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Page 11
The following morning I looked up Doctor Castleton; and he, ever
courteous and obliging, did more than consent to permit me to drive out
to the home of his patient, Peters. He proposed that I wait a day, as he
knew that Peters would within that time, and might any hour, send for
him; and as soon as he was summoned he would notify me, and together we
would drive out to the old sailor's residence--which, the doctor said,
was a small, two-roomed log structure, where the old man dwelt entirely
alone.
The FOURTH Chapter
The summons from Doctor Castleton to accompany him came sooner than he
had led me to expect; and at a little past noon of the same day on which
he had made his promise to take me with him to see Dirk Peters, I
received a message, saying that if agreeable to me he would at two
o'clock be in front of my hotel, prepared to start for the home of the
old sailor.
At a minute or two before the time fixed, I was standing at the main
entrance to the Loomis House, and at precisely two o'clock Doctor
Castleton drove up in a two-horse, four-wheeled, top-buggy. He made room
for me on his left, and off we started.
We drove in a westerly direction for a full mile along the main street
before leaving the town behind us. Then we struck a level turf road; and
away trotted the superb team of rather small, wiry, black horses. Doctor
Castleton said that we should reach our destination--which was rather
more than ten miles from the city limits--within forty minutes; and we
did. Over a part of the level turf road I should estimate that we drove
at about a three-minute gait; but after traversing some four or five
miles, we turned south into a narrow road, which soon became hilly and
tortuous; yet even here it was only on particularly rough or uneven
portions of the way that the doctor moderated our speed to less than a
four-minute gait.
As we rode along at this exhilarating pace, the buggy whirling around
acute curves among the mighty oaks and maples, now and then dashing down
a forty-five-degree descent of fifty or sixty feet, again thundering
over a dilapidated bridge of resonant planks, the doctor remarked to me
that Peters was certain to die, it being only a question of days, or
perhaps of hours. "Old Peters," he said, "has been without visible means
of support for the past two or three years. The Lord only knows how he
has lived since the period when he became unable to work. Even his small
farm is mortgaged for all it is worth." I expressed to the doctor some
surprise that he should be making twenty-mile drives to see a lonely old
man whose illness he was unable to relieve, and from whom he could
expect no fee. I had grown to take an interest in hearing Castleton
express his opinions. Many of his conceptions of life were so unique;
his mental vision, always intensely acute, was often so oblique; his
station of mental observation so alterable, and so quickly altered; his
sentiments often so earthy, again so exalted--that I believe the man
would have interested me even under circumstances less quiet and
monotonous than were those of my stay, up to this time, in Bellevue. To
my expression of mild wonderment that he should tax his time and
energies to such an extent without pecuniary gain, he replied:
"My dear sir, you are a traveller. You have sailed the seas and crossed
the mighty main; you have dashed over mountains, and sweltered 'mid
tropical suns on sandy desert-wastes. To you our Rockies are
mole-hills--our great lakes mere ponds. You are not a child to cry out
in the darkness. Granted. Yet, sir, let us by a stretch of fancy imagine
ourselves in the place of Columbus, on the third day of August, 1492. We
are about to leave the Known, in search of the Unknown--about to
penetrate for the first time that vast expanse of water which for
uncounted ages has stretched away before the wondering vision and
baffled research of Europe. We are not leaving the world--we are not
alone. Yet is it not a solace that a few friends gather on the shore to
say good-by? The sympathy of the kind, the well-wishes of the brave--are
they not always a comfort? This poor fellow Peters, whose lowly home we
are now approaching, is alone--he is about to start on his last journey,
alone. The land to which he perhaps this day begins that journey is not
only unknown, but unknowable to us in our present state. And therefore
is it, sir, that the learned professions live. Even the worldly man,
when he comes to start upon this last journey, does not disdain the
sympathy and kindness of the loving, and the expressions of hopefulness
that come from the good and pure. True, you may say that the learned
professions are for the man who is about to die but frail supports on
which to lean. The wise man as well as the ignorant man, when he fears
that death is near, reaches out for help or at least some knowledge of
his future. He sends for his physician, who cannot promise him
anything--cannot number the days or hours of his remaining life; for his
lawyer, who cannot assure him beyond all doubt that his will can be made
to endure for a single day beyond his death. At last, he sends for a
minister of God--and what says the spiritual expert? Perhaps he
represents that old, old organization, whose history stretches back for
centuries through the dark ages to the borders of the brilliancy beyond;
that old hierarchy that claims to hold all spiritual power to which man
may appeal with reasonable hope. What says to the dying man this
representative and heir of the accumulated spiritual research and
culture of the past? He may with honesty say, 'Hope;' but if he says
more than Hope, he does it as the blind might sit and guide by signs
through unknown labyrinths the blind. All this is true; but the fact
that the learned professions have come into existence, and continue to
live and draw from the masses their material support--a tax greater in
amount than the income of the nations--shows that they meet, and
genuinely meet, a demand. I say genuinely, for 'You cannot fool all the
people all the time.' And so, my young friend, this poor man Peters
wants me. Later, if there is time, he will want the representative of
the religion which he professes, or which he remembers that his mother
or his father professed. I shall stand by his side and place my hand
upon his throbbing brow--and he will hope, and not despair. Who knows
whether or not our hope and our faith have power in some strange way to
link the present to the future, carrying forward the spirit-seed to
soil in which it blooms in splendor through eternity? As Byron says,
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