Читать книгу Action at Aquila - Hervey Allen - Страница 6

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At Lancaster the army quartermasters and the patient employés of the Pennsylvania Railroad had been up all night, and the night before, switching troop trains going east and empties going west. They were hollow-eyed and cinder-grimy. To them Colonel Franklin was just as welcome as a wasp in a bag of candy. All he wanted was a box-car on a west-bound empty for Black Girl and a flat-car or a ride on a locomotive for himself. Only as far as Harrisburg. Where, said he, looking very official, the government was in a great hurry to have him go.

But it was afternoon before he could arrange it. A great deal of coffee and doughnuts, several plugs of tobacco, and another greenback finally made up for his lack of orders. At last a quartermaster, convinced or worn out, flagged a west-bound empty headed for the arsenal at Pittsburgh.

Consequently, about one o'clock the colonel found himself somewhat ridiculously being "made comfortable" as the sole passenger of a flat-car immediately behind the tender of a diamond smoke-stacked locomotive called the "Ambassador." A defunct rocking-chair had quickly been spiked to the planks of the car and over this the wreck of an old canvas-covered crate was hastily erected to keep off the sparks. The quartermaster who had wildly assembled this squalid contraption muttered to the fireman that some people wanted to be too damn' comfortable anyway, and winked. Under his martial pavilion the colonel now sat in a semi-woebegone state, for the fireman had thoughtfully emptied a bucket of water over the canvas to prevent the sparks. It dripped--on the colonel and onto a copy of the Harrisburg Telegraph that the engineer had provided to keep his passenger quiet. He, too, had handled "ginerals" before. He didn't like them in the cab.

The colonel grinned patiently. Over the top of his newspaper his blue eyes twinkled at Black Girl's brown ones, where she nickered at him through the slats of the first car behind. She had basely and falsely been persuaded into her present alarming predicament by doughnuts--and she wanted more.

"Gookamo, gookamo," wheedled the Pennsylvania Dutch brakeman, making circular gestures to the engine crew as he lured the "Ambassador" slowly backward to couple onto the colonel's car.

"Look out, you're against!" he roared suddenly. But it was too late.

The "Ambassador" settled into the cars with a smashing shock that nearly catapulted the colonel from his chair. A whistle, that set Black Girl dancing, summoned the train crew. There was a volcanic eruption of sparks and clouds of steam, a sickening, earthquake lurch taken up by each car in turn; and with admonitory wails to its long line of brakemen, alert at their wheels on every other car, the long empty train rushed screaming out of Lancaster.

The colonel was delighted. He might have caught the two-o'clock express for Harrisburg. But in that case he would have had to trust to providence and the quartermaster corps to see that Black Girl got to Harrisburg too. Providence might be all right, but he had his doubts about quartermasters. Besides, like all old campaigners, he was now easily at home almost anywhere he found himself.

Flaming clinkers caromed off the roof of his "pavilion." A constant rain of cinders pattered about. Behind him the square rear of the tender leaped up and down and rocked frantically to and fro as the "Ambassador" negotiated the right of way at all of forty miles an hour. But he sat contentedly enjoying the feeling of rushing out into space which the open flat-car conveyed. His two saddle-bags, all that he needed, were beside him. Presently he placed Black Girl's saddle over the broken chair, sat on it comfortably enough, and managed in the shelter of the tender to read the Harrisburg Telegraph.

The jerks of the train no longer annoyed him. He had crossed the continent and fought three campaigns in that saddle. It was now the most comfortable seat he knew. The lovely fields and valleys of his native state flowed backward into the east, followed by the telegraph wires loop by loop by loop. The colonel chewed the end of a Wheeling tobie, which is one degree more stunning than a Pittsburgh stogie, and settled himself to his newspaper.

Sheridan, he was glad to see, was thoroughly reorganizing the new "Department of the Middle." Snipers were being ruthlessly wiped out in the Valley. Early was temporarily quiet beyond Port Republic. Grant was--but he turned the page.

Clement Laird Vallandigham was loose again, thumbing his nose at "King Lincoln." There was a real Copperhead for you! He skipped the item impatiently.

Representative John M. Broomall, of Pennsylvania, had "introduced a bill in the House to reimburse every officer above the rank of captain"--the colonel's attention became fixed--"for oats consumed by the said officer's horse or horses during the period of the rebellion."

