Part 7

And his days were no less wondrous, for their sun, and shade, and good going. Sometimes, when he was beginning to feel dusty or weary, an unexpected pool would signal to him from beside a shaded road; and when he came up from it, he was a new-made creature. He liked being solitary, yet he liked stopping at sudden inns for frugal meals, and he liked chatting with the wayfarers he met. The latter half of the week had moments less idyllic. His fourth night he spent in a box car, his fifth in a boarding-house for Polish immigrants, and his sixth, in part at least, in the jail-room of a village town-hall, where he had been held in custody on a false charge of having stolen an automobile.

His code was very explicit as to stealing. He made a point of stealing and begging nothing but rides of various sorts. He had begged and received rides in hay-carts, touring-cars, lumber-trucks: he had also managed to get without cost considerable railroad transportation. It sounds crooked, to me! But of course each type of ride has its good and bad points. He took whatever fruit he saw lying on the ground, on the public side of fences; it was astonishing what excellent pickings were to be had in this way; he felt that an essay on economics might be written on this subject. But he never entered an orchard, never even shook a wayside tree. His head was full of these delicate distinctions. From Kipling he had imbibed the idea that the white man’s burden can best be sustained in dark lands by the unfailing practice of wearing a dinner jacket in the evening, no matter how solitary the meal. _Noblesse oblige!_ And it keeps you from sinking. The idea had appealed to Royal, and he had invented a variant of it to use in his travels. He would at all times deal with the fruits of the earth exactly as if the owner of them were watching him. No unheroic task! If he should fall once, he told himself, it would be all the easier to fall again, and yet again; and then where are you? As a matter of exact record, he did not fall once; and I see no reason why this may not be set down to his credit. It is of course regrettable that a principle which worked so well for agriculture could not have been applied to transportation also.

Thus, by being partly prig, partly poet, partly his own stage-manager, and altogether boy, Royal was taking steps toward being a man. There was absolute truth in his protestations before the one-armed justice of the peace (apparently the universal functionary of the village) that he knew nothing of the stolen car, nothing whatever, from fender to tail-light. Unluckily, on being asked his father’s name and address, he gave a wholly fantastic reply, his brain being stuffed to capacity with material for such purposes. I believe that he had a laudable idea of protecting the family by “putting one over” on the village Dogberry. But by a lamentable oversight, disclosed to the one-armed man on consulting directories and maps, the county of Chesterfolk, in the adjoining State, acknowledged no township called Four Bridges; and even had there been such a place, it still remains doubtful whether Royal’s putative father, Algernon M. Hollingsworth, that splendid creature born of necessity’s invention, would ever have been content to live there. Other questions were put; Royal’s _Whither_ was found to be fully as obscure as his _Whence_. He was therefore clapped as a “suspicious vagrant” into the jail-room, a high and narrow cubicle left over from the previous century, and unused for years except for the occasional storing of the movie-man’s impedimenta on wet evenings.

In lieu of a left hand, the one-armed justice of the peace had a steel hook, which he managed with an address that Royal could but admire. He carefully examined our poet’s possessions; his purse, food, poems, matches, wristwatch, toothbrush, Iliad, flashlight. The purse, poems, and food he regarded as negligible. The Iliad received from him both respect and scorn; respect because it was print, scorn because it was print he couldn’t read.

“Your Koran, ain’t it?” He asked the question with the irony he thought due to those who gave false addresses. Royal trembled when hand and hook turned those Homeric pages. His father’s bookplate might give the whole show away. But fortunately that telltale emblem escaped the hook-and-eye of justice. And the man’s idea of calling the book a Koran had in it something that appealed strongly to the inventor’s own imagination; he played upon the theme with alliterative variations.

“Kid carries Koran,” he ejaculated while pulling out a rickety settee for the repose of the accused. Hooking up Royal’s flashlight, he discovered a tattered blanket belonging to the movie-man, and this he threw over the settee, still improvising. “Koran concealed on Courteous Kid.” Perhaps that fancy of his softened his fibre. He had pocketed Royal’s matches, and was about to confiscate his flashlight also, when a humane thought occurred to him. For our humor may at times produce humanity in ourselves, if not in those whom we expose to it.

“Well, kid, I guess I’ll leave you your light to read your Koran by. Sorry we can’t give you a prayer-rug too, but our finest Orientals are in storage, this season.” (He’d show the young fella ’t givin’ false addresses was a game two could play at!) Royal was relieved when at last the justice really locked the door, and departed. Something to tell old Peter, this.

