Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  The deacon opened his eyes with astonishment. That lad intelligent? Why, he was no judge at all of a bullock, and he knew scarcely anythin’ more about fall wheat’n a greenhorn that might hev kem out from Ireland by the last steamer. However, he contented himself upon that head with smiling sardonically, and muttered half to himself, ‘Edoocation; edoocational influence; not with members of the Hopkinsite connection, I reckon.’

  Audouin carefully checked the smile that threatened to pull up the corners of his delicate mouth. He was beginning to understand now what manner of man he had got to deal with, and for Hiram’s sake he was determined to be patient. Fancy such a lad living always exposed to the caprices of such a father!

  ‘No,’ he said gravely, ‘not with the Hopkin-sites, but with the Congregationalists and others, where your boy would not be interfered with in his religious convictions.’

  ‘‘Tain’t entirely satisfactory,’ the deacon continued. ‘Consider my persition as one set in authority, as it were, in the Hopkinsite connection. Hiram ain’t bin nowhar so far, ‘ceptin’ to common school, an’ I dunno as I hev made up my mind ever to send him any-whar else. Boys loses a lot o’ time over this here edoocation. But ef I was to, I guess I should send him to Bethabara Seminary. We hev a seminary of our own, sir — we of the Believin’ Church, commonly known as the Hopkinsite connection — at Athens in Madison County, which we call Bethabara, because we surmise it’s the on’y place in America whar the Gospel is taught on thorough-goin’ Baptist principles. We air not only for immersion as agin sprinklin’, mister, but also for scriptooral immersion in runnin’ water as agin the lax modern practice of or’nary immersion in tanks or reservoyers. That’s why we call our seminary Bethabara — Athens bein’ sitooated on the Musk-rat river close above its junction with the Jordan; an’ that’s why, ef I was goin’ to send Hiram any whar, I should send him whar he could hear the Gospel expounded accordin’ to the expositions an’ opinions of Franklin V. Hopkins, of Massachusetts, which air the correck ones.’

  ‘This question will take a little time to thrash out,’ Audouin answered with unruffled gravity. ‘May I ask, deacon, whether you will courteously permit me to take a chair in your house and talk it over fully with you?’

  ‘Why, certainly,’ the deacon answered with a doubtful look that clearly belied his spoken words. ‘Hiram, you jest go an’ drive up the cows, sonny, an’ mind you put up the fence behind you, jest the same as you find it.’

  They went together into the dreary living-room, a room such as Audouin had seen in duplicate ten thousand times before, with a bare wooden floor, bare walls, a white pine table, a rocking-chair, a bunk, some cane seats, a stove, and a cheap lithograph of a vacant-looking gentleman in a bag-wig and loose collar, whom an inscription surmounted by a spread eagle declared largely to have been first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. (Lithographs of the sort are common in American farmhouses, and are understood to be posthumous libels on the intelligence and personal appearance of George Washington.) Audouin seated himself humbly on the bunk, and the deacon took his accustomed place in the rocking-chair, where he continued to sway himself violently to and fro during the whole interview.

  Audouin began by pleading hard for education for Hiram, and suggesting, as delicately as he was able, that if pecuniary difficulties barred the way, they might perhaps be easily smoothed over. (As a matter of fact, he would willingly have given freely of that dirty paper, stamped with the treasury stamp, that they call money, to free such a lad as Hiram Winthrop from the curse of that material civilisation that they both so cordially detested.) He praised Hiram’s intelligence and his wonderful talent for drawing: spoke of the wrongfulness of not allowing full play to his God-given faculties: and even condescended to point out that Hiram educated would probably make a much larger fortune (ugh! how he shuddered over it) than Hiram set to do the drudgery of a farm which he hated and always would hate. The deacon listened, half-wrathful; such open aiding and abetting of sinful rebelliousness and repining was almost too much for him; his only consolation was that Hiram wasn’t along to listen to it all and drink in more unfilial sentiments from it.

