The Debatable Land Part 1

The Debatable Land.

by Arthur Colton.

Part I

"The Debatable Land"

Chapter I

"Hinter die Kirche bluhe die blaue Blume der Zufriedenheit."--MEISTER ECKHART.

Widow Bourn's house stood behind the church, and blue flowers grew contentedly on the sloping green, shy fancies of a maiden spring that never lasted out a summer's experience. New England churches have not that air of nestling comfort which seemed to Meister Eckhart so sweet a symbol. They crown the hills with square frames and sharpened steeples, churches militant, plate-mailed in clapboards, with weather-vane aimed defiantly into the wind. Their doors are closed, their windows shuttered against all days of the week saving one. But Widow Bourn found the proximity comfortable. The church militant faced the issues of the spirit for her, and subdued them. She plodded through her Bible, drawing contentment from texts that meant no such matter, seeing in the ecclesiast's despondency only reflections connected here and there with sermons. "It is a pleasant thing to stand on the sh.o.r.e when other people are in the floods," the melancholy Roman poet remarked, meaning that it _would be_, because it was something his ever-journeying spirit in the waste seas of thought rendered impracticable for himself.

A gate opened from the widow's garden on the sloping green.

Heavy-scented lilacs, purple and white, hung over it, and followed the fence at fragrant intervals. Lilacs crowded along the garden walls, pushed against green pillars of the porch and drooped luxurious heads at the windows. Lilacs are tropical and anti-puritan; they belong with the chuckle of lutes over low cas.e.m.e.nts, and liquid voices speaking a vowelled tongue. Widow Bourn was pleasant-tempered, placid, possessed of a stillness, a certain dignity, and a frame not overpadded, but comfortable.

The Bourns were early settlers in Hagar. The settlers were still feeling their way in the wilderness beyond the Connecticut, sensible farmers who bargained for whole mountain ranges and valleys of the magnificent savage, and recorded the transaction in minutes of the town-meeting.

The magnificent savage commonly declared that his heart was great; he would sell the lands from the crooked lake to the joining of swift rivers to his white brothers, who marked the boundaries inferred from the sachem's oratory, and omitted to comment on the humor of it in minutes of the town-meeting. When the first Simon Bourn piled hewn beams for his cabin and ran his plough around stumps of trees that had furnished the beams there were few cabins in the neighborhood, and the town-meeting was held fifteen miles away. The last Simon Bourn ran his plough along the same hill-side, not dodging the same stumps, but the hill-side still drew up stones out of its inner perversity to check his plough. He found the slope of his life, like the slope of his ancestral fields, unfertile, shallow-soiled. The five generations of Bourns had acc.u.mulated and transmitted this opinion of their lives and hilly fields, that on the whole they were not justified.

Simon died in the early fifties and was buried in Hagar's hemlocked graveyard. Oddly enough, he seemed to regret it. Widow Bourn a.s.sociated herself with this regret, but regret has commonly an element of interrupted possibilities in it, and these must have lain the rather in Nellie, a yellow-headed, long-limbed, swift-footed maiden whose level gray eyes had in them a certain challenge and accusation, and whose years were ten.

"Don't let Nellie forget me," he said, and the graver carved on his tombstone, "Remember Me." Simon perhaps intended it only for Nellie, but that did not prevent its forcing the pa.s.ser to "remember" him, who never knew him and did not care about it. "Simon Bourn--Born ----, Died ----.

Remember," in raised letters on a white tombstone, stared out of the green gloom of the hemlocks. So the Elder Hamlet desired, "Remember Me."

"Remember thee, poor ghost?" Why remember? Go your ways, Simon Bourn, and trouble us not. It might have struck the public as egotistic, which was only a pathetic impulse pointing to Nellie, if the public had not been in the habit of accepting epitaphs of all kinds with a tolerance born of experience.

One could understand the exception Simon made in favor of Helen from his opinion and feeling about the world he left--that it was not on the whole justified--could understand it in this way, that there was something in her young gravity and impetuous faith which seemed to isolate whatever she looked at. To be considered and remembered by her seemed important. It lifted one out of triviality. In Hagar she was a p.r.o.nounced, a separate person. Hagar itself was compact of varieties, but Helen was intense in conception and direct in action to surprise Hagar. She ran away with Morgan Map to the Hamilton County Fair, and came back in the gray dawn, white-lipped with weariness. A neighbor or two had sat up with Widow Bourn to prevent her worrying. It was a gratifying success. The widow slept by the fire. Morgan was eighteen then, but the Maps were somewhat out of the reach of Hagar's opinion.

She smote Mr. Paulus with a paint-brush across the face for interfering with her painting designs on cows and cats. They were not his cows and cats. That question in ethics threw Hagar into excited division, and it was not remembered whose cows and cats they were. She was sent to Miss Savage's School in Wimberton; muttering rumors of her crossed the Cattle Ridge. At sixteen she was thrown by one of the Sanderson horses, a red-eyed, ugly breed of racers; and Joe Sanderson, then aged nine, ran at the horse and shot a barbed arrow into its hide, out of his bitter wrath and love of Nellie; and Nellie lay a twelvemonth and more on her back to cure her spine. These are but instances of enterprise. Whatever stood the challenge or test of worth and reality in her eyes was apt to be a cause of sudden valor or unreckoned devotion.

