The Spread Eagle and Other Stories

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"I asked him what the writing on the bark was all about. He said, and he
blushed, as every young author, and most old ones, should, that the
writing was just more or less nothing--all about different kinds of
things. So I pointed specifically to the top of one sheet, and said,
'begin there and tell me what that's about.' 'If I began there,' he
said, 'I'd have to go backward; that's the finish of--oh!' he literally
threw himself on my mercy with the most ingenuous blushing face. 'Oh,'
he said, 'I suppose _you'd_ call them poems.' I, of course, had my
doubts of that; but I kept countenance, and said, 'well, what's that one
about?' He looked puzzled for a moment, and then he smiled. 'Why,' he
said, 'I suppose it's about me, about the way I felt one day, I suppose;
but if I tried to say it into English it would just sound damn foolish;
but, perhaps, you'd sooner hear it in my own language. It's better,
because, after all, you can't turn sounds into words, can you?' 'Go
ahead,' I said.

"His hands, holding the sheet of bark shook a little with embarrassment,
and he was very red in the face; and before he could begin--I suppose
you would call it _reading_--he had to wet his lips two or three times.
I expected, of course, to hear the usual grunts and minor guttural
sounds of the usual very primitive dialect. But Jonathan's own
particular patent language was not that sort of thing at all. He began
with the faintest, and most distinct rustling of leaves--I can't imagine
how he made the sound at all. It seemed to come from somewhere between
the back of his throat and his lips, and to have nothing to do with his
tongue or vocal cords. It lasted for, perhaps, half a minute; dying out,
fainter and fainter and finer and finer into complete silence. Then,
from the distant point where the rustling had last been heard, there
came the softest little throaty whistle, three times repeated; then, for
two good minutes without seeming to draw breath, the young man burst
into peal after peal of the sweetest, clearest, highest, swiftest
whistling that you can possibly imagine. I don't know how he did it--he
didn't even purse or move his lips--they were barely parted, in a kind
of plaintive, sad little smile--and the notes came out; that was all. Of
course I can't tell you what the thing meant word for word or sound for
sound; but, in general, it said youth, youth and spring: and I tell you
it had those compositions of Mendelssohn, and Grieg, and Sinding lashed
to the mast. Well, the leaves rustled again, a little lower in the
scale, I think, but wouldn't swear to it, and the first little soft
throaty whistle was twice repeated--and there was a little, tiny whisper
of a human moan. And that was the end of that poem.

"I made him read to me from his bark sheets until he was tired out. And
the next day I was at him again early, and the next. Suppose you were
living in a jumping-off place, bored to death, and blowing yourself
every fifth or sixth day to a brand new crop of prickly heat; and wanted
to go away, and couldn't because you had to sit around until a fat
Dutchman made up his mind about a concession; and suppose the only book
in the place was on the uses of and manufacture and by-products of the
royal palm, written in a beastly language called Tamil, which you only
knew enough of to ask for tea and toast at four o'clock in the morning,
and were usually understood to mean soda biscuits and a dish of buffalo
milk. And suppose that then you came across the complete works of
Shakespeare--and that you had never read them--or the Odyssey and that
you had never read that--or, better, suppose that there was a Steinway
piano in your sitting-room, and that one day the boy who worked the
punka for you dropped the rope and sat down at the piano and played
Beethoven from beginning to end--as Rubenstein would have played
him--and suppose you had never heard a note of Beethoven before. It was
like that--listening to the works of Jonathan Bull."

Gardiner paused, as if considering very carefully what he should say.

"No!" he said presently, "I'm _not_ overdoing it. My judgment of
Jonathan Bull is no longer a sudden enthusiasm, as the natural effort of
a man to make his own discoveries seem more important to his friends
than they deserve. He _is_ one of the giants. Think of it: he had made,
on an impulse of out and out creation, the most expressive of all
languages, so far as mere sound goes; and as if that were not enough, he
had gone ahead and composed in that language incomparable lyrics. The
meanings were in the sounds. You couldn't mistake them. Have you ever
heard a tiger roar--full steam ahead? There was one piece that began
suddenly with a kind of terrible, obsessing, strong purring that shook
the walls of the room and that went into a series of the most terrible
tiger roars and ended with the nightmare screams of a child. I have
never been so frightened in my life. And there was a snake song, a soft,
wavy, piano, _pianissimo_ effect, all malignant stealth and horror, and
running through it were the guileless and insistently hungry twitterings
of baby birds in the nest. But there were comical pieces, too, in which
ludicrous adventures befell unsophisticated monkeys; and there was a
whole series of spring-fever songs--some of them just rotten and
nervous, and some of them sad and yearning--and some of them--I don't
know just how to put it--well, some of them you might say were not
exactly fit to print. One thing he read me--it was very
short--consisted of hoarse, inarticulate, broken groans--I couldn't make
out what it meant at all. And I was very curious to know, because it
seemed to move Jonathan himself much more than anything else of his.

