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- Herausgeber: Delphi Publishing Ltd
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Delphi Series Thirteen
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1942, Ellen Glasgow published 19 novels to critical acclaim, establishing a new form of Southern fiction. Offering realistic depictions of life in her native Virginia, her narratives avoided the nostalgia, sentimentality and idealistic escapism that characterised Southern literature after Reconstruction. With an assured and increasingly ironic treatment, Glasgow’s novels examined the decay of the Southern aristocracy and the trauma of the encroachment of modern industrial civilization, with compelling results. For the first time in publishing history, this eBook presents Glasgow’s complete works, with numerous illustrations, rare texts, informative introductions and bonus material. (Version 1)
* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Glasgow’s life and works
* Concise introductions to the major texts
* All 19 novels, with individual contents tables
* Features rare novels appearing for the first time in digital publishing
* Images of how the books were first published, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the texts
* Rare short stories, only available in this collection
* Glasgow’s critical essays, digitised here for the first time
* Includes Glasgow’s autobiography – discover her literary life
* Ordering of texts into chronological order and genres
Please visit www.delphiclassics.com to browse through our range of exciting titles
CONTENTS:
The Novels
The Descendant (1897)
Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898)
The Voice of the People (1900)
The Battle-Ground (1902)
The Deliverance (1904)
The Wheel of Life (1906)
The Ancient Law (1908)
The Romance of a Plain Man (1909)
The Miller of Old Church (1911)
Virginia (1913)
Life and Gabriella (1916)
The Builders (1919)
One Man in His Time (1922)
Barren Ground (1925)
The Romantic Comedians (1926)
They Stooped to Folly (1929)
The Sheltered Life (1932)
Vein of Iron (1935)
In This Our Life (1941)
The Shorter Fiction
The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923)
Miscellaneous Short Stories
The Non-Fiction
A Certain Measure (1943)
The Autobiography
The Woman within (1954)
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The Complete Works of
ELLEN GLASGOW
(1873-1945)
Contents
The Novels
The Descendant (1897)
Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898)
The Voice of the People (1900)
The Battle-Ground (1902)
The Deliverance (1904)
The Wheel of Life (1906)
The Ancient Law (1908)
The Romance of a Plain Man (1909)
The Miller of Old Church (1911)
Virginia (1913)
Life and Gabriella (1916)
The Builders (1919)
One Man in His Time (1922)
Barren Ground (1925)
The Romantic Comedians (1926)
They Stooped to Folly (1929)
The Sheltered Life (1932)
Vein of Iron (1935)
In This Our Life (1941)
The Shorter Fiction
The Shadowy Third and Other Stories (1923)
Miscellaneous Short Stories
The Non-Fiction
A Certain Measure (1943)
The Autobiography
The Woman within (1954)
The Delphi Classics Catalogue
© Delphi Classics 2022
Version 1
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The Complete Works of
ELLEN GLASGOW
By Delphi Classics, 2022
COPYRIGHT
Complete Works of Ellen Glasgow
First published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by Delphi Classics.
© Delphi Classics, 2022.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.
ISBN: 978 1 80170 080 1
Delphi Classics
is an imprint of
Delphi Publishing Ltd
Hastings, East Sussex
United Kingdom
Contact: [email protected]
www.delphiclassics.com
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The Novels
Richmond, Virginia — Glasgow’s birthplace
Richmond, c. 1917
The Descendant (1897)
Ellen Glasgow was born in Richmond, Virginia, on 22 April 1873, to wealthy parents, Anne Jane Gholson (1831-1893) and her husband, Francis Thomas Glasgow. From an early age she suffered poor health, being much later diagnosed as chronic heart disease. She was educated at home in Richmond, receiving the equivalent of a high school degree. She read deeply in philosophy, social and political theory, as well as European and British literature. She would go on to experience “nervous invalidism” throughout her life.
Her first novel, The Descendant (1897) was written in secret and published anonymously when she was 24 years old. She destroyed part of the manuscript after her mother died in 1893. After her brother-in-law and mentor, George McCormack, ended his own life the following year, Glasgow was plunged into depression and was unable to complete the novel until 1895. Itwas finally published by Harper & Brothers in the early spring of 1897. The book was only credited to Glasgow when her second novel, Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898) was published with a title page which read ‘by Ellen Glasgow, author of The Descendant’. Her debut novel was not a commercial success and it received mixed reviews from critics.
The reviewer for The Outlook journal described the novel as ‘…of a strenuous kind, which exhibits untrained force’. In the April 1897 edition of Harper’s Magazine, the essayist and critic, Laurence Hutton asserted that the novel was ‘A very strong and very unusual, piece of fiction’. The narrative centres on the lives of Michael Akershem, the illegitimate son of a woman from Virginia and his love interest Rachel Gavin, a talented painter. Michael moves to New York as a young man and becomes a successful writer for a socialist publication, while Rachel shows immense creative potential. However, Rachel’s sublimation of her own needs to appease Michael results in her artwork suffering and rendering her a social outcast when she agrees to live with him outside of marriage.
A miniature of Ellen Glasgow as a young lady, by an unknown artist, Virginia Historical Society
The first edition
CONTENTS
BOOK I. VARIATION FROM TYPE
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
BOOK II. THE INDIVIDUAL
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
BOOK III. DOMESTICATION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
BOOK IV. REVERSION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
The first edition’s title page
TO
G. W. McC.
BOOK I. VARIATION FROM TYPE
OMNE VIVUM EX OVO
CHAPTER I
THE CHILDSATupon the roadside. A stiff wind was rising westward, blowing over stretches of meadow-land that had long since run to waste, a scarlet tangle of sumac and sassafras. In the remote West, from whose heart the wind had risen, the death-bed of the Sun showed bloody after the carnage, and nearer at hand naked branches of poplar and sycamore were silhouetted against the shattered horizon, like skeletons of human arms that had withered in the wrath of God.
Over the meadows the amber light of the afterglow fell like rain. It warmed the spectres of dead carrot flowers, and they awoke to reflect its glory; it dabbled in the blood of sumac and pokeberry; and it set its fiery torch to the goldenrod till it ignited and burst into bloom, flashing a subtle flame from field to field, a glorious bonfire from the hand of Nature.
