Irvin S. Cobb

“ At the far, upper end of that street, upon the poll of a gentle eminence, uplifted the Van Nicht elm. It was for sundry months of the year a splendid vast umbrella, green in the spring and summer and yellow in the fall; and in the winter presented itself against the sky line as a great skeleton shape, without a blemish upon it, except for a scar in the bark close down to the earth to show where once there might have been a fissure in its mighty bole. No grass, or at least mighty little grass, grew within the circle of its brandishing limbs. ”

“ There were wide patches of blue in the sky when they turned into Putnam Street and came within sight of the Van Nicht elm, rising as a great, green balloon at the head of it. By now they were chatting upon the basis—almost—of a seasoned acquaintanceship. Olcott found himself talking about his work. When a young man tells a young woman about his work, and is himself interested as he tells it, it is quite frequently a sign that he is beginning to be interested in something besides his work, whether he realises it yet or not. ”

“ Perhaps that is why I can almost taste the dust which is winnowed up from beneath the hoofs of the teams and the turning wheels as the crowds stream off out the gravel turnpike, bound for Cold Springs. Nearly everybody of consequence, politically or socially, joins in that hurrying pilgrimage. Like palmers of old, Judge Priest and Commonwealth's Attorney Flournoy and Sheriff Giles Birdsong and all our district and county and city officials attend, to attest by their presence the faith that is in them. ”

“ These Northerners are game clear through; I can tell that. Their ancestors before them were brave men—the Southern Confederacy could never have been starved out and bled white by a breed of cowards. And these young men here—these splendid young Americans from up yonder in that Northern country—have the same gallant spirit their people showed forty years ago against your people. But you—you have lost the spirit of your race, that surely must have been born in you. You are going to let these Yankees run right over you—your behaviour proves it—and not fight back. ”

“ As though the hiss of the water had aroused him, Judge Priest sat up in the grass, where he had been lying during these tumultuous and crowded five minutes. He was still half dazed. As his eyesight cleared, he saw that the bathroom was as good as gone and that his bedroom was about to go. Some one helped him to his unsteady feet and kept him upright. He shook himself free from the supporting grasp of the person who held him, and advanced toward the porch steps, wavering a little on his legs as he went. ”

“ Oh, Lord, that's all I'll ever ask You—fur God's sake git Billy Priest out of there! Ez a favour to me, Lord, please, Suh, git Billy Priest out of there!” From many throats at once a yell arose—a yell so shrill and loud that it overtopped all lesser sounds; a yell so loud that the sergeant ceased from his praying to look. Through the smoke, and over the sloping peak of the roof from the rear, came a slim, dark shape on its all-fours. ”

“ It was in the winter that the house, which stood almost directly under the tree, was most clearly revealed as a square, ugly domicile of grey stone, a story and a half in height, lidded over by a hip roof of weathered shingles; with a deeply recessed front door, like a pursed and proper mouth, and, above it, a row of queer little longitudinal windows, half hidden below the overhang of the gables and suggesting so many slitted eyes peering out from beneath a lowering brow. ”

“ Felsburg reared himself back in his chair at his desk with an expectant, eager look on his face. In the doorway at the top of the stairs appeared the man for whom he waited—a middle-aged man with slumped shoulders, in worn, soiled garments, and in every line of his harassed face expressing the fact that here stood a failure, mutely craving the pardon of the world for being a failure. ”

“ It may interest you to know, sir—I trust indeed that it may please you to know—that I, personally, am most highly pleased that you should seek to inculcate in the minds of our people, through the medium of your columns, a knowledge of those strains of blood to which our nation is particularly indebted for much of its culture, much of its social development, many of its gentler and more graceful influences. ”

“ It was no small honour for victorious Midsylvania that her football eleven should be the chosen eleven below the Line to meet these all-conquering gladiators from above it. So everybody agreed, at the outset. But on second thought, which so often is the better thought of the two, the opportunity seemed, after all, not so glorious. A hero may go down leading a forlorn hope—may die holding a last ditch—and posterity possibly will applaud him; but we may safely figure that he does not greatly enjoy himself while thus engaged ”

