Time Travel Omnibus, page 13
“Oh, Rip Van Winkle!” exclaimed two or three, “Oh, to be sure! that’s Rip Van Winkle yonder, leaning against the tree.”
Rip looked, and beheld a precise counterpart of himself, as he went up the mountain: apparently as lazy, and certainly as ragged. The poor fellow was now completely confounded. He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man. In the midst of his bewilderment, the man in the cocked hat demanded who he was, and what was his name?
“God knows,” exclaimed he, at his wit’s end; “I’m not myself—I’m somebody else—that’s me yonder—no—that’s somebody else got into my shoes—I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and every thing’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”
The by-standers began now to look at each other, nod, wink significantly, and tap their fingers against their foreheads. There was a whisper also, about securing the gun, and keeping the old fellow from doing mischief, at the very suggestion of which the self-important man in the cocked hat retired with some precipitation. At this critical moment a fresh comely woman pressed through the throng to get a peep at the gray-bearded man. She had a chubby child in her arms, which, frightened at his looks, began to cry. “Hush, Rip,” cried she, “hush, you little fool; the old man won’t hurt you.” The name of the child, the air of the mother, the tone of her voice, all awakened a train of recollections in his mind. “What is your name, my good woman?” asked he.
“Judith Gardenier.”
“And your father’s name?”
“Ah, poor man, Rip Van Winkle was his name, but it’s twenty years since he went away from home with his gun, and never has been heard of since—his dog came home without him; but whether he shot himself, or was carried away by the Indians, nobody can tell. I was then but a little girl.”
Rip had but one question more to ask; but he put it with a faltering voice:
“Where’s your mother?”
“Oh, she too had died but a short time since; she broke a blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New-England peddler.”
There was a drop of comfort, at least, in this intelligence. The honest man could contain himself no longer. He caught his daughter and her child in his arms. “I am your father!” cried he—“Young Rip Van Winkle once—old Rip Van Winkle now!—Does nobody know poor Rip Van Winkle?”
All stood amazed, until an old woman, tottering out from among the crowd, put her hand to her brow, and peering under it in his face for a moment, exclaimed, “Sure enough! it is Rip Van Winkle—it is himself! Welcome home again, old neighbor—Why, where have you been these twenty long years?”
Rip’s story was soon told, for the whole twenty years had been to him but as one night. The neighbors stared when they heard it; some were seen to wink at each other, and put their tongues in their cheeks: and the self-important man in the cocked hat, who, when the alarm was over, had returned to the field, screwed down the corners of his mouth, and shook his head—upon which there was a general shaking of the head throughout the assemblage.
It was determined, however, to take the opinion of old Peter Vanderdonk, who was seen slowly advancing up the road. He was a descendant of the historian of that name, who wrote one of the earliest accounts of the province. Peter was the most ancient inhabitant of the village, and well versed in all the wonderful events and traditions of the neighborhood. He recollected Rip at once, and corroborated his story in the most satisfactory manner. He assured the company that it was a fact, handed down from his ancestor the historian, that the Kaatskill mountains had always been haunted by strange beings. That it was affirmed that the great Hendrick Hudson, the first discoverer of the river and country, kept a kind of vigil there every twenty years, with his crew of the Half-moon; being permitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise, and keep a guardian eye upon the river, and the great city called by his name. That his father had once seen them in their old Dutch dresses playing at nine-pins in a hollow of the mountain; and that he himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of their balls, like distant peals of thunder.
To make a long story short, the company broke up, and returned to the more important concerns of the election. Rip’s daughter took him home to live with her; she had a snug, well-furnished house, and a stout cheery farmer for a husband, whom Rip recollected for one of the urchins that used to climb upon his back. As to Rip’s son and heir, who was the ditto of himself, seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work on the farm; but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend to anything else but his business.
Rip now resumed his old walks and habits; he soon found many of his former cronies, though all rather the worse for the wear and tear of time; and preferred making friends among the rising generation, with whom he soon grew into great favor.
Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived at that happy age when a man can be idle with impunity, he took his place once more on the bench at the inn door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times “before the war.” It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was—petticoat government. Happily that was at an end; he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle. Whenever her name was mentioned, however, he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and cast up his eyes; which might pass either for an expression of resignation to his fate, or joy at his deliverance.
He used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr. Doolittle’s hotel. He was observed, at first, to vary on some points every time he told it, which was, doubtless, owing to his having so recently awaked. It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related, and not a man, woman, or child in the neighborhood, but knew it by heart. Some always pretended to doubt the reality of it, and insisted that Rip had been out of his head, and that this was one point on which he always remained flighty. The old Dutch inhabitants, however, almost universally gave it full credit. Even to this day they never hear a thunderstorm of a summer afternoon about the Kaatskill, but they say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game of nine-pins; and it is a common wish of all hen-pecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life hangs heavy on their hands, that they might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle’s flagon.
