Delphi collected works o.., p.50
Delphi Collected Works of Grant Allen, page 50
‘I know it, some,’ Hiram answered, delighted, ‘but it ain’t out yet; it comes a bit later. But I kin draw it for you, if you like, so’s you can know it when it comes into blossom.’ And he felt in his pocket for some invisible object, which he soon produced in the visible shape of a small red jasper arrowhead. The boy was just beginning to scratch a figure with it on a flat piece of water-rolled limestone when Audouin’s quick eye caught sight, sideways, of the beautifully chipped implement.
‘Ha, ha,’ he cried, taking it from Hiram suddenly, ‘what have we here, eh? The red man: his mark: as plain as printing. The broad arrow of the aboriginal possessor of all America! Why, this is good; this is jasper. Where on earth did you get this from?’
‘Whar on airth, ‘Hiram echoed, astonished anew; ‘why jest over thar: I picked it up as I kem along this morning. Thar’s lots about, ‘specially in spring time.’Pears as if the Injuns shot ’em off at painters and bars and settlers and things, and missed sometimes, and lost ’em. Then they lie thar in the ground a long time till some hard winter comes along to uncover ’em. Hard winters, the frost throws ’em up; and when the snow melts, the water washes ’em out into the furrers. I’ve got crowds of ’em to home; arrowheads and tommyhawks, and terbacker pipes, an’ all sorts. I pick ’em up every spring, reglar.’ Audouin looked at the boy with a far more earnest and searching glance for a moment; then he turned quickly to the Professor. ‘There’s something in this,’ he said, in a serious tone, very different from his previous half-unreal banter. ‘The bucolic intelligence evidently extends deeper than its linguistic faculties might at first lead one to suspect.’ He spoke intentionally in hieroglyphics, aiming his words above the boy’s head; but Hiram caught the general sense notwithstanding, and flushed slightly with ingenuous pride. ‘Well, let’s see your drawing,’ Audouin went on, with a gracious smile, handing the boy back his precious little bit of pointed jasper.
Hiram took the stone weapon between finger and thumb, and scratching the surface of the waterworn pebble lightly with its point in a few places, produced in a dozen strokes a rough outline of the Canadian tassel-flower. Audouin looked at the hasty sketch in evident astonishment. It was his turn now to be completely surprised. ‘Why, look here, Professor,’ he said very slowly: ‘this is — yes, this is — actually a drawing.’
The Professor took the pebble from his hands, and scanned it closely. ‘Why, yes,’ he said, in some surprise. ‘There’s certainly a great deal of native artistic freedom about the leaf and flower. It’s excellent; in fact, quite astonishing. I expected a diagrammatic representation; this is really, as you say, Audouin, a drawing.’
Hiram looked on in perfect silence: but the colour came hot and bright in his cheek with very unwonted pleasure and excitement. To hear himself praised and encouraged for drawing was indeed a wonder. So very unlike the habits and manners of the deacon.
‘Do you ever draw with a pencil?’ Audouin asked after a moment’s pause, ‘or do you always scratch your sketches like this on flat bits of pebble?’
‘Oh, I hev a pencil and book in my pocket,’ Hiram answered shyly; ‘only I kinder didn’t care to waste the paper on a thing like that; an’ besides, I was scar’t that you two growed-ups mightn’t think well of my picturs that I’ve drawed in it.’
‘Produce the pictures,’ Audouin said in a tone of authority, leaning back against the trunk of the hickory.
Hiram drew them from his pocket timidly.
‘Thar they are,’ he murmured, with a depreciatory gesture. ‘They ain’t much, but they’re all the picturs I knowed how to draw.’
Audouin took the book in his hand — Sam Churchill’s ten-cent copybook — and turned over the well-filled pages with a critical eye. The Professor, too, glanced at it over his shoulder. Hiram stood mute and expectant before them, with eyes staring blankly, and in the expressive uncouth attitude of a naïf shamefaced American country boy.
At last Audouin came to the last page.
‘Well, Professor’ — he said inquiringly.
‘Something in them, isn’t there, eh? This boy’ll make a painter, I surmise, won’t he?’ The Professor answered only by opening a small portfolio, and taking out a little amateur water-colour drawing. ‘Look here, my son,’ he said, holding it up before Hiram. ‘Do you think you could do that sort of thing?’
