Chapter II: Book FOUR: 345 (2)

That was indeed a night of adventure! It was a tale he loved telling, and what realistic touches he could put into it: the rain that wet the prisoners to the skin--the cold--the chattering teeth--the groans of weary men--the closeness of the dark forest on either hand--the steady weary chug-chug of the feet of the prisoners in the mud--the line of guards at either side of the road, with the guns over their shoulders--the curses of the Rebel guards when they stumbled in the darkness.

What a night of weary anguish on the part of the prisoners! When they stopped to rest the guards went into a house and left the prisoners to stand outside in the rain, or lie on the bare ground, guarded by part of the company. If any died of exposure--well, there would be that many less men to feed when they were got into the Southern prison camp.

And now, after many days and nights, marching thus, the souls of the prisoners were sick with weariness. A dreary desolated look would come upon father’s face as he spoke of it.

They marched steadily along in the deep mud and the rain. How cold the rain was! Now and then, in the darkness, a dog barked, far away somewhere. There was a break in the solid line of timber along the road and the men marched across the crest of a low hill. There are lights to be seen now, in distant farmhouses, far away across a valley--a few lights like stars shining.

The story-teller has got his audience leaning forward in their chairs. Outside the farmhouse in which they sit a wind begins to blow and a broken branch from a near-by tree is blown against the side of the house. The farmer, a heavy, stolid-looking man, starts a little and his wife shivers as with cold and Tilly is absorbed--she does not want to miss a word of the tale.

And now father is describing the darkness of the valley below the hill and the lights seen, far off. Will any of the little company of prisoners ever see their own homes again, their wives, their children, their sweethearts? The lights of the farmhouses in the valley are like stars in the sky of a world turned upside down.

The Rebel commander of the guard has issued a warning and a command: “It’s pretty dark here, and if any of the Yanks make a stir to move out of the centre of the road fire straight into the mass of them. Kill them like dogs.”

A feeling creeps over father. He is, you see, a southern man himself, a man of the Georgia hills and plains. There is no law that shall prevent his having been born in Georgia, although to-morrow night it may be North Carolina or Kentucky. But to-night his birthplace shall be Georgia. He is a man who lives by his fancy and to-night it shall suit his fancy and the drift of his tale to be a Georgian.

And so he, a prisoner of the Rebels, is being marched over the low hill, with the lights from distant farmhouses shining like stars in the darkness below, and suddenly a feeling comes to him, a feeling such as one sometimes has when one is alone in one’s own house at night. You have had the feeling. You are alone in the house and there are no lights and it is cold and dark. Everything you touch--feel with your hands in the darkness--is strange and at the same time familiar. You know how it is.

The farmer is nodding his head and his wife has her hands gripped, lying in her lap. Even Aldrich is awake now. The devil! Father has given this particular tale a new turn since he told it last. “This is something like.” Aldrich leans forward to listen.

And there is the woman Tilly, in the half darkness. See, she is quite lovely now, quite as she was on that evening when she rode with the horse dealer in the buggy! Something has happened to soften the long, harsh lines of her face and she might be a princess sitting there now in the half-light.

Father would have thought of that. It would be something worth while now to be a tale-teller to a princess. He stops talking to consider for a moment the possibilities of the notion, and then with a sigh gives it up.

It is a sweet notion but it won’t do. Tale-teller to a princess, eh! Evenings in a castle and the prince has come in from hunting in a forest. The tale-teller is dressed in flashy clothes and with a crowd of courtiers, ladies in waiting--whatever hangers-on a princess has--is sitting by an open fire. There are great, magnificent dogs lying about too.

Father is considering whether or not it is worth trying sometime--the telling of a tale of himself in just that rôle. An idea crosses his mind. The princess has a lover who creeps one night into the castle and the prince has become aware of his presence, is told of his presence by a trusty varlet. Taking his sword in hand the prince creeps through the dark hallways to kill his rival, but father has warned the lovers and they have fled. It afterward comes to the ears of the prince that father has protected the lovers and he--that is to say, father--is compelled to flee for his life. He comes to America and lives the life of an exile, far from the splendor to which he has been accustomed.

Father is thinking whether it would be worth trying--the telling of such a fable of his former existence, some evening at some farmhouse where he and Aldrich are staying; and for a moment a sort of George Barr McCutcheon light comes into his eyes, but with a sigh he gives it up.

It wouldn’t go over--not in a farmhouse in northern Ohio, he concludes.

