IV

The following day was almost hot; at its decline coming across Winthrop

Common Elim was oppressed and weary. Nothing unusual was happening at

the boarding house; a small customary group was seated on the veranda

steps, and he joined it. The conversation hung exclusively to the

growing tension between North and South, to the forming of a Confederate

States of America in February, the scattered condition of the Union

forces, the probable fate of the forts in Charleston harbor.

The men spoke, according to their dispositions, with the fiery emphasis

or gravity common to great crises. The air was charged with a sense of

imminence, the vague discomfort of pending catastrophe. Elim listened

without comment, his eyes narrowed, his long countenance severe. Most

of the men had gone into Boston, to the Parker House, where hourly

bulletins were being posted. Those on the steps rose to follow, all

except Elim Meikeljohn--in Boston he knew money would be spent.

He went within, stopping to glance through a number of lately arrived

letters on a table and found one for himself, addressed in his father's

painstaking script. Alone, once more without his coat, he opened the

letter. Its beginning was commonplace--“My dear son, Elim”--but what

followed confused him by the totally unexpected shock it contained:

Hester, his wife, was dead.

At first he was unable to comprehend the details of what had happened to

him; the fact itself was of such disturbing significance. He had never

considered the possibility of Hester's dying; he had come to think

of her as a lifelong responsibility. She had seemed, in her invalid's

chair, withdrawn from the pressure of life as it bore upon others,

more enduring than his father's haggard concern over the increasing

difficulties of material existence and spiritual salvation, than his

mother's flushed toiling.

Elim had lived with no horizon wider than the impoverished daily

necessity; he had accepted this with mingled fatality and fortitude; any

rebellion had been immediately suppressed as a wicked reflection upon

Deity. His life had been ordered in this course; he had accepted it

the more readily from his inherited distrust of worldly values and

aspirations; it had, in short, been he, and now the foundations of his

entire existence had been overthrown.

He read the letter more carefully, realizing the probable necessity of

his immediate return home for the funeral. But that was dispelled--his

father wrote that it had been necessary to bury Hester at once. The

elder Meikeljohn proceeded relentlessly to an exact exposition of why

this had been done. “A black swelling” was included in the details. He

finished:

“And if it would be inconvenient for you to leave your work at this

time it is not necessary for you to come here. In some ways it would

be better for you to stay. There is little enough for you to do and it

would stop your money at college.... The Lord is a swift and terrible

Being Who worketh His will in the night.”

Hester was dead. Elim involuntarily walked to a window, gazing with

unseeing eyes at the familiar pleasant prospect. A realization flashed

unbidden through his mind, a realization like a stab of lightning--he

was free. He overbore it immediately, but it left within him a strange

tingling sensation. He directed his mind upon Hester and the profitable

contemplation of death; but rebellion sprang up within him, thoughts

beyond control whirled in his brain.

Free! A hundred impulses, desires, of which--suppressed by his rigid

adherence to a code of duty--he had not been conscious, leaped into

vitality. His vision of life swung from its focus upon outward and

invisible things to a new surprising regard of his own tangible self. He

grew aware of himself as an entity, of the world as a broad and various

field of exploit and discovery.

There was, his father had bluntly indicated, no place for him at home;

and suddenly he realized that his duties at college had been a tedious

grind for inconsiderable return. This admission brought to him the

realization that he detested the whole thing--the hours in class; the

droning negligent recitations of the men; the professor of philosophy

and letters' pedantic display; the cramped academic spirit of the

institution. The vague resentment he had felt at the half-concealed

disdain of his fellows gave place to a fiery contempt for their

majority; the covert humility he had been forced to assume--by

the thought of Hester and the few miserable dollars of an inferior

position--turned to a bitter freedom of opinion.

The hour for supper approached and passed, but Elim did not leave his

room. He walked from wall to wall, by turns arrogant and lost in his new

situation. Of one thing he was certain--he would give up his occupation

here. It might do for some sniveling sycophant of learning and money,

but he was going forth to--what?

He heard footfalls in the bare hall below, and a sudden easy desire

for companionship seized him; he drew on the sturdy Meikeljohn coat and

descended the stairs to the lower floor. Harry Kaperton's door was

open and Elim saw the other moving within. He advanced, leaning in the

doorway.

“Back early,” Elim remarked. “What's new at Parker's?”

