VI
Next morning, John—Dan was now by an inch the taller of the two—took him to his office, as he was apt to do when some decision was to be considered. ‘I’ve been talking to Miss Merrill, Dan,’ he began. The boys all attended Miss Merrill’s school. ‘She says you’re a fine student—and she says you should go to college. You know I went to Harvard College. Would you like to go?’
Dan had never foreseen this possibility. He had a natural aptitude for study, his work had never seemed to him hard, and he knew Miss Merrill ranked him highly; but this prospect at first alarmed him. ‘I don’t know, father,’ he admitted. ‘I’ve always kind of thought I wanted to be in the lumber business when I grow up, and—I liked working at the boom.’
His father smiled with pleasure. ‘Well, college needn’t interfere with that,’ he reminded Dan. ‘I went to Harvard, you know.’ He added: ‘And I’m glad you feel that way. We’ll make a team. I’m about ready to start in for myself.’ He leaned back in his chair. ‘But the lumber business is changing, son. The big pine is being cut off pretty fast. A lot of it has been culled out already.’
He talked quietly, and Dan listened almost without interruption while the older man went on, as though he were thinking aloud.
‘Up to ten years ago, the logs rafted up at the boom where you worked this summer averaged about three hundred and fifty board feet to the log,’ he said. ‘This year the average size was under two hundred feet for the first time. For five years now, there has been more and more spruce cut. In another ten years you’ll see more spruce than pine in the river.’ He looked at his son. ‘You know Mr. Hersey?’
‘I just know who he is. I’ve seen him.’
‘He tells me he’s thinking of buying some western land, in Michigan and Minnesota. He believes lumbering here is near its peak, about ready to start down grade. He says anyone who bothers with spruce is crazy. But there’ll be virgin spruce on the mountains up-river after the pine is gone. It’s harder to move, but we’ll find ways to get it to the water.
‘And there are men enough who see a big future here. General Veazie’s mills will be just as profitable sawing spruce as pine.’ He chuckled. ‘There’s a great man, a great businessman, Dan. You know he’s thinking of getting the upper part of Ward Seven set off as a town, to be named after him. He’s asking the Legislature to do it next winter. He’ll have his own town—own most of it, and own just about all the business in it-and he can run it the way he wants to, levy his own taxes and collect them too. He’ll run it the way he used to run the boom. You know, he was the whole corporation, held meetings all alone at his house, voted himself in as President and Clerk and the Board of Directors. Of course he sold out to Mr. Pingree five years ago; but he could afford to. He’s made his money out of mills and the boom and the dam at Chesuncook—that paid him close to eighty per cent a year from the first. And of course he’s in the banking business, too.
‘Rufe Dwinel’s another who’s not ready to quit.’ John smiled again. ‘The trouble is, Rufe would rather fight than ’tend to business. Like the Telos War. But he’s one of the biggest operators on the river.
‘And Colonel Black says Maine timber lands have never yet brought what they’re really worth. He’s in a position to know. Outside of the Bingham interests, he’s a tremendous operator on his own account, not only cutting lumber and milling it, but shipping it too, and usually in his own vessels, vessels he’s built. He worked up markets years ago in every port along the coast; not only Boston, but Taunton and New Bedford and Nantucket. Now most of his lumber goes to Boston. He’ll ship over four million feet to Boston this year, and he’s beginning to ship to Brett and Vose in New York.’
‘His own lumber?’ Dan asked.
‘Yes. You see, he had the same arrangement with the Bingham interests that I have with him; a salary plus the right to buy stumpage cheap. He’s been selling off the Penobscot Million right along. Most of the Bingham land up-river is in other hands now. His personal operations are to the eastward. And of course George is a keen businessman, too.’ He smiled.
‘Colonel Black sent George one day to see about a mill he had heard was for sale, and at noon he asked George about it and George had bought it for himself!
