Johnston Annie Fellows
Asa Holmes: or, At the Cross-Roads

Chapter IX

THE booming of distant cannon had been sounding at intervals since midnight, ushering in the Fourth, but Bowser, although disturbed in his slumbers by each reverberation, did not rouse himself to any personal demonstration until dawn. Then his patriotism manifested itself in a noisy tattoo with a hammer, as he made the front of his store gay with bunting, and nailed the word Welcome over the door, in gigantic letters of red, white, and blue.

When he was done, each window wore a bristling eyebrow of stiff little flags, that gave the store an air of mild surprise. The effect was wholly unintentional on Bowser's part, and, unconscious of the likeness to human eyes he had given his windows, he gazed at his work with deep satisfaction.

But the expression was an appropriate one, considering all the astonishing sights the old store was to look upon that day. In the woodland across the railroad track, just beyond Miss Anastasia Dill's little cottage, preparations were already begun for a grand barbecue. Even before Bowser had finished tacking up his flags, the digging of the trench had begun across the way, and the erection of a platform for the speakers. In one corner of the woodland a primitive merry-go-round had already been set in place, and the first passenger train from the city deposited an enterprising hoky-poky man, a peanut and pop-corn vender, and a lank black-bearded man with an outfit for taking tin-types.

By ten o'clock the wood-lot fence was a hitching-place for all varieties of vehicles, from narrow sulkies to cavernous old carryalls. A haze of thick yellow dust, extending along the pike as far as one could see, was a constant accompaniment of fresh arrivals. Each newcomer emerged from it, his Sunday hat and coat powdered as thickly as the wayside weeds. Smart side-bar buggies dashed up, their shining new tops completely covered with it. There was a great shaking of skirts as the girls alighted, and a great flapping of highly perfumed handkerchiefs, as the young country beaux made themselves presentable, before joining the other picnickers.

Slow-going farm wagons rattled along, the occupants of their jolting chairs often representing several generations, for the drawing power of a Fourth of July barbecue reaches from the cradle to the grave.

The unusual sight of such a crowd, scattered through the grove in gala attire, was enough of itself to produce a holiday thrill, and added to this was the smell of gunpowder from occasional outbursts of firecrackers, the chant of the hoky-poky man, and the hysterical laughter of the couples patronising the merry-go-round, as they clung giddily to the necks of the wooden ostriches and camels in the first delights of its dizzy whirl.

"Good as a circus, isn't it?" exclaimed Robert Akers, pausing beside the bench where the old miller and the minister sat watching the gay scene. "I'm having my fun walking around and taking notes. It is amusing to see how differently the affair impresses people, and what seems to make each fellow happiest. Little Tommy Bowser, for instance, is in the seventh heaven following the hoky-poky man. He gets all that people leave in their dishes for helping to drum up a crowd of patrons. Perkins's boy sticks by the merry-go-round. He has spent every cent of his own money, and had so many treats that he's spun around till he's so dizzy he's cross-eyed. One old fellow I saw back there is simply sitting on the fence grinning at everything that goes by. He's getting his enjoyment in job lots."

"Sit down," said the minister, sociably moving along the bench to make room beside him for the young man. "Mr. Holmes and I are finding our amusement in the same way, only we are not going around in search of it. We are catching at it as it drifts by."

"What has happened to Mrs. Teddy Mahone?" exclaimed Rob, as a red-faced woman with an important self-conscious air hurried by. "She seems ubiquitous this morning, and as proud as a peacock over something. One would think she were the mistress of ceremonies from her manner."

"Or hostess, rather," said the miller. "She met me down by the fence on my arrival, and held out her hand as graciously as if she were a duchess in her own drawing-room, and I an invited guest.

"'Gude marnin' to yez, Mr. Holmes,' she said. 'I hope ye'll be afther enjyin' yerself the day. If anything intherferes wid yer comfort ye've but to shpake to Mahone about it. He's been appinted constable for the occasion, ye understhand. If I do say it as oughtn't, he can carry the title wid the best av 'im; him six fut two in his stockin's, an' the shtar shinin' on his wes'cut loike he'd been barn to the job.'

