A Far Country, Book 1

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"Yes, I'll tell him," she said.

With a sense of having been baffled, I turned away.

Walking back toward the Yard my attention was attracted by a slowly
approaching cab whose occupants were disturbing the quiet of the night
with song.

"Shollity--'tis wine, 'tis wine, that makesh--shollity."

The vehicle drew up in front of a new and commodious building,--I believe
the first of those designed to house undergraduates who were willing to
pay for private bathrooms and other modern luxuries; out of one window of
the cab protruded a pair of shoeless feet, out of the other a hatless
head I recognized as belonging to Tom Peters; hence I surmised that the
feet were his also. The driver got down from the box, and a lively
argument was begun inside--for there were other occupants--as to how Mr.
Peters was to be disembarked; and I gathered from his frequent references
to the "Shgyptian obelisk" that the engineering problem presented struck
him as similar to the unloading of Cleopatra's Needle.

"Careful, careful!" he cautioned, as certain expelling movements began
from within, "Easy, Ham, you jam-fool, keep the door shut, y'll break
me."

"Now, Jerry, all heave sh'gether!" exclaimed a voice from the blackness
of the interior.

"Will ye wait a minute, Mr. Durrett, sir?" implored the cabdriver.
"You'll be after ruining me cab entirely." (Loud roars and vigorous
resistance from the obelisk, the cab rocking violently.) "This gintleman"
(meaning me) "will have him by the head, and I'll get hold of his feet,
sir." Which he did, after a severe kick in the stomach.

"Head'sh all right, Martin."

"To be sure it is, Mr. Peters. Now will ye rest aisy awhile, sir?"

"I'm axphyxiated," cried another voice from the darkness, the mined voice
of Jerome Kyme, our classmate.

"Get the tackles under him!" came forth in commanding tones from
Conybear.

In the meantime many windows had been raised and much gratuitous advice
was being given. The three occupants of the cab's seat who had previously
clamoured for Mr. Peters' removal, now inconsistently resisted it;
suddenly he came out with a jerk, and we had him fairly upright on the
pavement minus a collar and tie and the buttons of his evening waistcoat.
Those who remained in the cab engaged in a riotous game of hunt the
slipper, while Tom peered into the dark interior, observing gravely the
progress of the sport. First flew out an overcoat and a much-battered
hat, finally the pumps, all of which in due time were adjusted to his
person, and I started home with him, with much parting counsel from the
other three.

"Whereinell were you, Hughie?" he inquired. "Hunted all over for you. Had
a sousin' good time. Went to Babcock's--had champagne--then to see Babesh
in--th'--Woods. Ham knows one of the Babesh had supper with four of 'em.
Nice Babesh!"

"For heaven's sake don't step on me again!" I cried.

"Sh'poloshize, old man. But y'know I'm William Shakespheare. C'n do
what I damplease." He halted in the middle of the street and recited
dramatically:--

"'Not marble, nor th' gilded monuments
Of prinches sh'll outlive m' powerful rhyme.'"

"How's that, Alonzho, b'gosh?"

"Where did you learn it?" I demanded, momentarily forgetting his
condition.

"Fr'm Ralph," he replied, "says I wrote it. Can't remember...."

After I had got him to bed,--a service I had learned to perform with more
or less proficiency,--I sat down to consider the events of the evening,
to attempt to get a proportional view. The intensity of my disgust was
not hypocritical as I gazed through the open door into the bedroom and
recalled the times when I, too, had been in that condition. Tom Peters
drunk, and sleeping it off, was deplorable, without doubt; but Hugh Paret
drunk was detestable, and had no excuse whatever. Nor did I mean by this
to set myself on a higher ethical plane, for I felt nothing but despair
and humility. In my state of clairvoyance I perceived that he was a
better man, than I, and that his lapses proceeded from a love of liquor
and the transcendent sense of good-fellowship that liquor brings.




VII.

