“Sari,” corrects Mason.
“Not at all Sir,— ’twas I who was sarong.”
Since the Party crossed Susquehanna, Armand has been marinating in Melancholy, owing to Luise’s Departure.
Even Dixon had seen it coming. “Frenchy and Mrs. Redzinger, they’re scarcely together of late, ’d tha notice?”
As they draw nearer the Redzinger Farm, the presence of Peter Redzinger becomes quite sensible to all. Indeed, he’s been back since the Winter,— he and the Boys have been working the place, lumbering about insomniack, eating whenever they happen to remember, tracking soil ev’rywhere, hardly speaking. To Luise he seems chasten’d, even at times dejected, yet innocent of all suspicion as respects his Wife, having long travel’d past the Conjugal Emotions,— belonging to the simple fact of another hard Pennsylvania Winter, the lowness and solidity of Sky, no day without its distress, roads that end in Thickets at nightfall. “Christ went away,” he discovers at last how to tell her, one morning, the eaves a-drip, the bleary Sun irregularly brighter and dimmer, “one day, for no reason that I could see, Christ came to me and said, ‘Peter, I am going away. You thought it was hard before this? Here is where it gets impossible.’
“ ‘Are you coming back?’ I almost couldn’t speak.
“ ‘You must live ever in that Expectation.— Come, spare Me that Face,— of course it is a lot to ask.’ He seem’d in a dangerously merry State. Was it relief at being shut of me, at last?
“ ‘How do I proceed without you?’
“ ‘What have I been teaching you all this time?’
“I was smit dumb, Luise. I didn’t understand the Question. ‘Be more like You?’ I tried. He’d been teaching me? All this time? Wehe!
“ ‘Alas.’ His Smile, at least, was not a pitying one, nor was it quite as disappointed as I’d fear’d. He turn’d, for the first time I saw the back of His Robe. He had a Motto in German embroider’d fine as could be in Gold Threads, upon the back. I couldn’t read what it said. He receded. He was gone.”
“Peter.”
“I feel cold, helpless, without him . . . ah. I believ’d I could count upon him forever, he was there, he was real, then he turn’d and went away. I have displeas’d Him,— but how? I lov’d him!” All day, half the Night, on he talks, stunn’d and sing-song. He does not weep as much as Luise expects. Armand has a swift look in from time to time, smiles understandingly, heaves a Sigh, withdraws. Luise waits to grow impatient. She considers the Frenchman for the first time with unrestrain’d Desire, having glimps’d the possibility that they may never have a chance to address it,— she can also appreciate how tiresome this listening to Peter is. Yet from some unexplor’d Region to her Spirit’s West, like upland folk with goods to sell, come Messengers with the late News, that her destiny ’spite all may lie with this craz’d Christless wreck of a Husband,— or, as she will also find herself asking in tears, upon any number of future occasions, “What else was I suppos’d to do? What? That Frenchman, and his Duck? I actually tried for a while to tell Peter about our little Trio. But I couldn’t even do that, for he never heard me, he was too full of old adventures, out past Monongahela, with Christ, going about in various Disguises, Christ and his Hop-field companion Peter, upon missions of education. Christ and Peter visit the Indians. Christ reminisces about His Teen Years. Christ teaches Peter how to make Golems.”
“Excuse me, Luise! Your Husband, he . . . ?”
“Makes Golems,— oh, not the big ones, Lotte! No, Kitchen-size,— some of them quite clever, the Tasks they do,— one that peels and cores Apples,— ja, even pits Cherries,— ”
“Luise, for Shame!” The women beam together mischievously. One day, however, Luise will show her. Peter will not mind.
Pennsylvania is a place of spiritual Wonders amazing as any Chasm or Cataract. Among the German farmers of Lancaster, for example, are scores, perhaps hundreds, of truly, literally Good People, escap’d from a Hell we in our small tended Quotidian may but try to imagine,— entire Villages put to Flame, and Tortures worse than Inquisitorial,— disembowelments, bloodlettings,— a world without Innocence,— yet, escap’d here, into Innocence reborn,— something deeper and more intricate,— they call it “a new Life in Christ,”— it is their way of explaining it. Not a moment of their waking day passes, without some form of Christian devotion. Work, which the rest of us, at one time or another, have cursed and wish’d at an end, is here consider’d Sacred,— and this is only one of many Wonders. . . .