"'You know,' he explained to me, 'my father and mother couldn't make any
sound at all--oh, yes--they could clap their hands together and make a
sound that way--but I mean with their voices--they hadn't any
voices--sometimes their lips smacked and made a noise over eating, or
kissing; but they couldn't make sounds in their throats. Well, when my
mother died--just think, she couldn't make my father understand that she
was sick; and I couldn't. I tried every way. He didn't know that she was
leaving him--I'm glad you can't see that poor blind face of her's,
turned to father's blind face and trying to tell him good-by--I see it,
almost all the time,' he said. 'You know they were always touching--I
can't remember a single second in all those years when they weren't at
least holding hands. She went in the night. My father was asleep with
one arm over and about her. As she got colder and colder it waked him.
And he understood. Then he began to make those dumb, helpless groans,
like that piece I just read you--the nearest he got to speaking. He sat
on the ground and held her in his arms all the rest of the night, and
all the next day, and the next night--I couldn't make him let go, and
every little while he went into those dreadful, dumb groanings. You
don't get brought up in the jungle without knowing death when you see
it, and what dead things do. The second night, about midnight, the news
of my mother's death began to get about; and horrible, hunchbacked
beasts that I had never seen or dreamed of before began to slink about
among the trees, and peer out, and snuffle, and complain--and suddenly
laugh just like men. And I was so frightened of them, and of the night
anyway, that every now and then I'd go into a regular screaming fit, and
that would drive them away and keep them quiet for a time, but pretty
soon I'd hear their cautious steps, way off, drawing closer and closer,
and then the things would begin to snuffle, and complain, and laugh
again--they had disgusting, black dogfaces, and one came very close, and
I could see the water running out of its mouth. But when dawn began to
break they drew farther and farther away, until you could only hear
them--now and then.

"'My father looked very white and ill, as was natural enough; but his
face now had a peaceful, contented expression. I didn't understand at
first that he, in his turn, was dying. But it wasn't of a broken heart,
as you might suppose, or anything like that; he had gnawed his left
wrist until he got the arteries open; and he was bleeding to death.

"'Once a big dead fish was washed up on the beach--it was when I was
quite a little boy--but I remembered how, after a day or two, even my
parents had no trouble in finding it, and I remembered how my father had
scooped a hole in the sand and buried it. So I scooped a great deep hole
in the sand, very deep until water began to trickle into it. And I had
sense enough, when it came to filling up the hole, to put in lots of big
stones, the biggest I could roll in. And I'm strong. I stayed on--for
about six months, getting lonelier and lonelier--and then spring came. I
think that was really what started me. I still go almost crazy every
spring--anyway I got to this place, and found people.'"

* * * * *

"What's he doing now?" asked Pedder.

"He's trying," said Gardiner, "to do it in English. Of course it seems
impossible that he should succeed. But then it was absolutely impossible
for Shakespeare to do what he did with the English language, wasn't it?
And yet he did it."

"But--" said Pedder.

"Ped," said Gardiner, "we don't control the lightnings; and you never
can tell where they are going to strike next--or when."

Ludlow flushed a little, and did not look at his friends.

"Wouldn't it be wonderful," he said, "to be loved and to be in love the
way his father and mother were. Maybe they were the ones that really
heard and saw, and--sang. We admire the lily, but we owe her to the
loves of the blind rain for the deaf and the dumb earth...."

Nobody spoke for some moments. It had been the only allusion that Ludlow
had made in years and years to that which had left him a lonely and a
cynical man.

"I wonder," Pedder mused, "how it ever occurred to a blind, deaf mute
that severing his wrist with his teeth would induce death?"

Gardiner shrugged his shoulders.

"It is always interesting," he said, "to know just which part of a
story--if any--is thought worthy of consideration by a given
individual."

