Chapter XIV: Finis (4)

Marcellus was fishing that afternoon, over in the creek which ran through the woods. Just as at last he was making up his mind that it must be about time to go after the cows, he saw Myron sitting on a log beside the forest path, whittling mechanically, and staring at the foliage before him, in an obvious brown study. Marcellus went up to him, and had to speak twice before Myron turned his head and looked up.

“Oh! it’s you, eh, Bubb?” he remarked dreamily, and began gazing once more into the thicket.

“What’s the matter?” asked the puzzled boy.

“I guess Alvy’s dead,” replied Myron. To the lad’s comments and questions he made small answer. “No,” he said at last, “I don’t feel much like goin’ home jest now. Lea’ me alone here; I’ll prob’ly turn up later on.” And Marcellus went alone to the pasture, and thence, at the tail of his bovine procession, home.

When he arrived he regretted not having remained with Myron in the woods. It was like coming into something which was prison, hospital, and tomb in one. The household was paralyzed with horror and fright. Martha had gone to bed, or rather had been put there by Em, and all through the night, when he woke up, he heard her broken and hysterical voice in moans and screams. The men had hitched up the grays, and Arphaxed Turnbull was getting into the buggy to drive to Octavius for news when the boy came up. He looked twenty years older than he had at noon--all at once turned into a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old man--and could hardly see to put his foot on the carriage-step. His son Warren had offered to go with him, and had been rebuffed almost with fierceness. Warren and the others silently bowed their heads before this mood; instinct told them that nothing but Arphaxed’s show of temper held him from collapse--from falling at their feet and grovelling on the grass with cries and sobs of anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. After he had driven off they forbore to talk to one another, but went about a chalkfaced, trembling, infirm old man--and could hardly see to put his foot on the carriage-step. His son Warren had offered to go with him, and had been rebuffed almost with fierceness. Warren and the others silently bowed their heads before this mood; instinct told them that nothing but Arphaxed’s show of temper held him from collapse--from falling at their feet and grovelling on the grass with cries and sobs of anguish, perhaps even dying in a fit. After he had driven off they forbore to talk to one another, but went about noiselessly with drooping chins and knotted brows.

“It jest took the tuck out of everything,” said Marcellus, relating these tragic events to me. There was not much else to tell. Martha had had what they call brain fever, and had emerged from this some weeks afterward a pallid and dim-eyed ghost of her former self, sitting for hours together in her rocking-chair in the unused parlor, her hands idly in her lap, her poor thoughts glued ceaselessly to that vague, far-off Virginia which folks told about as hot and sunny, but which her mind’s eye saw under the gloom of an endless and dreadful night. Arphaxed had gone South, still defiantly alone, to bring back the body of his boy. An acquaintance wrote to them of his being down sick in Washington, prostrated by the heat and strange water; but even from his sick-bed he had sent on orders to an undertaking firm out at the front, along with a hundred dollars, their price in advance for embalming. Then, recovering, he had himself pushed down to headquarters, or as near them as civilians might approach, only to learn that he had passed the precious freight on the way. He posted back again, besieging the railroad officials at every point with inquiries, scolding, arguing, beseeching in turn, until at last he overtook his quest at Juno Mills Junction, only a score of miles from home.

Then only he wrote, telling people his plans. He came first to Octavius, where a funeral service was held in the forenoon, with military honors, the Wadsworths as the principal mourners, and a memorable turnout of distinguished citizens. The town-hall was draped with mourning, and so was Alva’s pew in the Episcopal Church, which he had deserted his ancestral Methodism to join after his marriage. Old Arphaxed listened to the novel burial service of his son’s communion, and watched the clergyman in his curious white and black vestments, with sombre pride. He himself needed and desired only a plain and homely religion, but it was fitting that his boy should have organ music and flowers and a ritual.

Dana Pillsbury had arrived in town early in the morning with the grays, and a neighbor’s boy had brought in the buggy. Immediately after dinner Arphaxed had gathered up Alva’s widow and little daughter, and started the funeral cortège upon its final homeward stage.

And so I saw them arrive on that July afternoon.

III

For so good and patient a man, Si Hummaston bore himself rather vehemently during the milking. It was hotter in the barn than it was outside in the sun, and the stifling air swarmed with flies, which seemed to follow Si perversely from stall to stall and settle on his cow. One beast put her hoof square in his pail, and another refused altogether to “give down,” while the rest kept up a tireless slapping and swishing of their tails very hard to bear, even if one had the help of profanity. Marcellus and I listened carefully to hear him at last provoked to an oath, but the worst thing he uttered, even when the cow stepped in the milk, was “Dum your buttons!” which Marcellus said might conceivably be investigated by a church committee, but was hardly out-and-out swearing.

I remember Si’s groans and objurgations, his querulous “Hyst there, will ye!” his hypocritical “So-boss! So-boss!” his despondent “They never will give down for me!” because presently there was crossed upon this woof of peevish impatience the web of a curious conversation.

Si had been so slow in his headway against flapping tails and restive hoofs that, before he had got up to the end of the row, Aunt Em had finished her side. She brought over her stool and pail, and seated herself at the next cow to Hummaston’s. For a little, one heard only the resonant din of the stout streams against the tin; then, as the bottom was covered, there came the ploughing plash of milk on milk, and Si could hear himself talk.

