The forty million Africans who had been raped from the Dark Continent
and distributed among the Christian nations at so much per head, had
made little active resistance to being swallowed, but had proved hard
to digest. The missionary movements just begun had made little progress
in Africa and some thought it an advantage to bring the Africans to
the country where they could have the benefits of training in the
true religion. But this training had a little too much to do with an
education in the arts of bloodhounds, in the vigor of overseers’ whips
and in the dramatic experiences of the auction block.
This transplanted race threw off such myriads of mulattoes, quadroons
and octoroons that the situation had social complications: involving
the future life as well as this. While most of the Americans were
undoubtedly going to hell, those who were going to heaven were not
comfortable at the prospect of flying around with black saints whose
haloes might get caught in their kinky hair. People were saying that
America “could not exist half black and half white”; some doubted if
even heaven could exist half black and half white.
The pestiferous abolitionists had survived mobs, courts, and the horror
of being unfashionable. Even the churches could not keep infidels in
their congregations from questioning the manifest will of God, who in
Mosaic law had imposed and regulated slavery, and in the New Testament
had commanded the return of a runaway slave. Numerous individual
clergymen had taken a conspicuous part in this form of sacrilege,
but the great majority were true to their creeds, and denounced the
heretics. The Methodist and other churches in official assemblies
repeatedly disciplined their anarchic parsons and forbade the attempt
to stir up useless hostility by advocating “emancipation.” But the
trouble-mongers would not be quieted. In spite of the efforts of the
respectables, there was, as one New York writer put it, a “lamentable
squandering of vast sums of money in an improbable and visionary
crusade, which might have conferred inestimable benefits had they not
been diverted from the legitimate channels of Christian benevolence.”
And now the outrageous disturbers had split the nation. Mayor Fernando
Wood, having failed to secede from the state, proposed that New
York City should secede from the Union. He was not heeded. Indeed
a number of prominent citizens held a meeting in Pine Street and
passed resolutions pleading with Mr. Jefferson Davis and the Southern
governors to return to the fold. RoBards was one of the signers of this
appeal.
To him and to others the great house of the republic could not be
divided. It was a pity to let a herd of ignorant blacks disrupt the
sacred compact. Numberless New Yorkers detested the abolitionists as
heartily as the Southerners did.
But the younger, hotter blood of the North demanded action. They did
not care much for the niggers, but they hated the secessionists. Keith
terrified Patty by his belligerent tone. He wanted to set out at once
and trample Richmond and Atlanta and Charleston into submission.
Strangely, very strangely, his martial humor brought on a sudden
amatory fever, and awoke a sudden interest in a certain young woman of
an old and wealthy family: Frances Ward, a relative of the banker Ward
who had moved into Bond Street when it began to rival St. John’s Park
as a select region.
At first Patty had been glad to have Keith seen about with the girl.
Patty had a wholesome and normal amount of snobbery in her nature, and
it pleased her to tell of the great people she had known, especially
the Ward sisters. They had been called “The Three Graces of Bond
Street,” until Julia had terrified everybody by going in for learning
to an almost indecent extent. Six years younger than Patty, she
had, at the age of seventeen, published a review and a translation
of a French book, reviewed German translations, and finally married
an outright philanthropist, Dr. Howe. She had become an abolitionist
and assistant editor of an anti-slavery paper! Not to mention her
activities as a mother, a poetess, the author of a play produced
at Wallack’s, and recently of a book on Cuba, which was forbidden
circulation in that island.
Still, much is forgiven to a banker’s daughter, and Patty encouraged
Keith to cultivate the relative of Julia Ward Howe. Frances took the
place of the aqueduct in Keith’s affections and Patty called her “the
Nymph Crotona” in proud ridicule. Every evening when Keith was not at
the Seventh Regiment in its armory over Tompkins market, he was at the
home of Miss Ward, or out with her in one of the great sleighs that
thrilled Broadway with tintinnabulation.
Keith sighed at the thought of love and roared at the thought of war.
He engaged in bitter wrangles with the supporters of the South, of whom
there seemed to be more than there were enemies. Often he came home
with knuckles bloody from the loosened teeth of disputants; but he
washed the gore away and went forth to woo.
Then suddenly he announced that he and Frances were to be married
immediately without even the splendid ceremony that might have given
Patty a medicine of excitement. She wailed aloud uncomforted. She was
losing another child by the half-death of marriage.