Why only oats? thought the colonel. But the Democrats were opposed--the villains! The colonel grinned and continued. Here was the kind of news he doted on:

REMARKABLE OCCURRENCE AT SHAMOKIN

Our Northumberland County correspondent informs us by electric telegraph that a frog having four perfect back legs and two heads was recently taken in the mill-race at Mary Ann. Although dead when first seen by our correspondent, he was assured by its captor, a prominent member of the local bar, that it was normal in every other respect. The person transmitting this information is of such a high order of moral character that it is impossible to doubt the correctness of his views. "What hath God wrought!"

For some reason or other this tickled the colonel enormously. Brushing occasional cinders from his eyes, he continued:

Dauphin County--a great many Rutherfords in the vicinity of Harrisburg were visiting a great many Rutherfords . . . The ladies' bazaar at the . . .

He turned the page:

URIAH H. MYERS

Printer to the

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

will

--for a trifling emolument--

beautifully bind, trim, and decorate

Copies of Harper's Weekly, The Illustrated London News also Leslie's Weekly and Other Periodicals (Preserve your illustrated history of the present great war)

Followed a long list of the killed, wounded, and missing of the present great war.

The train rocketed out onto a long trestle. Over the end of the tender climbed a fat soldier "to borry the loan of a chaw." The colonel extended him a tobie, upon which he began to ruminate. He was, he confided, from Doylestown. He belonged to the Pennsylvania Reserves and was returning to Camp Curtin at Harrisburg. "Mine off is all," he said. By this the colonel presently understood that the man meant his furlough had expired. Presently the tobie began to get in its good emetic work. The man arose, tottered, saluted with open fingers, and managed with some difficulty to crawl back over the tender to his friend the engineer. He wanted sympathy.

Sometime about sundown, with brakes and whistles screaming, the train pulled into the yards of Harrisburg.

The colonel enticed Black Girl out of her box-car by a final doughnut that he had saved for the occasion. She picked her way gingerly over the frogs and switches in the yards and snorted upon finding a good city road under her feet. They galloped down into town.

But Harrisburg was packed. The legislature was still in extra session. There was to be a great review by the governor at Camp Curtin next day. Politicians and soldiers, their families and relatives, swarmed. Not a decent bed was to be had. Even Mr. W. H. Thompson, the manager of the United States Hotel, could do nothing and said so. With some difficulty the colonel found a stall for Black Girl, but nothing for himself. It was already late twilight when he found himself, still supperless and shelterless, standing much perplexed in old Capitol Park looking down State Street.

There was something peculiarly inviting, genteel, and domestic about State Street. It ran for only a few blocks, with the river and an island glimmering at its end, seen down a tunnel of ancient trees. Through these and the honeysuckle vines covering the trellised porches shimmered the pale yellow of parlour lamps; sounded the voices of children going to bed and a low hum of conversation and click of supper dishes.

The colonel felt a wave of homesickness sweep over him. Behind him a few belated squirrels still frisked from tree to tree about the glimmering, white stone buildings of the old Capitol. A gig with its lamps burning like twin stars stood waiting for someone by the kerb. He walked up into the park and sat down on a bench with his haversack beside him. Twilight died slowly in the wide valley of the Susquehanna. Darkness comes softly in Harrisburg.

The colonel sat for a while in one of those half-pleasing, timeless reveries that fatigue and loneliness will bring upon the best of us. It was a quarter of an hour later when a tall man in a plug hat came down the walk from the Capitol, briskly, as though he were late for supper.

"Good evening," said the colonel suddenly out of sheer loneliness as the man passed him.

"Oh," said the gentleman, somewhat startled, for he had evidently not seen the man on the bench. "Who is it?" he asked a little doubtfully, stopping.

"I beg your pardon," replied the colonel. "I am a stranger here and had really no reason to speak to you. Except--that it seemed a bit lonely."

"Reason enough," said the gentleman, with a pleasant laugh. "Well, my name's Myers," he added, holding out a white hand in the darkness.

"Not Mr. Myers, the state printer!" said the colonel by journalistic inspiration, while he introduced himself.

"The very man," replied the figure in the plug hat and long black beard, for that was about all the colonel could see of him. "Were you looking for me?"

"Why, yes, in a way," laughed the colonel, straining circumstances a little. "I thought, since you are a person of some consequence, you might direct me to the home of a respectable family who could put me up overnight. I am unwashed, unshaven, supperless, and a stranger. You see, I need influence."

"In fact, a desperate character in desperate circumstances," said Mr. Myers, chuckling. By this time they had strolled down to the foot of the park together. "Come with me, sir. I think I know a fairly respectable family not far from here who will be happy to accommodate you. But I can't guarantee that my influence will necessarily prevail." Whereupon, much to the colonel's embarrassment, Mr. Myers insisted upon shouldering the colonel's bags and, much to his delight, turned down State Street.

