V
After the battle, three correspondents happened to meet on the trail. They were hot, dusty, weary, hungry, and thirsty, and they repaired to the shade of a mango tree and sprawled luxuriously. Among them they mustered two score friends who on that day had gone to the far shore of the hereafter, but their senses were no longer resonant. Shackles was babbling plaintively about mint juleps, and the others were bidding him to have done.
“By the way,” said one, at last, “it’s too bad about poor old Gates of the 307th. He bled to death. His men were crazy. They were blubbering and cursing around there like wild people. It seems that when they got back there to look for him they found him just about gone, and another wounded man was trying to stop the flow with his hat! His hat, mind you. Poor old Gatesie!”
“Oh, no, Shackles!” said the third man of the party. “Oh, no, you’re wrong. The best mint juleps in the world are made right in New York, Philadelphia, or Boston. That Kentucky idea is only a tradition.”
A wounded man approached them. He had been shot through the shoulder, and his shirt had been diagonally cut away, leaving much bare skin. Over the bullet’s point of entry there was a kind of white spider, shaped from pieces of adhesive plaster. Over the point of departure there was a bloody bulb of cotton strapped to the flesh by other pieces of adhesive plaster. His eyes were dreamy, wistful, sad. “Say, gents, have any of ye got a bottle?” he asked.
A correspondent raised himself suddenly and looked with bright eyes at the soldier.
“Well, you have got a nerve,” he said grinning. “Have we got a bottle, eh! Who in hell do you think we are? If we had a bottle of good licker, do you suppose we could let the whole army drink out of it? You have too much faith in the generosity of men, my friend!”
The soldier stared, ox-like, and finally said, “Huh?”
“I say,” continued the correspondent, somewhat more loudly, “that if we had had a bottle we would have probably finished it ourselves by this time.”
“But,” said the other, dazed, “I meant an empty bottle. I didn’t mean no full bottle.”
The correspondent was humorously irascible. “An empty bottle! You must be crazy! Who ever heard of a man looking for an empty bottle? It isn’t sense! I’ve seen a million men looking for full bottles, but you’re the first man I ever saw who insisted on the bottle’s being empty. What in the world do you want it for?”
“Well, ye see, mister,” explained Lige, slowly, “our major, he was killed this mornin’ an’ we’re jes’ goin’ to bury him, an’ I thought I’d jest take a look ’round an’ see if I couldn’t borry an empty bottle, an’ then I’d take an’ write his name an’ reg’ment on a paper an’ put it in th’ bottle an’ bury it with him, so’s when they come fer to dig him up some time an’ take him home, there sure wouldn’t be no mistake.”
“Oh!”
November, 1899
[Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Vol. 49, pp. 88–101.]
* Wounds in the Rain.
MAKING AN ORATOR*
In the school at Whilomville it was the habit, when children had progressed to a certain class, to have them devote Friday afternoon to what was called elocution. This was in the piteously ignorant belief that orators were thus made. By process of school law, unfortunate boys and girls were dragged up to address their fellow scholars in the literature of the mid-century. Probably the children who were most capable of expressing themselves, the children who were most sensitive to the power of speech, suffered the most wrong. Little blockheads who could learn eight lines of conventional poetry, and could get up and spin it rapidly at their classmates, did not undergo a single pang. The plan operated mainly to agonize many children permanently against arising to speak their thought to fellow creatures.
Jimmie Trescott had an idea that by exhibition of undue ignorance he could escape from being promoted into the first classroom which exacted such penalty from its inmates. He preferred to dwell in a less classic shade rather than venture into a domain where he was obliged to perform a certain duty which struck him as being worse than death. However, willy-nilly, he was somehow sent ahead into the place of torture.
Every Friday at least ten of the little children had to mount the stage beside the teacher’s desk and babble something which none of them understood. This was to make them orators. If it had been ordered that they should croak like frogs, it would have advanced most of them just as far toward oratory.
