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Strong Hearts

G >> George W. Cable >> Strong Hearts



Produced by Suzanne Shell, Lazar Liveanu
and PG Distributed Proofreaders




STRONG HEARTS

By George W. Cable


1899



_CONTENTS_


_The Solitary

The Taxidermist

The Entomologist



In magazine form "The Solitary" appeared under the title of "Gregory's
Island."_



The Solitary



I


"The dream of Pharaoh is one. The seven kine are seven years; and the
seven good ears are seven years: the dream is one.... And for that the
dream was doubled unto Pharaoh twice, it is because the thing is
established."...

In other words: Behind three or four subtitles and changes of time, scene,
characters, this tale of strong hearts is one. And for that the tale is
tripled or quadrupled unto you three or four times (the number will
depend); it is because in each of its three or four aspects--or separate
stories, if you insist--it sets forth, in heroic natures and poetic fates,
a principle which seems to me so universal that I think Joseph would say
of it also, as he said to the sovereign of Egypt, "The thing is
established of God."

I know no better way to state this principle, being a man, not of letters,
but of commerce (and finance), than to say--what I fear I never should
have learned had I not known the men and women I here tell of--that
religion without poetry is as dead a thing as poetry without religion. In
our practical use of them, I mean; their infusion into all our doing and
being. As dry as a mummy, great Joseph would say.

Shall I be more explicit? Taking that great factor of life which men, with
countless lights, shades, narrownesses and breadths of meaning, call
Religion, and taking it in the largest sense we can give it; in like
manner taking Poetry in the largest sense possible; this cluster of tales
is one, because from each of its parts, with no argument but the souls and
fates they tell of, it illustrates the indivisible twinship of Poetry and
Religion; a oneness of office and of culmination, which, as they reach
their highest plane, merges them into identity. Is that any clearer? You
see I am no scientist or philosopher, and I do not stand at any dizzy
height, even in my regular business of banking and insurance, except now
and then when my colleagues of the clearing-house or board want something
drawn up--"Whereas, the inscrutable wisdom of Providence has taken from
among us"--something like that.

I tell the stories as I saw them occur. I tell them for your
entertainment; the truth they taught me you may do what you please with.
It was exemplified in some of these men and women by their failure to
incarnate it. Others, through the stained glass of their imperfect
humanity, showed it forth alive and alight in their own souls and bodies.
One there was who never dreamed he was a bright example of anything, in a
world which, you shall find him saying, God--or somebody--whoever is
responsible for civilization--had made only too good and complex and big
for him. We may hold that to make life a perfect, triumphant poem we must
keep in beautiful, untyrannous subordination every impulse of mere self-
provision, whether earthly or heavenly, while at the same time we give
life its equatorial circumference. I know that he so believed. Yet, under
no better conscious motive than an impulse of pure self-preservation,
finding his spiritual breadth and stature too small for half the practical
demands of such large theories, he humbly set to work to narrow down the
circumference of his life to limits within which he might hope to turn
_some_ of its daily issues into good poetry. This is the main reason why I
tell of him first, and why the parts of my story--or the stories--do not
fall into chronological order. I break that order with impunity, and adopt
that which I believe to be best in the interest of Poetry and themselves.
Only do not think hard if I get more interested in the story, or stories,
than in the interpretation thereof.



II


The man of whom I am speaking was a tallish, slim young fellow, shaped
well enough, though a trifle limp for a Louisianian in the Mississippi
(Confederate) cavalry. Some camp wag had fastened on him the nickname of
"Crackedfiddle." Our acquaintance began more than a year before Lee's
surrender; but Gregory came out of the war without any startling record,
and the main thing I tell of him occurred some years later.

I never saw him under arms or in uniform. I met him first at the house of
a planter, where I was making the most of a flesh-wound, and was, myself,
in uniform simply because I hadn't any other clothes. There were pretty
girls in the house, and as his friends and fellow-visitors--except me--
wore the gilt bars of commissioned rank on their gray collars, and he, as
a private, had done nothing glorious, his appearance was always in
civilian's dress. Black he wore, from head to foot, in the cut fashionable
in New Orleans when the war brought fashion to a stand: coat-waist high,
skirt solemnly long; sleeves and trousers small at the hands and feet, and
puffed out--phew! in the middle. The whole scheme was dandyish, dashing,
zou-zou; and when he appeared in it, dark, good-looking, loose,
languorous, slow to smile and slower to speak, it was--confusing.

