The man of whom I am speaking was a tallish, slim young fellow, shaped
well enough, though a trifle limp for a Louisianian in the Mississippi
(Confederate) cavalry. Some camp wag had fastened on him the nickname of
"Crackedfiddle." Our acquaintance began more than a year before Lee's
surrender; but Gregory came out of the war without any startling record,
and the main thing I tell of him occurred some years later.
I never saw him under arms or in uniform. I met him first at the house of
a planter, where I was making the most of a flesh-wound, and was, myself,
in uniform simply because I hadn't any other clothes. There were pretty
girls in the house, and as his friends and fellow-visitors--except me--
wore the gilt bars of commissioned rank on their gray collars, and he, as
a private, had done nothing glorious, his appearance was always in
civilian's dress. Black he wore, from head to foot, in the cut fashionable
in New Orleans when the war brought fashion to a stand: coat-waist high,
skirt solemnly long; sleeves and trousers small at the hands and feet, and
puffed out--phew! in the middle. The whole scheme was dandyish, dashing,
zou-zou; and when he appeared in it, dark, good-looking, loose,
languorous, slow to smile and slower to speak, it was--confusing.
One sunset hour as I sat alone on the planter's veranda immersed in a
romance, I noticed, too late to offer any serviceable warning, this
impressive black suit and its ungenerously nicknamed contents coming in at
the gate unprotected. Dogs, in the South, in those times, were not the
caressed and harmless creatures now so common. A Mississippi planter's
watch-dogs were kept for their vigilant and ferocious hostility to the
negro of the quarters and to all strangers. One of these, a powerful,
notorious, bloodthirsty brute, long-bodied, deer-legged--you may possibly
know that big breed the planters called the "cur-dog" and prized so highly
-darted out of hiding and silently sprang at the visitor's throat. Gregory
swerved, and the brute's fangs, whirling by his face, closed in the sleeve
and rent it from shoulder to elbow. At the same time another, one of the
old "bear-dog" breed, was coming as fast as the light block and chain he
had to drag would allow him. Gregory neither spoke, nor moved to attack or
retreat. At my outcry the dogs slunk away, and he asked me, diffidently,
for a thing which was very precious in those days--pins.
But he was quickly surrounded by pitying eyes and emotional voices, and
was coaxed into the house, where the young ladies took his coat away to
mend it. While he waited for it in my room I spoke of the terror so many
brave men had of these fierce home-guards. I knew one such beast that was
sired of a wolf. He heard me with downcast eyes, at first with evident
pleasure, but very soon quite gravely.
"They can afford to fear dogs," he replied, "when they've got no other
fear." And when I would have it that he had shown a stout heart he smiled
ruefully.
"I do everything through weakness," he soliloquized, and, taking my book,
opened it as if to dismiss our theme. But I bade him turn to the preface,
where heavily scored by the same feminine hand which had written on the
blank leaf opposite, "Richard Thorndyke Smith, from C.O."--we read
something like this:
The seed of heroism is in all of us. Else we should not forever relish, as
we do, stories of peril, temptation, and exploit. Their true zest is no
mere ticklement of our curiosity or wonder, but comradeship with souls
that have courage in danger, faithfulness under trial, or magnanimity in
triumph or defeat. We have, moreover, it went on to say, a care for human
excellence _in general_, by reason of which we want not alone our son, or
cousin, or sister, but _man everywhere_, the norm, _man_, to be strong,
sweet, and true; and reading stories of such, we feel this wish rebound
upon us as duty sweetened by a new hope, and have a new yearning for its
fulfilment in ourselves.
"In short," said I, closing the book, "those imaginative victories of soul
over circumstance become essentially ours by sympathy and emulation, don't
they?"
"O yes," he sighed, and added an indistinct word about "spasms of virtue."
But I claimed a special charm and use for unexpected and detached
heroisms, be they fact or fiction. "If adventitious virtue," I argued,
"can spring up from unsuspected seed and without the big roots of
character--"
"You think," interrupted Gregory, "there's a fresh chance for me."
"For all the common run of us!" I cried. "Why not? And even if there
isn't, hasn't it a beauty and a value? Isn't a rose a rose, on the bush or
off? Gold is gold wherever you find it, and the veriest spasm of true
virtue, coined into action, is true virtue, and counts. It may not work my
nature's whole redemption, but it works that way, and is just so much
solid help toward the whole world's uplift." I was young enough then to
talk in that manner, and he actually took comfort in my words, confessing
that it had been his way to count a good act which was not in character
with its doer as something like a dead loss to everybody.
"I'm glad it's not," he said, "for I reckon my ruling motive is always
fear."
"Was it fear this evening?" I asked.
"Yes," he replied, "it was. It was fear of a coward's name, and a sort of
abject horror of being one."
"Too big a coward inside," I laughed, "to be a big stout coward outside,"
and he assented.
"Smith," he said, and paused long, "if I were a hard drinker and should
try to quit, it wouldn't be courage that would carry me through, but fear;
quaking fear of a drunkard's life and a drunkard's death."
I was about to rejoin that the danger was already at his door, but he read
the warning accusation in my eye.
"I'm afraid so," he responded. "I had a strange experience once," he
presently added, as if reminded of it by what we had last said. "I took a
prisoner."
"By the overwhelming power of fear?" I inquired.
"Partly, yes. I saw him before he saw me and I felt that if I didn't take
him he'd either take me or shoot me, so I covered him and he surrendered.
We were in an old pine clearing grown up with oak bushes."
"Would it have been less strange," I inquired, "if you had been in an old
oak clearing grown up with pine bushes?"
"No, he'd have got away just the same."
"What! you didn't bring him in?"
"Only part of the way. Then he broke and ran."
"And you had to shoot him?"
"No, I didn't even shoot at him. I couldn't, Smith; _he looked so much
like me_. It was like seeing my own ghost. All the time I had him
something kept saying to me, 'You're your own prisoner--you're your own
prisoner.' And--do you know?--that thing comes back to me now every time I
get into the least sort of a tight place!"
"I wish it would come to me," I responded. A slave girl brought his coat
and our talk remained unfinished until five years after the war.