Alphabetically Jimmie Trescott was near the end of the list of victims, but his time was none the less inevitable. “Tanner, Timmens, Trass, Trescott—” He saw his downfall approaching.
He was passive to the teacher while she drove into his mind the incomprehensible lines of “The Charge of the Light Brigade”:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward—
He had no conception of a league. If in the ordinary course of life somebody had told him that he was half a league from home, he might have been frightened that half a league was fifty miles; but he struggled manfully with the valley of death and a mystic six hundred, who were performing something there which was very fine, he had been told. He learned all the verses.
But as his own Friday afternoon approached he was moved to make known to his family that a dreadful disease was upon him, and was likely at any time to prevent him from going to his beloved school.
On the great Friday when the children of his initials were to speak their pieces Dr. Trescott was away from home, and the mother of the boy was alarmed beyond measure at Jimmie’s curious illness, which caused him to lie on the rug in front of the fire and groan cavernously.
She bathed his feet in hot mustard water until they were lobster-red. She also placed a mustard plaster on his chest.
He announced that these remedies did him no good at all—no good at all. With an air of martyrdom he endured a perfect downpour of motherly attention all that day. Thus the first Friday was passed in safety.
With singular patience he sat before the fire in the dining room and looked at picture books, only complaining of pain when he suspected his mother of thinking that he was getting better.
The next day being Saturday and a holiday, he was miraculously delivered from the arms of disease, and went forth to play, a blatantly healthy boy.
He had no further attack until Thursday night of the next week, when he announced that he felt very, very poorly. The mother was already chronically alarmed over the condition of her son, but Dr. Trescott asked him questions which denoted some incredulity. On the third Friday Jimmie was dropped at the door of the school from the doctor’s buggy. The other children, notably those who had already passed over the mountain of distress, looked at him with glee, seeing in him another lamb brought to butchery. Seated at his desk in the schoolroom, Jimmie sometimes remembered with dreadful distinctness every line of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and at other times his mind was utterly empty of it. Geography, arithmetic, and spelling—usually great tasks—quite rolled off him. His mind was dwelling with terror upon the time when his name should be called and he was obliged to go up to the platform, turn, bow, and recite his message to his fellow men.
Desperate expedients for delay came to him. If he could have engaged the services of a real pain, he would have been glad. But steadily, inexorably, the minutes marched on toward his great crisis, and all his plans for escape blended into a mere panic fear.
The maples outside were defeating the weakening rays of the afternoon sun, and in the shadowed schoolroom had come a stillness, in which, nevertheless, one could feel the complacence of the little pupils who had already passed through the flames. They were calmly prepared to recognize as a spectacle the torture of others.
Little Johnnie Tanner opened the ceremony. He stamped heavily up to the platform, and bowed in such a manner that he almost fell down. He blurted out that it would ill befit him to sit silent while the name of his fair Ireland was being reproached, and he appealed to the galla
nt soldier before him if every British battlefield was not sown with the bones of sons of the Emerald Isle. He was also heard to say that he had listened with deepening surprise and scorn to the insinuation of the honorable member from North Glenmorganshire that the loyalty of the Irish regiments in her Majesty’s service could be questioned. To what purpose, then, he asked, had the blood of Irishmen flowed on a hundred fields? To what purpose had Irishmen gone to their death with bravery and devotion in every part of the world where the victorious flag of England had been carried? If the honorable member for North Glenmorganshire insisted upon construing a mere pothouse row between soldiers in Dublin into a grand treachery to the colors and to her Majesty’s uniform, then it was time for Ireland to think bitterly of her dead sons, whose graves now marked every step of England’s progress, and yet who could have their honors stripped from them so easily by the honorable member for North Glenmorganshire. Furthermore, the honorable member for North Glenmorganshire—
It is needless to say that little Johnnie Tanner’s language made it exceedingly hot for the honorable member for North Glenmorganshire. But Johnnie was not angry. He was only in haste. He finished the honorable member for North Glenmorganshire in what might be called a gallop.
