The Biography of an Elderly Gentleman: Iii. The Boy and the Dollar
I
WHEN the old gentleman left home, all the family had their pictures taken. That, was their way of keeping him company who was then so young, on his journeys that were to be so far. These pictures have been perfectly faithful; they keep him company to this day. And among them is one of himself looking lost. The old gentleman says that this lost look of Rubie is all due to the coat; it was a borrowed coat, his own not being fine enough for the immortalities of a portrait, and it was too big for him. Here, we claim, is where Rubie was lost — in the borrowed coat. For the young man who took ship at Glasgow was named Robert; he was aged nineteen, hailed from the East Highlands, and had all the documents of Rubie and all Rubie’s savings in his pocket. But never a man on the Emergency Exchange Passenger S.S. Venezia had sight or sound of Rubie. Robert it was.
And Robert began at once to experience the most extreme adventures. For overture there was an unparalleled tempest. One of us is competitive by nature and has spent the prime of life upon the sea looking for another such tempest, and without success. The Venezia was twenty-one days crossing the Atlantic; on the seventh day out the sun found her still off the coast of Galway. Robert exceeded in another sense — he was more seasick than you or I can ever hope to be. In that cabin, where twenty of the ship’s forty passengers were seasick, Robert was the most so.
This was a winter of a voyage, in the very valley of the waters. A lamp hung from the ceiling of that cabin. A steward with punctual cruelty brought in food; and, on a day worse than other days, the news that the captain had been heard to say that ‘She could not stand much more of this.’
Horrible rumor! The one of us who is competitive and seafaring remembers — but oh, hush, and never mind — do listen to the flute! For in a bunk of that cabin on that ship so doomed by the captain and the steward, there is a man who plays the flute! ‘The Flowers of Edinburgh’ — there they float, on all those days of storm and strangeness, like little straws of melody for Robert to catch at; and that piping is a magic all intact between him and the winnings of the little ship and the sounds of the great sea.
At the fag end of that long voyage, and to the old gentleman’s quite obvious present satisfaction, there was a shortage of rations. You got your hardtack from a cabin on deck and your butter from another deck-cabin and that was all you got. And when you were twenty-one days out, you observed by the sun that you were sailing east. This was the ‘ emergency passenger exchange’ feature of the Venezia, operating on the grounds of a shortage of rations. The passengers were to be landed at St. John, New Brunswick.
Robert, with a ticket for New York in his pocket, was sent down the ship’s ladder to the soil of the New World. The old gentleman claims that he noted at once the great tides in that bay. You see how clever he was. There were no formalities in landing, but the authorities laid hands at once on all such incomers, requiring them to drill to meet the Fenians, who had just raided Indian Island. Our wise Robert evolved the idea that St. John was no port for him; and he who went down the ship’s ladder to the dock in the morning was to be seen, later in the day, looking very innocent, and climbing down a ladder from the dock to the ship. This ladder effect was due, explains the old gentleman with something of Robert’s relish, to the great tides in that bay.
He debarked at Windsor, Nova Scotia, meaning to go from there inland to relatives of his. He slept the night in this port, the first night ever he slept in a hotel. With the evening he felt homesick, and he went down to walk by the sea. Now, as all exiles know, a stroll by the sea is the most appealing cure for homesickness — and the worst. ‘I found a little marble on the beach,’ says the old gentleman; ‘I picked it up and I cherished it — then and for long afterward.’
‘How do you mean — you cherished it?’ we ask, thinking to pluck out the heart of this emotional word.
But the old gentleman says, ‘Oh, I was homesick!’ and goes back to his bed in the tavern with a marble for company in his pocket.
In the morning he took train for Truro. ‘I had just money enough for my ticket,’ says the old gentleman briskly. We register a falling barometer, but the weather will not alter; it is springtime in Nova Scotia, where Robert takes notes, through a car-window, of thrifty farms. It is springtime at Halifax Junction, where Robert is to wait fasting. But the ticket agent, about to go home for his dinner, observes him, and with an extraordinary intuition, guesses him to be fresh from the old country. Yes, and from within four miles of the agent’s old home Robert proves to be — for which cogent reason he is asked to dinner.
