The Dive. I
I
No one seemed to know exactly what depth of water lay beneath the Shelf. Some said eighteen feet, some twenty-five. Payne Gilbert, an aged retired salt, with a quizzical squint, a gnarled, compact body, and a row of beautifully child-like straw-colored curls that hung below his shoulders, swore to over seventy. This was a preposterous figure — but then, old Payne swore to many preposterous facts and figures. In the fashion of all notable liars, he had made his story the most circumstantial of all. Anyone might see, hanging at the head of his bunk in a cabin up the Valley, the lead and the twelve fathoms of line which, he guaranteed, had been heaved from the Shelf without finding bottom. The lie circumstantial was Payne Gilbert’s prerogative — his reputation, almost his character, from time immemorial, through the length and breadth of the Valley. One smiled indulgently at his seventy feet, and returned unruffled to the argument of twenty-five against eighteen.
As a fact, both of the lesser estimates were reasonably correct, for the water of the Reservoir had been known to lapse as much as seven feet down the vertical wall of the Shelf between April and mid-August. However, the local disputants, for purposes of debate, assumed a constant depth, scorning all estimates of variation as needlessly technical. For pure academicism, nothing can exceed the methods of such localistic disputes.
With Ronald Ronald alone, of all the men and youths in Chiswick Valley, the question stood otherwise. He did not, to be sure, care a brass penny how deep the water was; but he had a secret and romantic wish of his own, actually to see and touch the bottom. And he meant to achieve his wish and, sooner or later, get his fingers into the jungle of rotting limbs and trailing weeds, eels and derelict fish-lines, stones and black primal ooze, which, to his imagination, constituted the floor of that abysmal gloom. Many and many a night he had sat above on the Shelf, alone or with his uncle and his father, catching prosaic strings of horn-pout, while in thought he was down there with the uncaught horn-pout nuzzling their blind way around the bottom, poking flat broad noses through the weeds, stirring up little clouds of mud with their tails. All the while that his father and his father’s brother talked desultorily of the prospects for breakfast and the niceties of skinning their catch, he was vividly conscious of the queer unseen world below the level of the Shelf. He visualized it, he groped about in it; and the other two, so contentedly unaware of it, seemed to him as blind in their way as the struggling and flapping pout which, every now and then, one or the other of them pulled out into an upper world of air and trees and stars, which was to the fish as non-existent as the world below the Shelf seemed to be to his placid elders.
And in the morning, while they were sleeping away a good part of the forenoon, Ronald Ronald was as likely as not to be back on the Shelf, stripping off his clothes, stowing them at the inner end of a little cave he had discovered in the cliff at his back, and preparing to dive again and again into the cool liquid blackness below — now and then, after a perfect take-off, a few inches deeper than he had ever gone before, but never deep enough to get his fingers round a pebble or into the mud.
You would have liked to see him there on the edge of the Shelf making ready for his dive; for he was perfect and sound and strong in body, and — a poet or any genuine and simple soul would add — beautiful. A little more than boy and less than man, he had in every movement the pure lithe grace and symmetry of nature. If you had seen Ronald there on the Shelf, poised for his plunge into the water ten feet below, and standing clear-cut against the blue-black surface of it, he would have seemed as natural and as decorative, in his supreme lack of self-consciousness, as the slender and gleaming stem of a birch sapling in a sombre grove of cedars. You could have imagined as he raised his arms that, instead of dropping with the precision of old Gilbert’s lead into a snarl of hideous and rotting things, he was going to spring upward like a flame and clutch at the sun.
There was nothing in the place to blend a suggestion of artifice with this naturalness of the boy. The Shelf was a narrow rock-ledge jutting over the water — a chin of rock, under which the throat fell away sheer to invisible depths. It was on the west wall of an ancient river-gorge, at this point two hundred feet wide. The gorge narrowed just above, where Salter’s Run, the tributary, roared in over its cascades; below, it broadened out into the greatest diameter of the Reservoir. The whole body of water was an artificial creation, made from one valley brook caught and tamed; but it had been there ever since the decade of the Mexican War, making itself at home within its frame of rugged hills; and the dam at its southern end was two miles from the Shelf, and concealed from it by twin islands. All that was visible from Ronald Ronald’s favorite haunt was in keeping with the gorge full of sluggish black water, the rugged cliffs at each side, the narrow footpath winding down to the Shelf, and the soft thunder of Salter’s Run taking its final plunge. Only the local name, ‘Seven Farms Reservoir,’ existed to remind the living that once, in an elder generation, engineering had inundated a whole little farming community, had blotted it out under a hundred feet of water, in order that the future generations of a great and growing city thirty miles nearer the sea might be assured of perennial clean water from the hills.
Of the detailed traditions of the Valley in which he spent his summers, young Ronald Ronald knew much less, and felt much more, than he might have done had he lived there the year round from his birth. His father, Jeremy Ronald, had been born there; but, growing up in the generation in which the country began to move cityward, he had broken the long regional habit of his ancestors by becoming a silversmith in the nearest large town, and his liking for his rural origins came out principally through the humdrum fisherman in him.
Also in the generation of Jeremy Ronald, the family had astoundingly evolved a professional genealogist and haunter of libraries — Eustace, a bachelor, the older brother of Jeremy, and the aforementioned uncle of Ronald.
These two brothers were drawn back to the old homestead often enough for it really to remain home to each of them. But they were drawn by very different considerations. Jeremy was simply a boy who would never grow up. He had performed the notable feat of establishing his place in the industrial life of the town eight miles away; but that exhausted his genius for innovation. He would always remain a supremely contented fisherman, hunter, and gatherer of nuts and berries in their seasons.