He wondered what Peter, the practical genius, would do in that ill-smelling hole. Peter, he concluded, would explore things. Royal’s flashlight revealed two flimsy packing-cases; the movie-man was his Providence, that night. He waited until midnight, by his watch. He then set one box on the other, and by cautious climbing, managed to reach the tiny barred window, high in the wall. The bars were ancient in their shallow sockets; Royal was lean, even leaner than usual; in a twinkling he had leaped down crashing into some mournful sumac trees, and after that, escape was easy, along the adjoining church and churchyard. Surely the leprecauns were on his side! All of a sudden he realized that his act of self-preservation from so-called justice was one of the most practical bits of work he had ever performed in his life. He had a momentary gleam of shame for his impractical, un-Peter-like past, and even gave a thought to his father, in his hot city studio, working for the wherewithal. But that mood soon passed. The ecstasy of escape from the troubles he had brought on himself gave him wings. Until nearly dawn, he swept straight ahead, under a favoring moon. He was composing a Sonnet to Some Sumacs.

“A prisoner pent, I flew to your fond arms, And maybe broke a few of them, my dears”;—

A wonderful beginning! It would require some fine work with _charms_, _harms_, _alarms_; with _fears_, _cheers_, _reveres_. But Royal was perfectly happy; and no one can say that his inspiration was not authentic.

Not twenty miles from his own home with its bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, he saw a belated or else be-earlied furniture-van approaching from a wooded road that met the highway. Its driver, so Royal judged as a bearded face emerged out of the morning mist, was one of those how-could-I-help-it persons who are always a little late or a little early, a type toward which he felt drawn. He waited there, at the heart of the crossroads. The man hailed him, and Royal, in his character-part of young man out of work, accepted the proffered lift, and ate heartily of the rude liberal bread and cheese that tasted of the leather seat. They chatted at ease of brakes, tires, clutches, and children, as they rode quietly into the morning. Royal contributed most of the listening; he was quite as much at home among elderly workers for a living as with frivolous persons of his own age.

When they reached Falmouth Junction, a railway centre of note, their ways diverged. At the station, Royal bought coffee, sandwiches, and fruit, all of which he shared with the man; and the man gave him two black cigars at parting. Royal liked that furniture-fellow. He considered that when compared with the one-armed miscarrier of justice, the man had the makings of an excellent leprecaun in him; his beard sticking out of the mist was just like a leprecaun’s. But although the man, in his dreamy behindhand (or else beforehand) way, had confided much to Royal, with a wealth of detail as to his youngest child, “cutest kid of the bunch, and a reg’lar Dannle Webster with his spellin’-book,” our traveller did not in return open his heart about his escape from the jail-room. For a long time after that incident, Royal was inclined to suspect both justice and peace in quarters where they were least intended. Falmouth town boasts a traffic policeman; Royal, on spying those bright buttons, took swiftly to the road again.

And now, on the last stretch of his wander-week, he bethought himself of the soldier grave on that little hill, scarcely an hour’s walk from the very end of his appointed round. He loved the place; he felt drowsy, in spite of the railway coffee and the fresh morning air, and he wanted to lie down and sleep for a pleasant hour under those pines, his head pillowed on heroic ashes. He phrased it thus to himself, although he knew that he would probably find a better resting-place on the warm ground somewhat removed from the grave. After a good little snatch of sleep, there would be time for a few last touches on the Amaryllis poem, and then, home. The Sumac Sonnet could wait. After all, a beefsteak luncheon has its merits.

Royal was more tired than he knew. His pleasant hour of sleep multiplied itself by two, by three, by four. He woke with a start to find that the day was no longer young. He would have to step lively if he hoped to reach home by tea-time; scones, fresh from the oven! But he had just had a very marvellous dream, and surely, before the glamour of it should vanish, he owed it to the world to put some breath of it into his poem.

Enthralled by his verses, the poet resented the approach of that other traveller, just puffing up over the western slope of the little hill. The man was forty-five or fifty or even sixty, the boy guessed; oh, ever so old! He was soiled, obese, crumpled, out of breath; he needed a shave. Limp gray hairs straggled behind his plaided cap. His profile was fattened, yet highly predacious. But his tweeds seemed rather better in quality than Royal’s, his shoes no worse. Royal’s bookish theory that you can always tell at a glance whether a man is a gentleman or not fell to pieces under that fugitive’s weary, wary eye. Certainly no poet, our sumac sonneteer decided. Villon never looked quite like that, nor Poe, nor Vachel Lindsay.

IV

Yet any wise observer of our poor dust would have known at once, on seeing the two travellers together, that the hand of art had been laid inevitably on each; lightly and graciously enough on the youth, rudely and ironically and with stripes and lashes on the man. Phœbus Apollo hardly knew, as yet, whether he should ever really need the boy Royal or not. However, he meant to lend the child his lute for a summer morning or two, and hear whatever trailing wisps of song those smooth young fingers could coax goldenly from its strings. Yes, Royal was a true probationer of Apollo. But with the man, the god would plainly have no more to do, except by way of bitter punishment. For the man was too old, too ill, too evil, even, to be of any further service in the temple of the Muses. Those ladies do not carry a pardoner’s wallet. They have no pension system; uncompromising dames, the Nine, when all is told.

