made of hickory withes that gave to his weight, and put his thoughts
upon breakfast and the goodness of the day; but presently, as he sat
there, he saw something that set a frown between his faded blue eyes.
He saw, coming down Clay Street, upon the opposite side, an old man--a
very feeble old man--who was tall and thin and dressed in somber black.
The man was lame--he dragged one leg along with the hitching gait of the
paralytic. Traveling with painful slowness, he came on until he reached
the corner above. Then automatically he turned at right angles and left
the narrow wooden sidewalk and crossed the dusty road. He passed Judge
Priest's, looking neither to the right nor the left, and so kept on
until he reached the corner below. Still following an invisible path in
the deep-furrowed dust, he crossed again to the other side. Just as he
got there his halt leg seemed to give out altogether and for a minute or
two he stood holding himself up by a fumbling grip upon the slats of a
tree box before he went laboriously on, a figure of pain and weakness in
the early sunshine that was now beginning to slant across his path and
dapple his back with checkerings of shadow and light.
This maneuver was inexplicable--a stranger would have puzzled to make it
out. The shade was as plentiful upon one side of Clay Street as upon the
other; each sagged wooden sidewalk was in as bad repair as its brother
over the way. The small, shabby frame house, buried in honeysuckles and
balsam vines, which stood close up to the pavement line on the opposite
side of Clay Street, facing Judge Priest's roomy and rambling old home,
had no flag of pestilence at its door or its window. And surely to this
lone pedestrian every added step must have been an added labor. A
stranger would never have understood it; but Judge Priest understood
it--he had seen that same thing repeated countless times in the years
that stretched behind him. Always it had distressed him inwardly, but on
this particular morning it distressed him more than ever. The toiling
grim figure in black had seemed so feeble and so tottery and old.
Well, Judge Priest was not exactly what you would call young. With an
effort he heaved himself up out of the depths of his hickory chair and
stood at the edge of his porch, polishing a pink bald dome of forehead
as though trying to make up his mind to something. Jefferson Poindexter,
resplendent in starchy white jacket and white apron, came to the door.
"Breakfus' served, suh!" he said, giving to an announcement touching on
food that glamour of grandeur of which his race alone enjoys the
splendid secret.
"Hey?" asked the judge absently.
"Breakfus'--hit's on the table waitin', suh," stated Jeff. "Mizz Polks
sent over her houseboy with a dish of fresh razberries fur yore
breakfus'; and she say to tell you, with her and Mistah Polkses'
compliments, they is fresh picked out of her garden--specially fur you."
The lady and gentleman to whom Jeff had reference were named Polk, but
in speaking of white persons for whom he had a high regard Jeff always,
wherever possible within the limitations of our speech, tacked on that
final s. It was in the nature of a delicate verbal compliment, implying
that the person referred to was worthy of enlargement and pluralization.
Alone in the cool, high-ceiled, white-walled dining room, Judge Priest
ate his breakfast mechanically. The raspberries were pink beads of
sweetness; the young fried chicken was a poem in delicate and flaky
browns; the spoon bread could not have been any better if it had tried;
and the beaten biscuits were as light as snowflakes and as ready to melt
on the tongue; but Judge Priest spoke hardly a word all through the
meal. Jeff, going out to the kitchen for the last course, said to Aunt
Dilsey:
"Ole boss-man seem lak he's got somethin' on his mind worryin' him this
mawnin'."
When Jeff returned, with a turn of crisp waffles in one hand and a
pitcher of cane sirup in the other, he stared in surprise, for the
dining room was empty and he could hear his employer creaking down the
hall. Jeff just naturally hated to see good hot waffles going to waste.
He ate them himself, standing up; and they gave him a zest for his
regular breakfast, which followed in due course of time.