“ There are soldiers out there like this one, whose arms are not strong enough to lift the guns to their shoulders. They are children who fight outside—children in the garb of men!”
The widow, who continually wept, sprang forward. She had quit weeping and a great and terrible fury looked out of her red-lidded eyes. She screeched in a voice that rose above the wails of the rest:
“And it was for this, months ago, that they took away from me my little Pierre! Mother of God, they fight this war with babies!” ”

“ It is a tradition; and they go in rather strongly for traditions at Midsylvania, and always have since the days when there was not much else to Midsylvania except its traditions. The team may have won that afternoon, or it may have lost. The boys may be jubilating for the biggest victory of the whole year, or, over the trenches and the tankards, consoling themselves and one another for an honourable defeat at the hands of their classic rival, Vanderbeck. It makes no difference. Win or lose, they toast the shade and the name of Major Stone. ”

“ A day was merely a period of lightness marked at one end by a sunrise and at the other by a sunset; and when that was over and darkness had come, they bedded themselves down under fouled and ragged coverlids and slept the dumb, dreamless sleep of the lower animals. Except for the weeping woman who went about with her red eyes continually streaming and her whining wail forever sounding, no one among them seemingly gave thought to those of their own kinspeople and friends who were dead or scattered or missing. ”

“ Ulysses Rice, who lived in the next street, climbed the side fence—under the circumstances it somehow to him seemed a more resolute thing to scale the fence than to enter by the gate in the regular way—and ran across the yard, inspired with a neighbourly and commendable desire to save something right away. He put his toe in a croquet wicket and fell headlong. This was to be expected of Mr. Rice. He had a perfect genius for getting into accidents. All Nature was ever in a conspiracy with all the inanimate objects in the world to do him bodily hurt. ”

“ The old man slammed the gate to with a passionate jerk. The infirm latch clicked weakly, then slipped out of the iron nick and the gate sagged open—an invitation to anybody's wandering livestock to come right on in and feast upon the shrubs, which from lack of pruning had become thick, irregular little jungles. Clumps of rank grass, like green scalp locks, were sprouting in the walk, and when the master had mounted the creaking steps he saw where two porch planks had warped apart, leaving a gap between them. In and out of the space ran big black ants. ”

“ She held to a tie what was conceded to be the best team that Old Dominion had ever mustered; and Vanderbeck, the largest and, athletically considered, the strongest of them all, bested her only by the narrowest and closest of margins on Vanderbeck's own gridiron. It was one of the upsetting things that never can happen, but occasionally do, that Midsylvania should go straight through to Thanksgiving Day with a miraculous record of five victories, one tie and one defeat out of seven games played, and with not a man in the regular lineup seriously damaged. ”

“ Felsburg's legs first acquired for me an interest unrelated to their picturesqueness of aspect. As I think backward along the grooves of my memory to that occasion, it defies all the rules of perspective by looming on a larger scale and in brighter and more vivid colours than many a more important thing which occurred in a much more recent period. I reckon, though, that is because our Creator has been good enough to us sometimes to let us view our childhood with the big, round, magnifying eyes of a child. ”

“ They lived not because life was worth while any more, but because to keep on living is an instinct, and because most human beings are so blessed—or, maybe, so cursed—with a certain adaptability of temperament, a certain inherent knack of adjustability that they may endure anything—even the unendurable—if only they have ceased to think about the past and to fret about the future. ”

“ It was Vretson—no less—who drove his talented punting toe into the pigskin.
There was a sound as though some one had smote a taut bladder with a slapstick, and the ball soared upward and away, shrinking from the size of a watermelon to the size of a gourd, and from a gourd to a goose egg; and then it came whirling downward again, growing bigger as it dropped. Woolwine, our quarter, caught it and took a flying start off his shoe hobs. Fay and the other Sangamon end, whose name I have forgotten, were after him like a pair of coursing beagles after a doubling hare ”

