The Old Blood Part 1

The Old Blood.

by Frederick Palmer.

CHAPTER I

A HOME-COMING

Perhaps a real story-teller, who leaps into the heart of things, would have begun this story in France instead of with a railroad journey from the Southwest to New England; perhaps he would have taken the view of "our Philip's" mother that Phil fought the whole war in Europe himself; perhaps given the story the name of "The Plain Girl," leaving Phil secondary place.

A veracious chronicler, consulting Phil's wishes, makes his beginning with a spring afternoon of 1914, when the Berks.h.i.+re slopes were dripping and glistening and smiling and the air, washed by showers and purified by a burst of suns.h.i.+ne, was like some rare vintage which might be drunk only on the premises.

Complaining in a familiar way as it followed the course of a winding stream, which laughed in flashes of pearly white over rocky shallows, the train ran out into a broad valley--the home valley. Not a road that he had not tramped over; not a woodland path that he did not know; not a mountain trail that he had not climbed. The scene was bred in his blood.

If Bill Hurley were at the station the auguries would be right, and there he was, standing on the same spot where he had stood for twenty years when the trains arrived; there, too, the stooped old station agent in his moment of bustling importance. By the calendar of Bill's chin it was Tuesday; for Bill shaved only on Sunday and Wednesday afternoons. A man of observation and opinion this keeper of the gate of Longfield, who let the world come to him and took charge of its baggage and conveyed its persons to their destinations. He was also a dispenser of news.

"The Jerrods have got that new porch," he said. "They'd been talking about it so long that they're sort of lost-minded and dumb these days.

And Hanks has put in a new soda fountain and plate gla.s.s windows.

Ambitious man, Hanks. Nothing can keep him from branching out."

"And nothing can change you, Bill."

"Me? I guess not. May wither a little when the winters are hard, but you'll find me here fifty years from now. H-m-m!" after looking Phil over. "Bound to happen to young fellers out of college. Noticed it often. Something rubbed off you and something rubbed in out West, I jedge."

"You have it--and in one of your epigrams, as usual," Phil agreed.

"Folks do say that I have a tolerable understanding of human nature, not to mention a sententious way of saying things, which I've always said comes from handling trunks. Hear you're going to Europe."

"Always well informed!" Phil affirmed.

"Never denied it. Well, you've earned the trip. Three years out there. Made good, too, everybody says. Soon as you've seen your folks and eat your veal, you and me must have a talk about old times. Trunk and suit case? Right! Have 'em up in a quarter of an hour."

Beyond the station was the old wooden bridge, which spanned the river here running deep and sluggish under drooping, solicitous willows.

Then the avenue of maples; and at the end of the vista of deep shade, in the bright light of the little square, the statue of a strenuous gentleman in bronze who, sword in hand, was charging British redcoats.

For Longfield had a real work of art, though not all Longfield appreciated the fact yet and certain Puritan sections were inclined to regard anything called a work of art with suspicion.

In boyhood Phil had heard so much about the hero at home that he seemed a bore. To-day that spirited, indomitable figure gave him a thrill.

With a fresh eye he realised its quality and something deeper than that in a wave of personal grat.i.tude to a famous sculptor, also a son of Longfield, known in other lands where the ancestor was unknown, who had taken the commission out of civic pride for a small fee and the satisfaction of putting his best into a chivalrous subject after having received a large fee for doing a statesman in a frock for the grounds of a State capital.

Phil recalled how his father and mother and the Sons of the Revolution, and also the Daughters thereof, had favoured a full Continental uniform for the hero. But the sculptor had had enough of coats. Not lacking in that pithiness of expression which is salad to genius, he had told the family and societies and committees and all such that either he would have his way or they could employ a mortuary chiseller and a tailor, who would gratify their conceptions of martial dignity by clothing a gallant gentleman who had fought free-limbed on a hot August day in an overcoat, m.u.f.fler and mittens and two suits of underclothes, which would have meant death to freedom from sunstroke and that the Declaration of Independence might be a relic in the British Museum.

Coatless, hatless, sleeves rolled and s.h.i.+rt open at the throat, young and lean, with every fibre attuned to conflict, the "rebel" who had helped to found a nation now served the purpose not of stopping a British charge, but of bringing touring automobiles to a standstill while their occupants appreciated, either by virtue of their own taste or by the desire to be in fas.h.i.+on with the taste of their superiors, what many considered to be the best work of a master, in contrast with the graveyard effigies, which had the martial spirit of Alaskan totem poles, from the same mould in other squares, to glorify the deeds of local regiments in the Civil War.

Longfield was proud of the statue because it attracted so much attention and because it was Longfield's and yet resentful because it attracted more attention than the elms. Tourists thought that other villages had equally as n.o.ble elms as Longfield--equally patched and scarred. Longfield knew better. Its elms were without comparison.

From the selectmen's point of view the cost of nursing was considerable, too, which gave further merit over the statue, which cost nothing for upkeep.

Besides, the elms were old when the hero was a child. They marked the epoch of the village's birth, even as the maples marked that of the railroad's coming. Nothing in Old England is quite as old as New England. Not even the pyramids are as old as a New England elm.