  But Audouin soon made one convert at least. Mrs. Winthrop, with her hard unlovable face, sat silently listening beside the stove, and picking over the potatoes for the spring planting. In her shrivelled mother’s heart, she had always been proud of Hiram; proud even of his stubbornness and rebellion, which in some dim, half-unconscious fashion she vaguely knew to be really a higher, nobler sort of thing at bottom than the deacon’s stern, unbending fidelity to the principles of Solomon and the Hopkinsite Confession. Somewhere away down in the dark unfathomed depths of Mehitabel Winthrop’s stunted personality there lay a certain stifled, undeveloped, long-since-smothered germ of human romance and feminine sympathy which had blossomed out in Hiram into true love of art and of nature. Deadened as it was in her by the cruel toilsome life of Muddy Creek, with its endless round of dull monotonous labour, as well as by the crushing defeat experienced by all her girlish ideals in the awful reality of the married state with Zephaniah Winthrop, the deacon’s wife still retained in some half-buried corner of her soul a little smouldering spark of the divine fire which enabled her in a doubtful halffrightened fashion to sympathise with Hiram. It was very wrong and weak of her, she knew: father was right, and Hiram was a no-account, idle loiterer: but still, when he spoke up to father, to his very face, about his novel-reading, and his birds-nesting, and his drawing, Mrs. Winthrop was somehow aware of a sneaking admiration and pride in him which she never felt towards the deacon, even during his most effective and unctuous exhortation. And now, when she heard Audouin praising and speaking well of her boy for those very, things that the deacon despised and rejected, she felt that here was somebody else who could appreciate Hiram, and that perhaps, after all, her own instinct had not in the end entirely misled her.

  ‘Zeph,’ she said at last — it was many years since she had called him ‘Zeph’ habitually, instead of ‘Father’ or ‘Deacon’— ‘Zeph, I think we might manage to send Hiram to college.’

  The deacon started. Et tu, Brute! This was really almost too much for him. He began to wonder whether the universe was turned upside down, and all the powers that be were hereafter to be ranged on the side of rebelliousness and opposition. To say the truth, his godly horror was not altogether feigned. According to his lights, his dusky and feeble lights, the deacon wished and believed himself to be a good father. He held it his clear duty, as set forth in his reading of the prophets and apostles, to knock this idle nonsense out of Hiram, and train him up in the way he should go, to be a respectable corn-raising farmer and shining light of the Hopkinsite connection. These habits of hunting ‘coons and making pictures of rattlesnakes, into which the boy had lapsed, were utterly abhorrent to the deacon’s mind as idle, loitering, vagabond ways, deserving only of severe castigation His reading of English classics appeared as a crime only one degree less heinous than frequenting taverns, playing cards, or breaking the Sabbath. The boy was a bad boy, a hopelessly bad boy, given him as a thorn in the flesh to prevent spiritual boasting: on that hypothesis alone could the deacon account for such a son of perdition being born of such believing and on the whole (as poor worms go) extremely creditable parents.

  And now, here was this fine-spoken, incomprehensible Boston critter, who had took that ramshackle place of Hitchcock’s, and didn’t even mean to farm it — here was this unaccountable phenomenon of a man positively interested in and pleased with Hiram, just because of these very self-same coon-hunting, snake-drawing, vagabond proclivities. The Deacon’s self-love and selfrespect were deeply wounded. Audouin had already been talking with the boy: no doubt he had set him even more agin his own father than ever. No doubt he had told Hiram that there was something fine in his heathenish love for Injun tommy-hawks, in his Bohemian longings for intercourse with ungodly trappers (men to whom the Sabbath was absolutely indifferent), in his wicked yearning afte
r Pickwick’s Papers, and the Complete Dramatic Works of William Wakefield. The deacon couldn’t bear to stultify himself after all, by sending Hiram to school at the request of this favourer of rebellion, this vile instigator of revolt against paternal authority, this Ahithophel who would lure on a foolish Absalom with guileful counsel to his final destruction.

  ‘Wal, Het,’ the Deacon said slowly, ‘I dunno about it. We must take time to consider and to wrastle over it.’

