happy in his mind. It was not that he so much minded being left at home
to mind the youngest baby while the rest of the family spent the
afternoon amid the Teutonic splendors of Smeltzer's Harlem River Casino,
with its acres of gravel walks and its whitewashed tree trunks, its
straggly flower beds and its high-collared beers. He was used to that
sort of thing. Since a plague of multiplying infirmities of the body
had driven him out of his job in the tax office, the corporal had not
done much except nurse the babies that occurred in the Speck-Engel
establishment with such unerring regularity. Sometimes, it is true, he
did slip down to the corner for maybe zwei glasses of beer and a game of
pinocle; but then, likely as not, there would come inopportunely a
towheaded descendant to tell him Mommer needed him back at the flat
right away to mind the baby while she went marketing or to the movies.
He could endure that--he had to. What riled Corporal Jacob Speck on this
warm and sunny Sunday was a realization that he was not doing his share
at making the history of the period. The week before had befallen the
fiftieth anniversary of the marching away of his old regiment to the
front; there had been articles in the daily papers about it. Also, in
patriotic commemoration of the great event there had been a parade of
the wrinkled survivors--ninety-odd of them--following their tattered and
faded battle flag down Fifth Avenue past apathetic crowds, nine-tenths
of whom had been born since the war--in foreign lands mainly; and at
least half, if one might judge by their looks, did not know what the
parading was all about, and did not particularly care either.
The corporal had not participated in the march of the veterans; he had
not even attended the banquet that followed it. True, the youngest
grandchild was at the moment cutting one of her largest jaw teeth and so
had required, for the time, an extraordinary and special amount of
minding; but the young lady's dental difficulty was not the sole reason
for his absence. Three weeks earlier the corporal had taken part in
Decoration Day, and certainly one parade a month was ample strain upon a
pair of legs such as he owned. He had returned home with his game leg
behaving more gamely then usual and with his sound one full of new and
painful kinks. Also, in honor of the occasion he had committed the error
of wearing a pair of stiff and inflexible new shoes; wherefore he had
worn his carpet slippers ever since.
Missing the fiftieth anniversary was not the main point with the
corporal--that was merely the fortune of war, to be accepted with
fortitude and with no more than a proper and natural amount of grumbling
by one who had been a good soldier and was now a good citizen; but for
days before the event, and daily ever since, divers members of the old
regiment had been writing pieces to the papers--the German papers and
the English-printing papers too--long pieces, telling of the trip to
Washington, and then on into Virginia and Tennessee, speaking of this
campaign and that and this battle and that. And because there was just
now a passing wave of interest in Civil War matters, the papers had
printed these contributions, thereby reflecting much glory on the
writers thereof. But Corporal Speck, reading these things, had marveled
deeply that sane men should have such disgustingly bad memories; for his
own recollection of these stirring and epochal events differed most
widely from the reminiscent narration of each misguided chronicler.
It was, indeed, a shameful thing that the most important occurrences of
the whole war should be so shockingly mangled and mishandled in the
retelling. They were so grievously wrong, those other veterans, and he
was so absolutely right. He was always right in these matters. Only the
night before, during a merciful respite from his nursing duties, he
had, in Otto Wittenpen's back barroom, spoken across the rim of a tall
stein with some bitterness of certain especially grievous misstatements
of plain fact on the part of certain faulty-minded comrades. In reply
Otto had said, in a rather sneering tone the corporal thought:
"Say, then, Jacob, why don't you yourself write a piece to the paper
telling about this regiment of yours--the way it was?"
"I will. Tomorrow I will do so without fail," he had said, the ambition
of authorship suddenly stirring within him. Now, however, as he sat at
the kitchen window, he gloomed in his disappointment, for he had tried
and he knew he had not the gift of the written line. A good soldier he
had been--yes, none better--and a good citizen, and in his day a capable
and painstaking doorkeeper in the tax office; but he could not write his
own story. That morning, when the youngest grandchild slept and his
daughter and his daughter's husband and the brood of his older
grandchildren were all at the Lutheran church over in the next block, he
sat himself down to compose his article to the paper; but the words
would not come--or, at least, after the first line or two they would not
come.