The open road wound lazily along, crossing transversely the level meadow-land and leading from the small town of Plaguesville to somewhere. Nobody — at least nobody thereabouts — knew exactly where, for it was seldom that a native left Plaguesville, and when he did it was only to go to Arlington, a few miles farther on, where the road dropped him, stretching southward.
The child sat restlessly upon the rotten rails that were once a fence. He was lithe and sinewy, with a sharp brown face and eyes that were narrow and shrewd — a small, wild animal of the wood come out from the underbrush to bask in the shifting sunshine.
Occasionally a laborer passed along the road from his field work, his scythe upon his shoulder, the pail in which his dinner was brought swinging at his side. Once a troop of boys had gone by with a dog, and then a beggar hobbling on his crutch. They were following in the wake of the circus, which was moving to Plaguesville from a neighboring town. The child had seen the caravan go by. He had seen the mustang ponies and the cowboys who rode them; he had seen the picture of the fat lady painted upon the outside of her tent, and he had even seen the elephant as it passed in its casings.
Presently the child rose, stooping to pick the blackberry briers from his bare legs. He wore nankeen trousers somewhat worn in the seat and a nankeen shirt somewhat worn at the elbows. His hand was rough and brier-pricked, his feet stained with the red clay of the cornfield. Then, as he turned to move onward, there was a sound of footsteps, and a man’s figure appeared suddenly around a bend in the road, breaking upon the glorified landscape like an ill-omened shadow.
It was the minister from the church near the town. He was a small man with a threadbare coat, a large nose, and no chin to speak of. Indeed, the one attribute of saintliness in which he was found lacking was a chin. An inch the more of chin, and he might have been held as a saint; an inch the less, and he passed as a simpleton. Such is the triumph of Matter over Mind.
“Who is it?” asked the minister. He always inquired for a passport, not that he had any curiosity upon the subject, but that he believed it to be his duty. As yet he had only attained that middle state of sanctity where duty and pleasure are clearly defined. The next stage is the one in which, from excessive cultivation of the senses or atrophy of the imagination, the distinction between the things we ought to do and the things we want to do becomes obliterated.
The child came forward.
“It’s me,” he said. “Little Mike Akershem, as minds the pigs.”
“Ah!” said the minister. “The boy that Farmer Watkins is bringing up. Why, bless my soul, boy, you’ve been fighting!”
The child whimpered. He drew his shirt sleeve across his eyes.
“I — I warn’t doin’ nothin’,” he wailed. “Leastways, nothin’ but mindin’ the pigs, when Jake Johnson knocked me down, he did.”
“He’s a wicked boy,” commented the minister, “and should be punished. And what did you do when Jake Johnson knocked you down?”
“I — I fell,” whimpered the child.
“A praiseworthy spirit, Michael, and I am glad to see it in one so young and with such a heritage. You know the good book says: ‘Do good unto them that persecute you and despitefully use you.’ Now, you would like to do good unto Jake Johnson, wouldn’t you, Michael?”
“I — I’d like to bus’ him open,” sobbed the child. Tears were streaming from his eyes. When he put up his hand to wipe them away it left dirty smears upon his cheeks.
The minister smiled and then frowned.
“You’ve forgotten your Catechism, Michael,” he said. “I’m afraid you don’t study it as you should.”
The boy bubbled with mirth. Smiles chased across his face like gleams of sunshine across a cloud.
“I do,” he rejoined, righteously. “Jake, he fought me on o’count o’ it.”
“The Catechism!” exclaimed the minister. “Jake fought you because of the Catechism?”
“It war a word,” said the child. “Jake said it war consarnin’ me an’ I—”
“What word?” the minister demanded. “What did the word mean?”
“It war an ugly word.” The boy’s eyes were dry. He looked up inquiringly from beneath blinking lids. “It war dam — damni—”
“Ah!” said the minister, in the tone in which he said “Amen” upon a Sabbath, “damnation.”
“Air it consarning me?” asked the child with anxious uncertainty.
The minister looked down into the sharp face where the gleams of sunshine had vanished, and only the cloud remained. He saw the wistful eyes beneath the bushy hair, the soiled, sunburned face, the traces of a dirty hand that had wiped tears away — the whole pitiful littleness of the lad. The nervous blinking of the lids dazzled him. They opened and shut like a flame that flickers and revives in a darkened room.
“No,” he said, gently, “you have nothing to do with that, so help me God.”
Again the boy bubbled with life. Then, with a swift, tremulous change, he grew triumphant. He looked up hopefully, an eager anxiety breaking his voice.
“It might be consarning Jake hisself,” he prompted.
But the minister had stretched the mantle of his creed sufficiently.
“Go home,” he said; “the pigs are needing their supper. What? Eh? Hold on a bit!” For the boy had leaped off like laughter. “What about the circus? There’s to be no gadding into such evil places, I hope.”
The boy’s face fell. “No, sir,” he said. “It’s a quarter, an’ I ‘ain’t got it.”
“And the other boys?”
“Jake Johnson war looking through a hole in the fence an’ he wouldn’t let me peep never so little.”
“Oh!” said the minister, slowly. He looked down at his boots. The road was dusty and they were quite gray. Then he blushed and looked at the boy. He was thinking of the night when he had welcomed him into the world — a little brown bundle of humanity, unclaimed at the great threshold of life. Then he thought of the mother, an awkward woman of the fields, with a strapping figure and a coarse beauty of face. He thought of the hour when the woman lay dying in the little shanty beyond the mill. Something in the dark, square face startled him. The look in the eyes was not the look of a woman of the fields, the strength in the bulging brow was more than the strength of a peasant.
His code of life was a stern one, and it had fallen upon stern soil. As the chosen ones of Israel beheld in Moab a wash-pot, so he and his people saw in the child only an embodied remnant of Jehovah’s wrath.
But beneath the code of righteousness there quivered a germ of human kindness.
