A Far Country, Book 1

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Crusty old Nathaniel Durrett once declared that when you bought a bill of
goods from Robert Breck you did not have to check up the invoice or
employ a chemist. Here was a character to mould upon. If my ambition
could but have been bounded by Breck and Company, I, too, might have come
to stand in that doorway content with a tribute that was greater than
Caesar's.

I had been dreading the Christmas holidays, which were indeed to be no
holidays for me. And when at length they arrived they brought with them
from the East certain heroes fashionably clad, citizens now of a larger
world than mine. These former companions had become superior beings, they
could not help showing it, and their presence destroyed the Balance of
Things. For alas, I had not wholly abjured the feminine sex after all!
And from being a somewhat important factor in the lives of Ruth Hollister
and other young women I suddenly became of no account. New interests, new
rivalries and loyalties had arisen in which I had no share; I must
perforce busy myself with invoices of flour and coffee and canned fruits
while sleigh rides and coasting and skating expeditions to Blackstone
Lake followed one another day after day,--for the irony of circumstances
had decreed a winter uncommonly cold. There were evening parties, too,
where I felt like an alien, though my friends were guilty of no conscious
neglect; and had I been able to accept the situation simply, I should not
have suffered.

The principal event of those holidays was a play given in the old
Hambleton house (which later became the Boyne Club), under the direction
of the lively and talented Mrs. Watling. I was invited, indeed, to
participate; but even if I had had the desire I could not have done so,
since the rehearsals were carried on in the daytime. Nancy was the
leading lady. I have neglected to mention that she too had been away
almost continuously since our misunderstanding, for the summer in the
mountains,--a sojourn recommended for her mother's health; and in the
autumn she had somewhat abruptly decided to go East to boarding-school at
Farmington. During the brief months of her absence she had marvellously
acquired maturity and aplomb, a worldliness of manner and a certain
frivolity that seemed to put those who surrounded her on a lower plane.
She was only seventeen, yet she seemed the woman of thirty whose role she
played. First there were murmurs, then sustained applause. I scarcely
recognized her: she had taken wings and soared far above me, suggesting a
sphere of power and luxury hitherto unimagined and beyond the scope of
the world to which I belonged.

Her triumph was genuine. When the play was over she was immediately
surrounded by enthusiastic admirers eager to congratulate her, to dance
with her. I too would have gone forward, but a sense of inadequacy, of
unimportance, of an inability to cope with her, held me back, and from a
corner I watched her sweeping around the room, holding up her train, and
leaning on the arm of Bob Lansing, a classmate whom Ralph had brought
home from Harvard. Then it was Ralph's turn: that affair seemed still to
be going on. My feelings were a strange medley of despondency and
stimulation....

Our eyes met. Her partner now was Ham Durrett. Capriciously releasing
him, she stood before me,

"Hugh, you haven't asked me to dance, or even told me what you thought of
the play."

"I thought it was splendid," I said lamely.

Because she refrained from replying I was farther than ever from
understanding her. How was I to divine what she felt? or whether any
longer she felt at all? Here, in this costume of a woman of the world,
with the string of pearls at her neck to give her the final touch of
brilliancy, was a strange, new creature who baffled and silenced me....
We had not gone halfway across the room when she halted abruptly.

"I'm tired," she exclaimed. "I don't feel like dancing just now," and led
the way to the big, rose punch-bowl, one of the Durretts' most cherished
possessions. Glancing up at me over the glass of lemonade I had given her
she went on: "Why haven't you been to see me since I came home? I've
wanted to talk to you, to hear how you are getting along."

Was she trying to make amends, or reminding me in this subtle way of the
cause of our quarrel? What I was aware of as I looked at her was an
attitude, a vantage point apparently gained by contact with that
mysterious outer world which thus vicariously had laid its spell on me; I
was tremendously struck by the thought that to achieve this attitude
meant emancipation, invulnerability against the aches and pains which
otherwise our fellow-beings had the power to give us; mastery over
life,--the ability to choose calmly, as from a height, what were best for
one's self, untroubled by loves and hates. Untroubled by loves and hates!
At that very moment, paradoxically, I loved her madly, but with a love
not of the old quality, a love that demanded a vantage point of its own.
Even though she had made an advance--and some elusiveness in her manner
led me to doubt it I could not go to her now. I must go as a
conqueror,--a conqueror in the lists she herself had chosen, where the
prize is power.

