* Publisher's Note--Under a different title this story was
printed originally in another volume of Mr. Cobb's. It is
included here in order to complete the chronicles of Judge
Priest and his people as begun in the book called “Back
Home” and continued in this book.
THERE was a sound, heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning, that
used to bother strangers until they got used to it. It started
usually along about half past five or six o'clock and it kept up
interminably--so it seemed to them--a monotonous, jarring thump-thump,
thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms; but at
breakfast, when the beaten biscuits came upon the table, throwing off a
steamy hot halo of their own goodness, the aliens knew what it was that
had roused them, and, unless they were dyspeptics by nature, felt amply
recompensed for those lost hours of beauty sleep.
In these degenerate days I believe there is a machine that accomplishes
the same purpose noiselessly by a process of rolling and crushing, which
no doubt is efficacious; but it seems somehow to take the poetry out
of the operation. Judge Priest, and the reigning black deity of his
kitchen, would have naught of it. So long as his digestion survived
and her good right arm held out to endure, there would be real beaten
biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen
with the dawn, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled
wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as
plastic as sculptor's modelling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of
tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread
and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then,
with her master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the small round
disks and delicately pink each one with a fork--and then, if you were
listening, you could hear the stove door slam like the smacking of an
iron lip.
On a Sunday morning I have in mind, Judge Priest woke with the first
premonitory thud from the kitchen, and he was up and dressed in his
white linens and out upon the wide front porch while the summer day was
young and unblemished. The sun was not up good yet. It made a red glow,
like a barn afire, through the treetops looking eastward. Lie-abed
blackbirds were still talking over family matters in the maples that
clustered round the house, and in the back yard Judge Priest's big red
rooster hoarsely circulated gossip in regard to a certain little brown
hen, first crowing out the news loudly and then listening, with his head
on one side, while the rooster in the next yard took it up and repeated
it to a rooster living farther along, as is the custom among male
scandalisers the world over. Upon the lawn the little gossamer hammocks
that the grass spiders had seamed together overnight were spangled with
dew, so that each out-thrown thread was a glittering rosary and the
centre of each web a silken, cushioned jewel casket. Likewise each web
was outlined in white mist, for the cottonwood trees were shedding down
their podded product so thickly that across open spaces the slanting
lines of drifting fibre looked like snow. It would be hot enough after a
while, but now the whole world was sweet and fresh and washed clean.
It impressed Judge Priest so. He lowered his bulk into a rustic chair
made of hickory withes that gave to his weight, and put his thoughts
upon breakfast and the goodness of the day; but presently, as he sat
there, he saw something that set a frown between his eyes.
He saw, coming down Clay Street, upon the opposite side, an old man--a
very feeble old man--who was tall and thin and dressed in sombre black.
The man was lame--he dragged one leg along with the hitching gait of the
paralytic. Travelling with painful slowness, he came on until he reached
the corner above.
Then automatically he turned at right angles and left the narrow wooden
sidewalk and crossed the dusty road. He passed Judge Priest's, looking
neither to the right nor the left, and so kept on until he reached the
corner below. Still following an invisible path in the deep-furrowed
dust, he crossed again to the far side. Just as he got there his halt
leg seemed to give out altogether and for a minute or two he stood
holding himself up by a fumbling grip upon the slats of a tree box
before he went laboriously on, a figure of pain and weakness in the
early sunshine that was now beginning to slant across his path and
dapple his back with checkerings of shadow and light.
This manoeuvre was inexplicable--a stranger would have puzzled to make
it out. The shade was as plentiful upon one side of Clay Street as
upon the other; each sagged wooden sidewalk was in as bad repair as
its brother over the way. The small, shabby frame house, buried in
honeysuckles and balsam vines, which stood close up to the pavement
line on the opposite side of Clay Street, facing Judge Priest's roomy,
rambling old home, had no flag of pestilence at its door or its window.
And surely to this lone pedestrian every added step must have been
an added labour. A stranger would never have understood it; but Judge
Priest understood it--he had seen that same thing repeated countless
times in the years that stretched behind him. Always it had distressed
him inwardly, but on this particular morning it distressed him more
than ever. The toiling grim figure in black had seemed so feeble and so
tottery and old.
