5. CHAPTER V.
AT THE CASTLE.
By the time August reached Andrew Anderson's
castle it was dark. The castle was built in
a hollow, looking out toward the Ohio River, a
river that has this peculiarity, that it is all beautiful,
from Pittsburgh to Cairo. Through the trees,
on which the buds were just bursting, August looked out on the
golden roadway made by the moonbeams on the river. And
into the tumult of his feelings there came the sweet benediction
of Nature. 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 its lord and its architect. Evidently a whimsical
fancy had pleased itself in the construction. It was an
attempt to realize something of medieval form in logs. There
were buttresses and antique windows, and by an ingenious transformation
the chimney, usually such a disfigurement to a loghouse,
was made to look like a round donjon keep. But it was
strangely composite, and I am afraid Mr. Ruskin would have
considered it somewhat confused; for while it looked like a
rude castle to those who approached it from the hills, it looked
like something very different to those who approached the
front, for upon that side was a portico with massive Doric
columns, which were nothing more nor less than maple logs.
Andrew maintained that the natural form of the trunk of a tree
was the ideal and perfect form of a pillar.
To this picturesque structure, half castle, half cabin, with
hints of church and temple, came August Wehle on Saturday
evening. He did not go round to the portico and knock at the
front-door as a stranger would have done, but in behind the
donjon chimney he pulled an alarm-cord. Immediately the
head of Andrew Anderson was thrust out of a Gothic hole—
you could not call it a window. His uncut hair, rather darker
than auburn, fell down to his waist, and his shaggy red beard
lay upon his bosom. Instead of a coat he wore that unique garment
of linsey-woolsey known in the West as wa'mus (warm
us?), a sort of over-shirt. He was forty-five, but there were
streaks of gray in his hair and beard, and he looked older by
ten years.
“What ho, good friend? Is that you?” he cried. “Come
up, and right welcome!” For his language was as archaic and
perhaps as incongruous as his architecture. And then throwing
out of the window a rope-ladder, he called out again, “Ascend!
ascend! my brave young friend!”
And young Wehle climbed up the ladder into the large upper
room. For it was one peculiarity of the castle that the upper
part had no visible communication with the lower. Except
August, and now and then a literary stranger, no one but the
owner was ever admitted to the upper story of the house, and
the neighbors, who always had access to the lower rooms, re
[ILLUSTRATION]
THE CASTLE.
[Description: 555EAF. Page 041. Illustration page. Engraving with arched top of stone building
with a tower or turret in the woods. A small figure approaches in the foreground.]
garded the upper part of the castle with mysterious awe.
August was often plied with questions about it, but he always
answered simply that he didn't think Mr. Anderson would like
to have it talked about. For the owner there must have been
some inside mode of access to the second story, but he did
not choose to let even August know of any other way than
that by the rope-ladder, and the few strangers who came to see
his books were taken in by the same drawbridge.
The room was filled with books arranged after whimsical
associations. One set of cases, for instance, was called the
Academy, and into these he only admitted the masters, following
the guidance of his own eccentric judgment quite as much
as he followed traditional estimate. Homer, Virgil, Dante, and
Milton of course had undisputed possession of the department
devoted to the “Kings of Epic,” as he styled them. Sophocles,
Calderon, Corneille, and Shakespeare were all that he admitted
to his list of “Kings of Tragedy.” Lope he rejected on literary
grounds, and Goethe because he thought his moral tendency
bad. He rejected Rabelais from his chief humorists, but accepted
Cervantes, Le Sage, Molière, Swift, Hood, and the then
fresh Pickwick of Boz. To these he added the Georgia Scenes
of Mr. Longstreet, insisting that they were quite equal to Don
Quixote. I can only stop to mention one other department in
his Academy. One case was devoted to the “Best Stories,” and
an admirable set they were! I wish that anything of mine
were worthy to go into such company. His purity of feeling,
almost ascetic, led him to reject Boccaccio, but he admitted
Chaucer and some of Balzac's, and Smollett, Goldsmith, and
De Foe, and Walter Scott's best, Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Bernardin
St. Pierre's “Paul and Virginia,” and “Three Months
under the Snow,” and Charles Lamb's generally overlooked
“Rosamund Gray.” There were cases for “Socrates and his
Friends,” and for other classes. He had amused himself for
years in deciding what books should be “crowned,” as he called
it, and what not. And then he had another case, called “The
Inferno.” I wish there was space to give a list of this department.
Some were damned for dullness and some for coarseness.
Miss Edgeworth's Moral Tales, Darwin's Botanic Garden,
Rollin's Ancient History, and a hideously illustrated copy of
the Book of Martyrs were in the first-class, Don Juan and some
French novels in the second. Tupper, Swinburne, and Walt
Whitman he did not know.
In the corner next the donjon chimney was a little room
with a small fireplace. Thus the hermit economized wood, for
wood meant time, and time meant communion with his books.
All of his domestic arrangements were carried on after this frugal
fashion. In the little room was a writing-desk, covered with
manuscripts and commonplace books.
“Well, my young friend, you're thrice welcome,” said Andrew,
who never dropped his book language. “What will you have?
Will you resume your apprenticeship under Goethe, or shall we
canter to Canterbury with Chaucer? Grand old Dan Chaucer!
Or, shall we study magical philosophy with Roger Bacon—the
Friar, the Admirable Doctor? or read good Sir Thomas More?
What would Sir Thomas have said if he could have thought that
he would be admired by two such people as you and I, in the
woods of America, in the nineteenth century? But you do not
want books! Ah! my brave friend, you are not well. Come
into my cell and let us talk. What grieves you?”
And Andrew took him by the hand with the courtesy of a
knight, with the tenderness of a woman, and with the air of an
astrologer, and led him into the apartment of a monk.
“See!” he said, “I have made a new chair. It is the highest
evidence of my love for my Teutonic friend. You have
now a right to this castle. You shall be perpetually welcome.
I said to myself, German scholarship shall sit there, and the
Backwoods Philosopher will sit here. So sit down on my
sedilium, and let us hear how this uncivil and inconstant world
treats you. It can not deal worse with you than it has with me.
But I have had my revenge on it! I have been revenged! I
have done as I pleased, and defied the world and all its hollow
conventionalities.” These last words were spoken in a tone of
misanthropic bitterness common to Andrew. His love for
August was the more intense that it stood upon a background
of general dislike, if not for the world, at least for that portion
of it which most immediately surrounded him.
August took the chair, ingeniously woven and built of rye
straw and hickory splints. He knew that all this formality and
apparent pedantry was superficial. He and Andrew were bosom
friends, and as he had often opened his heart to the master of
the castle before, so now he had no difficulty in telling him his
troubles, scarcely heeding the appropriate quotations which Andrew
made from time to time by way of embellishment.