“Er — er, that’s all,” he said, his nose growing larger and his chin shorter. “You may go — but — how much have you? Money, I mean—”
“Eight cents,” replied the child; “three for blackberrying, an’ five for findin’ Deacon Joskins’s speckled pig as war lost. Five and three air eight—”
“And seventeen more,” added the minister. “Well, here they are. Mind, now, learn your Catechism, and no gadding into evil places, remember that.”
And he walked down the road with a blush on his face and a smile in his heart.
The child stood in the white dust of the road. A pale finger of sunshine struggled past him to the ditch beside the way, where a crimson blackberry-vine palpitated like a vein leading to the earth’s throbbing heart. About him the glory waned upon the landscape and went out; the goldenrod had burned itself to ashes. A whippoorwill, somewhere upon the rotten fence rails, called out sharply, its cry rising in a low, distressful wail upon the air and losing itself among the brushwood. Then another answered from away in the meadow, and another from the glimmering cornfield.
A mist, heavy and white as foam, was rising with the tide of night and breaking against the foot of the shadowy hills.
The boy shifted upon his bare feet and the dust rose in a tiny cloud about him. Far in the distance shone the lights of the circus. He could almost hear the sound of many fiddles. Behind him, near the turnpike branch, the hungry pigs were rooting in the barnyard. He started, and the minister’s money jingled in his pocket. In the circus-tent were the mustang ponies, the elephant, and the fat lady. He shifted restlessly. Perspiration stood in beads upon his forehead; his shirt collar was warm and damp. His eyes emitted a yellow flame in their nervous blinking. There was a sudden patter of feet, and he went spinning along the white dust of the road.
CHAPTER II
THE CIRCUSWASover. One by one the lanterns went out; the tight-rope walker wiped the paint and perspiration from his face; the clown laid aside his eternal smile.
From the opening in the tent a thin stream of heated humanity passed into the turnpike, where it divided into little groups, some lingering around stationary wheelbarrows upon which stood buckets of pink lemonade, others turning into the branch roads that led to the farm-houses along the way.
In the midst of them, jostled helplessly from side to side, moved that insignificant combination of brown flesh and blue nankeen known as Michael Akershem. As the crowd dwindled away, his pace quickened until he went trotting at full speed through the shadows that were flung across the deserted road. Upon the face of the moon, as she looked down upon his solitary little figure, there was the derisive smile with which crabbed age regards callow youth and Eternity regards Time.
Perhaps, had he been wise enough to read her face aright, the graven exaltation of his own might have given place to an expression more in keeping with the cynicism of omniscience.
But just then, as he trotted resolutely along, the planet was of less importance in his reverie than one of the tallow candles that illumined the circus-tent.
The night was filled with visions, but among them the solar system held no place. Over the swelling hills, along the shadowy road, in the milky moonlight, trooped the splendid heroes of the circus-ring. His mind was on fire with the light and laughter; and the chastened brilliance of the night, the full sweep of the horizon, the eternal hills themselves seemed but a fitting setting for his tinselled visitants. The rustling of the leaves above his head was the flapping of the elephant’s ears; the shimmer upon tufts of goldenrod, the yellow hair of the snake-charmer; and the quiet of the landscape, the breathless suspense of the excited audience.
As he ran, he held his worn straw hat firmly in his hand. His swinging strides impelled his figure from side to side, and before him in the dust his shadow flitted like an embodied energy.
Beneath the pallor of the moonlight the concentration of his face was revealed in grotesque exaggeration. His eyes had screwed themselves almost out of vision, the constant blinking causing them to flicker in shafts of light. Across his forehead a dark vein ran like a seam that had been left unfelled by the hand of Nature.
From the ditch beside the road rose a heavy odor of white thunder-blossom. The croaking of frogs grew louder as, one by one, they trooped to their congress among the rushes. The low chirping of insects began in the hedges, the treble of the cricket piercing shrilly above the base of the jar-fly. Some late glow-worms blazed like golden dew-drops in the fetid undergrowth.
The boy went spinning along the road. With the inconsequence of childhood all the commonplaces of every day seemed to have withered in the light of later events. The farmer and his pigs had passed into the limbo of forgettable things.
With the flickering lights of the cottage where Farmer Watkins lived, a vague uneasiness settled upon him; he felt a half-regret that Providence, in the guise of the minister, had thought fit to beguile him from the unpleasant path of duty. But the regret was fleeting, and as he crawled through a hole in the fence he managed to manipulate his legs as he thought the rope-walker would have done under the circumstances.
From the kitchen window a stream of light issued, falling upon the gravelled path without. Against the lighted interior he beheld the bulky form of the farmer, and beyond him the attenuated shadow of the farmer’s wife stretching, a depressing presence, upon the uncarpeted floor.
As the child stepped upon the porch the sound of voices caused him to pause with abruptness. A lonely turkey, roosting in the locust-tree beside the house, stirred in its sleep, and a shower of leaves descended upon the boy’s head. He shook them off impatiently, and they fluttered to his feet.
The farmer was speaking. He was a man of peace, and his tone had the deprecatory quality of one who is talking for the purpose of keeping another silent.
“My father never put his hand to the plough,” said the farmer, and he stooped to knock the ashes from his pipe; “nor more will I.”
He spoke gently, for he was a good man — good, inasmuch as he might have been a bad man, and was not. A negative character is most often a virtuous one, since to be wicked necessitates action.
The voice of the farmer’s wife flowed on in a querulous monotone.
“Such comes from harborin’ the offspring of harlots and what-not,” she said. “It air a jedgment from the Lord.”
The child came forward and stood in the kitchen doorway, scratching his left leg gently with the toes of his right foot. The sudden passage from moonlight into lamplight bewildered him, and he stretched out gropingly one wiry little hand. The exaltation of his mind was chilled suddenly.
For a moment he stood unobserved. The farmer was cleaning his pipe with the broken blade of an old pruning-knife, and did not look up. The farmer’s wife was kneading dough, and her back was turned. All the bare and sordid aspect of the kitchen, the unpolished walls, the pewter dishes in the cupboard, the bucket of apple parings in the corner, struck the child as a blight after the garish color of the circus-ring. He felt sick and ill at ease.
The monotone of the farmer’s wife went relentlessly on. “A jedgment for harborin’ the offspring of harlots,” she repeated. “God A’mighty knows what mischief he air workin’ to-night. He air worse than a weasel.”