He returns to the tale, that so evidently is going over; but, before he resumes, casts another glance at Tilly. “Oh, Tilly, thou dear lovely one,” he sighs inwardly.

The farmhouse is in the North and he has set himself forth as a southerner enlisted in the northern army. An explanation is in order, and he makes it, with a flourish.

Born a southerner, the son of a proud southern family, he was sent to school, to a college in the North. In college he had a roommate, a dear fellow from the state of Illinois. The “roommate’s father was owner and editor of the _Chicago Tribune_” he explains.

And during one summer, a few years before the breaking out of the war, he went on a visit to the home of his Illinois friend, and while he was there he, with his friend, went to hear the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates. It was odd, but the facts were that the young fellow from Illinois became enamored of the brilliant Douglas while he--well, to tell the truth, his own heart was wrung by the simplicity and nobility of the rail-splitter, Lincoln. “Never shall I forget the nobility of that countenance,” he says in speaking of it. He appears about to cry and does in fact take a handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his eyes. “Oh, the noble, the indescribable effect upon my boyhood heart of the stirring words of that man. There he stood like a mighty oak of the forest breasting the storms. ‘A nation cannot exist half slave and half free. A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ he said, and his words thrilled me to the very marrow of my being.”

And then father would have described his homecoming after that terrific experience. War was coming on and all the South was aflame.

One day at table in his southern home, with his brothers, his father and mother and his beautiful and innocent young sister sitting with him, he dared to say something in defense of Lincoln.

What a storm was then raised! The father getting up from his place at table pointed a trembling finger at his son. All eyes, except only those of his younger sister, were turned on him in wrath and disapproval. “Mention that hated name again in this house and I will shoot you like a dog, though you are my son,” his father said, and the son got up from the table and went away, filled with the sense of filial duty that would not let a born southerner answer his own father, but nevertheless determined to stick to the faith aroused in him by the words of the noble Lincoln.

And so he had ridden away from his southern home in the night and had finally joined the Union forces.

What a night--riding away from his father’s house in the darkness, leaving his mother behind, leaving all tradition behind, condemning himself to be an outlaw in the hearts of those he had always loved--for the sake of duty!

One can imagine Aldrich blinking a little and rubbing his hands together. “Teddy is laying it on rather thick,” he no doubt says to himself; but he must nevertheless have been filled with admiration.

However, let us, who are together revisiting the scene of my father’s triumph on that evening in the farmhouse long ago, be not too much in fear for the heart of the woman Tilly. At any rate her physical self, if not her heart, was safe.

Although there can be little doubt that the presence of the virgin Tilly, sitting in the half darkness, and the kindliness of the shadows that had temporarily enhanced her failing beauty, may have had a good deal to do with father’s talent on that evening, I am sure nothing else ever came of it. Father, in his own way, was devoted to mother.

And he had his own way of treasuring her. Did he not treasure always the lovelier moments of her?

He had found her in a farmhouse when he was by way of being something of a young swell himself and she was a bound girl; and she was then beautiful--beautiful without the aid of shadows cast by a kerosene lamp.

In reality she was the aristocrat of the two, as the beautiful one is always the aristocrat; and oh, how little beauty in woman is understood! The popular magazine covers and the moving-picture actresses have raised the very devil with our American conception of womanly beauty.

But father had delicacy, of a sort, of that you may be quite sure; and do you not suppose that Tilly, in the Ohio farmhouse, sensed something of his attitude toward what fragment of beauty was left in her, and that she loved him for that attitude--as I am sure my own mother also did?

My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms, into the arms of the others, over the top of the wall.

And now the weary prisoners with their escort have come down off the hillside to a valley and are approaching a large old southern mansion, standing back from the road they have been traveling, and the officers in charge of the prisoners--there were two of them--command the guards to turn in at a gate that leads to the house.

There is an open space before the house where the prisoners are gathered and the ground--covered with firm turf during most of the year--has, under the continuous rains, become soft and yielding. Where each prisoner stands a puddle gathers about his feet.

The house is dark, but for a single light at the back, and one of the officers begins shouting. A large pack of hunting dogs have come from a shed, hidden away in the darkness somewhere, and are gathered growling and barking in a half circle about the prisoners.

One of the dogs rushes through the mass of prisoners and with a glad cry leaps upon father, and all the others follow so that guards are compelled to drive the dogs off, kicking them and using the butts of their guns. Lights are lit inside the house. The people are astir.

