The Strange Woman

by Ben Ames Williams

  John showed an aptitude for this work; as he grew older, he graduated from chores and from the bookkeeping in the store to work in the shipyards. He was at first no more than an errand boy there; but he began to round treenails in his idle time till he acquired a skilful axe hand. So he came by degrees to do a man’s work in the yard.

  Out of this experience there arose in him a passion for wood. He liked the smell of it and the feel of it, liked working it with his axe to a smooth and flawless surface, liked the scuff of chips under his feet, and the smell of sawdust and the pleasant crackle of shavings. He had begun to haunt the shipyards as soon as he was old enough to wander so far from his home; and in the pauses of the work there he listened—remembering, as young children do, so much more than their elders suspect—to the talk of the men. Much of that talk dealt with the exploits of the Dash privateer, which had been built at Porter’s Landing; and he was old enough to remember the anxiety and then the grief when early in 1815 she disappeared in a gale and was never heard of again. He had known, as a boy of seven knows brave young men, John and Ebenezer Porter and John Bennett who were among the Freeport men aboard her when she sailed on that fatal voyage; and he felt at their deaths a personal loss mingled with an ennobling pride.

  John left Freeport when he was seventeen years old to spend a winter lumbering in the forests far up the Connecticut. His older brothers had turned in that direction, and this influenced his decision. His mother worked for weeks to supply him with the clothes she foresaw he would need; and her parting present to him was a gold ring, a duplicate of rings which she had given to each of her older sons. She was a simple woman with a simple faith, the stronger for its simplicity.

  ‘I give my boys rings,’ she told John, ‘because a ring is like a family.

  When it’s broken, it has no more strength and goodness in it. A family is just a group of people all holding hands in a circle so that each helps the other. Dan and Walter are gone—and now you’re going—but wherever you are you will always be part of our family, John; and even if we do not see you for many a year, we’ll be helping you and strengthening you with our prayers, just as you will be helping us.’ And she added: ‘You’ll marry, yourself, some day. Remember to choose a woman who’ll always stand hand in hand with you; and remember that even when your children come and widen the circle of your family, one of your hands will always hold on to hers. So choose a wife carefully and wisely, John. The thing I’ll pray for most will be for you to many the right, good woman.’

  III

  John did not see his father and mother again for three years after his departure. That first winter he worked in the woods, beginning as a swamper; but before spring he was handling an ox team. He came downriver with the drive, and left it to work all summer in a shipyard at New London before returning to the north woods again.

  He had decided by that time that he wished to go to college; and he saved money with this in mind. He had worked, even in the winter, since he was twelve, so he had little formal schooling; and it was necessary now for him to ground himself in certain fields before he could hope to get the full benefit from college work. He did this by diligence, alone.

  Before going to Cambridge he came home for a fortnight’s stay to find that his father had prospered and was now a leading merchant in Freeport and with widening interests.

  ‘There’s a big time coming for Maine, John,’ the older man told his son. ‘You go on with your college. You’ll be through soon enough. Things are just starting now. But there’s more pine up the Kennebec and the Penobscot than you ever saw in New Hampshire; and four or five years from now folks will begin to find it out. When you’re ready, you take a look up our way. I’ll know more about it by then. You’ve got a better head for figures than any of your brothers. You and me will make a good pulling team.’

  They talked long that night. John’s father had gone to Bangor during the summer, had pushed on up the river to see for himself the great pine forests to the northward; and already, quietly, he was buying state lands—not only from Maine but from Massachusetts—paying one-fourth down and pledging yearly payments on the remainder. ‘Some are buying stump- age or taking permits,’ he explained, ‘but I’m buying the lands. Time enough to start cutting when the price gets up where it ought to be. The only risk now is fire and trespassing, but the land agents are after the trespassers. I went to see Colonel Black at Ellsworth. He’s agent for the Bingham heirs. He’s after the trespassers all the time, seizing outfits, or logs after they’re cut, so his case will stand up in court. But I’ve been buying mostly so far up-river the trespassers haven’t got that far yet.’

  John went to Harvard with his head full of his father’s plans; but during his second year in Cambridge the older man died, and when John came home to help check over his affairs, it became immediately manifest that the dream was ended. The annual payments could not now be met, and there was not yet a sufficient demand to allow a ready sale of land on which only instalments had been paid. John stayed out of college for most of a year, till the tangle had been straightened out. His brother Dan came home to assume the management of the store, and only then did John return to Cambridge.