We relax — he is not to go hungry. We tremble when he makes his demure refusals; we are thinking that the ticket agent will take him at his word and leave him to starve there under the bright skies of Halifax Junction and among those notable thrifty farms. But no, says the old gentleman, ‘we were both from the Highlands, and that was manners.’ Moreover, he assures us, feeling our extreme financial agitation, that, he personally never had the least concern. He was always able, he tells us, to put this and that together. But if there were no this or that, we urge, and are told: ‘ Well, then I would just have to devise!’ And he tells us how, on the train out from Halifax Junction, he sold his silver watch-chain.
We did not know till now that he had a silver chain; but yes, all this time he has been wearing a chain and we have not observed it. A present from his brother Murdo it was; it went round his neck and hung all over the front of him. We cannot think how it could have escaped us. You may judge for yourself of the effect of it when I tell you that the train conductor coveted it and bought it of him for ten shillings. Was ten shillings the worth of it, we cynically wonder. But the old gentleman is perfectly satisfied: ten shillings was money in the spring of 1866.
From Truro he bought a seat in a stage-coach for the rest of his journey. A sixpence remained. The friends he made in the stage-coach named the farmsteads by the way, and he with sixpence in his pocket rejoices upon this — that these farms are tilled by their owners.
‘It was a shining day of spring,’ says the old gentleman, ‘ very bright, and by the roadside in that brilliant light I saw a little church standing in a little cemetery. And I thought, “If I should die in this country I’d like to be buried here! ” ’ And he looks at us with smiling and embarrassed eyes.
We think that, upon the whole, and after his many years and his much wandering, this can hardly be said to qualify as a typical Celtic premonition, and we are haunted rather by the lone sixpence. A little, too, by our Robert’s bland trust of his unknown relatives.
II
The coach drops him at the very door. He knocks. We get him to agree that he was — well, apprehensive. A good woman opens the door, and he goes into the house. He sleeps that night in the room of an absent son — ‘When my son went away ’ is the way of it, and the going away of that son was aboard the City of Boston of the Inman Line. Long gone she then was, and never heard of to this day. ’I was very sorry for that woman,’says the old gentleman, who remembers to be pitiful after all these years. She was a good woman, he tells us, but the man was a Morrisonian. The Morrisonians, it appears, were a sect loving to argue about religion — a subject on which Robert had never yet argued or heard an argument. This new thing he observed in his relative; and another thing he observed.
He went with his uncle for a morning stroll. And coming to a tavern, his uncle said he’d be having a dram if he had a sixpence, but that he had come out with none. Had Robert a sixpence?
Robert, as we know, had a sixpence. Standing by the bar, he paid for the dram; it was his first purchase in America. Two portions were poured out and his uncle drank both, Robert being a teetotaler.
‘ I seemed to see a dark shadow coming over the faces of all men,’ says the old gentleman, making a gesture with his hand; ‘I can see it coming now.’ Highland custom was liberal and he had to give the sixpence; but he claims that he can still remember fishing for it —
‘a poor little thing in the emptiness of my trousers pocket.’
He then felt, he says, his first touch of caution — of disappointment in his fellow men. If his uncle would do that, thought he, then what will not others do?
At this time Robert was in his twentieth year.
He seems not to have slept often in the room of ‘my son who went away.’ From these relatives he went on to others, without, so far as we can find, a sixpence in his pocket. And of these latter, with whom he stayed a year or more, the old gentleman would have us know their every aspect and condition: the manner of their house and farm; that they were unmarried (a brother and sister they were); that she did Robert’s mending; that they had long prayers of a morning and evening; that he had been a passionate fiddler until this idolatrous frenzy was repented of, when he put his heel through his darling fiddle. There were the awesome remains of the sacrifice to be seen about the house — very afflicting. And that, so far as Robert was concerned, they grudged him nothing — from the never-failing farthing they gave him of a Sunday, that he might feel no shame when the Elder passed the plate, to the offer they made him at the last, that if he would stay with them he should have the farm.
Often we have heard tell of that farm, but the farthing is all new to us. We are terribly impressed by that farthing — it is a little lantern shining upon our own past, by which we see a group of ourselves more grown up than we now are, more finely dressed, about to go to church, and much approved by the old gentleman, who detains us long enough to fish a coin from his pocket — and this is for the one of us who is a guest.
‘For the collection,’ says the old gentleman benignly, and sure that all is plain. Now, indeed, by the light of the farthing all is plain: we know now where he learned that gesture, and that it is the very best of the gestures of that never-to-be-forgotten gentleness of long ago. It is strange, but that farthing has enslaved us for the Francie Henrys — this was their name —more than all their offers of the farm.