"Oh, I'm getting along pretty well," I said. "At any rate, they don't
complain of me."

"Somehow," she ventured, "somehow it's hard to think of you as a business
man."

I took this for a reference to the boast I had made that I would go to
college.

"Business isn't so bad as it might be," I assured her.

"I think a man ought to go away to college," she declared, in what seemed
another tone. "He makes friends, learns certain things,--it gives him
finish. We are very provincial here."

Provincial! I did not stop to reflect how recently she must have acquired
the word; it summed up precisely the self-estimate at which I had
arrived. The sting went deep. Before I could think of an effective reply
Nancy was being carried off by the young man from the East, who was
clearly infatuated. He was not provincial. She smiled back at me brightly
over his shoulder.... In that instant were fused in one resolution all
the discordant elements within me of aspiration and discontent. It was
not so much that I would show Nancy what I intended to do--I would show
myself; and I felt a sudden elation, and accession of power that enabled
me momentarily to despise the puppets with whom she danced.... From this
mood I was awakened with a start to feel a hand on my shoulder, and I
turned to confront her father, McAlery Willett; a gregarious, easygoing,
pleasure-loving gentleman who made only a pretence of business, having
inherited an ample fortune from his father, unique among his generation
in our city in that he paid some attention to fashion in his dress; good
living was already beginning to affect his figure. His mellow voice had a
way of breaking an octave.

"Don't worry, my boy," he said. "You stick to business. These college
fellows are cocks of the walk just now, but some day you'll be able to
snap your fingers at all of 'em."

The next day was dark, overcast, smoky, damp-the soft, unwholesome
dampness that follows a spell of hard frost. I spent the morning and
afternoon on the gloomy third floor of Breck and Company, making a list
of the stock. I remember the place as though I had just stepped out of
it, the freight elevator at the back, the dusty, iron columns, the
continuous piles of cases and bags and barrels with narrow aisles between
them; the dirty windows, spotted and soot-streaked, that looked down on
Second Street. I was determined now to escape from all this, and I had my
plan in mind.

No sooner had I swallowed my supper that evening than I set out at a
swift pace for a modest residence district ten blocks away, coming to a
little frame house set back in a yard,--one of those houses in which the
ringing of the front door-bell produces the greatest commotion;
children's voices were excitedly raised and then hushed. After a brief
silence the door was opened by a pleasant-faced, brown-bearded man, who
stood staring at me in surprise. His hair was rumpled, he wore an old
house coat with a hole in the elbow, and with one finger he kept his
place in the book which he held in his hand.

"Hugh Paret!" he exclaimed.

He ushered me into a little parlour lighted by two lamps, that bore every
evidence of having been recently vacated. Its features somehow bespoke a
struggle for existence; as though its occupants had worried much and
loved much. It was a room best described by the word "home"--home made
more precious by a certain precariousness. Toys and school-books strewed
the floor, a sewing-bag and apron lay across the sofa, and in one corner
was a roll-topped desk of varnished oak. The seats of the chairs were
comfortably depressed.

So this was where Mr. Wood lived! Mr. Wood, instructor in Latin and Greek
at Densmore Academy. It was now borne in on me for the first time that he
did live and have his ties like any other human being, instead of just
appearing magically from nowhere on a platform in a chalky room at nine
every morning, to vanish again in the afternoon. I had formerly stood in
awe of his presence. But now I was suddenly possessed by an
embarrassment, and (shall I say it?) by a commiseration bordering on
contempt for a man who would consent to live thus for the sake of being a
schoolteacher. How strange that civilization should set such a high value
on education and treat its functionaries with such neglect!

Mr. Wood's surprise at seeing me was genuine. For I had never shown a
particular interest in him, nor in the knowledge which he strove to
impart.

"I thought you had forgotten me, Hugh," he said, and added whimsically:
"most boys do, when they graduate."

I felt the reproach, which made it the more difficult for me to state my
errand.

"I knew you sometimes took pupils in the evening, Mr. Wood."

"Pupils,--yes," he replied, still eyeing me. Suddenly his eyes twinkled.
He had indeed no reason to suspect me of thirsting for learning. "But I
was under the impression that you had gone into business, Hugh."

