one august evening in 1869 a number of damascenes were gathered as usual at the railroad station to witness and audit the arrival and departure of the seven o’clock train. this was an event still miraculous and unbelievable, requiring verification of the senses. a young man swung off before the train had quite stopped, walked forward, and stood watching the small freight unload. when the last of it was off, one of the heavers, leaning from the car door, called to the station agent, andy weir:
“give us an extra hand here. there’s a flat passenger.”
weir came and looked in.
“them’s rawkis words you use,” he said admonishingly. “suppose it was somebody we knew.”
“come on,” said the heaver. “give us a hand. this ain’t a hearse. it’s a railroad train.”
weir beckoned. several men stepped out of the crowd to help. with a hollow grating sound the end of a long pine box was pushed into view. it came out slowly. weir felt for handles. there weren’t any. it was a plain coffin case.
“shoulder it,” he said to his volunteers.
they walked with it to the far end of the platform and stopped.
“might rain,” said weir, changing his mind. “over[83] there,” he added, after looking around. “under the overhang.”
they turned back. awkwardly, with scraping feet and gruntings, they put it down against the station wall under the projecting eave, and then stood looking at it, all a little red from the exertion and stooping.
“tain’t yours, is it?” said weir, turning suddenly on the young man who had followed the box to and fro.
“yes,” he said.
“who are you?”
“john breakspeare.”
the station agent bent down and read the card tacked to the top of the box. the name was aaron breakspeare.
“i knew him,” he said, now gazing at the young man. “knew him well, i might say. everybody around here did. you ain’t his boy?”
“he was my father,” said the young man. “will it be all right to——?”
“and he’s sent himself home,” said weir. “sent himself home to be buried. you all alone?”
“i’m the whole family,” said the young man with a smile that made weir look away. “will it be all right,” he began to ask again, and hesitated before the pronoun. for nearly a week he had been travelling with this freight and the dilemma was new each time. how should one refer to one’s father in a pine box? corpse was a sodden, gruesome word. body was too cold and distant. remains,—no. there were left only the pronouns—it, this, that—and they were disrespectful.
[84]
“it’s all right there,” said the station agent, seeing what the young man meant. “but if you want to leave it all night we’ll take it in.”
“only for a few minutes,” said the young man. “i’m coming right back.”
the idlers about the station waited until he was out of sight and then gathered around the box, staring at it, reading the card, looking away, commenting—
“so that’s poor old aaron.... as the fellow said, we’re all alike at the end of the lane.... he wasn’t so oldan, i ought t’know because wasn’t i born—?... the young one brought him back.... where’d he come from, does it say?... likely looking boy.... what’s his name?... wonder what old gib’l say.... this here one stole his sweetheart away back there in....”
to john breakspeare, son of esther, great grandson of the founder, now turning his twentieth year, new damascus was a legend. he had never been there. yet without asking his way he walked straight to the inn that was his grandfather’s, since named lycoming house, and wrote two names in the register thus:
{ john breakspeare.
aaron ditto } denver, colo.
they meant nothing to the clerk, who was new in the place. he blotted the writing, looked at it, and asked:
[85]
“is your party all here?”
“not yet,” said the young man. “we want two parlor rooms on the ground floor.”
“connecting rooms?”
“yes.”
“you are john breakspeare?” the clerk guessed.
“yes.”
“the other member of your party will be coming tonight?”
“he is waiting at the station,” said the young man. “we shall want the rooms only for tonight and tomorrow. i’ll pay now, please.”
“we can send a rig to the station,” said the clerk.