From the old walnut hatrack, with its white-tipped knobs that stood just
inside the front door, Judge Priest picked up a palmleaf fan; and he
held the fan slantwise as a shield for his eyes and his bare head
against the sun's glare as he went down the porch steps and passed out
of his own yard, traversed the empty street and strove with the stubborn
gate latch of the little house that faced his own. It was a poor-looking
little house, and its poorness had extended to its surroundings--as if
poverty was a contagion that spread. In Judge Priest's yard, now, the
grass, though uncared for, yet grew thick and lush; but here, in this
small yard, there were bare, shiny spots of earth showing through the
grass--as though the soil itself was out at elbows and the nap worn off
its green-velvet coat; but the vines about the porch were thick enough
for an ambuscade and from behind their green screen came a voice in
hospitable recognition.
"Is that you, judge? Well sir, I'm glad to see you! Come right in; take
a seat and sit down and rest yourself."
The speaker showed himself in the arched opening of the vine barrier--an
old man--not quite so old, perhaps, as the judge. He was in his
shirtsleeves. There was a patch upon one of the sleeves. His shoes had
been newly shined, but the job was poorly done; the leather showed a
dulled black upon the toes and a weathered yellow at the sides and
heels. As he spoke his voice ran up and down--the voice of a deaf person
who cannot hear his own words clearly, so that he pitches them in a
false key. For added proof of this affliction he held a lean and
slightly tremulous hand cupped behind his ear.
The other hand he extended in greeting as the old judge mounted the step
of the low porch. The visitor took one of two creaky wooden rockers that
stood in the narrow space behind the balsam vines, and for a minute or
two he sat without speech, fanning himself. Evidently these neighborly
calls between these two old men were not uncommon; they could enjoy the
communion of silence together without embarrassment.
The town clocks struck--first the one on the city hall struck eight
times sedately; and then, farther away, the one on the county
courthouse. This one struck five times slowly, hesitated a moment,
struck eleven times with great vigor, hesitated again, struck once with
a big, final boom, and was through. No amount of repairing could cure
the courthouse clock of this peculiarity. It kept the time, but kept it
according to a private way of its own. Immediately after it ceased the
bell on the Catholic church, first and earliest of the Sunday bells,
began tolling briskly. Judge Priest waited until its clamoring had died
away.
"Goin' to be good and hot after while," he said, raising his voice.
"What say?"
"I say it's goin' to be mighty warm a little later on in the day,"
repeated Judge Priest.
"Yes, suh; I reckon you're right there," assented the host. "Just a
minute ago, before you came over, I was telling Liddie she'd find it
middlin' close in church this morning. She's going, though--runaway
horses wouldn't keep her away from church! I'm not going myself--seems
as though I'm getting more and more out of the church habit here
lately."
Judge Priest's eyes squinted in whimsical appreciation of this
admission. He remembered that the other man, during the lifetime of his
second wife, had been a regular attendant at services--going twice on
Sundays and to Wednesday night prayer meetings too; but the second wife
had been dead going on four years now--or was it five? Time sped so!
The deaf man spoke on:
"So I just thought I'd sit here and try to keep cool and wait for that
Ledbetter boy to come round with the Sunday paper. Did you read last
Sunday's paper, judge? Colonel Watterson certainly had a mighty fine
piece on those Northern money devils. It's round here somewhere--I cut
it out to keep it. I'd like to have you read it and pass your opinion on
it. These young fellows do pretty well, but there's none of them can
write like the colonel, in my judgment."
Judge Priest appeared not to have heard him.
"Ed Tilghman," he said abruptly in his high, fine voice, that seemed
absurdly out of place, coming from his round frame, "you and me have
lived neighbors together a good while, haven't we? We've been right
acros't the street from one another all this time. It kind of jolts me
sometimes when I git to thinkin' how many years it's really been;
because we're gittin' along right smartly in years--all us old fellows
are. Ten years from now, say, there won't be so many of us left." He
glanced sidewise at the lean, firm profile of his friend. "You're
younger than some of us; but, even so, you ain't exactly what I'd call a
young man yourself."
Avoiding the direct, questioning gaze that his companion turned on him
at this, the judge reached forward and touched a ripe balsam apple that
dangled in front of him. Instantly it split, showing the gummed red
seeds clinging to the inner walls of the sensitive pod.
"I'm listening to you, judge," said the deaf man.
For a moment the old judge waited. There was about him almost an air of
embarrassment. Still considering the ruin of the balsam apple, he spoke,
and it was with a sort of hurried anxiety, as though he feared he might
be checked before he could say what he had to say.
