But the shouting little boys were hard after him. Finally they were even pulling at his arms. “Jimmie—”
“What?” he demanded, turning with a snarl. “What d’you want? Leggo my arm!”
“Here he is! Here’s the new feller! Here’s the new feller! Now!”
“I don’t care if he is,” said Jimmie, with grand impatience. He tilted his chin. “I don’t care if he is.”
Then they reviled him. “Thought you was goin’ to lick him first time you caught him! Yah! You’re a ’fraid-cat!” They began to sing: “ ’Fraid-cat! ’Fraid-cat! ’Fraid-cat!” He expostulated hotly, turning from one to another, but they would not listen. In the meantime the Hedge boy slunk on his way, looking with deep anxiety upon this attempt to send Jimmie against him. But Jimmie would have none of the plan.
III
When the children met again on the playground, Jimmie was openly challenged with cowardice. He had made a big threat in the hearing of comrades, and when invited by them to take advantage of an opportunity, he had refused. They had been fairly sure of their amusement, and they were indignant. Jimmie was finally driven to declare that as soon as school was out for the day, he would thrash the Hedge boy. When finally the children came rushing out of the iron gate, filled with the delights of freedom, a hundred boys surrounded Jimmie in high spirits, for he had said that he was determined. They waited for the lone lad from Jersey City. When he appeared, Jimmie wasted no time. He walked straight to him and said, “Did you say you kin lick me?”
Johnnie Hedge was cowed, shrinking, affrighted, and the roars of a hundred boys thundered in his ears, but again he knew what he had to say. “Yes,” he gasped, in anguish.
“Then,” said Jimmie, resolutely, “you’ve got to fight.” There was a joyous clamor by the mob. The beleaguered lad looked this way and that way for succor, as Willie Dalzel and other officious youngsters policed an irregular circle in the crowd. He saw Jimmie facing him; there was no help for it; he dropped his books—the old books which would not “do.”
Now it was the fashion among tiny Whilomville belligerents to fight much in the manner of little bear cubs. Two boys would rush upon each other, immediately grapple, and—the best boy having probably succeeded in getting the coveted “under hold”—there would presently be a crash to earth of the inferior boy, and he would probably be mopped around in the dust, or the mud, or the snow, or whatever the material happened to be, until the engagement was over. Whatever havoc was dealt out to him was ordinarily the result of his wild endeavors to throw off his opponent and arise. Both infants wept during the fight, as a common thing, and if they wept very hard, the fight was a harder fight. The result was never very bloody, but the complete dishevelment of both victor and vanquished was extraordinary. As for the spectacle, it more resembled a collision of boys in a fog than it did the manly art of hammering another human being into speechless inability.
The fight began when Jimmie made a mad, bear-cub rush at the new boy, amid savage cries of encouragement. Willie Dalzel, for instance, almost howled his head off. Very timid boys on the outskirts of the throng felt their hearts leap to their throats. It was a time when certain natures were impressed that only man is vile.
But it appeared that bear-cub rushing was no part of the instruction received by boys in Jersey City. Boys in Jersey City were apparently schooled curiously. Upon the onslaught of Jimmie, the stranger had gone wild with rage—boylike. Some spark had touched his fighting blood, and in a moment he was a cornered, desperate, fire-eyed little man. He began to swing his arms, to revolve them so swiftly that one might have considered him a small working model of an extra-fine patented windmill which was caught in a gale. For a moment this defense surprised Jimmie more than it damaged him, but two moments later a small, knotty fist caught him squarely in the eye, and with a shriek he went down in defeat. He lay on the ground so stunned that he could not even cry; but if he had been able to cry, he would have cried over his prestige—or something—not over his eye.
There was a dreadful tumult. The boys cast glances of amazement and terror upon the victor, and thronged upon the beaten Jimmie Trescott. It was a moment of excitement so intense that one cannot say what happened. Never before had Whilomville seen such a thing—not the little tots. They were aghast, dumbfounded, and they glanced often over their shoulders at the new boy, who stood alone, his clenched fists at his side, his face crimson, his lips still working with the fury of battle.
But there was another surprise for Whilomville. It might have been seen that the little victor was silently debating against an impulse.
But the impulse won, for the lone lad from Jersey City suddenly wheeled, sprang like a demon, and struck another boy.