‘I guess I could,’ Hiram answered, with the unhesitating confidence of inexperienced youth. ‘ef I’d on’y got the right sort of colours to do it with.’
The Professor laughed heartily. ‘Then you shall have them, anyhow,’ he said promptly. ‘Native talent shall not go unrewarded for the sake of a paltry box of Prussian blue and burnt sienna. You shall have them right off and no mistake. Where do you live, Mr. Melibous?’
‘My name’s Hiram,’ the boy answered, a little smartly, for he somehow felt the unknown nickname was not entirely a courteous one: ‘Hiram Winthrop, and I live jest t’other side of Muddy Creek deepo.’
‘Winthrop,’ Audouin put in gaily. ‘Winthrop. I see it all now. Good old Massachusetts name, Winthrop: connected with the hub of the universe after all, it seems, in spite of mere superficial appearances to the contrary. But it’s a pretty far cry to Muddy Creek dépôt, my friend. You must be hungry, ain’t you? Have you had your dinner?’
‘No, I ain’t.’
‘Then you sit down right there, my boy, and pitch into those sandwiches.’
Hiram lost no time in obeying the seasonable invitation.
‘How do you find them?’ asked Audouin.
‘Real elegant,’ Hiram answered.
‘Have some wine?’
‘I never tasted none,’ the boy replied:
‘But it looks real nice. I don’t mind ef I investigate it.’
Audouin poured him out a small cupful. The boy took it with the ease of a freeborn citizen, very unlike the awkwardness of an English plough-boy — an awkwardness which shows itself at once the last relic of original serfdom. ‘Tain’t bad,’ he said, tasting it. ‘So that’s wine, then! Nothing so much to go gettin’ mad about either. I reckon the colour’s the best thing about it, any way.’
They waited till the boy had finished his luncheon, and then Audouin began asking him a great many questions, cunningly devised questions to draw him out, about the plants, and the animals, and the drawings, and the neighbourhood, and himself, till at last Hiram grew quite friendly and confidential. He entered freely into the natural history and psychology of the deacon. He told them all his store of self-acquired knowledge. He omitted nothing, from the cuffs and reprobation to Sam Churchill and the bald-headed eagles. At each fresh item Audouin’s interest rose higher and higher. ‘Have you gone to school, Hiram?’ he asked at last.
‘Common school,’ Hiram answered briefly. ‘Learnt much there?’
‘Headin’, writin’, spellin’, ‘rithmetic, scrip-tur’, jography, an’ hist’ry an’ const’tooshun of the United States,’ Hiram replied, with the sharp promptitude begotten of rote learning.
Audouin smiled a sardonic Massachusetts smile. ‘A numerous list of accomplishments, indeed,’ he answered, playing with his watch-chain carelessly. ‘The history of the United States in particular must be intensely interesting. But the Indians — you learnt about them yourself, I suppose — that’s so, isn’t it, Hiram? What we learn of ourselves is always in the end the best learning. Well, now look here, my boy; how’d you like to go to college, and perhaps in time teach school yourself?’
‘I’d like that fust-rate,’ Hiram answered; ‘but I think I’d like best of all to go to sea, or to be a painter.’
‘To be a painter,’ Audouin murmured softly; ‘to be a painter. Our great continent hasn’t produced any large crop of prominent citizens who wanted to be painters. This one might, after all, be worth trying. Well, Hiram, do you think if I were to ask your father, there’s any chance that he might possibly be willing to let you go to college?’
‘Nary chance at all,’ Hiram answered vigorously. ‘Why, father couldn’t spare me from the peppermint an’ the pertaters; an’ as to goin’ to college, why, it ain’t in the runnin’ any way.’
‘Professor,’ Audouin said, ‘this boy interests me. He’s vital: he’s aboriginal: he’s a young Antæus fresh from the bare earth of the ploughed fields and furrows. Let’s till him; without cutting down all the trees, let’s lay him out in park and woodland. I’ll have a try, anyhow, with this terrible father of yours, Hiram. Are you going home now?’
‘I reckon I must,’ the boy answered with a nod. ‘He’ll be mad enough with me as it is for stopping away so long from him.’
‘You’ll get a thrashing, I’m afraid, when you go home?’
‘I guess that’s jest the name of it.’
