Chapter 3 No.3

Of Morgan Map and his Purposes

Early frosts in October turned the maples into pillars of fire; followed a long Indian summer, hazy, even-footed, thoughtful days; as if after making ready this ceremonial purple and red and gold, gold brown of the meadows, blue and gold of aster and golden-rod by roadsides and meadow edges, veiled purple of the sweet fern in high pastures, the year remembered that it was not a pageantry of entry and advance, but of departure, and walked after the banners in recessional mood. In November red and yellow leaves had flickered past the windows and were raked into heaps on the village green.

Helen kicked through the leaves, scattering them with a dry rustle. "I'm as fit as can be. Morgan."

"Don't jump the fence."

"I hadn't thought of it. It's the very thing."

"Wait."

She stopped and looked at him.

"Better not," said Morgan, dryly. Helen made a face, put one foot on the low rail of the picket fence, jumped and plunged through the lilacs, picked up her hat and swung into the path. Morgan stood still outside the gate. "Then you'll have to come out again and go through."

His yellow eyebrows met over his eyes. Helen flushed, hesitated-"Don't be an idiot," and then laughed. "I'll come if you don't mind my thinking you're an idiot."

"I don't mind your saying you think so."

She came outside the gate, looking interested. Morgan leaned his back to its post and smiled approval on Windless Mountain.

"Why not?"

"Oh, because you don't think so. You think I want you to do what I tell you. That's very true; I do. Why shouldn't you?"

The question involved a series of other questions, linked and secret. Helen fell to looking, too, at Windless Mountain, which seemed to be brooding as well over its constitutional phenomena, whose causes were ages ago and deep in the earth, its relations with other creatures such as winds, clouds, the regular and the drifting stars.

She did do as Morgan said, whenever he said anything; at least, she had almost always. When one was Morgan and not a girl, and seven years older, and able to dare all things and do them-(to carry a person on his shoulder miles, for instance, across the Cattle Ridge, together with the game-bag, when a person was tired, and begging not to be disgraced for a baby, and would not have shed a tear for a gold crown and a bushel of diamonds)-of course it was right and necessary that such a one should be worshipped and obeyed. Morgan broke into her thoughts.

"Is it fixed when you go to Hamilton?"

"After Christmas. Do you know, I believe uncle doesn't like you."

"Oh, well, that's all right. I'll forgive him till he feels better."

To fear nothing, to count no costs, to be unlimited! The two years seemed as long as lifetimes, since that summer when things happened; and Morgan was still Morgan. He had never cared who was angry with him, or who liked or disliked him. Helen had longed not to care and been bitterly driven to do so always. She struggled to imitate him. In the face of sudden danger, attack of angry game-preserver or owner of posted stream, or any crisis of the woods when the partridge whirred or the fox broke into the open, Morgan's face would not flush nor his hand tremble; but he only seemed to gather his brows and centre himself on the subject, while little Nellie wondered and worshipped. So he stood for an ideal of effectiveness and freedom from the tyranny of circumstances, which to her small experience and large deduction seemed visibly to bend aside before and around him, from the tyranny of other people's opinions, which he cared so little about that they turned into harmless murmurs behind him instead of planting themselves monumentally in front.

For at times this world appeared to exist for opposition only, in iron battle order, bristling with spears, stolid, reasonless, forbidding. It was a caste system, a privileged aristocracy of one's elders, the dead-line of an old régime. Morgan walked through it promptly. "People," he said, "pretend a lot more than they are, most of 'em. My dad doesn't so much."

But freedom seems not to be an end in itself, only an opportunity to do things differently. It has its own régime, its tyranny of devotions, heroisms, and heroes, military, imperial.

That Morgan proposed a Napoleonic career for himself-reasonably such, for he was no dreamer-that he proposed to dominate, to break through limits and oppositions, to drive a path through the jam of men wide enough for his shoulder muscles to work in, was merely his own candid statement. And regarding Thaddeus, his expression sprang equally from candor. A man's dislike for him was a poor reason for disliking that man. To carry malice was to carry a load. A man was an engine for covering ground and arriving at ends, and malice was burned-out slack. Resentments of old hostilities and memories of old loves were slack, likes and dislikes mostly whims. Mankind was various and whimsical, and few were such as discarded futilities and went on, which was lucky for the few.

"You're very sure of yourself, Morgan."

"Aren't you as sure of me, Nellie? You used to be. Well," he said, slowly, "you see, if Thaddeus Bourn tried to take a fall out of me, he'd want to be subtle, and then it would be all up with him, for I shouldn't understand it."

"Why should he want to take a fall out of you?"

"If he doesn't, why should I mind his disliking me?"

"Wouldn't you mind being disliked by anybody, until they did something, really?"

"Not much."

"Oh! Not by me?"

"I'd rather be disliked by the United States. Besides, that's foolish."

"Oh, I don't know. It's funny, I have an opinion of you that's miles long. It isn't exactly an opinion, either."

Morgan smiled again with approval on Windless Mountain.

"If you're going to be subtle I sha'n't understand it," meaning possibly it was the privilege of girls to have half-grown ideas that they could not describe. A man had business with only such as he could handle, put to the use of resolve, statement, or persuasion. If he was unable to express his mind completely, it was because there was rubbish in his mind. But between himself and Windless Mountain, he did not object to Helen's having an opinion of him that was not exactly an opinion.

Any one could have an understanding with Windless, that eclectic philosopher, with his feet deep in the earth, fertile loins, jovial belly, the chest of a wrestler, and the gray, scarred head of a prophet. On his flanks were chuckling little rivulets, nesting birds, and all kinds of flitting incident. From a distance you might see his forehead lifted to abstractions, pale-blue, spiritual things. Whatever you said to him, he had an answer to your liking. Whatever your philosophy, somewhere about him he felt much the same. If you hated an enemy, there was a trifle of ice, a certain ambient glacier that once ground him badly, of whom he had no loving remembrance and the grooves whereof were on his bones. He was no moralist. The liar and the thief could find companionship there, the outcast existences more deserted, the murderer note the hawk risen red and screaming from the thicket, and admit a spirit that bettered his own. Only if you were not content in finding a likeness in detail, and wished to look straight to his scarred forehead, you would probably do well to be candid and take your time. What you got from him would be no special advice, but an assurance that he understood you, and there would be something in his manner of understanding that would meet the case and be enough. If it was a moral influence, it lay in bringing you to see the relations of things in size and quality, and in making your own directions more evident.

* * *

"I like Windless best," said Helen, dreamily. "He's the nicest person there is."

"It would be no joke to have him in your way."

They turned into the garden and up the path between brown, withered flower-beds.

"I jumped the fence, anyway, Morgan. It would be idiotic to hurt myself. I won't do it again."

"The point was, you didn't mind the colonel."

"I'm on a furlough. Take me up Windless again."

"Not if you're on a furlough."