"Then she turned to greet some strangers from Morristown, and I heard her introducing herself as Mrs. Constable Mahone, and repeating the same instructions she had given me, to report to her husband, in case everything was not to their liking."

Both listeners laughed at the miller's imitation of her brogue, and the minister quoted, with an amused smile:

 
"'For never title yet so mean could prove,
But there was eke a mind, which did that title love.'
 

It is a pity we cannot dress more of them in 'a little brief authority.' It seems to be a means of grace to a certain class of Hibernians. It has Americanised the Mahones, for instance. You'll find no patriots on the ground to-day more enthusiastic than Mr. and Mrs. Constable Mahone. Fourth of July will be an honoured feast-day henceforth in their calendar. It is often surprising how quickly a policeman's buttons and billy will make a good citizen out of the wildest bog-trotter that ever brandished a shillalah."

Later, in subsequent wanderings around the grounds, the young collegian spied the little schoolmistress helping to keep guard over the cake-table. He immediately crossed over and joined her. She was looking unusually pretty, and there was an amused gleam in her eyes as she watched the crowds, which made him feel that she was viewing the scene from his standpoint; that he had found a kindred spirit.

"What incentive to patriotism do you see in all this, Miss Helen?" he asked, when he had induced her to turn over her guardianship of the cake-table to some one else, and join him in his tour among the boisterous picnickers.

"None at all – yet," she answered. "I suppose that will come by and by with the songs and speeches. But all this foolishness seems a legitimate part of the celebration to me. You remember Lowell says, 'If I put on the cap and bells, and made myself one of the court fools of King Demos, it was less to make his Majesty laugh than to win a passage to his royal ears for certain serious things which I had deeply at heart.' It takes a barbecue and its attendant attractions to draw a crowd like this. See what a hotch-potch it is of all nationalities. Now that Schneidmacher family never would have driven ten miles in this heat and dust simply to hear the band play 'Hail, Columbia,' and Judge Jackson make one of his spread-eagle speeches on the Duty of the American Citizen. Neither would the O'Gradys or any of the others who represent the foreign element in the neighbourhood. Even Young America himself, the type we see here, is more willing to come and bring his best girl on account of the diversions offered."

"Well, that may be so," was the reluctant assent, "but if this is a sample of the Fourth of July observances all over the country I can't help feeling sorry for Uncle Sam. Patriotism has sadly degenerated from the pace that Patrick Henry set for it."

"The old miller says not," answered the little schoolmistress. "I made that same complaint last Washington's Birthday, when I was trying to work my school up to proper enthusiasm for the occasion. He recalled the drouth of the summer before when nearly every well and creek and pond in the township went dry. Cattle died of thirst, gardens dried up like brick-kilns, and people around here were almost justified in thinking that the universe would soon be entirely devoid of water. The skies were like brass, and there was no indication of rain for weeks. But one day there was a terrific earthquake shock. It started all the old springs, and opened new ones all over this part of the country, and the water gushed out of the earth where it had been pent up all the time, only waiting for some such touch to call it forth. 'And you're afraid that patriotism is going dry in this generation,' he said to me. 'But it only takes some shock like the sinking of the Maine, or some sudden menace to the public safety, to start a spring that will gush from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate. There is a deep underground vein in the American heart that no drouth can ever dry. Maybe it does not come to the surface often, but it can always be depended on in time of need.'"

The speakers for the day began to arrive, and Rob, seeing the crowds gravitating toward the grand stand, took the little schoolmistress to the bench where the miller had stationed himself.

"Watch that old Scotchman just in front of us," whispered the girl, "Mr. Sandy McPherson. Last Thanksgiving there was a union service in the schoolhouse. After the sermon 'America' was sung, and that old heathen stood up and roared out through it all, at the top of his voice, every word of 'God Save the Queen!' Wasn't that flaunting the thistle in our faces with a vengeance? I am sure that he will repeat the performance to-day. Think of the dogged persistence that refuses to succumb to the fact that we have thrown off the British yoke! The very day we are celebrating that event, he'll dare to mix up our national hymn with 'God Save the King.'"

