years later one of the foremen in the factory died suddenly. I asked the
manager who should be put in his place.
“‘Well,’ he said, ‘there is a man out in the shop just fitted for it. I
can’t pronounce his name, but I will bring him in.’
“He did; a great black-haired man who looked me right in the eye as I
like to have people do.
“‘How long have you been in this country?’ I asked.
“‘Ten years. You may not remember, but I came in the ship with you; in
the steerage, with my wife and two boys.’
“It flashed into my mind at once; this was what America had done for the
man. I smiled as I thought of the flat-faced woman who wanted to look
like the Goddess of Liberty, and the man whose faith in America was such
that he told her this dream could come true.
“The man more than made good. It is wonderful how things happen in this
country. Those two black-eyed boys were at school with my boy and played
on the football team with him. They were all three to go to college
together.
“Then you know how, before we entered the war, the women organized to do
Red Cross work? One day my wife came home and told me how a Polish woman
had made the most wonderful talk before her society. Before we knew it
America had entered the war, and we were all at it. You couldn’t keep my
boy here. He volunteered the first week after war was declared, and these
two black-haired boys belonging to my foreman volunteered with him, and
they all went over the sea to fight for America.
“I had not seen their mother, and I was curious to see what she looked
like after American competence and success had been rubbed in. We had a
big parade in our town during one of the Liberty Loan drives, and there
was one division of women who carried service flags. I stood in the
window of my club watching the parade, and as it happened within six feet
of me on the sidewalk stood John, my foreman. I did not laugh this time,
nor was he shamed into silence for what he thought of his wife.
“Oh, how that war did stir up and level the elements of American society!
There passed before us in parade, side by side, my wife with a service
flag of one star and John’s wife with two stars in her flag! And as they
passed they turned and looked at us. My wife told me later that they had
been talking as they marched. My wife had asked her comrade if she did
not feel dreadfully to think of her two great boys far away in France.
And the woman with the flat, homely face had answered:
“‘No, I feel glorified to think that I, the poor immigrant woman, can
offer my boys in part payment for what America has done for me and my
people.’
“And it was just then that I saw her face. I give you my word that at
that moment it was the most beautiful face I ever saw. There was a calm
beauty and dignity, a light of joy upon it which made me forget the flat
nose, the narrow forehead and the great mouth. They passed on, and John,
the foreman, looked up at me. We were both thinking the same thing,
master and man though we were. I couldn’t reach him with my hand, but I
did say:
“‘John, she has had her life wish. She has come to look like the Goddess
of Liberty. It was a miracle.’
“And John answered in his slow, thoughtful way:
“‘No, not a miracle—always she has had that great spirit in her heart;
always that great love in her soul. She has kept that love and spirit
pure all through these hard years, and now at the great sacrifice it
shone out through her face. Said I not right that my wife would come to
be the most beautiful woman on earth?’”
My friend told the story in a matter-of-fact way, and then fell into a
silence. I did not ask him how he reconciled this experience with his
statement that beauty is rubbed in from the outside. It wasn’t worth
while; we both knew better. The face of mature years is a mask. It is the
candle behind it that gives it character and beauty.
CAPTAIN RANDALL’S HOUR
Uncle Isaac Randall was the last Grand Army man in our town. All the
other old comrades had passed on. As a boy I used to try to imagine what
“the last Grand Army man” would be like. Poets and artists have tried to
picture him, but when he actually appears you know how far the real must
travel to reach the ideal. For poet and artist would have us look upon
some calm, dignified man, carried by the wings of great achievement far
above the mean and petty things of life which surround us like a thick
fog in a narrow valley. For that, I fear, is what most of us find life
to be unless the memory of some great sacrifice or some great devotion
can lift our heads up into the perpetual sunshine. Those who knew Uncle
Isaac saw little of the hero about him. He was just a little, thin,
nervous man, very deaf, irritable and disappointed. No one can play the
part of a deaf man with any approach to success unless he be a genuine
philosopher, and Uncle Isaac was unfitted by nature for that. Sometimes
in Summer, when the sun went down, you would see the old man standing in
the barn looking off to the crimson West, over the purpling hills where
the shadows came creeping up from the valley. A man with some poetry and
philosophy would have seen in the darkening notch where the hills gave
way, to let the road pass through, an approach to the beautiful gate
through which wife and children and old comrades had passed on, to wait
for him beyond the hills. But Uncle Isaac was cursed with that curiosity
which is the torture of the deaf—he saw the hired man up on the hill
talking to the neighbor’s boy, and his burning desire was to know what
they were talking about as they stood in the twilight.