AN ANACHRONISM; OR MISSING ONE’S COACH
Anonymous
Kind and credulous reader, and I wish for no other, be it known to you that I am one of those who dip into antiquarian lore, and that I am moreover like some of the same tribe, fond of long and solitary rambles on foot, in quest of the wrecks and relics of things forgotten, or forgotten by all but the family of the “Dryasdusts.” Nor ought I to conceal the fact that I am (when a day’s march has failed to bring me in the way of the monuments of remote ages) much given to the indulgence of splendid philosophical poetical speculations concerning the future; thus borrowing from the time to come, entertainment for the time present, in place of that which should have been furnished me by the times that are past. Many a road-side “St. George and the Dragon,” or “Robin Hood,” where I have found shelter for the night, has witnessed the cheap felicity I have created for myself amid these Janus-like meditations.
During several sultry days of last August, or, if you please, of some other August, I had risen at the earliest dawn, and had held on my pilgrim path until sunset, carefully tracking the course of the Piet’s wall, from the shores of Solway Firth, eastward. Toward the close of the last of these days, all my musings upon the past, as well as every bright and fair dream respecting the future, had been dispelled, or had lost its wonted charm over my imagination, partly by the now overpowering sensations of bodily fatigue and mental exhaustion, and partly by the obtrusion, on every side, of objects utterly at variance with sentiment and speculation of whatever sort, and whether retrospective or anticipative; and which forbad any thing to be thought of but the bustling interests of the generation extant. Who, I ask, can be poetical, or who sublimely philosophical, within ten miles of Newcastle-upon-Tyne?
Yet let me not be thought to disparage the town and neighbourhood whence incalculable chaldrons of comfort, cookery, and gas illumination are emanating every day, and are blessing all our eastern shores! This radiating, if not radiant coal mart, I entered about five o’clock in the afternoon—limping, hungry, thirsty, grimed with dust, and shorn of all sentimentality; and notwithstanding the horror I have—an instinctive horror, not to be reasoned with—of large commercial and manufacturing towns, I was now so thoroughly broken down in spirit and so foot-sore too, that I resigned myself to the thought of spending the night at the best inn which would deign to receive a dusty pedestrian, with a wallet on his back. Thus purposing, I made a discreet choice among the caravanseriea of Newcastle, lowering my pride to the dimensions of a fourth-rate hotel; and there, by assuming some airs of importance, I actually so far secured the good opinion and services of waiters, boots, and chambermaid, as to get myself renovated, in the course of two hours, and found myself a new man, or rather my own self again; that is to day, neither very new, nor very old; but now—shaved, dressed, cooled, tested, dined, and enlivened moreover by a sober pint of execrable sherry. In a word, by seven o’clock, I was beginning to readmit, and to dally with swarms of “fine ideas,” which came crowding upon my rather fevered sensorium.
In this mood I felt it to be out of the question to remain, as a prudent man could have done, where I was, in a dusky, smoke-stained coffee-room; and in the very heart of a Babylon, like Newcastle. Although, therefore, any man in my case, would have thought he had had foot-work enough for the day, I rushed forth; yet intending nothing else but to occupy the bed I had engaged; and meaning only to muse away the twilight hour by the river’s side, if I could find free space there, for a time. It happened, however, that, in limping across the market-place, on my way to the quays, I, was almost run over by the impetuous “Edinburgh and Leeds Mercury,” which, at the moment, swung round the corner with its reeking four. It stopped—and I stopped—and, scarcely thinking what I meant, I accosted the guard as he reached the pavement, with the laconic question—“Room outside?” to which I received the not more wordy answer—
“For one, sir.”
“When do you start?”
“In ten minutes, at the fullest.”
“Keep a place for me in front, then.” The comparison that rushed upon my mind, at first sight of the “Mercury,” between a stifling chamber in a murky inn, for the night, and the splendours of heaven, and the glories of the ensuing dawn—never better enjoyed than on the outside of a night-coach, during the summer months—this instantaneous comparison, carried away all my plans, and actually seemed to dispel my bodily sensations of fatigue.
I hurried back to the den within which I had thought to have gasped till morning, paid my reckoning—lavished gratuities upon waiters, boots, and chambermaid; snatched up my knapsack, and with the precipitation of a man who has scaled the walls of his prison, and in listening for pursuit, hobbled toward the great “Commercial,” whence I was to start. I found that the fresh cattle had not yet come out. I caught the guard by the sleeve, and telling him that I should be on the road, set forward, as if to realize the unexpected pleasure of my escape from Newcastle; or as if to exclude any possible disappointment, although, with this View, it would have been far more wise, as the event proved, to have occupied my seat on the coach, and to have endured the smutty atmosphere of the town a few minutes longer. But the suggestions of vulgar prudence contemned, I made my way, with a hurried, hobbling step through the descending streets, and over the bridge that strides the deep-dyed waters of the Tyne, thence ascending the steep opposite hill on the Durham road, from the brow of which a prospect wide (and fair, if not fouled with smoke) stretches east and west.
