LET us, however, return to father and the tale he is telling as he sits
in the farmhouse on the winter’s evening. I am too good a son of my
father to leave such a tale hanging forever thus, in the air.
As it turned out on that night, when it rained and when he in his young
manhood stood just outside the door of that southern mansion house of
his childhood, and when his mother, that proud woman of the Southland,
spat at him and his companions in misery, so that a white speck of her
spittle landed on his beard--where, as he said, it lay like a thing of
fire burning into his soul--on that night, I say, he did, by a stroke
of fortune, escape the fate that seemed to have him in its clutches.
Dawn was just beginning to break when the two Confederate officers came
out at the door of the house and marched their prisoners away.
“We went off into the gray dawn, up out of the valley and over the
hills, and then I turned to look back,” father explained. Gray and
weary and half dead with starvation, he turned to look. If he dropped
dead from starvation and weariness on his way to the prison pen, what
did it matter now? The light of his life had gone out. He was never
again to see any of his own people, that he knew.
But even as he looked he did see something. The company had stopped to
rest for a moment and stood where a sharp wind blew over them, just at
the crest of a hill. Down in the valley the dawn was just breaking and,
as father looked, he could see the gray of the old house and against
the gray of it, on the front veranda, just a fleck of white.
That would be his young and innocent sister, come out of the house, you
will understand, to look along the road taken by the prisoners, whose
evident misery had touched her young heart.
For father it would be, as he would so elaborately explain, a very high
spot in his life, perhaps the highest spot he was to reach in all his
weary march to the grave.
He stood there on the hillside, quite cold and miserable--in just that
utterly miserable and weary state when one is sometimes most alive--the
senses, that is to say, are most alive. At the moment he felt, as any
man must feel sometime in life, that an invisible cord does extend from
the innermost parts of himself to the innermost parts of some other
person. Love comes. For once in a lifetime a state of feeling becomes
as definite a thing as a stone wall touched with the hand.
And father had that feeling, at that moment on the hill; and that the
person for whom he had it was a woman and his own sister, made it even
more an assured thing. He might have expressed the feeling by saying
that, as by a miracle, the hill dropped away and he stood on dry level
ground in the very presence of his younger sister, so close to her in
fact that he might very easily have put out his hand and touched her.
So strong was the feeling that he lost for the moment all sense of
his presence among the prisoners, all sense of the cold hunger and
weariness of the hour and--exactly as the thing might be done, quite
ridiculously, by a second-rate actor in the movies--he did in fact step
out from among the ranks of prisoners and, with his hands extended
before him and his eyes shining, took several steps down the hillside,
only to be stopped by an oath from one of the guards.
In the farmhouse, as he told of that moment he would get out of his
chair and actually take several steps. He would at bottom be always a
good deal of an actor as well as a story-teller, as every story-teller
worth his salt inevitably is.
And then came the oath from the guard and an upraised gun, the heavy
butt of a gun, ready to swing down upon his head, and back he goes into
the ranks of prisoners. He mutters some excuse: “I just wanted to have
a look”--and is thus jerked down from the high place, to which his
imagination had suddenly lifted him, and back into the weariness of his
apparently hopeless journey. Gone, he thought at the moment, was the
sister he loved, his boyhood with its memories, all his past life, but
it wasn’t quite true.
Father did make an escape. How many escapes he, in fancy, made from
the hands of the enemy during that Civil War! He lived, you will
understand, in a rather dull farming community and loved at least some
air of probability hanging over his tales.
And so the Civil War became for him the canvas, the tubes of paint, the
brushes with which he painted his pictures. Perhaps one might better
say his own imagination was the brush and the Civil War his paint pot.
And he did have a fancy for escapes, as I myself have always had. My
own tales, told and untold, are full of escapes--by water in the dark
and in a leaky boat, escapes from situations, escapes from dullness,
from pretense, from the heavy-handed seriousness of the half artists.
What writer of tales does not dote upon escapes? They are the very
breath in our nostrils.
It is just possible that upon that occasion, father would have put it
to his audience, that the sight, or the imagined sight, of his sister
that morning had given him new hope. She was a virgin and there was
something catholic about father.
Very well, then, off he goes down the road with his head held high,
thinking of the possible schemes for escape and of his sister. He had
been given something, a new flair for life. A ray of new hope had come
into the black night of his situation. He walked more stoutly.
Stout Cortez--
Silent upon a peak in Darien.
It was just that stout way in which he now walked that gave him his
opportunity for escape--that time. All that day the other prisoners
went with hanging heads, tramping through the deep mud of the southern
roads in winter, but father walked with his head up.
Another night came and they were again in a forest, on a dark and
lonely road, with the guards walking at the side and sometimes quite
lost in the shadows cast by the trees--the prisoners a dark mass in the
very centre of the road.
