A Daughter of the Middle Border Part 34

The mason called insatiably for more brick, more mortar, and the chimney (the only outside chimney in Hamilton township) rose grandly, alarmingly above the roof--whilst I gained a reputation for princely expenditure which it will take me a long time to live down.

Suddenly discovering that we had no fire-clay for the lining of the firebox, I ordered it by express (another ruinous extravagance), and the work went on. It was almost done when a cold rain began, driving the workmen indoors.

Zulime fairly ached with eagerness to have an end of the mess, and the mason catching the spirit of our unrest worked on in the rain. One by one the bricks slipped into place.

"Oh, how beautiful the fire would be on a day like this!" exclaimed Zulime. "Do you think it will ever be finished? I can't believe it. It's all a dream. It won't draw--or something. It's too good to be true."

"It will be done to-night--and it will draw," I stoutly replied.

At noon, the inside being done, Otto went outside to complete the top, toiling heroically in the drizzle.

At last, for the fourth time we cleaned the room of all but a few chips of the sill, which I intended to use for our first blaze. Then, at my command, Zulime took one end of the thick, rough mantel and together we swung it into place above the arch. Our fireplace was complete!

Breathlessly we waited the signal to apply the match.

At five o'clock the mason from the chimney top cheerily called, "_Let 'er go!_"

Striking a match I handed it to Zulime. She touched it to the shavings.

Our chimney took life. It drew! It roared!!

Pulling the curtains close, to shut out the waning daylight, we drew our chairs about our hearth whereon the golden firelight was playing. We forgot our troubles, and Mary Isabel pointing her pink, inch-long forefinger at it, laughed with glee. Never again would she sit above a black hole in the floor to warm her toes.

Out of the corners of the room the mystic ancestral shadows leapt, to play for her sake upon the walls. "She will now acquire the poet's fund of sweet subconscious memories," I declared. "The color of all New England home-life is in that fire. Centuries of history are involved in its flickering shadows. We have put ourselves in touch with our Anglo-Saxon ancestors at last."

"It already looks as ancient as the house," Zulime remarked, and so indeed it did, for its rude inner walls had blackened almost instantly, and its rough, broad, brick hearth fitted harmoniously into the brown floor. The thick plank mantle (stained a smoky-green) seemed already clouded with age. Its expression was perfect--to us, and when father "happened in" and drawing his armchair forward took Mary Isabel in his arms, the firelight playing over his gray hair and on the chubby cheeks of the child, he made a picture immemorial in its suggestion, typifying all the hearths and all the grandsires and fair-skinned babes of New England history.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The old soldier and pioneer loved to take the children on his knees and bask in the light of the fire. At such times he made a picture which typed forth to me all the chimney corners and all the Anglo-Saxon grandsires for a thousand years. In him I saw the past.

In them I forecast the future. In him an era was dying, in them Life renewed her swiftly pa.s.sing web.]

The grim old house had a soul. It was now in the fullest sense a hearth and a home. Oh, Mother and David, were you with us at that moment? Did you look upon us from the dusky corners, adding your faint voices to the chorus of our songs? I hope so. I try to believe so.

That night when Mary Isabel was asleep and I sat alone beside the hearth, another and widely different magic came from those embers. Their tongues of flame, subtly interfused with smoke, called back to memory the many camp-fires I had builded beside the streams, beneath the pines of the mountain west.

Each of my tenting places drew near. At one moment, far in the Skeena Valley, I sat watching the brave fire beat back the darkness and the rain--hearing a glacial river roaring from the night. At another I was encamped in the shelter of a mighty cliff, listening in awe while along its lofty shelves the lions prowled and in the cedars, amid the ruins of prehistoric cities, the wind chanted a solemn rune filled with the voices of those whose bones had long since been mingled with the dust.

Oh, the good days on the trail!

I cannot lose you--I will not!

Here in the amber of my song I hold you.

Here where neither time nor change Can do you wrong.

I sweep you together, The harvest of a continent. The gold Of a thousand days of quest.

So, when I am old, Like a chained eagle I can sit And dream and dream Of splendid s.p.a.ces, The gleam of rivers, And the smell of prairie flowers.

So, when I have quite forgot The heritage of books, I still shall know The splendor of the mountains, and the glow Of sunset on the vanished plain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Fairy World of Childhood

One night just before leaving for the city, I invited a few of my father's old cronies to come in and criticize my new chimney. They all came,--Lottridge, Stevens, Shane, Johnson, McKinley, all the men who meant the most to my sire, and as they took seats about the glowing hearth, the most matter-of-fact of them warmed to its poetic a.s.sociations, and the sternest of them softened in face and tone beneath its magic light.

Each began by saying, "An open fire is nice to sit by, but not much good as a means of heating the house," and having made this concession to the practical, they each and all pa.s.sed to minute and loving descriptions of just the kind of fireplaces their people used to have back in Connecticut or Maine or Vermont. Stevens described the ancestral oven, Lottridge told of the family hob and crane, and throughout all this talk a note of wistful tenderness ran. They were stirred to their depths and yet concealed it. Not one had the courage to build such a chimney but every man of them covertly longed for it, dimly perceiving its value as an altar of memory, unconsciously acknowledging its poignant youthful a.s.sociations. The beauty of vanished faces, the forms of the buried past drew near, and in the golden light of reminiscent dream, each grizzled head took on a softer, n.o.bler outline. The prosaic was forgot. The poetry of their lives was restored.

Father was at his best, hospitable, reminiscent, jocund. His pride in me was expressed in his faith in my ability to keep this fire going.