The crisis through which I passed at Cambridge, inaugurated by the events
I have just related, I find very difficult to portray. It was a religious
crisis, of course, and my most pathetic memory concerning it is of the
vain attempts to connect my yearnings and discontents with the theology I
had been taught; I began in secret to read my Bible, yet nothing I hit
upon seemed to point a way out of my present predicament, to give any
definite clew to the solution of my life. I was not mature enough to
reflect that orthodoxy was a Sunday religion unrelated to a world whose
wheels were turned by the motives of self-interest; that it consisted of
ideals not deemed practical, since no attempt was made to put them into
practice in the only logical manner,--by reorganizing civilization to
conform with them. The implication was that the Christ who had preached
these ideals was not practical.... There were undoubtedly men in the
faculty of the University who might have helped me had I known of them;
who might have given me, even at that time, a clew to the modern, logical
explanation of the Bible as an immortal record of the thoughts and acts
of men who had sought to do just what I was seeking to do,--connect the
religious impulse to life and make it fruitful in life: an explanation,
by the way, a thousand-fold more spiritual than the old. But I was
hopelessly entangled in the meshes of the mystic, the miraculous and
supernatural. If I had analyzed my yearnings, I might have realized that
I wanted to renounce the life I had been leading, not because it was
sinful, but because it was aimless. I had not learned that the Greek word
for sin is "a missing of the mark." Just aimlessness! I had been stirred
with the desire to perform some service for which the world would be
grateful: to write great literature, perchance. But it had never been
suggested to me that such swellings of the soul are religious, that
religion is that kind of feeling, of motive power that drives the writer
and the scientist, the statesman and the sculptor as well as the priest
and the Prophet to serve mankind for the joy of serving: that religion is
creative, or it is nothing: not mechanical, not a force imposed from
without, but a driving power within. The "religion" I had learned was
salvation from sin by miracle: sin a deliberate rebellion, not a pathetic
missing of the mark of life; useful service of man, not the wandering of
untutored souls who had not been shown the way. I felt religious. I
wanted to go to church, I wanted to maintain, when it was on me, that
exaltation I dimly felt as communion with a higher power, with God, and
which also was identical with my desire to write, to create....

I bought books, sets of Wordsworth and Keats, of Milton and Shelley and
Shakespeare, and hid them away in my bureau drawers lest Tom and my
friends should see them. These too I read secretly, making excuses for
not joining in the usual amusements. Once I walked to Mrs. Bolton's and
inquired rather shamefacedly for Hermann Krebs, only to be informed that
he had gone out.... There were lapses, of course, when I went off on the
old excursions,--for the most part the usual undergraduate follies,
though some were of a more serious nature; on these I do not care to
dwell. Sex was still a mystery.... Always I awoke afterwards to bitter
self-hatred and despair.... But my work in English improved, and I earned
the commendation and friendship of Mr. Cheyne. With a wisdom for which I
was grateful he was careful not to give much sign of it in classes, but
the fact that he was "getting soft on me" was evident enough to be
regarded with suspicion. Indeed the state into which I had fallen became
a matter of increasing concern to my companions, who tried every means
from ridicule to sympathy, to discover its cause and shake me out of it.
The theory most accepted was that I was in love.

"Come on now, Hughie--tell me who she is. I won't give you away," Tom
would beg. Once or twice, indeed, I had imagined I was in love with the
sisters of Boston classmates whose dances I attended; to these parties
Tom, not having overcome his diffidence in respect to what he called
"social life," never could be induced to go.

It was Ralph who detected the true cause of my discontent. Typical as no
other man I can recall of the code to which we had dedicated ourselves,
the code that moulded the important part of the undergraduate world and
defied authority, he regarded any defection from it in the light of
treason. An instructor, in a fit of impatience, had once referred to him
as the Mephistopheles of his class; he had fatal attractions, and a
remarkable influence. His favourite pastime was the capricious exercise
of his will on weaker characters, such as his cousin, Ham Durrett; if
they "swore off," Ralph made it his business to get them drunk again, and
having accomplished this would proceed himself to administer a new oath
and see that it was kept. Alcohol seemed to have no effect whatever on
him. Though he was in the class above me, I met him frequently at a club
to which I had the honour to belong, then a suite of rooms over a shop
furnished with a pool and a billiard table, easy-chairs and a bar. It has
since achieved the dignity of a house of its own.

We were having, one evening, a "religious" argument, Cinibar, Laurens and
myself and some others. I can't recall how it began; I think Cinibar had
attacked the institution of compulsory chapel, which nobody defended;
there was something inherently wrong, he maintained, with a religion to
which men had to be driven against their wills. Somewhat to my surprise I
found myself defending a Christianity out of which I had been able to
extract but little comfort and solace. Neither Laurens nor Conybear,
however, were for annihilating it: although they took the other side of
the discussion of a subject of which none of us knew anything, their
attacks were but half-hearted; like me, they were still under the spell
exerted by a youthful training.