"The fact is, sir," I explained somewhat painfully, "that I am not
satisfied with business. I feel--as if I ought to know more. And I came
to see if you would give me lessons about three nights a week, because I
want to take the Harvard examinations next summer."

Thus I made it appear, and so persuaded myself, that my ambition had been
prompted by a craving for knowledge. As soon as he could recover himself
he reminded me that he had on many occasions declared I had a brain.

"Your father must be very happy over this decision of yours," he said.

That was the point, I told him. It was to be a surprise for my father; I
was to take the examinations first, and inform him afterwards.

To my intense relief, Mr. Wood found the scheme wholly laudable, and
entered into it with zest. He produced examinations of preceding years
from a pigeonhole in his desk, and inside of half an hour the arrangement
was made, the price of the lessons settled. They were well within my
salary, which recently had been raised....

When I went down town, or collecting bills for Breck and Company, I took
a text-book along with me in the street-cars. Now at last I had behind my
studies a driving force. Algebra, Latin, Greek and history became worth
while, means to an end. I astonished Mr. Wood; and sometimes he would
tilt back his chair, take off his spectacles and pull his beard.

"Why in the name of all the sages," he would demand, "couldn't you have
done this well at school? You might have led your class, instead of Ralph
Hambleton."

I grew very fond of Mr. Wood, and even of his thin little wife, who
occasionally flitted into the room after we had finished. I fully
intended to keep up with them in after life, but I never did. I forgot
them completely....

My parents were not wholly easy in their minds concerning me; they were
bewildered by the new aspect I presented. For my lately acquired motive
was strong enough to compel me to restrict myself socially, and the
evenings I spent at home were given to study, usually in my own room.
Once I was caught with a Latin grammar: I was just "looking over it," I
said. My mother sighed. I knew what was in her mind; she had always been
secretly disappointed that I had not been sent to college. And presently,
when my father went out to attend a trustee's meeting, the impulse to
confide in her almost overcame me; I loved her with that affection which
goes out to those whom we feel understand us, but I was learning to
restrain my feelings. She looked at me wistfully.... I knew that she
would insist on telling my father, and thus possibly frustrate my plans.
That I was not discovered was due to a certain quixotic twist in my
father's character. I was working now, and though not actually earning my
own living, he no longer felt justified in prying into my affairs.

When June arrived, however, my tutor began to show signs that his
conscience was troubling him, and one night he delivered his ultimatum.
The joke had gone far enough, he implied. My intentions, indeed, he found
praiseworthy, but in his opinion it was high time that my father were
informed of them; he was determined to call at my father's office.

The next morning was blue with the presage of showers; blue, too, with
the presage of fate. An interminable morning. My tasks had become utterly
distasteful. And in the afternoon, so when I sat down to make out
invoices, I wrote automatically the names of the familiar customers, my
mind now exalted by hope, now depressed by anxiety. The result of an
interview perhaps even now going on would determine whether or no I
should be immediately released from a slavery I detested. Would Mr. Wood
persuade my father? If not, I was prepared to take more desperate
measures; remain in the grocery business I would not. In the evening, as
I hurried homeward from the corner where the Boyne Street car had dropped
me, I halted suddenly in front of the Peters house, absorbing the scene
where my childhood had been spent: each of these spreading maples was an
old friend, and in these yards I had played and dreamed. An unaccountable
sadness passed over me as I walked on toward our gate; I entered it,
gained the doorway of the house and went upstairs, glancing into the
sitting room. My mother sat by the window, sewing. She looked up at me
with an ineffable expression, in which I read a trace of tears.

"Hugh!" she exclaimed.

I felt very uncomfortable, and stood looking down at her.

"Why didn't you tell us, my son?" In her voice was in truth reproach; yet
mingled with that was another note, which I think was pride.

"What has father said?" I asked.

"Oh, my dear, he will tell you himself. I--I don't know--he will talk to
you."

Suddenly she seized my hands and drew me down to her, and then held me
away, gazing into my face with a passionate questioning, her lips
smiling, her eyes wet. What did she see? Was there a subtler relationship
between our natures than I guessed? Did she understand by some
instinctive power the riddle within me? divine through love the force
that was driving me on she knew not whither, nor I? At the sound of my
father's step in the hall she released me. He came in as though nothing
had happened.

"Well, Hugh, are you home?" he said....

