GETTYSBURG, MAY 30TH, 1909.
The Garrett party reached Gettysburg at mid-day, May 30th, 1909, having
passed through, in the train from Baltimore, the delightfully rural
scenes of western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. Recent rains had
swelled the brooks and expanded the ponds. The wide undulations of
hills and vales were radiant in verdure, responding with the alacrity
of new vegetation to the encouragement of the skies, that now in a
broad arch of fleckless blue, seemed to bend over them in pride and
emulation. A thousand pictures of loveliness, of homely domestic
bliss, of agricultural plenty, of bucolic thrift and retirement, met
their eyes, and Leacraft himself found a solace to his grieved soul
in resting his eyes upon spots of soft and uninjured beauty, wherein
nature and the gentle craft of pastoral life combined their artless
charms to make the landscape serene and inviting to the eye.
It was almost with regret that they left the train at Gettysburg.
The noise or motion of the cars, and the uninterrupted succession of
pleasant views from their windows had prevented conversation, in which
none of them, from preoccupation, or from anxiety, from, in one person
at least, sadness, or from, in this case to be exact, two persons,
extreme happiness, cared to enter. And when Gettysburg was itself
finally encountered, they found it in the last spasms of inordinate
repletion. The most exorbitant greed of guide and hackman, guide-book
man, publican and popcorn or peanut vendor, was abashed before a
popular consumption that threatened to drive them into a confession
of impotency. Everything that had cubic capacity, whether it moved or
stood still, whether it was a vehicle or a house, was aching under
the intolerable pressure of its human contents. Everywhere clouds of
flags decorated the air. The houses were beribboned and beflagged,
and innumerable lines crossing the streets in a web of suspensory
confusion, carried pennants and pictures to the last limits of their
carrying capacity, and to the bewilderment unutterable and admiration
unrepressed of the crowds beneath them. These crowds had become almost
stagnant because of the crowds in front of them, and these in turn
by reason of other crowds in front of them, until the successional
torpor seemed to reach out of sight, and presumably ended in some
greater peripheral crowd, which, having attained its appointed place by
choice or selection, refused to budge. To make their way, was almost
impossible to the visitors, whether they besought the services of a
driver, or tried the painful expedient of threading the human mass on
foot. In this extremity they simply remained where they were at first
arriving, hoping either the slow motion of the democratic assemblage
would afford them some sort of escape, or at some critical moment
the vast throng would resolve itself into dispersion, and under the
influence of direction or force, get itself better adjusted to the
requirements of its individuals.
Now, it was understood by all the published programmes of that day’s
exercises that the address of the President was to be delivered at
that historic spot known as the High Water Mark, which marks the
uprushing tide, the foaming crest and insurmountable limit of the
Rebellion, which thereafter receded in wavering surges to the south.
In the great reservation, devoted as a monument to the battle which
saved the Union, this spot is central, and the acres stretched about it
would accommodate an army. It was quite inexplicable why this annoying
interference and congestion prevailed. It turned out to be a military
precaution. The President was to be installed safely at the speaker’s
stand, escorted by veterans of the north and south, before the people
should be permitted to assemble around him, and a cordon of military
enclosed the little village, keeping confined within it the straining
and impatient visitors.
The village of Gettysburg, which was used in the great battle as
a hospital, and which entirely escaped injury in the three days’
conflict, was more than a mile away from the place chosen for the
ceremonies of the day. When the dam was removed it was seen there would
be a dangerous stampede for position. Music, too, swept exhilaratingly
over the throngs from the distant scene of the festivities, and its
martial notes awakened to desperation the disappointed and vexed
multitude. The large numbers twisted and irksomely tied up within the
narrow streets, and turbulently mixed up on the little square of the
village, groaned aloud.