With Eustace it was different. When he accompanied Jeremy on fishing trips and rambles, it was in a sort of amused absent-mindedness. Even to Ronald it was evident that Eustace was always preoccupied with concerns that he never thought of broaching to the boy’s father.
It was at the farmhouse, in talk with Elijah Ronald, the lad’s grandfather, that Eustace seemed most alive. Even there, he listened much more than he talked. But it was evident that he considered Elijah’s flow of anecdote and reminiscence good listening; whereas Jeremy, who talked not at all, was inclined to fall into the dozing attitude of one who thinks he has heard it all before.
Superficially, Ronald’s attitude was that of his father. Long ago he had accepted unthinkingly the family attitude toward his grandfather, which was the attitude of sensible middle-aged folk, with pressing current interests, toward a garrulous old gentleman who had laughed over his own stories so often that he could certainly have told them in his sleep. Nevertheless, Ronald could not help feeling at times, in flashes, a veneration amounting to awe. His grandfather had the patriarchal beard and austere facial nobility of a major prophet. What Ronald glimpsed now and then, not quite realizing it himself, was the import of the way his Uncle Eustace hung on the old man’s words — a circumstance which subtly tended to invest Elijah with the dignity of some great character in a play.
If Ronald had reached the age of self-analysis, he might have been aware that all his impressions of the region about Chiswick Valley were the resultant of an unusual triangular relationship which involved himself and his grandfather and (the boy’s father, characteristically, a blank here) his Uncle Eustace. There was hardly a spot or building for miles, which was not, in the boy’s consciousness, festooned with legend, humorous, sad, or grim; and the source of every one of these legends was his grandfather; and the cause of his sensitiveness to them was his uncle. A thousand times since he had begun to spend all of every summer at his grandfather’s a certain thing had happened, slight in itself, but so often repeated that it had become at once expected and momentous. It was only this: that, while Elijah was talking, and young Ronald lay sprawled on the grass or the old hair-cloth dining-room lounge or the littered shop-bench, the boy would suddenly become aware that his Uncle Eustace was looking at him in a strange way, with a peculiar fixed intentness of regard. It was a look droll, quizzical, inviting, reproving, wistful, and, in some undefined way, sad. Curiously, its effect on the boy was not to set him puzzling his wits about Eustace and what was going on in that eccentric gentleman’s mind, but simply to accent and underline what his grandfather then happened to be saying. In those moments the persons, the very things, in Elijah’s anecdotes came home to Ronald’s mind with a strange sharp intensity, more real than anything in his daily life, and less resembling the casualness of ordinary impressions than the unearthly distinctness of dreams. In this way Ronald stored up a multitude of ineffaceable images of a past beyond living memories, just as (he once saw in a flash of intuition) Elijah himself had stored up in youth the vivid images he was now displaying — many of them from his grandfather and his grandfather’s mother, who had died, an aged woman of nearly ninety, when he, Elijah, was in his nineteenth year, as Ronald now was.
In this three-cornered relationship Eustace might have appeared to an imaginative outsider as the embodied spirit and quintessence of the past, calling to youth to understand its own origins, to become sensitized and responsive to the dead-and-buried things that had made it. Or perhaps Eustace had reached that time of life at which a man regrets having no children to hand himself on to, and was simply groping for companionship with the boy. But certainly no such considerations touched the mind of Ronald — not even when he accidentally learned, from an overheard conversation between two maiden cousins of his father, that Eustace had once been in love with Ronald’s own mother, and that he and Jeremy had been keen fraternal rivals. This fact merely seemed to him prettily pathetic and romantic. Applying one of the rigid canons of youth, he felt a mild approval of his uncle’s never having married anyone else; and he was more than a little embarrassed when he reflected how near he had come, so to speak, to having Eustace for a father instead of Jeremy. But, so far, he was above everything a healthy-minded schoolboy, all of whose conscious life was absorbed in the affairs of his own lively young existence. Most of his awareness of his Uncle Eustace expressed itself in quickened appreciation of Grandfather Elijah, to whom Eustace was always deftly leading him.
There was one fact which, had Ronald ever had the chance to utilize it, might have cemented a remarkable comradeship between the man and the boy, even across the insulating gap of a generation. This was the fact that Eustace’s most deliberate interest lay, and had for years lain, exactly where Ronald’s own interest was constantly being drawn by the hint of submerged romanticism in his make-up — that is, at the bottom of the gorge below the Shelf, near the head of Seven Farms Reservoir. In the very moments when Ronald was thinking his elders rather stuffy because fishing meant to them only fish, one, at least, of them was mentally exploring the depths with an imagination not less keen than Ronald’s own, and an infinitely better notion of what to seek there and where to find it. A great deal of what he sought he had found in old bundles of family letters, legal documents, maps, records, manuscripts, two or three volumes of privately printed memoirs, and such tools of the genealogist’s trade; and, by dint of tirelessly piecing together these and occasional illuminating scraps of Elijah Ronald’s discourse, he was a long way toward having disinterred from under their seventy years’ covering of waters the century and three quarters of his own ancestors’ history that lay at the bottom of Lower Chiswick Valley.