The Great War came, and Uncle Isaac’s two grandsons volunteered. Before
they shipped overseas they came back to the farm—very trim and natty
in their brown uniforms. It irritated the old man to think that these
boys—hardly more than babies—hardly to be trusted to milk a kicking
cow—should be sent to fight America’s battles. And those little rifles!
They were not much better than popguns, compared with his old army
musket. The old man took the gun down from the nail where it had hung for
years. He had kept it polished, and the lock with its percussion cap was
still working. He would show these young sniffs what real warfare meant.
So they went out in the pasture—the old soldier carrying his musket,
carefully loaded with a round bullet—pushed in with the iron ramrod. In
order to show these boy soldiers what real warfare might be, the old man
sighted the musket over the fence and aimed at a board about 300 yards
away. The bullet went at least five feet wide, while the old musket
kicked back so hard that Uncle Isaac winced with the pain. Then one of
the boys quietly raised his “popgun” and aimed at a bush at least half
a mile away across the valley. In a fraction of a minute he fired half
a dozen bullets which tore up the ground all around that bush. Then the
boys hung one of their brown uniforms on the fence across the pasture,
and put Grandpa’s old blue coat beside it. You could hardly distinguish
the brown coat against the background, while the blue coat stood out
like a target. It was hard for the old man to realize that both he and
his musket belonged to a vanished past. The boys looked at the gun and
at Grandpa marching home—trying to throw his old shoulders back into
military form—and smiled knowingly at each other as youth has ever done
in the pride of its power. They could not see—who of us ever can see?—the
spiritual forces of patriotism which walked beside the old man, waiting
for the time to show their power.
The weeks went by, and day by day Grandpa read his paper with growing
indignation. You remember how for months the army in France seemed to
stand still before that great “Hindenburg line” which stretched out like
an iron wall in front of Germany. It seemed to Uncle Isaac as if his boys
and the rest of the army were cowards—afraid to march up to the line and
fight. One day he threw down his paper and expressed himself fully, as
only an old soldier can.
“I told you those boys never would fight. At the Battle of the Wilderness
Lee had a line of defense twice as strong as this Hindenburg ever had.
Did General Grant sit still and wait for something to happen? Not much!
“‘Forward by the left flank!’
“That was the order, and we went forward. Don’t you know what he said
at Fort Donelson? ‘I propose to move on your works at once.’ If General
Grant was in France that’s what he’d say, and within an hour you’d
see old Hindenburg coming out to surrender! My regiment fought all day
against a regiment from North Carolina. I’ll tell you what! Let me have
my old regiment and that North Carolina regiment alongside and I’ll
guarantee that we will break right through that Hindenburg line, march
right across the Rhine, hog-tie the Kaiser and bring him back with us.”
“But, father,” said his daughter gently, “don’t you remember what Harry
writes? They don’t fight that way now. The cannon must open a way first.
Harry says they fire shells so large and powerful that when they strike
the ground they make a hole so large you could put the barn into it.
Suppose one of these big shells struck in the middle of your regiment?”
“I don’t care,” said Uncle Isaac. “_We’d start, anyway! We’d move on
those breastworks and take our chances!_”
And mother wrote about it to her boys in the army over in France. The
young fellows laughed at the thought of those old white-haired men,
with their antiquated weapons, lined up before the death-dealing power
of Germany. It seemed such a foolish thing to youth. The letter finally
came to the grey-haired colonel of the regiment—an elderly man who had
in some way held his army place in the ocean of youth which surrounded
him. His eyes were moist as he read it, for he knew that if that group of
wasted, white-haired men had lined up in front of the army they would not
have been alone. Down the aisles of history would have come a throng of
old heroes—the spirit of the past would have stood with them. They would
have stilled the laughter, and if these old veterans had started forward
the whole great army would have thrown off restraint, broken orders and
followed them through the “Hindenburg line.”
