Chapter 2 No.2

Of Thaddeus Bourn and his Purposes

There was given to the Bourns, then, of old, natures sloping to the Northern side, or they had taken that tendency from experience. Thaddeus Bourn, that elder brother of Simon, who left Hagar so long ago as when Quincy Adams was President, and became a civil flower of society in the city of Hamilton, was a spontaneous variation or reaction from the type. One heard that he had made a fortune airily, and lost it. He surely married another, lost part of that, and his wife of a year or two, who died and surprised him into regretting her with some sincerity. He became an official of the Hamilton County Bank, and floated on in middle life, buoyant, carrying an aroma of old fashions, a flower in his buttonhole, a tall hat, a silver-headed cane. His eyes had wrinkles about them, his cheeks were thin, his foot light. All these were evident elements in the total of Thaddeus, but the total itself was not a sum, but a harmony. To keep the seamy side of life turned down, and its sheen always in the sun, not only was Thaddeus's practice and theory, but he belonged to a distinct school in the practice of the art, which might be called the pseudo-classic.

He sat by Helen's bed half a day, and talked to her as to a grown lady, and was gracious and fluent. He brought the best flowers of his worldliness, and jingled all his silver bells to please her.

"Not a finer pair of eyes in Hamilton!" he said to the widow. "Positively she must not have a crick in her back. On my word, impossible."

"We are taught to submit," said the widow, perhaps placidly, at any rate patiently. Thaddeus mounted the stairs with a wrinkled smile.

"Sheep! That woman is a sheep! Helen, my dear, your back will be as straight as my cane, I give you my word."

Nellie's lean hands, on the coverlet, and face, with its bacchante spread of hair above her head on the pillow, were losing their brown tan in the passage of slow weeks. The delicate creeping pallor and helplessness beckoned Thaddeus to something tender, but he took council with wisdom.

"Uncle Tad," she said, "why do you about always feel good?"

"Well, well, I haven't cracked my spine. Never cracked anything but my heart and reputation-a-both of them like old varnish, on my word. Very good, varnish them again. I have"-Thaddeus used his gold eye-glasses gracefully to punctuate, emphasize, distinguish, for illustration, for ornament-"I have the opinion that to feel agreeable and to be agreeable are two habits that one cultivates like a garden. The first is a vegetable, the second a flower. You see? Exactly. In point of fact they are the fruit and flower of the same plant. A-a figure of speech, Nellie. If you kindly wouldn't look at me like the Angel of Judgment. A-look at the ceiling. Thank you."

Thaddeus delicately unfolded his theory of the conduct of life, Nellie's grave eyes now and then confusing him with mute challenge.

To his experience, then, there were two classes of people-those who were more or less pleased with the world, and those who more or less were not. Both personally and morally it was better to be in the former class. Personally, for instance, one lived longer; morally, one, for instance, in point of fact, kept in better relations with Providence. Now this satisfaction was to be compassed partly by a certain inward insistence on feeling agreeable-"When I buy a pair of glasses of a seller of glasses, personally, I buy a pair that-a-slightly idealize"-partly by surrounding one's self by, in point of fact, a judicious selection of circumstances. Circumstances were, in the main, people. One surrounded one's self with-that is, one sought and lived among-agreeable people, and these were found commonly among such as had circumstances already agreeable. Selfishness was a word to keep on good terms with by understanding its nature, and making one's own share of it intelligent. Enlightened selfishness was the root of society. Good society really consisted of people who had the time and took the pains to be pleasant and entertaining, in order to have pleasure and entertainment about them. This was the sensible and experienced thing in the matter of the pursuit of happiness.

"Nellie"-Thaddeus's voice took a note of gravity-"you'll let me have an interest in your pursuit. Some time"-the wrinkles of his smile shot out around his eyes-"I'll explain to you how it is a case of enlightened selfishness. Between you and me, I'm growing old, but ordinarily I deny it."