Well, Judge Priest was not exactly what you would call young. With an
effort he heaved himself up out of the depths of his hickory chair and
stood at the edge of his porch, polishing a pink dome of forehead as
though trying to make up his mind to something. Jefferson Poindexter,
resplendent in starchy white jacket and white apron, came to the door.
“Breakfus' served, suh!” he said, giving to an announcement touching
on food that glamour of grandeur of which his race alone enjoys the
splendid secret.
“Hey?” asked the judge absently.
“Breakfus'--hit's on the table waitin', suh,” stated Jeff. “Mizz
Polks sent over her house-boy with a dish of fresh razberries fur
yore breakfus'; and she say to tell you, with her and Mistah Polkses'
compliments, they is fresh picked out of her garden--specially fur you.”
The lady and gentleman to whom Jeff had reference were named Polk, but
in speaking of white persons for whom he had a high regard Jeff always,
wherever possible within the limitations of our speech, tacked on
that final _s._ It was in the nature of a delicate verbal compliment,
implying that the person referred to was worthy of enlargement and
pluralisation.
Alone in the cool, high-ceiled, white-walled dining room, Judge Priest
ate his breakfast mechanically. The raspberries were pink beads of
sweetness; the young fried chicken a poem in delicate and flaky browns;
the spoon bread could not have been any better if it had tried; and the
beaten biscuits were as light as snowflakes and as ready to melt on the
tongue; as symmetrical too as poker-chips, and like poker-chips, subject
to a sudden disappearance from in front of one; but Judge Priest spoke
hardly a word all through the meal. Jeff, going out to the kitchen for
the last course, said to Aunt Dilsey:
“Ole boss-man seem lak he's got somethin' on his mind worryin' him this
mawnin'.”
When Jeff returned, with a turn of crisp waffles in one hand and a
pitcher of cane sirup in the other, he stared in surprise, for the
dining room was empty and he could hear his employer creaking down the
hall. Jeff just naturally hated to see good hot waffles going to waste.
He ate them himself, standing up; and they gave him a zest for his
regular breakfast, which followed in due course of time.
From the old walnut hatrack, with its white-tipped knobs that stood just
inside the front door, the judge picked up a palmleaf fan; and he held
the fan slantwise as a shield for his eyes and his bare head against the
sun's glare as he went down the porch steps and passed out of his own
yard, traversed the empty street and strove with the stubborn gate latch
of the little house that faced his own. It was a poor-looking little
house, and its poorness had extended to its surroundings--as if poverty
was a contagion that spread. In Judge Priest's yard, now, the grass,
though uncared for, yet grew thick and lush; but here, in this small
yard, there were bare, shiny spots of earth showing through the'
grass--as though the soil itself was out at elbows and the nap worn off
its green-velvet coat; but the vines about the porch were thick enough
for an ambuscade and from behind their green screen came a voice in
hospitable recognition.
“Is that you, Judge? Well, suh, I'm glad to see you! Come right in; take
a seat and sit down and rest yourself.”
The speaker showed himself in the arched opening of the vine barrier--an
old man--not quite so old, perhaps, as the judge. He was in his
shirtsleeves. There was a patch upon one of the sleeves. His shoes had
been newly shined, but the job was poorly done; the leather showed
a dulled black upon the toes and a weathered yellow at the sides and
heels. As he spoke his voice ran up and down--the voice of a deaf person
who cannot hear his own words clearly, so that he pitches them in
a false key. For added proof of this affliction he held a lean and
slightly tremulous hand cupped behind his ear.
The other hand he extended in greeting as the old judge mounted the step
of the low porch.
The visitor took one of two creaky wooden rockers that stood in the
narrow space behind the balsam vines, and for a minute or two he sat
without speech, fanning himself. Evidently these neighbourly calls
between these two old men were not uncommon; they could enjoy the
communion of silence together without embarrassment.
The town clocks struck--first the one on the city hall struck
eight times sedately, and then, farther away, the one on the county
courthouse. This one struck five times slowly, hesitated a moment,
struck eleven times with great vigour, hesitated again, struck once with
a big, final boom, and was through. No amount of repairing could cure
the courthouse clock of this peculiarity. It kept the time, but kept it
according to a private way of its own. Immediately after it ceased the
bell on the Catholic church, first and earliest of the Sunday bells,
began tolling briskly. Judge Priest waited until its clamouring had died
away.