You will understand what a moment this was for father. By one of those strange streaks of fate--which he is very careful to explain to his audience happen much more frequently in life than one imagines--he had been led, as a prisoner on his way to a southern prison pen, right to the door of his own father’s house.

What a moment indeed! Being a prisoner he has of course no idea how long he will be kept there. Thank God, he has grown a thick, bushy beard since he left home.

As to his fate--if the prisoners are kept in the yard until daylight comes--well, he knows his own mother.

His own father, old man though he is, has gone off to the war and all his brothers have gone; and his mother has come from a proud old southern family, one of the oldest and proudest. Had she known he was there among the prisoners she would have seen him hanged without a protest and would herself have lent a hand at pulling the rope.

* * * * *

Ah, what had not my father given for his country! Where will his equal be found, even among the whole world’s heroes? In the eyes of his own mother and father, in his brother’s eyes, in the eyes of all the branches and ramifications of his southern family, in the eyes of all--except only one unsophisticated and innocent girl--he had brought everlasting disgrace on one of the proudest names of the South.

Indeed it was just because he, the son, had gone off to fight with the northern army that his father, a proud old man of sixty, had insisted on being taken into the southern army. “I have a strong old frame and I insist,” he had said. “I must make good the loss to my Southland for my own son, who has proven himself a dog and a renegade.”

And so the old man had marched off with a gun on his shoulder, insisting on being taken as a common soldier and put where he could face constant and terrible danger, and the seeds of an undying hatred against the son had been planted deep in the hearts of the whole family.

The dullest mind surely will comprehend now what a position father was in when, in answer to the shouts of the officer, lights began to appear all through the house. Was it not a situation to wring tears from the heart of a man of stone! As for a woman’s heart--one can scarcely speak of the matter.

And in the house, before father’s eyes, there was one--a pure and innocent southern girl of rare beauty--a pearl of womanhood in fact--rarest example of the famed spotless womanhood of the Southland--his younger sister--the only woman child of the family.

You see, as father would so carefully have explained that evening in the farmhouse, he did not care so much for his own life. That had already been given to his country, he would have said proudly.

But, as you will understand quickly enough, had his presence among the prisoners been discovered, his proud mother--eager to wipe out the only stain on the family escutcheon--would at once have insisted that he be hanged to the doorpost of the very house in which he was born, her own hand pulling at the rope that was to jerk him up, into the arms of death--to make white again the family escutcheon, you understand.

Could a proud southern woman do less?

And in the event of such an outcome to the adventures of the night, see how that younger sister--the love of his life at that time--see how she would have suffered.

There she was, the pure and innocent girl, the one who understood nothing, to be sure, of the import of his decision to stick to the old flag and fight for the land of Washington and Lincoln, and who, in her innocent way, just loved him. On that day at his father’s table, when he--so deeply affected by the Lincoln-Douglas debates--had dared say a word for the cause of the North, it had been her eyes and her eyes alone that had looked at him with love, when all the other eyes of his family had looked at him with hatred and loathing.

And she would just be bursting into womanhood now. The aroma of awakening womanhood would be lying over her as perfume over the opening rosebud.

Think of it! There she, the pure and innocent one, would have to stand and see him hanged. A blight would be brought down upon her young life and her head would, ever after that night, be bowed in lonely and silent sorrow. That brave pure and just girl made old before her time. Ah; well might it be that in one night the mass of golden locks, that now covered her head like a cloud just kissed by the evening sun--that very golden hair might be turned as white as snow!

I can, in fancy, hear my father saying the words I have set down here and coming very near to crying himself as he said them. At the moment he would have believed without question the story he himself was telling.

* * * * *

And now the front door to the old southern mansion is thrown open and there, in the doorway facing the prisoners in the rain, stands a gigantic young negro--my father’s own body servant before he left home. (Father stops the flow of his talk long enough to explain how he and the negro boy, as lads together, had fought, wrestled, hunted, fished and lived together like two brothers. I will not go into that, however. Any professional southerner will tell you all about it, if you care to hear. It would have been the most trite part of father’s evening’s effort.)

Anyway, there the gigantic young negro stands in the doorway and he is holding in his hand a candle. Back of him stands my grandmother and back of her the young and innocent sister.

The figure of father’s mother is erect. She is old but she is yet tall and strong. One of the officers explains to her that he and his men have been on an all-night march, taking the crowd of Yankee prisoners to a prison camp, and asks for the hospitality of the house. Being a southerner himself he knows that southern hospitality can never fail, even at midnight. “A bite to eat and a cup of hot coffee in the name of our Southland,” he asks.

