“It
was
my mother’s,” said the lady. “But she has grown infirm and lives in our house nowadays and will not relinquish the farm.”
“How so?” asked Firestone again. “And where?”
“It is abandoned of necessity,” Mrs. Dancey explained. “She cannot climb the stairs.”
Beyond the tent flap darkness fell, and as it descended so too did the level of grog in the glass, the lowering soft-lidded glance of the girl.
“A farm”—the elder Dancey embroidered the theme—“that serves us now for grazing just behind that stand of split-leaf maple. And fields we keep planted for sentiment’s sake. The skies are good to Saratoga,” he concluded. “They look down on us benignly, do they not?”
His remark, as it was intended to, furnished a new topic for discussion. It is rather
we
who view
them
benignly, said Thomas Edison; the skies do not “look down,” as you would have it, sir, so much as we look up. I hold man to be the measure of all things—or, more particularly, to be he who does the measuring; our Creator’s elsewhere occupied and need not be bothered with plumb line and rule. He does not bring a yardstick to the task.
Mrs. Dancey appeared—or strove to appear—not to notice, since the irreverence of the great man’s observation, while not a blasphemer’s precisely, might nonetheless have been construed provocative and as a challenge to complacence in his guests. He liked to do this, the inventor, and was forever stirring up the hornet’s nest of piety to discover what might fly out. “God created man in his own image,” Edison was wont to say. “And man, being a gentleman, returned the compliment.”
The others were well used to this and continued unperturbed. Such a nighttime view, said Burroughs, is not possible in cities, nor will it long adorn the countryside, which too must prove contaminate by coal soot and the detritus of modernity: rust, dust. Or so I fear, the old man said, or so I sometimes think. That clarity of evening light which we thought to be a standard is a standard that our children’s children will not know. The steady hum of engines and—I do not exempt you, Tom—the wire and the wireless will soon enough make silence be but a thing remembered; no true wilderness nor quiet anymore.
“Or anywhere?” asked Harvey Firestone.
“Or anywhere,” said Burroughs.
Now there was silence in the tent. Young Dancey stood before them, his fiddle in one hand, his bow in the other. “Suggestions, gentlemen? Ladies? A particular tune that you’d like us to play?”
“‘Skip to My Lou,’” said Edison. And then ‘Green Grow the Rushes, Ho!’ I want something lively, not mournful.”
“I want something
lovely,
” Firestone said, and sighed, and shut his eyes. “A song, Peter? What would you sing?”
Peter Barclay was Firestone’s man. He had been in the employ of the family since aught-six, a decade since, and traveled everywhere with Firestone—whom he called equally master and friend. The former did the latter service: arranging his clothing and schedule, setting out his refreshments and correspondence, presenting his own person as a kind of shield or buffer between the wealthy Firestone and an importunate world. In consequence he had free access to society, the hurly-burly of companionable encounter, and may better be described as secretary than valet. His was the second opinion his employer sought and valued in matters of horseflesh and commerce and waistcoats and wine. Whether from his naturally gregarious and all-embracing nature, that characteristic wide-ranging American enthusiasm, or whether from the civilizing nurture of his benefactor’s fortune, Barclay combined the oil and water of the well-bred swell and common man, and did so with an effortless insouciance that those without it call “charm.”
He was well-favored, well-proportioned, a great favorite with the weaker sex,whom he in turn would favor with a democratic inclusiveness, embracing them not so much collectively as turn by turn. There were Mary and Susan and Jane. There were Lisa and Margaret and Kate. There were others whose eyes he remembered, or their teeth and scent and limber limbs, but of whose present whereabouts he had to admit to ignorance, and though he could recall down to the nicest detail the details of their dalliance he was not in full possession of their names. He was, in short, a rake. And that wandering eye of his, once fixed, would gleam with bright persuasiveness and fairly illumine the object it lit on—in this instance, it goes without saying, the Dancey girl, whose glass he filled twice, thrice.
“A song?” repeated Firestone. “Will you oblige us, friend?”
“I will,” said Peter. “Yes.”
Such entertainment, however, although requested, was postponed. There would be no music forthcoming just yet, for Dancey and his uncle had engaged in politics. Young William was martial, or wished to become so, and he yearned to fight in the Great War and show those European namby-pambies how to stand and fight. Woodrow Wilson is my man, he said, he’ll get us over there.