Kaperton was unsuccessful in hiding his surprise at the other's

unexpected appearance and direct question. “Why--why, nothing when

I left;” then more cordially: “Come in, find a chair. Bottle on the

table--oh, I didn't think.” He offered an implied apology to Elim's

scruples.

But Elim advanced to the table, where, selecting a decanter at random,

he poured out a considerable drink of pale spirits. Harry Kaperton

looked at him in foolish surprise.

“Had no idea you indulged!” he ejaculated. “Always took you to be a

severe Puritan duck.”

“Scotch,” Elim corrected him, “Presbyterian.”

He tilted the glass and the spirits sank smoothly from sight. His throat

burned as if he had swallowed a mouthful of flame, but there was a

quality in the strong rum that accorded with his present mood: it was

fiery like his released sense of life. Kaperton poured himself a drink,

elevated it with a friendly word and joined Elim.

“I'm going home,” the former proceeded. “You see, I live in Maryland,

and the situation there is getting pretty warm. We want to get our

women out of Baltimore, and our affairs conveniently shaped, before any

possible trouble. I had a message this evening to come at once.”

The two men presented the greatest possible contrast--Harry Kaperton

had elegantly flowing whiskers, a round young face that expressed facile

excitement at a possible disturbance, and sporting garb of tremendous

emphasis. Elim's face, expressing little of the tumult within, harsh and

dark and dogged, was entirely appropriate to his somber greenish-black

dress. Kaperton gestured toward the bottle, and they took a second

drink, then a third.

Kaperton's face flushed, he grew increasingly voluble, but Elim

Meikeljohn was silent; the liquor made no apparent impression upon him.

He sat across the table from the other with his legs extended straight

before him. They emptied the decanter of spirits and turned to sherry,

anything that was left. Kaperton apologized profoundly for the depleted

state of his cellar--knowing that he was leaving, he had invited a party

of men to his room the night before. He was tremendously sorry that Elim

had been overlooked--the truth being that no one had known what a good

companion Elim was.

It seemed to Elim Meikeljohn, drinking sherry, that the night before he

had not existed at all. He did not analyze his new being, his surprising

potations; he was proceeding without a cautious ordering of his steps.

It was neither a celebration nor a protest, but instinctive, like the

indiscriminate gulping of a man who has been swimming under the water.

“Why,” Kaperton gasped, “you've got a head like a cannon ball.”

He rose and wandered unsteadily about, but Elim sat motionless, silent,

drinking. He was conscious now of a drumming in his ears like distant

martial music, a confused echo like the beat of countless feet. He

tilted his glass and was surprised to find it empty.

“It's all gone,” Kaperton said dully.

He was as limp as an empty doll, Elim thought contemptuously. He, Elim,

felt like hickory, like iron; his mind was clear, vindicative. He rose,

sweeping back the hair from his high austere brow. Kaperton had slid

forward in his chair with hanging open hands and mouth.

The drumming in Elim's ears grew louder, a hum of voices was added to

it, and it grew nearer, actual. A crowd of men was entering the boarding

house, carrying about them a pressure of excited exclamations and a more

subtle disturbance. Elim Meikeljohn left Kaperton and went out into the

hall. An ascending man met him.

“War!” he cried. “The damned rebels have assaulted and taken Sumter!

Lincoln has called for fifty thousand volunteers!” He hurried past and

left Elim grasping the handrail of the stair.

War! The word carried an overwhelming significance to his mind dominated

by the intangible drumming, to his newly released freedom. War upon

oppression, upon the criminal slaveholders of the South! He descended

the stairs, pausing above the small agitated throng in the hall.

A passionate elation swept over him. He held his long arms upward and

out.

“How many of the fifty thousand are here?” he asked. His ringing voice

was answered in an assent that rolled in a solid volume of sound up the

stairs. Elim Meikeljohn's soul leaped in the supreme kinship that linked

him, man to man, with all.

V

It was again April, extremely early in the morning and month, and

thickly cold, when Brevet-Major Elim Meikeljohn, burning with the fever

of a re-opened old saber wound, strayed away from his command in the

direction of Richmond. His thoughts revolved with the rapidity of a

pinwheel, throwing off crackling ideas, illuminated with blinding spurts

and exploding colors, in every direction. A vague persistent pressure

sent him toward the city. It was being evacuated; the Union forces,

he knew, were to enter at dawn; but he had stumbled ahead, careless of

consequences, oblivious of possible reprisal.

