It may seem presumptuous that so young a man as myself should propose
to write his life and memoirs, for, as a rule, one waits until he has
accomplished something in the world, or until he has reached old age,
before he ventures to tell of the times in which he has lived, and of
his part in them. But the profession to which I belong, which is that
of a soldier, and which is the noblest profession a man can follow, is a
hazardous one, and were I to delay until to-morrow to write down what
I have seen and done, these memoirs might never be written, for, such
being the fortune of war, to-morrow might not come.
So I propose to tell now of the little I have accomplished in the first
twenty-three years of my life, and, from month to month, to add to these
memoirs in order that, should I be suddenly taken off, my debit and
credit pages may be found carefully written up to date and carried
forward. On the other hand, should I live to be an old man, this
record of my career will furnish me with material for a more complete
autobiography, and will serve as a safeguard against a failing memory.
In writing a personal narrative I take it that the most important events
to be chronicled in the life of a man are his choice of a wife and his
choice of a profession. As I am unmarried, the chief event in my life
is my choice of a profession, and as to that, as a matter of fact, I
was given no choice, but from my earliest childhood was destined to be
a soldier. My education and my daily environment each pointed to that
career, and even if I had shown a remarkable aptitude for any other
calling, which I did not, I doubt if I would have pursued it. I am
confident that had my education been directed in an entirely different
channel, I should have followed my destiny, and come out a soldier in
the end. For by inheritance as well as by instinct I was foreordained
to follow the fortunes of war, to delight in the clash of arms and the
smoke of battle; and I expect that when I do hear the clash of arms and
smell the smoke of battle, the last of the Macklins will prove himself
worthy of his ancestors.
I call myself the last of the Macklins for the reason that last year,
on my twenty-second birthday, I determined I should never marry. Women I
respect and admire, several of them, especially two of the young ladies
at Miss Butler’s Academy I have deeply loved, but a soldier cannot
devote himself both to a woman and to his country. As one of our young
professors said, “The flag is a jealous mistress.”
The one who, in my earliest childhood, arranged that I should follow
the profession of arms, was my mother’s father, and my only surviving
grandparent. He was no less a personage than Major-General John M.
Hamilton. I am not a writer; my sword, I fear and hope, will always be
easier in my hand than my pen, but I wish for a brief moment I could
hold it with such skill, that I might tell of my grandfather properly
and gratefully, and describe him as the gentle and brave man he was. I
know he was gentle, for though I never had a woman to care for me as a
mother cares for a son, I never missed that care; and I know how brave
he was, for that is part of the history of my country. During many years
he was my only parent or friend or companion; he taught me my lessons by
day and my prayers by night, and, when I passed through all the absurd
ailments to which a child is heir, he sat beside my cot and lulled me to
sleep, or told me stories of the war. There was a childlike and simple
quality in his own nature, which made me reach out to him and confide in
him as I would have done to one of my own age. Later, I scoffed at this
virtue in him as something old-fashioned and credulous. That was when
I had reached the age when I was older, I hope, than I shall ever be
again. There is no such certainty of knowledge on all subjects as one
holds at eighteen and at eighty, and at eighteen I found his care and
solicitude irritating and irksome. With the intolerance of youth, I
could not see the love that was back of his anxiety, and which should
have softened it for me with a halo and made me considerate and
grateful. Now I see it--I see it now that it is too late. But surely he
understood, he knew how I looked up to him, how I loved him, and how I
tried to copy him, and, because I could not, consoled myself inwardly by
thinking that the reason I had failed was because his way was the wrong
one, and that my way was the better. If he did not understand then,
he understands now; I cannot bear to think he does not understand and
forgive me.
Those were the best days of my life, the days I spent with him as a
child in his own home on the Hudson. It stands at Dobbs Ferry, set in
a grove of pines, with a garden about it, and a box hedge that shuts it
from the road. The room I best remember is the one that overlooks the
Hudson and the Palisades. From its windows you can watch the great
vessels passing up and down the river, and the excursion steamers flying
many flags, and tiny pleasure-boats and great barges. There is an open
fireplace in this room, and in a corner formed by the book-case, and
next to the wood-box, was my favorite seat. My grandfather’s place was
in a great leather chair beside the centre-table, and I used to sit
cross-legged on a cushion at his feet, with my back against his knees
and my face to the open hearth. I can still see the pages of “Charles
O’Malley” and “Midshipman Easy,” as I read them by the lifting light
of that wood fire, and I can hear the wind roaring down the chimney and
among the trees outside, and the steamers signalling to each other as
they pushed through the ice and fog to the great city that lay below us.