Robert stayed in the house of the broken fiddle for more than a year, and these things happened to him: —
He did not fall in love. (The old gentleman does not volunteer this, but affirms it with a kind of startled surprise, under cross-examination.) No. He began to shave, which he should have done before.
He went to school, where he made friends, and he taught school, where he made friends.
He read a book about the Christian brotherhood, and was so uplifted by it that he acclaimed the very first man he met upon the highway as a Christian brother. He can still see himself walking abroad in a bright sunlight, gaining upon a man of whom he said to himself, in his heart, ‘ If he is a Christian he is my brother!’ And he was, a Christian and a carpenter, both of which facts were forthcoming and satisfactory. They walk away together, spiritually arm in arm. We seem to see them walking away together in that morning light, until suddenly, when they are very small and far away, we laugh — because we remember where we have seen them before, and it was in the Pilgrim’s Progress!
Robert joined the church in these days, whether before the dawn of his day of Christian brotherhood or after — at least upon a glimmer of that same ilhimination. Because, he was wondering, did he dare, who was so wicked, aspire to such a privilege, when his eye fell upon Jimmie Cameron, who sat between himself and the minister. Now Robert knew his Jimmie, and thinks he to himself, ‘I’m as good as Jimmie Cameron anyway!’ Upon which conclusion he joined the church.
With the earning of his school-term he bought a suit of clothes — a tailor made them — and an overcoat. Do not minimize these adventures.
And among the many letters got by Robert from the old country, be prepared for the fateful letters — so like other letters when the postman brings them to the door, so different when you release them! Little Alec is dead, writes his mother. And his brother Murdo writes that little Alec is dead, but that, if Robert will send on the passage-money for Jimmie, that brother will come to the new country, where he will make a wage that will educate Robert. For Robert is to be the minister, now that little Alec is dead.
Robert sends on what money he has. It is a good thing, is n’t it, that he has joined the church and has bought a new suit of clothes — he that is so suddenly called to the ministry! And about the passage-money the old gentleman tells us that, when it came to hand in that Highland village, it was just in time to bury Jimmie. We look at those photographs, — of Alec, so small and wise, being bigger than he was on a footstool, and of Jimmie, so young, so rustic, so debonair, so Scotch bonnie, — and we wonder how Robert ever kept his faith in savings. But he did, and Murdo writes that, if only enough can be saved for the passage, he himself will come to earn the makings of the minister.
The old gentleman will not have it that Robert was shattered. But there he is, moving on and away from that Nova Scotian village where you get sad letters and learn that the young may die. He will not stay there — no, not for a farm.
III
The old gentleman, when we have come to this point in the things he remembers, remembers that he had for a long time a wish to be a toll-keeper. He saw himself, he says, tipped back in a chair and reading a book. When he would be hailed in his dream by a traveler, he would come to earth and collect the toll; but that well-trained traveler would pass on, and he would read his book again.
It is plain to see, when this aspiration is recalled, that it is not all dead. ’It would certainly be a pleasant life,’ muses the old gentleman. But we cannot leave him there, lolling at the gate of a dream, while Robert waits to get away, and the Francie Henrys, having packed his box with dainties, suffer the moment of farewell.
Robert takes ship from St. John for Boston. Their first call was at Eastport, Maine. It was a jewel of a morning, a late September morning, and it was, he says, as if he had never seen an autumn day before. He looks at that enchanting shore. And he writes a letter to his father all about the ‘Country of the Yankees,’ and that, however shrewd they are (these were the clichés of that September day in 1867), he, Robert, knows how many pence there are to the sixpence! Having reassured himself by the touch of the written word of his pebbles and his sling, he hangs upon the rail to watch the landing. And Miss Hare comes aboard.
Of the extraordinary personality of Miss Hare I will say at once that the old gentleman has never since that day seen a well-dressed woman but he has thought of Miss Flare. She was then for him, and is to-day, the glass of fashion and the mould of form. And she was more — just as Titian knows that there is more than one woman in a beautiful woman and paints her two upon the fountain’s brim. Well, there comes Miss Hare, and she moves in a little company.
‘She had a novel manner,’says the old gentleman; ‘it was the United States manner. Her carriage was very striking and different from the carriage of the Provinces. Her dress was peculiar to me: her skirt was one of those skirts cut in four panels from nothing [this nothing would seem to have been her waist] to a good flare; it was gray with a sheen on it. It was not very wide. I looked at that dress as if I were going to make another like it. She was a slim tall girl with gray eyes. Her face was not round. So attractive she was and so novel, that any young man would have looked at her more than once or twice.’ And the old gentleman says further that in any country he would have been interested in the men and women, and most particularly in the young girls.