‘Professor,’ Audouin said, rising resolutely, ‘this means business. We must see this thing right through immediately to the very conclusion. The boy must not have his thrashing. I’ll go and see the father — beard the Geauga County agriculturist in his very lair: dispute his whelp with him: play lambent lightning round him: save the young Antæus from sinking in the natural course of things into one more pickier of pork and contented devourer of buttered buckwheat pancakes. There’s a spark in him somewhere: I’m going to try whether I can manage to blow it up into a full-fed flame.’
CHAPTER VII. THE DEACON FALTERS.
Boston has worn itself out. The artificial centre of an unnatural sickly exotic culture ever alien to the American soil, it has gone on studying, criticising, analysing, till all the vigour and spontaneity it may ever have possessed has utterly died out of it from pure inanition. The Nemesis of sterility has fallen upon its head in the second generation. It has cultivated men, fastidious critics, receptive and appreciative intellects by the thousand; but of thinkers, workers, originalities, hardly now a single one.
Lothrop Audouin was the very embodiment of the discontent and mocking intellectual nihilism begotten of this purely critical unoriginative attitude. Reaction against American materialism was the mainspring of his inner being. He felt himself out of harmony with the palace cars on the New York Central Railroad; jarring and conflicting with the big saloons of the Windsor Hotel; unappreciative of the advertising enterprise on the rocks of the Hudson River; at war with mammoth concerns, gigantic newspapers, Presidential booms, State legislatures, pop corn, saw mills, utilisation of water power, and all the other component elements of the great American civilisation. Therefore, being happily endowed by fate and his ancestors with a moderate competence, even as moderate competences go on the other side of the Atlantic, he had fled from Boston and the world to take refuge in the woods and the marshes. For some years he had hidden himself in the western hill district of Massachusetts; but being driven thence by the march of intellect (enthroned on a steam plough), he had just removed to a new cottage on the shore of Muddy Creek, not far from its entry into Lake Ontario. There he lived a solitary life, watching the birds and beasts and insects, sketching the trees and shrubs and flowers, and shunning for the most part his fellow-man, save only his friend, the distinguished ornithologist, Professor Ezra P. Hipkiss, of Harvard College, Massachusetts.
The Professor had left them, intending to return home by himself; and Audouin walked back alone with the boy, noticing at every step his sharp appreciation of all the natural signs and landmarks around him. At last a sudden thought seemed to strike Hiram. He drew back a second in momentary hesitation.
‘Say,’ he said falteringly, ‘you ain’t one of Father Noyes’s crowd at Oneida, are you?’
Audouin smiled half contemptuously.
Father Noyes is a New Haven fanatic who has established an Agapemone of his own in northern New York; and to Hiram, who had heard the Oneida community spoken of with vague horror by all the surrounding farmers from his babyhood upward, the originally separate and distinct notions of Father Noyes and the Devil had so coalesced that even now in his maturer years they were not completely differentiated or demarcated. ‘No, no,’ Audouin answered reassuringly: ‘I’m not one of the Oneida people, my boy: I’m quite free from any taint of that sort. I’m a Boston man; a Boston man, I said; even in the woods that sticks to me. “Patriæ quis exul,” I think the line runs, “se quoque fugit.”’ Hiram didn’t understand exactly what he was driving at, but he went along satisfied at least that his strange acquaintance, though he spoke with tongues, was not directly connected either with Father Noyes or the Devil.
By-and-by they reached the high-road, and came at last opposite the bare gate that gave access to Deacon Winthrop’s yard. Audouin gazed about him drearily at the dreary prospect. ‘A very American view, Hiram,’ he said slowly: ‘civilisation hard at work here; my boy, we must try to redeem you out of it.’
Hiram looked up in the stranger’s face curiously. He had grown up among his native surroundings so unquestioningly, after the fashion of boys, that, though he knew it was all very ugly, hopelessly and hideously ugly, it would never even have occurred to him to say so in so many words. He took it for granted that all the world was of course dull and uninteresting, except the woods, and the weeds, and the marshes, and the vermin. He expected always to find all man’s handicraft a continuous course of uglification, and he never suspected that there could by any possibility be anything beautiful except untouched and unpolluted nature. If you had told him about the wonders and glories of art, he would simply have listened to you then in mute incredulity.