The mental pictures of those stirring great days when he marched off on
his two good legs--both good legs then--to fight for the country whose
language he could not yet speak was there in bright and living colors;
but the sorry part of it was he could not clothe them in language. In
the trash box under the sink a dozen crumpled sheets of paper testified
to his failure, and now, alone with the youngest Miss Engel, he brooded
over it and got low in his mind and let his pipe go smack out. And right
then and there, with absolutely no warning at all, there came to him, as
you might say from the clear sky, a great idea--an idea so magnificent
that he almost dropped the youngest Miss Engel off his lap at the
splendid shock of it.
With solicitude he glanced down at the small, moist, pink, lumpy bundle
of prickly heat and sore gums. Despite the sudden jostle the young lady
slept steadily on. Very carefully he laid his pipe aside and very
carefully he got upon his feet, jouncing his charge soothingly up and
down, and with deftness he committed her small person to the crib that
stood handily by. She stirred fretfully, but did not wake. The corporal
steered his gimpy leg and his rheumatic one out of the kitchen, which
was white with scouring and as clean as a new pin, into the rearmost and
smallest of the three sleeping rooms that mainly made up the Speck-Engel
apartment.
The bed, whereon of nights Corporal Speck reposed with a bucking bronco
of an eight-year-old grandson for a bedmate, was jammed close against
the plastering, under the one small window set diagonally in a jog in
the wall, and opening out upon an airshaft, like a chimney. Time had
been when the corporal had a room and a bed all his own; that was before
the family began to grow so fast in its second generation and while he
still held a place of lucrative employment at the tax office.
As he got down upon his knees beside the bed the old man uttered a
little groan of discomfort. He felt about in the space underneath and
drew out a small tin trunk, rusted on its corners and dented in its
sides. He made a laborious selection of keys from a key-ring he got out
of his pocket, unlocked the trunk and lifted out a heavy top tray. The
tray contained, among other things, such treasures as his naturalization
papers, his pension papers, a photograph of his dead wife, and a small
bethumbed passbook of the East Side Germania Savings Bank. Underneath
was a black fatigue hat with a gold cord round its crown, a neatly
folded blue uniform coat, with the G. A. R. bronze showing in its
uppermost lapel, and below that, in turn, the suit of neat black the
corporal wore on high state occasions and would one day wear to be
buried in. Pawing and digging, he worked his hands to the very bottom,
and then, with a little grunt, he heaved out the thing he wanted--the
one trophy, except a stiffened kneecap and an honorable record, this old
man had brought home from the South. It was a captured Confederate
knapsack, flattened and flabby. Its leather was dry-rotted with age and
the brass C. S. A. on the outer flap was gangrened and sunken in; the
flap curled up stiffly, like an old shoe sole.
The crooked old fingers undid a buckle fastening and from the musty and
odorous interior of the knapsack withdrew a letter, in a queer-looking
yellowed envelope, with a queer-looking stamp upon the upper right-hand
corner and a faint superscription upon its face. The three sheets of
paper he slid out of the envelope were too old even to rustle, but the
close writing upon them in a brownish, faded ink was still plainly to be
made out.
Corporal Speck replaced the knapsack in its place at the very bottom,
put the tray back in its place, closed the trunk and locked it and
shoved it under the bed. The trunk resisted slightly and he lost one
carpet slipper and considerable breath in the struggle. Limping back to
the kitchen and seeing that little Miss Engel still slumbered, he eased
his frame into a chair and composed himself to literary composition, not
in the least disturbed by the shouts of roistering sidewalk comedians
that filtered up to him from down below in front of the house, or by the
distant clatter of intermittent traffic over the cobbly spine of Second
Avenue, half a block away. For some time he wrote, with a most scratchy
pen; and this is what he wrote:
"TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN, CITY.
"_Dear Sir:_ The undersigned would state that he served two years
and nine months--until wounded in action--in the Fighting Two
Hundred and Tenth New York Infantry, and has been much interested
to see what other comrades wrote for the papers regarding same in
connection with the Rebellion War of North and South respectively.
I would state that during the battle of Chickamauga I was for a
while lying near by to a Confederate soldier--name unknown--who
was dying on account of a wound in the chest. By his request I
gave him a drink of water from my canteen, he dying shortly
thereafter. Being myself wounded--right knee shattered by a
Minie ball--I was removed to a field hospital; but before doing
so I brought away this man's knapsack for a keepsake of the
occasion. Some years later I found in said knapsack a letter,
which previous to then was overlooked by me. I inclose herewith a
copy of said letter, which it may be interesting for reading
purposes by surviving comrades.
