Читать книгу Action at Aquila - Hervey Allen - Страница 5

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"Wheatland" near Lancaster, the house of ex-President Buchanan, lay down a long alley of ancient maples. A prosperous farm, the main house was surrounded by a space of noble lawn. It was long after nightfall when the colonel arrived.

The house appeared half-ghostly in a light mist luminous with twinkling fireflies and the glow of window lamps. In the dull moonlight it seemed inordinately sequestered, and the clop of Black Girl's hoofs rang in her rider's ears like the hoof-beats of some messenger from the present vainly trying to carry news of battles into the past.

Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday--tapped the feet of the mare.

As he emerged on the drive the figure of an elderly man, apparently wrapped in a voluminous bedgown, rose from a rocking-chair on the front porch and disappeared into the darkened hallway.

Buchanan's old servant, Crawford, met the colonel at the steps.

"Oh!" said Crawford. "Why, if it isn't you, Mr. Nat! Lord, I'd never have known you, you've gotten so thin. And how's your father, sir?"

"He's been dead these two years, Crawford," said the colonel, a bit nettled despite himself. His father had been a fairly prominent man.

"No!" said Crawford. "Don't tell me!" He sounded more shocked than he need have been. "But that's the way it goes here at 'Wheatland' nowadays, you know. We don't hear, sir. I guess it's the war. The President never approved of it, you know. We just don't get the news often. There're not many people come, and when they do--" The man made a vague gesture in the dark. "I can remember when there used to be twenty horses tied at that bar, sir. Before we went to Washington." He sighed an old man's sigh in the darkness.

Black Girl pawed the gravel impatiently.

"Perhaps," began the colonel, "I had better not . . ."

"Oh, no," said the old man. "Excuse me, I didn't mean that!"

He came down the steps and took the bridle. "Don't think of going! The President would never forgive me. Your old . . . your father and him, sir, you remember. And he was alers right fond of you too when you was a boy. Why, that time you left for the West he . . ."

"Yes, I know," said the colonel, dismounting wearily. His sabre clashed a little strangely before the wide, peaceful doorway.

"Every night at supper," continued Crawford, mounting Black Girl stiffly by way of the horse block, "the President says, 'And who's been here today?' And do you know, Mr. Nat, I dasn't tell him nobody." The old man lowered his voice painfully. "I jes' says to him, I--"

"Yes, yes, I understand. He must be lonely."

A window opened upstairs.

"Who's there?" asked the rather flat voice of James Buchanan, tired but eager.

"It's me, Nat Franklin from Kennett Square."

"What, Young Franklin! Why, step out into the moonlight where I can see you," said the ex-President of the United States, leaning out of his window in a night-shirt and illogically trying to illuminate the outdoors with a candle in his hand. "It's a boon to have you drop in. How are you? Where's your father?"

"He isn't able to come, sir."

"Have you had your supper?" continued the President. "Crawford, you rascal, where's Pollock?"

"He'd be at the barn, sir, wouldn't he?"

"Call him. Have him take Mr. Franklin's horse and rub it down. Come in, Nat. Crawford, give Mr. Franklin the North Room--and something to eat. Oh, you're in uniform, aren't you? What have y' got on your straps?"

"Buzzards," said the colonel.

"'Pon my soul!" exclaimed the President. "Colonel, eh! Well, come in, come in. Damn it, there goes my candle!" The white head was withdrawn but the voice continued. "I'll see you tomorrow at breakfast. Six o'clock promptly, mind you. There's a lot to do here. Have to get up early." The window closed.

"Pollock's been dead a year now come October," whispered Crawford. "I'll take your horse down to the barn myself. Go upstairs to the big room at the end of the hall. I'll be back in a jiffy, sir, and get you some hot fixin's."

Yesterday, yesterday, yesterday--sounded the hoofs of Black Girl slowly, as she moved off down the drive with Crawford.

The colonel entered the big house alone. Except for a lamp on the landing, it was dark and silent. A wind waved the long white curtains in the moonlit library listlessly. The colonel waited till Crawford returned and showed him to his room. The North Room was tremendous, coldly still and furnished with gigantic walnut furniture. The bed was monolithic, with urns. Someone, it seemed, had been trying to make Cyclops cosy.

The colonel felt tired and slept soundly. But something woke him towards morning.

The moon was setting and drew long shadows across the room. Outside, the perpetual controversy of the katydids suddenly quickened as though at some instinctive hint of unseen dawn. It quickened but it also seemed to be tired and thinner, threatening to cease from sheer inertia like a tired war.

On an elephantine marble washstand in one corner of the room stood a colossal pitcher. There were white eagles on it. Even in the dim moonlight there could be no doubt that the pitcher was federal. Its eagles screamed silently. Down at Lancaster a locomotive in the yards kept wailing to its brakeman. The colonel knew those sounds. A troop train, no doubt. Some more of Curtin's Pennsylvania militia going to the front. He could tell when the last car was coupled. The train wailed its way eastward, humming into the night.