Audouin lifted up the latch of the gate and walked into the yard; and the deacon, seeing him approach, strode to meet him, in no very amiable frame of mind, thinking it probable that this was only another one of Hiram’s undesirable trapper acquaintances. To say the truth, the misapprehension was a natural one. Audouin was coarsely dressed in rough country clothes, and even when he spoke a nature like the deacon’s was hardly of the sort to be much impressed by his quiet cultivated manner. ‘Wal, cap’n,’ the deacon said, coming towards them, ‘what might you be lookin’ after this mornin’, eh? I presume you air on the look-out for horses?’
Audouin smiled and bowed with a dignity which suited strangely with his rude outer aspect. ‘No, sir,’ he answered in his bland voice. ‘I’m not looking out for horses. I met your son here — a very interesting boy — down by the Creek, and I have come up here with him because his individuality attracted me. I wanted to have a talk with you about him.’ As it happened, to speak well of Hiram, and before his face too (the scapegrace!), wasn’t exactly the surest path to the deacon’s esteem and affection. He coughed nervously, and then inquired in his dry manner, ‘Trapper?’ ‘No, not exactly a trapper,’ Audouin replied, smiling again faintly. The faint smile and the ‘exactly’ both misled and exasperated the deacon.
‘Farmer, then?’ he continued laconically, after the fashion of the country.
‘No, nor farmer either,’ the New Englander answered in his soft voice. ‘I am Mr. Audouin, of Lakeside Cottage.’
The deacon scanned him contemptuously from head to foot. ‘Oh, Mister Audouin,’ he said significantly. ‘Wal, Mister Audouin, so you’ve bought up that thar ramshackle place of Hitchcock’s, hev you? And what air you goin’ to dew with it naow you’ve got it? Clear off the timber, I reckon, and set up rafting.’
‘God forbid,’ Audouin replied hastily. (The deacon frowned slightly at such obvious profanity.) ‘I’ve taken the place just because of its very wildness, and I merely wish to live in it and watch and sympathise with nature. I see your son loves nature, too, and that has formed a bond of union between us.’
‘Wal,’ the deacon murmured meditatively, ‘that’s all accordin’ to taste. Hiram is my own son, an’ if the Lord has bin pleased to afflict us in him, mother an’ me ain’t the ones to say nothin’ agin him to casual strangers, anyway. But I don’t want to part with him, Mister Audouin; we ain’t lookin’ out for a place for him yet. Thar’s work enough for him to do on this farm, I kin tell you, ef on’y he’d do it. You wasn’t in want of any butter or eggs now, was you?’
‘No, Mr. Winthrop,’ Audouin answered seriously, leaning against the gate as he spoke. ‘I see you quite misunderstand me. Allow me a moment to explain the position. I’m a Boston man, a man of independent means, and I’ve taken Lakeside because I wish to live alone, away from a world in which I have really very little interest. You may possibly know, by name at least, my uncle, Senator Lothrop, of Syracuse;’ (that was a horrid bit of snobbery, worthy almost of the old world, Audouin thought to himself as he uttered it; but it was necessary if he was to do anything for Hiram). ‘Well, that’s my card — some use in civilisation after all — Lothrop Audouin; and I was wandering in the woods by the Creek this morning with my friend, Professor Hipkiss of Harvard, when I happened to fall in quite accidentally with your son here. He charmed us by his knowledge of nature all around, and, indeed, I was so much interested in him that I thought I would just step over and have a little conversation with you about his future.’
The deacon took the little bit of pasteboard suspiciously, and looked with slowly melting incredulity at Audouin’s rough dress from head to foot. Even upon his dense, coarse, materialised mind the truth began to dawn slowly that he was dealing with a veritable gentleman. ‘Wal, Mr. Audouin,’ he said, this time without the ironical emphasis upon the ‘Mister,’ ‘what do yer want to dew with the boy, eh, sir? I don’t see as I kin spare him; ‘pears to me, ef he’s goin anywhar, he may as well go to a good farmer’s.’
‘You mistake me still,’ Audouin went on. ‘My meaning is this. Your son has talked to the Professor and myself, and has shown us some of his sketches.’ The deacon nodded ominously. ‘Now, his conversation is so intelligent and his drawings so clever, that we both think you ought to make an effort to give him a good education. He would well repay it. We have both a considerable influence in educational quarters, and we would willingly exert it for his benefit.’
