THE TOLL HOUSE
The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines,
with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and
well trodden croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable
door, chewing a straw; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back
parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and
equally anxious to lend or borrow books;--dozed all day in the
dusty sunshine, more than half asleep. There were no neighbours,
except the Hansons up the hill. The traffic on the road was
infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or a
dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over "the grade" to that
metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the
passage of the stages.
The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the
school-ma'am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the
morning to the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones
of the district, and returning thither pretty weary in the
afternoon. She had chosen this outlying situation, I understood,
for her health. Mr. Corwin was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was
Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In short, the place was a kind of
small Davos: consumptive folk consorting on a hilltop in the most
unbroken idleness. Jennings never did anything that I could see,
except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in the bar
and the verandah, waiting for something to happen. Corwin and Rufe
did as little as possible; and if the school-ma'am, poor lady, had
to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into
much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.
Her special corner was the parlour--a very genteel room, with Bible
prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion,
a few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not
represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried grasses. A large
book was laid religiously on the table--"From Palace to Hovel," I
believe, its name--full of the raciest experiences in England. The
author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility
particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that
traveller had ill requited his reception. His book, in short, was
a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and
there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside,
mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and "Jenkins,"
and the "Mysteries of London," and sickening, inverted snobbery,
fit to knock you down. The mention of this book reminds me of
another and far racier picture of our island life. The latter
parts of Rocambole are surely too sparingly consulted in the
country which they celebrate. No man's education can be said to be
complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment,
till he has made the acquaintance of "the Reverend Patterson,
director of the Evangelical Society." To follow the evolutions of
that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which even Mr.
Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new ideas.
But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House. Only,
alongside of "From Palace to Hovel," a sixpenny "Ouida" figured.
So literature, you see, was not unrepresented.
The school-ma'am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma'ams
enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels. They seemed
never to go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the
little parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind among the
trees. Sleep dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture: summer
sleep, shallow, soft, and dreamless. A cuckoo-clock, a great
rarity in such a place, hooted at intervals about the echoing
house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes for a moment in the bar,
and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the resting school-ma'ams in
the parlour would be recalled to the consciousness of their
inaction. Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard
indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling dishes; or
perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away
among the woods: but with these exceptions, it was sleep and
sunshine and dust, and the wind in the pine trees, all day long.
A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke. The
ostler threw his straw away and set to his preparations. Mr.
Jennings rubbed his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had
been waiting for all day about to happen at last! The boarders
gathered in the verandah, silently giving ear, and gazing down the
road with shaded eyes. And as yet there was no sign for the
senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the mountain road. The birds,
to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is unknown, must have set
down to instinct this premonitory bustle.
And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House
with a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time
to subside, before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns
they were, well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves,
the women swathed in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol;
and as they charged upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding
a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and talk and
clatter. This the Toll House?--with its city throng, its jostling
shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the bar? The mind
would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly
credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from the post-
bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
these strangers' eyes. They paused there but to pass: the blue-
clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust
coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with
her troop of girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down
for us behind life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the
line. Yet, out of our great solitude of four and twenty mountain
hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence gauged and divined
them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed in that storm of
human electricity. Yes, like Piccadilly circus, this is also one
of life's crossing-places. Here I beheld one man, already famous
or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and another who, if not yet
known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when he
comes to hang--a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado, six
long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey, playing cards,
and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of
the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths
in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
depravities of two races and two civilizations. For all his lust
and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the
shadow of the gallows. He imagined a vain thing; and while he
drained his cock-tail, Holbein's death was at his elbow. Once,
too, I fell in talk with another of these flitting strangers--like
the rest, in his shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust--and the
next minute we were discussing Paris and London, theatres and
wines. To him, journeying from one human place to another, this
was a trifle; but to me! No, Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it.
And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb.
Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then,
there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing policeman and
the lamps and stars. But the Toll House is far up stream, and near
its rural springs; the bubble of the tide but touches it. Before
you had yet grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud
whips volleyed, and the tide was gone. North and south had the two
stages vanished, the towering dust subsided in the woods; but there
was still an interval before the flush had fallen on your cheeks,
before the ear became once more contented with the silence, or the
seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their accustomed
corners. Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the great
barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn
begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.
As I recall the place--the green dell below; the spires of pine;
the sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint
stirrings of life amid the slumber of the mountains--I slowly awake
to a sense of admiration, gratitude, and almost love. A fine
place, after all, for a wasted life to doze away in--the cuckoo
clock hooting of its far home country; the croquet mallets,
eloquent of English lawns; the stages daily bringing news of--the
turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once in the summer, a
salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the Pacific.
