Colonel Dugald Forth, my grandfather, fought very bravely through the
war, from first Manassas to Appomattox. He saw two sons and a
brother slain, and many kinsmen and many friends. He was five times
wounded, and the last hurt, at Cold Harbor, made him limp through
life. He had put all the money he could raise into Confederate
bonds. "The government must be supported, sir!" He had seen his
government go down into the Swire Deep of lost governments. The
bonds were worthless. When he came home, after the Surrender, to
Restwell, it was to find the house standing, and that was better fare
than had many of his neighbors and friends. But the negroes were
free, and were gone, most of them, to the four winds. Those that
stayed were the inwardly attached, and that, in a case like this,
meant chiefly the elderly. And, staying, they must henceforth not
only be clothed, housed, and fed, but paid. He did not see whence
the money was to come with which to do it. It was springtime when he
came home. The fields lay unplowed, unplanted, unkempt, desolate.
The fences had disappeared. The cattle, the horses, were gone from
the meadow-land. Where was stock to come from--implements--seeds
even? Who would labor the fields? The earth of the plantation
stood, and the old pillared, brick house. Behind, at the foot of
Lone Tree Hill, were the quarters, three-fourths deserted. Over by
the big oak rose the overseer's house. But his old overseer was
dead, killed at Sharpsburg. He could not get, nor did he need, a new
one. Down by the creek he saw a ruin where had been his mill. He
could not rebuild.
The bridge was gone from over the river. He had to find and cross by
the old ford. Restwell, at that time, stood eight miles from a
railway. He rode these miles over a highway, unmended for so long
that it must have forgotten the very look of road-menders. The
railroad--the railroads--by which he had traveled from Richmond were
painful, decrepit things. The fields to either side lay fenceless,
turned out, dead. The villages, the wayside houses, had a beaten
look. Gaunt chimneys stood up, all that was left of burned homes.
All the South was broken down. My grandfather loved the South.
Before him and his region, to be traveled, perforce, ran the painful
bitter road of the years after the war. Generosity is a great virtue
and is slow of acquisition. It hung over North and South, it
descended here and there, but in these years there was little common,
public attempt to bring it down and mix it with the daily bread.
Colonel Dugald Forth came home. My grandmother met him with
ejaculations of thankfulness and welcome. His unmarried daughter, my
aunt Sarah, clung about him. My mother, his widowed daughter-in-law,
came with the genial look behind the tears in her eyes. I was set
upon his knee. Mammy came and Uncle Plutus and Aunt Esther.
"We'll begin again, Dugald!"
"Father, they're here still--around and with us--a cloud of sharers!
And here's Michael to grow up and help you!"
Courage in any form insures a possible courage elsewhere. My
grandfather, at fifty-five, took up an altered life and walked with
it bravely. The year after the war my grandmother died. I can
remember her--a small, active, gallant woman. My mother and I lived
on at Restwell. The man to whom my aunt Sarah had been betrothed had
died in the third year of the war, a prisoner at Camp Chase. Her
life was at this time almost wholly subjective, a dreamy intercourse
with the past and with the future across the grave. My grandmother,
feeling herself going, had turned to my mother. "Cary, you take the
housekeeping. You make them comfortable!" Later, when they were all
around her, in the dead of night, she opened her eyes and said, "My
key-basket to Cary!" Then she took her husband's hand and held it,
and with her odd, inscrutable smile, died.
So my mother took the reins that she dropped. My mother had a strong
power of liking and loving. And as she gave she drew. My
grandfather, my aunt Sarah, the servants, the place, took light and
warmth from her, and gave her from their own store, great or small.
She was a flame-kindler, a beneficent ferment. Kindred and
acquaintance differed from her at many points, would sometimes hotly
argue with her. But the level lifted where she was.
Uncle Gilchrist was the youngest of my grandfather's children.
Nineteen when he fought in the battle to be seen from Lone Tree Hill,
he was presently transferred to the Army of Tennessee and henceforth
fought out of Virginia. When the end came he was artillery captain,
somewhere far south. Thence he wrote that as soon as might be he
would go to Mexico. He went, and Restwell heard of him as fighting
with Juarez. At very long intervals came a letter to his father.
My father was dead, and my uncle Robert. Uncle Gilchrist was in
Mexico. Aunt Sarah lived at Restwell. There were left my aunts
Harriet and Kate--Mrs. Warringer, Mrs. Dallas. Aunt Harriet lived in
Richmond, Aunt Kate at Flowerfield, in the next county. The husbands
of both were living--General Warringer, Major Dallas, the latter with
an empty sleeve--but both men were impoverished, involved, like the
rest of our world, in the huge debacle. They could not help Colonel
Forth.
