The End of the World: A Love Story

  CHAPTER V.

  AT THE CASTLE.

  By the time August reached Andrew Anderson's castle it was dark. Thecastle was built in a hollow, looking out toward the Ohio River, a riverthat has this peculiarity, that it is all beautiful, from Pittsburgh toCairo. Through the trees, on which the buds were just bursting, Augustlooked out on the golden roadway made by the moonbeams on the river. Andinto the tumult of his feelings there came the sweet benediction ofNature. And what is Nature but the voice of God?

  Anderson's castle was a large log building of strange construction.Everything about it had been built by the hands of Andrew, at once itslord and its architect. Evidently a whimsical fancy had pleased itselfin the construction. It was an attempt to realize something of medievalform in logs. There were buttresses and antique windows, and by aningenious transformation the chimney, usually such a disfigurement to alog-house, was made to look like a round donjon keep. But it wasstrangely composite, and I am afraid Mr. Ruskin would have considered itsomewhat confused; for while it looked like a rude castle to those whoapproached it from the hills, it looked like something very different tothose who approached the front, for upon that side was a portico withmassive Doric columns, which were nothing more nor less than maple logs.Andrew maintained that the natural form of the trunk of a tree was theideal and perfect form of a pillar.

  To this picturesque structure, half castle, half cabin, with hints ofchurch and temple, came August Wehle on Saturday evening. He did not goround to the portico and knock at the front-door as a stranger wouldhave done, but in behind the donjon chimney he pulled an alarm-cord.Immediately the head of Andrew Anderson was thrust out of a Gothichole--you could not call it a window. His uncut hair, rather darker thanauburn, fell down to his waist, and his shaggy red beard lay upon hisbosom. Instead of a coat he wore that unique garment of linsey-woolseyknown in the West as wa'mus (warm us?), a sort of over-shirt. He wasforty-five, but there were streaks of gray in his hair and board, and helooked older by ten years.

  "What ho, good friend? Is that you?" he cried. "Come up, and rightwelcome!" For his language was as archaic and perhaps as incongruous ashis architecture. And then throwing out of the window a rope-ladder, hecalled out again, "Ascend! ascend! my brave young friend!"

  And young Wehle climbed up the ladder into the large upper room. For itwas one peculiarity of the castle that the upper part had no visiblecommunication with the lower. Except August, and now and then a literarystranger, no one but the owner was ever admitted to the upper story ofthe house, and the neighbors, who always had access to the lower rooms,regarded the upper part of the castle with mysterious awe. August wasoften plied with questions about it, but he always answered simply thathe didn't think Mr. Anderson would like to have it talked about. For theowner there must have been some inside mode of access to the secondstory, but he did not choose to let even August know of any other waythan that by the rope-ladder, and the few strangers who came to see hisbooks were taken in by the same drawbridge.

  THE CASTLE.]

  The room was filled with books arranged after whimsical associations.One set of cases, for instance, was called the Academy, and into thesehe only admitted the masters, following the guidance of his owneccentric judgment quite as much as he followed traditional estimate.Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton of course had undisputed possession ofthe department devoted to the "Kings of Epic," as he styled them.Sophocles, Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that headmitted to his list of "Kings of Tragedy." Lope he rejected on literarygrounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency bad. Herejected Rabelais from his chief humorists, but accepted Cervantes, LeSage, Moliere, Swift, Hood, and the then fresh Pickwick of Boz. To thesehe added the Georgia Scenes of Mr. Longstreet, insisting that they werequite equal to Don Quixote. I can only stop to mention one otherdepartment in his Academy. One case was devoted to the "Best Stories,"and an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine were worthyto go into such company. His purity of feeling, almost ascetic, led himto reject Boccaccio, but he admitted Chaucer and some of Balzac's, andSmollett, Goldsmith, and De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's RipVan Winkle, Bernardin St. Pierre's "Paul and Virginia," and "ThreeMonths under the Snow," and Charles Lamb's generally overlooked"Rosamund Gray." There were eases for "Socrates and his Friends," andfor other classes. He had amused himself for years in deciding whatbooks should be "crowned," as he called it, and what not. And then hehad another case, called "The Inferno." I wish there was space to give alist of this department. Some were damned for dullness and some forcoarseness. Miss Edgeworth's Moral Tales, Darwin's Botanic Garden,Rollin's Ancient History, and a hideously illustrated copy of the Bookof Martyrs were in the First-class, Don Juan and some French novels inthe second. Tupper, Swinburne, and Walt Whitman he did not know.

  In the corner next the donjon chimney was a little room with a smallfireplace. Thus the hermit economized wood, for wood meant time, andtime meant communion with his books. All of his domestic arrangementswere carried on after this frugal fashion. In the little room was awriting-desk, covered with manuscripts and commonplace books.

  "Well, my young friend, you're thrice welcome," said Andrew, who neverdropped his book language. "What will you have? Will you resume yourapprenticeship under Goethe, or shall we canter to Canterbury withChaucer? Grand old Dan Chaucer! Or, shall we study magical philosophywith Roger Bacon--the Friar, the Admirable Doctor? or read good SirThomas More? What would Sir Thomas have said if he could have thoughtthat he would be admired by two such people as you and I, in the woodsof America, in the nineteenth century? But you do not want books! Ah! mybrave friend, you are not well. Come into my cell and let us talk. Whatgrieves you?"

  And Andrew took him by the hand with the courtesy of a knight, with thetenderness of a woman, and with the air of an astrologer, and led himinto the apartment of a monk.

  THE SEDILIUM AT THE CASTLE.]

  "See!" he said, "I have made a new chair. It is the highest evidence ofmy love for my Teutonic friend. You have now a right to this castle. Youshall be perpetually welcome. I said to myself, German scholarship shallsit there, and the Backwoods Philosopher will sit here. So sit down onmy _sedilium_, and let us hear how this uncivil and inconstant worldtreats you. It can not deal worse with you than it has with me. But Ihave had my revenge on it! I have been revenged! I have done as Ipleased, and defied the world and all its hollow conventionalities."These last words were spoken in a tone of misanthropic bitterness commonto Andrew. His love for August was the more intense that it stood upon abackground of general dislike, if not for the world, at least for thatportion of it which most immediately surrounded him.

  August took the chair, ingeniously woven and built of rye straw andhickory splints. He knew that all this formality and apparent pedantrywas superficial. He and Andrew were bosom friends, and as he had oftenopened his heart to the master of the castle before, so now he had nodifficulty in telling him his troubles, scarcely heeding the appropriatequotations which Andrew made from time to time by way of embellishment.