Father stumbled over a stick, the heavy branch of a tree, quite
dead and broken off by the wind, and, stooping down, picked it up.
Something, perhaps just the impulse of a soldier, led him to sling the
stick lightly over his shoulder and carry it like a gun.
There he was, stepping proudly among those who were not proud--that
is to say, the other prisoners--and not having any plan in mind--just
thinking of his virginal sister back there, I dare say; and one of the
two officers of the guard spoke to him kindly.
“Don’t walk in there so close to the Yanks, in the deep mud, John,” the
officer said; “it’s better going out here. There is a path here at the
side. Get in here back of me.”
By his very pride, lifted up out of the ranks of the prisoners,
father’s mind acted quickly and with a muttered thanks he stepped to
the side of the road and became as one of the guards. The men came out
on the crest of another low hill and again, in the valley below, there
was the faint light of a farmhouse. “Halt!” one of the officers gave
command; and then--the younger of the two officers having been told by
his superior to send a man down into the valley to the farmhouse to see
if there was a chance for the guard and prisoners to rest for a few
hours and to get food--he sent father. The officer touched him on the
arm. “Go on you,” he said. “You go down and find out.”
So off father went, down a lane, holding the stick very correctly, like
a gun, until he was safely out of sight of the others, and then he
threw the stick away and ran.
The devil! He knew every inch of the ground on which he now stood. What
an opportunity for escape! One of his boyhood friends had lived in
the very house, toward which he was supposed to be going, and often,
in his young manhood and when he had come home for vacation from the
northern school, he had ridden and hunted along the very path his feet
now touched. Why, the very dogs and “niggers” on the place knew him as
they might have known their master.
And so, if he ran madly now, he ran knowing the ground under his feet.
Ah, he would be sure! When his escape was discovered dogs might be set
on his trail.
He plunged downward, getting clear of the trees, running across a
field--the soft mud clinging to his feet--and so skirted the house and
got to where there was a small creek down which he went for a mile
in the darkness, walking in the cold water that often came up to his
waist. That was to throw dogs off his trail, as any schoolboy should
know.
By making a great circle he got back into the road, by which he and the
other prisoners had been marched from his own father’s house. They had
come some twelve miles during the day and early evening, but the night
was still young and, after he had gone three or four miles, he knew a
short cut through the woods by which several miles could be cut off.
And so, you see, father went back again to his old home after all and
once again saw the sister he loved. The dawn was just breaking when he
arrived, but the dogs knew him and the negroes knew him. The very negro
who had held the light while his mother spat at the prisoners hid him
away in the loft of a barn and brought him food.
Not only food was brought, but also a suit of his own clothes that had
been left in the house.
And so he stayed hidden in the loft for three days, and then another
night came when it rained and was dark.
Then he crept out, with food for the needs of his journey, and knowing
that, when he had walked for a mile along the road that led back toward
the distant Union camp, a negro would be standing in a little grove
with a good horse saddled and bridled for him. The negro, in the late
afternoon, had gone off to a distant town, ostensibly for mail and was
to be bound to a tree where he would be discovered later by a party of
other negroes sent in search of him. Oh, all was arranged--everything
elaborately planned to ward off, from his helpers, the wrath of the
mother.
There was the night and the rain, and father, with a dark cloak now
about his shoulders, creeping from the stables and toward the house. By
the window of one of the rooms downstairs his young sister sat playing
an organ, and so he crept to the window and stood for a time looking.
Ah; there was moving-picture stuff for your soul! Why, oh why, did not
father live in another and later generation? In what affluence might
we not all have flourished! The old homestead, a fire burning in the
grate, the stern and relentless parent, and outside in the cold and wet
father, the outcast son, the disowned, the homeless one, about to ride
off into the night in the service of his country--never to return.
On the organ his sister would have been playing “The Last Link is
Broken,” and there stands father with the great tears rolling down his
cheeks.
Then to ride away into the night, to fight again for the flag he loved,
and that to him meant more than home, more than family--ah! more than
the love of the woman who was long afterward to come into his life, and
to console him somewhat for the fair sister he had lost.
For he did love her, quite completely. Is it not odd, when one
considers the matter, that the fair sister--who would have been my
aunt, and who never perhaps existed except in father’s fancy, but
concerning whom I have heard him tell so many touching tales--is it not
odd that I have never succeeded in inventing a satisfactory name for
her? Father never--if I remember correctly--gave her a name and I have
never succeeded in doing so.
How often have I tried and without success! Ophelia, Cornelia, Emily,
Violet, Eunice. You see the difficulty? It must have a quaint and
southern sound and must suggest--what must it not suggest?
But father’s tale must have its proper dénouement. One could trust the
tale-teller for that. Even had he lived in the days of the movies and
had the dénouement quite killed his story--for movie purposes, at least
in the northern towns, which would have been the best market--even in
the face of all of such difficulties which he fortunately did not have
to meet, one could be quite sure of the dénouement.
