Mary Virginia had gone, weeping and bewept, and the spirit of youth seemed to have gone with her, leaving the Parish House darkened because of its absence. A sorrowful quiet brooded over the garden that no longer echoed a caroling voice. Kerry, seeking vainly for the little mistress, would come whining back to John Flint, and look up mutely into his face; and finding no promise there, lie down, whimpering, at his feet. The man seemed as desolate as the dog, because of the child's departure.
"When I come back," Mary Virginia said to him at parting, "I expect you'll know more about moths and butterflies than anybody else in the world does. You're that sort. I'd love to be here, watching you grow up into it, but I've got to go away and grow up into something myself. I'm very glad you came here, Mr. Flint. You've helped me, lots."
"Me?" with husky astonishment.
"You, of course," said the child, serenely. "Because you are such a good man, Mr. Flint, and so patient, and you stick at what you try to do until you do it better than anybody else does. Often and often when I've been trying to do sums—I'm frightfully stupid about arithmetic—and I wanted to give up, I'd think of you over here just trying and trying and keeping right on trying, until you'd gotten what you wanted to know; and then I'd keep on trying, too. The funny part is, that I like you for making me do it. You see, I'm a very, very bad person in some things, Mr. Flint," she said frankly. "Why, when my mother has to tell me to look at so and so, and see how well they behave, or how nicely they can do certain things, and how good they are, and why don't I profit by such a good example, a perfectly horrid raging sort of feeling comes all over me, and I want to be as naughty as naughty! I feel like doing and saying things I'd never want to do or say, if it wasn't for that good example. I just can't seem to bear being good-exampled. But you're different, thank goodness. Most really good people are different, I guess."
He looked at her, dumbly—he had no words at his command. She missed the irony and the tragedy, but she sensed the depths of feeling under that mute exterior.
"I'm glad you're sorry I'm going away," said she, with the directness that was so engaging. "I perfectly love people to feel sorry to part with me. I hope and hope they'll keep on being sorry—because they'll be that much gladder when I come back. I don't believe there's anything quite so wonderful and beautiful as having other folks like you, except it's liking other folks yourself!"
"I never had to be bothered about it, either way," said he dryly. His face twitched.
"Maybe that's because you never stayed still long enough in any one place to catch hold," said she, and laughed at him.
"Good-by, Mr. Flint! I'll never see a butterfly or a moth, the whole time I'm gone, without making believe he's a messenger from Madame, and the Padre, and you, and Kerry. I'll play he's a carrier-butterfly, with a message tucked away under his wings: 'Howdy, Mary Virginia! I've just come from flying over the flowers in the Parish House garden; and the folks are all well, and busy, and happy. But they haven't forgotten you for a single solitary minute, and they miss you and wish you'd come back; and they send you their dear, dear love—and I'll carry your dear, dear love back to them!' So if you see a big, big, beautiful, strange fellow come sailing by your window some morning, why, that's mine, Mr. Flint! Remember!"
And then she was gone, and he had his first taste of unselfish human sorrow. Heretofore his worries had been purely personal and self-centered: this was different, and innocent. It shocked and terrified him to find out how intensely he could miss another being, and that being a mere child. He wasn't used to that sort of pain, and it bewildered him.
Eustis himself had wanted the little girl sent to a preparatory school which would fit her for one of the women's colleges. He had visions of the forward sweep of women—visions which his wife didn't share. Her daughter should go to the Church School at which she herself had been educated, an exclusive and expensive institution where the daughters of the wealthy were given a finishing hand-polish with ecclesiastical emery, as a sort of social hall-mark. Mrs. Eustis had a horror of what she called, in quotation-marks, the modern non-religious method of educating young ladies.
The Eustis house was closed, and left in charge of the negro caretakers, for Mrs. Eustis couldn't stand the loneliness of the place after the child's departure, and Eustis himself found his presence more and more necessary at the great plantation he was building up. Mrs. Eustis left Appleboro, and my mother missed her. There was a vein of pure gold underlying the placid little woman's character, which the stronger woman divined and built upon.
Laurence, too, entered college that Fall. I had coached him, in such hours as I could spare. He was conscientious enough, though his Greek was not the Greek of Homer and he vexed the soul of my mother with a French she said was spoke
But if he hadn't Mary Virginia's sensitiveness to all beauty, nor her playful fancy and vivid imagination, he was clear-brained and clean-thinking, with that large perspective and that practical optimism which seem to me so essentially American. He saw without confusion both the thing as it was and as it could become. With only enough humor to save him, he had a sternness more of the puritan than of the cavalier blood from which he had sprung. Above all was he informed with that new spirit brooding upon the face of all the waters, a spirit that for want of a better name one might call the Race Conscience.
It was this last aspect of the boy's character that amazed and interested John Flint, who was himself too shrewd not to divine the sincerity, even the commonsense, of what Laurence called "applied Christianity." Altruism—and Slippy McGee! He listened with a puzzled wonder.
"I wish," he grumbled to Laurence, "that you'd come off the roof. It gives a fellow stiff neck rubbering up at you!"
"I'd rather stay up—the air's better, and you can see so much farther," said Laurence. And he added hospitably: "There's plenty of room—come on up, yourself!"
"With one leg?" sarcastically.
"And two eyes," said the boy. "Come on up—the sky's fine!" And he laughed into the half-suspicious face.
The gimlet eyes bored into him, and the frank and truthful eyes met them unabashed, unwavering, with a something in them which made the other blink.
"When I got pitched into this burg," said the lame man thoughtfully, "I landed all there—except a leg, but I never carried my brains in my legs. I hadn't got any bats in my belfry. But I'm getting 'em. I'm getting 'em so bad that when I hear some folks talk bughouse these days it pretty near listens like good sense to me. Why, kid, I'm nut enough now to dangle over the edge of believing you know what you're talking about!"