One sunset hour as I sat alone on the planter's veranda immersed in a
romance, I noticed, too late to offer any serviceable warning, this
impressive black suit and its ungenerously nicknamed contents coming in at
the gate unprotected. Dogs, in the South, in those times, were not the
caressed and harmless creatures now so common. A Mississippi planter's
watch-dogs were kept for their vigilant and ferocious hostility to the
negro of the quarters and to all strangers. One of these, a powerful,
notorious, bloodthirsty brute, long-bodied, deer-legged--you may possibly
know that big breed the planters called the "cur-dog" and prized so highly
-darted out of hiding and silently sprang at the visitor's throat. Gregory
swerved, and the brute's fangs, whirling by his face, closed in the sleeve
and rent it from shoulder to elbow. At the same time another, one of the
old "bear-dog" breed, was coming as fast as the light block and chain he
had to drag would allow him. Gregory neither spoke, nor moved to attack or
retreat. At my outcry the dogs slunk away, and he asked me, diffidently,
for a thing which was very precious in those days--pins.

But he was quickly surrounded by pitying eyes and emotional voices, and
was coaxed into the house, where the young ladies took his coat away to
mend it. While he waited for it in my room I spoke of the terror so many
brave men had of these fierce home-guards. I knew one such beast that was
sired of a wolf. He heard me with downcast eyes, at first with evident
pleasure, but very soon quite gravely.

"They can afford to fear dogs," he replied, "when they've got no other
fear." And when I would have it that he had shown a stout heart he smiled
ruefully.

"I do everything through weakness," he soliloquized, and, taking my book,
opened it as if to dismiss our theme. But I bade him turn to the preface,
where heavily scored by the same feminine hand which had written on the
blank leaf opposite, "Richard Thorndyke Smith, from C.O."--we read
something like this:

The seed of heroism is in all of us. Else we should not forever relish, as
we do, stories of peril, temptation, and exploit. Their true zest is no
mere ticklement of our curiosity or wonder, but comradeship with souls
that have courage in danger, faithfulness under trial, or magnanimity in
triumph or defeat. We have, moreover, it went on to say, a care for human
excellence _in general_, by reason of which we want not alone our son, or
cousin, or sister, but _man everywhere_, the norm, _man_, to be strong,
sweet, and true; and reading stories of such, we feel this wish rebound
upon us as duty sweetened by a new hope, and have a new yearning for its
fulfilment in ourselves.

"In short," said I, closing the book, "those imaginative victories of soul
over circumstance become essentially ours by sympathy and emulation, don't
they?"

"O yes," he sighed, and added an indistinct word about "spasms of virtue."
But I claimed a special charm and use for unexpected and detached
heroisms, be they fact or fiction. "If adventitious virtue," I argued,
"can spring up from unsuspected seed and without the big roots of
character--"

"You think," interrupted Gregory, "there's a fresh chance for me."

"For all the common run of us!" I cried. "Why not? And even if there
isn't, hasn't it a beauty and a value? Isn't a rose a rose, on the bush or
off? Gold is gold wherever you find it, and the veriest spasm of true
virtue, coined into action, is true virtue, and counts. It may not work my
nature's whole redemption, but it works that way, and is just so much
solid help toward the whole world's uplift." I was young enough then to
talk in that manner, and he actually took comfort in my words, confessing
that it had been his way to count a good act which was not in character
with its doer as something like a dead loss to everybody.

"I'm glad it's not," he said, "for I reckon my ruling motive is always
fear."

"Was it fear this evening?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied, "it was. It was fear of a coward's name, and a sort of
abject horror of being one."

"Too big a coward inside," I laughed, "to be a big stout coward outside,"
and he assented.

"Smith," he said, and paused long, "if I were a hard drinker and should
try to quit, it wouldn't be courage that would carry me through, but fear;
quaking fear of a drunkard's life and a drunkard's death."

I was about to rejoin that the danger was already at his door, but he read
the warning accusation in my eye.

"I'm afraid so," he responded. "I had a strange experience once," he
presently added, as if reminded of it by what we had last said. "I took a
prisoner."

"By the overwhelming power of fear?" I inquired.

"Partly, yes. I saw him before he saw me and I felt that if I didn't take
him he'd either take me or shoot me, so I covered him and he surrendered.
We were in an old pine clearing grown up with oak bushes."

