Chapter XV

LIFE AT THE ROOST

JACK’S after recollections of this earlier part of his life in America while he lived at the Roost always remained with him as singularly fragmentary memories of things passed. The various events that then happened to him never, in those recollections, had a feeling of keen and vivid reality as a part of his own life. It was almost as though they might have somehow happened outside of the real things of his life. Nearly every one who has reached manhood and who looks back thence to the earlier periods of his adolescence, feels such strangeness of unfamiliarity in certain fragmentary parts of his younger life.

Maybe Jack felt this lack of reality in the events of that time because that just then he was passing from boyhood into manhood; perhaps the memory of those times seemed strange to him and lacking of vitality because of the many changes of scene and circumstance that then happened to him, and because he did not have time to become intimately acquainted with any especial arrangement of his surroundings before it was changed for some other surroundings of a different sort.

For Jack’s master was very often away from home, and generally he would take Jack with him, and so it was that during this period there were successive memories of queer rambling Virginia towns—level streets of earth fronted by gray wooden buildings with narrow windows and wide brick chimneys, in the midst of which lesser buildings there towered here and there maybe a more pretentious mansion of brick, set back in a tangled garden, approached by a steep flight of stone steps. The towns were nearly all of this nature:—Yorktown, Jamestown, Williamsburg and the lesser courthouse towns, more or less inland, up the river; and they always remained in Jack’s memory as so many pictured scenes rather than as various settings of his actual life.

At other times Mr. Parker would maybe take Jack with him on his periodical visits to the plantation houses of his friends; nearly all wide, rambling, barn-like structures, where wild company sometimes gathered, and where, during the time of his master’s visits, Jack would live in the company of the white servants and negroes who lounged about, ready to run at any moment at the owner’s call. Jack made many acquaintances among these people, but no friends.

This life was so varied and so entirely different from anything that he had known before that he never got to feel as though it were perfectly a part of himself. Even the Roost, with its bare, rambling rooms and hallways, never entirely lost this feeling of unfamiliarity.

Nearly always there was more or less company at the old house—the same sort of wild, roistering company that gathered at the other plantation houses; men who came riding fine high-bred horses, who fought cocks, who gambled, drinking deeply and swearing with loud voices, and with an accent that was not at all like the English speech that Jack had known at home.

One of his earlier experiences of this new life of his in the strange new world into which he had come was of such a company that one day came riding up to the gray old wooden mansion with a vast clattering of horses’ hoofs, a shouting of voices and laughter, and a cloud of dust. The party was accompanied by a following group of negro servants, one of whom carried a fighting-cock on a saddle before him. Jack and Little Coffee and another negro boy ran out to hold the horses, and Dennis and two negroes came over from the stable to help. Mr. Parker came out and stood on the upper step in the doorway, looking on as the visitors dismounted. The scene was always very vivid in Jack’s memory.

The most prominent of the visiting party was young Mr. Harry Oliver. He had been drinking, and his smooth cheeks were dyed a soft, deep red. He dismounted with some difficulty, and then with uncertain steps went over to his negro servant, who still sat on his horse, holding the cock before him on the horn of the saddle. “Give the bird to me, Sambo,” said the young man in a loud, unsteady voice.

“He strike you, mea-asta, you no take care,” said the negro warningly.

“Better let me take him, Mr. Oliver,” cried out Dennis.

The young man paid no heed to either warning, but took the bird from the negro. It struggled, and one of the spurs caught in the lace of Mr. Oliver’s cuff, tearing a great rent in it. Everybody laughed but Mr. Parker, who stood looking calmly on at the scene. “Ouch! Look what he’s done to me,” cried out Mr. Oliver. “Here, Dennis, you take him.” And again the others laughed loudly at the young man’s mishap.

Dennis took the bird, seizing its narrow cruel head deftly, and holding it so that it might not strike him.

“Hath Mr. Castleman been here yet?” asked one of the visitors of Dennis.

“No, your honor,” said Dennis.

“Aha!” shouted Harry Oliver, “what do you think of that, Tom? I tell you he’ll not come. His black cock’s no match for Red Harry. I’ll bet you five pounds he doesn’t come at all. I knew he was only talking for talk’s sake last night when he said that he would match his bird against Harry.”

The others, ready to be amused at anything the tipsy young fellow said, again laughed loudly.

“If you want to bet your money, I’ll cover your five pounds that the gentleman is here in the hour,” said one of the party, who was a stranger to Jack.

“Let him alone, Phillips,” said Mr. Parker, coming down the steps. “The boy is not cool enough to bet his money now. Won’t you come in, gentlemen?”

“Yes, I am cool enough, too,” cried out Oliver. “I’ll bet my money as I choose; and you shall mind your own business, Parker, and I’ll mind mine.”

Then they all went into the house and to the dining-room, where the rum and the sugar stood always ready on the sideboard.

