Читать книгу Mid-Pacific - James Norman Hall - Страница 8

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Emerson called traveling ‘a fool’s paradise.’ ‘It is for want of self-culture,’ he said, ‘that the idol of Traveling, the idol of Italy, of England, of Egypt, remains for all educated Americans.’ There is probably as much truth in this as in most general statements, but as I myself am a lover of traveling, I prefer to be more charitable in my judgment of other, likeminded people. I prefer to believe that individuals who long, at times, for movement and change of scene, experience the most natural and wholesome of appetites, one which they do well to indulge, if they can.

One evening, not a great while ago, I was seized with such a longing, and it came about in a curious way. I was walking along a lonely stretch of beach road on the island of Tahiti, in French Polynesia. The sun had just set and the sky had that serene and luminous purity which often succeeds a heavy tropical downpour in the midst of the rainy season. I went briskly on my way, enjoying the freshness of the air and the rich and varied mountain landscape, anticipating with keen relish the dish of curried shrimps and rice which I knew awaited me at the restaurant on the Papeete water-front where I was accustomed to dine. Presently I came to a mango tree by the roadside, and halted for a moment to watch the mynah birds—there must have been hundreds of them—settling for the night in the dense foliage, and already engaged in their usual evening conference, which is so strange a thing to hear. This comes as inevitably as dusk, and as I listened to the noisy chorus I wondered what it could be they find to discuss with such volubility every twenty-four hours. ‘Surely,’ I thought, ‘it is not mere idle chatter. It must have significance in the bird world which we humans try so vainly to understand.’ The conversation was all but deafening. Innumerable waves of shrill sound mingled and intermingled, but occasionally one or two voices rose triumphantly above the others, and there followed a gradual subsidence of the full chorus while these particular spokesmen gave expression to their own views of the matter under discussion. Then one of the silent birds would take exception to some statement and the tumult would again become general.

I was listening with interest to one of these outbursts when of a sudden the island seemed to fade from view. It was a cold, clear winter morning; I was a small boy again, standing ankle-deep in snow, watching a farm wagon, heavily laden with husked corn and drawn by four horses, moving slowly up a hilly street in a little Iowa town. The breath of the horses came out in clouds of steam, and the driver, the reins buckled around his shoulders, walked beside the wagon, beating his mittened hands together.

‘Hello, my boy,’ he called. ‘Better pull your ear-tabs down. If you don’t, Jack Frost will be giving you a nip first thing you know.’

I was surprised and mystified for a moment at the suddenness and clarity of that vision which vanished as quickly as it had come. Why should it have appeared in a place so remote from Iowa and winter? But while I was walking slowly on, trying to puzzle it out, the cause was made clear—the mynah birds. Their shrill chorus, heard from a little distance, resembled very closely the sound of the steel-rimmed wheels of a heavily loaded wagon screeching as they turned over dry, powdery snow.

What curious creatures we are, all of us! And what trivial incidents lead us, sometimes, toward decisions which upset the routine of our lives. It may be that Emerson, too, had had some unsettling experience at the time when he set down his observations on the folly of traveling. It may be that he was merely trying to exorcise thus some sudden longing of his own for other horizons, changed associations. Perhaps he succeeded; or perhaps, the spirit of restlessness growing upon him, he threw down his pen in disgust, seized his hat and stick, walked as far as Walden Pond and back, and called it a journey. This attempt at self-deception failing, in a petulant mood he again seated himself at his desk to disparage his fellow countrymen who gave scope to their love of wandering. Well, we know what he wrote, but we shall never know what all of his thoughts were at this writing, and there must be errant, undisciplined thoughts to pester philosophers as well as other men, thumbing their noses, so to speak, at those which are given form and substance and such an air of final judgment on pages of manuscript. ‘What about us?’ they shout derisively, and they whistle and hoot and cat-call like a crowd of gamins in a peanut gallery—‘Hey, mister! What about us?’ But sages, from the very nature of their calling, must be cautious men, and so that discordant outcry, however deafening it may be within the walls of their book-lined studies, never reaches the ears of the outside world.

