Ben Ames Williams

“ Walter Moore and his wife and Lucy were among those who followed the little cortege to the receiving tomb where—because the frost had fortified the earth against the digging of a grave—his mother’s body would lie till spring. Lucy was mysteriously moved by the pity of this; that a woman should die, and yet be kept waiting for her final sweet repose in the bosom of earth. After supper that evening, she drew on coat and heavy overshoes and muffled her head against the bitter wind that blew. “I’m going down to cheer up Johnny, mama,” she said. ”

“ That Proutt had some battle with himself cannot be denied. No man sets out to destroy a soul without first overcoming the scruples which bind him; and there were scruples in Proutt. There must have been. He loved dogs, loved fine dogs, and Reck was fine. Yet the destruction of Reck’s honor and reputation and life—these were the ends which Proutt set himself to bring about—at what pain to his own heart no man may fully guess. ”

“ Johnny was in the middle of the Starks when he saw Lucia coming toward him among the trees. After the fashion of the countryside, he looked at her with frank curiosity. He had seen her, at some distance, once or twice before, since Walter Moore bought the run-down farm on the hilltop above his orchard. Had summarized his impressions of rouge, plucked brows, short dresses in a single phrase, “A city girl.” There was no malice in the appellation; it was simply a classification. Her approach now did not embarrass him; there is a self respect in such men, not easily disturbed. ”

“ When they gathered at the Ravine of the Cold Tooth, straggling parties had swelled that number so that Jacques Fontaine, counting, with his big forefinger pointing in turn toward each man and his lips mumbling as he counted, found that he had a force of two hundred and seven hardy and energetic men.
And he was pleased.
The first thing this man did, gentlemen, was to reconstitute the regiment. A regiment, you understand, is an immortal thing. It cannot die. When every man of it is dead, the regiment still lives; because a regiment is an idea, and ideas are eternal. ”

“ But when white folks weep, the darky has comfort to give, and gives it.... To tell them a secret is like whispering it to one’s own self; there is the bliss of confession without the anguish of knowing that one’s shame is shared. It is easy to tell, hard to rebuff their gentle inquiries....
Jim Forrest was never able to understand how he had been led to unbosom himself to old Eph; but he did. The negro took him over Beacon Hill, and down one thin and dingy street, and then another; and so into a boarding house, and up to the room where Eph dwelt. ”

“ Eric was never a man to fear or avoid conflict, even with the forces of the universe itself; and after this third appearance of the scarred bull whale, he scarce slept at all, but held himself and his boat’s crew ready for battle the day long. He was aloft from dawn till dark, endlessly scouring the seas for a spout that would reveal the creature which personified to him the thing he was fighting. ”

“ There are trout in Sheepscot; and thirty years ago the valley was full of farms and mills; but{137} these farms are for the most part deserted now, and the mills are gone, leaving only shattered dams to mark the spots where they stood. The valley is a tangle of second-growth timber, broken here and there by ancient meadows through which brooks meander. Here dwells every wild thing that the region knows.
Proutt’s old buggy climbed the long road up the eastern slope of the ridge; and the somber beauty of the countryside lay outspread behind them. ”

“ One man only, and that man Jim Saladine, caught some inkling of that which was afoot. Jim was a deer hunter; and toward mid-October, with a shotgun under his arm for luck’s sake, but never a buckshot in his cartridge pocket, he went one day into the Sheepscot Valley to search out the land. Deer lay in the swamps there; and Jim sought to locate them against the coming season. He moved slowly and quietly, as his custom was; ears and eyes open. And he saw many things which another man would never have seen. ”

“ He saw what you may see any day along the Sheepscot, and what, by the same token, you may go a weary year without seeing. He saw a deer, a proud buck, come up from the stream and follow the meadow toward where he lay. It passed the isolated alder clump, and something there gave it alarm; for Jim saw its head lift—saw then the quick leap and rush which carried the creature to cover and away....
Saw something else. Out from the alder clump burst a man, driving before him a dog. Dusk was falling, Jim could see their figures only dimly. ”