It was as she had predicted. As the band started with a great clash of brazen instruments, and the whole company rose to the notes of "America," Sandy McPherson's big voice, with its broad Scotch burr, rolled out like a bass drum:

 
"'Thy choicest gifts in store,
On him be pleased to pour.
Long may he reign.'"
 

It drowned out every voice around him. "He ought to be choked," exclaimed Rob, in righteous indignation, as they resumed their seats. "To-day of all days! The old Tory has been living in this country for forty-five years, and a good living he's gotten out of it, too, for himself and family. Nobody cares what he sings on his own premises, but he might have the decency to keep his mouth shut on occasions of this kind, if he can't join with us."

There was a gleam of laughter in the little schoolmistress's eyes as she replied: "If the truth were known I have no doubt but that this Fourth of July celebration is very like the pie in Mother Goose's song of sixpence, when her four and twenty blackbirds were baked in a pie. If this pie could be opened, and the birds begin to sing according to their sentiments, there would be a wonderful diversity of tunes. One would be twittering the 'Marseillaise,' and another 'Die Wacht am Rhein,' and another echoing old Sandy's tune. America was in too big a hurry to serve her national pie, I am afraid. Consequently she put it in half prepared, and turned it out half baked. The blackbirds should have had their voices tuned to the same key before they were allowed to become vital ingredients of such an important dish."

"In other words," laughed Rob, "you'd reconstruct the enfranchisement laws. Make the term of probationary citizenship so long that the blackbird would have time to change his vocal chords, or even the leopard his anarchistic spots, before he would be considered fit to be incorporated in the national dish. By the way, Miss Helen, have you heard Mrs. Mahone's allegory of the United Pudding bag? You and she ought to collaborate. Get the storekeeper to repeat it to you sometime."

"You needn't laugh," responded the little schoolmistress, a trifle tartly. "You know yourself that scores of emigrants are given the ballot before they can distinguish 'Yankee Doodle' from 'Dixie,' and that is only typical of their ignorance in all matters regarding governmental affairs. Too many people's idea of good citizenship is like the man's 'who kept his private pan just where 'twould catch most public drippings.' There is another mistaken idea loose in the land," she continued, after a moment. "That is, that a great hero must be a man who has a reputation as a great soldier. I wish I had the rewriting of all the school histories. They are better now than when I studied them, but there is still vast room for improvement. I had to learn page after page of wars. Really, war and history were synonyms then as it was taught in the schools. Every chapter was gory, and we were required to memorise the numbers killed, wounded, and captured in every battle, from the French and Indian massacres, down to the last cannon-shot of the sixties. That is all right for government records and reference libraries, but when we give a text-book to the rising generation, the accounts of battles and the glorifying thereof would be better relegated to the foot-notes. It is loyal statesmanship that ought to be exalted in our school histories. We ought to make our heroes out of the legislators who cannot be bribed and public men who cannot be bought, and the honest private citizen who lives for his country instead of dying for it."

The old miller beside her applauded softly, leaning over to say, as the overture by the band came to a close with a grand clash, "If ever the blackbirds are tuned to one key, Miss Helen, America will know whom to thank. Not the legislators, but the patriotic little schoolma'ams all over their land who are serving their country in a way her greatest generals cannot do."

All day the Cross-Roads store raised its bristling eyebrows of little flags, till the celebration came to a close. Savoury whiffs of the barbecued meats floated across to it, vigorous hand-clapping and hearty cheers rang out to it between the impassioned words of excited orators. Later there were the fireworks, and more rag-time music by the band, and renewed callings of the hoky-poky man. But before the moon came up there was a great backing of teams and scraping of turning wheels, and a gathering together of picnic-baskets and stray children.

"Well, it's over for another year," said Bowser, welcoming the old miller, who had crossed the road and taken a chair on the porch to wait until the crowds were out of the way.

