From: Arden Town (1913; Unpublished MS)
Author: Scott Nearing
Published:
Fred Allen chatted for a few minutes longer with Sam Martin before he took his leave. They said no more about Ruth wade, but the professor bespoke her philosophy of life and of things almost as well as Ruth did it. Had Fred Allen been confronted with the philosophy alone, he would have rejected it with scorn; but to be confronted with Ruth Wade’s philosophy—he sighed inwardly. How much better it would be to confront Ruth Wade herself!
“By the way,” said Sam Martin, as Fred Allen started up the path, “will you take dinner with us some day? Say next Saturday at one.”
“Thank you, I should like it immensely.”
“You needn’t wear full dress unless you feel inclined,” added the professor. “If you do, my wife will make me put on my shoes. She is very particular at times.”
“Trust me to be discreet,” laughed Fred Allen. “Are you coming to the game?”
“Yes, I’ll be on hand. Where are you going to play’?”
“Third, I think.”
“Jolly, jolly—come again,” and Fred Allen walked toward the Homestead.
The sun was high, and scorching hot; the morning breeze had died away, and the air of the common vibrated tensely; out in the west, above the dark green of the tree-tops, twoo buzzards hung gracefully; from the playground cans childish shouts. As he strolled slowly forward, Fred Allen took in this scene.
“How ideal,” he muttered, “I have seen this kind of thing in a dream somewhere.”
He was passing the base ball diamond, and his eye lighted by chance on the pitching box and the third bag.
“Gad,” he cried, “a real base ball game. I haven’t had one in years. Watching isn’t in it with playing.”
He was as happy as a child, yet all the while he kept thinking. Ruth wade wandered through his mind, furtively, but constantly. He wondered about her. He wondered about the people in Arden Town. They seemed so simple, yet so natural, and they took him just as a matter of course. Never since his boyhood had he seem people take a matter-of-course attitude toward life. Some of his friends cursed, some sneered, others laughed; but they were not natural. He remembered that the “gang” of boys to which he once belonged looked a new-comer over, sized him up, and said, “Get in the game—what can you do?” They seldom asked his name or his parentage. If he was a good sport, he belonged with that gang; and if he wasn’t a good sport, nothing could get him in or keep him there. These people in Arden Town apparently made a similar test. If you were a good sport, you could join; if you weren’t, well, Fred Allen felt that he was.
“Whither away, my pretty maid?” It was Will Evans’s jolly voice, and Fred Allen looked up with a start.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said he, “I was on my way to the Homestead.”
“Sorry, son, but if you continue in that direction you’ll find the distance just a trifle under twenty-five thousand miles. If you’ll ‘about face,’ it is not much over a hundred yards.”
“Well, really, I was thinking, Mr. Evans, and I paid no attention.”
“So I observed. I should never have interrupted you, but I feared for the welfare of that old cherry tree dead ahead of you. The town is very proud of it, and as a loyal citizen, I could hardly stand mutely by and watch you knock it over.”
Fred Allen laughed, ruefully. “Perhaps you saved my life as well as the tree” he said. “Do you know,” he added, as they walked on together toward the Homestead, “I have done more genuine thinking here than I have been guilty of for years past. Does Arden always affect people that way?”
“No and yes. It depends on the person. We all try to think here—about one another and about the outside problems that are disturbing the big round world. You know, there are two kinds of people here – among the thinkers, I mean. The first kind loves good more than it hates evil; the second kind hates evil more than it loves good. We call them the Joys and the Glooms, and really, they measure up rather well. Heighho, there goes the bell.”
Sure enough, the Inn bell had sounded, and Fred Allen sat down to a plain, well-cooked dinner with an appetite that would have done credit to the king’s table.
“Things taste differently,” he explained to Will Evans. “I have a ten-penny-nail appetite, as we boys used to say.”
“It’s the country, ‘just a little different’ in such a superior way. Here a. man begins to feel like a human being.”
“Yes,” put in Al Wilson, “it’s the ‘born again’ feeling. I get it every time I come down here after a stay in town.”
After dinner, which was over before one, the crowd separated for an hour.
“Practice at two-thirty, Chickens,” called Al Wilson, as he trotted away.
Fred Allen wandered across the common, intent on an hour beside the stream. He was wondering whether Ruth Wade would come back on Sunday. It seemed an age since he had seen her. Wrapped in his thoughts, he was passing along a woodland path which was close to the professor’s little shack.
“Ship ahoy,” that worthy sang out lustily. “It isn’t Ardenish to sail by without firing some kind of a salute.”
Fred Allen stopped abruptly and looked across to where the professor and a brown-haired girl, who looked several years his junior, sat together at a square wooden table, eating their dinner.
“Come in and have some,” urged the professor.
“Thank you, I just finished my dinner. I’ll come later when you are not busy.”
“Do come. You see those three hammocks?” pointing to a group of trees.
Fred Allen saw them and nodded.
“They’re the three most comfortable hammocks in Arden. Furthermore, they are at your disposal. At any hour of the day or night, you may turn out unauthorized occupants and help yourself.”
“Shall I say that you are kind, or Ardenish?” laughed Fred Allen.
“Synonymous terms are always permissible if they are not mendacious,” came the answer.
“I always stop with the synonymous,” and Fred Allen stepped on down the path.
Again he was thinking—this time about himself. How was it? He was not ordinarily addicted to brown studies, he was far too keen for that; but twice within an hour he had been awakened out of one – awakened as from a dream. Was it a dream? Why should he be down among these brown tree trunks, thinking of Ruth Wade. He had never thought of Eleanor Treat that way. Yet he had liked her. Why should he think so differently of this other woman?
He found the path beside the brook, and wandered slowly along. The water gurgled musically around the rocks. Now and then a bird chirped. Two yellow butterflies danced across a sunlit space. He noticed these things, yet he was thinking of Ruth Wade, and of her sudden departure. Why had she gone?
He caught his toe in a root, stumbled so violently that his watch flew out of his vest pocket, and was only saved by the chain. He looked absently at the dial. It was five minutes of two.
“I wouldn’t miss that game for forty dollars,” he exclaimed. “I guess I can make it. Brown study number three. When I return to town I shall consult an alienist.”
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