Susie Timmens then went to the platform, and with a face as pale as death whisperingly reiterated that she would be Queen of the May. The child represented there a perfect picture of unnecessary suffering. Her small lips were quite blue, and her eyes, opened wide, stared with a look of horror at nothing.
The phlegmatic Trass boy, with his moon face only expressing peasant parentage, calmly spoke some undeniably true words concerning destiny.
In his seat Jimmie Trescott was going half blind with fear of his approaching doom. He wished that the Trass boy would talk for ever about destiny. If the schoolhouse had taken fire he thought that he would have felt simply relief. Anything was better. Death amid the flames was preferable to a recital of “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
But the Trass boy finished his remarks about destiny in a very short time. Jimmie heard the teacher call his name, and he felt the whole world look at him. He did not know how he made his way to the stage. Parts of him seemed to be of lead, and at the same time parts of him seemed to be light as air, detached. His face had gone as pale as had been the face of Susie Timmens. He was simply a child in torment; that is all there is to be said specifically about it; and to intelligent people the exhibition would have been not more edifying than a dogfight.
He bowed precariously, choked, made an inarticulate sound, and then he suddenly said,
“Half a leg—”
“League,” said the teacher, coolly.
“Half a leg—”
“League,” said the teacher.
“League,” repeated Jimmie, wildly.
“Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.”
He paused here and looked wretchedly at the teacher.
“Half a league,” he muttered—“half a league—”
He seemed likely to keep continuing this phrase indefinitely, so after a time the teacher said, “Well, go on.”
“Half a league,” responded Jimmie.
The teacher had the opened book before her, and she read from it:
“ ‘All in the valley of Death
Rode the—’
Go on,” she concluded.
Jimmie said,
“All in the valley of Death
Rode the—the—the—”
He cast a glance of supreme appeal upon the teacher, and breathlessly whispered, “Rode the what?”
The young woman flushed with indignation to the roots of her hair.
“Rode the six hundred,”
she snapped at him.
The class was a-rustle with delight at this cruel display. They were no better than a Roman populace in Nero’s time.
Jimmie started off again:
“Half a leg—league, half a league, half a league onward,
All in the valley of death rode the six hundred.
Forward—forward—forward—”
“The Light Brigade,” suggested the teacher, sharply.
“The Light Brigade,” said Jimmie. He was about to die of the ignoble pain of his position.
As for Tennyson’s lines, they had all gone grandly out of his mind, leaving it a whited wall.
The teacher’s indignation was still rampant. She looked at the miserable wretch before her with an angry stare.
“You stay in after school and learn that all over again,” she commanded. “And be prepared to speak it next Friday. I am astonished at you, Jimmie. Go to your seat.”
If she had suddenly and magically made a spirit of him and left him free to soar high above all the travail of our earthly lives she could not have overjoyed him more. He fled back to his seat without hearing the low-toned gibes of his schoolmates. He gave no thought to the terrors of the next Friday. The evils of the day had been sufficient, and to a childish mind a week is a great space of time.
With the delightful inconsistency of his age he sat in blissful calm and watched the sufferings of an unfortunate boy named Zimmerman, who was the next victim of education. Jimmie, of course, did not know that on this day there had been laid for him the foundation of a finished incapacity for public speaking which would be his until he died.
December, 1899
[Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 100, pp. 25–28.]
* Whilomville Stories.
TWELVE O’CLOCK
“Where were you at twelve o’clock, noon, on the 9th of June, 1875?”— Question on intelligent cross-examination.
I
“Excuse me,” said Ben Roddle with graphic gestures to a group of citizens in Nantucket’s store. “Excuse me! When them fellers in leather pants an’ six-shooters ride in, I go home an’ set in th’ cellar. That’s what I do. When you see me pirooting through the streets at th’ same time an’ occasion as them punchers, you kin put me down fer bein’ crazy. Excuse me!”