Never had I been more impressed, more bewildered by his self-command than
at that time. Save for the fact that my mother talked less than usual,
supper passed as though nothing had happened. Whether I had shaken him,
disappointed him, or gained his reluctant approval I could not tell.
Gradually his outward calmness turned my suspense to irritation....

But when at length we were alone together, I gained a certain
reassurance. His manner was not severe. He hesitated a little before
beginning.

"I must confess, Hugh; that I scarcely know what to say about this
proceeding of yours. The thing that strikes me most forcibly is that you
might have confided in your mother and myself."

Hope flashed up within me, like an explosion.

"I--I wanted to surprise you, father. And then, you see, I thought it
would be wiser to find out first how well I was likely to do at the
examinations."

My father looked at me. Unfortunately he possessed neither a sense of
humour nor a sense of tragedy sufficient to meet such a situation. For
the first time in my life I beheld him at a disadvantage; for I had,
somehow, managed at length to force him out of position, and he was
puzzled. I was quick to play my trump card.

"I have been thinking it over carefully," I told him, "and I have made up
my mind that I want to go into the law."

"The law!" he exclaimed sharply.

"Why, yes, sir. I know that you were disappointed because I did not do
sufficiently well at school to go to college and study for the bar."

I felt indeed a momentary pang, but I remembered that I was fighting for
my freedom.

"You seemed satisfied where you were," he said in a puzzled voice, "and
your Cousin Robert gives a good account of you."

"I've tried to do the work as well as I could, sir," I replied. "But I
don't like the grocery business, or any other business. I have a feeling
that I'm not made for it."

"And you think, now, that you are made for the law?" he asked, with the
faint hint of a smile.

"Yes, sir, I believe I could succeed at it. I'd like to try," I replied
modestly.

"You've given up the idiotic notion of wishing to be an author?"

I implied that he himself had convinced me of the futility of such a
wish. I listened to his next words as in a dream.

"I must confess to you, Hugh, that there are times when I fail to
understand you. I hope it is as you say, that you have arrived at a
settled conviction as to your future, and that this is not another of
those caprices to which you have been subject, nor a desire to shirk
honest work. Mr. Wood has made out a strong case for you, and I have
therefore determined to give you a trial. If you pass the examinations
with credit, you may go to college, but if at any time you fail to make
good progress, you come home, and go into business again. Is that
thoroughly understood?"

I said it was, and thanked him effusively.... I had escaped,--the prison
doors had flown open. But it is written that every happiness has its
sting; and my joy, intense though it was, had in it a core of remorse....

I went downstairs to my mother, who was sitting in the hall by the open
door.

"Father says I may go!" I said.

She got up and took me in her arms.

"My dear, I am so glad, although we shall miss you dreadfully.... Hugh?"

"Yes, mother."

"Oh, Hugh, I so want you to be a good man!"

Her cry was a little incoherent, but fraught with a meaning that came
home to me, in spite of myself....

A while later I ran over to announce to the amazed Tom Peters that I was
actually going to Harvard with him. He stood in the half-lighted hallway,
his hands in his pockets, blinking at me.

"Hugh, you're a wonder!" he cried. "How in Jehoshaphat did you work
it?"...

I lay long awake that night thinking over the momentous change so soon to
come into my life, wondering exultantly what Nancy Willett would say now.
I was not one, at any rate, to be despised or neglected.




VI.

The following September Tom Peters and I went East together. In the early
morning Boston broke on us like a Mecca as we rolled out of the old
Albany station, joint lords of a "herdic." How sharply the smell of the
salt-laden east wind and its penetrating coolness come back to me! I seek
in vain for words to express the exhilarating effect of that briny
coolness on my imagination, and of the visions it summoned up of the
newer, larger life into which I had marvellously been transported. We
alighted at the Parker House, full-fledged men of the world, and tried to
act as though the breakfast of which we partook were merely an incident,
not an Event; as though we were Seniors, and not freshmen, assuming an
indifference to the beings by whom we were surrounded and who were
breakfasting, too,--although the nice-looking ones with fresh faces and
trim clothes were all undoubtedly Olympians. The better to proclaim our
nonchalance, we seated ourselves on a lounge of the marble-paved lobby
and smoked cigarettes. This was liberty indeed! At length we departed for
Cambridge, in another herdic.