Voices suddenly rose high in altercation and abuse. A farmer whose
rickety wagon, laden with his sons and daughters, had got packed
between a curb and a particularly dense fragment of the crowd, made up
of vituperative young men, and was in almost certain danger of being
upset, was engaged in a lusty expostulation not unassisted by the quick
and sharp lashes of his whip, over the heads of the dodging group. The
latter, not averse to some retaliatory measures that might serve the
purpose of freeing their general resentment at their imprisonment,
attacked the irate proprietor of the wagon and pushed his shivering
vehicle over, spilling its screaming and swearing occupants upon the
heads of the bystanders, who were utterly unable to escape, and added
their din to the commotion.
This diversion, attended with laughter, shouts and cries of pain,
had nearly subsided, when a new and more alarming disorder arose in
the neighborhood of the Garrett party, who had betaken themselves
to the porch of one of the souvenir shops. A wandering and aimless
dog, suffering from kicks and repulses, had turned on some of its
persecutors, and, yelping and snapping with inflamed and frightened
eyes, had suddenly been diagnosed, by an inconsiderate observer,
as “_mad_.” This information, as usually, proclaimed in a loud,
denunciatory tone, raised in a second an indescribable hubbub. Room to
run from the bewildered canine was not to be found, and the only thing
to do for those in the vicinity, was to squeeze more violently against
their companions, leaving a slender and irregular space in which the
dog gyrated, biting at friend and foe alike. The undulous area of
movement thus formed swayed to and fro, with the distracted struggles
of the dog, and soon swung violently towards the Garretts, who became
rudely jolted and pressed by frantic men and women, in whose legs
apprehension of the dog’s teeth seemed to have produced extraordinary
motions, for they shuffled and kicked and scrambled in a way very
undignified and ridiculous. The upshot of it was to drive a frenzied
pack of people towards the souvenir shop, in the hope of entering the
shop, and evading the wretched canine somewhere beneath their skirts
and trousers--an absurd design, as the shop itself was solid with
condensed humanity.
Brig Barry saw the danger, and quickly hustling Sally and Mrs. Garrett
between the men of his party, told all to stand firmly, after knitting
their arms within each other, forming an elastic and impenetrable wall.
As it was, the colliding tides around them sent them on an unexpected
orbit of translation, and a few minutes later they found themselves
pushed towards the trolley tracks, not far from the dishevelled and
malign looking local hotel, but in a less exposed and stormy quarter.
And now a marvellous change took place. The barriers were down; the
rolled up soldiers opened the avenues of approach; the President,
members of his Cabinet, the Commissioners of the Reservation, and the
veterans of the North and the South, were in place, and the delayed
populace, released from its confinement, with instantaneous expansion,
hurried over the roads and fields to the station of the High Water
Mark on Cemetery Ridge. It was a picturesque spectacle. When the
condensation was removed, it became apparent in how much splendor the
girls and women of the country and the near and distant towns had
been arrayed. They came from Harrisburg, from Emittsburg, along the
fatal road that Longstreet’s rangers followed, from Taneytown, from
Hagerstown, where Lee’s army had its rendezvous before the battle
of Seminary Ridge; from Chambersburg, which Ewell had dragooned;
from Wrightsville, where Early was balked by the burning of the
Susquehanna Bridge, on the 29th of June; from Newville, from Hanover,
from Fairfield, the belles and beaux had gathered, and with them no
indifferent number of their fathers and mothers. They wore their best
ginghams, and calicoes, and silks; the ancient trouseaus, refitted and
remade, still imparted the aspect of richness to their wearers, who,
ensconced beside their furrowed and tanned husbands, also refurbished,
so to speak, with store clothes and a rainbow neck-tie, felt the
novelty of life return, and something of the freshness of the glad
morning of existence. The girls were most happy and the boys voluble
and attentive. The caravan of vehicles would have tasked the vocabulary
of Tattersalls, though it was not altogether so remarkable for the
variety of its contents as the indefinite suggestion of varied ages in
its parts. And here and there some time-worn carryall creaking under
the infliction of an unusual load, and drawn by some Rosinante, whose
feeble gait and frequent halts betokened a sad contemporaneity with the
vehicle itself, offered a pathetic note in the hurrying splendor of the
congregated regalia of the barn and stable and garage.