"Those were fine speeches we had this afternoon, but seemed to me as if they were plumb wasted on the majority of that crowd. They applauded them while they were going off, same as they did the rockets, but they forget in the next breath." As Bowser spoke, a rocket whizzed up through the tree tops, and the old miller, looking up to watch the shining trail fade out, saw that the sky was full of stars.

"That's the good of those speeches, Bowser," he said. "'To leave a wake, men's hearts and faces skyward turning.' I hadn't noticed that the stars were out till that rocket made me look up. The speeches may be forgotten, but they will leave a memory in their wake that give men an uplook anyhow."

Chapter X

"GUESS who's come to board at the Widder Powers's for the month of August?" It was Bowser who asked the question, and who immediately answered it himself, as every man on the porch looked up expectantly.

"Nobody more nor less than a multimillionaire! The big boot and shoe man, William A. Maxwell. Mrs. Powers bought a bill of goods this morning as long as your arm. It's a windfall for her. He offered to pay regular summer-resort-hotel prices, because she's living on the old farm where he was born and raised, and he fancied getting back to it for a spell."

"Family coming with him?" queried Cy Akers, after a moment's meditation over the surprising fact that a millionaire with the world before him should elect such a place as the Cross-Roads in which to spend his vacation.

"No, you can bet your bottom dollar they're not. And they're all abroad this summer or he'd never got here. They'd had him dragged off to some fashionable watering-place with them. But when the cat's away the mice'll play, you know. Mrs. Powers says it is his first visit here since his mother's funeral twenty years ago, and he seems as tickled as a boy to get back.

"Yesterday evening he followed the man all around the place while she was getting supper. She left him setting up in the parlour, but when she went in to ask him out to the table, he was nowhere to be seen. Pretty soon he came walking around the corner of the house with a pail of milk in each hand, sloshing it all over his store clothes. He'd done the milking himself, and seemed mightily set up over it."

"Lawzee! Billy Maxwell! Don't I remember him?" exclaimed Bud Hines. "Seems like 'twas only yesterday we used to sit on the same bench at school doin' our sums out of the same old book. The year old man Prosser taught, we got into so much devilment that it got to be a regular thing for him to say, regular as clock-work, almost, 'I'll whip Bud Hines and Billy Maxwell after the first arithmetic class this morning.' I don't s'pose he ever thinks of those old times since he's got to be one of the Four Hundred. Somehow I can hardly sense it, his bein' so rich. He never seemed any smarter than the rest of us. That's the way of the world, though, seesaw, one up and the other down. Of course it's my luck to be the one that's down. Luck always was against me."

"There he is now," exclaimed the storekeeper, and every head turned to see the stranger stepping briskly along the platform in front of the depot, on his way to the telegraph office.

He had the alertness of glance and motion that comes from daily contact with city corners. If there was a slight stoop in his broad shoulders, and if his closely cut hair and beard were iron gray, that seemed more the result of bearing heavy responsibilities than the token of advancing years. His immaculate linen, polished low-cut shoes, and light gray business suit would have passed unnoticed in the metropolis, but in this place, where coats and collars were in evidence only on Sunday, they gave him the appearance of being on dress parade.

Perkins's oldest eyed him as he would a zebra or a giraffe, or some equally interesting curiosity escaped from a Zoo. He had heard that his pockets were lined with gold, and that he had been known to pay as much as five dollars for a single lunch. Five dollars would board a man two weeks at the Cross-Roads.

With his mouth agape, the boy stood watching the stranger, who presently came over to the group on the porch with smiling face and cordial outstretched hand. Despite his gray hair there was something almost boyish in the eagerness with which he recognised old faces and claimed old friendships. Bowser's store had been built since his departure from the neighbourhood, so few of the congenial spirits accustomed to gather there were familiar to him. But Bud Hines and Cy Akers were old schoolfellows. When he would have gone up to them with old-time familiarity, he found a certain restraint in their greeting which checked his advances.

