Читать книгу Action at Aquila - Hervey Allen - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Next morning, Dr. Craig and the colonel drove out the Doylestown Road a way and bought the horse. It was a beauty, a black mare with three white socks and a fine, small head. Her neck arched like an Arab's and she stepped high. They returned to Spring Garden Street, and the colonel spent an hour trying out his new mount's paces, and breaking her in to the army bit and saddle before the doctor's door.

It was a spirited moment of good horsemanship.

Under the tracery of maple boughs that met over the old-fashioned street, the colonel raced back and forth, turning and wheeling, a golden stir of autumn leaves whirling about his horse's legs. The neighbours came out to see. One of them, a young boy from North Seventh Street, never forgot that morning nor the figure of the tall, dark man with flowing burnsides who rode by him with creaking leather and slapping sword. The campaign hat with bright golden cord and acorns, the long blue coat and glittering buttons, the man motionless in the saddle of the galloping black horse, were photographed on the boy's memory. Thirty-four years later he was still, secretly, "being like Colonel Franklin" when he rode forth at the head of his own regiment for the Spanish War.

But no one on Spring Garden Street was tall enough that morning to peep onto the knees of the gods. The colonel bade his friends good-bye. That is to say, he jumped down and clasped to his breast old Dr. Craig, who had brought him into this world, and he nearly had his right hand crippled by old General Jack, who "blubbed" then and there.

"I'll see you both after it's over," cried the colonel cheerily. "And when I come back, there's to be a dinner at Kennett Square. Will you come?" he shouted.

"Aye!" they called, half speechless.

But they never came. Peace has its casualties as well as war--and two old men standing on a white Philadelphia doorstep, their faces mottled by the leafy sunlight, made the last glimpse Colonel Franklin ever had of Dr. Craig and General Fithian.

"Go and see Buchanan at 'Wheatland,'" roared the doctor as the colonel wheeled to wave the last time. "He's lonely as I am."

"By Jove, I will," said the colonel to himself. "I suppose everybody's forgotten Buchanan"--and he trotted off down Walnut Street, bound on the most peaceful of errands. For it was before a toy-shop six blocks below Broad Street that he finally tethered his war horse. "Now," said he, "I'll get 'em." And he did.

No colonel in the United States Army, perhaps, had ever filled his haversack quite like that. When Colonel Franklin emerged from the shop and slung it over his saddle, besides some spare clothes now used for safe packing only, the haversack contained no less than six dolls most elegantly attired, a small, a very small, suite of doll furniture, and a set of dainty china dishes that might have been used at a banquet for the Queen of Mice. Thus armed to the teeth, the colonel turned his horse back towards Broad Street and prepared, with secret amusement, to swagger his way out of Philadelphia with pardonable military pride.

But he was not to get out of the city so easily as that. Drums began to beat.

The white man's beating of drums is not to be approached by that of any other race. Compared with it, the much-vaunted negro tom-tom and hand-jar sound a mere nervous irritant, a kind of fumbling hypnosis. Two-four time is a suggestion for a man to walk; for many men to walk together to a given end. Beat a drum in march time and it becomes the voice of a god roaring, "go and do." Like real thunder, the thunder of drums becomes the voice of lightning, but it rolls before. It is a warning that something is about to be riven from leaf to root.

Thunder like that, such an enormous music, was loose in Philadelphia the morning that Colonel Franklin was riding up Walnut Street. He had gone only a couple of blocks from the toy-shop when his horse began to dance, fret, and jiggle to the pulsation of drums. He worked Black Girl into a blind archway so that people might keep clear of her dancing heels. In that way he had quite a space to himself, and he could look clear over the heads of the crowd. Four blocks away, around the corner from Broad Street, wheeled the cause of tumult, the drums at the head of a regiment marching out to war.

Philadelphia is a contented town. It is situated on a river flat and most of the time breathes heavy, valley air a little more than tranquilly. But occasionally, especially in the fall, the keen atmosphere from the mountains slips into the village of William Penn. Then everything is preternaturally clear and suddenly electric. There is a positively Vichy-like quality to the air, and to a Philadelphian that is intoxicating. On such autumn mornings, Quaker housewives from a sense of inner, and perhaps spiritual, excitement have even been known, inadvertently, to scrub their doorsteps twice.