But to continue, had I been content merely to recognize the identity of sound between a nightly chorus of mynah birds and the complaining of steel-rimmed wheels over dry snow, perhaps I should not have started on my journey at all. But I was greatly pleased with the immediacy of the recognition, and such a throng of boyhood memories came crowding back in the train of it, that I sat down on the beach the better to enjoy them; and the result was an overwhelming desire to leave the South Seas. Now love of wandering—largely, I confess, for its own sake—has kept me all these years as poor as Job’s turkey. I had thought I was rid of it at last, having remained at Tahiti for nearly a year without once wishing to go elsewhere. But here it was again, in another guise, for I found that I was longing, not so much for new horizons as for those which had ringed me round in boyhood. I wanted to make a sentimental journey to a little, back-country, middle-western town which has for me many happy associations. I sprang up, hoping to outdistance the yearning by mere physical movement, but it walked apace with me and was still abreast when I reached the restaurant in Papeete. Dinner was in progress, and Mr. Mitchner, the proprietor—a Frenchman by naturalization, born in England, of German parents—was moving among the tables exchanging gossip with his guests.

‘You’re late this evening,’ he said as I took my seat. ‘I thought you weren’t coming and the curried shrimps are all gone.’

At another time this would have been a disappointment, but I had just lost my appetite for curried shrimps. I found that I was longing, as only a northerner can who has had a winter vision under a mango tree, for buckwheat cakes and maple syrup. How many years had passed since I had enjoyed that most delectable of cold-weather dishes? I couldn’t remember, but I found a melancholy pleasure in thinking of it, and I did some of my thinking aloud, in the presence of Mr. Mitchner. I described how they were made, and assured him that there was no place in the world where the art of mixing and baking them had reached such perfection as in a small town I could name in the upland prairie country of Iowa. He listened with a show of interest, and when I had finished, he said:

‘I know what’s the matter with you—you’re homesick.’

I admitted that this was true.

‘Well, why don’t you go home, then, if you’re so hungry for buckwheat cakes? We can’t supply you here, that’s certain.’

He left me to attend to some matter in the kitchen, while I ate, without relish, a dish of poisson mayonnaise. I noticed a young man seated at a near-by table, his supper untasted before him. He was writing in a notebook. It was fascinating to watch him, he was so deeply absorbed, so wholly oblivious to everything around him. His eyes sparkled with interest and he smiled to himself as he wrote. Now and then he paused to gaze through the window across the lagoon to the island of Moorea, fifteen miles away, whose jagged peaks were still faintly outlined against the afterglow. Evidently he was a stranger at Papeete, some traveler but recently arrived. I envied him the freshness of his impressions, and remembered my own keen pleasure when I had first set foot in this tropical island world.

Mr. Mitchner returned from the kitchen and sat down with a sigh of weariness in the chair opposite mine. I called his attention to the young man in the corner.

‘Yes,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘He seems to be enjoying himself, doesn’t he? What do you suppose he finds to write about, letting his dinner get cold, that way? Some one told me that he is Hilaire Belloc’s son—you know, the English author. I’ve heard that his father has sent him on his own, without a penny, to see the world. He must earn his way as he goes. Now that’s what I call a sound plan for a young man’s education, a heap better than sending him to college in a motor car. But of course you must know your son. He must have the right kind of stuff in him.’

This young man had, I thought. Traveling would do him nothing but good. I wished that his father might have looked in on him at that moment.

‘You know,’ said Mr. Mitchner, after a brief silence; ‘your speaking of buckwheat cakes reminds me of an Englishman I once knew in the Solomon Islands. It’s odd what a man will do, sometimes, when he gets hungry for home cooking. This man was taken about the way you’ve been, but what he wanted was a dish of apple tart and cream. So what did he do but go all the way home to Devonshire to get it! That’s as true as I’m sitting here talking to you. I knew him very well. When he came back, eight months later, he brought a wife with him, but what he went for was the apple tart. He was a sorry man, though, about a year afterward. His wife was a regular shrew. That’s the trouble with journeys. They never turn out the way you expect them to. But if you really want to go to America,’ he added, ‘you can, you know. There’s the Jeanne d’Arc: she’s sailing to-morrow.’

It often happens thus when the itch for wandering comes. The irritation spreads with amazing rapidity. Everything seems to add to it. A young man writing up his travel diary at a table, ignorant of your very existence, scatters further contagion as a dynamo scatters sparks, and a hotel proprietor, with complete indifference to his own practical interests, says, ‘There’s the Jeanne d’Arc: she’s sailing to-morrow.’