  But Audouin, now thoroughly in earnest, his sense of plot-interest vividly aroused, would hear of no delay, but that the question must be settled that very evening, he saw the deacon wouldn’t entertain the idea of Hiram being sent somewhere to prepare for Yale or Harvard, where Audouin would have liked him to go: and so, with a diplomatic cleverness which the deacon, if he could have read his visitor’s mind, would doubtless have characterised as devilish, he determined to shift his ground, and beg only that Hiram might be sent to Bethabara. In a year or two, he said to himself, the boy would be older and would have a mind of his own; and then it would be possible, he thought, to send him to some college where his intellectual and artistic nature might have freer development than at the Hopkinsite Seminary. Bit by bit, the Deacon gave way: he couldn’t as a consistent church member and a father with the highest interests of his son at heart, refuse to let him go to Bethabara, when a mere stranger declared he saw in him signs of talent. He yielded ungraciously at last, and told Audouin he wouldn’t stand in the way of the boy’s receivin’ a good edoocation, purvided allus it wa’n’t contrary to the principles of Franklin P. Hopkins.

  ‘Very well,’ Audouin said with a sigh of relief. ‘I’ll write and inquire about the matter myself this very evening.’

  ‘Address the Secatary,’ Mr. Winthrop put in officially, ‘Bethabara Seminary, Athens, N.Y.’ Audouin made a note in his memorandum book of the incongruous address with a stifled sigh.

  ‘Mother,’ the deacon said, ‘call in Hiram.’ Mrs. Winthrop obeyed. Hiram, who had been loitering about the wood-shed in wonder at what this long interview could portend, slunk in timidly, and stood with his ragged hat in his hand beside the table.

  ‘Hiram,’ said the deacon, solemnly, with the voice and air of a judge publicly addressing a condemned criminal, ‘that gentleman thar has been conversin’ with mother an’ me relatively to the desirability of sendin’ you to an edoocational establishment, whar you may, p’raps, be cured from your present oncommonly idle and desultory proclivities. Though you hev allus bin, as I confess with shame, a most lazy lad, sonny, an’ hev never done anything to develop your nat’ral talents in any way, that gentleman thar, who has received a college edoocation hisself at one of our leadin’ American Universities, an’ who is competent by trainin’ an’ experience to form an opinion upon the subjeck, believes that you dew possess nat’ral talents of which you ain’t yet giv any open indication.’Tain’t for me to say whether you may hev inherited them or not: it is sufficient to point out that that thar gentleman considers you might, with industry and application, dew credit in time to an edoocational institoot. Such an institoot of our own denomination is Bethabara Seminary, located at Athens, New York. Thar you would receive instruction not at variance with the religious teachin’ you hev enjoyed in your own residence an’ from your own parents. An eminent Hopkinsite pastor is installed over that institoot as President; I allood to Elder Ezra W. Coffin, with whose commentary on the prophet Ezekiel you air already familiar. Mother an’ me has decided, accordingly, that it will be for your good, both temporal and sperritooal we hope, to enter junior at Bethabara Seminary. That gentleman thar will make inquiries relatively to the time when you kin be received into the institootion.

  We trust that when you he ventered upon this noo stage in your career, you will drop them habits of idleness an’ insubordination for which it has been my dooty on a great many occasions to correck you severely.’ Hiram stood there dazed and trembling, listening with blank amazement to the deacon’s exhortation (the same as if it was conference), and only vaguely taking in the general idea that he was to be sent away shortly to some school or other somewhere. Andouin saw at a glance the lad’s timid hesitation, and added kindly: ‘Your father and mother think, Hiram, that it would be well to send you to Bethabara’ (he suppressed his rising shudder), ‘so that you may have opportunities of learning more about all the things in which you’re already so much interested. You’ll like it, my boy, I’m sure; and you’ll get on there, I feel confident.’

  The boy turned to him gratefully: ‘That’s so, I guess,’ he answered, with his awkward country gratitude; ‘I shall like it better’n this, anyhow.’

  The deacon frowned, but said nothing.

  And so, before a week was over, Hiram had said good-bye to his mother and Sam Churchill, and was driving over in the deacon’s buggy to Muddy Creek deepo, ong rowt for Athens, Madison County.

  CHAPTER VIII. WOOD AND STONE.

