ABEL GOODFRIEND
GLAMOR of fresh winds that ruffle blue waves to thin lines of foam, tall elms with swaying branches, elderberry bushes billowing in white bloom against the velvet back ground of dark pines, and all the rich color and prodigality of July frame my mental picture of Abel Goodfriend, chief sustainer of our Summer existence. Rugged he is, and homely and kind. For fifteen long years he put up our ice, hauled, and split our firewood, was our dairyman, green-grocer and chore-boy all in one. His little frame house, which had a way of blossoming out in different shades of paint on successive seasons, stood on the main shore not far from our dot of an Island, and the vise-like grip of his horny hand extended in annual welcome, with the light of the honest blue eye above it looking straight-forwardly into your own, was like the very incarnation of Nature herself guaranteeing another season's harvest of benefactions. Indeed, one scarcely differentiated him from Nature. He seemed so essentially her product—so unsophisticated, so incapable of self-seeking.
For myself, I have always liked Nature's way of bestowing her benefactions, unassorted. I like the big and little basketed together under the parent tree, and not hand-picked over with an eye to commercial values as they come on the vendor's stall. It takes off something, a sense of friendliness, to see them formally laid out in graduated rows. For the same reason I liked Abel. He was so unpremeditated, so genuinely a product of the soil, so wholesome and intelligible and flavorsome. No taint of commercial standards spoiled his quality. He was incapable of considering us in the light of material for exploitation. We were real people to him, friends and fellow-beings. When our floating dock broke loose one wild night in our absence and starting off down stream on its own account, was captured by him and lassoed to a stout oak by the shore, it didn't occur to him to make capital of it, and charge up for time and rope. Instead, he glowed with the pleasure of having done a neighborly deed. And not the least of the blessings (albeit an unconscious one) that flow from his elemental view of life, is Abel's own belief in human kindliness. I will not maintain that his outer and material welfare is advanced thereby. It is not given to all to believe in or rely upon elemental honesty. We are so habituated, most of us, to the money-suckers, that we insensibly assume an attitude of defense, forgetting that some simple natures remain human and honest to the end.
No credit is due me if I escaped this pitfall with Abel. It is due to his own ingenuousness. I had myself from very shame, to suggest that the price of the milk daily distributed among his coterie of cottagers (capable, unlike the city brand, of covering itself overnight with a yellow blanket of thick cream), should be raised from five to six cents per quart, and again on a later occasion to seven. I hope the neighbors never found me out, but it really lay heavy on my conscience to pay for this pure, country-grass quality little more than half what our thin, snobbish, Toronto variety costs.
Eggs too, remained stationary in price, though on moonlit evenings (so conducive to confidences), when Abel rowed me over to the village for the late mail, he opened his mind to me on the scandalous price of chicken-feed. Abel had been in the habit of opening his mind to me on these occasional moon-light excursions for 12 years or more. Its contents have changed considerably during this time. Though the price of chicken-feed and seed potatoes preoccupied it more recently, in remoter times the absorbing topic was young ladies.
By young ladies, Abel meant the damsels who served in our neighbor's kitchens, and I saw that in the alembic of his imagination they took on a radiance unperceived by me. They became units instead of accessories; individuals, instead of a negligible class quantity, and were clothed upon with traits and graces I had never even suspected.
I saw, moreover, that there were more things in Heaven and earth and cottage neighborhoods than I in my isolated ignorance dreamed of. Some of these things were unconsciously revealed to me through the naïveté of Abel's transparent mind. I became aware that he was being played with, cat's paw fashion, by his nearest neighbors, a certain Mrs. Dack, second wife to "Hickory" the fisherman whose hearth and home (his heart must have ossified long ago, she had commandeered shortly after their vacancy by No. One. Mrs. Dack, No. Two, was of Irish extraction and the Sinn Fein type of mind. She had penetrated our isolated community in the capacity of cook for a wealthy New York family who were simulating the simple life, in vogue just then, and all Hickory's skill and cunning in the baiting of hooks availed him nothing when his own turn came. He was approved, appropriated and partly reformed before awakening to the full seriousness of the situation.
He merits a chapter to himself. His large inexpressiveness, his keen eye under the shaggy, gray brows, somehow suggested to me a trapped giant; and indeed he was that. One of the innumerable, pathetic things trapped by tyrannous circumstance.
Even the large amount of nervous energy his second wife lavished upon his numerous weaknesses failed to exhaust her supply and she spent the residue in setting up sundry conflagrations in our erstwhile peaceful neighborhood. The picturesquely tumble-down cottage which she had made Hickory resuscitate and whitewash, nestling in among a grove of oak and hemlock in a sheltered nook of the same inlet where Abel "farmed," became a Sunday afternoon rendezvous for the maids of the region, and thither Abel was wont to betake himself in bravest array with hopefully beating heart. And upon him the Sinn Fein lady sharpened her wit and loosed her stores of venom, doing this tongue-tied, isolated country dweller what despite she could in the eyes of the city "young ladies" whose companionship he coveted during the brief days of Summer.