But once you’ve been a soldier, said his uncle, you relish the bloodletting less. Trust me, Bill, we’re well out of it here. Then he turned to Peter Barclay and inquired, What think you of our cider? It comes from my own orchards, and the Saratoga apple is the sweetest one for pressing, is it not? I have not pressed it yet, said Barclay, therefore am ignorant of its delights. Drink deep, the uncle said, let’s hoist a glass to the health of my daughter. Standing, he suited the action to word. They drank.
Becomingly, the maiden blushed and said, her handkerchief in her right hand, “It’s nothing, nothing at all to concern you, but I must get some air.”
And then she stepped away.
Now Edison and Burroughs resumed their badinage. This too was habitual, frequent between them; they liked to tell stories and jokes. Encouraged perhaps by the view of the girl, her white back small and fading in the ardent, all-embracing night, the inventor asked the naturalist, “Do you know the definition, John, of ‘virgin forest’?”
“I do,” said the self-styled old rascal—whose store of wit seemed somehow to be new-replenished daily, and whom in any case the carrot soup had fortified. “It’s a place where, so to speak, the hand of man has not set foot.”
They laughed. Next Peter Barclay gave a spirited rendition of “Coming Through the Rye” and the mournful “Barbry Allen.” His voice was sweet, untutored, yet in intonation correct. There was laughter and applause, and then the talk resumed. The men began a discussion of warfare and its current state in Europe. “As to the Jews,” said Thomas Edison, “I share Henry’s opinion, as you know, and believe them to be profiting—shamelessly, shamefully—from honest people’s need.”
“Wartime is profit-time,” Firestone said.
“
Prophet
-time,” said Burroughs. “And not a happy prospect for the wilderness, for wildness . . .”
“By the waters of Hudson I sat down and wept.” Firestone smiled at his own jest and thought to point out the affinity of “Babylon” and “babble on,” but then he thought the better of it and did not. “You cannot blame the mercantiles entirely. They also choose ‘To be not a spectator of, but a participator in it all!’ To visit Saratoga and enjoy—as we do—country air.”
“Country matters,” Burroughs said.
Unbuttoning his waistcoat, the elder Dancey opined that this part of the nation was second to none in its actual yield as well as in the prospect of fertility. There be a future here, he said, and while he delivered himself of a speech as to the splendors of the planted grass and, with specific reference to horses, husbandry, the chance—were one to take it—of speculation’s profit, the good companions noticed Barclay—not furtive but deliberate—push back his chair at table and rise and leave the ring of light and vanish in the outer dark to which the girl had gone.
1916
O
f what transpired in the humid night Peter Barclay spoke no word. He kept his own counsel throughout. Although voluble by nature and by contrast in this instance the more noticeably reticent, he made no answer when asked; neither direct nor offhand inquiry elicited response. “A gentleman,” he’d say, and, falling silent, shake his head. “No gentleman . . .” and then again withdraw. Day after day he remained—on this one topic—mute.
Yet Firestone who knew him well could not fail not to notice how the fellow’s gaze would wander and smile arrive unbidden. Pressing fingernail tips to his shut eyes, he pursed his lips and beamed. As though memory had fixed on some most pleasing inward spectacle on which he looked with evident and repeated satisfaction, he rubbed at his cheeks with his palms. Too, the sonority of his heaved sighs made speech itself irrelevant; here was a pup in love.
Or so, at any rate, said Edison to Burroughs and then Henry Ford, when at last he joined them in the town of Plattsburgh. You call him a whelped pup, said Burroughs; was not the bitch in heat? Speak civilly, said Ford, himself the most civil of speakers, or I will not hear you out; what went on between them, friends, and what do you make of it now?
Peter Barclay was busy with baggage; the travelers sat in the shade. They occupied their camp chairs, drawn close to facilitate conference and render it inaudible to those who wished to pry. Although vigorous and sturdy yet, they could not keep from consciousness of the season’s turning; it was September 5. Tomorrow the four would go south through Vermont—through the towns of Burlington, Shelburne, Middlebury, Rutland, Wallingford, East Dorset, Manchester—and make their camp near Arlington. The year’s vagabonding was soon to be done, and though they talked of and were planning a renewal in the year to come, the plans were but provisional and would in fact be canceled: their own well-being and that of the world seemed more than ever at risk. No fool like an old fool, the old saying goes, and yet the sojourners were provident men: such a reckoning had to be settled and such bills marked
Paid.