My grandfather took up his burden. Trouble of the past and of the
present, a cloudy day overspreading, to him, the future, made it
somewhat grim and heavy. Men like him--like Warringer, like
Dallas--must somehow hold the time until children like me, like
Warringer's five and Dallas's four, grew up to improve it. The
present work was to keep the South--Virginia--the heritage's head
above water. That must be done despite very complete poverty,
despite disfranchisement, despite a stinging cloud of daily defeats,
despite a veritable upas-tree of memory, perpetually waving a
welcome, perpetually murmuring, "Come, sleep under me!"
My grandfather assumed his task, but it bent him like the stony
masses that they bear in the first round of the Mountain of Purgatory.
He must find an inner way to make it lighter, since there was no
outer way. He first tried blind, proud endurance, an exoteric
Stoicism. After a time this broke down. He began to be a reader, a
ponderer. Restwell owned a very fair number of books. The Forths
possessed a good many, and my mother had brought with her from her
old home in eastern Virginia her inherited portion of a considerable
and well-chosen library. My grandfather turned from book to book.
At last, in two or three quartos, he came upon Swedenborg.
Despite Scotch blood and name, the Restwell Forths were
Episcopalians. Every Sunday, in the old time, the old, roomy,
high-swung carriage, the two sleek, strong chestnuts, and Mingo or
Daniel on the box, had taken the women of the family to St.
Matthew's, in the oak-grove, in the middle of Whitechurch. Colonel
Forth and his sons had ridden there. In the new time, in fine
weather, my mother and Aunt Sarah walked the two miles. In bad
weather the two farm-horses were put to the old carriage, rusty now
and shaken, and Uncle Plutus, rusty too, drove them to St. Matthew's.
My grandfather, alone, rode upon Selim, brought somehow through the
war, but old now and with a trick of stumbling.
The Rev. Thomas Millwood belonged to St. Matthew's and St. Matthew's
to him. He also belonged to Whitechurch and Whitechurch to him. And
to the county at large and the county to him. And likewise to
Virginia and Virginia to him. When the war clanged down upon us he
became a fighting chaplain. Then the army belonged to him and he to
the army. After the Surrender all the one-time comrades-in-arms
belonged to him and he to them. Later in history, I do not think
that he missed a single Confederate reunion. A younger man than my
grandfather, the two had been at the university in the same
half-decade. They had an affection for each other. There was Mrs.
Millwood, but she moved like a cool, pale moon around the orb in
activity that was her husband. The pair had no children, but
relatives, temporarily stranded, were always more or less permanently
at home in the pleasant, large-gardened, brick parsonage around the
corner from St. Matthew's.
During and after the war, the Millwoods, too, must cut the cloth of
life after altered patterns. Old, pleasant, easy living and giving
had to be relinquished. The toll-gate bar swung decisively across
the road of expenditure. They gave up much, but kept their dogmas.
Mr. Millwood always spoke of himself as an active Christian. He
preached good orotund sermons, and he practised a thousand brotherly
charities and kindlinesses. He had, though always within his own
frontiers, a strong social gift. I think that he was an active
Christian, though perhaps not as active as he considered himself.
His marked impatiences were with religious doubts: "How _can_ you
doubt, sir? Here--and here! Isn't it plain?" And with tokens of a
changing mind where social and political theories were in question:
"Change, sir! Look at the French Revolution! Look at the French
character to-day! Look at this tragic country! What has brought
about all these horrors? Old ways not good enough! Unrest! Minds
bitten by tarantulas! What has been the result--is it lovely and of
good report? Look at the Northern character!"
Mr. Millwood came often to Restwell. All there, white and black, had
an old fondness for him, for all could remember many a goodness. He
was a large man, with a broad, fresh-colored face and a manner at
once bluff and cordial. He came one afternoon and stayed to supper,
the moon being full and the night fitted for a ride back to
Whitechurch on his most venerable gray Dobbin. After supper, upon
the porch, while they smoked, my grandfather opened upon his inner
preoccupations.
"I read more than I used to, you know, Millwood--turn things over
more in my mind. Origins and destinies, and so forth, you know. I
happened, a while ago, upon Swedenborg."
"Ah yes! Swedenborg! I tried to read him once and couldn't," said
Mr. Millwood. "'Origins and destinies!' Stick to Moses, Colonel,
and to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and to Paul!"