"Fall over: I know I know what I'm talking about," said Laurence magnificently.
"I'm double-crossed," said John Flint, soberly and sadly, "Anyway I look at it—" he swept the horizon with a wide-flung gesture, "it's bugs for mine. I began by grannying bugs for him," he tossed his head bull-like in my direction, "and I stand around swallowing hot air from you—" He glared at Laurence, "and what's the result? Why, that I've got bugs in the bean, that's what! Think of me licking an all-day sucker a kid dopes out! Me! Oh, he—venly saints!" he gulped. "Ain't I the nut, though?"
"Well, supposing?" said Laurence, laughing. "Buck up! You could be a bad egg instead of a good nut, you know!"
John Flint's eyes slitted, then widened; his mouth followed suit almost automatically. He looked at me.
"Can you beat it?" he wondered.
"Beating a bad egg would be a waste of time I wouldn't be guilty of," said I amusedly. "But I hope to live to see the good nut grow into a fine tree."
"Do your damnedest—excuse me, parson!" said he contritely. "I mean, don't stop for a little thing like me!"
Laurence leaned forward. "Man," said he, impressively, "he won't have to! You'll be marking time and keeping step with him yourself before you know it!"
"Huh!" said John Flint, non-committally.
Laurence came to spend his last evening at home with us.
"Padre," said he, when we walked up and down in the garden, after an old custom, after dinner, "do you really know what I mean to do when I've finished college and start out on my own hook?"
"Put 'Mayne & Son' on the judge's shingle and walk around the block forty times a day to look at it!" said I, promptly.
"Of course," said he. "That first. But a legal shingle can be turned into as handy a weapon as one could wish for, Padre, and I'm going to take that shingle and spank this sleepy-headed old town wide awake with it!" He spoke with the conviction of youth, so sure of itself that there is no room for doubt. There was in him, too, a hint of latent power which was impressive. One did not laugh at Laurence.
"It's my town," with his chin out. "It could be a mighty good town. It's going to become one. I expect to live all my life right here, among my own people, and they've got to make it worth my while. I don't propose to cut myself down to fit any little hole: I intend to make that hole big enough to fit my possible measure."
"May an old friend wish more power to your shovel?"
"It'll be a steam shovel!" said he, gaily. Then his face clouded.
"Padre! I'm sick of the way things are run in Appleboro! I've talked with other boys and they're sick of it, too. You know why they want to get away? Because they think they haven't got even a fighting chance here. Because towns like this are like billion-ton old wagons sunk so deep in mudruts that nothing but dynamite can blow them out—and they are not dealers in dynamite. If they want to do anything that even looks new they've got to fight the stand-patters to a finish, and they're blockaded by a lot of reactionaries that don't know the earth's moving. There are a lot of folks in the South, Padre, who've been dead since the civil war, and haven't found it out themselves, and won't take live people's word for it. Well, now, I mean to do things. I mean to do them right here. And I certainly shan't allow myself to be blockaded by anybody, living or dead. You've got to fight the devil with fire;—I'm going to blockade those blockaders, and see that the dead ones are decently buried."
"You have tackled a big job, my son."
"I like big jobs, Padre. They're worth while. Maybe I'll be able to keep some of the boys home—the town needs them. Maybe I can keep some of those poor kids out of the mills, too. Oh, yes, I expect a right lively time!"
I was silent. I knew how supinely Appleboro lay in the hollow of a hard hand. I had learned, too, how such a hand can close into a strangling fist.
"Of course I can't clean up the whole state, and I can't reorganize the world," said the boy sturdily. "I'm not such a fool as to try. But I can do my level best to disinfect my own particular corner, and make it fit for men and safe for women and kids to live and breathe in. Padre, for years there hasn't been a rotten deal nor a brazen steal in this state that the man who practically owns and runs this town hadn't a finger in, knuckle-deep. He's got to go."
"Goliath doesn't always fall at the hand of the son of Jesse, my little David," said I quietly. I also had dreamed dreams and seen visions.
"That's about what my father says," said the boy. "He wants me to be a successful man, a 'safe and sane citizen.' He thinks a gentleman should practise his profession decently and in order. But to believe, as I do, that you can wipe out corruption, that you can tackle poverty the same as you would any other disease, and prevent it, as smallpox and yellow fever are prevented, he looks upon as madness and a waste of time."
"He has had sorrow and experience, and he is kind and charitable, as well as wise," said I.
"That's exactly where the hardest part comes in for us younger fellows. It isn't bucking the bad that makes the fight so hard: it's bucking the wrong-idea'd good. Padre, one good man on the wrong side is a stumbling-block for the stoutest-hearted reformer ever born. It's men like my father, who regard the smooth scoundrel that runs this town as a necessary evil, and tolerate him because they wouldn't soil their hands dealing with him, that do the greatest injury to the state. I tell you what, it wouldn't be so hard to get rid of the devil, if it weren't for the angels!"
"And how," said I, ironically, "do you propose to set about smoothing the rough and making straight the crooked, my son?"
"Flatten 'em out," said he, briefly. "Politics. First off I'm going to practice general law; then I'll be solicitor-general for this county. After that, I shall be attorney-general for the state. Later I may be governor, unless I become senator instead."
"Well," said I, cautiously, "you'll be so toned down by that time that you might make a very good governor indeed."
"I couldn't very well make a worse one than some we've already had," said the boy sternly. There was something of the accusing dignity of a young archangel about him. I caught a glimpse of that newer America growing up about us—an America gone back to the older, truer, unbuyable ideals of our fathers.
"I guess you'd better tell me good-by now, Padre," said he, presently. "And bless me, please—it's a pretty custom. I won't see you again, for you'll be saying mass when I'm running for my train. I'll go tell John Flint good-by, too."