But Uncle Isaac, at home, humiliated and sad, went about the farm with
something like a prayer in his old heart.
“Why can’t _I_ do something to help? Don’t make me know my fighting days
are over. What can _I_ do?”
And Uncle Isaac finally had his chance. Perhaps you remember how at one
time during the war things seemed dark enough. Our boys were swarming
across the ocean, and submarines were watching for them. Food was
scarce. Frost and storm had turned against us. Money was flowing out
like water. Spies and German sympathizers were poisoning the public
mind, and the Liberty Loan campaign was lagging. Uncle Isaac, reading
it all day by day in his paper, felt like a man in prison galled to
the soul by his inability to help. There came a big patriotic meeting
at the county town. It was a factory town with many European laborers.
They were restless and uneasy, opposed to the draft, tired of the war
and not yet in full sympathy with America. Uncle Isaac determined to go
to this meeting, though his daughter did all she could to dissuade him.
There was no stopping him when he once made up his mind, so his daughter
let him have his way, but she sent old John Zabriski along with him.
Old John was a German Pole who came to this country as a young man out
of the German army. He had lived on Uncle Isaac’s farm for years, and
just as a cabbage or a tomato plant seems the stronger and better for
transplanting, so this transplanted European in the soil of this country
had grown into the noblest type of American. So the daughter, standing in
the farmhouse door with eyes that were a little dimmed, watched these two
old men drive away to the meeting.
They had the speaker’s stand in front of the court house. The street
was packed with a great crowd. Right in front was a group of sullen,
defiant foreigners who had evidently come for trouble. The sheriff was
afraid of them, and inside the court house out of sight, but ready for
instant service, was a squad of soldiers. A young man who was running
for the Legislature caught sight of Uncle Isaac and led him through the
court house to the speaker’s platform, and John went, too, as bodyguard.
The old veteran sat there in his blue coat and hat with the gold braid,
unable to hear a word, but full of the spirit which had come down to him
from the old days.
Something was wrong. Even Uncle Isaac could see that, and John Zabriski
beside him looked grave and anxious. That solid group of rough men in
front began to sway back and forth like the movement of water when the
high wind blows over it, and a sullen murmur, growing louder, came from
the crowd. A small, effeminate-looking man was making a speech. Very
likely his ancestors came originally to this country two centuries ago,
but somewhere back in the years this man’s forebears had made a fortune.
Instead of serving as a tool to spur the family on to finer things it had
been spread out like a soft cushion to carry them through life without a
bruise or bump. And these rough men, whose life had been all bruise and
turmoil, knew that this soft little American was here talking platitudes
when he should have been over in France. Perhaps you have never heard the
angry murmur of a sullen crowd grow into a roar of rage, until the crowd
becomes like a wild beast. The sheriff had heard this, and he was frankly
frightened. He started a messenger back into the court house to notify
the soldiers, but old John Zabriski stopped him.
“Wait,” he said, “do not that. You lose those men by fighting. We gain
them.”
Then, before anyone could stop him, old John stepped up in front and
barked out strange words which seemed like a command. Then a curious
thing happened. The angry murmur stilled. The crowd stopped its movement,
and then every man stood at attention! Almost every man there had in
former years served in one of the European armies, and what old John
had barked at them was the old army command which had been drilled into
them years before. And through force of habit which had become instinct,
that order, for the moment, changed that mob into an army of attentive
soldiers. The bandmaster was a man of imagination, and as quickly as
his men could catch up their instruments they began playing “The Star
Spangled Banner.” Poor old Uncle Isaac heard nothing of this. He could
only guess what it was all about until John Zabriski laboriously wrote on
a piece of paper:
“Dey blay der Shtar Banner!”