My heart burned with the recital of this artless spirit, bruised by the injustices of life, and smarting under the lash of merciless feminine wit. Child-like he undoubtedly was, with a child's need of understanding and consolation, but also with a child's faith in human kind, and a generous interpretation of others. He was himself incapable of unkindness. When the Dack's cow broke into his pasture, or the Elysian depths of his oat-field, no complaint was made. She was gently driven forth only. And when her industry in milk-giving ebbed, the need was supplied from his own never-too-abundant stores, all the readily, I imagine, by way of placating his termagant of a neighbor, and endeavoring to reinstate himself in her esteem, after the manner of the meek of the earth who seek not their own.
But there are those to whom meekness is but a confession of weakness. The redoubtable Mrs. Dack never perceived in Abel a nature handicapped from the start, essentially fine, struggling against odds to maintain and fulfill the obligations of existence. She may have been herself the thwarted victim of circumstances. Nay, are we not all more or less so?
Yet there are things against which every normal instinct rebels. Cruelty is one of them. I have spoken of Abel as handicapped. A great and unatonable wrong had been done to him indirectly in his childhood. He had been allowed to grow up without learning to read and write. At least indisputable evidence points that way, though it had never been mentioned between us, or allowed to come into the open.
Early orphaned, and brought up by a busy Aunt with her own quiver full, living in isolated country regions, the thing had probably never been realized until it was too late. I admired the sensitiveness and fine feeling for self-respect which kept Abel silent as to this lack, and I really almost hate to be setting it down here in cold ink. Still, the picture is incomplete without it, for it was consciousness of this deficiency which put him so helplessly at the mercy of others and kept him a prisoner in his own mind.
I tried to blink the suspicion when it first presented itself to me. I didn't want to know it even if it were true. But when the checks in payment for winter services returned to me after many days backed with "Abel Xhismark Goodfriend," the thing was writ clear and inescapable. He may not realize that the evidence comes back to us, or it may be that surmise of it torments his solitary hours. But it is never spoken of. He does not know what he has been spared, along with what he has been robbed of. The sensationalism, the vulgarity, the diffuseness that follows in the train of such reading as is likely to come within his radius, one might thankfully remain a stranger to. But he could know only of the deprivation, necessarily greater in the region of his own self-respect and community opinion than in the actual loss. Though he never mentioned it, I have no doubt but that Mrs. Dack's wit coruscated around this sorest of points, and that poor Abel suffered as only a sensitive nature can, in being held up in ridicule for the diversion of the summer young ladies.
However that may be, season followed season with no change in Abel's "prospects." He still "batched it" in the little green (or brown or yellow) house among the elder-berry bushes, and went his daily round of milking, chicken-feeding, and housekeeping, ever a little more bronzed, a little heavier of step, a little more humble-minded. A gentler dignity settled upon him; the dignity of faithful and honorable toil and of association with Nature's wind-swept tides and spaces. It became him well.
But Nature does not change words with you or put a stick on the fire when it languishes. We have need of our kind. The fear began to haunt me that some fine spring we should find Abel had vanished, driven forth by the loneliness of the life he had undertaken, combined with the jibes of his erratic neighbor.
Then one February when the ice bill came due, I observed that it had been written in a new hand, a nice feminine hand, though signed as usual, "Mr. Abel Goodfriend," and there was a slightly tangled sentence in the observations at the end of the note which seemed to imply some unusual order of things. So in the following June when we were once more deposited on the little dock amidst our innumerable boxes and bags, with Abel coming down to greet us over the path that was newly glorified with columbine and stars of Bethlehem, I was not altogether surprised to find a more than wonted heartiness in his grip, and a suppressed excitement in his manner betokening events of a highly important character.
When our impedimenta were all collected and unroped on the cottage veranda, and the little steamer that brought us had wobbled off over the clear lake again, looking for all the world like some huge, clumsy, water-beetle, Abel and I settled down to accounts out on the pine-shaded, balsam-scented side veranda, I with my hat still on, Abel in his honest gingham shirt-sleeves.
It always takes time for Abel to tell things. There has to be a starter, in the way of a few general observations, and a gradual leading up to the main point. There is nothing to be gained by trying to hurry him. It results simply in inarticulation. Gentle encouragement, like a tidal wave, floats him ever nearer and nearer his high-water mark (which one perceives from afar) and finally lands him correctly in the middle of it. So in the sanctuary of intoxicating woodland peacefulness with an oriole fluting over-head, I assumed a provocative air of casualness while, with many crossings and uncrossings and recrossings of his jean-covered legs, and interminable chewings of the grass-stalk he had acquired by way of moral support, Abel succeeded in acquainting me with the most momentous fact and crowning achievement of his life, his marriage.