The Garretts, once extricated from their embarrassed position, armed
with passports, one in the hands of Brig Barry, and a special card in
the possession of Mr. Garrett, as guest of the Chamber of Commerce of
Baltimore, had little difficulty in securing the essential indulgences
for a delightful day. In a three-seated coach wagon, with a splendid
team of horses, they bowled along as far as the beginning of Hancock
avenue, which leads from the National Cemetery to the Round Tops. Here
they alighted and surveyed the wondrous scene. It was resplendent. A
sun burning with the soft brilliancy of June bathed the grand distances
towards the Blue Hills in light, while the Blue Hills themselves
receded with artistic forbearance behind an atmosphere that veiled
them in an evanescent purple and yet seemed to magnify their height.
The slopes of Cemetery Ridge were covered by people, and the lower
levels where the Codori farm buildings stood; the Peach Orchard, where
Sickles and Longstreet met for the mastery; the grain field beyond,
over whose long stretches Pickett’s charge was made, were filled with
moving groups. The distant woods, the nearer groves, the grassy
fields, Little and Big Round Top, all were transfigured in the golden
blaze, and the innumerable monuments that gave the park-like Ridge a
sort of scenic artifice, seemed to become accordant, in the vastness
of the panorama, with its natural and simple features. The farm lands,
the white houses, dotting fields, or emerging with human interest
from lines of shadowing trees, the peace of the distant perspective,
accorded a welcome contrast to the foreground of the picture, immersed
in the waves of a popular assembly.
Automobiles flying like clouds rushed along the far away roads,
bicycles in undulating and streaming lines, grew large with rapid
approach; the gathering spots of people merged together and became
irregular squares, the squares united and became tracts, and the
tracts, by an incessant accretion, coincided along their edges until
Cemetery Ridge, the slopes towards Little Round Top and the field below
the “angle,” where Cushing and Armistead died, were unbrokenly covered
with the vast congregation, pulsating ceaselessly by an interior
agitation everywhere.
The heterogeneous assortment of conveyances were halted near the
National Cemetery, and the people made their way to the enclosure,
where the President was to address them, along the triumphal
monument-enfiladed boulevard of Hancock avenue.
The Garrett party had noticed the earnestness and apparent
preoccupation of the people. The news of the previous night had spread
its sinister announcements through the papers of the country, carried
to every village on the myriad fingered currents of the telegraph. It
had left its impress in the serious, sombre and sometimes dully frowned
faces of the men. “I feel sorry for the President,” said Sally. “The
Canal seemed almost himself, and the people thought of it and him
together. What will he do?”
“The President,” answered Ned Garrett, “will not flinch. Ever since he
went down to the Isthmus in 1906, and made the dirt fly, he has watched
the Canal with his whole heart in it. He knew what it meant for the
country, for the world, and now”--the speaker hesitated--“he will know
what to say and do. How I believe in that man!”
“But I can’t see,” continued Brig Barry, “that the idea of the Canal is
lost. Let us suppose there is a shifting and readjustment down there.
The two oceans are left behind, not much different, and if the isthmus
breaks down, splits up, and goes to thunder, there’s water enough to
cover the remains, and we have the Canal anyway.”
“But it isn’t our Canal any more,” ejaculated Sally. “It seems,” said
Mr. Garrett, “as if our grief had been premature. There is enough to
worry over in this frightful catastrophe, and its limits no one to-day
can correctly estimate, but as Brig says, the Canal idea is saved,
or at least it seems reasonable to believe that it may be. If Nature
makes a bigger canal, if she changes the face of the earth enough, as
Leacraft told us last night, to unite the oceans and make a strait, the
commercial union of the western and eastern continents is secured on a
larger scale. Perhaps our national pride must suffer some, but the fact
remains, though, it would have saved our exchequer a handsome outlay,
if nature, consulting our financial happiness, had done her work a
little earlier.”
“If we’d only waited,” sighed Mrs. Garrett, ruefully.