"Good evening, all the Blacks," said Mr. Myers, raising his plug hat mock-loftily as he passed the side porch of a house on the corner. A chorus of familiar greeting and the giggles of girls came out of the darkness.

"Helen has been waiting supper an hour for you," said a motherly voice.

"You'd never do that for your mister, would you, Mrs. Black?" replied Mr. Myers.

"I'd never keep her waiting," shouted Mr. Black. At which tremendous repartee there was warm laughter from all hands.

Something about this simple neighbourly warmth, perhaps something in the umbrageous atmosphere of State Street itself with its broad brick walks and dark spreading trees laced below with the glow from bedroom windows, contrived to warm the cockles of the colonel's heart. Somehow he felt as though he were going home, and he surrendered himself gladly to the impression. Mr. Myers turned in at the house next door to Mr. Black's. "Sit down for a minute," said he, "till I speak to Mrs. Myers."

"But, my dear Mr. Myers, I had no idea of imposing myself on you!" began the colonel.

"My dear sir," replied Mr. Myers, pausing for a moment on his own threshold proudly, "no officer in the Union Army shall go without supper and shelter in Harrisburg so long as there's food and a roof at my house. Now wait just a minute," he added and went in with the colonel's bags.

"Uri, how late you are," cried a clear, womanly voice somewhere in the hall. There was the sound of a kiss, whispers, and the swish of skirts rushing upstairs. Somewhere up there a room was being rapidly put in order for him, the colonel thought; and he remembered how empty and bare the old house at Kennett Square had seemed since his mother's death. Decidedly it lacked something.

What a sensible fellow this Myers is, he began to reflect, when he noticed that he was not, as he had supposed, alone on the porch.

The porch was dark except where a dim glow came out of the front door from a room beyond the vestibule. But at the opposite end of the veranda a clear stream of lamplight escaped in a downward bar from beneath a blind to illuminate the lap of someone seated there. From the waist up the figure was invisible; a black skirt from the knees down--and a great splash of scarlet, blue, and white, smouldering and squirming in the lap under the bar of light.

In the cavernlike perspective of the porch, behind the dense vines that shielded it from the street, the trunkless figure, the living, moving mass of colour in so mysterious a lap, produced an all but occult effect. Back and forth through the beam of light flashed a pair of birdlike hands that seemed unattached and to be feeding, as it were, upon the mass of colour over which they hovered. Nothing else was to be seen, and there was nothing else to be heard but the breeze in the vines and a faint rustle of silk.

It was some instants before the colonel's eyes were able to resolve this camera obscura vision into the more prosaic view of a pair of woman's hands engaged in mending an American flag.

Still there was something aloof about the half-concealed figure. Although he was tired and hungry, the colonel's curiosity was aroused. Nor did it lessen when he observed that neither darkness nor light made any difference to the busy fingers sewing the flag. With a strange indifference, but an infinitely delicate touch, they sought out the rents in the fabric, whether in lamplight or shadow, and went to work upon them with the smallest of needles that flashed occasionally like a firefly as it darted in and out of the beam of light.

The silk rustled. The colonel did wish Mr. Myers would return. . . .

"Helen will be ready for you presently," said the woman in the corner.

The colonel started a little. The voice seemed to be coming from behind the veil. There was a queer other-world quality to it.

"I have felt your eyes upon me for some time," the woman continued. "You are a soldier, aren't you? At least I can smell your horse." She laughed a little languidly.

"Yes, madam, I am Colonel Franklin of the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry," answered the colonel, somewhat awe-struck.

"I am Mrs. Anna Gill, Mr. Myers's mother-in-law," replied the woman. "Uri would have introduced us if he had seen me." She sighed a little. "He is not indifferent."

"That is beautiful work you are doing, Mrs. Gill," said the colonel, at a loss what else to say.

"So they tell me," replied the voice patiently. "But perhaps they are only being kind? I can't see the work myself, you know. I have been blind now for nearly fifteen years."

Lord! thought the colonel. I might have known.

"That makes it a little difficult, you see, sometimes."

"Yes, Mrs. Gill," said the colonel.

