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Arthur Conan Doyle - "Sign of the Four"

Charles Kingsley - "Alexandria and her Schools"

Andrew Lang - "New Collected Rhymes"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "Etexts from Mosses From An Old Manse"

The Choir Invisible

J >> James Lane Allen >> The Choir Invisible



THE CHOIR INVISIBLE

by James Lane Allen




"O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence. . .
. . . feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused
And in diffusion evermore intense.
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world."

GEORGE ELIOT

THE middle of a fragrant afternoon of May in the green wilderness of
Kentucky: the year 1795.

High overhead ridges of many-peaked cloud--the gleaming, wandering Alps of
the blue ether; outstretched far below, the warming bosom of the earth,
throbbing with the hope of maternity. Two spirits abroad in the air,
encountering each other and passing into one: the spirit of scentless spring
left by melting snows and the spirit of scented summer born with the
earliest buds. The road through the forest one of those wagon-tracks that
were being opened from the clearings of the settlers, and that wound along
beneath trees of which those now seen in Kentucky are the unworthy
survivors--oaks and walnuts, maples and elms, centuries old, gnarled,
massive, drooping, majestic, through whose arches the sun hurled down only
some solitary spear of gold, and over whose gray-mossed roots some cold
brook crept in silence; with here and there billowy open spaces of wild rye,
buffalo grass, and clover on which the light fell in sheets of radiance;
with other spots so dim that for ages no shoot had sprung from the deep
black mould; blown to and fro across this wagon-road, odours of ivy,
pennyroyal and mint, mingled with the fragrance of the wild grape; flitting
to and fro across it, as low as the violet-beds, as high as the sycamores,
unnumbered kinds of birds, some of which like the paroquet are long since
vanished.

Down it now there came in a drowsy amble an old white bob-tail horse, his
polished coat shining like silver when he crossed an expanse of sunlight,
fading into spectral paleness when he passed under the rayless trees; his
foretop floating like a snowy plume in the light wind, his unshod feet,
half-covered by the fetlocks, stepping noiselessly over the loamy earth; the
rims of his nostrils expanding like flexible ebony; and in his eyes that
look of peace which is never seen but in those of petted animals.

He had on an old bridle with knots of blue violets hanging, down at his
ears; over his broad back was spread a blanket of buffalo-skin; on this
rested a worn black side-saddle, and sitting in the saddle was a girl, whom
every young man of the town not far away knew to be Amy Falconer, and whom
many an old pioneer dreamed of when he fell asleep beside his rifle and his
hunting-knife in his lonely cabin of the wilderness. She was perhaps the
first beautiful girl of aristocratic birth ever seen in Kentucky, and the
first of the famous train of those who for a hundred years since have
wrecked or saved the lives of the men.

Her pink calico dress, newly starched and ironed, had looked so pretty to
her when she had started from home, that she had not been able to bear the
thought of wearing over it this lovely afternoon her faded, mud-stained
riding-skirt; and it was so short that it showed, resting against the
saddle-skirt, her little feet loosely fitted into new bronze morocco shoes.
On her hands she had drawn white half-hand mittens of home-knit; and on her
head she wore an enormous white scoop-bonnet, lined with pink and tied under
her chin in a huge muslin bow. Her face, hidden away under the
pink-and-white shadow, showed such hints of pearl and rose that it seemed
carved from the inner surface of a sea-shell. Her eyes were gray, almond
shaped, rather wide apart, with an expression changeful and playful, but
withal rather shrewd and hard; her light brown hair, as fine as unspun silk,
was parted over her brow and drawn simply back behind her ears; and the lips
of her little mouth curved against each other, fresh, velvet-like, smiling.

On she rode down the avenue of the primeval woods; and Nature seemed
arranged to salute her as some imperial presence; with the waving of a
hundred green boughs above on each side; with a hundred floating odours;
with the swift play of nimble forms up and down the boles of trees; and all
the sweet confusion of innumerable melodies.

Then one of those trifles happened that contain the history of our lives, as
a drop of dew draws into itself the majesty and solemnity of the heavens.