Europe may repair and renovate cathedrals; New England repairs and renovates elms. The Puritan Fathers planted trees on such broad main streets as that of Longfield, with stretches of green border of old turf now curving around the ma.s.sive trunks that supported their stately plumes--a street which Phil saw in its age, its serenity and its spring freshness with the appreciation of one come from the Southwest, plus the call of old a.s.sociation which absence strengthens. To him the Berks.h.i.+res were the hills of all hills; Longfield the village of villages; this street the street of streets; and the most majestic elm stood beside a path which led to the house of houses. Home-coming had kindled his sentiment. He had been long enough out of college not to be ashamed of a little of it, if he did not have to mention it to anybody.

It was this mood in its desire to find all home pictures unchanged that had kept him from naming his train; and he had taken one arriving in the afternoon in the hope of witnessing the scene which was set for that hour in the routine of the Reverend Doctor and Mrs. Sanford, of Longfield. Their chairs in the accustomed places on the porch, the father was reading and the mother sewing in their conscious and unspoken companions.h.i.+p. What a delightful pair of sequestered old dears they were! How worldly he felt beside them!

They had not heard his steps. He paused until his mother should see him, for he knew that she would be the first to look up. When she did, her little outcry, as she put her hand impulsively on the doctor's knee to draw the attention of an absent-minded husband, was also entirely in keeping with his antic.i.p.ation and with the dependability of habit in Longfield, which was not the least of its charms. She was well on her way to meet him before his father had taken off his spectacles and placed the marker in his book. After Philip had embraced them they were silent, taking in the reality of him who had been so long absent and possibly a little awed at the presence of this st.u.r.dy, tanned only son--come to them late when they had almost given up ever having any children--who had been out battling with that world which was confusing and forbidding to them.

He slipped his arm around his mother's waist. She took his hand in hers with a fluttering of mothering impulse, as he directed their steps by the side path which led to the garden, while the father, brought up the rear.

"You've been successful, Phillie," she said, the thought uppermost in mind coming out first. "It was such an undertaking and we're so pleased." She might have said proud, but that was a vain word.

Self-warned about the weakness of parents with only sons, it had been her rule never to spoil Phil with praise.

"Yes, I've done pretty well for a----" and he glanced around at his father in the freemasonry of a settled comrades.h.i.+p.

"For a minister's son!" put in the father, chuckling.

"I had to," Philip proceeded. "I was right up against it. It was rough stuff at first and Mexico the limit!"

"What language!" exclaimed the father, who could be a purist on occasion.

"Very expressive!" said the mother, defending her son. "It must have been rough, indeed." She would have forgiven Philip if he had said d.a.m.n that afternoon.

"In other words," observed the Reverend Dr. Sanford, "when it came to the rough stuff Philip was no piker! I've been studying up so as to make you feel at home," he added, with another chuckle.

"What do you think my first job was?" Phil said. "I didn't tell you that. It was cleaning out cattle cars."

"Oh, Phil, no!" She looked down at her son's hands as if wondering how such horrors could be.

"He has washed them since," observed the father.

"Now you're both up to your old tricks, teasing me!" she said admonis.h.i.+ngly. "And, Phillie"--she pressed a point of unsatisfied maternal curiosity which his letters had never answered--"you never told us why it was that you did not go to work for Peter--that is, your side of it. You seem to have had a quarrel with him."

In a sense Peter Smithers was one of the Sanford family. He had been a clever village boy whom Phil's grandfather had taken under his wing some forty years ago, and the type of clever village boy who does not need sheltering wings for long. Middle age found him the head of a great manufacturing business in New Jersey. Hieing homeward, New England fas.h.i.+on, he had built himself a big country place back in the hills, which he referred to as "my little farm." People spoke of him as a millionaire, but he insisted that he was dirt poor. He was a bachelor, with no heirs, a fact which Mrs. Sanford, more practical than the clergyman, could never forget when she thought of the future of her son.

"What was Peter's side?" Phil asked.

"He said that you didn't want to begin at the bottom of the ladder."

"And yet he began at the bottom of a cattle car," said the father.

"I didn't mind a humble beginning," said Phil, "but from the way that Peter spoke I was afraid there wasn't in his establishment a place so humble but if I took it I might be the ruin of his business. You see, mother, I was cleaning out those cattle cars on the orders of a stranger. I knew that he was not hiring me because my grandfather had done him a favour."

"Peter did not mean it that way. It's only his manner," persisted his mother. "I think he was really hurt about it. I suppose you know that he is going to give all his money for founding a school and club for his employees. He talks of nothing else."

"I can hear him, mother."

But there Peter and his eccentricities and philanthropic projects vanished from mind at sight of an expense of gingham ap.r.o.n filling the kitchen doorway and covering the ample form of Jane, grinning and beneficent, who, as she herself said, was no skittish young thing who didn't know a good place when she had it, which accounted for the Sanfords having retained their general houseworker.

Diplomacy and grat.i.tude demanded that homage be paid to Jane; and affection which began with childhood greeted Patrick, the gardener, leaning on his hoe and sucking in his pipe, as Phil had seen him a thousand times. Unchanged the garden with its bounteous colour, its perfume, and green and budding and flowering promise of plenty in that little world walled in by larches from the neighbours on either side in the village world in turn walled in by the hills, gone golden in high lights and dark in shadows in the recesses of the woods with the lowering slant of the sun's rays.

"There is no place like it," said Phil. "My roots are in this soil as deep as the elms."