I can feel the fire burning my face, and the cold shivers that ran down
my back, as my grandfather told me of the Indians who had once hunted in
the very woods back of our house, and of those he had fought with on the
plains. With the imagination of a child, I could hear, mingled with the
shrieks of the wind as it dashed the branches against the roof, their
hideous war-cries as they rushed to some night attack, or the howling of
the wolves in the snow. When I think of myself as I was then I am very
fond of that little boy who sat shivering with excitement, and staring
with open eyes at the pictures he saw in the firelight, a little boy who
had made no enemies, no failures, who had harmed no one, and who knew
nothing of the world outside the walls that sheltered him, save the
brave old soldier who was his law and his example, his friend in
trouble, and his playmate.
I knew nothing then, and I know very little now, either of my father
or my mother. Whenever I asked my grandfather concerning them he always
answered vaguely that he would tell me some day, “when you are of age,”
but whether he meant when I was twenty-one or of an age when I was best
fitted to hear the truth, I shall never know. But I guessed the truth
from what he let fall, and from what I have since heard from others,
although that is but little, for I could not ask strangers to tell me of
my own people. For some reason, soon after they were married my mother
and father separated and she brought me to live with her father, and he
entered the Southern army.
I like to think that I can remember my mother, and it seems I must,
for very dimly I recollect a young girl who used to sit by the window
looking out at the passing vessels. There is a daguerreotype of my
mother, and it may be that my recollection of her is builded upon that
portrait. She died soon after we came to live with my grandfather, when
I was only three years old, but I am sure I remember her, for no other
woman was ever in the house, and the figure of the young girl looking
out across at the Palisades is very clear to me.
My father was an Irish officer and gentleman, who came to the States
to better his fortunes. This was just before the war; and as soon as it
began, although he lived in the North, in New York City, he joined the
Southern army and was killed. I believe, from what little I have learned
of him, that he was both wild and reckless, but the few who remember
him all say that he had many noble qualities, and was much loved by men,
and, I am afraid, by women. I do not know more than that, except the one
story of him, which my grandfather often told me.
“Whatever a man may say of your father,” he would tell me, “you need not
believe; for they may not have understood him, and all that you need to
remember, until when you are of age I shall tell you the whole truth,
is how he died.” It is a brief story. My father was occupying a trench
which for some hours his company had held under a heavy fire. When the
Yankees charged with the bayonet he rose to meet them, but at the same
moment the bugle sounded the retreat, and half of his company broke and
ran. My father sprang to the top of the trench and called, “Come back,
boys, we’ll give them one more volley.” It may have been that he had
misunderstood the call of the bugle, and disobeyed through ignorance,
or it may have been that in his education the signal to retreat had been
omitted, for he did not heed it, and stood outlined against the sky,
looking back and waving his hand to his men. But they did not come to
him, and the advancing troop fired, and he fell upon the trench with his
body stretched along its length. The Union officer was far in advance of
his own company, and when he leaped upon the trench he found that it was
empty and that the Confederate troops were in retreat. He turned, and
shouted, laughing: “Come on! there’s only one man here--and he’s dead!”
But my father reached up his hand, to where the officer stood above him,
and pulled at his scabbard.
“Not dead, but dying, Captain,” my father said. “And that’s better than
retreating, isn’t it?”
“And that is the story,” my grandfather used to say to me, “you must
remember of your father, and whatever else he did does not count.”
At the age of ten my grandfather sent me to a military academy near
Dobbs Ferry, where boys were prepared for college and for West Point and
Annapolis. I was a very poor scholar, and, with the exception of what
I learned in the drill-hall and the gymnasium, the academy did me very
little good, and I certainly did not, at that time at least, reflect any
credit on the academy. Had I been able to take half the interest in my
studies my grandfather showed in them, I would have won prizes in every
branch; but even my desire to please him could not make me understand
the simplest problems in long division; and later here at the Point, the
higher branches of mathematics, combined with other causes, have nearly
deprived the United States Army of a gallant officer. I believe I have
it in me to take a piece of field artillery by assault, but I know I
shall never be able to work out the formula necessary to adjust its
elevation.