This pageant of family history, almost a sealed book even to the genealogist’s father, Eustace had often enough relived as he uncoiled it backward, generation by generation; and often, as he sat on the Shelf making suitable answers to the somewhat pointless remarks of his brother Jeremy, he was inwardly taking the part of one character after another in the lighted and costumed and always intensely romantic tragi-comedy of men and women, that had first been played above the very soil on which his baited hook now lay. But of all this his young nephew was to know nothing in time to make use of it. The two never, in the deep sense, found each other.
II
The summer of Ronald’s nineteenth year broke the chain of the boy’s vacations at his grandfather’s farm above the Reservoir. A sudden project of entering the university a year earlier brought him against certain matters of quadratics and European history that had to be accounted for in short order; and he stuck faithfully with his books, living in a triangle between his own home and the rooms of two teachers. It was not until late afternoon of the first Saturday in September that he coasted his motor-cycle down the last long hill into Upper Chiswick Valley, and pulled down to dismount by the white well-house in the farmyard.
His grandmother was there weeding a flower-bed — a little lovable faded woman, who gave the effect of having been hopelessly drowned decades ago under the flood of her husband’s loquacity. Ronald gave her a hug and a kiss and answered her invariable questions about his mother. And then, at the front door, appeared his grandfather with two empty pails, which he promptly set down on the well-curb in order to pump Ronald’s hand.
‘Well, now, my boy,’ he said heartily — and then, noticing, ‘ What’s the matter with the volcano? ’ This was his perennial joke about the newer modes of locomotion. He had summed up the motor-cycle when it was new by saying,
‘ Well, every man to his own notion; one man’s meat is another’s pizen, and some folks ain’t all alike — but for my part, when I go to ride I dunno ’s I care much about settin’ a-straddle of a volcano.’
Ronald laughed. ‘Oh, I just shut her off at the top of the hill,’ he explained.
‘ Gas is up to thirteen cents now! ’ (This places his period with sufficient accuracy.) ‘You ’ll hear her erupt all right when I go back. Where’s dad and Uncle Eustace? ’
Ronald gathered, from a circuitous explanation, that they had gone down to the Reservoir early, to see if they could not get a big pickerel or two before sunset, and that they meant then to collect a string of pout for breakfast and come back early. Laughing away his little grandmother’s protests against his missing supper, he stalked off down the main Valley road to join the fishermen.
Half a mile on the sloping road, a turn at the little one-room brick-red schoolhouse, and another half-mile on a footpath through dusky woods, brought him out at the edge of the cliff above the Shelf. At this high point he always stopped, breathless at the sudden expanse of water, and always held by a sense of living over some dim forgotten experience, half-remembered, perhaps, from a dream. The Reservoir lay under him like a sheet of gun-metal, burnished where the last glow of sunset touched its edge, dull elsewhere, and blue-black in the gorge below, where, on the Shelf, he could just make out the two expected figures.
After a little he scrambled on down the path, whistling.
‘Well!’ exclaimed his father, glancing up, ‘here’s the boy!’
‘Good!’ said Eustace, getting to his feet to shake hands warmly. ‘And how’s Ronald Square? Sit down, Ronald Square, and take over one of my poles, and tell me how goes the cramming.’
‘And look at that,’ put in Jeremy, signifying a spot behind his back. ‘Four pounds and thirteen ounces, scaled. And settle down, you two: the pout are just beginning.’
Ronald exclaimed sufficiently over the big pickerel laid out on the rock; then he sat down between the others, helped himself to one of his uncle’s two poles, and plunged into his account of preparations for college. The darkness grew; the talk fell off; Jeremy lighted the lantern. After a half-hour there was no sound among them except the occasional splash of a horn-pout drawn struggling from the water, and the thudding flap-flap of its tail as it lay gasping on the rock, waiting to be unhooked.
The stillness of the night was thick, almost palpable. The surface of the water lay unseen except where one of the lines, moving, started faint concentric rings; the great receding cliff at their backs was an ambiguous bulk, indefinitely remote. There grew upon Ronald slowly a queer illusion that the Shelf, with themselves on it, was swung floating through a misty blur of space, in a curious dreamy hinterland outside of time and dimensions and the solid earth. He felt nebulous, disembodied, strange to himself. ‘Am I really I, or am I someone else, and if so who?’ was the ancient and trite dilemma to which the silence and his own sensations had brought him.
Suddenly an exclamation from his father brought him back and jerked his attention upward to a lantern that was flickering down the crooked footpath. Now it disappeared as its bearer passed behind some huge rock; then it threw distorted and quivering masses of light upon the water, and cast the striding shadows of two legs on the face of the east wall opposite, like a gigantic pair of scissors opening and closing.
‘Most probably old Gilbert,’ said Jeremy matter-of-factly. ‘Always was a night-owl.’
It was indeed Payne Gilbert, descending nimbly to them amid a rattle of dislodged stones, and looking, by the light of his own lantern, more than ever like an inconceivably aged child who had never been any different and never could be. His smooth straw-colored curls were innocence, and his dancing blue eyes were impishness. No one knew Payne’s age. He laid claim to upward of a hundred, but that was neither here nor there, as Elijah said. Eustace, reckoning by things that Payne could vividly remember, gave him credit for close to ninety.
‘How fi’ ye? How fi’ ye, Ronnie?’ he cried, at sight of the unexpected third member of the group. ‘Well, now, how be ye? ’
Eustace saw with approval that Gilbert had an honest and hearty liking for the boy.
Ronald explained his summer as simply as he knew how. The old sailor stared at him, with the stupefaction of one in whose universe the world of books has no orbit.
