad attempt, originating in England, to undermine the Christian Religion. He withered with irony Messrs. Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall. Hilltop Academy must sooner or later go forth into the world. He would arm its units against insidious modernity! He proceeded to arm us. I remember that Mr. Millwood was among those from the town who was present that day. I see now the big head and shoulders vibrating assent. The flaying of the evolutionists lasted an hour.

Again political economy. Doctor Young gave up the divine right of kings, but quite subtly and passionately inculcated divine right of class. He was devoted to the point of romance to class, order, hierarchy, successiveness. How feudal, reasonable, logical he was!

Out of his numerous "literary" talks I recall most plainly that upon "Paradise Lost." He labored Shakespeare, but he loved Milton. I remember, too, a scorching warning away from most modern novels, poems, and other works--"modern" and highly explosive, that is, in 1876, to country-living folk. George Eliot was armed against no less than George Sand. A young poet then writing, named Swinburne we must never touch! There were qualities in Browning, but also dangerous heresies, to say nothing of impossible style. The evolutionists--how few were untainted by the evolutionists! Coming to our own country, Mr. Emerson was undoubtedly able, but could be followed only a little way and through careful selection. Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier were safe. Mr. Millwood, who was again among the listeners, shook his head, remembering utterances "against the South."

But Doctor Young differed here from Mr. Millwood. It was not the South that he thought of, but the moral nationality.... I think of him as a kind of Switzerland, shot up high from a narrow base.

Gamaliel had a stub of a pencil and the back of a long envelop and was drawing while his father talked. He drew a man reading and made the figure look like himself. The book held in both hands was quite large. The pencil hesitated, then printed on the cover, SWINBURNE. He next stood on end around the reader a number of volumes, the back of each of which he proceeded to letter. GEORGE SAND--GEORGE ELIOT--EMERSON--DARWIN. There was just a tremor, then the pencil added INGERSOLL.

Now I know Gamaliel, and he was not in the least trying to be "smart." Father and son were alike in dead earnest.

In the late summer, just before the beginning of my second year at Hilltop, I met with an accident. A colt that I was breaking threw me and broke my ankle. It was set and healed, but for a long time was weak. Doctor Gilbert said that I must not walk each day to and from Whitechurch. It ended in my becoming, from October to Christmas, one of the boarding boys.

Mrs. Young was an invalid. She lay on a sofa and looked with dark, hollow eyes at some inner pageant. The house where ate and slept and forgathered twenty boys, under the eyes of four teachers and of Doctor Young, was kept by two maiden sisters, cousins of the principal. It was well kept after our easy-going Southern fashion. The teachers were intelligent and good-natured, the two maiden sisters amiable, maternally-minded women. Every one intended kindness. It was a pretty fair home. The twenty boys slept in four rooms. I had the luck to be with Gamaliel. Moreover, two out of the five in our room went home in November upon some contingency. The remaining one was a "little fellow" of whom we were fond and who had the good habit of going to sleep immediately upon getting into bed. Gamaliel and I could talk till late.

But I do not speak now of the lasting nearness of Gamaliel and me. With John and Miriam he came near. We were countrymen, though Miriam and I were more closely countrymen than any. But we were all of one language. Gamaliel spoke it with poignancy and thrill, differing there from John's long, slow waves, quiet and massive.

Whitechurch rambled around the foot of Doctor Young's hill like a pleasant trailing vine, then went up and down and over a hill of its own. The spire of St. Matthew's, the spires of the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches, leaned against the sky. The square old court-house held its place. There was Garth's Hotel with its row of horse-chestnuts edging the brick pavement, pleasant for men's souls who wished to loaf. The Bank was found retired behind a sycamore beneath which Indians may have lighted council fires. Up and down the High Street signs guided to stores where general merchandise was bought and sold. Whitechurch expected a railroad, but as yet only expected it. A ramshackle stage left Garth's in the morning light and returned in the evening. Folk looked out of window or stopped upon the sidewalk to see it pass, with or without passengers. "There's the stage!" Back from the High Street, down short ways named for pioneers, Indian fighters, and Colonial governors, along Washington Street that paralleled High Street, gathered the homes, brick and frame, large and small, each a unit compounded of units, a person synthesizing persons--as Whitechurch was a person, and the county a person, and the state a person, and the country a person, and the world a person. Most of the houses had gardens, large or small. In the spring there bloomed old shrubs, bowery and fragrant, lilac and snowball and syringa and weigelia. And there were trees and again trees, so many that in June the place grew leafy and sang like a forest.

Whatever there had been before the war, or might be in the future, the present Whitechurch had exceedingly little money. Just in these years the whole country, North and South, knew financial depression. Inflation met Nemesis in the road. Whitechurch was poor, but Whitechurch prided itself upon its ability to rise above what it called "material considerations." Mr. Millwood was a good leader here, and Doctor Young likewise, and four or five other estimable figures, men and women, whom I see now through a mist of laughing and liking. There was plenty of grit in Whitechurch. It prided itself upon its sense of values, religious, esthetic, and social.

Ten of the Hilltop boarding pupils were boys above fourteen. Out of this number the principal saw sparks of promise in at least five. And there were the boarding teachers who should, who must, give scholastic distinction to the cultural life of Whitechurch. The principal himself felt the weight of his responsibility. Doctor Young, the four boarding teachers, the five boys that scintillated and the five that were supposed to be deader coals, attended in a body the fortnightly meetings of the Whitechurch Literary and Debating Society. When there were concerts we went; when there came to town stray lecturers (if Doctor Young approved their subjects) we went. Twice or thrice when there were passionate political harangues (Democratic) we went. Each summer and each winter each church had a supper or festival or lawn party. The Women's Mite Society or the Women's Missionary Society made, collected, and sold good things to eat. We went to these fund-raising church affairs. And of course we went to church. There Hilltop divided. Episcopalians went to St. Matthew's, Presbyterians to Doctor Baird's church, Baptists to the Baptist church, Methodists to the Methodist church. We had no Catholics nor Quakers, nor Unitarians, nor other sectarians. Church-going was not conceived of as among cultural activities. It was a flat command of God. Commands of God were outside of question or modification and outside of comparison with other activities. I discussed this with Gamaliel. "Then something acts besides God?" He answered. "Of course! Don't you know your devil?" We went to Sunday-school and were in Doctor Young's class, and heard there indeed of a fearful devil.... Only--only--he linked on so beautifully to the devil Mandy's Jim believed in! He was a devil of physical terror--but, even so, of grotesque terror!

For all the devil that it talked about Whitechurch, as a whole, was of a sunny temperament. Evils were there, shadows of ignorance and weakness, ancient falsehoods, lusts, vanities, arrogances, and angers. But it wanted to do right, it wanted to grow. Gamaliel wanted that, and I wanted that, and Doctor Young and Mr. Millwood, and Mrs. Young upon her sofa, and the maiden cousins, and Aunt Ailsy in the kitchen, and the teachers and the loafers about Garth's Hotel, and all the townsfolk, those who had more momentum and those who had less, souls ripening, and souls green and crude.