With the exception, perhaps, of Caesar’s “Commentaries,” I hated all of
my studies, not only on their own account, but because they cut me out
of the talks with which in the past my grandfather and I had been wont
to close each day. These talks, which were made up on my part of demands
for more stories, or for repetitions of those I already knew by heart,
did more than any other thing to inspire me with a desire for military
glory. My grandfather had served through the Mexican War, in the Indian
campaigns on the plains, and during the War of the Rebellion, and his
memory recalled the most wonderful and exciting of adventures. He was
singularly modest, which is a virtue I never could consider as a high
one, for I find that the world takes you at your own valuation, and
unless “the terrible trumpet of Fame” is sounded by yourself no one else
will blow your trumpet for you. Of that you may be sure. But I can’t
recall ever having heard my grandfather relate to people of his own
age any of the adventures which he told me, and once I even caught him
recounting a personal experience which redounded greatly to his credit
as having happened to “a man in his regiment.” When with childish
delight I at once accused him of this he was visibly annoyed, and
blushed like a girl, and afterward corrected me for being so forward in
the presence of my elders. His modesty went even to the length of his
keeping hidden in his bedroom the three presentation swords which had
been given him at different times for distinguished action on the field.
One came from the men of his regiment, one from his townspeople after
his return from the City of Mexico, and one from the people of the State
of New York; and nothing I could say would induce him to bring
them downstairs to our sitting room, where visitors might see them.
Personally, I cannot understand what a presentation sword is for except
to show to your friends; for, as a rule, they are very badly balanced
and of no use for fighting.
Had it not been for the colored prints of the different battles in
Mexico which hung in our sitting room, and some Indian war-bonnets
and bows and arrows, and a box of duelling pistols, no one would have
supposed that our house belonged to one of the most distinguished
generals of his day. You may be sure I always pointed these out to
our visitors, and one of my chief pleasures was to dress one of my
schoolmates in the Indian war bonnet, and then scalp him with a carving
knife. The duelling pistols were even a greater delight to me. They were
equipped with rifle barrels and hair triggers, and were inlaid richly
with silver, and more than once had been used on the field of honor.
Whenever my grandfather went out for a walk, or to play whist at the
house of a neighbor, I would get down these pistols and fight duels with
myself in front of the looking-glass. With my left hand I would hold the
handkerchief above my head, and with the other clutch the pistol at my
side, and then, at the word, and as the handkerchief fluttered to the
floor, I would take careful aim and pull the trigger. Sometimes I died
and made speeches before I expired, and sometimes I killed my adversary
and stood smiling down at him.
My grandfather was a member of the Aztec Club, which was organized
during the occupation of the City of Mexico by the American officers
who had stormed the capital; and on the occasion of one of its annual
meetings, which that year was held in Philadelphia, I was permitted to
accompany him to that city. It was the longest journey from home I had
ever taken, and each incident of it is still clearly fixed in my mind.
The event of the reunion was a dinner given at the house of General
Patterson, and on the morning before the dinner the members of the club
were invited to assemble in the garden which surrounded his house. To
this meeting my grandfather conducted me, and I found myself surrounded
by the very men of whom he had so often spoken. I was very frightened,
and I confess I was surprised and greatly disappointed also to find
that they were old and gray-haired men, and not the young and dashing
warriors he had described. General Patterson alone did not disappoint
me, for even at that late day he wore a blue coat with brass buttons and
a buff waistcoat and high black stock. He had a strong, fine profile and
was smooth shaven. I remember I found him exactly my ideal of the Duke
of Wellington; for though I was only then ten or twelve years of age,
I had my own ideas about every soldier from Alexander and Von Moltke to
our own Captain Custer.