From the child’s face all brightness was blotted out. His lips tightened until the red showed in a narrow line, paling from the pressure as a scar pales that is left from an old sabre cut.
The farmer replied soothingly, his hand wandering restlessly through his beard. “He air a young child,” he said, feebly. “I reckon he air too little to work much.”
Then he looked up and saw the shrinking figure in the doorway. He shook his head slowly, more in weariness than wrath.
“You hadn’t ought to done it,” he murmured, reproachfully. “You hadn’t ought to done it.”
A sob stuck in the boy’s throat. With a terrible revulsion of feeling, his passionate nature leaped into revolt. As the farmer’s wife turned, he faced her in sullen defiance.
“I ‘ain’t never seed nothin’ afore,” he said, doggedly. “I ‘ain’t never seed nothin’ afore.”
It was the justification he offered to opposing fate.
The woman turned upon him violently.
“You ingrate!” she cried. “A-leaving me to do your dirty work. A-sneaking off on meetin’ night an’ leaving me to tote the slops when I ought to led the choir. You ingrate!”
The child looked pitifully small and lonely. He pulled nervously at the worn brim of his straw hat. Still he sought justification by facts.
“You are been to meetin’ every Wednesday night sence I war born,” he said, in the same dogged tone, “an’ I ‘ain’t never seed nothin’ afore.”
Then the impotence of all explanation dawned upon him and his defiance lost its sullen restraint. He felt the rage within him burst like a thunder cloud. The lamplight trembled in the air. The plank floor, the pewter plates, the chromos pinned upon the wall passed in a giddy whirl before his eyes. All his fire-tinctured blood quickened and leaped through his veins in a fever of scarlet. His face darkened from brown to black like the face of a witch. His thin lips were welded one into the other, and Nature’s careless handiwork upon his forehead palpitated like a visible passion.
He sprang forward, striking at vacancy.
“I hate you!” he cried. “Curse you! Curse you!”
Then he turned and rushed blindly out into the night. A moment more and he was speeding away into the meadows. Like a shadow he had fled from the lamplight, like a shadow he had fled from the gravelled walk, and like a shadow he was fleeing along the turnpike.
He was unconscious of all save rage, blinding, blackening rage — a desire to stamp and shriek aloud — to feel his fingers closing upon something and closing and closing until the blood ran down. The old savage instinct to kill fell upon him like a mantle.
A surging of many waters started in his head, growing louder and louder until the waters rose into a torrent, shutting out all lesser sounds. The sob in his throat stifled him, and he gasped and panted in the midst of the moonlit meadows. Suddenly he left the turnpike, dashing across country with the fever of a fox pursued by hounds. Over the swelling hills, where the corn-ricks stood marshalled like a spectre battalion, he fled, spurred by the lash of his passion. Beneath him the valley lay wrapped in a transparent mist; above him a million stars looked down in passionless self-poise.
When he had run until he could run no more, he flung himself face downward upon the earth, beating the dew-drenched weeds into shapeless pulp.
“I hate ’em! I hate ’em!” he cried, choking for speech.
“Damn — damn — damn them all. I wish they war all in hell. I wish the whole world war in hell — the farmer and the missis, and the minister and little Luly! I wish everybody war in hell — everybody ‘cept me and the pigs!”
He ran his hand through his hair, tearing apart the matted waves. His lips quivered and closed together. Then he rolled over on his back and lay looking up to where the sky closed like a spangled vault above him.
“I hate ’em! I hate ’em!” he cried, and his cry fell quiveringly against the relentless hills. “I hate ’em!”
Back the faint echo came, ringing like the answering whisper of a devil, “h-a-t-e ’e-m — e-m — h-a-t-e!”
Above him, beyond the wall of stars, he knew that God had his throne — God sitting in awful majesty before the mouth of hell. He would like to call up to Him — to tell Him of the wickedness of the farmer’s wife. He was sure that God would be angry and send her to hell. It was strange that God had overlooked her and allowed such things to be. Then he pictured himself dying all alone out upon the hillside; and the picture was so tragic that he fell to weeping. No; he would not die. He would grow up and become a circus-rider, and wear blue stockinet and gold lace. The farmer’s wife and the farmer’s ten children, their ten braids all smoothly plaited, would come to watch him ride the mustang ponies, and he would look straight across their heads and bow when the people applauded.
He saw himself standing before the glittering footlights, with the clown and the tight-rope walker beside him, and he saw himself, the most dazzling of the trinity, bowing above the excited heads of the farmer’s children.
Yes, that would be a revenge worth having.
He sat up and looked about him. The night was very silent, and a chill breeze came blowing noiselessly across the hills. The moonlight shimmered like a crystalline liquid upon the atmosphere.
His passion was over, and he sat, with swollen eyes and quivering lips, a tiny human figure in the vast amphitheatre of Nature.
Beyond the stretch of pasture the open road gleamed pallid in the distance. The inky shadows through which he had passed some hours ago seemed to have thrilled into the phantoms of departed things. He wondered how he had dared to pass among them. Upon the adjoining hill he could see the slender aspens in the graveyard. They shivered and whitened as he looked at them. At their feet the white tombstones glimmered amid rank periwinkle. In a rocky corner he knew that there was one grave isolated in red clay-soil — one outcast from among the righteous dead.
He felt suddenly afraid of the wicked ghost that might arise from that sunken grave. He was afraid of the aspens and the phantoms in the road. With a sob he crouched down upon the hillside, looking upward at the stars. He wondered what they were made of — if they were really holes cut in the sky to let the light of heaven stream through.
The night wind pierced his cotton shirt, and he fell to crying softly; but there was no one to hear.
At last the moon vanished behind a distant hill, a gray line in the east paled into saffron, and the dawn looked down upon him like a veiled face. Presently there was a stir at the farm, and the farmer’s wife came from the cow-pen with a pail of frothy milk in her hand.
When she had gone into the house the boy left the hillside and crept homeward. He was sore and stiff, and his clothes were drenched with the morning dew. He felt all alone in a very great world, and the only beings he regarded as companions were the pigs in the barn-yard. His heart reproached him that he had not given them their supper.