It was such a morning in late September when the State Fencibles left for the South. Grant had called for them. The iron machine that was slowly contracting about Richmond needed spare parts. And the weather being electric, Philadelphia muttered with thunder.

They came marching down Walnut Street toward the ferry, preceded by drums, drums, drums. It was a national election year, and a great banner was stretched across Walnut Street. At one end of it there was a portrait of a bearded man, "Lincoln"; at the other, a picture apparently of the same man without a beard, "Johnson."

OUR CANDIDATES

REPUBLICAN

Vote National Union

THAT GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE BY THE PEOPLE

FOR THE PEOPLE SHALL NOT PERISH FROM THE EARTH

Under this "arch" suddenly appeared flags, taut in the breeze, a hedge of flashing bayonets, and wide lines of marching men in blue, rolling the dust before them.

The crowd formed like magic. Buses and drays drew hastily to one side. Out of a thousand shops and houses poured the sober population of Philadelphia, exalted with excitement. As the drums passed along between the teeming sidewalks, they peeled off the last intellectual queries, the petty personal reservations even from cold doubters, like a strip of thin hide. The mind darkened to let the heart burn more furiously. The deep substratum of common feeling by which a nation lives was revealed and laid bare to the quick, quivering. Bugles and screaming fifes joined in with the drums:

"The Union forever,

Hurrah! boys, Hurrah!"

The people knew those words; they knew what the words meant. An eerie folk-singing ran down the street. A high-tension current streaked down the sidewalks, welding the crowd into one thing, jumping the gaps from block to block.

"Down with the traitor,

Up with the star . . ."

At Ninth Street, an old gentleman in archaically tight trousers who had once seen Washington drive to the State House, fell down and died in a fit. There was no waving of dainty handkerchiefs to "departing cavaliers." There were oaths, screams, the violent weeping of hysterical women in black bombazine, roars--and that high-pitched patriotic singing that gradually mounted in intensity:

"While we rally 'round the flag, boys,

Rally once again,

Shouting the battle-cry of Freedom!"

And how they shouted. For once the whole vast, patient city uttered itself with one voice.

About the colonel the excitement was peculiarly intense and enhanced by a constant flurry in the crowd. This was partly due to the dangerous dancing of the colonel's mare, and the fact that, by a natural mistake, most of the spectators thought that the colonel was stationed there to review the departing regiment. Many kept trying to press in upon him. They could see by his weathered uniform that he was a veteran, and of high rank.

Personally, the colonel would rather not have been there. He towered conspicuously above the crowd, which was uncomfortable to a man of his temperament, and to him the sight of a regiment going to the front was bound to be painful. He knew only too well what their final destination was. But as the column of marching men drew rapidly nearer, he forget all that. That is to say, he forgot himself.

He was swept by the overpowering feeling that surged down the street. His horse suddenly stood still and trembled. As though from the current of a battery, that trembling was transmitted to the body of the man. As the drums passed before him, the baton of the drum-major flashed high out of the shadow of the houses, twinkled in the upper sunlight, and streaked back to the drum-major's hand again. Black Girl neighed and shook the foam from her bridle. A hot blast of bugles tossed the air. Just in front of him a servant-girl with red arms and a dirty apron started to whinny. A large, dignified woman, who soared up out of her vast, flounced hoop-skirt like a centaur looking out of a tent, threw her little sunshade into the air and sobbed like a child at its mother's funeral. The colonel's dark face flushed even darker. He sat as though cast in bronze.

He exchanged salutes with the colonel of the passing troops, a young man whom he didn't know. The faces of the men who followed looked drawn and chalk-white above their dusty blue coats. Most of them were older schoolboys. The tension of the scene they were passing through was as great as that of battle. They seemed to be drawn down the street in the current that followed the maelstrom of drums. They were being rushed off. Some of them missed step to catch up. A sort of gasp from the crowd closed in behind them. There were few dry eyes on the sidewalks. Then the flag passed, with all the stars still there, and the crowd went crazy.

The tension was eased by the major of the last battalion. He was a dusty, determined-looking little man on a rather sorry horse. He wore his hat over his eyes and he was smoking a cigar. He didn't know it, but he looked like a caricature of General Grant. The crowd roared at him good-naturedly and laughed all the more that the little major took the plaudits for himself.