>From the pommel of the side-saddle there dangled a heavy roll of home-spun
linen, which she was taking to town to her aunt's merchant as barter for
queen's-ware pitchers; and behind this roll of linen, fastened to a ring
under the seat of the saddle, was swung a bundle tied up in a large
blue-and-white checked cotton neckkerchief. Whenever she fidgeted in the
saddle, or whenever the horse stumbled as he often did because he was clumsy
and because the road was obstructed by stumps and roots, the string by which
this bundle was tied slipped a little through the lossening knot and the
bundle hung a little lower down. Just where the wagon-trail passed out into
the broader public road leading from Lexington to Frankfort and the
travelling began to be really good, the horse caught one of his forefeet
against the loop of a root, was thrown violently forward, and the bundle
slipped noiselessly from the saddle to the earth.

She did not see it. She indignantly gathered the reins more tightly in her
hand, pushed back her bonnet, which now hung down over her eyes like the
bill of a pelican, and applied her little switch of wild cherry to the
horse's flank with such vehemence that a fly which was about to alight on
that spot went to the other side. The old horse himself--he bore the
peaceable name of William Penn--merely gave one of the comforting switches
of his bob-tail with which he brushed away the thought of any small
annoyance, and stopped a moment to nibble at the wayside cane mixed with
purple blossoming peavine.

Out of the lengthening shadows of the woods the girl and the horse passed on
toward the little town; and far behind them in the public road lay the lost
bundle.

II

IN the open square on Cheapside in Lexington there is now a bronze statue of
John Breckinridge. Not far from where it stands the pioneers a hundred years
ago had built the first log school-house of the town.

Poor old school-house, long since become scattered ashes! Poor little
backwoods academicians, driven in about sunrise, driven out toward dusk!
Poor little tired backs with nothing to lean against! Poor little bare feet
that could never reach the floor! Poor little droop-headed figures, so
sleepy in the long summer days, so afraid to fall asleep! Long, long since,
little children of the past, your backs have become straight enough,
measured on the same cool bed; sooner or later your feet, wherever
wandering, have found their resting-places in the soft earth; and all your
drooping heads have gone to sleep on the same dreamless pillow and there are
sleeping. And the young schoolmaster, who seemed exempt from frailty while
he guarded like a sentinel that lone outpost of the alphabet--he too has
long since joined the choir invisible of the immortal dead. But there is
something left of him though more than a century has passed away: something
that has wandered far down the course of time to us like the faint summer
fragrance of a young tree long since fallen dead in its wintered
forest--like a dim radiance yet travelling onward into space from an orb
turned black and cold--like an old melody, surviving on and on in the air
without any instrument, without any strings.

John Gray, the school-master. At four o'clock that afternoon and therefore
earlier than usual, he was standing on the hickory block which formed the
doorstep of the school-house, having just closed the door behind him for the
day. Down at his side, between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, hung
his big black hat, which was decorated with a tricoloured cockade, to show
that he was a member of the Democratic Society of Lexington, modelled after
the Democratic Society of Philadelphia and the Jacobin clubs of France. In
the open palm of the other lay his big silver English lever watch with a
glass case and broad black silk fob.

A young fellow of powerful build, lean, muscular; wearing simply but with
gentlemanly care a suit of black, which was relieved around his wrists and
neck by linen, snow-white and of the finest quality. In contrast with his
dress, a complexion fresh, pure, brilliant--the complexion of health and
innocence; in contrast with this complexion from above a mass of coarse
dark-red hair, cut short and loosely curling. Much physical beauty in the
head, the shape being noble, the pose full of dignity and of strength;
almost no beauty in the face itself except in the gray eyes which were
sincere, modest, grave. Yet a face not without moral loftiness and
intellectual power; rugged as a rock, but as a rock is made less rugged by a
little vine creeping over it, so his was softened by a fine network of
nerves that wrought out upon it a look of kindness; betraying the first
nature of passion, but disciplined to the higher nature of control;
youthful, but wearing those unmistakable marks of maturity which mean a
fierce early struggle against the rougher forces of the world. On the whole,
with the calm, self respecting air of one who, having thus far won in the
battle of life, has a fiercer longing for larger conflict, and whose entire
character rests on the noiseless conviction that he is a man and a
gentleman.

Deeper insight would have been needed to discover how true and earnest a
soul he was; how high a value he set on what the future had in store for him
and on what his life would be worth to himself and to others; and how,
liking rather to help himself than to be helped, he liked less to be trifled
with and least of all to be seriously thwarted.