THE BOOT

Mary Rex was more particularly _my_ nurse, for my sister Ellen, a
thoughtful, dependable child of eight, was her own mistress in
most matters.

This was in the days when we got our servants from neighborhood
families; before the Swedish and Irish invasion had made servants of us
in turn. Mary was the youngest of an ancestored county family. Her
great-grandfather had fought in the Revolution, as you might know by the
great flint-lock musket over the Rexes' fireplace. A brother of his had
formed part of a British square at Waterloo; and if Mary's own father
had not lost his right hand at Gettysburg he would never have let his
children go out to service. Poor soul, he bore the whole of his
afflictions, those to his body and those to his pride, with a dignity
not often seen in these degenerate days. He was by trade a blacksmith,
and it was for that reason, I suppose, that Providence, who loves a
little joke, elected for amputation his right hand rather than one or
both of his feet. Since, even in these degenerate days, many a footless
blacksmith makes an honest living.

Mary was a smart, comely, upstanding young woman. Even my father, a
dismal sceptic anent human frailty, said that he would freely trust her
around the farthest corner in Christendom. And I gathered from the talk
of my elders and betters that Mary was very pretty. People said it was a
real joy to see a creature so young, so smiling, so pink and white, so
graciously happy--in those degenerate days. I myself can see now that
she must have been very pretty indeed. Her eyes, for instance, so blue
in the blue, so white in the white, can't have changed at all--unless,
perhaps, the shadows deep within the blue are deeper than they were when
she was a girl. But even to-day you would have to travel far to see
another middle-aged woman so smooth of forehead, so cleanly-cut of
feature, so generally comely.

But if there was one thing in the world that I had formed no conclusions
upon at the age of six it was female loveliness. To cuddle against a
gentle mother when bogies were about had nothing whatsoever to do with
that gentle mother's personal appearance. To strike valiantly at Mary's
face when the hot water and the scrubbing-brush were going had nothing
to do with the prettiness thereof. Nor did I consider my sister the less
presentable by a black eye given and taken in the game of Little John
and Robin Hood upon a log in the Baychester woods. And indeed I have
been told, and believe it to be a fact, that the beauty before whom
swelled my very earliest tides of affection was a pug-nosed,
snaggle-toothed, freckled-faced tomboy, who if she had been but a jot
uglier might have been exhibited to advantage in a dime museum. Peace,
old agitations, peace!

Everybody knew the Rexes, as in any part of the world, for many years
stable, everybody knows everybody else. In Westchester, before great
strips of woodland and water became Pelham Bay Park, before the Swedes
came, and the Irish, and the Italians, and the Germans--in other words,
before land boomed--there had always been an amiable and
uninjunctionable stability. Families had lived, for well or ill, in the
same houses for years and years. So long had the portraits hung in the
rich men's houses that if you moved them it was to disclose a
brightly-fresh rectangle upon the wall behind. The box in the poor man's
yard had been tended by the poor man's great-grand female relatives.
Ours was a vicinage of memory and proper pride. We would no more have
thought of inquiring into the morals of this public house or that than
of expunging the sun from the heavens. They had always been there.

There was a man who left his wife and little children to fight against
King George. He could think of but one thing to protect them against
vagrant soldiers of either side, and that was to carve upon certain
boards (which he nailed to the trees here and there along the boundaries
of his farm):

BEWARR OF THE BOOLE DOGGES

When I was a child one of these signs still remained--at the left, just
beyond Pelham Bridge. And people used to laugh and point at the great
trees and say that because of the sign the British had never dared to
trespass and cut down the timber. Now the man had never owned a Boole
Dogge, nor had any of his descendants. I doubt if there was ever one on
the premises, unless latterly, perhaps, there has been a French bulldog
or so let out of a passing automobile to enjoy a few moments of
unconventional liberty. But the bluff had always held good. As my mother
used to say: "I know--but then there _may_ be a bulldog now." And that
farm was always out of bounds. I relate this for two reasons--to show
how stable and conservative a neighborhood was ours, and because on that
very farm, and chosen for the very reason which I have related, stood
the hollow oak which is to play its majestic part in this modest
narrative.

