Harold Frederic

“ From the living-room in the rear of our little house came the monotonous incessant clatter of Aunt Susan’s carpet loom. Through the window I could see the outlines of her figure and the back of her head as she sat on her high bench. It was to me the most familiar of all spectacles, this tireless woman bending resolutely over her work. She was there when I first cautiously ventured my nose out from under the warm blanket of a winter’s morning. Very, very often I fell asleep at night in my bed in the recess, lulled off by the murmur of the diligent loom. ”

“ We filed into the living-room. The Beeches had come in and shut the veranda door, and “M’rye” was seated in her rocking-chair, in the darkness beyond the bookcase. Her husband had the big book open before him on the table; the lamp-light threw the shadow of his long nose down into the gray of his beard with a strange effect of fierceness. His lips were tight-set and his shaggy brows drawn into a commanding frown, as he bent over the pages.
Abner did not look up till we had taken our seats. Then he raised his eyes toward the Irishman. ”

“ Less manure was drawn out onto the fields than in other autumns, and it looked as if there was to be little or no fall ploughing. Abner went about his tasks in a heavy, spiritless way these days, doggedly enough, but with none of his old-time vim. He no longer had pleasure even in abusing Lincoln and the war with Hurley. Not Antietam itself could have broken his nerve, but at least it silenced his tongue.
Warner Pitts came home on a furlough, with a fine new uniform, shoulder-straps and sword, and his arm in a sling. ”

“ I heard Hurley begin again, at the top of his voice, and Abner roared out something I could not catch. Then as in a flash the whole cluster of men became one confused whirling tangle of arms and legs, sprawling and wrestling on the ground, and from it rising the repellent sound of blows upon flesh, and a discordant chorus of grunts and curses. Big chunks of icy mud flew through the air, kicked up by the boots of the men as they struggled. ”

“ I half expected that Abner Beech would crumple up in some such distressing way, all of a sudden, when I told him that his son Jeff was in open rebellion, and intended to go off and enlist. It was incredible to the senses that any member of the household should set at defiance the patriarchal will of its head. But that the offence should come from placid, slow-witted, good-natured Jeff, and that it should involve the appearance of a Beech in a blue uniform—these things staggered the imagination. It was clear that something prodigious must happen. ”

“ The feeble light of the candle was losing itself upon the broad high walls of new hay; the huge shadows in the rafters overhead; the women-folk silently moving about, fixing up on the barn floor some pitiful imitation, poor souls, of the home that had been swept off the face of the earth, and outside, through the wide sprawling doors, the dying away effulgence of the embers of our roof-tree lingering in the air of the winter night. ”

“ Even when the house was filled with extra hired men, no one ever thought of getting in any female help, so tireless and so resourceful was Em. She did all the housework there was to do, from cellar to garret, was continually lending a hand in the men’s chores, made more butter than the household could eat up, managed a large kitchen-garden, and still had a good deal of spare time, which she spent in sitting out in the piazza in a starched pink calico gown, knitting the while she watched who went up and down the road. ”

“ The others would sit about till bedtime, amusing themselves as best they could, the women-folk knitting or mending, the men cracking butternuts, or dallying with cider and apples and fried-cakes, as they talked over the work and gossip of the district and tempted the scorching impulses of the stovehearth with their stockinged feet.
This tacit separation of the farmer and myself from the rest of the household in the course of time begat confidences between us. He grew, from brief and casual beginnings, into a habit of speaking to me about the things we read. ”

“ All at once, when she was something over thirty, Em had up and married a mowing-machine agent named Abel Jones, whom no one knew anything about, and who, indeed, had only been in the neighborhood for a week or so. The family was struck dumb with amazement. The idea of Em’s dallying with the notion of matrimony had never crossed anybody’s mind. As a girl she had never had any patience with husking-bees or dances or sleigh-ride parties. No young man had ever seen her home from anywhere, or had had the remotest encouragement to hang around the house. ”

“ A tall, dark figure, opaque against a gleaming background of moonlight and snowlight, was what I for a moment saw in the frame of the open doorway. Then, as he entered, shut and hooked the door behind him, and stood looking in a dazed way over at our lamplit group, I saw that he was a slender, delicately featured man, with a long beard of yellowish brown, and gentle eyes. He was clad as a soldier, heavy azure-hued caped overcoat and all, and I already knew enough of uniforms—cruel familiarity of my war-time infancy—to tell by his cap that he was an officer. ”