"Uri gets me the torn flags from the adjutant-general's office when the regiments turn them in," continued Mrs. Gill. "Uri is quite a politician, you know. He knows how to get things. I repair them before they go back to the field again. Some of them are shot full of holes, and the state has to buy new ones. This one, they say, has been back twice. I repaired it, I think, just after Gettysburg. Do you know, I dream over these flags a good deal." She sighed almost inaudibly. "I have three sons in the army myself. None of them has been killed yet. I am very thankful. Ah, here comes Uri!"

Mr. and Mrs. Myers were both at the door.

The colonel was introduced, formally to Mrs. Myers and with some gaiety to Mrs. Gill, who, as she was led into the house by her daughter, enjoyed immensely the kindly banter heaped upon her for having adroitly annexed the colonel in the dark.

"But it is always dark for me, you know, colonel," laughed Mrs. Gill. "I have to do the best I can."

"You do extraordinarily well, mother," said Mr. Myers, winking at his wife. "Every morning, colonel," he continued, "Mrs. Gill holds a levee on the front porch when State Street goes to work. She is better than an extra cup of coffee. Even when the war news is terrible she sends us all to the office laughing."

"The finest stimulant in the world," said the colonel, taking Mrs. Gill's arm to lead her into the dining-room. "Madam, permit me."

The wonderful face of the blind woman, calm, invincible, with a kind of cosmic benignity caught in its lines of suffering, looked up at him and with closed eyes flashed him an unquenchable, coquettish smile. She patted his arm. It was the signal that he had been taken into the family circle. Mr. and Mrs. Myers looked at each other and smiled.

"Mother and I have had our supper," said Mrs. Myers, "but we can sit with you and Uri while you eat, if you like."

"Certainly we should like," said Mr. Myers, putting an arm around his wife--and they entered the little dining-room, elegant with coloured glassware, stuffed pieces, and whatnots. An oil lamp threw an intimate circle of light on the broad roses of the low ceiling.

By some domestic magic Mrs. Myers had not only rearranged the guest chamber, but had also set the table for a pleasant little supper for two, all, so to speak, in the twinkling of a mouse's eye. She had even managed her long jet earrings, a fresh lace collar, and her best cameo brooch.

What is important to the soul is always mysterious. Just why the supper that night in Harrisburg with the Myerses afterwards assumed an importance in the colonel's memory equal to a major and vital event was largely inexplicable. That it did, he could have no doubt.

Curiously presiding over the scene was the patient and yet determined and exalted spirit of the blind Mrs. Gill. Already past middle age, with two homely but kindly furrows extending from her nose to her mouth, she gazed seemingly into the future with unseeing and unwinking eyes. Events could no longer much affect her. Her affliction, by darkening the world, had intensified within her a secret source of blander radiance. Absent from her eyes, it seemed to shine through her lips slightly parted in a smile as calm and reassuring as lamplight under the threshold of a closely-shuttered house.

Not that she said anything in particular. She simply sat there with all the vivid awareness and all the aloofness of those who for some reason are at one within; whom nothing can overcome. And while Mrs. Myers poured the coffee and spoke of the difficulties of raising tame blackbirds and children,--both of them died easily, it seemed, in Harrisburg,--Mrs. Gill continued to look into the future blindly and to provide the human atmosphere that surrounded them all; in which the four of them gathered under the misty arch of lamplight reflected from the ceiling were as one.

They were not particularly aware of this. No one spoke of it. It was a mutual and understood feeling. Suddenly, quite suddenly to the colonel, who was fatigued and somewhat hazy for lack of sleep, it seemed that Mrs. Gill had become--was--in herself the essence of the town, the state, the nation that lay all about them in the night without.

The blackbirds that died were embalmed, that is--The colonel started a little.

Mrs. Myers was still speaking of blackbirds.

They were under a glass dome on the mantelpiece, poised coyly on an obviously artificial branch and supposed to be about to peck at a berry that was--that looked uncommonly like a shoe button lost in the painted leaves of yester-year at the bottom of the dome. They seemed to have attained a complete domesticity, a timeless existence in a vacuum under the glass. The colonel, a bit weary, envied them for the time being. Marriage had its compensations. After the war he would like to crawl under a glass dome like that, with someone. That precious pair of birds, how they looked at the shoe button--while he forever smirked, she poised in air--elegantly.

And above them was Mrs. Myers's child, who had passed with the blackbirds, so she was saying. He also was embalmed, but in paint.

It was a startling portrait in a tremendous gilt frame. A little boy with wide clear brows, dressed in a virulent red dress. ABC blocks were heaped over his chubby legs, and behind him were two tremendous painted curtains with tassels, and a light that seemed to be beating up from the Sea of Glass. Nothing else could be reflecting it.