"Would it have been less strange," I inquired, "if you had been in an old
oak clearing grown up with pine bushes?"

"No, he'd have got away just the same."

"What! you didn't bring him in?"


"Only part of the way. Then he broke and ran."

"And you had to shoot him?"

"No, I didn't even shoot at him. I couldn't, Smith; _he looked so much
like me_. It was like seeing my own ghost. All the time I had him
something kept saying to me, 'You're your own prisoner--you're your own
prisoner.' And--do you know?--that thing comes back to me now every time I
get into the least sort of a tight place!"

"I wish it would come to me," I responded. A slave girl brought his coat
and our talk remained unfinished until five years after the war.



III


Gregory had been brought up on the shore of Mississippi Sound, a beautiful
region fruitful mainly in apathy of character. He was a skilled lover of
sail-boats. When we all got back to New Orleans, paroled, and cast about
for a living in the various channels "open to gentlemen," he, largely, I
think, owing to his timid notion of his worth, went into the rough
business of owning and sailing a small, handsome schooner in the "Lake
trade," which, you know, includes Mississippi Sound. I married, and for
some time he liked much to come and see us--on rainy evenings, when he
knew we should be alone. He was in love yet, as he had been when we were
fellow-absentees from camp, and with the same girl. But his passion had
never presumed to hope, and the girl was of too true a sort ever to thrust
hope upon him. What his love lacked in courage it made up in constancy,
however, and morning, noon, and night--sometimes midnight too, I venture
to say--his all too patient heart had bowed mutely down toward its holy
city across the burning sands of his diffidence. When another fellow
stepped in and married her, he simply loved on, in the same innocent,
dumb, harmless way as before. He gave himself some droll consolations. One
of these was a pretty, sloop-rigged sail-boat, trim and swift, on which he
lavished the tendernesses he knew he should never bestow upon any living
she. He named her Sweetheart; a general term; but he knew that we all knew
it meant the mender of his coat. By and by his visits fell off and I met
him oftenest on the street. Sometimes we stopped for a moment's sidewalk
chat, New Orleans fashion, and I still envied the clear bronze of his fine
skin, which the rest of us had soon lost. But after a while certain
changes began to show for the worse, until one day in the summer of the
fifth year he tried to hurry by me. I stopped him, and was thinking what a
handsome fellow he was even yet, with such a quiet, modest fineness about
him, when he began, with a sudden agony of face, "My schooner's sold for
debt! You know the reason; I've seen you read it all over me every time we
have met, these twelve months--O _don't_ look at me!"

His slim, refined hands--he gave me both?-were clammy and tremulous.
"Yes," he babbled on, "it's a fixed fact, Smith; the cracked fiddle's a
smashed fiddle at last!"

I drew him out of the hot sun and into a secluded archway, he talking
straight on with a speed and pitiful grandiloquence totally unlike him.
"I've finished all the easy parts--the first ecstasies of pure license--
the long down-hill plunge, with all its mad exhilarations--the wild vanity
of venturing and defying--that bigness of the soul's experiences which
makes even its anguish seem finer than the old bitterness of tame
propriety--they are all behind me, now?-the valley of horrors is before!
You can't understand it, Smith. O you can't understand----"

O couldn't I! And, anyhow, one does not have to put himself through a
whole criminal performance to apprehend its spiritual experiences. I
understood all, and especially what he unwittingly betrayed even now; that
deep thirst for the dramatic element in one's own life, which, when social
conformity fails to supply it, becomes, to an eager soul, sin's cunningest
allurement.

I tried to talk to him. "Gregory, that day the dogs jumped on you--you
remember?--didn't you say if ever you should reach this condition your
fear might save you?"

He stared at me a moment. "Do you"--a ray of humor lighted his eyes--"do
you still believe in spasms of virtue?"

"Thank heaven, yes!" laughed I.

"Good-by," he said, and was gone.

I heard of him twice afterward that day. About noon some one coming into
the office said: "I just now saw Crackedfiddle buying a great lot of
powder and shot and fishing-tackle. Here's a note. He says first read it
and then seal it and send it to his aunt." It read:

_"Don't look for me. You can't find me. I'm not going to kill or hurt
myself, and I'll report again in a month."_

I delivered it in person on my way uptown, advising his kinswoman to trust
him on his own terms and hope for the best. Privately, of course, I was
distressed, and did not become less so when, on reaching home, Mrs. Smith
told me that he had been there and borrowed an arm-load of books, saying
he might return some of them in a month, but would probably keep others
for two. So he did; and one evening, when he brought the last of them
back, he told us fully, spiritual experiences and all, what had occurred
to him in the interval.