He turned on his pillow to resettle himself--and then he heard the sound that was, he realized, the background for all the other sounds he had been listening to, and unconsciously evaluating. It was even the background for the silence of the house, for it seemed more eternal than silence.

It was a long, sonorous, and soporific sound. It seemed at time to strike difficulties like a file in a board full of nails, but it overcame them and went on. It rumbled furiously but in meaningless syllables. Like the ghost of that endless debate in the federal Senate which forever haunts the halls of the Republic, it only threatened to cease. And it was some moments, for he was very sleepy, before the colonel realized that he had the honour of listening to the snoring of the man who had come nearer than anyone else to ruining the United States.

"Lord," said the colonel, sitting up suddenly in the moonlight. "I hope no one ever snores like that again. Let's do something about it," he added, and gave his pillow a smack. Then smiling a little grimly he dropped off again.

Next morning Colonel Franklin and the ex-President took breakfast together. A large urn of strong coffee, eggs, fried potatoes, small beefsteaks, buckwheat cakes and maple syrup, toast and muffins appeared all at once on the table, and were ably discussed by Mr. Buchanan and his guest, together with amusing anecdotes about the court of Russia thirty years before; how nearly we had gone to war with England over the Oregon boundary in Polk's administration; and how, by "every law human and divine," we should be justified in wrestling Cuba from Spain "as soon as we have the power."

"And that will be soon now," said Mr. Buchanan, "for when we emerge from this war the great fact will be that, whether we like it or not, we shall be the most powerful military nation on earth. Manifest destiny from now on will be merely a matter of a series of peaceful delays. The federal government is going to be supreme, and that will eventually mean conquest." He took a large apple as he neared the end of his discourse and began to pare it.

"Personally," said he, "I did all I could to prevent this. I now see the hand of God in it. But personally I regarded the nice balance of power between the states and the federal government, that has existed up until recently, as the triumph of the political genius of our race. That was what I wished to conserve. Slavery, I tell you, was a side issue. Most of the thinking men, the statesmen at both the North and the South, that I have known for two generations have always said so. We are a legal-thinking people. We and the English are the only two peoples on earth who understand that the government must be kept in leash.

"Now," he continued, walking over to the window and eating his apple in considerable excitement, "our balance in America has been destroyed. The federal government is going to be everything. Since Mr. Lincoln has enlisted the services of General U. S. Grant I can see that that is going to be so. There is a fatality about that man's initials, you know. History sometimes plays the Pythoness whimsically like that. And his is a new kind of generalship." The ex-President drummed on the window-pane. "U. S.," said he. "U. S. . . . U. S.? . . . It is only men of genuine philosophical sense who can understand that the form of government is the most important thing in the world. Everything is contained in that," he muttered. "I did my best to prevent this. I did my best!"

"Would you have let the South go?" asked the colonel, fascinated at hearing an ex-President confess himself to a window-pane.

"No, I would have prevented them but I wouldn't have conquered them. Is that too nice a distinction? Too nice, I am afraid, to exist now in the fires of passion that so much killing has kindled. But it will be the final test, I think, for Mr. Lincoln after the war. God help him!" said James Buchanan. He turned from the window, and his face worked.

"Come," said he, "let me show you about 'Wheatland.' It is the pride and comfort of my old age. Most of my life was given to the Republic. I could wish that 'Wheatland' should not be forgotten--afterwards." He sighed and ate the last of his apple pensively.

They walked down to the farm buildings together while the ex-President expatiated upon his barns and acres. And, indeed, "Wheatland" was a magnificent farm.

Time was when it was possible for a young man to bow his head naturally before an old one to receive his blessing. And this the colonel did before James Buchanan. The blessing was brief. But it was given with an old-fashioned piety and a courtesy in farewell that justly marked Mr. Buchanan as one of the great well-mannered gentlemen of his time.

Much moved by this leave-taking from his father's old friend and the hero of his own boyhood, the colonel saddled Black Girl himself and prepared to depart. But he was not so affected as to forget to press a greenback into the fervent hand of old Crawford, who walked with him a space down the lane for old time's sake and out of sheer gratitude.

"Ah, it's only local shin-plasters I get around here now," said Crawford, "and not too many of them. At the White House, I remember, the Brazilian ambassador used to give me gold. Great days, sir!" he whispered.

"Good-bye, Mr. Nat, good-bye!"

The colonel broke into a gallop. The trees on the old road rushed by him. It was a magnificent September day. "Wheatland" and its memories lay behind him. Some weeks of his furlough and the open road lay before. He drank in the cool morning air with delight and whistled shrilly. A field of late wheat rippled goldenly in a valley. It reminded him of the corn colour in Mrs. Crittendon's hair. He whistled even louder at that.

"Why, the idea!"

It was good to be alive. Black Girl gathered herself under him and thundered down the Pike towards Lancaster. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow--was the tune her hoofs now seemed to be drumming on the road away from yesterday.