“ Barnard, in his dream, began to feel old; and he began to feel lonely.
He missed the laughter of the little child. Even though Anne, and Dick, and Charles still walked with him, he missed the little child.
He could see in Anne’s eyes that she, too, was lonely, but when he taxed her with it, she gave him a gay denial.
The two boys, however, soon forgot. At first Barnard resented this; then he accepted it dumbly. Revolt was dying in him. He still went forward as steadily as before, but the old, fierce defiance no longer burned in his breast. He no longer sought to escape The Threat above them. ”

“ Chet had taken Job out the night before to try for a partridge in the fringes of the wood below the farm. They were late in starting, but within fifteen minutes Job was marking game and just at sunset the bird rose and wheeled toward the thickets of the wood. Chet had a snap shot; he took it and he saw the bird’s legs drop and dangle before it disappeared. He knew what that meant. A body wound, a deadly wound. The bird would fly so long as its wings would function, then set its pinions and glide in a long slant to earth, and when it struck ground it would be dead. ”

“ The men got out and belled their dogs and old Job stood quietly at Chet’s heel while Chet filled his pockets with shells. The other dogs were racing and plunging, breaking across the wall, returning impatiently at command, racing away again. When they were ready the three men went through the bars, and with a gesture Chet sent Job into an alder run to the right. The great dog began his systematic zigzagging progress, designed to cover every foot of the ground, while the younger dogs circled and scuffled and darted about him, nosing here and there, wild with the excitement of the hunt. ”

“ I believe I may be forgiven for holding that valor is a trait of most Frenchmen. And by valor I do not mean the bravery which can be taught, which is merely a form of habit. You may take the most craven material and teach it the habit of obedience, and you have what passes for a brave soldier; but the Frenchman is valorous before he is a soldier, and he is valorous when he is no longer a soldier. The whining beggar has valor; so has the peasant, and the comfortable bourgeois, and the man of birth and breeding. ”

“ It is certain, my friends, that I have failed to give you any comprehensive picture of the life of this poor regiment during the years of its isolation. It is impossible for you, who have always been well fed and comfortable, to imagine the hunger, the cold, the loneliness, the misery. Some of you have faced peril, perhaps for hours on end. But these men, gentlemen, faced death for years on end. ”

“ He snapped his fingers to Frenchy, and the setter came to lay his chin upon Chet’s knee. Reck, jealous of this attention, at once rose and demanded a caress from me. “Take a dog,” said Chet. “You lick him to hurt, so he yelps with the pain of it, and the helplessness, and you can make a rogue dog out of him mighty quick. A pain that breaks down the pride of a man, or a boy, or a dog, and makes him beg for mercy, does bitter things to him. Man, or boy, or dog, he’s not what he was, after that has happened to him. I’ve known dog breakers that whipped dogs, and made rogues or cowards out of them. ”

“ She was on the pier the day we sailed; and I saw Eric Scarf watching her with the hopeless longing in his eyes that tears at the vitals of a man.
“There was a shadow over the mate from the beginning of that cruise. Any man could see it; and the fo’mast hands used to watch him, and whisper among themselves. Outwardly he was the same; strong and quick and proud, alive, alert, his body uplifted with the energy it housed. He trod the decks lightly, he moved with the quick precision of an animal; and he plunged into his work in a fashion that would have worn another man to threads. ”

“ For little old Bob Dungan was desperately afraid of being fired.
A newspaper staff is built to meet emergencies. That means that, left to itself, it inevitably becomes top-heavy, and on days when news is slack, the City Room is half full of men waiting for an assignment that never comes. When such a condition develops, the veterans in the office know what will follow. Some fine morning, the publisher drifts down stairs and sees the idle men—idle because there is nothing for them to do. ”