The apple orchards of the Boole Dogge Farm ran southerly to a hickory
wood, the hickory wood to an oak wood, the oak wood to thick scrub of
all sorts, the scrub to the sedge, and the sedge to the salt mud at low
tide, and at high to the bassy waters themselves of inmost Pelham Bay.
On the right was the long, black trestle of the Harlem River Branch
Railroad, on the left the long-curved ironwork of Pelham Bridge. And the
farm, promontoried with its woods and thick cover between these
boundaries and more woods to the north, was an overgrown, run-down,
desolate, lonely, deserted old place. Had it not been for the old sign
that said "Bewarr," it must have been a great playground for
children--for their picnics, and their hide-and-seeks, and their games
at Indians. But the ferocious animals imagined by the old Revolutionary
were as efficacious against trespassers as a cordon of police. And I
remember to this day, I can feel still, the very-thrill of that wild
surmise with which I followed Mary and my sister over the stone wall and
into those forbidden and forbidding acres for the first time. But that
comes later.

It was my sister who told me that Mary was engaged to be married. But I
had noticed for some days how the neighbors went out of their way to
accost her upon our walks; to banter her kindly, to shake hands with
her, to wag their heads and look chin-chucks even if they gave none. Her
face wore a beautiful mantling red for hours at a time. And instead of
being made more sedate by her responsible and settling prospects she
shed the half of her years, which were not many, and became the most
delightful romp, a furious runner of races, swiftest of pursuers at tag,
most subtle and sudden of hiders and poppers out, and full to the arch,
scarlet brim of loud, clear laughter.

It was late spring now, lilacs in all the dooryards, all the houses
being cleaned inside out, and they were to be married in the fall. They
had picked the little house on the outskirts of Skinnertown not far from
the Tory oak, in which they were to live. And often we made it the end
of an excursion, and played at games devised by Mary to improve the
appearance of the little yard. We gathered up in emulation old, broken
china and bottles, and made them into a heap at the back; we cleared the
yard of brush and dead wood, and pulled up weeds by the hundred-weight,
and set out a wild rose or two and more valuable, if less lovely, plants
that people gave Mary out of real gardens.

Will Braddish, a painter by trade, met us one day with brushes and a
great bucket of white paint, and, while he and Mary sat upon the
doorstep talking in low tones or directing in high, Ellen and I made
shift to paint the little picket-fence until it was white as new snow.
At odd times Braddish himself painted the little house (it was all of
old-fashioned, long shingles) inside and out, and a friend of his got up
on the roof with mortar and a trowel, and pointed-up the brick chimney;
and my father and Mr. Sturtevant contributed a load of beautiful, sleek,
rich pasture sod and the labor to lay it; so that by midsummer the
little domain was the spickest, spannest little dream of a home in the
whole county. The young couple bought furniture, and received gifts of
furniture, prints, an A1 range, a tiny, shiny, desirable thing; and the
whole world and all things in it smiled them in the face. Braddish, as
you will have guessed, was a prosperous young man. He was popular, too,
and of good habits. People said only against him that he was impulsive
and had sudden fits of the devil's own temper, but that he recovered
from these in a twinkling and before anything came of them. And even the
merest child could see that he thought the world of Mary. I have seen
him show her little attentions such as my sister retailed me of
personages in fairy stories and chivalric histories. Once when there was
a puddle to cross he made a causeway of his coat, like another Raleigh,
and Mary crossed upon it, like one in a trance of tender happiness,
oblivious of the fact that she might easily have gone around and saved
the coat. His skin and his eyes were almost as clear as Mary's own, and
he had a bold, dashing, independent way with him.

But it wasn't often that Braddish could get free of his manifold
occupations: his painting contracts and his political engagements. He
was by way of growing very influential in local politics, and people
predicted an unstintedly successful life for him. He was considered
unusually clever and able. His manners were superior to his station, and
he had done a deal of heterogeneous reading. But, of course, whenever it
was possible he was with Mary and helped her out with looking after
Ellen and me. My mother, who was very timid about tramps, looked upon
these occasions as in the nature of real blessings. There was nowhere in
the countryside that we children might not safely venture with Will
Braddish strolling behind. He loved children--he really did, a rare,
rare thing--and he was big, and courageous, and strong, and quick. He
was very tactful, too, on these excursions and talked a good part of the
time for the three of us, instead of for Mary alone. Nice, honest talk
it was, too, with just enough robbers, and highwaymen, and lions, and
Indians to give it spice. But all the adventures through which he passed
us were open and honest. How the noble heroes _did_ get on in life, and
how the wicked villains did catch it!

