Full as the day had been of surprises, I could not help wondering that
the fact of Tom's ringers should stir up such profound emotions in the
teacher's breast. Since the subject so interested her, I went on with
a long catalogue of Tom's other pyrotechnic possessions, and from that
to an account of his almost supernatural collection of postage-stamps.
In a few minutes more I am sure I should have revealed to her the great
secret of my life, which was my determination, in case I came to assume
the victorious rôle and rank of Napoleon, to immediately make Tom a
Marshal of the Empire.
But we had reached the post-office square. I had never before seen it
so full of people.
Even to my boyish eyes the tragic line of division which cleft this
crowd in twain was apparent. On one side, over by the Seminary, the
youngsters had lighted a bonfire, and were running about it—some of
the bolder ones jumping through it in frolicsome recklessness. Close by
stood the band, now valiantly thumping out "John Brown's Body" upon the
noisy night air. It was quite dark by this time, but the musicians knew
the tune by heart. So did the throng about them, and sang it with lusty
fervor. The doors of the saloon toward the corner of the square were
flung wide open. Two black streams of men kept in motion under the
radiance of the big reflector-lamp over these doors—one going in, one
coming out. They slapped one another on the back as they passed, with
exultant screams and shouts. Every once in awhile, when movement was
for the instant blocked, some voice lifted above the others would begin
"Hip-hip-hip-hip—" and then would come a roar that fairly drowned the
music.
On the post-office side of the square there was no bonfire. No one
raised a cheer. A densely packed mass of men and women stood in
front of the big square stone building, with its closed doors, and
curtained windows upon which, from time to time, the shadow of some
passing clerk, bareheaded and hurried, would be momentarily thrown.
They waited in silence for the night mail to be sorted. If they spoke
to one another, it was in whispers—as if they had been standing with
uncovered heads at a funeral service in a graveyard. The dim light
reflected over from the bonfire, or down from the shaded windows of
the post-office, showed solemn, hard-lined, anxious faces. Their lips
scarcely moved when they muttered little low-toned remarks to their
neighbors. They spoke from the side of the mouth, and only on one
subject.
"He went all through Fredericksburg without a scratch——"
"He looks so much like me—General Palmer told my brother he'd have
known his hide in a tan-yard——"
"He's been gone—let's see—it was a year some time last April——"
"He was counting on a furlough the first of this month. I suppose
nobody got one as things turned out——"
"He said, 'No; it ain't my style. I'll fight as much as you like, but I
won't be nigger-waiter for no man, captain or no captain'——"
Thus I heard the scattered murmurs among the grown-up heads above me,
as we pushed into the outskirts of the throng, and stood there, waiting
with the rest. There was no sentence without a "he" in it. A stranger
might have fancied that they were all talking of one man. I knew
better. They were the fathers and mothers, the sisters, brothers, wives
of the men whose regiments had been in that horrible three days' fight
at Gettysburg. Each was thinking and speaking of his own, and took it
for granted the others would understand. For that matter, they all did
understand. The town knew the name and family of every one of the
twelve-score sons she had in this battle.
It is not very clear to me now why people all went to the post-office
to wait for the evening papers that came in from the nearest big city.
Nowadays they would be brought in bulk and sold on the street before
the mailbags had reached the post-office. Apparently, that had not yet
been thought of in our slow old town.
The band across the square had started up afresh with "Annie
Lisle"—the sweet old refrain of "Wave willows, murmur waters," comes
back to me now after a quarter-century of forgetfulness—when all at
once there was a sharp forward movement of the crowd. The doors had
been thrown open, and the hallway was on the instant filled with a
swarming multitude. The band had stopped as suddenly as it began, and
no more cheering was heard. We could see whole troops of dark forms
scudding toward us from the other side of the square.
"Run in for me—that's a good boy—ask for Dr. Stratford's mail," the
teacher whispered, bending over me.
It seemed an age before I finally got back to her, with the paper in
its postmarked wrapper buttoned up inside my jacket. I had never been
in so fierce and determined a crowd before, and I emerged from it at
last, confused in wits and panting for breath. I was still looking
about through the gloom in a foolish way for Miss Stratford, when I
felt her hand laid sharply on my shoulder.
