Читать книгу Under the Law - Edwina Stanton Babcock - Страница 10

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THE ORGAN BUILDER'S HOUSE

The Hudson River has not only the opulence that Washington Irving portrayed, not only the swelling of soft hills and majesty of toppling mountains and slopes that spell fecundity of farmland but it has, along palisade and headland, another opulence. Under those mountains that throw down thunder-storms, and along the rocky walls climbed by winding roads magnificent homes testify to the imperialism that has not yet been cleansed from the heart of man. The instinct for choosing imposing sites for impressive homes would be difficult to trace to its beginning. Robber barons built their castles inaccessibly for very good reasons; the prelates' palaces were on the hills that all might see and be reminded of Mother Church. The Roman Roads, unlike the furtive sunken roads of the cavemen, were built high because of fearlessness and pride. But the American who builds his home, or one of his homes, on the Hudson does not do so just because he longs to feast his eyes on sumptuous natural terrace and broad natural waterway; he does so because in his instinctive choice of surroundings, he selects an expressive background for his own dignity and his own importance.

All night long the great steamers of the Hudson River glide majestically up and down, the long white fingers of their search-lights pointing to this and that lordly residence. The Oil King, the Copper King, the Pill King, and the Shoe King, whose white palaces and miles of stocked and fruited domain are gated and avenued away from the public, are silently indicated to such humble travelers as care to look. One can hardly travel the Hudson River nowadays and worship the great Creator, for the great Creator is a little overshadowed by the aforesaid King of Commerce, the great Producer. But in spite of the sleepiness and lethargic atmosphere that the Dutch traditions have strangely imparted to the strings of villages, there are in certain moods superb freedoms and freshnesses along the Hudson. There are still spiritual emphasis and quests along red sandstone shores, where the green hemlocks gather. The sunrises in the Westchester Hills are like black tents with banners streaming. The waters of the Tappan Zee are then a great glittering field of cloth of gold, and at sunset when the houses on the Irvington Hills are all ablaze with sunstruck window glass, the bold, black breasts of Palisades and Hook Mountain front the river like African slaves guarding some inner mystery of valley, some clean, unspoiled fastness of forest and field and stream.

To a man who sat at his table in a bleak old wooden house high up on the western range, these night and morning scenes spelled only two things, the Human Will, as yet absorbed only in the passions of an aggressive aggrandizement, and the proud subservience of nature to the little schemes of men. Nature, lying down like a great beast of destiny, to let the little shapes and enterprises swarm and crowd over her! "Only," thought Watts Shipman, "only when the great beast starts to rise and take new positions, look out then, little shapes. Either you will be raised on some great mountain of Nature's mysterious changes or you will slip into some new uncharted sea or who knows, you may spill altogether out of the world!"

It was this wistful attitude toward nature, the great mystery, the great Book of Worship and Wonder that had taken Watts Shipman from his clubs and cliques and corporations, away from success and "putting it over" and their accompanying shiftiness and meanness, and had taken him for the season of a summer into the country, to think.

Yes, just that—"to think," was what he replied to complaining letters and telegrams—"Watts, what are you doing, stuck up there on the rim of nowhere?" His confrères laughed at the curt answer "Thinking." For a lawyer so able, so successful, there could be no comment of "queer" or "crazy"; Watts' partners shrugged their shoulders and went on with the business which, as he had denied them telephone access, they had sometimes to refer to him by long night letters. "Drat your thinking," writes the senior partner, "don't I think?" To which came the teasing telegram by code, "You don't think, you calculate."

Watts' house, planted high on the spur of the mountain a few miles above Willow Roads, the little Dutch village where Sard lived, had been owned by an organ builder about whom the Willow Roaders liked to say "nobody knew anything." The Willow Roaders, complacent in the usual village life where everyone thinks he knows "everything about everyone" disdained knowing anything about a mere organ builder. The house, surrounded as it was by hanging boulders and pine trees, looked gravely down on the big field of river and on all the little steeples and turrets and gingerbread conservativeness of Willow Roads. Watts liked to commune with the spirit of the man who had once lived here.

"I'll bet he stole some notes out of the Dawn," the man thought, "and think of nights here—like last evening, with the hermit thrush and the sky gold through the trees. 'The Organ Builder'—I can just see him, a seedy chap, possibly with too many children, probably half starving, working up here with the village below curious and gossiping, thinking maybe an organ builder was immoral."

It was a soft yet cool spring night. The little frogs in mountain rain pools kept up a croaking like rusty wheels; the pungent smells of earth and leaf mould came through the window. Fire burned quietly and soft lamplight fell on books and rugs and flickered over the cast of the Winged Victory, over the dingy chimneypiece. Watts' eyes, through the smoke of his pipe, went to this. "Nice girl," he grunted in approval, "nice girl—afraid of nothing—ready for anything, yet somehow all woman, true to type but not crystallized by type." The man, rising, walked up and down the rather bare room where one or two fine rugs caught the warm fire colors. "I can say this for the Greeks, they, themselves, fastened nothing upon civilization but healthy ideals for men and women; harvest making, home keeping, child bearing, strong bodies, imaginative minds, it wasn't until their æsthetics and the Roman plutocrats got hold of all they gave the world that their philosophies were debased." The lawyer's eyes, sombre in strength and depth, looked fixedly at the gracious woman figure; he compared it with the figures on Fifth Avenue, tripping in affected coquettishness or striding in callous mannishness. "Not clever of you, ladies, to find no middle path," he considered. "Who made you as you are to-day, Paris—the war? That's what you and the newspapers and magazines say, but come now, didn't you make yourselves? You wanted to be 'popular,' you want to be 'in' things, behold the result." Watts' mouth curled with slow mockery on his pipe.

