The best of it was that no one would mistake his calling. He looked the part. He hadn’t shaved—he remembered by the sudden feel of scratchy whiskers on his chin—for three days, and he had the disreputable look that usually results from such an omission. His outing clothes were torn, drenched, soiled, and dust-covered. At first he had felt somewhat uncomfortable in his unsightly togs; he had regretted the departure of his usual well-groomed appearance, but now he actually rejoiced in his disreputability. He wouldn’t have any trouble convincing the camp-tender—when that mysterious gentleman should reveal himself—that sheep-herding was his fitting station in life. He would make, he thought with a laugh, a fairly plausible tramp.
He had been greatly fatigued by his hard swim in Silver Creek, but now he felt refreshed. And he found himself wondering at the ease with which laughter came to his lips. It wasn’t the usual thing with Hugh Gaylord at all. He found to his surprise that life was full of things to laugh at: the incongruity of his position, the awkward antics of the lambs, the grandmotherly concern of the ewes, the whole irresistible joke of existence. Before, Hugh had laughed in really but two ways—one at wit (usually the forced wit of a professional comedian) and the other in scorn. One of these two ways, it seemed to him, had wholly left him now. The ability to be really scornful of anything in the wide world had seemingly passed away. The vision of himself watching the flocks had brought a new tolerance, a new breadth of view toward all the world. Never in his life, so far as he could remember, had he laughed from the simple joy of life, the laugh of sheer delight. Somehow, he had never learned to know delight in its true sense.
Then Hugh came to a curious conclusion. He denied it a long time, but slowly the facts to support it became too many to resist. It was simply that in his past life—the life between which mighty mountains now raised a formidable barrier—he had grown old before his time. Nor was it kindly and wholesome old age that had come to him: the ripened wisdom of venerable years. It was a false age, and it had given him a wholly false outlook on life. Two weeks ago he had felt infinitely old and tired, and now he had been born again.
His vision hadn’t been quite straight. He had taken his own little sphere of life to represent the whole magnificent sphere in which the continents rise above the sea. Unlike all truly great people, unlike the most worthy even among his own set, he had adopted an attitude of what he flattered himself was sophistication. But he had not been a true Sophist, one who could immutably separate the gold from the dross, one who knew the infinite good humor as well as the remorseless travail of life. He had thought that everything was dross. He had lost faith in the world, conceiving virtue as the exception rather than the rule, doubting the compensation of clean living, the sanctity of homes, the solace of religion, the pride of good work, the purity of womanhood, the immortality of ideals. And most of all he doubted happiness. He didn’t believe that it existed.
Yet all at once he had found it: a quiet, healthy happiness that was constant as his own breathing. It lay, not in stimulation or in pleasures between which the mood drops down, but in a clear, sweet level of contentment, of personal worth, of time well spent, of existence justified and destiny fulfilled. There behind that flock, tired of muscle but still on duty, guarding with watchful eye and ready weapon, Hugh Gaylord felt content for the first time in his life.
If there was one blessing in particular that his false sophistication had cost him it was that of simple faith—the faith of children, faith in the redemption of the race and the high constancy of the stars. It meant, clearest of all perhaps, that he had lost faith in miracles. Yet he now found a miraculous quality in this very happiness that had come upon him. He had self-wonder no less amazing at the curious familiarity and boundless peace with which he fell into the spirit of the sheep.
He felt at peace. There was no other word. Could it be that he had come into his own at last? All his life, it had seemed to him, he had carried in the deepest realms of his spirit a vision that had now come true: just the feeding flocks in the deep shade of the forest. He had the strange feelings of one who—exiled in babyhood—catches the far gleam of his homeland at last.
It seemed wholly natural that he should be walking here—behind the flocks—in silent vigil as the sun climbed up over the far, white peaks. He had a sense of having returned, after long and futile wanderings, to his own home. Always there had been blind, little-understood gropings in his own soul, a reaching outward; and had he found his destiny at last?
Up Silver Creek came the salmon, returning to their home waters for their last days. Four years had they dwelt in the dark bewilderment of the sea, but they came back to their own places in the end. Did they, all through those four years of their exile, carry in the deepest recesses of their beings a vision of their Lost Land to which they would return to die? Did they know a vague bewilderment, blind gropings in their fishy souls, an unfamiliarity with the gray wastes and the incessant waves that was not to end until they could know again the shallows and cataracts and waterfalls of their native river? Did peace come to