Never has Traveler encounter’d such personal Variety, where utter cleanness and sobriety may be seen immediately adjoining the most stupefied exhibitions of Hemp-field Folly. There are Germanickal Mystics who live in Trees,— not up in the Branches, but actually within the Trunks, those particularly of ancient creek-side Sycamores, which have, over time, become hollow’d out, like Caverns. In the midst of these lightless Woods are gun-smithies where the most advanc’d and refin’d forms of Art are daily exercis’d upon the machinery of Murder by Craftsmen whose Piety is unquestion’d. . . .
— Wicks Cherrycoke, Spiritual Day-Book
DePugh recalls a Sermon he once heard at a church-ful of German Mysticks. “It might have been a lecture in Mathematics. Hell, beneath our feet, bounded,— Heaven, above our pates, unbounded. Hell a collapsing Sphere, Heaven an expanding one. The enclosure of Punishment, the release of Salvation. Sin leading us as naturally to Hell and Compression, as doth Grace to Heaven, and Rarefaction. Thus— ”
Murmurs of,” ‘Thus’?”
“— may each point of Heaven be mapp’d, or projected, upon each point of Hell, and vice versa. And what intercepts the Projection, about mid-way (reckon’d logarithmickally) between? why, this very Earth, and our lives here upon it. We only think we occupy a solid, Brick-and-Timber City,— in Reality, we live upon a Map. Perhaps even our Lives are but representations of Truer Lives, pursued above and below, as to Philadelphia correspond both a vast Heavenly City, and a crowded niche of Hell, each element of one faithfully mirror’d in the others.”
“There are a Mason and Dixon in Hell, you mean?” inquires Ethelmer, “attempting eternally to draw a perfect Arc of Considerably Lesser Circle?”
“Impossible,” ventures the Revd. “For is Hell, by this Scheme, not a Point, without Dimension?”
“Indeed. Yet, suppose Hell to be almost a Point,” argues the doughty DePugh, already Wrangler material, “— they would then be inscribing their Line eternal, upon the inner surface of the smallest possible Spheroid that can be imagin’d, and then some.”
“More of these . . . ,” Ethelmer pretending to struggle for a Modifier that will not offend the Company, “curious Infinitesimals, Cousin.— The Masters at my Purgatory are bewitch’d by the confounded things. Epsilons, usually. Miserable little,”— Squiggling in the air, “sort of things. Eh?”
“See them often,” sighs DePugh, “this Session more than ever.”
“What puzzles me, DeP., is that if the volume of Hell may be taken as small as you like, yet the Souls therein must be ever smaller, mustn’t they,— there being, by now, easily millions there?”
“Aye, assuming one of the terms of Damnation be to keep just enough of one’s size and weight to feel oppressively crowded,— taking as a model the old Black Hole of Calcutta, if you like,— the Soul’s Volume must be an Epsilon one degree smaller,— a Sub-epsilon.”
“ ‘The Epsilonicks of Damnation.’ Well, well. There’s my next Sermon,” remarks Uncle Wicks.
“I observe,” Tenebræ transform’d by the pale taper-light to some beautiful Needlewoman in an old Painting, “of both of you, that your fascination with Hell is match’d only by your disregard of Heaven. Why should the Surveyors not be found there Above,”— gesturing with her Needle, a Curve-Ensemble of Embroidery Floss, of a nearly invisible gray, trailing after, in the currents rais’d by Talking, Pacing, Fannin
g, Approaching, Withdrawing, and whatever else there be to indoor Life,— “drifting about, chaining the endless airy Leagues, themselves approaching a condition of pure Geometry?”
“Tho’ for symmetry’s sake,” interposes DePugh, “we ought to say, ‘almost endless.’ ”
“Why,” whispers Brae, “whoever said anything had to be symmetrickal?” The Lads, puzzl’d, exchange a quick Look.
50
Not all Roads lead to Philadelphia. Chesapeake means as much, and often more, to the Back Inhabitants as Philadelphia,— so Roads here seldom run in the same sense as the West Line, but rather athwart it, coming up from Chesapeake, and going on, to the North and the West. Soon, lesser roads, linking farms and closer Markets, begin to feed into these Line-crossing roads,— before long, on one or more of the Corners so defin’d, a Tavern will appear. It is thus, in the Back-Country, evident to all, however unschool’d in Euclid, that each time the Visto crosses a Road, there’s sure to be an Oasis but a few miles north or south.