He went over and rapped on the window, through which we could see Flint sitting at his table, his head bent over a book.
"Good-by, John Flint" said Laurence. "Good luck to you and your leggy friends! When I come back you'll probably have mandibles, and you'll greet me with a nip, in pure Bugese."
"Good-by," said John Flint, lifting his head. Then, with unwonted feeling: "I'm horrible sorry you've got to go—I'll miss you something fierce. You've been very kind—thank you."
"Mind you take care of the Padre," said the boy, waiving the thanks with a smile. "Don't let him work too hard."
"Who, me?" Flint's voice took the knife-edge of sarcasm. "Oh, sure! It don't need but one leg to keep up with a gent trying to run a thirty-six hour a day job with one-man power, does it? Son, take it from me, when a man's got the real, simonpure, no-imitation, soulsaving bug in his bean, a forty-legged cyclone couldn't keep up with him, much less a guy with one pedal short." He glared at me indignantly. From the first it has been one of his vainest notions that I am perversely working myself to death.
"There's nothing to be done with the Padre, then, I'm afraid," said Laurence, chuckling.
"I might soak him in the cyanide jar for ten minutes a day without killing him," mused Mr. Flint. "But," disgustedly, "what'd be the use? When he came to and found he'd been that long idle he'd die of heart-failure." He pushed aside the window screen, and the two shook hands heartily. Then the boy, wringing my hand again, walked away without another word. I felt a bit desolate—there are times when I could envy women their solace of tears—as if he figured in his handsome young person that newer, stronger, more conquering generation which was marching ahead, leaving me, older and slower and sadder, far, far behind it. Ah! To be once more that young, that strong, that hopeful!
When I began to reflect upon what seemed visionary plans, I was saddened, foreseeing inevitable disillusion, perhaps even stark failure, ahead of him. That he would stubbornly try to carry out those plans I did not doubt: I knew my Laurence. He might accomplish a certain amount of good. But to overthrow Inglesby, the Boss of Appleboro—for he meant no less than this—why, that was a horse of another color!
For Inglesby was our one great financial figure. He owned our bank; his was the controlling interest in the mills; he owned the factory outright; he was president of half a dozen corporations and chairman and director of many more.
Did we have a celebration? There he was, in the center of the stage, with a jovial loud laugh and an ultra-benevolent smile to hide the menace of his little cold piglike eyes, and the meaning of his heavy jaw. Will the statement that he had a pew in every church in town explain him? He had one in mine, too; paid for, which many of them are not.
At the large bare office in the mill he was easy of access, and would listen to what you had to say with flattering attention and sympathy. But it was in his private office over the bank that this large spider really spun the web of our politics. Mills, banks, churches, schools, lights, railroads, stores, heating, water-power—all these juicy flies apparently walked into his parlor of their own accord. He had made and unmade governors; he had sent his men to Washington. How? We suspected; but held our peace. If our Bible had bidden us Americans to suffer rascals gladly—instead of mere fools—we couldn't be more obedient to a mandate.
Men like James Eustis and Judge Mayne despised Inglesby—but gave him a wide berth. They wouldn't be enmeshed. It was known that Major Appleby Cartwright had blackballed him.
"I can stand a man, suh, that likes to get along in this world—within proper bounds. But Inglesby hasn't got any proper bounds. He's a—a cross between a Republican mule and a party-bolting boa-constrictor, an' a hybrid like that hasn't got any place in nature. On top of that he drinks ten cents a bottle grape juice and smokes five cent cigars. And he's got the brazen and offensive effrontery to offer 'em to self-respectin' men!"
And here was Laurence, our little Laurence, training himself to overthrow this overgrown Goliath! Well, if the boy could not bring this Philistine to the earth, he might yet manage to give him a few manful clumps on the head; perhaps enough to insure a chronic headache.
So thinking, I went in and watched John Flint finish a mounting-block from a plan in the book open upon the table, adding, however, certain improvements of his own.
He laid the block aside and then took a spray of fresh leaves and fed it to a horned and hungry caterpillar prowling on a bit of bare stem at the bottom of his cage.
"Get up there on those leaves, you horn-tailed horror! Move on,—you lepidopterous son of a wigglejoint, or I'll pull your real name on you in a minute and paralyze you stiff!" He drew a long breath. "You know how I'm beginning to remember their real names? I swear 'em half an hour a day. Next time you have trouble with those hickeys of yours, try swearing caterpillar at 'em, and you'll find out."
I laughed, and he grinned with me.
"Say," said he, abruptly. "I've been listening with both my ears to what that boy was talking to you about awhile ago. Thinks he can buck the Boss, does he?"
"Perhaps he may," I admitted.
"Nifty old bird, the Big Un," said Mr. Flint, squinting his eyes. "And," he went on, reflectively, "he's sure got your number in this burg. Take you by and large, you lawabiders are a real funny sort, ain't you? Now, there's Inglesby, handing out the little kids their diplomas come school-closing, and telling 'em to be real good, and maybe when they grow up he'll have a job in pickle for 'em—work like a mule in a treadmill, twelve hours, no unions, and the coroner to sit on the remains, free and gratis, for to ease the widow's mind. Inglesby's got seats in all your churches—first-aid to the parson's pants-pockets.
"Inglesby's right there on the platform at all your spiel-fests, smirking at the women and telling 'em not to bother their nice little noddles about anything but holding down their natural jobs of being perfect ladies—ain't he and other gents just like him always right there holding down their natural jobs of protecting 'em and being influenced to do what's right? Sure he is! And nobody howls for the hook! You let him be It—him with a fist in the state's jeans up to the armpit!
