Hempfield. Grayson David

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I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood

      As she read, she would thrill with delicious horror.

      Then she went away to school, not knowing in the least how much her father missed her; and when she came back, the home of her girlhood seemed dreadfully shabby, small, old-fashioned, and she did not like the iron deer on the lawn nor the cabinet of specimens in the corner of the parlour.

      Anthy did not tell me all these things at one time, and some she never told me at all. They were the slow gatherings of many rich friendships in Hempfield, and a few things afterward came to me, inadvertently, from Nort. I shall venture often in this narrative to assume the omniscience of foreknowledge: for it is one of the beautiful things to me, as I write, that I can look at those early hard days in the printing-office through the golden haze of later events.

      It was in the vacations from college that Anthy began really to know her father, who was, in his way, a rather remarkable man. Although I never knew him well personally, I remember seeing him often in the town roads during the latter years of his life. He was always in a hurry, always looked a little tired, always wore his winter hat too late in the spring, and his straw hat too late in the fall.

      Anthy remembered her father as forever writing on bits of yellow paper: "John Gorman lost a valuable pig last Wednesday"; or "Mrs. Bertha Hopkins is visiting her daughter in Arnoville."

      Anthy was secretly ashamed of this unending writing of local events, just as she was ashamed of the round bald spot on her father's head, and of the goloshes which he wore in winter. And yet, in some curious deep way – for love struggles in youth to harmonize the real with the ideal – these things of which she was ashamed gave her a sort of fierce pride in him, a tenderness for him, a wish to defend him. While she admired her handsome uncle, the Captain, it was her father whom she loved with all the devotion of her young soul.

      He knew everybody, or nearly everybody, in the town, and treated every one, even his best friends, with a kind of ironical regard. He knew life well – all of it – and was rarely deceived by pretence or surprised by evil. Sometimes, I think, he armoured himself unnecessarily against goodness, lest he be deceived; but once having accepted a man, his loyalty was unswerving. He believed, as he often said, that the big things in life are the little things, and it was his idea of a country newspaper that it should be crowded with all the little things possible.

      "What's the protective tariff or the Philippine question to Nat Halstead compared with the price of potatoes?" he would ask.

      He was not at all proud, for if he could not get his pay for his newspaper in cash he would take a ham, or a cord of wood, a champion squash, or a packet of circus tickets. One of Anthy's early memories was of an odd assortment of shoes which he had accepted in settlement of an advertising account. They never quite fitted any one.

      As he grew older he liked to talk with Anthy about his business, as though she were a partner; he liked especially to have her in the office helping him, and he was always ready with a whimsical or wise comment on the people of the town. He also enjoyed making sly jokes about his older brother, the Captain, and especially about the Captain's thundering editorials (which Anthy for a long time secretly admired, wishing her father had written them).

      "Now, Anthy," he would say, "don't disturb your Uncle Newt; he's saving the nation," or "Pass this pamphlet along to your uncle; it will come in handy when he gets ready to regulate the railroads."

      He was not an emotional man, at least to outward view; but once, on a Memorial Day, while the old soldiers were marching past the printing-office on their way to the cemetery, Anthy saw him standing by the window in his long apron, a composing stick in his hand, with the tears rolling unheeded down his face.

      I think sometimes we do not yet appreciate the influence of that great burst of idealism, which was the Civil War, upon the lives of the men of that generation, nor the place which Lincoln played in moulding the characters of his time. Men who, even as boys, passed through the fire of that great time and learned to suffer with Lincoln, could never again be quite small. Although Anthy's father had not been a soldier – he was too young at the time – the most impressionable years of his boyhood were saturated with stories from the front, with the sight of soldiers marching forth to war, his own older brother, the Captain, among them, the sound of martial drums and fifes, and the heroic figures of wan and wounded men who returned with empty sleeves or missing legs. He never forgot the thrill that came with the news of Lincoln's assassination.

      There was a portrait of Lincoln over the cases at the office, and another over the mantel in the dining-room – the one that played so important a part, afterward, in Anthy's life.

      Sometimes, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, Anthy's father would get down a certain volume from the cases, and read Tom Taylor's tribute to the dead Lincoln. She could recall vividly the intonation of his voice as he read the lines, and she knew just where he would falter and have to clear his throat:

      You lay a wreath on murdered Lincoln's bier;

      You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace,

      Broad for the self-complaisant British sneer,

      His length of shambling limb, his furrowed face,

      His gaunt, gnarled hands, his unkempt, bristling hair,

      His garb uncouth, his bearing ill at ease,

      His lack of all we prize as debonair,

      Of power or will to shine, or art to please…

      When he had finished reading, he would take off his spectacles and wipe them, and say to Anthy:

      "Lincoln was the greatest man this country has ever produced."

      He was a curious combination of hardheadedness, of ironical wisdom, and of humour, and somewhere, hidden deep within, of molten sentiment. He was a regular Yankee.

      One night he got more than ordinarily tired, and just stopped. They found him in bed the next morning, his legs drawn up under the coverlet, a volume of Don Quixote open on his knees, his empty pipe fallen from his lips, the lamp dying out on a table near him. At his elbow were two of the inevitable yellow slips:

Squire Baker of Arnoville was a visitor at Lawyer Perkins's on MondayApples stopped yesterday at Banks's store at 30 cents a peck – on their way up (adv)

      He never knew what a hero he was: he had made a living for thirty years out of a country newspaper.

      Anthy came home from college to the forlorn and empty and ugly house – and it seemed to her that the end of the world had come. This period of loneliness made a deep impression upon her later years. When at last she could bear to open the envelope labelled: "To Anthy – in case of my death," she found this letter:

      Dear Anthy: I am leaving the Star to you. There is nothing else except the homestead – and the debts. Do what you like with all of them – but look after your Uncle Newt.

      Now, Anthy's earliest memories were bound up with the printing-office. There was never a time that she did not know the smell of printer's ink. As a child she had delighted to tip over the big basket and play with the paper ribbons from the cutting machine. Later, she had helped on press days to fold and label the papers. She was early a pastmaster in the art of making paste, and she knew better than any one else the temperamental eccentricities of the old-fashioned Dick labeller. She could set type (passably) and run the hand press. But as for taking upon herself the activities of her tireless father – who was at once editor, publisher, compositor, pressman, advertising solicitor, and father confessor for СКАЧАТЬ