"Poor Henry," Mrs. Myers was saying.

By a curious telepathy or sleepy propinquity, for the room was very silent except for the soughing sigh of the lamp, and Mrs. Myers's soft voice, the colonel suddenly saw the picture through her eyes. Her baby sitting in paradise bathed in eternal light. For an instant the long shadow made by one little foot across the golden sands assumed the importance of the shade cast by the gnomon of Cleopatra's Needle. It led fortuitously to "Alf Wall, pinxit, Pittsburg, Pa." The artist had somehow contrived to bathe his name in not a little of the eternal light.

With a start the colonel just prevented himself from nodding and chuckling at the same time. It would never have done, never!

"For when he died," said Mrs. Myers, her eyes hanging on the portrait softly, "mother said she thought she heard music in the room. Harps," she whispered. Under her lace cap Mrs. Gill smiled like a sibyl and said nothing.

Perhaps this was too much for the credulity of Mr. Myers, or perhaps he did not care to have so intimate a family miracle confessed to a stranger.

"Mother does hear things," he said. "She heard Gettysburg before the news came. The morning of the first day she made us bring her chair down to Front Street and she sat there on the river bank talking about the guns. No one else could hear them."

"I felt them," corrected Mrs. Gill. "It was like distant bells in the air. A great tolling."

"Quite a crowd gathered about," said Mr. Myers. "She kept saying a great battle was going on. Some of them laughed. Well, afterwards they got the papers. Then some of them said they could hear the guns." Mr. Myers laughed at that himself.

"She sat there for three days. We took her down every morning. People kept asking her what was going on. You'd think she was an oracle the way they acted."

"On the third day something died," said Mrs. Gill. "I told them! I said it was over. I knew I was right. What do they still go on fighting for?" she asked with a little quaver.

"Heaven only knows, madam!" said the colonel.

"Uri, don't talk about the war," said Mrs. Myers. "I'm sure that the colonel, that all of us, hear enough of it. I can't bear it. Sing us a little something. Mr. Myers plays the zither, you know," she added proudly.

Somewhat shamefacedly, yet evidently pleased, Mr. Myers brought his zither from the next room and laid it on the table. He sat down and in a moment lost himself as he ran his hands over the low-toned wires. He sang a few old German songs a little sleepily, like echoes from the past. When he finished, Mrs. Myers filled four tiny blue glasses with parsnip wine. They drank to one another and retired. Next day was a Thursday and a bright shining morning in Harrisburg.

The colonel rose early. But not so early that Mrs. Myers and Mrs. Gill had not already been to market and returned laden. Their "plunder was toted by a contraband." That is to say, their purchases were carried home for them by a coloured boy whose master in Virginia, owing to Mr. Lincoln's proclamations, no longer enjoyed his services. Harrisburg was already full of "contrabands." They poured across the narrow neck of Maryland into Pennsylvania and in the southern towns and counties of that state already constituted a problem which was not being solved.

Mrs. Myers's contraband had, for an old pair of Mr. Myers's shoes, virtually become a family retainer, who expected to be retained. He followed the two ladies every morning to market, taking a peculiar personal pleasure in watching the blind woman buy melons. Her touch told her whether they were ripe or green. The rejection by Mrs. Gill of a fine-looking but unripe fruit offered by some wily Dutch farmer caused the contraband Claudius, or "Cloud" as he was known, to whoop loudly, and to do a cart-wheel or two in front of the farmer's stall. This negative advertisement and Mrs. Gill's uncanny touch gave the market-men the feeling of being "hexed." As a consequence Mrs. Myers's basket was supplied with nothing but the super-best.

Upon such delicacies Cloud dined contentedly in Mrs. Myers's kitchen, dressed in an old mail-sack from which the iron collar, like a badge of slavery, had been removed. A pair of frayed scarlet suspenders, an ancient, moth-eaten beaver hat crushed beyond hope, Mr. Myers's boots, and the large black U. S. Mail staggering over his breast gave Cloud the appearance of an Ethiopian uhlan, and an importance that sustained his soul.

It was he who brought Black Girl, beautifully groomed and shining, from her stable and watched the colonel depart for "ole Virginny" with homesick eyes.

Poor Cloud, thought the colonel, your shadow lies black across the land.

Noon was booming out from the old Capitol clock when he at last rode down State Street, after a fond farewell to his hosts. Trotting along Front Street, he finally merged himself in the half-darkness of the long covered bridge across the Susquehanna--headed south.