It is possible that Nellie understood very little of Thaddeus's doctrine, saw no distinct consequences whatever, and was only caught by little gleaming points of illustration. The charm of Thaddeus's talk lay in its opalescent effect, and this had much to do with gesture and expression; so that "good society" may have been to her a phrase of the haziest quality, except as it might mean a pair of slightly idealized eye-glasses, rimmed with gold, and pointed at one in a manner to absorb attention; "happiness," a certain wrinkled smile; and the "pursuit" of it an endeavor to smile in that way. Thaddeus thought his doctrine likely to suffer much translation. He could not follow its vanishing nor guess what would happen to it.

It was a period of brooding and slow change for Helen. At such times, one remembers, the soul was a highway for processional shadows. They have no names in language. Only here and there one finds a thing said of them that is touched with recollection; their voices are heard at times in blown drifts of music; hints are given that it is not a solitary experience.

Monthly or even more often thereafter Thaddeus left his club and familiar pavements behind him, and travelled up the Wyantenaug Valley in a dull, noisy train, even through that winter when the cold wind swept down from Windless Mountain under the pines and piled drifts more than commonly along the Windless Mountain road. "Personally" he took no interest in the columned avenues of pines, the deep white ravine, the black, tinkling stream, the groined architecture of ice. He liked well enough the scents and balm of the country spring, the lilacs and the hill winds in summer, but he liked better his pavements and club. It argued a highly enlightened selfishness, a refined nicety of calculation, such pains to be agreeable. If we charge him with calculation, it is only to admire the refinement of it, and refer the charge to his doctrine. For if the confession that he was secretly growing old meant that he foresaw life would come presently to seem a little vacant, without the intimate interest it once had, and his house on Shannon Street be visited perhaps by ghosts that would not always take pains to be agreeable, it would seem to show a skill in the pursuit of happiness, an eye for a blind trail, not unworthy of the doctrine. To foresee coming changes, what provision the soul would need in a year or two more when middle life was past and the strong pull of the ebbing tide beginning to be felt, to disguise from it the consequences of sixty years, and so to persuade it gently, without force or argument, to continue to idealize and feel agreeable, were a fine bit of diplomacy. For it was not merely a matter of carrying Helen away to Shannon Street to start there a fresh stream of interest, but Helen must take an interest in him; they were to find each other lovable, if the choicest result were to come; and Helen was here somewhat difficult. The stream of interest was started for him. He felt it strongly when the first year was gone and Hamilton was at its wintry busiest. But it was difficult to be seen that she would pursue happiness with consistency.

It was the spring of the year '60 when she saw the green world once more, and summer before she walked free of the garden. The lilacs hung heavily and seemed almost to drip with thick perfume. Thrush, oriole, and bobolink were pursuing happiness and warbling their success. Thaddeus was there, and chirped in rivalry.

"But your mother would rather have something to submit to."

"Oh no, Thaddeus," protested the widow, mildly.

"You like the Lord to do you an injury. It makes a pretty item on the balance-sheet."

"How can you say so?"

"My good sister!" Thaddeus raised despairing hands. "You consist entirely of negatives. There is no positive opinion that can be attributed to you. I give you a character and you deny it. You escape definition. Personally, I doubt your existence. I believe you're a myth."

Still the widow murmured, peacefully, "Oh no, Thaddeus," knitting and rocking.

Thaddeus watched Nellie's face for signs of happiness, and the widow denied with safety and assurance. It was no trouble, except to fit her denials to the form of the attack. Thaddeus saw the loss of his rapier thrusts of fine casuistry sometimes with passing irritation.

He went down to the post-office after supper, to Mr. Paulus, the postmaster, one with whom he had gone forth on such balmy evenings, more than forty years past, and done things from which their elders had inferred disastrous careers. The postmaster was stout now, with grizzled hair cut Quakerly, ponderously grave, except that his left eyelid drooped and twitched. It was the one place on his wide face where the old spirit of demonry hinted of itself, and spoke of the days of the consulship of Tad and Pete. Without doubt the world was degenerate, and had lost its breed of noble bloods. Alas, Tad and Pete, once sworn and faithful, of one ideal together; now each in the eyes of the other was an exquisite absurdity, and all the young were degenerate, except Nellie. "Pete, she's doing well, poor little ghost, on my word."

