Next the neighbours came running—La Vergne, the barber, Latta, the fruit man, Copal, the saloon keeper, Mrs. Wittowsky, the midwife. And others. Many others. They all came running. They stood on tiptoe to see and hear. They backed Hunding; they backed Lubin. And presently all were talking, gesticulating, threatening, calling on their countries, on their emperors, on their God, each in his own tongue, each for the glory of the Quarrel that was shaking the world.
So Mahony, the policeman, thought best to turn in a call for the capacious blue wagon, for see you, Latta had a knife and Copal a pistol, and Lubin was tearing his beard with an immemorial gesture—and the hurdy-gurdy was playing The Watch on the Rhine.
That was how Hunding and Lubin and Latta and La Vergne and all the rest of them came to be arrested for disturbing the peace. Thrown together in the general cell, they fumed and sorrowed and suffered and raged according to their temperaments, and if it had not been for an alderman of paternal habits and a copious—one had almost said a communal—purse, they would have fared worse than they did. It was bad enough as it was, considering that they were honest men, and men of self-respect.
As for their women who watched them being driven away, they would have taken up the fight and been glad to do it, for their blood was boiling and their affections were wounded in their tenderest spot, had it not been that little Miriam, a quivering spectator, chanced to look within the alcove where Casper sat. She saw that his head was lying back against the chair, that his eyes were rolling, and his face strangely flushed.
“Casper!” she cried so shrilly that Anna Hunding, his mother, heard and looked and ran.
“Ah, you kill him among you!” she accused.
But he was not dead. He came back to life intensely, tremendously, with gleaming eyes, with parted lips as one who beheld a vision.
Then he spoke, strangely, like one chanting, and the neighbours, crowding around, stood spell-bound to hear.
“Mother,” he called, “Mother.”
“Casper, my boy!”
“Do you hear them marching? Do you hear the men marching? Hear their footsteps? Hear the drum beats? It keeps saying: ‘Fear-fear, fear-fear, fear-fear! Fear of Russians, fear of Germans, fear of English, fear of French.’ Hear it beating? What a drum-beat! Fear-fear! Don’t let father join them, mother. Don’t let neighbour Lubin go. See them coming—see them coming? Miles and miles of men all marching. Miles and more miles. ‘Pride-pride, pride-pride, pride of Russians, pride of Germans, pride of English, pride of French.’ Hear the drum beats—”
He had spoken the words as if to the deep pulsation of a drum. But now a new expression crossed his face. He shrank back in his chair as if to avoid the very scrutiny of God, and when his mother rushed to him he held her back.
“Keep away, keep away!” he cried.“Give them room, mother, give them room.”
“Give who room, my boy? Oh, what do you see?”
“Angels, mother, fighting, fighting. The angel in purple is the Angel of Pride, and the one in grey is the Angel of Fear. Oh, what terrible faces they have! I do not know which is worse. Ahaa-aa, how they struggle. Oh, mother, they need all the world to fight in. See the towns fall to give them room. Ah-aa-” He sank back weakly. The strange and terrible elation faded from his face, and he looked at his mother with blurred eyes. “I am very tired,” he said, letting her take his hands. “Has Paula come home yet?”
When Paula did come and heard all the tale, she looked at Casper with awe. The mother saw it and turned her head away. Did it mean he was near his end, that he, so many years her babe, her care, her joy-in-sorrow, was leaving her? Was his vision the forerunner of his death?
Like a maiden of snow, Paula sat by his chair, listening and weeping, nor would she be comforted till the crestfallen men came home and sullenly took up their work again.
After that, Lubin came no more for his paper. Paula carried it over and dropped it at his door; or Miriam, softly entering the white conspiracy stole into Hunding’s for it. When the Lubins passed the Hundings there were averted looks. No little dishes of soup were now sent from next door to strengthen the sick boy. If Paula took Miriam to a party at the Settlement house, she did not tell the Hundings where she was going. The men had been warned and they kept the peace, but as the paper brought each morning the news of the on-sweep of the European tragedy, each knew what the other was thinking, and to each his neighbours’ expletives seemed to hiss behind the door like cornered snakes.