"The Winged Victory didn't want to be popular," he decided. "She didn't want to be in things.

"She wanted to live. Who fastened the modern woman on us, anyway?" Watts demanded sternly of his dog. "Why have we got to stand for her?" The silken-haired, electric-muscled beast came over to him softly. Friar Tuck, with tail tossing, laid a devoted head on the brown golf-trousered knee. Watts tousled the long ears. "Always the henchman, aren't you, you old brute—why do you play that game?" The lawyer looked long and questioningly into his dog's eyes. "Why don't you get up and give me an order; how do you know I'm superior to you? You are probably equal to me."

He considered the bowl of his pipe then rubbed it on Friar Tuck's head.

"Just as I suppose, if men only knew it, they could be equal to Christ and the angels. Say, look here." Watts lifted the dog by his forefeet. He put the two forepaws against his breast. "How do you know I'm superior to you? Why do you play this game—do you just want to be 'popular' with me?"

Not to accept dogma—to be ready for the new light, to trim one's mental sails for the breeze from a fresh quarter, it had given the great criminal lawyer a profound insight into the human heart, an almost awful power over the souls of men. Wastrel after wastrel had tried to look Watts Shipman in the eye, and had known that some strange God of Equity sat watchful in this man—that only in proportion to their actual guilt would they be dealt with. Men and women had broken down and told him all, only because of the unendurable patience and remorseless gravity of his uncondemning gaze. He had fathered many a boy and stood many a woman on her own feet, and yet Life, the Great Mother, had held back from him what he, as human, knew must be the ultimate and only gift. Women had angled for Watts Shipman because of his fame; they had tried to use him politically; they had trusted him, feared him and been penitent before him. No woman had ever loved him.

Staring at the Victory, the man smoked silently. Half ruefully he passed his hand over the russet head on his knee, he threw back his own great black-haired head with its dapple of white spots; he stretched his long limbs and his deep-lined humorous face saddened. "Women want to play," he said softly, "uncertain, funny little things, they want to play"—tenderly, "and, not necessarily, to play fair—and I'm no plaything, although," he waved his pipe toward the bas-relief over the fire piece, "I could play with you, Miss Victory."

The word play made him think of something; pushing away the dog, Watts rose and went to a table drawer, taking out, with a smile, a little envelope with "Pudge" scrawled on it. The lawyer, still smiling, slid out the contents, two Indian arrow-heads, one white, the other gray flint. Thoughtfully he turned them over in his large palm. "Poor good little Indians," he murmured, "we're still teaching our children that you were devils, aren't we? Aren't we funny? We rather owe you an apology, you strange, mysterious men who never knew fulfilment—who ranged these Hudson River shores and thronged New Jersey and New England and were mighty hunters and happy until you came up against the white man and gunpowder and tobacco and whiskey! Well"—Watts chuckled, "Pudgy shan't be prejudiced. I'll write you a good character for him."

Knocking his pipe out, laying it tenderly on the mantel, the big man sprawled like a schoolboy over the table writing in long hand the letter that was to accompany the arrow-heads.

"Dear Pudge—How are you? What are you doing, helping Mother or raising the roof with noise and destruction. How are the guinea pigs? I often think of them. Well, Pudge, I rather hope you are helping Mother a lot, because she's such a good friend of yours and mine and she looks so pretty and seems so wise, though perhaps you and I are sometimes wiser. I'm sending you two arrow-heads I found in a field up North in Rockland County. I was fishing up near the Ramapo Mountains where the stone walls run like great serpents up and down the hills. There's a lot of history lying around loose near here, Major André and Washington and the Dutch and the Indians. I'll show you these places some day. The Indians, to my way of thinking, were fine fellows. They took long steps when they walked and knew how to set traps and hunt and fish, and they were for the most part real religious men. But men who knew how to make war just to get more money, came and took their land away from them, and then the Indians turned naughty the way you and I do sometimes, Pudge. My! my! how they tore around and howled and took scalps, which were not nice to keep. No gentleman would ever scalp a lady, it is so uncomfortable, and yet these Indians scalped many ladies!

"It's a pity the Indians were bad and forgot their manners, for if they could have remembered to be polite and gentlemanly they could have stayed here and they would have been the real Americans and you and I would have probably tried to imitate them and never used anything but wampum, which means shells; same as money to buy ice-cream cones with. I think it would have been a heap more sensible if the white man had made lasting friends of the Indians and learned a lot of things that the Indians knew but which the white men have since been too stupid to learn. But you see, the white men had a new machine called a 'gun,' and there was nothing to do with it but shoot it at somebody, and that made trouble. And the Indians, eager to learn, got guns too, and thought it was funny to point them at people. And their guns went off all right and there was the dickens to pay. Machines are nice things, Pudgy, but the men who make the machines must be sure to have their minds go ahead of the machines, or some day the machines will just get up and smash the world.

"Good-night, Pudgy, old chap—I wish you could hear all the funny sounds up on this mountain. Friar Tuck smells, besides hearing; he reads the night with his nose, the same way we would read a book—and he smells out such stories! Here are the arrow-heads; I'm sending them to you as if you were my own little boy, for see, Pudge—big man as I am, I have no little boy of my own—and that sometimes happens to big men ..."

Suddenly the man's head dropped. The pen rolled to the floor, and Friar Tuck nosed at it a moment then tucked his head into his folded paws. Watts Shipman sat at the table, his own face buried in his arms.