“no, thank you,” said the young man.
he looked at the rooms. in the large one he set two chairs six feet apart, facing. then lighting all the gas, he went out, locked the door, and carried the key away in his pocket.
one hour later an undertaker’s wagon, followed by a hack, pulled up in front of lycoming house. the young man got out of the hack and stood in the main doorway waiting. four men drew the pine box out of the wagon, shouldered it, and started in.
there was a crash from end to end of the long front veranda overhanging the street, as twenty men sitting there in tilted chairs, their feet on the railing, smoking, all with one impulse dropped their legs and sat up straight to look. a rigid hotel custom forbids hospitality to mr. death. there is only one way for a corpse to pass through a hotel door. that is out. if[86] you die inside that can’t be helped. you must go out. but if you die outside you can’t come in.
the clerk ran out to defend the threshold.
“what’s this?” he shouted. “you can’t do this. you can’t rent a mortuary chapel in a hotel.”
his words were futile. the young man turned his back, beckoned the undertaker to follow, and led the way through the door and down the hall to the big parlor room, the door of which he unlocked and threw open. they put the pine box on the floor, opened it, raised the coffin to rest on the chairs. the young man followed the empty box to the street and returned with two high candlesticks and candles. these he set at the head of the coffin and lighted. then, locking the door behind him, he joined the undertaker outside and drove away with him.
the clerk, outraged in both his authority and his traditions, meanwhile had fallen downstairs and was shaking a red, tissue-logged hulk that dozed in a hickory chair at the end of the bar. this was thaddeus crawford, the proprietor. he never opened his eyes but to eat and speak and look at the books. the sign he gave of listening, or of waking when addressed, was to open his mouth,—a small, cherubic orifice,—and roll the tip of his tongue round and round it. when he closed his mouth that was a sign he was no longer interested. when he opened his eyes and spoke it was a shock to discover that he could speak distinctly, that his senses were alert, that the triumph of matter was incomplete.
[87]
during the clerk’s recital of what was taking place upstairs he rolled his tongue excitedly without opening his eyes. then he heaved himself, achieved locomotion, and went up to look at the names on the register. he looked at them hard and long, dozed a bit, looked at them again, then returned inarticulate to the hickory chair downstairs and fell into it panting.
“what shall we do?” asked the clerk, who had followed him up and down again.
“do the dishes,” said thaddeus. “wouldn’t, anyhow.... won’t hurt the house.... care a damn if it does.... time we had a funeral here.” he dozed off for a minute, chortled in his depths, and spoke again with his eyes closed.
“put it on you, didn’t he? guess he did. guess yes. damn smart.... want to see him when he comes back.... knew his father.”
when john breakspeare returned, the clerk, now very civil, took him down to thaddeus.
they talked until long after the bar closed. thaddeus was surprised to discover how little the young man knew of his pre-natal history and proceeded to restore him to his background. the picture was somewhat blurred in the romantic passages, from a feeling of delicacy. that loss was more than compensated by high lights elsewhere. he told him in turgid, topical, verbless sentences what the old woolwine mansion was like in that other time, how enoch and aaron founded the iron industry together, how they prospered, how strange it was that they got along so well,[88] how they parted suddenly when esther, the banker’s daughter, who was engaged to enoch, changed her mind suddenly and married aaron instead, and finally of aaron’s failure with steel and how he changed all over after esther’s death.
the narrative had form and drama and a proper ending, very unexpected to the young man. the parlor room in which the body of his father then lay and the one adjoining in which he himself would spend the night were rooms he had lived in once before. they were the rooms his father took when he closed the woolwine mansion, unable to live there without esther, and came to this inn with nurse and infant. that infant was himself.
it came two o’clock. with no premonitory sign thaddeus heaved himself out of the hickory chair and called for the porter to put out the lights.
“what are you going to do?” he asked.
“i haven’t thought of it,” said the young man.