They had reached the edges of the throngs who stood in the sun,
engrossing every coigne of vantage, and an orderly, examining their
tickets, conducted them through a narrow lane of envious gazers to
a stand of seats to the south of the President’s rostrum. From this
position their eyes fell directly upon the amazing outpouring of the
people, an ocean of individuals, hopelessly cancelled from any chance
to hear the President’s voice, yet extending outward in a solemn
silence, and but furtively invaded by those busy concomitants of such
public gatherings--button men and popcorn merchants. For the most part
such annoyances were inordinately thrust aside, but scurrying over the
most distant outposts of the mammoth audience, their eager shapes
were seen, and inconstantly, borne inward by the breeze, the shrill
invitation of their voices was heard.
Leacraft fixed his eyes upon the President, and he was near enough to
him to note his expression. President Roosevelt sat squarely facing
the people--now crushing in with an irresistible impulse from the
distributed masses before him. He seemed serious, at moments almost
solemnly so, at others he turned to his companions with alacrity, and
his face even smiled at some allusion or whispered comment. Again his
eyes wandered dreamily--Leacraft thought sadly--to his notes, and then
he moved restlessly and leaned forward, and even half rose, eagerly
scanning the expectant faces. A jumping up of half a dozen men at the
rear of the platform, a signal of a waved handkerchief, followed, and
the band, stationed somewhere behind the distinguished occupants of the
platform, began the Star Spangled Banner. Everyone not already standing
rose, heads even uncovered, and the spirited strains seized by the
concourse, were flung back in a torrent of vocality, that sounded like
the far and near thunder of the ocean’s surges. It was overwhelming.
As if before the spirit of the Nation, the living and the dead;
those whose discarnate beings might seem rushing in upon them from
the viewless depths of space, summoned again to the fields of their
endeavor by the marshall air, hats were doffed in all directions,
until scarcely a covered head among the men remained, and many eyes
streamed with irrepressible tears. The note of a requiem, the prouder
challenge of defiance, the lofty questioning of Hope, the loving
clasp of fraternal patriotism, the aspirations of a race, solving
“in the foremost files of time” the problem of the world’s political
creed, seemed blended together, in the avalanche of sound. And it was
maintained to the end, even the verses of the national anthem were well
remembered, and that trying and unattainable high note, like the scream
of the eagle, which closes the lips of most singers in dubious apathy,
was now sustained. The President sang lustily, and then he stopped, his
head bowed; he might have been in prayer. It was noticed by all and it
almost seemed as if the music quailed and sank before the mystery of a
man’s outpoured petition to his God.
It was over. The music ceased, the frail voice of the chairman sounded
its quavering invitation to prayer, and a clergyman arose and droned an
invocation. The President was introduced and stood forward. He was well
in view. One hand grasped the railing before him, the other clutched
some separated papers, he looked well and the man’s vitality, his
zealous unmitigated self exaction were realized. As he was seen, the
tumult rose to a tremendous climax, cheers rolled forward and backward
like the fluctuating billows of a sea; they receded to the outer
margins far toward the Hagerstown road, where they vanished in murmurs,
they crashed inward in volleying thunders, and the President stood
erect, nerved to a steel-like rigidity; the air was swept with flags,
the intoxication of the emotion increased, women palled before it, and
men grew pale with the delirium of sudden enthusiasm. It seemed as if
music alone could lead them back into the resignation of attention. It
was a stupendous tribute. The man to whom it was given, had no reason
for misgiving, no retributive judgments for his actions, to dread.
Slowly, very slowly the cheering and cries died away, and then ensued a
silence as remarkable and as impressive. The two contrasted states of
the multitude might have been interpreted as a generous invitation to
the man to speak, and as a judicial reservation of mind as to its own
verdict when he had spoken. It almost seemed so, and the quick heart of
the President might again have felt the palpitation of a doubt, whether
he stood approved, or a critical people withdrew into the refuge of
an impartial scrutiny. Leacraft felt all this, and he could not help
also feeling a curious interest in the purely psychological enigma it
presented.