It was in the garden behind the Patterson house that we met the General,
and he alarmed me very much by pulling my shoulders back and asking me
my age, and whether or not I expected to be as brave a soldier as my
grandfather, to which latter question I said, “Yes, General,” and then
could have cried with mortification, for all of the great soldiers
laughed at me. One of them turned, and said to the only one who was
seated, “That is Hamilton’s grandson.” The man who was seated did not
impress me very much. He was younger than the others. He wore a black
suit and a black tie, and the three upper buttons of his waistcoat were
unfastened. His beard was close-cropped, like a blacking-brush, and
he was chewing on a cigar that had burned so far down that I remember
wondering why it did not scorch his mustache. And then, as I stood
staring up at him and he down at me, it came over me who he was, and
I can recall even now how my heart seemed to jump, and I felt terribly
frightened and as though I were going to cry. My grandfather bowed
to the younger man in the courteous, old-fashioned manner he always
observed, and said: “General, this is my grandchild, Captain Macklin’s
boy. When he grows up I want him to be able to say he has met you. I am
going to send him to West Point.”
The man in the chair nodded his head at my grandfather, and took his
cigar from his mouth and said, “When he’s ready to enter, remind me,
let me know,” and closed his lips again on his cigar, as though he had
missed it even during that short space if time. But had he made a long
oration neither my grandfather nor I could have been more deeply moved.
My grandfather said: “Thank you, General. It is very kind of you,” and
led me away smiling so proudly that it was beautiful to see him. When
he had entered the house he stopped, and bending over me, asked. “Do you
know who that was, Roy?” But with the awe of the moment still heavy upon
me I could only nod and gasp at him.
“That was General Grant,” my grandfather said.
“Yes, I know,” I whispered.
I am not particularly proud of the years that preceded my entrance to
West Point, and of the years I have spent here I have still less reason
to be content. I was an active boy, and behaved as other young cubs
of that age, no better and no worse. Dobbs Ferry was not a place where
temptations beset one, and, though we were near New York, we were not of
it, and we seldom visited it. When we did, it was to go to a matinee
at some theatre, returning the same afternoon in time for supper. My
grandfather was very fond of the drama, and had been acquainted since he
was a young man with some of the most distinguished actors. With him I
saw Edwin Booth in “Macbeth,” and Lester Wallack in “Rosedale,” and John
McCullough in “Virginius,” a tragedy which was to me so real and moving
that I wept all the way home in the train. Sometimes I was allowed to
visit the theatre alone, and on these afternoons I selected performances
of a lighter variety, such as that given by Harrigan & Hart in their
theatre on Broadway. Every Thanksgiving Day I was allowed, after
witnessing the annual football match between the students from Princeton
and Yale universities, to remain in town all that night. On these great
occasions I used to visit Koster & Bial’s on Twenty-third Street, a
long, low building, very dark and very smoky, and which on those nights
was blocked with excited mobs of students, wearing different colored
ribbons and shouting the cries of their different colleges. I envied
and admired these young gentlemen, and thought them very fine fellows
indeed. They wore in those days long green coats, which made them look
like coachmen, and high, bell-shaped hats, both of which, as I now can
see, were a queer survival of the fashions of 1830, and which now for
the second time have disappeared.
To me, with my country clothes and manners and scanty spending money,
the way these young collegians wagered their money at the football match
and drank from their silver flasks, and smoked and swaggered in the
hotel corridors, was something to be admired and copied. And although
I knew none of them, and would have been ashamed had they seen me in
company with any of my boy friends from Dobbs Ferry, I followed
them from one hotel to another, pretending I was with them, and even
penetrated at their heels into the cafe of Delmonico. I felt then for a
brief moment that I was “seeing life,” the life of a great metropolis,
and in company with the young swells who made it the rushing, delightful
whirlpool it appeared to be.
It seemed to me, then, that to wear a green coachman’s coat, to rush the
doorkeeper at the Haymarket dance-hall, and to eat supper at the “Silver
Grill” was to be “a man about town,” and each year I returned to our
fireside at Dobbs Ferry with some discontent. The excursions made me
look restlessly forward to the day when I would return from my Western
post, a dashing young cavalry officer on leave, and would wake up the
cafes and clubs of New York, and throw my money about as carelessly as
these older boys were doing then.
My appointment to West Point did not, after all, come from General
Grant, but from President Arthur, who was in office when I reached my
nineteenth year. Had I depended upon my Congressman for the appointment,
and had it been made after a competitive examination of candidates, I
doubt if I would have been chosen.
Perhaps my grandfather feared this and had it in his mind when he asked
the President to appoint me. It was the first favor he had ever asked
of the Government he had served so well, and I felt more grateful to him
for having asked the favor, knowing what it cost him to do so, than I
did to the President for granting it.