Little as he liked the looks of the man in his tumbled tweeds, Royal nevertheless gave him a good-day. Why not? The man enveloped the boy with a strange, hunted-yet-hunting glance, and after returning the salutation in a mannerly enough way, threw himself down heavily on the pleasant pine leaves, rather close to the spot that Royal had chosen for his own perfect seclusion with song. Our poet’s second sight instantly declared that there was something wrong. What if this were the wretch who had really stolen the car whose loss had threatened the Royal liberties? Well, if so, that was the one-armed justice’s affair, not Royal’s. The boy had lately read in a newspaper that our Anglo-Saxon law presupposes the innocence of the accused, until proven guilty. An excellent idea! Fair play for all, then, including the disinherited.

Still, it was but natural that he should try to put a self-protecting distance between himself and the other, tramps though they both were. So he hid his ode in his pocket, and pulled out his Iliad, that epic which before now had laid heavy conditions upon him, and was likely to do so in the future. Impressive gesture! Royal had several times used it to advantage during his travels. Pulling out your Iliad, no matter how amiably, is a way of drawing the line. This particular Iliad had, it is true, been something of a disappointment to him, at the start. He had meant to carry his school copy, a pocket edition that contained only one book of the poem, with English notes so copious as to constitute a “pony.” In the confusion of a brother’s departure, mischievous Peter had contrived to dislodge Royal’s own Iliad from its place in Royal’s pocket, and to substitute for it an Iliad from his father’s library. The parental Iliad, though like the other in size and shape, was a poor thing. It had all the books of the poem, to be sure, but in solid Greek; not a word of English from cover to cover. Some German had printed it that way. Annoying! But after his first dismay was over, Royal had managed very well with the volume; to-day, he drew it out as readily as if it had the English notes.

With this man, however, the trick was wasted. When the boy laid his Iliad down casually beside him, the man picked it up, no less casually. Homer had no terrors for him, it would seem. With a hand whose trembling he could not quite conceal, he turned over the leaves to regain his lost breath. In a leisurely, yet largely gesticulating way, he adjusted his black-ribboned eyeglass, and contemplated both bookplate and title-page. He then made short work of Royal’s pretensions to classic learning, merely by turning to Book XXIII, virgin soil as yet untrod by any foot in Royal’s form. Book XXIII appeared to interest him. Suddenly he began to read out, in orotund English, the episode of the funeral pyre, with all its meaty details.

As a matter of fact, this was but a gesture of the traveller; a gesture fully as empty as Royal’s, a scrap of drama within a drama. The rascal was not translating. He was reciting from memory a fragment from Lord Derby’s translation. In palmier days, he had constantly used those twenty lines with telling effect, in his popular dramatic elocution classes. He had even incorporated them, with full directions as to tempo, emphasis, and climax, into his Dramatic Interludes No. 1, a book which, though not precisely a best seller, had often been bought along the borderline that separates the real stage folk from the stage-struck fringe of the shadowy general public. And now, for an audience of one, that “slow-pac’d ox,” those “jars of honey,” the “four powerful horses,” the “nine dogs,” were all presented with an unction that seemed incredible in a stout man so out of breath a moment before. The reciter licked his lips feverishly over his “slaughtered carcasses,” and yet was able to reserve some climacteric gusto for the closing lines,

“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed, Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”

He appeared to find this an especially appetizing detail, and repeated the couplet, laying his hot fingers on Royal’s wrist.

The boy’s second sight had been caught napping during that recitation, but at the touch, sprang up, alert.

“Royal child,” she whispered, “quick, quick! Whatever are you about? Can’t you see that this wretched actor-man is far uncleaner and viler than anything you observed, with fearful curiosity, in the Polish boarding-house?”

And when Royal saw those fat fingers on his wrist, they looked to him like worms, and he wanted to be gone. But he wanted to be a man of the world, too, if a poet may; one who would needlessly insult no passer-by.

“Hot stuff, eh,” he remarked carelessly as he rose from the pine leaves. It seemed to him an appropriate thing to say about a funeral pyre found in the classics. The man had dropped the book; the boy swooped easily down, Discobolus-like, and swept it to safety within his pocket. “Well, I’m off! Date down below. Afraid I’m late, as it is.” His eyes were appalled by the ferocious hunger of the eyes they met; the hunger, the anger, the fatigue, the despair. Had he but known in his own young body and soul just what these things meant, and just how horribly they were gnawing that man’s vitals, he would have stayed, in common human kindness. But he could not know. Besides, his second sight had him cannily in her grip, and with all her might and main was pushing him straight home. Curiously enough, unaware as he was of “my uncle the psychiatrist’s” worm’s-eye prophecies, he said to himself, using Uncle Tom’s very words, “I started out with the leprecauns, and now perhaps I’m winding up with the lepers!” It gave him a pleased sense of his own individuality, that Fate had arranged it so. It was the sort of thing that didn’t happen to most boys, he thought. Without knowing why, he added to himself, “Just as well, perhaps.” Yet he felt sorry for the tweed-clad flesh down there at his feet. “Whatever’s the matter with the poor fish? Sure there’s something bothering his bean. The Ford, perhaps.”