“S’pose you know S’reny’s come, ’long with your father,” he remarked, ingratiatingly.

“I saw ’em drive in,” replied Em.

“_Whoa! Hyst there! Hole still, can’t ye?_ I didn’t know if you quite made out who she was, you was scootin’ ’long so fast. They ain’t--_Whoa there!_--they ain’t nothin’ the matter ’twixt you and her, is they?”

“I don’t know as there is,” said Em, curtly. “The world’s big enough for both of us--we ain’t no call to bunk into each other.”

“No, of course--_Now you stop it!_--but it looked kind o’ curious to me, your pikin’ off like that, without waitin’ to say ‘How-d’-do?’ Of course, I never had no relation by marriage that was stuck-up at all, or looked down on me--_Stiddy there now!_--but I guess I can reelize pretty much how you feel about it. I’m a good deal of a hand at that. It’s what they call imagination. It’s a gift, you know, like good looks, or preachin’, or the knack o’ makin’ money. But you can’t help what you’re born with, can you? I’d been a heap better off if my gift’d be’n in some other direction; but, as I tell ’em, it ain’t my fault. And my imagination--_Hi, there! git over, will ye?_--it’s downright cur’ous sometimes, how it works. Now I could tell, you see, that you ‘n’ S’reny didn’t pull together. I s’pose she never writ a line to you, when your husband was killed?”

“Why should she?” demanded Em. “We never did correspond. What’d be the sense of beginning then? She minds her affairs, ’n’ I mind mine. Who wanted her to write?”

“Oh, of course not,” said Si lightly. “Prob’ly you’ll get along better together, though, now that you’ll see more of one another. I s’pose S’reny’s figurin’ on stayin’ here right along now, her ’n’ her little girl. Well, it’ll be nice for the old folks to have somebody they’re fond of. They jest worshipped the ground Alvy walked on--and I s’pose they won’t be anything in this wide world too good for that little girl of his. Le’s see, she must be comin’ on three now, ain’t she?”

“I don’t know anything about her!” snapped Aunt Em with emphasis.

“Of course, it’s natural the old folks should feel so--she bein’ Alvy’s child. I hain’t noticed anything special, but does it--_Well, I swan! Hyst there!_--does it seem to you that they’re as good to Marcellus, quite, as they used to be? I don’t hear ’em sayin’ nothin’ about his goin’ to school next winter.”

Aunt Em said nothing, too, but milked doggedly on. Si told her about the thickness and profusion of Serena’s mourning, guardedly hinting at the injustice done him by not allowing him to go to the red barn with the others, speculated on the likelihood of the Wadsworths’ contributing to their daughter’s support, and generally exhibited his interest in the family through a monologue which finished only with the milking; but Aunt Em made no response whatever.

When the last pails had been emptied into the big cans at the door--Marcellus and I had let the cows out one by one into the yard, as their individual share in the milking ended--Si and Em saw old Arphaxed wending his way across from the house to the red barn. He appeared more bent than ever, but he walked with a slowness which seemed born of reluctance even more than of infirmity.

“Well, now,” mused Si, aloud, “Brother Turnbull an’ me’s be’n friends for a good long spell. I don’t believe he’d be mad if I cut over now to the red barn too, seein’ the milkin’s all out of the way. Of course I don’t want to do what ain’t right--what d’you think now, Em, honest? Think it ’ud rile him?”

“I don’t know anything about it!” my aunt replied, with increased vigor of emphasis. “But for the land sake go somewhere! Don’t hang around botherin’ me. I got enough else to think of besides your everlasting cackle.”

Thus rebuffed, Si meandered sadly into the cow-yard, shaking his head as he came. Seeing us seated on an upturned plough, over by the fence, from which point we had a perfect view of the red barn, he sauntered toward us, and, halting at our side, looked to see if there was room enough for him to sit also. But Marcellus, in quite a casual way, remarked, “Oh! wheeled the milk over to the house, already, Si?” and at this the doleful man lounged off again in new despondency, got out the wheelbarrow, and, with ostentatious groans of travail hoisted a can upon it and started off.

“He’s takin’ advantage of Arphaxed’s being so worked up to play ‘ole soldier’ on him,” said Mar-cellus. “All of us have to stir him up the whole time to keep him from takin’ root somewhere. I told him this afternoon ’t if there had to be any settin’ around under the bushes an’ cryin’, the fam’ly ’ud do it.”

We talked in hushed tones as we sat there watching the shut doors of the red barn, in boyish conjecture about what was going on behind them. I recall much of this talk with curious distinctness, but candidly it jars now upon my maturer nerves. The individual man looks back upon his boyhood with much the same amused amazement that the race feels in contemplating the memorials of its own cave-dwelling or bronze period. What strange savages we were! In those days Marcellus and I used to find our very highest delight in getting off on Thursdays, and going over to Dave Bushnell’s slaughter-house, to witness with stony hearts, and from as close a coign of vantage as might be, the slaying of some score of barnyard animals--the very thought of which now revolts our grown-up minds. In the same way we sat there on the plough, and criticised old Arphaxed’s meanness in excluding us from the red barn, where the men-folks were coming in final contact with the “pride of the family.” Some of the cows wandering toward us began to “moo” with impatience for the pasture, but Mar-cellus said there was no hurry.