“Goin' to be good and hot after 'while,” he said, raising his voice.
“What say?”
“I say it's goin' to be mighty warm a little later on in the day,”
repeated Judge Priest.
“Yes, suh; I reckon you're right there,” assented the host. “Just a
minute ago, before you came over, I was telling Liddie she'd find it
middlin' close in church this morning. She's going, though--runaway
horses wouldn't keep her away from church! I'm not going myself--seems
as though I'm getting more and more out of the church habit here
lately.”
Judge Priest's eyes squinted in whimsical appreciation of this
admission. He remembered that the other man, during the lifetime of his
second wife, had been a regular attendant at services--going twice on
Sundays and to Wednesday night prayer meetings too; but the second wife
had been dead going on four years now--or was it five? Time sped so!
The deaf man spoke on:
“So I just thought I'd sit here and try to keep cool and wait for that
little Ledbetter boy to come round with the Sunday paper. Did you read
last Sunday's paper, Judge? Colonel Watterson certainly had a mighty
fine piece on those Northern money devils. It's round here somewhere--I
cut it out to keep it. I'd like to have you read it and pass your
opinion on it. These young fellows do pretty well, but there's none of
them can write like the colonel, in my judgment.”
Judge Priest appeared not to have heard him. “Ed Tilghman,” he said
abruptly in his high, fine voice, that seemed absurdly out of place,
coming from his round frame, “you and me have lived neighbours together
a good while, ain't we? We've been right acros't the street frum one
another all this time. It kind of jolts me sometimes when I git to
thinkin' how many years it's really been; because we're gittin' along
right smartly in years--all us old fellows are. Ten years frum now, say,
there won't be so many of us left.” He glanced side-wise at the lean,
firm profile of his friend. “You're younger than some of us; but, even
so, you ain't exactly whut I'd call a young man yourself.”
Avoiding the direct questioning gaze that his companion turned on him
at this, the judge reached forward and touched a ripe balsam apple that
dangled in front of him. Instantly it split, showing the gummed red
seeds clinging to the inner walls of the sensitive pod.
“I'm listening to you, Judge,” said the deaf man.
For a moment the old judge waited. There was about him almost an air of
diffidence. Still considering the ruin of the balsam apple, he spoke,
and it was with a sort of hurried anxiety, as though he feared he might
be checked before he said what he had to say:
“Ed, I was settin' on my porch a while ago waitin' fur breakfast, and
your brother came by.” He shot a quick, apprehensive glance at his
silent auditor. Except for a tautened flickering of the muscles about
the mouth, there was no sign that the other had heard him. “Your brother
Abner came by,” repeated the judge, “and I set over yonder on my porch
and watched him pass. Ed, Abner's gittin' mighty feeble! He jest about
kin drag himself along--he's had another stroke lately, they tell me.
He had to hold on to that there treebox down yonder, stiddyin' himself
after he cross't back over to this side. Lord knows what he was doin'
draggin' downtown on a Sunday mornin'--force of habit, I reckin. Anyway
he certainly did look older and more poorly than ever I saw him before.
He's a failin' man ef I'm any judge. Do you hear me plain?” he asked.
“I hear you,” said his neighbour in a curiously flat voice. It was
Tilghman's turn to avoid the glances of his friend. He stared straight
ahead of him through a rift in the vines.
“Well, then,” went on Judge Priest, “here's whut I've got to say to you,
Ed Tilghman. You know as well as I do that I've never pried into your
private affairs, and it goes mightily ag'inst the grain fur me to be
doin' so now; but, Ed, when I think of how old we're all gittin' to be,
and when the Camp meets and I see you settin' there side by side almost,
and yit never seemin' to see each other--and this mornin' when I saw
Abner pass, lookin' so gaunted and sick--and it sech a sweet, ca'm
mornin' too, and everythin' so quiet and peaceful-” He broke off and
started anew. “I don't seem to know exactly how to put my thoughts into
words--and puttin' things into words is supposed to be my trade too.