‘I don’t think George and I would pull together. The Colonel’s an old man now. Mrs. Black died last fall, you know. I don’t think he’ll live long. When he dies—or maybe before—I’ll go in for myself. I’ve sold some of my stumpage rights from time to time, bought some land with the proceeds. It’s a long way up-river, but it’s easier to take supplies and teams that far now, going by road to Moosehead and up the lake by steamer and across the new Moosehead railroad to the river. And when the time comes I’ll cut my pine myself.’ He looked at Dan, and Dan guessed what was coming, watching this man whom he loved so proudly, seeing through his father’s eyes the greatness of these enterprises. ‘Maybe I’ll take you four boys into the woods with me, for one winter anyway, if mother thinks she can spare you. Would you like that?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Dan’s throat was for some reason full. He wetted his lips. ‘Yes, I would,’ he said.
John considered his son for a moment. He said: ‘I haven’t seen as much of any of you, these last few years, as I wish I had; don’t know any of you as well as I’d like to. By the way, Doctor Mason tells me Will wants to be a doctor.’
Dan said with a shy discretion: ‘I guess you’d better talk to Will about that, father, see what he says.’
‘I need to get better acquainted with all of you,’ John repeated. ‘But things have been developing so fast these last few years that I’ve been kept busy with business, other people’s business.’ He smiled. ‘It’s about time I began to ’tend to my own.’ He returned to the point. ‘Do you want to go to college, son?’
‘Well—do you want me to?’
‘Only if you want to. But—yes, I think it would be a good thing.’
‘Why, then—I’ll go,’ Dan agreed. ‘I guess I’d like to.’
His father nodded. ‘Good!’ he said. He hesitated, smiled in a way which made Dan love him. ‘It will be your first time away from home, Dan.’ There was suddenly something diffident about this big man. ‘You’ll run into things you haven’t encountered before.’ Dan began to guess what was in the other’s mind before his father suggested: ‘Have you-any questions you want to ask me, son? Is there anything you want to know?’
Dan, eager to help this embarrassed man he loved, said: ‘I guess you mean about women?’
‘Yes.’ John relaxed in relief, this hurdle crossed. ‘Yes, that’s it, son.’
‘I know about—going with women,’ Dan said reassuringly. He hesitated. ‘I’ve heard boys talk about it. Young Pat was talking once about you and mother, and he made it sound bad. I was just a kid, and I called him a liar and licked him. Pat heard us fighting, and he whipped him, too; but he told me the straight of it, afterward. It didn’t sound bad the way he told me. And of course, I’ve been working with men up at the boom, heard them talk, so I know about it.’
John watched his son in a slow regret. Tm sorry I didn’t talk to you before, Dan; sorry you had to find out these things for yourself. Perhaps I can fill up some gaps in what you know.’ He asked curiously: ‘Do your brothers—do you all—I mean, did Pat talk to all of you?’
‘No, just to me.’
‘Well, see here, suppose we get the other boys and go for a walk this afternoon, and you can help me explain things to them?’
Dan approved of that. They spent an afternoon he would always remember; an afternoon that shone with a sort of glory in his thoughts as long as he lived. He saw cleanness and beauty and wonder in things which once had been not only mysterious but ugly and degrading; and he loved his father more and more.
3
WHEN Dan returned from his
first year at Cambridge, he was astonished and unhappy at the change in his mother. It was as though the fair flesh which had clothed her in loveliness so long were
now attacked and corrupted from within, just as a pine rotten at the heart may seem sound and fine outside till the inner rot breaks through the bark and spreads to overrun the whole. Her hair, which once had been so full of warm loveliness, began to lose its lustre. Without turning gray, it nevertheless faded into a nondescript hue. Her eyes began to be framed in fine lines like crow’s feet, assuming sometimes an expression astonishingly cold and cruel. Her mouth, which had been soft and warm, pursed narrowly. She and Aunt Meg were of about the same age, in their middle forties, yet Aunt Meg now seemed years the younger, with no suggestion of lines in her face, and jolly friendly eyes.