"She'll bust out pretty soon then. Been loadin' up now goin' on two year."

"I shall take her to Hamilton. She's a racer, boy. Smacked you with a paint-brush! God bless her! I should think she did. In point of fact, it served you right. You roasted Starr Atherton's litter of pigs yourself, I recollect distinctly, and turned out a postmaster. Respectable profession. I've nothing against it."

"I didn't mean to."

"Didn't mean to which? Fatheaded thing to try to do anyhow. I told you-I precisely stated the probable result. I said, any pig of that size would squeal loud enough to wake a congregation. And Starr Atherton was out in the yard before he saw the fire, with a picture in his mind already of himself pursuing Peter Paulus, pig-stealer."

Mr. Paulus twitched his eyelid and reverted to the other subject.

"Hamilton! Well-maybe she won't. She might remember your position in society now. She might gunpowder the mayor an' let it go at that. What's in will out, that's what I say-what's in will out. Now, as to paintin' cats-"

"I beg your pardon! It is even said they were not your cats."

"As to smackin' faces with paint-brushes-anybody say it wasn't my face?"

Thaddeus leaned forward eagerly.

"What was the color?"

"Well-the paint was green, but there must've been some white on the brush. It appeared to be streaked."

Thaddeus settled his glasses, rested his chin on his cane, and studied the postmaster's face. There were vast vacant spaces on it, where, it seemed, one could keep on smacking green paint a long while and not lose interest.

"What's in will out," repeated Mr. Paulus, heavily. "What's in will out."

Up the hill as far as the church Thaddeus thought of the post-office as compared to the Wyantenaug Club, in what respects the post-office had good points; from the church across the sloping green, where in the dusk the pale flowers glimmered against the grass, he thought of Mr. Paulus's face smitten with paint; and so of Nellie, a slim, white ghost, with eyes that sometimes looked wistfulness after nameless things, and sometimes seemed to watch only the slow march of dreams. At the lilac gate he stopped. Some one stood a moment squarely in the little doorway, filling it with his shoulders, then turned half back and leaned against the jamb.

"Morgan Map, by-a-mm." The light shone across the profile in the door. The Maps were men of shoulders and stature, Morgan the largest of the three; hair and brows of a Celtic yellow with a glint of red in them, a face of cliffs and caverns, bones of length and massiveness. "Picts, Scots, Caractacus. Vercingetorix," Thaddeus murmured. "My education was faulty. It seems to me he should be painted blue and carry a club."

He plucked a lilac and sniffed it, leaning on the gate, looking at Morgan contemplatively and at the placid knitting widow beyond.

"If I let that damned brute jockey me, it's funny."

The militant church with its starward steeple and weather-vane telling confidently to all men which way the night winds of heaven blew, the shining windows and doorways, the scent of lilacs and the glimmer of white flowers on the grass, the rounded billows of the hills, Windless Mountain and the Cattle Ridge dark against southern and northern skies, the Four Roads, the meadows east where one knew the Mill Stream was crooning to itself-Hagar, by dusk at least, was much the same as in the consulship of Tad and Pete, now forty years later when Tad and Pete had come to consider each other exquisite absurdities. Even after another forty years, is there any change in Hagar at dusk? You cannot see how the charcoal-burners have cut along the Cattle Ridge. Tad and Pete have gone where one hopes for their sakes everything is not a solemnity. But we were speaking of Hagar when the night drops low, when the hills seem to draw near and listen, and something is said to the stars, which they admit, about past and future being foolish endeavors of language to say "now." There seems to be a background and foreground everywhere. And in the foreground things appear to be hourly critical and important.

Morgan turned into the room and shut the door. Thaddeus dropped the lilac promptly and opened the gate.

"I seem to object to his shutting that door." He walked up the garden path, tapping the ground briskly with his cane, seeming to have in mind things critical and important.