The sale of the schooner had paid its debt and left him some cash over.
Better yet, it had saved Sweetheart. On the day of his disappearance she
was lying at the head of the New Basin, distant but a few minutes' walk
from the spot where we met and talked. When he left me he went there. At
the stores thereabout he bought a new hatchet and axe, an extra water-keg
or two, and a month's provisions. He filled all the kegs, stowed
everything aboard, and by the time the afternoon had half waned was
rippling down the New Canal under mule-tow with a strong lake breeze in
his face.

At the lake (Pontchartrain), as the tow-line was cast off, he hoisted
sail, and, skimming out by lighthouse and breakwater, tripped away toward
Pointe-aux-Herbes and the eastern skyline beyond, he and Sweetheart alone,
his hand clasping hers--the tiller, that is--hour by hour, and the small
waves tiptoeing to kiss her southern cheek as she leaned the other away
from the saucy north wind. In time the low land, and then the lighthouse,
sank and vanished behind them; on the left the sun went down in the purple
black swamps of Manchac; the intervening waters turned crimson and bronze
under the fairer changes of the sky, while in front of them Fort Pike
Light began to glimmer through an opal haze, and by and by to draw near.
It passed. From a large inbound schooner gliding by in the twilight, came
in friendly recognition, the drone of a conch-shell, the last happy
salutation Sweetheart was ever to receive. Then the evening star silvered
their wake through the deep Rigolets, and the rising moon met them, her
and her lover, in Lake Borgne, passing the dark pines of Round Island, and
hurrying on toward the white sand-keys of the Gulf.

The night was well advanced as they neared the pine-crested dunes of Cat
Island, in whose lee a more cautious sailor would have dropped anchor till
the morning. But to this pair every mile of these fickle waters, channel
and mud-lump, snug lagoon, open sea and hidden bar, each and all, were
known as the woods are known to a hunter, and, as he drew her hand closer
to his side, she turned across the track of the moon and bounded into the
wide south. A maze of marsh islands--huddling along that narrow, half-
drowned mainland of cypress swamp and trembling prairie which follows the
Mississippi out to sea--slept, leagues away, below the western waters. In
the east lay but one slender boundary between the voyager and the
shoreless deep, and this was so near that from its farther edge came now
and again its admonishing murmur, the surf-thunder of the open Gulf
rolling forever down the prone but unshaken battle-front of the sandy
Chandeleurs.



IV


So all night, lest wind or resolve should fail next day, he sailed. How to
tell just where dawn found him I scarcely know.

Somewhere in that blue wilderness, with no other shore in sight, yet not
over three miles northeast of a "pass" between two long tide-covered sand-
reefs, a ferment of delta silt--if science guesses right--had lifted
higher than most of the islands behind it in the sunken west one mere
islet in the shape of a broad crescent, with its outward curve to seaward
and a deep, slender lagoon on the landward side filling the whole length
of its bight. About half the island was flat and was covered with those
strong marsh grasses for which you've seen cattle, on the mainland,
venture so hungrily into the deep ooze. The rest, the southern half, rose
in dazzling white dunes twenty feet or more in height and dappled green
with patches of ragged sod and thin groups of dwarfed and wind-flattened
shrubs. As the sun rose, Sweetheart and her sailor glided through a gap in
the sand reef that closed the lagoon in, luffed, and as a great cloud of
nesting pelicans rose from their dirty town on the flats, ran softly upon
the inner sands, where a rillet, a mere thread of sweet water, trickled
across the white beach. Here he waded ashore with the utensils and
provisions, made a fire, washed down a hot breakfast of bacon and pone
with a pint of black coffee, returned to his boat and slept until
afternoon. Wakened at length by the canting of the sloop with the fall of
the tide, he rose, rekindled his fire, cooked and ate again, smoked two
pipes, and then, idly shouldering his gun, made a long half-circuit of the
beach to south and eastward, mounted the highest dune and gazed far and
wide.