All at once we discovered that Aunt Em was standing a few yards away from us, on the other side of the fence. We could see her from where we sat by only turning a little--a motionless, stout, upright figure, with a pail in her hand, and a sternly impassive look on her face. She, too, had her gaze fixed upon the red barn, and, though the declining sun was full in her eyes, seemed incapable of blinking, but just stared coldly, straight ahead.

Suddenly an unaccustomed voice fell upon our ears. Turning, we saw that a black-robed woman, with a black wrap of some sort about her head, had come up to where Aunt Em stood, and was at her shoulder. Marcellus nudged me, and whispered, “It’s S’reny. Look out for squalls!” And then we listened in silence.

“Won’t you speak to me at all, Emmeline?” we heard this new voice say.

Aunt Em’s face, sharply outlined in profile against the sky, never moved. Her lips were pressed into a single line, and she kept her eyes on the barn.

“If there’s anything I’ve done, tell me,” pursued the other. “In such an hour as this--when both our hearts are bleeding so, and--and every breath we draw is like a curse upon us--it doesn’t seem a fit time for us--for us to--” The voice faltered and broke, leaving the speech unfinished.

Aunt Em kept silence so long that we fancied this appeal, too, had failed. Then abruptly, and without moving her head, she dropped a few ungracious words as it were over her shoulder. “If I had anything special to say, most likely I’d say it,” she remarked.

We could hear the sigh that Serena drew. She lifted her shawled head, and for a moment seemed as if about to turn. Then she changed her mind, apparently, for she took a step nearer to the other.

“See here, Emmeline,” she said, in a more confident tone. “Nobody in the world knows better than I do how thoroughly good a woman you are, how you have done your duty, and more than your duty, by your parents and your brothers, and your little step-son. You have never spared yourself for them, day or night. I have said often to--to him who has gone--that I didn’t believe there was anywhere on earth a worthier or more devoted woman than you, his sister. And--now that he is gone--and we are both more sisters than ever in affliction--why in Heaven’s name should you behave like this to me?”

Aunt Em spoke more readily this time. “I don’t know as I’ve done anything to you,” she said in defence. “I’ve just let you alone, that’s all. An’ that’s doin’ as I’d like to be done by.” Still she did not turn her head, or lift her steady gaze from those closed doors.

“Don’t let us split words!” entreated the other, venturing a thin, white hand upon Aunt Em’s shoulder. “That isn’t the way we two ought to stand to each other. Why, you were friendly enough when I was here before. Can’t it be the same again? What has happened to change it? Only to-day, on our way up here, I was speaking to your father about you, and my deep sympathy for you, and--”

Aunt Em wheeled like a flash. “Yes, ’n’ what did _he_ say? Come, don’t make up anything! Out with it! What did he say?” She shook off the hand on her shoulder as she spoke.

Gesture and voice and frowning vigor of mien were all so imperative and rough that they seemed to bewilder Serena. She, too, had turned now, so that I could see her wan and delicate face, framed in the laced festoons of black, like the fabulous countenance of “The Lady Iñez” in my mother’s “Album of Beauty.” She bent her brows in hurried thought, and began stammering, “Well, he said--Let’s see--he said--”

“Oh, yes!” broke in Aunt Em, with raucous irony, “I know well enough what he said! He said I was a good worker--that they’d never had to have a hired girl since I was big enough to wag a churn dash, an’ they wouldn’t known what to do without me. I know all that; I’ve heard it on an’ off for twenty years. What I’d like to hear is, did he tell you that he went down South to bring back _your_ husband, an’ that he never so much as give a thought to fetchin’ _my_ husband, who was just as good a soldier and died just as bravely as yours did? I’d like to know--did he tell you that?”

What could Serena do but shake her head, and bow it in silence before this bitter gale of words?

“An’ tell me this, too,” Aunt Em went on, lifting her harsh voice mercilessly, “when you was settin’ there in church this forenoon, with the soldiers out, an’ the bells tollin’ an’ all that--did he say, ‘This is some for Alvy, an’ some for Abel, who went to the war together, an’ was killed together, or within a month o’ one another?’ Did he say that, or look for one solitary minute as if he thought it? I’ll bet he didn’t!”

Serena’s head sank lower still, and she put up, in a blinded sort of a way, a little white handkerchief to her eyes. “But why blame _me?_” she asked.

Aunt Em heard her own voice so seldom that the sound of it now seemed to intoxicate her. “No!” she shouted. “It’s like the Bible. One was taken an’ the other left. It was always Alvy this, an’ Alvy that, nothin’ for any one but Alvy. That was all right; nobody complained: prob’ly he deserved it all; at any rate, we didn’t begrudge him any of it, while he was livin’. But there ought to be a limit somewhere. When a man’s dead, he’s pretty much about on an equality with other dead men, one would think. But it ain’t so. One man get’s hunted after when he’s shot, an’ there’s a hundred dollars for embalmin’ him an’ a journey after him, an’ bringin’ him home, an’ two big funerals, an’ crape for his widow that’d stand by itself. The _other_ man--he can lay where he fell! Them that’s lookin’ for the first one are right close by--it ain’t more’n a few miles from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, so Hi Tuckerman tells me, an’ he was all over the ground two years ago--but nobody looks for this other man! Oh, no! Nobody so much as remembers to think of him! They ain’t no hundred dollars, no, not so much as fifty cents, for embalmin’ _him!_ No--_he_ could be shovelled in anywhere, or maybe burned up when the woods got on fire that night, the night of the sixth. They ain’t no funeral for him--no bells tolled--unless it may be a cowbell up in the pasture that he hammered out himself. An’ _his_ widow can go around, week days an’ Sundays, in her old calico dresses. Nobody ever mentions the word ‘mournin’ crape’ to her, or asks her if she’d like to put on black. I s’pose they thought if they gave me the money for some mournin’ I’d buy _candy_ with it instead!”