I was accordingly entered upon the rolls of the Military Academy, and my
career as a soldier began. I wish I could say it began brilliantly, but
the records of the Academy would not bear me out. Had it not been that
I was forced to study books I would not have been a bad student; for in
everything but books, in everything that bore directly on the training
of a soldier and which depended upon myself, as, for example, drill,
riding, marksmanship, and a knowledge of the manual, I did as well, or
far better, than any of my classmates. But I could not, or would not,
study, and instead of passing high in my class at the end of the plebe
year, as my natural talents seemed to promise I would do, I barely
scraped through, and the outlook for the second year was not
encouraging. The campaign in Mexico had given my grandfather a knowledge
of Spanish, and as a boy he had drilled this language into me, for it
was a fixed belief of his, that if the United States ever went to war,
it would be with some of her Spanish-American neighbors, with Mexico,
or Central America, or with Spain on account of Cuba. In consequence
he considered it most essential that every United States officer should
speak Spanish. He also argued that a knowledge of French was of even
greater importance to an officer and a gentleman, as it was, as I have
since found it to be, the most widely spoken of all languages. I
was accordingly well drilled in these two tongues, and I have never
regretted time I spent on them, for my facility in them has often served
me well, has pulled me out of tight places, put money into my pocket,
and gained me friends when but for them I might have remained and
departed a stranger among strangers. My French accordingly helped me
much as a “yearling,” and in camp I threw myself so earnestly into the
skirmish, artillery, and cavalry drills that in spite of my low marks
I still stood high in the opinion of the cadet officers and of my
instructors. With my classmates, for some reason, although in all
out-of-door exercises I was the superior of most of them, I was not
popular. I would not see this at first, for I try to keep on friendly
terms with those around me, and I want to be liked even by people of
whom I have no very high opinion and from whom I do not want anything
besides. But I was not popular. There was no disguising that, and in the
gymnasium or the riding-hall other men would win applause for performing
a feat of horsemanship or a difficult trick on the parallel bars, which
same feat, when I repeated it immediately after them, and even a little
better than they had done it, would be received in silence. I could
not see the reason for this, and the fact itself hurt me much more than
anyone guessed. Then as they would not signify by their approbation that
I was the best athlete in the class, I took to telling them that I was,
which did not help matters. I find it is the same in the world as it is
at the Academy--that if one wants recognition, he must pretend not to
see that he deserves it. If he shows he does see it, everyone else will
grow blind, holding, I suppose, that a conceited man carries his own
comfort with him, and is his own reward. I soon saw that the cadet who
was modest received more praise than the cadet who was his superior,
but who, through repeated success, had acquired a self-confident, or, as
some people call it, a conceited manner; and so, for a time, I pretended
to be modest, too, and I never spoke of my athletic successes. But I was
never very good at pretending, and soon gave it up. Then I grew morbid
over my inability to make friends, and moped by myself, having as little
to do with my classmates as possible. In my loneliness I began to think
that I was a much misunderstood individual. My solitary state bred in me
a most unhealthy disgust for myself, and, as it always is with those
who are at times exuberantly light-hearted and self-assertive, I had
terrible fits of depression and lack of self-confidence, during which
spells I hated myself and all of those about me. Once, during one of
these moods, a First-Class man, who had been a sneak in his plebe year
and a bully ever since, asked me, sneeringly, how “Napoleon on the Isle
of St. Helena” was feeling that morning, and I told him promptly to go
to the devil, and added that if he addressed me again, except in the
line of his duty, I would thrash him until he could not stand or see. Of
course he sent me his second, and one of my classmates acted for me.
We went out that same evening after supper behind Fort Clinton, and I
thrashed him so badly that he was laid up in the hospital for several
days. After that I took a much more cheerful view of life, and as
it seemed hardly fair to make one cadet bear the whole brunt of my
displeasure toward the entire battalion, I began picking quarrels with
anyone who made pretensions of being a fighter, and who chanced to be
bigger than myself.
Sometimes I got badly beaten, and sometimes I thrashed the other man,
but whichever way it went, those battles in the soft twilight evenings
behind the grass-grown ramparts of the old fort, in the shadow of
the Kosciusko Monument, will always be the brightest and pleasantest
memories of my life at this place.