‘Well, now, don’t that beat the Dutch!’ he exclaimed. ’I got all the lib’ry I ever expect to have right here’ — And he rolled up a sleeve of his blue jumper to show, tattooed in blue India ink on his fibrous arm: ‘Payne Gilbert, A. B., U.S.S. Halcyon, 1843,’ surrounded by an intricacy of ropes and anchors. ‘I c’n read it, ’n’ I c’n write it,’ he summed up with satisfaction. ‘It was your father’s grandfather larned me.’ This to Eustace. For purposes of genealogical reminiscence, Jeremy hardly existed. ‘None o’ these here new-fangled s’s for him! ’
‘ Your great-great-grandfather, Ronald,’ supplied Eustace. ‘That was Ephraim Ronald. You’ve heard your grandfather tell how he made the oak water-wheel, and how it was still turning out grist a good twenty years after the iron one that old Sam Rudd put in at the same time was nothing but a mass of rusty junk. Ephraim was born in 1798. One odd fact is that he died in 1864, just about a year before his own mother did — and she was born in 1776. She, you see, was your great-greatgreat-grandmother — the one who had the pink lustre tea-set when she was a bride. Your grandfather, of course, remembers them both very well — but not his great-grandfather, her husband, because he died when your grandfather was only a baby.’
‘’Lije don’t rec’lect his great-grandfather?’ said Payne in astonishment. ‘Why, it always appeared to me like ’Lije had a great power o’ memory.’ He seemed to imply that remembering a given thing was a feat of main strength — a sort of demonstration of virility. ‘Well, I remember him right enough, and his father afore him.’
‘Oh, come now, Payne!’ said Eustace. ‘You might well enough remember Sarah’s husband, because he did n’t die until 1850, when he was about seventy-four. But his father! why, he was only twenty-two when he was killed, and that was in 1777. To remember him, Payne, you’d have to be in the neighborhood of a hundred and forty years old. I expect you ’ll be remembering the assassination of Julius Cæsar next! — Ronald Ronald was that young man’s name — like yours, Ronnie.’
‘Now there you ’re plumb wrong, Eustace,’ cried Payne testily. ‘ I dunno nought about your Julia Cæsars, but I know about Joel Ronald’s father right enough. His name was just plain John, and he lived to be a old, old man, close on to a hunderd, and died as peaceful in his armchair as airy mortal ever lasted on to second childhood. Tell ye another thing, Eustace: ye ain’t come nigh on to doin’ justice to that there old oak millwheel.’
There followed a genealogical dispute, full of the sound and fury characteristic of such discussions. Throughout it, Payne bristled with the scorn of a nonagenarian whose memory is aspersed by callow youths who cannot possibly know anything about it. Nevertheless, Ronald’s paternal ancestry began for the first time to assume coherence in the boy’s mind, at least in its main aspects. He did not realize that Eustace was keeping the discussion alive more to inform him than to convince the old sailor.
Ephraim, to whom Eustace had ascribed the old mill-wheel, was, he made out, his grandfather’s grandfather. Ephraim’s father had been Ronald Joel Ronald — he who had courted and married Sarah, the Baltimore lady of the pink lustre tea-set. What was now being interminably disputed was the paternity of this Ronald Joel Ronald. If Eustace’s account were to be believed, Ronald Joel’s father was a certain youthful Ronald Ronald who had been killed in an accident in the period of the Revolutionary War. The ‘plain John’ whom Payne remembered from his boyhood had been the long-lived elder brother of this Ronald Ronald, and hence the uncle of Ronald Joel, who was, at the time of his father’s death, a mere babe in arms. This uncle’s name, moreover, had been not ‘plain John’ at all, but John Eustace. He it was who had brought up Ronald Joel, the child of his dead brother, young Ronald — whence Payne’s idea that John Eustace had been Joel’s own father. The argument went round and round in a treadmill, the disputants finding no item to agree on except the one salient romantic fact that John, or John Eustace, had fought for two years under Paul Jones.
III
At length Ronald’s uncle delicately closed the issue by reintroducing the old mill-wheel.
The old sailor jumped at this bait. ‘Did I onderstand ye to say,’ he said, ‘that Ephraim made that mill-wheel? Why, Ephraim no more made that wheel than I did. Ephraim remade it, and moved it up into the wheel-house where the new one is now — the one your dad’s father had put in about the end of the war, in sixty-six or seven. But that fust wheel was not put in by no Ephraim, nor by Joel, nor yet by this here old John that ye call John Eustace—Joel’s father that ye say was his uncle. It was put in by the own father o’ this here old John, or John Eustace — and many’s the time I ’ve heard tell of it from this same old John, just about the time Ephraim was a-rebuildin’ of that wheel, when I was a young sprig the age o’ Ronnie here.’
Ronald saw that his uncle was, at first, incredulous. At length Eustace said, ‘I should like to think you ’re right about all this, Payne —and I’m not going to say you ’re not. The old gentleman was certainly a good hand at woodwork, for we know that he made the old pine case of the grandfather clock that stands in the corner by the fireplace. He bought the wooden works and the dial from a peddler, and made the case himself. And that — think of it! — was in 1748. Besides, he was something of an inventor, not to say a mechanical genius. But a wooden water-wheel that lasted — let me see — pretty nearly a hundred years and was still sound! How are we going to prove this, Payne? ’
‘ Prove it! ’ snorted Payne. ‘ Prove it! ’ Hain’t I got one o’ the floats from that there old wheel screwed up on to the wall o’ my shanty, with the old hickory pegs still in it, one at each end, stickin’ out for to hang your hat and coat on? Stop ’n’ have a look at it on your way home, if what I’m tellin’ ye ain’t good enough.’
