THE HUNTER'S FAMILY
There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom
we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white
blood, they are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the
fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country;
rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English
gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the
dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot point. At the
time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the
conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies
failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically
by starvation. They are widely scattered, however, and easily
recognized. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day,
swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid
of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for
the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity
and a strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most
congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur
detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse
along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a
footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly
display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye
may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena,
Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion,
pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are
indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to
all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as
Poor Whites or Low-downers.
I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the
name savours of offence; but I may go as far as this--they were, in
many points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared. Rufe
himself combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a
hunter and an amateur detective. It was he who pursued Russel and
Dollar, the robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the
very morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a
hayfield. Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an
acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much grave commiseration
for his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe was grave. I
never saw him hurried. When he spoke, he took out his pipe with
ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
tones and few words, stated his business or told his story. His
gait was to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any
step, he had turned round and walked away again, so warily and
slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation did he go about. He
lay long in bed in the morning--rarely indeed, rose before noon; he
loved all games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll
House croquet ground I have seen him toiling at the latter with the
devotion of a curate. He took an interest in education, was an
active member of the local school-board, and when I was there, he
had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His waggon was broken, but
it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like all truly idle
people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff for his
wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork
quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated
eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste--the taste of an
Indian. With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in
word and act. Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any
society but that of fools. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep,
permanent excitement in his dark blue eyes; and when this grave man
smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady place.
Mrs. Hanson (nee, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace
than her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured,
with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by
Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion,
made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the
surface, what there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her
noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-
spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner
about the woman: she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband
was an unknown quantity between the savage and the nobleman. She
was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came
far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business, or now and
again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion,
with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event,
and turned our red canyon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the
windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length
of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck.
There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family
of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the
number. Nor did they want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular
stolidity, and called Breedlove--I think he had crossed the plains
in the same caravan with Rufe--housed with them for awhile during
our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of
Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess;
for I could get no information on the subject, just as I could
never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or not Rufe was
a contraction for Rufus. They were all cheerfully at sea about
their names in that generation. And this is surely the more
notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family
names appear to have been coined. At one time, at least, the
ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and
Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain
poetry in these denominations; that must have been, then, their
form of literature. But still times change; and their next
descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at
least be clear upon the point. And anyway, and however his name
should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated
Caliban I ever knew.
Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting
our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their
appearance together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity;
he, because he was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood
at I forget how much a day. The way that he set about cutting wood
was characteristic. We were at that moment patching up and
unpacking in the kitchen. Down he sat on one side, and down sat
his sister on the other. Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he,
to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure with profuse
expectoration. She rattled away, talking up hill and down dale,
laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked
on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his
head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a
tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin;
although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet
adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road. But it was plain he
was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed
frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were about. This
was scarcely helpful: it was even, to amateur carpenters,
embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off work and began to
get dinner. Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone
an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's laughter died
away among the nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine's first
day's work in my employment--the devil take him!
The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he
bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality. He prided
himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma'am.
HE didn't think much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He
had put a question to her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to
fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down? She
had not been able to solve the problem. "She don't know nothing,"
he opined. He told us how a friend of his kept a school with a
revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach
school, he could. All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.
He would stand a while looking down; and then he would toss back
his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward
a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
had poisoned his dog. "That was a low thing for a man to do now,
wasn't it? It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with
him: I pisoned HIS dog." His clumsy utterance, his rude
embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his
remarks. I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two
words until I knew Irvine--the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf;
between them, they complete his portrait. He could lounge, and
wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in
everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious
that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at
work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in
his own cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his
fellows. Above all things, he was delighted with himself. You
would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled,
struggling utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was
happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.
His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness. He
could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery. As long
as my wife stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long
exactly he would stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she
turned her back, or ceased to praise him, he would stop. His
physical strength was wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and
admire his achievements, warmed his heart like sunshine. Yet he
was as cowardly as he was powerful, and felt no shame in owning to
the weakness. Something was once wanted from the crazy platform
over the shaft, and he at once refused to venture there--"did not
like," as he said, "foolen' round them kind o' places," and let my
wife go instead of him, looking on with a grin. Vanity, where it
rules, is usually more heroic: but Irvine steadily approved
himself, and expected others to approve him; rather looked down
upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him, on the
strength of his superior prudence.
Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that
Irvine was as beautiful as a statue. His features were, in
themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse
expression that disfigured them. So much strength residing in so
spare a frame was proof sufficient of the accuracy of his shape.
He must have been built somewhat after the pattern of Jack
Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain, was no
lout. It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than
by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with
such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service.
Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and
grumbled curses. He had the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as
an artist's model, the exterior of a Greek God. It was a cruel
thought to persons less favoured in their birth, that this
creature, endowed--to use the language of theatres--with
extraordinary "means," should so manage to misemploy them that he
looked ugly and almost deformed. It was only by an effort of
abstraction, and after many days, that you discovered what he was.
By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we
got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that
we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the
work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily,
bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display:
but cutting wood was a different matter. Anybody could cut wood;
and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising him, and had other
things to attend to. And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came
daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained
intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
mountainside. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but
Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an
imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth
day of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could,
the light in which I had grown to regard his presence. I pointed
out to him that I could not continue to give him a salary for
spitting on the floor; and this expression, which came after a good
many others, at last penetrated his obdurate wits. He rose at
once, and said if that was the way he was going to be spoke to, he
reckoned he would quit. And, no one interposing, he departed.
So far, so good. But we had no firewood. The next afternoon, I
strolled down to Rufe's and consulted him on the subject. It was a
very droll interview, in the large, bare north room of the
Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson's patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and
his wife, and I, and the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed.
Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who
could do a day's work for anybody. Irvine, thereupon, refused to
have any more to do with my service; he "wouldn't work no more for
a man as had spoke to him's I had done." I found myself on the
point of the last humiliation--driven to beseech the creature whom
I had just dismissed with insult: but I took the high hand in
despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop
firewood for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons
being eager for the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with merely
affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ him
again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious. The
promise, I am bound to say, was kept. We soon had a fine pile of
firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and
spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse of him for
that, nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.
The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she
had more of the small change of sense. It was she who faced
Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar
would have had no rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a
fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without
exaggeration--perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he
lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts
so high a value on time and money. Sanity itself is a kind of
convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly,
he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way
less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his
own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play;
even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his
imagination. His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be
afraid to say how many bucks--the currency in which he paid his
way: it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was
dear to his heart. The pictorial side of his daily business was
never forgotten. He was even anxious to stand for his picture in
those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once warmed
almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear,
"with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a
crick" (creek, stream).
There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not
care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never
observed scenery. The world, as it appeared to him, was almost
obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground:
Caliban Malvolio. And it seems to me as if, in the persons of
these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly
well represented: the hunter living really in nature; the
clodhopper living merely out of society: the one bent up in every
corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches
it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint
dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life
that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in
the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's
beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into
the perfection of this crass and earthy vanity. In towns or the
busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men's
existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear
contempt. But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious
only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in the
silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
delight on the sound of his own thoughts.