Then there came into Uncle Isaac’s sad life the great, glorious joy of
power and opportunity. He walked down to the front of the stage, took off
his gold-braided hat and bowed his white head before them all. And old
John Zabriski, the transplanted European, came and stood at his side. A
young woman, dressed all in white, caught up a flag and came and stood
beside the two old men. Then a wounded soldier with one empty sleeve
pinned to his breast followed her. And there in that sunlit street a
great, holy silence fell over that vast crowd. For there before them on
that platform stood the glory, the pride, the precious legacy of American
history. The last Grand Army man, the European peasant made over into
an American, and the young people who represented the promise and hope
shining in the legacy which men like Uncle Isaac and John Zabriski have
given them.
When the band stopped playing a mighty cheer went up from that great
crowd, and one by one the men of that sullen group in front took off
their hats and joined in the cheering. They made Uncle Isaac get up again
and again to salute, and no less a person than Judge Bradley shook both
hands and said:
“We all thank you, Captain Randall. You have saved this great meeting and
made this town solidly patriotic.” It was a proud old soldier who marched
into the farmhouse kitchen that night, and in answer to his daughter’s
questioning eyes he said:
“Annie, I want you to write those boys all about it. Tell ’em they are
not doing it all. Tell ’em Judge Bradley called me cap’n and said I saved
the meeting. I only wish General Grant could have been there!”
All of which goes to show that those of you who have come to white hair
should not feel that you are out of the game yet. Material things may go
by us, but the spirit of the good old days is still the last resort!
“SNOW BOUND”
This is the one night of the year for reading “Snow Bound.” Every man
with New England blood in his veins should read Whittier’s poem at least
once a year. That becomes as much of a habit as eating baked beans and
fishballs. For two days now the storm has roared over our hills and shut
us in. It must have been on just such a night as this that Emerson wrote:
“The sled and traveler stopped; the courier’s feet
Delayed; all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.”
Of course, Emerson lived at a time when the telephone and the electric
light and the steam-heated house were dreams too obscure even for his
great mind to comprehend. So, in spite of this fearful storm, the strong
arm of the electric current still reaches our house, and while the
telephone is slow, we can get our message through, after a fashion. But
we are shut in. The car and the truck are useless tonight. The horses
stamp contentedly in the barn—not troubling about the head-high drifts
which are piled along the roadway. A bad night for a fire or for a hurry
call for the doctor; but why worry about that as we sit here before the
fire?
I got my copy of “Snow Bound” in 1872, and I have read the poem at least
once each year since, and I have carried it all over the country with
me. It is a little shabby now, but somehow that is the way I like to see
old friends:
“Shut in from all the world without
We sat the clean winged hearth about,
Content to let the north wind roar
In baffled rage at pane and door,
While the red logs before us beat
The frost-line back with tropic heat.
...
“Between the andiron’s straddling feet
The mug of cider simmered low,
The apples sputtered in a row
And close at hand the basket stood
With nuts from brown October’s wood.
...
“What matter how the night behaved?
What matter how the north wind raved?
Blow high, blow low, not all its snow
Could quench our hearth fire’s ruddy glow.”
...
There is no finer picture of the old-time Northern farm home, and we
Yankees are bound to think that with all her faults New England did in
those days set the world an example of what a farm home ought to be. So I
lay aside the book and look about me to see how close New Jersey can come
on this fearful night to matching this old-time picture.
Here we are before the fire. Great logs of apple wood are blazing up
into the black chimney. In Whittier’s day the open fire produced all the
light, but here we have our electric light blazing, and I think as I sit
here how miles away the great engines are working to send the current
far up among the lonely hills to our home. For supper we had a thick
tomato soup, a big dish of cornmeal mush—the grain ground in our little
grinder—pot cheese, entire wheat bread and butter, baked apples and
all the milk we could drink. Just run that over and see if it does not
furnish as fine a balanced ration and as good a lot of vitamines as any
$2 dinner in New York—and nearly 80 per cent of it was produced on this
farm. Now the girls have washed the dishes and planned breakfast, and
here we are. Mother sits in the first choice of seats before the fire.