The turnpike was chill and lonely as he passed along it. All the phantoms had taken wings unto themselves and flown. Upon the rail-fence the dripping trumpet-vine hung in limp festoons, yellow and bare of bloom. He paused to gather a persimmon that had fallen into the road from a tree beyond the fence, but it set his teeth on edge and he threw it away. A rabbit, sitting on the edge of a clump of brushwood, turned to glance at him with bright, suspicious eyes. Then, as he drew nearer, it darted across the road and between the rails into the pasture. The boy limped painfully along. His joints hurt him when he moved, and his feet felt like hundredweights. He wondered if he was not going to die shortly, and thought regretfully of the blue stockinet and tinsel which he could not carry with him into an eternity of psalm-singing.
Reaching the house, he seated himself upon the step of the porch and looked with miserable eyes at the kitchen window. The smell of steaming coffee floated out to him, and he heard the clinking of cups and saucers. Through the open window he beheld the bustling form of the farmer’s wife.
Then, with a cautious movement, the door opened and the farmer came out upon the porch. He glanced hesitatingly around and, upon seeing the boy, vanished precipitately, to reappear bearing a breakfast-plate.
The child caught a glimpse of batter-bread and bacon, and his eyes glistened. He seized it eagerly. The farmer drew a chair near the doorway and seated himself beneath the bunch of red pepper that hung drying from the sash. He turned his eyes upon the boy. They were dull and watery, like the eyes of a codfish.
“You hadn’t ought to done it, sonny,” he said, slowly. “You hadn’t ought to done it.”
Then he drew a small quid of tobacco from his pocket and began to unwind the wrapping with laborious care. “It war a fine show, I reckon,” he added.
The child nodded with inanimate acquiescence. It all seemed so long ago, the color and the splendor. It might as well have taken place in ancient Rome.
The farmer reached leisurely down into the pocket of his jeans trousers and drew out the old pruning-knife. Then he cut off a small square of tobacco and put it in his mouth.
“Sence it war a fine show,” he said, reflectively, “I wish I’d ha’ done it myself.”
And he fell to chewing with a sigh.
CHAPTER III
THE CHILDGREWapace. He shot upward with the improvident growth of a weed that has sprung in a wheat-field. The changing seasons only served to render his hold upon life more tenacious and his will more indomitable. And, by-and-by, the child became the youth and waxed strong and manly. At nineteen he was lithe and straight as a young pine. Slightly above the average height, he had the look of a sturdy, thickset farmer, but with more than a farmer’s breadth of brow. The dark hair still grew in a tangled mat upon his head, his features had roughened, and the lines in his face were deeply hewn. His jaws were strongly marked, and he had thin, flexible lips that quivered with reserve or paled with passion. Beneath the projecting brows his eyes were narrowed by a constant blinking.
Between himself and his little world there was drawn an invisible circle. The shadow that moved before or followed after him was a moral plague spot to the vision of his neighbors. If, with a spasmodic endeavor, they sought occasionally to rescue this stray brand from the burning, the rescue was attempted with gloved hands and a mental pitchfork. In periods of relaxation from personal purification, they played with the boy as children play with fire. It was the only excitement they permitted themselves.
As for the brand himself, he made the mistake of regarding the situation from a personal standpoint. Feeding the flame as he did, he naturally was unable to appreciate the vantage-ground of those who were only singed by it, and consequently in a position to enjoy that thrill of possible danger which is only enjoyable because the danger is not possible at all. Being insensible to any danger, he failed to experience the thrill.
But what he did experience was a silent rage that in the end froze into a silent bitterness. As we all look upon life through the shadows which we ourselves cast upon it, so the facts of organic existence shape themselves in our horizon conformably with the circumstances which have shaped our individual natures. We see large or small, symmetrical or distorted forms, not according to external forces which have played upon, external objects, but according to the adjustment of light and shade about our individual lenses. Truth is only truth in its complexity; our convictions are only real in their relativity. But Michael had not learned this. He still believed in his own ability to make plain the crooked ways of his neighbors’ consciences. Socrates believed this, and where had arisen a greater than Socrates? Perhaps the one thing which Socrates and Michael had in common was a faith in the power of truth and the impotence of error; but then, Socrates and Michael each followed a different truth. Only the name of their divinity was the same — his face was different.
So Michael saw the village doors close upon him, and laughed. He saw the girls pass him by with averted modesty and turn to look after him, and laughed again. He saw them, one and all, watching with a vulgar interest for the inheritance to creep out and the blood to show — and he sneered outwardly while he raged within.
He was a bright lad. The school-master had said so, and the school-master was right. Easily he outstripped all the hardy farmers’ louts in the class, and easily, in the end, he had outstripped the school-master himself. Then the minister had taken him in hand, and before long he had outstripped the minister.
“Here are my books,” the minister had said, “make use of them.” And he had looked over his shoulder to see that blue-eyed Emily was afar. He was a bright lad, but — well, blood is blood.
And Michael had made use of the books. He had fed upon them and he had laid up a store of capital. One and all, he had read them and absorbed them and pondered over them, and one and all he had disbelieved them.
The minister handed him “The Lives of the Saints,” and the next day he had brought it back, throwing it down upon the table.
“A lot of pig-headed idiots,” he said, with his lip curling and his grating laugh, “who hadn’t enough sense to know whether they were awake or asleep.”
The minister shuddered and recoiled.
“Be silent,” he said. “If you have no respect for me, at least show some for God and the holy men who represent Him.”
“Fiddlesticks!” said Michael. “They were so befuddled that they got God and the devil mixed, that’s all.”
But he laid the book aside and helped the minister about his copying. He was not without a wayward regard for worth. He was only warm with his fresh young blood and throbbing with vitality. The restless activity of mind could not be checked. The impassioned pursuit of knowledge was sweeping him onward. Self-taught he was and self-made he would be. The genius of endurance was fitting him to struggle, and in the struggle to survive.