Again Ford asked, what happened, and what do you make of it now? Tom Edison cupped his good ear. John Burroughs repeated the question, but shouting, and Edison nodded and smiled. I cannot be precise, responded the inventor, and this as you know is vexatious to me; we must attempt precision even if conjectural, even when we speak of matters of the heart. The heart, said Burroughs, or the glands; which think you, Tom, proved operational here?
Where,
where?
said Ford again; I was not with you, remember, and need to be informed. The particulars, gentlemen, please.
So Firestone and Edison and Burroughs spoke about the dinner party, the farm in Saratoga and the girl with whom—or so the companions deduced—Barclay whiled away the hours of that night. Next morning his cot showed forth unrumpled and his tent pristine. At ten o’clock when he appeared he was wearing what he’d worn to eat at their previous shared repast, though considerably disarrayed and in more than one spot stained. Through the long day’s sport he yawned, taking little part in their festivities and pleading a headache when chaffed; you must excuse him, observed Edison, winking, he didn’t sleep a wink.
Of William Dancey’s family—the garrulous uncle and plump silent aunt—there was no further trace. And of the girl herself—whose given name they could not now recall—there remained only the lingering scent of a languorous presence at table, her beauty untainted by commerce or age. You will forgive me, said John Burroughs, but I understand what bewitched him, and had I been our Peter I’d not have been more careful; it’s a thousand pities, Henry, you were not there to see. He shaped the air with his long fingers into an hourglass, then smacked his wizened lips. He made the joke he’d made before, the one about flint on a stone starting fire, and fire in the stony heart of their fellow-traveler’s man . . .
Of the Vagabonds Ford was briskest by far, the least susceptible. Too, he’d been absent from the scene as such and had no fond remembrance thereof; we are the more inclined to sanction lewd behavior in which earlier we joined. Therefore, clapping his hands on his knee-knobs, he stood; inserting his hands in his pockets, he walked. The men took a turn down the siding where railroad cars awaited them, and while they were inspecting track Ford mused aloud, well, possibly, well, yes. But did he take precautions; was he careful, do you think? Such practicality—not to say matter-of-factness—was characteristic of the man; he was, his fellows knew, chary of soft sentiment and cautious to a fault.
Yet caution and Barclay, Firestone claimed, would be far stranger bedfellows than a young man and a beautiful girl; he threw it to the winds. “Threw what,” John Burroughs asked, and Firestone said “Caution” and, again, he smiled.
Be that as it may, said Henry Ford, the question is what need we do if anything, what’s expected of us now?
Expected,
said Edison, tapping finger to ear to signify that perhaps he had not heard correctly what perhaps the other said, we don’t know as there’s anything expected, do we, John? And revolved his great bald head toward the white-maned dome of his companion, and in unison they nodded and then in unison shook.
“You find the situation funny?” Ford asked. “You find it a source of amusement?”
“Don’t be so rigid, Henry.”
“Stiff,” said Edison. “I stand at attention.
Stiff!
”
“As the Bishop said to the Actress,” said Burroughs, and the two men clapped each other on their upright backs.
To such bait Ford would not rise. Although he could well have spoken at length, this afternoon he elected restraint. Were he of Burroughs’s antic disposition or Tom Edison’s blunt suggestiveness, he might have pointed out that limp behavior would indeed have been much preferable to rigid: the wandering eye is a prelude to trespass and must not be blinked.
Firestone sighed. From his right boot, with a rag for the purpose, he removed a mud smear and wiped bright leather clean. He discoursed briefly on temptation and the duty to resist it, the self-policing requisite to men of position and wealth. We are prone to error since the fall; we embrace unoriginal sin. Yet where unbridled license reigns and where the man in power exercises it without restraint, then how to say democracy is better than the despot’s realm and who to call it less licentious than the Frenchified
droit du seigneur
? Our revolution was fought against just such ascendancy; is not each citizen equal to all others and in theory (as well as in factory practice) both master and acknowledged mistress of the empire of self?