"Respectfully yours,
"JACOB SPECK,
"Late Corporal L Company,
"Fighting Two Hundred and Tenth New York, U. S. A."
With deliberation and squeaky emphasis the pen progressed slowly across
the paper, while the corporal, with his left hand, held flat the dead
man's ancient letter before him, intent on copying it. Hard words
puzzled him and long words daunted him, and he was making a long job of
it when there were steps in the hall without. There entered breezily
Miss Hortense Engel, who was the oldest of all the multiplying Engels,
pretty beyond question and every inch American, having the gift of
wearing Lower Sixth Avenue stock designs in a way to make them seem
Upper Fifth Avenue models. Miss Engel's face was pleasantly flushed; she
had just parted lingeringly from her steady company, whose name was Mr.
Lawrence J. McLaughlin, in the lower hallway, which is the trysting
place and courting place of tenement-dwelling sweethearts, and now she
had come to make ready the family's cold Sunday night tea. At sight of
her the corporal had another inspiration--his second within the hour.
His brow smoothed and he fetched a sigh of relief.
"'Lo, grosspops!" she said. "How's every little thing? The kiddo all
right?"
She unpinned a Sunday hat that was plumed like a hearse and slipped on
a long apron that covered her from Robespierre bib to hobble hem.
"Girl," said her grandfather, "would you make tomorrow for me at the
office a copy of this letter on the typewriter machine?"
He spoke in German and she answered in New-Yorkese, while her nimble
fingers wrestled with the task of back-buttoning her apron.
"Sure thing! It won't take hardly a minute to rattle that off.
Funny-looking old thing!" she went on, taking up the creased and faded
original. "Who wrote it? And whatcher goin' to do with it, grosspops?"
"That," he told her, "is mine own business! It is for you, please, to
make the copy and bring both to me tomorrow, the letter and also the
copy."
So on Monday morning, when the rush of taking dictation at the office of
the Great American Hosiery Company, in Broome Street, was well abated,
the competent Miss Hortense copied the letter, and that same evening her
grandfather mailed it to the Sun, accompanied by his own introduction.
The Sun straightway printed it without change and--what was still
better--with the sender's name spelled out in capital letters; and that
night, at the place down by the corner, Corporal Jacob Speck was a
prophet not without honor in his own country--much honor, in fact,
accrued.
If you have read certain other stories of mine you may remember that,
upon a memorable occasion, Judge William Pitman Priest made a trip to
New York and while there had dealings with a Mr. J. Hayden Witherbee, a
promoter of gas and other hot-air propositions; and that during the
course of his stay in the metropolis he made the acquaintance of one
Malley, a Sun reporter. This had happened some years back, but Malley
was still on the staff of the Sun. It happened also that, going through
the paper to clip out and measure up his own space, Malley came upon the
corporal's contribution. Glancing over it idly, he caught the name,
twice or thrice repeated, of the town where Judge Priest lived. So he
bundled together a couple of copies and sent them South with a short
letter; and therefore it came about in due season, through the good
offices of the United States Post-office Department, that these
enclosures reached the judge on a showery afternoon as he loafed upon
his wide front porch, waiting for his supper.
First, he read Malley's letter and was glad to hear from Malley. With a
quickened interest he ran a plump thumb under the wrappings of the two
close-rolled papers, opened out one of them at page ten and read the
opening statement of Corporal Jacob Speck, for whom instantly the judge
conceived a long-distance fondness. Next he came to the letter that Miss
Hortense Engel had so accurately transcribed, and at the very first
words of it he sat up straighter, with a surprised and gratified little
grunt; for he had known them both--the writer of that letter and its
recipient. One still lived in his memory as a red-haired girl with a
pert, malicious face, and the other as a stripling youth in a ragged
gray uniform. And he had known most of those whose names studded the
printed lines so thickly. Indeed, some of them he still knew--only now
they were old men and old women--faded, wrinkled bucks and belles of a
far-distant day.