"Well—where is it?—did nothing come?" she asked, her voice trembling
with eagerness, and the eyes which I had thought so soft and dove-like
flashing down upon me as if she were Miss Pritchard, and I had been
caught chewing gum in school.
I drew the paper out from under my roundabout, and gave it to her. She
grasped it, and thrust a finger under the cover to tear it off. Then
she hesitated for a moment, and looked about her. "Come where there is
some light," she said, and started up the street. Although she seemed
to have spoken more to herself than to me, I followed her in silence,
close to her side.
For a long way the sidewalk in front of every lighted store-window was
thronged with a group of people clustered tight about some one who
had a paper, and was reading from it aloud. Beside broken snatches
of this monologue, we caught, now groans of sorrow and horror, now
exclamations of proud approval, and even the beginnings of cheers,
broken in upon by a general "'Sh-h!" as we hurried past outside the
curb.
It was under a lamp in the little park nearly half-way up the hill that
Miss Stratford stopped, and spread the paper open. I see her still,
white-faced, under the flickering gaslight, her black curls making
a strange dark bar between the pale-straw hat and the white of her
shoulder shawl and muslin dress, her hands trembling as they held up
the extended sheet. She scanned the columns swiftly, skimmingly for a
time, as I could see by the way she moved her round chin up and down.
Then she came to a part which called for closer reading. The paper
shook perceptibly now, as she bent her eyes upon it. Then all at once
it fell from her hands, and without a sound she walked away.
I picked the paper up, and followed her along the gravelled path. It
was like pursuing a ghost, so weirdly white did her summer attire now
look to my frightened eyes, with such a swift and deathly silence did
she move. The path upon which we were described a circle touching the
four sides of the square. She did not quit it when the intersection
with our street was reached, but followed straight round again toward
the point where we had entered the park. This, too, in turn she passed,
gliding noiselessly forward under the black arches of the overhanging
elms. The suggestion that she did not know she was going round and
round in a ring startled my brain. I would have run up to her now if I
had dared.
Suddenly she turned, and saw that I was behind her. She sank slowly
into one of the garden-seats, by the path, and held out for a moment
a hesitating hand toward me. I went up at this and looked into her
face. Shadowed as it was, the change I saw there chilled my blood. It
was like the face of some one I had never seen before, with fixed,
wide-open, staring eyes which seemed to look beyond me through the
darkness, upon some terrible sight no other could see.
"Go—run and tell—Tom—to go home! His brother—his brother has
been killed," she said to me, choking over the words as if they hurt
her throat, and still with the same strange dry-eyed, far-away gaze
covering yet not seeing me.
I held out the paper for her to take, but she made no sign, and I
gingerly laid it on the seat beside her. I hung about for a minute or
two longer, imagining that she might have something else to say—but
no word came. Then, with a feebly inopportune "Well, good-by," I
started off alone up the hill.
It was a distinct relief to find that my companions were congregated at
the lower end of the common, instead of their accustomed haunt farther
up near my home, for the walk had been a lonely one, and I was deeply
depressed by what had happened. Tom, it seems, had been called away
some quarter of an hour before. All the boys knew of the calamity which
had befallen the Hemingways. We talked about it, from time to time, as
we loaded and fired the cannon which Tom had obligingly turned over
to my friends. It had been out of deference to the feelings of the
stricken household that they had betaken themselves and their racket
off to the remote corner of the common. The solemnity of the occasion
silenced criticism upon my conduct in forgetting to buy the powder.
"There would be enough as long as it lasted," Billy Norris said, with
philosophic decision.
