A Far Country, Book 1

ctually yearned for someone in whom I could confide, who could suggest a solution. I repeat, I would not for worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Pound, of whom I ha

nd naturally I failed to perceive that this was because it laid its emphasis on personal salvation…. I did no

desire to do something that would astound my father and eventually wring from him the confession that he had misjudged me. To be sure, I should have to wait until early manhood, at least, for the accomp

bringing their sewing; and sometimes, when I unexpectedly entered the sitting-room, the voices of my mother's visitors would drop to a whisper. One afternoon I returned from school to p

gine she's paid a heavy penalty. No man alive

f the stairs, with a de

eard of her?" Cou

e her name mentioned in his presence, you know. And Whitcomb chased them as far as New York with a horse-pistol in his pocket. The re

a divorce?" Cousi

rch member, my dear,"

member or no church member," declared Cousi

emper, and he was awfully strict with her, and he was old enough, anyhow, to be her father. Grace Hollister wa

usin Bertha. "I don't think I ever saw a h

shed, for at this crucial m

st pitch. And that evening, when I came in at five o'clock to st

replied my mother, lo

I per

you are too you

mother if his Aunt Grace were really alive, after all? Whereupon complications and explanations ensued between our parents, of which we saw only the surface signs…. My father accused me of eavesdr

n encyclopaedic mind, especially well stocked with the kind of knowledge I now desired; first and last he taught me much, which I would better have got in another way. To him I appealed and got the story, my worst suspicions

ed shudd

d, "they were

love a woman?" Alec replied grandly. "I c

It was a mild afternoon in spring, and we stood in the deep limestone gutter

couldn't love any more after the

ed at me

r that notion,"

er started me to seeking restlessly, on bookshelves and elsewhere, for a secret that forever eluded me, and forever led me on. The word fermenting aptly describes the process begun, suggesting as it does something closed up, away from air and sunlight, continually working in secret, engendering forces that fascinated, yet inspired me with fear. Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was due to t

e story I had heard, supplying for myself the details he had omitted: I beheld the signals from the windows, the clandestine meet

d up within me an intense sympathy and pity. By an instinctive process somehow linked with other experiences, I seemed to be able to enter into the feelings of these two outcasts, to understand the fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that had led them to elude the vigilance and probity of a world with which I myself was at odds. I pictured them in a remote la

a black moustache and snapping black eyes. He carried a cane. I always associated canes with villains. Whereupon I arose, groped for

es for the Tariff. It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican in our city, and I was brought up to believe that Democrats were irrational, inferior, and-with certain exceptions like the Hollisters-dirty beings. There was only one degree lower, and that

afternoon having a vio

fair to end in blo

you anything you don

blic

or the Tariff," I r

, for example, was the Tariff? I tried

ried finally, with

out that h

ed, "to get fighting over somethi

hurled it into the marching ranks of those imposing torch-light processions which sometimes passed our house at night, with drums beating and f

died in the firm belief

was a de

t, he said. I was to take his word for it that the country would go to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the Tariff were taken away. Here, in a nutshell, though neither

and I recall the certain reverential emphasis he laid on it. And while my solicitude for the workmen was not so great as his and Mr. Durrett's, I was concerned as to what would happen to us if those twin gods, the Tariff and Prosperity, should take their departure fro

nected the dominance of the Republican Party with the continuation of manna and quails, in other words, with nothing that had t

good "which seeks to attain the permanent interests of the governed by evolving the character of its citizens." To put the matter bruta

world! Our leading citizens, learned in the classics though some of them might be, paid no heed to the dictum of the Greek idealist,

when there was a ring at the door-bell. I welcomed any interruption, even though the visitor proved to be only the druggist's boy; and there was always the possibility of a telegram announci

and Mr. Watling, a lawyer who had married the youngest of Gene Hollister's aunts, the visitors entered stealthily, after the manner of burglars; some of these were heavy-jowled, and all had an air of mystery that raised my curiosity and excitement to the highest pitch. I caught hold of Ella as she came up the stairs, but she tore herself free, and anno

ey want?" said my

them, and my father came upstairs, his usual

was it, Mr. Paret?

m-chair. He was clearly maki

Watling and some city po

they want? That is, if it's anything yo

Republican candidate for

s took me off my fe

consider it, Mr. Paret

t Ogilvy and Watling and Josiah Blackwood were thinking of

r I had already pictured myself tel

y didn't you ta

rned to me, he had regai

Hugh," he said. "Accept a political office!

uld be unwise, and my mother also understood that the discussion was closed. He

self-control or sang-froid only served to irritate and enhance, and my head w

y! And he had spurned it as if Mr. Blackwood and the others had gratuitously insulted him! And how was it, if my father so revered the Rep

had been made and declined. After all, this seemed to make my father a bigger

ed scornfully. "Office-holding

rather be his grandfather, Nathaniel Durrett, than the mayor of the biggest city in the country. Politicians, he said, we

exaggerated respect and awe in which Ralph's grandfather was held by my father and other influential persons, that I failed to be stirred by the elements of greatness in the grim personality of our first citizen, the iron-master. For he possessed such elements. He lived alone in Ingrain Street in an uncompromising mansion I always associated with the Sabbath, not only because I used to be taken there on decorous Sunday visits by my father, but because it was the ver

bindings. On the centre table, in addition to a ponderous Bible, was one of those old-fashioned carafes of red glass tipped with blue surmounted by a tumbler of blue tipped with red. Behind this table Mr. Durrett sat reading a volume of sermons, a really handsome old

latest flight on the nature of the Trinity or the depravity of man, or horticu

ould reply, "that he does not yet seem to b

heir company. They two, indeed, were of one kind, and I of another sort who could never understand them,-nor they me. To what depths of despair they reduced me they never knew, and yet they were doing it all for my good

it, Hugh," Mr. Durret

ny good without study.

could I but have entered into it. I did not reflect then that this stern old man must have throbbed once; nay, fire and energy still remained in his bowels, else he could not have continued to dominate a city. Nor did it occur to me that the great steel-works that lighted the southern sky were the result of a passion, of dreams similar to those posse

that I began to be impressed with the power of wealth, the adulation and reve

f smooth, orange-red bricks with threads of black mortar between them. One reads of happy school days, yet I fail to recall any really happy hours spent there, even in the yard

the Meaning of Things, no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the Spirit of man, but an endless marching and counter-marching up and down the map, weary columns of figures to be learned by rote instantly to be forgotten again. "On June the 7th General So-and-so proceeded with his whole army-" where? What does it matter? One little chapter of Carlyle, illuminated by a teacher of understanding, were worth a million such text-books. Alas, for the hatred of Virgil! "Paret" (a shiver), "begin at

ive again, as by a miracle. I travelled. Awakening at dawn, I saw, framed in a port-hole, rose-red Seriphos set in a living blue that paled the sapphire; the seas Ulysses had sailed, and the company of the Argonauts. My soul was steeped in unimagined colour, and in the memory of one rapturous instant is gathered what I was soon to see of Greece, is focussed the meaning of history, poetry and art. I was to stand one evening in spring on the mound where heroes sleep and gaze

tuffs from Tyre, tribute and spoil, slaves and jewels from conquered nations she absorbed; and yet whose very emperors were the unconscious instruments of a Progress they wot not of, preserved to the West by Marathon and Salamis. With Caesar's