"Look here, that Mayne kid's dead right. It's you good guys that are to blame. We little bad ones see you kowtowing to the big worse ones, and we get to thinking we can come in under the wires easy winners, too. However, let me tell you something while I'm in the humor to gas. It's this: sooner or later everybody gets theirs. My sort and Inglesby's sort, we all get ours. Duck and twist and turn and sidestep all we want, at the end it's right there waiting for us, with a loaded billy up its sleeve: Ours! Some fine day when we're looking the other way, thinking we've even got it on the annual turnout of the cops up Broadway for class, why, Ours gets up easy on its hind legs, spits on its mitt, and hands us exactly what's coming to us, biff! and we wake up sitting on our necks in the middle of day-before-yesterday and year-after-next. I got mine. If I was you I wouldn't be too cock-sure that kid don't give Inglesby his, some of these days, good and plenty."
"Maybe so," said I, cautiously.
"Gee, that'd be fly-time for all the good guys in this tank, wouldn't it?" he grinned. "Sure! I can see 'em now, patting the bump on their beams where they think the brain-patch sprouts, and handing out hunks of con to the Lord about his being right on his old-time job of swatting sinners in their dinners. Yet they'll all of them go right on leading themselves up to be trimmed by the very next holdup that's got the nerve to do them! Friend, believe a goat when he tells you that you stillwater-and-greenpasture sheep are some bag of nuts!"
"Thank you," said I, with due meekness.
"Keep the change," said he, unabashed. "I wasn't meaning you, anyhow. I've got more manners, I hope, than to do such. And, parson, you don't need to have cold feet about young Mayne. If you ask me, I'd bet the limit on him. Why, I think so much of that boy that if he was a rooster I'd put the gaffs and my last dollar on him, and back him to whip everything in feathers clean up to baldheaded eagles. Believe me, he'd do it!" he finished, with enthusiasm.
Bewildered by a mental picture of a Laurence with ruffled neck-feathers and steel spurs, I hurriedly changed the subject to the saner and safer one of our own immediate affairs.
"Yep, ten orders in to-day's mail and seven in yesterday's; and good orders for the wasp-moths, single or together, and that house in New York wants steady supplies from now on. And here's a fancy shop wants a dozen trays, like that last one I finished. We're looking up," said he, complacently.
The winter that followed was a trying one, and the Guest Rooms were never empty. I like to record that John Flint put his shoulder to the wheel and became Madame's right hand man and Westmoreland's faithful ally. His wooden leg made astonishingly little noise, and his entrance into a room never startled the most nervous patient. He went on innumerable errands, and he performed countless small services that in themselves do not seem to amount to much, but swell into a great total.
"He may have only one leg," said Westmoreland, when Flint had helped him all of one night with a desperately ill millworker, "but he certainly has two hands; he knows how to use his ears and eyes, he's dumb until he ought to speak, and then he speaks to the point. Father, Something knew what It was about when you and I were allowed to drag that tramp out of the teeth of death! Yes, yes, I'm certainly glad and grateful we were allowed to save John Flint."
From that time forth the big man gave his ex-patient a liking which grew with his years. Absent-minded as he was, he could thereafter always remember to find such things as he thought might interest him. Appleboro laughs yet about the day Dr. Westmoreland got some small butterflies for his friend, and having nowhere else to put them, clapped them under his hat, and then forgot all about them; until he lifted his hat to some ladies and the swarm of insects flew out.
Without being asked, and as unostentatiously as he did everything else, Flint had taken his place in church every Sunday.
"Because it'd sort of give you a black eye if I didn't," he explained. "Skypiloting's your lay, father, and I'll see you through with it as far as I can. I couldn't fall down on any man that's been as white to me as you've been."
I must confess that his conception of religion was very, very hazy, and his notions of church services and customs barbarous. For instance, he disliked the statues of the saints exceedingly. They worried him.
"I can't seem to stand a man dolled-up in skirts," he confessed. "Any more than I'd be stuck on a dame with whiskers. It don't somehow look right to me. Put the he-saints in pants instead of those brown kimonas with gold crocheting and a rope sash, and I'd have more respect for 'em."
When I tried to give him some necessary instructions, and to penetrate the heathen darkness in which he seemed immersed, he listened with the utmost respect and attention—and wrinkled his brow painfully, and blinked, and licked his lips.
"That's all right, father, that's all right. If you say it's so, I guess it's so. I'll take your word for it. If it's good enough for you and Madame, there's got to be something in it, and it's sure good enough for me. Look here: the little girl and young Mayne have got a different brand from yours, haven't they?"
"Neither of them is of the Old Faith."
"Huh! Well, I tell you what you do: you just switch me in somewhere between you and Madame and him and her. That'll give me a line on all of you—and maybe it'll give all of you a line on me. See?"
I saw, but as through a glass darkly. So the matter rested. And I must in all humility set down that I have never yet been able to get at what John Flint really believes he believes.
Little by little, so quietly as to be unnoticeable in the working, but with, cumulative effect; built under the surface like those coral reefs that finally rear themselves into palm-crowned peaks upon the Pacific, during the years' slow upward march had John Flint grown.
Nature had never meant him for a criminal. The evil conditions that society saddles upon the slums had set him wrong because they gave him no opportunity to be right. Now even among butterflies there are occasional aberrants, but they are the rare exceptions. Give the grub his natural food, his chance to grow, protect him from parasites in the meanwhile, and he will presently become the normal butterfly. That is the Law.
At a crucial phase in this man's career his true talisman—a gray moth—had been put into his hand; and thereby he came into his rightful heritage.
I count as one of my red-letter days that on which I found him brooding over the little gray-brown chrysalis of the Papilio Cresphontes, that splendid swallowtail whose hideous caterpillar we in the South call the orange puppy, from the fancied resemblance the hump upon it bears to the head of a young dog. Its chrysalis looks so much like a bit of snapped-off twig that the casual eye misses it, fastened to a stem by a girdle of silk or lying among fallen leaves.