Dan decided that the difference between Aunt Meg and his mother might lie in the fact that Aunt Meg was happy and at peace with herself while his mother was not; but unhappiness in anyone had always enlisted his sympathy, so he tried tentatively to draw near his mother, paying her small attentions, seeking to make her smile. She always welcomed his company, but he was tormented by the fact that more and more often she spoke about his father in a way he hated, as though the inner corruption which was destroying the bloom of her loveliness attacked her thoughts too. There had been a time when he did not know what she meant by these reflections on his father; but after a year in college he was wiser. Once when in this way she named Aunt Meg, Dan protested: ‘Mother, you know as well as I do that what you’re trying to make me believe just isn’t true!’
She smiled patiently: ‘I certainly don’t want to hurt your faith in your father—or in Aunt Meg, Dan!’
‘You can’t,’ he said stubbornly. ‘You’re just making yourself miserable, thinking such things about them.’ And he urged: ‘And you ought not to say things like that to us, to Will and Tom and Mat and me.’ He appealed to her: ‘Remember what you told Grandmother Evered about father’s being the rooftree, and our all sort of leaning on him? It’s true, so you oughtn’t to try to make us believe he’s rotten.’
‘Sometimes I wake in the night,’ she said softly, ‘and think of that huge timber at the top of the house and think some day it will fall and crush us all.’
‘Father’ll never fall, as long as we—stand by him!’ He tried to put his arms around her. ‘You know that, really, mother.’
But she put his embrace aside, smiled in that patient fashion he always found so infuriating and turned away.
Once he went frankly to his father to confess how she troubled him. He saw as he spoke a great weariness bow the older man’s shoulders; and he talked on, afraid to stop, anxious, now that he had begun, to say all he had to say. When he was done, John Evered said slowly, and with nothing but simple truth in his tones:
‘Dan, your mother is the only woman in my life, has always been, always will be as long as she lives.’
‘I know that, father,’ Dan assured him. ‘But she keeps saying things and insinuating things.’ He spoke awkwardly. ‘Father—you and she don’t sleep in the same room. Why don’t you? Don’t you—love each other?’ His voice suddenly was husky. ‘You used to. I can remember how happy we all were when you and she were happy together.’
‘Well, Dan, marriage includes a lot of things,’ John explained. ‘Sleeping together is one of them. It’s a beautiful, happy part of marriage. But sometimes that part of marriage has to end, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. It just ends.
‘But marriage goes on, Dan. People once married are always married. Your mother is my wife, just as surely as she is your mother; and she always will be. That can never be changed. I shall always be as good a husband as I can—just as you will always be a good son.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘That’s all I can promise you, Dan.’
‘She’s so grand in so many ways,’ Dan said miserably. ‘Everyone likes her and just thinks she’s wonderful.’
‘Exactly,’ John agreed. ‘And they’re right, Dan. Don’t ever think hardly of her.’
‘I’m so darned sorry for her—and for you.’
John said quietly: ‘Never be sorry for me, Dan. No one need ever be sorry for me as long as I have a son like you.’
II
It was during Dan’s college years that he first awoke to any personal interest in the great national political question which now approached its crisis. He knew that his mother was an abolitionist; but he knew also that his father felt less strongly on the subject. His own opinion, if he had any, was actually nothing but a memory of Atticus. Atticus was a slave, yet Dan knew Atticus had preferred to return to slavery rather than face a Bangor winter; so it was impossible for him to think of slavery as the outrage on humanity which his mother held it to be. Certainly she had been wrong about Atticus. It was reasonable to think she might have been wrong about the institution of which Atticus was a part.
But in the summer of 1856, this feeling on his part underwent a change. When he read in the papers how Hannibal Hamlin, Bangor’s great man, had arisen in the United States Senate to announce his withdrawal from the Democratic Party, Dan felt a quickening sense of something imminent and vital in which—since he would soon be twenty-one, and old enough to vote—he would have a part. While he was at home that summer, Senator Hamlin spoke in Norombega Hall, and Dan went with his father to hear him.
The hall was crowded, and Dan and John, to be sure of finding places, were early on hand. Elijah Hamlin, the Senator’s brother, a Whig all his life while Senator Hamlin had always until now been a Democrat, was elected chairman. Noah Barker of Exeter, recently returned from Kansas, described the terrorism there; Lot Morrill followed with a formal renunciation of his adherence to the Democratic Party; and then Senator Hamlin came forward.