“I’d like to poison the girl,” she cried, “she’ll have me a grandmother
in a year! Immy’s children are so far away they don’t count. Still, if
it will keep Keith from the war, I’ll be a dozen grandmothers.”
But Keith was not thinking of marriage as a substitute for war. It was
a prelude. The war mood was causing a stampede toward matrimony.
Death overspread the horizon like a black scythe sky-wide. Terror
became a kind of rapture. Life looked brief; and every moment sweet
because moments might be few.
The warrior heart surged with the thought, “I may not be beating
long.” The woman heart mourned: “My love who clasps me may soon lie
cold in death on a muddy field.”
Fear grew to a Bacchanal whose revelry is fierce because the drab
dawn is near. Men were greedy in their demands and women reckless in
their surrenders because their world was on the brink of doom. To the
lover expecting the bugle to cry “March!” at daybreak, the night was
desperate with crowded desires, and the beloved wondered if it were not
less a virtue than a treason to deny him any last luxury she had to
offer.
It had been so in every war. It came so in this. It was the unsuspected
tragic aspect of that ancient farce when Vulcan flung out his steel net
and caught Mars and Venus in each other’s arms; exposed them to the
laughter of the gods. But the laughter of the gods is the suffering of
the clods; and with war hovering, amours that had been disgraceful in
peace looked pitiful, beautiful, patriotic.
Keith was married on a Thursday in April and set out for a brief
honeymoon at Tuliptree Farm. The next day the nation’s flag at
Fort Sumter was fired on. The next day after that—the thirteenth
it was—Major Anderson saluted the flag with fifty guns before he
surrendered. The Sunday _Herald_ carried the headline “Dissolution
of the Union” and stated that on the night before a mass meeting had
been held to force the administration to desist from Mr. Lincoln’s
expressed intention to coerce the seceding states. But the challenge
and the insult to the Stars and Stripes stung most of the waverers into
demanding the blood of the insolent Southrons.
Monday morning Mr. Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand militia to
devote three months to suppressing the Rebellion. Nobody thought it
would take that long, but it was well to be safe.
The New York Legislature voted the amazing sum of three million
dollars; the Chamber of Commerce whereas’d and resolved that the
Southern ports should be blockaded; a hundred thousand people held a
mass meeting in Union Square. Patty was there, telling everybody that
when she was a girl Union Square was a paupers’ cemetery out in the
country. Judge RoBards was one of the eighty-seven vice-presidents
selected, along with Peter Cooper and historian Bancroft and W. C.
Bryant, Mr. William Bond, Mr. J. J. Astor, Mr. Lorillard, Mr. Hewett,
Mr. Morgan, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Fish—all the big ones.
The militia offered itself with a heroism all the finer for the
fact that it lacked only uniform, equipment, ammunition, drill,
organization, officers and men, and knowledge of war and of the more
perilous problems of taking care of the feet and the bowels.
One regrettable effect of the war spirit was the boldness of some of
the women. The ridiculous suffragists linked female freedom with black
liberty and asked that white women be granted what black men were to
receive. This impudence was properly quelled, but, in spite of all
the opposition, the regrettable influence of Florence Nightingale
encouraged restless women to offer their services in nursing—a nasty
business hitherto mainly entrusted to drunken and dissolute women of
the jails.
Before the wretched war was over, two thousand American women had
drifted into the most unladylike of activities. Sane people feared that
what was begun in war would be continued in peace, and that before long
ladies would be studying physiology and other subjects, at the very
mention of which nice females had fainted in the good old times.
While New York City was going mad with battle-ardor, up in Westchester
County a teacher in the city public schools began to form a company
called “The Westchester Chasseurs.”
One of the first to join was a lout named Gideon Lasher. RoBards saw
the name in a paper and it gave his heart a twist.
There was a mad explosion of war feeling and the irresistible noise
of war when the Sixth Massachusetts came to town one night on the
boat. The next morning the New Englanders went up Broadway with a
thumpity-thumpity-thump of drums and had breakfast at the Astor House;
then marched with gleaming bayonets and Yankee-Doodling fifes and
rolling standards through a sea of people. They met death first in the
Baltimore streets.
On Friday afternoon the Seventh New York pushed through the mob of
fathers, mothers, wives, sweethearts, sisters, brothers, on its way to
the transports. It hurried to the salvation of Washington, where the
Government was said to be packed in a valise for a backdoor escape.