"I watched it ooze out of an egg like a speck of dirty water. I watched it eat a thousand times its own weight and grow into the nastiest wretch that crawls. I saw it stop eating and spit its stomach out and shrivel up, and crawl out of its skin and pull its own head off, and bury itself alive in a coffin made out of itself, a coffin like a bit of rotting wood. Look at it! There it lies, stone-dead for all a man's eyes can see!
"And yet this thing will answer a call no ears can hear and crawl out of its coffin something entirely different from what went into it! I've seen it with my own eyes, but how it's done I don't know; no, nor no man since the world was made knows, or could do it himself. What does it? What gives that call these dead-alive things hear in the dark? What makes a crawling ugliness get itself ready for what's coming—how does it know there's ever going to be a call, or that it'll hear it without fail?"
"Some of us call it Nature: but others call it God," said I.
"Search me! I don't know what It is—but I do know there's got to be Something behind these things, anyhow," said he, and turned the chrysalis over and over in his palm, staring down at it thoughtfully. He had used Westmoreland's words, once applied to his own case! "Oh, yes, there's Something, because I've watched It working with grubs, getting 'em ready for five-inch moths and hand-colored butterflies, Something that's got the time and the patience and the know-how to build wings as well as worlds." He laid the little inanimate mystery aside.
"It's come to the point, parson, where I've just got to know more. I know enough now to know how much I don't know, because I've got a peep at how much there is to know. There's a God's plenty to find out, and it's up to me to go out and find it."
"Some of the best and brightest among men have given all the years of their lives to just that finding out and knowing more—and they found their years too few and short for the work. But such help as you need and we can get, you shall have, please God!" said I.
"I'm ready for the word to start, chief." And heaven knows he was.
His passion transformed him; he forgot himself; took his mind off himself and his affairs and grievances and hatreds and fears; and thus had chance to expand and to grow, in those following years of patientest effort, of untiring research and observance, of lovingest study. Days in the open woods and fields burned his pale skin a good mahogany, and stamped upon it the windswept freshness of out of doors. The hunted and suspicious glance faded from his eyes, which took on more and more the student's absorbed intensity; the mouth lost its sinister straightness; and while it retained an uncompromising firmness, it learned how to smile. He was a familiar figure, tramping from dawn to dusk with Kerry at his heels, for the dog obeyed Mary Virginia's command literally. He looked upon John Flint as his special charge, and made himself his fourlegged red shadow. I am sure that if we had seen Kerry appear in the streets of Appleboro without John Flint, we would have incontinently stopped work, sounded a general alarm, and gone to hunt for his body. And to have seen John Flint without Kerry would have called forth condolences.
Sometimes—when I had time—I went with him moth-hunting at night; and never, never could either of us forget those enchanted hours under the stars!
We moved in a quiet fresh and dewy, with the night wind upon us like a benediction. Sometimes we skirted a cypress swamp and saw the shallow black water with blacker trees reflected upon its bosom, and heard the frogs' canorous quarrelings, and the stealthy rustlings of creatures of the dark. We crossed dreaming fields, and smelt leaves and grasses and sleeping flowers. We saw the heart of the wood bared to the magic of the moon, which revealed a hidden and haunting beauty of places commonplace enough by day; as if the secret souls of things showed themselves only in the holy dark.
For the world into which we stepped for a space was not our world, but the fairy world of the Little People, the world of the Children of the Moon. And oh, the moths! Now it was a tiger, with his body banded with yellow and his white opaque delicate wings spotted with black; now the great green silken Luna with long curved tails bordered with lilac or gold, and vest of ermine; now some quivering Catocala, with afterwings spread to show orange and black and crimson; now the golden-brown Io, with one great black velvet spot; and now some rarer, shyer fellow over which we gloated.
How they flashed and fluttered about the lantern, or circled about the trees upon which the feast had been spread! The big yellow-banded sphinx whirred hither and thither on his owl-like wings, his large eyes glowing like rubies, hung quivering above some flower for a moment, and then was off again as swift as thought. The light drew the great Regalis, all burnished tawny brown, striped and spotted with raw gold; and the Cynthia, banded with lilac, her heavy body tufted with white. The darkness in which they moved, the light which, for a moment revealed them, seemed to make their colors alive; for they show no such glow and glory in the common day; they pale when the moon pales, and when the sun is up they are merely moths; they are no longer the fantastic, glittering, gorgeous, throbbing Children of the Dark.
Home we would go, at an hour when the morning star blazed like a lighted torch, and the pearl-gray sky was flushing with pink. No haul he had ever made could have given him such joy as the treasures brought home in dawns like these, so free of evil that his heart was washed in the night dew and swept by the night wind.
My mother, after her pleasant, housewifely fashion, baked a big iced cake for him on the day he replaced his clumsy wooden peg with the life-like artificial limb he himself had earned and paid for. I had wished more than once to hasten this desirable day; but prudently restrained myself, thinking it best for him to work forward unaided. It had taken months of patient work, of frugality, and planning, and counting, and saving, to cover a sum which, once on a time, he might have gotten in an hour's evil effort. And it represented no small achievement and marked no small advance, so that it was really the feast day we made of it. That limb restored him to a dignity he seemed to have abdicated. It hid his obvious misfortune—you could not at first glance tell that he was a cripple, a something of which he had been morbidly conscious and savagely resentful. He would never again be able to run, or even to walk rapidly for any length of time, although he covered the ground at a good and steady gait; and as he grew more and more accustomed to the limb there was only a slight limp to distinguish him. The use of the stick he thought best to carry became perfunctory. I have seen Kerry carrying that stick when his master had forgotten all about it.