Gilbert was not the first to cite the present existence of an object as conclusive proof of its antiquity. He spoke as if the ancient piece of wood were ready to shout its age and the name of its maker to the first inquirer.
Eustace, though, seemed not in the least disconcerted by this illogicality. ‘We ’ll do that, Payne, thank you,’ he said. ‘And if it was really made by the man you say — well, it’s just possible I may be able to prove it to my own satisfaction. The old man Payne means, Ronnie, was Abijah Ronald, the father of John Eustace and of the Ronald Ronald who was drowned; and he was your great-great-great-great-great— five great’s — grandfather.’ Eustace ticked off the generations on his fingers as if they had been seconds.
‘Yes, but, Uncle Eustace — ’
‘Go on, Ronnie.’
‘I suppose I’m rather mixed up about all this family history — but there’s one thing I can’t make head or tail of, and that ’s the houses.’
‘Yes — go on.’
‘Well, I always supposed the family moved up the Valley into our house, grandfather’s house, when the Reservoir came. But now you talk about someone long before that — Ephraim, was it ? — who had a water-wheel right where grandfather’s is now. And he must have lived in our house, then. What became of the old house, the one down here? and why did they leave it? Or did n’t they? I suppose that’s a fool question, is n’t it?’
‘Indeed it is n’t, my boy, not at all. Of course you would n’t know. I’ve spent several hundreds of hours myself, off and on, finding out things about it. It’s a rather romantic story, with a pretty enough little innocent romantic scandal bundled in with it, and some time I ’ll show you all the documents — at least, all I’ve found. But the long and short of it is that, when your greatgreat-great — No, I won’t do that any more, Ronnie; no wonder you make faces. Well, then, when that young Ronald Ronald was drowned in the well, — it was in 1777, and he was with the Colonial troops, only he came home on furlough, — he left his young wife with a nine-months-old baby, Ronald Joel, and a bedridden father-in-law, old Abijah, to take care of.
‘She had been in a peck of trouble, that young woman, even before her husband’s death. To begin with, there was not a single able-bodied man left in the Valley to work the fields, except one old Indian called Paskahegan. Then, in the summer of ’77, there was an epidemic of typhoid fever, or something very like it. Finally, on top of that there was a water-famine by midsummer, with nothing left of Salter’s Run except stagnant pools, and every well on the place gone dry except the Ron-
alds’. All this, you understand, was in the old house, right here in Devil’s-Pate Valley (no, I don’t know where that old name came from), no great way from this very rock, out there toward the island.’
Payne ratified this with a nod.
‘Well, this young woman, Martha Ronald, had been yoking up her oxteam every day and filling water-casks from her own well and driving clear round the Valley, stopping at every house to dole out the water. And she had spent all the rest of the time taking care of the sick as well as she could, and going with her baby to spend the night with the sickest ones. She had worked in the fields too, and brewed herbs, and prayed with the dying, and read the funeral service, and — actually — dug graves. For weeks she must have been on her feet more than twenty hours a day, doing the work of about a dozen men. The Valley was like a place under a curse that summer. The very ground burned and cracked at noonday; and yet, when night came, there was a thick, foul mist over everything, and of course mosquitoes swarmed out in clouds from the pools and the mud. There was hardly a healthy man, woman, child, or animal left. Yet through it all Martha Ronald kept herself going, and held the sickness away from her child and her father-in-law, and fed and nursed the whole Valley — and prayed for the strength to do more on top of that.
‘And then, one night late in the summer, she saw a lantern coming down the cliff, — along this very path it must have been, — just as we saw yours tonight, Payne. It was her husband, young Ronald Ronald, coming home on furlough. He had been with Stark’s forces up in Vermont, and they had just rounded up Baum and Breyman. Ronald had not been home since the late fall before. He had heard from an old neighbor who had come through the Valley that he was the father of a child, born in December; but he had never seen that little son, Ronald Joel. That night he held the child in his arms for the first time. — I am piecing this together, you understand, from old letters — among them some very interesting ones written by Martha, years later.
’The next day Ronald was drowned in the well. I have never made out just how it happened; but they were evidently trying to clean the well, and a stone was dislodged somehow and fell on him, and he was either drowned or killed by the stone. Anyway, his body was in the well. And somehow or other that amazing young woman, Martha Ronald, together with old Paskahegan, got it out, and dug the grave for it in the family corner of the little community burial ground. And the next day she read the burial service again — for the last time but one, as it turned out.
‘That night it set in to rain; and it rained for five nights and four days without stopping, until the Valley was threatened with a flood. The river was over its banks in places, and the wells filled, and a few of the higher patches of maize and rye began to look hopeful. And the sick people began to mend, — I suppose it was getting decent water again that did it, — and things seemed to be looking up.
‘And then, one morning, Martha found old Abijah Ronald dead in his bed. He was an old man, nearly eighty, feeble and in his second childhood. He had not married until a time of life at which most of the Ronalds had grandchildren growing up. He it was who, according to Payne here, built the original water-mill. Maybe. Anyway, on this night, some time late in September, he died in his sleep. And Martha was left alone in the house, with her baby, and with no one to turn to except Paskahegan.
‘It was just one thing more than she could bear. What with the work and her sorrow and all, she was probably near a collapse. And what she did was this: she sent Paskahegan on the craziest sort of wild-goose chase, to find and fetch home the one person she knew of to appeal to — her brother-inlaw, Ronald’s older brother, John Eustace.