He was, he recognized by the greater blackness ahead, near the outskirts

of the city--for Richmond was burning. The towering black mass of

smoke was growing more perceptible in the slowly lightening dawn. Elim

Meikeljohn could now hear the low sullen uprush of flames, the faint

crackling of timbers, and a hot aromatic odor met him in faint waves.

His scabbard beat awkwardly about his heels, and he impatiently unhooked

it and threw it into the gloom of the roadside. The service revolver was

still in its holster; but he had forgotten its presence and use. In

the multicolored confusion of his mind but one conscious impression

remained; and, in its reiteration, he said aloud, over and over, in dull

tones, “Two, Linden Row.”

The words held no concrete meaning, they constructed no vision, embodied

no tangible desire; they were merely the mechanical expression of

an obscure and dominating impulse. He was hardly more sensate in his

progress than a nail drawn irresistibly by a magnet.

The gray mist dissolved, and his long haggard face grew visible; it had

not aged in the past four years of struggle--almost from boyhood it had

been marked with somber longitudinal lines--but it had grown keener,

more intense, with the expression of a man whose body had starved

through a great spiritual conflict. His uniform, creased and stained,

and now silvery with dew, flapped about a gaunt ironlike frame; and from

under the leather peak of his kepi, even in his fever, his eyes burned

steady and compelling.

Scattered houses, seemingly as unsubstantial as shadows, gathered about

him; they grew more frequent, joined shoulder to shoulder, and he was in

a city street. On the left he caught a glimpse of the river, solid and

smooth and unshining; a knot of men passed shouting hoarsely, and a wave

of heat swept over him like a choking cloth. Like the morning, his mind

partially cleared, people and scenes grew coherent. The former were a

disheveled and rioting rabble; the conflagration spread in lurid waves.

The great stores of the tobacco warehouses had been set on fire, and the

spanning flames threatened the entire city. The rich odor of the burning

tobacco leaves rolled over the streets in drifting showers of ruby

sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw

a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the

retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw

soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing

away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with

white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the

opposite direction and demanded:

“Two, Linden Row?”

The other waved a vague arm toward the right and broke away.

The street mounted sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with

hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the

flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces,

heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now

below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke blotting

out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now,

and inquired again:

“Two, Linden Row?”

This man ejaculated:

“The Yankees are here!” The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood

with hanging hands and mouth.

Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had

joined them.

“On ahead, capt'n,” he volunteered; “fourth turn past the capitol and

first crossing.”

The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim, but

the latter moved swiftly on.

Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he saw a classic white

building on a patch of incredible greenery, infinitely remote; and then

from the center of the city came a deafening explosion, a great sullen

sheet of flame, followed by flashes like lightning in the settling

blackness.

“The powder magazines,” Elim heard repeated from person to person. An

irregular file of Confederate soldiers galloped past him, and the echo

of their hoofs had hardly died before a troop of mounted Union cavalry,

with slanting carbines, rode at their heels. They belonged, Elim

recognized, to Kautz' command.

He had now reached the fourth turn beyond the withdrawn vision of

the capitol, and he advanced through a black snowing of soot. Flames,

fanlike and pallid, now flickered about his feet, streamed in the

gutters and lapped the curbs. He saw heaps of broken bottles against

the bricks, and the smell of fine spilled wines and liquors hung in his

nostrils. His reason again wavered--the tremendous spectacle of

burning assumed an apocalyptic appearance, as if the city had burst

spontaneously into flame from the passionate and evil spirits engendered

and liberated by war.

He stopped at the first crossing and saw before him a row of tall brick

houses, built solidly and set behind small yards and a low iron fencing.

They had shallow porticoes with iron grilling, and at this end a

towering magnolia tree swept its new glossy greenery against the

third-story windows.

“Linden Row,” he muttered. “Well--Number Two?”

He swung back a creaking gate and went up a flight of bricked steps to

the door. He had guessed right; above a brass knocker filmed with the

floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the

fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose

silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city.

He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the

stillness of the façade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was

solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location

in his brain. It was a name--Rose--Rosemary Roselle. He beat with an

emaciated fist on the paneling and called, “Roselle! Roselle!”

There was a faint answering stir within; he heard the rattle of a chain;

the door swung back upon an apparently empty and cavernous cool hall.