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Thomas Haggerwells, large-boned like his daughter, with the ginger hair faded,
and a florid, handsome complexion, made me welcome, but he seemed to have
something else on his mind.
Finally he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and turned to Dorn.
 Ace, Barbara is quite upset.
I thought this extreme understatement, but Dorn merely nodded.
 Misunderstanding, Mr. H, and he explained the situation.
Mr. Haggerwells began pacing the flowered carpet.  Of course, of course.
Naturally we can t turn the poor girl out. But how can I explain to Barbara?
She . . . she came to me, he said half proudly, half apprehensively.  I don t
know quite  He pulled himself together.  Excuse me, Mr.
Backmaker. My daughter is high-strung. I m afraid I m allowing concern to
interfere with our conversation. . . .
 Not at all, sir, I said.  I m very tired, if you ll excuse me . . . ?
 Of course, of course, he answered with evident relief.  Ace will show you
your room. Sleep well we will talk more tomorrow. And Ace come back here
afterward, will you?
Barbara Haggerwells certainly seemed to have both Ace Dorn and her father
pretty well cowed, I
thought, as I lay awake. But it was neither Barbara nor overstimulation from
all I d been through that day which caused my insomnia. A torment,
successfully suppressed for some hours, invaded me. The chance the hold-up
gang could have been supplied with Sprovis firearms was remote far beyond
probability; connecting the trip of the Escobars with the counterfeiting of
Spanish pesetas was fantasy. But what is logic? I could not quench my feeling
of responsibility with ridicule, nor charge myself merely with perverse
arrogance in magnifying my trivial errands into accountability for all that
flowed from the Grand Army. Guilty men cannot sleep because they feel guilty.
It is the feeling, not the abstract guilt, which keeps them awake.
At last however, I slept, only to dream Barbara Haggerwells was a great fish
pursuing me over endless roads on which my feet bogged in clinging, tenacious
mud. But in the clear autumn morning my notions of the night before dwindled,
even if they failed to disappear entirely.
How shall I write of Haggershaven as my eyes first saw it twenty-two years
ago? Of the rolling acres of rich plowed land, interrupted here and there by
stone outcroppings worn smooth and round by time, and trees in woodlots or
standing alone, strong and unperturbed? Or the main building, grown from the
original farmhouse into a great, rambling eccentricity stopping short of
monstrosity only because of its complete innocence of pretence? Shall I
describe the two dormitories, severely functional, escaping harshness only
because they had not been built by carpenters, and though sturdy enough,
betrayed the amateur touch? Or the cottages and apartments two, four, at most
six rooms for the married fellows and their families? These were scattered all
over, some so avid for privacy that one could pass unknowing within feet of
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the concealing woods, others bold in the sunshine on knolls or on the level.
I could tell of the small shops, the miniature laboratories, the inadequate
observatory, the dozens of outbuildings. But these things were not the haven.
They were merely the least of its possessions.
For Haggershaven was not a material place at all, but a spiritual freedom. Its
limits were only the limits of what its fellows could do and think and
inquire. It was circumscribed only by the outside world, not by internal rules
and taboos, competition or curriculum.
Its history was not only a link with the past, but a possible hint of what
might have been if the War of Southron Independence had not interrupted the
American pattern. Barbara s great-great-
grandfather, Herbert Haggerwells, had been a Confederate major from North
Carolina who had fallen in love with the then fat Pennsylvania countryside.
After the war he had put everything not much by Southron standards, but a
fortune in depreciated, soon to be repudiated, United States
greenbacks into the farm which became the nucleus of Haggershaven. Then he
married a local girl and became completely a Northerner.
Until it became imperceptible with daily custom, I used to stare at his
portrait in the library, picturing in idle fancy a possible meeting on the
battlefield with this aristocratic gentleman with his curling mustache and
daggerlike imperial, and my own plebeian Granpa Hodgins. But the likelihood
they had ever come face to face was infinitely remote; I, who had studied both [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]