“ Though there was a trifle of rain in the air, the barrels and mossy discarded old fence-rails burned like pitch-pine, and when Hurley and I threw on armfuls of brush, the sparks burst up with a roar into a flaming column which we felt must be visible all over our side of Dearborn County. At all events, there was no doubt about its being seen and understood down at the Corners, for presently our enemies there started an answering bonfire, which glowed from time to time with such a peculiarly concentrated radiance that Abner said Lee Watkins must have given them some of his kerosene-oil barrels. ”

“ The red-brown front of our larger hay-barn loomed in a faint unnatural light, at close quarters, upon my first inquiring gaze. The big sliding doors were open, and the slanting wagon-bridge running down from their threshold was piled high with chairs, bedding, crockery, milk-pans, clothing—the jumbled remnants of our household gods. Turning, I looked across the yard upon what was left of the Beech homestead—a glare of cherry light glowing above a fiery hole in the ground. ”

“ The last discredited strips of snow up in the ravines on the hill-sides were melting away; the robins had come again, and were bustling busily across between the willows, already in the leaf, and the budded elms; men were going about the village streets without their overcoats, and boys were telling exciting tales about the suckers in the creek; our old friend Homer Sage had returned from his winter’s sojourn in the county poorhouse at Thessaly, and could be seen daily sitting in the sunshine on the broad stoop of the Excelsior Hotel. ”

“ Dana Pillsbury, carrying himself rigidly upright on the box-seat, drove past us with eyes fixed straight ahead, and a face as coldly expressionless as that of a wooden Indian. The wagon was covered all over with rubber blankets, so that whatever it bore was hidden. Only a few paces behind came the buggy, and my grandfather, old Arphaxed Turnbull, went by in his turn with the same averted, faraway gaze, and the same resolutely stolid countenance. He held the restive young carriage horse down to a decorous walk, a single firm hand on the tight reins, without so much as looking at it. ”

“ Hardly anybody in Octavius ever knew to what pathetic depths his poverty during the second winter descended. There was a period of several months, in sober truth, during which he fed himself upon six or seven cents a day. As he was too proud to dream of asking credit at the grocer’s and butcher’s, and walked about more primly erect than ever, meantime, in his frock-coat and gloves, no idea of these privations got abroad. And at the end of this long evil winter there came a remarkable spring, which altered in a violent way the fortunes of millions of people—among them Marsena. ”

“ They tried, too, to extract solace from the news that the regiments in question had been mentioned by name in the general despatches as having distinguished themselves and their county above all the rest—but it was an empty and heart-sickened pretence at best, and when, about dark, the women folks, who had waited in vain for them to come home to supper, began to appear on the skirts of the crowd, it was given up altogether. In after years Octavius got so that it could cheer those sinister names of Gaines’s Mill and Malvern Hill, and swell with pride at the memories they evoked. ”

“ All the girls of Octavius seemed to have been gathered here—the pretty ones and the plain ones, the saucy ones and the shy, the maidens who were “getting along” and the damsels not yet out of their teens. Stiff, spreading crinolines brushed juvenile pantalettes, and the dark head of long, shaving-like ringlets contrasted itself with the bold waterfall of blonde hair. These girls did not know one another very well, save by little groups formed around the nucleus of a church association, and very few of them knew Miss Par-malee at all, except, of course, by sight. ”

“ The millennium never came at all.
But at that time—in the late fifties and early sixties—the cheese-factory was the centre of an impressive constellation of dreams and roseate promises. Its managers were the very elect of the district; their disfavor was more to be dreaded than any condemnation of a town-meeting; their chief officers were even more important personages than the supervisor and assessor.
Abner Beech had literally been the founder of our cheese-factory. ”

“ The farmer did not comment on the relevancy of this. “Yes,” he went on, “the daughter of mine enemy, the child of that whining, backbiting old scoundrel who’s been eating his way into me like a deer-tick for years—the whelp that I owe every mean and miserable thing that’s ever happened to me—yes, of all living human creatures, by the Eternal! it’s his daughter that that blamed fool of a Jeff must take a shine to, and hang around after!” ”