A curtain should be drawn before this deed. A knowledge of it is really too much for the heart to bear. The other boy was Willie Dalzel. The lone lad from Jersey City had smitten him full sore.
There is little to say of it. It must have been that a feeling worked gradually to the top of the little stranger’s wrath that Jimmie Trescott had been a mere tool, that the front and center of his persecutors had been Willie Dalzel; and, being rendered temporarily lawless by his fighting blood, he raised his hand and smote for revenge.
Willie Dalzel had been in the middle of a vandal’s cry, which screeched out over the voices of everybody. The new boy’s fist cut it in half, so to say. And then arose the howl of an amazed and terrorized walrus.
One wishes to draw a second curtain. Without discussion or inquiry or brief retort, Willie Dalzel ran away. He ran like a hare straight for home, this redoubtable chieftain. Following him at a heavy and slow pace ran the impassioned new boy. The scene was long remembered.
Willie Dalzel was no coward; he had been panic-stricken into running away from a new thing. He ran as a man might run from the sudden appearance of a vampire or a ghoul or a gorilla. This was no time for academics—he ran.
Jimmie slowly gathered himself and came to his feet. “Where’s Willie?” said he, first of all. The crowd sniggered. “Where’s Willie?” said Jimmie again.
“Why, he licked him too!” answered a boy suddenly.
“He did?” said Jimmie. He sat weakly down on the roadway. “He did?” After allowing a moment for the fact to sink into him, he looked up at the crowd with his one good eye and his one bunged eye, and smiled cheerfully.
June, 1900
[Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 101, pp. 56–63.]
* Whilomville Stories.
THIS MAJESTIC LIE*
I
In the twilight, a great crowd was streaming up the Prado in Havana. The people had been down to the shore to laugh and twiddle their fingers at the American blockading fleet—mere colorless shapes on the edge of the sea. Gorgeous challenges had been issued to the faraway ships by little children and women while the men laughed. Havana was happy, for it was known that the illustrious sailor Don Patricio de Montojo had with his fleet met the decaying ships of one Dewey and smitten them into stuffing for a baby’s pillow. Of course the American sailors were drunk at the time, but the American sailors were always drunk. Newsboys galloped among the crowd crying La Lucha and La Marina. The papers said: “This is as we foretold. How could it be otherwise when the cowardly Yankees met our brave sailors?” But the tongues of the exuberant people ran more at large. One man said in a loud voice: “How unfortunate it is that we still have to buy meat in Havana, when so much pork is floating in Manila Bay!” Amid the consequent laughter, another man retorted: “Oh, never mind! That pork in Manila is rotten. It always was rotten.” Still another man said: “But, little friend, it would make good manure for our fields if only we had it.” And still another man said: “Ah, wait until our soldiers get with the wives of the Americans, and there will be many little Yankees to serve hot on our tables. The men of the Maine simply made our appetites good. Never mind the pork in Manila. There will be plenty.” Women laughed; children laughed because their mothers laughed; everybody laughed. And—a word with
you—these people were cackling and chuckling and insulting their own dead, their own dead men of Spain, for if the poor green corpses floated then in Manila Bay, they were not American corpses.
The newsboys came charging with an extra. The inhabitants of Philadelphia had fled to the forests because of a Spanish bombardment, and also Boston was besieged by the Apaches, who had totally invested the town. The Apache artillery had proved singularly effective, and an American garrison had been unable to face it. In Chicago, millionaires were giving away their palaces for two or three loaves of bread. These dispatches were from Madrid, and every word was truth, but they added little to the enthusiasm, because the crowd—God help mankind—was greatly occupied with visions of Yankee pork floating in Manila Bay. This will be thought to be embittered writing. Very well; the writer admits its untruthfulness in one particular. It is untruthful in that it fails to reproduce one hundredth part of the grossness and indecency of popular expression in Havana up to the time when the people knew they were beaten.
There were no lights on the Prado or in other streets, because of a military order. In the slow-moving crowd, there were a young man and an old woman. Suddenly the young man laughed a strange metallic laugh and spoke in English, not cautiously. “That’s damned hard to listen to.”
The woman spoke quickly. “Hush, you little idiot. Do you want to be walkin’ across that grass-plot in Cabanas with your arms tied behind you?” Then she murmured sadly: “Johnnie, I wonder if that’s true—what they say about Manila?”