"Ed," he said, "I was settin' on my porch a while ago waitin' for
breakfast, and your brother came by." He shot a quick, apprehensive
glance at his silent auditor. Except for a tautened flickering of the
muscles about the mouth, there was no sign that the other had heard him.
"Your brother Abner came by," repeated the judge, "and I set over there
on my porch and watched him pass. Ed, Abner's gittin' mighty feeble! He
jest about kin drag himself along--he's had another stroke lately, they
tell me. He had to hold on to that there treebox down yonder, steadyin'
himself after he crossed back over to this side. Lord knows what he was
doin' draggin' down-town on a Sunday mornin'--force of habit, I reckin.
Anyway he certainly did look older and more poorly than ever I saw him
before. He's a failin' man if I'm any judge. Do you hear me plain?" he
asked.
"I hear you," said his neighbor in a curiously flat voice. It was
Tilghman's turn to avoid the glances of his friend. He stared straight
ahead of him through a rift in the vines.
"Well, then," went on Judge Priest, "here's what I've got to say to you,
Ed Tilghman. You know as well as I do that I've never pried into your
private affairs, and it goes mightily against the grain for me to be
doin' so now; but, Ed, when I think of how old we're all gittin' to be,
and when the Camp meets and I see you settin' there side by side almost,
and yet never seemin' to see each other--and this mornin' when I saw
Abner pass, lookin' so gaunt and sick--and it sech a sweet, ca'm mornin'
too, and everything so quiet and peaceful----" He broke off and started
anew. "I don't seem to know exactly how to put my thoughts into
words--and puttin' things into words is supposed to be my trade too.
Anyway I couldn't go to Abner. He's not my neighbor and you are; and
besides, you're the youngest of the two. So--so I came over here to you.
Ed, I'd like mightily to take some word from you to your brother Abner.
I'd like to do it the best in the world! Can't I go to him with a
message from you--today? Tomorrow might be too late!"
He laid one of his pudgy hands on the bony knee of the deaf man; but the
hand slipped away as Tilghman stood up.
"Judge Priest," said Tilghman, looking down at him, "I've listened to
what you've had to say; and I didn't stop you, because you are my friend
and I know you mean well by it. Besides, you're my guest, under my own
roof." He stumped back and forth in the narrow confines of the porch.
Otherwise he gave no sign of any emotion that might be astir within him,
his face being still set and his voice flat. "What's between me and
my--what's between me and that man you just named always will be between
us. He's satisfied to let things go on as they are. I'm satisfied to let
them go on. It's in our breed, I guess. Words--just words--wouldn't help
mend this thing. The reason for it would be there just the same, and
neither one of us is going to be able to forget that so long as we both
live. I'd just as soon you never brought this--this subject up again. If
you went to him I presume he'd tell you the same thing. Let it be, Judge
Priest--it's past mending. We two have gone on this way for fifty years
nearly. We'll keep on going on so. I appreciate your kindness, Judge
Priest; but let it be--let it be!"
There was finality miles deep and fixed as basalt in his tone. He
checked his walk and called in at a shuttered window.
"Liddie," he said in his natural up-and-down voice, "before you put off
for church, couldn't you mix up a couple of lemonades or something?
Judge Priest is out here on the porch with me."
"No," said Judge Priest, getting slowly up, "I've got to be gittin' back
before the sun's up too high. If I don't see you again meanwhile be
shore to come to the next regular meetin' of the Camp--on Friday night,"
he added.
"I'll be there," said Tilghman. "And I'll try to find that piece of
Colonel Watterson's and send it over to you. I'd like mightily for you
to read it."
He stood at the opening in the vines, with one slightly palsied hand
fumbling at a loose tendril as the judge passed down the short yard-walk
and out at the gate. Then he went back to his chair and sat down again.
All those little muscles in his jowls were jumping.