  IV

  The attraction which Ephraim Poster from the first exercised on John Evered was not easy to explain. Evered was older than most of his college mates, and infinitely more mature; but he was a quiet, solid young man and he lacked the easy graces which would have won him many casual friends. He first saw Ephraim when the other spoke at a meeting of students gathered to protest at some detail of college management; and Ephraim’s quick and lively tongue and his shy grin, coupled as it was with an impudent and effective effrontery, seemed to Evered, who was not articulate, astonishing and wonderful. For the months that followed, he never saw Ephraim without a stir of interest. He himself was usually alone, but the other was always one of a group of good companions, and John came to attribute to Ephraim virtues which the young man was far from possessing. But he was at the same time by no means blind to young Poster’s patent vices. Without being a prig, Evered was nevertheless a decent man. In the lumber camps and on the river he had seen robust and flagrant vice with no particular reprobation, instinctively understanding that for the rough and half-savage men of the forest and the stream these occasional outbursts were to be expected, were even pardonable. A man who worked twelve or sixteen hours a day all winter long, toiling like an ox, seeing no one but other men like himself, could be forgiven for finding even in the stained and wretched women of the riverfront brothels something beautiful and worthy of desire; and John himself had known such women who were largely generous and loyal and, within their limits, fine, mothering the homeless and the lonely men who came hungrily to seek them out. There was one, named Lena Tempest, who kept a boarding house where he sometimes lodged, and whom he learned even to admire.

  But he could not forgive in Ephraim what he was ready to forgive in rough woodsmen; and one night at the Bell in Hand, watching the other swill gross quantities of the heavy ale, Evered felt an almost personal pain which led him to follow Ephraim and his friends when they left the tavern, and finally to capture Ephraim as much by force as by persuasion, marching him home to Cambridge.

  Their friendship in the months that followed came to mean much to both of them. Evered’s character was built on a solid foundation broad enough and strong enough so that Ephraim acquired from him a new sense of responsibility and self-respect and personal pride. Evered on the other hand benefited too, becoming less the recluse, less the country boy, less silent and awkward—without in the process losing any of his strength. When it came time for him to leave Cambridge, these two parted with regrets, and planned to meet again.

  V

  John went home to Freeport, but not for long. Of all the land to which for a while his father had held title, little remained; but there was one tract of pine on the Kennebec which had been saved, and Dan and John agreed that John should take an outfit into the woods and lumber
it off. The enterprise had an indirect result which determined the future course of Evered’s life. When he brought his drive down-river in the spring, he joined forces with another drive of logs owned by the Bingham heirs; and at the boom he met Colonel Black himself.

  The Colonel recognized his name, said it was unusual. ‘A man named Evered came to see me in Ellsworth a few years ago,’ he said. ‘He was buying state lands, wanted to talk to me about handling trespassers.’

  ‘He was my father,’ Evered agreed. ‘He died soon after.’

  ‘So? Well, I’m sorry to hear it,’ Colonel Black declared. He was a conspicuous figure among those who interested themselves in Maine pine. When on the heels of the Revolution Massachusetts found herself heavily in debt, she organized a lottery for the sale of fifty townships of Maine lands; but the lottery was a failure. Less than five hundred tickets were purchased, out of some twenty-seven hundred that were issued. Among those present at the drawing was William Bingham, a wealthy Philadelphian with an eye to the future; and taking advantage of the disappointment at the failure of the lottery, he bought at an average price of about twelve and a half cents an acre those lands which were not drawn by ticket- holders, as well as several of the best lots which had been assigned to owners of lucky tickets. His purchases included over two million acres, about equally divided between the watersheds of the Kennebec and the Penobscot, and made him by all odds the largest owner of wild lands in what was to become the State of Maine.

  Upon Mr. Bingham’s death, Colonel Black became the agent for the heirs. When John Evered met him for the first time, the Colonel was just past fifty years old, a solid, thick-set, clean-shaven man, bald on top of his head, but with tight curly hair above his ears and at the back. The outer ends of his upper eyelids slanted downward and the effect was to give his eyes a soft gentleness which made John like him at once. His mouth was wide and humorous, but his chin and jaw were framed in stern and heavy lines. He was individually the biggest operator on the Union River, which ran through Ellsworth, and in his capacity as agent he was taking advantage of the rising appetite for Maine lands to sell some of the colossal Bingham holdings—while at the same time he was as ready to buy land that could be had at a fair price. In 1828 he had sold some forty thousand acres, and his sales would mount in the next two years to over seven hundred thousand acres. In one month during this period he sold almost one hundred thousand acres, at an average price close to the two dollar mark.

  John Evered was impressed when they met, not only by what he knew of the man, but by the other’s pleasant kindliness. Tm sorry to hear it,’ the Colonel repeated. ‘Your father was a good man, a right-feeling man.’ He looked at Evered thoughtfully. ‘You’re bigger than he,’ he commented.

  John nodded. He was in fact just over six feet, and now after months of hard daily toil he carried not an ounce of surplus flesh. ‘Yes,’ he assented.

  The Colonel looked toward the river full of logs. ‘Whose drive is this you’ve brought down with ours?’ he asked.

  John smiled. ‘Well—as old Tom Hawkes in Freeport said about the horse—if you want to attach it, I don’t know; but if you want to buy it, it’s mine.’

  The Colonel chuckled, and he asked a dozen questions. How many teams had John operated, how many men, how long a haul, how many feet would his drive scale? John answered him explicitly; and the Colonel looked at him with a new interest. ‘You’ve a head for figures,’ he commented. ‘You seem to know exactly what you’re doing.’

  ‘I kept books in my father’s store when I was ten,’ John assented.

  The Colonel pushed his questions till there were not many things about John which he did not know. In the end he said: ‘Evered, come dine with me. You say you’ve no immediate, definite plans. I think I can use a man like you.’

