第20章 DANIEL AND LITTLE DAN'L(1)

THE Wise homestead dated back more than a century, yet it had nothing imposing about it except its site. It was a simple, glaringly white cot-tage. There was a center front door with two win-dows on each side; there was a low slant of roof, pierced by unpicturesque dormers. On the left of the house was an ell, which had formerly been used as a shoemaker's shop, but now served as a kitchen.

In the low attic of the ell was stored the shoemaker's bench, whereon David Wise's grandfather had sat for nearly eighty years of working days; after him his eldest son, Daniel's father, had occupied the same hollow seat of patient toil. Daniel had sat there for twenty-odd years, then had suddenly realized both the lack of necessity and the lack of customers, since the great shoe-plant had been built down in the vil-lage. Then Daniel had retired -- although he did not use that expression. Daniel said to his friends and his niece Dora that he had "quit work." But he told himself, without the least bitterness, that work had quit him.

After Daniel had retired, his one physiological peculiarity assumed enormous proportions. It had always been with him, but steady work had held it, to a great extent, at bay. Daniel was a moral coward before physical conditions. He was as one who suffers, not so much from agony of the flesh as from agony of the mind induced thereby. Daniel was a coward before one of the simplest, most in-evitable happenings of earthly life. He was a coward before summer heat. All winter he dreaded summer.

Summer poisoned the spring for him. Only during the autumn did he experience anything of peace.

Summer was then over, and between him and another summer stretched the blessed perspective of winter.

Then Daniel Wise drew a long breath and looked about him, and spelled out the beauty of the earth in his simple primer of understanding. Daniel had in his garden behind the house a prolific grape-vine.

He ate the grapes, full of the savor of the dead sum-mer, with the gusto of a poet who can at last enjoy triumph over his enemy.

Possibly it was the vein of poetry in Daniel which made him a coward -- which made him so vulnerable.

During the autumn he reveled in the tints of the landscape which his sitting-room windows com-manded. There were many maples and oaks. Day by day the roofs of the houses in the village be-came more evident, as the maples shed their crimson and gold and purple rags of summer. The oaks re-mained, great shaggy masses of dark gold and burn-ing russet; later they took on soft hues, making clearer the blue firmament between the boughs.

Daniel watched the autumn trees with pure delight.

"He will go to-day," he said of a flaming maple after a night of frost which had crisped the white arches of the grass in his dooryard. All day he sat and watched the maple cast its glory, and did not bother much with his simple meals. The Wise house was erected on three terraces. Always through the dry summer the grass was burned to an ugly negation of color. Later, when rain came, the grass was a brilliant green, patched with rosy sorrel and golden stars of arnica. Then later still came the diamond brilliance of the frost. So dry were the terraces in summer-time that no flowers would flourish. When Daniel's mother had come to the house as a bride she had planted under a window a blush-rose bush, but always the blush-roses were few and covered with insects. It was not until the autumn, when it was time for the flowers to die, that the sorrel blessing of waste lands flushed rosily and the arnica showed its stars of slender threads of gold, and there might even be a slight glimpse of purple aster and a dusty spray or two of goldenrod.

Then Daniel did not shrink from the sight of the terraces. In summer-time the awful negative glare of them under the afternoon sun maddened him.

In winter he often visited his brother John in the village. He was very fond of John, and John's wife, and their only daughter, Dora. When John died, and later his wife, he would have gone to live with Dora, but she married. Then her husband also died, and Dora took up dressmaking, supporting herself and her delicate little girl-baby. Daniel adored this child. She had been named for him, although her mother had been aghast before the propo-sition. "Name a girl Daniel, uncle!" she had cried.

"She is going to have what I own after I have done with it, anyway," declared Daniel, gazing with awe and rapture at the tiny flannel bundle in his niece's arms. "That won't make any difference, but I do wish you could make up your mind to call her after me, Dora."Dora Lee was soft-hearted. She named her girl-baby Daniel, and called her Danny, which was not, after all, so bad, and her old uncle loved the child as if she had been his own. Little Daniel -- he always called her Daniel, or, rather, "Dan'l" -- was the only reason for his descending into the village on summer days when the weather was hot. Daniel, when he visited the village in summer-time, wore always a green leaf inside his hat and carried an umbrella and a palm-leaf fan. This caused the village boys to shout, "Hullo, grandma!" after him. Daniel, being a little hard of hearing, was oblivious, but he would have been in any case. His whole mind was con-centrated in getting along that dusty glare of street, stopping at the store for a paper bag of candy, and finally ending in Dora's little dark parlor, holding his beloved namesake on his knee, watching her bliss-fully suck a barley stick while he waved his palm-leaf fan. Dora would be fitting gowns in the next room. He would hear the hum of feminine chatter over strictly feminine topics. He felt very much aloof, even while holding the little girl on his knee.

Daniel had never married -- had never even h ad a sweet-heart. The marriageable women he had seen had not been of the type to attract a dreamer like Daniel Wise.