We speculated upon the likelihood of De Witt Hemingway's being given a
military funeral. These mournful pageants had by this time become such
familiar things to us that the prospect of one more had no element of
excitement in it, save as it involved a gloomy sort of distinction for
Tom. He would ride in the first mourning-carriage with his parents,
and this would associate us, as we walked along ahead of the band,
with the most intimate aspects of the demonstration. We regretted now
that the soldier company which we had so long projected remained still
unorganized. Had it been otherwise we would probably have been awarded
the right of the line in the procession. Some one suggested that it was
not too late—and we promptly bound ourselves to meet after breakfast
next day to organize and begin drilling. If we worked at this night
and day, and our parents instantaneously provided us with uniforms and
guns, we should be in time. It was also arranged that we should be
called the De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves, and that Billy Norris
should be side captain. The chief command would, of course, be reserved
for Tom. We would specially salute him as he rode past in the closed
carriage, and then fall in behind, forming his honorary escort.
None of us had known the dead officer closely, owing to his advanced
age. He was seven or eight years older than even Tom. But the more
elderly among our group had seen him play base-ball in the academy
nine, and our neighborhood was still alive with legends of his early
audacity and skill in collecting barrels and dry-goods boxes at night
for election bonfires. It was remembered that once he carried away a
whole front-stoop from the house of a little German tailor on one of
the back streets. As we stood around the heated cannon, in the great
black solitude of the common, our fancies pictured this redoubtable
young man once more among us—not in his blue uniform, with crimson
sash and sword laid by his side, and the gauntlets drawn over his
lifeless hands, but as a taller and glorified Tom, in a roundabout
jacket and copper-toed boots, giving the law on this his play ground.
The very cannon at our feet had once been his. The night air became
peopled with ghosts of his contemporaries—handsome boys who had grown
up before us, and had gone away to lay down their lives in far-off
Virginia or Tennessee.
These heroic shades brought drowsiness in their train. We lapsed into
long silences, punctuated by yawns, when it was not our turn to ram and
touch off the cannon. Finally some of us stretched ourselves out on the
grass, in the warm darkness, to wait comfortably for this turn to come.
What did come instead was daybreak—finding Billy Norris and myself
alone constant to our all-night vow. We sat up and shivered as we
rubbed our eyes. The morning air had a chilling freshness that went
to my bones—and these, moreover, were filled with those novel aches
and stiffnesses which beds were invented to prevent. We stood up,
stretching out our arms, and gaping at the pearl-and-rose beginnings of
the sunrise in the eastern sky. The other boys had all gone home, and
taken the cannon with them. Only scraps of torn paper and tiny patches
of burnt grass marked the site of our celebration.
My first weak impulse was to march home without delay, and get into bed
as quickly as might be. But Billy Norris looked so finely resolute and
resourceful that I hesitated to suggest this, and said nothing, leaving
the initiative to him. One could see, by the most casual glance, that
he was superior to mere considerations of unseasonableness in hours.
I remembered now that he was one of that remarkable body of boys,
the paper-carriers, who rose when all others were asleep in their
warm nests, and trudged about long before breakfast distributing the
_Clarion_ among the well-to-do households. This fact had given him his
position in our neighborhood as quite the next in leadership to Tom
Hemingway.
He presently outlined his plans to me, after having tried the centre
of light on the horizon, where soon the sun would be, by an old brass
compass he had in his pocket—a process which enabled him, he said, to
tell pretty well what time it was. The paper wouldn't be out for nearly
two hours yet—and if it were not for the fact of a great battle, there
would have been no paper at all on this glorious anniversary—but he
thought we would go down-town and see what was going on around about
the newspaper office. Forthwith we started. He cheered my faint spirits
by assuring me that I would soon cease to be sleepy, and would, in
fact, feel better than usual. I dragged my feet along at his side,
waiting for this revival to come, and meantime furtively yawning
against my sleeve.
Billy seemed to have dreamed a good deal, during our nap on the common,
about the De Witt C. Hemingway Fire Zouaves. At least he had now in
his head a marvellously elaborated system of organization, which he
unfolded as we went along. I felt that I had never before realized his
greatness, his born genius for command. His scheme halted nowhere. He
allotted offices with discriminating firmness; he treated the question
of uniforms and guns as a trivial detail which would settle itself;
he spoke with calm confidence of our offering our services to the
Republic in the autumn; his clear vision was even the materials for a
fife-and-drum corps among the German boys in the back streets. It was
true that I appeared personally to play a meagre part in these great
projects; the most that was said about me was that I might make a fair
third-corporal. But Fate had thrown in my way such a wonderful chance
of becoming intimate with Billy that I made sure I should swiftly
advance in rank—the more so as I discerned in the background of his
thoughts, as it were, a grim determination to make short work of Tom
Hemingway's aristocratic pretensions, once the funeral was over.