  The result of that interview and of the dinner that followed it was to determine—so far as his work was concerned—the course of John’s future life. Colonel Black could not personally oversee the tremendous domain he administered.

  ‘I need help, and I think you’re the man for me,’ he told John. ‘For one thing, I’ve my own business—I manufacture some lumber at Ellsworth, have some mills there and plan more, and I take a turn at shipbuilding now and then—so I need someone to take detail off my hands. You’ll have a salary—we’ll discuss figures later—and a chance to buy stump- age at a low fee any time you want to. That will give you a foothold in the lumber business. I know your father had a bent that way. Now, what do you say?’

  So John entered the service of the Bingham heirs, entered more immediately the service of Colonel Black; and before they parted he agreed that as soon as his immediate business was done he would come to the Colonel’s home in Ellsworth to begin to familiarize himself with the estate’s manifold affairs.

  He went to Ellsworth in mid-July, travelling from Portland on the Bangor steamer; and he remembered that Ephraim’s home had been in Bangor, and wondered whether his friend was there. But he had no time on his arrival to inquire, for when he stepped on the wharf a young man met him smilingly.

  ‘By the look of you, you’re John Evered,’ he said.

  ‘Why, I am, yes.’

  ‘I’m George Black,’ the other explained. ‘Father sent me to meet you.’ He clasped Evered’s hand and led him to where a fine pair of trotters waited, harnessed to a light, well-sprung, two-wheeled curricle. The horses were eager, and a few minutes later they crossed the Brewer Bridge and sped away along the Ellsworth road.

  VI

  The weeks that followed were crowded with new experiences. Not only was John busy absorbing as much as possible from the ledgers in the Colonel’s big iron safe, but also he was introduced to a way of life completely new to him. Colonel Black’s house was a big square brick mansion, with a wide pillared veranda across the front and a one-story wing which was the Colonel’s office. The house stood on a slope above Union River with a fine prospect toward Mount Desert, and trees had been cut away to give the eye free reach in that direction. Around the house were spacious grounds, where white pine was used effectively for hedges. There was a tremendous barn and carriage house behind. George, who had met John at Bangor, at twenty was already keenly interested in trotting horses, and he had a half-mile track laid out in the pine woods near the house where he and John sometimes went to exercise the horses in the early morning before breakfast time.

  The household was a large one. George and Alex who were not yet married, and Charlie who never would be, lived at home; and the married sons and daughters lived near-by, so with children and grandchildren the big house was always well filled. But there were many guests too, coming for an evening, or for a day, or for days; and late in July Judge Saladine, who was Colonel Black’s attorney, arrived from Bangor for a week’s stay and his daughter Margaret came with him.

  So all summer the big house sang with gaiety, and every evening there was likely to be music and some dancing. John was, without in the least suspecting it, a handsome young man, thoroughly likable; and there were some charming feminine attempts to break down his defensive reserve. Margaret Saladine was the most amusing and the most persistent of his tormentors. Her mother had died when she was a baby, and she was an only child. She was, John thought, limpidly beautiful, with the freshness of a fine, sunned morning after rain; and he was tongue-tied with delight in her presence.

  She insisted one evening on trying to teach him to waltz, and he who with an axe in his hand or balanced upon a log as it floated down some strong river was as graceful as a reed, found himself in her nearness so clumsy that his ears burned.

  ‘It’s perfectly simple,’ she assured him smilingly. ‘If only you’ll forget yourself—and not be so scared of me. I won’t break if you touch me, you know!’ She drew his arm around her, pressed his hand more firmly against her waist. ‘Now it’s just onc-two-three, one-two-three,’ she urged. ‘Only don’t count! I can see your lips moving. Just feel the music, without really paying any attention to it. Around
and around, that’s the way.’

  When he stepped on her toes and stammered abject apologies, she assured him that he had not really hurt her at all. ‘You just caught the edge of my slipper,’ she declared. ‘Now—one-two-three, one-two-three.’

  He tried, perspiring with his own effort. They revolved in the same direction endlessly, till she protested: ‘Now unwind us! Go the other way, please, quick. I’m dizzy!’ But when he sought to do so, he stepped on his own feet and staggered and would have fallen but for her hand supporting him; and he was astonished to find how much strength there was in her slenderness.

  She labored with him long and assured him that he did finely; but he was so palpably miserable that at last she relented, and made him find her a shawl and they went out on the veranda together, and she led him to talk about himself, to tell her about his father and his mother and about his boyhood. She seemed so interested in all he told her that he forgot to be afraid. Before his second dancing lesson was finished, he was more at ease with her. She had a merry tongue, and when he realized that no one else was doing so he could laugh at himself—and so made progress.

  On another evening when there was a moon she said they must go for a drive, and Mrs. Black let them use her carriage, a high box-like buggy with three steps up which he helped Miss Saladine, and so narrow that they must sit close together. They drove down the river road, and when they were away from the house she made him let her take the reins, and she sent the good horse swiftly along the moonlit way, leaning a little forward, her eyes shining, her soft hair flying in the wind. John, watching her, thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful and so jolly and fine.