My grandfather, however, did not go with his regiment to the West. He
had been transferred to the Commissary Department, and he remained with
the Army of the Potomac until the close of the war, and it was on some
detail connected with his duties in that department that, in 1865, he
went into Washington and had the interview with President Lincoln I
so much liked to hear him tell about. It was not in the course of his
military duty that he went to see the Commander-in-Chief; whatever
those duties were they were quickly discharged at the War Department,
so that, in the hours of freedom remaining to him before he went back
to the front, he did what everyone likes to do in Washington,--he
went to see the President. But he went in no military capacity; he
went rather in that political capacity he so much preferred to the
military, and he went as to the chief he had so long known and loved
and followed.
It would be his old friend Chase who presented him to the President,
but their conversation was soon interrupted by the entrance of an aide
who announced the arrival in the White House grounds of an Indiana
regiment passing through Washington, which, as seems to have been the
case with most regiments passing through the Capital, demanded a speech
from the President. And Lincoln complied, and as he arose to go out he
asked my grandfather to accompany him, and they continued their talk
on the way. But when they stood in the White House portico, and the
regiment beheld the President and saluted him with its lifted cheer,
the aide stepped to my grandfather’s side, and much to his chagrin--for
he had been held by the President while he finished a story--told him
that it would be necessary for him to drop a few paces to the rear.
It was a little _contretemps_ that embarrassed my grandfather, but
Lincoln, with his fine and delicate perceptions, divined the whole
situation, and met it with that kindness which was so great a part of
the humor and humanness in him, by saying:
“You see, Mr. Brand, they might not know which was the President.”
It was not long after that he was at Appomattox and the first to issue
rations to the hungry Confederates who had just surrendered, and no
act of his life gave him quite as much satisfaction as to have been
the first to pour his whole supply of hardtack into the blankets of
those whom still and always he remembered as of his own blood. And that
done, after they had ridden into Richmond, he was relieved and was
soon back in Washington calling on Chase again. Chase asked him what
he could do for him, and my grandfather said there was but one thing
in the world he wanted: namely, to go home; and a request so simple
was granted with that alacrity with which politicians grant requests
that, in their scope, fall so short of what might have been expected.
But it was not long until Chase’s influence was requested in a more
substantial matter, and in 1870 my grandfather, with his wife and two
younger daughters, was on his way across the Atlantic to Nuremberg,
where President Grant had appointed him consul.
It was not, of course, until after his return from the foreign
experience that my conscious acquaintance with him began. But when they
returned and opened the old house, and filled it with the spoil of
their European travel,--some wonderful mahogany furniture and Dresden
china, and other objects of far more delight to us children,--he and
I began a friendship which lasted until his death, and was marred by
no misunderstanding, except, perhaps, as to the number of hours his
saddle-horse should be ridden on the gallop, and the German he wished
me to read to him out of the little black-bound volumes of Schiller and
Goethe, which for years were his companions. He held, no doubt with
some show of reason on his side, that if he could master the language
after he was sixty, I might learn at least to read it before I was
sixteen. The task had its discouragements, not lightened, even in
after years, when I read in their famous and delightful correspondence
Carlyle’s advice to Emerson to possess himself of the German language;
it could be done, wrote Carlyle, in six weeks! But, like Emerson, I was
afflicted with the postponement and debility of the blond constitution,
and I observed that, except in great moments of unappreciated
sacrifice, my grandfather preferred to read his German himself rather
than to listen to my renditions.
I have spoken of the house as the old house, and I do that as viewing
it from the point of disadvantage of the years that have gone since it
grew out of that haze and mist and darkness of early recollections into
a place that was ablaze with light at evening and full of the constant
wonder and delight of the company of a large family. It was, indeed,
an old house then, with a high-gabled roof at one wing, that made an
attic which we called, with a sense of its mystery, the “dark room,”--a
room, however, not so dark that I could not see to read the old bound
volumes of a newspaper an uncle had once edited;--one could lie under
the little gable windows and pore over the immense quartos, or more
than quartos, and exercise the imagination by reading of some long dead
event, and, with a great effort, project one’s self back to that time,
and pretend to read with none other than its contemporary impressions.
The cellar of the house was not so interesting, though it was
mysterious, and far more terrifying. There was a vast fireplace in the
cellar, in which, as Jane, the old colored woman who was sometimes a
cook and sometimes a nurse, once solemnly told my cousin and me, the
devil dwelt, so that I visited it only once, and there so plainly saw
the ugly horns of that dark deity that we fled upstairs and into the
sunlight again. It may have been that the crane and the andirons of
the old fireplace helped out the impression, though after the original
suggestion little was required to strengthen it, and we never went down
there again, except to lure a younger cousin as far as the door to
shudder in the awful pleasure of witnessing her fear.
This gabled wing had been the original house, and additions had been
built to it in two directions, with a wide hall, somewhat after the
southern fashion in which so many houses in that part of Ohio were
built in those days.
It seems larger in the retrospect than it is in the reality, and I am
not endowing it with the spaciousness of a mansion; it was, in fact, a
modest dwelling of a dozen rooms, with an atmosphere that was imparted
to it by the furniture that had been brought back from Europe, and the
personality that filled it.
My grandfather conducted his establishment on a scale of prodigality
that had a certain patriarchal air; he had a large family, and he loved
to have them all about him, and in the evenings they gathered there
at the piano they had bought in Berlin, and when the candles in their
curious brass sconces had been lighted, there was music, for the whole
family possessed some of that talent which, as President Eliot rightly
declares in his lecture on “The Happy Life,” contributes so much real
pleasure. My grandfather did not himself sing; or, at least, he sang
rarely, and then only one or two Scotch songs, but when he could be
induced to do this, the event took on the festal air of a celebration.
His two younger daughters had been educated in music in Germany, and
there was something more of music in the house than the mere classic
portraits of Mozart and Beethoven which hung on the wall near the
painting of the old castle at Nuremberg. They played duets, and once,
at least, at a recital given in the town, we achieved the distinction
of a number played on two pianos by my mother and her three sisters.
The May festivals in “the City,” as we called Cincinnati in those days,
were a part of existence, and my first excursion into the larger world
was when my father took me to Cincinnati to hear Theodore Thomas’s
Orchestra, which proved to be an excursion not only into a larger
world, but eventually into a larger life,--that life of music, that
life of a love of all the arts, which provides a consolation that would
be complete could I but express myself in any one of them. I did,
indeed, attempt some expression of the joys of that experience, for
with more pretension than I could dare to-day, I wrote a composition,
or paper, on Music which was printed in a child’s publication, and won
for me a little prize. It was twenty-two years before I was able again
to have any writing of mine accepted and published by a magazine.