We were forced to make a detour of the park on our way down, because
Billy observed some half-dozen Irish boys at play with a cannon inside,
whom he knew to be hostile. If there had been only four, he said, he
would have gone in and routed them. He could whip any two of them, he
added, with one hand tied behind his back. I listened with admiration.
Billy was not tall, but he possessed great thickness of chest and
length of arm. His skin was so dark that we canvassed the theory from
time to time of his having Indian blood. He did not discourage this,
and he admitted himself that he was double-jointed.
The streets of the business part of the town, into which we now made
our way, were quite deserted. We went around into the yard behind the
printing-office, where the carrier-boys were wont to wait for the press
to get to work; and Billy displayed some impatience at discovering that
here too there was no one. It was now broad daylight, but through the
windows of the composing-room we could see some of the printers still
setting type by kerosene lamps.
We seated ourselves at the end of the yard on a big, flat, smooth-faced
stone, and Billy produced from his pocket a number of "em" quads, so he
called them, and with which the carriers had learned from the printers'
boys to play a very beautiful game. You shook the pieces of metal in
your hands and threw them on the stone; your score depended upon the
number of nicked sides that were turned uppermost. We played this game
in the interest of good-fellowship for a little. Then Billy told me
that the carriers always played it for pennies, and that it was unmanly
for us to do otherwise. He had no pennies at that precise moment, but
would pay at the end of the week what he had lost; in the meantime
there was my twenty cents to go on with. After this Billy threw so many
nicks uppermost that my courage gave way, and I made an attempt to stop
the game; but a single remark from him as to the military destiny which
he was reserving for me, if I only displayed true soldierly nerve and
grit, sufficed to quiet me once more, and the play went on. I had now
only five cents left.
Suddenly a shadow interposed itself between the sunlight and the stone.
I looked up, to behold a small boy with bare arms and a blackened apron
standing over me, watching our game. There was a great deal of ink on
his face and hands, and a hardened, not to say rakish expression in his
eye.
"Why don't you 'jeff' with somebody of your own size?" he demanded of
Billy, after having looked me over critically.
He was not nearly-so big as Billy, and I expected to see the latter
instantly rise and crush him, but Billy only laughed and said we were
playing for fun; he was going to give me all my money back. I was
rejoiced to hear this, but still felt surprised at the propitiatory
manner Billy adopted toward this diminutive inky boy. It was not the
demeanor befitting aside-captain—and what made it worse was that the
strange boy loftily declined to be cajoled by it. He sniffed when
Billy told him about the military company we were forming; he coldly
shook his head, with a curt "Nixie!" when invited to join it; and he
laughed aloud at hearing the name our organization was to bear.
"He ain't dead at all—that De Witt Hemingway," he said, with jeering
contempt.
"Hain't he though!" exclaimed Billy. "The news come last night. Tom had
to go home—his mother sent for him—on account of it!"
"I'll bet you a quarter he ain't dead," responded the practical inky
boy. "Money up, though!"
"I've only got fifteen cents. I'll bet you that, though," rejoined
Billy, producing my torn and dishevelled shinplasters.
"All right! Wait here!" said the boy, running off to the building and
disappearing through the door. There was barely time for me to learn
from my companion that this printer's apprentice was called "the
devil," and could not only whistle between his teeth and crack his
fingers, but chew tobacco, when he reappeared, with a long narrow strip
of paper in his hand. This he held out for us to see, indicating with
an ebon forefinger the special paragraph we were to read. Billy looked
at it sharply, for several moments, in silence. Then he said to me:
"What does it say there? I must' a' got some powder in my eyes last
night."