Having finished my dinner I walked resolutely away from the water-front, along the road leading inland toward the mountains, but at every cross-road I was aware of a smell, an odor, or better, of innumerable, mingled odors, something less than fragrance, perhaps, but very pleasant for all that—the unmistakable bouquet of a four-thousand-ton tramp steamer, homeward bound after a long voyage in the tropics. The attempt to ignore it was futile. I was drawn toward it with irresistible attractive force, and, a few moments later, found myself standing in the darkness of the after-deck of the Jeanne d’Arc. Mr. Mitchner had told me that she was bound ultimately to Marseilles, but she was first to stop at the Marquesas, going thence, via Panama, to Baltimore and New York before proceeding to France.

The sailors had been given shore leave for the evening, and all was silent aboard. I saw a light burning over a passageway, and entering, I came to a door with the lettering, ‘Commandant,’ over it. It was a quite ordinary, varnished cabin door, with a brass knob in need of burnishing. It was hard even to imagine that it might open upon America. Nevertheless I knocked, a voice said, ‘Entrez!’ and the following afternoon, Mr. Mitchner, who was standing in the doorway of his restaurant, made a trumpet of his hands and called across a widening strip of water, ‘I hope you enjoy your buckwheat cakes!’

I hoped so, too, but I didn’t enjoy them because I didn’t have them. The Pacific is wide, and tramps the most leisurely of steamers. As for the Jeanne d’Arc, she was nearly a year from home; her bottom was covered with a wonderful growth of marine vegetation, and every variety of ship-loving mollusc which tropical seas afford. Days passed, weeks passed, months passed. We moved eastward across that lonely and seemingly interminable ocean with the deliberation of a scow laden with cement. By the time we reached Baltimore, where I went ashore, tulips were in bloom. I knew by that sign that there would be no more buckwheat cakes until next winter, so I proceeded westward by leisurely stages, and it was early summer before I crossed the Mississippi into Iowa.

The town of Riverview is not an easy place to reach even in these days. You must take a local train from Des Moines, change again at Orchard Valley and go on by a branch line. In my boyhood there had been but one train daily between Orchard Valley and Riverview. It came down in the morning to meet the east- and westbound trains on the main line, and returned in the late afternoon after the arrival of the Des Moines local. It was a pleasant surprise to find the old schedule unchanged after so many years. As for the train itself—a baggage-coach and day-coach drawn by a small engine with a flanged smoke-stack—it was precisely as I had remembered it.

There were few passengers that afternoon—no one I knew; but Mr. Frey, the conductor, I recognized at once. Even as a boy he had seemed old to me, although he could not then have been more than thirty. He punched my ticket three times, in the old, deliberate manner which had such fascination in the days when it was my dream to become the conductor of a passenger train.

‘Don’t you remember me, Mr. Frey?’ I asked.

He lowered his chin and gazed at me over the rim of his spectacles.

‘No,’ he said, after a brief scrutiny; ‘no, I reckon I ought to but I can’t say I do. Wait a minute! You’re not one of the Channing boys, are you?’

‘That’s very close,’ I replied. ‘They’re my cousins. We used to come to Riverview every summer and at Christmas time to visit our Aunt Martha—Mrs. Martha Colby.’ Then I gave him my name.

‘Well, I’ll declare! Sure enough I remember you now! But you’ve grown clean out of knowledge. That mustache changes you more than you might think.’

A moment later when he had finished collecting the tickets he sat down beside me for a chat.

‘Yessir! That mustache makes a big difference. I recollect the time when you didn’t have even the promise of one. Seems to me like it wasn’t no longer ago than yesterday that you came into George Shipley’s barber-shop for your first shave. Jaspar Willis and me was there—remember?—and after you got out of the chair, Jaspar said, “Well, I never saw such a change in a boy in all my born days! You must feel a lot better, sonny, to get rid of all them whiskers,” and you went out of the shop mad as a hornet.’

He chuckled reminiscently.

‘How long’s it been since you was back here?’

‘Fifteen years this summer.’