“Here’s how we’ll do it,” proposes Mason. “Whenever we come to a Road, one of us goes North, the other South. The one not finding a Tavern in a reasonable Time, returns to the Line, where he finds either the other waiting, or that the other has not yet return’d,— in which case, he then continues in the same direction, either meeting the other returning, or finding him, already a dozen pints down.”
East of Susquehanna, under this System, there prove to be Crossings where Inns lie both North and South of the Line, and on such Occasions, entire days may pass with each Surveyor in his own Tavern, not exactly waiting for the other to show up,— possibly imagining the good time the other must be having and failing to share. Later, across Susquehanna, there come days when the only Inns are worse than no Inn, and presently days when there are no Inns at all, and at last the night they encamp knowing that for an unforeseeable stretch of Nights, they must belong to this great Swell of Forested Mountains, this place of ancient Revenge, and Beasts outside the Fire-light,— the sun this particular evening as if in celestial Seal, spreading into a Glory, transgressing all Metes and Bounds, filling the Trees, lighting the Animals, their flanks averted, wash’d in its oncoming Flow, bringing to human faces a precision approaching purification, goading each soul, as if again and again, ever toward the Shambles of Eternity. The Axmen stand beneath it, no less bruised, worn or hungry than from any other day, blinking, turning away, then returning to this Radiance that flares from behind edges of Shapes uncertain,— the Creation they believe they know,— re-created.
Later, not all will agree on what they have seen.
Thus, as the Communication is a long sequence of Fortified remounting stations, so is the Line a long sequence of Taverns and Ordinaries, and absences of the same. One day, the Meridian having been closely enough establish’d, and with an hour or two of free time available to them, one heads north, one south, and ’tis Dixon’s luck to discover The Rabbi of Prague, headquarters of a Kabbalistick Faith, in Correspondence with the Elect Cohens of Paris, whose private Salute they now greet Dixon with, the Fingers spread two and two, and the Thumb held away from them likewise, said to represent the Hebrew letter Shin and to signify, “Live long and prosper.” The area just beyond the next Ridge is believ’d to harbor a giant Golem, or Jewish Automaton, taller than the most ancient of the Trees. As explain’d to Dixon, ’twas created by an Indian tribe widely suppos’d to be one of the famous Lost Tribes of Israel, who had somehow given up control of the Creature, sending it headlong into the Forest, where it would learn of its own gift of Mobile Invisibility.
“And . . . do you folk wear Special Hats, anything like that?” inquires Dixon. It sounds enough like the Frenchman’s Duck to make him cautious. “Most of thee, in Speech and Address, I’d’ve guess’d to be Irish . . . I thought thee were known for Little People. This is a Wonder of the Wilderness, for fair . . . ?”
“If, I say ‘if,’ you do see it,” advises the Landlord, “you’ll then talk of Wonders indeed.”
“Sure that Golem,— you have to catch him when he’s asleep,” asserts a short red-headed woodsman in Deerskins, who is holding a tankard in one hand and a Lancaster County rifle in the other.
“Of course,” adds a florid Forge-keeper who occupies the entire side of one Table, “that might not be for years.” He chuckles, and the Tankards rattle upon the Shelves.
“Aye, some of us have never seen him, only heard his steps on the nights when there is no Moon, or his voice, speaking from above the only words he knows,— ‘Eyeh asher Eyeh,’ “—in on which, in Tones hush’d, though ominous, the others now join.
“That is, ‘I am that which I am,’” helpfully translates a somehow nautical-looking Indiv. with gigantick Fore-Arms, and one Eye ever a-Squint from the Smoke of his Pipe.
“Tho’ Rashi in his Commentary has, ‘I will be what I will be,’ as the Tense is ambiguous between present and future.”
“Isn’t that what God said to Moses?” Dixon inquires.
“Exodus 3:14. ’Tis what the Indians’ll say to you, if you go far enough west,— being the Lost Tribes of Israel out there, whose Creature this is.”
“In the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, you see, Jesus as a Boy made small, as you’d say, toy Golems out of Clay,— Sparrows that flew, Rabbits that hopp’d. Golem fabrication is integral to the Life of Jesus, and thence to Christianity.”
“Nor is it any Wonder here by South Mountain, anyway. Sometimes the Invisible will all at once appear,— sometimes what you see may not be there at all.”