  Colin Churchill’s first delight at the wood-carver’s at Exeter was of the sort that a man rarely feels twice in a lifetime. It was the joy of first emancipation. Hitherto, Colin had been only a servant, and had looked forward to a life of service. Not despondently or gloomily — for Colin was a son of the people, and he accepted servitude as his natural guerdon — but blankly and without eagerness or repining. The children of the labouring class expect to walk through life in their humble way as through a set task, where a man may indeed sometimes meet with stray episodes of pleasure (especially that one human episode of love-making), but where for the most part he will come across nothing whatsoever save interminable rules and regulations. Now, however, Colin felt himself free and happy: he had got a trade and a career before him, and a trade and a career into which he could throw himself with his utmost ardour. For the first time in his life Colin began dimly to feel that he too had something in him. How could he possibly have got up an enthusiasm about the vicar’s boots, or about the proper way to deliver letters on a silver salver? But when it came to carving roses and plums out of solid mahogany or walnut, why, that of course was a very different sort of matter.

  Even at Wootton Mandeville, the boy had somehow suspected, in his vague inarticulate fashion (for the English agricultural class has no tongue in which to express itself), that he too had artistic taste and power. When he heard the vicar talking to his friends about paintings or engravings, he recognised that he could understand and appreciate all that the vicar said; nay, more: on two or three occasions he had even boldly ventured to conceive that he saw certain things in certain pictures which the vicar, in his cold, dry, formal fashion, with his coldly critical folding eyeglass, could never have dreamt of or imagined. In his heart of hearts, even then, the boy somehow half-knew that the vicar saw what the vicar was capable of seeing in each work, but that he, Colin Churchill the pageboy, penetrated into the very inmost feeling and meaning of the original artist. So much, in his inarticulate way, the boy had sometimes surprised himself by dimly fancying; but as he had no language in which to speak such things, even to himself, and only slowly learnt that language afterwards, he didn’t formulate his ideas in his own head for a single minute, allowing them merely to rest there in the inchoate form of shapeless feeling.

  Now, at Exeter, however, all this was quite altered. In the aisles of the great cathedral, looking up at the many-coloured saints in the windows, and listening to the long notes of the booming organ, Colin Churchill’s soul awoke and knew itself. The gift that was in him was not one to be used for himself alone, a mere knack of painting pictures to decorate the bare walls of his bedroom, or of making clay images for little Minna to stick upon the fisherman’s wooden mantelshelf: it was a talent admired and recognised of other people, and to be employed for the noble and useful purposes of carving pine-apple posts for walnut bedsteads or conventional scrolls for fashionable chimneypieces. To such great heights did emancipated Colin Churchill now aspire. Even his master allowed him to see that he thought well of him. The boy was given tools to work wi
th, and instructed in the use of them; and he learnt how to employ them so fast that the master openly expressed his surprise and satisfaction. In a very few weeks Colin was fairly through the first stage of learning, and was set to produce bits of scroll work from his own design, for a wainscoted room in the house of a resident canon.

  For seven months Colin went on at his wood-carving with unalloyed delight, and wrote every week to tell Minna how much he liked the work, and what beautiful wooden things he would now be able to make her. But at the end of those seven months, as luck would have it (whether good luck or ill luck the future must say), Colin chanced to fall in one day with a strange companion. One afternoon a heavy-looking Italian workman dropped casually into the workshop where Colin Churchill was busy carving. The boy was cutting the leaves of a honeysuckle spray from life for a long moulding. The Italian watched him closely for a while, and then he said in his liquid English: ‘Zat is good. You can carve, mai boy. You must come and see me at mai place. I wawrk for Smeez and Whatgood.’

  Colin turned round, blushing with pleasure, and looked at the Italian. He couldn’t tell why, but somehow in his heart instinctively, he felt more proud of that workman’s simple expression of satisfaction at his work than he had felt even when the vicar told him, in his stiff, condescending, depreciatory manner, that there was ‘some merit in the bas-relief and drawings.’ Smith and Whatgood were stonecutters in the town, who did a large trade in tombstones and ‘monumental statuary.’ No doubt the Italian was one of their artistic hands, and Colin took his praise with a flush of sympathetic pleasure. It was handicraftsman speaking critically and appreciatively of handicraftsman.