Those Times and These

“‘What is this – and this – and this? What are these delicious things you have given me to eat? And what is this exquisite drink I have swallowed?’

“We told him and he seemed not to believe it at first. He said:

“‘Why, I have handled such things as these often. I have taken them up in my hands a thousand times and I have swallowed them. I should have known what they were by the touch of my fingers – but the taste of them deceived me. Can it be possible that these things are common things – that even poor people can feast upon such meals as this which I am eating? Can it even be possible that there is food within the reach of ordinary mortals which has a finer zest than this?’

“And when his friend, the surgeon, told him ‘Yes’ – told him ‘Yes’ many times and in many ways – still he seemed loath to believe it. When he had finished, to the last scrap of the potato skin and the last morsel of the bread crust and the last drop in the glass, he bowed his head and outspread his hands before him as though returning thanks for a glorious benefaction.

“Perhaps I should have told you that this took place late in the afternoon. We waited a little while after that, and then just before sunset we took him outdoors into a little shabby garden on the asylum grounds; and we freed his eyes and we unmuffled his ears. And then we drew back from him a distance and watched him to see what he would do.

“For a little while he did nothing except stand in his tracks, transfixed and transfigured. He saw the sky and the sunlight and the earth and the grass and the shadows upon the earth and the trees and the flowers that were about him – saw them literally in a celestial vision; and he smelled the good wholesome smells of the earth, and the scents of the struggling, straggling flowers in the ill-kept flower beds, and the scents of the green things growing there too.

“And just then, as though it had known and had been inspired to choose this instant for bringing to him yet another sensation, a thrush – a common brown thrush – began singing in an elm tree almost directly above him. Of course it was merely a coincidence that a thrush should begin singing then and there. Thrushes are plentiful enough about the country in this climate at this season of the year. Central Park is full of them, sometimes. Most of us scarcely notice them, or their singing either. But, you see, with this man it was different. He literally was undergoing re-creation, re-incarnation, resurrection. Call it what you please. It was one of those three things. In a way of speaking it was all three of them.

“At the first note of music from the bird he gave a quick start, and then he threw back his head and uplifted his face; and quite near at hand he saw the little rusty-coloured chap, singing away there, with its speckled throat feathers rising and falling, and he heard the sounds that poured from the thrush’s open beak. And as he looked and listened he put his hands to his breast as though something were hurting him there. He didn’t move until the bird had fluttered away. Nor did we move either.

“Then he turned and came stumbling and reeling toward us, literally drunk with joy. His intoxication of ecstasy thickened his tongue and choked him until he, at first, could not speak to us. After a bit, though, the words came outpouring from his lips.

“‘Did you hear that?’ he cried out. ‘Did you hear it? Do you smell the earth and the flowers? And the sky – I have seen it! I can see it now. Oh, hasn’t God been good to us to give us all this? Oh, hasn’t He been good to me?’

“In an outburst of gratitude he seized the hand of my friend and kissed it again and again. I had meant to take notes of his behaviour as we went along, but I took none. I knew that afterward I could reproduce from memory all that transpired.

“Presently he was calmer, and the surgeon said to him:

“‘My son, there is something yet to be seen – something that you, having so many other things to see, have overlooked. Look yonder!’ And he pointed to the West, where the sun was just going down.

“And, at that, the other man faced about and looked full into his first sunset. Instantly his whole mood changed. It became rapt, reverential – you might say worshipful. His lips moved, but no words came from them at first, and he made as though to shut out the sight with his hands, as though the beauty of the vision was too great for him to endure. I went to him and put my hand on his shoulder. He was quivering from head to foot in an ague of sheer happiness. He seemed hardly to know I was there. He did not look toward me. He kept his eyes fixed upon the West as if he were greedy to miss nothing of the spectacle.

“Until now the sunset had seemed to me less beautiful by far than many another summer sunset I had seen, for the sky was rather overcast and the colours not particularly vivid; but, standing there beside him, in physical contact with him, I caught from him something of what he felt, and I saw that glow in the west as some-thing of indescribable grandeur and unutterable splendour, a miracle too glorious for words to describe or painters to reproduce upon squares of canvas.