Scarcely less momentous for us than for him. For on the disposition of the newly acquired partner of his joys and sorrows, would depend much of the comfort and success of our future summers in this sylvan abode. I own to gloomy forebodings. Matrimony is such a lottery at the best, and Abel wore so little the aspect of a prize. But I had the decency to look cheerful at any rate and to throw some effect of heartiness into the congratulations which were his due.
As soon as appeared to me seemly, I took the canoe and hastened around the hemlock-fringed bay to the little green house on the point, flanked in the rear by a disproportionately sized barn, and gay in front with straggly rose-bushes just making ready to bloom. Pushing my prow along the half-submerged planks which served Abel as temporary landing till the water should go down again, amid the clamor of the ducks and flapping of fat old Toby's tail, I prepared to make my advances, wedding-gift in hand, to the new Mrs. Goodfriend, devoutly hoping there might be something in a name.
And for once there was! Such a pleasant-faced, tidy, motherly-looking soul as emerged from the kitchen-end of the house to meet me, one's eyes are seldom gladdened by. We found common ground in the first exchange of remarks about the ducks and were on the basis of old friends in ten minutes. There was just one little matter for regret; she must have been Abel's senior by several years. Already the fine coronal of hair was graying over the temples, and little criss-cross lines were gathering at the corners of the dark eyes.
She was quite firm, though regretful, about not being able to give us any extra help should occasion require. Mr. Goodfriend would not like it, she said with dignity. And they had "an extry cow this year and between the churnin' and the gyarden there was all she had ought to do."
With this I heartily concurred. After all, fresh butter, friendliness and the ties that would bind Abel to our vicinity, were the chief desiderata, and these the pleasant-faced new comer insured.
For six more happy summers we frolicked the season through under the aegis of Abel's sustaining care. We fished off his shoal (where the biggest perch always lurked and there was rumor of black bass); we filled our jugs with wild roses and spirea off his point in July, and with plumy golden-rod in August; gathered raspberries and fuzzy wild gooseberries for tarts in the tangle of tall grass and woodsy borders behind his pasture. Later in the season, the royal blue of the closed gentian showed in a certain secluded hollow not far away, and in a grove beside the curve of the beach, when the golden stillness of September was upon us, clusters of hickory nuts split their brown cases, showing the white treasure within.
And every year Abel flourished and increased. Some new convenience or accessory was added to his small establishment each season. The cellar was cemented to keep out toads and garter-snakes; the veranda across the front was widened; a dairy adjoining the kitchen built and finally a real (though secondhand) motor-boat was installed. This last was an event indeed, a long-desired and much needed acquisition.
Never to be forgotten was the occasion when this same motor-boat was the means of rescuing us from an ill-starred expedition across the lake when the wind unexpectedly came up instead of going down, as it had been scheduled to do, and we found ourselves in the teeth of it in open boats seven miles from home. Among the spoils of the trip was a large, disabled blue-heron which a confiding member of the party had seen stranded on a rocky shore unable to extricate itself, and had insisted on taking aboard.
The few remaining scraps of nourishment in the depleted lunch-baskets had been offered this impassive fowl from time to time without response. It appeared not to see them but sat sphinx-like and immovable beside its rescuer.
Abel had been sent forth at sun-down to seek us by the one anxious member of the household who had stayed behind, and the relief with which the "Emma Jane" was sighted by us on that waste of darkening water, where shoals abounded, and waves continually increased in violence, remains to this day a joyful recollection. His exclamations of astonishment when he beheld the blue-heron sitting in fixed and stony silence on the lap of its friend sent a thrill through the entire framework of the Emma Jane. As soon as he recovered—which took time—he cleared his throat and said in an awed sort of voice, "Mis' 'Elen, don't that thar bird want to bite ye?"
I knew by his tone that he regarded the situation as unusual, not to say critical, but how critical I didn't realize until the following day when the stupefied fowl, having been placed in solitary confinement in the boathouse, sufficiently recovered its equanimity to inflict a severe wound upon a hand that ventured within the sweep of its powerful beak. The disablement that followed bore testimony both to the strength, and the ferocity behind that glittering wild eye.
But seasons go fast, and happy days have swift endings. That sixth and last summer of Abel's good fortune ended in darkness. It had been evident from our first glimpse of Mrs. Goodfriend that year, that the tides of strength were ebbing. It was a struggle for them more or less all through the season, though it was only too evident that Abel's own eyes were not opened to the seriousness of the situation.