And he made it splashy. It was at the dreadful battle of Gettysburg,
late in the war and on the third of July too. The Confederates had such
a dreadful way of getting off on just the wrong foot on the very eve
of our national holiday. Vicksburg and Gettysburg for Fourth of July
celebrations. Surely it was, what, during the World War, would have
been called, “bad war psychology.”
There can be no doubt that father had been a soldier of some sort
during the Civil War and so, as was natural, he would give his tale a
soldier’s dénouement, sacrificing even the beloved and innocent younger
sister to his purpose (to be brought back to life--oh, many, many times
later, and made to serve in many future tales).
It was the second day of that great, that terrible battle of
Gettysburg, father had picked upon to serve as the setting for the end
of his yarn.
That was a moment! All over the North the people stood waiting; farmers
stopped working in the fields and drove into northern towns, waiting
for the click of the little telegraph instruments; country doctors let
the sick lie unattended and stood with all the others in the streets of
towns, where was no running in and out of stores. The whole North stood
waiting, listening. No time for talk now.
Ah! that Confederate General Lee--the neat quiet Sunday-school
superintendent among generals! One could never tell what he would do
next. Was it not all planned that the war should be fought out on
southern soil?--and here he had brought a great army of his finest
troops far into the North.
Everyone waited and listened. No doubt the South waited and listened
too.
No Lincoln and Douglas debates now. “A nation cannot exist half slave
and half free.”
Now there is the rattle of the box, and the dice that shall decide the
fate of a nation are being thrown. In an obscure farmhouse, far in the
North, long after the battle of those two terrible days was fought
and half forgotten, father also has got his hands on the dice box. He
is rattling words in it now. We poor tellers of tales have our moments
too, it seems. Like great generals sitting upon horses upon the tops of
hills and throwing troops into the arena, we throw the little soldier
words into our battles. No uniforms for us, no riders springing away
into the gray smoke-mist of battle to carry out orders. We must sit in
lonely farmhouses or in cheap rooms in city lodging houses before our
typewriters; but if we do not look like generals, we at least feel like
that at moments anyway.
Father dropping his little rattling words into the hearts of the
farmer, the farmer’s wife, Tilly’s heart too. At Gettysburg a nation in
the death grapple. The innocent sister, fair virgin of the South, cast
in too.
Look at the eyes of that stoic Aldrich. They are shining now, eh? Ah!
he has been a soldier too. In his youth he also stood firmly amid shot
and shell, but ever after, poor dear, he had to be satisfied with mere
blank dumbness about it all. At the best he could but turn the crank of
a magic-lantern machine or join the G. A. R., and march with other men
through the streets of an Ohio town on Decoration days, when the real
question in the minds of all the onlookers was as to whether Clyde or
Tiffin, Ohio, would win the ball game to be played at Ame’s field that
afternoon.
A poor sort Aldrich, being able to do nothing but fight. On Decoration
days he marched dumbly through the dust to a graveyard and listened to
an address made by a candidate for Congress, who had made his money in
the wholesale poultry business. At best Aldrich could but speak in low
tones to another comrade, as the file of men marched along. “I was with
Grant at the Wilderness and before that at Shiloh. Where were you? Oh,
you were with Sherman, one of Sherman’s bummers, eh?”
That and no more for Aldrich--but for father, ah!
The second day at Gettysburg and Pickett’s men ready for their charge.
Was that not a moment? What men--those fellows of Pickett’s--the very
flower of the Southland--young bearded giants, tough like athletes,
trained to the minute.
It is growing late on that second day of the fight and Pickett’s men
are to decide it all. The sun will soon be going down behind the hills
of that low flat valley--the valley in which, but a few short days ago,
farmers were preparing to gather the grain crops. On the slope of one
of the hills a body of men lies waiting. It is the flower of the Union
army too. Father is among them, lying there.
They wait.
They are not trembling, but back of them in a thousand towns men
and women are both waiting and trembling. Freedom itself waits and
trembles--liberty is trembling--“You can’t fool all of the people all
of the time” is trembling like a broken reed. How many grand passages,
words, Decoration day addresses, messages to Congress, Fourth of July
addresses of the next two hundred years, not worth eight cents on the
dollar at the moment!
And now they come--Pickett’s men--down through the valley, in and out
of groves of trees and up the little slope. There is a place, known to
history as “the bloody angle.” There the men of the South rush straight
into a storm of iron. A hailstorm of iron swept also in among the men
of the North waiting for them.
That wild Rebel yell that broke from the lips of Pickett’s men is dying
now. The lips of Pickett’s men are turning white.
The voice of Meade has spoken and down through the valley go the Union
men in their turn--father among them.