Patty marched down Broadway clinging to the arm of Keith, embarrassing
him wonderfully, and none the less for the fact that she crowded his
wife aside.
Wives and mothers and girls betrothed were all agog over madly sweet
farewells. There was a civil war of love about Keith.
After a brief jostling match with Patty, Frances gave up the struggle
and with a last fierce hug and a hammering of kisses, fell away into
the mass of crumpled crinolines at the curb and was lost to Keith’s
backward gaze.
His heart ran to her but he could not rebuke the triumphant laugh of
his mother, who scuttered alongside, with hardly equal steps clinging
to him so tight that her hoop skirts must bulge out sidewise and
brush the throngs. She was no longer the radiant beauty, but only a
frightened little old lady whose child was striding off to all that
a mother’s heart could imagine for her anguish. And at last the hard
cobbles broke her little feet and made them bleed as her heart bled.
Her breath came in such quick gasps that she could not speak. Her
breath became a drumming of sobs and her eyes spilled so many tears
that she could not mind her way. Finally, realizing that her stumbling
threw her soldier out of step and out of the alignment of which the
Seventh was so proud; realizing blindly that her grief was beginning to
break his pride and would send him to war blubbering, she panted:
“Kiss me good-by, oh, my little boy, for I must let you go.”
He bent his head and drenched her cheeks with his tears, as their lips
met in salt. The soldier behind him jostled his heel and forced him
along. And that was the last he saw of his mother for four years.
Patty was flung back from the edges of the companies, going by like
the blades of a steamer’s wheel. She got home somehow, and it was
no consolation to her that thousands of other mothers joined her in
despair as regiment after regiment filled Broadway with the halloo of
trumpets and the thud of warward feet.
The Irish Sixty-ninth had not drilled since it refused to honor the
Prince of Wales, but now Colonel Corcoran begged that the colors should
be restored, and promised to march a thousand men in twenty-four hours.
He got his prayer and kept his word. And the Sixth and Twelfth and the
Seventy-first, and the Eighth and the Twenty-eighth and the others went
forth into the dark, so that numerals took on a sacred significance
once more.
Day after day, night after night, the streets throbbed like the
arteries of men who have been running. The glory and the pride of
war made hearts ache with a grandeur of neighborliness. The religion
of nationhood became something awesome like the arrival of a new
all-conquering deity upon the mountain tops. Suddenly the words “My
Country” conjured a creed. People vied with one another to die in
proof of their fealty to this vague thing that but yesterday had been
a politician’s joke, a schoolboy’s lesson in geography. This flag that
had been a color scheme for decorating band stands on Fourths of July
became an angel’s wing streaked with blood, a thing that filled the
eyes with tears, the soul with hosannas.
Then the hilarious victory of the Bull Run picnic was turned into
a panic of disaster, of shame, of dismay. Lists of dead men became
news, and the poor citizens gnashed their teeth upon their grief,
understanding how grim and long a game they had begun. Whichever side
won the game, both must lose infinitely precious treasures only now
valued truly.
All the songs were war songs; all the love-stories had either warriors
or skulkers involved; the rejoicings were over the disasters of other
Americans, other mothers and fathers; the highest of arts was the art
of destruction; the zest of life was in slaughtering and enduring. Life
had more beauty and glory than ever but no more prettiness, no grace.
One day RoBards brought home the paper, and after assuring Patty that
Keith’s name was not in any of the gory catalogues, he said:
“Our relative-in-law—Cousin Julia Ward Howe—has broken into poetry
again. It’s a war poem, very womanly for a blue-stocking; not bad.”
Patty took the paper and glanced at it carelessly. Being about silks
the verses caught her and her smile became a look of pain. RoBards
said, “Read it aloud to me. I used to love to hear you read aloud.”
She read. And because of the miracle there is in the voice, especially
to him in her voice, the poem seemed to him a thing of deeper sorrow
and more majesty than any of the bombast that filled the press. It was
a dirge for beautiful glad things:
“Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
To deck our girls for gay delights!
The crimson flower of battle blooms,
And solemn marches fill the nights.
“Weave but the flag whose bars to-day
Drooped heavy o’er our early dead,
And homely garments, coarse and gray,
For orphans that must earn their bread.