I read this paragraph aloud, not without an unworthy feeling that the
inky boy would now respect me deeply:
"CORRECTION. Lieutenant De Witt C. Hemingway, of Company A, ——th
New York, reported in earlier despatches among the killed, is
uninjured. The officer killed is Lieutenant Carl Heinninge, Company
F, same regiment."
Billy's face visibly lengthened as I read this out, and he felt us
both looking at him. He made a pretence of examining the slip of paper
again, but in a half-hearted way. Then he ruefully handed over the
fifteen cents and, rising from the stone, shook himself.
"Them Dutchmen never was no good!" was what he said.
The inky boy had put the money in the pocket under his apron, and
grinned now with as much enjoyment as dignity would permit him to show.
He did not seem to mind any longer the original source of his winnings,
and it was apparent that I could not with decency recall it to him.
Some odd impulse prompted me, however, to ask him if I might have the
paper he had in his hand. He was magnanimous enough to present me with
the proof-sheet on the spot. Then with another grin he turned and left
us.
Billy stood sullenly kicking with his bare toes into a sand-heap by the
stone. He would not answer me when I spoke to him. It flashed across my
perceptive faculties that he was not such a great man, after all, as I
had imagined. In another instant or two it had become quite clear to me
that I had no admiration for him whatever. Without a word, I turned on
my heel and walked determinedly out of the yard and into the street,
homeward bent.
All at once I quickened my pace; something had occurred to me. The
purpose thus conceived grew so swiftly that soon I found myself
running. Up the hill I sped, and straight through the park. If the
Irish boys shouted after me I knew it not, but dashed on heedless of
all else save the one idea. I only halted, breathless and panting, when
I stood on Dr. Stratford's doorstep, and heard the night-bell inside
jangling shrilly in response to my excited pull.
As I waited, I pictured to myself the old doctor as he would presently
come down, half-dressed and pulling on his coat as he advanced. He
would ask, eagerly, "Who is sick? Where am I to go?" and I would calmly
reply that he unduly alarmed himself, and that I had a message for his
daughter. He would, of course, ask me what it was, and I, politely but
firmly, would decline to explain to any one but the lady in person.
Just what might ensue was not clear—but I beheld myself throughout
commanding the situation, at once benevolent, polished, and inexorable.
The door opened with unlooked-for promptness, while my self-complacent
vision still hung in mid-air. Instead of the bald and spectacled old
doctor, there confronted me a white-faced, solemn-eyed lady in a black
dress, whom I did not seem to know. I stared at her, tongue-tied, till
she said, in a low, grave voice, "Well, Andrew, what is it?"
Then of course I saw that it was Miss Stratford, my teacher, the
person whom I had come to see. Some vague sense of what the sleepless
night had meant in this house came to me as I gazed confusedly at her
mourning, and heard the echo of her sad tones in my ears.
"Is some one ill?" she asked again.
"No; some one—some one is very well!" I managed to reply, lifting my
eyes again to her wan face. The spectacle of its drawn lines and pallor
all at once assailed my wearied and overtaxed nerves with crushing
weight. I felt myself beginning to whimper, and rushing tears scalded
my eyes. Something inside my breast seemed to be dragging me down
through the stoop.
I have now only the recollection of Miss Stratford's kneeling by my
side, with a supporting arm around me, and of her thus unrolling and
reading the proof-paper I had in my hand. We were in the hall now,
instead of on the stoop, and there was a long silence. Then she put her
head on my shoulder and wept. I could hear and feel her sobs as if they
were my own.
"I—I didn't think you'd cry—that you'd be so sorry," I heard myself
saying, at last, in despondent self-defence.
Miss Stratford lifted her head and, still kneeling as she was, put a
finger under my chin to make me look her in her face. Lo! the eyes were
laughing through their tears; the whole countenance was radiant once
more with the light of happy youth and with that other glory which
youth knows only once.
"Why, Andrew, boy," she said, trembling, smiling, sobbing, beaming all
at once, "didn't you know that people cry for very joy sometimes?"
And as I shook my head she bent down and kissed me.