My grandfather had one other daughter besides my mother, my Aunt Mary,
who had married a Harvard professor, Dr. Endicott, and who had lived in
Cambridge ever since they married.
In my second year here, Dr. Endicott died and my grandfather at once
went to Cambridge to bring Aunt Mary and her daughter Beatrice back
with him, installing them in our little home, which thereafter was to
be theirs as well. He wrote me saying he knew I would not disapprove of
this invasion of my place by my young cousin and assured me that no one,
girl or boy, could ever take the place in his heart that I had held. As
a matter of fact I was secretly pleased to hear of this addition to our
little household. I knew that as soon as I was graduated I would be sent
to some army post in the West, and that the occasional visit I was now
able to pay to Dobbs Ferry would be discontinued. I hated to think that
in his old age my grandfather would be quite alone. On the other hand,
when, after the arrival of my cousin, I received his first letter
and found it filled with enthusiastic descriptions of her, and of how
anxious she was to make him happy, I felt a little thrill of jealousy.
It gave me some sharp pangs of remorse, and I asked myself searchingly
if I had always done my utmost to please my grandfather and to give him
pride and pleasure in me. I determined for the future I would think only
of how to make him happy.
A few weeks later I was able to obtain a few hours’ leave, and I wasted
no time in running down from the Point to make the acquaintance of my
cousin, and to see how the home looked under the new regime. I found it
changed, and, except that I felt then and afterward that I was a guest,
it was changed for the better.
I found that my grandfather was much more comfortable in every way. The
newcomers were both eager and loving, although no one could help but
love my grandfather, and they invented wants he had never felt before,
and satisfied them, while at the same time they did not interfere with
the life he had formerly led. Aunt Mary is an unselfish soul, and most
content when she is by herself engaged in the affairs of the house and
in doing something for those who live in it. Besides her unselfishness,
which is to me the highest as it is the rarest of virtues, hers is a
sweet and noble character, and she is one of the gentlest souls that I
have ever known.
I may say the same of my cousin Beatrice. When she came into the room,
my first thought was how like she was to a statuette of a Dresden
shepherdess which had always stood at one end of our mantel-piece,
coquetting with the shepherd lad on the other side of the clock. As a
boy, the shepherdess had been my ideal of feminine loveliness. Since
then my ideals had changed rapidly and often, but Beatrice reminded me
that the shepherdess had once been my ideal. She wore a broad straw hat,
with artificial roses which made it hang down on one side, and, as
she had been working in our garden, she wore huge gloves and carried a
trowel in one hand. As she entered, my grandfather rose hastily from his
chair and presented us with impressive courtesy. “Royal,” he said, “this
is your cousin, Beatrice Endicott.” If he had not been present, I think
we would have shaken hands without restraint. But he made our meeting
something of a ceremony. I brought my heels together and bowed as I
have been taught to do at the Academy, and seeing this she made a low
courtesy. She did this apparently with great gravity, but as she kept
her eyes on mine I saw that she was mocking me. If I am afraid of
anything it has certainly never proved to be a girl, but I confess I was
strangely embarrassed. My cousin seemed somehow different from any of
the other girls I had met. She was not at all like those with whom I
had danced at the hotel hops, and to whom I gave my brass buttons
in Flirtation Walk. She was more fine, more illusive, and yet most
fascinating, with a quaint old-fashioned manner that at times made her
seem quite a child, and the next moment changed her into a worldly and
charming young woman. She made you feel she was much older than yourself
in years and in experience and in knowledge. That is the way my cousin
appeared to me the first time I saw her, when she stood in the middle
of the room courtesying mockingly at me and looking like a picture on
an old French fan. That is how she has since always seemed to me--one
moment a woman, and the next a child; one moment tender and kind and
merry, and the next disapproving, distant, and unapproachable.