‘This, you see, was the “plain John” whom Payne remembers from his boyhood. He lived to be an ancient of ninety-two or -three. He long outlasted Martha, who was several years younger: she lived only till 1803, when she was less than sixty. From the Ronald point of view, this was dying in early youth.
‘ Now, the interesting fact here is that there had been some sort of love-affair between John Eustace and Martha before she was married to Ronald. It seems to have been about the time of the general call for troops, in the early summer of 1775, that he gave up all hope of winning her. She was married to Ronald only a few days later; and then he too hurried off to join Washington’s men. Meanwhile, Eustace joined one of the first privateers that went out from New England, and from late seventy-five to early seventy-seven he was continuously with Paul Jones, under the old yellow flag with the coiled rattlesnake and the motto, “Don’t tread on me.” Probably all that Martha knew of Eustace was that he might be found somewhere in the Colonies’ wreck of a navy.
‘Well, that old Indian found him, exactly as if he had been an Indian out of a romantic story. He got to Portsmouth early in November. Paul Jones’s Ranger had been expected to sail for Nantes weeks before, but had been held in port by one delay after another. In two or three days more she was actually off—but with no Eustace Ronald aboard, for Paskahegan had come on his man somewhere about the wharves of Portsmouth, and given him Martha’s letter if she sent one, as she probably did, and haled him away toward home. How he got away from the Ranger, goodness only knows: there has never been a record of furlough or discharge, and yet Eustace never came under any sort of cloud. Perhaps — ’
‘Perhaps nothin’! ’ interrupted Payne Gilbert, making Ronald jump as if a pistol had gone off at his ear. ‘John Ronald had his hon’able discharge, writ in Paul Jones’s own hand and signed with Paul Jones’s own name. That I ’ve heard him say a hunderd times, if I have once.’
‘Capital!’ said Eustace. ‘I’m glad you recall that, Payne, for I’ve never been able to find anything about it. And very reasonable, too, if Eustace presented his case frankly to his captain: for Paul Jones was not the man to see a lady refused anything she wanted — especially a young lady, in a romantic plight. Anyway, Eustace fought no more to the end of his days.
‘Just here comes in the new house — our house — that you thought I was n’t ever going to get to. Eustace came back to the Valley and took up his life with Martha and the child exactly as if he had been Ronald — so far as outward appearances went. That winter he was her good angel, and the whole Valley’s. Eustace very soon saw that she would never be herself again in that place; it was too full of horrible suggestions and reminders. So with the spring of 1778 he began the new house that he had been planning in his head all winter; and before the next winter closed in, they moved up the Valley into it. That, of course, is your grandfather’s house — the one your father and I were born in, and all the others, back through Ephraim. The old house simply went out of the family — to the Rudds, who had it until the Reservoir came.
‘For the rest of Martha’s life, Eustace tried off and on to get her to marry him, but always without success. I have their letters to each other, written during the years when he sat in the Legislature; and from the references in them it is easy to follow the queer relationship between the two. Everyone accepted it as the most natural thing in the world that he should come home to live with his brother’s widow, after that ghastly summer, and in a time so troubled and abnormal anyway. But after things had settled down a bit, people began to remember that Eustace had once been head over heels in love with Martha, and there was a period when their status was regarded as — well, peculiar. Eustace, who, of course, was still in love with her, could not press his suit until she had somewhat recovered from the blow of Ronald’s death; and by that time tongues were whispering and heads wagging, so that when he did finally propose marriage to her, she got it into her head that he was doing it out of pity and to save her from the gossip. Besides, she had come of a devout Established Church family, and she had more than a trace of the deceasedhusband’s-brother superstition.
‘Anyway, the upshot of it was that they settled into a steadfast, year-inand-year-out sort of domestic relation, exactly like that of a million married couples who have got past the hectic stage of romance and could not possibly imagine any other set of circumstances. They lived down the talk in the course of twenty years or so, and people came to take them on their own terms. It must have been pretty difficult to think any serious evil of those two, anyway! How the thing came out in the long run, you can see from Payne’s idea that Eustace was the own father of Ronald Joel. People simply forgot, in time, that there had ever been anything unusual about the pair. Yet the time had been when Eustace thrashed an itinerant preacher — this was at the Baptist meeting-house—for alluding in a prayer to “those two in our midst who are daily living in open sin.”
‘It may be worth adding that Eustace got one rather notable compensation out of Martha’s refusal to consider marrying him. I mean his relation to the boy Joel, Ronald Ronald’s son. There was something in that beyond common fatherhood. It’s as if the fact that he had missed being Joel’s father made him love the lad all the more. I don’t mean that Eustace was sentimental about it, or even that he showed it much on the surface. For that matter, he was mostly dry and humorous. He was a good deal like father in some ways; and a man of some book-learning, too, though he did n’t always choose to show it. He knew altogether more than his grand-nephew Ephraim, who taught you to read and write, Payne. — What now, Jerry?’
Jeremy, who had sat smoking and watching his pair of fishlines without a word, now deliberately drew in his poles. ‘ Pout quit half an hour ago,’ he said. ‘Moon comin’ up, I should n’t wonder.’ He began collecting his traps. ‘ Got enough, anyway.’
‘It’ll be a good while ’fore ye git any more off’n this here platform,’said Payne. ‘They was a-openin’ of the gates down yonder when I come acrost the dam. Goin’ to do some fixin’ down to the base o’ the dam. She’s a-runnin’ out to beat the Dutch by now. That’s how come your fish to be gittin’ narvous.’