As he read the first words it came back to the judge, almost with the
jolting emphasis of a new and fresh sensation, that in the days of his
own youth he had never liked the girl who wrote that letter or the man
who received it. But she was dead this many and many a year--why, she
must have died soon after she wrote this very letter--the date proved
that--and he, the man, had fallen at Chickamauga, taking his death in
front like a soldier; and surely that settled everything and made all
things right! But the letter--that was the main thing. His old blue eyes
skipped nimbly behind the glasses that saddled the tip of his plump pink
nose, and the old judge read it--just such a letter as he himself had
received many a time; just such a wartime letter as uncounted thousands
of soldiers North and South received from their sweethearts and read and
reread by the light of flickering campfires and carried afterward in
their knapsacks through weary miles of marching.
It was crammed with the small-town gossip of a small town that was but
little more than a memory now--telling how, because he would not
volunteer, a hapless youth had been waylaid by a dozen high-spirited
girls and overpowered, and dressed in a woman's shawl and a woman's
poke bonnet, so that he left town with his shame between two suns;
how, since the Yankees had come, sundry faithless females were
friendly--actually friendly, this being underscored--with the more
personable of the young Yankee officers; how half the town was in
mourning for a son or brother dead or wounded; how a new and sweetly
sentimental song, called Rosalie, the Prairie Flower, was being much
sung at the time--and had it reached the army yet? how old Mrs. Hobbs
had been exiled to Canada for seditious acts and language and had
departed northward between two files of bluecoats, reviling the Yankees
with an unbitted tongue at every step; how So-and-So had died or married
or gone refugeeing below the enemy's line into safely Southern
territory; how this thing had happened and that thing had not.
The old judge read on and on, catching gladly at names that kindled a
tenderly warm glow of half-forgotten memories in his soul, until he came
to the last paragraph of all; and then, as he comprehended the intent of
it in all its barbed and venomed malice, he stood suddenly erect, with
the outspread paper shaking in his hard grip. For now, coming back to
him by so strange a way across fifty years of silence and
misunderstanding, he read there the answer to the town's oldest, biggest
tragedy and knew what it was that all this time had festered, like
buried thorns, in the flesh of those two men, his comrades and friends.
He dropped the paper, and up and down the wide, empty porch he stumped
on his short stout legs, shaking with the shock of revelation and with
indignation and pity for the blind and bitter uselessness of it all.
"Ah hah!" he said to himself over and over again understandingly. "Ah
hah!" And then: "Next to a mean man, a mean woman is the meanest thing
in this whole created world, I reckin. I ain't sure but what she's the
meanest of the two. And to think of what them two did between 'em--she
writin' that hellish black lyin' tale to 'Lonzo Pike and he puttin' off
hotfoot to Abner Tilghman to poison his mind with it and set him like a
flint against his own flesh and blood! And wasn't it jest like Lon Pike
to go and git himself killed the next day after he got that there
letter! And wasn't it jest like her to up and die before the truth could
be brought home to her! And wasn't it like them two stubborn, set,
contrary, close-mouthed Tilghman boys to go 'long through all these
years, without neither one of 'em ever offerin' to make or take an
explanation!" His tone changed. "Oh, ain't it been a pitiful thing! And
all so useless! But--oh, thank the Lord--it ain't too late to mend it
part way anyhow! Thank God, it ain't too late for that!"
Exulting now, he caught up the paper he had dropped, and with it
crumpled in his pudgy fist was half-way down the gravel walk, bound for
the little cottage snuggled in its vine ambush across Clay Street before
a better and a bigger inspiration caught up with him and halted him
midway of an onward stride.
Was not this the second Friday in the month? It certainly was. And would
not the Camp be meeting tonight in regular semimonthly session at
Kamleiter's Hall? It certainly would. For just a moment Judge Priest
considered the proposition. He slapped his linen clad flank gleefully,
and his round old face, which had been knotted with resolution, broke up
into a wrinkly, ample smile; he spun on his heel and hurried back into
the house and to the telephone in the hall. For half an hour, more or
less, Judge Priest was busy at that telephone, calling in a high,
excited voice, first for one number and then for another. While he did
this his supper grew cold on the table, and in the dining room Jeff, the
white-clad, fidgeted and out in the kitchen Aunt Dilsey, the turbaned,
fumed--but, at Kamleiter's Hall that night at eight, Judge Priest's
industry was in abundant fulness rewarded.