He was thinking, as his eyes rested on the watch, that if this were one of
his ordinary days he would pursue his ordinary duties; he would go up street
to the office of Marshall and for the next hour read as many pages of law as
possible; then get his supper at his favourite tavern--the Sign of the
Spinning, Wheel--near the two locust trees; then walk out into the country
for an hour or more; then back to his room and more law until midnight by
the light of his tallow dip.

But this was not an ordinary day--being one that he had long waited for and
was destined never to forget. At dusk the evening before, the post-rider, so
tired that he had scarce strength of wind to blow his horn, had ridden into
town bringing the mail from Philadelphia; and in this mail there was great
news for him. It had kept him awake nearly all of the night before; it had
been uppermost in his mind the entire day in school. At the thought of it
now he thrust his watch into his pocket, pulled his hat resolutely over his
brow, and started toward Main Street, meaning to turn thence toward Cross
Street, now known as Broadway. On the outskirts of the town in that
direction lay the wilderness, undulating away for hundreds of miles like a
vast green robe with scarce a rift of human making.

He failed to urge his way through the throng as speedily as he may have
expected, being withheld at moments by passing acquaintances, and at others
pausing of his own choice to watch some spectacle of the street.

The feeling lay fresh upon him this afternoon that not many years back the
spot over which the town was spread had been but a hidden glade in the heart
of the beautiful, awful wilderness, with a bountiful spring bubbling up out
of the turf, and a stream winding away through the green, valley-bottom to
the bright, shady Elkhorn: a glade that for ages had been thronged by
stately-headed elk and heavy-headed bison, and therefore sought also by
unreckoned generations of soft-footed, hard eyed red hunters. Then had come
the beginning of the end when one summer day, toward sunset, a few tired,
rugged backwoodsmen of the Anglo-Saxon race, wandering fearless and far into
the wilderness from the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge and the
Alleghanies, had made their camp by the margin of the spring; and always
afterwards, whether by day or by night, they had dreamed of this as the land
they must conquer for their homes. Now they had conquered it already; and
now this was the town that had been built there, with its wide streets under
big trees of the primeval woods; with a long stretch of turf on one side of
the stream for a town common; with inns and taverns in the style of those of
country England or of Virginia in the reign of George the Third; with shops
displaying the costliest merchandise of Philadelphia; with rude dwellings of
logs now giving way to others of frame and of brick; and, stretching away
from the town toward the encompassing wilderness, orderly gardens and
orchards now pink with the blossom of the peach, and fields of young maize
and wheat and flax and hemp.

As the mighty stream of migration of the Anglo-Saxon race had burst through
the jagged channels of the Alleghanies and rushed onward to the unknown,
illimitable West, it was this little town that had received one of the main
streams, whence it flowed more gently dispersed over the rich lands of the
newly created State, or passed on to the Ohio and the southern fringes of
the Lakes. It was this that received also a vast return current of the
fearful, the disappointed, the weak, as they recoiled from the awful
frontier of backwood life and resought the peaceful Atlantic seaboard--one
of the defeated Anglo-Saxon armies of civilization.

These two far-clashing tides of the aroused, migrating race--the one flowing
westward, the other ebbing eastward--John Gray found himself noting with
deep interest as he moved through the town that afternoon a hundred years
ago; and not less keenly the unlike groups and characters thrown
dramatically together upon this crowded stage of border history.

At one point his attention was arrested by the tearful voices of women and
the weeping of little children: a company of travellers with
pack-horses--one of the caravans across the desert of the Western woods--was
moving off to return by the Wilderness Road to the old abandoned homes in
Virginia and North Carolina. Farther on, his passage was blocked by a joyous
crowd that had gathered about another caravan newly arrived--not one
traveller having perished on the way. Seated on the roots of an oak were a
group of young backwoodsmen--swarthy, lean, tall, wild and reckless of
bearing--their long rifles propped against the tree or held fondly across
the knees; the gray smoke of their pipes mingling with the gray of their
jauntily worn raccoon-skin caps; the rifts of yellow sunlight blending with
the yellow of their huntingshirts and tunics; their knives and powder-horns
fastened in the belts that girt in their gaunt waists: the heroic youthful
sinew of the old border folk. One among them, larger and handsomer than the
others, had pleased his fancy by donning more nearly the Indian dress. His
breech-clout was of dappled fawn-skin; his long thigh boots of thin
deer-hide were open at the hips, leaving exposed the clear whiteness of his
flesh; below the knees they were ornamented by a scarlet fringe tipped with
the hoofs of fawns and the spurs of the wild turkey; and in his cap he wore
the intertwined wings of the hawk and the scarlet tanager.