It is granted, of course. The proud woman beckons him and his brother officer into the house and herself steps out into the cold, drizzling rain.

She has ordered the young negro to stand on the porch, holding the candle aloof, and now, marching across the wet lawn, approaches the prisoners. The southern guards have stepped aside, bowing low before southern womanhood, and she goes near the prisoners and looks at them, as well as one may in the uncertain light. “I have a curiosity to see some of the unmannerly dogs of Yanks,” she says, leaning forward and staring at them. She is very near her own son now but he has turned his face away and is looking at the ground. Something however causes him to raise his head just as she, to express more fully her contempt, spits at the men.

A little speck of her white spittle lands upon father’s thick, tawny beard.

And now his mother has gone back into the house and it is again dark on the lawn in front. The Rebel guards are relieved--two at a time--to go to the kitchen door, where they are given hot coffee and sandwiches. And once his young sister, she of the tender heart, tries to creep to where the prisoners stand in the darkness. She is accompanied by an old negro woman and has planned to give food aid and comfort to the weary men but is prevented. Her mother has missed her inside the house and coming to the door calls to her. “I know your tender heart,” she says, “but it shall not be. The teeth of no Yankee dog shall ever bite into food raised on the land of your father. It shall not happen, at least while your mother is alive to prevent.”

NOTE III

SO there was father, sitting comfortably in the warm farmhouse living room--he and Aldrich having been well fed at the table of a prosperous farmer--and having before him what he most loved, an attentive and absorbed audience. By this time the farmer’s wife would be deeply moved by the fate of that son of the South that father had represented himself as being; and as for Tilly--while, in the fanciful picture he is making, he stands in the cold and wet outside the door of that southern mansion, Heaven knows what is going on in poor Tilly’s heart. It is however bleeding with sympathy, one may be sure of that.

So there is father and, in the meantime, what of his own actual flesh-and-blood family, the family he had left behind in an Ohio village when he set forth on his career as an actor?

It is not suffering too much. One need not waste too much sympathy on his family. Although he was never what we called in our Ohio country, “a good provider,” he had his points and as one of his sons I at least would be loath to trade him for a more provident shrewd and thoughtful father.

It must however have been a fairly hard winter, for mother at least and in connection with that winter and others that followed I have often since had an amusing thought. In later years, when my own name had a little got up in the world as a teller of tales I was often accused of having got my impulse, as a story-teller, from the Russians. The statement is a plausible one. It is, in a way, based upon reason.

When I had grown to be a man, and when my stories began to be published in the pages of the more reckless magazines, such as _The Little Review_, the old _Masses_ and later in _The Seven Arts_ and _The Dial_, and when I was so often accused of being under the Russian influence, I began to read the Russians, to find out if the statement, so often made concerning me and my work, could be true.

This I found, that in Russian novels the characters are always eating cabbage soup and I have no doubt Russian writers eat it too.

This was a revelation to me. Many of the Russian tales are concerned with the lives of peasants and a Boston critic once said I had brought the American peasant into literature; and it is likely that Russian writers, like all the other writers who have ever lived and have not pandered to the popular demand for sentimental romances were fortunate if they could live as well as a peasant. “What the critics say is no doubt true,” I told myself; for, like so many of the Russian writers, I was raised largely on cabbage soup.

Let me explain.

The little Ohio farming community, where I lived as a lad had in it, at that time, no factories, and the merchants artisans lawyers and other townspeople were all either owners of land which they rented out to tenant farmers, or they sold goods or their services to farmers. The soil on the farms about the town was a light sandy loam that would raise small fruits, corn, wheat, oats or potatoes, but that did particularly well when planted to cabbages.

As a result the raising of cabbages became a sort of specialty with us in our country; and there are now, I believe, in my native place, some three or four prosperous factories, devoted to the making of what before the war was called “sauerkraut.” Later, to help win the war, it was called: “Liberty Cabbage.”

The specialization in the raising of cabbage began in our Ohio country in my day, and in a good year some of the fields produced as high as twenty tons of cabbage an acre.