Peering down over the edge of the Shelf, they could indeed see on the ledge, several inches above the present surface-level, a black wet streak, the highwater mark of some hours earlier.
In Ronald’s Uncle Eustace this piece of chance information produced a visible preoccupation and excitement. In Ronald himself, it started a similar thrill, though he could hardly have said why, and, with the strange secretiveness of youth, he certainly meant to keep it to himself. By Eustace’s recital of past events, he had been more completely taken possession of than he would have admitted even to himself — the immensity of darkness and silence round them, and the dreamy unreality of his own sensations, doubtless contributing something to the effect. The rim of the moon cut through the opposite sky-line of the gorge, diffusing a smoky red glow. Above, in the woods, a screech-owl began its everlasting plaint; against the undertone of the falls, it was like sound strained through a sieve. His mind kept churning over the odds and ends of his family’s past, now for the first time directed upon his consciousness in one unbroken flow; churning away like the ancient mill-wheel which had perhaps been made by his — how many great’s had Eustace said ? — grandfather Abijah. He quite lost himself among the scattered items — and yet with an inexplicable sensation of groping for, almost finding, himself. The twentieth-century Ronald Ronald seemed to him, in this hour of sensibility, the least actual of actualities. He tried to imagine what he would have seemed like to one of the other two Ronald Ronalds, if they could have looked down upon him from their point of vantage; to Ronald Ronald who had been the victim of a tragic accident at twenty-two, just when he had come back to the arms of his young wife and the first glimpse of his child; or to Ronald Joel Ronald, who had never known, and therefore never known how to miss, his father.
Time presented itself to the boy as a sheer wall of centuries, near the top of which stood those others, looking down upon him at his lower level. Perhaps this was nothing more than a subconscious effect of his present physical ascent of the cliff. However that may have been, on a sudden he himself seemed to be at the top, looking down at himself, as if in good earnest he had been one of those others. He could not in that instant have told you who he was. Again, in his abstraction, he was revolving the old dilemma, ‘Am I truly myself, or am I some other?’ He was not enough of a philosopher to surmise that perhaps every one of us is, in part, a congeries of unknown selves, some of them with their roots deep in the soil of historic generations, and all of them walled apart from each other by a solid masonry of the common human limitations— the limitations, notably, of mere human memory. He had only his vague sense of the wall, and that, perhaps, only because he was near one of those points at which the wall is thinnest or lowest. It was as if, by going on a little farther in the same direction, he could completely pierce it. There came a sharp tug of instinct for clinging tenaciously to his direction, going on and on through, resisting any possible diversion away from his present wistful and tantalizing sense of the past.
It was no diversion, but rather an energetic shove of propulsion along the same path, that Ronald received in the smoky lantern-light of old Gilbert’s cabin, just off the main path in the woods above. There was no doubt, it seemed, about the authorship of the old oaken float from the mill-wheel, when Payne unscrewed it from the wall above his bunk and handed it silently over for inspection. This piece of the ancient overshot mill-wheel had originally been of Abijah’s making, as certainly as if his signature were carved in the grain of its wood, with a date that would carry one back to a time earlier than the Peace of Paris. A word from Eustace, and in a twinkling the thing had grown a century older while Ronald stood there gazing at it.
The stout hickory pegs or spikes at each end were what told the story. These their maker had shaped out of the wood with a draw-shave, or perhaps a spoke-shave. In the blade of his tool some accident had once left a tiny semi-circular nick. Instead of tossing the instrument aside to be reground, he had shrewdly surmised that it would make better pegs as it was, and increase their holding power by leaving on the surface of each a multitude of fine, slightly rough parallel grooves. By this trivial accident he had found the easy and unexcelled way of making a peg hold as if it were literally of greater diameter than its socket; and thereafter he had saved the tool for that one use. That the draw-shave in question was indeed Abijah’s, Eustace knew because the same nicked blade had left its signature on the pegs of the old pine clockcase in Elijah’s kitchen. This case, once refastened by Eustace himself where it had warped, was certainly known to have been made by Abijah. On the pegs of the float, where they had been tightly imbedded in the frame of the great wheel and shielded from the action of the water and of time, the same tiny grooves and ridges were unmistakable. There they were, a sort of sign-manual of the whole unique old Yankee tradition of workmanship — the workmanship that had astonishingly known how to exact from the imperfection of the blind tools a crowning individual perfection of success for each thing made with them.
IV
Wakeful in his bed at the farmhouse that night, Ronald Ronald remained for hour after hour a being strange to himself, if by ‘himself’ one should happen to mean a certain twentieth-century Yankee schoolboy who whizzed about on a motor-cycle at demented and forbidden speeds, and masked all the more serious parts of himself under a protective coloring of slang. He was in the path of an imminent landslide of things that only yesterday had been tombed in oblivion.
He was, in the most literal sense, not himself. He seemed to be nobody in particular — just a suspended consciousness played upon forcibly by a jet of other men’s memories, sensations, experiences, hopes, regrets, and whirled round and round in them, churning them into a spray of images. Once he was his ancient ancestor Abijah Ronald, opening the wheel-house gate for the first time upon the floats of the new and untried mill-wheel. His heart tightened within him like a tuned string as, with a ponderous and mighty deliberation, the wheel began to revolve. It picked up speed and momentum, threw off a suggestion of incalculable power; and as he stood listening to its slow, musical clink-clink’, clink-clink’, the deep chuckle of a gigantic throat, he felt himself at a summit of achievement, of creation, such as few lives scale.