Anyway I couldn't go to Abner. He's not my neighbour and you are; and
besides, you're the youngest of the two. So--so I came over here to you.
Ed, I'd like mightily to take some word frum you to your brother Abner.
I'd like to do it the best in the world! Can't I go to him with a
message frum you--to-day? To-morrow might be too late!”
He laid one of his pudgy hands on the bony knee of the deaf man; but the
hand slipped away as Tilghman stood up.
“Judge Priest,” said Tilghman, looking down at him, “I've listened to
what you've had to say; and I didn't stop you, because you are my friend
and I know you mean well by it. Besides, you're my guest, under my own
roof.”
He stumped back and forth in the narrow confines of the porch. Otherwise
he gave no sign of any emotion that might be astir within him, his face
being still set and his voice flat. “What's between me and my--what's
between me and that man you just named always will be between us. He's
satisfied to let things go on as they are. I'm satisfied to let them go
on. It's in our breed, I guess. Words--just words--wouldn't help mend
this thing. The reason for it would be there just the same, and neither
one of us is going to be able to forget that so long as we both live.
I'd just as lief you never brought this--this subject up again. If you
went to him I presume he'd tell you the same thing. Let it be, Judge
Priest--it's past mending. We two have gone on this way for fifty years
nearly. We'll keep on going on so. I appreciate your kindness, Judge
Priest; but let it be--let it be!”
There was finality miles deep and fixed as basalt in his tone. He
checked his walk and called in at a shuttered window.
“Laddie,” he said in his natural up-and-down voice, “before you put
off for church, couldn't you mix up a couple of lemonades or something?
Judge Priest is out here on the porch with me.”
“No,” said Judge Priest, getting slowly up, “I've got to be gittin' back
before the sun's up too high. Ef I don't see you ag'in meanwhile be
shore to come to the next regular meetin' of the Camp--on Friday night,”
he added.
“I'll be there,” said Tilghman. “And I'll try to find that piece of
Colonel Watterson's and send it over to you. I'd like mightily for you
to read it.”
He stood at the opening in the vines, with one slightly palsied hand
fumbling at a loose tendril as the judge passed down the short yard-walk
and out at the gate. Then he went back to his chair and sat down again.
All the little muscles in his jowls were jumping.
Clay Street was no longer empty. Looking down its dusty length from
beneath the shelter of his palmleaf fan, Judge Priest saw here and there
groups of children--the little girls in prim and starchy white, the
little boys hobbling in the Sunday torment of shoes and stockings; and
all of them moving toward a common centre--Sunday school. Twice again
that day would the street show life--a little later when grown-ups went
their way to church, and again just after the noonday dinner, when young
people and servants, carrying trays and dishes under napkins, would
cross and recross from one house to another. The Sunday interchange of
special dainties between neighbours amounted to a ceremonial; but after
that, until the cool of the evening, the town would simmer in quiet,
while everybody took a Sunday nap.
With his fan, Judge Priest made an angry sawing motion in the air, as
though trying to fend off something disagreeable--a memory, perhaps, or
it might have been only a persistent midge. There were plenty of gnats
and midges about, for by now--even so soon--the dew was dried. The
leaves of the silver poplars were turning their white under sides
up like countless frog bellies, and the long, podded pendants of the
Injun-cigar trees hung dangling and still. It would be a hot day, sure
enough; already the judge felt wilted and worn out.
In our town we had our tragedies that endured for years and, in the
small-town way, finally became institutions. There was the case of the
Burnleys. For thirty-odd years old Major Burnley lived on one side of
his house and his wife lived on the other, neither of them ever crossing
an imaginary dividing line that ran down the middle of the hall, having
for their medium of intercourse all that time a lean, spinster daughter,
in whose grey and barren life churchwork and these strange home duties
took the place that Nature had intended to be filled by a husband and by
babies and grand-babies.
There was crazy Saul Vance, in his garb of a fantastic scarecrow, who
was forever starting somewhere and never going there--because, so sure
as he came to a place where two roads crossed, he could not make up his
mind which turn to take. In his youth a girl had jilted him, or a bank
had failed on him, or a colt had kicked him in the head--or maybe it
was all three of these things that had addled his poor brains. Anyhow
he went his pitiable, aimless way for years, taunted daily by small boys
who were more cruel than jungle beasts. How he lived nobody knew, but
when he died some of the men who as boys had jeered him turned out to be
his volunteer pallbearers.