“Presently he spoke to me, still without turning his head in my direction.

“‘How often does this – this – come to pass?’ he asked, panting the words out.

“‘Many times a year,’ I told him. ‘At this season nearly every evening.’

“‘And is it ever so beautiful as this?’ he said.

“‘Often more beautiful,’ I said. ‘Often the colours are richer and deeper.’

“‘Why are there not more of us here to look upon it?’ he asked. ‘Surely at this hour all mankind must cease from its tasks – from whatever it is doing – to see this miracle – this free gift of the Creator!’

“I tried to tell him that mankind had grown accustomed to the daily repetition of the sunset, but he seemed unable to comprehend. As the last flattened ray of sunshine faded upon the grass, and the afterglow began to spread across the heavens, I thought he was about to faint; and I put both my arms round him to steady him. But he did not faint, though he trembled all over and took his breath into his lungs in great sobbing gulps. I showed him the evening star where it shone in the sky, and he watched it brighten, saying nothing at all.

“Suddenly he turned to me and said:

“‘At last I have lived, and I have found that life is sweet. Life is sweeter than I ever dared to hope it might be.’

“Then he said:

“‘I have a home. Will you show me where it is? While I was blind I could feel my way to it; but, now that I can see, I feel lost – all things are so changed to me. Please lead me there – I want to see with my own eyes what a home is like.’

“So I took his hand in mine and we went toward it, and the three others who were there followed after us.

“Madam, his home – the only home he had, for so far as we knew, he had no living kinspeople – was a room in that big barn of an asylum. I led him to the door of it. It was a barren enough room – you know how these institutions are apt to be furnished, and this room was no exception to the rule. Bare walls, a bare floor, bare uncurtained windows, a bed, a chair or two, a bare table – a sort of hygienic and sanitary brutality governed all its appointments.

“I imagine the lowest servant in your employ has a more attractively furnished room than this was. Now, though, it was flooded with the afterglow, which poured in at the windows; that soft light alone redeemed its hideousness of outline and its poverty of furnishings.

“He halted at the threshold. We know what home means to most of us. How much must it have meant, then, to him! He could see the walls closing round to encompass him in their friendly companionship; he could see the roof coming down to protect him.

“‘Home!’ he said to himself in a half whisper, under his breath. ‘What a beautiful word home is! And what a beautiful place my home is!’

“Nobody gave the signal, none of us made the suggestion by word or gesture; but with one accord we four, governed by the same impulse, left him and went away. We felt in an inarticulate way that he was entitled to be alone; that no curious eye had any right to study his emotions in this supreme moment.

“In an hour we went back. He was lying where he had fallen – across the threshold of his room. On his face was a beatific peace, a content unutterable – and he was dead. Joy I think had burst his heart. That bit of plaster you hold in your hand is his death mask.”

The doctor finished his tale. He bent forward in his chair to see the look upon his caller’s face. She stood up; and she was a creature transformed and radiant!

“Doctor,” she said – and even her voice was altered – “I am going home – home to my husband and my children and my friends. I believe I have found a cure for my – my trouble. Rather, you have found it for me here to-day. You have taught me a lesson. You have made me see things I could not see before – hear things I could not hear before. For I have been blind and deaf, as blind and as deaf as this man was – yes, blinder than he ever was. But now” – she cried out the words in a burst of revelation – “but now – why, doctor, I have everything to live for – haven’t I?”

“Yes, madam,” he said gravely; “you have everything to live for. If only we knew it, if only we could realise it, all of us in this world have everything to live for.”

She nodded, smiling across the table at him. “Doctor,” she said, “I do not believe I shall ever come back here to see you – as a patient of yours.”

“No,” he affirmed; “I do not believe you will ever come back – as a patient of mine.”

“But, if I may, I should like to come sometimes, just to look at that face – that dead face with its living message for me.”

“Madam,” he told her, “you may have it on two conditions – namely, that you keep it in your own room, and that you do not tell its story – the story I have just told you – to any other person. I have reasons of my own for making those conditions.”

