Part 11

There were three tramp-holes by the riverside, but two were sheltered hollows used only in the winter-time. The third was a collection of abandoned canal-boats on the muddy strand of the river. Most of them were hopeless wrecks; in three or four a few patches of deck remained, enough to afford lodgment and shelter to the reckless wayfarers who made nothing of sleeping close to the polluted waters that permeated the rotten hulks with foul stains and fouler smells.

From the largest of these long, clumsy carcasses of boats came a sound of muffled laughter. The two searchers crept softly up, climbed noiselessly to the deck and looked down the hatchway. The low, red sun poured in through a window below them, leaving them in shadow and making a picture in red light and black shades of the strange group below.

Surrounded by ten tramps; ten dirty, uncouth, unshaven men of the road, sat the little Penrhyn boy, his little night-shirt much travel-stained and torn, his fat legs scratched and bruised, his soiled cheeks showing the traces of tears, his lips dyed with the juices of the berries he had eaten on his way, but happy, happy, happy--happier perhaps than he had ever been in his life before; for in his hand he held a clay pipe which he made persistent efforts to smoke, while one of the men, a big black-bearded animal who wore three coats, one on top of the other, gently withdrew it from his lips each time that the smoke grew dangerously thick. And the whole ten of them, sitting around him in their rags and dirt, cheered him and petted him and praised him, even as no polite assemblage had ever worshipped him before. No food, no drink could have been so acceptable to that delicately nurtured child of the house of Penrhyn as the rough admiration of those ten tramps. Whatever terrors, sufferings, or privations he had been through were all forgotten, and he crowed and shrieked with hysterical laughter. And when his two rescuers dropped down into the hole, instead of welcoming them with joy, he grabbed one of the collars of the big brute with the three coats and wept in dire disappointment and affright.

"Fore God, boss!" said the spokesman of the gang, the sweat standing out on his brow, "we didn't mean him no harm, and we wouldn't have done him no harm neither. We found de little blokey over der in the ma'sh yonder, and we tuk him in and fed him de best we could. We was goin' to take him up to the man what keeps the gin-mill up the river there, for we hadn't no knowledge where he come from, and we didn't want to get none of you folks down on us. I know we oughter have took him up two hours ago, but he was foolin' that funny-like that we all got kinder stuck on it, see, and we kinder didn't want to shake him. That's all there was to it, boss. God in heaven be my judge, I ain't lyin', and that's the truth!"

The faces of the ten tramps could not turn white, but they did show an ashen fear under their eyes--a deadly fear of the two men for whom any one of them would have been more than a match, but who represented the world from which they were outcasts, the world of Home, of whose most precious sweetness they had stolen an hour's enjoyment--the world so strong and terrible to avenge a wrong to its best beloved.

Then the silence was broken by the voice of the child, wailing piteously:

"I don't want to be tooken away from the raggedty gentlemen!"

Dirck still looked suspicious as he took the weeping child, but Halford smiled grimly, thoughtfully and sadly, as he put his hand in his pocket and said: "I guess it's all right, boys, but I think you'd better get away for the present. Take this and get over the river and out of the county. The people have been searching for this baby all day, and I don't know whether they'll listen to my friend and me."

* * * * *

The level red light had left the valleys and low places, and lit alone the hilltop where the mother was watching, when a great shout came out of the darkness, spreading from voice to voice through the great expanse below, and echoed wildly from above, thrilling men's blood and making hearts stand still; and as it rose and swelled and grew toward her out of the darkness, the mother knew that her lost child was found.

A LETTER TO TOWN

FERNSEED STATION. ATLANTIS CO., NEW ---- February 30, 189-.

MY DEAR MODESTUS:--You write me that circumstances have decided you to move your household from New York to some inexpensively pleasant town, village, or hamlet in the immediate neighborhood, and you ask me the old, old innocent question:

"Shall I like suburban life?"

This question I can answer most frankly and positively:

"No, certainly not. You will not like it at all."

There is no such thing as liking a country life--for I take it that you mean to remove to the real suburban countryside, and not to one of those abominable and abhorrent deserts of paved streets laid out at right angles, and all supplied with sewers and electric light wires and water-mains before the first lonely house escapes from the house-pattern books to tempt the city dweller out to that dreary, soulless waste which has all the modern improvements and not one tree. I take it, I say, that you are going to no such cheap back-extension of a great city, but that you are really going among the trees and the water-courses, severing all ties with the town, save the railway's glittering lines of steel--or, since I have thought of it, I might as well say the railway ties.

If that is what your intent is, and you carry it out firmly, you are going to a life which you can never like, but which you may learn to love.

How should it be possible that you should enjoy taking up a new life, with new surroundings, new anxieties, new responsibilities, new duties, new diversions, new social connections--new conditions of every kind--after living half a lifetime in New York? It is true that, being a born New Yorker, you know very little indeed of the great city you live in. You know the narrow path you tread, coming and going, from your house to your office, and from your office to your house. It follows, as closely as it may, the line of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The elevated railroads bound it downtown; and uptown fashion has drawn a line a few hundred yards on either side, which you have only to cross, to east or to west, to find a strange exposition of nearsightedness come upon your friends. Here and there you do, perhaps, know some little by-path that leads to a club or a restaurant, or to a place of amusement. After a number of books have been written at you, you have ventured timorously and feebly into such unknown lands as Greenwich Village; or that poor, shabby, elbowing stretch of territory that used to be interesting, in a simple way, when it was called the French Quarter. It is now supposed to be the Bohemian Quarter, and rising young artists invite parties of society-ladies to go down to its table d'hote restaurants, and see the desperate young men of the bachelor-apartments smoke cigarettes and drink California claret without a sign of trepidation.