‘We sailed along,’ he tells us, ‘and I looked at her from time to time. She had no interest in me.’ We note this, and we note further that, by eliminations of which the old gentleman can still give the count, beginning in the saloon where the attendants withdraw singly, to last withdrawals on the deck, Robert is left alone at last with Miss Hare. They sit by the rail in the autumn night, while the ship’s bell strikes the hour. Eight bells, and Miss Hare is still telling Robert the story of ‘The Minister’s Wooing.’ Yes, that is the tale she told him — the so fashionable and so beautiful and so affable Miss Hare. We do rejoice that Robert, besides his new suit, had bought an overcoat.
There was a maiden lady on that boat, and she was a distant relative of Robert. How came she to know of the condescensions of Miss Hare? And why must she next morning upbraid him for them? ‘Don’t be thinking to lift your eyes so high,’ she tells Robert; and that Miss Hare would never take a serious thought of a poor young man like him! The old gentleman, in recalling this would-be assassin, has the customary injured air of the man who has been accused of more serious intentions than he has entertained; and you may see to this day, on the margin of his bright memory of this super-encounter, the print of an alien thumb.
It was late afternoon when Robert, landing in Boston, paid the classic dollar. You paid a dollar in those days for the privilege of entering the United States. The old gentleman makes gestures at this point — impassioned gestures, calculated to startle our attention. We must know, if he can make us know, the value of what Robert got for his dollar; and his emotion quite visibly beats against the cage of his control while he tells us that thirteen battles were fought within sight of Stirling Castle, — all of them for Liberty, — and here you are, in September of 1867, buying Liberty for a dollar!
We are the friends of the bridegroom and we make our little gestures of appreciation of that joy. We do not minimize it, but we know that Robert is to be a long time in America savoring the fruits of that dollar, and we want to hear at once the tale of the famous necktie bought in Boston. Before we leave Boston we must buy him that tie. The old gentleman explains that the tie was bought in Michigan, and for this or for other reasons, he leaves Boston that very afternoon, traveling all night to Albany — shut up in the prison of the train from the wonders of these United States. A late thunder-shower beat upon that train and awed him, who was not bred to such storms. And a fellow passenger came and sat beside him, speaking of the Deity and of the things of Friendship. How kind that was, we think; and we think we see him sitting all lonely in that unfamiliar clamor, until this nameless man, caught by some appealing aspect of youth, casts a bridge across to that isolation.
‘He told me,’ says the old gentleman, ‘that I must learn to make a friend of God and to be friendly to my fellow man; then I would never lack for friends.’
With the morning he was in Albany, and all that day — he was twenty-four hours between Albany and Toledo — he marveled at the United States. There through the car-window was the Mohawk Valley, there were the clean fields, the corn in shock and the colored pumpkins, the towns with their classic names, and everywhere, in town and field and woodland, the bright last embers of our year. First adventures, says the old gentleman, not only live accurately in memory, but they shine.
Robert saw hunters come aboard the train with braces of rabbits; free as air, they were, in these United States, who in the old country might well have been in prison for poaching; and he, who had never poached or had a heart for shooting, yet felt a sense of liberation . There was a boy aboard that train who was called the Butcher Boy; he sold nuts that were called beechnuts. He had been in the Civil War. Robert ate his nuts, while he listened to his adventures, and was very much in the United States. In the old Toledo station he is laughed at by a girl because he calls for a tart that is a pie. ‘Well, then, that pied ‘All of it?’ mocking youth asks of youth. And youth with dignity inquires as to the custom: what portion is it customary to sell? And buys the fourth, as per specifications.
IV
Fortified by this customary section of pie, and by more, we trust, that the old gentleman has forgotten, Robert went on from Toledo to a town in Michigan. He had an uncle in that town, and we know how uncles draw him. This one was of the nobler sort. ‘He was brusque,’ says the old gentleman, ‘but he was never brusque to me.’ And here Robert found his first job in America — he sold wild turkeys for Thanksgiving. Here, too, he bought the necktie.