A stray sister-in-law was produced and persuaded to "see them along." Mrs. Goodfriend was away in a hospital for a time, a new doctor was called in, and so on. It was supposed that she was better, and no one was prepared for the suddenness with which, just the day before we were to have followed the migrating birds, she slipped the cables of life and was away.
Abel came over with the milk that evening as usual, but he himself was not as usual and never would be so again. Janet came to say, "Mr. Goodfriend wants to see you, Ma'am; his wife's gone."
It was a wild and desolate night with gusty drifts of rain, and rapidly gathering dark. The trees were giving up their leaves in fitful showers; the world was soaked and sodden. Abel came around to the side veranda sheltered from the storm, where he had told me of his marriage. I noticed how heavy his step had become. He sank into the first chair he reached, his empty pail rattling against its side.
We sat long and silent in the benison of the dark. I could not venture to intrude upon the sanctuary of his grief with cold words of commonplace consolation.
It was for him that lonely hour when the soul comes face to face with the instability of all things mortal and reads the doom of its happiness.
He spoke once or twice in whispers, as if thinking half aloud, words that were lost in the shouting of the gale among the writhing trees without. Once I caught the sentence, "Mebbe we was too fond o' one another." Was it the strange sense we have that happiness is alien—something that must be paid for and that we must not take lest the penalty be too great?
It was an hour of quickened sensibilities for both of us. For me, a deepened sense of the Reaper's silent footsteps that go ceaselessly to and fro leaving broken hopes and stagnant waters behind. For that dim child-soul beside me, caged in heavy man's form, stricken and robbed of all that gave savor and meaning to life—who shall say what it meant?
"I mus' go back," he said suddenly and simply. "Good-night Mem, an' thank ye kindly."
I could hear his heavy feet stumbling down the rocky path to the landing in the dark, till the rushing winds and darkness swallowed him up.
The least we could do was to postpone our departure, and see him through the burden of the next few days. There was a hectic flush about him, an unnatural glitter in his eye betokening unwonted excitement. I dreaded for him what must inevitably follow—the long winter's reaction, whether it should be spent in his own lonely abode, or in the home of his brother-in-law some miles beyond, and which I understood was always open to him. It was with the hollow mockery of bidding him take care of himself, because there was nothing better to say, that we left him to his lonely grief, and I shall never forget the picture of him, standing against the mellowed tones that Autumn weaves, when we came away, inarticulate, helpless, living on merely in habit.
I hardly expected to find him there still when we came again next spring, but he was. Haggard and thin and "doctorin'" but still going the old round, patient and faithful as ever. He was always at hand when wanted, one missed nothing save the light in his eye and the sense of life about him. He made a few references to the past when we chanced to be by ourselves, but one felt that he carried with him a weight of memory and an experience of life that words could not unburden him of.
Now it so happened that summer that a neighboring family brought with them as cook and general manager, a woman somewhat resembling the late Mrs. Goodfriend, an exemplary, capable, eligible, person who was kindly disposed towards Abel, and who would have made a most suitable help-mate for him. Part of his work, moreover, was to take her to church every Sunday in the "Emma Jane." It became evident that her kindliness and good common sense was a staff upon which Abel might safely lean. I ventured to refer to her abilities one day in conjunction with some of the domestic difficulties which he confided to me and which were increasing upon him. Unexpectedly he spoke out straight to the point for once.
"Mis' C.," he said very earnestly, "Miss O'Grady is a very nice lady. I've nothin' agin her. I enjoy her comp'ny, an' if things wus diff'rent, mebby I'd tell her so. But it's awful hard to forgit days that has gone by, an' I don't know es I ever kin." I felt ashamed of my shallowness, my haste to witness the healing of life's deepest wounds. I was silenced. We learn so slowly how to thread our ways over these delicate inner roads of life!
This was five years ago. Others, brisker and more up to date, occupy the little cottage among the elder-berry bushes now and it has changed its varied hues for a permanent, and pleasing dark red. Milk has risen to 12 cents per quart undelivered and other commodities "accordin'."
Once a season Abel, who lives with his brother-in-law, "up at the crick," makes us a short visit between the seasons of haying and harvest, seeming to take a certain pleasure in doing odd chores about the place.
He has recovered some measure of his earlier tone, and though the shoulders stoop, and grayness is showing in the dark hair, he is still able to "carry on." Time and life's incessant demands are potent healers.
Standing together last September on "sunset rock," from which is to be had a view of the little cottage so long the center of his existence, Abel turned to me with something of the old earnestness and said:
"Ef I cud git the rentin' of it agin, I bleeve I'd take it, an' git a larger head o'cattle, an' do more wid the gyardenin'. Prices hes riz so."
I wasn't sorry for the practical turn of his thoughts. It was a token of returning health. Nature takes her own way and good time in covering life's chasms with fresh growth of healing green.