The President was speaking; his voice reached Leacraft thin and sharp:
“My friends,” he began, “To-day we celebrate again the brave deaths
of brave men, and the sacrifices they made for the maintenance of our
common country. And we are gathered together on the battlefield which
more than any other battlefield in that historic war, represented the
culminating energies of both sides, the last vital contention for
the mastery. These men left behind them the inestimable example of
fortitude. And after the battle of Gettysburg it was more difficult
for the southern man to continue the fight, in the face of disaster,
with a depleted country behind him, and a foe flushed with victory,
and drawing upon almost illimitable resources, than for his northern
brother, for whom at last the tide of war seemed to have turned. We
to-day need the lesson of this fortitude of the man in gray.
“My friends, a disaster has overtaken us,”--the crowd before the
President seemed to compress itself in a further effort to get closer
to him, “and it is our duty to remain firm and unfalteringly confident.
I can scarcely doubt that you all have heard that nature has destroyed
the Nation’s work. The face of the earth at the Isthmus of Panama is
altered. Our work, our expenditures, the lives of thousands of hard
working men have been sacrificed, and we stand aghast before a natural
revolution unequaled in our day, unparalled perhaps in all the annals
of history; something which in its wide devastating power, crushes our
pride, and for a moment makes us cease to think, to plan, to build. I
come to you this morning with strange tidings--tidings so unspeakably
great in their influence upon our knowledge, that I almost hesitate to
pronounce them, lest I might find myself the victim of some horrible
and wicked hoax. The Isthmus of Panama, from Quibo Island in Montijo
Bay, on the west, to the confines of the valley of the Atrato River
at the edge of the Columbia, on the east, is deviously, here with a
regular movement of depression, in another place with violent shock,
sinking beneath the waters of the opposite encroaching oceans that
swings backward and forward on either side in awful tidal deluges.
“The latest news confirms all the previous reports. Slowly, surely,
even with hastening steps, the narrow neck of Panama, with its
shallow shores, its long exposure of swamp and mud flats, with its
crumbling hills, covered with tropical life will be engulfed, and the
two continents of North and South America will return to a pristine
condition of geographical autonomy. It is hard to believe. I cannot
recount to you the wonderful pictures, terror-inspiring, and yet
majestic with the majesty of Nature’s awful deeds, which have been sent
to us. The loss of life has been considerable, but not proportionate
to the stupendous agencies involved. After the first earthquake
upheavals, the quickly succeeding disappearance of the solid ground
furnished an adequate warning, and the populations along the canal-way
at the villages and camps, and at Aspinwall and Panama, retreated to
the hills, and with them the animal life, in a singular copartnership
of fear. It is now regarded as certain, that we are about to see the
last vestiges of the canal itself, the work of these last four years
disappearing in the folding in and submergence of the rock strata.”
The President then told the story of the catastrophe as it had been
narrated in the despatches received at the White House. He painted in
graphic words the shaking down of the hills, the dislodged blankets
slipping from the hill sides like a shawl from a shuddering woman,
carrying with them the crashing trees, the jungle growth, the entwined
tendrilous creepers and vines, while above the trees, swaying toward
each other and then outward as if following the crests and troughs
of hidden waves, above these tottering trees, the birds in screaming
volleys rose and fell. The bared rocks showed rents, and tremendous
explosions sent their shattered fragments into the air, while long
weird groans issued from the ground as if the buried foundations of the
hills were undergoing the tortures of mutilation. In other places it
had been quite different. The ground slowly seemed to melt away, and
with a sort of shuddering succession of chills the land disappears.
How long, how much further this swallowing up of the land will go no
one can tell. But it has seemed to those who have some knowledge of
the region that it may embrace the S shaped Isthmus only, and that the
tapering ends of the bulwarks of elevation in the Rocky Mountain chain
on the north, and the Andes on the south will resist this degradation,
that Costa Rica on the north and Columbia on the south will rudely
define the north and south edges of the new avenue or gateway of unions
between the oceans, that the new canal in this way, reconstructed
by the titanic convulsions of nature, will become a wide and useful
passage for commerce.