Meeting him now upon the streets, plainly but really well-dressed, scrupulously brushed, his linen immaculate, and with his trimmed red beard, his eyeglasses, and his soft hat, he conveyed the impression of being a professional man—say a pleasantly homely and scholarly college professor. There was a fixed sentiment in Appleboro that I knew very much more about Mr. Flint's past than I would tell—which was perfectly true, and went undenied by me; that he had seen better days; that he had been the black sheep of a good family, gotten into a scrape of some sort, and had then taken to traveling a rough road into a far country, eating husks with the swine, like many another prodigal; and that aware of this I had kept him with me until he found himself again.
So when folks met him and Kerry they smiled and spoke, for we are friendly people and send no man to Coventry without great cause. And there wasn't a child, black or white, who didn't know and like the man with the butterfly net.
The country people for miles around knew and loved him, too; for he walked up and down the earth and went to and fro in it, full of curious and valuable knowledge shared freely as the need arose. He would glance at your flower-garden, for instance, and tell you what insect visitors your flowers had, and what you should do to check their ravages. He'd walk about your out-buildings and commend white-wash, and talk about insecticides; and you'd learn that bees are partial to blue, but flies are not; and that mosquitoes seem to dislike certain shades of yellow. And then he'd leave you to digest it.
He was a quiet evangelist, a forerunner of that Grand Army which will some day arise, not to murder and maim men, but to conquer man's deadliest foe and greatest economic menace—the injurious insect.
It was he who spread the tidings of Corn and Poultry and Live Stock Clubs, stopping by many a lonely farm to whisper a word in the ears of discouraged boys, or to drop a hint to unenlightened fathers and mothers.
He carried about in his pockets those invaluable reports and bulletins which the government issues for the benefit and enlightenment of farmers; and these were left, with a word of praise, where they would do the most good.
Those same bulletins from the Bureau of Entomology had planted in John Flint's heart the seed which bore such fruit of good citizenship. The whole course of his early years had tended to make him suspicious of government, which spelt for him police and prison, the whole grim machinery which threatened him and which he in turn threatened. He had feared and hated it; it caught men and shut them up and broke them. If he ever asked himself, "What can my government do for me?" he had to answer: "It can put me in prison and keep me there; it can even send me to the Chair." Wherefore government was a thing to hate, to injure—and to escape from.
The first thing he had ever found worthy of respect and admiration in this same government was one of its bulletins.
"Where'd you get this?"
"I asked for it, and the Bureau sent it."
"Oh! You've got a friend there!"
"No. The bulletins are free to any one interested enough to ask for them."
"You mean to say the government gets up things like this—pays men to find out and write 'em up—pays to have 'em printed—and then gives 'em away to anybody? Why, they're valuable!"
"Yes; but they are nevertheless quite free. I have a number, if you'd like to go over them. Or you can send for new ones."
"But why do they do it? Where's the graft?" he wondered.
"The graft in this case is common sense in operation. If farms can be run with less labor and loss and more profit and pleasure, why, the whole country is benefited, isn't it? Don't you understand, the government is trying to help those who need help, and therefore is willing to lend them the brains of its trained and picked experts? It isn't selfish thwart that aim, is it?"
He said nothing. But he read and re-read the bulletins I had, and sent for more, which came to him promptly. They didn't know him, at the Bureau; they asked him no questions; he wasn't going to pay anybody so much as a penny. They assumed that the man who asked for advice and information was entitled to all they could reasonably give him, and they gave it as a matter of course. That is how and why he found himself in touch with his Uncle Sam, a source hitherto disliked and distrusted. This source was glad to put its trained intelligence at his service and the only reward it looked to was his increased capacity to succeed in his work! He simply couldn't dislike or distrust that which benefited him; and as his admiration and respect for the Department of Agriculture grew, unconsciously his respect and admiration for the great government behind it grew likewise. After all, it was his government which was reaching across intervening miles, conveying information, giving expert instruction, telling him things he wanted to know and encouraging him to go right on and find out more for himself!
Now if he had asked himself what his government could do for him, he had to answer: "It can help me to make good."
And he began to understand that this was possible because he obeyed the law, and that only in intelligent obedience and co-operation is there any true freedom. The law no longer meant skulking by day and terror by night; it was protection and peace, and a chance to work in the open, and the sympathy and understanding and comradeship of decent folks. The government was no longer a brute force which arbitrarily popped men into prison; it was the common will of a free people, just as the law was the common conscience.
I dare not say that he learned all this easily, or all at once, or even willingly. None of us learns our great lessons easily. We have to live them, breathe them, work them out with sweat and tears. That we do learn them, even inadequately, makes the glory and the wonder of man.
And so John Flint went to school to the government of the United States, and carried its little text-books about with him and taught them to others in even more need that he; and heckled hopeless boys into Corn Clubs; and coaxed sullen mothers and dissatisfied girls into Poultry and Tomato Clubs; and was full of homely advice upon such living subjects as the spraying of fruit trees, and how to save them from blight and scale-insects, and how to get rid of flies, and cut-worms, and to fight the cattle-tick, which is our curse; and the preservation of birds, concerning which he was rabid. His liking for birds began with Miss Sally Ruth's pigeons and the friendly birds in our garden. And as he learned to know them his love for them grew. I have seen him daily visit a wren's nest without once alarming the little black-eyed mother. I have heard him give the red-bird's call, and heard that loveliest of all birds answer him. And I have seen the impudent jays, within reach of his hand, swear at him unabashed and unafraid, because he fed a vireo first.