“Why, Ben,” drawled old Nantucket, “you ain’t never really seen ’em turned loose. Why, I kin remember—in th’ old days—when——”
“Oh, damn yer old days!” retorted Roddle. Fixing Nantucket with the eye of scorn and contempt, he said, “I suppose you’ll be sayin’ in a minute that in th’ old days you used to kill Injuns, won’t you?”
There was some laughter, and Roddle was left free to expand his ideas on the periodic visits of cowboys to the town. “Mason Rickets, he had ten big punkins a-sittin’ in front of his store, an’ them fellers from the Upside-down-P ranch shot ’em—shot ’em all—an’ Rickets lyin’ on his belly in th’ store a-callin’ fer ’em to quit it. An’ what did they do? Why, they laughed at ’im—just laughed at ’im! That don’t do a town no good. Now, how would an eastern capiterlist”—(it was the town’s humor to be always gassing of phantom investors who were likely to come any moment and pay a thousand prices for everything)—“how would an eastern capiterlist like that? Why, you couldn’t see ’im fer th’ dust on his trail. Then he’d tell all his friends: ‘That there town may be all right, but ther’s too much loose-handed shootin’ fer my money.’ An’ he’d be right, too. Them rich fellers, they don’t make no bad breaks with their money. They watch it all th’ time b’cause they know blame well there ain’t hardly room fer their feet fer th’ pikers an’ tinhorns an’ thimble-riggers what are layin’ fer ’em. I tell you, one puncher racin’ his cow-pony hell-bent-fer-election down Main Street an’ yellin’ an’ shootin’, an’ nothin’ at all done about it, would scare away a whole herd of capiterlists. An’ it ain’t right. It oughter be stopped.”
A pessimistic voice asked: “How you goin’ to stop it, Ben?”
“Organize,” replied Roddle, pompously. “Organize. That’s the only way to make these fellers lay down. I——”
From the street sounded a quick scudding of pony hoofs, and a party of cowboys swept past the door. One man, however, was seen to draw rein and dismo
unt. He came clanking into the store. “Mornin’, gentlemen,” he said civilly.
“Mornin’,” they answered in subdued voices.
He stepped to the counter and said, “Give me a paper of fine cut, please.” The group of citizens contemplated him in silence. He certainly did not look threatening. He appeared to be a young man of twenty-five years, with a tan from wind and sun, with a remarkably clear eye from perhaps a period of enforced temperance, a quiet young man who wanted to buy some tobacco. A six-shooter swung low on his hip, but at the moment it looked more decorative than warlike; it seemed merely a part of his old gala dress—his sombrero with its band of rattlesnake-skin, his great flaming neckerchief, his belt of embroidered Mexican leather, his high-heeled boots, his huge spurs. And, above all, his hair had been watered and brushed until it lay as close to his head as the fur lies to a wet cat. Paying for his tobacco, he withdrew.
Ben Roddle resumed his harangue. “Well, there you are! Looks like a calm man now, but in less ’n half an hour he’ll be as drunk as three bucks an’ a squaw, an’ then—excuse me!”
II
On this day the men of two outfits had come into town, but Ben Roddle’s ominous words were not justified at once. The punchers spent most of the morning in an attack on whiskey which was too earnest to be noisy.
At five minutes of eleven, a tall, lank, brick-colored cowboy strode over to Placer’s Hotel. Placer’s Hotel was a notable place. It was the best hotel within two hundred miles. Its office was filled with armchairs and brown papier-maché spittoons. At one end of the room was a wooden counter painted a bright pink, and on this morning a man was behind the counter writing in a ledger. He was the proprietor of the hotel, but his customary humor was so sullen that all strangers immediately wondered why in life he had chosen to play the part of mine host. Near his left hand, double doors opened into the dining room, which in warm weather was always kept darkened in order to discourage the flies, which was not compassed at all.