“stay with us,” said thaddeus. “long as you like.”
on his way to bed thaddeus said to the clerk: “give him anything he wants. don’t send him a bill till he asks for it. don’t send him a bill at all.”
a spiritual adventure awaited john breakspeare to complete his day. as he re-entered the room where his father’s body was and closed and locked the door behind him he got suddenly a sense of reality beyond any perception of things. it was a reality to which he himself merely pertained. this was a sense of existence. the story he had just heard in the bar room,[89] as he was hearing it, seemed to concern only his father; and his father was a separate being who had lived and was dead and about to be buried. but no. that was not so. vividly, yet with no way of saying it, no way of thinking it, with only a way of feeling it, he became in one instant aware that the story no less concerned himself. everything that had happened to his father had happened also to him. his father was dead, for there he lay. that was the evidence of things. beyond was the truth that his father was not dead. the same life thread continued in him. that na?ve delusion of youth in which oneself is perceived as a separate miracle, beginning at the toes and ending at the top of the head, was shattered. back of his father and mother were others, numberless. their history was his history. he was but a link in a continuous scheme, as his father was, and his father’s father, and so on and on, back through an eternity of moments. the past surrounded him. it was intangible, enormous, indivisible.
one of the candles, dying with a splutter, startled him. the other one also was low. he replaced them, lighted the fresh ones, then slid back the panel of the coffin cover and gazed at the face of his father with strange, uneasy interest.
how little he knew of him! always he had thought of him as a man of sorrow. yet once he had been gay and spontaneous, full of the enthusiasms and compulsions of life. never before had he sensed anything of that. the first recollection of his father was sad. it[90] was of going with him, hand in hand, to an open air show, trembling with excitement. it was a special occasion. his father had come a long distance to see him. how he knew that he could not remember. there were animals in the show and men and women who made them perform, and noise and music and peanuts and wonderful smells and much going on. he was delirious with happiness until he noticed that his father was weeping. that almost spoiled the day. after that he could not remember him again until somebody took him a long journey, lasting many days, for aught he knew many years, and at last they found his father, who was in bed, in a little white bed, and very strange, and he had not liked kissing him. then was a time, rather dim, when they were together and became great and equal friends. this could not last. he was sent to school in philadelphia and saw his father only at long intervals; and each time they had to get acquainted all over again. they both looked forward eagerly to these meetings and always they were disappointed, especially in the beginnings of new acquaintanceship, until the strangeness wore off and they had reconstructed their memories of each other. at least, it had been so with him. he remembered it as a fact. and now he realized that it had been so also with his father. intuition multiplied his recollections and made them new. he remembered something he had never once thought of before. they were together, waiting for the train that was to take him back to school. he was restless with childish impatience and[91] counted the minutes that delayed their parting. the train was late. when it came he clamored to get aboard, lest he should be left, and almost forgot to look back and wave. the wistful sadness in his father’s face meant nothing to him at the time. now he understood it.
suddenly, as he stood there gazing at his father’s face, his spirit of itself achieved a form of mystical experience such as may occur naturally and surprisingly at a certain time of youth and is seldom if ever repeated save in the lives of ascetics. he felt himself flooded with understanding, though he knew not in the least what it was he so lucidly understood. there was a sense of new friendship then beginning with his father,—a friendship that should be perfect, wordless, indestructible, beyond peril. never had he felt so near to his father, so alive to him, so communicative. death at the same time changed its aspect. it was a catastrophic event, but inconclusive. it was not the final enigma. it had nothing to do with life, for life was a prior transaction and bound to go on. it had nothing to do with love, for love was parallel to life and reached beyond death. life and love,—they were truly mysterious. for death there must be some simple explanation, like the explanation of night, without which every sunset would fill mankind with the terror of extinction. it was ... death was ... death itself was only ... what? he had almost seen it, what it was, and then suddenly it disappeared. he had looked the wrong way. for an instant it was there. he[92] tried to reconstruct the point of view. but when he began to think of what he was thinking the dazzling, jewel-like space he had been staring into collapsed with an inaudible crash. all that was left of it was the dead face, reflecting the light of the candles. that experience was closed. never in his life was it repeated. he had no idea what it meant, then or afterward. yet the memory of it became his chief spiritual asset. one thought thereafter controlled his life. he was his father continued.