“In my own room is exactly where I would keep it,” she said. “I promise to do as you ask. I shall never part with it. But how can you part with it?”

“Oh, I think I know where I can get another copy,” he said, “The original mould has not been destroyed. I am sure my – my friend – has it. This one will be delivered at your home before night. My servant shall take it to you.”

“No,” she said. “If you do not mind, I shall take it with me now – in my own hands.”

She clasped the gift to her breast, holding it there as though it were a priceless thing – too priceless to be intrusted to the keeping of any other than its possessor.

For perhaps five minutes after the departure of his recent patient the great specialist sat at his desk smiling gently to himself. Then he touched with his forefinger a button under the desk. His manservant entered.

“You have heard of troubles being started by a lie, haven’t you?” asked the doctor abruptly.

“Yes, sir – I think so, sir.”

The man was not an Englishman, but he had been trained in the school of English servants. His voice betrayed no surprise.

“Well, did you ever hear of troubles being ended by a lie?”

“Really, sir, I can’t say, sir – offhand.”

“Well, it can be done,” said the doctor; “in fact, it has been done.”

The man stood a moment.

“Was that all, sir?”

“No; not quite,” said the master. “Do you remember an Italian pedlar who was here the other day?”

“An Italian pedlar, sir?”

“Yes; don’t you remember? A street vender who passed the door. I called him in and bought a plaster cast from him – for seventy-five cents, as I recall.”

“Oh, yes, sir; I do remember now.”

The man’s eyes flitted to an empty space on the wall moulding above the bookcase behind his employer’s chair, and back again to his employer’s face.

“Well,” said the doctor, “you keep a lookout for him, in case he passes again. I want to buy another of those casts from him. I think it may be worth the money – the last one was, anyhow.”

CHAPTER III. MR. FELSBURG GETS EVEN

OF all the human legs ever seen in our town I am constrained to admit that Mr. Herman Felsburg’s pair were the most humorous legs. When it came to legs – funny legs – the palm was his without a struggle. Casting up in my mind a wide assortment and a great range of legs, I recall no set in the whole of Red Gravel County that, for pure comedy of contour or rare eccentricity of gait, could compare with the two he owned. In his case his legs achieved the impossible by being at one and the same time bent outward and warped inward, so that he was knock-kneed at a stated point and elsewhere bow-legged. And yet, as legs go, they were short ones. For a finishing touch he was, to a noticeably extent, pigeon-toed.

I remember mighty well the first time Mr. Felsburg’s legs first acquired for me an interest unrelated to their picturesqueness of aspect. As I think backward along the grooves of my memory to that occasion, it defies all the rules of perspective by looming on a larger scale and in brighter and more vivid colours than many a more important thing which occurred in a much more recent period. I reckon, though, that is because our Creator has been good enough to us sometimes to let us view our childhood with the big, round, magnifying eyes of a child.

I feel it to be so in my case. By virtue of a certain magic I see a small, inquisitive boy sitting on the top step of the wide front porch of an old white house; and as he sits he hugs his bare knees within the circle of his arms and listens with two wide-open ears to the talk that shuttles back and forth among three or four old men who are taking their comfort in easy-chairs behind a thick screen of dishrag and morning glory and balsam-apple vines.

I am that small boy who listens; and, as the picture forms and frames itself in my mind, one of the men is apt to be my uncle. He was not my uncle by blood ties or marriage, but through adoption only, as was the custom down our way in those days and, to a certain degree, is still the custom; and, besides, I was his namesake.

I know now, when by comparison I subject the scene to analysis, that they were not such very old men – then. They are old enough now – such of them as survive to this day. None of that group who yet lives will ever see seventy-five again. In those times grown people would have called them middle-aged men, or, at the most, elderly men; but when I re-create the vision out of the back of my head I invest them with an incredible antiquity and a vasty wisdom, because, as I said just now, I am looking at them with the eyes of a small boy again. Also, it seems to me, the season always is summer – late afternoon or early evening of a hot, lazy summer day.