If he thought he was coming back to them the same freckle-faced, unconventional country lad they had known as Billy Maxwell, he was mistaken. He might feel that he was the same at heart; but they looked on the outward appearance. They saw the successful man of the world who had outstripped them in the race and passed out of their lives long ago. They could not conceive of such a change as had metamorphosed the boy they remembered into the man who stood before them, without feeling that a corresponding change must have taken place in his attitude toward them.

They were not conscious that this feeling was expressed in their reception of him. They laughed at his jokes, and indulged in some reminiscences, but he felt, in a dim subconscious way, that there was a barrier between them, and he could never get back to the old familiar footing.

He turned away, vaguely disappointed. Had he dared to dream that he would find his lost youth just as he had left it? The fields and hills were unchanged. The very trees were the same, except that they had added a few more rings to their girth, and threw a larger circling shade. But the old chums he had counted on finding had not followed the same law of growth as the trees. The shade of their sympathies had narrowed, not expanded, with the passing years, and left him outside their contracted circle.

Perkins's oldest, awed by reports of his fabulous wealth, could hardly find his tongue when the distinguished visitor laid a friendly hand on his embarrassed tow head, and inquired about the old swimming-hole, and the mill-dam where he used to fish. But the boy's interest grew stronger every minute as he watched him turning over the limited assortment of fishing tackle. The men he knew had outlived such frivolous sports. It was a sight to justify one's gazing open-mouthed, – a grown man deliberately preparing for a month's idleness.

If the boy could have seen the jointed rods, the reels, the flies, all the expensive angler's outfit left behind in the Maxwell mansion; if he could have known of the tarpon this man had caught in Florida bays, and the fishing he had enjoyed in northern waters, he would have wondered still more; wondered how a man could be considered in his right mind who deliberately renounced such privileges to come and drop a common hook, on a pole of his own cutting, into the shallow pools of the Cross-Roads creek.

After his purchases no one saw him at the store for several days, but the boy, dodging across lots, encountered him often, – a solitary figure wandering by the mill stream, or crashing through the woods with long eager strides; lying on the orchard grass sometimes with his hat pulled over his eyes; leaning over the pasture bars in the twilight, and following with wistful glance the little foot-path stretching white across the meadows. A pathetic sight to eyes wise enough to see the pathos, – a world-weary, middle-aged man in vain quest of his lost boyhood.

On Sunday, Polly, looking across the church from her place in the miller's pew, recognised the stranger in their midst, and straightway lost the thread of the sermon in wondering at his presence. She had gone to school with his daughter, Maud Maxwell. She had danced many a german with his son Claude. They lived on the same avenue, and passed each other daily; but this was the first time she had seen him away from the shadow of the family presence, that seemed to blot out his individuality.

She had thought of him only as Maud's father, a simple, good-natured nonentity in his own household. A good business man, but one who could talk nothing but leather, and whose only part in the family affairs was to furnish the funds for his wife and children to shine socially.

"Oh, your father's opinion doesn't count," she had heard Mrs. Maxwell say on more than one occasion, and the children had grown up, unconsciously copying her patronising attitude toward him. As Polly studied his face now in the light of other surroundings, she saw that it was a strong, kindly one; that it was not weakness which made him yield habitually, until he had become a mere figurehead in his own establishment. It was only that his peace-loving nature hated domestic scenes, and his generosity amounted to complete self-effacement when the happiness of his family was concerned.

His eyes were fixed on the chancel with a wistful reminiscent gaze, and Polly read something in the careworn face that touched her sympathy. "Grandfather," she said, at the close of the service, "let's be neighbourly and ask Mr. Maxwell home to dinner with us. He looks lonesome."

She was glad afterward that she had suggested it, when she recalled his evident pleasure in the old man's company. There were chairs out under the great oak-trees in the yard, and the two sat talking all afternoon of old times, until the evening shadows began to grow long across the grass. Then Polly joined them again, and sat with them till the tinkle of home-going cowbells broke on the restful stillness of the country Sabbath.

"All the orchestras in all the operas in the world can't make music that sounds as sweet to me as that does," said Mr. Maxwell, raising his head from the big armchair to listen. Then he dropped it again with a sigh.