There was Mr. H. Jackman--Brother Jackman to all the town--who had
been our leading hatter once and rich besides, and in the days of his
affluence had given the Baptist church its bells. In his old age, when
he was dog-poor, he lived on charity, only it was not known by that
word, which is at once the sweetest and the bitterest word in our
tongue; for Brother Jackman, always primped, always plump and well clad,
would go through the market to take his pick of what was there, and to
the Richland House bar for his toddies, and to Felsburg Brothers for new
garments when his old ones wore shabby--and yet never paid a cent for
anything; a kindly conspiracy on the part of the whole town enabling him
to maintain his self-respect to the last. Strangers in our town used to
take him for a retired banker--that's a fact!
And there was old man Stackpole, who had killed his man--killed him in
fair fight and was acquitted--and yet walked quiet back streets at all
hours, a grey, silent shadow, and never slept except with a bright light
burning in his room.
The tragedy of Mr. Edward Tilghman, though, and of Captain Abner G.
Tilghman, his elder brother, was both a tragedy and a mystery--the
biggest tragedy and the deepest mystery the town had ever known or ever
would know probably. All that anybody knew for certain was that for
upward of fifty years neither of them had spoken to the other, nor by
deed or look had given heed to the other. As boys, back in sixty-one,
they had gone out together. Side by side, each with his arm over the
other's shoulder, they had stood up with more than a hundred others to
be sworn into the service of the Confederate States of America; and on
the morning they went away Miss Sally May Ghoulson had given the older
brother her silk scarf off her shoulders to wear for a sash. Both the
brothers had liked her; but by this public act she made it plain which
of them was her choice.
Then the company had marched off to the camp below the Tennessee border,
where the new troops were drilling; and as they marched some watchers
wept and others cheered--but the cheering predominated, for it was to be
only a sort of picnic anyhow--so everybody agreed. As the orators--who
mainly stayed behind--pointed out, the Northern people would not
fight. And even if they should fight could not one Southerner whip four
Yankees? Certainly he could; any fool knew that much. In a month or two
months, or at most three months, they would all be tramping home again,
covered with glory and the spoils of war, and then--this by common
report and understanding--Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman
would be married, with a big church wedding.
The Yankees, however, unaccountably fought, and it was not a ninety-day
picnic after all. It was not any kind of a picnic. And when it was over,
after four years and a month, Miss Sally May Ghoulson and Abner Tilghman
did not marry. It was just before the battle of Chickamauga when the
other men in the company first noticed that the two Tilghmans had
become as strangers, and worse than strangers, to each other. They quit
speaking to each other then and there, and to any man's knowledge they
never spoke again. They served the war out, Abner rising just before the
end to a captaincy, Edward serving always as a private in the ranks. In
a dour, grim silence they took the fortunes of those last hard, hopeless
days and after the surrender down in Mississippi they came back with the
limping handful that was left of the company; and in age they were all
boys still--but in experience, men, and in suffering, grandsires.
Two months alter they got back Miss Sally May Ghoulson was married to
Edward, the younger brother. Within a year she died, and after a decent
period of mourning Edward married a second time--only to be widowed
again after many years. His second wife bore him children and they
died--all except one, a daughter, who grew up and married badly; and
after her mother's death she came back to live with her deaf father
and to minister to him. As for Captain Abner Tilghman, he never
married--never, so far as the watching eyes of the town might tell,
looked with favour upon any woman. And he never spoke to his brother or
to any of his brother's family--or his brother to him.
With years the wall of silence they had builded up between them turned
to ice and the ice to stone. They lived on the same street, but never
did Edward enter Captain Abner's bank, never did Captain Abner pass
Edward's house--always he crossed over to the opposite side. They
belonged to the same Veterans' Camp--indeed there was only the one for
them to belong to; they voted the same ticket--straight Democratic; and
in the same church, the old Independent Presbyterian, they worshipped
the same God by the same creed, the older brother being an elder and the
younger a plain member--and yet never crossed looks.