Under another tree in front of a tavern bearing the sign of the Virginia
arms, a group of students of William and Mary, the new aristocrats of the
West, were singing, gambling, drinking; while at intervals one of them, who
had lying open before him a copy of Tom Paine's "Age of Reason," pounded on
the table and apostrophied the liberties of Man. Once Gray paused beside a
tall pole that had been planted at a street corner and surmounted with a
liberty cap. Two young men, each wearing the tricolour cockade as he did,
were standing, there engaged in secret conversation. As he joined them,
three other young men--Federalists--sauntered past, wearing black cockades,
with an eagle button on the left side. The six men saluted coolly.

Many another group and solitary figure he saw to remind him of the turbulent
history of the time and place. A parson, who had been the calmest of Indian
fighters, had lost all self-control as he contended out in the road with
another parson for the use of Dr. Watts' hymns instead of the Psalms of
David. Near by, listening to them, and with a wondering eye on all he saw in
the street, stood a French priest of Bordeaux, an exile from the fury of the
avenging jacobins. There were brown flatboatmen, in weather-beaten felt
hats, just returned by the long overland trip from New Orleans and
discussing with tobacco merchants the open navigation of the Mississippi;
and as they talked, up to them hurried the inventor Edward West, who said
with excitement that if they would but step across the common to the town
branch, he would demonstrate by his own model that some day navigation would
be by steam: whereat they all laughed kindly at him for a dreamer, and went
to laugh at the action of his mimic boat, moving hither and thither over the
dammed water of the stream. Sitting on a stump apart from every one, his dog
at his feet, his rifle across his lap, an aged backwoodsman surveyed in
sorrow the civilization that had already destroyed his hunting and that was
about sending him farther west to the depths of Missouri--along with the
buffalo. His glance fell with disgust upon two old gentlemen in
knee-breeches who met and offered each other their snuff-boxes, with a deep
bow. He looked much more kindly at a crave, proud Chickasaw hunter, who
strode by with inward grief and shame, wounded by the robbery of his people.
Puritans from New England; cavaliers from Virginia; Scotch-Irish from
Pennsylvania; mild-eyed trappers and bargemen from the French hamlets of
Kaskaskia and Cahokia; wood-choppers; scouts; surveyors; swaggering
adventurers; land-lawyers; colonial burgesses,--all these mingled and
jostled, plotted and bartered, in the shops, in the streets, under the
trees.

And everywhere soldiers and officers of the Revolution--come West with their
families to search for homes, or to take possession of the grants made them
by the Government. In the course of a short walk John Gray passed men who
had been wounded in the battle of Point Pleasant; men who had waded behind
Clark through the freezing marshes of the Illinois to the storming of
Vincennes; men who had charged through flame and smoke up the side of King's
Mountain against Ferguson's Carolina loyalists; men who with chilled ardour
had let themselves be led into the massacre of the Wabash by blundering St.
Clair; men who with wild thrilling pulses had rushed to victory behind mad
Antony Wayne.

And the women! Some--the terrible lioness-mothers of the Western jungles who
had been used like men to fight with rifle, knife, and axe--now sat silent
in the doorways of their rough cabins, wrinkled, scarred, fierce, silent,
scornful of all advancing luxury and refinement. Flitting gaily past them,
on their way to the dry goods stores--supplied by trains of pack-horses from
over the Alleghanies, or by pack-horse and boat down the Ohio--hurried the
wives of the officers, daintily choosing satins and ribands for a coming
ball. All this and more he noted as he passed lingeringly on. The deep
vibrations of history swept through him, arousing him as the marshalling
storm cloud, the rush of winds, and sunlight flickering into gloom kindle
the sense of the high, the mighty, the sublime.