The President indulged the evident curiosity of his popular audience
in a scientific discourse. His own interest was evident. He discussed
earthquakes; he plunged into an essay on volcanoes; he spread
luminously before the people the theories of the pear-shaped earth,
the slipping of faults, the loading of the earth’s crust, the original
formation of the deep creases in the earth’s surface, which now held
its gathered waters. The President made a model expositor. He was clear
and interesting. His style, his illustrative similes were attractive
and deliberately helpful. It was almost amusing to note the contrasted
effect of this improvised academic demonstration upon the people and
upon the political sages of the platform. The former were attentive and
absorbed. Their faces lit up with the quiet pleasure of intelligent
appreciation, frequently at some pungent expression that pictured to
them in stirring forcible photographic phrase the stifling struggle of
land and water, the fierce unrest far down there in the tropics, which
was unsettling the foundations of the earth, and slowly establishing a
new order of things, pregnant with revolution in the day and fate of
nations, carrying in its geological material insensate womb of meaning
the dissolution of states, the upset and consternation of rulers,
a menace to civilization, the ruthless unwavering threat to human
accidents and institutions.
To all this the political magnates listened with bored indifference.
They expected a party appeal, some appetizing bid for popular suffrage,
a shot at the South, a resounding puff for the Republican candidates,
a public acknowledgement of their personal industry in securing the
re-election of himself, new projects of expenditure, and a programme
of national expansion. They turned and twisted, and some deliberately
slept or engaged in low conversations with an expressive irony of
shrugs and smiles.
The President paused, his hands came together, and he leaned far
forward, and a moment’s hesitancy marked the termination of his
scientific periods. He continued, with sudden earnestness and vigour,
with almost self-surrender to the impetus of his thought: “My friends,
these are the facts, and no lamentations can change them. We must
learn from the courage and devotion of the men who left this field
defeated, to face this new predicament, not with resignation, simply,
but with the constructive determination to seize this new turn in
events and force it into our service, to make it only a more complete
realization of our first designs. This is the triumph of Opportunity.
Thus shall we wrest from the confusion of chance its empire of the
fitting moment, and drive its scattered impulses into the straight, the
narrow path of our strictest needs. The canal as a commercial necessity
cannot be eclipsed or abandoned. The original project is replaced.
Replaced by something greater, more permanent, more cosmopolitan. It
becomes no longer a provincial fact, a national asset simply. It is a
feature of the earth.
“What exactly has happened, how complete is the transformation no one
exactly knows, but if the assistance of engineering is still to be
invoked it can only be in a way of a help to nature. The facts remain.
“And now my friends a stranger possibility confronts us, nay it lifts
up a sinister and awful, an ominous portent for the leading nations of
the world. It seems likely that this physical alteration may mean a
change in the climate of the older portion of the earth.”
Again the President launched into a scientific lecture and he was
fortunate, as at first, as alertly careful, as broadly popular, as
adroitly technical, without obscurity. It was well received. And its
conclusion was altogether wonderful. Leacraft had good reason to listen
with all his ears.
The President described the contrasted temperatures of similar
latitudes in Europe and America, how England on the latitude of
Labrador was warmer than New York which found its Adirondack
mountains--chilled in the depth of winter to almost forty degrees
below zero--on the same degree as southern France; itself the type
and synonym of warmth. He made it clear how the thermal flood of warm
waters upon the shores of Europe--heating the drifting airs above it
till, laden with moisture, they too added their gifts of rain and
warmth to Great Britain, and the shores of Scandinavia; how this Gulf
Stream, a wayward impressionable wandering river pushing past Florida
with a cubic capacity of seven hundred thousand cubic feet of water in
half a second of time, and, held in its fluctuating course by the laws
of gravity, how this marvellous oceanic flood, controlled the material
conditions of England’s greatness; grasped, as it were, in the filmy
fingers of its webbed and spreading tides, its wealth, its maritime
supremacy, its intellectual distinction, its domestic thrift, and sunny
sweetness. And then the President ended, and Leacraft bent forward,
gripped the railing before him with sudden fierceness, a knell
strangely appalling sounded in his ears, a portent widely distracting
and unreasonable drove the color from his cheeks.