“Keep back your tunes, ye viols sweet,
That poured delight from other lands!
Rouse there the dancer’s restless feet:
The trumpet leads our warrior bands.
“And ye that wage the war of words
With mystic fame and subtle power,
Go, chatter to the idle birds,
Or teach the lesson of the hour!
“Ye Sibyl Arts, in one stern knot
Be all your offices combined!
Stand close, while Courage draws the lot,
The destiny of human kind.”
Patty’s voice died away on the last stanza. RoBards, the lawyer, the
pleader, the juggler of words like cannon balls, admired the exalted
phrases, the apostrophic strain, but Patty was touched only by the
first and third stanzas and like a mournful nightingale she warbled
softly to a little tune made up of reminiscences of the opera:
“Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms.”
Only as she trilled it it ran:
“We-e-e-eave no mo-o-ore silks, ye Ly-y-ons loo-oo-oo-ooms.”
It got caught in her thoughts and ran through her head for weeks,
until unconsciously she was always crooning or whispering the haunting
syllables.
It was odd that a city-bred banker’s daughter should have written the
most graceful of war elegies. It was odder yet that in a still darker
hour when discouragement gripped the unsuccessful North and recruits
were deaf to the call, this same woman should fire the country with the
most majestic of battle-hymns:
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”
A shy little wife of a preacher wrote the most successful novel ever
written, and brought on the war; and a banker’s daughter gave it its
noblest voice.
No wonder that women were getting out of hand, and questioning the
ancient pretense of the male; calling his bluff. That song chanted
everywhere to the forward-marching tune of “John Brown’s Body” started
a new current of volunteers and brought the final resolution to many a
hesitant patriot. And Patty was proud again to claim relationship to
the daughter of money and of song.
But the Battle Hymn seemed to harrow the soul of her boy Junior. There
were dark secrets back of his eyes. Patty would fling her arms about
him to shut out the Lorelei-appeal of the bugles that rang through the
streets calling, calling. She tried to hide from his eyes the uniforms
that shamed his civilian clothes. And she would plead:
“Don’t leave me, Junior boy! Don’t leave your poor old mother! I’ve got
a right to keep one son, haven’t I? Promise me you won’t go.”
He would pet her and kiss her, but never quite give the pledge she
implored.
Then one day while Patty was standing at the window and her husband was
reading in a newspaper the story of the heroisms and tragedies of his
neighbors’ sons, Patty cried out:
“Mist’ RoBards, look! Come quick!”
He ran to her side and peered through the glass.
Below was a youth in uniform clinging to the iron fence, waveringly.
RoBards said:
“It’s just some young soldier who has drunk too many toasts.”
He turned back to his paper, but Patty whirled him round again:
“No, no, no! It’s Junior! He’s in uniform! He’s afraid to come in and
break my heart!”
RoBards’ own heart seemed to feel the grip of a terrible hand, wringing
the blood out of it; but he caught Patty to him and held her fast as if
to hold her soul to its treadmill duty. He mumbled:
“You’re not going to make it too hard for him?”
She shook her head; but tears were flung about, glittering. Her
frowning brows seemed to squeeze her very brain, to compel it to
bravery. Then she ran to the washbasin and bathed her eyes, slapped
them with cold water, and rouged and powdered her cheeks, to flirt with
despair! She straightened herself like an orderly sergeant a moment,
saluted, and said: “Now!”
Then she ran down the stairs, opened the front door, and called:
“Come in here, you big beautiful soldier!”
When Junior shambled up the steps with awkward poltroonery, she clapped
her hands and admired:
“My, my, my! how handsome we are! I’ll bet the Johnny Rebs will just
climb over one another to get out of your way.”
Junior was fooled by her bravado. He breathed deep of the relief of
escaping both her protest and the shame of not going for a soldier. He
was young and innocent, but RoBards was old enough to know what abysmal
gloom was back of Patty’s jocund eyes.
On his last night in town, Junior was away for two hours. When he came
home, he said he had been at the armory; but he was so labored in his
carelessness that Patty laughed:
“Did she cry very hard?”
Junior did not even smile at that. There was not much fun in Patty’s
laugh, either.
The next morning she rejoined the multitudes that crowded the curbs
and waved wet handkerchiefs at the striding soldiery while the high
walls of Broadway shops flung back and forth the squealing fifes and
thrilling drums and the ululant horns.