As he was crossing the common, a number of young fellows stripped and girt
for racing--for speed greater than an Indian's saved many a life in those
days, and running was part of the regular training of the young--bounded up
to him like deer, giving a challenge: he too was very swift. But he named
another day, impatient of the many interruptions that had already delayed
him, and with long, rapid strides he had soon passed beyond the last fields
and ranges of the town. Then he slackened his pace. Before him, a living
wall, rose the edge of the wilderness. Noting the position of the sun and
searching for a point of least resistance, he plunged in.

Soon he had to make his way through a thicket of cane some twelve feet high;
then through a jungle of wild rye, buffalo grass and briars; beyond which he
struck a narrow deertrace and followed that in its westward winding through
thinner undergrowth under the dark trees.

He was unarmed. He did not even wear a knife. But the thought rose in his
mind of how rapidly the forest also was changing its character. The Indians
were gone. Two years had passed since they had for the last time flecked the
tender green with tender blood. And the deadly wild creatures--the native
people of earth and tree--they likewise had fled from the slaughter and
starvation of their kind. A little while back and a maddened buffalo or a
wounded elk might have trodden him down and gored him to death in that
thicket and no one have ever learned his fate--as happened to many a
solitary hunter. He could not feel sure that hiding in the leaves of the
branches against which his hat sometimes brushed there did not lie the
panther, the hungrier for the fawns that had been driven from the near
coverts. A swift lowering of its head, a tense noiseless spring, its fangs
buried in his neck,--with no knife the contest would not have gone well with
him. But of deadly big game he saw no sign that day. Once from a distant
brake he was surprised to hear the gobble of the wild turkey; and more
surprised still--and delighted--when the trail led to a twilight gloom and
coolness, and at the green margin of a little spring he saw a stag drinking.
It turned its terrified eyes upon him for an instant and then bounded away
like a gray shadow.

When he had gone about two miles, keeping his face steadily toward the sun,
he came upon evidences of a clearing: burnt and fallen timber; a field of
sprouting maize; another of young wheat; a peach orchard flushing all the
green around with its clouds of pink; beyond this a garden of vegetables;
and yet farther on, a log house.

He was hurrying on toward the house; but as he passed the garden he saw
standing in one corner, with a rake in her hand, a beautifully formed woman
in homespun, and near by a negro lad dropping garden-seed. His eyes lighted
up with pleasure; and changing his course at once, he approached and leaned
on the picket fence.

"How do you do, Mrs. Falconer?"

She turned with a cry, dropping her rake and pushing her sun-bonnet back
from her eyes.

"How unkind to frighten me!" she said, laughing as she recognized him; and
then she came over to the fence and gave him her hand--beautiful, but
hardened by work. A faint colour had spread over her face.

"I didn't mean to frighten you," he replied, smiling at her fondly. "But I
had rapped on the fence twice. I suppose you took me for a flicker. Or you
were too busy with your gardening to hear me. Or, may be you were too deep
in your own thoughts."

"How do you happen to be out of school so early?" she asked, avoiding the
subject.

"I was through with the lessons."

"You must have hurried."

"I did."

"And is that the way you treat people's children?"

"That's the way I treated them to-day."

"And then you came straight out here?"

"As straight and fast as my legs could carry me--with a good many
interruptions."

She searched his face eagerly for a moment. Then her eyes fell and she
turned back to the seed-planting. He stood leaning over the fence with his
hat in his hand, glancing impatiently at the house.

"How can you respect yourself, to stand there idling and see me hard at
work?" she said at length, without looking, at him.

"But you do the work so well--better than I could! Besides, you are obeying
a Divine law. I have no right to keep you from doing the will of God. I
observe you as one of the daughters of Eve--under the curse of toil."

"There's no Divine command that I should plant beans. But it is my command
that Amy shall. And this is Amy's work. Aren't you willing to work for her?"
she asked, slowly raising her eyes to his face.

"I am willing to work for her, but I am not willing to do her work!" he
replied." If the queen sits quietly in the parlour, eating bread and
honey"--and he nodded, protesting, toward the house.

"The queen's not in the parlour, eating bread and honey. She has gone to
town to stay with Kitty Poythress till after the ball."

She noted how his expression instantly changed, and how, unconscious of his
own action, he shifted his face back to the direction of the town.

"Her uncle was to take her in to-morrow," she went on, still watching him,
"but no! she and Kitty must see each other to-night; and her uncle must be
sure to bring her party finery in the gig to-morrow. I'm sorry you had your
walk for nothing; but you'll stay to supper?"

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