I like to think of his intimate friendship with the wholesome country children—not the least of his blessings. He was their chief visitor from the outside world. He knew wonderful secrets about things one hadn't noticed before, and he could make miracles with his quick strong fingers. He'd sit down, his stick and knapsack beside him, his glamorous dog at his feet, and while you and your sisters and brothers and friends and neighbors hung about him like a cluster of tow-headed bees, he'd turn a few sticks and bits of cloth and twine and a tack or two, and an old roller-skate wheel he took out of his pocket, into an air-ship! He could go down by your little creek and make you a water-wheel, or a windmill. He could make you marvelous little men, funny little women, absurd animals, out of corks or peanuts. He knew, too, just exactly the sort of knife your boy-heart ached for—and at parting you found that very knife slipped into your enraptured palm. You might save the pennies you earned by picking berries and gathering nuts, but you could never, never find at any store any candy that tasted like the sticks that came out of his pockets, and you needn't hope to try. He had the inviolable secret of that candy, and he imparted to it a divine flavor no other candy ever possessed. If you were a little doll-less girl, he didn't leave you with the provoking promise that Santa Claus would bring you one if you were good. He was so sure you were good that he made you right then and there a wonderful doll out of corn-husks, with shredded hair, and a frock of his own handkerchief. When he came again you got another doll—a store doll; but I think your child-heart clung to the corn-baby with the handkerchief dress. I have often wondered how many little cheeks snuggled against John Flint's home-made dollies, how many innocent breasts cradled them; how many a little fellow carried his knife to bed with him, afraid to let it get out of reach of a hard little hand, because he might wake up in the morning and find he had only dreamed it! No, I hardly think the country children were the least of John Flint's blessings. They would run to meet him, hold on to his hands, drag him here and there to show him what wonders their sharp eyes had discovered since his last visit; and give him, with shining eyes, such cocoons and caterpillars, and insects as they had found for him. It was they who called him the Butterfly Man, a name which spread over the whole country-side. If you had asked for John Flint, folks would have stared. And if you described him—a tall man in a Norfolk suit, with a red beard and a red dog, and an insect case:
"Oh, you mean the Butterfly Man! Sure. You'll find him about somewhere with the kids." If there was anything he couldn't have, in that county, it was because folks hadn't it to give if he should ask.
At home his passion for work at times terrified me. When I protested:
"I was twenty-five years old when I landed here," he reminded me. "So I've got twenty-five years' back-work to catch up with."
He had taken over a correspondence that had since become voluminous, and which included more and more names that stood for very much. Sometimes when I read aloud a passage from a letter that praised him, he turned red, and writhed like a little boy whose ears are being relentlessly washed by his elders.
By this time he had learned to really classify; heavens, how unerringly he could place an insect in its proper niche! It was a sort of sixth sense with him. That cold, clear, incisive power of brain which on a time had made Slippy McGee the greatest cracksman in America, was, trained and disciplined in a better cause, to make John Flint in later years an international authority upon lepidoptera, an observer to whom other observers deferred, a naturalist whose dictum settled disputed points. And I knew it, I foresaw it!
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! I grew as vain over his enlarging powers as if I had been the Mover of the Game, not a pawn. I felt, gloriously, that I had not lived for nothing. A great naturalist is not born every day, no, nor every year, nor even every century. And I had caught me a great burglar and I had hatched me a great naturalist! My Latin soul was enraptured with this ironic anomaly. I could not choose but love the man for that.
I really had some cause for vanity. Others than myself had been gradually drawn to the unassuming Butterfly Man. Westmoreland loved him. A sympathetic listener who seldom contradicted, but often shrewdly suggested, Flint somehow knew how to bring out the big doctor's best; and in consequence found himself in contact with a mind above all meanness and a nature as big and clean as a spray-swept beach.
"Oh, my, my, my, what a surgeon gone to waste!" Westmoreland would lament, watching the long, sure fingers at work. "Well, I suppose it's all for the best that Father De Rancé beat me to you—at least you've done less damage learning your trade." So absorbed would he become that he sometimes forget cross patients who were possibly fuming themselves into a fever over his delay.
Eustis, who had met the Butterfly Man on the country roads and had stopped his horse for an informal chat, would thereafter go out of his way for a talk with him. These two reticent men liked each other immensely. At opposite poles, absolutely dissimilar, they yet had odd similarities and meeting-points. Eustis was nothing if not practical; he was never too busy to forget to be kind. Books and pamphlets that neither Flint nor I could have hoped to possess found their way to us through him. Scientific periodicals and the better magazines came regularly to John Flint's address. That was Eustis's way. This friendship put the finishing touch upon the Butterfly Man's repute. He was my associate, and my mother was devoted to him. Miss Sally Ruth, whose pet pear-tree he had saved and whose pigeons he had cured, approved of him, too, and said so with her usual openness. Westmoreland was known to be his firm friend; nobody could forget the incident of those butterflies in the doctor's hat! Major Cartwright liked him so much that he even bore with the dogs, though Pitache in particular must have sorely strained his patience. Pitache cherished the notion that it was his duty to pass upon all visitors to the Butterfly Man's rooms. For some reason, known only to himself, the little dog also cherished a deep-seated grudge against the major, the very sound of whose voice outside the door was enough to send him howling under the table, where he lay with his head on his paws, a wary eye cocked balefully, and his snarls punctuating the Major's remarks.
"He smells my Unitarian soul, confound him!" said the major. "An' he's so orthodox he thinks he'll get chucked out of dog-heaven, if he doesn't show his disapproval."
The little dog did finally learn to accept the major's presence without outward protest; though the major declared that Pitache always hung down his tail when he came and hung it up when he left!
The Butterfly Man accepted whatever friendliness was proffered without diffidence, but with no change in his natural reserve. You could tell him anything: he listened, made few comments and gave no advice, was absolutely non-shockable, and never repeated what he heard. The unaffected simplicity of his manner delighted my mother. She said you couldn't tell her—there was good blood in that man, and he had been more than any mere tramp before he fell into our hands! Why, just observe his manner, if you please! It was the same to everybody; he had, one might think, no sense whatever of caste, creed, age, sex, or color; and yet he neither gave offense nor received it.