‘Has it now! As long as that? I wouldn’t have thought it. You’ll miss your Aunt Martha. She was a fine woman, one of the kindest and best that ever lived, I reckon. Lord! I wonder how many times I’ve carried you boys up and down this line? And that makes me think: here’s something I’ll bet you’ve forgotten.’

He reversed the back of the seat in front of us and showed me a deeply cut notch on the sill of the adjacent window. It had long since been varnished over and was blackened by soot and time.

‘I think you was the one that done it,’ he said. ‘You boys was going down to Orchard Valley to the circus, and you had a brand-new pocket-knife your aunt had give you. Well, when I came along for the tickets, there you was, hard at work, as if my nice new car—it was new then—was nothing but an old store box to try jack-knives on.’

The reminder of this forgotten incident brought back the very feel of boyhood, and scores of happy memories all but lost under the dust of many years. I was grateful to Mr. Frey who was not at all aware of the service he had done me.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I remember, and I was the guilty one.’

‘That’s what I was thinking,’ he replied. ‘Remember how I blowed you up? I was hopping mad at first, but you know, that was the very day I was boosted to conductor, and afterward I thought, well, that mark will be a little souvenir of my new job, and I was glad then you’d made it. That’s how I happen to remember it so well.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance now to get buckwheat cakes at Riverview?’

‘Buckwheat cakes! At this time of year? No, you’ll have to come back in the winter time.’

‘Are they as good as they used to be?’

‘Every bit. But say! there was no one could make them like your Aunt Martha. Many a time she’s called me in for a big plateful when I was on my way to the depot. She was the best cook Riverview has ever seen or ever will see, I reckon.’

We talked of one thing and another while the train, proceeding on its leisurely twenty-mile journey, past Oak Grove and Cherry Hill, seemed to be traveling through time as well as space, back to the very period of my boyhood. There was a meadow lark on every fence-post, and the right-of-way was even brighter with honeysuckle and Sweet William than I had remembered it. Looking out over cornfields and pasture land where the cattle were drowsing in the shade, I realized that I was as native to this country as a pignut tree; that for all my wandering my roots were still here, deeply embedded in the rich, black soil.

The train drew up at the same small brick depot, standing as of old at the edge of the open prairie. It was a pleasant and truthful augury, for outwardly at least, the town had changed very little. Picket fences and board sidewalks had long since disappeared, to be sure, and the hitching-posts around the square, but the same two-story brick business blocks fronted it, and the same boyhood smells of drugs, drygoods, groceries, sprinkled streets and freshly cut grass mingled in the sultry air.

Plummer’s livery stable had been converted into a garage, but the old Willard hotel had withstood like rock the winds of change. Two commercial travelers sat on the front porch, their chairs tilted back against the wall, as though they had not moved for a generation, and when I went in to supper, I more than half believed, for a moment, that the dining-room girl who stood by the window, one hand resting on her hip, the other lightly patting her elaborately arranged hair, was the one who had presided there when I was in knee trousers. Her hair had been bobbed, of course, but it required as much patting as of old, and she had the same leaning-forward carriage and slightly disdainful air. As she approached my table her cheeks quivered at every step, and that was just as it used to be. Then, with the well-remembered, far-away look in her eyes, she greeted me with the old formula: ‘Do you wish beefsteak, pork chops, or cold roast beef?’ I was sure of it then: the genius loci, changeless in nothing but its love of change in most American towns, had been as faithful as possible at Riverview and the Willard hotel. I could have ordered and consumed another supper for the mere pleasure of again hearing, ‘Do you wish.’

But it was while eating, absent-mindedly, of a dish of lettuce, sprinkled with vinegar and sugar, that I shrank forthwith to boyhood stature. Illusion became perfect at that moment. Opposite me sat two of my cousins, the Channing boys, with a third at my side. Aunt Martha was at the head of the table—we always came to the hotel for the Sunday evening meal—her head and shoulders mirrored in a glass over the sideboard behind her. ‘Now, boys,’ I heard her say, ‘aren’t you going to eat any of this nice lettuce?’ It is a curious fact that, in that town where, with the exception of the hotel, appetizing food was the rule rather than the exception, vinegar and sugar was the inevitable green salad dressing. I remember my astonishment at discovering, long afterward, that lettuce may be a really palatable food.