“I don’t know,” said Johnnie, “but I think they’re lying.”
As they crossed the Plaza, they could see that the Café Tacón was crowded with Spanish officers in blue and white pajama uniforms. Wine and brandy were being wildly consumed in honor of the victory at Manila. “Let’s hear what they say,” said Johnnie to his companion, and they moved across the street and in under the portales. The owner of the Café Tacón was standing on a table making a speech amid cheers. He was advocating the crucifixion of such Americans as fell into Spanish hands, and—it was all very sweet and white and tender, but above all it was chivalrous, because it is well known that the Spaniards are a chivalrous people. It has been remarked both by the English newspapers and by the bulls that are bred for the red death. And secretly the corpses in Manila Bay mocked this jubilee; the mocking, mocking corpses in Manila Bay.
II
To be blunt, Johnnie was an American spy. Once he had been the manager of a sugar plantation in Pinar del Rio, and during the insurrection it had been his distinguished function to pay tribute money, food, and forage alike to Spanish columns and insurgent bands. He was performing this straddle with benefit to his crops and with mildew to his conscience when Spain and the United States agreed to skirmish, both in the name of honor. It then became a military necessity that he should change his base. Whatever of the province was still alive was sorry to see him go, for he had been a very dexterous man, and food and wine had been in his house even when a man with a mango could gain the envy of an entire Spanish battalion. Without doubt he had been a mere trimmer, but it was because of his crop—and he always wrote the word thus: C R O P. In those days a man of peace and commerce was in a position parallel to the watchmaker who essayed a task in the midst of a drunken brawl, with oaths, bottles, and bullets flying about his intent bowed head. So many of them—or all of them—were trimmers, and to any armed force they fervently said: “God assist you.” And behold, the trimmers dwelt safely in a tumultuous land, and without effort save that their little machines for trimming ran night and day. So, many a plantation became covered with a maze of lies, as if thick-webbing spiders had run from stalk to stalk in the cane. So, sometimes a planter incurred an equal hatred from both sides, and, when in trouble, there was no camp to which he could flee save, straight in air, the camp of the heavenly host.
If Johnnie had not had a crop, he would have been plainly on the side of the insurgents, but his crop staked him down to the soil at a point where the Spaniards could always be sure of finding him—him or his crop; it is the same thing. But when war came between Spain and the United States he could no longer be the cleverest trimmer in Pinar del Rio. And he retreated upon Key West, losing much of his baggage train, not because of panic, but because of wisdom. In Key West he was no longer the manager of a big Cuban plantation; he was a little tan-faced refugee without much money. Mainly he listened; there was nought else to do. In the first place he was a young man of extremely slow speech, and in the Key West Hotel tongues ran like pin wheels. If he had projected his methodic way of thought and speech upon this hurricane, he would have been as effective as the man who tries to smoke against the gale. This truth did not impress him. Really, he was impressed with the fact that, although he knew much of Cuba, he could not talk so rapidly and wisely of it as many war correspondents who had not yet seen the island. Usually he brooded in silence over a bottle of beer and the loss of his crop. He received no sympathy, although there was a plenitude of tender souls. War’s first step is to make expectation so high that all present things are fogged and darkened in a tense wonder of the future. None cared about the collapse of Johnnie’s plantation when all were thinking of the probable collapse of cities and fleets.
In the meantime battleships, monitors, cruisers, gunboats, and torpedo craft arrived, departed, arrived, departed. Rumors sang about the ears of warships hurriedly coaling. Rumors sang about the ears of warships leisurely coming to anchor. This happened and that happened, and if the news arrived at Key West as a mouse, it was often enough cabled north as an elephant. The correspondents at Key West were perfectly capable of adjusting their perspective, but many of the editors in the United States were like deaf men at whom one has to roar. A few quiet words of information were not enough for them; one had to bawl into their ears a whirlwind tale of heroism, blood, death, victory—or defeat; at any rate, a tragedy. The papers should have sent playwrights to the first part of the war. Playwrights are allowed to lower the curtain from time to time and say to the crowd: “Mark ye, now! Three or four months are supposed to elapse.” But the poor devils at Key West were obliged to keep the curtain up all the time. “This isn’t a continuous performance.” “Yes, it is; it’s got to be a continuous performance. The welfare of the paper demands it. The people want news.” Very well: continuous performance. It is strange how men of sense can go aslant at the bidding of other men of sense and combine to contribute to a general mess of exaggeration and bombast. But we did; and in the midst of the furor I remember the still figure of Johnnie, the planter, the ex-trimmer. He looked dazed.