The cabbage fields grew larger and larger and, as we grew older, my brothers and I went every spring and fell to work in the fields. We crawled across the fields, setting out cabbage plants in the spring, and in the fall went out to cut cabbages. The huge round hard heads of cabbage were cut from their stalks and pitched to a man who loaded them upon a hay wagon; and on fall days I have often seen twenty or thirty wagons, each bearing its two or three tons of cabbages and waiting its turn to get to the cars on the railroad siding. The waiting wagons filled our streets as tobacco-laden wagons fill the streets of a Kentucky town in the fall, and in the stores and houses everyone for a time talked of nothing but cabbages. “What would the crop bring on the markets at Cleveland or Pittsburgh?” Pittsburgh, for some reason I have never understood, had a passion for cabbages; and why Pittsburgh hasn’t produced more so-called realistic writers, in the Russian manner, I cannot understand.

However, one may well leave that to the modern psychologists.

During the fall of that year, after father had set out on his adventures as an actor, mother did something she had often done before. By a stroke of strategy she succeeded in getting a winter’s supply of cabbages for her family, without the expenditure of any monies.

The fall advanced, father had gone, and the annual village cut-up time, called among us “Hallowe’en,” came on.

It was the custom among the lads of our town, particularly among those who lived on the farms near town, to make cabbages part of their celebration of the occasion. Such lads, living as they did in the country, had the use of horses and buggies, and on Hallowe’en they hitched up and drove off to town.

On the way they stopped at the cabbage fields and, finding in some of the fields many cabbages yet uncut, pulled them out by the roots and piled them in the backs of their buggies.

The country lads, giggling with anticipated pleasure, drove into one of the quieter residence streets of our town and, leaving the horse standing in the road, one of them got out of the buggy and took one of the cabbages in his hand. The cabbage had been pulled out of the ground with the great stalklike root still clinging to it and the lad now grasped this firmly. He crept toward one of the houses, preferably one that was dark--an indication that the people of the house, having spent a hard day at labor, had already gone to bed. Approaching the house cautiously, he swung the cabbage above his head, holding it by the long stalk, and then he let it go. The thing was to just hurl the cabbage full against the closed door of the house. It struck with a thunderous sound and the supposition was that the people of the house would be startled and fairly lifted out of their beds by the hollow booming noise, produced when the head of cabbage landed against the door and, as a matter of fact, when a stout country boy had hurled the cabbage the sound produced was something quite tremendous.

The cabbage having been thrown the country boy ran quickly into the road, leaped into his buggy and, striking his horse with the whip, drove triumphantly away. He was not likely to return unless pursued, and there it was that mother’s strategy came into play.

On the great night she made us all sit quietly in the house. As soon as the evening meal was finished the lights were put out and we waited while mother stood just at the door, the knob in her hand. No doubt it must have seemed strange to the boys of our town that one so gentle and quiet as mother could be so infuriated by the hurling of a cabbage at the door of our house.

But there was the simple fact of the situation to tempt and darkness had no sooner settled down upon our quiet street that one of the lads appeared. It was worth while throwing cabbages at such a house. One was pursued, one was scolded, threats were hurled: “Don’t you dare come back to this house! I’ll have the town marshal after you, that’s what I’ll do! If I get my hands on one of you I’ll give you a drubbing!” There was something of the actor in mother also.

What a night for the lads! Here was something worth while and all evening the game went on and on. The buggies were not driven to our house, but were stopped at the head of the street, and town boys went on pilgrimages to cabbage fields to get ammunition and join in the siege. Mother stormed scolded and ran out into the darkness waving a broom while we children stayed indoors, enjoying the battle--and when the evening’s sport was at an end, we all fell to and gathered in the spoils. As she returned from each sally from the fort mother had brought into the house the last cabbage thrown--if she could find it; and now, late in the evening when our provident tormentors were all gone, we children went forth with a lantern and got in the rest of our crop. Often as many as two or three hundred cabbages came our way and these were all carefully gathered in. They had been pulled from the ground, with all the heavy outer leaves still clinging to them, so that they were comparatively uninjured and, as there was also still attached to them the heavy stalklike root, they were in fine shape to be kept. A long trench was dug in our back yard and the cabbages buried, lying closely side by side, as I am told the dead are usually buried after a siege.

Perhaps indeed we were somewhat more careful with them than soldiers are with their dead after a battle. Were not the cabbages to be, for us, the givers of life? They were put into the trench carefully and tenderly with the heads downward and the stalks sticking up, mother supervising, and about each head straw was carefully packed--winding sheets. One could get straw from a strawstack in a near-by field at night, any amount of it, and one did not pay or even bother to ask.

When winter came quickly, as it did after Hallowe’en, mother got small white beans from the grocery and salt pork from the butcher, and a thick soup, of which we never tired, was concocted. The cabbages were something at our backs. They made us feel safe.