That is where she belongs. She is mending a pair of stockings, and as
her fingers fly, no doubt she is thinking of those warmer days back in
Mississippi. My daughter has just put a new record into her Victrola. The
music comes softly to us—“Juanita.”
“Soft o’er the fountain
Lingering falls the Southern moon.”
I wonder what Whittier’s folks would have said to that! Two of the little
girls are looking over some music, trying to get the air in “I dreamt
that I dwelt in marble halls!” There is no “frost line” in this house for
the fire to drive back, for there is a good hot-water radiator in the
corner. The pipe from the spring seems to have frozen, but the faithful
old windmill, standing over the well at the barn, has stretched out its
arms to catch this roaring gale and make it carry the water up to the
tank. Thomas and three of the boys are playing parchesi, while the rest
of the company give them all advice about playing from time to time. I
have a big chair by the corner of the fireplace—where grandfather is
supposed to sit—and little Rose is curled up on my lap eating an apple. I
wish you were here. We could easily make room for you right in front of
the fire, and we would surely call on you for a new story.
The wind is howling on the outside. As we sit here in comfort there comes
an eager, pitiful face at the window pleading to be taken in. No, it is
not the old story of the wayward child coming back to the lights of home.
The nearest we can come to that at Hope Farm is the black cat with the
dash of white at her face and throat. She and her tribe are expected to
stay at the barn and catch rats, but there she is out in the cold looking
in at the window. Mother is as stern as a Spartan mother when it comes to
cats in the house. She _will not_ have them there. But, after all, they
are Hope Farm folks, and the little girls plead so hard that the good
lady looks the other way when the baby opens the door. In comes the black
cat and, though they were not invited, three of her brothers and sisters
run in with her! So now I shall sit with little Rose on my lap, while on
her lap is a cushion on which the white-faced kitty purrs contentedly. In
the original “Snow Bound” the mug of cider simmered between the andirons.
No hot drinks for us. A little of that cold pasteurized apple juice goes
well. We see no use in cooking apples before the fire. There is that
big basket of Baldwins by the table. Help yourself—we like them cold.
Cherry-top was ahead in the game, but Thomas has just taken his leading
“man” and sent him back to the starting point. The boy is a good sport.
He takes a big bite out of a fresh Baldwin and goes after them again.
The nearest we can come to “nuts from brown October’s wood” is a big bag
of roasted peanuts. We have all been eating them and throwing the hulls
at the fire. They have accumulated so that Mother’s idea of neatness
compels her to get up and brush them all into the blaze. I did not tell
you that we are starting up our little Florida farm again. Jack will grow
a crop of sugar cane and peanuts.
And so, here in New Jersey, as well as in old-time New England, we care
not how the wind blows or how the storm roars. This is home, and we are
satisfied with it—all of us, from the white-faced kitty up to the Hope
Farm man. We have all worked to make this home. It is a co-operative
affair. None of us could be called rich or great, yet nothing could ever
buy what we see in our big fire. Every now and then Mother looks up from
her work and glances across the room at me with a smile. I know what she
has in mind. Some of us rise to the power of animals in our ability to
communicate thought without words. Life has been very much of a fight
with us, but it seems worth while as we look at this big room full of
eager young people, content and happy with the simple things of life.
As little Rose snuggles up closer to me and pulls the kitty with her I
begin to think of some of the complaining fault-finding people I know.
I _do_ know some star performers at the job of pitying themselves and
magnifying their own troubles. On a night like this I will wager an apple
that they are pouring out the gloom and trouble like a man tipping over
a barrel of cold water. It’s their rheumatism or their debts or the
Administration or the Republican party, or something else that they hold
responsible for their troubles. I wish I could have some of those fellows
here tonight, and also some of you folks who know the joy of looking on
the bright side. We would do our best to rub some of the gloom out of
them. I will guarantee that any one of us could, if we wanted to, tell
the truth about our own troubles so that these gloomy individuals would
look like “pikers” in their poor little self-pity! I would like to read
extracts from two new books to them. One is “A Labrador Doctor,” by W. T.
Grenfell; the other, “The Great Hunger,” by John Bojer.