The President ended with these words: “The Gulf Stream whipped into
violent activity by the south east trade winds beats impetuously upon
the islands of the West Indies, washes the beaches of Central America,
and whirls its spinning tides within the Gulf of Mexico, and then,
repulsed by the continuous shore lines of North America, returns to
Europe bearing its mantle of verdure to be thrown over the hills, the
capes, the valleys the western edges and islands of the Old World.
But now the barrier is gone. The Gulf Stream before the strong and
rapacious winds is no longer turned aside by impossible walls of land
but triumphantly sweeps into the Pacific, and with it vanishes the
glory of England. For ourselves it means singular disaster though it
may bring compensating changes. If England disappears as a world power
we are robbed of a friend, we have lost a market. What words shall
measure the moral meaning of the first, what revenues express the
yearly increasing value of the latter. We stand on the threshold of a
New Era.”
The termination of this remarkable address was its most momentous
and unexpected announcement. As the President sat down, there was
no applause, just a ripple of clapping hands as a half-hearted
recognition of an invariable habit. The speech had been utterly
robbed of political significance, despoiled of rhetorical or personal
emphasis, it failed entirely as the usual thing in public oratory,
and it left behind it an oppressive sense of impending changes.
The President seemed depressed by his own vaticinations, and those
around him, chilled into anxious forebodings, sat stiffly silent and
unresponsive. The moment was saved from intolerable embarrassment by
the band.
The leader stepped forward, waved his baton and the solemn strains
of America--the transplanted hymn of England--rose plaintively,
like a prayer; to Leacraft it sounded like encouragement, like
sympathy. Someone began to sing--hats came off, the guests rose, and
the multitude sang. If the Star Spangled Banner had been exultant
and triumphant, thronged with the memories of achievement and
victory--America throbbed with supplication, and underneath the
supplication, the fervor of allegiance, sacrifice and love. The
peculiar awkwardness of an unusual, an unique predicament, was removed.
The speakers following the President made no allusion to the Canal,
and all the marvellous happenings far away in Central America. They
led the people’s thought back again to the soil they stood upon, to
the memories of a glorious past, to the hopes of the future, the
realization of the present tasks, the reiteration of the nation’s
wealth and happiness, its strength under misfortune, its illimitable
resources. They were successful. The pall of misgivings which the
President had invoked was lifted. The band broke out again with
reassuring liveliness, and good humour and holiday satisfaction revived.
Then came a procession through the Reservation to Big Round Top and
back again on the lower ground past the Devil’s Den, and over the
Emmetsburg road to Gettysburg, and in the clamorous excitement,
the parade of uniforms, the brilliant atmosphere, congratulations
and convivial indulgence, all the President’s words became clouded
and unreal. And if the Isthmus was covered by water, if the Gulf
Stream was deflected, if it meant blight for England, what of it?
The United States would only become greater--its magnification would
be unquestioned, boundless; the stars in their courses worked for
them, and the mutations of the earth’s surface only brought to them
unrivalled aptitudes for new chances, for new power.
This was said a good many times by a good many kinds of men, and the
intangible something it suggested, by repetition, assumed the force
of demonstration. There was a distinguishable forgetfulness of the
disasters that had come, and a listless thought of those that were
threatened. A few observant and reflecting minds brooded over the
strange catastrophe, and yielded an attention to their implications.
This attitude sprang from knowledge, and in the case of Leacraft from
a personal interest in the singular sequence of events which the
President portrayed, and which even the placidity of an Englishman’s
confidence in his destiny failed to contemplate as injurious fiction.
It was a thing to be reflected upon, at least, and added its sombre
influence to deepen the gloom of Leacraft’s disappointment. But it
also gradually developed for him a remedial efficacy, not simply as
a spurious employment for his thoughts, but through a substantial
relevancy to his emotional needs.