And there was also a sense of something achieved. In the land in which we lived one did not need to have a large income. There was food all about, plenty of it, and we who lived so precariously in the land of plenty had, by our “mother’s wit,” achieved this store of food without working for it. A common sense of pride in our cleverness held us together.

One went out into our back yard on a winter’s night when there was snow on the ground and looked abroad. Already we lads read books, and snow-covered fields stretching away under the winter moon suggested strange, stirring thoughts--travelers beset by wolves on the Russian Steppes--emigrant trains lost in whirling snowstorms on the Western sagebrush deserts of our own country, men in all sorts of strange terrible places wandering, desperate and starving, under the winter moon--and what of us? The place where the cabbages were buried made a long white mound, directly across our back yard, and when one looked at it there was a sense of fullness and plenty in the land. One remembered that down under the snow, buried away in the straw, were those long rows of cabbages. Deer, buffaloes, wild horses and equally wild long-horned cattle, far out on the Western plains, did not worry about food because the ground was covered with snow. With their hoofs they pawed the snow away, and found buried beneath the snow the sweet little clusters of bunch grass, that again sent the warmth of life singing through their bodies.

It was a chance for the fancy to play, to kick up its heels and have a good time. One could imagine the house in which one lived as a fort, set far out on the Western frontier. The cabbages had been put into the ground with the stalks straight up. They stuck up straight and stiff, like sentinels standing and, after looking, one went into the fort and slept quietly and peacefully. There the soldiers were--they were standing firm and unyielding. Were there enemies prowling out there in the white darkness, the little wild dogs of want? One could laugh at such thoughts. Were not the sentinels standing--quietly and firmly waiting? One could go into the fort and sleep in peace, hugging that thought.

To us at home, father was always, somewhat strangely, a part and at the same time not a part of our lives. He flew in and out as a bird flies in and out of a bush, and I am quite sure that, all through the years of our childhood, it never occurred to him to ask, when he set off on one of his winter adventures, whether or not there was anything to eat in our house. The fall came with its snows, and the little creeping fear of actual starvation for her brood, that must often have been in mother’s mind, followed by the spring, the warm rains, the promise of plenty and his return. If he brought no money, he did bring something--a ham, some combs of honey, a jug of cider, or even perhaps a quarter of beef. There he was again and there was food on the table. He made a gesture. “There!” he seemed to be saying; “you see! Who says I’m not a provider?”

There were tales to be told and he was the teller of tales. “It is sufficient. Can man live by bread alone? There is food on the table now. Eat! Stuff yourselves! Spring has come and there are signs to be painted. The night has passed and it is another day. I am a man of faith. I tell you a sparrow shall not fall to the ground without my notice. I will make a tale of it--tell why and how it fell. The most marvelous tale in the world might be made from the fall of a sparrow. Is not the workman worthy of his hire? What about the lilies of the field, eh? They toil not and neither do they spin--do they?”

And yet, was Solomon, in all his glory, arrayed like one of these?

* * * * *

I remember a day in the early spring when we were compelled to move out of one house and into another. The rent for the house in which we had lived all during the winter had been long unpaid and mother had no money. Father had just returned from one of his long adventures, but early in the day of the moving he disappeared again and, as we could not afford a moving wagon, mother and we boys carted our poor belongings to the new place on our backs.

As for father, he had managed to borrow a horse and a spring wagon from a neighbor and had set off again into the country. The house to which we were moving was far out at the edge of the town and next to it was a field in which there was a great straw stack--a convenience, as what we called our “bed ticks,” on which we slept, had to be emptied of the straw that had become fine and dustlike from long use, and then refilled with the new straw.

When all was done and we were quite settled in the new place, father drove into the yard. He had noticed, he explained, a special kind of straw at a farmhouse some five miles away, at a place he had visited during his wanderings of the winter just past, and he had thought he would give us all a treat by getting that particular kind of straw for our beds.

And so he had driven off at daybreak, and, while we packed our furniture to the new place, had dined with the farmer and his family and had now returned. Although our beds had been made for the night the bed ticks must all be brought down again, the straw tumbled out and the special straw put in. “There,” he said, with one of his grand gestures, as we lads tramped wearily up the stairs with the refilled bags and as mother stood smiling--a little resentfully perhaps, but still smiling; “there, you kids, try sleeping on that. There is nothing on earth too good for my kids.”

NOTE IV

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.”