It was then that a bullet in the leg dropped him in his tracks, and in
memory of that moment he stops the telling of his tale in the farmhouse
long enough to pull up his pants leg and show the scar of his wound.
Father was a true naturalist, liked to pin his tales down to earth, put
a spike of truth in them--at moments.
He pitched forward and fell and the men of his company rolled on to a
victory in which he could have no part. He had fallen in what was now,
suddenly, a little, quiet place among trees in an old orchard, and
there close beside him was a confederate boy, mortally wounded. The two
men roll uneasily in their pain and look directly into each other’s
eyes. It is a long, long look the two men give each other, for one of
them the last look into the eyes of a fellow before he goes on, over
the river.
The man lying there, and now dying, is just that young man who, as a
boy, was father’s best friend and comrade, the lad to whose place--some
twelve miles from his own father’s plantation--he used to ride for days
of sport. What rides they had taken together through the forests, a
pack of dogs at their heels, and what talks they then had!
You will understand that the young man now dying lived in that very
house, far back from the road, toward which father went that night when
he escaped the Rebel guard. He had marched off with the stick over his
shoulder, you will remember, and had then cut off across fields to his
own home where he was concealed by the negroes until the night of his
final escape.
And he had gone away from his own home on that dark night, dreaming of
a return, some time when the cruel war was over and the wounds it had
made were healed; but now he could never return. He was condemned to
remain alone, a wanderer always on the face of this earth.
For the lad now dying beside him on the field of Gettysburg was, in his
death hour, telling a fearful and tragic story.
Father’s family had been entirely wiped out. His father had been killed
in battle as had also his brothers.
And now, from the lips of his old comrade, he was to hear the most
fearful tale of all.
A party of northern foragers had come to the southern plantation house
on just such another dark, rainy night as the one on which he was
taken there as a prisoner. They marched as the confederate troops had
marched, along the driveway to the front of the house, and stood on the
lawn. A northern officer’s voice called as the southern officer had
called on that other night, and again the tall young negro came to the
door with a light, followed by that fiery woman of the Southland.
The negro held the light above his head so that, even in the darkness,
the blue coats of the hated northern troops could be seen.
The old southern woman came to stand at the edge of the porch. She
understood for what purpose the northern men had come, and she had
sworn that not a bite of food, raised on that plantation, should ever
pass the lips of a Yank.
Now she held a shotgun in her hand and, without a word or without any
sort of warning, raised it and fired into the mass of the men.
There was a cry of rage, and then many guns were raised to shoulders.
A sudden roar of the guns and a hundred leaden bullets cut through the
front of the house. It wiped out all of father’s family--except just
himself--and deprived his sons, too, of a proud southern ancestry; for,
just in the moment, before the shower of bullets came, father’s young
and innocent sister--realizing with that sure instinct that, everyone
understands, all women inevitably possess--realizing, I say, that death
was about to call her mother--the young girl had rushed panic-stricken
out of the door and had thrown her arms about her mother’s body,
just in time to meet death with her. And so all that was left of the
family--except just father--fell there in a heap. The captain of the
northern troops--a German brewer’s son from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cried
when later he looked down into the white silent face of the young girl,
and all his life afterward carried in his heart the remembrance of the
dead, pleading young eyes; but, as father so philosophically remarked,
what was done was done.
And with that fall there was father--a man left to wander forever
stricken and forlorn through life. Later he had, to be sure, married
and he had children whom he loved and treasured, but was that the same
thing? To the heart of a southerner, as every American understands,
ancestry means everything.
The purity of a southern woman is unlike any other purity ever known
to mankind. It is something special. The man who has been under the
influence of it can never afterward quite escape. Father didn’t expect
to. He declared always, after he had told the above story, that he did
not ever expect to be gay or happy again.
What he expected was that he would go on for the rest of his days
doing just what he was doing at the time. Well, he would try to bring
a little joy into the hearts of others--he would sing songs, dance a
little dance--he would join an old comrade in arms, one whose heart he
knew was as true as steel, and give a magic-lantern show. Others, for
an hour anyway, would be made to forget that element of sadness and
tragedy in life that he, of course, could never quite forget.
On that very night, lying half dead on the field of Gettysburg beside
the dead comrade of his youth, he had made up his mind to spend the
remaining days of his life bringing what sweetness and joy he could
into the lacerated hearts of a nation torn by civil strife. It had been
two o’clock in the morning before he was picked up by a squad of men
sent out to gather in the wounded, and already the news of the great
victory and the triumph of the cause of freedom was sweeping over the
northern land. And he had lain looking at the stars and had made his
resolution. Others might seek for the applause of the world, but, as
for himself, he would go into the dusty highways and byways of life
and bring to the lowly and forgotten the joy of a little fun at the
schoolhouse.