The accident was in 1858, the year after Squire Map's wife died, whose name was once Edith Lorn. There was a great funeral in Hagar, and carriages from down the Wyantenaug Valley as far as Hamilton. There was an explosion then, too, in the Map family regarding property. Gerald and Morgan were supposed to have announced their independence on the strength of their majority and inheritance. The squire took to himself a grudge against the world where sons are unfilial, friends betray, and love falls from negation to negation, and began that lonely life which lasted twenty years, shut in and brooding in the square house on the hill half a mile out on the Cattle Ridge road. Gerald Map came no more to Hagar, but Morgan was seen at times. He rode up from Hamilton the day after Helen's fall, talked with the doctor, went up-stairs and kissed her cheek, and departed, silent to Widow Bourn's murmured remonstrance. "He shouldn't do that!"

Helen said: "Oh, that's all right," indifferently, and Widow Bourn fell to extracting comfort from the situation. If a honey-bee extracts anything from anywhere, it is honey; she may not extract anything. There was a comfort in knowing where Helen was the day long; not that the widow's comfort had ever been seriously long disturbed, but Helen quiescent was more comfortable than Helen active, in process of silent loading or sudden discharge. One could consider her clothes at leisure, not in heated endeavor to have one dress for Sunday without a lateral or perpendicular rip. Everything in the balm of the widow's temperament took the soft flow of slow waters, as Simon's plaintive discontent had long before to her ears come to resemble Ecclesiastes. Helen was more difficult to adapt herself to, because Helen grew and changed. Now, the growth and change seemed for the time to have ceased. She was no less mysterious; but a mystery which is constant and presents the same inscrutable face, and not always another and another, is more comfortable. Helen's life, after cataracts and restless seeking, seemed to have flowed into a dark pool, and lay there reflecting clouds, patches of stars, and the edges of dim forests.

The similitudes of young maidens and varied flowers, the happy possibilities in that comparison, were discovered of earliest poets. Out of the best of intentions there has come to us so far only the conviction that Helen did not resemble the blue violets growing behind the church in Hagar. As for Simon's epitaph, it outlasts the story and is still to be read. One may lean over the wall of the cemetery, say, at twilight, when the shadow of Windless Mountain is wide over Hagar, and read it to-day, note its stiff insistence, and suit one's self with reflections on man and nature and the purport of things. An issue will be observed to lie between Simon's epitaph and the solemn, fading mountain, an issue distinct and inclusive.

Chapter II

Of Thaddeus Bourn and his Purposes

There was given to the Bourns, then, of old, natures sloping to the Northern side, or they had taken that tendency from experience. Thaddeus Bourn, that elder brother of Simon, who left Hagar so long ago as when Quincy Adams was President, and became a civil flower of society in the city of Hamilton, was a spontaneous variation or reaction from the type.

One heard that he had made a fortune airily, and lost it. He surely married another, lost part of that, and his wife of a year or two, who died and surprised him into regretting her with some sincerity. He became an official of the Hamilton County Bank, and floated on in middle life, buoyant, carrying an aroma of old fashions, a flower in his b.u.t.tonhole, a tall hat, a silver-headed cane. His eyes had wrinkles about them, his cheeks were thin, his foot light. All these were evident elements in the total of Thaddeus, but the total itself was not a sum, but a harmony. To keep the seamy side of life turned down, and its sheen always in the sun, not only was Thaddeus's practice and theory, but he belonged to a distinct school in the practice of the art, which might be called the pseudo-cla.s.sic.

He sat by Helen's bed half a day, and talked to her as to a grown lady, and was gracious and fluent. He brought the best flowers of his worldliness, and jingled all his silver bells to please her.

"Not a finer pair of eyes in Hamilton!" he said to the widow.

"Positively she must not have a crick in her back. On my word, impossible."

"We are taught to submit," said the widow, perhaps placidly, at any rate patiently. Thaddeus mounted the stairs with a wrinkled smile.

"Sheep! That woman is a sheep! Helen, my dear, your back will be as straight as my cane, I give you my word."

Nellie's lean hands, on the coverlet, and face, with its bacchante spread of hair above her head on the pillow, were losing their brown tan in the pa.s.sage of slow weeks. The delicate creeping pallor and helplessness beckoned Thaddeus to something tender, but he took council with wisdom.

"Uncle Tad," she said, "why do you about always feel good?"

"Well, well, I haven't cracked my spine. Never cracked anything but my heart and reputation--a--both of them like old varnish, on my word. Very good, varnish them again. I have"--Thaddeus used his gold eye-gla.s.ses gracefully to punctuate, emphasize, distinguish, for ill.u.s.tration, for ornament--"I have the opinion that to feel agreeable and to be agreeable are two habits that one cultivates like a garden. The first is a vegetable, the second a flower. You see? Exactly. In point of fact they are the fruit and flower of the same plant. A--a figure of speech, Nellie. If you kindly wouldn't look at me like the Angel of Judgment.