Those outbursts which had so terrified me at first came at rare and rarer intervals. If I were to live for a thousands years I should never be able to forget the last and worst; which fell upon him suddenly and without warning, on a fine morning while he sat on the steps of his verandah, and I beside him with my Book of Hours in my hand. In between the Latin prayers I sensed pleasantly the light wind that rustled the vines, and how the Mayne bees went grumbling from flower to flower, and how one single bird was singing to himself over and over the self-same song, as if he loved it; and how the sunlight fell in a great square, like a golden carpet, in front of the steps. It was all very still and peaceful. I was just turning a page, when John Flint jerked his pipe out of his mouth, swung his arm back, and hurled the pipe as far as he could. I watched it, involuntarily, and saw where it fell among our blue hydrangeas; from which a thin spiral of smoke arose lazily in the calm air. But Flint shoved his hat back on his head, sat up stiffly, and swore.
He had been with me then nearly four years, and I had learned to know the symptoms:—restlessness, followed by hours of depressed and sullen brooding. So I had heretofore in a sense been forewarned, though I never witnessed one of these outbursts without being shaken to the depths. This one was different—as if the evil force had invaded him suddenly, giving him no time to resist. A glance at his face made me lay aside the book hurriedly; for this was no ordinary struggle. The words that had come to me at first came back now with redoubled meaning, and rang through my head like passing-bells:
"For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood but against ... the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness."
He tilted his head, looked upward, and swore steadily. As for me, my throat felt as if it had been choked with ashes. I could only stare at him, dumbly. If ever a man was possessed, he was. His voice rose, querulously:
"I get up in the morning, and I catch bugs, and I study them, and I dry them—and I go to bed. I get up in the morning, and I catch bugs, and I study them, and I dry them—and I go to bed. I get up every morning, and I do the same damn thing, over and over and over and over, day in, day out, day in, day out. Nothing else. ... No drinks, no lights, no girls, no sprees, no cards, no gang, no risks, no jobs, no bulls, no anything! God! I could say my prayers to Broadway, anywhere from the Battery up to Columbus Circle! I want it all so hard I could point my nose like a lost dog and howl for it!
"... There is a Dutchman got a restaurant down on Eighth Avenue, and I dream at nights about the hotdog-and-kraut, and the ham-and that they give you there, and the jane that slings it. Hips on her like a horse, she has, and an arm that shoves your eats under your nose in a way you've got to respect. I smell those eats in my sleep. I want some more Childs' bucks. I want to see the electrics winking on the roofs. I want to smell wet asphalt and see the taxis whizzing by in the rain. I want to see a seven-foot Mick cop with a back like a piano-box and a paw like a ham and a foot like a submarine with stove-polish on it. I want to see the subway in the rush hour and the dips and mollbuzzers going through the crowd like kids in a berry patch. I want to see a ninety-story building going up, and the wops crawling on it like ants. I want to see the breadline, and the panhandlers, and the bums in Union Square. I want a bellyful of the happy dust the old town hands out—the whole dope and all there is of it! My God! I want everything I haven't got!"
He looked at me, wildly. He was trembling violently, and sweat poured down his face.
"Parson," he rasped, "I've bucked this thing for fair, but I've got to go back and see it and smell it and taste it and feel it and know it all again, or I'll go crazy. You're all of you so good down here you're too much for me. I'm home-sick for hell. It—it comes over me like fire over the damned. You don't fool yourself that folks who know what it is to be damned can stay on in heaven without freezing, do you? Well, they can't. I can't help it! I can't! I've got to go—this time I've got to go!"
I sat and stared at him. Oh, what was it Paul had said we were to pray for, at such a time as this?
"And for me, that speech may be given to me ... that I may open my mouth with confidence..."
But the words wouldn't come.
"I've got to go! I've got to go, and try myself out!" he gritted.
"You—understand your risks," I managed to say through stiff lips. I had always, in my secret heart, been more or less afraid of this. Always had I feared that the rulers of the world of darkness, swooping down and catching him unaware, might win the long fight in the end.
"Here you are safe. You are building up an honored name. You are winning the respect and confidence of all decent people—and you wish to undo it all. You wish to take such desperate chances—now!" I groaned.
"I've got to go!" he burst forth, white-lipped. "You've never seen a dip cut off from his dope, have you? Well, I'm it, when the old town calls me loud enough for me to hear her plain. I've stood her off as long as I could—and now I'm that crazy for her I could wallow in her dust. Besides, there's not such a lot of risks. I don't have to leave my card at the station-house to let 'em know I'm calling, do I? They haven't been sitting on what they think is my grave to keep me from getting up before Gabriel beats 'em to it, have they? No, they're not expecting me. What I could do to 'em now would make the Big Uns look like a bunch of pikers—and their beans would have to turn inside out before they fell for it that I'd come back to my happy home and was on the job again."
"If—if you hadn't been so white, I'd have cut and run for it without ever putting you wise. But I want to play fair. I'd be a hog if I didn't play fair, and I'm trying to do it. I'm going because I can't stay. I've got enough of my own money, earned honest, saved up, to pay my way. Let me take it and go. And if I can come back, why, I'll come."
He was stone deaf to entreaties, prayers, reasoning, argument. The four years of his stay with me, and all their work, and study, and endeavor, and progress, seemed to have slipped from him as if they had never been. They were swept aside like cobwebs. He broke away from me in the midst of my pleading, hurried into his bedroom, and began to sort into a grip a few necessities.
"I'll leave on the three-o'clock," he flung over his shoulder to me, standing disconsolate in the door. "I'll stop at the bank on my way." I could do nothing; he had taken the bit between his teeth and was bolting. I had for the time being lost all power of control over him, and before I might hope to recover it he would be out of my reach. Perhaps, I reflected wretchedly, the best thing to do under the circumstances, would simply be to give him his head. I had seen horses conquered like that. But the road before John Flint was so dark and so crooked—and at the end of it waited Slippy McGee!