{Illustration: He made our meeting something of a ceremony.}
Up to the time I met Beatrice I had never thought it possible to
consider a girl as a friend. For the matter of that, I had no friends
even among men, and I made love to girls. My attitude toward girls, if
one can say that a man of eighteen has an attitude, was always that of
the devoted admirer. If they did not want me as a devoted admirer, I put
them down as being proud and haughty or “stuck up.” It never occurred to
me then that there might be a class of girl who, on meeting you, did not
desire that you should at once tell her exactly how you loved her, and
why. The girls who came to Cranston’s certainly seemed to expect you to
set their minds at rest on that subject, and my point of view of girls
was taken entirely from them. I can remember very well my pause of
dawning doubt and surprise when a girl first informed me she thought
a man who told her she was pretty was impertinent. What bewildered
me still more on that occasion was that this particular girl was so
extremely beautiful that to talk about anything else but her beauty was
a waste of time. It made all other topics trivial, and yet she seemed
quite sincere in what she said, and refused to allow me to bring our
talk to the personal basis of “what I am to you” and “what you are to
me.” It was in discussing that question that I considered myself an
artist and a master. My classmates agreed with me in thinking as I did,
and from the first moment I came here called me “Masher” Macklin, a
sobriquet of which I fear for a time I was rather proud. Certainly, I
strove to live up to it. I believe I dignified my conduct to myself by
calling it “flirtation.” Flirtation, as I understood it, was a sort of
game in which I honestly believed the entire world of men and women, of
every class and age, were eagerly engaged. Indeed, I would have thought
it rather ungallant, and conduct unworthy of an officer and a gentleman,
had I not at once pretended to hold an ardent interest in every girl I
met. This seems strange now, but from the age of fourteen up to the age
of twenty that was my way of regarding the girls I met, and even today I
fear my attitude toward them has altered but slightly, for now, although
I no longer tend to care when I do not, nor make love as a matter of
course, I find it is the easiest attitude to assume toward most women.
It is the simplest to slip into, just as I have certainly found it
the one from which it is most difficult to escape, But I never seem to
remember that until it is too late. A classmate of mine once said to me:
“Royal, you remind me of a man walking along a road with garden gates
opening on each side of it. Instead of keeping to the road, you stop at
every gate, and say: ‘Oh! what a pretty garden! I’ll just slip in there,
and find out where that path will take me.’ And then--you’re either
thrown out, and the gate slammed after you, or you lose yourself in
a maze and you can’t get out--until you break out. But does that ever
teach you a lesson? No! Instead of going ahead along the straight and
narrow way, and keeping out of temptation, you halt at the very next
gate you come to, just as though you had never seen a gate before, and
exclaim: ‘Now, this _is_ a pretty garden, and _what_ a neat white fence!
I really must vault in and take a look round.’ And so the whole thing is
gone over again.”
I confess there may be some truth in what he said, but the trouble I
find with the straight and narrow way is that there’s not room enough
in it for two. And, then, it is only fair to me to say that some of the
gardens were really most beautiful, and the shade very deep and sweet
there, and the memories of the minutes I passed in them were very
refreshing when I went back to the dust of the empty road. And no one,
man or woman, can say that Royal Macklin ever trampled on the flowers,
or broke the branches, or trespassed in another man’s private grounds.
It was my cousin Beatrice who was responsible for the change of heart
in me toward womankind. For very soon after she came to live with us, I
noticed that in regard to all other young women I was growing daily more
exacting. I did not admit this to myself, and still less to Beatrice,
because she was most scornful of the girls I knew, and mocked at them.
This was quite unfair of her, because she had no real acquaintance with
them, and knew them only from photographs and tintypes, of which I had a
most remarkable collection, and of what I chose to tell her about them.