As I say, that is pretty near all you know of the great, marvellous, multitudinous town you live in--a city full of strange people, of strange occupations, of strange habits of life, of strange contrasts of wealth and poverty; of a new life of an indescribable crudity, and of an old life that breeds to-day the very atmosphere of the historic past. Your feet have never strayed in the side paths where you might have learned something of the infinite and curious strangeness of this strange city.

But, after all, this is neither here nor there. You have accustomed yourself to the narrow dorsal strip that is all New York to you. Therein are contained the means of meeting your every need, and of gratifying your every taste. There are your shops, your clubs, your libraries, your schools, your theatres, your art-galleries, and the houses of all your friends, except a few who have ventured a block or so outside of that magic line that I spoke of a little while ago. And now you are not only going to cross that line yourself, but to pass the fatal river beyond it, to burn your boats behind you, and to settle in the very wilderness. And you ask me if you will like it!

No, Modestus, you will not. You have made up your mind, of course, to the tedium of the two railway journeys every weekday, and when you have made friends with your fellow-commuters, you will get to like it, for your morning trip in will take the place with you of your present afternoon call at your club. And you are pretty sure to enjoy the novelty of the first few months. You have moved out in the spring, and, dulled as your perceptions are by years of city life, you cannot fail to be astonished and thrilled, and perhaps a little bit awed, at the wonder of that green awakening. And when you see how the first faint, seemingly half-doubtful promise of perfect growth is fulfilled by the procession of the months, you yourself will be moved with the desire to work this miracle, and to make plants and flowers grow at your own will. You will begin to talk of what you are going to do next year--for you have taken a three years' lease, I trust--if only as an evidence of good faith. You will lay out a tract for your flower garden and your vegetable garden, and you will borrow your neighbor's seed-catalogue, and you will plan out such a garden as never blossomed since Eden.

And in your leisure days, of course, you will enjoy it more or less. You will sit on your broad veranda in the pleasant mornings and listen to the wind softly brushing the tree-tops to and fro, and look at the blue sky through the leaf-framed spaces in the cool, green canopy above you; and as you remember the cruel, hot, lifeless days of summer in your town house, when you dragged through the weeks of work that separated you from the wife and children at the sea-side or in the mountains--then, Modestus, you must look upon what is before you, and say: it is good.

It is true that you can't get quite used to the sensation of wearing your tennis flannels at your own domestic breakfast table, and you cannot help feeling as if somebody had stolen your clothes, and you were going around in your pajamas. But presently your friend--for of course you have followed the trail of a friend, in choosing your new abode--your friend drops in clad likewise, and you take the children and start off for a stroll. As the pajama-feeling wears off, you become quite enthusiastic. You tell your friend that this is the life that you always wanted to lead; that a man doesn't really live in the city, but only exists; that it is a luxury to breathe such air, and enjoy the peaceful calm and perfect silence. Away inside of you something says that this is humbug, for, the fact is, the perfect silence strikes you as somewhat lonesome, and it even scares you a little. Then your children keep running up to you with strange plants and flowers, and asking you what they are; and you find it trying on the nerves to keep up the pretence of parental omniscience, and yet avoid the too-ready corrections of your friend.

"Johnny-jumper!" he says, scornfully, when you have hazarded a guess out of your meagre botanical vocabulary: "Why, man, that's no Johnny-jumper, that's a wild geranium." Then he addresses himself to the other inquiring youngster: "No, my boy, that's not a chestnut; that's an acorn. You won't get chestnuts till the fall, and then you'll get them off the chestnut trees. That's an oak."

And so the walk is not altogether pleasant for you, and you find it safest to confine your remarks on country life to generalizations concerning the air and the silence.

No, Modestus, do not think for a moment that I am making game of you. Your friend would be no more at home at the uptown end of your little New York path than you are here in his little town; and he does not look on your ignorance of nature as sternly as you would look upon his unfamiliarity with your familiar landmarks. For his knowledge has grown upon him so naturally and unconsciously, that he hardly esteems it of any value.

But you can have no idea of the tragico-comical disadvantage at which you will find yourself placed during your first year in the country--that is, the suburban country. You know, of course, when you move into a new neighborhood in the city you must expect to find the local butcher and baker and candlestick-maker ready to fall upon you, and to tear the very raiment from your back, until they are assured that you are a solvent permanency--and you have learned how to meet and repel their attacks. When you find that the same thing is done in the country, only in a different way, which you don't in the least understand, you will begin to experience a certain feeling of discouragement. Then, the humorous papers have taught you to look upon the Suburban Furnace as part of the machinery or property of a merry jest; and you will be shocked to discover that to the new-comer it is a stern and cold reality. I use the latter adjective deliberately and advisedly. There will surely come an awful night when you will get home from New York with Mrs. Modestus in the midnight train, too tired for anything but a drowsy chat by the lingering embers of the library fire over the festivities of the evening. You will open your broad hospitable door, and enter an abode of chill and darkness. Your long-slumbering household has let fires and lights go out; the thermometer in the children's room stands at forty-five degrees, and there is nothing for you to do but to descend to the cellar, arrayed in your wedding garments, and try your unskilful best to coax into feeble circulation a small, faintly throbbing heart of fire that yet glows far down in the fire-pot's darksome internals. Then, when you have done what you can at the unwonted and unwelcome task, you will see, by the feeble candle-light, that your black dress-coat is gray with fine cinder dust, and that your hands are red and raw from the handling of heavy implements of toil. And then you will think of city home-comings after the theatre or the ball; of the quiet half-hour in front of the dying cannel; of the short cigar and the little nightcap, and of the gentle passage bedward, so easy in that warm and slumberous atmosphere that you hardly know how you have passed from weariness to peaceful dreams. And there will come to your spirit a sudden passion of humiliation and revolt that will make you say to yourself: This is the end!