Once upon a time Gideon K. Irons Camp claimed a full two hundred
members, but that had been when it was first organized. Now there were
in good standing less than twenty. Of these twenty, fifteen sat on the
hard wooden chairs when Judge Priest rapped with his metal spectacle
case for order, and that fifteen meant all who could travel out at
nights. Doctor Lake was there, and Sergeant Jimmy Bagby, the faithful
and inevitable. It was the biggest turnout the Camp had had in a year.
Far over on one side, cramped down in a chair, was Captain Abner
Tilghman, feeble and worn-looking. His buggy horse stood hitched by the
curb downstairs. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby had gone to his house for him and
on the plea of business of vital moment had made him come with him.
Almost directly across the middle aisle on the other side sat Mr. Edward
Tilghman. Nobody had to go for him. He always came to a regular meeting
of the Camp, even though he heard the proceedings only in broken bits.
The adjutant called the roll and those present answered, each one to his
name; and mainly the voices sounded bent and sagged, like the bodies of
their owners. A keen onlooker might have noticed a sort of tremulous,
joyous impatience, which filled all save two of these old, gray men,
pushing the preliminaries forward with uncommon speed. They fidgeted in
their places.
Presently Judge Priest cleared his throat of a persistent huskiness and
stood up.
"Before we proceed to the regular routine," he piped, "I desire to
present a certain matter to a couple of our members." He came down off
the little platform, where the flags were draped, with a step that was
almost light, and into Captain Abner Tilghman's hand he put a copy of a
city paper, turned and folded at a certain place, where a column of
printed matter was scored about with heavy pencil bracketings. "Cap'n,"
he said, "as a personal favor to me, suh, would you please read this
here article?--the one that's marked"--he pointed with his finger--"not
aloud--read it to yourself, please."
It was characteristic of the paralytic to say nothing. Without a word he
adjusted his glasses and without a word he began to read. So instantly
intent was he that he did not see what followed next--and that was Judge
Priest crossing over to Mr. Edward Tilghman's side with another copy of
a paper in his hand.
"Ed," he bade him, "read this here article, won't you? Read it clear
through to the end--it might interest you maybe." The deaf man looked up
at him wonderingly, but took the paper in his slightly palsied hand and
bent his head close above the printed sheet.
Judge Priest stood in the middle aisle, making no move to go back to his
own place. He watched the two silent readers. All the others watched
them too. They read on, making slow progress, for the light was poor and
their eyes were poor. And the watchers could hardly contain themselves;
they could hardly wait. Sergeant Jimmy Bagby kept bobbing up and down
like a pudgy jack-in-the-box that is slightly stiff in its joints. A
small, restrained rustle of bodies accompanied the rustle of the folded
newspapers held in shaky hands.
Unconscious of all scrutiny, the brothers read on. Perhaps because he
had started first--perhaps because his glasses were the more expensive
and presumably therefore the more helpful--Captain Abner Tilghman came
to the concluding paragraph first. He read it through--and then Judge
Priest turned his head away, for a moment almost regretting he had
chosen so public a place for this thing.
He looked back again in time to see Captain Abner getting upon his feet.
Dragging his dead leg behind him, the paralytic crossed the bare floor
to where his brother's gray head was bent to his task. And at his side
he halted, making no sound or sign, but only waiting. He waited there,
trembling all over, until the sitter came to the end of the column and
read what was there--and lifted a face all glorified with a perfect
understanding.
"Eddie!" said the older man--"Eddie!" He uttered a name of boyhood
affection that none there had heard uttered for fifty years nearly; and
it was as though a stone had been rolled away from a tomb--as though out
of the grave of a dead past a voice had been resurrected. "Eddie!" he
said a third time, pleadingly, abjectly, humbly, craving for
forgiveness.
"Brother Abner!" said the other man. "Oh, Brother Abner!" he said--and
that was all he did say--all he had need to say, for he was on his feet
now, reaching out with wide-spread, shaking arms.
Sergeant Jimmy Bagby tried to start a cheer, but could not make it come
out of his throat--only a clicking, squeaking kind of sound came. As a
cheer it was a miserable failure.