"Side-Winder" Smith scrubbed the floor
for us and moved the bar to the back room. The fair was designed
for the support of the circuit rider who preached to the few that
would hear, and buried us all in turn. He was the symbol of
Jimville's respectability, although he was of a sect that
held dancing among the cardinal sins. The management took no
chances on offending the minister; at 11.30 they tendered him the
receipts of the evening in the chairman's hat, as a delicate
intimation that the fair was closed. The company filed out of the
front door and around to the back. Then the dance began formally
with no feelings hurt. These were the sort of courtesies, common
enough in Jimville, that brought tears of delicate inner laughter.
There were others besides Mr. Fanshawe who had walked out of
Mr. Harte's demesne to Jimville and wore names that smacked of the
soil,--"Alkali Bill," "Pike" Wilson, "Three Finger," and "Mono
Jim;" fierce, shy, profane, sun-dried derelicts of the windy hills,
who each owned, or had owned, a mine and was wishful to own one
again. They laid up on the worn benches of the Silver Dollar or
the Same Old Luck like beached vessels, and their talk ran on
endlessly of "strike" and "contact" and "mother lode," and worked
around to fights and hold-ups, villainy, haunts, and the hoodoo of
the Minietta, told austerely without imagination.
Do not suppose I am going to repeat it all; you who want these
things written up from the point of view of people who do not do
them every day would get no savor in their speech.
Says Three Finger, relating the history of the
Mariposa, "I took it off'n Tom Beatty, cheap, after his brother
Bill was shot."
Says Jim Jenkins, "What was the matter of him?"
"Who? Bill? Abe Johnson shot him; he was fooling around
Johnson's wife, an' Tom sold me the mine dirt cheap."
"Why didn't he work it himself?"
"Him? Oh, he was laying for Abe and calculated to have to
leave the country pretty quick."
"Huh!" says Jim Jenkins, and the tale flows smoothly on.
Yearly the spring fret floats the loose population of Jimville
out into the desolate waste hot lands, guiding by the peaks and a
few rarely touched water-holes, always, always with the golden
hope. They develop prospects and grow rich, develop others and
grow poor but never embittered. Say the hills, It is all one,
there is gold enough, time enough, and men enough to come after
you. And at Jimville they understand the language of the hills.
Jimville does not know a great deal about the crust of the
earth, it prefers a "hunch." That is an intimation from the gods
that if you go over a brown back of the hills, by a dripping
spring, up Coso way, you will find what is worth while. I have
never heard that the failure of any particular hunch disproved the
principle. Somehow the rawness of the land favors the sense of
personal relation to the supernatural. There is not much
intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you and
the organizing forces to cut off communication. All this begets in
Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an
explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and
drunkenness, coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a
certain indifference, blankness, emptiness if you will, of all
vaporings, no bubbling of the pot,--it wants the German to coin
a word for that,--no bread-envy, no brother-fervor. Western
writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the savor of lawlessness
too much upon their tongues, but you have these to witness it is
not mean-spiritedness. It is pure Greek in that it represents the
courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond that it
endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no
death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do
beasts, so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day
did gods. Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to
gape and wonder at.
Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct
which includes passion and death in its perquisites. I suppose
that the end of all our hammering and yawping will be something
like the point of view of Jimville. The only difference will be in
the decorations.
MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD
It is one of those places God must have meant for a field from all
time, lying very level at the foot of the slope that crowds up
against Kearsarge, falling slightly toward the town. North and
south it is fenced by low old glacial ridges, boulder strewn and
untenable. Eastward it butts on orchard closes and the village
gardens, brimming over into them by wild brier and creeping grass.
The village street, with its double row of unlike houses, breaks
off abruptly at the edge of the field in a footpath that goes up
the streamside, beyond it, to the source of waters.
The field is not greatly esteemed of the town, not being put
to the plough nor affording firewood, but breeding all manner of
wild seeds that go down in the irrigating ditches to come up as
weeds in the gardens and grass plots. But when I had no more than
seen it in the charm of its spring smiling, I knew I should have no
peace until I had bought ground and built me a house beside
it, with a little wicket to go in and out at all hours, as
afterward came about.
Edswick, Roeder, Connor, and Ruffin owned the field before it
fell to my neighbor.