With this climax of flaming sarcasm Aunt Em stopped, her eyes aglow, her thick breast heaving in a flurry of breathlessness. She had never talked so much or so fast before in her life. She swung the empty tin-pail now defiantly at her side to hide the fact that her arms were shaking with excitement. Every instant it looked as if she was going to begin again.

Serena had taken the handkerchief down from her eyes and held her arms stiff and straight by her side. Her chin seemed to have grown longer or to be thrust forward more. When she spoke it was in a colder voice--almost mincing in the way it cut off the words.

“All this is not my doing,” she said. “I am to blame for nothing of it. As I tried to tell you, I sympathize deeply with your grief. But grief ought to make people at least fair, even if it cannot make them gentle and soften their hearts. I shall trouble you with no more offers of friendship. I--I think I will go back to the house now--to my little girl.”

Even as she spoke, there came from the direction of the red barn a shrill, creaking noise which we all knew. At the sound Marcellus and I stood up, and Serena forgot her intention to go away. The barn doors, yelping as they moved on their dry rollers, had been pushed wide open.

IV

The first one to emerge from the barn was Hi Tuckerman. He started to make for the house, but, when he caught sight of our group, came running toward us at the top of his speed, uttering incoherent shouts as he advanced, and waving his arms excitedly. It was apparent that something out of the ordinary had happened.

We were but little the wiser as to this something, when Hi had come to a halt before us, and was pouring out a volley of explanations, accompanied by earnest grimaces and strenuous gestures. Even Marcellus could make next to nothing of what he was trying to convey; but Aunt Em, strangely enough, seemed to understand him. Still slightly trembling, and with a little occasional catch in her breath, she bent an intent scrutiny upon Hi, and nodded comprehendingly from time to time, with encouraging exclamations, “He did, eh!”

“Is that so?” and “I expected as much.” Listening and watching, I formed the uncharitable conviction that she did not really understand Hi at all, but was only pretending to do so in order further to harrow Serena’s feelings.

Doubtless I was wrong, for presently she turned, with an effort, to her sister-in-law, and remarked, “P’rhaps you don’t quite follow what he’s say-in’?”

“Not a word!” said Serena, eagerly. “Tell me, please, Emmeline!”

Aunt Em seemed to hesitate. “He was shot through the mouth at Gaines’s Mills, you know--that’s right near Cold Harbor and--the Wilderness,” she said, obviously making talk.

“That isn’t what he’s saying,” broke in Serena. “What _is_ it, Emmeline?”

“Well,” rejoined the other, after an instant’s pause, “if you want to know--he says that it ain’t Alvy at all that they’ve got there in the barn.”

Serena turned swiftly, so that we could not see her face.

“He says it’s some strange man,” continued Em, “a yaller-headed man, all packed an’ stuffed with charcoal, so’t his own mother wouldn’t know him. Who it is nobody knows, but it ain’t Alvy.”

“They’re a pack of robbers ’n’ swindlers!” cried old Arphaxed, shaking his long gray beard with wrath.

He had come up without our noticing his approach, so rapt had been our absorption in the strange discovery reported by Hi Tuckerman. Behind him straggled the boys and the hired men, whom Si Hummaston had scurried across from the house to join. No one said anything now, but tacitly deferred to the old man’s principal right to speak. It was a relief to hear that terrible silence of his broken at all.

“They ought to all be hung!” he cried, in a voice to which the excess of passion over physical strength gave a melancholy quaver. “I paid ’em what they asked--they took a hundred dollars o’ my money--an’ they ain’t sent me _him_ at all! There I went, at my age, all through the Wilderness, almost clear to Cold Harbor, an’ that, too, gittin’ up from a sick bed in Washington, and then huntin’ for the box at New York an’ Albany, an’ all the way back, an’ holdin’ a funeral over it only this very day--an’ here it ain’t _him_ at all! I’ll have the law on ‘em though, if it costs the last cent I’ve got in the world!”

Poor old man! These weeks of crushing grief and strain had fairly broken him down. We listened to his fierce outpourings with sympathetic silence, almost thankful that he had left strength and vitality enough still to get angry and shout. He had been always a hard and gusty man; we felt by instinct, I suppose, that his best chance of weathering this terrible month of calamity was to batter his way furiously through it, in a rage with everything and everybody.

“If there’s any justice in the land,” put in Si Hummaston, “you’d ought to get your hundred dollars back. I shouldn’t wonder if you could, too, if you sued ’em afore a Jestice that was a friend of yours.”

“Why, the man’s a fool!” burst forth Arphaxed, turning toward him with a snort. “I don’t want the hundred dollars--I wouldn’t’a’ begrudged a thousand--if only they’d dealt honestly by me. I paid ’em their own figure, without beatin’ ’em down a penny. If it’d be’n double, I’d ’a’ paid it. What _I_ wanted was _my boy!_ It ain’t so much their cheatin’ _me_ I mind, either, if it ’d be’n about anything else. But to think of Alvy--_my boy_--after all the trouble I took, an’ the journey, an’ my sickness there among strangers--to think that after it all he’s buried down there, no one knows where, p’raps in some trench with private soldiers, shovelled in anyhow--oh-h! they ought to be hung!”