I remember once we were returning home past the Boole Dogge Farm, and
Braddish, wiping his brow, for it was cruelly hot, seated himself as
bold as could be on the boundary wall. The conversation had been upon
robbers, and how they always, always got caught.

"It doesn't matter," Braddish said, "where they hide. Take this old
farm. It's the best hiding-place in this end of the county--woods, and
marshes, and old wells, and bushes, and hollows--"

We asked him in much awe if he had ever actually set foot on the place.

"Yes, indeed," he said; "when I was a boy I knew every inch of it; I was
always hunting and trapping, and looking for arrowheads. And that was
the best country. Once I spent a night in the woods yonder. The bridge
was open to let a tugboat through and got stuck so they couldn't shut
it, and there was no way back to Westchester except over the railroad
trestle, and my father had said that I could go anywhere I pleased
except on that trestle. And so here I was caught, and it came on to
blither and blow, and I found an oak tree, all hollow like a little
house, and I crept in and fell asleep and never woke till daylight. My
father said next time I could come home by the trestle, or he'd know the
reason why."

"But," said I, "weren't you afraid the bulldogs would get you?"

"Now, if they'd said bull-terriers," he said, "I might have had my
doubts, but a bulldog's no more dangerous than a toadfish. He's like my
old grandma. What teeth he has don't meet. And besides," he said, "there
weren't any bulldogs on that farm. And I don't believe there ever were.
Now, I'm not sure, sonny," he said, "but you climb up here--"

I climbed upon the wall, and he held me so that I should not fall.

"Do you see," said he, "way down yonder over the tops of the trees a
dead limb sticking up?"

I saw it finally.

"Well," he said, "I'd stake something that that's a part of the old
hollow oak. Shall we go and see?"

But Mary told him that the farm was out of bounds. And he thought a
moment, and then swung his legs over the wall.

"I won't be two minutes," he said. "I'd like to see if I'm right--it's
fifteen years ago--" And he strode off across the forbidden farm to the
woods. When he came back he said that he had been right, and that
nothing had changed much. He tossed me a flint arrowhead that he had
picked up--he was always finding things, and we went on again.

When we got to the middle of Pelham Bridge we all stopped and leaned
against the railing and looked down into the swift, swirling current.
Braddish tore an old envelop into little pieces and dropped them
overboard by pairs, so that we might see which would beat the other to a
certain point.

But the shadows began to grow long now and presently Braddish had to
leave us to attend a meeting in Westchester, and I remember how he
turned and waved, just before the Boulevard dips to the causeway, and
how Mary recollected something that she had meant to say and ran after
him a little way calling, and he did not hear. And she came back
laughing, and red in the face, and breathing quick.

Two days later my father, who had started for the early train, came
driving back to the house as if he had missed it. But he said, no, and
his face was very grave--he had heard a piece of news that greatly
concerned Mary, and he had come back to tell her. He went into the study
with my mother, and presently they sent for Mary and she went in
to them.

A few minutes later, through the closed door, Ellen and I heard a
sudden, wailing cry.

Poor Braddish, it seems, in one of his ungovernable tempers had shot a
man to death, and fled away no one knew whither.

II

The man killed was named Hagan. He was a red-faced, hard-drinking brute,
not without sharp wits and a following--or better, a heeling. There had
been bad blood between him and Braddish for some time over political
differences of opinion and advancement. But into these Hagan had carried
a circumstantial, if degenerate, imagination that had grown into and
worried Braddish's peace of mind like a cancer. Details of the actual
killing were kept from us children. But I gathered, since the only
witnesses of the shooting were heelers of Hagan's, that it could in no
wise be construed into an out-and-out act of self-defence, and so far as
the law lay things looked bad for Braddish.

That he had not walked into the sheriff's office to give himself up made
it look as if he himself felt the unjustifiability of his act, and it
was predicted that when he was finally captured it would be to serve a
life sentence at the very least. The friends of the late Hagan would
hear of nothing less than hanging. It was a great pity (this was my
father's attitude): Hagan was a bad lot and a good riddance; Braddish
was an excellent young man, except for a bit of a temper, and here the
law proposed to revenge the bad man upon the other forever and ever. And
it was right and proper for the law so to do, more's the pity. But it
was not Braddish that would be hit hardest, said my father, and here
came in the inscrutable hand of Providence--it was Mary.

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