“ So beside ourselves with excitement were we all, each in turn seeking to get in a word edgewise, that no one noticed the approach and entrance of a stranger, who paused just over the threshold of the barn and coughed in a loud perfunctory way to attract our attention. I had to nudge Abner twice before he turned from where he stood at Jeff’s side, with his hand on the luckless shoulder, and surveyed the newcomer. ”

“ With a gesture of amazing swiftness Aunt Susan threw her arm about me, and drew me close to her side, lamp and all. With her other hand she lifted and almost brandished the cleaver.
“No, you don’t!” she cried. “You don’t touch him! He’s mine! I’ve worked for him day and night ever since I took him from his dying mother’s breast. I closed her eyes. I forgave her. Blood is thicker ’n water after all. She was my sister. Yes, I forgave poor Emmeline, and I kissed her before she died. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hi Tuckerman had taken part in the battle of Gaines’s Mill two years before, and had been shot straight through the tongue. One could still see the deep scar on each of his cheeks, a sunken and hairless pit in among his sandy beard. His heroism in the war and his good qualities as a citizen had earned for him the esteem of his neighbors, and they saw to it that he never wanted for work. ”

“ Then, again, an artillery force was somehow out of joint with our notion of what Octavius should do to help suppress the Rebellion. Infantrymen with muskets we could all understand—could all be, if necessary. Many of the farmer boys round about, too, made good cavalrymen, because they knew both how to ride and how to groom a horse. But in the name of all that was mysterious, why artillerymen? There had never been a cannon within fifty miles of Octavius; that is, since the Revolution. Certainly none of our citizens had the least idea how to fire one off. ”

“ As we stood around the heated cannon, in the great black solitude of the common, our fancies pictured this redoubtable young man once more among us—not in his blue uniform, with crimson sash and sword laid by his side, and the gauntlets drawn over his lifeless hands, but as a taller and glorified Tom, in a roundabout jacket and copper-toed boots, giving the law on this his playground. ”

“ But now the farmer, leaping over into the next chapter, brought swart, stalwart, blood-stained Joab on the scene before us, and in an instant we saw why the King’s outburst of mourning had fallen so flat upon our ears. Abner Beech’s voice rose and filled the room with its passionate fervor as he read out Joab’s speech—wherein the King is roundly told that his son was a worthless fellow, and was killed not a bit too soon, and that for the father to thus publicly lament him is to put to shame all his household and his loyal friends and servants. ”

“ But you are wrong to think that you have failed. Why, this beautiful work of yours, it all is Art—pure Art. No person who really knows could look at it and not see that. No, Mr. Pulford, you do yourself an injustice; believe me, you do. Why, you couldn’t help being an artist if you tried; it’s born in you. It shows in everything you do. I saw it from the very first.”
The unmistakable sound of Dwight Ransom’s large artillery boots moving on the floor outside intervened here, and Marsena hurriedly opened the door. ”

“ She paused as if expecting a reply, but Abner only said, “Go on,” after some hesitation, and she went on:
“Now take the neighbors all about here—”
“Excuse me!” broke in the farmer. “I guess if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not. They’re too rich for my blood.”
“Take these very neighbors,” pursued Esther, with gentle determination. “Something must be very wrong indeed when they behave to you the way they do. Why, I know that even now, right down in their hearts, they recognize that you’re far and away the best man in Agrippa. ”

“ In a little community where every one worked as a matter of course till there was no more work to do, and all shared alike the simple food, the tired, heavy sleep, and the infrequent spells of recreation, no one talked or thought of benefits conferred or received. My rights in the house and about the place were neither less nor more than those of Jeff Beech, the farmer’s only son. ”

“ Next them walked a man, hired just for the haying, named Philleo, and then, scuffling along over the uneven humps and hollows on the outer edge of the road, came Si Hummaston, with the empty ginger-beer pail knocking against his knees.
As Tuckerman’s “Hi” stood for Hiram, so I assume the other’s “Si” meant Silas, or possibly Cyrus. I dare say no one, not even his mother, had ever called him by his full name. I know that my companion, Marcellus Jones, who wouldn’t be thirteen until after Thanksgiving, habitually addressed him as Si, and almost daily I resolved that I would do so myself. ”