So he drew out the minister’s dog-eared sermon and set about the copying. He had copied such sermons before, and it was a task he rather enjoyed, given the privilege of making amendments — which the minister good-naturedly granted. As for the minister himself, perhaps he remembered the occasions upon which the boy had written sermons as compositions, and how he had delivered them as substitutes for old ones of his own which had worn threadbare. In his simple-minded search for divine purposes, the cleverness of the lad appeared inexplicable. That the hand of the Almighty should have overreached a flock of his elect to quicken with consuming fire the mind of an Ishmaelite seemed suspiciously like one of those stumbling-stones to faith which we accept as tests of the blindness of our belief.
That Michael knew more philosophy than he, he had acknowledged cheerfully, and now he was fast beginning to harbor a suspicion that Michael knew more theology as well.
He heaved a perplexed sigh and went to interview a consumptive concerning his spiritual condition, while Michael dipped his pen in the inkstand and fell to work.
It was a moment such as he enjoyed, when his intellectual interests were uppermost and his mind eager to seize an abstract train of thought. He remembered such exaltations during the long winter nights when he had sat up with a tallow candle and attacked the problems of political economy. He had spent plodding hours in mastering them, but mastered them he had. The dogged endurance of mind had perhaps served him better than any natural quickness.
The remembrance of those winter nights turned the channel of his thoughts, and from the minister’s sermon he passed to larger premises and wider demonstrations. Pushing the paper aside, he leaned back against the cushioned back of the minister’s chair and allowed his gaze to wander from the sheets before him to the flower-beds in the garden below, and then, past the wood-pile, where the hickory chips had rotted to mould, to the jagged line of purple mountains. The landscape was radiant with color. As the sunlight fell over them the meadows deepened in opalescent tints, purpling with larkspur, yellowing with dandelion, and whitening to a silver sweep of life everlasting.
Across Michael’s lips a smile passed faintly, like the ripple of sunlight upon a murky pool. He put up his hand and brushed a lock of hair from his brow. He looked suddenly younger and more boyish. Then his reverie was broken by a sound of footsteps. The lattice door in the passage opened and shut, and a shadow passed across the chintz curtain at the window. He heard voices, at first broken and indistinct, and then clearer, as his mind left its cloudy heights and returned to commonplaces.
One was the gentle voice of the minister’s wife. “And if you can help me out with the custard-spoons,” it said, “I’ll be mightily obliged. I have a dozen of mother’s, to be sure, but, somehow, I don’t just like to use them. If you can let me have ten, I reckon I can manage to make out with them and some tin ones Aunt Lucy sent me last Christmas.”
The other voice was sharper and brisker.
“I reckon I can piece out a dozen,” it returned, with the ringing emphasis of one eager to oblige. “If I can’t, I’ll just borrow them from old Mrs. Cade without saying what I want with ’em. And I’ll send all the things over by Timothy as soon as I get home — the custard-spoons, and the salver for the cake, and the parlor lamp. If that glass stand for butter ain’t too badly cracked, I’ll send that along too; and I’ll be over in plenty of time to help you set the tables and fix things.”
A murmur of thanks followed in the gentle tones, and then the brisker ones began.
“You’ll have a first-rate evening for the party,” they observed. “When I got up this morning the wind was in the east, but it has shifted round again. Well, I’ll send the things all right.”
“I’m mightily obliged,” responded the minister’s wife, in her repressed manner. “I hope it warn’t any trouble for you to bake the cake — our stove draws so poorly. It seems a heap of work to go to, but the minister never can deny Emily anything; and, after all, a birthday tea ain’t much to do for her. She’s a good child.”
The other voice chimed in with cordial assent. “If a little party makes her happy, I reckon you don’t begrudge the work. She won’t be sixteen but once, I say, and it’s just as well to do what we can.”
“If it makes her happy,” added the gentle voice, and then it sighed softly. “There’s always a cloud,” it said.
“To be sure, this is a very little one, but, as I told the minister, it was the prophet’s little cloud that raised the storm.”
It was silent for a moment and then spoke sadly.
“It’s about Michael,” it said.
The brisker tones drooped.
“That boy!”
“Well, the minister’s compassions are great, you know, and he can’t feel just easy about not asking him. Of course, we must consider the other young folks, but the minister says it don’t seem to him human to leave him out.”
“Of course, I ain’t as fit to judge as the minister, but I know I shouldn’t like to have him around with my Lucy. And it seems to me that it ain’t right to encourage him in familiarity — with his birth, too.”
“Yes,” assented the soft voice, deprecatingly, “but the minister can’t feel easy about it. He says he knows Christ would have had him.”
The brisk tones rose in an ejaculation.
“But the Lord never lived in such times as these!”
“I can’t help its worrying me,” continued the minister’s wife, “and Emily is just like her father — all tenderness and impulse. It does seem hard—” Then the voice changed suddenly. “Oh, you wanted the nutmeg grater,” it said. “I forgot all about it.”
And the lattice door opened and shut quickly.
When the minister came in a while later he found Michael standing beside the desk, his clenched hand resting upon the lid. At his feet lay the uncopied sermon. It was crumpled and torn, as if it had been held in a brutal grasp. The boy’s lips were pale and a yellow rage flickered in his eyes. As the minister paused, he confronted him.
“I hate these people!” he cried. “I hate them! I hate everybody who has come near this place. I hate my father because he was a villain. I hate my mother because she was a fool.”
He said it vehemently, his impassioned glance closing upon the minister. The minister quavered. The genial smile with which he had entered faded from his face. He had faced such storms before and they always stunned him.
“I — I feel for you,” he stammered, “but—” and he was silent. The boy stood upon other ground than his, and he could not follow him; he saw with other eyes, and the light blinded him. In his veins the blood of two diverse natures met and mingled, and they formed a third — a mental hybrid. The spirit that walked within him was a dual one — a spirit of toil, a spirit of ease; a spirit of knowledge, a spirit of ignorance; a spirit of improvidence, a spirit of thrift; a spirit of submission, a spirit of revolt.
“I hate them all!” repeated Michael.
His scorching gaze blazed through the open window and seemed to wither the beds of flowering portulacca in the garden. “I hate these people with their creeds and their consciences. They dare to spit upon me, that I am not as clean as they. I hate them all!”