The two women had stood motionless, with their gaze on the grass; Aunt Em lifted her head at this.

“If a place is good enough for private soldiers to be buried in,” she said, vehemently, “it’s good enough for the best man in the army. On Resurrection Day, do you think them with shoulder-straps ’ll be called fust an’ given all the front places? I reckon the men that carried a musket are every whit as good, there in the trench, as them that wore swords. They gave their lives as much as the others did, an’ the best man that ever stepped couldn’t do no more.”

Old Arphaxed bent upon her a long look, which had in it much surprise and some elements of menace. Reflection seemed, however, to make him think better of an attack on Aunt Em. He went on, instead, with rambling exclamations to his auditors at large.

“Makin’ me the butt of the whole county!” he cried. “There was that funeral to-day--with a parade an’ a choir of music an’ so on: an’ now it’ll come out in the papers that it wasn’t Alvy at all I brought back with me, but only some perfect stranger--by what you can make out from his clothes, not even an officer at all. I tell you the war’s a jedgment on this country for its wickedness, for its cheatin’ an’ robbin’ of honest men! They wa’n’t no sense in that battle at Cold Harbor anyway--everybody admits that! It was murder an’ massacre in cold blood--fifty thousand men mowed down, an’ nothin’ gained by it! An’ then not even to git my boy’s dead body back! I say hangin’s too good for ’em!”

“Yes, father,” said Myron, soothingly; “but do you stick to what you said about the--the box? Wouldn’t it look better--”

“_No!_” shouted Arphaxed, with emphasis. “Let Dana do what I told him--take it down this very night to the poor-master, an’ let him bury it where he likes. It’s no affair of mine. I wash my hands of it. There won’t be no funeral held here!”

It was then that Serena spoke. Strangely enough, old Arphaxed had not seemed to notice her presence in our group, and his jaw visibly dropped as he beheld her now standing before him. He made a gesture signifying his disturbance at finding her among his hearers, and would have spoken, but she held up her hand.

“Yes, I heard it all,” she said, in answer to his deprecatory movement. “I am glad I did. It has given me time to get over the shock of learning--our mistake--and it gives me the chance now to say something which I--I feel keenly. The poor man you have brought home was, you say, a private soldier. Well, isn’t this a good time to remember that there was a private soldier who went out from this farm--belonging right to this family--and who, as a private, laid down his life as nobly as General Sedgwick or General Wadsworth, or even our dear Alva, or any one else? I never met Emmeline’s husband, but Alva liked him, and spoke to me often of him. Men who fall in the ranks don’t get identified, or brought home, but they deserve funerals as much as the others--just as much. Now, this is my idea: let us feel that the mistake which has brought this poor stranger to us is God’s way of giving us a chance to remember and do honor to Abel Jones. Let him be buried in the family lot up yonder, where we had thought to lay Alva, and let us do it reverently, in the name of Emmeline’s husband, and of all others who have fought and died for our country, and with sympathy in our hearts for the women who, somewhere in the North, are mourning, just as we mourn here, for the stranger there in the red barn.”

Arphaxed had watched her intently. He nodded now, and blinked at the moisture gathering in his old eyes. “I could e’en a’most ’a’ thought it was Alvy talkin’,” was what he said. Then he turned abruptly, but we all knew, without further words, that what Serena had suggested was to be done.

The men-folk, wondering doubtless much among themselves, moved slowly off toward the house or the cow-barns, leaving the two women alone. A minute of silence passed before we saw Serena creep gently up to Aunt Em’s side, and lay the thin white hand again upon her shoulder. This time it was not shaken off, but stretched itself forward, little by little, until its palm rested against Aunt Em’s further cheek. We heard the tin-pail fall resonantly against the stones under the rail-fence, and there was a confused movement as if the two women were somehow melting into one.

“Come on, Sid!” said Marcellus Jones to me; “let’s start them cows along. If there’s anything I hate to see it’s women cryin’ on each other’s necks.”

THE EVE OF THE FOURTH

It was well on toward evening before this Third of July all at once made itself gloriously different from other days in my mind.

There was a very long afternoon, I remember, hot and overcast, with continual threats of rain, which never came to anything. The other boys were too excited about the morrow to care for present play. They sat instead along the edge of the broad platform-stoop in front of Delos Ingersoll’s grocery-store, their brown feet swinging at varying heights above the sidewalk, and bragged about the manner in which they contemplated celebrating the anniversary of their Independence. Most of the elder lads were very independent indeed; they were already secure in the parental permission to stay up all night, so that the Fourth might be ushered in with its full quota of ceremonial. The smaller urchins pretended that they also had this permission, or were sure of getting it. Little Denny Cregan attracted admiring attention by vowing that he should remain out, even if his father chased him with a policeman all around the ward, and he had to go and live in a cave in the gulf until he was grown up.