"Swedenborg says that he is only giving the spiritual sense of the
Scriptures."
"Haven't you all your life heard given the spiritual sense of the
Scriptures? What is the pulpit for?"
"Yes, I know. But somehow.... We take help where we are lucky
enough to find it, Millwood!"
"Don't you go wandering after nightshade thinking you're getting
strawberries! Swedenborg!"
"If God is Total and Divine Man--"
"God is God, and man is man! I must say that you surprise me,
Forth--"
"As a commentary--"
"Heterodoxy always begins as a commentary! You stick to the plain
letter of the Bible! Look where the age is being led! Emerson and
Beecher--this man Darwin in England--wild theories of
communism--women forgetting their nature! For God's sake, Forth,
don't you be running after strange idols! Don't you become a
betrayer!"
Now loyalty stood very high in my grandfather's scale of virtues.
For some days after this conversation he read no more Swedenborg.
Indeed, he read nothing. It happened to be a depressing week.
Poverty bore hard upon the South; unmagnanimous political measures
were abroad. There fell a chill rain. The crops at Restwell proved
small, and yet, such as they were, it was hard to get them gathered.
The interest was due on the mortgage he had had to place. Colonel
Forth's shoulders were beginning to be bowed.
One day, when it rained too much to be out in the fields, he took
from his desk the small Testament which he had carried through the
war. He had read in it not infrequently during those four years.
But the reading had been more or less perfunctory, blind,
unintelligent. What the book had chiefly given him was a sense of
protection, of lightness in having it upon his person. It had been
something very like an amulet, a fetish. It had turned no bullets,
averted no saber strokes, but the feel of it under his gray vest had
been a help to strength. Once he had missed it. There had been a
desperate charge, a hand-to-hand fight. At the first possible
instant he returned to the scene of this, and, at risk of death or
capture, picked the book out of a bloodstained, trampled hollow.
Now he sat down before the long window, with the sobbing day outside,
and opened the Testament. It opened at the Letter to the Romans.
The Colonel read, and now he touched idea where before had been
uncomprehended sound. He held the book in his hand and sat gazing
out at mist and rain. "I see," he thought. "But Swedenborg helped
me to see. Where is the harm, then, in Swedenborg?" He kept on
thinking. "Paul explained, interpreted.... Why should
interpretation stop when everything here was bound together? ... _It
has never stopped. It is going on now._"
My grandfather began now to read both the Bible and Swedenborg. It
was a comfort to him when he dug from the latter that members of all
churches might apprehend the Church above--the New Church--and yet
still sit among old congregations. He did not want to cease to go to
St. Matthew's. He did not want to break with Millwood, or his
neighbors, or kin. He did not want the county to talk about Colonel
Forth and his defections. He only wanted all helps toward finding a
shore above his wasted world. Presently he began to read other
mystics besides Swedenborg. And now the Bible was often in his
hands. He acquired a habit of shaking or of nodding his head in
church, at first only at points in the sermon. Fortunately, St.
Matthew's construed this as a slight palsy, creeping upon the colonel
and manifesting itself at inconvenient seasons.
Now I begin to remember my grandfather as he appeared to a small boy.
He was a tall, bent man, with a beard, with dreamy blue eyes and
lines of care above them. He had a deep voice, somewhat drawling and
caressing--what is called "a Southern voice." I used to follow him
about--field or orchard or barn--wherever he was going. And often I
rode behind him on Selim.
I was very fond of him. His long silences did not trouble me. There
was always so much to see or to think about while he was saying
nothing. When he did speak his voice wrapped me like a deep, old
wood, half melancholy, slow, and always kind. He answered my
questions, too, with a satisfying open door in the answer. In that
he and my mother were alike. When, by the next day, I had found
another closed door to which the open door had led, he did his best,
with a simple seriousness, with this one also.
Dear grandfather! Dear old movements about the old Restwell place!
Dear childhood! I go there now at will. I move or sit or stand at
will in the bright and tender world of Memory. I alter there where I
see that alteration is needed. I condense or expand, strengthen or
disintegrate. I hasten or linger, I heighten, widen, and deepen. I
recognize form within form. The "irrecoverable Past"--there is no
such thing! I treat my past as an artist should. It is mine and I
visit my vineyard when I will. I prune and tend the vineyard. I
make wine from the grapes, and in one chalice, in deep moments, know
my past's essence. "My" past! These pronouns are the bane of
existence. "My" past is the past--all the past. And where has the
past gone to? It is very sufficiently here! Open the gate and go
into it at your will. There is not even a gate; there is no barrier.