It was right there, perched upon the top step of Judge Priest’s front porch, that I heard, piece by piece, the unwritten history of our town – its tragedies and its farces, its homely romances and its homely epics. There I heard the story of Singin’ Sandy Riggs, who, like Coligny, finally won by being repeatedly whipped; and his fist feud with Harve Allen, the bully; and the story of old Marm Perry, the Witch. I don’t suppose she was a witch really; but she owned a black cat and she had a droopy lid, which hung down over one red eye, and she lived a friendless life.

And so when the babies in the settlement began to sicken and die of the spotted fever somebody advanced the very plausible suggestion that Marm Perry had laid a spell upon the children, and nearly everybody else believed it. A man whose child fell ill of the plague in the very hour when Marm Perry had spoken to the little thing took a silver dollar and melted it down and made a silver bullet of it – because, of course, witches were immune to slugs of lead – and on the night after the day when they buried his baby he slipped up to Marm Perry’s cabin and fired through the window at her as she sat, with her black cat in her lap, mouthing her empty gums over her supper. The bullet missed her – and he was a good shot, too, that man was. Practically all the men who lived in those days on the spot where our town was to stand were good shots. They had to be – or else go hungry frequently.

When the news of this spread they knew for certain that only by fire could the evil charm be broken and the conjure-woman be destroyed. So one night soon after that a party of men broke into Marm Perry’s cabin and made prisoners of her and her cat. They muffled her head in a bedquilt and they thrust the cat into a bag, both of them yowling and kicking; and they carried them to a place on the bluff above Island Creek, a mile or so from the young settlement, and there they kindled a great fire of brush; and when the flames had taken good hold of the wood they threw Marm Perry and her cat into the blaze and stood back to see them burn. Mind you, this didn’t happen at Salem, Massachusetts, in or about the year 1692. It happened less than a century ago near a small river landing on what was then the southwestern frontier of these United States.

There were certain men, though – leaders of opinion and action in the rough young community – who did not altogether hold with the theory that the evil eye was killing off the babies. Somehow they learned what was afoot and they followed, hotspeed, on the trail of the volunteer executioners. As the tale has stood through nearly a hundred years of telling, they arrived barely in time. When they broke through the ring of witch burners and snatched Marm Perry off the pyre, her apron strings had burned in two. As for the cat, it burst through the bag and ran off through the woods, with its fur all ablaze, and was never seen again. I remember how I used to dream that story over and over again. Always in my dreams it reached its climax when that living firebrand went tearing off into the thickets. Somehow, to me, the unsalvaged cat took on more importance than its rescued owner.

There were times, too, when I chanced to be the only caller upon Judge Priest’s front porch, and these are the times which in retrospect seem to me to have been the finest of all. I used to slip away from home alone, along toward suppertime, and pay the Judge a visit. Many and many a day, sitting there on that porch step, I watched the birds going to bed. His big front yard was a great place for the birds. In the deep grass, all summer long and all day long, the cock partridge would be directing the attention of a mythical Bob White to the fact that his peaches were ripe and overripe. If spared by boys and house cats until the hunting season began he would captain a covey. Now he was chiefly concerned with a family. Years later I found that his dictionary name was American quail; but to us then he was a partridge, and in our town we still know him by no other title.

Forgetting all about the dogs and the guns of the autumn before he would even invade Judge Priest’s chicken lot to pick up titbits overlooked by the dull-eyed resident flock; and toward twilight, growing bolder still, he would whistle and whistle from the tall white gate post of the front fence, while his trim brown helpmate clucked lullabies to her speckled brood in the rank tangle back of the quince bushes.

When the redbirds called it a day and knocked off, the mocking birds took up the job and on clear moonlight nights sang all night in the honey locusts. Just before sunset yellow-hammers would be flickering about, tremendously occupied with things forgotten until then; and the chimney swifts that nested in Judge Priest’s chimney would go whooshing up and down the sooty flue, making haunted-house noises in the old sitting room below.

Sprawled in his favourite porch chair, the Judge would talk and I would listen. Sometimes, the situation being reversed, I would talk and he listen. Under the spell of his sympathetic understanding I would be moved to do what that most sensitive and secretive of creatures – a small boy – rarely does do: I would bestow my confidences upon him. And if he felt like laughing – at least, he never laughed. And if he felt that the disclosures called for a lecture he rarely did that, either; but if he did the admonition was so cleverly sugar-coated by his way of framing it that I took it down without tasting it.