The town had come to accept this dumb and bitter feud as unchangeable
and eternal; in time people ceased even to wonder what its cause had
been, and in all the long years only one man had tried, before now,
to heal it up. When old Doctor Henrickson died, a young and earnest
clergyman, fresh from a Virginia theological school, came out to take
the vacant pulpit; and he, being filled with a high sense of his
holy calling, thought it shameful that such a thing should be in the
congregation. He went to see Captain Tilghman about it. He never went
but once. Afterward it came out that Captain Tilghman had threatened to
walk out of church and never darken its doors again if the minister
ever dared to mention his brother's name in his presence. So the young
minister sorrowed, but obeyed, for the captain was rich and a generous
giver to the church.
And he had grown richer with the years, and as he grew richer his
brother grew poorer--another man owned the drug store where Edward
Tilghman had failed. They had grown from young to middle-aged men and
from middle-aged men to old, infirm men; and first the grace of
youth and then the solidness of maturity had gone out of them and the
gnarliness of age had come upon them; one was halt of step and the other
was dull of ear; and the town through half a century of schooling had
accustomed itself to the situation and took it as a matter of course.
So it was and so it always would be--a tragedy and a mystery. It had
not been of any use when the minister interfered; it was of no use now.
Judge Priest, with the gesture of a man who is beaten, dropped the
fan on the porch floor, went into his darkened sitting room, stretched
himself wearily on a creaking horsehide sofa and called out to Jeff to
make him a mild toddy--one with plenty of ice in it.
On this same Sunday--or, anyhow, I like to fancy it was on this same
Sunday--at a point distant approximately nine hundred and seventy miles
in a northeasterly direction from Judge Priest's town, Corporal Jacob
Speck, late of Sigel's command, sat at the kitchen window of the
combined Speck and Engel apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street in the
Borough of Manhattan, New York. He was in his shirtsleeves; his tender
feet were incased in a pair of red-and-green carpet slippers. In the
angle of his left arm he held his youngest grandchild, aged one and a
half years, while his right hand carefully poised a china pipe, with
a bowl like an egg-cup and a stem like a fishpole. The corporal's blue
Hanoverian eyes, behind their thick-lensed glasses, were fixed upon
a comprehensive vista of East Eighty-fifth Street back yards and
clothespoles and fire escapes; but his thoughts were elsewhere.
Reared back there at seeming ease, the corporal none the less was
distracted 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 splendours 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 realisation 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 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,
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 at-tended the banquet that followed it. True, his 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
underpinning such as he owned. He had returned home with his game
leg behaving more gamely then usual and his sound one full of new and
painful kinks. Also, in honour of the occasion, he had committed the
error of wearing a pair of stiff new shoes; wherefore he had favoured
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 across to 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 marvelled
deeply that sane men should have such disgustingly bad memories; for
his own recollection of these 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 nursing duties, he had,
in Otto Wittenpen's back barroom, spoken across the rim of a tall stein
with some bitterness regarding certain especially grievous misstatements
of plain fact on the part of 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. To-morrow 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--ja, 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 grandbaby 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 were there in bright and living colours;
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 little 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 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 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 naturalisation
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 honourable record, this
old man 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 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. Entered breezily Miss
Hortense Engel, the eldest of all the multiplying Engels, pretty beyond
question and every inch American, having the gift of wearing Lower Sixth
Avenue's stock designs in a way to make them seem Upper Fifth Avenue's
imported models. Miss Engel's face was pleasantly flushed; she had just
parted lingeringly from her steady company, Mr. Lawrence J. McLaughlin,
plumber's helper, 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 high collar to hobble hem.
“Girl,” said her grandfather, “would you make to-morrow 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 to-morrow, the letter and also the
copy.”
So on Monday morning, when the rush of taking dictation at the offices
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 honour in his own country. Much honour, in
fact, accrued.
You may remember that, upon a memorable occasion, Judge Priest went on
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 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, these enclosures
reached the judge on a showery Friday 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 longdistance 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
grey 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 not liked the girl who wrote that letter nor 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 short 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 skirt 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 legs, shaking with the shock of revelation and with
indignation and with 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 shore but whut 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 ag'inst 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, closemouthed 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 fur 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 to-night 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 tur-baned,
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 organised. 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. But a keen onlooker might have noticed a sort of
tremulous, joyous impatience, which filled all save two of these old,
grey 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 purceed 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, “ez a personal favour 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
the same paper in his hand.