Perhaps a restive leader, flinging over the traces, or a lagging passenger, had delayed the Mercury so much beyond the “ten minutes” allowed me,by the guard. In fact, when I reached the summit of, the hill, I listened in vain for either the rattling wheels, or the bugle. In that luckless—or, shall I say lucky—moment, I descried a little to the left, a rising ground, whence the course of the river might advantageously be seen. At the risque (almost the certainty) of losing my place, I darted toward this eminence; and finding, when I reached it, a tempting seat, upon the gnarled roots of a decayed oak, I sat down; yes, I sat; and as my sceptical reader will tell me, nodded and slept. This explanation of what follows I am, however, resolved not to admit; and yet even if this were granted, it would be not the less certain that I looked around me, as I sat with as clear a consciousness of plain reality, as I had had a while before in taking my steak at the Swan. There may, perhaps, be those who will insult me by insinuating that, worn out as I confess myself to have been, I had fallen sound asleep in my box in the coffee-room, with the last half-glass of the “execrable sherry” before me; and that the whole affair of the “Mercury” is no better than a midsummer night’s dream. I shall not condescend to argue the point with any such objectors, too wise already in their own conceits; but shall go on in all simplicity to relate how that, seated in the aforesaid natural arm chair, I looked around and looked beneath, and looked in vain for the roofs, and chimneys, and spires of the dingy Newcastle—for the most entangled quays, for the spouting furnaces, for the glowing fire-heaps, at the pits’ mouths, in the distance; or, in a word, for any one object indicative of recent times, or of the busy wonders of the metropolis of soot; and all which bad a moment before lain outstretched before me.
In the stead of any such familiar appearances, noting the current time, the August of 1837 (or some other August of modern date,) there was, indeed, the same glowing sky, and the same general outline of country; the same winding river, yet winding in a somewhat different track, and seen only at points among overgrowing tufts of trees. But instead of the vast, town and its accompaniments, I gazed upon a wild solitude; or if not a solitude, which in truth it was not, yet such comparatively.
The ground about me was a rugged forest, crossed by rude paths, yet down the hill side, and in the fiats beneath, I descried many small enclosures, each containing a hovel or cabin, and within which there were the indications of thrift and comfort. The distance toward the north, and west was dark with wide-stretching forests, the more sullen in their aspect, as they now lay in gloomy shade, immediately beneath the dazzling expanse, whence the sun had but just sunk away.
But now—mark it, reader—what was the most surprising in this instantaneous shifting of the scene, was that I looked upon it as coolly as if it had not been surprising at all; as if it were just what I had expected, and had actually beheld a hundred times. Never in my life have I seemed more myself, more wide awake, or more calmly and familiarly conversant with things about me. I was conscious of no excitement, no poetic elevation, no wonderment, no exaggerated impressions; there was no fantastic mixing up of chimeras with ordinary realities; all within and all without was sober truth. I, who had the same afternoon entered the Swan covered with dust—I, who had a few minutes before engaged my place to Leeds, and was listening for the coach—the same real and veracious I, now stood gazing upon a scene utterly changed in aspect and objects.
In turning about, I perceived at a little distance an uncouth being—shall I call him peasant or savage—who was dragging his weary steps homeward—if, indeed, he might have a home, other than the hollow of a tree. His hatless head was matted with a mop of caroty hair, brushing his broad and naked shoulders, and almost concealing a florid Scythian-like visage, marked with the hopeless sullennese and mindless wildness, with which cruel bondage deforms the human countenance. A torn woollen jerkin, of the coarsest texture, left uncovered his shaggy bosom and brawny arms. The man, and this startled me more than even his strange appearance, passed me so near as almost to brush me with his tatters, and yet seemed no more to notice me than as if I had been a disembodied spirit. I accosted him with the question—”What place is this?” He started at the sound of my voice, but looked in an opposite direction, as if he had heard himself called from a distance, and seeing no one, went on.
Yet this question had no sooner escaped my lips, than the answer to it, like the most familiarly known fact, came to my recollection. Where am I? Where should I be, after having crossed Tina’s flood—where but on the brow of Gaetshefed; yes, Gaetshefed (Gateshead), and close at hand must be the sacred Girvum (Janoro), and the cloistered retreat of the learned and venerable historian of the British and Saxon Church!
I looked around, and although, to satisfy the strict demands of topography, I should have had some little way to go, and far enough to forfeit all chance of being taken up by the Mercury; yet, so it was, or so it seemed, that I descried, half hid by a clump of oaks, a pile of buildings, seemingly fresh from the mason’s hand, regular in form, but of no great extent or elevation. The main structure was surrounded by a low, scolloped wall of uncemented stones, through which there was access by a narrow gateway, into a court-yard or rough area, variously occupied with sheds and lumber. Behind the building, however, I saw a much loftier wall, apparently enclosing a garden.
The edifice itself—the monastery, for such, in fact, I found it to be—presented, in its general appearance, the combined characteristics of a church, to fortress, a prison, a seignorial mansion, and a farm-house—at least there was a something proper to each of these styles of building, discernible in this sanctuary of piety, whose inmates, while in the main devoting their lives to the business of piety, maintained their ground amid lawless hordes, as well by the aid of substantial defences, as by the awe of religion.