As for Paula, she drooped. The clash of temperaments thrust her into a place of doubt and dread where she lost sight of that Perfect Good toward which she was working. She grew paler, thinner; her little hands were habitually cold; her eyes grew larger in her wistful face. She was growing used to seeing hungry people, and drunken people, and people who were sinners, and people who were about to die. She could stand that. It was her business to stand it. But the Lubins and the Hundings were somehow her own. With her great talent for loving, she loved them, and when their hates clashed, she shrunk as if from open blows. Besides, she knew in the quivering soul of her that Casper suffered from it even more than she.
“Men, men!” sighed Mrs. Hunding to her.“They are so fierce and wild! Always fighting yet for this idea and that! ‘What’s the matter with you at all,’ I say to Hunding. ‘You, with your ideas. Leave ideas alone. Be happy. In a little while you will be dead.’ Here is Christmas coming, and what good will it do us with our hearts all black with hate? I wanted to make a pudding for the Lubins. I don’t care if they are not Christians. They would have liked a pudding at Christmas as well as anyone. They would know it spoke of the friendship of our hearts. That is what I said to myself. But now what do we send them? Black looks; angry thoughts; whisperings and nudgings. Men, men!”
“Well,” declared Paula with her downright Iowa determination, “no man has any say about what I shall do, and I intend to dress a new doll for Miriam. If the men want to be stupid that’s their affair, but I’ll not have a sweet little girl cheated of her Christmas.”
“Maybe her father will let her take a present from you,” sighed Frau Hunding, “but it would be useless for me to try to give her anything. I am their enemy. Oh, of course, their enemy!”
“You never could be the enemy of anyone,” protested Paula, putting her slim arm about her protector’s copious waist. “How can I thank you for being so good to me, mother Hunding?”
Sadder and more terrible grew the news from over seas. Darker and more cruel were the looks which Otto Hunding and Moses Lubin exchanged. So what pleasure was there to be found in sitting up late o’nights sewing on Christmas presents? How was the kindly spirit of Christmas to grope its way through the grey mist which hung over the place?
Then a day came—it must have been less than a week before Christmas—when Casper, very pale, very inert, sat listening against his will while his father read terrible stories of weeklong battles, of driven and desperate men, of rivers choked with the slain. Casper, shrinking from the words as if they were blows, grew paler yet and cried out to his father to stop, but could not make his voice heard. Then as the vision of these innocent men, made murderous against their better natures, arose before him— these men dying in trenches, in the fields they had sown, or on the hard stones of foreign town—once more black confusion swirled in his brain. Again he sank into unconsciousness. It was a chance visitor to the shop who noticed it first.
“Has the young man fainted?” he asked.
Mrs. Hunding and Paula ran together toward the invalid, but before they could reach him his eyelids fluttered and he seemed to be struggling up through waves of deep oblivion to the light of exaltation. As on the previous occasion, his face was transfigured. His eyes were lit with a heavenly glory, his mouth bowed itself like a seraph’s; but this time there was no dread, no pain. He was uplifted by the cognizance of some perfect beauty.
“He has come!” he chanted. “I have waited long, but he has come!”
“Oh, who, Casper, please?�
�� asked Paula, looking where he looked and trying to see with his eyes. “Who?”
“The Angel,” he answered. “The shining Angel—the white Angel. Oh, call our neighbours. They must see! Hasten, call them. They must see.”
“Yes,” said Paula, tranced with his vision, though she saw it not.
She sped next door, trembling, white-faced.
“Casper needs you,” she cried.“Come! He has sent for you.”
“By the faith of my father’s I will not go,” cried Lubin.
But Paula did not listen. She took his arm in her grasp.
“He is seeing an Angel,” she cried.“And he wants you to see it too.”
“Oh! Oh, an Angel!” said little Miriam. She dropped her toys and sped ahead.
Mrs. Lubin had already gone on swift feet.