Before leaving the dining-room I stopped to examine the mirror over the sideboard. It was the identical one which had hung there in my aunt’s time with a wavery flaw in the glass which had so queerly distorted her reflection as she leaned over her plate. So I came away at once, and tried not to think any more of such imperishable things as mirrors.

I saw a few vaguely familiar faces during my evening walk, but only one or two that I could identify. Doctor Hammond I would have known at once, even though he had not been sitting in his rocking-chair on the sidewalk in front of his office. His hair and beard were snow white now, but he looked as vigorous as ever, his eyes were as clear, and his face as kindly and thoughtful. He glanced up from his paper as I passed and said ‘Good-evening to you’ in his old courtly manner, but it was plain that he did not recognize me.

As dusk deepened into night old ghosts met me at every corner, old memories came crowding back, and mine being an avowedly sentimental journey, I gave myself up to sentimental reflections. How gently, I thought, Time has dealt with this sleepy little town! In what kindly fashion the years have passed here. In so quiet a place one would have an enviable sense of leisure; one’s gift of life would seem an immeasurably generous one. Engaged in these reflections I turned into a side street leading again to the open prairie, and midway along it came to a house that had a puzzlingly familiar aspect. It stood but a short distance from the sidewalk, and was half hidden in shrubbery. On the front porch I heard some one rocking back and forth, back and forth.

I stopped for a moment, trying to recall its association for me, one which seemed to be connected in some way with my aunt and the Willard hotel. Then I remembered that we had often passed this way during our after-supper stroll on Sunday evenings. A family named Albright had lived here then—a young man and his wife. In the first year of their marriage he had been injured by a tree which had fallen during a wind storm, and I remembered Aunt Martha telling us that he had been paralyzed and would never walk again. She used to bring him delicacies of her own making: currant jelly, cherry pie, a dish of peach dumplings, or strawberry shortcake. Neither the Channing boys nor I ever saw him during these visits. We sat on the front steps while Aunt Martha went with Mrs. Albright into his bedroom, and we could hear her hearty laugh and cheery voice as she tried to make them forget their troubles. When they returned to the front porch, Mrs. Albright, who was little more than a girl, sometimes gave way to her feelings. ‘There, there, Nellie!’ my aunt would say, patting her shoulder. ‘You and Frank have had your share of trouble, goodness knows, but you mustn’t let it get the best of you.’

Once I had gone to the house with all the small boys of the town, following Riverview’s contingent of soldiers returning from the Spanish-American War. There were a dozen or more of them, just arrived from the demobilization camp, and they had been met at the station by the band and many of the townspeople. During the parade which followed they stopped for a moment in front of the Albright house. The band played ‘Just as the Sun Went Down,’ and Mrs. Albright, who had come to the door, had said, ‘Boys, Frank and I both thank you for this, and he wants me to tell you that he would have been with you in Cuba if it hadn’t been for that tree.’

‘We know that, Nellie,’ their spokesman had replied. ‘Please tell Frank from all of us that we talked of him and thought of him many a time. Tell him to keep up his courage. We’ll all be in to see him, and if our good wishes are of any use, he’ll be up and around again before he knows what’s happened.’

Then Mrs. Albright had gone into the house, crying.

How long ago that seemed, as though it were an event in a previous existence. One’s sense of time is so much a matter of personal experience that the Spanish-American War seemed to me as far away as the Battle of Hastings or the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.

I was walking slowly on when I heard some one call through the darkness from across the street:

‘Oh, Mrs. Albright!’

‘Yes? Is that you, Mrs. Gaynor?’ a small, plaintive voice replied.

‘Yes. How is Mr. Albright this evening?’

‘He hasn’t felt so well to-day. This hot weather’s pretty trying for him.’

‘Of course it is,’ replied the first voice with a deeply sympathetic intonation.

‘I’ve moved him into the sitting-room. He’s more comfortable there, by the west window.’

The rest of the conversation was lost to me, but I had already heard more than enough. I no longer thought of Time in the guise of a kindly old gentleman bringing generous gifts of years.

‘Mr. Mitchner was right,’ I said inwardly, as I walked back to the hotel. ‘The trouble with journeys is that they never turn out the way you expect them to.’