“ Before two o'clock, the slanting floor beneath the high-peaked red roof of the structure made you think of a big hanging garden, what with the faces and the figures of all those thousands packed in together, row after row of them, with the finery of the women standing out from the massed background in brighter patches of colour, and the little red pennons that the venders had peddled in the audience all dancing and swaying, like the petals of wind-blown flowers. ”

“ Your father and the fathers of more than half of the rest of you served in an army that for four years defended our beloved country against a foe immensely stronger than they were—stronger in men, in money, in munitions, in food, in supplies, in guns—stronger in everything except valour. ”

“ Into the struggle an element of real dash had entered and mightily it uplifted the spectators. They knew now that, though the Varsity team might be beaten, and probably would be, they would not be disgraced. It would be an honourable defeat before overpowering odds, and one stoutly resisted to the end by all that intelligence, plus pluck, could do.
There was no fault now to be found with Midsylvania's captain. Little Morehead, with his face a red smear, was playing all over the lot. ”

“ Aunt Dilsey didn't stay on the place at night and Jeff's sleeping quarters were over the stable at the back. As Judge Priest felt his way through the upper hall and made a light in his bedchamber, the house was giving off those little creaking, complaining sounds from its joints that an old tired house always gives off when it is lonely for a fuller measure of human occupancy. ”

“ I imagine you in the act of telling yourself that he might be a clever life-insurance solicitor, or a purchasing agent for a trunk line, or a canny judge of real-estate values—a man whose taste in dress would run rather to golf stockings than to spats, rather to soft hats than to hard ones, and whose pet hobby would likely be trout flies and not first editions. ”

“ Please—please, doctor, do something for me!”
Mounting hysteria edged her voice with a sharpened, almost a vulgar shrillness. The austere and studied reserve of her class—a reserve that is part of it poise and the rest of it pose—dropped away from her like a discarded garment, and before her physician she revealed herself nakedly for what she was—a creature with the passions, the forwardness and the selfishness of a spoiled and sickly child; and, on top of these, superimposed and piled up, adult impulses, adult appetites, adult petulance, adult capacity for misery. ”

“ Did they git everything out?”
“Everything out—hell!” answered Tilghman, sobbing in his distress. “The old judge is in there. He got a lick on the head and it must have made him crazy. He just ran back in there and went upstairs. He'll never make it—and nobody can get him out. He'll smother to death sure!”
Down on his knees dropped Sergeant Bagby and shut his eyes, and for the first, last and only time in his life he prayed aloud in public.
“Oh, Lord,” he prayed, “fur God's sake git Billy Priest out of there! ”

“ You were a grown man, Mr. Albritton; anyhow, you were older than the little pedlar boy that your dogs bit. You say you are sorry now; but you forgot about it, didn't you?
“I didn't forget about it, Mr. Albritton! All these years I have not forgotten it. All these years I have been waiting for this day to make you sorry. All these years I have been waiting for this day to get even with you. I was that little Jew boy, Mr. Albritton. In my legs I have now the red marks from your dogs' teeth. ”

“ All at once, simultaneously his audience grasped the purport of his pantomime.
“The Germans that you saw, they were children too—children like this one?” demanded the old woman, her voice all thickened and raspy with her passion. “Is that what you mean?”
He jerked his head up and down in violent assent, his jaws clicking and his face muscles jumping. The old woman shoved him away from in front of her. ”

“ Then, all along, the bank has just been representing you in the matter?”
“As my agent—yes,” said the little merchant. “Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not sorry to hear it,” said Albritton. “A bank has got its rules, I reckin, and has to live up to 'em. But, dealing with you, suh, as an individual, is another thing altogether. Anyhow, I'm hoping so, Mr. Felsburg.” ”