“Is he dying then?” she asked.
“Come, come,” the youth called to them as they entered. “It is for you to see, and you will tell the others. See how it fills the room with its wings brighter than silver clouds. See its face, like the smile of God. And behold with your eyes what it is doing. It is sweeping away the landmarks with its shining broom. Do you understand? Sweeping away all that holds man from man. Down go boundaries! Down go divisions! No more Russian lines, no more German lines, no more French, Austrian and Italian lines. All gone, wiped out. Do you understand? Just men, men, men, living, loving, laughing, working, helping! Just men with no lines between them! And the kings walking with the rest, men too, and shouting with joy because of the Angel with the broom.” He is a prophet,”’ said Moses Lubin, and stroked his beard.
“He is a saint,” said Hunding.“My son, and I a sinner!”
Suddenly the youth flung his arm across his eyes.
“Mother!” he screamed. “It is too bright! I cannot stand the radiance! Oh, what wings—what wings.”
Mrs. Hunding dropped her face in her hands. She dared not approach him. It was little Miriam who went to him.
“Don’t be afraid, Casper,” she whispered. “Nothing is too bright. Nothing is ever too bright.”
He looked at her, dazed.
“Where am I?” he cried. Then he saw the familiar room, the familiar faces—saw Lubin and Mrs. Lubin, and he caught Miriam to him.
“Are you back?” he asked.“Are you our neighbours again?”
His eyes, purer than a child’s, blue with the blueness like a June day, begged for their understanding.
Otto Hunding strode to Moses Lubin.
“In the name of God,” he said, holding out his hand.
“In the name of God,” said Lubin, grasping it.
Mrs. Hunding caught the faded purple skirt of Mrs. Lubin with her trembling hand.
“I may send you my pudding on Christmas day?” she faltered.“I may give my little gift to Miriam?”
“Oh, yes, yes,” said Rachel Lubin weeping.“Now I feel happy again. Now I feel once more as if I was at home.”
Paula had an idea. She explored the recesses of the worn brown wrist bag which the children of her street knew to their pleasure, and drew forth some small objects. With these she went first to the giant Hunding, slipping something in his buttonhole; then to little Lubin and fastened something in his. Each man turned the lapel of his coat to see what she had done.
“Peace,” read the little buttons. “Peace.” They looked at each other with penitent eyes, not ill at ease, yet not themselves. The place still was filled with the rustle of the wings of Casper’s Angel; they seemed to hear the swish of his shining broom, sweeping away the landmarks. They were as folk who had partaken of a sacrament.
Casper’s face was wistful now, like a tired child’s, but his eyes continued to look like crystal pools. Beside him was Miriam, her dark hair streaming across his shoulder.
“Tomorrow,” said Paula, seeking for some subject of conversation to break the spell that held them, “will be Christmas day.”
Casper sat up in his chair and lifted his transparent hand. “Peace day,” he cried, “goodwill day!”
“Amen,” said Hunding.
“Selah,” said Lubin.
The Blood Apple
(A.k.a. The Curse of Micah Rood)
In the early part of the last century there lived in eastern Connecticut a man named Micah Rood. He was a solitary soul, and occupied a low, tumble-down house, in which he had seen his sisters and his brothers, his father and his mother, die. The mice used the bare floors for a playground; the swallows filled up the unused chimneys; and in the attic a hundred bats made their home. Micah Rood disturbed no living creature, unless now and then he killed a hare for his day’s dinner, or cast bait for a glistening trout in the Shetucket. For the most part his food came from the garden and the orchard which his father had planted and nurtured years before.
Into whatever disrepair the house had fallen, the garden bloomed and flourished like a western Eden. The brambles, with their luscious burden, clambered up the stone walls, sentinelled by trim rows of English currants. The strawberry nestled among its wayward creepers, and on the trellises hung grapes of varied hues. In seemly rows, down the sunny expanse of the garden spot, grew every vegetable indigenous to the western world or transplanted by colonial industry. Everything here took seed, and bore fruit with a prodigal exuberance. Beyond the garden lay the orchard, a labyrinth of flowers in the springtime, a paradise of verdure in the summer, and in the season of fruition a miracle of plenty.