He began by embracing his brother, glad that at last they were politically united in their opposition to the extension of slavery; and Dan’s eyes filled and his throat ached as he joined in the shouting approval of that scene. But thereafter, intent on hearing every word, he resented the applause which occasionally interrupted the speaker; and when Senator Hamlin sat down, Dan was convinced that upon the new Republican Party all the hopes of every right-thinking man must centre.
Next day Senator Hamlin and a group of men came to dinner at the house, and Dan at John’s suggestion joined them at the table. The group included Judge Saladine, still apparently hale but actually with only a few months to live; Colonel Black, upon whom age had laid a heavy hand, but who, despite the fact that his vision was almost completely gone, spoke with authority in any company; his son George, Elijah Hamlin, General Veazie, and half a dozen others. Dan listened to their talk with a glowing interest. There was a rocklike strength in Hannibal Hamlin’s clean-shaven face, his heavy jaw a little protruding, his broad upper lip and deep-shadowed eyes. For a while they spoke of things that happened long ago, questioning the Senator; and he told them about the growth of anti-slavery sentiment which had led to the founding of the new party. He said the slave states had tried to surrender Oregon to England, and he declared that the Mexican War was part of the South’s design to extend slave territory. He spoke of the Clayton Bill and the Wilmot Proviso and the compromises of 1850; and though Dan, whose years in college had left him almost completely ignorant of the things most important for any young man to know, the recent history of his own country, understood none of these references, he felt in the Senator’s tone their profound importance.
‘Doctor Bailey of the National Era did more than any other individual to bring anti-slavery men together,’ the Senator told them. ‘His home in Washington was a place where we could meet in cosy, congenial surroundings and where we could find intellectual and physical refreshment after our long labors.
‘Now we can foresee eventual victory, but there is much still to be done, and it will not be easy. The troubles in Kansas are an earnest, I’m afraid, of what is to come. The South is ready for violence. The assault upon Senator Sumner is no more than a symptom of the disorder in the minds of the slavery men as they see their defeat approaching.
‘If there is to be a trial of strength,’ he continued, ‘why, then, I say, let it
come. But it was always from the firm certainty in my mind that the people of Maine were behind me in the great fight that I have drawn what powers I possess. I asked John Evered to bring you together today because I want to know you are still of the same mind.’
Judge Saladine said: ‘We are, Senator. In fact, we hoped you would be named for President, at the Philadelphia Convention.’
‘I have no desire for the office,’ Senator Hamlin assured him. ‘The ambition to be President has ruined the public usefulness of many an able man. I can be more valuable if I can keep my bonnet clear of that bee.’ He smiled grimly, and then he added: ‘Fremont is a good man; but of course we will lose this election. The country has yet to be made to see the issue clear and plain.’
His immediate appeal to them had to do with the coming campaign in the state. He was looked upon as the inevitable nominee for Governor at the Republican State Convention to be held in Portland on July 8; but he was reluctant to accept without assurances of strong support. They discussed the question gravely. There was still among sober men of business a lingering respect for the right of property in slaves; but Dan, listening, watching their faces, saw in each one a growing conviction of the justness of the Republican position which expressed itself at last in their unanimous insistence that the Senator should accept the nomination. Old Colonel Black said quietly:
‘We Maine folks trust you, Senator. Eastern Maine will follow you to a man. The size of your majority will surprise you.’
Dan carried away from that gathering a profound and stirring sense that he had seen a great man. He heard the Senator speak three times during that summer’s campaign; and when the returns were in and Hamlin’s sweeping victory, greater than even the most optimistic had foreseen, was known, Dan felt an almost personal triumph, a feeling of having shared in the birth of a fine and splendid thing.
III
Dan finished college and came home with a sense of new beginnings, of changes in process and to come. He looked forward to a closer association with his father. Colonel Black and Judge Saladine had died within a few weeks of each other, and John’s long connection with the Bingham interests was done. In his letters during Dan’s last year in college he had proposed that he and his sons spend the coming winter in the woods together.
The Strange Woman Page 52