My inferiority to these companions of mine depressed me. They were allowed to go without shoes and stockings; they wore loose and comfortable old clothes, and were under no responsibility to keep them dry or clean or whole; they had their pockets literally bulging now with all sorts of portentous engines of noise and racket--huge brown “double-enders,” bound with waxed cord; long, slim, vicious-looking “nigger-chasers;” big “Union torpedoes,” covered with clay, which made a report like a horse-pistol, and were invaluable for frightening farmers’ horses; and so on through an extended catalogue of recondite and sinister explosives upon which I looked with awe, as their owners from time to time exhibited them with the proud simplicity of those accustomed to greatness. Several of these boys also possessed toy cannons, which would be brought forth at twilight. They spoke firmly of ramming them to the muzzle with grass, to produce a greater noise--even if it burst them and killed everybody.

By comparison, my lot was one of abasement. I was a solitary child, and a victim to conventions. A blue necktie was daily pinned under my Byron collar, and there were gilt buttons on my zouave jacket. When we were away in the pasture playground near the gulf, and I ventured to take off my foot-gear, every dry old thistle-point in the whole territory seemed to arrange itself to be stepped upon by my whitened and tender soles. I could not swim; so, while my lithe bold comrades dived out of sight under the deep water, and darted about chasing one another far beyond their depth, I paddled ignobly around the “baby-hole” close to the bank, in the warm and muddy shallows.

Especially apparent was my state of humiliation on this July afternoon. I had no “double-enders,” nor might hope for any. The mere thought of a private cannon seemed monstrous and unnatural to me. By some unknown process of reasoning my mother had years before reached the theory that a good boy ought to have two ten-cent packs of small fire-crackers on the Fourth of July. Four or five succeeding anniversaries had hardened this theory into an orthodox tenet of faith, with all its observances rigidly fixed. The fire-crackers were bought for me overnight, and placed on the hall table. Beside them lay a long rod of punk. When I hastened down and out in the morning, with these ceremonial implements in my hands, the hired girl would give me, in an old kettle, some embers from the wood-fire in the summer kitchen. Thus furnished, I went into the front yard, and in solemn solitude fired off these crackers one by one. Those which, by reason of having lost their tails, were only fit for “fizzes,” I saved till after breakfast. With the exhaustion of these, I fell reluctantly back upon the public for entertainment. I could see the soldiers, hear the band and the oration, and in the evening, if it didn’t rain, enjoy the fireworks; but my own contribution to the patriotic noise was always over before the breakfast dishes had been washed.

My mother scorned the little paper torpedoes as flippant and wasteful things. You merely threw one of them, and it went off, she said, and there you were. I don’t know that I ever grasped this objection in its entirety, but it impressed my whole childhood with its unanswerableness. Years and years afterward, when my own children asked for torpedoes, I found myself unconsciously advising against them on quite the maternal lines. Nor was it easy to budge the good lady from her position on the great two-packs issue. I seem to recall having successfully undermined it once or twice, but two was the rule. When I called her attention to the fact that our neighbor, Tom Hemingway, thought nothing of exploding a whole pack at a time inside their wash-boiler, she was not dazzled, but only replied: “Wilful waste makes woful want.”

Of course the idea of the Hemingways ever knowing what want meant was absurd. They lived a dozen doors or so from us, in a big white house with stately white columns rising from veranda to gable across the whole front, and a large garden, flowers and shrubs in front, fruit-trees and vegetables behind. Squire Hemingway was the most important man in our part of the town. I know now that he was never anything more than United States Commissioner of Deeds, but in those days, when he walked down the street with his gold-headed cane, his blanket-shawl folded over his arm, and his severe, dignified, close-shaven face held well up in the air, I seemed to behold a companion of Presidents.

This great man had two sons. The elder of them,

De Witt Hemingway, was a man grown, and was at the front. I had seen him march away, over a year before, with a bright drawn sword, at the side of his company. The other son, Tom, was my senior by only a twelvemonth. He was by nature proud, but often consented to consort with me when the selection of other available associates was at low ebb.

It was to this Tom that I listened with most envious eagerness, in front of the grocery-store, on the afternoon of which I speak. He did not sit on the stoop with the others--no one expected quite that degree of condescension--but leaned nonchalantly against a post, whittling out a new ramrod for his cannon. He said that this year he was not going to have any ordinary fire-crackers at all; they, he added with a meaning glance at me, were only fit for girls. He might do a little in “double-enders,” but his real point would be in “ringers”--an incredible giant variety of cracker, Turkey-red like the other, but in size almost a rolling-pin. Some of these he would fire off singly, between volleys from his cannon. But a good many he intended to explode, in bunches say of six, inside the tin wash-boiler, brought out into the middle of the road for that purpose. It would doubtless blow the old thing sky-high, but that didn’t matter. They could get a new one.

Even as he spoke, the big bell in the tower of the town-hall burst forth in a loud clangor of swift-repeated strokes. It was half a mile away, but the moist air brought the urgent, clamorous sounds to our ears as if the belfry had stood close above us.

We sprang off the stoop and stood poised, waiting to hear the number of the ward struck, and ready to scamper off on the instant if the fire was anywhere in our part of the town. But the excited peal went on and on, without a pause. It became obvious that this meant something besides a fire. Perhaps some of us wondered vaguely what that something might be, but as a body our interest had lapsed. Billy Norris, who was the son of poor parents, but could whip even Tom Hemingway, said he had been told that the German boys on the other side of the gulf were coming over to “rush” us on the following day, and that we ought all to collect nails to fire at them from our cannon. This we pledged ourselves to do--the bell keeping up its throbbing tumult ceaselessly.