“ Sometimes people, listening to Eph’s singing, thought the old man must be shivering where he sat upon the stones; and Ragan drove him away two or three nights and bade him warm himself. But each time Eph looked at him with such pitiful entreaty against this kindness that Ragan gave up. “Have it your own way, you old idiot,” he told Eph. “If you want to freeze, go ahead and freeze. But don’t look at a man like he’s kicked you....” ”

“ No man can look out across its smooth bosom day and day, and remember the vast multitude of lives which go their way beneath that smiling surface, without a sense of mystery and wonder of it all. The sea in a storm may be terrible and appalling, when its broad expanse is cut up into myriad gulleys and mountains in which the ship is lost as in a labyrinth ”

“ The army’s front is like the front of a dam, vast and impregnable; but behind, that front is bolstered and strengthened and buttressed by many little lines of communication and supply, just as a dam may be buttressed on the lower side. A division may shatter itself in vain against the army’s front; a hundred men may cut one of those little lines behind. ”

“ No one ever saw Eph about the streets in the day time. He appeared at dusk; and it was known that he sometimes remained at his post, singing and picking at his banjo, long after the ways were empty of pedestrians. Sometimes, in those middle hours between night and morning, when there was no one near, the songs he sang became ineffably sad and mournful; he crooned them, under{270} his breath, to the banjo that he hugged against his breast, and his sweet old voice was like a low lament. ”

“ She told him she was going to marry Bud. And Jack rolled a cigarette with both hands, slowly and with care; he fashioned it neatly, and stroked it between his fingers, and twisted the ends and lighted it before he spoke at all.
“Said so to him?” he asked then.
Jeanie shook her head. “No. I wanted you to know first, because I want you and Bud to keep on being friends. I like you, Jack. But you’re—flighty. Bud’s steady. You’re more amusing sometimes, but he’s more reliable. I couldn’t ever really count on you. I can count on Bud, Jack. But you will go on being friends with him, won’t you? ”

“ He was so manifestly exhausted that Chet’s eyes filled with frank tears—they flowed down his cheeks. He had not the heart to scold Tantry for breaking orders and following them.
He reached down and patted the grizzled old head and said huskily: “You damned old fool, Tantry! What are you doing down here?”
Tantry looked up at him and barked again and again and there was a rending ring of triumph in the old dog’s cackling voice.
Chet said gently: “There now, be still. You’ll scare the birds, Tantry. Behave yourself. Mac’s got a bird here somewhere. Be still—you’ll scare the birds.” ”

“ And now and then, with a sense of unreality, you will come upon a deer along some old wood road; or a rabbit will fluster from some bush and rise on haunches, twenty yards away.
The talk in Will Bissell’s store turns, night by night, upon these creatures of the woods that lie about the town; and by the same token the talk is filled with speech concerning dogs. The cult of the dog is strong in Fraternity. Every man has one dog, some have two. These, you will understand, are real dogs. ”

“ In the still crisp air a sound seemed still ringing—the sound of a dog’s bark—the bark of Old Tantrybogus, yet strangely different too. Stronger, richer, with a new and youthful timbre in its tones; like the bark of a young strong dog setting forth on an eternal hunt with a well-loved master through alder runs where woodcock were as thick as autumn leaves.
VII
Half an hour after that Will Bissell chanced by Chet’s farm and saw Chet fetching pick and shovel from the shed, and something in the other’s bearing made him ask: “What’s the matter, Chet? Something wrong?” ”

“ There are men whose profession it is to train bird dogs, or as the phrase goes, to break them. With some of these men it is a breaking indeed, for they carry a lash into the field, nor spare to use it. Others work more gently to a better end. But any man may make his dog what he will if he have patience coupled with the gift of teaching the dog to understand his wishes.
Chet decided to train Job himself. He set about it when the pup was some six months old, at a season when winter was settling down upon the farm and there were idle hours on his hands. ”