Clay Street was no longer empty. Looking down its dusty length from
beneath the shelter of his palmleaf fan, Judge Priest saw here and there
groups of children--the little girls in prim and starchy white, the
little boys hobbling in the Sunday torment of shoes and stockings; and
all of them were moving toward a common center--Sunday school. Twice
again that day would the street show life--a little later when grown-ups
went their way to church, and again just after the noonday dinner, when
young people and servants, carrying trays and dishes under napkins,
would cross and recross from one house to another. The Sunday
interchange of special dainties between neighbors amounted in our town
to a ceremonial and a rite; but after that, until the cool of the
evening, the town would simmer in quiet, while everybody took Sunday
naps.
With his fan, Judge Priest made an angry sawing motion in the air, as
though trying to fend off something disagreeable--a memory, perhaps, or
it might have been only a persistent midge. There were plenty of gnats
and midges about, for by now--even so soon--the dew was dried. The
leaves of the silver poplars were turning their white under sides up
like countless frog bellies, and the long, podded pendants of the
Injun-cigar trees hung dangling and still. It would be a hot day, sure
enough; already the judge felt wilted and worn out.
In our town we had our tragedies that endured for years and, in the
small-town way, finally became institutions. There was the case of the
Burnleys. For thirty-odd years old Major Burnley lived on one side of
his house and his wife lived on the other, neither of them ever crossing
an imaginary dividing line that ran down the middle of the hall, having
for their medium of intercourse all that time a lean, spinster daughter,
in whose gray and barren life churchwork and these strange home duties
took the place that Nature had intended to be filled by a husband and by
babies and grandbabies.
There was crazy Saul Vance, in his garb of a fantastic scarecrow, who
was forever starting somewhere and never going there--because, as sure
as he came to a place where two roads crossed, he could not make up his
mind which turn to take. In his youth a girl had jilted him, or a bank
had failed on him, or a horse had kicked him in the head--or maybe it
was all three of these things that had addled his poor brains. Anyhow he
went his pitiable, aimless way for years, taunted daily by small boys
who were more cruel than jungle beasts. How he lived nobody knew, but
when he died some of the men who as boys had jeered him turned out to be
his volunteer pallbearers.
There was Mr. H. Jackman--Brother Jackman to all the town--who had been
our leading hatter once and rich besides, and in the days of his
affluence had given the Baptist church its bells. In his old age, when
he was dog-poor, he lived on charity, only it was not known by that
word, which is at once the sweetest and bitterest word in our tongue;
for Brother Jackman, always primped, always plump and well clad, would
go through the market to take his pick of what was there, and to the
Richland House bar for his toddies, and to Felsburg Brothers for new
garments when his old ones wore shabby--and yet never paid a cent for
anything; a kindly conspiracy on the part of the whole town enabling him
to maintain his self-respect to the last. Strangers in our town used to
take him for a retired banker--that's a fact!
And there was old man Stackpole, who had killed his man--had killed him
in fair fight and had been acquitted--and yet walked quiet back streets
at all hours, a gray, silent shadow, and never slept except with a
bright light burning in his room.
The tragedy of Mr. Edward Tilghman, though, and of Captain Abner G.
Tilghman, his elder brother, was both a tragedy and a mystery--the
biggest tragedy and the deepest mystery our town had ever known or ever
would know probably. All that anybody knew for certain was that for
upward of fifty years neither of them had spoken to the other, nor by
deed or look had given heed to the other. As boys, back in sixty-one,
they had gone out together. Side by side, each with his arm over the
other's shoulder, they had stood up with a hundred others to be sworn
into the service of the Confederate States of America; and on the
morning they went away Miss Sally May Ghoulson had given the older
brother her silk scarf off her shoulders to wear for a sash. Both the
brothers had liked her; but by this public act she made it plain which
of them was her choice.
Then the company had marched off to the camp on the Tennessee border,
where the new troops were drilling; and as they marched some watchers
wept and others cheered--but the cheering predominated, for it was to be
only a sort of picnic anyhow--so everybody agreed. As the orators--who
mainly stayed behind--had pointed out, the Northern people would not
fight. And even if they should fight could not one Southerner whip four
Yankees? Certainly he could; any fool knew that much. In a month or two
months, or at most three months, they would all be tramping home again,
covered with glory and the spoils of war, and then--this by common
report and understanding--Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman
would be married, with a big church wedding.