From without the full-throated call of a cat-bird floated into the room. Then it grew fainter and was lost in the graveyard. Michael’s face was dark and ugly. All the ingrowing bitterness of his youth was finding an outlet.
“What have I done?” he cried, passionately. “What have I done? Is it my fault that the laws of nature do not wait upon marriage banns? Is it my—” He paused suddenly.
“I — I am sure that you misjudge them,” said the minister. “I am sure that—”
The door opened, and his own pretty Emily, her blue eyes all alight, darted into the room. Michael’s eyes fell upon her, and, unconsciously to himself, they softened.
The minister saw the softening, and he stammered and grew confused. He fell back as if to shelter the girl from the look, pushing her hastily into an adjoining room.
“Go — go, my dear — your mother wants you, I am sure of it.” Then he turned and took up his speech. “I — I am—” and his conscience stung him and he blushed and stammered again. Michael laughed shortly. There was something brutal in the sound of it.
“Your daughter is safe,” he said. “I will turn my eyes away.”
And the minister blushed redder than before.
There was something masterful about the boy, and he had the brow of a genius, but — well, girls will be girls, and there’s no telling.
Michael walked to the window and stood looking at the flower-beds in the garden. Then he turned and faced the minister, all the bitterness of his warped and sullen nature in his voice.
“I want to get away,” he said. “Anywhere that I am not known — anywhere. I can work. I can work my fingers to the bone — but I must get away.”
The minister thought for a moment.
“I could help you a little,” he said, slowly. “Say, lend you enough to pay your passage to, and a week’s board in, New York. Such a bright fellow must find work. And, by-the-by, I’ve a cousin in the grocery business there; perhaps he could get you a job—”
He said it honestly, for he wished well to the boy; and yet there was a secret satisfaction in the chance of getting rid of him, of losing the responsibility of one stray sheep. God, in his wisdom, might redeem him, but the minister felt that the task was one for omnipotent hands to undertake. It was too difficult for him. If the Lord could unravel the meshes of Satan, he couldn’t, and it shouldn’t be expected of him.
“I’ll go,” said Michael. He said it with determination, bringing his quivering hand down upon the table. “I’ll go. I’d rather die anywhere else than live here — but I won’t die. I’ll succeed. I’ll live to make you envy me yet.”
A sudden flame had kindled in his eyes. It shot fitfully forth between the twitching lids. He became infused with life — with a passionate vitality, strong to overcome.
“I’ll go to-morrow,” he said.
He left the minister’s house, walking briskly down the narrow path leading to the whitewashed gate. At the gate he paused and looked back. In a patch of vivid sunshine that fell upon an arbor of climbing rose he saw the blue flutter of pretty Emily’s skirts. She put back the hair from her eyes and stood gazing after him, an expression of childish curiosity upon her face. All the joy of life at that moment seemed filtered through the sunlight upon her head.
He sighed and passed onward. Upon the steps of the farmer’s cottage sat a plump child in a soiled pinafore. It was little Luly, the youngest of the farmer’s ten children. As he entered the house she rose and trotted after him on her plump little legs.
In the doorway he was met by the farmer’s wife. She held a pan of watermelon rinds in her hand. “Take these here rinds to the pig-pen,” she said, “an’ then you kin draw some water fur dinner. There ain’t none left in the water-bucket.” The boy looked at her silently. He was debating in his mind the words in which he would renounce her service. He had often enacted the scene in imagination, and in such visions he had beheld himself rising in righteous wrath and defying the farmer’s wife with dramatic gestures. Now, somehow, it all seemed very stale and flat, and he couldn’t think of just what to say. The woman was harder to confront in real life than she had been in his dreams. He wished he had gone away without saying anything to anybody.
At last he spoke with a labored emphasis.
“I won’t feed the pigs,” he said, and his voice sounded half apologetic, “and I won’t draw the water; I am going away.”
At the dinner-table the farmer was sitting before a plate of cabbage. He removed his knife slowly from his mouth and regarded the boy with mild amazement.
“An’ the crops ain’t in,” he murmured, reproachfully.
The farmer’s wife set the pan on the table and wiped her face upon the corner of her gingham apron.
“You ain’t goin’ fur good, I reckon?” she suggested.
Michael stood awkwardly before her. He had expected vituperation, and when it did not come he felt curiously ashamed of his resolve.
“Yes,” he said, with a long pause between his words, “yes; I am going for good — I am not coming back ever any more. I am going for good.”
A stifled wail broke from little Luly. “An’ you ‘ain’t made my water-wheel,” she cried. “You ‘ain’t made my—”
Her mother silenced her, and then looked at Michael in rising anger.
“You kin go as fast as you please,” she said. “It’ll be a good riddance. I won’t hev my children mixin’ with the offspring of har—”
But Michael had flung himself out of the room.
CHAPTER IV
THE OLD DOMINIONsteamed slowly into the New York wharf, and her passengers made a precipitate rush for the gangway. Among those who left the third - class cabin there was an awkward youth in an ill-fitting suit of clothes and a cheap straw hat. From his right hand was suspended a small bundle which held all his earthly possessions of a tangible quality. His capital he carried in his brain.
As he stepped from the gangway to the wharf he hesitated and fell back, confused by the din of traffic.
“Step lively there!” called some one from behind, and the young man collected himself with a shake and started down the long’ wharf amidst a medley of boxes, trucks, and horses’ feet.
“If you air looking for New York I guess you won’t find it in that direction,” remarked a laborer who was winding a coil of rope at some little distance.
Michael turned, his face reddening, and retraced his steps to his starting-point, from whence he made a fresh venture.
The tumult bewildered him. He was feeling strangely homesick, and there was a curious weakness in the pit of his stomach. It was as if he were passing to a scaffold of his own erecting. He wondered how so many people could ever have come to New York. Surely, if he had known what it was like, he would have remained where his lines had fallen until death had readjusted them. He had never heard so much noise in his life, not even in Arlington on court day.
