第4章 THE CHILD OF THE FOREST(3)

It is said that he astounded his father by refusing to own a gun.He earned terrible whippings by releasing animals caught in traps.Though he had in fullest measure the forest passion for listening to stories,the ever-popular tales of Indian warfare disgusted him.But let the tale take on any glint of the mystery of the human soul--as of Robinson Crusoe alone on his island,or of the lordliness of action,as in Columbus or Washington--and he was quick with interest.The stories of talking animals out of Aesop fascinated him.

In this thrilled curiosity about the animals was the side of him least intelligible to men like his father.It lives in many anecdotes:of his friendship with a poor dog he had which he called "Honey";of pursuing a snake through difficult thickets to prevent its swallowing a frog;of loitering on errands at the risk of whippings to watch the squirrels in the tree-tops;of the crowning offense of his childhood,which earned him a mighty beating,the saving of a fawn's life by scaring it off just as a hunter's gun was leveled.And by way of comment on all this,there is the remark preserved in the memory of another boy to whom at the time it appeared most singular,"God might think as much of that little fawn as of some people."Of him as of another gentle soul it might have been said that all the animals were his brothers and sisters.[7]

One might easily imagine this peculiar boy who chose to remain at home while the men went out to slay,as the mere translation into masculinity of his mother,and of her mothers,of all the converging processions of forest women,who had passed from one to another the secret of their mysticism,coloring it many ways in the dark vessels of their suppressed lives,till it reached at last their concluding child.But this would only in part explain him.Their mysticism,as after-time was to show,he had undoubtedly inherited.So,too,from them,it may be,came another characteristic--that instinct to endure,to wait,to abide the issue of circumstance,which in the days of his power made him to the politicians as unintelligible as once he had been to the forest huntsmen.Nevertheless,the most distinctive part of those primitive women,the sealed passionateness of their spirits,he never from childhood to the end revealed.In the grown man appeared a quietude,a sort of tranced calm,that was appalling.From what part of his heredity did this derive?Was it the male gift of the forest?

Did progenitors worthier than Thomas somehow cast through him to his alien son that peace they had found in the utter heart of danger,that apparent selflessness which is born of being ever unfailingly on guard?

It is plain that from the first he was a natural stoic,taking his whippings,of which there appear to have been plenty,in silence,without anger.It was all in the day's round.

Whippings,like other things,came and went.What did it matter?And the daily round,though monotonous,had even for the child a complement of labor.Especially there was much patient journeying back and forth with meal bags between his father's cabin and the local mill.There was a little schooling,very little,partly from Nancy Lincoln,partly from another good woman,the miller's kind old mother,partly at the crudest of wayside schools maintained very briefly by a wandering teacher who soon wandered on;but out of this schooling very little result beyond the mastery of the A B C.[8]

And even at this age,a pathetic eagerness to learn,to invade the wonder of the printed book!Also a marked keenness of observation.He observed things which his elders overlooked.

He had a better sense of direction,as when he corrected his father and others who were taking the wrong short-cut to a burning house.Cool,unexcitable,he was capable of presence of mind.Once at night when the door of the cabin was suddenly thrown open and a monster appeared on the threshold,a spectral thing in the darkness,furry,with the head of an ox,Thomas Lincoln shrank back aghast;little Abraham,quicker-sighted and quicker-witted,slipped behind the creature,pulled at its furry mantle,and revealed a forest Diana,a bold girl who amused herself playing demon among the shadows of the moon.

Seven years passed and his eighth birthday approached.All this while Thomas Lincoln had somehow kept his family in food,but never had he money in his pocket.His successive farms,bought on credit,were never paid for.An incurable vagrant,he came at last to the psychological moment when he could no longer impose himself on his community.He must take to the road in a hazard of new fortune.Indiana appeared to him the land of promise.Most of his property--such as it was--except his carpenter's tools,he traded for whisky,four hundred gallons.Somehow he obtained a rattletrap wagon and two horses.

The family appear to have been loath to go.Nancy Lincoln had long been ailing and in low spirits,thinking much of what might happen to her children after her death.Abraham loved the country-side,and he had good friends in the miller and his kind old mother.But the vagrant Thomas would have his way.

In the brilliancy of the Western autumn,with the ruined woods flaming scarlet and gold,these poor people took their last look at the cabin that had been their wretched shelter,and set forth into the world.[9]