Boston! Could it be possible? Everything was so different here as to give
the place the aspect of a dream: the Bulfinch State House, the decorous
shops, the still more decorous dwellings with the purple-paned windows
facing the Common; Back Bay, still boarded up, ivy-spread, suggestive of
a mysterious and delectable existence. We crossed the Charles River,
blue-grey and still that morning; traversed a nondescript district, and
at last found ourselves gazing out of the windows at the mellowed,
plum-coloured bricks of the University buildings.... All at once our
exhilaration evaporated as the herdic rumbled into a side street and
backed up before the door of a not-too-inviting, three-storied house with
a queer extension on top. Its steps and vestibule were, however,
immaculate. The bell was answered by a plainly overworked servant girl,
of whom we inquired for Mrs. Bolton, our landlady. There followed a
period of waiting in a parlour from which the light had been almost
wholly banished, with slippery horsehair furniture and a marble-topped
table; and Mrs. Bolton, when she appeared, dressed in rusty black,
harmonized perfectly with the funereal gloom. She was a tall, rawboned,
severe lady with a peculiar red-mottled complexion that somehow reminded
one of the outcropping rocks of her native New England soil.

"You want to see your rooms, I suppose," she remarked impassively when we
had introduced ourselves, and as we mounted the stairs behind her Tom, in
a whisper, nicknamed her "Granite Face." Presently she left us.

"Hospitable soul!" said Tom, who, with his hands in his pockets, was
gazing at the bare walls of our sitting-room. "We'll have to go into the
house-furnishing business, Hughie. I vote we don't linger here
to-day--we'll get melancholia."

Outside, however, the sun was shining brightly, and we departed
immediately to explore Cambridge and announce our important presences to
the proper authorities.... We went into Boston to dine.... It was not
until nine o'clock in the evening that we returned and the bottom
suddenly dropped out of things. He who has tasted that first, acute
homesickness of college will know what I mean. It usually comes at the
opening of one's trunk. The sight of the top tray gave me a pang I shall
never forget. I would not have believed that I loved my mother so much!
These articles had been packed by her hands; and in one corner, among the
underclothes on which she had neatly sewed my initials, lay the new Bible
she had bought. "Hugh Moreton Paret, from his Mother. September, 1881." I
took it up (Tom was not looking) and tried to read a passage, but my eyes
were blurred. What was it within me that pressed and pressed until I
thought I could bear the pain of it no longer? I pictured the
sitting-room at home, and my father and mother there, thinking of me.
Yes, I must acknowledge it; in the bitterness of that moment I longed to
be back once more in the railed-off space on the floor of Breck and
Company, writing invoices....

Presently, as we went on silently with our unpacking, we became aware of
someone in the doorway.

"Hello, you fellows!" he cried. "We're classmates, I guess."

We turned to behold an ungainly young man in an ill-fitting blue suit.
His face was pimply, his eyes a Teutonic blue, his yellow hair rumpled,
his naturally large mouth was made larger by a friendly grin.

"I'm Hermann Krebs," he announced simply. "Who are you?"

We replied, I regret to say, with a distinct coolness that did not seem
to bother him in the least. He advanced into the room, holding out a
large, red, and serviceable hand, evidently it had never dawned on him
that there was such a thing in the world as snobbery. But Tom and I had
been "coached" by Ralph Hambleton and Perry Blackwood, warned to be
careful of our friendships. There was a Reason! In any case Mr. Krebs
would not have appealed to us. In answer to a second question he was
informed what city we hailed from, and he proclaimed himself likewise a
native of our state.

"Why, I'm from Elkington!" he exclaimed, as though the fact sealed our
future relationships. He seated himself on Tom's trunk and added:
"Welcome to old Harvard!"

We felt that he was scarcely qualified to speak for "old Harvard," but we
did not say so.

"You look as if you'd been pall-bearers for somebody," was his next
observation.

To this there seemed no possible reply.

"You fellows are pretty well fixed here," he went on, undismayed, gazing
about a room which had seemed to us the abomination of desolation. "Your
folks must be rich. I'm up under the skylight."

Even this failed to touch us. His father--he told us with undiminished
candour--had been a German emigrant who had come over in '49, after the
cause of liberty had been lost in the old country, and made eye-glasses
and opera glasses. There hadn't been a fortune in it. He, Hermann, had
worked at various occupations in the summer time, from peddling to
farming, until he had saved enough to start him at Harvard. Tom, who had
been bending over his bureau drawer, straightened up.