Often the master of the orchard stood by the gate in the crisp autumn mornings, with his hat filled with apples for the children as they passed to school. There was only one tree in the orchard of whose fruit he was chary. Consequently it was the bearings of this tree that the children most wanted.
“Prithee, Master Rood,” they would say, “give us some of the gold apples?”
“I sell the gold apples for siller,” he would say. “Content ye with the red and green ones.”
In all the region there grew no counterpart to this remarkable apple. Its skin was of the clearest amber, translucent and spotless, and the pulp was white as snow, mellow yet firm, and without a flaw from the glistening skin to the even, brown seeds nestling like babies in their silken cradle. Its flavour was peculiar and piquant, with a suggestion of spiciness. The fame of Micah Rood’s apple, as it was called, had extended far and wide, but all efforts to engraft it upon other trees failed utterly; and the envious farmers were fain to content themselves with the rare shoots.
If there dwelt any vanity in the heart of Micah Rood, it was in the possession of this apple tree, which took the prize at all the local fairs and carried his name beyond the neighbourhood where its owner lived. For the most part he was a modest man, averse to discussions of any sort, shrinking from men and their opinions. He talked more to his dog than to any human being. He fed his mind upon a few old books, and made nature his religion. All things that made the woods their home were his friends. He possessed himself of their secrets and insinuated himself into their confidences. But best of all he loved the children. When they told him their sorrows, the answering tears sprang to his eyes; when they told him of their delights, his laugh woke the echoes of the Shetucket as light and free as their own.
He laughed frequently when with the children, throwing back his great head, while the tears of mirth ran from his blue eyes. His teeth were like pearls, and constituted his chief charm. For the rest he was rugged and firmly knit. It seemed to the children, after a time, that some cloud was hanging over the serene spirit of their friend. After he had laughed he sighed, and they saw, as he walked down the green paths that led away from his place, that he would look lovingly back at the old homestead and shake his head again and again with a perplexed and melancholy air. The merchants, too, observed that he began to be closer in his bargains, and he barrelled his apples so greedily that the birds and the children were quite robbed of their autumnal feast.A winter wore away and left Micah in this changed mood. He sat through the long, dull days brooding over his fire and smoking. He m
ade his own simple meals of mush and bacon, kept his own counsels, and neither visited nor received the neighbouring folk.
One day, in a heavy January rain, the boys noticed a strange man who rode rapidly through the village and drew rein at Micah Rood’s orchard gate. He passed through the leafless orchard and up the muddy garden paths to the old dismantled house. The boys had time to learn by heart every good point of the chestnut mare fastened to the palings before the stranger emerged from the house. Micah followed him to the gate. The stranger swung himself upon the mare with a sort of jaunty flourish, while Micah stood heavily and moodily by, chewing the end of a straw.
“Well, Master Rood,” the boys heard the stranger say, “thou’st till the first of next May, but not a day of grace more.” He had a decisive, keen manner that took away the breath of the boys, used to men of slow action and slow speech. “Mind ye,” he snapped, like an angry cur,“not another day’s grace.” Micah said not a word, but stolidly chewed on his straw, while the stranger cut his animal briskly with the whip, and mare and rider dashed away down the dreary road. The boys began to frisk about their old friend and pull savagely at the tails of his coat, whooping and whistling to arouse him from his reverie. Micah looked up and roared:
“Off with ye! I’m in no mood for pranks.”
As a pet dog slinks away in humiliation at a blow, so the boys, hurt and indignant, skulked down the road, speechless at the cruelty of their old friend. The April sunshine was bringing the dank odours from the earth when the village beauties were thrown into a flutter of excitement. Old Geoffry Peterkin, the peddler, came with such jewellery, such stuffs, and such laces as the maidens of Shetucket had never seen the like of before.
The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Elia W. Peattie Page 10