"Hamlin don't mind a little expense like this chimney," he said. "He put it in just to amuse the baby,--so he says and I believe him. He can afford it--so I'm not saying a word, in fact I like an open fire so well I'm thinking of putting one into my own house."

To this several replied by saying, "We'd have a riot in our house if we put in such an extravagance." Others declared, "It's all a question of dirt. Our wives would never stand the ashes."

We had provided apples and nuts, doughnuts, cider and other characteristic refreshments of the older day, but alas! most of our guests no longer took coffee at night, and only one or two had teeth for popcorn or stomach for doughnuts. As a feast our evening was a failure.

"I used to eat anything at any time," Lottridge explained, "probably that is the reason why I can't do it now. In those days we didn't know anything about 'calories' or 'balanced rations.' We et what was set before us and darn glad to get it."

Shane with quiet humor recalled the days when buckwheat cakes and sausages swimming in pork fat and covered with maple syrup, formed his notion of a good breakfast. "Just one such meal would finish me now," he added with a rueful smile.

These were the men who had been the tireless reapers, the skilled wood-choppers, the husky threshers of the olden time, and as they talked, each of them reverting to significant events in those heroic days, I sobered with a sense of irreparable loss. Pathos and humor mingled in their talk of those far days!

Shane said, "Remember the time I 'bushed' you over in Dunlap's meadow?"

To this my father scornfully replied, "You bushed me! I can see you, now, sitting there under that oak tree mopping your red face. I had you 'petered' before ten o'clock."

It all came back as they talked,--that buoyant world of the reaper and the binder, when harvesting was a kind of Homeric game in which, with rake and scythe, these l.u.s.ty young sons of the East contended for supremacy in the field. "None of us had an extra dollar," explained Stevens, "but each of us had what was better, good health and a faith in the future. Not one of us had any intention of growing old."

"Old! There _weren't_ any old people in those days," a.s.serted Lottridge.

Along about the middle of the evening they all turned in on a game of "Rummy," finding in cards a welcome relief from the unexpressed torment of the contrast between their decrepit, hopeless present and the glowing, glorious past.

My departure on a lecture trip at ten o'clock disturbed their game only for a moment, and as I rode away I contrasted the n.o.ble sanity and the high courage of those white-haired veterans of the Border, with the att.i.tude of certain types of city men I knew. Facing death at something less than arm's length, my father and his fellows nevertheless remained wholesomely interested in life. None of them were pious, some of them were not even religious, but they all had a st.u.r.dy faith in the essential justice of the universe. They were still playing the game as best they knew.

Like Eugene Ware they could say--

"Standing by life's river, deep and broad, I take my chances, ignorant but unawed."

As I sat among my fellow members at the Club, three days later, I again recalled my father and his group. Here, too, I was in the Zone of Age.

A. M. Palmer, a feeble and melancholy old man, came in and wandered about with none to do him reverence, and St. Gaudens, who was in the city for medical treatment, shared his dry toast and his cereal coffee with me of a morning. George Warner, who kept a cheerful countenance, admitted that he did so by effort. "I don't like the thought of leaving this good old earth," he confessed one afternoon. "It gives me a pang every time I consider it." None of these men faced death with finer courage than my sire.

As I had a good deal of free time in the afternoon, and as I also had a room at the Club, I saw much of St. Gaudens. We really became acquainted. One morning as we met at breakfast he replied to my question with a groan and a mild cuss word: "Worse, thank you! I've just been to Washington, and on the train last night I ate ice-cream for dinner. I knew I'd regret it, but ice-cream is my weakness." He was at once humorous and savage for, as he explained, "the doctor will not let me work and there is nothing for me to do but sit around the Club library and read or write letters."

He wrote almost as many letters as I did, and so we often faced each other across a desk in the writing room. Sometimes he spoke of President Roosevelt who was employing him on the new designs for our coins, sometimes he alluded to the work awaiting him in his studio. Oh! how homesick we both were! Perhaps he felt the near approach of the hour when his cunning hand must drop its tool. I know the thought came to me, creating a tenderer feeling toward him. I saw him in a sorrowful light.

He drew nearer to me, seeming more like a friend and neighbor.

I have said that I had a good deal of time on my hands, and so it seemed to me then and yet during this trip I visited many of my friends, prepared _The Tyranny of the Dark_ for serial publication, attended a dinner to Henry James, was one of the Guests of Honor at the Camp Fire Club and acted as teller (with Hopkinson Smith) in the election which founded the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a fairly full program as I look back upon it, but I had a great many hours to spend in writing to Zulime and in dreaming about Mary Isabel. In spite of all my n.o.ble companions, my dinners, speeches and honors I was longing for my little daughter and her fireplace, and at last I put aside all invitations and took the westward trail, counting the hours which intervened between my laggard coach and home.

At times I realized the danger which lay in building so much of my content on the life of one small creature, but for the most part I rejoiced in the fact that she was in my world, even though I had a growing sense of its illusory and generally unsatisfactory character. I found comfort in the knowledge that billions of other men had preceded me and billions more would follow me, and that the only real things in my world were the human relationships. To make my wife and child happy, to leave the world a little better than I found it, these formed my creed.

It was cold, crisp, clear winter when I returned to West Salem and the village again suggested a Christmas card ill.u.s.tration as I walked up the street. The snow cried out under my shoe soles with shrill familiar squeal, carrying me back to the radiant mornings in Iowa when I trod the boardwalks of Osage on my way to the Seminary Chapel, my books under my arm and the courage of youth in my heart. Now a wife and daughter awaited me.