Smoking on parade, major! thought the colonel. Dear, dear, what will the regular army say? It's only the state militia, only the damned militia that's won all the wars the United States has always nearly lost. "You'll fill up the ditches for the generals from West Point on both sides, my lads," he said half-aloud. He felt overpowered by a desire for a cigar himself. "The damned generals!" As a soldier of the Army of the Potomac he felt bitter about generals. He rose in his saddle to roar at the last company--and sank back again. For leading it, in a pathetically new lieutenant's uniform, was the boy who had called him a Copperhead only yesterday. For some reason he was in command of the company.

Young Moltan looked up and saw the colonel. His whole face flushed a painful red. My God! he thought. Even in this short march from the armoury to the ferry, he was learning the difference between wearing a uniform and being a soldier. For the veteran on the horse he now had nothing but adoration. In his confusion he forgot to salute. He took off his hat instead.

The colonel choked. Tears ran down his face. "God bless you, Moltan, my boy," he called. "Come back, son!" He took off his own hat and held it to his breast. He waved it benignly and helplessly after him. With a look of relief and surprised exaltation, the young man passed on . . .

"You young fool, you, you'll get yourself killed," the colonel kept muttering to himself long after the last files had gone by and the urchins had linked arms and closed in at the end of the column to follow the music. An old coloured man from the Navy Yard, vending hot pepper pot, still kept bowing and taking off his straw hat again and again and saying, "Good-bye to you, Mars' Lincoln's boys. Good-bye!" A few women in black, who seemed equally dazed, lingered here and there, touching their handkerchiefs to their eyes, till a little whirlwind began to blow dirty newspaper down the empty street.

Black Girl shied violently at the papers and brought the colonel to himself. For he, too, had been, he considered, shamefully overcome. Somehow that last glimpse of Lieutenant Moltan had been peculiarly searing. Into the instant of his passing by had flowed and overflowed all the terrific emotion of the day. The mind tends to personify its griefs, and in the person of young Moltan the colonel had relived all the exaltation and glory, the proud hopes, and the unexpected agony and regret of a youth marching off to war. It was like beholding a vision. The vision remained. And it was for that reason that he had no recollection whatever of the aftermath of the procession.

When his horse shied he was still sitting her in a daze in the blind archway, and the street was all but empty. Down at the State House he could hear distant cheering where the speechmaking would now be going on. Remembering the speeches of three years ago, he smiled grimly. He was just about to move off when someone began to pound at his leg.

He looked down, annoyed and surprised, into the flushed countenance of a most curious little man.

"An indestructible union of indestructible states," cried the little man in a strange, rapt voice. He ceased pounding the colonel's leg to emphasize his proposition, and removed his plug hat. A shiny and flushed bald head appeared like a dome in the sunlight. He gave his large beaver a tremendous flourish and retired a couple of paces like a dancer, turned, faced the colonel again, and declaimed, "Destined to endure for ages to come." He smacked his hat down over his brows. The dome disappeared.

"Those, sir," resumed the little orator, apparently becoming aware of the colonel for the first time, "are my irrevocable sentiments. You will recollect the source, eh? John Marshall, a Virginian, but . . ."

"My sentiments, too," said the colonel, suddenly reaching down and shaking the little man's hand.

"Then, sir, I can see there is no point at issue between us," cried the little man, drawing himself up under his hat. He looked considerably disappointed. "Good day to you, sir," he rapped out, and marched up a pair of steps to an office door.

CHARLES R. ROSS

Attorney-at-Law

blazed from the brass shingle. The door banged.

Suddenly it opened again.

"And I might add," roared the little lawyer, once again hatless, "that it was a late great-aunt of my family who is alleged to have first conceived the American flag." The door closed. This time "irrevocably."

Colonel Franklin grinned, touched heels to his horse, and moved on. Black Girl needed exercise. The city began to fall away behind.

"Charles R. Ross, attorney-at-law," muttered the colonel in a kind of illogical day-dream. "Funny that--why the at? Why not Nathaniel T. Franklin, colonel-at-war?" His horse almost shied onto the sidewalk. He hastily resumed the reins.

Not many hours later he was riding along the old, dusty Western Pike through the fertile fields of Lancaster County. The war had never come here. The rolling landscape, cultivated like one vast garden and dotted with huge red barns and stone farmhouses, is one of the most peaceful in the world.

The afternoon wore away as the miles rolled behind.