Again, he was Eustace, the brother of the first Ronald Ronald, busily absorbed in the finishing details of a house he had built. For whom had he built that house? Oh, yes: for Martha, of course, and her child Joel, his dead brother’s child. He must not forget a place for the tall clock; and in his mind he planned the box-like inset in the low-studded kitchen ceiling. That would be better than the bare square hole that his father Abijah had cut in the ceiling of the old house, for the cornice of the clock’s hood to stick through. Why had the old gentleman made that clock-case so tall, anyway? Straight came the answer from somewhere inside him, as if he had merely forgotten it: why, Abijah had had to allow at least that much fall for the weights, or the unwieldy old colossus of a timepiece would not have room to run itself through the twentyfour hours.
And so on, interminably. While these images, the blown spindrift of the past, were beating upon the consciousness of Ronald, he was acutely aware of his sleeplessness: yet later, when he came to himself and saw that the sky was graying into pearl, he felt as if reality had thrust itself irritatingly into the midst of dreams that wanted to go on and on to some proper finis.
He got up, dressed himself rapidly, and tiptoed down the narrow stairs, carrying his shoes and stepping over the boards that creaked. From the hall, with its almost unused front door, he passed through the great living-room and into the kitchen.
Something strange in the silence there arrested him. It was like an empty ringing in his head. For a second, he thought that his grandfather had inexplicably forgotten to wind the great clock, and that it had stopped in the night. He had the distinct thought that he must wind and start the clock, and was even wondering whether he could do it without too great a clacking of the old wooden machinery. Then the illusion passed: the venerable timepiece ticked stolidly away as ever, beating off the seconds in the hush of the sleeping house. Ronald passed on through the back room into the wood-house, put on his shoes, and let himself out at the barn door.
Under the lustreless gray sky he set off down the road toward the Reservoir. Once he noticed, in the dimness, the strips of grass and weeds on each side of the horse-path, and the ghostly wayside bushes that encroached in places on the wagon-ruts. He kept suffering the illusion that the road was completely overgrown and lost just ahead; out when he came to the spot, it was always the old familiar way. It was as if two faint photographs of different roads were superposed on the same film. His attention was behaving oddly. The proof was that he felt aware of no oddness.
At the schoolhouse he struck off as before into the woods, running surefootedly until he came out in the little clearing at the edge of the cliff above the shelf. Again, as he looked out over the Valley, he had that queer sense of having been there before in exactly the same circumstances; having been there this very time before, so to speak, as if he had really gone there but once long ago, and thereafter repeated the moment of arrival in recurring cycles, as one seems to do in a dream. For an instant he had the impression that the Reservoir had been drained dry over-night. He looked out into a landscape of misty low-lying meadows instead of a lake. The leaves round him whispered in a cool breath from the east wall opposite. At the same instant it crossed his mind that the dull light was, inexplicably, that of evening twilight rather than of dawn. He brushed a cold hand across his eyes. Silly, of course: there under the thin covering of mist lay the surface of the water, looking like tarnished silver in the early light. It was the reflection of the mist in the water, which had created the illusion of a dry valley blurred with fog. Nevertheless, another unaccountable thread wove itself into the pattern of his thought, taking form in the definite question, ‘Where’s the pony?’ Well, sometimes there was a pony — one that blundered up through the woods and bushes from a pasture farther down the Reservoir. So this too was all right. He went along down the path, saying over and over to himself that it was all right.
Arrived on the Shelf, he looked over the edge to see how far the water had fallen during the night. Five feet, he estimated. The smooth roar of Salter’s Run, entering above, was intensified by the increased depth of its fall. He wondered idly whether, to do the proposed work on the dam, they would have to lower the water enough to uncover the floor of the gorge.
It was then that, with a sudden obviousness, the idea struck him. He must, by his own unaided efforts, reach that floor, while it was still wrapped in its aqueous and romantic gloom, and before they had laid it prosaically bare to the inquisitive sunlight. He stripped off his clothes and pushed them in a neat bundle to the innermost crevice of the little cave. A moment later he was poised on the edge, his whole body one pæan of exultation as he thought that now, at last, he was almost certain to reach his goal. An instant he stood there, swaying lithely on his toes. Then, aiming at a far point to escape any possible projection of the wall below, he flung himself outward and down.
Why could n’t he see anything? Water roiled. A cold layer, unexpectedly. Must n’t shiver: body rigid, like an arrow. Strong current: was he being carried downstream? Oh, yes: they were drawing off the water, and that would make a current. Could he reach it? Brrr! icy. Next time, perhaps.
At the bottommost point of his dive, and while his body was still vertical and taut, he brought his hands to his thighs in one powerful and sweeping stroke, at the same time kicking with his feet. Am I there? Crash! What is that? Pain, stinging pain. Head. — Time to turn. Why don’t I turn? No, keep on! keep on, same direction. Must get through. Through what? Who am I? Ronald. Who screamed ‘Ronald!’ in that terrible voice? — Can’t move. Wedged in, somehow. Funny! — Who wants to move, anyway? And who the deuce am I?
He strained his eyes toward something. Was it light, or was it such a hideous depth and eternity of blackness as his eyes had never looked into? Light! A blinding white light flashed upon him, as if some window in his brain had opened and closed like the shutter of a camera.
There was something that he must beat his way through until he came out clear beyond. He wished he understood what it was that he must beat his way through, what it was that lay waiting for him beyond.
(To be concluded)