As I see the vision now, it was at the close of a mighty warm day, when the sun went down as a red-hot ball and all the west was copper-plated with promise of more heat to-morrow, when Mr. Herman Felsburg passed. I don’t know what errand was taking him up Clay Street that evening – he lived clear over on the other side of town. But, anyway, he passed; and as he headed into the sunset glow I was inspired by a boy’s instinctive appreciation of the ludicrous to speak of the peculiar conformation of Mr. Felsburg’s legs. I don’t recall now just what it was I said, but I do recall, as clearly as though it happened yesterday, the look that came into Judge Priest’s chubby round face.

“Aha!” he said; and from the way he said it I knew he was displeased with me. He didn’t scold me, though – only he peered at me over his glasses until I felt my repentant soul shrivelling smaller and smaller inside of me; and then after a bit he said: “Aha! Well, son, I reckin mebbe you’re right. Old Man Herman has got a funny-lookin’ pair of laigs, ain’t he? They do look kinder like a set of hames that ain’t been treated kindly, don’t they? Whut was it you said they favoured – horse collars, wasn’t it?” I tucked a regretful head down between my hunched shoulders, making no reply. After another little pause he went on:

“Well, sonny, ef you should be spared to grow up to be a man, and there should be a war comin’ along, and you should git drawed into it someway, jest you remember this: Ef your laigs take you into ez many tight places and into ez many hard-fit fights as I’ve saw them little crookedy laigs takin’ that little man, you won’t have no call to feel ashamed of ‘em – not even ef yours should be so twisted you’d have to walk backward in order to go furward.”

At hearing this my astonishment was so great I forgot my remorse of a minute before. I took it for granted that off yonder, in those far-away days, most of the older men in our town had seen service on one side or the other in the Big War – mainly on the Southern side. But somehow it never occurred to me that Mr. Herman Felsburg might also have been a soldier. As far back as I recalled he had been in the clothing business. Boylike, I assumed he had always been in the clothing business. So —

“Was Mr. Felsburg in the war?” I asked.

“He most suttinly was,” answered Judge Priest.

“As a regular sure-nuff soldier!” I asked, still in doubt.

“Ez a reg’lar sure-nuff soldier.”

I considered for a moment.

“Why, he’s Jewish, ain’t he, Judge?” I asked next.

“So fur as my best information and belief go, he’s practically exclusively all Jewish,” said Judge Priest with a little chuckle.

“But I didn’t think Jewish gentlemen ever did any fighting, Judge?”

I imagine that bewilderment was in my tone, for my juvenile education was undergoing enlargement by leaps and bounds.

“Didn’t you?” he said. “Well, boy, you go to Sunday school, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, sir – every Sunday – nearly.”

“Well, didn’t you ever hear tell at Sunday school of a little feller named David that taken a rock-sling and killed a big giant named Goliath?”

“Yes, sir; but – ”

“Well, that there little feller David was a Jew.”

“I know, sir; but – but that was so long ago!”

“It was quite a spell back, and that’s a fact,” agreed Judge Priest. “Even so, I reckin human nature continues to keep right on bein’ human nature. You’ll be findin’ that out, son, when you git a little further along in years. They learnt you about Samson, too, didn’t they – at that there Sunday school?”

I am quite sure I must have shown enthusiasm along here. At that period Samson was, with me, a favourite character in history. By reason of his recorded performances he held rank in my estimation with Israel Putnam and General N. B. Forrest.

“Aha!” continued the Judge. “Old Man Samson was right smart of a fighter, takin’ one thing with another, wasn’t he? Remember hearin’ about that time when he taken the jawbone of an ass and killed up I don’t know how many of them old Philistines?”

“Oh, yes, sir. And then that other time when they cut off his hair short and put him in jail, and after it grew out again he pulled the temple right smack down and killed everybody!”

“It strikes me I did hear somebody speakin’ of that circumstance too. I expect it must have created a right smart talk round the neighbourhood.”