Whatever it was, he knew he could not stop to set it right. But at any rate, he could offer a sandwich. The law of the road’s hospitality was in his heart. He opened his tin box, and with his inimitable rippling puppy-dog grace, emptied out its contents beside the stranger. The articles thus disclosed had by now attained a composite flavor through close contact within the sun-warmed tin. Royal suddenly knew this, and was sorry. There were the three thick railway sandwiches, the two black cigars, and several bars of chocolate he had bought the day before at the Charlemont five-and-ten, from a radiant, chiffon-clad girl whom he had secretly christened Lalage; for his next poem, of course, after the Amaryllis one was done, oh, quite, quite done. He kept for himself one bar of the chocolate. Its cover had the color of the girl’s warm dark eyes, and so would be a material witness, during his inspiration for the Lalage stanzas.

“Excuse me, but you seem to be a traveller, like myself. I’d be awfully glad if you can use these things.” From his jacket pocket he drew out two ripe peaches, oozing, and these he added to the store. “Cheero!” He loped down the hill, with long, uneasy strides, not really happy until he was far away. His thoughts were confused. “What a dreadful old beast! Actor, of course, probably screen. Face seemed familiar, too familiar. Some villain, what? Needed the car to make a getaway from something or other.”

All of a sudden the Homeric couplet mouthed by the man returned with terrific force to his mind.

“Last with the sword, by evil counsel swayed, Twelve noble youths he slew, the sons of Troy.”

The poet stopped short in his tracks. “Golly-dieu! I see it all now. I’ve been talking with a _murderer_! And they always come back to revisit the scene, every one knows that. Of course, he didn’t do up as many as twelve. It was remorse made him nutty about the number. I wonder now—”

His wonder lit his eyes and freshened his steps until he reached the garden-gate, with the great apple tree over it, and the carved millstone below as a tread. Old Peter was probably just coming up from the pool. He himself needed a bath, frightfully! Then he saw his mother, in the white-and-purple iris dress he loved, walking toward the green tea-table under the pergola. Agnes with her tray would soon appear. For the present, Royal’s appointed rounds were over. An immense wave of tenderness suffused his whole being. Mother, bath, scones, sanctuary! Those first and last words he called aloud. Mother, sanctuary!

V

Left to himself, the elder traveller pounced on the peaches and devoured them, smearing their juice on his dry lips. He then tore the meat from the poor hearts of the sandwiches, and began to eat it greedily. It was his first meat in four days, and he was distinctly of the carnivorous order, and no mere nut-eater. The maid at the Canaan inn had looked suspiciously at him, four days ago, and from that moment, fear had palsied him. Not daring to buy gas under the pitiless publicity of the red pump, he had abandoned his stolen Ford. Like Royal, he was now on a solitary walking tour.

Since the incident at the inn, he had lived on package food, bought at obscure crossroads grocery stores. All his life, he had kept a fine contempt for package food, the various frugal tinned and cartoned things the _bourgeois_ eat. He himself always wanted everything fresh from the vine, he used to say. Everything except the grape; that was different. Just at present, he was more thirsty than hungry. Royal’s black cigars were a poor substitute for a living drink.

“Blast the boy with his clean airs! ‘A traveller like myself!’ Little Lord Bountiful, to be sure!”

His face looked very old in the afternoon light. It was purplish red as to the forehead, and that whitishness around the mouth was not wholly to be explained by a four days’ stubble of graying beard. Even while he blasted the boy, he likened himself to him. “Just what I was at his age, a little Lord Bountiful! And, God, look at me now!”

If ever a man needed God’s look at that moment, it was this fugitive. Let it be understood clearly, however, he was not at all the murderer Royal’s imagination had conjured up. That boy’s second sight had been working overtime, and had fallen into error. Except in an indirect way, the man had never been a murderer. He had never desired the death of any human being. Yet he had undoubtedly turned the feet of at least “twelve noble youths” into the roads that lead to death. Also, he was revisiting a scene. Therefore we may as well admit that Royal’s imaginings had strange truths mingled with their errors. Perhaps his visions, like yours and mine, were made up wholly from truths, but truths mysteriously misplaced; truths disordered, and so, unserviceable.