There was a young lady among his relatives who loathed his tie and said so. How pliable he was, you may guess, when I tell you that he agreed to buy another. And how he suffered, you should know, when he was asked four shillings for the new one. Now Robert knew — you remember ho said so — how many pence there are to the sixpence, and he knew besides how shrewd the Yankees are, and that you must never give what you arc asked. So he just made a feint of moving away from the counter. And the clerk called after him, ‘What will you give for it?’ Aha, thinks Robert, thrilled to his marrow by this encounter of Greek with Greek; and he says that he will give sixty cents. Which he does. The tie is much admired, and its financial history is related, with Robert staged to centre, outwitting the Shrewd Yankee.
‘ But it was only fifty cents he asked you!’ cries the young lady. For in Michigan in those days there were just twelve and a half cents to the shilling. You see for yourself how hard it was in 1867 to outwit the Shrewd Yankees.
Well, you need not always be outwitting them. With a teacher’s diploma in your pocket, you ride out into the autumn air and you pick up your living by the roadside. It is a November day; you borrow your uncle’s pony; above your necktie you look with your young eyes to right and left for your fortune; and when you have ridden seven miles into the country, you see a brick schoolhouse at a four corners. You hail a man and ask is it a vacant school; and it is. And if you will just be going to a farmhouse at the corners, you will be hearing something to your advantage.
You go. And that very night you meet with the School Board. There is something about you that dazzles them — it is a perfect case of Lohengrin, with a pony for swan. You are to teach four months; you are to be paid one hundred and twenty dollars, and you are to ‘board round.’
Thus Robert came to anchor for a winter of which the old gentleman says that there are no bitter memories, unless of the chill of the guest-rooms where he boarded round. All those rooms were cold. But there was food in abundance; there was firewood for jolly big black stoves; there were boys and girls slipping along in sleighs between the snow and the moon, warm and laughing in the straw. There were spelling-bees, and this is why our elders are so infallible. And of a Sunday there was a meeting of Spiritualists in the schoolhouse, and there was much postwar talk of Spiritualism in that robust community. But Robert, who came of a race that sees ghosts, and whose feeling for the ghostly was of a deep and Celtic dye, was not intrigued by these facile occult adventures.
He was busy with his school, and he was busy trying to correct his accent. He dearly wished to be like the people among whom he lived, and particularly he wished to be like the Pennsylvania Dutch. He aimed, it seems, to please. Having aimed for four months at this unique mark, and the spring having rounded out his school-term, there is a stroke of the bell, and Robert might infer, we claim, that he has hit the bull’s-eye. For on the day of the closing of school all the pupils — there were sixty pupils — kissed their teacher.
The old gentleman, to prove this phenomenon, produces a sheaf of tintypes. There they are, boys and girls, and all with a tinge of rose upon their cheeks to prove that they kissed their teacher. One of these is Johnny Skinner, and oh, he looks like Alec! All the four months of that winter he looked like Alec, and here is the little picture of him after fifty years — still looking like Alec, the two of them looking alike to this day.
Outside the schoolhouse there is the most beautiful spring weather. And in that beautiful weather there flourishes the most beautiful larch tree. The immortal beauty of this tree, and a memory of Robert worshiping it, are the last of the old gentleman’s memories of the four corners. ‘And how,’ he muses, ‘can we have had such golden weather in a Michigan spring!’
However that may be, and we confess to a sophisticated wonder ourselves, Robert makes back to his uncle in golden weather, with gold in his pocket and with a golden word in his mouth. For it is in this spring that he begins to sing about college. He is going to college.
‘I am saying good-bye,’ he tells his uncle, ‘because I am going to college.’ For this song is the song of migration.
And his uncle says, with exactly the fervor of the Francie Henrys when they offered him the farm, that he will educate Robert for a doctor.
‘But I mean to be a minister!’ says Robert.
And his uncle looks at him. Presently he asks, does Robert want to know what he thinks of him? And he tells him. Now I know that you want to know what his uncle thought of Robert; but I cannot just tell you with the old gentleman listening in. For he thought that Robert was a fool of a classic type.
And that was the end of uncles so far as Robert was concerned, and of all relatives whatsoever, except those unforgotten ones who write letters from the East Highlands and who think it just gran’ to be a minister. With the pictures of these and the tintypes of his sixty pupils Robert moves forever out of the zone of uncles.
But of this latter one the old gentleman thinks long, sighing at last and saying, ‘He was brusque, but he never was brusque with me.’
‘How fortunate you were!’ we tell our old gentleman.