We were all of us aware of Ralph, who sat at some distance looking over
the pages of an English sporting weekly. Presently he flung it down.

"Haven't you found out yet that man created God, Hughie?" he inquired.
"And even if there were a personal God, what reason have you to think
that man would be his especial concern, or any concern of his whatever?
The discovery of evolution has knocked your Christianity into a cocked
hat."

I don't remember how I answered him. In spite of the superficiality of
his own arguments, which I was not learned enough to detect, I was
ingloriously routed. Darwin had kicked over the bucket, and that was all
there was to it.... After we had left the club both Conybear and Laurens
admitted they were somewhat disturbed, declaring that Ralph had gone too
far. I spent a miserable night, recalling the naturalistic assertions he
had made so glibly, asking myself again and again how it was that the
religion to which I so vainly clung had no greater effect on my actions
and on my will, had not prevented me from lapses into degradation. And I
hated myself for having argued upon a subject that was still sacred. I
believed in Christ, which is to say that I believed that in some
inscrutable manner he existed, continued to dominate the world and had
suffered on my account.

To whom should I go now for a confirmation of my wavering beliefs? One of
the results--it will be remembered of religion as I was taught it was a
pernicious shyness, and even though I had found a mentor and confessor, I
might have hesitated to unburden myself. This would be different from
arguing with Ralph Hambleton. In my predicament, as I was wandering
through the yard, I came across a notice of an evening talk to students
in Holder Chapel, by a clergyman named Phillips Brooks. This was before
the time, let me say in passing, when his sermons at Harvard were
attended by crowds of undergraduates. Well, I stood staring at the
notice, debating whether I should go, trying to screw up my courage; for
I recognized clearly that such a step, if it were to be of any value,
must mean a distinct departure from my present mode of life; and I recall
thinking with a certain revulsion that I should have to "turn good." My
presence at the meeting would be known the next day to all my friends,
for the idea of attending a religious gathering when one was not forced
to do so by the authorities was unheard of in our set. I should be
classed with the despised "pious ones" who did such things regularly. I
shrank from the ridicule. I had, however, heard of Mr. Brooks from Ned
Symonds, who was by no means of the pious type, and whose parents
attended Mr. Brooks's church in Boston.... I left my decision in
abeyance. But when evening came I stole away from the club table, on the
plea of an engagement, and made my way rapidly toward Holder Chapel. I
had almost reached it--when I caught a glimpse of Symonds and of some
others approaching,--and I went on, to turn again. By this time the
meeting, which was in a room on the second floor, had already begun.
Palpitating, I climbed the steps; the door of the room was slightly ajar;
I looked in; I recall a distinct sensation of surprise,--the atmosphere
of that meeting was so different from what I had expected. Not a "pious"
atmosphere at all! I saw a very tall and heavy gentleman, dressed in
black, who sat, wholly at ease, on the table! One hand was in his pocket,
one foot swung clear of the ground; and he was not preaching, but talking
in an easy, conversational tone to some forty young men who sat intent on
his words. I was too excited to listen to what he was saying, I was
making a vain attempt to classify him. But I remember the thought, for it
struck me with force,--that if Christianity were so thoroughly
discredited by evolution, as Ralph Hambleton and other agnostics would
have one believe, why should this remarkably sane and able-looking person
be standing up for it as though it were still an established and
incontrovertible fact?

He had not, certainly, the air of a dupe or a sentimentalist, but
inspired confidence by his very personality. Youthlike, I watched him
narrowly for flaws, for oratorical tricks, for all kinds of histrionic
symptoms. Again I was near the secret; again it escaped me. The argument
for Christianity lay not in assertions about it, but in being it. This
man was Christianity.... I must have felt something of this, even though
I failed to formulate it. And unconsciously I contrasted his strength,
which reinforced the atmosphere of the room, with that of Ralph
Hambleton, who was, a greater influence over me than I have recorded, and
had come to sway me more and more, as he had swayed others. The strength
of each was impressive, yet this Mr. Brooks seemed to me the bodily
presentment of a set of values which I would have kept constantly before
my eyes.... I felt him drawing me, overcoming my hesitation, belittling
my fear of ridicule. I began gently to open the door--when something
happened,--one of those little things that may change the course of a
life. The door made little noise, yet one of the men sitting in the back
of the room chanced to look around, and I recognized Hermann Krebs. His
face was still sunken from his recent illness. Into his eyes seemed to
leap a sudden appeal, an appeal to which my soul responded yet I hurried
down the stairs and into the street. Instantly I regretted my retreat, I
would have gone back, but lacked the courage; and I strayed unhappily for
hours, now haunted by that look of Krebs, now wondering what the
remarkably sane-looking and informal clergyman whose presence dominated
the little room had been talking about. I never learned, but I did live
to read his biography, to discover what he might have talked about,--for
he if any man believed that life and religion are one, and preached
consecration to life's task.