Nowhere on sand or sea under the illimitable dome was there sign of human
presence on the earth. Nor would there likely be any. Except by
misadventure no ship on any course ever showed more than a topmast above
this horizon. Of the hunters and fishermen who roamed the islands nearer
shore, with the Chandeleurs, the storm-drowned Grand Gosiers and the deep-
sea fishing grounds beyond, few knew the way hither, and fewer ever sailed
it. At the sound of his gun the birds of the beach--sea-snipe, curlew,
plover--showed the whites of their wings for an instant and fell to
feeding again. Save when the swift Wilderness--you remember the revenue
cutter?-chanced this way on her devious patrol, only the steamer of the
light-house inspection service, once a month, came up out of the southwest
through yonder channel and passed within hail on her way from the stations
of the Belize to those of Mississippi Sound; and he knew--had known before
he left the New Basin--that she had just gone by here the day before.

But to Gregory this solitude brought no quick distress. With a bird or two
at his belt he turned again toward his dying fire. Once on the way he
paused, as he came in sight of the sloop, and gazed upon it with a
faintness of heart he had not known since his voyage began. However, it
presently left him, and hurrying down to her side he began to unload her
completely, and to make a permanent camp in the lee of a ridge of sand
crested with dwarfed casino bushes, well up from the beach. The night did
not stop him, and by the time he was tired enough for sleep he had
lightened the boat of everything stowed into her the previous day. Before
sunrise he was at work again, removing her sandbags, her sails, flags,
cordage, even her spars. The mast would have been heavy for two men to
handle, but he got it out whole, though not without hurting one hand so
painfully that he had to lie off for over two hours. But by midday he was
busy again, and when at low water poor Sweetheart comfortably turned upon
her side on the odorous, clean sand, it was never more to rise. The keen,
new axe of her master ended her days.

"No! O no!" he said to me, "call it anything but courage! I felt--I don't
want to be sentimental--I'm sure I was not sentimental at the time, but--I
felt as though I were a murderer. All I knew was that it had to be done. I
trembled like a thief. I had to stoop twice before I could take up the
axe, and I was so cold my teeth chattered. When I lifted the first blow I
didn't know where it was going to fall. But it struck as true as a die,
and then I flew at it. I never chopped so fast or clean in my life. I
wasn't fierce; I was as full of self-delight as an overpraised child. And
yet when something delayed me an instant I found I was still shaking.
Courage," said he, "O no; I know what it was, and I knew then. But I had
no choice; it was my last chance."

I told him that anyone might have thought him a madman chopping up his
last chance.

"Maybe so," he replied, "but I wasn't; it was the one sane thing I could
do;" and he went on to tell me that when night fell the tallest fire that
ever leapt from those sands blazed from Sweetheart's piled ribs and keel.

It was proof to him of his having been shrewd, he said, that for many days
he felt no repentance of the act nor was in the least lonely. There was an
infinite relief merely in getting clean away from the huge world of men,
with all its exactions and temptations and the myriad rebukes and rebuffs
of its crass propriety and thrift. He had endured solitude enough in it;
the secret loneliness of a spiritual bankruptcy. Here was life begun over,
with none to make new debts to except nature and himself, and no
besetments but his own circumvented propensities. What humble, happy
masterhood! Each dawn he rose from dreamless sleep and leaped into the
surf as into the embrace of a new existence. Every hour of day brought
some unfretting task or hale pastime. With sheath-knife and sail-needle he
made of his mainsail a handsome tent, using the mainboom for his ridge-
pole, and finishing it just in time for the first night of rain--when,
nevertheless, he lost all his coffee!

He did not waste toil. He hoarded its opportunities as one might husband
salt on the mountains or water in the desert, and loitering in well
calculated idleness between thoughts many and things of sea and shore
innumerable, filled the intervals from labor to labor with gentle
entertainment. Skyward ponderings by night, canny discoveries under foot
by day, quickened his mind and sight to vast and to minute significancies,
until they declared an Author known to him hitherto only by tradition.
Every acre of the barren islet grew fertile in beauties and mysteries, and
a handful of sand at the door of his tent held him for hours guessing the
titanic battles that had ground the invincible quartz to that crystal meal
and fed it to the sea.

I may be more rhetorical than he was, but he made all the more of these
conditions while experiencing them, because he knew they could not last
out the thirty days, nor half the thirty, and took modest comfort in a
will strong enough to meet all present demands, well knowing there was one
exigency yet to arise, one old usurer still to be settled with who had not
yet brought in his dun.

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