The Yankees, however, unaccountably fought, and it was not a ninety-day
picnic after all. It was not any kind of a picnic. And when it was over,
after four years and a month, Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman
did not marry. It was just before the battle of Chickamauga when the
other men in the company first noticed that the two Tilghmans had become
as strangers, and worse than strangers, to each other. They quit
speaking to each other then and there, and to any man's knowledge they
never spoke again. They served the war out, Abner rising just before
the end to a captaincy, Edward serving always as a private in the ranks.
In a dour, grim silence they took the fortunes of those last hard,
hopeless days and after the surrender down in Mississippi they came back
with the limping handful that was left of the company; and in age they
were all boys still--but in experience, men, and in suffering,
grandsires.
Two months after they got back Miss Sally May Ghoulson was married to
Edward, the younger brother. Within a year she died, and after a decent
period of mourning Edward married a second time--only to be widowed
again after many years. His second wife bore him children and they
died--all except one, a daughter, who grew up and married badly; and
after her mother's death she came back to live with her deaf father and
minister to him. As for Captain Abner Tilghman, he never married--never,
so far as the watching eyes of the town might tell, looked with favor
upon another woman. And he never spoke to his brother or to any of his
brother's family--or his brother to him.
With years the wall of silence they had builded up between them turned
to ice and the ice to stone. They lived on the same street, but never
did Edward enter Captain Abner's bank, never did Captain Abner pass
Edward's house--always he crossed over to the opposite side. They
belonged to the same Veterans' Camp--indeed there was only the one for
them to belong to; they voted the same ticket--straight Democratic; and
in the same church, the old Independent Presbyterian, they worshiped the
same God by the same creed, the older brother being an elder and the
younger a plain member--and yet never crossed looks.
The town had come to accept this dumb and bitter feud as unchangeable
and eternal; in time people ceased even to wonder what its cause had
been, and in all the long years only one man had tried, before now, to
heal it up. When old Doctor Henrickson died, a young and ardent
clergyman, fresh from the Virginia theological school, came out to take
the vacant pulpit; and he, being filled with a high sense of his holy
calling, thought it shameful that such a thing should be in the
congregation. He went to see Captain Tilghman about it. He never went
but that once. Afterward it came out that Captain Tilghman had
threatened to walk out of church and never darken its doors again if the
minister ever dared to mention his brother's name in his presence. So
the young minister sorrowed, but obeyed, for the captain was rich and a
generous giver to the church.
And he had grown richer with the years, and as he grew richer his
brother grew poorer--another man owned the drug store where Edward
Tilghman had failed. They had grown from young to middle-aged men and
from middle-aged men to old, infirm men; and first the grace of youth
and then the solidness of maturity had gone out of them and the
gnarliness of age had come upon them; one was halt of step and the other
was dull of ear; and the town through half a century of schooling had
accustomed itself to the situation and took it as a matter of course. So
it was and so it always would be--a tragedy and a mystery. It had not
been of any use when the minister interfered and it was of no use now.
Judge Priest, with the gesture of a man who is beaten, dropped the fan
on the porch floor, went into his darkened sitting room, stretched
himself wearily on a creaking horsehide sofa and called out to Jeff to
make him a mild toddy--one with plenty of ice in it.
* * * * *
On this same Sunday--or, anyhow, I like to fancy it was on this same
Sunday--at a point distant approximately nine hundred and seventy miles
in a northeasterly direction from Judge Priest's town, Corporal Jacob
Speck, late of Sigel's command, sat at the kitchen window of the
combined Speck and Engel apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street in the
Borough of Manhattan, New York. He was in his shirtsleeves; his tender
feet were incased in a pair of red-and-green carpet slippers. In the
angle of his left arm he held his youngest grandchild, aged one and a
half years, while his right hand carefully poised a china pipe, with a
bowl like an egg-cup and a stem like a fishpole. The corporal's blue
Hanoverian eyes, behind their thick-lensed glasses, were fixed upon a
comprehensive vista of East Eighty-fifth Street back yards and
clothespoles and fire escapes; but his thoughts were very much
elsewhere.