Of little use to speculate whether the message, had I learned it then,
would have fortified and transformed me!

In spite of the fact that I was unable to relate to a satisfying
conception of religion my new-born determination, I made up my mind, at
least, to renounce my tortuous ways. I had promised my father to be a
lawyer; I would keep my promise, I would give the law a fair trial; later
on, perhaps, I might demonstrate an ability to write. All very
praiseworthy! The season was Lent, a fitting time for renunciations and
resolves. Although I had more than once fallen from grace, I believed
myself at last to have settled down on my true course--when something
happened. The devil interfered subtly, as usual--now in the person of
Jerry Kyme. It should be said in justice to Jerry that he did not look
the part. He had sunny-red, curly hair, mischievous blue eyes with long
lashes, and he harboured no respect whatever for any individual or
institution, sacred or profane; he possessed, however, a shrewd sense of
his own value, as many innocent and unsuspecting souls discovered as
early as our freshman year, and his method of putting down the
presumptuous was both effective and unique. If he liked you, there could
be no mistake about it.

One evening when I was engaged in composing a theme for Mr. Cheyne on no
less a subject than the interpretation of the work of William Wordsworth,
I found myself unexpectedly sprawling on the floor, in my descent kicking
the table so vigorously as to send the ink-well a foot or two toward the
ceiling. This, be it known, was a typical proof of Jerry's esteem. For he
had entered noiselessly, jerking the back of my chair, which chanced to
be tilted, and stood with his hands in his pockets, surveying the ruin he
had wrought, watching the ink as it trickled on the carpet. Then he
picked up the book.

"Poetry, you darned old grind!" he exclaimed disgustedly. "Say, Parry, I
don't know what's got into you, but I want you to come home with me for
the Easter holidays. It'll do you good. We'll be on the Hudson, you know,
and we'll manage to make life bearable somehow."

I forgot my irritation, in sheer surprise.

"Why, that's mighty good of you, Jerry--" I began, struggling to my feet.

"Oh, rot!" he exclaimed. "I shouldn't ask you if I didn't want you."

There was no denying the truth of this, and after he had gone I sat for a
long time with my pen in my mouth, reflecting as to whether or not I
should go. For I had the instinct that here was another cross-roads, that
more depended on my decision than I cared to admit. But even then I knew
what I should do. Ridiculous not to--I told myself. How could a week or
ten days with Jerry possibly affect my newborn, resolve?

Yet the prospect, now, of a visit to the Kymes' was by no means so
glowing as it once would have been. For I had seen visions, I had dreamed
dreams, beheld a delectable country of my very own. A year ago--nay, even
a month ago--how such an invitation would have glittered!... I returned
at length to my theme, over which, before Jerry's arrival, I had been
working feverishly. But now the glamour had gone from it.

Presently Tom came in.

"Anyone been here?" he demanded.

"Jerry," I told him.

"What did he want?"

"He wanted me to go home with him at Easter."

"You're going, of course."

"I don't know. I haven't decided."

"You'd be a fool not to," was Tom's comment. It voiced, succinctly, a
prevailing opinion.

It was the conclusion I arrived at in my own mind. But just why I had
been chosen for the honour, especially at such a time, was a riddle.
Jerry's invitations were charily given, and valued accordingly; and more
than once, at our table, I had felt a twinge of envy when Conybear or
someone else had remarked, with the proper nonchalance, in answer to a
question, that they were going to Weathersfield. Such was the name of the
Kyme place....