"It rests me so after the racket of the city. If Julia would only consent, I'd sell out and come back to-morrow. But she's lost all interest in the old place. I'm country to the core, but she never was. She took to city ways like a duck to water, just as soon as she got away from the farm, and she laughs at me for preferring katydids to the whirr of electric cars."

A vision rose before the old miller of a little country girl in a pink cotton gown, who long ago used to wait, bright-eyed and blushing, at the pasture bars, for Billy to drive home the cows. Many a time he had passed them at their trysting-place. Then he recalled the superficial, ambitious woman he had met years afterward when he visited his son. He shook his head when he thought of her renouncing her social position for the simple pastoral life her husband longed to find the way back to. Presently he broke the silence of their several reveries by turning to Polly.

"What's that piece you recited to me the other night, little girl, about old times? Say it for Mr. Maxwell." And Polly, clasping her hands in her lap, and looking away across the August meadows, purple with the royal pennons of the ironweed, began the musical old poem:

 
"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle,
Way down the darkening dingle
The cows come slowly home.
(And old-time friends and twilight plays
And starry nights and sunny days
Come trooping up the misty ways,
When the cows come home.)
 
 
"'And over there on Merlin Hill
Hear the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill.
And the dewdrops lie on the tangled vines,
And over the poplars Venus shines,
And over the silent mill.
 
 
"'Ko-ling, ko-lang, ko-linglelingle,
With ting-aling and jingle
The cows come slowly home.
(Let down the bars, let in the train
Of long-gone songs and flowers and rain,
For dear old times come back again,
When the cows come home.)'"
 

Once as Polly went on, she saw the tears spring to his eyes at the line "and mother-songs of long-gone years," and she knew that the that had been his delight in the past, were his again as he listened. But, much to her surprise, as she finished, he rose abruptly, and began a hurried leave-taking. She understood his manner, however, when his mood was revealed to her a little later.

 
"same sweet sound of wordless psalm,
The same sweet smell of buds and balm,"
 

At her grandfather's suggestion she walked down to the gate with him, to point out a short cut across the fields to Mrs. Powers's. Outside the gate he paused, hat in hand.

"Miss Polly," he began, as if unconsciously taking her into his confidence, "old times never come back again. Seems as if the bottom had dropped out of everything. I've done my best to resurrect them, but I can't do it. I thought if I could once get back to the old place I could rest as I've not been able to rest for twenty years – that I'd have a month of perfect enjoyment. But something's the matter.

"Many a time when I've been off at some fashionable resort I've thought I'd give a fortune to be able to drop my hook in your grandfather's mill-stream, and feel the old thrill that I used to feel when I was a boy. I tried it the day I came – caught a little speckled trout, the kind that used to make me tingle to my finger ends, but somehow it didn't bring back the old sensation. I just looked at it a minute and put it back in the water, and threw my pole away.

"Even the swimming-hole down by the mill didn't measure up to the way I had remembered it. I've fairly ached for a dip into it sometimes, in the years I've been gone. Seemed as if I could just get into it once, I could wash myself clear of all the cares and worries of business that pester a man so. That was a disappointment, too. The change is in me, I guess, but nothing seems the same."

Polly knew the reason. He had tried so long to mould his habits to fit his wife's exacting tastes, that he had succeeded better than he realised. He could not analyse his feelings enough to know that it was the absence of long accustomed comforts that made him vaguely dissatisfied with his surroundings; his luxuriously appointed bathroom, for instance; the perfect service of his carefully trained footmen. Mrs. Powers's noisy table, where with great clatter she urged every one "to fall to and help himself," jarred on him, although he was unconscious of what caused the irritation. As for the rank tobacco Bowser furnished him when he had exhausted his own special brand of cigars with which he had stocked his satchel, it was more than flesh and blood could endure. That is, flesh and blood that had acquired the pampered taste of a millionaire whose wife is fastidious, and only allows first-class aromas in the way of the weed.