But when at last the shipping district lay behind him and he turned into Sixth Avenue, his youth and energy combined to reassure him, and a flush of excitement revived something of his dominant bearing. Even the knowledge that his trousers bagged hopelessly, which dawned upon him like a revelation, was not sufficient to check the rising exaltation of spirit. It was like being born again to start upon life with no ties in the past to bind one — with no past, only a future. His second birth would be free from the curse that had descended upon his first. He would make himself, let the weathercock of circumstances veer beneath ill-winds as it would. Circumstances crumble before a determined mind.
Yes; with two hands and a brain to guide them he would create a new Michael Akershem, as God had created a new Adam. He had the power — there was nothing beyond him — nothing.
With a vigorous gesture he threw back his head and surveyed his surroundings. He regarded them with the curiosity with which a thinking infant might regard the universe as it sprang into existence.
Several points about the city impressed him, fresh from his primitive environments; first the size, secondly the ugliness, and thirdly the indifference. No one noticed him, no one turned to look after him, and when he jostled anybody they accepted his apology without seeing him or knowing what he meant. In the beginning it was refreshing, and he thrilled with the knowledge of freedom. Here, his right was unquestioned, his identity ignored; he was but one atom moving in its given line amidst many thousands. Then the denseness of population oppressed him, humanity jammed into a writhing mass, like maggots in a cheese. The tenements, with their smoke-stained windows — their air of dignified squalor — seemed to cut off all means of ventilation. He examined them curiously, pausing on the sidewalk to look upward, dazed by their height and by the number of their tenants. He laughed at the fire-escapes, spindling from the roof, at the inevitable geranium in its tomato-can, stunted and bare of bloom, the burlesque of a living flower.
On the Bowery he found a cheap restaurant with a sign reading, “Corned-beef & Onions, 10 cents,” and he went inside and got breakfast at the counter. Then he came out and set about making his fortune.
That was the first day, and on that day he went into twelve offices seeking employment. Upon the second day he went into twenty-four; upon the third, fifty. At the end of the third day his courage faltered, at the end of the fourth it failed, and at the end of the fifth it oozed rapidly away.
He wandered restlessly about the streets. He no longer feared the crowd, he no longer feared anything. He was desperate and hungry, like an untamed animal. Corned-beef and onions at ten cents are cheap, but when one has not the ten cents they might as well be twenty.
“I want work,” he said to the foreman of some machine shops.
“Work!” repeated the man. “Why, there are a thousand men outside wanting work as hard as you, and as little likely to get it.”
“It’s my right,” cried Michael, hotly, “the world owes me a living and I’ll have it.”
“The world owes you a living, very probably,” said the man, “but you’ll find it deuced hard to collect. The world’s a bad debtor.”
He had gone out with an impotent curse upon the destiny that held his leading-strings. It was unjust! It was damnable!
The sunshine blinded him. He was young and strong and vibrating with energy, and yet, in the prodigal waste of Nature, this strength and energy were held of less account than the blowing of the wind. The former exultation of mind recoiled upon him in a wave of bitterness and dwindled to a slough of despond.
In the beginning he had sought only for a situation in which there might chance a rise. He had taken his brain into consideration, and in imagination he had allowed his ambition full play. Now, in the delirium of apparent failure, he cried out that for manual labor alone he was fitted, and that his dream of mental power was but the self-deception of a fool. Then it was that he went to the wharf at which he had landed, and asked for a job at the trucking.
It was given him, a substitute being needed in place of one of the employes who had been injured.
For a week Michael worked at the wharf among the common laborers. He stood shoulder to shoulder with negro hands and swung freight across the gang-plank. It was the roughest work that he had ever done, and his hands grew redder and more knotted and his shoulders lost their uprightness.
With the loading of the vessels frenzy seized upon him, and he worked at the high-pressure of insanity. Then, in the hours of leisure, the vultures of disappointed hopes preyed upon his vitals, and he faced life as Prometheus faced Jove. In all the years that came, the scars that those days wrought were not obliterated.
When the injured man returned the job was lost, and he went from the shipping-port with brutal inconsequence.
But Fate had not wearied of her puppet. He was yet to know the worst.
Night and day he walked the streets, hungry and defiant. During the day he watched the world in its fevered haste, during the night he watched it in its restless sleep. He stood upon the corners looking over the blackness of closed tenements, or, walking to the arch of Brooklyn Bridge, watched the swelling tide of water, the flickering of the lights around the city, the islands dotting here and there the dusk.
Among the tramps that thronged the bridge he loitered, as desperate as they.
And at this time his mind and his life were forming. Circumstances were busy making the man; the man was busy cursing circumstances. A rage that years could not cool consumed him. He looked with blood-shot eyes for the cause of such a ghastly condition — and, finding it, lifted against it the full force of his impassioned mind. It was not the man, but the system! It was the system that he hated — the system that suffered such things to be — that protected oppression in the name of liberty, and injustice in the name of law.
With the altered direction of his wrath, the early hatred for his parents melted away. He had found something vaster upon which to vent his undisciplined passion; and with the larger hate the old childish one seemed dwarfed and lifeless. He saw in his parents now but victims to the existing order — a machine which ground out millions of sentient beings and ground them into nothingness again. He even felt a half-tenderness for his mother and thought regretfully of the grave in the overgrown churchyard, with its red clay soil bare of bloom. He wondered how he could have thought of her save as wretched and bruised like himself, reviling the system that hemmed her down. He forgot, in his awakened sympathy, that she was but a woman of the fields, coarse and of great ignorance, into whose comprehension no system could have entered.
On the eleventh evening he fainted in a public square, and a woman of the street laid his head upon her lap and bathed his brow. He had come to life to see her bending over him, the street light flickering about her, revealing the paint upon her face and the dye upon her hair.
But he had not known. He knew nothing of women and little of life. She seemed only kind and helpful to him, and as he staggered to his feet he thanked her.
“You are good,” he said. And the woman had been touched and turned to look at him. She saw his ignorance, which was innocence, and all the charity buried beneath a ruined virtue responded to his words.
“You’re starving,” she said. And she slipped something into his hand and went her way, her harsh laughter softened for a span. A man beside him had called after her a ribald jest, and Michael staggered up to him.
“Do you know that lady?” he asked.
And the man laughed — a coarse, loud laugh that pained his ears.
Like a flash Michael understood, and he shook and quivered, red with humiliation.