I shall never forget the impression made on me by the decorous luxury of
that big house, standing amidst its old trees, halfway up the gentle
slope that rose steadily from the historic highway where poor Andre was
captured. I can see now the heavy stone pillars of its portico vignetted
in a flush of tenderest green, the tulips just beginning to flame forth
their Easter colours in the well-kept beds, the stately, well-groomed
evergreens, the vivid lawns, the clipped hedges. And like an overwhelming
wave of emotion that swept all before it, the impressiveness of wealth
took possession of me. For here was a kind of wealth I had never known,
that did not exist in the West, nor even in the still Puritan environs of
Boston where I had visited. It took itself for granted, proclaimed itself
complacently to have solved all problems. By ignoring them, perhaps. But
I was too young to guess this. It was order personified, gaining effect
at every turn by a multitude of details too trivial to mention were it
not for the fact that they entered deeply into my consciousness, until
they came to represent, collectively, the very flower of achievement. It
was a wealth that accepted tribute calmly, as of inherent right. Law and
tradition defended its sanctity more effectively than troops. Literature
descended from her high altar to lend it dignity; and the long, silent
library displayed row upon row of the masters, appropriately clad in
morocco or calf,--Smollett, Macaulay, Gibbon, Richardson, Fielding,
Scott, Dickens, Irving and Thackeray, as though each had striven for a
tablet here. Art had denied herself that her canvases might be hung on
these walls; and even the Church, on that first Sunday of my visit,
forgot the blood of her martyrs that she might adorn an appropriate niche
in the setting. The clergyman, at one of the dinner parties, gravely
asked a blessing as upon an Institution that included and absorbed all
other institutions in its being....

The note of that house was a tempered gaiety. Guests arrived from New
York, spent the night and departed again without disturbing the even
tenor of its ways. Unobtrusive servants ministered to their wants,--and
to mine....

Conybear was there, and two classmates from Boston, and we were treated
with the amiable tolerance accorded to college youths and intimates of
the son of the house. One night there was a dance in our honour. Nor have
I forgotten Jerry's sister, Nathalie, whom I had met at Class Days, a
slim and willowy, exotic young lady of the Botticelli type, with a crown
of burnished hair, yet more suggestive of a hothouse than of spring. She
spoke English with a French accent. Capricious, impulsive, she captured
my interest because she put a high value on her favour; she drove me over
the hills, informing me at length that I was sympathique--different from
the rest; in short, she emphasized and intensified what I may call the
Weathersfield environment, stirred up in me new and vague aspirations
that troubled yet excited me.

Then there was Mrs. Kyme, a pretty, light-hearted lady, still young, who
seemed to have no intention of growing older, who romped and played songs
for us on the piano. The daughter of an old but now impecunious
Westchester family, she had been born to adorn the position she held, she
was adapted by nature to wring from it the utmost of the joys it offered.
From her, rather than from her husband, both of the children seemed to
have inherited. I used to watch Mr. Grosvenor Kyme as he sat at the end
of the dinner-table, dark, preoccupied, taciturn, symbolical of a wealth
new to my experience, and which had about it a certain fabulous quality.
It toiled not, neither did it spin, but grew as if by magic, day and
night, until the very conception of it was overpowering. What must it be
to have had ancestors who had been clever enough to sit still until a
congested and discontented Europe had begun to pour its thousands and
hundreds of thousands into the gateway of the western world, until that
gateway had become a metropolis? ancestors, of course, possessing what
now suddenly appeared to me as the most desirable of gifts--since it
reaped so dazzling a harvest-business foresight. From time to time these
ancestors had continued to buy desirable corners, which no amount of
persuasion had availed to make them relinquish. Lease them, yes; sell
them, never! By virtue of such a system wealth was as inevitable as human
necessity; and the thought of human necessity did not greatly bother me.
Mr. Kyme's problem of life was not one of making money, but of investing
it. One became automatically a personage....

It was due to one of those singular coincidences--so interesting a
subject for speculation--that the man who revealed to me this golden
romance of the Kyme family was none other than a resident of my own city,
Mr. Theodore Watling, now become one of our most important and
influential citizens; a corporation lawyer, new and stimulating
qualification, suggesting as it did, a deus ex machina of great affairs.
That he, of all men, should come to Weathersfield astonished me, since I
was as yet to make the connection between that finished, decorous,
secluded existence and the source of its being. The evening before my
departure he arrived in company with two other gentlemen, a Mr. Talbot
and a Mr. Saxes, whose names were spoken with respect in a sphere of
which I had hitherto taken but little cognizance-Wall Street. Conybear
informed me that they were "magnates,"... We were sitting in the
drawing-room at tea, when they entered with Mr. Watling, and no sooner
had he spoken to Mrs. Kyme than his quick eye singled me out of the
group.