“Ed,” he bade him, “read this here article, won't you? Read it clear
through to the end--it mout interest you mebbe.” 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 grey 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 risen 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 yell, but could not make it
come out of his throat--only a clicking, squeaking kind of sound came.
Considered as a yell it was a miserable failure.
Side by side, each with his inner arm tight gripped about the other,
the brothers, bareheaded, turned their backs upon their friends and went
away. Slowly they passed out through the doorway into the darkness of
the stair landing, and the members of the Gideon K. Irons Camp were all
up on their feet.
“Mind that top step, Abner!” they heard the younger man say. “Wait! I'll
help you down.” And that was all except a scuffling sound of uncertainly
placed feet, growing fainter and fainter as the two brothers passed
down the long stairs of Kamleiter's Hall and out into the night
together--that was all, unless you would care to take cognisance of a
subdued little chorus such as might be produced by twelve or thirteen
elderly men snuffling in a large bare room. As commandant of the Camp it
was fitting, perhaps, that Judge Priest should speak first.
“The trouble with this here Camp is jest this,” he said: “it's got a lot
of sniffln' old fools in it that don't know no better than to bust out
cryin' when they oughter be happy!” And then, as if to prove how deeply
he felt the shame of such weakness on the part of others, Judge
Priest blew his nose with great violence, and for a space of minutes
industriously mopped at his indignant eyes with an enormous pocket
handkerchief.
*****
In accordance with a rule, Jeff Poindexter waited up for his employer.
Jeff expected him by nine-thirty at the latest; but it was actually
getting along toward ten-thirty before Jeff, who had been dozing lightly
in the dim-lit hall, oblivious to the fanged attentions of some large
mosquitoes, roused as he heard the sound of a rambling but familiar
step clunking along the wooden sidewalk of Clay Street. The latch on the
front gate clicked, and as Jeff poked his nose out of the front door he
heard, down the aisle of trees that bordered the gravel walk, the voice
of his master uplifted in solitary song.
In the matter of song the judge had a peculiarity. It made no difference
what the words might be or the theme--he sang every song and all songs
to a fine, thin, tuneless little air of his own. At this moment Judge
Priest, as Jeff gathered, showed a wide range of selection. One second
he was announcing that his name it was Joe Bowers and he was all the way
from Pike, and the next, stating, for the benefit of all who might care
to hear these details, that they--presumably certain horses--were
bound to run all night--bound to run all day; so you could bet on the
bobtailed nag and he'd bet on the bay. Nearer to the porch steps it
boastingly transpired that somebody had jumped aboard the telegraf and
steered her by the triggers, whereat the lightnin' flew and 'lectri-fied
and killed ten thousand niggers! But even so general a catastrophe could
not weigh down the singer's spirits. As he put a fumbling foot upon
the lowermost step of the porch, he threw his head far back and shrilly
issued the following blanket invitation to ladies resident in a faraway
district:
“Oh, Bowery gals, won't you come out to-night? Won't you come out
to-night?
“Oh, Bowery gals, won't you come out to-night, And dance by the light of
the moon?
“I danced with a gal with a hole in her stockin'; And her heel it kep'
a-rockin'--kep' a-rockin'! She was the purtiest gal in the room!”
Jeff pulled the front door wide open. The song stopped and Judge Priest
stood in the opening, teetering a little on his heels. His face was all
a blushing pink glow--pinker even than common.
“Evenin', Jedge!” greeted Jeff. “You're late, suh!”
“Jeff,” said Judge Priest slowly, “it's a beautiful evenin'.”
Amazed, Jeff stared at him. As a matter of fact, the drizzle of the
afternoon had changed, soon after dark, to a steady downpour. The
judge's limpened hat brim dripped raindrops and his shoulders were
sopping wet, but Jeff had yet to knowingly and wilfully contradict a
prominent white citizen.
“Yas, suh!” he said, half affirmatively, half questioningly. “Is it?”
“It is so!” said Judge Priest. “Every star in the sky shines like a
diamond! Jeff, it's the most beautiful evenin' I ever remember!”