This was in May.
We all liked him. From time to time some of us heard in his words the vibrant note of a thoughtful experience. But it could not be well heard; it was only like the sound of a bell from under the floor. We were too busy with our own clatter. He was taciturn and competent, while we solved the war in a babble of tongues. Soon we went about our peaceful paths saying ironically one to another: “War is hell.” Meanwhile, managing editors fought us tooth and nail, and we all were sent boxes of medals inscribed: “Incompetency.” We became furious with ourselves. Why couldn’t we send hair-raising dispatches? Why couldn’t we inflame the wires? All this we did. If a first-class armored cruiser which had once been a towboat fired a six-pounder shot from her forward thirteen-inch gun turret, the world heard of it, you bet. We were not idle men. We had come to report the war, and we did it. Our good names and our salaries depended upon it, and we were urged by our managing editors to remember that the American people were a collection of super-nervous idiots who would immediately have convulsions if we did not throw them some news—any news. It was not true, at all. The American people were anxious for things decisive to happen; they were not anxious to be lulled to satisfaction with a drug. But we lulled them. We told them this and we told them that, and I warrant you our screaming sounded like the noise of a lot of sea birds settling for the night among the black crags.
In the meanti
me, Johnnie stared and meditated. In his unhurried, un-startled manner he was singularly like another man who was flying the pennant as commander-in-chief of the North Atlantic Squadron. Johnnie was a refugee; the admiral was an admiral. And yet they were much akin, these two. Their brother was the Strategy Board—the only capable political institution of the war. At Key West the naval officers spoke of their business and were devoted to it and were bound to succeed in it, but when the flagship was in port the only two people who were independent and sane were the admiral and Johnnie. The rest of us were lulling the public with drugs.
There was much discussion of the new batteries at Havana. Johnnie was a typical American. In Europe a typical American is a man with a hard eye, chin whiskers, and a habit of speaking through his nose. Johnnie was a young man of great energy, ready to accomplish a colossal thing for the basic reason that he was ignorant of its magnitude. In fact he attacked all obstacles in life in a spirit of contempt, seeing them smaller than they were until he had actually surmounted them—when he was likely to be immensely pleased with himself. Somewhere in him there was a sentimental tenderness, but it was like a light seen afar at night; it came, went, appeared again in a new place, flickered, flared, went out, left you in a void and angry. And if his sentimental tenderness was a light, the darkness in which it puzzled you was his irony of soul. This irony was directed first at himself; then at you; then at the nation and the flag; then at God. It was a midnight in which you searched for the little elusive, ashamed spark of tender sentiment. Sometimes you thought this was all pretext, the manner and the way of fear of the wit of others; sometimes you thought he was a hardened savage; usually you did not think, but waited in the cheerful certainty that in time the little flare of light would appear in the gloom.
Johnnie decided that he would go and spy upon the fortifications of Havana. If any one wished to know of those batteries, it was the admiral of the squadron, but the admiral of the squadron knew much. I feel sure that he knew the size and position of every gun. To be sure, new guns might be mounted at any time, but they would not be big guns, and doubtless he lacked in his cabin less information than would be worth a man’s life. Still, Johnnie decided to be a spy. He would go and look. We of the newspapers pinned him fast to the tail of our kite, and he was taken to see the admiral. I judge that the admiral did not display much interest in the plan. But at any rate it seems that he touched Johnnie smartly enough with a brush to make him, officially, a spy. Then Johnnie bowed and left the cabin. There was no other machinery. If Johnnie was to end his life and leave a little book about it, no one cared—least of all, Johnnie and the admiral. When he came aboard the tug, he displayed his usual stalwart and rather selfish zest for fried eggs. It was all some kind of ordinary matter. It was done every day. It was the business of packing pork, sewing shoes, binding hay. It was commonplace. No one could adjust it, get it in proportion, until—afterwards. On a dark night, they heaved him into a small boat and rowed him to the beach.