I was a good deal annoyed to find that the stories which appealed to me
as best illustrating the character of each of my friends, only seemed to
furnish Beatrice with fresh material for ridicule, and the girls of whom
I said the least were the ones of whom she approved. The only girls
of my acquaintance who also were friends of hers, were two sisters who
lived at Dobbs Ferry, and whose father owned the greater part of it, and
a yacht, in which he went down to his office every morning. But Beatrice
held that my manner even to them was much too free and familiar, and
that she could not understand why I did not see that it was annoying to
them as well. I could not tell her in my own defence that their manner
to me, when she was with us and when she was not, varied in a remarkable
degree. It was not only girls who carried themselves differently before
Beatrice: every man who met her seemed to try and show her the best in
him, or at least to suppress any thought or act which might displease
her. It was not that she was a prig, or an angel, but she herself was
so fine and sincere, and treated all with such an impersonal and yet
gracious manner that it became contagious, and everybody who met her
imitated the model she unconsciously furnished. I was very much struck
with this when she visited the Academy. Men who before her coming had
seemed bold enough for any game, became dumb and embarrassed in her
presence, and eventually it was the officers and instructors who
escorted her over the grounds, while I and my acquaintances among the
cadets formed a straggling rear-guard at her heels. On account of my
grandfather, both she and my aunt were made much of by the Commandant
and all the older officers, and when they continued to visit the Academy
they were honored and welcomed for themselves, and I found that on such
occasions my own popularity was enormously increased. I have always been
susceptible to the opinion of others. Even when the reigning belle or
the popular man of the class was not to me personally attractive, the
fact that she was the reigning belle and that he was the man of the
hour made me seek out the society of each. This was even so, when, as
a matter of fact, I should have much preferred to dance with some less
conspicuous beauty or talk with a more congenial companion. Consequently
I began to value my cousin, whom I already regarded with the most
tremendous admiration, for those lighter qualities which are common
to all attractive girls, but which in my awe of her I had failed to
recognize. There were many times, even, when I took myself by the
shoulders and faced the question if I were not in love with Beatrice. I
mean truly in love, with that sort of love that one does not talk about,
even to one’s self, certainly not to the girl. As the young man of the
family, I had assumed the position of the heir of the house, and treated
Beatrice like a younger sister, but secretly I considered her in no such
light.
Many nights when on post I would halt to think of her, and of her
loveliness and high sincerity, and forget my duty while I stood with
my arms crossed on the muzzle of my gun. In such moments the night,
the silence, the moonlight piercing the summer leaves and falling at my
feet, made me forget my promise to myself that I would never marry.
I used to imagine then it was not the unlicked cubs under the distant
tents I was protecting, but that I was awake to watch over and guard
Beatrice, or that I was a knight, standing his vigil so that he might
be worthy to wear the Red Cross and enter her service. In those lonely
watches I saw littlenesses and meannesses in myself, which I could not
see in the brisk light of day, and my self-confidence slipped from me
and left me naked and abashed. I saw myself as a vain, swaggering boy,
who, if he ever hoped to be a man among men, such as Beatrice was a
woman above all other women, must change his nature at once and forever.
I was glad that I owed these good resolutions to her. I was glad that
it was she who inspired them. Those nights, as I leaned on my gun, I
dreamed even that it might end happily and beautifully in our marriage.
I wondered if I could make her care, if I could ever be worthy of her,
and I vowed hotly that I would love her as no other woman was ever
loved.
And then I would feel the cold barrel of my musket pressing against the
palm of my hand, or the bayonet would touch my cheek, and at the touch
something would tighten in my throat, and I would shake the thoughts
from me and remember that I was sworn to love only my country and my
country’s flag.
In my third year here my grandfather died. As the winter closed in
he had daily grown more feeble, and sat hour after hour in his great
armchair, dozing and dreaming, before the open fire. And one morning
when he was alone in the room, Death, which had so often taken the man
at his side, and stood at salute to let him live until his work was
done, came to him and touched him gently. A few days later when his body
passed through the streets of our little village, all the townspeople
left their houses and shops, and stood in silent rows along the
sidewalks, with their heads uncovered to the falling snow. Soldiers of
his old regiments, now busy men of affairs in the great city below
us, came to march behind him for the last time. Officers of the Loyal
Legion, veterans of the Mexican War, regulars from Governor’s Island,
with their guns reversed, societies, political clubs, and strangers who
knew him only by what he had done for his country, followed in the long
procession as it wound its way through the cold, gray winter day to the
side of the open grave. Until then I had not fully understood what it
meant to me, for my head had been numbed and dulled; but as the body
disappeared into the grave, and the slow notes of the bugle rose in
the final call of “Lights out,” I put my head on my aunt’s shoulder and
cried like a child. And I felt as though I were a child again, as I did
when he came and sat beside my bed, and heard me say my prayers, and
then closed the door behind him, leaving me in the darkness and alone.
But I was not entirely alone, for Beatrice was true and understanding;
putting her own grief out of sight, caring for mine, and giving it the
first place in her thoughts. For the next two days we walked for hours
through the autumn woods where the dead leaves rustled beneath our feet,
thinking and talking of him. Or for hours we would sit in silence, until
the sun sank a golden red behind the wall of the Palisades, and we went
back through the cold night to the open fireside and his empty chair.