Jack, as was said, was still new to all this life. “What are they going to do?” he asked of Dennis as he led the horse he held over toward the stable.

“Do?” said Dennis; “what d’ye think they’d do but fight a cock main?”

About an hour after the arrival of the first party of guests, Mr. Castleman and four of his friends came in a body. Mr. Castleman’s negro also brought a cock, and almost immediately the birds were pitted against one another in the bare and carpetless hallway.

Jack did not see the beginning of the fight. He was up-stairs helping Mrs. Pitcher make up some beds for the night. When he heard that they were fighting the cocks down in the hall, he hurried down-stairs, boy-like, to see what was going on. A burst of loud voices greeted his ears as he descended the stairway. A number of the negroes and some white servants were clustered on the steps, looking over the banister and down below. There was another loud burst of voices dominated by Mr. Oliver’s shrill boyish tones crying out, “Why, then! Why, then! That’s my hero! Give it to him again! Why, then! ’Tis Red Harry against them all! Where’s your fifty pounds now, Castleman?”

Jack at the head of the stairs could look down upon the tragedy being enacted on the floor below. He stood for a second—two seconds—gazing fascinated. The black cock—a dreadful bloody, blinded thing—was swaying and toppling to death. The red cock towered above him, cruel, remorseless, striking, and striking again; then poising, then striking its helpless dying enemy again. Harry Oliver was squatted behind his bird, hoarse with exultation. The end was very near. Mr. Parker sat calm and serene, looking down at the fight. The others stood or squatted around in a circle, tense and breathless with excitement. All this Jack saw in the few dreadful seconds that he stood there, and the scene was forever fixed upon his memory. He awoke to find that his mouth was clammy with a dreadful excitement. Peggy Pitcher had followed him out on the landing. Suddenly she burst out laughing. “Look at Jack!” she cried. “‘T hath made him sick.”

Jack saw many cock-fights after that one, but the circumstances of this time always remained the most keenly stamped upon his memory as one of the most vivid of those unreal realities of that transition period.

Another memory of an altogether different sort was of one time when Mr. Parker was away from home, and when he himself went with Dennis, and Little Coffee, and two other negroes, down the river to the Roads, fishing. Mrs. Pitcher had advised him not to go. “His honor may come back,” said she; “and if he does and finds you away he’ll be as like as not to give you a flaying with his riding-whip.”

“A fig for his honor!” said Jack. “I’m not afraid of his honor. And as for being away when he comes back, why, that I shall not. He’ll be sure not to be back from Annapolis for a week to come.”

The memory that followed was of a long sail in the open boat of some forty miles or so in the hot sun and the swift, brisk wind; a memory of sitting perched on the up-tilted weather-rail listening to Dennis and the negroes chattering together in the strange jabbering English that was becoming so familiar to him now.

It was pretty late in the afternoon when they approached the fishing-ground. Dennis leaned over the rail every now and then, and peered down into the water, as the hoy drifted along close-hauled to the wind. One of the negroes stood ready to drop the sail, and the other stood in the bow to throw over the stone that served as an anchor when Dennis should give the order. “Let go!” shouted Dennis suddenly, and the sail fell with a rattle of the block and tackle, and in a heap of canvas. At the same time the negro in the bow threw the stone overboard with a great loud splash.

Jack and Little Coffee were the first to drop their lines into the water. Jack sat watching the negro boy; he hoped with all his might that he might catch the first fish, but it did not seem possible that he could catch a fish in that little open spot of the wide, wide stretch of water. Then all of a sudden there came a sharp, quivering pull at the hook, and he instantly began hauling in the wet and dripping line wildly, hand over hand. He thought for a moment that he had lost the fish; then there came a renewed tugging at his line, and in another second he had jerked the shining thing into the boat, where it lay flashing and splashing and flapping upon the boards of the bottom. “I caught the first fish, Little Coffee!” he shouted.

“Look dar, now,” said Little Coffee, testily. “Fish just bite my hook, and you talk and scare ‘um away.”

Jack jeered derisively, and Dennis burst out laughing, while Little Coffee glowered at Jack in glum sullenness.

They fished all that afternoon, and it was toward evening when they hoisted up the anchor stone. Two of the negroes poled the hoy to the shore. Jack was the first to jump from the bow of the boat to the white, sandy beach, littered with a tangle of water-grasses and driftwood, washed up by the waves. A steep bluff bank of sand overlooked the water, and Jack ran scrambling up the sliding, sandy steep, and stood looking around him. For some little distance the ground was open, and there was a low wooden shed, maybe fifty or sixty paces away; beyond it stood the outskirts of the virgin forest. He stood and gazed about him, realizing very keenly that this was the new world, and sensing a singular thrilling delight at the wildness and strangeness of everything.

This, too, was a very vivid memory fragment of that strange and distantly impersonal period of his life.