A--look at the ceiling. Thank you."

Thaddeus delicately unfolded his theory of the conduct of life, Nellie's grave eyes now and then confusing him with mute challenge.

To his experience, then, there were two cla.s.ses of people--those who were more or less pleased with the world, and those who more or less were not. Both personally and morally it was better to be in the former cla.s.s. Personally, for instance, one lived longer; morally, one, for instance, in point of fact, kept in better relations with Providence.

Now this satisfaction was to be compa.s.sed partly by a certain inward insistence on feeling agreeable--"When I buy a pair of gla.s.ses of a seller of gla.s.ses, personally, I buy a pair that--a--slightly idealize"--partly by surrounding one's self by, in point of fact, a judicious selection of circ.u.mstances. Circ.u.mstances were, in the main, people. One surrounded one's self with--that is, one sought and lived among--agreeable people, and these were found commonly among such as had circ.u.mstances already agreeable. Selfishness was a word to keep on good terms with by understanding its nature, and making one's own share of it intelligent. Enlightened selfishness was the root of society. Good society really consisted of people who had the time and took the pains to be pleasant and entertaining, in order to have pleasure and entertainment about them. This was the sensible and experienced thing in the matter of the pursuit of happiness.

"Nellie"--Thaddeus's voice took a note of gravity--"you'll let me have an interest in your pursuit. Some time"--the wrinkles of his smile shot out around his eyes--"I'll explain to you how it is a case of enlightened selfishness. Between you and me, I'm growing old, but ordinarily I deny it."

It is possible that Nellie understood very little of Thaddeus's doctrine, saw no distinct consequences whatever, and was only caught by little gleaming points of ill.u.s.tration. The charm of Thaddeus's talk lay in its opalescent effect, and this had much to do with gesture and expression; so that "good society" may have been to her a phrase of the haziest quality, except as it might mean a pair of slightly idealized eye-gla.s.ses, rimmed with gold, and pointed at one in a manner to absorb attention; "happiness," a certain wrinkled smile; and the "pursuit" of it an endeavor to smile in that way. Thaddeus thought his doctrine likely to suffer much translation. He could not follow its vanishing nor guess what would happen to it.

It was a period of brooding and slow change for Helen. At such times, one remembers, the soul was a highway for processional shadows. They have no names in language. Only here and there one finds a thing said of them that is touched with recollection; their voices are heard at times in blown drifts of music; hints are given that it is not a solitary experience.

Monthly or even more often thereafter Thaddeus left his club and familiar pavements behind him, and travelled up the Wyantenaug Valley in a dull, noisy train, even through that winter when the cold wind swept down from Windless Mountain under the pines and piled drifts more than commonly along the Windless Mountain road. "Personally" he took no interest in the columned avenues of pines, the deep white ravine, the black, tinkling stream, the groined architecture of ice. He liked well enough the scents and balm of the country spring, the lilacs and the hill winds in summer, but he liked better his pavements and club. It argued a highly enlightened selfishness, a refined nicety of calculation, such pains to be agreeable. If we charge him with calculation, it is only to admire the refinement of it, and refer the charge to his doctrine. For if the confession that he was secretly growing old meant that he foresaw life would come presently to seem a little vacant, without the intimate interest it once had, and his house on Shannon Street be visited perhaps by ghosts that would not always take pains to be agreeable, it would seem to show a skill in the pursuit of happiness, an eye for a blind trail, not unworthy of the doctrine. To foresee coming changes, what provision the soul would need in a year or two more when middle life was past and the strong pull of the ebbing tide beginning to be felt, to disguise from it the consequences of sixty years, and so to persuade it gently, without force or argument, to continue to idealize and feel agreeable, were a fine bit of diplomacy.

For it was not merely a matter of carrying Helen away to Shannon Street to start there a fresh stream of interest, but Helen must take an interest in him; they were to find each other lovable, if the choicest result were to come; and Helen was here somewhat difficult. The stream of interest was started for him. He felt it strongly when the first year was gone and Hamilton was at its wintry busiest. But it was difficult to be seen that she would pursue happiness with consistency.

It was the spring of the year '60 when she saw the green world once more, and summer before she walked free of the garden. The lilacs hung heavily and seemed almost to drip with thick perfume. Thrush, oriole, and bobolink were pursuing happiness and warbling their success.

Thaddeus was there, and chirped in rivalry.

"But your mother would rather have something to submit to."

"Oh no, Thaddeus," protested the widow, mildly.

"You like the Lord to do you an injury. It makes a pretty item on the balance-sheet."

"How can you say so?"

"My good sister!" Thaddeus raised despairing hands. "You consist entirely of negatives. There is no positive opinion that can be attributed to you. I give you a character and you deny it. You escape definition. Personally, I doubt your existence. I believe you're a myth."

Still the widow murmured, peacefully, "Oh no, Thaddeus," knitting and rocking.

Thaddeus watched Nellie's face for signs of happiness, and the widow denied with safety and a.s.surance. It was no trouble, except to fit her denials to the form of the attack. Thaddeus saw the loss of his rapier thrusts of fine casuistry sometimes with pa.s.sing irritation.