Suddenly we saw the familiar figure of Johnson running up the street toward us. What his first name was I never knew. To every one, little or big, he was just Johnson. He and his family had moved into our town after the war began; I fancy they moved away again before it ended. I do not even know what he did for a living. But he seemed always drunk, always turbulently good-natured, and always shouting out the news at the top of his lungs. I cannot pretend to guess how he found out everything as he did, or why, having found it out, he straightway rushed homeward, scattering the intelligence as he ran. Most probably Johnson was moulded by Nature as a town-crier, but was born by accident some generations after the race of bellmen had disappeared. Our neighborhood did not like him; our mothers did not know Mrs. Johnson, and we boys behaved with snobbish roughness to his children. He seemed not to mind this at all, but came up unwearyingly to shout out the tidings of the day for our benefit.

“Vicksburg’s fell! Vicksburg’s fell!” was what we heard him yelling as he approached.

Delos Ingersoll and his hired boy ran out of the grocery. Doors opened along the street and heads were thrust inquiringly out.

“Vicksburg’s fell!” he kept hoarsely proclaiming, his arms waving in the air, as he staggered along at a dog-trot past us, and went into the saloon next to the grocery.

I cannot say how definite an idea these tidings conveyed to our boyish minds. I have a notion that at the time I assumed that Vicksburg had something to do with Gettysburg, where I knew, from the talk of my elders, that an awful fight had been proceeding since the middle of the week. Doubtless this confusion was aided by the fact that an hour or so later, on that same wonderful day, the wire brought us word that this terrible battle on Pennsylvanian soil had at last taken the form of a Union victory. It is difficult now to see how we could have known both these things on the Third of July--that is to say, before the people actually concerned seemed to have been sure of them. Perhaps it was only inspired guesswork, but I know that my town went wild over the news, and that the clouds overhead cleared away as if by magic.

The sun did well to spread that summer sky at eventide with all the pageantry of color the spectrum knows. It would have been preposterous that such a day should slink off in dull, Quaker drabs. Men were shouting in the streets now. The old cannon left over from the Mexican war had been dragged out on to the rickety covered river-bridge, and was frightening the fishes, and shaking the dry, worm-eaten rafters, as fast as the swab and rammer could work. Our town bandsmen were playing as they had never played before, down in the square in front of the post-office. The management of the Universe could not hurl enough wild fireworks into the exultant sunset to fit our mood.

The very air was filled with the scent of triumph--the spirit of conquest. It seemed only natural that I should march off to my mother and quite collectedly tell her that I desired to stay out all night with the other boys. I had never dreamed of daring to prefer such a request in other years. Now I was scarcely conscious of surprise when she gave her permission, adding with a smile that I would be glad enough to come in and go to bed before half the night was over.

I steeled my heart after supper with the proud resolve that if the night turned out to be as protracted as one of those Lapland winter nights we read about in the geography, I still would not surrender.

The boys outside were not so excited over the tidings of my unlooked-for victory as I had expected them to be. They received the news, in fact, with a rather mortifying stoicism. Tom Hemingway, however, took enough interest in the affair to suggest that, instead of spending my twenty cents in paltry fire-crackers, I might go down town and buy another can of powder for his cannon. By doing so, he pointed out, I would be a part-proprietor, as it were, of the night’s performance, and would be entitled to occasionally touch the cannon off. This generosity affected me, and I hastened down the long hill-street to show myself worthy of it, repeating the instruction of “Kentucky Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” over and over again to myself as I went.

Half-way on my journey I overtook a person whom, even in the gathering twilight, I recognized as Miss Stratford, the school-teacher. She also was walking down the hill and rapidly. It did not need the sight of a letter in her hand to tell me that she was going to the post-office. In those cruel war-days everybody went to the post-office. I myself went regularly to get our mail, and to exchange shin-plasters for one-cent stamps with which to buy yeast and other commodities that called for minute fractional currency.

Although I was very fond of Miss Stratford--I still recall her gentle eyes, and pretty, rounded, dark face, in its frame of long, black curls, with tender liking--I now coldly resolved to hurry past, pretending not to know her. It was a mean thing to do; Miss Stratford had always been good to me, shining in that respect in brilliant contrast to my other teachers, whom I hated bitterly. Still, the “Kentucky Bear-Hunter-coarse-grain” was too important a matter to wait upon any mere female friendships, and I quickened my pace into a trot, hoping to scurry by unrecognized.

“Oh, Andrew! is that you?” I heard her call out as I ran past. For the instant I thought of rushing on, quite as if I had not heard. Then I stopped and walked beside her.

“I am going to stay up all night: mother says I may; and I am going to fire off Tom Hemingway’s big cannon every fourth time, straight through till breakfast time,” I announced to her loftily.

“Dear me! I ought to be proud to be seen walking with such an important citizen,” she answered, with kindly playfulness. She added more gravely, after a moment’s pause: “Then Tom is out playing with the other boys, is he?”

“Why, of course!” I responded. “He always lets us stand around when he fires off his cannon. He’s got some ‘ringers’ this year too.”

I heard Miss Stratford murmur an impulsive “Thank God!” under her breath.