Leacraft’s mental inclinations carried him towards speculative
forecasts. He had cultivated his predilections along all sorts of
scientific horoscopes, and had enjoyed the indulgence of his fancy
in studying nations and inventions, with a view to composing a plan
or description of their future condition, phase and expression. He
had arrived at some curious results, but they represented solely
the changed surface of society, in its industrial, civic or social
states, or else, in their more immaterial flights, pictured the
enduring alterations of religious or philosophic systems. In all
these speculations he had quite neglected the physical constants of
the world, its climate and topography. His thought engaged itself
with the mechanical structure of civilization, as affected by new
discoveries, allied with an increasing utilitarianism, in which the
individual vanishes before the imperious supervention of the State, the
incorporated multitude, the abstract Wisdom of the most knowing minds,
influenced by a solicitous paternalism for the Whole.
But now he found himself confronted by a new exigency, the geological
interferences of Nature, and it piqued his curiosity, it assailed his
fancy with indubitable fascination. By reason of his intellectual
proneness to these questions, which quite deeply occupied his mind, he
felt at this moment that the tremendous and supreme chance of his own
mighty nation, succumbing to the accidents of a tidal caprice might
offer him an alternative refuge of interest which would help to dull
the pain of his misfortune. So convulsing a spectacle as the pitiless
war of nature upon the embedded bulwarks of a great commercial nation’s
prosperity, terrified him as a possible historical fact. Above all, it
terrified him as a British subject. It became so overwhelming in the
magnitude of its effects that he shudderingly admitted to himself that
his love for Sally suffered a relieving diminution, as though in such
events the End of the World seemed precipitated, and all human ties
became obliterated, were dissolved.
The day closed in resplendent beauty. The sun curtained in a haze,
shed a diffused glory through the upper sky, and sank at last in a
grating of narrow bars of cloud, that lay across the west like reefs
of gold, slowly transmuted into a purple nimbus upon the faintly
turquoised ether. The great crowds dispersed, the troops escorted the
President away, and music from near and far seemed to mingle dreamily
with the mute harmonies of the sunset.
The Garretts, with Mr. Leacraft and Brig Barry, returned that night by
train to Baltimore. The night proved a sleepless and excited one for
Leacraft. He felt ill at ease. There was much reason for uneasiness
and heartache, and the hours passed in a dull series of mournful
reflections upon his own trouble, and the immodest threat of nature at
the prestige of his people.
The next morning he entered the library and found Miss Garrett bending
over the morning paper. She looked up as he appeared in the doorway,
and there was for both a moment’s hesitation, before the morning’s
greeting passed their lips. It was Sally who first spoke, and her voice
was eager with alarm.
“Mr. Leacraft, the President’s lecture--surely, it was nothing else--is
all here. And there is more news from the Isthmus. The land is sinking,
all sinking, and”--she turned to the paper--“almost all the canal has
now disappeared beneath the assault of the waves, and a stormy waste of
waters sweeps across the Isthmus of Panama. Isn’t it simply fearful?
And nothing can be done.”
“Miss Garrett,” answered Leacraft slowly, his eyes sadly resting upon
her face, grown more beautiful, he thought, by the dwelling of a tender
fearfulness in her eyes, “it is a fearful thing; an occurrence such as
this is a pretty sharp shock to our sense of security. I can’t forget
the President’s words. As an Englishman I really contemplate coming
events with a positive terror. But there is something else, Miss Sally,
I beg to speak about, another sorrow for me, though I must not permit
my selfish regret to cloud your happiness.”
Sally Garrett came quite close to Leacraft. She had a true estimate
of his strong and dignified nature; she yielded the just homage
of affectionate regard, but her heart had never been moved by the
Englishman’s impressive seriousness. Leacraft was about to speak
again when voices were heard approaching, and among them the vigorous
intonations of Brig Barry. Leacraft stopped, and a shadow of suffering
crossed his pale face. Sally understood too clearly. She put out her
hand and seized his, and pressed it kindly, and Leacraft understood her
sympathy.
Brig and Ned Garrett came into the room, and soon the discussion of the
strange events taking place at the Isthmus occupied the group, to which
in a few minutes Mr. and Mrs. Garrett were added.
Leacraft shortened his visit under the pretext of an engagement in New
York, and it was years after that he again saw Miss Sally Garrett--then
become Mrs. Brig Barry--after the stupendous facts on the following
pages had made the Kingdom of Great Britain part of the Frozen North.