“I am told of certain Stars, in the Chinese system of Astrology, which are invisible so long as they keep moving, only being seen, when they pause. Might thy Golem share this Property?”
The Company rush to enlighten Dixon.” ’Tis shar’d with this whole accursèd Continent,” the quarrelsome Carrot-top lets him know, waving his Rifle and narrowly missing several Tankards upon the Table.
“— Which, as if in answer to God’s recession, remain’d invisible, denied to us, till it became necessary to our Souls that it come to rest, self-reveal’d, tho’ we pretended to ‘discover’ it. . . .”
“By the time of Columbus, God’s project of Disengagement was obvious to all,— with the terrible understanding that we were to be left more and more to our own solutions.”
“America, withal, for centuries had been kept hidden, as are certain Bodies of Knowledge. Only now and then were selected persons allow’d Glimpses of the New World,— ”
“Never Reporters that anyone else was likely to believe,— men who ate the Flesh and fornicated with the Ghosts of their Dead, murderers and Pirates on the run, monks in parchment Coracles stitched together from copied Pages of the Book of Jonah, fishermen too many Nights out of Port, any Runagate craz’d enough to sail West.”
“All matters of what becomes Visible, and when. Revelation exists as a Fact,— and continues, as Time proceeds. If new Continents may become visible, why not Planets, sir, as Planets are in your Line?”
“Ye’d have to ask Mason, who should be here Hourly.”
“Howbeit,— the Secret was safe until the choice be made to reveal it. It has been denied to all who came to America, for Wealth, for Refuge, for Adventure. This ‘New World’ was ever a secret Body of Knowledge,— meant to be studied with the same dedication as the Hebrew Kabbala would demand. Forms of the Land, the flow of water, the occurrence of what us’d to be call’d Miracles, all are Text,— to be attended to, manipulated, read, remember’d.”
“Hence as you may imagine, we take a lively interest in this Line of yours,” booms the Forge-keeper, “inasmuch as it may be read, East to West, much as a Line of Text upon a Page of the sacred Torah,— a Tellurian Scripture, as some might say,— ”
“— ’Twill terminate somewhere to the West, no one, not even you and your Partner, knows where. An utterance. A Message of uncertain len
gth, apt to be interrupted at any Moment, or Chain. A smaller Pantograph copy down here, of Occurrences in the Higher World.”
“Another case of, ‘As above, so below.’ ”
“No longer, Alas, a phrase of Power,— this Age sees a corruption and disabling of the ancient Magick. Projectors, Brokers of Capital, Insurances, Peddlers upon the global Scale, Enterprisers and Quacks,— these are the last poor fallen and feckless inheritors of a Knowledge they can never use, but in the service of Greed. The coming Rebellion is theirs,— Franklin, and that Lot,— and Heaven help the rest of us, if they prevail.”
“Yet,” puts in a queer, uncollected sort of Townsman, who’s been drinking so far in silence, “what of the way Mr. Franklin and his people stopp’d the Paxtonians before the City, as the Pope halted Attila before Rome,—
‘Like Leo First, upon the Mincian Bank,
Before that Horde, Rank after endless Rank . . . ’
— yes and now, as then, the preponderant Question is, What kind of Arrangements were made? With conquest in their grasp and sight, our own Barbarians in like wise turn’d, and sought once again their wild back-lands, renouncing their chance to sack the Quaker Rome.”
“Enjoy its Women.” General Comment.
“Careful, Lad, some of them’s us.”
“Just so. What argument could have prov’d compelling enough to dissuade them?—
‘The Kite, the Key, the mortal Thundering
As Heaven’s Flame assaults the hempen String,’
— Eh?— for they esteem Franklin a Magician. A Figure of Power. We know what he is,— but to the Mobility, he is the Ancestor of Miracle,— or, of Wonders, which pass as well with them,— without which, indeed, they would soon grow inquisitive and troublesome. For, as long as it remains possible to keep us deluded that we are ‘free men,’ we back Inhabitants will feed the Metropolis, open new roads to it, fight in its behalf,— we may be Presbyterian today, and turn’d only by the force of God, but after very few seasons of such remorseless Gulling, we must be weak and tractable enough even for the Philadelphian men of affairs, who themselves cannot be reckon’d as any sort of Faithful, but rather among Doubt’s advancing Phalanx,— of whom one must ask, If they no longer believe in Bishops, where next, might their Irreverence not take them?”
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