Full as the day had been of surprises, I could not help wondering that the fact of Tom’s ringers should stir up such profound emotions in the teacher’s breast. Since the subject so interested her, I went on with a long catalogue of Tom’s other pyrotechnic possessions, and from that to an account of his almost supernatural collection of postage-stamps. In a few minutes more I am sure I should have revealed to her the great secret of my life, which was my determination, in case I came to assume the victorious rôle and rank of Napoleon, to immediately make Tom a Marshal of the Empire.

But we had reached the post-office square. I had never before seen it so full of people.

Even to my boyish eyes the tragic line of division which cleft this crowd in twain was apparent. On one side, over by the Seminary, the youngsters had lighted a bonfire, and were running about it--some of the bolder ones jumping through it in frolicsome recklessness. Close by stood the band, now valiantly thumping out “John Brown’s Body” upon the noisy night air. It was quite dark by this time, but the musicians knew the tune by heart. So did the throng about them, and sang it with lusty fervor. The doors of the saloon toward the corner of the square were flung wide open. Two black streams of men kept in motion under the radiance of the big reflector-lamp over these doors--one going in, one coming out. They slapped one another on the back as they passed, with exultant screams and shouts. Every once in a while, when movement was for the instant blocked, some voice lifted above the others would begin “Hip-hip-hip-hip--” and then would come a roar that fairly drowned the music.

On the post-office side of the square there was no bonfire. No one raised a cheer. A densely packed mass of men and women stood in front of the big square stone building, with its closed doors, and curtained windows upon which, from time to time, the shadow of some passing clerk, bareheaded and hurried, would be momentarily thrown. They waited in silence for the night mail to be sorted. If they spoke to one another, it was in whispers--as if they had been standing with uncovered heads at a funeral service in a graveyard. The dim light reflected over from the bonfire, or down from the shaded windows of the post-office, showed solemn, hard-lined, anxious faces. Their lips scarcely moved when they muttered little low-toned remarks to their neighbors. They spoke from the side of the mouth, and only on one subject.

“He went all through Fredericksburg without a scratch--”

“He looks so much like me--General Palmer told my brother he’d have known his hide in a tan-yard--”

“He’s been gone--let’s see--it was a year some time last April--”

“He was counting on a furlough the first of this month. I suppose nobody got one as things turned out--‘’

“He said, ‘No; it ain’t my style. I’ll fight as much as you like, but I won’t be nigger-waiter for no man, captain or no captain ‘--”

Thus I heard the scattered murmurs among the grown-up heads above me, as we pushed into the outskirts of the throng, and stood there, waiting for the rest. There was no sentence without a “he” in it. A stranger might have fancied that they were all talking of one man. I knew better. They were the fathers and mothers, the sisters, brothers, wives of the men whose regiments had been in that horrible three days’ fight at Gettysburg. Each was thinking and speaking of his own, and took it for granted the others would understand. For that matter, they all did understand. The town knew the name and family of every one of the twelve-score sons she had in this battle.

It is not very clear to me now why people all went to the post-office to wait for the evening papers that came in from the nearest big city. Nowadays they would be brought in bulk and sold on the street before the mail-bags had reached the post-office. Apparently that had not yet been thought of in our slow old town.

The band across the square had started up afresh with “Annie Lisle”--the sweet old refrain of “Wave willows, murmur waters,” comes back to me now after a quarter-century of forgetfulness--when all at once there was a sharp forward movement of the crowd. The doors had been thrown open, and the hallway was on the instant filled with a swarming multitude. The band had stopped as suddenly as it began, and no more cheering was heard. We could see whole troops of dark forms scudding toward us from the other side of the square.

“Run in for me--that’s a good boy--ask for Dr. Stratford’s mail,” the teacher whispered, bending over me.

It seemed an age before I finally got back to her, with the paper in its postmarked wrapper buttoned up inside my jacket. I had never been in so fierce and determined a crowd before, and I emerged from it at last, confused in wits and panting for breath.

I was still looking about through the gloom in a foolish way for Miss Stratford, when I felt her hand laid sharply on my shoulder.

“Well--where is it?--did nothing come?” she asked, her voice trembling with eagerness, and the eyes which I had thought so soft and dove-like flashing down upon me as if she were Miss Pritchard, and I had been caught chewing gum in school.

I drew the paper out from under my roundabout, and gave it to her. She grasped it, and thrust a finger under the cover to tear it off. Then she hesitated for a moment, and looked about her. “Come where there is some light,” she said, and started up the street. Although she seemed to have spoken more to herself than to me, I followed her in silence, close to her side.

For a long way the sidewalk in front of every lighted store-window was thronged with a group of people clustered tight about some one who had a paper, and was reading from it aloud. Beside broken snatches of this monologue, we caught, now groans of sorrow and horror, now exclamations of proud approval, and even the beginnings of cheers, broken in upon by a general “’Sh-h!” as we hurried past outside the curb.

It was under a lamp in the little park nearly halfway up the hill that Miss Stratford stopped, and spread the paper open. I see her still, white-faced, under the flickering gaslight, her black curls making a strange dark bar between the pale-straw hat and the white of her shoulder shawl and muslin dress, her hands trembling as they held up the extended sheet. She scanned the columns swiftly, skimmingly for a time, as I could see by the way she moved her round chin up and down. Then she came to a part which called for closer reading. The paper shook perceptibly now, as she bent her eyes upon it. Then all at once it fell from her hands, and without a sound she walked away.